Not long ago I spoke with an old friend who lives in Canada with her American husband. They recently traveled to China. In conservative jargon that would be “Communist China” or “Red China” said with an appropriate sneer. She said that getting into China was easier than traveling the United States. When a communist dictatorship makes traveling easier than does the United States government you know that something has gone terribly wrong.

That’s a quote from a recent “Classically Liberal” blog:

♦ Fly the Unfriendly Skies — courtesy of Big Brother.

He makes a strong case regarding how horrible the treatment of people with layovers in the U.S. are being treated by The Gestapo Homeland Security. Interestingly, he reports, there are international airlines and travel agencies/services that are advertising and taking great pride in featuring flights that allow the passenger to avoid stepping foot on U.S. altogether.
What a great impression we’re making in the world!

On a related note, that is, visitors to the country being treated like criminals, Wired has a recent story:

♦ Reporter Visits Terror Watch List Center, Prevented from Seeing Map of Targets in America

The interesting thing to note is this part:

[Terrorist Screening Center Watch Commander Mike Ross] says the terrorist-locator dots on the map in the room change color depending on how long it has been since a local law enforcement officer called in a positive encounter, or “hit.” If you have ever wondered when you get pulled over in a traffic stop whether your name is being fed into a terrorist database, rest assured — it is. When the police officer puts your name and driver’s license into his computer, he is linking to the TSC.

Interesting.

President Theodore Roosevelt made a recorded speech in 1912–a time in which Capitalism had been going strong for over a hundred years and the Industrial Revolution was in full swing:
♦ Confession of Faith
He was the leader of the Republican Party and of the Progressive Movement both. Imagine that! Republican and progressive. But that’s not unusual pre-Nixon. Maybe even pre-Goldwater. By that time, the Republican Party became the party of the rich and wanna-be rich. Then was perverted even more with Reagan as being the party for the corporate elite and theocrats.

But a hundred years ago, the progressive leader of the Republican Party made some very prescient statements, such as:

Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great staffs, both of the old parties have ganged aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them in martialling [sic] to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

What do you think he’d say today, where the government has taken the mantle of Empire? Where government is bought and owned by corporate interests? Where there are two corporate health industry lobbyists for every Senator in Washington D.C.?

He continues toward the end of his speech discussing what it means for a government to support the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for the citizen:

In the last twenty years an increasing percentage of our people have come to depend on industry for their livelihood, so that today the wage-workers in industry rank in importance side by side with the tillers of the soil. As a people we cannot afford to let any group of citizens or any individual citizen live or labor under conditions which are injurious to the common welfare. Industry, therefore, must submit to such public regulation as will make it a means of life and health, not of death or inefficiency. We must protect the crushable elements at the base of our present industrial structure.

We stand for a living wage. Wages are subnormal if they fail to provide a living for those who devote their time and energy to industrial occupations. The monetary equivalent of a living wage varies according to local conditions, but must include enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living–a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit a reasonable saving for old age.

(emphasis mine)
What do you think is government’s current concept of living wage?

Speaking of the Bush administration’s lack of interest in it’s own country, a recent independent report came out revealing how much lack of care there is:

♦ Post-Katrina education problems linger

“Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has the United States witnessed so many of its own students thrown out of school,” the report said. “During the last two years, however, the most powerful national government in the world has spent relatively small amounts of time, money, and effort in helping to set right the hurricane-displaced students and the schools they attend.”

In fact, the report contends, as of the middle of 2007, foreign nations had supplied $131 million for rebuilding and restoring colleges and universities in Louisiana, where the largest destruction of schools occurred–virtually the same amount that the federal government has provided for this purpose.

(emphasis mine.)

Get that? Other countries have provided as much money, a paltry $131 million dollars compared to the $177 million the government spends in one day on the Iraq War, as our own government has spent on rebuilding educational institutions in LA. The Bush administration grudgingly spent less than what they spend in one day on the Iraqi War, on the education system in one of our own devastated cities.

