While blogosphere triumphalism is one of my least favorite forms of triumphalism, this is pretty neat. Harper’s Magazine wrote a story about Colorado Springs’ large evangelical New Life Church. Colorado Springs blogger Non Prophet wrote about the article, and attracted the attention of both Jeff Sharlet, the author of the article, and Rob Brendle, associate pastor at the Church. Non Prophet ended up interviewing both; he asked Brendle what errors he thought Sharlet had made, then let Sharlet answer those criticisms. It’s an interesting exchange, and one that just wouldn’t have happened a few years ago.
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Ted
To the editors of the New Republic:
I am a former subscriber to your magazine who has let my subscription lapse. I’m one of the people who periodically receives invitations to resubscribe as an “old friend”. I should explain that when I let my subscription lapse, I was simply choking in reading materials and not reacting in horror to your non-left positions. (For what it’s worth, my most-read weekly nowadays is BusinessWeek.). The New Republic is excellent far more often than it’s infuriating, and we’d be better off if all journals of political opinion shared your willingness to seriously consider the arguments of the other side. Unfortunately, not all arguments are worthy of serious consideration.
Recently, Amnesty International released its 2005 annual report of human rights violations around the globe. In connection with this report, Irene Khan, the Secretary General, made a wide-ranging speech criticizing the United States, the UN, Western Europe, and the governments of Sudan, Zimbabwe, China, and Russia, among others. In this speech, she made an overheated and historically ignorant comparison of Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet gulags. In response, Bush administration officials joined the ignoble ranks of leaders who have responded to Amnesty International reports of human rights abuses with spin and self-pity. President Bush said, “I’m aware of the Amnesty International report, and it’s absurd.” Vice-President Cheney said that he didn’t take Amnesty seriously, and Donald Rumsfeld called the description “reprehensible”. A small army of pundits rushed forward to attack Amnesty International’s credibility.
We had a truly remarkable debate. On one hand, we had an organization with a 40-year history of standing up for human rights regardless of borders and ideology, criticizing the United States for holding prisoners without due process and torturing them. Only a fool would deny that this is, in fact, happening. On the other hand, we have an Administration accusing Amnesty International of poor word choice. Your contribution to the debate was a piece criticizing Amnesty for the use of the term “gulag”.
I completely understand the objection to the term. After all, the gulags were a vastly larger evil, and a part of a far more sinister and omnipresent system of repression. However, I have to question your priorities. Your magazine supported the war on Iraq on the basis of human rights. (Like the Administration, you used Amnesty’s reports of Saddam’s tyranny without hesitation in arguing for the war.) Surely human rights abuses performed in our name, by our elected government, deserve scrutiny and criticism, even if such abuses don’t approach the depths of Stalin or Saddam. It seems obvious to me that Amnesty doesn’t deserve your sneers.
We have seen horrors, great and small, in the past century. There have always been some who have done what they could to oppose them. History will not look kindly on those who made excuses, looked the other way, or told the supporters of justice to keep their damn voices down. I expect no better from the alleluia chorus of movement conservatives. Too many have shown that their interest in human rights ends when it ceases to be a useful club against domestic opponents. But I expect more from the New Republic.
As I mentioned, I’m frequently invited to resubscribe to your magazine. I see that a digital subscription to the New Republic can be had for $29.95. I’m not going to buy one. Instead, I’m going to send that money to Amnesty International, who have done more for human rights than perhaps any volunteer organization existing. And I’m going to encourage my readers to do the same thing.
Sincerely,
Ted Barlow
P.S. You can imagine a world in which the term “gulag” had not been used in that speech. In that world, do you imagine that the Amnesty report would have set off a serious effort on the part of the Bush Administration to correct its abuses? Or do you think that they would find another excuse- any excuse- to belittle and ignore the report? The question answers itself, doesn’t it?
Do not, under any circumstances, heat an empty Teflon-covered nonstick pan on the range for more than two or three minutes. At temperatures above 500 degrees (beyond the range of normal home cooking), Teflon will release fumes that cause flu-like symptoms in humans and can be fatal to birds.
(No birds were harmed in the preparation of this post. One human, however, feels like he’s been chewed up and spit out of something big.)
Gary Farber has an interesting series of posts (here, here, here, and here) about elements of Revenge of the Sith that ended up on the cutting room floor.
From Saturday Night Live‘s TV Funhouse, the adventures of Divertor! The Jay Leno impression just slays me.
I don’t know what made me think of the Movie Trailer Cliché Theater, but it never fails to raise a smile. I miss Modern Humorist something fierce.
All the Deep Throat talk reminded me of the pleasant little comedy Dick, which proposes that Deep Throat was really two bubbly teenage girls who wandered downstairs at the wrong time during a sleepover at the Watergate. Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch (from “Kids in the Hall”) steal the show as Woodward and Bernstein, but Jim Breuer (as John Dean) and Harry Shearer (as G. Gordon Liddy) have some moments. I think we’ve got some readers who would enjoy it at their hastily-scheduled Deep Throat parties this weekend.
