Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday in Australia, but I do it anyway. It’s great because the stores are open, it’s warm outside, and there’s no football. Bit hot for cooking though.
I’m thankful that Labor is looking to win the election this weekend. Saturday night will find me glued to the TV, and perhaps dancing on the couch as we give the mean little man from Earlwood the boot.
A political message from Tom Tancredo:
ZOMG! They’re gonna kill you in your beds at night KABOOOOMMMMM!!!!!1!!!
Someone had to say it.
What kind of person would make this kind of argument, and what kind of voter would buy into it? A cynical fear-mongering manipulator, and an awfully scared bed-wetter, respectively.
I have moved on from my “Bad Person” theory of political conservatism, and am now working on a new model. Here it is.
Let’s say there’s a guy over there that you don’t know, who looks kind of different.
Fear of perceived threats v. openness to experience. I think it goes a long way toward explaining the difference between the two political tendencies.
And the reason conservatives have had their victories in the last decade is that they’ve been very successful at joining with a third group of people: the people who would go up to that guy, beat him up, and steal his wallet.
Elections are coming soon, and I’ll definitely be voting for the Secular Party of Australia. Religious groups are nowhere near as politically influential here as in some other countries I could name, but I’d like to keep it that way. And the wall of separation between church and state can always use some shoring up.
But isn’t it a waste of a vote? Not here. Australia uses a system of ‘preferences’, where votes for minor parties aren’t discarded — they flow on to whoever the party (or you) specifies. It does mean that we get a proliferation of single issue parties like the Fishing Party. But then you might think the Fishing Party is a good idea. Also, some scary fringe parties can agglomerate power — like Family First or the Christian Democrats. (Or the Secular Party.) But at least you can throw your vote to someone you’d actually like to see win, instead of playing the cynical gamesmanship that American voters have to engage in. My vote will probably be passing through a few parties — probably Greens, then Labor.
America could learn some lessons from Australia.
Back when Ashcroft suggested that Americans spy on each other to protect themselves from terrorism, the American public somehow noticed, squawked, and the plan was dropped. But here in Australia, the Citizens’ Domestic Spying Squad is set to ‘operative’! Here’s the ad currently running on TV.
Even now, Australians can flood the hotline with nuisance calls, and turn in neighbours and friends for any behaviour that looks ‘unusual’.
In fact, this ad seems a bit more to the point.
One from home: yet another Republican has been outed, this one from Washington state.
State Representative Richard Curtis says he’s not gay, but police reports and court records indicate the Republican lawmaker from southwestern Washington dressed up in women’s lingerie and met a Medical Lake man in a local erotic video store which led to consensual sex at a downtown hotel and a threat to expose Curtis’ activities publicly.
Curtis is notable for having voted against two LGBT bills.
And this isn’t the first time this has happened in dear old Eastern Washington. Anyone remember Mayor Jim West, who voted to bar gay people from teaching in schools or working in day care centres?
Republicans didn’t see it coming, not even with that mustache:
State Rep. Bob Sump, R-Republic, described Curtis as an intelligent man and an effective legislator and said he was “dumbfounded” by the reports.
“I’m sitting here in shock,” Sump said. “When we lose our moral compass, these are the things that can happen.”
Yes, without their moral compass, people can become self-hating hypocrites. Sad.
Check out this ham-handed dodge from State Rep. John Ahern, R-Spokane:
Candidates of either party who espouse family values on the campaign trail then indulge in illicit sex are hypocrites.
Of either party? How many closeted Democrats can you think of? Are there any? The false equivalence, it burns.
I decided months ago that whenever I heard someone espousing ‘family values’ or speaking against homosexuality, I’d just ask them how long they’d been gay. But, as always, Tom the Dancing Bug has beaten me to it.
Who will it be next week?
I caught this quote from Republican presidential candidate and evolution denier Mike Huckabee.
A reporter asked Huckabee how he thought his views — including his view on evolution — might play in the general election.
