Politics: December 2005 Archives

This is the Bush Countdown Clock. I was in Bookshop Santa Cruz last week, and they had a bin of these by the cash registers. I bought one for a friend, who has been proudly sporting it on her keychain ever since. She did experience one tense encounter in a shop in Berkeley, where another customer spat, "How can you stand to look at him!" My friend suggested she take a closer look, and all was forgiven.

They seem to have been a runaway hit — and in fact seem to have sold out already. Looks like they'll be making more, so place your order today!

Conservative, Wall Street Journal property Barrons' drops the i-word.

AS THE YEAR WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE, we picked up our New York Times and learned that the Bush administration has been fighting terrorism by intercepting communications in America without warrants. It was worrisome on its face, but in justifying their actions, officials have made a bad situation much worse: Administration lawyers and the president himself have tortured the Constitution and extracted a suspension of the separation of powers. . . .

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.

From today's Chronicle:

The American Family Association is suggesting that adults buy nothing from stores for each other next year. Sliding an Xbox 360 to a child would be OK, said association president Tim Wildmon, but adults should funnel their consumer cash to a charity that helps the poor -- preferably one friendly to "Christian values" such as the Salvation Army.

If grown-ups really want to express their appreciation for someone through a Christmas gift, Wildmon suggests that they either make something themselves or give a gift of their time. He wants folks to focus on Christmas as the birth of Jesus Christ, not as the day before the after-Christmas sales begin.

"We want people to get back to what Christmas should be about," Wildmon said.

Wow... I agree with them about something? How weird is that?

Not that their motives are entirely pure:

"Such an effort will remind all of us, including retailers, what Christmas is all about," the American Family Association chairman, Donald Wildmon, Tim Wildmon's father, wrote in an e-mail to supporters last week. "I very much believe that you will see retailers get on board promoting Christmas instead of Happy Holidays.

"If they miss us shopping next Christmas, maybe they will respect us more."

Of course, many of his colleagues are hemming and hawing and saying things like...

"I certainly understand Tim Wildmon's concern to focus on the true meaning of Christmas," said Mathew Staver, president of Liberty Counsel. The conservative legal organization's "Friend or Foe Christmas" campaign promised to file suit against anyone who spread what the group saw as misinformation about how Christmas can be celebrated in schools and public spaces.

"But I fail to see how that (not buying gifts) would bring back the essence of Christmas," Staver said. "And I don't think it would affect retailers. Besides, that's part of the joy of Christmas -- to give someone a gift to show your appreciation for them."

Jan LaRue, legal counsel with Concerned Women for America, another major conservative player in the Christmas campaign, said that while the idea of contributing to the needy was noble, "I don't know if it has to be linked to punishing retailers. A lot of believers, Christians and Jews, own small businesses that would be punished by the loss of income during the Christmas season."

Michael Lerner of Tikkun weighs in...

"Liberals and civil libertarians would be making a huge mistake to see this as merely the rantings of a few overt anti-Semites and anti-civil-liberties extremists. They articulate a legitimate concern that many Christians say privately: Their children have learned that Christmas is about buying -- and the person with the most expensive gifts wins!

"Our task is to help them understand that the solution is not blaming secular people, civil libertarians, Jews, gays or anyone else," Lerner wrote, "but instead to recognize that the emptiness or feeling of loneliness of 'lack' has been forced upon them by market values that they need to become aware of and then reject."

Don't hold your breath, Mr. Lerner.

Today's Oakland Tribune starts like this:

It took 21 years longer than expected, but the future has finally arrived.

And we don't like it. Not one bit.

We are fighting a war with no end to create a peace with no defined victory.

We occupy a foreign land that doesn't want us, while at home our civil liberties are discounted.

We are told that it's better not to know what our government is doing in our name, for security purposes. Meanwhile, our government is becoming omnipresent, spying on us whenever it deems it necessary.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

George Orwell was right after all.

and ends like this:

We think it's time for Congress to heed the warning of George Orwell.

To that end, we're asking for your help: Mail us or drop off your tattered copies of "1984." When we get 537 of them, we'll send them to every member of the House of Representatives and Senate and to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Feel free to inscribe the book with a note, reminding these fine people that we Americans take the threat to our liberties seriously. Remind Congress that it makes no sense to fight a war for democracy in a foreign land while allowing our democratic principles to erode at home.

Remind President Bush that ours is a country of checks and balances, not unbridled power.

Perhaps our nation's leaders can find some truth in this fiction and more carefully ponder the road we're traveling.

Bring or mail your books to the Oakland Tribune, 401 13th St., Oakland CA 94612. Doors are open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Heh. This appeared this morning. I bet by now they've received more copies than they bargained for, and that copies keep turning up at their doorstep for years...

Tikkun Olam has a lengthy and great post about Abramoff, Milken, and the implications of taking donations from someone whose conduct and character leaves much to be desired. Worth a read.

