The Thinkery

Sheesh, The Things I Forget To Do

2075-01-02T12:21:00.000-05:00

Where to begin? Firstly, sorry it's been so long. Secondly, the big news is that I'm one of the contributors to Cogitamus, a new group blog composed of Ezra alumni and a few other folks we managed to fool into thinking that it would be a good idea to join us.

So in addition to the end of year nuttiness, I've also been working on design stuff, setting up accounts and domain names and even working to ban a particularly persistent troll whose specialty is harassing female bloggers.

I will keep the Thinkery, at least for a while, but I won't be regularly updating it. I will use it to post the occasional item that doesn't really fit the model of a group blog that focuses on politics. Posts such as one dealing with the ramifications of the filioque in the Nicene Creed, and why that matters to every Christian in the world even if you don't know it.

So please, please update your bookmarks and change your browsing habits to head over to Cogitamus (that's www.cogitamusblog.com, folks!) instead of here. I'll keep this post on the top of the screen. Whenever I write something that I post back over here, I'll put up a note and link to it at Cogitamus, so there's no need to worry about missing anything if you don't regularly come back here.

Thanks!

Easter

2008-03-23T00:16:00.004-04:00

You know what Easter is? It's a father looking at those who murdered his son and saying, "I forgive you."

You know what Easter is? It's a God looking at the mess we've made of our world and ourselves and saying, "I'm going to give you a way to make it right."

You know what Easter is? It's the Creator looking at Death and saying, "I think I've changed my mind about you."

You know what Easter is? It's the whisper in the darkness, in the midst of fear saying, "I am here. . . .with you."

And all of Creation trembles in wonder, and delight.

Oh, For

2007-12-05T15:19:00.001-05:00

Crying out loud.

This video reminds me of how a theology professor at my alma mater got in trouble for telling his class that the 12 Disciples weren't Christians. That they were all Jews just went right over some of his students' heads. And yes, it does matter a great deal that all of them were Jews, especially since 3 of the Gospels claim to be from Apostolic sources as well as the Petrine Epistles.

On a completely different note, I'm really tired of being sick. I've had chest, sinus and multiple ear infections for about a month now. I'm used to a chest or sinus infection once, maybe twice a year. Blech.

It's So Hard To Be A Member Of The Majority

2007-11-30T13:38:00.000-05:00

Remember when I wrote this a few days ago?

What is wrong, however, is spending 365 days a year in a righteous little snit over the utter gall of some people to not only refuse to address one's every whim, but their failure to anticipate what whim currently occupies one's attention this afternoon.

Today's idiot in a righteous little snit because they aren't getting preferential treatment comes to us from WorldNetDaily:

Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air have announced a new program that will charge heterosexuals 10 percent extra for their air travel to specific locations during the Christmas season.

Can you believe that? If you don't prove to them that you're gay, they'll add 10% to your ticket price!

Oh, wait:

The company actually offers the 10 percent as a discount but only if the purchaser obtains the ticket through a "gay" page of the company's website, a location not typically patronized by families seeking travel arrangements, according to an Idaho activist who was distressed by the offering.

Well, this falls under the "gum in class" rule, doesn't it? If you don't bring enough for everyone, then you can't chew your gum. Obviously companies never, ever offer discounts to particular groups.

I'll just wait a few moments as you purge your memories of all the "Christian" nights at amusement parks and baseball games, and the family meal nights at restaurants where kids eat free in order to get the parents to come too, and the family vacation packages that are always sold, and well, you get the idea.

The problem is clearly not the issue of a discount, but that Alaskan Airlines considers those homosexuals to be real people deserving of the same treatment as everyone else.

Consider this little gem:

"They are giving preferences to male passengers who want to wear dresses on the planes, and giving them preference over married couples," Fischer said, noting families typically buy more tickets than individuals or pairs traveling together.

I guess I missed the part where the discount is only for cross-dressers. And families buy more tickets at one time than a person traveling alone, but that doesn't mean they buy more tickets overall.

Go ahead and read the rest of the article if you have the stomach for it. It's the pure, quadruple-distilled essence of the culture of entitlement and victimization that infuses modern American conservatism. "If I'm not getting a benefit, then I'm getting a penalty!" "If a business reaches out to people other than me me me and people just like me me me then they aren't worthy of my patronage!"

It's disgusting.

At Least It's Interesting

2007-11-29T13:43:00.001-05:00

Rudy Giuliani has not only been married three times, and he not only was forced out of the Mayor's Residence by his then-wife because of his affair with his now-wife, apparently used New York City funds to pay for his romantic getaways with his then-mistress/now-wife in the Hamptons. He used his security detail to help cover things up and tried to hide the public financing of his private affair by using the budgets of fairly obscure city departments like the Office for People with Disabilities.

I'm sure everyone reading this blog already knows about this. You knew about it yesterday. The question is, what about the rest of the country? My recent Google News search for "Giuliani" brought up over 1,000 articles relating to the debate last night and how Rudy and Mitt went after each other. There were approximately 250 articles on Giuliani's misappropriation of city funds.

Drudge led with the story for a while, and even Fox News has paid some attention to it, although "Special Report with Brit Hume," for example, spent most of their time blathering about Bill Clinton and managed to squeeze in only a hurried reference to the Giuliani story at the end.

That, I think, is the real problem with the story: it's not about Bill Clinton. Or to put it another way, it doesn't fit established storylines and narratives. It has the potential to be treated as a Big Deal, but there's no guarantee at this point that it'll really go anywhere in the press. Giuliani was a pretty rotten mayor. When he left most New Yorkers hated him, none more than the FDNY because of how Giuliani's decisions regarding their radio system led to many of the Fire Department's losses on 9/11. His BFF Bernie Kerik is a complete crook. Almost everything he's said about his record in NYC has been not only false but easily demonstrated as such.

Yet he still has managed to sit atop polls and receive good press, not only from Roger Ailes but other media outlets as well. They've crafted a narrative around him, one that a bunch of the country seems to accept, and that's what will make it hard for the news media to turn on him now rather than just dismiss this story.

Nothing shows the news media's dysfunction more than how loyal they are to the myths they construct. It's why everything is good news for Republicans, why people are concerned about Bill Clinton's potential for infidelity in the White House and not Giuliani's, why it keeps getting reported that the Democrats' FISA bill would have required court approval for President Bush's bathroom breaks (as opposed to Condi's) or whatever it is Joe Klein made up.

The danger we face in trying to pressure the media to report stories like the US Attorney purge or Giuliani's criminal misuse of NYC money is that we'll only be able to change the prevailing narrative rather than actual journalistic practice. Broder is mythologically committed to his perverted "centrism" rather than ideologically committed, and the same is true for the rest of them. We can change the myth; the GOP has the route all mapped out, and that destination is easier to reach with all of the technological tools available to us now. But all that means is someday the tide will turn against us again. I want a media that reports facts, that doesn't consider the horserace to be the only side of a campaign that exists, that doesn't mistake he said/she said articles with false equivalence as balance. If we can get them to report on the Giuliani story because it's about criminal activity and breach of the public's trust and not because Giuliani was having The Sex, then we'll have a real accomplishment under our belt.

I'm not holding my breath for either the possibility that the press will really run with it or, if they do, that they'll put the focus where it belongs.

Cherry Chocolate Zonday

2007-11-29T11:27:00.000-05:00

It's hard to categorize Tay Zonday. He's the genius(?) behind "Chocolate Rain," which was this incredibly weird yet, to me, compelling song. His voice is. . .unique. Yes, let's go with unique. Very unique.

Anyway, apparently Dr. Pepper has decided to release a cherry and chocolate flavored version of Diet Dr. Pepper. Think of it as the Jones Sodafication of the industry. What person could embody the rather unique appeal of something like Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper?

That's right: Tay Zonday.

It's a wonderful time to be alive, folks. Never forget that.

Reality Check: Illegal Immigrant Edition

2007-11-28T11:25:00.001-05:00

Via Ezra, here's another study showing that illegal immigrants not only don't go to the emergency room more than hardworking & law-abiding citizens from America's Heartland, they actually utilize emergency care far less than we do.

Hospitals have been complaining about the costs of treating the uninsured for quite some time, and nativist politicians and groups like the Minutemen have been quick to place the blame squarely upon the shoulders of illegal immigrants. Somehow it actually makes sense to some people to believe that these poorly-educated migrant workers are able to know and understand far more about the American welfare system than US citizens and are sophisticated enough to continually, excessively and fraudulently take advantage of it.

The reality about hospitals' costs for treating the uninsured is that there are 45 million American citizens with no health insurance, and an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. Even if these two groups use emergency rooms at exactly the same rate it means that American citizens account for 80% of those costs. If the situation is so bad that emergency rooms need to close - or entire hospitals go out of business - then making so that no illegal immigrant ever goes to the hospital won't solve the problem. This is especially true since multiple studies, such as the one linked above, show that illegal immigrants use emergency services less than the rest of us.

In our current healthcare system, the only people getting rich are the top executives and shareholders of insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Everyone else is seeing their income stagnate. Illegal immigrants, obviously, are not the problem.

It's About Time

2007-11-27T22:50:00.000-05:00

We finally managed to get some real journalists on Phill Kline's case regarding the time he spends out of the office and where exactly he lives. Kudos to KCTV5, Kansas City's CBS station, for investigating when Kline actually shows up for his job as Johnson County, KS, District Attorney and when he doesn't. They also apparently staked out the apartment Kline is renting for $400/month down in Stilwell, KS from some of his ardent supporters.

Kline makes $143,000 a year and has kids, and we're supposed to believe that this family chooses to still live in an upstairs apartment at a storage facility in Stilwell, KS, almost a year after getting installed at Johnson County DA.

It's been blatantly obvious to everyone that Kline signed a quickie deal with a pair of his followers right before the election in order to secure eligibility for the vote and has never intended on living there. It'd be fun to get a peek inside that apartment to see if there is anything at all inside.

You can get all these details and more at the link. It's all just a big "DUH" to me. I will say that I've long thought that Kline never had any intention of doing the Johnson County DA gig long-term, but the fact that he's a vindictive son of a bitch managed to overcome his limitless ambition, so he took the job as a way to get back at all those Johnson County voters that wanted to be rid of him.

I also suspect that certain senior members of the DA's office have been willing to keep silent over Kline's absences and obvious heavy involvement in abortion politics because they know that he isn't really a lawyer and would be a disaster in the courtroom. If this investigation causes Kline to start actually running the DA's office, we're in trouble around here.

If I'm right about an arrangement, then it might be best to just continue paying the guy to stay away from Johnson County as much as possible. Further, since Kline is already the DA and has managed to not completely destroy the office so far, I wouldn't mind it too much if he were still around next November to remind everyone in Johnson County that it was the Republicans who foisted this loser on us for another two years.

If he does resign - don't count on it - or is removed - slightly more likely - from office, then perhaps this time around more than half the GOP Precinct Leaders can be bothered to show up for the vote instead of just handing their proxies to their friends. Of course, they might just view this as a liberal media hit job and put some other dangerously right-wing schmuck in office.

Man, January 2009 is going to be a good month on so many levels.

Really Big Moose

2007-11-27T11:21:00.000-05:00

This will be awesome:

Officials in northern Sweden have just given the all-clear for the construction of the world's largest elk, or moose as the animal is known in North America.

Perched on top of a mountain, the 45-metre (148-foot) elk will double as a restaurant and concert hall that can seat up to 350 guests. From its antlers, more than 500 metres above sea level, visitors will be able to enjoy the spectacular view over the valleys below.

There's even a very helpful video showing us what this Wonder of the World is going to look like:

I just added this to my "must-see" list.

Life Tip: Don't Get Born Poor

2007-11-26T20:32:00.001-05:00

Concerned that your rights are being taken away by warrantless wiretapping and other "security" measures? You apparently aren't poor:

The Supreme Court rejected a challenge today to San Diego County's practice of routinely searching welfare applicants' homes without warrants and ruling out assistance for those who refuse to let them in.
The justices refused, without comment, to intervene in the case from San Diego County, where investigators from the District Attorney's Office show up unannounced at applicants' homes and conduct searches that include peeking into closets and cabinets. The visits do not require any suspicion of fraud and are intended to confirm that people are eligible for government aid.
Failure to submit to the searches, which can last an hour, disqualifies applicants from assistance.

The Fourth Amendment should supersede any desire to make sure that every damn nano-penny of government assistance is spent in exactly the correct, morally upright way. If the DA suspects a crime - even welfare fraud - then the DA should go get a warrant just like for any other crime.

There was some buzz recently - I'm too lazy to link it, so too bad - about why conservatives favor private charity over government assistance. One possible reason that was put forth is that they want to be able to control not only what their beneficiaries use the assistance for but also what they do or don't do in the other parts of their lives as well. So you get the soup kitchens that require hungry people to sit through a church service before they get to eat, for example. Having done that type of thing - and I'm profoundly regretful for it* - it now seems to me that if you can't get people to stick around after they've eaten, you're doing it wrong.

There's nothing wrong with governmental or private assistance requiring certain qualifications and even some behavior standards. But enforcing the regulations associated with welfare assistance needs to happen within the established laws of the USA. It is a sign of profound societal decay that a lousy couple hundred bucks a month justifies a violation of our constitutional rights.

*I don't regret trying to help; the meals served, the time spent in conversation, the nights spent out on the streets in Ocean Beach. I regret following the pattern of making hungry men and women act like they wanted to have a church service before they could eat a hot meal. And I freely admit that very few people would have bothered to stick around to listen to me preach after the meal, at least after hearing me once or twice. No college sophomore is a good preacher.

The Real Silly Season

2007-11-26T10:40:00.000-05:00

Liberty Counsel's "Naughty or Nice" list of businesses is absurd on so many levels it's hard to get through them all. The naughty/nice concept is of course part of the secular Santa myth, and presumably Liberty Counsel would hope to keep the focus of CHRISTmas on CHRIST and not a contextually flexible secular icon of spending on credit.

The list itself was last updated a year ago. I do hope they not only update the business listing but the reasons for including particular businesses on either list. A sampling:

Cabela’s ~ Web site has a “Christmas Shoppe” and one customer reported a sales associated greeted him with “Merry Christmas.”

Dollar Tree - Customer reports store is avoiding the “C” word: Everything is “holiday”, although “it’s pretty obvious which ‘holiday’ they will not discuss.”

I don't think it's at all clear what holiday they won't discuss. They're not discussing Bodhi Day (Dec. 8), Eid al Adha (Dec. 20), Yule/Litha in the southern hemisphere (Dec. 22) or Zarathosht Diso (Dec. 26). There's all sorts of religious holidays that never get discussed, never completely take over the airwaves, never become the focus of countless news stories and never morph into the only hope that our nation's economy has to look like it's growing.

Some holidays are incredibly important in other parts of the world. Lunar New Year is pretty big in Asia. I spent one in Singapore and our group had to physically hold on to each other in order to not get separated in the crush of people. Buddha's Birthday is another significant holiday, but for some reason it's never mentioned over here. It's not like Americans aren't able to appropriate holidays when it suits them; Cinco de Mayo and St. Patrick's Day are good examples. Though I suppose that Americans have so missed the point on both those days that Asian cultures should be happy to be ignored.

People like those at Liberty Counsel who insist upon fighting a War against Christmas are wrong. Wrong about their ability to celebrate any holiday they see fit, wrong about how much Christmas is pushed on everyone in this country all the time, starting 2 weeks before Halloween, wrong about the idea that belligerence and jingoism are appropriate for celebrating any religion's holiday. The current American Christian way of celebrating Christmas has nothing to do with ancient Church tradition. It's completely backwards, actually; traditionally Advent - the month before Christmas day - has been a time of solemn reflection and penitence, not 30 days of parties, eating to the point of nausea, lying about our families' accomplishments for the year, sending cards to people we can't really remember and racking up even more consumer debt after 12 months of spending too much.

I have some friends who celebrate Christmas the ancient way; I think it's weird and my family won't do it. It's not like having a month of joyous anticipation and celebration which culminates on Christmas day is wrong. What is wrong, however, is spending 365 days a year in a righteous little snit over the utter gall of some people to not only refuse to address one's every whim, but their failure to anticipate what whim currently occupies one's attention this afternoon.

When God sent his only Son to the world, he considered it good enough for his Son to be born a bastard reeking of donkey piss and ox shit. Somehow it was just fine for the Messiah, the King of kings, the Alpha, Omega and Big Man on our campus to show himself first to some men whose primary notoriety, up to that point, was the persistent rumor that they diddled with the sheep under their care.

Good enough for our Heavenly Father I guess, but not good enough for us. We expect extra discounts on our useless consumer crap, obsequious clerks who bow and scrape for our pleasure, inane songs about reindeer and chestnuts on our radios and garish lights everywhere we look.

Behold how we honor the birth of Jesus, and despair.

Not Much, How About You?

2007-11-23T11:54:00.000-05:00

So I'm in New Mexico for the holiday. It's been surprisingly cloudy, and yesterday it even snowed a bit. It's just a warmup for tomorrow when we start to head back to Kansas City; last year was so bad we headed due east into Texas and went through Wichita Falls to get to Oklahoma City. Normally we head northeast to Amarillo and the panhandle. So we'll see what tomorrow brings.

Word around here is that Udall will win Domenici's Senate seat against Pearce, though he and Wilson will bloody each other up quite a bit in the primary. And no one is taking Marty Chavez very seriously. I'm with Kos on this, I hope he trashes Udall to heaven, hell and back, loses in a landslide and never gets to run for elected office again. I'm sick of bad Democrats.

Oh yeah, I'm in Plateau Espresso again, and it's still the best coffee shop in the world, bar none. I just wish I could pick the whole place up and take it back to Kansas City with me.

I'll get back to regular posting after a while. And there's some fun stuff happening in the background right now that I'll be able to write about further soon.

Working The Refs

2007-11-16T12:50:00.001-05:00

If a Presidential campaign - especially that of a Democrat, and Oh God Yes! if it's that woman Democrat - plants a question in an audience, then it's NEWS.

But if a news organization, such as CNN, decided to plant a question at a Presidential campaign debate, that's apparently just business as usual.

This is just another example of the utterly exquisite ways in which the GOP has been working the system to their advantage. Think of it like this:

I was a Resident Director at a small Christian college in the KC area. We had some really good sports teams, and since athletes actually lived in the dorms and took an active role in campus life - one of the basketball team captains was an RA for me - they were quite popular. We had a small gymnasium at that time, with the space between the basketball court boundaries and the bottom bleachers being very narrow, just a couple of feet. It was a terrible place for other teams to play, a hard place to be a referee, though our students did keep it clean. They were just loud.

I had one kid in my dorms who was really good at working both the refs and the other team. He realized that everyone expects yelling and screaming, lots of noise. AH would yell and scream, of course, since that is a big part of the fun of a basketball game. But when he really wanted to work people over, he would get quiet. He would stand at the sidelines next to a player trying to inbound the ball or next to the ref and just keep up a low-volume but very steady stream of patter. Commentary on what the other team was doing in terms of fouls, faking out the other player as to who was open, stuff like that.

I started watching him do this, and it was amazing. He really did get into the refs' and other players' heads. I watched the refs get distracted and miss calls, I saw the other players get confused and irritated. AH was, more than anyone else, our 6th player.

The shrieking about a "liberal media" is only one aspect of the GOP's plan to work the refs and the other side. As this strategy has aged it's become less and less important. The rank-and-file still believe it and will engage in loud, obnoxious yelling and screaming about it. But in DC they've been working on other ways to work the refs.

When you were a ref at one of our basketball games and you got anywhere near AH, you got a constant barrage about the other team. He didn't really go after the ref, not when he got quiet. His whole strategy was to get the ref on our side, to make him laugh, to turn him into a friend. And to point out, constantly, every little thing that the other team was doing. Since the other team didn't have anyone doing that, it was pretty effective.

That, of course, is where we are in the media's political coverage. They've been under constant pressure from millions of people to stop showing a "liberal bias," while powerful politicians and wealthy business people have been very busy making friends, being pleasant at all the right events and in all the right ways. They've flattered and flirted and made them laugh, all the while keeping up a very quiet yet steady - and reasonable sounding - patter about the Democrats, about every little thing those Democrats have done.

The GOP has included the media in their inner circles. They've invited them to not only witness decisions and events, but to participate in making those decisions and events happen. And because of all this, the pundits identify personally with the people of the GOP even if they don't support any of their politics.

That's how we get utter nonsense like this from Andrew Sullivan:

I have always found it very hard to actually hate George W. Bush. He maddens me, his policies have shaken my political allegiances and identity to the core, but I've always found him pretty congenial as a person from a distance. I'm glad I've never met him because I'd probably be totally suckered. Even on some of the deepest betrayals - spending and torture - I think his main crime has been criminal negligence and shallowness, not evil. But I do despise what he has done to this country, the wreckage in Iraq, and the dishonor of the torture/interrogation policies. I despise what he has done to conservatism, and the economic and environmental debt he will pass to the next generation. But I really, honestly don't hate him personally. Certainly not in the same league as my visceral dislike for the Clintons.

The GOP spent years working on media figures for exactly this result. Report after report has come from people who know Bush personally that he's arrogant, crude (he likes fart jokes), proud of his ignorance and in possession of a truly terrifying temper. He's condescending, especially to women, and generally acts unprofessionally all the time. By contrast, George H.W. Bush would apparently have the company of Bill Clinton than his own son and Senators from both parties have expressed admiration and affection for Hillary Clinton as a fellow Senator.

Cinton didn't set aside the Constitution, didn't ignore our laws and our rights, didn't lie to the entire world in order to start a vanity war. He was impeached for lying about a sexual escapade during a grand jury investigation. Here's a question, without Googling for it, do you remember what that grand jury investigation was even about? Did Clinton lie about anything else, especially anything that had to do with the ostensible purpose of the investigation? Of course, everyone - especially that execrable Ken Starr - knew that there wasn't anything to investigate. That's why he veered so far off course, why he spent over $50 million and never managed to do anything of value.

Clinton regularly reached across to the GOP to pass legislation, even to the point that progressives now feel like we got a bad deal. Certainly he didn't just issue edict after edict from the White House and expect them to be obeyed. Nor did he ignore the GOP completely and use White House influence with the press to keep GOP politicians and officials off the air. All of these things Bush has done and more, but he's the "genial" one. He's the scion of one of our nation's wealthiest, most powerful families, he's the one that grew up with friends that have titles like "Prince" and "King" in front of their names, he's the legacy admission to Yale, and somehow he's also the "regular guy."

Bill Clinton earned every damned thing he's ever gotten. He came from the little town and grew up poor, he stood up to his abusive stepfather, he's the one who had to accomplish things by being the best and the smartest and the hardest worker. Bill Clinton personifies the American Dream - which of course is another reason for those privileged, cocooned elitist snobs in the national media to sneer at him and despise him.

All of this to say that I don't believe there is a "conservative bias" in the media. I do, however, believe that there is a GOP bias, a clear practice of favoritism, of double standards, of ignoring the very real corruption and lawbreaking that's currently happening in every level of the Republican party while focusing on stupid things like wondering if Hillary Clinton prefers "pearls or diamonds" or if Barack Obama wears an acceptably jingoistic lapel pin.

The refs have been played to a degree I wouldn't think possible if I couldn't see it with my own eyes. It helps to have shallow, unintelligent clowns like Russert, Matthews and Broder as your refs, of course, but they couldn't have come all this way on their own. They lack the imagination for it.

We need to fight back, of course, work the refs harder than the other side. But the goal needs to be fairness, not to merely twist the system so it favors our players. And the continued development of commentary and news sites - from TPM to DailyKos - will help as the stranglehold those few elitist snobs have on our national discourse is weakened.

North And South

2007-11-14T10:30:00.000-05:00

The Prime Ministers of North and South Korea are meeting in Seoul right now. It's a huge step, a sign of progress. I'd love to be back in South Korea just to experience the feeling that I know is permeating the entire country.

This is the type of thing that can only happen when the USA actually engages North Korea, since Pyongyang tends to view the South as puppets of a sort - even though the US isn't involved in these talks at all. So I'm glad that DC has opened talks with North Korea and cooperated with the other involved nations in granting concessions to them.

Here's hoping nothing mucks it up for the next 15 months.

Two Senators Udall

2007-11-09T16:53:00.000-05:00

Rep. Tom Udall (D-NM) will be joining his cousin in the US Senate in 2009, now that he's finally decided to run for Pete Domenici's seat. This is excellent news, since Marty Chavez seems to be one of those wonderful combinations of able executive and personal asshole that we get from time to time.

Chavez should drop out, honestly. But since he decided to start slinging mud around before Udall even entered the race, it looks like there will be a pretty ugly primary campaign the end of which will probably coincided with Chavez's political career, the dummy.

The two important things are that Udall will of course win this easily, and Richardson isn't going to run for the Senate. He probably figures he's got good chances for high position in the next President's cabinet no matter who it is.

Time To Worry About Giuliani

2007-11-08T10:36:00.000-05:00

David Kurtz at TPM points us to this insight on Pat Robertson's Giuliani endorsement from Walter Shapiro:

The Washington press conference announcing the Robertson endorsement was carefully constructed to make it all look like an alliance of strict-constructionist legal philosophers. Introducing the televangelist was not the campaign's director of evangelical outreach, or a political figure known for sharing Robertson's literal reading of the Book of Revelation. Instead the task fell to Ted Olson, the former solicitor general in the Bush Justice Department, a leading conservative legal thinker. The message was clear: This melding of minds was about putting more Antonin Scalias on the Supreme Court, not about Giuliani's personal life and beliefs.

I've been saying this for a while now. Giuliani isn't trying to win over the Religious Right by acting as if he's had a coming to Jesus moment on abortion or homosexuality. He's going to appeal to them through the judiciary. He's saying that a Giuliani Administration, whatever the personal beliefs and/or actions of Giuliani himself, will result in "strict-constructionist," anti-choice, anti-equal rights judges appointed to every available judgeship in the nation.

