The Pledge doesn't need protection

Will somebody please explain to me how this stuff can even be constitutional? I want somebody to protect me from these Christofascists...

Why freedom matters (Iranian edition)

Why does all this free speech and civil liberties stuff matter? Just consider the negative case examples, such as Iran, home of the deep-dish "elastic loaf."

This Week's Outrages

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) is still calling on Americans to contact their Senators and urge them to oppose Arlen Specter's Senate Bill 2453, which will essentially overwrite the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and give the Executive Branch free reign in violating our right to privacy. BORDC has established a webpage through which you can send Senators a faxed messaged at no charge to you.

Brian Fogarty finds parallels between modern America and 1920's Germany.

Lest you think I exaggerate, see what happened when the Missouri Public Service Commission tried to investigate the NSA-telephone company data base scandal--they got sued (for the record, the Kentucky PSC refused to even ask any questions).

And in the air, too: U.S. Air Marshalls are apparently under pressure to make sure they find enough suspicious airline passengers to meet their "quotas."

Looking for inspiration: My buddy Mike and I put away several beers yesterday while trying to figure out a way to more effectively fight the tyrants (letter writing obviously isn't going to do anything but assuage our consciences)...no great ideas were revealed, but we did find some inspiration re-reading Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. I'm not too keen on being locked up at the moment, though (Thoreau's primary proposal)...I do welcome friends' ideas for more effective ways to fight the Man.

Full text of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience here.

I Stand with Harold, Mostly

Today I met Tennessee’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate. Harold Ford Jr. has a lot going for him — a moderate Democratic platform, youth, experience in Congress, and a GOP field that’s eviscerating each other in the primaries.

He appeared before an enthusiastic crowd at the Howard Office Building in Nashville today. He led by criticizing W for vetoing the stem cell research bill and ended with the quip, “If the Republicans can support Vice President Cheney, surely you can support me.” The desperate humor was unneeded though, since he had the crowd behind him all the way.

The only time they didn’t cheer was when he talked about the war. Although Harold Ford Jr. nearly got into a fistfight defending Jack Murtha on the floor of Congress, he still thinks we need to keep our troops in a country that wants us out. When he explained that a pullout would play into the hands of the Iranians, I think I could hear the grass dying. There was not a clap or cheer to be heard.

Congressman Murtha will be in Nashville in a few weeks to fundraise for Ford. Maybe he can convince Ford to get on the right side of this issue and support a pull-out. He’s got my vote, but if he had a change of heart about the war he’d have thousands more.

The Bush Legacy (or lack thereof)

CBS News interviews conservative icon William F. Buckley, who says that thanks to his failure as a small-government conservative and his ill-conceived foray into Iraq, "there will be no legacy for Bush."

Another conservative heavy, George Will, also takes a swipe at W.

Links thanks to Reason Hit and Run and JABBS.

Overkill

A new book-length report is out from the Cato Institute, available in its entirety here. Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America documents the increasingly common activities of the police who have used excessive force (usually in pursuit of non-violent drug offenders) and often damaged the property of--and sometimes killed--innocent people.

Check out this interactive map that documents where many of these raids have taken place (maybe in your neighborhood).

Hail, Caesar!

Every day I am more impressed by the analogy of what's going on in Washington to the Roman Senate making Caesar the emperor.

Yesterday Attorney General Alberto "September 12" Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and explained that the President forbade the Justice Department to investigate warrantless wire tapping, and that was just fine by him.

Not that it matters much. Committee chairman Arlen Specter has drafted a "compromise" piece of legislation that essentially gives the Bushies the power to do anything they want. (The ACLU is sponsoring a letter-to-the-editor campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of this proposed law.)

Reason's look at Specter, who is obviously more talk than anything else.

Tennessee’s God-Given Right to Gay Bowling Leagues

It’s been months since I’ve posted here on Bluenecks. I’ve been busy with other projects, family vacation, my other blogs, blah blah blah. I’ve missed rattling on about things, but Gary has kept things rolling quite well in my absence.