“Oh, I believe in science. I certainly do,” he said. “In fact, what I believe in is, I believe in God. I don’t think there’s a conflict between the two. But if there’s going to be a conflict, science changes with every generation and with new discoveries and God doesn’t. So I’ll stick with God if the two are in conflict.“
He’s actually hit upon the very reason why science rules and religion drools.
Yes, our scientific understanding changes. The ideas we hold as true will in 100 years’ time be superceded by better and more refined knowledge. But that’s a good thing. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Science is good at changing and updating our canon of knowledge as the facts demand it. That’s why our scientific knowledge has increased exponentially, while religions… look pretty much the same as they did hundreds of years ago.
Because religions are based on beliefs instead of facts, they’re not very good at updating when new facts come in. It takes a long time for religions to change, and there’s usually a lot of resistance. To some, this looks like constancy in a world of change, but it’s actually a drag on human knowledge.
And take a look at the direction of flow. Science is considered good if it’s new and current, while there’s a very strong tendency for some Christian churches to be as ‘first-century’ as possible.
I went to an observatory with the boys the other night. I found out how we know how far away the stars are. I heard about what’s likely to happen to our Sun in the future. Best of all, I got to see clusters of nebulae. There’s so much to learn about our universe, and the scientific method is the most successful way to do that. But for people like Huckabee, if this knowledge doesn’t agree with their biblical preconceptions, they’ll stick with a cosmology made up by people who didn’t have telescopes.
Brownback and Huckabee trading barbs over whose religion is better is like watching clowns whacking each other with big fish, but slightly less entertaining.
[A] pitched battle has broken out involving two lesser-known candidates who are trading accusations of religious bigotry and hypocrisy. The battle has become the most heated and personal rivalry in the Republican field.
The current tensions stem from an e-mail message sent to two Brownback supporters by Rev. Tim Rude, the pastor of an evangelical church in Walnut Creek, Iowa. In the message, Mr. Rude, a Huckabee volunteer, compared the religious backgrounds of Mr. Huckabee, a Baptist pastor, and Mr. Brownback, who is Roman Catholic.
“I know Senator Brownback converted to Roman Catholicism in 2002,” Mr. Rude wrote. “Frankly, as a recovering Catholic myself, that is all I need to know about his discernment when compared to the Governor’s.”
While it’s refreshing to see the term ‘recovering Catholic’ in print, I’ll just put something out there that I’ve been thinking for a while: Insane people hate competing insanities. I mean, both Huckabee and Brownback put their hands up as evolution deniers in a debate. They’re both religious nutters. Why can’t they get along?
Today in the Senate.
WASHINGTON: Christian activists briefly disrupted a Hindu invocation in the US Senate on Thursday, marring a historic first for the chamber and showing that fundamentalism is present and shouting in the US too.
Invited by the Senate to offer Hindu prayers in place of the usual Christian invocation, Rajan Zed, a Hindu priest from Reno, Nevada, had just stepped up to the podium for the landmark occasion when three protesters, said to belong to the Christian Right anti-abortion group Operation Save America, interrupted by loudly asking for God’s forgiveness for allowing the ”false prayer” of a Hindu in the Senate chamber.
“Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight,” the first protester shouted. “This is an abomination. We shall have no other gods before you.”
Democratic Senator Bob Casey, who was serving as the presiding officer for the morning, immediately asked the sergeant-at-arms to restore order. But they continued to protest as they were headed out the door by the marshals, shouting, “No Lord but Jesus Christ!” and “There’s only one true God!”
This is what they say about school prayer. Oh, it doesn’t have to be explicitly Christian. But would they be happy with a Wiccan prayer? A prayer to Allah? A Hindu prayer? Evidently not; America’s a Christian nation.
The organisation Operation Save America later issued a press release confirming that Ante Pavkovic, Kathy Pavkovic, and Kristen Sugar were all arrested in the chambers of the United States Senate “as that chamber was violated by a false Hindu god.”
“The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ,” the statement said, adding, “This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers.”
Well, at least one. Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom.
