The silence from the ticking-time-bomb crowd

Though I appreciate Frank Schaeffer's boldness and credibility, I generally agree with Nat that his "You know who was a real asshole? My dad and his stupid evangelical friends. Come read my latest HuffPost rant about it!" routine is wearing thin. (This post had its excesses but was powerful and much-needed; this one's mostly just over the top.)

So I could take or leave this Rachel Maddow interview with Schaeffer. But the clip's worth watching for Maddow's intro, when she briefly raises the question of whether Scott Roeder, who has volunteered that he has information about future violent attacks against abortion providers, is pretty much a textbook example of who, if anyone, should be tortured by the authorities. (Leaving aside the definition of "terrorist," it's certainly worth noting that Roeder, unlike most of the people at Gitmo, is clearly guilty.) Here's Maddow:

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She's not the only one to bring this up. Zachary Roth asked Dick Cheney, John Cornyn, Charles Krauthammer, and Rich Lowry whether they'd support using enhanced interrogation techniques on Roeder. Three days later, he's still waiting for a reply.

Those anything-goes Episcopalians!

It looks as though Kevin Thew Forrester, the controversial and liberal bishop-elect of the Northern Michigan diocese of TEC, doesn't have the votes for consecration.

"But wait," you say. "I thought the Episcopal church leadership was just a bastion of unmoored heterodoxy, that virtually all the people who actually believe anything left already and live in the Rwandan town of Wheaton or the Nigerian town of Fairfax."

Well, not quite. Surprise!

CT ran a pretty good news story by Frank Lockwood, though they also couldn't resist headlining it "Too Unorthodox Even for the Episcopal Church?" That's right: the headline perpetuates the very stereotype that the story itself resists.

E.E. Evans has a good take.

Draft from HELP

Sen. Kennedy and the HELP Committee Democrats have released draft health care legislation (pdfs).

Jonathan Cohn has a quick take.

The phrase "open carry celebration" doesn't belong in the same sentence as the word "church"

And that's granting that the words "open carry celebration" belong together in the first place, which requires all the see-both-sides energy I can muster today. Beyond that, words fail me.

They don't, however, fail Nat.

Civil marriage and the church

I've long been interested in Rebecca Voelkel's point (pdf) that the way to win hearts and minds on the same-sex (civil) marriage question is to include religious people in the effort. (She said this to me in an interview a couple years ago.) Gene Robinson agrees.

It's a provocative observation, among other reasons because it troubles the basic assumption shared by many, including me--namely, that the reason the same-sex marriage conversation is so difficult in this country, or at least one of the main ones, is that marriage is apparently immune to the separation of church and state in an unparalleled way.

Still, I'm with Mark on this one: it seems pretty clear that the key to winning civil marriage equality for same-sex couples is not to undo church people's objections so much as to take seriously the ones that deserve to be taken seriously: the ones about religious freedom.

Or rather, SOME of the ones about religious freedom. Others are basically crap. See this great Century article by Thomas Berg for more on that distinction, and on how to craft better policy that protects EVERYBODY's rights.

Obama in Cairo

Mark Juergensmeyer gets it right: It's amazing, and sobering, that all Obama has to do to make a deep impression in Cairo is speak respectfully and graciously to his audience. To which I'll add only that the contrast is not just with BO's immediate predecessor but with most of presidential history. Obama's disappointed me in any number of ways, both during and before his presidency, but he's doing a fine job in communicating to the rest of the world that America does, in fact, care that they exist, and not just for the exciting business opportunities.

And in the Times: a great example of what a large, internationally situated news company can do that you or I or our three-person-start-up-on-a-shoestring-budget simply can't (notice I didn't say that PAPER is a necessary part of the equation): a short article that gives us feedback to the speech from all over the region. 1400 words from 11+ journalists makes for an incredibly informative five minutes of your time.

Some Tiller links

Per usual, William Saletan asks the hard questions: if abortion is murder, why is killing one of the country's handful of providers of late-term abortion not a perfectly reasonable act? His good point: few anti-abortion folks actually behave as though abortion were equivalent to murder, whatever their rhetoric.

What he skips, however, is the fact that most in the anti-abortion movement have deep respect for the rule of law, and many--particularly of the Catholic persuasion--are also invested in nonviolent means of social change. The condemnation Tiller's murder has received from the mainstream anti-abortion folks reflects political damage control, of course, but it also has the advantage of representing the actual opinions of the vast majority of people who oppose abortion. And opposing both abortion and vigilantism is hardly an inconsistent position.

Meanwhile, Van Helsing calls the murder a "big propaganda coup for the left," without providing any links as evidence. (And then this nugget: "From the point of view of our progressive ruling class, only innocent life is expendable." Interesting phrase, "innocent life." In fact, the same qualifier appears in the boilerplate language from some of the anti-abortion groups. Wonder why.)

Which is not to say that some responses from the left haven't been over the top, totalizing of abortion opponents, etc. Here's a good example. But I've been relieved to see how good of a job most of the left-leaning folks I read have done at maintaining that this is about violent, lawless extremism, and not about the anti-abortion movement itself. And the Planned Parenthood statement is exactly what it should be, given who they are--it's entirely about the man who was murdered and the work he did, which they of course support, and not about what this event says about their political opponents.

Finally, what would the aftermath of an event like this be without a strongly worded piece by Frank Schaeffer?

U of C's Wheaton-style incident

Back at Wheaton, there used to be a "forum wall" at the post office, on which people engaged in debate, sometimes informative and sometimes less so. Every spring like clockwork, some freshman guy would post a note addressed generally to women in the campus community, asking them--sometimes indignantly, other times apologetically--to dress modestly so as not to lead the men, for whom the author claimed to speak generally, into temptation. Sometimes he would speak in quite degrading terms of the women in question. Other times the whole thing was couched in a softer, pleading, come-on-sisters-in-Christ-enough-with-the-sundresses-already tone.

Then all forum-wall hell would break loose: between the feminists and the putters-of-women-in-their-place, between the libertines and the prudes, between the straight shooters and those who danced tortuously around the word "masturbation."

