Month: July 2011

Unamerican Activities

by digby

I’m sure Michele Bachman and Glen Beck’s favorite “historian” would say this was something the founders would heartily endorse and participate in if they were alive, but the truth is that this is a truly UnAmerican government activity:

Gov. Rick Perry’s call for a day-long event of prayer and fasting Aug. 6 at a sports stadium in Houston is a dramatic escalation of government meddling in religion. Called “The Response,” the event is being coordinated by the American Family Association (AFA), an extreme Religious Right group, as well as other far-right religious groups and figures with controversial theological and political ideas. The rally is exclusively Christian in nature; in fact, it reflects a certain type of Christianity – the fringes of fundamentalism.

What brought this about? Perry’s theological allies claim that America is being punished by God for its wicked ways. They see a national day of repentance as the solution.

On The Response’s website, Perry writes, “Right now, America is in crisis: we have been besieged by financial debt, terrorism, and a multitude of natural disasters. As a nation, we must come together and call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles, and thank Him for the blessings of freedom we so richly enjoy.”

[…]

Mainline Christian, non-Christian and secularist groups have protested the Perry event – and rightly so. Perry and his supporters don’t try to downplay the proselytizing nature of the event; in fact, they brag about it. They say non-Christians are welcome to attend to hear a message about redemption through Christ.

Perry defended the event, tellingThe New York Times, “It is Christian-centered, yes, but I have invited and welcome people of all faiths to attend.” He also brushed off charges that the AFA is extreme, calling it “a group that promotes faith and strong families, and this event is about bringing Americans together in prayer.”

Eric Bearse, a spokesman for the event who formerly worked as Perry’s communications director, told American Family Radio, which is run by the AFA, that the event would be evangelistic in tone.

“A lot of people want to criticize what we’re doing, as if we’re somehow being exclusive of other faiths,” Bearse said. “But anyone who comes to this solemn assembly, regardless of their faith tradition or background, will feel the love, grace, and warmth of Jesus Christ in that assembly hall, in that arena. And that’s what we want to convey, that there’s acceptance and that there’s love and that there’s hope if people will seek out the living Christ.”

Allan E. Parker Jr., one of the event’s organizers, writes on its website, “This is an explicitly Christian event because we are going to be praying to the one true God through His son, Jesus Christ.It would be idolatry of the worst sort for Christians to gather and invite false gods like Allah and Buddha and their false prophets to be with us at that time.Because we have religious liberty in this country, they are free to have events and pray to Buddha and Allah on their own.But this is time of prayer to the One True God through His son, Jesus Christ, who is The Way, The Truth, and The Life.”

Sure, anybody’s allowed to attend — as long as they don’t mind praying to the One True God through His son, Jesus Christ.

This GOP primary season is going to be a doozy if these people are going to try to out-evangelize each other.

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The Greatest American Writer on the 4th of July

by digby

Ain’t nothin’ new under the sun, Mark Twain edition:

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
– Following the Equator, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar

Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people’s countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood of his hands and works for “the universal brotherhood of man”- with his mouth.
– “The Lowest Animal”

…the liberty of the Press is called the Palladium of Freedom, which means, in these days, the liberty of being deceived, swindled, and humbugged by the Press and paying hugely for the deception.
– “From Author’s Sketch Book, Nov. 1870,” reprinted in The Twainian, May 1940

And then there’s this:

You know my weakness for Adam, and you know how I have struggled to get him a monument and failed. Now, it seems to me, here is my chance. What do we care for a statue of liberty when we’ve got the thing itself in its wildest sublimity? What you want of a monument is to keep you in mind of something you haven’t got – something you’ve lost. Very well; we haven’t lost liberty; we’ve lost Adam.
Another thing: What has liberty done for us? Nothing in particular that I know of. What have we done for her? Everything. We’ve given her a home, and a good home too. And if she knows anything, she knows it’s the first time she ever struck that novelty. She knows that when we took her in she had been a mere tramp for 6,000 years, biblical measure. Yes, and we not only ended her troubles and made things soft for her permanently, but we made her respectable – and that she hadn’t ever been before. And now, after we’ve poured out these Atlantics of benefits upon this aged outcast, lo! and behold you, we are asked to come forward and set up a monument to her! Go to. Let her set up a monument to us if she wants to do the clean thing.

