Personal Musings category archive

A couple of weeks ago, there was a big furor about a report on American religious leanings. Radio Times devoted an hour to it. From the website:

America’s changing religious landscape. We talk with GREG SMITH one of the principal authors of the latest “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey” by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Some of the trends it found include: Protestants are becoming a minority, Catholicism is becoming heavily Hispanic, and more people are saying they’re not affiliated with any religion.

(To hear the show, go to the website and search for the February 28, 2008, show or listen here.)

On top of that, the local rag–not the one I subscribe to, because I want a paper with more than five minutes of content; the other one–had a story today about persons looking for compatible churches.

There are certainly big changes in the religious make-up of the United States, big changes driven by demographic changes.

Nevertheless, I believe that the much of the fuss was overdone. Much was said about members of Protestant denominations changing from one denomination to another. That is really No Big Deal.

I was raised a Southern Baptist. Leaving aside that the Sourthern Baptist Convention has, in recent years, abandoned one of its core tenets (freedom of religion) and fallen into the hands of the Pharisees, when I was looking for a new church in this part of the world, I really didn’t care what denomination it might be. The doctrinal differences among the main line Protestant denominations are really very very minor.

What I looked for was a congregation in which I could feel comfortable. The congregation I found happened to be Methodist.

The fact that Methodists believe in infant baptism and Baptists believe in baptism of the believer upon profession of faith really is not a deal breaker. (Since infants are incapable of professing faith, infant baptism, is, well, how should I put this? scripturally insupportable.)

Baptists also believe in priesthood of the believer, which means I can attend this Methodist church and discount those tenets of Methodism which, as a good Baptist, I find not to have a solid theological basis.

Here’s my point.

It’s really no big deal when Protestants move between denominations. It’s not worth making up trends and theories. Such movement is likely to have more to do with the atmosphere of the local congregation than it is to have to do with doctrinal disagreements, since, frankly, most Protestants don’t know much of anything about doctrine (If they did, the Donald Wildmons of the world would never get traction, but that’s another story). That’s just the way it is.

It’s a little bigger deal when Protestants become Catholics or Ukrainian Orthodox or vice versa, but only a little bigger. It’s still the same tent.

As far as I am concerned, the findings of the report in question were grossly overbown.

A while ago, I explained how conservatism is morally and intellectually bankrupt, pointing out that, when conservative policies fail, conservatives claim that X (the policy-maker waving their flag) must not be a “true conservative” and therefore must be responsible for the failure.

Comes now a true believer to demonstrate a corollary to that postulate (not a theory, a postulate, that is, a fundamental truth from which flows the remainder of reasoning):

When conservative polices fail, it is not because they were wrong, well, from the git-go, but because they were betrayed by Bad People who, ergo, must not be “true conservatives.”

Douglas Feith, one of the architects of the of the War in Iraq, has delivered himself of a mighty tome in which, according to news reports, he blames everyone except Donald Rumsfeld and, natch, himself, for the debacle in Iraqcle.

These people never made a mistake for which they took responsibility.

In the world of conservative ideology, the failure of their polices is always someone else’s fault, because they are always right; they are never wrong.

Just ask them.

Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush’s policies.

Among the disclosures made by Feith in “War and Decision,” scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush’s declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that “war is inevitable.” The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a “momentous comment.”

Although he acknowledges “serious errors” in intelligence, policy and operational plans surrounding the invasion, Feith blames them on others outside the Pentagon and notes that “even the best planning” cannot avoid all problems in wartime. While he says the decision to invade was correct, he judges that the task of creating a viable and stable Iraqi government was poorly executed and remains “grimly incomplete.”

Contemporary conservatism is not an ideology. It’s a circle of jerks.

(For the NASCAR challenged, Darlington is a race track.)

I was listening to yesterday’s Talk of the Nation, which had its regular Wednesday “Political Junkie” feature.

One of the callers asked an interesting question.

She pointed out that, in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, supporters of the Clinton campaign have brought up race three times.

Supporters of the Obama campaign have not brought it up (except in response to comments from the other side).

Her question was (paraphrased, because I’m not going to listen to the entire podcast over again once more redundantly just to get an exact quote), “What does that tell you?”

Well, indeed, what does that tell you?

Leave the poor working girl alone, for heaven’s sakes.

I would say he fit right in. After all, one is known by the company one keeps.

But, you know, every dollar the NRCC lost is another dollar they cannot devote to further undermining the Constitution of the United States of America and to making the rich, richer and the poor, poorer.

