Joel's Army

See what the respected Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about Joel's Army, the militant Christianist movement that espouses the use of violence to impose its religious views.

See Kos for more on links between Dominionist stealth candidate Sarah Palin and Joel's Army. This piece, written by a former cultist, has insights not readily available elsewhere, and bristles with informative links. The writer's diary and the linked articles are a good window on segments of US Christo-Fascism, a huge, well-funded, and very, very powerful voice in Republican politics and policy, foreign and domestic. The fact that Palin was selected over McCain's own preference--Lieberman first, then Pawlenty--speaks volumes to the power of this bloc in the GOP. It ain't your daddy's conservative voice.

But then if you've been paying any attention for the last eight years, you know that, don't you?

AZ Tribe Calls Halt to Water for Immigrant Desert Crossers

From the Santa Fe New Mexican:

TUCSON, Ariz. — A member of a Southern Arizona Indian tribe who has been putting out water for illegal immigrants crossing the desert for about seven years said Thursday that he has again been told to stop.

Mike Wilson has ignored an admonition to stop the practice since 2002 and has been operating four water stations on one part of the Tohono O'odham Nation for several years and two others just south of the Mexican border, all in cooperation with the humanitarian organization Humane Borders.

The water is set out in 55-gallon drums along routes heavily used by illegal immigrants to try to cut the number of heat-related desert deaths.

"The (Tohono O'odham) nation has been adamant in not cooperating with any person or groups in the social justice community in trying to mitigate the deaths on tribal lands," said Wilson, 59, a resource manager for a charter high school in Tucson.

Calls to Tohono O'odham tribal Chairman Ned Norris Jr., Baboquivari District Chairwoman Veronica Harvey and tribal spokesmen were not returned immediately Thursday.

Some of the busiest smuggling routes in Arizona cut through the Tohono O'odham Reservation, which shares 75 miles of border with Mexico and which has registered a disproportionate number of illegal immigrant deaths in the state, mostly heat-related. Arizona has been the focal point for illegal immigrant trafficking from Mexico for most of the past decade.

The Border Patrol says the agency doesn't break out migrant deaths on the reservation, but has documented 154 fatalities since Oct. 1 across the agency's Tucson sector, which includes most of the Arizona-Mexico border. That's a 21 percent decrease from the same period a year earlier.

The Arizona Daily Star, which has tracked border deaths for years, said the bodies of 70 illegal immigrants were recovered on the reservation in 2007. Eighty-three were recovered between Jan. 1 and mid-June this year, according to the newspaper.

In June 2002, the reservation's Baboquivari District Council passed a resolution prohibiting Wilson from putting out water in the district. The council resolution said illegal immigrants and smugglers were breaking immigration laws, threatening tribal members for food and rides, breaking into homes, littering, cutting fences and trading drugs to tribal members for information.

Wilson said he's been threatened with banishment by the tribe's public safety director and Attorney General's Office if he doesn't stop putting water out for migrants. However, tribal officials have largely left a water placement ban to each of the tribe's 11 districts.

On Saturday, a police officer told him to take down a water station he has nicknamed St. Matthew, Wilson said. "I told her I would respectfully decline the instructions to take down the water station," he said.

Wilson said he felt a responsibility as a human being, a Tohono O'odham member and a pastor to do something.

This grim story illustrates the very real and very tragic complexities created by our criminally complicit federal immigration policies for those who live on the border--all merely to further the lowballing wage interests of corrupt and influential operators in meatpacking, construction, landscaping, agriculture, and other industries heavily reliant on exploitable immigrant labor.

Don't Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. And Then Get Busy.

Thank God Kos is on it. Maybe he has the leverage to help get this into the mainstream media. In any case, it's the responsibility of the Left blogosphere to make this THE issue of this election in the mainstream mind. If you have a blog, get informed and start writing about what's at stake in the coming election.

The Dominionist/Reconstructionist/Extreme Christian Right agenda is not a joke, not an exaggeration, not a made-up horror story, not a myth.

For more than 20 years, I've been following it closely, writing about it, and warning about it.

The hardest challenge has been to persuade sane people to believe it for the simple reasons that (a) it sounds insane, (b) they think the Christian Right is a small, lunatic fringe, and (c) they believe it cannot happen here.

Au contraire. If you're sane, take heed NOW. Fight any inclination to dismiss this as exaggeration. It isn't. It's deadly serious, and it's real, and it could be coming to a White House near you.

The extreme Christianist Far Right movement is huge, enormously wealthly, and extraordinarily powerful. Its followers--in varying degrees of conviction, and with certain theological differences--are in the White House, the Supreme Court, and the US Congress, to say nothing of state governments. The intentions? To remake the United States into an Old Testament theocracy (that means that Old Testament law as fundamentalists interpret them will be the law of the land) and hurry the Second Coming by any means necessary.

Much has been written about this horrifying phenomenon by numerous reputable scholars, biblical scholars, journalists, and former cult members. It's here, it's real, and Sarah Palin is their dream candidate. Visit Kos for an overview focused on Palin's connections.

See the links at the right side of this blog, under Heads Up, for reliable information about America's deadly serious, enormously influential, militant, extremist Christian Right. See also my series on the long march to US Christo-Fascism, starting here.

Do you really want Sarah Palin a heartbeat from Launch Code? If not, what are you willing to do to elect Obama and Biden instead?

Do You Really Want Palin a Heartbeat from Launch Code?

For those like RWR (my faithful if somewhat confused Rightwing Reader) who embrace the fantasy that Palin is "awesome" and simultaneously claim to hate lying, let me recommend this thorough fact-check of her RNC sermon and her actual record. It's awesome and it doesn't lie.

And on this basis alone (there being many others) I would say this to Republicans out there: If you're going to vote for McSame and Palin expecting an honest, conservative, small-government, no spending, no-lobbyists, pro-America administration, my friends, you're going to be had. Again.

