LOSING DAVID BRODER….What’s the modern day equivalent of "losing Walter Cronkite"? Perhaps losing David Broder?
In today’s column he doesn’t quite come right out and say that we need to withdraw from Iraq, but he sure wiggles up to within kissing distance of it. Will the rest of centrist Washington follow?
This is painful for someone who grew up watching Walter Cronkite to read. You just see in it so horribly the decline of the American spirit since the Reagan years. I doubt Drum was thinking in those terms when he wrote that…he’s probably thinking in terms of the environment of the inside the beltway kool kids. And he’s probably right. For the D.C. kool kids, loosing Broder may well be, in a sense, like loosing Walter Cronkite. And this very nicely sums up what’s wrong with the mainstream news media today, and in particular, the shitfaced pundocracy. Comparing David "they came in and trashed the place" Broder to Walter Cronkite is like comparing the Matterhorn to Walt Disney’s recreation of it. One’s a real goddamned mountain and the other is a hollow fake created purely for entertainment. And that’s Broder. And that’s why he’s thought well of by the D.C. cocktail party crowd. He entertains them. If, as Broder said, Bill Clinton came in with his trailer trash crowd and "trashed the place", Broder was the man to tell them all their cheapshit Georgetown conceits were insightful and high principled pearls of wisdom. As Atrios points out:
The country doesn’t care what David Broder thinks. He reflects the conventional wisdom of his clique back at them. That’s his audience.
Just so. Broder’s audience is his own Washington inside the beltway clique. The same mindless soulless lapdogs who have been breathlessly kissing the feet of anti democratic republican thugs ever since Kenneth Starr started sniffing Bill Clinton’s underwear. What we’re seeing in the beltway pundocracy now, is that Deer In The Headlights expression of a person watching a catastrophe rushing at them like an out of control semi, bearing their own words on its bumperstickers.
In the months and years to come remember: these people mindlessly, witlessly, cheered President Junior on his way to war, when anyone with half a brain and a functional conscience could tell it was bullshit. These people mindlessly, witlessly, roused American passions for war. Saddam was a threat to our national security they said. And defended Bush and the republicans when they began shredding our consitution. The war would be over in days they said. They’ve been making excuses for why it’s been relentlessly killing people for going on four years now. The Iraqis would shower our troops with flowers they said. They’re killing and maiming more and more every day now. The tyrannies of the middle east would all fall like dominos they said. Now an anti-human religious fanatisism sweeps the entire Arab world, taking its moral authority from everything Bush has done to destroy democracy in America and ignore treaties on the conduct of war, and the practice of torture. And now it’s become too much, even for the likes of David Broder. Second thoughts? No. He’s looking for a way to deflect his share of the blame. They all are.
They’ll say they were all bamboozled by a bunch of terrible, wicked men. But…no. They were willing to be fooled. They held the Clintons in the same contempt Imelda Marco held her shoe shine girl, worshipped the republicans for the same arrogance of power that brought us war, corruption, and an America divided against itself like it hasn’t been since the civil war. They roused the mob, not because they believed in Dubya, but because they loathed the democrats, and their prissy preoccupation with the rights of common people, and that bleeding heart liberal crap about liberty and justice for all. Their support for President Junior was more a gesture of contempt for liberalism then a hurrah for republican oligarchy, but it did its work.
Now president Smirk is egging the Israelis to make war on Syria, and rumbling that maybe we should start another one with Iran. With what troops and with what money who knows…but the republicans don’t care about details like that. They’re Big Picture folks. Broder and the entire inside the beltway kool kids crowd hated liberals and democrats too much to notice or care who they were sanctifying, but it wasn’t their father’s republican party. It is the party of Pat Robertson and James Dobson, men who think the end of the world will begin in the holy lands. Now that they have the power they’ve always wanted, it’s too late to politely suggest to them that they’re making a mistake. They think they’re doing God’s work. They’re ushering in the Second Coming.
Broder and his audience could have used their position to make this country a better place. Instead they pissed on it, and blamed the democrats. They didn’t think it mattered who governed America, as long as it wasn’t common trash who didn’t know how to throw a proper Georgetown party. And now a terrible wind is blowing at the foundations of everything America ever stood for, everything America was, everything America could ever have become, and worst of all, it is bearing their own words back to them.
Please Know From My Heart That I Am Not An Anti-Semite. I Am Not A Bigot.
Sure thing Mel…
"For 1,950 years [the church] does one thing and then in the ’60s, all of a sudden they turn everything inside out and begin to do strange things that go against the rules. Everything that had been heresy is no longer heresy, according to the [new] rules. We [Catholics] are being cheated… The church has stopped being critical. It has relaxed. I don’t believe them, and I have no intention of following their trends.It’s the church that has abandoned me, not me who has abandoned it."
Mel Gibson, in an interview with El Pais in January 1992, discussing why his brand of Traditionalist Catholicism does not subscribe to the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 rulings on various subjects including who was responsible for the death of Jesus Christ.
"Why are they calling her a Nazi? …Because modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church. And it’s a lie. And it’s revisionism. And they’ve been working on that one for a while."
On criticism of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a nineteenth-century nun whose writings influenced his portrayal of Jesus’ death. The New Yorker, September 15, 2003
"That’s bullshit…I don’t want to be dissing my father. He never denied the Holocaust; he just said there were fewer than six million. I don’t want them having me dissing my father. I mean, he’s my father."
On allegations that his father is a Holocaust denier. The New Yorker, September 15, 2003
"I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union."
In The New York Post, January 30, 2004
"They take it up the ass. This [pointing to his butt] is only for taking a shit."
When asked what he thinks of homosexuals in an interview with El Pais in January 1992
"With this look, who’s going to think I’m gay. I don’t lend myself to that type of confusion. Do I sound like a homosexual? Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?"
When asked during the El Pais interview if he is afraid of being mistaken for a homosexual, because he is an actor.
"I have no idea how anti-Semitism entered into it. But I do feel that gay people will burn in hell. Their way of life goes completely against God’s plan for procreation."
"Fucking Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."
During his arrest for driving under the influence, July 2006
"What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?"
To a female sergeant during his arrest for DUI
"In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson’s Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images."
It’s worth noting that The Man Without A Face, was produced after Gibson’s homophobic outburst in El Pais, and was widely taken at the time (mostly by heterosexuals sympathetic to Gibson) as a kind of apology to the gay community. I’ve read the book the film was based on, I still have it on my shelves. The story is about a young boy growing up in an emotionally abusive family, who turns to an older neighbor for support and guidance. As their relationship develops, the boy finds himself experiencing a nascent sexual awakening and desire for the older man, which the older man gently but firmly turns aside. He is not interested in having a sexual relationship with the boy, he just wants to help him through a difficult time in his life, despite the suspicions of the local townsfolk. The final confrontation in the book comes when the boy discovers that the man really was a homosexual, and he lashes out at him in fear and confusion over his own sexual orientation.
