Soldiers of Christ II

Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters

Posted on Monday, May 30, 2005.
Originally from May 2005.
By Chris Hedges.

...A bearded man dressed as a biblical prophet is pushing tours of the Holy Land. I see anti-abortion booths and evidence of fringe groups such as Jews for Jesus and Accuracy in Media, one of whose representatives hands me a report with the title “American Troops Cheer Attacks on U.S. Media.”

All the seminars and workshops are taking place on the upper floors. One seminar is entitled “Finding God in Hollywood.” Another is called “Invading Cities for Christ: The Thousand-Day Plan.”

In the parking lot outside the center, I come across a pickup truck with large hand-painted panels bearing anti-gay slogans and a round red circle with a line through the center superimposed on the faces of two men kissing. STOP THE INSANITY, it says across the top. I pick up one of the pamphlets in a metal box on the side of the truck: “Protect Your Family & Friends from the Dangers of . . . Homosexuality: The Truth!” It lists “the facts about homosexuality they refuse to teach in Public Schools or report on the Evening News!” including: “homosexuals average 500 sexual partners in their short lifetime” and “because of unsanitary sexual practices homosexuals carry the bulk of all bowel disease in America.”

...

Wright promises the audience that as the new president of NRB he will fight to block the passage of hate-crime legislation, something many Christian broadcasters fear might be used to halt their attacks on gays and lesbians.

“For the first time in history, representatives and senators may pass hate-crime legislation,” he says, “which is one step to oppose what you do as against the law.

“If we had to give equal time to every opposing viewpoint, there would be no time to proclaim the truth that we have been commanded to proclaim,” he says. “We will fight the Fairness Doctrine, tooth and nail. It could be the end of Christian broadcasting as we know it if we do not.”

...

What the disparate sects of this movement, known as Dominionism, share is an obsession with political power. A decades-long refusal to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over the earth itself. Dominionists preach that Jesus has called them to build the kingdom of God in the here and now, whereas previously it was thought that we would have to wait for it. America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan.

Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, Creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and “homeland” security

Some Dominionists (not all of whom accept the label, at least not publicly) would further require all citizens to pay “tithes” to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social-welfare agencies, and a number of influential figures advocate the death penalty for a host of “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft. The only legitimate voices in this state will be Christian.

All others will be silenced.

...

I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Adams had watched American intellectuals and industrialists flirt with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini’s “Corporatism,” which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, had appealed to many at the time as an effective counterweight to the New Deal. In 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the expense of workers.

Then as now, Adams said, too many liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical Christians came, these people would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state. Adams had watched German academics fall silent or conform. He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable lies told by totalitarian movements, how easily those lies lull moderates into passivity.

Adams told us to watch closely the Christian right’s persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933, then imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and publications. Then came raids on the places where homosexuals gathered, culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first “deviants” singled out by the Christian right.

We would be the next.

Link: http://www.harpers.org/FeelingTheHate.html

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Hmmm...just the way Jesus would have done it.

Am I the only one who sees these people as the Taliban of the West?

On Fox News? The Devil Needs Ear Muffs.

Link: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,157960,00.html


U.S. Has Long History of Waging Wrong Wars

Tuesday, May 31, 2005
By Jim Powell

... If, in the name of fighting terrorism and reforming the world, the U.S. embarks on a policy of perpetual war, its ability to fight as effectively as possible when it really counts will be undermined. Already, the armed forces have had difficulty conducting operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq. There's much concern about enlistment rates for a volunteer army because of the Pentagon's "stop loss" orders forcing tens of thousands of soldiers to remain on active duty perhaps a year longer than they had bargained for.

In addition, the U.S. invasion of nuke-free Iraq and its restraint with nuke-armed North Korea send a signal that other nations should secretly accelerate efforts to acquire nuclear weapons since they deter U.S. intervention. U.S. actions encourage the nuclear proliferation it is intended to prevent.

Woodrow Wilson left a legacy of trouble.

With the Gloves Off

By BOB HERBERT
New York Times

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/26/opinion/26herbert.html?hp

A photo of President Bush gingerly holding a month-old baby was on the front page of yesterday's New York Times. Mr. Bush is in the habit of telling us how precious he thinks life is, all life.

The story was about legislation concerning embryonic stem cell research, and it included a comment from Tom DeLay urging Americans to reject "the treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred, some are more sacred than others."

