The Monday After...

Christmas is Over

Christmas is done for another year, and we're all happy. It'll be at least five or six months before we start hearing Christmas music again and the stores start pushing Christmas sales at us. This year I never once heard Bing Crosby sing a Christmas song, but I sure heard a lot of crappy new neo-conservative Christian rock songs. I wonder what they say if you play them backwards...

This is the first Christmas I remember where people told each other "Let's not exchange gifts this year," and meant it. Most people here in Iowa (my bosses excepted) have little or no money to spare, so Christmas money went to the kids, with the adults skipping the gift thing altogether (My wife made homemade gifts for our family and friends this year). In fact, this is the first year I've heard people actually complaining about Christmas. "You know," I heard several times, "Christmas isn't in the Bible anywhere. It's really not a Christian holiday. Christ was born in the spring, not in the winter. We're really celebrating an old pagan holiday..." I also heard, "Did you know the first Christians in America banned Christmas for the first forty years they were here?"

Why the grinchy feelings? Our government, led by United States President George Walker Bush, has effectively spent, squandered and stolen the nation's money. People do not feel safe in their homes any more as our government has failed to protect us from terrorism. People realize that our government is misleading us, and that makes people uneasy. There is now a backlash against Mr. Bush and his merry band of thugs in power, and that backlash is following a slippery slope - "Our president is an ignorant man doing evil things. Our president is a Christian. Therefore Christians are ignorant people doing evil things. Christmas is a Christian holiday. Christmas is evil." The logic, while stretched pretty thin, does indeed exist. Many people I talk to used to view theologically conservative Christians as a harmless group of people who'd rather not think for themselves. Those people now view theologically conservative Christians with active mistrust. "You know," I heard the other day, "that guy over there goes to that whacky church over in Morningside, you'd best stay away from him - you know how Christians are."

I have nothing against Christians, mind you. In fact, I'm pretty sure I qualify as one myself. But I remember when the churches remained more or less apolitical. Now Marion "Pat" Robertson is railing against women, advocating murder, and demanding that the Lord give the Republicans "just one more seat on the Supreme Court." (Mr. Robertson, by the way, is quite the character. He was indeed in the Marine Corps as a young man during the Korean War, however his father intervened when they tried to send him into combat, and young Mr. Robertson was sent to Japan and put in charge of making sure the officer's clubs had enough alcohol. While in Japan, Mr. Robertson had sexual relations with prostitutes and sexually harassed his cleaning lady.) source If Mr. Robertson is an example of this new form of Christianity, I'm not impressed. I have a feeling Jesus would be upset, too. These are, however, the Christians that are pulling strings in our government, and these are the Christians that Mr. Bush seems to enjoy hanging out with.

There is no denying that the right-wing neo-conservative Christian faction truly believes in their faith. They have, however, lost all sense of perspective, and they have no sense of humor about it at all... You can say the same about the fundamentalist Muslims that strap bombs to their sons and send them into crowded stores.

It scares me. It really does.

To me, Christianity should be different. And I believe it was different when I was a kid. I remember when Christian churches were very open and accepting of people of all backgrounds. Anyone could go to a church and feel welcome and safe. This has gradually changed, in my experience. People wore their Sunday best to honor God. Now people wear their Sunday best to show off. If you go to your average church during a service you will not find any beat-up old rustbucket cars in the parking lot, but you WILL find shiny new Cadillacs and Hummers. It seems that the churches these days somehow discourage the poor from worshipping. Many local churches donate to the Soup Kitchen or the Gospel Mission, but when is the last time your church invited the people who use the Soup Kitchen or Gospel Mission to one of their services? It won't happen - people from the Gospel Mission don't have money to put in the collection plate, and they don't vote - therefore they tend to be neglected from weekly services in many churches. (My wife pointed out to me that there are several churches in Sioux City that welcome the poor to their services - so my blanket statements may be erroneous. But in my personal experience, if a homeless person with mental problems and poor hygiene were to show up at a Sunday service, he or she would not be welcomed with open arms. I sincerely hope that there are churches that welcome ALL people to their services.)

Christianity used to be people helping people. The church I used to go to in LeMars often donated money to a mission in Africa. They stopped sending so much money, though, because they needed a new parsonage and they wanted to put glass offices and elevators in the church. The result? A nice new church in Iowa and lots of poor people in Africa. It seems to me that your average neo-conservative Christian feels very smug and good about himself for donating five or ten bucks a week at church. But it also seems likely to me that this same average neo-conservative Christian would never help a homeless man by giving him a job or even a sandwich - this sort of charity is left to the "left-wing bleeding-heart heathen liberals," a group the neo-conservatives feel are trying to ruin the country. How? By being nice to people, that's how.

