Public Expression of Religion Act

Late last month the House of Representatives passed a bill to intentionally make it a hardship for Americans to sue their government for unconstitutional sponsorship and promotion of religion. The Public Expression of Religion Act (PERA) passed the house 244-173, with 97% of Republicans supporting it and 87% of Democrats in opposition.

PERA was introduced in the House by Rep. John Hostettler (R-IN), the same guy behind a scheme in 2003 that would have withheld funds from the U.S. Marshals Service and any other agency charged with enforcing the decisions of U.S. District Courts if their decisions removed the words "Under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, or ordered a Ten Commandments monument to be taken out of the Alabama Capitol Building. If adopted by the Senate and signed into law by President George Duplicitous Bush, PERA would overturn current law that gives courts discretionary authority to award reasonable attorneys' fees if it’s found that a government entity violated the Constitutional separation of religion and state principle.

Referring to court awards of attorney fees to the ACLU for their successful legal challenges in several establishment clause cases, Hostettler said his bill “will protect us from being the victims of this assault on our religious liberties.”

Huh? If it wasn’t for the fact that Christian fundamentalists in this country unmercifully hound their communities into displaying religious artifacts on publicly-owned properties, no one would be suing those government entities and no one, therefore, would be awarded attorney fees. Not willing to pay the fine? Don’t break the law. Seems simple enough to me.

Although I don’t at all agree with many of the votes cast by my congressional representative (Chet Edwards, D-TX), he does have the right position on PERA:

"Mr. Speaker, let's be clear -- there's nothing benign about this bill. This bill makes it more difficult to enforce the First Amendment to the Constitution and the very words thereof designed to protect the religious freedom of every American."

God’s senator and the religious right’s favorite 2008 presidential hopeful, Sam Brownback, R-KS, has introduced a version of this bill (S. 3696) in the Senate. Although I haven’t yet checked to see if he has a public position on PERA, I suspect Republican Texas Senator John Violence-Against-Judges-Is-Understandable Cornyn would be in full support of it. Hopefully, the majority of senators will readily recognize that PERA is far from being intelligently designed and will toss it into the garbage can where it belongs.

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Shut Up & Sing

Another Un-American Act

Last month I wrote a column for The Bryan-College Station Eagle about the un-American act of banning books. Yes, despite the fact that we long ago left the dark ages, some folks here in this country still try, and sometimes succeed, to ban books—like Laura Mallory, an evangelical Christian in Georgia who wants the Harry Potter books banned from the library shelves of schools because they have “evil themes, witchcraft, demonic activity, murder, evil blood sacrifice, spells, and they teach children all of this.” (And why is it that it is always zealous Christians, but not, say, animists, skeptics, wiccans, or atheists who demand the banning of books that contain themes that they don’t subscribe to? Hey, I'm just asking here.)

But, to get to the matter of this post, there are many other un-American acts committed by folks who consider themselves upstanding U.S. citizens--including the one just committed by NBC executives. According to a report in Variety yesterday, NBC has refused to air national ads (like this one) for the Dixie Chicks documentary "Shut Up & Sing" because the spots "are disparaging of President Bush.

Without doubt, our most disingenuous president has earned contempt. But, given the screwy system we’ve got concerning our “public” airways, NBC can legally choose to put just about whatever the hell it wants or doesn’t want on its network. Their refusal to air the Shut Up & Sing ads, however, on the ground that it may cause someone to think poorly about our president is self-censorship of opinion. And because NBC is supposed to be a steward of our public airwaves, I think their refusal is an un-American Act.

I guess ABC didn’t have this qualm about disparaging another president when it aired The Path to 9/11.

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Texas animal cruelty law loopholes

Beware: this posting deals with animal cruelty and is very disturbing.

Last Thursday two Bryan, Texas college students were arrested on felony charges of animal cruelty and criminal mischief relating to the murder of a horse. According to the report in our local paper, the two students chased two horses around a pasture with golf clubs and polo mallets. One of the students told police that the other student wanted to kill one of the horses because they chased him the last time he was in the pasture. He said this other student struck the horse on the head with a polo mallet--knocking it down--and then jumped on top of the horse and began slashing at its neck with a knife. Both students then ran off, but later returned. The student who accused his friend of wanting to kill the horse then himself rammed a broken golf club into the chest and heart of the horse to "put it out of its misery."

