Left At The Altar

LATA lives at a new address!

2008-02-01T19:49:00.000-08:00

This blog has been revived, and now lives at Wordpress: http://leftatthealtar.wordpress.com

Hope to see you there!

It's that time

2006-09-12T21:52:00.000-07:00

Folks, it is that time. I believe - and abc agrees - it is time to close up "Left at the Altar." I am delighted and honored that people read this blog - that many have even bookmarked it and make it a regular weekly stop. But it's time to re-direct the hours and energy that goes into the search for bloggable material. (Even when I'm updating this site with the minimal and unsatisfying "regularity" that has characterized the past year or so, I still spend more hours than I care to count "surfing" other blogs and news sites.) Other bloggers and activists are doing this much better, more resourcefully, and with greater reach and impact than I have the time or talent to cultivate. We're quite small, and have stayed pretty small. I know that some people are going to miss us, and I know I (I won't speak for abc) will miss blogging.

But the internet can be - as abc herself has called it - a big time sink. You all know what happens: you follow a link, which leads to another, which leads to another, and suddenly 30-60 minutes are gone. If that happens a few times each week, then there's that block of time I've been saying I don't have for volunteering somewhere! abc and I attended the Faith and Politics
conference in Pasadena this past weekend. One of the speakers quoted someone - Rabbi Abraham Heschel, perhaps? - on the need to "put feet on our prayers." Walk the talk. I'm ready to put some of my blog time and energy to different use. The reason you haven't heard much from abc this year is because she's been "putting feet on her prayers" -- organizing, demonstrating, and rallying others to do the same. I've been content to conduct a pretty anonymous "virtual activism" on this very small scale. But I'm preaching to the choir - not even recruiting new "singers"! - and there are much more inspirational and effective "preachers" out there.

Why stop now, of all times? No matter what happens in November - whether Dems take back one or both houses, as they possibly could, or whether they once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - closing up shop the day or week after won't feel right. It will look smug and satisfied, or tired and defeated. Closing up now will let us concentrate even more on November and the aftermath. There is much to be done!

We'll keep the site up (but not updated) through Election Day -- taking up bandwidth and giving you time to make sure you've bookmarked any sites you accessed regularly from the sidebar on the right. Then we'll take the site down and someone else will fill the space.

Thank you all!

P.S. Consider adding these sites to your blog stops:

Progressive Christian Witness

Faithful Democrats

Quaker Agitator

Don't ask...

2006-09-06T12:11:00.001-07:00

...about the comprehensive exam. It wasn't pretty.

You CAN ask about Baxter, on the other hand. He is doing quite well! He had those gnarly stitches removed yesterday, and the biopsy report came back Saturday with a good news/bad news aspect to it. The bad news: the tumor was malignant. The good news: it's a non-fatal type of cancer that likes to recur in the same location, and doesn't spread. So we will need to remain vigilant in order to catch it earlier if it returns (and sadly, there's a good chance of that: the vet was not able to "take anything extra" around the tumor to leave super-clean margins). The cancer has such a long and bizarre name, even the vet stumbled as he read the report to us. If I can figure out how to spell it, I'll link to a description later.

A few items:

San Francisco and Oakland are having a disturbing increase in violent crimes this year, but it turns out that's happening all over the U.S. Still feeling safer under the Tough on Crime/Tough on Terror Republicans? Check out this report by the Third Way Strategy Center for Progressives. I love the title, "The Neo Con: The Bush Defense Record By the Numbers." The reality is this: while the BushCo NeoCons waste billions of dollars and thousands of lives on an illegal and unwinnable war over there, our national resources and preparations for violence and disaster are rapidly deteriorating. Sleep tight!

Oh, you meant those secret prisons?

A more constructive link: I buy and sell quite a few used books from Amazon's "Marketplace." Recently, several of my textbook purchases came from a dealer called "Better World Books," and arrived with the claim that my purchase was helping send books to Africa. Sounded pretty cool, so I finally checked out the organization and discovered I can order books directly through their web site. Please take a look and throw them some business!

Next time a wingnut tells you conservation projects don't work, show them this study!

(A Bali starling, one of the species saved from extinction.)

(If this post appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in your "feeder," it's because Blogger only published 3/4 of it the first time, and momentarily lost all the sidebar links, etc. So I deleted the original post and "re-published" it.)

A poll to chew on

2006-08-29T20:13:00.000-07:00

My 24-hour take-home open-book-but-dastardly comprehensive exam is tomorrow. I'll be offline and up all night squeezing every last minute out of those hours. The Better Half bought me a case of Tab, my "drug" of choice since I was but a teen (and not available in San Francisco!), to assist in maintaining wakefulness (no promises for coherence).

While I'm writing, and then weeping, and then spending the holiday weekend curled into a fetal position, digest the results of the latest Pew Poll on Religion and Public Life, which says Americans yearn for the via media on this issue.

One of the interesting points to me: "Only 7 percent of Americans identify with the "religious left" (an increase, nonetheless), but "32 percent of the public identify themselves as 'progressive Christian'"! They "tend to be more moderate than left-of-center on political issues." That is an unhelpful distinction, since there are moderates on both "sides" of the center. I won't be able to dig into the specifics before Friday, but if you want to, the full report is here.

Of Dwarf Planets and other downsizeable objects

2006-08-26T18:45:00.000-07:00

Pluto has been demoted from a full-sized planet to a "dwarf planet," and Neptune could be next! What is this universe coming to?!

The difference in Pluto's stature was immediately apparent. Here is Pluto and its "moon" when Pluto was still a planet:

And here is Pluto and its "moon" since Pluto was demoted:

Pluto's fans and supporters are taking it pretty hard.

But observers in other disciplines have been inspired to re-examine their own sacred cows and classification schemes. Reasonality proposes the Dwarf Presidency, for example. (MizM disclaimer: Mr. Reasonality is a friend and former colleague; welcome to the blogosphere "Cal"!)

So far, so good

2006-08-26T17:39:00.000-07:00

(Baxter and one of the wonderful techs at the SF/SPCA animal hospital.) (Updated: I replaced the original photo with one edited to blur the tech, since I forgot to ask if I could post her picture!)

Baxter was heading outside with a vet tech when we went to get him this morning. The tech said he'd been very quiet up to that point, then got so agitated that she "thought he had to pee." But he saw us coming up the sidewalk and either forgot what he was going to do, or - as the tech suggested - just "knew" we were coming for him!

Alas, with this many stitches to mess with for the next two weeks (warning: "stitches" photo follows!)...
Yucky photo coming...

Yucky photo coming...

Yucky photo coming...

(For the squeamish, I tried to put enough "warnings" there to push the photo out of your window.)

...he'll need to spend a lot of time in this fashionable headgear:

(Another "yucky photo" alert.) You can see the pre-surgery growth on his knee in this picture.

It was big, but that still seems like a mighty generous incision he's sporting!

Some good meds, some napping in the sun... He'll be just fine. We'll get the biopsy results in a week or so. Thanks for all the good wishes!

Enlightenment from "DarkSyde"

2006-08-26T16:08:00.000-07:00

(Updated to correct a surprising number of typos.) "DarkSyde," a regular contributor to Daily Kos, today reflects on the five year anniversary of Bush's announcement that he would cripple all stem cell research. DarkSyde puts it in linear terms, first:

Five years ... let's put that in technological perspective: Are you reading this post on the same computer you had five years ago? Does your business use the same routers, hubs, software, and servers you used five years ago, with no upgrades or replacements? Now extend that analogy to stem cell research and you get the idea of where we could be. For half a decade, this precious research has been frozen in time, placed in suspended animation at the expense of the sick and dying, to benefit the already rich and the powerful while enabling the incompetent.

Then he gives us a brilliant visual, posting these pictures and caption--

The President's rationale in pictures: Left an Iraqi girl, one of the thousands of living human beings BushCo considers worth sacrificing for an unknown benefit, maybe, at an unknown future date, perhaps, in some unknown way. Right: A human embryonic stem cell magnified thousands of times; a life too precious to risk destroying no matter what the potential benefit.

Of course, the administration's medieval mindset is getting to be old news, and we grow weary of protesting it. But folks, Bush's war on science is serious business, systematically crippling research and education. From a July 22 NYT article I saved (now only available in paid archives):

NASA's Goals Delete Mention Of Home Planet
By ANDREW C. REVKIN (NYT)
Published: July 22, 2006

From 2002 until this year, NASA's mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: "To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can."

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" deleted. In this year's budget and planning documents, the agency's mission is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."

David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush's goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.

But the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the "understand and protect" phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities. Without it, these scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Then there's Friday's news that evolutionary biology had mysteriously and "inadvertently" been omitted from a list of majors approved for federal student aid:

Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List
By CORNELIA DEAN

Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.

The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.”

Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing.

If a major is not on the list, students in that major cannot get grants unless they declare another major, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Mr. Nassirian said students seeking the grants went first to their college registrar, who determined whether they were full-time students majoring in an eligible field.

“If a field is missing, that student would not even get into the process,” he said.

That the omission occurred at all is worrying scientists concerned about threats to the teaching of evolution.

One of them, Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University, said he learned about it from someone at the Department of Education, who got in touch with him after his essay on the necessity of teaching evolution appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 15. Dr. Krauss would not name his source, who he said was concerned about being publicly identified as having drawn attention to the matter.

An article about the issue was posted Tuesday on the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Dr. Krauss said the omission would be “of great concern” if evolutionary biology had been singled out for removal, or if the change had been made without consulting with experts on biology. The grants are awarded under the National Smart Grant program, established this year by Congress. (Smart stands for Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent.)

The program provides $4,000 grants to third- or fourth-year, low-income students majoring in physical, life or computer sciences; mathematics; technology; engineering; or foreign languages deemed “critical” to national security.

The list of eligible majors (which is online at ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN0606A.pdf) is drawn from the Education Department’s “Classification of Instructional Programs,” or CIP (pronounced “sip”), a voluminous and detailed classification of courses of study, arranged in a numbered system of sections and subsections.

Part 26, biological and biomedical sciences, has a number of sections, each of which has one or more subsections. Subsection 13 is ecology, evolution, systematics and population biology. This subsection itself has 10 sub-subsections. One of them is 26.1303 — evolutionary biology, “the scientific study of the genetic, developmental, functional, and morphological patterns and processes, and theoretical principles; and the emergence and mutation of organisms over time.”

Though references to evolution appear in listings of other fields of biological study, the evolutionary biology sub-subsection is missing from a list of “fields of study” on the National Smart Grant list — there is an empty space between line 26.1302 (marine biology and biological oceanography) and line 26.1304 (aquatic biology/limnology).

Students cannot simply list something else on an application form, said Mr. Nassirian of the registrars’ association. “Your declared major maps to a CIP code,” he said.

Mr. Nassirian said people at the Education Department had described the omission as “a clerical mistake.” But it is “odd,” he said, because applying the subject codes “is a fairly mechanical task. It is not supposed to be the subject of any kind of deliberation.”

“I am not at all certain that the omission of this particular major is unintentional,” he added. “But I have to take them at their word.”

Scientists who knew about the omission also said they found the clerical explanation unconvincing, given the furor over challenges by the religious right to the teaching of evolution in public schools. “It’s just awfully coincidental,” said Steven W. Rissing, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio State University.

Jeremy Gunn, who directs the Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that if the change was not immediately reversed “we will certainly pursue this.”

Dr. Rissing said removing evolutionary biology from the list of acceptable majors would discourage students who needed the grants from pursuing the field, at a time when studies of how genes act and evolve are producing valuable insights into human health.

“This is not just some kind of nicety,” he said. “We are doing a terrible disservice to our students if this is yet another example of making sure science doesn’t offend anyone.”

Dr. Krauss of Case Western said he did not know what practical issues would arise from the omission of evolutionary biology from the list, given that students would still be eligible for grants if they declared a major in something else — biology, say.

“I am sure an enterprising student or program director could find a way to put themselves in another slot,” he said. “But why should they have to do that?”

Mr. Nassirian said he was not so sure. “Candidly, I don’t think most administrators know enough about this program” to help students overcome the apparent objection to evolutionary biology, he said. Undergraduates would be even less knowledgeable about the issue, he added.

Dr. Krauss said: “Removing that one major is not going to make the nation stupid, but if this really was removed, specifically removed, then I see it as part of a pattern to put ideology over knowledge. And, especially in the Department of Education, that should be abhorred.”

If you haven't curled up with Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, now is a good time; since the book's original publication just one year ago, the Administration has been so dogged in its anti-science efforts that Mooney had lots of material to add to the paperback edition.

Baxter's Big Scary Day

2006-08-24T17:37:00.000-07:00

Keep a good thought for this guy. Baxter is having surgery Friday to remove a tumor from his leg. We'll all be glad to see it go. We've been operating under the hypothesis that it was a sebaceous cyst - not at all uncommon in an older dog - but it got suspicious-looking this summer. We'll have it biopsied, too.

Anesthesia gets a little dicier as dogs and cats get older, and Baxter is around 13. But we're counting on picking him up Saturday morning!

The big judicial decision that happened while the networks were running Jon-Benet stories

2006-08-22T21:43:00.000-07:00

You probably didn't hear much about the stunning slap-down of Bush's unconstitutional wiretapping program on Friday -- what with the far more important news that a visibly disturbed man has made a dubious claim to be the murderer of Jon-Benet Ramsey. But a judge confirmed what we all knew, and Bush had a conniption, and the wingnuts are - predictably - screeching with racist indignation about the judge. Buzzflash sets them straight.

All of which reminds me... I went bumpersticker shopping at Carry A Big Sticker and got this one

and this one

and this one

But the only one the Better Half will allow on the shared automobile is this one.

Nice, but pretty innocuous. The Better Half is afraid the others will invite small arms fire when the vehicle ventures outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

(By the way, it's nearly 10 p.m. Pacific time, and the Apocalypse hasn't happened, yet. So I guess my comprehensive exam is still on. 7 days and counting...)

Exam Countdown

2006-08-19T18:18:00.000-07:00

Many, many thanks to the lovely and talented "Dr. Ruth" (no, not that Dr. Ruth) for permission to post her gorgeous photo of a cactus wren - which she snapped somewhere along her journeys through New Mexico and Arizona.

Count on things being a little sparse around here for the next 11 or so days. During my non-work hours, I'm desperately and anxiously preparing for a comprehensive exam. In fact, I should be doing that right now!

Jim Wallis in Berkeley, September 11

2006-08-19T13:22:00.000-07:00

I've received this notice from a couple of sources, and keep meaning to share it. For those of you in the Bay Area: Jim Wallis will be speaking in Berkeley on September 11. 'abc' and I will have just heard him the previous weekend at the Politics and Spirituality conference we'll be attending in Pasadena, so I will probably be catching up on homework instead of attending this event:

Christian leader Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, will speak about faith and politics at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley on Monday, September 11 from 5:30 to 7:00 pm in an event co-sponsored by the Graduate Theological Union, the Sojourners organization, and the Beatitudes Society. The executive director and editor-in-chief of Sojourners, Wallis brings a progressive message that links personal values with public issues. Prior to his talk, books will be available for purchase from 5:00 to 5:30 pm.

First Congregational Church of Berkeley is located at 2345 Channing Way in Berkeley, California 94704. For more information, contact David Myers at 510/649-2420 or dmyers@gtu.edu.

Pat Robertson: Ceasefire sucks

2006-08-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

Just two weeks ago Pat Robertson alarmed me greatly when he declared himself a believer in global warming.

But I'm relieved to report that he's back to normal:

Pat Robertson laments Mideast cease-fire

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. The Reverend Pat Robertson, who prayed for victory last week with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, contends that the cease-fire with Hezbollah has rendered the entire bloody conflict pointless.

Back from Israel to resume hosting his "700 Club" broadcast, Robertson quoted a Bible passage from the prophet Isaiah: "We were with child. We writhed in pain, but we gave birth to wind."

"In other words," he said, "nothing came out of this at all. 'We writhed in pain,' but nothing was born from it."

Suggesting that the invasion of Lebanon failed to achieve its objective, Robertson said, "Israel went in, but what have they done? Is the word of Isaiah true? -- 'We writhed in pain but we gave birth to wind' -- I'm afraid so."

(via Faith in Public Life)

Brown Bears=Sitting Ducks

2006-08-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

(Update: photo should be clickable, now. But just in case, it came from here and is used with gratitude!)

I just caught a very disturbing story on CBS News.

The reporter visited McNeil River State Game Sanctuary in Alaska, which runs a kind of eco-tourist program where lucky lottery winners (200 a year) are allowed to come and observe/photograph very habituated wild brown bears at close range.

(CBS) The spectacle plays out each summer at the world's premier bear-viewing area: Alaska's massive brown bears posing, wrestling and filling up on migrating salmon in the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary.

CBS News correspondent Jerry Bowen reports there's not a more camera-friendly group of brown bears in the world, because over time they've become very accustomed to having human visitors watch what they do.

And it's a tough ticket. A lottery system grants admission to just 10 visitors a day, totaling just 200 for the entire summer.

"It's overwhelming," says Steve Roberts, who came from Minneapolis to see the bears. "You just don't know which way to look."

"It's a three-ring circus," says Ruth Roberts.

Some people wait years for their chance to visit the sanctuary. Cheryl Parker, of Fairbanks, Alaska, found herself taken with a skinny girl bear who was trying to catch salmon: "There's a girl out here who's a tiny thing, and it takes her a while to get that fish. But once she gets it, she tears off with it."

The sanctuary is located a float plane ride over Cooke Inlet on the Katmai Peninsula, just past the still-steaming Augustine volcano. Once there, it's a four-mile hike to experience the ultimate bear tale.

Close encounters are common, and, as Bowen discovered, unnerving.

A young bear looked to Bowen for a little help with other, bigger, bears who wanted his fish. Guides shooed him off, but retired sanctuary manager Larry Aumiller said it's another sign that these are not your average bears.

"They're so confident and so unconcerned about us and what we're going to do, that they're relaxed enough to play," Aumiller says. "It's great."

Therein lies the problem. McNeil's bears may be too relaxed for what's about to happen, when, one year from now, adjacent buffer zones that protect them will be opened to trophy hunters. It's led Aumiller to retire, because he fears he's set the bears up for disaster.

He says, "When you finally get there, and they finally trust you, and you know that trust is going to be violated, I don't know how to describe it except to say it's heartbreaking."

Emphasis mine. Seems like that little zinger should get a bit more play in this story! Trophy hunters will be allowed to shoot habituated bears? Sounds like Dick Cheney's cup of tea. Judging from the comments following the story link, a lot of reader/listeners are outraged by the plan. One commenter posted a link to an online petition you can "sign" here (and get more info here).

Well, that didn't take long -- Part II

2006-08-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

(Here is part 1.) Try to act surprised.

A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.

The New York Times was deeply impressed by the tightly coordinated spin operation:

That picture of Republican disunity eased dramatically this week with the defeat on Tuesday of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut and the news on Thursday that Britain had foiled a potentially large-scale terrorist plot.

The White House and Congressional Republicans used those events to unleash a one-two punch, first portraying the Democrats as vacillating when it came to national security, and then using the alleged terror plot to hammer home the continuing threat faced by the United States.

By the time the president’s top political strategists met at his ranch on Friday for an annual summer fund-raiser, the events had given them an opportunity to pull together the Republican Party as it headed toward the home stretch of the campaign, rallying once more around Mr. Bush’s signature issue, the fight against terrorism.

The entire effort was swiftly coordinated by the Republican National Committee and the White House, using the same political machinery that carried them to victory in 2004. It began in the days before the anticipated loss of Mr. Lieberman, a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq, to Ned Lamont, a vocal war critic whose victory Republicans used to paint Democrats as “Defeatocrats.”

That word originated in a White House memorandum by Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Tony Snow, suggesting ways to frame the debate, that was shared with officials, including Ken Mehlman, the Republican chairman, and Karl Rove, the president’s top strategist.

The effort continued with the news of the British intelligence breakthrough, with the message that the plot had highlighted the stakes of a fight that the Democrats, according to Republicans, were not equipped to face.

But Democrats, seeing a political opportunity, began to focus on national security, making a vigorous case this week that the Republicans were mismanaging the war and making the country more vulnerable to attack.

“If the Republican Party thinks this is a good political issue for them, they are mistaken,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

And a top Republican strategist cautioned that the party’s candidates still faced serious challenges in states where the war and Mr. Bush were overwhelmingly unpopular.

But at the very least, news of the plot helped the White House and the Republican Party achieve something they have struggled to do all year: bring the party forcefully together with the president.

(Hat tip Americablog and FDL.)

Massive oil spill off the coast of Lebanon

2006-08-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

Hannah Allam, McClatchey Newspapers:

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- A massive oil spill off the coast of Lebanon is choking marine life, polluting the air as it evaporates and threatening to produce a long-lasting ecological disaster if Israel doesn't allow cleanup crews into the sea soon, local environmental officials warned yesterday.

Between 10,000 and 15,000 tons of heavy fuel oil poured into the Mediterranean Sea after Israeli jets bombed a power plant south of Beirut in mid-July, during the first days of the war between Israel and Hezbollah militants. A month later, Israel's maritime blockade is still in place, making Lebanese coastal waters far too dangerous for specialized teams to get to work on the spill, environmental officials and activists say.

While international attention is focused on the human casualties of Israel's month-long bombing campaign, the Lebanese government also is pleading for help to save its pristine beaches and fragile underwater life.

"The turtles are hit, the dolphins are hit, the urchins are hit, the corals are hit," Lebanese Environment Minister Yacoub Saffar said. "We are facing a major ecosystem failure."

The spill already has reached Syrian waters north of Lebanon, and the governments of Cyprus, Turkey and Greece are on alert, as strong tides spread what experts are calling the worst spill ever in the Mediterranean and a disaster comparable with the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989.

The United Nations, the European Union and Greenpeace International have dispatched experts to assess the damage, but no real cleanup can occur until the waters are safe again for boats.

Cleanup efforts are expected to take more than a year and cost more than $150 million.

The crisis began July 13, when Israeli air strikes targeted fuel storage tanks at the Jieh power plant, about 19 miles south of Beirut. Another strike at the same site came two days later. The tanks caught fire and burned for weeks, as thousands of tons of industrial fuel oil washed into the Mediterranean.

The early bombing campaign against Lebanese infrastructure was so intense, Mr. Saffar said, that the government was unable to conduct a comprehensive study of the damage. He added that it was only on Aug. 2, nearly three weeks after the last strike, that the Israelis provided aerial photos of the damage.

Satellite photos show the spill as a series of oily blobs darkening the aqua waters just half a mile from Lebanon's coast. The spill runs 93 miles long and more than 8 miles wide at some points, and it is contained in a small sea rather than an ocean.

"This is like a spoonful of sugar in a cup of tea. If you dump it in a bathtub, it's different," Mr. Saffar said. "And the Exxon Valdez treatment started 72 hours after the spill. We are 25 days late."

The damage already is visible at several beach resorts, where inky waves have washed oil-covered fish and birds ashore. The fuel's most volatile elements are the first to evaporate, which sends toxins into the air in and around Beirut, experts said.

A greasy, gray film has shown up on cars near the coast, and the government warns that it's just a matter of time before the pollution causes headaches and nausea among Lebanese fishermen and coastal residents. The government has advised all Lebanese to stop eating seafood until the scope of the pollution is determined.

"All along the bay, it's just a strip of oil. The white sands have become black beaches," said Zeina Alhajj, who is studying the disaster for Greenpeace International. "The water is full of oil and debris and dead fish. We saw crabs full of oil, struggling, fighting."

An oxygen-starved "dead zone" that has appeared annually off the coast of Oregon is more extensive this year:

[...]On Tuesday, underwater video cameras remotely operated from this research vessel sent back a starkly different view — a reef barren of fish but littered with what researchers estimated as thousands of carcasses of decaying crabs.

Worms, normally dug into sea sand, drifted dead along the bottom.

"It's just a wasteland down there," said Francis Chan, an Oregon State University marine ecologist aboard the Elakha. "I didn't expect to see anything quite like this."

These crabs and worms died because they proved too slow to move away from an extraordinary swath of oxygen-depleted water.

Scientists call this a dead zone.

Although this reef appeared to be a worst-case scenario, oxygen-poor water now stretches along 70 miles off the Oregon Coast. Oxygen-poor water also has been detected off the coast of Washington's Olympic Peninsula.[...]

Try not to miss this 5-part special feature in the LA Times, Altered Oceans. It doesn't seem to require registration, at this point. Each part is essential reading, and the graphics, photos, and videos are all worth viewing.

Loren Eisley, quoted in Sylvia Earle's 1995 book, Sea Change:

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water....Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast upon the sea.

Well, that didn't take long.

