From AlterNet
By Rachel Maddow

The following is a transcript from The Rachel Maddow Show on Washington D.C.’s “C Street House,” which is now at the center of a media firestorm. Now GOP Senator Tom Coburn, sex-scandal embroiled GOP leaders Senator John Ensign and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford have been tied to the C Street House, which is registered as a church and provides substantially lower than market rate rent. Coburn and Ensign have lived at the C Street house, while Sanford has participated in its Bible study group.

We start with a mystery — a mystery that’s unfolding alongside the two major political scandals of the summer. It’s a mystery that concerns this house at 133 C Street Southeast in Washington, D.C. I’m calling it a house because that’s what it looks like to me and people do live there.

But if you consult this building’s financial paper trail, you will find that it’s actually considered to be a church. That designation makes C Street a convenient tax-free haven for the secretive organization that runs it, an organization known as the Family. It also makes for some awkward tax and income questions for the at least five, probably seven members of Congress who live at the house, in exchange for what appears to be substantially below market rent.

As explained by our guest last night, Jeff Sharlet, who secretly infiltrated the family to write a book about them, the C Street house is a former convent. It’s used as a sort of subsidized, really upscale dorm for members of Congress who are associated with this powerful, poorly understood religious group.

The Family and the house at C Street have ended up reluctantly in the headlines now because of the two major politicians’ sex scandals that are embroiling the Republican Party this summer and that have taken two of their reported 2012 presidential hopefuls out of political contention.

Read more Conservative Religious Group

From Common Wonders
By Robert C. Koehler

Wanna hear a good Holocaust joke? Or a rib-tickler about lynching? How about starving Ethiopians? You’ll bust a gut.

I spent an eerie couple of hours recently on the wrong side of the sicko line, checking out hate sites and hate jokes. What’s the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead . . .

I won’t go on, but we have to think about this. Hate crimes and hate speech are, you could say, democracy’s paradox. Let’s start with a definition: An “ordinary crime” (as though there could ever be anything ordinary about, say, murder) morphs into a “hate crime” when it’s primary or, perhaps, entire point is to amplify speech, perfectly legal in and of itself, that targets and dehumanizes a particular group. Indeed, a hate crime is a perverted form of altruism in that it isn’t generally committed for personal gain, but rather, for social intimidation and control.

I would add that hate crimes also reflect values that are socially marginal. James von Brunn, who had once blogged that Hitler’s worst mistake was that he didn’t gas the Jews, walks into Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum with a rifle and opens fire, killing a security guard. The judgment against him is instant and visceral: He’s a violent loner nut. Look at his eyes. He’s not there. His humanity has been replaced with an ideology of hate. And this judgment begins to generate both fear and counter-hatred.

I confess to those emotions, especially as I wandered through some of the sites that would have stoked von Brunn’s fires, like, oh, tightrope.cc, with a logo that proclaims, “It’s not illegal to be White . . . yet” and flaunts an illustration of a hand holding a noose.

Click on “n-jokes” and you’ll find the humor equivalent of snuff porn or graphic photos of dead Iraqis: a hundred or so short jokes, which I took the trouble to categorize. The biggest bunch of them, a good 30 percent, could be called “murder is funny” jokes, celebrating lynching, gas ovens, starvation and he-men, a la von Brunn, shooting off their rifles. The second largest category, about 25 percent, sucked humor out of the gross dehumanization of the target subjects (African-Americans, Africans, Jews, Latinos and Chinese). A small group of jokes extolled the joys of slave ownership, with the rest of them resurrecting various long-dead ethnic and racial stereotypes.

Read more Paradox

From The NY Times
By Bob Herbert

Stephen Johns, known as “Big John,” was opening the door for a man he thought was just an elderly visitor to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington when he was shot dead on Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Johns was a security guard. The bullet that killed him was a reminder of the continuing menace of bigotry and violence that pervades this country — and that we insist on underestimating.

The authorities have identified an 88-year-old, hard-core white supremacist, James von Brunn, as the killer. Our knee-jerk tendency is to comfort ourselves by declaring that this guy is so freakish, so far out of the American mainstream, that he is not representative of much of anything. Sane people are not violently obsessed with blacks and Jews. The murder was a tragic aberration. After all, this is a country that only recently elected an African-American president.

