Foamer conflates United States with Biblical nation of Israel

One of the real wack jobs I follow is a guy who posts occasionally to a blog entitled (all caps, please) HELL ON EARTH. Today's post, in which he applies the standards to which Jehovah held the Old Testament children of Israel to the modern-day U.S., is typical.

Just one sentence, punctuation uncorrected (at least he got the hyphenated adjectival phrases right):

Turning towards an ungodly course of embracing sin such as the love of money, no-fault divorce, promiscuity, abortion and the asexual agenda, America has drifted far off its' God-set course.

Strange and even frightening as it may be to believe, this is the way true fundamentalists feel. Just as the Taliban apply the most reactionary interpretations of the Koran to Afghanistan, real Christian fundies genuinely expect the modern-day world to have the relationship to God as Israel did three thousand years ago -- as reported in the Old Testament, which they take as literal, historical fact.

I did like "asexual agenda." Not just homosexual agenda -- asexual agenda. I wonder what that's about.

There is no point in struggling against this mind-set, no hope of talking to them or attempting, however gently or violently, to re-educate them. They are as truly lost and left behind in the modern world as the poorest residents of ghettos or rural America, only they're capable of holding down jobs. And now (unlike before 1975) they vote, thanks to people like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, whose pawns they are.

Of course, this blog post -- my words, the one you're reading now -- is simply a mirror image. I'm no more capable of changing my mind about what I believe politically or, for that matter, religiously.

Foamer has apocalyptic vision in downtown... Columbus, Ohio

Gadfly, failed congressional candidate and opinionated old white man Dave Daubenmire took his granddaughter to the Fourth of July in downtown Columbus, Ohio, and was struck by this apocalyptic vision:

Boiling in the inner cities is a witch's brew of out-of-control passions fed by ignorance, poverty, drugs, and sex. ... Our journey into downtown Columbus exposed us to an element that has been quietly lurking in the shadows. All of the signs have been visible, yet our rose-colored glasses and Polyannic attitudes have cast a false brightness into the storm clouds.

The thunder is rolling in the form of roving gangs of fatherless families trolling the sidewalks of the inner cities. Saggy-trousered teenage boys, tattooed from pillar to post, wander the sidewalks, followed by scantily-clad teenage mothers with a toddler saddled to the hip.

But Dave, at least the men are still leading!

That was from last week's post. This week he takes up one of his standard hobby-horses: the alleged effeminization of evangelical Christianity and his broad dislike of most of its leaders. Along the way, he suddenly blurts:

Heck, I guess Jesus isn't good enough. It takes an "anointed teacher" to help lead you to your destiny. The thought of getting out a Bible and getting on your face just doesn’t seem to do the job anymore. I've always found eating carpet to be an effective way of getting in touch with my destiny.

Emphasis mine, but wow, did that ever jump out. That doesn't mean today what it used to mean, Coach.

When recordings betray you

Harold Camping, the 89-year-old self-proclaimed "Bible teacher" (he never refers to himself as a "minister" or preacher, contrary to references in SF Gate.com and other reports), is being released from the hospital after treatment for a mild stroke which he suffered a few days ago. Camping is the head of Family Radio, an obscure but world-reaching Christian radio station which he used to disseminate a prediction that Christ would return on May 21 this year.

That prediction, its failure, and Camping's rescheduling of the apocalypse to Oct. 21, has been widely covered. In the meantime, what's Family Radio been doing with its main announcer and on-air presence down with a stroke?

Running recorded programs, that's what. And they don't do him any favors. There's no way of telling when the recorded versions of his daily "Open Forum" call-in show were recorded, but they give us a noticeably younger and more in-control Camping. His voice has always been gravelly and monotonous, but in the last year or two has been quivering with age. The recordings only point up the contrast to his present state.

Another program in which Camping has been going through the Old Testament book of Ruth seems to have been recorded even longer ago than the "Open Forum" recordings now running. He sounds positively middle-aged, his voice powerful and steady. All the sadder for this misguided man.

"Patriot" preacher can't resist bragging about how smart he is

I've posted about Chuck Baldwin before -- he's the crypto-facist Christian preacher who was more or less kicked out of his Florida church and decided, with great fanfare, to move his family to a remote corner of Montana because it is "more free."

Today he posted another dilly. I'm going to quote just the really funny parts.

