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  1. Democracy Now! - Monday, February 19, 2007
    2. 19 Feb 2007 at 9:00am
    Headlines for February 19th, 2007; Chris Hedges on American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America; NYPD Spy Tactics Exposed: Democracy Now! Airs Exclusive Police Surveillance Footage Recorded From Blimps, Helicopters and "Lipstick Cams" During Republican National Convention


  2. Democracy Now! Tuesday, May 06, 2003
    3. 12 Aug 2007 at 10:32am
    * Headlines for Tuesday, May 6th, 2003* "It's Clear That Islam Is On the Way to Disappearing": The Words of Israeli Tourism Minister Benny Elon, Who Is Set to Lobby Christian Fundamentalists Close to President Bush Against the Middle East Peace Plan* Anti-Apartheid Leader Walter Sisulu Dies at the Age of 90* "The Bookie of Virtue": Moral Crusader and Former Drug Czar Bill Bennett Made Millions Lecturing People On Morality-and Blew $8 Million On High Stakes Gambling* Inside the Secret Hearings of Joseph Mccarthy: Newly Released Documents Shed Light On the Questioning of Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes and Others* U.S. Hires Christian Fundamentalists to Produce News for Iraqis* United for Peace Justice Organizer Leslie Cagan Speaks On the State of the Anti-War Movement After the Invasion of Iraq


  3. One Nation Under Fraud? Christian Shariah | Islamic Democracy.....Say Whaat! ...
    4. 13 Jan 2008 at 11:00pm
    Listen
    Is theocracy a form of mind-control? Should there be a hard separation between Church and State? Can Islam and America co-exist? Tune in, call in live, cast you vote on the politics of religion.


  4. IWR WorldNews 10th April 6
    5. 28 May 2007 at 12:03am
    Pro-democracy protesters have defied a curfew and returned to the streets of Kathmandu for a fifth consecutive day. Three demonstrators have been killed and 800 arrested in the protests against King Gyanendra. The protests were organised by Nepal’s seven-party alliance to dispute the King’s direct rule. The king seized full power last February saying political parties were failing to deal with the country's long-running Maoist insurgency. Almost 13,000 people have been killed by the insurgency since 1996.://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://:/ /://://://://://://The World Health Organisation says people in Zimbabwe have a shorter life than anywhere else in the world. Zimbabwe's women have an average life expectancy of 34 years and men 37 years according to the report. The health organisation said the figures were related to the high prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe but NGOs have linked it to the current economic crisis. Zimbabwe's economy has shrunk by an estimated 40 per cent in the last seven years under President Robert Mugabe.://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://:// ://://://://://://://President Jacques Chirac has announced plans to replace a contested employment law that sparked massive protests and strikes across France. Bowing to intense pressure from students and unions, the president said a new law would now focus on helping disadvantaged young people find work. The original law would have allowed employers to fire, at will, workers younger than 26. The conservative government had pushed the law as a way to stem youth unemployment which is currently at 22 per cent. ://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://: //://://://://Anti-corruption campaign group Transparency International has called on Western governments to help Africa recover part of the wealth it has lost through corruption. The group estimates that 140 billion dollars has been stolen both by African governments and Western companies in the post-colonial period. It urged Western governments to change its banking laws to make it easier for illegally acquired money to be given back to Africa. The group said that although the United Nations have set up some measures to tackle corruption, more commitment is needed from governments. ://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://: //://://://://A new law to ban forced religious conversions has been approved in the western Indian state of Rajasthan. The law seeks to impose a sentence of up to five years in prison for those found guilty of forcing and encouraging others to convert. The decision to introduce the bill follows a series of attacks by Hindu activists on christian churches and mission schools. The hardline Hindus allege poor Hindus were being enticed to convert to Christianity. Human rights groups, minority religions and the opposition Congress party fear that religious minorities will be targetted by the law. Hindus make up 89 per cent of the states population while 0.11 per cent are Christian.://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://://:// ://://://://://://://://A ban to prevent Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko and 30 ministers from entering EU countries comes into force today. The EU ban was imposed after a presidential election which was won by Mr Lukashenko was condemned as flawed. Election monitors from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the elections did not meet international electoral standards. Demonstrations followed and hundreds of opposition supporters were arrested. Mr Lukashenko was sworn in for a third term in office on Saturday.


  5. Shakespeare and Power
    6. 29 Mar 2007 at 10:00am
    h4a href="http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/ros/open_source_070329.mp3"Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)/a/h4 On our pitch-a-show thread this week Dora a href="http://www.radioopensource.org/pitch-a-show-3107/#comment-47663"remembered our Thucydides show/a and what it made her think of: Shakespeare. blockquoteFor months, I’ve been thinking about an exchange that occurred on your Thucydides show. Susan Cheever kind of bowed out of the conversation saying something to the effect of "literature is more important than politics." She’s a wonderful writer, but I’ve just been completely baffled by this comment. I remember thinking at the time that Shakespeare seemed to believe that politics –- i.e. the struggles and dilemmas of those who wield power -- were the very essence of literature.h6Dora, in an a href="http://www.radioopensource.org/pitch-a-show-3107/#comment-47663"show pitch to iOpen Source/i/a, March 23, 2007/h6/blockquote She pointed us to an article in iThe New York Review of Books/i by Stephen Greenblatt, a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20073"Shakespeare and the Uses of Power/a. blockquoteIt begins with Bill Clinton as literary critic, and then goes on to discuss Shakepeare’s depictions of people who for reasons of fate and family are destined to hold power (G.W. Bush? Hillary?); his attraction to characters who attempt to walk away from power (Al Gore?); as well as his distrust of democracy ('when he tried to imagine electioneering, voting, and representation,' Greenblatt says, 'he conjured up situations in which the people, manipulated by wealthy and fathomlessly cynical politicians, were repeatedly induced to act against their own interests.')h6Dora, in an a href="http://www.radioopensource.org/pitch-a-show-3107/#comment-47663"show pitch to iOpen Source/i/a, March 23, 2007/h6/blockquote So we've got Stephen Greenblatt in the studio tonight. David and I waded into his fourteen-page argument yesterday; it can be best boiled down to a single quote: blockquote...in Shakespeare no character with a clear moral vision has a will to power and, conversely, no character with a strong desire to rule over others has an ethically adequate object.h6Stephen Greenblatt, a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20073"Shakespeare and the Uses of Power/a, iThe New York Review of Books/i, April 12, 2007/h6/blockquote Greenblatt reaches deep into the catalog: iKing Lear/i, iThe Tempest/i, iRichard III/i, iMacbeth/i, iHamlet/i, iCoriolanus/i, iHenry V/i and iJulius Ceasar/i. We'll try to do the same tonight, stopping to get filled in on what we've forgotten since college. What does Shakespeare tell us about power? Can he shed any light on democracy, or just kings deposing each other? What does power do to his characters? What can we read in Shakespeare about this century's Presidents? Can you have both a will to power and an "ethically adequate object"? h3Stephen Greenblatt/h3 dl dd Professor of the Humanities, a href="http://www.fas.harvard.edu"Harvard University/a Author, a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=29928#038;cgi=product#038;isb n=0393050572"Will in the World/a and a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=29928#038;cgi=product#038;isb n=0415903521"Learning to Curse/a General editor, a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=29928#038;cgi=product#038;isb n=0393970876"Norton Shakespeare/a/dd/dl h3Oliver Arnold/h3 dl dd Associate Professor of English, a href="http://www.princeton.edu/main/"Princeton University/a Author, a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=29928#038;cgi=product#038;isb n=9780801885044"The Third Citizen/a/dd/dl h3Jim Fitzmorris/h3 dl dd Author and playwright a href="http://www.tulane.edu/~theatre/faculty.html"Professor of Theatre History/a, Tulane University /dd/dl dl dtExtra Credit Reading/dt dd David A. Bell, a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/openuniversity?pid=92396"THe Character Issue/a, iOpen University/i, March 26, 2007: "So in the upcoming campaign, please, let's not equate 'character' with being a boy or girl scout, still less with being 'meek.' As Greenblatt reminds us, the character Shakespeare most memorable defined as "meek" was Duncan, in Macbeth. And we all know what happened to him." Guy Zimmerman, a href="http://www.bestcyrano.org/voxpop/?p=41"Against the New Model Army/a, iPlacebo ART/i, March 25, 2007: "I think in Shakespeare there's a recogition that the vertical hierarchy of monarchy was about to be toppled by fanatics of the Self, but what would have surprised Shakespeare is how this process managed to conceal itself within the language of religion and Christianity." Alicia Colon, a href="http://www.nysun.com/article/38582?page_no=1"Shakespeare and Politics/a, iThe New York Sun/i, August 25, 2006: "I was under the impression that the Shakespeare plays were a good thing. Then I realized that my tax dollars were paying not only for something I'd never enjoy, but for productions that were less about Shakespeare than about politics." Rick Sincere, a href="http://ricksincerethoughts.blogspot.com/2007/03/report-from-new-york.html"Repor t from New York/a, iRick Sincere Notes and Thoughts/i, March 28, 2007: "Asquith's book (subtitled "The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare") posits that Shakespeare's plays are "coded" documents designed to support Catholic dissidents in an age of political and religious turmoil." Ezra Klein, a href="http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/mccains_miscalc.html"McCain's Fall/a, iTomorrow's Media Conspiracy Today/i, March 8, 2007: "It's possible that, when all is said and done, not only will he have humiliated himself only to lose, but he'll have lost because he humiliated himself. It's downright Shakespearean." Gerard Barker, a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article1296179.ece"The vaulting ambition of America's Lady Macbeth/a, iThe Times/i, January 26, 2007: "Now, you might say, hold on. Aren't all politicians veined with an opportunistic streak? Why is she any different? The difference is that Mrs Clinton has raised that opportunism to an animating philosophy, a P. T. Barnum approach to the political marketplace." /dd /dlbr /


