Month: February 2007

Who Ya Gonna Call?

by digby

An update on the case of the Reverend Lonnie Latham: apparently, the ACLU has filed a brief on his behalf. Don’t get me wrong, I think the ACLU should defend the constitution without regard to the case, but nonetheless it always sticks in my craw just a bit to hear these rightwingers rail against the ACLU until they find themselves on the receiving end of an overzealous prosecutor.

And in case anyone’s of a mind to argue that the ACLU is anti-religion, here’s proof that it isn’t, although all the “Stop The ACLU” wingnuts certainly are howling:

But let’s tell the truth as we know it – the ACLU despises the fact that this nation is one that operates under Judeo-Christian principles. This is not a Muslim nation or a Hindu or Buddhist nation. This is a Christian nation, even if our morality is going down the sewer. This nation was founded by men who believed in the Christian God. There is no problem for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists or others who want to practice their own “faith” here in America. We afford them that privilege under the 1st Amendment. But our foundation is that of the Judeo-Christian faith. If the ACLU doesn’t like it, I suggest they go to Communist Cuba or China where they can practice their godlessness. I’m getting sick of being told that all religions are equal. They are not!

Sigh.

Join the ACLU.

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We Need To Wake Up

by digby

If you haven’t seen it, go out and rent or buy the DVD of “An Inconvenient Truth” today. Hopefully, after tomorrow, the stores will be out them.

Here’s Melissa Etheridge singing the oscar nominated song.

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No Fags Or Fat Chicks Please

by digby

Here’s macho Michael Medved discussing that icky Tim Hardaway and giving all the he-men over at Townhall an argument that doesn’t make them feel all funny down there:

Tim Hardaway (and most of his former NBA teammates) wouldn’t welcome openly gay players into the locker room any more than they’d welcome profoundly unattractive, morbidly obese women. I specify unattractive females because if a young lady is attractive (or, even better, downright “hot”) most guys, very much including the notorious love machines of the National Basketball Association, would probably welcome her joining their showers. The ill-favored, grossly overweight female is the right counterpart to a gay male because, like the homosexual, she causes discomfort due to the fact that attraction can only operate in one direction. She might well feel drawn to the straight guys with whom she’s grouped, while they feel downright repulsed at the very idea of sex with her.

I think he missed the boat here. A much better analogy would be to imagine what would happen if a shrunken little creep like Michael Medved entered a woman’s gym naked, blowing kisses through his pathetic 70’s porn star mustache. I would bet a million dollars that all the women, including the fat ones, would sooner fuck a corpse than that deplorable racist, sexist, homophobic jerk. (Townhall writers of both sexes, on the other hand, would undoubtedly be intrigued.)

Medved’s worked himself into a lather thinking about showering with all those big, black “love machines” but it’s not an issue for professional athletes, gay or straight, who spend their entire lives hanging around naked men. And most know very well that there are gays in the NBA like everywhere else:

“You don’t think we all played with gay guys. Of course we have,” Barkley said. “It has never been an issue.

And considering that there have always been gays in the locker room without incident it’s obvious that what gets Medved and his homophobic buddies all worked up is the fear that they might do something inappropriate once they find out a fellow player is gay. They aren’t afraid that the gay man might desire them like some loser fat girl who should take herself to cliff and jump off of it she’s so revolting. It’s that they are afraid of their own desire rising up to the surface once they find out one of those hot love machines likes dick.

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Romper Room

by digby

In a room of 2-gallon carboys holding liquid the color of amber beer, Bush picked up a jar of straw to show off to the journalists tagging along.

“Straw!” he proclaimed. Cameras clicked and whirred.

“Someday, you’re going to be using this in your car,” he said.

He picked up another jar. “Spruce chips!”

Then he said, “I made a doodie!” and started crying for his mama.

H/T to Sue

Defense Tactics

by digby

Here’s a right wing hypocrite I can defend with a whole heart:

The lawyer for a former Baptist church leader who had spoken out against homosexuality said Thursday the minister has a constitutional right to solicit sex from an undercover policeman.

The Rev. Lonnie W. Latham had supported a resolution calling on gays and lesbians to reject their “sinful, destructive lifestyle” before his Jan. 3, 2006, arrest outside the Habana Inn in Oklahoma City.

Authorities say he asked the undercover policeman to come up to his hotel for oral sex.

His attorney, Mack Martin, filed a motion to have the misdemeanor lewdness charge thrown out, saying the Supreme Court ruled in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas that it was not illegal for consenting adults to engage in private homosexual acts.