The Elephants are pretty clearly showing their colors this week with the Sen. Larry Craig issue.
Let’s forget for a second that tax money is going toward having police stake-outs for consensual gay sex encounters, and that what Craig was arrested for was basically playing footsie with someone he thought was a willing participant.
In Craig’s public response he spent a lot of time and energy not in saying “I’m straight,” but in saying very adamantly “I am not gay, and never have been.” It’s very telling that he finds it very important to stress that he is not gay. Just as in the 80′s when there was a Senate page sex scandal, before his name was ever used, he came out to express he’s not gay, oh, and not involved in the scandal (which, his name was not connected with before that moment.) Then, he got married only six weeks later.

But this is what I really wanted to touch on: Craig has been pressured to resign his congressional posts, which he did. He’s under pressure to resign, period. His support in his state has dropped into the basement. And who’s doing all the persecuting? His own Republican party. I listen to a lot of left-wing radio, and no one on the liberal, Democratic side is saying anything negative against Craig, but rather the ridiculous nature of his arrest!

Now contrast this with the Republican Sen. David Vitter scandal. He admitted to being a regular customer of prostitutes. Has he been pressured by his party to resign? Nope. In fact, polls in his state have him at 67% approval rating.
Then you have prominent conservative talking head Tucker Carlson the other night basically admit on TV to a gay bashing hate crime in response to the Sen. Craig news.

Again, all I can say, is we have to be allowed to live as we were born to live. Not be afraid to live true to yourself, and not hate people based on who and what they are.

King Bush is demanding another $50 billion to add to his already $450 billion spent on his hostile corporate takeover war in Iraq.
But he doesn’t want to spend the $35 billion estimated to complete the reconstruction of New Orleans.
Instead, he’d rather make his annual visit to the city and give people platitudes: “Today is better than it was yesterday; tomorrow will be better than it was today.”

Gawd! This is such a long year and a half til he’s gone!
Oh, scary thought I heard the other day: Soon, Cheney will resign as Vice President citing heart problems. Bush will appoint McCain as VP giving him an encumbancy in the coming primaries and then presidential elections.

I came across another The Nation article today (I don’t go there as often as I should), this one by Barbara Ehrenreich, discussing the issue of the capitalists cutting off their own feet by creating the poor and then selling products the poor can’t afford:

♦ Smashing Capitalism

The sad truth is that people earning Wal-Mart-level wages tend to favor the fashions available at the Salvation Army. Nor do they have much use for Wal-Mart’s other departments, such as Electronics, Lawn and Garden, and Pharmacy.

It gets worse though. While with one hand the high-rollers, H. Lee Scott among them, squeezed the American worker’s wages, the other hand was reaching out with the tempting offer of credit. In fact, easy credit became the American substitute for decent wages. Once you worked for your money, but now you were supposed to pay for it. Once you could count on earning enough to save for a home. Now you’ll never earn that much, but, as the lenders were saying–heh, heh–do we have a mortgage for you!

So when the bottom falls out and an unprecedented thousands of foreclosures rain down on people swindled into ridiculous adjustable rates, does the market change? Is there regulation? No, there’s government bail-outs of the banks and lenders.

Global capitalism will survive the current credit crisis; already, the government has rushed in to soothe the feverish markets. But in the long term, a system that depends on extracting every last cent from the poor cannot hope for a healthy prognosis. Who would have thought that foreclosures in Stockton and Cleveland would roil the markets of London and Shanghai? The poor have risen up and spoken; only it sounds less like a shout of protest than a low, strangled, cry of pain.

This begs a question that will take a lot of thinking and pondering to try to come up with possibilities, but how do these different aspects of the war on the middle class pan out? The global capitalists desire global power. The rich rule by divine right over the poor. The more poor the proletariat is the less choices and options they have, the less political and social power they have. The more the people have to worry about earning and keeping food and shelter, and are enslaved by medical costs that most people are affected by, the less they are able to worry about police state, rights violations, corporate power, social inequality. It’s the goal of the corporate political elite to lower the middle class into becoming the working poor. And the plan is succeeding. For the fifth straight year the poverty level has risen, the extreme poverty level has risen and yet capital gains has also risen and even unemployment hasn’t gotten worse. What this means is that the people are earning less, but not because of layoffs, and the rich are earning more. The majority of people below the poverty line are employed.

