Over at Salon, Scott Rosenberg has a great commentary about a NY Times column on Bush’s God complex :

In today’s column, Keller tries to argue that, yes, George Bush is driven by his religious belief, but that — since he does not have an overt agenda of converting the heathen or deriving specific political policies from his born-again faith — we should not worry too much. The president’s sense of divine mission? His apparent belief that every decision he makes is the right one because he is fulfilling God’s plan? No fear, says Keller — what’s wrong with self-confidence? Then he cites “John Green of the University of Akron, a scholar of religion in politics,” who “sees it as a perfectly ordinary way for a religious man to understand a task history has presented him.” “For Bush to conclude that this was God’s plan,” Green declares, “is not a whole lot different from a plumber in Akron deciding that God wants him to serve lunch to homeless people.”

Huh? I mean, I’d be delighted if Bush concluded that God wanted him to serve lunch to homeless people! The point that eludes Mr. Green is that the plumber in Akron is not making life-or-death decisions for millions of people, and devising policies that will shape the world economy for a generation. We worry when national leaders assume a mantle of divine destiny. The worry is based on history, not faith.

As I mentioned here, the scary thing about Bush’s faith isn’t that he’s predisposed towards a Christian worldview. Belief that “every decision he makes is the right one because he is fulfilling God’s plan” ensures that he’ll be unwilling to comprimise and will use his faith to justify every bad choice he makes. Bush isn’t the only one who’s unwilling to comprimise :

A Washington conference of Christian and Jewish Zionists yesterday heard attacks on the U.S. “road map” for peace in the Middle East as a breach of a 4,000-year-old covenant between God and Israel.

“The land of Israel was originally owned by God,” said Gary Bauer, president of American Values and a Republican presidential contender in 2000. “Since He was the owner, only He could give it away. And He gave it to the Jewish people.”

I don’t have any strong opinions about the whole Israel/Palestine thing, but it’s pretty obvious to me that both sides need to be willing to comprimise if they want any peace. Since the Palestinian’s God says the Israelis are all oppressors and the Israeli’s God is telling them that all the Palestinians are terrorists, it’s unlikely that either side will ever accept anything but total victory. Shouldn’t a secular government (like the U.S.) refuse to take sides in a conflict like this?

Well, NASA is now saying that the space shuttle is ready for primetime again. In the wake of the Columbia disaster, wouldn’t now be a good time to rethink the shuttle program entirely?

Though the space shuttle is viewed as futuristic, its design is three decades old. The shuttle’s main engines, first tested in the late 1970s, use hundreds more moving parts than do new rocket-motor designs. The fragile heat-dissipating tiles were designed before breakthroughs in materials science. Until recently, the flight-deck computers on the space shuttle used old 8086 chips from the early 1980s, the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game.

Most important, the space shuttle was designed under the highly unrealistic assumption that the fleet would fly to space once a week and that each shuttle would need to be big enough to carry 50,000 lbs. of payload. In actual use, the shuttle fleet has averaged five flights a year; this year flights were to be cut back to four. The maximum payload is almost never carried. Yet to accommodate the highly unrealistic initial goals, engineers made the shuttle huge and expensive. The Soviet space program also built a shuttle, called Buran, with almost exactly the same dimensions and capacities as its American counterpart. Buran flew to orbit once and was canceled, as it was ridiculously expensive and impractical.

Capitalism, of course, is supposed to weed out such inefficiencies. But in the American system, the shuttle’s expense made the program politically attractive. Originally projected to cost $5 million per flight in today’s dollars, each shuttle launch instead runs to around $500 million. Aerospace contractors love the fact that the shuttle launches cost so much.

In two decades of use, shuttles have experienced an array of problems–engine malfunctions, damage to the heat-shielding tiles–that have nearly produced other disasters. Seeing this, some analysts proposed that the shuttle be phased out, that cargo launches be carried aboard by far cheaper, unmanned, throwaway rockets and that NASA build a small “space plane” solely for people, to be used on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space.

