Jesus Wrote The Constitution, The Remix

Someone very clever has created a parody version of John McNaughton's One Nation Under God interactive portrait. A sample: "Professor: He's holding tight to his copy of Charles Darwin's Origin Of Species, which none of the people in this image has read, but they heard things about it on Fox News, so!"

Jesus Wrote The Constitution

Christianist artist John McNaughton is selling prints of his painting One Nation Under God, which depicts Jesus proudly holding the U.S. Constitution as a crowd of historical figures and representatives of right-wing targets look on. On this interactive version of the painting, an effete man with crossed arms called Mr. Hollywood "represents the entertainment business in America. He looks with disdain upon the judge and the pregnant woman." An Asian man representing "the immigrant" has a "look of shock on his face as he realizes where America's source of greatness comes from as he see Christ holding the Constitution." The Supreme Court justice is "hiding his head in shame as he realizes the damage his court has done to this country." Click over for more scroll-over nonsense. One Nation Under God is available for $139, unframed.

Oklahoma House Passes Sovereignty Bill

Spurred by President Obama's stimulus package, today the Oklahoma House passed a bill declaring the state sovereign from any rule of the federal government not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, the first shot in a growing national movement intended to give states the power to defy federal laws on a broad range of issues from abortion to gun control to hate crimes.

Via the Christianist site WorldNetDaily:

The Oklahoma House of Representatives passed House Joint Resolution 1003 Feb. 18 by a wide margin, 83 to 13, resolving, "That the State of Oklahoma hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States. "The language of HJR 1003 further serves notice to the federal government "to cease and desist, effectively immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers." The sponsor of the resolution, state Rep. Charles Key, told WND the measure was a 'big step toward addressing the biggest problem we have in this country – the federal government violating the supreme law of the land." "The Constitution either means what it says, or it doesn't mean anything at all," Key said. "The federal government must honor and obey the Constitution, just like the states and this citizens of this country are obligated to do, or our system of government begins to fall apart."

Eight other states have sovereignty bills pending, another twelve have bills on the way. Some legal sources call the bills merely symbolic, saying that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution renders such efforts moot. Others are calling the sovereignty movement the thin wedge of a coming secessionist effort largely driven by disagreements over social policy issues such as gay rights, immigration, and freedom of religion.

NSA Whistleblower: Bush Administration Spied On Journalists, Regular Citizens

Via Wired:

NSA whistleblower Russell Tice was back on Keith Olbermann's MSNBC program Thursday evening to expand on his Wednesday revelations that the National Security Agency spied on individual U.S. journalists, entire U.S. news agencies as well as "tens of thousands" of other Americans. Tice said on Wednesday that the NSA had vacuumed in all domestic communications of Americans, including, faxes, phone calls and network traffic.

Today Tice said that the spy agency also combined information from phone wiretaps with data that was mined from credit card and other financial records. He said information of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens is now in digital databases warehoused at the NSA. "This [information] could sit there for ten years and then potentially it marries up with something else and ten years from now they get put on a no-fly list and they, of course, won't have a clue why," Tice said.

In most cases, the person would have no discernible link to terrorist organizations that would justify the initial data mining or their inclusion in the database. "This is garnered from algorithms that have been put together to try to just dream-up scenarios that might be information that is associated with how a terrorist could operate," Tice said. "And once that information gets to the NSA, and they start to put it through the filters there . . . and they start looking for word-recognition, if someone just talked about the daily news and mentioned something about the Middle East they could easily be brought to the forefront of having that little flag put by their name that says 'potential terrorist'."

Fuck You And Goodbye, Dubya

Turn it up and sing along. (Unless you're at work; there be dirty words here.)