There are those who call my criticism oif the administration unamerican.  There are those who call my objections to policy being pro-terrorist.  There are those who think because I don’t agree with our military policy right now that I am anti-military.  There are those who think when my opinion is of a minority view that it should be ignored, because I am just another minority.  Of course they would be wrong.  Those who would call for people to not exercise their rights and try to control the flow of information to cover only their view point are the unamerican, pro-terrorists who would use our men and women in uniform as pawns in their game of domination.  However this post is about none of that.

This post is to say Happy 4th of July and hope that some of you who don’t feel as i do thin you numbers by running into each other on the highways or find yourself in the running for a Darwin Award by other means.  I also think this crazy radical liberal will celebrate the Supreme Court’s upholding of Second Amendment by buying a gun… Anyone know when the season and bag limit on Ohio Fundamentalists is?

Bea scared change is coming this fall!

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With the sad and frightening disappearance of Brooke Bennett, a twelve year old Vermont girl, online communities are once again forced to face public criticism. Public scrutiny is always needed. Criticism however is usually misplaced though.

The public, especially uninformed parents likes to blame the online services every time something happens to a child. While there have been a few cases where some small companies have failed to act on information that is rarely the case. While I do not like blaming the parents of kids that had something happen to them because of their online activities, they are the ones who ultimately old the most responsibility.

In The case of Brooke Bennett I have to ask what she was doing with a MySpace account in the first place. She was twelve, meaning she lied about her age to get an account. A lot of kids do it when they go online, in fact I have only ever met one who was unwilling to do so and played by all the rules. She however is scrupulously honest about her seventeen years. She is also the exception to the rule I think. There are literally are no ways to prevent this behavior that doesn’t put a serious burden on everyone else.

Not only would making it harder for kids to go online make it harder for everyone else, it would potentially endanger them even more. The more we forbid or restrict the action the more enticing it becomes as a rebellious activity. Secondly, every predator online would have the excuse, I thought she was eighteen, because you have to be eighteen to go online. Making it harder to go online or use services, benefits no one.

This once again brings the responsibility right back into the lap of the parents. Most parents will openly say, I don’t understand or really know what my kids do online. That however is not good enough. As a parent if you allow your kids to participate in an activity, then it is up to you to educate yourself with the facts. You are responsible for them, so it simply isn’t good enough to listen to hype from your kids about how great the internet is or the fear mongers saying how dangerous it is. It is up to parents to become informed and if that means showing and interest and taking part in what they are doing so be it.

It is also up to parents to learn about the sites their kids go to. If you are worth anything as a parent you aren’t letting your kids come and go at any hours of the night or day without knowing who they are with, where they are going, or when they will be back. The same rules apply online. If they are keeping a blog read it. If they are going to MySpace, FaceBook, LiveJournal or anywhere else, you need to find out what they are doing there. It is up to parents not some corporate internet service to act like parents.

In the end, Brooke Bennett’s parents may not have been able to do anything to stop this. Some kids will rebel and get hurt at no fault of the parents. On the other hand they should have known a hell of a lot more about what their daughter was doing. A lack of understanding is simply no excuse for parental ignorance.

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All the government really needs to know it could have learned in preschool or before. The biggest of those lessons is minding your own business. According to a new CNN story we are preparing for war in Iran now.

CNN: “The Bush administration has launched a “significant escalation” of covert operations in Iran, sending U.S. commandos to spy on the country’s nuclear facilities and undermine the Islamic republic’s government…”

After telling the American people we want to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but we are preparing for war with yet another country. For those a little short on instant geography Iran lies between those two areas we hope to get out of. I can only assume the government failed two of the earliest lessons we teach children, “don’t tell lies” and “mind your own business”.

In failing to learn those lessons we have in fact brought most of our problems on ourselves. I am not say we deserve to be attack, but I do understand why we are hated and therefore attack. Before we allow the government to continue acting on our behalf for reasons too secret to tell us the truth over, the American public needs to ask why do they hate us?

