HATE, HATE, HATE 

For the last six years or more, a Tea Party friend of mine has been inundating me almost daily with hate-Obama emails. 

Some of his diatribes are legitimate.  Many are exaggerations, ranging from mild to gross.  Others are bald-faced lies, which he admits when I call him on them.  

He used to send along racist jokes too until I threatened to block all his emails if he didn’t stop.  I’m sure he still sends them to others on his list.

The one thing all of these missives have in common is that they all grow out of hatred.  Whether these folks hate Obama because he’s a Democrat or because he’s black is hard to tell, but it is plain there’s a lot of both involved.  If you doubt that, I have an ocean-front house in Kansas I’d like to sell you.

If it were just one person doing this, it wouldn’t bother me.  But none of what he sends is original.   All of it is just Tea Party stuff he picks up off the Internet and mindlessly passes along.  Six years of this endless drumbeat has to originate somewhere, and that tells me there are a lot of people out there filled with hatred. 

Let me make clear here that I draw a very distinct line between Tea Party Republicans and real Republicans.  Real Republicans, like real Democrats,  can sit down and talk about their differences and find compromise solutions.  That’s the history of our nation.  It’s part of what made us great.

But Tea Partiers will not even consider an idea if Obama likes it, even if they originated the idea themselves.  If Obama likes it, they hate it.  

Hate, Hate, Hate it.

It’s hard not to grow intolerant of their intolerance.

-Skip

Questions for Atheists

I don’t understand atheists.

In the first place, very few atheists call themselves atheists anymore.  There used to be atheists who wore the name proudly -- Ayn Rand and Madelyn Murray O’Hair come to mind.  But today most atheists use words like humanist, freethinker, agnostic.  Why?  I’ve never met a humanist, etc., who wasn’t an atheist.

(Incidentally, many self-described agnostics say they don’t take sides as to whether  God exists, and therefore they’re not atheists.   But they are.  The word “atheist” means “without belief”, so anyone who does not actively believe God exists -- and that includes people who don’t take sides -- is “without belief”.)    

Also, atheists like to say, “In Reason We Trust", which is a rather sarcastic slap at the motto, “In God We Trust.”  They use the phrase as though reason cannot lead to any conclusion other than theirs.  I ask, is that reasonable?  

But the granddaddy of all my questions for atheists, one I’ve asked many atheists and  have yet to hear a reasonable answer, is this:  

If my life ends at death, then ultimately my life is meaningless.  So how can something meaningless have any meaning?  

And if life has no meaning, what would be wrong with with my killing you and taking everything you have.  Or you me?  Or they us?   

And how does one define words like wrong and right and bad and good in terms of life’s having no meaning? 

I should say here that I have nothing against atheists.  Ultimately, atheists and theists alike base their choices on faith.  Nobody knows, so everybody has the right to believe what she or he chooses.   

Still, the questions persist. 

I hope an atheist will answer.

-Skip

Kill the Shield Laws

As a retired newspaperman and present-day blogger on current events, I have to say I hate the idea of shield laws for journalists.   

My first problem is, how do you define journalist?  A reporter for The New York Times obviously would qualify, but how about a retired newspaperman?  Or a blogger on current events?  Would Al Jareeza qualify?  How about high school or middle school newspapers?  If someone asks a government official a question and publishes the answer, might she qualify?  Where do you draw the line?

Trying to define journalist for legal purposes is too much like trying to define pornography.  We all know it when we see it, but our best lawyers can’t define it.

And even if we could define it, government has no business licensing journalists -- which is exactly what shield laws do. They give to journalists (or those the government defines as journalists) rights that no one else can have.  That strikes me as bordering on being unAmerican, if not blatantly unconstitutional. 

In order for Democracy to work the press must be free, but a press licensed by the government is not free.  It is beholden to the government under laws that the government, and only the government, can change, anytime and anyhow it wishes.  And that is wrong, wrong, wrong. 

Journalists should retch at the idea of shield laws.

-Skip

Danger: Feds Fish in Journalists’ Files

We all should be deeply alarmed that federal agents recently fished in the emails and telephone records of an American-based international news organization. 

Not that the government didn’t have a good reason to look.  The Associated Press had published an article, based in part on information provided by an unnamed government source, that inadvertently revealed the identity of an American spy in Yemen.  

The feds called it a breach of national security and demanded to know the reporter’s source, but the AP refused on grounds that revealing the source would betray a trust.  So, the feds secretly searched through a number of the AP’s emails and telephone records to find it.  

The feds are absolutely right in wanting to know who leaked the information, but they are dead wrong in searching the AP’s files to get it. 

The danger is that if sources feel they cannot trust the news organizations to keep them anonymous -- if, for example, they think the feds might search the news organizations’ emails and phone records -- the sources will dry up, and our news media will become mere conduits through which government-written press releases would flow.  We the public would know only what the government wants to know, only what it spoon-feeds us. 

If that had been the case in recent times, we never would have known of such things as our government’s warrantless wiretappings, or its secret prisons, or that it tortured its prisoners.  All of those stories depended on confidential sources.

Yes, there will be some abuses, and that is sad.  But I’d rather face the news media’s abuses than the government’s.  

-Skip