Wow, I step away for a week or so, and everyone’s reworking their blogs. Well, ok, not everyone, but two people at least. Ed Cone has a shiny new TypePad blog, and Cara Michele has given Chosen Fast a sparkly new look. Nice work on both! Are there any other redesigns I missed?
Saturday’s News and Record contained an Associated Press article (which, for now, may be found here) about the ACLU, the Alliance Defense Fund, and other groups gearing up for a seasonal legal battle over public government Christmas observances. One quote in particular caught my attention:
Spokesman [for Americans United for Separation of Church and State] Rob Boston said “about 95 percent of the whining from the far right” over Christmas is for fundraising purposes. “They’re trying to get people worked up so they will think Christmas is being removed from public life,” Boston said. “There isn’t any evidence that’s happening.”
This, of course, ties in with what I pointed out yesterday: Conservative Christians are being lied to and used by the very people who are claiming to defend their interests. The 95 percent figure in the above quote is certainly just a generalization, but I think its very likely that the overall point is true. The ADF, commenters at the News and Record’s LTE blog, and many others like to claim that there’s a war on Christmas, and on Christianity in general, often pointing a finger at the ACLU. However, if you look at the ACLU’s overall record, this accusation doesn’t hold water.
Ed Brayton has an excellent blog post that gives a little more detail about the ACLU, pointing out that they are actually often involved in defending the rights of Christians. They’ve defended a church’s right to access school facilities, defended a Presbyterian church against excessive city restrictions, fought for a Baptist minister’s right to baptise people in a state park, and have even done legal work on behalf of Jerry Falwell himself.
In fact, if you want a concrete example of the nexus of the whining and the lies, Brayton has one in another post:
After his American Center for Law and Justice won the Lamb’s Chapel case before the Supreme Court, Robertson went on national TV on his own show, the 700 Club, and declared this a great victory over the ACLU. The problem? The ACLU was on the same side in that case. The ACLU had filed a 15-page brief (and thank you to Mike Litrownik at the ACLU office for faxing me a copy of it) on behalf of Lamb’s Chapel in which they argued that denying them access to the school facilities could not survive constitutional scrutiny because it was obviously viewpoint discrimination.
What Mr. Robertson said was a lie. It wasn’t a mistake. The chief counsel of the ACLJ, who had argued the case before the Supreme Court, was standing right there next to him and could certainly have pointed out that the ACLU had filed a brief on behalf of their client; he did not. And it was a lie that could only have been told for a particular purpose: to distort the positions of the organization that his group relies upon as a boogey man in their fundraising efforts.
Which brings us right back to the point of the first quote in this post, namely, the far right whining about something to keep the cash flowing in. It’s understandable that a group will try to unite their supporters in a common cause and mobilize them to act, and even give money towards that cause. But it’s despicable when the common cause is based in lies and exists mainly for controlling people and parting them from their money. And it’s particularly odious when this is done under the guise of faith and morality.
In case there was any doubt that some in the Republican leadership are concerned about Christians primarily as a means to an end, a Salon article points out that former DeLay aide Mike Scanlon referred to Christian conservatives as “wackos” in a memo, and essentially advocated using their concerns to trick them into voting a certain way:
“The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees,” Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. “Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them.” The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious “wackos” could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it.
How the Republicans can be considered by anybody to be “God’s Own Party” is beyond me.
Via DailyKos.
Greg over at The Talent Show speculates on Bush’s next pick for the Supreme Court.
Bush has reversed himself, and is reinstating the Davis-Beacon Act, which will guarantee certain wage levels for workers involved in Katrina reconstruction.
Update: More details on this at the Working Life blog. Sounds like there was bipartisan opposition to the suspension of Davis-Beacon. Democrat George Miller caused the White House to blink first by forcing a Congressional vote on the suspension.
No, rank-and-file Republicans, I’m not talking about you, but rather your leaders at the federal level. Via Chewie it seems that some bloggers were invited to meet with House Republicans at the Capitol, where they were to discuss “the House Republican record of successful economic policies, their commitment to fiscal responsibility, and the details of the historic proposed budget amendment that is expected to reach the floor later this week”. According to one of the bloggers there:
We’ve been advised not to believe the liberal spin in the media about spending… ‘This Republican majority, with no help from the other side’ has fought against spending.
Since the debt, deficit, and our spending keeps rising this would seem to leave two options: Either the Republicans making the above statement are full of it, and being less than honest about the situation, or they are ineffective at governing, being unable to accomplish their stated goals while controling two out of three branches of our government. Either way, it doesn’t reflect very positively on them.
The first cartoon was very well received, so here’s another. In today’s, poor Skip can’t catch a break.
The Parents Television Council recently named four Fox shows as being “worst for families”. From cnn.com:
Four Fox network programs, led by the comedies “The War at Home,” “The Family Guy” and “American Dad,” topped a parents group’s annual listing of the worst prime-time shows for family viewing.
The group’s president, L. Brent Bozell, said he was alarmed that the three Fox Sunday night comedies are being marketed as family friendly.
“Families should not be deceived,” he said. “The top three worst shows all contain crude and raunchy dialogue with sex-themed jokes and foul language. Even worse is the fact that Hollywood is peddling its filth to families with cartoons.”
Now it’s been pretty well documented by films such as Outfoxed and websites such as MediaMatters.org that the news programming on Fox is, shall we say, a little biased towards the conservative end of the spectrum, and in fact “Fox’s core viewers are conservative” according to a Pew Research Center poll referenced in The New Yorker.
However, if I’m not mistaken, it’s many these same conservatives who often speak out on the decadence of Hollywood and boycott companies for doing something they consider immoral. Considering that Fox has locked up the top spots in the list of family-unfriendly programming, shouldn’t we be seeing a conservative exodus away from Fox news in response?
I’ve decided to try creating a cartoon blog entry – a little local humor. Hopefully it’s humorous. Let me know if you’d like to see more of this sort of thing.
Jakob Nielsen, venerable pundit of website usability, has published a list of the top ten design mistakes made by blogs (via Pharyngula). Here’s a rundown of the list, with some comments of my own:
