The Christian Extremists Behind Roy Moore.

Right Wing Watch has a comprehensive rundown of all those backing Roy Moore. In case you don’t remember Moore, here are two posts from last year, when Moore made a mess of his career at the time: one, two. Now that Moore is running for a senate seat, the religious reich is fervently backing him.

…Some better-known Religious Right groups, including the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council, have recently gone all-in for Moore. He has also been getting serious financial support in the form of outside spending from groups like Ken Cuccinelli’s Senate Conservatives Fund and from Alabama activist Stan Pate, who has been funding ads attacking Strange.

And Moore has also quietly been getting support from some of his most extreme allies, who see him as a chance to give their Christian nationalists views the biggest megaphone yet:

Michael Peroutka is a local Republican politician in Maryland who has used wealth from a set of debt-collection businesses to bankroll Christian nationalist causes across the country, most notably by funding the career of Moore. Peroutka has funded Moore’s Christian nationalist ventures and political campaigns for decades; he gave Moore’s Senate campaign $2,500 in June and his wife Natalie gave the same amount in early August, each nearly maxing out on their individual contribution limit for the initial Republican primary.

Peroutka is a former member of the neo-Confederate League of the South—he quit when the association started to cause him trouble in his campaign for office. As recently as 2012, he was on video leading a League of the South gathering in a round of “Dixie,” which he calls the “national anthem”; in a 2004 speech to the group, he said he was “still angry” that Maryland didn’t join the Confederacy and said that his daughter had the nickname “Beth Booth,” as in “John Wilkes Booth.”

Peroutka, who runs a group called the Institute on the Constitution, advocates an extreme form of Christian nationalism, saying for instance that the Maryland legislature had ceased to be a legitimate governing body when it violated “God’s law” by passing a marriage equality bill. Last year, he presented on his theocratic view of the law to Operation Save America, an extreme anti-choice group that is trying to get government officials to defy laws on abortion rights and ultimately charge women who have abortions with homicide. (OSA has its own relationship with Moore, which we discuss below.) Along with his longtime support for Moore, Peroutka has helped to fund the campaigns of Tom Parker, Moore’s protégé on the Alabama Supreme Court, who has been trying to establish a legal framework for extreme anti-choice “personhood” laws.

Rusty Thomas, the head of the extreme anti-choice group Operation Save America, contributedjust over $200 to Moore’s campaign in three separate contributions in July and August. Although Thomas’ financial contribution is relatively small, he has been a stalwart ally to Moore throughout his tribulations on the Alabama Supreme Court.

In the summer of 2015, as Moore attempted to fight the Supreme Court’s landmark marriage equality decision, he accepted an award from OSA at the group’s gathering in Montgomery, telling them that “America is under attack” as it moves away from God and adding, “I’m sorry but this country was not founded on Muhammad. It was not founded on Buddha. It was not founded on secular humanism. It was founded on God.”

Moore responded to criticism of his association with OSA by saying: “You know, some told me ‘you know they’re a radical group.’ I said yeah. They are radical for God.”

Like Peroutka, Thomas and OSA promote the theocratic worldview that laws that they perceive to be ungodly are null and void. OSA’s main text for this belief is a book called “The Doctrine of Lesser Magistrates” by OSA activist Matt Trewhella, one of the anti-choice radicals who signed a statement in the 1990s declaring the murder of abortion providers to be justifiable homicide; in presenting the award to Moore in 2015, Thomas prayed that God would use him to “set an example for lesser magistrates throughout the United States of America that it’s time to say no to the federal beast!”

That’s just a little bit. There’s video, many links, and background on these supporters, including Anita and Mat Staver, Steve Hotze, Ken Eldred, and Eugene Delgaudio at RWW. I think a bit of fear is setting into the religious reich at this point, about how long they may have their stooge in office. Their efforts are seriously ramping up when it comes to getting as many religious reich fanatics as possible into government positions.

Word Wednesday.

Batrachian

Noun.

Amphibian; especially: Frog, Toad.

– batrachian adjective.

[Origin: ultimately from Greek batrachos frog.]

(Circa 1828.)

“When the migraine began to fade a little, Marc looked at Merlin, now pinioned by two policemen and moving his batrachian lips in an incoherent automatic way.” – The Accordionist, Fred Vargas.

Paper!

Even doing the draft of I Have Seen The Moon has been irritating, because thanks to having no paper, I couldn’t fit everything on my scratch paper. After doing battle with a closet full of crap, I managed to drag out my monster portfolio, and found a bit of paper and illustration board. I still don’t have anything large enough for the whole work, but at least I can do this bit, which means more painting today, yay! This bit is 14″ x 11.5″.

© C. Ford, all rights reserved.

Glenn Beck’s Revolutionary Design.