But then there’s the problem this article addresses: the corporations are finding that the credit is getting maxed by the proletariat who are earning less, meaning sales are down and profit is down. (Lower profit doesn’t affect the CEO’s who are still earning millions in salary, but does affect how much a company pays its lower employees, provide benefits like healthcare, or daycare options, or vacations, or overtime. What’s the culmination of the goal of the capitalist power structure in a situation in which the working poor can’t buy anything beyond basic needs–and not even that when millions can’t afford basic healthcare anyone in an organized society should have access to?

I was going to start writing an article regarding the hypocrisy of the right-wing, conservative, family values politicians that have been embroiled in sex scandal:
♦ Republican Congressman Mark Foley who was a crusader against child exploitation and child pornography (an admirable cause!) who was caught soliciting sex with underage Congressional pages,
♦ huge Republican Party supporter National Association for Evangelicals pastor who preached great hellfire against homosexuals Ted Haggard who was outed having illicit gay sex with prostitutes,
♦ Floridan Republican Congressman and proponent of marriage amendments Bob Allen and his soliciting for sex in a men’s room,
♦ Republican Louisiana Senator David Vitter who was a passionate warrior against gay rights and for marriage amendments and his being outted as a regular of prostitutes,
♦ and the recent Republican Senator Larry Craig and his arrest for soliciting sex in a men’s room.
I was going to discuss why it might be that these warriors for forcing their morality on others get caught being “immoral” while this almost never happens with liberal, progressive politicians and preachers. Is it because they set themselves up as arrogant and holier-than-thou paragons of virtue, it makes better news when they fall from their pedestal? Or, is it because in the liberal, progressive camp there’s more acceptance of different lifestyles and sexuality, where self-hating and guilt-ridden men hate the fact they may be gay and are ashamed of it protest too much and hide in the party of anti-alternate lifestyles in order to deny their true selves?

I believe I’d blogged before how I actually feel sorry for Ted Haggard. How he was probably born gay but brought up in a fundamentally religious and intolerant family and community where he grew up believing who and what he was born as is an “abomination,” so what’s he do? He has no choice in his cognitive dissonance to but to preach against homosexuality while going underground to fulfill his innate sexuality–and so it’s a tragedy what has happened to him.

But I came across this The Nation article by Richard Kim that adds a different perspective:

♦ The GOP’s Bathroom Problem

He writes:

There’s something palpably sad to me about what happened to Allen and Craig too, something oddly touching about their misplaced faith in the fading world of secret, anonymous gay sex. That world–once found in bathrooms, parks, piers and adult bookstores; the furtive refuges of adventuresome queers, married men, the curious–has been swept away by so many police raids, privatization schemes, quality of life campaigns and internet dating services. But mostly, it’s fallen away as gays have become increasingly integrated into the mainstream, and also, paradoxically, more marked than ever. “You’re either gay or you’re not” seems to be the equation.

People who are outwardly gay or bi have found a home in the progressive political side, while those, mainly older men who grew up in the 50′s through 70′s, seeking gay sex in the only outlets there were at the time, and filled then as they are now with self-denial and resentment for who they are, side with the political party of self-denial and hyperbolic morality. They’d become used to, and may have even allowed themselves to enjoy, that closeted and secretive culture of clandestine and anonymous encounter. The bath houses, rest-stops. And then ironically, it’s been their own party of righteous busybody and intrusive morality that has created such a culture of privacy invasion and homophobia that those long-time outlets are being closed to them, becoming dangerous and unavailable.

Sad tragedy always befalls those who don’t live honestly in regards to who and what they are.

800 times per week in this country, a SWAT team breaks open an American’s door, and invades his home. Few turn up any weapons at all, much less high-power weapons. Less than half end with felony charges for the suspects. And only a small percentage end up doing significant time in prison.

