Blue is God's Favorite Color

Same Republican greed and cynicism, different President

2011-07-26T16:53:00.003-04:00

Crisis? We don't need no stinkin crisis! So should say the Republicans under John Boehner's "leadership." Because what they are about in linking together a historically procedural lifting of the debt ceiling with their hoped for imbalanced mangling of the federal government's budget is nothing more than another round of greed and cynicism posing as love of free markets and country.
Mr. Boehner is just one of several Republicans who found their way to the Capital in time to raise the debt ceiling 7 times for W but now have manufactured a crisis, blamed it on President Obama and rewritten history to insure their own re-elections while they deepen their cynicism and project the same intent on the President.
Indeed these are nearly the same Republicans who not only gave W EVERY new debt ceiling he needed but many are the same Republicans who worked WITH President Clinton to package for W the healthiest budget position since WW2. That gift was immediately

squandered and disappeared the first year George W. Bush was in office, even before the 9/11 attacks happened, in no small part because Bush began slashing taxes for the wealthy upon taking office. And then he and his Republican allies running the Congress proceeded to ring up the deficit to unheard-of heights, thanks largely to a needless invasion of another nation under false pretenses.
Where were all these Republicans in the years 2001-2006, when they were setting new records for federal deficits and destroying the economy along the way? (Thanks Crooks and Liars. Read more http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/just-how-it-republicans-get-lecture- or Read more http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1022-26.htm)

They were sitting on huge campaign budgets and going on junkets yet to be blamed on Abramson type lobbyists. Now their greed has them sucking the teats of Nordquist, Koch and friends. Just as bad as the greed and cynicism, characteristics which have unique expressions from the Republican side of the aisle so please no excuses based on "Democrats do it, too" is the out right fiction that counts as "hard truth," "straight talk," or "what the American people are saying."
During his remarks following the President's address Monday night, Speaker Boehner said, "the American people will not accept an increase in the debt limit without significant spending cuts and reforms." He was lying when he purportedly said this to the President in January and lying to all of us when he said it last night. According to the most recent Gallup poll

when asked how Congress should reduce the federal deficit, 30 percent said 'mostly with spending cuts' and 32 percent chose 'equally with spending cuts and tax increases.' Just 20 percent said the deal should be exclusively spending cuts and 11 percent wanted a deal mostly or only with tax increases." (Thanks My Fox News Orlando for this info. Read more: http://www.myfoxorlando.com/dpps/news/polls-show-voters-favor-tax-hikes-in-debt-deal-dpgonc-20110714-ch_14128419#ixzz1TFVEYif9

Boehner and his co-dependents do not need a crisis. Their greed, cynicism and lies have been doing enough damage as it is.

Robert Reich's Perfect Storm is Looming

2010-10-20T10:27:00.003-04:00

Find me a Tea Partier who has admitted concern over any of the issues Reich raises. (Remember Robert Reich helped President Clinton work with a Republican congress and leave the country and government on the strongest financial footing EVER.) Heck, find me an elected Republican from Georgia, (Saxby? Johnny? Paul?) who has done anything to help make -- even their own -- election funding more transparent. For those of my friends who want a tougher challenge than finding a Reich-reading Tea Partier just look for one not standing on "astroturf."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/the-perfect-storm_1_b_767387.html

Deal and Barnes on Taxes: Errors or Greed?

2010-10-19T10:37:00.003-04:00

Did you know? According to the Associated Press: In 2006: Nathan Deal paid 2.95 percent — or $5,575 in federal taxes — on $188,904 in adjusted gross income. In 2007: Deal paid 1 percent — or $2,068 — on $205,433 in income. Based on the Obama tax plan he'll GET a tax break.

Did you know? According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution: In 2008: Roy Barnes claimed as depreciated property, a house and lot that was no longer his. He did the same thing in 2009. The property had been gifted to his children. BUT in 2009: Roy Barnes' tax return erroneously included income he did not earn such that he paid nearly $30,000 MORE than he actually owed in taxes. He has filed an amended return so as to pay the taxes owed. As it stands Roy Barnes will have paid more than 2 million dollars in taxes by the election in November. Nathan Deal, not so much.

Roy Barnes has made public more than 1500 pages of tax records. Nathan Deal, not so much.

Want to read more? http://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-politics-elections/roy-barnes-amends-tax-682746.html

A Thought Experiment Regarding Scapegoats

2010-06-08T20:17:00.004-04:00

Attempts to purge away difference in a quest for unity almost always end up creating classes and victims other than those initially used as scapegoats. Who do you think of when I say "demand for a scapegoat forces a ranking of goats best-to-least suited for the role of symbolic sacrifice and the "safe" disposal of sin. Wild goats need not apply. Goats that will render sweet milk and soft wool are herded to safety. Best not to waste resources, so those with scapegoat potential are only afforded the nurture that will continue each toward that result. Being without beauty or utility to avoid the distinction means a life of deceit, denial, or closeting, especially when the world the scapegoat will leave believes its resources scarce."

Who fills these roles in your view of the Anglican Communion as it sends away TEC to make itself pure?

More alike everyday!

2010-06-07T20:52:00.002-04:00

Judge Rules Against Breakaway Church | Georgia Public Broadcasting

2009-10-28T15:57:00.000-04:00

Judge Rules Against Breakaway Church | Georgia Public Broadcasting

This just may be the end of litigation for the those who pretend to be Christ Chuch, Savannah and those who are the Episcopal Diocese of Savannah. This judgement matches in force and authority the summary made in the case Diocese of Atlanta v. St. Andrew's, Peachtree City. Appealing this would require Marcus Robertson and the Ugandans to find some constitutional issue as yet unaddressed in all previous court action. Which means they would have had to have left something out of their presentations up to now. It appears that they were not confident enough nor shrewd enough to have done that. There really is nothing left for them to do short of returning the keys and making sure to leave things as they found them the day they changed the locks.

Our prayers can match at this point, Godspeed to us both.

They no/know not what they do.

2009-10-05T22:53:00.010-04:00

The Conservative Bible Project is hubris driven by fear and spite. Frank Shaeffer was right when he told Rachel Maddow, "You don’t work to move them off this position. You move past them. Look, a village cannot reorganize village life to suit the village idiot. It’s as simple as that, and we have to understand: we have a village idiot in this country. It’s called fundamentalist Christianity." So check out the "guidelines" for this project. I'm calling it the gospel according to the village idiot. I'm praying for these people like I pray for all heretics.

Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level
Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".
Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots"; using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaningExclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God.

Whose Humility?

2009-09-09T13:15:00.001-04:00

Thank you for acknowledging my email to you. I must say, the form of your acknowledgement seemed to be missing any response specific to the concerns I raised in my first contacting you. Doubly troubling is the way in which your reply fails to do anything more than protect your current partisan position on the matter of health care reform in America. I assume you have many replies to generate in a day so it makes sense that you would use a form letter. Perhaps you were listening last night when yours and my president spoke to the very points your response to me includes. I hope your next letter reflects the President's specific answers to some of the very concerns you present in your reply to me.

Because I take my role as a citizen seriously I even read your form letters and I am not willing to leave your claims unclear or unchallenged by facts I know and the questions I continue to have.

For instance, in what way did you "urge [your] colleagues to take [y]our time and debate all of the issues and proposals so that the American people can follow and understand the development and discussion of the legislation?" It seems to me that when you characterize a public option as dangerous to the point of destroying the private insurance market when it would be serving less than 10% of the population you are not helping the American people understand the legislation. Also, when you portray a public option as trying to "determine the coverage it feels is appropriate for you, choose the doctors that you see, and dictate the care that you receive," you are not helping the American people to understand that private insurers already do exactly that, after charging some employers and sometimes individuals more than 25% of their total income and benefits package.

So I'm bothered that you do not seem to take your own criticisms of our President to heart. Maybe its hard for you seek humility and to see yourself as beholden to all of the citizens of your state as opposed to the corporations or wealthy neighborhoods that provide you more of the funding you receive to insure your incumbency. For instance, how many of the residents in Atlanta's 30327 area code have ever been without medical insurance or worse been without care because their insurer wouldn't cover the cost of a doctor prescribed procedure? Ask Ken Blackwell, he's on the board of your largest institutional contributer, Club for Growth, has he ever been without medical coverage since his football scholarship days at Xavier?

In short, Senator Chambliss, you seem to be out of touch with your constituents. You seem to be out of touch with the specifics of the health care reform debate. You seem to be more interested in satisfying your contributers and not ALL the citizens of GA. Are you also so out of touch that you don't realize that the very insurance covering your medical costs as a member of the Senate is the model for the "public option?"

Please sir, stop protecting your Republican, gentrified, partisan talking points and get in touch with the people of your state. And please stop misrepresenting the state of the current debate on health-are reform in America.

The FOXification of debate in America

2009-08-23T15:36:00.004-04:00

Facebook is pretty tame when it comes to viewpoints being shared. Most status updates will garner little in the way of impersonal or inflammatory replies through the "comment" link or the simpler "like" link. Most of the blogs I read regularly will often collect those sorts of comments in the hundreds. So when status updates start to become heated replies to previous status updates you know that a change is occurring. Two days ago I saw this on a friend's status update,

"No one should die because they cannot afford health care and no one should go broke because they got sick. Pass it on."

I did pass it on by making it my status and the comments piled up like never before for me. Most of the dialogue was polite and for the most part focused so that we could work WITH what the others had said and not just spew talking points at each other. It heated up just once and that was enough.
That was Thursday morning. Since then bunches of people have updated their status with something identical or at least similar. And then today, this update from a former campus minister:

No one should die because they are waiting and waiting and waiting in line for rationed medical care, and no one should go broke because they have to pay for this 10 TRILLION dollar deficit.

I guess I could say something like, "you reap what you sow" or "all's fair in love and war." Really I could say anything that properly groups both statements together as of the same category. But isn't there an edge in the reply that is not in the initial statement? Yes we both are using FB for more than it was intended but that is really not the problem with our debate. It's just that now what has developed over the last twenty years -- When was Rush Limbaugh first on the air? -- is now the norm. Advocacy triggers blatancy. And sweet little Facebook is not immune.

So I guess my next status update will be to apologize for opening FB the door to "debate" American-style.

But there must be more to this response than my apologizing for awakening the giant. Otherwise the "village" will never live with the truth but only continue live in fear of some romanticized version of it. That's why there are scapegoats to take sins we'll admit away so that we can then assume without losing power a righteousness/purity/safety that is not only undeserved but in many ways illusory.

It takes denial fueled by talking points displayed in 'all caps" to avoid the real dialogue for which even some FB updates dare to hope. And all the while the truths behind the ideals are waiting and waiting and waiting for enough time and energy and patience and courage to be fully heard. Why are we so afraid that we will not agree to take the time, turn down the rhetoric and listen to the truth?

Keeping One's Vows

2009-08-15T11:54:00.009-04:00

60 lbs more, twice as many weddings and bunches of stories later I still remember this event like it was yesterday. I remember how comfortable and excited I was making my ordination vows.

The Bishop says to the ordinand

Will you be loyal to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of Christ as this Church has received them? And will you, in accordance with the canons of this Church, obey your bishop and other ministers who may have authority over you and your work?

