From The Boston Globe
By H.D.S. Greenway

There is nothing like a disputed place to bring incendiary nationalism to the boil. The mother of all examples is Jerusalem. Much of the energy of Europe was taken up in trying to wrest it from Muslims from the 11th to the 14th centuries. Today we are told there will be no progress in settling the 100-year dispute between Jews and Arabs in the Palestinian territories this year because of disagreements over the holy city.

But nations can face off over less exalted territory. Think of the predawn assault by Spanish commandos in July 2002, to force Moroccan soldiers off an uninhabited rock in the Mediterranean. Secretary of State Colin Powell got on the phone to calm the situation, and no one got hurt. The Spanish call the islet “Perejil,” while the Moroccans call it “Leila,” and both think it’s theirs.

A lot of people got hurt when Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falklands in 1982, islands that the Argentines call “Malvinas.” It is said that Britain could have resettled the entire population of the Falklands in Scotland for less money than the war cost, but, of course, it had become a matter of national pride, which Argentina lost.

The latest such face-off comes between Thailand and Cambodia over the ancient Khmer temples of Preah Vihear, recently named by UNESCO as a “world heritage site.”

The temple complex was built between the ninth and 11th centuries, during the heyday of the Khmer empire, before the Thais pushed down in force from China into Southeast Asia. But the Thais soon asserted sovereignty over Preah Vihear, as well as the better known temples of Angkor Wat.

Read more Nationalism

From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

”What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?”

I have gone forward and back for a while now trying to figure out where today’s rant should begin, but I find that I cannot get past that question. It was posed by Monica Goodling, an aide to then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, to job seekers at the Department of Justice.

“What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?”

Is it me, or doesn’t she sound less like a job interviewer than like an adolescent girl splayed out on her bed, giggling with her girlfriend about some hottie actor they both adore? I mean, what, exactly, was an applicant expected to say?

“I adore his strong chin?”

“That crinkly smile really turns me on?”

“I can’t resist the manly twinkle in his eyes when he mispronounces ‘nuclear?’ ”

Presumably, Goodling is somewhere doodling the president’s name and hers inside Valentine hearts while she awaits her fate. You see, she faces possible professional sanctions for violations of both civil-service law and the DOJ’s own policy. As detailed last week in a Justice Department report, she and other aides systematically schemed to fill nonpolitical positions with Bush loyalists.

It wasn’t just that she asked a question that would have been more at home on the cover of Tiger Beat. It was that she passed over a respected prosecutor with almost 20 years of experience for an important counterterrorism job because his wife was active in Democratic politics, hiring instead a Republican with three years’ experience. And that she denied one applicant on the suspicion — the “suspicion,” mind you — that she was a lesbian. And that she jettisoned yet another because he was a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. And that she ran Internet searches to determine applicants’ political views. And that one of her interview questions was: “Why are you a Republican?”

Read more Ideology

From True Blue Liberal
By Lawrence R. Velvel

On December 14, 2007 I wrote a post that assailed Michael Mukasey for a statement — that he doesn’t know if waterboarding is torture — which was a sheer disgrace for someone born into his religion, the same one I was born into, and whose parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who fled evil, as were mine. A difference between us, of course, is that he went to an Orthodox Jewish prep school and his wife was the headmistress at an Orthodox Jewish school, while I went to public schools and for practical purposes have never practiced religion. Another difference is that he seems to be the kind of guy who does what it takes to get ahead in the conventional world; he became, after all, a federal judge and then Attorney General for the Axe of Evil.

Yesterday I read a piece about Mukasey in the July 28-August 3 issue of The National Weekly Edition of the Washington Post. Obviously speaking of Democrats’ desires for an investigation of torture, the Post, immediately after saying that Mukasey had appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the destruction of CIA torture tapes, said this: “He has resisted Democrats’ other requests in part by arguing that their allegations are thin and that coercive questioning strategies were blessed by administration lawyers at the time.”

Is the Post kidding? Did he really say what the Post claims he said? If he did, is Mukasey kidding? The allegations supposedly are thin? Has he read any of the numerous books and articles which now have detailed much of what occurred? Gimme a break. This jerk knows the allegations of torture are overwhelming, not thin. If he said what the Post claims, he was deliberately lying. Is that what they teach you to do in Orthodox Judaism? It would be hard to believe.

And how about the claim that he won’t act because “coercive questioning strategies were blessed by administration lawyers at the time.” Those strategies were not blessed by all administration lawyers. As books and articles make clear, some strongly opposed them. The military JAGs, two of the civilian general counsels of the services (notably Alberto Mora), a State Department lawyer, an FBI man with a legal degree named Clemente, and others whose names and/or positions don’t trip quickly off my tongue (for which I apologize). Read the rest of this entry »

From Tom Paine
By Sara Robinson

We are an odd group, we Unitarians.

Conventional wisdom says that we’re soft in all the places our society values toughness. Our refusal to adhere to any dogma must mean that we’re soft in our convictions. Our reflexive open-mindedness is often derided as evidence that we’re soft in the head. Our persistent and gentle insistence on liberal values is evidence of hearts too soft to set boundaries. And all of this together leads to a public image of a mushy gathering of feckless intellectuals that somehow lacks cohesion, backbone, focus, or purpose.

