What will Walker do to social programs? What programs will he cut in the name of business progress?? Truly scary.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
From The New Yorker
Asked how high he got in Scientology’s levels of study, Haggis said, “All the way to the top.” Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark.
On August 19, 2009, Tommy Davis, the chief spokesperson for the Church of Scientology International, received a letter from the film director and screenwriter Paul Haggis. “For ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego,” Haggis wrote. Before the 2008 elections, a staff member at Scientology’s San Diego church had signed its name to an online petition supporting Proposition 8, which asserted that the State of California should sanction marriage only “between a man and a woman.” The proposition passed. As Haggis saw it, the San Diego church’s “public sponsorship of Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California—rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state—is a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us.” Haggis wrote, “Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.” He concluded, “I hereby resign my membership in the Church of Scientology.”
Haggis was prominent in both Scientology and Hollywood, two communities that often converge. Although he is less famous than certain other Scientologists, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, he had been in the organization for nearly thirty-five years. Haggis wrote the screenplay for “Million Dollar Baby,” which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2004, and he wrote and directed “Crash,” which won Best Picture the next year—the only time in Academy history that that has happened.
Davis, too, is part of Hollywood society; his mother is Anne Archer, who starred in “Fatal Attraction” and “Patriot Games,” among other films. Before becoming Scientology’s spokesperson, Davis was a senior vice-president of the church’s Celebrity Centre International network.
In previous correspondence with Davis, Haggis had demanded that the church publicly renounce Proposition 8. “I feel strongly about this for a number of reasons,” he wrote. “You and I both know there has been a hidden anti-gay sentiment in the church for a long time. I have been shocked on too many occasions to hear Scientologists make derogatory remarks about gay people, and then quote L.R.H. in their defense.” The initials stand for L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, whose extensive writings and lectures form the church’s scripture. Haggis related a story about Katy, the youngest of three daughters from his first marriage, who lost the friendship of a fellow-Scientologist after revealing that she was gay. The friend began warning others, “Katy is ‘1.1.’ ” The number refers to a sliding Tone Scale of emotional states that Hubbard published in a 1951 book, “The Science of Survival.” A person classified “1.1” was, Hubbard said, “Covertly Hostile”—“the most dangerous and wicked level”—and he noted that people in this state engaged in such things as casual sex, sadism, and homosexual activity. Hubbard’s Tone Scale, Haggis wrote, equated “homosexuality with being a pervert.” (Such remarks don’t appear in recent editions of the book.)
In his resignation letter, Haggis explained to Davis that, for the first time, he had explored outside perspectives on Scientology. He had read a recent exposé in a Florida newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, which reported, among other things, that senior executives in the church had been subjecting other Scientologists to physical violence. Haggis said that he felt “dumbstruck and horrified,” adding, “Tommy, if only a fraction of these accusations are true, we are talking about serious, indefensible human and civil-rights violations.”
Online, Haggis came across an appearance that Davis had made on CNN, in May, 2008. The anchor John Roberts asked Davis about the church’s policy of “disconnection,” in which members are encouraged to separate themselves from friends or family members who criticize Scientology. Davis responded, “There’s no such thing as disconnection as you’re characterizing it. And certainly we have to understand—”
“Well, what is disconnection?” Roberts interjected.
“Scientology is a new religion,” Davis continued. “The majority of Scientologists in the world, they’re first generation. So their family members aren’t going to be Scientologists. . . . So, certainly, someone who is a Scientologist is going to respect their family members’ beliefs—”
“Well, what is disconnection?” Roberts said again.
“—and we consider family to be a building block of any society, so anything that’s characterized as disconnection or this kind of thing, it’s just not true. There isn’t any such policy.”