I can’t begin to comprehend how a human being could commit such an inhumane act. I’ve really tried to figure it out, but so far I can’t get past the angry stage—and I best not say what punishment I’d like to inflict on the guilty parties.

But, while I got mad and sick to my stomach when I read about this sadistic crime in the morning paper, I’m even sicker and madder about it now because of what I’ve found out about our grossly deficient animal cruelty laws here in Texas.

The current animal cruelty statute (Texas Penal Code Section 42) is riddled with loopholes (put there intentionally and not) like the one that prevented the Bell County Attorney from prosecuting a man who deliberately ran over his own puppy with a lawn mower “because the cruelty law only covers killing someone else's animal and because the puppy's instant death didn't meet the law's definition of terror.”

In Harris County, animal cruelty law loopholes prevented the prosecution of a man who killed several kittens by stomping on their heads and warned his mother, who'd been feeding the animals, that he'd do the same to her.

In Waco, animal cruelty law loopholes prevented the prosecution of two Baylor University baseball players for shooting, decapitating, and skinning a cat nicknamed Queso that hung around a fast-food restaurant.

Other examples of horrific animal cruelty acts that have gone unpunished in this state because of loopholes, include: skinning and decapitating a feral cat; tying a dog to a tree and hammering it to death with a claw hammer; bludgeoning 22 emus with an aluminum baseball bat; burning a rabbit alive; and mutilating a live kitten.

As an example of one of the biggest loopholes, according to sub-sections (A)(5) and (9) of the Code, it is not a crime here in Texas for someone to kill, seriously injure, or administer poison to a stray animal or another person’s cattle, horses, sheep, swine, or goats. That is shear lunacy!

It is incomprehensible to me that our Texas legislators allotted themselves sufficient time to draft, debate and pass legislation making it a felony for an individual in the state to own six or more dildos (a law that was just a few weeks ago upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States when they refused to consider a challenge to its constitutionality), but they didn’t have the sense or time to close these and other loopholes in the animal cruelty law.

Given the loopholes, I don’t know how the animal cruelty charges against the two students will play out. If they’re not guilty, that’s one thing, but to escape responsibility and appropriate punishment for the horrible means used to murder that horse because of loopholes that have been intentionally allowed to remain, would be beyond absurd; it would be a crime against our humanity.

I intend to follow this matter very closely and will be reporting here on further developments.

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Living on the miserable minimum wage

Imagine, if you can, having to make monthly rent or mortgage payments, feed and clothe yourself and your family, pay for insurance, gasoline and maintenance of your car, pay for your children’s schooling costs, and pay for needed medical treatment for you and/or your family--all that and more--on the $892.65 per month that you earn from your full-time minimum wage job. (Oh, and that’s your before-tax gross amount; your after-tax net, of course, would, be less than that.)

And just to drive the point home, working full-time at the current federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour would earn you $10,700 per year (gross)--nearly $5,000 below the poverty line for a family of three.

Can’t imagine living life on the minimum or near-minimum wage? Well, if you want to learn a little about what that life is really like, please point your browser to 7 Days @ Minimum Wage and starting today, October 23, and running for the next seven days, you’ll see real people with real stories about their lives at minimum or near minimum pay.



On Day 1, Denver couple Paul Valdez and Susan Windham tell their
story of living on the minimum wage. Paul receives $35 for a full day's
labor in back-breaking construction work.

7 Days @ Minimum Wage is a videoBlog created by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO) in support of minimum wage ballot initiatives in six states (Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Ohio).

Hosted by actress, comedienne and former Utah waitress Roseanne Barr, 7 Days @ Minimum Wage features interviews with men and women who are working at or near the federal minimum wage, which has been frozen at $5.15 an hour since 1997.

Despite the desperate need to raise it, during the past nine years Congress has refused every call to increase the pay of minimum wage workers. They didn’t refuse the call, however, when it came to their own wallets. Members of Congress voted themselves pay raises that between 1997 and 2007 will add up to $34,900.