2006-08-10T21:41:00.000-07:00

How breathtakingly coincidental. One day after Lamont wins the Connecticut Democratic primary, the Prince of Darkness, VP Cheney, heads out to warn Americans that the election of Ned Lamont will prove to "Al Qaeda types" that we don't have the stomach to fight the war on terror, and Tony Snow warns Americans that electing people like Ned Lamont leads to events like 9/11. Then today, a foiled plot is announced (the White House has known about it for several days), the US moves the color-coded terror threat level to "red" for the first time ever, the RNC is all ready with a new "war on terror" fundraiser plea (via Americablog) and "anonymous" administration officials celebrate an opportunity to make political hay:

But Bush's Republicans hoped the raid would yield political gains.

"I'd rather be talking about this than all of the other things that Congress hasn't done well," one Republican congressional aide told AFP on condition of anonymity because of possible reprisals.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won't "look as appealing" under the circumstances.

(Also via Americablog.) Of course, we knew this was coming. The next three months will be one long scarefest as the Rovians try to win back their apostates.

I finally got to listen to a podcast I've been carrying around for months - Martin Doblmeier talking about the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Krista Tippett's "Speaking of Faith." Download and listen to the program if you can, or read the transcript and look at the photos on the SOF site. (And rent Doblmeier's documentary on Bonhoeffer.) But I was particularly struck - and even more so today - by something Bonhoeffer said at a conference in August 1934:

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture, and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security.

I wasn't going to do this...

2006-08-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

...but it's just too good. From the Department of Says-It-All:

George Stephanopoulos reports:

According to a close Lieberman adviser, the President's political guru, Karl Rove, has reached out to the Lieberman camp with a message straight from the Oval Office: "The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do."

Via TPMCafe.

(Update: A Lieberman advisor claims no help was offered.)

And now for something completely different

2006-08-08T23:22:00.000-07:00

Because every news- and blog-site you look at today is going to have a blow-by-blow analysis of the causes and meanings of Joe Lieberman's momentous and much-deserved loss in the CT primary -- including discussion of his campaign's last-minute 24-hour "they hacked our web site" smear (to account for a massive crash that was their own fault), their refusal to acknowledge that the Lamont campaign offered their own technical staff and even hosted the site for the day, and the details of Lieberman's plan to carry out his threat of further dividing the Democrats by running as an independent in order to keep his place at Bush's table -- I'm not going to post about any of that.

Instead, I'm going to link to this very cool story about caterpillars. An enticing snippet:

Few reference-quality collections of specimens exist, because, unlike birds and beetles and butterflies, dead caterpillars do not keep well. Scientists have tried pickling them in alcohol, or hollowing them out and blowing them up like little balloons, but both techniques distort them badly.

And until recent advances in DNA science, the only way to identify a caterpillar positively was to rear it to adulthood, which requires careful husbandry. (There are well-known moths whose caterpillars have never been seen by science.) Most caterpillars shed their skins five or six times as they grow, and each stage, or instar, can have radically different markings and patterns from the previous one.

“In order to do this well, you sort of had to know the entire universe,” said Dr. Wagner, who said that 5 percent to 10 percent of the caterpillars in his book had never before been studied through their entire life cycles. The 700 species in the book are only a small fraction of the 5,000 east of the Mississippi.

It's a very cool feature. Watch the video, too (it's in the multimedia sidebar).

I snatched the photo above of the cecropia moth catepillar from Google Images because I remember them from my youth and think they're bizarrely gorgeous. I think we also called them tomato worms, but that could be a crossed-wire in my addled memory. In any event, when I was growing up in Ohio, we saw them all the time -- in the moth form, too. Seems like I don't see them at all anymore. (My "little" brother - then around 7 - will never live down having adopted one as a playmate one afternoon - carrying it around on his bike, "feeding" it blades of grass, etc., and finally carrying its limp and deflated former-caterpillar-self to my mother, announcing, "I don't want it any more, it's too dead.")

Here's a link to Wagner's book, Caterpillars of Eastern North America. (Entry updated to fix a format issue and make sure nobody was left thinking my now 38-year old brother kills caterpillars.) (Also, my brother protests, "I believe I was much younger than SEVEN.")

Shirley learns to type

2006-08-05T23:02:00.000-07:00

Like clockwork, Shirley arrives at around 10:30 p.m. each night to leap up into my lap and rest some part of her body on the keyboard tray. Tonight, she decided she's been watching long enough and was ready to give it a try.

"What do these do?"

"Left paw, A-S-D-F... Right paw, J-K-L --- is that a bug?!"

"I'm trying to work, here."

I'm taking notes from Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning, entering them into a nifty citation manager called, fittingly, Citation. You can read Shirley's contribution on the last line.

"That was exhausting."

Backyard blogging

2006-08-05T21:59:00.000-07:00

Two weekends ago I sat on the sunny back porch, ostensibly to study. I was armed with my trusty Kodak Z-740, in case anything cool happened on the feeders -- but of course, I was supposed to be reading and not watching. I've tried this ruse several weekends in a row, and finally had to admit to myself that it's not working. I don't read; I watch stuff. So for the rest of the month, I am locking myself indoors on weekends, as much as it pains me. These are my "parting shots" from that last hurrah.

First, a relatively new customer - a house sparrow.

One of the regulars, a finch - looking a little disgruntled about the empty thistle feeder (which is also blowing from side to side).

A tiger swallowtail dining on bouganvilla.

The same swallowtail, taken from about 1-1/2 feet away and with telephoto - on a different part of the bush.

This last one I took this morning - from the kitchen window, looking down into the yard, THROUGH glass, a screen, and framed by safety bars! So, apologies for the lack of crystal-clarity. But, talk about making yourself at home! I made this feeder from a jug, after my better half expressed concern that I might possibly be getting a little carried away on feeder-purchases. I inserted a long perch, but the finches climb right inside and chow down!(All photos by MizM.)

That strange sound you hear...

2006-08-05T17:41:00.000-07:00

...is the scales falling from their eyes:

Then there are undecided voters like Peggy Beekler, a retired social worker who lives in the 3rd District of Kentucky, represented by Ann Northup.

"Well, I'm rather disappointed in the Republicans," Beekler says. "I think they've made a mess of things, even though I've been a Republican."

Beekler is not happy about the war, but she's also unhappy about the so-called values issues that Republicans have counted on to get their voters to the polls.

"I think to do an amendment on burning the flag would be totally ridiculous," Beekler says. "I also think when Bush vetoed the stem-cell research … I feel like that's ridiculous because they're just going to destroy all those embryos anyway, so even though I am for life, I think that shouldn't have been vetoed. I think that was a really bad thing."

Beekler represents one of our most surprising findings: On the question of which party would do a better job on "values issues," like stem-cell research, flag-burning and gay marriage, Democrats prevailed by their biggest margin in the entire poll: 51 percent to 37 percent.

"And when we list values issues like stem-cell research, flag-burning and gay marriage, these are the issues that Republicans took the initiative, used their control in Congress to get on the air to be voting on, to be talking about," Greenberg says. "What this says: By 13 points, voters say they are more likely to vote Democratic because of hearing about these issues. Which suggests that the strategy of using the Congress to get out the base is one that's driving away a lot of voters."

On other issues like the war in Iraq, or the state of the economy, Democrats have a smaller advantage.

Only on the issue of illegal immigration are the parties tied -- in the view of likely voters in the most competitive districts.

Voters are ready for change, but are Dems ready to fight fire with fire? (Yes, I've linked to that last one before.)

"Centrism is for suckers"

2006-08-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman compares the strategies of conservative versus liberal advocacy groups, and has some warnings:

...The Sierra Club’s executive director defended the (Lincoln) Chafee endorsement by saying, “We choose people, not parties.” And it’s true that Mr. Chafee has usually voted with environmental groups.

But while this principle might once have made sense, it’s just naïve today. Given both the radicalism of the majority party’s leadership and the ruthlessness with which it exercises its control of the Senate, Mr. Chafee’s personal environmentalism is nearly irrelevant when it comes to actual policy outcomes; the only thing that really matters for the issues the Sierra Club cares about is the “R” after his name.

Put it this way: If the Democrats gain only five rather than six Senate seats this November, Senator James Inhofe, who says that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” will remain in his current position as chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. And if that happens, the Sierra Club may well bear some of the responsibility.

The point is that those who cling to the belief that politics can be conducted in terms of people rather than parties — a group that also includes would-be centrist Democrats like Joe Lieberman and many members of the punditocracy — are kidding themselves.

The fact is that in 1994, the year when radical Republicans took control both of Congress and of their own party, things fell apart, and the center did not hold. Now we’re living in an age of one-letter politics, in which a politician’s partisan affiliation is almost always far more important than his or her personal beliefs. And those who refuse to recognize this reality end up being useful idiots for those, like President Bush, who have been consistently ruthless in their partisanship.

Now, speaking of useful idiots... The Republicans' favorite "Democrat" is in meltdown. Joe Lieberman's campaign is paying staffers to try to provoke Lamont supporters on camera. Last weekend, Lieberman's staff was distributing race-baiting fliers in church parking lots. And he's blatantly lying about his position on Iraq. Really, how much lower can he go - I mean, besides hiring Republicans to steal the election? (Note to the Lamont camp: I hope you aren't falling for the carefully placed stories trumpeting the fact that Lieberman is "scaling back" his get-out-the-vote operation.)

The "tipping point of despair"

2006-08-05T17:21:00.000-07:00

This is too good. Here's just an excerpt, but you'll resonate with the whole thing:

There is an argument to be made that the world is no more in crisis now than it has been at any other point in history, give or take a world war, and that the only reason we are freaking out is that the countries involved are western. No one reported much existential angst during Rwanda. When Israel bombed Beirut airport I was aware that part of the reason I got end-of-the-world shivers was that, unlike the airports in Baghdad or Mogadishu, I have been to Beirut's and it is just like Luton. When two countries with well-decorated departure halls and branches of Starbucks start fighting, you pay more attention than when Ethiopia marches into Somalia, as it did in July without anyone paying much attention. (The Ethiopian troops entered at the invitation of Somalia's secular interim government, to help fight the Islamic militia, who promptly threatened them with another jihad).

These are strange times and the fact that everyone claimed to see them coming in 2004 hasn't made them any easier to deal with. It occasionally feels as if magnetic flip is taking place, the process of polar reversal that happens every 300 millennia or so when north becomes south and south north, and birds fly into buildings and people with pacemakers keel over in the street. What can you do? For the past 10 years I have taken William L Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on holiday and for the first time, last week, I actually thought about reading it. (I didn't, obviously.) As multiple wars on multiple fronts drag on, you try to initiate a cycle of response that reminds you there are things to be grateful for; the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo going off without violence, for example, and Mel Gibson self-detonating. You reassure yourself that, as in all cycles of history, this one will come to an end, too. Then you remember that the man in charge of writing the ending is George Bush, and you have to start again.

Well, well, well

2006-08-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

Pat Robertson has declared "I'm a convert" on global warming. Is this one of those heartbreakingly-fleeting moments of clarity that dementia sufferers occasionally exhibit? Or is it a TRAP? Did Oklahoma Senator James ~~Dumbkopf~~ Inhofe (who recently compared the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" to "Mein Kampf" and those who warn of global warming to the Third Reich) convince Robertson (who recently informed us that Ariel Sharon's stroke is a punishment from God) to embrace global warming so that legions of respected climate scientists would abandon the fight?! (OK, I'm more-or-less kidding about that possibility.)

A sage and learned woman I know suggests that Robertson's flock has finally left him behind on this issue, and he's trying to catch up.

Just kidding

2006-08-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

Well, that photo probably just lost us our Ohio readership -- which I think amounts to my mother and my college roommate -- but COME ON, PEOPLE! If you can't vote these nutbags out of the majority this fall -- or, maybe I should say, even if you do technically vote them out but a series of suspicious developments reverses the election results and you aren't prepared to fill every courthouse in the state with legal challenges -- then we're going to have to conclude that you kind of like being governed by potential felons and frauds and wingnut "clergy" who demand your gubernatorial challenger "prove" his sexuality in court. (OK, OK, it would be damn good entertainment if there weren't so much at stake. If Molly Ivins gets tired of Texas politics, there's a very rich vein to tap in Ohio.) (Hat tip to G.D., who spotted the t-shirt somewhere in the Castro.) (P.S. That's the San Francisco Castro, if Rev. Russell Johnson wants to know.)

But this is a really good start, Ohio! -- no matter how patronizing the coverage. Good thoughts and prayers are headed your way.

Speaking of tampering with elections, someone is finally organizing a legal challenge to another suspicious electoral outcome, the Bilbray "win" in San Diego.

Poor Katherine Harris! She personally facilitated the fraud that was Florida 2000, and this is the thanks she gets?

Lynn Woolsey introduced The Iraq War Powers Repeal Act of 2006, H.R. 5875! (Mentioned here last week.)

You'll probably be shocked to learn that Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Cover-up Committee, will see to it that a report on pre-war intelligence use/abuse/failures will not be released until after the November elections. That would be the same report he said 9 months ago was nearly done. Apparently, it wasn't even really started. Well... you know... they've been busy.

Really, Mom, just kidding about that t-shirt.

I usually like EJ Dionne Jr's columns. And for the most part, I like his analysis this week of what Lieberman's troubles mean for the Democrats --

The opposition to Lieberman is motivated by an effort to reverse the trend to the right. It's true that Lamont's campaign has been energized by widespread opposition to the Iraq War and the fact that Lieberman has been one of the most loyal Democratic defenders of President Bush's Middle East policies.

But Lieberman's troubles are, even more, about a new aggressiveness in the Democratic Party called forth by disgust with the Bush presidency -- an energy comparable to the vigor that a loathing for liberalism brought to the Republican right in the 1970s and 1980s.

Like the earlier generation of conservatives, today's Democratic activists are impatient with accommodating the powers-that-be. They demand that Democrats stop trying to chase a "center" that has veered ever rightward since 1980.

Instead, they want to haul that center back to more progressive terrain. That's why so much of the political energy in Connecticut seems to be with Lamont.

But he also parrots increasingly tiresome "wisdom":

A Lieberman loss next week could also create distracting problems for Democrats. Lieberman has said he would run as an independent if he lost the primary. This would divert national attention from the Democrats' central goal of making this fall's elections a referendum on Bush and the Republican Congress.

Cow pies! Lieberman has made a career of diverting, distracting and dividing Democrats, and that's a big part of why he's in the trouble he's in! It is NOT just his bizarre allegiance to Bush's war. It's his bizarre allegiance to Bush! Mark Schmitt has a very smart interpretation of Lieberman's problem today:

It’s a great expression of the Democratic Party of 1996: You got your enviros, you got your minorities, you got your women. Each group has one issue. For the enviros, it’s ANWR (the most trivial of victories, but the one that raises the money). For the minorities, affirmative action. (Likewise, of minor relevance to the actual structure of economic opportunity for most African-Americans and Latinos.) For women, it’s all about “preserve abortion rights.” There are a couple others, but those are the basic buttons you press to be credentialed as a good liberal Democrat. After you press them, you can do whatever you want.

But has Lieberman failed to press those buttons? No! In fact, he’s been pounding on them like that guy at the elevator who thinks that if he presses “Down” hard enough and often enough, eventually the elevator will recognize how important and how late he is.

But it’s not working. Why? Two reasons: One of course is that Iraq, and the constellation of foreign policy and security failures it represents really is huge. And while Democrats can accept a fairly wide range of viewpoints, roughly from Biden’s make-it-work to Murtha’s get-out-now, only Lieberman’s stay-the-course is ridiculous. It’s pretty difficult to look at ANWR and Iraq and conclude that a good position on ANWR more than offsets a bad one on Iraq. (Especially if there’s no reason to think that Ned Lamont has a different position on ANWR or the other three buttons.)

The second reason is that Lamont supporters actually aren’t ideologues. They aren’t looking for the party to be more liberal on traditional dimensions. They’re looking for it to be more of a party. They want to put issues on the table that don’t have an interest group behind them - like Lieberman’s support for the bankruptcy bill -- because they are part of a broader vision. And I think that’s what blows the mind of the traditional Dems. They can handle a challenge from the left, on predictable, narrow-constituency terms. But where do these other issues come from? These are “elitist insurgents,” as Broder puts it - since when do they care about bankruptcy? What if all of a sudden you couldn’t count on Democratic women just because you said that right things about choice - what if they started to vote on the whole range of issues that affect women’s economic and personal opportunities?

But caring about bankruptcy, even if you’re not teetering on the brink of it or a bankruptcy lawyer yourself, is part of a vision of a just society. And a vision of a just society - not just the single-issue push-buttons of a bunch of constituency groups - is what a center-left political party ought to be about...

(Emphasis mine.) It's just killin' Lieberman. Some Democrats are finally articulating a principled vision, and the establishment Dems don't know what to make of it. And pseudo-Dem Joe Lieberman is completely befuddled!

Sunday I attended a church service out of town, in order to hear a good friend deliver the sermon. I scooted into the service just in time, and found my friend's partner in the pews. Her partner is Catholic, and was perusing the day's selected hymns in the bulletin. "It's a very Catholic selection of music," she said, thumbing through the pages, "very Catholic." She continued, "Really... I would almost think I'm at a Catholic service."

She paused. "...Except there's a woman presiding."

Paused again. "...And she's my lesbian partner."

Which reminds me (in a loosely connected way), I just love this bumpersticker.

Just so's you know what's up around here... I start the doctoral program in ethics this fall, and at the end of August I'm getting a head start by taking one of four comprehensive doctoral exams (a little early! because I've already taken some of the courses it covers). If I pass, it will very slightly speed my progress through the program, and that's a good thing (she says, staring down her 44th birthday). But it means I need to study quite a bit in the next four weeks, and really shouldn't spend much time compulsively scanning headlines and blogs. My posting has been relatively light since our "sabbatical" ended, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future.

It will probably also shift direction, slightly. With such an important election coming up, it will be impossible not to blog about political news, but for my own sanity and well-being, I need to spend a more time on the news relevant to my own studies (environmental ethics, especially the biodiversity crisis), and on developments pertaining to the progressive faith community. I hope y'all will continue to find those things worth checking in for. Of course, I'm not speaking for my co-conspirator, abc, but her posts have tended to be more thoughtfully tailored toward progressive faith issues to begin with. (I also hope to post some short reviews of a few good books I've managed to scarf down this summer.)

And for those increasingly necessary moments of zen, I'm adding a few blog links to the sidebar - sites I head for when my "other" blog visits start to give me a headache. Enjoy.

Words fail me... again

2006-07-28T14:35:00.000-07:00

I am mute with wonder. The breath-taking mental gymnastics... Savor the president's words:

It’s an interesting period because, instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root causes of violence and instability.

For a while, American foreign policy was just, Let’s hope everything is calm — manage calm. But beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was manifested on September the 11th.

And so we’ve taken a foreign policy that says: On the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in the short run by being aggressive in chasing down the killers and bringing them to justice.

And make no mistake: They’re still out there, and they would like to harm our respective peoples because of what we stand for. In the long term, to defeat this ideology — and they’re bound by an ideology — you defeat it with a more hopeful ideology called freedom.

That is to say, the fact that Baghdad has become hell on earth, and that our troops are "driving around waiting to get blown up" are good things - evidence of a clever new policy aimed at forcing long-simmering hostilities to the surface!

First, there was the flypaper theory. Then the increased-violence-is-a-sign-of-insurgent-desperation theory. Now there's the violence-is-good theory (aka the Civil War could be a good thing theory). And William F. Buckley thinks Bush will have no foreign policy legacy?!?!

What a fabulous idea. Molly Ivins says we should draft Bill Moyers to run for president, and she's "serious as a stroke" about it.

The poor man who is currently our president has reached such a point of befuddlement that he thinks stem cell research is the same as taking human lives, but that 40,000 dead Iraqi civilians are progress toward democracy.

Another fabulous idea - probably equally likely to happen. Rep. Lynn Woolsey says Congress should repeal the president's war powers.

Perhaps you read earlier this month that increasing numbers of neo-Nazis are infiltrating the US Army, thanks to increasingly desperate recruiting. Today I received an email about a letter being circulated through Congress by Representatives Artur Davis and Eliot Engel, urging the Pentagon to adopt a zero-tolerance policy on extremists in the military. My friend's email says we can sign on at Color of Change, asking our representatives to sign this letter. It takes no time - please do it! (By the way, the recruiting problems won't end anytime soon.)

Speaking of spare parts, Eleanor Clift notes that - contrary to what the president might have you think, only 128 of 400,000 frozen embryos have ever been "adopted" (hat tip Atrios).

How dare they protest King George!

When school was canceled to accommodate a campaign visit by President Bush, the two 55-year-old teachers reckoned the time was ripe to voice their simmering discontent with the administration's policies.

Christine Nelson showed up at the Cedar Rapids rally with a Kerry-Edwards button pinned on her T-shirt; Alice McCabe clutched a small, paper sign stating "No More War." What could be more American, they thought, than mixing a little dissent with the bunting and buzz of a get-out-the-vote rally headlined by the president?

Their reward: a pair of handcuffs and a strip search at the county jail.

Authorities say they were arrested because they refused to obey reasonable security restrictions, but the women disagree: "Because I had a dissenting opinion, they did what they needed to do to get me out of the way," said Nelson, who teaches history and government at one of this city's middle schools.

"I tell my students all the time about how people came to this country for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, that those rights and others are sacred. And all along I've been thinking to myself, 'not at least during this administration.'"

Their experience is hardly unique.

In the months before the 2004 election, dozens of people across the nation were banished from or arrested at Bush political rallies, some for heckling the president, others simply for holding signs or wearing clothing that expressed opposition to the war and administration policies.

Similar things have happened at official, taxpayer-funded, presidential visits, before and after the election. Some targeted by security have been escorted from events, while others have been arrested and charged with misdemeanors that were later dropped by local prosecutors.

Now, in federal courthouses from Charleston, W.Va., to Denver, federal officials and state and local authorities are being forced to defend themselves against lawsuits challenging the arrests and security policies.

While the circumstances differ, the cases share the same fundamental themes. Generally, they accuse federal officials of developing security measures to identify, segregate, deny entry or expel dissenters...

There's a lot more, and it is a surprisingly critical story; I've learned to expect so much less from the AP! (It appears that Bush's favorite Democrat, Joe Lieberman, has been learning from the master.)

Another story on the up-and-coming religious left. I was going to be a little snarky about it, but I can't top Pastor Dan:

"...(I)nstead of a response, I've decided simply to refer to my handy-dandy checklist:

Declaration that the religious left is back? Check.

Obligatory quotes from members of the UCC or Unitarians? Check, two UCC'ers quoted, and don't think we're not grateful.

Obligatory name-check of Martin Luther King? Check.

Experts wondering if the religious left can be as politically influential as its counterpart? Check.

Due to inability to organize and/or find a coherent agenda? Check.

Experts fretting that religion and/or politics will only get more polarized? Check.

Religious Right leader sneering at religious left for being too small to worry about? Check.

Obligatory quote from Jim Wallis? Check.

Wheee. If I'd know journalism was this easy, I'd have gone into it, instead of working for a living. All you have to do is follow the template - you don't even have to go in order!"

Did you notice the count-down clock I put over in the sidebar?

"These boys and girls are not spare parts..."

2006-07-21T00:03:00.000-07:00

The Frat-Boy-in-Chief, home from the G-8, all cleaned up and scripted (God knows, and now the world knows, how desperately he needs to be scripted), delivered a sentimental and scientifically misleading rationale for his first-ever-in-6.5 years-veto -- thus making good on his promise to deny hope to the tens of thousands who could benefit from stem cell research. But it's all OK, because Karl Rove apparently knows something about adult stem cells that scientists don't. Still, the plain fact is (from ThinkProgress):

Only about 10 percent of embryos are adopted — the rest are disposed of. Had Bush signed the bill into law, they could instead be used to develop potentially live-saving cures for millions of people.

Yes, disposed of.

The people who have the least, pay the most. But that's really of no interest to Bush.

"Does he often talk about poverty? No," Snow said. "There hasn't been a direct discussion of poverty, but he is focused on eliminating the barriers that stand in the way of people making progress."

Polls show the public is ready to sweep out the GOP this fall, and Mark Crispin thinks that means the GOP will be playing more dirty tricks than ever this fall. They've as much as said so. And they've certainly been laying the groundwork:

What the Republicans have created is, in effect, a system where they have multiple tools to deter their opponents from casting ballots in the first place--through the voter-ID requirement, the strict rules on provisional balloting and so on--and then making the vote count itself so opaque as to be beyond redress.

