A high school principal in Athens, Georgia, apologized for reading a pro-prayer-in-school poem over the intercom. He claims it was meant 'to provoke thought and discussion' but what it mostly does is whine bitterly about modern society and complain about how unfair it is to keep Christianity out of classrooms. Here's the poem:

The New School Prayer

Now I sit me down in school

Where praying is against the rule

For this great nation under God

Finds mention of Him very odd.

If Scripture now the class recites,

It violates the Bill of Rights.

And anytime my head I bow

Becomes a Federal matter now.

Our hair can be purple, orange or green,

That's no offense; it's a freedom scene.

The law is specific, the law is precise.

Prayers spoken aloud are a serious vice.

For praying in a public hall

Might offend someone with no faith at all.

In silence alone we must meditate,

God's name is prohibited by the state.

We're allowed to cuss and dress like freaks,

And pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks.

They've outlawed guns, but FIRST the Bible.

To quote the Good Book makes me liable.

We can elect a pregnant Senior Queen,

And the "unwed daddy," our Senior King.

It's "inappropriate" to teach right from wrong,

We're taught that such "judgments" do not belong.

We can get our condoms and birth controls,

Study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles.

But the Ten Commandments are not allowed,

No word of God must reach this crowd.

It's scary here I must confess,

When chaos reigns the school's a mess.

So, Lord, this silent plea I make:

Should I be shot, my soul please take!

I particularly like the deft touch of the last two lines wherein chaos only reigns because students aren't allowed to pray in school, and the lack of a posted Ten Commandments in every school room leads to students being shot, I suppose by somebody who forgot the Fifth because it wasn't emblazoned over his head every day.

There's something of the 'magical reality' school of thought in fundie Xtianity, as if having monuments dedicated to 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' will somehow deter people from doing it, and the simple act of praying in school will make them safer despite rampant poverty and an inbred gun culture. An...unlikely...hypothesis, to say the least. Fortunately, as in the case of the attempt to force religious dogma into the Georgia science curriculum, there were some parents who weren't about to stand for a principal pushing his religious beliefs on an entire school.

Some parents have complained to both Craft and Clarke County School Superintendent Lewis Holloway.

"Basically, I found the poem offensive, but even if I didn't, I still would believe it crossed the line between church and state," said Ginger Smith, whose daughter is a junior at Cedar Shoals.

Smith also objected to misrepresentations in the poem. She said, for example, that students are allowed to wear crosses or other religious items, to wear clothing with religious messages and to pray in school in some circumstances.

Holloway said the district had received "several calls" from people who were upset about the poem.

Somebody should raise a monument to them for protecting the Constitution.

Two unions representing government employees in the Homeland Security Dept have gone public with the disclosure statements Tom Ridge wants them to sign in order to work for HSD. The statements, usually pledges not to disclose secrets, are so much broader than standard ones that they may be unConstitutional.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The Homeland Security Department is requiring employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement so restrictive that it might be unconstitutional, two unions for thousands of border workers said Monday.

The agreement, which was introduced in May, prohibits department employees from giving the public "sensitive but unclassified" information. It also says the government "may conduct inspections at any time or place" to ensure that the agreement is obeyed.

The two unions, the National Treasury Employees Union and the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement that the agreement gave the government "unprecedented leeway to search employee homes and personal belongings in violation of the Fourth Amendment." The unions, which together represent about 35,000 Homeland Security Department employees, include a large number of Customs and border workers.

This month, lawyers for the unions wrote to the general counsel of the department, Joe D. Whitley, asking that the agreement no longer be distributed and that a directive that outlines the policy for identifying and safeguarding sensitive but unclassified information be withdrawn. The letter also says that the directive gives officials a device "to suppress and cover up evidence of their own misconduct or malfeasance by stamping documents 'for official use only.' "

A spokesman for the department, Brian Roehrkasse, said in a telephone interview, "The notion that this would be used to cover up evidence of wrongdoing is baseless."