They hate us because we have forgotten the most important lessons of statehood preschool. Imperial over-extension is bad. We taught that lesson to Britain from 1776 to 1783. Now, where we fail to conquer politically and militarily, we use huge corporations to do the dirty work. What we do in our own lands is none of your business, stay out of it unless you want a big fight on your hands, we preached that with the Monroe Doctrine. Being a social bully only works if those we bully can’t bite us back, 9/11 should have taught us that.

Will it take a dirty bomb going off at a crowded high school football game? Does it take the release of a fast acting chemical weapon in a Middle American Shopping mall? Will it be the slower but wider spread of an airborne disease through our airports: plague, some exotic virus, or even just a financially crippling common one like the flu, Rubella or TB? What will it take before we learn to start minding our own business or at least showing the respect other powers deserve? I don’t know, but I do know if we don’t start doing it, we don’t have to worry about what the attack will be, only when and where it will occur.

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The Supreme Court has finally ruled on the Second Amendment case they have been mulling over for months now.  They have in fact ruled as I thought they would in favor of gun owners over the District of Columbia’s ban.  This is no big shock considering the makeup of the current court.  What may come as a shock to those of you, who know me a liberal, is I am in favor of their ruling.

The Second Amendment doesn’t exist so people can hunt.  It doesn’t even exist so you can protect your home and property.  The Second Amendment was written and has remained in the US Constitution for one reason alone.  The Second Amendment is the reasoning by which the revolutionaries justified their war of independence.  The Second Amendment only protects our right of rebellion.

If you don’t think we have the right to rebel, let me point out the Civil War.  Had we not the protected right of rebellion every member of the Confederate Army would have been guilty of treason.  Not a single person involved in the Civil War was ever tried much less convicted of it.  The right of the people to rebel remains intact to this day.  Before you go out and decide to take on the government remember they reserve the right to put down any rebellion.

What chaps my hide though was driving home today I was listening to radio when a fear monger was on the radio saying how this was going to make his job harder.  While I generally agree with the goals of PeaceOholics, when it comes to learning to live together, they are dead wrong with this stance.  Doing what is right should never enter into the picture when talking about how hard or easy your job is.
We have given up way too many of our liberties of late in the name of making security easier.  I am glad the court has gone against recent precedence putting freedom head of so called security.  Of course they might have thought differently had the remembered rebellions and revolutions aren’t started by the conservative members of society, but rather us radical liberals.

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It is hard to figure out exactly what the priorities of Bush Administration really are since they are covered with so many layers of obfuscation and double talk.  Thankfully though, that administration’s days are numbered.  Not even W would be so arrogant as to think he doesn’t have to leave the White House after the Chief Justice swears in the next president.  Part of me would actually like to see the outcome of that fiasco.  I am trying to decide which would be funnier at the moment W standing out on the balcony with his tie wrapped around his head ala Rambo shouting, “Never give up… and never surrender!”  Alternately it could be Secret Service agents dragging him away while he shouts “This ain’t over!  There are ways around this Law.  I’ll get you John!  I gave you your job and I can take it away!”  Then as W disappears into the crowd never to be seen again Jerry Springer would come out and give a little closing monologue about the tragedy.

Sometimes I am just too easy to amuse.  Other days I am just too easy to piss off, like today.  For the last seven plus years this administration has claimed it was making the country, which is the whole world as far as most American’s are concerned, a safer place.  They have protected it from terrorists, foreign missiles, gay who want to marry each other, people fleeing the economic desperation of their homeland, probably even space aliens if you pushed them on the subject.  Our infrastructure, schools, and economy are failing, but they even have tried to protect us from that truth where they could.  There are those of us who know the truth is out there, because we see it every day.

I want to believe that the no matter who the next President is, that they will start to make things better. (I have a hard time seeing how they could really make it worse) Both candidates purport to be able to end the war in Iraq freeing up billions of dollars.  Just because they don’t have a war on, doesn’t mean we will ever get that money back in our pockets.  The government doesn’t ever take for just a little while, if they did the federal gas tax which was instituted to pay for world war one would have been gone before most of Americans were ever born.  I don’t mind paying taxes so long as I know it is going to decent cause, like the gas tax which outs billions every month into the federally maintained roads large numbers of jobs all across the country.

Where do you think we should the next government be spending our money, since there is no way in hell they will be giving it back to us.]

