Bush Gives Environment Coal Sholder, Cutting Services to Protect Tax Cuts, GOP Civil Rights, Huckabee Didn't Come From No Monkey & Radical Religion.

Coal fired power plants are a subject near and dear to me. Well maybe not dear. The AES corporation and my whore politicians were nice enough to build one about a mile away from my front door. It makes a lot of noise and it's lit up like a Christmas tree, I guess I should say Holiday tree, just to tick off the Right.

The biggest problems I have with it is trying to dodge the coal trucks and I've lost my night sky to the south. But then, I have no way of knowing how much carbon dioxide it's putting out.

To get to the point, in his State of the Union address, Bush said, “Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions.”

But after all these years we know that what Bush says has very little to do with reality. The next day his Secretary of Energy cut the funds on clean fossil fuel energy.

Yet just 24 hours after his SOTU declaration, Bush’s Secretary of Energy
Samuel Bodman indicated the White House was pulling the plug on the ambitious
FutureGen project, a clean coal plant that was touted as “the cleanest
fossil fuel fired power plant in the world.”

In defense of Bush, you've got to admit that it's hard to do the right thing and subsidize the nation's wealthy at the same time.

BTW, I stole the image from the Texas Sierra Club, click on it to go to their site for better information than I can give.

In another attempt to insure the status quo, Bush is proposing cuts to Medicare and Medicaid instead of raising taxes on the wealthy. If you think about it, it makes sense. Let's face it, with fuel prices like they are, it takes a lot to keep a private jet in the air. A lot more than than keeping a '98 Honda or whatever on the road that the peasants are driving back and forth to work.

Hell, any Social Darwinist will tell you that they've earned it.

WASHINGTON — In his new budget, to be unveiled Monday, President Bush will call
for large cuts in the growth of Medicare,
far exceeding what he proposed last year, and he will again seek major savings
in Medicaid,
according to administration officials and budget documents.

Since Social Darwinism has worked so well with the tax cuts and the economy it's only logical to apply it to civil rights. Even more.

Washington, DC – This morning, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington (CREW) and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) hosted a
press conference call with the NAACP and MALDEF to demand that U.S. Attorney
General Michael B. Mukasey rescind a Bush legal memo that authorized deceptive
appointments of exclusively partisan Republicans to the bipartisan Civil Rights
Commission.

Now I don't want the Religious Right to feel left out, so you can go to Pharyngula to get a video of Huckabee saying that Biblical creation should be taught in public schools. This site will soon be on my links list. You've gotta love a site that proclaims "Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal". It's written by PZ Myers, an actual biologist.

And just what if the Religious Right were to take over? Some will say this wouldn't happen here, we're Christians. History says otherwise.

A young man, a student of journalism, is sentenced to death by an Islamic
court for downloading a report from the internet. The sentence is then upheld by
the country's rulers. This is Afghanistan – not in Taliban times but six years
after "liberation" and under the democratic rule of the West's ally Hamid
Karzai.

The fate of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has led to domestic and international
protests, and deepening concern about erosion of civil liberties in Afghanistan.
He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website
which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the
oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Scared? You should be.

Later.

Huckabee vs The Constitution, Gerald L. K. Smith, Al Mohler, Earl Paulk Jr., Losing the Science Race, Antarctic Ice Loss, Inflation and Spying on Us.

We all owe Mike Huckabee a big "Thank You" for admitting that the plan of the Religious Right is to basically do away with the United States as we now know it.





If you don't know it, the Religious Right has a higher calling than patriotism, love of country or compassion for their fellow man. Their calling is to do away with what they call Man's Law (the Constitution) and replacing it with their particular interpretation of what they call God's Law (the Bible), thereby insuring their entry into Heaven by, in their view, handing our country over to God on a silver platter.





What else could you read into the following quote from the Right Reverend Governor Huckabee?

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a
Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the
Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's
what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards
rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary
view."

There's an awfully lot of us that at one time swore an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution and as far as I'm concerned that oath still holds. So, Governor, you and your ilk can keep your filthy, covetous hands the hell off my Constitution.





If the Religious Right were ever able to get what they want, in no time the country would be torn apart by the different Christian factions arguing over whose interpretation of a particular verse was the right one. That's why we have so many churches all over the place. Christians can't agree about their own beliefs. And you thought all those churches were a sign of great religiosity in this country. Nope, just great contention.





Jim Pinkerton, a Huckabee aide, advocates putting the police in front of every mosque in this country as a way to defend "Christendom". The Crusades didn't work the first time around.





The modern Religious Right has taken on and expanded the views of now dead Arkansas preacher Gerald L. K. Smith, kindly put, he was a nut.