It was adopted in 1779 with the valuable assistance of james Madison but not until a proposed amendment attempting to insert the words “Jesus Christ . . . the holy author of our religion” was rejected. In his autobiography, Jefferson notes the defeat of this proposed amendment “by a great majority, is proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and the Infidel of every denomination.“
Let’s all remember that pandering to these people just feeds their hunger for domination. They won’t be happy until other views are eliminated but their own. It’s never Jesusy enough for them. Abomination, indeed.
Atheists don’t get elected to public office in America (very often). And so we see all the major players paying lip service to Gawd, or a higher power, or ‘spirituality’ or some other such claptrap.
But if I’m annoyed by political goddiness, colour me supremely irked by this:
Sen. Barack Obama drew his heartiest welcome of a two-day swing through Iowa in the state’s capital of inner peace.
To the frustration of the cameramen in the Fairfield town square, Obama delivered his remarks facing east, with the setting sun behind him blotting out their shots.
But here, there’s a power even higher than the television networks: Obama had positioned himself in alignment with the rotation of the earth, in accordance with the teachings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose followers moved en masse to this small Iowa city more than 30 years ago.
You need votes, and you’ve got to pander to respect people’s beliefs. That’s the part I’d be rotten at. I’d probably tell them that the Maharishi was a fraud, that spirituality is just made up, and then I’d challenge them to show me some yogic flying. In short, I’d get nowhere at all with the nutball New Agers.
Obama needs to pander to faith, I suppose, but does he have to wallow in it? Surely part of the job of President must be calling out bullshit of one type or another, and Obama looks incapable of it.
And how does the Democratic Party hold together when it contains the secular Left and the New Age spiritual left at the same time?
Bush at 26% approval. He has now broken through the Crazification Barrier and polled lower than the number of absolutely crazy people that will always be present in any population.
Now here’s the question: if you or I or anyone else were to start acting like Bush, siding with Bush, agreeing with Bush on the vital issues of the day, what would happen to their popularity? Would it go up, do you think? Or would it plummet?
Well, Congress has given in to Bush on lots of issues lately, including war funding for Iraq and abstinence-only sex education (to name two off the top of my head). Let’s see what happens.
The percentage of Americans with a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress is at 14%, the lowest in Gallup’s history of this measure — and the lowest of any of the 16 institutions tested in this year’s Confidence in Institutions survey. It is also one of the lowest confidence ratings for any institution tested over the last three decades.
I know America’s a nation of Congress-haters, but this is something else. Americans sent Democrats to Congress to
a) be Democrats, and
b) counteract this insane president.
Instead, they’re refusing to stand up for Democratic values, and fulfilling every stereotype about ‘finger-in-the-wind’ wimpy politicians. It is intensely frustrating, even from where I’m sitting. And the polls are showing this frustration.
In one of his special comments, Keith Olbermann said
Our politics… is now about the answer to one briefly-worded question.
Mr. Bush has failed.
Mr. Warner has failed.
Mr. Reid has failed.
So.
Who among us will stop this war—this War of Lies?
To he or she, fall the figurative keys to the nation.
To all the others—presidents and majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party—there is only blame… for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal.
He was right.
Now what would it take to make it even lower and send Bush’s popularity to, say, four? Surprisingly, the answer is not ‘for Bush to screw up even more’. As if that were possible. No, for year after year we watched Monkey-Boy’s hijinks while his popularity remained improbably high.
But Bush’s popularity among the faithful was never about Bush himself, or his actions. It was more how they ‘felt’ about Bush the Symbol. As long as he remained the rallying point, as long as he represented their feelings of self-worth, as long as they invested themselves in him and his ideology, those numbers were always going to stay high. And since an authoritarian cult of personality abhors a vacuum, stay high the numbers would until a new Saviour could appear — a Republican the public could like. Yeah. Good luck. Who would that be? Cheney? Giuliani? Ha.
But just as soon as someone comes along in which the faithful can invest their sense of self, the Bush cult will utterly collapse, and we’ll see approval ratings in the low teens. The groundwork is already being laid; you’ll be hearing the ‘Bush is not a True Scotsman’ from now until November 2008. Well done, keyboard konservatives. Keep it up. He will come.
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