At some point some older student--I did this at least once--would point out that a) the feminists are right and, whatever you think of sexual ethics, it's way out of line for men to blame women for their own issues, and b) seriously? again? This stupid thing gets posted every damn year. (What we needed was an archive of past posts, perhaps some sort of Web-based log, to refer back to.)

Anyway, I always figured this sort of thing was an issue peculiar to conservative religious institutions of higher learning, in this case, to what administrators and distinguished guests often referred to as "the Harvard of the Midwest," though "the Notre Dame of evangelicalism"would have been more accurate. Turns out this spring saw a somewhat similar controversy at the ACTUAL Harvard of the Midwest, the University of Chicago. Huh.

Yes we can! Look the other way!

Good question raised by Justin Raimondo in the first major magazine to oppose the Iraq war back in 2003, The Nation Washington Monthly The New Republic In These Times The Mennonite The American Conservative: where are the antiwar Democrats now that their favorite mostly-antiwar candidate is the not-so-antiwar president?

What will be the next exhibit A?

OMG, the religious right is dead!

Exhibit A: the NAE's main lobbyist is an anti-global-warming advocate.

UPDATE: Exhibit A: There's a campus Democrats group at Liberty University.

UPDATE:

Tough guys and nature hymns

I recently learned that I'm not (quite) a real man. So I was heartened when the Daily Mail informed me that hymns can be macho. I love hymns!

Unfortunately, the actual list of macho hymns is a mix of hymns I don't like and hymns that don't strike me as particularly macho. I love "How Great Thou Art," but really? If memory serves:

When through the woods and forest glades I wander
And hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze
When I look out on lofty mountains' grandeur
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees

Makes me want to watch some wrestling or whatever!

The Republican health care plan

According to Ezra, it looks as though the Republicans are putting forth a health care plan that bears little resemblance to the awful one McCain offered during the election. Instead, it's acknowledging that serious reform is needed and that some, though not all, of the Democrats' ideas as to what KIND of reform are not partisan ones to be fought but simply good ones to be embraced.

Good for them.

This week's must-read comes from...

...of all places, the Washington Post. DeNeen L. Brown's article on how expensive it is to be poor paints a vivid picture of financial barriers and inequities that those of us who are not poor rarely see.

My current favorite blogger:

Adam Serwer at TAPPED.

He's been damn sharp lately: here he is on the curious disconnect between opposition to affirmative action in college admissions and quiet acceptance of legacy admissions. A good point: either it's racist, it's classist, and/or it makes absolutely no sense.

Here he is pointing out that saying that the CIA lies to Congress is not slanderous and unproductive. It's a well-documented fact and a tacitly embraced status quo.

Here he is ably busting the stereotype that liberals are just a bunch of uncritical Obama heads. (This was never entirely fair even during the election, and several Wall Street giveaways, South Asian military escalations, and sneaky union-screwings later, why should it be now?) Also: here and here.

And here he is on the vile, hateful, offensive Wanda Sykes. Decent Americans unite!

"Local" Lays and local fish

Ethicurean calls foul on junk food companies advertising their products as "local food" just in those media markets that happen to be near where they mass produce the junk food...and ship it all over the country.

Fair enough. But Tom L points out that the Times story buries the real lede: big farms moving from growing commodities for junk food and livestock feed and toward diversified crops that feed their human (regional, not hyperlocal) neighbors. Which is...not greenwashing at all, but exactly the main things that's needed to scale sustainable agriculture beyond its current niche. Good on them.

Meanwhile, while I don't eat fish--even before I quit eating meat, it was never a favorite of mine--if I did I'd be real excited about this development: CSFs. (Via Liz.)

A day in the life of our bizarro-world red-scare politics

The president and the majority leadership--that is, the most powerful Democrats in the country--are making it really, really clear that single-payer health care (aka the system that would be a massively positive change for everyone involved except the insurance companies and the politicians tarred as socialists for supporting it, a senseless accusation since private care providers would stay that way) is off the table. Not even going to talk about it, except to remind people that they're not talking about it and that they love America and free markets.

Meanwhile, the Republicans keep it classy.

"Waterboarding may make a person talk, but it won't make 'em talk English."

Pretty funny Jon Stewart clip here, but I can't even muster a smile:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
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If only the church were that powerful

Awhile back I pooh-poohed the idea that going to church makes anybody MORE likely to support torture. The problem, instead, is that the church's power to PREVENT people from supporting torture--or to shape their political/social/ethical beliefs in any particular way--is far more limited than we often like to think. Or as Dave put it in the comments, "I WISH churches exerted that kind of influence ... then we could stop torture from the pulpits."

Sarah Sentilles goes in a different direction, exploring the ways Christian theology/ies can in fact, in often subtle ways, nurture a tolerance for torture. It's a fairly compelling argument, based on the starting point that religion's power over people's thinking is not only or even primarily about explicit teaching.

Still, it's interesting that evangelical leaders--who are presumably more immersed in religion than the average layperson and thus even more susceptible to its subconscious influence, good or bad--have been pretty bold in opposing torture. Why the disconnect between the leadership and those in-the-pews-at-least-once-a-week? I don't think it's because their theology is different to such a degree that it pushes them in opposite directions on such an enormously important question.

I still think it's because, as David Neff hinted at recently without coming out and saying it, many white evangelicals are Republicans first and Christians second.

And yes, certainly many liberal Christians are Democrats first, as I said in my previous post. And anyway the problem is not that a lot of Christians are Republicans. The problem is that a lot of Christians' faith-based ethical commitments seem unable to match the power of political loyalties in their lives, whatever those loyalties. This is bad for everybody except the political powers so adept at manipulating people of faith to their own purposes. The GOP mainstream seems committed to defending--not denying or downplaying--U.S. torture practices. Sadly, I fear that this alone does more than any other factor to produce the sobering sorts of findings we saw from Pew.

According to Esquire, I'm either half or two-thirds of a man

I opened up Esquire's "How to be a Man" special issue with more than a little skepticism. And seriously: "a man knows how to bust balls"? He loves "the physics of the human skeleton, the alternating current of the flesh"? I'm not a regular reader, so maybe you get used to this sort of thing, but--what the hell?

Before I put it down in disgust, however, I came across this:

A man has had liquor enough in his life that he can order a drink without sounding breathless, clueless, or obtuse. When he doesn't want to think, he orders bourbon or something on tap.