  6. The Handling of Bullies
    7. 8 Mar 2007 at 6:17pm
    pLee Kaplan, over at a href="http://www.think-israel.org/kaplan.shoebatucdavis.html"Think-Israel/a, reports as follows (Hat Tip: a href="http://the-gathering-storm.blogspot.com/"The Gathering Storm/a)/p blockquotepA curious thing happened when Walid Shoebat[1] arrived for a speech at the University of California at Davis last week. Shoebat, the former PLO terrorist who now speaks out against terrorism and militant Islam, not only faced his largest ever audience at a college campus #8212; a sold-out crowd of over 1,300 people #8212; but he actually got to deliver his remarks without interruption./p pThis was hardly a foregone conclusion. Only one week earlier at the University of California at Irvine, Middle East expert Daniel Pipes had his remarks disrupted[2] by students from the Muslim Students Association (MSA), who chanted and yelled before finally being escorted from the auditorium./p pThe MSA#8217;s sister organization at UC Davis had planned a similar welcome[3] for Shoebat #8212; only worse. The MSA had planned to fill up several rows in the school#8217;s Freeborn Hall when Shoebat spoke in order to chant and drown him out. Using a cell phone, they intended to phone a member stationed outside the building to start a fire so as to empty the auditorium. What#8217;s more, they had ample reason to think that they could do so without penalty. Organizers and sponsors of the Shoebat speech, who included the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the UC Davis College Republicans and campus Hillel, were initially informed by the UC Davis campus police that were the MSA to interfere with the event, there was nothing to be done. It would be considered #8220;freedom of speech.#8221;/p pThat#8217;s when the organizers decided to take action. They demanded that the MSA students be warned of the consequences if they did disrupt. An attorney and organizer also informed the university of legal statutes in California, upheld by the Supreme Court in a similar case that involved disruption of Martin Luther King Jr. while speaking during the Civil Rights Movement, and which provided the basis for arrest and prosecution. They further informed the school#8217;s administration that the same rules applied in the university#8217;s codes[4] of conduct. Just prior to Shoebat#8217;s speech, a student organizer notified the MSA that any intentional disruption would result in actual arrests and prosecutions and would not be tolerated. The MSA remained silent throughout the entire speech and question period, choosing to walk out later midway through the event./p pIn his remarks, Shoebat did not shy away from his critics. He spoke first about a flyer that was handed out to entrants outside the building by the MSA, asserting that he was a fraud. One accusation in the flyer claimed that Shoebat had falsified the name of a terrorist colleague he knew in America while he was still a student himself at Loop College in Chicago. The flyer maintained no such person existed./p pAgainst these charges, Shoebat pointed out that the man in question #8212; one Jamal Said #8212; was very real indeed. He had formed the Islamic Association for Palestine, the forerunner for CAIR,[5] Shoebat said, and was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood,[6] the predecessor of al-Qaeda, and Hamas.[7] He explained how as a young student he had worked with this man to prepare for jihad in America. Said is still the imam at the Bridgeview Mosque in Chicago.[8] Shoebat also provided the exact location and address of the Bank Leumi next to the Church of the Nativity, in the West Bank, where he had attempted a terrorist attack, thus deflating an accusation that no Bank Leumi branch existed in the West Bank./p pShoebat took strong exception to the school#8217;s Muslim Students Association calling him a #8220;racist#8221; and a liar. #8220;When I was a terrorist they called me a freedom fighter. Now that I reject terrorism they say I#8217;m a racist,#8221; he said. Indeed, the MSA at UC Davis has in the past paid homage to Hassan al-Banna[9] who founded the Muslim Brotherhood.[10]/p pShoebat#8217;s oratory especially shined when he discussed his life. He recounted how his mother, an American Christian, had married his Palestinian father, whom she met at Humboldt State College in California. After going on a visit to the West Bank, she was kept a virtual prisoner of his family: Henceforth, she was told, she would be a Muslim #8212; whether she liked it or not. At one point, she tried to flee to the U.S. consulate with her three children, though her US passport had been taken away, only to be caught at the entrance and brought back home. There Shoebat#8217;s father severely beat her and even enlisted the children, including Shoebat, to spy on her. It took her 35 years for her to escape with Shoebat#8217;s help. #8220;The Middle East is like the Hotel California,#8221; Shoebat explained. #8220;You can check out, but you can never leave.#8221;/p pEventually, Shoebat rescued his mother and brought her back to America. Her freedom was purchased at a steep price: complete alienation from his family; the loss of his property; and death threats that continue to this day./p pShoebat also recounted his history as an Islamic militant. Brought up in the West Bank, Shoebat learned from Palestinian society and schools to hate and even to kill Jews. From his earliest days, he explained, the writing was on the wall./p p#8220;Everywhere in the West Bank you see graffiti. It#8217;s not gang affiliations like you see here. The typical written message is like this: #8216;We pound on the gates of heaven with the skulls of Jews.#8217;#8221;/p pOver time, however, anti-Semitic ideology lost its grip on Shoebat. Although Shoebat#8217;s ancestors had all taken part in Arab nationalist and Muslim irredentist movements to kill Jews and drive them from Palestine #8212; his grandfather had been a close friend of Nazi ally Haj[11] Amin al-Hussein, who raised two divisions of Muslim troops for Hitler #8212; he began to question his teachings. His epiphany occurred when he married a Christian woman. He tried to force her to convert to Islam. On a dare, she asked him to show her what was #8220;untrue#8221; in the Bible. After reading it, he began to reject Islamic eschatology. He began to question what he had been taught, not least the Holocaust denial on which he had been raised. #8220;We were taught the Jews have no shame..When shown photos of dead bodies piled atop each other at Auschwitz, we were taught to believe the Jews remove their clothing to fake a scene to justify taking our land.#8221;/p pTurning to the history of the Middle East, Shoebat bemoaned #8220;the Middle East experts who claim to know the culture and history of the region but have never really lived there.#8221; He spoke about Palestinians destroying Jewish holy sites after the 1993 Oslo Accords and the episodic vandalism of the Church of the Nativity, from which gold sacraments were stolen. By contrast, Shoebat noted, Israel had always treated these holy sites with respect. Yet that has not deterred the PLO and Hamas from trying to shift the blame for their persecution of Christians in the Holy Land onto Israel./p pIn this connection, Shoebat offered a trenchant analysis of anti-Semitism in the Arab and Muslim world. He discussed the blood libel frequently seen on Arab television and media, readily accessible to children, and he revealed that many Palestinians privately say that the golden age of life in the West Bank was in fact under Israeli occupation. #8220;After Israel left, the West Bank and Gaza became the Night of the Living Dead,#8221; he explained, as Shoebat also described how Palestinian #8220;collaborators#8221; with Israel are executed in the streets, strung upside down, their entrails taken out and presented to the enraged crowds as a treat. #8220;Why are the Jews not allowed to live among us?#8221; he asked./p pShoebat reserved much of his criticism on what he sees as the growing intolerance of the academic world. #8220;I#8217;m very concerned about what is going on at the college campuses,#8221; he said. Shoebat listed comments by professors praising the Ayatollah Khomeini and terrorist leaders and groups and noted that students dissenting from the political consensus are intimidated on campus when speaking out. Shoebat said that he had been the target of similar attacks. #8220;They call me a racist because I criticize Islam. But I criticize Christianity and Judaism too. To criticize a religion is not racism, it is freedom of speech.#8221; He continued, #8220;We don#8217;t want to bring over here the way of life in the Middle East,#8221; and he warned the audience #8220;This is what life would be like under Sharia Law. I don#8217;t want to live in Egypt, or Pakistan or Syria or Iran or other countries where we do not have the freedoms we enjoy here.#8221;/p pDespite its tardy start #8212; Shoebat#8217;s speech had been delayed by over 30 minutes because campus security had to frisk the attendees #8212; it was a popular success, at least if the sustained standing ovation Shoebat received at the end is a reliable index. As with the MSA, 60 of whose members silently walked out midway through the evening, not everyone appreciated his message that fundamentalist Islam poses a threat to America and Israel. More surprising is that many students, including many Palestinians, surrounded Shoebat, not to harass him but to shake his hand and ask him questions. For these students, Shoebat was a refreshing change from the relentless campus propaganda against Israel and America they hear daily on campus./p pstrongFootnotes/strong/p p1. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26655/p p2. xhref=#8221;http://www.hyscience.com/archives/2007/02/muslim_students.php#8221; mce_href=#8221;http://www.hyscience.com/archives/2007/02/muslim_students.php#8221;/p p3. http://www.dafka.org/NewsGen.asp?S=4#038;PageID=1505#8243;/p p4. http://spac.ucdavis.edu/forms/peaceful_protest.pdf/p p5. http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6176/p p6. http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6386/p p7. http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6204/p p8. http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:a0hAdppUbRoJ:www.militantislammonitor.org/ article/id/2566+Jamal+SAid+%2B+ISlamic+Association+for+Palestine#038; hl=en#038;ct=clnk#038;cd=1#038;gl=us/p p9. http://msa-west.net/archiveofevents.php/p p10. http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6386/p p11. http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_grand_mufti.php/p p!-- acknowledgements. //--emLee Kaplan is an undercover investigative journalist and a contributor to Front Page Magazine, Israel National News and Canada Free Press. He is a senior intelligence analyst and communications director for the Northeast Intelligence Network. He heads the organizations Defending America for Knowledge and Action (DAFKA) and Stop the ISM. He has been interviewed on over one hundred nationally and internationally syndicated radio shows and is often a guest on T.V. talk shows. He is currently working on a book about America#8217;s colleges in the War on Terror. /em/p pThis appeared February 12, 2007 in Front Page Magazinebr / (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26881)./p/blockquote pIn universities throughout the country, Muslim students have interrupted the speeches of those they did not want to speak out. It seems that any criticism of IslamoFascists, no matter how truthful, is in their eyes #8220;hate speech.#8221; Why? Because they are afraid of being exposed, they strongare afraid of any truly free speech/strong that shows, that unequivocally proves and exposes them what they are. That is why they have no problem practicing every form of hate speech, against Jews and against everyone who disagrees with them./p pThese #8220;students#8221; have proven themselves totally incapable of coexisting in a peaceful Western society, it is not very surprising therefore that they chickened out (as all cowards and bullies do!) when confronted with the possibility of unpleasant consequences, including jail. Dr. Martin Luther King, and those who supported his call for change (many, many Jews among them!) were not afraid to risk jail or even death to stand up for the truth. It was not an easy road, there were many dissapointments, but the more they were willing to sacrifice for their beliefs, the more the walls of segregation started cracking until they finally came tumbling down unmourned and a, new, better America was born./p pBy contrast these fascists, have proven that they who are so strident, even they who so glorify suicide bombers as freedom fighters are little more than puny liitle bullies. Like all bullies when you stand up to them, they cower in fear. They bet on the fact that the other side will be to scared#8230; and up until now it always has!/p pI expect the example of UC Davis will now be repeated throughout the country, so that universities can once again be a bastion of free speech. Soon voices of courage like Wallid Shoebat, Brigitte Gabriel, Hirsi Ali and so many more will be allowed to be freely heard trough academe. Extreme left wing academics who hate America and everything it stands for, rather than prey unopposed on impressionable young minds might then find their ideas and hatred challenged by those very same young minds they want to subjugate. Perhaps then, universities will return to being learning grounds as opposed to the left wing political indoctrination grounds they#8217;ve become today. Parents spend tens of thousands of dollars a year for their children to get an education that will help them cope with life and its vicissitudes. They do not spend the money to have their children#8217;s heads poisoned by some pseudo-intellectuals agenda of political lies. Politics has no place in teaching. While every legitimate political view should be represented on campus, no matter how disparate, none of them has a right to pursue lies or distortions, none of them has a right to silence the other. Voltaire once said: #8220;I disagree with every word you say, but I shall defend with my last drop of blood, your right to say so.#8221;/p pI found interesting and heartwarming thatemstrong /strong/emstrongemmany students, including many Palestinians, surrounded Shoebat, not to harass him but to shake his hand and ask him questions. For these students, Shoebat was a refreshing change from the relentless campus propaganda against Israel and America they hear daily on campus. /em/strongThat was one campus, one time, that kept true to the promise of liberal teaching. I am sure that not everyone who heard and later asked questions from Mr. Shoebat changed his/her beliefs right then and there. I can assure you, however, (having interviewed Mr. Shoebat on radio myself this past year, a href="http://www.jewishradionetwork.net/Shoebat%20#038;%20Szmidt.mp3"here/a.) that his passion, his sincerity and deep personal experience provided some very rich food for thought./p pChaim /p


  7. The Economist on the resurgence of religion
    8. 7 Nov 2007 at 11:32pm
    pimg src="http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/photos/20071103issuecovUS400.jpg" width="380" height="500" alt="religion in the economist" img align="right" style="margin: 5px"/If there is one edition of emThe Economist/em you should pick up off the newsstand, it is this week#8217;s because of its a href="http://www.economist.com/specialreports/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10015255"s pecial report/a on the state of religion in the world. /p pQuite appropriately, emThe Economist/em notes that it was wrong when it wrote in a href="http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=347578"Decemb er 1999/a that God#8217;s career was over. If any other journalists felt the same way lately, they should have reconsidered that thought a long time ago. /p pThere is so much that could be said about this report. Generally from what I have read they get it. The general message is that religion matters in the world. Moreover, you have to get it to function. /p pAs you can see from the cover, the big issue of the day is why religion has inspired violence in the modern era. Much of the leading report discusses how the world should #8220;deal with#8221; religion as if all its readers are secular and are frustrated with religion#8217;s role in the world. To me that#8217;s a flawed approach, but not that surprising from emThe Economist/em:/p blockquotepPart of that secular fury, especially in Europe, comes from exasperation. After all, it has been a canon of progressive thought since the Enlightenment that modernity #8212; that heady combination of science, learning and democracy #8212; would kill religion. Plainly, this has not happened. Numbers about religious observance are notoriously untrustworthy, but most of them seem to indicate that any drift towards secularism has been halted, and some show religion to be on the increase. The proportion of people attached to the world#8217;s four biggest religions #8212; Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism #8212; rose from 67% in 1900 to 73% in 2005 and may reach 80% by 2050 (see chart 2)./p pMoreover, from a secularist point of view, the wrong sorts of religion are flourishing, and in the wrong places. In general, it is the tougher versions of religion that are doing best #8212; the sort that claim Adam and Eve met 6,003 years ago. Some of the new converts are from the ranks of the underprivileged (Pentecostalism has spread rapidly in the favelas of Brazil), but many are not. American evangelicals tend to be well-educated and well-off. In India and Turkey religious parties have been driven by the up-and-coming bourgeoisie./p pWith modernity now religion#8217;s friend, an eternal subject has become fashionable. Father Richard John Neuhaus points out that when he founded his Centre for Religion and Society in 1984, there were only four centres of religion and public life in America; now, he thinks, there are more than 200. Religious people are getting more vocal in all sorts of fields, including business. Religion is also cropping up in economics. Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian, re-examined Max Weber#8217;s theory of the Protestant work ethic to explain why Europeans work less than Americans. /p/blockquote pOne of the things I enjoy most about reading emThe Economist/em is its respect and understanding of the broad scope of history. If there is a news report from a far-off place, a href="http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2837#comments"such as Pakistan/a, emThe Economist/em generally makes the background of the story, particularly if there is a long history behind it, fairly clear. You can debate the conclusions, but at least something is there and it#8217;s generally fairly sound./p pIn this instance, the report takes a step back and tries to pinpoint when religion in the world decided it was not going anywhere:/p blockquotepIn retrospect, the turning point came long before Osama bin Laden declared his jihad on Jews and Crusaders. For Timothy Shah, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York who is writing a book on secularism, the symbolic turning point was the six-day war of 1967. It marked a crushing defeat for secular pan-Arabism; meanwhile Israel#8217;s #8220;miraculous#8221; triumph gave God a stronger voice in its politics, emboldening the settler movement. In the same year a Hindu nationalist party won 9.4% of the vote in India./p pBy the end of the 1970s this counter-revolution was in full swing. America had elected its first proudly born-again Christian, Jimmy Carter; Jerry Falwell had founded the Moral Majority; Iran had replaced the worldly shah with Ayatollah Khomeini; Zia ul Haq was busy Islamising Pakistan; Buddhism had been formally granted the foremost place in Sri Lanka#8217;s constitution; and an anti-communist Pole had become head of the Catholic church. /p/blockquote pIs it fair and accurate to lump those religious movements together like that? Are they responding in unity to the first revolution of the 1960s?