Answer

I am willing and ready to do so; and I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation; and I do solemnly engage to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church.

This comes to mind now because Bishop Lawrence of S.C. has concentrated on the same language in his appeal to the clergy of the Diocese of South Carolina to refrain from participating in leadership and decision making outside the diocese. Even worse he has presumed to be able to speak to all what the phrase means in a pastoral letter to be read from the pulpit in each congregation.

Perhaps he believes his withdrawal idea qualifies as something other than what Scofield and Duncan have attempted and therefore is more likely to succeed. I can't see that he has chosen to do anything really radical or creative. It just looks like another slowly-bleeding clergy led exit meant to publicly humiliate and then starve the impure remainder and to convince some judge somewhere that Team Lawrence is the true church worthy of state intervention.

What really bothers me is the presumption -- born of denial or ignorance or pious arrogance -- that there is an outcome available for the Bishop and his true believers other than the very same one that simply walking out the door and leaving the keys behind would attain. Claiming some affiliation beyond U.S. soil wins them NOTHING in any court, most especially courts of the State of South Carolina. Appearing polite and humble while they use assets and properties that they will go to great expense to attempt to possess or will eventually abandon without having maintained any proper future provisions for their care and upkeep gains them NO sympathy once the bills are due.

Bishop Lawrence tries to wedge himself and his minions into a niche for which there is NO canonical standard or description. What does he imagine will be the proper role for a diocese that resigns all of its appointments, votes on no legislation, and fails to join in the offerings that become the church's mission and ministry for those in need and THEN prematurely attempts to join itself extra-provincially to the Windsor covenant movement? Does Bishop Lawrence imagine this to be a sacrifice of power to show us that our inclusivity actually excludes a class of believers? Regardless of how you understand the legitimacy of her purported death bed baptism Simon Weil's self exclusion from communion really did indict the church's classism and exclusion. Surely Lawrence doesn't imagine we will understand his planned actions to be as significant as hers.

So, I'm left wondering just what Bishop understood the "doctrine, discipline and worship" to mean when he was ordained. And when did he begin to presume to possess an authority that allows him to claim himself as it's chief interpreter and to pronounce it's meaning?

That's not true, I'm not wondering. I am tired. I'm not tired of all the weddings, or sermons, or free meals, or of the doctrine, discipline and worship to which I promised to be loyal. I am tired of the presumptions that Bishops like Lawrence have partnered so well with a lust for power and a fear of impurity. I am tired of the false humility. I am tired of the routine.

Bishop Lawrence, I am tired of you and your sanctimonious crusade against the church who ordained you and, like me, to whom you pledged your loyalty. Forget the pastoral letter, forget about leveraging the misplaced loyalties of the priests of the Diocese of South Carolina, forget your end-run to Windsor protection, forget your piecemeal attack on the constitution and canons you once swore to obey. Keep your vows to the church that ordained you. Just do that. Change the routine and just do that.

Zero Sum Games

2009-08-07T23:13:00.002-04:00

These guys are incredible. The American Anglican Council, the latest incarnation of the pool of friends of Rev. David Anderson -- I'm sorry I can't call him Bishop-- has followed their news of budget and staff cuts at 815 to make an appeal for financial support. Check it out here. I guess they've figured that if The Episcopal Church doesn't have as much money with which to work then they must deserve it.

I love reading into moments like this. could they explain their actions by describing God as full of grace and mercy or do you think they'd have to rely on a description of God that demands accounts be balanced? At least the latter goes with substitutionary penal atonement. BTH.

Elected and Holy

2009-08-03T04:18:00.008-04:00

There are several dioceses in the Episcopal Church that are in the process of electing a bishop either to be the one in charge or to serve under and assist the one currently in charge. Two dioceses have announced slates of nominees that include a gay and/or lesbian person. The Diocese of Los Angeles has a slate for suffragan(assisting) bishop that includes a gay man and lesbian each of whom are in an open relationship. Here's a link to their information about the election. The Diocese of Minnesota has information about their search process and the nomination thus far here. DioMinn's slate includes a lesbian in an open relationship.

Mind you, there are other dioceses in their own bishop search processes Georgia and Upper South Carolina are two that come to mind. They are nearby and important to me because of historic ties and current acquaintances. The elections in DioLA and DioMinn. will gather more attention than most because both have nominees in homosexual relationships that are neither closeted or celibate. [Here's a link to news about the news about these elections]

If the aforementioned nominees in LA and Minn were closeted then many of our Anglican Partners would not be paying one bit of attention to the elections. Really, look around, who has blogged or reported about election news in GA and USC? Or who has written about LA's and Minn's elections and NOT made mention of the sexual orientation of some of the nominees. If the nominees were celibate, certainly some conversation/debate would occur regarding the difference that makes in their eligibility. For sure we'd be reading more about that than we would about the nominees in GA.

All our talking about the nominees, regardless of which diocese is in process, is for me just so much like an altar guild arguing about bread recipes. As if somehow we could keep God from making holy that which God choses to make holy by presenting a bread baked from a bad recipe. What priest has not had an discussion with someone about the appropriateness of unleavened bread at the Altar during the Great 50 days. My foil would have equated presenting bread without leaven during Easter to presenting nominees that can't be judged "pure" by a portion of our Communion.

I'm pretty sure those who see only sacramental efficacy thwarted by the nomination of a gay or lesbian will also see a Eucharist undone by the "wrong bread" or a "hapless priest." I'm pretty sure that in that old three part scheme of sacramentality -- regularity, validity, efficacy -- efficacy is that part of the "process" that we can't predetermine or screw-up. Efficacy is God's job. The way I remember the interplay of these parts was that regularity was our part and that God hadn't given us many details about it anyway. K.I.S.S. was the best approximation of how to define our role in making our sacraments regular.

So I guess you could say it is being argued that the presentation/nomination of an openly gay man or lesbian for ordination is a violation or undoing of sacramental regularity or validity. It s in a sense contending that they are incapable of being presented/offered because of their orientation and/or their openness about their it. I've never thought to ask the bread how it felt about its readiness. All Jesus ever did was take whatever bread was available, give thanks, bless it and break it. That approach says to me that regularity is less a tending to the specifics of the recipe and more a result of the extent to which one gives thanks and makes an offering of the element whatever it is. Seems like we do have a expectation to present the best, the first fruits, the tithe of our possessions when we make an offering. but even that points more toward the offering's representative status and less to their "content."

If one were to attempt an argument from the principal of validity, it would necessitate seeing as analogous and equal sexual orientation and/or "practice" to some rejection or pretense during the actual liturgy/election process itself. Perhaps failing to be forthcoming about one's proclivities during interviews and walk-abouts might constitute such an invalidation. I remember when Bob Trache was refused ordination/consecration in Atlanta. It had something to do with his being less than forthcoming about his life during those times set aside exactly for such. Perhaps that is an example.

So . . . are the people of GA or USC concerned about the "recipe of the bread" with which they will make an offering to God so that God can make it holy? I'd say , yes. Go to their web sites and you will say yes with me. Have they done everything to make their part in this sacrament of nomination/election/ordination regular? Sure does look like it! Are they guaranteeing a safe election and therefore valid episcopacy for their respective dioceses? It's to soon to tell. Will the persons they present for ordination be holy? We'll only know after the fact! Efficacy is God's job!

So . . . is it fair to ask the same questions of LA and Minn? Sure it is. If our answers are different than those we gave for GA and USC we have ask ourselves why. It seems to me that as long as a gay man or lesbian is willing to be "bread, blessed and broken," and those who would do that nominating are willing to be forthcoming in their understandings in making an offering of any of the persons listed, then NONE of us has much to say right now about efficacy, the most important of those sacramental principals. That's God's job!

Salvation is Universal Health Care

2009-08-02T00:14:00.004-04:00

Many of you whom I love and call friends have already characterized government initiated/enforced health care reform as socialism and in so doing claim you have upheld a more conservative or libertarian and therefore more Christian standard.

So I ask you to read this article by Jonathan Alter in Newsweek titled "What's Not to Like? Reform? Why do we need health-care reform? Everything is just fine the way it is" and Bill Maher's commentary on "profit making as other than patriotism"

Go here and then let's talk about Jesus' claim on us and our citizenship.
Peace, Dann

Marion Hatchett on Historic Voyage

2009-08-01T14:30:00.004-04:00

Marion Hatchett was my only liturgics professor at Sewanee. Prof. Hatchett's teaching style was lean and mean. He gave us the basics of the 1979 BCP along with the reasons and histories behind those basics. Cradle Episcopalians had the hardest time with Prof. Hatchett because they had to work through the imprinting of years of bad liturgies. I say "histories" because he encouraged us to know as much about Hippolytus as we did about the revision committees who nursed the "new prayer book" into being. He understood them as members in a single voyage with Cranmer and others.

He taught this once Southern Baptist boy that even written prayers, including those suffering bad translations, like the Lord's Prayer did more for me than I did for God in praying them. He taught me that much of what Jesus sought to reform in that warped practice of Torah he encountered from the hands of the Pharisees and the Temple authorities was largely bad liturgy. He taught me that Prayer Book reform at its best was a Christian practice of good Torah, as if the word was more verb than noun, as if HOW we remembered and passed on our story was as important as WHAT we passed along. Marion was the householder who brought out what was old and what was new.

So seeing the "swamp fox" quoted by Susan Russell was a gift, especially after having been one of hundreds who were praying for Marion's dwindling health as recently as this past spring. The commentary of his she quoted made a unity for me out of what were decades of ideas, thoughts and lingering questions strung together. Good Torah like good Christian liturgy and by association good Episcopal canonical practice requires an honesty about necessity that avoids simply maintaining the status quo, especially when that maintenance fails to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to include the outcast.

Now, the Marion I know would not brag but he also would not be bullied or let himself be dismissed by pious ones claiming "orthodoxy" as theirs or othrs crying " Jesus said" or "the authority of scripture" as first defenses against scrutiny or question. Like he did in class so many times and just like he is doing in this short entry he has defended a historical/liturgical practice of openness and honesty. His calling us the 'flagship" says more about our risk taking in the face of necessity than it does about our presuming to be the first or always justified when we do something others have not. Thank you Susan and thank you Marion for remembering for us our history of making a way for Anglicanism to go where previous of her sailors have not yet gone.

By Dr. Marion Hatchett in the GTS Alumni Magazine, Summer 2009

The American Church jumped way out ahead of the Church of England and other sister churches in a number of respects. One was in giving voice to priests and deacons and to laity (as well as bishops and secular government officials) in the governance of the national church and of dioceses and of parishes. The early American Church revised the Prayer Book in a way that went far beyond revisions necessitated by the new independence of the states.

At its beginning the American Church legalized the use of hymnody along with metrical psalmody more than a generation before use of "hymns of human composure" became legal in the Church of England. At an early stage the American Church gave recognition to critical biblical scholarship.

The American Church eventually gave a place to women in various aspects of the life of the church including its ordained ministry. The American Church began to speak out against discrimination against those of same-sex orientation, and the American Church began to make moves in establishing full communion with other branches of Christendom.

