Month: December 2010

Perversion Of Power Into Tyranny

by digby

“The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” –-Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526

That’s nice. But according to most of the US media, our world is just too complicated and dangerous for the people to be privy to what its government does so we need to put our complete trust in people like the lunatic General Jerry Boykin, who served as Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under Donald Rumsfeld. We’re much safer that way.

And speaking of the perversion of power into tyranny:

The Chinese hacking of Google that forced the search engine to withdraw from the country was orchestrated by a senior member of the communist politburo, according to classified information sent by US diplomats to Hillary Clinton’s state department in Washington.

The leading politician became hostile to Google after he searched his own name and found articles criticising him personally, leaked cables from the US embassy in Beijing say.

That single act prompted a politically inspired assault on Google, forcing it to “walk away from a potential market of 400 million internet users” in January this year, amid a highly publicised row about internet censorship.

The explosive allegation that the attack on Google came from near the top of the Communist party has never been made public until now. The politician allegedly collaborated with a second member of the politburo in an attempt to force Google to drop a link from its Chinese-language search engine to its uncensored google.com version.

A cable from the Beijing embassy marked as secret records that attempts to break into the accounts of dissidents who used Google’s Gmail system had been co-ordinated “with the oversight of” the two politburo members.

The cyber assault was described to the Americans by a high-level Chinese source as “100% political in nature” and having “nothing to do with removing Google… as a competitor to Chinese search engines”.

Last December Google said that it was hit by a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure”. Part of it was aimed at the Gmail accounts of “Chinese human rights activists” – although in a statement released in January, Google said that there was no evidence the hackers were successful. Shortly after the attack, Google chose to abandon China. It relocated to Hong Kong, where it was able to run an uncensored version of its website in English and Chinese, ending an awkward attempt to reconcile partial adherence to Chinese requirements with western democratic values.

While Google and the US suspected leading Chinese politicians were behind the hacking, neither the company nor the US government said so at the time. Diplomats even discussed whether China’s most powerful man, Hu Jintao, the president, or his prime minister, Wen Jiabao, were “aware of these actions”. The secret note sent back to Washington concedes that “it is unclear” whether advance knowledge of the attack went right to the top.

Thankfully, nothing like that could ever happen here. Not that we should know about it if it did because then we would be unsafe. Again, thankfully, we have people like Joe Lieberman to do our thinking for us with the full cooperation of much of the corporate the media. That’s very good. I feel safe now.

h/t to David Swanson for the Jefferson quote

Waiting For Morning In America

by digby

Atrios asks:

I’m someone who pays attention to politics 16 hours per day and I still can’t tell you, aside from a few tax cuts and unemployment benefits extensions, what the Democratic economic agenda is. Isn’t that a problem?

I’m fairly sure I know what it is. I think they simply want to make as few waves as possible while the invisible hand and “savvy businessmen” magically fix everything so they can run on “Morning in America” in 2012. I think that’s been the plan from the beginning. I don’t think they have a Plan B.

In fact, the biggest irony of this administration is how much they have depended on the preservation of the status quo to fix the problems. (Ironic considering the “change” message they ran on. Fully expected from neo-liberal lawmakers.)

And yeah, it’s a problem.
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Village ethos

by digby

Krugman follows up on his argument from yesterday in which he posits that it’s easier for the upper classes to require “sacrifice” from the hoi polloi on Social Security than Medicare because even the well off know they could be destroyed by massive medical bills while SS is much less important to them personally.

He uses this chart to illustrate just how much less the upper incomes depend on Social Security than the rest of us:

I would also point out that this is one of the reasons why the privatization scheme sounds so reasonable to the comfortable and well off. They see that little slice as one they could easily add to their investment pool without risking much. In fact, they look at that little slice and think, “my broker could have done so much more with that!” The risk factor just doesn’t affect them the same way it affects everyone else. The rest of us see that slice as the main thing keeping us from penury in our old age.

This is why I scream every time I hear these wealthy celebrity pundits with their ersatz middle class identities going on about “shared sacrifice”. It’s infuriating for them to be encouraging such a thing in the first place, but to take credit for sacrifice when they are all so well off … let’s just say that it’s the height of Village-ism.

