Via The Christian Science Monitor…this from Peter Akinola, who it’s a safe bet fancies himself the Archbishop of the new church he’s busy carving out of the Anglican one. It’s really entertaining when they don’t know enough to keep their goddamned mouths shut…
Best known for his vocal opposition to homosexuality, Akinola has found support among US Anglicans, or Episcopalians, who opposed the 2003 consecration of a gay bishop and the church’s move to allow dioceses to bless same-sex unions.
Last month, two of America’s oldest Episcopalian churches – both in Virginia – voted to break with the US branch of Anglicanism over the issue and concerns about church leaders’ adherence to biblical authority. These churches, and several other smaller churches, joined the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, which is connected to Akinola.
"Homosexuality seeks to destroy marriage as we know it, unity as we know it, family life as we know it, so how can we endorse that?" asks Akinola. "That is completely outside what God planned for humanity. When God created man, he saw man was alone and added a female mate for him. Why didn’t he pick one of the baboons, one of the lions to make his partner? He could have done so. He didn’t,"
[Emphasis mine] Say…weren’t they saying the same thing about mixed race marriages not all that long ago in Virginia…?
David Brooks says Nanci Pelosi is some kind of hereditary plutocrat, like George W. Bush:
A snit in first class – Opinion – International Herald Tribune: I have a dream that [Nancy] Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child…. I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich…. [But] I know that both Bush and Pelosi are part of an upper-income whirlwind of strife….
This week, witness Pelosi going on her all-about-me inauguration tour, which is designed to rebrand her as a regular Catholic grandma from Baltimore. Members of the middle classes never have to mount campaign swings to prove how regular they are, but these upper-bracket types can’t help themselves, and they always lay it on too thick…
Here is a photo of Nancy Pelosi’s childhood home in Baltimore:
Nancy Pelosi grew up at the far end of this block of Albemarle Street in Baltimore. San Francisco Chronicle photo by Michael Macor.
Here’s a photo of the Bushes’ summer house on Walker Point:
Daughters of ethnic Democratic mayors in the 1950s did get driven to school. But hereditary plutocrats they were not.
I live not far from where Pelosi grew up and I can attest to the fact that this is not a neighborhood full of "obscenely rich" people. It is Baltimore’s little Italy…thoroughly Baltimore working class. People live in the usual Baltimore row houses there, and yes, some of those row houses are very nice, but there are nothing near the palatial splendor you see in the Walker Point photo. Pelosi got driven to school because she was the mayor’s daughter, not because their family was filthy rich like the Bush clan.
But Brooks, without a doubt, knows this. What he’s counting on is that you don’t. He can just say…oh…she was chauffeured to school as a child, just like the silver spoon brat in the White House now. My next door neighbors drive their boy to the Friend’s School here in Baltimore every day and they live in the same working class Baltimore rowhouse neighborhood I do. Maybe Brooks thinks that gives them the same childhood George Bush had too. Maybe Brooks thinks that makes us all Obscenely Rich here in Medfield. On the other hand, maybe Brooks is just pulling the same kind of fast one that the book that made him famous, Bobos In Paradise is full of.
As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home.“On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s,” he wrote. “I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.”
Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The “Steak and Lobster” combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. “Most of our checks are over $20,” said Becka, my waitress. “There are a lot of ways to spend over $20.”
The easiest way to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts “turn-of-the-century elegance.” I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed.
I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end?” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”
Let’s be civil here: David Brooks is a goddamned liar. He does it for money. Perhaps he believes in the republican party cause. Perhaps he has his own emotional stake in the American Kultar Kampf. But the first thing to remember about him, is that he lies for money. Really…that’s all you need to know about him.
These are shots taken during my weekend trip with some friends to celebrate New Year’s at Rehoboth Beach. It’s my first experiment at using Apple’s Aperture software to organize and publish my photos, and all in all I’m finding Aperture a pure pleasure to use. With one really irritating exception. It doesn’t seem to be able to handle the very large file sizes that result from the scans of color medium format film. Scans off my Hasselblad are running almost half a gig and Aperture just doesn’t seem to be able to handle them…at least on the hardware I’m running.
