Do you want people who respect Stephen Baldwin to run your army?

I mentioned the growing entanglement of fundamentalist religion in the military the other day, and here’s another example: proselytization in the military by evangelical freaks like Stephen Baldwin.

Baldwin became a right-wing, born-again Christian after the 9/11 attacks, and now is the star of Operation Straight Up (OSU), an evangelical entertainment troupe that actively proselytizes among
active-duty members of the US military. As an official
arm of the Defense Department’s America Supports You program, OSU plans to mail copies of the controversial apocalyptic video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces to soldiers serving in Iraq. OSU is also scheduled to embark on a “Military Crusade in Iraq” in the near future.

Hang on there … maybe we shouldn’t worry too much. If the evangelical arsenal consists of the dumbest of the Baldwin brothers and an exceptionally lame video game, all it’s going to succeed in doing is recruiting the dregs and dullards…

…who will then be lofted into positions of leadership in the most powerful military force in the world.

Hmmm. Maybe we should be concerned.

I get email

Here’s an odd correlation for you: whenever I take a swipe at the foolishness of Scott Adams, I get a major uptick in the usual trickle of Christian email. I don’t quite see Adams as a friend to Christianity, although he does seem to foster the kind of shallow thinking on which religiosity thrives. Anyway, for your delectation, I’ve put a couple of samples below.

[Read more…]

What Would Jesus Do … with a cruise missile?

It’s frightening to see religion poisoning our military, but it’s happening. A group of generals is facing disciplinary action for promoting an evangelical religious organization, and they admit to being oblivious to the problem of a general declaring that his “first priority is his faith in god”, or in supporting a fanatical Christian group that wants to target foreign diplomats, ambassadors, and other representatives for conversion to Christianity. These fellows lent the dignity and responsibility of their positions to a weird cult, and now they defend themselves with this particularly chilling argument:

Brooks told investigators he believed he did not violate any rules. Due to Christian Embassy’s long tenure of working with Pentagon employees, Brooks said he saw the group “as a sanctioned or endorsed activity.”

Catton’s response was similar. Christian Embassy had become a “quasi-federal entity,” he told investigators, and he believed he was taking part in a program approved by the Defense Department.

So because they blindly assumed that Christian proselytization was a normal activity for high-level military leaders, they went ahead and contributed to a movie that portrays our government as a hotbed of Christian crazies … which is true, unfortunately, but we don’t need to pretend that that is a good thing.

You can watch the whole movie — it’s an embarrassingly treacly pile of crap in which politicians and soldiers profess their reliance on morning bible study and advice from the Lord to do their jobs. For instance, it’s got representative Gresham Barrett of South Carolina piously declaiming the moral guidance he’s been given, saying “You have to think about what’s right, what’s right for the country” while the video shows a picture of him smilingly shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld. It’s got Pentagon chaplain Ralph Benson providing his solution to the “war on terror”: “What more do we need than Christian people leading us?” Christian Embassy, by the way, seems to be affiliated with Bill Bright and the Campus Crusade for Christ — that’s all we need is crusaders taking over the military.

These displays of piety from our leaders always make me want to sit them down and pin them down on precisely how Jesus is advising them. They seem bereft of any sense of ethics at all, which is making Jesus look like a right clueless bastard whose sole interest is in promoting the careers of self-serving maggots like Tom Delay.

Down with the DCCC

It’s a perfect example of the failure of the Democratic party: they allowed the FISA bill to pass, and essentially revealed that they don’t give a damn about civil liberties. Revere is right: don’t support them. Don’t donate to the DCCC. He recommends ActBlue, which does look like a very good organization that actually promotes progressive politics rather than the craven do-nothing politics of the current party organization.

You should also voice your displeasure with your representatives. I gave Senator Amy Klobuchar grief for her spinelessness, and also yelled at my representative
Collin Peterson, who allowed the house bill to pass (and other Minnesotans might cuss out Tim Walz, if you’re in his district). What good is a party that won’t represent any ideals, and instead seems to be a gathering of cowards who do nothing to oppose the Republican bullying?

