progressive involvement

Colorado firm involved in Wisconsin recall?

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that recall petitions filed against three Democratic state senators will take more time to verify.

In challenging the recalls against the three Democrats, lawyers argued that evidence of fraud by some of the petition circulators, especially ones hired through a Colorado firm by the GOP, tainted the whole recall process and so all petitions collected by those particular circulators had to be thrown out...

Some of the claims of fraud involve discrepancies in the home addresses listed by the circulators; others were generated by a phone survey of petition signers.

Which firm might that be? I wonder.

Yep, that's about it

Jed Lewison at DailyKos notes the recent uptick in public approval for President Obama, who is up 6 points in an Opinion Research.  

Lewison thinks, however, that this is a pretty big jump and there must be more to it than just getting bin Laden.

Why so?  In the first place, it's a nice boost, but not a huge one.  Secondly, getting bin Laden may turn out to have been a bigger event than some think.

When was the last time the United States had a successful operation of this kind?  

Plus, it shifts domestic politics.  The Democrat got him, which is nice tonic for a party that is regularly derided by its opposition on security issues.

A 6 point jump for getting bin Laden?  Sounds about right to me.

Random factoid

Taranto, Italy was originally a Greek colony named Tarentum.  Many Greek cities founded colonies, several of them in some cases.  Tarentum is the only colony ever sponsored by the militaristic city of Sparta.

Its first settlers were illegitimate children born to Spartan wives while their husbands were on military campaigns.

Lectionary blogging: John 17: 1-11

After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, ²since you have given him authority over all people,^* to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. ³And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. ⁴I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. ⁵So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.

6 ‘I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. ⁷Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; ⁸for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. ⁹I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours.¹⁰All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. ¹¹And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.

Translation:  Jesus spoke these things, and lifted up his eyes into heaven (and) he said, "Father, the hour has come.  Glorify your son so that the son may glorify you.  As you have given to him power over all flesh, so anyone who has been given to him, he will give to them eternal life.  And this is eternal life:  that they might know you, the only true God, and whom you sent, Jesus Christ.  I glorified you upon the earth.  I brought to completion the work which you have given me to do.  And now, Father, glorify you me, alongside yourself the glory which I am having alongside you before the universe came to be.

I made known your name to the ones whom you gave me out of the world.  They were yours and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.  Now they have known that all things, however many, you have given me are alongside of you, for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them, and they know truly that I came out alongside of you, and they have 'faithed' that you sent me.  I am asking concerning them--not concerning the universe am I asking--but concerning the ones you gave me because they are yours.  And all mine are yours and yours mine, and I am glorified in them.  And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I also am coming to you.  Holy Father, take care of them in your name that you have given me so that they may be one, just as we."

Random factoid

The first labor strike in recorded history occurred c. 1150 BC.  When grain rations didn't arrive, the Egyptian craftsmen building royal tombs quit working.  

This was a big deal.  The Egyptians had been organizing these kinds of things for 1000 years.  Failure to get food delivered was an indication that Egypt was in decline.  

Ramses' harem organizing an assassination plot against him wasn't a real good sign either.

In the market for a cathedral?

The Crystal Cathedral is for sale.  Home of "Hour of Power" ministries, the southern California megachurch has been riven with debt and conflict in recent years.  They obviously need to dump some debt in order to survive, even if the price of doing so is the potential loss of an icon of modern evangelicalism.

The financial reorganization plan, which could be submitted to court as early as Friday, would put the 40-acre church campus up for sale to an unnamed real estate investment group, in order to pay off a $36-million mortgage and pay back hundreds of creditors over the next 3-and-a-half years.

Hour of Power ministries was founded in the 1950's by the Rev. Robert Schuller, who famously began a church in a drive-in theater.  Schuller was ordained in a very traditional denomination, the Reformed Church in America, but wound up being an evangelical pioneer.  He used entrepreneurial flare and deft marketing to build something new on the American religious landscape.

The Crystal Cathedral was built in the late 1970's.  It was designed by noted architect Philip Johnson.  Hour of Power continued to expand through the 1980's and 1990's.  Five years ago, Schuller Sr. passed the pulpit to his son, Robert Schuller Jr.  