Ahh, pretty words. Now I wonder when Mr. Bush and Mr. DeLay will find the time to address - or rather, to denounce - the depraved ways in which the United States has dealt with so many of the thousands of people (many of them completely innocent) who have been swept up in the so-called war on terror.

...

Warfare, when absolutely unavoidable, is one thing. But it's a little difficult to understand how these kinds of profoundly dehumanizing practices - not to mention the physical torture we've heard so much about - could be enthusiastically embraced by a government headed by men who think all life is sacred. Either I'm missing something, or President Bush, Tom DeLay and their ilk are fashioning whole new zones of hypocrisy for Americans to inhabit.

...

Torturing prisoners, rather than making the U.S. safer, puts us all in greater danger. The abuses of detainees at places like Guantánamo and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have come to define the United States in the minds of many Muslims and others around the world. And the world has caught on that large percentages of the people swept up and incarcerated as terrorists by the U.S. were in fact innocent of wrongdoing and had no connection to terrorism at all.

Bitterness against the U.S. has increased exponentially since the initial disclosures about the abuse of detainees. What's the upside of policies that demean the U.S. in the eyes of the world while at the same time making us less rather than more secure?

The government, like an addict in denial, will not even admit that we have a problem.
"We're in this Orwellian situation," said Leonard Rubenstein, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, "where the statements by the administration, by the president, are unequivocal: that the United States does not participate in, or condone, torture. And yet it has engaged in legal interpretations and interrogation policies that undermine that absolutist stance."

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"The end and perfection of our victories is to avoid the vices and infirmities of those whom we subdue."

- Alexander the Great

Prayer For Destruction

http://www.aychamo.com/2005/01/southern-baptists-pray-for-destruction.html

The website of the International Mission Board (IMB), a branch of the infamous Southern Baptist Convention, is calling for American Southern Baptist missionaries to visit a prominent Hindu temple in India and pray for its destruction.The mission assignment entitled “Jericho Prayerwalk” calls for missionaries to visit “one of the holiest temples“ once a day (at differing times) to walk around the complex praying for the people group. Pray specifically that the walls to the Gospel message will collapse like the walls of Jericho in Joshua.” In other words, missionaries should pray that all the local Hindus convert to Christianity and that their temple will be destroyed.

In the past, the Southern Baptist Convention distributed 30,000 copies of a handbook just before the most important Hindu festival of 1999, Diwali, stating that 'Hindus seek power and blessing through the worship of gods and goddesses and the demonic powers that lay behind them."

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Yes, God really does want you to pray for the destruction of others. Our God is better, it's that simple...or is that the people who make such calls to prayer? It always confuses me.

The ONLY Truth You'll Get From Bush

President Bush: "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

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'nuff said.

C.E.O.'s, M.I.A.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/25/opinion/25friedman.html?hp

... Is there any company in America that should be more involved in lobbying for some form of national health coverage than General Motors, which is being strangled by its health care costs? Is there any group of companies that should have been picketing the White House more than our high-tech firms, after the Bush team cut the National Science Foundation budget by $100 million in 2005 and in 2006 has proposed shrinking the Department of Energy science programs and basic and applied research in the Department of Defense - key sources of innovation?

Is there any constituency that should be clamoring for a sane energy policy more than U.S. industry? Is there any group that should be mobilizing voters to lobby Congress to pass the Caribbean Free Trade Agreement and complete the Doha round more than U.S. multinationals? Should anyone be more concerned about the fiscally reckless deficits we are leaving our children than Wall Street?

Yet, with a few admirable exceptions, American business has not gotten out front on these issues. In part, this is because boardrooms tend to be culturally Republican - both uncomfortable and a little afraid to challenge this administration. In part, this is because of the post-Enron keep-your-head-down effect. And in part, this is because in today's flatter world, many key U.S. companies now make most of their profits abroad and can increasingly recruit the best talent in the world today without ever hiring another American.

So with business with its head in the clouds, labor with its head in the sand, the administration focused on terrorism and Congress catering to people who think "intelligent design" is something done by God and not by Intel, it's not surprising that "we don't have a strategy for making America competitive in the 21st century - a century of three billion new capitalists," as Clyde Prestowitz put it. He is the author of a smart new book about the rise of China and India, called, appropriately, "Three Billion New Capitalists."

If we don't get our act together, this will affect not just our economy, but also our power...

Conservative With a Brain

Michael Knox Beran, writes in National Review Online about why American conservatives "have failed to criticize" American mistakes in Iraq. Conservatives, he writes, should not "fancy themselves immune from the intellectual stultification that has overwhelmed other orthodoxies during a spell of power."