The fellow should have a nice future at KBR.

National Republican Congressional Committee officials acknowledged publicly today that they have found discrepancies in their books of more than a million dollars and evidence that the NRCC’s former treasurer, Christopher Ward, made “several hundred thousand dollars” worth of unauthorized wire transfers out of the committee that appear to have ended up in Ward’s own bank accounts.

The NRCC launched an internal probe and contacted the FBI in January after learning that Ward “apparently fabricated and submitted 2006 financial statements to the NRCC’s bank,” according to a memo issued by the committee today. Some details of the probe have been reported previously, but today’s memo and press briefing by a lawyer retained by the committee marked the fullest public accounting so far of the unfolding scandal.

Some persons who either do not know or who choose to lie about the history of the United States of America are fond of saying that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

It was not. The only excuse for making such a comment is ignorance. The only reason for making such a comment, knowing that it is false, is perfidy.

Check out this interview with Steven Waldman, founder of Beliefnet, who has recently written a book on America’s religious history.

No, I’m not going to comment on Elliot Spitzer’s problems. (He’s not the first, won’t be the last, but at least it wasn’t in a restroom with a strange guy or a Senate page.)

Today, though, I listened to yesterday’s Talk of the Nation (I love my mp3 player), which had an excellent episode on “Why do rich smart powerful people do such stupid things”?

It’s worth a listen, particularly the segment with Peter Sagal. From the website:

When he’s not hosting Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, NPR’s weekly news quiz show, Peter Sagal is likely at a casino, a swingers club or visiting a porn-movie set. All investigative research, of course, for his recent book, The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them).

Sagal wanted to get a perspective on the indulgences of others and report back to the rest of us.

In light of Monday’s surprising allegations that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was involved in a prosecution ring, Sagal weighs in on the correlation between power and vice.

“It goes back in history that powerful people get to break sexual rules,” Sagal says — those in power are “immune from the sexual rules that bind down the poor rest of us.”

Addendum, Later That Same Evening:

I said I wasn’t going to comment on Spitzer directly.

But am going to point you to Jon Swift, who comments incisively and lengthily (and, when you consider what those two words mean, to combine them in one essay is, actually, a heck of an accomplishment):

Excerpt:

While I cannot deny the glee I feel that a holier-than-thou Democrat who is supporting Hillary Clinton has been hoist on his own petard, I cannot in good conscience say that Spitzer should resign, while Vitter, whose seat would be filled with a Democrat if he quit, should not. I am not a hypocrite when it comes to hypocrisy.

If I weren’t old, I wouldn’t have seen this article:

Bernice Todd’s Choctaw family roots are sunk deep in the soil of Oklahoma, a state whose very name is Choctaw for “red people.” But in the middle of a debilitating battle with cancer, Todd, a 39-year-old who cleans homes at a trailer park and baby-sits for a living, lost her state Medicaid health care coverage because, although she’s a Native American, she could not prove she is a U.S. citizen.

While Todd’s case is rich in irony, she is one of tens of thousands of Americans who are falling victim to a new federal rule—aimed at keeping illegal immigrants off the Medicaid rolls—requiring that recipients prove their citizenship and identity with documents many don’t have.

(snip)

“This rule was the answer to a problem that really doesn’t exist,” says Donna Cohen Ross, an analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, a nonpartisan research organization.

In fact, the year the rule was passed, Mark McClellan, then the administrator for CMS, said that a report by the CMS inspector general did “not find particular problems regarding false allegations of citizenship, nor are we aware of any.” Most states agreed with that assessment.

This would seem pretty typical of the Republic Party. Claiming that it is protecting American citizens, it solves a problem that doesn’t exist, thereby damaging American citizens. It also is able to throw a bone to those amongst its constituency who don’t like brown people by raising, then tilting at the windmill of fraudulent Medicaid enrollments.

(Haven’t they figured out that the last thing a sane illegal immigrant is likely to do is to join a government program, for heaven’s sake?)

It’s sort of like their phony voter fraud campaign. (Election fraud historically has not occurred at the polling place; it’s occurred at the counting place).

Hell, what about the War in Iraq–claiming to protect Americans, the Republic Party has (failed to) solve a problem that didn’t exist, created a whole slew, maybe two or three slews, of problems that didn’t exist before, all the while causing the death, injury, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of persons.

The Republic Party is clearly not fit to govern.

As I have pointed out previously, the collapse of the housing market, which seems to be leading to the collapse of every other market, was not a result of some natural business cycle. (I did hear an economist–I forget who–say recently that the market has two phases: Fear and Greed. Fear is in control now.)

