I heard that

This member of the Oklahoma State Legislature thought that only 50 people heard her speak… This is what “They say” when “they” think “we’re” not listening:

Gays are infiltrating city councils!… They are winning elections. They are worst than terrorists!

I’m torn… It’s believable - having heard such speeches in the past. But it would have helped if the Victory Fund had said her name instead of “this member of the legislature…”

I want to blog it, but without names or dates “we” don’t even if this person is still in office. (This sounds like one of the loonies that got elected in the “Contract With America” election in 1994.)

In the same way that the speaker was citing baseless facts in order to stir up support from her constituency, the Victory Fund is, by not using her name, dates or pictures, using the same tactic.

Left and Right mirror each other. It’s scary.

Update: the Victory Fund does have reasons why. Not good. But reasons.

Numbers Mount Up

The big information tonight from South Carolina was that Obama won the younger voters by such a huge majority as to cause someone on CNN to note a Generational Divide in the Democratic party. I take this to be quite hopeful, futurewise, at least.

Screwy cites a whole bunch more on the hope-for-the-future side.

Hope for the future

Jewcy’s Marty Beckerman blogs on a pew study that Generation Y is more liberal than any other age group — including Gen X when they were our age.

Granted, to judge by his ouvre, Beckerman is a wee bit conflicted on the meaning of this…

But I think it’s a good thing.

Classist Editors

While it’s certainly true I’m no great fan of Pastor Huckabee, the NY Times‘ Tim Egan reports that, seemingly, “real” Republicans don’t like him either.

And then he draws in every stereotype, every annoying, tedious, coastal bigoted image of the rest of us (here in the flyover areas) available. The entire article is a frontal assault on the vast majority of Americans - not because they are Christian or Conservative, but because they eats, sleep, work, shop, play and live differently than the editors of the NY Times. It’s the same crap that my friends in SF say about Asheville. It’s the same crap the blue voters in Asheville utter about the red voters in Buncombe county.

Class war is forbidden in the Republican playbook. But Huckabee, despite an inept last week of campaigning, has forced the Republican party to face the Wal-Mart shoppers that they have long taken advantage of. He’s here. He’s Gomer. And he’s not going away.

The Times takes Huckabee and rubs him in the face of the Republican Party. These are the people whose votes you wanted, so here they are. Guess who’s coming to dinner!

[Republicans honchos] were appalled at the recent YouTube debate because it looked like a parody of one faction of their party - complete with Bible-waving wackos, trigger-happy gun nuts and Confederate-flag enthusiasts.

The Media is manufacturing Pastor Mike’s “populism”, doing such things as the Times is doing here. By casting aspersions on everyone who is not a Manhattanite in mind and soul, the Times and the other media are helping to create Huckabee as the Mass Market Messiah. They are doing far better in their attacks than he, himself, could do from his campaign office. I’m quite certain that a Gay Sometimes-Wannabe-Jew wouldn’t do well in the type of America that the I-♥-Huckabees want to inflict on the rest of us. But I sure as hell don’t want to be part of the Bigoted World of the NY Times. “Republicans in the three-home set should relax. Huckabee may occasionally lack class, but he’s no class warrior.”

It’s the “lack class” line that annoys me. What that means is that he may not be “one of us proper Republicans” but he also not “one of us properly cultured, NYC types” either.

I may have to vote for Huckabee just in the hopes that he pisses off the NY Times even more. The only thing that needs “culture” is yoghurt. We’ll get a coon pie recipe on the pages of the Arts and Leisure Section yet.

Huckabee Homiletic Coverup?

Want to hear some sermons preached by the Rev Presidential Wannabe? Tough. Huckabee Ain’t Gonna Let His Light Shine

When Mother Jones contacted the Huckabee campaign and asked if it would help make his previous sermons available, the campaign replied in a one-sentence email that it had received multiple requests for such material and was “not able to accommodate” them.

And all his previous churches say “oops we lost ‘em”.

*sigh*.

I know what those sermons contain. I’ve heard those sermons most of my life. There isn’t a scandal if you mean surprises. He ain’t said nothing you don’t expect him to say. If you want him on record, just ask him questions. You don’t need to dig in his past! Trust me, he doesn’t like Catholics or gays or abortion or women clergy, he probably has said a couple of things about Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians. I doubt not that at his first church he probably said something about divorce. Once. And got taken to task by the board of deacons. Back in the day he probably preached a good one against Rock Music and another one against drugs. He may have preached against dancing.

Just ask, ok? Don’t make a big deal about it.

Personally, I think if you ask enough questions about his religion, he’ll go the way of Romney.

And yes, given Republican Politics since Ronald Reagan, I think it’s quite OK to ask a Republican about his personal religious positions. After this current election cycle, I may feel that way about Democrats as well.

Factual Errors

I’m not sure what more enjoyable: reading the right wing writings on Pullman’s The Golden Compass or reading the Left-wing writings about the right wing writings about Pullman’s The Golden Compass.

Over at Episcopal Cafe, the Lead’s Andrew Gerns follows the right-wing by implying that Pullman’s trilogy isn’t very popular… (why would anyone make a movie from an unpopular book?) I’ve heard that 5,000,000 copies have sold in the US. Don’t know. But that’s not too unpopular in my book.

