God is not religious?

And invoking God on our currency is not religious either, or so say the judicial theologians sometimes known as the Federal Appeals Court. The California court decided 2 to 1 to overturn their own 2002 ruling that sided with atheist Michael Newdow's complaint that doing so established a State Monotheistic religion and violated the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Did they see the light, or did they feel the heat?

Why? It may seem hard to us to accept that God is not a religious figure or concept, but the reasoning behind the decision: that the government's power is limited by God's power, certainly is a religious atatement and even more certainy is at odds with the Constitution and the philosophy behind it. In fact the Biblical God seems very much against the idea of choosing leaders by popular vote if you remember the fate of Saul and that European Christians could be excommunicated for voting well into the 19th century.

The "pledge of allegiance" is also constitutional said the majority.

"The pledge of allegiance serves to unite our vast nation through the proud recitation of some of the ideals upon which our Republic was founded and for which we continue to strive,"

the two judges said. An interesting concept seeing as both of these shibboleths are rather recent and the founders of the Republic would have started a second revolution if they were around. I never feel more disunited with my countrymen than when at various club functions I have to stand up like a schoolchild and swoon over a symbol and affirm somebody else's religious delusion. Of course I always say "Under Fogg" but that's another matter.

As I've reminded my readers many times, the pledge was not originally about God or its relationship to our Republic, it was about the flag and nationalism and freedom and justice, two out of four of which are good ideas. Forcing children to swear to pray to God in a public school is an abomination and an attempt to punish people who do not believe. That everyone else has come to see this as a part of every public and private meeting or convocation is just silly, but the real comedy is watching federal judges bend over so far backward to be fair to people of superstition that their heads might just as well be fully inserted.

Alan Grayson's Public Option/Medicare Buy-In Bill

This is important, fellow Zoners. Please add your signatures to the petition and call your congresspeople. Thanks.

HR 4789 and The Public Option: The Way Forward

By Alan Grayson via HuffPo:

Health care reform -- here's where we are. The House of Representatives is about to vote on a Senate bill without a public option. It looks like the reconciliation amendment will not have a public option. The House bill had a public option, but once the House passes the Senate bill, that's history.

Which is why I introduced H.R. 4789, the Public Option Act. This simple four-page bill lets any American buy into Medicare at cost. You want it, you pay for it, you're in. It adds nothing to the deficit; you pay what it costs.

Let's face it. Health insurance companies charge as much money as possible, and they provide as little care as possible. The difference is called profit. You can't blame them for it; that's what a corporation does. Birds got to fly, fish got to swim, health insurers got to rip you off. And if you get really expensive, they've got to pull the plug on you. So for those of us who would like to stay alive, we need a public option.

In many areas of the country, one or two insurers have over 80% of the market. They can charge anything they want. And when you get sick, they can flip the bird at you. So we need a public option.

And they face no real competition because it costs billions of dollars just to set up a national health care network. In fact, the only one that's nationwide is . . . Medicare. And we limit that to one-eight of the population. It's like saying that only seniors can drive on federal highways. We really need a public option.

And to the right-wing loons who call it socialism, we say, "if you want to be a slave to the insurance companies, that's fine. If you want 30% of your premiums to go to 'administrative costs' and billion-dollar bonuses for insurance CEOs who figure out new and creative ways to deny you the care you need to stay healthy and alive, that's fine. But don't you try to dictate to me that I can't have a public option!"

And there is a way left to get it. By insisting on a vote on H.R. 4789. Three votes on health care, not two. The Senate bill, the reconciliation amendments, and the Public Option Act.
We got 50 co-sponsors for this bill in two days. Including five powerful committee chairman. But we need more.

Sign our Petition at WeWantMedicare.com.

Call. Write. Visit. Do whatever you can do to get you Congressman to co-sponsor this bill, and push it to a vote. Right now, before it's too late.

Let's do it!

Update (4:30 pm): We're up to 65 cosponsors on HR 4789! Call your member of Congress NOW at (202) 225-3121.

P.S. While at it, go to Whip Congress for Public Option site and do your thing. Thanks.

CRIMINALIZING MENTAL ILLNESS: THE SAD CASE OF JIHAD JANE

Recently, our cables news stations sensationalized the story of Colleen LaRose, now infamously known as Jihad Jane. What disturbs me are superficial reports by our mainstream media that refuse to tell the story inside the story. According to the indictment against Ms. LaRose, she allegedly "recruited men on the internet to wage violent jihad in South Asia and Europe, and recruited women on the internet who had passports and the ability to travel to and around Europe in support of violent jihad."  End of story. Arrested, tried in the court of shallow journalism, and condemned … all within 30 seconds on the nightly news.