Smith's perceived giant would be the modern religious right. Smith ought to
be of interest since he was one of the founding fathers of the movement
according to author Glen Jeansonne. Smith once sought the office of President
of the United States forsaking his ordination as a minister in the Christian
Church. Much like Pat Robertson and Arkansas preacher Mike Huckabee, Smith felt led to
another platform.





Drawing his parallels form the folklore of Gulliver's giant, Smith believed
the silent majority of American voters had not yet been aroused from slumber.
They, like Gulliver's giant, were held down by small impotent pygmies who held
great sway over the giant by their evil and orchestrated efforts to harness and
hold the great being. Smith, founder of the famous Passion Play in Eureka
Springs, Arkansas, wrote, "We have been overrun with pygmies, poisoners and
traitors. Ten thousand organizations have sprung up for the purpose of
crystallizing this shackling process, this porgram of bureaucratic regimentation, this innoculation of treason's
poison. To the short sighted and faithless, America has been drugged, opiated, shackled and
subdued." A few years later leaders like the late TV preacher James Kennedy
reasoned with his faithful followers that the ACLU, which he called the anti
Christian liberal union, was out to destroy Christianity. The preception by James Dobson's crowd is that a
small faction in the nation keeps the lid on the majority opinion which they
represent.





To those who might think I am stretching it a bit linking Smith's racism to
the early religious right I assure you I am not alone in this. A more recent
point is the report that Al Mohler is now being promoted as the next president
of the Southern Baptist Convention. Mohler, a seminary president in the SBC has openly stated that
white women need to be more fertile. He stated such in Al's blog Aug. 15, 2005.
Some in the Dominion movement have given up on restructuring the society by
legislation and have adopted the idea of expanding their base by reproduction.
Thus the more births, the more future voters. Mohler stated that the cultures who birthed the
nation are not keeping up with the other cultures in the country.





Gerald Smith, who once in the 30s wrote Hitler asking for an audience, is
buried under the 70 foot statue known as Jesus of the Ozarks. Whether or not
Gerald's giant exists is subject to a great deal of speculation today. Some
claim it lived a short life and is now dead. A lot is at stake and lots of
people are counting on their opinions about this giant propelling someone into
office.

Apparently Al Mohler's kind of a nut too.





If you think that preachers are made of a stronger moral fiber than the rest of us...

(AP) An 80-year-old leader of a suburban megachurch who is at the center of a sex scandal has
been charged with lying under oath for saying he had sex outside marriage with
only one other woman, court documents show.





Former church employee Mona Brewer is suing Paulk, his brother and the church on allegations
that Paulk
manipulated her into an affair from 1989 to 2003 by telling her it was her only
path to salvation. In a 2006 deposition stemming from the lawsuit, the
archbishop said under oath that the only woman he had ever had sex with outside
of his marriage was Brewer.





But the results of a court-ordered paternity test revealed in October that Paulk is the
biological father of his brother's son, D.E. Paulk, who is now head pastor at the church. As part
of Brewer's lawsuit, eight women have given sworn depositions that they were
coerced into sexual relationships with Earl Paulk.

Oh well, there was a time when I considered nookie a higher calling.





If the Religious Right ever did take over, we wouldn't have to worry about things like the U.S. losing it's edge in scientific and technological innovation. After all, science is just a liberal plot to make people who don't believe in global warming and evolution look stupid.

Many Americans remain ignorant about much of science, the board said; for
example, many are unable to answer correctly when asked if the Earth moves
around the Sun (it does). But they are not noticeably more ignorant than people
in other developed countries except on two subjects: evolution and the Big Bang.
Although these ideas are organizing principles underlying modern biology and
physics, many Americans do not accept them.



“These differences probably indicate that many Americans hold religious
beliefs that cause them to be skeptical of established scientific ideas,” the
report said, “even when they have some basic familiarity with those ideas.”

Science means nothing to the Right as long as scientific conclusions differ from the Right's agenda. Global warming is a good example. Here's the NYT's John Tierney whoring for the Big Polluters.

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by
satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was
warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever
recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica
has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on
one small part that has warmed.

Is that so? No. Here's the latest.

The Antarctic ice sheet is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year
in a trend that scientists link to global warming, according to a new paper that
provides the first evidence that the sheet's total mass is shrinking
significantly.

The new findings, which are being published today in the journal
Science, suggest that global sea level could rise substantially over the next
several centuries.

I guess that taking a look at what our current faith-based president has wrought would be the best argument for keeping people who believe that they are doing God's work out of politics.

