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Showing posts from July, 2006

Women need not apply in Dallas churches

Your blogstress has received a tip from a dear reader that the standing committee of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas has voted to stop ordaining women. (There are three other U.S. Episcopal dioceses that do not ordain women, including the Diocese of Ft. Worth.) This would appear to be the response of the Diocese of Dallas to the election of Bishop Kathleen Jefferts Schori to the top leadership post in the Episcopal Church USA.

Black, white, drunk, not

Andrew Sullivan just made an amazingly ignorant comment while psychoanalyzing, on " The Chris Matthews Show ," the leader of the arguably free world. President Bush's problem, Sullivan asserted, is that, as "a recovering alcoholic," the president sees everything as either black or white, and therefore cannot deal with all "the grey" that has occurred over the course of the last few weeks. It seems that Mr. Sullivan is in need of a 12-step refresher course. It is drinking alcoholics who typically have the black-white worldview; in most recovery programs, alcoholics are taught to accept nuances (key phrase: accepting life on life's terms).

Percentage of African-American population by state

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Persuant to your blogstress's previous post on the nation's presidential primary set-up, herewith some useful statistics on race within the states discussed. Numbers represent the percentage of people who, on the 2000 Census , identified themselves as "Black or African American" : 12.3 percent - United States of America 02.1 percent - Iowa 00.7 percent - New Hampshire 06.8 percent - Nevada 13.6 percent - New Jersey

When the dealin's done

The notion of an early presidential caucus in Nevada (advanced, of course, by favorite son, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ) seems to be gaining ground among Democrats. From the Associated Press : WASHINGTON - Democrats were lobbied hard by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and organized labor before they picked Nevada as the best bet to energize the party's early presidential voting in 2008. A Democratic rules panel on Saturday recommended that Nevada hold a caucus after Iowa's leadoff contest in mid-January 2008, but before New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary. South Carolina was awarded an early primary a week after New Hampshire. While this would probably prove to be something of a bone-warming respite for us frostbitten reporters who flock to Des Moines and Manchester in January, your blogstress offers an alternative, if only slightly less frigid, plan. Rather than have all the early candidate-settling voting taking place in states with unique characteristic

How to fight the right

Your blogstress has a new essay posted at The American Prospect Online that offers a suggestion for how to do just that. CLICK HERE TO READ "FIGHTING RIGHT" AT THE AMERICAN PROSPECT ONLINE

Religious left: still here

Reader Steve Bartin asks: How does the religious left overcome the fact that it has lost over half its' membership since 1980? While the RR has grown? What went wrong with the RL? Well, Étienne, mon ami , your blogstress must dispute your analysis that "religious left" has lost half its membership since 1980. A certain group of churches -- mostly mainline Protestant denominations -- may have lost a number of congregants, but to contend that they make up the whole of the "religious left" is a mistake. And they have lost no where near to half. Because of the querant's lack of specificity, your cybertrix presumes that he refers to the much-vaunted membership drop in the mainline Protestant churches, a group comprising the Episcopal Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church USA. While all but the Presbyterians have suffered losses, according to the Association of Religion

Moving the pieces around

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President Bush just conducted a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at which the president conceded that more troops are needed in Baghdad. So, he's going to move some in from elsewhere in Iraq. For his part, Maliki declined, when offered the chance via a reporter's question, to condemn Hezbollah. Earlier in the day, the U.S. Senate's Democratic leaders called a press conference (via Real Player ) of their own at which they warned Maliki that he's no friend of ours if, in his scheduled address to a joint session of Congress tomorrow, he neither denounces Hezbollah or his earlier plan to grant amnesty to insurgents who have killed U.S. troops. [Maliki's criteria for amnesty, according to Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) exclude only those who have shed Iraqi blood. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said he planned to attend the joint session, but would leave it up to the consciences of the individual senators as to whether or not they would sta

A lovely delusion?

