Our Latest Stories:

Atheists don’t agree on much of anything, except that they have the right to disagree and disbelieve. Atheists do share in common a belief that they ought not to be made second class citizens in punishment of their disbelief. Sadly, the Democratic Party no longer supports the idea that non-religious Americans should not be excluded and discriminated against. Throughout the Democratic National Convention in Denver, the Democrats have been excluding nonreligious Americans from access to party leaders. The Democratic Party is on the verge of enacting a platform that makes the Democrats a religious party in favor of government funding of churches and other religious organizations.

It’s a small silver lining, but now atheists do share one thing: The need to come together for the sake of mutual defense. We don’t have a political party that will speak up for our rights. We need to speak for ourselves.

And so, a podcast speaking out on this very subject.

… in which we sit on a park bench, talk about the current state of presidential politics, and recall the days when we found it easier to care.

Listen in if you’d like.

Every honest and aware participant in the current debates about offshore drilling knows that expanded drilling for oil along America’s shorelines won’t help with the current energy crisis. The first oil out of any new offshore drilling wouldn’t be available until many years from now, and even at the peak of new production, the price of gasoline would only be decreased by a few pennies per gallon.

Offshore drilling isn’t just economically ineffective, however. It is also ecologically dangerous.

Big oil companies like to tell people that offshore drilling is safe and clean, but the truth is that it remains a dirty business that pollutes our oceans. In the 1990s alone, there were 224 oil spills from offshore oil platforms and pipelines off the coasts of the USA, resulting in 1.8 million gallons of oil spilled into American waters.

However, even if there were no crude oil spilled from offshore oil rigs, new offshore drilling would result in a large amount of pollution along our shorelines. That’s because offshore drilling brings up toxic muds containing poisonous heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium and lead, other poisons such as arsenic and benzene, and even radioactive minerals.

Our oceans are already overfished, and populations of animals Americans like to consume as seafood are crashing. Expanded offshore drilling could eliminate these species entirely. The pollutants brought up by offshore drilling have been found to interfere with the ability of fish and other animals to successfully breed. These substances are also extremely dangerous to humans.

So, even if there wasn’t a single oil spill, expanded offshore drilling would mean devastated marine environments along the coasts of the USA. Up here on land, we would have less seafood to eat. The seafood that would be left would be more expensive and at the same time more dangerous to eat.

The essential lesson is easy for you to remember: There is no benefit for Americans in general from expanded offshore drilling, but there is substantial danger. The only people who would benefit from more offshore oil drilling would be the big oil companies… and the members of Congress who receive money from them.

For the auditory and visual learners out there, a short video podcast of this article

Remember back in 2001, when people everywhere were singing God Bless America, and putting United We Stand bumper stickers on their cars?

What did it get us? Did America get blessed? Did America truly unite?

In the guise of unity, what we got was blind faith in George W. Bush. It’s clear to most Americans now that faith in Bush was not well placed. However, the larger lesson that remains unlearned for most Americans is that blind faith in any President, or any other leader, is inherently unwise. Whether it’s George W. Bush or Barack Obama who asks for unity, we need to regard all leaders with suspicion.

It’s for that reason that we’ve created the button you see here in this video podcast: Blind faith is not patriotic.

They’ll keep coming at us with United We Stand and Yes We Can, but the true patriots will be off standing by themselves, offering support when it is merited, and pulling back when trust is broken.

Republicans in Congress keep on blathering on about how we need to legalize offshore oil drilling along every mile of the American coastline and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in order to reduce the price of gasoline.

That’s bull.

You want to increase the supply of gasoline in the United States? Ban jet skis. Every year across the United States huge numbers of Americans haul jet skis along the highways to the water’s edge, and then ride their personal watercraft around in circles, annoying everyone in sight with the annoying, mosquito-like buzzing sound these machines make.

Jet skis get, depending on the model, somewhere between 1 and 5 miles per gallon of gasoline - and that’s not counting all the extra gasoline that’s used just to haul them around. All that gasoline goes for no practical purpose. It’s burned up just for the entertainment of people who like to go vroom.

