LONDON (Reuters) – Elton John has said organized religion should be banned because it promotes homophobia and turns some people into “hateful lemmings”.
“I would ban religion completely, even though there are some wonderful things about it,” the British singer said in an interview with the Observer newspaper on Sunday.
“Religion has always tried to turn hatred toward gay people. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it is not really compassionate.”
The singer, who tied the knot with long-term partner David Furnish in a civil ceremony last year, said he admired the teachings of Jesus Christ, but disliked religious bodies.
The headline ambiguously implies that Elton wants some religion banned, the hateful kind. From his full quote, it’s clear he wants all religion banned.
Reuters should be more careful with its headlines.
We need talented and determined writers to produce the long, detailed historical work that will reveal the total amount of taxpayers’ money that the federal government gave to rich and powerful people from 2001-2007.
It is then, and only then, that Americans will have any hope of learning the truth and consequences of Karl Rove and George W. Bush. Everything else, conservatism, religious issues, terrorisim, Iraq, everything, is just the means and the public relations required to transfer the money without anyone noticing or asking questions.
By the time this historical work is produced, if it is produced at all, no one will have any interest in the crimes of this administration, all the principle actors will be dead or otherwise beyond prosecution and the interest earned on the transfered money will be enough to purchase another six years of one-party rule.
James has it right. For example, if a ruling party (Republican) transfers wealth from State to Industry in the form of a drug benefit program that guarantees income (at taxpayer expense) to private firms, what is the quid pro quo from industry, if it’s not to help get the ruling party re-elected?
Likewise, if gas prices drop more than a dollar a gallon in the several months leading up to an important election, a price drop that puts the cost of fuel below its market equilibrium, should the profits foregone by the oil companies be considered campaign contributions made to the incumbent party? It would appear, after all, that the purpose of the price drop was an attempt to buy the election.Call it pluto-reciprocity, or some such name.
With the post-election dust settling, the Republican opportunists are beginning to make moves around their hapless loser-mates. Yes, authentic conservatives are ready to reclaim government. First up? A man who proclaims on a web-site we pay for that he is “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.”
He means that literally, of course. Here was Mike Pence a few years back speaking at the Center For Christian Statesmanship (No, really, Christian Statesmanship!)
At this year’s first Center-sponsored summer intern event, over 400 young people filled the Cannon Caucus Room to hear Representative Mike Pence (IN) deliver his personal testimony of faith.
Because of that first luncheon, one intern has already come to know Christ personally. In addition, 13 more interns have asked how they too can have a personal relationship with Christ, 58 requested to take part in discipleship relationships, and 85 requested Bible studies.
One intern said that events like this one allowed him to see a side of Capitol Hill that he did not know existed.
“When I first heard Mike Pence speak, I called home and told my mom, ‘You’re not going to believe what just happened here,’” said Matt McKinney, a second-year intern for Representative Robert Aderholt (AL). “You don’t hear about the people who live for God. I didn’t realize that people of integrity [worked] here.”
But that was then and this is now. Here is Human Events responding to Pence’s announcement that he intends to become minority leader of the House.
When the now-defeated Republican majority in the House of Representative was led astray on key issues by President Bush, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, it was Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana who rallied backbenchers to fight back in defense of conservative principles.
That is why Pence should be elected minority leader for the next Congress.
Under Pence’s leadership over the next two years, we believe, House Republicans can put themselves in position to retake the majority in 2008. More importantly, they can be counted on to fight for what’s right—even when that means defying a president of their own party.
Speaker Hastert did the right thing today by stepping aside. But if Republicans in the House simply elevate the other members currently in the leadership—go back to business as usual—the party may find itself mired in the minority for years to come. Conservative activists need to speak out now to make certain this doesn’t happen. They need to say: No to the old leaders. No to business as usual. Yes to Mike Pence.
Pence stumbled a little on immigration (in the eyes of the conservative base) though I suspect he’ll recover quite easily from that.
But the real reason to watch out for Mike Pence? He’s not a faux-maverick, fleshy dough-boy, like John McCain. He’s young, vibrant, and handsome — and, get this, he entered politics through talk radio, as mentioned in a NYT lede:
He supports tax cuts and the war in Iraq. He opposes stem cell research and the Medicare drug plan. He is a master of his movement’s medium, talk radio. Jesus Christ is his personal savior and Ronald Reagan his political idol.