Liberals – at least those of the ‘netroots’ - have pretty much laughed off this endorsement because Robertson is supposedly so crazy that even the Religious Right won't have anything to do with him. That is a dangerous mistake and clear evidence of how little they know about America’s Evangelical subculture. Robertson still has his media empire, still has followers, and what he said on 9/13/2001 isn't any different than what has been said from countless pulpits, in countless small groups and Sunday School classes, in countless fellowship halls throughout the USA for the last 6 years. Most Evangelicals only criticize Robertson for not having enough tact.

There has always been a strain in American Christianity that understands the USA to be the spiritual successor to the Israel of the Hebrew Bible (not that this is unusual; most European and European-descended cultures have done this at one time or another). There are millions of people in this country who still believe that their Old Testament is a guide and warning, that the threats and promises God made to Israel have been made, in the same way, to the United States. And they believe that they currently live in the decisive moment, the crisis point at which the USA can either remain God's Chosen or can be destroyed and its people sent into exile. That's why 2 Chronicles 7:14 is now found everywhere in conservative American churches:

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

They are fighting for the very existence of America and for its status as God's Most Favored Nation. And when your goals are that big, when your cause is that righteous, then you'll accept a thrice-divorced, cross-dressing, kissed-Trump-on-the-lips, homosexual-rights-supporting former mayor of a liberal East Coast city, as long as he gets the job done. The job is to appoint judges, appoint judges appoint judges. If we will remember the lessons that David Niewart has been teaching for years now, we will understand that the rightwing complaints about “judicial activism” have been yet another smoke screen thrown up to disguise a concerted effort to twist the judiciary to their own goals. The talk among GOP Congressional members about passing laws to limit judicial oversight was an anomaly brought on by the now-discredited belief that Karl “Moses” Rove was bringing the GOP into the Permanent Majority Promised Land.

When Robertson endorsed Giuliani, then, he made it clear that Giuliani is exactly the man to get the job done. And I don’t think Giuliani is finished with this. He's going to start making clearer promises about judges, and through that he's going to get some more support. Coupling this strategy with his constant 9/11 rhetoric means that Giuliani doesn't care one bit about Democrats, Independents or even the shrinking contingent of moderate Republicans. He's not going to try and convince anyone that he's not a far-right authoritarian whackjob who will seek to undo every advance in civil rights of the last 144 years. Giuliani's strategy is to resurrect the Religious Right as the potent force in American politics and to ride their frenzied support through the GOP nomination to the White House.

I don't know if he can do it or not. But that's where this is heading, and those of us on the other side need to stop dismissing the Religious Right and Giuliani just because we think they're silly. They're dedicated to a degree that would shock the most hardened liberal activists, and we can only beat them if we're alert.

Oh Jeez, Not This Crap Again

2007-11-07T19:21:00.000-05:00

Here is our President. This man holds the highest elected office in the land, a position he has held for almost 7 years now. Before that he was a Governor of Texas. You'd think that he would have at least a basic understanding of how our government works.

Especially because he talks about being "Commander-in-Chief" all the time.

Here's the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces speaking today about the situation in Pakistan and his conversation with Perez Musharraf:

"You can't be President and head of the military at the same time." This, my friends, is why I contend that Bush's incompetence and stupidity - let alone the way he has trampled upon the Constitution and broken scores of laws while in office - are such that I owe him absolutely no respect whatsoever, even if he is President. I'm willing to respect a President for whom I did not vote, but this guy is a joke, a sad little man put into office by the GOP's kingmakers, motivated only by his delusions of grandeur.

It's The B-I-B-L-E

2007-11-06T17:00:00.000-05:00

In honor of ~~Revs.~~ Reps. Mike McIntyre (D-NC), Nancy Boyda (D-KS), Bobby Rush (D-IL) and James Clyburn (D-SC), who decided to take to the floor of the House of Representatives to laud, praise, edify, lift up, bless and otherwise speak well of the Christian Bible a full week before National Kiss-up to Fundamentalists Week - or whatever it's called - I thought I'd post some of my favorite verses from it:

First up is Psalm 137:

7 O Lord, remember what the Edomites did
on the day the armies of Babylon captured Jerusalem.
“Destroy it!” they yelled.
“Level it to the ground!”
8 O Babylon, you will be destroyed.
Happy is the one who pays you back
for what you have done to us.
9 Happy is the one who takes your babies
and smashes them against the rocks!

Brings a tear, doesn't it? Then there's this uplifting story that comes to us from 1 Kings 12, in which King Solomon's son, Rehoboam, is being asked just what type of king he will be:

4 “Your father was a hard master,” they said. “Lighten the harsh labor demands and heavy taxes that your father imposed on us. Then we will be your loyal subjects.”
5 Rehoboam replied, “Give me three days to think this over. Then come back for my answer.” So the people went away. . . .King Rehoboam. . .asked the opinion of the young men who had grown up with him and were now his advisers. 9 “What is your advice?” he asked them. “How should I answer these people who want me to lighten the burdens imposed by my father?”
10 The young men replied, “This is what you should tell those complainers who want a lighter burden: ‘My cock is thicker than my father’s waist! 11 Yes, my father laid heavy burdens on you, but I’m going to make them even heavier! My father beat you with whips, but I will beat you with scorpions!’”

Yes, he really did say that. Oddly, though, you won't find it in any English translation and pretty much need to study ancient Hebrew - which I have done - to find it out.

And it goes on and one. Absalom rapes his father's concubines in full view of Jerusalem, King David, of course, murders one of his best generals in order to marry his wife and cover up how he raped her, and it goes on and on.

My point is not to try and degrade the Bible or portray it as an evil book. But I hate it when people, especially politicians, wax rhapsodic about their "favorite verses" and then go on to only quote 1/2 or 1/4 of a cherry-picked verse that sounds nice so long as no one remembers the context.

If National Use the Bible as a Masturbatory Aid Week really helped people to learn more about what the Bible actually says and to appreciate it because of all it contains, both positive and negative examples, then I could support that. But so long as it's just another chance for dumb politicians to demagogue and score cheap political points with bigoted, hateful constituents, then I'm going to make fun of it and pray to the very God of that Bible that such fake events become an unfortunate part of our nation's memory.

Bush's Surge: Still Not Working

2007-11-05T10:41:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you've noticed that US casualties in Iraq have dropped in recent months, to 38 in October, the lowest month in the last year and a half. And perhaps this news has caused you to wonder - or exult, as it may be - if Bush's idea for a surge of 30,000 troops wasn't such a bad idea after all. Maybe putting 30,000 more troops in a country of over 20 million people that's larger than California can make a huge difference!

Well, not really. This diary at DailyKos spells out the facts, and they are quite sobering:

When someone tells you that the "surge" is working, you must walk them through this chain of events:

On August 7, 2007, near the end of America’s bloodiest summer in Iraq, the New York Times reported the following:

Attacks on American-led forces using a lethal type of roadside bomb said to be supplied by Iran reached a new high in July, according to the American military.

The devices, known as explosively formed penetrators, were used to carry out 99 attacks last month and accounted for a third of the combat deaths suffered by the American-led forces, according to American military officials.

"July was an all-time high," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, said in an interview, referring to strikes with such devices.

Such bombs, which fire a semi-molten copper slug that can penetrate the armor on a Humvee and are among the deadliest weapons used against American forces, are used almost exclusively by Shiite militants.

The "Shiite militants" described by the New York Times were, in fact, members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. And, as we all saw this past summer, Muqtada’s fighters were really doing a job on American forces—despite the troop increase which began earlier in the year.

That was on August 7th. And remember, this was during a summer throughout which we were bombarded with news of Iranian/Shia efforts to kill Americans and destabilize the Iraqi government.

Then, barely three weeks after the New York Times article ran, 50 Muslim pilgrims were slaughtered in sectarian fighting in Karbala. In response, Muqtada al-Sadr announced that he had

ordered his militia to suspend offensive operations for six months.

Muqtada al Sadr has been Iraq's kingmaker for the entire occupation, the most powerful man in the country. He has a large, well-trained and well-equipped army, and the decisions to fight him and his soldiers, in terms of utter stupidity, rank right up there with staffing the CPA with Heritage Foundation interns and sending pallets of dollar bills to literally drop over the countryside.

Let me reiterate: this last summer, the most powerful man in Iraq unilaterally declared a cease-fire. With America's most dangerous foes quitting the field, our casualties dropped, as did the number of Iraqi casualties and the level of violence overall.

Of course, the Bush Administration, right-wing pundits and the media members of the cult of the Righteous and Holy General St. Petraeus have all gushed that the improving numbers coming out of Iraq are completely due to the wisdom and foresight of the brilliant tactical team of George Bush and David Petraeus.

At this rate, Bush will soon declare that his new strategy is for American troops to not be so uncomfortably hot while in Iraq. The media will certainly cover this new strategy with optimism and enthusiasm, and will report that, just as Bush said, temperatures are dropping all over Iraq. Right-wingers will celebrate not only the success itself but the way the cooler temperatures are proving the rightness of every conservative talking point. And no politician or journalist will ever bring up the completely irrelevant words "earth's axial tilt."

Diocesan Conventions Are Fun - Who Knew?

2007-11-03T17:58:00.000-04:00

When I was growing up I noticed that the last thing the adults in the church wanted was to be delegate to District Assembly. You had to take time off work, listen to a bunch of boring reports and vote on dumb resolutions.

Well, a few months ago my pastor asked me to be a delegate at our Diocesan Convention, and sometimes it's not really a benefit for your best friend to be your pastor, because it's just that much harder to say no.

But Episcopalians do things differently than Nazarenes. This 2-day convention featured more wine than I've ever drunk in a month. The delegates all pack a couple of bottles, some crackers, cheese and summer sausage and bring it with them so we can sit in one of our rooms and make fun of all the Diocesan leaders. Also, the church pays for the hotel room, for 2 breakfasts, one lunch and one dinner. It's just part of the budget. But there was a cash, not an open bar last night. Oh well.

It was a little hard to focus on the reports of the committees and figure out where we were in the budget, but it was worth it.

Waaaay better than pie.

Dumb Political Email

2007-10-31T13:52:00.000-04:00

Just got this email from the Kansas GOP:

Happy Halloween everyone…

To mark the occasion we, at the Kansas Republican Party, would like to talk about some things that scare us this Halloween.

Scary Taxes

Boyda voted to sustain the death tax. This equates to a $1,350,000,000,000 tax hike on the American people. Nearly 90 percent of small business owners favor the repeal of this tax. In spite of Ms. Boyda’s vote, Republicans in Congress are working hard to make sure that both small business owners and farmers, the people who this tax affects the most, get to keep more of their money. (Roll Call vote 959)

Not much has happened under the new “leadership” in Congress. But what has happened has been horrific…In just 10 months of control of Congress, Democrats have passed legislation to raise taxes on the American people to the tune of over $100 billion. This equals to an average of $10 billion in new taxes on the American people per month. (Link)

Daunting Earmarks

Ms. Boyda’s campaign promises are haunting her as a member of Congress…In her campaign Ms. Boyda promised, “The earmark process has been abused in the past. Members of Congress have set aside funds for programs that turned out to personally benefit them.”

However, when given the opportunity to support real earmark reform, she didn’t. In fact she said that she was “skeptical” about the earmark reform and thought it would “bog down the House.” We at the Kansas Republican Party are “skeptical” that Ms. Boyda will pass any meaningful legislation this year and are increasingly “afraid” that her liberal leanings will damage the 2^nd District permanently.

Menacing Leadership

After promising an “independent leadership” Ms. Boyda has once again broken a campaign promise by asking Majority Leader Stony Hoyer and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to come to Kansas and raise money for her. This is the same House Leadership that has led Congress to the lowest approval ratings in American history…now that is scary. ( Link)

As a reminder, Ms. Boyda stated that she wanted to run an “independent

campaign.” (CQ Politics, 2/19/07) Not surprisingly, similar to her ever-changing position on any number of issues, Ms. Boyda’s definition of “independence” seems to change too. So far, Ms. Boyda’s “independence” has resulted in:

A fundraising visit by House Majority Leader Stony Hoyer from Maryland;
Fundraising support by Massachusetts Senator and former Democrat Presidential Nominee John Kerry;
A fundraising visit with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from California.;
Fundraising assistance by Democrat Governor Kathleen Sebelius; and
Contributions from the liberal New York Representative Charles Rangel.

All this adds up to a very scary Congresswoman and a frighteningly liberal voting record.

Scariest of all...

If Nancy Boyda wasn’t scary enough for you then a Hillary Clinton Presidency should make you quake in your shoes. Last night during the Democrat Presidential debate, Hilary Clinton showed us, once again, exactly why we don’t want a Democrat president.

During the debate when asked about her position on the trillion dollar tax hike, she said, “Rangel has suggested repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax, which has proved a burden to some middle-class Americans...Clinton said she agreed with Rangel’s goal but did not like ‘all the details’ and declined to commit to a specific approach.” (Mark Z. Barabak and Peter Nicholas, “In Debate, Rivals Say Clinton Is Too Divisive,” Los Angeles Times, 10/31/07)

Not only that, but today, commentators across the board agree, Hillary is just another politician who doesn’t like to answer questions on the pressing issues facing the American people.

The Kansas Republican Party isn’t used to quoting the following “balanced” commentators, but their take on Hillary last night is striking…

NBC Political Director Chuck Todd: "I think she got stuck when she tries very hard not to answer specifics." (MSNBC's "Hardball," 10/30/07)

MSNBC's Chris Matthews: "Hillary Clinton would not answer the

question straight." (MSNBC's "Hardball," 10/30/07)

Newsweek's Howard Fineman: "At the very end of the debate, she just came off like a politician who didn't want to answer the question." (MSNBC's "Hardball," 10/30/07)

Please forward this email to everyone you know – friends, family, co-workers, ghosts and goblins.

Have a happy Halloween, and remember that in a little over one year we will be deciding what kind of leaders we want in Washington and Topeka.

The Kansas Republican Party

I have yet to receive an email from them that isn't terminally lame, even stupid. They're clunky, ham-handed and of course full of intentional errors of fact. I'd be embarrassed if I was a Republican.

Unfortunately, that same moment the Edwards campaign decided to send this my way:
Guess I don't need to be a Republican to be embarrassed by stupid emails. Tying campaign literature to holidays is really, really dumb. "This Christmas, Candidate X just gave a big gift to [insert hated special interest group]!" All of them should have signs put up in their offices that say, "Don't be clever." FEMA holding a fake news conference with staffers posing as reporters was clever. Clever is always a bad thing.

Endless And Astounding Variety

2007-10-30T23:46:00.000-04:00

Scientific American reports that the residents of Tibet are able to handle the low levels of oxygen found when living at an average altitude of almost 15,000 because their bodies are, quite simply, different than anywhere else in the world.

Tibetans have bigger arteries and higher blood flow than the rest of us. The cells lining their blood vessels produce nitric oxide, which turns into nitrite and nitrate in their blood, making them expand and the amount of blood flowing through them to increase quite a bit.

And get this: Tibetans have higher levels of nitrite and nitrate than people with septic shock, which is a dangerous blood infection. They breathe more than anyone else, and have more antioxidants in their blood than the rest of us as well. Oh, and the article notes as merely an aside that residents of the Andes in South America don't have these characteristics; they just have larger lungs than the rest of the human race.

The human ability to adapt and thrive in any setting is truly remarkable. It's all the more so because this adaptability comes not only through our intelligence and tool-making abilities, but also because we have such incredibly mutable genes, producing extremes in skin color, height, bone structure and even the chemical processes our bodies use to get needed oxygen from the air.

Of Course Rudy Is Nuts. They All Are

2007-10-30T14:17:00.000-04:00

Everyone seems so worried about Rudy Giuliani and how nutso insane he is. What I don't get is why this is so upsetting. Giuliani is just running the exact same campaign, with exactly the same rhetoric, that the GOP has been running from the 2002 elections onward. Fearmongering, portraying the candidate as some fearless warrior despite all evidence to the contrary and accusing Democrats of being in league with terrorists, of wanting America to "lose," etc. and so on.

If we consider that GOP consultants are probably fairly similar to Democratic consultants - though obviously not as thoroughly stupid, worthless and incompetent - then the reasons for Rudy's strategy become quite clear. In 2000 George Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative," a man devoted to fiscal accountability and restraint, a man who wanted to rein in America's unfortunate penchant for nation-building. He was a relaxed, genial guy who just wanted to have America work for the reg'lar folk or some such nonsense.

And he lost the popular vote. Yes, he got the White House, but that required an unprecedented intrusion of the United States Supreme Court into the affairs of a state's Supreme Court, something that had never happened before. And don't show up in comments with crap about how Bush would have won the recount. The issue is so muddled by now that the very best we can say is that we don't know who would have won the recount, had it actually happened.

While Bush got the Presidency, the GOP political consultants did not ignore the fact that they lost the popular vote. That's a big strike against the whole "compassionate conservative" facade they worked so hard to create, which probably explains why they didn't waste much time trying to continue the act.

And act it was, as was Bush's supposed distaste for nation-building. An Iraq invasion was being planned as soon as he took office, and telecom companies were being bullied into giving the Feds access to their data the summer before the 9/11 attacks. In regards to the Bush Administration's desires for conquest and the ability to operate outside American law, 9/11 didn't change a thing.

Rather, it was a gift, and they exploited it to the fullest. The GOP took the outpouring of support and goodwill toward our leaders and used it as a club to beat Democrats over the head. The 2002 elections were brutal, centering entirely around the idea that Democrats are all traitors, even those who had given the Bush Administration everything that it wanted.

In 2004, however, they remembered that the compassionate conservative shtick didn't work so well and how effective jingoistic nationalism and fearmongering was in 2002. However, Roveco didn't want to completely undo all their work making Bush seem like anything other than a sociopathic dry drunk bent on dictatorial control. That's where Dick Cheney was able to play his most valuable role as the shuffling, squint-eyed gargoyle leering at your children while describing what a tasty snack they would be for Osama bin Laden. And when Cheney says that there are people who want to kill you, you believe it, if for nothing else then for the fact that he always looks ready to do the job himself.

By having Bush and Cheney play Good Cop/Evil Demon From the 8th Circle of Hell, the GOP was able to do all the fearmongering and slanderous accusations against Democrats that they did in 2002 while protecting Bush's image. And they won.

So for 2008, Rudy's advisors have obviously decided that they need to employ that winning strategy. The reason it seems so shocking is simply because Rudy doesn't have a Dick Cheney to take the heat off him. In fact, Rudy is better suited to be someone else's Dick Cheney in terms of the campaign trail.

Whether this strategy can work for him even in the primaries remains to be seen. But let's not get caught off guard by a 5 year old campaign strategy.

Um, Hey There

2007-10-29T18:52:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I don't know about this blogging stuff, really. At least not anymore. If you're still around to read this, thanks. Anyway, we will see what we will see, since I can't help but comment on something I found at Eschaton a while ago.

Part of the reason that we have had a faith outreach in our campaigns is precisely because I don't think the LGBT community or the Democratic Party is served by being hermetically sealed from the faith community and not in dialogue with a substantial portion of the electorate, even though we may disagree with them.

This is Obama speaking about his ridiculous decision to include "ex-gay" Donnie McClurken at his campaign appearances (for a rundown of the whole story, go here).

The reason this is still a problem for Obama is that someone is telling him how he can never, ever apologize for anything that makes liberals mad. Of course, if you upset conservatives - or more accurately, if you give conservatives a chance to manufacture some fake outrage in order to distract everyone from how evil and stupid they are - then of course you need to apologize. That's why Pete Stark apologized, why the Senate wasted its time condemning Moveon.org for Constitututionally protected free speech, why Democrats are always apologizing for something or other that Michelle Malkin or Rush Limbaugh can twist into a problem.

Sorry, that's a real pet peeve.

Even if Obama wasn't making a huge mistake by taking on Social Security, the whole mess with "ex-gay" Donnie McClurkin should be proof enough that he's listening to the same clowns Democratic Presidential candidates have been listening to for far too long now. "Triangulate triangulate triangulate." "Show your independence by taking on 'sacred cows.'" "Try to appeal to 'swing voters'" - interesting how to Democratic consultants and the DC pundits "swing voter" always means "extreme right-wing lunatics who hate gays, who belong to militias and have argued in federal court that they don't owe taxes."

Anyway, the big issue here is that Obama is making the mistake of conflating bigoted, hate-filled homophobes with Christianity. While I will allow for the existence of many sincere and authentic Christians who think that homosexuality is a sin, this does not mean that every Christian believes this. In fact, evidence for the presence of millions of Christians who do not believe such things is in plentiful supply. There are several Christian denominations that do not believe it to be a sin, and several more with large portions of their membership who believe that way.

There is already a political party for people, Christian or not, who think that homosexuality is wrong, is a sin, is an abomination, is gross and icky and worthy of death or something. It's called the GOP, and if Obama wants to appeal to people who believe that way, he can switch parties. But if he's going to run as a Democrat, at the very least he needs to acknowledge that the rights and protections guaranteed under the Constitution extend to every single person within the borders of the United States of America regardless of creed, color, gender or what they may or may not do in a bedroom with another consenting adult.

Why is this so hard?

So Weary

2007-10-21T00:16:00.000-04:00

I've been working 6 days a week for a couple weeks now, on top of taking care of the kids, so I'm a bit tired.

But what really wears me out is the news that spews out from Washington DC every day. I'm tired of politicians being more in league with each other than they are with their constituents. I'm tired of knowing that the minuscule number of super-rich white men who control this nation's large corporations have plans and goals diametrically opposed to mine, goals that include an increase in their wealth intentionally at the expense of everyone else in the country. I'm tired of knowing that their concerns and whims will always be more important than mine.

I'm tired of the millions of people who sell their Constitutional rights, livelihood and their children's futures for the sake of meaningless rhetoric about abortion and homosexuals. I'm tired of people so closed-off and callous that they can't muster the barest amount of empathy for someone who might not share their exact experiences. I'm tired of so-called "Christians" who stand for nothing but hate, who fight for a fetus yet throw children in the garbage, who worship a God whose grace apparently runs out after covering their multitude of sins so that no one outside the four walls of their shrinking sanctuaries can taste of it.

I'm tired of a national press that trades in silly insults and gossip, that creates false equivalence in order to satisfy braying critics, that consists far too often of people who peddle racism, fear, lies, eliminationist rhetoric and simple bullying. I'm tired of every magazine, every commercial, every toy being designed to intentionally tell my daughter to hate herself and the way she looks.

For that matter, I'm tired of every toy being so loaded with toxic materials that they should all be shot into space. I'm tired of the degradation of all our products, each generation of manufactured goods lowering in quality to generate more profit for the privileged few, each year seeing "food" producers chip away at FDA regulations so they can pump diseased cattle with more hormones and antibiotics, feed chicken even more of their own solid waste, spray ever-increasing amounts of chemicals on our produce and even meddle with their genes - as if anyone really understands the consequences of genetic manipulation yet - in order to increase crop yields even as they sacrifice taste and nutrition.

And it's all - all of it, everything I've mentioned - for the Almighty Dollar. People oppose abortion and any help for mothers and children because the former is free and the latter would cost. People never want to pay more, so when a retailer like Wal-Mart throws poorly made and dangerous shit on the shelves, as long as it's cheap people will buy and be grateful they can fill their homes with it. We're driving around in cars powered by technology that's well over 100 years old, getting fuel mileage that would have embarrassed us 20 years ago because it's cheap. Not inexpensive, not a good deal, just cheap.

We're sailing into oblivion, you and I, on a ship made from the bones of children who work and die in sweatshops, in a sea full of the blood of the world's sex slaves, malnourished and abused. And as long as our politicians wear flag lapel pins and tell us who to hate and fear, as long as the high-fructose corn syrup keeps getting pumped into our food and as long as the damn television keeps us drowning in dreck, we'll just grin and row faster.

Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!

President Dodd Has A Nice Ring To It.

2007-10-18T15:57:00.000-04:00

Chris Dodd put a hold on the execrable FISA bill, the one that grants retroactive immunity to telecoms for breaking the law.

Interesting how that's what Bush wants after years of claiming that he hasn't ever broken the law. This demand from the White House is a blatant admission of crimes against the Constitution of the United States of America. And the spineless, near-useless Democrats in Congress just keep handing Bush whatever he wants, without even a real fight.

Most of the American people want their Constitutional rights protected against any and all attempts to curtail them, no matter the justification. Those willing to trade the rule of law for chimeric "security" honestly just need to have their rights protected for them, even if it's against their will. The Constitution is the supreme law, over the President, over the Congress, over the Supreme Court. We need to remember this and restore it to the way our government operates.

You can give Senator Dodd encouragement, thanks and contributions at this link. I suggest you do so, no matter what your political persuasion, because there is simply no more pressing issue before the USA today than the assault on its Constitution.

Governor Blunt Tries To Redeem Himself

2007-10-18T15:39:00.000-04:00

Matt Blunt, Governor of Missouri, has recommended $4.1 million to fund a law that requires the state to now pay for rape examinations. Good for him. I strongly suspect that having a strong opponent in the governor's race and the country's increasingly poor view of the GOP might have a bit to do with the decision, especially after all the flack he's gotten for cutting healthcare benefits for the poor in Missouri.

But the important thing is that victims of rape will no longer be charged for undergoing what has to be an incredibly difficult medical procedure. I would say that it's hard to believe that rape victims would be sent a bill for allowing a hospital to perform an invasive examination right after being violated in the worst way possible in order to help the police with their investigation, but I'm not. It seems par for the course for a crime which affects way more women than men to be handled in such an uncaring way.

