Every morning I wake up, roll out of bed, and turn on the news. Here’s what was on the three cable networks :

CNN - Discussion of today’s Supreme Court hearings in the Jose Padilla case.

MSNBC - Coverage of the fighting in Iraq.

FOX - Live coverage of a police chase in Huston Texas.

I flipped between the three for the next half hour or so and while CNN and MSNBC moved on to other still-newsworthy stories, Fox stayed with the helicopter shot of the guy running from police. When are Joe and Jane Sixpack gonna finally realize that Fox News is just as sensationalistic and empty as its sister network? Or do they even care?

“…revisionist historians is what I like to call them.” — This is what Bush said last June about people who called his WMD bluff, but could he have been referring to himself as well?

Reading the White House’s biography of our third president, a student would never know that Jefferson founded the world’s oldest continuously operating political party - the Democratic party. Instead, the site says, “Sharp political conflict developed, and two separate parties, the Federalists and the senate-Republicans, began to form. Jefferson gradually assumed leadership of the Republicans, who sympathized with the revolutionary cause in France.”

The reality, of course, is that the senate-Republicans went by that compound name from their formation in the 1790s until 1844, when the party officially dropped the word “Republicans” from its name. (The modern-day Republican Party came into being a decade later, after both the Federalist the Whig parties had collapsed; the first Republican presidential nominee was Abraham Lincoln.)

The White House’s website opens Jefferson’s biography in a startlingly out-of-context way that seems to imply Jefferson was a Bible-thumping believer like George W. The lead sentence of his biography says: “In the thick of party conflict in 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private letter, ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’”

Jefferson’s letter, in fact, had nothing to do with party conflict. Instead, it had to do with attacks against him from Christian fundamentalists, the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of his day, and how the First Amendment should keep religion separate from government.On September 23, 1800, a few months before the election in which he became president, Jefferson wrote to his good friend, the physician Benjamin Rush:

“DEAR SIR, - … I promised you a letter on Christianity, which I have not forgotten. I do not know that it would reconcile the genus irritabile vatum [the angry preachers (the same root word as “Vatican”)] who are all in arms against me. Their hostility is on too interesting ground to be softened.

“The delusion …on the [First Amendment] clause of the Constitution, which, while it secured the freedom of the press, covered also the freedom of religion, had given to the clergy a very favorite hope of obtaining an establishment of a particular form of Christianity through the United States; and as every sect believes its own form the true one, every one perhaps hoped for his own, but especially the Episcopalians and Congregationalists.

“The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes, and they [the preachers] believe that any portion of power confided to me [such as being elected President], will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough, too, in their opinion.”

Ahhhh…the irony! I wonder if the Bush Administration (or whoever they get to write these things) is even aware that Jefferson’s comments were aimed at people like Bush’s supporters? Here’s a few more Jefferson quotes which flesh out his opinion of this particular “tyranny over the mind of man” :

“Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.”

- Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”

- letter to Baron von Humboldt, 1813

“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”

- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

I wonder what Jefferson would have thought about this?

Via Tom Tomorrow, I see that Counterspin is advising potential protesters to dress up in a flightsuit and chicken mask. Sure it sounds silly, but it’s been done before :

Chicken George is squawking at another Bush.

Five Republican presidential candidates debated for the second straight week minus the leading contender, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas. His absence was a family matter, Bush argued from afar ? but opponents in both parties were not in a forgiving mood.

“He’s a chicken,” said the chicken. Actually, it was a Democrat dressed as a yellow-feathered bird carrying a sign that read, “Chicken George Won’t Debate.”

Bush’s rivals ran with the theme.

“The absent governor from Texas,” conservative activist Gary Bauer said as the debaters gathered onstage Thursday night to warm up the audience.

“Perhaps in the future, at a forum like this, if we call it a fund-raiser he might show up,” sniffed publisher Steve Forbes.

Democrats first used the fowl tactic in 1992 during the re-election campaign of Bush’s father, who was mocked for delaying debates with challenger Bill Clinton.

Bush advisers are going to do everything they can to avoid having to debate John Kerry. After Bush’s crybaby act over debate formats in 2000 and last year’s debate ducking by the Austrian boob-grabber, Republicans know that the best thing they can do to get elected is to avoid having their candidate express his views.

