Cross-posted at my blog DemWrite.

If I had to come up with a reason for my lack of posting, it's pretty simple, really. If I'm going to post something, I want it to be more substantial than simply saying, "What Keith said...." Keith Olbermann's special comments seem to be the words I want to say, but he seems to be able to put them together in a much more forceful way than I can. That's not to say that I don't think I'm a good writer. I do. Keith is just in a class all his own, the Edward R. Murrow of this generation.

I'm going to try to talk about a few issues that are in the news as far as Missouri politics (a lot of it is national in scope), as well as Kansas, our neighbor to the west.

Dive in after the flip.

Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence under President Jimmy Carter, has called Vice President Dick Cheney "a vice president for torture", saying that Cheney "was damaging America's reputation by overseeing torture policies of possible terrorist suspects". Turner made these comments in an interview with Britain's ITV news yesterday.

Quite frankly, I'm happy that Mr. Turner has called it as he saw it and let it be known.

http://www.cnn.com/...

Cross-posted to my blog DemWrite

As a writer/journalist, I'm a big fan of the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution. It says, in part:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...

As Voltaire once said, "I may not like what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." That said, I think FOX News should go away.

More below the fold.

This is a piece I wrote in the early fall of 2001, shortly after the attacks of 9/11... With all the recent state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriages, I think it's still relevant.

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Events in our world recently have brought to mind a single word: intolerance. It is this word that has driven the attacks on the United States and, in some ways, has also driven our response. I'm not saying that everyone feels this way, but large numbers of people do and it's, at best, disturbing.

We've learned that someone wrote a letter to the hijackers, in copies found in the luggage of one of the hijackers at the airport in Boston and at the crash site in Pennsylvania. The letter was part prayer book, part instruction manual. It told each of the hijackers how they were to prepare themselves for the attack, making sure that they were clean, as well as their clothes and shoes, and that they should make sure they were not followed to the airport. They were told that they were doing God's work and that, by carrying out this mission, they would be earning everlasting life in paradise.

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -- James Madison

Madison uttered these words about 200 years ago, at a time when the new nation had just recently thrown off the shackles of a king who taxed them without asking their opinion and generally did what he wanted.

I am not saying that George W. Bush thinks he's a king, although he did once say that being a dictator would be easier. What I am saying is that under the guise of fighting a foreign enemy, in this case the hard to define enemy of "terrorism", he has brought tyranny and oppression to this land.