I am a citizen of the United States of America. In this country, I can criticize my government as intelligently, as profanely, or as stupidly as I wish. I can call the president of the nation an unintelligent, uninspiring, and incompetent leader — which I have done. I can call my representative in Congress a buffoonish party hack — which I have done — and urge his removal from office by the voters. I can attack the policies enacted by government at all levels as often as I wish.
I can assemble with others to complain about the government. I can petition the government for redress of grievances. I can practice a religion free of government interference. Most importantly, I have the right to speak my mind. I can say whatever I want about the government short of advocating violence against it. I am free to speak or write critically about the actions or inactions of my government.
I can be a critic of my government because for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of Americans before me fought and died for my right to do that. Full Story »
Wu Tao stands at the front of the bus, microphone in hand, radiating charm.
Wu “Harry” Tao (right) talks with St. Bonaventure
professors Carl Case (left) and Darwin King at the
Winter Palace in Xi’an.
As our group rides around Xi’an, Wu Tao serves as our tourguide. He stands in the bus’s center aisle and regales us with stories about the city’s past. He wears a dark t-shirt with a big numeral “8” on it—which has made him easy to find in a crowd—jeans, a pair of open-toed sandals, and a million-yuan smile.
When he points something out to us and tells us its name, he carefully repeats it and even spells it out for us to ensure we can follow him.
Tao is his given name while Wu is his family name, but Chinese custom puts the family name first, then the given name: Wu Toa.
Like many Chinese, Wu Tao has an American name, too: Harry. “Like Harry Potter,” he says with good-natured amusement. A lot of things appear to amuse him. He smiles freely and chuckles often.
Orson Scott Card is a barking fascist asshat. Let me illustrate.
I always marveled at how some of my friends worshiped the writing of Orson Scott Card. Maybe, I thought, it’s because we’re North Carolinians and he’s from Greensboro. From my perspective he was nothing special, at best, and has in the last couple of decades evolved into perhaps America’s most overrated science fiction author. Ender’s Game was prescient in its way - in a world where weaponry is so technologized that war is a video game, of course kids can be uber-warriors. But when the boy is made into some kind of equally uber moralist and philosopher (or whatever the hell Speaker for the Dead was about) I smelled the pungent aroma of self-indulgence that so often attends SF writers of a certain stripe.
The Alvin Maker series was even less bearable. We were doing fine in Seventh Son, clipping through an interesting enough little story (assuming you could get past the inexplicably patronizing treatment of Native American names) and then - the damnedest what the fuck passage in all of known literature. Full Story »
We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. - Natalie Maines
I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. - Merle Haggard
Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Full Story »
Those who own a property have the right to continue owning that property, and what they do with their justly owned and acquired property is entirely their own look-out.
If you happen to be the owner of a unique piece of art, say the Mona Lisa, and you decide to set fire to it, then that is a terrible tragedy, but it is your property. No government should ever have the right to intervene.
Apartheid in South Africa was a crime against humanity. You can argue the reasons. Some say that it was racial prejudice translating into attempted genocide. Others that it was a violation of human rights of equality and justice. Full Story »
Let’s go back to one month after 9/11. The country just suffered its worse terrorist attack in the nation’s history and was going through another. Weaponized anthrax was being sent through the mail targeting politicians and the 4th estate. The intelligence agencies failed catastrophically and didn’t cooperate with each other. The nation panicked and didn’t know if it could protect itself.
Gay marriage will open the door to incest, to polygamy, and every conceivable marriage arrangement demented minds can possibly conceive. If God does not then punish America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Out in the west Texas town of El Paso, where bags of drugs are simply thrown over the border from Juarez to be retrieved from back yards on the US side, things almost took a turn for the worst. The City Council decided that the terrible violence of Juarez and its creep across the border needs to stop. But they didn’t call for helicopter gunships or paramilitary intervention; the failure of those sorts have tactics has become all to apparent. According to a recent Reuters report, the Mexican cartels have even infiltrated the DEA. They have the money and the arms to fight, and the profits are high enough to make it worthwhile. The violence in Juarez has reached epic proportions, so in a show of solidarity with their sister city, the El Paso City Council voted in favor of a resolution that included “an honest, open national debate on ending the prohibition of narcotics.”
Never mind that the resolution also called for clamping down on gun running and money laundering. It was the desire to debate, and perhaps focus less on incarceration for drug offenses that made the resolution go over like a lead Zeppelin. The Mayor vetoed it, and the council members started getting pressure from as high as the US Congress to shut the fuck up. Full Story »
Last week, actor Tom Hanks called Mormons who supported California’s Proposition 8 “un-American.” Today Hanks apologized.
He shouldn’t have, because he’s right.
Anyone who would support curtailing the civil rights of a minority group is un-American. Codifying discrimination in a state constitution or in the U.S. Constitution is un-American. And supporting people who aim to curtail civil rights and codify discrimination, as the LDS Church did with regard to Prop-8, is un-American.
And I’ll say this to anyone who supported Prop-8 - you acted un-American too.
During Monday’s State Department press briefing, Associated Press State Department Correspondent Matthew Lee posed the most pointed question about the conflict in Gaza and the Bush administration’s position: “What’s wrong with an immediate cease-fire that doesn’t have to be sustainable and durable if, during the pause that you get from an immediate cease-fire, something longer-term can be negotiated?” Lee didn’t tread lightly either when Deputy Secretary of State Sean McCormack failed to provide a sufficient answer and continued to challenge McCormack on the same point in Tuesday’s press briefing.
Yet a funny thing happened on the way to print: the substance of these exchanges never made it into Lee’s corresponding articles. Full Story »
In 1977, former president Richard Nixon offered up some interesting thoughts on the concept of legality.
FROST: So what in a sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.