We need, as a country and a religion, to start looking beyond the literal word of the Bible and realize just what Jesus was trying to teach us. The big lesson I got from Jesus is simple - be nice to each other. The world is a small place. We need to realize that not everyone looks like us, and not everyone thinks like us, but we are ALL human, we ALL deserve respect and dignity, and we ALL are in this together.


A Day Off

This is the first time in a month I've had a day off and been healthy enough to enjoy it! I wonder if my pneumonia and my wife's bronchitis could somehow be linked to the rising energy costs...? I'll have to find a way to blame the Bush administration for this, somehow...

I've not been paying any attention to politics lately, so I'm playing catch-up, and I like what I see, for the most part.

United States President G. Walker Bush was caught spying on U.S. citizens. No one's sure why Mr. Bush endorsed this behavior as there are laws in place to allow the U.S. Government to place wire taps on telephone lines IF they get a warrant from a special court first. It turns out that this special court has hardly ever turned the government's requests for wire taps down. So why did Mr. Bush authorize the National Security Agency to snoop it's own citizens? We'll know for sure when the Judiciary Committee investigates... source (From what little I've read on this issue it sounds like the N.S.A. has listened to, analyzed, or recorded a LOT of phone conversations and e-mail correspondences. In fact, the only criteria to be met for eavesdropping was that one end of the conversation or correspondence take place outside the United States. So when my wife called her relatives in Austria to wish them a merry Christmas the government may have been listening. Did the government read the e-mail joke I sent to a friend in Canada? I dunno... Spooky!) President Bush has broken the law. He should be mindful of what happened to the last Republican president who had a penchant for wiretaps...

I was VERY happy to read about possible censure against Mr. Bush and Vice President Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney, and investigations into possible impeachment offenses. That makes me happy! Happy happy happy! source

I keep getting e-mails from the democrats telling me that the majority of American citizens now wish to see impeachment hearings against Mr. Bush. I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems to me that if the Republicans tried to impeach President Bill Clinton for piddling around with an intern, well, the Democrats should be able to impeach Mr. Bush for lying to his citizens, spying on his citizens, giving money to his friends (Haliburton), starting a war in Iraq, failing to find Osama bin Laden, condoning torture... The list goes on and on. The question then is, if we CAN impeach Mr. Bush, SHOULD we? I don't know. Regardless of how cavalierly the republicans treated impeachment eight years ago, impeachment is a very serious thing. I'm worried that if we impeach Mr. Bush the republicans will start impeachment hearings on the next democratic president the day after he or she is sworn into office as retribution. But on the other hand, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have clearly broken the law and should be punished for their actions. They keep spouting how people should take responsibility for their actions - I think it's high time they led by example.

Spyboy Magazine

Censure Bush and Cheney for Abuse of Power

Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) has just issued a press release announcing he has introduced resolutions to censure Bush and Cheney for abuse of power and to create a Select Committee with subpoena authority to investigate the administration’s misconduct with regard to the Iraq war and report on possible impeachable offenses.

The Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciay Committee Democratic Staff, upon which the introductions of these resolutions is based, is here.

In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice-President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration. There is at least a prima facie case that these actions that federal laws have been violated - from false statements to Congress to retaliating against Administration critics.

In response to the Report, I have already taken several initial steps. First, I have introduced a resolution (H. Res. 635) creating a Select Committee with subpoena authority to investigate the misconduct of the Bush Administration with regard to the Iraq war and report on possible impeachable offenses. In addition, I have introduced Resolutions regarding both President Bush (H. Res. 636) and Vice-President Cheney (H. Res. 637) proposing that they be censured by Congress based on indisputable evidence of unaccounted for misstatements and abuse of power in the public record. There are a number of additional recommendations in the Report that I expect to be taking up in the coming weeks and months.

What can I say? Go get ’em!

Your President is a Liar

He lied straight to our faces.

April 20, 2004, at 9:49 a.m., in Buffalo, NY, talking about the USA Patriot Act :

Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

My, How Far We've Come

"None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead." -- Sen. John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, December 20, 2005

"I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" -- Patrick Henry, patriot of Virginia, March 23, 1775

You Might Be a Terrorist If...

This is from the blog 'Donkeyphant'

I have had the unique opportunity of looking at some of this intelligence and I have made a list of things you may or may not know. Trust me, this is being done for our protection.

You might be a terrorist if God tells Bush you are.

You might be a terrorist if after 14 months of torture you admit you are.

You might be a terrorist if you live in the US.

You might be a terrorist if you're Muslim and live in Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, etc, etc.

You might be a terrorist if you're dating someone in a foreign country.

You might be a terrorist if you are calling anyone outside the US.

You might be a terrorist if you own a bank account that has overseas transactions.

You might be a terrorist if you are a Quaker opposing the war.

You might be a terrorist if you are any race and object to the war.

You are a terrorist if you protest the war.

