Sen. Sanders: Anyone want to get rid of the VA? I didn't think so.

I enjoyed this bit from Bernie Sanders. Complete w/ a nonsensical interjection from Sen. McCain....

Compared to what?

The congressional Republicans would like you to know just how complicated our health care system will be under the Democrats' proposed reforms. Yes, they've tried this trick before, but they're generally right: it'll be complicated.

But--like their claims that health care post-reform will cost a lot of money, that some of that money will go to bureaucrats, and that these bureaucrats will make decisions about allowing and preventing care--the Republicans tend to skip the part about how whatever bad thing they're describing IS ALREADY TRUE UNDER THE CURRENT SYSTEM. That's a fairly significant thing to leave out. (Someone should point it out to them; I'm sure it was an honest mistake they made! All those times, over and over again.)

Anyway, TNR has a good corrective: a chart showing how convoluted health care is right now. Oh nos! We can't give this up for something COMPLICATED!

Meanwhile, Jonathan Chait details how the Republicans aren't really acting like Republicans on health care--they're being awfully spendy. What they're acting like is health insurance lobbyists--e.g., by opposing cuts to Medicare and Medicaid payments. WTF? Here's Chait:

Conservatives certainly have understandable ideological reasons to oppose the Obama health care reform as a whole. It's the particulars of their opposition that arouse curiosity. The right has presented its opposition to health care reform as principled disagreement with "big government." But opposing "big government" can mean different things. Does it mean opposition to regulation? To spending? To the direct funding of public services as opposed to via private sector middlemen? The Republican Party and its ideological allies have defined it increasingly as whatever suits the profitability of the health care industry.

It's not that every conservative apparatchik is walking around Washington toting a suitcase of Pharma cash and a conspiratorial grin. Intellectual corruption doesn't work that way. The health care industry has spent vast sums to influence politicians and opinion leaders, mostly on the right. Health care is an issue where precious few conservatives have paid any attention to the details of policy. And the industry is a natural ally of the conservative goal of preventing single-payer health care. So the industry has managed to define its self-interest as the conservative position on health care.

And Jonathan Cohn reminds us to stop comparing our health care future to Canada and England, neither of which represents a model that's remotely on the table here, and to look instead at France and the Netherlands--countries whose citizens have no interest in trading places with us when it comes to health care.

Salmon vs. DeLong on stimulus

Felix Salmon: The economy's still bad. This means we spent too much on the stimulus bill, and any more will be useless.

Brad DeLong: That's "like sticking your toe into the ocean and pointing out that your hair is still dry."

That we may be several

The Episcopal bishops have voted to affirm gay and lesbian ordination. Now the resolution returns to the House of Delegates.

Anglicans in the Wilderness declares a "golden opportunity to pray online for The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion," adding the following:

For the sake of preserving an atmosphere of peace, when you come to pray we hope your prayers posted online will not presume or ask for any particular outcome at General Convention, nor preach on any hot-button issue.

Okay, fair enough. But then there's this from their Twitter feed, complete with a link to a not-exactly-neutral writeup:

Thank you Lord for the clarity of TEC's D025. Help us now to choose. Help us to decide rightly. http://bit.ly/kPYXi

Thank God for the clarity of confirming that TEC is apostate and deserves to be cut loose? That's a rather suspicious-sounding prayer. If your wish is to stay in communion with a TEC that doesn't ordain gays and lesbians, wouldn't the appropriate prayer be one of lament that the bishops decided this way, or petition that the House of Delegates will somehow decide the other way, rather than gratitude for CLARITY? If your goal is for the apostate liberals to be even more so and thus further marginalized, fine, but don't call that praying for the church.

Elsewhere, Mark Silk: "Give the Duncanites a couple of decades, and they'll be fighting over the ordination of gays and lesbians to.

"Cruising down Wilson / All up in my Prius"

Northern Virginia's Arlington County is an interesting specimen of urban-village planning, with walkable business districts and high-rise residential buildings built around subway stops. By no means a worst-case scenario when it comes to suburban living.

Still, this video (via FPR) about Arlington's yuppy-and-chain-store landscape is pretty funny:

Yet another reason not to shop at Trader Joe's

They're the 17th best Chicago-area grocery chain on sustainable seafood issues.