I’m finally back, blogging about the latest effort by the extreme right to divide and conquer America: banning gay marriage. This is an issue that gets people pretty riled up, but it shouldn’t. I say if you don’t like gay marriage, then don’t have one. It’s really no more threatening to you than that. I mean, what are folks really afraid of, that gay people will do boring married stuff like the rest of us? I mean, if Jerry Falwell really wants to curb “the gay lifestyle,” wouldn’t he want all of “them” to start recycling, join bowling leagues, and buy SUVs?

I’ve spent some time — at least the time since breakfast — thinking about marriage on three levels: personal, civil, and spiritual. Here’s my take on things.

Marriage is a personal commitment. When my wife decided to spend the rest of her mornings with my coffee breath and bad hair, it was a commitment that I still can’t really fathom. At its heart marriage is a wonderfully insane idea, like electing a decent President. And we can’t exactly blame the 50% divorce rate on gay marriage, right? I think we straight folks managed that all on our own.

The spiritual aspect of marriage is unaffected by this November’s vote or any other. If we believe our relationship is more than just legal cohabitation — and don’t we all believe that? — it comes from a higher power than the Tennessee Legislature. It’s obvious that spiritual marriage is completely unaffected by what other couples do, gay or straight.

So that brings us to the only aspect of marriage in question in November: the civil aspect. This was the part of marriage that I paid the least attention to when Karen and I got all lacy and tuxy and everyone statrted tossing rice, flowers, and garter belts. But our marriage licence gives my wife and I the right to split up any money, debts, and all our other stuff fifty-fifty, including my unopened boxes of crap from graduate school. It gives us equal parenting privileges for our two daughters. It gives us the right to share health insurance benefits, inheritance without a will, and lots of other rights so basic that I’m probably forgetting some of them right now. We know couples who lack those same rights because they are the same sex. If their child gets hurt at school and has to go to the hospital, at least one of the parents can find out nothing more than her name, rank, and serial number from the hospital.

These civil rights are what we are voting on in November, and what all Tennesseans deserve equally under the law. It’s basic democracy folks, and fair-minded Tennesseans get that. This law will not change people’s personal or spiritual commitments, but a successful amendment banning gay marriage in Tennessee will limit the rights of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens of our state. So whether or not you like the idea of boys marrying boys and girls marrying girls, vote “no” on TN 1 in November. It’s good for democracy, it’s good for Tennessee, and it’s simply the right thing to do.

Take a Stand
If you agree that equal marriage rights are important, go to Vote No On 1 and take the pledge there. I did it and you can to. Our state is too important to us to let the extreme right control it.

In the wake of Independence Day...

In the news this week....

Bloomberg's reported last week that the NSA solicited customer calling records from AT&T before the 9/11 attacks.

From "The Reformer," a look at the president's legal reasoning for why he's above the law.

And from the USA Today, the government gives $1 million to fund research on ways to roll back the Freedom of Information Act.

Muzzle Awards

Check out this year's annual Muzzle Awards, recognizing the enemies of free speech. Sad thing is, they only focus on the New England region. We Southerners could probably outdo 'em....

USA Today clarifies

Much of the energy behind civil liberties criticisms of the Bush administration's domestic spying programs came from the big USA Today story in May. In that story, the newspaper quoted high-level sources in the telecommunications industry that said ATT&T, Verizon and BellSouth had cooperated with the NSA to create a massive database of customer calling information without warrants. Yesterday the paper clarified, saying that they could not support the allegation that Verizon and BellSouth participated in the program. Evidently the jury is still out on AT&T. The article in yesterday's paper quotes a number of members of Congress involved in investigating the allegations.

While I'm pleased that the complicity of the phone companies wasn't as broad as it first seemed, the whole thing just again comes down to a single issue: if the Bush administration had simply followed the law set out under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), none of this would have been an issue. It's a government that has no respect for the separation of powers inherent in our Constitution that has created this problem for the phone companies and the American people.