Conjure what might be called the perfect conservative, and chances are he would look a lot like Representative Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who in just three terms has turned 100 House allies into a vanguard and himself into one of his party’s rising stars.
“Our mission has now changed. Our mission in the Majority was to pass legislation reflecting Republican principles. The duty of the Republican Minority in the 110th Congress is to defeat the liberal agenda of the Democrat Party and become the majority in Congress again. We will only defeat the Democrat agenda by presenting a positive, conservative message in vivid contrast to the big government liberalism of the new Majority.”
Look at that face, peeps … the opposition is gonna love him.
Following up on Digby’s earlier post about Congressional investigations, I think Nancy Pelosi likewise has it right, that it isn’t necessary to do all the impeachment drum-beating that would be typical of the now side-lined Movement Conservatism and Aggrievement Society, were the shoe to be on the other foot. To do so would be the equivalent of the prosecutor’s office judging someone guilty, and then setting out to look for evidence to prove it. It’s hard to wait it out, and much less gratifying, of course, but I think she put it well in her comments to CNN:
BLITZER: The power that you will have as the majority is subpoena power, when you conduct your investigations, your oversight. You said on “Meet the Press” back on May 7th, “Well, we will have subpoena power. Investigation does not equate to impeachment. Investigation is the requirement of Congress. It’s about checks and balances.”
Tell us how you plan on pursuing using this subpoena power.
PELOSI: Well, first of all, others have said to us, do the Democrats want to get even now that we’re in the majority? We’re not about wanting to get even. What we want to do is to help the American people get ahead, not to get even with the Republicans.
And so, as we go forward with our hearing process and — which is the normal checks and balance responsibility of Congress, it will be to what is in furtherance of passing legislation that makes the policy better, that improves the lives of the American people. In order to make important decisions, you have to base them on facts. That’s the only way your judgment…
BLITZER: So you’ll use that subpoena power as appropriate?
PELOSI: Well, it’s not a question — well, subpoena power is a last resort. We would hope that there would be cooperation from the executive branch in terms of investigating the pre-war intelligence. I don’t know — those decisions will be made by our caucus with the wisdom of the committees of jurisdiction.
They may or may not be a priority. We’re a brand-new caucus, we have many new, excellent members coming in and we will establish our priorities together. But we will not abdicate our responsibility as the first branch of government, Article I, the legislative branch and our checks and balances responsibilities.
BLITZER: I asked the question about subpoena power because the vice president once again made clear if you subpoena him, he’s not necessarily going to play ball. “I have no idea that I’m going to be subpoenaed,” he said the other day, “and obviously we’d sit down and look at it at the time, but probably not in the sense that the president and vice president are constitutional officers and don’t appear before the Congress.”
PELOSI: Well, as you know, President Ford did and he wasn’t subpoenaed because he came without a subpoena, but why are we even talking about this? We’re so far from that. We’re at a place where we’re here about the future.
Whatever information we need to make the future better, to go forward, whether it’s to protect our country, to end our engagement in Iraq, to make our economy fair, whatever it is — we need to move towards energy independence, I might add — that’s where our priorities are. Information is central to that. So we would have hearings to obtain information.
That’s right. Relax. Get the information (evidence) first. Time is on our side now.
Veteran’s Day is a good day to take a look at one of the greatest building blocks of the American middle class, the GI Bill:
On June 22, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944,” better known as the “GI Bill of Rights.” At first the subject of intense debate and parliamentary maneuvering, the famed legislation for veteran of World War II has since been recognized as one of the most important acts of Congress.
During the past five decades, the law has made possible the investment of billions of dollars in education and training for millions of veterans. The nation has in return earned many times its investment in increased taxes and a dramatically changed society.
The law also made possible the loan of billions of dollars to purchase homes for millions of veterans, and helped transform the majority of Americans from renters to homeowners.
Most people would call that a good thing, right? A successful government program that helped millions of people improve their lives in tangible ways must be unassailable.
The public purpose of the G.I. Bill was to smooth the transition from military to civilian life after the war. But ulterior motives were also present. Washington Keynesians wrongly feared the economic consequences of putting this many people in the private sector at once; better to let them flounder around in schools for a few years.
