Focus on the Fundies: FOTF to shed more employees

Focus on the Family, the influential fundamentalist media empire headed by Dr. James Dobson, will lay off 46 employees after sales of videos, books and other products failed to meet expectations, an article in the Colorado Springs Gazette reported.

The Colorado Springs company -- which has radio, television, publishing, marketing, distribution and internet divisions -- has been highly influential over the last 25 years in creating the politicized Christian Right. In addition to initiatives like the antigay Love Won Out, which claims that gay people can be converted to heterosexuality, and Pure Intimacy, which addresses porn addiction and other sexual problems among evangelicals, the group has an influential political policy and lobbying arm.

But with disillusionment with the Republican Party spreading among evangelicals, FOTF's influence has also lessened, with donations and newsletter subscriptions way down, according to a January 2008 Time article.

technorati: Focus on the Family, Dobson, evangelicals, Fundies, Christian Right

Sign of the apocalypse: Dentist chair TV's programming is Disney, ads

This definitely falls into the Kill Me First category: a new device you wear like eyeglasses allows you to watch television in the dentist's chair while being worked on. Sounds good, you say? The only programming is:
ð Disney programs
ð Dental health messages
ð Advertising.

It's paid, of course, by the latter.

Personally I'd rather listen to the drill.

technorati: advertising, television, technology

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Dog Day Afternoon edition

In Fountain, Colo., an 18-year-old man tried to hire two men to kill his mother so he could cash in her bank accounts in order to finance his girlfriend's breast augmentation. The plot went forward but the incompetents hired by the youth failed even to seriously injure the woman, who alerted neighbors by setting off the car alarm using her car key thingy. This was sufficient to stun the sole attacker -- the other idiot was standing outside -- long enough for the woman to flee next door.

Today's fake: A man who stole a Dodgers baseball uniform to impersonate a player was arrested Wednesday when he walked onto the field at Dodger Stadium. A security guard "recognized him from an earlier incident," which suggests a pathetic untold story. The man is 47.

Speaking of pathetic, this headline says it all: Bass fishing catching on as high school sport. I'll bet that really attracts the chicks.

Two San Francisco vagrants are regular attendees at the many conventions and conferences in the city, scamming conference swag, free meals, and, of course, "donations." They say they've been a team for 17 years, entertaining out-of-towners with comic pleas for alms.

A police detective in the New York suburb of New Rochelle, whose wife is a famous local TV anchor, admitted he used his badge to force a teenaged girl to have sex with him -- and that it wasn't the first time. Amazingly, the thug was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and got no jail time.

The Seattle Times has a feature on Ben Huh, the master of I Can Has Cheezburger, but he didn't invent the site. He merely bought it from a Hawaii couple, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, "who started it as a hobby and were overwhelmed by the response." I hope they got a ton of money. The Korean-born Huh also owns Fail Blog, the article says.

Nebraska has a law that permits parents to permanently abandon a child at a hospital with no legal consequences. This week a widowed, out-of-work man dropped off his entire family, nine children between the ages of 1 and 17.

Staton said his wife died last year, shortly after delivering their youngest child. He said he quit his job because of his family responsibilities but couldn't pay rent or utilities or take care of his children. "I was with her for 17 years, and then she was gone," he said of his late wife. "What was I going to do? We raised them together. I didn't think I could do it alone. I fell apart. I couldn't take care of them."

This paragraph is also significent:

A 2007 interview with Staton's oldest daughter in Omaha North High School's student newspaper said she shouldered some of the parenting duties. Despite helping to feed her siblings, check their homework and put them to bed, the teen graduated a year early.

And got the hell out, I hope, though it doesn't say that.

Focus on the Fundies: Xtian bookstore chain refuses magazine with female pastors

A bookstore chain owned by the far-right Southern Baptist Convention has carried a magazine called GospelToday for many years, but recently refused to distribute an issue depicting female pastors on its cover, because of the denomination's rule that only men can be pastors in its churches.

It wasn't that the magazine was saying the five female ministers were, or should be, pastors at Southern Baptist churches, or that the SBC should change its rules. The denomination simply didn't want customers at its bookstores to be exposed to the fact that other denominations -- just as conservative, no doubt, in most matters -- allowed women to become pastors. Such is the paranoid attitude that typifies fundamentalists and totalitarians everywhere as they try frantically to keep control of people.

technorati: href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/fundamentalists" rel="tag">fundamentalists, Baptists, books, bookstores, Christians

Asshole RNC delegate's karma: robbed of over $100,000 by 'beautiful woman'

A Colorado delegate to last month's Republican National Convention who loves uttering jingoistic, aggressive statements was taken to the cleaners by an opportunistic prostitute to the tune of over $100,000. A sampling of his wit and wisdom:

Schwartz was candid about how he envisioned change under a McCain presidency. "Less taxes and more war," he said, smiling. He said the U.S. should "bomb the hell" out of Iran because the country threatens Israel.

