In response to the ACLU’s lawsuit against the Santa Rosa County school district, we have the inevitable, inaccurate statements from the Daily News’ spout-off column:
“Why is it that students can go around wearing shirts that support gay pride but we can’t pray or support the Lord?”
“Without (the ACLU), kids wouldn’t get to learn the merits of homosexuality and they might actually be praying in school.”
Nothing prevents kids from praying in school. They have the right to form prayer groups, say grace at lunch, pray before they take a math test or form Christian after-school clubs (or Wiccan clubs, Judaism clubs, Muslim clubs, etc.). That’s their constitutional right (for brevity, I’ll let the spouters’ freaking out about gay rights pass without comment).
What isn’t a Constitutional right is for schools to hold prayers at school events, have teachers preach to students about their religious beliefs and offer Bible readings during non-religious student meetings, which are among the allegations in the lawsuit.
In the letters page, a DeFuniak minister suggested anyone who doesn’t like religious presentations at graduation should just “abstain.” I wonder, if Christians in parts of Hawaii (where the religious makeup is heavily Shinto/Buddhist, due to the high Asian population) were told “Well, this is a Buddhist community, if you don’t want to listen to Buddhist prayers, stay home from graduation,” would he say the same thing? Or does he feel that only Christians have the right to flaunt their religion at public government events?

“People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.”—Bill Clinton

Some months back I joked that McCain saying we could stay in Iraq for a century if there were no casualties or attacks on our troops was like saying we could stop worrying about the uninsured if everyone had Wolverine’s (from the X-Men movies) healing powers.

Little did I realize that John Goodman, a think tanker who helped draft McCain’s healthcare policy, has a healthcare view that’s about at that level. Goodman told The Dallas Morning News that since E/Rs will provide anyone with medical care (by law) therefore, nobody is truly uninsured:

“So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime … The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.

“So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved.”

Right. All we have to do is call the uninsured insured and they’ll be fine.

Meanwhile, McCain economic adviser Phil Gramm says the economy is great, we’re just whining over nothing, and McCain’s foreign policy advisers are a pack of Iraq war hawks who’ve been consistently wrong in everything they’ve said since before the war started.

I’m soooo looking forward to the possibility of a McCain presidency.

Some Stephanie Meyer fans are not happy.
Meyer has written an amazingly successful vampire quadrilogy, but the fourth book has antagonized a lot of readers who hated the ending and decided they want their money back.
And I don’t mean readers going back to the store and returning the book, I mean there are some who are calling for a mass sending back of books on the grounds this will Send A Message to Meyer not to write bad books.
OK, I admit I haven’t read the book, but I think it’s a little much to assume this is a wilful decision by Meyer to write crap rather than an aesthetic disagreement.
She’s hardly the first author to have this problem, either: Many people hated the end of Rosemary’s Baby and Ivanhoe, though as far as I know, there were no mass movements to Send A Message to Ira Levin or Sir Walter Scott.
As a writer, I unsurprisingly side with Meyer’s comment that what she writes “can’t be about what everyone else wants.”
For more information, check out Christian Science Monitor’s book blog

Apparently not: Faced with Iraq Prime Minister al-Maliki’s insistence that the US set a specific date for withdrawal, the White House wants our status-of-forces agreement in Iraq to be more open-ended. According to the Christian Science Monitor today, White House spokesman Tony Fratto says withdrawal must be linked to our old friend “conditions on the ground” (CSM’s words).

So after several years of Bush assuring us that Iraq is an independent government and we’re only keeping our troops there as long as they want us–it appears that’s not quite the case (is anyone surprised?). Telling Iraq we’ll decide when conditions justify withdrawal is hardly how independent governments negotiate.

I also find myself irked by the Monitor (much as I like the paper) for describing the “increasingly assertive Iraqi government” as “a key foreign policy problem with which the next occupant of the Oval Office will likely have to deal.”

A nation that decides for itself if it wants US troops within its borders is hardly a “foreign policy problem” unless you start from the assumption that the US is entitled to call the shots and Iraq should submit like a good puppet state.