Historically the American Church has been the flag-ship in the Anglican armada. It has been first among the provinces of the Anglican Communion to take forward steps on issue after issue, and on some of those issues other provinces of Anglicanism have eventually fallen in line behind the American Church. My prayer is that the American Church will be able to retain its self-esteem and to stand firm and resist some current movements which seem to me to be contrary to the principles of historic Anglicanism and to the teachings of the Holy Scriptures.

Pluralist Speaks: The Real Archbishop of Anglicanism

2009-07-27T21:14:00.000-04:00

Pluralist Speaks: The Real Archbishop of Anglicanism

I was so upset that ABC Rowan had reduced sexual orientation to life-style choice I forgot to think through the larger argument he is making against innovation as he innovates a history for the AC that never was! Thanks Pluralist!

Following ABC's logic I guess St. Paul only really needed to write one letter and just send copies to each church. I mean why waste parchment as if the local church could have concerns the global church hadn't already settled. Also, I wonder if St. Peter waited until everybody got the "roof-top vision memo" to change what the church said about what is clean or unclean.

ABC makes more than one category error in giving to the global church an authority that is not already operating in the local church. I've asked this before and I'm asking it again. What are either of the historic creeds for if not to define that which we hold in common, so that in proclamation any part of the church can be said to represent all? After that, why would a bishop from the other side of the planet even want to weigh in on obviously local church concerns? Do the polygamists in Africa realize the local-trumps-global authority they already enjoy? Does ABC Rowan realize that he is describing as historic an ecclesiology that never was?

The Archbishop of Canterbury - Communion, Covenant and our Anglican Future

2009-07-27T11:35:00.002-04:00

The Archbishop of Canterbury - Communion, Covenant and our Anglican Future

ABC Rowan doesn't surprise me. Especially when he says in section 2 para 9 "It is that a certain choice of lifestyle has certain consequences." This is not the same argument he gave when he was Bishop of Wales.
For too long the stand against full inclusion of GLBT persons in the sacramental life of the church has relied on equating sexual orientation to "life-style choice."
Isn't it the Church that is making the prior and more complicating choice by baptizing infants, long before they are able understand who they are as sexual creatures and then work from that understanding as grounds for their own life-style choices?
Maybe Rome could help here by returning to the practice of what my Southern Baptist forebearers long called "believers baptism." Maybe TEC should redefine confirmation as a coming out party. Or maybe we're doing exactly what Jesus calls us to do. Risk our institutional life while Rowan tries to preserve his fiction of a singular AC. I'm blaming it all on Constantine.

Shared via AddThis

Dr. Broun's Medicine

2009-04-22T23:42:00.000-04:00

I don’t enjoy having to do things this way but in the case of my US congressional representation I must do this. I am sharing with anybody inclined to read my blog my disappointment in his so called representation. Check his web page (if you must) and look especially at his Survey.

Follow he link and you will find yourself being asked ONE question.

Here it is, “As the illegal immigration debate resurfaces, I’d like to know if you think the 12+ million illegal immigrants currently in the USA should be granted amnesty and citizenship.” Check Yes or No.

Some survey.

Jesus and the Money Changers

2008-09-22T23:41:00.000-04:00

Temple practices that hooked the poor on high interest credit and drove them into debt were the target of Jesus' anger. I knew that his cleansing wasn't simply a reaction to monied interests too close to the Holy of Holies. It makes more sense to understand his tirade as giving Sabbath a "fighting chance." Rev. Thistlewaite's development of this idea is an excellent interpretation that should never be avoided when preaching this Gospel.

A Formula for Fun-damn-mentalisn*

2008-09-14T23:37:00.000-04:00

In an excellent critique of Gov. Palin's stumble following Charlie Gibson's question about the Bush Doctrine, James Fallows provides the basic formula for the current crop of hard right conservatives and religious right believers in America. Episcopalians would call this the three-legged-stool of fundamentalism.

Ignorance
Lack of curiosity
"Decisiveness"

Palin's and Bush's "ignorances" are equal to each other and analogous to those of any "believer" who doesn't know how the collection of writings called the Bible came together, for instance. In both political and religious veins the result is a fallacy of "unitary" authority. Loyalty, sincerity and zeal replace wisdom and knowledge as first requirements for membership. One rises to ceremonial leadership by exposing their own emptiness. (Don't forget who really pulls the strings.)

It takes about one second of inspection to recognize fundamentalism's lack of curiosity. It has all kinds of expressions . One is the striking similarity between fundies disdain for an "educated clergy" and the folksiness of Bush and Palin.

Check here and click on the FAQ link (you'll need a flash player) to marvel at what Palin's church's Masters Commission graduates call a curriculum. NO Greek, NO Hebrew, NO documentary hypothesis, NO historic criticism, NO multiple translations, NO church history. Yet from this training are sent men into their version of ordained leadership. I can't find any evidence that women graduates are allowed the same authority status. Apparently, study is not meant to cultivate or even allow curiosity but to limit it to a pre-ordained simplification that is repeated in a one size fits all mantra. In this world Palin's folksiness becomes MC Crew with spray paint and laptops.

Fallow's three part formula becomes a three cornered web as "Decisiveness" describes the balancing between real experience and doctrine. It is an imitation of resolve which "doesn't blink." It answers back before the questions are finished with a mantra or a snicker. It maintains the ignorance so important to daily management in a world that once expected and in some more liberal circles still expects knowledge and wisdom of its leaders. Decisiveness asserts itself before all the answers are in, holding at bay the curiosity that is so cumbersome and even dangerous to the unitary character of authority. In the end both fundies and conservatives have to keep repeating themselves whether what they are saying is true or makes any sense at all.

Jesus was a Community Organizer

2008-09-07T23:36:00.000-04:00

The recent events orchestrated in St. Paul, MN to mock Barack Obama's pre-law school work in Chicago's Southside to help unemployed steel workers to find jobs, to set up childcare for poor families so they can work, or to find healthcare for the uninsured were offensive to many of my fellow Athenians, especially those who have performed similar acts of community service here in one of Georgia's poorest counties.

Why the snide and cynical remarks from Mayor Giuliani and Govenor Palin? Except to lower the bar for themselves and those who would vote for their candidate, there is no good reason. Rovian scoffing that turns shrill from the lips of Governor Palin and just plain disingenuous when Giuliani asks "what's that?" has lost its currency along with the US dollar. It will not work for much longer to keep acting like the world is too bad to be helped by the good done by teachers, coaches, "Y" directors, social workers of all stripes, legal services providers, pregnancy counselors, drug counselors, CASA workers, visitation supervisors.

Saying that "Jesus was a community organizer" makes no claims to Obama being a Messiah or the One as those same cynics have tried to box him and his supporters. (The Charlton Heston image was ironic at best if not plain offensive.) Instead, the reminder of the work of the first century rabbi properly recognizes and claims for many voters the very hope that gets us to do things like vote in the first place.

Plus, trying to get most voters to laugh at Obama's excellent resume and its emergent hope is a failure at framing. It fails because of who has been chosen to deliver the remarks, so far they've all claimed to be followers of the very one whose "community organizing" is world renowned. It fails because the facts -- both those that confirm the quality of Obama's work along with those that confirm how well protected from their individual failings the speakers have been -- can be checked too easily. Finally it fails because Obama actually was a community organizer and too many voters know how good a thing that has been.

Worshipping the Constitution

2008-08-10T23:34:00.000-04:00

This was tucked into W's news while in China for the Olympics.

The president worshipped at a Beijing church and declared China has nothing to fear from expressions of faith. Later, he met with Chinese leaders and again voiced concern about the jailing of dissidents and religious activists, aides reported.

"As you know, I feel very strongly about religion," he told President Hu Jintao in a meeting at the Zhongnanhai government compound while reporters were present.

Whether or not the "current occupant" feels “strongly about religion” is irrelevant to his being in China. It is not his job to advocate for religion even where the practice of religion suffers the kind of establishment unique to China.

If there is any creed the President should be indicating it is the one he has twice pledged in his inaugurations:

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Nothing about religion but a whole lot about freedom all bound up in the one word, "constitution." Bush's remarks do not make any sense except that, like China, under this administration we have drifted into our own version of the establishment of religion.

Religion doesn't require presidential endorsement to be freely exercised. Instead, whether in China or at home W should be professing his love for the Constitution.

Whither Goeth Lambeth 2008?

2008-08-10T23:29:00.000-04:00

I like Mark Harris' take on Lambeth's "trajectory." With the reaction to retired Bishop Spong's explosive 1998 publication of 12 thesis in "Why Christianity must change or die" fundamentalists began a replacement of traditional Anglican theology continuing to the current Windsor "process" and border crossings in the name of orthodoxy. Spong always was a rabid anti-fundamentalist and sensitive to the "theology" that haunted his life inside the religion of the southern U.S. Spong's early, vocal arguments became the whipping boy against which power hungry Wantlands, Duncans, and Schofields struck as if defending all Episcopalians from the monster of heresy. I'll do more on what constitutes heresy later.

Harris sees GAFCON, the current border crossings of Venebles and some African bishops and the devolution of American provincial pretenders like AMIA, AAC, CANA etc. as continuing the trajectory now with Lambeth's stumbling to help it along.

Where NOT to buy the "emperor's new clothes."

2008-08-04T23:28:00.000-04:00

As of August 4, 2008 these closings just begin to tell how good our chances are of "consuming" our way out of recession. BTW, where did you spend your tax rebate? Probably not at Starbuck's! Thanks to GlobalResearch.ca for the info.

Ann Taylor closing 117 stores nationwide.
Eddie Bauer to close more stores after closing 27 stores in the first quarter.
Cache, a women’s retailer is closing 20 to 23 stores this year.
Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, Catherines closing 150 stores nationwide
Talbots, J. Jill closing stores. Talbots will close all 78 of its kids and men's stores plus another 22 underperforming stores. The 22 stores will be a mix of Talbots women's and J. Jill.
Gap Inc. closing 85 stores
Foot Locker to close 140 stores
Wickes Furniture is going out of business and closing all of its stores. The 37-year-old retailer that targets middle-income customers, filed for bankruptcy protection last month.
Levitz - the furniture retailer, announced it was going out of business and closing all 76 of its stores in December. The retailer dates back to 1910.
Zales, Piercing Pagoda plans to close 82 stores by July 31 followed by closing another 23 underperforming stores.
Disney Store owner has the right to close 98 stores.
Home Depot store closings 15 of them amid a slumping US economy and housing market. The move will affect 1,300 employees. It is the first time the world's largest home improvement store chain has ever closed a flagship store.
CompUSA (CLOSED).
Macy's - 9 stores closed
Movie Gallery – video rental company plans to close 400 of 3,500 Movie Gallery and Hollywood Video stores in addition to the 520 locations the video rental chain closed last fall as part of bankruptcy.
Pacific Sunwear - 153 Demo stores closing
Pep Boys - 33 stores of auto parts supplier closing
Sprint Nextel - 125 retail locations to close with 4,000 employees following 5,000 layoffs last year.
J. C. Penney, Lowe's and Office Depot are all scaling back
Ethan Allen Interiors: plans to close 12 of 300 stores to cut costs.
Wilsons the Leather Experts – closing 158 stores
Bombay Company: to close all 384 U.S.-based Bombay Company stores.
KB Toys closing 356 stores around the United States as part of its bankruptcy reorganization.
Dillard's Inc. will close another six stores this year.