They’ve been promising us “space planes” for years. Where are they? Maybe the aerospace companies (and the politicians they bribe) make more money from fixing up the old ship than creating a new low-cost model. Somebody needs to tell NASA it’s time to sell the Dodge Dart and get a Honda.

Damn. I wish I’d though of this. Happy Birthday, Joey.

…and business sucks. I’ve changed the comments service that I’m using because their site was timing out and slowing down my page loads. The new comments should be faster, but uglier. I’m going to try to fix the template today and tomorrow. I’ve also upgraded my blogger to some new version that has everything in a different place (I feel like someone broke into my house and rearranged all the furniture) Arrrggh… Now I see why so Calpundit switched to Moveable Type.

In the meantime, in order to test the comments template feel free to post anything you want in the comments of this post. Book and site recommendations are greatly appreciated. I’ve been meaning to update my links for a while. Unfortunately, the new comments means that all the old ones are gone. Sorry…

A little side note, the spell check for Blogger didn’t recognize the words “blog”, “blogger”, or “blogging”. It suggested that my post should be titled “Flogging is my business…” How did they know?

Howard Dean’s opposition to medical marijuana makes sense to me :

My opposition to medical marijuana is based on science, not based on ideology.

More specifically, I don’t think we should single out a particular drug for approval through political means when we approve other drugs through scientific means.

When I’m President, I will require the FDA to evaluate marijuana with a double blind study with the same kinds of scientific protocols that every other drug goes through.

I’m certainly willing to abide by what the FDA says.

Of course since “political means” are probably what’s keeping the FDA from doing a fair evaluation of the medical benefits of pot, I’mm all for limited legalization (and overall decriminalization) or marijuana.

Okay, not the witch, maybe one of the higher ranking flying monkeys. Either way, good riddance :

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, the public face of the Bush administration through two wars and a terrorist attack, said Monday he will resign in July to enter the private sector.
. . .
He frustrated reporters by constantly refusing to answer the toughest questions and sometimes irked his White House colleagues by pushing for access behind the scenes ? often without success.

His meatless pronouncements on Bush policy are generally in keeping with a White House that keeps a tight lid on information. Though he is not as close to the president as other top aides, Fleischer has earned Bush’s respect by taming what the president considers to be a hostile press corps.

“Hostile press corps”? The press treats every speech Bush delivers like it’s breaking news. He gets hours of airtime each week to present his policies and opinions in an unchallenged manner and that’s hostile??

Having successful defeated the gerrymandering bill, the Democrats returned to Texas this morning. During the Democrat’s exile, the Texas Republicans resorted to getting the Department of Homeland Security involved in the search :

As reports in various Friday morning papers make clear, the Texas Department of Public Safety, tricked the folks at Homeland into thinking that they were looking for a missing aircraft that might either have crashed or fallen victim to a terrorist attack when in fact they were just trying to track down those Democrats who refused to make a quorum call. “From all indications, this request from the Texas DPS was an urgent plea for assistance from a law enforcement agency trying to locate a missing, lost or possibly crashed aircraft,” said Dean Boyd, spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

By the way, you know things are bad when people flee to Oklahoma to avoid conservative tyranny.

It looks like the military’s rescue of Jessica Lynch was just a big propaganda operation :

Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital.

Dr Uday was surprised by the manner of the rescue
“We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital,” said Dr Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital.

“It was like a Hollywood film. They cried ‘go, go, go’, with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital – action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan.”

Was this what the president meant by “the purpose of using the military should be to fight and win wars”? If so, then it looks like the military is winning the war on truth.

Here’s an excellent response to this post courtesy of my friend Dan :

I kind of took issue with those Canadians in Owen, who took a newspaper to court over a Bible verse printed in it. I also take issue with the judge who “ruled that a Biblical passage in Leviticus ‘exposes homosexuals to hatred.’” Anyone who tries to take the stance that the Bible condemns gays and therefore should be considered hateful or dangerous is playing into the hands of those conservatives. The better approach would be to take the Bible and simply state that those who believe it condemns gays are wrong.