President Bush this week on Russia’s clash with Georgia: “Georgia’s territorial integrity and borders must command the same respect as every other nation’s, including Russia’s.”

Yes, what kind of country would disrespect territorial integrity to the point of invading another nation that wasn’t even threatening them?

McCain foreign-policy advisers an Iraq-war hawks Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham likewise say in the Wall Street Journal that “Russia’s invasion of Georgia represents the most serious challenge to this political order since Slobodan Milosevic unleashed the demons of ethnic nationalism in the Balkans.” They go on to assert that “In the long run, a Russia that tries to define its greatness in terms of spheres of influence, client states and forced fealty to Moscow will fail — impoverishing its citizens in the process.”

And how much are we spending on the Iraq war? A billion a month now?

An article on Christian Science Monitor about a man posting his grandfather’s letters from the front in World War I, and doing it in real time–if there’s a week between letters, there’s a week between posts.

The site itself is wwar1.blogspot.com.

From writer G. Willow Wilson: “Art is by nature and most artists are extremists … I’m also an extremist—-I simply choose the other extreme. And at a time when artists of all sorts are allowed and even expected to do the stuff everyone else just wishes they could get away with, my extreme feels almost naughty. Antiestablishment. Aberrant. I like being a chemical-free, overdisciplined ball of morning-person enthusiasm.”

Rice on the United States’ enthusiasm for putting antimissile defenses in Poland: “This is an agreement that, of course, will establish a missile defense site here in Poland, a missile defense site that will help us to deal with the new threat to the 21st century of long-range missile threats from countries like Iran or from North Korea.”

As journalist Spencer Ackerman points out, North Korea doesn’t have missiles that long-range, and Iran doesn’t have a history of antipathy toward Poland. Which leaves me speculating why Rice might have said such a silly remark:
•It’s easier than telling America “Yes, we’re not only going to exhaust our resources and our military fighting a non-existent “Islamofascist” plan for world takeover, we’re going to spend whatever’s left reviving the Cold War.”
•Reminding everyone that Iran is a terrible, terrible threat to every human being on Earth will hopefully make us accept an invasion before Bush leaves office.
•The defense contractors who build the antimissile systems want to make more money, and it’s not like we have any left to give them.

One of the things we know about Republicans is that they hate stuck-up rich “elitists.”

In 2004, for instance, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and other right-wing pundits derided John Kerry as a “gigolo” because he’d married the wealthy Teresa Heinz, and pronounced him too rich to understand anything about the middle-class (the mainstream media dutifully parroted similar points, contrasting Very Rich Kerry with Plainspoken Texas Farmer Bush).

Strangely enough, the fact John McCain’s entire political career has been backed by his wealthy wife (okay, a lot of lobbyists helped too) doesn’t see to raise the same hackles.

Okay, not so strange. I know perfectly well that in politics, a double standard always applies: Your candidate’s sins are much, much less significant than the opposition candidate who does exactly the same thing.

Republicans, however, keep insisting that they are beyond politics and that their attacks represent some sort of fundamental downhome, working class American values, so I think it’s a good idea to point out what a load of crap that is.

Republicans have no problems with elitists: If Kerry was too rich to have any feeling for the middle class, Coulter and Limbaugh (and most of the national media who make the “elitist” argument about Obama) are in the same boat. If Edwards’ big house somehow disqualifies him from concern about poverty (and we were told over and over by the mainstream media that it did), then what about McCain, who this week admitted he can’t even remember how many houses he and his wife own? Oh, and believes “rich” doesn’t apply to anyone unless they make at least $5 million a year.

The McCain campaign’s defense of his statement was, unsurprisingly, that you can’t criticize McCain because he’s a POW. Campaign aide Brian Rogers statement was that “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison.”

I don’t really think this is the sort of thing the campaign should be about. We have lots of serious issues on the table. But if the Republicans decide the vote should be about whether Barack Obama is a snotty elitist who vacations in Hawaii, then McCain is fair game for the same treatment.