Meanwhile, in answer to Hans Johnson's missive on the defeat of Ralph Reed in the Georgia GOP primary for lieutenant governor, one of your blogstress's favorite writers reached out with this eruption: Only the most delusional liberal could see Ralph Reed’s glorious defeat as anything other than Republicans cutting their losses. These people will chew off a foot to avoid losing the Senate or House in November, and they don’t need another high-profile grifter in the mix, even if he’s not running for Congress himself. The GOP threw Reed in front of the train, not the progressives. --Yellowboat Okay, Y, but what do you really think?

Spirit
Mea culpa (but not for everything)

When your blogstress wrote, for The American Prospect Online, an essay in which she threw up her hands at the notion of a cohesive, politically effective religious left, she knew not what she had done. Somehow, she managed to anger religious people on both the left and the right, and places in between. Your écrivaine based her conclusion on the latest turmoil in the Episcopal Church over the place of lesbians and gay people in church life, deducing that while all the mainline Protestant churches in the US remain engaged in similar internal battles, there is no hope for producing a religious left movement that is up to doing full-scale battle with the forces of the religious right. It is your cyberscribe's description of the Episcopalians' travails that rankled the Rev. Glynn C. Harper of Christ Church in San Augustine, Texas, who writes: Dear Ms. Stan: I am writing to tell you that I have seldom read as misinformed and misleading an article on any subject as your article &q

The Jarrett NSA files

Earlier this week, mes amis , Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was taken to task by Senator Patrick Leahy , ranking Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, for the administration's thwarting of an inquiry, undertaken by DoJ Office of Professional Responsibility Director H. Marshall Jarrett , into the role of Justice Department officials in signing off on the administration's domestic spying program, which is being conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). Jarrett's inquiry was undertaken at the request of members of Congress, but was quashed by none other than President George W. Bush himself, according to Gonzales. The indefatiguable Murray Waas has led the reporting on this constitution-crushing executive branch gambit. Herewith you will find the attorney general's response to the committee regarding the stymied investigation and, more importantly, three memos penned by Jarrett expressing his frustration that his investigators were denied t

Ralph Reed vanquished

Your blogstress's good friend (and certified hottie -- see photo #5) Hans Johnson, president of the data and strategy firm Progressive Victory , writes to remind us of a little-celebrated victory enjoyed by progressives this week: the defeat of GOP strategist and former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed in his primary race for his once-certain spot on the ballot as the Republican candidate for the office of lieutenant governor of the great State of Georgia. Seems that progressives were able to leverage the unravelling story of Reed's role in the Jack Abramoff scandal to liberal advantage. Herewith, Mr. Johnson's missive: It is with relief and some reflection that we can all celebrate the defeat of Ralph Reed , purveyor of prejudice and candidate for Lt. Gov. in Georgia, in yesterday's GOP state primary. His trouncing by a nearly 4-3 margin statewide in a primary vote -- where a late poll showed him running neck and neck with his opponent -- is testi

Success in the Middle East?

At today's White House press briefing, still in progress as your blogstress writes, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow answered a question about the prospect for diplomatic success in the current Israeli-Hezbollah conflict this way: How on earth do you define "success" in the Middle East? He then mumbled something about "thousands of years." Snow also said that the White House does not consider the current conflict to be a war.

Note to media:
"Christ" was not his last name

On MSNBC, Fox News refugee Rita Cosby -- whose reporting forte is more murdered co-eds than war dead -- just referred to Nazareth as "the holy city" that is "the birthplace of Jesus Christ." Nazareth, an Israeli town with a largely Arab population, had just been hit by Hezbollah rockets. First of all, given Cosby's "objective" reportage of Nazareth as a place universally regarded as a holy city, one would hope she knew her New Testament a bit better -- or at least a few Christmas carols. The Gospels tell us , as even non-Christians know, that Bethlehem was the birthplace of the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth. (There is much dispute whether or not this claim is accurate, or simply an attempt by Gospel writers to fulfill Hebrew scripture regarding the birth of a messiah, such as that found in Micah .) But worse than that is Cosby's reference to "Jesus Christ." Christ was not the guy's last name; it is a Greek word th

