The American Tight Rope

It is the most commonly accepted, and least spoken aspect of life in the United States. Things aren't what they used to be. You hear it all the time from your parents and their parents, and as we all go to our various jobs, we KNOW it.

It's bred cynicism into us. We were taught that if you work hard and are reliable, your job is secure. If you stay at the same job, someday you'll be able to retire with a pension. If you're a good employee, you'll be rewarded.

That's not true any more, and it hasn't been for a long time. A fabulous series of articles was written that documents just how perilous times are, and how we got there. It's definitely worth the read.

Jobs are more tenuous now more than ever. Where I work, I've lived through four rounds of layoffs. It's the dreaded scheduled meeting on your calendar that no one else knows about. It's the moment your scan card no longer allows you into the building. It's the shame of having somehow 'failed', when you'd done all your parents taught you to do.

You worked the extra hours. You were the reliable one, and always went above and beyond. You always gave 110%, and made your family play second fiddle to the demands of the job, trying to insure that they were provided for. This was for you and your children's futures.

The problem is, the company you worked for didn't get the memo. Cuts were based by department, automation, out-sourcing, or how long you were with the company. Companies today use any number of factors for layoffs. Very rarely do they use merit.

The truth is, no one is safe in their job anymore. Being a good worker can no more protect you from being laid off than having straight teeth could. And once you are without income, the safety nets that used to be there for you aren't anymore. The retraining is harder to get in. The unemployment benefits don't last as long. Welfare, a thing so many are ashamed to need but must, is *very* short term, and unfortunately the retraining isn't. The scholarships and grants your children might have had access to for aid with ever-rising college tuition is drying up quickly.

Take a look at FDR's famous "Economic Bill of Rights". I happen to agree with them. Read through, and tell me if you see ANY of them being supported by the current Republican party, and give me a decent reason why they shouldn't be.

These are indeed perilous times for the American employee, and they shouldn't be. Yes, I'm well aware that life isn't fair. But this is no longer about fairness. This is about what is right. Regulations were put in place to keep the average citizen from being abused and taken advantage by those with means, and right now, very few of those protections are left in place.

Power corrupts. Turn on the news if you don't believe me. Democracy was founded as a means for everyone to be afforded the same freedoms and the same protections against abuse. It was also founded with the belief that the same opportunities should be available to everyone, not just those born into the right families.

The American Dream used to be that if you worked hard enough, were smart and diligent enough, that you can be anything you wanted to be. Isn't it about time we had that dream again?

“The Economic Bill of Rights”

Excerpt from President Roosevelt's January 11, 1944 message to the Congress of the United States on the State of the Union

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

Methinks the President Doth Protest Too Much

 
A person's sexual identity is not all they are as human beings,
but it is a part. Homophobia is running rampant in this country,
and the government is fueling it.

What is this, the McCarthy era?  There is such a thing as free
speech.  And guess what?  There are homosexuals in this world.
They are like all of us, striving to do the best they can with
what they've got.  They fall in love, they dream of better
futures - they are human beings, no less and no more than their
heterosexual brethren.

What is it that radical fundamentalists and the Bush
Administration want?  What is their ultimate aim?  
To strip anyone who is not heterosexual of all legal
rights and protections?

To make them less of a citizen?  What's next?  Who's next?

To vilify and try to dehumanize any sector of our society
goes against the Constitution.  More importantly, it is the
unChristian thing to do.  You who seek to persecute and
strip homosexuals of their basic rights -
I accuse you of doing far worse than them.

They have committed no sins.  They are attracted to others
who you judge to be unacceptable.  Who are you to judge?  
Who are any of us?

Homophobia has proven a convenient distraction provided by
the government to try to keep you from seeing that the Bush
Administration is losing the war in Iraq.

The decisions the President is making are hurting the economy,
not helping it, and he doesn't care one whit about the average
American.  He wouldn't just sell you out in a heartbeat -
he already has.  All you have to do is take a look at the
deficit and read the legislation he'd like to have pushed
through Congress to see that.

There are moments in American history when the population
at large finally opens its eyes to the truth that's been
there all along. We need one of those moments now.

