As a Christian, I believe that the universe and its living creatures are the products of intelligent design. This belief is not merely derived from theology but is also supported by rational considerations. There is enormous intelligence embedded in the laws of nature. The greatest scientists over the past few centuries have worked to decode the intelligence mysteriously imprinted in the workings of nature. Scientific laws, as spelled out by Keppler, Newton, Einstein and others, reveal nature as exquisitely orderly. So who encoded this intelligence in nature?

Since the universe had a beginning, how did it get here? There is no natural explanation, since the universe includes all of nature. It is more than absurd to posit that the universe caused itself. The most reasonable explanation is that our rational universe is the product of some super-rational or omniscient intelligence. An intelligent designer is not the only explanation, but it certainly is the best explanation.

How the creator went about His business of making the universe and its life forms is another question, and this is a question for science to answer to the degree that it can be answered. Darwin's theory of evolution posits that chance, mutation and natural selection largely account for the transitions between one life form and another. Man, as an animal, is also the product of evolution, having descended from the same evolutionary "tree" that produced gorillas and chimpanzees.

Did God order things this way? Certainly if you read the Bible you would never predict Darwin's theory of evolution. But neither from the Scriptural accounts could one predict that the earth goes around the sun. The Bible is not and does not purport to be a science textbook. It takes no position, for example, on the heliocentric theory. Unfortunately, in past centuries, many Christians interpreted a few casual references to the sun "rising" to mean that the earth must be stationary and the sun must revolve around the earth. These interpretations were hasty, to say the least: the Bible is describing sunrise from a human or experiential perspective. Still, these narrow-minded Christians opposed Copernicus and Galileo until they were forced to admit that they were wrong. It wasn't the Bible that was mistaken; it was the foolish certainty of its interpreters that was exposed and discredited.

Today some Christians may be heading down the same path with their embrace of "intelligent design" or ID. This movement is based on the idea that Darwinian evolution is not only flawed but basically fraudulent. ID should not, however, be confused with bible-thumping six-day creationism. It does not regard the earth as 6,000 years old. Its leading advocates are legal scholar Phillip Johnson, biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician David Berlinski, and science journalist Jonathan Wells. Berlinski has a new book out The Devil's Advocate that makes the remarkable claim that "Darwin's theory of evolution has little to contribute to the content of the sciences." Ben Stein's movie "Expelled" provides horror stories to show that the case for ID as well as critiques of evolution from an ID perspective are routinely excluded or censored in the halls of academe.

ID advocates have sought to convince courts to require that their work be taught alongside Darwinian evolution, yet such efforts have been resoundingly defeated. Why has the ID legal strategy proven to be such a failure, even at the hands of conservative judges? Imagine that a group of advocates challenged Einstein's theories of general and special relativity. Let's say that this group, made up of a law professor, a couple of physicists, several journalists, as well as some divinity school graduates, flatly denies Einstein's proposition that e=mc2.

How would a judge, who is not a physicist, resolve the group's demand for inclusion in the physics classroom? He would summon a wide cross-section of leading physicists. They would inform him that despite unresolved debates about relativity--for example, its unexplained relationship to quantum theory--Einstein's theories are supported by a wide body of data. They enjoy near-unanimous support in the physics community worldwide. There is no alternative scientific theory that comes close to explaining the facts at hand. In such a situation any judge would promptly show the dissenters the door and deny their demand for equal time in the classroom. This is precisely the predicament of the ID movement.

The problem with evolution is not that it is unscientific but that it is routinely taught in textbooks and in the classroom in an atheist way. Textbooks frequently go beyond the scientific evidence to make metaphysical claims about how evolution renders the idea of a Creator superfluous. If I wanted to promote my book What's So Great About Christianity I'd direct you there to find examples. (But I don't, so I won't.)

Most Christians don't care whether the eye evolved by natural selection or whether Darwin's theories can account for macroevolution or only microevolution. What they care about is that evolution is being used to deny God as the creator. For those who are concerned about this atheism masquerading as science, there is a better way. Instead of trying to get unscientific ID theories included in the classroom, a better strategy would be to get the unscientific atheist propaganda out. In future blogs I'll show such a strategy can be successfully implemented.

