The Healthcare Debate

I know a couple of people that are in medical crisis right now as we speak that don't have coverage. Guess who's paying for it at absorbent rates... US. They get care alright, but, its given grudgingly and minimally and at often sub standards- but still very expensive rates are charged-  and its paid for by our taxes and in higher insurance premiums. As I understand it, the way to go is a single payer system. That did come up, but was also shot down by the (R)'s aka, the "Obama is a Nazi" crowd. Therein lies part of the problem We now have one party that is totally committed and deeply invested in the failure of our President and the failure of healthcare reform because they have broadcasted to everyone that the President is and evil tyrant bent on the destruction of America and all that is holy. You see, they simply can't afford for anything good to happen on his watch now- since they have set it up in such a way that all Obama has to do now to accentuate their desperation and clownishness is NOT be Hitler. Smooth, dang those boys are smooth.

Anyhow, because of this dynamic from the "right", there is almost no bipartisan teamwork, consensus or effort to find a way to alleviate the problems within our healthcare system. You have one side tossing about trying to find something that will simply clear the house whether it is a good, long term solution or not and another side that thinks that even having this conversation is somehow subversive and evil. I am not optimistic about anything good coming out of this mix.

I did some research on the definition of the single payer system as prompted by the article above. It is defined as:

"Single-payer health care: A system of health care characterized by universal and comprehensive coverage. Single-payer health care is similar to the health services provided by Medicare in the US. The government pays for care that is delivered in the private (mostly not-for-profit) sector. Doctors are in private practice and are paid on a fee-for-service basis from government funds. The government does not own or manage their medical practices or hospitals.
Single-payer health care is distinct and different from socialized medicine in which doctors and hospitals work for and draw salaries from the government."

Ok, interesting. It is clearly defined and distinct from socialized or govt. run medicine. So, I played dumb, asking some of my so called conservative colleagues there what single- payer healthcare was all about.
The first thing out of every single one of their mouths was... it's "government run healthcare".

I know it may seem that I am harsh and picking on the talk show and Fox news set- but this is a prime example of why. If a person uses those sources for their sole reservoir of information they will become imbued with a certain false certitude about everything, a Manichean worldview and become essentially locked into a monolithic ignorance or worse- become self defeatingly stupid. Practically every time I have a discussion on any issue with these colleagues the are apt to parrot what they have heard on some talk radio show. You see, I listen to those shows quite a bit myself in an effort to understand all facets of a given question. I recognize when someone is simply parroting ideas they have heard from one of their intellectual surrogates.

One of the most destructive forces that has undue influence on these matters today in our society is what has been described as "The permanent war economy". This is also part of what is called the military industrial complex or defense industry- and what is passing for conservative thought today is eaten up with it. Unfortunately, no one in either of the two major political parties is even talking about any of this. Figures like Ron Paul have made some reference to ideas in this ballpark when they speak of statism and interventionism.
Here are some useful thoughts on the matter found written elsewhere by Chris Hedges:

“In "Pentagon Capitalism" Seymour Mellman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures towards their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule and our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war.
Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $le1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.

Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war-who have corrupted the doctrine of permanent revolution-must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.

Mellman, who coined the term permanent war economy to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current, and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. It comes with guaranteed profits. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.”

Literally three days after the first big bailout package passed- the one that was tried to pass with no oversight at all- the one that happened on Bush's watch about two weeks after Republican  presidential candidate McCain bloviated that the economy was fundamentally sound and that all this talk about economic imbalance was a construct of the "liberal media" to make Bush look bad and scare the people into voting for democrats- another big spending package was passed. It also put out a 7 to 8 hundred billion dollar payoff. What was it for? It was for the sustenance of the 750 plus military bases we have around the world and all the big military projects and defense contracts (by the way, there are 195 countries- so we have over three times more military bases than there are countries which begs the question what on earth are we doing and why???). This package passed the house without any discussion, without any cost- benefit analysis, without any conception of the blowback of all this military only interface we have with much of the world and without hardly any public awareness. It is comical to watch all the so called conservatives rail about out of control government spending and cry about the bailouts and then fall into lockstep whenever anything military is on the table. "You can't cut defense spending", they'll say, "it will eliminate jobs and decrease national security- we have to keep pumping in money or the economy will tank". Its just funny how that concept supposedly works if you are building weapons but not if you are building bridges or infrastructure.
I will go out on a limb and say unless we deal with this "permanent war economy" problem and the attending militaristic mindset, value system and the blowback and socio- economic suffocation under it we ARE doomed as a nation.

I offer this as part of the answer to the question about the fairness of the present healthcare system and the question of whether its our right to have universal healthcare. I am not of the opinion that we are owed anything from the world, so its hard to think in terms of fairness… but, I will say that the way things are make little sense. I am likewise not of the opinion that these matters are questions of rights- but rather of sustainable dynamics within a society. It makes little sense to me to have a society that is consumed by militarism and living in fear of foreign enemies and willing to spend trillions on “national security” to the detriment of many other aspects of the system. It makes no sense to be consumed with fear of other geopolitical systems that are perceived as threats or of terrorist acts and then essentially unconcerned about whether or not our neighbors right here at home are able to protect themselves from health risks or financial ruin in the case of medical crisis. It makes no sense to be willing to invest that much in weaponry for protection from “enemies” but then wax all pious and individualist when it comes to protection from disease or bankruptcy to the machinery of big corporate medicine.... especially when our government spends 29 or greater times more on weapons and "defense" than all of the nations we consider rogue states combined.

Many times I have heard people defending our present medical system by pointing out how the best care is available here and that people come from all over the world to get treatments here. That argument is pretty well moot. Only the most affluent can get here to receive that care and the best care, this care that is allegedly the envy of the world, is simply not available to vast sections of our own population. A recent study shows that people without coverage are twice as likely to die of their complications because there are constantly brushed aside and given the minimum attention required by law. This “best care, treatments and medicine in the world” is then, not part of the equation for people without coverage.

There are more theological and moral implications to these topics that would require much more attention. I have just touched on some of the moral calculus on this, but, there is much more to be said of course. The theological implications are deeper than I care to go on this fine, chilly, football Saturday morning. But, since this dilemma has inspired me to reflect deeper and articulate my thoughts, I will address this more very soon.

Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land

A Challenge for "The Bible Answer Man" on Money, Greed and God

Hank Hanegraaff, the "Bible Answer Man" recently aired an interview of Jay Richards over two days of the B.A.M. radio program, concerning Richards' new book, Money, Greed and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem.  The bumpers for the interview and the trailers for the book made it almost irresistible to listen in on.  The book was purported to "annihilate all the "leftist" and "socialist" myths and propaganda on economics being taught as fact today" and a "must read for Americans and Christians seeking the truth in these trying times".

The book was advertised as Part one of the interview is here. Part two is found here.

**I found the program not to live up to the billing, to simply do a cursory gloss over the "myths" it was supposedly destroying and leave many unanswered questions.  I think its worth mentioning here that I am not a leftist, liberal or socialist. The only labels I will wear are Christian, human, American, Cherokee and Oklahoman. I will not participate in the false dichotomy and endless contention of "conservative" vs. "liberal' or "capitalist" vs. "socialist" debate as it is customarily formulated.  I will not allow someone else to signify me as any of those other things simply because I am questioning the veracity of the thesis on capitalism as put forth by Richards and Hanegraaff in this radio program and in the book.

I too am a fan of the “Bible Answer Man”. I have four of his books and listen to his radio program most days. I was also listening on the two days that he ran the two programs about the "Christian Merits" of capitalism. It is very seldom that I question or challenge the positions that the “Bible Answer Man” takes. I did have a few issues with this topic as it was spelled out by Mr. Hanegraaff and Mr. Richards. I was looking for a blog or a forum by CRI or either one of these gentlemen to address some of the questions I was left with and found practically nothing so I decided to throw the discussion out onto the internet via my own blog.