/p pIf you do not have time to read the entire special report or cannot find a place to buy it, check out a href="http://economist.com/media/audio/specialreport_religion_Nov_2007.m3u"this free audio interview/a with John Micklethwait, editor of emThe Economist/em and author of the special report. This is Micklethwait#8217;s first special report, and he says he chose religion because of the demand for religion news and commentary./p pI hope other journalists are hearing that. If a leading numbers-crunching, libertarian-leaning publication finds religion news in demand and important in today#8217;s society, how can other newspapers serving a more general interest see otherwise? /p !-- Social Bar BEGIN --p style="padding-top:5px;"span style="display:block;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;text-align:center;"emBookmark to:/embr /a target="_blank" href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2843title=emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Del.icio.us"img src="http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/plugins/social_bar/delicious.png" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Del.icio.us" alt="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Del.icio.us" //anbsp;a target="_self" href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2amp;url=http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2843title=e mThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to digg"img src="http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/plugins/social_bar/digg.png" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to digg" alt="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to digg" //anbsp;a target="_self" href="http://furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religionamp;u=http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2843" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to FURL"img src="http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/plugins/social_bar/furl.png" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to FURL" alt="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to FURL" //anbsp;a target="_self" href="http://blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.phpamp;Name=emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religionamp;Description=emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religionamp;Url=http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2843" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to blinklist"img src="http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/plugins/social_bar/blinklist.png" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to blinklist" alt="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to blinklist" //anbsp;a target="_self" href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2843amp;title=emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to reddit"img src="http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/plugins/social_bar/reddit.png" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to reddit" alt="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to reddit" //anbsp;a target="_self" href="http://feedmelinks.com/categorize?from=toolbarop=submitname=emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religionurl=http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2843version=0.7" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Feed Me Links!"img src="http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/plugins/social_bar/feedmelinks.png" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Feed Me Links!" alt="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Feed Me Links!" //anbsp;a target="_self" href="http://www.technorati.com/faves?add=http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2843" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Technorati"img src="http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/plugins/social_bar/technorati.png" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Technorati" alt="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Technorati" //anbsp;a target="_self" href="http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=http://www.getreligion.o rg/?p=2843t=emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Yahoo My Web"img src="http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/plugins/social_bar/yahoo_myweb.png" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Yahoo My Web" alt="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Yahoo My Web" //anbsp;a target="_self" href="http://www.newsvine.com/_wine/save?u=http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2843h=emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Newsvine"img src="http://www.getreligion.org/wp-content/plugins/social_bar/newsvine.png" title="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Newsvine" alt="Add 'emThe Economist/em on the resurgence of religion' to Newsvine" //anbsp;/span/p !-- Social Bar END --


  8. Why Al Gore? Listen to this Speech for Recollection
    9. 12 Oct 2007 at 3:37pm
    pI don#8217;t have a favorite presidential candidate; I#8217;m not committed to anyone. But for those of you who are wondering why so many people are coming out of the woodwork today to support a possible run by Al Gore to be President of the United States, I#8217;d like to offer this reminder, the text and audio of a speech given by Al Gore on January 16, 2006. At a time when mainstream Democrats like Hillary Clinton were still insisting we needed to shut up, line up and support George W. Bush, Al Gore was issuing a clarion call of principled opposition to the agenda of Bush and the Republican Party. Long before the beginning of the 2008 election season, Al Gore reminded many Americans why the Bush agenda was so dangerous, and what a progressive alternative might look like./p pa href="http://www.irregulartimes.com/gorejan06.mp3"Listen here to a podcast of Al Gore#8217;s January 16, 2006 speech/a#8230;/p p#8230; or read this transcript:/p blockquotepAs we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses./p pIt is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored./p pSo, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved./p pIt is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people./p pOn this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period./p pThe FBI privately called King the “most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country” and vowed to “take him off his pedestal.” The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide./p pThis campaign continued until Dr. King’s murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King’s life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping./p pThe result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue./p pYet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on “large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States.” The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program “without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection.”/p pDuring the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place./p pBut surprisingly, the President’s soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end./p pAt present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently./p pA president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”/p pAn executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”/p pThomas Paine, whose pamphlet, “On Common Sense” ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America’s alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that “the law is king.”/p pVigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint./p pThe rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion of power./p pA commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability also helps our country avoid many serious mistakes. Recently, for example, we learned from recently classified declassified documents that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based on false information. We now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later, was also based on false information. America would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history. Following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable./p pThe President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm./p pWhere we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable./p pOnce violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws./p pThe President’s men have minced words about America’s laws. The Attorney General openly conceded that the “kind of surveillance” we now know they have been conducting requires a court order unless authorized by statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has been doing, and no one inside or outside the Administration claims that it does. Incredibly, the Administration claims instead that the surveillance was implicitly authorized when Congress voted to use force against those who attacked us on September 11th./p pThis argument just does not hold any water. Without getting into the legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts. First, another admission by the Attorney General: he concedes that the Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing law and that they consulted with some members of Congress about changing the statute. Gonzalez says that they were told this probably would not be possible. So how can they now argue that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force somehow implicitly authorized it all along? Second, when the Authorization was being debated, the Administration did in fact seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to use military force domestically - and the Congress did not agree. Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made statements during the Authorization debate clearly restating that that Authorization did not operate domestically./p pWhen President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him all the power he wanted when they passed the AUMF, he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother. But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote: “To find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular instance the clear will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole legislative process and the constitutional division of authority between President and Congress.”