"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

This short opinion piece by Kevin Myers is fascinating in it's central thesis that a belief in God, not necessarily the existence of God herself mind you, more often than not leads to a kinder, gentler society.

But here is the paradox. Rulers who believed in a Divine Creator have tended to create gentler societies than have atheists. The twentieth century was the first in which various avowedly godless states came into existence: and robbed of the inhibitions caused by a belief in the afterlife, the most astonishingly lawless regimes in world history emerged. The Aztec society which removed a heart each dawn from a teenage rib-cage to lure the sun-god from his couch, the Dahomey chieftain who daily dispatched a child to the afterlife to enquire after the health of his ancestors. Why, these were positively vegan compared to the godless butchers of the 20th century, the fine fellows who variously supervised human affairs from the Rhineland to Vladivostok, and from the Kamchatka Peninsula to the South China Sea. Their victims can be measured, not in the modest hundreds but in the hundreds of millions. The world has never, ever seen anything like the evil triumphs of the totalitarian secular states of the 20th century.

Which is not an argument in favour of the existence of god, merely one in favour of the belief in one: it is the social utility of a theistic faith which is appealing, not the fictions which lie at its heart.

It's a terrific argument but unfortunately grounded on tons of logical fallacies and historical oversights which Myers simply ignores.

First off the idea that religion and totalitarian dictatorships cannot commingle is ridiculous. I would suggest Myers check this page for just a couple of examples of how the Nazi state merged the Christian religion with the government. Hitler himself famously said "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." Another famous founder of a totalitarian state who later went on to found the Beatles, said "religion is the opiate of the masses."

Totalitarian states COUNT on the religious. They are the ones least likely to question, quick to dispense with personal morality when carrying out the greater will of the god/ state. I would argue that a large contingent of the faithful is a necessity to a fascist state.

Then there's the idea that the predominance of Christianity itself will lead to a kinder, gentler state. I'm sure all those who died in the crusades and inquisition would be quick to back up that idea. But violence and cruelty aren't limited to Christianity. What the hell is the Aztec sacrifice example that Myers uses if not as a demonstration of the violence of religion? Religion doesn't mean peace. It just means for more organized violence.

It just doesn't matter.

This "investigative" piece on the political contributions of journalists is stunningly imbecilic.

OSTON - A CNN reporter gave $500 to John Kerry's campaign the same month he was embedded with the U.S. Army in Iraq. An assistant managing editor at Forbes magazine not only sent $2,000 to Republicans, but also volunteers as a director of an ExxonMobil-funded group that questions global warming. A junior editor at Dow Jones Newswires gave $1,036 to the liberal group MoveOn.org and keeps a blog listing "people I don't like," starting with George Bush, Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition, the NRA and corporate America ("these are the people who are really in charge").

Whether you sample your news feed from ABC or CBS (or, yes, even NBC and MSNBC), whether you prefer Fox News Channel or National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker, some of the journalists feeding you are also feeding cash to politicians, parties or political action committees.

Look, I don't give a rat's ass whether journalists contribute campaign cash to the Republican party, the Democratic party or the People's Front of Judea. It just doesn't matter. The problem with journalism today isn't that journalists are too engaged or too biased towards their individual causes. The problem with journalism today is that modern journalism is too biased towards "objectivity." At least their own twisted concept of what objectivity means.

As long as journalism continues to conflate relativism and objectivity then people will think journalism sucks.

We keep you alive to serve this ship. So row well, and live.

This story hits the Republican anti-immigrant base/ support the troops/ Bush is a moral man trifecta.

CBS/AP) While the U.S. military searches for a soldier missing in Iraq, kidnapped by insurgents possibly allied with al Qaeda, his wife back home in Massachusetts may be deported by the U.S. government.

Army Spec. Alex Jimenez, who has been missing since his unit was attacked by insurgents in Iraq on May 12, had petitioned for a green card for his wife, Yaderlin Hiraldo, whom he married in 2004.

Their attorney, Matthew Kolken, said 23-year-old Hiraldo illegally entered the United States in 2001 to reunite with her husband, whom she had met in her native Dominican Republic and later married at his New York State Army base in 2004.

If you haven't been following the search for the two soldiers then suffice it say it looks like Jimenez is most likely dead. Judging by state of the body of his squad mate that they recovered it's a good guess to say his death was probably pretty horrible.

