Monday, January 21, 2013 1:31:28 AM
How the NRA Became an Organization for Aspiring Vigilantes (Part 1)
January 9, 2013
http://www.thenation.com/blog/172100/how-nra-became-organization-aspiring-vigilantes-part-1 [with comments]
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How the NRA Became an Organization for Aspiring Vigilantes (Part 2)
January 10, 2013
http://www.thenation.com/blog/172125/how-nra-became-organization-aspiring-vigilantes-part-2 [with comments]
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The Suprising Unknown History of the NRA
For most of its history, the NRA supported gun control laws and did not see government as the enemy.
January 13, 2013
http://www.alternet.org/suprising-unknown-history-nra [ http://www.alternet.org/suprising-unknown-history-nra?paging=off ] [with comments]
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The Sandy Hook Shooting - Fully Exposed
First off I would like to thank the users that contributed to this video, including IDAHOPICKER, MAX MALONE and OneTruth4Life. this is not meant to offend anyone but merely to raise questions that need to be answered. I am not pointing the finger because there is too much confusion, but it seems something is going on!
LINKS:
Helicopter footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9YwnXAtm4k
Multiple Shooters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7pT0nKxgqY
Medical Examiner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV3KYBS64R8
Gene Rosen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alp64daGTSohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFyexz_IuHE
Facebook Page DEC 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyJ0Nl5lpOg
Robbie Parker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKWgCRBR5qE
Obama Pics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSnhYMaGYuY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHv_RhVgfUQ
FEMA drills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlWi97yBRAc
Sites up before shooting : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSUAXBChnbE
Nurse Sally Cox - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIz-Nx_RV0g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx9GxXYKx_8
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Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theory Video Debunked By Experts
01/17/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/sandy-hook-conspiracy-theory-video-debunked_n_2487427.html [with the conspiracy theory video itself just above and an additional video report embedded, and comments]
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Why we can’t ignore the truthers
Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists aren't going to go away if we pretend they don't exist
Jan 18, 2013
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/18/why_we_cant_ignore_the_truthers/ [with comments]
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Your comprehensive answer to every Sandy Hook conspiracy theory
Every conspiratorial allegation about the tragic Newtown shootings, answered
Jan 18, 2013
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/18/your_comprehensive_answer_to_every_sandy_hook_conspiracy_theory/ [with comments]
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Shifting 'Liberal' Attitudes On 'Gun Culture' Are Entirely The Fault Of Three Guys On The Internet Who Went To A Gun Range, Apparently
01/18/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/17/liberal-gun-culture-internet-range_n_2496966.html [with comments]
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Tim Donnelly, Republican Legislator, Says Guns Are 'Essential To Living The Way God Intended'
Tim Donnelly believes that gun are "essential to living the way God intended." Here, discusses a bill before the Assembly in Sacramento, Calif., Friday, Aug. 31, 2012.
(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
[ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/17/california-lawmaker-guns-are-essential-to-living-the-way-god-intended/ ]
By Cavan Sieczkowski
Posted: 01/18/2013 2:59 pm EST | Updated: 01/18/2013 4:54 pm EST
A California Republican legislator, who is a vocal opponent of President Barack Obama's gun control proposal, believes that guns are "essential to living the way God intended."
Assemblyman Tim Donnelly called in to the AM740 KBRITE Christian radio show, "The Bottom Line [ http://www.kbrt740.com/ ]," to discuss gun control on Wednesday, when he revealed that he believes firearms are part of God's plan [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/01/18/1467621/california-guns-god/ ].
“Guns are used an average of 3 million times a year according to the Clinton Justice Department,” Donnelly said via RawStory. “That’s like 6,900 times a day. That’s the high end of the statistics. Other people say it’s only 200 times a day. Whatever that number is, they are used to defend human life. They are used to defend our property and our families and our faith and our freedom, and they are absolutely essential to living the way God intended for us to live [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/17/california-lawmaker-guns-are-essential-to-living-the-way-god-intended/ ].”
Annie-Rose Strasser of ThinkProgress notes that Donnelly's "God and guns" argument [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/01/18/1467621/california-guns-god/ ] can be disputed by Bible verses pointing to the notion that "life should focus on family, not firearms."
Isaiah 2:4 [ http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+2%3A4&version=ESV ], for example, reads thus: “He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore."
Many religious people have mobilized against guns recently. On Jan. 15, a group of 45 clergy and heads of religious organizations headed to Capitol Hill to petition lawmakers to reinstitute a ban on assault weapons [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/religious-leaders-gun-lobby_n_2485886.html ], require background checks and make illegal weapons trafficking a federal crime.
Just two days after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, the dean of the Washington National Cathedral, Rev. Gary Hall, alluded to scripture to promote his pro-gun control [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/national-cathedral-gun-control-rev-gary-hall_n_2313328.html ] stance. He preached a passage from the Gospel of Luke in which John the Baptist addresses a crowd that comes to him out of desperation.
"What does he say to them?" asked Hall at the Dec. 16 service. "'Bear fruits worthy of repentance.' [3: 10-14] What he means is: stop doing the crazy thing you’re doing and do a new thing, a new thing that will bear fruit, that will bring about the change you seek."
As for Donnelly, he does not only advocate for guns, but he has also been know to carry them. Illegally.
Last January, he was detained by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for trying to bring a loaded Colt .45 handgun with four rounds onto a flight [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/calif-lawmaker-cited-afte_n_1184620.html ], the Associated Press reported. The gun was discovered in the Christian legislator's carry-on bag as he went through screening at Ontario International Airport. A magazine with five additional rounds was also found.
Donnelly didn't have a permit to carry a concealed weapon, permission he should have obtained from the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, according to the AP. He claimed he had the gun with him because of death threats he had previously received.
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Related
The NRA's Dangerous Theology
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/the-nras-dangerous-theolo_b_2505401.html
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Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/18/tim-donnelly-god-guns-essential-republican_n_2505537.html [with embedded clip with audio of Donnelly's statements, and comments]
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Edward Avery, Former Priest, Allegedly Made Boy Do Striptease, Said 'This Is What God Wants'
Edward Avery
By MARYCLAIRE DALE
01/15/13 06:55 PM ET EST
PHILADELPHIA — A policeman's son testified Tuesday that he withdrew from friends, sports and school clubs, and began a long descent into heroin addiction, after he was molested by two priests and a Catholic school teacher by age 11.
The gaunt, troubled 24-year-old has become a key figure in the decade-long prosecution of priest sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Tuesday marked the second time he's testified in open court, but he'll likely face his first cross-examination on Wednesday.
His stunning complaint, filed in 2009, led to last year's landmark child-endangerment conviction of a Philadelphia church official who transferred accused pedophile-priests to new parishes at the behest of two archbishops.
According to the trial witness Tuesday, defrocked priest Edward Avery made him do a striptease dance and engage in oral sex after a Saturday afternoon Mass in 1999.
"He just sat there with this eerie smile. Like he wouldn't want to be anywhere else but there," the accuser testified. "He said, `This is what God wants.'"
The accuser said he walked home afterward and took a shower.
Avery has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the impish, slightly built altar boy. But the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, 66, of Wyndmoor and ex-teacher Bernard Shero, 49, of Levittown are fighting the charges at trial.
Jurors saw boyhood pictures of the witness in his school uniform and altar boy cassock, a sunny contrast to the man with brooding eyes and a flat affect before them. His monotone voice wavered only once or twice, when he acknowledged that he was too young to understand the sexual acts that allegedly unfolded in church anterooms or a parked car.
He said he was first abused at St. Jerome's Parish in northeast Philadelphia after Engelhardt caught the 10-year-old drinking altar wine. And he said Shero sexually assaulted him when he drove the boy home after detention.
Defense lawyers will no doubt attack inconsistencies between his testimony and that of other witnesses when the trial resumes Wednesday. They include somewhat different takes on an alleged disclosure to a high school friend as the two drank beer in 10th grade, and of their discussion when they ran into each other at a bar last year. The friend said that he first asked if anything had come out of the topic they'd discussed, while the accuser said he had brought it up. And the accuser said he had forgotten telling the friend about it.
Both discussions occurred while they were drinking, as the defense lawyers noted.
One has called priests "a bull's-eye" for dubious accusers looking for a church payout.
Avery, who moonlighted as a disc jockey and was nicknamed "the Smiling Padre," is expected to testify for the government during the weeks-long trial.
Before his transfer to St. Jerome's, he admitted to church officials that he had fondled a teen accuser, according to church documents aired at the trial of the church official, Monsignor William Lynn. Avery's testimony would be his first in open court about the priest-abuse scandal.
It's not clear if he'd be asked about a string of other accusers who have come forward since his 2011 arrest. He has not been charged in those cases.
The accuser was expelled from a Catholic high school in ninth grade and asked to leave a private Christian school two years later. He said he now works for relatives in Florida, and, after 23 stints at rehab, has been sober for 12 months.
He told jurors that he didn't tell his parents about the abuse because he thought he'd get in trouble. He described the priests and nuns at his school as "almighty."
"They're basically another parent, but a little holier," he said.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/edward-avery-striptease-this-is-what-god-wants_n_2486136.html [with comments]
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Matthew Rader, Oregon Man, Allegedly Tattooed Name Near Underage Girl's Vagina
01/16/2013
A 30-year-old Oregon man who allegedly tattooed his name near the vagina of a teenaged girl faces charges, including third-degree rape.
An affidavit filed in Oregon's Benton County Court states that the victim, who has not been publicly identified, told police that Matthew Abram Rader [ http://www.kval.com/news/local/Police-Man-tattooed-girls-vagina-with-his-name-for-her-15th-birthday-186229442.html ] gave her three tattoos for her 15th birthday, including one of his name "near her vagina."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/matthew-rader-oregon-tattooed-vagina_n_2489100.html [with comments]
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Preacher killed wife, stuffed body in freezer, police say
updated 4:26 p.m. EDT, Thu July 31, 2008
(CNN) -- An evangelical preacher killed his wife several years ago and stuffed her body in a freezer after she caught him abusing their daughter, according to police and court documents.
Anthony Hopkins, 37, was arrested Monday night at the Inspirational Tabernacle Church of God in Christ in Jackson, Alabama, just after he had delivered a sermon to a congregation that included his seven other children, officials said.
He faces charges including murder, rape, sodomy, sexual abuse and incest.
Hopkins was denied bail Thursday when he appeared before Mobile County District Judge George Hardesty. The case is set for arraignment next week, Hardesty's clerk said.
The case began Monday, when the daughter, now 19, went to the Mobile Police Department's Child Advocacy Center and reported that she had been sexually abused by Hopkins since she was 11 years old, according to an affidavit filed in support of a search warrant of the preacher's home in Mobile.
The affidavit related the daughter's story as follows:
Her mother, Arletha Hopkins, 36, caught her father abusing her in a bathroom in November 2004. Afterward, her parents argued, and her mother locked her father out of the house. The father came to the daughter's window and asked her to let him in, and she did so.
The next morning, her father asked her to help him hide her mother's body in the freezer in the laundry room of the home.
The girl said she moved out of the home about two weeks ago and was living with a neighbor. She told police that her mother's body was still in the freezer.
When authorities went to the home, no one was there, as Hopkins and the other children were at the church. A body was found in the freezer, the affidavit says.
Although police think the body is that of Arletha Hopkins, an identification is not expected until early next week, Mobile Police spokesman Officer Eric Gallichant said Thursday. Watch Nancy Grace's report »
Mobile Police Chief Phillip Garrett had said that an identification and autopsy results would take a few days: "obviously, the body was in a freezer."
He said he was not sure of the body's condition or whether it was intact, as upon seeing the body, authorities immediately sealed the chest-type freezer. The body had been covered in the unit, he said, and the entire appliance was taken to the state Department of Forensic Science.
At the Inspirational Tabernacle Church of God in Christ, Hopkins was preaching at a revival, pastor Beverly Jackson told CNN affiliate WKRG. His message, she said, was about forgiveness and not passing judgment -- and at one point, he turned to his seven children and asked them to forgive him his past, present and future.
Police allowed Hopkins to finish his sermon before arresting him, Jackson said. She said she asked police why they were arresting him and was told, "he murdered his wife."
She said Hopkins had told her his wife died four years ago while giving birth to their youngest son.
Attempts to reach Jackson on Thursday were unsuccessful.
Authorities moved quickly on the daughter's accusations to make sure the children still in the household were OK, Garrett said. They were placed in the custody of child welfare authorities. The next-oldest child is a 17-year-old female, he said.
All eight were the children of Arletha Hopkins, and Anthony Hopkins fathered six of them, he said.
An investigation has not found any record of Arletha Hopkins' existence since 2004, according to the affidavit. Asked how long police think the body had been in the freezer, Garrett said, "I'm thinking that she's probably been there for a number of years."
He said Anthony Hopkins did not have a regular church but apparently preached in various areas around the South.
"Part of the mystery here is that, apparently, none of these children were in school" but were being home-schooled, Mobile County District Attorney John Tyson said. "Home schooling, under this situation, removes almost any chances of us catching up with these kinds of things until there is a catastrophe."
Pastor Jerry Porter said he used to preach with Hopkins at his church, the Williams Street Holiness Church, and knew the family.
Arletha Hopkins "was very quiet," he told Mobile television station and CNN affiliate WPMI. "She was kind of secluded. She'd talk, but not much."
Anthony Hopkins, he said, made statements that led him to believe all was not well at home. "He always used to tell me ... 'You're blessed in the fact that you have a wife that supports you and what you're trying to do for God,' " Porter said.
He said Arletha Hopkins disappeared shortly after the couple's youngest child was born. As rumors swirled, Porter said, he confronted Hopkins and asked whether his wife was dead. Hopkins "wouldn't give me an answer," he said.
After that, Porter said, he banned him from the church but remained on good terms with him.
He said he visited the family a few years ago, and their home was clean and well-kept.
"It was the ideal family. I mean, the children were so respectful, just so easygoing," Porter said. "Didn't seem to be no stress at all. Never got that impression, never."
The children, he said, "loved their dad. They were very close to him."
Of Hopkins' preaching ability, Porter said, "he was a bulls-eye prophet. If he told you something, you could pretty much bank on it."
© 2008 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/07/31/preacher.freezer/index.html
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Preacher guilty of killing wife, putting body in freezer
Anthony Hopkins guilty on all counts of murder, rape, sodomy, sex abuse and incest.
April 10, 2010
http://www2.alabamas13.com/news/2010/apr/10/preacher_guilty_of_killing_wife_putting_body_in_fr-ar-398471/
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Body Stolen From Detroit Cemetery, 2 Men Arrested
Authorities say a casket containing the body of 93-year-old Clarence Bright was stolen from Gethsemane Cemetery, seen Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2013 in Detroit. Police say two men have been arrested, including a 48-year-old reported to be the son of the deceased, on suspicion that they stole a Bright's body and casket from the cemetery on Monday.
(AP Photo/Ed White)
01/15/13 07:22 PM ET EST
DETROIT — A man who was arrested in the theft of his father's corpse from a Detroit cemetery stored the body in a freezer after a weekend funeral, hoping for it to be miraculously resurrected, police said Tuesday.
Clarence Bright's 48-year-old religious son was arrested along with another man after officers found an empty casket inside their van at a gas station, Detroit police said.
"This is a very, very bizarre situation," Leon Jones, a mortician's assistant at Swanson Funeral Home, told The Associated Press. The funeral home handled Bright's funeral.
Bright's final earthly journey was supposed to end Saturday at Gethsemane Cemetery on Detroit's east side, but soggy ground from recent rain postponed the 93-year-old's burial. The casket was placed near a chapel or a mausoleum on cemetery grounds and remained there through Monday morning when it was reported stolen, Jones said.
Acting on a tip that a white van had been seen at the cemetery, police spotted one parked at a gas station Tuesday – the men and the empty casket were inside, Officer George Day said.
The body was later found in a freezer at the home of Bright's son, Lt. Harold Rochon told The Detroit News ( http://bit.ly/ZUviFC [ http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130115/METRO01/301150372/Police-Brothers-took-dad-s-body-from-Detroit-cemetery-miracle-resurrection ]).
"In the interview with the son, he was very, very, very distraught," Rochon said. "He is very religious, and he was hoping his father would be resurrected. He was hoping for a miracle."
Police declined to release the names of Bright's son or the 38-year-old man who was with him. They had not been charged and the theft remained under investigation.
Across the street from the home where the body was found, 36-year-old Terri Gaines said she didn't have much contact with Bright's son.
"He's so quiet. He just goes in and out. He never had company," Gaines told the AP.
Jones said there was nothing unusual at the weekend funeral.
"People come in, they're grieving," he said. "We just try to comfort people."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/body-stolen-detroit-cemetery_n_2479780.html [with comments]
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Pastor to replace Alabama preacher accused of killing wife
In this 2011 photo, United Methodist Minister Rev. Terry Greer preaches as a guest speaker at First Baptist Church during Easter Holy Week in Decatur, Ala. Greer fatally shot his wife and wounded their 18-year-old daughter in their church-owned home before grabbing a kitchen knife and trying to stab himself to death, police said Friday, Jan. 11, 2013.
(AP Photo/The Decatur Daily, John Godbey)
GARDENDALE, Ala. (AP) — North Alabama Methodists have named an interim pastor to replace a preacher charged with murder in the slaying of his wife.
Bill Bostick will take over at Gardendale-Mt. Vernon United Methodist Church beginning Thursday.
Bostick's appointment was announced by Debra Wallace-Padgett, the United Methodist bishop for north Alabama.
The former pastor at Gardendale-Mt. Vernon, the Rev. Terry Greer, is recovering from what police describe as a suicide attempt after the gunshot killing [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/police-ala-pastor-killed-wife-wounded-daughter-18195065 ] of his wife, Lisa Greer.
Authorities charged Greer with murder in the killing. He's also charged with attempted murder in the wounding of his 18-year-old daughter.
Authorities haven't disclosed a possible motive in the shooting, but Greer has had health problems.
Methodist leaders have suspended Greer from his ministerial duties, but he remains a Methodist pastor.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/viewart/20130117/NEWS/130117005/Pastor-replace-Alabama-preacher-accused-killing-wife [no comments yet]
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Notre Dame’s real dead woman
(Credit: AP/Joe Raymond)
Manti Te'o's soap opera moves the school's athletic director to tears, while Lizzy Seeberg's suicide is ignored
By Irin Carmon
Thursday, Jan 17, 2013 09:53 AM CST
Less than a day into the Manti Te’o revelations, we’ve heard more about a fake dead girlfriend of a Notre Dame football player than a real dead girl. Lizzy Seeberg committed suicide, not long after being intimidated by Notre Dame football players for reporting a sexual assault by one of their teammates. A second woman who was taken to the hospital for a rape exam declined to formally accuse another Notre Dame football player after getting a series of bullying texts from players.