The story is about growing up, trust, and what it is to genuniely love someone. It’s about accepting differences in others, accepting yourself and not running away from your life. The punchline is that the man was gay, and so was the boy, yet the man did not take advantage of him. There was real love and friendship there between them, that was taken away and destroyed by fear and prejudice. The prejudice of the townspeople, and the boy’s own fears and doubts about himself. Gibson, in making the film, turned the man into a heterosexual who had only been mistaken for a homosexual once in his life, when he was falsely accused of having an affair with a former student, effectively nullifying the book’s point that to be homosexual isn’t necessarily to be a child molester, and thereby weakening the impact of its message about love. The townsfolk were right about the man…and yet they were wrong. The boy lashed out at the man from fear of something within himself. This is what prejudice does to us…it tears us apart from within, tears neighbor from neighbor, friend from friend. But Gibson could not bring himself to make that film. So he turned the story into a tale about the unjust persecution of a heterosexual. Yet to this day people point to this film, Gibson’s directorial debut, as some kind of proof that Gibson really isn’t a homophobic bigot after all.
So when Gibson offered to make a film about the Holocaust after the outrage over Passion of the Christ…I laughed. Some blogger wag whose name I cannot recall just now, joked that in his script for his Holocaust film, Gibson changes the story to make it a bunch of Jews who kill six million Nazis. But no…he would have made a very nice film about the crimes against the Jews by the Third Reich, and few would have noticed that the film’s basic premise was, as Gibson’s father insists, that the killing of Jews by the Nazis wasn’t anything special or systematic, because a lot of people died during world war II.
At the root of prejudice is a terrible blindness to the humanity of the hated other. The hated other is not really human, so the things that happen to them are not remarkable. It is only injustice when bad things happen to real people. Not when it happens to Jews. Not when it happens to women who challenge the authority of men. Not when it happens to homosexuals. That is the message of every film Mel Gibson has ever made. It is what he believes. It is his bedrock. You saw it again last week in Malibu, without the silver screen makeup.
This is the kind of thing I was taught about homosexuals nearly all through grade school. They taught me that homosexuals usually kill the people they have sex with. They taught me that homosexuals prey on young boys, but will sometimes lure an unsuspecting heterosexual man into the woods too. They told me that homosexuals almost never have sex with another homosexual because they know how dangerous it is. This was in the 1960s, in the school system of a well do do suburb of Washington D.C.
That film brings back memories all right. That is what I grew up knowing about homosexuals. I suppose a lot of people from my generation were taught those things. I suppose a lot of people from my generation still believe them. The only thing that saved me from a lifetime of fear of my sexual nature and self loathing was that it was so extreme I just knew it was not me, and the conclusion I drew throughout most of my school years, even while I was severely stressing out over a certain male classmate, was that I was not a homosexual. I just couldn’t be. I wasn’t anything like what they were telling me homosexuals were. Therefore I was not a homosexual.
They’re not teaching boys to be careful around strangers in that film. They’re teaching them to fear and loath homosexuals. They’re teaching the gay boys to fear and loath themselves. And they are taking from the gay boys, all the awe and wonder and joy of that first high school romance, and for many of us of my generation, the possibility of love altogether. What they took from us is incalculable, and unforgivable.
The usual suspects have filed suit in Michigan , to stop Michigan State University from offering health insurance to the partners of gay people.
LANSING — A conservative group sued Wednesday to stop Michigan State University from offering health insurance to the partners of gay workers and said the school is violating a 2004 amendment to the state constitution.
The American Family Association of Michigan filed the lawsuit in Ingham County Circuit Court and hopes to get a ruling setting a precedent that would block domestic-partner benefits at other state universities.
The purpose of the suit is to ensure that courts rule on the constitutionality of domestic-partner benefits at public universities, said Patrick Gillen, an attorney for the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, which is representing the association.
By providing same-sex benefits, MSU is "recognizing same-sex marriage in substance, if not by label," Gillen said.
Not to mention providing access to health care for a class of people the American Family Association would just as soon see dead. The bible says their blood will be upon them after all…
I’ve told this story before, but those of you who’ve heard it will just have to bear up. In the 1992 election when I was making volunteer calls for Clinton, Mary Matalin made a major gaffe she had to apologize for quite publicly. (Doesn’t matter what it was.) I was riding down in the elevator with a high level political consultant (who didn’t know me from Adam, of course) and I smugly mentioned that Matalin had really stepped in it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said, "she got it out there, didn’t she?"
Here’s another little pointer on wingnut gossip mongering and dirty politics. As you sling the shit with the biggest megaphone you can find, be sure to primly assert that you don’t believe a word of it and chastize those who are doing it on the victim’s behalf. It makes you look like a good guy even though your purpose is to spread the gossip far and wide.
In this case it doesn’t matter much because the "gossip" is irrelevant to normal people and would make no difference if it were true. This gossip is aimed solely at the wingnut doughboy losers who couldn’t manage to get laid at the Bunny Ranch with 5k in their pockets. Still, it’s nice of one of the leading voices in the blogosphere to spread it around, (while being above it all, of course.) It’s good practice for serious swift-boating.
Digby is referring to a post Instapundit (who is not a moderate libertarian-republican, but only plays one for effect) made concerning Markos, of Daily KOS who, running one of the biggest of the liberal-progressive blogs, now finds himself the target of the republican propaganda machine. One simply cannot challenge the establishment party line and expect to get away with it. Reynolds happliy plays his role, goosing a rumor that Markos is…wait for it…gay.
And as an aside, I see some blog-commenters are speculating that Kos is gay. Why that should matter, I don’t know, but I remember — back when the blogosphere was younger and people were nicer — commiserating with Kos over his wife’s miscarriage (my wife and I had several) and assuring him that it didn’t preclude successful pregnancies later on, which I believe his wife has since had. So try to keep things at something better than a seventh-grade level.
If it doesn’t matter, Glenn, why mention it? From the looks of it, the genial professor did so only to further cement his rep as a "gentleman" — the "civility" thing, you know? Why he had to use rumors about Kos’ sexuality and a rehashing of a miscarriage to do so is beyond this page’s comprehension.
Because he’s a gutter crawling Bush republican thug is why. What else about him did you need to know? Why else would speculation about his sexual orientation matter? Digby’s right…this is about pumping up the bigot base, and practice for some serious swift boating later on as election day draws near.