“Now, my client’s being prosecuted basically for having offered to engage in such an act, which basically makes it a crime to ask someone to do something that’s legal,” Martin said.

Both sides agree there was no offer of money, but prosecutor Scott Rowland said there is a “legitimate governmental interest” in regulating offers of acts of lewdness.

The issue here is whether the man should be tried for soliciting an undercover cop for a blow job. Money was never discussed, so the “crime” is simply that he asked. That is the sex police at their worst.

Now, I’m sure that prior to his arrest the Reverend Latham would have absolutely agreed that the government had an interest in regulating offers of acts of lewdness, but that’s beside the point. This is not a matter for the legal system if prostitution was not involved. The hypocrisy of the victim is not at issue.

As for the Reverend Latham’s joining the burgeoning ranks of religious right closet cases, that’s something else entirely. When you see this kind of cruel hypocricy on the part of Elmer Gantry after Elmer Gantry, it’s not hard to see why some of the non religious might just think all this righteousness is a con that is not worthy of the kind of special respect and deference for religion that our society seems to require.

I try to be respectful and I do not believe that religion is a con. I enjoy discussing this issue with religious people of good will and I count many among them as my friends. But I also think you have to cut people a little slack when they fail to make all the proper distinctions among believers in light of the massive number of revelations these past few years about the Catholic Church and the Protestant fundamentalist leaders who fail spectacularly to practice what they preach. These are people who are at the forefront of the religious right movement and are in direct and often aggressive opposition to progressivism and liberalism. Most importantly, they are constantly represented in the media and politics as being the true religious face of America.

So, I’m not inclined to go completely ballistic on the hard core anti-religios. When you look at the big picture you see that the religious are as politically varied as the population as a whole and that Democrats are as religious as are the Republicans. But the culture war is being waged by churches, if not all churches, and day after day these sexual scolds and allegedly traditionalist leaders are being exposed as frauds after years of self-righteous finger-pointing at anyone who doesn’t toe their line. It results in real damage to real people. It should not be surprising that some respond with anger and hostility to such hypocrisy and attack religion as a whole rather than make distinctions among them. It’s as predictable as a rightwing Republican preacher soliciting sex from a male prostitute.

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Compassionate Conservatism

by digby

The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation’s “haves” and “have-nots” continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 – half the federal poverty line – was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That’s 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy’s review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn’t confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation’s 37 million poor people into deep poverty – the highest rate since at least 1975.

The share of poor Americans in deep poverty has climbed slowly but steadily over the last three decades. But since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown “more than any other segment of the population,” according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“That was the exact opposite of what we anticipated when we began,” said Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, who co-authored the study. “We’re not seeing as much moderate poverty as a proportion of the population. What we’re seeing is a dramatic growth of severe poverty.”

Dear God. Is anyone advocating for these people?

Read on. It gets worse.

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Counting Coup

by digby

There has been a lot written in recent days about the religious right and the Democratic party’s attempts to gain their votes. I think I’ll let all that simmer for a while and examine the real problem with these quixotic crusades to get the most conservative people in the country to vote for the Democrats.

It’s not about politics and it’s not about religion. It’s about tribalism. The Republicanism is an “identity” movement in which member’s affiliation with the party is more akin to affiliation with clan or family.

All three Republican frontrunners — Giuliani, McCain and Romney — are suspected of not being true members of the tribe. And as with most tribes, the Republicans have a way for members to show their loyalty and courage even if they have been forced to spend years among the enemy and have adopted some of their ways.

Rick Perlstein illustrates how this works with an examination of Mitt Romney’s recent presidential announcement:

Mitt Romney is in trouble. In a deeply conservative party, the former governor of Massachusetts is a ghost of Republicanism past: a moderate. His presidential announcement speech read like a tribute to his father, the late George Wilcken Romney, who became a GOP shining star in the early ’60s largely because he was liberal enough to get elected and reelected governor in a Democratic state, Michigan. Mitt Romney held the event in his father’s state, in front of a backdrop–a hybrid car–that honored his father’s most famous accomplishment as an automotive executive in the 1950s: championing the Rambler, Detroit’s first fuel-efficient “compact car.” He said, “We have lost our faith in government–not in just one party, not in just one house, but in government,” as if oblivious to the heresy: Rehabilitating government as a good in itself is not the usual way of introducing yourself to voters in today’s post-Reagan Republican Party. Maybe Romney’s tried to shake it, but he just can’t: He carries progressive Republicanism around in his blood.