Scott McClellan dropped another bombshell today. It turns out the man who ultimately authorized the leak of secret intelligence information was -- George W. Bush. As Bush was claiming he would not tolerate any intelligence leaks, he was leaking the intelligence himself.

Watch McClellan explain what happened exactly:




Remember what George H.W. Bush said about people expose the identities of our secret agents:




The most insidious of traitors, indeed.

Young Turks on You Tube

The real problem with Darwinism in the public school classroom is that it is often taught in an atheist way. Textbooks by biologists like William Provine and Richard Dawkins routinely assert that evolution has done away with the need for God. The claim is that chance and natural selection have demonstrated that we can have design--or the appearance of design--without a designer. In this sense Darwinism becomes propaganda for atheism.

Typically evangelical Christians seek to counter this atheism by trying to expose the flaws in the Darwinian account of evolution. This explains the appeal of "creation science" and the "intelligent design" (ID) movement. These critiques, however, have not made any headway in the scientific community and they have also failed whenever they have been tried in the courts. Fortunately there is a better way.

How much intelligence does it take for you to realize that Cheney has an agenda and would throw you under the bus in one second if he thought it suited his advantage? We could see it from a mile away. We said on the show -- at the time -- that Cheney sent Colin Powell and George Tenet to the UN to make the presentation on intelligence because he was going to turn around and blame it on them. He knew it was all BS and that those two were among the biggest skeptics in the administration. So he made them the public face of the questionable intelligence.

Cheney is dead wrong on policy, but he is a master manipulator. If your job is to be the head of intelligence, you have to be able to piece together Dick Cheney's machinations. Now that I have seen Tenet with my own eyes talk about these events, I have even less respect for him.

I also have less respect for the whole government. You can tell in about two minutes flat the guy isn't that bright. How does this guy get to be the head of the CIA? Shouldn't the guy gathering our intelligence be one of the most intelligent guys in the country? Remember, Clinton picked him in the first place. Huge error.

Yes, today is Charles Darwin's 199th birthday and people around the world are celebrating. Boy, it feels like just yesterday we believed man was created out of dirt by an angry invisible man. Thank you science for setting us all straight.

A wonderful way to celebrate Darwin's birthday, learn more about him and/or watch a documentary about the old man, may I suggest the Darwin Legacy documentary from UKTV? It's pretty sciency and probably even boring for most, so perhaps a quick Henry Rollins Intelligent Design rant for the religion/science debaters out there.

In Ben Stein's new film "Expelled," there is a great scene where Richard Dawkins is going on about how evolution explains everything. This is part of Dawkins' grand claim, which echoes through several of his books, that evolution by itself has refuted the argument from design. The argument from design hold that the design of the universe and of life are most likely the product of an intelligent designer. Dawkins thinks that Darwin has disproven this argument.

So Stein puts to Dawkins a simple question, "How did life begin?" One would think that this is a question that could be easily answered. Dawkins, however, frankly admits that he has no idea. One might expect Dawkins to invoke evolution as the all-purpose explanation. Evolution, however, only explains transitions from one life form to another. Evolution has no explanation for how life got started in the first place. Darwin was very clear about this.

In order for evolution to take place, there had to be a living cell. The difficulty for atheists is that even this original cell is a work of labrynthine complexity. Franklin Harold writes in The Way of the Cell that even the simplest cells are more ingeniously complicated than man's most elaborate inventions: the factory system or the computer. Moreover, Harold writes that the various components of the cell do not function like random widgets; rather, they work purposefully together, as if cooperating in a planned organized venture. Dawkins himself has described the cell as the kind of supercomputer, noting that it functions through an information system that resembles the software code.

Is it possible that living cells somehow assembled themselves from nonliving things by chance? The probabilities here are so infinitesimal that they approach zero. Moreover, the earth has been around for some 4.5 billion years and the first traces of life have already been found at some 3.5 billion years ago. This is just what we have discovered: it's quite possible that life existed on earth even earlier. What this means is that, within the scope of evolutionary time, life appeared on earth very quickly after the earth itself was formed. Is it reasonable to posit that a chance combination of atoms and molecules, under those conditions, somehow generated a living thing? Could the random collision of molecules somehow produce a computer?