Left-liberals wanted universities to be “democratized” and purged of traditional notions of merit and class. These ideologues saw veterans as a helpful tool (90 percent were eligible to receive funds) in this egalitarian effort. Moreover, colleges and universities across the country wanted government subsidies, just as they do today.
There’s a myth that most veterans would not have attended college without federal government help. In fact, myriad programs existed at all levels of society. Virtually every major church, civic organization, and large corporation raised money to provide them, and most states established loan programs as well. These could have worked without negative effects on schools. But they were preempted by the feds and history’s largest infusion of public dollars to education.
In 1946, the program’s first year, the government dumped $1.3 billion on higher education. This may not seem like much today, but it was then the largest program giving direct payments to individuals, exceeding unemployment benefits, Social Security (by four times), military retirement (by one third), and even agricultural subsidies during the heyday of rural central planning. Two years later, it had exploded in cost by 250 percent.
As veterans grew older, spending stabilized and declined, but the program left an awful political legacy. It served as a model for how politicians can grow the government without provoking public revolt, and caused an entire generation to regard government as a benefactor.
As Bob Dole said on the campaign trail, promoting federally funded vouchers, “I want to help young people to have an education, just as I had an education after World War II with the G.I. Bill of Rights.”
The bastard.
This is essentially the conservative argument against the New Deal and it’s been driving the political and economic debate for decades now. If the government does it — no matter how efficiently or how many people benefit — it must be wrong. And anyone who promotes such things is a self-interested liberal ideologue who wants nothing more than to destroy America’s will to succeed and make people dependent on them. It’s such an awful problem that they can’t even give government benefits to those who put their lives on the line because people might get the idea that government programs work — and that sends the wrong message. Slippery slope, don’t you know.
They’ve never had the nerve to really go after the GI Bill, of course. It would be political suicide. But they hate it and if Grover Norquist and his ilk have their way they would drown government veterans benefits in the bathtub right along with social security — or transform them into faith-based programs where Vets could get training from Ted Haggard (if they asked nicely.)
Among the motives inspiring the legislation was the desire to spare the veterans and the nation the economic hardships that accompanied the return, years before, of those who fought in World War I.
The Bonus march of 1932, when World War I veterans rallied in Washington DC for more effective veterans benefits during the height of the Depression was broken up when the US army sent tanks and soldiers with bayonet-affixed rifles into the veteran camps to clear the veterans out and burn the camp down, killing some (including William Hushka), and injuring many more.
The GI Bill was a case of the government learning from mistakes, being responsive to a problem — and solving it. It worked.
Now who is it that supports the troops again — the conservative Club for Growth-style extremists like that guy I quoted above, or the Democratic party? The Democrats will make sure the VA works (as it has beautifully ever since Bill Clinton had it overhauled in the 90’s) and the GI bill and other more modern benefits will continue to be available to Veterans. The other side won’t because when you get down to it they just don’t believe that government is in the problem solving business. It’s really that simple.
* ironically, this article weighs in against the conservative hobby horse,school vouchers, because they are just as pernicious as the GI Bill in installing government into the private education system. It’s pretty clear, although not explicit, that he would just prefer a totally private educational system for everyone — let the hoi-polloi teach themselves.
Super smart commenter Sara left this one the Southern Comfort post and I thought it was well worth talking about as we continue this conversation:
Yes, the South needs to rebuild its Democratic Party, and the DNC and Dean can start the ball rolling with some subsidies, but the hard work will be pulling together the Majority Minority African American Democratic Districts with the progressive democratic culture. It has to be built by people on the ground who can cross that racial divide and the trust divide that reflects racial sell-outs of the past, and create one party. For right now the secure Democratic Districts are mostly Majority African American — and in many parts of the South, that is the core of the Democratic Party. In Texas it will need to be three way trust — White anglo, Hispanic and Black.
The parties need to keep focused on doing elections well — but in the off season they need to be good social and information centers. You compete with the Republican Clubhouse in the Mega Church by offering up the party organization as a social setting and a place of fellowship as well as political education. You introduce young people to the party with events that welcome them into their political maturity. Parties in the South ought to be planning major events to which all those new Senate and House Committee Chairs are invited to speak and meet and greet. Out of this will come more election volunteers, and eventually candidates that can win locally and eventually on the state-wide stage. I’ll feel less critical of the South when I see all this sort of stuff just regularly happening. I’ll also be less critical when I see people on all sides of the race and trust divides understanding each other’s take on issues, and backing each other’s interests. That is, afterall, what a political party is all about.
