A Post-Easter Trinity Post

The fundamentalists are on the march again. It's not surprising, times of crisis invevitably bring about an upsurge in wackos as the true believers emerge from their caves to reveal the secrets revealed to them and only them. The coming week will bear witness to a triptych of delusion, a true masterpiece that deserves to be hung alongside Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado. For those of us on the flipside of delusion however, where reality rules supreme instead of royalty, theocracy or right-wingnuttery, the scenes out of London, the Vatican and Ottawa serve to remind us of how easily the masses are convinced to continue down the path of self-destruction.

Another crisis, another royal wedding. The parallels between today and 1981 are striking. Another conservative government pushing through a right-wing agenda provided with the perfect diversion with which to distract its population of Daily Mail readers. Kate Middleton will wed Prince William Friday in a choreographed ceremony of pomp and circumstance to rival that fairy tale marriage between Diana Spencer and Prince Charles nearly thirty years ago. Panem et circenses serving once again as cover as the ideologues in power push through an agenda to cure the nation's economic woes by doubling down on the same policies that caused the crisis to begin with.

The main difference to be found is in the rhetoric employed by Margaret Thatcher then and David Cameron today in order to justify implementing policies to further shift the wealth of the nation towards the top. While Thatcher may have referenced Francis of Assisi when she moved into 10 Downing Street, "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope", she generally took on a confrontational tone with those who opposed her. Cameron on the other hand, due to the nature of his coalition government with the Lib Dems, employs a much more subtle divide and conquer strategy.

While Thatcher thrived on confrontation, Cameron's PR spin doctors (courtesy of the Murdoch empire) have him cloying on about a fictitious Big Society. Whether or not you believe that Thatcherism sowed the seeds of the UK's current economic distress, her policies failed to decrease the size of government while shifting the tax burden down the income scale, setting the scene for the explosion of income inequality seen today. Cameron and his Eton buddy-turned chancellor of the exchequer George Osbourne are proposing to build on this while shifting ever more wealth into the hands of the corporations and other elite. Of course, you won't hear this from their mouths in the UK, however, their minions will tell potential investors on the other side of the pond exactly what they are planning - We are making cuts that Margaret Thatcher, back in the 1980s, could only have dreamed of.



Whoops, where was I? Right, wedding. Royal. Buck-toothed balding guy and his commoner bride-to-be. Why does the public still eat up this pablum? Who cares what it costs when the working shmoes can get an eleven day holiday by simply taking three vacation days thanks to the magic of the calendar. Besides, won't the expense be offset by the benefit provided to the economy from all the tourists who plan on flocking to the British capital to take in the event? Well, in a word, no. The firm, or royal family as they are known, cost the public about £38.2 million a year, or 62p a person to defray expenses but the wedding will cost the public an awful lot more than that. Extra policing and overtime alone is estimated at more than $35 million. Add in the cost of all that extra holiday time and the costs begin to skyrocket, economists are "suggesting that it could knock something like a quarter percent off growth." That translates into a potential loss to the economy of about $50 billion.

But it's worth it right? After all, instead of watching depressing stories of British missiles raining down death on Libyans or Taliban terrorists escaping from prisons in the graveyard of empires, we get to see a princess crowned. Another aspirational lesson in which we learn that if we just believe enough, we too can have the fairy tale ending. Or not. Guess what Britons? There's only one royal family and you're not part of it, nor will you ever be. Kate will become your sixth Queen Catherine carrying on a tradition that should have died centuries ago but somehow didn't. She'll hopefully avoid the fate of Catherine Howard and probably won't have the impact of Henry VIII's first queen, Catherine of Aragon. After a 24-year marriage cursed by the stillbirths and early deaths of several sons, Henry was so desperate to have the marriage annulled that when the Pope refused to give his consent he broke away from Rome and founded the Church of England.

Ah, that church thing, the Brits are still sticking it to the Vatican, this time the royal wedding is stealing the thunder of the beatification of John Paul II. There doesn't seem to be a problem with the fact the church waved the manadatory five-year waiting period for JPII's beatification, or that maybe he shouldn't be beatified at all, no, the problem is that the Holy See's big event isn't selling enough tickets. When the date was announced in January the royal wedding date had already been set for months yet Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, former head of the Vatican's saint-making department, said he expected more than two million faithful to show up for the event. Based on that prediction, Vatican and Italian tour operators booked entire hotels in Rome and its surroundings. Enthusiasm has been tempered a bit since then, predictions have fallen to the 150,000 range despite the Vaticans best efforts to make the event go viral by setting up a beatification website, Facebook page and Twitter account.

In typical unthinking fashion, Santo subito! - Sainthood now! is the chant today just as it was then on St. Peter's Square in 2005 during JPII's funeral. Granted, he was an extraordinary man and a decent enough pope in many ways. More than a moral and symbolic force again totalitarianism, he toured his homeland giving Poles the courage to resist Soviet domination. Even after the collapse of communism, he offered a prescient warning about capitalism, "The excessive hoarding of riches by some denies them to the majority and thus the very wealth that is accumulated generates poverty." The first non-Italian pope since the renaissance, the former actor and factory worker was a skiing cardinal, a mountain-climbing poet, a kayaking philosopher, a singing author. By capturing the world's imagination he was in a position to not only influence the world outside the walls of the church but that within as well and that is where he sadly failed.

Imagine if Grima Wormtongue who whispered counsel into the ear of King Théoden to poison his soul in The Lord of the Rings coveted little boys instead of the kings niece Eowyn. Such a character would most properly be based on the Rev. Marcial Degollado, the founder of the Legion of Christ, who was formally accused of pedophilia in a Vatican proceeding yet remained John Paul’s pet. Despite nine different people accusing him of abusing them as children, the soon-to-be-blessed refused to investigate thus allowing the church's wound that is peodophilia to continue to fester and ooze pus to this day. Instead of reform and healing we get the former bishop of Bruges serenely admitting to abusing his nephews on TV and rationalizing his atrocities, "I had the strong impression that my nephew didn’t mind at all," 74-year-old Roger Vangheluwe said, smiling. "On the contrary. It was not brutal sex. I never used bodily, physical violence." He said he abused the second boy for "merely over a year".

Revalations of the game of hide the pedo-priest from parish to parish or the effects of the regressive stance taken on social issues and the part played in the spreading of AIDS particulary in Africa are slow evolving stories and exactly the reason for the five year waiting period before beatification. Calm rationality replaces emotional passion and allows us to weight decision properly instead of making rash choices. Instead, Pope Benedict chose to speed up the process, the third of four steps in cannonization, the path to sainthood. It was JPII himself who cheapened the whole process, beatifying almost 1,400 people, more than the total of all his predecessors since Pope Sixtus V (1585–1590).

