Nick Juliano, The Raw Story, September 24, 2007 In a move ostensibly aimed at providing "better science education" in Louisiana schools, Sen. David Vitter has secured $100,000 in taxpayer dollars to fund an anti-evolution effort spearheaded by a religious group politically connected to the alleged prostitute-soliciting Republican. Vitter secured an earmark in an upcoming labor, health and education financing bill for the Louisiana Family Forum, which The New Orleans Times Picayune reports has "taken the lead in promoting 'origins science,' which includes the possibility of divine intervention in the creation of the universe." The group was founded by Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana state lawmaker who now leads the conservative Family Research Council. The Louisiana Family Forum works to "present biblical principals" on public policy issues, and until a reporter questioned them about it, the group's Web site included a "battle plan to combat evolution," which argued the theory "has no place in the classroom." Despite Vitter's admission earlier this year that he used a Washington, DC, call-girl service and allegations that he frequented prostitutes in New Orleans, the first-term Republican has maintained the support of religious conservatives in his home state. In a YouTube clip posted by user "lafamilyforum," the group's executive director Gene Mills defended Vitter from comparisons to Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, who was arrested in a restroom sex sting in June. "The media's going to do whatever it can to smear any of the family values guys, and unfortunately Vitter has been elevated into that role, not because of what he has done on the family values front, which is commendable," but because of the prostitution allegations, Mills said. He went on to praise the fact that "Vitter has repented of the allegations. He sought forgiveness, reconciliation and counseling." Read More Here

Howard Witt, The Chicago Tribune, September 24, 2007 HOUSTON - No sooner did tens of thousands of African-American demonstrators depart the racially tense town of Jena, La., last week after protesting perceived injustices than white supremacists flooded in behind them. First a neo-Nazi Web site posted the names, addresses and phone numbers of some of the six black teenagers and their families at the center of the Jena 6 case and urged followers to find them and "drag them out of the house," prompting an investigation by the FBI. Then the leader of a white supremacist group in Mississippi published interviews that he conducted with the mayor of Jena and the white teenager who was attacked and beaten, allegedly by the six black youths. In those interviews, the mayor, Murphy McMillin, praised efforts by pro-white groups to organize counterdemonstrations; the teenager, Justin Barker, urged white readers to "realize what is going on, speak up and speak their mind." Over the weekend, white extremist Web sites and blogs across the Internet filled with invective about the Jena 6 case, which has drawn scrutiny from civil rights leaders, three leading Democratic presidential candidates and hundreds of African-American Internet bloggers. They are concerned about allegations that blacks have been treated more harshly than whites in the criminal justice system of the town of 3,000, which is 85 percent white. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, last week announced his support for Jena's white residents, who voted overwhelmingly for him when he ran unsuccessfully for Louisiana governor in 1991. Read More Here

If Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize, will he run for president? http://www.slate.com/id/2174590/ This article sums up what I have been saying for over a year and a half, Al Gore is the person the Democrats need as their contender for the presidency in 2008. Hillary and Obama and John may be capable politicians, but right now Al has the experience, intelligence and star power to run over anyone the GOP could possible throw at him.

The criminally insane Dick Cheney (who is still convinced of a link between Saddam and 9/11) evidently has been thinking about ways to get the new war he so desperately wants with Iran. Newsweek (via Reuters) has the terrifying details here. Excerpt: Vice President Dick Cheney had at one point considered asking Israel to launch limited missile strikes at an Iranian nuclear site to provoke a retaliation, Newsweek magazine reported on Sunday. The news comes amid reports that Israel launched an air strike against Syria this month over a suspected nuclear site. Citing two unidentified sources, Newsweek said former Cheney Middle East adviser David Wurmser told a small group several months ago that Cheney was considering asking Israel to strike the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz. A military response by Iran could give Washington an excuse to then launch airstrikes of its own, Newsweek said. Further, disturbing reports have surfaced that Bush recently met in the White House for 45 minutes with Neocon Godfather Norman Podhoretz, who regularly calls for massive attacks on Iran which would slaughter untold numbers of Iranian civilians. Podhoretz's fantastically reckless attitude is described in Think Progress: Podhoretz has argued that “if we were to bomb the Iranians as I hope and pray we will…we’ll unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we’ve experienced so far look like a lovefest.” By enlisting Podhoretz’s advice, President Bush is demonstrating that there isn’t any idea too radical for him to consider. But then again we already knew that, didn't we?

Michael McAuliff, The New York Daily News, September 24, 2007 WASHINGTON - In the latest sign ofhow unsettled the Republican presidential race is, Newt Gingrich says he'll run if supporters come up with $30 million in three weeks. "I don't see as a citizen how you could turn that down," Gingrich said yesterday on "Fox News Sunday." The fiery and controversial former speaker of the House has been a polarizing public figure. Still, he believes he can mount a White House bid just a few months before voting starts because the GOP faithful have yet to solidify behind a candidate. Rudy Giuliani remains the leader, at 30% in the latest Gallup Poll, just 8 percentage points ahead of already-stumbling actor Fred Thompson. Gingrich has tasked longtime adviser Randy Evans with launching the ambitious fund-raising bid next Monday, and reporting back in three weeks. Read More Here

BartCop.com Volume 2043 - Sac & Fox. In Today's Tequila Treehouse...