In his resignation letter, Haggis said, “We all know this policy exists. I didn’t have to search for verification—I didn’t have to look any further than my own home.” Haggis reminded Davis that, a few years earlier, his wife had been ordered to disconnect from her parents “because of something absolutely trivial they supposedly did twenty-five years ago when they resigned from the church. . . . Although it caused her terrible personal pain, my wife broke off all contact with them.” Haggis continued, “To see you lie so easily, I am afraid I had to ask myself: what else are you lying about?”
Haggis forwarded his resignation to more than twenty Scientologist friends, including Anne Archer, John Travolta, and Sky Dayton, the founder of EarthLink. “I felt if I sent it to my friends they’d be as horrified as I was, and they’d ask questions as well,” he says. “That turned out to be largely not the case. They were horrified that I’d send a letter like that.”
PROFILES, “THE APOSTATE,” THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 14, 2011, P. 84
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright#ixzz1DZ5RBLj1
From The Humanist
CHURCH & STATE
The Religious Right and the Tea Party:
Marriage of Convenience or Just a Passing Fling?
by Rob Boston
Published in the November/December 2010 Humanist
I spent two weekends in September attending conferences sponsored by religious right groups in Washington, DC. They were nothing if not eye-opening.
The first gathering was sponsored by a new group called the Faith & Freedom Coalition. This organization was founded last year by Ralph Reed, former executive director of TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition.
Reed left the Coalition in 1997 to become a political consultant and lobbyist—and to launch a political career. But he became ensnared in the scandal surrounding disgraced casino lobbyist Jack Abramoff, which dashed Reed’s hopes of becoming lieutenant governor of Georgia. After trying and failing to launch a career as a novelist, Reed decided to return to his religious right roots.
It’s hard to know what to make of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. Although Reed claims to have 400,000 supporters, only about 200 people showed up for his inaugural conference. Reed brags about mobilizing a younger, more racially diverse crowd and using cutting-edge technology. Yet most of the attendees at his first event were white and past retirement age; only about a dozen people showed up for a breakout session on how to use Facebook as an organizing tool.
Can Reed get back into the game? It’s too early to tell, but I wouldn’t write him off.
The other conference, the annual “Values Voter Summit” sponsored by the Family Research Council, drew a much bigger audience. About 2,000 people packed the ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel to hear speakers like Newt Gingrich, Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly. Busloads of students from Liberty University added a youthful vibe. The energy level was high.
Yet both events shared one thing in common: Anger. There is a lot of hate and rage out there in Religious Right Land. Speakers lashed out at favorite targets: President Barack Obama, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the “liberal media,” gay people, Muslims, feminists, and so on.
But increasingly, one of the religious right’s favorite targets is anyone who dares adopt a secular worldview.
At Reed’s event, a California pastor named Jim Garlow snarled, “Godlessness has created havoc in our culture. If we didn’t face secularism, we wouldn’t have babies being ripped up in the womb. If it wasn’t for secularism, we wouldn’t have the definition of marriage being destroyed. …We wouldn’t have oppressive taxation if it wasn’t for secularism. We wouldn’t have debt so excessive that we are literally stealing—it’s a form of theft—from generations yet unborn if it wasn’t for secularism.”
During a special Values Voter Summit session on church-based political organizing, Kenyn Cureton, the FRC’s vice president for church ministries, urged attendees to gird themselves for a “spiritual battle.”
“When you think about it, you know, the real enemy is not the poor, deluded souls who are advancing these evil agendas,” Cureton said. “Really, they’re just simply pawns in the hands of their malevolent master. They’re simply doing the bidding of the devil, OK?”
How are these “poor, deluded souls” to be dealt with? An invocation that Bishop Harry Jackson, a Maryland preacher known for his anti-gay activism, gave during the summit’s closing banquet provides a clue. The reading was from the Book of Psalms 68:1, which states, “May God arise, may his enemies be scattered; may his foes flee before him. As smoke is driven away, so drive them away. As wax melts before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.”
Let the wicked perish? Gee, I don’t think they like us!
