Evolution debate spawns a saucy monster

I just posted an article to the archives which I think everyone should look into. Essentially a challenge to the Religious Right idea of teaching “Intelligent Design” in schools has arisen in the form of the followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Pastafarians, as they call themselves, believe that the Universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and that their beliefs are every bit as relevant as those of Christianity. Therefore, they believe by extension that their beliefs as just as much right be taught in school alongside Christianity.

It will, no doubt, be interesting to see how this ongoing debate unfolds.

- Watch Alert archived post
- Original Article

Related Links
- Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

The Demonization of Cindy Sheehan

I've been watching with some dismay as the mainstream media in the United States has started to fall in line with the Right-Wing politicos in condemning Cindy Sheehan. They don't do it as blatantly. Often they don't criticize her at all, but simply report on the criticism by including quotes from the Right without balancing quotes from the so-called Left. In other words, it's the old “we're just reporting what people are saying” without the understanding that reporting only one side of any issue is, in itself, bias.

I've read many stories in which Cindy Sheehan's comments have been taken completely out of context. For instance, she seems to be quoted a lot with saying “America Not Worth Dying For.” Oddly enough you can only seem to find that quote on Conservative web sites. What she actually said was “This country is not worth dying for,” and the country she was referring to was Iraq, not the United States. Iraq is not worth dying for. Context is everything.

The Right has a favorite word, which is “Borking.” They typically use it as a verb whenever a political nomination is being opposed by the Democrats. They say someone is “being Borked” (a reference to the fight over Reagan's appointment of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court). Well, it looks like a new verb is surfacing which the Left is using to some degree. “Swift Boating.” That new verb describes an effort to discredit someone with lies and misinformation (a reference to the “Swift Boat Veterans” attempt to discredit presidential candidate John Kerry).

That's what is happening to Cindy Sheehan. The Right-Wing policital and media machines have cranked up to fever-pitch in an effort to portray Cindy Sheehan as some irrational, politically motivated opportunist who is building some sort of celebrity career upon the dead body of her son, Casey (who died in Iraq, if you don't know). The attacks have been particularly vicious. Especially from the Right-Wing talking heads on the radio and television talk shows.

What worries me is that the mainstream media is picking up on it.

For once I'm going to limit my ranting here. There are a lot of great articles out there that need to be read, which go into these details much better than I ever could. But if you want to see my main point, simply go to the main news pages on Google or Yahoo!. Look at the headlines concerning Cindy Sheehan. For one thing, you won't find her under any human interest categories. She's now firmly ensconced in the politics section.

Anyway, here are some articles of interest;

• The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan


• What would satisfy Sheehan?


• ‘Peace Mom's’ marriage a metaphor for Dems


• Bush supporters create opposing camp


• Conservatives, others in the media launch smear campaign against Cindy Sheehan


• Limbaugh, Coulter, Liddy, Hitchens, Barone continue attacks on Cindy Sheehan


• Finding Cindy Sheehan

If you read any of these articles, please note how particularly nasty the Right-leaning articles are. None of them specifically discuss Cindy Sheehan's positions, but instead spend most of their time talking about how her efforts are undermining “our war in Iraq” and damaging “the morale of our troops.” Simply put, by voicing opposition at all she is proving herself to be unpatriotic, un-American, extremist, un-hinged, etcetera, etcetera.

I think this issue surprised everyone on the Right. They truly expected that the standard media spin would suffice in distracting the American public, as it always has before. Most Conservatives chalked up the interest in Cindy Sheehan as simply a slow news period. In other words, if anything else had been going on, no one would have noticed Ms. Sheehan's protest in Crawford. They may be right about that, actually. But I think the truer statement would be to say that had anything else been going on the mainstream media could have been intimidated into looking for the easier story.

More than anything, it's interesting that Cindy Sheehan has become such a focal point. Obviously a lot more people had strong feelings about the Iraq war and the possible illegality of it than the Bush Administration and Conservatives thought. Just because President Bush and the Right have managed to intimidate the mainstream media into under-reporting opposition to Administration policies and the War in Iraq does not mean that such opposition does not exist. In regard to Cindy Sheehan the standard spin has not worked very well thus far. But I worry that it's beginning to work now that Right-Wing media outlets are getting up to speed. If Cindy Sheehan can be discredited and swept under the rug with the amount of media coverage that she's garnered thus far, then we are truly doomed.

- Watch Alert archived post

“Justice Sunday II” Rally Targets “Arrogant Judiciary”

The schizophrenia of the Christian Right continues to rage unchecked and untreated. This is evidence by the fact that the key speaker for a rally which they called “Justice Sunday II” was House Majority Leader Tom DeLay; a man who has been charged with numerous ethics violations and has only avoided probable prison time because the Republicans have blocked every investigation, replaced members of investigation committees with people more sympathetic to DeLay and outright changed the rules of the House of Representatives so that DeLay could remain in office while under investigation. So much for justice.

