The Allen Almanac

Over at TalkingPointMemo there is a moving blog entry by eastside93 detailing his decision not to vote for Barack Obama yesterday.

I didn’t vote.  Not for President, anyway.

Oh, I went to the voting booth.  I signed, was given my stub, and was walked over to a voting machine.  I cast votes for statewide races and a state referendum on water and sewer improvements.

I stood there, and I thought about all of these people, who influenced my life so greatly.  But I didn’t vote for who would be the 44th President of the United States.

When my ballot was complete, except for the top line, I finally decided who I was going to vote for – and then decided to let him vote for me.  I reached down, picked him up, and told him to find Obama’s name on the screen and touch it.

And so it came to pass that Alexander Reed, age 5, read the voting screen, found the right candidate, touched his name, and actually cast a vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Oh, the vote will be recorded as mine.  But I didn’t cast it.

Then again, the person who actually pressed the Obama box and the red “vote” button was the person I was really voting for all along.

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Hopefully, we’ll be telling our grandkids about this one.

Follow the link for the full text…

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via TPM:

You’ve probably already seen some of the news about the Bush White House engaging in a seemingly unprecedented spree of firings of US Attorneys across the coutry. Conveniently, they’re being replaced without senate approval under a provision of the Patriot Act. We’re digging into now and we’re finding a bunch. More soon.
– Josh Marshall

[edit]Here’s some more on this:
Okay, so we already know that the White House has now taken the unprecedented step of firing at least four and likely seven US Attorneys in the middle of their terms of office — at least some of whom are in the midst of corruption investigations of Bush administration officials and key Republican lawmakers. We also know that they’re taking advantage of a handy provision of the USA Patriot Act that allows the White House to replace these fired USAs with appointees who don’t need to be approved by the senate.

Given that these new USAs are being plopped into offices currently investigating Republicans and other administration officials and others into states with 2008 presidential candidates, there’s certainly ample opportunity for mischief.

via Washington Times:

A last-minute addition to a federal spending bill at the end of the last U.S. Congress now makes civilians eligible for military courts-martial.
With the addition of just five words, the provision sponsored by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was signed into law by President Bush, and makes civilian government employees and journalists eligible for prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Washington Post reported Monday.

And (perhaps, some good news) Barack Obama on his decision to run for President:

The NY Daily News reports:

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open people’s mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

And of course President Bush is the one who gets to decide what constitutes “emergency conditions.” As Ed Brayton pointed out, the President has always had the power to open our mail, but he at least had to obtain a FISA warrant after the fact. Now he says he can open anything he wants anytime he wants with no oversight. Republicans sure get up in arms when judges legislate from the bench. So why don’t they seem to care that the President is doing the same thing from the Oval Office? This is beyond ridiculous in a democratic government. Of all the things he has done, the complete lack of respect our President has shown our government by abusing these signing statements might be his most insidious and lasting legacy. Daily Kos notes:

They’re taking on a symbolic meaning, although it might actually be true that they were meant to have this meaning all along. And that symbolic meaning is that they demonstrate that Bush is reserving for himself the right to do anything. He just keeps planting stakes further and further out, noting well that nobody’s really willing to set boundaries. Don’t challenge me, he says, because I’ll make you prove you can make it stick. That’s how I measure power. If you can’t physically restrain me from doing these things, you can’t stop me.

It violates the law? Who cares? Have a signing statement. The government’s being sued? Who cares? We’ll appeal forever. Lose the appeals? Who cares? We’ll just change the terminology or continue in secret. Investigated by Congress for it? Who cares? We’ll just flood them with irrelevant documents. Subpoenaed to testify? Who cares? We just won’t show. Cited for Contempt? Who cares? We’ll appeal forever (if we even permit the U.S. Attorney to prosecute in the first place).

This is just disgusting to anyone who believes in the values of democracy. Values that we are supposedly trying to teach to the Iraqis. Is it any wonder they are failing at establishing a democracy when the model is broken?

From the Guardian’s blog, Comment is Free:

That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its “war on terror” can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human-rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay. This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain “stress positions”, and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.

The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep. The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were “commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep” while kept, like Padilla and the arrivals at Guantánamo, “in black hoods or spray-painted goggles”.

Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: “stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation”. The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position – maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.

Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates. US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.

[..]

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the “values of civilised nations”: terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation’s interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.

The War of Terror continues. This administration has done more to damage America than 100 September 11ths could have ever done on their own, and the effects of their malfeasance are still going to be felt by our grandchildren. The depths this government has sunk us to would have been unbelievable if you had suggested them six years ago. The depths are shocking enough but it is the breadth of their wrongdoing that is truly stunning. War profiteering, torture, lying to get us into war, Hurricane Katrina, the vilification of Muslims and homosexuals, allowing Osama bin Laden to go free, arrogance towards our allies, the polarization of Americans, chipping away at the wall between church and state, refusing to talk with countries like Iran and North Korea. The list just goes on and on.