The handful of people who immediately [ https://twitter.com/amaditalks/status/291716624933875712 ] took [ https://twitter.com/anamariecox/status/291894541110358016 ] note [ https://twitter.com/studentactivism/status/291723795843145729 ] of the contrast in the attention — both by the press and by the university — are absolutely right to be angry. But no one should be surprised.
We don’t know everything about the Te’o saga yet, but there is probably only one fake dead girlfriend mythologized by the sports media, the existence of “Catfish”-ing as a verb notwithstanding. Whereas there are legions of stories of sexual violence against women and men by star athletes and staff, who can reliably count on the impunity offered by fandom. Confronting the former is a little embarrassing: The public equivalent of loving too much, the allure of a heartwarming story everyone wanted to believe. Confronting the latter requires uglier, more difficult self-examination, and accepting collective responsibility costs more.
It matters, too, how we can talk about each story. Some Manti Te’o Twitter jokes were instant classics; no one decent can make jokes about a girl who killed herself after being told, “Don’t do anything you would regret,” and “Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea,” according to Melinda Henneberger’s reporting [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2012/12/04/why-i-wont-be-cheering-for-old-notre-dame/ ]. Henneberger, a Notre Dame alum, wrote in the Washington Post in early December that she won’t be cheering for the team. “As a thought exercise, how many predators would have to be on the team before you’d no longer feel like cheering?” she wrote. (She also said, “There are plenty of good guys on the team, too, I’m repeatedly told, And oh, that Manti Te’o [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/linebacker-teo-says-if-he-wins-heisman-trophy-it-would-be-a-victory-for-all-defensive-players/2012/11/29/4c8ed656-3a7a-11e2-9258-ac7c78d5c680_story.html (story now gone missing)] is inspiring. I don’t doubt it.” Very few did.) It’s easier to just change the subject and not think about whether there is something endemic to football culture that enables sexual entitlement with the reasonable assumption of getting away with it.
We all have heard by now how denial and institutional culture contributed to Jerry Sandusky’s ability to continue assaulting young boys for years, under cover of the Penn State football program. But once that was exposed, it was rightly considered an unambiguous evil. But the sexual assault of women can and is often explained away — including the Notre Dame donor who justified his continued support to Henneberger by saying that Seeberg had been sexually aggressive, that “she was all over the boy.” In other words, it’s not just the players who are banding together around their brothers whether they’re rapists or not; it’s the adults around them who are turning a blind eye because they consider other things are more important. And they’re willing to believe anything except that these nice boys can be rapists.
Dave Zirin, who has long called [ http://www.thenation.com/blog/156708/ncaa-should-shut-down-notre-dames-football-program ] for the Notre Dame football program to be shut down as irredeemably corrupt, pointed out that the university had hired a private investigator for the Te’o case but not the numerous other allegations of wrongdoing by players. Zirin said of the school’s athletic director, “It says so much that Te’o’s bizarre soap opera has moved [Jack] Swarbrick to openly weeping but he hasn’t spared one tear, let alone held one press conference, for Lizzy Seeberg … The problem at Notre Dame is not just football players without a compass; it’s the adults without a conscience.” We live in a country that officially condemns rape and sexual assault but when confronted with the real possibility of it, rarely strays from denial and excuses. That’s the biggest scam of all.
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/notre_dames_double_standard/ [with comments]
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Rush’s latest abortion idiocy
Rush Limbaugh
(Credit: AP/Chris Carlson)
The shock jock offers a new plan to stop abortion -- and takes conservative trolling to previously unknown heights
By Katie Mcdonough
Thursday, Jan 17, 2013 02:51 PM CST
There really isn’t much to say about Rush Limbaugh anymore. Barely a day passes without hearing about some new, horrible thing he said.
And obviously, since you’re reading this, today is no different.
After a rousing bit of back and forth with a caller on gun control (“If you have gun control laws, the law-abiding will be the only people that don’t have guns!“), Limbaugh launched into a new theory about how to ban abortion in the United States.
By suggesting doctors perform them with guns.
Partial transcript [ http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/01/16/revenge_on_the_bitter_clingers ] below (bold text mine):
RUSH: That’s true. I’ve often wondered, what is so hard for the left to understand about that? By definition, if you have gun control laws, the law-abiding will be the only people that don’t have guns. In fact, the most stringent gun control laws in the country today are DC and New York and they’ve got the highest crime rates with guns. Doesn’t that tell them something? So it must be something not to do with guns. It’s gotta be about something totally different than gun control.
CALLER: I think it does. It’s just terrible that 26 people died in Sandy Hook and 20 of them were children. Terrible. Very sad, coming up to Christmas. Hopes and dreams the young children had, their parents and weddings and congratulations that will never occur. However, on any given day in America, more than 3,000 children are killed from abortion, and we have no problems with that. We’re okay with that; it’s not an issue.
You can’t spend 40 years telling people and telling children that if I make a mistake — if something comes up and this child that I don’t want is in the way of my future and the way of me graduating high school, is in the way of me going to college, is the way of me being happy, is in the way of whatever I want out of life — then it’s okay for me to kill the baby. But later on when I become a disgruntled employee, when I become an unhappy student at school because children are bullying me, then I want to eliminate them to get them out of the way? It’s the same concept.
RUSH: Well, it’s a good point. You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun.
END TRANSCRIPT
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/rushs_latest_abortion_idiocy/ [with comments]
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Vatican Welcomes Obama Gun Control Proposal
01/19/13 10:16 AM ET EST
VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican praised President Barack Obama's proposals for curbing gun violence, saying they are a "step in a right direction."
The Vatican's chief spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Saturday that 47 religious leaders have appealed to members of the U.S. Congress "to limit firearms that are making society pay an unacceptable price in terms of massacres and senseless deaths."
"I am with them," Lombardi said, in an editorial carried on Vatican Radio, lining up the Vatican's moral support in favor of firearm limits.
`'The initiatives announced by the American administration for limiting and controlling the spread and use of weapons are certainly a step in the right direction," Lombardi said.
Obama is trying to rally support for reinstating a ban on assault weapons and requiring background checks on all gun sales. He faces stiff opposition in the U.S. Congress and from powerful gun lobbies.
Considering that Americans possess `'about 300 million firearms," Lombardi said, `'people cannot fool themselves that it is enough to limit the number and use (of guns) to impede in the future horrendous massacres like that of Newtown that shook the conscience of America and world, as well as that of children and adults. `'
He was referring to the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school where 20 children and six adults were killed by a sole attacker last month.
`'But it would be worse to be satisfied with words" of condemnation alone, Lombardi said. And while massacres are `'carried out by unbalanced or hate-driven persons, there is no doubt that they are carried out with firearms," the Vatican spokesman said.
Lombardi renewed Vatican appeals for disarmament and encouragement for measures to fight "the production, commerce and contraband of all types of arms," an industry fueled by `'enormous economic and power interests."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/19/vatican-gun-control-_n_2510885.html [with comments]
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Rand Paul Repeats Debunked Obamacare Conspiracy Theory, Claim 'Databanks' Spy On Gun Owners
Rand Paul has now recycled an old -- and untrue -- myth that claims Obamacare will be used to spy on gun owners.
By Meredith Bennett-Smith
Posted: 01/18/2013 6:58 pm EST | Updated: 01/19/2013 9:31 am EST
A nutty conspiracy theory involving doctors gathering intelligence on gun-owning patients in advance of a mass gun-confiscation plan has cropped up again after being touted Wednesday by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
Speaking with evangelical leader Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, the outspoken Paul claimed that the President was "going to use Obamacare apparently to have doctors informing on their patients to whether or not they have guns," and then store the information in "government databanks [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/rand-paul-pushes-conspiracy-theory-obamacare-databanks-gather-information-gun-owners ]," reports Right Wing Watch.
Perkins said he, too, had read of this plan to have doctors acting as informants and had been "just flabbergasted."
Paul appears to be referring to a general theory that, in one form or another, has been making the rounds in conservative groups ever since the Gun Owners of America warned in 2009 that Obamacare "could be used to ban guns in home self-defense [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/11/23/reality-check-health-insurance-reform-not-a-guns-bill ]." At the time, PolitiFact dismissed the claim as false [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/20/gun-owners-america/gun-rights-group-says-health-care-bill-could-harm-/ ], but Gun Owners of America Executive Director Larry Pratt resurrected the theories in November, telling VCY America’s "Crosstalk" that Obamacare and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were conspiring to disarm Americans [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pratt-obamacare-take-away-your-guns ].
Said Pratt:
[Obamacare] says that all of our medical records are available to be pawed through by bureaucrats somewhere in Washington, looking for a reason to disenfranchise gun owners, to say ‘oh you have a medical diagnosis that means you might be a danger to yourself or others so we’re going to come and knock on the door for the BATF to take away your guns.
Radio personality Rush Limbaugh has apparently also joined the debate. On his show this week, Limbaugh said that wording in Obama's executive gun control package [ http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/01/16/regime_deputizes_gun_snitch_doctors ] means "your doctor has essentially been deputized."
"Again, folks, this is pushing people's buttons on purpose," Limbaugh added. "This is gonna cause some people to snap. It might."
More credibly, Fox News wrote a long story Thursday [ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/17/does-white-house-plan-enlist-doctors-in-gun-control-fight/ ] that quoted National Rifle Association President David Keene as saying, "The idea that your doctor would ask you if you have firearms in your house as part of an examination of your health is repugnant."
Fox News noted, however, that much of the language that has been seized on is "in line with the policy of most states. All but a few allow mental health professionals to report information about patients they believe may become violent."
And the site also clarified that while the 2010 Affordable Care Act "does not prohibit doctors from asking about firearms, the law states that the government cannot require that information to be disclosed either," and the information cannot be used to raise insurance rates.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/18/rand-paul-obamacare-conspiracy-theory-databanks-spy-gun-owners_n_2506535.html [with comments]
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Ind. man shoots himself while leaving gun show
Updated 3:46 pm, Saturday, January 19, 2013
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Police say a 54-year-old Indianapolis man was injured when he accidentally shot himself while leaving a gun show.
Indiana State Police say Emory L. Cozee was loading his .45 caliber semi-automatic when he shot himself in the hand Saturday afternoon as he was leaving the Indy 1500 Gun and Knife show at the state fairgrounds.
Loaded personal weapons are not allowed inside the show.
Cozee was taken to Wishard Hospital for treatment.
Police say the shooting was accidental and no charges will be filed.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.seattlepi.com/news/us/article/Ind-man-shoots-himself-while-leaving-gun-show-4208362.php [with comment]
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Fear of Feds Leads to Nullification Fever in SC
In this Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2013 photo, Dick LoBue looks through his signs at a rally to support a bill to nullify the new health care law supported by President Barack Obama in Columbia, S.C. The bill is one of several pieces of legislation in South Carolina designed to go around federal laws.
(AP Photo/Jeffrey Collins)
By JEFFREY COLLINS
COLUMBIA, S.C. January 20, 2013
A politician told a crowd of several hundred people at South Carolina's Statehouse that they didn't have to accept overreaching laws from an out-of-control federal government — arguing the Constitution says so.
"My objective over the next four years, every day I walk into that Senate chamber, is to find another way I can thwart federal encroachment," the politician thundered to the cheers of the crowd.
It wasn't John C. Calhoun calling for South Carolina to stop collecting federal tariffs in the 1830s. It was state Sen. Tom Davis earlier this month, supporting a bill that would declare the new health care law supported by President Barack Obama illegal in the state. The bill, the subject of a "Nullify Obamacare" rally on the opening day for the Legislature, said anyone trying to enforce it would be guilty of a felony.
Health care isn't the only reason South Carolina lawmakers aren't happy with the federal government. Over the past two years, lawmakers have suggested the state should be able to ignore federal laws on gun control and light bulbs, mint its own currency and refuse all stimulus money.
The proposals haven't gotten a lot of traction in the state Senate or across the hall and past the statue of Calhoun in the House. But they get a certain segment of Republican voters excited — a segment that will be critical to anyone mounting a primary challenge to Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham in 2014. Davis has said Graham needs to go because he isn't conservative enough, but he hasn't committed to run himself.
"This state has a proud tradition of leaders stepping up and holding aloft the candle of liberty at a time when things are darkest," said Davis, R-Beaufort. "We have to rise to that challenge now."
Nullification is a loaded word in South Carolina. While various states considered it in this country's first few decades, the state was the first to push the federal government to the brink. In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson threatened to send the entire U.S. Army to South Carolina if the state nullified a tariff that many residents felt protected Northern industry at the expense of Southern farmers.
Jackson said if one drop of blood was shed, he would hang the first supporter of nullification he found in the first tree he passed. The issue split Jackson and Calhoun, who was his vice president in his first term, but things simmered down after a compromise tariff was reached.
In 2013, the issue remains dissatisfaction with the federal government, even if the root causes are different. Anger over federal regulations that ended manufacturing of incandescent 100-watt bulbs led to the proposal that those types of bulbs made and sold in South Carolina might be exempt.
The gun bill is similar, proposing firearms manufactured and then sold exclusively in South Carolina be exempt from any new federal gun control laws. It does limit the firepower of the weapons, so a South Carolina-made cannon or surface-to-air missile would still be illegal.
Making and selling the items only in South Carolina is critical, supporters say, to avoid triggering the interstate commerce clause that would allow federal law to usurp state law.
For many at the rally earlier this month, the fact that Obama won 51 percent of the vote nationally (and 44 percent of the vote in South Carolina) meant that it is much more urgent to take action now.
Dick LoBue, a 76-year-old retired utility worker from New York who moved to Myrtle Beach more than a decade ago, is excited to see the idea of nullification return. He brought several homemade signs to the rally, including one that called Obama a "self-ordained socialist, communist dictator."
"We won't go without a fight. As Patrick Henry said, 'Give me liberty, or give me death,'" said LoBue, a member of the Carolina Patriots, which split from a tea party group a few years ago.
And the federal government is in such a mess of debt and is so unpopular that officials likely will have their hands tied if any state starts nullifying laws, said state Sen. Lee Bright, who is a sponsor of many of these bills.
"They are 16 trillion in the hole. I don't think they are going to push their power around too much," said Bright, R-Roebuck.
The federal government is no stranger in South Carolina. It has major posts for the Air Force, Army and Marines. It also is set to contribute $8.7 billion to the state's budget, while $6.1 billion comes from taxes and other general state revenue.
The bills tweaking the federal government likely won't pass. Nullification should have been settled after Abraham Lincoln's vision of federal power won the Civil War 150 years ago, said House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford.
But the nullification talk does create problems getting things done at the Statehouse, said Rutherford, D-Columbia.
"It's not serious talk. They suggest one thing openly to their constituents who bite at the red meat, but they live in a separate place. This just kills any chance at having a conversation or reaching an agreement," Rutherford said
Supporters of nullification say the federal government never prohibited it, even after the Civil War. They say even the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the new health care law doesn't mean much. They point out the justices have changed their minds before, citing the segregation-supporting 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, and the segregation-ending 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
The nullification supporters attract a sometimes unwelcome subset. Also at the rally was the state director of the League of the South, holding up a sign that read "If nullification fails, try secession."
Robert Hayes, who attended the rally at the capitol, said South Carolina has bucked supervision since it successfully demanded to be separated from North Carolina decades before the American Revolution.
"I think it is in the genetic makeup of South Carolinians," Hayes said. "We simply like to stand up to any government that oppresses our freedoms."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fear-feds-leads-nullification-fever-sc-18259809 [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fear-feds-leads-nullification-fever-sc-18259809?singlePage=true ] [no comments yet]
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5 injured after firearms go off at Ohio, N.C., Indiana gun shows
An injured person is taken from the North Carolina State Fairgrounds after being wounded in a gun accident on Saturday.
By Michael Martinez and Greg Botelho, CNN
updated 11:25 PM EST, Sat January 19, 2013
(CNN) -- At least five people -- three in North Carolina, one in Indiana and one in Ohio -- were injured after weapons went off at gun shows Saturday, officials said, at a time when there's been renewed discussion about private gun sales at such shows.
The most casualties came at the Dixie Gun and Knife Show in Raleigh, where attendees bolted -- with at least one woman wiping out in the frenetic scene -- when gunfire rang out around 1 p.m., as seen on video captured by CNN affiliate WRAL.
Police later explained that a a 36-year-old man from Wilmington, North Carolina, was unfastening the case of his 12-gauge shotgun on a table near the show entrance when it accidentally discharged. The man planned to sell the shotgun at the show.
The bird shot ended up injuring three people. One was a sheriff's deputy, who suffered a slight injury to his hand and was treated and released at a local hospital before returning immediately to work, said Joel Keith, chief of police of the North Carolina State Fair.
A 54-year-old woman from Benson, North Carolina, was being treated a wound to her right torso at a local hospital, and a 50-year-old man from Durham, North Carolina, was treated for an injured left hand, Keith told reporters.
"I want to emphasize that this is an accident," Keith said.
That said, Wake County sheriff's investigators and the local prosecutor will determine whether to file charges against the gun's owner, authorities said.
Sheriff Donnie Harrison said he was unsure whether it was legal to bring a loaded gun on state fairgrounds. However, when the state fair is held in October, it is illegal to bring a loaded gun to the fairground because of the large crowds, authorities said.
"This is state property. That's something we're looking into," Harrison told reporters. "It's early right now."
The shooting prompted police to ban any private gun sales -- in which visitors bring their firearms to sell at the gun show -- for the remainder of the two-day show, which concludes Sunday, Keith said. He added there wouldn't be any private gun sales on fairgrounds for the indefinite future.
The gun show was closed after the shooting and will reopen Sunday. At that point, show vendors can continue to sell firearms, which are already secured inside the show, Keith said.
"If we thought if it was a problem or a hazard, we wouldn't have this show," Keith said about private gun sales at the show. "I'm sure there isn't anybody who hates this more than the guy who owned this weapon."
Man shoots business partner with semi-automatic handgun
A person is in stable condition at a northern Ohio hospital after being shot by his business partner at a gun show run by Conrad and Dowdell Productions, said Medina police Chief Patrick Berarducci.