Well, I thought, I don't know about calling people obtuse because they don't know how to order a trendy cocktail smoothly. Of course, I NEVER want to think--and I felt a flush of manly pride when I realized that I, too, generally order bourbon or something on tap. These are two of the three things I drink, in fact. I must be a real man.

But then: "Never the sauvignon blanc."

That's the third. Oh well.

CNN: Going to church makes you more likely to love torture

Well, the article's choice of words implies this; it doesn't explicitly say it. Here's what is says: "The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey." (That would be the Pew Forum analysis of a Pew Research Center for People & the Press survey released yesterday.)

Two comments. First the obvious one: there's a correlation-not-causation problem here. Everyone knows that political conservatives are more likely to be regular churchgoers than liberals. Political conservatives are more likely to offer at least qualified support for the use of torture. No reason for CNN to suggest the faith is to blame, that each additional midweek service you attend makes you embrace sadism all the more. (According to the Pew data, mainline Protestants, many of whom attend weekly worship like clockwork [whether this makes us Real Christians is for the purposes of this post neither here nor there], offer less support for torture than do occasional church attenders generally. It's just that the mainline's overall numbers are so much smaller than those of evangelicals, so they're less represented in the statistic CNN trumpets here.)

Second, the ornery-skeptical one: Contrary to popular belief, by and large, conservative Christians aren't going out of their way to buck the Republican party line on torture much more than most liberal Christians are doing so with the Democrats on, well, anything. On both sides, a lot of churchgoing folks are not political renegades who consistently follow their faith-based ethical imperatives as they understand them, parties be damned. They're Republicans or Democrats who go to church at least once a week. Their faith may well be serious and sincere; so are their--admittedly, OUR--largely secular cultural-political affiliations. Like it or not (I, naturally, do not), many more of them are conservative than liberal.

Which principles and which compromises?

I missed this the other day, but Nat alerted me to it: Daniel Larison on

The profoundly dispiriting realization (really, it is just a reminder) that it is torture and aggressive war that today’s mainstream right will go to the wall to defend, while any and every other view can be negotiated, debated, compromised or abandoned.

The Stone boy sayseth

It seems my college roommate Nathaniel is back at the blogging. Actually, I'm quite certain of it--this is not a half-assed sort of fellow we're dealing with here.

That's 574 selectively bred huge breasts per second, with plenty of dark meat to put in pet food or throw away or whatever

Disclaimer: No, I don't think that eating meat is intrinsically bad, nor do I think that people who eat meat are bad people. I came off my vegetarian high horse years ago...and have since replaced it with a nice food-movement horse. (He's a good horse. Kind of hip but not too aloof, kind of earthy but not a total hippy, you know? Eats strictly perennial grasses.)

In other words, I DO think that industrial livestock farming is among the most devastatingly harmful industrial practices in this country, one that should be, if not abolished outright, at least heavily regulated like a factory with clear social-environmental-public health negative outcomes, rather than subsidized and propped up as if we'd starve without it or something. And I do think that, whether your meat's from Tyson or some fancy farmer's market vendor, Americans in general eat entirely too MUCH of it for our own good or that of the rest of creation. Exhibit A: the difference between a dinner plate here and one in pretty much any other country, especially if you're dining with the bottom 70 percent or so of the income bracket.

Anyway...this is a cool graphic that illustrates well just how many (energy-sucking, water-wasting, air-polluting, and yes, sentient) animals we slaughter in this country:

Don't go right or left, go deeper...left?

This is weird: it turns out Jim Wallis, who has consistently dodged the label "religious left" for a long, long time, is a religious left leader after all. Huh.

Pastordan's reaction is a bit stronger than "huh."

"When the gay community is granted personal freedoms, ours get taken away. How? Shhh."

I don't think Colbert's all that funny, but I loved his summation of the anti-same-sex-marriage movement's messaging, so I put it in the title. Now I guess I'll embed the whole clip:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad
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High-speed rail? High-speed rail.

So it looks like the president's got some pretty serious high-speed rail plans. Here's a map of planned service routes:

Some light reading

This is cool: Michael Westmoreland-White has a handy short bibliography on the subject of Christianity vs. empire. I've only read a few of these so far (mostly biblical studies stuff), but going deeper into the literature on this subject is high on my list.

Here, have some nice risk-free debt on us

I recently finished paying off a student loan I'd been chipping away at for years. It felt good, but not very--it was just the first of several; I'd prioritized it because of the obscenely high interest rates. So I was glad to hear that the president is pushing to get rid of the middleman banks in federally guaranteed student loans--a pretty straightforward tax-dollar giveaway, useless (or worse) to actual students who need the aid, and a program that's seen some recent scandal.

I still owe thousands to Sallie Mae. Lousy bums.

It's official: the church has gotten into the Twitters

And not just the cool-kids church but the stodgy one, too.

RD reports on this goofy stunt and offers an obligatory think piece to boot.

Rep. Ryan: Spending doesn't end a recession, spending does

By now you've probably heard that the GOP alternative to the president's proposed budget is a little thin on details. (Though word is they'll be coming back soon with something with some actual numbers amid the ideological boilerplate.)

This morning I woke to the sound of my former congressman, Rep. Paul Ryan (WI-1), shilling for the Republican so-called plan on Morning Edition. I was frustrated that the reporter declined to follow up on a couple of standard-nonsense talking points. From the npr.gov write-up:

But Ryan says unemployment during the New Deal ranged from 12 to 25 percent. "Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury secretary, came to the Ways and Means Committee at the end of that period and said, 'This was a disaster.' It didn't work. We borrowed so much money; we ran up the debt. We didn't get out of the Depression until World War II came along."

First of all, unemployment went down, not up, during the New Deal. (As Jonathan Chait put it awhile back, blaming FDR for the fact that unemployment was higher than it was LATER is like blaming Jefferson for leaving office with a smaller country than we have now.)

Second, you can't criticize the idea of spending your way out of recession by saying that the war, not the New Deal, got us out of the Great Depression--because whichever of those two things made the difference, it was because the government spent money. The relative merit of spending on guns vs. butter is a different question, as much as conservatives might want to conflate the two.

