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a few favorites from the spring Location: Albuquerque |
Monthly Archives: April 2006
sandias
Local Talking Heads
I’m still not quite happy with The Line on KNME (7pm Fridays). What brings me back is the hope the guest panelist will make it all work better for me. Friday night, the combination of Janice Paster and Susan Conway did just that. Afterwards, I wrote theline@knme.org :
There is one important defect in comparing the assimilation of European immigrants of the early 1900’s with immigration today. They had just left Europe, and clearly so. An Irish immigrant in Boston had a long way to go “home”; a Mexican immigrant in Las Cruces does not; a native New Mexican in Las Vegas has been “home” for centuries. Hispanics have been in the southwest and west longer than the United States itself or any English speakers. It makes for a significantly different set of facts.
Janice Paster is such a great addition to the line up; she’s cool, articulate and bright. I appreciate much about Margret Montoya and I think you do well to have at least one Hispanic perspective; can’t you have both Montoya and Paster? Are two-fifths too much yin?
Susan Conway is also an excellent counter-balance to John Dimdahl. Let’s see her again.
Dimdahl said the ACLU argues an employer cannot make employees speak English. Nonsense — why didn’t one of the others challenge him? The issue is employers trying to *prevent* their employees from ever using something other than English — even during breaks. That’s a very different matter. But Dimdahl gets his sly digs in, no matter how far from the truth.mjh
Search blog for Dimdahl.
The Bible in Georgia’s Public Schools
Teaching the Bible in Georgia’s Public Schools – New York Times By BRENDA GOODMAN
Georgia is about to become the first state to approve the use of the Bible as a textbook in public schools.
On Monday, the State Senate passed a bill providing money to high schools that offer elective classes in the Bible, and setting specific guidelines for those classes. The bill was approved by Georgia’s House of Representatives last week.
Gov. Sonny Perdue is expected to sign the law.
The bill creates two courses, the History and Literature of the Old Testament Era and the History and Literature of the New Testament Era, that can be offered as electives. It gives the state’s Department of Education a year to approve the curriculum, but it requires that the Bible itself, not a textbook, be the core material used. Supplementary materials can also be used.
Other state school systems offer classes in the Bible, but Georgia’s law would be the first to require that the Bible be the core text. Legislators in Alabama and Missouri are considering similar measures. …
The closest thing to a Bible-as-literature class Georgia schools now offer is an elective in comparative religion, and Education Department officials said it is not in great demand. Only 800 students out of 400,000 in state high schools signed up for the class last year, they said. …
The Christian Coalition of Georgia has strongly supported the legislation. The group’s chairwoman, Sadie Fields, said the courses were “another way to help students think critically.” [mjh: LOL. ‘Bible literalism’ encourages critical thinking? When there is only one truth and no others, “critical thinking” means learning how to reject all other views.]
State Senator Williams disputed predictions of the classes’ popularity among Georgia students.
“Where it’s been taught, it’s my understanding it’s a very popular course,” he said. “It’s a very interesting book, by the way.”
Georgia School Superintendent Kathy Cox visits Walker schools Eric Beavers
State School Superintendent Kathy Cox said Wednesday she’s solidly behind a measure that would allow the Bible to be used as a textbook in Georgia’s public schools.
“I think this is much ado about nothing,” Cox said about controversy over the issue, as she toured three Walker County schools. “I was a world history teacher for 15 years, and in world history you teach Greek mythology, you teach Buddhism, you teach Judaism, you teach Confucius — you teach all the world’s religion as part of world history, including Christianity.”
‘War’ on Christians Is Alleged
I can’t be the only one creeped out about how Evangelical Christians have completely immersed themselves in a war-mindset. It makes them a great tool for fascism. mjh
‘War’ on Christians Is Alleged
Conference Depicts a Culture Hostile to Evangelical Beliefs
By Alan Cooperman, Washington Post Staff Writer
The “War on Christmas” has morphed into a “War on Christians.” …
Among the … speakers [at the two-day conference in Washington on the “War on Christians and the Values Voters in 2006”] were former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) as well as conservative Christian leaders Phyllis Schlafly, Rod Parsley, Gary Bauer, Janet Parshall and Alan Keyes.