The original owner of the Taurus semi-automatic 9 mm handgun used in the shooting brought the firearm into the show fully loaded. This is despite the policy of searches to make sure all guns are not loaded and rendered safe before others can handle them.
The man who bought the gun told police that he took it out, then accidentally fired it, said Berarducci. A single bullet ended up going into the arm and thigh of this man's business partner.
Authorities don't know who brought the loaded firearm into the gun show and sold it, added the police chief. They'll file a request with the federal ATF to track this person down.
The victim, meanwhile, is in good spirits with non-life-threatening injuries, according to Berarducci.
And in Indianapolis, a man walking out of the Indy 1500 Gun and Knife Show shot himself in the hand as he was loading his .45-caliber semi-automatic firearm, Indiana State Police said in a statement.
The 54-year-old Indianapolis man was sent to Wishard Hospital for treatment after being "slightly" injured.
"The investigation determined the shooting to be accidental, and no charges will be filed," police said.
Shootings occur as gun debate rages
Reforming private gun sales -- at shows or anywhere else -- is among the changes that President Barack Obama is now seeking by requiring background checks.
The president has called for action in the wake of last month's shooting at a school in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 27 people -- 20 of them children age 7 or younger -- dead. Gun control activists have likewise pushed for changes, while gun rights advocates have said restrictions on gun sales are unnecessary and in defiance of their Second Amendment rights.
Currently, federal law requires background checks on gun sales by federally licensed firearms dealers, who are often among the vendors at gun shows.
Saturday's incidents occurred on 'Gun Appreciation Day," an event led by a gun rights group that urged Americans to "go to your local gun store, gun range or gun show with your Constitution, American flags and your 'Hands off my Guns' sign to send a loud and clear message."
Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, last Sunday issued a statement predicting this event would drive up sales of things like "assault-style rifles," which have already "skyrocketed" in the wake of the Newtown mass shooting.
Jabari Richards, a gun enthusiast, told WRAL at the Raleigh, North Carolina, show that he thought some reforms were wise.
"I think there should be background checks for everybody," Richards said, "because then you know they ... are capable of having a gun."
But another man at the Raleigh show said it was useless for Washington to step in.
"The gun laws that they have on the books aren't enforced, don't do any good," Al Galbraith said.
CNN's Stefan Simons and Maggie Schneider contributed to this report.
© 2013 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/19/us/north-carolina-gun-show-shooting/ [with comments]
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Gun Found In Seven-Year-Old's Backpack At Wave Preparatory Elementary School In Queens
01/18/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/17/gun-found-in-7-year-olds-backpack-queens_n_2498109.html [with comments]
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Gun Appreciation Day Celebrated With Accidental Shootings at Gun Shows
Jan 19, 2013
[...]
As the Daily Intelligencer [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/shooting-at-gun-show-marks-gun-appreciation-day.html ] notes, today is both Gun Appreciation Day [ http://gunappreciationday.com/ ] and Guns Across America [ http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2013/0119/Guns-Across-America-Gun-owners-push-back-with-national-rally ]. What a perfect way to celebrate!
[...]
http://gawker.com/5977377/gun-appreciation-day-celebrated-with-accidental-shootings-at-gun-shows-in-north-carolina-and-ohio [with comments]
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Sandy Relief Passes House Despite Conservative Opposition
01/16/2013
A measure providing $51 billion for relief and recovery from Hurricane Sandy was approved by a bipartisan majority in the House on Tuesday evening, three weeks after Northeast Republicans excoriated the chamber's GOP leaders for failing to vote on storm aid before the end of the last Congress.
An amendment to the relief package introduced by Tea Party-allied conservatives requiring across-the-board cuts to defense and domestic programs to pay for $17 billion of storm aid was supported by a majority of Republicans, but was defeated 258-162 with a combination of GOP and Democratic votes.
The full $51 billion relief bill passed the House 241-180, with 179 Republicans opposed.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/sandy-relief-measure-passes_n_2480328.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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The endangered GOP House majority?
2014 will be a tough lift for Dems, but they may be closer than you think to winning back complete control of D.C.
Jan 18, 2013
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/18/the_endangered_gop_house_majority/ [with comments]
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David Brooks Now Totally Pathological
By Jonathan Chait
1/18/13 at 11:50 AM
Moderate Republicanism is a tendency that increasingly defies ideological analysis and instead requires psychological analysis. The psychological mechanism is fairly obvious. The radicalization of the GOP has placed unbearable strain on those few moderates torn between their positions and their attachment to party. Many moderate conservatives have simply broken off from the party, at least in its current incarnation, and are hoping or working to build a sane alternative. Those who remain must escape into progressively more baroque fantasies.
The prevalent expression of this psychological pain is the belief that President Obama is largely or entirely responsible for Republican extremism. It’s a bizarre but understandable way to reconcile conflicting emotions — somewhat akin to blaming your husband’s infidelity entirely on his mistress. In this case, moderate Republicans believe that Obama’s tactic of taking sensible positions that moderate Republicans agree with is cruel and unfair, because it exposes the extremism that dominates the party, not to mention the powerlessness of the moderates within it. Michael Gerson [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/obamas-sinister-being-reasonable-ploy-exposed.html ] recently expressed this bizarre view, and the pathology is also on vivid display in David Brooks’s column today [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/opinion/brooks-the-next-four-years.html ].
Brooks begins by noting that the Grand Bargain on the deficit, which he has spent the last two years relentlessly touting, is not actually possible. Why is it impossible? Because, he writes, “A political class that botched the fiscal cliff so badly are not going to be capable of a gigantic deal on complex issues.”
Oh, the political class? That’s funny. In 2011, Obama offered an astonishingly generous budget deal to House Republicans, and Brooks argued at the time that if the GOP turned the deal down, it would prove their “fanaticism.” Naturally, they turned it down. Obama continues to offer a bargain including higher revenue through tax reform in return for lower spending on retirement programs, but Republicans refuse to consider higher taxes. So, in summary, this proves “the political class” is to blame.
What Obama should be doing in response, Brooks argues, is push for policies that provoke no opposition even from the craziest of the Republicans: “We could do some education reform, expand visa laws to admit more high-skill workers, encourage responsible drilling for natural gas, maybe establish an infrastructure bank.” Brooks argues that these issues would be uncontroversial enough to “erode partisan orthodoxies and get back into the habit of passing laws together.” Then, maybe we could pass some laws under a future president.
Note that solving actual problems is besides the point here. Brooks is almost explicit about this. He begins with the need for initiatives that he thinks will lead to happiness and comity between the parties in Washington, and then comes up with policies that might fit the bill. Not surprisingly, viewed from the standpoint of an agenda designed to make life better for Americans in some way, shape or form, Brooks’s proposed agenda is strange. Let’s consider his ideas:
Education reform. I love education reform. Obama passed a sweeping education reform in 2009. Brooks writes a column the next year fulsomely praising it. (Obama “has used federal power to incite reform, without dictating it from the top.”) Is there more education reform to be done? There may be, but I don’t know what it would be, and Brooks doesn’t seem to know or care.
Expand visa laws to admit more high-skill workers. Would this really pass right away without partisan animosity? Brooks says yes. We don’t have to guess. Democrats tried this last month. Republicans loaded it with poison pills and killed it dead. So instead they’re trying to do it as part of comprehensive immigration reform.
Encourage responsible drilling for natural gas. Wait, how much more encouragement do we need? The country is undergoing a massive natural gas boom:
Is there some element to natural gas policy that needs fixing? Does Brooks just think the two parties should get together and congratulate each other for all the natural gas being produced?
Establish an infrastructure bank. Okay, this one is a good policy idea. But is it something Republicans would easily pass without rancor? In fact, Obama has been asking for this very thing for years now. And Republicans have called it dead on arrival.
So Brooks’s proposed alternative agenda consists of either empty list-filler or actual policies that Obama has proposed and Republicans have killed. But instead of this happy term of modest accomplishment, Obama is pursuing a nasty, partisan agenda. Step one of this devious ploy is to, as Brooks puts it, “invite a series of confrontations with Republicans over things like the debt ceiling — make them look like wackos willing to endanger the entire global economy.”
Right – Obama is the one inviting confrontations over the debt ceiling. Never mind that, before 2011, the debt ceiling was just an occasion for routine posturing, and Republicans insisted on turning it into a showdown with real, dangerous stakes. Also never mind that Obama offered to sign the plan — proposed by Mitch McConnell! — to permanently defuse the debt ceiling and let Republicans use it to posture against him rather than actually threatening a global meltdown. And never mind as well that, by refusing to cave in to extortion, Obama seems to actually be defusing the real danger to the world economy.
This is all Obama’s fault because it makes Republicans “look like whackos willing to endanger the entire global economy.” Brooks displays an almost surreal lack of interest in the underlying reality that Republicans actually are whackos willing to endanger the entire global economy. It is his responsibility to conceal this reality from America.
Worse, argues Brooks, Obama is nastily choosing an agenda intended only to harm Republicans. Obama’s proposals on gun safety and immigration, he writes, are “wedge issues meant to divide Southerners from Midwesterners, the Tea Party/Talk Radio base from the less ideological corporate and managerial class.”
Brooks asserts, but does not actually explain, that Obama chose these issues for the purpose of dividing the opposition — as opposed to trying to cut down on mass murders and fix a huge field of broken policy. Brooks concedes that Obama’s proposals here are moderate, but believes that the moderation is what makes them so nasty. By appealing to mainstream Republicans, he is splitting them from the most extreme Republicans!
You would think proposing policies that large numbers of Republicans agree with would qualify as the kind of centrism and bipartisanship Brooks has spent the entire Obama presidency calling for, but now that it’s here, it turns out to prove just the opposite to him.
*
Related
David Brooks Teaching Writings by David Brooks in Yale Course on Humility.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/david-brooks-defends-yale-course-on-humility.html
Bush Speechwriter Michael Gerson Exposes Obama’s Sinister Being-Reasonable Ploy.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/obamas-sinister-being-reasonable-ploy-exposed.html
The Tragedy of Moderate Republicanism
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/10/tragedy-of-moderate-republicanism.html
*
Copyright © 2013, New York Media LLC (emphasis in original)
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/david-brooks-now-totally-pathological.html [with comments]
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Americans growing wise to Republican plan to rig presidential race
January 17, 2013
Rachel Maddow reports on the growing awareness among the American political media of a plan by state Republicans to use a gerrymandering strategy with the Electoral College to give a greater advantage to Republican candidates in presidential races.
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/50502443#50502443 [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSttN2unU48 ; show links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/01/17/16576206-links-for-the-117-trms (with comments)] [further to her January 15, 2013 segment "GOP seeks to rig presidential race on model of Congressional gerrymandering", http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/50477422#50477422 (show links, 19 related to the segment, at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/01/15/16535348-links-for-the-115-trms {with comments}) (a bit less than halfway down at (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83473699 )]
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Election process toolkit
ProPublica
By Vanessa Silverton-Peel
Thu Jan 17, 2013 8:41 PM EST
The national picture:
• REDMAP 2012 Summary Report
http://rslc.com/_blog/News/post/REDMAP_2012_Summary_Report
• ProPublica: House Seats vs. Popular Vote
http://www.propublica.org/article/how-dark-money-helped-republicans-hold-the-house-and-hurt-voters
• A chart!
http://projects.propublica.org/graphics/seats-vs-votes [above]
• RNC chief backs electoral college scheme
http://www.thenation.com/blog/172191/rncs-priebus-proposes-rig-electoral-college-so-losing-republicans-can-win
And in the states:
• Michigan Effort Shows G.O.P. Sway
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/us/politics/republican-donors-make-gains-in-states.html?pagewanted=all
• Wisconsin GOP governor is "intrigued"
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/reince-priebus-backs-electoral-vote-change-but-its-states-decision-fp8bqc3-186720481.html
• So goes Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, so goes any chance of there ever being another Democratic president
http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/on-the-trail/the-gop-s-electoral-college-scheme-20121217
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/01/17/16572191-election-process-toolkit [with comments]
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Obamacare’s Other Shoe
The Pentagon and Chuck Hagel
By Mark Steyn
January 11, 2013 3:00 P.M.
If you had buttonholed me in the Senate men’s room circa 2003 and told me that a decade hence Joe Biden would be America’s vice president, John Kerry secretary of state, and Chuck Hagel secretary of defense, I’d have laughed and waited for the punch line: The Leahy administration? President Lautenberg? Celebrate lack of diversity! But even in the republic’s descent into a Blowhardocracy staffed by a Zombie House of Lords, there are distinctions to be drawn. Senator Kerry having been reliably wrong on every foreign-policy issue of the last 40 years, it would seem likely that at this stage in his life he will be content merely to be in office, jetting hither and yon boring the pants off whichever presidents and prime ministers are foolish enough to grant him an audience. Beyond the photo-ops, the world will drift on toward the post-American era: Beijing will carry on gobbling up resources around the planet, Czar Putin will flex his moobs across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Arab Spring “democracies” will see impressive growth in the critical clitoridectomy sector of the economy, Iran will go nuclear, and John Kerry will go to black-tie banquets in Europe. But Chuck Hagel is a different kettle of senatorial huffenpuffer. And not because of what appears to be a certain antipathy toward Jews and gays. That would be awkward at the Tony Awards, but at the Arab League the post-summit locker-room schmoozing should be a breeze. Since his celebrated “evolution” on marriage last year, President Obama is famously partial to one of those constituencies, so presumably he didn’t nominate an obscure forgotten senator because of his fascinating insights into the appropriate level of “obviousness” the differently oriented should adopt. So why Hagel? Why now?
My comrade Jonah Goldberg says this nomination is a “petty pick” made by Obama “out of spite.” I’m not so sure. If the signature accomplishment of the president’s first term was Obamacare (I’m using “signature accomplishment” in the Washington sense of “ruinously expensive bureaucratic sinkhole”), what would he be looking to pull off in his second (aside from the repeal of the 22nd Amendment)? Hagel isn’t being nominated to the Department of Zionist and Homosexual Regulatory Oversight but to the Department of Defense. Which he calls “bloated.”
“The Pentagon,” he said a year ago, “needs to be pared down.” Unlike the current secretary, Leon Panetta, who’s strongly opposed to the mandated “sequestration” cuts to the defense budget, Hagel thinks they’re merely a good start.
That’s why Obama’s offered him the gig. Because Obamacare at home leads inevitably to Obamacuts abroad. In that sense, America will be doing no more than following the same glum trajectory of every other great power in the postwar era. I feel only a wee bit sheepish about quoting my book After America two weeks running, since it’s hardly my fault Obama’s using it as the operating manual for his second term (I may sue for breach of copyright and retire to Tahiti). At any rate, somewhere around Chapter Five, I suggest that, having succeeded Britain as the dominant power, America may follow the old country in decline, too:
“In what other ways might the mighty eagle emulate the tattered old lion? First comes reorientation, and the shrinking of the horizon. After empire, Britain turned inward: Between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of government expenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to seven, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 percent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.
“Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: You can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford — cut back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite?”
Democrats put it slightly differently: In 2004 John Kerry demanded to know why we were building firehouses in Iraq but closing them in America (the municipal fire department apparently falling, like everything else, under the federal government). Barack Obama prefers to say that it’s time for the United States to do some nation-building at home — the pilot program in Afghanistan having worked out so well. Either line will do, and, like Britain’s inverted budget priorities, both implicitly acknowledge that a military-industrial complex and a dependency-bureaucrat complex are incompatible. And that’s before you factor in Washington-size borrowing, under which, within this decade, the interest payments on the debt will be covering the entire cost of the Chinese military. America can fund the Pentagon or the People’s Liberation Army, but not both, not for long. Having gotten the citizenry to accept a supersized welfare bureaucracy, Obama reasonably enough figures he can just as easily get them used to a shrunken American presence in the wider world.
So the president is looking for his equivalent of Denis Healey, the Labour cabinet minister who in the 1968 defense review announced an all but total withdrawal of British forces from “east of Suez” — a phrase that in the imperial imagination is less geographic than psychological.
Kipling’s English Tommy on the road to Mandalay: “Ship me somewheres east of Suez . . . ” And then a cheeseparing defense minister says: No, we won’t. Not now, not ever again. It’s over.
Who would you hire for the Pentagon’s east-of-Suez moment? According to the Washington Post, Obama picked Hagel to “bridge the partisan divide.”
Even for the court eunuchs of the palace media, that must be hard to type with a straight face: He seems to be all but entirely loathed by his own party. Nevertheless, he is technically a Republican, not to mention a bona fide war hero. Only Nixon can go to China, and only a pro-life, pro-gun, climate-denialist, homophobic, Strom Thurmond–loving, medal-draped Republican can go to the Pentagon and tell them to start clearing out their desks. Obama has picked a guy whose rhetoric is more anti-Pentagon than his own, and who, unlike most of the cabinet senators, has a record of executive experience that suggests he may well live up to it.
If he pulls it off, it’ll be a big part of Obama’s legacy. And, if he doesn’t, I’m sure the media will be happy to remind everyone that, oh well, Hagel was a Republican.
But beyond the politics is a real question. He’s not wrong to raise the question of Pentagon “bloat.” The United States has the most lavishly funded military on the planet, and what does it buy you? In the Hindu Kush, we’re taking twelve years to lose to goatherds with fertilizer.
Something is wrong with this picture. Indeed, something is badly wrong with the American way of war. And no one could seriously argue that, in the latest in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll call of America’s un-won wars, the problem is a lack of money or resources. Given its track record, why shouldn’t the Pentagon get a top-to-toe overhaul — or at least a cost-benefit analysis?
Just to be clear: I disagree with Hagel on Israel, on Iran, and on most everything else. But my colleagues on the right are in denial if they don’t think there are some very basic questions that need to be asked about the too-big-to-fail Department of Defense. Obama would like the U.S. military to do less. Some of us would like it to do more with less — more nimbly, more artfully. But, if the national-security establishment won’t acknowledge there’s even a problem, they’re unlikely to like the solutions imposed by others. “Petty” and “spiteful”? No. Obamacare’s other shoe.
Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon [ http://www.amazon.com/After-America-Get-Ready-Armageddon/dp/1596983272 ].