In other news, it's clear that, as during the election, we've reduced our understanding of distinct, different-in-kind political ideologies to a single, one-dimensional continuum: from Mussolini to Mao, with U.S. politicians defined by how close they get to either pole. So here's a good corrective from Alan Wolfe, who reminds us that socialism isn't liberalism-but-more-so. Actually they're fundamentally different things.

Everyone's favorite possibly-slightly-better-than grocery option

Whole Foods: the delicious taste of over-priced, greenwashed, big-organic food.

Now with even more union-busting.

A defense contractor that isn't afraid of commitment

And loves me for whom I am.

Aryeh Cohen: "Has Israel jumped the shark?" Exhibit A: this Bollywood-style number by arms manufacturer Rafael:

This Red Scare Doesn't Really Make Sense: bank nationalization edition

Kevin Drum makes a good argument that the banks should be nationalized because of, not in spite of, our capitalist economic system.

Torturing for nothing

Lawrence Wilkerson (Secretary of State Powell's CoS): debates about morality aside, Gitmo Bay has been fairly useless to intelligence efforts.

That's right: even if you grant that the concrete reality of torture is a lesser evil than the possibility of a terrorist attack--an idea I have a hard time even taking seriously, much less granting--Gitmo is an immense failure even on these fairly frightening terms.

Benedict and the TAC

AP:

Absorbing the breakaway Traditional Anglican Communion would be a small but notable victory for Pope Benedict XVI, who has made unifying Christians a goal of his papacy.

Really? By absorbing these people, who find not just the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada but the entire Anglican Communion too liberal to stay in communion with them?

Md. Senate: Declining to kill people who are no longer a threat to anyone is more change than we can believe in right now

Gov. O'Malley concedes defeat.

"Is there a semiotician in the house?"

Mark asks a good question: what, if anything, does the little cross mean in the recovery.gov logo?

Correlation vs. causation

Talking with lots of folks about the economics crisis lately--which few of us understand particularly well--I've been thinking about the old correlation=causation fallacy.

So has Randall:

Albany Park's foreclosed homes

A couple blocks from where I live, right across the river, is the 33rd Ward, which has the dubious distinction of being the foreclosure capital of Chicago. Sen. Durbin did a press conference there the other day, at which he promoted the bill he introduced back in the last Congress to help homeowners in bankruptcy proceedings avoid foreclosure by allowing bankruptcy courts to reduce their payments. Joining the senator in holding the press conference was the Albany Park Neighborhood Council, a community-organizing group that has done much great work on behalf of the area and its many low-income people.

My church is in the 33rd, and my friend and pastor Tom Terrell, shown above with the senator, spoke at the event. As a pastor and community leader, Tom sees the effects the financial crisis has on real people in his daily work. I'm a renter with limited expenses (and an apparently responsible landlord), so it can be a bit less tangible to me (so far). I've tended to think about the crisis mostly in the aggregate terms of public policy. But the people losing their homes are actual people, real individuals and families and neighbors.

Photo used by permission of APNC.

Local food for Illinois

This is exciting: the local and organic food task force created in 2007 by the IL legislature has released its report. Some solid, concrete policy proposals aimed at 20 percent of Illinoisans' food being sourced within the state by 2020. (This is an ambitious goal--though if an observer from another time/planet/whatever saw the kind of land Illinois is made of, s/he would likely find it absurd that we don't already provide the VAST MAJORITY of our own food. Which, of course, it IS. But circumstances being what they are, 20 percent in the next 11 years would be huge.) From the exec summary:

The Illinois General Assembly can foster this farm-based local economic development by approving new legislation that (1) directs state agencies to align their missions to support this strategy for economic development, public health, and food security; (2) supports the Local Foods Initiative of University of Illinois Extension; (3) Encourages state institutions to procure at least 20% of their food locally by 2020; (4) assembles a team to eliminate regulatory barriers restricting local food production and marketing, (5) creates the Illinois Local Food, Farms, and Jobs Council which will be commissioned to facilitate local farm and food system development statewide. Passage of this legislation will accelerate countless initiatives at the local, regional, and state level to promote community revitalization throughout Illinois.

More here.

Via Windy Citizen user hughadam.

Do you have a strong enough stomach to eat pizza and ranch dressing with a side of fries for lunch every day?

If so, then it might also be strong enough for you to watch this video about school-lunch policy without becoming ill:

Biden's addition to the internets/connected tubes/etc. lexicon

Vice President Biden: "Do you know the Web site number?"

My friend Dave, in an e-mail: "The next time he plugs his internet into the web, he should just ask the operator if she would connect him to the building where the bailout lives. No fancy numbers needed."

America wants to know: When will our highways start making some MONEY already?

Tom Laskawy names a frustration I share: why do we insist on talking about Amtrak like it's a private-sector business and should be turning a profit? It's a publicly owned agency that provides a clear service, analogous to roads and parks and the armed services. Why does everyone compare it instead to airlines and cars? (Well, maybe they don't NOW, but they did back when Amtrak suffered from the comparison...)

Re-framing the question

Economics is notoriously a field in which there is rarely broad consensus on really major questions. In times like the present, the ideological fault lines may shift considerably, but they don't go away. This is one reason--along with others, not least of which is the fact that I'm not now nor have I ever been an economist--that I don't like to get bogged down by abstract debates about overarching ways of looking at economic policy. It's hard to appeal to "the experts" when they're split, and I get tired of playing pick-an-expert or regurgitating talking points.

So, while a person of my political persuasion may be glad to see an ad in the Washington Post in which a long list of prominent economists offers support for EFCA, I think Ezra has exactly the right response:

Expect, of course, to see a counter-letter of economists opposing EFCA shortly. Which is just the point: Economists disagree on the impact of unions. So the question ends up being whether you want to err on the side of distributing more to the workforce or err on the side of distributing more the executive class.

So the question for the purposes of laypeople like me isn't which group of economists has a more persuasive methodology. How the hell do I know? The question is rather whether you want to put the burden of proof on the folks advocating for the haves or on those advocating for the have-nots. For me, that's a pretty easy call.