Asked by the interviewer how America would pay for a military confrontation with Iran, he said the U.S. should take the country's resources. "We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money," he said. "We deserve reimbursement."

The "beautiful woman who introduced herself to me" quickly put Schwartz's words into practice, relieving him of a $30,000 watch, a $20,000 ring, and other valuables, plus cash. (What is a Republican convention delegate doing with tens of thousands of dollars in cash? I'll leave that to your imagination.)

Here's more of Mr. Schwartz:

He said an attack on Iran was needed to protect Israel, and he offered how it could be accomplished through "strategical airstrikes. Hopefully, just bomb the hell out of them from the sky. No troops," he said.

Schwartz was asked if he had a message to the protesters who filled the streets of downtown St. Paul. "Get a job," he replied.

Or, just maybe, find some stupid Republican and take advantage of him.

It could have been better. It could have been a male prostitute.

technorati: Republicans, prostitutes

Hurricane yike

The hurricane that clobbered the Texas coast this past weekend struck a bulls-eye on the Houston suburb where I went to high school, a purgatorial realm I have written about in stories. Judging from news reports, the destruction was not what I might have hoped. (Sorry if you live there now, but consider this weekend's events as just another big hint that you ought to leave.)

Remnants of the storm dumped copious rain in the Midwest yesterday. I just got email from my friend Marilyn in Ohio saying she just got power back after being dark for 24 hours.

The petits fours of the bourgeoisie

I'm posting on Open Salon a lot, and today's post was one of my typically oblique free-associations that nobody likes but me.

Yuppies know their comforts often come at the expense of others. Those fantastic strawberries at your dinner party, organic though they may be, were raised and picked through an immigrant's back-breaking labor. My comfortable brand-name sneakers protect my middle-aged joints, at the expense of the blighted lives of the Chinese factory workers who made them. Und so weiter. This is what it means to be an affluent first-worlder in a top-heavy global economy. One's pleasures are another's pain; in fact, the pain of not just one other, but a thousand.

Today's fake: 'professional seducers'

Courtesy Melissa Gira: a story from the Times of London about an agency that employees young Japanese women to seduce husbands whose wives want a divorce. The story goes into quite some detail about how it all works, complete with case studies. What's strange to me is that the women -- the wives, that is -- are so desperate that they are basically paying a prostitute not just to to fuck their husbands but to make the men fall in love with them so as to convince them they'd be better off without their wives. Once the men agree to let their wives go, the young ladies disappear, naturally.

Takashi works for a company called ACYours. It was founded in 1997 by Mr Mishima, a rather sinister-looking character with a sparse beard, earrings and a tattooed arm. He explains solemnly that the business is all about helping people.

If this all sounds like a film noir setup, remember the opening scenes of "Chinatown," for example: Jack Nicholson's character specializes in capturing spouses on film in flagrante delicto. Such practices used not to be unheard of in the U.S., before the era of no-fault divorce and other advances in women's rights.

technorati: Japan

It's so over

Utterly brilliant is my friend's take on the Palin nomination:

It's uncanny, isn't it, how the guyz only seem to adopt a form after it has been drained of every last whiff of inspiration, meaning, or purpose and has limped off to die? Thus, one cannot be surprised to find that it is within the sublimely ironic Sarah Palin Republican candidacy that the once-vital corpse of Second-Wave Feminism seems to have reached its final resting place, caught like a consolation prize in the triumphal, rigid, and perfectly unmusical embrace of the official Party of the Straight White Men, where it will moulder for decades as an anachronism so empty it is devoid of even a clue.

Dandy is so awesome.

technorati: Palin, feminism

On Salon: All Palin, all the time

On Open Salon, I couldn't help myself: I posted an entry about Sarah Palin. In part:

Whatever the likelihood that McCain might die in office, it's 100% probable that if he does die in office, the president will then be Sarah Palin... This darling of religious conservatives who is forcing her own 17-year-old daughter to bear an unplanned-for child and to marry her deer-in-the-headlights boyfriend would be appointing Supreme Court justices until 2012, and maybe for four years after that.

technorati: Palin, McCain