Thursday, July 31, 2008
Heading straight for the gutter
If John McCain is jealous of all the attention Barack Obama is getting, maybe he should take his own world tour. He could visit Czechoslovakia and denounce the Velvet Revolution, or stroll along the Iraq-Pakistan border and learn the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.
Sadly, McCain has chosen instead to take the low road and drive straight into the gutter, waging a campaign of lies and dog-whistle racism. I can't believe I ever had an ounce of respect for this old bastard. He is just another Karl Rove, only meaner.
McCain's not-too-swift boats
After putting out an ad that just reeks of dog-whistle racism, the McCain campaign is now whining that Obama's very measured and restrained response amounts to playing the race card. What sickening hypocrisy!
A black man with white women continues to be the huge unbreakable taboo in the US. It's the one thing guaranteed to give Republican voters the hives, and the merest suspicion that it might be happening has led to countless brutal lynchings and murders right up to the present day. McCain's spinmasters knew exactly what they were doing when they linked Barack Obama with two well-known promiscuous white women, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Talk about audacity!
For McCain to rant and rave about the race card is as dishonest and despicable as the rethugs cutting every program that helps ordinary people in order to fund more tax cuts for millionaires - and then sneering that we are waging "class warfare" when we oppose their corruption. McCain very definitely owes Obama an apology, not the other way round!
Update: McCain's stupid Paris Hilton ad has very possibly pissed off one of his biggest supporters - Hilton's father! Heckuva job, you little jerk!
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Oops, he did it again!
So much for John McCain's pledge to run a positive campaign with honor and integrity. Now he's equating Barack Obama with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. What, Obama goes commando and records sex tapes?
Is it just me or is McCain getting increasingly unhinged and deranged? Is his jealousy at the attention Obama is getting making him crotchety and bitter? And does he think the majority of voters would rather have a cranky old man in the White House?
I suspect this ad will backfire on McCain big time. It will increase Obama's allure with the American Idol generation. McCain will be left behind as the American Midol, the old guy who gets ornery when he forgets his medication.
Keep digging your political grave, McCain!
Oh, and if you can stomach it, here's Britney's interview with rethug tool Cocktucker Carlson where she gushes about how "we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens." Sounds like a good little Stepford Wife - what could McCain have against her?
Beneath contempt
The headline above sums up what I think of Karl Rove, but a house committee has just found Rove in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify when subpoena'ed. Unfortunately, "[t]he committee decision is only a recommendation, and it was unclear whether Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would allow a final vote."
Presumably, Pelosi will decide that enforcing the law and upholding the Constitution are "off the table." In which I case I will regard her as contemptible too.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
To Serve Chimp
One of Monica Goodling's illegal interview questions to would-be loyal Bushies applying for career positions at the Department of Justice was: "What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?" Gag... could the rethugs' cult of personality around their empty suit be any more vomit-inducing?
Over to you! How would you fare in an interview with Goodling?
Monday, July 28, 2008
Heckuva job, Dumbya
After inheriting a record budget surplus from Bill Clinton, George Bush Junior leaves as his legacy a staggering deficit of half a trillion dollars. Thanks of course to his tax cuts for billionaires and his disastrous adventurism in Iraq which has turned into a never-ending quagmire.
That's the difference between rethugs and dems. Rethugs claim dems are all about taxing and spending. The reality is that rethugs tax your grandchildren!
This is standard operating procedure for rethugs - they run the country into the ground, and loot and plunder the treasury for their cronies while the plundering's good. Then when the voters finally wake up and realize how corrupt and incompetent the 'thugs are, they boot them out on their asses - but then the Democrats have to clean up the mess and deal with recession, unemployment, the US dollar being worth less than toilet paper etc. Then of course the punditocracy screams about how bad things are under Democratic rule, and slobus vulgaris americanus with his 5-second attention span forgets who caused the Cheney-up in the first place, and votes the criminals back in at the next election, repeating the whole cycle.
Rethugs couldn't organize a one-car parade without causing a pile-up. There is only one thing they're good at: bullying, blustering and shouting down everyone else. When it comes to actually doing anything useful, they suck, whether it's about national security, the economy, you name it.