Duking it out on the sides of buses

This from Raffi Shahinian--it's the winner of his Alternative Atheist Bus Slogan Contest:

It makes me sick that we even need to resort to such an argument, but since we obviously do:

Md. Gov. O'Malley: end the death penalty, because it's a vindictive and dehumanizing outrage against everything decent, one that scoffs at core theologies Catholic and Protestant alike expensive.

Well, whatever it takes. God bless the governor for his ongoing leadership on this issue.

Some basic understanding=the ability to respond when people start in with their blaming-the-poor

For all us economics laypeople, this video's one of the most helpful primers I've seen:

Congressional candidates forum

Just came back from a candidates forum for the special election to replace Rahm Emanuel in IL-5, my district. The format was to ask a question and give each candidate (18 in attendance; several others weren't there) a minute to respond. So far so good-as-can-be-expected, but then somebody decided to have the 10 Democrats go first and then switch gears and do the whole things again--afterthought style--with the four Republicans and four Greens. Several of the non-Dems were justifiably upset by this arrangement, though to the organizers' credit they did manage both to keep most of the audience there for the second half and to keep the whole thing on schedule and finished in two hours.

The candidates are predictable: the Dems all come off about the same, especially when all you get is 60-second sound bytes of them all answering the same couple of questions. Several of them are old Chicago/Springfield hands. They're for jobs, support for homeowners, health care reform, and not scapegoating undocumented immigrants for problems they didn't cause. They like the president well enough. Sure, count me in--but I'm still not sure who to vote for in the only election anyone's paying attention to the Democratic primary.

Actually, I do have a favorite, though I'm very much undecided: Tom Geoghegan, a labor lawyer w/ a lot of public service experience but none of it in the Chicago Dem machine.

The Republicans, again predictably for these parts, seem mostly to fall somewhere on the moderate-to-RINO continuum. Tom Hanson called himself a "liberal Republican" every time it was his turn to talk. Jon Stewart, an "independent Republican," applauded points the Green candidates made on multiple occasions. But the other two guys, for all their common-sense-moderate populist talk, at least had the decency to pivot repeatedly to some good old-fashioned taxation-trashing.

As for the Greens, three of them made solid enough cases for their candidacies but got overshadowed by Matt Reichel, a lefty activist-journalist who just acted super angry most of the time. He's even younger, even more liberal, and even more bombastic than yours truly (calling into question my three main reasons for deciding against a run myself...). Afterwards, he stood outside the door smiling at people as they left, but he seemed even more intense than he had on stage.

The primary's in eight days.

Vilsack's garden

USDA's such a mess it can't even pull off a proper publicity stunt.

Eddie walks us through, step by excruciating step.

"All we have to do to find compromise is admit that we wrong [sic] about everything"

You think you're mad about centrist equivocation and triangulation and selling-out-of-core-values?

You've got nothing on pastordan. His righteous fury is even leaving behind VERBS. This whole post reads as though he saw something that pissed him off, took a deep breath, held it while he wrote a few hundred words and clicked "publish," and then finally exhaled.

VA legislator: How will I comfort the mourning without...including sectarian prayers at public events?

From the Washington Post:

RICHMOND, Feb. 18 -- As a former Virginia state trooper who has visited horrific crime scenes and notified families of the death of a loved one, Charles W. Carrico Sr. learned the value of prayer and turned to it many times, he says.

So Carrico, who now represents Grayson County as a member of the House of Delegates, said he felt he had to act after Virginia State Police chaplains were ordered last summer to give only generic prayers at public events, a ruling several interpreted as a ban on uttering "Jesus." Rather than comply, six of the agency's 17 chaplains resigned. Carrico wrote a bill to address their stance.

"As a Christian, I must pray to Jesus Christ," Carrico said. "I'm being told not to. Why should I even pray?"

Why indeed--a good question. I'm as much a separation supporter as the next "Christian" liberal, but I couldn't agree more that bland, least-common-denominator prayers at public events are pretty much useless. Of course, my objection is to calling God's blessing on such events in the first place--I think prayer's too important to use it as a stamp-of-divine-approval on a non-religious function. Still, ultimately I agree with Carrico's point here.

Except...what does praying to Jesus for strength and comfort amidst a difficult and wrenching job have to do with offering prayers at public events? Well, actually not much. That's right--it's the same old bait-and-switch we know from school-prayer debates: public-school students should have the right to pray in whatever way they want! (Yes!) So teachers/other authority figures should be able to lead them in specifically Christian prayer during school. (Huh?)

From Third Way to the Poverty Forum: Yawning down faith-based-incrementalism lane

Jim Wallis and Mike Gerson: center-left and center-right Christians agree that we shouldn't just let all the poor people die!

The leftier folks are naturally unimpressed: Sarah Posner, Peter Laarman.

As usual, more interesting criticisms from Mark Silk: Does Gerson really support a higher minimum wage? (If so, when did this happen? And if not, what exactly does this coalition mean?) And why are these guys stepping all over Christian Churches Together, anyway? What's the point of duplicating CCT's impressive work in this way-- "we're like those guys, but less bold and with a less diverse coalition" ?

When I was a boy, Republicans and Democrats walked uphill both ways between bipartisan cooperation on the Hill and friendly drinks after work

James Morone on the myth of a less partisan past.

Pelosi and Benedict

So the Speaker of the House met with the Pope, and he naturally isn't thrilled with her views on abortion.

RNS says he gave her a stern reprimand.

Really? Looks more like a standard we-spoke-and-it-was-nice-but-we-don't-agree-about-everything statement to me. Which, the RNS story points out, is an uncommon move on the Vatican's part for a meeting with a political leader who isn't even a head of state.

Doesn't Pelosi come out of this ahead by getting the meeting and the statement at all?

Hooray for transportation spending slightly less dramatically tilted toward highway expansions!

Here's some small-scale good news: high-speed rail actually got an INCREASE in funding during the reconciliation process for the stimulus bill. Which isn't to say that we're actually going to invest anything remotely approaching what we're spending on roads and bridges--and why should we? Passenger rail is less invasive, accessible for more people, vastly superior environmentally, less dangerous, super fun...all in all, a total bummer.

Forgive my pesky sarcasm. This is good news.

Phil Rizk's new blog

His old Google blog was compromised by the Egyptian authorities. Here's his new wordpress.com blog.