To many of the 400 evangelicals packed into a small ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, it was a hard but necessary look at moral relativism, hedonism and Christophobia, or fear of Christ, to pick just a few terms offered by various speakers referring to the enemy.
To some outsiders, it illuminated the paranoia of the Christian right. …
“This is a skirmish over religious pluralism, and the inclination to see it as a war against Christianity strikes me as a spoiled-brat response by Christians who have always enjoyed the privileges of a majority position,” said the Rev. Robert M. Franklin, a minister in the Church of God in Christ and professor of social ethics at Emory University.
White evangelicals make up about one-quarter of the U.S. population, and 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians. But three-quarters of evangelicals believe they are a minority under siege and nearly half believe they are looked down upon by most of their fellow citizens, according to a 2004 poll. …
In a luncheon speech yesterday, DeLay took issue with the “chattering classes” who think there is no war on Christians.
“We are after all a society that abides abortion on demand, that has killed millions of innocent children, that degrades the institution of marriage and often treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition. Seen from this perspective, of course there is a war on Christianity,” he said. [mjh: let me be the first to call Christianity a first-rate superstition]
I watched part of Ron Luce’s Battle Cry on the Christian channel 23 (you’d be shocked how much time I spend on that channel — my wife certainly is — but I feel you’ve got to know what this particular group is up to; besides, it’s always cool to see TDJakes). Battle Cry addresses teenagers as being attacked by their culture and forced to sit in a pen with pigs (me, maybe you). It uses hip-hop and skateboard culture to reach the youngins. Reminds me of that King of the Hill episode when Bobby joins a bunch of Christian skateboarders. mjh
Evangelical teens rally in S.F. Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
“This is more than a spiritual war,” [Ron] Luce, [whose Teen Mania organization is based in Texas,] said. “It’s a culture war.”
Military metaphors abound in Luce’s descriptions of the struggle. He tells young people of how “an enemy has launched a brutal attack on them.” At a pre-Battle Cry rally Friday afternoon on the steps of City Hall, Luce told his mostly teenage audience that “terrorists of a different kind” — advertisers — were targeting them and that they were “caught in the middle of the battle.” [mjh: “Terrorists”? Aren’t we overusing this term?]
“Are you ready to go to battle for your generation?” he asked, and the young people roared “yes!” and some waved triangular red flags flown from long, medieval-looking poles.
Democrats Detail Security Policy
Democrats Detail Security Policy By Chris Cillizza and Dan Balz, Washington Post Staff Writers
Democrats unveiled a national security platform [3/30] for the midterm elections that stresses renewed focus on capturing Osama bin Laden, reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq and stepped up protection at home. …
Declaring that the administration’s “dangerous incompetence has made America less safe,” Reid said, “We are uniting behind a national security agenda that is tough and smart, an agenda that will provide the real security President Bush has promised, but failed to deliver.” …
Albright decried the Bush administration’s “rank incompetence” on such issues as the Iraq war and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Albright called for a security plan based on “facts not fantasy.”
Old News Rediscovered
I ran across these two linked articles by chance and did a double-take when I saw the dates were nearly a year ago. I remember Curveball, but don’t remember the American press calling him a crazy drunkerd, as the Brits did. I don’t recall the Blackwater controversy at all. mjh
The Observer | International | US relied on ‘drunken liar’ to justify war Edward Helmore in New York
Sunday April 3, 2005
The Observer
An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi has emerged as the key source in the US rationale for going to war in Iraq.
According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq’s alleged biological weapons programmes and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as ‘crazy’ by his intelligence handlers and a ‘congenital liar’ by his friends.
The defector, given the code-name Curveball by the CIA, has emerged as the central figure in the corruption of US intelligence estimates on Iraq. Despite considerable doubts over Curveball’s credibility, his claims were included in the administration’s case for war without caveat.
Fury at US Security Firm’s ‘Shoot for Fun’ Memo by Mark Townsend
One of the biggest private security firms in Iraq has created outrage after a memo to staff claimed it is ‘fun’ to shoot people.
Emails seen by The Observer reveal that employees of Blackwater Security were recently sent a message stating that ‘actually it is “fun” to shoot some people.’
Dated 7 March [2005] and bearing the name of Blackwater’s president, Gary Jackson, the electronic newsletter adds that terrorists ‘need to get creamed, and it’s fun, meaning satisfying, to do the shooting of such folk.’