/p pThis is precisely the “disrespect” for the law that the Supreme Court struck down in the steel seizure case./p pIt is this same disrespect for America’s Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties./p pFor example, the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person./p pThe President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned./p pAt the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world./p pOver 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges./p pThis shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then - until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture./p pThe President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture./p pSome of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan - one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons - registered a complaint to his home office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice: “This material is useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful.”/p pCan it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is “yes” then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?/p pThe Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch’s claims of these previously unrecognized powers: “If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.”/p pThe fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply troubling. This failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore our constitutional balance./p pFor example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by John McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the President declared in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply with it./p pSimilarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally imprison American citizens without giving them access to review by any tribunal. The Supreme Court disagreed, but the President engaged in legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from providing meaningful content to the rights of its citizens./p pA conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the Executive Branch’s handling of one such case seemed to involve the sudden abandonment of principle “at substantial cost to the government’s credibility before the courts.”/p pAs a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America’s representative democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized./p pThese claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation./p pFor more than two centuries, America’s freedoms have been preserved in part by our founders’ wise decision to separate the aggregate power of our government into three co-equal branches, each of which serves to check and balance the power of the other two./p pOn more than a few occasions, the dynamic interaction among all three branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create what are invariably labeled “constitutional crises.” These crises have often been dangerous and uncertain times for our Republic. But in each such case so far, we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement to live under the rule of law./p pThe principal alternative to democracy throughout history has been the consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single strongman or small group who together exercise that power without the informed consent of the governed./p pIt was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America was founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,” he was not only saving our union but also was recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in history. And when they fail, as did Athens and the Roman Republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily, what emerges in their place is another strongman regime./p pThere have of course been other periods of American history when the Executive Branch claimed new powers that were later seen as excessive and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents./p pWhen his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses he said: “[The essential principles of our Government] form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation… [S]hould we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety.”/p pOur greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others./p pBut in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret./p pThere are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a global environment of nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counter intelligence activities and to allocate our military forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, “The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.”/p pA second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is that we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to “last for the rest of our lives.” So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity./p pThird, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and to mine it for intelligence. This adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies. These techologies have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound./p pDon’t misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not./p pBut the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government./p pThere is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential authority is exactly what our Constitution intended./p pThis legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president’s powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President’s authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine./p pThis effort to rework America’s carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is-ironically-accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America’s foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world./p pThe common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control./p pThis same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting views within the Executive Branch, to censor information that may be inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and to demand conformity from all Executive Branch employees./p pFor example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases./p pIronically, that is exactly what happened to FBI officials in the 1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover’s view that Dr. King was closely connected to Communists. The head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division said that his effort to tell the truth about King’s innocence of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues becoming isolated and pressured. “It was evident that we had to change our ways or we would all be out on the street…. The men and I discussed how to get out of trouble. To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious matter. These men were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes, children in school. They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money on their homes, as they usually did. … so they wanted another memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were in.”/p pThe Constitution’s framers understood this dilemma as well, as Alexander Hamilton put it, “a power over a man’s support is a power over his will.” (Federalist No. 73)/p pSoon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI. The false accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the same way, George Tenet’s CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that there was a linkage between al Qaeda and the government of Iraq./p pIn the words of George Orwell: “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”/p pWhenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded./p pLast week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the Administration’s eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that if it had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out the names of some of the hijackers./p pTragically, he apparently still doesn’t know that the Administration did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available to them information that could have easily led to the identification of most of the other hijackers. And yet, because of incompetence in the handling of this information, it was never used to protect the American people./p pIt is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has./p pMoreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. Many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this President means that the next President will have unchecked power as well. And the next President may be someone whose values and belief you do not trust. And this is why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with what this President has done. If this President’s attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never would have thought possible./p pThe same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance characterizes the relationship between this Administration and the courts and the Congress./p pIn a properly functioning system, the Judicial Branch would serve as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observed their proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties and adhered to the rule of law. Unfortunately, the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands - notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals without legal process — by appointing judges who will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence of the third branch./p pThe President’s decision to ignore FISA was a direct assault on the power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established the FISA court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap. Yet, to ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive power, the President simply did not take matters to it and did not let the court know that it was being bypassed./p pThe President’s judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure that the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a powerful executive - a supporter of the so-called unitary executive, which is more properly called the unilateral executive. Whether you support his confirmation or not - and I do not - we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking./p pAnd the Administration has supported the assault on judicial independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the President’s judicial nominees. The assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the jurisdiction of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge of allegiance. In short, the Administration has demonstrated its contempt for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions at every turn./p pBut the most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to attain a massive expansion of its power./p pI was elected to Congress in 1976 and served eight years in the house, 8 years in the Senate and presided over the Senate for 8 years as Vice President. As a young man, I saw the Congress first hand as the son of a Senator. My father was elected to Congress in 1938, 10 years before I was born, and left the Senate in 1971./p pThe Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the one in which my father served. There are many distinguished Senators and Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of them are here in this hall. But the legislative branch of government under its current leadership now operates as if it is entirely subservient to the Executive Branch./p pMoreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials./p pThere have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don’t really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70’s and 80’s, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the Executive Branch to the fire - no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today./p pThe role of authorization committees has declined into insignificance. The 13 annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed anymore. Everything is lumped into a single giant measure that is not even available for Members of Congress to read before they vote on it./p pMembers of the minority party are now routinely excluded from conference committees, and amendments are routinely not allowed during floor consideration of legislation./p pIn the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the “greatest deliberative body in the world,” meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: “Why is this chamber empty?”