© National Review Online 2013
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/337490/obamacare-s-other-shoe-mark-steyn [with comments]
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Public Option Resurfaced By House Democrats As Deficit Reduction Measure
01/16/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/public-option_n_2483499.html [with comments]
===
Luis Leon, Episcopal Priest, Will Deliver Obama's Inauguration Benediction, Replacing Louie Giglio
The Presidential Inaugural Committee has selected the Rev. Luis Leon to deliver the benediction at President Barack Obama's inauguration, replacing the Rev. Louie Giglio. Above, Leon meets with Obama and Michelle Obama during the president's first inauguration.
01/16/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/luis-leon-benediction-obama-inauguration-louie-giglio_n_2468824.html [with comments]
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This Week in God
House Chaplain Rev. Patrick Conroy
By Steve Benen
Sat Jan 19, 2013 10:37 AM EST
First up from the God Machine this week is an interesting controversy involving the chaplains for the U.S. House and U.S. Senate -- two religious leaders, whose salaries are paid by taxpayers.
Ordinarily, the congressional chaplains are rarely noteworthy. They deliver a prayer at the start of legislative sessions, but otherwise, are generally neither seen nor heard outside Capitol Hill. (James Madison insisted these positions are unconstitutional and should not exist [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2004/12/16/hannity-repeated-misleading-claim-that-james-ma/132456 ].)
But this week, the chaplains raised questions about how they intend to spend Inauguration Day [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/01/are-congressional-chaplains-attending-anti-obama-prayer-breakfast ], in a story first brought to my attention by Faithful America [ http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2518/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=12274 ].
Just before President Barack Obama's swearing in on Monday, a group of religious conservatives plans to hold a prayer breakfast featuring a number of anti-Obama conspiracy theorists. The Presidential Inaugural Prayer Breakfast [ http://www.pipb2013.com/ ] -- billed as offering "prayer, worship, and reconciliation of the nation" -- will feature the editor of the birther site WorldNetDaily and minister and media mogul Pat Robertson, according its website. The organizers of the prayer breakfast also claim the House and Senate chaplains will speak at their event -- appearances that may conflict with the non-partisan nature [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/us/congresss-chaplains-face-divided-flock-on-religion.html ] of the chaplain job.
House Chaplain Rev. Patrick Conroy and Senate Chaplain Barry Black ... are listed under the "Prayer for the Nation" portion of Monday's event, just ahead of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). But featured speaker Joseph Farah, the WorldNetDaily editor, has drawn the most attention, given his website's regular assertions that President Obama was actually born in Kenya and allegations that he is "the first Muslim president [ http://superstore.wnd.com/SUBSCRIPTIONS/2010-2008/Whistleblower-Single-Issue-January-2013 ( http://superstore.wnd.com/SUBSCRIPTIONS/whistleblower/Whistleblower-Magazine )]." The event also features "messianic rabbi-pastor and author" Jonathan Cahn, who believes that there are signs of the apocalypse encrypted in Obama's communications [ http://www.wnd.com/2012/06/obama-fulfills-isaiah-910-prophecy-again/ ].
As the week progressed, the story got a little strange. Right-wing organizers of the event said the Senate's Rev. Black, who's run into trouble like this before [ https://www.au.org/church-state/march-2007-church-state/people-events/senate-chaplain-drops-speech-at-religious-right ], had accepted their invitation, but the chaplain's office insisted he'd never agreed to participate. The House's Rev. Conroy, who's also billed [ http://pipb2013.com.tripod.com/webonmediacontents/InaugeralPrayerBreakfast%20invite%20final.pdf ] as a member of the Presidential Inaugural Prayer Breakfast Committee, conceded [ http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2013/01/18/senate-chaplain-wont-attend-controversial-inaugural-prayer-breakfast ] that he will appear alongside the fringe activists and far-right lawmakers, but added he doesn't intend to "stay too long."
To be sure, if Bachmann, Birthers, and radical televangelists want to get together to hold a far-right event on Inauguration Day, that's their business. But as my friend Rob Boston at Americans United for Separation of Church and State explained [ https://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/bad-breakfast-do-congressional-chaplains-plan-to-spend-inauguration-morning ], when taxpayer-financed chaplains, who are not supposed to take sides in political fights, participate in events like these, it's far more problematic.
Also from the God Machine this week:
* The benediction at President Obama's second inaugural will be delivered by the Rev. Luis Leon [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/pastor-for-inauguration-is-a-white-house-neighbor-86324.html ], pastor of St. John's Episcopal Church, dubbed "the church of presidents" because it's just a block and a half from the White House.
* Oh my [ http://www.mediaite.com/online/listen-911-call-from-priest-stuck-after-playing-with-handcuffs-while-allegedly-wearing-gag/ ]: "The pastor of St. Aloysius Church in Springfield, Ill., has been granted a leave of absence after he called 911 in November from inside the church and told a police dispatcher that he needed help getting out of a pair of handcuffs." The priest, Tom Donovan, told the 911 operator he was "playing with" the handcuffs, and needed help "getting out." Donovan is perhaps best known for testifying to the Illinois legislature earlier this month in opposition to [ http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/springfield-illinois-priest-tom-donovan-handcuffs-185697332.html ] marriage equality (thanks to reader R.P. for the tip).
* Lawrence Wright has published a new book on Scientology which appears to be generating quite a bit of attention [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/books/review/going-clear-lawrence-wrights-book-on-scientology.html ].
* A group of prominent evangelical leaders, including the National Association of Evangelicals and the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, have launched the "I Was a Stranger [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/evangelical-coalition-seeks-immigration-overhaul-18213913 ]" campaign in the hopes of encouraging policymakers in Washington to pass immigration reform.
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/01/19/16600194-this-week-in-god [with comments]
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What My Wife and I Would Like to Say to the Café Owner Who Handed Us an Anti-Gay Letter
01/15/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shawnee-mcphail/cafe-owner-anti-gay-letter_b_2481381.html [with comments] [further to "Arielle and Shawnee McPhail, Lesbian Couple, Handed Anti-Gay Letter From Restaurant Owner", about 60% of the way down at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83385518 ]
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Megan Fox, Devout Pentecostal, Tells Esquire She Speaks In Tongues
01/16/2013
[...]
Fox told Esquire that she began speaking in tongues when she was 8 years old.
"The energy is so intense in the room," she said, "that you feel like anything can happen. They're going to hate that I compare it to this, but have you ever watched footage of a Santeria gathering or someone doing voodoo? You know how palpable the energy is? Whatever's going on there, it's for real."
Fox also said she had witnessed healings and other "magical things" in church, and that the experience, called "getting the Holy Ghost," feels like "your whole body is filled with this electric current."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/megan-fox-devout-pentecostal-esquire-speaks-in-tongues_n_2489730.html [with comments];
http://www.esquire.com/features/megan-fox-photos-interview-0213 [source of the issue cover image above]
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British Christian Lilian Ladele Loses Case; Court Rules Religious Beliefs Do Not Justify LGBT Discrimination
British Christians Gary McFarlane, a marriage counselor in Bristol who was sacked for saying he objects to offering sex therapy to homosexuals, and Shirley Chaplin, a nurse who says she suffered discrimination at work over wearing a cross [barred from doing so because it was a health hazard ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/uk-equality-laws-trump-personal-religious-beliefs-european-court-says_n_2481592.html )], pose for photographs in central London on January 15, 2013, after the European Court of Human Rights refused to rule that they suffered discrimination at work over their Christian beliefs.
01/15/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/lilian-ladele-lgbt-discrimination_n_2480625.html [with comments]
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Does the Internet Spell Doom For Organized Religion?
Here's one theory why religion is in decline in many places around the world.
By Valerie Tarico
January 12, 2013
As we head into a new year, the guardians of traditional religion are ramping up efforts to keep their flocks—or in crass economic terms, to retain market share. Some Christians have turned to soul searching [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/are-young-evangelicals-sick-of-sexual-politics ] while others have turned to marketing. Last fall, the LDS church spent millions on billboards, bus banners and Facebook ads touting “I’m a Mormon.” In Canada, the Catholic Church has launched a “Come Home [ http://www.catholicscomehome.org/ ]” marketing campaign. The Southern Baptists Convention voted to rebrand itself [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/oops-rebranding-of-southern-baptists-reveals-more-than-intended/ ]. A hipster mega-church [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11punk-t.html?_r=0 ] in Seattle combines smart advertising with sales force training for members and a strategy the Catholics have emphasized for centuries: competitive breeding.
In October 2012 the Pew Research Center announced [ http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/10/09/us-usa-religion-unaffiliated-idUKBRE89813G20121009 ] that for the first time ever Protestant Christians had fallen below 50 percent of the American population. Atheists cheered while evangelicals beat their breasts and lamented the end of the world as we know it. Historian of religion Molly Worthen has since offered [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/american-christianity-and-secularism-at-a-crossroads.html ] big-picture insights that may dampen the most extreme hopes and allay the fears. Anthropologist Jennifer James [ http://www.jenniferjames.com/introduction/index.htm ], on the other hand, has called fundamentalism the “death rattle” of the Abrahamic traditions.
In all of the frenzy, few seem to give any recognition to the player that I see as the primary hero, or if you prefer, culprit—and I’m not talking about science populizer and atheist superstar Neil deGrasse Tyson [ http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/12855.Neil_deGrasse_Tyson ]. Then again, maybe I am talking about Tyson in a sense, because in his various viral guises—as a talk show host [ http://www.uproxx.com/music/2012/12/watch-neil-degrasse-tyson-and-wu-tang-clans-gza-talk-science-music-philosophy/ ] and tweeter [ https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/253680452240547840 ] and as the face [ http://www.webpronews.com/neil-degrasse-tyson-talks-about-being-a-meme-2012-03 ] of scores of smartass Facebook memes—Tyson is an incarnation of the biggest threat organized religion has ever faced: the Internet.
A traditional religion, one built on “right belief,” requires a closed information system. That is why the Catholic Church put an official seal of approval on some ancient texts and banned or burned others. It is why some Bible-believing Christians are forbidden [ http://bible.cc/2_corinthians/6-14.htm ] to marry nonbelievers. It is why Quiverfull [ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nolongerquivering/about/ ] moms home-school their kids with carefully screened textbooks. It is why, when you get sucked into conversations with your fundamentalist Uncle George from Florida, you sometimes wonder if he has some superpower that allows him to magically close down all avenues into his mind. (He does! [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deqPVE5KmtM&list=UUuff10A6JeheV__mso67QdA&index=1 (a sequence of 19 videos, next below)])
Tech-savvy mega-churches may have Twitter missionaries, and Calvinist cuties may make viral videos about how Jesus worship isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship, but that doesn’t change the facts: the free flow of information is really, really bad for the product they are selling.
Here are six kinds of web content that are like, well, like electrolysis on religion’s hairy toes.
1. Radically cool science videos and articles.
Religion evokes some of our most deeply satisfying emotions: joy, for example, and transcendence, and wonder. This is what Einstein was talking about when he said that “science without religion is lame.” If scientific inquiry doesn’t fill us at times with delight and even speechless awe at new discoveries or the mysteries that remain, then we are missing out on the richest part of the experience. Fortunately, science can provide all of the above, and certain masters of the trade and sectors of the Internet are remarkably effective at evoking the wonder—the spirituality if you will—of the natural world unveiled. Some of my own favorites include Symphony of science [ http://www.symphonyofscience.com/videos.html ], NOVA [ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ ], TED [ http://www.ted.com/ ], RSA Animate [ http://www.thersa.org/events/video/animate/rsa-animate-the-power-of-networks ], and Birdnote [ http://birdnote.org/show/shorebirds-not-shore ].
It should be no surprise that so many fundamentalists are determined to take down the whole scientific endeavor. They see in science not only a critique of their outdated theories but a competitor for their very best product, a sense of transcendent exuberance. For millennia, each religion has made an exclusive claim, that it alone had the power to draw people into a grand vision worth a lifetime of devotion. Each offered the assurance that our brief lives matter and that, in some small way, we might live on. Now we are getting glimpses of a reality so beautiful and intricate that it offers some of the same promise. Where will the old tribal religions be if, in words of Tracy Chapman, we all decide that Heaven’s here on earth [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYcJ9J5DggU (next below)]?
Religious beliefs that aren’t yours often sound silly, and the later in life you encounter them the more laughable they are likely to sound. Web writers are after eyeballs, which means that if there’s something ridiculous to showcase, one is guaranteed to write about it. It may be a nuanced exposé or a snarky list or a flaming meme, but the point, invariably, is to call attention to the stuff that makes you roll your eyes [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/test-your-knowledge-of-wild-weird-and-outright-wacky-american-religious-beliefs/ ], shake your head in disbelief, laugh, and then hit Share.
3. The kinky, exploitative, oppressive, opportunistic and violent sides of religion.
Of course, the case against religion doesn’t stop at weird and wacky. It gets nasty, sometimes in ways that are titillating and sometimes in ways that are simply dark. The Bible is full of sex slavery, polygamy and incest [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/captive-virgins-polygamy-sex-slaves-what-marriage-would-look-like-if-we-actually-followed-the-bible/ ], and these are catalogued at places like Evilbible.com [ http://www.evilbible.com/ ]. Alternately, a student writing about holidays can find a proclamation [ http://www.thanksgivingnovember.com/the-first-thanksgiving-proclamation.html ] in which Puritans give thanks to God for the burning of Indian villages or an interview on the mythic origins of the Christmas story. And if the Catholic come-home plea sounds a little desperate, it may well be because the sins of the bishops [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/%ef%bb%bfeight-ugly-sins-the-catholic-bishops-hope-lay-members-and-others-wont-notice/ ] are getting hard to cover up. On the net, whatever the story may be, someone will be more than willing to expose it.
4. Supportive communities for people coming out of religion.
With or without the net (but especially with it) believers sometimes find their worldview in pieces. Before the Internet existed most people who lost their faith kept their doubts to themselves. There was no way to figure out who else might be thinking forbidden thoughts. In some sects, a doubting member may be shunned, excommunicated, or “disfellowshipped” to ensure that doubts don’t spread. So, doubters used to keep silent and then disappear into the surrounding culture. Now they can create Web sites, and today there are as many communities of former believers as there are kinds of belief. These communities range from therapeutic to political [ http://ffrf.org/ ], and they cover the range of sects: Evangelical [ http://new.exchristian.net/ ], Mormon [ http://www.exmormonfoundation.org/ ], Jehovah’s Witness [ http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/jehovahs-witness-experiences.php ], and Muslim [ http://ex-muslim.org.uk/ ]. There’s even a web home for recovering clergy [ http://www.clergyproject.org/ ]. Heaven help the unsuspecting believer who wanders into one of these sites and tries to tell members in recovery that they’re all bound for hell.
5. Lifestyles of the fine and faithless.
When they emerge from the recovery process former Christians and Muslims and whatnot find that there’s a whole secular world waiting for them on the web. This can be a lifesaver, literally, for folks who are trapped in closed religious communities on the outside. On the web, they can explore lifestyles in which people stay surprisingly decent and kind without a sacred text or authority figures telling them what to do. In actuality, since so much of religion is about social support (and social control) lots of people skip the intellectual arguments and exposes, and go straight to building a new identity based in a new social network. Some web resources are specifically aimed at creating alternatives to theism, like Good without God [ http://harvardhumanist.org/good-without-god/ ], Parenting Beyond Belief [ http://parentingbeyondbelief.com/ ] or the Foundation Beyond Belief [ http://foundationbeyondbelief.org/mission ].
6. Interspiritual okayness.
This might sound odd, but one of the threats to traditional religion are interfaith communities [ http://www.worldprayers.org/ ] that focus on shared spiritual values. Many religions make exclusive truth claims and see other religions as competitors. Without such claims, there is no need for evangelism, missionaries or a set of doctrines that I call donkey motivators (ie. carrots and sticks) like heaven and hell. The web showcases the fact that humanity’s bad and good qualities are universal [ http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kohlberg.htm ], spread across cultures and regions, across both secular and religious wisdom traditions [ http://religioustolerance.org/ ]. It offers reassurance that we won’t lose the moral or spiritual dimension of life if we outgrow religion, while at the same time providing the means to glean [ http://www.wisdomcommons.org/ ] what is truly timeless and wise from old traditions. In doing so, it inevitably reveals that the limitations of any single tradition alone.
The Dalai Lama, who has led interspiritual dialogue for many years made waves recently by saying as much: “All the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.”
The power of interspiritual dialogue is analogous to the broader power of the web in that, at the very heart it is about people finding common ground, exchanging information, and breaking through walls to find a bigger community waiting outside. Last year, Jim Gilliam, founder of Nationbuilder, gave a talk titled, “The Internet is My Religion [ http://www.internetismyreligion.com/ ].” Gilliam is a former fundamentalist who has survived two bouts of cancer thanks to the power of science and the Internet. His existence today has required a bone marrow transplant and a double lung transplant organized in part through social media. Looking back on the experience, he speaks with the same passion that drove him when he was on fire for Jesus:
I owed every moment of my life to countless people I would never meet. Tomorrow, that interconnectedness would be represented in my own physical body. Three different DNAs. Individually they were useless, but together they would equal one functioning human. What an incredible debt to repay. I didn’t even know where to start. And that’s when I truly found God. God is just what happens when humanity is connected. Humanity connected is God.
The Vatican, and the Mormon Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and the Southern Baptist Convention should be very worried.
Valerie Tarico [ http://www.alternet.org/authors/valerie-tarico ] is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons [ http://www.wisdomcommons.org/ ]. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light [ http://www.amazon.com/Trusting-Doubt-Former-Evangelical-Beliefs/dp/0977392937 ]" and "Deas and Other Imaginings [ http://www.amazon.com/Deas-Other-Imaginings-Spiritual-Folktales/dp/0977392945 ]." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/ ].
Copyright 2013 Valerie Tarico
http://www.alternet.org/belief/does-internet-spell-doom-organized-religion [ http://www.alternet.org/belief/does-internet-spell-doom-organized-religion?paging=off ] [with comments] [also at/text conformed to http://www.salon.com/2013/01/16/religion_may_not_survive_the_internet/ (with comments)]
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Morality: It's not just for humans
January 19, 2013
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/19/health/chimpanzee-fairness-morality/index.html [with comments]
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January 9, 2013
http://www.thenation.com/blog/172100/how-nra-became-organization-aspiring-vigilantes-part-1 [with comments]
*
How the NRA Became an Organization for Aspiring Vigilantes (Part 2)
January 10, 2013
http://www.thenation.com/blog/172125/how-nra-became-organization-aspiring-vigilantes-part-2 [with comments]
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The Suprising Unknown History of the NRA
For most of its history, the NRA supported gun control laws and did not see government as the enemy.
January 13, 2013
http://www.alternet.org/suprising-unknown-history-nra [ http://www.alternet.org/suprising-unknown-history-nra?paging=off ] [with comments]
===
The Sandy Hook Shooting - Fully Exposed
Published on Jan 7, 2013
First off I would like to thank the users that contributed to this video, including IDAHOPICKER, MAX MALONE and OneTruth4Life. this is not meant to offend anyone but merely to raise questions that need to be answered. I am not pointing the finger because there is too much confusion, but it seems something is going on!
LINKS:
Helicopter footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9YwnXAtm4k
Multiple Shooters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7pT0nKxgqY
Medical Examiner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV3KYBS64R8
Gene Rosen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alp64daGTSohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFyexz_IuHE
Facebook Page DEC 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyJ0Nl5lpOg
Robbie Parker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKWgCRBR5qE
Obama Pics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSnhYMaGYuY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHv_RhVgfUQ
FEMA drills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlWi97yBRAc
Sites up before shooting : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSUAXBChnbE
Nurse Sally Cox - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIz-Nx_RV0g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx9GxXYKx_8
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Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theory Video Debunked By Experts
01/17/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/sandy-hook-conspiracy-theory-video-debunked_n_2487427.html [with the conspiracy theory video itself just above and an additional video report embedded, and comments]
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Why we can’t ignore the truthers
Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists aren't going to go away if we pretend they don't exist
Jan 18, 2013
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/18/why_we_cant_ignore_the_truthers/ [with comments]
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Your comprehensive answer to every Sandy Hook conspiracy theory
Every conspiratorial allegation about the tragic Newtown shootings, answered
Jan 18, 2013
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/18/your_comprehensive_answer_to_every_sandy_hook_conspiracy_theory/ [with comments]
===
Shifting 'Liberal' Attitudes On 'Gun Culture' Are Entirely The Fault Of Three Guys On The Internet Who Went To A Gun Range, Apparently
01/18/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/17/liberal-gun-culture-internet-range_n_2496966.html [with comments]
===
Tim Donnelly, Republican Legislator, Says Guns Are 'Essential To Living The Way God Intended'
Tim Donnelly believes that gun are "essential to living the way God intended." Here, discusses a bill before the Assembly in Sacramento, Calif., Friday, Aug. 31, 2012.
(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
[ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/17/california-lawmaker-guns-are-essential-to-living-the-way-god-intended/ ]
By Cavan Sieczkowski
Posted: 01/18/2013 2:59 pm EST | Updated: 01/18/2013 4:54 pm EST
A California Republican legislator, who is a vocal opponent of President Barack Obama's gun control proposal, believes that guns are "essential to living the way God intended."
Assemblyman Tim Donnelly called in to the AM740 KBRITE Christian radio show, "The Bottom Line [ http://www.kbrt740.com/ ]," to discuss gun control on Wednesday, when he revealed that he believes firearms are part of God's plan [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/01/18/1467621/california-guns-god/ ].
“Guns are used an average of 3 million times a year according to the Clinton Justice Department,” Donnelly said via RawStory. “That’s like 6,900 times a day. That’s the high end of the statistics. Other people say it’s only 200 times a day. Whatever that number is, they are used to defend human life. They are used to defend our property and our families and our faith and our freedom, and they are absolutely essential to living the way God intended for us to live [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/17/california-lawmaker-guns-are-essential-to-living-the-way-god-intended/ ].”
Annie-Rose Strasser of ThinkProgress notes that Donnelly's "God and guns" argument [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/01/18/1467621/california-guns-god/ ] can be disputed by Bible verses pointing to the notion that "life should focus on family, not firearms."
Isaiah 2:4 [ http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+2%3A4&version=ESV ], for example, reads thus: “He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore."
Many religious people have mobilized against guns recently. On Jan. 15, a group of 45 clergy and heads of religious organizations headed to Capitol Hill to petition lawmakers to reinstitute a ban on assault weapons [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/religious-leaders-gun-lobby_n_2485886.html ], require background checks and make illegal weapons trafficking a federal crime.
Just two days after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, the dean of the Washington National Cathedral, Rev. Gary Hall, alluded to scripture to promote his pro-gun control [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/national-cathedral-gun-control-rev-gary-hall_n_2313328.html ] stance. He preached a passage from the Gospel of Luke in which John the Baptist addresses a crowd that comes to him out of desperation.
"What does he say to them?" asked Hall at the Dec. 16 service. "'Bear fruits worthy of repentance.' [3: 10-14] What he means is: stop doing the crazy thing you’re doing and do a new thing, a new thing that will bear fruit, that will bring about the change you seek."
As for Donnelly, he does not only advocate for guns, but he has also been know to carry them. Illegally.
Last January, he was detained by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for trying to bring a loaded Colt .45 handgun with four rounds onto a flight [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/calif-lawmaker-cited-afte_n_1184620.html ], the Associated Press reported. The gun was discovered in the Christian legislator's carry-on bag as he went through screening at Ontario International Airport. A magazine with five additional rounds was also found.
Donnelly didn't have a permit to carry a concealed weapon, permission he should have obtained from the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, according to the AP. He claimed he had the gun with him because of death threats he had previously received.
*
Related
The NRA's Dangerous Theology
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/the-nras-dangerous-theolo_b_2505401.html
*
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/18/tim-donnelly-god-guns-essential-republican_n_2505537.html [with embedded clip with audio of Donnelly's statements, and comments]
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Edward Avery, Former Priest, Allegedly Made Boy Do Striptease, Said 'This Is What God Wants'
Edward Avery
By MARYCLAIRE DALE
01/15/13 06:55 PM ET EST
PHILADELPHIA — A policeman's son testified Tuesday that he withdrew from friends, sports and school clubs, and began a long descent into heroin addiction, after he was molested by two priests and a Catholic school teacher by age 11.
The gaunt, troubled 24-year-old has become a key figure in the decade-long prosecution of priest sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Tuesday marked the second time he's testified in open court, but he'll likely face his first cross-examination on Wednesday.
His stunning complaint, filed in 2009, led to last year's landmark child-endangerment conviction of a Philadelphia church official who transferred accused pedophile-priests to new parishes at the behest of two archbishops.
According to the trial witness Tuesday, defrocked priest Edward Avery made him do a striptease dance and engage in oral sex after a Saturday afternoon Mass in 1999.
"He just sat there with this eerie smile. Like he wouldn't want to be anywhere else but there," the accuser testified. "He said, `This is what God wants.'"
The accuser said he walked home afterward and took a shower.
Avery has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the impish, slightly built altar boy. But the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, 66, of Wyndmoor and ex-teacher Bernard Shero, 49, of Levittown are fighting the charges at trial.
Jurors saw boyhood pictures of the witness in his school uniform and altar boy cassock, a sunny contrast to the man with brooding eyes and a flat affect before them. His monotone voice wavered only once or twice, when he acknowledged that he was too young to understand the sexual acts that allegedly unfolded in church anterooms or a parked car.
He said he was first abused at St. Jerome's Parish in northeast Philadelphia after Engelhardt caught the 10-year-old drinking altar wine. And he said Shero sexually assaulted him when he drove the boy home after detention.
Defense lawyers will no doubt attack inconsistencies between his testimony and that of other witnesses when the trial resumes Wednesday. They include somewhat different takes on an alleged disclosure to a high school friend as the two drank beer in 10th grade, and of their discussion when they ran into each other at a bar last year. The friend said that he first asked if anything had come out of the topic they'd discussed, while the accuser said he had brought it up. And the accuser said he had forgotten telling the friend about it.
Both discussions occurred while they were drinking, as the defense lawyers noted.
One has called priests "a bull's-eye" for dubious accusers looking for a church payout.
Avery, who moonlighted as a disc jockey and was nicknamed "the Smiling Padre," is expected to testify for the government during the weeks-long trial.
Before his transfer to St. Jerome's, he admitted to church officials that he had fondled a teen accuser, according to church documents aired at the trial of the church official, Monsignor William Lynn. Avery's testimony would be his first in open court about the priest-abuse scandal.
It's not clear if he'd be asked about a string of other accusers who have come forward since his 2011 arrest. He has not been charged in those cases.
The accuser was expelled from a Catholic high school in ninth grade and asked to leave a private Christian school two years later. He said he now works for relatives in Florida, and, after 23 stints at rehab, has been sober for 12 months.
He told jurors that he didn't tell his parents about the abuse because he thought he'd get in trouble. He described the priests and nuns at his school as "almighty."
"They're basically another parent, but a little holier," he said.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/edward-avery-striptease-this-is-what-god-wants_n_2486136.html [with comments]
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Matthew Rader, Oregon Man, Allegedly Tattooed Name Near Underage Girl's Vagina
01/16/2013
A 30-year-old Oregon man who allegedly tattooed his name near the vagina of a teenaged girl faces charges, including third-degree rape.
An affidavit filed in Oregon's Benton County Court states that the victim, who has not been publicly identified, told police that Matthew Abram Rader [ http://www.kval.com/news/local/Police-Man-tattooed-girls-vagina-with-his-name-for-her-15th-birthday-186229442.html ] gave her three tattoos for her 15th birthday, including one of his name "near her vagina."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/matthew-rader-oregon-tattooed-vagina_n_2489100.html [with comments]
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Preacher killed wife, stuffed body in freezer, police say
updated 4:26 p.m. EDT, Thu July 31, 2008
(CNN) -- An evangelical preacher killed his wife several years ago and stuffed her body in a freezer after she caught him abusing their daughter, according to police and court documents.
Anthony Hopkins, 37, was arrested Monday night at the Inspirational Tabernacle Church of God in Christ in Jackson, Alabama, just after he had delivered a sermon to a congregation that included his seven other children, officials said.
He faces charges including murder, rape, sodomy, sexual abuse and incest.
Hopkins was denied bail Thursday when he appeared before Mobile County District Judge George Hardesty. The case is set for arraignment next week, Hardesty's clerk said.
The case began Monday, when the daughter, now 19, went to the Mobile Police Department's Child Advocacy Center and reported that she had been sexually abused by Hopkins since she was 11 years old, according to an affidavit filed in support of a search warrant of the preacher's home in Mobile.
The affidavit related the daughter's story as follows:
Her mother, Arletha Hopkins, 36, caught her father abusing her in a bathroom in November 2004. Afterward, her parents argued, and her mother locked her father out of the house. The father came to the daughter's window and asked her to let him in, and she did so.
The next morning, her father asked her to help him hide her mother's body in the freezer in the laundry room of the home.
The girl said she moved out of the home about two weeks ago and was living with a neighbor. She told police that her mother's body was still in the freezer.
When authorities went to the home, no one was there, as Hopkins and the other children were at the church. A body was found in the freezer, the affidavit says.
Although police think the body is that of Arletha Hopkins, an identification is not expected until early next week, Mobile Police spokesman Officer Eric Gallichant said Thursday. Watch Nancy Grace's report »
Mobile Police Chief Phillip Garrett had said that an identification and autopsy results would take a few days: "obviously, the body was in a freezer."
He said he was not sure of the body's condition or whether it was intact, as upon seeing the body, authorities immediately sealed the chest-type freezer. The body had been covered in the unit, he said, and the entire appliance was taken to the state Department of Forensic Science.
At the Inspirational Tabernacle Church of God in Christ, Hopkins was preaching at a revival, pastor Beverly Jackson told CNN affiliate WKRG. His message, she said, was about forgiveness and not passing judgment -- and at one point, he turned to his seven children and asked them to forgive him his past, present and future.
Police allowed Hopkins to finish his sermon before arresting him, Jackson said. She said she asked police why they were arresting him and was told, "he murdered his wife."
She said Hopkins had told her his wife died four years ago while giving birth to their youngest son.
Attempts to reach Jackson on Thursday were unsuccessful.
Authorities moved quickly on the daughter's accusations to make sure the children still in the household were OK, Garrett said. They were placed in the custody of child welfare authorities. The next-oldest child is a 17-year-old female, he said.
All eight were the children of Arletha Hopkins, and Anthony Hopkins fathered six of them, he said.
An investigation has not found any record of Arletha Hopkins' existence since 2004, according to the affidavit. Asked how long police think the body had been in the freezer, Garrett said, "I'm thinking that she's probably been there for a number of years."
He said Anthony Hopkins did not have a regular church but apparently preached in various areas around the South.
"Part of the mystery here is that, apparently, none of these children were in school" but were being home-schooled, Mobile County District Attorney John Tyson said. "Home schooling, under this situation, removes almost any chances of us catching up with these kinds of things until there is a catastrophe."
Pastor Jerry Porter said he used to preach with Hopkins at his church, the Williams Street Holiness Church, and knew the family.
Arletha Hopkins "was very quiet," he told Mobile television station and CNN affiliate WPMI. "She was kind of secluded. She'd talk, but not much."
Anthony Hopkins, he said, made statements that led him to believe all was not well at home. "He always used to tell me ... 'You're blessed in the fact that you have a wife that supports you and what you're trying to do for God,' " Porter said.
He said Arletha Hopkins disappeared shortly after the couple's youngest child was born. As rumors swirled, Porter said, he confronted Hopkins and asked whether his wife was dead. Hopkins "wouldn't give me an answer," he said.
After that, Porter said, he banned him from the church but remained on good terms with him.
He said he visited the family a few years ago, and their home was clean and well-kept.
"It was the ideal family. I mean, the children were so respectful, just so easygoing," Porter said. "Didn't seem to be no stress at all. Never got that impression, never."
The children, he said, "loved their dad. They were very close to him."
Of Hopkins' preaching ability, Porter said, "he was a bulls-eye prophet. If he told you something, you could pretty much bank on it."
© 2008 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/07/31/preacher.freezer/index.html
*
Preacher guilty of killing wife, putting body in freezer
Anthony Hopkins guilty on all counts of murder, rape, sodomy, sex abuse and incest.
April 10, 2010
http://www2.alabamas13.com/news/2010/apr/10/preacher_guilty_of_killing_wife_putting_body_in_fr-ar-398471/
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Body Stolen From Detroit Cemetery, 2 Men Arrested
Authorities say a casket containing the body of 93-year-old Clarence Bright was stolen from Gethsemane Cemetery, seen Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2013 in Detroit. Police say two men have been arrested, including a 48-year-old reported to be the son of the deceased, on suspicion that they stole a Bright's body and casket from the cemetery on Monday.
(AP Photo/Ed White)
01/15/13 07:22 PM ET EST
DETROIT — A man who was arrested in the theft of his father's corpse from a Detroit cemetery stored the body in a freezer after a weekend funeral, hoping for it to be miraculously resurrected, police said Tuesday.
Clarence Bright's 48-year-old religious son was arrested along with another man after officers found an empty casket inside their van at a gas station, Detroit police said.
"This is a very, very bizarre situation," Leon Jones, a mortician's assistant at Swanson Funeral Home, told The Associated Press. The funeral home handled Bright's funeral.
Bright's final earthly journey was supposed to end Saturday at Gethsemane Cemetery on Detroit's east side, but soggy ground from recent rain postponed the 93-year-old's burial. The casket was placed near a chapel or a mausoleum on cemetery grounds and remained there through Monday morning when it was reported stolen, Jones said.
Acting on a tip that a white van had been seen at the cemetery, police spotted one parked at a gas station Tuesday – the men and the empty casket were inside, Officer George Day said.
The body was later found in a freezer at the home of Bright's son, Lt. Harold Rochon told The Detroit News ( http://bit.ly/ZUviFC [ http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130115/METRO01/301150372/Police-Brothers-took-dad-s-body-from-Detroit-cemetery-miracle-resurrection ]).
"In the interview with the son, he was very, very, very distraught," Rochon said. "He is very religious, and he was hoping his father would be resurrected. He was hoping for a miracle."
Police declined to release the names of Bright's son or the 38-year-old man who was with him. They had not been charged and the theft remained under investigation.
Across the street from the home where the body was found, 36-year-old Terri Gaines said she didn't have much contact with Bright's son.
"He's so quiet. He just goes in and out. He never had company," Gaines told the AP.
Jones said there was nothing unusual at the weekend funeral.
"People come in, they're grieving," he said. "We just try to comfort people."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/body-stolen-detroit-cemetery_n_2479780.html [with comments]
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Pastor to replace Alabama preacher accused of killing wife
In this 2011 photo, United Methodist Minister Rev. Terry Greer preaches as a guest speaker at First Baptist Church during Easter Holy Week in Decatur, Ala. Greer fatally shot his wife and wounded their 18-year-old daughter in their church-owned home before grabbing a kitchen knife and trying to stab himself to death, police said Friday, Jan. 11, 2013.
(AP Photo/The Decatur Daily, John Godbey)
GARDENDALE, Ala. (AP) — North Alabama Methodists have named an interim pastor to replace a preacher charged with murder in the slaying of his wife.
Bill Bostick will take over at Gardendale-Mt. Vernon United Methodist Church beginning Thursday.
Bostick's appointment was announced by Debra Wallace-Padgett, the United Methodist bishop for north Alabama.
The former pastor at Gardendale-Mt. Vernon, the Rev. Terry Greer, is recovering from what police describe as a suicide attempt after the gunshot killing [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/police-ala-pastor-killed-wife-wounded-daughter-18195065 ] of his wife, Lisa Greer.
Authorities charged Greer with murder in the killing. He's also charged with attempted murder in the wounding of his 18-year-old daughter.
Authorities haven't disclosed a possible motive in the shooting, but Greer has had health problems.
Methodist leaders have suspended Greer from his ministerial duties, but he remains a Methodist pastor.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/viewart/20130117/NEWS/130117005/Pastor-replace-Alabama-preacher-accused-killing-wife [no comments yet]
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Notre Dame’s real dead woman
(Credit: AP/Joe Raymond)
Manti Te'o's soap opera moves the school's athletic director to tears, while Lizzy Seeberg's suicide is ignored
By Irin Carmon
Thursday, Jan 17, 2013 09:53 AM CST
Less than a day into the Manti Te’o revelations, we’ve heard more about a fake dead girlfriend of a Notre Dame football player than a real dead girl. Lizzy Seeberg committed suicide, not long after being intimidated by Notre Dame football players for reporting a sexual assault by one of their teammates. A second woman who was taken to the hospital for a rape exam declined to formally accuse another Notre Dame football player after getting a series of bullying texts from players.