Aperture has a reputation, not unjustified, for being a resource pig. The first versions of it were, I’m told, horrible. But 1.5.2 isn’t so bad at all, if you give it at least a couple gigs of ram (I’m running three in Bagheera now), and if you’re using your machine to process graphics you should be running with lots of memory (and hard disk space) anyway. But Aperture handles very large Tif files poorly. So poorly the image display becomes garbled and I get the spinning beachball of death when I try to work with those images. This time, since I was creating a web gallery, I loaded the Hasselblad image files into Photoshop and bumped down the resolution, and then saved them back out to work with in Aperture. That did the trick. But I shouldn’t have had to do that with a program that bills itself as being professional grade. For the record, Adobe’s Lightroom beta handled those files just fine. But I like Aperture’s toolkit and workflow much better.
You can create a web photo gallery pretty easily with Aperture. I did some minor tweaking of the html pages Aperture produced, but not much was needed. You can see the results for yourself. It was a snap. With Aperture this process is so easy now, that I can see updating my photo gallery much more frequently then once every couple years.
It’s interesting, but with the new film scanner and Aperture, my film cameras, and in particular my Canon F1s, are becoming much more useful to me then they’d been. I’d seen my use of film going on the decline and my sense of it was that my future was going to be digital whether I wanted it to be or not. I bought the Canon EOS 30d digital SLR last spring so I could more easily put my stuff up on the web. But the integration of my film cameras with the computer is considerably tighter now, and I’ve been using an F1 since I was a teenager. I like my F1s. They’re like old friends. They fit comfortably in my hands and I don’t have to think about it much when using them, I’ve done it the manual way for so long. You wouldn’t believe the number and the variety of settings there are on the 30d. On the F1s there are only focus, aperture, shutter speed and film speed. That’s it. If you asked me to recite all the settings on the 30d I couldn’t do it.
The only problem with the film cameras is taking them on the road with me means I can’t see what I’ve got until I get it all back home and the film processed. With the digital camera I can see what I’ve got right away. I can even post it up on the web right away as long as I have my laptop with me. But I reckon the F1s are still essential to me, and always will be. I’ve been using them for so long, setting my focus, and my exposure manually now for so long, it’s really second nature anymore. They’re more an extension of me then the digital camera gets for now, and probably ever. I can just concentrate on what I’m seeing when I use them.
I think I may not be the only one who feels that way about the Canon F1s. I’m noticing that one of those in good condition still fetches a pretty good price on eBay. Best camera Canon ever made.
Walking around Hampden with one of my Canon F1s, the 24mm f1.4 wide angle lens, a red filter and some Kodak Tri-X pan. I’m happily snapping away at whatever catches my eye. No jacket…not even a light vest. Just jeans, sneakers, a light short-sleeved shirt and my Taos cap. The sky is bright blue with a few puffy cumulus clouds to make it visually interesting. When I stop and turn towards the sun, I can feel its heat on my body, through the fabric of my shirt.
I was going to spend the day working in the artroom, but it’s too nice to be down in the basement all day. They’re saying it will be colder and rainy tomorrow. By colder, I mean in the 50s. It was 70 in my back yard just a little while ago. As I write this, it’s reading 74 at BWI airport.
Via Steve Gilliard…via Firedoglake… How do you sell advertising space on a radio station that openly calls for liberals to be killed? Why…you sell it to them as Disney programming, of course…
Evenin’, fellow firedogs! Tonight I’m going to attempt to get us all up to speed about a situation that I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot about in the near future. This story was brought to my attention by ¡El Gato Negro!.
Where to begin? First we’ll go to A. J. Kandy, who blogs at King Marketing:
ABC/Disney operates a US-wide network of radio stations and affiliates. One of these affiliates, San Francisco’s KSFO, is a die-hard right-wing talk shop whose rabidly eliminationist hosts have publicly endorsed (if not outright revelled in) torture and engaged in hate speech of all stripes. However, the station is sold to its advertisers as a “Disney” station, with all the connotations of family-friendliness that entails. [Bruce here – the emphasis is mine…]
Self-described “fifth-tier blogger” Spocko decided to “out” KSFO to its national advertisers with a polite letter-writing campaign, and by exposing their hate speech on his blog with short audio clips and transcripts (which falls under the Fair Use statutes.)