Newt and the War of the Worlds

With his assertion that the Middle East is ablaze with the flames of World War III , former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has successfully raised the hackles of your blogstress's many friends on the left. Your cybertrix, however, takes some pride in having suggested just that , days before Gingrich made his declaration. The difference between your Webwench and Newt (other than, presumably, the bustier ) is that election strategy did not enter into your écrivaine 's calculation, as it did into Newt's. (See Matt Stoller .) A word to her progressive friends: The problem with Newt is that he's occasionally right -- and not in that broken-clock-twice-a-day way. To dismiss out of hand everything he says just because he says it never gets one very far. The trick with Newt to pay very close attention, as Mr. Stoller did. Look not only for the ruthlessness, but also for the inherent contradictions in the whole of his body of orally disseminated work. He's so often off

The cedar and the star
A lament for the Middle East

As she reads this morning of Israel's ground invasion of Lebanon, your blogstress finds her heart sinking ever deeper as the Middle East War intensifies. One can't help but feel this thing deeply as the names of ancient cities on both sides of the border appear on the role call of towns bombed and attacked by missiles. Yesterday, your écrivaine flinched as the town of Tyre appeared on the list; this is the place from whence Hiram, the architect and builder of Solomon's temple hailed. Last night, as she watched the BBC News, your cyberscribe meditated on the graphic that accompanied the report: the flags of Israel and Lebanon, shown side by side. The former, of course, is adorned with the ancient symbol of the Jewish faith, the Star of David. At the center of the latter is a great cedar tree -- the wood used to frame the temple. I do not argue that Israel has no right to defend itself; of course it does. But accusations of collective punishment do tend to ring true when

Religion doesn't equal stupidity

From a reader and believer in Southern California, your blogstress received this missive regarding her essay at The American Prospect Online , "A Canterbury Tale." I have a slight disagreement with your excellent article in TAP about the religious left. You wrote this: "In seeking to create a counterpart to the religious right, we tried to force our values through a narrow hole. In essence, we bought into the religious authoritarianism of the right, inferring that moral authority proceeds only from religion. In this, we have sold ourselves short." I don't see it that way. The religious left isn't making the argument you suggest, not even implicitly. We are trying to do two things: 1. Convince religious people that leftist politics is a valid option for religious people. When the right has a monopoly on religion, religious people who otherwise might be sympathetic are given the false choice of being liberal or being against God. That may not seem important

Spirit
Obama on religion and politics

A reader named Matthew asks your blogstress to consider the words of Senator Barack Obama , delivered last week to the "Call to Renewal" conference convened by the Rev. Jim Wallis, a liberal evangelical. The left is quite abuzz about Obama's speech, in which he urges outreach by Democrats to evangelical Christians, ordinarily presumed to be acolytes of the right: For some time now, there has been plenty of talk among pundits and pollsters that the political divide in this country has fallen sharply along religious lines. Indeed, the single biggest "gap" in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't. Conservative leaders have been all too happy to exploit this gap, consistently reminding evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesti

Them that know won't say
The Plame-Wilson press conference

Your blogstress just returned from a briefing at the National Press Club at which Valerie Plame Wilson, and her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, made short statements about the lawsuit they have filed against, among others, the vice president of the United States for the disclosure to reporters of Ms. Wilson's identity as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Though called a news conference , no news appeared to have been broken there, with the exception of the announcement that today's briefing would be the last time that the Wilsons would make themselves available to the news media on the subject of their lawsuit until the matter was resolved (which could take years). Neither of the Wilsons took questions. Their lawyer, however, did. He just didn't really answer many of them.

