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Do you feel that women participate equally in the responsibilities and rewards of all aspects of the nation’s governance, economic activity, social and cultural institutions and family?

Share your opinion (and see what others think) by taking the short poll from Care2.com and Legal Momentum!

And yes, it’s most likely intended to introduce you to the sponsoring organization. Legal Momentum is the nation’s oldest organization of legal advocates for women. They work on legal issues such as freedom from violence against women, equal pay and equal work, and comprehensive healthcare for women and girls.

Check out Care2.com – free email, clicks for causes, news shares, free blog, and a lot more. I’ve been on their system for years now, and I really enjoy it.

Here’s an interesting list from AlterNet – their ten most popular stories of the year. ALterNet is a great resource, although a couple of the stories surprised me.

They also have the top ten most discussed (which leans hard on 9/11), the top ten Iraq myths, the top ten outrageous right-wing comments of 2006, the top ten most popular book reviews, the top ten sex and relationship stories, and my personal favorite – a meta-list of the top ten top-ten lists of 2006.

AlterNet published thousands of articles in 2006 — here are the 10 that readers liked the most.

10. Bush’s Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq’s Oil
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Even as Iraq verges on splintering into a sectarian civil war, four big oil companies are on the verge of locking up its massive, profitable reserves, known to everyone in the petroleum industry as “the prize.”

9. Stephen Colbert: New American Hero
By Don Hazen, AlterNet
When Colbert turned up the heat on Washington’s elite, he revealed the big split between those basking in power and those fighting for change.

8. Where Bush’s Arrogance Has Taken Us
By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown
An illegal war, a long list of eroded rights, and a country run by and for the benefit of corporate campaign donors — all courtesy of the imperial presidency.

7. Lobbying for Armageddon
By Sarah Posner, AlterNet
Some influential evangelical leaders are lobbying for an attack on Iran. But it’s not about geopolitics — it’s about bringing about the End Times.

6. Why Religion Must End
By Laura Sheahen, Beliefnet
A leading atheist says people must embrace rationalism, not faith — or they will never overcome their differences.

5. Tyranny of the Christian Right
By Michelle Goldberg, AlterNet
The largest and most powerful mass movement in the nation — evangelical Christianity — has set out to destroy secular society.

4. Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?
by Jan Frel, AlterNet
A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the ’supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.’

3. Iraq’s War Porn
By David Swanson, Tomdispatch.com
We believe the war would end if the media showed more images of the human horrors in Iraq, yet we turn away when they’re placed in front of us. Not anymore.

2. Men Who Love Burgers and Loathe Sex
By Susie Bright, HuffingtonPost.com
There’s an unhappy host of young men who seem to have soured on the mating game — but why?

1. Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State
by Allan Uthman, Buffalo Beast
From secret detention centers to warrantless wiretapping, Bush and Co. give free rein to their totalitarian impulses.

Check out the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2006, too.

Republican Pete Hoekstra, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has criticized Bush for hiding more surveillance programs from Congressional oversight. The NY Times has published his criticism of Bush on this matter.

On Fox News Sunday, Hoekstra said that a whistleblower came to him with several more spying operations that were in danger of being abused without oversight.

Wait… several more??

Hoekstra: …this is actually a case where the whistleblower process was working appropriately. Some people within the intelligence community brought to my attention some programs that they believed we had not been briefed on. They were right. We have now been briefed on those programs, but I wanted to reinforce to the President and to the executive branch in the intelligence community how important and by law–the requirement that they keep the legislative branch informed of what they are doing.

See video at Crooks and Liars

So…. first, an internal whistleblower comes to him because he knows that the legislative branch hasn’t even been informed about several other spying operations.

Then, once it’s clear that this is the case, they are (probably very partially) informed under a question-and-answer format?

Even this Republican ally says

“The U.S. Congress simply should not have to play Twenty Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution.”

So what are you going to do about it, Congress?

What are you going to do about it?

In the previous post, I made mention of the language of the sacred. If the government decrees that the flag is sacred, does that violate the separation of church and state?