Audience, donations, and church membership headed into decline.  It wasn't that Schuller Jr. was a bad preacher.  (Personally, I thought he was head and shoulders above his famous father as a preacher--more Biblical, less hammy.)  In fact, it's not at all clear that any of this is necessarily Schuller Jr.'s fault.  Debt had begun to mount well before he took over.

Long story short:  Schuller Sr. intervened, forced Schuller Jr. from the pulpit, and eventually installed his daughter, Sheila Coleman, to run the place.  Her contribution has included making the choir sign pledges that they aren't gay.

It could be that the difficulties of Hour of Power are unique to that organization.  Other evangelical churches seem to be maintaining themselves, and Hour of Power has always been a bit different from southern (and more conservative) varieties of evangelicalism.

Still, it could also be a harbinger of cultural shift.  Churches built on the market may prove to be especially vulnerable to the market.  It could be that the time of huge megachurches is passing.  They do seem somewhat out of place in a society that is currently suffering economically because of the failures of out-of-control bigness.

Time will tell.  It does seem, however, that right now might not be a good time for a church to be running up a huge debt, or trying to build an empire. 

 

HHH, 100 years old today

Rick Perlstein, writing in the New York Times, reminds us of the "happy warrior"--Hubert Horatio Humphrey--who would be 100 years old today.  

Perlstein calls him the "forgotten liberal," but I remember him well enough.  I met him in 1965.  Then Vice President Humphrey spoke at a Lutheran youth convention in Miami Beach.

Typical Humphrey:  He told the assembly of all the Lutherans in his family--his children who were Lutheran and his grandchildren who were Lutheran--then turned to then-LCA President Fry and said, "Now, Dr. Fry, don't say I've never done anything for you."

He spoke for over an hour that day, and was magnificent.  Were I to be compelled to name the precise moment at which I became a Democrat, that occasion would compete with few others for the title.  (One way or another, all my "liberal ideas" came from the church--I'm still to the right of Jesus, though.)

More than any other single person, Hubert Humphrey put the modern Democratic Party on a path in support of civil rights.  In 1948, Hubert Humphrey was the mayor of Minneapolis and a candidate for U.S. Senate.  As Perlstein notes, Humphrey led the Minnesota delegation to the Democratic National Convention and also "led a faction insisting the platform include a federal fair employment commission, a controversial goal of the civil rights movement."

The Roosevelt coalition, one will remember, was composed both of urban blacks and rural southerners.  The south had been solidly Democratic in those days.  Meanwhile, Eleanor Roosevelt's friendly attitude, and the smidgen of aid the administration was able to direct into the black community, swung African-Americans from the party of Lincoln to that of Roosevelt.  (One of John Lee Hooker's songs, "Welfare Blues," talks about getting a new pair of shoes "when the Democrats get in.")  

Roosevelt had managed to hold all this together, but it was now 1948 and Roosevelt's political magic was no longer available.  The southern delegations were absolutely opposed to any civil rights legislation.  It was shaping up to be a Republican year anyway.  Lose the south and it's all over.  

Into this situation, and onto the stage, stepped a 37 year old Mayor Humphrey.  Addressing the convention with his and his party's political future on the line, he began slowly, invoking the name of Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the party, and also a slave owner. 

Then, building to a crescendo, with everything on the line, Humphrey made his appeal.  His young dark hair slick with sweat, head thrown back, arm punching the air, voice ringing and clear, Humphrey gave no quarter:

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. People -- human beings -- this is the issue of the 20th century. People of all kinds -- all sorts of people -- and these people are looking to America for leadership, and they’re looking to America for precept and example.

The southern delegations walked out, and that was probably the beginning of the south's slide into the Republican camp.  It was the right thing to do, though, for which we can thank Hubert Humphrey.

Rumors that the United States might end martial law prove erroneous

Patriot Act extended, by autopen from Europe.

Demographic change from 1990 - 2040

America's Tomorrow from PolicyLink on Vimeo.

 

Harry Truman is the "real daddy" of Medicare