HotShots!

Disclaimer: I voted a straight Democratic line. It's like I told a young socialist coworker the other day who said she wasn't about to vote for a capitalist candidate: you have to understand that realizing longer term goals are built from short-term steps. This administration is a threat to every possible thing that any socialist might find repulsive. The Dems--while weasly, whining, and spineless--would not have passed the torture laws, Patriot Act, invasion of Iraq, consolidated immense power in the presidency, etc. For all those idealists out there--and believe me, I've been there--the country stands on the verge of tyranny and a form of soft fascism that could deteriorate into more forbidding forms of political oppression.

The Elections, National Security Policy, and Wars If the Dems win the midterm elections, will they work with Bush? Or will there be a constitutional meltdown that could equal a bloodless purge not seen since the heydays of the fascist demise in Germany?

'Allah is my Lord and yours': Talking with Ahmadinejad The President of Iran's challenge to George Bush to live by his faith was treated as a joke by much of the press, if they even mentioned it. But really George, what would Jesus do?

"Christian" politics Evangelicals love to quote CS Lewis. But would good old CS turn over in his grave thinking about the devil's pact the Religious Right has made with the Beast, Ubu-Bush?

A Brief History of Wedge Politics An excellent review of the way politics is machined in the US--all to guarantee that certain ruling class interests are not challenged.

"What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that practically I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all.....I have not got to answer for having read a single President's Message. A strange age of the word this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-beggin to a private man's door and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched goverment or other, hard pushed, and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it, - more inportunate than an Italian beggar." -- Henry David Thoreau, "Life Without Principle."

The lessons of Iraq 'state-building' Another decent posting by the commie atheists at Lenin's Tomb.

THE COMING CONSTITUTIONAL SHOWDOWN Okay, let's assume that the Reps don't intimidate, steal, deceive their way out of a Democratic win today. What might the Dems do to bring some real accountability to the political landscape, especially in getting the White House to account for its unconstitutional actions during the last six years?

Religion and Politics Analyzes recent Newsweek and Time cover stories on religion and politics--notes the odd fetish many Xtians for things sexual rather than social justice. Thank God Jesus wasn't that uni-dimensional, huh?

Religion and the Profane Investigates the intersection between the notions and how they play into the political.

Science & faith work together, Pope says The guy's got nute. While I don't believe it for a minute, it's good to hear the old dude say it and put some of the more odious neo-creationists in their place.

Dawkins Interviews Haggard Seriously. Hear the two go at it...

The Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals In case you had some spare reading time... These are what you might call "light"reading, written for popular consumption, which might explain their ability to "shape" evangelicals.

The New Testament and the 'State' Some will say that this piece by the good Bishop of Durham is dated, perhaps hearkening to days of a liberation theology that had already been brutally oppressed by secular and religious authorities. On the other hand, you could say that the hope it conveys in staid, pedantic terms cannot never be suppressed because it always lives in people's hearts.