But suppose your statue represented her old, bent, clothed in rags, downcast, shame-faced, with the insults and humiliation of 6,000 years, imploring a crust and all hour’s rest for God’s sake at our back door? – come, now you’re shouting! That’s the aspect of her which we need to be reminded of, lest we forget it – not this proposed one, where she’s hearty and well-fed, and holds up her head and flourishes her hospitable schooner of flame, and appears to be inviting all the rest of the tramps to come over. O, go to – this is the very insolence of prosperity.

— Mark Twain was asked to contribute to the album of artists’ sketches and autograph letters, to be raffled for at the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition. This is his response, which accompanied his contribution

I think we need to to get some people to work on Wikipedia to change Twain’s nationality to French.

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Independency

by digby

I usually post “Fourth of July” by X on this holiday, but this year i’m just not in the mood. This better expresses my patriotism this year:

This is good too. (h/t/ to pastordan)

Happy 4th of July everyone.

Panda-monium

by digby

I had a request for some panda footage so here it is. This is the adorable cub named Po at the Atlanta Zoo cavorting about with his mother:

(Unless you want to hear a bunch of inane conversation, I’d lower the sound.)

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Driven by religion

by digby

Here’s another profile of Michele Bachman, this time from the Financial Times:

“Instead of looking at who’s electable, I’m looking at who’s the best person,” Barb Heki tells me as we discuss politics over breakfast in a bakery just outside of Des Moines, Iowa. “From a theological perspective, biblically, God puts leaders in place and my role is to look for the most righteous leaders – to be a light by supporting them and then let God work through that.” Heki does not fit the mould of a powerful political operative. A devout Christian with four children and a frizzy, 1980s-style mane, she is an outspoken advocate of home schooling. But for the last few months, she has been courted by many of the top Republican contenders for the White House…

Heki is modest about her clout but she is happy to express views that many would consider radical. She does not believe the government should run schools and opposes abortion under all circumstances, including in cases of rape or incest. She is also ready to do whatever it takes to get Michele Bachmann, the Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, elected president.
[…]
Rebecca Otto, a Democrat who serves as state auditor of Minnesota and used to share a district with Bachmann, believes her former colleague is driven by religion. “I don’t think she always makes that public … you’re not going to see that in commercials,” Otto tells me over lunch in downtown St Paul. Bachmann, she says, is “very, very bright” and extremely careful about not allowing herself to be “set up for failure”.
She is also, says Otto, a woman who does not mince words when unhappy. Otto tells a story about how she once appeared uninvited at one of Bachmann’s town hall meetings with constituents, and invited Bachmann to attend a town hall meeting she was planning. Otto says this was standard practice for two lawmakers who shared the same district. But an angry Bachmann allegedly cornered her in a corridor, jabbing her finger as she spoke.

“She said, ‘Don’t you ever invite me to a town hall meeting again and don’t you ever come to mine again. Do you understand?’ I said the state has budgetary issues and [voters] would expect us to work together to solve their problems,” Otto recalled. Bachmann allegedly replied “That is not how it works” and walked away.
[…]
As she ramps up her campaign, Bachmann is one of the only candidates who has nothing to prove to the Tea Party and the socially conservative Republicans who make up roughly two thirds of the party’s voters. That support alone will not secure her the nomination in a field that is still not settled; she may yet face a rival in Rick Perry, the Texas governor who has hinted at a late presidential run.
“The level of stridency that we are seeing in the Republican party is such that there is a lot that wouldn’t surprise me any more,” says Charlie Cook, a non-partisan political analyst in Washington and publisher of the closely followed Cook Political Report newsletter. “In the old fashioned Republican party, she would be a joke. But in this Republican party, she is a real contender.”

The good news is that we don’t have to worry about social conservatism anymore. Well, at least that’s what they tell us.

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Trouble in bipartisan paradise

by digby

Gosh, it turns out that the bullying, thuggish Governor of New Jersey isn’t a man of his word. Who ever could have guessed?

Senate President Stephen Sweeney went to bed furious Thursday night after reviewing the governor’s line-item veto of the state budget.

He woke up Friday morning even angrier.

“This is all about him being a bully and a punk,” he said in an interview Friday.

“I wanted to punch him in his head.”

Sweeney had just risked his political neck to support the governor’s pension and health reform, and his reward was a slap across the face. The governor’s budget was a brusque rejection of every Democratic move, and Sweeney couldn’t even get an audience with the governor to discuss it.

