America the Gift Shop

America the Gift Shop

Photography by Phillip Toledano

(It's political.)

Atheist files suit against military.

There was a really interesting story on CNN tonight on Jeremy Hall, an atheist who is suing the Department of Defense for religious persecution.

It will be interesting to see where this goes.

Retroactive Immunity

The government is stomping on the fourth amendment, in case you hadn't heard.

Telecommunication companies that helped the government tap phones and listen in on the private conversations of Americans without a warrant are now being sued for their actions. Around 40 lawsuits have been filed against these companies because these actions are illegal based on the fourth amendment, which states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Sounds good, right? Upholding the Constitution and whatnot.

Unfortunately for the constitution, a bill has passed in the House and is now sitting in waiting in the Senate that will give retroactive immunity to these telecom companies because Bush told them to do it. According to this Reuters article, the suits stem from their participation in a warrantless electronic surveillance program Bush secretly began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Again from Reuters, critics also charge Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in authorizing the spy program without court approval. He maintains he had the wartime power to do it. But in January 2007 he put the program under FISA court jurisdiction.

McCain

John McCain strolled through our neck of the woods today (not to be confused with John McClane from Die Hard), and we figured we should go down and give him a healthy dose of what for.
We worked closely with members of a local Anarchist Infoshop called The Radish (we call 'em Radishites), Peace Network of the Ozarks, and Planned Parenthood to combat the politically corrupt retardation that is John McCain.
We ended up getting quite the gatheration going. Although some moronic Creationists operating under the guise of "pro education" came out, we were able to keep control of the situation, and we certainly had the numbers on our side. Video and pictures should be up later tonight.

You know, it's funny. We got a lot of McCain's supporters walking past us saying things like, "Don't you have anything better to do?" and, "Pffft. What's your definition of 'Peace'?" and, "My father fought so that you would have the right to make that stinking sign!"
However, not a single person was willing to calmly and rationally stand and discuss their beliefs. We were asking them nicely to discuss why they believed what they believed, standing there calmly and explaining that we were here to be accountable for what we believed, and trying to meet their accusations will logical conjecture, but not a single person would stand and discuss their beliefs with us.
Huh.
It's almost as if they're weak, corrupt bastards who know that we're right.

(Note to any McCain supporters out there: hit me up in the comments section with your email address and we'll have an online dialog. You can be accountable for what you say!)

-Ryan Culbertson-Faegre

Awkward

Trotsky posted a great piece today on his blog, from which I have unapologetically ganked most of this.

Scott McClellan, the ex-Press Secretary to President Bush, will release a book on Monday criticizing the administration he served for four years regarding their rationale for the War in Iraq. What did McClellan have to say?

"As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq," McClellan wrote. "Unfortunately, subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgment of Bush and his team was misplaced."

Misplaced? Alright, but just how misplaced was it?

In Iraq, McClellan added, Bush saw "his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness," something McClellan said Bush has said he believes is only available to wartime presidents.

The president's real motivation for the war, he said, was to transform the Middle East to ensure an enduring peace in the region. But the White House effort to sell the war as necessary due to the stated threat posed by Saddam Hussein was needed because "Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitions purpose of transforming the Middle East," McClellan wrote.

"Rather than open this Pandora's Box, the administration chose a different path — not employing out-and-out deception, but shading the truth," he wrote of the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, an effort he said used "innuendo and implication" and "intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary."

"President Bush managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option," McClellan concluded, noting, "The lack of candor underlying the campaign for war would severely undermine the president's entire second term in office."

To quote Trotsky, "Dang...so....wait....you mean this guy, who was the spokesman for the Bush White House for all that time, is coming out and basically saying what we all already knew? That we knew those WMDs were imaginary, and it was all a huge lie? Well...that's just embarrassing."

Not that it makes that big of a difference now. Those who are interested in what is true regarding the War in Iraq succumbed to the evidence long ago (Indeed, some of us have been shouting it from the rooftops since day 1). For the rest of the loyal Conservatives who believe that changing their opinion is matter of defeat rather than enlightenment, anything short of a confession from Bush's very lips wouldn't be enough. So yet another confession from a man who was once a faithful employee of Bush, and who remains a supporter, will be unlikely to change anything aside from making those of us who are sick of this situation and the loss of life attached to it shake our heads a little harder.

And our soldiers continue to die. How can we not hold the man who sent them there accountable?