Not only do they suck, they don't even want to do anything useful for ordinary Americans - all they want to do is further enrich the already obscenely wealthy top 1% by manipulating the useful idiots of the religious right, and riling them up on cue with god, guns and gays. Bitter? Hell, yeah, I'm bitter! Bitter at the endless sleaze, corruption and stark raving insanity of the rethug ruling elite.
When will the voters cop on and kick these criminals to the curb - permanently?
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Tennessee church shooting
This is horrible and my heart goes out to the victims and their families. I now look forward with dread to the inevitable response:
- Gun nuts screaming that this would never have happened if everyone in the church, including the children, had been packing heat.
- Dominionists screaming that this is another example of the persecuted xian minority being viciously hunted to the brink of extinction by violent god-hating "fundamentalist atheists." (Notwithstanding that the church was UU, and would thus itself be atheist in the eyes of many theocrats. Could this in fact be the motive?)
Friday, July 25, 2008
All Obama, all the time
The corporatist media's coverage of this election season gets infinitely stupider every day. Currently we are being bombarded 24-7 with the media complaining that the media loves Barack Obama.
Good grief, is everyone's short-term memory that far gone? Doesn't anyone remember the constant screaming headlines to the effect that Obama is a secret Muslim, was trained in a radical madrassa, took his oath of office on the Koran and refuses to say the pledge of allegiance - not to mention the broadcasting in a continuous loop, day in, day out, of Jeremiah Wright shouting, "God damn America"? Oh, and did you know that Obama's middle name is Hussein?
But of course, that's so five minutes ago. The current strategy is to give Obama's trip blanket coverage in the desperate hope that he will utter some gaffe that will torpedo his campaign, or at least diminish the aura of inevitability that surrounds him. Now they are expressing disappointment that he didn't make any gaffes, but their consolation prize is that his very popularity in Europe means they can equate him with Hitler. The "citizen of the world" remark proves his anti-Merkin hatred, of course.
The lunatic right is also screeching in deranged unison about some incidental remark Obama made about Belfast. It's comical in a way to see them coming unglued like this.
Anyway, whoever genuinely thinks that the media has fallen in love with Obama is a willfully ignorant fool. There's just doing what they always do. They pile on a certain story, be it Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, then five minutes later they all lose interest at the same time and pile on some other story. But it is entertaining to see John McCain frantically dashing around every podunk burg in Ohio in search of a bratwurst shop so that he can stand in front of it and speak to two people, while desperately hoping that some news cameras will show up.
Of course, a lot can happen between now and November. I'd stake my life that the rethugs are right now hatching some really vile dirty trick that will make the Swift Boat Liars for Bush look like saints. The wurst is yet to come! (As Bismarck might say, those who are fond of sausages and election victories should not inquire too closely into how they are made.) But it's looking more and more inevitable all the time that Barack Obama will be the 43rd legitimately elected president of the United States. You might as well stick a fork in McCain!
Tennessee: worse than Florida
I came across this link by sheer chance, over 7 years after the article was written. If Al Gore had won Tennessee he would be president today, and the world would be vastly different. He didn't, and the reason is widespread, blatant and brutal disenfranchisement of black voters on a massive scale.
How could this stunning injustice, the worst of the Jim Crow era, occur in the 21st century? And why has nobody heard anything about it?
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Define your terms
Does God exist? Many would say this is the central question in theology, but in a way it's the wrong question.
Do Higgs bosons, Bigfoot or lake monsters exist? These are meaningful questions because whether you argue yes or no, at least you and your opponent have a common understanding of what you are arguing about. However, God is a much more slippery concept.
In the past, people had a relatively clear picture of the god or gods they believed in. There was the rain god, the sun god and so on. There was Krishna with his blue skin, or Jesus with his flowing locks and doe eyes. Today most rank and file believers probably see their god in similar terms. At the same time, they accept what their preachers feed them about God being omniscient, omnipotent, infinitely benevolent and what not.
However, as soon as theologians started thinking systematically about god concepts, problems cropped up. If God really is all that and a bag of chips, then you quickly run into such difficulties as the problem of evil. If God is omniscient, he knows whenever suffering is occurring. If he is omnipotent, he can stop it. If he's infinitely benevolent, he will stop it. So why does suffering occur?
