In that parking lot, you tailored your approach and message to the people you were trying to convince. But you won’t do that for white men when it comes to gender power issues. Seems intolerant to me, and ultimately counterproductive to education.

This is a blog with the word “scholar” in the name; where a higher level of intellectual rigor is asssumed.

…is EXACTLY the point I’m trying to make on the other thread with regard to educating white men on gender power issues.

You had better hold on to your young adult children now. The draft just may become a more probable possibility. The founder of Veterans for America, Bobby Muller, raised the question to an audience at a book review gathering hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

There are many vets (and others) who believe that the draft is a must to “stabilize” the Middle East with huge numbers of troops and to distribute the share of the burden equally (a very unjust method of putting the lives of more people at risk so the few who are already there do not feel singled out).

The damage to the critical thinking capacity of this nation is already too great and has been taking place over the past 20 years or more. There is more disconnect between the experiences of people living in war and the civilians here. There is a disconnect between America and the rest of the world. That reality can only be grasped fully if experienced from the point of view of other nations.

Our present view of the world is constructed on a lie perpetrated deliberately over decades. It was perpetrated with the help of most politicians from different ideological perspectives for selfish and corporate motives. That reality has not changed. Add to that the fact that many people are always on the side of the winner in their nation and will always support war because of deep ideological beliefs or the desire to be identified with the “victor.” We have too many of those in the U.S.

I am sick and tired of hearing how we support the troops but not the war and am tired of hearing how troops are victims who need to be recognized for their sacrifice. I would have accepted that premise four years ago but, now, when the true motives of the imperial designs of this nation are apparent, any soldier who willingly enlists is complicit murder and self-destruction and in promoting the agenda of the politicians. It is very easy to feel sorry for people who have suffered in “service” of their country or for “Democracy”. It makes us look good and helps us feel that somehow we are doing something and standing up for something. I would put forth the argument to the parents out there, whatever their political leanings, you are complicit in the oppression of the poor of this country and other countries if you encourage your children to join the military. War is not about democracy or security. It is not about protecting oppressed people because most war victims are civilians and most war victims lose their independence and political and economic autonomy.

Short of mass peaceful resistance (boycotts of products and, companies, and individuals or groups who are pushing poverty and war), we are just engaging in futile debate.

Right or Left, most people have no clue because most people in this country have not been there and have not done it, including the politicians and many in the military who never saw actual killing and destruction from a close distance.

Charles

^^^^^

The Jewish Weekly - November 10, 2006

Christian Right Agenda In Shambles After GOP Defeat
Moderate Evangelicals seen chafing against narrow priorities like abortion, gay rights. Will some work with Dems?

Larry Cohler-Esses - Editor At Large

For a man witnessing a debacle in real time, Rev. Louis Sheldon, a leader of the Christian Right political movement, sounded amazingly
sanguine Tuesday night – even as an early AP exit poll indicated that almost one-third of white Evangelicals chose a Democrat for Congress.

“We know that in America the people are with us,” insisted the founder and chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, one of the
largest groups in the Christian right. “They’re just confused.”

Now, taking a break from monitoring discouraging election returns on television, Sheldon stressed that the defeat of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives signaled no decline for the movement that has been so central to GOP tenure there.

The issues that brought defeat, he said, had nothing to do with his movement.

“The issue is Iraq and the culture of corruption among a few Republican elected officials,” said Sheldon. “It’s very clear, we’re
here to stay. We’re in it for the long haul. The assault on marriage, sexual predators and abortion are not going away. So, we’ll go on.”

No one doubts this. But whether they will go on in the same way and with the same sway over the Republican Party is already a matter of
intense debate among political observers and activists.

Everyone agrees that the Evangelical right’s legislative agenda for the next session of Congress appears dead as a result of Tuesday’s
Democratic House victory. That is a source of great satisfaction for mainstream Jewish groups; they strongly opposed several measures passed by the House last session that had the movement’s backing.

These include the Public Expression of Religion Act, which would stop judges from awarding lawyers’ fees to plaintiffs who win suits
against the government for violating the separation of religion and state. Another bill passed last session would empower faith-based groups to discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring staff for
government-funded social service programs such as Head Start.

