Don't give me that old time religion

When I read that rather bizarre Hugh Hewitt/Terry McAuliffe interview last week, one of things I started to think about was whether maybe, finally, our society is beginning to shake itself loose from a lock-step, all-or-nothing approach to religion.
Maybe we've realized where that can lead -- to Guyana and to Manhattan.
One advance would be if people did not think that the only way to be religious is to slavishly revere every single thing their religious leader has decreed to be an article of faith. Terry McAuliffe (who is former chair of the Democratic National Committee) demonstrates this when he refuses Hugh Hewitt's You're-Not-A-Real-Catholic frame just because he is pro-choice:

TM: Hugh, I don’t cite Catholic doctrine all through the book. I say I’d gone to Catholic schools, Hughie, through the book, and I am pro-choice, no question about it. But I don’t pretend to be a priest . . .
HH: No, but I mean, the whole abortion controversy, that’s just…you compartmentalize that and put that aside?
TM: I can, as can many Catholics.
. . .
TM: And as you know, the Holy Father himself, John Paul II, blessed my wife’s engagement ring when I wound up being at a private Mass for us in his private chapel.
HH: Nice picture. I know. Did he know about your supporting late term abortions?
TM: Sure, he knew he was.
HH: Is that teaching optional, Terry McAuliffe?
TM: Is what teaching optional?
HH: The Church’s teaching on the sanctity of life?
TM: Hey, listen, I have my views on my religious beliefs, Hugh, you’ve got yours.
HH: But I’m asking, do you think it’s…
TM: And you know, if you want to do a show on religious teaching, that’s fine. I’m talking about my book.
. . . HH: No, but it’s in the book all the time about how Catholic you are.
TM: It’s not how Catholic I am. I’m an Irish Catholic kid from Syracuse. It’s probably mentioned five times, Hugh, so please don’t incorrectly characterize my book to your listeners.
HH: Well, it’s in here a lot…
TM: If you want to talk about the book, talk about the facts as they exist. I know you’re a right wing whacko, but don’t make things up.

Another advance would be if religion itself could change its own hurtful, narrow, mean-spirited doctrines and find a shining, kind, expansive, inclusive, and, dare I say, a more "Christian" God for its adherents to worship. Here is Lance Mannion's rant about what is wrong with the Catholic Church:

. . . I can't imagine a wedding outside a church.
I can't imagine Christmas without snow, either.
I can't imagine the World Series without the Yankees, cars without gas tanks, books without covers, Greenland without glaciers, living happily in Dallas, shopping at a mall, keeping ferrets as pets, any social situation in which Joe Lieberman is taken seriously, anybody but Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, and a world in which I've been dead and forgotten so long that I might as well never have existed.
There's tradition, and there's what you're used to.
There's what is, and there's what you wish there was.
There's the world as it ought to be and there's the world as people have made it.
There's convention, there's culture, there's ritual, there's a right way and a wrong way, and then there are things people do because that's what people have always done and they're too stupid to imagine doing them any other way, even if an obviously better way has come along.
There's marriage, and then there's the desperately clung to notion of marriage of an unimaginative, ranting, and frustrated old man who sees the institution he has devoted his life to and in which he has now risen to the position of supposed ultimate authority disintegrating into irrelevance. Pope Benedict is seeing the end of the world as he knows it in Italy's taking steps to legally recognize the unions of unmarried couples. (Pssst, homosexuals are among us!)
. . .
Maybe if the Church hadn't spent centuries imposing and enforcing an idea of marriage that was horrifically unfair to half the people getting married and a trap and a curse to many among the other half. Maybe if it hadn't spent the last fifty years teaching that children are the result of Divine whimsicality and mood . . . Maybe if it hadn't spent the last forty years teaching that the simple application of science and common sense that would allow women to decide how many children they would have, allow some to even have them, is a sin . . . [then] people would think the Church had something useful and helpful to say about marriage . . .
And maybe if they hadn't spent all that time defending celibacy as an ideal at the expense of all others to the point that it made itself hospitable to no one but the closeted, the hypocritical, and the perverse, especially the perverse, so that it became a criminal organization of pederasts and their enablers. And maybe if when the scandal was revealed church leaders had responded with courage and honesty and admitted its guilt and taken the one, easy, intelligent step to ending the problem---allowing priests to get married, making the rectories homes for real adults and their families instead of hideouts for creeps and villains---instead of reacting with a hypocritical and self-defeating purge of homosexuals. Maybe if the Church acted as if it cared about its own survival, then people might think it had something to say about anything.

