"Aw, jeez Ma, World Changers ain't allowed to pass out Bibles to the students in my school anymore on Religious Freedom Day. Whatever are we gonna do?"
"Well, I'll tell ya, sonny, we is gonna sic that God-fearing Liberty Counsel on their evil little asses!"
Yep, and that's what has happened. Down in Collier County, Florida. World Changers of Florida, based in Tamarac, Florida, is your typical fundamentalist bunch of christianist wackos who want to remake the US of A into a wacko fundamentalist christian country where everybody loves Jesus or else!
World Changers, having the "Truth", naturally believes it is their right to distribute Christian propaganda (the Protestant version of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) to students in the Collier County school district.
And they used to get by with it. Until 2008 when the Collier County school said enough. No more. Take your bibles elsewhere. Shove 'em up your ass. Nah, they didn't say that, but they should have.
World Changers, being head-bangers for Jesus and the 12 apostles (whoever they were) and the sainted Paul and Peter and other sundry folks from the first century common era, hired a "Christian" legal firm, Liberty Counsel to sue the school district. Yes, they did, based on the skewed notion that World Changers has certain rights, such as the right to promote their particular religious views to the children in Collier County. I mean there is no such thing as "separation of church and state" in the Constitution, right?
Wrong.
So Liberty Counsel, founded by the nogoodnik christianist goofball, Matt Staver, is arguing that if other groups like Little League, 4-H, and the YMCA can hand out their literature to students, World Changers should be able to hand out their literature (the Bible) too!
It's their "right," they claim.
Yeah, right! It's not their "right." It crosses the sacred line dividing church and state and is thus forbidden by our Constitution! Bibles do not belong anywhere near our public schools. My God, there's a damn church on almost every corner of every street in every city and town in the state of Florida. They've all got Bibles. If a kid needs a Bible, he or she would have no trouble finding one!
But public schools are "public" schools, not captive audiences for christianist fools who want to impose their cranky beliefs on the students! No religious literature of any kind should be distributed to public school students.
Let's turn this around. Suppose a Muslim group insisted it was their "right" to pass out copies of the Koran to public school students in Collier County. Do you think Liberty Counsel and World Changers would be banging on the legal doors demanding the Muslims be granted that "right"?
Hell, no.
God don't like them Muslim folks. Jesus died for Amurricans!
[The info for this rant came from an article by Adrienne S. Gaines at Charisma magazine which you can read here.]
And you can read all about World Banger, er, World Changers here.
This is the kind of crap that is taught in fundamentalist Christian churches day after day after day! Which would be fine except that those children taught this crap grow up and become senators and representatives and some of them want to become president so they can force their sick beliefs upon all citizens of the United States.
Seems like Bristol Palin and the father of her baby, Levi Johnston, are gonna tie the knot in August. Bristol's daddy, Todd, according to "sources," plans to walk his daughter down the aisle.
But mommy Sarah, former governor of Alaska who quit before her term was up, ain't gonna attend. Nope. She ain't goin'!
Michele Bachmann, the Republican goofball from Minnesota, is a Tea Party "darlin" and an anti-government broomstick.
She's also one of the world's biggest hypocrites. Or, let's just call her a Welfare Queen!
As Holland points out:
1. She is paid by the U.S. Government - that "big" government that she hates so much. Not enough, of course, to turn down her paycheck, though.
2. And every year, Ms. Bachmann receives over $200,000 in farm subsidies "for her family's agriculture operation" from that big government that she hates. Or as Holland reminds us, "she hates the way government takes care of people."
3. Plus, she is involved in another "family" business, Bachmann and Associates, Inc., a "Christian" counseling service. And I'll be damned if she hasn't "claimed nearly another $30k in 'big government' payouts for this business. That in spite of the fact that this counseling center is openly Christian. No wonder she likes to claim there is no separation of church and state in the US of A.
One might say the U.S. Government is out of control. Not, however, in the manner described by the Tea Party crackpots and those goofballs who point to the president and scream "Obamunist"!
