jesus

It's not exactly new, but some folks in the Southern Baptist Convention are pushing their leadership to plan an "exit strategy" from the public school system. NPR had an interesting story, which you can listen to here.

I don't know whether to be concerned or think "good riddance."

The man pushing the strategy, Roger Moran, has some baffling quotes, including

It is time for responsible Southern Baptists to develop an exit strategy out of the public schools because the public schools are no longer allowed to train our children in the ways that the scripture commands that we train them. And that is in the ways of the lord, not in the ways of the world.

I must admit I'm not especially godly, but to claim that you want your children not to be taught "the ways of the world" seems a bit goofy to me. But I suppose they are entitled, and better that they take their kids out of school than insist that public schools teach to Baptist ideals.

Another of Moran's statements has some encouraging news:

Evangelical Christianity is losing 88% of it's children. At the age of 18, they're leaving the Church, and they're not coming back. Or at least they're showing no signs of coming back. And if that is even remotely true, then what that says is, we got a serious problem.

The NPR report continues: "Moran says it's not just the public schools, but also movies, popular music, and other cultural influences that pull children away from the biblical Christian perspective."

In an article on The Conservative Voice, Nicholas Jackson has more interesting thoughts on Baptists in public schools. Apparantly

never has there been such a clear antithesis between those who love our God, our country and our children, and those who wish to destroy our God, our country and our children. Nowhere is this battle being fought more aggressively and fiercely than in the halls of our government (public schools).

Even worse, "It is self-evident that secular humanism and its concomitant moral relativism has become the official state sponsored religion in government schools." Not to mention that "we are raising up warriors for homosexual activism rather than warriors for Jesus Christ." and:

The impact of homosexual activism alone has been staggering in my sphere of influence. There are young women in their early twenties, having lesbian affairs on the job, and acting it out on the clock. Women are abandoning their husbands and children for other women, men are abandoning their wives and children for other men, there are countless men who want to be women, and countless women who want to be men.

There are some weird people in this country.

mercenaries

An increasing reliance on "private security companies" by the United States has led to a recent report by Amnesty International accusing it of "war outsourcing."

Amnesty's Executive Director Larry Cox states that "War outsourcing is creating the corporate equivalent of Guantánamo Bay — a virtual rules-free zone in which perpetrators are not likely to be held accountable for breaking the law." He goes on to claim that the U.S. "has sacrificed its most fundamental principle [human rights] by abusing prisoners as a matter of policy, by 'disappearing' detainees into a network of secret prisons and by abducting and sending people for interrogation to countries that practice torture." This doesn't seem like the sort of thing a country leading the war against terror should be doing.

In a somewhat related matter, the "military contractor" Blackwater USA is being sued for the wrongful death of four employees killed in Falluja, Iraq. Blackwater is a "professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations firm" according to its website. Essentially, the U.S. pays them to do the same job as the military. Well, not quite. The U.S. pays Halliburton, which pays another security firm, ESS, slightly less. They then pay another firm, Regency, slightly less, which pays Blackwater slightly less. Blackwater then goes on to pay its employees slightly less. Profit for everyone.

The mind-boggling details are a bit too complex to relate here, but The Nation does a good job.

Blackwater doesn't discriminate, though. They've profited nicely from Hurricane Katrina, are prepared to take on "the Darfur account."

recent news round-up

There has been a lot going on in the past few days, and I've been bookmarking articles left and right to remind myself to post about them. But, since I'll probably never get a chance to go as in-depth as I like with analysis and commentary, I'll just stick them all up here for you to peruse at your leisure, highlighting my favorite parts. It's all over the place, but interesting (at least to my mind) nonetheless.


Flak Over 'Fast Food Nation': US food manufacturers rally to oppose a film and book that blame them for obesity

More than a dozen trade groups representing producers of beef, potatoes, milk and snacks, along with restaurant groups, are fighting back with a media campaign to counter what one groups contends is the "indigestible propaganda" Mr. Schlosser [author of Fast Food Nation] is spreading. They've launched a Web site called Best Food Nation that quotes employees from Tyson Foods Inc., Cargill Inc. and other food concerns praising the quality and safety of the food supply...

The Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Va., organization that says its mission is to further conservative causes, recently sent a letter to the headmaster of a California school before Mr. Schlosser was scheduled to appear there, warning that his message would "be harmful to your school and to your children," and that the author "undermines and assaults American businessmen."