Dr. James Dobson and other Religious Right leaders apparently believe that the Judiciary should only be independent in regard to supporting their agenda. What Dobson and other extremist Christian leaders are calling for is a well-heeled Judiciary that will support whatever far-Right legislation politicians like Tom DeLay force through Congress. That such legislation should face scrutiny for compatability with the United States Constitution is an abhorrent idea to people like James Dobson.

Dobson and his ilk love to quote Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson when they can twist his words to their advantage, and yet anyone who has read Jefferson's words in their correct context knows that people like Dobson were feared by Jefferson, and that Jefferson warned us of their influence. Dobson and other Religious Right leaders love to invoke the image of the Founding Fathers, claiming that our Government has strayed from their original intentions, when any impartial scholar would have to note that if we have indeed strayed from the intentions of the Founding Fathers, it has been in a decided and frightening shift to the Right.

I refuse to believe that an educated man like Dr. James Dobson truly does not understand how our Democracy was intended to work. Whether or not Dobson likes the rulings of the Judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court, it was intended as a check against possible abuse of Congressional power. That is its function, to determine that Congress, in its bid to please its highest paying contributors and settle political debts with people like Dobson and his Focus on the Family, does not install legislation that cannot pass Constitutional muster.

Make no mistake. “Justice Sunday II” has nothing whatsoever to do with justice. This rally is all about convincing the American public that the next appointee to the Supreme Court should be a Right-Wing wacko like James Dobson, that the court does not lean far enough to the right already. We're talking about a court which has already appointed a President (Bush in 2000) in defiance of the will of the American people and the due process of law (Al Gore was legally entitled to demand a recount of the entire state of Florida; a recount that was stopped by the Supreme Court).

These people talk a lot about justice, but only appear to recognize it as concessions to their will. If ever there were enemies to our Democracy, the people in the pulpit at Two Rivers Baptist Church are the enemies of the United States of America. Why do I say this? Only our enemies would work so tirelessly to overturn the very Democracy that our Founding Fathers worked so hard and spilled their blood for.

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.” -Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814.

- Watch Alert archived post
- Original Article

For religious issues, devil's in the details

In the early days of The Watch and the Watch Alert archive, a lot of people were confused about our mission. We posted a lot of information on Pagan issues, and so many people thought we were simply a Pagan forum. I suppose that might be true if one believes, as I do, that Pagans have just as much of a right to their beliefs as anyone else.

However, the reasoning behind posting so many articles and notes about Pagans had more to do with politics than with religion. Simply put, the people who stand the most to lose at the hands of the Religious Right and Christian Extremists are Pagans. Who do you think Christians see most specifically as one of their enemies? Pagans go right to the front of the list because most Christians see Pagans as Devil-worshippers.

While all Americans will suffer under the roll-back of Democracy that will occur under the steel-gloved hand of an American Taliban, Pagans will be the first to suffer because they are seen largely as a standing enemy. Therefore, I have always felt that Pagans especially should keep up with their politics and be aware of everything that's going on around them.

I posted a story to the Watch Alert Archive about Wiccans and other Pagans being denied their rights of representation in their local governments. It makes for an interesting read, and is just the sort of story I think all Americans, not just Pagans, need to be aware of. For whatever reason, the Pagans get left out of every conversation when people start talking about oppression. It is never mentioned that when Jerry Falwell tried to lay blame on non-Christians for provoking God to allow the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the first group of people he mentioned was Pagans. Some of the first people the Nazis started rounding up in the early days of World War II were the Pagans, in the form of Gypsies.

Pagans must be aware of local, state and Federal level politics, because whether they like it or not they are in the forefront. If by some bizarre twist armed conflict should come to the streets of American cities between Christians and other groups, Pagans would be among the first targets. All Pagans should keep this in mind.

- Watch Alert archived post
- Original Article

Mother's War Protest Gaining Momentum In Crawford

I just posted an article to The Watch Alert archive concerning Cindy Sheehan. I've been watching Cindy Sheehan's protest outside of President Bush's ranch in Texas with great interest. This article finally compelled me to comment on this.

So far Sheehan's protest has been informative concerning the dynamic of American culture and politics. For instance, every statement by the Bush Administration in regard to Ms. Sheehan has been hyperbole, followed by cliche'd statements about how her son died for a noble cause and the American public should support its troops. The exact same message is parroted in the Right-leaning press. In the mainstream press, in every article I've read that has tried to include a counterpoint to Ms. Sheehan's views, the counterpoint has always come from some Right-Wing think-tank spouting typical party-line claptrap about how Ms. Sheehan is undermining our efforts in Iraq and either directly or indirectly asserting that this means she does not support the troops. The so-called Left, of course, thinks Cindy Sheehan is great.

