If you were in Congress, and wanted to pass a terrible law that you didn’t want anyone to notice, how would you do it? Think like a newspaperman. You’d insert it as an amendment in a huge bill with a lot of other things in it, and then have it passed just before a big holiday weekend, when everyone is going to be out having fun, not sitting inside paying attention to the legislation of the day. Then, when the holiday weekend was over, a few days later, there would be other news for people to pay attention to.

That’s exactly what’s just happened. The United States Senate has just approved a terrible law that offends the American tradition of freedom, and almost nobody has noticed it, because the law was passed just before Memorial Day weekend.

The law, amendment 1157 to H.R. 2346, has no name, although some are calling it the Censorship of Photographs of Future Torture Amendment. That’s a bit long-winded. Perhaps we had better just call it Torture Amendment 1157.

Here’s what Torture Amendment 1157 does: It gives the Secretary of Defense the power to conceal photographic evidence of torture by the US military. The amendment applies not just to photographs that have already been taken, and torture that has already taken place, but also to photographs of torture by the US military that will be taken in the future.

Why would the United States Senate pass a law giving cover to future acts of US military torture?

In the small discussion of this amendment in the Senate this week, the following excuse emerged: It’s dangerous to American national security when people find out that the US military has been torturing people.

That’s where the Senate has got it wrong. The photographs of torture are not the danger. The torture is the problem.

The last time we spoke, I was writing about how it might be useful to attend the inauguration of Barack Obama by participating in a pro-Constitution demonstration along the parade route. Well, you know what happened? Almost no one showed up for that demonstration.

Americans were too busy cheering and weeping about how Barack Obama was bringing change to bother to support the Constitution… or to pay attention to the details.

Barack Obama seems to have interpreted that fawning adulation as permission to do whatever the hell he wants. President Obama is rapidly turning into another President George W. Bush.

Think I’m exaggerating? President Obama has over a dozen lobbyists working in his White House, though he promised to have none. Obama is keeping George W. Bush’s Big Brother spying programs under the FISA Amendments Act and Patriot Act going. He’s expanding the “faith-based” religious government kickback scheme. He’s working to keep Bush’s torture secrets secret.

President Obama is claiming the power of the Unitary Executive, just like George W. Bush did. Don’t know what a Unitary Executive is? Let me translate that phrase for you: It means dictator.

Yesterday, Barack Obama sent his White House lawyers out to make the argument that the President has the right to stop a lawsuit from proceeding merely by claiming that the lawsuit would expose “state secrets”. Does the President have to present any evidence that state secrets would be exposed? No, says President Obama. He says that the President just has to make a declaration, and then the lawsuit stops.

The context of this case is torture by the U.S. government. 5 plaintiffs are filing suit because they were kidnapped by the U.S. government and tortured. They want justice. Barack Obama says they will get none, because he wants to preserve “state secrets” related to their torture.

Is this what America had in mind when it throbbed with joy during the 2009 Inauguration?

Splash cold water on your face, America and wake up. Barack Obama is not who you thought he was.

I see a lot of people planning Inauguration parties. At these parties, people will watch TV, drink, and eat snacks. There’s nothing wrong with these activities, but they aren’t exactly meaningful.

The Presidential Inauguration of 2009 will be a meaningful event, and it seems a shame to treat it as merely an opportunity to have a party. What if January 20, 2009 could be adopted as a day for all Americans to rededicate themselves to the ideals of democratic citizenship?

There are a few opportunities being presented by activist groups to do just that.

One opportunity is to participate in a political demonstration urging Barack Obama to restore the Constitution. It’s at the corner of 9th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C., and it officially starts at Noon on January 20, 2009, but if you want to actually get there to participate, you’d best plan to arrive there a bit earlier. A bit more information.

For a longer event, on the same block, check out the protest along the parade route in front of the FBI building that will urge the criminal arrest of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It runs from 5:00 am until 4:00 pm in front of the FBI building. Word of this protest comes from the Inauguration Action Center, which has more information about other events as well.

Southern states in the U.S. have been loud in promoting the idea of mixing religion and government. Southern politicians have claimed that putting government in charge of the promotion of religious beliefs will bring positive benefits for everyone, bringing order and stability to society as a whole. These claims conveniently overlook the lack of order that has resulted from Christian governments in the past. Warfare and social divisiveness have been the historical companions of theocracy.