God must think that we are too well off, for He has sent a plague of inflation to afflict us.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Wholesale inflation shot up in 2007 by the largest
amount in 26 years even though falling gasoline costs allowed price pressures to
moderate in December.

The Labor Department reported that wholesale inflation was up 6.3
percent for all of 2007, reflecting a huge increase for the year in various
types of energy costs ranging from gasoline to home heating oil.

And I guess that God told his man in the White House that the rest of us can't be trusted on our own and a close eye needs to be kept on the sinners.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is drawing up plans for cyberspace
spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a "walk in the park,"
according to an interview published in the New Yorker's print edition today.

Lord protect us from your followers.

Know Your Enemy: Right-Wing Nuts, Protecting a President from Free Speech, The Free Market, Religious Right and Wrong, Iraq Full Circle & Voter Fraud

You've probably never heard of Jim Goodnow, but Jim is a veteran who owns a bus, The Yellow Rose, that he uses to haul Iraq Veterans Against the War around the country.

Friday night he pulled into a New Jersey truck stop to get some sleep and someone torched The Yellow Rose. Jim is OK.

Let this be a lesson for all of us. We are not dealing with rational, sane people, when we're dealing with the Right. Let's face it, these people consider the draft dodging, drug addicted, liar Rush Limbaugh a great American patriot.

The majority of the Right is made up of people who need to be led, need to be told what to do, told what to think and have and have a strong belief in the infallibility of their convictions, which have been given to them by somebody else.

So if you think that sweet logic is the way to reason with the Right, dream on.

For the last seven years the Right has gotten everything they wanted and the results are obvious. They have achieved their goals. The fact that they have ruined the country and done away with our Constitution is of no consequence when compared to getting what they want.

Think I'm hyperventilating here? OK, how's this for irony.

With the original First Amendment "Freedom of Speech" looking on, admirers of
the U.S. Constitution in the Washington D.C. National Archives Building today
were ordered to leave for wearing tee-shirts reading "Impeach Bush and Cheney."

Make you sick? It should.

The Right is always telling us how bad government regulation is. The rest of us are expected to follow certain rules. Why is it so good for us, but so bad for business. It's simple, unbridled greed doesn't function well when regulated. The laissez faire free market system, just like mercenaries, is more trouble than it's worth unless it's well controlled.

We're learning once again why government needs to protect capitalism from
itself.

Back in the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt came to the rescue of the
so-called "free market" with a series of new programs and regulations to restore
trust in the nation's financial and corporate institutions, whose excesses had
thrown the country into the Great Depression and ruined the financial well-being
of millions of Americans.

Roosevelt and many of the reformers of his day recognized that the
interests of business don't exist in a vacuum, that the fortunes or misfortunes
of businesses can have a profound impact on even the most innocent of
citizens.

Laissez faire advocates like
the late Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman protested, saying that nothing should
"interfere" with the "free market" and that unfettered competition would right
the marketplace. History has proven them wrong.

Time and time again, corporate America has shown that greed, unless
checked by government oversight, will unjustly ensnare the unwary.

I know this is somewhat rude, but just how stupid do you have to be to believe the crap put out by the Right? Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of room for improvement on my side. But if it's just pure evil you're looking for, look to the Right.

They've wrapped themselves in the flag for years, masquerading as some sort of uber-patriots and ever since Ronald Reagan they've been passing themselves off as uber-Christians to boot.

BTW, how's that working out?

Fortunately for the Right, hypocrisy is apparently no longer frowned upon by the Religious Right.

Mike Huckabee
campaigns as an ardent upholder of traditional marriage. On his website
he says he led the move in Arkansas to adopt the practice of "covenant"
marriage, and that he supports amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit gay
people from marrying. He and Mrs. Huckabee say
they believe in the New Testament edict that “a wife is to submit herself
graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.”

But if you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps then it
appears that Huckabee’s moralizing about the sanctity of marriage
is mainly just for show. For example, he takes advice on political strategy from
Dick Morris, the sleazy Fox News Clinton-hater who was outed in a tabloid
magazine over a decade ago by his paid mistress — and who was one our nominees
last year to the GOP
Adulterers Hall of Fame.

Huckabee
has tried to keep his relationship with Morris on the q.t. (He even lied
about it to George Stephanopoulos.) On the other hand, he was brazenly
unashamed to have former Sen. Tim Hutchinson, one of Arkansas’ most notorious
adulterers, serve as his surrogate in television interviews in Iowa and New
Hampshire.

What makes Hutchinson’s betrayal of his
wife particularly scandalous is the fact that, like Huckabee, he is an
ordained minister as well as a Republican politician who won elections by
presenting himself as an adherent of moral values, including, of course, the
sanctity of marriage.