The problem with rhetoric like this—and by extension the problem with the religious right’s entire approach to politics—is that it is based on rage, hate, and fear. There are always enemies to despise. The constant manipulation of these most base emotions is unhealthy for individuals and for our body politic.
Politics is supposedly the art of compromise, yet how can you find any common ground when your opponents aren’t just wrong about an issue but are in fact tools of Satan?
This demonization of entire segments of the U.S. population feeds a dangerous “us vs. them” mentality. At the Values Voters Summit, it was never enough for speakers to say they disagreed with liberals, secularists, and progressive Christians. These groups were always portrayed as hating America, seeking to subvert the Constitution and longing to destroy the country.
Here’s more bad news: Groups like the FRC are reaching out to the Tea Party movement in the hopes of forging a lasting alliance that will change the face of U.S. politics.
I’ve been attending religious right meetings for a long time. Usually the talk is about issues like legal abortion, same-sex marriage, religion in public schools, and other “values” concerns. At Reed’s confab and the Values Voter Summit, the big focus was on deficit spending, taxes, Obama’s healthcare reform, and the stimulus legislation.
These aren’t traditional religious right issues, and their prominence at these gatherings was no accident: The religious right hopes to either co-opt the Tea Party or attach itself to that movement. The cynical among us might add that groups like the Heritage Foundation, which cosponsored this year’s summit, are trying to win a new flock of converts for their minimalist approach to government. It’s normally difficult to convince people who rely on Social Security and Medicare to join anti-government movements—unless you first convince them that government is out to destroy religion.
Some would argue that there is already significant overlap between the religious right and the Tea Party. Summit attendees heard three women who are active in local Tea Parties talk about how their religious faith motivated them to act. One claimed God literally woke her up at 3 a.m. and ordered her to form a Tea Party group.
Of course, not all Tea Partiers are on board with this religious crusade. About a week before the Values Voter Summit, I received a call from a distraught young man in Idaho who is active in a local Tea Party and has been trying to persuade members that James Madison was a strong supporter of church-state separation. The man told me that most members had embraced a revisionist “Christian nation” history of America and could not be persuaded to stick to the fiscal issues that concerned my caller.
If the religious right has its way, the “leave-us-alone” libertarians who don’t want Big Government or Big Religion running their lives will be pushed out of the Tea Party, and the movement will morph into just another vehicle for conservative religious social engineering. This new manifestation may include a lot of anti-government rhetoric to keep the Tea Partiers interested, but the end result will be the same: People who believe, by virtue of their religion (which is the only true one, of course) that they have the right to employ the power of the state to make decisions for you and forge a “godly” society.
While I must reject the religious right’s calls for “spiritual warfare,” I do believe political battles lines have been drawn. The resurgence of the far right means that humanists and the values we hold dear—tolerance, self-determination, secular government—will be constantly tested in the months and years to come.
It is vital that we stand up for them. Remember, at the end of the day, we are all “values voters.” The question is whose values will prevail.
Rob Boston is senior policy analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a board member of the American Humanist Association.
From Fighting Bob
Ryan the cruel
By Ed Garvey
Paul Ryan is an earnest man who tries to impress the listener that he is, indeed, an "egg head" but a practical one. He wants you to know that he is smarter than Scott Walker, Charles Grassley, and John Kyle--smarter than the Speaker of the House, but he is also tougher.
With a warm smile he wants us to like him. "How much is that doggy in the window?" That will be his Achilles. He looks warm and cuddly but he is a pit bull not a poodle and people will see through the smiley face.
Progressives run for office to provide housing for the homeless, economic justice, good public education, health care as a right of citizenship. Not Paul Ryan.
No sir. Earnest Ryan is out to demonstrate that he is tough, hard, and ruthless. You know, he is a man of commerce and free markets, and he has lots of advice: pull yourself up by your bootstraps. While he might shy from literally showing up on his neighbor's porch with eviction papers on Christmas eve, he doesn't flinch at the thought of throwing millions of Americans into the street. Tears do not well when he is told that repeal of health care would literally kill thousands of people, that young people will die who could be saved.