Sure it is. Nobody in the Bush Administration would ever 'cover up' incompetence or malfeasance. Ever. Right? They would never NEVER stamp documents 'ultra super secret' just to keep politically embarrassing material hidden. Would they?

Nah.

In the name of 'security', Tom Ridge has just declared war on potential whistleblowers.

A lawyer for the American Federation of Government Employees, Mark Roth, said the policies would discourage employees from talking to the public and Congress about "matters of public concern." Mr. Roth said he was also worried that the government would use the agreement to pick out and discipline outspoken workers.

"I think, sadly, it will probably be used to keep information that the public needs to know out of the public's hands until we challenge it in court," he said.

And maybe then. The disclosure agreements could also function as a major red herring, focusing litigation on whether the employee violated an oath rather than on the thornier issue of incompetent management. It always works out better for the employer if they can claim the issue the employee is reporting is irrelevant and the real issue is the reporting itself. It takes all the legal and PR heat and puts it on the employee. The Red Lion Foods case showed all employers--even the government, apparently--that you can successfully undermine discovery of a crime you've committed if you can find a way to blame the one who discovered it. The disclosure agreements not only give them the tools to hassle suspected whistleblowers, they give them the opportunity ignore the message and shoot the messenger.

Which is the way Junior likes to do business, after all.

Mark Fiore tries really really hard to look on the bright side....

In yesterday's post, river at Baghdad Burning reports that rumors are flying around Iraq that the American Army used chemical weapons in Fallujah.

The situation in Falloojeh is worse than anyone can possibly describe. It has turned into one of those cities you see in your darkest nightmares- broken streets strewn with corpses, crumbling houses and fallen mosques... The worst part is that for the last couple of weeks we've been hearing about the use of chemical weapons inside Falloojeh by the Americans. Today we heard that the delegation from the Iraqi Ministry of Health isn't being allowed into the city, for some reason.

I don't know about the chemical weapons. It's not that I think the American military is above the use of chemical weapons, it's just that I keep wondering if they'd be crazy enough to do it. I keep having flashbacks of that video they showed on tv, the mosque and all the corpses. There was one brief video that showed the same mosque a day before, strewn with many of the same bodies- but some of them were alive. In that video, there's this old man leaning against the wall and there was blood running out of his eyes- almost like he was crying tears of blood. What 'conventional' weaponry makes the eyes bleed? They say that a morgue in Baghdad has received the corpses of citizens in Falloojeh who have died under seemingly mysterious conditions.

If this is true, a) the words 'irony' and 'hypocrisy' don't begin to do justice to the criminal insanity of invading a country to keep it from using chemical weapons only to use those same chemical weapons on the citizens we're supposedly there to 'liberate'; and b) you will never hear Word One of this in the complacent, cheerleading US press. There is no Peter Arnett this time to report on the destruction of Bin Te and quote the anonymous Army colonel who summed up the entire Viet Nam experience with those immortal words, 'We had to destroy the village in order to save it.' US reporters nowadays rarely stray from their hotels, and swallow military press releases like bon-bons. After all, their job is to report just what the military tells them, not check on it.

My god, what have we become?

There's a special room in Hell reserved for these people, and I hope it's in the section where they serve eggs Maledict 24/7.

GLASGOW, Scotland — A British company said Sunday it was releasing a video game recreating the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.

The Glasgow-based firm Traffic said "JFK Reloaded" was an educational "docu-game" that would help disprove conspiracy theories about Kennedy's death. The game is due to be released Monday, the 41st anniversary of the shooting in Dallas.

Traffic said the game challenged players to recreate the three shots fired at the president's car by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository.

Traffic's managing director, Kirk Ewing, said the game — available as an Internet download for $9.99 — would "stimulate a younger generation of players to take an interest in this fascinating episode of American history."

By trying to kill the last True Liberal? Again?

Rumor has it Cheney ordered six of them.