What Happens When You Don't Do Any Risk Planning

Peace in Iraq 'will take at least five years to impose'

Richard Norton-Taylor and Michael Howard in Iraq
Wednesday May 25, 2005
The Guardian

Link: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1491690,00.html

It could take at least five years before Iraqi forces are strong enough to impose law and order on the country, the International Institute of Strategic Studies warned yesterday.
The thinktank's report said that Iraq had become a valuable recruiting ground for al-Qaida, and Iraqi forces were nowhere near close to matching the insurgency.

John Chipman, IISS director, said the Iraqi security forces faced a "huge task" and the continuing ability of the insurgents to inflict mass casualties "must cast doubt on US plans to redeploy American troops and eventually reduce their numbers".

...

Insurgents have killed 600 Iraqis since the new government was formed. The IISS report said: "Best estimates suggest that it will take up to five years to create anything close to an effective indigenous force able to impose and guarantee order across the country."

...

The report said that, on balance, US policy over the past year had been effective in emboldening regional players in the Middle East and the Gulf to rally against rogue states.

But it warned that the inspirational effect of the intervention in Iraq on Islamist terrorism was "the proverbial elephant in the living room. From al-Qaida's point of view, [President] Bush's Iraq policies have arguably produced a confluence of propitious circumstances: a strategically bogged down America, hated by much of the Islamic world, and regarded warily even by its allies".

Iraq "could serve as a valuable proving ground for 'blooding' foreign jihadists, and could conceivably form the basis of a second generation of capable al-Qaida leaders ... and middle-management players", the report said.

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If you are simplistic in your reasoning, then the results of your actions often cause more problems then they solve and cost more in resources and money then originally planned.

From what B-Schools did Bush and his dunces graduate?

Simple is as simple does. Too bad it's the average American who takes it on the chin.

US Theocracy's Budding Army?

Yeah, pay no attention to the Religious Right, they're harmless...

http://www.forceministries.com/

How To Win A War Without Firing A Shot?

Give your enemy enough rope by which they may hang themselves.

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The Chinese Connection

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/opinion/20krugman.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Stories about the new Treasury report condemning China's currency policy probably had most readers going, "Huh?" Frankly, this is an issue that confuses professional economists, too. But let me try to explain what's going on.

...

So why is the U.S. government complaining? The Treasury report says nothing at all about how China's currency policy affects the United States - all it offers on the domestic side is the usual sycophantic praise for administration policy. Instead, it focuses on the disadvantages of Chinese policy for the Chinese themselves. Since when is that a major U.S. concern?

In reality, of course, the administration doesn't care about the Chinese economy. It's complaining about the yuan because of political pressure from U.S. manufacturers, which are angry about those Chinese trade surpluses. So it's all politics. And that's the problem: when policy decisions are made on purely political grounds, nobody thinks through their real-world consequences.

Here's what I think will happen if and when China changes its currency policy, and those cheap loans are no longer available. U.S. interest rates will rise; the housing bubble will probably burst; construction employment and consumer spending will both fall; falling home prices may lead to a wave of bankruptcies. And we'll suddenly wonder why anyone thought financing the budget deficit was easy.

In other words, we've developed an addiction to Chinese dollar purchases, and will suffer painful withdrawal symptoms when they come to an end.

The Right Continues To Lie About The Filibuster

The "Nuclear Option" as a Return to Tradition? Hogwash.

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.22537,filter.all/pub_detail.asp

By Norman J. Ornstein
Posted: Wednesday, May 18, 2005

ARTICLES

Roll Call

Publication Date: May 18, 2005

Sorry, but I have to address judicial confirmations one more time. I wasn’t planning on doing this, but the constant drumbeat of propaganda forced my hand.

There is so much misinformation floating around that I thought it was important to clarify the historical record. Of course, by the time this column appears, enough institutionalists in the Senate might reach the edge of the abyss and think better of it. But even if there is a deal to head off the “nuclear option” to end judicial filibusters, some of these myths need to be confronted directly.

The myths have been repeated ad nauseam by Republican Senators on television, in op-eds, at press conferences and on the floor. They have been faithfully repeated by bloggers and columnists. They were pulled together nicely and concisely in The Washington Post column by my friend Charles Krauthammer last Friday.