Safeway/Dominick's is fifth.

James Stambaugh's "Christianity must..." list

I don't think I'll ever agree 100 percent with someone else's list of what Christians need to believe / do / say / focus on / whatever. But James Stambaugh's 10 Things Christianity Must Do gets closer than most.

I'm not quite as absolutist as he is about either #3 or #8 on his list. But I think I'm pretty much with him on the rest of it. Take a look--good stuff.

Rick Warren among the Muslims

The latest episode in Rick Warren's ongoing effort to roughly alternate when he's pissing off liberals vs. his own base: he's speaking at the Islamic Society of North America's annual convention this weekend. On Our Nation's Birthday, no less!

Good for him.

God bless Barbara Ehrenreich

She's a fine writer who's devoted herself to writing about being poor in America. Astonishingly, this is a pretty rare thing.

Here she gets into something important, and overlooked: what does a recession, with its nouveau poor and its somewhat less rich, mean for people who were barely getting by--or weren't--in the first place?

Affording Harvard

This is a really cool idea.

Of course, a larger-scale solution might include reforming the federal student loan system itself, making schools get rid of legacy admissions, and promoting the Washington Monthly's college rankings over the U.S. News ones among the hiring classes. Just saying.

Ken Schenck on inerrancy

Ken Schenck has devoted a couple recent posts on his fine biblioblog to the different understandings of inerrancy that exist within Wesleyanism. (Obviously, we're in subtler territory here than with the "different understandings of faith that exist within evangelicalism!" topic recently so popular in the MSM.)

On the one hand, you have the Chicago Statement of the late 70s, which is formative for conservative reformed circles and the Evangelical Theological Society. On the other, Wesleyans--and others--have long affirmed inerrancy without endorsing or implying all the specifics the Chicago Statement gets into. In Schenck's second post, he gets into how specifically some of these details fall short in his view. It's good stuff. (The first [numbered] graf is from the statement itself; Schenck's comments follow.):

2. Scriptures are supreme. The authority of the Church is subordinate. Creeds, councils, declarations are of lesser authority.

Given the assumptions of the authors, I agree. I think the "Church" here is understood in a political sense--the political bodies of church history, not least the "Catholic church." I certainly do not think any political church holds such authority, and the creeds and councils are still political statements. In my opinion, however, when these authors say "Scriptures," they really mean the Bible read Christianly, the Bible read as Christian Scripture. They would disagree that they meant this, but in my opinion they cannot see their own glasses and how those glasses color their perspective.

From my point of view, these sorts of statements involve such subtle but significant misunderstandings of language that I almost don't know what to say. It poses as contradictory options things that, on deeper examination, I believe are virtually the same. I'll agree to it in the same way I agree when my son says something like, "So it's better to score a touchdown than strike out, right Dad?" What I'm thinking, though, is that he's a little confused.

In my opinion, so many of the meanings these signatories themselves found so authoritative in the text of Scripture were themselves products of their own Christian tradition. The signatories would deny that this is the case, but they do not properly see themselves, in my opinion.

The NIV is a wonderful example of the "say one thing, do another" dynamic I see necessary for this hermeneutic to sustain itself.

Say: We are listening to the Bible. Our interpretations come from the plain sense of the text. We are under the authority of the text and not letting the Church have a higher authority.

Do: Let's translate "form of God" as "very nature God" so the full divinity of Christ is not in question (Phil. 2:6)--is "shape" really the same as "very nature"?! Let's translate "firstborn of creation" with "firstborn over creation" (Col. 1:15) so there is no question of whether Jesus is created or not. Let's add a word out of nowhere to "did not give" so it reads "did not just give" (Jer. 7:22), even though there is no such word in the Hebrew--we don't want to leave any question about whether Leviticus was written at the time of the exodus. Let's add another word out of the blue so that "to the dead" reads "to those now dead" so there is no room for the dead being saved (1 Pet. 4:6)--Protestants don't believe such Catholic ideas. Again, let's add another word that isn't there in the original so that "is not concerned" reads "is not just concerned" so we give no room for allegorical interpretation in 1 Cor 9:9-10.

