I wonder how many of my fellow federal employees remember this little phrase…

I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States…

Why do I mention this? Because there’s a bunch of bigots out there who have forgotten this part of their oath as a federal employee or as holders of political offices.

The Constitution of the United States is very clear. People have the right to practice whatever religion they damn well please. Part of that right is to have houses of worship.

So why on earth is the proposal, by a religious group, to build a community center which will include an area used for worship in dispute at all?

If it meets the local building and land-use codes, it not only should be allowed, but it MUST be allowed.

If you believe in religious freedom; if you want to have the right to choose your own religion; if you want to be able to gather with others and worship or pray together; and if you take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, then you should not be fighting any such proposal.

In fact, you should be supporting it against anyone who is trying to stop it. You should be saying “look, it’s their right, and more importantly it’s what separates us from oppressive governments like those in Saudi Arabia or Iran.”

I’m discussing this, of course, because of the hubbub around the proposal by a Muslim group to build a community center- which will include a mosque- a few blocks away from Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers used to stand, in lower Manhattan.

Whether you like Muslims (or Islam as a religion) or not should not be at issue here.

Whether you blame all Muslims for 9/11 or not (though if you do, you’re a idiot) shouldn’t matter.

What matters is that they have a right, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, to build that community center.

Every American who believes in our Constitution should be defending this proposal.

And people who aren’t defending it are, put simply, un-American. Newt Gingrich, claiming that we should stop it from being built? Un-American. Republicans running for Congress, bitching about it? Un-America.

It is NOT an American habit to suppress religions. It goes against our very nature. Yes, we might feel discomfort with Muslims being near the WTC site, but we must fight that discomfort and stand up for the rights of everyone in America to worship as they see fit.

And that includes Muslims. Like it or not.

I don’t know how into detail people are following the oil spill and all of the accusations and recriminations about it, but it’s been interesting watching the Republicans try and find things to complain about on behalf of Big Oil and those massive campaign contributions.

One of the things that the Republicans have bitched about lately is the moratorium on deepwater drilling that the Obama Administration has implemented (a bit too late for thousands of birds, sea turtles, and countless numbers of other creatures in the Gulf). They claim this drilling ban (even if temporary) is horrible for the economy of the Gulf Coast.

You know what’s horrible for the economy of the Gulf Coast? A oil well spewing a bajillion gallons of crude oil into the ocean. (It would appear that the Gulf Coast is, therefore, screwed either way.)

But put that aside. Even if the government opens up deepwater drilling again, it’s highly likely that… it won’t happen. Know why?

Well, the answer is in this article.

Insurance costs for deepwater drilling are poised to rise by as much as 50 percent after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and the increases are sharp enough that it could make some exploration and production projects too expensive no matter what happens with new regulations in Washington.

. . .

The impact is particularly potent in deepwater, meaning depths of greater than 1,000 feet, the areas of the Gulf of Mexico that hold the most remaining oil reserves.

Drilling in deepwater is more price-sensitive than other types of oil exploration, because it requires expensive state-of-the-art equipment, detailed analysis of hard-to-reach geology and long planning horizons for projects. Many deepwater exploration and production projects are viable only when oil prices are expected to remain high, so increases in the costs of drilling could render some projects unfeasible.

In other words, all this whining about how the Big Bad Evil Government is unConstitutionally intruding on the poor little oil companies’ ability to provide jobs and money to the common people doesn’t matter.

(And of course anyone who believe that the oil companies are in it for the People is an idiot; the oil companies don’t give a shit about people, turtles, fish, the environment, or anything but making as much money as possible at every moment.)

The reality is this: If you make the companies pay the true price of their drilling, which includes the costs associated with the inevitable accidents (and yeah, accidents do happen, even if they are the result of negligence or even outright recklessness of the drilling companies) then those companies might decide that they can’t afford to do it.

So don’t believe, not for a minute, the crocodile tears of the Republicans. They aren’t bitching because they are concerned about the little guy. They’re bitching because they want their corporate overlords to have the freedom to drill or not, but even knowing that deepwater drilling is likely to be pulled way back or even stopped, they’ll still pretend that it’s President Obama who’s responsible for bad news.

This is just another example of how dishonest politics has become, led primarily by the right wing noise machine of entities like Fox News and right wing talk radio.

If you want to honestly talk about deepwater drilling, then do so. If you want to point out that hey, the reality is that we love our big-ass cars and we, jointly, are responsible for drilling all these wells because we can’t give up our SUVs and so forth, then do so.

But spare us the bullshit about how Obama is to blame for drilling slowing down. The market is speaking, and when insurance costs for oil companies skyrockets companies are going to be less likely to drill.

Oh, and you know what will happen then? The odds are the government is going to put on new regulations, requiring more safety equipment and better blowout valves and so forth, and you can bet that the Republicans will blame THAT for the oil companies deciding to not drill as much. But it’ll really be as much because of the market, and the higher insurance costs, as anything else.