Krauthammer--like Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and their compadres--suggests that filibusters against judicial nominees are a fraud. He dismisses the filibuster against Abe Fortas as not a real filibuster, since he didn’t have the votes anyhow. He says, “two hundred years of tradition have been radically and unilaterally changed by the minority” Democrats, because they have lost the last two elections and fear losing the only branch they control, the courts, on which their loyalists have legislated “by judicial fiat everything from abortion to gay marriage to religion in the public square.”

He says, further, that “one of the great traditions, customs and unwritten rules of the Senate is that you do not filibuster judicial nominees.” He calls the Democrats’ actions “historically unprecedented” and “radical,” saying they have “unilaterally shattered one of the longest-running traditions in parliamentary history.”

This view was reinforced by Frist’s op-ed in Monday’s USA Today, in which he wrote about the 214-year-old tradition of having up-or-down votes in the Senate on judicial nominations. He adds that, since President Bill Clinton’s judicial nominees only required 51 votes, “why should George W. Bush’s be treated differently?”

Where to begin? Let’s deal quickly with Fortas. First, apply Logic 101: If Fortas did not have the votes, why filibuster? If it was not a filibuster, as many Republican Senators have contended, explain the official Senate Web site, in its section on history, having as its headline “October 1, 1968: Filibuster Derails Supreme Court Appointee.” Must be the phenomenon Ronald Reagan talked about with his White House, that sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the far-right hand is doing.

Now let’s turn to the twin notions that through 214 years of American history there has been a near-ironclad tradition of judicial nominees getting up-or-down votes on the Senate floor, undergirded by the great custom of the Senate that renders filibusters of judicial nominees taboo.

On the latter point, I have searched through a whole lot of history of the Senate, from George Haynes’ classic volumes to memoirs and other literature. I have yet to read anything about some long-standing tradition, custom or unwritten rule against filibustering judicial nominees.
It is true that for more than 30 years after the Senate got its first cloture rule in 1917, there was no cloture provision on nominations. But remember that cloture is the way to end, not to extend, debate. Before 1917, for nominations or legislation, there was no way to end debate if one or more Senators held the floor. So the lack of a specific cloture provision for nominations did not mean there was no provision for a filibuster; quite the contrary. It meant there was no way for any supermajority of Senators, whether two-thirds of those present and voting or 60 Senators, to stop talking and start voting.

Now let us take up the assertion that we have had a two-century-plus tradition of giving presidents up-or-down votes on their judicial nominations. What are these people smoking? For more than 200 years, hundreds of judicial nominees at all levels had their nominations deep-sixed, buried, killed or asphyxiated by the Senate, either by one individual, a committee or a small group of Senators, before the nominations ever got anywhere near the floor. To be sure, most were not filibustered in the “Mr. Smith” sense, or in the modern and direct version. These judicial nominees were stabbed in the back, not in the chest.

Consider the history of Supreme Court nominations--the most visible and prized, of course, and the ones you’d think would have clearly fit Krauthammer’s notion.

Of the 154 nominations to the Supreme Court between 1789 and 2002, 34 were not confirmed. Of these, 11 were rejected by a vote of the full Senate. The remaining 23 were postponed, referred to a committee from which they never emerged, reported from committee but not acted on, or, in a few cases, withdrawn by the president when the going got tough. At least seven nominations were killed because of objections by home-state Senators. Five others were reported to the Judiciary Committee (which was created in 1816) and never made it out.
That is the Supreme Court. We don’t have a precise account of nominees to federal appeals courts or district courts, but we do know that there is a longstanding tradition, custom and unwritten rule applying to district court nominees, giving one or two Senators from the home state a veto power that has been exercised countless times. (That unwritten rule, incidentally, was shattered by Hatch, then the Judiciary chairman, when Clinton was president.)

This “blue slip” power was applied less frequently to appeals court nominees, but many in the past were killed far short of a vote on the Senate floor. Why weren’t more of them filibustered? Because it was easy enough to kill most of the controversial ones without resorting to a filibuster.

There is no record I can find of a historical period in which the Senate systematically killed such nominations. Rather, they tended to be done on a case-by-case basis. But that did change in the second Clinton term, when dozens of judicial nominees, including many to appeals courts, were denied hearings, in some cases for four or five years, not on the basis of any charge that they were ideologically extreme or unqualified, but rather because they represented slots on important courts, worth keeping open in case the next president turned out to be a Republican.
If we want to look for a breach in Senate traditions, that is where to start. And the failure to bring more than 60 to the floor for up-or-down votes makes one gape at Frist’s astonishing comment that the standard in the Clinton years was 51 votes. For these 60 would-be judges, it was a one-vote standard--that of the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

There are longstanding traditions in the Senate regarding judicial nominations. Those traditions call for a vigorous and independent Senate playing its role of advice and consent. They understand that judicial nominations, because they represent lifetime appointments which cannot and should not be easily rescinded, require higher hurdles than simple legislation which can always be amended or repealed. Charles Krauthammer called the nuclear option “restoration.” It’s not even close.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.