• Montana is the new land of the free because it has no large cities, which are "the bane of freedom," though he doesn't explain the reasoning behind that.
• Idaho is a "great freedom-loving state" now, but as many liberals are moving to Boise, it may soon be lost "and go the way of Oregon and Washington."
• The people in Montana come out for his rallies, unlike the people in Florida. (He doesn't realize it's because Montanans have almost nothing else to do than go to tea party rallies.)
• God loves mountainous areas more than flat ones.
• The cold weather in Montana "keeps out undesirables: people who are comfort-oriented and not liberty-oriented!"
• Montana is a very peaceful state because they allow people to carry guns openly.

Of course, this summary doesn't do justice to his weird syntax, love of exclamation points, and the strange way he develops a theme.

What the guy is really doing is laying the groundwork for a run at governor. I hope he doesn't take the disappointment too hard.

Who's even crazier? Randall Terry. He's running for President -- solely so he can collect funds to air an explicit anti-abortion advertisement -- which all the networks will probably reject.

Right-wing collapsitarians' racist beliefs

One of the core beliefs of the crypto-fascist collapsitarians, who think the western world is headed for an economic and social apocalypse, is that when "the end" comes, all cities will collapse into hellholes of violence, rioting, looting, pillaging, and so on. This is one of the main reasons they believe in "prepping" for the catastrophe -- which they refer to as The End of The World As We Know It, or TEOTWAWKI -- and "bugging out" to a well-stocked, heavily armed and fortified compound in, say, Montana. 

When this collapse of the cities is predicted, the example almost always cited is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. According to this way of thinking, that aftermath was almost exclusively characterized by, on the one hand, looting and violence, and on the other, pathetic dependency on government to save the people. Cable TV coverage of the event stressed both these themes, because they made for dramatic images, and that is what right-wingers have in mind when they say the collapse of the cities will look like that.

They are, of course, ignoring all the incidents where people helped others, acted with compassion, shared their resources, and made peace. TV ignored these incidents too, for the most part, because they aren't conflict-y, and are therefore boring.

But the other reason the crypto-fascist collapsitarians talk about the collapse of the cities, and assume they will descend into a cauldron of violence, is that they're racist. Take a look at this post on a prominent collapsitarian blog. About the cities, the author says: 

Misconception number four: Roving criminal hordes will come from the urban environment to your rural home or Bug Out Location (BOL). Nope, these people do not play chess or even checkers; they do not plan ahead much at all. Criminals, with few exceptions are lazy. And many are on drugs. Yes, a few will flee at the very beginning if they have a specific refuge in mind, the uncle with the farm, but most will not leave their familiar comfortable environment. Even if they have an operational vehicle capable of the trip it is likely to be low on fuel, particularly these days. They will burn up what little fuel they have driving around their usual haunts, to the liquor and drug stores, then to the convenience or grocery store like they did before the event, until their tank is empty. Walking or biking to save fuel will never cross their mind. No gas means no travel for this group.

They are stupid, lazy, and many are on drugs! Really!

Refuting those ideas, which are based on such an idiotic image of city dwellers, would be a waste of time. The only thing I can say in response is that that paragraph actually represents a more moderate prediction than the usual one, where crazed and armed city dwellers, having used up and then burned all the resources in their city, then go out to attack the good Christians in their Montana bunkers. (See my previous entry, Grim Dystopians Hoping for Complete Collapse.) So never mind that -- they are simply too lazy to do so!

It would be laughable, if not for the utter gullibility and ignorance of these collapsitarians, many of whom are elderly people who fall victim to tax-dodging schemes rooted in weird, almost schizophrenic ideas (such as so-called "truth language"). There is lots of money to be made from all the paranoia being served out there.

Nutbag of the month: special 9/11 edition

Of course, a discussion of right-wing Christian nutbags would not be complete without mentioning Terry Jones, the "pastor" of an organization in Florida called the Dove World Outreach Center. (Despite its name, which makes it sound like the visitor center of a soap factory, it is a "tiny church," according to the New York Times.) Jones is the fellow who wants to burn copies of the Koran on Sep. 11.