Still, the Southern Christian neotheocrats ask us to leave the past in the past, and to look merely at what they want to do in American society today. Well, okay, let’s play that game. Let’s forget about the terrible history of bloody theocracies, and focus on the record of Christian theocrats today. How has the mixture of church and state performed in recent years.

Contrary to its promises, George W. Bush’s campaign of religious kickback schemes (faith-based initiatives) and government-funded Christian education programs have brought about greater social instability. Let’s take the Christian-founded government programs of abstinence-only education programs, which withhold information about prevention of pregnancy and STDs from public school students.

For several years, the state of Mississippi has taken between one and two million dollars in federal funds per year in order to pay for abstinence-only programs in public schools there. The result: Mississippi has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the USA.

But, let’s be fair. The problem is not due only to the wasteful government spending on abstinence-only programs. Mississippi’s high rate of teenage pregnancy is also due to the influence of right wing Christian churches throughout the state. These churches, which are the original source of the abstinence-only agenda in public schools, also work in the private sphere to keep teenagers ignorant about responsible sexual behavior. Mississippi’s Christian groups claim that keeping kids ignorant prevents them from having sex, but in truth, the Christian-promoted ignorance merely interferes with the ability of Mississippi teenagers to make wise decisions about what to do when they do become sexually active.

As long as Christianity promotes ignorance, it will promote social instability. That’s just one of the many, many reasons that it’s a profoundly unwise idea to go on mixing church and state.

In about a week, George W. Bush will be gone. Unfortunately, incoming President Barack Obama has expressed an interest in continuing failed “faith-based” initiatives that violate the Constitution and give financial support to theocratic organizations. That may be politically convenient for Obama, but it’s harmful to our society as a whole.

During the Bush years, Democrats picked up on a derisive comment made by a member of the Bush White House that those citizens who were critically examining the facts, and asking the government to base its actions on evidence, were just members of the “reality-based community”. Democrats proudly took on this term for themselves, contrasting themselves with Republicans who were, they said, irresponsibly engaged in faith-based politics.

It was a fair critique. But now that a Democrat has been elected to the White House, many Democrats seem to have conveniently forgotten about it.

The Inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States is coming with right wing preacher Rick Warren at the lead. Obama has chosen Rick Warren for the special honor of introducing the Inauguration with an official, government-sanctioned, Christian prayer. That’s a blatant violation of the Constitution, and a sad irony, given that right after Warren is done with his invocation, Obama will swear, in the Oath of Office, to uphold the Constitution.

Beyond the mixing of Church and State, there’s the problem of Rick Warren’s particular ideology. It’s an anti-science ideology. It’s Creationism. Rick Warren teaches that evolution doesn’t happen. He teaches that dinosaurs and human beings lived at the same time, and that human beings ruled over dinosaurs. Rick Warren teaches that our children ought to be taught these things in their science classes in public schools.

This is a matter of public policy. Rick Warren advocates for the use of public schools to teach Christian theology, and to do it in science classes. Now, Barack Obama is embracing Rick Warren, and many Democrats are looking the other way, pretending not to notice the problem.

That’s not very reality-based of them.

Barack Obama is also inviting religious leaders to meet with him and his advisors, to continue George W. Bush’s office of faith-based initiatives, another unconstitutional mixture of Church and State.

That’s not reality-based policy either, but once again, Democrats are just looking the other way, pretending that there’s nothing wrong.

It seems that many Democrats never really were a part of the reality-based community. They were just using that line when it was politically convenient for them.

Now, the reality-based community has become politically incovenient for the Democrats, and so they’re mixing religion up with the public business of the White House, just like the Republicans before them.

Those of us who remain committed members of the reality-based community see a problem with Barack Obama’s embrace of faith-based government, and are speaking out against the problem. Please join them. President-Elect Obama needs to know from the start that using the loose standards of faith to run the state is an strategy that won’t be accepted.

It was nearly midnight, and I was lost in the mountains. A sudden police detour forced me to exit a minor highway and take a road that was unmarked on my map in the middle of the Catskills. I guessed at where I was going.

Wandering toward where I hoped I would be able to intersect my original route, I came upon a gas station in a small town. I needed a rest, but I was determined to reach home before the night was over. I was already jittery from an evening of coffee, but I wanted something interesting in my mouth to keep my consciousness in focus.

My eyes found a bottle of A&W Root Beer Float. A root beer float in a bottle ought to be interesting I thought, and so I bought a bottle.

