WEDNESDAY 01.07.04 / 6:53 AM / LINK

Well, which is it, "We, the people" or God?

Here's an interesting article by Susan Jacoby. In it she says, "When I lecture on college campuses, students frequently express surprise at being told that the framers of the Constitution deliberately omitted any mention of God in order to assign supreme governmental power to 'We the People.' "

It's hard to maintain perspective about God issues because somepeople seem to think they know who or what God is, especially Republicans. My own view is that Republican minds are just too small to grasp God. In fact, I think all our minds are too small to grasp God so we all ought to stick to what God put it in our province to handle, namely our reason, our intellects, and our behavior.

If God had chosen to be explicit we wouldn't have so many religions. In fact, we wouldn't have any religions, all efforts to gain knowledge would be called "science". But God chose not to be explicit and so we have mystery and confusion. Pick your poison.

Despite this obvious and overbearing mystery we'll always have among us the plain, arrogantly overbearing, who dismiss this clear omission by the framers of the constitution.

As Jacoby puts it, "Dismissing this inconvenient fact, some on the religious right have suggested that divine omnipotence was considered a given in the 1780's — that the framers had no need to acknowledge God in the Constitution because his dominion was as self-evident as the rising and setting of the sun. Yet isn't it absurd to suppose that men as precise in their use of language as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison would absentmindedly have failed to insert God into the nation's founding document? In fact, they represented a majority of citizens who wished not only to free religion from government interference but government from religious interference."

In short they were right and these frothing neoconservatives have got it all wrong. But they seem to be running things right now so God it is. They share a lot with the ayatollas.

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01.07.04 / 6:31 AM / LINK

Bush plays the Hispanic card

Elections are coming up, so he's morphing into a Democrat.

As reported in the NY Times, "The real political risk to the White House, moderate Republicans said, was whether the proposals would be as welcomed by Hispanics as Mr. Bush and his political advisers expected. Many Hispanic leaders quickly heaped criticism on an immigration plan that they said did not go far enough, and asserted that the White House was cynically chasing their votes with an empty plan that would do them no good in the end."

And it'll be interesting to see how this plays out within his atavistic party.

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01.07.04 / 6:14 AM / LINK

If we ran our households like this... Wait a minute, this is the U.S.A. We do run our households like this!

In typical fashion the Bush administration rejects the view of the I.M.F. that U.S. fiscal policy is a danger to the global economy. As usual the Bush administration thinks they're right and everybody else is wrong.

As this report in today's NY Times says, "With its rising budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance, the United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report released Wednesday by the International Monetary Fund."

Nah. Not to worry says George Bush. I've got everything under control ...especially the media.

In another opinion in the Times piece we learn that "In a paper presented last weekend, Robert E. Rubin, the former secretary of the Treasury, said that the federal budget was 'on an unsustainable path' and that the 'scale of the nation's projected budgetary imbalance is now so large that the risk of severe adverse consequences must be taken very seriously, although it is impossible to predict when such consequences may occur.' "

Don't worry, says Bush. Republicans have everything under control.

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1.07.04 / 5:38 / LINK

Electoral God Games in a Santa Claus Nation

Who can blame a politician who get's behind God in a nation that claims to believe in God and miracles more than it believes the science of evolution? Howard Dean is only practicing prudence by jumping on the god wagon, though it's disappointing he's trying to do so. It's even more disheartening that in the present political climate he feels he must.

Columnist Nicholas Kristof takes a look at the relative positions of Republicans and Democrats on religious belief. What he points out is that Democrats are slogging uphill on this one.

"America is riven today by a "God gulf" of distrust," says Kristof, "dividing churchgoing Republicans from relatively secular Democrats. A new Great Awakening is sweeping the country, with Americans increasingly telling pollsters that they believe in prayer and miracles, while only 28 percent say they believe in evolution." That's 2-8 percent!

Very Beautiful:


Not so:


U.S. religious view: A triumph of aesthetics over reality, of wishful thinking over pure mystery

According to statistics more Americans find it more comprehensible --despite scientific evidence-- to believe in what in any other context would read as fable, rather than to put their money on the theory of evolution which has stacks of scientific data to back it. Adam, Eve, and the serpent, before Homoerectus, Neanderthal, and Homosapiens. But belief before evidence is a troublesome way to go.

I was very disappointed as a child when I finally understood there was no Santa Claus, but I shudder to think of what my life would be like if I still believed it. No drive, no sense of responsibilty; just waiting, waiting, waiting for flying reindeer and a sleigh full of gifts.

"Get a life," my wife would have said.

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MONDAY 01.05.03 / 9:14 PM / LINK

If short-sightedness were a virtue...

Japan doesn't think our screening for mad cow disease is stringent enough. So what's new? Everybody knows Americans have trouble regulating themselves. Put ten U.S. citizens in a locked and sealed garage, each with his own personal SUV running at high idle and they still won't believe the results of poor air quality tests. At least half of them have to keel over first.

And even then the most ideologically paralyzed rightwingers left alive will insist they need more scientific evidence the deaths we're caused by carbon monoxide poisoning and not by Hillary Clinton.

Where do our officials stand on this? U.S. agriculture officials have suggested comprehensive screening of all beef to be eaten by people would be unnecessary and costly. Death is much more preferred then smaller profits.

If short-sightedness were a virtue, Virtue Czar William Bennet could claim near sainthood for his party and its beef business bedfellows. But the Japanese, at least, aren't buying, in more ways than one. According to the Salon article linked to above, On Monday, "Japan's agriculture ministry said it plans to send envoys to Australia and New Zealand this week to ask about buying more of their beef."

More on bad beef.

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