WHO ARE AIDING TERRORISTS NOW?

Remember when, during the lead-up to the second Gulf War, Vice President Dick Cheney and a host of right-wing conservatives accused left-wing critics of the Administration's drum-beat for war in Iraq of being traitors who were giving comfort to our terrorist enemies? Remember the constant stream of emails accusing anti-war activists of being terrorist sympathizers or un-American because their dissent and cries for military restraint supposedly encouraged Middle Easterners to believe they could make a difference by joining the terrorist jihad against America? Well, it seems those same conservatives have now joined the un-American crowd aiding and abetting foreign terrorists.

Newsweek has reported the since vocal opposition to the proposed building of a Mosque and Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero erupted from the bowels of right-wing conservatives in America, Islamic terrorist websites have experienced a sudden and substantial jump in the number of people visiting their websites, pledging contributions and seeking ways to aid and assist with the jihad against America. Once again, American arrogance and stupidity will end up costing us lives, liberty, and no doubt, billions of dollars that could have been better spent elsewhere.

In the months leading up to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, anti-war critics questioned the decision to invade Iraq because Iraq had no connection to the September 11th terrorist attacks. Critics warned that any U.S. invasion, which was not seen as justified in the eyes of most of the world, especially in the Middle East, would serve as a rallying cry for radical terrorists who would use the unjust actions of the United States to convince others to join their cause. By invading Iraq without legitimate justification, the U.S. played right into the terrorists' hands, and tens of thousands lost their lives, thousands more were maimed and crippled, and trillions were wasted on a war effort that left Iraq no better, and certainly a lot more unsafe for the average Iraqi citizen, than the day we invaded. All the while, terrorists used our actions to recruit more soldiers for their sadistic jihad. You'd think the lessons of Iraq would have taught us something. Apparently not!

With America withdrawing combat troops from Iraq, terrorists have been searching for another excuse to bolster their recruiting, and once again, conservatives in American have handed them one on a silver platter. Instead of standing tall on the principle of freedom of religion, the supposed bedrock of our nation, a loud and angry chorus, led by the most conservative of politicians and political pundits, has arisen to vehemently deny peaceful Muslims in America the very right we claim to hold sacred. It's no wonder terrorists are reaping a windfall at our expense. America just doesn't seem to learn from its mistakes.

PARIS HILTON AND THE DEBT OF THE DEAD

Paris Hilton was arrested late last Friday night in Las Vegas for possession of cocaine after police stopped the vehicle in which she was riding because the unmistakable smell of burnt marijuana was emanating from the vehicle. When the police searched Paris, they found cocaine in her purse.

That news item comes on the heels of a discovery by Mexican authorities of a mass grave in San Fernando, a village about 100 miles south of the U.S. border, where the bodies of 58 men and 14 women were dumped after being brutally slaughtered by members of the Zetas drug cartel.

The Zetas cartel and several other Mexican drug cartels are locked in a bloody war for control of the lucrative drug supply lines for shipping cocaine and marijuana to the United States, and the level of atrocities being committed by these drug cartels on the innocent Mexican population caught in the crossfire, is quickly reaching staggering proportions. Last month, 51 bodies were discovered in a field near Monterrey, Mexico. Two months ago, 55 bodies were ditched in a mine near Taxco, a city south of Mexico City. And those body counts are just the tip of the iceberg.

Mexican authorities report that over the past four years, approximately 28,000 people have been killed in Mexico in the on-going civil war amongst drug cartels and the simultaneous crackdown by the Mexican government on drug trafficking activities. As the war between drug cartels ratchets up, thousands more deaths are expected.

When I look at both of those news stories together, I can't help but wonder how many innocent people were brutally slaughtered and dumped in unmarked graves, so that Paris Hilton could enhance her evening with a few puffs of marijuana and a hit of cocaine. Then again, I doubt Paris Hilton even cares. As I type these words, I'm sure her lawyers are working on a strategy to try to shield her from ever having to take responsibility for the cocaine she was carrying. Whether they are successful remains to be seen, but one thing is beyond doubt - Paris Hilton will never pay the full price for the cocaine she possessed. The dead souls in Mexico paid it for her.

GLEN BECK et al.

Glen Beck and thousands of his followers, including the likes of Sarah Palin, gathered yesterday in Washington D.C. and exercised their Constitutional right to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. Their choice of day and place for holding the march ruffled the feathers of many in the civil rights movement who considered it a painful affront to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King's civil rights rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Although I deeply sympathize with their pain, I wholeheartedly support Beck's right to exercise his freedom of speech at the time and place of his choosing, just as I support the rights of Muslims near ground zero in New York City to exercise their freedom of religion at the time and place of their choosing. To support anything less would dishonor the true principles upon which this nation was founded.

