New American Dark Ages
ABQjournal: Lawyer: Church-State Wall Has Crumbled By Debra Dominguez-Lund, Journal Staff Writer
“It’s time for Americans to wake up and realize the wall separating church and state has crumbled,” he said. “It’s time to take it back. Stand up for our rights. Do the patriotic thing.” Military Religious Freedom Foundation lawyer Mikey Weinstein— a former Air Force officer and attorney in the Reagan White House, whose family has a long history at military academies
More GOP Districts Counted as Vulnerable
Number Doubled Over the Summer
By Dan Balz and David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writers
Facing the most difficult political environment since they took control of Congress in 1994, Republicans begin the final two months of the midterm campaign in growing danger of losing the House while fighting to preserve at best a slim majority in the Senate, according to strategists and officials in both parties.
Over the summer, the political battlefield has expanded well beyond the roughly 20 GOP House seats originally thought to be vulnerable. Now some Republicans concede there may be almost twice as many districts from which Democrats could wrest the 15 additional seats they need to take control. …
Meanwhile, finger-pointing has begun as Republicans here and around the country blame the White House and the GOP congressional leadership for leaving Republican candidates in such a vulnerable position.
Despite these advantages, Democratic strategists say they see ways they could fall short of their goal of capturing one or both houses of Congress. They cite what they consider to be a superior Republican get-out-the-vote operation, a coming barrage of negative ads aimed at their challenger candidates, and a sizable cash-on-hand disparity between the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee.
Even with the political winds at their backs, Democrats, to take control, must defeat a significant number of incumbents — ordinarily one of the hardest tasks in politics — and, in most cases, do so in districts that have voted consistently Republican in recent presidential races. …
[M]ost of the Democrats interviewed for this report predicted that their party will win a House majority with votes to spare. “That’s as of September 1,” one well-placed source said, “but on September 1, 2004, John Kerry would have been elected president.”
Democrats have learned the hard way to fear the ability of the White House and the Republican National Committee to dominate the final days of any campaign, when the money and organization the GOP can muster come fully to bear.
GOP Focus on Security Issues to Sideline Other Matters By Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post Staff Writer
Congress will return to Washington this week with the Republican majorities in both chambers at risk and GOP leaders planning to turn the floors of the House and Senate into battlegrounds over which political party can best protect the country from terrorists and other security threats.
But in devoting the few remaining legislative days almost exclusively to security issues, Republicans will leave major domestic tasks undone, including President Bush’s prized immigration overhaul and long-promised legislation to toughen the restrictions on lobbying after a wide-ranging corruption scandal. No budget plan for 2007 will be completed. Promised relief for seniors struggling with their Medicare prescription drug plans will have to wait. And as many as eight of the 11 bills needed to fund the government will not be passed before the November elections.
That has some Republicans worried. …
Work promises to start slowly. After a five-week summer break, the centerpiece of the House’s schedule for the coming week is a bill to toughen rules against horse slaughtering. …
“Our fight is with the Republicans,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. “They have weakened our military, hurt our position in the world, spent away our children’s future and again not made America safer.” …
Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said he fully expects Republicans to go back to the political playbook that worked so well in the past two elections. But he added: “They’ve run that play one too many times.”
Florida’s Harris under fresh fire
Harris, who as Florida’s secretary of state gained national attention during the disputed Florida presidential vote count in 2000, said her religious beliefs “animate” everything she does, including her votes in Congress.
She then warned voters that if they do not send Christians to office, they risk creating a government that is doomed to fail.
“If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin,” she told interviewers, pointing to abortion and gay marriage as examples of that sin.
“Whenever we legislate sin,” she said, “and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong.”
Harris also said the separation of church and state is a “lie we have been told” to keep religious people out of politics.
In reality, she said, “we have to have the faithful in government” because that is God’s will. Separating religion and politics is “so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers,” she said.
“And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women,” then “we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that’s [sic] certainly isn’t what God intended.”
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From the original interview/survey (linked):
“Why should Florida Baptists care about this primary election?
They should care about this election period. I will tell you that everywhere I go throughout the state and even the nation, people say the pollsters, the politicians and spiritually—that Florida is the forerunner state. That what happens in Florida sets the trend for what happens nationally. And with this election, if Bill Nelson wins, it’s going to be a very frightening proposition in 2008 in the presidential elections because whoever wins Florida will win the presidency. And he’ll be in a position to largely influence. No other candidate can beat Bill Nelson except for me. No one even has a chance because of name identification and fund raising abilities and things like that. But the real issue is why should Baptists care, why should people care? If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin. They can legislate sin. They can say that abortion is alright. They can vote to sustain gay marriage. And that will take western civilization, indeed other nations because people look to our country as one nation as under God and whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong. …”
http://www.floridabaptistwitness.com/6298.article
It’s our Christian duty to vote on Sept. 5
By JAMES A. SMITH SR.