For anyone who hopes that McCain will bring some sanity to US foreign policy, let me share this perspective from Ottawa, our neighbor to the north.

Please keep in mind that, now that McCain has put Palin a heartbeat from launch code, this is the Armageddon mentality that you'll be putting into the White House. It's worth the read.

From today's Ottawa Citizen
5 Sep 2008 By: DAN GARDNER

God help us if political pandering to religious zealots with apocalyptic fantasies puts someone who wants the world to end with a finger on the button.

Well, God bless America. And here’s hoping the rest of us get a little of that divine pixie dust because we’ll need it if the American political class continues its descent into flaky, Bible-waving irrationality.

It is a truism that only a devout Christian who prays for miracles, believes that God’s will is done on earth, and gabbles about the wonders of his faith to anyone who will listen can become president of the United States of America and, as Americans like to say, leader of the free world. In today’s America, Thomas Jefferson — the greatest of the Founding Fathers and a man who viewed the supernatural claims of religion as nothing more than primitive superstition — would be utterly unelectable.

But someone who believes that every word of the Bible is literally true, someone who believes all who disagree will be cast into fire to be tortured forever, someone who believes the actions of the United States must be guided by scripture and prophecy, someone who believes the end of the world could come any day now and who hopes and dreams and prays it does — someone like that can be president of the United States of America, commander-in-chief of the mightiest military in human history, and the person on whose judgment the fate of the world most depends.

Oh, and someone like that can have the launch codes. God bless us, indeed. Now, whenever I write one of these little missives about the dangerous malignancy of religion, I hear from decent and rational Christians who say that they personally don’t believe the world is 6,000 years old, or that angels guide footballs into the hands of wide receivers, or that the loving Jesus will return to smite infidels and launch a thousand-year Reich. This is a caricature of my faith, they say. And they are right.

But I am not responsible for that caricature. I am merely describing what tens of millions of Americans — hundreds of millions worldwide — have made of Christianity. It is they who are responsible for embracing and promoting a system of belief that increasingly resembles a primitive, irrational, millennial death cult.

A 2002 CNN/Time poll found that 59 per cent of all Christians and 77 per cent of those described as born-again, fundamentalist or evangelical agreed that the events portrayed in the Book of Revelation would happen at some time in the future. A 1999 Newsweek poll that asked a more specific question — “Will the world end in an Armageddon battle between Jesus Christ and the Antichrist?” — found that almost half of all Christians and three-quarters of evangelicals believe human history was nothing but a round or two of midget wrestling before Jesus puts the smackdown on Satan. (That image of Jesus is actually common in much of devout America: One popular illustration portrays the Son of God as a professional wrestler.)

And what a smackdown it will be.

Jesus returned to the world with “conviction like a flame of fire” in his eyes, write Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in the Left Behind series of Christian novels. The very words of the Lord caused the blood of infidels to boil and “burst through their veins and skin. ... Even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated.

Forget the hippy Jesus. This is Jesus as totalitarian maniac. The carnage of the final battle will be so awesome, LaHaye and Jenkins write, that Christians will have to drive carefully to avoid “hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses.”

More than 60 million copies of the Left Behind books have been sold. Although it’s technically fiction, LaHaye is widely respected as a biblical scholar by evangelicals, and the authors insist their books are a literal rendering of the Revelation prophecies that will inevitably come true. And that’s how their audience reads them. “Many people have asked me,” a Christian bookstore owner told the New York Times before the final installment in the series had been published, “do you think they’ll finish the series before Christ comes?’” (Happily, they did.)

All infidels should be nervous about this stuff, but Jews have a more immediate reason to be concerned. The Armageddonists believe a mass conversion of Jews is a critical event in the chronology. Not all will see the light, of course, and Jews who insist on remaining Jewish will be filleted and splayed with the rest of us. But get enough Jews to turn in their menorahs and the End Times are on — which helps explain why so many evangelicals have a creepy interest in all things Jewish.

And that, in turn, leads to scenes like this one: A couple of Sundays ago, David Brickner, the executive director of “Jews for Jesus” — a group that proselytizes among Jews — told Pentecostals at the Wasilla Bible Church that bad things happen to people because God is punishing them.

“Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television,” Brickner said. Just look at the terrorism that plagues Israel. That’s God’s judgment. And Jews will continue to suffer it until they see the light."

As religious flakiness goes, this was modest stuff. It only came to light because, sitting in the pews that Sunday morning, was one Sarah Palin — long-time member of the Wasilla Bible Church, governor of Alaska, and Republican nominee for vice-president of the United States.

But what really makes this incident interesting is that so few Americans found it interesting. No one seems to much care that Ms. Palin belongs to the sort of church that wants to hear from “Jews for Jesus.” And the fact that her church declares the Bible “the inspired, inerrant word of God” — a conclusion presumably shared by the woman who may be the next vice-president — was apparently of no interest at all. Even the revelation that Palin herself had described both the invasion of Iraq and the construction of an oil pipeline as part of “God’s plan” garnered only a fraction of the attention lavished on the irrelevant story of her pregnant daughter and the dazed boyfriend-cum-fiancé who stood on the stage of the Republican convention Wednesday night.

In a sense, it’s understandable. So someone with a good shot at the White House sat quietly and listened to a religious nut spout flaming nonsense. It’s hardly news, at least not in the sense of being novel. Quite literally everyone with a shot at the White House does the same. Routinely.

John McCain — who began his second attempt at the presidential nomination by kissing the ring of Jerry Falwell — attends a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Among its doctrines, the SBC declares the Bible “has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.”