So Ahnold is still trying to decide whether to grant clemancy to Tookie Williams or not. Everyone has reasons for wanting to stop the execution: he's a good role model now; there's a danger of L.A. breaking out in riots if Tookie gets executed; etc. etc.

Me, I'm a little skeptical of the whole "Save Tookie!" phenomenon, just as when I read about people fawning over Mumia, I roll my eyes (by the way, he's apparently just got a bit of good news from the Third Circuit.)

People tend to identify with the individual case, I suppose. Environmental groups have more success when they turn the spotlight on the fate of some cute fuzzy animals, and death-row opponents sometimes seem to pick a particularly well-spoken, presentable person on death row to rally around. But what about the unlovely insects who are just as in danger of extinction, and what about the thousands (thousands?!) of others waiting for their sentences to be carried out?

Anyway, I hate that this case hinges on whether Williams has sufficiently repented and redeemed himself or not. How about, we just shouldn't be in the business of executing people, period? Capital punishment isn't making us safer, it's just another factor destroying our moral fabric (much more so then the "war on Christmas.")

With no death penalty, life-or-death decisions don't have to be made via popularity contest. Love Tookie or hate him, it doesn't matter. He's in prison and he's not getting out. End of story.

Admit it. Don't you get a twinge of satisfaction when you hear Charles Manson has been turned down for parole for the umpteenth time? You know that has got to suck. And so it should.

But in any case, it seems fewer people are being sentenced to death these days. Maybe someday we'll collectively come to our senses and get rid of the stupid death penalty for once and all. 

Well, how else do you explain this ridiculous turn of events?

ush-administration officials privately threatened organizers of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, telling them that any chance there might’ve been for the United States to sign on to the Kyoto global-warming protocol would be scuttled if they allowed Bill Clinton to speak at the gathering today in Montreal, according to a source involved with the negotiations who spoke to New York Magazine on condition of anonymity.

Bush officials informed organizers of their intention to pull out of the new Kyoto deal late Thursday afternoon, soon after news leaked that Clinton was scheduled to speak, the source said.

The threat set in motion a flurry of frantic back-channel negotiations between conference organizers and aides to Bush and Clinton that lasted into the night on Thursday, and at one point Clinton flatly told his advisers that he was going to pull out and not deliver the speech, the source said.

“It’s just astounding,” the source told New York Magazine. “It came through loud and clear from the Bush people—they wouldn’t sign the deal if Clinton were allowed to speak.” Clinton spokesman Jay Carson confirmed the behind the dustup took place and that the former president had decided not to go out of fear of harming the negotiations, but Carson declined to comment further.

On Friday afternoon, Clinton did end up speaking at the conference, a global audience of diplomats, environmentalists, and others who were in the final hours of a two-week gathering devoted to discussing the future of the protocol, the existing emissions-controls agreement.

Um... WTF?

Good column in the New York Times today... 

Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They're for it.

The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using the words "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. (Target denies it has an anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart in part over the way its Web site treated searches for "Christmas." Bill O'Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a "Christmas Under Siege" campaign, has a chart on his Web site of stores that use the phrase "Happy Holidays," along with a poll that asks, "Will you shop at stores that do not say 'Merry Christmas'?"

This campaign - which is being hyped on Fox and conservative talk radio - is an odd one. Christmas remains ubiquitous, and with its celebrators in control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and every state supreme court and legislature, it hardly lacks for powerful supporters. There is also something perverse, when Christians are being jailed for discussing the Bible in Saudi Arabia and slaughtered in Sudan, about spending so much energy on stores that sell "holiday trees."

What is less obvious, though, is that Christmas's self-proclaimed defenders are rewriting the holiday's history. They claim that the "traditional" American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson, another Fox anchor, calls "professional atheists" and "Christian haters." But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America's Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda.

The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian, and hoped to keep it out of America. They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible, their sole source of religious guidance, and insisted that the date derived from Saturnalia, the Roman heathens' wintertime celebration. On their first Dec. 25 in the New World, in 1620, the Puritans worked on building projects and ostentatiously ignored the holiday. From 1659 to 1681 Massachusetts went further, making celebrating Christmas "by forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way" a crime.

It's worth reading the whole thing.

I keep picturing Jerry Falwell and a small group of his holy goons walking into one of the box stores to strong-arm the store manager. As he turns to go, he says with a wink, "And while youse guys are at it, may I and my boys suggest that maybe an unfortunate accident should happen to the Chanukah decorations. 'The menorahs was tragically lost at sea on the way from the factory in China when the cargo container hit a storm... THE DREIDELS SLEEP WITH THE FISHES!'"

O.K., I'm sure that's not what Jerry Falwell actually does. Really. 

Updated to add: Apparently the following exchange - which could have been taken straight from the pages of the Onion - actually took place on Bill O'Rellly's show the other day:

Rev. Tim Bumgardner: I think they should put a Nativity scene -- be American! Hey, celebrate Christmas -- people spend more money! Jesus makes people want to spend money!

O'Reilly: I agree. I'm with you.

Yeah.