Op-Ed

The Supreme Court's mixed rulings on displaying the Ten Commandments on public buildings and property offer us the perfect patriotic step forward for this coming July 4: let's post the first Ten Amendments, i.e. the Bill of Rights, instead.

As we approach our nation's birthday, its core values are under attack. Religious fanatics, who are profoundly unAmerican, are trying to impose their particular theology on us all.

A cult of Christian Ayatollahs and their jihad GOP are using the Ten Commandments as a wedge to force mandatory, tax-sponsored religion into every corner of American life (not to mention the rest of the world).

But it is the Bill of Rights, not the Ten Commandments, that embodies the true core of our national existence.

First and foremost, these amendments guarantee separation of church and state. Remembering the witch trials of the 1690s, a ban on theocracy was very first freedom this nation's founders enshrined.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The first thing I ever learned about politics was never to let anyone else define what you believe, or what you are for or against. I think for myself.

I am not "you liberals" or "you people on the left who always ..." My name is Molly Ivins, and I can speak for myself, thank you. I don't need Rush Limbaugh or Karl Rove to tell me what I believe.

Setting up a straw man, calling it liberal and then knocking it down has become a favorite form of "argument" for those on the right. Make some ridiculous claim about what "liberals" think, and then demonstrate how silly it is. Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and many other right-wing ravers never seem to get tired of this old game. If I had a nickel for every idiotic thing I've ever heard those on the right claim "liberals" believe, I'd be richer than Bill Gates.

The harder they come, the harder they fall.

The legendary reggae song says it all about the evil, soon over Karl Rove.

For years we've heard only of the GOP Guttermeister's "genius". But for all his alleged success, what matters most about Karl Rove's legendary career is that the world is a much worse place for who he is and what he's done. He leaves no legacy except pain and suffering, anger and devastation.

The gameplayers love Rove's uncanny mastery of the dirty trick and knife in the back, of the lowest common denominator and the perfectly timed smear. Gay marriage and flag burning, bigotry and fundamentalism, immigration and abortion....Rove's use of anything handy to divide and confuse has been peerless. No American better understands those ultimate fascist mainstays, the Terror Card and the Big Lie.

Rove began as a dirty trickster for Richard Nixon. He took the dubious George W. Bush and made him governor, then president, then "war president." He's engineered a near-absolute takeover of the American media and government in ways without precedent.

He is kingmaker and coup master, the Prince of slime and sleaze.

SAN DIEGO -- As that great American, Deep Throat, never said, "Follow the money." (The line is by William Goldman, who wrote the movie, "All the President's Men"). Keeping your eye on the shell with the pea under it is not easy when the right-wing echo chamber continually takes up new chapters in the culture wars -- the dread case of the senator who didn't, in fact, say the United States is as bad as the late Soviet Union and the equally grave perennial constitutional amendment to prevent the menace of flag desecration.

Meanwhile, largely unnoticed and unreported, the drumbeat of giveaways to big corporations continues: unnecessary tax breaks for the undeserving, more green lights for the rampant exploitation of the environment, and all manner of theft and skullduggery.

Seriously, this administration is starting to look like that old television show in which contestants lined up their shopping carts in a grocery store and, on the signal, began running around throwing every valuable item they could find in their carts. Whoever grabbed the most high-priced items won. The contestants here and now are corporations and lobbyists.

As long as I've lived in America, there's been this tragic-comic ritual known as the "hunt for the smoking gun," a process by which our official press tries to inoculate itself, and its readers, from political and economic realities.

The big smoking gun issue back in 1973 and 1974 concerned Richard Nixon. Back and forth the ponderous debate raged in editorial columns and news stories: Was this or that disclosure a "smoking gun"? Fairly early on in the game, it was clear to about 95 percent of the population that Nixon was a liar, a crook and guilty as charged. But the committee rooms on Capitol Hill and Sunday talk shows were still filled with people holding up guns with smoke pouring from the barrel telling one another solemnly that no, the appearance of smoke and the stench of recently detonated cordite notwithstanding, this was not yet the absolute, conclusive smoking gun.

It’s bad enough that the Bush administration had so little international support for the Iraqi war that their “coalition of the willing” meant the U.S., Britain, and the equivalent of a child’s imaginary friends. It’s even worse that, as the British Downing Street memo confirms, they had so little evidence of real threats that they knew from the start that they were going to have manufacture excuses to go to war. What’s more damning still is that they effectively began this war even before the congressional vote.

While I think you make a compelling case that Bush did steal the 2004 election, there's no doubt that Bush stole the 2000 election. Whie it looks like Kerry may have gotten the most votes in 2004, Al Gore in fact did get the most votes in 2000 both nationally and in Florida. I used to live in Florida so I know the disputed territory and the Florida election laws that were deliberately broken in 2000 like the back of my hand.

The Gore campaign's request for a hand count of the uncounted Florida votes was a routine request that I'd watched be carried out in close local elections in Florida many times. There's no doubt that Harris flat out refused to enforce Florida's clear election laws that required that the uncounted votes in 2000 be counted because she knew that counting all of the votes meant victory for Al Gore. For the record, it's Al Gore who belongs in the White House because it's clear that he was in fact the people's choice in 2000. Democracy in America clearly died in 2000.

AUSTIN -- I was watching the PBS science program "Nova" the other night and spotted the liberal bias right away. I knew it would be there because Ken Tomlinson, the Bush-appointed chairman of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), says the network is riddled with leftist leanings. Sure enough, in a program on tsunamis and what causes them, the show blamed it on shifting tectonic plates in the earth's surface. Then the graphic shows these two tectonic plates grinding against each other -- suddenly, the one on the left sort of falls down, and the big, aggressive plate on the right jumps on top of it, causing a killer tsunami. See? Wouldn't have happened on Fox.

This piece is excerpted for Father's Day from Harvey Wasserman's A GLIMPSE OF THE BIG LIGHT: LOSING PARENTS, FINDING SPIRIT, available from http://harveywasserman.com.

My Dad
a businessman
was
in his way
a real revolutionary
fighting the Big Guys
the way we fought the Pentagon
to end that damn war.

He always supported me
in those efforts
and when I came
back to Columbus
and to his business
and saw what he
really did
I was equally proud.

We did have our differences
mostly about computers
which he understood
a shade less than I.

We also argued
over finance and strategy
he liked to pick fights
from time to time
to test the limits
of my mettle.

But by and large
for ten full years
we got along
grew together
activist and businessman.

My mom kept the books
my sister sold gifts
somehow
it worked.

Today
is the day
my father
will pass away.

The shoe guys
are offering
such a deal
a special buy-out

There's at least one man recently convicted of homosexual misconduct with a minor, now serving a 12 to 15-year sentence, who surely received news of Michael Jackson's acquittal with a sigh of envy at the quality of Jackson's defense team and the sturdy independence of a jury that refused to be swayed by the lynch mob atmosphere that has hung over the Jackson trial like a toxic fog. I'll return forthwith to that convicted sex offender, Father Paul Shanley, but first, what lessons should we draw from Jackson's acquittal on all counts?

The not-guilty verdict for Jackson shows once again what can happen when the prosecution and defense are on at least an equal footing. Jackson had a top-flight lawyer with an unlimited budget. The prosecutors did what most prosecutors do in America: pile up the charges, on the calculation that the defendant will plead out.