Egypt continues down the "road toward democracy"

Riot police beat and arrested hundreds of demonstrators today who had gathered to support two judges facing disciplinary charge for charging publicly that parliamentary elections were fixed.

Egypt's treatment of the judges and the demonstrators, its reauthorization of an emergency law and its decision to postpone local elections for two years all threaten to take attention away from [the World Economic Forum, which began on Saturday], that officials hoped would highlight this country's efforts at economic reform. Recent decisions in Egypt, from arresting a popular blogger to postponing local elections, present a problem for the White House. Not only do they contradict President Bush's call for spreading democracy, but they complicate the administration's effort to maintain the nearly $2 billion a year that Egypt receives in military and development aid in the face of some calls from Congress to re-evaluate the package.

An appeals court on Thursday upheld the fraud conviction of Ayman Nour, the candidate who challenged President Hosni Mubarak and his 25 years of one-man rule in elections last year, effectively consigning the fiery lawyer to five years in prison. Nour was convicted in December of forging documents needed to legalize his Tomorrow Party, even though a government commission had approved the papers in October 2004 and a witness at his trial said he was tortured into testifying against Nour.

Nour finished a distant second in Egypt's first multiparty presidential election last September and incurred the wrath of officials by claiming fraud. His campaign, though it attracted only about 7 percent of the vote, was notable for its energetic effort to reach large numbers of Egyptians. The government occasionally sent out police and provocateurs to block Nour from reaching rallies in the countryside.

During the presidential vote, members of Mubarak's National Democratic Party openly recruited voters at polling places. During the parliamentary rounds, police kept voters away from several polling stations and killed 11 people who tried to reach the ballot boxes. There has been no judicial inquiry into the deaths.

Protesters accused the United States of being soft on Mubarak. Last week, a day after Cairo police beat scores of demonstrators during a march in support of the judges, Gamal Mubarak, the president's son, secretly visited the White House. He was greeted by President Bush and met with Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The meeting became public only because a reporter for al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite television news channel, observed Mubarak entering the White House.


Language in leases to oil companies for off-shore drilling "mistakenly" did not include a price cap for royalty incentives

In an attempt to revoke billions of dollars worth of government incentives to oil and gas producers, the House on Thursday approved a measure that would pressure companies to renegotiate more than 1,000 leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The measure, approved 252 to 165 over the objections of many Republican leaders, is intended to prevent companies from avoiding at least $7 billion in payments to the government over the next five years for oil and gas they produce in publicly owned waters.

Democrats argued that energy companies were shortchanging taxpayers at the same time that soaring prices for crude oil and natural gas had pushed industry profits to record highs. Republican leaders, who had hoped to avoid a vote on the issue, agreed that companies should not be getting lucrative incentives in times of high prices. But they insisted that the government had no right to reopen valid leases that it signed years ago with offshore drillers.

The lopsided vote to rescind royalty incentives came three months after The New York Times disclosed that companies drilling in publicly-owned waters of the Gulf of Mexico were set to escape royalties on about $65 billion worth of oil and gas over the next five years. The windfall stemmed in large part from a major error in leases that the Clinton administration signed with energy companies.

To encourage drilling and exploration in water thousands of feet deep, the government offered to let companies avoid the standard royalties, usually 12 percent or 16 percent of sales, for large quantities of the oil and gas they produced. But the incentives, which have been expanded in recent years by the Bush administration and by Congress, were supposed to stop as soon as prices for oil climbed above $34 a barrel and prices for natural gas climbed above $4 per thousand cubic feet. For reasons that are now being investigated, the Interior Department omitted the restriction in 1,000 leases it signed in 1998 and 1999. In addition, the Bush administration offered extra "royalty relief" to companies that drilled very deep wells in very shallow water. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimated in March that the royalty incentives could cost the government $20 billion over the next 25 years.

Ed: this does raise some contract law issues. a bigger question is: oil has been WAY over $34/barrell for quite a while now. when was this first caught, and where was the news when it was??


Receiving and distributing information that was obtained by illegal means (leaks of classified information, tapping into cellphone signals) by a third party might be a crime in itself.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales raised the possibility yesterday that New York Times journalists could be prosecuted for publishing classified information based on the outcome of the criminal investigation underway into leaks to the Times of data about the National Security Agency's surveillance of terrorist-related calls between the United States and abroad.