All scripture. No exceptions. God’s sanction for slavery and genocide. The subordination of women? The ringing declaration in Leviticus that all homosexuals must be put to death? The eternal waterboarding that awaits anyone who disagrees? Word for word, it’s all “true and trustworthy.” The demonstrably false description of the universe and its origins in Genesis? Bang on. The technicolour lunacy in the Book of Revelation? More factual than On The Origin of Species.

The SBC is by far the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, and, not surprisingly, a whole lot of Americans see things its way. One-third of respondents told Gallup they believe the Bible “is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word.” Almost two thirds said the Bible’s account of Noah’s ark is literally true. The same proportion said it is true that God created the world in six days and Moses parted the Red Sea.

And don’t think this is only a Republican thing. In 2000, it was Al Gore, not George W. Bush, who said he decides policy by asking “what would Jesus do?” and today every leading Democrat is only too happy to blather on about his very special relationship with Jesus. How much is sincere and how much calculation is impossible to say but it is astonishing that Barack Obama agreed to make his first joint appearance with John McCain a few weeks ago at the cavernous Southern Baptist church of Rick Warren — a superstar evangelical whose message is more positive than many of his kind but whose substitution of fantasy for reason is every bit as total.

Or rather, it should be astonishing. But it doesn’t seem that many of us are astonished.

And even fewer are prepared to call these beliefs what they are. Or to do whatever they can to ensure that the most powerful office on the planet is not handed to anyone who eagerly awaits the destruction of that planet.

As certainly as Thomas Jefferson would be unelectable today, he would be disgusted.

Amen.

[Reprinted courtesy of the Ottawa Citizen. Emphases added throughout.]

"Palin's Speech to Nowhere"

Here's your hero, Rightwingers, a mean-spirited, lying bitch whose own classmates called a "barracuda." No stateswoman here, no leadership for the 21st Century, and nobody I'd want my kids to emulate.

Palin's Speech to Nowhere
Thursday 04 September 2008
by: Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Daily News

Sarah Palin delivered a great speech tonight--for her party, for John McCain, for herself, for what she set out to accomplish. This was America's first real glimpse at the Alaska governor, and what we saw was a boffo politician who speaks in a plaintive prairie voice that channels America's Heartland like a chilling breeze rippling a field of wheat, who knows how to tell a joke, how to bring down the house and bring a tear to a few eyes.

She is proud of her family, as she should be, and there is much to admire in her own "personal journey of discovery" (don't we all have these, by the way?) including her efforts to raise her son Trig. It is indeed nice to think that there would be an advocate for such children inside the corridors of the White House, although I'd surely like to hear what--if anything--she's done for special needs kids as governor of Alaska.

But. . .it was a great speech--written for someone else, a male in fact, days before the Palin selection was even a gleam in John McCain's eye, but a great speech nonetheless. The pundits are fawning over it as I write this--Tom Brokaw said she could not have been "more winning and more engaging"--and in a world that is dominated by horse race journalism I can understand why, because I agree that Palin's one-of-a-kind story has given her long shot running mate a decent chance now of pulling this one out at the finish line.

It's a good metaphor, a horse race, because in the end it finishes right near where it started -- just as it will be for America if John McCain and Sarah Palin are sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009. Yes, it was a great speech politically, and a great night for her family, but an empty speech for America--and for America's families. It was defined by its lowest moment, Palin's shameless lie about "the Bridge to Nowhere."

This was a Speech to Nowhere.

It was a Speech to Nowhere when Palin said that "I told the Congress 'Thanks but no thanks' on that Bridge to Nowhere," because that was a lie, and the worst kind of lie in American politics, a blatant falsehood that showed utter contempt for the American people that Palin pledged to serve, assuming we are too stupid to look up or know that truth, that she pushed for those funds in Congress and while she got great political mileage out of announcing that she was killing the project, she still has not returned the funds to American people.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because Palin also boasted seconds before her lie of fighting against wasteful earmarks in Congress, even though she pushed for and accepted $27 million of such grants when she was mayor of Wasilla.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because Palin said that "we've got lots" of oil and gas this country, and while one supposes that all depends upon what you definition of the words "lots" is, the production of oil in the United States has been irrevocably on the decline since 1970, and with her words she showed this nation that she and John McCain will perpetrate the dangerous myths that began with Ronald Reagan at his acceptance speech in 1980, that sunny optimism is the solution to all our energy woes, and not a posture that put energy research on a war footing, or requires moral leadership on conservation, mass transit, or any other common sense answers whatsoever.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because Palin boasted that "I stood up to the special interests, and the lobbyists, and the Big Oil companies," and the audience cheered --after eight brutal years of the same crowd's cheering two oilmen in the White House who fiddled while $4-a-gallon gas burned and while American men and women died in a needless war fought on top of an oilfield, and while lobbyist friends like Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed got rich at the same time.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because Palin had the nerve to talk at length about John McCain's "torturous interrogations" in the very same speech when she all but condoned the continuation of similar, abhorrent practices that have been directed for eight years by our own U.S. leaders, when she stated that Democrats are "worried that someone won't read them [terrorism suspects] their rights."

It was a Speech to Nowhere because Palin belittled "community organizers"-- thousands of Americans who work long hours for little pay in some of the toughest neighborhoods, trying to assist the American Dream that even the poorest among us can pull themselves out of the muck with a helping hand. Palin and other GOP speakers have turned a noble job into a dirty word tonight--shame on you! Listen to what CNN's Roland Martin said after Palin's speech was over.

My two parents are sitting home in Houston, Texas and they are both community organizers and the GOP and Sarah Palin might have well have said "being community organizers doesn't matter" to my parents face. I'm disgusted. Community organizers keep people in their homes, keep their lights on, keep food in the fridge.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because it made no mention of the men that Sarah Palin and John McCain are running to replace--their names are Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, in case you've forgotten this week--and no acknowledgment that as many 80 percent of Americans believe this country is on the wrong track, or that you can't solve a nation's problems when you deny they exist.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because. . .well, I urge everyone to read the text, without Palin's sharp delivery or her adoring fans in the crowd and in the press box, and tell me where there is any kind of policy at all--except for the short boilerplate passage on energy--or any mention of the issues that concern everyday Americans, including the No. 1 issue of the economy. Show me the part where this "grand slam" of speech touches on how citizens can afford health care or sending their kids to college.