/p pIn the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a dozen out of 435./p pAnd too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued access to the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of those who have the money to give; and, in the case of the majority party, the whole process is largely controlled by the incumbent president and his political organization./p pSo the willingness of Congress to challenge the Administration is further limited when the same party controls both Congress and the Executive Branch./p pThe Executive Branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress’ role, and often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its own power./p pLook for example at the Congressional role in “overseeing” this massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but what he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the top leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed that they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to VP Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe./p pThough I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program./p pMoreover, in the Congress as a whole-both House and Senate-the enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized corruption./p pThe Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that threatens the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government./p pIt is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which now threatens a radical transformation of the American system./p pI call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you’re supposed to be./p pBut there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by the Executive Branch to dominate our constitutional system./p pWe the people are-collectively-still the key to the survival of America’s democracy. We-as Lincoln put it, “[e]ven we here”-must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy./p pThomas Jefferson said: “An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.”/p pThe revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: “All just power is derived from the consent of the governed.”/p pThe intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia./p pIndeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people - in their various States - that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification./p pAnd it is “We the people” who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution./p pAnd here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television - a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates./p pLincoln’s memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way to our dilemma today: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”/p pForty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their principal source of information. Its dominance has become so extensive that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the confines of flickering 30-second television advertisements./p pAnd the political economy supported by these short but expensive television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America’s first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages./p pThe constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control the flow of information as a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions that still lie in the hands of the people./p pThe Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain the secrecy of its operations. After all, the other branches can’t check an abuse of power if they don’t know it is happening./p pFor example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the Administration withheld facts and prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it sought from the principal administration expert who had compiled information showing in advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the President./p pDeprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire initiative is now collapsing- all over the country- with the Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out./p pTo take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House who had no scientific training. And today one of the leading scientific experts on global warming in NASA has been ordered not to talk to members of the press and to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive Branch can monitor and control his discussions of global warming./p pOne of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. As President Eisenhower said, “Any who act as if freedom’s defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.”/p pFear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”/p pThe founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk./p pYet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights./p pIs our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment’s notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?/p pIt is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same./p pWe have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens’ right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the President’s apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law./p pI endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, “The President has dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will.”/p pA special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents him from investigating what many believe are serious violations of law by the President. We have had a fresh demonstration of how an independent investigation by a special counsel with integrity can rebuild confidence in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald has, by all accounts, shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that the Executive Branch has violated other laws./p pRepublican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the President./p pSecond, new whistleblower protections should immediately be established for members of the Executive Branch who report evidence of wrongdoing — especially where it involves the abuse of Executive Branch authority in the sensitive areas of national security./p pThird, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive-and not just superficial-hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the President. And, they should follow the evidence wherever it leads./p pFourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive Branch in its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should, under no circumstances be granted, unless and until there are adequate and enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution and the rights of the American people against the kinds of abuses that have so recently been revealed./p pFifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government with access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of American citizens./p pFreedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy./p pIt is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it./p pI mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason for hope. As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will be re-established and will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed I can feel it in this hall./p pAs Dr. King once said, “Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.”/p/blockquote pIf, after listening to or reading that speech, you find yourself in agreement with the notion that Al Gore should enter the 2008 presidential race, a href="http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/algore2008/"head over here to sign the Draft Gore petition/a, which is currently growing at a rate of about 100 people every five minutes./p pP.S. The a href="http://www.cafepress.com/votedem2008.177921653"Al Gore Lawn Signs/a are in./p p class="akst_link"a href="http://irregulartimes.com/?p=6114amp;akst_action=share-this" title="E-mail this, post to del.icio.us, etc." id="akst_link_6114" class="akst_share_link" rel="nofollow"Share This/a /p


  9. Voting and Salvation: Thanks, but no thanks
    10. 15 Nov 2007 at 10:12pm