	Bush's Thug Nation
	Bush to Kids: 'Drop Dead'
	GOP says thanks?
	The Right's falsies
	Stevens caught in sting
	Out of America
	Country music deserts W
	Let's Dump Harry Reid
	Hayden starts TV season

    As many of Scribe's gentle readers know, Scribe has a time machine. What they may not know is that this machine, dubbed the U.S.S. Peabody was fitted with an alternate universe door opening, and jamming, device.  The jamming comes in handy when there's leakage, like when the "Yummy, Yummy We All Got Love in Our Teletubbie Tummies" universe almost leaked into our own.      Recently Scribe just came back from one such trip and proceeded to write this cautionary, yet true in the satirical sense, tale. He had gone back to warn the president about terrorists, terrorism and what was about to happen not too far in the future.    Now when a time line changes we don't wink out of existence; though we may snooze a little. No, an alternate universe is created with an alternate timeline...      Scribe is crying in anguish. How can he type the words? Was Junior RIGHT? How do we deal with terrorism? Scribe just went back and mentioned to the president what was going to happen. Immediately he clamped down on the Bill of Rights, he had those even suspected of aiding or sympathizing with the terrorists picked up, interrogated, water boarded, rendered, diced, sliced and sold to the Ronco company for a handsome profit.      The society turned far less free, that's for sure. One party, even when they are in the minority, gets most of what they want and little of what they don't. The mainstream press, afraid of being painted unpatriotic and in the pocket of industries connected to one certain party, do everything  they can to either not cover such abuses or give them as little press, and as much leeway, as possible.     Scribe wondered: was the president not the man Scribe thought him to be? Or had knowing the future turned him into another Junior? Or, instead of going back in time, had Scribe entered an alternative universe?    That's right, Scribe went...     ...to pre-Oklahoma City and then whispered into Bill Clinton's ear what was about to happen.     On the semi-bright side, Lush Dimbulb is breaking waterboards on a regular basis, the towers are still standing, several horrendous, needless, pointless wars unstarted and Ann Coulter hasn't been seen since she joined Jimmy Hoffa. Wellstone is still here and tries, the best he can, to object. Millions of people are still alive, The ReTHUGlican party has turned soft and into, "Oh, we won't challenge that, or that, or... might be used against us."     Why did Scribe come back?      Because it doesn't matter...     Evil is evil.     Wrong is wrong.      And the Neo Cons damn well KNOW IT.      Recently Mike Malloy called for the Republican Party to be banned, and Scribe respectfully disagrees for the same reason. Like banning the Communist Party, or even the Nazi Party, it's counter productive and most of all...     Like Junior's policies and Neo-Con tactics, it turns us into a Pogo-ism.     "We have met the enemy: and he is us."

Laura Miller, Salon, September 24, 2007 An alternate title for "The Stillborn God," Mark Lilla's new history of the separation of church and state in the West, could be "How Soon They Forget." Take an example from our own lifetime, something titanic like Sept. 11. Remember how it seemed so inconceivable, so unprecedented, that terrorists would blow up the World Trade Center? Yet it had already happened -- in 1993, when a group affiliated with al-Qaida tried to do just that, with a car bomb, killing six people. Somehow, the fact of that bombing never seemed to stick in the public's mind; until the towers actually came down, spectacularly and on national television, and thousands died, an Islamist terrorist attack on American soil remained "unimaginable." Small wonder, then, that we also have a hard time remembering the religious fanaticism in our own history. Westerners now talk blithely about the need for a "reformation" in Islam, apparently oblivious to how bloody and traumatic the Christian Reformation actually was. Lilla finds this situation perilous. As long as we refuse to acknowledge the madness of the religious wars and persecutions of the 16th century, he argues, we remain in danger of loosening our grip on "the Great Separation" (of church and state) that resulted from it. By not understanding how easily any politics infused with any religion can drift in the direction of fanaticism and terror, we put ourselves at risk of drifting that way ourselves. If we think the West is way beyond lapsing into that kind of insanity, Lilla (a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books) begs to differ. "Intellectual complacency," he writes, "nursed by an implicit faith in the inevitability of secularization, has blinded us to the persistence of political theology and its manifest power to shape human life at any moment." Political theology, what Lilla defines as "discourse about political authority based on a revealed divine nexus," takes its beliefs about how society should be run and how power should be distributed from what it considers to be the word of God -- the divine truth revealed to man through scripture. This way of thinking about politics isn't merely a holdover from our evolutionary past, destined to dwindle away like the appendix. It is "a primordial form of human thought and for millennia has provided a deep well of ideas and symbols for organizing society and inspiring action, for good and ill." Read More Here

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, September 24, 2007 Last Thursday there was a huge march in Jena, La., to protest the harsh and unequal treatment of six black students arrested in the beating of a white classmate. Students who hung nooses to warn blacks not to sit under a “white” tree were suspended for three days; on the other hand, the students accused in the beating were initially charged with second-degree attempted murder. And one of the Jena Six remains in jail, even though appeals courts have voided his conviction on the grounds that he was improperly tried as an adult. Many press accounts of the march have a tone of amazement. Scenes like those in Jena, the stories seemed to imply, belonged in the 1960s, not the 21st century. The headline on the New York Times report, “Protest in Louisiana Case Echoes the Civil Rights Era,” was fairly typical. But the reality is that things haven’t changed nearly as much as people think. Racial tension, especially in the South, has never gone away, and has never stopped being important. And race remains one of the defining factors in modern American politics. Consider voting in last year’s Congressional elections. Republicans, as President Bush conceded, received a “thumping,” with almost every major demographic group turning against them. The one big exception was Southern whites, 62 percent of whom voted Republican in House races. And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered. There’s a large statistical literature on the subject, whose conclusion is summed up by the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book “Whistling Past Dixie”: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters to depict American conservatism as a nonracial phenomenon, the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.” Read More Here