While we ponder this most loving of days, let's also take a small amount of time out to consider this delightful letter sent by Pastor Billy Ball of Faith Baptist Church, Primrose, Georgia to Pam Spaulding in 2007.
As one commenter on the blog remarked:

A lot of crayons in a week. I wonder if he still eats them.
Nice handwriting though. He's almost ready to start learning cursive.

A lawsuit has been filed in California's court system by lawyers representing people and corporations who donated money to the campaign to pass Proposition 8 in the November 2008 elections. The lawsuit seeks to prevent the publication of the names of donors to the campaign in favour of Proposition 8. The lawsuit is actually rather pointless, since the names of the donors are already in the public domain on the internet.
Terry Cosgrove in Huffington Post has an article on this lawsuit. He neatly sums up the intellectual and morally bankrupt reasoning behind the lawsuit:

Why does all of this sound so familiar? Perhaps because for more than 30 years, the anti-abortion activists on the right, many associated with the Catholic Knights of Columbus and Mormons (both conveniently oppose measures to prevent abortion and HIV), have been invading the right to privacy of millions of American women seeking medical care with physical violence, vandalism of personal property, harassing phone calls, emails, blacklisting, boycotts, etc. In other words, the law should protect anti-abortion and anti-gay activists from threats, boycotts and violence but these same people should be allowed to participate freely in threats, boycotts and violence against women seeking birth control and abortion. You can't even make this stuff up.

Another good point comes from a commenter in the attached discussion thread:

Frankly, why would anyone who is saving this country from a slippery slope of bestiality marriages and hate crime legislation against preachers be ashamed of their contribution? Shouldn't they be bragging about how they saved "traditional values?"

As a person who was bullied in high school, I understand exactly the pathology that is at work in the debate and campaign over Proposition 8. The supporters of Proposition 8 are nothing more than societal bullies seeking to impose their worldview on others. And, like most bullies, they shy away from any accountability for their actions. When the teachers at my school caught one of my fellow pupils trying to bully me one day, his defence was "I wasn't bullying him, I was merely teasing him". Even at the age of 13, that guy was already deveoping the reasoning ability to dodge accountability. The lawsuit by supporters of Proposition 8 is merely an adult manifestation of the same lack of willingness to be accountable for their actions. The bullies do not want to be forced to endure the same fate as their would-be victims. This is totally predictable given the underlying pathology of bullying. Most bullies are themselves frightened insecure people, hence their fear of being called on their actions. The lawsuit is without merit, and should be tossed, and the supporters of Proposition 8 should accept accountability for their actions. Anything less is merely allowing the practice of societal bullying to continue.

Link: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/02/14/house-judiciary-cuffs-joe-arpaio-the-most-abusive-sheriff-in-america/

This article in Firedoglake highlights a letter sent to the House Judiciary Committee asking for an investigation of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, an elected official who, by all accounts, has little respect for fundamental judicial concepts such as presumption of innocence and due process.
Arpaio's exploits have been highlighted for years by investigate journalists and several local newspapers, yet he consistently gets re-elected by the voters of Maricopa County - five times to be exact. This is therefore a "We The People" problem - Arpaio would not exist as a problem for the House Judicial Committee to investigate were he not returned to office by voters who should know better.

Link: http://gethuman.com

The website GetHuman.com, which lists major customer service organizations and how to get through their Voice Response front-ends and talk to a real live human...

Link: http://grahamshevlin.com/b2evo///index.php/music.php/2009/02/02/r_i_p_john_martyn

A great musical voice has disappeared...

Link: http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=8&threadID=172325&start=0

I have seen a number of amusing complaint letters over the years, but this one from an irate and pissed-off customer of the UK telecom company NTL is my favorite...I first found it on the Internet 5 years ago, lost it, and now I just found it again.
WARNING - Readers not familiar with English vernacular as spoken in the UK may require the translation of certain slang and naughty words...

Link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/1/27/144748/995/913/689624

...is discussed in this diary at DailyKos. The subject of the diary ostensibly revolves around yet another defensive pronouncement from former Attorney-General Alberto Gonzalez. However, the important definition and distinction is contained in this succinct couple of paragraphs:

...in order for the law to work, it must be just. It must be rational. It must treat famous men and ordinary ones, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the meek, the same. The rule of law exists when we live under a system of laws we believe to be just and cheerfully submit to them.
Legalism, on the other hand, is a gimmick. It dresses itself in the clothing of the law but it is arbitrary and capricious. Legalism misuses the language and majesty of the law to attempt to make legal what is illegal, moral what is immoral, and rational what is absurd. Legalism was the modus operandi of the entire Bush administration - from "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forest" legislation that was the height of Orwellian double-speak to the so-called Patriot Act and telecom immunity. Legalism is the facile and idiotic belief that "when the President does it, it's not illegal," and that all laws, all protections and rights of man, which good people have fought for, and bled for, and died for, can be sublimated to some almighty "Commander in Chief Power" that knows no limits or boundaries.
Legalism, in its most vicious and evil form, is the Nuremberg Laws.
Legalism is the basis for the defense of "just following orders."