This, of course, is what we call citizen action, and most of us know the drill by now. We write to advertisers and once in a blue moon, they write us back, pat us on the head and tell us that they’ll take our suggestion under advisement, then go on their merry way without changing a thing. This was not the case, however, with Spocko. From a guest post at BlogIntegrity, Spocko himself can tell us what happened next:
In mid-December I got confirmation that a major national advertiser, VISA, pulled their ads from the Melanie Morgan and Lee Rogers show, based on listening to audio clips I provided them. I also think that FedEx, AT&T and Kaiser are considering pulling their ads. Visa isn’t the first advertiser who has left KSFO, multiple advertisers have left the station, especially from the Brian Sussman show. In July of this year when KSFO lost MasterCard as an advertiser someone from KSFO “outed” me on a counter-blog (which I won’t link to). This same person has also threatened me with local and federal criminal action for using the audio (which I clearly used under the fair use portion of copyright law). And because they have suggested violence toward me (in addition to talking about suing me "for everything I have”) I have chosen to remain anonymous.
As Thers has said,
Hooray, for Thers!! Oh, uh, ahem. Sorry. You were saying, Spocko?
95 percent of blog fights don’t mean anything, but I think this one does since KSFO is using the full weight and force of an ABC/Disney lawyer and copyright law against a private citizen blogger. I dared to use the audio content in question for nonprofit educational purposes (I don’t even have ads on my blog!), and thus under the protection of the Fair Use Doctrine set forth in Section 107 of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C.§107.
IN THE LATEST SKIRMISH BETWEEN big media and a blogger, The Walt Disney Company has succeeded in shutting down the Web site "Spocko’s Brain."
On the site, blogger and media critic "Spocko" took issue with on-air comments made by right-wing talk show hosts at Bay Area ABC affiliate radio station KSFO. He posted audio files of hosts’ comments on his Web site, and also began a letter-writing campaign that, he says, resulted in advertisers fleeing the station.
But Tuesday, Spocko’s Internet service provider, 1&1 Internet, pulled the plug on the blog–a move prompted by a Dec. 22 cease-and-desist letter from ABC Radio claiming that material on Spocko’s Brain violated Disney’s copyright.
And that’s where things stand right now. Many of us are now familiar with ABC/Disney’s strong-arm fascism-in-mouse-ears tactics from the "Path to 9/11" debacle earlier this year. Here’s what you can do to help our fellow blogger, Spocko:
1. The KSFO hate clips are all up at Online BlogIntegrity. Collect ’em all. Share with your friends. Spread them around. It’s a veritable cornucopia of Right Wing Hate Speech. (Listen at your own risk.)
2. Go here and scroll down to "What Can You Do?" and follow the instructions. Spocko has provided us with a step-by-step plan to alert the blogging world, the MSM (if they’ll listen), and KSFO’s advertisers to the current situation.
I urge you all to get involved. This is an example of how we can effectively fight the tide of hateful bile that pollutes our airwaves and rots the brains of millions of overly credulous talk-radio listeners. We, of course, support the wingnuts’ right to say whatever they want to say, but they must be prepared to face the real-world consequences of stoking the fires of ethnic, political, and religious hatred. If that means losing the support of their advertisers and cutting into their six-figure salaries, well, then, hurrah! We win.
Thank you and good night.
If those clips get taken down email me and I’ll pass them along to you. Here’s some excerpts from the menu at Online Blogintegrity…
Somebody at Disney needs to get their head screwed on straight. This isn’t anything Disney should want its brand associated with. Yet they’re apparently marketing that station to advertisers as a Disney station. It’s like putting the Disney logo on a burning cross at a Klan rally. Why are they doing this? Is someone in marketing there just completely brain dead or what?
I can appreciate wanting to attract an audience. But some audiences you should probably just walk away from, regardless of whether or not it adversely impacts the shareholder bottom line. The kind that think ridiculing a congressman’s racial make-up is funny, for example. If Disney owns this station, then they either need to make it reflect their corporate values, or they need to sell it.
In the meantime, the least the rest of us can do is inform the advertisers of what it is they’re buying into, when they buy into the Disney brand. Read this from the blogger Disney is going after, for more info on how. If that post gets taken down email me and I’ll send you a copy of it.
