Thursday morning and America’s getting worse

Posted on June 23, 2005 by Gene

I just don’t understand what is happening these days to my country… and why people don’t notice. For instance:

• The “Justice” Department has enacted a rule — 18 U.S.C. §2257 — that restricts websites from posting “sexually explicit” photos. It seems like they haven’t been paying attention all these years, and then John Ashcroft must have fired up a browser and realized what was out there, and Roberto Gonzalez finished the job. So to speak. Even funnier is their idea of explicit — for instance, you can’t have an image of a person with a hand down his pants, because that might indicate masturbation. And absolutely no cartoons of a sexual nature, because we all know what happened to Sponge Bob. The new regulations go into effect today, even though they were already declared unconstitutional by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Now do you see why the Bush administration is so intent on pushing through ultra right wing judges?
• Another flag-burning amendment? Are you kidding? Why do right-wingers seem to wrap themselves in symbolism and rhetoric, but not understand that the true strength of American freedom lies in the exercise of our rights, not the symbols of them? Orrin Hatch says that burning the flag is “offensive conduct” that we ought to ban. Well, so is sending thousands of American kids to their deaths for a trumped up war, but they managed to get around that constitutional road block, so…
• The Pentagon is creating a database of high school and college students so that the military can conduct recruiting — the database includes not only names and social security numbers, but grade point averages, ethnicity, and subjects studied. You know, these days the old ultra-right groups who claimed the government was overbearing and tracking us through our money seem more and more on the ball, don’t they?
• As always, once they set their sights on a new target for conquest, the neo-Cons attack from all sides. Not content to place high-ranking Bush politicos as top management of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS, they’ve now decided that the way to take over one of the last bastions of balanced broadcasting is by taking away it’s funding. What really irks me is the way they’ve just come right out and said it: they want it to be conservative. None of this tedious back and forth about “programming duplicated by commercial stations” like in the past, they just laid it on the line and told the truth. They want PBS to be a Bush administration mouthpiece like Fox or talk radio. For example: a Republican House aide recounted traveling through the South recently and hearing “six Christian radio stations and NPR. The contrast was obvious. There’s a real cultural dissonance there.” Through his eyes (or ears), the fact that NPR didn’t sound like six religious stations was a cause for concern! Scary. If they do manage to cut the funding by millions, I hope that George Soros will stand up and make a big pledge to replace that money. That’d show the bastards.

Tomorrow is Friday, and I’m sure there will be a slew of horror stories coming from various podiums… ’cause no one reads papers on Saturday. Except me.