To be fair I have not read the book yet. Some of what I am wanting to address may be in the book. However, based upon the way this material was presented in the radio program I would not likely spend my money on the book. The book was advertised as one that “annihilates the liberal myths on economics often taught as facts”. Now, I would say that to annihilate a position and expose it as myth it would take more than just a cursory gloss over of that position being annihilated and slapping the label “liberal” on it and calling it done. To me at least, and I suspect to other critical thinkers it would take a line item review of the “mythical economic theories taught as fact” and then a thorough and comprehensive rebuttal to those. Granted, the radio show was a limited time format, but I still think they could have taken on those “liberal” positions much better, especially if they are being portrayed as merely “myth” and “propaganda”. Instead what we had was a couple of hours of full on praise of capitalism and cheerleading of capitalist assertions on economics and opinions. Richards said in the program that “liberal” and “socialist” types always have the “best rhetoric”, but based on this program alone and the way these topics were handled one could conclude that the “capitalists” have a very good propaganda model working as well. Then if you factor in the patriotic and religious overtones and jingoistic cant of the corporate, advertising dollars driven media, I think I would really have to question and/or challenge the idea that the “leftists” have the best rhetoric.

I will not go into a treatise on the media or a history lesson on the wars and bloodshed propagated by the capitalist urge and the “great commission” to spread the gospel of capitalism and “make the world safe for democracy” in places like East Timor, the Philippines, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and so on and so on. But I will simply point out that Hanegraaff and Richards and those like them generally prefer to either downplay or flat out ignore these sorts of things while they are praising capitalism and/or dismissing those “silly liberal” myths. Granted, they do like to list the litany of crimes against humanity by people like Hitler and Stalin. But there seems to be a void where qualifications about capitalism concerning things like the conquest of North America, the theft of land and the holocaust of American Indians ought to be. For instance, when discussing the need to quell the resistance of “American Indians” so as to obtain the goal of “civilizing” them and assimilating them into the framework of the republic, general William T. Sherman put forth an idea that speaks volumes about the worldly culture of capitalist ideals. He said that the “Indians”, “know no greed, and, until they understand greed, they will never understand the private ownership of property.” This demonstrates, not only the superficial understanding of other cultures that we often see from the captains of capitalism, but also that the capitalist system is propagated and motivated in large part by the institutionalized, individualized greed. American Indian and Christian, theologian George E. Tinker spells out quite a case on this in his books “Spirit and Resistance” and “Missionary Conquest”.
Another point I would like to make is on how Richards and Hanegraaff spoke about how capitalism “creates” wealth, progress and prosperity. First, this depends upon how one defines wealth, progress and prosperity. Since these men are professing Christians some qualifications on these terms ought to be easy to come up with. That seemed to be missing in any kind of comprehensive, spiritual treatment in the program and review of the book.
Also, I would challenge the very pretense that capitalism truly “creates” anything. It sometimes seems like these avowed capitalists think that all the resources and raw materials that are harvested and/or consumed to make the products that fuel the capitalist engine simply appear from nowhere. It seems that they think that the earth is an inexhaustible resource, a bottomless garbage can and that the forces, human costs, blowback and turbulence created by mass consumption and material greed are minimal, easily controlled and easily rationalized since they create jobs and medical and military advances. Again, a redefinition of progress and prosperity seems to be needed here. About as far as they, or many other capitalist apologists go on this is the platitude about how God has created the Earth to be used and consumed by men. I will resist the urge to go into a much more comprehensive treatment the theological incompleteness of this sort of rationalization for the moment.
I would however like to challenge the idea that one can have a “Christian capitalism”. I will allow that you can have a Christian values driven person or people operating within the framework of capitalism (or other economic systems like socialism for that matter). But, the idea that you can have a “Christian capitalism”, a Christian nation or a Christian business is about as valid as the idea that you can have a Christian machine or a Christian milkshake. It just doesn’t work that way. Such ideas simply do not take into ful account the fatally flawed, fallen nature of mankind and are oddly as Utopian as anything I have ever heard coming from the “left”. It is allowed that humans can be the representatives of the Kingdom of God while they are in the world. But, do not forget, if one is going to use the Bible to prop up the cause of capitalism or any other ism that Jesus said that his Kingdom is not of this world. We are also told not to love the world or anything in it in the scriptures. I do have a qualified understanding of what that really means- but, I am wondering if they have not realized what this fully means themselves. Richards did go into a bit about the “Secret” of capitalism and a treatment on the “rule of law” on this point. But, again it did not take into account practically any of the questions I am raising here. In fact his points about the “secret” and unleashing of the “creative potential” of humans as reflections of God started to sound like new age humanism. Maybe that is unfair not having read the book. But, as I have stated already, based on what I have heard, I am not planning to spend my money on the book and feed Richards’ capitalist urge.  Maybe I'll find it in the library or someone will send me a copy if they are convinced of it's truth and wish to change my mind.
Lastly, here are the type of concepts that Richards and Hanegraaff really need to address if they are going to presume to annihilate these supposedly leftist myths and economic theories:

Excerpted from: IN THE ABSENCE OF THE SACRED- By Jerry Mander
Source
The following list is an attempt to articulate the obligatory rules by which corporations operate. Some of the rules overlap, but taken together they help reveal why corporations behave as they do and how they have come to dominate their environment and the human beings within it.

• The Profit Imperative: Profit is the ultimate measure of all corporate decisions. It takes precedence over community well-being, worker health, public health, peace, environmental preservation or national security. Corporations will even find ways to trade with national "enemies"—Libya, Iran, the former Soviet Union, Cuba—when public policy abhors it. The profit imperative and the growth imperative are the most fundamental corporate drives; together they represent the corporation's instinct to "live."
  
• The Growth Imperative: Corporations live or die by whether they can sustain growth. On this depends relationships to investors, to the stock market, to banks and to public perception. The growth imperative also fuels the corporate desire to find and develop scarce resources in obscure parts of the world.
  This effect is now clearly visible, as the world's few remaining pristine places are sacrificed to corporate production. The peoples who inhabit these resource-rich regions are similarly pressured to give up their traditional ways and climb on the wheel of production-consumption. Corporate planners consciously attempt to bring "less developed societies into the modem world" to create infrastructures for development, as well as new workers and new consumers. Corporations claim that they do this for altruistic reasons to raise the living standard—but corporations have no altruism.
  Theoretically, privately held corporations—those owned by individuals or families—do not have the imperative to expand. In practice, however, their behavior is the same. Such privately held giants as Bechtel Corporation have shown no propensity to moderate growth.
  
• Competition and Aggression: Corporations place every person in management in fierce competition with each other. Anyone interested in a corporate career must hone his or her ability to seize the moment. This applies to gaining an edge over another company or over a colleague within the company. As an employee, you are expected to be part of the "team," but you also must be ready to climb over your own colleagues.
  Corporate ideology holds that competition improves worker incentive and corporate performances and therefore benefits society. Our society has accepted this premise utterly. Unfortunately, however, it also surfaces in personal relationships. Living by standards of competition and aggression on the job, human beings have few avenues to express softer, more personal feelings. (In politics, non-aggressive behavior is interpreted as weakness.)
  
• Amorality: Not being human, corporations do not have morals or altruistic goals. So decisions that maybe antithetical to community goals or environmental health are made without misgivings. In fact, corporate executives praise "non-emotionality" as a basis for "objective" decision-making.
  Corporations, however, seek to hide their amorality and attempt to act as if they were altruistic. Lately, there has been a concerted effort by American industry to appear concerned with environmental cleanup, community arts or drug programs. Corporate efforts that seem altruistic are really Public relations ploys or directly self-serving projects.
  There has recently been a spurt of corporate advertising about how corporations work to clean the environment. A company that installs offshore oil rigs will run ads about how fish are thriving under the rigs. Logging companies known for their clearcutting practices will run millions of dollars' worth of ads about their "tree farms."
  It is a fair rule of thumb that corporations tend to advertise the very qualities they do not have in order to allay negative public perceptions. When corporations say "we care," it is almost always in response to the widespread perception that they do not have feelings or morals.
  If the benefits do not accrue, the altruistic pose is dropped. When Exxon realized that its cleanup of Alaskan shores was not easing the public rage about the oil spill, it simply dropped all pretense of altruism and ceased working.
  