Master of meaningless indignation

Your blogstress wonders if any of her devotees are as tired as she of the Arlen Specter act, which features the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee pretending to take on the Bush administration over its routine desecration of Constitution, only to kick up some dust and pretend to do something about it. The latest from Chairman Specter is a hard-won agreement for a one-time review of the administration's illegal domestic spying program. Herewith from Charles Babington and Peter Baker of the Washington Post : Bush agreed voluntarily to submit his program to the court named for the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, contingent on Congress passing legislation drafted by Specter and administration lawyers. The legislation would allow the Justice Department unlimited attempts to revise the program to meet the court's approval and would allow it to appeal adverse court rulings. It would also give the NSA in emergency situations a week rather than the current

At the Pentagon, it's all double-super-secret background

Walter Pincus writes in today's Washington Post of a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that condemns Rummy's office, and the Pentagon at large, for marking "classified" all manner of documents containing only unclassified information : The GAO reviewed only a "nonprobability sample" of 111 classified Defense Department documents from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. To understand how minute the sample is, the GAO reported that in the five fiscal years between 2000 and 2004, the Pentagon was responsible for 66.8 million new classified records. That is about 13.4 million a year. [...] In a broader administrative criticism, the GAO found that 92 of the 111 documents had some marking error, such as failure to include declassification instructions or the source of the classification as required.

It's looking like World War III
Can the rapture be far behind?

With Israel's bombing of the Beirut Airport, your blogstress thinks it's safe to say that there's a war going on in the Middle East. Duh, you say? Well, mes amis , the experts will tell you that what's going on between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the Israelis and the Lebanese does not constitute a war, but rather represents two high-intensity conflicts, or some other sort of euphemism. For example, the following, from today's comprehensive report by Anthony Shadid, Scott Wilson and Debbi Wilgoren of the Washington Post Foreign Service : "We are not at war, but we are in a very high-volume crisis, and we have an intention to put an end to the situation here along the northern border," said Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, according to the wire service reports. For its part, the Bush administration, which has set the standard for military responses to terrorist attacks, appears to be trying to make a distinctio

Bloggers weigh in about religious left

Your blogstress finds herself most indebted to Atrios of that pithy blog, Eschaton , for linking to her piece , A Canterbury Tale , at The American Prospect Online, in which she, once and for all, throws in the towel at the notion of a cohesive religious left. At AmericaBlog , John Aravosis echoes your Webwench's sentiment . Posting in reponse to news of yet another gathering of liberal religious figures, Aravosis writes: I'm not convinced the religious left will ever get its act together. They just don't seem to know politics, or public relations, nor are they angry enough to be inspired enough to make a difference (our guys, silly people that they are, actually buy into all that Biblical stuff about loving thy neighbor - the religious right, on the other hand, has ignored all the love in the Bible).

Rummy: The good news - we're finally keeping track

Speaking of South Asia, did anybody catch Rummy's performance yesterday in his joint press conference with beleaguered Afghan President Hamid Karzai? He actually had the gall to suggest that the fighting in southern Afghanistan between coalition forces and the Taliban doesn't speak to a resurgent Taliban; it just looks that way because the U.S. has gotten better at keeping track of Taliban attacks. Was the U.S. military, until recently, really not keeping track of attacks on its forces by the reportedly routed enemy?

Bombing Bombay Mumbai

Your blogstress finds it quite amazing that the terrorist bombing of commuter trains in Mumbai -- known to Westerners as Bombay -- are playing in this continent's broadcast media as a B-list story. Nearly 200 people were killed, and at least double that number injured, in those ghastly attacks, carried out during rush hour in India's largest city. Mumbai is to India what New York is to the U.S.: its financial capital, its multicultural Mecca, if you will. (You'll recall that when the London tubes were attacked, the situation was treated almost as if the attack had happened on this side of the pond. But then again, the U.K. is a nation run by white people.) The Indian government has been quick to lay responsibility for the assault (which, as of this writing, no group has claimed) at the feet of the Kashmiri separatist group Lashkar-e-Toiba , but your cyberscribe suspects the truth is a bit more complex. Yesterday's bombings bear all the marks of an al Qaeda action: p

A well-timed good-bye
For Ken Lay's survivors, that is

From Simon Romero , writing in today's New York Times : HOUSTON, July 5 — In yet another bizarre twist to the Enron saga, the sudden death of Kenneth L. Lay on Wednesday may have spared his survivors financial ruin. Mr. Lay's death effectively voids the guilty verdict against him, temporarily thwarting the federal government's efforts to seize his remaining real estate and financial assets, legal experts say. CLICK HERE TO READ ROMERO ON THE POTENTIAL DELIVERANCE OF THE FAMILY LAY

Adieu, Kenny Boy
Enron founder Lay is dead

CNN is reporting that Enron founder Kenneth Lay, major fundraiser for the presidential campaign of President George W. Bush, has died this morning, perhaps of a massive heart attack. One wonders what he had for breakfast. A little OJ laced with Digitalis , perhaps? (Not that your blogstress doubts the official account or anything.)