The bursting of the dot com bubble a few years ago might be seen as some type of natural economic phenomenon, in sense the people were buying any stock to do with the Internet, in the assumption that people would do stuff over the Internet, well, simply because they could, regardless of whether it made any sense to do whatever it was on line.

In contrast, the current phenomenon is a direct result of the failure of duly appointed regulators to, well, regulate, thereby allowing Greed to overcome good business sense on the part of just about everyone.

And why did they not regulate? Because NeoCons worship wealth and assume that those with $700 suits, who have someone else to carry their Blackberries for them, are inherently virtuous, and therefore will make moral decisions.

Sadly, it ain’t so.

The headline number in the monthly jobs report from the U.S. Labor Department tells a grim tale – 63,000 jobs lost nationwide in a month, the most in five years.

But the situation is much worse than that.

The number of jobs shed by the private sector – the main driver of the economy – was 101,000, reflecting three straight months of losses in nongovernment jobs.

“That’s how you know we’re in a recession, for God’s sake,” said Eileen Appelbaum of Philadelphia, a labor economist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Addendum, Later That Same Evening:

FBI.

Dan Froomkin reports:

Bush’s current tally (of vacation days–ed.) represents a little more than a third of his presidency. And that’s not counting the 39 days that Knoller says he spent in whole or in part at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Me. All in all, Knoller says, Bush has made 134 separate visits to Camp David, 70 to Crawford and 10 to Kennebunkport in a little over seven years.

Damn, think of how much damage he would have done if he’d stayed on the job the whole time.

Sheesh!

Too long. They should have stopped with the first two words.

What Duncan likes to refer to as the Big Shitpile has gone to graduate school and earned a Ph. D. (Pile It Higher and Deeper), as shown by a bunch of stories in the local rag:

One:

In the latest signs of the U.S. economy’s weakness, reports yesterday showed sharp declines in housing prices but higher costs for almost everything else.

And there was a third dose of bad news, prompted mostly by the slump in housing and rising inflation: Consumer confidence fell to the lowest point since just before the Iraq war began.

Yesterday’s reports raised the threat of a return of “stagflation,” the economic curse of the 1970s, in which economic growth stagnates at the same time that inflation continues racing ahead.

Two:

The United States is on the brink of experiencing a toxic economic mix not seen in three decades: Prices are speeding upward at the fastest pace in a quarter-century even though the economy is losing steam.

Economists call the disease “stagflation,” and they are worried it might be coming back.

Already, paychecks are not stretching as far as they did just a year ago. Jobs are harder to find, threatening to set off a vicious cycle that could make things even worse.

The economy nearly stalled in the final three months of last year and probably is barely growing or even shrinking now. That is the “stagnation” part of the ailment.

Typically, that slowdown would keep prices in check – the second part of the diagnosis. Instead, prices are climbing higher.

Once the twin evils of stagflation take hold, it can be hard to break the grip. Consumers, stung by rising prices and shriveling wages, cut their spending. Businesses, also socked by rising costs and declining demand from customers, clamp down on their hiring and capital investment.

That would be a nightmare scenario for Wall Street investors, businesses, politicians, and most everyone else. They are already looking to the Federal Reserve for help, but the Fed’s job is complicated by the dual nature of the problem.

Three (not that I can get too worked up over the misfortunes of Toll Brothers, who are responsible for some of the ugliest houses I’ve ever seen):

Toll Bros. Inc. today reported a first-quarter loss as revenue fell 23 percent from the same period a year earlier, reflecting worsening conditions in most of the Horsham-based builder’s markets around the country.

Total revenues for the three months that ended Jan. 31 were $842.9 million, compared with $1.09 billion a year ago. The first-quarter backlog of unsold homes was 42 percent lower, however, at $2.40 billion, compared with $4.15 billion, the company said.

So, what does original sin have to do with all this? Fraudulent sales techniques, stupid consumer decisions, stupid business decisions–none of them seem particularly original.

It seems to be a verse in the NeoCon Bible that all regulation is bad and that, somehow, Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market will resolve all problems and lead to nirvana. Instead, we are closer to Valhalla.

During the course of the last eight years, the Bushies have hamstrung the EPA, OSHA, the FDA, the SEC and any other agency charged with ensuring that businesses comport themselves with integrity.

And we know the results. Just look at the recents successes of the FDA.

Meat recalls. Spinach recalls. Drug recalls.

I won’t even bother to look up stuff for the other agencies. Just one word: Enron.