It is ridiculously implausible to think so. And the absurdity was recognized more than a decade ago by Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the DNA double helix. Yet Crick is a committed atheist. Unwilling to consider the possibility of divine or supernatural creation, Crick suggested that maybe aliens brought life to earth from another planet. And this is precisely the suggestion that Richard Dawkins makes in his response to Ben Stein. Perhaps, he notes, life was delivered to our planet by highly-evolved aliens. Let's call this the "ET" explanation.

Stein brilliantly responds that he had no idea Richard Dawkins belives in intelligent design! And indeed Dawkins does seem to be saying that alien intelligence is responsible for life arriving on earth. What are we to make of this? Basically Dawkins is surrendering on the claim that evolution can account for the origins of life. It can't. The issue now is simply whether a natural intelligence (ET) or a supernatural intelligence (God) created life. Dawkins can't bear the supernatural explanation and so he opts for ET. But doesn't it take as much, or more, faith to believe in extraterrestrial biology majors depositing life on earth than it does to believe in a transcendent creator?

My last blog remarked on the fact that Richard Dawkins, one of the world's leading atheists, now believes in the possibility of "intelligent design." Dawkins is quite willing to grant that life may have originated on earth not by evolution nor by some chance combination of chemicals. He knows how infinitesimal are the odds of random chemicals simply mixing together to produce, say, the first cell. Even the simplest cell is more complicated than the most elaborate human inventions, such as the jet airplane or the most advanced computer. Consequently Dawkins told Ben Stein that maybe smart aliens deposited life on earth. I call this the ET explanation. Intelligent design is okay with Dawkins as long as that intelligent design does not involve a supernatural creator.

Some atheists on this blog are not happy with Dawkins' ET explanation. They want to go back to the early twentieth-century view that somehow the chemicals must have assembled together to produce the first cells. And the favorite piece of evidence is the 1953 experiment conducted by Harold Urey and Stanley Miller. Urey and Miller were operating on Darwin's hopeful assumption that perhaps life originated accidentally in some "warm little pond." They mixed together various chemical compounds, including hydrogen, ammonia, methane and water. To their delight they were able to generate organic compounds, including a small tincture of amino acids.

For a decade or so this generated enormous excitement in the scientific community. But then two things happened to take the wind out of the Urey-Miller balloon. First, scientists found that the early conditions on earth were nothing like the ones that Urey and Miller envisioned. For one, there was virtually no oxygen on the earth in its early stages. So even if chemicals somehow came together to produce organic compounds and amino acids, they could not have done so in anything like the way that Urey and Miller showed.

Second, biologists seeking to try and create life in the laboratory discovered that the really difficult thing is not producing amino acids. It is converting those amino acids into proteins. Here is where things get really complicated, and here is where chance really collapses as a reasonable explanation. For the details I direct you to Franklin Harold's scholarly yet accessible The Way of the Cell. Harold notes that as a consequence of the two developments listed above, the Urey-Miller experiments are now largely dismissed as a viable hypothesis of life's origin. And of course knowledgeable atheists like Dawkins and Francis Crick know this, which is why they have fled to the ET explanation--an explanation that would seem to require at least as much faith as believing in divine creation.

If you enjoy seeing atheist arguments exploded in this way--or even if you're an atheist with masochistic tendencies--you may want to attend one of my "God v. Atheism" debates this week. On Monday, April 21 I'll be debating philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong at Dartmouth College. The debate is at 8 pm in Alumni Hall on the Dartmouth campus. On Tuesday, April 22 I'll be debating Dan Barker, head of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, at Harvard. The debate is at Memorial Church, 1 Harvard Yard, at 8 pm. Finally on Friday April 25 I debate the controversial philosopher Peter Singer at Biola University. The debate is at Chase Gymnasium on the Biola campus near Los Angeles. You can get tickets at the door or at apologeticsevents.com.

It has now come to light that the detainee abuse in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan started when the Bush administration ordered our interrogators to use a document called: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."