Suspicious minds

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Photo: AP/WWP, courtesy U.S. Department of State The very foxy Glenn Kellis, in his most recent post on his Ob:Blog, reveals the secrets of the recent interplay between the markets and and interest-rate woes: What's really going on -- and it has become grossly obvious lately -- is the global stock markets are running purely on artificial liquidity supplied constantly, but unevenly, by the central banks. When there's an injection of cash, the markets rally. When the magic spigot is closed and the liquidity dries up, the markets drop. Most recently, the cash injection from the Bank of Japan (BOJ), Japan's central bank, has been calling the shots. It's no coincidence that when the BOJ announced, in the middle of May, that the it would begin raising rates, the markets tanked.... So, now we know why Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi got that special tour of Graceland , with the U.S. president as his guide. Continues Mr. Kellis: As long as the cash injections keep

Burning the Constitution

What's the best thing about Independence Day in Our Nation's Capital? C'est facile, mes amis -- the Constitution is momentarily safe from the destructive hands of the country's lawmakers. In recent days, your blogstress has meditated on the recent, by-a-whisker defeat in the Senate of a constitutional amendment that would have banned flag-burning -- at the expense of the First Amendment, which the New Yorker 's ever-eloquent Hendrik Hertzberg describes as "the Constitution's crowning glory." More from Mr. Hertzberg: The flag is not a piece of cloth, any more than the Constitution is a piece of paper; and the flag’s sacredness is not damaged when a piece of cloth representing it is burned or trampled or used as an autograph book, any more than the Constitution can be damaged by the destruction of a printed copy. But the Constitution can and would be damaged, to the nation’s shame, by the addition of something as inimical to its spirit as the flag-des

Spirit
Cast in stone

And so it was on a fair Saturday evening that your blogstress sauntered toward Union Station, there to board the train that would carry her to the friends with whom she would travel to hear some exquisite jazz at the hands of guitarist and guru Paul Wingo. On Massachusetts Avenue, about to cross D Street, your cybertrix was accosted by a beautiful young man, who handed her a rather handsome paperback book, Ten Commandments, Twice Removed . "This is for you," he said, and quickly flitted away. He had brown skin and thick, curly black hair; despite the heat and humidity, he wore a long-sleeved white button-down shirt and charcoal dress pants held up by black braces. He darted across the street and began frantically approaching cars, passing books to the drivers. For her sartorial part, your Webwench was done up for her Saturday night in a swingy skirt embossed with a design in silver, and a most fetching lace-encrusted silk camisole, exceeded only in delectability by the la

Dana Priest has a moralist for breakfast

If you missed today's edition of Meet the Press , your blogstress advises you to view the podcast of the roundtable segment, wherein Bill Bennett, for whom gambling is a virtue, repeated his charge that the Pulitzer Prize won by the Washington Post for Dana Priest's reporting on the secret U.S. prisons overseas was "a disgrace." This time, however, Priest was sitting next to Bennett, cool as a cucumber, ably defending her position. Also present were William Safire and John Harwood, who might as well have stayed home, as Bennett stole the show with his eye-rolling and twitchy demeanor. From the official NBC transcript : MS. [ANDREA] MITCHELL [(MODERATOR)]: Dana, let me point out that The Washington Post, your newspaper, was behind the others but also did publish this story. And a story you wrote last year disclosing the secret CIA prisons won the Pulitzer Prize, but it also led to William Bennett, sitting here, saying that three reporters who won the Pulitzer Priz