Mr. Greenwald, in an article at Salon.com, references a Washington Post investigative series by Dana Priest and William Arkin which describes "the sprawling, unaccountable, inexorably growing secret U.S. Government," which Priest and Arkin dub "Top Secret America."
Greenwald called attention to our secretive government about a week ago "when writing about the Obama administration's escalating war on whistle blowers:
"'Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance -- literally -- occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry....Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. That's why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics. They're one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.'"
In his Salon article, Greenwald quotes the first sentence in the WaPo series:
"The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."
What we have here is "an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight."
Thus, says Greenwald, "We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization."
Greenwald further comments on one of my major concerns -- that government is increasingly owned by the private corporatists and operated for the sake of those corporatists with little or no concern for "we the people." Speaking of the "secret world" that is our government, Greenwald says, "This world is so vast, secretive and well-funded that it's very difficult to imagine how it could ever be brought under control. That's particularly true given its inextricable intertwining with the private sector: the billions upon billions of dollars funneled from the Government to its private-sector 'partners' .... "
How this works out in practice becomes painfully obvious when Roger Altman, investment banker, insists the only way to bring Obama and the business community together is "if the political class is willing to 'fix Social Security' -- i.e., to slash Americans' retirement security."
Greenwald quotes George Carlin: "And now, they're coming for your Social Security money - they want your fucking retirement money - they want it back - so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you sooner or later. Because they own this fucking place. It's a Big Club: and you're not in it."
At this point I have not seen the Priest and Arkin series. Only the first installment has been run. But I intend to do so, especially after reading Greenwald's article.
And, as Greenwald points out, it really isn't important if Sarah Palin can't spell or read or write. Unfortunately, however, our media will obsess about the tweets from the twit from Alaska, while ignoring the real story which is in process of being written behind our backs by those in the Big Club in Washington!
Keith Olbermann shoots down Glenn Beck's hackery for claiming that there's a conspiracy theory because he can't seem to find any footage of the late Sen. Robert Byrd filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in his Worst Persons segment.
Olbermann: Live television coverage of the Senate floor didn’t begin until June 2, 1986. T.V. cameras were not permitted onto the Senate floor until Dec. 1974 and were then used only to broadcast the swearing in of Vice President Rockefeller. Prior to that T.V. or film cameras were never permitted on the Senate floor, only occasionally in committee hearing rooms. No cameras as the Civil Rights Act debate of 1964.
And maybe it’s not necessary for Glenn Beck to know this obvious fact of the history of his own profession, nor for Tiffany to and it’s nice she got work after the singing career fizzled out by the way. But the answer to his fulmination is available on Google by typing in “Senate televised” and waiting, you know, two seconds!
Founding a university… this guy is not qualified to found a Magic 8-Ball. Lonesome Rhodes “Where’s the film of Congressman Brooks caning Senator Sumner in 1857? Huh? Huh? The communists stole it” Beck, todays Worst Person in the World!
Runners up were Sen. Jim DeMint for embarrassing the state of South Carolina again and Mel Gibson for making more idiotic bigoted comments.
The New York Times has a very important article on how the oil companies are reaping billions of dollars in subsidies. Talk about corporate welfare! Read it here.
In addition to this article you may wish to read the current Time magazine story on the cost of lobbying; how it works to change legislation before it is voted on in ways that are not read before being voted upon! The lobbying industry saves many industries and companies BILLIONS in taxes each year, forever.
The starting date of the new laws are often delayed a year or two, before becoming effective, which saves BILLIONS TOO. The turnover of young people working for a few years as bureaucrats and then being hired as lobbyists at very high salaries is usually only a few years! We now have thousands of registered lobbyists, where we used to have a few hundred.
Lobbyists also dole out campaign funds to both sides of the aisle which essentially allows them to write the laws; guarantees they will be voted into law and and further gives them the inside track on avoiding or redefining laws they dislike once said laws have been enacted.
Lobbyists for big business number in the thousands; lobbyists for consumers number about three people!