This was a 1957 document that showed how the Chinese Communists tortured people -- in order to get false confessions! The only thing we changed was that we dropped the title of the document. Otherwise it is exactly the same. We have been using communist torture tactics that are designed to get false confessions. Meanwhile, The Bush administration has been calling it "enhanced interrogations" and saying we got "valuable intelligence" from it.

More details on the story here:




If you want to read the story of how we came to use this document for our own interrogations, you can click here. This is deplorable. Will anyone ever suffer the consequences for ordering this illegal torture? Will the press question John McCain on why he voted to allow the CIA to continue doing this? I wouldn't bank on it.

But if we do this, and no one ever gets punished for it, can we really say that America doesn't torture anymore?

Watch the Best Web TV Show Here and Here

It's a catchy title, but not exactly a good summary for this post. It's relevant though; so keep reading, watch these clips and you'll find out why I titled it so...

I am proud of all the Tag Series voters choosing The Science Tag as the winner last week, I came across this excellent video on videosift.com that you all might enjoy.

Isaac Newton has been mentioned a few times recently here on NB, so I thought I would throw in an interesting clip. Neil deGrasse Tyson (1st threepeat guest on the Colbert Report) uses Isaac Newton's Principia as an example for why the Intelligent Design debate is a tad more complex then we (myself included) might realize.

Yep, pretty fascinating. however this next clip is what makes the title of this post appropriate. Neil explains when talking about "Naming Rights" in science that it was the Arabs who named two thirds of the stars... Hence "Bush was wrong about the Stars" (what a stupid Bush idea to put religions up against each other at the start of a war)...Anyway... Baghdad was at one point the center of all ideas and great minds and the Arabs thrived between 800 and 1100 AD, inventing crazy concepts like al-gorithm. Without it you and I wouldn't be sitting here typing/reading.

It wasn't until Al-Ghazali said math was the devil that the golden age ended. The Middle East has never been the same. Don't listen to me explain it, click play on the clip below.

Will influential religious men cause the intellectual progression in America to collapse? I dunno, I surely hope not. But if you have 40 minutes to spare watch this entire lecture and let me know what you think.

11th Century religion eh, I can't help but to think of the James Burke clip I posted in this weeks Tag Series Introduction (don't forget to vote). Back in those days it appears it was the intellectually inferior Christians causing terror by attacking the superior Muslims...Jump directly to that clip.

When Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, philosopher Michael Ruse was quoted as saying that the book "makes me embarrassed to be an atheist." What especially galls Ruse is Dawkins' pig-headed insistence that anyone who embraces the Darwinian account of evolution cannot remain a Christian.

Ruse is a noted philosopher at Florida State University, an atheist champion of evolution and Darwinism, and author of several critically acclaimed books including Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?

I've been reading Ruse's book, and in it he counters Dawkins' simple-minded argument that God has been proven irrelevant since chance and natural selection now constitute "the blind watchmaker." Ruse writes, "It still leaves open the option of God's designing at a distance. Perhaps God put His design into action through the medium of unbroken law. Perhaps a God who works in this way is superior to a God who has to intervene personally and miraculously."

But doesn't evolution contradict a literal reading of the first chapter of Genesis? Yes, but Ruse points out that there are only two groups of people who insist on reading Genesis in a close-mindedly literal way. The first group is ignorant fundamentalists. And the second group is ignorant atheists like Dawkins.

By contrast, Ruse shows that from earliest times thoughtful Christians like the church father Augustine read the creation account figuratively. And for nearly two thousand years the Catholic Church has followed in this tradition. Ruse adds that while Calvin was a bit more literal-minded than Luther, both leading reformers also allowed for non-literal understandings of creation. Indeed Calvin introduced his doctrine of "accommodation" in which he argued that the Bible is sometimes written in a form as to make itself intelligible to people who are not well educated and don't have a sophisticated understanding of science.

Ruse 's conclusion introduces subtleties that seem entirely beyond the capacity of Dawkins. "Is the Christian obligated to be a Darwinian?" Ruse answers no, but urges Christians to take evolutionary biology seriously because they don't want a Christianity practiced in the dark. "Is the Darwinian obligated to be a Christian?" Again, the answer is no but Ruse adds this advice: "Try to be understanding of those who are." Finally Ruse gets to the big one. "Can a Darwinian be a Christian?" To which he offers the resounding answer: "Absolutely!"

