Yeah, well, the CL is right. I guess this Hagee guy has the Chick tract narrative on the Church down pat.
When will these guys give up these kooks? I guess Obama's preacher is an Afrocentrist who has said some crazy things on the other side of the wacky pack.
From Harry Shearer's site.
She giggles, she squeals, she swears, she "freaks out", she gets a cold -- she's a real human being, folks. My favorite line is "I don't know... I just feel like we're, like, kind of not making it kind of dramatic enough."
Scott Ott, that is. Right on target as usual. From yesterday:
Democrat Sen. Barack Obama today seemed to indirectly respond to presidential rival Sen. Hillary Clinton’s suggestion that Martin Luther King’s dream would have gone unfulfilled if not for President Lyndon B. Johnson who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Sen. Clinton’s comment was meant to contrast her vast record of accomplishment and political prowess, with Sen. Obama’s mere rhetorical skills and inspirational persona, but the rookie Senator offered an analogy of his own.
“The 19th Amendment to the Constitution grants women the right to vote,” said Sen. Obama, “and while women, like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, marched, and spoke and held inspirational rallies, ultimately it took men in 36 state legislatures to fulfill that dream.”
“Now, I would not suggest,” the former Illinois state legislator added, “that it takes a man to really make change in this country, nor even that it takes someone with experience in a state legislature. I’m just sayin’.”
Wowwwww... People, check out today's bible art. A picture is worth a thousand lamentations. That Rembrandt dude sure could paint.
Caption: "Despite the warnings in his prophecies, Jeremiah has to witness the fall of his beloved Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar’s troops set the city on fire."
"By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept..." I'll bet Kucinich is jealous of old King Nebu -- he only managed to set the Cuyahoga River on fire.
And it may be especially useful to apply this advice to weblog publishing in the age of instant gratification. Think about it before you hit that post button. From Edwin Tait via Shawn McElhinney:
We always make our opponents out to be more radical than they are, so that we can position ourselves as part of the mainstream. But in times of great social tension this polarizing game can become an extremely dangerous form of self-fulfilling prophecy. We use the alleged radicalism of our opponents as an excuse to become radical ourselves, and thus prompt our opponents to follow suit, turning them into the monsters we thought they were all along (and so justifying further extremism on our part).
His record taps into a latent populism that attracts Republicans, Democrats and Independents. His battle against big tobacco, efforts to address global warming, opposition to torture during interrogations and fight to reform corporate governance and to protect investors and pensioners appeal to voters of all stripes.
Ultimately, though, he can likely transcend the nativist vote and appeal to the broad spectrum of Republicans. Polls indicate that nobody really believes it is feasible to deport 11 million people back to their home nations. If we can't do that, they'll linger on our streets and in our fields forever, as illegal tomorrow as they are today, unless we move to meet them halfway.
The Pat Buchanans of the world will split their votes between Mitt Romney and Huckabee, so this negative is not likely to prove any more lethal in Michigan, New York or California than it was in New Hampshire.
I found this piece to be insightful, charitable and concise.
If you live in Further Right World, you may well believe that the Constitution was a kind of NATO between the states. I think that is demonstrably wrong, but it is an honorable view (Jefferson, in some moods, professed it).
Close by that view is the view that the slave power was the historic defender of liberty, which I think is both wrong and wicked (Jefferson, in his old age, found himself driven to it).
Many inhabitants of Further Right World are also gold bugs. That may be a mistaken belief, but again it is honorable. Gold buggery goes off the rails when it breeds an unhealthy suspicion of central banks. ("The necessary secrecy of [bankers'] transactions gives unlimited scope to imagination to infer that something is, or may be wrong"—Alexander Hamilton, "Report on a National Bank," 1790). I was startled, the first time I read Lysander Spooner—and if you have spent any time in Further Right World, you will know exactly who that is—to find a little blast at the Rothschilds.
Ron Paul clearly holds the honorable views mentioned above, and everyone who knows him testifies that he does not hold the wicked ones. But it requires eternal vigilance in Further Right World to keep the two apart, and he has not exercised it.