Ever since then, theologians have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. They encourage the faithful masses to go on believing in traditional ideas of God, while they themselves issue learned treatises about an arcane, abstruse god that would be quite unrecognizable to the masses. God is that being than which no greater can be conceived, he is the ground of all being, he is defined as that which cannot be defined, he is not a member of any set (not even the set of gods? What about the set of all entities that are not members of any set?), and so on.
It often seems to me that theologians are constantly moving the goalposts, redefining God to avoid logical problems (and perhaps as a sort of reverse strawman tactic, so they can sneer at uppity atheists for attacking strawmen) and in the process they end up refining and abstracting God out of existence. And yet they have absolute certainty in identifying such hazy and useless god concepts with the traditional god who raised Jesus from the dead and will dispatch everyone to Heaven or Hell on the Day of Judgment. After all, who prays to the ground of all being, or has a personal relationship with the indefinable?
What gets me about the purveyors of "sophisticated" religion is the smugness of so many of them. They rightly scorn the simple-minded fundamentalists who believe in every kind of barking lunacy imaginable, but they are equally disdainful of atheists, whom they regard as just as fundamentalist and simple-minded. To them, we are rigid, closed-minded fanatics who are too dense or stubborn to grasp their ethereal, recondite concept of God - which they refuse to define except in the most vacuous terms.
It's all very well to say for example that God is the ground of all being - but what does that mean? What information does it convey? If we lived in a universe where it was not the case that God was the ground of all being, would anything be noticeably different about that universe?
The theologians' airy, ineffable claims about God are, in my humble opinion, nothing but obfuscation and semantic masturbation. Theologians sometimes invoke Wittgenstein's language game as a rationale for their content-free statements. But, as I understand it, Wittgenstein viewed the language game as a cooperative effort where the speaker conveys information to the hearer by means of a mutually accepted vocabulary. The theologians' god-talk is, it seems to me, smoke and mirrors to cover up the awkward fact that there's no there there.
This is why I say that "does God exist?" is not the central question. After all, if we define God as Stevie Wonder, then God exists. If we define God as love, God exists as a concept in peoples' minds. And if we say God is that which cannot be defined, we are just making noise.
If you claim that God exists, the first order of business should be to define what it is that you are talking about - at least in enough detail so that the hearer can meaningfully address your claim. Anything else is evasion. Personally, I don't think I've ever heard God defined in such a way as to make a debate about God's existence even worth engaging in.
What set me off on this rant was my frustration at Sam Norton, an English vicar who blogs on theology and what he calls "humourless atheism". Several months ago, he started a series in which he promised he would show why atheism is irrational and Christianity is rational. A great deal of verbiage later, I am no closer to understanding what the hell he is asserting - except to realize that he can redefine his way out of any difficulty. And when you ask him a direct question, he responds, if at all, with lowest common denominator Josh McDowell apologetics: "the god you disbelieve in" versus "the god I believe in" and what not. I'm sure "Slippery Sam" is a perfectly nice guy in person, and would serve you tea and cucumber sandwiches, but trying to engage him in a discussion in terms that are meaningful to both parties is an exercise in futility. It seems the Celtic Chimp has the same reaction - see his interesting post.
Bottom line: if you want to convince me that God exists, the onus is on you to come up with a coherent, non-contradictory definition of God. Then you can get back to me. Until then, I won't hold my breath.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Arizona Conservative Idiot of the Week: Jack Harper
This is the sort of schoolboy shenanigans that go on in the Arizona state legislature all the time and make the state the laughing stock of the country. The rethugs who dominate the state senate try to bulldoze through a gay-bashing bill, a Democratic senator starts to filibuster it, and the rethug chairman, Jack Harper (R-Surprise, surprise!) simply switches off his mike. Then he switches it on again and gives the floor to a fellow rethug, the slimy Thayer Verschoor, a previous proud winner of the ACIOTW award.
Although Arizona voters turned down a similar gay-bashing proposition in 2006, the rethugs are determined to force their bigotry and hatred down our throats, due process be damned. It reminds me of the sleaze and dishonesty they used to abolish Martin Luther King Day as a state holiday.