If the Republicans were serious about bringing down the cost of gasoline, they would introduce legislation to ban jet skis, thus increasing the supply of gasoline.

Of course, we all know that the Republicans don’t really care about bringing down the cost of gasoline. They’re just looking for a new excuse to do what they’ve always wanted to do - to give cheap oil drilling leases on public lands so that big corporations can make even more obscene profits.

(For those of you who are looking for that sort of thing: A short video podcast on that very subject.)

If you want a crass education in the reason why so many Democrats in Congress joined George W. Bush and the Republican Party in voting for the FISA Amendments Act, I suggest that you go visit the sponsors list for the Democratic National Convention to be held from August 25th to August 28th in Denver this year. The sponsors are almost all corporations, and when I call them “sponsors”, that means that they’re paying off the Democrats. “Paying off” is more commonly referred to as bribing.

So, the FISA Amendments Act gave telecommunications corporations retroactive immunity from lawsuits. That means that, although millions of Americans had their constitutional rights violated, and the telecommunications corporations knowingly violated binding commercial agreements, the telecommunications corporations won’t have to pay a dime in compensation. The American people are out of luck. That’s a very nasty, but very profitable, arrangement for the telecommunications corporations.

Among the telecommunications corporations that was being sued was AT&T. (Read more about Hepting v. AT&T)

Gosh, but below look at who one of the top sponsors of the Democratic National Convention is: It’s AT&T! Apparently, AT&T has given so much money to the Democratic National Committee for the 2008 convention that AT&T has been declared the official wireless provider of the convention, and the AT&T logo is featured on the official tote bag of the convention, with its logo three times the size of convention’s logo.

Is it just a coincidence? Golly, could AT&T, a for-profit corporation, just give millions of dollars to the Democrats without expecting anything in return? Well, yes, I suppose that could be. I suppose that there could be absolutely no connection between the millions of dollars given to the Democrats and the Democrats’ support of the FISA Amendments Act, a law that eliminates billions of dollars in liability for companies like AT&T.

It could be… just like there could be an invisible fairy who runs around my house at night when everybody is asleep.

Here are the corporate bribers, I mean sponsors, of the Democratic National Convention:

And here’s a short video podcast on the subject. You’ll have to excuse the audio - it’s a little bit rough, but then, I don’t have a corporate sponsor.

If you’re one of the many Americans who hire ChemLawn or some similar company to spray their lawns to make sure that the grass looks lush, thick and uniform, you might want to think about the little things I found in my own lawn yesterday.

I had let the grass grow up to about 5 inches before I mowed it yesterday. As I pushed along, I noticed that, along with the crickets and grasshoppers leaping out of the way, there were also toads, peepers, and some extremely tiny little frogs (I don’t really know for sure that these smallest ones were actually tiny frogs. I suppose they could have been young toads or peepers - ask your friendly neighborhood herpetologist.)

Looking out upon my back yard from my kitchen window, you would never imagine that there were dozens, maybe hundreds of little vertebrates finding their livelihood amidst the grass, and the other sorts of plants that make up my lawn. I don’t see them except when I provoke the small animals into flight. Yet, I get a great deal of satisfaction knowing that they’re there.

Spray your lawn with pesticides and herbicides, and your lawn will be pure, thick grass, and deadly poison to amphibians, who absorb chemicals easily through their skins. Your lawn will also be a monoculture with poor soil, and therefore more like a desert than a useful little ecosystem.

Let the bugs and sligs, worms and other critters crawl through your grass, and you could get dozens, maybe hundreds, of little amphibians living in your lawn.

It’s always fascinating to me to look at a small vertebrate - something that shares our basic body plan but operates on a profoundly different scale. How different?

Here’s a tiny video of one of those tiny frogs, placed next to my wife as she works on her laptop, so that you can get an idea of its size in context.