But more than anything else, it was a Speech to Nowhere because for all the acclaim, the great bulk of it was devoted to one thing, and that is the one thing that millions of Americans are talking about in 2008 when we talk about "change"--to the ugliest kind of "pit bull" politics, to use Palin's words, that tear down the other side with cheap ad hominem attacks, surrounded by a cloud of half-truths (uh, those "Greek columns"...did you actually even watch Obama's speech? Because there weren't any) and ridiculous innuendo about "parting the waters" which means nothing but fires up a big hockey rink full of Dittoheads. These kinds of vicious attacks--without having the grace to acknowledge that, despite some real differences on issues with Obama, that he has already accomplished something impressive that says something positive about America and the progress we've made--were utterly lacking in class. And this is what Tom Brokaw considers "winning"--have we really sunk that low as a nation? The people of America want and deserve a real debate, now trash talk from the basketball point guard who was once called "Sarah Barracuda."

I hope America wakes up tomorrow and realizes that Sarah Palin's words were rousing--and completely empty, that they offered no road map (let alone bridge) for America other than more of the bogus partisan name-calling that has gotten us into the mess that we're in now.

Actually, let me rephrase that.

I hope America wakes up tomorrow.

[Reprinted here courtesy of The Philadelphia Enquirer. Emphases added throughout.]

General Sarah and Our Homegrown Suicide Bombers

Sarah Palin makes crystal clear that unless the mainstream talking heads focus Americans' attention on the choices that actually are up for grabs in this election, our lives and livelihoods are on the line.

Extreme? I think not. How many indicators does it take to make one probability? We see intimations of what I'm talking about in the police state rampaging in St. Paul this week. We see intimations in Palin's extremist Assembly of God roots, with all its assertions that Democrats are bound for Hell, no less--not for political oblivion, but for Hell. They're obvious in Blackwater, Inc., and in the utterly unscrutinized Patriot Acts 1 and 2. Plainly we see them in the explosion of utterly unaccountable detention centers all across the land, dedicated now to immigrants, but to whom tomorrow? There will be somebody, because the Corrections Corporation of America doesn't plan on backing off a 35% annual rate of growth in the stock market, you can bet your tutu on that. (Do the math: Private prisons are reimbursed by states on a per diem/per capita basis. The more people in their greedy maws, the more money they make.)

The list continues. James Watt lives in Palin's disdain for God's creatures. Polar bears? To Hell with them, too. It's pure DOMINIONist theology, rooted here-- "And God has given him DOMINION over them"--and in the desperation that makes a soul convinced of its evil willing to incite Armageddon by any means necessary--global warming, nuclear war, whatever.

If we can't see our mortal peril here, I fear for all of us. The analogy I see is to suicide bombers. Dominionists, Reconstructionists, the End Timers all are willing to sacrifice themselves and their own children to their twisted version of salvation. The rest of us are simply irrelevant.


Somewhere I just this second read that in order for the Republicans to win, they have to distract the country from the straightforward fact that we're in a hell of a mess that they created--economically, environmentally, internationally, infrastructurally, and constitutionally--not necessarily in order of priority.

Distraction is Palin's first mission. If she continues along last night's lines--and she will--Republicans will move to the Right and the media will reflect her sarcastic attacks as water reflects whatever crawls beside it. It's a terrifying thought, because as I've said here before, the Far Right Christianist approach to governing is one election away from implementation. That's her second mission. John McCain, fool that he is, doesn't realize how badly he's been had.

(If there are terms here you're not intimately familiar with--Dominionism, Reconstructionism, etc.--please do your homework. There are links in the Righthand column under Heads Up that will point you in reliable (fact-based) directions.

Great Big Small Steps for Arizona Worker Justice

Labor Day was the perfect day for the grand opening of Arizona's first worker rights center.

What's a worker rights center, you ask?

The Interfaith Worker Justice AZ Worker Rights Center is a place where anyone who gets paid for his or her labor can come to learn his or her rights under AZ law, and find out how to seek remedies when those rights are violated.

We teach workers how to use legal remedies to respond workplace violations, provide legal aid, and help workers reach out to educate and assist others who've faced similar abuse and exploitation. We call on employers, large and small, who are charged with unsafe working conditions, wage theft, overtime exploitation, discrimination, and violating workers' civil and human rights to dialog and to reach voluntary restitution. If necessary, we also hold demonstrations and prayer vigils to draw the public's attention to intractable abuse. Not least, we work to increase Arizona's minimum wage to living wage levels, testify at state and federal hearings, and work to pass laws to create fair, just, and safe working conditions for all Arizonans.

What does Arizona law do to protect Arizona workers, you ask?

I'll tell you right now: Precious little. Worse still, perhaps, is the state's labor culture. This is not the place to come expecting respect for workers' rights.

A more anti-labor mentality I've never seen anywhere. That's saying something, because I grew up in the Southeast and cut my teeth on so-called "right to work" Republican lawmaking. I think it's because this state has deep roots in the most brutal mining and agricultural traditions of the Old West--copper, citrus, construction, and cotton--each as cruel an exploiter of Native Americans, Mexicans, and poor Anglos as anything the South ever offered.

Maybe today's enslavement here is more of the company-store variety, but without a doubt there are out-of-the-way places in Arizona where undocumented workers are routinely trapped without means of escape to work in slave labor conditions. (For an eye-opener on slave labor in America in today's global economy, see Nobodies.)