Last month, the Times said: "If there was ever a sign of a ruling party in trouble, it is a game plan that calls for trying to win by discouraging voting." The editorial continued:

The latest sign that Republicans have an election-year strategy to shut down voter registration drives comes from Ohio. As the state gears up for a very competitive election season this fall, its secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, has put in place "emergency" regulations that could hit voter registration workers with criminal penalties for perfectly legitimate registration practices. The rules are so draconian they could shut down registration drives in Ohio.

Mr. Blackwell, who also happens to be the Republican candidate for governor this year, has a history of this sort of behavior. In 2004, he instructed county boards of elections to reject any registrations on paper of less than 80-pound stock -- about the thickness of a postcard. His order was almost certainly illegal, and he retracted it after he came under intense criticism. It was, however, in place long enough to get some registrations tossed out.

This year, Mr. Blackwell's office has issued rules and materials that appear to require that paid registration workers, and perhaps even volunteers, personally take the forms they collect to an election office. Organizations that run registration drives generally have the people who register voters bring the forms back to supervisors, who can then review them for errors. Under Mr. Blackwell's edict, everyone involved could be committing a crime. Mr. Blackwell's rules also appear to prohibit people who register voters from sending the forms in by mail. That rule itself may violate federal elections law.

Mr. Blackwell's rules are interpretations of a law the Republican-controlled Ohio Legislature passed recently. Another of the nation's most famous swing states, Florida, has been the scene of similar consternation and confusion since it recently enacted a law that is so harsh that the Florida League of Women Voters announced that it was stopping all voter registration efforts for the first time in 67 years.

Florida's Legislature, like Ohio's, is controlled by Republicans. Throughout American history both parties have shown a willingness to try to use election law to get results they might otherwise not win at the polls. But right now it is clearly the Republicans who believe they have an interest in keeping the voter base small. Mr. Blackwell and other politicians who insist on making it harder to vote never say, of course, that they are worried that get-out-the-vote drives will bring too many poor and minority voters into the system. They say that they want to reduce fraud. However, there is virtually no evidence that registration drives are leading to fraud at the polls.

But there is one clear way that Ohio's election system is corrupt. Decisions about who can vote are being made by a candidate for governor. Mr. Blackwell should hand over responsibility for elections to a decision maker whose only loyalty is to the voters and the law.

I don't suppose that has happened, yet?

Here's Krugman, on the lessons of history - in the GOP's own words.

Bush personally blocked the justice department from investigating his illegal wiretapping program.

Bush's decision represents an unusually direct and unprecedented White House intervention into an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the internal affairs office at Justice, administration officials and legal experts said. It forced OPR to abandon its investigation of the role Justice officials played in authorizing and monitoring the controversial NSA eavesdropping effort, according to officials and government documents.

"Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving Executive Branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at the highest levels," the office's chief lawyer, H. Marshall Jarrett, wrote in a memorandum released yesterday. "In all those years, OPR has never been prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation."

You would think that might set off a few more alarms around the republic? At least The Globe gets it. (Seems Bush is more hands-on than we've given him credit for, doesn't it? He also personally authorized the exposure of Valerie Plame.)

One of life's great mysteries, solved.

Chris Hedges, "Mutually Assured Destruction in the Middle East":

This is the world of the apocalypse. It is the world where those on either extreme become indistinguishable. And if we do not find a new way to speak, and soon, there will be untold suffering—not only for many innocents in the Middle East but eventually innocents at home. It was the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon that spawned and empowered Hezbollah. It was the decades-long occupation and humiliation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank by Israel that spawned and empowered Hamas, and it is the brutal American occupation that has bred the legions of extremists in Iraq. And when Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah promises “open war” against Israel, as he did in an address shortly after his Beirut offices were bombed, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he won’t cease his attack until Israel is secure, it is time to run for cover, especially when George W. Bush is our best hope for peace.

(But Tony Snow says it's not a war, yet.)

Please read this terrific TomGram, too.

What force has done, thanks to the Bush administration's utopian foolishness, is to tie the region's many competing groups, movements, and states into an ever-tightening, Gordion-style knot -- and that knot, in turn, has been ever more tightly hitched to the global economy, so that every tug on any loose end now sends oil prices up another disastrous notch and trembling stock markets into convulsions. (Call it stock-and-awe!) Just Friday, the Dow Jones completed a three-day, 400 point shuddering drop, while oil, not so long ago hovering in the vicinity of $30 for a barrel of crude, managed to hit a staggering $78.40 a barrel by the end of last week -- and remember, this was just based on "nerves," not on more oil supplies actually going off the market, as would certainly happen, one way or another, in a widening conflict in the region.

In fact, the oil heartlands of the planet look to be heading for further rounds of violence and turmoil and, potentially, the American and global economy with them -- and the only tool imaginable to anybody is still: Force.

The Bush administration had no wish for other tools -- that was the meaning, after all, of "unilateralism" -- and so now it has no other tools in its "arsenal." It lost most of its allies while in its unilateral dream-state. Focusing all its attention on the Pentagon and on military-to-military relations globally, it also lost whatever modest capacity might have been available to it not just to head down another path, but to deploy the most basic tools of diplomacy. What it has left is, of course, force; but its own on-the-ground forces are dangerously depleted and it's evidently no longer obvious to top administration officials exactly where American force (and forces) should be applied (much as they may loathe the Iranians and Syrians).

They launched a force party in the Middle East. Now it's in full swing; the club's pilled high with dancers; many of the exits are bolted shut; the bouncers are no longer at the front door; and, on stage, the performers are brandishing blowtorches, while the Earth's last hyperpower and its hyper-commander-in-chief President are watching, helplessly, from the sidelines. As Dan Froomkin, the fine Washington Post on-line columnist, pointed out this week in a column headlined Bush the Bystander, "stopping off in Germany on his way to the G-8 summit in Russia," as the Middle East caught fire, "Bush reserved his greatest enthusiasm for tonight's pig roast -- technically, a wild-boar barbecue -- bringing it up three times. ‘I'm looking forward to that pig tonight,' he gushed."

[snip]

Everywhere this administration is being less attended to. Everywhere, others are sharpening their knives, loading their weapons, and preparing to smite their enemies, inspired by the American example, liberated by its failure.

It's worth the longish read. Meanwhile in Iraq, where things have gotten "far more stable" than in 2003, Baghdad is collapsing, 100 civilians are dying everyday, and attacks on US and Iraqi forces are up 40%. Seems like it's just about time for Cheney to come out of his bunker and tell us the insurgency is in its "last throes."

Or perhaps it's time to keep an eye on the Rapture Index - currently at 157, or "fasten your seatbelts" territory. (For those unfamiliar with the tool, read Jon Carroll.)

(I keep forgetting to post this.) Refresh your memory of Rev. Tim Simpson's letter about the harrassment of a sixth-grade Jewish student and his family, and then read Jesus' General's brilliant letter to the Stop the ACLU Coalition.

Had we known our recent Tour de I-80 would take us through so many potential terrorist targets, we would have carried more duct tape!

I never heard this story before, and loved it.

The Weight of a Snowflake

A coal tit and a dove were sitting together on the branch of a tree.

"Do you know the weight of a snowflake?" asked the coal tit.

"Well!" laughed the dove. "Of course! It weighs nothing at all." And secretly he was thinking that, of course, even a coal tit ought to know that!

"In that case," said the coal tit, "I must tell you a surprising story.

"One cold night I was sitting on the branch of a fir tree, when it started to snow. I had nothing better to do, so I started counting the snowflakes as they landed on the twigs and pine needles of my branch.

I counted up to three million, seven hundred and forty one thousand, nine hundred and fifty two. When the three million, seven hundred and forty one thousand, nine hundred and fifty third snowflake dropped onto my branch, weighing, as you say, nothing at all, the branch broke off and I had to fly away."

The coal tit smiled at the dove and flew away.

The dove thought carefully for several minutes, and finally said to himself, "Perhaps only one more person's voice is needed for peace to come to the world."

When I googled for an origin, I realized I must be one of the only people who've never heard it. Then I wondered what the heck a coal tit was. It appears to be the British version of a chickadee.

"The secular left usually wins"

2006-07-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

So sayeth The Economist in an assessment of the religious left. (It's from May; I'm still working through my pile...) They note that "The religious left is more energised than it has been for years," but suspect it lacks longevity.

But is this truly a sea-change in American religious politics? Or is it a brief “hallelujah moment”—born of Bush fatigue and political opportunism—that will bring no lasting change? The betting is on the latter. The religious left suffers from two long-term problems. The first is that it is building its house on sand. The groups that make up the heart of the religious left—mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics and reform Jews—are all experiencing long-term decline. Most of the growth in American religion is occurring among conservative churches. And the constituent parts of the religious left are also at odds over important issues. Middle-of-the-road Catholics are happy to march hand-in-hand with mainline Protestants over immigration and inequality. But they often disagree over abortion and gay rights.

The secular left usually wins
Serious doubts also persist about how much the Democratic Party is willing to change to embrace religion. Some influential Democrats want real change. Others think that all they need to do is drop a few platitudes to religious voters and the God-gap will disappear. Mr Dean's performance on Pat Robertson's television programme was as telling as it was laughable. He not only chose to talk to a man who plays a much bigger role in the liberal imagination than among evangelicals; he also let slip that Democrats “have an enormous amount in common with the Christian community.”

The biggest problem for the religious left is that it is badly outgunned by the secular left. The Democratic Party's elites—from interest-groups to funders to activists—are determinedly secular. So are many of its most loyal voters. John Kerry won 62% of the vote of people who never go to church; and that group is the fastest-growing single “religious” group in the country. These secular voters don't just feel indifferent to religion. They are positively hostile to it, regarding it as a embodiment of irrationality and a threat to liberal values such as the right to choose. These crusading secularists are in a particularly militant mood at the moment, as the sales of Kevin Phillips's Bush-bashing book, “American Theocracy”, testify. The last thing they want is a religious left to counterbalance the religious right.

That little zinger (emphasis mine) propagates a meme the folks over at Talk 2 Action call "demonizing secularism." Barack Obama recently took some heat for remarks that seemed to buy into that frame, as well (and some of the feedback, of course, demonstrated his point precisely). But as "Carlos" at Talk 2 Action commented awhile back, "Even though this theme is largely a rhetorical contrivance of the religious right, religious and secular progressives have not been very effective in responding to it." That's gonna take some cooperation, folks.

He makes me so proud...

2006-07-17T21:25:00.000-07:00

...Everytime he goes overseas (video link). (I wonder if he splattered anything on Blair's pink silk tie?)

Juan Cole assembled the likely order of comments, based on several published accounts, and concludes about Bush's insightful assessment of the Middle East,

It is an astonishingly simple-minded view of the situation, painted in black and white and making assumptions about who is who's puppet and what the Israeli motivations are...

[snip]

It is a little window into the superficial, one-sided mind of the man, who has for six years been way out of his depth.

I come away from it shaken and trembling.

Coincidentally, in his column "Is Bush Still Too Dumb to be President?" Jonathan Chait zeroes in on a remarkable item in Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine.

Ron Suskind's new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," paints a harrowing picture of Bush's intellectual limits. Bush, writes Suskind, "is not much of a reader." He prefers verbal briefings and often makes a horse-sense judgment based on how confident his briefer seems in what he's saying. In August 2001, the CIA was in a panic about an upcoming terrorist attack and drafted a report with the title, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." When a CIA staffer summed up the memo's contents in a face-to-face meeting with Bush, the president found the briefer insufficiently confident and dismissed him by saying, "All right, you've covered your ass, now," according to Suskind. That turned out to be a fairly disastrous judgment.

I'd love to read Suskind's book this summer, but I've already got too many underway and several more to read for an upcoming exam. So I will be checking in regularly as Tristero at Hullabaloo blogs about it.

Vital signs

2006-07-14T13:19:00.000-07:00

Last week, CBS Evening News ran a short feature about the "emergence" of a religious left. It must have been the very one Jeff Sharlet mentioned in the essay I linked to last weekend. Sure enough, Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo were interviewed (and there was a fleeting appearance by Robert Edgar, of the National Council of Churches) and were described as the left's "own Evangelical leaders." Apparently, a religious left will only make sense to mainstream media if it matches the right, evangelical for evangelical.

The story declared that the religious left seeks "the same political muscle as the Conservative Christians." Hmmm... Is that actually what we seek? I keep mulling this over. Yes, we seek to redirect a legistlative agenda that has abandoned the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the earth that surrounds and sustains us. Is it the same thing?

In Sharlet's essay, he refers to the "religious left of the moment" as "tepid," and suggests that it is too willing to conform to media expectations about its shape and priorities:

Another common mistake made by a media in search of the new religious left is its insistence on finding the color purple — that is, some ostensibly innovative blend of “red” and “blue” values, “fresh” ideas. Again, much of what passes for the religious left complies, declaring, like Michael Lerner of Tikkun, that by mixing more religion into the public sphere we’ll alchemize a whole new liberalism.

The religious left, he says (if I'm condensing him fairly), will not be viable if it simply tries to make itself the leftie equivalent of the religous right.

The folks who are looking for that, or perhaps hoping for that, are - I think - missing the point, and it leads to dashed expectations and grave warnings of our impending demise. John Aravosis has decided that the religious left is too disorganized and politically unsophisticated to counter the right. Adele Stan says that growing divisions within the Episcopal Church will kill off the fledgling religious left for good:

Ever since the rise of the religious right, liberals have longed for a religious counterpart on the left. But that notion was always dubious, and the recent turmoil within the Episcopal Church should put it to rest for good. Without the wholehearted participation of the mainline Protestant churches, there can be no religious left remotely comparable to the Christian right in Protestant-dominated America. And churches in the throes of schism hardly have the wherewithal to marshal their resources in the service of battles in the secular political arena.

But she says that's OK, because

In seeking to create a counterpart to the religious right, we tried to force our values through a narrow hole.

In essence, we bought into the religious authoritarianism of the right, inferring that moral authority proceeds only from religion. In this, we have sold ourselves short.

Liberal values represent the essence of the world’s great religions. At the root of all of the great faiths are fundamental beliefs in compassion, justice, love, and charity. We have the right -- dare I say the duty? -- to express ourselves as moral agents without the imprimatur of ecclesiastical authority.

Would I be out of line, here, to remind folks that the religious left is not trying to organize in order to lend "ecclesiastical authority" to liberal politics, secular or otherwise? The religious left has been coalescing and naming itself because many people of faith want to proclaim that their values are not represented by the obsessive, hateful, militaristic, prosperity-gospel politics of the religious right, particularly the Christian right.

That's why I started this blog, that's why abc joined me in it, that's why many of you read it - and read others like it. (Allow me to refer you, for the umpteenth time, to this terrific essay by Anna Quindlen.) It turns out, of course, that those sentiments are being felt by a lot of people, including some who formerly aligned themselves with the religous right. Randall Balmer, for example. Excerpts of his new book Thy Kingdom Come (which I'll be reading next) are available here and here. That ChronEd excerpt is no longer available without a subscription, but here's a "byte," in which Balmer discusses the fruits of the marriage between the Christian right and the GOP:

And what has the religious right done with its political influence? Judging by the platform and the policies of the Republican Party - and I'm aware of no way to disentangle the agenda of the Republican Party from the goals of the religious right - the purpose of all this grasping for power looks something like this: an expansion of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the continued prosecution of a war in the Middle East that enranged our longtime allies and would not meet even the barest of just-war criteria, and a rejiggering of Social Security, the effect of which, most observers agree, would be to fray the social-safety net for the poorest among us.

It would appear that the excesses of the right might be wearing a little thin. Amy Sullivan and EJ Dionne, Jr. have both written about subtle-but-important shifts away from the extreme right by a number of prominent evangelicals. As Dionne, Jr. sees it:

The mellowing of evangelical Christianity may well be the big American religious story of this decade. The evolution of the evangelical movement should not be confused with the rise of a religious left. Although the margin of the Republican Party's advantage among white evangelicals is likely to decline from its exceptionally high level in the 2004 election, a substantial majority of white evangelicals will probably remain conservative and continue to vote Republican.

But the evangelical political agenda is broadening as new voices insist on the urgency of issues such as Third World poverty and the fights against AIDS and human trafficking. Among the most prominent advocates for a wider view of Christian obligation is Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., and author of "The Purpose Driven Life."

In the meantime, Rich Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals (and a self-described "Ronald Reagan movement conservative"), has been a leader in urging evangelicals to make environmental stewardship a central element of their political mission.

Call me crazy, but when staunch evangelical leaders are beginning to worry about "leftie" issues like global warming, AIDS, and poverty, and an organization like the Institute for Religion and Democracy (discussed momentarily) devotes itself entirely to destablizing liberal Christian institutions, that tells me the religious left is not as near death as some apparently wish.

I'm still trying to figure out what exactly Jeff Sharlet means when he says the religious left needs solidarity. We may marvel at the lockstep unity between the Christian right and the Republican party, and the political effectiveness of their unison. But we shouldn't aspire to it. For one thing, the left has a hearty regard for religious pluralism, which will by definition breed variety and dissent (dissent being a good thing, signalling independent thought) in our positions and priorities. Party loyalty and uniformity has led the Christian right to stake out some jaw-dropping positions that toe the Bush administration line, but would seem antithetical to their own aims, and in some cases, the Gospel itself. In Amy Sullivan's article, she tells the remarkable story of a Bible-in-public-schools bill in Alabama. Republicans there opposed a bill authorizing an elective course on the Bible to be taught in public high schools, because it was sponsored by two Democrats! Randall Balmer discovered that the Christian right could not bring itself to oppose torture because that would put them on the wrong side of the Bush administration:

The torture of human beings, God's creatures - some guilty of crimes, others not - has been justified by the Bush administration, which also believes that it is perfectly acceptable to conduct surveillance on American citizens without putting itself to the trouble of obtaining a court order. Indeed, the chicanery, the bullying, and the flouting of the rule of law that emanates from the nation's capital these days make Richard Nixon look like a fraternity prankster.

Where does the religious right stand in all this? Following the revelations that the U.S. government exported prisoners to nations that have no scruples about the use of torture, I wrote to several prominent religious-right organizations. Please send me, I asked, a copy of your organization's position on the administration's use of torture. Surely, I thought, this is one issue that would allow the religious right to demonstrate its independence from the administration, for surely no one who calls himself a child of God or who professes to hear "fetal screams" could possibly countenance the use of torture. Although I didn't really expect that the religous right would climb out of the Republican Party's cozy bed over the torture of human beings, I thought perhaps they might poke out a foot and maybe wiggle a toe or two.

I was wrong. Of the eight religious-right organizations I contacted, only two, the Family Research Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, answered my query. Both were eager to defend administration policies. "It is our understanding, from statements released by the Bush Administration," the reply from the Family Research Council read, "that torture is already prohibited as a means of collecting intelligence data." The Institute on Religion and Democracy stated that "torture is a violation of human dignity, contrary to biblical teachings," but conceded that it had "not yet produced a more comprehensive statement on the subject," even months after the revelations. Its president worried that "the anti-torture campaign seems to be aimed exclusively at the Bush administration," there by creating a public-relations challenge.

I'm sorry, but the use of torture under any circumstances is a moral issue, not a public-relations challenge.

Can you imagine the religious left uniformly defending the Dems who voted for the invasion of Iraq, or who rubberstamped the president's "PATRIOT" Act, simply because it was the party line? Coincidentally, just this week, the IRD issued a statement chastising other evangelical leaders for signing a declaration opposing the use of torture (hat tip to Americablog):

Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist Committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), based in Washington, DC. Tooley says he has reviewed the declaration issued by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and has noted the document does not say anything about torture in places where it really occurs. That causes him to question the group's motive.

"If this group were genuinely interested in torture, of course they would be addressing those regimes that actively and deliberately do practice torture rather than focusing exclusively on the United States," he comments. He says he detects a "double standard" in the campaign against torture. "[It] is primarily a creation of the religious left and whose interest is not so much in torture, per se, but about opposing U.S. foreign policy."

Tooley goes on to warn said evangelicals that they are repeating the mistakes of the religious left:

"A growing number of evangelicals are ultimately repeating the same mistakes that mainline Protestant church leaders first started making 50, 60, 70 years ago," he states. As a result, says Tooley, those denominations suffered deep theological divisions and great declines in membership.

Wait a second, now... Where have I read something like that recently? Ah, yes, in an ~~angry screed~~ LA Times editorial by Charlotte Allen. In "Liberal Christianity is paying for its sins" she declares:

Embraced by the leadership of all the mainline Protestant denominations, as well as large segments of American Catholicism, liberal Christianity has been hailed by its boosters for 40 years as the future of the Christian church.

Instead, as all but a few die-hards now admit, all the mainline churches and movements within churches that have blurred doctrine and softened moral precepts are demographically declining and, in the case of the Episcopal Church, disintegrating.

Allen ticks off her list of liberal Christian sins (which include using feminine imagery for the divine in the liturgy, openly and earnestly debating the ordination of gays and lesbians, and -- apparently a long-held grudge -- ordaining women) and assures us that these are the reasons for declining membership in mainline Protestant churches:

When your religion says "whatever" on doctrinal matters, regards Jesus as just another wise teacher, refuses on principle to evangelize and lets you do pretty much what you want, it's a short step to deciding that one of the things you don't want to do is get up on Sunday morning and go to church.

Allen salivates with gleeful anticipation over the threatened schizm in the Episcopal church - also the fault of liberal Christianity, of course.

So this is the liberal Christianity that was supposed to be the Christianity of the future: disarray, schism, rapidly falling numbers of adherents, a collapse of Christology and national meetings that rival those of the Modern Language Assn. for their potential for cheap laughs. And they keep telling the Catholic Church that it had better get with the liberal program — ordain women, bless gay unions and so forth — or die. Sure.

The column is peppered with faulty logic and faulty history, but I'll refer you to I am a Christian toofor a thorough rebuttal.

Allen's editorial also rang a bell, or should I say, a "death knoll"... Awhile back (I've intended to link to it for weeks), Father Jake had an important post about the Institute for Religion and Democracy's war on mainline Protestantism. He included excerpts of a discussion on Air America, exposing the IRD's efforts and sources of funding, and he linked to an excellent diary on Daily Kos, "Summer '06 Battles Could Tear Apart Liberal Churches." Not surprisingly, the IRD has invested heavily in destabilizing the Episcopal church, and will be ringside for the implosion:

Many believe a schism in the Episcopal Church USA and the worldwide Anglican Communion is inevitable after this summer. If it does occur it will not be about homosexuality or Gene Robinson or the blessing of same-sex unions. It will have been planned, plotted and engineered by the IRD and its very rich, ultraconservative henchmen (some women, but mostly men) who have targeted the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), the United Methodist Church (UMC) and the Episcopal Church for nearly 25 years. Sexuality was just a hot-button issue the IRD could exploit along with "radical feminist theology" and what the IRD judges to be an abandonment of "biblical Anglican theology."

For a movement that strikes many as irrelevant and disorganized, we sure seem to bother the likes of the IRD. Ah, but the article by Amy Sullivan, "When Would Jesus Bolt?", shines some light on this puzzler. Sullivan explains:

Nationally, and in states like Alabama, the GOP cannot afford to allow Democrats a victory on anything that might be perceived as benefiting people of faith. Republican political dominance depends on being able to manipulate religious supporters with fear, painting the Democratic Party as hostile to religion and in the thrall of secular humanists. That image would take quite a blow if the party of Nancy Pelosi was responsible for bringing back Bible classes—even constitutional ones—to public schools.

The holy skirmish down in Alabama, with its “GOP blocks votes on Bible class bill” headlines, may seem like just a one-time, up-is-down, oddity. But it's really the frontline of a larger war to keep Democrats from appealing to more moderate evangelical voters. American politics is so closely divided that if a political party peels off a few percentage points of a single big constituency, it can change the entire electoral map.

[snip]

That's why, insiders say, the word has gone forth from the Republican National Committee to defeat Democratic efforts to reclaim religion. Republicans who disregard the instructions and express support for Democratic efforts are swiftly disciplined. At the University of Alabama, the president of the College Republicans was forced to resign after she endorsed the Bible legislation. A few states away, a Missouri Republican who sponsored a Bible literacy bill came under criticism from conservatives for consulting with Brinson and subsequently denied to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter that he had ever even heard of Brinson. But as for [(evangelical activist and occasional Democratic consultant) Randy] Brinson himself, he's already gone. “Oh, they're ticked at me,” he says. “But it's because they're scared. This has the potential to break the Republican coalition.”

Wow. So then, it's not so much about deep religious convictions and moral values, afterall? It's more about winning and keeping power? I'd like to think that the Christian opponents to the Alabama Bible bill, for example, had sinking feelings in their stomachs, pangs of regret, as they lined up to voice opposition to a measure any one of them would otherwise have supported. And that some on the Christian right are sickened and frustrated by the gag order on torture. But that's the price of allegiance to the GOP and RNC, I suppose. Why does the phrase "Faustian bargain" keep coming to mind?

