November 24, 2006


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

FRESNO TARGETS THE HOMELESS

Rush Limbaugh is king, the right-wing radio station is the number one station in town, and right-wingers defile the letters page of The Fresno Bee. So it's no real surprise that the city would target the homeless. The city thinks it's good policy to take or destroy the personal possessions of the homeless. Alan Autry, the mayor here, is another bad actor turned politician, but Autry fancies himself a good Christian. It's too bad Christianity isn't displayed in public policy. This article by John Ellis is at www.fresnobee.com:

A federal judge Wednesday blasted Fresno for destroying personal property when it clears away homeless encampments and ordered a halt to the practice.

U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger said the city's policy of immediately destroying the belongings of homeless people during sweeps if they are not present to claim them violates their constitutional rights. He called it "dishonest" and "intentionally disparaging."

Wanger also didn't buy the city's argument that storing items for owners to claim later is impractical and expensive.

"That is - I'll be charitable - disingenuous," Wanger said.

RIGHT WING ILLUSIONS

Today's Fresno Bee had another letter to the editor that suggests that the "war on terror" is really a war on Islam itself. It isn't the United States killing Iraqis, the writer says, it's the Moslems themselves. The level of sectarian violence in Iraq is appalling and getting worse, but the majority of the deaths in Iraq have been caused by the United States military. One estimate is that over 650,000 Iraqis have died since the United States invaded. It is troubling that some of these right-wing commentaries advance the idea that all Moslems should be exterminated because we have to protect Western "civilization." Never mind that genocide is not civilized and not consistent with the Christianity so many right-wingers claim to believe. Never mind that most Moslems do not support groups like al-Qaeda. This article is by a conservative who looks at the repression of any ideas that do not adhere to the right-wing party line. The article by Austin W. Bramwell is linked at www.amconmag.com:

Conservatives identify themselves in part by repeating slogans (“we are at war!”) that, like “ignorance is strength,” are less important for what (if anything) they say than for what saying them says about the speaker. At the same time, to rise in the movement, one must develop a habitual obliviousness to truth, or what Orwell labeled “doublethinking.” Anyone who expresses too vociferously too many of the following opinions, for example, cannot expect to make a career in the movement: that the Soviet Union was not the threat that anti-communists made it out to be, that the current tax system discriminates in favor of the very wealthy, that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq invasion in nearly every respect, that the constitutional design itself prevents judges from deciding cases according to the original meaning of the Constitution, that global warming poses small but unacceptable risks, that everyone in the abortion debate—even the most ardent pro-lifers—inevitably engages in arbitrary line-drawing. Whether these opinions and others are correct or not matters little to the movement conservative, even if he knows next to nothing about the topic at hand. If you do not reject these opinions or at least keep quiet, you are not a movement conservative and will be treated accordingly.