I saw a lecture on this topic in which the speaker compared the way the Bible is used to condemn homosexuals today to the way the Bible was used to condone segregation or prejudice just a few generations ago. People were certain that their Bibles told them they should not mix with people outside of their race, but the evidence was flimsy and obviously was being pushed with an agenda of hate. Rather than examining the Biblical evidence and deciding how to behave, people learned to hate first and then pick and choose scripture to support their behaviors.

In modern fundamentalist churches, ministers are doing the same thing–hating gays and then trying to stretch a bare handful of Bible verses into some kind of evidence that gays are in league with Satan. But the evidence is even flimsier. Some translations of the Bible seem to have more anti-gay sentiment than others, but in all Bibles homosexuality is mentioned very rarely.

It doesn’t take a Biblical scholar to point out that sins such as greed, pride, and false religiousity seem to be 90% of what the Bible condemns, yet these sins are mentioned far less by modern right-wing religious leaders than are the horrors of homosexuality. But if we do listen to smart Biblical scholars, we find that the passages in the Bible that contain homosexuality (and usually they only refer to very specific types of homos such as pagan temple prostitutes) often only mention their sexual preferences as a detail. If you read the whole stories, they clearly point out that the sin and the lesson they teach had nothing to do with these people being gay–it was that they were bad hosts, or acted too much like Babylonians, or whatever the hell “sin” was really going on.

So, why does it matter whether the Bible tells a nice fairy tale or a mean fairy tale? Why should we promote the Biblical acceptance of gays when that’s tantamount to saying gays have Santa’s approval?

Well, you know I hate religion and think it’s a bunch of horseshit, but the majority of Americans seem to at least sympathize with the idea of God and Jesus and the angels, even if not all of them get to church every Sunday. So taking the approach that the Bible creates anti-gay sentiment and is therefore bad seems like an attack bound to backfire and just further the “othering” of an already much-hated group. I think it would be wiser to spread the notion, as some decent scholars are doing that people can believe in the Bible, even devoutly, without believing that homosexuality is wrong. They’re going to be reading the damn thing anyway, so they may as well be reading it well.

The U.S. Government isn’t the only place where democracy is waning, it’s all but gone at corporate annual meetings as well :

When Comcast CEO Brian Roberts asked for shareholders’ comments at Wednesday’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, several attendees were ready.

One, representing communications union workers who went along with last year’s Comcast-AT&T merger, said his members “feel betrayed” by Comcast’s tough stance in current contract negotiations.

“If a company is successful enough to put its chief stockholder on the Forbes 400 list, it’s successful enough to pay a living wage,” he declared.

Another shareholder griped about Comcast’s stock-option grants to executives, arguing options contributed to the recent corporate scandals around the country.

Yet another complained that two of the four members of Comcast’s nominating committee for corporate directors, including Roberts, are “insiders.” The company, he said, is using “legal loopholes” to skirt the intent of regulations meant to assure that nominating-committee members are free to pick candidates who will aggressively oversee management.

“How can shareholders be confident directors are truly independent if they are handpicked by the CEO?” he asked.

Just recently I was sent a ballot to vote on a few corporate initiatives for the company I work for. After looking through the descriptions of what was up for a vote, I noticed that every one I was iin favor of (living wage for sweatshop overseas workers, etc.) ended with the words “The Board of Directors reccomends voting against this measure.”

Yesterday I went to the Electronics Entertainment Expo which was pretty disappointing compared to previous years. One of the things that I was really impressed by though was a flyer that was given to every attendee at the registration booths for the IDSA’s Grassroots Program (quote from the flyer) :

While “on the ground” advocacy in Washington, DC is effective, efforts are greatly enhanced when Members of Congress hear directly from their individual and corporate constituents back home.

