Things NOT to say if you call your Mom tomorrow

In light of the NSA's recently disclosed data-mining activity, there should be certain precautions taken if you happen to phone home on Mother's Day. Certain words and phrases that you avoid using. Such as:

Hey Mom, my new job's da bomb! My boss has been laudin' my performance! Sue aside, he says I'm the best new recruit!

After watching Scott McClellan, and now Tony Snow, I have to think, 'Gee, Hodding Carter wasn't such a bad White House spokesman.

You've not had much luck with that hedge on the left side of the house. I think the shade might kill that bush.

It's almost as exciting as the time I got to shake Muhammed Ali's hand!

Say hi to Al, Kay, da whole gang, and Gramma! Oh, and "Hi, Jack"!

And tell Dad I said, "Over the hill, my eye! E.D. is easily treated these days, and there's no reason to be ashamed.' (And please don't bring this up with me again, ever.)"

And lastly:

Love you! Death to America, the Great Satan!

How long has this been a 'Constitutional Crisis'?

The Bush administration came clean this week and told us that they had been spying on us.

As you may remember, they had previously denied doing so, then said it was only international calls, then finally admitted it was all calls. Your calls, my calls, the calls of politicians, of reporters, of government officials, tens of millions of landline and cellular phone calls and probably our e-mail communications as well. Purely between Americans. They're all stored by a government agency in an attempt to "mine" that information for, they tell us again, “potential” ties between you and the terrorists. But don't worry, the president says, the government would never misuse the data they've collected on us.

Three telecommunications companies – AT&T, which recently changed its name from SBC, and is headquartered in San Antonio; and Verizon and BellSouth – apparently allowed the NSA to monitor all calls passing through their lines. One company, Qwest, declined to participate. They thought that it might be illegal.

Republicans expressed as much shock and outrage as Democrats. Senator Dianne Feinstein said: “We are approaching a constitutional confrontation.”

Well, if the Washington politicians had been paying attention a few months ago, they could have heard David Van Os say that. In fact, David was calling it a “Consitutional Crisis” even before Al Gore was. And in February, David challenged incumbent attorney general and corporate shill Greg Abbott to protect Texans against illegal federal wiretapping:

“I think this is a matter where the people of Texas have a right to know your views. They have a right to know if their elected attorney general views such important issues the same way Alberto Gonzales and George Bush do, or if he will stand by their fundamental rights to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into their personal phone calls.”

The Attorney General is given broad power in the Texas Constitution to bring marauding corporations to heel. He can file a lawsuit on behalf of all Texans restraining their activities which are in violation of the law. And every legal expert agrees that wiretapping without a warrant is against the law.

So is there anything can you do to prevent your government from continuing to spy on you? Sure is. First, contact AT&T and Verizon and BellSouth if you’re their customer and tell them to stop sharing your information with the feds. Second, call Greg Abbott’s office and ask him when he intends to do his job and demand that the big phone companies stop breaking the law.

And third, you can vote in November for an Attorney General who will fight to protect your civil rights from a federal government and big companies who want to keep taking them away.

Full disclosure (for those who weren't already aware): I am the statewide coordinator for the Van Os campaign.

714 and 31 (26, actually)

Two examples of recent good reading on unrelated subjects:

In the hallowed company of Ruth and Aaron, Bonds is treated as the punchline to a joke, like the one in left field that said, "For Sale: Life-Sized Bobblehead. See Leftfield." Or the one in the upper deck with an enormous asterisk-marked head drawn over a small body that said, "Life Size. Shrink This." Or the faux Giants jerseys that say "Cheater" on the front and "Juiced" arched over a No. 25 on the back. Or the people dressed in giant cardboard juice boxes marked "100% Roids." Or the "Got Juice?'' signs. Or the skinny guy with the T-shirt that said "Barry With Pirates" while his buddy, dressed in an inflatable sumo costume, wore one that said "Barry With San Fran." Or the sign that simply said, "Fraud*.' On and on it goes, the majesty of history trumped by lowbrow humor.

"Cheater."

That simple sign may be the worst of it. An athlete being labeled a cheater is worse than being called soft or a loser or even a jerk. And yet that is the verdict on Bonds, a player once gifted with as great a package of all-around baseball skills the game had ever seen. And that, really, is why this tour toward history is so sad.

I think Barry ought to be in the HOF. After all, baseball has been rife with cheating from the beginning, from spitballs to corked bats. Gaylord Perry, who won Cy Youngs in both leagues, was never reticent in talking about his tobacco juice and emory boards and sandpaper.

But Barry will never get to the HOF because the writers who do the voting despise him, and not just for cheating but for his obnoxious attitude going back to when his hat size was still a 7 1/4.