In case you missed it, the popular right-libertarian blog QandO has recently written a detailed post in opposition to torture by U.S. forces. An excerpt:
Torture and abuse is not just a moral or legal failure. It is a strategic failure in the War on Terror. Certainly, we will never be nice enough to convince Zarqawi—and the ~20,000 like him—to stop killing Americans. But there are another 55 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan who may still be convinced of our moral superiority to the Islamic fundamentalists, the terrorists and their ilk; another 55 million people whose hearts and minds may still be won.
Following a link to James Taranto from Pandagon, I find that Taranto got paid for writing this:
The Associated Press dispatch in which we found the original Kerry quote also includes this one:
“The fact is, 10 million more Americans voted for our idea of what we wanted to do than voted for Bill Clinton in 1996 when he was the sitting president of the United States,” Kerry said. “The fact is, a million people volunteered. The fact is, across America we created an energy.”“We created an energy”? But the first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So much for the Democrats’ claim to be the party of science.
Well, there goes that.
I am very, very sorry that it took me so long to pull this together. Many thanks to Anthony at Things You Don’t Talk About in Polite Company for the name, and many thanks to those who emailed. Newish bloggers, I’m going to do this again in two or three weeks, and I’d love to hear from you about your best posts. Opinions expressed are not necessarily mine.
Mark Thoma at Economist’s View has a terrific basic-principles primer about The Need for Social Insurance.
Charles Norman Todd at Freiheit und Wissen compares the Bush administration’s treatment of two different Latin American governments in Guatemala and Venezuela: Two Models for U.S. Diplomacy. He also edits the Carnival of the Un-Capitalists:
Our Carnival is not meant to be anti-capitalist. Rather, we are just trying to gather the best economic posts from the left on issues ranging from globalization and neoliberalism, to income disparity, free-trade, corporate malfeasance, etc, and so on.
Patrick Smith at Tiberius and Gaius Speaking… is likely to get some angry comments about Is the Republican Party truly fascist?
Wufnik at Bazzfazz is an American ex-pat in the London. He’s got an interesting post on Team Horowitz’s take on European anti-Americanism:
American xenophobia.
Delicious Pundit has a nice metaphor going on in The martini of public policy.
Nick at News From Beyond The North Wind writes about Cumbrian company towns in These Preterite Shoes.
Chase McInerney at Cutting to the Chase is a freelance journalist in Oklahoma; he writes In Defense of Newsweek.
The Houston Bar Association has just published its judicial evaluation poll.
The poll, which is completed every two years, asked HBA members to rate judges “outstanding,” “acceptable” or “poor” in seven categories, including following the law, demonstrating impartiality, paying attention in court and using attorneys’ time efficiently. It also assigned them an overall rating. The poll included federal, state, county and municipal judges.
About 1,200 lawyers, 11 percent of the association’s membership, responded to the poll. Most judges were not rated by every attorney participating in the poll because lawyers were asked only to consider judges they have worked with directly.
You’ll never guess who was judged to be the worst Supreme Court Justice in Texas. Go on, try. (In her defense, the poll apparently asked nothing about Sunday School teaching.)
About a third of the 152 adult guests who slept at the White House or Camp David last year were fundraisers or donors to President Bush’s campaigns, but at least half of those also are family or old friends.
It’s not surprising that there’s a lot of overlap between a successful politician’s fundraisers/ donors and his old friends, so I appreciate that they tried to break that out. It looks like about 1/2 of 1/3 of the guests were donors or fundraisers who were not family or old friends. That’s probably a little less than 16%.
Most readers will remember that Bill Clinton’s presidency came under continuous assault for inviting donors to stay at the White House, specifically the Lincoln bedroom. In 1997, the White House released a list of all of the guests who had stayed in the Lincoln bedroom. (The Bush administration does not report where guests stayed.) CNN posted the list as of 2/97, which they have divided into five groups. They’ve tried to define donors and fundraisers who were not family or old friends as “friends and supporters”. They make up 13% of the list.
There are obviously several degrees of imprecision here. Most importantly, there’s no great way to discern who’s really the President’s friend and who isn’t without a subpoena of his Trapper Keeper. We’re also looking at different timespans, and comparing the Lincoln bedroom to both the White House and Camp David.
What’s less obvious is how the liberal media allowed one President’s pattern of behavior (about 13%) to become a widely-understood multi-year scandal, whereas another President’s pattern of behavior (about 11-15%) is a page 17 story, if that. But, what do I know.
This really ought to enter the standard brief against PowerLine, along with “Jimmy Carter is a traitor!”, “That Schiavo memo is a forgery!”, “How dare the New York Times reveal the sexual orientation of openly gay activists!” and “When the left begins beating its wife, it will be an outrage!”
I’d like to draw a little more attention to one of those squares.
(Executive Direcector of Reclaiming America Gary) Cass also presents another small-town activist, Kevin McCoy, with a Salt and Light Award for leading a successful campaign to shut down an anti-bullying program in West Virginia schools. McCoy, a soft-spoken, prematurely gray postal worker, fought to end the program because it taught tolerance for gay people — and thus, in his view, constituted a “thinly disguised effort to promote the homosexual agenda.” “What America needs,” Cass tells the faithful, “is more Kevin McCoys.”