Today's story in the NYT on the man and his plan draws attention to the fact that one of his justifications for the act of burning a Koran is a "never-reported story" of an attack on Christians by "radical Muslims" during the Balkan war in the 1990s. "Never-reported story" is the NYT's way of saying "completely made-up bullshit;" this is clear when the writer goes so far as to say:

To a reporter who worked in Bosnia during that war, the story Mr. Jones told on Wednesday sounds very like the kind of fictional tales of wartime atrocities against Christians that were cited by Bosnian Serbs and Croats at the time to justify the well-documented massacres of Muslims that did take place — like the murder of thousands of Muslim men and boys buried in mass graves around Srebrenica in 1995.

The story goes on to say that Jones is not just one more Florida cracker (like Chuck Baldwin); he and his wife led a church in Cologne, Germany until two years ago. And it gets weirder after that.

Xtian nutbag fails in Congress bid

Dave Daubenmire, the Chistianist nutbag I wrote about last month, placed fifth in the Republican primary for the Ohio 18th district this week. I was going to link to the Ohio Sect'y of State's website with the results, but today Daubenmire posted his own post-mortem including the results. Short version: he came in 5th in a field of eight. His version:

80% of the voters did not vote for the standard bearer. The top three are all Republican hacks. The bottom five ran against the machine. With no Tea Party endorsement the votes were spread out among the "citizen" candidates. The Tea Party candidates win the most votes... except the Tea Party wanted to remain neutral. Because the Tea Party votes were spread around the voters get to choose between Bob Dole and Zack Space in November.

Still under the impression that the "Tea Party" is an actual organization that can endorse or nominate someone, I see. (His reference to "Bob Dole" is to his opinion that the top two vote getters, who finished in a virtual tie, are "Bob Dole clones" and thus worthy of his contempt. And Zack Space is the Democratic incumbent, who won the seat several years ago after the long-time incumbent, Bob Ney, resigned after being caught in the Jack Abramoff scandal. So there's more to this apparently conservative district than meets the eye.)

Why he is so contemptuous of Bob Dole, he doesn't say.

But anyway, like most losers, he is turning over the returns and feels cheated:

Less than 20% of the registered voters turned out to vote. Only 51,421 votes were cast. If only 4733 Evangelicals had turned out and voted for me I would have won. Do you suppose there were 4733 Christians among the 205,684 who didn't go to the polls?

I should have won this race in a romp.

You and each of the other seven candidates, all of whom are making the same calculations today.

But the weirdest scene is at the end of the column, or essay, or rant, in which a man who is identified as a Lutheran pastor comes by to commiserate and does everything but give him a mercy fuck. It's moments like this that make me embarrassed to be a Lutheran, but I'm hoping Coach got that part wrong.

The danger of American proto-fascism

Noam Chomsky on the times:

[The situation in the U.S. today] "is very similar to late Weimar Germany," Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. "The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum [in] which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.

"The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen. Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says 'I have got an answer, we have an enemy'? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don't think all this is very far away."

Chomsky should know, the interviewer points out in his introduction, as he has spent his entire life thinking about politics from an iconoclastic perspective. And I think he's right about how the main difference is the lack of a galvanizing figure, a leader (like that envisioned by "Coach" Daubenmire in his plea for the Tea Party to line up behind him). Not that there aren't plenty of people like Daubenmire and Kenneth Hutcherson and Newt Gingrich. But as Chomsky points out, each is too obviously venal and unstable to attract much of a following.

At least I hope that's true when it comes to Gingrich.

technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER

Praise the Lord and pass the sniper scopes

Trijicon, a Wixom-based supplier that has a $660 million multi-year contract with the Marine Corps and additional contracts with the U.S. Army, inscribes coded references to New Testament Bible verses on its ACOG high-powered rifle sights sold to the military.

-- news stories

BREAKING: Dobson resigns from Focus on the Family

James Dobson, founder and head of the Focus on the Family religious education and lobbying organization, is stepping down, the Associated Press reported.

The 72-year-old Dobson, who is a psychologist by training, has been one of the most powerful religious conservatives in the U.S. for decades. His Focus on the Family organization, despite a financial downturn in recent years, is one of the most influential right-wing Christian organizations. It was a major donor to California's anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8, and its daily radio program is heard on hundreds of religious radio stations around the country.

However, the Proposition 8 win (after which Dobson said he was "jubilant" over the anti-gay law) may have been the group's high point. Earlier this month they lost a battle when the Colorado House passed a domestic partners health care bill. And while it was giving lavishly to the Prop. 8 battle, it continued to suffer financially, laying off 20% of its staff.

