A six part video series published at the YouTube Account of The Thomas Jefferson Foundation: Monticello.org. the videos run from 1:33 to 6:33 in length, and are about 4 minutes average.. From the Monticello.org Description:

On June 21, 2005, David Holmes, Professor of Religion at The College of William and Mary, listed out key points of Jefferson's religious beliefs and practices and offered an answer to the oft-asked question of whether the Author of the Declaration of American Independence might have been a Unitarian.

Read more »

Anonymous Iran - any advice from protest vets would probably be appreciated.

And, I a tole a you to proxy this MFs:
Guy Fawkes In Iran

It is proper to consider, as a part of the ongoing discussion regarding indefinite detentions without first securing a conviction at a trial that adhered to due process of law, and its constitutionality; The Geneva Conventions' allowance for detaining POWs for the indeterminate period of a conflict's duration. When viewed within the scope of U.S. Constitution; Article VI; clause 2; legitimises it. There are those who believe that a treaty which violates Constitutional text can never be legitimate, yet a simple reading of Art. VI; clause 2; implies otherwise:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

A treaty enacted "under the Authority of the United States" is "the supreme law of the land...any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding". Clearly, lawfully enacted treaties possess supremacy within their scope over Constitutional text. This has always been a potential threat to liberty.

Read more »

Many have been quick to attack Obama, charging he has broken his campaign promises to restore and defend civil liberties. Some of these charges are utterly unwarranted, and fueled from a misunderstanding of the real issues. A case in point: the claim that Obama's support for continuing renditions is a breach of promise, rests on a shaky foundation that fails to differentiate between renditions and extraordinary renditions. There is a world of difference between these two terms. Many other charges leveled against Obama have been related to DOJ legal briefs filed in preexisting trial cases, which supported the Bush Administration's previously held positions in these cases. All of these either falsely attribute motives for the briefs, or are as yet unproven.

There are sound reasons why an incoming President should not begin the term by completely upsetting the apple cart left by the previous President. It is not the duty of a sitting President to initiate criminal investigations into the acts of the Previous President. That is clearly a Congressional duty. If a President were to do this, it would assure a dark future in America: partisan witch trials whenever the party of the sitting President changed. A new President's DOJ should not get involved with wholesale changes in government arguments previously presented in ongoing Federal Court cases. An important element of justice is stability, and stability requires continuity. A new President sails into dangerous uncharted waters if claiming that past law, previously supported by the DOJ is suddenly unconstitutional, because of an election result. Again, this only will lead to horrible Partisan factionalism in the future. A President's duty is to enforce law, unless it is egregiously offensive to the Constitution. Law, enacted prior to a President's inauguration should be invested with a great sense of its legitimacy. If the President does not like the law, (s)he should petition Congress to change it, and not attempt to legislate from within the Executive Branch.

These are many of the reasons that Obama's DOJ has presented arguments in preexisting trial cases that many have viewed as breaking campaign promises. There has also been a great deal of noise generated by pro-Bush factions in false flag operations, as a means to prove that Bush acted properly when President. The left-side of the political bipolarity has allowed itself to be corrupted with an ailment that once only predominated on the right: CONSPIRACY. Ditto-heads are repugnant be they from the left or the right.

Read more »

Marc Thiessen, who from 2001-2004 was Chief Speechwriter for Donald Rumsfeld, and from 2004-2009 was a speechwriter for the Bush White House, has since Obama's inauguration, been a vociferous defender of human torture, even going so far as to claim that Americans who tortured are American Heros. More recently, while attempting to discredit a Washington Post article about torture's counter-productive effects in an article published at National Review Online, Thiessen rested on a false allegation previously promoted by the Bush Administration which had been thoroughly discredited.

Read more »

Anybody, who desires some help with computer or site related problems they are presently going through, feel free to post in the comments, and I'll try to help you resolve them. Better here than in someone else's blog post, hijacked with off-threaded commentary .

John McCain has gotten onboard the GOP's horseless wagon powered by the content of that newfangled Web technology which now floods the datastreams with vacuity, Twitter. McCain stands proudly together with other Republicans, as Tweety Blurred LooneyCons, the GOP's rank, texting byte-sized messages small enough to be ingested by The Party's defiled. To believe Twitter is the path that leads to a future Republican majority is InterTubular Fails.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has taken his fight against wasteful government spending to the Twitter social networking site and continues to push for small business tax cuts to help the sagging economy.