Just like a Republican

News from the Wingnut Heartland! Brave Oklahoma is issuing a new license plate design:

i-19e68c65bf3f7ccf3afcf7a78fa1d3a6-waronterrorplates.jpg

Wouldn’t that look perfect on the SUV decorated with yellow magnetic ribbons that you use to drive (alone) into work every day?

And how about Kansas? You know they’re always going to be at the forefront of America’s mad plunge backward. Now the Republican party in that fine state has decided they need loyalty oaths:

Over the weekend, Kansas Republican leaders formed what they’re calling a “loyalty committee,” a move that’s ticking off moderates and conservatives alike.
It is never a sign of strength when your group, country or otherwise starts imposing loyalty oaths, or so I told Kansas Republican Party Chairman Kris Kobach over the phone on Tuesday.

Next step, I suspect, is to issue belt buckles saying “God is with us” and purifying the party structure in a Night of the Long Knives.

Bridge collapse update

The place to go if you want to track the media responses to our Twin Cities bridge disaster is Minnesota Monitor. There are regular updates as new information comes in.

If you’re looking to know where the responsibility is going to fall, Nick Coleman has the answers.

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It’s been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase – the first in 20 years – last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

I’m not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan. It is general.

Both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap, and both have dithered and dallied and spent public wealth on stadiums while scrimping on the basics.

After citing that ghastly quote from Grover Norquist, “My goal is to cut government in half … to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” (especially after Katrina, that quote deserves to be Norquist’s epitaph), Phoenixwoman seconds that suggestion:

It’s possible that delayed maintenance — delayed because of budget cuts, as the Republican Pawlenty would rather chop off his own genitals than undo his tax cuts for the rich — may have been a factor.

I think we can safely say that the Republican party platform has been a catastrophic and costly failure. Let’s hope one positive result from these recent disasters is that people realize that taxes ought to be used for investments in infrastructure rather than propping up the obscenely wealthy and funding wasteful foreign military adventures.

Spot makes an interesting observation: he reminds us that the Republican convention is in Minneapolis next summer. This disaster is not going to be corrected by then. Can we all remember to rub their noses in the debris when they come around?

Now we just need an opportunity to tell the Democrats that they’d better set their priorities appropriately, too.

Also read BldgBlog: Infrastructure is patriotic.

It’s interesting to point out, then, that the Federal Highway Administration’s annual budget appears to be hovering around $35-40 billion a year – and, while I’m on the subject, annual government subsidies for Amtrak come in at slightly more than $1 billion. That’s $1 billion every year to help commuter train lines run.

To use but one financial reference point, the U.S. government is spending $12 billion per month in Iraq – billions and billions of dollars of which have literally been lost.

I dread airports, not flying

Tomorrow, I’m flying off to San Jose, California to hang out with a bunch of weirdos on Google’s dime, and naturally I’m anticipating being pissed off at the experience of going through the airports again. I despise TSA, an organization of typical Bushpublican incompetence that will not accomplish their goals of suppressing terrorism, but is supremely efficient at being a nuisance to legitimate travelers. Actually, the one good thing about them is that they’ve replaced fear of flying with annoyance at bureaucratic idiots as the primary emotional vibe in modern American airports.

So naturally I’ve been enjoying Bruce Schneier’s interview with Kip Hawley, head of the TSA. Well, enjoying Scheier’s side of the discussion, anyway: Hawley is an obtuse timeserving fan of petty hoop-jumping. Read about the fluids foolishness, the shoe scam, and the no-fly list nonsense. Hawley can only provide shoddy excuses, and as Schneier says, it’s only cover-your-ass security, nothing useful. If you don’t want to read it all, Timothy Burke has a good summary.

But tomorrow I’m still going to have to take my shoes off and play games with toothpaste and deodorant and shuffle through that familiar line of bored, officious goons who will make you suffer if you don’t pretend they are the beloved guardians of your safety.

America’s alcohol problem

Rolling Stone has an excellent article on the ethanol boondoggle.

Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption — yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America’s energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 — twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon — about half of ethanol’s wholesale market price.

And that’s just the beginning … it starts getting savage after this point.