Once this whole military service crap blows over, Kerry should renew his call for monthly debates with the President. Except this time, don’t let Bush change the subject. Keep challenging him every time you’re near an open mike. Make some jokes about it (”I’ll even let him bring Cheney along.”) Whenever Bush tries to change the subject, say it’s because he’s unable to defend himself. Send your high-profile friends to reiterate the challenge (Gore, the Clintons, Dean, etc.) Bush isn’t the only one who knows how to act like a bully.

This is the most retarded non-controversy since…well…I guess last week or so :

Kerry has said for years that he threw away his ribbons, not his three Purple Hearts, Bronze Star and Silver Star during the April 1971 protest. On Monday, however, a tape of a television interview Kerry gave shortly after the protest suggested he was talking about more than his ribbons when discussing the anti-war demonstration.

In an exchange, aired by ABC and published in The New York Times, an interviewer asks Kerry, ?How many did you give back, John?? Kerry responds, ?I gave back, I can?t remember, six, seven, eight, nine.? The host then notes that Kerry had won the Purple Hearts and Bronze and Silver stars. Kerry says, ?Well, and above that, I gave back my others.?
. . .
?Back then ribbons, medals were absolutely interchangeable,? Kerry told ?Good Morning America? on ABC. ?The U.S. Navy pamphlet calls them medals. We all referred to them as the symbols they were representing. Medals, ribbons … countless veterans threw the ribbons back.?
. . .
On Sunday, Bush adviser Karen Hughes said she was offended by Kerry?s actions when he protested the war in 1971 and accused him of not actually throwing back his medals.

?He only pretended to throw his,? Hughes said in a CNN interview. ?Now, I can understand if, out of conscience, you take a principled stand, and you would decide that you were so opposed to this that you would actually throw your medals. But to pretend to do so ? I think that?s very revealing.?

I think one important aspect that’s missing from this debate is this : Who fuckin’ cares??

Seriously, is this the best the Republicans have against Kerry? A semantic debate about whether or not ribbons can be called medals? As far as I’m concerned, if you’ve been awarded medals for injuries, you can call them whatever the hell you want.

Also, kudos to Kerry for lashing back at Bush on his military record. If the GOP really wants to make the race about military records, I’m sure the decorated veteran/protester will beat the AWOL frat boy every time.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Get Your War On, but this one that TBogg linked to is pretty damn funny.

The article cracks me up :

Westminster College’s president said Monday he was so “surprised and disappointed” by Vice President Dick Cheney’s attacks on John Kerry during a speech that he is inviting the Democrat to visit for a reply.

Fletcher Lamkin told The Associated Press that Cheney’s staff approached him last week about using Westminster as the backdrop “for a major foreign policy address. Nothing was said about a stump speech.”

In a campus-wide e-mail after the speech, Lamkin said: “I must admit that I was surprised and disappointed that Mr. Cheney chose to step off the high ground and resort to Kerry-bashing for a large portion of his speech.”
. . .
Standing in the campus gymnasium where Winston Churchill warned in 1946 of an “Iron Curtain” descending across postwar Europe, Cheney sharply criticized Kerry’s senate votes on defense and intelligence legislation.
. . .
“I’m pretty independent,” Lamkin said. “I can’t tell you I am for one or the other, I’m not. As a college president, I try to remain someone who has all viewpoints represented on the campus fairly and equally.”

Lamkin said he was not expecting a speech minus any mention of presidential politics during an election year, but that the second half “was all about politics and a political stump speech and in that respect it was disappointing.”

In the e-mail, Lamkin said that “in the interest of balance and fairness and integrity, we will strongly encourage Senator Kerry to take advantage of this venue to make his views known as well.”

Okay conservatives, here’s your cue to start bitching about the liberal bias on college campuses.

Man, if you thought those WMD’s were hard to find, wait ’til you see this :

An expedition is being planned for this summer to the upper reaches of Turkey’s Mount Ararat where organizers hope to prove an object nestled amid the snow and ice is Noah’s Ark.

A joint U.S.-Turkish team of 10 explorers plans to make the arduous trek up Turkey’s tallest mountain, at 17,820 feet, from July 15 to August 15, subject to the approval of the Turkish government, said Daniel P. McGivern, president of Shamrock_The Trinity Corporation of Honolulu, Hawaii.

The goal: to enter what they believe to be a mammoth structure some 45 feet high, 75 feet wide and up to 450 feet long that was exposed in part by last summer’s heat wave in Europe.

“We are not excavating it. We are not taking any artifacts. We’re going to photograph it and, God willing, you’re all going to see it,” McGivern said.