McCain's Twitter posts include earmarks for pet projects in various states...

McCain also criticized federal spending in the stimulus package and other appropriations bills on Fox News Sunday reaffirming his preference for tax cuts.

Mike Sunnucks , "McCain uses Twitter to fight earmarks, makes case for small business tax cuts", Phoenix Business Journal, March 9, 2009

Now some who read this will be doubters and naysayers; wondering whether McCain is actually Tweeting away, thinking that he probably has some aide do it. Justin Germany, formerly the McCain 2008 Director of Online Media, and Bush-Cheney 2004 videographer, tweeted two weeks ago about McCain taking to wing, as the skypilot in control of his twittering:

• RT @anamariecox If you have noticed a slight change to the tone of @senjohnmccain's Tweets, that's because he now writing them himself. - 3:40 PM Feb 25th

Justin spun the truth some; but that's unsurprising considering he is a partisan loyalist media flack, and Mac elitist. The very next day, McCain tweeted about steep learning curves, keeping him from going solo navigating through the canyon lands of posting 140 character max text messages on a Blackberry alone. It was also the same day that McCain started taking his stimulus opposition to the tweets, posting lame top-ten lists of projects he asserted were wasteful:

• YEs!! I am twittering on my blackberry but not without a little help! - - 6:07 AM Feb 26th
• Tmr I am gonna tweet the TOP TEN PORKIEST PROJECTS in theOmnibus Spending bill the Congress is about to pass - - 10:08 AM Feb 26th

This had to be McCain's composition. No Senator's aide with even a smattering of Web2.0 self-consciousness would text the fabricated word: "Porkiest". When the medium is texting delimited by 140 characters, the message often is castaway when littered with anti-semantic folderol. Judging from what McCain presented as the most egregious examples of Congresspersons bringing the fatback back home as cracklings for their constituencies, it looks as if the Democrats have proven once again that when compared to Republicans, they are the lamer of two evils, in this instance, nowhere near as fiscally irresponsible as the debauchers who starred in The GOP Gone Wild In DC: 2002-2006. Many of McCain's examples are distorted descriptions of the funded projects, and even if every one of them are improper uses of the public treasury, the sum is insignificant, when compared to the total in the stimulus bills. I have extracted out of McCain's Twitter stream, the seven top-ten "porkiest project" lists he has posted so far. Oddly, those seven top ten lists added up only to 67, and two of those were duplicated, one within the same list. Hell, John didn't even have to take off his shoes, because he was only ciphering up to ten. If math and details aren't his strong point, maybe some other Republican should be leading this charge.

Read more »

John Choon Yoo is presently a distinguished visiting professor at Chapman University School of Law, located in Orange County, California. The Orange County Register recently published an interview with him:

Eugene W. Fields, "Ex-Bush lawyer talks about torture memos", The Orange County Register, March 3, 2009

Read more »

The Guantánamo Testimonials Project was initiated in the Fall of 2005 by The UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas (CSHRA), in an attempt "to assess the effects of the U.S. war on terror on human rights in the Americas".

In December 2008, Brandon Neely, former U.S. Army Specialist in the 410th military police company, who was honorably discharged, contacted the CSHRA, desiring to testify as to what he'd witnessed and been part of at Guantanamo Bay. The 410th military police company was stationed at Guantanamo Bay when the first GWOT detainees arrived. What follows is a short excerpt from Brandon Neely's testimony:

Read more »

The Washington Times published an article about how Republicans have begun to use the internet properly. Amusingly, it highlights Congressional Republicans' use of Twitter.

Republicans finally get it - and have jumped on Internet technology in hopes of dominating it in the same way they used talk radio in the early 1990s to build a following.

"Every time I send out a tweet, I'm throwing another shovel of dirt to help bury the old media," said Rep. John Culberson of Texas, a 52-year-old Republican who became one of the most quoted speakers at the Republican National Committee tech summit Friday.

Of the 219 congressional Republicans, 49 were using Twitter, while 27 of 317 Democrats were using it as of Monday, according to Tweet Congress (www.tweetcongress.org). The site tracks use of Twitter, a social messaging Web site that allows microblog text entries of 140 characters or less, known as tweets.