Callous hunour

Do you know conservatives have no sense of humour?
Just hum a few bars and see if they recognize it.
There's a bit of a funny discussion going on in the left blogosphere now about why conservatives aren't funny, inspired by a Townhall article which said it was all the fault of those mean, sneering librulls because conservatives are just too nice.
I'm not making this up.
I guess Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter would be just as funny as Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart if only they could become more callous.
Skippy adds his two cents here in his post titled two conservatives walk into a bar. they buy it, then raise the prices, then complain about welfare cheats wanting free peanuts. He quotes a Huffington Post comment that sums it up:

. . . conservatives are unfunny because a) they take themselves so damned seriously, and b) they don't know it. The left, though it also takes itself too seriously, has at least the virtue of knowing it. Our best comics realize this and make it work for them. They poke fun at the right, while not letting us forget our own foolishness and that of our "liberal" leaders . . . When conservatives like Limbaugh and Hannity try to do humor, it's not that they are being too nice to liberals that makes them unfunny. It's that they are being too nice to themselves. It's called self-righteousness.

Canadian Press, what a scoop!

What a journalistic coup for Canadian Press, a real scoop!
Unnamed and unidentified "sources" have just leaked some really, really major news about Harper.
He's going to give a speech on Tuesday.
To the Canadian Club.
And its not just any old speech.
Nope, its going to be a "mini-throne speech" with the "broad strokes" of "major public policy" which will "highlight accomplishments".
And its even going to "include key messages" on "Harper's goals for the environment" -- which is breathlessly revealed to be "the burning issue on both Parliament Hill and in public opinion polls - sources say".
Oh, and this speech will "form the backbone" of an election platform. These "broad policy outlines" and the March budget "will be a one-two punch of Conservative ideas" and "a challenge to the opposition parties to come to the table with their own nascent platforms" -- because, after all, those other parties haven't really been announcing much of anything, I guess, while they have been waiting for Our Leader to challenge them.
Oh, and here's some more breaking news -- "several members of Harper's cabinet" are even expected to attend the speech. If they aren't too busy demonstrating leadership and resolve and truth and steadfastness and family values, I guess.
Unmentioned is that somebody in the Conservative communications office now owes Canadian Press big-time for reporting this press release just as if it were actually a news story.

Five hours

Wow, that didn't take long.
Americablog's first post on the Snickers homophobic ad campaign. launched at the Superbowl, was timed at just after noon, at 12:37 pm to be exact.