NIXON: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.
Merry Christmas to the readers of Scholars & Rogues! This is a personal greeting – and I thus hereby issue a disclaimer that it does not speak on behalf of nor represent the intentions or persuasions of all of my blogger colleagues here at our joint endeavor.
But I’d like to offer this wish of seasonal cheer, no strings attached. No agenda, no proselytizing, no offense. Just the outpouring of a full and warm heart on the 25th of December.
It is Christmas Day, and my heart’s naïve hope is that it could stand for what it is ought to be in the broadest cultural sense – an occasion to wish peace on earth and good will to all. Whether or not one believes in the incarnation of Jesus Christ as God come into human history, the nativity myth is filled with simple beauty, and the ancient yuletide traditions it has become associated with have for centuries celebrated the triumph of light over darkness in a bleak world. To say “Merry Christmas” is, for me, to affirm that light and share its spirit with others, whether or not we embrace the same religious practices or none at all. Full Story »
Well, here’s a fine howdy-do: Rick Warren, pastor of the mother of all mega-churches, has been tapped to channel Jesusconduct a seancedeliver the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Because Warren is, you know, a “moderate.”
…in 2004 Warren declared that marriage, reproductive choice, and stem cell research were “non-negotiable” issues for Christian voters and has admitted that the main difference between himself and James Dobson is a matter of tone. He criticized Obama’s answers at the Faith Forum he hosted before the election and vowed to continue to pressure him to change his views on the issue of reproductive choice. He came out strongly in support of Prop 8, saying “there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … Full Story »
In this season’s eighth episode, Boston Legal - the relentlessly liberal ABC dramedy starring William Shatner and James Spader - lobbed an absolute bomb at those of us on the pro-choice side of the Roe v. Wade question. The bunker-buster was posed, predictably enough, by Crane Poole & Schmitt’s resident conservative, the gleefully Republican Denny Crane, portrayed by Shatner. BL fans know Crane to be positively Cheney-esque in his politics (although he did finally cross the aisle to vote for Obama because even he couldn’t stomach four more years like the last eight), and he routinely plays the straw man for the passionate liberalism of Spader’s litigator par excellence, Alan Shore.
This time, though, Crane (who’s battling through the early stages of Alzheimer’s) breaks through to a moment of pristine, Emmy-worthy clarity. Full Story »
A person consists both of their being and of the works that their being produces. Whether those works are physical or as intangible as the time spent on a particular task.
A traditional Westminster approach to politics, with a typical Left / Right political duopoly, has become the gold standard of democratic representation. It is also conflicted and inherently incapable of resolving its core contradiction. Full Story »
And now for something completely different…a group of crafty Brooklynites pooled their collective resources to produce this calendar of local burlesque dancers. All proceeds go directly to supporting Barack Obama (Obama’s campaign, though, is in no way affiliated; sorry McCain-Palin trolls). The dancers are accompanied by quotes from W.’s archive of inanity.
It isn’t just that there is an appetite for scandal, sex, sleaze, death narratives, it is also that feeding such appetites can be very profitable. The fact is that an essential problem with today’s media, one that has been gestating for many years, even decades, lies with the families and trust-funders that own media chains, and with the media moguls that, like great beasts, roam the landscape of a new grim cultural ecology, gobbling up this and that tasty morsel, a television station here, a newspaper there, forever seeking to sate their own insatiable appetite. Full Story »
2 Timothy 1:7: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”
James Dobson and the Christian Right activists at Focus on the Family seem to have forgotten that scriptural promise. Then again, there is a great deal of the Bible they seem to have forgotten, or chosen to blatantly ignore. Their real “focus” is on scare tactics to frighten conservative evangelicals away from any flirtation with voting for Barack Obama, who may as well be the devil incarnate masquerading beneath a veneer of seductive charisma.
The latest instrument in this campaign of emotional intimidation is a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” [download PDF at website] produced by Focus on the Family Action, the PAC arm of Dobson’s organization. Full Story »
That’s the debate I’ve been having with an old college friend whom I’ve recently reconnected with.He’s become a Catholic since we knew one another back in the ‘80s, and is a deep-thinking, deeply principled man.He will not be voting for Barack Obama in November.Nor will he be voting for John McCain.He will vote, but he will cast a blank ballot.He urges me, if I am serious about my moral commitments, to do likewise.Neither candidate, in his opinion, cares enough about ‘life issues’ to merit an affirmative vote.
The New York Times reports that other Catholics are struggling with what do with in the upcoming election. The most troublesome issue for many remains abortion.Some, like Joe Biden, believe we must make accommodations for differing views in a pluralistic society, despite his own embrace of personhood at conception.Others, like my old friend, see Biden’s support for legal access to abortion as no different from espousing the Holocaust – if not in deed, then in complicity.
Can a Catholic possibly vote for a Democratic candidate who has regularly received a 100% approval rating from Planned Parenthood and indeed, as a state senator, voted against an Illinois version of the Born Alive Infant Protection bill passed by Congress?Can I, as a person of faith who believes all life is sacred?I am going to answer ‘yes,’ and in so doing, proclaim myself also a utilitarian and a realist, with all the moral conundra that pragmatism involves. Full Story »
It looks our old friends are up to their old games again.
In Michigan: “The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.”
In Virginia: “Election officials in the county that is home to Virginia Tech were wrong when they issued a news release saying college students who register to vote there cannot be claimed as dependents on their parents’ income tax returns, a civil liberties group said Monday.”
Orson Scott Card is a barking fascist asshat. Let me illustrate.
In 1977, former president Richard Nixon offered up 
Well, here’s a fine howdy-do: Rick Warren, pastor of the mother of all mega-churches, has been tapped to 
2 Timothy 1:7: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”
It looks our old friends are up to their old games again.
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