Bless Her Heart!

2008-06-02T23:27:00.000-04:00

For my whole life I've heard the phrase "Bless Her Heart" applied in case after case like the one dear Senator Clinton seems to have found herself in right now. Saying BHH meant that when something went wrong you gave some credit to the person, usually measured by their sincerity or courage. It's very 19th century. One can easily imagine Kierkegaard or Flaubert dropping such a line at those grand occasions that found some socially fragile person's makeup smudged or worse, when the news came that a romantic affair had been exposed by some clumsy coachman. Two would get the BHH at that point.

In my experience I've seen BHH acknowledge sincerity as a means to the end of ridicule or as some now say "truth-telling." Like this, "BHH, she needs to be in jail."

It often went with what has been for me a particularly southern habit of ogling politicians, preachers and salesmen. Especially the ones that hadn't quite fallen and still had a full supply of vim and vigor. We'd say, "BHH, I sure don't want to be there when __________ (insert appropriate embarrassment) happens.

But I've had a hard time saying this about Senator Clinton. Not everything she did seemed born of sincerity and courage. There was some spoilage there and it just didn't smell good. But the end is near. Senator Obama needs less that 43 delegates to come his way and HRC is leaking her plans to call it quits. Nowadays candidates just suspend their campaigns. I think that has more to do with their money than with their chances. Of course, she has $20 million owed to her by own campaign. BHH.

First Amendment and Bad Theology

2008-05-30T23:24:00.000-04:00

This may take a while so bear with me. Another of my constant peeves is the misrepresentation of the first amendment by hard right fun-damn-mentalists and those of the political right using religion to seize power not meant for them by our constitution. One of the consequenses of this manipulation is that a soldier in Iraq hands out coins embosed on one side with John 3:16 translated into arabic in answer to the question posed on the other side, "Where will you spend eternity?"
After I stop screaming I screamed some more because I remembered that this methodolgy masquerading as a theology has been the musak of my life of southern religion. John 3:16 which promises salvation based on God's love of the world has been spun for decades as if it only contained its latter half, the part that says "whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life" (KJV) Believing gets elevated to a position at least equal to God's love and becomes the guarantee of one's eternal habitation. Believe first and then you can say you are saved.
Over the years two scripturally based correctives have grown in my understanding since those naive days of my childhood when John 3:16 was as commonplace in its assurance of safety as knowing one's phone number. The first is the reminder spoken by Jesus himself in each of the synoptics:

“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” Matthew 16:25
“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.”Mark 8:35
“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.” Luke 9:24, KJV.

I have come to understand this caution to be against basing one's faith/belief/religion on getting one's life saved. Indeed it is more than a caution. It is clearly saying that the appeal made by that young soldier was at least misguided, probably a waste of time, certainly suspect. Nothing thwarts salvation better than trying to cover one's a**.
The other corrective is the idea found in Ephesians:

“But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, by grace ye are saved; And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” Ephesians 2:4-9, KJV.

In short, faith is not the work that earns eternal life, because there is no "work" that can save us. So why hand out coins with John 3:16 on the "answer" side? Except that this young soldier believes that belief saves. Not God in mercy but belief in Jesus.
I'll admit this is too fine a matter for this simplification. Indeed, salvation -- whatever it really is -- deserves better discourse than my diatribe or a soldier's coin. But it is not enough for me to complain simply on the basis of constitutional concerns. As far as the first amendment is concerned things have been handled properly. Something much larger than a misguided soldier is amuck here.
One of the consequences of what I call "first amendment abuse," is that actions like this coin evangelization will give another undeserved public hearing to what is always and sadly so just very bad theology.
Its bad theology to worry about the salvation of your own life when the world is starving and thirsty and oppressed and imprisoned.
Its bad theology to get others to believe like you so that they can be saved. Unless the world becomes a better place you have to ask, "saved from what?" Its bad theology to try to save your own life, especially if that effort thwarts another's salvation. Its bad theology to turn faith into a righteous work, to turn human believing into an eternal guarantee.
No wonder the religious right wants to undermine first amendment protections, it allows for propagation of bad theology.

Ascension to Pentecost Artwork

2008-05-14T23:20:00.000-04:00

But you will have power, when the Holy Spirit has come on you; and you will be my witnesses
in Jerusalem and all Judaea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Acts 1:8

I just love this photo. It was our homepage artwork for the 10 days from the Feast of the Ascension of our Lord to the Feast of Pentecost. The woman is actor Heather Graham. It must be from some film promo. I think it exemplifies the themes of God's power in us gained by way of the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as it is sustained for us by the Holy Spirit. That's what I think!

One More Reason to Cheer Against the Gators

2008-04-27T23:17:00.000-04:00

This is incredible (pun intended.) The Florida legislature has begun to consider production of a vanity plate that would look like this.

I'm pretty sure this is another wolf in sheep's clothing move by some "conservative" legislator. Pandering to people's wanting choices like that's what freedom is and using it to back door conservative christianistic power mongering into the mainstream. Want to test the freedom of choice claim? Try to imagine the state painting the symbol for an atheist vanity tag. Think also about how strained a thing it is for the legislature to "just be making this available" without crossing the no state support of religion line.

The Bill of Rights says:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
It doesn't say "a religion" it says "religion" That seems to me to be very clearly prohibiting the State of Florida providing a service that paints a cross and stained glass window with the words "I believe" on a state required auto license.
Even worse is the argument equating belief in a religion with "belief" in a team (one assumes some of the teams are of the several athletically active institutions of "higher learning" in the state). It once again proves the point that on the spectrum of religious expression that extends from vacuous to enlightened (and you can pretty much put the religious among the founding fathers on the enlightened end) conservative is often at best one notch from vaccous. Who elects these people?

Do the Math and VOTE!

2008-04-19T23:16:00.000-04:00

Salary in the highest tax bracket is taxed at 35 percent, but profits from stocks held long enough to be called “long-term capital gains” are taxed at 15 percent. A hedge fund manager making $100 million in a year would pay $15 million to the government if he is able to take his income as capital gains, not the $35 million he would have to pay if the income was considered salary.

Secular Sabbaths

2008-03-29T23:15:00.000-04:00

A pet interest of mine has been the need for a cultural recovery of the "sabbath." Not "blue laws" but a generally held and working "expectation" that would precede any civil statute and inform our definitions of things like: fair wage, fair tax, benefits, poverty, earned income, income from interest and dividends, estate income, etc. It's important to avoid a repeat of the past and confuse this cultural sabbath keeping with the blue laws of the past. Blue laws were forced on minority populations to support the personal - lifestyle - religious choices of the majority. I remember when the theaters were not allowed to operate on Sunday. I remember as a child asking my mom when the Jewish kids got to go to the movies. We still have vestiges of that era with the fairly widely practiced bans on the Sunday sale of alcohol.

Mind you, my interests have always been governed by a moderate libertarianism. I don't like the "gubment" telling me what to do when those actions would impinge in no way on the rights of others. Vestigial blue laws are not the only intrusion of the government into the free market (goods and ideas). Our "current occupant" and his regime have so supported the upper class in this society and protected the portion of what cannot honestly be called the free market in which are vested their interests less than 10% of the population can afford to "take a day off."

To develop a sabbath expectation in culture just start with thinking exploitation of the lower class, of minorities, of immigrants, of the environment, of the economy, then back up one step and you still have a strong case. Why do bank computers run "realtime" 24/7 but customer access to those same computers does not? Why do public schools charge fees for required materials? Why is access to public lands and waterways so often limited to commercial/corporate interests seeking a profit? These are "sabbath" questions.

Sabbath standards wouldn't allow the wealthy/powerful to force a pace onto the economic lives of lower income persons. Heck, even the banks could afford to turn off the computers one day a week. Once civil authorities undertake education and make attendance compulsory, required fees limit only the access of the poor by forcing them to choose between necessities and not between options. Sabbath standards would protect land, sea and air for all, including nature itself.

Blue laws are inadequate but stripped of their religiosity and directed toward the benefit of the poor or -- even better -- the middle class they would be a start toward the sabbath our culture craves.

Little in Common with their Cause

2008-03-12T23:11:00.000-04:00

I was poking around the news of John David Schofield's just desserts and I came across the web pages for Common Cause Patnership. I saw a couple of things that saddened me: college pal and fellow house church brother Norman Beale is listed among clergy members, and in their foundational documents they - I hope inadvertently - redefine Christian Communion to a new level of understanding. Item 10.4 in their Articles of Incorporation (Confederation would be more honest) states "Communicant members of any Partner shall be received b y a congregation of another Partner on presentation of a letter of transfer." I hope that this was only meant to establish a consistent method for movement of lay members from parish to parish. It could just as easily be read "a letter of transfer is sufficient to establish membership in another parish." How are members of non-partner congregations to be received by a Partner parish: exam? testimony? first born? And what role does the rector play in making a determination?

Later I was still surfing my regular stops and remembered this wonderful recounting of Sara Miles and her introduction to Episcopal Worship a la St. Gregory of Nyssa. I don't believe a CCP parish would accept her letter of transfer. As a rector I would.

Chicken Doves and Waterboarding for God

2008-02-10T23:04:00.000-05:00

I have some questions thanks to the wake-up call I received in reading Ray McGovern of Common Dreams and Matt Taibi of Rollingstone.

Why have none of the moderated debates for either party questioned the candidates about:

reversing Bush's unitary executive office?
impeachment of Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, et al
reversal of No Child Left Behind
ending to corporate welfare
the false piety of the Republican Elite
the hypocrisy of the Evangelistic Leadership as non-questioning supporters of Bush
etc., etc., etc

Why wait for a debate? Why haven't any of the candidates asked these questions of each other? By not making known what they believe on these matters and countless others that don't make the manufactured news, each of the candidates -- regardless of party -- leaves us ready to assume that come January 2009 nothing will change but the White House letterhead.

Republicans and Biblical Justice for the Middle Class

2008-02-04T23:02:00.000-05:00

Even Huck the Bible Thumping Bee can't pull it off with his (not so) Fair Tax but given the chance so far NONE of the Republicans have mentioned any long term direct help to the middle class in their economic plans. And we all know the current "stimulus package" will not come so enough for most -- read April the 15th -- and be roughly equal to a "Title Pawn" as a boost to the economy. With too many Democrats joining them they sing, "Let's spend our way out of this recession."