A Chart Of Judges

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/05/18/opinion/20050519_opchart.html

A Response To: United We Stand

Wednesday, May 18, 2005
By Neil Cavuto
Fox News

Editorial Link: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,156971,00.html


My Response:

Consider:


"But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle [the Declaration of Independence] I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it."

Abraham Lincoln - Republican

"The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise."

Cornelius Tacitus
Roman Historian
c.55-117AD

"T'is man's perdition to be safe, when for truth he ought to die."

Richard Vines
English Cleric
c.1585-1651

"The end and perfection of our victories is to avoid the vices and infirmities of those whom we subdue."

Alexander the Great

"Security is the mother of danger and the grandmother of destruction."

Thomas Fuller
English Clergy
1654-1734

"There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor, Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and love of the Fatherland."

Sign on walls of concentration camps, signed by Adolf Hitler

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How desperate you are: As the nation learns of the Republican's incompetence in the Congress and the White House, their minions turn back to fear as blaming Clinton obviously is not working for them anymore. Ironic that the right now has the power they so coveted and now have no one to blame but themselves for where we stand. You see it don't you; the beginning of the end of the Right's fanciful attempt to enrich themselves and legislate morality in attempt to return to a past that never was?

There is nothing more pathetic than watching those in power break into a sweat at the thought of losing their perceived status.

United? Indeed. It has taken five years of effort for this administration and Congress to divide this nation.

PLEASE HELP EASE EXXON’S HEADACHE

– by Jim Hightower

Friends, there is someone among us who has a big problem, and he needs our help. Knowing the innate generosity of Americans, I’m certain that you’ll reach out and do all you can to assist Mr. Lee Raymond.

He’s the CEO of Exxon Mobil – and wait’ll you learn about his desperate situation: His company has so much cash that he doesn’t know what to do with it. And you thought you had problems. Here is “Fortune” magazine’s gloomy analysis of the situation: “[Lee Raymond] suddenly has a new anxiety: how to spend the windfall wrought by $55-a-barrel oil. By the end of April, Exxon [had] a cash hoard of more than $25 billion. And if crude prices stay where they are, this geometrically growing bonanza could soon give Exxon more cash on hand than any other U.S. company.... Each dollar jump in the price of a barrel of oil adds another half billion in earnings. Based on current prices, Exxon is accumulating more than $1 billion a month – even after allocating for dividends, share repurchases, and capital spending. If oil simply stays where it is now, Exxon s cash could approach $40 billion in 12 months. “

I have no doubt that you feel Mr. Raymond’s pain and will want to help him cope with, as “Fortune” expressed it, “the headache of what to do with all that cash.” If you have suggestions, email them to me and I’ll forward them directly to Mr. Raymond.

Just to get your creative juices flowing, I’ll offer an obvious way for Exxon to end this “crisis” of excess cash gushing into its coffers: Stop gouging us at the pump! Each dollar of those billions causing such a headache for Mr. Raymond comes out of your and my pockets. Exxon doesn’t have to rip us off just because it can – it could pass on some of its windfall oil profits to its gasoline customers in the form of lower prices.

But I’m sure you have more creative suggestions. Send your ideas for easing Mr. Raymond’s headache to me: mailto:info@jimhightower.com .

--

Jim Hightower is the best-selling author of “Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back,” on sale now from Viking Press.

http://www.jimhightower.com

Ethnic divisions laid bare in post-election Iraq

Two weeks of intense insurgent violence have made it crystal clear that Iraq’s parliamentary elections, hailed in late January as a triumph for democracy, haven’t helped to heal the country’s deep divisions. They may have made them worse.

http://tinyurl.com/78obm

Report: U.S. makes mistake on Iraq

The escalating insurgency wreaking havoc in Iraq was made significantly worse by major mistakes of U.S.-led forces, a report from a leading Washington security think tank concluded.

http://tinyurl.com/a4znh

Halliburton Defined

A detailed account of the biggest profiteer since WWII:

http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/about_hal/houston.2005.pdf

A Response To: Are Your Kids Safe?
Friday, May 13, 2005
By John Gibson
Fox News

Editorial Link: Here

My Response:

Do you really want to know the answer, or are you just kicking up dust to make an ideological point or make money?