The new head of the organization is a retired Air Force general -- Colorado Springs is also home to the Air Force Academy, which has been the site of alleged proselytizing by evangelical Christians -- who is also a former executive with defense contractor Northrup Grumman.

technorati: Focus on the Family, religious right, conservatives, Republicans, Dobson

Focus on the Fundies: Give money so he can 'minister without hindrance'

For a few months I've been monitoring the ravings of a Pentacostal preacher who is madly trying to establish a nationwide "ministry" dedicated to ridding American cities of Satanic influence. I first noticed him when he made some passing comment about how the Colorado mountain tourist town of Manitou Springs is well-known as a Satanic base camp.* Since then, I've seen him move spastically around the country, from Kansas City to Detroit, attempting to gather followers.

Recently he's been begging openly for money, and a blog posting yesterday really takes the cake for shameless solicitation. Emphasis mine.

Biblically it's clear that believers live in a different economic system, and I'm convinced that the church is called to be financial forerunners -- we are called to lead the way by giving our way out of this recession.

We pray you would consider this to be fertile and good soil for your seed in 2009. In fact, we have many challenges right this very moment, and we'd like to invite you to give before the end of 2008. Your gifts are tax-deductible... Would you invest in this ministry of teaching, planting and revival? Your donation will help us as we... (m)inister in the cities of the earth without any financial hindrance. God has moved powerfully in Detroit and other places through the ministry in 2008. Due to a timely rumbling in this city, we will be ministering in Detroit 6 times (at least) in the first half of 2009 alone.

So he goes to economically devastated Detroit and invites followers to "Give our way out of this recession." And how will he use that money? To help the poor of Detroit? To retrain auto workers being thrown out of their jobs?

Your donation will help us as we... (d)evote ourselves to the time consuming yet deeply important ministries of prayer and study. It's common for full-time prayer missionaries to devote 6 hours or more to prayer each day. (And to)
Focus on our call to author prophetic materials. I've had a book burning in my spirit for over two years, yet have not had the time to start it.

Nice! He wants to spend hours of day in prayer, and the rest of the time writing a book. Me too, dude!

To top it all off, he illustrates his plea with a picture of his family. Is it a nice soft-toned picture of them wearing sweaters around a Christmas tree? No, they're all looking glumly into the camera with tape over their mouths with the word "LIFE" written on the tape. (A one-year-old baby is spared this discomfort; they stuck the LIFE label on its chest.) I guess the point is, If you don't send him money, it's the same thing as gagging him and his whole family.

If only it were so.

* cached web page

technorati: fundamentalists, Christianists, far-right, evangelicals, bipolar

Focus on the Fundies: Haggard pushes himself back in the spotlight

Ted Haggard, the disgraced megachurch leader whose outing as a meth-snorting Big Gay embarrassed the Christian Right just prior to the 2006 midterm elections, has agreed to promote an HBO documentary about his rise and fall.

The documentary, "The Trials of Ted Haggard," was shot by Alexandra Pelosi, who earlier made an HBO documentary "Friends of God," which also featured Haggard. The film is scheduled to air on HBO next month.

Haggard startled observers earlier this fall by appearing in the pulpit of a rural Illinois megachurch as a "Christian businessman" talking of his rise an fall as a star of the conservative Christian Evangelical movement, and now he's pushing himself into the spotlight on television. It's not enough for him to appear in a documentary; he's so starved for attention that he also signs on to promote the film, which I suspect will show him as a complete lying douchebag. What a media whore!

technorati: Ted Haggard, fundamentalists, Alexandra Pelosi

Obama voters sinned: Roman Catholic priests

A Catholic priest in Modesto, Calif. has told parishioners that voting for Obama was a sin that must be confessed and forgiven before they receive church sacraments (courtesy Huffington Post). It's not the first time, according to the Modesto Bee story; a priest in South Carolina told his parishioners the same.

At least The Catholics require an actual act before condemning people. You may recall the Alabama city administrator who told the NYT that people who aren't disappointed by Obama's victory "need to be at the altar" to ask forgiveness.