I don't know if anyone will be more likely to report a rape because of this, but for those who do the experience will now be slightly better, and that's a good thing.

The Dimwit DA

2007-10-18T12:28:00.000-04:00

It would be criminal for others to talk about Crazy Phill Kline while I remain silent about it. You can follow the links, but the story is simple. Kline has charged Planned Parenthood in Overland Park with 107 different criminal counts. That's 23 felonies, 29 misdemeanor counts of providing illegal late-term abortions, and various misdemeanor counts of maintaining false records, etc.

Of course, with Phill Kline the story goes beyond such mundane issues. This Planned Parenthood is one of the clinics he targeted while Attorney General, and about which Bill O'Reilly had some way-inside inside information, coincidentally just days before the 2006 elections and right at the time that Kline appeared on the O'Reilly Factor.

In addition, when Paul Morrison restored sanity and ethics to the office of Attorney General, he had to ask Kline what happened to all the clinic records he'd subpoenaed, since for some reason they weren't where they were supposed to be. Kline claimed that he returned those records, but Morrison had to join with Planned Parenthood of Overland Park in a lawsuit against his own subordinate to get the records out of Kline's grubby paws. Kline had actually transferred those documents to the Johnson County DA's office just a few days before taking office.

My read is that Kline has in fact kept those records - illegally - and is using the detailed information in them to try and find charges to file against Planned Parenthood of Overland Park. I doubt he thinks that all of them will stick, but is hoping that a jury will be so overwhelmed by them, so convinced that there must be a "there" there that they convict them of something. It's fairly obvious that Planned Parenthood hasn't done anything wrong, because Paul Morrison has looked over (his copies of) the same records and decided that there is nothing to pursue.

It's important to note that this type of legal analysis was just fine with Johnson County's wacko wingnut coalition for 25 years while Morrison was the Johnson County District Attorney as a Republican. But Phill Kline is a true believer. I can tell you with absolute authority that, like George Bush, he has long believed that God wants him in positions of political power and that he's justified in using any means he considers necessary to accomplish his goals. I've personally seen Phill Kline betray someone who was a close friend and associate of his, I've listened to him lie about people who had befriended and helped him over the years. No law or morality will stop him from doing what he wants to do.

He has "promised" not to run for office next year, which means that the GOP told him to not run or they'd cut him loose. Two of Paul Morrison's old ADA's are running for Johnson County DA, and if Kline stays in we can expect at least one of them to take a page from their old boss's strategy book and switch parties. No way the GOP is willing to hand the Democrats another significant victory because of Phill Kline.

But I also know that he'll never go away.

News Out Of New Mexico

2007-10-16T15:44:00.000-04:00

Steve Pearce is running for the Senate seat just vacated by Pete Domenici. Pearce is nominally the Representative for my hometown, but no one ever cares about Alamogordo. Anyway, that means a GOP primary battle between Pearce and Heather Wilson, who represents Albuquerque. Pearce is quite a bit more conservative than Wilson, so the primary will be between north and south, conservative and (somewhat) moderate. Not exactly what the GOP needs right now, but don't expect me to cry any tears over it.

I don't see how either Pearce or Wilson (or for that matter Spiro G. Vassilopoulos, whoever that is) will be able to win a general election against either Marty Chavez or Diane Denish - who isn't running, but the rumors are swirling.

As much as I can't stand how Albuquerque and Santa Fe dominate New Mexico, they'll go heavily for Chavez, or Denish if she runs, and that will pretty much be the end of it.

As far as Pearce's seat, I know the GOP doesn't have a very deep bench in New Mexico, but neither, it seems, do the Democrats in every case. From my gut I'd say that NM-2 is a tossup or lean GOP. But the Dems have a chance to compose NM's entire Congressional delegation. That'd be nice to see, whatever it might do to certain of my family members.

Roots Of Hypocrisy

2007-10-15T14:08:00.000-04:00

A county GOP chairman in Wisconsin has resigned his position after being indicted on two counts of child enticement, one count of exposing himself to a child and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He is free on a $20,000 bond and has pleaded not guilty.

It just goes on and on, doesn't it? There is a real problem with GOP politicians and conservative pastors engaging in immoral, criminal and sick behavior. Just head over to this handy post from Melissa and click on one or two of the links. You'll be shocked at what you see. And yes, I do happen to believe that it's more of a problem on the Right than it is on the Left, for reasons I will now explain.

To attempt to explain this I'm going to use my own experiences, because I see the same dynamic at work with these stories of adultery, drug abuse, pedophilia, etc. and my own history - though let it be clear that I have never even used narcotics, let alone abused them, I have never been unfaithful to my wife, and I have never considered an inappropriate relationship with a minor in any way whatsoever.

But what I did do was pursue a career as a pastor. Pretty terrible stuff, right? The problem was not with the career choice, but with my motivations, which came not from a real sense of a "call," - though I was sincere in my beliefs, but from my self-loathing and despair because of depression. I hated myself and could not believe that I would ever amount to anything worthwhile. I felt completely cut off from God even as I tried ever harder to establish a connection with him. And even though I knew that pastors weren't perfect, I still had a vision of them as being close to God, as being recipients of divine grace if for nothing else then because of their responsibilities. I thought that becoming a pastor would turn me into a good Christian, would put me back in touch with God and would change my attitudes about myself.

If I had been a gay teenager that still believed homosexuality was wrong and sinful, I might have become a pastor because I thought that doing so would drive my sexual desires from me. I might have gotten married and become a crusader against LGBT acceptance, believing that if I would only work a little harder at it I would rid the world and therefore myself of those "sinful urges."

Or I might have become a politician, one of those who make careers out of convincing the electorate of how horrible our nation is becoming and how I would stem the tide. Perhaps I would have been one of those for whom laws against the LGBT community could never be harsh enough, punishing them as a proxy for what I felt I deserved.

There is a hysteria about homosexuality in this nation, and I see it as profoundly dangerous to our society and profoundly damaging to individuals' psychological health. Some people who grow up in hysterically anti-homosexual surroundings and who find themselves attracted to members of the same sex manage to leave it behind. They're able to understand that they must accept who they are, because denial of one's own core identity will always lead to self-destructive behavior.

But I believe that many people are not able to do that. They want to hold on to the identity painted for them by their families and churches no matter the personal cost. It is their dogged determination to exorcise their false demons that will lead some of them to become the conservative movement's loudest and most hysterical voices. And that, I believe, is part of the dynamic behind this seemingly unprecedented amount of religious and political conservatives getting caught in the exact behaviors* they so loudly condemn. The other part of the dynamic is that the 24-hour news cycle and the ability for the Internet to act as a megaphone makes it significantly harder for people and communities to sweep this kind of thing under the rug. The media have learned that stories like this will sell, and so they search them out.

The answer the problem, of course, is for people to just be who they are, to accept their own identities and those of their families and friends without condemnation. But that, I'm afraid, is a long time coming.

*About those caught in pedophilia, while I agree that there is no connection whatsoever between homosexuality and pedophilia, I do wonder if some of the cases that are prosecuted as pedophilia are the result of deeply closeted and emotionally unhealthy people learning that teenagers can be easier to manipulate and seduce than adults and so find themselves in trouble with an underaged kid without having ever wanted to abuse a child per se. That is to say, perhaps there are pedophiles and then there are people who abuse a child; the punishment needs to be exactly the same, but the underlying motivation might be different and might require different treatment. Or I might be full of crap.

Dumb Political Staffers

2007-10-15T13:14:00.000-04:00

You'd think that the Chief of Staff for a US Representative would be able to contain his temper and deal with critics. You'd think that they would all develop a thick skin, and would just let questions go. That they would deal with protestors and other critics with courtesy, if firmly.

You'd especially think that if they were being recorded. But you'd be wrong:

Considering how differently the Congressman handled himself compared to his Chief of Staff, I'd say that Wisecup got his ass chewed over this. Don't these guys realize that if not for a guy catching ex-Senator George Allen on tape using a racial slur, Allen would not only still be a Senator but would also be the GOP front-runner for President? You never know what's going to catch on, what's going to grab people's attention.

Cats

2007-10-13T18:12:00.001-04:00

Take a look here first.

So, cats. It's perhaps not the subtlest story you've ever seen, but I think it does a good job of showing just how ludicrous we can be with our traditions and habits.

A few posts back Lewis left a really good comment:

It used to be that the fundamentalist churches would have a week-long revival scheduled twice a year. I hated them.

After working all day, I had a hour commute. Only time to have a snack and then - to church. The evangelist felt that his job was to get someone down to the altar to pray through.

Think about it. Small town - small church - the only ones at the meeting were church members.

Give me a break.

What we should have done was to have a designated sinner go down and pray through at the first sign of an altar call. Then they would get up and testify how evil they had been and that Jesus had come into their heart and cleaned them up. Evangelist is happy, we get to go home early - great preaching!

I too remember those twice-yearly revivals, the parade of itinerant preachers and singing families that came through. And there was of course church camp, both age level and Family Camp. And Vacation Bible School. Sunday morning and evening church services and Wednesday nights. And this was all just during the summer.

Let's see: 1 revival + VBS + 2 camps + regular services = 62 sermons over the course of summer vacation (approximately). And around 20 of them would be explicitly "evangelistic," with "altar calls" and everything. A friend of mine who, as a child, traveled with his singing evangelist father, told me that one summer alone he was born again 18 times, which sounds about right.

And all of this can be understood as the Teacher's cat.

By the mid-19th century, Christianity wasn't doing too well. For the civilized upper classes it was an opportunity to gather in a socially acceptable place and be polite to socially acceptable people. For the lower classes it was largely irrelevant. In the midst of this preachers started to come up who could really speak to people's condition, to the state of society whatever place in society a given person might occupy.

This was the beginning of camp meetings and revivalism, though it must be understood that no one held any revivals. No church scheduled a revival meeting. Those traveling preachers with tents were not holding revivals. They simply called these things "protracted meetings" or something like that. It was only after the fact that people might begin to talk of a particular meeting being a revival.

I've read several journals and letters from the late 1800s to the early 1900s as part of a job that I had in the Church of the Nazarene's Archives. I believe that there were actual "revivals," that people did actually change as a result of them. At least, it would be hard to sustain such a large conspiracy for so many years across such great distances, which is what would have needed to happen if none of it were true.

The faith tradition in which I grew up was a full-fledged member of the camp meeting and Revivalist movement. Early Nazarenes were viewed as a riotous lot, prone to shouts and people running around a sanctuary or tent. The beginnings of the Church of the Nazarene (ca. 1890 - 1908, which is the official date of the church's establishment) saw a group that not only ordained women but had no problem putting them in leadership even over other pastors. The older members were committed abolitionists and expected younger members to adhere to the same philosophy. They established charitable organizations everywhere they went, even and especially on the "mission field." There are hospitals and nursing colleges that exist to this day in South Africa, India and Papua New Guinea, and I know I'm forgetting some.

I must admit that even though I no longer attend a Nazarene church - and probably never will - I still view people like Phineas Bresee, H.F. Reynolds and H. Orton Wiley as great men, even heroes.

The men and women of the early Church of the Nazarene were, in my opinion, worthy of emulation by later generations, and that is exactly what happened. The Nazarenes were active in the Temperance movement, a good-intentioned if too extreme movement. They didn't drink alcohol, and neither did those who came later. They didn't go to dances because they felt that it led to sexual immorality, so neither did later generations. Gambling was a scourge, especially in the Western US, and most early Nazarenes felt that moving pictures had storylines that didn't inspire people to be more Christlike. So later Nazarenes never went to the movie theater (officially) and never gambled - for that matter, they never used normal decks of playing cards or played regular card games. So Spades was right out, but Rook was ok, etc.

In the 1950s and 60s "compassionate ministry" fell out of favor with theologically conservative denominations. The classically Liberal churches were increasing their social commitments, and conservative churches were looking for any way in which they could distinguish themselves from the mainline denominations. So various orphanages, soup kitchens, clinics and other places where the down-and-out could find a hand up were closed, one by one, until almost none were left.

Which was a tragedy on many levels. Phineas Bresee, regarded as the principle founder of the denomination, was a Methodist Episcopal pastor, a presiding elder. He was in line to become a bishop in that denomination, and he pastored the largest Methodist church in the American West, with the largest auditorium of any type on the west coast as his sanctuary. He left it all so that he could be a chaplain at a soup kitchen.

Bresee was able to not go to movies, not drink and not gamble as a prominent and successful pastor. But he believed that he couldn't adequately pastor the poor, and so he left it all behind.

When Bresee and others died, we kept their teachings and their cats. We made sure to have revivals just like they did. We had camp meetings, and more and more people started to see "evangelist" as a career calling just like "pastor" or "blacksmith." The degradation of the role of the evangelist came about simply because of competition. Churches evaluated you on the basis of how many people got saved or sanctified during your meetings, and if you didn't consistently get the numbers that the churches wanted, you were out of work. So you did all that you could, all that you needed to in order to get the people off the pews and down at the altar, crying and shaking as they either were born again by being saved or born again again by being sanctified. Thank God, literally, that the Church of the Nazarene allowed everyone to be counted at the altar at least twice, the doctrine of backsliding helping out even more. Especially with teenagers.

When the great women and men of the Church of the Nazarene died, we did make a good faith effort to keep their teachings alive. Thing is, though, teachings don't make constant demands on us. Cats, however, do. Cats require daily maintenance, and even when they don't need anything they're much more noticeable than something as prosaic as teachings. As time went on and the teachings got blurred, the cats were still there. We remembered to not dance or drink, but we forgot how to resist the temptation to devalue women. We remembered that movie theaters were bad, but we forgot the ability to make wise entertainment choices in any medium.

We lost the teachings, but we damn sure kept the cats around. This is the story for all of us, all the time. We see it in our politics, in our religions, in our families. It is for this reason that God sent Israel the Prophets and why what the prophets said was written down so we would remember. It's for this reason that we have had people like both Martin Luthers, like Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez, and yes, like Dennis Kucinich and even Michael Moore.

If you can catch them in lies, then heap on condemnation and allow me to join in. But if you can't, then understand that those who hate them do so only because they're so busy taking care of a bunch of cats they've forgotten who they are and what they are on this earth to do.

Internet Tough Guy Quarterly

2007-10-13T11:10:00.000-04:00

(image by EMPulse_of_KC)

I can be pretty harsh on the ol' internet. In fact, as direct as I can be in person, I can be more, um, forthright about my opinions and even blunter when it comes to blog posts or comment threads. But I've never been banned. I've never threatened anyone. I've never had to change my IP address and screen name in order to keep commenting at a place that clearly doesn't want me around.

So here's to you Bob/Fred/El, you massive douchebag, you.

The Teacher's Cat

2007-10-12T21:27:00.000-04:00

High in the Pyrenees, tucked into one of the innumerable valleys and away from the normal passes through those mountains, there was a monastery. It had little to distinguish it from others, really. It was just a middling-sized place full of industrious, serene men, helping lost travelers and providing nearby hamlets with really good beer.

Monasteries, of course, are usually the last place to find extremely spiritual people, at least insofar as we define the word "spiritual." Being self-reliant, the monks often find themselves spending far more time shoveling manure and tilling fields than kneeling in contemplation of the Divine Mysteries.

In this monastery, however, there once was an abbot who combined the very best of an earthy spirituality with the best of heavenly insight and inspiration. He was dearly loved by everyone who met him, and was known for quite some distance for his wisdom, leading everyone, including his own brothers in the monastery, to drop the title "Abbot" and call him "Teacher."

Every morning before their work began and every evening before retiring, the Teacher would speak to the assembled brothers. He was wise and compassionate, and the years of his stewardship were the apex of that monastery's history. The Teacher was also a man freed from the burdens of earthly desire and never abused his power, never used the monastery's resources for his own gain. His only indulgence was a cat.

Like all felines, the Teacher's cat had a soul of pure evil that was obvious to everyone but the Teacher himself. No amount of destruction, no number of scratches could convince the Teacher that the hissing, spitting demon/cat he kept was anything different than the little ball of fluff he'd first brought into his life.

The Teacher's cat, then, had the run of the place. He disrupted as much as he could, especially during the morning and evening sessions with the Teacher. It was only because of the Teacher's surpassing wisdom and charisma that the brothers were able to put up with the cat.

Unfortunately, the Teacher died like anyone else. The monastery went into deep mourning for their loss, and as often happens, the next abbot spent most of his time trying to keep things as they were under the guidance of the Teacher. Even the awful cat was redeemed in the eyes of the community, because of the living - some might say "undead" - connection to the Teacher the cat represented. So as they kept up the morning and evening teaching sessions rehashing the Teacher's lessons, they also allowed the cat to attend and disrupt them.

The Teacher's cat one day decided to see what havoc he could wreak in the afterlife and was found dead by the suddenly-relieved brother tasked with changing his litterbox and giving him food. It is a sign of the deep love for the Teacher and the deep loss they all felt that when the evening session came, one of the brothers suggested getting another cat to remind them of how much the Teacher loved his. And so they did.

The seasons passed this monastery in the mountains, and the brothers grew old and went on to their rewards. The memory of the Teacher was kept alive and amended as necessary, with the best qualities and practices of his successors inevitably being attributed to him. The cat which replaced the Teacher died and was replaced, who was replaced as well. After many years much of what the Teacher did and said was lost to the community. Most of the brothers didn't learn of this revered figure from the past, and the monastery entered a low point of its history, ruled over by petty little abbots who abused their authority and lived sumptuously at the expense of not only the hard work of their fellow monks, but the gifts they were able to extort from the surrounding communities. Everything good which had been passed on from the Teacher was lost.

But the morning and evening teaching sessions still happened. And for each session, before they could begin, the cat was carried in on soft pillows and placed in a seat of honor before the assembled brothers. The cat's collar was pure gold, and he ate better than anyone beside the abbot himself. He had his own chambers (those of the Teacher, kept empty for his memory), richly decorated with silks and jewels. Nothing could happen at that monastery without the presence - and with it the ceremonial blessing - of the Teacher's cat.

As humans, we tend to hold onto the damnedest things.

The Glorious People's Republic Of Bananas

2007-10-12T12:23:00.000-04:00

TPMMuckraker:

CIA Director Michael Hayden is going after the agency's independent watchdog, Inspector General John Helgerson. Hayden wonders if Helgerson -- who is not appointed by the CIA director -- hasn't gone too far in investigating how the agency conducts detentions and interrogations.

Of course being the CIA's inspector general doesn't make someone infallible. But I'm curious about how anyone could be excessively zealous when investigating allegations of torture. If Helgerson hasn't been employing torture in the course of his investigations, I don't see how there could be a problem.

Unless, of course, the CIA is still being directed by Bush to violate American law - not to mention basic human values - by torturing people in its custody. In that situation there's very little that Helgerson could do that wouldn't be considered excessive.

And so it goes in the land of George Bush.

Al Gore: Nobel Laureate

2007-10-12T11:43:00.000-04:00

Well, good on Al Gore. Not surprisingly, I agree with Josh Marshall's thoughts on this:

And let's not discount another benefit: watching the rump of the American right detail the liberal bias of the Nobel Committee and at this point I guess the entire world. Fox News vs. the world.

That's been true for a while, but it'll be fun to see this dynamic put in sharp relief for a while.

Republic Of Bananastan

2007-10-11T21:52:00.000-04:00

Kagro X has a post up at DailyKos that should make your blood run cold. It's worth a read, believe me, but I'm going to summarize it quickly here so that I can make one point that Kagro X alludes to but doesn't make clear.

Joe Nacchio is the former CEO of Qwest, the only telecommunications company to stand up to the Bush Administration's demands for unlimited access to their records and phone lines. He was convicted of insider trading and faces 6 years in prison for it. The case against Nacchio was that he knew Qwest's earnings were going to fall short of projections and that its stock would fall, so he sold it early to get his personal stash taken care of.

What's interesting is Nacchio's defense, which is that shortly before he sold the stock he was in meetings with the Federal Government for a $100 million contract and was told Qwest had the inside track on a $2 billion deal to build a network between the US and South America. The problem is that he can't say what the $100 million contract was for because of "national security" concerns, and any mention of it in documents is redacted.

So Qwest's earnings aren't looking good and Nacchio sells a bunch of stock that turns out to have been overvalued. Nacchio's defense is that he believed that Qwest was going to be in great shape and, if anything, the stock was undervalued at the time of the sale.

But those contracts went to other companies and Qwest's stock took a hit. The NSA tells the telecoms to hand everything over and Nacchio says no. All of the sudden the SEC gets real interested in the stock sale, and the DOJ pulls the US Attorney off the prosecution, replacing him with some guys from DC. Sound familiar? Have there been any other situations in which a US Attorney has been pulled from a case, or perhaps fired, with the replacement initiating charges against some "enemy" of the Bush Administration?

What I think Kagro didn't quite say is that it looks like the Bushies had some reason to be unhappy with Nacchio back in early 2001. They knew he sold the stock based upon getting those contracts, so they awarded them to other companies, knowing that if their fears proved true they would have a clear-cut case against him with the SEC.

When you get down to it, inertia is the only reason that the USA still functions as a free country in any form at all. Inertia is the only way to explain why any of our laws are still upheld - that and perhaps an inability for the Bush Administration to put all their plans in place before Congress changed hands.

These are dangerous people, especially because there are still millions of Americans who think that George Bush is a committed Christian, and honest man who only wants what's best for America and who is right about just what that means.

Quantum Explains Quite A Bit

2007-10-11T21:40:00.000-04:00

I recently went back to work part-time for a buddy of mine who owns a web hosting business. I'm an "operator," which means "peon." I just have to be here, let clients in and respond to the various alerts and such that we might get. Some evenings it seems like every server in the place is going to blow up, some nights nothing happens.

We use a lot of biometrics, even more than when I worked here before (last summer and fall). I no longer have a key because the front door is opened with my fingerprint. My palm opens the doors for both the Network Operations Center (the cool room with the windows and 8 computer monitors showing all sorts of impressive graphs and security camera images) and the Data Center (the room that has all the servers). Then I have to give my fingerprint again for either the communications room or the electrical room.

The palm scanners have a little digital readout where I enter my code before putting my palm down, forgot that part, and when it scans my palm it says "Approved" and gives me a number on a 100 scale that measures just how closely my palm resembles the original scan when I was entered into the database.

A year ago I regularly got scores of 20-35. Since coming back - I was never removed from the system, so it's the same palm scan of 18 months ago - I get scores of 2-9.

Apparently my palm in October 2007 looks more like my palm of June 2006 than my palm looked in June 2006.

I'm going to go with Terry Pratchett and say that it's because of all the quantum around here.

It Just Gets Worse

2007-10-10T13:44:00.000-04:00

ThinkProgress has some very convincing evidence that the smear campaign against 12-year-old accident victim Graeme Frost has been orchestrated from the beginning by the office of Senator Mitch McConnell.

Think about that a moment. The Senate Minority Leader cooking up a plan to lie about a hardworking, decent family, to make it look like they were frauds and con artists. A United States Senator targeting a 12 year old boy with lies.

The rot in the Republican party runs from top to bottom. A conservative movement in this country could be valuable, even necessary. But the one we have consists of deranged, jingoistic psychopaths being manipulated by sociopathic powermongers. George Bush is wrong on this issue - wrong about the facts of it, wrong about the morality of it - and his followers in Congress are just as wrong. They're so far in the wrong that they can't even make an attempt of debating the actual issue, so they'll cheerfully invade the privacy and endanger the lives of an innocent family living and working in Baltimore.

How much of a monster can someone be that they would endanger children instead of just taking their political lumps? How antithetical to American values does the GOP need to become before people rise up and say, "enough!"

The Problem With The Democrats

2007-10-10T00:36:00.000-04:00

Lots of confusion about the way the Democratic leadership in DC acts. They're handling the SCHIP thing pretty well, they passed ethic legislation that contains everything they promised, they passed a minimum wage increase, they backed down with the last FISA bill and stand ready to give into the White House's demands again, they talk tough then always give up when it comes to Iraq War supplementals, and on it goes. Progressives all over the country are frustrated. People are using this political schizophrenia to bolster their arguments that there is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans. Theories are floated - so many and so often it's impossible to begin to link to them, just look around - about this Senator belonging to Such-n-Such, Inc. and that Representative is in bed with XYZ Group.

But that's not the problem. All of this misses the real issue, and that is how DC Democrats simply don't believe the polls which say the majority of Americans agree with them about healthcare, about Iraq, about foreign policy and defense. They certainly don't believe the polls which say that a majority of Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans to competently handle a War on Terror.

Under the leadership of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi the DC Democrats have pushed and fought for the types of things in which Democrats have held traditional advantages: wages, ethics, protecting massively popular entitlement programs (especially when the Boomers are all starting to get their SS checks; really, what was the GOP thinking on that one?) - pretty much all the domestic policy stuff that has proven to be a winner for the Democrats over and over and over again.

But when it comes to the things that the conventional wisdom - that is to say, the accepted views of pundits like David Broder, Maureen Dowd and other parasites on the body politic - believes favor the Republicans, the Democrats have caved again and again. The War in Iraq, limits of government law enforcement and war-making authority, the introduction of new entitlement programs such as universal healthcare.

The High Elders of the Pundit Class have been saying since Reagan's election that the USA is a basically conservative nation, conservative in religion, in social policy, in fiscal policy. This has been repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseum until it is etched on every politician's brain all over the country. That has put the Democratic party in the unnecessary position of believing that it needs to sell its policies to the public by means of subterfuge and stealth. Democratic policies need to be enacted despite Americans, for their own good.