The handful of people who immediately [ https://twitter.com/amaditalks/status/291716624933875712 ] took [ https://twitter.com/anamariecox/status/291894541110358016 ] note [ https://twitter.com/studentactivism/status/291723795843145729 ] of the contrast in the attention — both by the press and by the university — are absolutely right to be angry. But no one should be surprised.
We don’t know everything about the Te’o saga yet, but there is probably only one fake dead girlfriend mythologized by the sports media, the existence of “Catfish”-ing as a verb notwithstanding. Whereas there are legions of stories of sexual violence against women and men by star athletes and staff, who can reliably count on the impunity offered by fandom. Confronting the former is a little embarrassing: The public equivalent of loving too much, the allure of a heartwarming story everyone wanted to believe. Confronting the latter requires uglier, more difficult self-examination, and accepting collective responsibility costs more.
It matters, too, how we can talk about each story. Some Manti Te’o Twitter jokes were instant classics; no one decent can make jokes about a girl who killed herself after being told, “Don’t do anything you would regret,” and “Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea,” according to Melinda Henneberger’s reporting [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2012/12/04/why-i-wont-be-cheering-for-old-notre-dame/ ]. Henneberger, a Notre Dame alum, wrote in the Washington Post in early December that she won’t be cheering for the team. “As a thought exercise, how many predators would have to be on the team before you’d no longer feel like cheering?” she wrote. (She also said, “There are plenty of good guys on the team, too, I’m repeatedly told, And oh, that Manti Te’o [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/linebacker-teo-says-if-he-wins-heisman-trophy-it-would-be-a-victory-for-all-defensive-players/2012/11/29/4c8ed656-3a7a-11e2-9258-ac7c78d5c680_story.html (story now gone missing)] is inspiring. I don’t doubt it.” Very few did.) It’s easier to just change the subject and not think about whether there is something endemic to football culture that enables sexual entitlement with the reasonable assumption of getting away with it.
We all have heard by now how denial and institutional culture contributed to Jerry Sandusky’s ability to continue assaulting young boys for years, under cover of the Penn State football program. But once that was exposed, it was rightly considered an unambiguous evil. But the sexual assault of women can and is often explained away — including the Notre Dame donor who justified his continued support to Henneberger by saying that Seeberg had been sexually aggressive, that “she was all over the boy.” In other words, it’s not just the players who are banding together around their brothers whether they’re rapists or not; it’s the adults around them who are turning a blind eye because they consider other things are more important. And they’re willing to believe anything except that these nice boys can be rapists.
Dave Zirin, who has long called [ http://www.thenation.com/blog/156708/ncaa-should-shut-down-notre-dames-football-program ] for the Notre Dame football program to be shut down as irredeemably corrupt, pointed out that the university had hired a private investigator for the Te’o case but not the numerous other allegations of wrongdoing by players. Zirin said of the school’s athletic director, “It says so much that Te’o’s bizarre soap opera has moved [Jack] Swarbrick to openly weeping but he hasn’t spared one tear, let alone held one press conference, for Lizzy Seeberg … The problem at Notre Dame is not just football players without a compass; it’s the adults without a conscience.” We live in a country that officially condemns rape and sexual assault but when confronted with the real possibility of it, rarely strays from denial and excuses. That’s the biggest scam of all.
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/notre_dames_double_standard/ [with comments]
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Rush’s latest abortion idiocy
Rush Limbaugh
(Credit: AP/Chris Carlson)
The shock jock offers a new plan to stop abortion -- and takes conservative trolling to previously unknown heights
By Katie Mcdonough
Thursday, Jan 17, 2013 02:51 PM CST
There really isn’t much to say about Rush Limbaugh anymore. Barely a day passes without hearing about some new, horrible thing he said.
And obviously, since you’re reading this, today is no different.
After a rousing bit of back and forth with a caller on gun control (“If you have gun control laws, the law-abiding will be the only people that don’t have guns!“), Limbaugh launched into a new theory about how to ban abortion in the United States.
By suggesting doctors perform them with guns.
Partial transcript [ http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/01/16/revenge_on_the_bitter_clingers ] below (bold text mine):
RUSH: That’s true. I’ve often wondered, what is so hard for the left to understand about that? By definition, if you have gun control laws, the law-abiding will be the only people that don’t have guns. In fact, the most stringent gun control laws in the country today are DC and New York and they’ve got the highest crime rates with guns. Doesn’t that tell them something? So it must be something not to do with guns. It’s gotta be about something totally different than gun control.
CALLER: I think it does. It’s just terrible that 26 people died in Sandy Hook and 20 of them were children. Terrible. Very sad, coming up to Christmas. Hopes and dreams the young children had, their parents and weddings and congratulations that will never occur. However, on any given day in America, more than 3,000 children are killed from abortion, and we have no problems with that. We’re okay with that; it’s not an issue.
You can’t spend 40 years telling people and telling children that if I make a mistake — if something comes up and this child that I don’t want is in the way of my future and the way of me graduating high school, is in the way of me going to college, is the way of me being happy, is in the way of whatever I want out of life — then it’s okay for me to kill the baby. But later on when I become a disgruntled employee, when I become an unhappy student at school because children are bullying me, then I want to eliminate them to get them out of the way? It’s the same concept.
RUSH: Well, it’s a good point. You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun.
END TRANSCRIPT
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/rushs_latest_abortion_idiocy/ [with comments]
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Vatican Welcomes Obama Gun Control Proposal
01/19/13 10:16 AM ET EST
VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican praised President Barack Obama's proposals for curbing gun violence, saying they are a "step in a right direction."
The Vatican's chief spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Saturday that 47 religious leaders have appealed to members of the U.S. Congress "to limit firearms that are making society pay an unacceptable price in terms of massacres and senseless deaths."
"I am with them," Lombardi said, in an editorial carried on Vatican Radio, lining up the Vatican's moral support in favor of firearm limits.
`'The initiatives announced by the American administration for limiting and controlling the spread and use of weapons are certainly a step in the right direction," Lombardi said.
Obama is trying to rally support for reinstating a ban on assault weapons and requiring background checks on all gun sales. He faces stiff opposition in the U.S. Congress and from powerful gun lobbies.
Considering that Americans possess `'about 300 million firearms," Lombardi said, `'people cannot fool themselves that it is enough to limit the number and use (of guns) to impede in the future horrendous massacres like that of Newtown that shook the conscience of America and world, as well as that of children and adults. `'
He was referring to the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school where 20 children and six adults were killed by a sole attacker last month.
`'But it would be worse to be satisfied with words" of condemnation alone, Lombardi said. And while massacres are `'carried out by unbalanced or hate-driven persons, there is no doubt that they are carried out with firearms," the Vatican spokesman said.
Lombardi renewed Vatican appeals for disarmament and encouragement for measures to fight "the production, commerce and contraband of all types of arms," an industry fueled by `'enormous economic and power interests."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/19/vatican-gun-control-_n_2510885.html [with comments]
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Rand Paul Repeats Debunked Obamacare Conspiracy Theory, Claim 'Databanks' Spy On Gun Owners
Rand Paul has now recycled an old -- and untrue -- myth that claims Obamacare will be used to spy on gun owners.
By Meredith Bennett-Smith
Posted: 01/18/2013 6:58 pm EST | Updated: 01/19/2013 9:31 am EST
A nutty conspiracy theory involving doctors gathering intelligence on gun-owning patients in advance of a mass gun-confiscation plan has cropped up again after being touted Wednesday by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
Speaking with evangelical leader Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, the outspoken Paul claimed that the President was "going to use Obamacare apparently to have doctors informing on their patients to whether or not they have guns," and then store the information in "government databanks [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/rand-paul-pushes-conspiracy-theory-obamacare-databanks-gather-information-gun-owners ]," reports Right Wing Watch.
Perkins said he, too, had read of this plan to have doctors acting as informants and had been "just flabbergasted."
Paul appears to be referring to a general theory that, in one form or another, has been making the rounds in conservative groups ever since the Gun Owners of America warned in 2009 that Obamacare "could be used to ban guns in home self-defense [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/11/23/reality-check-health-insurance-reform-not-a-guns-bill ]." At the time, PolitiFact dismissed the claim as false [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/20/gun-owners-america/gun-rights-group-says-health-care-bill-could-harm-/ ], but Gun Owners of America Executive Director Larry Pratt resurrected the theories in November, telling VCY America’s "Crosstalk" that Obamacare and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were conspiring to disarm Americans [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pratt-obamacare-take-away-your-guns ].
Said Pratt:
[Obamacare] says that all of our medical records are available to be pawed through by bureaucrats somewhere in Washington, looking for a reason to disenfranchise gun owners, to say ‘oh you have a medical diagnosis that means you might be a danger to yourself or others so we’re going to come and knock on the door for the BATF to take away your guns.
Radio personality Rush Limbaugh has apparently also joined the debate. On his show this week, Limbaugh said that wording in Obama's executive gun control package [ http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/01/16/regime_deputizes_gun_snitch_doctors ] means "your doctor has essentially been deputized."
"Again, folks, this is pushing people's buttons on purpose," Limbaugh added. "This is gonna cause some people to snap. It might."
More credibly, Fox News wrote a long story Thursday [ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/17/does-white-house-plan-enlist-doctors-in-gun-control-fight/ ] that quoted National Rifle Association President David Keene as saying, "The idea that your doctor would ask you if you have firearms in your house as part of an examination of your health is repugnant."
Fox News noted, however, that much of the language that has been seized on is "in line with the policy of most states. All but a few allow mental health professionals to report information about patients they believe may become violent."
And the site also clarified that while the 2010 Affordable Care Act "does not prohibit doctors from asking about firearms, the law states that the government cannot require that information to be disclosed either," and the information cannot be used to raise insurance rates.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/18/rand-paul-obamacare-conspiracy-theory-databanks-spy-gun-owners_n_2506535.html [with comments]
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Ind. man shoots himself while leaving gun show
Updated 3:46 pm, Saturday, January 19, 2013
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Police say a 54-year-old Indianapolis man was injured when he accidentally shot himself while leaving a gun show.
Indiana State Police say Emory L. Cozee was loading his .45 caliber semi-automatic when he shot himself in the hand Saturday afternoon as he was leaving the Indy 1500 Gun and Knife show at the state fairgrounds.
Loaded personal weapons are not allowed inside the show.
Cozee was taken to Wishard Hospital for treatment.
Police say the shooting was accidental and no charges will be filed.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.seattlepi.com/news/us/article/Ind-man-shoots-himself-while-leaving-gun-show-4208362.php [with comment]
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Fear of Feds Leads to Nullification Fever in SC
In this Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2013 photo, Dick LoBue looks through his signs at a rally to support a bill to nullify the new health care law supported by President Barack Obama in Columbia, S.C. The bill is one of several pieces of legislation in South Carolina designed to go around federal laws.
(AP Photo/Jeffrey Collins)
By JEFFREY COLLINS
COLUMBIA, S.C. January 20, 2013
A politician told a crowd of several hundred people at South Carolina's Statehouse that they didn't have to accept overreaching laws from an out-of-control federal government — arguing the Constitution says so.
"My objective over the next four years, every day I walk into that Senate chamber, is to find another way I can thwart federal encroachment," the politician thundered to the cheers of the crowd.
It wasn't John C. Calhoun calling for South Carolina to stop collecting federal tariffs in the 1830s. It was state Sen. Tom Davis earlier this month, supporting a bill that would declare the new health care law supported by President Barack Obama illegal in the state. The bill, the subject of a "Nullify Obamacare" rally on the opening day for the Legislature, said anyone trying to enforce it would be guilty of a felony.
Health care isn't the only reason South Carolina lawmakers aren't happy with the federal government. Over the past two years, lawmakers have suggested the state should be able to ignore federal laws on gun control and light bulbs, mint its own currency and refuse all stimulus money.
The proposals haven't gotten a lot of traction in the state Senate or across the hall and past the statue of Calhoun in the House. But they get a certain segment of Republican voters excited — a segment that will be critical to anyone mounting a primary challenge to Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham in 2014. Davis has said Graham needs to go because he isn't conservative enough, but he hasn't committed to run himself.
"This state has a proud tradition of leaders stepping up and holding aloft the candle of liberty at a time when things are darkest," said Davis, R-Beaufort. "We have to rise to that challenge now."
Nullification is a loaded word in South Carolina. While various states considered it in this country's first few decades, the state was the first to push the federal government to the brink. In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson threatened to send the entire U.S. Army to South Carolina if the state nullified a tariff that many residents felt protected Northern industry at the expense of Southern farmers.
Jackson said if one drop of blood was shed, he would hang the first supporter of nullification he found in the first tree he passed. The issue split Jackson and Calhoun, who was his vice president in his first term, but things simmered down after a compromise tariff was reached.
In 2013, the issue remains dissatisfaction with the federal government, even if the root causes are different. Anger over federal regulations that ended manufacturing of incandescent 100-watt bulbs led to the proposal that those types of bulbs made and sold in South Carolina might be exempt.
The gun bill is similar, proposing firearms manufactured and then sold exclusively in South Carolina be exempt from any new federal gun control laws. It does limit the firepower of the weapons, so a South Carolina-made cannon or surface-to-air missile would still be illegal.
Making and selling the items only in South Carolina is critical, supporters say, to avoid triggering the interstate commerce clause that would allow federal law to usurp state law.
For many at the rally earlier this month, the fact that Obama won 51 percent of the vote nationally (and 44 percent of the vote in South Carolina) meant that it is much more urgent to take action now.
Dick LoBue, a 76-year-old retired utility worker from New York who moved to Myrtle Beach more than a decade ago, is excited to see the idea of nullification return. He brought several homemade signs to the rally, including one that called Obama a "self-ordained socialist, communist dictator."
"We won't go without a fight. As Patrick Henry said, 'Give me liberty, or give me death,'" said LoBue, a member of the Carolina Patriots, which split from a tea party group a few years ago.
And the federal government is in such a mess of debt and is so unpopular that officials likely will have their hands tied if any state starts nullifying laws, said state Sen. Lee Bright, who is a sponsor of many of these bills.
"They are 16 trillion in the hole. I don't think they are going to push their power around too much," said Bright, R-Roebuck.
The federal government is no stranger in South Carolina. It has major posts for the Air Force, Army and Marines. It also is set to contribute $8.7 billion to the state's budget, while $6.1 billion comes from taxes and other general state revenue.
The bills tweaking the federal government likely won't pass. Nullification should have been settled after Abraham Lincoln's vision of federal power won the Civil War 150 years ago, said House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford.
But the nullification talk does create problems getting things done at the Statehouse, said Rutherford, D-Columbia.
"It's not serious talk. They suggest one thing openly to their constituents who bite at the red meat, but they live in a separate place. This just kills any chance at having a conversation or reaching an agreement," Rutherford said
Supporters of nullification say the federal government never prohibited it, even after the Civil War. They say even the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the new health care law doesn't mean much. They point out the justices have changed their minds before, citing the segregation-supporting 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, and the segregation-ending 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
The nullification supporters attract a sometimes unwelcome subset. Also at the rally was the state director of the League of the South, holding up a sign that read "If nullification fails, try secession."
Robert Hayes, who attended the rally at the capitol, said South Carolina has bucked supervision since it successfully demanded to be separated from North Carolina decades before the American Revolution.
"I think it is in the genetic makeup of South Carolinians," Hayes said. "We simply like to stand up to any government that oppresses our freedoms."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fear-feds-leads-nullification-fever-sc-18259809 [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fear-feds-leads-nullification-fever-sc-18259809?singlePage=true ] [no comments yet]
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5 injured after firearms go off at Ohio, N.C., Indiana gun shows
An injured person is taken from the North Carolina State Fairgrounds after being wounded in a gun accident on Saturday.
By Michael Martinez and Greg Botelho, CNN
updated 11:25 PM EST, Sat January 19, 2013
(CNN) -- At least five people -- three in North Carolina, one in Indiana and one in Ohio -- were injured after weapons went off at gun shows Saturday, officials said, at a time when there's been renewed discussion about private gun sales at such shows.
The most casualties came at the Dixie Gun and Knife Show in Raleigh, where attendees bolted -- with at least one woman wiping out in the frenetic scene -- when gunfire rang out around 1 p.m., as seen on video captured by CNN affiliate WRAL.
Police later explained that a a 36-year-old man from Wilmington, North Carolina, was unfastening the case of his 12-gauge shotgun on a table near the show entrance when it accidentally discharged. The man planned to sell the shotgun at the show.
The bird shot ended up injuring three people. One was a sheriff's deputy, who suffered a slight injury to his hand and was treated and released at a local hospital before returning immediately to work, said Joel Keith, chief of police of the North Carolina State Fair.
A 54-year-old woman from Benson, North Carolina, was being treated a wound to her right torso at a local hospital, and a 50-year-old man from Durham, North Carolina, was treated for an injured left hand, Keith told reporters.
"I want to emphasize that this is an accident," Keith said.
That said, Wake County sheriff's investigators and the local prosecutor will determine whether to file charges against the gun's owner, authorities said.
Sheriff Donnie Harrison said he was unsure whether it was legal to bring a loaded gun on state fairgrounds. However, when the state fair is held in October, it is illegal to bring a loaded gun to the fairground because of the large crowds, authorities said.
"This is state property. That's something we're looking into," Harrison told reporters. "It's early right now."
The shooting prompted police to ban any private gun sales -- in which visitors bring their firearms to sell at the gun show -- for the remainder of the two-day show, which concludes Sunday, Keith said. He added there wouldn't be any private gun sales on fairgrounds for the indefinite future.
The gun show was closed after the shooting and will reopen Sunday. At that point, show vendors can continue to sell firearms, which are already secured inside the show, Keith said.
"If we thought if it was a problem or a hazard, we wouldn't have this show," Keith said about private gun sales at the show. "I'm sure there isn't anybody who hates this more than the guy who owned this weapon."
Man shoots business partner with semi-automatic handgun
A person is in stable condition at a northern Ohio hospital after being shot by his business partner at a gun show run by Conrad and Dowdell Productions, said Medina police Chief Patrick Berarducci.
The original owner of the Taurus semi-automatic 9 mm handgun used in the shooting brought the firearm into the show fully loaded. This is despite the policy of searches to make sure all guns are not loaded and rendered safe before others can handle them.
The man who bought the gun told police that he took it out, then accidentally fired it, said Berarducci. A single bullet ended up going into the arm and thigh of this man's business partner.