Christina Bellantoni, "GOP surpasses Dems on Twitter", Washington Times, February 17, 2009

Read more »

Interesting read:
Max Blumenthal, "Rick Warren's Africa Problem", The Daily Beast, January 7, 2009

A nice companion read:
"The Less They Know, the Better", Human Rights Watch, March 29, 2005

Related current news item:

Mississippi has claimed the distinction of having the highest teen birth rate in the United States, a figure more than three times higher than the states with the lowest rates, health officials said on Wednesday.

Mississippi, a comparatively poor state in the South, had a rate of 68.4 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19 in 2006, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report. That marked a 13 percent increase over 2005.
[. . .]
The only states with a decrease in teen birth rates from 2005 to 2006 were North Dakota, Rhode Island and New York.

The CDC previously reported that the nationwide teen birth rate rose in 2006 for the first time in 15 years. The national average was 40.5 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19.

Critics have said that one factor in that increase may be recent federal funding for so-called abstinence-only education that does not give information about contraceptives.

Will Dunham, "Mississippi has highest teen birth rate", Reuters, January 7, 2009

A recent blog post here at TPM Cafe, caused me to go looking for some anarchistic essays, on about a coming future economic over-supply aided by great leaps in productivity caused by technological advances which would decrease workforce demand, and lead to "Zero Work" paradigms. This was floating around on the net's News Groups in the early 80's, and was a fairly commons subject published onto some of the first internet websites. I discoverd that a great deal of the websites where I read of this are no longer no longer active. Here's links to four essays

• Christian Marazzi, "Money In The World Crisis: The New Basis of Capitalist Power", 1976
• Bob Black, "The Abolition of Work", 1985
• Bob Black, "What Is Wrong With This Picture? - A critique of a neo-futurist's vision of the decline of work", 1995
• Bob Black, "Technophilia, An Infantile Disorder", 1997

Many of the members here at TPM Cafe are offended by Obama's choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. The bad feelings about Warren stem largely from his open support for California's recent Proposition 8, as well as his vocal opposition to homosexuality. Truthfully, I knew little about Warren before Obama's choice caused an uproar. The reason I know of Warren at all is because Warren often hyped his book, "The Purpose Driven Life", with the story of how Ashley Smith, who was taken hostage by Brian Nichols after he'd murdered four people at an Atlanta courthouse, convinced Nichols to give himself up by reading from the book.

"I asked him if I could read. He said, what do wouldn't to read? I said, well, I have a book in my room. So, I went and got it. I got my Bible. Then I got a book called "The Purpose Driven Life." I turned it to a chapter that I was on that day, which was chapter 33. And I started to read the first paragraph of it. After I read it, he said, stop, will you read it again? So, I read it again to him." - Ashley Smith

Was Warren purposefully driving book sales with a fable?

You might remember Ashley Smith, the woman who was taken hostage a few months ago by the Atlanta courthouse shooting suspect. Well, in a new book, she admits giving Brian Nichols methamphetamine from her own stash to put him at ease. She says she refused to take any that night. Nichols held her hostage after allegedly going on a shooting spree which left four people dead, including an Atlanta judge.

Thomas Roberts, CNN News, September 27, 2005

Read more »

Dick Cheney in a December 15, 2008, telephone interview with Rush Limbaugh (White House dot gov source):

I think Guantanamo has been very well run. I think if you look at it from the perspective of the requirements we had, once you go out and capture a bunch of terrorists, as we did in Afghanistan and elsewhere, then you've got to have some place to put them. If you bring them here to the U.S. and put them in our local court system, then they are entitled to all kinds of rights that we extend only to American citizens.

Remember, these are unlawful combatants. These are people who don't belong to any recognized military force. They don't obey the rules of warfare. They're unlawful combatants. And you can't -- if you're not going to have a place to locate them like Guantanamo, then you either have to bring them here to the continental United States -- and I don't know any member of Congress who's volunteering to have al Qaeda terrorists deposited in his district -- or you've got to turn them over to some foreign government. And we found lots of times when you do that that a number of them have gone back into the -- on to the battlefield and tried to kill Americans again.

So Guantanamo has been very, very valuable. And I think they'll discover that trying to close it is a very hard proposition.

Read more »