Here's what Jeremiah said,

"For wicked men are found among my people; they lurk like fowlers lying in wait. They set a trap; they catch men. Like a basket full of birds, their houses are full of treachery; therefore they have become great and rich, they have grown fat and sleek. They know no bounds in deeds of wickedness; they judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy. Shall I not punish them for these things? says the LORD, and shall I not avenge myself on a nation such as this?"" Jeremiah 5:26-29, RSV.

and before you think I'm out of line check this info from PBS' Frontline:

10 Reasons America's Two-Income Families Aren't What You Think
(According to Harvard Law professor and bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren)

Two-income families today make 75% more in inflation-adjusted dollars, but have less money to spend than one-income families did 30 years ago.
Two-income families today spend: 21% less on clothing, 22% less on food, and 44% less on appliances compared to one-income families a generation ago.
Every 15 seconds an American family files for bankruptcy.
This year, more kids will live through their parents' bankruptcy, than through their parents' divorce.
1.6 million families will file for bankruptcy this year, 9 million more are already in credit counseling.
Home mortgage foreclosures are up more than three-fold over the last generation and car foreclosures have hit record levels.
More than 62% of families say that they worry about making ends meet.
The average family spends 69% more in inflation-adjusted dollars on their home mortgage than their parents spent a generation ago.
The average family spends 61% more on health insurance, than their parents spent a generation ago.
Credit card default rates are at a record high.

Jesus v. the Church

2008-01-10T22:59:00.000-05:00

From FrJake: unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity by David Kinnaman, President of the Barna Group, and Gabe Lyons, founder of the Fermi Project. Their research project involved interviewing "outsiders" (those who are outside the Christian faith) and young Christians, focusing on the 16 - 29 age group (identified as older "Mosaics" and younger "Busters"). The perception that they discovered of how younger generations view "Christians" is a real eye opener. Here's a few of the top descriptions from the "outsider" group:

Question: Here are some words or phrases that could be used to describe a religious faith. Please indicate if you think each of these phrases describes Christianity.

91% - Antihomosexual

87% - Judgmental

85% - Hypocritical

75% - Too involved in politics

Here's some of the responses to the same question from young adults who are church members:

80% - Antihomosexual

52% - Judgmental

47% - Hypocritical

50% - Too involved in politics

Oh, to see ourselves as others see us!

frDann

Obama and Niebuhr

2007-09-03T22:56:00.000-04:00

Thanks to David Brooks for the opening but even more thanks to Barak Obama for his depth of understanding and demeanor. These are the things that interest me in his candidacy. I picked this up via Slacktivist, but do follow the links to the whole interview, Brooks' remarks, Casey Blake's remarks and the comments. All in all it is the kind of thinking and reflection sorely missing from the Bush side. Duh! Which is not the point of the original or the first few commentators.

I remember having a conversation with one of my colleagues in the Diocese of Atlanta, rector of a large downtown Atlanta parish. It was in the days following the Trache debacle. We were considering a new batch of nominees and thinking about the basics, the one or two things that "our choice" must possess. Without cue we looked at each other and said together, "She has to be smart!" We voted and the election found a very smart, very bright man.

Since then I've had my experiences with J. Neil Alexander be nothing if not strong confirmations of the role that intelligence and enlightened thinking play in a progressive church like ours.

So here's my take on the Presidents I've known:

Kennedy - smart and bright, I never minded that he was so very patrician.

Johnson - smart but too much a the Texas Senator and Majority Leader instead of being presidential

Nixon - smart but nefarious, very, very dark!

Ford - Honest but not bright and not presidential

Carter - smart but too Southern Baptist

Reagan - not smart (senile?) and too presidential.

Bush - more patrician than smart (CIA, Saudi $$, Daddy's $)

Clinton - very smart and very bright but horribly narcissistic

Bush - not smart, not bright, not much more than stubborn.

Think about how these men answered tough questions. Kennedy would not show perturbation. Carter would get impatient at times but he would still answer the question, often "upping the ante." Clinton would answer too much or too well. (Remember Slick Willy!)

Now think about how frustrated you have seen Reagan and Bushes become at questions that were often screened in advance! Ford does not rank here but does balance Johnson's short term. Neither was presidential. Both were Hill toppers in the White House. Johnson was a Senator from Texas. Ford was a multi-term Congressman.

Somewhere around Nixon, Carter, Reagan the mythic responsibility of the Presidency began to loom over whoever sat in the Oval Office. Think how grandious some of their ideas became. Carter's Olympic boycott. Reagan thought big of himself in that old romantic cowboy way, as if he could ride over tell that Mr. Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. And the worst was Nixon with the tapes and Plumbers. Who did these people think they were? Only Clinton after them "reigned from on high."

The Bushes have pretended. Gentiles.

The only rub against Obama - youth. But boy is he smart AND bright!

Rev. Beth Long's Witness for a Living Wage

2006-12-11T22:55:00.000-05:00

St. Gregory's Rector, Beth Long, joined a state-wide gathering advocating for Georgia's assembly to pass legislation to raise the minimum wage as they met at the Presbyterian Center in Athens. She rocked the house! Here's what she said:

Why do people of faith need to raise the minimum wage? Because Moses led the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt! He received a covenant which empowered living life as a free people: physically, socially, economically and spiritually. There is hardly anywhere you can open the Bible that you will not find true religion equated with social and economic justice, and idolatry equated with injustice and oppression.

Jesus of Nazareth said plenty about money. It was one of his favorite topics, second only to the kingdom of God. For almost 200 years after his death, the people who followed his way lived with equality, sharing and non-violence. Love God with all your heart and life and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Do you want to work like a slave and still not have enough to feed, clothe and house yourself and your family, and never enjoy a Sabbath rest without worry and anxiety for the future? Would you want that for your own children? Would you want that for anyone you love? God certainly doesn’t want that for you. That’s why God led the people out of slavery in Egypt and sent the prophets to the kings every time they began to make it hard for ordinary folk to survive. So if we love this God, we will want for our neighbors the same good things that God wants for us: to live in health and safety with enough to eat, and a day of rest to enjoy and give thanks for all our blessings. Right now we have a perfect opportunity to live this out by supporting the increase in the minimum wage in Georgia and to continue to do so until it becomes a living wage!

Maybe some of us think this is impossible. We imagine that institutional and economic realities are absolute constraints on our creativity and what is possible for us to accomplish. But the good news of God’s love is not a luxury or a fairy tale. Where we see scarcity, Jesus and the prophets see abundance.

The living God tells us there is enough, and in fact, there is more than enough. When we stand by while others are hungry or enslaved, we are starving and imprisoning our own souls because deep down it is our joy to love our neighbors as ourselves!

Why do people of faith need to raise the minimum wage? Hear the words of the Prophet Isaiah: “If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness. . . The Lord will satisfy your needs in parched places and make your bones strong. . .your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.. . .Go through the gates, prepare the way for the people, build up the highway, clear it of stones; and you shall be called Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken.”

The Reverend Beth Long

St. Gregory the Great, Athens

What law limits freedom of speech in the Capital building? And what did Cindy Sheehan's T-shirt say?

2006-02-01T22:54:00.000-05:00

Better to ask: Is there a law that limits speakers to telling the truth? or at least names lying as an punishable offense? W can falsely assert the following without consequence but Cindy is arrested for wearing a T-shirt that says: 2,245 Dead — How Many More??

". . . It is said that prior to the attacks of September the 11th, our government failed to connect the dots of the conspiracy. We now know that two of the hijackers in the United States placed telephone calls to al Qaeda operatives overseas. But we did not know about their plans until it was too late. So to prevent another attack –- based on authority given to me by the Constitution and by statute -- I have authorized a terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al Qaeda operatives and affiliates to and from America. Previous Presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have, and federal courts have approved the use of that authority. Appropriate members of Congress have been kept informed. The terrorist surveillance program has helped prevent terrorist attacks. It remains essential to the security of America. If there are people inside our country who are talking with al Qaeda, we want to know about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again."

Let me break it down:

1. It is said - By whom?

Gore Vidal on Fear

2006-01-29T22:53:00.000-05:00

Gore Vidal has been there, done that. I like what he has put together from his many many years of observation and critical thinking. His development of the "Closing of the American Mind" speaks volumes about the cumulative effect of fear -- and just as significantly, despair -- in the service of power.

Vidal's work is done with what appears to me to be a relentless hope grounded in an honest memory (thus the correct reading of Tiberius' history.) I understand hope to be the opposite of despair and thus the divining of history and current events offered by those without hope is a much more cynical hermenutic.

Cynicism as it projects despair is popular because it takes little or no courage at all, requiring only the strength to fend off altruism while one is allowed to put on the guise of tough realism. Think of Rove's latest criticism of some democrats he claims are reading the world through “pre-9-11 eyes.” He only sounds tough. But his realism is not tough or realistic at all! It is cynicism with all the incumbent misinterpretations of history, all the false rhetoric, all the fear-mongering, and all the abuse of power to maintain power of an apocalyptist without hope.

Cynicism is the canary in the coal mine of any generation's "closing." But behind it there is a deep despair. Whatelse allows a 20 year old Georgian to support Sen. Frist's threat of nuclear option as the "best option" allowed by the politicization of "advice and consent?" Does the Constitution encourage us to understand as rubber stamp what is really the high authority of "advice and consent?" Frist et al would have it portrayed as a duty at best to "give the president's nominees the up or down vote they deserve." No high callings around. How audacious of the Kennedys and Kerrys to presume otherwise!

I understand consent in general as the action of a parent or board of elders like the Senate. Who were originally unlimited in the number of terms they could serve and elected on a slower cycle than the other offices of national import and thus privileged to an honest memory. Remember term limits? or perhaps more pointedly said "will the real originalists please stand up!" Later on I'll get my rant about term limits and the need we have to repeal that freakish legislation. We forget the role it has played in accelerating change, in making elections more easily purchased than contested and in concentrating power toward the top of both parties and away from the grass roots. But like I said, that's later.

For now read Vidal.

Published on Saturday, January 28, 2006 by TruthDig

President Jonah

by Gore Vidal

While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, Read more

If you talk the right talk, you can do no wrong v. Matthew 15:11

2006-01-27T22:51:00.000-05:00

This from the comments to The Carpetbagger Report January 25 article on Roy Blunt supporter in a business that provides services for a phone sex business. JoeW has spoken the truth. Isn't interesting how blind to our own "contradictions" us religious types can become when power is in play.

C'mon CB! 'm sure Dobson and his ilk will applaud it along this line:

Blunt heroically outfoxed the godless fornicators. He took their ill-gotten booty and cleansed it in the light of the baby Jesus. Taking money from these filthy secularists and turning it to God's cause shows how deeply he cherishes his Christian convictions.

With the Christian right, if you talk the right talk, you can do no wrong.

Comment by JoeW — 1/25/2006 @ 10:46 am

Personally, I do not care from where Blunt's money comes. He is dangerous to the nation -- not just Missouri -- as a top dog in the Republican machine. It's not what goes into a man's mouth that defiles him . . .

Fear Not = Vote Republican?

2006-01-26T22:52:00.000-05:00

Time was when we understood the biblical refrain ''fear not" as a comfort spoken to those suffering unjust oppression. Now there may another reason to follow this holy imperative: to protect ourselves from our own leaders. BTW "fear not" appears 39 times in the RSV translation of the Hebrew Scriptures and 5 times in the Christian Testament. Eugene Robinson has a great take on the latest fear-mongering from the White House.