ISDA’s Legislative Action Center allows you to have the power to take immediate action on issues affecting the computer and video game industry (i.e. I.P. protection, regulating the content of our products, etc.)

This program will not only inform you on these issues, but lead you through a step by step process of composing a letter to your respective Members of Congress on a given issue.

Wouldn’t it be great if the Democratic party had a program like this? The Republicans already do.

Well, their hearts are in the right place :

An attempt to broaden Canada’s hate-crimes laws to include protection for homosexuals has sparked a fierce debate in Parliament over whether the Bible and the Koran could be branded as hate literature.

It centres on a bill from gay Member of Parliament Svend Robinson that would make it a crime, punishable by up to two years in prison, to incite or promote hatred against homosexuals.

But his attempt to end gay-bashing has brought warnings that pastors or imams could be thrown into jail for preaching homosexuality is evil and that their scriptures could be banned or confiscated.

I don’t know much about Canadian laws, but it seems like they’re using some really broad terms here. Shouldn’t their hate crimes law be more concerned with eliminating crimes against homosexuals and not hatred? It would be a shame for a hate crimes law that protects homosexuals to be shot down because they’re afraid of banning the Bible.

The Memory Hole has an archive of some of documents from Congress’s joint inquiry into 9/11 that the Bush Administration is now trying to retroactively classify. Among the findings is that the major failures weren’t with the collection of intelligence, but the analysis of that intelligence :

In short, for a variety of reasons, the Intelligence Community failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information that appears relevant to the events of September 11. As a result, the Community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11th plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack.

No one will ever know what might have happened had more connections been drawn between these disparate pieces of information. We will never definitively know to what extent the Community would have been able and willing to exploit fully all the opportunities that may have emerged. The important point is that the Intelligence Community, for a variety of reasons, did not bring together and fully appreciate a range of information that could have greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and preventing Usama Bin Ladin?s plan to attack these United States on September 11th, 2001.

Why do we need a PATRIOT Act? By giving the intelligence agencies the ability to collect even more data, aren’t we just adding to the mountain of evidence that that aren’t able to analyze? I can’t help but think all of this is just making us less safe.

Like the Dixie Chicks psuedo-backlash proves, the country music community isn’t all Republican :

Willie Nelson has sent greetings and gifts to the runaway Texas lawmakers.
. . .
A few of the Democrats say they’ve received red bandanas and whiskey from Nelson. The Texas singer also sent them a note saying: “Way to go. Stand your ground.”

Rosskumar made an damn good point in comments for this post that’s worth repeating :

I’ll add that the real problem isn’t being fat. The obesity is merely a symptom. The real problem is that Us Americans want literally to have our cakes and eat them too. We don’t want to be responsible for anything we do.

The social factors that lead us to be so fat are the very same factors that have killed our educational system, allowed lies like Trickle Down theory to be presented as the truth, and have ensured the successful “election” of Bush. They’re the same factors that make us the world’s largest drug consumers, and the world’s foremost supporters of the war on drugs.

Essentially, we’re completely shielded from the consequences of our actions, so completely cut off from the world that we have almost lost something of our humanity.

This reminded me of a quote from Bill Maher’s book :

Americans today confuse freedom with not being asked to sacrifice. The fact that you can’t have everything you want exactly when you want it has somehow become un-American. We’d rather sacrifice virgins than our SUV’s.

“I’ll guzzle as much gas as I want. This isn’t Europe.” Well, sure you can Captain America, but just try to imagine a WW2-era American saying “I’ll use as much damn gas and tin as I want. And while we’re at it, screw your victory garden!” They’d call you “Axis Asshole”.

Somehow, America morphed from a nation that embraced rationing to one that practically impeached Jimmy Carter for having the nerve to suggest we turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater.

Even in the wake of an event so invasive and frightening as September 11th not one person in a leadership position in America has asked anyone to really give up or rethink anything. Pandering to a spoiled citizenry had become so ingrained it remained in place even as buildings and complacencies crumbled.