• Hierarchy: Corporate laws require that corporations be structured into classes of superiors and subordinated within a centralized pyramidal structure: chairman, directors, chief executive officer, vice presidents, division managers and so on. The efficiency of this hierarchical form (which also characterizes the military, the government and most institutions in our society) is rarely questioned.
  The effect on society from adopting the hierarchical form is to make it seem natural that we have all been placed within a national pecking order. Some jobs are better than others, some lifestyles are better than others, some neighborhoods, some races, some kinds of knowledge. Men over women. Westerners over non-Westerners. Humans over nature.
  That effective, non-hierarchical modes of organization exist on the planet, and have been successful for millennia, is barely known by most Americans.
  
• Quantification, Linearity, Segmentation: Corporations require that subjective information be translated into objective form, i.e. numbers. The subjective or spiritual aspects of forests, for example, cannot be translated, and so do not enter corporate equations. Forests are evaluated only as "board feet."
  When corporations are asked to clean up their smokestack emissions, they lobby to relax the new standards in order to contain costs. The result is that a predictable number of people are expected to become sick and die.
  The operative corporate standard is not "as safe as humanly possible," but rather, "as safe as possible commensurate with maintaining acceptable profit."
  
• Dehumanization: In the great majority of corporations, employees are viewed as ciphers, as non-managerial cogs in the wheel, replaceable by others or by machines.
  As for management employees, not subject to quite the same indignities, they nonetheless must practice a style of decision making that "does not let feelings get in the way." This applies as much to firing employees as it does to dealing with the consequences of corporate behavior in the environment or the community.
  
• Exploitation: All corporate profit is obtained by a simple formula: Profit equals the difference between the amount paid to an employee and the economic value of the employee's output, and/or the difference between the amount paid for raw materials used in production (including costs of processing), and the ultimate sales price of processed raw materials. Karl Marx was right: a worker is not compensated for full value of his or her labor—neither is the raw material supplier. The owners of capital skim off part of the value as profit. Profit is based on underpayment.
  Capitalists argue that this is a fair deal, since both workers and the people who mine or farm the resources (usually in Third World environments) get paid. But this arrangement is inherently imbalanced. The owner of the capital—the corporation or the bank always obtains additional benefit. While the worker makes a wage, the owner of capital gets the benefit of the worker's labor, plus the surplus profit the worker produces, which is then reinvested to produce yet more surplus.
  
• Ephemerality: Corporations exist beyond time and space: they are legal creations that only exist on paper. They do not die a natural death; they outlive their own creators. They have no commitment to locale, employees or neighbors. Having no morality, no commitment to place and no physical nature (a factory, while being a physical entity, is not the corporation). A corporation can relocate all of its operations at the first sign of inconvenience—demanding employees, high taxes and restrictive environmental laws. The traditional ideal of community engagement is antithetical to corporation behavior.
  
• Opposition to Nature: Though individuals who work for corporations may personally love nature, corporations themselves, and corporate societies, are intrinsically committed to intervening in, altering and transforming nature. For corporations engaged in commodity manufacturing, profit comes from transmogrifying raw materials into saleable forms. Metals from the ground are converted into cars.
  Trees are converted into boards, houses, furniture and paper products. Oil is converted into energy. In all such energy, a piece of nature is taken from where it belongs and processed into a new form. All manufacturing depends upon intervention and reorganization of nature. After natural resources are used up in one part of the globe, the corporation moves on to another part.
  This transformation of nature occurs in all societies where manufacturing takes place. But in capitalist, corporate societies, the process is accelerated because capitalist societies and corporations must grow by extracting resources from nature and reprocessing them at an ever-quickening pace. Meanwhile, the consumption end of the cycle is also accelerated by corporations that have an interest in convincing people that commodities bring material satisfaction. Inner satisfaction, self-sufficiency, contentment in nature or a lack of a desire to acquire wealth are subversive to corporate goals.
  Banks finance the conversion of nature insurance companies help reduce the financial risks involved. On a finite planet, the process cannot continue indefinitely.
  
• Homogenization: American rhetoric claims that commodity society delivers greater choice and diversity than other societies. "Choice" in this context means product choice in the marketplace: many brands to choose from and diverse features on otherwise identical products. Actually, corporations have a stake in all of us living our lives in a similar manner, achieving our pleasures from things that we buy in a world where each family lives isolated in a single family home and has the same machines as every other family on the block. The "singles" phenomenon has proved even more productive than the nuclear family, since each person duplicates the consumption patterns of every other person.
  Lifestyles and economic systems that emphasize sharing commodities and work, that do not encourage commodity accumulation or that celebrate non-material values, are not good for business. People living collectively, sharing such "hard" goods as washing machines, cars and appliances (or worse, getting along without them) are outrageous to corporate commodity society.
  Native societies—which celebrate an utterly non-material relationship to life, the planet and the spirit—are regarded as backward, inferior and unenlightened. We are told that they envy the choices we have. To the degree these societies continue to exist, they represent a threat to the homogenization of worldwide markets and culture. Corporate society works hard to retrain such people in attitudes and values appropriate to corporate goals.
  In undeveloped parts of the world, satellite communication introduces Western television and advertising, while improvements in the technical infrastructure speed up the pace of development. Most of this activity is funded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as agencies such as the US Agency for International Development, the Inter-American Bank and the Asian-American Bank, all of which serve multinational corporate enterprise.
  The ultimate goal of corporate multinationals was expressed in a revealing quote by the president of Nabisco Corporation: "One world of homogeneous consumption. . . [I am] looking forward to the day when Arabs and Americans, Latinos and Scandinavians, will be munching Ritz crackers as enthusiastically as they already drink Coke or brush their teeth with Colgate." Page 31
  

In the book, Trilateralism, editor Holly Sklar wrote: "Corporations not only advertise products, they promote lifestyles rooted in consumption, patterned largely after the United States.... [They] look forward to a post-national age in which [Western] social, economic and political values are transformed into universal values... a world economy in which all national economies beat to the rhythm of transnational corporate capitalism.... The Western way is the good way; national culture is inferior."
Form Is Content Corporations are inherently bold, aggressive and competitive. Though they exist in a society that claims to operate by moral principles, they are structurally amoral. It is inevitable that they will dehumanize people who work for them and the overall society as well. They are disloyal to workers, including their own managers. Corporations can be disloyal to the communities they have been part of for many years. Corporations do not care about nations; they live beyond boundaries. They are intrinsically committed to destroying nature. And they have an inexorable, unabatable, voracious need to grow and to expand. In dominating other cultures, in digging up the Earth, corporations blindly follow the codes that have been built into them as if they were genes.
We must abandon the idea that corporations can reform themselves. To ask corporate executives to behave in a morally defensible manner is absurd. Corporations, and the people within them, are following a system of logic that leads inexorably toward dominant behaviors. To ask corporations to behave otherwise is like asking an army to adopt pacifism.- Jerry Mander

Corporation: n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914.