Here's what I think.

The Right spins everything regarding Cindy Sheehan back to the same tired argument; those who disagree with or protest against the war in Iraq are unpatriotic and are not supporting our troops. It's all spin, of course. I truly cannot believe that they really, honestly imagine that you can't be against the military action our troops are ordered to carry out without being against the troops themselves. They try to make their political base believe that people are practically spitting on returning troops like some people did during the Vietnam War (to my knowledge, nothing of the sort has happened).

But Cindy Sheehan is not protesting against our troops. She's protesting against the war itself. Her son, Casey, died in Iraq; not because he believed in the conflict, but because he believed in fulfilling his duty, and he did so at the cost of his life. To date no one has been able to fully explain to the American public why soldiers like Casey are in Iraq in the first place. And don't throw that crap in my face about Saddam being a bad man. There are a lot of bad men in the world, and the morally superior Right never once asked that the United States military stop the slaughter of civilians in Rwanda or the Durfur region. In fact, when the Serbs were attempting genocide against Muslims in Bosnia, the Right uniformly chanted “No war for Monica!” when President Clinton took action to intervene. I can only guess that Bosnia didn't have enough oil for the Republicans' supporters to think it was justified. That hypocrisy continues to this day. Mugabe, anyone?

I realize that it seems that I'm getting off-track here, but I'm not. This stuff is all tangled up together. This myth that you can't be against a war without being against the troops themselves is one of the reasons The Right hates Cindy Sheehan so. You can take the vilest human being in the world and stand him up in front of the population for them to spit upon him and they will do so, but if you wrap him in an American flag it's suddenly anti-patriotic to suggest that this same guy is anything less than good and moral.

That's what they've done with this war; they've wrapped it up in the American flag. So that's the lense they see Cindy Sheehan through. She's not against something or someone that's wrong. She's against the United States, its troops and our very democracy because The Right has wrapped the Iraq war tightly in the American flag and dared anyone to be critical of it. In the scary black and white world of the Republican Neo-Con, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan supported President Bush because he went to Iraq as ordered; Cindy Sheehan did not support her son, Casey, because she did not blindly support the President as she was supposed to.

The irony of this entire situation is that it is probably President Bush himself who finally pushed Cindy Sheehan into being an anti-war activist. In her first meeting with Bush, in which she was part of a group of mothers who were allowed to meet with the President, Bush would not look at pictures Casey. When she tried to talk about Casey on a personal level, Bush would deflect her and change the dialogue. He also wouldn't refer to Casey by name, instead repeatedly referring to him as “your loved one,” and apparently he didn't know whether Casey was male or female.

Now, I don't expect the President of the United States to remember the names and sexes of every soldier killed in combat, but President Bush showed no interest whatsoever in Casey Sheehan while standing before his grieving mother; a mother grieving a son who died in a conflict that Bush himself initiated, which facts have born out was based on lies, misinformation and the Administration's eagerness to fix facts to suit their own agenda.

It breaks my heart as an American to see how Cindy Sheehan is being demonized in the Right-Wing press, that our country and our democracy has devolved to a point where these worthless dogs run wild in the proverbial streets. All I keep thinking about is something someone asked about the Bush family; if the war in Iraq is such a noble and holy cause, why aren't President Bush's daughters, Jenna and Barbara, in uniform? One has to wonder how many of the Right-Wing talking heads like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh have children in Iraq. I imagine the number is pitifully low. As such, I believe that Cindy Sheehan has more of a right to speak on the issue than any of them.

- Watch Alert archived post
- Original Article

Related Links
- Army Spc. Casey Sheehan
(Note: Non-political. This a memorial page on the Fallen Heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom web site. This web site is for remembering fallen soldiers only. It is not a political forum.)

Media Coverage from The Left

The Smearing of Cindy Sheehan
“Republicans are now accusing Cindy Sheehan of being motivated by ‘hate’ and ‘anger’ for wanting the war in Iraq to end.”
@ WebCommentary

AUDIO: O’Reilly and Malkin Smear Cindy Sheehan
“If you don’t like what the mother of a fallen soldier has to say, what do you do? Smear her!”
@ Think Progress

Cindy Sheehan Draws Tears of Support in Crawford
“She will not leave until they put her in jail, until she sees the President, or until he leaves Crawford for the summer.”
@ OpEdNews

Cindy Sheehan "changed her story on Bush"?
“Tracking a lie through the conservative media”
@ Media Matters for America


Media Coverage from The Right

Cindy Sheehan: The Grieving Activist
“Cindy Sheehan’s son fought under our Commander-in-Chief. Cindy Sheehan fights against him.”
@ Men's New Daily

If Cindy and Akbar Could Meet
“...both are on either side of a debate on how much sacrifice should be made to bring democracy to the Middle East.”
@ Christian Science Monitor

Cindy Sheehan: Media Glorifies a Radical
“Now, angry, Bush-hating Cindy Sheehan...is being celebrated again as she sits outside Bush's Texas ranch.”
@ National Ledger

Robert Novak Cracking Under Pressure?