But then he says the Catholic League is organising a boycott…

*sigh*

This is a factual error (and the second time this week the Lead has made the same error). Newsweek is already reporting the boycott and, predictably, press releases have gone out.

But there is nothing about it on the League’s website, however.

The left seems to want the right to be evil and make a boycott. I mean the right is EVIL, right? They just have to boycott! But the right has not yet obliged. Mores the pity. I think the best thing for the movie would be a boycott. But the left is so certain the right is evil that the left has created a rightwing boycott whole cloth. (Not to say the right isn’t complaining - they are.)

I also wonder if anyone commenting has actually read the book. I think the right has started to complain - and the left is replying to the right. But it seems no one has read the book.

First off: the book is “alternative history” like the sort of fiction that answers the question, “What if the South had won the war?”

It’s also steampunk - armoured bears, elaborate oil lamps, dirigibles delivering the mail. Think Jules Verne and you’ll be on the right track. I love that the London Underground is called the “Chthonic Railroad”.

The first major alternative I’ve noticed in reading is that the Protestants won the Reformation. John Calvin was elected Pope. The entirety of the Catholic Church was dismantled. “The Church” that the book is always talking about seems Protestant through and through. As is only logical, of course: Pullman was at Oxford, the Church that Pullman would complain about would be Anglican and Protestant.

Actually, the MOST enjoyable thing to read… is Pullman’s tale.

Top ten most viewed pages

Boing Boing starts a post with some interesting stats: Top ten most viewed pages on Wikipedia and Conservapedia:

But it seems the stats are screwed by click-bots. Ok. I can handle that.

But the comments section turns into a mini-fight between Conservapedia and RationalWiki.

Very fun.

Fred Phelps to Pay Millions to Offended Family

Danger, Will Robinson!

Despite what some might expect, I’m neither pleased nor amused in the least that Fred “God-Hates-Fags” Phelps has been fined for demonstrating at the funeral of a US soldier killed in Iraq.

$11,000,000

Look, the man is obnoxious. But for years (decades?) he’s been shouting his hate-filled rhetoric at gays and lesbians and no one has said a thing. In NYC the Roman Catholics and the Hassidim even joined in the party.

But now he yells at a dead soldier and gets fined $11,000,000?

There are two issues here - freedom of speech and freedom of religion. There’s also the parallel issue of who else will such a fine stop? War protesters? Religious people who calmly and quietly object to the war? Religious people who calmly and quietly object to things they call “moral issues”?

The Federal Gov’t has used our most obnoxious brothers and sisters to get at the rest of us. And every one of us should be worried.

Fear or What?

The Guardian reports that Google Earth is being used by al-Aqsa to target Israel:

Members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah political party, say they use the popular internet mapping tool to help determine their targets for rocket strikes.

“We obtain the details from Google Earth and check them against our maps of the city centre and sensitive areas,” Khaled Jaabari, the group’s commander in Gaza who is known as Abu Walid, told the Guardian.

Now, pro-fear, pro-Israel stuff is not normally what I expect from a “centre-left” publication. So when I read news I don’t expect, I tend to believe it more.

But point of fact, Google Earth doesn’t have very clear images of Jerusalem. Neither does Google Maps. Of course both are useless for current, “live” targets. Might just as well use a road map - or other any other online aerial photographs. But this would certainly sell papers.

So is this news? Or fear?

Bush the universalist

Over at GetReligion Mollie well points out a bias in the secular media’s reporting on The Lame Dubya. When he sounds like part of the religious right he is reported as such. But when he sounds like a religious modernist (”we all worship the same God and get to heaven by different ways”) the media pays almost no attention.

Mollie rightly wonders what it might be so.

I have a sneaking suspicion it’s because of politics: religion, qua religion, does not enter into American Politics. No one cares what defines “The Real ____ Religion”. Religion is the strawman in most political debates.

I was taught in Orthodoxy not to judge (as much as I fail in that, forgive me) and this loops out to an odd conundrum: if I see someone I “know” to be a sinner taking communion, I’m to not-judge them and assume the priest knows what he’s doing. Their salvation is between them and God (again, I fail at this often). But among the Orthodox - and even in these blog pages - you can find us judging Orthodox politicians for what we assume are non-Orthodox actions in the political sphere. Yet we know those politicians to be in fully communion with the Orthodox through the chalice at their local parish and we know we’re supposed to not-judge them.

But the *political* act becomes a way to ignore the *religious* one. I don’t think you’d see an Orthodox Bishop making the sort of pronouncements about Orthodox politicians that Archsbishop Burke has made about Rudy Guiliani - whom I assume he’s never met. If a given Orthodox Politician receives communion in his own diocese from his own priest… that’s good enough for everyone except for certain rumblings in Orthoblogoslavia.

The same seems to be *more* true among those who describe themselves as secular. It becomes possible to create straw men of every religion. I - the Reporter or Journalist - need know nothing about the reality or lack of your faith. I simply need to appeal to a stereotype and how you do or do not measure up (depending on my angle).

Until recently conservative Christians were desperate to assume Dubya as one of their own and they ignored Bush’s more non-conservative religious pronouncements. The media - likewise wanting to assume Dubya as one of the religious right - did the same thing. Now the Religious Right is trying to distance itself from Dubya in a lot of ways (I think, mostly to prepare for the Presidential cycle as they seek a candidate). But for the media, Bush must fit into a certain mould - no more or less now than two election cycles ago.