The New Rulers of the World- John Pilger

Editorial: Unchristian Response from American Christians

Written by Leonard Pitts Jr. Thursday, 07 May 2009 09:19

May 5, 2009 - Between 1933 and 1945, as a series of restrictive laws, brutal pogroms and mass deportations culminated in the slaughter of 6 million Jews, the Christian church, with isolated exceptions, watched in silence. Between 1955 and 1968, as the forces of oppression used terrorist bombings, police violence and kangaroo courts to deny African-Americans their freedom, the Christian church, with isolated exceptions, watched in silence. Beginning in 1980, as a mysterious and deadly new disease called AIDS began to rage through the homosexual community like an unchecked fire, the Christian church, with isolated exceptions, watched in silence. So who can be surprised by the new Pew report? Specifically, it's from the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life, and it surveys Americans' attitudes on the torture of suspected terrorists. Pew found that 49 percent of the nation believes torture is at least sometimes justifiable. Slice that number by religious affiliation, though, and things get interesting. It turns out the religiously unaffiliated are the “least” likely (40 percent) to support torture, but that the more you attend church, the more likely you are to condone it. Among racial/religious groups, white evangelical Protestants were far and away the most likely (62 percent) to support inflicting pain as a tool of interrogation. You'd think people who claim connection to a higher morality would be the ones most likely to take the lonely, principled stand. But you need only look at history to see how seldom that has been the case, how frequently my people -- Christians -- acquiesce to expediency and fail to look beyond the immediate. Never mind that looking beyond the immediate pretty much constitutes a Christian's entire job description. In the Bible it says, “Perfect love casts out fear.” What we see so often in people of faith, though, is an imperfect love that embraces fear, that lets us live contentedly in our moral comfort zones, doing spiritual busywork and clucking pieties, things that let you feel good, but never require you to put anything at risk, take a leap, make that lonely stand. Again, there are exceptions, but they prove the rule, which is that in our smug belief that God is on our side, we often fail to ask if we are on His. So it is often left to a few iconoclasts -- Oskar Schindler, the war profiteer who rescued 1,200 Jews in Poland; James Reeb, the Unitarian Universalist minister murdered for African-American voting rights in Alabama; Princess Diana, the British royal who courted international opprobrium for simply touching a person with AIDS in Britain -- to do the dangerous and moral thing while the great body of Christendom watches in silence. Now there is this debate over the morality of torture in which putative people of faith say they can live with a little blood (someone else's) and a little pain (also someone else's) if it helps maintain the illusion of security (theirs), and never mind such niceties as guilt or innocence. Thus it was left to Jon Stewart, the cheerfully irreligious host of “The Daily Show,” to speak last week of the need to be willingly bound by rules of decency and civilization or else be indistinguishable from the terrorists. “I understand the impulse,” he said. “I wanted them to clone bin Laden so that we could kill one a year at halftime at the Super Bowl. ... I understand bloodlust, I understand revenge; I understand all those feelings. I also understand that this country is better than me.” So there you have it: a statement of principle and higher morality from a late-night comic. That Christians are not lining up to say the same is glaringly ironic in light of what happened to a Middle Eastern man who was arrested by the government, imprisoned and tortured. Eventually he was even executed, though he was innocent of any crime. His name was Jesus. The Salt Lake Tribune

Am I Conservative?

I have not been writing actively since about the time of the U.S. presidential elections. After the last several years of the very heated geopolitical climate, the milieu of the Church and all the passion I had invested in the things I have written about- it was time for a break and a re-alignment of my own spirit. After attending the funeral of my beloved 92 year old Cherokee grandmother and an energizing visit with my aunt and uncle and other relatives- I have decided it is time to wield my voice again- hopefully in a way thast reflects the progression of my spirit as guided by the Holy Spirit. I am hoping to bring out less of me and more of my Master.

Let's start with this. This, from my e-mail archives, was merely an attempt to explain to my friends and family where I was coming from around the time of the elections. I think it is an important point in trying to explain my perspective, which is hopefully representative of God's perspective.

Subject: Am I conservative?
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:18:44 -0500

I received a message earlier that asked a few good questions and raised a few good points. Since I have been torturing you with e-mail rants between another person and I- this may give a "frame of reference" to some things that have been said:

To SS:

Who is Mr. Rowley? (I had an exchange with him that was public and very harsh from his side)

I receive a lot of emails from acquaintances that I've made over the years. 100% of the political related email that I receive is a bunch of right wing spin with one exception. You are the exception. Your emails appear to be left wing spin compared to everything that I receive. I enjoy and value your emails as I do you my friend.

I know that you declare yourself independent as I have seen you state numerous times. Be aware, however, that SOLELY BASED ON YOUR EMAILS I would label you a full blown liberal before considering you to be libertarian as I believe that you would probably prefer. Anyway, it's all perception and opinion that is founded by one's own frame of reference. That's my honest perception be it good, bad, right, or wrong.

I listen to NPR a lot recently because I detest commercials. Yesterday there was a very interesting segment with an author that chronicled the philosphies of the early Quakers. They were very disciplined and were driven to create education institutions for the pure sake of knowledge. It was important to them that there leaders were EXPERTS on the United States constitutions and all concepts and philosophies of it's basis. This was a critical point for their choosing a president considering that person is the foremost defender of the constitution. I have not heard this concept uttered a single time this election. Have any of the candidates achieved a sufficient level of expertise of the United States constitution to be true defenders of it?

Answer from SS:

That is the father of some good friends I made in Dallas. He gets credit for launching my career as an armchair pundit. I was in his back yard by the pool one day in 1998 with Chuck and his sons sharing some cold beverages. One of the sons casually mentioned that I was not going to be supporting then Texas governor George W. Bush for his quest for the office of president. Right then and there without asking a single question of me and without nuance he lit into me with a tirade not unlike the ones he's written this week. I barely got a word in.

Afterwards, I thought to myself, if this mean spirited fellow is a representation of what conservatism has become, then as now counting myself as a conservative at heart, then this whole "conservative" thing is waaaayyyy off the intended track. This inspired me to start writing and as soon as I could I started doing just that and hitting his e-mail box with challenges to his twisted world view. Needless to say it has not played well with him.

I agree that the perceptions of these terms have much to do with contrasts and frames of reference. I am sure I am a flaming liberal up next to Mr. Rowley and most other inobjective, party line toting ideologues. It is a relative term. I can tell you that in Native circles I would be considered very much conservative and traditionalist. I was thinking about this very concept today and came to the conclusion that where the disconnect and misunderstanding lies in this is that I am operating from a spiritual, biblical, Christian conservatism that takes seriously Christ's injunctions against intolerance and the overly militaristic reliance on the myth of redemptive violence and worldly power structures and folks like Mr. Rowley are operating from a very contaminated- by-the- world version of Christianity that for the most part is not authentic spirituality but worldliness and American nationalist, political ideology with a quasi Christian veneer slapped over it.

I may be the only one operating with definitions like this that you know- but I stand on what I say. I have said before that these terms conservative and liberal have lost their meaning and what we actually have here in the US political arena is authoritarian and worldly and more authoritarian and worldly.

Another thing... Mr. Rowley does not really know me because as you can imagine he is nearly impossible to talk to in person and has little more than his own 'frame of reference" and the e-mails to go on concerning what I think.

Lastly, not that I am a constitutional expert, no, none of these candidates both know and honor what the constitution actually says- which I can plainly see even with my own limited knowledge of the document.

Thanks for the good word.

Now, this is a comment I got back from an old Bible teacher of mine that I first met during my stay in Waco, TX. on the subject of my claims of conservatism in the above message:

Interesting.

I tell people I’m a conservative, and that those who try to pass themselves off as “conservatives” these days are really liberals. I can demonstrate this philosophically. In short, the “liberal” position in the Enlightenment (out of which our nation sprang, NB), was “anti-conservative.” The “Conservative” position were those who believed in conserving tradition (in this case the Christian tradition) because of its inherent value (longer explanation belongs here). The Enlightenment philosophers rejected this conservatism because they came to believe that one both could and should “think for oneself.” That is liberalism. Your friend is a liberal.

IN our country, as some contemporary philosophers have pointed out, we are all liberals. To be sure, there are “right leaning” liberals like Bush/Cheney, and left leaning liberals like Clinton/Gore, but we’re all liberals. Period.

Now, if the idea of “thinking for yourself” is nothing but an Enlightenment myth/lie, then all liberalism is based on a false premise (that “thinking for yourself” is indeed possible) and doomed to failure. That is why the Enlightenment died. And good riddance. May true conservatism live on.

If you want to explore this more, see the various works of Alasdair MacIntyre, especially After Virtue. He has some followup books that are also incredibly insightful, but that’s the place to start.