This, of course, is not true. American can't really be described as "liberal" or "conservative." What we can say is that there's an awful lot of Democrats out there, and there always has been. And for the last few years, the number of Democrats has been increasing greatly, far outpacing the growth of the GOP. These last few years Americans' opinions have shifted in a massive way to favor the Democratic party and its policies, not because we're all now liberals, but because of the massive corruption, incompetence and disdain for the Constitution evidenced by the GOP along with an economy that, while giving us record CEO compensation and DOW numbers, has pretty much sucked for most Americans.

Reality is that this is a golden opportunity for Democrats, not only politically, but in terms of enacting good, solid policies that will help this country. Protecting Social Security as it is and ensuring Medicare's continued solvency are not unpopular ideas that a reluctant public needs done with or without its approval. Universal health coverage of some sort is an absolute winner politically. And of course the American people, in spite of incessant war cheerleading, wants out of Iraq right now.

That's reality. The question is, will the DC Democrats ever wake up to reality, to 2007? Or will they remain stuck in the alternate universe of the Beltway where the GOP is the permanent majority, even when it isn't?

Dangerous, Hateful, Amoral Scumbags: Right Wing Bloggers and Radio Hosts

2007-10-09T14:11:00.000-04:00

So a couple of weeks ago 12 year old Graeme Frost delivered the weekly Democratic radio address, talking about Bush's reprehensible veto of the SCHIP bill - a bill with the overwhelming support of states' Governors and Congressional members of both parties.

The Right Wing Hate Machine, sensing a vulnerability, has kicked into gear, harassing people at the Frost's home and business, digging up their tax returns, investigating where their kids go to school, etc. They've come to the predictable conclusion that the Frosts are scam artists, that their children are pampered little rich kids living large off the government.

The Frosts, of course, have never made more than $50,000/year. They bought their house in Baltimore for $55,000. I don't know much about Baltimore, but in Kansas City a $55,000 house means either no indoor plumbing or that it's in between two crack houses - or both. The family was in a horrible car accident a few years ago, which left their daughter with severe brain damage and their son, Graeme, has had to fight for a couple of years now to get back to health. They do attend private school, but as recipients of scholarships. The family pays about $500/yr for each kid.

George Bush has used "snowflake babies" - extraneous fertilized eggs from fertility treatments that were adopted ahead of already-living kids that need a home, but hey, these kids are all white - to make his stem cell policies unassailable, during the Social Security debacle a while back there was a 9 year old who traveled the country speaking at events to try and convince people to destroy the program, etc. Not one blogger - NOT ONE! - "visited" that kid's family at home, or looked into their finances. Not one blogger has searched out these "snowflake babies" to see what lives they're living.

In fact, I've been surprised at the restraint the media has had regarding George Bush's kids. Chelsea Clinton was never spared any insult the Right Wing Hate Machine could spew out. If the Bush twins could have just behaved themselves a bit a few years ago, we would have never heard anything about them.

Why? Because there is simply no organization, no group, no ethos on the American Left which considers its political philosophy so important and inherently moral that this nation's laws and normal ethics don't apply. There is no such thing as a Left-wing radio host with a program based upon insults and hatred. There are no Left-wing TV show hosts who get on every night and lie lie lie like Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Scarborough, Matthews, Russert and all the other hacks and flacks on TV.

I'm not trying to say that all liberals are super-good and moral people, nor can every conservative be characterized as the opposite. But the movements are entirely different.

Moveon.org puts an ad in the New York Times using a nickname from General Petraeus' own career - General Betrayus - and the Right goes nuts. Rush Limbaugh had used that smear against Chuck Schumer months ago, calling him Senator Betrayus in counterpoint to Gen. Petraeus' then-upcoming testimony. Nothing was done.

The above example is just par for the course. The Left in this country is routinely portrayed as being angry, bitter, unhinged. But what proof is there of that? Just like with the fabricated spitting on Vietnam vets incidents, proof of a rabid, angry and deranged Left in this country simply isn't around. But there is an entire media industry that garners a majority of its profits from the perpetuation of that very myth while ignoring the quite real examples of extreme Right-wing fanatics who do commit violence. Violence such as bombing women's health clinics (they usually aren't the clinics that offer abortions) and shooting doctors who perform abortions, like posting journalists' personal information and calling on people to teach their children - there's the children as targets again - a lesson for publishing photos of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's vacation homes, never mind that they had permission. Invasions of privacy, smears, lies, all piped into the homes of millions of Americans simply because someone got on their bad side, or happened to be around when the GOP desperately needed a distraction from the corruption and incompetence that has so taken hold of the party structure and leadership.

I can tell you this: If Michelle Malkin - or anyone else - trespassed on my property in order to harass my family about stuff that's none of her business, I'd smack the hell out of her and be fully within my rights. This is one liberal who, when it comes to his kids, makes the proverbial she-bear protecting her cubs look like an arthritic toy poodle.

Apples

2007-10-06T22:09:00.000-04:00

Apples are wonderful things. They represent one of the very few items that can be represented in a dizzying variety without causing me to lament the way American culture piles choice upon choice without regard to logic or value.

Because with apples, how can you lose? Except for eating Granny Smiths raw, but other than that.

Just a moment ago I was eating a Gala apple, and found that one side of the apple was noticeably sweeter and softer than the other. It reminded me of a Red Delicious, though it's been so long since I've eaten one of those I could be a bit wrong.

This unusual specimen got me wondering about it's lineage, so off to Wikipedia I went, and Behold! The Gala apple is a cross between Golden Delicious and a Kidd's Orange Red. That, of course, is hardly an acceptable stopping place, so on I went. The Golden Delicious is not related to the Red Delicious, but I've always thought they had a similar taste profile. But onward we shall go, to the heretofore unknown Kidd's Orange Red, which comes to us from the fertile mind of one J.H. Kidd of New Zealand. He took the Cox's Orange Pippin and crossed it with - drumroll, if you will - the Red Delicious. Feel free to follow the links for those apples, the whole thing is fascinating.

Red Delicious, while quite bland by itself, seems to be a good base upon which an apple breeder can build. It certainly shows up a lot, and seems to be the source of necessary sweetness that allows us to enjoy the stronger, sharper flavors of other apples. Lately I've grown quite fond of the Cameo and get it when I can, following a few years of Fuji devotion.

God On The Campaign Trail

2007-10-06T20:48:00.000-04:00

With so many candidates for President from both parties - including Lee L. Mercer, who the damn Em-Ess-Em refuses to cover - it might be hard for even dedicated political junkies to know, moment by moment, just how much each candidate is saying about God.

Well, thank somebody for Beliefnet and Time, because they've created the God-o-Meter (pronounced "gah-DOM-meter*).

With the God-o-Meter, we have a scientific tool that scientifically measures the just how much each candidate is Godding up his or her campaign. For example, Obama, Richardson, Huckabee, Romney and McCain all top the rating at 8 apiece, with Dodd and Giuliani occupying the bottom rung at 3 apiece.

There is also a handy visual which gives Beliefnet's opinion as to whether a particular candidate is a "theocrat" or a "secularist." It may look random, but it's scientific. It says so at the top of the browser!

Neil and other Edwards fans will be pleased to see that their Johnny ranks a 5 from the God-o-Meter, right in the middle between secularist and theocrat. Apparently he really is the Baby Bear of this presidential election, with everything about him neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right.

As silly as the God-o-Meter seems, it does appear to be a fairly accurate reading of just how much God extract is being used by each candidate. Further, this tool strikes me as representative of a shift in the way Goddyness is being reported this time around. In previous elections the Godicity question has always seemed to be treated as a relevant question for all Americans, and that certainly is still there. But there seems to be more coverage of how each candidate's particular application of Godissitude represents just another campaign strategy, a way to please one of the myriad special interest groups.

In that sense, I really do think that the Religious Right is changing from the arbiter of American morality and identity to a special interest group that a candidate can seek to enlist or not, with all the usual benefits and costs associated with reaching out to any particular group.

I'd be very interested in anyone's thoughts on this in the comments.

*The first syllable of which probably sounding quite like what you said upon hearing about it.

All Domenici, All The Time

2007-10-05T08:24:00.000-04:00

I just want to say that I called it. Heather Wilson is running for Domenici's seat. She won't win, and we'll pick up her seat as well. New Mexico is about to go Democratic in a fairly big way, with Steve Pearce looking forward to not only being in the Congressional minority, but the only Republican coming out of New Mexico for a good long time.

Update: Well, I'm batting .500, which isn't bad. Udall, who I was sure would run for the Senate, has decided not to run. That does make the Senate race a bit more of a challenge. I wonder if Bill Richardson sees the writing on the wall of his presidential campaign and has been talking to Udall.

More Domenici News

2007-10-04T09:14:00.000-04:00

Heath Haussamen has a post today that the reason Senator Domenici is resigning is because he has frontotemporal lobar degeneration, a degenerative brain disease. It may incapacitate him, it may not. It may take years, it may not.

I think it's clear that something has been affecting him in recent years. I hope he is able to complete his term without further ill effects, and that he is able to enjoy at least some years of his retirement.

It's horrible the way our bodies can sometimes outlast our minds.

See You Later, Senator Domenici

2007-10-03T17:51:00.000-04:00

Well, Pete's riding off into the sunset. Good for him. He's not been well for a while, and certainly doesn't need to hang around to reap what George Bush is sowing for this country and his party.

According to Heath Haussamen, Domenici will announce his retirement at St. Mary's Catholic School tomorrow at 4pm. That's where he attended as a child.

Let's see what Tom Udall does with this. We just might have two Udalls in the Senate after next year, which would suit me just fine.

Mustang Bobby has more at Shakesville.

How To Keep Kids In Church

2007-10-03T09:52:00.000-04:00

Time has an article about the decline in Christianity's good image in the USA. Seems that in 1996, the Barna Group found that 83% of Americans self-identified as Christian, with less than 20% of the remainder expressing negative opinions about Christianity.

Another group of polls taken over the last 3 years showed that, among non-Christians, 38% "had a 'bad impression' of present-day Christianity," and that 73% of the country now self-identifies as Christian. Significantly, 40% of people aged 16-29 self-identifies as non-Christian.

It's encouraging that of those outside the faith, 90% said that Christianity is too "anti-homosexual," and 75% said that Christianity is "too involved in politics." Good, because it wasn't too long ago that homosexuality was enough of a taboo that even atheists were "against" it, and anything that makes people understand and oppose Christians' distressing involvement in politics and the levers of power is a good thing.

This bit of information is fascinating:

Churchgoers of the same age share several of the non-Christians' complaints about Christianity. For instance, 80% of the Christians polled picked "anti-homosexual" as a negative adjective describing Christianity today. And the view of 85% of non-Christians aged 16-29 that present day Christianity is "hypocritical — saying one thing doing another," was, in fact, shared by 52% of Christians of the same age. Fifty percent found their own faith "too involved in politics." Forty-four percent found it "confusing."

For quite some time now the Church has faced a real challenge in trying to pass the faith to the younger generation. Much of the growth found in Evangelical churches comes from like-minded people leaving mainline denominations; that is to say, the more conservative members of mainline denominations like the Presbyterian Church, USA are leaving to attend churches in the Southern Baptist Convention or the multitude of unaffiliated congregations springing up everywhere.

But even that growth is not as explosive as the conservative denominations would have you believe. The dirty little secret of many conservative groups is that their non-USA growth accounts for most, if not all of the growth the group has. I know for a fact - because I helped compile the statistics - that the Church of the Nazarene in the USA, Canada and Europe is growing very little, if at all, while the church sees phenomenal growth in places like India and all over Africa. Keeping the younger generation in the church is a huge focus, a big problem. It's part of why the average youth pastor tenure hovers around 9 months to a year; people want tangible results, they want to see new kids coming in the doors and the kids already there making big, public commitments.

This is why youth conventions are getting so showy and so big, not because this new media-saturated generation demands it. Churches want teenagers to feel like they're a part of something cool, but also something extremely significant. They want the teens to have a huge emotional experience in the hopes that it ties them to the church forever - not unlike the way many people approach marriage, both inside and out of the Church, which can explain the divorce rate and the Church's retention problem.

The last youth conference I attended - hopefully the last I'll ever attend - was Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 (link goes to NYC 07 page). It wasn't all bad. Out of conversations I had there I was able to help some of my youth group members get some badly needed professional help, we had fun at Six Flags, and I was able to see some old friends. One of the kids from the first youth group I led was there as a sponsor - with her husband! - and she'd turned into an impressive woman. It was nice to see.

But the conference as a whole is practically an evil. The schedule is brutal: 13-15 solid hours of worship services, seminars, service projects, games and concerts, and then the kids go back to the excitement of being in a hotel without their parents, in rooms with just other teenagers, and with boys, or girls in the very next room probably not wearing any clothes at all! And this goes on for about 4 days, until Thursday night.

Thursday night. That's the big one, the service that everyone - except the kids, of course - knows is going to last and last and last. Everything that happens is designed to create an overpowering emotional environment. At NYC 03 they had a guy speak whose daughter was killed in the Columbine massacre. Apparently she had spoken of an early death for years and would regularly engage in erratic behavior: once she was driving on the interstate with a friend. She slammed on the brakes and swerved from the left lane all the way to the right shoulder, all without warning. She jumped out of the still running car and started dancing along the freeway, illuminated by the car's headlights. Her friend was stunned, and when she got back in the car, she looked over and said, "sometimes you just have to dance before the Lord, you know?"

After her death her family looked through her journal and found extensive writing about her expectation of an early death along with her apparent belief that she would become hugely famous and impact people all over the world. Her dad has spent the years since trying to make that come true. So that Thursday night, utterly exhausted, we spent a couple of hours listening to a man talk about and looking at pictures of a murdered teenage girl. We heard example after example of erratic behavior bordering on the destructive, held up to us as an example of extreme piety.

Of course, at the end of the service, there was the "altar call," which was an invitation for the kids to walk to base of the stage and publicly commit to be a Christian patterned after the mold of that dead girl. I felt ill.

I found out the next day that the leader of another district's group - a group of 400 kids - directed the students into a meeting room at their hotel that night, and started in on them again. He told them that they weren't going to go back to their rooms until there was a "breakthrough." It was horrible abuse, but par for the course. That guy is a successful youth pastor, always able to build a youth group into a large group, always able to get his quota of commitments, of kids going off to Christian colleges declaring their intentions to become missionaries or pastors.

All this is done to try and stem the tide of those who leave the Church. So many courses, books, seminars, conferences, degrees, camps, workshops, retreats, so much money and time and effort, when the answer to the problem is so simple, so obvious.

You see, the Barna Group dug down in their polls. They found that "non-Christians' biggest complaints about the faith are not immediately theological: Jesus and the Bible get relatively good marks (emphasis mine)."

The answer is simple and should be easy to implement: stop acting like assholes, and start acting like Jesus. Oh, and try to actually read the New Testament to find out how Jesus acted instead of relying on James Dobson or whoever to tell you. Show some concern for justice, show some compassion, and try to enjoy life. 'Cause the "damn them all to hell" and "grimace for Jesus" methods just aren't working out.

Miscellany

2007-10-02T23:52:00.000-04:00

-Bruce Springsteen's latest album, Magic, came out today. It is, of course, a great album. Everything Springsteen does is incredible, even the stuff you don't like. Here's what I really appreciate about Bruce: his songs have strong messages, but he doesn't beat you over the head with them. It's a rare talent, one I don't share of course, which may be why I admire it so much. For example, take a look at Your Own Worst Enemy:

You can't sleep at night
You can't dream your dream
Your fingerprints on file
Left clumsily at the scene

Your own worst enemy has come to town
Your own worst enemy has come to town

Yesterday the people were at ease
Baby slept in peace
You closed your eyes and saw her
You knew who you were

Now your own worst enemy has come to town
Your own worst enemy has come
Your world keeps turnin' 'round and 'round
But everything is upside down
Your own worst enemy has come to town

There's a face you know
Staring back from the shop window
The condition you're in
Now you just can't get out of this skin

The times they got too clear
So you removed all the mirrors
Once the family felt secure
Now no one's very sure

Your own worst enemy has come to town
Your own worst enemy has come
Everything is falling down
Your own worst enemy has come to town
Your own worst enemy has come
Everything is falling down
Your own worst enemy has come to town

Your flag it flew so high
It drifted into the sky

My song dealing with the same subject would go thusly:

HEY MORONS YOU GAVE UP ALL YOUR CIVIL LIBERTIES FOR SAFETY AND NOW YOU DON'T HAVE EITHER ONE. WAY TO GO, IDIOTS!

That's why Bruce Springsteen is Bruce Springsteen, and I'm not.

-In other music news, Radiohead has a new album coming out on the 10th. The only way to get it is to go to their website and either order a CD - which won't come until December - or download it. Here's the thing, though: you decide how much to pay. It's a badly needed shot of whimsy in an industry that is, well, very industrial right now.

-In still more music news, I adore Kelly Clarkson. I don't generally go in for her type of music, but my daughter does, and Clarkson's songs are certainly better than pretty much anything else you can listen to in that genre. Plus, she refuses to lose weight to silence all the critics who continually call her fat. She's not fat, of course, she's beautiful. But that doesn't matter, because she wears clothes that actually come in a size. Also, she stood up to her label to release the album she wanted, not the one they wanted. Good stuff all around.

-Moving on to other things, let me be the latest person to say that when I ask a clerk, "How are you," I don't really care. Normally I'm the most empathetic person in the world. Anyone tears up in front of me, I start to cry. Normally, I really do care. But while I understand how work can be a pain, you are at least getting paid to deal with me. I'm asking how you are because our culture doesn't have very many greetings. So when you're scanning my groceries and we exchange pleasantries, you need to recognize that I'm not telling you how I didn't sleep last night because my son woke up a bunch, or that I accidentally missed a dose of my antidepressants, which means I just lost about 3 years of progress in that area, or that I have a raging sinus infection. No, I just say that I'm doing fine, and I expect the same from you. I don't care if you're tired. We're all tired. When I worked in retail, I didn't let on to my customers what was going on in my life.

-Yesterday at the end of dinner I wet my finger and started tracing it around the edge of my wine glass. It took me a while to get it right - I always forget to press hard enough - but after a few minutes I was able to produce a very clear, very loud tone. My son thought it was great and kept trying to find out where the sound was coming from. My daughter looked at me as if I were a wizard. It was cool.

Grasping At Straws

2007-10-02T13:10:00.000-04:00

Just got this in from the Kansas Republican Party:

I haven't got the slightest idea what they're talking about. Oh, I know how the GOP loves to paint Democrats as out of control spenders - quick! Which party introduced us to deficit spending? Which party has overseen the largest increases in government size and spending over and over again? - but it's a sign of how bad things are for the GOP that all they have is tired, vague accusations.

It is interesting how this email doesn't just bring up the terror of taxing and spending, but how it focuses upon three particular Democrats: Kathleen Sebelius, Nancy Boyda and Nancy Pelosi.

Perhaps you can think of some characteristic they all share which other Democrats - like Dennis Moore from the 3rd district in Kansas - might not, and which would play into common prejudices.

Texan "Integrity"

2007-09-28T10:53:00.000-04:00

This is just lovely. KEYE TV in Austin, TX, has a report on voting habits in the Texas Legislature. Seems that state lawmakers, as a favor to one another, I suppose, will generously reach over to their colleagues' seats and cast votes for those who are not present. Some legislators are so altruistic that they will get up and walk around the chamber, making sure that no matter how many people are physically present, the vote total represents the total number of legislators.

KEYE's report has a funny twist to it:

See, TX lawmakers want to force people to show photo ID before voting and to criminalize the act of delivering a ballot to the polls for people who cannot do it themselves. "It's all about integrity."

Yeah, integrity for the common people, not for politicians. It's a sad story that gets played out in every statehouse in the country, probably every city hall and county courthouse as well. Our "representatives" are better than us, because they know more than us, because they have a higher responsibility than us schlubs who take care of our kids, who go to school, who are retired or sit in cubicles all day.

It is possible to change this, if only slightly. But the only way is for people who actually care about integrity in politics first of all refuse to keep casting votes for the same morons over and over. Secondly, we need to stop giving them money. Thirdly, we need to try and band together as much as possible and give our money and time to primary challengers, to advocacy groups that work to shine light on despicable practices like this.

This is why I like the progressive blogosphere, why what we're doing is so much more important than the conservative online presence. While conservative websites devote themselves to repeating GOP talking points and kissing up to a power structure that despises them, progressives raise money, write letters and make phone calls that pressure Democratic politicians to start doing the right thing. Every once in a while, it works. We got Pelosi to include the American Samoa in the minimum wage bill even though it was obvious that Starkist and Chicken of the Sea were pressuring her not to. And there are a lot more primary challengers going after worthless Democrats than there used to be.

This is what needs to happen, more and more. It's the only way to change things.

Unfortunately, It Won't Change A Thing

2007-09-26T11:29:00.000-04:00

El Pais, Spain's largest newspaper, just released transcripts of a conversation between George Bush and "Spanish [President] Jose Maria Aznar on February 22, 2003, concerning the coming U.S. invasion of Iraq. It took place at the ranch in Crawford, Texas."

I know they'll be translated soon and my Spanish isn't what it once was, but I can get what I believe to be a pretty solid paraphrase from it. Here's some relevant bits:

Durante una larga conversación privada con el entonces presidente español, José María Aznar, celebrada el sábado 22 de febrero de 2003 en el rancho de Crawford, Tejas, Bush dejó claro que había llegado el momento de deshacerse de Sadam. "Quedan dos semanas. En dos semanas estaremos militarmente listos. Estaremos en Bagdad a finales de marzo", le dijo a Aznar.

[During a private conversation with then-president of Spain Jose Maria Aznar on Saturday, February 22, 2003, at his Crawford, TX, ranch, Bush said clearly. . .not sure here. . . "I need two weeks. In two weeks we'll be militarily ready. We'll be in Baghdad by the end of March," he told Aznar."]

This while Bush publicly said that we was waiting for Saddam to disarm. Here's more:

Sólo siete días antes de esa reunión en el rancho de Crawford, tres millones de personas se manifestaban en varias ciudades de España contra la guerra inminente. "Necesitamos que nos ayudéis con nuestra opinión pública", pide Aznar. Bush le explica el alcance de la nueva resolución que piensa presentar: "La resolución estará hecha a la medida de lo que pueda ayudarte. Me da un poco lo mismo el contenido"

[Only 7 days before the meeting in Crawford, 3 million people attended various anti-war protests in Spain. "We need your help with public opinion [in Spain]," asked Aznar. Bush explained the new resolution just presented: "That resolution is a media stunt [and] it will help you. It's all the same to me."]

But like I said in the post title, this won't change anything. People who support Bush will continue to do so, because they're convinced of the superior morality of the "War on Terror," a morality that transcends silly notions like honesty and rule of law. Those that don't support Bush merely have yet another piece of clear evidence for why they don't support him.

Perhaps most importantly of all, Congressional Democrats will do nothing to capitalize on this, do nothing to resist Bush in any significant way because of this, do nothing to actually defund this war, do nothing which would make it seem like they actually pay attention to anyone outside the Beltway.

Domenici

2007-09-26T10:44:00.000-04:00

Looks like Pete Domenici (R-NM) is in trouble. His approval rating in the last SUSA poll is at 41%, the first time that Domenici has ever been below 50%. Obviously the US Attorney mess hasn't helped him, nor has his apparent habit of wandering around the Capitol Building in his pajamas.

An approval rating of 41% is especially worrying to Domenici because there isn't a major candidate yet from the Democratic side to take him on. I really thought that Tom Udall would have jumped in the race by now, though he probably wants to see if Domenici is going to retire or if this poll is more than a fluke.

If Domenici does retire, Heather Wilson is rumored to run for the seat. That would be fun to watch, since there's little chance she's going to keep her House seat next year. You usually don't win Senate seats when everyone knows you're running away from an election loss to the lower house.

My take on it all is that Domenici is old and he's tired. They should let the poor guy retire, and if there was a strong Republican candidate, they would. I hope he's going to be able to get out of the Senate before he suffers some sort of debilitating breakdown.

Legends

2007-09-25T13:07:00.000-04:00

The Devil's Bible has just been put on display in Prague, Czech Republic. It has 624 pages - out of an estimated 640 originally - and weighs 165 pounds. So it's a big book.

A Benedictine monk wrote it around 800 years ago, and included all of the Christian Bible, Josephus' "War of the Jews," a list of saints and the way to determine the correct date to celebrate Easter.

It's called the "Devil's Bible" because legend has it that this monk decided to write it out in only one night as a way to atone for his sins. But then he realized that writing all that out in one night would be impossible, so he asked the Devil to help him.

So let's see. He wanted to atone for his sins, so he asked Satan to help him. I'm sorry if this is rude, but that's a pretty dumb legend. It's like they weren't even trying with that one.

Anyway, it would be cool to see the book. Union Station in KC got the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, maybe they could get this too.

Manufactured Outrage Is Our New Biggest Export

2007-09-25T11:20:00.001-04:00

When David Kurtz is on, he's really on. He writes about the faux-outrage over the Moveon.org advertisement:

You don't have to get into the appropriateness of the MoveOn ad or the intricacies of the NYT's ad rate schedule to conclude the obvious: The GOP is engaged in another round of cynical, exploitative caterwauling to change the subject from their party's Iraq debacle. The manufactured indignation over the MoveOn ad has the added benefit of letting the vast right wing fund-raising machine milk a little more money from what's left of its base, not to mention that it turns MoveOn into a proxy candidate for president, which may be the only candidate the weak GOP field can beat.

The GOP has done this for a couple of decades now. It was interesting to see Bob Dole's campaign in which he blatantly asked "where's the outrage?" I guess we should admire the GOP's adherence to their "principles" since right after announcing their entire political strategy in the 1996 Presidential election and losing, they stuck with it to produce the nonsense that was the Clinton impeachment.

Outrage, outrage, outrage. That the GOP relies entirely upon manufactured anger and fear to turn out votes is why they're so quick to label Democrats as "angry" and suffering from "Bush Derangement Syndrome." Sometimes you need to be careful of the ways in which you describe your enemies.