Compare that to evangelical writer Tony Campolo:
Roger was gay; we all knew it, and we all made his life miserable. When we passed him in the hall, we called out his name in an effeminate manner. We made crude gestures, and we made Roger the brunt of cheap jokes. He never took showers with us after gym class, because je knew we’d whip him with our wet towels.
I wasn’t there the day some of the guys dragged Roger into the shower room and shoved him into the corner. Curled up on the floor, he cried and begged for mercy as five guys urinated all over him.
The reports said that Roger went to bed that night as usual, and that sometime around two in the morning, he got up, went down to the basement of his house, and hanged himself.
When I heard about Roger, I realized that I wasn’t a Christian. I was a theologically sound evangelical, believed in all of the points of the Apostles Creed, and had declared Jesus to be my Savior. But I know now that if the Holy Spirit had actually been in me, I would have stood up for Roger. When the guys came to make fun of him, I would have put one arm around Roger’s shoulder, waved the guys off with the other, and told him to leave him alone and not to mess with him because he was my friend.
But I was afraid to be Roger’s friend. I knew that if I stood up for a homosexual, people would say cruel things about me too. So I kept my distance. I had done better, who knows if Roger might be alive today.
I desperately hope that we have more Tony Campolos than Kevin McCoys. Specifically, I desperately hope that there’s more Campolo than McCoy in me.
| Alabama legislator proposes bill to ban libraries from buying books by gay authors or about gay people. | Middle-aged anti-Bush protestors arrested and strip-searched. | Christian lobbying group prepares to fight vaccine against cervical cancer because it might encourage women to have premarital sex. | Florida Republican legislator proposes bill to give students the right to sue if they think their beliefs are being questioned or treated with disrespect. | Republicans in Congress write one-time-only law purporting to cancel decisions of Florida courts for Terry Schiavo’s parents. |
| Senate Majority Leader Frist joins questionable characters on “Justice Sunday” to proclaim that the Democrats are prejudiced against people of faith. | Christian lobbying group gives “Salt and Light” award for successful campaign to reverse anti-bullying program that includes gays. | Focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly from hard drugs to marijuana (trend started under Clinton, to be fair) | James Dobson compares the Supreme Court to the KKK. | Virginia bans private contracts between gay couples; no wills, medical directives, powers of attorney, child custody and property arrangements, even perhaps joint bank accounts can be recognized. |
| East Waynesville Baptist Church kicks out all its Democratic members. | Bush administration bumps Kerry supporters from international telecommunication standards conference. |  |
Pat Robertson says that federal judges are a more serious threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists. | GOP rewrites descriptions of Democratic amendments to accuse Dems of protecting sexual predators. |
| Texas legislature bans suggestive cheerleading. | Former pro-McCarthy ghostwriter given new job as ombudsmen for the Public Broadcasting System. | Senate Majority Leader (and physician) Bill Frist refuses to contradict federally funded abstinence-only materials that claims that tears and sweat can transmit HIV. | Conservative media saves Christmas. | Texas House of Representatives votes to ban lesbians, gays, and bisexuals from being foster parents. |
| Top Republican lawmakers propose applying decency standards to cable television and satellite television and radio to protect children from explicit content. | Chief of staff for Tom Coburn (R-OK) says, “I’m a radical! I’m a real extremist. I don’t want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!” | Bush’s federal court nominee Janice Rogers Brown claims that America is in the midst of a religious war. | Kansas Board of Education (not legislature, sorry) holds debate on validity of evolution vs. intelligent design. | Texas legislature votes to make gay marriage extra double super illegal by changing the Texas Constitution’s Bill of Rights. |
HOW TO PLAY: Well, that’s just the point. Why would you want to play?
(P.S. If anyone can help me get rid of all the blank space up top, I’d be grateful. -FIXED! Thanks, William)
Need some good news?
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) — Authorities arrested the nation’s most-wanted militant, the head of al-Qaida operations in Pakistan who had a $10 million bounty on his head, and said Wednesday they now were ”on the right track” to catch Osama bin Laden.
Abu Farraj al-Libbi, who allegedly orchestrated two assassination attempts against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was arrested after a firefight on the outskirts of Mardan, 30 miles north of Peshawar, capital of the deeply conservative North West Frontier Province, the government and security officials said.
Via praktike, who has more.
Some interesting posts at Non Prophet, the Colorado Springs-based blogger who previously revealed that Focus on the Family had distributed Michael Moore’s home address. He’s been writing about Soulforce, a group that protests against the use of religion to condemn gays from a Christian perspective.
Soulforce protestors recently attempted to deliver this letter to Dr. James Dobson at Focus on the Family’s Colorado Springs headquarters. The Reitan family were arrested for trespassing when they entered the premises with the letter (photos here.)
Non Prophet was on the ground to interview the Reitans after they were released. Check it out.
I watched Rosemary’s Baby over the weekend. I don’t know who I’m typing SPOILER ALERT for, but I don’t want to hear any whining.