Via Pam’s House Blend, via Muskrat Hunt… Here’s what unleashing religious passions against a minority accomplishes, in case you missed hearing about the Holocaust, and were wondering…
Note the death threat side by side with the statement of religious belief. And we have an election coming up…don’t we? Time for another round of…this perhaps…?
Who on the republican side of the isle, wants to step up to the plate and take responsibility for the dead homosexuals later this year? Nobody, of course.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Barbie? A lesbian? Well, that’s the message on a T-shirt worn by a middle school student in Queens. And now the girl’s mother is suing the city of New York over what happened after her daughter showed up for class. Glen Thompson of affiliate station WPIX fills us in.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GLEN THOMPSON, WPIX CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): 14-year-old Nicky Young shows off the "Barbie is a lesbian" t-shirt that got her in hot water at Middle School 210 in Ozone Park, Queens. Nicky, who is openly gay, says the school’s principal also took offense at her gay pride beads.
NICKY YOUNG, MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT: I went to school with a t- shirt that said "Barbie is a lesbian," and they held me in a room for two hours and they said, it’s not appropriate to wear, I should take it off and I didn’t have any other clothing. So I told them, I’m not going to take it off.
THOMPSON: After being held in the principal’s office, Nicky’s mother had to come get her after she was suspended for refusing to take off the shirt.
YOUNG: Everybody should be treated equally, and I think that I was treated differently because of my sexual orientation, and I don’t think it was fair and what they did was kind of rude, and to me it was childish.
THOMPSON: Nicky says she was only goofing on Mattel’s widely popular Barbie doll and didn’t mean to offend anyone. Her lawsuit against the school system claims she had a right to wear the t-shirt. The Department of Education isn’t commenting.
DAN PEREZ, ATTORNEY: The First Amendment doesn’t stop at the school house door, and students have the right generally to wear a variety of clothing that contains social and political commentary, as well as engage in symbolic speech.
THOMPSON (on camera): Nicky’s lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount in monetary damages and an injunction preventing the school system from suspending her if she ever wears the t-shirt again. I’m Glen Thompson, for the WB11 News at 10.
(END VIDEOTAPE) PHILLIPS: School and city representatives have declined to comment on this, but Natalie Young’s attorney, Dan Perez, is talking, and in Washington, attorney Jack Burkman has agreed to look at this from the school district’s point of view. Gentlemen, thanks for being with me.
Good afternoon. Dan, let’s start with you. Mom — I’m looking at the charges here. Mom is saying that her daughter suffered emotional and psychological injury, but she seems very confident about being gay, coming out and saying that she’s gay and addressing all the cameras and the press.
PEREZ: She does. She is a very self-assured young lady. She came out when she was 12 years old. In fact, lots of people are comfortable with who they are from a sexual orientation standpoint far earlier than that. Lots of straight people come out and realize that they like girls if they’re a guy or they like boys that they’re a girl by the time they’re 12, so there’s nothing — there’s nothing about that that’s particularly remarkable.
PHILLIPS: Jack, what do you think? Does Dan have a case here?
JACK BURKMAN, ATTORNEY: No, he doesn’t and he knows it. It’s a entirely frivolous suit, Kyra. The thing with this, this law is well settled. There have been 70 or 80 cases over the years. The Supreme Court has ruled on it. All the circuits have ruled on it. You know, there’ve been cases with girls in the see-through t-shirts and the halter tops and the hair and the jewelry. Schools have fairly broad discretion to enforce the kind of values they want. If people don’t like that, the way you change that is to vote out the school directors. If you think gays are being discriminated against, vote out your school directors, vote out your congressman.
But look, schools from a family values perspective, that’s the legal — I think what the school district is doing is morally right. We shouldn’t have an atmosphere where gay values are encouraged in schools. I think it’s wrong. I think for too many years particularly up there in that area we’ve had a culture where there is a difference between, I don’t support discrimination against homosexuals, certainly not, but at the same time, schools should not create an atmosphere and allow an atmosphere to flourish where gay values will be encouraged.
PHILLIPS: So you’re saying family values — Jack, are you saying that family values means that being gay is wrong, it’s not good family values?
BURKMAN: It’s not that it’s being wrong. There’s a fine line between tolerating and encouraging. If you let this kind of behavior go, Kyra, what happens is more and more children — you know, for years in this country, let’s face it, the media has overstated the number of gays. You have a left-wing culture in schools that begins in grade school, goes to high school, goes to college, and children are told that being gay is OK and they’re almost pushed in that direction. And I think this is an example where a school district wants to put its foot down, and do the right thing, but again, you don’t have to take my word for it. If the public up there doesn’t like that, vote out those school directors. A lawsuit is not the way to handle this.
It’s getting so that a couple nice young girls can’t drive up to DC for the Pride parade without getting openly propositioned by Republican Strategists who give them their real names and business cards these days. Take, for example, the MySpace blog of one such lady, whose sordid tale is reprinted (as a warning to the well-endowed) below:
The initial proposition:
afterward, we got a snazzy hotel room at the mayflower downtown. on the way over there, this really hot business man in a pinstriped suit walked past me, said hello, and doubled back. he asked me my name and introduced himself (jack burkman, government relations strategies), asked where i went to school, etc, gave me his card, and asked me to call him. i later texted him and never could get rid of him again. he thought he talked to me on the phone several times, but he never did. i always made kat or kristin be me. he told kristin about how he really enjoyed my outfit (TITS GALORE) and that i was beautiful, etc. by the end of the night (5 am or so), he was offering to pay for our room and give us a thousand dollars if two of us would fuck him. oh, jack burkman. his card is my DC souvenir.
Wonkette has a photo of the card he gave them up, here. Nice guy. You can’t be an out and proud lesbian in school, but if you’ll give the man a good time he’ll slip you a k-note.
GOP Campaign Manager Guilty of Corruption of Minors
ABC News’ Andrew Katz and Fiore Mastroianni contributed to this report.
A man convicted of "corruption of minors" after being accused of having sex with two teenage girls is working as the campaign manager for a Republican candidate for Congress in Arizona, according to documents obtained by ABC News.
Steve Aiken, a former Quakertown, Pa. police officer and self-proclaimed reverend, was convicted of two counts of corruption of a minor stemming from his 1995 sexual relationships with two teenage girls. He served almost two-and-a-half months at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility.
Aiken is listed as campaign manager for Randy Graf, a Republican in a five-way primary for the Congressional seat in Arizona’s 8th district.
Aiken told ABC News he had been "falsely accused and convicted" of the two misdemeanor counts.
Aiken says the candidate, Graf, was fully aware of the conviction when he was hired as campaign manager.
"What he did was no more serious than providing a teenager with beer," Graf told ABC News. "I believe Steve when he says he was falsely accused."
The "corruption of minor" violations in Pennsylvania did not require Aiken to register as a sex offender.
