aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
McCain’s appeasement
I never understood why liberals liked Colin Powell. And I don’t want to understand why they like John McCain. The Lynchburg News Advance, in a story reporting that McCain will speak at Liberty University’s graduation:
[Jerry] Falwell said McCain’s appearance at LU’s graduation is another sign that McCain is wooing evangelical Christians.
“He is in the process of healing the breech with evangelical groups,” Falwell said.
Falwell said McCain has expressed a willingness to support a Federal Marriage Amendment, an issue dear to conservative Christians.
It prompted the DNC’s Karen Finney to say, “Here he goes again, more double talk and pandering to the right wing from John McCain. It looks like there are real questions about where he truly stands on this issue, in fact, it’s getting hard to tell where he truly stands on a number of critical issues.”
According to The Note, Falwell clarified the issue with ABC News, saying that McCain is not pushing the constitutional amendment “at this time,” but would support it if federal court ruled against state bans on gay marriage.
I guess McCain was sort of against the amendment before he was sort of for it.
SEE ALSO: Joe Gandelman, John McCain’s Political Tightrope Act.
I’m rich!
In equivalence.
Economists John Helliwell and Haifang Huang at the University of British Columbia have done estimates based on an analysis of life satisfaction surveys considering four key factors of job satisfaction. They conclude:
Trust in management is by far the biggest component to consider. Say you get a new boss and your trust in management goes up a bit at your job (say, up one point on a 10-point scale). That’s like getting a 36 percent pay raise, Helliwell and Huang calculate.
In other words, that increased level of trust will boost your level of overall satisfaction in life by about the same amount as a 36 percent raise would. [...]
Having a job that offers a lot of variety in projects, Helliwell and Huang found, is the equivalent of a 21 percent hike in pay.
Having a position that requires a high level of skill is the equivalent of a 19 percent raise.
And having enough time to finish your work is the equivalent of an 11 percent boost in pay.
Via Kevin Drum.
The “War on Christmas Christians” II
Among the conference’s speakers were former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) [Brownback cancelled because he was needed for a vote] as well as conservative Christian leaders Phyllis Schlafly, Rod Parsley, Gary Bauer, Janet Parshall and Alan Keyes.
To many of the 400 evangelicals packed into a small ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, it was a hard but necessary look at moral relativism, hedonism and Christophobia, or fear of Christ, to pick just a few terms offered by various speakers referring to the enemy.
To some outsiders, it illuminated the paranoia of the Christian right.
“Certainly religious persecution existed in our history, but to claim that these examples amount to religious persecution disrespects the experiences of people who have been jailed and died because of their faith,” said K. Hollyn Hollman, general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
“This is a skirmish over religious pluralism, and the inclination to see it as a war against Christianity strikes me as a spoiled-brat response by Christians who have always enjoyed the privileges of a majority position,” said the Rev. Robert M. Franklin, a minister in the Church of God in Christ and professor of social ethics at Emory University.
Via Media Matters, “ABC’s Tapper reported on “War on Christians” conference, again quoting no dissenting voices.”
The “War on Christmas Christians”
A strange mix of dejection and ecstatic expectation pervaded the War on Christians conference… At a time when the foot soldiers of the right feel weary and betrayed by the administration they helped put in office, it was meant to rally the base for 2006 by presenting the election in eschatological terms. The energy in the room sometimes felt sluggish, and people were clearly worried about November, forcing their leaders to work all the harder to motivate them for the political crusade… In the face of lassitude, speakers repeatedly cautioned against giving in to disillusionment and apathy. They reminded the audience that they are one judge away from overturning Roe v. Wade. They warned that Christianity is on the verge of being criminalized in America, and they harped on the manifold dangers of the “homosexual agenda.” [...]