"Why Most Christians will Die and Go to H-E-L-L"

This is the title of a tract that a man handed Nadia outside a coffee shop in my neighborhood. It's from a fundie Baptist church nearby. Lot's of raging quotes; here are a couple, complete w/ colonial-style over-capitaliziation-of-Nouns:

"Churches and Pastors and Christians today do not know anything about holiness. They are so worldly and the world is so churchy. Preachers today do not preach against the sins they preached against in yesteryear. Where's the Prophet? Where's the Man of God? Who'll cry out against the sins of the Church members."

"Most preachers are controlled by pulpit committees and the IRS."

"Call us if you're searching for a hellfire & brimstone Baptist Church in your area that believes the King James bible and stands for something"

"We welcome all Religions & Cultures"

This last one is particularly rich given that the man who handed the tract to Nadia is Latino and speaks very limited English. While one never knows, it's a safe guess that he's not a cradle fundamentalist Baptist, and neither are his friends and family--but good chance they're Christians. Nothing like being "welcomed" by being told your faith isn't good enough and you're going to burn in h-e-l-l.

This is the thing that makes it hard for me to go too far down the "conservative and liberal Christians each have their blind spots and intolerances; let's meet in the middle and try to understand each other better--we're all equally guilty in this area." (And yes, I know that this tract comes from some pretty fringy folks, but the mainstream religious right sentiment is softer and kinder more than it's substantively different.) But, while the liberal church may read the Bible just as selectively as the religious right, ignore just as many of its own doctrinal tensions and contradictions, and look down on people who disagree, I've never, ever heard a left-leaning mainliner--fringe or otherwise--say or even imply that conservative Christians aren't real Christians, or that they're going to hell.

This is a difference that matters.

The cutting edge of hating on the LGBT-affirming liberal church

Then: You're not really Christians.

Now: You don't even EXIST--see, that prayer you just prayed didn't really happen!

Phil Rizk talks about his detainment

He wasn't physically harmed, but otherwise a pretty rough go. From this NYT story:

“I was held for four days, but the people of Gaza continue to be held in a form of prison, and there are others in Egypt who are also being held,” he said. “I want to move the attention to others who are still in this situation.”

61 votes: appeasing the incoherent center

Smart words on the stimulus from Ross Douthat:

[The centrists have] done absolutely nothing to widen the terms of debate about what should go into the bill, and they've shaved off just enough money to reduce its effectiveness if Paul Krugman is right - but not nearly enough to make it fiscally prudent if the stimulus skeptics are right.

More.

I agree with Ezra: end the filibuster.

Sorry, can't resist posting one more Drew comic

Two in a day! This is a first for me. But this one's so gentle and bridge-buildy:

Cool new Apple toy!

With apologies to my baby sister, who once--when she was MUCH younger than she is now--sincerely challenged my older sister and me to a "Coldplay-liking contest":

Philip's release

The Egyptian authorities released Philip Rizk on Wednesday, February 11, after five days in custody.

Chicago demonstration for Phil Rizk

A protest is being organized for tomorrow at the Egyptian consulate on N Michigan.

More here.

Free Phil Rizk

Phil Rizk, a journalist and activist in the Middle East, has been taken into custody by Egyptian police after leading a march in solidarity with Palestine.

Phil's a Wheaton acquaintance/friend-of-friends. Here's a Facebook group with more information.

UPDATE: Here's an eyewitness report.

AND: for DC-area people, there will be a protest tomorrow at the Egyptian embassy.

The bomb throwers have it

You know, in general I try not to be too quick to side with the bomb throwers over the bridge builders. I have a fairly instinctual preference for building stuff over blowing it up, to the point that I find myself spending more time defending people I disagree with to other people I also disagree with (i.e., evangelicals and very-liberal mainline Protestants and back again) than actually saying what I myself think. (Those who know me will point out that it's not that I don't find time to say what I think--I just talk a whole lot. I'm speaking relatively here.)

That said: pastordan talks some good sense here. As much as I might try to get excited about the new Third Way "governing agenda," there just isn't that much there.

How Wal-Mart took over the country

If you dare:

FlowingData has a fairly terrifying visual representation of the spread of Wal-Mart.

It's sorta awkward when one arm's longer than the other

So the pope has a long right arm.

Rose (w/ apologies to Michael Lerner): what about his LEFT arm?

Plenty room for Change® at USDA

If you've been here long you've perhaps noticed that I'm no fan of USDA's behavior in the recent past. And none of us foodie types has been too thrilled with the choice of Tom Vilsack as Obama's secretary of agriculture.

But more recently there are signs that Vilsack might not be all bad (see another Tom, and yet another one). Among other things, he's signaled that he intends to make USDA less...blatantly racist.

That's right: not only do your tax dollars pay for big-agriculture thugs to do their food-safety-/local-community-/environment-destroying dirty work in federal uniforms, but they're also paying to explicitly discriminate against black farmers.

But perhaps not for long.

"Did you mean? crises rutherford"

Eddie Gehman Kohan asks a good question: why is the new White House Web site so light on information about food, even omitting any reference to WH chef Cristeta Comerford?

Benedict: The St. Pius kids are alright

The pope is making nice with his right flank. No huge surprise there, but it's worth reading to the end of the article if only to get to this great quote, in which George Weigel out-Weigels himself:

It is not easy to see how the unity of the Church will be enhanced unless the Lefebvrists accept Vatican II’s teaching on the nature of the Church, on religious freedom, and on the evil of anti-Semitism, explicitly and without qualification; otherwise, you get cafeteria Catholicism on the far right, as we already have on the left.

Weigel's sensible! He's moderate! He's...taking a potshot at liberals in an article about extreme conservatives. Because everyone knows that more mainstream conservative Catholics are never guilty of a cafeteria approach.

Wal-Mart saves the earth with the innovation of...concentrated laundry detergent?

Hmmm. As cool and happy as the stock boy looks in the photo, that there's some serious greenwashing.

Or worse.

I'm in "the fake DC" this weekend

So I'm back in DC for the inauguration right now, and, as someone who tries hard to live in the moment, I'm feeling the DC pride as if I still lived here.