What I find offensive about the whole angry movement that Beck is leading, is its systematic distortion of honor, principles, values and what God truly asks of his children on Earth. Granted, these distortions bear an appealing facade to people adrift in an ocean of distrust and feelings of helplessness in a fast-changing world, but they are very much designed to bring out the worst in humanity, and it breaks my heart to see thousands flocking to what is nothing more than a nationalistic religion of hate and intolerance.

The kind of honor Beck seeks a return to, is the kind of honor that unapologetically tortures our enemies, demonizes religions and people who do not share our viewpoints and castigates those true peacemakers of the world as idiots and fools for not carrying a gun. The kinds of principles Beck seeks to return this country to, are the kinds of principles that espouse America's claim of superiority, America's supposed infallibility and America's sense of entitlement to the largest measure of wealth on the planet. The kinds of values Beck seeks to return this country to are the same kinds of values that prompted citizens and police on the streets of Selma, Alabama to spew words of anger and hate at peaceful marchers seeking nothing more than equality for all, regardless of skin color. And the same warped version of God Beck seeks to return this country to, is the same warped version of God that terrorists the world over invoke as the reason for all that they do.

Beck can say that all he wants is a peaceful world, but Beck's version of a peaceful world is a lot like Hitler's version of a peaceful world – one where he and his followers are sitting on top and the rest of humanity is buried out of sight in an unmarked grave. No doubt, people will flock by the thousands to Beck and his ilk, like Germans did to Hitler, eager to satisfy the hunger in their bellies for someone to blame for their miseries besides themselves, but the road on which they tread will not be paved with good intentions. It will be littered with the blood of souls who actually did sacrifice their lives for peace, equality and justice for all. Those aren't the kinds of things Beck really wants to achieve. He just wants people to think he does, and the sad part is that thousands do!

DISCRIMINATION AND THE GAY MARRIAGE BAN

America has a rich legacy of discriminating against one group or another based upon tenuous reasoning, so it's no surprise that states would attempt to ban certain people from marrying, including homosexuals. From the 1500's through the 1960's, discrimination against Blacks was legally sanctioned, largely upon the belief that Black people were racially inferior to whites. The U.S. Constitution provided men with the right to vote the day it was ratified. Women waited 133 years to acquire the same privilege, largely because of the prevailing belief that women lacked sufficient intellect to make a proper choice. In WWII, Japanese-American citizens were segregated and confined to detention camps to appease the public's fear of American-Japanese insurrection. It didn't matter that insurrection never occurred in the first place. People thought it might, and that was enough to legitimize the discrimination.

The same arguments favoring bans on homosexual marriage were advanced as recently as forty years ago to support bans on interracial marriage. It didn't matter that the arguments of old lacked reason; discrimination is born of ignorance. Inter-racial marriage was argued to be unnatural, a threat to the future of traditional marriage, biblically outlawed and a harbinger of no future for children born of such a union. Try pitching that last argument to Barack Obama.

Is homosexuality unnatural? One should start by asking what's 'unnatural'. The dictionary on my bookshelf defines the term as "violating natural law", so let's go with that definition. Does homosexuality violate nature's laws? Apparently not! A plethora of recent scientific studies have concluded that same-sex sexual behavior is found in nearly every animal species. If the studies that suggest homosexuality in humans span from 5% to 20% of the population are true, humans are merely mimicking the statistical occurrence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom. Far from violating nature's law, human homosexual patterns appear to be following it.

Does homosexual marriage threaten the future of the traditional marriage? It's hard to see how. States that have allowed homosexual unions and/or marriages haven't witnessed any increase in the divorce rate among heterosexual couples, so there's no basis for arguing that heterosexual spouses will suddenly start abandoning those marriages in favor of homosexual ones. The divorce rate in America has hovered around 50% long before homosexual marriage or civil unions became an option, largely thanks to couples not communicating and infidelity, so the notion of homosexual marriage posing a greater threat to traditional marriage than those factors is downright laughable.

And what of the future of children reared by homosexual parents versus heterosexual parents? Again, the consensus in the scientific community is that no appreciable differences exist.

What's left is the Biblical argument, and when push comes to shove, that's the main reason folks oppose homosexual marriage. Arguing the Bible in this context is a losing proposition in my book, because you can find a quote in the Bible to support any proposition you advance, from the abomination of eating a good old-fashioned Maryland crab cake (Leviticus 11: 9-12) to the evils of polyester (Leviticus 19: 19). One thing I do know is that the drafters of the Constitution espoused the belief that religion and government shouldn't mix, and toward that end, religion shouldn't provide government with a justification to discriminate. That's bad government. Come to think of it, that's bad religion too.