You could argue that he knew the risks when he signed up and that he probably signed up just to gain residency for himself and his wife. I don't care. The least you could say is that he took that risk. Most of the critics of immigration seem to fall squarely into the chickenhawk category when it comes to the war in Iraq from where I'm sitting. He's obviously a braver man than they, regardless of his reasons.

All that doesn't even begin to touch on the thing that really disgusts me about this story. The Bush administration could give her amnesty with a wave of a pen. It doesn't appear to this point that they've avoided doing so out of any weird idea about sticking to the letter of the law (but only on immigration, mind you) but rather that they simply don't care.

It's just another vivid reminder that the soldiers and their families are worthless in the eyes of this administration unless it's in their capacity as props to stand behind the President while he delivers a speech on how he's tough on terror.

If you don't tell me what I want to know, then it'll just be a question of how much you want it to hurt.

I'm so happy that Justice Scalia is turning to a fictional character in defining his own brand of jurisprudence. The "Jack Bauer Rule" can be the definitive legal defense employed by torturers everywhere.

Of little note is the fact that this isn't the only element of Scalia's legal philosophy grounded on creative fiction. Here are some of his lesser known legal theories:

The Bugs Bunny Rule - Shooting a buddy in the face with a shotgun is okay since he'll be magically okay by the next scene. If you do it while dressed by a girl bunny then you can't even be charged.

The A-Team Defense - Guns don't kill people. Guns don't even HIT people, just the ground around their feet. The Second Amendment rules supreme.

The Caddyshack Clause - Gopher removal is allowable by any means necessary. Gambling is legal at Bushwood as long as the club President is involved.

The Caped Crusader Rule - It is allowable to shot a suspect with a neutrino ray, drop a suspect into a vat of chemicals or off a clock tower or blast a suspect into atoms as long as that suspect defines themselves as a "supervillain" (or a "liberal.")

The Dirty Harry Defense - (Also referred as the "Deathwish Doctrine.") Vigilante killing is not illegal, especially if it's in revenge for the murder of the member of one's family.

The Arsenic and Old Lace Amendment - cute little old ladies can get away with anything.

And now for something completely different.

No reason to link this otherwise uninteresting article other than the fact I thought this quote was funny-

Snow acknowledged that U.S. officials have heard similar positive statements from Iraqi leaders before, but said: "We think they are very serious in moving on the key items. ... I think the president was impressed and reassured by the sense of seriousness that he heard"

Iraqi leaders weren't that serious before but they are now and the Prezident is really serious about how serious they've become.

Do you have the slightest idea what a moral and ethical principle is? Do you?

Josh Marshall makes a great observation (as usual) on the hullabaloo surrounding Reid's "incompetent" comment on General Pace.

Thinking back over the blather last week over Sen. Reid's (D-NV) comments about Gen. Pace, it's quite astonishing that the White House could with a straight face attack Reid for questioning Pace's competence only day's after they'd fired him. Think about that. The White House fires Pace as part of its many-month effort to sack everyone from the Rumsfeld era at the Pentagon. And Reid is in hot water for questioning the man's abilities?

This incident was also illustrative of the insane relativist media-driven world we live in these days. In the last few weeks we've had to endure debates about Nancy Pelosi's "earmarks" initiated by the architects of the biggest budget deficits in history who have literally thrown taxpayer's money into a bottomless pit in Iraq, Diane Feinstein's "secret' land dealings begun by some of the very same people who gave us the K-Street project and then Reid's criticism of a General's incompetence started by the people who are, well, incompetent.

In a rational world this idiocy would've been laughed off by reporters and never seen the light of day. You don't go to Paris Hilton for advice on avoiding sustance abuse or Charles Manson for information on how to love your fellow man. The source in and of itself should have been enough to kill these non-stories well before they made it onto our teevees. These are indeed strange times.

There, there. Shut up boy.

In honor of Father's Day and because I'll be golfing with a buddy rather than posting come Sunday here are a few quotes from my favorite fictional dad-

Homer: Son, when a woman says nothing's wrong, it means everything's wrong. When a woman says everything's wrong, it means everything's wrong. And when a woman says that something *isn't* funny, you'd better not laugh your ass off!

--

Bart: I want to be emancipated.

Homer: Emancipated? Don't you like being a dude?

--

Homer: Hey boy. Wanna play catch?

Bart: No thanks dad.

Homer: When a son doesn't want to play catch with his father something is definitely wrong.

Grampa: I'll play catch with you.

Homer: Go home.

--

Homer: Kids, just because I don't care doesn't mean I'm not listening.