No wonder we have such inequities and the consumer or average tax payer is picking up the bill! We pay whatever the tax code demands while corporations pay from zero to a fraction of actual profits!!!!!
The Tea Party folks and anti tax public is being taken to the cleaners every day. Our large industries paid billions to prevent health care reform and banking reform. We the people end up subsidizing the entire oil industry, the transportation industry, the clean air industry; anti pollution efforts, even car dealers among others. It is mind boggling and it works!!!
We, the tax payers have very few resources or people with which to even try to compete with the special interests that use the media, campaign financing, corruption, and huge law firms, etc., to perpetuate their goals. We are manipulated by them in many ways and they are skilled at appealing to our ignorance and our emotions. They form organizations with great sounding names, set up rallies with preprinted placards, organize the transportation, write the scripts that people shout out at public meetings, etc., all designed to whip up anger and hatred of just about everything.
Most people could care less about inheritance taxes on estates of over a million dollars. But when the discussion was changed by the words, "death tax," a lot of folks became terribly agitated. The same kind of thing happened when it was suggested we increase taxes for those earning over $250,000 a year. The great majority in this country earn less than $100,000.
These corporate funders of anti-government sentiment use wonderful bumper stickers that have little to do with the average person. And the latest attack is now focused on Medicare and Social Security in another attempt to privatize, which means we may well lose everything if the stock market tanks again! Bush tried the privatization route and it almost worked. Think where most of us would be if he had been successful!
As Blue Texan at FDL noted, Al Franken laid waste to the GOP's anti-Thurgood Marshall Campaign and as they called it, their minority outreach program. Franken gives his "good friend" Lindsey Graham and the Republicans a little history lesson on what an "activist judge" is and why Justice Thurgood Marshall wasn't one of them.
Franken: You said there are three things that judges hold to when they’re not activists. You said that they respect precedent. They make narrow decisions and they defer to the political branches, in other words the legislature. And there are a lot of recent cases that we’ve been talking about that instinctively strike me and a lot of other people as falling outside of these three guidelines. And I think that in these cases the Supreme Court was legislating from the bench, which is being activist.
Franken goes on to discuss why the decisions in Circuit City v. Adams, Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Rent-a-Center v. Jackson, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS Inc., the Supreme Court would have fit into Kagan’s guidelines of what would define an “activist court” and noted that Republicans all “seem to like” those decisions. He went on to explain why there is no way that Brown v. Board of Education should not be lumped in with those other cases and how it was “an exemplar of overturning a precedent that needed to be overturned.”
Franken: There are certain situations where the Supreme Court really should subject the law to a heightened scrutiny and this is what I think Justice Marshall was talking about when he said that the court should show “special solicitude for the despised and disadvantaged, the people who went unprotected by every other organ of government and who had no other champion.”
Now in the opening statements you were criticized for admiring Justice Marshall for believing this, but I actually think that this belief, Justice Marshall’s belief is just good, Constitutional law.
Are you familiar with Carolene Products… Carolene Products case of 1938?
Kagan: Yes sir.
Franken: Are you familiar with Footnote Four of that decision?
Kagan: Yes sir.
Franken: And you’re familiar with that because the footnote’s really important, isn’t it? It’s often taught in Constitutional law classes, whether they be in the first year or the second year or the third year, right?
Kagan: It is.
Franken: Can you tell me what that footnote says and why it’s important?
Kagan: Senator it seems as though you have it in front of you and you’re going to do a better job of it than I am at this moment.
Franken: You’re a mind reader. Footnote Four basically says that when courts interpret the Constitution and try to figure out whether a law complies with the Constitution, courts should give special scrutiny to laws that violate a specific part of the Constitution, that restrict the political process and that affect “religious, national, racial and discrete and insular minorities” who have a really hard time getting help through the normal political process.
Now to me discrete and insular minorities sounds a lot like the despised and disadvantaged that go unprotected and have no other champion. Is it safe to say that Justice Marshall’s belief is consistent with Carolene Products?
