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How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
John F. Kerry

While I can understand the feeling beneath that statement, what is worse is asking the military and other government employees to give up their honor in support of lies. You need to know that the vast majority of government employees are not political hacks and they really are trying to do their jobs according to the rules.

The Shrubbery introduced the ultimate corruption to government: the corporate model. In a corporation the purpose of lawyers is to make the decisions of management “legal”, not ethical or correct, but merely within the letter of the existing law. That is what the lawyers acting as counsel to this administration are doing.

In the last century the executive branch would ask for a legal opinion as to whether an action was legal, but now the question is how to present the action as legal. When career attorneys refuse to going along with this deceit they are removed from the decision process to be replaced by political appointees who will play by the new rules.

This is how they came up with an executive order that contravenes the clear meaning and intent of the laws governing domestic surveillance and has the National Security Agency intercepting the communications of American citizens.

I was part of the National Security Agency for 8 years. This conduct is illegal. I was told it was illegal in an official briefing. There were specific instructions as to the course to take if it occurred by accident, and reporting requirements to prevent the accident from recurring. This isn’t a close call, and it’s not a matter of interpretation, it is illegal.

The New York Times held this story for a year. They found out about it from Agency insiders without any doubt, and they should not have held up the story while the criminals in the White House continued to claim dictatorial powers based on a non-existent declaration of war on TERROR. We have a system of checks and balances. That system isn’t suspended for wars, real or imagined.

It is an unconscionable abrogation of their basic position in the American society that we have found yet another example of the media withholding a story that they had before the Presidential election that would have reflected badly on the Shrubbery and his culture of corruption. The American people were systematically excluded from the information to make an informed decision on the fitness of the current administration to remain in office.

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The Religious Reich are always the victims, they are “martyrs” for their “faith”, which is under constant attack by everyone.

Into this atmosphere steps an agnostic, paleontologist Gregory S. Paul of Baltimore, who is tired of the ID/Creationist attacks on evolution. Being an academic, he used a scholarly tool to irritate the “Talibaptists”.

Mr. Paul decided to research the claim that a “secularized” society is worse that a society of the faithful. He called his study: Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies.

The MSNBC article is subtitled: Researcher of religion’s link to social ills comes under withering attack, which is a mischaracterization as bad as the distortions of those attacking him.

The “victims” are accusing Mr. Paul of claiming to prove that religion makes societies worse, while Mr. Paul states that the report generally shows a lack of correlation between religion and condition of society.

The Reich just can’t stand being judged irrelevant.

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™ ^{[Kevin Drum]}

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Annoying Ringo

Bring that box closer…got it!

[Editor: Ringo is not a fan of posing and really doesn’t like the flash.]

Friday Ark

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