Executive Editor, Editorial
“the bottom line is—by whatever means it is done, I believe Christians who fail to vote are, in fact, sinning.
Have you ever considered the idea that it is a sin to fail to vote when you are qualified to do so? I believe it’s clear from Scripture that Christians should be the best citizens a nation has to offer. And in a nation such as ours, where the citizens direct the course of our government, the failure to participate in the most fundamental way we have to provide direction to our government cannot be seen to be anything less than a sin.
The witness of Scripture is that Christians are citizens simultaneously of two realms—the earthly nation of our birth (or naturalization) and the heavenly realm of the Kingdom of God. ”
http://www.floridabaptistwitness.com/6304.article
The most nauseating part of this whole disgusting assault on the nation is the patronizing notion that Christians have to rule those who “don’t know any better” (me).
Can there be any doubt that if Katherine Harris believed god chose Duhbya as our “ruler” that she would cheat in the 2000 election?
One hundred years from now, people will look back at evangelism as proof of our mental health crisis or too much lead in our water. mjh
The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA
“It was never the intent of the Framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregarded the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights,” Taylor wrote. She added: “There are no hereditary kings in America.”
“I would say that those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live. I strongly disagree with this decision,” he told reporters at the presidential retreat in Camp David.
[mjh: I find it ironic to be lectured by Duhbya about grasping reality.]
The Favor Factory
How a top House Appropriations aide didn’t have to wait to lobby
AS ONE OF THE top appropriations staffers to Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), Letitia White made a nice salary. Ms. White, who oversaw the dispensation of earmarks for Mr. Lewis, earned almost $118,000 in 2000 and nearly $125,000 in 2001. But the following year, Ms. White took a hefty pay cut: Her pay dropped to slightly over $113,000. An effort to save the taxpayers money?
Don’t bet on it. The rules — such as they are — that require congressional staff members to wait a single year before lobbying their former committees apply only to those who earn a certain amount — in 2002, $112,500. Even though Ms. White was a bit over that limit, her pay cut, on an annualized basis, put her $80 below the cap — and cleared the way for her to join a lobbying firm and rake in $670,000 in lobbying fees during her first year in business. Why endure a cooling-off period when your former boss makes you a hot commodity?
Ms. White’s lucrative trip through the revolving door was detailed by Paul Kane last week in Roll Call. The story reported how in March 2002, Ms. White and her husband went on a nearly $9,000, nine-day trip to Italy paid for by defense contractor General Atomics. The company received $6.1 million in two separate earmarks in the defense appropriations bill passed that year. Ms. White left the appropriations staff on Jan. 8, 2003; she joined the lobbying firm renamed Copeland, Lowery, Jacquez, Denton & White on Jan. 9. Name partner Bill Lowery is a former Republican congressman from California who is one of Mr. Lewis’s closest friends. And guess who Ms. White signed up as a client on her first day? General Atomics.
The company was just one of 16 clients — mostly defense contractors whose interests were overseen by Mr. Lewis as chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee — whom Ms. White secured that year. Those clients received about $22 million in earmarks in the next round of spending bills. That kind of success paid off: By 2004, Ms. White was reporting lobbying fees of almost $1.5 million.
In a statement to Roll Call, Mr. Lewis, who now chairs the appropriations panel, said, ” I have always made every effort to carefully follow the rules of the House of Representatives in all aspects of my Congressional work. I am confident that any review will confirm this.” A spokesman for Ms. White said she consulted the House ethics committee about how to handle job negotiations and “recused herself from any official activity that involved a prospective employer or client.”
This is just a piece of the increasingly disturbing picture emerging about the goings-on at the appropriations panel, which lobbyist Jack Abramoff memorably dubbed the “favor factory.” We’ll examine other aspects of the story in another editorial. Federal prosecutors have subpoenaed a number of Copeland, Lowery clients and examined the financial disclosure forms of Mr. Lewis and his staff. Whether crimes were committed remains to be determined, but this much is clear: There’s quite an odor emanating from the favor factory.
Utilities giving big bucks to global warming skeptic
By SETH BORENSTEIN | Associated Press
July 27, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) – Coal-burning utilities are passing the hat for one of the few remaining scientists skeptical of the global warming harm caused by industries that burn fossil fuels.
Pat Michaels _ Virginia’s state climatologist, a University of Virginia professor and senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute _ told Western business leaders last year that he was running out of money for his analyses of other scientists’ global warming research. So last week, a Colorado utility organized a collection campaign to help him out, raising at least $150,000 in donations and pledges.
The Intermountain Rural Electric Association of Sedalia, Colo., gave Michaels $100,000 and started the fund-raising drive, said Stanley Lewandowski, IREA’s general manager. He said one company planned to give $50,000 and a third plans to give Michaels money next year.