The final panel in our tryptich features the creepiest image of all, that of a democratic nation lulled to sleep by an egomaniacal authoritarian bent on turning his country into the mirror image of their southern neighbour. I mean, it's not even the government of Canada anymore, it's the Harper government. Canada, my birthplace, has enjoyed a reputation surpassed by few nations. In fact, to those not paying attention, the word Canada still brings to mind an image of unspoiled wilderness and friendly, peace-loving people. This has been slowly eroded over the past five years by the Harper minority-government yet many seem prepared to give him and his party a free pass based on the fact that they are the only choice to ensure a stable government conducive to economic growth. The main selling point seems to be that under his stewardship, Canada was able to sail through the financial crisis relatively unscathed. This is of course a joke, a monkey could have (and would have) done a better job, being capable of giving a green light to the exploitation of resources to be ripped and burned out of the earth in order to satifsy the insatiable appetite to the south while ironically benefiting from the sound foundation provided by the financial regulations that Harper's corporate puppet-masters will have him tear down in the event of a Conservative majority. Meanwhile, the world is beginning to pay attention, sharply rebuking Canada for it's Afghanistan atrocities by denying her a UN security council seat (which of course Harper blamed on the Liberal party!) and naming the Great White North the worst environmental offender in the world.

A closer look reveals the self-destructiveness of his evil mix of policies, neocon on the social side and neoliberal on the economic, all sold to the public through lies, deceipt and cover-ups. Oh, by the way, that's why there's even an election at all, Harper's became the first government in Canadian history to be found in contempt of parliament. While Mr. Harper likes to tell Canadians what they care about, this little detail should be enough to reveal the undemocratic nature of the man, especially when combined with his unprecedented usage of an obsure parliamentary trick, proroguing government, not once, but twice. On both occasions Harper requested and was granted permission from the governor general, the Queen of England's representative in Canada (she is after the true head of the Canadian government), to shut down parliament as he was set to lose confidence votes. Yep, sounds like a democracy to me, one where if you don't like the possible outcome, you just change the game.

The financial press lauds Harper's economic program because it consists of lowering taxes on their corporate masters and shifting the tax burden to the people. Meanwhile the illusion of fiscal responsibility is nearly maintained by lowering environmental standards and subsidizing the oil giants to rape and pillage the ecosystem in a mad scramble to burn up the planet as quickly as possible. Following the American lead, the sheeple are being sold the same old bill of sale, lowering taxes on the corporations and the rich while gutting regulation will lead to economic prosperity. If people would just take the time to read the fine print they'd realize their wealth is simply being handed over to the wealthiest 1%. Canada will have cut corporate taxes virtually in half over the past 10 years once the current program is complete. The super-rich in Canada have enjoyed a decline in their tax rate of 11 percentage points while 95 per cent of Canadians averaged a decrease of 1 percentage point. In a bid to improve Canada's competitiveness, or what should be called trying to win the race to the bottom, Harper wants to lower the already-reduced corporate tax rate from 18% to 15% at a time when Canada is sporting a record $56 billion deficit. We're not competing with the US, where the rate is 35%, we're trying to compete with already broke and IMF controlled Ireland, Albania and Uzbekistan. Oh, and this tax break won't apply to 95% of the 2.2 million businesses in Canada, only the big boys on Bay Street.

Social policies? Let's see. Cut funding to the arts. Check. Cut funding to women's shelters. Check. Watch as your country falls from 6th to 24th in child mortality. Check. Spend like drunken sailors to build prisons for all the folks who fall on hard times and through the growing holes in the social safety net. Check. Add the US style get tough on crime costs to the nearly $30 billion for a bunch of F-35s without engines and then act surprised that more cuts are necessary to plug the budget deficit especially while cutting revenue earned on corporate taxes. Check. Ignore abuses of the health care system to encourage the development of an American style for profit game of life and death. Check. Orwellian surveillance laws to ensure the populations docility? Check. This seems to be what many people want as they continue, Candide style to believe that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, somehow nothing can go wrong following the US down it's suicidal path of destruction.

Truth is far stranger than fiction, yet none of this surprises anymore. How could it be surprising that billions of people would be interested in a wedding that has nothing to do with them or pilgrims are fainting like school girls at a Justin Bieber concert over the sight of a vile of a dead Pole's blood - it all explains how people could vote for the likes of Stephen "I'm not quite as bad as Robert Mugage" Harper. The fundamentalists are still firmly in control driving us ever faster towards judgment day.

This Month in Wingnuttery

Format changes continue with a tweak to my promised semi-regular feature on wingnuttery; by making it monthly it'll give me a chance to do a piece on schedule and allow me to use the far more convenient shotgun rhetoric those nutters love to use. What, with the oil gushing top kill reaching Cousteau shock and awe, it's time to set things right before it's too late. Who knew the term wingnut had so many different meanings? According to dictionary.com it's a nut having two flat, widely projecting pieces such that it can be readily tightened with the thumb and forefinger; the first definition on the urbandictionary is "An outspoken, irrational person with deeply-held, nominally conservative, political views. A person who chooses on principle to be flagrantly ignorant. A "right-wing nut". And wingnuttery? Well, for our purposes let's take it to be anyone who's parsimonious with the truth, often disguising this fact with allusions to god, guns and (smaller) government in order to advance a conservative agenda. Unbeknownst to me when I started this semi-regular (woohooo 2 editions!) feature, CNN has been running a similarly named feature for the past year, but they take a more "balanced" approach, naming a left and right wing freakshow of the moment. Here we don't need to maintain the faux illusion of fairness. We better hurry though, lots of ground to cover, from the Empress of Alaska down to the Gulf, duh, and then over to the home of wingnut civilization, the cradle of the big three Abrahamic religions, the Middle East and Israel.

America has of course become the capital of wingnuttery, or New Jerusalem if you will. Anywhere that someone of Sarah Palin's type can so easily stir a populist frenzy by flashing some MILF thigh and screeching some internet mined redneck jokes is in trouble. Coming within a heartbeat of being a heartbeat from the presidency was scary enough, but she seems to be on track for another run in a couple years, this time at the top of the Republican ticket. Wouldn't surprise me if she won as the very corporations that are busy destroying the world will be able to spend unlimited amounts on future elections thanks the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. Money is speech for corporations with guaranteed freedom but the people whose lives they destroy don't have the money to buy voices.