Most of these moves have no clear basis in the text and seems in each case to be motivated overwhelmingly to maintain the perspective of the neo-evangelical tradition, thus deconstructing the fundamental claims of this hermeneutic. When push comes to shove, those of the Chicago Statement approach consistently trump the most obvious meaning of the Bible with evangelical tradition, in my opinion.

The Church is something more profound and Spiritual than any of the specific creeds or councils... and the Church led by the Spirit is already assumed in much of what the crafters of this Statement call the "Scriptures."

I particularly like his example of the creation of the (CRC- and NAE-initiated, evangelical-usage-dominating) NIV. It's one thing for inerrantists to acknowledge the value of reading the Bible in original languages. It's quite another to confront the actual process of translation and its ideological undertones. Whether the NIV is a special case in this regard isn't the point, so much as the fact that we constantly read the Bible through particular lenses, even and especially when we deny--knowingly or otherwise--that we're doing so.

Via James McGrath.

Happy Father's Day! See you at work tomorrow, unless you can afford unpaid paternity leave.

Something I'd like for Father's Day (along with a church service that doesn't observe Father's Day): paid paternity and maternity leave. Most industrialized countries have it; we don't. I wrote about this (and paid sick days) for Utne awhile back. This week, EPI's indispensable Snapshots series highlighted the issue:


I don't think I'll get either of my wishes this year. Maybe cause I'm not a father yet? I'll get moving on that--this is important stuff. The ability of parents to spend time caring for and bonding with newborns without losing their income or their job is a family value, if anything is--unless, that is, family values only matter for people who can afford to keep one parent at home full-time and/or take unpaid leave.

Calling the kettle hateful and ignorant

If you're going to not only totalize and personally smear Prop 8 supporters but even go so far as to write hateful letters about them to their own neighbors, you ought to at least get your facts straight:

Last November, Jay Pimentel began hearing that people in his neighborhood were receiving letters about him. Pimentel lives in Alameda, Calif., a small, liberal-leaning community hanging off Oakland into the San Francisco Bay. Pimentel, who is a Mormon, had supported Proposition 8, the ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. And that made him a target. "Dear Neighbor," the letter began, "Our neighbors, Colleen and Jay Pimentel" — and it gave their address — "contributed $1,500.00 to the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign. NEIGHBORS SHOULD BE AWARE OF THEIR NEIGHBORS' CHOICES." The note accused the Pimentels of "obsessing about same-sex marriage." It listed a variety of local causes that recipients should support — "unlike the Pimentels."

Pimentel, a lawyer and a lay leader in the small Mormon congregation in Alameda, is markedly even-keeled. Yet the poison-pen note still steams him, even though in May the California Supreme Court validated Prop 8 as constitutional. He is bothered less by the revelation of his monetary contribution, which he stands by, than the fact that the letter's author didn't bother to find out that every other Saturday for 15 years, he or someone else from Alameda's 184-member Mormon ward has delivered a truckload of hot meals to the Midway Shelter for Abused and Homeless Women and Children — one of the organizations the Pimentels allegedly wouldn't support.

Read the whole article.

Nope, they're not going to tell us who they're talking to

This is disappointing. Where's that transparency you talked about, Obama?

For the last time: Fresh, local food isn't elitist; assuming that poor people don't want it is.

Until this weary critique goes away, we need good examples. Here's a great one.

Who's rationing, and what's being rationed?

Sens. McConnell and Kyl are cosponsoring a bill to prevent the federal government from rationing health care. Without such a measure, OMG IT COULD BE AS BAD AS CANADA!! (The press release even manages to work in a comparison to "socialized health-care systems.")

But why single out public insurance with your fear of rationing, when private insurers (actually, already) deny care to the people they cover all day long? Today's Leonhardt column details the various destructive ways care is being rationed now. ("The choice isn’t between rationing and not rationing. It’s between rationing well and rationing badly.") And Ezra points to the fact that the factor by which more Canadians than Americans have to wait for care is about the same as the factor by which more Americans than Canadians AVOID care because it's too expensive. He and others have pointed to this study before--it's from 2001--but this doesn't keep the rationing boogey man from remaining a political winner.

If the Republicans think not having to wait in line awhile for elective surgery is more important than ensuring that lower-income people can have surgery at all, they should say so. Of course, they won't--they'll just keep whining about how Americans want to make their own health decisions, with their doctors, instead of having some big government bureaucracy tell them what care they can and can't have access to. They won't mention that a big PRIVATE bureaucracy is already doing this, a lot.