DBB

Using Our Fear

By Eugene Robinson

Friday, January 27, 2006; Page A23

Once upon a time we had a great wartime president who told Americans they had nothing to fear but fear itself. Now we have George W. Bush, who uses fear as a tool of executive power and as a political weapon against his opponents. (Read more)

Jack Who? Deemed "not relevant," photos scrubbed by Bush supporter before Time announcement

2006-01-26T22:51:00.000-05:00

Talking Points Memo by Joshua Micah Marshall

(January 26, 2006 -- 11:59 AM EDT)

. . . So, here we have it that the president of Reflections admits that she removed photos of Abramoff and the president from their online database. If what her employee told me on the 11th is accurate the photos were also deleted from the CDs they keep on file in their own archives. So the scrub seems to have been pretty thorough. (Read more)

Turns out the company's president is a Bush contributor. Read it on Public Campaign Action Fund: Clean Money, Clean Elections in their Thursday January 26th blog. How else did they get the contract in the first place? Either pay to play or just join the regime. What other institution works this way and on this scale? . . . 3,2,1. . . The Mafia.

Molly Ivins is right, again!

2006-01-26T22:50:00.000-05:00

By Molly Ivins

TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2006, AND THEREAFTER

AUSTIN, Texas -- We live in interesting times, we do, we do. We can read in our daily newspapers that our government is about to launch a three-day propaganda blitz to convince us all that its secret program to spy on us is something we really want and need. "A campaign of high-profile national security events," reports The New York Times, follows "Karl Rove's blistering speech to national Republicans" about what a swell political issue this is for their party. (Read more)

Book of Daniel's Desparations

2006-01-26T22:49:00.000-05:00

This is a wonderful essay/review of two TV shows I have watched and enjoyed for the very different reasons this author lists here.

frDann

Jesus, 'Daniel,' and 'Earl'

by Donovan Jacobs

SojoMail 1-25-2006

It's no surprise that a range of conservative Christian organizations and commentators criticized NBC's recent TV series The Book of Daniel, canceled this week by the network, which blamed low ratings around the country. Between the title character - a pill-popping Episcopal priest who regularly talks to a vision of Jesus - his gay son, pot-dealing daughter, and martini-swilling wife, the show featured enough hot-button topics to rile up virtually anyone on the Religious Right. (Read more)

Too many wrongs don't make a right, just one dizzy.

2006-01-18T22:48:00.000-05:00

I've pasted a Truthout translation of Gaudemar's essay as it appeared in Liberation. This is a sobering reminder that our government is digging holes on too many fronts to count. I almost forgot about this horror of illegal detention. It is depressing to realize that Abramoff's troubles like all the other crap W's methods and madness have brought us to contemplate have only diverted our attention from bad news with more bad news.

Oh to be diverted by the truth that we have stopped spinning and corrected these wrongs!

Defeat
By Antoine de Gaudemar in Libération Thursday 12 January 2006

Four years after its creation, Guantánamo prison camp remains faithful to its sinister reputation. More than five hundred men of about thirty different nationalities are still rotting there, and not all of them were made prisoner in 2002 in Afghanistan during the American military intervention in that country. Some of them were arrested in the course of illegal kidnappings in third countries. This scandal is only the first in a long list: as of today only nine detainees have been charged; not one has been tried. In spite of a decision by the United States Supreme Court - which has still not ruled on the legality of the military tribunals headquartered on the Cuban base - arbitrary action and abusive treatment continue to reign there: although a few prisoners have been able to meet their lawyers, they denounce the inanity of procedures that change constantly. Neither the families, nor NGOs - with the exception of the Red Cross - can visit the precincts where hunger strikes are on the increase. This opacity makes us fear the worst about the conditions of detention inside the camp, fears confirmed by the new testimonies of torture Amnesty International published yesterday. The only glimmer of light in this nightmare is the drip drop of detainee releases after months and months of imprisonment, most of the time for nothing. Along with the tortures practiced in Iraqi jails and secret CIA prisons, Guantánamo symbolizes what is most hateful about the George Bush regime: the desire to be above its own laws as well as international law and a total sense of impunity. Because the fight against terrorism does not require that we use the same weapons it does, the very existence of Guantánamo is a most serious defeat for democracy.

Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.

How much warrantless searching will $89.95 get you?

2006-01-14T22:47:00.000-05:00

Published on Friday, January 13, 2006 by the Chicago Sun Times

Blogger Buys Presidential Candidate's Call List

by Frank Main

One of the nation's top political bloggers purchased the cell phone records of former presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark on Thursday to demonstrate the growing privacy concerns highlighted in a Chicago Sun-Times story last week.

John Aravosis, publisher of AMERICAblog.com, said he bought Clark's records for $89.95 from celltolls.com. Aravosis said he obtained a list of 100 calls made on Clark's cell phone over three days in November -- no questions asked. Read on

And the 70's, too!

2006-01-14T22:46:00.000-05:00

Published on Friday, January 13, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Play It Again, Sam

by Richard Hendrick

Play It Again, Sam.

It looks like Sam Alito will be a Supreme Court Justice. Before he gains whatever credibility inheres in this lofty office, let me record my objections to his contributions to the revision of Sixties history and point out the glass house from which he has lofted a few stonesŠin my direction.

It has been a rough thirty years since the end of The Sixties. Not least because The Sixties has taken such hits in its rewriting. What was (among many things) a time of almost childish naivete, innocence, and idealism has been slowly, purposefully and completely robbed of its virtues. It is now depicted as a time of confusion, irresponsibility, self-indulgence and unwarranted violence (on the parts of demonstrators, not the military and police!). Read on . . .

Imperial Presidency v. Government Drowned in a Tub

2006-01-14T22:45:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to figure out the mind set of someone who can campaign espousing smaller federal government -- like Patrick Basham recalls in his Cato Institute piece after Bush was elected over Gore by a 5 to 4 Supreme Court vote -- and then work so hard to expand his own power as if two centuries of "checks and balances" were some so-called "liberal fantasy." I am left with just a couple of logical conclusions.

One is that W is a liar. This is my less cynical conclusion BTW. It is less cynical because I have tried in my evaluation to give him credit for what he said in public throughout the two campaigns and while in office as President. I consider it less cynical to assume that W knows what he is saying when he is saying it. I am also assuming that he believes everything he says. Not to would require that we admit for him higher levels of intelligence and mental acuity than he has ever demonstrated in public discourse or by official/institutional testing. He does demonstrate a degree of "good-old-boy" street smarts at times looking much like the former Clemson football coach Danny Ford. You know, "he's as a dumb as a fox." It seems to me that Molly Ivins has asked us to understand W this way. So . . . let's give him credit for what I want to call conscious expediency. Another way to say it is: Saying or doing what he thinks he needs to say or do so that he can say or do what he thinks he needs to say or do.

CE is W's part in what Paul Waldman calls Fraud. This how he outlines it in his book.

How to Build a Fraud:

• Portray son of one of America's most influential families as down-home Texan

• Berate media as "liberal" until they stop asking tough questions

• Take advantage of reporters' tendency to not check the facts

• Mask reactionary policies in compassionate words and pictures

• Push false stories from right-wing media into mainstream media

• Extol the virtues of workers while systematically pushing an anti-labor agenda

• Propose a series of tax cuts aimed at the wealthy, but sell them as a boon to ordinary Americans

• Disguise destructive initiatives with friendly sounding names

• Befriend media with "genuine guy" routine

• Keep the public from accessing information

• Maintain message discipline at all times

• Question patriotism of anyone who disagrees

• Repeat above until it all seems true

At some point, George W. Bush took a good long look at who he was and what he wanted for the country and decided that the American people would never buy it if he gave it to them straight. So Bush and his political machine made their decision: the American people would have to be lied to.

I couldn't agree more. As I said, he believes what he thinks he knows. Belief is important because ultimately some vision -- of which W is simply an ordained recipient (in cahoots with other fellow travelers) --becomes the sole/soul and -- this is important --purifying motivation for everything that he says or does. With the deluding indignation of a self-appointed martyr and a pronounced comfort with contradiction, he lies. How can you tell that he is lying? Read his lips. If they're moving, he's lying.

The more cynical outcome is to conclude that he is being duped -- like the Emperor with no clothes. Interestingly, we focus on the gullibility of the subjects through out our retelling of the age-old tale. Blaming them for their succumbing to a lie. We do the same with the American public today. But doesn't the fairy tale contain the truth that publics "under the power of a "despot" -- puppet or not -- do not know what they do not know? "Tell them over and over until they believe it is true." Eventually "they" don't know. Only someone who has participated in that which is the subject of the lie, the whistleblowers like Russell Tice or who have not yet been hypnotized by the droning, the child whom I've always thought was a little girl, can dispel the lie for what it is in its dissonance and incongruity. Bush appears at times to be horribly ignorant or at least susceptible to his own droning. Like an emperor so enamored by flattery that he never questions the source. Gullible is as gullible does "a heck of a job."

Part of not knowing what we don't know is that we can not tell the difference between the person who is President and the Presidency itself. The rhetoric flattens these two into one. So that we can no longer speak of how W has dishonored the office without being accused of dishonoring the office ourselves. The doublespeak of the puppet plus the doublespeak echoing back via a hypnotized media and public equals little or nothing of consequence recognized as utterable. Think of Bill Murray going Japan to show us what living in the US with a mind of your own was like. Oh that W had an inking of Bob Harris' self consciousness.

See what I mean about this being the more cynical conclusion?

I guess it doesn't matter which part of the doublespeak comes out his mouth or whether he is conscious of it as doublespeak or not. We are in trouble, of Orwellian proportions. Because neither an imperial presidency or a drownable government will be our salvation. We already have a way of doing things in this country that could rescue us from either of these false Saviors. It has the potential to inform us so that we can honestly join the little girl who utters the truth from her innocence and hear the prophetic voices of whistleblowers like Russell Tice. It is the Constitution. But I best be careful otherwise I do dishonor to W which he has not already done to himself.

Economic Cronyism

2006-01-10T22:44:00.000-05:00

01/10/06 20:50

Published on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal (Florida)

What Numbers Aren't Saying About the Economy Most Live In

by Pierre Tristam

. . . From 1947 to 1979, family income for the poorest 20 percent of the population grew by 120 percent, and by comparable rates for the next two-fifths of the nation's households. Income for the top fifth grew by 94 percent. Since 1979, household income for the poorest 20 percent has risen 0.7 percent. Total. It has risen between 7 percent and 8 percent, total, for the next two-fifths of the country's households, or about 0.3 percent per year. For the richest 10 percent, household income grew 61.2 percent during the same 25 years. And for the richest 1 percent, it grew a staggering 111 percent. Wealth had been becoming a more equal opportunity. It's now a privilege again. . . . Read more

Militar Spending: All This and NO Flack Jackets?

2006-01-09T22:43:00.001-05:00

Published on Sunday, January 8, 2006 by the Toronto Sun (Canada)

The 'Fin de Regime'?

An Out-of-Touch George Bush Now Presides Over a Lost Foreign War and a Morass of Influence Peddling

by Eric Margolis

WASHINGTON -- China's Taoists philosophers warned that you become what you hate. We see this paradox in Washington, where the current administration increasingly reminds one of the old Soviet Union.

