Last teaching day!

Yay!!! Of course, though the roads are ok (the major ones), the sidewalks are sheets of ice. I made the mistake of shoveling the walk and the driveway; now it is solid ice and the stores are out of salt and icemelt. I did find large bags of water softener tablets though, and those are much better than nothing.

Racewalking: it has been making the rounds of the racewalking groups that racewalking is the geekiest sport. True, racewalkers like gadgets like gps stopwatches with heart rate monitors, but I’d say that we are, in fact, more “nerdy” than “geeky”.
At least, I am anyway.

Politics

Huckabee:

His wooishness and desire for a theocracy has caught the eyes of many. Here is a nicely done 10 point argument as to why he is unqualified to be President:

As former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee catapults to the top of the 2008 Republican presidential race, amazed media on-lookers ponder his meteoric rise. The authentic, charismatic former minister, they say, is swaying disheartened conservative voters, especially the legions of evangelicals in Iowa and other states, disillusioned with President Bush and unimpressed with his potential successors. But despite emerging stories from his checkered past such as the Wayne Dumond affair or his past AIDS bigotry, a true portrait of Mike Huckabee as a radical reactionary and dangerous extremist has yet to be painted.

Here then, are the Top 10 Moments in Mike Huckabee’s Extremism:

* Avenging Angel’s diary :: ::
*

1. Huckabee Calls for the Quarantine of AIDS Victims
2. Huckabee Enables the Politically-Motivated Parole of Repeat Rapist/Murderer
3. Huckabee Offers Faith-Based Pardons
4. Huckabee Undermines the Teaching of Evolution
5. Huckabee Speaks for God
6. Huckabee Speaks to God
7. Huckabee Claims God Behind His Rise in the Polls
8. Huckabee Proclaims His Theology Degree a Unique Qualification to Fight Terrorism
9. Huckabee Flip-Flops, Calls for Federal Abortion Ban
10. Huckabee Calls for Consumption Tax, Abolition of the IRS [...]

Each of these points is elaborated on in the article that I linked to.

Science and Politics Many scientists are calling for a Presidential candidate on science and the issues. To sign the petition go here.

Personally, I am not holding my breath, though it would be fun for me to see the idiot from Arkansas trot out the long discredited canard about “the laws of science saying that the bumblebee can’t fly“. I sure wish that he and his followers would give up all that modern science has come up with such as modern medicine, electronic stuff, and the like.

I find it ironic that these kooks and morons use modern inventions to spread this type of nonsense.

Democrats

Well, Obama had quite the outing in South Carolina.

Not everyone was happy about it.

Oprah brought out some 29,000 people at Obama’s rally in South Carolina. Politics does not normally draw that kind of crowd, at least not in apathetic America. And Oprah does not normally endorse candidates. Obama is the first.

Kudos to Oprah for participating in politics by standing up for the candidate she believes in. If more people were politically active, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

While I have serious doubts about Obama’s ability to withstand the Republican smear machine in the general election, I can’t help being encouraged about the fact that Obama’s candidacy is a blow for progress in this historically racist, aka backward, cowboy nation.

That said, I’m voting for the candidate who looks most like a secular humanist. Obama ain’t it.

Politico reports that the South Carolina rally was “suffused with Christian – and at times messianic – rhetoric” and “Oprah Winfrey described Obama in near-messianic language in South Carolina, calling him ‘the one.’”

Obama’s opening remarks were lines I expect to hear in a church, not a political rally: “I give all praise and honor to God. Look at the day the Lord has made.”

And I thought it was bad listening to the bat-shit crazy Republicans argue over who gets to be God’s ‘chosen’ candidate. If Obama and preacher Huckabee go to the general election with this kind of holy rhetoric, this nation is beyond hope. [...]

Ok, so what about that other Democratic candidate: a real secular humanist, right? Wrong. Obama comes off as downright secular when compared to Hillary Clinton. Remember that Obama belongs to the United Church of Christ, which is the most liberal denomination that is “Christian” (the Unitarian Universalists are not Christian any longer). On the other hand, Clinton is downright pious by comparison.

Oh don’t worry, many of Clinton’s backers already know this; many even LIKE this about her. But I’ve posted excerpts from this Mother Jones article for the benefit of those who don’t know this about her as well as to expose the hypocrisy of those Clinton backers who slammed Obama for this rally:

It was an elegant example of the Clinton style, a rhetorical maneuver subtle, bold, and banal all at once. During a Democratic candidate forum in June, hosted by the liberal evangelical group Sojourners, Hillary Clinton fielded a softball query about Bill’s infidelity: How had her faith gotten her through the Lewinsky scandal?

After a glancing shot at Republican “pharisees,” Clinton explained that, of course, her “very serious” grounding in faith had helped her weather the affair. But she had also relied on the “extended faith family” that came to her aid, “people whom I knew who were literally praying for me in prayer chains, who were prayer warriors for me.”