The ad in question showed a mechanic eating a Snickers bar. Hi co-mechanic is so desirous of the Snickers that he starts eating it from the other end of the same bar that's already in the other guy's mouth. The two butch guys eat their way down the bar, like the dogs eating the same string of pasta in the Disney movie - until they're accidentally kissing. The guys, naturally, recoil in disgust - then, oddly, start ripping out their chest hair with their hands . . . Snickers has set up a Web site where ... you can watch recorded-live-on-video reactions of real Bears and Colts players watching and reacting to the ad, and you can even watch the ad with 3 additional endings not shown on TV. You then vote on the three endings and the most popular one will air during the Daytona 500 . . . the reactions of the Bears and Colts players to two guys kissing is outright disgust . . . [one of the additional endings] After the guys kiss, they say "I think we just accidentally kissed - quick, do something manly," and proceed to drink motor oil and I think anti-freeze - they guzzle it down, screaming at the top of their lungs, making them sick to their stomachs. The ad is vaguely violent - better to die than be gay.. . . [another ending]The two guys accidentally kiss, they say to each other again "quick, do something manly," and one guy proceeds to pick up a huge oversized wrench and violently attack the other guy, while the second takes the first and throws him under the hood of the car, slamming it down on his head. Yes, the appropriate reaction to a guy kissing you is to beat the crap out of the guy who kissed you. Maybe Snickers should rename this ad "Matthew Shepard." . . . The entire thing is absolutely sickening. And while I can appreciate that Snickers didn't overtly think that promoting violence against gays and lesbians is "funny," they knew what they were doing. They were gay-bashing for fun. And they didn't just cross the line - they left the line in the dust. . . . I've called the head of corporate public relations for Mars and am waiting to hear back. I've also talked with the lead press guy for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay civil rights group in the country, and they're not very happy, to put it lightly.
As the guy who launched the first-ever successful boycott of a TV show (StopDrLaura.com), I'm going to suggest to Mars that they had better nip this in the bud quickly, or they're not going to know what hit them.

Five hours and 200,000 visitors later, at 5:47 pm, John posted another message that the offending, offensive website was gone.

Masterfoods, Mars and Snickers parent company (or something), called to let me know that while humor is highly subjective, and their target market for the ads did give them positive feedback (that would be the neanderthal gay-bashing fans of Snickers?), they did not intend to offend anyone and will not be airing any of the four ads ever again, nor will they be airing the commentary from the NFL players responding to the ads. This includes not airing the ads during the Daytona 500

Problem solved. Thanks, John.

I read the news today, oh boy

Dave is my go-to guy whenever anything military is in the news. At The Galloping Beaver, Dave explains that Harper's "troops in the city" announcement means less than meets the eye:

It's not a plan; it's an advertising campaign.

From the department of Yeah, That'll Happen:

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty says he and three other premiers will try to convince officials in Washington to ease cross-border restrictions on Canadians travelling to the United States.

While I can certainly see why Canadians would want the United States to change its passport rules, what I cannot see is why the US should ever do so -- especially with all the ex-CSIS people who've been running to the media in recent years complaining about how badly Canada is protecting the border.

If you liked the Lennie Briscoe Law & Order as much as we did, then don't miss Lance Mannion's The Ballad of Lennie Briscoe. His bit comparing George Bush to Frank Burns is pretty good, too.

I knew today's weddings were getting rather crass and boorish, but this one takes the cake, so to speak:

Dear Miss Manners:
What does one say to a friend who offers to sell one back one's wedding present? I gave her the gift some time before the wedding, which I was unable to attend. After the wedding, she approached me, said that she was unable to use my gift, and offered to sell it back to me. Suggestions for a civilized response would be appreciated.

Words would fail me, but Miss Manners never does. She always comes up with the perfect bon mot putdown phrase:

"This came with my good wishes. I don't know what you think they are worth."

And finally, Editor and Publisher (via) gives us this great Molly Ivins story:

The line that ended her New York Times career came in a story about a community chicken-killing festival. Ms. Ivins called the event a ‘gang pluck,’ a choice of words that caused her to be ‘sort of abruptly recalled like a defective automobile and replaced,’ she told Salon.com in 2000.

Apparently the NYT still wouldn't publish the offending phrase, even in her obituary. I think she got the last laugh.

Great line of the day

Over at Firedoglake, Swopa talks about how Dick Cheney -- you know, the guy that only one in five Americans likes anymore -- is going to appear as a defense witness for Libby:

Really, when you think about it, who else on planet Earth would be willing to serve as a character witness for Scooter Libby? Can't be a terribly large pool to choose from.