But while Congress has time and again refused calls to help working folks, labor unions, workers and their families, and community, church, civil rights, and social justice organizations (like John Edwards’ One America Committee and Let Justice Roll) have come together around this injustice and started fighting to raise state minimum wage rates through legislation or ballot initiatives.

It’s such a simple and real family value: folks who work full-time shouldn’t be paid poverty-level wages. That they are is an outrage. But if enough people organize around this wrong, it’ll be one less social injustice that needs to be eradicated.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel has been attributed with saying that action engenders hope. All of the folks responsible for bringing us 7 Days @ Minimum Wage and working to correct this injustice at the state level are certainly doing just that for me—and I suspect for many others, too.

Joe Hill was right; Don’t mourn. Organize!

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After Pat’s Birthday

And if Olbermann’s words don’t impress the need for regime change here at home, then maybe these words of Kevin Tillman will:

After Pat’s Birthday
Posted on Oct 19, 2006
By Kevin Tillman

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by...


Courtesy the Tillman Family
Pat Tillman (left) and his brother Kevin stand
in front of a Chinook helicopter in Saudi Arabia
before their tour of duty as Army Rangers in Iraq in 2003.

Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004.

Truthdig has the rest of Tillman's powerful essay here.

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A government more dangerous to our liberty

I offer no apologies for posting this article in its entirety; it's a passionate expression of my feelings exactly. If you haven't the time to read it now, bookmark it and come back to it when you can give it the attention it deserves:

'Beginning of the end of America'
Olbermann addresses the Military Commissions Act in a special comment

SPECIAL COMMENT

By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Countdown
Updated: 2:00 p.m. CT Oct 19, 2006

We have lived as if in a trance.

We have lived as people in fear.

And now—our rights and our freedoms in peril—we slowly awaken to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.

Therefore, tonight have we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before—and we have been here before, led here by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.

We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail newspaper editors.

American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote about America.

We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as “Hyphenated Americans,” most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.

American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America.

And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen—he is still a Japanese.”

American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America.

Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And each was a betrayal of that for which the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.

Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.

Many of the very people Wilson silenced survived him, and one of them [link mine] even ran to succeed him, and got 900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his jail cell.

And Roosevelt’s internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States to the citizens of the United States whose lives it ruined.

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

In times of fright, we have been only human.

We have let Roosevelt’s “fear of fear itself” overtake us.

We have listened to the little voice inside that has said, “the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass.”

We have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.

Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.

Or substitute the Japanese.

Or the Germans.

Or the Socialists.

Or the Anarchists.

Or the Immigrants.

Or the British.

Or the Aliens.

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And, always, always wrong.

“With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?”
Wise words.

And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.

Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.

You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.

Sadly—of course—the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.

We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

But even within this history we have not before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.

You, sir, have now befouled that spring.

You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.

You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.

For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And — again, Mr. Bush — all of them, wrong.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done to anything the terrorists have ever done.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that “the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values” and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens “unlawful enemy combatants” and ship them somewhere—anywhere -- but may now, if he so decides, declare you an “unlawful enemy combatant” and ship you somewhere - anywhere.

And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.

And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy combatant”—exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you?

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against?

“These military commissions will provide a fair trial,” you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush, “in which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney and can hear all the evidence against them.”

"Presumed innocent," Mr. Bush?

The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain “serious mental and physical trauma” in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.

"Access to an attorney," Mr. Bush?

Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.

"Hearing all the evidence," Mr. Bush?

The Military Commissions Act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.

Your words are lies, Sir.

They are lies that imperil us all.

“One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks,” you told us yesterday, “said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America.”

That terrorist, sir, could only hope.

Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.

Habeas corpus? Gone.

The Geneva Conventions? Optional.

The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.

These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be “the beginning of the end of America.”

And did it even occur to you once, sir — somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 -- that with only a little further shift in this world we now know—just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died --- did it ever occur to you once that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future president and a “competent tribunal” of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of “unlawful enemy combatant” for -- and convene a Military Commission to try -- not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?

For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And doubtless, Sir, all of them—as always—wrong.

© 2006 MSNBC Interactive
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15321167/
© 2006 MSNBC.com

I don't at all understand why we've not yet taken to the streets in massive protest against this Military Commissions Act of 2006 and other un-American actions of our current sick and pathetic government, but at the very least there ought to be a new rule: everyone who shows up at the polls to vote next month should be required to show proof that they've read this article. Anyone who does read it will surely conclude--won't they?--that every politician responsible for this (here and here) should be thrown out on his or her ear.