So it’s early morning here at Casa del Garrett, and I’m getting ready to make myself some breakfast. I’m barefoot, and just wearing my jeans and a light shirt. I glance outside and I see a squirrel hanging off one of my bird feeders (they jump onto them from nearby trees…it’s quite a leap for the little dickens…). I quickly slip on some shoes and rush outside to chase it off so the birds can come back to eat. And…
…Christ Almighty…it’s warm out here! I mean…summertime in the city warm. I’m living in Baltimore Maryland, It’s January 6 and it’s too warm to even be wearing a coat outside.
Other people would just relax and enjoy prospect of a low heating bill for the month…but not me. Is it the Scot in me, or the German, that keeps worrying about how I’m going to be paying for all my low heating bills this winter, with some ugly looking AC bills this summer…?
[Update] Yes…my daisies are coming up now. Much more of this and I might have to get the lawn mower out again. I’ll be mowing my lawn. In January.
I’m the last person to complain about being too warm. But this weather is starting to freak me out. I was just outside taking an evening walk. It is somewhat foggy again this evening, and warm enough to walk around with my jacket unzipped. It was colder inside the local supermarket, standing next to the frozen food coolers, then it was outside.
I’ve had the furnace off more then its been on for a couple months now. Mid Atlantic winters aren’t exactly fierce, but this is ridiculous. When I was a kid, there would be permanent, winter long pockets of snow on the ground by now. All the places that didn’t get much sunlight during the day, or spots where it got piled up by the snow plows in parking lots and side streets, would have snow in them by now, and when that snow was finally gone you knew it was getting to be spring again. Yesterday someone told me the cherry trees had started to blossom in spots. Tomorrow I should check to see if my daises are coming up.
Who would have guessed that answering a few census questions could make you a participant in battling the "homosexual agenda"?
Napa resident Marcia Zwick never imagined this when she recently received a large, important-looking envelope in the mail. She works as a legal secretary and is accustomed to handling official documents.
"I’m a reasonably intelligent person," Zwick said. "I couldn’t tell what this really was."
The answer isn’t readily apparent.
"U.S. Taxpayer Census," the envelope says on the outside in big letters. "Do Not Tamper: Reply Within 5 Days."
Inside is an official-looking questionnaire. "This U.S. Taxpayer Census has been specially commissioned to gather public opinion in America’s ‘grassroots’ about the new Social Security Preservation Act (HR 219) now pending in the U.S. Congress," it says.
"This Census is individually registered under your name to represent Napa public opinion in California 01 voting district. So it is critical you return it — even if you are undecided about some answers."
In reality, the "Census" is a mailer from something called the Christian Seniors Association. And of the nine questions it asks, six involve a slanted look at Social Security and three involve donating money to the right-wing organization.
What the mailer doesn’t tell you, though, at least not in so many words, is that any funds contributed to the Christian Seniors Association will in fact go to its parent group, the Traditional Values Coalition.
Cute. This from the man who routinely calls gay people sexual predators and pedophiles. They’re the folks responsible for this bit of fragrant web advertising:
The mailer from the Christian Seniors Association only hints at broader public-policy goals. An accompanying letter explains that the organization was started several years ago as an alternative to the AARP.
…
It’s not until you get to the fine print on the back of the association’s Census form that you learn the organization "is a division of Traditional Values Coalition" and that "all contributions are combined to help pay Traditional Values Coalition expenses."
So this ersatz seniors organization really exists mostly to funnel old people’s money over to TVC. You have to figure that’s because scaring them with the gay bogyman isn’t opening up their checkbooks like it used to. Picture Lou spending money old people gave to him out of their fixed incomes thinking it was going to a campaign for senior’s issues, on his splendid little war on homosexuality instead. I guess screwing old people isn’t ungodly if all you rape them for is their money. You know…that stuff they use to put food in their mouths and a roof over their heads and buy their medicine with. Who the hell made Lou Sheldon a reverend? John Gotti?
If the vehement prejudices toward gay people in some Episcopalian churches here in America seems surprising to the majority of American Episcopalians…there may be a reason for that…
Parishioners say it happens quietly, unobtrusively: As the sick make their way to the altar, some worshipers begin speaking in tongues. Occasionally, one is "arrested in the spirit," falling unconscious into the arms of a fellow congregant.
The special faith-healing services, held one Sunday night a month at The Falls Church in Fairfax, are a rarity in the Episcopal Church. But members of The Falls Church have long felt at odds with fellow Episcopalians, who they believe have been drifting theologically in an ever more liberal direction.