Wage Theft

It's not getting better. The raging wars on unions and on undocumented workers seems to have given unscrupulous employers large and small a license to let loose, big time. On our first day, 27 people walked in for help, and over 100 people called to report mostly wage theft. That's when a person works for days or even weeks and isn't paid one thin dime.

And it happens all the time. Mostly, from what I've seen so far, the cheatering exploiters are small-time contractors--house painters, roofers, landscapers and the like--who hire day laborers for short- and medium-term jobs at an agreed-upon pay rate and then stiff the workers, most of whom are men and women new to this country. They don't speak English well and they know little about how to protect themselves. As long as they have to work to live, they're easy marks for unscrupulous predators.

And it's not limited to the small-timers. I've personally interviewed men who work for large, prominent, well-known commercial and residential construction companies. Their stories made me ashamed and angry. It blows my mind that everybody isn't ashamed and angry. When one of us cheats and abuses others, it reflects badly on all of us. What's more, it ought to be obvious that any employer who will exploit his or her workers will also exploit his or her customers.

But now, at last, there's a Worker Rights Center in Arizona. It's not going to solve the problem of worker abuse, but it's a brave step in the right direction, and as a bit player in the Center, I'm awfully proud of it. I hope you will be, too.

And I hope you'll help us, financially and with your time and talents. Call 602-254-5452, or visit us at 331 E. Willetta St. for more information. If you can spare a few hours, your help is badly needed, especially if you speak both English and Spanish. Currently, volunteers from Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, Pagan, and freelance faith traditions--and even some who're unattached-- assist with day-to-day functions, but more volunteers are always needed, especially bilingual Spanish/English speakers.

The Center is directed by the Rev. Trina Zelle, an ordained Presbyterian minister, and the Rev. Liana Rowe, an ordained United Churches of Christ minister, both of whom have deep connections to worker and immigrant justice issues throughout the Southwest. The IWJ-AZ/WRC board is made up mostly of workers themselves. Virtually all our funding comes from faith-based organizations.

Because we exist to improve working conditions, benefits, and wages especially for low-wage workers, we work directly in partnership with faith-based organizations and with workers themselves. We are an independent, nonprofit, volunteer-driven organization that is not affiliated with any labor union. Anywhere there's advocacy for workers, IWJ-AZ is there.

Interfaith Worker Justice is a national organization with chapters almost everywhere. It exists because the need is immense.

Oh Say it Ain't So!

Andrew Sullivan on Mitt Romney's speech at the Republican Convention: "A largely content-free speech that went out on a limb, defending patriotism, attacking liberals, vowing to defeat evil and defend the family. I was somewhat surprised to hear that the GOP is about cutting spending, and restraining government, and that liberals have been in charge for the last quarter of a century - but, hey, this is the 2008 Republican National Convention. Reality is what they say it is." It's always that way, right, RWR?

I've always wanted to ask a solidly religious Bible-based Republican: As opposed to the subject of gays getting married, isn't there an actual commandment against bearing false witness? Would that be relevant at all in your world?

Cyborg Sarah

Sarah Palin is all over the news, but so far I haven't heard an informed, incisive analysis of what she means in the larger context of national politics.

Sarah Palin no accident. What created her is exactly what makes her viable today. A large and well-funded extreme Right militant Christianist movement begun some thirty years ago is just now watching its true firstborn come onto the international stage.

It isn’t that we haven’t seen Christianists (more or less) before her. We have, but they, mostly hybrids, arrived onto the political scene by stealth rather than invitation. They were a vanguard whose mission was to quietly penetrate the local levels of the Republican Party and secure the national government for a far more radicalized cohort that was, meanwhile, being cultivated in home schools and private Christian academies run by sophisticated and heavily funded evangelical and fundamentalist cults, nurtured on Christian rock, and inspired by Tim LaHaye's Left Behind visions of the Rapture.

We may have seen men and women like Karen Hughes and Ralph Reed and Gary Bauer and Sam Brownback and Kay Bailey Hutchison, but we ain’t seen nothing yet.

It isn’t that Palin herself was specifically selected from infancy to be groomed for the presidency. She wasn’t. However, of millions of seeds cast in the past three decades onto that cold theocratic ground, hers is the one that has blossomed into the most plausible perfect contender for this moment.

What’s important to notice is that she had already percolated far enough up the ranks to be both noticed and to pass the right vetting criteria. That didn't happen in a vaccuum.

What is sought is a campaigner, not a stateswoman. And what was found? Precisely the right counterpart to the Obama/Clinton muse: a very smart, beautiful, young mother simultaneously savvy about but innocent of the system she’s to destroy, simultaneously equal to but no threat to the big boys, simultaneously seductive and PTA, simultaneously Vogue and Revelation, simultaneously church-lady and moose-killer, simultaneously ethnic and white.

It might be a little far-fetched to say that in the Far Right Christianists’ collective unconscious Sarah (note the biblical name) evokes the Madonna, but I do think something of near archetypal force is being prepared for us here and woven into the candidate’s manufactured storyline. This, after all, is Karl Rove’s forte.

What we do not see, and yet must see and see clearly, is that in every hamlet, town, and city in America are dozens or hundreds or thousands of families who have been nurtured for 30 years in the bosom of intensely politicized little congregations, churches like Palin’s Wasilla Assembly of God that serve on a Sunday as a hybrid House of God and local precinct station, ready-made to serve the One God so long as he is a Republican.

What we do not see, and yet must see quickly, are the phalanxes of Christianist soldiers, graduates and soon-to-be graduates of intensely politicized Christianist day schools, home schools, bible colleges, patriot schools, and law colleges—even US military academies and Army bases. Fed a pabulum of King James and NRA, these 20- to 40-somethings have been churned out by the thousands from schools like Liberty and Patrick Henry, schools that were founded explicitly for the purpose of turning this constitutional democracy into a fundamentalist’s idea of a Christian nation.