“We cannot allow the discussion to be monopolized by the alarmists,” Lewandowski wrote in a July 17 letter to 50 other utilities. He also called on other electric cooperatives to launch a counterattack on “alarmist” scientists and specifically Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” …
Michaels is best known for his newspaper opinion columns and books, including “Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media.” However, he also writes research articles published in scientific journals.
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Progress Report Archives 2006 – American Progress Action Fund
WHO IS PAT MICHAELS?: Pat Michaels is a climate scientist based at the University of Virgina. John P. Holdren, a Harvard scientist, told the Senate Republican Policy Committee that Michaels has “published little if anything of distinction in the professional literature, being noted rather for his shrill op-ed pieces and indiscriminate denunciations of virtually every finding of mainstream climate science.” In 2003, Michaels famously “proved” that global warming was mostly hype by mixing up degrees and radians. In 2004, Michaels told Business Week, “We know how much the planet is going to warm. It is a small amount, and we can’t do anything about it.” This year, Michaels completely misrepresented a study by University of Missouri Professor Curt Davis to falsely claim that Antarctica has been gaining ice in recent years. Michaels’ views about climate change are at odds with the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a rigorously peer-reviewed report that involved thousands of scientists from over 100 countries, which concluded, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities” and that, absent aggressive mitigation efforts, future warming will be significant and dangerous.
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On the Roof of Peru, Omens in the Ice By Doug Struck, Washington Post Foreign Service
[Researchers] have confirmed a rapid recession of glaciers worldwide. Snows on Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro, extolled by Ernest Hemingway as “wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white,” will be gone within 14 years, Thompson estimates. Glaciers in the Alps, the Himalayas and throughout the Andes are also shrinking, he and other researchers have found.
The dramatic rise in carbon dioxide that has accompanied the industrial age has brought a spike in global temperatures. Scientists have found that the jump in temperatures is even greater in the upper atmosphere, where the glaciers reign on silent mountain peaks.
Glaciers store an estimated 70 percent of the world’s fresh water. Water that falls as snow moves through the slowly churning ice and may emerge from the glacier’s edge thousands of years later as meltwater. Humans have long depended on the gradual and faithful runoff.
The melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, which feed seven great Asian rivers, will bring “massive eco and environmental problems for people in western China, Nepal and northern India,” a World Wildlife Fund report concluded last year.
“The repercussions of this are very scary,” agreed Tim Barnett, a climate scientist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “When the glaciers are gone, they are gone. What does a place like Lima do? Or, in northwest China, there are 300 million people relying on snowmelt for water supply. There’s no way to replace it until the next ice age.”
$2 Million Payment to Former Lobbyist Raises Eyebrows By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
You’ve probably never heard of Jeffrey S. Shockey. So, for simplicity’s sake, think of him as the Two Million Dollar Man.
The 40-year-old congressional staffer last year collected nearly $2 million in severance payments from his former employer, a lobbying firm that specializes in winning benefits from the committee he now serves. Many longtime Washingtonians are shaking their heads in disbelief over the payout’s enormous size, its ad hoc method of calculation and the fact that Shockey received it while working as a senior congressional aide. …
Federal employees are prohibited from supplementing their incomes with money from private sources, especially from lobbyists who have business before the government. Shockey says his payment was justified and within the rules. But experienced lobbyists around town question both its economics and its propriety.
The situation is an example of a common occurrence — the spinning of the “revolving door” between the public and private sectors. Shockey is deputy chief of staff of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Before that he was a partner for five years in a lobbying firm that made its living extracting goodies from the same committee. And before that he worked for Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), who was then a member of the committee and is now its chairman. …
Lobby shops often give parting gifts to colleagues who go into public service as a way to maintain strong relations. But the amount tends to be nominal and strictly tied to past performance to avoid even the appearance of paying a federal official in exchange for favorable treatment — an exchange that would be illegal.
Why, then, would Shockey’s former firm pay him so much? The reason, several seasoned lobbyists speculated, must have been the firm’s desire to keep its communications with Shockey and the appropriations panel absolutely seamless. “There would be no need to pay out that amount of money unless you needed to maintain a superlative relationship with that person after he leaves,” one veteran lobbyist said. …
Congressional appropriators like Lewis were once hesitant to explicitly fund pet projects for fear of being accused of playing favorites and of micromanaging the government. But that was a long time ago. The Republican Revolution of 1994 ushered in a new congressional majority that professed to be distrustful of government but also worked overtime to maintain its control by directing federal aid into popular programs that would help reelect GOP members. …
Publicity over the investigation has broken up the partnership. The firm’s two Democratic partners, James M. Copeland and Lynnette R. Jacquez, told their Republican colleagues last month that they were leaving. The reason, they said, was that ethical and legal questions threatened to destroy their professional reputations and ruin their commercial prospects.