Thankfully the Democrats have gotten better at responding to this - sometimes - and even journalists are willing to call GOP politicians out on this type of thing.

Kurtz shows us a video of just such a thing happening, and his introduction of it is perfect:

Watch this David Shuster interview with the pathetic Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who is prepared to slam the MoveOn ad and mock the NYT's financial difficulties (the point of which is what?), but who is brought up short, first when she is asked to repudiate a similar "betray us" remark made by Rush Limbaugh and then when she is asked to name the last soldier from her district to die in Iraq. She won't and she can't.

Yeah, it's "gotcha" journalism, but it's the right thing here. He's right; Blackburn can say all this stuff about the New York Times but she doesn't know diddly about a young man who made the ultimate sacrifice to his country just last month.

I hope you also noticed the amazing change in her demeanor, from the smug, cocky GOP hack doing what they do best - which is to deflect the conversation away from issues that matter and to create villians where none exist - to the oh-so-serious Member of Congress, very concerned about her constituents, falling back on utter bullshit about "working with families." She basically said the same sentence over and over, and even hid behind the military service of one of her staffers.

The Moveon ad doesn't matter. What matters is Jeremy Bohannon, 18 years old, 9 months into his military career, killed in Iraq while this nation's political leaders piss at each other and call it governance.

It's A Hard To Be A Bigot

2007-09-25T11:00:00.001-04:00

It must be frustrating to be a white supremacist. Take Richard Barrett as an example. He's the leader of the Nationalist Movement, a bunch of bigoted freaks operating out of Mississippi, of course. Barrett went down to Jena, Louisiana and interviewed the town's Mayor and Justin Barker, the white teenager that was attacked by black students.

In the interview Jena's Mayor thanked Barnett "for what [he's] trying to do," and for his "moral support." The victim* Justin Barker said that whites needed to "realize what is going on, speak up and speak their mind."

This after multiple assaults and fights which found white teenagers charged with misdemeanors, if at all, and the Jena 6 initially charged with attempted murder. But it's the whites who need to realize what's going on.

The frustrating part for Barrett comes when interviews like this are made public and, like the cockroaches they are, bigots such as Mayor McMillin and Justin Barker scurry away from the attention with lame excuses about not knowing who Barrett is or what he believes before granting an interview with him and inviting him to stay in their home like the Barkers did.

I don't have much to add to the larger Jena situation. In fact, I'm not sure what commentary really is needed. In a backwater, racist town, black students had to ask permission to sit under a tree. This was granted, to the dismay of white students who felt the tree was their own property. So they hung some nooses on the tree, which was dismissed as a "prank" by the school district.

Tensions ran high, fights broke out, the District Attorney threatened all the kids in town by saying that with a "stroke of his pen" he could make their "lives disappear." When a white student was beaten up, he tried to make good on his promise by charging the black students who beat him up with attempted murder.

Typical of the type of bullshit that goes on every day all over the American south.

*I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that if I knew Justin Barker, I'd want to beat the hell out of him as well. Violence doesn't solve things and blah blah blah, but you can bet the only thing Barker was a "victim" of was seeing his violence met with violence.

'Twas For This God Created The Internet

2007-09-24T21:55:00.000-04:00

In a comment thread discussing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to the USA, Carl Gordon produced the best thing I have read on the internet, ever. It is reproduced in full so that his genius can be sufficiently appreciated:

Things like stock market prices, miniature golf scores, post-drugged semen levels, and chronic back pain and flatulence can fluctuate naturally and may regress towards the mean and uncalled for. The logical flaw is to make predictions that expect exceptional results to continue as if they were the average, a representativeness heuristic if I ever saw one! People are most likely to take action when dissent, like morning wood, is at its peak. Then after results become more normal or less turgid, they believe that their action was the cause of the change when in fact it was not causal, wherein cohesion between objects of similar silly appearance is assumed. While often very useful in everyday life, it can also result in neglect of relevant base rates and volumes, an inability to play funk, and other errors. Another snag you may encounter involves describing some occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem, when, throughout my garbled history, it’s been commonly identified again and again that, if the nuns of the order of Sisters of Saint Joseph are to be believed, I am the one with the “problem”. Though misleading vividness does nothing to support an argument logically, it can have a very strong psychological effect because of a cognitive forceful brainwashing called the availability heuristic. Another area that needs to be dealt with in a timely and thorough manner is several references in my late Elementary/Junior-high phase of mutational development, otherwise known as the "Parade of horribles", originally referred to as a literal parade of people wearing comic and grotesque costumes, rather like the Philadelphia Mummers Parade or my yearly family reunion. It was a traditional feature of Fourth-of-July parades in dismal parts of the U. S. in the nineteenth century without indoor plumbing. A 1926 newspaper article about July Fourth celebrations in the White Mountains of New Hampshire notes “Old-time celebrations are to be held tomorrow at Littleton, Lancaster, Colebrook, and Conway, with all the usual features of street parades of horribles and grotesques, brass balls bands, decorated automobiles and vehicles, dance exhibitions by fire departments, basket picnics in convenient small groves, finger-sniffing contest sponsored by the local Catholic diocese, and the regional dwarf tossing semi-finals...”. And to further enlighten and confuse, in Hesse’s “Steppenwolf”, the protagonist affirms that the men of the Dark Ages (see “Living at Virginia’s house”) did not suffer more than those of the Classical Antiquity (see “Attending Catholic school in the 60’s”), and vice-versa. It is rather those who live between two times, those who do not know what to follow, that suffer the most. In this token, a man from Virginia’s house attending Catholic school, or the opposite, would undergo a gulping sadness and agony.

Indeed, Carl. Indeed.

Kill Everyone, Apparently

2007-09-24T13:28:00.000-04:00

So the newest strategy for finding insurgents in Iraq is to plant "evidence" on the street in the form of detonation cords, ammunition and similar items. Anyone who picks that stuff up can then be shot by waiting American snipers and counted as another "insurgent" killed.

Following this strategy, American police could put a gun on a sidewalk and arrest anyone who picks it up, or even shoot them since they would be in possession of a deadly weapon. We could plant drugs in the same way and send whoever picks them up to look at them to prison.

I would call this entrapment, but that word doesn't even begin to describe the hideous nature of this strategy. And, like other utterly stupid and depraved strategies to carve miniscule successes out of the granite mountain of failure in Iraq, this despicable practice will only serve to inflame Iraqi citizens against the US.

The reason for that should be simple to see: the relatives and friends of the people killed through this will know whether the person really was an insurgent or not. And every time US snipers kill an innocent Iraqi citizen simply because they were curious, there will be another group of people with one more reason to hate American soldiers. Once again the idiots in command have stumbled upon a strategy perfectly designed to recruit new insurgents and/or terrorists.

It's almost, you know, as if that was somehow the goal.

While our political and military leaders work on new ways to endanger our soldiers and bring destruction upon Iraqi civilians, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, President of Iran, is in the United States being asked utterly stupid and pointless questions and generally getting made to look like a reasonable, rational statesman. Again, it makes one wonder if the Bush Administration's goal is to ruin everything about America that they can.

Super Awesome

2007-09-22T09:24:00.001-04:00

Click through, it's worth it. Found here.

The Real Thunder Birds

2007-09-21T10:16:00.000-04:00

Velociraptor had feathers. The Tyrannosaurus Rex may have even had "protofeathers," at least while a juvenile.

Horseshoe crabs have been in their present form for about 20 million years.

Sharks have been around in their modern form for around 100 million years. And sharks like Cladoselache from around 370 million years ago would still be recognizable as such today.

Cladoselache Sandbar Shark

And these are hardly the only "living fossils" among us. In the last few years, the evidence has mounted that the dinosaurs, long thought to have gone extinct through cataclysm and and competition, did no such thing. They simply changed into birds, and live with us still.

When you think about it, this is a pretty cool world.

(h/t Liss)

ps - Blogger's "preview" function is pathetic. Utterly, utterly pathetic.

Cowardice

2007-09-20T09:36:00.000-04:00

At TalkingPointsMemo, David Kurtz reports that Senate Republicans used filibusters to kill three separate measures:

A full voting House member for the District of Columbia - and one more for Utah
Restoration of Habeas Corpus for enemy combatants
The Webb Amendment on troop rotations

Kurtz also notes the McClatchey report from July which extrapolates the number of GOP filibusters by the end of this Congress, predicting an almost threefold increase from the previous high. Technically what we're dealing with is a "threat" to filibuster, but the result is the same, since Harry Reid is unwilling to force the "debate" the GOP keeps threatening to have. And as a thought experiment, try to remember the reaction in the media when the Democrats "threatened" a filibuster. Do you remember the hysteria? It's not the media's fault; it's because the GOP not only called the Dems on their threat but also flooded the airwaves with their side of story.

This is yet another example of weak leadership in the Democratic party. Harry Reid is a skilled tactician, but he and almost every other Democratic politician in DC still run scared from the GOP Bogeyman. Americans hate the war in Iraq and they pretty much hate George Bush, but the Democrats still refuse to stand up to Bush and the GOP.

If the Democrats would just go ahead and force the GOP to actually filibuster, they would win in the court of public opinion. The more President Bush's actual policies and ideas get aired, the less Americans like them. Let the Republicans filibuster, and while they're reading from the phone book, go on TV and talk about how all the Democrats want is for soldiers to have a few months with their families before going back to Iraq. All Democrats want is for the law to apply the way it always has.

It's clear through these and other (non)actions that DC Democrats don't pay any attention to polls. They don't really pay attention to their constituents. DC Democrats pay attention to consultants, and Democratic consultants have been selling themselves as saviors to a doomed political movement for decades now. If the Democrats are not a minority of voters, not on the fringes of American opinion, not in danger of complete irrelevancy, if the GOP is not an almost invincible political force, then the Democratic consultant business model breaks down.

The White House report on Iraq, delivered by Gen. Petraeus, didn't do anything to change public opinion on the war. George Bush's latest speech didn't do anything to change public opinion on the war, except to perhaps bring it down further, since every time he gets on TV people like him less. Americans hate this war. They want it to end. Politically speaking, if Congressional Democrats would just force the issue by sending the same timeline-ridden bill to Bush over and over and over again, if they would refuse to grant any more supplemental spending, if they would just force the GOP to actually filibuster instead of "threaten" it, the Democrats would set themselves up for electoral success like no one has ever seen.

But a culture, a worldview, is hard to change. And it seems like there is no more entrenched culture than the dystopian insularity reigning supreme over Washington, DC's pundits and politicians.

Frivolous Lawsuits

2007-09-19T09:56:00.000-04:00

In an apparent effort to make life in a completely rectangular, flat state - an impulse I can understand - State Senator Ernie Chambers of Nebraska has filed a lawsuit against God. Not against a person calling himself "God," but against the deity named and described in the Christian Bible. More proof, I suppose, that state legislatures simply don't have enough to do.

Unfortunately, the humor in this is shallow and short-lived, because Senator Chambers has an agenda with this. He filed the lawsuit in order to highlight "frivolous" lawsuits and the way they hinder and abuse our justice system. In fact, Senator Chambers told KETV7 that

his main objection is that the constitution requires that the doors to the courthouse be open to all.

That's a chilling statement. Ernie Chambers thinks that the doors to the courthouse should be closed to certain people. He hasn't gone into detail as to just who those people are, but the above-linked article does give us a small clue into his thinking:

Chambers said he decided to file the lawsuit after a suit was filed in early September in federal court against Lancaster County Judge Jeffre Cheuvront.

Now we're getting somewhere. Judge Cheuvront is the subject of a lawsuit because during a rape trial he prohibited anyone from using the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant and sexual assault kit. It's a RAPE TRIAL. The crime at issue is RAPE. But the good Judge Cheuvront, so concerned, apparently, for the rights of the accused, doesn't want any of that inflammatory language to be used. He doesn't want the jury to be prejudiced by the use of words that describe the crimes the defendant is accused of committing, nor does he want prosecutors to call things by their actual names, like "sexual assault kit."

Not only can jurors not hear those words, they cannot be told that those words have been banned from the courtroom. So prosecutors are required to use terms even more loaded than rape: sex, intercourse, have sex with. All of these imply consent and innocence.

To bar the prosecution from using the legal term used to describe the criminal charges which form the basis of the trial is a huge miscarriage of justice. No one should be happy about this, no one. I can only assume that Judge Cheuvront has already decided on the innocence of the accused and is willing to rig the trial in order for it to return the verdict he wants. It's disgusting.

But leave it to America to have someone else put in a position of authority that not only agrees with Cheuvront, but is willing to pull a stupid stunt to get it done. See, wanting to use proper names for things like "sexual assault kit" and to tell the jury just what it is the accused is accused of is just like filing a lawsuit against God. That silly woman, wanting to be able to tell the jury even that she thinks she was sexually assaulted. Clearly they just had sex, and now she's all pissy about it. The jury can just draw their own conclusions, which I'm sure they will.

Will Cheuvront ban "murder, burglary, assault" and all other terms contained in the charges prosecutors file? Will the family of a murder victim be required to dance around every word that might imply unhappiness with the fact that their loved one just happened to die one day?

Somehow, I doubt it.

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Death

2007-09-18T10:47:00.000-04:00

From the good people at Sick of Blue Cross, here's some dark humor for this morning:

Good Behavior In DC

2007-09-18T10:29:00.000-04:00

The "Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007" was just signed into law on Friday. It was the first piece of legislation passed by the Democratic Congress, just as promised, and it contains all the provisions that we were promised by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

Adam B at DailyKos has the rundown, here's a few highlights:

Earmark sponsors must be listed in appropriations committee reports. And Senators will be able to attack earmarks on the floor with a point of order triggering an hour of debate, and it will take a three-fifths majority vote to retain the provision.
Say goodbye to infinite, anonymous holds. Senators will still be able to anonymously block a request for unanimous consent, but only for six days. After that, the senator’s name would be disclosed unless the objection was withdrawn.
Slow down the revolving door -- after Dec. 31, senators, top aides and top administration officials would have to wait two years after leaving office before lobbying Congress.

There's quite a bit more, of course, but it was a good bill and now it's a good law. Of course, I'm not surprised that Bush didn't make a big deal out of signing a bill that puts the Democrats in such a good light.

It needs to be said, I think, that Reid, Pelosi and many others have been in Congress for a long time, and this law is full of what I as a regular person consider reasonable, common-sense regulations. We should not have had to wait until 2007 for these reforms to take place, and while the GOP is furiously trying to corner the corruption market all to itself, Democrats are hardly innocent in these areas. But they did pass it. Let's hope we can pressure them for more good legislation like this.

Blessed Are The Scientists, For They Will Be Assaulted By The Ignorant

2007-09-18T09:47:00.000-04:00

Having grown up in the Church of the Nazarene, I still feel a sort of odd thrill whenever I see that the Nazarenes have made it into a newspaper or magazine article or TV News. Sometimes the Nazarenes even become fodder for slang, as at a restaurant on Kansas City's Plaza shopping center. It's no longer open, but for several years, whenever a server got a bad tip, they would announce their displeasure to their colleagues by saying that they "got Nazarened." To be fair, I'm fairly certain the practice was started by a Nazarene Theological Seminary student - not me, though it's the type of thing I would do.

Last week, two of the Church of the Nazarene's 12 universities (4 are outside the US: England, Canada, Kenya and the largest is in Korea) were the subject of an article in Newsweek (subscription required), titled "Can God Love Darwin Too?" Richard Colling, a biology professor at Olivet Nazarene University, found himself in some trouble for writing a book called Random Designer.

In a letter posted to the website, Dr. Colling states that he wrote this book because he believes that God is far bigger and "more creative" than he is usually portrayed, and that his lifelong work as a microbiologist not only fails to threaten his faith, but actually strengthens it. I haven't read the book but I'm quite interested.

Predictably, Nazarenes on Olivet's educational region went crazy over this. Several of the larger churches threatened to withhold their educational budgets - which, speaking theologically, is a sin since those budgets are assigned and accepted by vote of the congregation at annual meetings; therefore refusing to pay them is to break their word. People wanted Colling sacked, something that unfortunately has precedent in the Church of the Nazarene's schools. I'm friends with one professor who lost his job because the daughter of a friggin' youth pastor* didn't like what he had to say about Exodus, a seminary professor was sacked for saying that using A Thief in the Night as an evangelical tool wasn't really a good idea, another professor was forced out of his position for not being sufficiently condemnatory of the Jesus Seminar, etc.

Dr. Colling still has his job, but he's now forbidden to teach general biology - which he has taught for 16 years - and his book is banned from the classroom, though a quick check shows that it is still in the Olivet library's collection. As for banning it from classrooms, we all know that such an action will probably only increase interest in the book. I wonder if Olivet's president had such a dynamic in mind when he made his decision. My instincts, though, tell me that Bowling simply isn't that complex a thinker; if he were, he probably wouldn't be the college president*.

Next year, Karl Giberson of Eastern Nazarene College, will come out with Saving Darwin, a book that explains evolutionary processes as the means by which God creates. Good for him, but I can only say, "Duh," to something like that. Of course, I wasn't raised by morons, so that helps. Giberson probably won't get in much trouble, Eastern is one of the "liberal" colleges, the other being my alma mater, Point Loma Nazarene University.

That these incidents continue at Nazarene schools is further evidence of the continuing slide of the Church of the Nazarene into undifferentiated American Evangelical Fundamentalism. For decades the Nazarenes prided themselves on the fact that they were not fundamentalists. And this belief was supported by the astonishing number of social programs the church offered. But American Fundamentalism is an easy ethos to accept, with simply-stated beliefs and rock-solid absolutes. Sure, if you think about it very much it starts to fall apart, but human beings are not always willing to expend the effort required to really think about what they've been taught or what they assume they believe.

So as the Church of the Nazarene embraced Christian Fundamentalism, it started to shutter its social programs and focus on people's souls, and its colleges increasingly became battlegrounds. Nazarene Bible College was literally pushed through the General Assembly because the son of a General Superintendent became an Episcopal priest after attending the church's seminary. It was that GS's deep and abiding hatred for the seminary that propelled him into pushing the idea of a bible college which would take ministerial students away from the universities, put them in a "safe" setting and give them a worthless degree so they wouldn't even be able to enter seminary. Two new universities were started at the same time - 1964 - in the Midwest because the church had two schools with enrollment over 2,000, and it was a stated policy of the church that no school would be allowed that level of enrollment, over fears that they would be able to attain financial independence from the church and therefor "go liberal."

So it goes. The fundamentalization of the Church of the Nazarene, like so many others, continues apace. Good professors at good schools live in fear of their jobs and reputations, until there won't be good professors and therefore there won't be good schools.

*Not every youth pastor is an idiot. However, the longer a person lasts as a youth pastor, the more likely it becomes that he or she either has been an idiot all along, or is turning into one. Trust me on this.

*Zing!

They Shall Fight Us On The Radio, They Shall Fight Us On TV, They Shall Fight Us In Every Newspaper

2007-09-15T10:39:00.000-04:00

When I was in college - waaay back in the day, before camera phones and Web 1.0, let alone 2.0 - the right wing assault on America's media industry had already been in full swing for some time, long enough for the concept of "The Liberal Media" to have been accepted by pretty much everyone. All conservatives believed it, of course, because that explained why their philosophies didn't always square with the way the world was working. Liberals tended to believe it back then as well, based partly on the idea that "facts have a liberal bias" and the impression that journalists, being well-read and traveled, would naturally be liberals.

We know better now, of course. While it may be true that most journalists are registered as and give to Democrats, the US media has for a long time been controlled by large corporations that are reliably conservative, at least in fiscal policy, and The Boss's opinions tend to get in print whatever the underlings might think. Conservatives haven't let up with their critique, or with their desire to control the media. Talk radio is of course dominated by conservatives, newspaper editorial pages publish more conservatives than progressives, and in response to Rupert Murdoch's growing wingnut media empire, other cable news outlets have stocked their rosters with what appears to be anyone willing to shill for the right.

But these are all editorial in nature - with the exception of Fox News, of course, which still tries to pass itself off as a "straight news" operation. Even Fox News, though, is being exposed as a mouthpiece for the right, with conservatives taking the attitude that liberals once enjoyed about the media.

What's truly fascinating and frightening about the right's assault on the media is how they targeted not only editorial venues or established their own networks, but also actual journalists from other media outlets. Certainly the Bush Administration has been quite adept at granting/removing "access" in order to convince journalists to run White House spin as either fact or as if it were coming from sources outside the White House itself.

Nothing, however, comes close the the ways in which journalists have been duped by Alexis Debat. From fake interviews of Obama, Bill Clinton, Pelosi, Kofi Annan and others to fabricated reports coming from "sources" in Iraq and Iran, Alexis Debat has steadily and successfully pushed the neo-con agenda of his colleagues of the Nixon Center and The National Interest. Closely connected to the Debat saga is the story of Amir Taheri, an Iranian exile who has worked for Rupert Murdoch publications and, notably, was the editor of Politique Internationale, which published the fake interviews. Taheri was the source of the bogus story about Iran forcing its Jewish citizens and other religious minorities to wear armbands identifying them as non-Muslims, which was immediately debunked, though that didn't get in the way of Taheri going to the White House just days after the fabricated story was published to advise President Bush on Iran.

Clearly Alexis Debat and Amir Teheri are brilliant manipulators of the rules and culture of journalism - that they have been exposed doesn't take away from that at all. But they are only two of what appears to be a fairly large cohort on the right who have discovered at different times and ways that once the rules of the journalistic world are accepted and internalized, they can be turned into powerful methods for undermining the very purpose that journalism is supposed to serve.

The lesson for liberals, of course, is not that we need to adopt these methods, but that we need to be as skeptical of straight news stories as we are of the Journal's editorial page. As important as it is to have progressive politicians in Congress and the White House, the political battlefield has always been in the nation's media, and the other side, as it were, has established fronts in the media's every iteration.

President Bush Makes A YouTube Video

2007-09-13T22:00:00.000-04:00

Hee hee hee.

Some context here, via Kagro X. First link has naughty language.

Where Your Healthcare Dollars Go

2007-09-12T09:45:00.000-04:00

Atrios - PhD in economics, remember - points out today that over 30% of all healthcare expenditures in the United States go to administrative costs. This bears repeating, I think: almost 1/3 of every dollar spent for healthcare in this country goes toward keeping records, filing claims and other office work. As Atrios says:

Doing a little trick we like to call "multiplication," when you add in the fact that 16% [of] GDP is spent on health care we learn that close to 5% of our GDP is spent on people pushing little bits of paper back and forth between doctors and insurance companies.

Philip Longman wrote a lengthy, well-researched article for the Washington Monthly about the Veterans Health Administration. The VHA has gone from being one of the worst healthcare systems imaginable to a top performer, consistently delivering high quality, cost-efficient care. The VHA now sees fewer mistakes, more care available and does it for far less money than private insurance. For example:

Between 1999 and 2003, the number of patients enrolled in the VHA system increased by 70 percent, yet funding (not adjusted for inflation) increased by only 41 percent.

Better care at less cost. This is no fluke; it happens all the time. The VHA, Medicare and Medicaid, and every single socialized healthcare system in the world are all able to do this. Every. Single. One.

In systems like the VHA or Medicare, the challenge is to determine the most cost-effective way to deliver services to the people who need them. In the private insurance industry, the challenge is to reduce costs while maximizing profit, and the easiest way to do that is to deny services to the insured. Remember that the next time you get worried about a "government bureaucrat" choosing your doctor or telling you what tests you can have - as if it's just fine when it's a corporate bureaucrat making those decisions for you.

Anthrax Anthrax Anthrax

2007-09-11T13:13:00.001-04:00

One of the more bizarre assertions made about the last 6 years is that there have been no more terrorist attacks on American soil. This claim is used to justify everything from the war in Iraq to all of the ways in which Americans' civil rights are violated on a daily basis.

Like any other claim of "success" in George Bush's policies, it's false:

The 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, also known as Amerithrax from its FBI case name, occurred over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic U.S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others.

Atrios makes a good point about the anthrax attacks, namely that they were actually more terrifying than the plane attacks in New York and the Pentagon. As horrifying as those were, no one really had the idea in their head that they would continue to happen on a daily basis. And most people in this country never enter a large and/or significant building at all, let alone every day. But we all get mail. With the anthrax attacks we had unknown person(s) sending this incredibly dangerous substance through our postal system, and we had no idea from whence or from whom it came.

There are several reasons why these attacks have been sent down the memory hole. First, Americans insist upon subscribing to the comforting fiction that terrorists are brown-skinned Muslims, not "regular" folks. Second, since the Bush Administration and conservative commentators started to immediately use 9/11 to attack liberals and Democrats - oh yes they did, within days of the attacks; the so-called political unity after the attacks consisted of Democrats supporting the President while he beat up on them - the presence of biological warfare agents being sent exclusively to Democratic Senators and the liberal media would have been quite inconvenient to acknowledge.

There is a third reason why the anthrax attacks have been largely forgotten, and this reason illustrates the one thing that the Bush Administration has always been able to do well. As I noted above, it was the anthrax attacks that really scared Americans, really hit them hard personally. 9/11 was horrible, but it was in the class of big, horrible things that don't happen too often. Without some hard work, the attacks on New York and the Pentagon were going to fade in people's minds into abstractions, like Hurricane Katrina or the Asian tsunami. What the Bush Administration was able to do - helped as always by their enablers in the media, both conservative commentators and by the so-called liberals who probably thought that by becoming Bush stenographers they would discourage further attacks - was take the climate of personal fear and tie it to the sense of national tragedy surrounding 9/11.

You can see, then, how we have been manipulated from the very beginning. How our emotions and fears have been twisted to serve the purposes of a few power-hungry, twisted old men in Washington, DC.