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Sage Advice For Our Insufficiently Paranoid President

by tristero

Reading Frank Rich this morning brought the following song to mind:

Frank Zappa: The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing

Saturday Night At The Movies

Double Feature: Ocean deep, mountain high

By Dennis Hartley

Pressure drop: Alamar

It’s not time to make a change
Just relax, take it easy
You’re still young, that’s your fault
There’s so much you have to know

-Cat Stevens, from “Father and Son”

To say that “nothing happens” in Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s leisurely paced cinematic tone-poem, Alamar, set against the backdrop of Mexico’s intoxicatingly beautiful Banco Chinchorro, is to deny that the rhythm of life has a pulse. That is because, analogous to the richly complex and delicately balanced eco-system that sustains the reef, there is much more going on just beneath the surface of Rubio’s sparse story than meets the eye.

Granted, the narrative is simple. A Mexican man named Jorge (Jorge Machado) has been separated from his Italian-born wife, Roberta (Roberta Palombini) for several years. The couple has a five-year-old son named Natan (Natan Machado Palombini). Roberta has decided to leave Mexico and move to Rome, taking Natan with her. Before he says goodbye to his son, Jorge wants to bond with him by taking him on a special trip to the place he grew up-the Chinchorro Reef (on Mexico’s Caribbean coast) where the pair are greeted by Jorge’s mentor Nestor (Nestor Marin), a leathery, weathered elder fisherman (with a requisite twinkle in his eye) who seems to have strolled out of a Hemingway tale.

Over the next several weeks, young Natan (and the astute viewer, in about an hour of screen time) is given a crash-course in becoming one with nature and living completely in the “now”. It actually doesn’t feel like a “crash course”, because the message is subtly delivered through an episodic series of deliberately paced, Zen-like vignettes. Young Natan waits quietly in the boat, contentedly contemplating the sea birds circling overhead, while his father and Nestor spearfish for lobster on the reef’s bed. Jorge patiently teaches Natan how to hand-cast lines to catch snapper and barracuda. Father and son wrestle playfully; their joyful giggles are infectious and speak volumes about the genuine bond between them. Jorge and Natan hand-feed an egret, a scene-stealing sea bird (whom they nickname “Blanquita”) that decides to adopt the fishermen for a spell.

I am sure there will be viewers who will find the film just too “slow” and uneventful for their taste, but that’s OK. If you can’t wait for it to end so you can turn your phone back on and check all those “important” text messages, I suspect that the film’s message, telegraphed in the sunlit shimmer of a crystalline coral reef, or in the light of love on a father’s face as he watches his son slowly drift off to sleep is destined to never get through to you anyway. And what is this “message”? Perhaps it is best summed up by Nestor, relaxing with a cup of coffee after another long day of fishing, who tells Jorge, “It’s beautiful here at sea. That’s why I’m sitting here, watching the night. It’s as simple as that. I sit here alone and drink my coffee, watching for a while and then off to sleep.”

Alamar is a beautiful film. It’s a simple as that.

Land and freedom: Tibet in Song

Did you know that the Tibetans have a traditional song for milking your yak? And yet another to sing while churning said milk into butter? That might sound like the setup for a bad joke, but it’s not. Far from it-especially if you know this: if the Chinese government got wind that you were warbling the yak-milking song (or any traditional Tibetan music) in public, you could be imprisoned. Or maybe tortured. Or killed. Or-how about all three?

