May 2006

Fundamentally, this is an issue of law. FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was established in 1978 to address a wide variety of issues revolving around Watergate, during which a president used foreign intelligence agencies to collect data on U.S. citizens. As part of FISA, the NSA has to get warrants to analyze and maintain collections of data involving U.S. citizens… The president claims that the process of getting those warrants—of complying with the law—is too time-consuming. Normally, that would sound like simple laziness, but the reality is that the program is so large that they would need an army of lawyers to get all the warrants they’d need to be in compliance with FISA. But the law is the law. No president has the right to pick and choose which laws they find convenient to follow.

One way for progressives to build a movement and fight Christian nationalism at the same time is to focus on local politics. For guidance, they need only look to the Christian Coalition: It wasn’t until after Bill Clinton’s election exiled the evangelical right from power in Washington that the Christian Coalition really developed its nationwide electoral apparatus… In conjunction with local initiatives, opponents of Christian nationalism need a new media strategy… Much of what media strategists need to do simply involves public education. Americans need to learn what Christian Reconstructionism means so that they can decide whether they approve of their congressmen consorting with theocrats.

Q Can you give us a readout on the President’s meeting this morning with the Iraq experts?

MR. SNOW: Yes. Oh, my goodness, I forgot to bring the list. But actually—do you have the list, Fred? Yes, it was an interesting meeting. What you ended up having was—I’ve got all the names but one written down here. We had Wayne Downing, Barry McCaffrey, Michael Vickers, Amir Taheri, Fouad Ajami and Raad Alkadiri.

Even those who admit that the United States helped start Iran’s current nuclear development claim that two factors make a difference in how Iran should be treated today as opposed to the 1970’s: Iran’s concealment of nuclear energy development activities in the past and President Ahmadinejad’s remarks on Israel.

What White House officials never tell the American public is that President Ahmadinejad’s remarks have little or no connection with any probable action on Iran’s part regarding Israel (or “the Zionist regime” to be strictly accurate regarding his reference). President Ahmadinejad has no effective power in this area, and his remarks aren’t even embraced by Iran’s clerical leaders. His remarks are widely understood as a clumsy attempt to pander to his own right-wing base in an attempt to shore up his faltering power within the Iranian government.

However, the second proposition is equally specious. It is fruitful to examine the now conventional wisdom that Iran had “regularly hidden information about its nuclear program” etc. as if this in and of itself was proof of a nuclear weapons program. Of course, it is not, although many breathlessly cite it as the principal smoking gun.

Roger Wright, UNICEF’s Special Representative for Iraq, lamented that children were confirmed as the major victims of food insecurity. “The chronic malnutrition rate of children in food insecure households was as high as 33 per cent, or one out of every three children malnourished,” he stated. Chronic malnutrition affects the youngest and most vulnerable children, aged 12 months to 23 months, most severely. “This can irreversibly hamper the young child’s optimal mental and cognitive development, not just their physical development,” he said. Acute malnutrition was also of concern, with nine per cent of Iraqi children being acutely malnourished. The highest rates (12-13 per cent) were again found in children aged under 24 months.

I don’t see the religious schism as a right/left or conservative/liberal one, anyway. To me, what it appears to be is a schism between those religious people who are concerned with justice, and those who are concerned with power. The contemporary religious right is tremendously politically powerful, but it is almost wholly unconcerned about justice — it has political and social policies that explicitly abandon or punish those who do not share its worldview, and it has a worldview which is not notably compassionate or charitable, so that leaves out quite a lot. Promoting a discriminatory agenda, promoting ignorance in public education and promoting one’s religion above all others in the political arena is not justice in any moral sense of the word.

I think many of the religious people who are rebelling against the religious right’s agenda are doing so because they see the lack of justice in it; a lack of the charity and compassion and love that is explicit in the message of Christianity, for one, and in most other religions as well. And it’s not about political positions, per se. One may believe abortion is wrong, but be opposed to a political agenda that explicitly denies to the poor the access to family planning that the middle and upper classes have as a matter of course. One may believe that homosexuality is morally wrong but be opposed to the political agenda that works to have gay Americans permanently branded as second class citizens.

The funny thing about all this is how closely it parallels the xenophobic hysteria that was raised almost exactly a century ago, during the initial wave of Japanese immigration. It was called the "Yellow Peril."

Prejudice against Asian immigrants had a long history, particularly against the Chinese. During the successful drive to exclude them—culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—popular prejudices of the nativist variety came into full play, such as a labor organizer’s screed warning of "China’s Menace to the World"…