The Central Valley where Modesto is located is one of the most socially conservative areas of California. Churches in the region's Episcopal diocese left the national Episcopal church last year over the national body's endorsement of an openly gay bishop -- not in their diocese but in New Hampshire -- and voters in Stanislaus County, where Modesto is located, voted 68 to 32 percent in favor of anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 earlier this month.

technorati: Roman Catholics, Obama, Christian Right

Focus on the Fundies: Ted Haggard is preaching again

For some reason, disgraced, defrocked religious leaders always seem to be able to attract new or old followers by allowing the suckers to "forgive" them and thus feel virtuous. And in America, there has never been a shortage of either. Disgraced Colorado Springs megachurch leader Ted Haggard, whose outing as a meth-snorting, gay prostitute-paying hypocrite played a role in 2006's Republican election debacle, and in the disillusionment of right-wing Christians with the Republican party, is preaching again, appearing at a rural Illinois church.

Then the 50-year-old president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a symbol of the relationship between the Christian Right and the Republican Party, Haggard was outed by the male prostitute whom he had patronized and bought drugs from over several years in Colorado. His very public fall, coming just days before the 2006 election, was preceded a month earlier by the fall of Mark Foley, and marked the beginning of the end of Republican domination of electoral politics in the U.S. for several years.

Be sure to read to the end of today's story where an elder of Haggard's former church compares him to a "mouse" in his present state.

Update: Courtesy Jeff Sharlett, here's an ABC News story -- with audio excerpts from Haggard's sermon if you play the video.

technorati: Ted Haggard, Christians, televangelists

Focus on the Fundies: Dobson 'jubilant' over anti-gay election wins

Focus on the Family head James Dobson was "jubilant" over passage of gay marriage bans in Florida, California and Arizona, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported. While Dobson praised the election of Barack Obama as "historic," he also said he was concerned that Obama is "in favor of much of the homosexual agency" (sic -- don't know whether this is a typo in the news story or just a brain fart by the sexegenarian Dobson; he undoubtedly meant to refer to the well-known, if non-existent, homosexual agenda).

Dobson's group contributed half a million dollars to help pass California's Proposition 8, which intends to amend the state's constitution to disallow gay marriage. Pro-marriage groups sued Thursday to keep the vote from being enforced.

technorati: James Dobson, Focus on the Family, gay marriage

Bad behavior extra: foamer's comments lead to avalanche of donations -- for opponent

On Friday, arch-conservative nutbag Michele Bachmann, a first-term US Representative from Minnesota, suggested the media investigate members of Congress to determine whether they hold "un-American" views:

By today, disgusted contributors from across the country had donated nearly $500,000 to her opponent, one El Tinklenberg, a former Methodist minister, mayor of Blaine, Minn., and state transportation commissioner.

I just sent him $50.

technorati: Republicans, Bachmann

Reporter visits New Life Church, manages not to mention Ted Haggard

On Huffington Post, a reporter visits Colorado Springs, and writes 1600 words about New Life Church without mentioning its disgraced founder Ted Haggard. How impressively fair.

Strangest thing in the story is her description of "a half-used tray of communion wine, its thimbles of juice with frayed pull-tops." They have little bitty juice containers with pull-tops for communion? Now that's déclassé.

technorati: New Life Church, Colorado Springs, Ted Haggard

Small-town high school renames yoga after 'concerned citizens' object

After a group of "concerned citizens" objected that offering yoga might amount to a promotion of Hinduism, a small town New York high school has renamed the exercise "Raider relaxation" after the school's mascot. But the best paragraph from the story was this one:

The debate around Massena's yoga program is not unprecedented. In 2002 in Aspen, Colo., a group of Baptists objected to a proposed yoga program in the public school district, citing separation of church and state as well. In the end, all of the Sanskrit terms were dropped -- "meditation" became "time in" and "yogic panting" became "bunny breathing." The only term that remained was yoga.

technorati: yoga

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

Focus on the Fundies: Haggard back home, just in time for Gay Pride

Ted Haggard has left the "rehabilitation program" that was supposed to turn him into a heterosexual and has returned to Colorado Springs with a shameless appeal to former supporters:

It looks as though it will take two years for us to have adequate earning power again, so we are looking for people who will help us monthly for two years.... Between now and the end of the year, we have to find the people who want to help us transition into our future. So I am starting today to let friends like you know that we are raising money ...

The story goes on to say that Haggard is living in the same Colorado Springs mansion he lived in when running a magachurch there. And there are still five big cars in the driveway.

In an email to a "friend," Haggard admitted using drugs with male prostitute Mike Jones, whose revelations to Colorado TV stations outed him just before the 2006 election

technorati: Ted Haggard