Category Archives: NADA – New American Dark Ages

New American Dark Ages

NADA - New American Dark Ages

our domestic fundamentalism

1 Comment

I do

sometimes think extreme conservatism is some kind of mental illness. The Radical Right constantly accuses others of the very things they

do themselves — sometimes it’s laughable, sometimes it’s scary/weird.

A narrow form of evangelical Christianity — our domestic

fundamentalism that echos foreign fundamentalist threats — has been growing for decades. Now, with more power and influence than every

before, these believers are paranoid about their rights, even as they trample on others’ rights. Oh, but my rights as an atheist are

meaningless because they have god on their side. God damn them. mjh

Forward Newspaper Online: Air Force Rules Rile Republicans By E.B. SOLOMONT

Dozens

of Republican lawmakers are pressing the Bush administration to relax a set of new restrictions aimed at curbing religious

coercion within the U.S. Air Force.

In an October 25 letter to President Bush, 70 Republicans and one Democrat urged him

to protect the constitutional rights of Christian military chaplains whose freedom of speech and religious expression are “under

direct attack.” The letter refers to new religious guidelines adopted by the Air Force this summer after an investigation

revealed religious coercion at the U.S. Air Force Academy. …

Rep. Walter Jones, the North Carolina Republican who drafted the

letter, told the Forward that the new guidelines reflect “the continuous attack and erosion on people of faith in this

country.”

“We have got to protect the First Amendment rights of all of our spiritual leaders,” Jones said. …

“Ten years ago, much of the evangelical community was prepared to acknowledge limits,” said Marc Stern, general counsel of the American

Jewish Congress. Today, he said, “there is not a willingness to do that.” …

[New York Democrat Rep. Steve] Israel rejected the

criticisms of the new rules. “Of course they have a right to pray,” he said, “I just don’t believe they have any right to harass

or coerce people into praying a certain way.” …

Rep. John Hostettler, an Indiana Republican, denounced the

“mythical wall of church-state separation” and insinuated that the proposed measures would “quash the religious

expression of millions of service personnel.”

ID

Seemingly Reasonable

I had my own reaction to Quigley’s anti-Intelligent Design

column last week. He seems to have inspired many responses from both sides in letters and a column.

The blatantly bible-thumping

IDers are easier to dismiss. But the intellectual IDers remind me the devil will appear in a pleasant form.

Below, Edenburn

demolishes his own argument with one word: “current”. He seems to allow that someday science will prove ID wrong. But that’s just the

devil seeming pleasant. IDers believe it cannot be proven wrong. Precisely what they falsely accuse evolutionists of believing. mjh

Note: I have added an “ID” category to gather related entries; see link to left.

—–

ABQjournal: Intelligent Design and Finding New Ideas By Mike

Edenburn, For the Journal

Mr. Quigley’s description of ID as a proposition is appropriate. I might expand on it a little by

describing intelligent design as the “proposition” that scientifically derived empirical evidence suggests that design by an

intelligent agent is the best current explanation for the origin of a variety of natural systems, particularly in

biology, and that natural laws and chance alone, the basis for the theory of evolution, are not adequate to explain these

observations. …

[I]nnovation usually comes from looking at things in different ways and adopting new paradigms. Some of

the greatest scientific discoveries in history have come from thinking outside the box, and those have been good for business.
—

Mike Edenburn is a mechanical engineer, former systems analyst at Sandia National Laboratories for 35 years, and a member of New Mexico

Intelligent Design Network
—

There’s no box like that little black book. Not to say

great and creative minds haven’t belonged to powerfully faithful believers. Just that fundamentalism by its nature requires closing your

mind.

—–

ABQjournal: Letters to Outlook

You are presenting the study of evolution as being necessary to achieving a quality

education. Somehow I cannot grasp how the study of man’s supposedly evolutionary climb from monkeys is going to help me learn to read,

write and add 2+2. If anything, my observation of our school system is that we are evolving back to the primate era.
Gary Hays

Albuquerque

This one is too easy. Hays doesn’t realize apes (“monkeys”) and humans evolved from a

common ancestor that was neither ape nor human. He also doesn’t realize we ARE primates.

—–

Quigley’s claim

that “ID is bad for business” is just plain laughable. Please tell me what makes more sense in education — simply accepting evolution as

truth, or evaluating evolution in light of a competing theory and then examining the evidence to see which has a greater claim to truth?

Hank Happ
Albuquerque

The devil himself speaks here. Open-minded and well-educated people

— even liberal people — must consider competing theories equally. Then must we allow astrology in the astronomy class?