A lot of people were surprised by columnist Robert Novak's recent hissy fit on CNN's Inside Politics, where he said, on air, “That's bulls**t” and walked off the set. Some people were not surprised. Novak is been under a lot of pressure because his Conservative buddy Karl Rove has been taking a lot of flack since he's been revealed as the leak who named Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative. With two journalists in trouble because they refused to reveal their source (one for a story that was never actually written), eyes have continued to return to Novak, who was the first person to reveal Plame's status in the CIA.

Novak has thus far refused to talk about it, has not named his source, and has generally left people to wondering what he knew, when he know it, and who gave him his information. Most importantly it's left a lot of people wondering why, if one journalist is already in jail over the Valerie Plame issue, Novak has skated free of any legal troubles.

Ed Henry had planned to ask Novak about the CIA leak case on "Inside Politics" and had informed Novak of that fact. Could Novak finally be cracking from the pressure of protecting his Karl Rove? Has the time finally come for Robert Novak to pay a price for revealing the identity of an undercover CIA operative? And does, perhaps, know it full well?

- Watch Alert archived post
- Original Article

Bush Wants Intelligent Design Taught In Schools

It should surprise no one that President Bush would like to see Creationism, which of late has been disguised as a “scientific theory” called Intelligent Design, taught in schools as an alternative to Darwinism. One hallmark of Fundamentalist thought is a basic misunderstanding of the word “theory” in regard to science. They regard a scientific theory, such as Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution, to be merely an opinion. The Theory of Evolution is simply Darwin's opinion, his theory, on the development of species. Hence, their own opinion, Intelligent Design, is just as valid of a theory, right?

It's difficult to explain to people who think like this that a scientific theory, while not inherently “provable” in the sense that one can find absolute proof about every aspect of it, is not just some guy thinking up an idea and everyone else going along with it. While there often can be no absolute proof of a scientific theory, every theory is held to a pretty rigid standard, and is only accepted after a lot of examination and observation. In other words, the theory becomes an accepted idea when it is shown to be largely valid by scientific evidence and long-term study of real-world conditions to support it. So the reason Darwin's Theory of Evolution is so widely accepted is that scientists have found a lot of evidence to support it.

Intelligent Design represents a matter of opinion and a matter of faith. It is creationsim in a new package. As long as there is not sufficient scientific evidence to support the idea, I firmly believe that it should be taught in churches and not in schools. There is nothing whatsoever wrong in believing that God created the Universe and all things in it. But that is a religious belief, not a scientifically valid theory. People should not confuse the two.

However, installing Intelligent Design in the schools as an alternative to the Theory of Evolution would certainly fit in with the overall mind-set of the Bush Administration. Thus far they have had very little regard with facts, truth or reality. What we have had since 2000 is a faith-based White House, where their faith in their own ideas has trodden reality time and time again. It certainly isn't a big stretch of the imagination for President Bush to believe that Intelligent Design should trump scientific theory. After all, science is for atheists, right?

- Watch Alert archived post
- Original Article

Related Links
- Evolution is a Fact and a Theory
- Intelligent Design Network

Bush Installs Bolton

I don't think many people are surprised that President Bush used a recess appointment to install John Bolton into his position as ambassador to the United Nations. As many people have noted, Bolton has been a key player in the Conservative assault against the American people. The Republicans have been looking for a position for him within the Administration for some time. This also represents an opportunity for the Administration to score major points with the Conservative Right, by apparently installing someone who Conservatives expect to take the battle to the U.N. All you have to do is travel the country and see the billboards shouting “Get us out of the United Nations!” to understand who this appointment is intended to appease.

Hopefully Mr. Bolton will not embarass the United States too greatly on the world stage. For my own part, I believe he will. I believe that is his intended function. While this Administration and the Right-Wing of the Republican party continues its war against the American people, the Constitution, and, well, Democracy in general, the three-wing circus that will be John Bolton at the United Nations will provide a convenient distraction. And while the Republicans are cutting funding for nearly every social program while awarding their rich buddies in corporations all across America unheard-of contracts, the media will be attentively watching John Bolton's Conservative lap dance.

- Watch Alert archived post
- Original Article