The religious left will not survive - in fact, would not deserve to survive - if it adopts the tactics of the religious right merely to advance an alternative vision. So it's not going to "look" the way a lot of people expect it to look, which means it's going to be declared "dead" or "dying" as often as it is declared "new" or "emerging." But it clearly speaks to a need, or organizations such as the IRD wouldn't be working so hard to torpedo it. As Sullivan notes in that article, "Despite all of the punditry about a 'God gap' at the voting booth, this is a better moment for Democrats to pick up support from religious moderates than any other time in the past few decades." Two and a half dreadfully long years ago, that made the difference between a Kerry administration, and another Bush nightmare. Need I say more?

Emotional vicissitudes

2006-07-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

I admitted to a couple of friends recently that it's been hard to get my blogging "groove" back. I thought the long sabbatical would be good for me, but the blog-muscles apparently got a little flabby. I suppose the thesis-writing wrung me out a bit, too. I struggle a bit to form coherent thoughts, and the accompanying sentences to reflect them. We'll have to rectify this situation, since I got my statistical analysis job kicked up to fulltime for the summer, and I'm studying for a comprehensive exam in August! (I start the doctoral program in ethics this fall, and am getting a head start on the exam schedule.)

Obviously, I've got some cobwebs to clear, and doldrums to shake. So I have to say, thank you, Acting Deputy Attorney General Steve Bradbury, thank you for this gift:

"The president is always right."

I'm so grateful to you. I mean, really, do I laugh, or do I cry? I couldn't decide, so first I spit Diet Coke all over my monitor. That turned out to be kind of a reflexive response, so then I wondered whether to laugh or cry. It's easy to laugh at first. But then you give it a little thought, perhaps reflecting only as far back as the last press conference and the vision of a world leader who cannot form an unscripted thought but has been granted unprecedented powers over lives and constitutional freedoms, and you find yourself getting a little weepy. Sobbing, even.

See there? Now my doldrums are back... Thank heaven the Dems have such a good sense of humor (via Americablog):

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) offers a few more lessons learned:
Mr. Speaker, yesterday the President said we continue to be wise about how we spend the people's money.

"Then why are we paying over $100,000 for a 'White House Director of Lessons Learned'?

"Maybe I can save the taxpayers $100,000 by running through a few of the lessons this White House should have learned by now.

"Lesson 1: When the Army Chief of Staff and the Secretary of State say you are going to war without enough troops, you're going to war without enough troops.

"Lesson 2: When 8.8 billion dollars of reconstruction funding disappears from Iraq, and 2 billion dollars disappears from Katrina relief, it's time to demand a little accountability.

"Lesson 3: When you've 'turned the corner' in Iraq more times than Danica Patrick at the Indy 500, it means you are going in circles.

"Lesson 4: When the national weather service tells you a category 5 hurricane is heading for New Orleans, a category 5 hurricane is heading to New Orleans.

"I would also ask the President why we're paying for two 'Ethics Advisors' and a 'Director of Fact Checking.'

"They must be the only people in Washington who get more vacation time than the President.

"Maybe the White House could consolidate these positions into a Director of Irony."

That perked me up a bit.

By the way, I know that I promised some follow-up thoughts to this item. They're still growing, so please bear with me.

A new kind of power

2006-07-07T16:59:00.000-07:00

I'm just going to throw this link up for now, and hope to comment on it (with a few other links) tomorrow or Sunday. I'm supposed to be re-checking my footnotes and preparing to print the final/library version of my thesis this weekend. But I hadn't checked in on The Revealer for awhile and just read Jeff Sharlet's essay on the religious left's struggle to define/characterize itself (instead of letting the media and the right do it for us). Here's a good sample:

Power matters. The religious right knows that but doesn’t like to say it, since doing so would involve confessing how much it already possesses. The would-be religious left, as seen on TV, knows it, too, but doesn’t like to believe it, since doing so would involve admitting it doesn’t have any.

The real religious left — the one yet to be organized — will recognize the reality of power and appreciate its nuances; its applications. Another contributor to Getting on Message, Rev. Vivian Denise Nixon, an ex-con who’s now an African Methodist Episcopal pastor, quotes James Cone, author of a modern classic, A Black Theology for Liberation: “‘authentic love is not ‘help’ — not giving Christmas baskets — but working for political, social, and economic justice, which always means a redistribution of power. It is a kind of power which enables [the oppressed] to fight their own battles and thus keep their dignity.’”

Too much of what passes for the contemporary religious left speaks in terms of “help,” in no small part because that's the only story most media will listen to. And yet, here's another irony — “help” of the sort Cone disdains is what the Christian Right is best at. The media does Christian conservatives a disservice when it fails to notice that their movement is organized around the idea of helping people.

As a forthcoming book by statistician Arthur Brooks, Who Cares, demonstrates, religious conservatives give more to charity than liberals do by any measure. Not just in sheer numbers, but as a percentage of individual income. And not just to their churches, but to charities that really do provide food, medicine, and education for the poor. The one victory the tepid religious left of the moment can claim is the media misconception that religious liberals are more charitable, that they care more about the poor. They’re not, and they don’t. Rather, some of them — those not busy playing to the press — care differently.

That’s made most plain in the closing essay of Getting on Message, “Putting Our Money Where God's Mouth Is.” It’s by Garret Keizer, a former Episcopal priest who’s also the author of an essay in Mother Jones last year that drew the starkest line yet between the “help” offered by religious conservatives and liberals and the solidarity that he says must be the standard of any left worthy of the label, religious or otherwise.

“I have begun to lose patience with ‘compassion,’” writes Keizer, “be it the conservative version that sees poverty as a moral disease to be cured with a benevolent dose of 19th-century rectitude, or the liberal version that views poverty as an exotic culture to be scrutinized through the kindly lens of tolerance. Poverty is not a culture to be understood; it is a condition to be eradicated.”

In his more recent examination of “help” vs. “solidarity” in Getting on Message, Keizer proposes a list of policy initiatives to make that happen. They’e not particularly original — national health care, equal education funding, etc. — but that’s significant in itself. Another common mistake made by a media in search of the new religious left is its insistence on finding the color purple — that is, some ostensibly innovative blend of “red” and “blue” values, “fresh” ideas. Again, much of what passes for the religious left complies, declaring, like Michael Lerner of Tikkun, that by mixing more religion into the public sphere we’ll alchemize a whole new liberalism.

And yet, we never managed to achieve the old liberalism. “Putting Our Money Where God's Mouth Is” means, simply, redistribution of wealth. It means recognizing the reality of class. The “spiritual warfare” of the religious left is what the religious right considers class warfare. And the right is right — solidarity among the religious left will provoke a fight. Solidarity doesn’t mean asking for help from the powers that be, it means organizing to become a new kind of power.

More later!

Bird Envy

2006-07-07T13:59:00.000-07:00

My father has a veritable "food court" of about a dozen bird feeders in his backyard in Indiana, and the avian patrons drop in nonstop throughout the day. I sat on the back porch and snapped photos during our visit. (All photos by MizM, who should probably consider using a tripod someday.) As for my own birdless feeders, they were bereft of birds and seed when I got home. I filled them all and added a suet-y kind of feeder during the weekend, but we're getting into the tremendously windy summer season, when it's all the little guys can do to fly rightside-up, and anything smaller than a jay needs to be tethered to the feeder to eat.

Here are a few of the guys I spotted on dad's feeders... Feel free to correct my identifications if I'm wrong. They are, in this order: a downy woodpecker, house finches (including one in flight), a cardinal, a nuthatch of some kind, and tufted titmice (titmouses?).

By the way, a new study says that 12% of the world's bird species are likely to be extinct by the end of this century.

Niemoller Redux

2006-07-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

This is the junior partner writing on this blog, and I've been even more absent than MizM, although I do actually have an excuse: six weeks-plus of radiation treatments following excision of a small, well-contained ductal carcinoma in situ that was detected by mammography in February. Say what you will about health care in the US (and there's plenty to be said), but I am grateful for the technological advances that made this very early detection possible.

One of the effects of the radiation was a pretty stunning case of skin irritation that made it impossible for me to focus on anything else for a few weeks. It's pretty much over now, but even if it hadn't been, I would have been just as jolted by the message below, which arrived in my inbox this morning courtesy of the Rev. Tim Simpson of the Christian Alliance for Progress. It put me in mind of Pastor Martin Niemoller's poem, ending (more or less) "and by the time they came for me, there was no one else left to stand up for me." Read and weep, and then vow to stand up for someone who needs it.

"Take Your Yarmulke Off, Jew-Boy"

I hope that line grabbed your attention like it grabbed mine. Along with taunts of "Christ killer," these are some of things to which sixth grader Alexander Dobrich claims he has been subjected since his family became embroiled in an attempt to protest the encroachment of Christianity into their public school system in Delaware. Alexander's older sister Samantha had protested explicitly Christian prayers at her graduation ceremony, during which she was actually singled out by the one leading the prayer. The Dobrich family, which has been in litigation since 2004, offered a settlement last year, which was rejected by the school board who seemed to want to make a point that they have the right to force Christianity on children in their care (It was such a reasonable settlement that the board’s insurers promptly sued them and refused to pay any more of the board’s legal expenses for not accepting it).. Now comes word that right-wing zealots in an outfit called Stop the ACLU have gone so far as to publish the address and phone number of the Dobriches, who in the face of such harassment and abuse have been forced to move. Never mind that the Dobriches are NOT being represented by the ACLU in their lawsuit and instead by a local legal firm, but facts don't matter much to people like
this..

This sounds like something out of 1930s Germany, not something out of 21st century America. The pathetic part is that it is being done by people who claim to be followers of Jesus, ostensibly undertaken to advance the ends of his kingdom. The Religious Right loves to use the buzz word "Judeo-Christian tradition" in all of their pronouncements in order to make them sound like pluralists, but instances such as this one show this for what it really is: Jews are welcome so long as they keep quiet.

I am an unapologetic Christian who confesses faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and I am appalled that the Dobriches and families of other religious traditions, as well as those who have no religious affiliation, have been subjected to this kind of treatment in the name of my faith. Authentic Christianity understands that people come to faith in Christ as they are moved by the Holy Spirit, not by being force fed the faith against their will by means of state organs. It does nothing to advance the values of the Gospel to oppress people who do not share Christian beliefs and is in fact the very antithesis of such values. Increasingly, however, this is becoming a regular feature of the American political landscape created by the Religious Right, who is committed to undoing the historic American commitment to the separation of church and state.

In his newly released book, Thy Kingdom Come , one of the most prominent scholars of American religion, and himself an evangelical Christian, Randall Balmer points out that evangelical outsiders like Baptists were the very first in the New World to champion the idea that churches ought not be tethered to the government nor have privileged status. Baptists in the 17th and 18th century like Roger Williams and Isaac Backus laid the foundation for the longstanding principle that governments should stay out of religion. Amazingly, however, as the descendants of these Baptists have moved from the margins of society into the mainstream and now into ascendancy in public life, they have dumped the beliefs of their forbears and are now seeking state-sponsored recognition and special treatment for their particular brand of Christianity.

As Balmer notes, not only is this an egregious capitulation of their tradition's core values, it is also the fast track to the ruin of evangelical faith in the United States . What Williams and Backus knew that their modern descendants have forgotten is that state-sponsored religion quickly turns into a barren and desiccated faith. Using the state to disciple those who accept their religion and compelling to endure the religion's rituals in public those who don't is the surest way possible for the Religious Right to kill a vibrant American Christianity. To see the difference such state attachments can make, one need only look at Europe, where established churches have been empty for decades. By contrast, America is the most religious of the Western industrial democracies, to the point that government-sponsored churches in countries such as Sweden and Norway are moving to sever their ties to the state in order to embrace an American model of church-state separation. How ironic that American evangelicals want to move our country in the opposite, failed direction.

An authentic Christianity will defend people like the Dobriches from the bullies in our own ranks. It will also stand up for the separation of church and state so that the Gospel will be free from government influence or filtering and thus be allowed to flourish as it should. It is time for those who hold this authentic faith to stand up for what is right. America needs to see that the Gospel is about love and not oppression, that it is about tolerance and acceptance rather than exclusion and ostracism. In a country where the vast majority claims the name of Jesus Christ, we cannot expect the Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Atheists to be the sole defenders of the good. So if we are to maintain our long tradition of church-state separation and protect religious minorities it is necessary that Christians take up this task as well.

Life is a highway

2006-07-05T12:27:00.000-07:00

Fittingly, we arrived back in SF on the 50th anniversary of the nation's highway system, completing a 6500-mile roundtrip tour of Interstate 80 and a few of its tributaries. I gave up on road-blogging, as you may have noticed. We encountered only one Motel 6 equipped for wireless internet, and while I think it's incredibly cool that all of Iowa's I-80 rest areas have free wireless, I was more eager to get across the state than to stop-and-surf. (And may I just say, bless you, Boulder CO's AM-760/Progressive Talk, for penetrating 200 miles of Wyoming's otherwise unbearable and mysteriously NPR-free airwaves. You made me forget I was in Cheney Country for a few shining hours.) The 1999 Chevy Prizm (manual trans.), burdened with 3-weeks worth of luggage and supplies, and equipped with an on-board Olfactory Positioning System (OPS, aka "Baxter," pictured above), pulled 37-39 MPG most of the way. Coupled with the fact that we paid less for gas along the way than we pay in San Francisco, the trip hurt a lot less than air travel would have!

Say what you will about the likes of Interstate 80 (you probably can't top Charles Kuralt: "Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything." Clearly ~~he's~~ he'd* never been to the World's Largest Truckstop)... But there are some big, beautiful skies out there.
(*Update: corrected a little problem with my tenses; Mr. Kuralt, of course, passed away in 1997.)

I-80 Blogging

2006-06-19T06:29:00.000-07:00

Didn't mean to "go dark" for so long. I tried to log on last weekend to mention that I was hitting the road for awhile, but Blogger was down. I haven't had internet access since! We've logged 3200 miles since last Monday, on a long trip out I-80 from San Francisco to (in this order) Pennsylvania, Ohio and (still to come) Indiana, and Iowa. Then we'll head south and west through Kansas City, the Texas panhandle, New Mexico, AZ and back to SF. I wanted to add photos today, but the new digital Kodak Z740 keeps dozing off before the pictures download, so I need to dig up a universal card reader and try to download that way. I was looking forward to a little I-80 photo-blogging. To the best of my ability, I'm ignoring the news, but I'm reading the good old Findlay Courier this morning and probably won't be able to hold my tongue for long. Meanwhile, peace and all good!

"Parish Council tackles Illegal Immigration Problem"

2006-06-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

Pastor Brian Haller submitted this shocking report to his Swanton, Ohio church newsletter:

Parish Council tackles Illegal Immigration Problem

A recent surprise sweep of Sunday morning worshippers uncovered many undocumented aliens from other denominations right inside our church! Many of them entered as visitors and simply stayed, but several Presbyterians snuck in the back door during the exchange of Peace. Three Episcopalians have obtained Thrivent insurance!

Two Ushers were actually Baptists who were performing jobs that could be filled by real Lutherans, and there was an entire pew of Pentecostals who could only speak in tongues and did not know a word of Lutheran. Four undocumented Roman Catholics were discovered when they yelled “BINGO” in response to “The Lord be with You”.

Concerned that there might not be enough grace to go around, the Parish Council has decided to offer an amnesty program for illegal and undocumented visitors from other denominations. They have until August 1st to pick up a box of offering envelopes.

I think I need to get on Pastor Haller's newsletter mailing list. ("Hat tip" to my mother. And special thanks to Pastor Haller for permission to reprint!)

Friday Desk-clearing

2006-06-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

I worked from home Tuesday and took a break to walk Baxter and vote in California's primary. That's Baxter wearing my "I voted" sticker and waiting for our falafel sandwich outside The Moonlight Cafe.

True to form, progressive Democrats apparently stayed home in droves for Tuesday's primary, leaving the more conservative Dem voters to decide all the ballot issues. Brilliant, folks! If you think that strategy is going to win back the House and Senate this fall, you're as delusional as, well...

...as the author of this letter to Editor & Publisher, written to praise Ann Coulter (no linking to that name, ever; this is a serious blog hygiene issue) for standing up for the rights of "bullied" conservatives everywhere. The letter's author writes (WAIT! clear your mouth of fluids):

...Many of us Conservatives have felt like the schoolyard kid constantly being picked on by the aggressive bullies (the leftwing bomb-throwers) ever since the 2000 election, so we cannot help but applaud the tough kid (Ann) who comes to our aid and punches the bullies back. We are tired of being beaten up.

Ann's words about the "Jersey Girls" was harsh, but no harsher than some of their own words. Who is questioning them? Ann's right. Do these "Jersey Girls" have extra credibility just because they sadly lost loved ones? No! But it's taboo to say so, because they are widows. Ann is pointing that out in a way that makes headlines. In a time when we shy away from showing "offensive cartoons" about Mohammed, it's refreshing to let it all out.

You notice the leftwing bomb-throwers never make the front page with their daily outrageous and hateful statements. The Right is tired of always being polite. I know I am!

Such delicate sensibilities for a member of a party that specializes in hate-mongering, xenophobic, homophobic, race-baiting rhetoric and controls all branches of government and the mainstream media! Dang, if we can bully you, we are a force to be reckoned with!

It's the end of the internet as you know it. This is why they paid Mike McCurry the big bucks! Telecomms win, internet users lose... What does it mean for you? It means that more and more things like this are going to happen. Blocked access, slowed access, selected access... But I'm sure it will have no implications at all for the frighteningly effective progressive "netroots." Only a really paranoid person would think Republicans are trying to hogtie the internet just in time to affect mid-term electioneering.

Types of justice:

Poetic Justice: The slandered and smeared Dixie Chicks debuted at number one on Billboard's pop AND country album lists.

Divine Justice: Ann Coulter, who in 2000 famously referred to Florida Democratic voters as "ignorant and stupid," has had to hire Bush's recount lawyer to fight voter fraud allegations (for trying to vote in the wrong Florida district).

Cheap Justice: Kill, maim, and pay off the families. "A chilling report from the Boston Globe on Thursday reveals that the amount of cash the U.S. military has paid to families of Iraqi civilians killed or badly injured operations involving American troops 'skyrocketed from just under $5 million in 2004 to almost $20 million last year, according to Pentagon financial data.' The payments can range from several hundred dollars for a severed limb to a standard of $2500 for loss of life."

Jesus Christ, [Baseball] Superstar?

2006-06-04T07:51:00.000-07:00

It's just a guess, but I'm thinking that readers of this blog might not also be avid sports fans. I can't help it, it's apparently in my blood, so I peruse the sports page of the newspaper with as much interest (and often despair) as I read the front sections.

One of the most provocative voices writing on sports today is the incomparable Dave Zirin, author of What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States. Zirin is that rarest of folks: a true progressive (socialist, actually) possessing an hilarious wit that cuts through so much of the fluff and boosterism passing for sports fandom these days. His most recent essay in The Nation especially caught my eye because it combines two of my favorite topics: baseball and religion (misuse of). Read and chuckle and weep, all at the same time....

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060619/zirin

It's "Defense of Homophobia" weekend!

2006-06-03T10:11:00.000-07:00

Churches everywhere are being urged to preach about the dangers of same-sex marriage, which, left unchecked, leads to hurricanes, tsunamis, and terrorist attacks (oh, and the demise of traditional families -- but I haven't figured out that chain of causality, yet). The president has taken time off the hard work of planning an invasion of Iran, calculating still more tax breaks for the wealthy, and discouraging energy alternatives to oil in order to warn against (1) the dangers of "activist courts" getting all haughty and acting like the judiciary is a co-equal branch of the government, and (2) the greatest threat to civilization -- yes, children, even greater even than he whose name must never again be mentioned because it will remind us all that he's still out there -- is the prospect that two men or two women might care enough about each other to desire some kind of official acknowledgement of their union. THAT is the real threat to our freedom: Weddings of Mass Destruction (shoot; for a second there, I thought maybe I made that up, but I didn't).

The pope has been doing his part, arguing that the real "pillar of humanity" is traditional heterosexual marriage. I know, you were probably thinking it was going to be "love," or maybe even "justice" or "kindness," weren't you? No, no, no! In fact, according to Rick Santorum (taking time out of his own busy schedule of teaching family values like how to lie about where you live in order to bilk tax payers), it's time to "get beyond, you know, 'we should treat everybody nicely.'"

Why this Sunday, you may ask? Well, the Republicans are facing pretty dismal midterm election probabilities, so they need to fall back on their reliable electoral techniques - hate-mongering and fear-mongering - to get their otherwise uninspired base to the polls. To that end, Bill Frist (yes, the one with the hairy biceps and jungle-print scrubs) moved the marriage amendment to the front burner, and it is up for a vote this week. It's true that it has little chance of passing (as that article link will tell you), but the important thing is to look like they tried, and to make it a "roll call" vote so they can try to embarrass Democrats in the fall.

Kos has Jack Cafferty's take on the matter:

Guess what Monday is? Monday is the day President Bush will speak about an issue near and dear to his heart and the hearts of many conservatives. It's also the day before the Senate votes on the very same thing. Is it the war? Deficits? Health insurance? Immigration? Iran? North Korea?

Not even close. No, the president is going to talk about amending the Constitution in order to ban gay marriage. This is something that absolutely, positively has no chance of happening, nada, zippo, none. But that doesn't matter. Mr. Bush will take time to make a speech. The Senate will take time to talk and vote on it, because it's something that matters to the Republican base.

This is pure politics. If has nothing to do with whether or not you believe in gay marriage. It's blatant posturing by Republicans, who are increasingly desperate as the midterm elections approach. There's not a lot else to get people interested in voting on them, based on their record of the last five years.

But if you can appeal to the hatred, bigotry, or discrimination in some people, you might move them to the polls to vote against that big, bad gay married couple that one day might in down the street.

Any lingering questions about Ohio?

2006-06-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

You won't have after you read RFK Jr's Rolling Stone feature. It begins:

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in "tinfoil hats," while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as "conspiracy theories,"(1) and The New York Times declared that "there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale."(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

It ends:

The issue of what happened in 2004 is not an academic one. For the second election in a row, the president of the United States was selected not by the uncontested will of the people but under a cloud of dirty tricks. Given the scope of the GOP machinations, we simply cannot be certain that the right man now occupies the Oval Office -- which means, in effect, that we have been deprived of our faith in democracy itself.

American history is littered with vote fraud -- but rather than learning from our shameful past and cleaning up the system, we have allowed the problem to grow even worse. If the last two elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a government by the people.

Voting, as Thomas Paine said, "is the right upon which all other rights depend." Unless we ensure that right, everything else we hold dear is in jeopardy.

And the intervening pages are nauseating and infuriating. If you still carry a nostalgic soft spot for "democracy," this will be a difficult but important article to read. Remember that the man who facilitated this fraud on the ground could be Ohio's next governor (I refuse to link to his campaign site).

If I've got any Ohio readers besides my relatives, I'm begging you (including my relatives!): please devote yourself to getting ALL votes logged and counted, and defeat that man!

About that liberal media bias

2006-05-31T21:38:00.000-07:00

Let's review recent examples of liberal media bias shall we? Let's see... the Liberal Media:

thoroughly buried Judy Miller's revelation that a senior White House official leaked intelligence to her in July 2001, indicating advance knowledge that Al Qaeda was planning an attack on American soil; and

quickly suffocated a Boston Globe feature on George W. Bush's unprecedented use of signing statements (750 so far; more than all previous presidents combined) to selectively break laws he finds incovenient (and the Globe's follow-up discovery that Cheney's office specifically screens legislation for provisions it thinks will limit the president's "power"); and

so far ignored the fact that Cheney's office is flagrantly violating the law by not reporting the number of documents he secretly classifies; and

launched another character assassination of Harry Reid (same writer, John Solomon, of the Associated Press), because the first one just didn't do the trick; and to make extra sure this sticks, they've edited subsequent versions to make the story even more misleading (see here, too); and

devoted a week of bloviating to a ridiculous profile of the Clinton marriage (see The Left Coaster on this point, too); and

seems to have successfully shushed up news that the NSA is also reading your email; and

well, you get the idea. This all makes me very tired. But that is precisely the point:

The blogger Billmon writes: "I don't know if it's a byproduct of decades of excessive exposure to television, the state of America's educational system, or something in the water, but the ability of the average journalist -- not to mention the average voter -- to remember things that happened just a few short months ago appears to be slipping into the abyss. "If this keeps up, we're going to end up like the villagers in "One Hundred Years of Solitude," who all contracted a rare form of jungle amnesia, so virulent they were reduced to posting signs on various objects -- 'I AM A COW. MILK ME' or 'I AM A GATE. OPEN ME' -- just so they could get on with their daily lives."