    pAs a Catholic whose ongoing study and reflection on discipleship has led him to political anarchism (of a particular type, mind you, though there is no space to get into the details here), the question of voting has been one that I have wrestled with for some time now. My own personal position does not feel particularly settled, nor do I think it is bound to be, as I think context is crucial to the question of how much a Christian should cooperate with the state and its practices. Thus, my own decision about whether or not to vote in a given election is bound to look differently in various circumstances./p pBut nevertheless I am convinced that most U.S. Catholics and most Christians have it all wrong when it comes to voting, and sometimes that includes our own U.S. bishops. Most of these Catholics get it all wrong because they buy into the American myth that one must vote in order to be a #8220;good citizen,#8221; and the one who opts not to vote is demonized for this or that reason: for being irresponsible, for being ungrateful to those who gave their lives so that Americans can enjoy the #8220;right#8221; to vote, or some such variation on these themes./p pThe U.S. bishops have traditionally bought into this myth as well, insisting in their periodic document emFaithful Citizenship/em that U.S. Catholics have a #8220;duty#8221; to vote and, further, that this duty is linked with their faith. Over the years I have become more and more uncomfortable with this sort of claim as I have grown to see much value in the (anti-)practice of principled non-voting, emespecially/em when the principles involved are theological ones./p pa id="more-589"/aOver the last year or so, as the build-up to yet another election year has grown, and memories of the last media circus and election year battles are still fresh in our minds, I had been hoping that the bishops#8217; statement on #8220;faithful citizenship#8221; would quietly omit references to the #8220;Catholic#8217;s duty to vote.#8221; Surely the bishops would have learned from the Church#8217;s election year battles #8212; battles which, frankly, have torn the Church apart #8212; and would not even think to suggest that Catholics have a #8220;duty#8221; to participate in such divisive, hateful behavior. Maybe they would even come to express the virtue of #8220;sitting this one out#8221; as a valid and praiseworthy expression of one#8217;s #8220;faithful citizenship.#8221;/p pMy hopes were not exactly fulfilled. In some ways they were, but in others, quite the opposite./p pMuch of the bishops#8217; new a href="http://www.usccb.org/bishops/FCStatement.pdf"strongdocument/strong/a (PDF) on voting is quite good and provides very clear criteria for those who plan on taking part in this aspect of the political process. The bishops even mention the possibility of choosing not to vote, which they say is a legitimate option emwhen all candidates support intrinsic evil in one way or another: /em/p blockquotep36. When all candidates hold a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods./p/blockquote pBut after saying this, the bishops make a startling statement that takes the notion of a Catholic#8217;s #8220;duty#8221; to vote and steps it up a notch by insisting that the very casting of an electoral vote #8220;also may affect the individual#8217;s salvation#8221;:/p blockquotep38. It is important to be clear that the political choices faced by citizens not only have an impact on general peace and prosperity strongembut also may affect the individual’s salvation/em/strong. Similarly, the kinds of laws and policies supported by public officials affect their spiritual well-being. Pope Benedict XVI, in his recent reflection on the Eucharist as “the sacrament of charity,” challenged all of us to adopt what he calls “a Eucharistic form of life.” This means that the redeeming love we encounter in the Eucharist should shape our thoughts, our words, and our decisions, including those that pertain to the social order./p/blockquote pThis kind of statement, in the middle of what is essentially a list of criteria on #8220;how to vote,#8221; is unfortunate and potentially misleading. Of course politics and salvation have everything to do with one another. After a long history of the popular Catholic mentality of separating the political from the spiritual, liberation theologians (and others) reminded the Church that salvation cannot be divorced from politics. This insight made its way into modern Catholic social teaching, including papal documents of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, under the concept of #8220;integral liberation,#8221; i.e. the notion that salvation, in its complete sense, involves the fullness of liberation, including its spiritual aspects (liberation from sin) and its socio-political aspects (liberation from all that threatens human life and well-being)./p pWith this Catholic principle in mind, that our political orientation, stances, decisions, and involvements emdo /emhave everything to do with our salvation, we must be careful not to reduce politics to voting, as the bishops seem to do here by placing this statement about #8220;salvation#8221; in the middle of a voting guide. Voting is but one part of our entire political lives, and it could be argued that voting is in fact one of the emleast important/em aspects of our political lives. Indeed, this is so because we cannot divide our lives into different compartments, separating the religious aspects of our lives, for example, from everything else. In much the same way, the whole of our lives involves the empolitical/em, not in the sense of political campaigns and projects, but the way we envision human life and society to be ordered. Therefore, our chosen state in life, the things we buy, the values we hold, our choice of career#8230; everything about our lives is political. Voting is but one very minor part of the political nature of all human life and activity./p pThe problem with equating the act of voting with politics as such can be seen clearly in the fact that, for Catholics, the options that present themselves come election time are limiting. The U.S. bishops have rightly pointed out in the past that when it comes to partisan politics, Catholics should feel #8220;politically homeless.#8221; During the last presidential election, I chose to vote for pragmatic reasons. I felt awful doing so. It occurred to me much later that no Catholic should have been comfortable voting four years ago, and truly no Catholic should have felt emgood/em or emproud/em of the particular candidate he or she chose if he or she was truly approaching the voting booth emas a Catholic/em who was making a sincere effort to bring emthe fullness of Catholicism/em to bear on that decision./p pIf it is the case that Catholics in the United States are truly #8220;politically homeless#8221; as the bishops have said, and if I am right that Catholics can never be satisfied or proud of who they do vote for, I find it strange that the bishops would reduce the Catholic understanding of political involvement to this simple action that is, ultimately, so restrictive and by which we should never feel satisfied. And if salvation and politics have everything to do with one another (and they do), the fact that bishops seem to suggest that emvoting/em is the way toward this salvation, or can even really affect our salvation in any profound sense, is utterly baffling./p pTo argue that it does seems elevate voting#8217;s importance both politically and theologically. The political reasons seem, to me at least, to be quite obvious. Theologically, the matter was described well by the New Testament scholar and Episcopal priest A.K.M. Adam a couple years back at the annual gathering of the a href="http://ekklesiaproject.org"stronga target="_blank" href="http://www.ekklesiaproject.org"Ekklesia Project/a/strong/a in a lecture entitled #8220;The Strong Right Arm That Holds for Peace: Godliness as an Alternative to Empire#8221; (available a href="http://akma.disseminary.org/?p=439#more-439"stronghere/strong/a and also as a a href="http://akma.disseminary.org/images/EkklesiaProject.pdf"strongPDF/strong/a or a href="http://www.chuckp3.com/AKMA_Adams.mp3"strongmp3/strong/a). In that lecture, Adam argued that imperial America (the term #8220;imperial America#8221; is, of course, less controversial now than it was ten or twenty years ago) has its own set of myths and practices in which its citizens live, move, and have their being and which take on an unspoken sacred quality./p blockquotepIn the name of realism, in the name of deference to honoring those who bear the effects of war (effects that our everyday language reveals that we regard as a sacrifice), strident voices demand that Christians profess their loyalty to a national ensign, and observe the festivals that the government establishes as though they were feasts of holy martyrs. The combined interests and sensitivities – often innocent, often commendable – of state power, of patriotic citizens, of injured families, and of corporate advantage converge in an ambiance I will call emstrongSacramerica/strong/em. In Sacramerica, the national pride of the United States blossoms into a displaced messianic hope that subordinates the God of the Decalogue to the sentimental consolations and pragmatic policy interests of a vast congregation of baseball fans, apple-pie eaters, and fireworks admirers./p/blockquote pIncluded in this culture of #8220;Sacramerica#8221; are a set of what Adam calls emsignifing practices/em, #8220;ways that people express important claims about themselves and the world not only by talking or writing, but by the ways they behave, by the ways they interact with others.#8221; Some of these practices can be quite conscious, he says, but/p blockquotep[m]ore often, though, we participate in signification less self-consciously, more by elective affiliation, with much less formal expectations and obligations; in so doing, we float along with the significations made available by mass culture and socially-dominant institutions./p/blockquote pAdam goes on to insist that Christians should learn to recognize the signifying practices of #8220;Sacramerica#8221; which include the state#8217;s insistence that/p blockquotepone must vote, that liberal democracy constitutes a political order unexceptionably superior to other alternatives, that the way to resolve all conflicts is to hold a vote of some sort, hence that being right in the world should be correlative to winning#8230;./p/blockquote pAnd finally, Christians should not only recognize the myths and practices of Sacramerica but should actively resist their #8220;misplaced Messianic hopes#8221; through another set of signifying practices rooted in imaginative discipleship:/p blockquotepIn order resist the signifying system of Sacramerica, I propose that we need to begin the work, the practice, of imagining our discipleship as an antithetical signifying practice, a practice of living in a way that throws Sacramerica off-step, out of balance./p/blockquote pAdam suggests not voting as one way to resist the practices of Sacramerica. The state and its mythos tell us that our salvation is bound up in democracy and the electoral process. Our Church leaders seem to be telling us the same thing. At a time in history when the candidates and the process that produces them seem to be devolving into a parody of itself, in an election that will undoubtedly give us nothing but options in which choosing one or the other will involve backing persons and programs that openly and loudly defend the willful, demonic defacing of human life #8212; the very image of God #8212; through abortion, war, and torture, shouldn#8217;t we give up on even suggesting that our salvation #8220;might#8221; depend upon this laughable electoral ritual, that anything about it might emsalvific? /emembr / /em/p pYes, our salvation as Christians and as human beings is undeniably a political reality. And do not misunderstand me: voting can play a role in the way we practice our discipleship politically. The way we vote, emif/em we vote, does have significance. But perhaps our salvation #8212; our integral liberation #8212; is bound up in the possibility of the counter-cultural option emnot/em to vote rather than playing the empire#8217;s game #8212; yet again, like clockwork #8212; by throwing up our hands and throwing in our lot with inevitably sub-par candidates and telling our fellow members of the Body of Christ that #8220;their salvation depends#8221; on voting for the #8220;right#8221; person./p pThanks, bishops, for the permission. If my salvation depends on it, I#8217;ll sit this one out. /p