I've never been overly concerned about the Religious Right. Here in Eastern Oklahoma, which BTW, is a shining jewel on the buckle of the Bible Belt, we just about have a church on every corner. Now all these churches are reading out of the same book and they are all reading something different. Oh yeah, they also think that all the others are going straight to Hell.

So this facade that the Religious Right puts up about all the Christians in this country belonging to some monolithic movement is a crock. Case in point, no matter how well you brainwash your children...

WASHINGTON — Much of the national leadership of the Christian conservative
movement has turned a cold shoulder to the Republican presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, wary
of his populist approach to economic issues and his criticism of the Bush
administration’s foreign policy. But that has only fired up Brett and Alex
Harris.

The Harris brothers, 19-year-old evangelical authors and speakers who grew
up steeped in the conservative Christian movement, are the creators of Huck’s
Army, an online network that has connected 12,000 Huckabee campaign
volunteers, including several hundred in Michigan, which votes Tuesday, and
South Carolina, which votes Saturday.

As you can see, even the people who have banded together to replace our Constitution with their religious beliefs, don't even get along with each other.

How about the Right's magnum opus, the Iraq War? Well after months of BS, the folks who perpetrated this deadly farce, finally settled on removing Saddam and the Baath Party as the reason for the sacrifice of life and wealth in Mr. Bush's little war. Where are we five years later? Reinstating the Baath Party.

BAGHDAD - Iraq's parliament passed a benchmark law Saturday allowing
lower-ranking former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party to reclaim government jobs, the first
major piece of U.S.-backed legislation it has adopted.

Traveling in Manama, Bahrain, President Bush hailed the law as "an
important step toward reconciliation."

So we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and they were worth something when this started, and we are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths just to try to get things back like they were before we invaded. Brilliant!

The Right has another brilliant plan, making sure that only the right sort of people get to vote. In other words, Republicans.

There's a war on across the country over who will be allowed to vote in
2008. One of the key battles in the election was fought on January 9 before the
Supreme Court.

The case is called Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. It tests
an Indiana statute, passed in 2005, requiring voters to present a
government-issued ID before they can cast a ballot. The law is aimed at alleged
fraudulent voting by unregistered or noncitizen voters. Republicans insist that these
voters pose a major problem, despite the fact that every systematic study of the
question has concluded that this kind of fraud--called "voter impersonation"--is
all but unknown in the United States right now. In fact, authorities in Indiana
could not point to a single case of voter impersonation in the state's history.

The more restrictive the law, the greater the likelihood that it will tip a
close election by turning away legal voters--mostly the poor, minorities and the
elderly. It's not a coincidence that these voters tend to vote Democratic. In
fact, the State of Indiana, in its filings with the Supreme Court, admits that
the litigation represents "politics by other means." This flippant attitude
toward the right to vote permeates the state's argument. Unfortunately, the
Supreme Court has shown signs that it shares the view that turning voters away
from the polls is constitutionally unimportant.

Now don't be thinking that all this will go away after we have a Democrat President, it won't. Greed is an incredibly powerful motivator to these people and they will do whatever it takes to have things their way. Hang in there, we'll fight them and we'll beat them.

Enjoy your Sunday, you know that Monday's going to pretty much suck.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donohue, Rich Getting Richer, American Health Care Sucks, Big Pharma goes Olive Drab, John Ashcroft and Deadbeat FBI.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce president President Tom Donohue let the world know where working folks stand in the land of the free.

If you're a candidate and you're for the working class, then the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is against you. And they're going to spend big bucks to try to stop you.

WASHINGTON -- Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political
campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery
promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be
anti-business.

"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it
bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said.

I have no doubts that Mr. Donohue knows what he's talking about when it comes to butt biting. After all, it's just the same as butt sucking, except he has to use his teeth. He has to have a stressful job, having to be sure that he's not biting when he should be sucking.

And what has Mr. Donohue's butt biting and sucking gotten us? Let's take a look.

The income gap in the United States is greater than anywhere else in the
developed world. Conservative analysts attempt to justify the disparities as a
necessary step to economic growth, arguing that the rich are being rewarded for
innovation and risk-taking, while the poor experience smaller but meaningful
gains. Everyone benefits in the long run.