The demi-governor of Alaska has been busy during this mid-term election primary season, throwing her support behind anyone willing to pay her appearance fees. With the attention span of a hummingbird on a nectar jag, she probably misses the hypocrisy and cruel irony of her choices. The Palin of 2008 pledged to "stop multi-million dollar payouts and golden parachutes" for executives who run their company into the ground. So why not support Carla Fiorini for Senate, a woman who oversaw the loss of over 50% in the value of Hewlett Packard only to walk away with a $45 million payout. Where did she run her company and what color was that parachute? Or Vaughn Ward, her choice to be the Republican congressional candidate from Idaho. Besides fulfilling the Palin geography requirement calling Puerto Rico a country, he also happened to lift a speech given by Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic convention. Teleprompter anyone? Plagiarize much? How about Clint Didier for Senate in Washington blasting government intervention while taking $140,000 in federal farm subsidies. Not sexy enough? Ok, take Palin's pick for governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, who had an affair with a former co-worker in the governor's office.

Of course every time these stories come out, it's not the lack of proper vetting, exactly what allowed her to join the McCain ticket in '08 and launched her into the national spotlight, it's the 'lamestream' media's fault. These are somehow personal attacks which are "a violation of our press freedom", a curious claim coming from someone who supposedly studied journalism in college. Sure, she could've served out her term as governor and tried to leave a public service legacy while boning up on the issues in order to take a run at the presidency in 2012. God bless America, however, where the pursuit of wealth and fame trumps intellect and democracy every time. In order for a two-party system to function properly it's essential to have some kind of balance between the two choices. It's gotten to the point where the wingnuts have enough influence to grind the legislative process to a near halt, where 'no' isn't about belief but dogma. However, if the Palins and teabaggers have their way, come November the Republican slate of candidates will be so wingnut heavy as to be poisonous to democracy.

Check out the ad for the aforementioned Carly Fiorini against her FCINO (Fiscal Conservative in Name Only) opponent, really watch it to the end if you want to learn that good Republicans are sheep and don't have glowing red eyes. It only gets worse in Alabama where teacher's unions sponsor attack ads against gubernatorial candidates who believe in evolution and don't believe in the infallible truth of the bible. Or maybe you prefer a candidate who made her fortune specializing in blood, seminaked women and scripted subplots featuring rape, adultery and familial violence. Sounds like a surefire way to get elected in a NASCAR friendly state like Alabama, but it was the Connecticut Republican party who chose Linda McMahon to be their candidate for the senate. Rand has even come back, no not a brain-eating zombie named Ayn, this time as a first name as Rand Paul took a step to joining dad Ron in the senate. Sure they call themselves libertarians, but they're just racists who want to repeal civil rights and abolish the department of education while keeping medicare cheques rolling in, after all, an optometrist needs to earn a living, right? These are the people who will be screaming for deregulation as the world eats itself up and if you dare to blame a corporation, you are un-American.

Palin and her ilk's drill baby drill bit is the reason the Gulf of Mexico is witnessing the craziest shit we've seen in awhile. A wingnut's job in times like this is to call this Obama's Katrina to try to take the blame off of our society's insatiable need for a black-gooey resource that is getting harder and harder to extract, oil sands anyone? Even wingnuttier is the fact they'll still be holding the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, for which I will grant them the honor of being my first wingnuts of the month. Even as the new oil ecosystem hovers and splashes onto their coasts wiping out the entire fishing industry with it, they still plan to celebrate the 75th edition of the festival. It is the diamond jubilee after all. Who knows, maybe oil-dipped shrimp will be the wake up call to the fact that despite the states pro-business policies, they somehow still remain one of the poorest states in the union where the rich get richer while the poor, well, die. Too bad the media damage control spin has been more effective in dulling the outcry than the effort to control both the leak and the damage done to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. By low-balling the original estimates, much of the public has been softened up to the real amount of oil that is oozing relentlessly into the gulf.

Don't worry though you true believers in the capitalist system, as always, there's money to be made from tragedy. After all, the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska brought us the credit default swap who knows what weapon of financial destruction will be unleashed as a result of this latest disaster. The spill has already opened the opportunity to bet on the first species to become extinct in addition to creating a whole new reality TV genre, truly hypnotic, let's hope they don't get any ideas for spin-offs. Maybe the wingnuts truly believe that corporate rights should win out over human rights and that big oil would never knowingly do anything to endanger the planet. No, corporations should be just left on their own to do as they please like Chevron in Ecuador or Shell in Nigeria. If we could just get tort reform poor big oil wouldn't have to worry about silly environmental lawsuits and could back to the serious pursuit of profits.

Oh, in case you missed it, this tragedy reminds of another wingnut misconception. The one where all regulation is bad. The fact is bad regulation has the potential to be bad times two whereas none has infinite badness potential. Too bad the double bad in this case may turn out to be an unstoppable force of destruction of gooey destruction where top kills and junk shots don't relieve the pressure. Funny, the regulators charged with overseeing the oil and gas industry were doing the same thing as the financial regulators - jerking to porn while writing the rules that decide how you're buddies play the game. The MMS, or Interior Department's Minerals Management Service was staffed predominately by Dick Cheney's Dubya administration, yes that helps explain why Halliburton is so involved in this fiasco (they're a huge company thanks to government war and oil contracts my friends, let's hear it for the free market, yeah!). Obama was at the helm when this went down and had an opportunity to, pardon the expression, blue ball those bastards before blowing their bunk, but as with the financial oversight authorities, the old boys network was allowed to develop thanks to Dubya.

Anyway, the MMS collects royalties and writes the rules for the BP's and Exxon's and Chevron's sorta like Fitch's, Moody's and Standard and Poor's charges the financial industry for the ratings they provide. Do you think this opens the door to corruption? Well, gifts and cushy jobs are nice but it's the porn link that is almost too much, hey, these guys were all buddies, financial and oil good ol' boys, they naturally shared porn links. At work, oh, and the meth. One handers took down finance and now the gulf. Instead of focusing on why the BP spill response plan for the gulf seemed to be lifted directly from other plans we get the wingnut leader lord Limbaugh grunts towards those who may now question offshore drilling "what better way to head off more oil drilling, nuclear plants, than by blowing up a rig? I'm just saying." A wingnut doesn't want us to know that deregulation and lax oversight is what allows the BP's and Halliburton's to fill in inspection forms in pencil for the MMS inspectors to write over in pen.