We are taught as children the difference between
right and wrong.  Ostracizing little Johnny
for being different has always been wrong.  When did
the rest of you start thinking it was okay?

Hello colleagues and friends,

Recently, I was asked to help present a workshop on suicide
prevention among GLBT individuals, at the third in a series
of five regional conferences on suicide prevention in the
U.S. This particular conference covers Public Health Regions
9 and 10 (basically, the entire west coast). Following is a
statement my co-presenters and I have prepared outlining
recent chilling events surrounding our workshop. One
interesting thing to note the two previous conferences, one
in New Orleans and the other in Denver, contained workshops
very similar to ours and were not a problem. The difference?
Both were held PRIOR to the last election.

We give permission to forward this to whoever you believe
needs to read it:

Please distribute as widely as possible:


Statement of Concern and Protest

Government funders within the Bush Administration at SAMHSA
(Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration)
notified the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC) that
SAMHSA Administrator, Charles Curie, would not be allowed to
attend a SPRC regional conference on suicide prevention if
conference organizers went forward with a workshop title
that included the words "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual", and
"transgender". The conference is scheduled to take place in
Portland, Oregon, February 28-March 2. The original title of
the workshop was "Suicide Prevention Among Gays, Lesbians,
Bisexuals, and Transgender Individuals."

On January 31, Lloyd Potter, SPRC Center Director, contacted
workshop presenters Ron Bloodworth, Joyce Liljeholm and Reid
Vanderburgh and requested that we come up with alternative
wording for the workshop so that the words
"gay","lesbian","bisexual", or "transgender" did not appear
in the workshop title or descriptor.

We worked with SPRC to create alternative wording so that
the workshop could continue to be offered but we expressed
deep concern about government intrusion to remove any
reference to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people
in the workshop title and descriptor. After agreeing to the
title "suicide Prevention in Vulnerable Populations", we
were told that the new title would be acceptable to SAMHSA
and that we could use the term "sexual orientation" in the
workshop descriptor but that the term "gender identity"
would "not fly with SAMHSA."

We are still planning to offer the workshop as originally
planned even though the workshop title and descriptor had to
be changed but we will not be quiet about the heavy handed
efforts of SAMSHA to render gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or
transgender people invisible. The action of our government
in this regard is the very reason a workshop on suicide
prevention with gay,lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender
individuals is needed. How ironic! The discriminatory and
intimidating actions of SAMHSA and the Bush administration
should not go unchallenged and should be of concern to all
Americans.

It's important to note that Oregon Senator Gordon Smith is
scheduled to attend the conference as part of his support
for suicide prevention efforts in the U.S. We urge you to
use the attached contact information to express your concern
to SAMHSA Administrator Charles Curie, Secretary of Health
and Human Services, Mike Leavitt, Oregon Senator Gordon
Smith, and other members of Congress from your state that
represents you.

Thank you for your concern and support.


Ron Bloodworth, MA, LPC, Portland, OR
Joyce Liljeholm, MEd, Portland, OR
Reid Vanderburgh, MA, Portland, OR

Contact Information for Government Officials:

Charles Curie
Office of the Administrator
SAMHSA
Rockville, MD 20850
Tel: 240-276-2000
charles.curie@samhsa.hhs.gov
Secretary of Health and Human Services
200 Independence Ave. SW
Washington, D.D. 20201
Tel: 202-690-7000
Fax: 202-690-7203

Senator Gordon Smith
404 Russell Bldg
Washington, D.C. 20510-3704
Tel: 202-224-3753
Fax: 202-228-3997
President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500
Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
president@whitehouse.gov

A proposed budget breakdown the Administration doesn't want you to see.

I pulled this from another group, but it's an excellent summary of exactly what Bush is proposing to do. You can find the link to the full article and graphs here.

As the person who posted this mentioned, pay special attention to how the Administration is hiding numbers they don't want the public to know and inflating others to make themselves look better.

Here's the short analysis of what's going on:

This short analysis examines the priorities reflected in the Administration's
budget, the effects of its proposals on the deficit, and some budget gimmicks it
contains.