As I have mentioned before, one of the traits of wingnut thought seems to be the belief that wealth indicates virture. (And the corollary: that poverty indicates sin. That’s why those in economic need don’t deserve health care.)

There is, of course, a fallacy in this reasoning. Hell, there is a fallacy in the whole NeoCon Weltanschauungen, but that’s another story.

And that fallacy is ignoring original sin, or, more properly, imagining that the wealthy are somehow exempt therefrom and will therefore, in following the dictates of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” act with integrety.

Some do, of course. Warren Buffet and George Soros come to mind.

But others do not.

Society needs to deal with them, to protect the common good and the good of the common.

The instrument society has for dealing with them (and for building roads and for defending the nation and for putting the bad guys behind bars and for doing lots of other things) is called (gasp!) Government.

Government is not some evil thrust upon us from outside, as the Club for Greed would have us believe (I have to say, I agree completely with Mr. Huckabee on the characterization of that organization).

Government is the only instrument we have to protect ourselves, as a citzenry, from those who would defraud and delude us.

Government is a necessity for life in a civilized world.

And those who, in order to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, thwart its legitimate function to promote the general welfare betray the public trust.

Fortunately, they are easy to identify. They call themselves “Movement Conservatives.”

(Warning: I violate one of my rules in this post: The rule of not using more than one rhetorical question in a row.)

I got another one of those stupid RNC “surveys” today.

I’ve mentioned them before. I’ve already answered the questions, sealed it up in the business-reply envelope, and will be sending it off tomorrow. (At least they will have to pay the incoming postage; according to the USPS, it will cost them $1.11 to receive the letter. That’s $1.11 they will not be apply to apply to further subverting the Constitution of the United States of America.)

The questions in the “survey” were in the usual style:

Do you favor the forces of truth, justice, and the American way, or do you favor evil librul Democrats?

Yes

No

No opinion

One of the questions, though, caught my eye.

It was something like

Do you favor Republican plans for a balanced budget as opposed to [blah blah blah]?

I could ask myself only, “What the hell planet are these people living on?”

How the heck can they seriously put a question like that on this “survey”? Have they no consciousness of what they have done to the Federal budget during their failed stewardship of the engine of governance?

Or do they seriously believe that their adherents are only listening to what they say, while ignoring what they do?

Or do they figure that their adherents are just too stupid for words?

Also posted on Kos.

It is indeed totally strange that, somehow, the security of the United States of America depends on protecting corporations who broke the law from liability for their acts.

Corporations that obeyed the existing FISA law in implementing wiretapping and eavesdropping were already protected from liability, because, holy moly, they were obeying a law.

The issue here is protecting those who broke the law.

But, given that the Current Federal Administrator contemns the rule of law, we should not be surprised that he chooses to protect the lawless.

Failure. It didn’t work. It isn’t working. It won’t work.

The crucial justification for the s(pl)urge ™, to allow time for the Iraqi so-called puppet government to consolidate its position, has not occurred, is not occurring, will not occur.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said for the first time yesterday that he supported a pause in American troop reductions in Iraq. It was the most authoritative indication to date that the United States will maintain a large force here through 2008 and into the next presidential term.

If you are old enough, you’ve heard it all before:

It’s the Bushie Midas touch. And its results will be with us, yea, unto the third or fourth generation.

Via jdrbunnythoughts.

What Digby said.

I was over here trying to buy some stuff, but all the good stuff is back ordered.

I think that’s a good sign.

Josh Marshall:

I pointed out a while ago that the persons citing Iraqis returning to Iraq as somehow a sign that Bush had done something right was, well, a pile of Bushie crap.

Here’s a little more information which pretty much supports my position:

The Iraqis continue to flee toward Syria, and the number of those who cross the border is much greater than that of those returning home. The motives of those who decide to come back, moreover, are not connected to an improvement in security, but mostly because of the expiration of residency permits and economic difficulties. These are the findings of the latest report from the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) on the numbers on Iraqi emigration into Syria. The result of the study clearly contradicts the scene depicted by the Baghdad government, according to which a drop in the number of attacks and the level of insecurity is bringing thousands of refugees back home each month.

Ya know, you can wrap the doggy poop up in a box, put fancy paper and a bow on it, but, when it’s unwrapped, it’s still doggy poop.

(Afterthought: Now that Empty Suit is out of the race and his sons are no longer serving America by trying to convince the voters that well-tailored material equals presidential material, maybe they can join my son in serving in the uniform of the United States Army.)

Via upyernoz.