A 1991 science fiction film called Total Recall pictured political amnesia, in the words of Michael Rogin as "an essential aspect of the 'postmodern American empire.'"

A book by Andreas Huyssen takes another tack, arguing, "Rather than blaming amnesia on television or the school, "Twilight Memories" argues that the danger of amnesia is inherent in the information revolution. Our obsessions with cultural memory can be read as re-representing a powerful reaction against the electronic archive, and they mark a shift in the way we live structures of temporality."

But whatever the causes, the consequences are truly frightening. When 63 percent of young people can't find Iraq on a map after three years of war and coverage, you know that the institutions that claim to be informing us are doing everything but.

Read the rest of Danny Schecter's "Political Amnesia is the enemy."

Declare peace!

2006-05-29T08:21:00.000-07:00

Readers who were around when the Vietnam war was raging will recall the proposal to end that conflict put forward by commonsensical New Englander George Aiken, senator from Vermont: "Declare victory and withdraw." Sadly, that did not happen and the war continued until the withdrawal happened anyway, along with the loss of more than 58,000 U.S. military lives and perhaps as many as 4 million civilian lives as well.

We now find ourselves in another era of needless and tragic conflict, and we have another opportunity to bring it to an end: The Declaration of Peace. It is a call to end the war, and a commitment to take action to translate the call into a concrete plan for peace. The Declaration is a pledge to take nonviolent steps for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq -- and to engage in peaceful protest if a comprehensive withdrawal plan is not established and begun by September 21, 2006, International Peace Day, just days before Congress adjourns for the fall elections.

People in the Bay Area, and especially those living in the Peninsula/South Bay region, have a wonderful opportunity to hear more about the Declaration of Peace from one of its premier advocates, Father Louis Vitale. Everyone is invited to an evening with Louie on Monday, June 5, in San Mateo. See below for details and check out the website www.declarationofpeace.org for more information.

As I have reflected on this initative (a brainchild of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service), its necessity has become clear to me. Both as a nation and as a member of the global community we have many challenges, and we will fail to meet any of them until the economic, moral, and spiritual drain of the Iraq occupation has ceased. The Declaration of Peace is that comprehensive and concrete plan that we have been waiting for, and I hope that all peacemakers will respond to the call to support it in whatever way we can. To echo another Vermonter, "You have the power" -- we the people have the power to declare peace, and in the failure of our current political leadership, declare it we must. Join us on June 5th to learn more!

Network of Spiritual Progressives-San Mateo County,
Pax Christi Burlingame, and
Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service present

The Declaration of
Peace

An Evening with

Fr. Louis Vitale
Franciscan Priest and Nonviolent Action Advocate

Monday, June 5, 7:30 pm
Transfiguration Episcopal Church, Parish Hall
3900 Alameda de las Pulgas, San Mateo

The Declaration of Peace is a commitment to take nonviolent steps for a comprehensive, concrete, and rapid end to the war in Iraq. With nearly seventy percent of the people of the United States supporting an end to the war, there is a growing call to bring the troops home now. Together, people of faith and people of conscience have the power to declare a new era of peace and justice.

Join Fr. Louis Vitale to learn more about this proposal for bold, powerful and peaceful steps to help establish a comprehensive withdrawal plan. A longtime social activist, Louie co-founded the Nevada Desert Experience, a movement to end nuclear testing. He served 13 years as pastor of St. Boniface Catholic Church in the Tenderloin and recently completed a six-month sentence for nonviolent action to close the School of the Americas/WHINSEC at Ft. Benning, Georgia.

Freewill offerings to support the Declaration of Peace will be gratefully received.
For more information, contact: Anne Carey, 415-238-0704, http://www.declarationofpeace.org/

Create peace.
Create alternatives.
Create hope.
End the US war in Iraq.

Hamza El Din

2006-05-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

I've developed a fascination with oud music in the last couple of years - to the extent that I even bought a beginner's oud on Ebay and found some free online tutorials in the hope that I might learn to play. This year being a little crowded and complicated, I haven't gotten much further than plucking and admiring the instrument, but I look forward to rewarding myself with practice time this summer. (A musician acquaintance says I really should find an oud teacher in order not to develop bad playing habits, but that is definitely not in the budget.) Last year I picked up a used copy of Hamza El Din's CD A Wish and I've played it so often I have all the tunes memorized.

I just learned today that Hamza El Din died this week. Jon Pareles wrote his NY Times obit, a shorter version of which was published in the Long Beach Press Telegram:

He made quite a musical din
By Jon Pareles , The New York Times
(Long Beach Press Telegram)

Hamza El Din, an oud player and composer who reinvented the musical culture of Nubia and carried it worldwide, died Monday in Berkeley. He was 76.

The cause was complications after surgery, said his wife, Nadra.

El Din's austere, hypnotic music was based on his research into the traditions of Nubia, an ancient North African kingdom on the upper Nile, which was a cradle of civilization.

Hamza El Din was born in 1929 in Egypt, in what had been the territory of ancient Nubia, a crossroads of trade that flourished as early as the fourth millennium B.C. Nubia's former territory is now part of Egypt and the Sudan, and El Din's hometown, Toshka, was flooded after the building of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. He studied electrical engineering and worked for the national railroad in Cairo, Egypt.

But he was drawn to music, first playing the round hand drum called the tar and then taking up the oud, a six-stringed lute.

When he learned about the plans to build the Aswan Dam, which flooded much of ancient Nubia, he grew determined to preserve Nubian culture.

He studied Arabic music at Ibrahim Shafiq's Institute of Music and at the King Fouad Institute for Middle Eastern Music. He also traveled through villages in Egypt by donkey, collecting Nubian songs. With a grant from the Italian government, he studied Western music and classical guitar at the Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome.

He drew on his studies, and on surviving Nubian traditions, to create music that fused rhythms and inflections from Nubia with Arabic classical elements and a virtuosic approach to the oud, an instrument not traditionally played in Nubia. El Din performed in 1964 at the Newport Folk Festival and recorded two albums for the folk label Vanguard in 1964 and 1965. He moved to the United States, where he was a mentor to musicians, including the guitarist and oud player Sandy Bull. He settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1971 his album "Escalay (The Water Wheel)" was released on the Nonesuch Explorer label.

Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead produced El Din's album "Eclipse" (Rykodisc); El Din helped arrange for the Dead to perform at the Great Pyramids in Egypt in 1978.

El Din also made albums for Lotus Records and Sounds True. His music was used for movie soundtracks and for dance pieces by the Paris Opera Ballet, Maurice Bejart Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet; and he composed music for a version of the Aeschylus play "The Persians," directed by Peter Sellars at the Salzburg Festival.

He had stints teaching ethnomusicology at Ohio University, the University of Washington and the University of Texas. During the 1980s, with a grant from the Japan Foundation to work on a comparative study of the Arabic oud and the biwa, a Japanese plucked lute, he moved to Tokyo, where he lived until the mid-1990s.

El Din collaborated with ensembles including the Kronos Quartet, which recorded an arrangement of "Escalay" in 1992. When he returned to the United States, he resettled in the San Francisco Bay Area.

His most recent album, "A Wish" (Sounds True), was released in 1999, but his wife said that he had recently completed recording a new album.

There's a nice summary of his work here, too. (If you're not familiar with the sound of an oud, listen to a few of the recordings on this site.)

The Religious Left gets a pat on the head from the NYT

2006-05-25T15:05:00.000-07:00

I suppose it's possible to write a more condescending article about the "Religious Left" than this one, but I think you'd have to be on the Religious Right to do it.

Political Memo
Religious Left Struggles to Find Unifying Message
By NEELA BANERJEE
WASHINGTON, May 18 — They had come to All Souls Unitarian Church, 1,200 of them from 39 states, to wrest the mantle of moral authority from conservative Christians, and they were finally planning how to take their message to those in power.

After rousing speeches on Wednesday by liberal religious leaders like Rabbi Michael Lerner of the magazine Tikkun and Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, participants in the new Network of Spiritual Progressives split into small groups to prepare for meetings with members of Congress on Thursday.

Yet at a session on ethical behavior, including sexual behavior, the 50 or so activists talked little about what to tell Congress about abortion or same-sex marriage. Instead, the Rev. Ama Zenya of First Congregational Church in Oakland, Calif., urged them to talk to one another about their spiritual values and "to practice fully our authentic being."

Kimberly Crichton, a Washington lawyer and Quaker, grew impatient. "I think we would be more effective if we focused on specific legislation," Ms. Crichton said. "Are we going to discuss specific policies?"

Ms. Zenya replied: "What we envisioned this time is saying we are a religious voice. More relationship-building, consciousness-raising."

The man in the pew in front of Ms. Crichton translated: "The answer is, no."

Since the last presidential election, liberals of various faiths have talked about taking back religion from the conservative Christians who helped bring President Bush and a Republican Congress to power.

Yet liberal believers have so far been unable to approach, even modestly, the success of the religious right and command the attention of Congress.

Turnout at the Spiritual Activism Conference is high, but if the gathering is any indication, the biggest barrier for liberals may be their regard for pluralism: for letting people say what they want, how they want to, and for trying to include everyone's priorities, rather than choosing two or three issues that could inspire a movement.

"We didn't get on the same page with everyone, and it is about getting on the same page," said the Rev. Tony Campolo, an outspoken liberal Baptist minister from Pennsylvania who once served as a spiritual adviser to President Bill Clinton, and attended the conference. "The thing about the left is that they want everybody to feel good."

Initiatives by liberals have been percolating locally and nationally, from state interfaith alliances in Ohio to counter a powerful conservative Christian movement there to national campaigns to reduce poverty led by liberal evangelicals like the Rev. Jim Wallis.

The Democratic Party itself is wrestling with the best way to shake an image of indifference to religion. Most recently, the party's national chairman, Howard Dean, courted evangelicals by appearing on Pat Robertson's television program, "The 700 Club." In the process, Mr. Dean alienated gay and lesbian supporters of the Democratic Party by misstating the party's platform on same-sex marriage.

Religious leaders at the conference here cautioned that it would take years before liberal believers could match the savvy and strength of conservative Christian groups.

But Rabbi Lerner, the editor of Tikkun, the progressive Jewish magazine, and an organizer of the spiritual progressives' network, rejected the approach that Democrats have so far taken to faith, describing it as window-dressing.

He called on the activists at All Souls Church to define progressive faith, rather than have politicians do it. He said research begun years ago showed that Americans were experiencing a deep spiritual crisis but that only conservative Christians had responded to it, with an agenda that he said "backs the ethos of selfishness and materialism in our society."

"They get away with this because the left isn't even in the relevant ballpark," Rabbi Lerner said.

When people on the left "hear talk of a spiritual crisis, they think it's some kind of New Age flakery or a code word for homophobia, sexism and racism," he said.

He urged participants to offer a real alternative to the ideas that many conservative Christian groups promulgate. But identifying those alternatives proved to be the hard part for many at the conference.

Mr. Campolo, the Baptist minister, explained to the participants in a seminar that many people on Capitol Hill were religious, and that to reach them and to establish authority, liberals should rely on the Bible.

"You have no right to be a spiritual leader if you haven't read Scripture," he told the group.

"People in Congress respect the Book, even if they don't know what it says. If we don't recognize this, we don't know squat."

A young man with long hair and a tunic challenged Mr. Campolo.

"I thought this was a spiritual progressives' conference," he said. "I don't want to play the game of 'the Bible says this or that,' or that we get validation from something other than ourselves. We should be speaking from our hearts."

Carol Gottesman was urged at her group to speak from her heart about her priority, the environment. A 64-year-old nurse from Hubbard, Ohio, and a Conservative Jew, Ms. Gottesman spoke Thursday with her congressman, Tim Ryan, a Democrat. It was one of dozens of meetings the network had set up.

Mr. Ryan, who had read about the network on the Internet, asked Ms. Gottesman if the group was pushing specific policies.

"No, it's more that we want to take caring and generosity and bring it into everything," she said.

Mr. Ryan responded: "Spread love, not hate. Pretty simple. Do you have a little network back home?"

Ms. Gottesman squared her shoulders proudly and said, "I'm it."

I will concede the one point: "the biggest barrier for liberals may be their regard for pluralism: for letting people say what they want, how they want to, and for trying to include everyone's priorities" - and of course the same could be said of progressives in the Democratic party at large. Perhaps it could be said of the whole Democratic party. It is mathematically and in all other ways impossible to address all of our often-conflicting priorities, and we have a notorious tendency to dissolve into territorial bickering while the Right executes their vaunted "message discipline." But the rest of the article strikes me as an exercise in making the participants look as flakey as possible without having to actually publish it on the op-ed page.

Contrast that article with speaker Joan Chittister's reflections on the same event:

To be perfectly honest, I really didn’t expect many people to come. It opened with an early morning session. What’s more, it was a kind of opening before the official opening of a three day event. At a jamboree like that, nobody goes to every session, however committed they may be.

By the time I got there, 30 minutes before the session was to start, the church was packed to the rafters; more than 1,100 people were registered and walk-ins streamed in. It was a conference of “Spiritual Progressives,” almost all of them officially representing an organization rather than simply themselves.

If there is any single phenomenon going on in the world of politics today, it is clearly the proliferation of small religiously inspired groups intent on relating public issues to traditional moral principles.

The only difference between this situation and the national political world of the 2004 election is that this time the groups have a leftist, a liberal or a progressive bent -- depending on whatever euphemism appeals to you. Once caught off-guard by the political sophistication of the religious right -- the breadth and depth of its national organization and its single-issue public agenda -- progressive groups this time are clearly intent on providing another voice, a new accent to the language of religion on the national scene.

Many of the liberal groups are long-established supporters of a traditional populist agenda: Tikkun, Sojourners, Pax Christi, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Many more are newcomers to the political scene, fresh and intent but small and basically separate from one another in everything but their common concerns about ecology, poverty, the social safety net, peace and U.S. foreign policy.

The list of conference supporters itself was a clear reminder to those who substitute demographic dominance for political philosophy that the United States is not “a Christian nation.” It is a nation founded “under God” which, for past historical reasons, is still a nation whose religious majority is predominantly Christian, yes, but even those are split into a myriad of creeds, liturgical rites and spiritual practices.

No surprise then that the list of conference sponsors and affiliates included Buddhist groups, Humanists, the Progressive Muslim Union, the Shambala Sun, Jewish organizations, New Dimensions, the Christian Alliance for Progress, and Pace e Bene. Among a host of others.

Unlike the Rightists, these groups are largely independent of any single or official church body. Translation: They are not being either spearheaded or funded by any religious body.

Nor are they politically defined as either Republican or Democrat. Many, in fact, have given up on both parties and are simply looking for candidates who espouse a moral view of the world that is global in scope and universally just in its intentions.

They are, therefore, largely lay organized but spiritually inspired. The feeling seems to be that it was ministers, priests and bishops who got us the present Administration. Now time has shown us that elections are too important to be trusted to clerical groups. Anybody’s clerical group.

This time, then, they are determined to bring lay theologians, ethicists, activists and professionals to bear on the moral issues of the time rather than trust the soul of the nation to any such single issue groups again.

The next election, the thinking is, has to be about all of the commandments, not just one or two of them. Otherwise the globe, as well as the country, may well be in very serious danger from the moral issues to which we are now paying very little attention at all: peace, education, economic devastation of the working class, the ecological destruction of the globe and life issues of all ilk rather than simply a few.

For that matter, contrast it with the piece in the Washington Post just last weekend (I linked to it here, too). Incidentally, I somehow missed the NYT article so I'm glad sojo.net gave a heads-up.

Quite possibly the most revolting profile you'll ever read

2006-05-24T14:55:00.000-07:00

You can thank Atrios for ruining your dinner. He linked to this revolting profile of Bill Frist:

In medical school, Frist cut out a dog's heart and held it in his palm. It continued to beat for a slippery minute.

"Watching it beat, the beauty of it," Frist recalled. "I decided I would spend my life centered around the heart."

"And you didn't say 'I'll take some time off and be a politician' while you were holding the dog heart," Karyn said.

Frist, in a gray suit, picked up his file marked "ZOO" and said, "We've got to be on time to open the Senate."

He climbed into the back of his black SUV; his driver steered toward the zoo. "I gravitate towards insurmountable problems," Frist said, his long legs spilling between the front seats. "I try to use creative solutions." One day, he hopes to cure AIDS or cancer. He sucked on the stem of his glasses: "The typical person around here may not understand."

At the zoo hospital, a team of four veterinarians, three technicians, an animal keeper and a veterinary dentist were wheeling a 350-pound gorilla into surgery as Frist arrived. They would perform an ultrasound of the heart, a root canal and a physical. Frist joined the team, as he had on other mornings, tying on a mask. He unbuttoned his business shirt, revealing jungle-pattern surgical scrubs and a pair of hairy, toned biceps.

"A little bit like Superman," said the dentist, Chuck Williams.

Frist snapped on rubber gloves. He leaned over the operating table, gripping the corners. An oxygen monitor beeped. The patient gagged.

"This is home," Frist said through his mask. "Where I spent 12 hours a day for 20 years." Frist spent so much time in the hospital in Tennessee that when he came home to his wife and three sons he felt like an intruder.

He pressed his stethoscope to the gorilla's chest and narrowed his eyes. Kuja, a silverback patriarch, was breathing isofluorine. He was the Senate majority leader of the gorillas, who negotiated disputes, back-slapped the ape boys and owned exclusive mating rights with the females. When Kuja started to stir, a veterinarian injected more anesthesia. One backhanded swipe could break Frist's neck.

Frist listened to the heart; the gorilla's lub-dub sounded human. "When you're this close, you feel this kind of oneness with them," Frist said. The stink of ape sweat and gorilla testosterone soaked his hair and clothes. "Gorillas, people, men. You look at the people here, a symphonic flow of people pitching in. It's the oneness of humanity."

This kind of oneness does not come easily to Frist. Though devoted to matters of the heart, Frist acknowledges that he is aloof, something he traces back to the day he refused to attend kindergarten. He calls it "the Great Wall," an emotional barrier that has kept him from having close friends. It is a wall that could block his connection with voters, some say, and his way to the White House.

But in the operating room there were no walls, only bridges, as one arm reached over another. A veterinarian rotated the ultrasound probe over Kuja's heart. The dentist tweezed out the bloody string of a root canal -- "Isn't this exciting?" And Frist slipped an IV needle into Kuja's vein. His gloves turned red with gorilla blood.

"There's almost a spiritual, poetic component to it," Frist said, his eyes expressing what his surgical mask hid. "This oneness, this wholeness. You can't compare it to the Senate floor. I immerse myself in it. This is my real life."

I just can't bring myself to quote more. Laura Blumenfeld may have a future in truly awful bodice-ripper writing, but for the love of God and all that's sacred, keep her away from political profiles. Is she the editor's high school daughter? Did she win this assignment because she has compromising photos of someone? "Hairy, toned biceps"? "His eyes expressing what his surgical mask hid"??? Maybe it's a joke. Could this be a joke?

I happen to know a bit about this heart disease, having lost a good gorilla friend to it in my animal caretaker days. I also know there IS literature, albeit thin and frustrating. I wish I could say that the fact Frist is working on this problem raises him a notch or two in my estimation, but mostly, I'm scared for the gorillas.

Birdless Feeder Update

2006-05-22T17:09:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you recall my lament on the birdless feeder. Well, I'm pleased to report that the feeding population has quadrupled this season: we now FOUR regular avian visitors, and seem to have thwarted the rats, somehow. Or they've simply grown too fat and heavy on birdseed to climb up the feeder posts.

In theory, the thumbnails below are "clickable" - click on each for a larger version. They're all being hosted at Photobucket, which is a terrific free service that - at least this evening - runs rings around Blogger's photo-loading utility.

The mouthy scrub jay, who we call Frank, has begun bringing his partner, Ernestine. They are strapping specimens, and a bit large for the feeders...

So they take their seeds to a fence post and crack them open.

The jays announce themselves with a grating, piercing shriek as they sail into the backyard, and the cats - now thoroughly conditioned to it - race to the window from all over the house to watch them.

We've also had regular visits from a pair of house finches.

And though she doesn't count as a "feeder" (because she came to the front window), a mourning dove stopped on the windowsill a couple of times to check on my thesis progress.

...As one of our Ace Birders snoozed soundly about 3 feet away.

She hasn't returned, however, and I suspect she showed up one day when the cats were all awake, and is presently recovering in a cardiac ICU.

Thanks for indulging me. Now for a real bird photo blog, check out Mike's Birding and Digiscoping Blog or Stokes Birding Blog.

And we're back...

2006-05-21T21:45:00.000-07:00

Seems like coming out of hibernation is a good time for a little spring cleaning and redecorating, don't you think? While we "slept," we had our second birthday, and passed the 11,000 mark in our visitor counter! So I spent a few hours this afternoon fussing around testing new templates and creating the new "header" while my brain steadfastly refused to work on revisions to my thesis. (I'm sure my advisor will understand.) The header may be a work-in-progress; is the font hard to read?

My semester officially ended Friday. I wrote and defended my thesis (passed with "minor revisions"), stayed afloat in my three lecture classes and one reading course, and managed not to get fired from my 20-hour/week statistical programming job (which has nothing to do with my degree in ethics, except to make food and shelter possible). If all goes well, revisions will be finished in the next couple of weeks and I can close the books on the MA program. I'll try to squeeze in fulltime hours at work during the summer before starting the doctoral program in the fall. I'll let abc catch you up on her "sabbatical," but I know she has been very busy preparing a very special event she'll be telling you about in the next week or so.

Now, then... I can't tell you how hard it has been to sit on my blogging hands during these four months, while the White House and GOP self-destruct and try to take us all down with them. But for the most part, I'm going to pick things up in the here and now and will indulge in historical snark only when appropriate. So here are just a few items while we get up to speed.

The Washington Post rediscovers the Religious Left!

Religious Liberals Gain New Visibility
A Different List Of Moral Issues

By Caryle Murphy and Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 20, 2006; A01

The religious left is back.

Long overshadowed by the Christian right, religious liberals across a wide swath of denominations are engaged today in their most intensive bout of political organizing and alliance-building since the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, according to scholars, politicians and clergy members.

In large part, the revival of the religious left is a reaction against conservatives' success in the 2004 elections in equating moral values with opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

Religious liberals say their faith compels them to emphasize such issues as poverty, affordable health care and global warming. Disillusionment with the war in Iraq and opposition to Bush administration policies on secret prisons and torture have also fueled the movement.

"The wind is changing. Folks -- not just leaders -- are fed up with what is being portrayed as Christian values," said the Rev. Tim Ahrens, senior minister of First Congregational Church of Columbus, Ohio, and a founder of We Believe Ohio, a statewide clergy group established to ensure that the religious right is "not the only one holding a megaphone" in the public square.

"As religious people we're offended by the idea that if you're not with the religious right, you're not moral, you're not religious," said Linda Gustitus, who attends Bethesda's River Road Unitarian Church and is a founder of the new Washington Region Religious Campaign Against Torture. "I mean there's a whole universe out there [with views] different from the religious right. . . . People closer to the middle of the political spectrum who are religious want their voices heard."

Recently, there has been an increase in books and Web sites by religious liberals, national and regional conferences, church-based discussion groups, and new faith-oriented political organizations. "Organizationally speaking, strategically speaking, the religious left is now in the strongest position it's been in since the Vietnam era," said Clemson University political scientist Laura R. Olson...

It's a sweeping and simplistic overview, but nice to see. Christy at Firedoglake, and DarkSyde at Daily Kos both have thoughtful reflections on the topic.

Yet another deadly mine accident. Still no congressional action on tightening mine safety restrictions weakened by the current administration, but then they've been very busy protecting the English language.

Kevin Phillips excerpts his new book, American Theocracy at The Nation.

As a great power, a large heterogeneous nation like the United States goes about as far in a theocratic direction as it can when it meets the unfortunate criteria on display in George W. Bush's Washington: an elected leader who believes himself in some way to be speaking for God; a ruling party that represents religious true believers and seeks to mobilize the nation's churches; the conviction of many rank-and-file Republicans that government should be guided by religion and religious leaders; and White House implementation of domestic and international political agendas that seem to be driven by religious motivations and biblical worldviews.

It's a long article, but he's always worth it.

Not only is the NSA tracking more calls than the president has admitted, they're listening to them, too. (Kind of a "must read.")

I only read him when I can get past the first two paragraphs without throwing things... This column passed that test: George Will admits that the left can have "values voters," too!

An aggressively annoying new phrase in America's political lexicon is "values voters." It is used proudly by social conservatives, and carelessly by the media to denote such conservatives.