“You know who he reminds me of?” Sweeney says. “Mr. Potter from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ the mean old bastard who screws everybody.”

This is not your regular budget dispute. This is personal. And it could have seismic impact on state politics.

Because the working alliance between these two men is the central political fact in New Jersey these days. If that changes, this brief and productive era of bipartisan cooperation is over.

“Last night I couldn’t calm down,” Sweeney said. “To prove a point to me – a guy who has stood side by side with him, and made tough decisions – for him to punish people to prove his political point? He’s just a rotten bastard to do what he did.”

You can certainly see why the national Republicans and the Villagers all love Christie so much.

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Bugged

by digby

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you:

I visited him in June. He had been given a new series of shock treatments, but it was as before: the car bugged, his room bugged. I said it very gently: “Papa, why do you want to kill yourself?” …

Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.

In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.

With liberty and justice for all …

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“It’s A Personal Matter”

by digby

Marvelous:

“Last Tuesday, Ohio Rep. Robert Mecklenborg — a self-described “Catholic boy from the west side of Cincinnati” — stood on the House floor to champion the most radical anti-abortion legislation in the country.

“We marvel, don’t we?” he said, before voting for the “heartbeat” bill. “We marvel at the march of the penguins as they go to propagate their species under very, very difficult odds and conditions. We marvel at the leaping salmon as they return to their ancestral homes.”

He also marveled over the mating habits of loggerhead turtles.

Apparently he also marveled at his own sexual prowess with younger women not his wife:

Mecklenborg refused a chemical test, and then failed three field sobriety tests. After a blood test, he was charged with drunken driving. The 59-year-old married father of three also tested positive for Viagra.

Mecklenborg was not alone that evening. His passenger was a 26-year-old woman who is neither his wife nor one of his children…

“Being human, I have made a mistake and this has caused great hurt to my family, and I’m deeply sorry for that. I’ve served tirelessly and well my constituents and I want to apologize to them as well. While the discovery process in this case goes on, I am entitled to the same presumption of innocence as any other citizen.”

When asked about his young passenger, Mecklenborg said, “I understand the interest in the DUI part, I guess, but the rest is a personal matter.

How much do you want to bet that if he got this “personal matter” pregnant, he’d want her to have an abortion?

h/t to @tarkloon and lgf

Fired up Drum

by digby

If you’re looking for some good reading, treat yourself to a series of fired-up, fed-up posts by Kevin Drum over the past few days. There are a number of good observations but I like this one in particular, in which he responds to Marco Rubio rending his garments over Barack Obama’s failure:

““When does it start to get better?” Rubio asks. “When does the magic of this president start to happen?”

Gag…

Here’s Drum:

Today is one of those days where I hardly know how to react to things anymore. Part of me shrugs at this stuff: politics is politics. Of course Republicans are going to call a Democratic president a failure. What else would they do?

But then, for about the thousandth time, my mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they’ve rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.

But despite the fact that this is all recent history, it’s treated like some kind of dreamscape. No one talks about it. Republicans pretend it never happened. Fox News insists that what we need is an even bigger dose of the medicine we got in the aughts, and this is, inexplicably, treated seriously by the rest of the press corps instead of being laughed at. As a result, guys like Marco Rubio have a free hand to insist that Obama — Obama! The guy who rescued the banking system, bailed out GM, and whose worst crime against the rich is a desire to increase their income tax rate 4.6 percentage points! — is a “left-wing strong man” engaged in brutal class warfare against the wealthy. And Rubio does it without blinking. Hell, he probably even believes it.

We are well and truly down the rabbit hole. The party of class warfare for the past 30 years is fighting a war against an empty field and the result has been a rout. I wonder what would happen if the rest of us ever actually started fighting back?

As long as the war is just a game — the field, the teams, the referees — owned by big money I have a sneaking suspicion that it will continue to be rigged, unfortunately. The biggest danger I see in all this is that the people just stop caring about the game at all.

But I do take Kevin’s point that as depressed as I am by the Democrats’ and administration’s abdication, listening to Rubio lugubriously whine about “waiting for the magic” is enough to make me want to put my foot through the computer screen. The chutzpah of these assholes is truly epic.

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Red, white, & Blu: Best BD reissues of 2011 (so far)

By Dennis Hartley