As for me (and probably you), I believe we are attempting to conserve the Christian tradition of social justice that begins in the Law of Moses, continues in the OT Prophets, and is revived by Jesus. Romans 8:18-24 demonstrates that God intends eventually to bring all his creation under his kingdom/rule/reign. What that polity would look like is probably best described by the Sermon on the Mount (i.e., what would it look like if people really lived as if God really is in charge?). To conserve that tradition is indeed true conservatism. It is NOT “thinking for oneself,” and in fact many things in this sermon don’t make sense on a purely rational basis, but ONLY make sense if one really calls Jesus “Lord” and believes he is king and is in charge and cares about his subjects and his creation. Only on that basis can one have the courage to love one’s enemies and be cheated out of what he/she has lent to someone, etc.

Stanley Hauerwas is another author to whom I’m greatly indebted. And one of his mentors was John Howard Yoder, a NT scholar.

So, call your friend a stinking commie liberal. J With Christian love, of course.

The War on Voting

Using the Department of Justice, friendly governors, and its usual propaganda outlets, the GOP has propagated the myth of voter fraud to purge the rolls of non-Republicans.

One week before the close of voter registration in Kentucky last fall, in an election that culminated with the victory of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Steve Beshear, Johanna Sharrard, a fresh-faced 26-year-old national organizer for the low-income advocacy group ACORN, gathered her canvassers in a run-down Louisville office and told them some good news: "We got 396 people yesterday -- that's really great!" Then she added what could have seemed a jarringly discordant note: "We know it's getting harder to reach people with the cards in this area. It's really important that you guys are not slipping up and turning to filling out your own applications or other fraudulent activity. Just yesterday we had to let another person go because she did not follow protocols." Sharrard continued sternly, "What's important is that we get 15,000 new voters. We're not out there to get 10,000 new voters and 5,000 false applications." Indeed, the voter registration waged by ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) in Kentucky was also an effort to test the group's new system for rooting out any fraud. The organization is readying itself for the challenges to voter participation that the poor and minorities -- and Democrats -- are sure to face in 2008. Sharrard's cautionary tone was a response to the Republican Party's ongoing nationwide campaign to suppress the low-income minority vote by propagating the myth of voter fraud. Using various tactics -- including media smears, bogus lawsuits, restrictive new voting laws and policies, and flimsy prosecutions -- Republican operatives, election officials, and the GOP-controlled Justice Department have limited voting access and gone after voter-registration groups such as ACORN. Which should come as no surprise: In building support for initiatives raising the minimum wage and kindred ballot measures, ACORN has registered, in partnership with Project Vote, 1.6 million largely Democratic-leaning voters since 2004. All told, non-profit groups registered over three million new voters in 2004, about the same time that Republican and Justice Department efforts to publicize ?voter fraud? and limit voting access became more widespread. And attacking ACORN has been a central element of a systematic GOP disenfranchisement agenda to undermine Democratic prospects before each Election Day. Revelations that U.S. attorneys were fired for their failure to successfully prosecute voter fraud have revealed how fictitious the allegations of widespread fraud actually were -- but the allegations haven't gone away. They live on in all the vote-suppressing laws and regulations that will likely affect this year's election, in GOP rhetoric and, most recently, in the arguments presented by champions of Indiana's restrictive voter-identification law in a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Unfortunately, progressives have tended to pay more attention to Election Day dirty tricks and to electronic voting machines than to a more systemic threat: the Republican campaign to suppress the votes of low-income, young, and minority voters through restrictive legislation and rulings, all based on the mythic specter of voter fraud. Those relatively transient voters, drawn to the polls this year by the Obama and Clinton campaigns, could find themselves thwarted in November and thereafter by the GOP-driven regime of voting restrictions -- particularly if, as many observers believe, the Court upholds Indiana's restrictive law before it adjourns this June. Voter fraud is actually less likely to occur than lightning striking a person, according to data compiled by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. As Lorraine Minnite, a Columbia University professor, observed in the Project Vote report, The Politics of Voter Fraud, "The claim that voter fraud threatens the integrity of American elections is itself a fraud." In October 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft launched an intensive "Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative" that required all U.S. attorney offices to coordinate with local officials in combating voter fraud. Yet even after the Justice Department declared the war against voter fraud a "high priority," only 24 people were convicted of illegal voting in federal elections between 2002 and 2005 -- and nobody was even charged by Justice with impersonating another voter. (The Justice Department declined to answer questions about more recent fraud prosecutions.) And despite the anti-immigrant frenzy fueling photo-ID laws, only 14 noncitizens were convicted of illegally voting in federal elections from 2002 through 2005 -- mostly because of their ignorance of election law. Unfortunately, the public hasn't heard just how nonexistent the voter fraud epidemic actually is. While progressives have successfully challenged some of the most restrictive laws in court, they're still playing catch-up when it comes to combating the glib sound bites of voter-fraud alarmists. Republicans and the Bush Justice Department have cloaked their schemes under such noble-sounding concepts as "ballot integrity." The GOP's vote-suppression playbook features everything from phony lawsuits to questionable investigations to authoritative-seeming reports, all with the aim of promoting restrictive laws. These tactics were first perfected in the hotly contested swing state of Missouri. The roots of John Ashcroft's passion on this issue go back to the chaos of Election Day 2000 in St. Louis, when hundreds, if not thousands, of mostly inner-city voters were turned away from polling places because their names were not on voting rolls. The resulting last-minute court battle kept some polling places open for 45 minutes after their scheduled closing time of 7 P.M. Ashcroft, then the Republican U.S. Senate nominee, lost his race to the dead Democratic governor, Mel Carnahan, whose name stayed on the ballot weeks after he died in a plane crash. At an election-night party, an infuriated Republican Sen. Kit Bond pounded the podium and screamed, "This is an outrage!" -- and subsequently charged that Republican losses were due in part to dogs and dead people voting. As one local government official observed, "In St. Louis, 'dogs and dead people' is code for black people [voting fraudulently]." That election night gave birth to the new right-wing voter-fraud movement, while Missouri became a proving ground for the vote-suppression campaigns that later spread to other key states. Missouri's then-Secretary of State Matt Blunt, now governor, launched a trumped-up investigation that concluded that more than 1,000 fraudulent ballots had been cast in an organized scheme. A Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigation, started before Ashcroft shifted the department's priorities, found no fraudulent ballots, however. Instead, it discovered that the St. Louis election board had improperly purged 50,000 voters from the rolls. Nonetheless, the template for smear campaigns, groundless lawsuits, and politicized prosecutions used across the country had been set in Missouri. Key roles were played by many of the same GOP zealots who later made their mark on the national drive to fight voter fraud, among them St. Louis attorney Thor Hearne, the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign election counsel who later launched the GOP front group, the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). And as early as 2002, the executive director of the Missouri Republican Party pioneered a new dirty trick: publicly "filing" with the Federal Election Commission a 26-page complaint against the state's leading registration group, known as Pro Vote, that charged it with secretly conspiring with Democrats in the Senate race -- but then failing to sign the document so the agency never considered it. The goal of such complaints and allegations was to create a barrage of negative publicity about voter-registration groups and the voter-fraud menace that could pave the way for restrictive laws. In Missouri, the Republicans' cries for a new state photo-ID law began in 2002, before the GOP blitz in most other states. The legislature passed such a bill in early 2006, before it was struck down that September by a Missouri state court as unconstitutional. The GOP in Missouri also turned to prosecutions and lawsuits, most either overblown or groundless. In November 2005, Bradley Schlozman, then the Justice Department's acting civil-rights chief, insisted on filing a lawsuit that accused Missouri's secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, a Democrat, of failing to purge supposedly ineligible voters under federal law. (U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was forced out in March 2006 for having balked at filing the suit.) A federal judge, who found that the Justice Department did not produce any evidence showing fraud justifying the purges, dismissed the lawsuit in April 2007. The department continues to appeal the ruling. The fraud-obsessed Schlozman was then moved into Graves' old post without Senate confirmation, through a loophole in the Patriot Act. In an apparent effort to discredit both Democrats and ACORN, just five days before the tight Senate election in 2006 between incumbent Republican Jim Talent and Democrat Claire McCaskill, Schlozman announced, in violation of the department's own standards, the indictment of four former ACORN workers who had been fired by ACORN for filling out false voter-registration forms. The indictments were part of a broader effort to tilt the campaign against Democrats by bashing ACORN and limiting voter access. St. Louis' Republican election director, Scott Leiendecker, sent out a chilling letter shortly before the election to 5,000 mostly African Americans registered by ACORN, asking them to verify to the election board that they were eligible to vote. Leiendecker backed off after he faced the threat of a voting-rights lawsuit and received a warning letter from Secretary of State Carnahan. *** What began in Missouri soon went nationwide. Starting in 2003, the Justice Department's civil-rights division issued a flurry of advisory letters, rulings, and lawsuits under the guise of fighting fraud that appear designed to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters. Federal and state courts have struck down some of the