Since his conviction, Aiken also has worked as a spokesperson for the Traditional Values Coalition, a Washington lobby group that represents over 43,000 churches. A spokesman for the Coalition would only say, "He is no longer with us."
The self-proclaimed reverend met the underage teens in Pennsylvania through YouthQuest, a Christian counseling agency.
According to testimony by the victim, reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Aiken "came into her room while she was asleep, undressed her and began to rub her breasts."
Aiken reportedly forced himself on the girl about 15 times in the course of four months, according to the Inquirer.
Aiken says the girls "made up the charges" because he had kicked them out of the YouthQuest program.
According to the Allentown Morning Call, at his sentencing hearing in June 1996, Aiken said, "Steve Aiken’s days of helping kids are over."
In addition to his political activities, Aiken also hosts a weekly radio program on KVOI in Tucson. Aiken’s website includes a "help wanted" page seeking high school or college students to work as volunteer interns on the radio program.
On the show he espouses American traditional values and the abolition of "hate crimes" punishments.
Values. Morals. And remember, same sex marriage is an attack on the family.
WASHINGTON — For nearly a decade, Allen Raymond stood at the top ranks of Republican Party power.
He served as chief of staff to a cochairman of the Republican National Committee, supervised Republican contests in mid-Atlantic states for the RNC, and was a top official in publisher Steve Forbes’s presidential campaign. He went on to earn $350,000 a year running a Republican policy group as well as a GOP phone-bank business.
But most recently, Raymond has been in prison. And for that, he blames himself, but also says he was part of a Republican political culture that emphasizes hardball tactics and polarizing voters.
Raymond, 39, has just finished serving a three-month sentence for jamming Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire during the 2002 US Senate race. The incident led to one of the biggest political scandals in the state’s history, the convictions of Raymond and two top Republican officials, and a Democratic lawsuit that seeks to determine whether the White House played any role. The race was won by Senator John E. Sununu , the Republican.
In his first interview about the case, Raymond said he doesn’t know anything that would suggest the White House was involved in the plan to tie up Democrats’ phone lines and thereby block their get-out-the-vote effort. But he said the scheme reflects a broader culture in the Republican Party that is focused on dividing voters to win primaries and general elections. He said examples range from some recent efforts to use border-security concerns to foster anger toward immigrants to his own role arranging phone calls designed to polarize primary voters over abortion in a 2002 New Jersey Senate race.
"A lot of people look at politics and see it as the guy who wins is the guy who unifies the most people," he said. "I would disagree. I would say the candidate who wins is the candidate who polarizes the right bloc of voters. You always want to polarize somebody."
I’m a uniter, not a divider… Remember that? You know how you can tell that George Bush is lying? His mouth is moving. America is today so bitterly divided against itself, because the republicans want it that way. It wins them elections. Garrison Keillor was right when he said that they are republicans first, and Americans second. They want power, and they don’t care what they have to destroy in order to get and keep it. Our constitution …
Blackwell’s dual roles draw fire
Candidate is also top elections official
Columbus — Secretary of State Ken Blackwell’s dual roles as Republican nominee for governor and the man responsible for ensuring a fair and impartial election in November have subjected him to an avalanche of criticism this week.
Pilloried by voter-registration groups for drafting new rules that they say are intended to suppress the poor-, black- and Democratic vote, Blackwell also is being threatened with a lawsuit for Ohio’s failure to enforce the national "motor voter" law.
Viewing the battle from afar, the New York Times weighed in Wednesday with a lead edit orial titled "Block the Vote, Ohio Remix." The Times labeled Ohio’s election system "corrupt" and called for Blackwell to relinquish all duties pertaining to this fall’s election.
That’s not going to happen, Carlo LoParo, Blackwell’s spokesman, angrily replied. He ripped the Times and said Democrats and left-leaning voter-registration groups were hypocrites…
…Blackwell’s latest ploy is couched in an extremely narrow interpretation of House Bill 3, a recently passed election reform measure. The bill, championed by Republican legislative leaders and signed into law by Gov. Bob Taft, purportedly is designed to eradicate vote fraud.
But Blackwell is using the new law to draft highly restrictive voter registration rules that tightly govern the work of groups engaged in mass registration drives. Registrars could be subject to felony prosecution for violations.
Most disturbing to many election activists is Blackwell’s insistence that completed registration forms be returned by the registrar directly to a county board of elections – and not to any of the legitimate organizations, like public libraries and the League of Women Voters, that regularly encourage voter registration.
Blackwell must stop acting in ways that leave the clear impression that he is trying to drive down voter turnout in the fall. Otherwise, he runs the risk of this newspaper and others joining the growing chorus of those calling for him either to step aside as secretary of state, or to hand over election-related duties to someone who will act in the best interest of all Ohioans.
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush’s victory as nut cases in ”tinfoil hats,” while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ”conspiracy theories,”(1) and The New York Times declared that ”there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.”(2)
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote(4) — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America’s voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ”We didn’t have one election for president in 2004,” says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ”We didn’t have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.”
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio’s Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)
”It was terrible,” says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ”People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct — it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I’m terribly disheartened.”
You’re terribly disheartened are you? Well that’s why the republicans are getting away with it. You should be livid. Until democrats start acting like they give a good goddamn that this democracy survives long enough to pass down the promise of liberty and justice for all to the next generation, until they get blood in the face angry enough to fight the republicans for the fate of America, the republicans will do what they damn well please whether its legal or not, because they can, and we will loose our democracy. Blackwell fixed Ohio for Bush, why shouldn’t he fix it for himself too? Who says he can’t?
Fred Clark tells us that years ago, back in the stone age gamer days of Pong and Space Invaders, there was a text only version of the Left Behind game you could play on your Commodore 128. Kinda like Zork…but with more sacred violence.
(I think Fred’s being a bit sarcastic and maybe even a tad bitter here…)
You are in Manhattan. There is an infidel here.
>Convert infidel.
The infidel does not want to be converted.
>Convert infidel.
The infidel does not want to be converted.
>Convert infidel.
The infidel does not want to be converted.
>Witness to infidel.
The infidel does not want to be converted.
>tell infidel about Hell
Such language!
You are in Manhattan. There is an infidel here.
>tell infidel about eternal suffering and gnashing of teeth in the lake of fire
The infidel does not want to be converted.
>shoot infidel
You raise the BFG-9000 and fire, raining divine judgment on the infidel in a righteous hail of molten lead. The infidel falls over, dead.
Score: 105 out of 500.
You are in Manhattan. There is a dead infidel here.
>examine dead infidel.
On the body of the dead infidel you find more change for the pay phone.
>get change.
You are in Manhattan. There is a dead infidel here.
>make phone call
You have to find a phone first!