For the past few days I've been blogging on racial differences in the short and long distance Olympic races. I noted Jon Entine's argument that such differences may have a biological origin, a taboo subject because once we start talking about physical differences, perhaps some people might then begin to suspect differences of intelligence between the races.

In my book The End of Racism I argued against such differences, noting instead that culture is a far better explanation of ethnic differences in intellectual achievement and economic performance. But when we turn to the issue of men and women, I note an anomaly.

No one denies that men are taller and stronger than women on average. This explains of course why competitive sports is based on the "separate but equal" principle. Men play against men, and women play against women. Segregation on the basis of gender appears to have an obvious rational basis in physical contests of speed and strength.

Yet one of my favorite games, namely chess, is not such a contest. Rather, chess is entirely based on intellectual capacity. It involves planning, calculation, strategy. One would assume that since men and women are equally intelligent, therefore women should be fully competive with men in chess. But it is not so. Consider: of the top 100 players in the USA currently, only two are women. Even more startling, of the top 100 chess players in the world today, only one is a woman.

So embarrassing is male over-representation at the top level that most chess competitions today are divided into two categories. There is a general category that is almost inevitably won by a man, and then there is a separate women's championship obviously designed to give women a chance to succeed as well. Currently there is a World Chess Champion and a World Women's Champion. Somehow the chess world seem to have adjusted to the reality that int his particular mental contest, women simply aren't as good as men.

Can culture account for the difference between the sexes? Actually no. Culture can help to explain why certain countries like Russia are more dominant in chess. They simply play a lot more chess over there. But culture doesn't explain why Russian males are so much better than Russian females in chess. I am not aware of an historical exclusion of women from chess, and even if there was some past discrimination, how come women still fare so poorly in an age of equality? Of the top 20 junior chess players in the world, there isn't a single woman. So in these respects the cultural explanation falters.

Are we forced to conclude then that men are smarter than women, at least when it comes to chess? Not really. The average IQ of both groups is 100. But when it comes to the bell curve distribution, an interesting difference emerges. The female bell curve is taller and narrower, with the vast majority of women bunched in the middle. The male bell curve is shorter and flatter, with more men at both ends of the distribution. What this means is that there are more male geniuses and more male morons. And this would effectively account for why at the very top level of an intellectual contest like chess, we find far more men than women.

The fallout continues from my debate with Daniel Dennett, which had religious believers unanimously declaring me the winner and atheists sorely divided, with several conceding that I won and others condemning Dennett for being condescending, lazy, incoherent, unprepared, etc. Dennett was not unprepared: he came armed with slides, and he had clearly worked his way through my writings, since he had various quotations from me that he put up on the screen. Unfortunately for him the quotations weren't damaging and in fact gave me the opportunity to respond to Dennett's challenge. He challenged me to endorse or repudiate his proposal that all children be taught about the beliefs and actions of the various religions, including their "toxic elements." I noted that the toxic elements of atheism should not be left out of such an account, including the murderous histories of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, Hoxha, Kim Jong-il, etc. If you'd like to watch the Dennett debate, you can find it on Tothesource.org, which also features several examples of atheist distress over having another leading "bright" found intellectually wanting.

Shouldn't biology teachers and textbooks stick with science and leave metaphysical statements--especially statements implying or promoting atheism--out of the classroom? I have made a constitutional argument that they must, and some leading Christian groups are now reviewing this strategy. Meanwhile, atheists on this blog and elsewhere noisily contend that there is no problem, and that no one is peddling atheism in the name of science.

In this context it's instructive to review a controversy generated several years ago by the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) when the group decided to remove the words "impersonal" and "unsupervised" from its position statement on the teaching of evolution. The NABT is a membership organization of thousands of teachers at the elementary, secondary and college levels. It has been in the forefront of legal battles against "creation science" and "intelligent design."