Authorities don't know who brought the loaded firearm into the gun show and sold it, added the police chief. They'll file a request with the federal ATF to track this person down.
The victim, meanwhile, is in good spirits with non-life-threatening injuries, according to Berarducci.
And in Indianapolis, a man walking out of the Indy 1500 Gun and Knife Show shot himself in the hand as he was loading his .45-caliber semi-automatic firearm, Indiana State Police said in a statement.
The 54-year-old Indianapolis man was sent to Wishard Hospital for treatment after being "slightly" injured.
"The investigation determined the shooting to be accidental, and no charges will be filed," police said.
Shootings occur as gun debate rages
Reforming private gun sales -- at shows or anywhere else -- is among the changes that President Barack Obama is now seeking by requiring background checks.
The president has called for action in the wake of last month's shooting at a school in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 27 people -- 20 of them children age 7 or younger -- dead. Gun control activists have likewise pushed for changes, while gun rights advocates have said restrictions on gun sales are unnecessary and in defiance of their Second Amendment rights.
Currently, federal law requires background checks on gun sales by federally licensed firearms dealers, who are often among the vendors at gun shows.
Saturday's incidents occurred on 'Gun Appreciation Day," an event led by a gun rights group that urged Americans to "go to your local gun store, gun range or gun show with your Constitution, American flags and your 'Hands off my Guns' sign to send a loud and clear message."
Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, last Sunday issued a statement predicting this event would drive up sales of things like "assault-style rifles," which have already "skyrocketed" in the wake of the Newtown mass shooting.
Jabari Richards, a gun enthusiast, told WRAL at the Raleigh, North Carolina, show that he thought some reforms were wise.
"I think there should be background checks for everybody," Richards said, "because then you know they ... are capable of having a gun."
But another man at the Raleigh show said it was useless for Washington to step in.
"The gun laws that they have on the books aren't enforced, don't do any good," Al Galbraith said.
CNN's Stefan Simons and Maggie Schneider contributed to this report.
© 2013 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/19/us/north-carolina-gun-show-shooting/ [with comments]
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Gun Found In Seven-Year-Old's Backpack At Wave Preparatory Elementary School In Queens
01/18/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/17/gun-found-in-7-year-olds-backpack-queens_n_2498109.html [with comments]
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Gun Appreciation Day Celebrated With Accidental Shootings at Gun Shows
Jan 19, 2013
[...]
As the Daily Intelligencer [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/shooting-at-gun-show-marks-gun-appreciation-day.html ] notes, today is both Gun Appreciation Day [ http://gunappreciationday.com/ ] and Guns Across America [ http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2013/0119/Guns-Across-America-Gun-owners-push-back-with-national-rally ]. What a perfect way to celebrate!
[...]
http://gawker.com/5977377/gun-appreciation-day-celebrated-with-accidental-shootings-at-gun-shows-in-north-carolina-and-ohio [with comments]
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Sandy Relief Passes House Despite Conservative Opposition
01/16/2013
A measure providing $51 billion for relief and recovery from Hurricane Sandy was approved by a bipartisan majority in the House on Tuesday evening, three weeks after Northeast Republicans excoriated the chamber's GOP leaders for failing to vote on storm aid before the end of the last Congress.
An amendment to the relief package introduced by Tea Party-allied conservatives requiring across-the-board cuts to defense and domestic programs to pay for $17 billion of storm aid was supported by a majority of Republicans, but was defeated 258-162 with a combination of GOP and Democratic votes.
The full $51 billion relief bill passed the House 241-180, with 179 Republicans opposed.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/sandy-relief-measure-passes_n_2480328.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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The endangered GOP House majority?
2014 will be a tough lift for Dems, but they may be closer than you think to winning back complete control of D.C.
Jan 18, 2013
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/18/the_endangered_gop_house_majority/ [with comments]
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David Brooks Now Totally Pathological
By Jonathan Chait
1/18/13 at 11:50 AM
Moderate Republicanism is a tendency that increasingly defies ideological analysis and instead requires psychological analysis. The psychological mechanism is fairly obvious. The radicalization of the GOP has placed unbearable strain on those few moderates torn between their positions and their attachment to party. Many moderate conservatives have simply broken off from the party, at least in its current incarnation, and are hoping or working to build a sane alternative. Those who remain must escape into progressively more baroque fantasies.
The prevalent expression of this psychological pain is the belief that President Obama is largely or entirely responsible for Republican extremism. It’s a bizarre but understandable way to reconcile conflicting emotions — somewhat akin to blaming your husband’s infidelity entirely on his mistress. In this case, moderate Republicans believe that Obama’s tactic of taking sensible positions that moderate Republicans agree with is cruel and unfair, because it exposes the extremism that dominates the party, not to mention the powerlessness of the moderates within it. Michael Gerson [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/obamas-sinister-being-reasonable-ploy-exposed.html ] recently expressed this bizarre view, and the pathology is also on vivid display in David Brooks’s column today [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/opinion/brooks-the-next-four-years.html ].
Brooks begins by noting that the Grand Bargain on the deficit, which he has spent the last two years relentlessly touting, is not actually possible. Why is it impossible? Because, he writes, “A political class that botched the fiscal cliff so badly are not going to be capable of a gigantic deal on complex issues.”
Oh, the political class? That’s funny. In 2011, Obama offered an astonishingly generous budget deal to House Republicans, and Brooks argued at the time that if the GOP turned the deal down, it would prove their “fanaticism.” Naturally, they turned it down. Obama continues to offer a bargain including higher revenue through tax reform in return for lower spending on retirement programs, but Republicans refuse to consider higher taxes. So, in summary, this proves “the political class” is to blame.
What Obama should be doing in response, Brooks argues, is push for policies that provoke no opposition even from the craziest of the Republicans: “We could do some education reform, expand visa laws to admit more high-skill workers, encourage responsible drilling for natural gas, maybe establish an infrastructure bank.” Brooks argues that these issues would be uncontroversial enough to “erode partisan orthodoxies and get back into the habit of passing laws together.” Then, maybe we could pass some laws under a future president.
Note that solving actual problems is besides the point here. Brooks is almost explicit about this. He begins with the need for initiatives that he thinks will lead to happiness and comity between the parties in Washington, and then comes up with policies that might fit the bill. Not surprisingly, viewed from the standpoint of an agenda designed to make life better for Americans in some way, shape or form, Brooks’s proposed agenda is strange. Let’s consider his ideas:
Education reform. I love education reform. Obama passed a sweeping education reform in 2009. Brooks writes a column the next year fulsomely praising it. (Obama “has used federal power to incite reform, without dictating it from the top.”) Is there more education reform to be done? There may be, but I don’t know what it would be, and Brooks doesn’t seem to know or care.
Expand visa laws to admit more high-skill workers. Would this really pass right away without partisan animosity? Brooks says yes. We don’t have to guess. Democrats tried this last month. Republicans loaded it with poison pills and killed it dead. So instead they’re trying to do it as part of comprehensive immigration reform.
Encourage responsible drilling for natural gas. Wait, how much more encouragement do we need? The country is undergoing a massive natural gas boom:
Is there some element to natural gas policy that needs fixing? Does Brooks just think the two parties should get together and congratulate each other for all the natural gas being produced?
Establish an infrastructure bank. Okay, this one is a good policy idea. But is it something Republicans would easily pass without rancor? In fact, Obama has been asking for this very thing for years now. And Republicans have called it dead on arrival.
So Brooks’s proposed alternative agenda consists of either empty list-filler or actual policies that Obama has proposed and Republicans have killed. But instead of this happy term of modest accomplishment, Obama is pursuing a nasty, partisan agenda. Step one of this devious ploy is to, as Brooks puts it, “invite a series of confrontations with Republicans over things like the debt ceiling — make them look like wackos willing to endanger the entire global economy.”
Right – Obama is the one inviting confrontations over the debt ceiling. Never mind that, before 2011, the debt ceiling was just an occasion for routine posturing, and Republicans insisted on turning it into a showdown with real, dangerous stakes. Also never mind that Obama offered to sign the plan — proposed by Mitch McConnell! — to permanently defuse the debt ceiling and let Republicans use it to posture against him rather than actually threatening a global meltdown. And never mind as well that, by refusing to cave in to extortion, Obama seems to actually be defusing the real danger to the world economy.
This is all Obama’s fault because it makes Republicans “look like whackos willing to endanger the entire global economy.” Brooks displays an almost surreal lack of interest in the underlying reality that Republicans actually are whackos willing to endanger the entire global economy. It is his responsibility to conceal this reality from America.
Worse, argues Brooks, Obama is nastily choosing an agenda intended only to harm Republicans. Obama’s proposals on gun safety and immigration, he writes, are “wedge issues meant to divide Southerners from Midwesterners, the Tea Party/Talk Radio base from the less ideological corporate and managerial class.”
Brooks asserts, but does not actually explain, that Obama chose these issues for the purpose of dividing the opposition — as opposed to trying to cut down on mass murders and fix a huge field of broken policy. Brooks concedes that Obama’s proposals here are moderate, but believes that the moderation is what makes them so nasty. By appealing to mainstream Republicans, he is splitting them from the most extreme Republicans!
You would think proposing policies that large numbers of Republicans agree with would qualify as the kind of centrism and bipartisanship Brooks has spent the entire Obama presidency calling for, but now that it’s here, it turns out to prove just the opposite to him.
*
Related
David Brooks Teaching Writings by David Brooks in Yale Course on Humility.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/david-brooks-defends-yale-course-on-humility.html
Bush Speechwriter Michael Gerson Exposes Obama’s Sinister Being-Reasonable Ploy.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/obamas-sinister-being-reasonable-ploy-exposed.html
The Tragedy of Moderate Republicanism
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/10/tragedy-of-moderate-republicanism.html
*
Copyright © 2013, New York Media LLC (emphasis in original)
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/david-brooks-now-totally-pathological.html [with comments]
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Americans growing wise to Republican plan to rig presidential race
The Rachel Maddow Show
January 17, 2013
Rachel Maddow reports on the growing awareness among the American political media of a plan by state Republicans to use a gerrymandering strategy with the Electoral College to give a greater advantage to Republican candidates in presidential races.
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/50502443#50502443 [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSttN2unU48 ; show links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/01/17/16576206-links-for-the-117-trms (with comments)] [further to her January 15, 2013 segment "GOP seeks to rig presidential race on model of Congressional gerrymandering", http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/50477422#50477422 (show links, 19 related to the segment, at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/01/15/16535348-links-for-the-115-trms {with comments}) (a bit less than halfway down at (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83473699 )]
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Election process toolkit
ProPublica
By Vanessa Silverton-Peel
Thu Jan 17, 2013 8:41 PM EST
The national picture:
• REDMAP 2012 Summary Report
http://rslc.com/_blog/News/post/REDMAP_2012_Summary_Report
• ProPublica: House Seats vs. Popular Vote
http://www.propublica.org/article/how-dark-money-helped-republicans-hold-the-house-and-hurt-voters
• A chart!
http://projects.propublica.org/graphics/seats-vs-votes [above]
• RNC chief backs electoral college scheme
http://www.thenation.com/blog/172191/rncs-priebus-proposes-rig-electoral-college-so-losing-republicans-can-win
And in the states:
• Michigan Effort Shows G.O.P. Sway
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/us/politics/republican-donors-make-gains-in-states.html?pagewanted=all
• Wisconsin GOP governor is "intrigued"
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/reince-priebus-backs-electoral-vote-change-but-its-states-decision-fp8bqc3-186720481.html
• So goes Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, so goes any chance of there ever being another Democratic president
http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/on-the-trail/the-gop-s-electoral-college-scheme-20121217
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/01/17/16572191-election-process-toolkit [with comments]
===
Obamacare’s Other Shoe
The Pentagon and Chuck Hagel
By Mark Steyn
January 11, 2013 3:00 P.M.
If you had buttonholed me in the Senate men’s room circa 2003 and told me that a decade hence Joe Biden would be America’s vice president, John Kerry secretary of state, and Chuck Hagel secretary of defense, I’d have laughed and waited for the punch line: The Leahy administration? President Lautenberg? Celebrate lack of diversity! But even in the republic’s descent into a Blowhardocracy staffed by a Zombie House of Lords, there are distinctions to be drawn. Senator Kerry having been reliably wrong on every foreign-policy issue of the last 40 years, it would seem likely that at this stage in his life he will be content merely to be in office, jetting hither and yon boring the pants off whichever presidents and prime ministers are foolish enough to grant him an audience. Beyond the photo-ops, the world will drift on toward the post-American era: Beijing will carry on gobbling up resources around the planet, Czar Putin will flex his moobs across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Arab Spring “democracies” will see impressive growth in the critical clitoridectomy sector of the economy, Iran will go nuclear, and John Kerry will go to black-tie banquets in Europe. But Chuck Hagel is a different kettle of senatorial huffenpuffer. And not because of what appears to be a certain antipathy toward Jews and gays. That would be awkward at the Tony Awards, but at the Arab League the post-summit locker-room schmoozing should be a breeze. Since his celebrated “evolution” on marriage last year, President Obama is famously partial to one of those constituencies, so presumably he didn’t nominate an obscure forgotten senator because of his fascinating insights into the appropriate level of “obviousness” the differently oriented should adopt. So why Hagel? Why now?
My comrade Jonah Goldberg says this nomination is a “petty pick” made by Obama “out of spite.” I’m not so sure. If the signature accomplishment of the president’s first term was Obamacare (I’m using “signature accomplishment” in the Washington sense of “ruinously expensive bureaucratic sinkhole”), what would he be looking to pull off in his second (aside from the repeal of the 22nd Amendment)? Hagel isn’t being nominated to the Department of Zionist and Homosexual Regulatory Oversight but to the Department of Defense. Which he calls “bloated.”
“The Pentagon,” he said a year ago, “needs to be pared down.” Unlike the current secretary, Leon Panetta, who’s strongly opposed to the mandated “sequestration” cuts to the defense budget, Hagel thinks they’re merely a good start.
That’s why Obama’s offered him the gig. Because Obamacare at home leads inevitably to Obamacuts abroad. In that sense, America will be doing no more than following the same glum trajectory of every other great power in the postwar era. I feel only a wee bit sheepish about quoting my book After America two weeks running, since it’s hardly my fault Obama’s using it as the operating manual for his second term (I may sue for breach of copyright and retire to Tahiti). At any rate, somewhere around Chapter Five, I suggest that, having succeeded Britain as the dominant power, America may follow the old country in decline, too:
“In what other ways might the mighty eagle emulate the tattered old lion? First comes reorientation, and the shrinking of the horizon. After empire, Britain turned inward: Between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of government expenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to seven, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 percent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.
“Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: You can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford — cut back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite?”
Democrats put it slightly differently: In 2004 John Kerry demanded to know why we were building firehouses in Iraq but closing them in America (the municipal fire department apparently falling, like everything else, under the federal government). Barack Obama prefers to say that it’s time for the United States to do some nation-building at home — the pilot program in Afghanistan having worked out so well. Either line will do, and, like Britain’s inverted budget priorities, both implicitly acknowledge that a military-industrial complex and a dependency-bureaucrat complex are incompatible. And that’s before you factor in Washington-size borrowing, under which, within this decade, the interest payments on the debt will be covering the entire cost of the Chinese military. America can fund the Pentagon or the People’s Liberation Army, but not both, not for long. Having gotten the citizenry to accept a supersized welfare bureaucracy, Obama reasonably enough figures he can just as easily get them used to a shrunken American presence in the wider world.
So the president is looking for his equivalent of Denis Healey, the Labour cabinet minister who in the 1968 defense review announced an all but total withdrawal of British forces from “east of Suez” — a phrase that in the imperial imagination is less geographic than psychological.
Kipling’s English Tommy on the road to Mandalay: “Ship me somewheres east of Suez . . . ” And then a cheeseparing defense minister says: No, we won’t. Not now, not ever again. It’s over.
Who would you hire for the Pentagon’s east-of-Suez moment? According to the Washington Post, Obama picked Hagel to “bridge the partisan divide.”
Even for the court eunuchs of the palace media, that must be hard to type with a straight face: He seems to be all but entirely loathed by his own party. Nevertheless, he is technically a Republican, not to mention a bona fide war hero. Only Nixon can go to China, and only a pro-life, pro-gun, climate-denialist, homophobic, Strom Thurmond–loving, medal-draped Republican can go to the Pentagon and tell them to start clearing out their desks. Obama has picked a guy whose rhetoric is more anti-Pentagon than his own, and who, unlike most of the cabinet senators, has a record of executive experience that suggests he may well live up to it.
If he pulls it off, it’ll be a big part of Obama’s legacy. And, if he doesn’t, I’m sure the media will be happy to remind everyone that, oh well, Hagel was a Republican.
But beyond the politics is a real question. He’s not wrong to raise the question of Pentagon “bloat.” The United States has the most lavishly funded military on the planet, and what does it buy you? In the Hindu Kush, we’re taking twelve years to lose to goatherds with fertilizer.
Something is wrong with this picture. Indeed, something is badly wrong with the American way of war. And no one could seriously argue that, in the latest in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll call of America’s un-won wars, the problem is a lack of money or resources. Given its track record, why shouldn’t the Pentagon get a top-to-toe overhaul — or at least a cost-benefit analysis?
Just to be clear: I disagree with Hagel on Israel, on Iran, and on most everything else. But my colleagues on the right are in denial if they don’t think there are some very basic questions that need to be asked about the too-big-to-fail Department of Defense. Obama would like the U.S. military to do less. Some of us would like it to do more with less — more nimbly, more artfully. But, if the national-security establishment won’t acknowledge there’s even a problem, they’re unlikely to like the solutions imposed by others. “Petty” and “spiteful”? No. Obamacare’s other shoe.
Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon [ http://www.amazon.com/After-America-Get-Ready-Armageddon/dp/1596983272 ].
© National Review Online 2013
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/337490/obamacare-s-other-shoe-mark-steyn [with comments]
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Public Option Resurfaced By House Democrats As Deficit Reduction Measure
01/16/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/public-option_n_2483499.html [with comments]
===
Luis Leon, Episcopal Priest, Will Deliver Obama's Inauguration Benediction, Replacing Louie Giglio
The Presidential Inaugural Committee has selected the Rev. Luis Leon to deliver the benediction at President Barack Obama's inauguration, replacing the Rev. Louie Giglio. Above, Leon meets with Obama and Michelle Obama during the president's first inauguration.