You are in Manhattan. There is a dead infidel here.
>n
Well that beats Zork any day. On a more serious note, one of Fred’s commenters urges us to check out the Left Behind Games FAQ. You should, but only if you can handle the occasional peek down into the Pit…
Does anyone get killed in the game?
People do perish in our game just like some do in the book series. This is a real strategy game, so the gamer controls his forces just like you do in chess game.
Why does this game have to contain violence at all? Why is it necessary for a fun and successful game?
Violence is not required to make a fun game. However, it is required to make a game about the end of the world in the Left Behind book series. We have taken great care to make certain that there are real consequences for poor gamer behavior, unlike most games in the market. For instance, unnecessary killing will result in lower Spirit points which are essential to winning.
I especially liked this one:
What distinctive features differentiate LEFT BEHIND: Eternal Forces from other RTS games on the market?
Parents need a substitute for the degrading moral values of games like ’Grand Theft Auto.’ We’re giving the industry an RTS game that is fun to play as well incorporating inspirational content.
And let’s face it, there’s very little in this life more inspirational and conducive to a wholesome moral childhood then making the streets run red with the blood of the infidel for spirit points. I hear promotional copies have been handed out in a few megachurches. You can imagine parents tucking them alongside their bibles in their laps, reading the cover blubs on the ride home and after playing a few rounds with the kids, perhaps, walking calmly to the bathroom, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, peering in, and asking the face on the other side what the hell they’ve let themselves become.
Exgays huddled in the massive ghettos of Anytown, USA had better beware. The trains are rolling in. The furnaces have been tested and the ex-ex-gay, –XXtroopers– have their marching orders via the supreme commander of anti-exgay forces in America, Herr Wayne Besen.
…and so on and so forth. D.L.’s a tad pissed that Wayne has stepped up to the plate and created Truth Wins Out, to counter Love Won Out’s lies with some hard facts about the damage conversion therapy causes, and the political motivations of the leaders of the ex-gay movement. With Truth Wins Out we’ll finally have an organization dedicated 100 percent to confronting ex-gay groups and their between the lines political message, that gay people don’t need rights, because gay people either don’t, or should not exist in the first place. This is a good thing, and something the religious right cannot be happy about. They’ve had a virtual free pass to lie through their teeth in the debate about conversion therapy in the popular media for decades now. It seems now that those days are over, and if painting little Hitler mustaches on pictures of Wayne Besen, who is Jewish, is the best that louts like D.L. can do, then they have to know at some level that they’ve lost the fight.
The problem I’ve always had with Goodwin’s Law is that it stifles discussion about fascism in an age when fascism is on the rise. But D.L. makes a good case for it all the same, and you almost feel sorry for him. Reading his post was like watching a raving street lunatic walking around buck naked and babbling to everyone about the aliens in his microwave oven. You just want to scream for someone, anyone, to please give the goddamned nutcase a bathrobe and a ride to his shrink. Seriously. Just because everyone can expose themselves to the whole goddamned world in their blogs, that doesn’t mean everyone should.
This is good:
Wayne Besen’s Final solution (WBFS) Truth Wins Out (TWO) is for all accounts exgaywatch with shark teeth. Along with a 10 point plan to expose, root out and if possible imprison former homosexuals and supporters, Besen seems to have finally found the trigger to his uncontrollable desire to rid the world of exgays.
…root out and if possible imprison former homosexuals and supporters… That’s really rich, coming from someone allied with a political movement whose leadership has repeatedly called for the reestablishment of sodomy laws. But what really makes D.L.’s histrionics about trains and furnaces and prisons so pathetic, is that the bedrock theory of the ex-gay movement is that homosexuals should not exist. The very fact of our existence is proof that there is something wrong within us, and something wrong with the society we live in. If there’s any eliminationist thinking going on around here, it’s being preached from the pulpits of the religious right. And as for final solutions, the religious right already has theirs. They call it the Second Coming:
Addressing the group from the very spot where the conflict is to take place, Frazier turns to Revelation 19, which describes Christ going into battle. "It thrills my heart every time that I read these words," he says, then begins to read: "’And I saw heaven standing open.… And there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire.’"
Frazier pauses to explain the text. "This doesn’t sound like compassionate Jesus," he says. "This doesn’t sound like the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. This is the Warrior King. He judges and makes war."
Frazier returns to the Scripture: "He has a name written on him that no one but he himself knows. He is dressed in a robe that is dipped in blood and his name is the word of God."
This is the moment the Rapturists eagerly await. The magnitude of death and destruction will make the Holocaust seem trivial. The battle finally begins.
Those who remain on earth are the unsaved, the left behind—many of them dissolute followers of the Antichrist, who is massing his army against Christ. Accompanying Christ into battle are the armies of heaven, riding white horses and dressed in fine linen.
"This is all of us," Frazier says.
Frazier points out that Christ does not need high-tech weaponry for this conflict. "’Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword,’ not a bunch of missiles and rockets," he says.
Once Christ joins the battle, both the Antichrist and the False Prophet are quickly captured and cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. Huge numbers of the Antichrist’s supporters are slain.
Meanwhile, an angel exhorts Christ, "Thrust in thy sickle, and reap." And so, Christ, sickle in hand, gathers "the vine of the earth."
Then, according to Revelation, "the earth was reaped." These four simple words signify the end of the world as we know it.
Grapes that are "fully ripe"—billions of people who have reached maturity but still reject the grace of God—are now cast "into the great winepress of the wrath of God." Here we have the origin of the phrase "the grapes of wrath." In an extraordinarily merciless and brutal act of justice, Christ crushes the so-called grapes of wrath, killing them. Then, Revelation says, blood flows out "of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs."
With its highly figurative language, Revelation is subject to profoundly differing interpretations. Nevertheless, LaHaye’s followers insist on its literal truth and accuracy, and they have gone to great lengths to calculate exactly what this passage of Revelation means.
As we walk down from the top of the hill of Megiddo, one of them looks out over the Jezreel Valley. "Can you imagine this entire valley filled with blood?" he asks. "That would be a 200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We’ve done the math. That’s the blood of as many as two and a half billion people."
We’ve done the math… How much raw, bleeding seething hatred do you have to have in your heart for your neighbors, when you can raptly, joyfully, eagerly imagine literally billions of them being crushed to death by Jesus Christ in a massive wine press, and calculate exactly how many of them have to go through it in order for their blood to fill the Jezreel valley to a depth of four and a half feet, the height of a horse’s bridle?
Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a military mission — to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state – especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.
Left Behind Games" has stated, on its website its hopes of getting a "suitable for ages 13 and up" or "suitable for ages 6 and up" rating for "Left Behind: Eternal Forces". Here’s a screen capture:
This game immerses children in present-day New York City — 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian.
