That's okay with me. It'll make the choir sing louder and maybe someone outside the church will hear.

Go, Al!!

Official secrets should only exist for national security reasons. Secrets that are kept from the citizenry because voters would be displeased to learn what officials have done or have failed to do are not legitimate secrets. Unfortunately, it seems likely more things are kept under wraps to avoid pissing off the public than actually to protect us from anything or anyone.

What we need is an "official secrets" version of the wiretapping court: a panel of judges who review applications from the government for permission to keep something secret. No permission, no secret.

Gotta chime in again. The drive to war was not powered by something as inane and pointless as Bush's "ignorant whim." A war, with its built-in claim of presidential privilege, is a made-to-order cover for the real goals of the administration, the goals for which Little Georgie was rammed into office. How much easier is it to cut taxes, gut environmental protections, allow corporate interests to engorge themselves further and further, leave universal health care on the back burner, put off requiring higher-mileage product out of Detroit, etc., etc., when there's an oversized, overseas SWAT operation that can be rebranded by Rovian semanticists as a war?

As someone else pointed out, Bush has put conservatives on the SC. He's also cut taxes for his best friends, jacked up the price of oil for his best friends by fomenting even more unrest in the Middle East and cutting off oil from Iraq, he's made serious inroads into those pesky environmental protections that so bedevil his best friends, he's stood by as the WalMartization of the consumer economy proceeded unchecked for another six (presumably another eight by the time he's finished) years, he's made sure his best friends weren't forced by mandate to produce more fuel-efficient automobiles...and obviously I could go on. Maybe, just maybe GWB isn't as concerned about being popular as one might think. Since his best friends are laughing all the way to the bank, and he's going to spend the rest of his life basking in their gratitude, what does he give a shit about being popular with thee and me?

But the truly just resolution to the Holocaust would have been to carve out a nice, juicy chunk of the nicest part of Germany and to create Israel there. Dispossessing Germans who had either participated in, or turned a deaf/blind ear/eye to what the Nazis were doing would have had a real sense of justice to it. Throwing the Palestinians off their land was like finding a whipping boy rather than punishing the true villains.

I took my son to the state university he’s going to attend recently for an orientation session. I hadn’t been on a college campus in decades. It was a wonderful facility, full of people dedicated to the proposition that my son, and a lot of other people’s children, are the future and well worth the effort to educate and mature. It was a terrific experience for a father about to push junior out of the nest. There were so many people ready to ease his transition. I thought back to the days when I first showed up at a similar institution; the bus just sort of dumped me at the curb and I damn well had to figure out what was what on my own. Obviously, some progress had been made in the intervening eons.

At one point, I was in an office and picked up a pen. On the side, it was labeled: “University of X, Department of Discrimination and Harassment.” At first, I thought, “How cool, they actually have an office with employees whose sole job is to protect kids from D & H." But I also thought about how an office with employees needs something to keep it busy, to justify its budget...and how an office of “Discrimination and Harassment” is at risk to attract a certain kind of employee: self-righteous, loaded up on PC terms and concepts, eager to root out evil even if the evil needs to be manufactured. This article is about just such a state of affairs, I believe. The DFCS, while they undoubtedly do good work and protect children in real ways, is obviously an agency that has attracted the wrong kind of employees and has, either explicitly or implicitly, sent them the message that “You’d better find plenty of evil out there, or our budget is going to suffer.” What a shame, but it’s really just human nature. I don't have a solution to propose.