Umm….

Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers filed suit against God Friday, asking a court to order the Almighty and his followers to stop making terrorist threats.

Nebraska: Big with the Wacky.

The suit accuses God of having his chroniclers “disseminate in written form, said admissions, throughout the Earth in order to inspire fear, dread, anxiety, terror and uncertainty, in order to coerce obedience to Defendant’s will.”

[...]

The lawsuit indicates that Chambers attempted to make God appear in order to serve him by saying “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” but the Almighty declined, like many defendants, to make it easy for a plaintiff to serve him with court papers.

WTF?

Chambers filed the suit to make a point that the state constitution allows lawsuits to be filed for any reason, according to WOWT.

O RLY?

The full story’s over at Wired.

Chad Jones at Theater Dogs points us to what is my favorite YouTube mashup of the year:

“If You Were Gay” from Avenue Q
plus
“I Am Not Gay!” from Sen. Larry Craig:

YouTube vid: If Larry Craig were Gay

[via Valli « via Theater Dogs]

Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor (she was Chief of the San Jose Branch U.S. Attorney’s Office), has constructed a theoretical convening of a grand jury in which she lays out the case that Bush and company deliberately and willfully deceived the nation about the Iraq war.

Her work is being released as a book, United States v. George W. Bush et al., but there’s a sizeable excerpt available on AlterNet.

“Elizabeth de la Vega, appearing on behalf of the United States.” That is a phrase I’ve uttered hundreds of times in twenty years as a federal prosecutor. I retired two years ago. So, obviously, I do not now speak for any U.S. Attorney’s Office, nor do I represent the federal government. This should be apparent from the fact that I am proposing a hypothetical indictment of the President and his senior advisers — not a smart move for any federal employee who wishes to remain employed. Lest anyone miss the import of this paragraph, let me emphasize that it is a disclaimer: I am writing as a private citizen.

Obviously, as a private citizen, I cannot simply draft and file an indictment. Nor can I convene a grand jury. Instead, in the following pages I intend to present a hypothetical indictment to a hypothetical grand jury. The defendants are President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The crime is tricking the nation into war — in legal terms, conspiracy to defraud the United States. And all of you are invited to join the grand jury.

[...]

[One of my goals] is to send the message home — to whomever will listen. And this is it:

The President has committed fraud.

It is a crime in the legal, not merely the colloquial, sense.

It is far worse than Enron.

It is not a victimless crime.

We cannot shrug our shoulders and walk away.

» Full excerpt (AlterNet)

visited security check points at the White House, the main Treasury, IRS and Justice Department Buildings and the Capitol. “V’s” purpose was to deliver the People’s Petitions for Redress of Grievances relating to the Government’s violations of the war powers, tax, privacy and money clauses of the Constitution, and to inform key Government officials that at least 100 more “Vs” would be at their doorstep on November 14th expecting a response to the Petitions.

What’s most interesting, I think, is that the Secret Service, et al, were generally very friendly with “V,” and listened to his explanations rationally.

When an agent asked if “V” would remove his mask for identification purposes, “V” explained that would defeat the very purpose of the mask, which was to give expression to the fact that the nation was becoming a police state, that too many people were becoming afraid to be identified as dissenters or protestors, and that this was not in the long term interest of a free people. The agents accepted the veracity of “V’s” message and refrained from veering “V” from his vanguard visit as the vox populi.

Really, though, how sad a state of affairs is it when it’s noteworthy that the agents weren’t jackbooted thugs?

The full essay and some [over-long] videos are here.

[via John Wick]

For those who aren’t sure where they need to go to vote, and who haven’t already voted absentee, Amelia G points us to a nationwide polling place locator site.

And in that spirit, here’s the Lascivious Biddies with “Cast That Ballot”:
[audio:Lascivious_Biddies-Cast_That_Ballot.mp3]

[via]

Why is she posting this information? As she says in another post:

When my friends and I began to discuss the way the wind was blowing regarding Roe — and the fact that there might not be abortion-friendly laws in the United States, especially in red states, soon, several commented that within a few years, there would of course be setups built to handle it — safe illegal clinics, another Jane network, newsgroups developed for the sole purpose of transporting women, et cetera. But even as this idea soothed us a little, it also suggested something horrible: that for a few years, there would be a service gap that would kill many women unlucky enough to get pregnant during those lean years.

I am posting this now so that the information is available for anyone who believes it is needed where they are, as a hedge against these laws. No woman should be caught in a gap, forced to give birth or attempt self-abortion.

Brava, Molly.

[AP] PIERRE, S.D. – Gov. Mike Rounds signed legislation Monday banning nearly all abortions in South Dakota, setting up a court fight aimed at challenging the 1973
U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

The bill would make it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion unless the procedure was necessary to save the woman’s life. It would make no exception for cases of rape or incest.

/stunned and dismayed

[EDITED TO ADD:] Planned Parenthood is asking for help in what’s surely going to be a Supreme Court battle over this anti-Roe v. Wade.

In a reversal of policy, the United States on Monday backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a coalition of 40 organizations, led by the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, called for an explanation of the vote which aligned the United States with governments that have long repressed the rights of sexual minorities.

…

In voting against the applications to the NGO committee, the U.S. was joined by Cameroon, China, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Senegal, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Votes in favor of consultative status came from Chile, France, Germany, Peru, and Romania. Colombia, India, and Turkey abstained, while Côte d’Ivoire was absent.

Ah, we’re teaming up with such happy, shiny comrades-in-oppression as Iran and Zimbabwe. From elsewhere on that page:

As the U.S. government acknowledged in its 2004 country report on Iran, Iranian law punishes homosexual conduct between men with the death penalty. Human Rights Watch has documented four cases of arrests, flogging, or execution of gay men in Iran since 2003. In its 2004 country report on Zimbabwe, the U.S. government noted President Robert Mugabe’s public denouncement of homosexuals, blaming them for “Africa’s ills.” In the past, Mugabe has called gays and lesbians “people without rights” and “worse than dogs and pigs.”

[via John Wick]

So I don’t understand why the American zeitgeist is so astonishingly indifferent to the wholesale sidestepping of our civil and legal rights that the current administration has been engaged in — from Jose Padilla to the warrantless wiretaps on Americans abroad… and those are just the injustices we know about.

After all, we’re dealing here with people whom the State says it suspects, but has not yet proven, are “drug dealers.” With those people (and, of course, with “suspected terrorists”), anything goes, even before a trial and without any due process of any kind. All of this can be done strictly on the Government’s say-so, even if the Constitutional “niceties” which exist to prohibit such behavior haven’t been complied with. “It may be wrong,” spits out Jonah, but we should do it anyway, because these people deserve it.

Isn’t it exactly this depraved thinking which lies at the heart of almost every current controversy we have? The whole point of the Bill of Rights — really, its principal function — is to prevent the Government from punishing those whom the Government claims (but has not yet proven in a court of law) are bad people deserving of punishment. That’s why there is a sequence mandated by the Constitution before rights can be abridged and punishment inflicted — first, charge someone with a crime, then give them the right to defend themselves along with other protections of due process, and then convict them. Only then are they considered criminals whose rights can be abridged.

Glenn Greenwald has a nice essay called “A Nation of Jonah Goldbergs” that is, IMHO, on the mark.

(Counterpoint: My friend Doug has a different point of view.)