.  .  .  I'll pack his parachute!

He's baaaaack! And rather than just getting the hell out this nation under God (which would make me giddy),  Newdow wants God to take a hike.

Michael Newdow, of Sacramento, Calif., says he wants to remove the phrase
"so help me God" from the oath of office, plus axe the invocation prayer
from Pastor Rick Warren, already under fire from the left for his opposition
to gay marriage.

According to Newdow, any reference to God or religion violates the
Constitution.

"Equality is important to me," Newdow told The Examiner. "We should show
equal respects for all of our citizens, regardless of their race, gender or
religion."

The draft of the lawsuit contends: "By placing 'so help me God' in its oaths
and sponsoring prayers to God, government is lending its power to one side
of perhaps the greatest religious controversy: God's existence or
non-existence."

Newdow has tried this before: he sued to remove religion from the 2001 and
2005 presidential inaugurations, but lost both times.

In 2005, U.S. District Judge John Bates denied his effort to obtain a
preliminary injunction to keep the president from uttering the words 'so
help me God' as he takes the oath of office.

Nonetheless, Newdow thinks his odds are good.

"It depends on if they decide to uphold the principles of the constitution
or not," Newdow told the Examiner. "If they do, they're 100 percent."

Prof. Ron Allen, a constitutional law expert at Northwestern University,
disagrees.

"You can understand the impulse, it seems as though it's a governmental
activity imbued with religious symbols and a certain sect of religious
symbols, Christian obviously, in particular,"Allen said. "No one thinks the
government is establishing a church by the president saying 'so help be God'
at his own initiative when taking the oath. I don't think the courts will
intervene."

I actually don't understand the impulse, but I do understand that this is a nation founded on principles touched by a sense of the Divine.  I, for one, am not willing to alter those principles, or deny the spirit in which they were established to avoid offending the atheists among us.  You are free to believe, or not believe as you choose.  You are NOT free to castrate our founding precepts.  For the love of God, shut up . . . or go away!

The UN announcement that 51 civilians have died in the conflict in Gaza must be understood in the context of Hamas's declared ideology to use civilians as human shields for Hamas fighters. Indeed, Hamas continues to emphasize and promote the religious ideology that death for Allah is an ideal to be actively pursued.

The goal is to convince Palestinians, including women and children, not to fear death but even to face it at the front to protect Hamas fighters. Hamas's placement of its military installations and fighters among civilians reflects this ideology, and has led to these 51 deaths.

A Hamas representative in the PA legislative council this year expressed pride in the fact that women and children are used as human shields in fighting Israel. He described it as part of a "death industry" at which Palestinians excel, and explained that the Palestinians "desire death" with the same intensity that Israelis "desire life."

The following is the full text of the comments by Hamas representative Fathi Hamad: "For the Palestinian people death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the Jihad fighters excel, and the children excel. Accordingly [Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the Jihad fighters against the Zionist bombing machine, as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: We desire death as you desire life."