As I took the drink down behind the wheel, the sensation was interesting, but not pleasurable. A&W calls it the ultimate treat, but in truth the drink is more like the ultimate letdown. It doesn’t really taste like a root beer float, and it has the best qualities of neither root beer nor vanilla ice cream. Imagine a root beer float, left to melt together, then put into a bottle with chemical aftertaste added, and that’s what this drink tastes like - in a depressingly small bottle to boot.

The next time I am forced to drive through the night in unfamiliar territory, I will grab another drink - even if it means going one cup of coffee too far.

A quotes of the day service ran the following two quotations today, almost right next to one another. I was struck by the opposition of their sentiment:

What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.
- Hansell B. Duckett

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.
- Galileo Galilei

Hansell Duckett offers a statement of complaint much like those who feel annoyed by the Internet liberation of publication from the print elites: They fret and bother that now that anyone can publish themselves, almost everyone is publishing themselves. Golly, what a lot of drivel we’re reading now, they say.

Galileo, on the other hand, seeks out more contact with people with the idea that every person offers something of value, even if through their ignorance of what he deems important. We’re all ignorant - even the most brilliant and educated of us. We’re just ignorant about different things. The realm of knowledge has expanded so much, even beyond that of Galileo’s day, that no person can hope to gain a comprehensive grasp of even a single segment of it.

Even if we accept the assertion of Duckett and his ilk that expansion of expression has led to a large amount of low quality expression, it doesn’t make sense to oppose the expansion itself. There was always a lot of drivel in print. The percentage of good quality remains the same - but the amount of material has grown larger, and that means that there’s a lot more out there worth knowing, for those who have the wisdom to know how to recognize it.

In which category do we place Duckett? Who was Hansell B. Duckett, anyway? No one really knows much about that. The only thing that most sources have to say about Mr. Duckett was that he said, “What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.”

It looks as if history has judged Hansell B. Duckett as somebody who is not, in general, worth listening to. I have to agree.

Let’s talk about the power of faith.

Christian preacher Anthony Hopkins was arrested after giving a sermon at the Inspirational Tabernacle Church of God in Christ in Jackson, Alabama.

The charges: In 2004, he murdered his wife after he was caught molesting his daughter. Police had found a dead human body in the Hopkins family’s extra large freezer.

For the four years since the murder, with molestation apparently continuing, Anthony Hopkins kept on giving sermons at churches all around the South. He was in demand. People thought he was a pretty good preacher.

That’s the power of faith.

It’s a rare position, and a principled one: No Beliefs. Imagine no beliefs - no ideologies that guide the perception of facts, but rather facts that shape ideology.

NoBeliefs.com brings us news today of some rather inconvenient facts for the men who claim to speak for the omnibenevolent and omnipotent creator of the universe.

Two Anglican priests were exposed in the repeated sexual abuse of a boy. One has been convicted and sentenced to prison. Another has died, and escaped justice through death.

If there is a God who brings cosmic justice through churches, then why is it that those churches are so frequently instruments of injustice?

There’s been a huge fuss, for months on end, made by the establishment news media about Jeremiah Wright, and the fact that once, during a sermon, in order to criticize American government policies, he said, “God damn America”.

So why hasn’t the establishment news media made the same huge fuss when John Hagee said essentially the same thing?

John Hagee, the radical televangelist has served as an essential political ally of John McCain. John McCain spent months pursuing the endorsement of John Hagee, and then hugged John Hagee on stage when he accepted that endorsement. John McCain has placed John Hagee’s words on his official campaign web site, and said that he is glad to have John Hagee’s support.

But John Hagee has damned America. It’s a quote: John Hagee declared proudly, “America is under the curse of God, even now!”

That’s not all. John Hagee has said that America deserves to be attacked by terrorists, and that Al Qaeda terrorists have been sent by God himself as a part of God’s damnation of America: “I believe that God will bring this nation into judgment, because I believe what this book says. And if God brings this nation into judgment, He will very likely release the terrorists that you’ve already let get here through the ridiculous immigration policy you refuse to stop, and this nation is going to go through a bloodbath that you have permitted because of what you have done. You have disobeyed the law of God, and now, we as a nation are going to pay a price for that.”

Barack Obama has denounced Jeremiah Wright. Why hasn’t John McCain denounced John Hagee?

Here’s a video showing just how kooky John Hagee can get, and how close he is to John McCain.