You might be a terrorist if you are Muslim and live anywhere (except Iraq, then you are an insurgent)

You might be a terrorist if you question any part of this administrations intentions.

You are a terrorist if you question the above vocally.

You might be a terrorist if you have ever visited a website from the Middle East.

You might be a terrorist if you have ever talked to a Muslim person.

You might be a terrorist if you object to the violations of your civil liberties.

You might be a terrorist if you have ever .......well let's admit it we probably all are terrorists, it's just that the Pentagon hasn't gotten around to starting a file on us yet.

Rep. John Dinglell: Bush's Christmas Time

VERBATIM

Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) recited the following poem on the House floor Wednesday, December 14, concerning House Resolution 579, which expressed the sense of the House of Representatives that the symbols and traditions of Christmas should be protected. Preserving Christmas has been a frequent topic for conservative talk show hosts, including Fox News's Bill O'Reilly.

'Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the House

No bills were passed 'bout which Fox News could grouse;

Tax cuts for the wealthy were passed with great cheer,

So vacations in St. Barts soon would be near;

Katrina kids were nestled all snug in motel beds,

While visions of school and home danced in their heads;

In Iraq our soldiers needed supplies and a plan,

Plus nuclear weapons were being built in Iran;

Gas prices shot up, consumer confidence fell;

Americans feared we were on a fast track to . . . well . . .

Wait -- we need a distraction -- something divisive and wily;

A fabrication straight from the mouth of O'Reilly

We can pretend that Christmas is under attack

Hold a vote to save it -- then pat ourselves on the back;

"Silent Night," "First Noel," "Away in a Manger"

Wake up, Congress, they're in no danger!

This time of year we see Christmas everywhere we go,

From churches, to homes, to schools, and yes . . . even Costco;

What we have is an attempt to divide and destroy,

When this is the season to unite us with joy

At Christmastime we're taught to unite,

We don't need a made-up reason to fight

So on O'Reilly, on Hannity, on Coulter, and those right-wing blogs;

You should just sit back, relax . . . have a few eggnogs!

'Tis the holiday season: enjoy it a pinch

With all our real problems, do we honestly need another Grinch?

So to my friends and my colleagues I say with delight,

A merry Christmas to all, and to Bill O'Reilly . . . Happy Holidays.

1,000 Days in Iraq

To mark what it called the "1000 Days" of the Iraq war, the London daily The Independent offered extensive coverage today, featuring a by-the-numbers approach.

Here are some of their calculations:

$204.4 billion: The cost to the U.S of the war so far.

2,339: Allied troops killed

15,955: US troops wounded in action

98: U.K troops killed

30,000 : Estimated Iraqi civilian deaths

0: Number of WMDs found

66: Journalists killed in Iraq.

63: Journalists killed during Vietnam war

8: per cent of Iraqi children suffering acute malnutrition

53,470: Iraqi insurgents killed

67: per cent Iraqis who feel less secure because of occupation

$343: Average monthly salary for an Iraqi soldier. Average monthly salary for an American soldier in Iraq: $4,160.75

5: foreign civilians kidnapped per month

47: per cent Iraqis who never have enough electricity

20: casualties per month from unexploded mines

25-40: per cent Estimated unemployment rate, Nov 2005

251: Foreigners kidnapped

70: per cent of Iraqi's whose sewage system rarely works

183,000: British and American troops are still in action in Iraq.

13,000: from other nations

90: Daily attacks by insurgents in Nov '05. In Jun '03: 8

60-80: per cent Iraqis who are "strongly opposed" to presence of coalition troops

Things to Think About

It's been five years. Why hasn't our government found Osama bin Laden yet?

The Bush administration has spent billions of dollars on national security. Why, then, aren't we secure? The 9/11 Commission has recently (in the past few weeks) given our government a failing grade on this sort of thing. (As if we needed to be told, after watching our government's ineffectiveness during Katrina.)

Why is Haliburton still making money off the Iraq war?

Why is our vice-president still advocating torture? The United States of America is NOT supposed to be the first to abandon the Geneva Conventions. We are NOT that sort of nation.

Why are our children still being left behind? (I read in Readers' Digest this month that the United States is ranked 24th out of 28 nations in math. In science our 15-year-olds are tied with Latvia at number 24. Wonderful - Latvia has an education system as good as ours. We used to be able to be proud of our educational system.

Why do we have secret prisons in Europe? What are we hiding from ourselves?

Why are there still "detainees" at Guantanamo Bay? Why haven't they been processed yet? Why are we holding them in Cuba? Boy, I'd hate it if a bunch of, say, brainy Latvian soldiers invaded Iowa and took me off to a prison camp in Cuba and left me there for five years. Thank God we have the Geneva Conventions, and common decency. Oh, wait... (I know, I know. The people being held at Guantanamo Bay are accused of nasty crimes and terrorism. I have no problem picking them up and detaining them. But for FIVE YEARS? In Cuba? That's not good, folks. We're supposed to be Christians.)