The right-wing hate machine is pretty despicable. People think that it doesn’t exist, but it does; over the past 15 to 20 years, the right wing has figured out how to drive the media narrative, and in fact does a pretty damn good job of doing so.

Here’s an example. Recently, conservative bloggers and pundits have been heavily criticizing President Obama because he did not attend Memorial Day services at Arlington National Cemetery.

They have driven the media narrative to the point where the media is saying the President “is skipping the usual visit to Arlington”.

But is it really “traditional”? Of the past 4 Presidents, stretching back decades, let’s have a look.

• President George W Bush was in office 8 years. In that time, he went to Arlington 7 times. The one time he missed, he was at services at a military cemetery in Normandy, France.
• President Bill Clinton was in office 8 years. In that time, he went to Arlington all 8 years.
• President George HW Bush was in office 4 years. In that time, he never went to Memorial Day services at Arlington.
• President Ronald Reagan was in office 8 years. In that time, he went to Arlington 4 times. One of the 4 times he missed, he was recovering from the assassination attempt. The other three times he was otherwise engaged but did not go to a National or military cemetery.

So that’s 28 years worth of Presidents.

19 of those years (68% of the time) the President went to services at Arlington. (Interestingly enough, the one who came the closest to making it a true “tradition” was a Democratic President, Bill Clinton.)

Of the 9 years (32% of the time) that the President missed, 7 were complete skips, with no attendance at a military cemetery at all. 1 was fairly excusable (President Reagan recovering from being shot) and 1 was President George W Bush going to a cemetery elsewhere.

So first of all, let’s face it; it’s not really a “tradition”. It’s common, about two-thirds of the time the President does it, but it’s not absolute; I don’t think anyone could accuse President George HW Bush of not liking the military (being ex-military and a vet of a foreign war himself) but he never went to Arlington.

So right there we see how the right-wing hate machine has skewed the viewpoint of the media.

What’s more, they are pushing this and the media is so cowed that they don’t report the actual facts. They suggest that somehow there’s shame in not going to Arlington, as if the fallen members of our military who are in the over 100 other National Cemeteries don’t deserve our respect and honor.

Why?

Because they hate President Obama, so much that they’re willing to disrespect the fallen military members buried (for example) in Lincoln National Cemetery. They’re willing to ignore the fact that one of their own, conservative President George HW Bush, never did a Memorial Day ceremony.

They’re so desperate to get everyone hating President Obama that they’ll go for ANY reason to do so, ignoring his speech, ignoring his history of honoring the military, ignoring the truth, and generating all kinds of noise and lies to get us to believe that Obama is some kind of horrible scumbag.

Whether you like Obama’s policies or not, don’t buy into the hype and hate. Object, if you must, to political decisions, but don’t use the sacred memory of our fallen soldiers to try and score cheap points.

Those who do are disrespecting our nation’s dead.

The right-wing noise machine is trying to make it seem as though Obama’s response to the oil rig disaster in the Gulf is like Bush’s response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

There’s a lot of huge differences, like the fact that over 1,800 Americans lost their lives in Katrina to a disaster that was created by a HURRICANE, as opposed to a problem created by a giant multinational corporation.

I wrote this comment in response to a snipe on the Seattle Times web site:

So where is the outrage at Mr Obama from the left about his failure to be on top of this? Mr Obama saw first hand the damage a week and a half after the start of the spill. I recall Mr Bush viewing the results of Katrina two days after.

The differences are many.

First of all, Bush only flew over the top of the damage, Obama went in person. But that’s just PR in both cases, anyway.

The real difference is that the Obama Administration has been working on this issue from the get-go, because Democrats generally believe that government can be a powerful force for obtaining good results.

For example, if left strictly to Democrats, drilling rigs and wells such as this would have had an additional type of blowout prevention valve that’s required by nearly every other nation on the planet.

However, since these rigs are “regulated” under rules established by the “drill baby drill” crowd dominated by Republicans like Dick Cheney, and since those rules tend to reflect the ideology that “government is bad and needs to do as little as possible and stay out of the way”, in the United States those blowout valves are not required.

Hence, a greater risk of a blowout… which inevitably happened.

And that leads us to the difference in governmental response. With the Obama Administration, people know and understand that the government is going to actually be working as hard as it can to try and respond appropriately to the situation.

With the Bush Administration, we had Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown, ex-commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, leading the FEMA “response” to the Katrina disaster.

With Obama, the head of the EPA is Lisa Jackson, who worked for the EPA for over a decade.

So Republican ideology says “let government do as little as possible” and appoints horse guys as disaster experts; Democratic ideology says “let government do as much good as possible” and appoints people with environmental experience to head the environmental agency.

What’s more, with Katrina you had a natural disaster that wasn’t generated by the activities of a private corporation that’s supposed to be responsible for that kind of thing; with the oil spill, in theory, BP is supposed to be taking care of the messes they make.

Free market is supposed to be more efficient and all that, you know.

That’s why you don’t hear the same people complaining about the Obama response… because it’s NIGHT AND DAY DIFFERENT in terms of the overall situation.