Inevitably, with a hip and classy new president coming to town--one who'd rather check out a trendy restaurant or theater company then go out and clear some brush somewhere--the national media has turned its elitist, patronizing attention to DC and its cultural scene. Did you know that there are artists in Our Nation's Capital? And even restaurants?

Here's a good specimen of the genre: a piece on the dining scene in "the real DC," which seems to mean roughly the opposite of what Sarah Palin means by "the real America"--the real DC is apparently a place where rapid gentrification is welcome, everyone has money, and cuisine is judged primarily on its relative haute-ness. This will certainly be news to DC's many, many poor people.

And, you ask, what publication might have run this article implying that

• it's a pleasant surprise when anything remotely fashionable happens in a city of fewer than five million people
  
• DC is a cultural wasteland waiting to be rescued by a celebrity president
• "real" people routinely spend $50 on dinner?

A hint: it rhymes with the "blue fork crimes."

Gordon Cosby's last sermon

The Post ran a good article last week about the last sermon of Gordon Cosby, a legend in DC faith-and-activism circles, and about the future of the Church of the Saviour, which Cosby founded, and its many ministries.

Good comments here, here, and here.

Just give me a f***ing neighborhood-based thing!

I missed this last week, but my kid sister didn't: Obama's people are dealing w/ the faith-based-initiative hot potato by refashioning it so as not to be strictly faith-based. Clever.

No, USA Today headliner, it doesn't. Not even close.

I like Luis Lugo, and religious diversity on Capitol Hill certainly matters.

But the headline for this piece--which, obviously, Lugo himself didn't write--is appalling. Last I checked, people of different religions don't necessarily LOOK different. Meanwhile, we're down to zero black senators again (or one, depending whom you ask).

Our long national nightmare is documented

I finally read Vanity Fair's lengthy oral history of the Bush administration. Fair, non-reactionary, focused almost entirely on the words of actual actors and witnesses with minimal editorializing.

I haven't been so angry since...well, since I watched No End in Sight.

New Year's advice

If you're ever in Chicago at 9 pm on New Year's Eve and you're looking for somewhere to not go, I strongly recommend the liquor store at the corner of Belmont and Sheffield.

"I have always found the middle class slightly annoying."

One of the many people whom we didn't elect president last month is the poet Sparrow, who runs pretty much every time. The current issue of The Sun--do you subscribe to The Sun? If not, stop reading and go do so, right now--includes excerpts from this year's campaign journal. (Sparrow ran this time around as the candidate of the Sudoku For All Party.) Here's a sample:

There's been a lot of discussion in this election about saving the middle class. Let me confide in you, my electorate, that I have always found the middle class slightly annoying. I am running to protect the hobos, stevedores (I'm not sure exactly what a stevedore is, but I love the word), opera singers, prostitutes, people who dress up as rabbits, and experts on Chaucer. The middle class, with their comfortable couches and macaroni casseroles, can probably take care of themselves.

I like this entry because, as a Steve, I too am fascinated by the word "stevedore." Furthermore, the broad coalition he seeks to protect includes two different vocations I briefly considered for myself. (I'm going to make you guess.)

More importantly: seriously, I think it's pretty gross when every time a politician not named John Edwards wants to talk about poor people, his/her people do a global find/replace and make it about the middle class instead. Now, talking about how rising inequality is squeezing the middle class out of existence is another thing. But then you're still talking about poor people (i.e., in the general sense--both the poor and the low-income in policy parlance--people who are struggling to make ends meet even w/o any expectation of middle-class comforts).

In summary: read The Sun, stand up for the poor, and Sparrow's funny. That's my philosophy.

What happened to slow news weeks right before Christmas?

Busy week for me, and even more so for the religion internets.

The Newsweek cover story on same-sex marriage made a bit of a splash, to say the least. Mollie was predictably unimpressed. Many of her criticisms are spot-on, but I can't quite figure out why she's so pissed that the article focuses specifically on biblical arguments (as opposed to e.g. natural law ones) against same-sex marriage. No, biblicism isn't the whole story here, but it's not exactly a straw man, either. (Had she asked, I'd have been happy to do a Google search for her.) Waldman has a good analysis of the inside-the-media side of the story.

Meanwhile, turns out our United Methodist, Episcopal-worshiping, NE-patrician current president is, horror of horrors, a theologically liberal mainline Protestant. Just another unlikely hero of a cynically waged culture war...good thing his faith was interrogated as fiercely pre-election as the very similar views of the president-elect!

And New-Kind-of-Evangelical® hero Rich Cizik has finally been ousted from his position as head lobbyist for the NAE. A long-sought-after win for the old-line religious right, which, you'll recall, is dead/dying/whatever.

Elsewhere, the old debate between the pro-LGBT-and-abortion-rights religious left and the common-ground-common-good-anti-poverty-etc. religious center-left resurfaced this past week. Yawn.

And here's a really interesting standalone piece: from Sightings, the issue of interfaith work and proselytizing.

What is blog?

I've been talking to a lot of folks lately who are interested in "the internets" and "blogging" but feel they lack a sophisticated understanding. My responses tend to be rather rambling, but I discovered recently that my friend Jon has a more concise response:

"Beg for mercy, strawman!"

Don Byrd's takedown of this Chuck Norris column is pretty fun.

High-speed rail! High-speed rail!

This is cool:

Teach a man to Google, and you have cut down on his irritating requests for a lifetime

Hey, I live in Chicago, so I probably know where to find, say, a boring sandwich there, right?

Tired of people asking you for information they could have figured out themselves w/ a simple Web search? The internets have just the thing.

"A big day for Roy Bourgeois"

You think?

Anglican roundup: the insanity rumbles on

Week after next, the Common Cause-affiliated conservatives will gather at my alma mater. Not for worship led by an archbishop who remained silent when asked at GAFCON only to go so far as to condemn violent hate crimes against gays and lesbians--not THIS time. No, they say they'll be forming a new province of the Anglican Communion, a rival North American church.

Adrian Worsfold's response: he's starting his own Anglican Church, too. So there.

And Jim highlights one (of many!) reasons why the difference between an established church and American-style separation matters, even post explicit-financial-support: because the covenant that the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his capacity as leader of the Anglican Communion, wants the different primates to sign--in particular, the U.S. and Canadian presiding bishops--is ILLEGAL for the AofC HIMSELF to sign in his capacity as head of the Church of England...because he isn't really the head.