—–

The scientific support for a creator’s involvement in the origins of life and universe is overwhelming.
Earl

Godwin, M.D.
Albuquerque

Please. An essential tenet of ID is irreducible complexity — that we

cannot grasp that which is most god-like. It is anti-science and anti-progress; it insist we must hit a point beyond which the answer is:

god did it.

—–

The proponents of ID are religious fundamentalists who are taught from birth to believe that the

worldly things of this life are of no importance; that salvation, that is, the life of the world after death, is all that matters. The

total lack of empirical evidence for this belief is irrelevant as Tertullian, an early Christian priest, said: “I believe because it is

absurd.”

The fundamentalist theocrats of all the monotheistic religions will never give up; their self-image depends on

continuing the control over the masses of the deluded faithful. It is this power, not salvation, that is the prime motivation to the

preachers, the witch doctors, and the theistic con artists. George Orwell would have understood.
Ross Milner
Albuquerque

Amen, Brother Milner!

Dump Duhbya

Brownie, You Look Fabulous!

I can’t add anything to this indictment of a shallow, image-conscious man in over his head. And I

don’t just mean Brownie. mjh

Winners of Katrina contracts defend deals By HOPE YEN,

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

[E]-mails show that Brown, who had been planning to step down from his post when the storm hit,

was preoccupied with his image on television even as one of the first FEMA officials to arrive in New Orleans, Marty Bahamonde, was

reporting a crisis situation of increasing chaos to FEMA officials.

“My eyes must certainly be deceiving me. You look

fabulous – and I’m not talking the makeup,” writes Cindy Taylor, FEMA’s deputy director of public affairs to Brown on 7:10

a.m. local time on Aug. 29.

“I got it at Nordstroms,” Brown writes back. “Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go

home?” An hour later, Brown adds: “If you’ll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you’ll really vomit. I am a fashion god.”

A

week later, Brown’s aide, Sharon Worthy, reminds him to pay heed to his image on TV. “In this crises and on TV you just need to

look more hardworking … ROLL UP THE SLEEVES!” Worthy wrote, noting that even President Bush “rolled his sleeves to just below the

elbow.”

Dump Duhbya

a covert prison system set up by the CIA?

Small wonder Bush and Cheney want the CIA exempt from rules limiting torture. Aren’t you the least

surprised the CIA runs a prison system?

Will we recognize when we cross the line from “a strong executive” to a

dictatorship? mjh

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing

Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11
By Dana Priest, Washington Post Staff Writer

The

CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according

to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up

by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan

and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and

former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in

the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even

basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with

overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.

Dump Duhbya

Has anyone noticed that the coverup worked?

NOW. Transcript. October 28, 2005 | PBS

BRANCACCIO: Former

House Majority Leader Tom Delay wrote a letter yesterday to supporters. And he said it’s all linked, the allegations of financial

impropriety involving Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the Fitzgerald investigation. His quote to his constituents, “We are

witnessing the criminalization of conservative politics.” What do you make of that?

CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: I would

respectfully disagree. I think we’re looking at when you do something illegal you get caught. And this is what’s

happened with Scooter Libby, at least, the allegation.

There’s enough there that the prosecutor feels that he can make a case and

from all that we’ve seen in the notes that– that Scooter Libby took that tell one thing whereas his– testimony at the grand jury was

something different which is kind of mind-boggling in the first place. That tells you that there’s something real here. And that’s

about illegal activity. …

I can’t imagine a thought process that said to Scooter Libby, “Go ahead and say to the grand jury

that you heard about Valerie Plame first from the press when you have your own notes that you know are being turned over under discovery

that show that you heard it from the Vice-President.” I don’t understand the thinking the went into that. It’s going to be very

interesting to see how they handle this and what the Vice-President does. Because this is his right hand person. And clearly he didn’t

act without– the Vice-President being very involved in whatever he did.

What the ‘Shield’ Covered Up By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Has anyone

noticed that the coverup worked?

In his impressive presentation of the indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby last week,

Patrick Fitzgerald expressed the wish that witnesses had testified when subpoenas were issued in August 2004, and “we would have been

here in October 2004 instead of October 2005.”

Note the significance of the two dates: October 2004, before President Bush was

reelected, and October 2005, after the president was reelected. Those dates make clear why Libby threw sand in the eyes of prosecutors,

in the special counsel’s apt metaphor, and helped drag out the investigation.