Those like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal want less government involvement except when they want more government involvement. Yet it's the Reagan in them that limited the liability of big oil corporations like BP after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, until just a few days ago America's worst environmental disaster, to $75 million. It might piss us off if we knew about BP's hand in exacerbating that Alaska mess back in 1989. Or, maybe even remember the 2005 BP refinery explosion in Texas killing 15 in 2005 or the 200,000 gallons leaked out of their Alaskan pipeline just a year later. It might upset people to know that the lives of those men in Texas could've been saved if BP had sprung for the more expensive facilities instead of penning them like pigs. Our blood would boil if we found out that even more egregiously, BP was using dispersant to break up the giant oil slicks that look so bad on TV which is only making the disaster worse and putting clean up worker's health at risk. It would be a public relations disaster, just like acknowledging there is a respiratory danger, so BP prevented fisherman helping in clean up efforts from wearing respirators. People would get angry if they knew this was all just the cost of doing business, right? Especially if they found out that the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP, Transocean Ltd., decided to insure the rig for about twice what it was worth (don't ask me how they have more sense than insurance companies) and made a $270 million profit from insurance payouts thanks to the disaster.

The best way to keep stuff like this happening is to keep 'em dum (sic), Texas dumb that is. The Texas school board are doing their bit to keep the country ignorant, having finished it's ten year review of the history curriculum and deciding they didn't like it. History that is. So they've made some minor adjustments. Minor, if you consider Oscar Romero being bumped off by right-wingnuts for the second time because an ignoramus had never heard of him or omitting the achievements of a Founding Father because he believed in a strong central government as minor. A March refresher:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Don't Mess With Textbooks
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

Well, the bad news is, the changes officially passed into the books just last week to little fanfare, unless watching a purchased school board discussing the UN takeover of America being taught in the classrooms is exciting (Don McLeroy a name to remember - not, I love that second guy though). No, the bad news is that they'll be teaching kids that the founding fathers never intended complete separation of church and state. No wait, the really bad news is that changes made to Texas history books will affect what much of the nation will have their children taught as publishing companies cater to the state's needs seeing as its such a big customer.

Don't let us forget neighbor Arizona is making matters even worse rallying to the Faux News banner of illegals stealing jobs and killing white folk turning the state into a Goebbels' paradise. Am I using a wingnut jedi nazi trick? Um, does the Catholic Church protect paedophiles? Wingnut supporters of their new anti-immigration law wrap themselves in the Constitution while taking away the cover the document offers society's most vulnerable. SB 1070 requires cops in Arizona to stop anyone appearing Latino on reasonable grounds that they are committing a criminal act because if they are undocumented they have been redefined as a criminal by merely being in the state. Isn't racial profiling through circular arguments fun!

Thedeafening march of blackboots is almost enough to drown out the screaming contortions caused by having a Miss USA with Palestinian roots. Releasing the hounds and screaming "Git (sic) her, she's different!". Aaah, fear of the other combined with a little intolerance and you've got the perfect wingnut recipe. Take the proposal to build a Muslim cultural center a couple blocks from ground zero. Somehow they still don't get the fact that being able to build it was what made America great, instead they're calling on 'true Americans' to blow it up if it's built. Better yet, instead of the community center, a monument should be built to "victims of hundreds of millions of years of jihadi wars, land enslavements, cultural annihilations and mass slaughter." Ah yes, the classic wingnut response, treating numbers like putty, turning history on its head and oblivious to the irony of being suggested as the cost of their crusade-like response to 9/11 passes the trillion dollar mark.

Right wingnuts don't even have to answer questions, simply make baseless accusations to stun and distract the public. Easy enough when they're playing to an audience where educated might mean graduating from a place like Liberty University which bans Democrats, campus organizing, distribution of unapproved literature, viewing most movies and playing of music that's "offensive to Liberty's Christian stand". The kind of place that  invites Glenn Beck to give commencement speeches where he can take his president's words out of context. At least he avoided hawking gold while fomenting distrust in the central government and left out the part where he rails against the social justice preached in the gospel or that socialist Jesus, guess they don't have that kind of stuff in his Book of Mormon.

See, wingnuttery preys on the believers' naivety, finding fertile ground in religious belief. Politicians trumpeting social conservatism will always play well to some, never mind that their homophobia most likely stems from same-sex arousal, or that their family values preaching doesn't seem to jibe with their adulterous ways. Yes, I'm talking to you Rep. Mark Souder, Sens. John Ensign and David Vitter and Gov. Mark Sanford and, well, you get the picture. Right-wingnut hypocrisy when it comes to sex is even worse than the libertarians who would have the government's hands all over the uterus but it all makes sense when you realize the congregation is led by preachers who believe they can cure homosexuality that take jaunts to Europe with rented boy toys. I know, that ain't nothing, if we we're only reviewing March's wingnuttery we could go after the Rat and his minions a bit, but we're not, and I'm chomping at the bit for Israel, the land where the neoliberal meets the neocon.

Why? Well, again, in case you missed it, we now have proof that the Israeli wingnuts hooked up the South African apartheid nutters with nukes. Yeah, I know, Israel hasn't signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty so that means they can't even have nukes. What? That doesn't mean they don't? Yike! Well, shouldn't it freak us out then that Shimon Peres was dealing them to PW Botha all the way back in the 70's? Shouldn't Israeli's themselves find it awkward remembering that their country welcomed a Nazi sympathizer, former South African Prime Minister John Vorster, back in April of 1976 to iron out the details. Well, after visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, where he laid a wreath to the victims of the German Reich he once extolled. Does no one care that Israel aided the oppression of the black majority, nuclear missiles no less, um, do you think maybe it's Israeli wingnuttery that is getting in the way of dealing with Iran honestly. Why is it that the Israeli lobby has been so successful? Guilt and obfuscation. With rhetorical flourishes any anti-Israel statement is turned into an anti-semitism. Somehow questioning how a nation whose very existence is due to atrocities committed can commit those very same atrocities makes one an anti-Semite. In order to keep the truth hidden, wingnuts must also keep those who speak the truth silent, or at least quiet.

The likes of Noam Chomsky can be denied entry trying to cross the Allenby Bridge from Jordan with his daughter to deliver a scheduled lecture at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. Silencing a critic who had spoken at Israeli universities in the past most likely because of his saying "supporters of Israel are in reality supporters of its moral degradation" after the 2008/9 war in Gaza seems a little anti-freedom. I mean this is Noam Chomsky. My English students only know him for his linguistics books, after all he was and is one of the smartest men of our times. How do the wingnuts keep his political views so silent? Oh yeah, the entry denial thing. Totalitarian regime thing. Oh, and the wingnuts supporting the guys selling them the bombs who want to keep tensions ratcheted up in the region to guarantee a steady flow of profits from killing innocent people along with a few crazies. Keep illegally building in East Jerusalem and the occupied territories, quietly balancing the numbers, putting up an illegal concentration camp fence barrier in the West Bank and building apartheid road networks and eventually people won't even remember that two national groups claim the right to self-determination in what used to be Palestine. All the nutter faithful see are towel headed terrorists, not a people being methodically exterminated by a more powerful master. Doesn't seem like Apartheid South Africa at all, no reason for an Israel Apartheid Week every year.

Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's chief wingnut, er, foreign minister, wants to require Israeli Arabs to sign a loyalty oath. Loyalty to a government that has maintained a stranglehold over Gaza for more than two years, a blockade to slowly starve and dehumanize the population. Slower and more painful than the gas chambers I guess. The Gaza War that bridged 2008 and 2009, or Israeli Operation Cast Lead, not only saw Israel commit war crimes, but was preceded by the sealing of all entry points to Gaza, severely hindering efforts to deal with the injured. Unbelievably this situation has continued until today, and if heaven forbid you call a spade a spade and compare Gaza to a concentration camp, you get called a Palestinian propagandist, even if you're a Catholic cardinal. Another flotilla is trying to break the siege, this time number six ships, 700 activists, over 10,000 tons of aid and one Nobel laureate, but will most likely be stopped by the Israeli navy. It has somehow become normalized over the last three years that Israel determines what the 1.5 million citizens of Gaza can and can't have. Frozen salmon yes, cilantro no. Of course Israel fears the latest flotilla attempt as it never looks good for soldiers to block people trying to bring the essentials of life, but what are they gonna do? Once a wingnut, always a wingnut.

Better cut this rambling rant off now before I lose some readers (sigh, resigned laugh here). We've clearly entered a new phase of the culture war, where guns, gays and god still have their part to play, but this time in a battle for the survival, not just economic and political, but as a species. Even recent history has seen momentous turning points as witnessed in Berlin, Tianamen and Pretoria about 20 years ago. It only takes a pebble to start an avalanche and the pebbles being kicked around seem to be getting bigger and bigger from the financial meltdown through to the gulf disaster. When faced with overwhelming evidence that something no longer works, a rational person changes tack, tries something new, whereas it's clear that a wingnut only wants to maintain the status quo in order to enrich himself. America is truly the Wingnuts-R-US of the world, wielding so much influence over so many that nothing short of armageddon will get them to change their ways as seen by the chart on the right. Yet it's hard not to notice that the scale of crises has become too big and if we don't find a way to get through to the wingnuts of no, the next one could prove to be the big one and it'll be too late. This is a teachable moment to remind us that "the role of government is to do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves." After all, even hillbillies can learn a new tune.

The Past In Poland's Present

Upon a hill at the bend of the Vistula River in Kraków sits an ancient castle known as Wawel, the Polish seat of royalty for over 550 years. Within its walls is housed the city's cathedral known as the Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Stanisław (Stanislaus) and Vaclav whose crypt holds the tombs of Polish kings, national heroes, generals and revolutionaries. Among them, one ornate silver tomb stands out. Unlike most of the other residents of the crypt, this man was neither King nor revolutionary yet almost all of the Polish kings beginning with Władysław I the Elbow-high were crowned while kneeling before his sarcophagus which sits near the center of the cathedral above. In order to understand the significance of the decision to bury Lech Kaczynki and his wife in this sacred place, one need look no further than the story behind the man whose remains are to be found within this silver tomb.

Saint Stanislaus of Szczepanów, whose name is now born by the most important cathedral in Poland, was one of the earliest native Polish bishops. According to legend, nearly a millennium ago this man was transformed into the martyr of Poland after paying the price for opposing King Bolesław II the Bold of his then young nation. Stanislaus first gained his reputation after purportedly resurrecting the body of a man named Piotr to testify against the king in a property dispute. However, when the Bishop dared to criticize the king of sexual immorality in his punishment of the wives of soldiers returning from war and had him excommunicated, the king accused him of treason and decided to have him killed without trial. When his soldiers refused to perform his order, Bolesław slew the bishop while he was celebrating mass in the Skałka outside the walls of Kraków, hacked the body to pieces and threw them into a pool outside the church. According to the legend, Stanislaus' members miraculously reintegrated while the pool was guarded by four eagles. Public anger was so great that Bolesław the suddenly not so Bold fled to Hungary and was succeeded by his brother Władysław I Herman. 

There may be no other nation in which history, martyrdom, the church and politics are so deeply intertwined. Most history books point to the AD 965 Catholic baptism of Prince Mieszko I as the birth of Poland and since Stanislaus' killing just over a century later, on either April 11 or May 8, 1079, the nation has seen more than her share of martyred symbols to go along with a long list of tragedies. Last Saturday saw another catastrophe added to the list as the Polish presidential Tupolev Tu-154 exploded short of the airport in Smolensk, where the presidential party was landing on their way to attend a remembrance ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. In one stroke, 96 members of the Polish elite were wiped out leaving a nation to grieve a second national disaster on the same site. “First the flower of the Second Polish Republic is murdered in the forests around Smolensk,” said former president Aleksander Kwasniewski. “Now the intellectual elite of the Third Polish Republic die in this tragic plane crash when approaching Smolensk airport.”

It's not everyday that you wake up and find that the president of the country you're living in has perished in a plane crash. After the shock and sadness came the practical questions of what constitutes 'a week of national mourning' (does one work? are the stores going to be open? Yes, and some - not the national chain stores); why did the pilot try to land after being warned off by the tower (more conspiracies at work, Kaczynski may have pushed the pilot as he did in Georgia a couple years back, do you really think we'll get the real black box?); why were so many important people on the same plane (um, did I say conspiracy theory?). Most importantly today, seeing that life is going on and the constitution ticking like clockwork, there will be an election much sooner than the original October plan, an election that Kaczynski was virtually assured to lose. The date will be announced following the funeral, but June 20th seems the most likely date that will answer the question of whether Poland will allow the church and PiS to continue to keep the past in the way of her future.

Leave it to the conservative PiS party and their Catholic allies to turn a tragedy into a controversy by trying to take advantage of a disaster for political gain. Immediately following the crash, the well-practiced Poles were flying the national flag with a black ribbon of remembrance attached while gathering to pay their respects in public places, many of them laying candles used to mark the numerous mournful anniversaries across the country. Despite the unpopularity of the incumbent president, the nation was unified in its grief and condolences, with tributes pouring in from all points on the political spectrum. Both the leftist SLD party and the Kaczynski right-wing PiS have been left without candidates as Jerzy Szmajdziński was also on the passenger list of the ill-fated flight. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Lech's twin brother, along with the cardinal of Krakow, Stanislaw Dziwisz, have fired the first shot in the election campaign in an attempt to replicate the miraculous reintegration of Bishop Stanislaus body. Their answer, turn Lech into a martyr in order to re-brand his image and somehow resurrect his failed presidency.