Among the many things George W Bush should give thanks for on this holiday, along with the silver spoon lodged in his craw at birth and the many Family-connected saviours who have bailed his butt out of every one of his abject failures except his sorry excuse for a presidency, is the insistently puerile state of arrested adolescence in which American culture is caught like a spy in a honey-trap. Like adolescents, we habitually over-react to threats; like adolescents, we are focused on appearances to the exclusion of everything else; and like adolescents, we are easily distracted by our hormones. The only thing the Bush Invitation-Only Campaign Tour was missing was a string of Vegas dancing girls high-stepping on stage behind him. Maybe next time, assuming he bothers with the fraud of an 'election' at all.

Grownups knew better than to be fooled by his pig-ignorant posturing and propagandistic sloganeering; the adolescents among us took those the way they would take a cheerleader's pump-you-up excesses during the local Turkey-Day matches. Grownups knew that his simple-minded repetition of a few key phrases showed how thinly he grasped the concept--any concept; adolescents took it as Deep Thought, MTV-style. Grownups understood that his refusal to adapt, instead focusing like a laser on making sure he never admitted a mistake, meant that his mind was solidly closed to any new idea that threatened to intrude on its blissfully ignorant serenity; adolescents thought it meant he was 'strong', since being blindingly stubborn is how they measure strength.

George W Bush and an adolescent society were made for each other, let's face it. The only real surprise in retrospect is that there turned out to be as many grownups as there were. But they've all gone back to their books and blogs and are listening to NPR right now, so we can spend some time meditating on what might have been had the culture been more 17-ish than 16-ish.

Purely as an exercise, for instance, we could always amuse ourselves with the spectacle of how 'news' cheerfully debases itself for the 15 and 16 yr-old minds who dominate tube-watching.



Once upon a time, Spencer Tunick's nude group photographs inspired criticism of our adolescent snickering and Puritan outrage over nudity and sexuality, challenging us to look at nude bodies in a more adult way: not as objects of what the SCOTUS might call 'prurient interest' during one of its periodic convulsions of sexual hysteria, but as simple, natural forms--something we all have whether we hide it or not. As Sandra Bernhart put it: 'I'm naked under my clothes.' So aren't we all.

But forget all that intellectual junk. Forget art. And for gawd's-sake forget 'social commentary'. What we want on our tv screens is a good-looking female body strutting all her stuff for the camera--and us. And please let it be a 'news reporter' so we have a sort-of socially-acceptable excuse to feast our eyes all the way through the photo 'installation'.

Local 'news' has been a joke for decades, ever since the small cadre of news 'consultants' got their hooks into station managers, scaring them with how big an audience the competition was going to get by listening to their 'advice', advice that centered around exploiting sensationalism at every conceivable opportunity: 'If it thinks, it stinks. If it bleeds, it leads.' For 20 years, local tv news has descended further and further into the same pit which housed the National Enquirer and the NY Post, avoiding by mere inches the mother-gives-birth-to-cow and aliens-have-abducted-Madonna stories. But they always loomed on the horizon.

Well, after this, there may be no stopping them. Given the whopping success of this 'story' in the ratings, we can no doubt look forward in the future to features like 'Tonight's Nude', the tv equivalent of the Post's famous Page Six centerfold, only there won't be any namby-pamby cheesecake: full-frontal all the way. And hard news, barely more than three minutes of headlines per hour now, will be cut to a whisper that races by your consciousness without a chance to register as we speed along to the 5 minutes devoted to yet another 'human interest' story that involves yet another beautiful young woman yet again shedding her outer garments for the glory of 'reporting' the 'news'.

Let's be clear: lord knows I have nothing against naked bodies. I like them, especially attractive female ones (and in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I find almost any naked female body attractive, especially if I like the woman living in it). I like looking at them. I find them...inspiring. And I don't have anything against showing them on television. I had some bad moments when my daughter was growing up that centered around my fear that she would think she wasn't attractive if she didn't look like Heather Locklear or Pam Anderson, never mind Brooke Burke or Cindy Crawford. But although there were a couple of scary years when she went out of her way to prove how sexy she was, ultimately, by 19, her native good sense and down-to-earth, blunt honesty had asserted themselves. She spared herself the buleimia that way too many of her friends practiced, and escaped the damage to her self-esteem that I had imagined would be her inevitable fate. She emerged from adolescence liking herself and liking the way the man she eventually married responded to the way she looked. He didn't care if she didn't look like Cindy Crawford. He was in love with her (still is, I hasten to add), and to him she was (and always will be, I think, although these things are hard to predict) beautiful because of who she was, not because of what she looked like, nude or not.