The U.S.S.R. went bankrupt after spending 40% of national income on the military. President George Bush's administration will spend a staggering $419.3 billion US on the military this fiscal year. An additional $130 billion US has been budgeted in 2006 for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

That's $10.8 billion a month -- 40% above previous estimates -- and somewhat more than the monthly cost of the Vietnam War at its height. Add to this huge sum an estimated $1.5 billion in monthly secret expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan by CIA and Pentagon intelligence.

Astoundingly, U.S. military spending in 2006 will equal the rest of the world's total combined military expenditures. (DBB's emphasis) I just saw an ad for the new, $115-million F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, trumpeting how its radar can "intercept communications of insurgents." Using a $115-million aircraft to listen to cellphone calls by a bunch of jihadis in Waziristan staggers the imagination. . . . Read More

Abramoff's Broken Theology of Merit

2006-01-08T22:42:00.000-05:00

I want to be careful because I am not an Orthodox Jew as Mr. Abramoff claims to be. But I am attentive to the use of religious language in the public sphere. In particular the invocation of the Almighty by Abramoff.

Here's what he said as reported in the Washington Post

"Standing before U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle in Washington yesterday, Abramoff looked sheepish and sad. "Your Honor, words will not be able to ever express how sorry I am for this, and I have profound regret and sorrow for the multitude of mistakes and harm I have caused," he said softly. "All of my remaining days, I will feel tremendous sadness and regret for my conduct and for what I have done. I only hope that I can merit forgiveness from the Almighty and from those I have wronged or caused to suffer."

What caught my attention was his idea the forgiveness was something to be gained or earned -- that's what merit means in most dictionaries. Likely the Almighty -- even as understood by this redneck Episcopal priest -- is interested, perhaps on occassion even impressed by sincerity, but mostly when attached to real action, especially the restorative kind so needed in this case. In other words, just how does Mr. Abramoff intend to shift the balance in favor of those he has caused to suffer and then "to merit the forgiveness of the Almighty?"

His plea bargain is a weak attempt at that at best. He will have to endure approximately 10 years incarceration. Ask Martha Stewart how that went for her, . . . after her next show. He must pay a $26 million restitution to IRS and his Indian clients. In other words he has to pay the taxes he has already owed and not paid and he will have give back the money he kept for himself or used for purposes other than the ones named to solicit the donations. Then he has to snitch on the others mostly politicians -- of whom the best evidence says "politician equals republican" -- he courted via St. Andrew's, skyboxes, and trips to the beach. Oh darn. Is that what Mr. Abramoff means when he imagines what he'll do to merit forgiveness from the Almighty? Which one of these requirements is punitive? Which one of these is restorative? Does the Casino part of the $26 million fund them to the level they'd be now based on when the money was first collected by Abramoff?

If the Almighty is waiting on Mr. Abramoff to earn forgiveness, I'm afraid he'll have to work through more agencies than the Federal Government's District court. But really my hunch is that the Almighty is not going to wait and will not even intervene to coerce any of the parties involved toward restoration for the sake of Mr. Abramoff's merit. If Mr. Abramoff covets -- among the many things I'm sure he has at least once coveted -- the Almighty's forgiveness he need only acknowledge that it is God's property always to have mercy. In other words forgiveness is a result of God's mercy and not our merit. If there is anything for Mr. Abramoff to hope to merit it ought to be our respect -- another word for the reduction of revulsion -- but understood exactly in terms of his ability to restore the balance he tipped so unmeritoriously in his favor. He can start doing that by getting out of Washington, entirely. His chances are just better somewhere else. Like Lame Deer, Montana -- yes, the Cheyenne have a casino but they're still broke -- where he could paint houses for the tribal council. At the rate he charges per hour it'll only take him a summer.

I would also suggest to him that he avoid speaking of his crime as causing "others to suffer." For his clients, apparently he delivered, there was no suffering because they thought they'd received their money's worth. Yes they are victims of a crime -- it's called fraud -- but have they suffered due to his action? Has his family suffered? Hard to imagine that, given his wife's 6 figure political donation sum. And what about those politicians he was funding? President Bush had to give to charity $6000 out of the more than $100,000 that made Abramoff a Bush Pioneer. Since W is not running for re-election I can't imagine how they'll suffer from what si now a charitable donation. Just who is it that has been caused to suffer? If any one it will be those who are implicated by his testimony -- I called it snitching earlier. But if they're guilty of a crime Abramoff's not needed to explain their suffering. Unless it's only "wrong" to get caught.

For me Abramoff's apology is made hollow by bad theology. Because of who the Almighty is, Abramoff has already been forgiven. Abramoff should stop apologizing and actually do somthing restorative, something that really helps make the world a better place. Only after a long time can he start talking "merit."

More on Abramoff's $$

2006-01-04T22:40:00.000-05:00

Lobbying Plan Was Central to GOP's Political Strategy

By Janet Hook and Mary Curtius

The Los Angeles Times
Wednesday 04 January 2006

. . . According to a study by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, 296 members of Congress since 1999 have received contributions from Abramoff, his Indian tribe clients or SunCruz Casinos. Abramoff and his wife contributed $204,253 - all of it to Republicans.
In addition, Abramoff also leaned on his Indian clients to give to key lawmakers. The center found that Abramoff's clients gave almost $4.2 million, more than half to Republicans. . . .

2006-01-03T22:33:00.000-05:00

Follow these two links for the officially reported contributions from Abramoff (and his wife) to political figures. Here and here. Word is that there are NO Democrats on those two lists.

And check out the chart which lists the distribution of campaign contributions from Abramoff's Indian Casino Clients.

Let's do the math
$ 843,209 to 33 members house/senate
$ 651,393 to 26 Republicans = ~$25,000 per person (9 were at or above the average)
$ 191,816 to 7 Democrats = ~$27,000 per person (4 were at or above the average)

From the Daily KOS
Out of Republican talking points as quoted by Bloomberg- hitting the streets today comes this  Between 2001 and 2004, Abramoff joined with his former partner, Michael Scanlon, and tribal clients to give money to a third of the members of Congress, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, according to records of the Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service. At least 171 lawmakers got $1.4 million in campaign donations from the group. Republicans took in most of the money, with 110 lawmakers getting $942,275, or 66 percent of the total.

Let's do the math using Republican talking points
1.40 million to 171
-.94 million to 110 Republicans = $8566 per person
_____________________
.45 million to 61 Democrats = $7500 per person

Also from the Daily KOS
And the LA Times reported more Abramoff donation facts:  Abramoff, a once-powerful lobbyist who is the subject of a federal influence-peddling investigation, is considering a deal to plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors, according to sources familiar with the probe. That could open the prospect that Abramoff will implicate any number of lawmakers and aides who were part of his vast network of access. [snip]  "Washington is holding its collective breath," said one Republican lobbyist who did not want to comment for the record on a scandal affecting his profession and political allies.  The concern is widespread because Abramoff's reach into the Capitol was so deep. According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, 210 current members of Congress have received contributions from Abramoff, his Indian tribe clients or SunCruz Casinos since 1999.  Most received less than $10,000, but 25 lawmakers received $21,500 or more. Twenty were Republicans and five were Democrats, but none of the Democrats received money directly from Abramoff. (Emphasis mine, DBB)  Jack's lobbying firms and some of his clients gave to Democrats as well the GOP. While those are Abramoff-connected donations, they are not the same as Jack's personal checks to candidates.  It is only true to say that some Democrats received donations from co-workers of Abramoff and/or his clients, but that is different than an direct donation or connection to Abramoff.  And all Democrats are auditing all their connections and purging any funds that they find to be connected to Jack by the thinnest of threads.
(Thanks to Daily KOS for this excellent compilation)

Every time but one the Republicans try to paint Abramoff as an equal opportunity lobbyist they end up "more equal." The only time Democrats were "equal" to Republicans as recipients -- and this was campaign contributions from Abramoff's clients, not Abramoff himself -- are the 3 from Louisiana (John, Landrieu, Breaux) and the one from Nevada (Reid). Incidentally, the Republican leader "enjoyed" ~$36,000 more than his Democratic collegue. Several of these folks have redirected some of these funds. Dennis Hastert is telling folks that he gave his Abramoff $$ to charity. I wonder who got it. 

Saxby's Choice

2005-12-29T22:21:00.000-05:00

A mini-screen shot from Saxby Chambliss' web site at http://chambliss.senate.gov/

Like there weren't some other choices. Oh well. Looks like the republican party wants another year based on lowered expectations.

Judges or Lawyers, Who Gets to Say?

2005-12-28T22:16:00.001-05:00

Dear Mr. Yoo:

Commenting on your advising President Bush to direct NSA surveilance without warrents from FISA courts Peter Slevin of the Washington Post quotes you as saying,"It would be inappropriate for a lawyer to say, 'The law means A, but I'm going to say B because to interpret it as A would violate American values. A lawyer's job is if the law says A, the law says A."

I believe Slevin has exposed a slight but indeed very consequential flaw in your thinking. Let's hope this is just a onetime occurence for you or maybe you've been misquoted but it seems to me that you failed to properly portray our system of government with its three branches marvelously allowing even lawyers to say whatever they want about laws and American values because we ultimately rely on judges - not lawyers -- "to say, 'The law means A . . . "

Maybe next time you could advise the President to rely on a judge -- like FISA intends -- instead of a lawyer, or even a bright legal scholar such as yourself. That should offer us all some protection from the slight but consequential flaw in your thinking.

Daniel Brown

Chaplain

The Episcopal Center @ UGA

PS: Thanks to Truthout.org for citing Slevin's article

Scholar Stands by Post-9/11 Writings On Torture, Domestic Eavesdropping

Former Justice Official Says He Was Interpreting Law, Not Making Policy

By Peter Slevin

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 26, 2005; Page A0

Stuck in Stage 4

2005-12-27T22:18:00.000-05:00

I've been reading again on James Fowler's Stages of Faith. Google "Fowler's Stages" and the first five or so links will be good summaries of his profiles. Fowler, while at Emory in Atlanta, sort of synthesized Piaget, Erickson, and Kohlberg as he saw their work explaining faith development. Faith being more broadly defined than the "just believing in Jesus" that I grew up hearing about. I like Fowler's work and take it with the grain of salt, a grain Fowler himself offers. it is a careful appreciation for the vague territories between "stages."
The way I see it, transition is the work of faith and when we are faithful we will be moved beyond the comforts of familiar thoughts and beliefs. Either you move through faith or you stall in bitterness and fear. It seems to me that part of our faith development is eventually to grow more comfortable with and to be more forgiving of our limitations. Or said another way, part of faith development is remembering that we take our childhood with us wherever we go. Fowler talks about this as one of the constant "edges" that makes each stage "penultimate." We are stirred by the dissonance of, we are stretched in the tension between the way things are and the way things us to be. The tension is always with us but our recognition and appreciation of it is the stuff of transition.
I've been curious again about Fowler's ideas because they help me to understand the machinations and postures of one George W. Bush. Briefly, I think W is "stuck in stage 4" and he exhibits all the symptoms of bitterness and fear that literally block one's transition, ones faith development. Some would argue that he is not yet "into stage 4" such that transitioning out can be a thing to consider. Remember, we need to maintain a healthy respect for the vague boundaries. Some of us, still carrying the faith of childhood with us, are in 3 stages at the same time. So think with me and let's talk a little about W's faith and it's development. Here's a summary of stages 3, 4, and 5. Let me know what you think.