This phrase diminishes our understanding of politics. It also is arrogant on the part of social conservatives and insulting to everyone else because it implies that only social conservatives vote to advance their values and everyone else votes to... well, it is unclear what they supposedly think they are doing with their ballots.

On Sunday a Los Angeles Times article on the possibility of a presidential run by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush reported:

"The Family Research Council, an influential evangelical activist group, has invited Gov. Bush to appear at a fall conference of 'values voters.' " On Monday the Wall Street Journal quoted a pastor who is president of a Texas-based organization, Vision America, that mobilizes conservative pastors: "Values voters see their vote as a sacred trust."

The phrase "values voters," which has become ubiquitous, subtracts from social comity by suggesting that one group has cornered the market on moral seriousness.

It's actually fairly even-handed.

Letter from prison

2006-03-28T15:54:00.000-08:00

One of us (abc) is a voluntary refugee from St. Boniface Church, a Catholic parish in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Last year our pastor, Fr. Louis Vitale, a priest of the Franciscan order, moved on after 13 years at St. Boniface to work full-time for peace and justice. A committed activist, he has been arrested more than 200 times for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience at Vandenberg Air Force Base, the Nevada Test Site, on the streets of San Francisco, and most recently at the School of the Americas, Fort Benning, Georgia. In November Louie was arrested for crossing the line at the SOA (his second offense at that site) and in January he received a six-month sentence, which he is serving in the Crisp County Jail in Cordele, Georgia. During his incarceration he has sent back messages to his friends and supporters, and the latest is copied below. Receive it as a gift of this season of Lent, and join me in gratitude for this living saint!

Reflection on a Lenten Wilderness Retreat in a Georgia“desert”
March 2006

“LIGHTNING EAST TO WEST”

As Lent 2006 began to dawn on my Crisp County hermitage cell I felt a call to a deeper Lenten Experience. I had received a letter from Jim Douglass offering his phone number for a collect call. Early Ash Wednesday morning I placed a call to him asking for some spiritual additional food for Lent. (Jerry Zawada and I shared a Lenten retreat last year with the Douglasses’ community in Birmingham, Alabama, on the theme of the wildernesses of life where—as Jesus and John the Baptist—we discover God.) I recalled to him how during a three month “retreat” at the Camaldolese Hermitage in Big Sur California I had a great spiritual theophany while reading his book Lightning East to West. Two days later I had the book as well as the finally published Peace in the Post-Christian Era by Thomas Merton. I was ready for the 1st Sunday of Lent.

The title recalls Mt. 24:27: “The coming of the son of man will be like lightning striking in the East and flashing far into the West”—an image of the second coming of Christ. I had been through the experience of our dear Friar brother Ed Dunn dying a couple of weeks earlier. I experienced, locked in my cell, his life pass and merge into the resurrection of Jesus and felt his presence fill the sky from the Coast of California to my eastern presence in the State of Georgia—I also experienced his life as one engrossed in the very human struggles of the family of God in Latin America, on U.S. borders, and in the labor of farm workers on the streets of our cities. Ed had joined our Las Vegas community when we were engaging that lightning force of nuclear weapons that Douglass traces to Einstein’s discovery E=mc2 –that taking even an infinitesimal mass to approach the speed of light (c2) can bring an eruption of almost
infinite energy. Our desert in Nevada had experienced that and its deadly traces were only too evident—not only that (the history of testing nuclear bombs) but also there is continual tension towards repeating the 2 times we unleashed such a diabolical force deliberately targeting the people of Japan. The clock ticking towards this re-enactment of the end-times is by viewed by many as the threshold of nuclear holocaust. We witness the tensions with Iran, between India & Pakistan, the well-known desires of many to obtain nuclear weapons as a national goal or as leverage to address grievances. The U.S. has moved from a defensive posture to an announced willingness and ability to engage in successful pre-emptive nuclear attack against other nuclear powers and even against a nation without nuclear weapons. Again and again even those who have armed and targeted such weapons of mass destruction (such as Gen. Lee Butler) warn us that once we cross this line the “lightning flash” encompassing the world is near inevitable. This readiness and for some eagerness to bring on the endtime has been well attested by experts (cf. for example “The Perils of Primacy” by BenjaminSchwarz—Atlantic Monthly Jan/Feb 2006). My last sojourn as a federal inmate was on the border of the Nevada Test Site as we prepared such weapons for the emerging war in Iraq.

The spectre of the world on “hair trigger alert” for nuclear holocaust once again fills the void of my incarcerated life and so I turn to Douglass’ search for/promise of an antidote—Douglass turns first to Gandhi (also drawing from Einstein’s conviction that there is a continuous harmony in creation) and the awareness of an equally near infinite spiritual power—that within a person or even more a community lies an equal lightning energy. Hebrews Ch. 1 quotes Ps 104:4: “God makes those who serve to be like flashes of lightning.” Gandhi speculates just as the speed of light—the activator for physical energy—there is an underlying reality that can project even a single human thought into a world engaging spiritual transformation. For Douglass and Gandhi this is seen in Jesus’ life beginning with his time in the wilderness where he foregoes the temptations to “worldly” power and possession for a life totally given in selfless love & service. This life of total nonviolent love of “God” and neighbor continually transforms aspects of our world.

During my retreat here in my own wilderness of my Crisp County cell I reflect deeply on this nonviolent love demonstrated by Jesus. Jerry Zawada and I began our follow up in Jail to our School of the Americas protest by commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the massacre of 4 religious women (Ita, Maura, Dorothy & Jean) in El Salvador. They had forecast this in a prayer service the night before their death that to share the life of the poor in El Salvador meant to experience their fate: capture, disappearance, torture & death. We also recalled Sr. Dorothy Stang recently killed in Brazil while defending in total nonviolence the rights of rubber growers. As she knelt and read Jesus’ words of mercy and forgiveness she received their bullets in her face and died in a total act of love and acceptance. We also continue to walk a journey with 4 members of the Christian Peacemaking Team in Iraq who went with acceptance & nonviolence as involuntary guests into the hands of frustrated Iraqis who do not seem to recognize their gift of their lives to them (so similar to Jesus). On and on these stories flow and many more of every day people caring for loved ones, sharing their goods and lives with others. And they pierce the sky like lightning. Thomas Merton discovered this energy as he engaged the spiritual force in total self-emptying that comes to those who pierce all self-centeredness, selfishness, greed and violence by an inner transformation in contemplation. They carry out Jesus’ search in the wilderness to find the underlying reality of goodness/godness that most religions and spiritual people see as the unifying source in which we all participate. We experience the merging of the inner and the outer in all encompassing nonviolence seen so well in the lives of Francis & Clare of Assisi, Gandhi, King, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, the women were called above who serve, suffer, go to prison (we recall Sisters Ardeth, Carol, Jackie recently released from 3-4 years in prison for pouring out their own blood & energy to say “no” to the
nuclear holocaust.)

Douglass concludes by recalling one of Merton’s final experiences. A week before his death as he experienced great stone Buddhas in Ceylon and was struck by “the Great Smiles”; knowing everything, rejecting nothing—radiating peace—Merton realized their peace & smiles came from a radical self-emptying that reflects the total reality—‘everything is emptiness and everything is compassion.’ Douglass concludes “In our resistance to humankind’s destruction, we need to live and act in the spirit of ultimate perfect emptiness and compassion if we are to experience a way of transformation.” As I read these words, Sr. Mary Litell wrote me of a Lenten reflection she was leading in a socially conscious parish on the theme “awe (what remains when we achieve emptiness) and compassion.” Yes it is on the threshold of our consciousness and when persons and communities truly live this we will approach a critical mass that can bring about that lightning flash of the second coming, not by mass destruction imposed by a vengeful God or destructive human and technological “progress” but an emergence of love embracing all from East to West & West to East.

I hope to experience this emptying and compassion here among those considered least socially desirable in our U.S. community (such that we have 2 million locked up in seemingly endless and inhumane imprisonment and in the Guantanamo Bays and ghetto prisons, and on and on--). Yes we need to see & experience all creation in awe and with compassion and the peaceable kin-dom of which Jesus spoke—and so many other religious seers point us to with Hope—will come to be. May we all pray together during these forty days and be visible signs of Alleluya when the glory of the promise of Resurrection (or whatever fulfilled spiritual goals we embrace) draws us into the one Reality from which we all come, in which we all live.

Peace and all good, Louie

We interrupt this sabbatical again...

2006-03-26T22:23:00.000-08:00

...Because this is important and a few of you might stumble onto it in time.

The World Bank board of directors is meeting this Tuesday, March 28. Jubilee USA is organizing a call-in to urge the board to stop delaying debt relief to the world's poorest countries. Here is background info on debt relief from Jubilee USA. Here is a letter-writing wizard the ELCA offers to help you tailor an emailed letter to World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz (yes, that Paul Wolfowitz). But please call if you can. Here is Faithful America's action page.

Now, as long as I've got your attention: Please read Sister Joan this week!

We interrupt this sabbatical...

2006-03-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

...for a message worth reading, from the pen of Eric Alterman via The Nation. Here's a nice teaser:

The moronic level of cable discourse notwithstanding, missing from almost all discussions of the role of religion in public life is what William James famously termed the "varieties of religious experience." The right-wing hijacking of religion's public role in our political discourse is as undeniable as it is inappropriate, and represents one of liberalism's most serious problems.

Is it possible that the Bush-Cheney PR nosedive (ports management, documentation of pre-Katrina briefing, plunging poll numbers) is somehow related to a reconsideration of the left about what religion means for those of us for whom it means something? We'll stay tuned for more hints of this, even in our sabbatical mode.

What's going on around here?

2006-02-12T09:44:00.000-08:00

So here's the scoop. I (MizM) am now in my final semester of a masters program (environmental ethics), taking four classes and finishing a thesis. I will be starting the doctoral program in the fall, so my MA thesis must be completed and defended by the end of this semester. Although it will be a very hard habit to break, I cannot afford to spend the usual amount of time I spend scanning the news and the blogs for good stuff to share with you here. My intrepid co-blogger, abc also has her hands full this spring, as she is using her "retirement" to do some very important advocacy and organizing work.

For those reasons, we have decided to put the blog under light sedation for the coming four months. We will inevitably, knowing the two of us, be compelled to wake it up and post something* from time to time, but not with the "regularity" (stop laughing!) we've attempted thus far.

So I've added a little reminder message on the title bar, to reduce the frustration of clicking on your bookmark and finding the same dang page you saw last time. I've also added a funny little orange button on the sidebar, next to the Sitemeter counter. Those of you who use homepage services of various kinds (My Yahoo, My AOL, personalized Google, etc.), or who subscribe to aggregators like Bloglines, can use that button to "subscribe" to Left At The Altar and automatically receive new postings if and when they happen.

Bear with us, and please don't drift away forever!

(*Update: This story, for instance, begs posting. A VA nurse investigated for sedition because she wrote an editorial criticizing the administration?!)

Bird(less) feeder blogging

2006-02-12T09:30:00.000-08:00

Since moving to a different part of the neighborhood last June, I've noticed something missing. Birds! At the old house, the garden was popping with birds every morning - as were the gardens of surrounding neighbors. Now, these are mostly tiny "backyard" gardens (single-family homes in our part of SF do not have "side yards" or "front yards"; most don't even have spaces between adjoining houses), a very few of which were lucky enough to have one big established tree, like a fir, or a eucalyptus. But birds were everywhere, singing and dining. Mostly your garden variety Little Brown Jobs, lots of hummingbirds, the occasional house finch, warbler, kinglet, a pair of flickers, mourning doves, etc.

The new place has a huge, non-fruiting avocado tree in the back, a bouganvilla, and an enormous prickly pear cactus. Plus shrubby stuff that we've added. A house right behind ours has a old acacia in full flower. Another has what looks like a fruiting pomelo tree.

But no birds!

Well, OK, there is one scrub jay who mouths off from the avocado tree every once in awhile, and from time to time a zillion starlings will swarm briefly on the telephone wires out in front, and then vanish. I can't figure it out: there are fewer dogs on this block than on the old one, and fewer outdoor cats... But we're also closer to the highways, now, with nonstop traffic noise and grit.

I'm stumped. But last weekend I set up the bird(less) feeder station you see above. So far, no takers. The jay landed on the hook yesterday and yelled for a minute, but did not dine. Perhaps it will take awhile for word to spread. Maybe I should leaflet the area like the Chinese restaurants do -- I'll hang menus on the trees and shrubs of surrounding blocks, urging the birds to visit and sample my fortified hummingbird juice, my delectable seed selection, the neighbor's pomelos...

What's not to be disgusted by, today?

2006-02-09T20:33:00.000-08:00

(No idea who the kid is. I found the photo here.)

The White House lied when they claimed to have been surprised by New Orlean's levee failure.

Karl Rove apparently put out a hit on Harry Reid, and the AP gleefully carried it out... (Except that, by the end of the story, they present no evidence of wrongdoing; they're satisfied to imply guilt by association.)

Bush unloaded a ~~steaming pile of horse dung~~ Weapon of Mass Deception on the public, giving new-but-untenable and uncorroborated details of a 2004 plot to fly a plane into a tall building in Los Angeles. The disruption of said plot owes nothing to his domestic spying program, but we need it anyway...

He also snuck his unpopular Social Security privatization plan into this year's immoral budget...

Meanwhile, did you see the NYT story on moral disengagement? (If you're an old psych major, you'll recognize some Big Names.) (Thanks, BB).

Has this all been a bit of a downer?

Go have some french fries. Sure, they're even worse than you thought, but what does it matter?

Or, read Bono's amazing prayer breakfast sermon... This was in last week's SojoMail and I can't find a permanent link to it, so I'm going to reproduce it here and hope they don't mind:

Bono's best sermon yet: Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT: CHECK AGAINST DELIVERED REMARKS]

If you're wondering what I'm doing here, at a prayer breakfast, well, so am I. I'm certainly not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is leather. It's certainly not because I'm a rock star. Which leaves one possible explanation: I'm here because I've got a messianic complex.

Yes, it's true. And for anyone who knows me, it's hardly a revelation.

Well, I'm the first to admit that there's something unnatural... something unseemly...about rock stars mounting the pulpit and preaching at presidents, and then disappearing to their villas in the south of France. Talk about a fish out of water. It was weird enough when Jesse Helms showed up at a U2 concert... but this is really weird, isn't it?

You know, one of the things I love about this country is its separation of church and state. Although I have to say: in inviting me here, both church and state have been separated from something else completely: their mind.

Mr. President, are you sure about this?

It's very humbling and I will try to keep my homily brief. But be warned - I'm Irish.

I'd like to talk about the laws of man, here in this city where those laws are written. And I'd like to talk about higher laws. It would be great to assume that the one serves the other; that the laws of man serve these higher laws... but of course, they don't always. And I presume that, in a sense, is why you're here.

I presume the reason for this gathering is that all of us here - Muslims, Jews, Christians - all are searching our souls for how to better serve our family, our community, our nation, our God.

I know I am. Searching, I mean. And that, I suppose, is what led me here, too.

Yes, it's odd, having a rock star here - but maybe it's odder for me than for you. You see, I avoided religious people most of my life.

Maybe it had something to do with having a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, a battle line. Where the line between church and state was... well, a little blurry, and hard to see.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays... and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.

For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land... and in this country, seeing God's second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash... in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment...

I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV.

Even though I was a believer.

Perhaps because I was a believer.

I was cynical... not about God, but about God's politics. (There you are, Jim.)

Then, in 1997, a couple of eccentric, septuagenarian British Christians went and ruined my shtick - my reproachfulness. They did it by describing the millennium, the year 2000, as a Jubilee year, as an opportunity to cancel the chronic debts of the world's poorest people. They had the audacity to renew the Lord's call - and were joined by Pope John Paul II, who, from an Irish half-Catholic's point of view, may have had a more direct line to the Almighty.

'Jubilee' - why 'Jubilee'?

What was this year of Jubilee, this year of our Lord's favor?

I'd always read the scriptures, even the obscure stuff. There it was in Leviticus (25:35)... 'If your brother becomes poor,' the scriptures say, 'and cannot maintain himself...you shall maintain him... You shall not lend him your money at interest, not give him your food for profit.'

It is such an important idea, Jubilee, that Jesus begins his ministry with this. Jesus is a young man, he's met with the rabbis, impressed everyone, people are talking. The elders say, he's a clever guy, this Jesus, but he hasn't done much... yet. He hasn't spoken in public before...

When he does, is first words are from Isaiah: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,' he says, 'because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.' And Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord's favour, the year of Jubilee (Luke 4:18).

What he was really talking about was an era of grace - and we're still in it.

So fast-forward 2,000 years. That same thought, grace, was made incarnate - in a movement of all kinds of people. It wasn't a bless-me club... it wasn't a holy huddle. These religious guys were willing to get out in the streets, get their boots dirty, wave the placards, follow their convictions with actions... making it really hard for people like me to keep their distance. It was amazing. I almost started to like these church people.

But then my cynicism got another helping hand.

It was what Colin Powell, a five-star general, called the greatest W.M.D. of them all: a tiny little virus called AIDS. And the religious community, in large part, missed it. The ones that didn't miss it could only see it as divine retribution for bad behaviour. Even on children... even [though the] fastest growing group of HIV infections were married, faithful women.

Aha, there they go again! I thought to myself judgmentalism is back!

But in truth, I was wrong again. The church was slow but the church got busy on this the leprosy of our age.

Love was on the move.

Mercy was on the move.

God was on the move.

Moving people of all kinds to work with others they had never met, never would have cared to meet... conservative church groups hanging out with spokesmen for the gay community, all singing off the same hymn sheet on AIDS... soccer moms and quarterbacks... hip-hop stars and country stars. This is what happens when God gets on the move: crazy stuff happens!

Popes were seen wearing sunglasses!

Jesse Helms was seen with a ghetto blaster!

Crazy stuff. Evidence of the spirit.

It was breathtaking. Literally. It stopped the world in its tracks.

When churches started demonstrating on debt, governments listened - and acted. When churches starting organising, petitioning, and even - that most unholy of acts today, God forbid, lobbying... on AIDS and global health, governments listened - and acted.

I'm here today in all humility to say: you changed minds; you changed policy; you changed the world.

Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives.

Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.

I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff.

Maybe, maybe not. But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house.

God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. "If you remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places."

It's not a coincidence that in the scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It's not an accident. That's a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions. (You know, the only time Christ is judgmental is on the subject of the poor.) 'As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me' (Matthew 25:40). As I say, good news to the poor.

Here's some good news for the president. After 9/11 we were told America would have no time for the world's poor. America would be taken up with its own problems of safety. And it's true these are dangerous times, but America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors.

In fact, you have doubled aid to Africa. You have tripled funding for global health. Mr. President, your emergency plan for AIDS relief and support for the Global Fund - you and Congress - have put 700,000 people onto life-saving anti-retroviral drugs and provided 8 million bed nets to protect children from malaria.

Outstanding human achievements. Counterintuitive. Historic. Be very, very proud.

But here's the bad news. From charity to justice, the good news is yet to come. There is much more to do. There's a gigantic chasm between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response.

And finally, it's not about charity after all, is it? It's about justice.

Let me repeat that: It's not about charity, it's about justice.

And that's too bad.

Because you're good at charity. Americans, like the Irish, are good at it. We like to give, and we give a lot, even those who can't afford it.

But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.

Sixty-five hundred Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity, this is about justice and equality.

Because there's no way we can look at what's happening in Africa and, if we're honest, conclude that deep down, we really accept that Africans are equal to us. Anywhere else in the world, we wouldn't accept it. Look at what happened in South East Asia with the tsunami.

150,000 lives lost to that misnomer of all misnomers, "mother nature."

In Africa, 150,000 lives are lost every month. A tsunami every month.

And it's a completely avoidable catastrophe.

It's annoying but justice and equality are mates. Aren't they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

You know, think of those Jewish sheep-herders going to meet the Pharaoh, mud on their shoes, and the Pharaoh says, "Equal?" A preposterous idea: rich and poor are equal? And they say, "Yeah, 'equal,' that's what it says here in this book. We're all made in the image of God."

And eventually the Pharaoh says, "OK, I can accept that. I can accept the Jews - but not the blacks."

"Not the women. Not the gays. Not the Irish. No way, man."

So on we go with our journey of equality.

On we go in the pursuit of justice.

We hear that call in the ONE Campaign, a growing movement of more than 2 million Americans...Left and Right together... united in the belief that where you live should no longer determine whether you live.

We hear that call even more powerfully today, as we mourn the loss of Coretta Scott King - mother of a movement for equality, one that changed the world but is only just getting started. These issues are as alive as they ever were; they just change shape and cross the seas.

Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market... that's a justice issue.

Holding children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents... that's a justice issue. Withholding life-saving medicines out of deference to the Office of Patents... that's a justice issue.

And while the law is what we say it is, God is not silent on the subject.

That's why I say there's the law of the land¿. And then there is a higher standard. There's the law of the land, and we can hire experts to write them so they benefit us, so the laws say it's OK to protect our agriculture but it's not OK for African farmers to do the same, to earn a living?

As the laws of man are written, that's what they say.

God will not accept that.

Mine won't, at least. Will yours?

[ pause]

I close this morning on...very...thin...ice.

This is a dangerous idea I've put on the table: my God vs. your God, their God vs. our God...vs. no God. It is very easy, in these times, to see religion as a force for division rather than unity.

And this is a town - Washington - that knows something of division.

But the reason I am here, and the reason I keep coming back to Washington, is because this is a town that is proving it can come together on behalf of what the scriptures call the least of these.

This is not a Republican idea. It is not a Democratic idea. It is not even, with all due respect, an American idea. Nor it is unique to any one faith.

'Do to others as you would have them do to you' (Luke 6:30). Jesus says that.

'Righteousness is this: that one should... give away wealth out of love for him to the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and the beggars and for the emancipation of the captives.'

The Koran says that (2.177).

Thus sayeth the Lord: 'Bring the homeless poor into the house, when you see the naked, cover him, then your light will break out like the dawn and your recovery will speedily spring fourth, then your Lord will be your rear guard.' The Jewish scripture says that. Isaiah 58 again.

That is a powerful incentive: 'The Lord will watch your back.' Sounds like a good deal to me, right now.

A number of years ago, I met a wise man who changed my life. In countless ways, large and small, I was always seeking the Lord's blessing. I was saying, you know, I have a new song, look after it. I have a family, please look after them. I have this crazy idea...

And this wise man said: stop.

He said, stop asking God to bless what you're doing.

Get involved in what God is doing - because it's already blessed.

Well, God, as I said, is with the poor. That, I believe, is what God is doing.

And that is what he's calling us to do.

I was amazed when I first got to this country and I learned how much some churchgoers tithe. Up to 10% of the family budget. Well, how does that compare with the federal budget, the budget for the entire American family? How much of that goes to the poorest people in the world? Less than 1%.

Mr. President, Congress, people of faith, people of America:

I want to suggest to you today that you see the flow of effective foreign assistance as tithing... Which, to be truly meaningful, will mean an additional 1% of the federal budget tithed to the poor.

What is 1%?

1% is not merely a number on a balance sheet.

1% is the girl in Africa who gets to go to school, thanks to you. 1% is the AIDS patient who gets her medicine, thanks to you. 1% is the African entrepreneur who can start a small family business thanks to you. 1% is not redecorating presidential palaces or money flowing down a rat hole. This 1% is digging waterholes to provide clean water.

1% is a new partnership with Africa, not paternalism toward Africa, where increased assistance flows toward improved governance and initiatives with proven track records and away from boondoggles and white elephants of every description.

America gives less than 1% now. We're asking for an extra 1% to change the world. to transform millions of lives - but not just that and I say this to the military men now - to transform the way that they see us.

1% is national security, enlightened economic self-interest, and a better, safer world rolled into one. Sounds to me that in this town of deals and compromises, 1% is the best bargain around.

These goals - clean water for all; school for every child; medicine for the afflicted, an end to extreme and senseless poverty - these are not just any goals; they are the Millennium Development goals, which this country supports. And they are more than that. They are the Beatitudes for a globalised world.

Now, I'm very lucky. I don't have to sit on any budget committees. And I certainly don't have to sit where you do, Mr. President. I don't have to make the tough choices.

But I can tell you this:

To give 1% more is right. It's smart. And it's blessed.

There is a continent - Africa - being consumed by flames.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did - or did not to - to put the fire out in Africa.

History, like God, is watching what we do.

Thank you. Thank you, America, and God bless you all.

In which MizM sasses a perfect stranger and feels pretty good about it

2006-02-04T12:59:00.000-08:00

You know, I missed this January 2001 issue of Weakly World News (which I found here) and it really explains a lot. I mean, according to this, the aliens took the spines in January 2001, and that's about when Congressional Democrats started behaving as if they had their innards sucked out and replaced with silicon wafers.