I learned all this and more from a fascinating documentary called Tibet in Song, which is really two films in one. Primarily, it is the film that director Ngawang Choephel initially set out to make back in 1995, when he returned for a visit to his homeland after years of exile in India and the United States (his mother had fled Tibet in 1966 with her then 2-year-old son) The filmmaker’s intent was to seek out and document the remaining vestiges of traditional Tibetan song and dance, which had become increasingly elusive in the wake of the Cultural Revolution imposed on the country by the Chinese government following the Tibetan Rebellion of 1959. And, as intended, the first third of the film does deliver an interesting sampler of the region’s folk dances and unique indigenous music, which (oddly enough) seems to share a spooky tonality with Native American chants (at least to my armchair ethnomusicologist’s ears). One thing it most decidedly does not share so much in common with is Chinese music (which most Westerners, frankly, would likely assume that it would). While this latter observation is most certainly not lost on Tibetans, it seems to have been to the Chinese government, which has made concerted efforts, beginning with the Cultural Revolution era and going forward, to replace all traditional Tibetan melodies with Chinese pop songs that sing the praises of the Communist regime. One Tibetan interviewee (now an exile) recounts the introduction of radio broadcasts in the 1960s that delivered the populace a steady diet of the aforementioned propagandist pop. Most Tibetans, who traditionally were all culturally ingrained to literally “make their own kind of music” and express themselves daily in song and dance, had never even seen a radio before; it was referred to as “the sound box”. The interviewee’s father would warn him, “From that thing, there’s nothing to hear. It’s just for transforming ‘us’ into ‘them’.” When you think about it, those are actually very astute and wise words- because one could apply that exact credo to our own MSM today.

The “second” film within the film is a very personal story, precipitated by a profoundly life-changing event for the director that occurred two months into filming. While driving to visit his father, he was stopped at a checkpoint and grilled by Chinese intelligence agents, who confiscated his camera, videotapes and notes. What happened next? You guessed it-he was accused of “spying” (that good old standby trumped up charge favored by oppressive regimes everywhere) and sentenced to 18 years in prison (without a trial).

Undaunted, Choephel continued his project. Fellow prisoners (many of them political dissidents) were more than happy to share their knowledge of traditional songs, which the director transcribed on cigarette wrappers. When this makeshift archive was discovered and seized by prison officials, Choephel began to commit the songs to memory (life imitating the art of Fahrenheit 451). The studious and mild-mannered Choephel also experienced a classic “prison conversion” which transformed him from objective researcher into political activist. “I had joined the (‘Free Tibet’ movement) struggle,” he tells us in the voiceover. Thankfully, after a tireless one-woman campaign by his devoted mother galvanized a celebrity-studded cause célèbre that in turn caught world media attention, he was released in 2002, after six years of imprisonment (for “health reasons”, according to the Chinese government’s rather transparent attempt at a face-saving spin).

Tibet in Song may begin as an academic culture study, but, not unlike the director’s own personal transformation, it becomes a surprisingly inspirational and unexpectedly moving story. What more could you demand from a film? Singing and dancing? Well, actually…

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Fiscal Terrorism

by digby

Floyd Norris catches the malevolent oligarch Pete Peterson deploying some big rhetorical guns in the deficits wars:

Today he put out a statement on the deficit reduction commission vote. I have italicized one phrase.

The work of this commission has clearly demonstrated the need to address our nation’s unsustainable long-term fiscal challenges, and it has shown that we should begin now. The time for denial, inaction and political gamesmanship is over. The time for fiscal patriotism is now.

There is a long and ignoble history in America of the misuse of the word patriotism, in which those who disagree with the speaker are not just misguided, but unpatriotic.

I hope Mr. Peterson will think better about the use of that phrase, and that others will not pick it up.

The deficit is now large in significant part because the financial system blew up and the government had to pick up the bill at the same time the recession caused by the financial crisis caused tax revenue to fall and social safety net spending to rise.

Well hell, I say let’s take their rhetorical bombs and hurl them back on them. Does this sound patriotic to you?

“It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger,” President Obama said on Thursday of the banks he’s chosen to bail out. “You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk [to] them, ease that finger off the trigger.”

You’ll recall that these same “patriots” also threatened to burn down the whole system if they didn’t get their bonuses.

Feinberg’s push for long-term accountability was met with what Feinberg calls “intense pressure” from officials at the Treasury Department and from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which had provided most of the A.I.G. bailout, to make accommodations for the firms whose perceived extravagance had created his job in the first place. First, there were those cash retention bonuses, which 8 of the 12 A.I.G. executives now under Feinberg’s purview received in 2009. Feinberg pushed to have the executives return the money and replace it with salarized stock. They all refused, even those who had pledged to give the bonuses back altogether.

Among those who insisted on keeping the cash was David Herzog, A.I.G.’s chief financial officer, whose bonus was $1.5 million. He and the others told Feinberg, through A.I.G.’s vice chairman Anastasia Kelly, that if they didn’t get to keep that bonus, plus get additional bonuses for work in 2009, they would leave, which would grievously imperil the company. No one at A.I.G. seemed to be embarrassed to argue that the chief financial officer of Wall Street’s Titanic was irreplaceable.