From Reason.com‘s contributing writer Radley Balko’s U.S. House testimony:
♦ Our Militarized Police Departments

“Classically Liberal” has posted quite a bit on the encroaching police state and the militarization of the police:
♦ Classically Liberal’s “Police State” search
Some specific articles:
♦ Total control of guns is total control of people.
♦ The failure of the state and national tragedies.
♦ Stop the Big Brother State
♦ Drug Warriors attack wrong house again.
♦ US Senator says end War on Drugs (It’s my prez candidate, Mike Gravel, by the way)
♦ In the War on Drugs you could be collateral damage.
♦ Drugs & socialism: the more you succeed the more you fail.
♦ Atlanta cops lied and Kathryn Johnston died.

Back to Balko and his House testimony, he provides information regarding how the U.S. military is providing arms and military training to the police in its effort to “fight the war on drugs,” turning our peace officers into paramilitary thugs and shocks forces. Which might be justified if it was actually doing some good with little to no innocent collateral damage–but that’s not what’s happening. Drug use hasn’t really changed, the supply certainly hasn’t changed, and most of the victims of these SWAT raids end up being non-violent, minor criminals and all too often innocent victims of chance and circumstance. Such as the elderly lady who was raided by stormtroopers who go the house number wrong, tried to fight back because after all, when black-clad armed troopers storm into your house and you know you’ve done nothing wrong–you’ll probably fight to protect yourself from these unknown assailants. They shoot her and stand on her neck as she bled to death, and then planted drugs in her house once they realized they made a mistake.

It’s not even an issue of the morally despicable and cowardly stance of “if you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about” when out of control and unchecked police force is used wantonly with a focus on scorch-and-burn military tactics instead of protecting the peace and liberty of the citizens.

Balko:

It’s time we stopped the war talk, the military tactics, and the military gear. America’s domestic police departments should be populated by peace officers, not the troops of an occupying military force.

Viet Nam was “the first war fought on T.V.”, Iraq is the first war sold on T.V.

♦ Ari Fleischer’s Propaganda Iraq War Ad

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer is on the board of a group called Freedom’s Watch, a thinly veiled propaganda machine for the Bush Administration. And he put together a $15 million national commercial promoting the Iraqi war. Not asking people to join the military as we’ve seen the armed services do for 100 years or so, not ask people to “do their part” in sacrificing for the war, or buy war bonds–but simply a commercial justifying the war. Using wounded soldiers and widows and the ghost of 9/11 to appeal to the viewer to view the war in Iraq as a positive and just war.

Are you sickened yet?

Of course in justifying this commercial, and the war it tries to convince people to support, Ari compares invading Iraq even though it was the Taliban supported al-Qaeda that attacked us, with attacking Germany even though it was Japan that attacked Pearl Harbor–a chestnut he used as Press Secretary some years ago. This is intellectually dishonest, and sadly, often accepted by most Americans because they don’t know history:
♦ a) Japan and Germany had an alliance pact.
Afghanistan and Iraq not only had no pact but the fanatically religious Taliban (and al-Qaeda and bin-Laden) hated the secular Iraqi government.
♦ b) After we declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, four days later Germany declared war on the U.S.
Iraq did not declare war on us, and even verbally supported our attack on Afghanistan.
♦ c) Even if Germany hadn’t declared war on us (again, a good reason to then attack a country,) they were pretty busy attacking the rest of Europe. Not a bad reason to enter a war–defending a handful of other countries.
Iraq was attacking no one, had no weapons to effect an invasion or attack on another country.

CNN:

♦ Attorney General Gonzales resigns

YEA! Only months after he said he wouldn’t resign because “there’s still so much to do,” he’s gone!
“Bush will likely nominate Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to the position, senior administration officials said.”
Ah krahp. From one incompetent criminal to another.
But, Chertoff’s got some work ahead of him if he’s going to be as incompetent. Gonzo gave over 2 minutes of, over 300 instances of “I don’t recall” during his Senate hearing over the firings of federal prosecutors. He’s either totally incompetent or a huge liar. He also had absolutely no federal law enforcement experience before he was appointed to the role of “the people’s attorney.” But that’s par for the course for King Bush, who cares more about granting favors than running a country.

