President Gas

We're getting closer to an evangelical Christian theocracy than you think. Even though I'm all to cognizant of the Bush administrations efforts to eliminate women's access to safe abortion, birth control, and medically-accurate reproductive health information, it scared the living poop out of me to read this article in The Nation about their efforts to funnel millions of tax dollars to the Christian right's grassroots organizations, while using the full might of the federal government to defund, discredit, and persecute the Christian right's perceived enemies (Planned Parenthood, the Audubon Society, ACLU, Human Rights Watch, etc.). Who would have thought that Bush and Co. could have obliterated so much of what has made America great in so little time? What happened to the separation of church and state? What happened to the "great American melting pot" (sorry to go so "Schoolhouse Rock" on you) -- the acknowledgment that our diversity is a source of America's strength?

Speaking of Bush's trampling of the Constitution, why hasn't anyone been fired over Abu Gharib (and why hasn't it been an issue in the election)? If this had happened on Clinton's watch, he and his Secretary of Defense would have been crucified by the Republicans and the press! Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, the freak who wrote the legal memo justifying the President's use of torture in the "war on terror," is now a federal judge, for pete's sake, and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez is being promoted! Where's the outrage over Ashcroft's Department of Justice (proof positive that irony's not dead) trying to indefinitely revoke Jose Padilla's Constitutional right to due process? Who knows who they'll be "disappearing" if they win (or again are selected by the Supreme Court) in November? If you're an outspoken opponent of the Bush Regime, or an enemy of the Christian right (and you thought Nixon's sh*t list was long!), it might be you.