The original statement said, "The diversity of life on earth is the result of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, historical contengencies, and changing environments." And there it is: the official statement of the largest pro-evolution group of teachers smuggling metaphysical atheism into a scientific claim about evolution. Let's remember that this metaphysical pronouncement appears in an instruction manual for science teachers nationwide. So much for atheist ideologues who say that this is not an issue for anyone to worry about.

Two thoughtful academics, philosopher Alvin Plantinga and theologian Huston Smith, noticed the problem and wrote the NABT. They pointed out that the vast majority of Americans believe that a personal agent, God, is responsible for both the universe and for life. What Christians object to is not the idea that the earth is old or that one life form has evolved into another; what they object to is the insinuation, using the authority of science, that Gd does not exist and that material reality is all that there is.

Plantinga and Huston noted that terms like "impersonal" and "unsupervised" are not scientific terms. "It is extremely hard to see how an empirical science such as biology could address such a theological question as whether a process like evolution is or isn't directed by God. How could an empirical inquiry possibly show that God was not guiding and directing evolution?"

The NABT board found the argument persuasive, and decided to drop the two unscientific terms from its statement. At this point, a group of atheists, led by one Massimo Pigliucci, filed an open letter with more than 100 signatures accusing the NABT of bowing to religious pressure. But Eugenie Scott, writing on behalf of the NABT, pointed out that the NABT's decision was scientific and not political. Scott noted that making metaphysical claims about God's existence or nonexistence "is venturing outside of what science can tell us."

Atheists who were hoping to use the battering ram of evolution to attack religion were bitterly disappointed by this outcome. But this was one small episode: I'd like to see a coordinated strategy over the next several years to increase their dismay. Imagine the apoplexy in the God-hating camp if courts rule that atheist interpretations of evolution by scientists such as Richard Dawkins, William Provine, Steven Pinker, Douglas Futuyma and others have no place in the biology classroom! When atheism is the loser, science is the winner.

My Youtube exchange with Richard Dawkins on Al-Jazeera is finally up on the web. You can watch my segment here and the subsequent Dawkins segment here. This is the famous "debate that never was." And that's the real pity. Dawkins insisted on appearing separately from me and being interviewed after me. This way he ensured that I could not rebut anything he said on the show. Fortunately I have an AOL blog where I can carry on the conversation.

Dawkins made some good points, noting for instance that evolution does not rely on mere "chance," but he also made some obvious blunders. When a caller pointed out that World War II was motivated in substantial part by a "survival of the fittest" ideology, Dawkins pretended to be completely baffled. He proclaimed the caller's reference "absolute nonsense." Yet Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler provides extensive documentation that the Nazis repeatedly invoked Darwinian evolution and that Nazi doctrine used "survival of the fittest" as a virtual recruiting phrase. So Dawkins is either historically ignorant or wilfully obtuse.

Here I want to address Dawkins's response to my argument that the effect that is the universe requires a causal explanation. It seems unreasonable in the extreme to say that even though nature had a beginning, somehow nature is the cause of itself. So God is the name we give to the supernatural being that is the cause of nature as a whole. Dawkins argued: "This leaves open the question of where did the creator come from?" Since the creator is this "great big complicated thing," what good does it do to invoke one complex thing to explain another? "If you postulate a designer you haven't explained anything." Basically what Dawkins is saying is that there is no point in using complex explanation A to account for complex phenomenon B if you cannot account for A.

This is a fallacy. We can see this by applying the logic to evolution itself. The logic of evolution is a "great big complicated thing" with all its elements of replication, natural selection, mutations, genetic drift, and so on. Yet it is invoked to explain another complicated thing: the exquisite fit between living creatures and their surroundings. How reasonable would it be to argue: "We are invoking one complicated thing, namely evolution, to explain another, namely living things. Yet this leaves open the question of where evolution came from. We have no idea how and why evolution originally started. Since we cannot account for evolution, our explanation is useless. Simply to postulate evolution is to explain nothing." This is precisely Dawkins's argument regarding God, and here we can see how it boomerangs on evolution!

But consider the argument itself more closely. Is it really true that Complex Explanation A for Complex Phenomenon B only works if we can give a full account of A? Actually it is not true. Gravity may account for why objects fall at a certain pace, but this does not require that we give an account for where gravity comes from or why it exists in the first place. If we find various signs of intelligent life on another planet we can conclude that there are aliens on that planet without having any idea of who created them or where they came from. In summary, the best explanation for something does not require that we also provide an explanation for the explanation.