Which raises certain suspicions about that announcement speech. As the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) immediately observed, its location, the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, is a “testament to the life of … a notorious anti-Semite and xenophobe.” Some observers wondered if perhaps this wasn’t intentional: If you want to prove to conservatives you’re no liberal, what better way than to announce on the former estate of a man who, as the NJDC also pointed out, was “bestowed with the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle by Adolf Hitler”?

The campaign denies such calculations outright of course. “I think most people, no matter what your ideology,” spokesman Kevin Madden says, “saw that as a somewhat absurd criticism, given that it’s a museum, a place of learning, a Michigan landmark. Thousands of schoolchildren go through this place.” And he’s right: Thus framed, the charge is an absurdity. Praise the Lord, there is no electoral payoff in appealing to heartland memories of the Henry Ford whose Dearborn Independent reached a circulation of 900,000 featuring articles like “Jewish Jazz–Moron Music–Becomes Our National Music.”

Those memories no longer exist–except to the hair-trigger sensitivities of the likes of the NJDC, which put out their press release and garnered an AP article on the flap. But here’s something to consider: The Romney campaign has harvested benefits from that flap, whether it was intentional or not. Consider the sarcastic reflection of this denizen of the right-wing website Free Republic:

Allright, an AP hit piece! The MSM has more acute RINOdar than we. Real RINO’s don’t get rinky-dink MSM hit pieces such as this. This proves that the MSM believes Romney is a conservative, and therefore must be roughed up.

Translation: I used to suspect that Romney was only a “Republican in Name Only.” But now I realize: He bugs the liberal media. By the tribal logic of right-wing identity politics, that is enough–Mitt Romney now can be called a conservative

Now liberals have some tribal signals too, no doubt about it. But it consists of things like a stirring call for single payer healthcare or a denunciation of the war in Iraq. Reaching back to the past to notorious leftists to give a wink and nod to the base would be useless. If Bill Richardson, for instance, went to a Che Guevara museum to make his announcement the only meaning that would be conferred is that he’s a kook and it would actually lose him votes in the primary.

But a Henry Ford political revival is apparently all the rage on the right:

Half of the facility (the half not populated by futuristic kitsch and automotive souvenirs) is “Greenfield Village,” a Colonial Williamsburg-style living museum of glassblowers, blacksmiths, and one-room schoolhouses. And it is simply not credible that a son of the Motor State like Romney is unaware that, for millions of Midwestern tourists, a trip to Dearborn is as much about celebrating “innovation and transformation” as it is conjuring up the wistful nostalgia for the pre-automotive–and, by plain implication, pre-immigrant–America that Ford worshiped. And it is simply not credible that an alert and ambitious Republican pol like Romney is unaware that this Ford–the xenophobe–has been making a comeback in Republican circles. Former congressman J.D. Hayworth quotes him as a hero in his recent book Whatever It Takes: “These men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live.”

Every Midwesterner also knows that Dearborn is a city of many nations–Arab nations, specifically, more so than any American town. Is it entirely a coincidence that, folded into Romney’s otherwise forward-looking announcement speech, there was the now-de rigeur right-wing Republican line, “I believe homeland security begins with securing our borders”? Writes Hayworth of Ford’s doctrine of “Americanization”: “Talk like that today, and our liberal elites will brand you a culture imperialist, or worse.”

The Republican tribe has worked for decades on two separate tracks. They know that their real philosophy and agenda is repellent to the majority of Americans so they all agree to keep it more or less under wraps at election time. But they do have to prove to each other that they are for real and the way to do it is through coded language and angering the left into making them look like heroes to the tribe.

Perlstein writes about the masterful use of these coded messages from the master himself:

For the suspicious, Romney’s announcement in Dearborn recalled Ronald Reagan’s notorious 1980 campaign kickoff in Philadelphia, Mississippi, mere miles from the site where, in 1964, Klansmen murdered three civil rights workers. Then, the symbolism was absolutely deliberate: Reagan pledged fealty to “states’ rights,” a concerted attempt to nudge the tribal identities of Southerners into the Republican column once and for all. But it didn’t mean Reagan, or anyone in his audience, was for bringing back Klan terrorism any more than Romney has Michigan anti-Semites dusting off their copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Reagan’s benefit from speaking at Philadelphia, Mississippi derived primarily from all that outrage that he spoke at Philadelphia, Mississippi. He stood up to the Yankees. He proved to Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and the rest that he felt their pain: tribally, he was one of them–just as Romney has just demonstrated oneness with conservatives sick of being called “fascists” by liberals.