Pariah risk

When I read Glenn Greenwald's article Enforced orthodoxies and Iran yesterday, I was both greatly heartened that debate is finally taking place about knee-jerk support of Israel defense and greatly disturbed that I couldn't really articulate what worried me about this support. Now The Sideshow has explained it for me:

. . . many of us probably made a mistake four years ago in failing to state loudly what we thought was so obvious it didn't need saying: Any increase in tensions in the Middle-East endangers Israel. This was, of course, part of what we were saying when we warned that invading Iraq would further destabilize the region.
There is no advantage to Israel in having its neighbors in violent turmoil to begin with - even less so if they believe they are the victims of a murderous campaign against them on Israel's behalf. There are far too many ways that such warfare can only end up with Israel the loser. The likelihood of any other outcome is slim; stoking the hatred of the Muslim world can only increase the likelihood that violence will overcome Israel's defenses.
If AIPAC is actively supporting candidates who oppose diplomacy, and thus actively working against a peaceful resolution in the Middle-East, then AIPAC is encouraging conditions that will most likely lead to the downfall of both Israel and America.
And all of our leading politicians, on both sides of the aisle, are hustling for AIPAC's money and essentially sucking up to the neocon cause.
I'm beginning to wonder if this insanity isn't what some people mean when they talk about "serious" critics of the war - that you have to support military aggression in the Middle-East because some crazy people have decided that such aggression will protect Israel, and therefore the only legitimate criticism is criticism of the way that aggression is carried out. That is, it's okay to criticize the administration for failing to fight a war to win it and failing to install democracy, but it's not really OK to criticize the administration for using US military aggression on behalf of Israel.
And that points to our real mistake: Not saying loudly enough that our military aggression endangers Israel.

Exactly. Israel has been fighting with its neighbours for 60 years, since 1947 -- coming up on three generations. The unnecessary war with Lebanon and Hezbollah last summer weakened Israel by demonstrating that its military strategy is not flawless, just as the war in Iraq has weakened America by demonstrating that its military strength is not decisive. Unfortunately, one result has been that now the warmongers in both Israel and the United States think they have something to prove.
If AIPAC goads the US into an unprovoked attack on Iran, and particularly if nuclear weapons are used, then both Israel and the US will become international pariahs.

Great line of the day

Bill Scher at LiberalOasis:

Maybe the only thing that can save us from the Bushies expanding the war into Iran is their sheer incompetence.

Thanks for the link, DBK.

Shorter

Shorter Dan Savage (via) -- Mary Cheney, you reap what you sow.
Shorter Digby -- those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
Shorter Gilliard -- it's not Fort Apache, Baghdad, it's Little Big Horn.
Shorter Josh Marshall, here and here -- with friends like these...
And Skippy (via) says Boston is now looking for this terrorist who lives in a cave, "which, according to experts on the scene, makes him osama bin laden":

I read the news today, oh boy

Concern is erupting all over the blogosphere about how the Bush administration is bound and determined to go to war with Iran - here, here, here, here, here, here, And if anyone wonders about whether the Iranian people would surrender to America, just read this.

All I can say in response to this headline is: You've obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a shit!

If you haven't had time to read through the play-by-play of the Libby trial over at Firedoglake, just see Sidney Blumenthal's piece in Salon -- in a few paragraphs, it lays out the whole appalling story.

RossK draws our attention to the Conservatives' sleazy plan to swiftboat Stephane Dion -- they're planning to mock Dion's leadership abilities and his environmental record, when they haven't done anything in either area to boast about themselves. What wankers! Devin has the ads (h/t Beaver).

Sorry

Sorry for the lack of posts -- its one of those weeks at work, and my brain is mush (yeah, yeah, I know -- so what's new about that?) Anyway, more soon, I hope.