Hmm, when he was counsel during Bush’s governorship in Texas, he had a standing order to not show Bush any of the appeals for death row clemency in order to be able to not grant any and claim plausible deniability. He had to be tough on crime, of course! So the person executed who had his lawyer fall asleep during trial, or the people who’s prosecutor’s witnesses later recanted their testimony, never got a chance to be at risk of benefiting from one of the very few powers the Governor of Texas has available to him.

Well, I’m interested in what King Bush will have to say today when he makes a speech during his vacation (is it weird that “the war president” has been on vacation more than ANY president in American history?)

(Get the “I don’t recall” elephant t-shirt from Goats: http://www.goats.com/store/item/tshirt_elephant-blue–hanes-1.html)

Here’s a great clip from the Daily Show that will really make you rethink the concept of isolationism.

♦ Daily Show: Three Generations of “America to the Rescue”
(You have to click the links on the page to view or download the video clip.)

Oh by the way, America also helped support Iran by helping them start their nuclear program, and sell them arms during the Iran-Contra affair, remember that? Oh, and Cheney-led Haliburton was doing business with Iran for some time back then before they suddenly became part of the Axis of Evil.

Interesting how all of our mucking up the Middle East has to do with oil, and religion (supporting Israel and their stolen country).

I never talk about sex on here. And this topic is somewhat about sex, but it’s more about rights of privacy, personal liberty, and an out of control government legislating morality. Which I do talk about way too much.

After a 10 year fight with appellate courts, a woman who has been fighting an Alabama law preventing the sale of “marital aids” will likely get to bring her case to the US Supreme Court:

♦ Alabama Sex Toy Law – No Vibrators Allowed

There are two primary issues at play here, why the Alabama appeals courts keep supporting the law: their belief that “sexual privacy” is not constitutionally guaranteed and that the state’s legislature is the “keeper’s of the keys of morality.”

Alright, first of all, all aspects of personal privacy and liberty are unalienable and guaranteed by the Constitution. It’s not the point of the Constitution to define what rights we do have, but to established how they’re protected, and what rare instance they are not. The Constitution doesn’t state we can have televisions, or clothing, or beds. On the contrary, legal precedence has determined that the people do have a legal expectation of privacy. In our home, in our conversations, in what we discuss with our spouses. The Declaration of Independence states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

(emphasis mine)
Some rights, such as personal liberty, are so self-evident that they need not have to be expressly stated. Although liberty is expressly stated as is the pursuit of happiness. And I for one believe that safe, sane, and consensual sexual happiness and freedom is one of those unalienable rights that the government has no right to inhibit or even involve itself in.

However, despite the intent of the freethinking and classically liberal founders and their belief in individual human dignity and self-determination, the state of Alabama (as have many states and even the federal government despite the 10th Amendment), have taken it upon themselves to legislate more than just commerce and land ownership and state militias as is the original purview of state government, but also to try to determine for the people their morality beyond those which directly interfere with the rights and liberties of other citizens (such as theft, murder, etc.) As they have stated, the Alabama court has the opinion it’s up to them to determine what is moral. And evidently the use of a sex toy is immoral and they want every citizen of Alabama to abide by this opinion.

And that’s the rub: one person’s morality is not another’s. Some would say gun ownership, fireworks, cigarettes, and alcohol are immoral–and yet they’re legal in Alabama. Some would say that explicitly violent movies are immoral, yet they’re legal. So there’s a double-standard in operation here when a group of uptight and sexually repressed busybodies decide that a plastic toy used by adults in the privacy of their bedroom is somehow “immoral” but guns, depictions of violence, and alcohol are not. This is a sign of government out of control. They have no interest in protecting our rights of liberty and pursuit of happiness–they want control.
Here’s another clip from the Declaration I think is very useful to keep in mind:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.