Kagan: Well there’s no doubt Sen. Franken that racial classifications are subject to very high scrutiny under the Equal Protection clause and have been so for a long time and the Equal Protection clause exists to ensure against discrimination on disfavored basis very much including in the archetypal example is race and that it is not only appropriate but obligatory on the courts to enforce that prohibition on discrimination on the basis of race.
Franken: So Justice Marshall’s belief that was criticized in the opening statements is really very consistent with established Constitutional law, isn’t it?
Kagan: Well Sen. Franken, I will say that when I wrote those words I was not speaking of Footnote Four in Carolene Products. I was speaking instead of what I’ve talked about several times at this hearing which is Justice Marshall’s deep belief in insuring a level playing field for all Americans and insuring that each and every American regardless of wealth or power or privilege, that each and every American gets fairly heard before the court and when I wrote that tribute to Justice Marshall and wrote those words that was very much what I had in mind.
Franken: So I’d like to leave you with this thought, okay. Justice Thurgood Marshall was one of the greatest lawyers, jurists in American history. This is a man who won Brown v. Board of Education, who helped end segregation in our nations’ schools and opened the doors to black Americans. This is a man who proved that separate but equal was inherently unequal.
Not only that but he served with distinction as Solicitor General, as a judge on the Second Circuit and as the first African American Supreme Court Justice. This is a giant of the American legal system. And I think what I really want to say is that Justice Marshall wasn’t some activist radical. Rather his views were very much in the mainstream and in line with Constitutional jurisprudence since 1938, since Carolene and before that. And I just think that we need to be aware of that and germane about it.
Kagan: Sen. Franken I’ll just say what I said on many occasions in the past which is that Justice Marshall is a hero of American law and a hero of mine.
Franken: And of mine. Thank you.
Al proves once again why any Republicans that dismiss him as just being a comedian, do so at their peril.
Keith Olbermann talked to John Wathen from The Waterkeeper Alliance who has been photographing the disastrous environmental impact of the oil spill in the Gulf. His blog is at http://bpoilslick.blogspot.com/. I've been watching some of the video from his site for a while now and was glad to see Keith finally give their work some attention.
OLBERMANN: Some of the most devastating pictures yet of the extent of the damage being caused by this oil disaster is coming from an Alabama conservationist named John Wathen, who has been flying over the spill whenever he can to document independently exactly what is taking place. Footage shot last week posted on YouTube, this gentleman revealed that the devastation is worse than BP has been telling us and it possible that it is more extensive than many of us had feared.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN WATHEN, ALABAMA CONSERVATIONIST: The further we got in the Gulf and the more consistent it came, at 17 miles out, it was obvious that the entire Gulf was covered at this point.
At 23 miles out, we encountered the heaviest sheen yet. The water was a deep purple, maroon, blue. It looked almost like a rainbow. The scope of this is beyond belief. It will take years at this rate to gather up even a portion of the oil that‘s on the surface today.
Some of it looks more like bruised internal organs of the human body than the surface of the ocean. And yet that‘s what it is.
The first time I came out, I saw a fire, there was only one. Today, when we got here, there were four. Within a couple of passes, there were seven.
From the size of these fires, it seems as though we‘re not only trying to kill everything in the Gulf of Mexico but everything that flies over it as well. This toxic environment can‘t be good for the birds that fly over the Gulf. And certainly nothing can live in these rainbows of death that cover the entire horizon.
As we look closer, we saw this pod of dolphins, obviously struggling just to breathe.
SUBTITLE: Thirty-six dolphins try to escape the BP slick. Eighteen dolphins in this pod.
WATHEN: Then we found this guy, a sperm whale swimming in the oil had just breached along his back where you see red patches of crude as if he had been basted for broiling.
Then there was this pod of dolphins found later, some already dead, some in the death throes. It seemed to be they were raising their heads and looking at the fires wondering, why is my world burning down around me? Why would humans do this to me?
(END VIDEOTAPE)
OLBERMANN: Joining us now from Tuscaloosa, the man behind the remarkable video, John Wathen, conservationist with the Water Keeper Alliance. Thanks for your time tonight, sir.
WATHEN: Thank you. I appreciate being here.