And it isn’t just these bureaucrats. To them and to the secular right, the white supremacists, and the Freepers, add the minions of Joel’s Army who have sprung from the loins of The Promise Keepers and the wives of Eagle Forum. This is the Far Right. It isn’t their mission to listen to reason or to ponder qualifications for negotiating with the Chinese, Iranians, and North Koreans. Such arguments resonate with us but not with them.

I am saying that what dismiss as home-grown ignorance and naïveté is in fact a tightly orchestrated mindset impervious to anything outside itself, and it is legion.

Remember: We’ve seen a modest Palin prototype before, placed at the Justice Department, no less, to break the law by root out qualified Democrats for state Attorneys General and hire only those Republicans she could personally determine had truly swallowed the Kool Aid and the wafer. Her name is Monica Goodling. Asked whom she served, she answered in truth: “The President.” Unfortunately for the democracy, she was supposed to serve the Constitution.

Note the heights she attained and the mission she effected. Do you think for a second that this Monica Goodling cares whether Sarah has the “experience” necessary to assume the presidency if something happens to George McCain? Not even Sarah cares. Remember: We’re not talking qualifications that we might seek for a stateswoman. That’s the farthest thing from the minds of George McCain, Sarah Palin, and the extreme Right Christianist GOP elite.

It isn’t mere arrogant cluelessness that explains Palin’s acceptance. It’s that Palin has an undisclosed mission and it isn't ours. In a scenario in which her people talk openly of hoping to rush Armageddon, statecraft is the last thing that’s wanted or needed.

From the Matrix-like land of ultra-Right extreme Christianists, Sarah Palin is a cyborg. She looks like one of us and she’s anything but. This is a heads they win/tails we lose game.

Unfortunately, when the faithful are called to defend her, they will. Every attack we make, every point we score will be a call to arms. It is imperative that we rally more of our troops than they, and that ours are more intensely committed than theirs. We've much to do, but we must get it done.

If the Republicans win in November, it’s game over. Enter fascism unleashed. That’s what Sarah Palin is, and that what she means for the US political landscape. Today we see its mere outlines: suppression of political dissent in St. Paul; run-amok Patriot Acts; privatized concentration camps on our soil, targeted and terrorized subgroups, illegal domestic espionage, proposals to dehumanize GLBGT people, video games of conversion at gunpoint, or death; private Christianist armies; a planet subjected to unbridled greed and exploitation; shredding of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. If McCain wins, Sarah Palin will be his successor, and following Palin are millions more schooled in her school, steeped in her fanatic rage.

The Tailhook Candidate

D'ya think Jerry Springer did the vetting? Really, this Palin crowd will keep the tabloids in barbecued pork rinds, like, forever. And I just can't wait until we get the extended family.

Maddow may be right that the question is whether Palin will make it through the week, but I doubt it. She's a superstar to the base, after all, and if She resigns, the base will tar and feather George McCain. Not gonna happen, IMHO. Such a thing would inscribe on the skies what we already know about George McCain: that his management style is shoot first, ask questions later.

George McCain is a former (apparently not very good) Navy fighter pilot. His personal style, from jettisoning his first wife because a car accident damaged the looker he had married, to bagging heiress Cindy for the cash and the connections, to carpet-bagging Arizona, to this latest beauty pageant, is pure Tailhook. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that George McCain selected Sarah Palin, whose primary qualifications for high office appear to be that she is pretty and has a uterus that she uses for its intended purpose.

We all saw George McCain checking out her rear-end attributes at the, um, unveiling. I'm fairly sure that this (and the girls, of course) were the central focus as Palin ran a thorough Republican vetting gauntlet in a secret location somewhere in Flagstaff a couple of days before the announcement. Guess what. She passed. This makes Sarah Palin in fact the perfect Tailhook Candidate, the pin-up Hockey mom queen with the AK-47. This is female perfection to the Republican mind, and she will have enormous appeal to the Mr. and Mrs. Bubba Brigade. God help us if they turn out to vote.

(Photo courtesy of Timesonline, UK.)

What She Is and What She Isn't

This good point from my friend Melissa Hefferlin, on Palin: "In considering the McCain choice of running mate, one marvels at the more qualified, more senior women he passed over in order to choose Palin. What she IS perhaps makes sense for him: a woman, heavy on family values, hard-right conservative, oil-aligned, young, pretty, perky in a really annoying way (sorry, it slipped out). However, I am insulted that McCain finds genuine qualifications utterly beside the point, and believes that women like myself (white, 40, middle class), or anyone, would be placated and seduced by a V. P. candidate choice of anyone from my gender, never mind that she has been in politics for about six seconds, with a background in PTA. This choice is terrifying in what Palin is (ferociously white and right-wing), but even more so, in what she is not. This choice is insulting to the office, and to the voters. At least I hope it is.
Melissa Hefferlin

More On Palin: The Next Bridge to Nowhere?

Didn't expect to see this in the Dallas Morning News!

"Five reasons why Sarah Palin is a laugh-out-loud choice for VP. It's one thing for millions of voters to put forward a sitting senator as a possible commander in chief, but for John McCain to hand-pick a first-term governor of a tiny state is bizarre. Here are five reasons why, if she is the pick, this is a huge mistake." More

A little background from the Alaska Daily News:

"During her first run for mayor, critics complained that Palin, at 32, was too young and inexperienced. The Wasilla mayor was a full-time, $68,000-a-year job. They objected to a quiet campaign by some Palin supporters raising emotional issues like abortion and gun control, which had no apparent tie to municipal politics.

"And they said that by posing for ads with the area's Republican legislators, who implied they could work better with her than her opponent, she was injecting divisive party politics into what was technically a nonpartisan race.

