How would you like to quickly access any of 547 newspaper front pages from 46 countries? You can do it right here, at a website called Today's Front Pages. Quite impressive! Click on "Read Today's Recap" for a short recap of some of the headlines.
The Missouri supreme court has ruled that a law banning sexually explicit billboards is--gasp!-- unconstitutional. This should come as a surprise to no one. But of course religious groups are stunned. They will try to appeal. Personally, I resent all the JESUS! billboards and the propagandistic ones that declare Pornography…
In 2004, George Bush was reelected. We can debate endlessly over whether or not he stole that election, but it’s beside the point for this rant. Besides, four million popular votes seems like a big wad to steal.
What we need to figure out if we want to have any possibility of turning this misdirected ship around is WHY SO MANY PEOPLE VOTED FOR THE REPUBLICAN RIGHT? Not even just Republicans–there are decent Republicans that I would support (Arlan Spector comes to mind, as does a pre-2004 John McCain)–but the rabid fundie far right wing of the party, the wing that is destroying it and trying to turn this country into something like a theocracy.
So what was it?
The factor listed by most exit polls in Middle America was–is–Moral Values. Not in California or the Northeast corridor, but in the Heartland.
Moral Values.
I had thought for a long time that the issues driving Bush supporters floated between abortion, school prayer, and taxes. I’m now not so sure tax cuts are that important–these people have got to realize that if Bush continues his policies, at some point a huge bill is going to come due.
The furor over gay marriage in the last months of the campaign underscores the exit polls. Moral Values.
If I thought the votes were driven by the deep morality stemming from a Kantian apprehension of the nature of the right, the good, and the universalizable as determined by a focused application of the categorical …
In the September, 2006 Harper's "Notebook," Lewis H. Lapham begins with this quote by Rainer Werner Fassbinder: In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism. Is there money to be made in Iraq? Lapham, who has wielded a sharp…
I’d like to do another riff on the science and religion thing, so bear with me. I largely don’t bother going on about this issue anymore, except in those instances where there may be an audience of undecideds.
One of the things about Americans in small groups is that by and large we will listen and we will weigh what we hear before making up our minds. It comes down to the slickness of the rhetoric or the overwhelming honesty of an argument. That’s on us, we who bother to make such arguments. It helps to remember that we do this for those who haven’t made up their minds yet.
Evolution vs Creation Science. The arguments are settled, the science is in, there’s no real dispute except on the Culture War Front. Evangelicals simply don’t like the program. When the truth destroys a cherished myth, print the myth. An old newspaper adage from the 19th Century.
We’ve been having this crap now for a couple of decades at least, in Kansas back in the 90s, and the issue is well-enough known and the stakes thoroughly understood by enough folks on both sides that anyone moving to circumvent the Supreme Court decision (Edwards vs Aguillard, 1987) is doing so with the knowledge that they are being duplicitous. They have decided that, as they cannot win their case on the basis of fact and reason, and since they believe they are right and everyone who disagrees with them is wrong, any tactic …