If you REALLY wanted to know, you would know. How? By doing some research. I know, I know, that would require work and real journalistic skills on your part and your editor's part and we can't have that.

I'll make it simple for you though:

-Research back to 1900 on criminal statistics and see what was the per capita incidence of on-child crime;
-Talk to criminal history experts to see what differences there was in crime reporting and record keeping;
-Make appropriate adjustments in stats;
-Look at stats today and the past decade;
-Do a trend analysis to see if there has been a SIGNIFICANT change given our increases in population and media coverage.

THIS will tell you what you want to know. But, I think you're more interested in continuing to foster the FEAR that children are in more danger because it fits nicely with the overall THEO-CON fear campaign used to justify theocratic influences and draconian laws.

Your question should be: Is the PERCEPTION of our children's safety worse than in the past?

That answer is simple: Yes. Because that is exactly the perception that Fox News wants to project. It's good for politics and it's good for business.
There may indeed be a rise in the threat to children, but your show and any show on Fox won't address that by putting talking heads on the screen to pontificate about the downfall of society without producing any such facts. See, THAT is what is bias in the media; not facts that are reported that run counter to an ideology. It's sad that you cannot tell the difference.

Convergence...the threat of theocracy looms larger...

Think Again: 'Faith-Based' Journalism
Missed by the Media, but Shaping the Debate
by Eric Alterman
May 12, 2005

...

Other right-wing Christian networks also ran live election coverage for the first time this past cycle, Blake reports; and much of it carried a clear bias. She notes a USA Radio Network segment, dressed up to sound like a news report that claimed that "Osama bin Laden spent years laying plans to destroy America, only to have them thwarted by a tough-talking Texan. He never planned on running into a president with the strength, character, and conviction of George W. Bush," [CIA analyst] Simmons said. "If George W. Bush wins the presidency, his fate – meaning Osama bin Laden's fate – is sealed. If John Kerry wins, he'll go back to business as usual because he knows he'll have another administration in there where he did nothing and let them plan attacks on us."

Granted, it sounds a lot like Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, but the difference is everybody knows about them. In total, conservative evangelicals presently control at least six national television networks, and more than 2,000 religious radio stations. By the start of 2005, religious stations outnumbered every other radio format except country music and news-talk. And when was the last time you heard a right-winger admit that they played any role in fixing the center of media political gravity?

Article Link: Here

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Ignore at your peril.

Seven Minutes With Bill O'Reilly
By John Shelby Spong

I began my Harper-Collins book tour to introduce The Sins of Scripture on Fox News' with Bill O'Reilly. It was my seventh appearance on the program and, I find that though we share little in common, I like the man. Behind his bluster and constant interruptions, I believe there is a person who cares more deeply than we might suspect from watching his program. Harper-Collins sent him my book seeking his endorsement and to my surprise it appears on the back cover. That endorsement brought a cancellation notice from one of my readers. I did suggest to O'Reilly that his endorsement would probably damage both his reputation and mine.

In a previous column, I took O'Reilly to task when he demanded that Al Sharpton answer "yes" or "no" to his question as to whether African-Americans, are better off today than they would have been if their ancestors had not been forcibly removed from Africa. It was, I believe, an attempt to suggest that in the final analysis slavery has been good for African-Americans. That question constituted, I suggested blatant but unadmitted racism. O'Reilly invited me to his program to defend himself against that charge. He countered that I did not know enough about him to make that judgment and appeared to be genuinely offended. He was right. I don't. Yet he needed to know that what he intended to communicate and what he communicated were two different things.

In public life we are held accountable for what people hear us saying. After I said to him on another appearance, "Bill, you are nothing but Rush Limbaugh with perfume," almost a year went by before I heard from him again. So both his endorsement of the book and his invitation to me to launch the book nationally on Fox's "O'Reilly Factor" surprised me. It also pleased me for this was a good place to begin the 15 city, 23 day book tour.

Bill O'Reilly is at least 6 feet five inches tall. His television audience hardly ever sees him standing so they are surprised to meet him in person. He was raised a Roman Catholic and still practices his faith though, he says not to the satisfaction of those who are zealous. Like many who define themselves as conservatives, O'Reilly tends to see the world in stark contrast between good and evil. Inevitably he sees himself as on the side of the angels. There is, however, a revealing harshness about his rhetoric that projects anything but certainty.