One of the things we haven’t really gotten to in this discussion of southern politics is how race affects the Democratic Party. Anyone want to weigh in on that?
Beliefnet did a recent poll of evangelicals that sheds a little light on my post below:
The findings were in line with exit poll estimates such as CNN’s, which found about 70 percent of white evangelicals voted Republican in Tuesday’s elections in which Democrats regained control of the U.S. Congress from President George W. Bush’s Republicans.
While still strong, that level of support was below the 74 to 78 percent range that different surveys found in the 2004 election.
Significantly, about 60 percent of those polled in the Beliefnet survey said their views of the Republican Party had become less positive in recent years.
“It’s not that they are soured with the Republican approach to culture war issues like abortion, it’s that they are angry with them on issues such as Iraq and corruption,” said Steven Waldman, editor in chief of Beliefnet.com, a Web site on issues of faith.
As with other Americans, the Iraq war topped evangelicals’ list of electoral concerns, with 22.5 percent citing it as the issue that most affected their votes.
Respondents were not asked to specify if Iraq was a negative or positive factor, so some who cited it may have voted in support of Bush’s Iraq policies. Other surveys have found white evangelical support for the unpopular war to be higher than among other Americans.
Abortion and gay marriage/homosexuality were second and third among evangelicals’ electoral concerns, cited by 16 percent and 10.7 percent respectively.
The survey found a general disenchantment with politics among devout evangelicals, with 51.5 percent also saying their views of Democrats had soured in recent years.
“There has been some movement away from the Republicans but it is by no means a stampede of evangelicals toward the Democrats,” Waldman said.
So the the top issues for evangelicals were Iraq (who knows whether they viewed it negatively or positively,) gay-marriage and abortion. A stampede it surely ain’t.
But if you really want to see where everything becomes clear, check this out:
Over 52 percent still felt Bush was a better Christian than former Democratic President Bill Clinton, while 13 percent felt the reverse was true. About a third rated them evenly.
I know I should be thrilled that 30% believe that Clinton and Bush are equal, but really, that is very thin gruel. George W. Bush started an immoral war that has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, endorsed torture and indefinite imprisonment, presided over the most corrupt government in American history, never goes to church and has never once admitted error or sought forgiveness — and yet 87 percent of these people believe that Clinton’s eight unauthorized hummers make Bush the better Christian or at least no worse. I think we all know what Jesus would have to say about that.
And bravo to the 13% of evangelicals who know that unjust war and torture are more heinous in the godly scheme of things than infidelity. I assume these are the folks who are voting for Democrats because they share their values of of social justice and the common good. Too bad there aren’t more of them.
The Democratic congressman who will investigate the Bush administration’s running of the government says there are so many areas of possible wrongdoing, his biggest problem will be deciding which ones to pursue.
There’s the response to Hurricane Katrina, government contracting in Iraq and on homeland security, political interference in regulatory decisions by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, and allegations of war profiteering, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., told the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.
“I’m going to have an interesting time because the Government Reform Committee has jurisdiction over everything,” Waxman said Friday, three days after his party’s capture of Congress put him in line to chair the panel. “The most difficult thing will be to pick and choose.”
[…]
Subpoenas would be used only as a last result, Waxman said, taking a jab at a previous committee chairman, GOP Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who led the committee during part of the Clinton administration.
“He issued a subpoena like most people write a letter,” Waxman said.
Waxman complained that Republicans, while in power, shut Democrats out of decision-making and abdicated oversight responsibilities, focusing only on maintaining their own power.
In contrast to the many investigations the GOP launched of the Clinton administration, “when Bush came into power there wasn’t a scandal too big for them to ignore,” Waxman said.
Among the issues that should have been investigated but weren’t, Waxman contended, were the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, the controversy over the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name, and the pre-Iraq war use of intelligence.
He said Congress must restore accountability and function as an independent branch of government. “It’s our obligation not to be repeating with the Republicans have done,” Waxman said.
Waxman is savvy and will run investigations with focus and flair. He’s very, very good at these things. I think he will find a way to do this without appearing to be exacting revenge or wasting the congress’s time. And the fact is that it’s his duty to do it, regardless. Just look at the list of events about which we are all still reading tea leaves and waiting for Bob Woodward’s book to come out to tell us what the Washington whispers are saying. We need a sober, serious official look at what the hell’s been going on in Washington these last six years and Waxman’s the guy who can do it.