As may be, it’s actually going to come to a vote in the Senate. We may only be able to sit and watch our government amend the First Amendment to restrict political freedom of expression.

So this seems to be the overall plan – get as much power away from the judicial branch as possible by handing it to Congress and the executive branch. Where Congress isn’t pliant enough, then disempower Congress, and focus on executive power.

The US Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that the First Amendment to the Constitution protected Americans’ right to desecrate the flag as a means of free expression. Interesting – the majority opinion was joined by Scalia.

Back in 1997, Dr. Roger Pilon, Ph.D., J.D broke with colleagues at the libertarian/conservative think tank Cato Institute in his testimony before the Subcommittee on the Judiciary of the House. It’s worth a read – here’s my favorite part:

Sir Winston Churchill captured well that essential feature of our system when he observed in 1945 that “the United States is a land of free speech. Nowhere is speech freer–not even [in England], where we sedulously cultivate it even in its most repulsive forms.” In so observing, Churchill was merely echoing thoughts attributed to Voltaire, that he may disapprove of what you say but would defend to the death your right to say it, and the ironic question of Benjamin Franklin: “Abuses of the freedom of speech ought to be repressed; but to whom are we to commit the power of doing it?”

When so many for so long have understood the principles at issue today, how can this Congress so lightly abandon those principles? It is said by some that the flag is a special case, a unique symbol. That claim may be true, but it does not go to the principle of the matter: in a free society, individuals have a right to express themselves, even in offensive ways. Once we bar such expression, however, Franklin’s question will immediately be upon us. What is more, we will soon find that the flag is not unique, that the Bible and much else will next be in line for special protection.

It is said also that the flag is special because men have fought and died for it. Let me suggest in response that men have fought and died not for the flag but for the principles it represents. People give their lives for principles, not for symbols. When we dishonor those principles, to protect their symbol, we dishonor the men who died to preserve them. That is not a business this Congress should be about. We owe it to those men, men who have made the ultimate sacrifice, to resist the pressures of the moment so that we may preserve the principles of the ages.

After all, free expression and the right to dissent are among the core principles that the American flag is meant to represent. What greater defacement of the flag can there be than to shift its meaning into something that makes a mockery of American values and rights? Freedom of expression is one of the the truest tests of our dedication to the principles that our flag is supposed to represent.

Flag Issue History – Resources

Three countries ban flag-burning – Quick! Who are they?

In April 100 years ago:

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”
–Teddy Roosevelt.

(April 19th, actually – I’m a few days late with this.)

Looks like the “invisible government” he was referring to has surged forward and become a lot more visible.

Consider this, from Lawrence Wilkerson: “Is U.S. being transformed into a radical republic?” in today’s Baltimore Sun:

As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: “America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great – as happened to all great powers before it, without exception.

From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.

Unprecedented interpretations of the Constitution that holds the president as commander in chief to be all-powerful and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism of this administration.

Moreover, fiscal profligacy of an order never seen before has brought America trade deficits that boggle the mind and a federal deficit that, when stripped of the gimmickry used to make it appear more tolerable, will leave every child and grandchild in this nation a debt that will weigh upon their generations like a ball and chain around every neck. Imagine owing $150,000 from the cradle. That is radical irresponsibility.

This administration has expanded government - creation of the Homeland Security Department alone puts it in the record books - and government intrusiveness. It has brought a new level of sleaze and corruption to Washington (difficult to do, to be sure). And it has done the impossible in war-waging: put in motion a conflict in Iraq that in terms of colossal incompetence, civilian and military, and unbridled arrogance portends to top the Vietnam era, a truly radical feat.

…

Congress can awaken and discover that the Constitution is correct, that Congress is in fact a separate and equal branch of government. The American people will find a way to deal with the remainder of the radicals, whether at the ballot box, in the courts or in the Senate.

We can halt the precipitate slide in our standing around the world, convince the majority of the Islamic world that we can and must co-exist – and eventually prosper together – and at the same time confront, confound and defeat the small element in Islam’s midst that lives to murder innocents, Christian, Jew and Muslim alike.

Sounds like place to start for the statemanship of today.