The emergence of the religious right as a national and local force has put our schools under constant scrutiny, with well-funded religious groups chomping at the bit to sue some school over some supposed slight to Christianity.  It not only fuels the misperception that Christians are persecuted, but creates an ever-stronger chilling effect: schools voluntarily change their behavior in ways that please the Christians, simply to stave off the cost and bad publicity of a lawsuit accusing them of discriminating against Christians.

No one doubts that arbitrary torture is wrong. Were we to pull random American citizens from their homes and drag them into a cell for a bit of waterboarding, we would undoubtedly be destroying our own moral fiber and discrediting our history. We would be no better than the Islamists we fight. But there is a fundamental difference between our treatment of non-citizens and our treatment of citizens. There is a fundamental difference between how we treat our friends and how we treat our enemies.

What distinguishes us from our enemies is not how we treat our enemies, but what we fight to ensure for our friends.

Wowee Zowee, Batman! A Rethug tells Il Chimpster off!...but who are we kidding?...

So the fearless leader and his personal Gonzo at the Justice Department have backed down on the NSA warrantless spying program, which will now operate with oversight by the FISA court.

If you don't laugh at these jackasses, you'll go crazy.  The House of Representatives votes to cut interest rates on student loans, and the White House opposes the bill because (I swear I'm not making this up) "the bill would encourage more student borrowing...encouraging more student debt can also fuel today's upward tuition spiral."

Tony Snow, Tony Snow, Tony Snow.  Maybe if you say it three times in a row, real fast, you can get back to the reality side of the mirror.  

This will come as no surprise to anyone who really understands bureaucracy and capitalism, but it's still infuriating--when "security" meets "marketing," guess which one wins?

Madison Avenue gave us the Pepsi Generation, pop culture gave us Generations X and Y, and WWII gave us the long and exhaustingly chronicled Baby Boom generation. A quarter of a century of Reaganism, globalization, and free marketeerism have given us "The Aldi Generation."

Apart from the very real possibility that Iraqis are now so anti-American that no policy supported by the U.S. could possibly get Iraqi public support, and that no Iraqi politician seen as really supporting the U.S. could possibly manage to survive in Iraqi politics, I think all of us need to ask the President and all our elected federal officials a single question:  What if the new "surge" goes as badly as all our other policies have gone?

Someone wrote in to the editor/opnion section of The Arizona Republic newspaper, expressing a concern many of us have of late...

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