Glenn Beck has an excruciatingly long facebook post about his revolutionary redesign of GB everything. By golly, no one has ever thought of this, in all of history, no sir. And no one has ever done this, either, nope! I get the feeling that Glenn doesn’t read much.

In between speeches, conversations in MA this weekend, I am working with the content and product team on last minute adjustments for THE BEGINNING of a new way to deliver news and information on theBlaze.com.

We are soft launching a new front page and a new approach to news Monday.

SOMETHING NEW

I want to get out of the “news and opinion” business and focus on “facts and perspective”.

News is breaking. Let others be first. I want to be driven by facts. I want us to be right and without the hype.

Facts are solid and must be our foundation if we are going to survive as a culture.

Opinion, is something that literally everyone has. Not all opinions are thought out, backed with facts, or even valid. In fact most are not. Some are just flat crazy and are dangerous.

Everybody knows that their opinion needs to be SHOUTED louder or more brutal if they are to be heard over all other opinions. “I am right and you will listen”.

Louder, meaner, crazier.

Perspective, on the other hand, is not something that everyone can offer. It is an invitation to look at an event from a new and unique way. “Have you looked at it from this angle?”

Opinions are shouted. Perspective is ‘offered’

An offer to engage in an intellectually honest and vigorous conversation based on the facts.

WORD GAMES?

Perhaps it is subtle to most but not to me and I hope not to my team. It isn’t just word play. It is a different way to write, speak and behave. To succeed we can’t just say it, we have to live it every second of everyday.

We have been working hard all summer and have had to turn this thing 180 degrees in approach – there is no one modeling this so we all are hoping we get it, but it is going to take us a couple of months. (Thus, the soft launch.).

That’s just a bit of the post. As you can see, Glenn is just boggled that there is absolutely no modeling of this type of approach, not anywhere, ever. This whole perspective business, it’s completely new! A point of view isn’t at an opinion, no, and it’s not possible for anyone to shout their perspective, because it’s so darn different from those angry opinions! I hate to break it to you, Glenn, but everyone has perspective on everything, and it’s generally expressed a zillion times a day by a zillion peoples. I’d offer Glenn a dictionary, but I’m not sure he’d know how to use it.

The full revolutionary process is here.

Peter Saul: Fake News.

Peter Saul, “Quack-Quack, Trump” (2017), acrylic on canvas, 78 x 120 inches.

If you’re unfamiliar with Peter Saul, do yourself a favour and click over to read John Yau’s article at Hyperallergic. Peter Saul has never known any fear when tackling the hot and heavy subjects of the day, and that has not changed.

In the 1960s, Saul titled two of his paintings, “Mickey Mouse vs. The Japs” (1962) and “I Torture Commie Virgins” (1967). The 1970s brought “Crucifixion of Angela Davis” (1973). In 1990, he did a painting titled “Legal Abortion,” and in 1993, he did one of Jeffrey Dahmer strapped into an electric chair, celebrating his birthday with a cake made from a butchered male pelvis.

Saul’s recurring subject is pain and abuse of all kinds — what we inflict on others and do to ourselves. It seems that the only way he can embrace these often monstrous subjects, and whatever they stir up in him, is with scandalous humor. This is why such distinctions as tasteful and tasteless seem beside the point when looking at and thinking about Saul’s garish work, which is just one reason why he is such an important artist. He also happens to be an amazing colorist and terrific caricaturist. More than socially conscious, he is a formally inventive artist with a deep love for toppling sacred cows and pushing everyone’s buttons. In his hands, painting and paint become a platform for preposterous visual proposals.

This is the America that Saul has never shied away from, never failed to poke, probe, or give the finger to — a self-righteous country that has been in a race war ever since intolerant religious freedom seekers landed on the Eastern seaboard and began slaughtering Native Americans in the name of God. I love the fact that he keeps hammering away at everything a well-behaved citizen, whether of a liberal or conservative political persuasion, would have an informed opinion about — Abstract Expressionism, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, fast food, sweaty businessmen, big-breasted women, or capital punishment. Saul has a quarrel with the world and he isn’t above using puerile humor, ghastly bad taste, or in-your-face grotesquerie to nettle it.

Peter Saul, “Donald Trump in Florida” (2017), acrylic on canvas, 78 x 120 inches.

Saul sees the President as a predatory crocodile — a cold-hearted creature incapable of empathy. There are six paintings in the exhibition, all of them irreverent. They riff on self-importance, make fun of Rembrandt, laugh at climate change because it is all too real. Saul’s impertinence is a frontal, no-holds-barred attack. I want him to keep it up. I want to see how far he can go. I want him to know that I am cheering him every step of the way. I don’t think Saul can be too tasteless when it comes to this disgusting regime.

Peter Saul: Fake News continues at Mary Boone (541 West 24th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through October 28, 2017)

I too am cheering Mr. Saul on, we need him more than ever. There’s much more to read and see at Hyperallergic.