There is, however, is another side to Jihad Jane that has been ignored by our vaunted MSM (source):

LaRose's ex-boyfriend, Kurt Gorman, 47, with whom she lived in Pennsburg, remained mystified yesterday about how the 5-foot-2 woman with dirty-blonde hair turned into an alleged terror conspirator from a person who cared for his frail mother until her death, and for his father, who died last summer.

(…)

The apparent suicide attempt occurred on May 21, 2005, according to a report by Upper Perkiomen police, about a month after her father's death, which had come on the heels of her brother's death.

Upper Perkiomen Police Officer Michael Devlin was summoned to Gorman's Pennsburg apartment by LaRose's worried mother and sister, in Ferris, Texas, who said that Colleen had called them, drinking and brooding about her dad, and had told them that she had taken eight to 10 prescription pills.

Devlin said he told Gorman that LaRose should get counseling.

There was a time not long ago when the First Amendment protected the rights of people who spoke truth or lies in any measure … and protected the rights of our mentally ill population including those who heard voices in their heads.

In an age of fear and paranoia, it seems, our mentally ill population is the first to have their rights violated.  Too bad we still regard mental illness with superstition and suspicion.  A disturbed person who self-medicates with a cocktail of drugs and alcohol should first be treated for substance abuse and then the underlying disorder.

Deaths in a family can trigger an adjustment disorder. Over time, an untreated adjustment disorder can lead to further decompensation, including disorganized or delusional thinking. There are case files rife with stories of persons suffering from bipolar disorder that remained undiagnosed until the subject ran afoul of the criminal justice system. Clearly, Jihad Jane falls within range of these diagnostic possibilities.

Too bad our law enforcement officials waste their time (and taxpayer resources) on disturbed persons when there are far more dangerous terrorists loosed upon the world.  Too bad our healthcare system is inadequate to the task of early intervention and treatment of mental illness. Too bad there are folks like Jihad Jane who enter the criminal justice system where punishment takes precedence over treatment.

Delusional thinking? Voices in the head? It makes one wonder: On which side of law enforcement are the real zealots and crazies?

H/T to our esteemed colleague, Robert Stein of Connecting the Dots, whose original post inspired this response.

Born in the USA

Everybody's a Communist. Everything you say or do or want or don't want is Communism. The sun comes up in the Communist East and sets in the Communist West. Hamburgers are Communist, hot dogs, apple pie and motherhood. Reality itself is Communist according to Beck, the bombastic blond Aryan brother from Fox.

And that includes the song that's become all but a second National Anthem, Springsteen's Born in the USA. It's Anti-American propaganda because it's about the bittersweet truth of growing up in a country that fights wars for war's sake and abandons the worn out warriors to live in the streets; a country that's racist here and abroad, a country where some struggle and never get anywhere but a country we're proud of in spite of itself, like a prodigal child we love even through our despair.

The truth actually is Anti-American and Communist according to Glenn Beck because true Americanism is all about constant rage and hatred toward Americans and the government they choose and the contempt for civilization, the contempt for anyone different than Glenn Beck. In fact the Constitution is anti-American, the law, the truth: history is anti-American and so it's patriotic to lie and patriotic to distort, to defame, to libel and slander and bear false witness while fake tears run down his fat face. To be a "real" American, when Bruce and I were young, used to mean supporting the Vietnam war. Now it means supporting war for war's sake - just to show the world how tough we are. Now it means unalloyed hatred of the Black, Kenyan Muslim secretly in league with atheist communism and theistic radical Islam.

It's patriotic to pretend that we have nothing and never had anything to apologize for, that the age of white male suffrage, Jim Crow, lynchings, segregation and misogyny laws was a golden age. We were better off when half us lived in poverty, most of us died indigent, minorities knew their place, monopolies ripped us off and banks regularly collapsed. It's patriotic to be ignorant.

"It's time for us to wake, wake up, out of our, um, dreamstate." Said Beck, quoting Adolph Hitler's book. "Wake up out of the propaganda. The, you know, this is the thing that, people who come from the Soviet-bloc or Cuba, they're all saying, 'How do you guys not hear this? How do you not see this?' Well, that's 'cause we don't ever expect it."

No, it's true, we didn't expect that Bruce Springsteen hated America until you told us and we didn't expect it because it's a God damned lie like every word out of your mouth, you sick, greedy, ignorant treasonous bastard. We didn't expect that someone could make millions by doing what Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw Haw once did. We didn't expect such evil from any American.

MAN MARRIES PILLOW

Octopüß is baaack ...