laws shaped by policies promoted by the Justice Department, such as strict database-matching laws limiting new voters in Washington state and Florida. Even so, Justice Department-backed secretive purging policies have targeted voter-registration applicants and current voters in several key states: In Ohio in 2006, 303,000 voters were purged in three major urban counties, while the Brennan Center reported that Pennsylvania's rigid database rules, later loosened, had excluded up to 30 percent of eligible registrants. Karl Rove aide Tim Griffin played a major role in state GOP voter "caging" operations (that is, challenging the eligibility of registered voters) in such states as Ohio and Florida. These schemes, Project Vote reports, challenged the right of 77,000 mostly minority voters to cast ballots between 2004 and 2006, under the pretext that non-forwardable letters sent by GOP activists to their addresses were returned as undelivered. Thor Hearne's now-vanished ACVR lobbied for strict voter-ID laws in nine states, according to McClatchy and other news organizations. Voter-ID laws in states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Indiana have, for now, been allowed to stand. All these campaigns have created a kind of GOP vote-suppression playbook that aims to limit voting rights in the states and attack registration groups such as ACORN. In most states where ACORN wages ballot-initiative and voter-registration campaigns, Republican lawyers, officials, and some prosecutors routinely file dubious lawsuits and complaints to generate bad press for the voter-registration drives. The lawsuits seldom if ever succeed, but the bad press they engender creates a climate to pass restrictive voting laws. In New Mexico by the summer of 2004, ACORN's effort to register voters in advance of the closely fought presidential election was a stunning success: The organization registered 35,000 voters, mostly in the Albuquerque area. "Republicans were freaking out," recalls John Boyd, an attorney for the state Democratic Party. Republicans accused ACORN of "manufacturing voters," conflating error-plagued cards with fraud while trumpeting one registration card filled out in the name of a 13-year-old boy. The boy's card became the centerpiece of the lawsuit Rep. Joe Thompson, an Albuquerque Republican, filed in August 2004 demanding that the state government require photo ID for voters registered by ACORN and other nonprofits. The lawsuit claimed that the Republican plaintiffs' votes were "diluted" by supposedly false registrations. Their case fell apart in court, and by September, a judge dismissed the lawsuit. But Republicans were not deterred by their loss in civil court and pressed for a criminal investigation, a probe which U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias started on the same day that the court ruled against the GOP. Iglesias was a true believer in the menace of voter fraud. As one of just two U.S. attorneys in the nation to form such task forces, he was invited to lecture other U.S. attorneys in 2005 as part of the annual Justice Department ballot-integrity conference. Iglesias' efforts weren't enough for Patrick Rogers, the Republican National Lawyers Association point person in the state, who mounted a campaign to pressure Iglesias to bring criminal charges before the election, rather than form a task force. Indeed, even before Iglesias concluded in 2006 that there wasn't enough evidence to indict on voter fraud, major Republicans in the state had started asking the Bush administration for his removal. In early December 2006, Iglesias was one of seven U.S. attorneys whom the Justice Department fired. Today, Iglesias says of voter fraud: "It's like the boogeymen parents use to scare their children. It's very frightening, and it doesn't exist. U.S. attorneys have better things to do with their time than chasing voter-fraud phantoms." But the damage of chasing phantoms proved more substantial. In 2005, the state legislature, with the blessing of its Democratic governor, Bill Richardson, passed legislation that essentially crippled the ability of groups like ACORN to do mass voter registration. In 2006, ACORN had only 10 certified canvassers in the whole state, and registration plunged to 2,000 new applicants from 35,000 two years before, according to ACORN's top New Mexico organizer, Matt Henderson. In Florida in 2004, ACORN's initiative to raise the state's minimum wage looked to be cruising to victory (it won with 71 percent of the vote), and brought in over 200,000 newly registered voters. That led business lobbies and the GOP to find a poster boy for fraud in a fired ACORN employee and ex-con named Mac Stuart, who spun elaborate tales of ACORN squirreling away hundreds of GOP voter applications it gathered but did not turn over to election officials. Republican attorneys filed two lawsuits featuring Stuart's claims. After the election, Stuart ultimately conceded that he made false statements about ACORN. In December 2005, federal judges dismissed both lawsuits. But in the same month, the legislature passed one of the most restrictive voting-registration laws in the country. The new law fined every registration worker $5,000 for any lost application, potentially wiping out the entire budget of the state League of Women Voters if just 14 forms were lost and forcing the group to stop registering voters for the first time in over 70 years. It was not until August 2006 that a federal judge blocked enforcement of the law. However, a slightly revised version passed last year. Responding to the GOP-generated hysteria over voter fraud, criminal investigations were launched in 2004 and 2005 in Wisconsin, Colorado, Florida, and Ohio, with ACORN often a target. But by the end of 2005, the investigations ended after finding either no evidence of wrongdoing by ACORN or any pervasive voter fraud. Nationally, only six former ACORN employees were charged with registration fraud or other election-related crimes in the 2004 election, offenses involving fewer than 20 forms. That's out of 1 million new voters registered by ACORN during that cycle. Yet Thor Hearne, among others, took advantage of these assorted investigations and news accounts about fraud to create the fictional appearance of an epidemic, then added some fabrications of his own. Perhaps the wildest ACVR whopper -- seized on by The Wall Street Journal as late as November 2006 -- was the charge that ACORN and an affiliated group were under criminal investigation for "paying crack cocaine for fraudulent registration forms." Actually, the tale originated with the arrest of a Toledo-area man who may have received drugs while working for another volunteer for a now-defunct organization, not ACORN. Without substantiation, ACVR identified Democratic-leaning cities as hotspots for fraud. They were generally the same locations where U.S. attorneys later faced pressure over prosecutions, including Seattle, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. (The one exception to overblown investigations targeting ACORN was the indictment last year by a local Seattle prosecutor, welcomed by ACORN, of seven rogue ex-employees who had fabricated nearly 2,000 registration forms.) The hyped reports, indictments, and hearings had their intended effect after the 2004 elections. Nearly 30 states considered bills to require photo ID or proof of citizenship to register or vote. While most of these measures haven't yet passed, those that have can be severe: An Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to register has disenfranchised up to 60 percent of applicants in some counties. Over the past few years, what began as local phony lawsuits and investigations escalated into a concerted drive by the Civil Rights Division to restrict voting. Since 2004, the goal of the state GOP vote-caging initiatives has become official Justice Department policy. The department has also promoted the equivalent of caging by pressuring 16 states and cities to speed up their purging of hundreds of thousands of voters through letters and lawsuits, as first reported by Alternet. Alarmingly, the insubstantiality of the claims of pervasive voter fraud may not deter the U.S. Supreme Court from upholding Indiana's restrictive voter-ID law -- which, according to a new University of Washington study, could disenfranchise the more than 20 percent of the state's African American voters who lack the ID required by Indiana's law. Amazingly, Indiana has admitted that there hasn't been a single alleged case of in-person voter fraud in the state's history. Instead, Indiana's attorneys and legal allies, including the federal government, have submitted virtually nothing but unverified newspaper clippings and right-wing claims about fraud allegations in other states. Indeed, the Supreme Court, in a little-noticed comment in an earlier ruling on Arizona's ID law, has already granted government the leeway to enact laws denying the vote based merely on fears of fraud, regardless of evidence. But outside of the world of voting experts, little attention has been paid to the lack of evidence in the federal court rulings leading up to the Indiana case. As Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center observes, "The way this case has been decided so far [in lower courts] is that a state doesn't have to justify measures to suppress the vote." The Supreme Court is expected to issue its Indiana ruling in the next few months, and it's considered unlikely that the Court will strike down the law. *** These days, weakened by the publicity over the U.S. attorneys scandal, the savvier voter-fraud propagandists are shifting their now-discredited arguments about massive voting by illegal immigrants to yet another "menace": "double voting." Republicans and some newspapers point to lists of the same names in different states to claim there has been large-scale double voting. Yet such sweeping double-voting claims are almost always due to administrative errors and the statistical probability that people with the same name and birth date will show up in large pools of voters. Regardless of the facts, the drive for new voter-ID restrictions will likely be strengthened in the wake of the upcoming Supreme Court decision. There's little sign that progressives or Democrats are going to launch what the Brennan Center's Deborah Goldberg has called the "huge public education effort" needed to raise awareness about the problems with voter-ID laws. Democrats seemingly haven't yet grasped the political importance of fighting these restrictive policies, though they could prove a major impediment to minority voting (and if minorities voted at the same rate as whites, there would be 7.5 million more voters on Election Day). But Johanna Sharrard and other ACORN leaders aren't going to be deterred by Republican obstacles and smears as they gear up for new registration drives this year that could be their most successful yet. Sharrard's campaign in Kentucky last year brought in over 14,000 new voters, a state record. And after seeing all the attacks against ACORN in Missouri and elsewhere, she realizes, "It's a good motivator; it showed us that that things we were doing are important." It's an open question, though, whether progressives will realize that it's worth fighting to make sure that the voters ACORN is trying to reach will actually have their votes count. Research assistance for this article was provided bvy the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.
Art Levine is a contributing editor of U.S. News and World Report and of The Washington Monthly and has written for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications.