That would be the queen.

Jim:

A pattern is beginning to emerge here. The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada must cease blessing same-sex relationships, but the Church of England does not have to because it does so quietly. The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada must relinquish their autonomy and sign on to a covenant that will almost certainly be used to marginalize them, but the Church of England doesn't have to because it is an established church.

The Archbishop of Canterbury continues to demand from the North American churches what he does not ask from his own people. And the peculiar thing is that nobody seems to find this objectionable.

Finally, on a lighter note--or at least a gallows-humor note--it seems the Anglican Communion's hiring. (Orphans preferred.)

Better late than never: infamously outlandish rock-star claims edition

The Vatican has forgiven John Lennon.

(And RNS has committed the cardinal sin of Beatles-related headline writing: punning on a song title written by the wrong Beatle. Particularly ironic in this case, given that even a moderate-to-serious [i.e., not a crazed, dogmatic, Kinks-and-Dylan-and-Velvets-and-everyone-else-dismissing] Beatles fan like myself knows that Lennon hated this song...because he understood it to be pro-religion in general and pro-Catholic in particular. ["Mother Mary comes to me..."] Oh well.)

A couple good health-care reads

A clear and informative op-ed by folks from the New America Foundation: 5 Myths on Our Sick Health-Care System.

And a story about two girls with cancer, one in the US and one in the UK, that puts some holes in the old "you'd-better-not-have-to-deal-with-socialized-medicine-in-a-crisis" saw. Good piece--but the remarkable thing, as Ezra points out, is that IT'S PUBLISHED IN FORBES.

Some people make the "it's a slippery slope--what's next? polygamy?!" argument more credibly than others

Mark makes a good observation: It's no small irony that one of main forces behind Prop 8's passage was the LDS church, which, not that long ago, WAS the group fighting for a more expansive (vs. "traditional") view of marriage.

Marketing vegetarianism to 14-year-olds

Via Meghan:

So who's right about my representative?

Michael Lerner?

Or Barack Obama:

Microphone interference=spiritual seekers go home w/o visiting the espresso bar or the bookstore

This is weird. Especially: only megachurch pastors use wireless microphones? And Shure--producer of the industry-standard live microphones used in virtually every live music or speech context--is "an audio-visual company working with megachurches and other users"?

What about pastors of medium-sized churches, and pastors of small churches that aren't quite small enough to not need microphones, and people who aren't pastors but still, incredibly, want to have their voices amplified w/o being attached to a cable?

The story behind the story: perhaps megachurch pastors are especially concerned about microphone interference because their worship aesthetic is so dependent on smoothness and technical perfection. And perhaps, unlike small-church pastors who are busy, you know, writing sermons and balancing budgets and visiting the sick or whatever, megachurches can devote staff time toward fighting the FCC. Really very strange.

Okay, sorry for that curve ball. Next post will be on our nation's new trinity of hope: Obama, Jesus, and Obama. I promise.

The Obama rally

It was a beautiful night in Grant Park, and I'm perfectly happy to have underestimated Obama's margin of victory earlier today. I was disappointed w/ the crowd's booing of Gov. Palin in Sen. McCain's concession speech. (Also: hints of the old, human McCain in the speech.) Otherwise, a great crowd and wonderful to be there. Back at my office in downtown Chicago now, with cheers and chants of "yes we can" in the streets below. Quite an experience.

Now my brother and I are off to catch the packed late-night train back to my apt. But well worth it.

Wes Anderson and David Lynch on the McCain payroll?

I missed this before--apparently the reason McCain's low on cash is that he spent it all hiring big-shot film directors to shoot attack ads for him. Check it out:





Via Hannah.

(Cross-posted at the Posse.)

Election day predictions!

I'm going to keep my predictions positive but conservative: Obama wins, but not big--he gets 295 electoral votes (i.e., he wins NC but loses the other toss-ups). The Democrats pick up a few Senate seat for a total of 58, including Lieberman and Sanders but not including any comedians or best-sellers of factually slippery books calling people "lying liars" right in the title who then carpet-bagged it back to their "home state" they hadn't lived in for many many years and asked for the votes of a famously polite and non-presumptuous electorate. Democrats pick up 22 seats in the House.

Pestilence, war, and famine

Mark Silk has a good anecdote about the Christian Science Monitor, that excellent, independent, quirky, and recently online-only daily paper.

RIP Studs Terkel

The writer/activist/radio personality/music lover died today at 96. (Living in Chicago, always hoped I'd get to meet him at some point.) He understood something many people miss: that you can't really participate in improving the situation of marginalized people without taking the time to LISTEN to them.

Two observations about the evangelical landscape

First: This little number from Focus on the Family is outrageous and reeks of desperation. (Remember, Dobson himself hasn't endorsed a candidate...)

Second: Every single comment on the CT politics blog's post about this is critical of Focus. (The post itself, as is typical of Sarah Pulliam's fine work, stays neutral.)

Both obvious points, I know. But the point is this: as critical as I am of the evangelicals-go-Democratic media narrative, I'm pleased that people are finally understanding the ideological DIVERSITY of evangelicals, electoral realities aside. And was the distance between mainstream neo-evangelicals and right-wing culture warriors ever in sharper relief than in this CT thread?

Bush administration confirms separation between Bush administration and separation

Remember the to-do about Obama's version of what Karl Rove likes to call the "f***ing faith-based thing"? Some media-driven confusion as to whether BO plans to allow organizations receiving federal funding to use a religious litmus test for hiring decisions. (He doesn't.)

The current administration, to no one's surprise, sees things differently. But lest there be any doubt, the Justice Dept recently posted a memo from last year to its Web site.

Item: Is WBEZ pushing the prosperity quasi-Dharma?

Heard this week on my local NPR affiliate's pledge-drive chatter:

When I give to public radio, I do it knowing that I won't miss the money--because the good karma I get in return will more than make up for my donation.

This is what you get when the Elite Liberal Media starts paying more attention to evangelicals, Pentecostals, and garden-variety crazy-religious-provincials: the (shudder) prosperity quasi-Dharma. Makes the New Age scare of the 80s look like harmless self-help crap...