Keep an eye out for your’s truly and the family.

Jews on First has a follow-up on the on the New Jersey teacher who got caught on tape proselytizing in class and then lied about it. The student is being harassed by the town while the teacher has gotten no punishment, although the superintendent did call him a “wonderful teacher”. Apparently no action has been taken by the school district at all. The student is quoted as having told the superintendent, “I thought when I gave this information to you, it would be handled by an adult, I guess I was wrong.” For a refresher here is what the teacher got caught on tape teaching his History class:

[Jesus] did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sin on his own body, suffered your pains for you and he’s saying, “Please accept me, believe me.”

If you reject that, you belong in hell. The outcome is your prerogative. But the way I see it, God himself sent his only son to die for David Paszkiewicz on that cross … And if you reject that, then it really is to hell with you.

He also specifically singled out a Muslim student and told her she would be going to Hell. I’m thinking the LeClairs are about to win a lot of money in a lawsuit. I hate to see something like that done to a school, but sometimes an example needs to be made. This foolishness cannot be tolerated in our public schools.

Go read this great article on Slate

We have become such “good Americans” that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights, be it “enemy combatant” or “illegal immigrant.” Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn’t give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don’t use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.

The latest entry in the Republican’s 289 part series “Destroying Your Freedoms to Protect Them” is Newt Gingrich’s idea that we may need to put some limits on free speech, and he said this at a freedom of speech dinner. Maybe he was joking. He has to be, right?

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich yesterday said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism.

Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a “different set of rules” may be needed to reduce terrorists’ ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.

“We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade,” said Gingrich, a Republican who helped engineer the GOP’s takeover of Congress in 1994.

Is this really what we’ve come to? I don’t even have the energy to refute this moronic position. If Newt wants to limit free speech he should start by shutting the hell up.

I’m a day late with this story, but it reminded me of something that happened when I was a student. A History teacher named David Paszkiewicz in New Jersey (who is also a Baptist minister) got caught proselytizing Christian fundamentalism to his students in class.

Instead of teaching them History, he was teaching them, “that a being must have created the universe, that the Christian Bible is the word of God, and that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark. If you do not accept Jesus, he flatly proclaimed to his class, “you belong in hell.[...]he also dismissed evolution and the Big Bang as non-scientific, arguing by contrast that the Bible is supported by what he calls confirmed biblical prophecies.” He also singled out a Muslim student and “lamented what he saw as her inevitable fate should she not convert.”

The best part is how they caught him though. One student, Matthew LaClair, complained about the event to the school principal and requested a meeting with Mr. Paszkiewicz and the principal. But in the meeting Mr. Paszkiewicz denied it and said that the student had taken something he had said out of context. And now, for the big pwning: “At the end of the meeting, LaClair revealed that he had recorded the remarks, and presented the principal with two compact discs. The teacher then declined to comment further without his union representative. However, he fired one last shot at the student, saying, ‘You got the big fish … you got the big Christian guy who is a teacher…!’” Self-important deceitful ass. UPDATE: There has been a response from some of the other students who attend the school at the original blog that posted this, The Lippard Blog.

My High School (Flippin High School – Go Bobcats!) probably had one of the highest minister to non-minister faculty ratios of any public school anywhere. Our Civics/History, Math, Biology, and Band teachers were all ministers of some sort. That’s in addition to our men’s Basketball coach (who also taught Health) and High School Principal. And that’s out of about a dozen to fifteen teachers total. Mostly, they were Church of Christ or Southern Baptist, so they weren’t exactly liberal in their beliefs either. But I will say one thing for my school, everybody there believed in the separation of Church and State. If they didn’t believe in it, at least they followed it.

We had only one incident of anything like this that I can remember. It was actually not even a regular teacher or minister that did it either. It was some wack-job they brought in as a substitute for our Physics teacher. He was real brilliant too. Instead of just trying to convert us to his religious beliefs by talking to us, he actually handed out those little Jack Chick tracts. One of the students in class that was arguing with him was a Mormon and he gave her a Jack Chick all about how Mormons are going to burn in Hell for worshiping a false god. Unfortunately for him, she wasn’t one to be bullied around and went straight to the principal’s office after class with his tract. I don’t know exactly what happened from there, but he wasn’t teaching class next period and we never saw him again.

Ed Brayton speculated that this goes on, unreported, all the time. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I do know that at least at my school, they have it right. This was at a small school in deep backwoods Arkansas. If they can get it right, hopefully a lot of schools are.

(By the way, if you actually go to my high school’s web page and look at some of the pictures, they aren’t crazy militia people (well, most aren’t). For some reason they always take group pictures during Spirit Week. Those appear to have been taken on Camo Day.)