Climate change photos

Here's the Globe and Mail's wonderful photo gallery relating to their story on global warming. Above is the cover photo of Greenland's disappearing glaciers. Below are the rest of the photos, with the cutlines from the website. Columnist Jeffrey Simpson writes:

Climate-change scoffers are now as rare as defenders of the invasion of Iraq. Reasonable people, in Canada and abroad, can differ over the means to combat the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that produce climatic changes, but only a dwindling few now deny changes are occurring — and that more will occur, with mostly negative effects.

A woman walks on the dried-up river bed in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality. Photo: China Daily News.


A farmer walks through a dusty field after the barley crop that was planted in it failed in Parkes, Australia. Photo: Ian Waldie/GETTY IMAGES


Mike Davis scrapes ice from his car windows after a winter storm in Austin, Tex. Photo: Ben Sklar/GETTY IMAGES


Oranges are covered in ice at a citrus orchard in Fresno, California. An estimated 70 per cent of California's citrus crops have been damaged by a severe cold snap. Photo: Justin Sullivan/GETTY IMAGES


Sheep drink from a dam in the drought-ravaged farming areas of the McLaren Vale region in South Australia, 80 kilometers southeast of Adelaide.


Scientists say the vast icy landscape of Greenland is thinning, and many blame global warming. Photo: John McConnico/AP


An iceberg carved from a glacier floats in the Jacobshavn fjord in southwest Greenland. Photo: Konrad Steffen/UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO


A polar bear on the hunt prowls across ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. Photo: Donald M. Robinson/AP


Three polar bears on the Beaufort Sea coast within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service


A vehicle lies buried under a fallen tree and snow in Vancouver's Stanley Park.


The stump of a tree sits shredded in Vancouver's Stanley Park. A devastating windstorm felled hundreds of trees, many well over a century old.


Workers in Vancouver's Stanley Park clean up the damage caused by a severe storm. Photo: John Lehmann/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Not impressive, Stephane

So instead of taking advantage of all the Canadian interest in him which was raised by his exciting come-from-behind win at the Liberal convention, and embarking on a high-profile cross-country flying tour in December, Liberal leader Stephane Dion somehow disappeared since the Christmas break -- emerging briefly to pick a shadow cabinet, big deal, ho hum, who cares other than Ottawa insiders, then evaporating again.
So now he's finally back in the news -- but its for resurrecting the sponsorship scandal by saying that one of the people Martin kicked out of the party should maybe be let back in:

"We can't sideline people who make mistakes forever," Dion told the Quebec newspaper Le Soleil.

Well, why not? Does any political party actually need these guys?
But wait. It gets worse.
In a chilling display of non-leadership, Dion then tries to shift the whole mess out of his lap by blaming the party or its constitution or something:

Dion told Le Soleil that Cote's punishment was exaggerated, that he'd recognized his error and shouldn't be penalized for life. Later in the day, Dion appeared to be more guarded, pointing out to reporters that none of the 10 expelled members has requested readmission to the party. He added that should any of them do so, there is a process the party would follow in determining whether to welcome them back.
"I have no recommendation to make.… It's not my job to make recommendation[s] to the party through the media."

Well, then, why did you?

Just shut up!

"Shut up" seems to be the new American meme.
Last weekend we had neocon William Kristol on a talk show saying war critics should shut up for a few months. Then last night we had George Bush saying that everyone should just be quiet and give his new Iraq strategy "a chance to work." Today Dick Cheney told Wolf Blitzer he was "out of line" about his daughter's pregnancy. And then we hear Ambassador Wilkins telling Stockwell Day to shut up about Maher Arar.
Next thing they'll be putting their hands over their ears and going "na-na-na-na".

Great line of the day

Following Bush's mention of a product called Baby Einstein in the State of the Union, Digby talks about the potential of selling corporate naming rights to locations like the White House ("Halliburton House"), congressional offices ("the Senator from Pfizer"), and so forth:

Product placement to fund the government is the kind of creative brainstorming that makes America great.

Maybe Tony Snow could have a Coke sitting on the press room lecturn, too.