By Liza Porteus Viana
Oct 17th 2008 5:52PM

Barack Obama's campaign fought back hard today against the ongoing accusations that the Illinois senator is connected to voter fraud.

Obama general counsel Robert Bauer wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking that a special prosecutor look into what role, if any, Justice Department and White House officials have had in supporting the McCain-Palin campaign and the Republican National Committee's "systematic development and dissemination of unsupported, spurious allegations of vote fraud."

The Republican White House ticket has been hammering Obama on his connection to ACORN, a voter-registration group being investigated by the FBI for voter fraud.

The special prosecutor on the case is Nora Dannehy, the same one investigating the removal of U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration.

Obama's camp says the same exact type of improper behavior that led to the firing of some of those U.S. attorneys several years ago - removals based on "improper political factors, including to affect the way they handled certain voter fraud or public corruption investigations and prosecutions" in 2006 - is being acted out now by Republican Party officials around the country.

"It has become clear, in these remaining weeks of the Presidential campaign, that 'the fact and law require' the Special Prosecutor's urgent attention to recent partisan Republican activities throughout the country," Bauer writes. "These activities seek both to suppress the vote and to unduly influence investigations and prosecutions through baseless allegations of vote fraud - exactly as in the 2006 election cycle."

Some of those activities cited included GOP claims of "fraud" by John McCain and Sarah Palin surrounding ACORN, and Republican lawmakers calling on the DOJ to launch an investigation into "these manufactured allegations of 'fraud'" involving ACORN. Bauer said those McCain-Pain surrogates who have sent such letters include: Sens. George Voinovich of Ohio, John Cornyn of Texas, and Reps. Roy Blunt of Missouri and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

"Of course, the timing of the opening of this investigation and leaking of this information is damning, 19 days before the general election - and less than 24 hours after the Republican Presidential nominee announced the advent of fraud so pervasive that it threatened the very 'fabric of democracy,'" Bauer writes.

But the McCain-Palin attack against ACORN marches on.

Palin today said Obama hasn't been forthcoming about his ties to the Association of Community Activists for Reform Now, even though Obama has said he doesn't have any significant links to the group.

"You deserve to know," Palin told thousands surrounding her stage in a suburban community park in Ohio. "This group needs to learn that you here in Ohio won't let them turn the Buckeye State into the Acorn State."

In a press call today, Bauer said ACORN is not "an agent of this campaign, they did not perform registration services for this campaign."

McCain-Palin campaign manager Rick Davis told reporters Friday that he sent a letter to Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, encouraging them to join a group called "The Honest and Open Election Committee" organized by the McCain campaign.

"We've gotten little to no response back from the Obama campaign on this issue," Davis said, adding that you can't just "blow off" these allegations as a "cynical ploy to reduce voter turnout," "like David Plouffe did."

The ACORN allegations are "not anything less than disturbing," Davis added.

To add to the ACORN debacle, AP reports that the group has another nasty issue on its agenda when its board of directors meets in New Orleans this weekend: missing money.

ACORN leaders are locked in a legal dispute stemming from allegations that the brother of the group's founder misappropriated nearly $1 million of the nonprofit's money several years ago. The embezzlement case has spawned a lawsuit and set off a power struggle inside ACORN.

Bertha Lewis, ACORN's interim chief organizer, called the lawsuit "a distraction from us marshaling our forces to deal with the Republican right-wing attacks" over ACORN's voter registration.



This all came on the heels of the High court rejecting the GOP in Ohio voting dispute.
Republicans had won an order that the state do more to check eligibility but were overturned by the USSC.

Iglesias: "I'm Astounded" By DOJ's ACORN Probe

By Zachary Roth - October 16, 2008, 6:50PM

David Iglesias says he's shocked by the news, leaked today to the Associated Press, that the FBI is pursuing a voter-fraud investigation into ACORN just weeks before the election.
"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again," Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. "Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic." In 2006, Iglesias was fired as U.S. attorney thanks partly to his reluctance to pursue voter-fraud cases as aggressively as DOJ wanted -- one of several U.S. attorneys fired for inappropriate political reasons, according to a recently released report by DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.
Iglesias, who has been the most outspoken of the fired U.S. attorneys, went on to say that the FBI's investigation seemed designed to inappropriately create a "boogeyman" out of voter fraud.
And he added that it "stands to reason" that the investigation was launched in response to GOP complaints. In recent weeks, national Republican figures -- including John McCain at last night's debate -- have sought to make an issue out of ACORN's voter-registration activities.
As we noted earlier, last year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein publicly highlighted changes made to DOJ's election crimes manual, which lowered the bar for voter-fraud prosecutions, and made it easier to bring vote-fraud cases close to the election.
Speaking today to TPMmuckraker, Iglesias called such changes "extremely problematic."
The way in which the news was revealed today -- Associated Press sourced its report to two "senior law enforcement officials" who "spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations particularly so close to an election" -- is also raising eyebrows.
Both Iglesias and Bud Cummins -- another of the U.S. attorneys who, according to the IG report, was also fired for political reasons -- told TPMmuckraker that DOJ guidelines do allow US attorneys to speak publicly about an investigation, even before bringing an indictment, if it's to allay public concern over an issue.
But that certainly wouldn't cover anonymous leaks. "If you can't say it with your name on it, it's fair to say you should not be saying it," Cummins told TPMmuckraker.
Earlier this afternoon, House Judiciary Chair John Conyers (D-MI) released a letter he sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI director Robert Mueller, which connected today's news to the U.S. attorney firings, and to recent GOP efforts to stoke fears over voter fraud.

My Priorites for the 2008 Election

I recently read an article by Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine entitled "My Personal 'Faith Priorities' for this Election". I agree with his priorities as listed which are as follows.