Yesterday, Gonzales said, "I understand very much the role that the press plays in our society, the protection under the First Amendment we want to promote and respect . . . but it can't be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity."

Related:

Rep. Jim McDermott tells the story of how Rep. John Boehner came to be his political nemesis. The story has its roots in a previous Republican ethics scandal in Congress, but at its core it is about take-no-prisoners politics and a challenge to First Amendment freedoms—a challenge that has alarmed free-speech advocates.

A Florida couple, John and Alice Martin, were messing around with their police radio scanner and happened to pick up the call [between Boehner, Newt Gingrich, and other Republicans] as the Republicans were talking about how to spin Gingrich's ethics charge. [A condition of Gingrich's settlement for his ethics violation was that no "spinning" would be done.] Being Democrats who followed politics, they realized whom they were hearing and decided to make a tape for posterity. Their congresswoman, Karen L. Thurman, encouraged them to give the tape to McDermott because of his position on the ethics committee.

What the Martins had done—recording a private cell-phone conversation and distributing it to others—was illegal. (Indeed, they were later prosecuted by the Justice Department, pleaded guilty to intercepting private electronic communications, and paid a $500 fine.) But the Martins' illegal behavior had produced information that was of public importance: a recording of congressmen plotting to get around an agreement with the House ethics committee. To get it out to the public, they turned to their representatives in Congress, and in that sense, this was not all that different a scenario than the common one in which a whistleblower, in violation of the law, makes a copy of a secret government or corporate record and then provides that record to another person, often a journalist, who has the power to make sure the document is widely read.

The story of the tape, which hit the front page of the New York Times on January 10, 1997, proved to be a political sensation, and when it came out that McDermott was behind the leak, Republicans reacted with fury. McDermott, however, believed he had a First Amendment right to leak the contents of the tape, just like the journalists who wrote about it had a right to quote from it; none of them, after all, had participated in the illegal behavior that led to the creation of the tape in the first place. Republicans begged to differ, demanding an investigation by Janet Reno's Justice Department. When that produced no criminal charges against McDermott, Boehner decided, in March of 1998, to file a civil suit against McDermott seeking $10,000 in damages for the disclosure of his private phone call.

It was the first time one congressman had sued another in civil court, and it marked the beginning of a draining legal fight that has gone up and down the federal court system for the last eight years, costing each side well over half a million dollars. "This is the modern-day duel," McDermott says.

Another battle of process vs content:

An unusual FBI raid of a Democratic congressman's office over the weekend prompted complaints yesterday from leaders in both parties, who said the tactic was unduly aggressive and may have breached the constitutional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government. Rep. William J. Jefferson (La.), who is at the center of a 14-month investigation for allegedly accepting bribes for promoting business ventures in Africa, also held a news conference in which he denied any wrongdoing and denounced the raid on his office as an "outrageous intrusion."

The Saturday raid of Jefferson's quarters in the Rayburn House Office Building posed a new political dilemma for the leaders of both parties, who felt compelled to protest his treatment while condemning any wrongdoing by the lawmaker. The dilemma was complicated by new details contained in an 83-page affidavit unsealed on Sunday, including allegations that the FBI had videotaped Jefferson taking $100,000 in bribe money and then found $90,000 of that cash stuffed inside his apartment freezer.

Ed: the normal investigative route involves months of subpoenas, congressional interviews, and media spin cycles. One issue to consider is the fact that this wasn't done for our favorite Congressman, Randy Cunningham, or Tom "the Hammer" DeLay. However, I'm inclined to think that search warrants should be issued to investigate ALL cases of potential criminal misconduct by lawmakers, rather than NONE of them (which is what's being advocated by vocal members of Congress on both sides of the aisle).

what's another billion here or there?

Having just finished cutting taxes (decreasing government revenue), Congress is now getting to work on increasing spending. The new plan includes a seven percent increase in military spending (to over half a trillion dollars) and provides at most no increases in spending on education and national parks.

Not surprisingly, the recent tax bill focused on providing breaks in dividend and capital gains taxes, as well as limiting the Alternative Minimum Tax. Both of these disproportionally hit affluent Americans. Left out of the bill were breaks for college tuition payments and savings credit for low-income families.

The military spending increase coupled with the recent tax cut makes up about one-third of the projected budget shortfall. Since President Bush took office we have gone from a projected surplus of $500 billion for 2007 to a shortfall of $350 billion. And still we're cutting taxes.

a WINNING strategy!