01/16/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/luis-leon-benediction-obama-inauguration-louie-giglio_n_2468824.html [with comments]
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This Week in God
House Chaplain Rev. Patrick Conroy
By Steve Benen
Sat Jan 19, 2013 10:37 AM EST
First up from the God Machine this week is an interesting controversy involving the chaplains for the U.S. House and U.S. Senate -- two religious leaders, whose salaries are paid by taxpayers.
Ordinarily, the congressional chaplains are rarely noteworthy. They deliver a prayer at the start of legislative sessions, but otherwise, are generally neither seen nor heard outside Capitol Hill. (James Madison insisted these positions are unconstitutional and should not exist [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2004/12/16/hannity-repeated-misleading-claim-that-james-ma/132456 ].)
But this week, the chaplains raised questions about how they intend to spend Inauguration Day [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/01/are-congressional-chaplains-attending-anti-obama-prayer-breakfast ], in a story first brought to my attention by Faithful America [ http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2518/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=12274 ].
Just before President Barack Obama's swearing in on Monday, a group of religious conservatives plans to hold a prayer breakfast featuring a number of anti-Obama conspiracy theorists. The Presidential Inaugural Prayer Breakfast [ http://www.pipb2013.com/ ] -- billed as offering "prayer, worship, and reconciliation of the nation" -- will feature the editor of the birther site WorldNetDaily and minister and media mogul Pat Robertson, according its website. The organizers of the prayer breakfast also claim the House and Senate chaplains will speak at their event -- appearances that may conflict with the non-partisan nature [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/us/congresss-chaplains-face-divided-flock-on-religion.html ] of the chaplain job.
House Chaplain Rev. Patrick Conroy and Senate Chaplain Barry Black ... are listed under the "Prayer for the Nation" portion of Monday's event, just ahead of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). But featured speaker Joseph Farah, the WorldNetDaily editor, has drawn the most attention, given his website's regular assertions that President Obama was actually born in Kenya and allegations that he is "the first Muslim president [ http://superstore.wnd.com/SUBSCRIPTIONS/2010-2008/Whistleblower-Single-Issue-January-2013 ( http://superstore.wnd.com/SUBSCRIPTIONS/whistleblower/Whistleblower-Magazine )]." The event also features "messianic rabbi-pastor and author" Jonathan Cahn, who believes that there are signs of the apocalypse encrypted in Obama's communications [ http://www.wnd.com/2012/06/obama-fulfills-isaiah-910-prophecy-again/ ].
As the week progressed, the story got a little strange. Right-wing organizers of the event said the Senate's Rev. Black, who's run into trouble like this before [ https://www.au.org/church-state/march-2007-church-state/people-events/senate-chaplain-drops-speech-at-religious-right ], had accepted their invitation, but the chaplain's office insisted he'd never agreed to participate. The House's Rev. Conroy, who's also billed [ http://pipb2013.com.tripod.com/webonmediacontents/InaugeralPrayerBreakfast%20invite%20final.pdf ] as a member of the Presidential Inaugural Prayer Breakfast Committee, conceded [ http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2013/01/18/senate-chaplain-wont-attend-controversial-inaugural-prayer-breakfast ] that he will appear alongside the fringe activists and far-right lawmakers, but added he doesn't intend to "stay too long."
To be sure, if Bachmann, Birthers, and radical televangelists want to get together to hold a far-right event on Inauguration Day, that's their business. But as my friend Rob Boston at Americans United for Separation of Church and State explained [ https://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/bad-breakfast-do-congressional-chaplains-plan-to-spend-inauguration-morning ], when taxpayer-financed chaplains, who are not supposed to take sides in political fights, participate in events like these, it's far more problematic.
Also from the God Machine this week:
* The benediction at President Obama's second inaugural will be delivered by the Rev. Luis Leon [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/pastor-for-inauguration-is-a-white-house-neighbor-86324.html ], pastor of St. John's Episcopal Church, dubbed "the church of presidents" because it's just a block and a half from the White House.
* Oh my [ http://www.mediaite.com/online/listen-911-call-from-priest-stuck-after-playing-with-handcuffs-while-allegedly-wearing-gag/ ]: "The pastor of St. Aloysius Church in Springfield, Ill., has been granted a leave of absence after he called 911 in November from inside the church and told a police dispatcher that he needed help getting out of a pair of handcuffs." The priest, Tom Donovan, told the 911 operator he was "playing with" the handcuffs, and needed help "getting out." Donovan is perhaps best known for testifying to the Illinois legislature earlier this month in opposition to [ http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/springfield-illinois-priest-tom-donovan-handcuffs-185697332.html ] marriage equality (thanks to reader R.P. for the tip).
* Lawrence Wright has published a new book on Scientology which appears to be generating quite a bit of attention [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/books/review/going-clear-lawrence-wrights-book-on-scientology.html ].
* A group of prominent evangelical leaders, including the National Association of Evangelicals and the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, have launched the "I Was a Stranger [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/evangelical-coalition-seeks-immigration-overhaul-18213913 ]" campaign in the hopes of encouraging policymakers in Washington to pass immigration reform.
© 2013 NBCNews.com
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/01/19/16600194-this-week-in-god [with comments]
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What My Wife and I Would Like to Say to the Café Owner Who Handed Us an Anti-Gay Letter
01/15/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shawnee-mcphail/cafe-owner-anti-gay-letter_b_2481381.html [with comments] [further to "Arielle and Shawnee McPhail, Lesbian Couple, Handed Anti-Gay Letter From Restaurant Owner", about 60% of the way down at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83385518 ]
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Megan Fox, Devout Pentecostal, Tells Esquire She Speaks In Tongues
01/16/2013
[...]
Fox told Esquire that she began speaking in tongues when she was 8 years old.
"The energy is so intense in the room," she said, "that you feel like anything can happen. They're going to hate that I compare it to this, but have you ever watched footage of a Santeria gathering or someone doing voodoo? You know how palpable the energy is? Whatever's going on there, it's for real."
Fox also said she had witnessed healings and other "magical things" in church, and that the experience, called "getting the Holy Ghost," feels like "your whole body is filled with this electric current."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/megan-fox-devout-pentecostal-esquire-speaks-in-tongues_n_2489730.html [with comments];
http://www.esquire.com/features/megan-fox-photos-interview-0213 [source of the issue cover image above]
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British Christian Lilian Ladele Loses Case; Court Rules Religious Beliefs Do Not Justify LGBT Discrimination
British Christians Gary McFarlane, a marriage counselor in Bristol who was sacked for saying he objects to offering sex therapy to homosexuals, and Shirley Chaplin, a nurse who says she suffered discrimination at work over wearing a cross [barred from doing so because it was a health hazard ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/uk-equality-laws-trump-personal-religious-beliefs-european-court-says_n_2481592.html )], pose for photographs in central London on January 15, 2013, after the European Court of Human Rights refused to rule that they suffered discrimination at work over their Christian beliefs.
01/15/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/lilian-ladele-lgbt-discrimination_n_2480625.html [with comments]
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Does the Internet Spell Doom For Organized Religion?
Here's one theory why religion is in decline in many places around the world.
By Valerie Tarico
January 12, 2013
As we head into a new year, the guardians of traditional religion are ramping up efforts to keep their flocks—or in crass economic terms, to retain market share. Some Christians have turned to soul searching [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/are-young-evangelicals-sick-of-sexual-politics ] while others have turned to marketing. Last fall, the LDS church spent millions on billboards, bus banners and Facebook ads touting “I’m a Mormon.” In Canada, the Catholic Church has launched a “Come Home [ http://www.catholicscomehome.org/ ]” marketing campaign. The Southern Baptists Convention voted to rebrand itself [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/oops-rebranding-of-southern-baptists-reveals-more-than-intended/ ]. A hipster mega-church [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11punk-t.html?_r=0 ] in Seattle combines smart advertising with sales force training for members and a strategy the Catholics have emphasized for centuries: competitive breeding.
In October 2012 the Pew Research Center announced [ http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/10/09/us-usa-religion-unaffiliated-idUKBRE89813G20121009 ] that for the first time ever Protestant Christians had fallen below 50 percent of the American population. Atheists cheered while evangelicals beat their breasts and lamented the end of the world as we know it. Historian of religion Molly Worthen has since offered [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/american-christianity-and-secularism-at-a-crossroads.html ] big-picture insights that may dampen the most extreme hopes and allay the fears. Anthropologist Jennifer James [ http://www.jenniferjames.com/introduction/index.htm ], on the other hand, has called fundamentalism the “death rattle” of the Abrahamic traditions.
In all of the frenzy, few seem to give any recognition to the player that I see as the primary hero, or if you prefer, culprit—and I’m not talking about science populizer and atheist superstar Neil deGrasse Tyson [ http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/12855.Neil_deGrasse_Tyson ]. Then again, maybe I am talking about Tyson in a sense, because in his various viral guises—as a talk show host [ http://www.uproxx.com/music/2012/12/watch-neil-degrasse-tyson-and-wu-tang-clans-gza-talk-science-music-philosophy/ ] and tweeter [ https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/253680452240547840 ] and as the face [ http://www.webpronews.com/neil-degrasse-tyson-talks-about-being-a-meme-2012-03 ] of scores of smartass Facebook memes—Tyson is an incarnation of the biggest threat organized religion has ever faced: the Internet.
A traditional religion, one built on “right belief,” requires a closed information system. That is why the Catholic Church put an official seal of approval on some ancient texts and banned or burned others. It is why some Bible-believing Christians are forbidden [ http://bible.cc/2_corinthians/6-14.htm ] to marry nonbelievers. It is why Quiverfull [ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nolongerquivering/about/ ] moms home-school their kids with carefully screened textbooks. It is why, when you get sucked into conversations with your fundamentalist Uncle George from Florida, you sometimes wonder if he has some superpower that allows him to magically close down all avenues into his mind. (He does! [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deqPVE5KmtM&list=UUuff10A6JeheV__mso67QdA&index=1 (a sequence of 19 videos, next below)])
Religions have spent eons honing defenses [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/christian-belief-through-the-lens-of-cognitive-science-part-6-of-8/ ] that keep outside information away from insiders. The innermost ring wall is a set of certainties and associated emotions like anxiety and disgust and righteous indignation that block curiosity. The outer wall is a set of behaviors aimed at insulating believers from contradictory evidence and from heretics who are potential transmitters of dangerous ideas. These behaviors range from memorizing sacred texts to wearing distinctive undergarments [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/are-mormon-underwear-magic-between-the-sheets/ ] to killing infidels. Such defenses worked beautifully during humanity’s infancy. But they weren’t really designed for the current information age.
Tech-savvy mega-churches may have Twitter missionaries, and Calvinist cuties may make viral videos about how Jesus worship isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship, but that doesn’t change the facts: the free flow of information is really, really bad for the product they are selling.
Here are six kinds of web content that are like, well, like electrolysis on religion’s hairy toes.
1. Radically cool science videos and articles.
Religion evokes some of our most deeply satisfying emotions: joy, for example, and transcendence, and wonder. This is what Einstein was talking about when he said that “science without religion is lame.” If scientific inquiry doesn’t fill us at times with delight and even speechless awe at new discoveries or the mysteries that remain, then we are missing out on the richest part of the experience. Fortunately, science can provide all of the above, and certain masters of the trade and sectors of the Internet are remarkably effective at evoking the wonder—the spirituality if you will—of the natural world unveiled. Some of my own favorites include Symphony of science [ http://www.symphonyofscience.com/videos.html ], NOVA [ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ ], TED [ http://www.ted.com/ ], RSA Animate [ http://www.thersa.org/events/video/animate/rsa-animate-the-power-of-networks ], and Birdnote [ http://birdnote.org/show/shorebirds-not-shore ].
It should be no surprise that so many fundamentalists are determined to take down the whole scientific endeavor. They see in science not only a critique of their outdated theories but a competitor for their very best product, a sense of transcendent exuberance. For millennia, each religion has made an exclusive claim, that it alone had the power to draw people into a grand vision worth a lifetime of devotion. Each offered the assurance that our brief lives matter and that, in some small way, we might live on. Now we are getting glimpses of a reality so beautiful and intricate that it offers some of the same promise. Where will the old tribal religions be if, in words of Tracy Chapman, we all decide that Heaven’s here on earth [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYcJ9J5DggU (next below)]?
2. Curated collections of ridiculous beliefs.
Religious beliefs that aren’t yours often sound silly, and the later in life you encounter them the more laughable they are likely to sound. Web writers are after eyeballs, which means that if there’s something ridiculous to showcase, one is guaranteed to write about it. It may be a nuanced exposé or a snarky list or a flaming meme, but the point, invariably, is to call attention to the stuff that makes you roll your eyes [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/test-your-knowledge-of-wild-weird-and-outright-wacky-american-religious-beliefs/ ], shake your head in disbelief, laugh, and then hit Share.
3. The kinky, exploitative, oppressive, opportunistic and violent sides of religion.
Of course, the case against religion doesn’t stop at weird and wacky. It gets nasty, sometimes in ways that are titillating and sometimes in ways that are simply dark. The Bible is full of sex slavery, polygamy and incest [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/captive-virgins-polygamy-sex-slaves-what-marriage-would-look-like-if-we-actually-followed-the-bible/ ], and these are catalogued at places like Evilbible.com [ http://www.evilbible.com/ ]. Alternately, a student writing about holidays can find a proclamation [ http://www.thanksgivingnovember.com/the-first-thanksgiving-proclamation.html ] in which Puritans give thanks to God for the burning of Indian villages or an interview on the mythic origins of the Christmas story. And if the Catholic come-home plea sounds a little desperate, it may well be because the sins of the bishops [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/%ef%bb%bfeight-ugly-sins-the-catholic-bishops-hope-lay-members-and-others-wont-notice/ ] are getting hard to cover up. On the net, whatever the story may be, someone will be more than willing to expose it.
4. Supportive communities for people coming out of religion.
With or without the net (but especially with it) believers sometimes find their worldview in pieces. Before the Internet existed most people who lost their faith kept their doubts to themselves. There was no way to figure out who else might be thinking forbidden thoughts. In some sects, a doubting member may be shunned, excommunicated, or “disfellowshipped” to ensure that doubts don’t spread. So, doubters used to keep silent and then disappear into the surrounding culture. Now they can create Web sites, and today there are as many communities of former believers as there are kinds of belief. These communities range from therapeutic to political [ http://ffrf.org/ ], and they cover the range of sects: Evangelical [ http://new.exchristian.net/ ], Mormon [ http://www.exmormonfoundation.org/ ], Jehovah’s Witness [ http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/jehovahs-witness-experiences.php ], and Muslim [ http://ex-muslim.org.uk/ ]. There’s even a web home for recovering clergy [ http://www.clergyproject.org/ ]. Heaven help the unsuspecting believer who wanders into one of these sites and tries to tell members in recovery that they’re all bound for hell.
5. Lifestyles of the fine and faithless.
When they emerge from the recovery process former Christians and Muslims and whatnot find that there’s a whole secular world waiting for them on the web. This can be a lifesaver, literally, for folks who are trapped in closed religious communities on the outside. On the web, they can explore lifestyles in which people stay surprisingly decent and kind without a sacred text or authority figures telling them what to do. In actuality, since so much of religion is about social support (and social control) lots of people skip the intellectual arguments and exposes, and go straight to building a new identity based in a new social network. Some web resources are specifically aimed at creating alternatives to theism, like Good without God [ http://harvardhumanist.org/good-without-god/ ], Parenting Beyond Belief [ http://parentingbeyondbelief.com/ ] or the Foundation Beyond Belief [ http://foundationbeyondbelief.org/mission ].
6. Interspiritual okayness.
This might sound odd, but one of the threats to traditional religion are interfaith communities [ http://www.worldprayers.org/ ] that focus on shared spiritual values. Many religions make exclusive truth claims and see other religions as competitors. Without such claims, there is no need for evangelism, missionaries or a set of doctrines that I call donkey motivators (ie. carrots and sticks) like heaven and hell. The web showcases the fact that humanity’s bad and good qualities are universal [ http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kohlberg.htm ], spread across cultures and regions, across both secular and religious wisdom traditions [ http://religioustolerance.org/ ]. It offers reassurance that we won’t lose the moral or spiritual dimension of life if we outgrow religion, while at the same time providing the means to glean [ http://www.wisdomcommons.org/ ] what is truly timeless and wise from old traditions. In doing so, it inevitably reveals that the limitations of any single tradition alone.
The Dalai Lama, who has led interspiritual dialogue for many years made waves recently by saying as much: “All the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.”
The power of interspiritual dialogue is analogous to the broader power of the web in that, at the very heart it is about people finding common ground, exchanging information, and breaking through walls to find a bigger community waiting outside. Last year, Jim Gilliam, founder of Nationbuilder, gave a talk titled, “The Internet is My Religion [ http://www.internetismyreligion.com/ ].” Gilliam is a former fundamentalist who has survived two bouts of cancer thanks to the power of science and the Internet. His existence today has required a bone marrow transplant and a double lung transplant organized in part through social media. Looking back on the experience, he speaks with the same passion that drove him when he was on fire for Jesus:
I owed every moment of my life to countless people I would never meet. Tomorrow, that interconnectedness would be represented in my own physical body. Three different DNAs. Individually they were useless, but together they would equal one functioning human. What an incredible debt to repay. I didn’t even know where to start. And that’s when I truly found God. God is just what happens when humanity is connected. Humanity connected is God.
The Vatican, and the Mormon Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and the Southern Baptist Convention should be very worried.
Valerie Tarico [ http://www.alternet.org/authors/valerie-tarico ] is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons [ http://www.wisdomcommons.org/ ]. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light [ http://www.amazon.com/Trusting-Doubt-Former-Evangelical-Beliefs/dp/0977392937 ]" and "Deas and Other Imaginings [ http://www.amazon.com/Deas-Other-Imaginings-Spiritual-Folktales/dp/0977392945 ]." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com [ http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/ ].
Copyright 2013 Valerie Tarico
http://www.alternet.org/belief/does-internet-spell-doom-organized-religion [ http://www.alternet.org/belief/does-internet-spell-doom-organized-religion?paging=off ] [with comments] [also at/text conformed to http://www.salon.com/2013/01/16/religion_may_not_survive_the_internet/ (with comments)]
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Morality: It's not just for humans
January 19, 2013
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/19/health/chimpanzee-fairness-morality/index.html [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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