Credit: The Huffington Post.

rich3324 - If this does not work out, does the pillow get custody of the sheets?

Sergeant - Could be worse ... he could love queen sized mattresses.

casaroonc - His parents must be proud.

Ampoliros - Its not sad when he marries his pillow. Its sad when he loses an argument and has to sleep on the couch.

mrbeadle - Would that be a pillow fight?

jl4141 - I admit that I sleep with a pillow every night.

Patrick - That’s a slippery slope! If you let people marry pillows, soon they will be marrying duvets.

LiberalScoop - I've been eye-balling a sexy olive green Naugahyde straight-back chair at my local thrift store for quite some time, and I think there's some chemistry there.

KarateKid - I didn't know there were Republicans in Korea.

peaceonearth - Does this mean I can finally marry my cucumber?

idiocracy

My newest creation is a video about the return of paranoid politics in our time, set to the tune of a defunct metal band called idiot. The CD it's all a lie was pressed before the movie Idiocracy was a glimmer in the eye.

Obama to impose ban on fishing

I feel left out. The hysterical e-mails about Obama's latest evil deed usually hit my in-box before Fact Check.org or Urban Legends.com or Snopes.com get around to debunking the latest scoop from the bottomless crock. Surprising indeed since nearly everyone where I live has a boat and loves to fish. Stuart, Florida, where my boat lives is the Sailfish capitol of America. This time I got wind of it before the fishy smell stank up my e-mail client

Obama, you see, wants to ban fishing. That's right, out of pure African-American freedom hating Marxist malice, Opie will have to throw away his bamboo pole and the Cat Fish House on Rte. 1 will have to close and of course we'll believe it because we'll believe anything that feeds our racism and anarchist paranoia. The public has a right to fish, you see, just like I have the right to kill every last damned bird in the federal sanctuary I live next to. The Bible agrees.

The real story of course is that an Obama administration task force charged with developing a comprehensive plan for managing U.S. ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes ecosystems stopped taking public input so it could prepare its final report. The deadline for writing letters simply ran out. That's right, just like the income tax is pure Marxism ( or Fascism if it suits your particular dementia better, ) scientific fish and wildlife management usually supported by sportsmen, is now a ban on commercial and recreational fishing.

It's all a case of slippery slopes, the fallacy behind virtually all Republican "principle' these days. Adjust the deer hunting season in Georgia, extend the snook season in South Florida and it will inevitably lead to an outright ban and therefore it IS an outright ban regardless of whether we've had such seasons and controls for a hundred years and regardless of the fact that we owe the continued existence of game fish and other wildlife to scientific management.

Will they ever tire of the daily lie? Not until you do.

The irreversible ratchet

The barber shop I frequent looks like something out of the old West, or at least a Hollywood version of it. Cowboy movie posters, ammunition boxes -- It has more old guns and shooting paraphernalia on display than most small gun shops and indeed Bob the barber is a licensed gun dealer.

So anyway, there I am waiting my turn along with one deputy and the rest of my disreputable contemporaries and reading American Rifleman -- and the first thing I see is an article by Wayne LaPierre of the NRA telling us that the "irreversible ratchet" of gun control has been turned back in Canada after their gun registration policy has cost a fortune and produced no measurable results. Why am I laughing? It's because that "camel's nose" and "irreversible ratchet" argument has been used to death since I can remember to counter any gun control laws at all, reasonable and unreasonable. It's because all I hear from NRA sources is that Obama is a gun grabber and he's so close to grabbing your guns that you'd better stock up on ammo and bury it in the back yard because here we go down the slippery slope to disarmed totalitarianism. Catalogs are selling books on just how to do that and ammunition prices are sky high, along with the prices of military surplus waterproof containers. Shops can't keep AK-47s on the racks.

Then if one looks at the news and realizes that under the current administration gun rights have been expanded to allow concealed carry in the national parks, as they are in most state parks and nearly everywhere else, that the last bastion of handgun banning, Chicago, Illinois may be about to fall and that 309 members of Congress and a majority of Americans approve, -- one has a hard time believing that there is a nationwide confiscation program being planned or that any gun control measures are by nature irreversible. Nearly all the states now issue concealed carry permits while crime continues to decline, so if that policy of citing the slippery slope fallacy has been debunked, where is the apology for all the fear mongering? were they wrong? Did the will of the majority actually prevail over the evil gun grabbing Liberals just like it's supposed to?

No, the ratchet works both ways, the camel isn't interested in your tent and the slope wasn't so slippery after all. Do I suspect that the worst thing that could happen to the NRA would be a definitive affirmation of the second amendment of the individual's right to keep and bear arms and a legislative branch inclined to go along with them? Does a red-neck shoot in the woods?