LESSONS FROM THE DEPRESSION

It's a shame that our 90 year-old citizens aren't more vocal than they are these days, because the political discourse in this country could use a heavy dose of wisdom gleaned from people who were old enough to remember the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting thirteen (yeah, you read that right – 13) years of depression this country experienced afterward. Those thirteen years not only taught people how to handle long periods of extreme personal deprivation and the value of conservation; they also illustrated how the government's response (or lack thereof) could adversely affect the lives of millions for years to come. People today just don't seem to have a clue!

On October 29, 1929 - "Black Tuesday" as it came to be called, the New York stock market began a plunge that overnight wiped out the lifetime savings of millions of Americans who, during the euphoria of the "roaring twenties", had invested in the stock market in greater numbers than ever before. Over the course of the following month the steep decline in the stock market continued, and by the end of November, almost forty percent of investment value in the United States vanished into thin air. One year later, that number had risen to ninety percent.

At the same time the stock market went into a tailspin, panic set into the banking industry, because banks had underwritten a majority of the stock market's traders, and as large financial institutions were going broke overnight, the value of the banks' collateral vanished overnight too. That led to a massive number of insolvent banks, and as news of massive insolvencies reached bank depositors, those depositors quickly descended on banks to withdraw as much as they could from their accounts. The result of the run-on-the-banks that ensued was the total collapse of the U.S. banking system, a collapse that ushered in The Great Depression.

While the stock market was crashing, banks were failing and ordinary Americans were losing their lifetime savings, President Herbert Hoover and his Republican allies refused to intercede in the growing economic collapse on ideological grounds, arguing that the government had no business interfering in the marketplace or trying to regulate commerce. Left to its own devices, they claimed, the economy would turn itself around. It didn't, and in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president.

Roosevelt immediately jumped into action, submitting New Deal legislation to Congress in an attempt to impose prudent regulation on the financial sector and to initiate massive job creation projects to combat crippling unemployment. Again, the Republicans balked, and again on ideological grounds. The fact that the "do nothing" approach of the prior administration had failed miserably didn't matter one iota. Ideology reigned supreme.

Fast forward to 2008…when the stock market was in the process of losing a quarter of its value, the housing market had collapsed and a substantial number of the largest banking and financial institutions in this nation were either insolvent or teetering on the brink of insolvency. Members of President Bush's Treasury Department, the Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank and many high ranking economists informed the President that massive government intervention was necessary to stave off a repeat of the 1929 calamity…a calamity that in today's world would trigger a global depression and massive political instability. And so, the President listened, and with only the backing of members from his opposing party – the Democrats, initiated the sweeping package of government financial intervention we know today as "the bailout".

Republicans who opposed the "bailout package" were more than happy to let the financial markets collapse on their own, despite the fact that the government was still on the hook as backers of the FDIC – the agency that insures bank deposits. Fortunate for everyone, a majority of Democrats were not willing to repeat the mistakes of the Herbert Hoover Administration and went along with the bailout package.

There's a bit of hypocrisy in the fact that many in the GOP had the most to lose if the government had not intervened to prevent a total collapse of our financial sector, but those same individuals were also in the best position to ride out the storm had the government decided to stay neutral. And despite the fact that lax government oversight over the excesses of the financial sector was a primary cause for the instant financial crisis, the GOP continues to wage war against government regulation and the notion of government bailouts in general.

I have to admit that it's a shrewd politician who can convince voters to hate the opponent who has saved their lives. That's what the GOP and the so-called "Tea Party" are doing, and because there are so few people left who remember the hard lessons of the Depression, their shrewdness seems to be working.

A THOUGHT OR TWO ON BERNIE

We’ve come a long way from the days when cattle rustlers found their punishment at the end of a hangman’s noose, but for somebody like Bernie Madoff, the ponzi-scheme operator who bilked investors, charities and philanthropic foundations out of 65+ billion dollars, that’s probably small consolation. Madoff received a 150 year sentence for his fraudulent activities and will spend the rest of his days behind the iron bars of a federal penitentiary. Only his charred ashes will taste freedom, and only then within the confines of a metal urn. If he’s lucky, one of Mr. Madoff’s relatives will have enough money to pay for his cremains and set them free somewhere, perhaps near one of his million dollar mansions.

Still, Madoff can count his blessings. He can still breathe, eat at the hands of taxpayers, read the Wall Street Journal, ponder over the direction of the NASDAC and cling to the hope that an appeal of his sentence will lead to a reduction of his jail time. Cattle rustlers were seldom that lucky!

PROPOSED 28th AMENDMENT

Somebody sent me an email containing the following proposal for the addition of a 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution:

"Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States."

Sounds reasonable to me! Why should members of Congress be treated any differently than those citizens they were elected to represent?