He speaks of both willingness and a desire to kill anyone who threatens his worldview, whether it is terrorists or burglars. He refers to Muslim fundamentalists as "villainous Islamic fascists," a designation that surely resonates with his listeners. He appears, however, to have little understanding of what motivates people to seek the annihilation of their enemies. There is little room in his world for examining the causes of hatred or attempting to understand the subjective relativity of his perspective.

For example, in the Galilean War fought between 66 and 73 CE, Jewish guerilla warriors carried out hit and run attacks against Roman soldiers. The Romans called them "terrorists" but to the Jews they were "Freedom Fighters." The Crusaders of the 11th and 12th centuries were to the Muslims of the Middle East "invading terrorists," but to the Vatican who sponsored them, they were the bearers of the truth of the Gospel. If the British had defeated the American revolutionaries in the late 18th century, George Washington would have been hanged as a traitor and Benedict Arnold would have been appointed Governor General of the defeated colonies.

Right wing ideologues think they see things objectively, without the relativising aspect of their self-oriented perspective. They don't. Theirs is not a 'no spin zone.'

Religion is a popular theme on the O'Reilly Factor. His theological understanding, however, seems frozen at about the sixth grade, parochial school level. 'Orthodoxy' is what he has been taught. He would be surprised to know that the story of the passion of Jesus was probably composed not from eyewitness accounts but from Hebrew sources, written long before the time of Jesus, primarily in Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53, and was actually written for use in early Christian liturgies not to describe what really happened in history. He probably is not aware that the story of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was not original to the Christian story but made its appearance no earlier that the 9th decade of the Christian era.

He seems not to embrace the fact that the intellectual revolution begun by Copernicus and continued in the work of such giants as Galileo, Einstein and Stephen Hawking have rendered inoperative the idea of a God perched above the sky, ready to intervene miraculously to accomplish the divine will or to answer the prayers of the faithful. He suggested on this program that the prayers of John Paul II were responsible for bringing down communism in Eastern Europe and that the Pope really believed that prayer worked. If prayer to such a deity doesn't work, O'Reilly said, then why bother. His definition of prayer working is that his prayers are answered just as he requested.

Since his reading of my book suggested to him that I did not believe in a God understood as a supernatural being above the sky ready to intervene, he inquired as to whether I really believe in God or if I pray. "Of course I pray," I responded to his query. I have a member of my family in the armed forces, who has just returned from a second tour of duty in the Iraqi war. I pray for this person daily, I said, because I love this person deeply. If what you are really asking, I continued, is do I believe that my prayers will stop bullets or defuse car bombs so that my loved one's life is miraculously saved, then I must say no I do not believe that. I tried to explain that this would mean that those who have died in this dreadful war were either so evil that they deserved to die or that their loved ones did not pray sufficiently for them. Both ideas present me with a God so capricious that I would never be drawn to worship such a Being. I learned that a seven-minute television segment is not the best format for developing theological understanding.

Somehow the worship of the God of Life, Love and Being that I experience at the heart of the Christian story lifts me out of a radical self-centeredness and allows me to view the world from a very different perspective. God is not in my employ, eager to do my will. God does not reward goodness and punish evil. God does not abandon the laws by which the universe operates to serve my agenda. I do not believe for one minute that God stopped the sun in the sky at the time of Joshua, creating the first instance of daylight-saving time, for the immoral purpose of allowing Joshua more time to kill more of his enemies. Indeed, what a strange view of God that would be if accurate. Yet that is the image that many people have of God while still in their theological immaturity. Bill O'Reilly is the television poster child for this mentality.

O'Reilly called me "an outspoken liberal theologian,' and said that The Sins of Scripture will "make a lot of believers very angry." Yet he called it "thought-provoking." He went on, probably to restore his credibility with his own audience to say, "It's against all Christian orthodoxy, almost all of it."

Then, because we did this show after the death of John Paul II and before the election of his successor, he went immediately to the Pope. Four times in four different ways, he enquired if I respected the Pope and if I thought he was a good man. He seemed not to be willing to accept my answer since in his mind someone as liberal as he perceived me to be could not really respect one "as conservative as the Pope." After his 4th inquiry I responded, " Bill, I respect you but I don't always agree with your point of view." In a previous column, I give John Paul credit for his contributions to freedom in Eastern Europe and for his unflinching opposition to the war in Iraq. I do not applaud his attitude toward women, birth control, homosexuality or scholarship. His claim that there is only one true faith, Christianity, and only one true expression of that faith, Roman Catholicism, is religious arrogance at its worst. This program was, however, neither the time nor the place to do a critical assessment of John Paul's career. People were still grieving over his death. The time would come for that soon enough, so I tried to express my respect for John Paul II without endorsing his policies.