"The high-profile support from local Republicans was hardly surprising, however. Party officials say Palin was already being groomed for bigger and better things, even as she talked about sewers and road-paving projects. In Alaska's fastest-growing region, Palin was the fresh young face of the suddenly dominant Republicans." More

And then this, from Mudflats, a Palin hometown blogger:

"Just months ago, when rumors surfaced that she was on the long version of the short list, she was questioned if she’d be interested in the position. She said she couldn’t answer “until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does every day. I’m used to being very productive and working real hard in an administration. We want to make sure that that VP slot would be a fruitful type of position, especially for Alaskans and for the things that we’re trying to accomplish up here….” More

Sarah Palin: Mother of the Year

McCain's nominee for vice president is sure to speak to kitchen table conservatives, Americans whose entire known world is family, football, and faith. These are good people. I know them. And as they've demonstrated in the last two presidential contests, they are dangerously naive people for whom the most important credential a politician can bring is that he's just like us.

For them, it's not just any family, it's heterosexual family. It's not just any football, it's home-town football. It's not just any faith, it's born-again bumper-sticker good old time religion: white, Protestant, and fundamentalist.

Palin speaks that language fluently. In her first speech to a world awaiting some reassurance that she has a clue about the gravity of the issues awaiting her, she chose to devote ninety-five percent of her remarks to laying out her home-town girl bona fides. I felt like I was watching "Big Love," that scene where Barb makes her pitch for Utah Mother of the Year.

This morning I contacted an old e-mail acquaintance who lives in Alaska to get her take. She said that Palin doesn't miss a trick and is scary. The scary part is that she's shot up the ranks of the GOP from nobody to AK governor in a political nanosecond, all on the strength of her connections and charisma.

It will be tempting to dismiss her as a lightweight and a pretty face. That would be a mistake. McCain (more realistically, GOP kingmakers) didn't pick her because they thought she'd lose.

In the coming weeks, keep one thing front and center. There's not only small awareness of it; more important, there's not even a scintilla of concern about the wider world here. There's not only scant exposure to how others might see our common humanity or solve our collosal problems; as her acceptance reveals, there's a phenomenally smug certainty that different strokes and complex deliberations are just not all that relevant in her world, soon to be our world if she's elected. We're talking about many shades of white, here.

Palin brings no knowledge to offset McCain's acknowledged weakness in economics, no experience whatsoever in global affairs, defense, security, and emerging global crisis spots. She brings less than no concern for looming environmental catastrophes, fond as she is of that epic sport, airplane machine gun v. wolf. And she brings basically no acquaintance of the hugely diverse human species. She's a forty-something bit-part mayor of a small Alaska town just now in her first role in statewide government, and already up to her ears in controversy for a serious alleged abuse of power.

However cute she might be, however good a mom she is, however charismatic she seems, and however skilled a politician she is, Sarah Palin brings but one thing to this campaign.

Like John McCain, she brings an overweening ambition that's more than ready to place its selfish apetites ahead of the national interest. This is the unmistakeable message in her acceptance of John McCain's cynical offer of the vice presidency, an offer as disturbing in its foolishness as it is dangerous for the planet and its inhabitants.

This nomination speaks of unbridled ambition utterly unmodulated by self-awareness or good judgment. Like John McCain, she is only too ready to feed her ego at the expense of the needs of a nation, a world, in crisis.

He Nominated WHO????

Are you kidding me?
Sarah Palin?
Sarah Palin??
Sarah Palin???

This is John McCain's first presidential act?

Can you see this woman running the country?

Let's be sure to put the aspirations of John McSame before the interests of the country.

John McCain and Real War Heroes

Do I respect John McCain's service?

I respect the fact that he served, and I respect any POW because his or her service was by definition a term in hell necessitated by our country's decision to go to war. It was a term endured on our behalf, unwillingly but nonetheless endured.

However, I have far, far greater respect for my late Air Force pilot uncle, a colonel who was one of the two pilots selected during the Korean War to fly into Chosin Reservoir and bring out the frozen bodies of 300 American Marines. I never knew about that until three years after his death.

I have far, far greater respect for my late Army Paratrooper father who lost his eye in North Africa, and whose unit, the famous 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion, was the first and much decorated combat paratrooper force of the US Army in WWII. He didn't talk about his war experience. He screamed in nightmares regularly, but he didn't discuss The War.

I never, ever even once heard my dad or my uncle mention their service, much less brag about it, or milk it from dawn to dark to advance their personal ambitions, or use their wounds of war to justify some later behavior.

For them, war wasn't something to be bragged about. War's suffering wasn't something to be cheapened by throw-away lines on late-night talk shows.

My father and my uncle didn't demean their military service by selling it for high office. It wasn't something they invested in for a later return. It was simply answering duty's call. It just wasn't for sale.

War wasn't something a self-respecting man thought appropriate ever to discuss except in private, sequestered alone somewhere with other wounded warriors, far out of our hearing. For my dad and my uncle, serving in wartime was a thing made sacred by agony and blood; it was a far, far too noble thing for common consumption.

This is the difference between heroes and honorable men, and men like John McCain.

Pumas and Bigfoots and Loch Ness Monsters

Is there more than one "puma" or is this a media-invented pehnomenon? So far, I've only seen one actual woman who is promising to vote for McCain because Hillary didn't win the nomination.

I'm hearing all kinds of crazy explanations for why a woman who voted for Hillary would be mad enough to vote for McCain now, but none of it makes the slightest bit of sense to me.

I'm even one of that generation who thinks we're about 235 years overdue to elect a woman president, and yet somehow I don't hold Barack personally responsible for Hillary's losing the primaries! Duh.

Even if I did, I wouldn't now turn around and vote for John McCain. That would be like joining Vegetarians for Burger King, or signing up with Log Cabin Republicans, even.