At one point, speaker Herb Titus held up a copy of Kevin Phillips’ “American Theocracy,” offering it as evidence of the putative war on Christians. It was an audacious move, given that Sara Diamond, the preeminent scholar of the Christian right, reported in a 1998 book that Titus was forced to resign his post as dean of the law school at Pat Robertson’s Regent University because he refused to renounce Christian Reconstructionism. Christian Reconstructionism is a theocratic sect that advocates the replacement of civil law with biblical law, including the execution of homosexuals, apostates and women who are unchaste before marriage. Christian Reconstructionists used to be politically radioactive, but a new generation of religious right leaders like Scarborough have embraced them, and some members of today’s GOP apparently see no problem associating with them. This does not mean that America is on the verge of theocracy, but it signals an important shift. The language of religious authoritarianism has become at least somewhat politically acceptable.
UCC’s rejected ads
Remember last spring when ABC rejected a United Church of Christ ad while running an ad by Dobson’s Focus on the Family? The networks are at it again:
The nation’s major television networks have rejected an ad that shows a gay couple and others being banished from a church, saying it violates their rules against controversial or religious advertising.
The 30-second commercial for the United Church of Christ will begin airing on cable networks and Spanish-language stations next week. The ad, called “Ejector,” shows a gay couple, a single mother, a disabled man and others flying out of their pews as a wrinkled hand pushes a red button.
Text on the screen reads, “God doesn’t reject people. Neither do we,” and a voiceover says, “The United Church of Christ. No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.”
It’s a good thing then that UCC has teamed up with Media Matters “to fight the pronounced tilt toward the Religious Right in mainstream media news.”
Here’s the ad.
Via PageOneQ.
Follow the finger
My blogger buddy PhillyTim suggests we all follow the finger and have us some fun! He spotted it on the side of a bus; where I live we don’t even have busses! But we do have Butterfinger. And we’re as responsive here as they are in Philly to viral marketing.
Katie & gravitas
What is gravitas? And why does it kick in at nightfall?
Gravitas lurks at the heart of the concentric speculation about Katie Couric’s television future: Should she leave Today for the CBS Evening News? Should the Evening News want her to?
It’s one thing to be the most successful morning news anchor. Being an evening news anchor is something else-something more … grave? More Latinate?
Ms. Couric lacks it, by various accounts, because of her legs or her boyfriends or her perky giggle. An evening news anchor is a different kind of person than that.
“It is essentially a chauvinistic word,” Connie Chung said.
It sure looks that way to me!
The story references this piece from Geneva Overholser on All Things Considered. I missed it then, don’t you miss it now.
I hope Overholser is right; I want her at CBS. I’ve compared Katie, favorably, to Edward R. Murrow.
Since Koppel left there’s a big news hole; I’ve virtually abandoned TV news. Katie - with my hoped-for new format - can bring me back.
Via Romenesko.
AP Truthiness
It seems AP got the story from Raw Story, but attributed it instead to “lesbian and gay advocacy groups.” Read the whole sad story at Huffington Post.
Raw Story then spoke with Jack Stokes, AP’s Director of Media Relations. Stokes took careful notes regarding our concerns and said he would investigate our claims. He found that the AP had, indeed, gotten our article from “human rights groups” but that it was AP policy not to credit blogs.
“It does turn out that we don’t give mentions to blogs when we’re researching our stories and when we’ve been given material by others such as in this case human rights groups that brought this stuff to us that we independently check,” Stokes said in a voicemail message.
Stokes elaborated Tuesday, saying the AP does give credit to blogs. He said the reason Raw Story wasn’t credited in the Mar. 14 article was because the bureau “hadn’t heard of” Raw Story, and because they had received the article from third-party groups. He said the agency would be issuing a statement, most likely later today.
“We do credit blogs that we know,” Stokes said. “We had no idea who you were.”
In the past, AP has given credit to such blogs as Instapundit and Pajamas Media. Raw Story has previously received credit from The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, Roll Call, The Hill, The Salt Lake Tribune, MSNBC and Rolling Stone, though major media publications have repeatedly lifted the site’s work without attribution.
UPDATE: They did it at TPM too. Josh Marshall, “ripping off original reporting from blogs is clearly routine.”