So let’s mop up the blood from the museum floor, and try to keep matters in perspective.

The problem when we think in terms of freaks and aberrations is that there are so many of them, which calls into question just how freakish or aberrational they really are. Was it an aberration when, according to authorities, Scott Roeder went into the lobby of a Lutheran church in Wichita two weeks ago and shot Dr. George Tiller to death? Hardly. The murder of Dr. Tiller, who was the nation’s most prominent provider of so-called late-term abortions, was the fourth assassination of an abortion provider in the U.S. since 1993.

Read more Us

From True Blue Liberal
By William John Cox

What does a shootout at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the confessions of a Khmer Rouge jailer and the murder of a Kansas medical doctor have in common? The answer is “children,” and how they suffer from being targeted and used by extremists to advance their own hateful agendas.

In 1981, acting as a public interest lawyer, I represented a Holocaust survivor who had been a 17-year-old boy when his entire family was murdered in Nazi concentration camps. We sued a group of radical right-wing organizations that denied the Holocaust and, as a publicity ploy, had offered a reward for proof it had occurred.

During the hearing in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, I asked, “If the Holocaust is a hoax, then where are all the children?” The answer was that the death camps were primarily industrial operations that worked prisoners to death, and children were quickly murdered because they were too young to contribute either their labor or body fat to the enterprise.

The presiding judge wisely disposed of the primary issue by simply taking “judicial notice” of the “historical fact” that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.

As I was reading in Mother Jones about the murder of a guard at the Holocaust Museum last week, I was not surprised to learn that James von Brunn, the shooter, had left a note saying “the Holocaust is a lie,” and that he was associated with the very same organizations we had defeated almost 30 years ago.
Read the rest of this entry »

From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

“Them Jews aren’t going to let President Obama talk to me.”
— the Rev. Jeremiah Wright

“I hate gay people … ”
— Tim Hardaway, former NBA star

“A Third World country.”
— Tom Tancredo, former Colorado representative, speaking of Miami

“She’s frightening. And she’s racist.”
— Dennis Baxley, former executive director, Christian Coalition of Florida, speaking of Judge Sonia Sotomayor

“Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”
— Glenn Beck, talk show host, to Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim

“Fifty years ago they’d have you hanging upside down with a (expletive) fork up your (expletive).”
— Michael Richards, comedian, to an African-American in his audience

I’ve always liked this place.

“Enjoy” is not a word one uses in connection with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, but I’ve always found a visit here conducive to contemplation and reflection. So it is even on a fog-shrouded morning when you can’t get in, when yellow tape rings off the entrance, police vehicles sit with lights flashing and armed security stands watch.

Read more Hate

From The Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson

We are blessed to live at a time when violent acts of hatred based on race, ethnicity or religion have become rare, at least in this country. As the act of terrorism committed Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum should remind us, though, rare doesn’t mean nonexistent.

James W. von Brunn, the 88-year-old white supremacist who allegedly took a rifle into the museum and killed security guard Stephen Johns, is more than a bitter, demented old man. He is a known figure in the domestic hate industry, a venom-spewing polemicist whose Web site offered readers the chance to download the opening chapters of his racist, anti-Semitic tome for free — and to buy the rest of the book for the bargain price of 10 bucks.

Apparently, there weren’t enough takers. The Post reported yesterday that acquaintances say von Brunn had become virtually destitute and was complaining that “someone in Washington” had cut his Social Security benefits as punishment for his political views. His recent e-mail blasts were apocalyptic. “It’s time to kill all the Jews,” said one.

It’s easy to surmise that von Brunn, a rabid Holocaust denier, could have chosen the Holocaust museum as a target because he thought it would offer the opportunity to kill Jews. His writings show that he also hates black people with great passion, however, so perhaps he took some measure of sick satisfaction in allegedly gunning down the 39-year-old Johns, an African American.

Read more Lone Wolves

From AlterNet
By Clive Anderson

The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means?

The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush’s Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.