I had the most satisfying conversation last night. A DNC representative called to tell me, breathlessly, that we need to make a "concerted effort" to "take back Congress" this year. I told him I agreed, and to that end I would be making contributions to individual Congressional candidates around the country this year. I said I was frustrated with the DNC and the DLC and felt that my hard-earned and limited money would be put to better use this way. He said again that it was essential we do everything we can... (I interrupted and told him I was and this was one way I was doing so)... but we need to make a "concerted effort"... I interrupted again and told him I agreed, but that I didn't think the DNC was capable of it. He sputtered with a combination of mockery and indignation, "well, please, by all means, tell me what we're doing wrong!" I said I wish I knew, but that we were losing elections and losing our democracy and I didn't think the answer was to act even more like Republicans. He sputtered again, "what do you think we should do differently?!" (This was said in a slightly snide and rhetorical tone; he was not really inviting an answer.) I said again, "start acting like Democrats! I'm not going to send money to a party apparatus that does not represent me." He said, in a tone implying that my comments were bordering on traitorous, "are you actually a registered Democrat?" "I most certainly am." "Certainly you understand the stakes..." At this point I reiterated my strategy for this year and said, "now, I don't want to hang up on you, but I'm going to have to if you can't take no for an answer." He couldn't of course, so I thanked him and hung up.

I really feel like this is the only way I can contribute to the Democratic "effort" in good conscience this year. This blog won't have time to research individual candidates and post recommendations -- the bigger blogs can do that. You can also go to Act Blue to make contributions this way. I'll add a link to the sidebar, as well.

Oh, and read Welcome to Weenie World. It's so sadly, painfully true.

"Did I say 75%?"

2006-02-02T18:40:00.000-08:00

(Click here to check out Mark Fiore's latest.)

It may shock you to learn that the president was blowing smoke when he vowed in his SOTU address to reduce US dependence on Middle Eastern oil by 75% by the year 2025. (Via the Daily Grist.)

One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

So that musta just been, you know, one of those off-the-cuff remarks that used to make him so popular among carefully screened, invitation-only, loyalist audiences.

As it happens, he didn't actually mean "75%" and he didn't actually mean "the Middle East."

"This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.
[---]
Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands."

Ok, so that was like, a parable? That paragraph ends, by the way:

The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.

In any event, the alternative fuels he touted will not replace our dependence on oil*:

But the plan for a 22 percent boost in federal energy research also left many experts scratching their heads. How would solar, wind, "clean, safe nuclear," and "clean coal" research cut US oil imports?

"The president's initiative ties an oil savings target to a basket of energy solutions for homes and businesses, which have nothing to do with our oil problem," Gal Luft of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, an energy security think tank in Washington, said in an e-mail.

(*Update: I managed to "disappear" this part of the post the first time.)

You were saying, Mr. President?

2006-01-31T20:51:00.000-08:00

Moments before Bush launched into his "soaring rhetoric" on freedom and democracy, his thugs arrested Cindy Sheehan- invited by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) to attend the SOTU - from the gallery. John of Americablog notes the irony. (~~That link is mysteriously not working; you might have to scroll down the page to see for yourself.~~ Update: The link is working again. And here is Cindy Sheehan's side of the story.)

It's National Gorilla Suit Day

2006-01-31T16:55:00.000-08:00

No, really. And I have one! But I can't find a picture of me in it, and I'm suffering a sinus infection that makes the mere thought of pulling a gorilla mask over my head bring tears to my eyes. I've never had a sinus infection like this before. I look almost exactly like this...

Neanderthal. Except that my upper lip is swollen and my lower is not. I have a couple good hours every six or so, when the ibuprofen is working and my face stops throbbing. So now is my chance to tell you that you don't have to watch the State of the Union address tonight. You can watch this instead. James Adomian is the impersonator, and he is perfect. He's got all the Bush twitches and wierd enunciations down so well, he's probably going to need some kind of therapy to become a normal human being again. And the text is every bit as enlightening as the load of hooey you're going to hear tonight. (The video loads a bit slowly, even on "high speed internet," so watch it through a second time if you need to- after it has loaded- to get the full, fluent effect.)

But if you'd rather curl up with some good reading, try this Newsweek story about hard-core conservatives deep within the administration (is there any other kind there?) who actually tried to stop the presidential power grab, and how they paid for it.

Just remember, "The W Stands for Women"

2006-01-30T16:35:00.000-08:00

I have simply run out of expressions of outrage. Read this:

In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.

The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn't located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. "There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night," Karpinski told retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview. It was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers. So the women took matters into their own hands. They didn't drink in the late afternoon so they wouldn't have to urinate at night. They didn't get raped. But some died of dehydration in the desert heat, Karpinski said.

Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task force said in a briefing that "women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep."

"And rather than make everybody aware of that - because that's shocking, and as a leader if that's not shocking to you then you're not much of a leader - what they told the surgeon to do is don't brief those details anymore. And don't say specifically that they're women. You can provide that in a written report but don't brief it in the open anymore."

For example, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's top deputy in Iraq, saw "dehydration" listed as the cause of death on the death certificate of a female master sergeant in September 2003. Under orders from Sanchez, he directed that the cause of death no longer be listed, Karpinski stated. The official explanation for this was to protect the women's privacy rights.

Sanchez's attitude was: "The women asked to be here, so now let them take what comes with the territory," Karpinski quoted him as saying. Karpinski told me that Sanchez, who was her boss, was very sensitive to the political ramifications of everything he did. She thinks it likely that when the information about the cause of these women's deaths was passed to the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that the details not be released. "That's how Rumsfeld works," she said.

Read the whole story at Truthout.

Bush's Science Fiction

2006-01-28T22:49:00.000-08:00

From the Washington Post:

Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.

This "tipping point" scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.

There are three specific events that these scientists describe as especially worrisome and potentially imminent, although the time frames are a matter of dispute: widespread coral bleaching that could damage the world's fisheries within three decades; dramatic sea level rise by the end of the century that would take tens of thousands of years to reverse; and, within 200 years, a shutdown of the ocean current that moderates temperatures in northern Europe.

The debate has been intensifying because Earth is warming much faster than some researchers had predicted. James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, last week confirmed that 2005 was the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998. Earth's average temperature has risen nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years, he noted, and another increase of about 4 degrees over the next century would "imply changes that constitute practically a different planet."

"It's not something you can adapt to," Hansen said in an interview. "We can't let it go on another 10 years like this. We've got to do something."

The WaPo story mentions NASA's silencing of Hansen, but that issue is covered in more detail by the NY Times in another chilling example of Bush's War on Science.

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

By the way, have you read Chris Mooney's book, yet?

And have you "neutralized" your car? Check out Terra Pass and Drive Neutral.

Your liberal media

2006-01-26T12:51:00.000-08:00

Please read this (which I first spotted on Atrios, but which is turning up everywhere, now). Peter Daou is so right:

What's the common thread running through the past half-decade of Bush's presidency? What's the nexus between the Swift-boating of Kerry, the Swift-boating of Murtha, and the guilt-by-association between Democrats and terrorists? Why has a seemingly endless string of administration scandals faded into oblivion? Why do Democrats keep losing elections? It's this: the traditional media, the trusted media, the "neutral" media, have become the chief delivery mechanism of potent anti-Democratic and pro-Bush storylines. And the Democratic establishment appears to be either ignorant of this political quandary or unwilling to fight it.
[---]
What’s so dumbfounding to progressive netroots activists, who clearly see the role of the traditional media in perpetuating these storylines - and are taking concrete action (here, here, and here) to remedy the problem - is that Democratic politicians, strategists, and surrogates have internalized these narratives and play into them, publicly wringing their hands over how to fix their "muddled" message, how to deal with Bush’s "strength" on national security, how to talk about "values."

It’s become a self-fulfilling cycle, with Democrats reinforcing anti-Dem myths because they can’t imagine any other explanation for the apparent lack of resonance of their message. Out of desperation, they resort to hackneyed, focus-grouped slogans in a vain attempt to break through the filter.

It’s simple: if your core values and beliefs and positions, no matter how reasonable, how mainstream, how correct, how ethical, are filtered to the public through the lens of a media that has inoculated the public against your message, and if the media is the public’s primary source of information, then NOTHING you say is going to break through and change that dynamic. Which explains, in large measure, the Dems’ sorry electoral failures.
[---]
To illustrate the power of the media to shape public opinion, simply imagine what would happen if the cable nets and the print media and the elite punditocracy treated the warrantless spying scandal with the same round-the-clock intensity as the Swift-boating of Kerry or the Natalee Holloway disappearance. Suppose Lewinsky-style headlines blared about impeachment and presidential law-breaking. Suppose the question of the day on every cable net was, “Should Bush be impeached for violating the Constitution?” The media can create a crisis -- and can squelch one. The media can deliver narratives, they can frame events, they can shape the way Americans see the political landscape. A disproportionate amount of power is wielded by a handful of opinion-shapers, and when these individuals tell America a story that favors the right and marginalizes the left, the remedies are few...

It's worth your time to read it all.

Is it a trope, yet?

2006-01-26T12:44:00.000-08:00

The NY Times on spineless Democrats...

Sirota on spineless Democrats (and saboteur consultants)...

Fafblog, in its inimitable way, on spineless Democrats...

My fixation with spineless Democrats...

(Any chiropractors or orthopedic surgeons out there who could start mailing cute little spinal column key chains to our Democratic "representatives"?)

OK, it's a post-9/11 world and all,

2006-01-26T12:42:00.000-08:00

but how come Cheney was urging the NSA to assist him in illegal domestic spying in January 2001?

Yeah, this'll happen...

2006-01-26T12:41:00.000-08:00

But it really is a great letter.

Remember the days when something like this would be called a "cover up"?

2006-01-26T12:36:00.000-08:00

Think back, now --- it would have been, oh, around 1996-2000. And there would have been a lot of irate, indignant, family-values Republicans calling numerous press conferences (just before having to admit their own extra-marital affairs) at which they would sputter their righteous indignation... But that was then, this is now. And why did Brownie get paid to stay on and testify if he didn't actually intend to stay on and testify?

2006-01-26T12:24:00.000-08:00

(Photo snatched from here.) Here's a pattern you can download to get your deflector/protectors ready before the State of the Republican Union address next week.

You probably could have used them this morning. I didn't, because the mute button provides all the protection I need, leaving me free to safely observe Bush's tik-y head and jaw thrusts, smirks and scowls. One wonders, though, could this inconvenient fact have anything to do with the press conference this morning? Or perhaps this?

You know, everytime Bush says "I didn't break the law," well, it brings back such fond memories...

Joining me in my lament...

2006-01-24T10:36:00.000-08:00

Did I sound below like I'm thisclose to giving up on the Democratic Party? Molly Ivins sounds like she's right behind me (thanks, BB), but of course she says it better. An excerpt:

Oh come on, people — get a grip on the concept of leadership. Look at this war — from the lies that led us into it, to the lies they continue to dump on us daily.

You sit there in Washington so frightened of the big, bad Republican machine you have no idea what people are thinking. I'm telling you right now, Tom DeLay is going to lose in his district. If Democrats in Washington haven't got enough sense to OWN the issue of political reform, I give up on them entirely.

Do it all, go long, go for public campaign financing for Congress. I'm serious as a stroke about this — that is the only reform that will work, and you know it, as well as everyone else who's ever studied this. Do all the goo-goo stuff everybody has made fun of all these years: embrace redistricting reform, electoral reform, House rules changes, the whole package. Put up, or shut up. Own this issue, or let Jack Abramoff politics continue to run your town.

Bush, Cheney and Co. will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long as you let them. I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were "German dogs." They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds. The MINUTE someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means. That, or you could just piss on them elegantly, as Rep. John Murtha did. Or eviscerate them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out the latest in the endless "string of bad news."

Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can't get up and fight, we'll find someone who can.

And read what William Rivers Pitt thinks the Dems should do next Tuesday, but won't, of course, because their neural tubes have not yet differentiated into spines:

George W. Bush's delivery of the State of the Union address will take place on Tuesday, January 31, a little more than a week from now. It is my strong belief that every single Democrat present in the House chamber for the speech should, at a predetermined moment, stand up and walk out. No yelling. No heated words. Every Democrat should simply stand silently and leave.

Crazy, I know. Crazy, and possibly the best idea ever put before a body of Democrats since the New Deal.

Understand this, congressional Democrats, and understand it well: you are not dealing merely with a body of political opponents in the GOP. You are dealing with a group of people that want you exterminated politically.

The days of walking the halls of the Rayburn Building, sharing a bourbon with a colleague from the other side of the aisle, and hammering out a compromise are as dead as Julius Caesar. Collegiality is out. Mutual respect is out. They want you gone for good. Erased. Destroyed.

And you have been far too polite about this. The writing has been on the wall for a while now. Back in 1995, Republican Senator Phil Gramm said, "We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs." That was eleven years ago. If you listen close, you can hear the beasts baying in the distance, waiting to slip the leash. Your limp tactics in the face of the assault upon you, your vacillation, your strange hope that maybe the GOP will be nicer tomorrow, has left you all smelling like Alpo.

For the love of God, you are being compared to Osama bin Laden all over network television because some within your ranks have had the courage to question the war in Iraq. It hasn't been subtle. Bin Laden, according to the right-wing talking heads, is getting his talking points straight from Howard Dean. These are the out-front spokespeople for the folks running the GOP right now. If you think there is compromise to be had with these people, if you think there is quarter to be given to you, then I have a nice, big red bridge to sell you in San Francisco.

I know you believe the Abramoff scandal is going to be your bread and butter in the upcoming midterm elections. I hate to break it to you, but you have already been outflanked. The television nitwits have flooded the airwaves with the meme that this is a "two-party scandal," despite the fact that Abramoff would have sooner lit himself on fire than give money to a Democrat. As you have been collectively incapable of setting the record straight in public, with the exception of a two-minute crunch between Howard Dean and Wolf Blitzer on CNN that left Blitzer spluttering impotently, understand that "this scandal affects both parties" is now commonly accepted fact all across the land.

Oh, yeah, P.S., the investigation is being run out of the Department Justice. If this scandal does touch some sixty Republican officeholders, as Abramoff's donation history indicates, do you really think this White House is going to let the investigation get far enough to do real damage?

If so, I again need to mention that big red bridge I have for sale.

Please read the rest.

AWOL

2006-01-22T17:07:00.000-08:00

I've really outdone myself this time! 10 days without a blog update! What do I have to say for myself? I had family visiting from Ohio last week, one of whom devoted his evenings to updating and repairing our aging home computer network (and he called it a vacation?), I've been inching toward a thesis draft, and I dropped my guard and let a WORM into my computer for the first time EVER. (I'm still ashamed of myself.) Here's the scoop on that worm. It came from an email address I know and trust, having apparently attached itself to that sender's address book. That sender isn't tech-savvy, and so I let myself be unsuspicious of the unexplained attachment. I've never been that careless before, and hopefully never will be again!

The break was all well and good for me, because I largely avoided my usual daily overdose of news and blogs, and stuck to what I heard on NPR while ferrying folks to and fro. I'm sure that made me a better person.

The radio news was infuriating enough, but then I tried to catch up yesterday and became thoroughly disgusted with Democrats, who seem to turn up their noses at every overflowing silver platter handed them -- Alito, body armor, rampant Republican corruption, presidential law-breaking -- in order to continue on their lemming march over the cliff. I'll never forgive the Greens for Ralph Nader; where else can I go?!

At least Buzzflash is asking the burning question of the week about yet another theatrically timed message from Osama bin Laden, who conveniently emerges from his cave just as the GOP and its president are caught in various forms of plundering and law-breaking. No wonder Bush didn't want to catch him; he's much more useful this way:

Isn't it a mighty big coincidence that Osama returns for a bizarre appearance just as Bush is on the ropes for illegal spying on Americans -- and as Karl Rove* announces that he is going to use fear again to maintain one-party dictatorial control over America in the fall elections?

(*Here's the link to the Karl Rove reference.)

And - thanks to reader/pal BB who was paying more attention than I was - here is a terrific editorial that all Bush-worshipping evangelicals should ponder:

January 20, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Wayward Christian Soldiers
By CHARLES MARSH
Charlottesville, Va.

IN the past several years, American evangelicals, and I am one of them, have amassed greater political power than at any time in our history. But at what cost to our witness and the integrity of our message?

Recently, I took a few days to reread the war sermons delivered by influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war. That period, from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2003, is not one I will remember fondly. Many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president's war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine.

Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, whose weekly sermons are seen by millions of television viewers, led the charge with particular fervor. "We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible," said Mr. Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers." In an article carried by the convention's Baptist Press news service, a missionary wrote that "American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."

As if working from a slate of evangelical talking points, both Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of Billy Graham, and Marvin Olasky, the editor of the conservative World magazine and a former advisor to President Bush on faith-based policy, echoed these sentiments, claiming that the American invasion of Iraq would create exciting new prospects for proselytizing Muslims. Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the hugely popular "Left Behind" series, spoke of Iraq as "a focal point of end-time events," whose special role in the earth's final days will become clear after invasion, conquest and reconstruction. For his part, Jerry Falwell boasted that "God is pro-war" in the title of an essay he wrote in 2004.

The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003. Recent polls indicate that 68 percent of white evangelicals continue to support the war. But what surprised me, looking at these sermons nearly three years later, was how little attention they paid to actual Christian moral doctrine. Some tried to square the American invasion with Christian "just war" theory, but such efforts could never quite reckon with the criterion that force must only be used as a last resort. As a result, many ministers dismissed the theory as no longer relevant.

Some preachers tried to link Saddam Hussein with wicked King Nebuchadnezzar of Biblical fame, but these arguments depended on esoteric interpretations of the Old Testament book of II Kings and could not easily be reduced to the kinds of catchy phrases that are projected onto video screens in vast evangelical churches. The single common theme among the war sermons appeared to be this: our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God's will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply.

Such sentiments are a far cry from those expressed in the Lausanne Covenant of 1974. More than 2,300 evangelical leaders from 150 countries signed that statement, the most significant milestone in the movement's history. Convened by Billy Graham and led by John Stott, the revered Anglican evangelical priest and writer, the signatories affirmed the global character of the church of Jesus Christ and the belief that "the church is the community of God's people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology."

On this page, David Brooks correctly noted that if evangelicals elected a pope, it would most likely be Mr. Stott, who is the author of more than 40 books on evangelical theology and Christian devotion. Unlike the Pope John Paul II, who said that invading Iraq would violate Catholic moral teaching and threaten "the fate of humanity," or even Pope Benedict XVI, who has said there were "not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq," Mr. Stott did not speak publicly on the war. But in a recent interview, he shared with me his abiding concerns.

"Privately, in the days preceding the invasion, I had hoped that no action would be taken without United Nations authorization," he told me. "I believed then and now that the American and British governments erred in proceeding without United Nations approval." Reverend Stott referred me to "War and Rumors of War, " a chapter from his 1999 book, "New Issues Facing Christians Today," as the best account of his position. In that essay he wrote that the Christian community's primary mission must be "to hunger for righteousness, to pursue peace, to forbear revenge, to love enemies, in other words, to be marked by the cross."

What will it take for evangelicals in the United States to recognize our mistaken loyalty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world. The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people utterly convinced of their righteousness.

Charles Marsh, a professor of religion at the University of Virginia, is the author of "The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today."

Please check out the SF Chronicle series on global warming: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Then add some wonder to your day by going here and clicking on the live web cam trained on the elephant seals at the aforementioned Ano Nuevo, and go here for a selection of web cams on various exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Bushbots by the Bay

2006-01-12T10:13:00.000-08:00

Grab your cell phone cameras! There's another Bushbot in San Francisco!

The Bushbot technology is really advancing, thanks to Ken Mehlman and his crack team of programmers. Sometimes a Bushbot sounds almost natural, and only a highly trained ear can distinguish the difference between the Bushbot and an actual human practicing independent thought. For instance, the text of this editorial contains many conversational phrases designed to make the programmed content flow more naturally. You need special equipment to filter out the RNC talking points, but I can do that for you here:

Sept. 11, Sept. 11, Sept. 11, Clinton did it too, FISA crippled the FBI and Able Danger, the leak is worse than the lawbreaking, the Valerie Plame leak is still unproven, Bushbashing Bushhaters endanger America, Sept. 11, Sept. 11, Sept. 11.

See? Embedded in that 1253 word column is the same standard code that you've been hearing for the last four or five years. I've just saved you a lot of time.

Bushbots are activated by a signal outside the normal human auditory range. It's issued from time to time by Karl Rove or his android, Mehlman. Since normal humans cannot hear it, we have to study artifacts: for example, the coordinated publication of multiple identical editorials in newspapers around the country, or the same-day appearances of exceedingly life-like Bushbots uttering identical talking points on weekend news programs such as Meet the Press, This Week, and Chris Matthews. It's difficult for scientists working with small budgets to study the phenomenon; they need more technical resources.

I wonder if the presence of just one Bushbot in SF is enough to keep Bill O'Reilly from smiting the city? Probably not. Bushbots are indestructible. They will motor forth from the smoldering ruins of SF to converge in Richard Pombo's district and await further instruction. Of course, Richard Pombo will be a little busy.

Odds and ends

2006-01-10T23:33:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to accumulate links again. In no particular order:

See this revolting story about the US military harrassment of an Iraqi journalist. The military claims they were looking for an insurgent. Coincidentally, Fadhil was investigating misuse of Iraq reconstruction funds for a British news agency. (A real shocker: his videotapes have not been returned.) Do we call this a pattern, yet?

Delay gives up his quest, but don't think Blunt or Boehner will be any different.

Funny!

Right after Christmas, I read that Signatures - Jack Abramoff's wheeler/dealer restaurant - wants to change its name, and that they are taking suggestions. I thought I offered a pretty darn good one: I suggested "Bread and Water."

Forget the desperate RNC talking points. Forget even the polls. This is a Republican scandal (via Buzzflash). Follow the money.

Compassionate Conservatism comes to the IRS!

2006-01-10T23:28:00.000-08:00

New York Times:

Tax refunds sought by hundreds of thousands of poor Americans have been frozen and their returns labeled fraudulent, blocking refunds for years to come, the Internal Revenue Service's taxpayer advocate told Congress today.

The taxpayers, whose average income was $13,000, were not told that they were suspected of fraud, the advocate said in her annual report to Congress. The advocate, Nina Olson, said her staff sampled suspected returns and found that, at most, one in five was questionable.

A computer program selected the returns as part of the questionable refund program run by the criminal investigation division of the Internal Revenue Service. In some cases, the criminal division ordered that taxpayers be given no hint that they were suspected of fraud, the report said.

Most of the poor people whose returns the computer flagged as fraudulent were seeking the earned income tax credit, a benefit for the working poor. The credit can return all of the income taxes and Social Security taxes withheld from the paychecks of poor people. Without the credit, many poor people coming off welfare and going to work would receive less money because of taxes taken out of their paychecks and the loss of health benefits, I.R.S. data and other government documents show.

The average refund sought was $3,500, which under the rules for obtaining the credit means that the vast majority of those suspected of fraud were single parents or married couples with children. The maximum benefit for singles is less than $400.

Ms. Olson said the I.R.S. devoted vastly more resources to pursing questionable refunds by the poor, which she said cannot involve more than $9 billion, than to a $100 billion problem with unreported incomes from small businesses that deal only in cash, many of which do not even file tax returns.

(emphasis mine) Meanwhile, the IRS is trying to make it harder to study its tactics - especially those that favor the wealthy.

The end of "checks and balances"

2006-01-10T23:16:00.000-08:00

Eric Alterman on White House hassling and intimidation of the press.

Betty the Crow on Bush's record-breaking use of signing statements to circumvent Congress. Here's a Knight-Ridder story on the same topic:

President Bush agreed with great fanfare last month to accept a ban on torture, but he later quietly reserved the right to ignore it, even as he signed it into law.

Acting from the seclusion of his Texas ranch at the start of New Year's weekend, Bush said he would interpret the new law in keeping with his expansive view of presidential power. He did it by issuing a bill-signing statement -- a little-noticed device that has become a favorite tool of presidential power in the Bush White House.

In fact, Bush has used signing statements to reject, revise or put his spin on more than 500 legislative provisions. Experts say he has been far more aggressive than any previous president in using the statements to claim sweeping executive power -- and not just on national security issues.

"It's nothing short of breathtaking," said Phillip Cooper, a professor of public administration at Portland State University. "In every case, the White House has interpreted presidential authority as broadly as possible, interpreted legislative authority as narrowly as possible and pre-empted the judiciary."