So what's my problem if it isn't nudity on tv? I'll put it as simply as I can for the cheap seats:

IT WAS A RATINGS STUNT. IT WASN'T, ISN'T, AND NEVER WILL BE 'NEWS', AND IT DOESN'T BELONG ON A 'NEWS' SHOW UNLESS WE'VE GIVEN UP ALL HOPE OF EVER AGAIN HAVING ANYTHING THAT APPROACHES A RESPONSIBLE PRESS.

There. So? Have we given up? Is the circus all we want? Sure looks that way from here.

After weeks of talking about this, or so it seems to me, the first issue of my first webzine devoted to highlighting a few of the best blog-posts I could find has finally been published.


Blog Tower

Blog Tower will, I hope, serve several purposes. First, it will give people a second chance to read great posts they may have missed the first time around. Second, it will start to call attention to the great writing in blogs that's been going largely unnoticed not just by the general public but by blog readers themselves. And third, it will foster continuing conversations about issues that tend to get picked up and dropped along with the daily news by re-publishing posts on those issues in special sections.

In this first issue, for instance, the Religion page is devoted to posts about the role of faith in public life and includes two posts written by evangelicals--one who still is and opposes an evangelical litmus test, and one who left the movement and talks about why--as well as a centrist's thoughts on the 'Great Awakening' and what it might mean.

But there's lots more: pages on politics, the arts, and humor, as well as a page that will showcase a featured article in every issue. This issue it's a moving, beautifully written piece by a soldier serving in Iraq who finds her father's face in the faces of the Iraqis around her. In a way, it's a meditation on the universality of laugh lines, and how to read them.

I suppose Thanksgiving week wasn't the best time to launch an effort like this. What can I say? I forgot. But I hope when things calm down next week you'll take a few moments to check out the work presented by Blog Tower, and then check out the sites where the pieces come from. A few of them regular readers of the Alley will be familiar with, but quite a few more they may not be, and they're all worth more than one look.

Fresh from their 'victory' installing a theocrat back into power, chief Xtian fundie Jerry Falwell is readying the Band of Angels who will transform American law according to Old Testament Biblical standards by attaching a law school to his Baptist college, Liberty University, which you may take it from me is an oxymoron since it intends to remove 'liberty' from a Godless secular society and replace it with obedience to my-way-or-prison canonical law.

LYNCHBURG, Va. — What Debra Meador read disturbed her. It didn't seem right that schoolchildren were once barred from holding prayer groups after class. Or that the Ten Commandments couldn't be displayed in a government building.

So at 34, the human relations specialist from Lynchburg made good on a longtime interest by enrolling in law school. But unlike most prospective lawyers, she applied to only one place.

"I wanted to take it in a Christian setting," said Meador, a member of the inaugural law class at Liberty University, a Baptist college founded here in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. "I don't believe anyone could be neutral. We're willing to tell you what we believe and to follow that."

The school, like Meador, who aspires to argue cases before the Supreme Court, has grand designs. Right now, it has only 60 students and six faculty members. Provisional accreditation by the American Bar Assn. — which certifies that a school has been evaluated on the quality of its legal education and allows students to sit for the bar exam in any state — is at least two years away.

But by teaching law from a Christian perspective, Falwell hopes to train a cadre of Christian lawyers to fight what he sees as the growing secularization of public life across the country.

Imagine that--a secular society daring to be secular. How dreadful! We'll have none of that nonsense if Jerry has anything to say about it. And he does. His little theocratic law school is only the beginning. It will be the precursor of an entire movement, bolstered by lawyers he's trained, which aims to 're-interpret' the Constitution for a while before it despenses with it entirely and uses the Book of Leviticus instead. Think I'm kidding?