Let it be said the game makers also give you the option of fighting on the side of the Antichrist, when you’ve had your fill of slaying heathens. By that time you could forgive a kid if they’re wondering if there’s any goddamned difference between being on the side of Christ the Savior, verses Satan the Despiser. Well…there is the fine linen.
Love God with all your heart, and love thy neighbor as thyself…and pass the ammunition! It’s not Wayne Besen who D.L. Foster and his kind have put the Hitler mustache on. It’s Jesus Christ.
BLACK JACK, Mo. – The city council has rejected a measure allowing unmarried couples with multiple children to live together, and the mayor said those who fall into that category could soon face eviction.
Olivia Shelltrack and Fondrey Loving were denied an occupancy permit after moving into a home in this St. Louis suburb because they have three children and are not married.
The town’s planning and zoning commission proposed a change in the law, but the measure was rejected Tuesday by the city council in a 5-3 vote.
"I’m just shocked," Shelltrack said. "I really thought this would all be over, and we could go on with our lives."
Olivia Shelltrack finally has her dream home. Her family moved into the five-bedroom, three-bath frame house in Black Jack last month. But now she fears she and her fiance face uprooting their children because of a city ordinance that says her household fails to meet Black Jack’s definition of a family.
Shelltrack and Fondray Loving, her boyfriend of 13 years, were denied an occupancy permit because of an ordinance forbidding three or more individuals from living together if they are not related by "blood, marriage or adoption." The couple have three children, ages 8, 10 and 15, although Loving is not the biological father of the oldest child.
…
The couple appealed the denial of an occupancy permit last week at a hearing before Black Jack’s board of adjustment. Shelltrack said board members asked her and Loving personal questions about their relationship, their children and their previous home in Minneapolis, from where they moved, for nearly an hour. Then the board denied the couple’s appeal. The case now goes before Black Jack’s municipal court.
At the hearing, Shelltrack said, one board of adjustment member, Norma Mitchell, even pointed at her and asked, "I don’t understand why you as a woman didn’t exercise your right to marry that man," before being hushed by another board member.
Mitchell refused to comment. She referred all calls to Black Jack Mayor Norman McCourt, who defended the ordinance.
"This is about the definition of family, not if they’re married or not," he said. "It’s what cities do to maintain the housing and to hold down overcrowding."
"This is about the definition of family, not if they’re married or not…" Gotta love it. From the book of Doubletalk, chapter 4 verse 12: Thou shalt be married, in order to be a family…however whether or not you are married has nothing to do with it… We thought you were speaking in tongues there for a while brother McCourt, but it turns out you were just talking out of both sides of your mouth.
This is what the religious right wants to turn America into…a place where they can dictate not only who is and is not a family, but where we can and cannot live, and what property we can and cannot hold, based on how well our lives conform to their religious dictates. If you think it’s only same sex couples, only same sex households, that are at risk of being literally thrown off their own property for religious crimes in the United States, think again. You’re on their plate too, your children, your home, your life, it all belongs to them as far as they are concerned. And you can bet your ass that there are people in that town who are nodding their heads approvingly right now, right this instant, and thinking that if the fornicators are arrested, the city can give their kids away to a decent, properly married couple…
Shelltrack, 31, could appeal Black Jack’s decision to the St. Louis County Circuit Court, but she said that would involve legal fees that she and Loving can’t afford because of the money they poured into buying their home.
She said, however, the couple has filed a complaint with the U.S. Housing and Urban Department.
That would be the Bush Housing and Urban Department. Try not to laugh too hard. And if that irony wasn’t enough, from the photos I’m seeing of the couple, it appears that Shelltrack is white and her boyfriend, Fondrey Loving, is black. Loving verses Missouri anyone? And you thought times had changed…
There are two subtle misconceptions about the rise of the neo fascist right in America. The first is that it amounts to a new and unholy alliance between big business and the religious right. The second is that the religious right has largely been responsible for giving that rise its energy. Both these beliefs have somewhat more then a germ of truth to them. But there is a power, even behind the religious right, and it isn’t exactly a godly one. The religious right can generate huge quantities of fire and brimstone, smoke and noise. But the fuel for the fire is money, and the major organizations of the religious right can barely meet their own expenses, much less fund a vast network of think tanks, publications, and grassroots political action committees that cannot support themselves. Big American corporations routinely give to political parties and bribe politicians and communities in various ways, but it does not itself fund the vast right wing infrastructure that has come to dominate, and profoundly distort, American politics.
The dragging of the American political dialogue into the gutter has been largely done by a small circle of right wing billionaires. Working quietly behind the scenes, their wealth funds an astonishing array of institutions and groups, from the very large to the very small. Through their foundations, and their occasional direct contributions, they have injected their wealth, and their political viewpoints, into everything from the major right wing propaganda mills masquerading as think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, to newspapers and magazines, to religious and conservative campus clubs and newspapers, and small ersatz community grassroots organizations, many of which seem to suddenly pop up out of nowhere whenever local governments begin enacting progressive legislation, particularly regarding gay rights.
This small circle of billionaires have utterly poisoned the political dialogue in America. But their ambitions are not confined to this nation alone. Their poison now works its way into the veins of many nations abroad as well. Canada. South America. Africa.
And for decades now, subtly and at times in complete secrecy, they have been distorting the dialogue of the mainstream protestant denominations. Through funding of small and otherwise obscure right wing clerical groups, they actively seek to establish their beliefs regarding faith and religion, as they have sought to establish their political beliefs, through the shear power of their billions.
Much of which, unsurprisingly when you think about it, is inherited wealth.
In the current issue of the newsletter of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington D.C., Jim Naughton has begun a multi-part series tracking this money, and its influence, in the Anglican church. I urge everyone to read it, even if you are not an Anglican, because it looks to shine a much needed light on how this group of billionaires not only operates, but who they are, and where they are determined to take this world. What they are doing to this one denomination, which was known for its religious and political moderation until they started injecting their money into it, they are doing to other churches as well. And what they are doing to religious life in America, is pretty much what they have done to our political life.
When the General Convention of the Episcopal Church meets next month in Columbus, Ohio, a small network of theologically conservative organizations will be on hand to warn deputies that they must repent of their liberal attitudes on homosexuality or face serious consequences. The groups represent a small minority of church members, but relationships with wealthy American donors and powerful African bishops have made them key players in the fight for the future of the Anglican Communion.
Millions of dollars contributed by a handful of donors have allowed a small network of theologically conservative individuals and organizations to mount a global campaign that has destabilized the Episcopal Church and may break up the Anglican Communion.