Both bills are stalled in the Senate. With the change in control of the House, “passage of these bills now becomes much less likely,” said Richard Foltin, head of the American Jewish Committee’s
Washington office.

Furthermore, he observed, with unsympathetic Democratic members taking over House committee chairmanships, the movement’s prospects
for moving new legislation forward are dim.

Even in the Senate, where the victorious party remained uncertain, many noted the defeat of Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) as a devastating
setback for the Christian right.

“He was the de facto leader of the social conservatives on the Hill,” said Marshal Wittman, a former official with the Christian Coalition
now affiliated with the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. “He carried their water on key issues. He was their most prominent advocate. And he was in the Senate Republican
leadership.”

Like most of the Christian right, Santorum was a fervent supporter of Israel. But his successor, Bob Casey Jr., pledged during his campaign
that “no senator will be as vigilant or supportive as me” in maintaining the U.S.-Israel relationship. Virtually all of the new
Democratic members have taken similar stands.

Seeking Other Issues

With its domestic legislative agenda on hold, its support for Israel seen as replaceable, and a significant portion of its grassroots
voting for the Democrats, what is the future of the movement whose influence within the Republican Party has made them kingmakers?

Even before last Tuesday, emerging voices within the Evangelical movement —sotto voce — were calling on the activist faithful to expand their agenda to encompass other issues. What about the
environment and global warming? they asked. Genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan and increasing economic inequality here at home?

Some now say acting on these concerns will mean working with the
newly empowered Democrats. The victorious party’s own numbers also
now include a coterie of socially conservative victors from Tuesday
night. And hoping to peel off even a few layers from what has been a
pro-GOP monolith, Democratic Party activists are plotting new ways to
welcome Evangelicals to their fold.

“It isn’t like the door is closed because Democrats are in control,”
said one high-ranking Democratic House staffer. “There may be certain
issues on which they agree with us. They’ll certainly have access.”

The staffer, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because
she was unauthorized to make statements to the press, was one of
several who saw an opportunity. Conservative Christian political
activism on sexual and church-state issues remained unstinting, she
conceded, “But in the last year, I’ve seen a huge change with this
movement. It’s fracturing.”

In Newsweek this week, President Bush’s former speechwriter Michael
Gerson, an Evangelical, spoke of a “head snapping generational change
among Evangelicals.”

Many, he wrote, “have begun elbowing against the narrowness of the
religious right, becoming more globally focused and more likely to
consider themselves ‘pro-life and pro-poor.’ Depending on your
perspective, this may be creeping liberalism or political maturity.”

Sheldon scoffed at this notion, and the idea that Christian right
activists might cultivate relationships with the newly empowered
Democrats. Some new Democratic members may be more in tune with their
views on sexual or church-state issues, he said, “But the leadership
won’t let us work with them. We can’t reorient because our issues are
issues the Democratic Party national platform repudiates.”

Drawing on his experience from years working with the Christian right, Wittman said, “The bottom line is that the social conservatives will remain a powerful force within the Republican
Party. … It’s unlikely they’ll have any significant relationship with Democratic leaders. Essentially we have one conservative and one liberal party. And the Evangelicals are part of the conservative party.”

A Tough Year

But that may be true only because Evangelicals have been content, until now, to let Christian right leaders speak for them, said John
Green, a senior fellow with the non-partisan Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

“We must make an important distinction between the Christian right per se and Evangelical Protestants,” he explained. “Moderate
Evangelicals have tended to follow the Christian right when it was about social issues. Many voted with Bush, but they are increasingly uncomfortable having their movement so exclusively identified with
him. Long-term, that’s quite important.”

With the rise of a Democratic House able to bring Democratic issues to the floor for votes, Green predicted support and involvement from
this sector of Evangelicals in an expected drive to raise the minimum wage, a key Democratic concern. “There actually is interest in
poverty,” he said.