But according to numerous recent studies, income and net worth have
actually been DROPPING for all but the top 10 percent of American households.
Because of escalating home mortgage expenses, healthcare, and childcare costs,
the average two-income family today has less disposable income than one-income
families had 30 years ago. The expected "trickle-down" effect has not occurred.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Gini coefficient (a measure of
inequality) has grown steadily over 35 years, from .394 in 1970 to .469 in 2005.
Low-wage earners find it increasingly difficult to escape the burdens of
poverty. The Economic Policy Institute found "significant income correlations
between parents and their children," to the degree that "it would take a poor
family of four with two children approximately nine to 10 generations -- over
200 years -- to achieve the income of the typical middle-income four-person
family."

Impressive, huh? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is actually proud of the work it's done to shovel as much wealth as possible from the bottom to the top. How Republican of them.

And by using this same formula, these scumbags have worked the same magic for health care as they have for the workplace.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United
States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable
conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on
Tuesday.
If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three
countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year,
according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.

And if you're one of those right-wing cretins who still believe that American health care is far superior to any other country's, I'd suggest that you read this.

You hear it over and over again, in casual conversation and in serious
debates among experts: If we create universal health insurance here in the U.S.,
then we'll end up with less responsive, less advanced medical care. Few
arguments have done as much political damage to the cause of universal health
care. And, as wonks like me have been arguing in recent months, few arguments
fall apart more quickly under scrutiny.

After all, if universal health insurance means long queues for treatments,
then why aren't patients in Paris or Hamburg waiting months for routine services
— while patients in Boston and Los Angeles are?

If it means getting rushed, impersonal treatment, then why do France and
Germany give new mothers more than four days to recover in the hospital, while
insurance companies in the U.S. push new mothers out before two?

If it means making do with less advanced technology, then why does Japan have
more CT and MRI scanners per person than we do?

Yes, we owe the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, along with their partner the Right Wing Propaganda Machine, a lot. Without them many more of us might be able to live the American Dream.

Here's a couple of neat things that the Chamber's philosophy has brought about.

The joining of Big Pharma and the military with the idea of drugging our troops for their own good. I think it's so that they won't realize how they're being screwed over.

In June, the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health acknowledged
"daunting and growing" psychological problems among our troops: Nearly 40
percent of soldiers, a third of Marines and half of National Guard members are
presenting with serious mental health issues. They also reported "fundamental
weaknesses" in the U.S. military's approach to psychological health. That report
was followed in August by the Army Suicide Event Report (ASER), which reported
that 2006 saw the highest rate of military suicides in 26 years. And last month,
CBS News reported that, based on its own extensive research, over 6,250 American
veterans took their own lives in 2005 alone -- that works out to a little more
than 17 suicides every day.

Posttraumatic stress injuries can devastate the lives of soldiers and their
families. The suicides that are so often the result of such injuries make it
clear that they can be every bit as lethal as bullets or bombs, and to date no
cure has been found. Treatment and disability payments, both for injured troops
and their families, are a huge budgetary concern that becomes ever more daunting
as these wars drag on. The Psychological Kevlar Act perhaps holds out the
promise of a prophylactic remedy, but it should come as no surprise that Big
Pharma has been looking for a chemical intervention.

I really think that the cheapest and most effective thing we can do for the troops is to bring them home.

I'm sure the U.S. chamber of Commerce is proud of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, it's not what you know but who you know.

WASHINGTON — When the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey needed to find an
outside lawyer to monitor a large corporation willing to settle criminal charges
out of court last fall, he turned to former Attorney General John
Ashcroft, his onetime boss. With no public notice and no bidding, the
company awarded Mr. Ashcroft an 18-month contract worth $28 million to $52
million.
That contract, which Justice Department officials in Washington learned
about only several weeks ago, has prompted an internal inquiry into the
department’s procedures for selecting outside monitors to police settlements
with large companies.

Oh well, Ashcroft can say a prayer and anoint himself with a little oil and probably slide right out of this.

And the Chamber can be particularly proud of the fact that Big Business interests now trump national security interests.

Telecommunications companies have repeatedly cut off FBI access to wiretaps of alleged terrorists and criminal suspects
because the bureau did not pay its phone bills, according to the results of an
audit released yesterday.

The report cited a case in which an order obtained under the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act -- which covers clandestine wiretaps of terrorism
and espionage suspects -- was halted because of "untimely
payment."
"Late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually
disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the
FBI, resulting in lost evidence," Fine said in a seven-page summary of the
audit's findings.

You know, this is a pretty sorry state of affairs, the FBI might accidentally stumble onto a real terrorist plot while they're busy spying on us and the phone company cuts off their service.

So thank you U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Republican Party and the dog vomit Democrats that voted with them, you have brought incredible changes to this country in the last seven years.

And to end, Happy Birthday Boo Boo! (My wife Retha) Thanks for putting up with me for the last 24 years.

Enjoy your Friday.