The school plans to offer select students hands-on experience with a law firm that takes on constitutional issues. That would occur when Liberty Counsel, a legal organization in Orlando, Fla., that focuses on cases involving religion and traditional values, moves its legislative arm to the campus.

Best known for establishing in 1979 the Moral Majority, one of the first evangelical efforts to affect political discourse, Falwell sees the law school as an extension of his mission.

"We certainly are training Christian activists," Falwell, who this month announced the creation of a 21st century version of the Moral Majority that aims to re-energize religious conservatives, said in an interview last week. "We're turning their attention to understand the Bible is the infallible word of God, that the American Constitution is a sacred document and that the Christian worldview is their matrix of service."

But Jerry, the 'sacred' Constitution and the Bible conflict in some very important ways. Like separating church and state, just as an example I pulled out of a hat. Which gets priority when they clash? Wait, wait, don't tell me....

But not to worry. Jerry isn't actually doing the teaching. Yet...

But for many students, the Christianity at the school's core does not mandate that they promote religion in the courtroom. Nor do faculty members see producing such graduates as their goal. As they point out, lawyers — not Falwell — do the teaching.

For Brad Fraser, a 23-year-old Pennsylvanian who completed his undergraduate degree at Liberty, the law school's purpose is not "to legislate morality. Our goal is to get back to the underlying principles that form the law."

Sure it is. Oddly enough, it's centrist Christians who are most disturbed by this development.

It's a direction that has raised eyebrows among some civil libertarians and constitutional law scholars who fear that schools like Liberty are designed to preach, not teach.

"I don't believe that the understanding of Jerry Falwell about the history of America and of the American Constitution is remotely accurate, nor is it ethically responsible," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a longtime critic of Falwell. "It is designed to turn America into his view of a Christian nation…. When you get these insular institutions who believe they are right and fighting the entire world, you get extremists coming out as graduates."

No kidding.

The 9/11 Reforms Bill is going nowhere fast in the House, first because the Pentagon's pet monkey, CA Cong Duncan Hunter, is protecting their interests using the excuse that the bill would somehow prevent their collection of field intelligence, and second because chief House whacko James Sensenbrunner is going to make goddam sure that none o' them goddam 'aliens' gets a goddam driver's licence.And so it goes.

WASHINGTON — Defying their leadership and direct appeals from President Bush and Vice President Cheney, two powerful House Republicans on Saturday blocked intelligence reform legislation that would put a single director in charge of the nation's spy agencies.

Passage of the legislation that would have implemented recommendations from the Sept. 11 commission had appeared likely earlier in the day. Commission members and families of the victims of the terrorist attacks reacted with frustration and outrage at the reversal.

The prospects of reviving the bill appeared uncertain late Saturday.

Hours after House and Senate negotiators said they had a deal, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said he was unable to persuade Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) and some other Republicans to support the compromise. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), also opposed elements of the bill.

Funny thing is, the pleas of our Junior Emperor, who actually bestirred himself in this crisis long enough to pick up the phone to do a little political arm-twisting, cut no ice with these two AT ALL.

The two chairmen stood firm even after the president called Sensenbrenner from Santiago, Chile, where Bush was attending a summit of Asian and Pacific leaders, to urge him to make a compromise. Vice President Cheney asked Hunter to do the same.

Hunter said the bill would undermine the Pentagon's ability to obtain real-time intelligence during a battle. Sensenbrenner objected to stripping out controversial law enforcement and immigration provisions that had been included in the House's intelligence bill.

"We're just doing our jobs," Hunter said in an interview.

Uh-huh.

What happened to all that 'political capital' Junior was bragging about not so long ago? I guess a polite phone call on metaphoprical bended knee isn't enough. I guess the political dollar is in no better shape than the real one.

Did you note the absence of the House Majority Leader in this fracas? Hmm? Where is The Hammer in all this? Having not just cleared his plate of that pesky 'illegal campaign contribution' nonsense but gotten the whistleblower censured for daring to open his mouth about it, you'd think he'd be riding high, wide and handsome to the rescue.