Explorers have long searched for an ark on the high slopes of Mount Ararat, where the biblical account of the Great Flood places it.

For their next expedition, they’re going to search near the Mississippi River for the remnants of the fence from Tom Sawyer.

Somebody really needs to tell the religious people of the world (and I don’t just mean literalistic Christians here) that you don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It’s okay for the story of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt to be fiction and still be inspired by Jesus’s plea to turn the other cheek. Just because there wasn’t actually a Tower of Babel doesn’t mean that “thou shalt not kill” is also crap. You don’t have to believe that Jesus rose from the grave, fed thousands with a fish a loaf of bread, or walked on water to love your neighbors.

They’re metaphors, people. While I’ll defend your right to believe any crazy shit you want, the big problem here is that religious literalism has gotten completely out hand. We’re at the point now that the most strict religious folks can’t even comprehend the idea that those of us who don’t share their superstitions and prejudices could actually share their values.

Here’s a couple things I wrote for Ostrich Ink that didn’t make it into their last issue. Rather then let these mini-reviews become orphans, I’m printing them here :

Satanic Panic in the Attic by of Montreal

The problem with this album is that it’s too good. Satanic Panic in the Attic is easily the most accessible and poppy album from an Elephant 6 band known a lot more for their complicated arrangements and experimentation than for their ability to crank out “singles”. With this album, of Montreal has added an 80’s flavor to their sound, and by that I don’t mean that it’s one of those genre retreads we see every once in a while like the Rentals or the Epoxies. Satanic Panic adds tinges of Talking Heads, Marshall Crenshaw, Thomas Dolby, and the B-52’s, while still remaining faithful to the style from of Montreal’s previous albums. They’ve both branched out and scaled back in a way that can only be compared to the Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin and you know what that means, don’t you? Car commercials faster than you can say “polyphonic”. Shows so packed that you can’t see the stage through the sea of trucker caps. In short, this album has the potential to be one of those hipster wet dream albums that you get sick of before you ever hear it. By the time you read this review, it may already be too late for you to go buy this album. If you don’t hurry, you may get beaten to the record store by that guy at Amoeba with the faded t-shirt for a softball team he’s never heard of.

Where Is My Mind?

March 19, 2004 is a day that may just go down in Hollywood history. Why? Because on that day, two great movies came out : Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the remake of Dawn of the Dead. With their shared theme of mental destruction (perhaps the only thing they have in common), they could make a perfect double feature. Just squint a little and pretend they’re sequels. After watching the emotionally conflicted ending of Sunshine in which (SPOILER ALERT) Clementine and Joel decide to throw caution to the wind and give romance another try, hop over to the next theater and see the story pick up a year later. Clementine (now played by Sarah Polley) has settled down a bit. Coming home to her loving husband Joel, she only has time for one gratuitous shower scene before all hell breaks loose. That’s right, the neighbor kid (played by Elija Wood) has just bitten her rubber-faced husband and finished the mindfuck that Lacuna Inc. had started. Thus begins Eternal Sunshine of the Living Dead.

Okay, we’ve got a serious problem here and we should probably discuss it now while we still have a chance : John Kerry is a bore. He’s not bland or emotionless, but his public persona is really stiff. This is mostly due to his outright hostility to such things, as evidenced by this exchange from VH1’s Presidential Pop Culture Quiz (this is from the comments of an earlier post) :

To Kerry’s credit, he was annoyed by the whole thing. The exchange was something like this :

HOST : Thanks for giving us a few minutes. I’ve got this short pop quiz that all the other candidates have taken…

KERRY : Oh, I hate it when you guys do these things.

HOST : This isn’t like asking you the price of a dozen eggs or anything.

KERRY : I know, it’s just that these things seem so…oh whatever.

And then when Kerry was asked the questions, he aced it. He was able to quickly answer every question correctly (which none of the other candidates could do).

But the problem is, when November rolls around, undecided voters might be more inclined to throw their support behind the guy who they relate to more. When given the choice between the guy who takes his job “too” seriously or the guy who doesn’t know how to read, Americans are gonna pick the dummy every time.

The importance of this problem, as well as its standard solution, is discussed at length in this article from The Atlantic (link via E-Rock) :

But over the past decade the popularity of late-night comedy programs and daytime talk shows has added to the list of necessary credentials the ability to appear warm and funny on television. Although candidates have favored such appearances at least since Richard Nixon’s 1968 cameo on Laugh-In, most observers trace this development to candidate Bill Clinton’s 1992 saxophone performance on The Arsenio Hall Show, which came to symbolize his differences in personality and style from the first President Bush. Comedy shows have since become a political rite of passage. A recent Pew Research Center study concluded that they are “increasingly becoming regular sources of news for younger Americans, and are beginning to rival mainstream news outlets.”