The donors include five secular foundations that have contributed heavily to politically conservative advocacy groups, publications and think tanks, and one individual, savings and loan heir Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., who has given millions of dollars to conservative causes and candidates.
Contributions from Ahmanson and the Bradley, Coors, Olin, Scaife and Smith-Richardson family foundations have frequently accounted for more than half of the operating budgets of the American Anglican Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, according to an examination of forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service and an analysis of statements made by both donors and recipients.
(Emphisis mine). Remember these names if you have not heard of them before. These same names keep popping up over and over again, whenever anyone tries to track where the money is coming from, that funds various right wing groups. Scafie. Olin. Bradley. Coors. Smith-Richardson.
Since the 1970s, charitable foundations established by families with politically conservative views have donated billions of dollars to what the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, has called "an extraordinary effort to reshape politics and public policy priorities at the national, state and local level."
Five foundations are of special note for the magnitude of their donations to political and religious organizations. They are: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; the Adolph Coors Foundation; the John M. Olin Foundation, which ceased operations last year; the Smith-Richardson Trust and the Scaife Family Foundations. Much of the foundations’ largesse supports institutions and individuals active in public policy, including think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute and individuals such as William Bennett, Charles Murray ( The Bell Curve ) and Dinesh D’Souza ( The End of Racism ).
However, the foundations’ activities also extend into the nation’s churches-particularly its mainline Protestant churches. The foundations have provided millions of dollars to the IRD 2 which, in a fundraising appeal in 2000, said it sought to "restructure the permanent governing structure" of "theologically flawed" Protestant denominations and to "discredit and diminish the Religious Left’s influence."
The IRD was established in 1981 by neo-conservative intellectuals hoping to counter the liberal public policy agendas of the National and World Councils of Christian Churches.
How they operate…
In one well-publicized instance in the 1980s, Diane Knippers, then an IRD staff member, and later its president, distributed information critical of the Nicaraguan Council of Protestant Churches (Consejo de Iglesias Pro-Alianza Denominacional, or CEPAD), a disaster relief organization founded after the devastating 1972 earthquake and sponsored by the mainline American Baptist Church.
CEPAD ran a network of medical clinics for the poor, as well as a successful literacy campaign, according to Fred Clark, an editor of Prism , the magazine of Evangelicals for Social Action. "That literacy work had won the admiration and support of Nicaragua ‘s president, Daniel Ortega, and his Sandinista regime. Ortega’s praise of CEPAD gave Knippers what she saw as an opening," Clark wrote in a 2003 account.
Although the evangelical churches did not support the Sandinistas, Clark wrote, "Knippers portrayed CEPAD — and therefore the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society — as ‘guilty’ by association. She wrote of CEPAD as a communist front, part of a supposed Soviet beachhead in Nicaragua . No one in this country paid much attention, but the contras did. CEPAD’s clinics became targets for their paramilitary terrorists."
The ensuing controversy was followed closely by mainstream evangelical publications such as Christianity Today . In the end, Clark writes, "CEPAD was vindicated and IRD suffered a devastating embarrassment. They were, rightly, perceived as an unreliable source of information – closed-minded ideologues who were willing to attack others on the basis of irresponsibly flimsy evidence."
Still, Knippers, who died in 2005, and the institute remained a favorite of conservative foundations. Since 1985, the IRD has received 72 grants worth more than $4,679,000 from the Bradley, Coors, Olin, Scaife and Smith-Richardson family foundations.
Ahmanson…
Ahmanson also helps sustain organizations in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that support removing the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada from the Anglican Communion unless they change their policies regarding same-sex relationships.
The full extent of his contributions cannot be determined because most are made through his private foundation, Fieldstead and Company, whose records are not open to public scrutiny. And neither the AAC nor the IRD discloses the names of its most significant contributors or the amounts of their donations.
As a result, Anglicans have no full accounting of how much money is being spent, and for what purposes, in the struggle for control of their Communion.
Naughton devotes most of the rest of his first part to Ahmanson. That’s a good start. You need to pay particular attention to Ahmanson…
Previously, Ahmanson was a disciple of the Rev. Rousas John Rushdoony, the father of Christian Reconstructionism. Rushdoony died in 2001 with the Ahmansons at his bedside. He advocated basing the American legal system on biblical laws, including stoning adulterers and homosexuals.
Unlike most mainstream protestant churches in America, Christian Reconstuctionists believe that the second coming of Christ won’t happen until After Christ’s kingdom has been established on the earth. They regard it as their duty to God to establish biblical fundamentalist theocracy around the world, so the second coming can happen. Think the Taliban, but with America’s military might and nuclear arsenal. The believe that non-believers can have no civil rights, cannot serve in government or the military, and must be ritually put to death if they violate biblical law…
Ahmanson, who suffers from Tourrette’s syndrome, rarely grants interviews with the media, but he and his wife cooperated with the Register on a five-part profile that appeared in August 2004."I think what upsets people is that Rushdoony seemed to think–and I’m not sure about this–that a godly society would stone people for the same thing that people in ancient Israel were stoned," Ahmanson was quoted as saying. "I no longer consider that essential."
"It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things," he added. "But I don’t think it’s at all a necessity."
Perhaps he’d also find it "a little hard to say" if it was inherently immoral to kill people running medical clinics, and teaching the poor to read in South America too.
This is where the money is coming from, to fund the destabilization of the Anglican church. Be certain that this same money is also actively funding right wing theocrats in every American denomination today. Never mind the Jerry Falwells and the Pat Robertsons of the pulpits…this is why religious life in America has become smaller, meaner, more venomous then ever. It is also why America and the American dream of liberty and justice for all is more in danger now, then it has ever been. The money that destabilizes the Anglican church, is also actively working to destabilize America.
Ahmanson emerged as a political force in his home state of California in the early 1990s. Research conducted for The Los Angeles Times found that he and his wife had contributed $3.9 million to Republican candidates in state and local races and $82,750 in federal races between 1991 and 1995. They also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to ballot initiatives that banned gay marriage and affirmative action.Campaign finance records indicate that the couple continues to contribute heavily to Republican candidates nationwide.
Ahmanson is a member of the secretive Council for National Policy, an elite group of politically conservative national leaders who meet several times a year to coordinate their efforts on a common agenda. According to a New York Times report, the dates and locations of the group’s meetings are kept secret, as is its membership. Participants in the group’s discussions promise not to reveal their content. Members in recent years have included Gary Bauer, Tom DeLay, James Dobson, Bob Jones, III, of Bob Jones University, Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series, Grover Norquist, Oliver North, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly.
Ahmanson also supports several think tanks. He was a major benefactor and former board member of Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation. He also contributes heavily to the Discovery Institute, the intellectual flagship of the Intelligent Design movement, and the George C. Marshall Institute, which disputes research indicating that human activity contributes to global warming.