The decision to bury Lech Kaczynski in the most sacred site has predictably turned a unifying moment into a political circus. Where just a few days ago Poles were amazed at the unity they had shown and the were proud of the resilience of their constitution, in its place we're seeing the return of the defeatist attitude so common here that expects nothing better than life gives them. When a major trauma occurs, the kind that is both individual and collective, something happens that Jungian psychology calls an “abaissement du niveau mental" a lowering of the level of consciousness. Intellect gives way to the gloom of the collective psyche. The horrified mind tries to find meaning, but lets itself be seduced by old myths. If only Kaczynski had done more than reinforce and perpetuate hatred and intolerance during his political career it would be easier to swallow his elevation to martyrdom. As mayor of Warsaw he banned a gay rights parade two years running while supporting a demonstration dubbed by the organizers as a "normality parade". This homophobia needs no encouragement here in Poland having been found guilty of violating human rights by the European Court.

Some critics of Cardinal Dziwisz’s decision to bury the Presidential couple in the Wawel Cathedral of Cracow next Sunday argue that his consent might have been imposed by an “election committee” of the PiS party, whose members wanted to use the national mourning and the burial of President Lech Kaczynski to promote his twin brother, the party’s Chairman, Mr. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, for the next President of Poland. What better boost to a presidential campaign than a martyred brother. The viral text meme quickly spread that "History has come full circle. Mickiewicz’s Poland as the Christ of Nations is returning. Let us be united by this love from God. Let us strengthen the fatherland through brotherhood." Senators begin comparing Kaczynski to past heroes. Before you know it, "The president, who died a heroic death when flying to Katyn to pay homage to the martyrs, and his wife will get a dignified place for their eternal rest," said Cardinal Dziwisz. "The final decision is that the most dignified place is Wawel, where he can rest together with those who have achieved so much for our fatherland—kings, heroes, commanders."

Lech Kaczyński became president in the 2005 election. His victory was a come from behind for the ages. Polish presidential elections are held on a two day system, where the first round sees the elimination of the whole field but the two leading vote getters. The first round on October 5th saw Donald Tusk (today's prime minister) win 36.3% of the vote to Lech Kaczynski's 33.1%. Yet two weeks later on the 23rd, Lech carried 54% to Donald's 46%. (Funny aside, Kaczynski is a variant of the word 'duck' in Polish, making the campaign the Donald Duck election). How did Kaczyński manage to turn the tables so drastically? Simple, operatives of his party, PiS, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or Law and Order, circulated reports to the media on the eve of the presidential election's decisive second round that Tusk’s grandfather served in the Wehrmacht during the final months of the second world war. His ten days of service following forced conscription before escaping to fight for the Allies in the west were enough to tip the scales of the voting. Even though Tusk had no way to know this history as it was never discussed in the family, it was enough to turn the election, such is the mark left on the Polish psyche by the war.

The worst was yet to come for Polish politics. Just prior to the presidential election of 2005, Lech's twin brother Jarosław, with whom he founded the PiS party in 2001, had pledged not to take the position of prime minister in the event their party won the general election in order to not diminish Lech's chances of victory. This enabled the PiS party to build a coalition along with two other lunatic fringe parties, the Self-Defense of the Republic of Poland (Polish: Samoobrona) and the conservative Christian League of Polish Families party as party-member of the latter, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, was appointed Prime Minister. Predictably, less than a year later, a rift appeared forcing Marcinkiewicz's resignation and Lech had his brother anoint him as PM. Together, the twins tried to forge a ultra-conservative Catholic reality in their homeland. Often paradoxical, get your head around to pass a constitutional amendment to eliminate rape or incest as grounds for terminating a pregnancy while trying to reintroduce the death penalty, usually ridiculous, Lech opposed on-line voting as the internet attracts people who enjoy "pornography while sipping a bottle of beer"  and always intolerant, the Kacynski reign was fortunately short lived as 2007 elections saw Donald Tusk's PO party sweep into power. Kaczynki's added further comedy when he said that Internet users are "the easiest group to manipulate, to suggest who to vote for." Enter captain irony as the brothers' support base is principally composed of the most gullible and malleable of society, playing with the politically dangerous mix of Polish nationalism and religious conservatism.

The cornerstone of the Kaczynski ideology was their fanatical abhorrence of all things communist. In the 1970s, the brothers joined the anti-communist underground and later Walesa's Solidarity movement with Lech even thrown in prison for 11 months by the communist government after the declaration of martial law in 1981. Their disdain for the communist era and populist sound bites won over much of the country. "We must turn the state around to face its citizens," he said during his campaign for the presidency. "The scale of the repair will be so great that Poland will become a new republic." Yet their plans proved over-zealous as their Lustration Laws that they attempted to pass were exposed for the witch-hunt it was that made "the McCarthyites of the US in the 1950s look like amateurs at the practice of anti-Communism". Before being struck down by the constitutional court, it appeared that 700,000 Poles, all senior civil servants, university professors, lawyers, headmasters and journalists born before 1972 were to be given two months to fill in a form and answer the question: "Did you secretly and knowingly collaborate with the former Communist security services?". Unwittingly, the Polish Catholic church also got caught up. Fortunately, they seem to be experts in denial and cover-up. It is perhaps the effect that Lech Kaczyński's death has had on the world's knowledge of one of atheist Soviet Russia's greatest atrocities, the Katyn Massacre that is being used to justify his martyrdom - martyrologia in Poland.

It's hard not to catch the symbolism (not irony as so many have called it) surrounding the location of the plane crash. The Polish presidential Tupolev Tu-154 exploded short of the airport in Smolensk, where the party was landing on their way to attend a remembrance ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. Perhaps even more than the near half century of repression Poland lived under thanks to the Soviets, this place is the source of greater animosity felt towards Russia to this day. On Stalin's direct orders, almost 22,000 of Poland's 2nd republic's elite were killed by the NKVD (the forerunner to the KGB, today it's the FIS) mostly with single bullets to the back of the head . The event was denied for decades and forbidden to be spoken of in Poland under Soviet domination then partially recognized by Gorbachev and Yeltsin before again threatening to erupt as Putin's Russia reasserted her nationalism collided with the Kaczynski twins anti-Russian foreign policy.