Once again, Arizona shows itself to be the dumbest state in the union...
A host of troubles
Sorry, PZ, but you're only a piker. Someone has already gotten really creative with communion host desecration. Would you believe hosts as poker chips, or spiked with LSD - aired on Canadian network TV?
And I can't decide if this is for real: the Purity 125 Communion Host Dispenser. Apparently the priest holds it by the handle and shoots a host into your mouth, no doubt while fantasizing that you are an altar boy... okay, I don't think I need to dwell on the sexual overtones.
Coming soon, the heavy duty Purity 400 Communion Host Dispenser! I swear, I'm not making this up.
Sheesh - how the hell can we of the sanity-based community be expected to keep a straight face, let alone treat this lunacy with respect?
Monday, July 21, 2008
PZ Myers headed for Camp Guano?
Now I'm worried:
On Friday the Catholic League reported that Thomas E. Foley, a Virginia delegate to the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Minneapolis has asked that increased security be considered for the event in light of Myers' threat to acquire and desecrate the Eucharist.Is PZ about to become an unperson, to be disappeared into Bush's vast torture gulag? Anything's possible nowadays, now that the US Constitution is officially quaint and obsolete.
"I just felt security at the Republican National Convention ought to look at him and his followers," Foley told CNA in a phone interview on Wednesday morning. He reported that he had not received an update about his request.
Voicing his concerns about Myers, Foley said: "What I think he has done, he's loaded a cyberpistol and he's cocked it and he's left it on the table. He may have set something in motion that no one can stop. It was irresponsible, a hell of a thing to do."Hasn't the Supreme Court just affirmed the right to bear cyberpistols, cocked and otherwise? And what the hell does any of this have to do with the rethug convention? Knowing how to use the Googles on the inner tubes, I readily determined that Morris is three hours from Minneapolis.
He also objected to Myers' recent description of Catholic League President Bill Donohue as "braying," which Foley, a self-described Irish Catholic, claimed was "a great insult for the Irish."Oh, get bent. Bill "Hollywood is controlled by Jews who love anal sex" Donohue is an insult to the Irish. So is Bill O'Fuck-It-we'll-do-it-live. So are you, Mr. Foley. Any relation to Mark Foley?
This whole fiasco is getting so stupid, it hurts my brain to think about it. I'm still wondering why the RNC has to get involved. Are they planning to distribute communion hosts to the rethug faithful from a giant pulpit, like the one they had at the 2004 convention?
The Pablum-Driven Life
Barack Obama is about to enter the belly of the beast. He and John McCain are planning to visit the megachurch of ultra-powerful televangelist Rick Warren to kiss his hand and presumably vie for his endorsement.
Warren is of course the author of the best seller The Purpose-Driven Life, whose basic message is that Christians should be like cancer cells - contributing every waking moment to the growth of the Christian death cult, and assimilating more and more members for the purpose of more growth, and so on ad infinitum. What a bleak, narrow, depressing view!
And it's even more depressing that Barack Obama feels he has to kiss up to this massive delusion. Meanwhile, as I predicted earlier, James Dobson of the North American Man-Boy Shower Association is dropping hints that he will endorse John McCain. Obviously his lust for power is overcoming his revulsion at McCain's lack of fundamentalist purity.
In a more rational world, a book like The Reason-Driven Life would be a best-seller and Warren's potboiler would be relegated to the 99-cent bin. People would realize that there is no such thing as "the" purpose of life, handed down on stone tablets and unilaterally binding on everyone. Instead, it is up to each individual to make his or her life meaningful, and for many people, the best way to do this is in service to one's fellow beings and to this fragile planet on which we all depend.
Sometimes I get so frustrated at the stupidity, ignorance and backwardness of the fundamentalists who hold so much power in the US that I want to write a book called: "The Satan-Driven Life: what the hell am I here for?" I would point out that Satan gets a bad rap; his only real sin in the holey buybull is getting Eve to think for herself and seek out knowledge. I would draw the connections between the lunatic religious right's hysterical denial of global warming, evolution and other scientific issues, and their knee-jerk tendency to view everything they don't understand as Satanic, a virulent meme which cocoons them in an impenetrable force-field of know-nothingism. Alas, almost nobody would buy such a book, though plenty of copies would be burned, and myself along with them, most likely.