These are the big swinging Galtian heroes who Peterson represents. And now he’s calling for destruction of the safety net in the guise of “fiscal patriotism.” Fiscal terrorism is the proper term. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

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Taser Breakthrough

by digby

Hey, some good news for a change:

A Coronado, Calif., police officer used excessive force when he shot a Taser dart at a young driver who was stopped for a seat belt violation, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

Carl Bryan, then 21, fell to the asphalt after being struck by the dart, breaking four teeth and suffering facial cuts. He later sued the Coronado Police Department and Officer Brian MacPherson.

The excessive-force ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals could have consequences for police use-of-force policies across the West, legal experts predicted.

Two other lawsuits over Taser incidents are still pending before the appeals court, including a case in which a pregnant woman in Seattle was subjected to the device in a routine traffic stop.

Police must have reasonable grounds for using a Taser on a suspect, the appeals panel said, noting that Bryan was wearing only boxer shorts and tennis shoes and was clearly unarmed. Bryan was standing about 20 feet away with his back to MacPherson when he was hit.

“I think police departments will have to tailor their use-of-force policies to the Bryan decision from now on,” said Steven E. Boehmer, the El Cajon, Calif., attorney who represented MacPherson.

The appeals panel, while deeming the Taser use excessive and unjustified, said the officer nonetheless deserved immunity from prosecution because the circumstances in which the weapon could be reasonably deployed weren’t clearly defined at the time.

Because of the immunity grant, Coronado, in San Diego County, won’t appeal the excessive-force ruling, Boehmer said, and would work with police to establish guidelines for use of the weapon.

Bryan, who now lives in Europe, where he assists his tennis-champion cousins Bob and Mike Bryan, still has state court actions in which he hopes to recover damages, said his attorney, Julia Yoo.

Bryan had been stopped at a seat belt enforcement roadblock at the Coronado Bridge after spending hours on the morning of July 24, 2005, driving between Camarillo and Los Angeles to fetch his keys that had been accidentally taken by a cousin’s girlfriend. On the drive home from Camarillo to Coronado, Bryan had been cited for speeding and was agitated when he was stopped a second time by MacPherson, according to court records.

I know it seems absurd that anyone would think that police shouldn’t have to have reasonable grounds for shooting unarmed citizens full of electricity whenever they choose, but the law is not clear. But as has been documented thousands of times now, police are not using common sense or good judgment and are often using the device as an instrument of torture in a punitive and coercive way. This ruling is a step toward making police stop using these things just as they were previously stopped from indiscriminately using billy clubs. It’s abuse of power and no free society should allow their authorities to use such violence on its citizens unless they are protecting themselves or others.

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Christie: “Bring him up here!”

by digby

Well, I guess we can see why the Tea Party loves this guy so much:

Gov. Chris Christie took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and warned the crowd: This, he said, is when his explosive town hall moments happen.

He waded into Parsippany yesterday — the epicenter of his battle with school superintendents. He appeared to be looking for a fight.

And he got it.

The Parsippany town hall, his 15th such event, proved to be the governor’s most explosive yet. There were robust challenges to his economic and education policies from all sides, catcalls, heckling, and three people were removed by the police. And despite of all of that, or because of it, he ended the night with an ovation.

Keith Chaudruc, of Madison, got the final question of the night.

The Livingston school district elementary teacher launched into a list of complaints about drops in municipal aid, increasing NJ Transit fares and tax cuts for those making more than $1 million.

His question: How could Christie sign off on a tax cut for the most wealthy, ignoring the regressive nature of the sales tax, while those at the bottom were getting squeezed with increases like the transit fares?

The two adversaries went back and forth for a few minutes, until Chaudruc, a Republican, interrupted the governor.

“You want to come up here?” Christie shouted. “You come up here … Let’s have a conversation..”

Chaudruc, who stands 5’6″ and weighs about 160 pounds, backed away until the governor insisted “bring him up here,” and a state trooper escorted him to the stage.