  10. Iraq in the Long View: Behnam Abu Al-Souf
    11. 22 Feb 2008 at 9:00am
    Listen
    Listen to the archeologist Behnam Abu Al-Souf long enough, and you'll be hearing the Iraqi uncle you never knew you had. Dr. Ben as I call him is a great bear of muscular, hands-on scholarship. For half a century he has been an eminence in the excavation and preservation of neolithic Northern Iraq. By now he is a sort of Father Time from Mesopotamia, a man with ten or fifteen thousand years of historical memory in his head, about the land for which archeology was invented. He is at Brown this winter, a "scholar at risk." And we have been having this long, free-ranging conversation about the recent and ancient past of Iraq, about the Baghdad he finally escaped ("I came out of Hell"), and sometimes about the future of his country. h4a href="http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Watson_Institute/Open_Source/Behnam_Abu_Al-Soo f.mp3"Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Dr. Behnam Abu Al-Souf here ( 57 minutes, 26 mb mp3) /a/h4 div class="image-right"img src='/wp-content/DrBen.jpg' alt='Dr Ben' /Dr. Behnam Abu Al-Souf at Brown/p/diva href="http://www.artsmia.org/world-myths/viewallart/nebuchad_background.html"King Nebuchadnezzar/a of Babylon in the sixth century B.C. can sound like the recent past in Dr. Ben's telling. The really ancient Sumerian past introduces giants like a href="http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/ch03.htm"Sargon/a, the king of Mesopotamia in the third millenium B.C. And then there's the king and legend a href="http://gilgamesh.psnc.pl/"Gilgamesh/a, Ben's "hero of heroes, the best of men." In the Sumerian epic and "creation myth," the oldest work in literature, Gilgamesh was the proto-giant who (around 2700 B.C.) wrestled with the shepherd Enkidu on a symbolic line between civilization and wilderness. "Gilgamesh won, and they were friends thereafter," as Dr. Ben puts it. These were the romantic "idylls of the king" in which Dr. Ben grew up. The Iraq of his youth in the 1940s was a "golden age," as he recalls it, in a safe and sane British-built constitutional monarchy under the Hashemite King Faisal II. Dr. Ben came of a Chaldean Catholic family in the old, religiously mixed and tolerant city of Mosul -- opposite the ancient city of Nineveh on the Tigris River. Ben was a body-builder in his youth, and a swimming star. A 40-kilometer swim in the Tigris was an afternoon's good exercise. His orientation to strongmen and heroes was his introduction to classical history, which he studied with the first generation of homegrown archeologists in Iraq, and then at Cambridge, where he got his Ph.D. blockquote Ten thousand years is... an open book. I read it, because I lived it. Not only I study it, but I lived those events. I don't practice archeology as a government employee or official. I practice archeology as a lover. You understand? More than admirer, a lover. That is why I make good progress in archeology. When I used to talk on the television, I don't need to have a paper with numbers and names. All are written here, on my chest, on my mind -- ten thousand years or more of events in my memory. I just talk, and they enjoy it. Even Saddam used to like my talk on the television. He used to tell a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2974443.stm"Tariq Aziz/a [his foreign minister]: 'Look at your friend.' He used to call me a href="http://web.utk.edu/~giles/"Ashurbanipal/a -- the famous Assyrian king whose library was found at Nineveh -- because I resemble the Assyrian and so he used to tell the people: 'Ashurbanipal is talking.' I mean: Saddam I don't think loved anybody, or liked anybody. Only himself perhaps. But he enjoyed watching me, and he used to tell Tariq Aziz: 'look at this man -- I like him. He talks without fear. He's bold. I wish there are many Christians like him in Iraq...' h6Dr. Behnam Abu Al-Souf, in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, Brown University, February, 2008/h6/blockquote div class="image-left"img src='/wp-content/DocBen.jpg' alt='Doc Ben' /[Frederick Fullerton photos]/p/divThe recent history of Dr. Ben's Iraq -- starting with the war with Iran through the 1980s -- is a nightmare spiraling downward to insanity and the unspeakable. The Iran-Iraq War was a monstrous bloodletting for which Ben holds Saddam mainly responsible. The invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was a worse mistake that brought disaster to his country. What you hear in Ben's account of the last years is a man fending off the absurdity of what he himself has just experienced. blockquoteOn the Voice of America I heard it myself from Dick Cheney: 'we could have toppled Saddam Hussein, but we were afraid we'd bring chaos to the country.' It was wise of Bush, the father, not to come to Baghdad at that time... Ahmed Chalabi [the expatriate Iraqi advocate and point-man of the US invasion in 2003] was living abroad for 40 years, not living and suffering under the regime. Reading Paul Bremer's book, a href="http://www.metacritic.com/books/authors/bremerpaul/myyeariniraq"iMy Year in Iraq/i/a, I realize even the Americans didn't like Chalabi... [On the night of 'shock and awe,' the start of the American invasion on March 20, 2003] I was asleep in my house in East Baghdad. I said to my wife: 'My God, they did it again.' The Americans! And I said to myself: 'Saddam, you are to be blamed...' It was as if he wanted to be attacked. As if he asked for it. We asked for it... The invasion for many Iraqis was a relief. They were suffering under Saddam Hussein. What happened later, after months of chaos... people started to think: at least there was security under Saddam Hussein... When we realized that antiquities were in danger in the National Museum, I heard an American army officer say, 'it is not our job to be policemen.' ... But they protected the Ministry of Oil... The first job of a conquering army is to protect. I cannot forgive them for that. [Of the pillaging of the National Museum -- in the period when Donald Rumsfeld said: "stuff happens"] Four unique Sumerian pieces were taken. Luckily they came back after 10 days... There is a great loss of smaller pieces: a loss but not a great tragedy... The rest of the figurines could be compensated by more excavation... We could go into the field and bring back ten times what we lost... It is easy to talk, sitting 8000 kilometers away. But as an archeologist and scientist and intellectual who loves his country: we don't need democracy. It is too early to have 'democracy' after 40 years without a parliamentary process... I wish they [the Americans] had left a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/19/world/main1419408.shtml"Ayad Allawi/a in charge -- a 'good Baathist,' against Saddam... a shrewd, tough, clever Arab nationalist before Shia sectarianism and the politics of revenge took over... We missed the Allawi opportunity... We need severe martial law, and to stop this parliamentary system which is not benefitting anyone. h6Dr. Behnam Abu Al-Souf, in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, Brown University, February, 2008/h6/blockquote There may be as much anecdotage and argument as analysis here. Certainly there are more questions than answers. I still want to know how we Americans thought we could contribute to a new Iraq by a war of humiliation and occupation. I still wonder who is going to help large-spirited Iraqis like Dr. Ben get their country and their heritage back. We will continue the conversation in a public session at the Watson Institute on April 10, and with your help on these pages. Talk to your Uncle Ben. br /


  11. Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke
    12. 23 Apr 2008 at 10:00am
    Listen
    h4a href="http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Watson_Institute/Open_Source/Nicholson_Baker.m p3"Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Nicholson Baker (53 minutes, 25 mb mp3) /a/h4 div class="image-right" img src='http://www.radioopensource.org/wp-content/nicholsonbaker.jpg' alt='nick baker' /pNicholson Baker: history by hyperlink/p/divblockquoteA wing commander in the [British] Royal Air Force [in Iraq], J. A. Chamier, published his views on how best to deal with tribal rebellions. The commanding officer must choose the most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe, said Chamier, and attack it with all available aircraft. "The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle," Chamier wrote. "This sounds brutal, I know, but it must be made brutal to start with. The threat alone in the future will prove efficacious if the lesson is once properly learnt." It was 1921.h6Nicholson Baker, a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9781416567844-0"ibHuman Smoke/b/i/a, page 8./h6 Frederick Birchall, Berlin correspondent for iThe New York Times/i, published an article about Germany's preparations for war. It was October 8, 1933. Birchell quoted from a recent book by Ewald Banse, a teacher at the Technical High School in Brunswick, Germany. The book was called iWehrwissenschaft/i -- "Military Science." War was no longer a matter of marches and medals, Banse observed: "It is gas and plague. It is tank and aircraft horror. It is baseness and falsehood. It is hunger and poverty." And because war is so horrible, Banse said, it must be incorporated into the school curriculum and taught as a new and comprehensive science: "The methods and aims of the new science are to create an unshakable belief in the high ethical value of war and to produce in the individual the psychological readiness for sacrifice in the cause of nation and state." h6Nicholson Baker, a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/books/04bake.html"ibHuman Smoke/b/i/a, page 44./h6 Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that England was officially at war with Germany... It was September 3, 1939. Churchill'