Carl Sagan said it best in The Demon-Haunted World:
Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
How I learned to stop worrying and love the Iraq War
Remember the scene in Dr. Strangelove where the US leaders plan to retreat to an underground bunker, amply supplied with buxom females, to sit out the destruction of life on Earth? As the title character says, "But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature."
Somehow, this scene came to mind when I learned that the Bush administration is spending millions of dollars to install "comfort capsules" in military transport planes for VIPs, so they don't have to dirty their hands joining the grunts in the back of the plane.
Meanwhile, said grunts are being killed by shoddy work done by KBR, a subsidiary of Dick Cheney's Halliburton. During a six-month period there were at least 283 electrical fires that destroyed or damaged military facilities in Iraq. This is how the extreme right "supports the troops."
Does any sane person still believe this war is about defending US national security? It's a corrupt gravy train for the Bush regime and its corporate cronies, pure and simple. The longer it drags on, the more I'm sickened by the utter sleaze and criminality of the neonazi-con warmongers.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Everyone's going crackers
Some belated thoughts on crackergate:
So this kid goes to Mass, goes up for communion, takes the host, and walks out of the church with it instead of swallowing it on the spot like you're supposed to. Instantly, all hell breaks loose. The guy is assaulted by church officials, and receives death threats from Catholics around the world who are outraged by the "body of Christ" being "held hostage" (!!!)
PZ Myers responds in the style we know and love. Inevitably, the odious and professional permanently-outraged Catholic bloviator Bill Donohue crawls out from under his rock and demands that the University of Minnesota fire Myers. Many other people are just as freaked out by Myers' words as cracker thief Webster Cook's actions.
Even Alonzo Fyfe, normally a reliable source of sanity in the blogosphere, writes of the incident: "this is theft, plain and simple." Strictly speaking, yes, but surely it's de minimis, like taking a packet of ketchup out of a restaurant without fulfilling the "implied contract" to use the ketchup on food that one has ordered and consumed on the premises. The use of force to try to prevent Cook from leaving the church with the host was way out of proportion, and I am astonished that Fyfe would condone the force.
In the midst of all the ranting and raving from all quarters, Sam Norton makes an interesting point. In the early centuries of the Christian church, the "body of Christ" was understood to the the church community itself, which was to be trusted with utmost respect. "Harming your neighbour, eg murder, wasn't just immoral, it was blasphemy." That certainly makes a lot more sense than getting your knickers in a knot over a piece of indigestible cardboard-like cracker. Then a change in thinking occurs around 1200. The cracker is now the itself the object of worship, and "whereas harming a baptised believer would once have been utterly unthinkable theologically, with this shift in understanding you end up with the Inquisition - abuse of the body to try and establish the state of the soul."
Of course Sam can't leave it at that, and has to go on about the "corpus mysticum" that can only be perceived with "the eyes of faith" - kind of like the emperor's new clothes - and how in addition to the Inquisition you get such consequences as "the whole gamut of western history that sees faith as something 'private' and personal, rather than public and visible." And Myers the biology professor gets some stick for not being intimately familiar with the history of Christian theology.
My own feeling is that, first of all, everyone should be treated with respect and reverence whether baptised, circumcised, or none of the above. Secondly, this whole fiasco is a perfect illustration of Hector Avalos' contention that religion is all about creating artificial scarcities, with the violence that inevitably ensues. Something perfectly ordinary and abundant becomes sacred and therefore scarce as a result of some mumbo jumbo being intoned over it, and it must then be defended to the death.
That's what's wrong with religion in a nutshell: it leads people to put inanimate objects, words, and every sort of intangible thing over their fellow human beings. Let's face it, people are choosing to be outraged by this whole non-story. No actual harm was done to anyone except Webster Cook, the supposed bad guy. I don't necessarily condone PZ's language, particularly his offer to desecrate a cracker if someone supplied one for him, but he has a right to free speech and other people have a right not to seek out his blog for the purpose of being offended.
Enough said!
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Imagine no recession, it's easy if you try...
Or at least if you dumped your wife to marry $100 million.
[Link]
Meet the old boss, same as the chimp boss
As the sun sets on the most corrupt, treasonous and criminal administration in US history, the power elite is working overtime to ensure that McCain will be more of the McSame, without the serfs catching on.
Remember when a t-shirt that read "Protect our civil liberties" was deemed obscene, and grounds for arrest, by the Junior junta? Pointing out that John McCain, if elected or otherwise installed in power, will simply be a continuation of the Bush regime cluster-Cheney, is apparently an equally heinous crime, as a 61-year-old-librarian discovered when she was arrested at a public meeting in Denver because she carried a sign that read: "McCain = Bush". Don't you just feel the love?
Friday, July 4, 2008
Calling all morally depraved atheists!
Consevapedia lists the causes of atheism. If you're an atheist, which one describes you?
Too many Commanders in Chief and not enough Indians
Yesterday is five years since I started blogging non-nicely. I can't believe I've kept it up this long!
Thomas Jefferson is attributed with the adage that the highest form of patriotism is dissent. He may not actually have said it, but it is a sentiment I heartily agree with. In this spirit I now present my annual July 4th patriotic message.
My inspiration this year is recent remarks by Wesley Clark regarding John McCain. Clark has made it clear that he respects McCain's patriotism, and respects the fact that McCain served in combat and underwent years of hardship in enemy hands, but this is not in itself a qualification to be president. The extreme right is livid, baying for Clark's blood, and comparing these perfectly reasonable comments to the vile, filthy Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry four years ago. (Notwithstanding that McCain has collected $70,000 from the Swift Boat scumbags whom he called "dishonest and dishonorable" in 2004. In fact, McCain's ongoing violation of his own campaign finance law has become so flagrant that even the Wall Street Journal can't avoid mentioning it.)
It disgusts me how the Boy Chimperor has wallowed in the title of "Commander in Chief" over the last eight years, sending better men to their deaths in a pointless quagmire war based on greed and lies, especially when he himself was too cowardly even to serve a cushy sinecure in a champagne unit of the National Guard, and went AWOL to avoid a drug test. And I'm very concerned that among his putrid legacy will be a permanent displacement of the very word "President" from the public consciousness, in favor of the militaristic "Commander in Chief", emphasizing the warmongering powers of the office and downplaying its civic responsibilities.
First of all, since I am a civilian, the president is not my Commander in Chief. I, along with the rest of the US population, am collectively his Commander in Chief. I don't owe allegiance to him - he owes allegiance to me!
Secondly, as George Bush Junior has shown, any idiot can wage war. All it takes is a spineless Congress and a convenient terrorist incident to have the public lusting for blood. It's far harder to govern in such a way as to make war unnecessary. It takes diplomacy, tact, intelligence, willingness to compromise - all the qualities Junior miserably lacks. Despite his tainted victories and razor-thin official majorities in 2000 and 2004, Junior and his gang of corrupt criminal traitors have ruled like an absolute monarchy, totally shutting out all input from the Democrats and the few remaining sane and moderate Republicans. A real president would have recognized the obligation to hear all points of view instead of letting an extreme fringe rule by fiat. This is what genuine leadership is about, and the military with its command-and-control hierarchy does not prepare you for it.
The chimp God talks to has made the world an infinitely more dangerous place through his corrupt, hubristic and incompetent misrule. This makes it all the more vital that the 43rd legitimate president be a leader who can transcend mindless swaggering and chest-thumping about being a war president, a decider and what not. When you reflect that even his friends are afraid of McCain's explosive temper, say that he makes Dick Cheney look like Gandhi and confess that the thought of him in the Oval Office sends a chill down their spines, it's clear that John McCain is the very opposite of the leader we urgently need.
I'd like to think that the United States is not all about militarism and warmongering, a Christian fundamentalist reincarnation of ancient Sparta. I want to believe it can serve higher and nobler goals - democracy, equality, limited and accountable government, freedom of and from religion - and that it can once again be a beacon of hope to the persecuted in other countries, rather than the source of their persecution. It may take generations to undo the damage the extreme religious-corporatist right has wreaked, but the first step must be an overwhelming rejection of the continuation of their policies by John McCain.
That's all for now. Have a great July 4th weekend!