The Priorities of the Budget

The budget makes very substantial cuts in domestic spending at the same time
that it calls for large additional tax cuts. If defense, homeland security, and
international affairs are funded at the levels the President proposes, then by
2010, funding for domestic discretionary programs (outside homeland security)
would have to be cut about $66 billion, or 16 percent, below the 2005 levels,
adjusted for inflation. These cuts hit programs - in areas such as education,
veterans' health care, and environmental protection - of importance to large
numbers of Americans.

The budget proposes new tax cuts costing $1.4 trillion over 10 years (a figure
that rises to $1.6 trillion when the resulting interest payments are added in),
even though the paucity of revenues is the main reason behind the rise in the
deficit. Revenues are now lower, as a share of the economy, than in any year
in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, or the 1990s. Yet the Administration's
budget would make its tax cuts permanent and add a number of new tax cuts on
top. It proposes, for example, a series of new tax cuts related to savings
that, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute
and the Brookings Institution, would go overwhelmingly to those with incomes
above $100,000. Furthermore, these savings proposals are designed around a
timing gimmick, so they produce increased tax revenues over the next five years
but lose massive sums in future decades. The Congressional Research Service has
estimated that these new tax cuts eventually cost the equivalent today of $300
billion to $500 billion over ten years.

Key low-income programs would be hit even though these programs have contributed
little to the return of the deficit, and since 2000, poverty has risen and the
number of Americans without health insurance has climbed. The number of poor
went up for the third straight year in 2003, the share of total income that goes
to the bottom two-fifths of households has fallen to one of its lowest levels
since the end of World War II, and the number of people lacking health insurance
rose to 45 million in 2003, the highest level on record. Yet the budget
proposes food stamp cuts that will eliminate benefits for approximately 300,000
people primarily in low-income working families and a five-year freeze on child
care funding that, according to tables in the Administration's budget, will
result in cutting the number of low-income children receiving child care
assistance by 300,000 in 2009. The budget also proposes to reduce Medicaid
funding by at least $45 billion over 10 years; such a proposal would almost
certainly push hard-pressed states to eliminate coverage for a substantial
number of low-income people, increasing the ranks of the uninsured and the
underinsured.

Effects on the Deficit

Despite cuts to scores of domestic programs, the Administration's budget
increases rather than decreases the deficit over the next five years. As shown
by its own figures, the effect of the Administration's budget is to increase
total deficits over the next five years from $1.364 trillion under current law
to $1.393 trillion. A main reason for this outcome is the tax-cut proposals
the Administration has included in its budget.

Over the longer run, by proposing to make its tax cuts permanent, the
Administration's budget proposals would dramatically swell the deficit. In 2015
alone, the Administration's tax proposals - including the cost of making the
2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent - would reduce revenues by $287 billion. The
total effect on the deficit, including the related interest costs, would be $358
billion. The Administration's proposal to replace part of Social Security with
private accounts also would swell deficits further. It would add $1.4 trillion
to deficits in its first ten years (2019 to 2028) and another $3.5 trillion in
the decade after that. In 2015 alone, it would add $177 billion.

Budgetary Hide and Seek

For the first time since 1989, the budget fails to provide information about the
funding of specific discretionary programs beyond the upcoming budget year,
thereby hiding the impact of the large discretionary cuts it is proposing. The
budget fails to show how much the Administration proposes to provide for
individual discretionary programs - which include education, veterans' health
care, and many other programs - after 2006. This is notable since the budget
proposes a "hard freeze" on domestic discretionary spending (outside homeland
security) for five years, to be enforced by binding caps on discretionary
programs. As discussed, this would result in a $66 billion cut in these
programs by 2010 (compared to today's level, adjusted only for inflation). But
the budget omits the Administration's proposals for the specific cuts it
envisions to comply with these caps.

The Administration also proposes a new budget rule that would require that
legislation to make the tax cuts permanent be treated as if such legislation had
already been enacted. When CBO and OMB are asked to provide estimates of the
cost of legislation to extend the tax cuts or make them permanent, they would be
required to produce estimates showing the cost to be zero. This proposal is
significant: it would exempt legislation to extend the tax cuts, or make them
permanent, from any Congressional budget enforcement. Such budgetary
legerdemain would be unprecedented and shatter rules designed to promote some
modicum of fiscal responsibility.