And on this anniversary of 9/11, Osama bin Ladin releases a tape, which is dutifully disseminated by our government and media, while General Petraeus sits in front of Congress to give a "report" that he didn't write about a "surge" that has not produced political reconciliation and has not reduced the violence in Iraq, which facts will be spun into justification for the continued presence of our overworked and under-equipped soldiers in a living hell.

Happy Birthday, Son

2007-09-11T08:59:00.001-04:00

Today is my son's 1st birthday. Last year my wife jinxed herself by saying that she didn't care what day our son came, so long as it wasn't September 11. She really has no one to blame but herself, of course.

So now whenever someone finds out what day our son was born, they always nod their head and say, "Ohhhhhhhhhhh." I try not to be too hard on them, because the events of September 11, 2001 are still an open wound on America's soul. It was a day on which the USA should have grown up and joined the rest of the world - the rest of the world that experiences terrorist violence regularly.

Unfortunately, George Bush and his accomplices saw that the United States was about to do just that, and saw how nations that are usually quite hostile to us were expressing their solidarity with us. Such emotional maturity, such awareness of world events on the part of Americans and such thawing of relations was, we can now see, entirely antithetical to the goals that Bush has had since before he took office. So he used his enormous bully pulpit to tell Americans to shop, to use blind consumerism to soothe their battered psyches, and he set about making sure that he alienated not only those nations traditionally hostile to us, but ever other nation he could.

Six years later, and the man responsible for the attacks is still free, and is still decidedly not a priority to the Bush Administration. All conspiracy theories aside, the most likely explanation for this is that Bush has no desire for Americans to be able to move past that day. He doesn't want there to be any sense of justice, of closure. He wants 9/11 to be an open wound so that he can periodically stick his thumb in it and twist it around, bringing up the pain and heartache again and again.

My son will never be able to escape the connection to 9/11/01. But I do long for the day in which that connection is to something that is finally put to rest in the past. If you want to honor the victims of that horrible day, then don't waste your time with "charity." You can do charity tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. Spend today learning the truth, as much as you can, about anything you can. Commit yourself to truth, to standing firm against the onslaught of lies coming from the "Petraeus" Report, to resisting the idea that Bush's war of conquest has anything to do with bin Ladin, anything to do with terrorism or preserving the safety of Americans.

Impeach Bush NOW

2007-09-10T13:07:00.000-04:00

General Petraeus is due to recite the White House-written "report" on the situation in Iraq. You can look elsewhere for all the ways in which statistics from Iraq have been suppressed, misreported, twisted, distorted and basically tortured so that the human filth and garbage in the White House, Pentagon, Capital Hill and our Very Serious People of the Media can all salve their bruised egos.

None of that really matters. That General Petraeus is going to read a report he has had nothing to do with doesn't matter. That jerks like Joe Lieberman, David Broder, every GOP politician and unfortunately most of the Democrats will bloviate endlessly on America's "duty" in Iraq and blah blah blah doesn't matter.

This is what matters. This video shows how no one has less regard for American soldiers and their families than George Bush. This video shows the all-too-real human cost of this war - this war sold to us with lies and threats, this war which creates and trains the very terrorists that George Bush and his enablers use to justify our loss of civil rights and the deaths of thousands of American troops, thousands of American civilians in Iraq and many thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Afghanis and Iraqis.

I happen to believe that this soldier's life, and those of his fellow soldiers and their families, are worth far more than keeping the Vain Old Men of Washington, DC happy. Remember that every soldier sent to Iraq is someone's father, son, mother, sister, daughter. Every single one of them. Every Iraqi civilian killed is someone's son, daughter, mother and father.

What's happening in Iraq isn't about numbers or statistics, it isn't about IEDs or suicide bombs. It's about men and women put into impossible situations, put into living hells because of the mendacity, the greed and vanity of a small group of men in women in Washington, DC, who have never been in danger in all their lives and will never be in any danger.

Each day that George Bush and his accomplices are allowed to walk free is a crime against the world.

A True Haunting

2007-09-07T13:46:00.000-04:00

If you told me that I would be doing a post like this even yesterday I would have laughed out loud. But I've seen the evidence, and I've been converted. The video embedded in this post is of a real haunting. It has not been digitally altered, there are no special effects. It's a completely real video from a family that set up a camera in their nursery to catch a babysitter that was apparently stealing from them.

If you're scared easily, don't watch it. Or at least turn all your lights on.

http://view.break.com/312640 - Watch more free videos

Confessions

2007-09-06T11:15:00.000-04:00

I haven't been honest with people. In fact, I'm a serial liar to friends, to family, to complete strangers. But something has just happened that is so heinous I can no longer keep up the charade. So here, finally, is Truth that I have been unwilling to voice for almost two decades.

To begin, I need to reference a change that's happening in New Mexico. Even my sparsely-populated home state has reached the area code breaking point and must add a new area code. For my entire life New Mexico's area code has been 505. In fact, for my entire freaking life my "home" phone number has been exactly the same. That phone number is ingrained into my mind so firmly that I know I could dial it from within a coma.

But no more. Now my dad, brother and mom will all have different phone numbers. Their cell phones, their home phones will all be different. They will now start with 575.

And here's where the confession comes in. See, for years I've had to deal with the fact that the only places that anyone visits in New Mexico are Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos. That's it. If I meet someone who has been to New Mexico, it's either because they've driven through it on I-40 or they traveled there to visit the the well-known trinity mentioned above.

And like the dutiful son of New Mexico that I am, I always talk about how great those towns are. I talk about Albuquerque's beauty, the cinnamon rolls at the Frontier Restaurant across from UNM, about Santa Fe's grace and history. I've been to all the landmarks and done all the touristy things, and people are usually quite intrigued that a cousin of mine was married at the Loretto Chapel.

The truth is, I hate Albuquerque. I can't stand Santa Fe. And I'd rather not ever talk about Taos. The only place in New Mexico where one can find people that are more insufferable, more arrogant and of generally less worth than those northern New Mexico enclaves of idiocy is Clovis, and everyone knows that Clovis is pretty much Texas anyway.

But we can't say that about big-time Albuquerque, oh-so-hip Taos and we-run-your-lives Santa Freaking Fe. They're right in the middle of the state. We can't blame their nonsense on proximity to Texas.

Everything in New Mexico is twisted to benefit them. Are the poor widdle football teams in Albuquerque getting their butts whipped by Las Cruces, Roswell and Alamogordo? Well, let's just redraw the sports districts! And we certainly can't have a new area code inconveniencing the only freaking part of New Mexico that anyone has ever heard of.

I don't want to hear anything more about northern New Mexico. Taking a trip to northern New Mexico is like staying at a Sandals resort and claiming that you've "been to Jamaica." Ha.

Bunch of no-good jerks. At least I can be honest about it now.

Puppet Governments

2007-09-05T13:28:00.000-04:00

In the just-released Dead Certain, George Bush had this to say about how things stand in Iraq:

"[Maliki's] learning to be a leader. And one of my jobs as the president and his ally is to help him be that leader without being patronizing. At some point in time, if I come to the conclusion that he can't be the leader—he's unwilling to lead or he's deceptive—then we'll change course. But I haven't come to that conclusion. As a matter of fact, his recent actions have inspired me."

If Bush loses confidence in Maliki, then Maliki goes. That's why I'm so furious about all the whining over the Iraqi Government's supposed incompetence and unwillingness to solve their own problems. While the elections that put Maliki into his office may not have been rigged, the resulting political situation in Iraq is depressingly similar to that of Iran: some political figureheads intended to make people feel like they have a voice in their own affairs while the real power resides in one powerful figure that works behind the scenes. As the Ayatollah rules Iran behind the public facade of Ahmanijedad, so Iraq is subject to the whims and desires of George W. Bush whose decisions are mediated through Maliki.

Disgusting, utterly disgusting.

You Get What You Pay For, An Ongoing Series

2007-09-05T09:09:00.000-04:00

Or rather, we get what they refuse to pay for. Certainly, the American consumer is too willing to just buy garbage so long as it's perceived as a "good deal" - our favorite euphemism for "cheap." But in this New Gilded Age, profit margins are up across industries. That's why newsmedia business reports have been so positive the last 7 years, since the targeted demographic of every Business Section of every newspaper, magazine and TV news show is the wealthy capitalist who has significant investments.

The truth, as anyone who has to rely on an actual paycheck knows - and whose interest in the paycheck's amount is more than curiosity or a spirit of competitiveness - is that the economy sucks and has for a long time. It's just that corporations are perfectly capable of making money in a bad economy. All they have to do is reduce their costs, and the best way to do that is of course to outsource the manufacturing of their goods to places that have few worker protections, few product quality or safety standards and a government that will always look the other way so long as its hold on power isn't threatened. Some place exactly like China.

Conspiracies And Accountability

2007-09-04T13:22:00.000-04:00

The estimable and always-fascinating litbrit put me on to an article recently that was written by Robert Shetterly about the issue of conspiracy.

Shetterly starts off talking about Martin Luther King, Jr., about how his message and agenda are hardly contained in the famous "I have a dream" speech, as uplifting and important as that was. In particular Shetterly says that he likes

to focus on his last year — the period when, defying the advice of many of his advisors in the civil rights movement, he spoke against the Vietnam War, equating racism with imperialism. King felt bound to make the point that the forces of capitalism, materialism, and militarism that were driving segregation were also driving the war, and until we confronted the source of the problem, the abuses would continue. It was April 4, 1967, in Riverside Church in New York, that he made that declaration. A year to the day before his assassination.

Shetterly then makes the case that it was those forces of "capitalism, materialism and militarism" which combined to get rid of the troublemaker once and for all, and that James Earl Ray was innocent of King's murder.

Before reading this article, I did not know that there was a wrongful death suit filed by King's family against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown conspirators," that they retained James Earl Ray's lawyer for that lawsuit, and that William F. Pepper, the lawyer that defended MLK's alleged killer and represented the King family was a friend of Martin Luther King himself.

Crazy conspiracy theories, aren't they? Reasonable people can't be expected to believe that tripe, can they? The American government would do no such thing, obviously. Next you're going to tell me that the American government is operating secret - and blatantly illegal - prisons in Eastern Europe where CIA agents torture suspected "terrorists" who were rounded up in random sweeps on the streets of Baghdad.

Oh, wait.

There is an invisible line in the American psyche which cannot ever be crossed. The problem is that it's hard to know where it is ahead of time. But there are certain events about which a narrative is quickly created that is believed with a religious fervor by almost every American citizen no matter their ideological framework. So to suggest that perhaps the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK didn't happen the way we've been told automatically puts one on the outer fringe of the fringe of American society. To suggest that the events of 9/11 didn't happen quite the way everyone thinks they remember is to invite upon one's self mockery, ridicule, scorn and derision.

Americans tend to distrust government - any powerful institution, really. This is true of left and right. It's peculiar, though, how this ingrained distrust becomes less apparent the more important the issue. No one trusts the county assessor to be fair about their home's value, and certainly no one thinks that Congress is full of saints. But complete trust, to the point of resembling fundamentalist religious belief, is given to official government accounts of things like 9/11. This is wrong, completely backwards from the way it should be.

No institution should be trusted, whether government, corporation, church or anything else. In fact, there is a word and process which describes a lack of trust for these things: accountability. It's that simple, that mundane. Accountability is required not only in those situations where there is evidence of suspicious activity. Accountability is required at all times for all institutions and all people who occupy positions of authority and influence within them.

Whatever you might feel about his theology and methods, Billy Graham is an excellent example of this principle. He founded the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability in 1979 to provide an objective, 3rd-party repository for a given minister's or ministry's financial records. Those records have always been open to whomever wishes to view them. The ECFA exists because Billy Graham and some others like him understand that they have no expectation of the public's absolute trust and never will.

Continuing with ministers as examples, I know several male clergy who have made it a rule to never be in any place where they would be alone with a woman (I know what you're thinking, but Ted Haggard's case doesn't always come into consideration). This position is a bit extreme, but the principle is sound. Even if they know that there is no chance of something inappropriate happening, they also know that trust is something always to be earned, never to be spent.

So do I think that the US government had a hand in the 9/11 attacks, or in the assassinations of 3 very prominent, popular, influential and liberal voices of the 20th century? I don't know. But I know it's possible. And I refuse to reject out of hand the idea that perhaps there really have been some conspiracies, some collusion between private and public interests, even ones that seem to have divergent aims. Because as soon as I grant them that level of trust, that lack of accountability, then I allow them the space to do exactly that which I believe they won't do.

Senators Craig And Vitter

2007-08-31T13:48:00.001-04:00

If you're wondering why the RNC is pushing Larry Craig to resign over a desire to have anonymous sex in an airport bathroom - which he didn't actually get to do - while not caring one bit about David Vitter's multiple instances of illegally paying women for sex in New Orleans and Washington, DC, there's a very simple reason for it.

See, Senator Craig is a homo-sexualist. That is a person who is attracted (ick!) to people (ewww!) of the same (gasp!) gender (yuck!). These homo-sexualists are terrible, horrible people who have thousands of sex partners a year, they all belong to NAMBLA and they all die of AIDS. They're gross and icky and the men act like women and the women all have facial hair and act like men and they'll cause you to get divorces and cheat on your spouse and hit your children just by existing.

Senator Vitter is another case entirely. Sure, he paid women to have sex with him. But a man's got needs, right? David Vitter is a powerful man, with powerful needs. And we all know that once a woman traps a man into a marriage, the sex and everything else fun just shuts off, right? Sure, the now-Mrs. Vitter probably let ol' Dave dress up in diapers all the time before they were married, but that wasn't going to happen after the ceremony! He had to go somewhere to get his Diaper Sex fix.

And before you think I'm just being judgmental against God's Own Party, remember that it was no real secret that Larry Craig had homo-sexualist tendencies. It's perfectly fine to be a homo-sexualist and a Republican no matter what Daddy Dobson or any of the rest of his lot says. You just have to keep it on the down-low, behind closed doors and in the closet. Homo-sexualists are great allies for Republicans, so long as they never do anything that any other Republican might find embarassing, offensive or gross.

Prayer Doesn't Matter

2007-08-30T10:30:00.000-04:00

The Slacktivist has an interesting post on prayer, noting the story of Wiley S. Drake, a Southern Baptist pastor who, acting in his capacity as a pastor and leader of a religious congregation, endorsed Mike Huckabee for President. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State had a problem with this and filed a complaint with the IRS to review the tax-exempt status of Drake's congregation. It's not the first time that Drake has issued an endorsement like this.

If we were just dealing with a run-of-the-mill thing like an American Evangelical pastor deciding to ignore tax law, there wouldn't be much need to write about it. What makes this interesting is that Drake decided to respond to the complaint from Americans United by urging his congregation to pray that God would kill two men in that organization. He calls this "imprecatory prayer," and says that (King) David said that people who oppose the will of God would die and their "children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."

I suppose Drake hasn't read all the Psalms of lament in which David wonders why those who oppose God are so successful.

What's surprising to me is the tepid response from liberals about this, considering how dangerous many liberals feel American-style Christian Fundamentalism is becoming. Amanda at Pandagon, chosen because Bill Donohue has pointed out how "hateful" and "vicious*" she is, had this to say:

The underlying threat of violence aside, I must confess that I find Wiley’s overwrought language amusing. How small-minded and pathetic must you be to write like that, pretending you’re a cross between a video game wizard and some Old Testament patriarch?

That's fairly standard. "What a horrible thing to say, how amusing." This incident is now pretty much in the background. Drake will not be heard from again until he says something equally stupid/amusing, and he'll quickly fall into the background again. Because people just don't care when Christians talk about prayer.

No matter how religious this country may be, no matter how many people claim a belief in the Christian God, no matter how many people say that they pray regularly, the plain fact is that the vast majority of people don't believe it will "work," or that it has any "power." And I'm talking about Christians, let alone Atheists or adherents of other religions.

The whole issue of prayer in Christianity is peculiar. When Christians pray for a certain thing, such as a healing or that the Republicans win Congress and the White House, everyone steels themselves mentally and emotionally for when the prayer isn't answered. Or they accept the cop-out, bullshit approach that "no" is an answer, so God really does answer all prayers. For that to be true, a complete lack of response needs to be interpreted into answers, which are "no" for everything that we can't do ourselves and "yes" for when we pray for permission to do the things we've already decided we want to do.

But even though Christians are quite adept at accepting and explaining away unanswered prayer, they still react to a prayer or a request for prayer as the time to sit back and do nothing while waiting for God to miraculously intervene and get the thing done. If a parishioner's house burns down, the worst thing that a pastor can do is pray that God will provide the family with a place to live and replacements for the daily essentials that they lost. If that happens, the congregation will nod, say "amen," perhaps even weep softly due to the intense emotion that comes with really, really believing in prayer. And after the service they'll all go home while that family wonders where they will sleep that night, what clothes they will wear, what food they will eat as they wait for their insurance to get worked out.

But if the pastor gets up and tells everyone that the Smith family just got burned out of their house, and they need a place to stay, some clothes, food, all those essentials - or even better, if the pastor or someone gets on the phone and talks to people about it directly - then those needs will be met. And the prayers of the Smith family for shelter and food will be answered.

It's that dynamic which explains why no one took Drake very seriously with his ridiculous idea of "imprecatory" prayers. "Dear God, do this and that" is a signal for everyone to sit back and wait for it to happen or not, and then forget about it. If Drake had preached for the need of good Christians to hunt down staff members of Americans United and kill them, that would be a far different thing. He could be arrested for that. People would have been up in arms about it.

But all he did was direct his congregation to ask God to kill two men, and everyone knows that prayer doesn't matter.

*Bill Donohue is, of course, a repulsive boil upon the face of humanity.

You Won't Believe This

2007-08-29T13:11:00.001-04:00

I don't know whether to fear for and pity the people - especially the kids - in this video, or to envy them. As long as they keep up their streak of safe crossings, I think I'll just envy them. Utterly amazing.

Miscellany

2007-08-29T09:46:00.001-04:00

A few things for a cloudy Wednesday morning:

-The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. If you also spend your "days" wondering why "people" use such "weird" punctuation, you'll "love" this.

-Kansas City weather can often be terrible. The temperature range in any 12 month period is usually around 120 degrees F or more; once you add in wind chill and heat index it's way higher. I've been more comfortable with a month of 100F+ days in New Mexico than a week of 90F days in Kansas City because of the humidity. But there's usually a deal that's struck between the weather and us each August, which is that though it's blisteringly hot and swelteringly humid, there isn't too much rain, and so grass doesn't grow as much. Normally you only need to mow once during the entire month. But not this year. No, it's been raining. And I'm lucky enough to have grass that grows really well in extreme heat. So while most of my neighbors have delightfully mottled lawns with some greens and browns and in-betweens, both my front and back yards are luscious, thick, and luxuriant. But this last time, I fought back - hard. I set that mower way too low, and shocked the bejesus out of that stinking grass. Now my yard is as mottled as everyone else's, and I shouldn't have to mow for several weeks. Stupid grass.

-My brother-in-law just celebrated his 30th birthday, and we had his party at Jumpin' Catfish, one of Kansas City's treasures. It's an absolute meat orgy, the kind of place that I'd take litbrit to just to watch her squirm. My wife just hates the place, not because she won't eat meat, but because the walls are covered in the owner's hunting trophies - antler racks, heads, stuffed birds, fish, dead animals are everywhere in abundance. It's hilarious. My daughter always talks about the trophies, asking detailed questions, which I pretend to not hear so I can laugh at my wife's answers. The food isn't too bad, either. They've got catfish, of course, which I always get. And then there's shrimp, clams, pheasant, venison, walleye, quail, crabs, crawfish, and a bunch of other stuff. Seriously, it's awesome.

-Speaking of food, this is what my daughter had for supper the last two nights, by her own choice:

I have a cool kid.

Shoot The Wounded

2007-08-28T23:09:00.000-04:00

The utterly indispensable Glenn Greenwald has a great post up today about the way in which the GOP responded to the original outing of Senator Larry Craig last October and the way in which they're responding now.

To summarize, when an election was just a few weeks away, the storyline was that the outing of Larry Craig was a despicable Democratic dirty trick that would backfire so completely it would reverse the impending Republican electoral defeats, not only keeping Congress in GOP hands but increasing its majority. People were shocked - shocked! - that anyone would suggest that Republicans were so concerned about a man's sexuality that they would turn on him or fail to support him.

Dean Barnett, responding to the idea that the conservative Christians in the GOP would reject Senator Craig, said

if those on the left actually knew more practicing Christians, they would know that the stuff about condemning the sin but loving the sinner isn't mere lip service. If the members of the left actually knew the people that they so casually and easily defame, they would also understand that infinite forgiveness is a hallmark of America's Christian community.

Unfortunately for Larry Craig, that was then, and this is now:

It's the personal aspect of this that is bothersome -- the deception, the lies, the adultery, the criminal nature of what he was arrested for back in June (is that the tip of the iceberg on Craig's adulterous behavior?). He's married. He's broken his vows of marriage. He hasn't been practicing what he preaches. He's deceived his constituency. That's what's bothersome.

How long before Craig checks himself into rehab or finds Jesus? . . . . Hugh Hewitt calls for his resignation. At the least, he should confirm that he will not run again.

I have blogged repeatedly here at RedState that we must clean our own house lest the voters clean it for us. . . .And today we have Larry Craig (R-Idaho) soliciting sex in a men's bathroom in an airport. . . . I can only say he must resign.

That last is from Redstate, which had this to say last October:

Mike Rogers, the scumbag who runs blogActive, has published a claim that Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) is homosexual. I won't go into the sordid details Mr Rogers presents; if you are really interested, you can visit Mr Rogers' site. Senator Craig has flatly denied Mr Rogers' allegations, calling them laughable.
Patterico has the details and (at the moment) 123 commenters who are rightly disturbed at Mr Rogers' abusive tactics. Sister Toldjah is rightly indignant, and Brian at Iowa Voice is hopping mad. . . .

Mr Rogers is a scumbag, no doubt about that; were he set on fire, I wouldn't urinate on him to put it out.

This nation's conservative radio and television hosts, columnists, authors, and of course bloggers live by a very simple credo: they are right and you are wrong. They are pure and you are not. They are worth more than you, better than you, more important than you. Their concerns are the concerns of this nation, not you.

The actual content of any of their stated beliefs means little, which is why it seems like they change their beliefs so much. In truth, they believe in nothing except winning. Their philosophies are informed by being against what their political enemies are for, and in favor of whatever their political enemies are against. They will accept anyone, anyone at all who appears to give them a better chance of winning, but if that person at any point starts to look like a liability, they will turn on them with a viciousness that's scary to see.

The Redstate blogger is right: the conservative movement needs to clean house. But while they may need to rid themselves of Larry Craigs - soliciting sex in public bathrooms isn't usually considered acceptable behavior - the real problem for the movement is its supposed standard-bearers.

Owen And Me

2007-08-28T11:23:00.001-04:00

That Owen Wilson apparently attempted to commit suicide has made quite a splash. You'd think that Americans would be more jaded about this type of thing; certainly entertainers are in the news for self-destructive behavior all the time.

But I've heard radio DJ's and read blogs about how much of a surprise it is that Owen Wilson would do this. Some people trot out the standard stuff about how dumb it is for some rich, famous actor in the height of his success to feel bad enough to do this, castigating him for apparently forgetting all the people who aren't rich, aren't famous yet manage to not attempt suicide.

The real reason for the shock surrounding Owen, though, isn't so much that he's successful as it is that he's so likable, so appealing a person. He has managed to completely steal every scene he's been in, at least in the movies I've watched. He doesn't always appear in great movies, but he's always great in them. I hated Meet the Parents. It was the worst collection of miserable, unsympathetic characters I've ever seen. Except Owen Wilson. He was supposed to be this "so-perfect-you-hate-him" kind of guy, except that you just couldn't get around to the hating him part. Zoolander is another example. That movie had 2 good parts: the scene at the gas station and whenever Owen Wilson was in front of the camera. He makes other actors better, more comfortable, the scenes flow more naturally.

Many actors are revered, some reviled, but everyone likes Owen. You walk out of his movies with a friend, it seems. And that's why people have been shaken by his suicide attempt.

It's self-centered* of me, but I have my own type of experience with this. As far back as I can remember, I have been the leader of every single group I've been a part of. Sometimes there's a formal process, but most of the time people just turn to me for leadership. Whether it's as one of the Starbucks managers on the district, as a youth pastor in the church district or on the innumerable academic group projects and discussions. One of the things that's been disconcerting, but good for me, is how I'm not automatically the first among equals when I discuss things in blog forums or write a post. It's certainly helped me to understand that a lot of why I've always been made a leader and been so persuasive is due to personality more than brilliance. Which is why my grades don't always reflect the deference paid to me by my academic peers.

I'm good at parties and conferences. I can get up and speak in front of a couple of thousand people, or lead a group of 5 in almost any discussion you want. When I started to open up about my Depression, a lot of people had a hard time accepting it, because they saw me as this confident, funny guy, with lots of friends, a great family, etc.

But this persona - which is the real me, but only a part - is not to be understood as existing in spite of my Depression, but largely because of it. I've come to grips with the idea that I have some leadership qualities, that I have some good ideas - and yes, it's been hard to accept that, to really believe it, and I still feel very guilty for ever thinking it - but for a very long time it was a combination of an act intended to deceive people into thinking that I was OK and an act intended to deceive myself for the same purpose.

Lots of Depressives - and people who suffer from other psychological illnesses - end up in creative and/or leadership positions because of this dynamic. We set up outer lives of who we want to be, or think we should be, and we can be incredibly successful with them.