OLBERMANN: As I implied there, that‘s not even your most recent footage. Do the new images show any sign of improvement out there?
WATHEN: Not at all. If anything, things are getting worse.
When we first went out, there were bright red colors. There were vivid colors in the oil and there was some separation between the bands. The second time, it looked more like deep bruising on the skin. This time, when we went out there, it was—it was much wider. It was much widespread from a mile and a half off the shore to Gulf Shores, Alabama, all the way out to the rig some 90 miles away. We didn‘t fly over clean water one time.
OLBERMANN: The—obviously—
WATHEN: It is getting worse.
OLBERMANN: The thing that is resonating with people that have seen your video online, in particular, have been the dolphins. How many would you say you spotted and how many of them were already dead by the time you saw them?
WATHEN: Well, we couldn‘t get an accurate count on how many were actually dead. We had three people in the plane trying to count.
And we figure we saw over 100 dolphin that‘s were in distress. Some were obviously dead. They were belly up in the water. And there were several more that were in, you know, obvious distress. It looked to me as if they were in their death throes.
OLBERMANN: The burning of the oil, the use of the dispersants that obviously created the separations that you described, and now, just the sort of coating of the surface, wall to wall oil, is this an instance where the attempt of the cure, what BP is supposedly doing to clean up what it has spilled into the Gulf, that the cure is as bad if not worse than the original disease itself?
WATHEN: In my opinion, absolutely. This dispersant, we‘re putting so much of this stuff in at the source. What they‘re basically doing is just hiding it from sight. We‘re not seeing it on the surface anymore. So, it must not be as bad.
But it‘s robbing the water column of the oxygen. And we‘re seeing these huge plumes of oil underwater. And what you‘re seeing in Florida today, in my opinion, is where these plumes are coming from the Continental Shelf and boiling out into that shallow water.
I flew the Florida coast right after this video. And I had people actually in water that had oil in it. And you could see the sheen for miles and miles and miles out on the horizon. So, they can‘t see from the beach what I can see from the airplane. This thing is huge.
OLBERMANN: What happens when that hurricane blows that into more sensitive—as if the rest of the ecology wasn‘t sensitive enough—but into things like the marshlands, what happens to the marshlands? Do you have any guess?
WATHEN: Well, from what I heard from most of the locals down there and the people that really know the marshes and bayous, this is the worst possible scenario, is a weak storm like this because all it‘s doing is raising the tide and pushing the oil into the marshes without enough force to really break it up. We‘re pushing bulk into the marshes, With the dispersant that‘s involved here, the oil, a lot of it is under the water and the booms had no effect with or without the waves. The oil was coming under the boom.
So now, there is nothing blocking it. All of that oil is going to be in our marshes. It‘s going to be in our estuaries. And there is nothing we can do about it.
OLBERMANN: How much do you think the fires, the burning off spread this into the environment in other ways? Do you have any way of measuring that?
WATHEN: I don‘t have any way of measuring it, Keith. But it‘s phenomenal when you get out there and you realize that these huge towering columns of smoke are coming from incredibly small fires on the horizon. When you look at the amount of oil that‘s out there, each one of those columns of smoke is nothing more than a tea cup in comparison. It will take thousands of these fires to burn all the oil on the Gulf of Mexico. This is—this is ludicrous.
We‘re toxifiying the atmosphere. We‘re killing everything in the Gulf of Mexico around this thing. It seems like we‘re trying to kill everything in the air, too. It‘s insane out there.
OLBERMANN: Indeed, it is. John Wathen, chronicler of that, resident of Alabama, member of the Water Keeper Alliance, his Website on the disaster is BPoilslick.blogspot.com. Mr. Wathen, great thanks for your time and we‘ll talk to you again when the next video gets out of there.
WATHEN: Thank you. It‘s an honor. I hope to have the next video out by the next week that will cover the Florida coastline. And then again, we want to go up right after this storm. I want to try to get down there and get as much of it as I can.
OLBERMANN: We‘ll talk you to then. Thank you, sir.