The Administration insists on its practice of budgeting for only five years,
masking the full cost of its tax cuts, while it simultaneously insists on using
"infinite" or 75-year time horizons in other contexts. A principal reason the
Administration cites for providing only a five-year budget is that estimates of
the budget beyond the fifth year are too uncertain. Yet the Administration
contends that the traditional 75-year test of solvency used by the Social
Security actuaries and most social insurance experts is not long enough and that
Social Security solvency must be measured into eternity. The Administration
also proposes that cost estimates for major entitlement legislation be produced
for 75 years, although it wants the cost of tax bills estimated for only five or
ten years.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


Read carefully. This is your future, and your children's future, that the Bush Administration wants to gut.

Take a fresh look at the Democratic party. They are for the everyday working man and woman.

Democrats care when you are laid off work and need retraining to find a new job, and want to provide access no matter what race or religion you are.

Democrats care that, even working two jobs, you don't earn enough money to support your family and live above the poverty level and want to do something about it.

If a member of your family gets sick, Democrats want them to be able to get the best medical attention possible.

If you need a helping hand to afford the ever-rising cost of a college education, Democrats want to insure you have all the opportunities that America's wealthy children have.

Democrats believe in the sanctity of quality public education.

Democrats want the air you breathe not to make you sick, and the water you drink not to cause birth defects in your children.

Democrats believe in good business, not big business.

The Republican party isn't about 'moral values'. It is morally corrupt.

It's not the rich who are in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting without proper equipment - it's the working class. It's not Democrats who are looking to cut funding to programs our returning veterans desperately need - it's Republicans.

Working America is bearing the brunt of the war in Iraq at terrible personal expense, but it is the rich who are profiting.

Corporations and the uber rich have bought and paid for the Republican party.

It's time for middle America to realize that Republicans are not 'good for business'. They're for big business, and it's at your expense.

Sometimes No News is also Bad News

For whatever reason, I haven't seen much mentioned in the news about it, but Carl Rove was recently named White House deputy chief of staff in charge of coordinating domestic policy, economic policy, national security and homeland security.

Oh, I feel much better now. This is some of what Dallasnews has to say in their article nominating him "Texan of the Year":

As a College Republican, Mr. Rove got his start teaching seminars on dirty tricks. In Mr. Rove's political rise, critics have been quick to see an instinct for winning at any cost. A Rove campaign, they say, always follows a pattern: virulent whisper campaigns or damaging attacks from surrogate groups against his opponents, but never evidence that he was involved...

In 1994, when Mr. Bush ran for governor, incumbent Gov. Ann Richards says she was targeted by an astonishingly effective word-of-mouth campaign in East Texas over gays and lesbians in her administration.

Four years ago, Sen. John McCain says he was targeted in the Republican presidential primary by a group of veterans who questioned his temperament to be president – code for whether his prisoner of war experience had made him crazy – and by Bush supporters who spread vicious rumors about his personal life...

Campaigns, in politics or on the battlefield, are often won on a key decision. Mr. Rove's big decision was to target the GOP base, not depend on moderate swing voters to build a majority. The idea was to identify your reliable voters – religious conservatives, rural voters, white men, married women in suburbs, exurbanites and business-friendly Republicans – and get them to the polls in bigger numbers than four years ago.

Energizing Christian conservatives was an important part of the strategy. Churches conducted voter-registration drives. The campaign collected church membership directories and recruited volunteers in congregations. With the Bush team's encouragement, allies put proposals to ban gay marriage on the ballot in 11 states.

This attracted evangelicals and social conservatives in droves. In the pivotal battleground state of Ohio, a quarter of those surveyed in exit polls identified themselves as "white evangelical/born-again Christians" – and most of them voted for Mr. Bush.

The election machine that Mr. Rove and company built for the 2004 race was like nothing ever seen before in an American election. Two years before a vote was ever cast, the team began assembling an enormous list from voter files, magazine subscriptions, marketing lists, population trends, TV viewing habits, census data, demographic information – and created a computerized model capable of identifying their voters with extraordinary precision.