For many years now, as part of our work to resist the right wing politics of the Republican Party, we have sold bumper stickers, buttons, t-shirts and other stuff through which people can express their opposition to the Republican agenda. We sell through several channels, including Zazzle and Skreened. For this year’s election, we have operated a shop at CafePress called No GOP 2008.

We knew that the Republican Party wouldn’t like what we had to say at No GOP 2008, but we never imagined they would sue. After all, the Republicans are the ones who complain about frivolous lawsuits all the time, right?

Well, we got it wrong - about the Republicans and frivolous lawsuits, that is. Word came to us through CafePress today that the Republican National Committee is threatening suit in order to shut down our shop and other shops like it.

It seems that the Republican Party thinks that it’s just plain wrong, wrong, wrong for anyone to criticize them using the terms that are popularly used to refer to the Republicans: GOP, Grand Old Party, and RNC. The Republican Party is even threatening to sue because people use elephants in their criticisms of the Republican Party.

What’s next? Will the Republican National Committee insist that no one use the word “Republican” without their permission? Are we supposed to go around talking about how we disagree with the Bepublicans, out of fear that we’ll be sued?

All this reminds me of how Lord Voldemort went on in the Harry Potter books, trying to intimidate people from using his name. It’s as if the Republicans want to be referred to only as the political party who must not be named.

CafePress is saying that it is in negotiations with the Republican Party to try to avert the threatened lawsuit. We can’t know what the outcome of the lawsuit will be, of course. Will we be censored? Will we be forced to shut down our shop criticizing the Republicans?

Just in case, we are preparing some alternative terminology that skirts the proposed prohibition on actually mentioning the Republican Party when criticizing the Republican Party.

Instead of referring to the GOP, we’ll use these other nicknames:

TOP - for Totalitarian Old Party
BOP - for Banned Old Party
COP - for Censoring Old Party

Or, maybe we could call the Republican Party the FLOP - for Frivolous Lawsuits Old Party.

We’ve made the following public service announcement as a warning - watch out for those angry elephants!

Senator Dianne Feinstein seems to love testing California Democrats to see just how much abuse they will take. Senator Feinstein has, over the last seven years, voted for the worst of the worst policies presented to Congress by George W. Bush.

Now Feinstein may have found the breaking point for California Democrats. She voted for George W. Bush’s FISA Amendments Act.

Partisan followers within the Democratic Party are trying to hush the whole thing up, but there is a surging wave of Democratic rank and file rebellion about to break on shore. One of the low-lying politicians especially vulnerable to this backlash is Dianne Feinstein.

Feinstein, following the talking points of betrayal, insists that the FISA Amendments Act somehow protects civil liberties. Sadly, that’s a lie. I’ve read the law, and I can state quite clearly that it does not protect civil liberties. It sacrifices them at the altar of Homeland Insecurity. The FISA Amendments Act gives the Attorney General the sole power to declare, without any court’s power to stop it, that the spy programs are legal. Guess who runs the spy programs. Why, goodness me - it’s the Attorney General!

It’s a short video podcast just perfect for a sultry Sunday night in San Diego, on Dianne Feinstein and the FISA Amendments Act:

Yes, I know that the FISA Amendments Act has passed both houses of Congress and been passed into law. I know that the filibuster in the Senate failed.

Now it’s time for a filibuster by the citizens of the United States of America.

The Democrats and Republicans who voted for the FISA Amendments Act did it in the middle of the summer because they think that Americans are too superficial to pay attention. They think we Americans have a short attention span, and that a few days at the beach will remove any of the anger we feel as a result of watching members of both parties in our Congress rip the Constitution to shreds.

Barack Obama and 71 other senators voted to kill the Senate filibuster. They voted to end debate and just pass the FISA Amendments Act.

Thanks to Barack Obama and his Republican allies, the Senate can no longer speak on the grave abuses of the FISA Amendments Act. So, it’s up to us to speak.

The politicians in Washington D.C. expect that you will just be upset for a few days, and then you’ll forget about it. Prove them wrong.

Join a citizen filibuster of the FISA Amendments Act. Don’t stop writing. Don’t stop talking. Don’t stop calling your members of Congress until the FISA Amendments Act is repealed.