One more thing about Ahmanson you need to know…
Increasingly, investigative writers seeking an explanation have looked to Diebold’s history for clues. The electronic voting industry is dominated by only a few corporations – Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Sequoia. Diebold and ES&S combined count an estimated 80% of U.S. black box electronic votes.
In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S’s originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS)…
…
The Ahmanson family sold their shares in American Information Systems to the McCarthy Group and the World Herald Company, Inc. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel disclosed in public documents that he was the Chairman of American Information Systems and claimed between a $1 to 5 million investment in the McCarthy Group. In 1997, American Information Systems purchased Business Records Corp. (BRC), formerly Texas-based election company Cronus Industries, to become ES&S. One of the BRC owners was Carolyn Hunt of the right-wing Hunt oil family, which supplied much of the original money for the Council on National Policy.
In 1996, Hagel became the first elected Republican Nebraska senator in 24 years when he did surprisingly well in an election where the votes were verified by the company he served as chairman and maintained a financial investment. In both the 1996 and 2002 elections, Hagel’s ES&S counted an estimated 80% of his winning votes. Due to the contracting out of services, confidentiality agreements between the State of Nebraska and the company kept this matter out of the public eye. Hagel’s first election victory was described as a “stunning upset” by one Nebraska newspaper.
Once again…You Must Read Jim Naughton’s article. Go. As he posts the rest of his series I will link to it. It is not only his church, but this nation, that desperately needs this kind of reporting about the activities of these billionaires, and how many sock puppets they own, because those sock puppets are everywhere.
Over the past three decades, conservatives have painstakingly cultivated the public persona of an aggrieved outsider class, bereft of the money and media influence they claim liberals enjoy. Their well-rehearsed routine consists of the repetition of a series of catchphrases designed to snare votes by using wedge social issues to create class divisions, while their own campaigns are funded by a class of wealthy, corporate donors who keep their think tanks flush with lucre. But this bait and switch is hardly a secret, and the donor class continues to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at conservative think tanks in order to shore up the right wing’s advantage in both organization and message discipline. Since the early 1970s, countless conservative foundations have sprung up to quietly influence American public policy by identifying, training, and churning out conservative journalists, thinkers, and pundits – many of whom now hold positions of power in the media.
Remember these names: Scafie. Olin. Bradley. Coors. Smith-Richardson. Carthage. Koch. Lambe. Earhart. DeVos. Ahmanson. By way of a huge array of foundations and front organizations, it is their money that has turned America from a land of freedom and promise, into the land of George Bush republicans and religious right hate mongers. That money is also working very diligently, to turn the Christ who said "Love thy neighbor" into one who says "Kill the stranger, because might makes right."
For the past several years, ever since the landmark Boy Scouts of America v Dale case, I thought I had staked out a solid position: As reprehensible as I found the Boy Scouts’ discrimination against gays and atheists, I don’t cherry-pick the First Amendment. I think that freedom of association is generally a good thing, because it means the assholes of the world will usually cordon themselves off where they won’t bother the rest of us.
But then came last night’s season premiere of Showtime’s outstanding series "Bullshit!"
Penn and the silent though emotive Teller laid bare the tangled relationship between the Boy Scouts and government, relying on an almost incalculable amount of public funds and accommodations to carry out Scouting activities.
See…this is the problem I’ve had with them when the case of James Dale came up. You’d have had to be living in a cave not to know how much money the BSA sucks from the public teat for their own purposes. Their annual jamboree, held with pentagon help and funding, costs the U.S. Taxpayer from what I’ve heard something between seven and eight million dollars every year. That’s just the jamboree. Atheists pay a portion to fund that thing. So do gay and lesbian Americans, and the parents of gay and lesbian kids. And without even they tiniest compunction or shred of shame, the BSA cheerfully takes that money and puts it into its pocket.
As an aside, a few years back when I worked in the Senate, I played a bit part in helping to turn back legislative threats to the Scouts’ dependence on government. Even though I was accurately representing the position of my boss, I felt I could do so in good faith, based on my own experience in the Boy Scouts dating back to the early 1980s. But as "Bullshit!" points out, the BSA was hijacked by the Mormon Church in the mid-’80s, and today I’m sickened that I didn’t know the full story before now.
You may have heard that Mormons have this reputation for being thrifty self sufficient hard working people. That’s certainly the reputation I grew up hearing. So either it wasn’t true all along or something’s changed since then, because now it seems as though self sufficiency is more like bigoted insularity, and thrift is not spending your own money so long as you can spend other people’s money.
The bottom line is, you cannot have private membership standards that exclude a good swath of the public while continuing to suck off the public teat…
Just so. My feelings at the time of Dale were that that BSA had worked so diligently for so long to make itself into a national institution, and now that it had this special place in the law and in public funding, for it to suddenly claim it was a private religion based club when it suited its purposes to do so was such transparent hypocrisy it deserved to be thrown out of court. They wanted that special place over all other youth organizations in American culture, that Norman Rockwell spot in American life. Now they needed to accept that with that came an obligation to actually serve all American youth…not just the chosen few.
That was the political issue as far as I was concerned. But there was a moral one too, which made me furious. The Boy Scouts were telling certain kids that they were lesser beings, destined to live immoral squalid lives simply as a matter of their religious beliefs, or their sexual orientation. I don’t care what your religious beliefs are, to beat up on a kid’s deepest sense of themselves, their relationship to their creator, their emerging sexuality, is obscene. It is a crime against humanity to take hope away from a child…to teach them that it’s pointless for them to reach higher, to strive for the best within themselves, to teach them that in fact they have no best within, only squalor they will never escape from. You can argue that youth groups deserve some degree of public support, but only to the extent that they actually nurture America’s children. An organization that takes some of America’s children and shoves their faces into the mud and then tells them that’s all they deserve in life is beyond contempt. After all the BSA had strived to become to America’s children, somebody needed to hold them to their own damn standards.
But…no, this is not the America it once was. The case came down against Dale and I was furious. Okay…fine…they want to be a private club…let them exist as one…on their own dime from now on. But judging from the religious right, and the ferocity by which they’ve fought to keep the BSA sucking at the public teat, you’d think hypocrits were Christ’s favorite kind of people.
Man…I wish I’d caught that premiere of Bullshit. Over at Naked Writing, Jody Wheeler says they’ve signed on for two more seasons of it, but in the process of doing their shows they’ve managed to piss off just about every executive at Showtime so more then five aren’t likely. Fine. I was looking to see if any of the big cable movie channels were going to be running Brokeback and I saw Showtime was running Crash, so they’ve pissed me off. Two more years of Bullshit is just about enough reason to keep subscribing despite that. But barely.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