Christie, a few inches taller and several pounds heavier, loomed over Chaudruc as he launched into a tirade.

“Your wonderful increase in taxes would have killed jobs in this state,” Christie said pointing his index finger at Chaudruc. “You and I have different ideas of what being a Republican is all about because I’m not going to raise taxes.”

Before he could get another word in, Chaudruc was ushered off the stage and out of the room by a trooper.

“It’s his playground. He holds the ball,” Chaudruc said afterward, adding that Christie never answered his question.

Wow.

Uhm, this isn’t normal folks.

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Wikitalk

by digby

There continues to be a lot of chatter about Wikileaks, which is turning into one of the most passionate and authentic political discussions I’ve seen in some time. We are, at least, talking about something other than kabuki beltway politics, which is a healthy thing, in my opinion.

The biggest complaints I’m getting from commenters about my position in favor of the project is the fact that Wikileaks is trying to hurt the US specifically and that it is resulting in the deaths of innocent people.

On the first, I think that’s just not true. Wikileaks has exposed a whole bunch of documents that both help and hurt the US and many other countries, including those which we might consider our enemies. And it goes beyond governments. For instance, Wikileaks exposed the graft and corruption of a particular group of Icelandic bankers and they are being called to account for it by their people. It exposed the secretive Church of Scientology. It exposed the ongoing war between China and Google (which, by the way, Joe Lieberman sees as an excellent template for the US to emulate.) And, if they don’t succeed in threatening the entire internet, we are likely to soon see a trove of communications exposing corruption in the US banking system.

It’s true that much of what’s been revealed in the last year has pertained to US foreign policy, but the US is the world’s superpower, spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined, has more global interests and more connections. It’s natural that it would be a primary subject for such revelations. But that doesn’t mean that Wikileaks is only interested in the US or is working on behalf of others to bring it down. Remember, it’s certain Americans who have felt compelled to reveal these secrets about out country. Why the messenger should be shot is beyond me.

The second concern is a moral question and it’s difficult. Everyone I’ve heard on both sides of this subject bemoans the fact that there is danger implicit in these revelations. Some of those who argue against Wikileaks believe(even despite the fact that there’s no evidence it’s happened) that the very possibility of someone dying as a result of the revelations makes them automatically immoral. But the way I see it, the fact that literally thousands and thousands of innocent Afghans are already “collateral damage” — including many of these very informants and helpmates — in a war which we now know the governments involved don’t even have a hope of winning puts it into a sort of grotesque perspective.

It is a hideous set of choices before us, caused not by the group of people who are revealing secrets, but by what has been revealed to be inept, corrupt and malevolent leadership across the spectrum of the governing class, whose purpose in keeping these secrets seems to have more often than not been to thwart democratic norms, cover their massive mistakes or enrich themselves. Knowing this doesn’t make the fallout any more palatable, but it leads to a fairly simple question: should we have the truth, knowing that it may cause innocent people to die or should we not have the truth knowing that it is causing innocent people to die? You tell me.

What I would also argue is that in an age of technological innovation these revelations are the inevitable consequence of governments, global finance and other forms of elite institutions wrapping themselves in secrecy and basically making democratic government moot. This creates both an opportunity and an incentive to reveal those secrets. Perhaps we would prefer that it be to an equally secretive foreign government? Or an enemy to be named later? How do we know they haven’t already?

In that light, it seems to me that those who are so concerned about security should be encouraging governments and institutions to be transparent because just as the global systems for transmitting and coordinating secrets has become easier with technology — it’s clear that the ability to find and transmit those secrets by others has become even easier. And this is not going to be stopped by threatening graduate students’ future job prospects. Seriously, the government needs to consult with the software and entertainment industries to find out just how impossible it is to put this genie back in the bottle. Unless they decide to go back to communicating by using carrier pigeons, the days of secrets being safe are probably over. Best to figure out another model.

People feel very strongly about this on all sides and that’s fine. But I do think that there is one thing we should all agree on: the appalling open calls for Julian Assange’s assassination are barbaric authoritarianism at its worst. (The obvious attempt to smear him as a sexual predator for alleged condom failure fall into the same category.) The man put some documents on the internet and there is a vigorous global debate going on about it. If there was ever a case for public servants and the media (which should all clearly be on the side of Wikileaks, in my opinion) to be circumspect in their language it’s in this case. I’m astonished that these calls for murder are so casually accepted. (But then, we are living in a country in which torture is accepted, so I’m probably foolish to keep clinging to these silly notions about civilized, democratic behavior.)