Ironically (now this is irony I think), 72 hours before the disaster saw tangible signs that the wound was going to be given a chance to heal as Putin joined Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk shake hands under the pines and over the graves. Putin went so far as to say "this crime cannot be justified in any way". He went on to condemn condemn Stalin's claims that the missing officers had "fled to Manchuria" as "cynical lies" and the "inhuman totalitarianism" during his speech in Katyn. What's more, everyday Russians were recently given a chance to catch Poland's take on those 1940 killings at various sites in the area, including Katyn forest, Tver and Kharkov as state television broadcasted the film "Katyn" by Polish director Andrzej Wajda, whose father was murdered by the Soviets there. Some 4,000 Polish officers, priests, officials and other "counterrevolutionary elements" were murdered by the Soviets in Katyn alone, killed by targeted shots to the neck with their hands tied behind their back.

Mind you Putin did hedge his words a bit and the movie was only shown on a niche art channel. After the ceremony he said Stalin was seeking revenge for the death in 1920 of Red Army soldiers in Polish prisoner of war camps, where around 32,000 troops under Stalin's command who had been captured by the Poles died of hunger and disease. "It is my personal opinion that Stalin felt personally responsible for this tragedy, and carried out the executions [of Poles in 1940] out of a sense of revenge". Oh yeah, he didn't forget to remind us that the Nazis killed a few folks in WWII as well, a fact Poles don't need reminding of any more than the scale of the most recent tragedy. “First the flower of the Second Polish Republic is murdered in the forests around Smolensk,” said former president Aleksander Kwasniewski following the crash, “now the intellectual elite of the Third Polish Republic die in this tragic plane crash. It is a damned place. It sends shivers down my spine." The atrocity committed at Katyn by Stalin's goons was intended to preemptively remove any threat of Polish resistance to the carving up of the nation agreed upon by the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact. Yet even Poland, a place where, as one of its great poets, Wislawa Szymborska, wrote, “History counts its skeletons in round numbers” couldn't imagine the scale of destruction she would suffer at the hands of her enemies during the war. The nation was literally transformed by the Nazis as it became the epicenter of their program to annihilate European Jewry, land of Auschwitz and Majdanek, killing field for millions of Christian Poles and millions of Polish Jews. No Pole could have viewed the failure of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa leading to the turning of the war at Stalingrad and the ensuing collapse of the Nazis with anything but joy, yet it was also impossible to view the prospect of Soviet liberation without anxiety as Katyn left an imprint on the Polish soul. Now the cover up has led to Poland's second leader dying in a plane crash, almost 70 years after her first.

A space next to General Sikorski has been apparently selected for Lech and his wife Maria. Sikorski was the WWII leader of the government constituted abroad in France and then later England after the occupation by Nazi and Soviet forces. It is general assumed, as a proper investigation was never held, that Sikorki was murdered when his RAF Liberator bomber went down July 4, 1943 a few minutes after take off from Gibraltar. The plane plummeted into the harbour, killing 16 passengers on board including Sikorski’s daughter, Zofia. The Czech pilot was the sole survivor who confirmed the cause of the crash to be a failure in the elevation controls. Not coincidentally, Sikorski had just gotten official word from the Red Cross report that the Nazi's hadn't been responsible for Katyn, but in fact, the Soviets were and was on his way back from visiting Polish troops in North Africa to confer with Churchill. Many point to this period as the origin of the cold war - the truth about Katyn may have fractured the Allies which may have changed the outcome of the war, so the truth had to be suppressed at all costs. We all know the history from there as Stalin's USSR was allowed to dominate the eastern third of Europe for the next half decade. Just to tie up history in a nice bow, another victim of last weekend's crash was the last "president-in-exile" during the Soviet years, 90-year-old Ryszard Kaczorowski.

“His approach is to first destroy and then think about what to build,” Lech Walesa, hero of the Solidarity movement and former president, said in 2006 of Lech Kaczynski, who once served as Mr. Walesa’s national security chief. Born June 18, 1949, in Warsaw, the Kaczynski twins came to public attention in the 1960s as mischievous boys in the allegorical film "The Two Who Stole the Moon". Their family history was replete with stories of Polish bravery. Their father was a fighter with the Polish resistance during World War II; their mother nursed wounded soldiers. In the 1970s,ine the brothers joined the anti-communist underground and later Walesa's Solidarity movement. Kaczynski was not a charismatic speaker, but his steely disdain for the communist era and populist sound bites won over much of the country. His courageous stand with Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and others in the movement that challenged Poland's communist regime made Kaczynski a touchstone of the post-World War II era.

Also among the 96 dead was Anna Walentynowicz, the shipyard worker whose dismissal in 1980 sparked the Solidarity union protests that eventually led to the collapse of Polish communism and made the symbolic first chink in the Berlin Wall. Lech's presence in Walesa's Solidarity movement was key to the negotiations as his labour law background made him indispensable at the Round-Table discussions on the eve of the restoration of capitalism in 1989 where the “oppositional” Solidarity trade union agreed with the Stalinists to forget the pre-1989 past. The Kacynski lustration crusade of this decade was a result of what they saw after these agreements. A battle for influence among the two wings of the new corrupt ruling class in Poland erupted as the post-Stalinist “red managers” scrambled to fill important posts in the state and privatized industry at the expense of the Solidarity wing of the ruling class, from which the Kaczynski brothers hail. Kaczynski was not a charismatic speaker, but his steely disdain for the communist era and populist sound bites won over much of the country. For many Poles, remembering his courageous stand with Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and others in the movement that challenged Poland's communist regime, Kaczynski was a touchstone of the post-World War II era.

Even though Poland joined the European Union in 2004, Mr. Kaczynski often preferred dealing with the United States. He distrusted the EU, but he hated Russia. Much of the popularity that he had, which wasn't much with approval ratings just over 20%, came from playing upon the Russophobia fears held by many mainly rural Radio Marya type listeners found predominantly in the east of the country. "We must turn the state around to face its citizens," he said during his campaign for the presidency. "The scale of the repair will be so great that Poland will become a new republic." Admittedly, Poland's political spectrum is wonky as Lech's brother Jaroslaw's Law and Justice Party offers Poland the only other choice to Tusk's ultra neoliberal Civic Platform PO party. Where the PiS are very far right socially, the PO is as far right economically, witness their sell-off of $10 billion in state assets - welcome Goldman Sachs. So you either have PiS selling you out militarily to the US, remember their support for Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and of course the missile shield or the PO to it's investment banks. Did we mention that the President of the central bank of Poland, Sławomir Skrzype was yet another victim of the crash?