Democracy will die when citizens no longer care enough to work to defend it.

Some people get all uptight about the burning of the American flag. Why is it that these same people seem to think it’s a good idea to burn the Constitution?

That’s what happened in the United States Senate today. They burned the Constitution when they passed the FISA Amendments Act.

In many cultures, you honor the dead by burning their corpses. It is with this thought in mind that I burn my own copy of the Constitution tonight.

There are a hundred reasons why the Senate should vote against the FISA Amendments Act, but it all boils down to this: The proposed law gives the Attorney General alone the power to declare whether the Attorney General’s own spy programs against the American people are being conducted in accordance to the law.

According to the FISA Amendments Act, no one else, not any judge, not anyone in Congress, can challenge that declaration.

That means that the Attorney General will receive the power to break the law and spy against Americans in a blatantly illegal manner, but then declare that the spying is legal - and no one will be able to do anything about it.

That one provision of the FISA Amendments Act transforms the United States of America into a nation in which the Attorney General, who is supposed to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer, is above the law.

At 10:00 this morning, the Senate will meet to consider the FISA Amendments Act. Please, call your two senators now, through the congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Beg them to vote NO, for freedom’s sake.

The following is a letter/podcast I am sending to the Obama for President campaign today, along with two shiny pennies:

Barack Obama announced today that he intends to expand George W. Bush’s unconstitutional program of so-called “faith-based” initiatives. These programs are religious - that’s what the phrase “faith-based” means.

So, let’s get down to brass tacks: Barack Obama intends to set up a system of government funding for religious programs, and one that’s even bigger than what George W. Bush has established. The purpose of this system is to channel government money to religious organizations, so that the religious organizations can perform the functions that the government had previously been performing. The government of We The People gets replaced by the churches of They The Preachers - yet We The People still get stuck with the bill.

(Hear more on the associated podcast about the new faith-based Obama scheme)

If the government’s paying for these programs, they’re established by the government, even if they’re administered by the religious groups. So, Barack Obama wants to use government money to establish religious programs.

Let’s go back to the First Amendment, shall we? It states that there shall be no government establishment of religion: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. All federal money comes through Congress. So, what Barack Obama is proposing is that Congress make law that provides the President with the money to give to religious programs (or, Obama is proposing to completely ignore the First Amendment ban on what money from Congress can be used for).

Obama’s campaign claims this all is just a big misunderstanding. They say that the programs that will get money under Barack Obama’s plans will all be secular. Think about that for a second, and you’ll see how absurd that claim is: Secular faith-based initiatives?!? Really? If the programs are all going to be secular, then why are they being called “faith-based” - when “faith-based” means religious?

These excuses don’t fly. There’s a reason that Barack Obama calls these programs “faith-based”, and it’s the same reason that George W. Bush called his programs “faith-based”. It has to do with campaign politics.

Barack Obama wants to get elected President. From the start, Obama has been using churches as de-facto campaign organizations. He’s campaigned in churches, and he’s had churches campaign on his behalf. He’s even had gospel tours for his campaign with church leaders taking part. This is illegal and unconstitutional, but Barack Obama seems to care more about getting elected than he does about the law and the Constitution.

Barack Obama’s announcement that he plans to use the power of government to shovel huge amounts of money into the bank accounts of big, powerful churches is nothing more than an attempt to buy more churches to use as campaign organizations to help Obama get elected.

Faith-based, nothing. These initiatives are kickback-based.

This is the main reason that Obama’s government-funded religious programs are unconstitutional and illegal: They are designed to persuade tax-exempt religious organizations to engage in political campaigning for one particular candidate.

These programs are corrupt. They corrupt the government by setting government policy with the purpose of political allegiance. They corrupt churches by encouraging church leaders to campaign for the candidate who promises to write the biggest government handout check back to the church after Inauguration Day.

If Barack Obama were truly progressive, and if he truly cared about the Constitution, he would end George W. Bush’s government-funded religious programs, not expand them.