Speaking in tongues…!? I hear you ask. Didn’t know that Episcopalians did that, did you? I sure didn’t. But they do at The Falls Church in Virginia. On the other hand, it’s probably not actually Episcopalians that are doing that…
At least two-thirds of the worshipers are Methodists, Presbyterians or Baptists, and there is no pressure on them to be confirmed as Episcopalians, said the Rev. Rick Wright, associate rector.
Now that’s really interesting. Go read the article. The schisming churches in Virginia have all the sense and sensibilities of your typical southern charismatic megachurch. So much so that they’ve lost many of their Episcopalians to other area churches. Now two-thirds of the people in that sanctuary don’t even bother calling themselves Episcopalians. And yet they’ve decided to take that Episcopalian church out of the American Episcopalian community, in favor of the church of a man who thinks gays should be arrested simply for sitting down together for lunch in public. Why is that not surprising? Ask the faithful at Six Flags Over Jesus and you’ll probably hear the same sentiment. But they’re in their own church, not living like digger wasps inside someone else’s.
So I guess while its technically true that the Episcopalians in northern Virginia are schisming, the reality seems to be that it’s really just the usual suspects. Ah, well…how else could a bunch of Baptists stage a schism, unless they did it in someone else’s church…
When I discuss the Left’s embrace of New Anger with people across the political spectrum, two not very satisfactory explanations keep coming up. One is that the party that is out of power has more to gripe about. Yes, but that doesn’t explain why the Left gravitated to a form of anger that exacerbated its unpopularity. Nor, why the Right, in similar circumstances kept its New Anger aficionados on the margins.
The New Anger. The left gravitiates to it. Even though it makes them unpopular. The right would never do such things…
Fortunately for liberals, the Iraqis executed Saddam Hussein the exact same week that former President Ford died, so it didn’t seem strange that Nancy Pelosi’s flag was at half-staff.
Civility. Why are you liberals so angry? Why can’t you be more civil?
President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant, the Daily News has learned.
The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people’s mail under emergency conditions.
That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.
Bush’s move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.
"Despite the President’s statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people’s mail without a warrant," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill.
Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.
"The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.
"The danger is they’re reading Americans’ mail," she said.
"You have to be concerned," agreed a career senior U.S. official who reviewed the legal underpinnings of Bush’s claim. "It takes Executive Branch authority beyond anything we’ve ever known."
A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised, "It’s something we’re going to look into."
Well, so what? You can’t impeach him unless the republicans go along with it and swear to God if Bush was caught with a pistol in his hands robbing a bank, they’d tell you that the president has the right to rob banks in the name of national security because 9-11 changed everything.
Good thing it’s not a democrat doing this or the news media would be having kittens right now.
I doubt that even Barack Obama can save us from our anger now. That’s because the anger that lately pervades our politics is more than just an after effect of six years of Democratic setbacks (although the strikingly angry Democratic response to their six bad years does call for an explanation).
An explaination…did you say? Well…how about this one…
You should go read the rest of Digby’s post. Digby says of the Kurtz review that, "It’s fascinating because it once again illustrates the degree to which conservatives have absolutely no self-awareness", but I don’t think it’s a lack of self awareness so much as a lack of conscience. When they kick people in the teeth, conservatives don’t see that as anything less then their god given right as superior beings. The role of all the rest of us lesser beings is to just stand there and passively take it because…well…they have a god given right to dish it out to us and if we object, we’re the ones being mean. To them. And of course, if we decide to dish it right back then we are being positively uncivil.
Speaking of which…have you noticed how the word, "civility" has become some kind of watchword recently? Civility. Civility. The news media has suddenly discovered that it is important for us to be civil. Now that the democrats are back in power. Goodness knows it wasn’t important when people like the lady in the photo above were in power. Goodness knows it wasn’t important back when Rush Limbaugh was playing "It’s Raining Men" right after news broke that a New York Times reporter had committed suicide by jumping out an office window. Goodness knows it wasn’t important when Ann Coulter said the only problem she has with Timothy McVeigh is that he didn’t go to the New York Times building. Now that democrats are back in power, the news media that treated Limbaugh and Coulter like elder statesmen have suddenly discovered that incivility is a bad thing. Gosh.