"I am in no position to tell anyone what is "non-negotiable," and neither is any bishop or megachurch pastor, but let me tell you the "faith priorities" and values I will be voting on this year:

1. With more than 2,000 verses in the Bible about how we treat the poor and oppressed, I will examine the record, plans, policies, and promises made by the candidates on what they will do to overcome the scandal of extreme global poverty and the shame of such unnecessary domestic poverty in the richest nation in the world. Such a central theme of the Bible simply cannot be ignored at election time, as too many Christians have done for years. And any solution to the economic crisis that simply bails out the rich, and even the middle class, but ignores those at the bottom should simply be unacceptable to people of faith.



2. From the biblical prophets to Jesus, there is, at least, a biblical presumption against war and the hope of beating our swords into instruments of peace. So I will choose the candidates who will be least likely to lead us into more disastrous wars and find better ways to resolve the inevitable conflicts in the world and make us all safer. I will choose the candidates who seem to best understand that our security depends upon other people’s security (everyone having "their own vine and fig tree, so no one can make them afraid," as the prophets say) more than upon how high we can build walls or a stockpile of weapons. Christians should never expect a pacifist president, but we can insist on one who views military force only as a very last resort, when all other diplomatic and economic measures have failed, and never as a preferred or habitual response to conflict.



3. "Choosing life" is a constant biblical theme, so I will choose candidates who have the most consistent ethic of life, addressing all the threats to human life and dignity that we face — not just one. Thirty-thousand children dying globally each day of preventable hunger and disease is a life issue. The genocide in Darfur is a life issue. Health care is a life issue. War is a life issue. The death penalty is a life issue. And on abortion, I will choose candidates who have the best chance to pursue the practical and proven policies which could dramatically reduce the number of abortions in America and therefore save precious unborn lives, rather than those who simply repeat the polarized legal debates and "pro-choice" and "pro-life" mantras from either side.



4. God’s fragile creation is clearly under assault, and I will choose the candidates who will likely be most faithful in our care of the environment. In particular, I will choose the candidates who will most clearly take on the growing threat of climate change, and who have the strongest commitment to the conversion of our economy and way of life to a cleaner, safer, and more renewable energy future. And that choice could accomplish other key moral priorities like the redemption of a dangerous foreign policy built on Middle East oil dependence, and the great prospects of job creation and economic renewal from a new "green" economy built on more spiritual values of conservation, stewardship, sustainability, respect, responsibility, co-dependence, modesty, and even humility.



5. Every human being is made in the image of God, so I will choose the candidates who are most likely to protect human rights and human dignity. Sexual and economic slavery is on the rise around the world, and an end to human trafficking must become a top priority. As many religious leaders have now said, torture is completely morally unacceptable, under any circumstances, and I will choose the candidates who are most committed to reversing American policy on the treatment of prisoners. And I will choose the candidates who understand that the immigration system is totally broken and needs comprehensive reform, but must be changed in ways that are compassionate, fair, just, and consistent with the biblical command to "welcome the stranger."



6. Healthy families are the foundation of our community life, and nothing is more important than how we are raising up the next generation. As the father of two young boys, I am deeply concerned about the values our leaders model in the midst of the cultural degeneracy assaulting our children. Which candidates will best exemplify and articulate strong family values, using the White House and other offices as bully pulpits to speak of sexual restraint and integrity, marital fidelity, strong parenting, and putting family values over economic values? And I will choose the candidates who promise to really deal with the enormous economic and cultural pressures that have made parenting such a "countercultural activity" in America today, rather than those who merely scapegoat gay people for the serious problems of heterosexual family breakdown.

That is my list of personal "faith priorities" for the election year of 2008, but they are not "non-negotiables" for anyone else. It’s time for each of us to make up our own list in these next 12 days. Make your list and send this on to your friends and family members, inviting them to do the same thing."

Sarah Palin Refuses To Answer Whether Or Not Abortion Clinic Bombers Are Terrorists

In her interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said that Bill Ayers is “no question” a terrorist because he sought to destroy the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon. Palin, however, refused to apply the same label to abortion clinic bombers:

Q: Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist, under this definition, governor?
PALIN: (Sigh). There’s no question that Bill Ayers via his own admittance was one who sought to destroy our U.S. Capitol and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist. There’s no question there. Now, others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities that uh, it would be unacceptable. I don’t know if you’re going to use the word terrorist there.

The FBI and other government security institutions may differ with Ms. Palin on this one. It is just about intellectually impossible to back a candidate with this kind of logic problems... at least for me. -SS


Abortion clinic bombers not terrorists?

2 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who has accused Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists," has refused to call people who bomb abortion clinics by the same name.When asked Thursday night by NBC television presenter Brian Williams whether an abortion clinic bomber was a terrorist, Palin heaved a sigh and, at first, circumvented the question.
"There's no question that Bill Ayers by his own admittance was one who sought to destroy our US Capitol and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist," Palin said, referring to a 1960s leftist who founded a radical violent gang dubbed the "Weathermen" -- and who years later supported Obama's first run for public office in the state of Illinois.
"Now, others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities that it would be unacceptable to... I don't know if you're gonna use the word 'terrorist' there," the ardently pro-life running mate of John McCain said.
Early this month, after the New York Times ran an article highlighting the ties between Obama and Ayers, Palin told a campaign rally in Colorado that Obama "sees America it seems as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."
Attacks on doctors who practice abortion and on family planning clinics in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s left several people dead and scores wounded.
Eric Rudolph, the extreme right winger who planted a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, which killed one person, was sentenced three years ago to two life terms in jail for an abortion clinic bombing in Alabama in which a policeman was killed.

I am wondering what is so difficult about the question. How could a person not just say, "Of course they are, anytime a person or political interest group resorts to planting bombs to inflict violence and/or damage and intimidation to promote any political agenda they are essentially operating with the same philosophy of jihadists like Osama bin Laden."

I can tell you why she didn't say that. Its because she is not morally grounded or intelligent enough to figure that out.

When she didn't say something like that she implied as much- that she was either ignorant and/or morally stunted or that she condoned the practice. It was she that put those words in her own mouth as implied by her lack of willingness to state what should be obvious. It is my personal belief that she probably thinks of abortion clinic bombers as noble warriors of God or at least that she has some kind of sympathy for such TERRORIST acts. Then again I suppose such a definition would raise several valid questions about American foreign and domestic policy...
like what makes an atomic bomb moral and a carbomb immoral?

Now, check this out: McCain’s Terror Connection: G. Gordon Liddy

McCain’s Terror Connection: G. Gordon Liddy

John McCain.

Here’s what the mainstream media won’t tell you when they’re busying parroting the Republican line on how what William Ayers did when Barack Obama was 8 actually having any relevance.

As Media Matters for America has noted, Liddy served four and a half years in prison in connection with his conviction for his role in the Watergate break-in and the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Liddy has acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in “if necessary”; plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a “gangland figure” to murder Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap “leftist guerillas” at the 1972 Republican National Convention — a plan he outlined to the Nixon administration using terminology borrowed from the Nazis. (The murder, firebombing, and kidnapping plots were never carried out; the break-ins were.) During the 1990s, Liddy reportedly instructed his radio audience on multiple occasions on how to shoot Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents and also reportedly said he had named his shooting targets after Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Liddy has donated $5,000 to McCain’s campaigns since 1998, including $1,000 in February 2008. In addition, McCain has appeared on Liddy’s radio show during the presidential campaign, including as recently as May. An online video labeled “John McCain On The G. Gordon Liddy Show 11/8/07″ includes a discussion between Liddy and McCain, whom Liddy described as an “old friend.” During the segment, McCain praised Liddy’s “adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great,” said he was “proud” of Liddy, and said that “it’s always a pleasure for me to come on your program.”

Liddy called for the murder of federal agents, served time in jail, plotted murder - and after that, John McCain applauded him and took his money.