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Earlier today News giant Tim Russert died.  Tim left a large journalistic legacy that will be hard to match.  I met Tim once years ago while waiting for a late night flight. We spoke at length while we waited to be irritated as the board went from from delayed to delayed some more, to canceled.  I was 19 and just starting to get politically active and we spoke about both the news, and a variety other subjects just to pass the time.  He didn’t speak down to me because of my age, but that might have had a lot to do with me being interesting and intelligent, but I would like to think it was because he was just a nice guy.  I can’t say that I know him, but I would like to think I knew him from the things he has had to say over the years.  The world will be a little smaller and little less informed without him.

From Wikipedia

Timothy John Russert, Jr. (May 7, 1950 – June 13, 2008)^[1] was an American journalist who hosted NBC’s Meet the Press. He was NBC News‘ Washington Bureau Chief and hosted a weekly interview program on MSNBC Tim Russert. He was a frequent correspondent and guest on NBC’s The Today Show and Hardball. He co-hosted the network’s presidential Election Night coverage and presented the polling results of the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey on the NBC Nightly News. Russert collapsed and died at his office in Washington on June 13, 2008.^[2]

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We have already had a call on the floor of the US House of Representatives this week calling for impeachment of President George W Bush, with on of the sited laws broken was his refusal to comply with federal rulings against him.  Now for the third time the Supreme Court of The United States has said the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay have rights.  What does W fucking say?  He says I disagree and will pull another law out of my ass to hold them and do what ever I like because I am the President.

From Mark Sherman of The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - In a stinging rebuke to President Bush’s anti-terror policies, a deeply divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign detainees held for years at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have the right to appeal to U.S. civilian courts to challenge their indefinite imprisonment without charges.

Bush said he strongly disagreed with the decision - the third time the court has repudiated him on the detainees - and suggested he might seek yet another law to keep terror suspects locked up at the prison camp, even as his presidency winds down.

Of course the likes of Justice Antonin Scalia said the decision

“will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

What Scalia and his other totalitarian fascists who will never be personally burdened by most of their own decisions fail to recognize is it doesn’t matter if more Americans die or war is harder for us.  If we fail to uphold the rights we believe we are so entitled to for everyone, then we are nothing but petty little dictators who say we are not only better than these people, we are above our own laws.  The time has come that we must put a stop to this bullshit.

I don’t care if we impeach him or we assassinate him, he needs to go before he can do any more damage to us.

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Last night US Congressman Dennis Kucinich from Ohio read out 35 articles of impeachment against President George W Bush.  For more than three hours he detailed everything from Election Fraud to War Crimes. This morning I checked the headlines of most news organization websites and my local Dayotn, Ohio newspapers looking for some response to this act.  What did I find?  Not a Damned Thing! Was a call for impeachment less news worthy than Jessica Alba’s new baby or Ken Griffey Jr hitting number 600?  I like the thought of anything that comes from between Jessica Alba’s legs.  However, I certainly think any agency that calls itself a purveyor of news should give a call for impeachment equal headlines.

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At this very moment Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich is presenting 35 articles of Impeachment against President George W Bush.  Go Dennis!  w00t!!!

digg.com/politics/Impeachment_Happening_in_Congress_Right_Now_2

Not only has Dennis brought this on the floor securing his place as my hero, he has said the one thing that everyone has refused to say about our military contractors in all their speeches.  He has called out security specialists just what they are, mercenaries.

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Out man in Havana is certainly going to take on a new meaning with the latest medical news form the island nation.  Yahoo and The AP are reporting that Cuba is soon to be offering free sex change operations for qualifying citizens.  Yes, you have heard that right free sex change operations.

It is not the sex change operations that I am really interested in out of Cuba.  It is great news for those who are wanting one I suppose, but simply put it isn’t for me, I like the convenience standing to pee.  My wife might have something to say about it too if I were interested.  What I am interested in is how a country our government who balks at the notion of providing affordable healthcare much less universal free healthcare can call Cuba evil, malicious, harmful, destructive, backwards, counterproductive?

I understand how a country that prides itself on social equality (even if those equals don’t have very much), universal healthcare, and a commitment to public education might be called un-American.  I also understand that those things should not be considered antithetical to our national prerogatives.

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