House Democrats, trying to capitalize on conservative dissatisfaction with Republicans, are reaching out to Christian voters with radio advertisements critical of Republican proposals to overhaul Social Security.

...What?

Republicans have alienated the fiscal conservative base of the party with their crazy spending, expansion of expensive entitlement programs, and freaky domestic and international policies. Meanwhile, the religious right bloc is stronger than it's been in years, so much so that they've extended the abortion debate to begin advocating for limits on contraception. So, instead of galvanizing the socially liberal base - which has become disenchanted with the lack of direction and leadership in the Democratic party - and targeting the disgruntled conservatives that are sick of ridiculous deficit spending, the Dems are going after the strong-as-hell religious base of the Republican party by talking about social security, an issue for which the Dem position has generally been limited to "Bush's plan sucks"?

Good job, kids. Really fucking brilliant.

scientific consensus: who needs it?

This Modern World is one of my favorite caroons, but I'd lost touch with it for a while. Here, a recent tidbit for your viewing pleasure.

rulers, and not the kind you measure with

I was reminded of this by Duke's post:

They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations.

I first saw this at a seminar in February and was quite impressed - not just because of the idea that Time Warner is connected to AmEx is connected to Viacom etc etc, but also by the construction of the site itself. If you've got an hour to kill, go play around a bit. It's kinda fun.

the death tax

I could write forever on taxes, but for now there's this.

Apparently the efforts over the past decade to repeal the estate tax have been orchestrated by 18 of the country's wealthiest families. A major part of the President's tax cuts, estate taxes are being gradually phased out, with higher minimum thresholds every year until 2011. At that point the cuts expire, reverting back to a lowly $1 million threshold -- only a person's first million dollars will be tax exempt. This was necessary to "balance" future budgets; the idea was that they could count the money expected to be brought in by the tax to offset future deficits while at the same time fully expecting Congress to act before 2011 to make the cut permanent. A brilliant job of passing the buck.

According to the report, the families have spend $490 million dollars lobbying in the past 8 years, and stand to save $72 billion if the tax is repealed permanently (or if they all die in 2010). Much of the money goes to persuading the public that the tax primarily hurts small business and farm owners, when in fact fewer than the richest one half of one percent of people are subject to the estate tax each year.

On a slightly related note, if you are interested in knowing where your Congressional Representative gets money from, you can do so here.

egypt is just going to hell

Police Beat Crowds Backing Egypt's Judges

President Hosni Mubarak's government dispatched thousands of riot police officers into the center of the city on Thursday to silence demonstrators intent on showing support for judges demanding independence from the president. The police clubbed men and women trying to demonstrate as well as half a dozen journalists.

[some pictures here]

After small steps last year toward greater political freedom, Mr. Mubarak's government stopped when it came to Egypt's nearly 7,000 judges, who have called not only for independence, but also for the right to be the sole monitor of elections. The judges say the system is corrupt at least in part because the justice minister, appointed by the president, oversees the judiciary. Government officials have said the judges have adequate independence and security decisions are made to protect people and property.

Last December, for the first time, the government tolerated protesters chanting anti-Mubarak slogans. But it has shown no tolerance for protesters backing the judges. That has put the United States, which considers Egypt one of its closest allies in the region and gives it nearly $2 billion annually in aid, in an awkward position. But, faced with huge challenges in the region — from Iran to Sudan — the United States has appeared to back off on putting pressure on Egypt over its domestic policies.

***

It's of note that, for better or worse, the most organized opposition group in the oppressive political environment is the Muslim Brotherhood, which supports creation of a conservative Islamic government.

disagreeing with the experts. again.

The special American Bar Association (ABA) committee that evaluates judicial nominees has unanimously rated Michael B. Wallace, one of President Bush's appeals court nominees, as unqualified for the post. This appears to be the first time in 25 years that a nominee has received a unanimous rating of unqualified from the committee. The White House disagrees with the ABA's rating and supports the nomination.

Article here.
ABA ratings here.
More on Mike B.Wallace here and here, and in his own words.

I wish the ABA would publish their reasoning.

introducing (and one other thing)

in the spirit sharing and caring, or whatever, it's my pleasure to welcome dave to the pretty things blog.

hi dave! write good things.

in other news, anyone with a tv has probably seen the new vw ads. love 'em or hate 'em, they're a new step in car marketing.