They studied how many of their likely voters were watching CSI on television in Cleveland. They placed ads on the Golf Channel. They discovered that although the president supported a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, many married Republican women – an important constituency – regularly watched the sitcom Will & Grace, which portrays gay life positively. In battleground states, Will & Grace became a favorite spot for Bush-Cheney TV ads...

(And by the way, over 20 years in Texas, Mr. Rove was instrumental in turning Democrat-dominated Texas into a state where the GOP today holds every statewide office and both Senate seats, as well as dominating the courts and the Legislature. When U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay spearheaded the successful drive to redraw congressional boundaries in Texas, he found a Legislature and state leadership friendly to his purpose – thanks in part to Karl Rove's handiwork.)

I feel so much better knowing this man has such a firm hand in our government, don't you?

Let me leave you with some parting thoughts on our new Deputy chief of staff, shall I?

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
- John DiIulio, a former senior aide to President Bush said in 2002

By the way, the very day his bracing criticism of Rove and the White House made national news, he apologized to his former colleagues, twice. It was a strange, cringe-inducing spectacle, with language out of a Soviet show trial: He called his own criticisms, as quoted by Suskind, "groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples." Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer had earlier called his complaints "groundless and baseless," so his use of the same terms seemed rote and creepy, like he'd either been beaten up or lobotomized. "I sincerely apologize and I am deeply remorseful," he said in a statement.

Nice. So this is what a "moral majority" gets us?

Wise Words

"In biology they made me dissect a fetal pig -- a skill I have never needed since. However, if they had made the class dissect a whole chicken -- now there's a life skill."
-Alton Brown

The Real Picture

With all the campaigning the President is doing to try to convince America that Social Security is in trouble, he often points to other nations - with no specifics, mind - as models with which we should compare our own system.

The Wall Street Journal has done just that - examining Sweden, Bolivia, Singapore, Chile, and Britain to determine whether privatization has helped them or not. Guess what? As far as success stories go - they aren't looking too good.

It is such a bad idea, even the Chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security, Rep. James McCrery (R) of Louisiana says Bush's privatization plan will weaken Social Security much further than doing NOTHING now.

Bill Gross, manager of the world's largest bond fund, had a pretty straightforward message for the President as well - It's the deficit, stupid!

Mr. President, you are no FDR, but you are so far gone in your own megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur that you haven't the sense to see it.

Campaign all you want. Bring Jeff Gannon to all your press conferences and only call on him. Your secret is out - you really don't care who you crush on your way to the history books. But know this: Your legacy will be how you pandered to the rich at the expense of the poor, how you exploited a national tragedy to the detriment of all, and how you actively sought to subvert the Constitution and everything this country is founded upon.

Won't it be the surprise when, many years later, the world remembers the era of your reign in much the same way the McCarthy era is remembered now? With shame and more than a little fear that it could happen again. That it Should Not happen again.

As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States, and (just a reminder) a Republican.

A religious message worth repeating...

Here is one minister's opinion of the administration...

Dr. Robin Meyers' Speech to students at OK University

As some of you know, I am minister of Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City, an Open and Affirming, Peace and Justice church in northwest Oklahoma City, and professor of Rhetoric at Oklahoma City University. But you would most likely have encountered me on the pages of the Oklahoma Gazette, where I have been a columnist for six years, and hold the record for the most number of angry letters to the editor.

Tonight, I join ranks of those who are angry, because I have watched as the faith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak for Jesus, but whose actions are anything but Christian.

We've heard a lot lately about so-called "moral values" as having swung the election to President Bush. Well, I'm a great believer in moral values, but we need to have a discussion, all over this country, about exactly what constitutes a moral value -- I mean what are we talking about?

Because we don't get to make them up as we go along, especially not if we are people of faith. We have an inherited tradition of what is right and wrong, and moral is as moral does.

Let me give you just a few of the reasons why I take issue with those in power who claim moral values are on their side:

1. When you start a war on false pretenses, and then act as if your deceptions are justified because you are doing God's will, and that your critics are either unpatriotic or lacking in faith, there are some of us who have given our lives to teaching and preaching the faith who believe that this is not only not moral, but immoral.

2. When you live in a country that has established international rules for waging a just war, build the United Nations on your own soil to enforce them, and then arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral.