Having defined carefully the difference between the two worldviews, the author then asks the now-rather obvious and devastating question about Gonzalez' latest attempt at post-hoc self-justification:

So when that mental midget, the affable torture enabler who made a mockery of this country's system of justice declares: "these activities ... They were authorized, they were supported by legal opinions at the Department of Justice," how is that any different from Adolf Eichmann claiming he did nothing wrong because "I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from... my superiors"?

Of course, this is a classic example of a devastating argument that cannot, by it's nature, be reduced to a soundbite, and is therefore unlikely to be seen on network television any time soon...

A bunch of links for a change to Interesting Stuff.
I read an article this week in The New Yorker, "The Dystopians" by Ben McGrath (not available unline unless you are a subscriber), a thoughtful look at a number of opinion leaders who have been forecasting some sort of breakdown in the American Way Of Life for some time. It is difficult to write articles about this subject without dragging in all sorts of weirded-out backwoods survivalist nutcases and groups from the likes of rural Idaho, but McGrath focusses instead on thought leaders such as Dmitry Orlov, James Kunstler, Jim Sinclair and Nassim Taleb, who, coming from highly dissimilar backgrounds, all have developed thinking about the future of the USA.
Crooks and Liars has a pointer to a series of articles that explore the reality that Democratic governance has been more likely to yield economic growth, balanced budgets and prosperity in recent years in the USA than Republican governance. The "tax and spend" meme of the impact of Democratic Party policies which is always produced by GOP supporters is rooted in this myth, and it is high time that enough Americans started to see the meme for what is - a mostly dishonest fabrication. The fabrication also has roots in the "trickle down" hypothesis which was deployed by the GOP in the 1980's under Ronald Reagan, the idea being that if governments reduced taxes, the overall governmental model would be improved because overall revenues would still increase due to the liberating effects of removing taxation burdens from income producers. This certainly worked in the UK in the 1980's, but the crucial difference, which keeps being overlooked by trickle-down supporters, is that in the UK we had direct taxation rates for high earners that bordered on confiscation. The USA has never been a highly taxed country, despite what your whining work colleague might have you believe, so the conditions were not the same. As David Stockman discovered during his term as Ronald Reagan's budget director, when the GOP took office in 1980, instead of cutting government spending, they instead greatly increased it (largely via a massive increase in defense spending) while also reducing taxes. That the outcome was a massive federal budget deficit should have been obvious to anybody with even a rudimentary grasp of mathematics; however, the US electorate has been oblivious for decades to the shell game being run by politicians where they promise to cut taxes and still balance budgets. Until electorates wake up and start tossing politicians from office when they run such scams, the current economic mess in the USA will continue.
Meanwhile, I was reminded of the very prevalent American confusion about socialism this week in a conversation with a friend who opined that Barack Obama is a socialist. Coming from Europe, where the Democratic party would be seen in most countries as a rather conservative party, I find the proposition fairly ludicrous, lacking any supporting evidence or any semblance of a supporting argument, and it appears to be largely an origination from talk radio, which paints for it's listeners a simplistic world of false dichotomies, where the USA is a capitalist nirvana and the rest of the world is mostly either a fascist, communist or socialist wasteland. Kollapsnik on Dmitry Orlov's blog has a lengthy post deconstructing the whole area of warped thinking in the USA about "socialism" today.

Link: http://www.saramednick.com/

The website of Dr. Sarah Mednick, who has accumulated research showing that most of the time it pays to nap rather than take stimulants...

Link: http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/2796

...is that the root cause lies with the US electorate. "We the people" elected George W. Bush in 2000, and re-elected him in 2004. The results are with us today.
Barack Obama is not the solution to that underlying issue. I am quite sure that if Obama is percieved to have failed, the electorate will merely be seduced into electing another leader in 2012, and the whole sorry cycle of inadequate governance will continue.
As Oxdown notes:

It was our elected representatives who failed to take a single effective action to hold the regime accountable for its multiple, blatant crimes; it was our media who blessed these actions; and it was we who voted these same people back into office, including a new President and Vice President who helped sanction some of these abuses.

Until we (as an electorate) start voting different people into office at all levels of the political system, the issues that are undermining America's position in the world will continue to work against this country.