Before everyone moves on from this election, I think it’s important that we all bookmark this post by Kevin Drum and keep it handy. A new zombie meme is emerging and it’s going to have to be chased down and killed over and over again:
Religious liberals contended that a concerted effort by Democrats since 2004 to appeal to people of faith had worked minor wonders, if not electoral miracles, in races across the country.
….Democrats recaptured the Catholic vote they had lost two years ago. They sliced the GOP’s advantage among weekly churchgoers to 12 percentage points, down from 18 points in 2004.
Once more with feeling: in the the overall national vote, Democrats picked up 5 percentage points compared to 2004.
Among Catholics they picked up 6 points.
Among weekly churchgoers they picked up 3 points.
Among white evangelicals they picked up 3 points.
There’s just no story here unless you look at individual races. Nationally, turnout among religious voters was as high as it was in 2004, and their shift toward Democrats was either the same or a bit less than the overall national shift. I’d love to be able to say that Democrats made some disproportionate inroads in this group, since it’s such an important part of the GOP base, but they didn’t. People need to quit saying it.
The problem with Cooperman’s story is not that it says that evangelicals and catholics may have moved to the Democrats, it’s that Amy Sullivan and her friends in the media are going to use Cooperman’s incorrect analysis to prove that that the Democrats need to deliver on some menu of social conservatism because of it.
And if it were true that conservative religious voters moved to the Democrats in great numbers, then I’m sure they would be right, which is why I’m not keen on continuing to try to appeal to social conservatives as a voting bloc — they are way too conservative even for our Big Tent. The real social conservatives understand this:
“Even though a lot of Democratic candidates talked about faith, and even though a lot of them are devout people who hold similar values, they are part of a party that is liberal,” said Janice Shaw Crouse, director of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, a conservative Christian think tank. “So the only hope social conservatives really have is the Republican Party.”
You can’t be all things to all people, people. If the large swathe of religious voters who are incorrectly alleged to have voted Democratic are widely seen by all these chatterers as religious liberals then great. More people concerned with social and economic justice would be a very welcome and logical addition to our coalition. (And even if it isn’t true I have no problem if people think it is.) But if this unsubstantiated mass migration to the Democrats is used by Amy Sullivan and the like as a cudgel to force Democratic tolerance for such abominations as creationism or right wing “family values,” then I see no margin in allowing the error to go unchallenged.
Let’s keep it real and ensure that it is well understood that the religious voters who voted Democratic are not people who expect the party to abandon gay rights or choice because they “delivered” the election. Those people voted in huge numbers, as they always do, for the Republicans.
The data shows that religious voters moved to the Democrats in the same numbers that every other demographic did, (except young voters and hispanics who voted Dem in significantly larger numbers than 2004.) We can draw no lessons on social policy at all from the rather small percentage change among these very religious voters except that they wised up, like a whole bunch of other people. Good for them. Welcome to the circus.
Update: Josh Marshall, also riffing on Kevin’s unpacking of the exit polls, has more on this zombie meme and where it came from. Unsurprisingly, it came from a badly written new story. .
“The profile of corruption in the exit polls was bigger than I’d expected,” Rove tells TIME. “Abramoff, lobbying, Foley and Haggard [the disgraced evangelical leader] added to the general distaste that people have for all things Washington, and it just reached critical mass.”
Exit polls showed heavy discontent with the course of the war, and Bush announced the departure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld the next day. But Rove took comfort in results of the Connecticut Senate race between the anti-war Democratic nominee, Ned Lamont, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who ran as an independent after losing the Democratic primary over his support for the war. “Iraq mattered,” Rove says. “But it was more frustration than it was an explicit call for withdrawal. If this was a get-out-now call for withdrawal, then Lamont would not have been beaten by Lieberman. Iraq does play a role, but not the critical, central role.”
How pathetic is it that the great GOP magus is reduced to finding his silver lining in an Independent beating a Democrat in a blue state?
He goes on to point out that they really didn’t lose because the races were so close in some states.
I know. This is not a man who has ever shown even the tiniest bit of shame or self-awareness so I shouldn’t be surprised. But that one got me.