For a while, at least, until the inevitable crash happens. That crash often takes place at precisely the moment when it outwardly seems most unlikely, because it's when we appear the most successful, the happiest, the most put together that mental illness sufferers are expending the most energy to not only keep the streak going but to also ignore the doubts, fears, panics and damaging self-talk. The thing about the Voice - or Voices, depending upon what disorder might be present - is that it will always be heard. The Voice will always be louder than applause, louder than acclaim, louder and more insistent than your friends, your family, your agent, whoever.

Sometimes success is the worst thing that can happen to a Depressive, because it puts the disconnect between public and private into such sharp relief that the discrepancy becomes intolerable, too painful to bear, and it can cause not just a downward turn but a crash so steep that self-inflicted death becomes a thing lovely to behold, a sweet release from all the garbage strewn around one's life.

Another aspect of all this is how it doesn't help for people to be surprised that a particular person is depressed, or bipolar, or suicidal. On the surface it seems like a compliment, and surely that's how people always intend it to be. But to have everyone express shock and wonder that you've got a mental illness only serves to increase your sense of alienation. That it was my wife who first spoke of depression to me, who insisted that I seek help has been an immense comfort to me, because it showed that she knew me, the real me, and knew there was a problem, and she cared enough to want to fix it. When I told my mother about it, she wasn't expecting it, but neither was she in shock. "I've known there was something for years," she said, "But I never could put my finger on it. And I never knew what to do for you."

That comment did far more good than all the people who simply couldn't believe that I could be depressed. I knew that my mom really knew me and really cared for me. We of course don't know how Owen's friends and family are taking this and how they're talking to him. Hopefully someone will have the good sense and insight to tell him that while they didn't expect him to try to take his own life, they could tell something was off, and now that they know how bad it's been they'll make sure he gets the help he needs.

*I'm a depressive and a blogger. It's a wonder I can ever think or write about anything but me.

All You Need To Know About Why Gonzo Resigned

2007-08-27T10:53:00.000-04:00

In a comment to this post, Stuart Eugene Thiel writes:

This administration uses appointees as car owners use oil filters. They catch the sludge aimed at Bush and Cheney, and when they're full, they're replaced. That Rove and Fredo left so close together simply results from the sheer volume of accusations of White House wrongdoing.

Nothing, in all the reams and gigabytes that will be devoted to Gonzo's resignation, will describe things more succintly, clearly or completely.

The White House apparently got worried that the Dems in Congress might do something, as far-fetched as that may seem. A resignation is better than an impeachment. Right now, the Bush Administration is on the run. Let's see if our feckless and fearful Democratic "leadership" finds it in themselves to press the advantage, or if they think that Gonzo's departure will actually change anything.

Mother Teresa's Crisis Of Faith

2007-08-24T13:35:00.000-04:00

Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.

These words were the foundation of my theology and pastoral ministry for many years. Despite all my education, training and experiences, I was convinced that God loved everyone in the world except for me.

It's shocking - at first - to see that these words were written by none other than Mother Teresa, in a letter to a priest in 1979. But after reading the article with its many quotes from Mother Teresa's letters, the shock wears off and is replaced by a dreary familiarity with her lifelong struggle to experience the presence and love of God, her insistence upon believing the worst about herself and punishing herself because of it.

Armchair diagnoses are to be avoided, but clearly Mother Teresa's problems had little to do with any real problems of faith and pretty much everything to do with Clinical Depression. It's hardly unusual for a depressive to seek a helping profession, to try and find redemption and feeling within the work of assisting the poor and sick. If not for my depression I doubt I would have ever entertained the idea of being a pastor, of going to seminary. Perhaps if Mother Teresa had been psychologically healthy she would have remained Agnes Bojaxhiu.

This teaches us many things, that even saints can suffer and be sick. That however strong something like depression can be, it is possible to be stronger. Human beings are remarkable creatures, capable of great things even in the face of tremendous handicaps. Mother Teresa was able to accomplish great things in spite of - and in some ways because of - her problems. As a person of faith I can recognize that this is evidence of redemption, of God's creative nature and his ability to work with us rather than requiring unrealistic levels of holiness before blessing our efforts. I suspect that Mother Teresa understood this as well, even if she never felt like she did.

A Case Against Hillary Clinton

2007-08-24T12:50:00.001-04:00

Matt Yglesias finds Hillary Clinton saying something silly:

"It's a horrible prospect to ask yourself, 'What if? What if?' But if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world," Clinton told supporters in Concord.

"So I think I'm the best of the Democrats to deal with that," she added.

His response to this is exactly right, worthy even of the title Quote of the Day:

I think the Democrat best positioned to deal with GOP political mobilization in a post-attack environment is going to be the one who isn't reflexively inclined to see failed Republican policies resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Americans as a political advantage for the Republicans.

This is a huge problem for Hillary Clinton. She's still too entrenched in the DLC milieu which says that the only way to get Americans to accept liberal ideas is to disguise them as conservative ideas. Hillary's claim is that she's the Democratic candidate who most seems like a Republican. And once again I am forced to wonder why people should vote for a Democrat who is like a Republican when they will have an actual Republican for whom to vote.

Roots Of Iraqi Violence

2007-08-24T09:58:00.000-04:00

I've been spending some time with McClatchy's Daily Iraq Violence Roundup, and it's fascinating and horrifying. Unlike what we might read in our local newspapers or hear on the US versions of cable news networks, this attempts to be as exhaustive a list as possible of the shootings, kidnappings, suicide bombs, IEDs, pitched battles, car bombs, mortar attacks - everything that goes on in a single day in Iraq. Even though McClatchy relies upon their own correspondents in Iraq who peruse police, military (US and Iraqi) and medical reports - as well as their own sources, to be sure - they admit that there is no way to give a complete record of all that happens.

Here's the report for yesterday, August 23rd:

Baghdad
- Around 8 a.m., mortars hit the Green Zone ( IZ) . No casualties reported.

- Around 9 a.m., a roadside bomb exploded at Na’iriya area of New Baghdad neighborhood ( east Baghdad) killing 1 person and injuring 5 others.
- Police found (12 ) dead bodies in the following of Baghdad’s neighborhoods ( 8 ) in west Baghdad( Karkh bank) ; 2 in Amil, 2 in Huriyah , 1 in Saidiyah , 1in Mansour , 1 in Jihad and 1 in I’laam. While ( 4 ) were found in east Baghdad ( Risafa bank); 2 in Sadr city , 1 in Ur and 1 in New Baghdad.
- Soldiers from Troop C, 3rd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, were targeted by insurgents while patrolling in Jisr Diyala, southeast of Baghdad, Aug. 21. U.S. Soldiers were unhurt, but two local children were caught in a roadside bomb explosion, killing one child and injuring another. Capt. Darrell Melton, Troop C commander, a native of San Antonio, described the incident. “The trail Bradley gunner was waving at two kids who were riding their bikes and were waving at my guys,” Melton said. “The next thing the Bradley commander knew, one of the kids was gone in a puff and he was thrown backward in the hatch. When he looked back, the other kid was crawling on the ground.” Melton said his Soldiers immediately dismounted their Bradley Fighting Vehicle and cautiously approached the wounded child. It is not uncommon for improvised explosive devices to be emplaced in groups and detonated on first responders coming to provide aid. “He (the wounded child) crawled a few feet, when the medic on site, despite the danger, ran out to him, picked him up and ran back to the Bradley to administer first aid,” Melton said. The medic was able to stabilize the wounded child, Melton said. Troop C then evacuated the child to a U.S. Army medical facility nearby. Such incidents are not unique to Troop C. Soldiers from Company A, 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, came upon a grieving family in the course of a routine combat patrol Aug. 13 in Salman Pak. Capt. Chris Pearson, of Birmingham, Ala., met with a local banking official in Salman Pak to discuss issues and prospective solutions concerning the banking industry in the local area. After the meeting, a town councilman approached him with a father who had lost his son earlier in the day to a roadside bomb. Pearson said he did not talk directly to the father, but the councilman explained the father just wanted to bury his son in accordance with Muslim tradition. “I expressed the Coalition’s condolences,” Pearson said. “Even though the IEDs target police or Coalition Forces, they can hit children and families. They are the ones that suffer.” The councilman informed Pearson that the family was having trouble getting through checkpoints and requested U.S. Soldier assistance in traveling to the cemetery. “Just to make it easier, we had them travel with us,” Pearson said. After dropping off the family, Pearson’s element began movement to Combat Outpost Cahill, north of Salman Pak. While traveling to COP Cahill, Pearson’s unit received word that the grieving family had run into another IED as they were returning from the burial. No one was seriously injured in the second incident. Pearson further explained that National Police, local Iraqi Police, governmental leaders and Coalition Forces all play a role in maintaining security in the area. When Pearson’s unit arrived in March, the local populace and Iraqi Security Forces had not yet developed a trusting relationship. “There are still a lot of improvements that need to be made,” Pearson said. “Everyday it gets better. There are highs and lows. They’ve begun attending meetings together and as long as they are communicating, it’s helpful.”
Anbar
- On Tuesday ( August 21) , a suicide bomber targeted a police check point at Dam street in Falluja (62 km west of Baghdad) injuring two people and he was killed by police.
Kirkuk
- Police found a dead body on Wednesday night for a civilian man ( 40 to 45 years old) at Ajaj village of Riadh district ( west of Kirkuk).
- Wednesday night, a car bomb targeted a convoy for a member of Hawija council board ( west of Kirkuk) injuring one guard who was transferred to hospital.
- Wednesday night, police arrested the media man of 1920th battalions in Kirkuk during a raid in Wahid Huzayran ( June 1st ) neighborhood in Kirkuk city.
Mosul
- Wednesday night, Iraqi army killed four gunmen during clashes took place at Noor neighborhood ( downtown Mosul city). In addition to that ,the army defused two car bombs at Harmat ( west Mosul) , Iraqi army said.

That medic from Troop C is a hero. He shouldn't have to buy his own drinks for the rest of his life. Even as our political leaders play their stupid games with each other, making our soldiers' mission more and more impossible, American troops do this type of thing every day. How I wish the rest of us could provide leadership worthy of their sacrifices and heroics.

Aside from the report on American troops, what you may notice is how it is Iraqi government forces and interests that are attacked the most. This bears out when looking through the other daily violence roundups. The majority of the attacks are upon Iraqi police, military and political leaders, along with government buildings. After that it's usually American patrols that are targeted. There's always dead bodies that have been found in various parts of Baghdad and at times other cities. Usually there's some mortar attacks (which seem to be rather ineffective), and then there's some car bombs and suicide bomb attacks.

What has really struck me about all this is how it doesn't completely fit the narrative of ethnic/religious violence about which we are constantly told. Don't misunderstand: I know that Iraq has serious problems with ethnic and religious violence. However, most of the reports that come straight from the source, as opposed to being run through a White House/Pentagon/media filter, paint a picture of most of the violence being Iraqi and American forces under direct attack. And much of the rest of the violence simply has an unknown motivation. Was X attack that occurred in Y neighborhood religiously motivated? We don't know.

In a nation as awash in military-level ordnance as Iraq, it stands to reason that the violent crime wave which always accompanies the chaos of war would feature explosives and automatic weapons. How much of the violence that occurs in Iraq each day is a result of rival crime factions fighting one another? Or takes place during the a crime committed for monetary gain rather than ethnic strife? Again, we don't know.

What I do know, however, is that attributing the chaos and violence in Iraq almost completely to ethnic and religious motivations fits into a longstanding attitude that Americans have regarding themselves and other peoples. One of the legacies of Enlightenment thought is that technological development is accompanied by spiritual and moral development, and this is as true of "secular" people as it is Christians. In fact, the reason Fundamentalist Christians are trying to push things like Intelligent Design has more to do with the need to see their belief system as fundamentally rational than it does proselytization. (See more I wrote about this here.)

Violence committed in the name of religion or ethnicity is irrational; everyone knows that. That's why we only commit violence in the name of democracy, freedom and defense. The fact that we have a higher level of technological development in this country than say, Iraq, means that we're more rational than they. If Iraqis are less rational, it stands to reason that their motivations for committing violence will be ethnic and religious in nature. Even if the target of that violence happens to be American soldiers, we can safely assume that it was Sunni or Shiite or Kurdish hatred that motivated it. Even if the target is an Iraqi police patrol made up of both Sunnis and Shiites, we can be sure that the motivation for the attack was hatred of either Sunnis or Shiites.

Again, I'm not trying to suggest that ethnic and religious violence doesn't happen. But making the assumption that all or even most of the violence in Iraq comes from those motives simply ignores the facts on the ground.

More troubling, though, is how such a belief plays into the Bush Administration's hands regarding the continued presence of American soldiers in Iraq. If much of the violence in Iraq is motivated by the presence of American soldiers and the perception that the Iraqi government is a bunch of puppets doing their American masters' bidding, then the longer American soldiers stay in Iraq, the worse the violence will be. If the Iraqi government is hated because people think that it's supporting American interests in opposition to Iraqi interests, then the longer American dictates its actions, the worse the violence will get.

However, if the violence in Iraq can be traced to the irrationality of ethnic and religious violence, then the presence of inherently rational actors like Americans will only improve the situation. Obviously, then, things will only get worse if Americans leave, because we would then just be leaving the irrational Iraqis to fend for themselves, and they will not be able to stop themselves from exploding into a vicious orgy of violence.

That outcome is by no means assured. Perhaps American troops are having a net benefit upon the levels of violence in Iraq. However, the discussion that needs to happen is an honest assessment of the truth of this, rather than assumptions based more in a belief of American exceptionalism than the facts coming out of Iraq.

Standing On Rock-Solid Principles

2007-08-21T09:07:00.000-04:00

Josh Marshall has an interesting post this morning:

When you're stuck down at 30% approval and down to your last 18 months in office, an administration really has to pick and choose its battles. Only real matters of principle are worth a fight. And the Bush administration has found one -- resisting state efforts to expand the Children's Health Insurance Program to more middle income families.

I'd say that the only "principle" involved is the Bush Administration's strategy of opposing every piece of legislation that hasn't been written in the Oval Office, but Josh does make a good rhetorical point.

It never fails to amaze me just how callous GOP politicians can be toward children. I understand all the rhetoric about choices and personal responsibility and blah blah blah. What I don't get is the idea that children should pay for the mistakes of their parents.

This isn't about giving every child a Nintendo Wii and a pony. I fully understand that some families have more than others. What I'd like to see, though, is every child with enough to eat and the ability to see a doctor when it's needed.

Now, I know a lot of conservatives feel that, so long as one has a job of any kind, whatever financial problems one may have can be solved by lifestyle changes. Get a smaller house/apartment. Don't have a car. Eat nothing but ramen noodles, don't ever turn on any lights and get your water from a creek. With that in mind I can see how the Bush Administration would want to resist expansion of the program or institute stricter means testing for new enrollees. And doing so would reduce the cost of the program, which is in line with the Republican principle of fiscal "responsibility" for every program that might in some way benefit someone who is not rich.

But the changes that the Bush Administration is making are simply ridiculous:

Under the new policy, a state seeking to enroll a child whose family earns more than 250 percent of the poverty level -- or $51,625 for a family of four -- must first ensure that the child is uninsured for at least one year. The state must also demonstrate that at least 95 percent of children from families making less than 200 percent of the poverty level have been enrolled in the children's health insurance program or Medicaid -- a sign-up rate that no state has yet managed.

If you have a child and don't have health insurance, every day is stressful. Should your child play sports? What about school recess? A friend of ours had to take their daughter to the hospital recently because she and some friends had decided to go to their basement, tie a rope to the rafter and swing from the basement stairs toward the metal support pole in order to be able to slide down it like a firehouse pole. Somehow this brilliant plan went awry and the girl in question broke her arm.

Kids do these things. It's not even wrong. Let's face it: human beings are all enrolled in the school of hard knocks because we are rarely able to learn any other way. Given that two kids plucked at random are going to be pretty much the same in the way that they sometimes use good judgment and sometimes rather poor judgment, why should one kid be punished simply because her parents don't make as much money as the other kid's folks?

dd

To Whom We Belong

2007-08-20T10:35:00.000-04:00

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, US Soldiers were sent in to New Orleans and surrounding towns. Since we know that people were not, in fact, evacuated with anything approaching haste, and we know that there were no attempts by the Federal Government to put up defenses against flooding, one might wonder just what those federal troops were doing.

Along with the New Orleans police, US soldiers were seizing guns.

As disturbing as that is - why yes, like most liberals, I understand what the 2nd Amendment says, even better than the gun fetishists at the NRA, thank you very much - we now have some new and even more troubling information. Apparently the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was the debut of the Department of Homeland Security's "Clergy Response Teams," clergy members* that have been trained by the Federal Government to quell unrest and to convince people that whatever the political authorities decided to do in an emergency is to be accepted without complaint. These pastors have been instructed to preach and teach from Romans 13 which says, as the American Federal Government happily points out, that governments are from God and should be obeyed. The US Government seems to be somewhat concerned about a restive population. It's certainly worrying to see that Homeland Security has set up such thorough plans and mechanisms for placating American citizens.

As far as the theology thats involved, Romans 13 is pretty clear:

Everyone must submit to governing authorities. For all authority comes from God, and those in positions of authority have been placed there by God. 2 So anyone who rebels against authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and they will be punished. 3 For the authorities do not strike fear in people who are doing right, but in those who are doing wrong. Would you like to live without fear of the authorities? Do what is right, and they will honor you. 4 The authorities are God’s servants, sent for your good. But if you are doing wrong, of course you should be afraid, for they have the power to punish you. They are God’s servants, sent for the very purpose of punishing those who do what is wrong. 5 So you must submit to them, not only to avoid punishment, but also to keep a clear conscience. (NLT)

In the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was President, I attend Point Loma Nazarene University and Nazarene Theological Seminary. I attended Nazarene churches and had a couple of staff positions, positions on the Church Board, etc. I can tell you - not merely "anecdotally" - that this chapter in Romans gave Evangelical Christians fits throughout that entire decade. Even George Bush Sr. was cause for concern, because of his "new world order" talk and his lack of Christianist code words throughout his speeches.

Aside from the blatant, casual hypocrisy that infuses Evangelical attitudes toward American government - "God-ordained when dominated by Republicans, "Ant-christ breeding ground" when it's Democrats in the majority - this blasé attitude toward Romans 13 and the claim that it commands not only submission but cooperation with earthly authorities is troubling, to say the least. The ancient Church certainly didn't have this attitude. For the first couple of centuries, converts to Christianity were to have no professional ties to the Roman government at all. If a soldier or other government functionary wanted to join the Church, he was to renounce his oath to Caesar, since it represented to the Church idolatry. If a member of the Church became functionary of the government - in any capacity but especially as a soldier - they were removed from the Church body until and unless they renounced such decision and went through a type of probation.

St. Augustine, so important to the development of Western thought, first rose to prominence because of the Donatist crisis, when a significant number of Christians believed that anyone who had renounced their faith during the most recent persecution of Christians should not be allowed back into the Church, and especially that sacraments performed by priests and bishops who had done so were not efficacious. It was Augustine who came up with the doctrine of ex opere operato, "by the work performed," which states that the value of the sacraments comes from God alone and is not dependent upon the righteousness of the priest or bishop in question. While it did allow for the reconciliation of those Christians who had cooperated and/or simply knuckled under to the Roman government's pressure, Augustine's solution to the problem said nothing about the inherent righteousness of always obeying earthly political authorities, and in fact recognized that what they had done was wrong and required repentance and reconciliation.

The first decades of the Church were marked by an extreme eschatological expectation, that Jesus would come back in a matter of months or years. As time passed, of course, this expectation started to wane among the larger Church, though there have always been groups within the Church that expect an imminent return and behave accordingly. There was an indifference to earthly political authorities because of the early Christians belief that Jesus would return and sweep them away quickly. Later, of course, we can see the development of doctrines and ideas of how exactly Christians were to live with the idea that perhaps Jesus wasn't going to come back right away. And so the later Epistles of the New Testament - ones like Romans and Ephesians - talk about ordering congregations and society in ways that would ensure the long-term existence of the Church, while it's the earlier letters - such as Galatians - that have the more radical statements such as God doing away with all earthly distinctions of gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

But we have to understand passages like Romans 13 within the context of the continuing eschatological expectation - the admonition to always be prepared for Christ's return - and the idea of the Kingdom of God. Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God more than just about anything else - much more than he did "hell," whatever you may have heard - and told his followers that their loyalties, their treasure, their present and future all lay in that Kingdom and not really here on earth. Christians are citizens of various nations, but their true citizenship is to be in heaven, their true master is God and God alone. This is accepted Christian doctrine, though obviously the interpretation differs.

Romans 13, as seen in the light of the attitudes and actions of the early Church, is more about the Church's indifference to earthly powers and allegiance to a heavenly Kingdom than it is about alliances with the government of Herod, Nero or even George Bush. We are to obey earthly authority because all authority really belongs to God and so can be said to ontologically be derived from him. But it's not because God puts his stamp of approval upon all earthly governments or all that they do. And most of all Christians are to submit to rulers and laws because anything that happens to us here on earth is of far less value and import than what awaits us in heaven.**

The Church simply has no business cooperating with any government, because their aims are entirely different. The Church exists to spread "good news" about God's love and forgiveness, to feed, clothe, heal, house, and otherwise care for any and all who need it. Pastors and other Church leaders are to facilitate these activities and to provide spiritual care and direction. That's it. If a government has a program which coincides with these duties, great. But the Church is really not supposed to rely upon any government*** to do its work for it.

Neither does the Church need to care about the 2nd Amendment - or the 1st, for that matter - or about a docile population, or any of those things over which an earthly government obsesses. Individual Christians can care about these things and even get involved, but not as the Church, not with the authority of the Church itself, saying that God wants everyone to support this government idea or that government action. In fact, even though I'm far more sympathetic to things such as Liberation Theology, I still believe that the Church as a whole should not take part and I'm wary of individual Christians - especially priests - doing so. Of course, I believe that if the Church is doing its job it makes things much harder for a repressive government to function well, but what matters is intention.

No matter what Romans 13 says, any pastor that preaches to his or her congregation that they are to cooperate fully with the government and all its decisions is betraying their call and the Church they supposedly serve. They are allying themselves with an earthly power and effectively renouncing their belief and citizenship in the Kingdom of God.

*Alternet also has an article about it, and of course there's a couple of people at Shakes' place that have commented on this. But I linked to WorldNet Daily to show how this is considered egregious - to say the least - even to those predisposed to defend Bush and his policies.

**This isn't about Christians needing some big sky fairy to reward them in order for them to be moral, so please don't even bring it up.

***I'm a liberal who supports government intervention in these areas because I have seen the Church abdicate its responsibility for those in need, while the poor - just as Jesus said - have unfortunately continued to exist despite certain portions of Christianity desperately trying to ignore them. When the Church takes up its responsibilities again, I might change my philosophy of government.

Monday, August 20th, 2007

2007-08-20T09:53:00.000-04:00

Today dawned with clouds the color of old iron, the remains of last night's rain still scattered on the grass and trees. It's one of those Kansas City days when you can sweat more at 75 degrees than the desert dwellers do at 110.

We all woke up early this morning, earlier even than we had to, nervous anticipation of this day blocking our attempts to snuggle back down into the covers and sleep a little longer. Today is the first day of Kindergarten.

My daughter can of course now completely choose her own clothes - sometimes matching them! - brush her own teeth, wash her own face and brush her hair, though for this day she did want her mom's help putting in some clips. When breakfast was done and we were all scrubbed and dressed, she marched out the front door, backpack on, pink shirt and skirt, and sat herself in her booster seat. Somehow this little one managed to look so grown up even with all these accoutrements of childhood.

We walked in the doors of the school for the third time, the tang of the paper sharper than ever, the high notes of disinfectant a little louder with the bass of the school lunches already being prepared as the foundation for the white-noise melody of children's voices, over which float the spoken-word descants of the teachers and parents.

It is into this babble, this chaos, this world of study and play that I now place my daughter. And I know that this is the point at which all my talk about parenthood being merely the process by which we teach our children to be free of us becomes terribly real. I tell myself that she hasn't had enough time, that 5 is just too young for her to start this process, but the truth is that I haven't had enough time, that I'm afraid of the challenges, I'm worried about being good enough in the years ahead.

For my daughter, this is just about today, and the next little while. She knows that after Kindergarten comes 1st Grade, but she doesn't really give that thought any real existence. It's in the far-off, like Christmas or even next weekend. She'll just play and make friends and learn because that's what she does without thought or effort.

And I, I will do all that is possible to keep her on that path. And I will try to not dwell upon the day, too fast in coming, when my son walks in the same classroom for his first day.

Here We Go Again

2007-08-19T14:40:00.000-04:00

DMH Ingredients, based in Libertyville, IL, has filed a lawsuit against Changzhou Kelong Chemical Co. Ltd. because they found metal shavings in 11,000 kilograms of the artificial sweetener aspartame.

In New Zealand, they've found that kids' pajamas made in China have incredibly high levels of formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is used on clothes to make them "permanent press." New Zealand doesn't have any safety regulations for clothes, but the World Health Organization apparently considers anything over 20 parts per million to be unsafe. The European Union has set 30 parts per million as the upper limit allowed within those countries. The pajamas - for children, mind you, had formaldehyde levels of up to 18,000 ppm.

The article further says that buying clothes "made" in New Zealand isn't necessarily safe either, since the underlying fabric and materials might come from China and, in addition to the insane levels of formaldehyde, may have unsafe ph levels from the dyes used. Formaldehyde will wash off, but these other items will not.

Well, you get what you pay for. And the West has long pursued a policy of valuing cheap over quality and safety. But this is not to be laid solely or even mostly at consumers' feet, because we are not always told just where companies are getting the materials for the things we buy, and because most of the time the savings realized by exploiting nations without reasonable safety regulations and enforcement are turned into shareholder dividends and CEO bonuses, not into reduced prices for the products.