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Americans United on Campus

I'm pleased to see that Americans United for Church and State has launched a new web site for college and high school students. Americans United on Campus, provides updates on relevant student church-state issues, access to nationally renowned speakers and the ability to utilize resources such as program ideas and action alerts. Student groups associated with AU are listed on the site, and a thorough (41 pages!) "Campus Organizing Manual" for student leaders is also available there for downloading.

Americans United, a non-sectarian, non-partisan religious freedom advocacy group, has for nearly 60-years now promoted and defended the separation of church and state. (The term "separation of religion and state " would be a more accurate, much less confusing term, and might not be as troublesome to Christians as "church and state," which can imply that there is some sort of a vendetta oppressing Christianity. See Introduction to the Principle of Separation of Church and State.)

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Amnesty Wireless

Given that our most disingenuous president ever has now signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, an ill-considered law brought to the world in part by Chet Edwards (D-TX) and 33 other Democratic culprits, Amnesty International’s work is needed even more. So the next time you’re looking for new cell phone service, please consider signing up with Amnesty Wireless. Ten-percent of every dollar you bill will automatically be donated to Amnesty International USA — and it won’t cost you a penny more.

And in the meantime, please also consider signing Amnesty's "The America I Believe In" pledge.

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Damn glad I missed..."The End"

The End of the World
Mark 13:1:
As he was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, 'Teacher, look! What stones! What buildings!'

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Wal-Mart Found Guilty of Knowingly Screwing its Workers--again!

Jury says Wal-Mart mispaid employees

A Philadelphia jury says Wal-Mart must ante up for improperly compensating its Pennsylvania employees for time worked.

Jurors had yet to decide just how much the giant retailer was to pay. Lawyers for the nearly 187,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees involved in the class-action suit say the tab could run as high as $157 million, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

The jury ended five weeks of testimony Thursday by finding that Wal-Mart, the state`s largest private employer, knowingly benefited from the practice, the Inquirer said.

This jury award comes on the heels of a similar verdict in December of 2005 when a California jury ordered Wal-Mart to pay $172 million for violations of a California law that requires meal breaks for employees. In 2004 an Oregon jury awarded 83 Wal-Mart workers in that state about $2,000 each for lunch period violations. Also in 2004, Wal-Mart settled a similar lawsuit by workers in its Colorado stores for $50 million.

Wal-Mart's screwing its employees like this is nothing less than stealing. So how come no member of management has been fired for these (and many other) acts of theft? Doesn't Wal-Mart have a rule chiseled-in-stone that calls for an employee's immediate dismissal if they're caught stealing any product or time from the company? Wal-Mart executives responsible for this are a gang of two-faced crooks that should be immediately thrown out of their jobs.

Wal-Mart defends itself by stating that corporations are responsible to their shareholders for creating as much wealth for them as they can. Yeah, well that’s not all corporations are responsible for. Corporations are responsible to other stakeholders, too, like the communities in which they operate and the workers who produce the wealth.

If Costco and other responsible corporate citizens can produce wealth for their shareholders and value for their clients while at the same time adequately rewarding their employees for their labors, like this article reports, then Wal-Mart can too. Like our current bankrupt Congress, it just needs an extensive executive house cleaning and injection of some moral leadership.

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Lots of people died for this??

Iraqi Journalists Add Laws to Their List of War's Dangers

Under a broad new set of laws criminalizing speech that ridicules the government or its officials, some resurrected verbatim from Saddam Hussein's penal code, roughly a dozen Iraqi journalists have been charged with offending public officials in the past year.

Currently, three journalists for a small newspaper in southeastern Iraq are being tried here for articles last year that accused a provincial governor, local judges and police officials of corruption. The journalists are accused of violating Paragraph 226 of the penal code, which makes anyone who ''publicly insults'' the government or public officials subject to up to seven years in prison.

No doubt our disingenuous Commander-in-Chief drooled all over himself with envy when he learned of Paragraph 226, but it's too damn hard to contemplate that anyone had their life taken from them for this crap.

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