Once he was sure that I respected the Pope, he moved to his conclusion that the Pope believed in a God of intervention and he perceived that I did not. I responded that no one knows and thus should not presume to say how God acts. Why did God not stop the Tsunami, I inquired, or such things as the Holocaust or AIDS in Africa?

"Everybody knows," Bill O'Reilly interrupted, "that God works in mysterious ways." It was the oldest and most familiar "copout" that religious voices have always used when simple answers cannot make sense out of harsh reality.

We were now down to the last three minutes of the program and he wanted me to discuss how we understand both God and prayer. A few moments later he shifted the subject to the end of the world. I tried to do damage control, so that I would not be perceived as allowing O'Reilly to define the limits of the theological debate. I tried to explain that horses could not describe what it means to be human and human beings likewise cannot possibly understand what it means to be God. It was no use. O'Reilly interrupted and the point was left hanging. Fortunately, time was up. We shook hands and he thanked me for coming on his show.

I have met many people like Bill O'Reilly, though most have not been as smart or articulate. They are not evil people, but righteousness hardly ever translates into being loving. I like this man and would love to spend an hour with him one on one in an in-depth discussion with no one playing to an audience. That is unlikely so I must be content with an occasional appearance that affords me the opportunity to speak maybe one line that one listener might find life-giving.

- John Shelby Spong

Dear Jonathan Alter,

"He mocks the people who proposes that the Government shall protect the rich and they in turn will care for the laboring poor."

- President Grover Cleveland
Message to Congress, March 1st, 1886

I read your latest post on keeping DeLay around and I could not agree more. I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the situation in America and I have come to the conclusion that the Republicans have spent 30 years getting to where they are today and as Democrats we must do nothing more than give them enough rope as is necessary to hang themselves. They have earned control of the Government through manipulation of emotions and simplistic reasoning and America must suffer for it before we collectively learn what we have inadvertently allowed to happen.

Utilizing raw, emotional issues relating to culture and other social constructs, they have created a divide that ignores reason and ties moderate and thoughtful Republicans to an agenda that actually accomplishes little on the social front, save maybe discord, while allowing them to serve up repackaged Voodoo Economics that encourages corruption and places the middle-class American at risk. Indeed, what IS the matter with Kansas?

As my father-in-law says, people rarely change until the pain is so great that they have no choice; at that point, the either change or perish. Those that have chosen emotion over reason and simplistic, bumper-sticker cognitive dissonance for critical thinking will indeed bear the brunt of their myopia and will then have no place to turn but to the mirror and those in charge...and it won't be the Democrats.

It's only unfortunate that all Americans will have to suffer for the other half's ignorance and selfishness.

"There is no virtue that poverty destroyeth not."

- John (Giovanni) Florio
Second Frutes (1591)

The Most Dangerous Threat To Our Children And Economy

Teachers, Scientists Vow to Fight Challenge to Evolution
Creationists Seek Curriculum Change; Kan. Education Hearings Open Today
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 5, 2005; Page A03

TOPEKA, Kan., May 4 -- Alarmed by proposals to change how evolution is taught, scientists and teachers are mobilizing to fight back, asserting that educational standards are being threatened by what they consider a stealth campaign to return creationism to public schools.

....

Scientists tested several arguments at an April 21 meeting in Lawrence, playing off the state decision to spend at least $500 million to develop the bioscience industry. They predicted that a change in the curriculum would cripple state firms in the exceedingly competitive bioscience field, holding back the Kansas economy.

Paleontologist Leonard Krishtalka called intelligent design "nothing more than creationism in a cheap tuxedo." He said the adoption of new standards would hurt the University of Kansas's ability to recruit faculty and students.

"There's a great deal of hesitancy. They don't see this as a nurturing academic environment for themselves or their kids," said Krishtalka, director of the university's Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center. "It is ridiculous to backtrack to the 1700s and subvert our education to superstition and religion."

Article Link: Here

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Yeah, all this sucking up to the religious right is nothing more than pandering for votes...right? Bill Gates recently complained that he cannot find enough qualified engineers in the United States; any wonder why? If we are fighting to take our kids back to the 1700s, than we might as well start importing our scientists and doctors now.

Well, I know one state I can write off when seeking candidates for employment: Kansas.

Hey, it's just your child's future.