Reagan provides another lesson for Republican aspirants who might be in trouble with the conservative base: past positions on issues don’t necessarily matter. As Romney himself notes, “On abortion, I wasn’t always a Ronald Reagan conservative. Neither was Ronald Reagan, by the way.” He’s referring to the time, in 1967, when Reagan signed the most liberal abortion law in the nation.

Of course, Reagan wasn’t always a Reagan conservative on most things, at one time or another. In 1967, in fact, in his first year as governor of California, he passed the biggest tax increase in state history. Except for a few scolds, conservatives proved entirely forgiving. Indeed, that was when they started plumping him for president. More important was that he got the tribal stuff right, the us-versus-them stuff–as when he confronted young people harassing him with make love, not war signs. He said it looked like they were incapable of doing either.

So you see the GOP base is not really concerned with issues or even God, Family, Country. They are about hating liberals. (Many of them are about hating dark or foreign liberals in particular.) We can present a thousand ten point plans and say they should vote for us because their economic interests lie with liberal policies, but it won’t make a bit of difference. We can point out their hypocrisy and flip-flops and it means nothing. Republican identity politics transcend such prosaic concerns as policy and political philosophy. It’s all about whether you are one of them. If you can prove that then they could not care less what you once stood for. The only thing that will trip you up is being insufficiently hostile to liberals once they have validated your membership. That will get you kicked to the curb in a Midland Minute.

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Cold Reason

by tristero

Recently, I wrote that “[t]he essential principle of American politics is that it insists upon the exercise of cold reason in governance; revelation can play no part, nor can any religion have any kind of privileged status. Period. The End.”

I truly thought that this glancing reference to one of the more famous statements on the nature of the US government by one of our most famous statesmen was patently obvious, especially since I dropped other hints in my post as to my reference, even going so far as actually to name the author.

But apparently, no one caught it. Which would be no big deal, except that, amusingly, one of our far-right commenters, Fidel Cigar, found the invocation of “cold reason” to be nothing less than the political philosophy of “lefty totalitarian greaseballs”.

So…for those of you who agree with Mr (or Ms.) Cigar, that a government that relies solely upon “cold reason” is little more than a police state run by slippery, Brylcreem-challenged leftists, here is the original quote I was obviously referring to:

Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence. Let those [materials] be moulded into general intelligence, [sound] morality and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.

By the way, I didn’t make the quote up.

One other point. Notice how, for this fellow, sound morality proceeds directly from materials fashioned through the exercise of cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason. On the other hand, for Fidel Cigar, morality has nothing to do with reason. As well as nothing to do with any knowledge of history, science, and a slew of other reality-based paths to knowledge, as his ignorant and bizarre comments demonstrated.

PS For the pedantic, it is true that the statesmen’s topic is not religion versus reason in government. Rather it is the importance of obeying laws from the danger of the lynch mentality that would, say, hang congressmen who disagree with the president on foreign policy. Because the separation of church and state is such an essential principle of our government, it is quite appropriate to use this quote as I did.

A President Named George

by digby

…has something important to tell us:

The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.

Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur.

Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation prompted by ill will and resentment sometimes impels to war the government contrary to the best calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion, what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations has been the victim.

So, likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions, by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.

And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity, gilding with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation. As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils! Such an attachment of a small or weak toward a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens, the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial, else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests.

Just Saying…

Happy Birthday George.

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Political Religion

by digby

Pastordan sent this Jon Meacham piece along and it’s worth sharing today on George Washington’s birthday. I’ve been hard on Meacham in the past, but I think this is good.

…For the wonderful thing about American public religion—or what Lincoln called our “political religion”—is that its creed is liberty and the rule of law, not coercion or forced belief or a link between one’s civil and religious lives. George Washington promised that the government would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” a promise that I think is as fundamental to America as the promises of the Declaration of Independence.

[…]

We are right to be reverent about our nation—and we obligated to be respectful of the rights of others to do as they please, within the spirit of the democracy whose leaders we celebrate today.

I don’t think we have proved ourselves as exceptional as Adams and the other founders hoped we would, but there is no doubt that we are a better and more successful nation on the occasions when we follow enlightened, democratic principles in actions as well as words. Our shared respect for the Bill of Rights and the Constitution as the governing documents of our civic life is what binds us together as a people.

So, as the current administration openly undermines this civic faith, hiding behind religious faith to do it, it undermines the “political religion” that’s held this country together over two centuries. That’s something to ponder isn’t it?

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