No sane Democratic woman would ever support the Neanderthal the GOP is planning to insert into the White House this fall. This is not a brilliant observation, I know, but it's all I've got, so I'm clearly missing something vital here.

Ideas? Somebody clue me in. I can think of no reason why a disappointed Hillary supporter would vote for John Mccain. But I need to understand what kind of insanity has befallen that poor woman so that if there actually are others, we can take some of it and make a vaccine.

Don't It Make Ya Proud?

Tip o' the hat to Michael for this reassuring example of Bush's Homeland Security goons at work:

"Jason Haist's arrival in the U.S. was a complete accident. After nearly drowning in rapids on the Niagara River, he [and a friend] washed ashore on American soil, where he was promptly informed he faced charges for entering the country illegally and could be detained for up to three weeks while officials try to determine his intentions."

The jet ski accident happened after Jason had contacted the US Coast Guard to determine whether it was legal to make his proposed trip. I'm sure all terrorists do that.

"Jason Haist, who was put on an IV drip after having fluid pumped from his lungs, said he could hear a border official using a walkie-talkie outside his hospital room.

"'He was on machines all night,' Kerr said. Haist was discharged from the hospital around 3 a.m. and arrested shortly after.

"'He told them, 'I almost died. I didn't plan on washing up on your land,' Kerr said.

"The men will remain in custody at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility until they can appear before an immigration judge.

"'They're here illegally,' Ciliberti said, because they turned up at an unauthorized point of entry, a U.S. customs violation. It doesn't help Haist's case that he didn't have any identification in his wetsuit. All he had was his boater's card, Kerr said.

"Ciliberti said the pair received notices to appear before a judge and explain their circumstances. If they choose to cancel the notice to appear and return to Canada voluntarily, Ciliberti said, 'you're admitting you're in the States illegally.' And if they don't appear, they will be deported and denied entry to the U.S. for at least five years.'"

Hit 'em where they live. I'm sure they're dying to come back.

As far as I know, they're still in detention. The moral of the story? Just don't have a near-drowning experience near our shore, buddy.

Other than that, I really don't know what to say.

"No Way, No How, No McCain!"

Hillary gave the best speech of the convention so far, and in terms of her assigment, it was nothing but net! Hillary was never better, never more gracious, never more the leader than tonight.

A thermo-nuclear world riven by fundamentalists of several stripes; wars of choice and profiteering; a planet sick from human greed; a nation hemorrhaging from the blades of big cars and big oil; a government careening toward a politics of final solutions; a people being deliberately underpaid, underprotected, and undermined. These are a few of the bigger stakes.

She brought us all right back on track: It's not about the personalities. It's about the policies.

Hillary brought the energy back to the party. Now let's get going.

Two Can Play Swiftboating

This isn't a conclusion I come to easily, but I've come to it reluctantly. It's time for Democrats to do their own swiftboating. I don't see America responding to anything but destructive campaigning. If that's the new standard, then there's not really an option if we want to win. We didn't make the rules, but we are going to have to play by them just the same.

The secret to effective swiftboating is to punch the fear button and the trust button. It won't do to pass along just any old gossip. The playing field underlying this stuff is the unconscious, where the demons play.

I want to see a knock-out punch, and I want to see it now. As the GOP is fond of saying, a bully only understands one language. Maybe if we speak it back, the Republicans will finally be motivated to leave the sewer they fondly call home.

Real Men Hate Facts

I noticed that RWR found a reason to get his panties in a bunch at exactly the same moment he was asked to deal in verifiable facts. I've gotten used to that in the last 30 years. Fact is irrelevant in Rightwing World. And that's a fact.

For instance, before his parting tanty, RWR imparted his wisdom thus:

"Unborn babies have no rights in the Democrat platform. Children do not have school choice or the right to pray in schools in your platform. Union membership is mandatory in most states. You see us as limiting freedoms, and that's how we see you."

"Unborn babies" is an oxymoron. It ain't a baby 'til it's born. I'd have thought that given conservatives' passion for the English language, they'd know how to speak it. Zygote, fetus, baby: Words have meaning. When they are lifted out of their established meaning and hurled indiscriminately hither and yon, there's usually propaganda afoot. As in "unborn babies."

Children do not have school choice? Sure they do. All parents who are properly self-sufficient and take personal responsibility for themselves and their families can send their children anywhere. Isn't that correct, Mr. Personal Responsibility? Only, Democrats just don't believe that Republicans should force the taxpayer to fund someone else's school choice.

Chidren don't have the right to pray in schools? How silly! Of course they do. They and their teachers can pray at length whenever they like, provided they don't present their form of religion as official school policy. There's no law against children praying on school grounds. The law is about establishing a state religion. It was designed to give you and me equally both freedom of and freedom from religion according to our individual consciences. It's about respecting each other's rights to be Americans. But I know Rightwingers have a problem with equality.

Then this doozie: "Union membership is mandatory in most states." Really? Can you document that? Actually, 22 states have "right to work" laws that prohibit mandatory union membership. Google it yourself. I'm not sure what the other 28 have, but it sure isn't mandatory union membership! We can go over all the facts related to union history in America since Ronnie busted the Air Traffic Controllers (ask ATCs how they feel about their working conditions now), but the point is that RWR doesn't live in a fact-based world and he doesn't want to.

When he's pushed, RWR says facts are a matter of opinion. (Seriously.) Which brings me back to that dictionary of the English language thing. As cats aren't dogs, and bananas aren't canteloups, what is a fact and what isn't a fact isn't up for grabs. We can disagree about their implications, but facts exist whether we like it or not.

So my invitation stands: When RWR can show proof of the moment in time when the founders all agreed on correct interpretation of the Constitution, I'll consider modifying my position about whether we can ever know "what the founders believed" or should care.

The founders didn't believe in air traffic controllers, Internet access, antibiotics, and Harley Davidsons, either. Does that mean we shouldn't?