And here is the WaPo story on signing statements:

The Bush administration "has very effectively expanded the scope and character of the signing statement not only to address specific provisions of legislation that the White House wishes to nullify, but also in an effort to significantly reposition and strengthen the powers of the presidency relative to the Congress," Cooper wrote in the September issue. "This tour d' force has been carried out in such a systematic and careful fashion that few in Congress, the media, or the scholarly community are aware that anything has happened at all."

Frank Rich:

Given that the reporters on the Times story, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, wrote that nearly a dozen current and former officials had served as their sources, there may be more leaks to come, and not just to The Times. Sooner or later we'll find out what the White House is really so defensive about.

Is anyone paying attention?

2006-01-06T23:02:00.000-08:00

One of the many visionary bumperstickers that came out of the first "election" of George W. Bush said, "thanks for not paying attention." We all told ourselves it couldn't happen again. But, of course, it did. Back on that dark morning after the second-term "election," Teresa Nielsen Hayden sighed, "225 years is a pretty good run for a republic, historically speaking."

It's hard to imagine that we have any intentional Bush voters reading this site, but if we do, I just have to ask: are you all still feeling pretty good about that pick? Sure, you were aiming for a safe and secure theocracy, and you got megalomaniacal dictators disguised as theocrats for the purposes of getting out the Christian vote, but it's all good, right? Just so long as gays can't marry, we destroy the UN, and get rid of some of the peskier provisions of the Constitution.

To politically-comatose Americans: Can we interrupt the important nightly schedule of reality TV programming to point out that a constitutional crisis is developing? Here's some "reality" for you: Your chances of getting on "Survivor" or "The Apprentice" are now infinitely smaller than your chances of having your telephone conversations tapped, and your private mail opened. (Heck, even that political affiliation you're so proud of has been monitored... By the IRS.) Hey, it's kind of like living in an all-new reality spy show, isn't it?

Yes, yes, I know that politically-comatose Americans aren't reading blogs like this, and I'm just preaching to the choir. (But I'm a preacher's kid, afterall. And a preacher's niece, for that matter.) Michael Reagan thinks Americans support what the president is doing. (Warning: Don't click this next link if you don't wish to contribute "hits" to a frothing lunatic like Michael Reagan, but you might enjoy it for sheer entertainment value.) He cites a poll showing that 64% are in favor of intercepting calls between terrorist suspects and people living in the US.

How do we say this?... "Duh." Yes, I'm in favor of that, too. And there are perfectly adequate legal procedures for obtaining permission to do that, lickety-split! The president himself said so:

Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

I am not, however, in favor of illegally wiretapping US citizens. Do you suppose the results would have turned out differently if the pollsters had asked a relevant question?

OK, perhaps I need to take a walk or meditate or something. In any event, I can't do better than to steer you to these two important pieces from TomDispatch, so I urge you to read them: A Cult of Presidential Power and What Year Is This Anyway?

(P.S. Pat Robertson, determined to continuing broadcasting his spiraling dementia, informs us that God struck down Sharon, just as God struck down Rabin, for "dividing God's land.")

Big Oops!

2006-01-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

Alert reader Rick was properly nonplussed by the link in my previous post -- mea culpa for trying to do too many things at the same time. Instead of linking to the article I wanted to direct you do, it gave you a nice Mapquest map of downtown San Mateo, California! To make matters worse, I don't remember what the article was. Thank you, Rick, for bringing it all to my attention. To make up for my boo-boo, here's a link to a nicely titled essay by Joe Conason. Let us prey, indeed!

(Update: Conason link fixed! - MizM)

King George W....

2006-01-05T18:16:00.000-08:00

I thought this piece was worth sharing. No time to comment now except to observe that Jesus had a few things to say about the excesses of empire. I'll leave it to readers to data-mine the Gospels.

An eerie coincidence...

2006-01-04T15:42:00.000-08:00

...is what I have discovered in reading of late about the resistance to apartheid and the achievement of freedom in South Africa during the last quarter-century. Most recently I've finished a haunting book called A Human Being Died That Night by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a clinical psychologist who served on the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The book relates a series of interviews Gobodo-Madikizela held with Eugene de Kock, the former head of state-sanctioned death squads under the Afrikaaner regime. It's remarkable on many counts, but what came through most strongly for me was the striking resemblance between the rationalizations for apartheid violence and those we hear today from the president and his supporters regarding our own embrace of violence. Here's an example from the book:

This [kind of rationalization] is a trick most perpetrators use, especially those sponsored by a powerful government, to try to make their actions understandable by saying, "What my people have done, yours have done too." What is tragic is that they really do believe that what they have done is no worse than the other group's actions. Typically, the perpetrator starts off with rationalization, to convince himself of the legitimacy of his acts, then he begins to communicate his rationalization to others. At this point it is no longer a rationalization but a "truth" that releases the perpetrator from any sense of guilt he may still feel about his evil deeds. If the enemy is doing the same thing he himself is engaged in, then he can't be that bad.

And another:

Some people, when faced with their evil deeds, understand the moral implications of their actions, but to maintain some "dignity," to protect their sense of identity as respectable human beings, they cling to the belief that what they did was morally correct.

Think killing of innocent civilians (women and small children) under the guise of military operations; think Abu Ghraib; think NSA wiretapping, and God only knows what else. But read this book not just for its portrayal of evil but also for its themes of forgiveness and reconciliation. I have also read two or three books by Archbishop Tutu, and a delightful memoir by the courageous editor Donald Woods, who returned to South Africa in the Mandela era after 12 years in exile -- and in all of them one can find hints on how to reconstruct and heal a society gone terribly, terribly wrong, as ours now has.

"Sunt lacrimae rerum...."

2006-01-04T07:40:00.000-08:00

Having the ongoing experience of compiling a list of Iraqi war dead, both civilian and military, for a public witness project in my home town, I was profoundly moved by this essay from a professor in Colorado.

"I'm Jesus of Nazareth, and I approved this message."

2006-01-03T19:14:00.000-08:00

Reflecting further on the aforementioned Loconte piece....

I find that I'm not in huge disagreement with some of his points. For example, I think it's fair to suggest that the scriptures do not provide "a coherent political philosophy." It might not be too off the mark to opine that they do not provide even a coherent theology! The Bible is in fact not a single consistent document, but is a collection of texts that were filtered through the experiences of diverse communities under a variety of circumstances. Even those of us who perceive an Ur-Theme of Liberation in the Christian Bible (Exodus, the prophets, Jesus) have to admit that the collection is full of contradictions and that we do pick and choose from among the texts. We liberals love Micah 6:8 and we loathe Leviticus 18 (just to cite some of my own favorites). But in the interests of intellectual honesty and humility, we are obliged to take account of everything in the Good Book, and that is my best argument for why biblical study ought to be at the top of every congregation's adult education curriculum. As Christians and liberals (or progressives, or whatever we are calling ourselves these days -- maybe just disciples), we need desperately to improve our understanding of these texts that we claim are foundational for our faith.

My own experience, at the end of a period of about 20 years out of the church and active in politics, was that politics alone was an inadequate foundation for making meaning. When I came back into the church in my 40s and began to work seriously at my personal faith development, I came to understand the importance (for me -- I'm only speaking for myself) of the transcendent mystery of the divine. We do indeed "see through a glass darkly," as St. Paul put it. Or, as a former (Methodist) pastor put it, "We have the Wesleyan quadrilateral of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience -- but God is mostly mystery." So it behooves all of us to be pretty prudent if not humble about our claims for divine approval of what we are about.

And this is why I believe you would never hear Jesus make the statement that is the headline of this piece about any political program. God is not a Republican, or a Democrat, or a Green, or anything else. God is God, and we had better beware of subordinating our theology to our politics. Politics can be an expression of faith, but never its basis.

I think I will have more to say later on this, especially what it means for the church in our day.

More about that ridiculous Loconte editorial...

2006-01-03T10:57:00.000-08:00

To refresh your memory, see here. I posted about it here (at the end of the post).

Here is a response from a Michael Lerner emailing to members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. I'm only quoting the P.S., because he can be a bit long-winded and this segment is the most on-point for our purposes:

P.S. A few of the many distortions in Joesph Loconte’s piece in the NY Times:

1. Jim Wallis was not an organizer of the Berkeley conference to which he refers, but was one of the speakers at it (and had parts of it that he supported and parts he did not). His Call for Renewal* organization, like the Network of Spiritual Progressives, is one part of the emerging new Religious/Spiritual Left.

2. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid do not identify with the Religious/ Spiritual Left, though they may have their own personal religious beliefs. When the Democratic Party adopts religious language or attempts to reframe its same old programs in religious garb, it is not acting as the Religious Left but as the opportunistic middle seeking any tools it can appropriate for its own self-interest. We in the Religious Left are not a branch of the Democrats or any other political party.

3. It is ludicrous to deny that the Bible has a political agenda. What exactly do you call a document that demands that people stop work one day out of seven, and one year out of seven, leave part of their crops for the poor, forgive all debts once every seven years, and redistribute land back to the original roughly equal distribution once every fifty years.

That Scriptures can sometimes be illegitimately appropriated to justify some aspects of a political program does not prove that there are no specific political implications of the holy writings. La Conte is correct that the Bible does not justify every specific spending program by the Democrats, but it doesn’t follow from that that the Bible does not mandate some spending programs on the poor.

4. The fact that we had one of our fifty workshops specifically addressed to "spiritual but not religious" people is singled out by Loconte in the article below as a way of signaling that we are not really religious at all. This is simply false. We are a movement of people some of whom fit into traditional religious communities, some of whom are struggling to change those communities to make them more spiritually alive, and some of whom are not part of those communities but nevertheless recognize that the empiricist/ materialist account of the universe is inadequate and misses a fundamental dimension of reality. That is further explored in The Left Hand of God. Loconte would prefer to ridicule by innuendo than engage with the openness and breadth of the new Religious/Spiritual Left.

5. Many on the religious Left oppose the war in Iraq and many of the other policies of the U.S. government. But we do not spend our energies comparing the US to Nazi Germany, and we are proudly patriotic in affirming the many good aspects of American society even as we draw from religious sources to critique aspects that are immoral and deserve to be changed.

*Jim Wallis' organization is actually Call to Renewal.

I wonder how many lawyers will be hired this week?

2006-01-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

Just heard it on NPR and confirmed it on CNN: Abramoff entered a guilty plea.

Maybe 2006 is my year to get Tivo...

2006-01-02T21:47:00.000-08:00

churchsign Originally uploaded by mizm_sf.

...because it's going to be a very good year to watch C-SPAN!

Sister Joan and her friends wonder, where's Monica when you need her? Of course, Sister Joan has too much class to link to the photo (above) that sped around the internet in emails recently, but I don't!

ReddHedd at Firedoglake:

We have a President, not a King -- no one should be allowed to act above the law. Period. Especially not a man who was elected to serve the people. Such a man should be held to a higher standard, because public service ought to be a noble calling -- the Constitution must be upheld in our own nation, or we have already lost whatever battles we claim to be fighting in the name of freedom and liberty elsewhere.

For every step we take away from the notions of liberty on which this nation was founded, Osama Bin Laden laughs a little louder. By turning away from liberty, we are becoming that which we fight against, something that we managed to avoid even at the height of the Cold War. That is cowardly and wrong, and America is a better nation than that.

Read the whole post.

Our hard workin' president is taking a shorter vacation than usual, so he can come back to DC and continue fabricating his legacy.

Oh, this is rich. Joseph Loconte (of the conservative Heritage Foundation - founded, as Talk2Action points out, to advance the agenda of the religious right) warns against the excesses of the religious left. Just read it while I try to collect my thoughts; or maybe abc will collect hers first.

Happy New Year, folks!

Piece of cake...

2005-12-28T12:44:00.000-08:00

Gosh with this handy interactive training graphic, I don't see how we couldn't all be doing 1080s on our snowboards! I mean, at least those of you with snowboards, halfbowls, death wishes, and no major mobility or vestibular issues... Follow the link and click each "next"; it's pretty cool, and I've only posted the final frame. (Update: I re-posted a cropped version of the photo to get rid of all the screenshot clutter. But just follow the link and check it out for yourself!)

This is your media on thorazine

2005-12-28T10:41:00.000-08:00

I heard this part of this interview Sunday morning, but I was still wrapping up a paper Monday and couldn't post the details. I nearly spit my diet coke at the TV when Koppel said "If 9/11 had happened on Bill Clinton's watch, he would have gone into Iraq." When I cruised through blog sites yesterday, I couldn't believe that I wasn't seeing more about it, but apparently, a few people have finally taken notice.

But Koppel topped himself when he declared that the American people will probably agree that Bush needs the power to spy on US citizens, in order to keep them safe:

MR. KOPPEL: We do a great job, Tim, of patting ourselves on the backs, not just the media but the great American democracy, for how much we believe in the process of disclosure, of public debate, of fully vetting the issues and deciding them through our elected representatives. In point of fact, often as not, we don't do that. Often as not the decision is made that you, the public, simply are not mature enough or sophisticated enough to understand everything that's at stake here. What scares the heck out of me is that there will be another terrorist attack in this country. And after the next terrorist attack, if it's anything like 9/11, there won't be any debate about whether the government should have the right to eavesdrop. The appropriate time to have this discussion, this debate, in Congress, in the media, is now.

MR. BROKAW: Right.

MR. KOPPEL: Because after the next event, it'll be Katy, bar the door. Why didn't you do more? And the fact of the matter is, in saying we need the debate, I'm not prejudging what the outcome would be. Quite frankly, I think the outcome may well be that the American public, through its elected representatives, will say, "You know something? We feel the president needs that right. He has to have the right to be able to order the wiretapping of terrorist suspects."

MR. RUSSERT: Let's have the debate.

MR. KOPPEL: But let's have the debate. Let's argue these issues out before it's too late.

(Now how exactly is it that he is not "prejudging what the outcome would be"?) Transcript here. Emphasis, mine.

A little something for Christmas

2005-12-24T17:06:00.000-08:00

I'm still writing a paper (my last of the semester), so I'm not doing much news-reading, but here's a little stocking stuffer for you: Barron's (Wall Street Journal-owned finance mag) used the I-word!!!

Now, brace yourself, because this will send you reeling... Apparently nothing the president has told us about his domestic spying program is true... Not the numbers, not the "international calls only" focus, not the alleged congressional authority...

But cheer up, because everything your third-grade friends told you about Santa Claus was a lie. He's real!
(Photo snatched from here.) Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Season's Greetings, everybody!

The most eloquent comment yet...

2005-12-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

...on impeachment is this thoughtful piece by Jonathan Schell. Would that the Congress might take his words to heart and act accordingly.

Now in good company

2005-12-22T11:08:00.000-08:00

Although I don't necessarily want to "eat pie with no seconds" (see previous post, Marge Piercy poem) with the likes of Norman Ornstein, I just point out that there seems to be a rising tide of opinion on the question of impeachment. See here for more.

And, typing the above, I typo-ed the I-word as "impeacement." I think that's a new coinage, albeit an accidental one. But wouldn't it be great if there were a rising tide of opinion that peace is the way. I think Jesus might approve!

Sense and sensibility in Dover, PA

2005-12-20T08:36:00.000-08:00

The US District Judge ruled against intelligent design proponents in Dover, PA:

Intelligent Design Barred From Pa. School District (Update1)
Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- A Pennsylvania school district cannot require the teaching of intelligent design in high school biology classes, a federal judge ruled in a case that may influence other challenges to the theory of evolution.

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, ruled today that the Dover, Pennsylvania school board can't force the teaching of intelligent design, a theory that claims that the universe is too complex to have developed randomly and must have been designed by a superior power. The board in October 2004 ordered that intelligent design be introduced alongside the theory that life evolved by natural selection.

"To preserve the separation of church and state" mandated by the First Amendment, the Dover Area School District is barred from maintaining the ID policy in any school, Jones wrote. "The students, parents and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

Here's the story.

"Three people are a delegation...."

2005-12-20T08:28:00.000-08:00

I seem to be on the impeachment bandwagon, now joined by Jonathan Alter, who at least mentions the possibility in this piece revealing that early last week Bush importuned the Times editors to spike the Snoopgate story once and for all. I am reminded of that wonderful poem by Marge Piercy, "The Low Road." Question: is she on the enemies list for writing it, or I for quoting it, or both?

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can't walk, can't remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can't stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

O Christmas (or Holiday?) Tree....

2005-12-19T14:33:00.000-08:00

Loved this piece by Sister Joan Chittister, one of my all-time favorites in the religion-and-politics realm. A sample of her prose:

If I were you and I really wanted to be a sign of Christianity, I wouldn't set out to prove it by fighting over the Christmas tree.

Sounds right to me.

The I-Word, Part 2

2005-12-19T06:49:00.000-08:00

At least I'm in pretty good company (what I've always said about those of us on the margins of one system or another): here's what Karen Kwiatkowski had to say about the possibility of impeachment. Listen up:

In my opinion, we need to fight, resist, refuse to subsidize Washington in every way, and we must immediately begin impeachment proceedings against this particular president, not only because he has clearly earned impeachment, but in order to revive a national awareness of the intent of the Founding Fathers to circumscribe centralized state power, and their vision of a free and peaceful Republic.

This comes from a truthout piece by William Rivers Pitt. You'll have to ignore the final paragraph, in which he credits Solomon with the writing of the book of Proverbs -- not quite as egregious as Howard Dean's locating Job in the New Testament. The attribution to Solomon, which biblical scholars uniformly understand to be apocryphal, is just one more example of what happens when you take the scriptures literally.

Impeachment, Anyone?

2005-12-18T06:50:00.000-08:00

The NY Times, without mentioning the I-word, lays out the case in good "gray lady" fashion. Of course the decision-makers should be taken to task for sitting on the story for all these months. Having been married once to a reporter, I'm guessing that the ones who got the story were beside themselves about the (albeit temporary) spiking. That aside, this all has a real Watergate feel to it. If you like the idea of a Bush impeachment (and hey, let's throw in Cheney too for good measure), and your member of Congress sits on the House Judiciary Committee, make some noise. Yeah, yeah -- I know that committee chair Jim Sensenbrenner will convene impeachment hearings in the year hell freezes over. Still, make some noise; that's how representative government is supposed to work. Also, and better yet, work like hell to get a Democratic Congress elected in 2006. Then, when Bush and Cheney are both thrown out and the next in line is sworn in as chief executive, we'll have President Nancy Pelosi (who'll be moving from her new post as Speaker of the House) -- way better than Geena Davis. Cool, huh? Sounds like a dream, but it could happen if anybody cares enough to make it so.

"The Wizard of Oil"

2005-12-17T09:45:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to MB for sending this link. It's really, really funny. Make yourself some popcorn (no worries about the keyboard; you'll only need your scrolling finger) and enjoy.

Another law broken by the Bush administration?

2005-12-16T16:59:00.000-08:00

Buzzflash, in their inimitable way, pretty well said it all this morning...

"Bush, Taking a Page from the East German Stasi Secret Police, Ordered Secret Wiretaps on Americans (Perhaps in the Thousands), Without Court Approval. Gulags, the Pentagon Spying on Americans, Unauthorized White House Wiretaps on American Citizens, Our Library Books investigated, Rampant Torture. Al Qaeda Doesn't Need to End Our Democracy; Bush Has Done It For Them. Stalin Would be Proud. (Also, NYT Delayed Report for a Year.)"

They've moved on to another header by now, but the story this one refers to is here and here:

President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign
nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying, sources with knowledge of the program said last night.

The super-secretive NSA, which has generally been barred from domestic spying except in narrow circumstances involving foreign nationals, has monitored the e-mail, telephone calls and other communications of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people under the program, the New York Times disclosed last night.

And the follow-up here -- what Bush has done is probably illegal. (See here, too.) And what the Times did - sitting on a story like this for a full election year - should be.

Friday Cat Blogging

2005-12-16T08:20:00.000-08:00

It just gets better (Warning: disturbing animal news)

2005-12-12T00:45:00.000-08:00

It's not my night for random television encounters. First, I stopped by just in time to see sharks being "finned" and dropped back into the sea to drown. And just now, I took a break to see who's on Larry King, and it's Alec Baldwin and some other folks discussing the booming trade in cat and dog fur in China! I couldn't watch, so I googled: cats and dogs are being captured by the thousands in the Czech Republic and China, and then skinned - in many cases, still alive - so that their "pelts" can be sold to a "thriving cat and dog skins industry and trade."

When the transcript shows up on Larry King's web site, I'll link to it here. (Update: here it is.)

Finning

2005-12-11T20:14:00.000-08:00

I'm neck-deep in paper-writing this week and next. But I just wandered past the television on my way to get another Diet Coke, and 60 Minutes' Bob Simon was talking about how sharks are facing extinction because of finning:

In some regions, shark populations are down 90 percent, and some species are approaching extinction.

Why is this happening?

The answer boils down, literally, to soup. Shark fin soup. In China, it’s been an expensive status symbol for millennia. Chefs in the emperor’s court were once beheaded if they prepared it incorrectly. But these days, with China booming, more people can pay $100 for a bowl. Finning sharks is a billion-dollar business, and it’s not a pretty sight.

That’s because as soon as a shark is caught, his fins are cut off and he is thrown overboard, alive, to sink to the bottom and drown...

So the shark is killed, quite brutally, for a minute fraction of its edible flesh - the rest of which sinks to the ocean floor. This kind of "thinking" makes my head hurt.

The whole story - on shark tourism - is here.

What are you doing here when you could be reading Fafblog?

2005-12-09T21:56:00.000-08:00

I haven't worked Fafblog into my daily rounds, yet: it takes practice to develop a good habit. But the times I remember, I'm well-rewarded.

The Central Front In The War On Facts

The usual antiwar suspects have been up in arms for well over a week over the military's planting of covert propaganda in Iraqi newspapers, caterwauling about the undermining of a fundamental tenet of Iraqi democracy. As always, their concerns are wildly misplaced. First, shouldn't a pretend democracy have a pretend free press? Second, most of these pieces weren't factually inaccurate, but mere "spin" - such as the article that spun an Iraqi general's death under torture as death under not-torture. Third, propaganda is merely a weapon. America's leaders would be foolhardy indeed to refuse a weapon in their arsenal, especially against an adverary as deadly as the truth.

While it may not be the ideal of journalism in a free society, is this planted, pro-military propaganda so different from the anti-military truthaganda published every day in the New York Times? While military propaganda shows a bias towards distortion, obfuscation, and outright lies in the service of the war effort, the baleful face of the Mainstream Media shows a clear bias towards reporting reality - and reality has always been America's greatest enemy in Iraq.

Along with facts on the ground and the ugly truth, cold hard reality has persistently undermined America's efforts in the war on terror. Were it not for reality, America would already have destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear-powered robo-mummy factories while uniting Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd in common love of their American liberators. Malicious facts, however, have conspired to turn Iraq into a bloody war zone racked by insurgent violence and sectarian bloodshed, and the war itself into an unwinnable quagmire built on a transparent fraud. Even now, reality is working to tarnish America's reputation by exposing its routine torture of military prisoners, in defiance of the stated policies of the Bush administration. This pattern of obstruction and interference can leave no doubt: reality isn't merely misguided or ill-informed. It's on the other side.

Read the rest. While you're there, check out their links to "Vital Resources" such as Animals on the Underground. Somehow, BART just doesn't fire the imagination in the same way.

Molly Ivins

2005-12-06T09:44:00.000-08:00

Some Christians seem to me inclined to lose track of love, compassion and mercy. I don't think I have any special brief to go around judging them, but when the stink of hypocrisy becomes so foul in the nostrils it makes you start to puke it becomes necessary to point out there is one more good reason to observe the separation of church and state: If God keeps hanging out with politicians, it's gonna hurt his reputation.

The whole column is here.

Akk-centuate the positives...

2005-12-06T09:29:00.000-08:00

Rummy says we're missing the good news - the ~~insurgents~~ Enemies of the Legally Elected Government have not blown up the oil fields! (the latter via Buzzflash) If the media would just stop "looking for drama" and reporting on US casualties, we'd recognize the progress in Iraq. And hey, says Rummy, let's have a little perspective on this whole casualty count thing:

In remarks delivered at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, Rumsfeld suggested that news organizations are reporting on deaths in Iraq because they are "looking for drama."

At the same time, he said, they are not giving intense coverage to fatalities in the United States, where an average of 42,000 traffic deaths and 16,000 homicides take place each year.

McCain

2005-12-06T09:27:00.000-08:00

Every time I get a little magnanimous and allow myself to think of John McCain as more principled than most ~~Republicans~~ of his Republican colleagues (update: I was a little hasty, there, but I caught myself within minutes), he proves me wrong. He is now leading the administration's attack on John Murtha. Sure, it's a kinder, gentler attack than Jean Schmidt or RoboScotty could pull off, but that's probably exactly the point. And McCain apparently is willing to do it for them. That's disgusting.