There are definitely huge threats in the world. And they are coming from many directions — terrorist violence, massive economic corruption, global warming, extremists of all sorts. What should be clear by now, however, is that the system by which we manage threats is failing. It seems to me that one thing we might want to do is start talking about that problem. This is an opportunity to do that.

Update: If you want to know the reason for my indictment of the governing elites above, just read this. Unbelievable.

Update II: Jay in comments points out an important post about Assange’s motives, which as it happens, I wrote about few days ago. it’s an important starting point if you want to catch up on this story.

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The Agenda for the New Republic of Gilead

by digby

Now why would an anti-abortion group which agitates against the practice on the basis of “life” suddenly be concerned about this:

On the fiftieth anniversary of the birth control pill, Human Life International America (HLI America) released a poll which shows that most American women are unaware of the health risks associated with the use of hormonal contraceptives.

“The Pill” has been one of the most commonly used means of birth control since the 1960s but, as HLI America’s report demonstrates, it has also been a source of contention as it has been linked to an increase in the risk of breast cancer.

Jenn Giroux, the executive director of HLI America, said her group commissioned the poll in order to gauge how many women and girls knew of the pill’s risks.

They’re starting to shift their goal posts to the next big battle — the one they’ve been waiting for. I’m assuming this is because they feel it’s only a matter of time before the right abortion case hits their packed Supreme Court and they can celebrate the end of Roe vs Wade. Certainly, they are feeling very optimistic about their agenda in the new congress:

If you thought the abortion battle during the health care debate was fierce, just wait until Republicans take over the House in January. Strengthened by congressional victories in the midterm elections, Republican abortion foes plan to push hard in the new year. Their top goals: enshrine tough restrictions on abortion funding into federal law and defund Planned Parenthood. And they’ll have Democratic help to do it.

The tip of the spear when it comes to GOP efforts advance anti-abortion legislatin is the the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (HR 5939), which was introduced by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and already has 185 cosponsors. The bill’s goals were highlighted in the GOP’s “Pledge to America,” and future Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) has repeatedly emphasized his continued commitment to anti-abortion legislation. After Republicans won control of the House, LifeNews, an anti-abortion rights website, trumpeted Boehner’s promise that he “won’t compromise” on key issues like abortion legislation. The site made special mention of Smith’s bill. (Smith’s office didn’t return multiple phone calls requesting comment.)

The current rule preventing most federal funding of abortions, the Hyde Amendment, has to be reauthorized every year. While the amendment has been re-upped each year since 1976, the annual reauthorization fight often forces opponents of abortion rights, who generally have a majority in the House, to negotiate with supporters of those rights, who often hold a majority in the Senate.

There’s lots to negotiate: while most people think of the Hyde Amendment as one bill, in practice it is a series of negotiated provisions in a series of different spending bills. It works a little bit differently in each of them. But if the GOP gets what it wants, pro-lifers won’t have to worry about that ever again. “The beauty of the new bill is…that it will make these policies banning abortion funding in various situations permanent federal law instead of annual battles that pro-life advocates sometimes lose depending on who controls Congress and the White House,” writes LifeNews’ Steve Ertelt.

They leaned hard on the “pro-life” Democrats in the last election on the basis of the huge lie that they had voted to expand abortion rights when they had actually voted to restrict it. (This proves once and for all that the right to life groups are simple whores for the Republican party.)

And now they are turning to long term planning and the big enchilada is to outlaw birth control. Turns girls into sluts dontcha know. And then they can’t marry their daddies until the right boy comes along to buy them.

“I pledge to remain sexually pure…until the day I give myself as a wedding gift to my husband. … I know that God requires this of me.. that he loves me. and that he will reward me for my faithfulness.”

“I, (daughter’s name)’s father, choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband and father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide and pray over my daughter and as the high priest in my home. This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come.”

I think I’m done for the night. I’m going to grab a glass of wine and curl up with a good book.

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