--

Homer: Books are useless! I only ever read one book, "To Kill A Mockingbird" and it gave me absolutely no insight on how to kill mockingbirds! Sure it taught me not to judge a man by the colour of his skin... but what good does *that* do me?

--

Homer: Please don't eat me. I have a wife and kids. Eat them.

--

Homer: Oh, they have the Internet on computers now.

So vote once, vote tuh-wice, for Bill McKay... you middle-class honkies.

Dean's thoughts on what's taken as conventional wisdom on the candidates for President-

"Oh noes, not the brier patch!" This one is my favorite. The CW happens to be that Hillary Clinton can't win in the general because conservatives hate her and will turn out in droves to vote against her.

This is just stupid on so many levels. Conservatives will hate whomever the Democratic nominee is, whether it's Hillary or not. Are we supposed to believe that people who spent the 90's watching Jerry Fallwell's "Clinton Chronicles" and the last Presidential election shouting down John Kerry as a cowardly traitor are going to approach the next Democratic candidate for President with an open mind? Who cares what those loonies think?

"My life's an open book." The inverse of the above. The CW is that the thousands of faux scandals during the Clinton presidency some how inoculates Hillary from the revelation of any more skeletons in her closet. Really? Look up "swiftboating." Republicans have learned they can just make shit up about the Democratic candidate and the lazy media won't call them on it.

"Bygones by bygones." Apparently Barack Obama candidacy is about some sort of kinder, gentler liberalism. Or something. How this translates into governance is increasingly to appear to be more attempts to reach out to the 28%ers and try and compromise. Not gonna happen. If the last twenty years have shown us anything they've shown us those people could care less about what the rest of the country thinks.

"The Gipper redux." The only thing Fred Thompson and Ronald Reagan seem to share in common is their chosen profession. The thing that helped Reagan paint-the-pig of some truly horrible, regressive policies was his sense of humor and sunny disposition. Thompson, on the other hand, is dour and grouchy. I knew the Gipper and you, sir, are no Gipper.

"Nyah, nyah - pubs keep the White House." As usual the CW is that the uber-man the Republicans nominate will take the White House as they've done in the last four out of five elections. Whatever. Put aside the dubious nature to a couple of those "wins," the biggest problem that the Republican candidate will face is that they have to run so hard right to win the nomination there's absolutely no way they can get all the way back to the center by the general election. I have a hard time seeing how they can overcome the disadvantage inherent to the fact the base of their party are insane.

"The Road to the White House runs Center/ Right." Nope. The road to the White House runs through America.

Salvation is a last-minute business, boy.

I'm hoping that Talk To Action is simply being alarmist about pending PBS documentary as PBS has declined to provide a screener but the history of the last six years doesn't give me much cause.

Promotional material for the program at the Boulevard Web site suggests that it promotes a radically revisionist view of church and state.

The Wall of Separation is a metaphor deeply embedded in the American consciousness," the company observes. "Most of us take for granted the idea that politics and religion should not be intermixed because of the heritage of The First Amendment in our understanding of freedom of religion. The No Establishment Clause has protected us from the entanglement of religion with government, and the Free Exercise Clause has secured the right for all faiths to engage in their religious practices without interference from the state. America is a religiously pluralistic culture guided by a secular government."

That sounds pretty good. But then the Boulevard promo takes a troubling turn.

"...[W]hat would surprise most Americans," it asserts, "is the discovery that this is not what the Founding Fathers of our country intended when they established our nation and wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They in fact had a radically different definition of establishment and the role of religion in state and federal governments than we do today. So radical, in fact, that some say the modern understanding of the role of religion in the public square is exactly the opposite of what the Founders intended."

So Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others among the nation's founders didn't intend a "religiously pluralistic culture guided by a secular government"? That's totally wrong and very much in keeping with the Religious Right's spin on America's founding.We at Americans United did a little research on Boulevard Pictures, and here's what we found. Although the Web site for the film company mentions no religious or political agenda, its president is Jack Hafer, an evangelical Christian who told one interviewer that Christians have an obligation to "shape the culture" and "spread the faith." He urged Christian young people to go into the arts as "kingdom-spreaders" and as "a form of missionary service."

There's a whole heck of a lot of room for the role of religion in our society and it's appropriate that such a discussion would take place on the public channel on the public airwaves. But this isn't about that sort of discussion. This is about proselytising of a warped Evangelical view of how and why this country was founded. It has no business on my PBS.

Anti-quitsies, you're it, quitsies, no anti-quitsies, no startsies!

Psst, George. It's not "your government."

Thanks anyway, you cretinous lug.