Now then, about that other number:

(T)he rise of the immigration debate was the single worst thing, at the single worst moment, that could have happened to the GOP coalition. It is the San Andreas fault line between the business conservatives and the movement/fundie conservatives. When this issue came up, that fault line slipped, and we are still rocking and rolling from the aftershocks.

The business conservatives, of course, want an ocean of super-cheap labor they don't have to offer health care bennies to, so they wanted the Senate bill. The movement/fundie conservatives want a thousand-foot wall built around the country and every undocumented worker sent away in leg irons, and so they backed the Sensenbrenner bill in the House. These two positions are totally irreconcilable, and unutterably dangerous to the GOP.

The business conservatives provide the cash, so they are essential to the coalition. The movement/fundie conservatives provide the blood, sweat and fanatacism that has helped a minority party achieve near-total political dominance, so they are essential to the coalition. Now they are at each other's throats, and Bush's weirdly aerobic straddle on the issue pacified neither side.

There's more, including the NYT graphic which explains the numbers in the headline, but there's enough known to reveal the simple truth: the GOP can't make a move on immigration without screwing about 40% of its base. If they pick the rich side, then the fundie base stays home on Election Day or votes Libertarian. And the DC pols can't get off the crack -- err, corporate money.

But it still remains to be seen how it plays out in November.

For now, just pop some corn and watch the Republican Party crumble.

You better watch out. Fitzmas is nearly here.

MSNBC's David Schuster, as interviewed by Keith Olbermann and transcribed at Raw Story:

Olbermann: What are you gathering on these two main points. Is the decision by Mr. Fitzgerald coming soon, would it be an indictment?

Shuster: Well, Karl Rove's legal team has told me that they expect that a decision will come sometime in the next two weeks. And I am convinced that Karl Rove will, in fact, be indicted. And there are a couple of reasons why. First of all, you don't put somebody in front of a grand jury at the end of an investigation or for the fifth time, as Karl Rove testified a couple, a week and a half ago, unless you feel that's your only chance of avoiding indictment. So in other words, the burden starts with Karl Rove to stop the charges. Secondly, it's now been 13 days since Rove testified. After testifying for three and a half hours, prosecutors refused to give him any indication that he was clear. He has not gotten any indication since then. And the lawyers that I've spoken with outside of this case say that if Rove had gotten himself out of the jam, he would have heard something by now.

And then the third issue is something we've talked about before, and that is, in the Scooter Libby indictment, Karl Rove was identified as 'Official A.' It's the term that prosecutors use when they try to get around restrictions on naming somebody in an indictment. We've looked through the records of Patrick Fitzgerald from when he was prosecuting cases in New York and from when he's been US attorney in Chicago. And in every single investigation, whenever Fitzgerald has identified somebody as Official A, that person eventually gets indicted themselves, in every single investigation. Will Karl Rove defy history in this particular case? I suppose anything is possible when you are dealing with a White House official. But the lawyers that I've been speaking with who know this stuff say, don't bet on Karl Rove getting out of this.

I've got cards to mail, presents still to buy, I have to get tinsel and lights for the tree, decide on turkey or ham ...

Finally. A frame that fits my portrait of Jesus.

Or more specifically, the snapshot of the practice of American politics and religion.

From now on, as Andrew Sullivan has established and Phillip Martin has advanced, "Christians" will be replaced with Christianists and "Christianity" is discarded in favor of Christianism.

You're going to have click on the links to get the frontstory. Here's my summary: the new words most accurately describe the co-optation of selected religious tenets by (mostly -- well, virtually exclusively) the Republican Party and their various acolytes in order to advance their political agenda, but which betray the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Christianists, in short, are hypocrites, and I believe Jesus would have spit them out of his mouth.

Here's a few examples of what I'm talking about:

• Christianists like Bill Frist -- and his buddy James Dobson -- really don't give a cat's ass about domestic animals -- or poor people, for that matter.
• Christianism is Tom DeLay grinning through his mugshot, letting us "see Christ through him", while lobbyists pour champagne on his daughter in a hot tub.
• Christianists like Rick Perry go to church to sign a bill that outlaws marriage except between heterosexuals while our children go without the proper schoolbooks to pass the state-mandated tests to advance to the sixth grade.
• Christianism is when Greg Abbott argues before the United States Supreme Court that a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state Capitol doesn't violate the First Amendment. And a majority of Justices agree.
• A small group of Christianists gathered just this past weekend in Pasadena to choose the man -- sorry, Dr. Sekula-Gibbs -- who will try to fill the golf shoes of The Hammer. The Seven District Twenty-Two Apostles, minus the Sugar Land mayor who was saved from the dead by prayer, dutifully answered their questions (.pdf).

Gee, I'm sure there's more examples of Christianism but I haven't even Googled yet.

Can you think of any?