Sunday's burial ceremony was to see heads of state from around the globe jet in to pay their respects. It seems as though mother Earth is going to prevent many of them from coming, volcanic glass in engines isn't very good apparently. While this may lose much of the foreign media coverage, the death of the chief of the Institute of National Remembrance, Janusz Kurtyka in the crash won't cause Poland to suddenly develop amnesia. All sports events have been cancelled this past week to make sure we don't get distracted, heck, there isn't even any commercials on TV, all I've seen is Lech and Maria black and white homage reels at half time on Canal sport plus football - even El Classico (which wasn't very classic) between Barcelona and Madrid was shown with commentary. There still wasn't commentary for today's Manchester derby, but folks in Krakow are getting it even worse as there are no alcohol sales this weekend due to the funeral. Last time this happened was B-16's first papal visit to the city - I lived in Krakow at the time, we threw a helluva Pope Party as we'd stocked up on booze while those who didn't seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of homemade vodka.

The church and her allies are happy Lech was a good Catholic unlike his soon to be neighbour, Józef Piłsudski, whose atheism caused his internment in Wawel to be controversial as well - the church has enough controversies to deal with right now. He was no king either but Piłsudski and World War I brought about the rebirth of Poland after disappearing off the map for 123 years following the three step partition process that saw Russia, Prussia and those pesky Austro-Hungarian swallow up Poland entirely in 1795. The First Marshall led his country into independence then successfully defended it against the Russians in the 1920 war. His Wawel burial forever links Poland's immaculate re-conception in 1918 with the place of worship of St Stanislaus, ... the grave of the martyr has been considered the Altar of the Homeland. The crypt holds 17 kings including Casimir III the Great and John III Sobieski, saviour of Vienna. Other non-noble new neighbours for the Kaczynskis will be national poet Adam Mickiewicz, whose name is born by my university and Tadeusz Kościuszko, hero of the American Revolution and leader of the 1794 uprising against Imperial Russia and the Kingdom of Prussia. Lech Kaczynski was none of these things, just a "good, modest man" who happened to die in a plane crash at a place from which an urn of soil already sits in the sacred tomb. Poles and good Catholics are being instructed to muzzle the complaints out of respect for the dead, but using Katyn and the past to once again refashion the present is what I find the most disrespectful of all.

The wheels on the bus go...

'round and round, round and round. Just like the earth goes round the sun. This week the air felt clearer as if a weight had been lifted and the future once again bright. I was wondering what in the world many of us bloggers will write about now that our favourite target has retired to his ranch in Texas, when the light shone down and gave me a sign:

THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD
NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE


What started as a little British story more than half a year ago, then spread to the continent has made the jump across the pond. That's right, it's the atheist bus campaign. In a two pronged attack the British movement is taking hold alongside an American incarnation. The nation that has spent so much energy trying to spread her beliefs across the globe finally seems to be willing to take some lessons from the rest of the world.

Could it be that the land of free and the home of the brave is once again ready to put science before the bible? While the first signs out of the new Obama administration are positive, there's still many reasons to fear the fundamentalists (I mean the scary kind, the Christians). Watching the Obama inauguration, not only did we have to listen to Rick Warren's invocation, one had to hear the g word uttered far too many times for comfort. However, there was a tiny crack in the religious armor that appeared with Obama's words: "For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers." That's right, even non-believers are citizens!

Two things flew in under the radar last week. One, the Texas Board of Education tentatively adopted new teaching standards that would make it more difficult to teach creationism in Lone Star state schools in an 8 to 7 vote. Even more importantly, President Obama lifted the ban on US funding for international organisations that offer advice or perform abortions, hoping to ease the suffering of millions of women worldwide. In a move that is sure to piss off a boatload of fundamentalists, he quietly rescinded what had become known as the "global gag order"- not the comedy kind of gag, the one where if you so much as think the word abortion, you lose your funding from the US government. Reagan created it, Clinton repealed it, Bush re-instated it and now Obama has continued the ping-pong rally between knowledge and faith. In fact, much like a mirror-image of Obama, Dubya re-instated the law in his first working day as president. After a campaign in which he said, "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us...If we're a humble nation but strong, they'll welcome us. We've got to be humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom." Then upon taking office, his first executive order imposed his way of thinking, the morality of the Christian Right, on the world. Of course, these were more innocent times, before the US was at war and there were more important things to worry about: (Get to about 1:20)

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

I on News - First Family Privacy

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Yes, before 9/11 my friends, check out the date, June 14, 2001, ahh, those we're the days. One of the new president's biggest challenges is going to be overturning the ignorance that the Bush administration propagated and return his nation to the path of science.

Unlike the signing of the order to close Gitmo, this repeal was low-key. This follows the inauguration ceremony which featured a religious tightrope act by Obama involving the above mentioned Warren and the liberal appeasing invitation to Gene Robinson, the openly homosexual Episcopalian bishop. Someone from outside of America wouldn't understand the controversy surrounding the words "so help me G(g)od". The same could be said of the controversies around the Reverends Jeremiah Wright, Rod Parsley and John Hagee stories, strange doings in a strange land. Of course keeping people stupid has its advantages, especially for the big corporations, particularly big oil. A little learning might make us question why a nation would want to continue feeding a habit that directly supports and created the people who wants to destroy them. The only reason to deny that climate change is possibly created by mankind's actions and thereby avoid doing anything about it is the religious answer. Only God has the power to change the world, little ol' us couldn't possibly do any harm. They miss the point. Whether or not climate change is a dire threat, the solutions to it is primarily an energy problem. Reducing pollution is an energy problem, concerns about the global oil supply is an energy problem, reducing dependence on foreign oil is an energy problem, reducing the trade deficit is an energy problem, improving national security is, you guessed it, an energy problem.

Maybe we should capitalize the word Science. The window of opportunity is closing for America to change its ways, to become energy independent through smart investment in Science. Even one of the American dollar oil fed creation of Abu Dhabi is creating a zero-carbon city, heck it won't even have any cars, as the emirate can foresee a time when alternative energy is king. Yet, mention CO2 reduction as a good idea to a fundamentalist and the same old myths to protect their right to continue supporting the enemy in the 'war on terror' through the continued reliance on black gold spew forth. Maybe we should ask a Bulgarian if they think it's a good idea to continue to rely on Russian gas anymore. At a time when more effort needs to be focused on investing in education, specifically real Science, we shouldn't be wasting our energy arguing about whether or not intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution or if women should have access to all possible health information. It didn't seem to matter when it was far more important to get into business school and someday work on Wall Street, become a Master of the Universe by inventing a new financial derivative. The true Masters of the next century need to be the Science nerds who invent things we can use and once put a man on the moon. This time the work needs to be done closer to home, from the $1.6 trillion in needed infrastructure to the power grid to the means of producing that power. Time will tell if America can be guided off its course toward ignorance and hate, but reaffirming the division between church and state is a good place to start.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Tyrannosaurus Redux

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video