Sheldon’s Anaheim, Calif.-based Traditional Values Coalition claims some 43,000-member churches as part of its lobby. It is well known,
well-funded and widely feared for the grassroots roar it can summon up to oppose abortion rights, gay rights, stem cell research,
pornography and sex education other than abstinence education. But it has been a tough year:

The scandals have come one after another for the political party he and others in the Christian right consider theirs: Reps. Randy
Cunningham (R-Calif.), who pleaded guilty to bribery last November; Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who pleaded guilty to corruption and
conspiracy charges last month after accepting lavish gifts for favors; Jack Abramoff, the convicted fundraiser and briber who provided many of those gifts — and to whom Sheldon himself was linked
through payments he received from an Abramoff client, an Internet gambling firm; and, perhaps most upsettingly for the author of “The
Homosexual Agenda to Change America,” Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who was forced to resign his seat after the disclosure of his uninvited sexual communications with male congressional interns.

Then, as if things could not get worse, there was the disgrace of Sheldon’s own friend and colleague, Rev. Ted Haggard, the Colorado
mega-church leader and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an even bigger pillar of Republican support on the
Christian right. Sheldon disclosed that he and “a lot” of others knew about Haggard’s homosexuality “for awhile … but we weren’t sure just how to deal with it.”

Months before a male prostitute publicly revealed Haggard’s secret relationship with him, and the reverend’s drug use as well, “Ted and
I had a discussion,” explained Sheldon, who said Haggard gave him a telltale signal then: “He said homosexuality is genetic. I said, no
it isn’t. But I just knew he was covering up. They need to say that.”

Sheldon insisted that being in opposition in the House “will be a huge energizing factor for us” as politics shifts toward the
selection of a presidential nominee for 2008.

But even he seemed to acknowledge that the tidal wave of scandal and electoral loss would not be without some effect.

“The Evangelical community is not monolithic,” he acknowledged. “Some of us hate politics because it’s so partisan. It doesn’t have a
comforting element. It can be very divisive.

“A lot of Evangelicals just don’t want to get involved,” he lamented.
>

There is an argument that you did the Leninist thing. See the Holy Text _Leftwing Communism: an Infantile Disorder_ or the Popular Front or even the CPUSA discussions in this period ( Stalinists ! horror of horrors; Lou Pro may rebut here ?). I just didn’t want everybody to think that ultra-leftists and petit bourgeois revolutionists are the only interpreters of Marxist Holy Theology. Can I get an Amen ?

Tactics and leaflets change, but I was thinking the good ole American term “Independent” accurately describes your political location, and you might call yourself that at the polls.

On working with churches, believers John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King have been more effective revolutionists in our history than “Red”. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is reportedly devout ( and was a Lt.Col)

I know “Red” is gone, but it was a lowdown dirty thing for him to call you “a murder merchant for the imperialist blood suckers”? Despite the macho sterotypes, men have feelings that can be hurt. You have more honor and honesty than most people.

It’s not an easy thing with the Dems being _so_ funky, but the Reps lead in the rightwing swing of the last 25 years, and the one party dominance and arrogance was starting to look like a juggernaut toward fascism. The danger’s not over , but a little “separation of powers” (and the extensive analysis above) seemed all we could do right now.

Charles
Leninist-feminist

I went on a road trip once in a VW Thing with an electrical problem that killed the windshield wipers. Along the way, it started to snow. A snowflake is pretty damn small, especially compared to a car. The windshield on a Thing is so flat that airflow doesn’t move the snow up and around the car – it just SPLAT sticks to the windshield and won’t get off. A layer of snowflakes 1/16th of an inch thick was enough to blind us within seconds and bring us to a screeching halt.

We rigged up some duct tape and sticks and manually moved the wipers like we were operating marionettes, with numb hands sticking out the open windows and the ensuing blizzard piling up in our laps. We drove an hour or two like that, but it’s not something we could have kept up indefinitely.

Given enough bugs, the person at the wheel will eventually be forced off the road.

So here we are with the republicans driving their hummers down the road, and the democrats in their WV Things. Step one, get the hummers off the road, cause they’re doing the most severe damage. Electing democrats so they can open investigations is part of that process.

Step two, now that the Things have the open road to themselves, start flinging ourselves in their direction. And start monkey wrenching their electrical systems.

Text is a good medium and a bad one. Allows us time to get a thought out wihtout being interrupted. Has no body language or tone of voice to differentiate emotional intent.