The problem I think for Dawkins is that his trademark snorts and sneers only work against televangelists who do not do much more than hurl Bible verses at their opponents. When he is confronted with history, philosophy, and logic, Dawkins seems to have very little to say. And perhaps this explains his peculiar insistence that I be given no chance whatever to respond to his statements on the Riz Khan show.

1. Well, to start, Congress gave Alaska Senator Ted Stevens (R) $1.5 billion dollars to build two bridges to absolutely nowhere. After two years, the citizens of Alaska stopped one of them and Sen. Stevens is now subject of an FBI investigation targeting public corruption. (1) (2)

Related Video: Daily Show October 10th 2005.

2. Right in the middle of this major war, Congress decided to give away hundreds of billions in tax cuts to major corporations. Isn't war supposed to be a time of sacrifice? Guess the big guys are too busy making money to sacrifice. (1) (2)

Related Video: Bush Press Conference September 20th 2007.

3. Speaking of sacrifice, Congress continued its special retirement system where just five years of service gets you full retirement with benefits at age 62. Sweet! Where can we get that deal? (1)

Related Video: This one was a little more difficult to find a video for, so while searching I found this Lemieux video from when he returned from retirement, my seach ended here. Hockey fans will appreciate this, others will skip.

4. One day Congress was feeling so powerful it decided to trash the great protection against unlawful imprisonment, the writ of habeas corpus. This dates back 800 years to the Magna Carta. You can now be arrested without a charge, denied a lawyer, and held indefinitely. They said it's just for terrorists but they lied. As a special bonus, those torture techniques for terrorists can also be used on U.S. citizens. More of that globalism business. Taser alert! (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Related Video: Keith Olbermann comments on the loss of habeas corpus. October 2006.

5. But let's be fair, the U.S. Senate did take a firm stand on Iraq just recently. They took the time to vote 72 to 25 to condemn an anti war group for criticizing the testimony of one of the few generals who actually supports the war. At the same time they gave billions more to continue in Iraq. Attack an ad, fund a war. It's Congress in action. (1) (2)

Related Video: Cenk from the Young Turks comments, September 21st 2007.

6. As if nuking a newspaper ad wasn't enough, Congress gave recently embarrassed Sen. Vitter, (R-LA), a big fat check for his pet project – "a Louisiana Christian group that has challenged the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public school system and to which he has political ties." (1) (2)

Related Video: Penn and Teller Bullshit - Creationism er..Intelligent Design.

7.Meanwhile, Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) got a 56 vote Senate majority to guarantee U.S. troops sufficient rest and leave to recover from the hardships of the Iraq war. But it needed 60 votes to pass! "It's a congressional thing, we wouldn't understand." (1) (2) (3)

Related Video:Youtube Video from Septeber 18th 2007 of Jim Webb making his case.

8.Congress made sure that seniors continue to pay top dollar for their medicine by refusing, that's right, refusing to let Medicare officials negotiate bulk discounts from big drug companies (Big Pharma). Why wouldn't they want seniors to get up to 60% off for vital medicines? Got me. (1) (2)

Related Video: Simpsons smuggling cheap pharmaceuticals from Canada.

9.Congress might be getting a little worried about us, the citizens. They passed a bill allowing the government to spy on our phone conversations and emails without a warrant "just because they say so." All it takes is the Attorney General and one intelligence official to say so and you're bugged. You'll never know it. They wouldn't want to upset us, would they? (1) (2) (3) (4)

Related Video: HBO Real Time NSA spoof, March 2006.

10.Not satisfied with screwing the seniors, the soldiers, and just about all U.S. citizens, Congress is now out to get the world by blocking any real action on global warming. Congress must be smarter than just about every scientist in the world. They're the "Brains." (1) (2) (3) (4)

Related Video: Global Warming will probably continue to be part of the political discussions in all countries. Here is a CBC report from Sept. 24th 2007.

Reprinted with permission from opednews.org, videos were added by myself for those who enjoy moving pictures.