Such references to spiritual warfare—prayer as battle against Satan, evil, and sin—might seem like heavy evangelical rhetoric for the senator from New York, but they went over well with the Sojourners audience, as did her call to “inject faith into policy.” It was language that recalled Clinton’s Jesus moment a year earlier, when she’d summoned the Bible to decry a Republican anti-immigrant initiative that she said would “criminalize the good Samaritan…and even Jesus himself.” Liberal Christians crowed (“Hillary Clinton Shows the Way Democrats Can Use the Bible,” declared a blogger at TPMCafe) while conservative pundits cried foul, accusing Clinton of scoring points with a faith not really her own.

In fact, Clinton’s God talk is more complicated—and more deeply rooted—than either fans or foes would have it, a revelation not just of her determination to out-Jesus the gop, but of the powerful religious strand in her own politics. Over the past year, we’ve interviewed dozens of Clinton’s friends, mentors, and pastors about her faith, her politics, and how each shapes the other. And while media reports tend to characterize Clinton’s subtle recalibration of tone and style as part of the Democrats’ broader move to recapture the terrain of “moral values,” those who know her say there’s far more to it than that.

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. “A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation,” says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. “I don’t….there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer.”

[...]
When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian “cell” whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

Clinton’s prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or “the Family”), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to “spiritual war” on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship’s only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has “made a fetish of being invisible,” former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God’s plan.

Clinton declined our requests for an interview about her faith, but in Living History, she describes her first encounter with Fellowship leader Doug Coe at a 1993 lunch with her prayer cell at the Cedars, the Fellowship’s majestic estate on the Potomac. Coe, she writes, “is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.”

The Fellowship’s ideas are essentially a blend of Calvinism and Norman Vincent Peale, the 1960s preacher of positive thinking. It’s a cheery faith in the “elect” chosen by a single voter—God—and a devotion to Romans 13:1: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers….The powers that be are ordained of God.” Or, as Coe has put it, “we work with power where we can, build new power where we can’t.”

When Time put together a list of the nation’s 25 most powerful evangelicals in 2005, the heading for Coe’s entry was “The Stealth Persuader.” “You know what I think of when I think of Doug Coe?” the Reverend Schenck (a Coe admirer) asked us. “I think literally of the guy in the smoky back room that you can’t even see his face. He sits in the corner, and you see the cigar, and you see the flame, and you hear his voice—but you never see his face. He’s that shadowy figure.” [...]

Unlikely partnerships have become a Clinton trademark. Some are symbolic, such as her support for a ban on flag burning with Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah) and funding for research on the dangers of video games with Brownback and Santorum. But Clinton has also joined the gop on legislation that redefines social justice issues in terms of conservative morality, such as an anti-human-trafficking law that withheld funding from groups working on the sex trade if they didn’t condemn prostitution in the proper terms. With Santorum, Clinton co-sponsored the Workplace Religious Freedom Act; she didn’t back off even after Republican senators such as Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter pulled their names from the bill citing concerns that the measure would protect those refusing to perform key aspects of their jobs—say, pharmacists who won’t fill birth control prescriptions, or police officers who won’t guard abortion clinics.

Clinton has championed federal funding of faith-based social services, which she embraced years before George W. Bush did; Marci Hamilton, author of God vs. the Gavel, says that the Clintons’ approach to faith-based initiatives “set the stage for Bush.” Clinton has also long supported the Defense of Marriage Act, a measure that has become a purity test for any candidate wishing to avoid war with the Christian right.

Liberal rabbi Michael Lerner, whose “politics of meaning” Clinton made famous in a speech early in her White House tenure, sees the senator’s ambivalence as both more and less than calculated opportunism. He believes she has genuine sympathy for liberal causes—rights for women, gays, immigrants—but often will not follow through. “There is something in her that pushes her toward caring about others, as long as there’s no price to pay. But in politics, there is a price to pay.” [...]

Of course, no matter how much Clinton speaks of common ground, she doesn’t stand a chance of winning votes among pro-lifers. As Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council, command central for Washington’s Christian right, told us, movement conservatives consider legislation like Clinton’s Putting Prevention First Act, which supports greater access to birth control and sex ed, “just another condom giveaway.”

But the senator’s project isn’t the conversion of her adversaries; it’s tempering their opposition so she can court a new generation of Clinton Republicans, values voters who have grown estranged from the Christian right. And while such crossover conservatives may never agree with her on the old litmus-test issues, there is an important, and broader, common ground—the kind of faith-based politics that, under the right circumstances, will permit majority morality to trump individual rights. The libertarian Cato Institute recently observed that Clinton is “adding the paternalistic agenda of the religious right to her old-fashioned liberal paternalism.” Clinton suggests as much herself in her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, where she writes approvingly of religious groups’ access to schools, lessons in Scripture, and “virtue” making a return to the classroom. [...]