Blackboard Jungle

So let me get this straight -- a congressional bill designed to keep untrained school personnel from tying your kid to a chair or radiator and choking the life out of him is a bad thing, even though a 2009 report from the GAO found

"hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death related to the use of these methods on school children during the past two decades."

"These methods" according to Raw Story, include a teacher sitting on a kid, mechanical restraints that might choke or restrict breathing and methods that in at least some cases, have killed children. "These methods," particularly when used against children with disabilities such as Cerebral Palsy have had grave and even fatal results and I'm quite sure that any of you with children would have something to say had your kid been strapped into a chair or held face down and suffocated. The Keeping All Students Safe Act, H.R. 4247 passed 262-153 in Congress and is designed to:

(1) prevent and reduce the use of physical restraint and seclusion in schools;

(2) ensure the safety of all students and school personnel in schools and promote a positive school culture and climate;

(3) protect students from—

(A) physical or mental abuse;

(B) aversive behavioral interventions that compromise health and safety; and

(C) any physical restraint or seclusion imposed solely for purposes of discipline or convenience;

(4) ensure that physical restraint and seclusion are imposed in school only when a student’s behavior poses an imminent danger of physical injury to the student, school personnel, or others….

Perhaps Congressmen don't have children or perhaps they are simply psychotic enough to see any federal action or regulation of any kind as a threat to freedom so grave that basic human rights are worth ignoring. 145 Republicans voted against the bill last week; only 24 voted yea. Iowa Representative Steve King probably spoke for many in insisting that the Keeping All Students Safe Act would be a first step toward a "federal takeover of the education system." We heard that scummy excuse in the 50's when schools were being desegregated and "states rights" became a euphemism for depriving people of freedom, justice and sometimes even life.

Do we have hypocrisy here, or just garden variety dishonesty -- or maybe it's more of that congressional multiple personality disorder that has these august idiots equating the abusive abridgment of civil rights by a school principal with freedom, but the Constitution's promise; the upholding of humane treatment or the very right to life of students is called a "federal takeover." When the government itself and the Republican party specifically is so afraid of the federal government that it will refuse to protect children from possibly lethal abuse by local government, perhaps it's time to sit on these dangerously disturbed, irresponsible, stupid and incompetent partisan child molesters and see how they like it.

Yes, we all want a government that has little to say about our personal choices and conduct, but that feeling is quite universal, as much as Republicans claim it for their own. What is not universal amongst sane and honest people is the desire to give the power of life and death to local school board Death Panels to prevent a wholly imaginary "federal takeover" and if there ever was a reason to restrain or isolate and punish anyone this is a perfect example.

If there is one thing clear and easily visible in American politics today, is that there is a political party that has been insisting 'it's a jungle out there' for so long, they've made America into one.

A strange kind of honor

Is David Frum having his "mission accomplished" moment?

" Israel may have to retire its title as the only democracy in the Middle East. With Sunday's free and fair national election, Iraq joins the honor roll as one of the very few Islamic democracies,"

wrote Frum on CNN.com today. If so it would be a strange kind of honor indeed, a ravaged, broken country with millions exiled, tens of thousands -- perhaps over a hundred thousand dead; a country cleansed of Christianity, where an election required massive military support and during which, dozens of people were killed.

Sure, it was an election that may actually reflect the will of the voters, but an election that could only be held because of the military might of an occupying invader; an election to pick a government that does not have the strength to run the country or to rebuilt it. Isn't it a bit premature to be portraying this as a "vindication" of George Bush's attempt to find al Qaeda training camps and Chemical weapons factories capable of attacking the United States within weeks? Is this somehow the conclusion of one of the longest and most costly wars in American history; a war which continues and the end of which is not yet in sight?

Certainly there is some hope for an eventual state of stability, but no assurance whatever as to what course a stable, self governing Iraq would take if not held at gunpoint. Certainly it's not time to have the Frum orchestra playing rhapsodies to a dishonest promise of the coming comity of nations and holding up Iraq as a model of enlightened and liberal democracy capable of spreading a Western model of government all over the Middle East. Can it be any more than dishonest when that still distant prospect is, at this point, the product of the wish to believe and more likely to be a fatuous dream than an accomplished mission?

David Frum is telling us that a distant shimmering mirage that never seems to get any closer as we move toward it is really a garden of Democratic Eden only steps away and that the unsubstantiated vision justifies having wandered in the desert wilderness for nearly a decade seeking one elusive promise after another. I wonder if, like the Moses he seems to think he is, he'll have to settle for seeing it from afar for the rest of his life.