As long as Bush still faced the voters, the White

House wanted Americans to think that officials such as Libby, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney had nothing to do with the leak

campaign to discredit its arch-critic on Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

And Libby, the good soldier, pursued a brilliant

strategy to slow the inquiry down. …

Bush and his disciples would like everyone to assume that Libby was some kind of lone

operator who, for this one time in his life, abandoned his usual caution. …

What exactly transpired in the meetings between

Libby and Cheney on the Wilson case? It is inconceivable that an aide as careful and loyal as Libby was a rogue official. Did Cheney set

these events in motion? This is a question about good government at least as much as it is a legal matter.

Dump Duhbya

GOP Angered by Closed Senate Session

Democrats

in the Senate did what they had to do to get their Republican colleagues to act responsibly. Boo-hoo for poor Dr Frist and his hurt

feelings. He lashes out like a dittohead.

GOP Angered by Closed Senate Session
Meeting Reopened After

Two Hours By Charles Babington and Dafna Linzer, Washington Post Staff Writers

Democrats forced the Senate into a rare closed-door

session yesterday, infuriating Republicans but extracting from them a promise to speed up an inquiry into the Bush

administration’s handling of intelligence about Iraq’s weapons in the run-up to the war.

With no warning in the mid-

afternoon, the Senate’s top Democrat invoked the little-used Rule 21, which forced aides to turn off the chamber’s cameras and close

its massive doors after evicting all visitors, reporters and most staffers. …

Republicans condemned the Democrats’ maneuver,

which marked the first time in more than 25 years that one party had insisted on a closed session without consulting the other party.

But within two hours, Republicans appointed a bipartisan panel to report on the progress of a Senate intelligence committee

report on prewar intelligence, which Democrats say has been delayed for nearly a year. …

The usually unflappable

majority leader, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), was searching for words to express his outrage to reporters a few minutes later. The Senate “has

been hijacked by the Democratic leadership,” he said. “They have no convictions, they have no principles, they have no

ideas.” Never before had he been “slapped in the face with such an affront,” he said, adding: “For the next year and a half, I

can’t trust Senator Reid.”

“They have no ideas”? How about the idea of pursuing the Bush administration

with one tenth the zeal they showed in attacking Clinton? How about some spine and ethics instead of party-only loyalty. mjh

Reid said he was forced to seek the closed session to spur action on the investigation. “The

only way we’ve been able to get their attention is to spend 3 1/2 hours in a closed session,” he said. “It’s a slap in the face

to the American people that this investigation has been stymied.”

Rockefeller said Democratic requests for information

related to the investigation are routinely denied or ignored, and he suggested that the Senate Republican leadership was under orders

from the Bush administration not to cooperate.

“Any time the intelligence committee pursued a line of inquiry that brought us

close to the role of the White House in all of this in the use of intelligence prior to the war, our efforts have been thwarted

time and time again,” Rockefeller said. “The very independence of the United States Congress as a separate and coequal

branch of the government has been called into question.”

Dump Duhbya

A Judge of One’s Peers

I think it is vital that a defendant have confidence he can get a fair

trial.

However, note what The Hammer is doing here. He is saying that no one can judge a Republican but another

Republican. He is demanding a separate and unequal judicial system. It’s not just a jury of one’s peers now, it is a judge, as

well. This is part of the corrossive influence of that strange paranoia of the Right Wing that there is uncontrollable bias everywhere.

Why didn’t all the Republicans recuse themselves during Clinton’s impeachment? Oh, of course, because they are holier than thou.

I’ll be sure to ask the next cop to stop me what his party affiliation is. Let’s see how that stands up in court. mjh

Defense Wins New Judge in DeLay Case By Sylvia Moreno, Washington

Post Staff Writer

DeLay’s lawyers argued that Perkins’s impartiality appears to be compromised by his contributing money to

national and local Democratic candidates, as well as to MoveOn.org, a group that has targeted DeLay’s defeat in national fundraising

efforts.

DeLay Loath

to Doff His Leadership Hat
Active Role Divides House Republicans
By Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post Staff Writer

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay’s efforts to retain power despite his indictment have angered some rank-and-file Republicans,

many of whom say his ethical problems and uncertain status are staining them and destabilizing GOP unity.

Although he was forced

to relinquish his leadership post Sept. 28, after the first of two indictments for alleged involvement in money laundering related to the

2002 Texas election, DeLay continues to use an office in the leadership suite, occasionally presides over private meetings with

committee chairmen and lobbies members during key floor votes.