3. When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail to acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teaching, or turn them on their head (you know, Sermon on the Mount stuff like that we must never return violence for violence and that those who live by the sword will die by the sword), you are doing something immoral.

4. When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse to even count them, you are doing something immoral.

5. When you find a way to avoid combat in Vietnam, and then question the patriotism of someone who volunteered to fight, and came home a hero, you are doing something immoral.

6. When you ignore the fundamental teachings of the gospel, which says that the way the strong treat the weak is the ultimate ethical test, by giving tax breaks to the wealthiest among us so the strong will get stronger and the weak will get weaker, you are doing something immoral.

7. When you wink at the torture of prisoners, and deprive so-called "enemy combatants" of the rules of the Geneva convention, which your own country helped to establish and insists that other countries follow, you are doing something immoral.

8. When you claim that the world can be divided up into the good guys and the evil doers, slice up your own nation into those who are with you, or with the terrorists -- and then launch a war which enriches your own friends and seizes control of the oil to which we are addicted, instead of helping us to kick the habit, you are doing something immoral.

9. When you fail to veto a single spending bill, but ask us to pay for a war with no exit strategy and no end in sight, creating an enormous deficit that hangs like a great millstone around the necks of our children, you are doing something immoral.

10. When you cause most of the rest of the world to hate a country that was once the most loved country in the world, and act like it doesn't matter what others think of us, only what God thinks of you, you have done something immoral.

11. When you use hatred of homosexuals as a wedge issue to turn out record numbers of evangelical voters, and use the Constitution as a tool of discrimination, you are doing something immoral.

12. When you favor the death penalty, and yet claim to be a follower of Jesus, who said an eye for an eye was the old way, not the way of the kingdom, you are doing something immoral.

13. When you dismantle countless environmental laws designed to protect the earth which is God's gift to us all, so that the corporations that bought you and paid for your favors will make higher profits while our children breathe dirty air and live in a toxic world, you have done something immoral. The earth belongs to the Lord, not Halliburton.

14. When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our killing is righteous, while theirs is evil, we have begun to resemble the enemy we claim to be fighting, and that is immoral. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.

15. When you tell people that you intend to run and govern as a "compassionate conservative," using the word which is the essence of all religious faith-compassion, and then show no compassion for anyone who disagrees with you, and no patience with those who cry to you for help, you are doing something immoral.

16. When you talk about Jesus constantly, who was a healer of the sick, but do nothing to make sure that anyone who is sick can go to see a doctor, even if she doesn't have a penny in her pocket, you are doing something immoral.

17. When you put judges on the bench who are racist, and will set women back a hundred years, and when you surround yourself with preachers who say gays ought to be killed, you are doing something immoral.

I'm tired of people thinking that because I'm a Christian, I must be a supporter of President Bush, or that because I favor civil rights and gay rights I must not be a person of faith. I'm tired of people saying that I can't support the troops but oppose the war.

I heard that when I was your age--when the Vietnam war was raging. We knew that war was wrong, and you know that this war is wrong--the only question is how many people are going to die before these make-believe Christians are removed from power?

This country is bankrupt. The war is morally bankrupt. The claim of this administration to be Christian is bankrupt. And the only people who can turn things around are people like you--young people who are just beginning to wake up to what is happening to them. It's your country to take back. It's your faith to take back.

It's your future to take back.

Don't be afraid to speak out. Don't back down when your friends begin to tell you that the cause is righteous and that the flag should be wrapped around the cross, while the rest of us keep our mouths shut.

Real Christians take chances for peace. So do real Jews, and real Muslims, and real Hindus, and real Buddhists--so do all the faith traditions of the world at their heart believe one thing: life is precious.

Every human being is precious. Arrogance is the opposite of faith. Greed is the opposite of charity.

And believing that one has never made a mistake is the mark of a deluded man, not a man of faith.

And war -- war is the greatest failure of the human race -- and thus the greatest failure of faith.

There's an old rock and roll song, whose lyrics say it all:

War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

And what is the dream of the prophets? That we should study war no more, that we should beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. Who would Jesus bomb, indeed? How many wars does it take to know that too many people have died?

What if they gave a war and nobody came? Maybe one day we will find out.