Jonathan Cohn asked both senators this morning whether they'd like to outlaw rationing for private insurers, too. He hasn't gotten a reply yet.

Quick quiz: FotF succession edition

Question: Does this nugget from Focus on the Family's new CEO--

Daly says he is results-oriented, not an ideologue.

"When those who are right, left and center all say, 'Let's make abortion rare,' let's meet at that starting point," Daly said. "Let's shove off the rhetoric and get together on practical matters."

--prove any of the following?

• OMG, the religious right is dead!
• Most evangelicals are totally moderates!
• The religious right is very much alive, Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo just use their "hey, we should do something about all the poor people!" shtick to distract from the fact that they're totally part of it, and now they've got their man at Focus!

Or is it just that, along with (perhaps) not being a blowhard and a bully, Daly's a bit savvier than Dobson?

Monsanto's unbiased thoughts on Monsanto

So I'm looking forward to seeing the movie Food, Inc., which opens in Chicago this Friday.

Big ag's naturally less excited about the film, a sort of feature-length primer on all things food movement. Monsanto has a blog, called Monsanto According to Monsanto. Why? Hey, they're glad you asked:

The title Monsanto According to Monsanto is a spoof of The World According to Monsanto, a horribly biased documentary which portrays Monsanto in a very negative light. Aside from the shoddy journalism, we at Monsanto found it incredibly arrogant that the filmmaker would present her own twisted view of Monsanto as the company’s view of the world.

Unfortunately there’s no shortage of people, particularly on the internet, who have taken it upon themselves to speak about Monsanto – what the company is, what it does, and why. Many of these folks have their own agendas. If anyone should speak to Monsanto’s vision of the world, it’s those of us who come to work here every day and collectively make this company what it is. This is the main reason for this blog.

"Particularly on the internet"! Nothing like using a blog to imply that teh internets aren't credible. But more importantly: WTF? Seems to me that what's really arrogant is talking down to us internets readers to the point of suggesting that we might actually believe that "those of us who come to work here every day and collectively make this company what it is"--i.e., staffers paid to write spin pieces--are "folks" with less of an agenda than a documentary filmmaker has.

At any rate, via Ethicurean, intrepid citizen blogger Monsanto According to Monsanto is shocked--shocked!--that Food, Inc.'s Robert Kenner would criticize Monsanto for prohibiting its seed buyers from saving seeds. Mr. Kenner! Don't you care about intellectual property, sir? If not, I guess you won't mind if people bootleg your nice little movie, will you?

Hmm. The fact that Monsanto's seeds are corporate intellectual property, and not, say, something occurring in nature, is of course a big part of the problem. That aside, an "ooh! I think I see a hypocrite!" gotcha like this is a silly distraction. The problem with Monsanto et al is that they're destroying our health, our planet, and peoples' livelihoods. One way they do this is by forcing farmers to buy new seeds every year. Kenner can't credibly criticize this without immediately putting his film in the public domain? That's absurd, a comparison that depends on very narrow terms of conversation.

Big ag's mounting a major defensive, and it's going to take a lot of work to keep them from defining the debate. Bonnie does a good job in the comments here--take a look at the back and forth she gets into w/ a Monsanto employee. (You can tell he's one of the cool kids and not some corporate goon because he has a South Park avatar!)

DC's homeless homeless advocate

Via Ann Fontaine, a great All Things Considered story about a homeless advocate who is himself homeless.

This is the most interesting and moving thing I've seen about homelessness since this guy's art (via Jeff Severns Guntzel).

"We'll ask the lord to forgive us for all our sins / And we’ll look at the latest in gold-plated firing pins"

I posted briefly earlier this week on a Louisville pastor's "open carry celebration" at his church.

Now Gary Stern's covered the story--and added a nicely illustrative (if unsubtly ironic) concert video by the Beat Farmers. Here's "Gun Sale at the Church":

Who's to blame and who's responsible for fixing it

Wednesday's David Leonhardt column is terrific for its clarity and fairness. His two "basic truths" about the deficit:

The first is that President Obama's agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.

Here he goes through the methodology. And here's a pie chart by Matt Yglesias:

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:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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:

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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
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

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.