Read more Biblical Prophecy

From GQ
By Robert Draper

These cover sheets were the brainchild of Major General Glen Shaffer, a director for intelligence serving both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. In the days before the Iraq war, Shaffer’s staff had created humorous covers in an attempt to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle. Then, as the body counting began, Shaffer, a Christian, deemed the biblical passages more suitable. Several others in the Pentagon disagreed. At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout—as one Pentagon staffer would later say—“would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

But the Pentagon’s top officials were apparently unconcerned about the effect such a disclosure might have on the conduct of the war or on Bush’s public standing. When colleagues complained to Shaffer that including a religious message with an intelligence briefing seemed inappropriate, Shaffer politely informed them that the practice would continue, because “my seniors”—JCS chairman Richard Myers, Rumsfeld, and the commander in chief himself—appreciated the cover pages.

But one government official was disturbed enough by these biblically seasoned sheets to hold on to copies, which I obtained recently while debriefing the past eight years with those who lived them inside the West Wing and the Pentagon. Over the past several months, the battle to define the Bush years has begun taking shape: As President Obama has rolled back his predecessor’s foreign and economic policies, Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer, and former speechwriters Michael Gerson and Marc Thiessen have all taken to the airwaves or op-ed pages to cast the Bush years in a softer light. My conversations with more than a dozen Bush loyalists, including several former cabinet-level officials and senior military commanders, have revealed another element of this legacy-building moment: intense feelings of ill will toward Donald Rumsfeld. Though few of these individuals would speak for the record (knowing that their former boss, George W. Bush, would not approve of it), they believe that Rumsfeld’s actions epitomized the very traits—arrogance, stubbornness, obliviousness, ineptitude—that critics say drove the Bush presidency off the rails.

Read more Rumsfeld

From The St.L Post Dispatch
By Leonard Pitts. Jr.

Between 1933 and 1945, as a series of restrictive laws, brutal pogroms and mass deportations culminated in the slaughter of six million Jews, the Christian church, with isolated exceptions, watched in silence.

Between 1955 and 1968, as the forces of oppression used terrorist bombings, police violence and kangaroo courts to deny African-Americans their freedom, the Christian church, with isolated exceptions, watched in silence.

Beginning in 1980, as a mysterious and deadly new disease called AIDS began to rage through the homosexual community like an unchecked fire, the Christian church, with isolated exceptions, watched in silence.

So who is surprised by the new Pew report?

Specifically, it’s from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, and it surveys Americans’ attitudes on the torture of suspected terrorists. Pew found that 49 percent of the nation believes torture is at least sometimes justifiable. Slice that number by religious affiliation, though, and things get interesting. It turns out the religiously unaffiliated are the least likely (40 percent) to support torture, but that the more you attend church, the more likely you are to condone it. Among racial/religious groups, white evangelical Protestants were far and away the most likely (62 percent) to support inflicting pain as a tool of interrogation.

Read more Tolerance

From Common Wonders
By Robert C. Koehler

“The special forces guys — they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom.”

It’s worse than you think.

Torture, religion, democracy, God. They’re all part of the mixed-up, horrific business that George Bush unleashed in the Middle East and Central Asia, and that Barack Obama is struggling to control and rationalize. As the words above demonstrate, the 12th century is striving mightily to join hands with the 20th in the U.S. military: Unbridled religious arrogance is forging a link with high-tech weaponry and an unlimited defense budget.

The speaker, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, who is no less than the chief of U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan, was videotaped last year delivering a sermon at Bagram Air Base. Since Al Jazeera first broadcast the footage at the beginning of the week, it has spread widely on the Internet. Like so much else that the Bush administration has bequeathed us, and the world — pre-emptive war and torture, for instance — this is nothing new, but suddenly it’s overt. I can’t exactly say this is a good thing, but certainly this is where we want it.

A U.S. military spokesman has denied that American soldiers are allowed to try to convert Afghans to Christianity — it violates Central Command’s General Order No. 1 — and said that Hensley was quoted out of context. U.S. military spokesmen, of course, also routinely deny that U.S. bombing raids kill civilians.

Read more Hounds