New Wrinkle.

Everything goes in cycles. Only these days I wonder if were going backwards with in the vast cycles that history repeats. President Lincoln freed the slaves in a war where states wanted to secede from the union. Why did the south want to leave the union? The south wanted to maintain slavery and the north thought it was barbaric.
With Americas first African-American President in the White House, the governor of Texas is now seriously talking about seceding from the rest of the country over what he calls the federal governments oppressive reach. Thats how he refers to the stimulus money.
This might be the clearest example of the difference between conservative thought and liberal thought. When the liberals are out of power they write blogs. If they are feeling really naughty they might have some meat instead of that veggie burger they normally get.
Three months out of power and the conservatives want to leave the country!
That would make them something they have been calling liberals for a long time now: Un-American!

Let them go.
This is the same action as an immature kid loosing his fifth game of checkers in a row. They basically want to flip the board over. Only the board is the country and its not a game.
Come on Texas. If you got real about this situation you would see that Texas needs America a lot more than America needs Texas.
This what Texas offers. More wool comes from Texas than any other state in the union. So we lose them. So what? What do we really lose, sweaters, ignorance and Chuck Norris?
Texas ranks #49 in verbal SAT scores and #46 in average math SAT scores.
That means if you wanted to confuse a Texan a sentence like this might do it:
If you're making less than 250,000 a year how much are your taxes going down under Obama?
I think I am starting to see the problem.
When Bush was governor of Texas they were 49th in education.
That means they could beat Mississippi, they just couldn't spell it.
Hell, let the entire south go if they want. Don't let the Mason Dixon line hit you on your ass on the way out.

Glen Beck. Know the guy? He is the next generation Bill O'reilly and one of the chief architects of the tea bagging movement. I might be wrong about this but if one of the guys talking about your movement works on TV where he talks for a living, I don't think you can claim your movement is grass roots.
On Tax day, Glen Beck held a rally in Texas at the Alamo. If you know your history then you know the reason why Davy Croket was fighting the Mexican army. Mexico had outlawed slavery and the good people of the nation of Texas were fighting to keep slavery legal.
Texas lost the battle of the Alamo, but when you think about the current condition of Mexicans working for slave wages across America in jobs you or I wouldn't do, you might think Texas won the war.
Odd place to announce you are a "real American with old fashioned American values..." cause I gotta tell you, the kind of old fashioned American values a place like the Alamo represents is the reason we passed the 13th Amendment,
abolishing slavery in the United States. I'm just saying if you want to reboot a revolution you might want to choose a better backdrop for it than a fort that was defended by red necks who were fighting to keep humans like animals for labor.

The NSA announced that it reviewed the current program of wire taping communications in the United States. The NSA said it "over collected" information and had a hard time distinguishing between domestic and international communication.
Over collected? What a polite way to say you eavesdropped on everyone. Do you know that right now the Justice Department affirms its right to go into a citizens home, search their computer and personal papers and never tell you they were there! The United States government says it can go through my stuff and not tell me?
I don't remember dating the government.
Also, its pretty clear on my bill what is a domestic call and an international call. If these guys couldn't even figure that out why would we think they could interpret terrorists plots talked about in code over the Internet?
But here is the real kicker.
It also found evidence that the NSA attempted to wire tap a member of Congress. This is the NSA saying this in their own public report. This isn't some urban myth being passed around by bloggers strung out on red bull this is your government admitting that it not only spied on U.S. Citizens but it actually made an attempt to bug a member of congress.
People sometimes tell me I swear too much on stage. If you're watching the news and not swearing with a few choice expletives when you hear stuff like this, then you just don't get it.
This is bad people! This is really bad. I know, its depressing and stunningly unfunny so here is a dirty joke to take your mind off of it before we get into more hard to hear truths.

I told my brother something he had never heard before apparently, because he said, "New wrinkle."
I asked, "What does new wrinkle mean?"
He said "Every time you learn something new your brain gets a new wrinkle."
"Oh. I guess that makes my testicles a genius then."

Thats how I will get you to pay attention. I will tell you something you should know and then follow that bitter truth with a bipartisan dirty joke.

Obama released four memos from the justice department written at the request of the Bush White House on the subject of enhanced interrogation techniques. They are little more than disgusting verbal games written in legal prose to not say the word torture. Its clear that the authors, one of whom is now a sitting federal judge, knew they were being asked to invent law to make torture appear legal.
OK. Thats pretty scary stuff too. Here is another dirty joke.

My brother told me his girlfriend had tricked him into getting pregnant. How is that possible? You're a grown man. What did she do, cover her vagina with leaves and you tripped and fell in?
Then he asked, "Thats how women get pregnant?"
"yes!"
he said "New wrinkle."

Obama has said they will not prosecute anyone at the CIA who participated in these types of "enhanced" interrogations. We have to move forward not look backward. This is the Obama doctrine. As much as I believe in what the man has come to represent I think almost everyone can agree that a blanket forgiveness without even a formal confession of wrong doing is premature.
You might not have to go after the people who were "only following orders" but shouldn't we go after the people who gave those orders?
I think we should.
No dick joke here folks. There isn't one powerful enough.
The fact is were suppose to be the good guys. The ones who don't put aside their values even when it seems we would gain by doing so. People say, thats naive. America has to live in "the real world."
America was founded on the idea to change the real world. But there right. America doesn't live in the real world. It exists in a better world. Torture has no place here. Thats why we have laws against it. Thats why we don't recognize a king or allow our rulers to abuse religious belief to control people. Right?
We are a nation of laws not a nation of what ever those in charge want to do. The truly scary thing is that all the enhanced powers the Bush administration gave itself have not ben given back yet by Obama. One of the oldest laws of man states very clearly, power given is rarely returned. If we are willing to set aside the values that make us better than the terrorists this time, what will we set aside next time?
I just hope that someday I won't be talking to a 20 year old kid and after I tell him what freedom is, hear him reply, "new wrinkle."