Digby reminds us about the little list of words the father of the new incivility, Newt Gingrich made for republicans to use every time they talked about democrats…
He became famous (with some help from his cohorts) for being a manipulative, vicious asshole and the lesson was well learned. He went on to create a lexicon of derision, used by Republicans everywhere, to describe Democrats and liberals. He called these words "contrast":
Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.
I realize it is churlish of us liberals to attempt to defend ourselves from this kind of bad faith and even worse for us to lose our Gary Cooper cool. But, you know, when you push people far enough and hard enough they start to fight for their survival. The level of vitriol and hate emanating from the right — and encouraged by Republicans leaders of all stripes — has been overwhelming. These past twelve years alone have been characterized by smears, toxic rhetoric, impeachments, abuse of power, stolen elections, power mad governance, corruption and ineptitude. So yes, we’re angry — but more importantly, we are fearful for our country.
Until Republicans admit what they have wrought and recognize that their trash talking and boot-to-the-throat mode of fetid politics are responsible for our state today, then for the good of the country, I hope the left remains angry and battles them back with everything they’ve got.
This is ugly, I admit. But the country just can’t take another couple of decades of Republican politics and Republican rule. We have to stop it — and it won’t be stopped if Democrats play nice.
No. It won’t. I say this over and over again but it’s true: we’re in a knife fight with these people. You either fight back to win, or you just stand there and let them laugh in your face and kick your balls, because that’s just what they’ll do, and keep doing, even after you’ve curled up in the fetal position. They don’t care. They hate you. They hate you with a passion that your gay and lesbian neighbors have seen first hand for decades now. Digby’s right. Until the republicans are held accountable for the past couple decades of vitriol and hate they’ve been spewing into the political well all that this newly discovered concern about the level of incivility amounts to, is just another way of keeping us passive while they get to keep kicking everyone they despise in the face. It won’t stop until they’re held accountable.
Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he’d take his oath of office on the Koran — especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.
Yet the holy book at tomorrow’s ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We’ve learned that the new congressman — in a savvy bit of political symbolism — will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson.
"He wanted to use a Koran that was special," said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, who was contacted by the Minnesota Dem early in December. Dimunation, who grew up in Ellison’s 5th District, was happy to help.
Jefferson’s copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson’s collection and has his customary initialing on the pages. This isn’t the first historic book used for swearing-in ceremonies — the Library has allowed VIPs to use rare Bibles for inaugurations and other special occasions.
Goode represents Jefferson’s birthplace, Albemarle County Virginia. Though I’m sure they’d lend him one, you have to suppose a Jefferson Bible wouldn’t be good enough for Goode to put his hand on while taking an oath. Or…maybe I have that backwards…
Thomas Jefferson believed that the ethical system of Jesus was the finest the world has ever seen. In compiling what has come to be called "The Jefferson Bible," he sought to separate those ethical teachings from the religious dogma and other supernatural elements that are intermixed in the account provided by the four Gospels. He presented these teachings, along with the essential events of the life of Jesus, in one continuous narrative.
This presentation of The Jefferson Bible offers the text as selected and arranged by Jefferson in two separate editions: one edition uses a revised King James Version of the biblical texts, corrected in accordance with the findings of modern scholarship; the second edition uses the original unrevised KJV. The actual verses of the Bible used for both editions are those chosen by Jefferson. Visitors should find the revised KJV text much easier to read and understand. Those seeking the precise English version Mr. Jefferson used when making his compilation can click on "Unrevised KJV text."
He may be on the conservative movement’s shit list these days, but Andrew Sullivan is still its useful idiot…
I doubt whether Massachusetts will forgo the honor of being the first state to grant gay couples legal equality with their straight peers. But there’s one way to find out. Let’s debate and campaign. The national gay groups, whose record on marriage has been spotty at best, need to make this the first priority of the national movement. Winning a democratic vote on marriage is a huge opportunity – and well within our grasp. We have the arguments. We have the evidence. Now let’s have the vote.
We have the arguments do we? Well…one argument we won’t have I guess is that no civilized nation puts the human rights of minorities up for popular vote. Can someone tell me when reason ever made a dent in the mindset of bigots? It wasn’t the voters who swept away the segregation laws in America, it was the hated Warren Court.
The Conservative Soul is it? Well of course. Conservatives never were very big on the concept of liberty and justice for all were they…
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