To politicians generally, but especially to those viewed as distant or aloof, this is a fraught development, because success in virtually every facet of their job depends on decorum, discretion, and a rigorous lack of spontaneity?traits that leave them ill equipped to be funny. “What’s interesting and disheartening,” says Ben Karlin, an executive producer of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, “is that politicians are the most stage-managed and image-conscious guests we see, even more so than actors and celebrities. They’re trained to exhibit a certain range of behaviors: serious, compassionate, practical. Comedy isn’t one of them.”
. . .
Kerry’s penchant for oratory and statesmanlike posturing would seem to make him Dukakis’s heir apparent. Though he has had material provided to him by a former writer for the comedian Bill Maher, and now draws on a phalanx of sitcom writers, little evidence of their handiwork has manifested itself. The trouble for Kerry is that the road to the White House runs through the gauntlet of late-night shows, which presents an opportunity?”If you’re going to beat back the charge that you’re aloof, here’s the perfect venue to do it,” Baer says?but also a risk. During the primaries Kerry’s lack of humor didn’t hurt him; his vaunted “electability” was enough to draw the support of Democrats eager to depose President Bush. But now he faces the considerable task of wooing the center?voters who by definition are not slavering to remove Bush?and this means displaying the warm and funny side that he has assiduously hidden throughout his public career.

While this article is great, the one big flaw is that it concentrates only on humor. Seriously, is there anything less funny than seeing a politician trying to be a comedian? Think back to Steve Forbes on SNL stuttering out “hilarious” lines while dressed like a blue-collar worker and you get my point. The only thing worse than not showing your sense of humor is trying to show it and failing.

The reason Clinton’s Arsenio Hall Show appearance was so brilliant is because it genuinely showed us another side of the man who was running for president. To think that the guy running for president was passionate about music was completely foreign to most Americans back in 1992. What was even better than Clinton’s sax playing was his 2000 appearance on Roger Ebert & the Movies :

But when Bill Clinton made a guest appearance to talk about films on “Roger Ebert & the Movies” Sunday night, he was surprisingly relaxed — hardly at all like a public figure trying to act like a regular guy. Maybe that was because the president seems to have actually put some thought into why he likes the movies he does. And even if you disagreed with his taste, you would have to admit that he did a better job articulating his opinions than your average dinner party guest.
. . .
When Ebert mentioned “Three Kings,” Clinton, with puppylike enthusiasm, cut him off. “I loved ‘Three Kings,’ did you like ‘Three Kings’?” he asked as if he hoped that Ebert would agree, but was ready to go to the mat if he didn’t. Oddly enough, although many liberal critics have accused “Three Kings” of whitewashing the Gulf War — in a recent “Sight and Sound” piece, Village Voice critic J. Hoberman cluelessly treats the movie as just another glorification of a clearly unnecessary war — Clinton seems to grasp just what the movie is about.

In fact, Clinton was more articulate about “Three Kings” than many critics were. He saw the movie as an indication that we need to face up to society’s “oldest, most primitive problem, our tribalism, our tendency to go beyond a natural pride in our group, whether it’s a racial or ethnic or religious group or whatever,” which results in “fear and distrust and dehumanization and violence against ‘the other.’”

(You can hear MP3’s of the show here or download parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7)

This episode of Ebert’s show is a perfect example of why people call Bill Clinton a “perfect politician”. While being relaxed and accessible, Clinton articulately discussed some of his favorite movies, while at the same time bringing the discussion back to politics. John Kerry can and should do this. It’s obvious from the VH1 special that John Kerry isn’t pop-culturally illiterate. He knows what’s going on, he just needs to relax and “hang out” with the American people. Here’s a few ideas :

Atrios has spent the last few days compiling a list of pro-choice Catholic Republicans that aren’t getting the same pressure that’s currently being put on John Kerry. While we’re on the subject of “bad Catholics”, it’s probably worth mentioning that the Catholic Church is against death penalty and the Iraq war as well. Unless the Republicans were able to pull some strings and get their sins downgraded from mortal to venal, maybe somebody should ask the Bishops about, among others, Sen. Rick Santorum (”that’s Latin for ‘asshole’”).