National Guard to Chase Mexicans Through Desert

Desperation (n.): Sending the National Guard to protect the country from poor Mexicans coming across the border to pick tomatoes.

How about sending them to the Port of New York to inspect shipping containers?

Not that our Guard wouldn't prefer the American desert to the Iraqi desert!

Basically the president's poll numbers have reversed. Toward the end of 2003, his approval hovered around 70%, now they're flirting with the 30% mark.

That 40% that blows with the wind? Hitler depended on them to get a good grip on Germany during the 1930's. I'm sure they all mean well and are very patriotic, but the grouch in me keeps thinking,

"Morons."

The 30% who still support Bush contains a few, stubborn Blind Faithers and Willful Ignorants and all the FDA's in the country, impatiently awaiting permission to don brown shirts.

Cheers,
Clemsy


QUOTES OF THE WEEK:

We all hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cause he might be all that stands between us and a full blown dictatorship in this country. ~Jack Cafferty, CNN

Many Americans have simply lost faith in the administration's ingenuity. Only a quarter of those polled had much confidence in W.'s ability to handle a crisis; a mere 9 percent are sure he can successfully end the Iraq war, and a paltry 4 percent think the administration has a clear plan to keep gas prices down. ~Maureen Dowd

If Democrats and, for that matter, Republicans let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too. ~Frank Rich


THE ENVIRONMENT

While Washington Slept

These are just some of the reasons why David King wrote in Science in 2004, “Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today—more serious even than the threat of terrorism.” King’s comment raised hackles in Washington and led a top press aide to Tony Blair to try to muzzle him. But the science adviser tells me he “absolutely” stands by his statement. By no means does King underestimate terrorism; advising the British government on that threat, he says, “is a very important part of my job.” But the hazards presented by climate change are so severe and far-reaching that, in his view, they overshadow not only every other environmental threat but every other threat, period.


RELIGION

So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

That's what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back. ~Andrew Sullivan