History in the Making

Steve Benen explains:

The McCain/Palin ticket is the first in American history in which both candidates were found to have violated ethics standards before a national election.

Ouch.

Oh.

Hell.

NAH.

I have to see this movie NOW!

Who's gonna get me to a screener?

You Must Have the Body.

Habeas Corpus.

One of the tenets of our judicial system.

But we live in a culture that increasingly denies the body. It denies it pleasure. It denies it autonomy. It offers to it suffering.

What if God had a body that could suffer?

Get the Pope, the President and the Prime Minister on the phone, quick! I've had an epiphany, a flash of understanding about the nature of the divine that should literally SAVE THE WORLD.

It's revolutionary, you ready?
Come closer.
Here it is --

Every person on earth is a nonbeliever. That's it.

Every person on earth is a nonbeliever. Even the most devout believers in each religious tradition are therefore nonbelievers of everything else, no matter what doctrine or denomination they claim as their own, or whether they claim any religion at all.

Every person on earth is a nonbeliever. Of someone's else's religion. Of someone's else's truth, and lies.

Every person on earth is a nonbeliever because in order to believe one thing, you must disbelieve everything else.

For any one given religious belief, most of us will be in its nonbelief camp.

Every person on earth is a nonbeliever.
The recent post from Thomas Jefferson 198 years ago, got me pondering all this:

"Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion.

Not too long ago, I discussed the fall of Mogadishu as another sign that Islamic extremists are winning and that the United States under Bush has failed to successfully combat al-Qaeda and it's related groups. One such diary got attention from BBC Radio, which had me on one of their live call-in shows.

Some responses to my fears that Bush's failures are enabling a new, extremist Caliphate in the Muslim world criticized me for being too quick to judge Islam harshly. I take such criticism to heart because my beef is with religious extremists of all kinds and those fools, like Bush, who aid and abet their oppressive, terrorist agendas. I have no beef with any religion in particular or religion in general. It is extremism and terrorism that I object to.

I am sorry to say that my characterization of the Somali Islamic fundamentalist regime as being akin to the Taliban was not unfair. It seems dead on accurate. From Salon.com:

July 05,2006 | MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Radical Islamic militia fighters in Somalia shot and killed two people who were watching a banned World Cup soccer broadcast, a radio station reported Wednesday.

Jamaican PM Portia Simpson Miller (right) greets
the visiting Chilean President Michelle Bachelet

[via BBC NEWS | Americas | 'I am seen as a symbol of hope']

Portia Simpson Miller - known among her supporters as "Sister P", or simply "Mama" - has broken the mould of previous prime ministers on the island.

Apart from being the first black woman to become prime minister, she was born to parents of modest means in Woodhall, St Catherine.

Her constituency of South West St Andrew is one of the most deprived in the capital, Kingston.

Supporters say this puts her in touch with the poor. Her detractors say her failure to improve conditions in her own area shows she will not be able to deliver what she promises.

The prime minister's message when she granted me an interview at her official residence was one of great optimism for the future.

"I am now at the top, and I want to pull the rest of Jamaica with me. I am seen by many as a symbol of hope that they too can one day rise to greatness. For years I have been the face of the faceless and the voice of the voiceless in the corridors of power," she said.

We are in the beginning stages of a once-in-a-generation political realignment. The "conservative" movement and its paradigms are dying, and the question now is what is to replace them.

Classical political theory holds that Americans are divided into remarkably stable blocs; there are about 25% conservatives, 20% liberals, and the rest float somewhere in the middle; libertarians, those odd people, may make up perhaps 10%.

So what happened?

The simple fact is that the "conservative" movement needs to call itself something else, because it's not conservative, end of story. What that movement is is christian-dominionist and corporatist, in love with the big government they think should be used as a tool to inflict their Weltanschauung on everyone else, at the same time as it removes any barrier standing between your wallet and the appetite of giant corporations. That's the essence of the new "conservatism". It's no longer about smaller government, but about Terri Schiavo, no longer about a strong defense, but about no-bid contracts, no longer about freedom, but about repression and control.

Hence, we have "bankruptcy reform" which puts you in the position of never being able to escape your debt, while corporations with more than a million dollars in revenue can file under the old rules that let them walk away from their debt; "tort reform", which helps insurance companies at your expense, but hasn't lowered malpratice rates for doctors anywhere it's been implemented; "tax cuts", of which you get a dribble, while the new leisure class gets real money, and communist China makes up the difference; an "energy policy" which has created $10 billion in quarterly profits at Exxon while you bleed at the pump; a "war on terror" which manifests itself chiefly in that there is an unrelated war going on in Iraq and the government gets to spy on you; and constitutional amendments to ban all sorts of behavior the dominionists want rooted out so that Jesus can come back - including, now, flag-burning.

Apparantly the "War on Terrorism" is no longer a fashionable name in Washington. The Bush Administration is re-branding the war "The Long War.

The Long War?

Forget that! Let's admit what it really is, with hat tip to Joseph Haldeman: We are in the midst of the Forever War.

We have abandoned pretence. All we are admitting to now is that we are at war. Why? Who cares! Oil? Maybe. Fighting terrorism? Sometimes, if it's convenient. A Crusade against Islam? Only in private do we admit that! Lucrative no-bid contracts for Halliburton and Bechtel?

Bingo!

That is the only excuse for the Forever War. Because, a real war on Terrorism would look nothing like the Forever War envisioned by the extreme right wing in the United States. The real war on Terrorism is what Democrats had envisioned: go after al Qaeda specifically, cutting off their funding, hitting their training camps, forcing Arab governments to abandon their support for anti-American Madrasses that feed into al Qaeda. Build up alliances across the globe. Fight the funding of terrorism and become part of the world community. That is what Democrats envisioned going back to Clinton and even, perhaps, the honestly elected Bush after he had freed his foreign policy from the Taliban-supporting days.

What she said. Why are Christians not standing up and protesting the murder of the innocents in Iraq?
Or do we only see the shadows on the wall?

The photograph, by the way, is from an Iraqi bombshelter. During Gulf War I, we bombed a shelter where hundreds of civilians had gone to seek safety. They were obliterated, but the outlines of their bodies were charcoaled onto the wall.