Does anyone remember back in 2004 when United States President George Walker Bush was running for re-election? Remember all those rallies he had, with cheering people waving flags? Did you know that if the Bush people thought you may disagree with Mr. Bush, they banned you from attending the public meeting. Why haven't we heard more about that? There are lawsuits pending...

Remember Mr. Rumsfeld? Whatever happened to him. He's being awfully quiet. Someone had better go see what he's doing...

What happened to Tom DeLay, former republican bigwig? Last I heard he was in Texas... He was going to go to trial for conspiracy and money laundering, then he got the judge removed because the judge had contributed a couple hundred dollars to liberal causes and got a hand-picked conservative judge on the trial. Mr. DeLay is still going to trial. United States Vice President Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney heard about this and promptly went to Texas and raised a bunch of money for Mr. DeLay's defense. (I don't know why Mr. Cheney had to get involved. Mr. DeLay probably could have tapped into his own funds. Or possibly had his friends help out. After all, Enron donated $28,000 to Mr. DeLay earlier in his career, and has given "DeLay-friendly" causes $133,000. What could be more DeLay-friendly than keeping him out of jail? source)

When did the government throw free speech out the window? Did you know that both the Bush administration and the armed forces have paid journalists and publications to write stories that are good for their cause? That's fine and dandy, IF you make sure everyone knows it's advertising. If you write advertising and let people think it's news, you're a fink in my opinion.

Bush's Lies

It’s very clever of President Bush to argue that Democrats and Republicans both favored removing Saddam Hussein from power and that somehow makes our invasion of Iraq okay. The problem with Bush’s argument is that his own administration misled everyone, including Democrats and Republicans, about the threat Saddam posed.

From the moment Bush took office he wanted to invade Iraq and had invasion plans drawn up, according to Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. “From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill said in an interview.

So when Al-Qeada attacked the World Trade Center, Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to use it as an excuse to invade Iraq. But they realized that would be an obvious overreach since Al-Qeada and Iraq were enemies and decided to first go after Al-Qeada in Afghanistan and other parts of the world. But once that mission was accomplished, they turned back to their real goal of invading Iraq.

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of the Bush’s desire to invade Iraq was our country’s heritage of not taking pre-emptive military action. To overcome this hurdle, the Bush Administration “manipulated” information to make a stronger case against Iraq, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Ret.), who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the time.

Cheney and Rumsfeld created their own unit to gather intelligence, outside the normal channels. This cabal “hijacked decisions on the run up to the war,” Wilkerson says. These Administration officials approached Iraqi exiles and gathered all the tall tales the exiles could tell. The exiles, who wanted Saddam removed, happily obliged.

The cabal pretended there was a connection between Iraq and Al-Qeada. The source for this lie was from an exile who was a known liar. The September 11 Commission, incidentally, reported in 2004 that there was no “collaborative relationship” between the terrorists and Iraq.

Then they began scaring all of us by saying Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction, including nuclear weapons, and that if he didn’t use them against us he would provide them to Al-Qeada to do the dirty work for him. “There is a real threat, in my judgment, a real and dangerous threat to America in Iraq in the form of Saddam Hussein,” Bush said on October 28, 2002.

But again, they over-hyped and manipulated the evidence, including the now famously discredited document that alleged Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. Bush included the charge in his State of the Union address in January 2003, only to have White House officials admit months later it never should have been there.

Next Colin Powell in his speech to the United Nations alleged Saddam had mobile bioweapons labs. Only later, did Powell learn that the source of that information was also an Iraqi defector who was a liar. Powell now admits he’s not sure if he would recommend an invasion of Iraq if he knew, as he does now, that Iraq has no stockpiles of banned weapons.

That’s exactly the point. The Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal knew they would not gain enough traction to invade Iraq if they couldn’t show that Iraq had nuclear weapons and was an immediate threat. So they manipulated the evidence. Or in the words of the Downing Street Memo written by an official in Tony Blair’s government: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

It’s time for an independent investigation into the charges that the Bush Administration manipulated us into the war with Iraq. Not surprisingly, Congressional Republicans are blocking such an investigation.

Interestingly, or tragically, the Downing Street Memo also states: “There was little discussion in Washington on the aftermath after military action.” Wilkerson says the Bush Administration believed it could turn things over to Iraqi exiles 90 to 120 days after defeating Saddam’s military. “This is ineptitude and incompetence of the first order,” Wilkerson said.

It also would explain why we never committed enough troops to secure the country. The Bush Administration really believed we would be embraced with hugs and flowers and didn’t have any idea what we would face. They were that naïve despite what Bush’s father had written in his memoirs on why he did not invade Iraq at the end of the Gulf War: “Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”

If only his son could read.