In Stage 3 Synthetic-Conventional faith, a person's experience of the world now extends beyond the family. A number of spheres demand attention: family, school or work, peers, street society and media, and perhaps religion. Faith must provide a coherent orientation in the midst of that more complex and diverse range of involvements. Faith must synthesize values and information; it must provide a basis for identity and outlook.
Stage 3 typically has its rise and ascendancy in adolescence, but for many adults it becomes a permanent place of equilibrium. It structures the ultimate environment in interpersonal terms. Its images of unifying value and power derive from the extension of qualities experienced in personal relationships. It is a "conformist" stage in the sense that it is acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of significant others and as yet does not have a sure enough grasp on its own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective. While beliefs and values are deeply felt, they typically are tacitly held-the person "dwells" in them and in the meaning world they mediate. But there has not been occasion to step outside them to reflect on or examine them explicitly or systematically.

At Stage 3 a person has an "ideology," a more or less consistent clustering of values and beliefs, but he or she has not objectified it for examination and in a sense is unaware of having it. Differences of outlook with others are experienced as differences in "kind" of person. Authority is located in the incumbents of traditional authority roles (if perceived as personally worthy) or in the consensus of a valued, face-to-face group.
The emergent capacity of this stage is the forming of a personal myth-the myth of one's own becoming in identity and faith, incorporating one's past and anticipated future in an image of the ultimate environment unified by characteristics of personality.
The dangers or deficiencies in this stage are twofold. The expectations and evaluations of others can be so compellingly internalized (and sacralized) that later autonomy of judgment and action can be jeopardized; or interpersonal betrayals can give rise either to nihilistic despair about a personal principle of ultimate being or to a compensatory intimacy with God unrelated to mundane relations.
Factors contributing to the breakdown of Stage 3 and to readiness for transition may include: serious clashes or contradictions between valued authority sources; marked changes, by officially sanctioned leaders, or policies or practices previously deemed sacred and unbreachable (for example, in the Catholic church changing the mass from Latin to the vernacular, or no longer requiring abstinence from meat on Friday); the encounter with experiences or perspectives that lead to critical reflection on how one's beliefs and values have formed and changed, and on how "relative" they are to one's particular group or background. Frequently the experience of "leaving home"--emotionally or physically, or both--precipitates the kind of examination of self, background, and lifeguiding values that gives rise to stage transition at this point.

The movement from Stage 3 to Stage 4 Individuative-Reflective faith is particularly critical for it is in this transition that the late adolescent or adult must begin to take seriously the burden of responsibility for his or her own commitments, lifestyle, beliefs and attitudes. Where genuine movement toward stage 4 is underway the person must face certain unavoidable tensions: individuality versus being defined by a group or group membership; subjectivity and the power of one's strongly felt but unexamined feelings versus objectivity and the requirement of critical reflection; self-fulfillment or self-actualization as a primary concern versus service to and being for others; the question of being committed to the relative versus struggle with the possibility of an absolute.

Stage 4 most appropriately takes form in young adulthood (but let us remember that many adults do not construct it and that for a significant group it emerges only in the mid-thirties or forties). This stage is marked by a double development. The self, previously sustained in its identity and faith compositions by an interpersonal circle of significant others, now claims an identity no longer defined by the composite of one's roles or meanings to others. To sustain that new identity it composes a meaning frame conscious of its own boundaries and inner connections and aware of itself as a "world view." Self (identity) and outlook (world view) are differentiated from those of others and become acknowledged factors in the reactions, interpretations and judgments one makes on the actions of the self and others. It expresses its intuitions of coherence in an ultimate environment in terms of an explicit system of meanings. Stage 4 typically translates symbols into conceptual meanings. This is a "demythologizing" stage. It is likely to attend minimally to unconscious factors influencing its judgments and behavior.
Stage 4's ascendant strength has to do with its capacity for critical reflection on identity (self) and outlook (ideology). Its dangers inhere in its strengths: an excessive confidence in the conscious mind and in critical thought and a kind of second narcissism in which the now clearly bounded, reflective self overassimilates "reality" and the perspectives of others into its own world view.
Restless with the self-images and outlook maintained by Stage 4, the person ready for transition finds him- or herself attending to what may feel like anarchic and disturbing inner voices. Elements from a childish past, images and energies from a deeper self, a gnawing sense of the sterility and flatness of the meanings one serves any or all of these may signal readiness for something new. Stories, symbols, myths and paradoxes from one's own or other traditions may insist on breaking in upon the neatness of the previous faith. Disillusionment with one's compromises and recognition that life is more complex than Stage 4's logic of clear distinctions and abstract concepts can comprehend, press one toward a more dialectical and multileveled approach to life truth.

Stage 5 Conjunctive faith involves the integration into self and outlook of much that was suppressed or unrecognized in the interest of Stage 4's self-certainty and conscious cognitive and affective adaptation to reality. This stage develops a "second naivete'' (Ricoeur) in which symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings. Here there must also be a new reclaiming and reworking of one's past. There must be an opening to the voices of one's "deeper self." Importantly, this involves a critical recognition of one's social unconscious-the myths, ideal images and prejudices built deeply into the self-system by virtue of one's nurture within a particular social class, religious tradition, ethnic group or the like.
Unusual before mid-life, Stage 5 knows the sacrament of defeat and the reality of irrevocable commitments and acts. What the previous stage struggled to clarify, in terms of the boundaries of self and outlook, this stage now makes porous and permeable. Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage strives to unify opposites in mind and experience. It generates and maintains vulnerability to the strange truths of those who are "other." Ready for closeness to that which is different and threatening to self and outlook (including new depths of experience in spirituality and religious revelation), this stage's commitment to justice is freed from the confines of tribe, class, religious community or nation. And with the seriousness that can arise when life is more than half over, this stage is ready to spend and be spent for the cause of conserving and cultivating the possibility of others' generating identity and meaning.
The new strength of this stage comes in the rise of the ironic imagination-a capacity to see and be in one's or one's group's most powerful meanings, while simultaneously recognizing that they are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality. Its danger lies in the direction of a paralyzing passivity or inaction, giving rise to complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth.
Stage 5 can appreciate symbols, myths and rituals (its own and others') because it has been grasped, in some measure, by the depth of reality to which they refer. It also sees the divisions of the human family vividly because it has been apprehended by the possibility (and imperative) of an inclusive community of being. But this stage remains divided. It lives and acts between an untransformed world and a transforming vision and loyalties. In some few cases this division yields to the call of the radical actualization that we call Stage 6.

Niemoeller's Lament is Our Warning

2005-12-27T22:15:00.000-05:00

Ed Bacon, Rector of All Saints from his sermon of November 13, 2005, titled "The IRS goes to Church."

We are all remembering those dark days in history when religious people thought it was not spiritual to get involved in social action and politics and so remained quiet. A Christian Pastor, Martin Niemoeller, after he was released from Dachau, ended all of his sermons the following way, “First they came for the communists and I was not a communist and I didn’t speak up, then they came for the labor organizers and I was not a labor organizer and I didn’t speak up, and then they came for the Jews and I was not a Jew so I didn’t speak up, and then they came for me but there was no one left to speak up.”

John Dear of CommonDreams.org

2005-12-26T22:13:00.000-05:00

Published on Saturday, December 24, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

“Peace on Earth” Means “No More War”

by John Dear

". . . Like Herod, Pilate and their soldiers, we have rejected the angels’ call for “peace on earth.” When Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their warmaking supporters celebrate Christmas, they mock Christ and his steadfast nonviolence, and carry on the massacre of the innocents. . . ."

Go to original

Patriotboy Cartoons!

2005-12-25T22:10:00.001-05:00

thanks, Patriotboy http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/

L'etat, c'est moi.

2005-12-24T21:44:00.001-05:00

"L'état, c'est moi." I am the State:" Louis XIV (1638-1715).

Bush being Bush, he would probably say: "Me, I'm the law, that's me, the law is me!"

Who Will Hold the President Accountable?

2005-12-22T21:41:00.000-05:00

This is the text of a letter I sent to my Senator, Saxby Chambliss. Mr. Chambliss likes to tell Episcopalians that his mom has been faithful to the Altar Guild of St. Margaret's Moultrie. She is currently listed as manager of the Clergy Retreat Cottage owned by the Diocese of Georgia in Saluda, NC.

Senator Chambliss:

I write to apologize for what I'm now calling "Part 1" of my letter to you concerning our president's in/ability to protect the Constitution and the people of this country at the same time. I am trying to understand how confusing it must be for the Chief Executive, what with all these threats that he knows about now that there are no more errors in intelligence. At least no more like the ones which mislead us into removing Saddam and destroying the Iragi infrastructure. But since he knows enough to decide without FISA oversight which international phone calls -- it is just phone calls? -- to detect (not monitor) then I have to give him the benefit of the doubt which you seem to extend to the same bureaus which gave us faulty intelligence in the first place.

In your letter to your collegues naming your concerns for the results of the conference on reauthorization of the Patriot Act you say "I am also disappointed that certain of my colleagues have seen fit to oppose the conference report over a single issue -- the appropriate standard of judicial review of the National Security Letters non-disclosure provisions. These opponents would ask courts to assess potential damage to national security rather than the officials in our government in the intelligence and diplomatic community who are the only ones capable of making such determinations based on all available intelligence and investigative information."

I guess if I had actually read your letter to your collegues, especially the last sentence of the portion I've just quoted, before I wrote Part 1 of this letter then I wouldn't have made the mistake of assuming that you and I mean the same thing when we say "checks and balances" or even "branches of government."

So I am sorry for assuming that you would be the member of the Senate majority in position and of sufficient courage to hold the President accountable when he authorizes the NSA to "detect, not monitor" the international phone calls -- again, just phone calls, right? -- of persons who as far as we know are U.S. citizens.

Finally, and so that I never again ask you to do something untoward a member of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, could you tell me now just who are the "officials . . . capable of making such determinations" on holding the president accountable to whom I should be writing with my concerns and questions?

Praying for Peace on Earth,

respectfully,

Daniel Brown

Chaplain

Episcopal Center @ UGA

Home for the Holidays

2005-02-21T12:00:00.000-05:00

It's been a little weird to be home for Christmas break. I'm still not used to having this much time off this time of year. For the previous ten years of my ordained life it was the very engaging and --ask my wife -- consuming rituals of Advent and Christmas. There was always some extra liturgical/spiritual schedule that owned at least one week night in the walk-up from Thanksgiving. There were always the meetings to tweek this year's Christmas eve mass-production. Until my arrival at the Episcopal Center I was always at a parish that held no less than three Christmas eve services. in one case, FOUR held at 4pm, 7pm, 9pm, and 11pm, with a choir party thrown in there somewhere.