I still wonder if anything is ever going to come of the daily revelations of the deadly products that fill our stores, almost all of them made in China.

What We've Accomplished

2007-08-17T09:52:00.000-04:00

Behold what we have wrought:

The women are too afraid and ashamed to show their faces or have their real names used. They have been driven to sell their bodies to put food on the table for their children -- for as little as $8 a day.

"People shouldn't criticize women, or talk badly about them," says 37-year-old Suha as she adjusts the light colored scarf she wears these days to avoid extremists who insist women cover themselves. "They all say we have lost our way, but they never ask why we had to take this path."

Suha has three children. She's married; her husband thinks that she cleans houses.

"I don't have money to take my kid to the doctor. I have to do anything that I can to preserve my child, because I am a mother," she says, explaining why she prostitutes herself.
Anger and frustration rise in her voice as she speaks.
"No matter what else I may be, no matter how off the path I may be, I am a mother!"

Karima, another woman forced into prostitution to feed her family, has five children. Her oldest son is old enough to work, but she doesn't allow it because of how dangerous Iraq is. Another woman lives with her three children in just one room. She hosts her "clients" in that room, with each child in a different corner, facing the wall.

The cost of living in Iraq has risen. The nation's infrastructure is of course horribly damaged. Women who once could drive cars, travel freely outside their homes and hold legitimate jobs now are denied drivers' licenses, must cover themselves with scarves or burkas, cannot travel anywhere without a man's permission, and are denied many of the jobs that were once open to them. Women in today's Iraq don't go to school even if there happens to be a school nearby that hasn't had its fresh coat of paint bombed and burned off.

As is always the case, the same fanatics who deny women a place in society because of "religion" are the ones who ensure that they can earn money as prostitutes, indeed are much happier with prostitution being the main way that a woman can make money independently of a man, because it allows them to indulge their own dark desires while maintaining their own auras of purity and piety in their public facade.

This is the American legacy in Iraq. There is no functioning democracy. The few freedoms enjoyed by Iraq's citizens under Saddam are functionally gone even as pieces of paper proclaim their existence, even as American rhetoric claims the presence of far more. The Iraqi people simply are not better off now than they were under Saddam Hussein.

Nor are we, with North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons due in large part to the Bush administration's indifference, Osama still free due completely to the Bush Administration's indifference, the strong possibility that Iran is developing nuclear weapons to counter the threat they see in the USA due to the Bush Administration's provocation, and Iraq as the most effective propaganda tool and training ground for terroristic organizations the world has ever seen.

People of course argue that if the USA were to withdraw its forces - and, one would hope, its thumb from on top of the Iraqi government - things there would become far worse. That may be, but the point is that we simply don't know for sure. What we can know definitely is that continuing to do what we have been doing, only more of it, will ensure the exact same results we have been getting, only more of them.

The Iraqi women and children - always the most vulnerable in war - are living in Hell. The more bombs we drop, the more people we kill, the more instability we instigate and allow to fester throughout that country, the worse it will get for them. It's time to get out. It's time to stop this insanity, this monument to foolishness, this disaster of American arrogance and ignorance.

cross-posted at Ezra's place

Nanny State

2007-08-16T15:13:00.000-04:00

The loony, moonbat, ultra-liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals predictably handed out rough treatment of the Justice Department yesterday.

At issue is whether lawsuits against the Federal Government and AT&T over warrantless wiretapping can indeed go forward. The Justice Department says that to let the suits proceed would put the nation in danger. They have also argued, essentially, that everyone should just take the government's word for it that nothing illegal has happened, nothing illegal is happening and nothing illegal will happen.

How quaint. For the record, this flaming liberal has never given complete trust to any level of any government and never will. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find a liberal anywhere that would claim the level of trust in government for which the Justice Department is asking. Liberals simply believe that government can be effective at taking care of certain things. We're certainly not the ones who think the government should be able to listen in on everyone's conversations no matter what, or what behaviors are acceptable in people's bedrooms.

Of the two broadly defined political perspectives in this country, one is radically changing its rhetoric and actions. If I belonged to that perspective, I'd be pretty ticked off.

Medical Credit Cards

2007-08-16T13:57:00.000-04:00

In other Ezra news, he points out a TAP article about the increasing popularity of medical credit cards. Not only will providers accept plastic, but some actually advocate the use of specialty credit cards and will help patients apply for them. Americans have a real problem with understanding how credit works - that you actually have to pay the money back and that the interest rates are so high it's often impossible to pay off the debt by making minimum payments. In fact, if the amount charged is high enough, a person could double the minimum or more and still end up being charged more in interest each month than they are paying.

For the financial sector this type of thing is great. It's a whole new market for them. From the article,

banks and other issuers of credit can make money from medical services in numerous ways: collecting a fee from the medical provider for handling a transaction, charging interest on patient bills, and charging employers for acting as administrators of their HSAs and other medical spending accounts.

Helaine Olen, the author, sees the financial sector's involvement as troublesom for those who want to enact universal healthcare. With so much profit being generated in so many ways, creditors are going to resist any changes which might threaten the status quo. Private insurers - making money hand over fist while turning away any applicant they want - are of course the other powerful, entrenched interest that will oppose universal healthcare, or at least any form of it that doesn't ensure their continued profitability. What we're doing is making the opposition more powerful.

There is another problem with using credit cards to pay medical bills, one that isn't discussed in the article. Several states have protections in place for patients that are unable to pay their hospital bills. You can see some of the protections that have been recently enacted here. Connecticut has done some great work in this area. Some highlights:

Public Act 03-266 ensures that:
Patients are notified of free and discounted care policies. All hospital billing and collection agents, whether internal or external to the particular hospital, have to include notice of the available charity programs in every collection notice sent to patients.
Patients indebted to a hospital are assessed by the hospital to determine whether they are eligible for charity care assistance. These assessments must be conducted before the hospital can sue the patient for the debt. If a collector learns that a debtor may qualify for charity care, the collector must cease collection activities, even if a lawsuit is in progress or the collector has won a lawsuit.
Medical debt is recognized as involuntary debt and not subject to the same kind of punitive debt collection tactics that Connecticut law normally allows.
The interest rates that hospitals are allowed to charge to patients are capped. The maximum monetary judgment interest on hospital debt is now set at 5 percent. For other debts, the maximum judgment can be 10 percent. Until this law was passed, hospitals had been able to collect 10 percent interest.
Special hearings are held before wage garnishment or bank execution (when the hospital or collection agency takes money out the patient’s bank account) is permitted .

These protections are for debts owed to hospitals. Debt owed to credit card companies is under no such protection. Whatever protection any particular state has for people that incur medical debt completely flies out the window when Visa, MasterCard and American Express are the ones sending the bills.

How To Be A Journalist

2007-08-16T10:20:00.000-04:00

Ezra interviewed Bill Richardson recently, and he's got the transcript and a short article about it up now.

I'd like to think that I could add some insightful commentary, but Ezra - as usual - covers all the bases. This, however, is worth highlighting (from the transcript):

You said something there that I've heard you say before, that I've always wanted to ask you about -- you said you're a pro-growth Democrat. Can you name some anti-growth Democrats for me?

No, I'm not going to do that. But I know some.

But you use that term frequently, and I'm always curious what you're actually contrasting yourself to. What part of the party, or what strain of economic thinking, do you count as anti-growth?

I'm not going to specify. I just believe that it's important that we not preclude options to incentive the economy in the right way -- to give tax cuts to the middle class, to give incentives to renewable energy companies to make them grow. I'm not for the Bush tax cuts, I'm not for the 2 percent.

These are the questions that hardly anyone asks. In fact, besides Ezra himself, I'm not aware of a journalist asking any politician to simply explain what they mean by what they say. Most of the time we're just given their words: "Richardson, a self-described "pro-growth Democrat," said in an interview with Writey McWriterson today that Democrats should be pro-growth." And that's the end of it, with no question about just what he means.

Imagine the difference in our national discourse if journalists actually took it upon themselves to ask questions of these people instead of merely repeating what they say. Here's hoping and praying that Ezra is but the vanguard of a new, and much better, class of journalist.

Japanese Food Is AWESOME

2007-08-14T14:23:00.000-04:00

I really don't have anything against Japan, the Japanese people or individual Japanese. Seriously, I don't. And I try very hard to respect other cultures and the different ways we all do things - in fact, I tend to celebrate these differences because they make life interesting.

But Japan has a problem with food. Oh, not actual Japanese cuisine which, with the exception of natto and a few other items, is incredibly refined and impressive. No, Japan has a problem with Western food. It's not enough, apparently, to just import some foods from the West, to have McDonalds and to start eating cheese.

No, the Japanese people apparently think that they need to do stuff like this:

That, my friends, is a Salty Dog. It's a simple cocktail of vodka (or gin) and grapefruit juice and a salted rim. But that's not salt, is it? No, on the above "cocktail" the rim is covered in mayonnaise. It's one of the, er, delightful and whimsical menu items at the "Mayonnaise Kitchen" in Tokyo.

Mayonnaise by itself is of course an unqualified evil no matter the culinary setting. But the people fueling its popularity and resultant "creativity" with the foul condiment in Japan are dancing on the knife edge of the Apocalypse, and the rest of us are in danger of falling with them. They must be stopped.

Purity Over People

2007-08-14T11:08:00.001-04:00

On Monday, August 6, Cecil Sinclair died. He was only 46. He was a veteran of the Navy, who rescued downed pilots during the first Gulf War. Mr. Sinclair's brother is employed by High Point Church in Arlington, Texas. He's also a member there, and 6 years ago, when Cecil Sinclair became sick from a heart condition, the church prayed for him. When Sinclair died from complications to a surgery, a minister from the church went to the family to help them.

Cecil Sinclair was not a member of any church, so High Point Church volunteered the use of their facility, a meal for around 100 people and even to have their people put together a PowerPoint show with photos from Sinclair's life. The church asked if they could have an altar call at the end of the funeral service, and even though Lee Sinclair is the only member of the family associated with the church, the family agreed.

The funeral was to be held on Thursday, August 9th. On Wednesday, a member of High Point Church was in the building, working on the PowerPoint presentation for the funeral. As he went through the photographs, Cecil Sinclair's real problem became disturbingly apparent:

Cecil Sinclair was a homosexual.

We can probably assume that none of the photos depicted Sinclair having sex with other men. But we can certainly assume that the photos selected by the family showed him alive, living, with family members and friends, perhaps trips he took. Sinclair was a member of a choir; certainly there were photos of performances and such.

Wednesday night, the evening before the funeral, High Point Church contacted the family and told them that they would not be allowed to have the funeral at the church. That Cecil Sinclair's life was such that no activity which honored his life could be held within the walls of the church.

This isn't just about homosexuality, of course. Oh, no, for

The pastor said that he could imagine a similar situation involving a different sin. Perhaps a mother who is a member of the church loses a son who is a thief or murderer, Mr. Simons said. The church would surely volunteer to hold a service, he said.

"But I don't think the mother would submit photos of her son murdering someone," he said. "That's a red light going off."

Emphasis is, of course, mine. Simons' - the church's senior pastor - honesty is refreshing. Unfortunately, that's about the only positive thing that could be said of his idea that being a homosexual is the same as being a murderer.

This is a good example of what I wrote about a couple of posts ago. While I disagree with their understanding of the Bible, I can understand why they feel that their condemnation of homosexuality is not only acceptable but required.

Quite aside from competing interpretations of scripture as to whether homosexuality is a sin like any other, equal in God's eyes to murder, High Point Church was presented with a choice. It is the same choice faced by the priest and the Temple assistant on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. It's the same choice that all of us, no matter our beliefs, face on almost a daily basis.

Last Wednesday, the leadership of High Point Church had to choose between safeguarding their own righteousness or extending love to people in pain. Which is more important? That High Point's doctrinal statements are honored, or that human beings are comforted in a time of grief? What good are beliefs, doctrinal statements, morality - righteousness - if we are forced to sacrifice our fellow human beings for them?

This is why I'm so convinced of the utter depravity of present-day Christianity. The Christ who ate with tax collectors, thieves, prostitutes and other sinners has been lost to us, in favor of a transcendent, ethereal Judge. The Jesus whom the Gospels tell us to worship has been replaced in our hearts by the same commandments, the same laws and rules so carefully guarded and practiced by the Pharisees of the 1st century CE. It's no coincidence that in recent years people have been writing journal articles and books that rehabilitate the Pharisees, that reinterpret the relationship Jesus had with them from antagonistic to friendly rivalry, to the type of conflict between people with similar aims and goals.

Righteousness or love. That's the choice we face. And the righteousness we protect is always my righteousness, my purity. In contrast, to choose love is to necessarily involve and honor the needs of others.

The case can be made for protecting and preserving righteousness. But that case is never made by Jesus, who always chose the other over his own status, who always chose love over all else and commanded us to do the same.

Ingenuity

2007-08-10T14:09:00.000-04:00

Please meet my brand-new hero, Scott Dawson:

Mr. Dawson lives in Houston, whose weather takes words like "muggy, humid, hot, horrible and hellish" and kicks the everliving tar out of them. And that's in January. It's worse in the summer.

Mr. Dawson was living in Houston, in the summer, with a car that has no air conditioning. He didn't have the $1,200 he needed to set his car up the conventional way. But no matter, because Scott Dawson is a freaking genius. He took a window unit home air conditioner, some duct tape, straps, vents and some elbow grease and solved his problem quite well.

Here's another view:

I have been in Houston in the summer, and have tried to cool my vehicle down with conventional automobile air conditioning. It takes a looooong time for the sweat to stop pouring down my face. A long time. I bet that Scott Dawson now has the most comfortable car in all of south Texas. The article says he's a civil engineering graduate. Looks to me like he'll do fine.

Righteousness vs. Love

2007-08-10T11:18:00.000-04:00

Let's talk about sin, shall we? It's a big part of Christianity, and a huge part of why people criticize Christianity. The Westminster Shorter Catechism has the classic definition of sin, which is, "Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God." That is to say, anything at all which either fails to live up to the perfect law of God and/or which breaks that law - sins of "omission" and sins of "commission."

I can accept that definition; indeed I need to if I want to be true to my faith. However, such a definition is not the final word on the matter. John Wesley said that sin is "a willful transgression of the known law of God." In Wesley's formulation, for sin to be "sin, properly so-called" the person needs to know that it's wrong and needs to make a free, conscious decision to commit the sin.

Wesley didn't want to do away with the classic definition, though. His distinction among sin is that while each "type" of sin - those sins which are knowingly committed and those about which we are completely ignorant - absolutely require forgiveness and grace, the latter sins are provided for by "prevenient" or "preventing" grace.

Grace - that's the thing which must always be a part of any discussion of sin. Paul said that no matter how much sin there may be, grace will always be more abundant. No matter how grievous the sin, how despicable the sinner, there is enough grace, and more, and even more. In the next chapter (Romans 6) he addresses the question of whether, then, we should intentionally sin in ever-increasing amounts so that the abundance of grace could be increased in ever-greater amounts.

Well, no. That's cynical, and if you read the Bible you'll find that God has a surprisingly low tolerance for things like that.

Prevenient grace - the grace that "goes before" - is a key element of Wesley's theology. It means that God's grace infuses all of creation, that before there is any understanding of God, or sin, or forgiveness, there is God's grace doing its work of drawing people to him and providing for forgiveness. The doctrine of prevenient grace is why it's ok to baptize infants and allow children to participate in Communion.

The biggest difference between Wesleyan/Arminian theology and Reformed theology is that the former emphasizes and relies upon God's grace and love, while the latter emphasizes and relies upon God's sovereignty and righteousness. If your starting point is "God loves us and extends grace to us," then you will tread a far different path than if you start with "God is sovereign and righteous."

Because, ultimately, righteousness and love are going to come into conflict with one another. Righteousness, sovereignty and justice are strongly objective categories. They can be defined, spelled out, and applied universally, to every situation. Righteousness, then, allows us to set forth right behavior and wrong behavior in any and every situation - and it does not allow us to deviate at all, for any reason.

Starting with God's sovereignty and righteousness leads us to elaborate forensic formulations about the purpose and work of Jesus. It's very reductive, making Jesus into nothing more than a particularly powerful and efficacious sacrifice as prescribed by the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Mosaic Covenant. Certainly there is that element in the New Testament, but that doesn't explain the whole of Jesus' life, actions and teachings.

But these extremely rigid formulations about how the death of Jesus ultimately satisfies God's requirement of blood sacrifices to atone for our sins are necessary to reconcile the way in which the love that is present in God's forgiveness conflicts with the idea that his sovereignty expressed through his righteousness is his primary characteristic.

Don't think that love and righteousness can conflict? Let's take a look, then, at a particularly famous parable told by Jesus: that of the "Good Samaritan." It's a simple story. A Jewish man is robbed by literal highway bandits, beaten and left for dead. The next several travelers on that road consist of a Jewish priest, a Jewish Temple assistant and then a Samaritan businessman. Samaritans are believed to have been the descendants of those people who were left in Palestine after the defeat of Israel and Judah. They considered themselves to be the true heirs of the faith of Israel's patriarchs, while the larger Jewish community considered them to be collaborators with Israel's enemies, half-breeds and heretics.

But the point of the parable is deeper and larger than the idea that someone hated by Jesus' audience could be the "hero" of the story. It's important, vitally important, to understand that the priest and the Temple assistant didn't do anything wrong. You can follow this link for a BibleGateway search for the term "dead body" within the context of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Put simply, the Jews had a lot of rules for when to touch a dead body and what needed to happen afterward. Anyone who did touch a dead body, even if absolutely necessary and unavoidable, was ceremonially unclean and could not participate in worship of any kind. The rules for priests, for anyone associated with the holiness of the Temple were even more stringent.

The priest and Temple assistant that passed the dying man on the road did the right thing. We're so programmed to think otherwise that it's hard to see their actions as anything but inappropriate, but the truth is that these men preserved their righteousness before God. They were, according to Jewish law and tradition, blameless in the matter.

That Jesus then brings a Samaritan down the road is significant for more than just how much Samaritans were despised by the Jews. Romans were similarly hated, if not more. If Jesus' point had been to merely bring up a hated ethnic group, a Roman - especially a soldier - would have done quite nicely. But the Samaritans had something that the Romans didn't - namely, an obligation to maintain the exact same standards of purity as the Jews.

In other words, in order for the Samaritan to help the man on the side of the road, even to merely find out whether he was truly dead or still alive, the Samaritan had to sin. Even though the Samaritan didn't have any duties at the Temple in Jerusalem over his head, he still broke Torah in order to care for the man at the side of the road. The Samaritan broke Torah, he made himself unclean, all for the sake of a man who, given the common attitudes of the day, would probably not return the favor and who, had he known what was going on, would have refused the help in the first place.

On the road between Jerusalem and Jericho a man was robbed, beaten and left for dead. Three men passed by the spot where he lay, and all three of them had a choice: Love or Righteousness. It was a clear choice, no ambiguity, nothing in Torah that gave any of them an out, an excuse to contravene the clear commands of God.

Love versus Righteousness. We are all faced with this choice. We all must decide which it will be, for the two are often in conflict with one another. Even God has faced this choice, has been forced to decide whether he will be defined by his own righteousness or by his love. When God set up his covenant with ancient Hebrews, he made it clear that they were under his protection and owed him their entire allegiance. If they strayed from him, then he would wipe them from the earth. He would allow them to be completely destroyed, scattered, lost as a people. These were the terms of the covenant, of the sacred agreement between God and his people.

And we see that it started to happen. The ancient Israelites turned away from God, worshiped other deities, oppressed the poor, enslaved the foreigner, allowed widows and orphans to starve. Not only was it God's right to destroy them, but his obligation that he set forth for himself. Yet in Hosea 11 - merely one example - God speaks through the prophet of what he has done for Israel. This chapter is, in its form, similar to other litanies of this type that recount God's accomplishments for his people.

But this is a lament, not a list of God's victories or justification for demanding Israel's allegiance. This is one of those moments in the Bible where it's not explicit, but where it's easier to understand what God's going through if we understand him as Mother. The pain of our Heavenly Mother is clear in this passage, this litany of how much God and her children have been through.

Hosea 11
1 "When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.

2 But the more I called Israel,
the further they went from me.
They sacrificed to the Baals
and they burned incense to images.

3 It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
taking them by the arms;
but they did not realize
it was I who healed them.

4 I led them with cords of human kindness,
with ties of love;
I lifted the yoke from their neck
and bent down to feed them.

5 "Will they not return to Egypt
and will not Assyria rule over them
because they refuse to repent?

6 Swords will flash in their cities,
will destroy the bars of their gates
and put an end to their plans.

7 My people are determined to turn from me.
Even if they call to the Most High,
he will by no means exalt them.

8 "How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, Israel?
How can I treat you like Admah?
How can I make you like Zeboiim?
My heart is changed within me;
all my compassion is aroused.

9 I will not carry out my fierce anger,
nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim.
For I am God, and not man—
the Holy One among you.
I will not come in wrath.

Faced with the choice between God's own righteousness and his love, God chooses love. Over and over again, God chooses love over righteousness. How could we possibly do any different?

Next we'll discuss a real-word example of this.

Why I Am A Democrat

2007-08-08T13:47:00.000-04:00

This is where my political beliefs and principles come from:

What did this man do wrong? In what way did he fail, that he would deserve such a thing? Show me this man's immorality, his sin, that justifies what has happened to him and his family.

I'm beginning to think that the root problem with the conservative movement is that, despite the rhetoric, it never has been about "small government" or even about "personal responsibility." Individuals can and surely do believe that. But the movement in aggregate certainly does not.

The movement fights every pay increase. It passes bankruptcy legislation which simultaneously makes it harder for individuals to declare bankruptcy and easier for corporations and protects corporations from lawsuits by individuals seeking to recover some of their losses. The conservative movement touts "free trade" as some great way to not only make everyone richer but also to expand democracy when it does neither. "Free trade," in the real world, simply means making it easier to move jobs from the USA to countries that don't have the same protections for their workers or the same standards for products.

And the conservative movement paints those who are poor as lazy, immoral, lacking in character. Even when you work for a company for 34 years, retire because of a disability and then lose your pension and health insurance through no fault of your own.

And when Democrats say that perhaps it's time for American citizens to band together so these things don't happen, the conservative movement shrieks "socialism" or some such nonsense. When people stop fearing one thing long enough to start calling for change, then it's time to trot out homosexuals, or immigrants, or to come up with another unfounded terrorism "alert," or to pretend that they care about abortion.

All of that in order to protect the wealth and privileges of an extremely small minority.

Miscellany

2007-08-07T15:30:00.000-04:00

Oklahoma's Legislature has passed a bill that declares the Watermelon the state's official vegetable. See, the strawberry is already their state fruit, so obviously they needed to. . . .find a way to honor the watermelon.

It's obvious, really. Sure, the watermelon is a fruit*, but the only other option would have been to not honor the watermelon! Unthinkable.

Why is it that we have state fruits, vegetables, insects and all that?

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Baby Einstein videos apparently don't make your kids smarter. Also, wishing on stars is a surprisingly ineffective way to accomplish anything and Abraham Lincoln and JFK don't have nearly as many connections as you have heard. People could do with a bit of expectations management.

*Don't quote watermelon.org at me and try to say that it's both. Just because something is vegetation doesn't mean it's a vegetable. If you're eating a plant's ovary, it's a fruit. And watermelons are nothing if not very big, tasty ovaries.

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Sheesh, The Things I Forget To Do

Easter

Oh, For

It's So Hard To Be A Member Of The Majority

At Least It's Interesting

Cherry Chocolate Zonday

Reality Check: Illegal Immigrant Edition

It's About Time

Really Big Moose

Life Tip: Don't Get Born Poor

The Real Silly Season

Not Much, How About You?

Working The Refs

North And South

Two Senators Udall

Time To Worry About Giuliani

Oh Jeez, Not This Crap Again

It's The B-I-B-L-E

Bush's Surge: Still Not Working

Diocesan Conventions Are Fun - Who Knew?

Dumb Political Email

Endless And Astounding Variety

Of Course Rudy Is Nuts. They All Are

Um, Hey There

So Weary

President Dodd Has A Nice Ring To It.

Governor Blunt Tries To Redeem Himself

The Dimwit DA

News Out Of New Mexico

Roots Of Hypocrisy

Dumb Political Staffers

Cats

Internet Tough Guy Quarterly

The Teacher's Cat

The Glorious People's Republic Of Bananas

Al Gore: Nobel Laureate

Republic Of Bananastan

Quantum Explains Quite A Bit

It Just Gets Worse

The Problem With The Democrats

Dangerous, Hateful, Amoral Scumbags: Right Wing Bloggers and Radio Hosts

Apples

God On The Campaign Trail

All Domenici, All The Time

More Domenici News

See You Later, Senator Domenici

How To Keep Kids In Church

Miscellany

Recommended Reading

Grasping At Straws

Texan "Integrity"

Unfortunately, It Won't Change A Thing

Domenici

Legends

Manufactured Outrage Is Our New Biggest Export

It's A Hard To Be A Bigot

'Twas For This God Created The Internet

Kill Everyone, Apparently

Super Awesome

The Real Thunder Birds

Cowardice

Frivolous Lawsuits

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Death

Good Behavior In DC

Blessed Are The Scientists, For They Will Be Assaulted By The Ignorant

They Shall Fight Us On The Radio, They Shall Fight Us On TV, They Shall Fight Us In Every Newspaper

President Bush Makes A YouTube Video

Where Your Healthcare Dollars Go

Anthrax Anthrax Anthrax

Happy Birthday, Son

Impeach Bush NOW

A True Haunting

Confessions

Puppet Governments

You Get What You Pay For, An Ongoing Series

Conspiracies And Accountability

Senators Craig And Vitter

Prayer Doesn't Matter

You Won't Believe This