But he isn't. He's invisible. Personna non here. Why is that, one wonders? Is he going to prove his power by storming in later on to do what the President and the House Speaker were unable to do? Or is he proving his power now? Is he, mayhap, protecting his constituency--defense corporations--from the depredations of odious regulations that will make it harder for them to do business with their terrorist clients?

I'm just asking.

Junior is preparing the ground for war again but is struggling to choose an enemy--we have so many now. After ignoring North Korea and Iran for several years and insulting the leaderships of each country whenever the opportunity presented itself, he spent his holiday in Chile this weekend rattling sabers and making veiled threats against both of them--a twofer.

SANTIAGO, Chile, Nov. 20 - President Bush increased the administration's pressure on Iran on Saturday, saying there were indications that the country was speeding forward in its production of a key ingredient for nuclear weapons fuel, a move he said was "a very serious matter'' that undercut Iran's denials that it was seeking to build weapons.

On the first day here of the annual gathering of Pacific Rim leaders, his first summit meeting since winning re-election, Mr. Bush also tried to re-establish a unified front against the other nuclear challenge facing his second term: North Korea.

In back-to-back meetings with the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea here Saturday morning, Mr. Bush urged each to draw North Korea back into six-nation negotiations. And in a speech later, he issued a direct challenge to North Korea's reclusive leader that echoed President Reagan's demand in 1987 for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. After the meetings, he said, he was convinced "that the will is strong, that the effort is united and the message is clear to Mr. Kim Jong Il: Get rid of your nuclear weapons programs."
(emphasis added)

The NYT, with its now-standard bit of Emperor-coddling, mentioned in passing that his not-so-benign 4-years of neglect has resulted in the Bush Admin allowing NKorea to produce enough weapons-grade plutonium to build six (6--count 'em [Republicans with one hand busily raiding the Treasury and stuffing their pockets may remove one shoe to facilitate their count]) nuclear weapons already. They also dutifully report that NKorea's weaponizing after he refused to talk to them is in fact the fault of China and Japan (note bolded portion of previous quote), whose laps he dumped this problem in when he couldn't be bothered to spare the time from one of his many vacations, and that Iran's sudden intransigence is the fault of Europe--

[I]n Iran's case, he is clearly skeptical about a European-led effort to suspend the country's manufacture of nuclear material.

--especially those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys in Paris. Cleary war is called for and Junior will no doubt be calling for it as soon as he has an excuse Karl Rove thinks will fly with the kool-aid drinkers, which should be any day now. Let's face it, the KADs don't demand much in the way of proof. Another Chalabi-style forgery should do it, something nice and subtle, like:

Dear Mighty Kim:

Those bastard Americans that we hate because they're so free will get what's coming to them pretty soon now, hee-hee! The 5000-megaton warhead has been loaded onto the oxcart which will be flown into the US on Junkbutt Airlines for only $3.75--one way (hee hee). Boy, will those freedom-loving running dogs hate that! Then it will be parked inconpicuously on the White House lawn where those stupid US of A'ers will think it's a new geranium box for the Rose Garden.

What a surprise for them! Hee hee!

signed,

A North Korean Nuclear Scientist named Lee or Wong. Whatever.

The RWSM will be up in arms, ranting and raving about how this is convincing proof that the NKoreans developed nuclear weapons with the single intention of destroying us, all the cliches from the 'Yellow Peril' days will get drug out of the closet where they've been kept shined and polished and waiting patiently since VJ Day, and the cry of the Blood-Drunk American Right with which we're all now so familiar will ring out strong and proud:

'NUKE THE FUCKING SLOPES!"

Ah yes, I love the sound of American bigots demanding revenge for insults they don't understand. It renews my faith in our kulchah.

One jarring note in the general hilarity was Colin's refusal to play the game.

Following Mr. Bush's assertion on Saturday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment, Mr. Powell appeared at a news conference here with Foreign Minister Ignacio Walker Prieto of Chile and was asked to provide details to back that up but declined to do so.

Aw. come on, Colin. We wanna see another slide show!