Tough guy that Ryan. I wonder if he has visited the GM plant in Janesville to see how it looks closed. So as he hurried out of Marquette Law School he didn't have time (courage?) to list the programs he would cut in order to curry favor with the nuts in the Tea Party by cutting $84 billion from the current budget. Whoa Nelly.
Guys like Ryan spend us into poverty with wars we should never have fought, weapons we should not have built, ships that should have remained in port. Ryan will shove grandparents into poverty because he lacks the courage to tax the wealthy! Talk about profiles in courage. Ryan's book should be entitled Get Out of the Way, Old-timer.
By Ed Garvey
Paul Ryan is an earnest man who tries to impress the listener that he is, indeed, an "egg head" but a practical one. He wants you to know that he is smarter than Scott Walker, Charles Grassley, and John Kyle--smarter than the Speaker of the House, but he is also tougher.
With a warm smile he wants us to like him. "How much is that doggy in the window?" That will be his Achilles. He looks warm and cuddly but he is a pit bull not a poodle and people will see through the smiley face.
Progressives run for office to provide housing for the homeless, economic justice, good public education, health care as a right of citizenship. Not Paul Ryan.
No sir. Earnest Ryan is out to demonstrate that he is tough, hard, and ruthless. You know, he is a man of commerce and free markets, and he has lots of advice: pull yourself up by your bootstraps. While he might shy from literally showing up on his neighbor's porch with eviction papers on Christmas eve, he doesn't flinch at the thought of throwing millions of Americans into the street. Tears do not well when he is told that repeal of health care would literally kill thousands of people, that young people will die who could be saved.
Tough guy that Ryan. I wonder if he has visited the GM plant in Janesville to see how it looks closed. So as he hurried out of Marquette Law School he didn't have time (courage?) to list the programs he would cut in order to curry favor with the nuts in the Tea Party by cutting $84 billion from the current budget. Whoa Nelly.
Guys like Ryan spend us into poverty with wars we should never have fought, weapons we should not have built, ships that should have remained in port. Ryan will shove grandparents into poverty because he lacks the courage to tax the wealthy! Talk about profiles in courage. Ryan's book should be entitled Get Out of the Way, Old-timer.
From Common Dreams
Obama, Inc.
With Daley and Immelt on board, our president is waltzing with the devil.
When you dance with the devil, never fool yourself into thinking that you're leading.
That would be my 50-cents-worth of advice to President Barack Obama as he remakes his presidency into a Clintonesque corporate enterprise. Following last fall's congressional elections, he immediately began blowing kisses to CEOs and big business lobbyists, and he's now filled his White House dance card with them.
First came Bill Daley, the Wall Street banker and longtime corporate lobbyist. In early January, Obama brought him to the White House ball to be his chief-of-staff, gatekeeper, and policy coordinator.
Then Obama tapped Jeffery Immelt to lead his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which is supposed to "encourage the private sector to hire [Americans] and invest in American competitiveness." This is a bizarre coupling, for as General Electric's CEO, Immelt was a leader in shipping American factories and jobs to Asia and elsewhere. Today, fewer than half of GE's workers are in our country.
As an AFL-CIO official notes, "Highly globalized companies don't have the same interests as the United States. There is no company more emblematic of this than GE."
In his recent State of the Union speech, Obama offered only cold comfort to the millions of Americans who are unemployed or barely employed, saying blandly that "The rules have changed." Well, yes--and who changed them? Self-serving CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt, that's who.
America's working families--our endangered middle class--have a right to expect Obama to fight for rules that are fair to them and our country, not meekly accept rules that have been skewed by an elite corporate class to profit them alone. Instead, our president is waltzing with the devil.
He's rebranding his presidency, all right. It's becoming Obama, Inc.
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