You can only believe this if you don’t know either the history or the modern reality of Unitarian Universalism. The faith’s early founders, Michael Servitus and Francis David, were executed for the radical notion that belief in the Trinity — which excluded Muslims and Jews — should not be a requirement for participation in 16th century public life. Four hundred years later, in the same part of the world, other Unitarians died in concentration camps for having the courage of their humanist convictions. Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother from Michigan who was killed by the Klan in the days following the Selma march in 1965, was one of ours, too.

And then there are the thousands of us who lived to fight another day — surviving not because we were weak and indecisive, but because we were unshakable in our convictions and unwilling to back down out of sheer cussedness. That Unitarian-bred belief in the nobility of the human spirit was the spiritual foundation on which a plurality of America’s founders found sure footing as their convictions crystallized into revolution against tyranny. It fueled the passionate oratory of Daniel Webster, the wisdom of Ben Franklin, and the incisively clear writings of Tom Paine. It sent Paul Revere out into the cold of an April evening, and set Thomas Jefferson to the task of writing a Declaration. It recklessly bet the church’s entire existence — and the lives of its leaders, who willingly and knowingly committed a capital act of treason — in order to publish the Pentagon Papers.

Read more Knoxville

From The LA Times
By Tim Rutten

A report released Tuesday by the Justice Department has documented the Bush administration’s unprecedented — and illegal — effort to politicize the ranks of the agency’s prosecutors and civil service employees with conservatives and true believers in the religious right’s agenda.

Under then-Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, a thirtysomething lawyer named Monica M. Goodling — a graduate of a law school founded by Pat Robertson — had virtual veto power over the appointment of U.S. attorneys, other prosecutors and immigration judges. Goodling, as the Washington Post reported, demanded that candidates “espouse conservative priorities and Christian lifestyle choices,” especially on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. The goal, according to the report, was to create a Republican “farm system” inside the Justice Department.

While Goodling was pursuing that mission, something not dissimilar was going on at the White House. According to an article by New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer in the latest New York Review of Books, “President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and a small handful of trusted advisors sought and obtained dubious legal opinions [on national security] enabling them to circumvent American laws and traditions.” She details how they used these legal opinions to dramatically expand executive power.

When the next administration and Congress begin the urgent work of sorting out precisely how and why the Bush-Cheney regime systematically undermined the rule of law, there are a couple of things that ought to be kept in mind.

Read more Few Good Apples

From The Boston Globe
Editorial

With just a few months left in office, President Bush is still doing the bidding of social conservatives who oppose women’s reproductive freedoms. Under the guise of rules to protect antiabortion nurses and doctors from discrimination in hiring, a proposed new regulation would expand the definition of abortion to include any form of contraception that can work by stopping implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus. This can include common birth-control pills, emergency contraception, and the intra-uterine device, or IUD. Doctors who refuse to perform abortions for reasons of personal conscience already are protected by law.

The potential impact of this new rule on the more than 500,000 hospitals, family planning clinics, and medical offices that receive any form of federal funding could be dramatic. The rule could also undercut many state laws - including one in Massachusetts requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception for rape victims - and laws requiring prescription drug insurance plans to include contraceptives. Massachusetts passed such a law in 2002.

The draft proposed rule highlights the fact that many antiabortion groups also oppose one good method of preventing the unplanned pregnancies that lead to abortions - birth control. At some point in their lives, 98 percent of US women use birth control.

The proposed rule, while claiming to protect the rights of nurses and doctors, would interfere with patients’ rights. A woman seeking treatment could be denied birth control and not even be aware that the service was available - only denied to her because of the unexpressed personal beliefs of the practitioner.

Read more Attacks

From TruthDig
By Marie Cocco

From the people who brought you the Terri Schiavo spectacle, the stem-cell research stalemate and the atrocious waste of tax money on abstinence-only sex education that has been shown not to work, comes a sequel: a proposal to redefine abortion to include some of the most common forms of birth control, and to potentially penalize with funding cuts hundreds of thousands of doctors, hospitals and other health care providers who expect their employees to give women full reproductive care.

This parting gift to the religious right comes in a proposed rule by the Health and Human Services Department, which says it is merely revising existing federal rules that allow health-care personnel to opt out of performing an abortion if they have a moral or religious objection to the procedure. From that minimalist and unobjectionable clause, a monster grows.

The draft regulation would redefine abortion to include “any of the various procedures—including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action—that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”

The right wing has failed to win approval of a “human life” amendment to the Constitution that would declare that life begins at conception. It has failed to get even conservative-leaning courts to go along with the most extreme elements of its anti-abortion agenda. It failed to block approval of the RU-486 pill that produces a medical abortion. It failed to block government approval of emergency contraception—the “morning after” pill long promoted by the medical profession—which is taken whether or not a woman even knows she is pregnant. Seven years ago, when the first Bush administration budget included language that would drop a requirement that federal workers’ health insurance plans offer contraception if the plan includes coverage of prescription drugs, a bipartisan storm extinguished the idea.

Read more Parting Gift

From The Boston Globe
By H.D.S. Greenway

Back in the days when the Indochina wars were on everyone’s mind, a droll newspaperman, Martin F. Nolan, observed that “when the American people have to know when a country’s rainy season is, we are already in too deep.”

I remembered that recently when I read about Saddam Hussein’s tattoo. Hussein had three dots tattooed on his wrist to identify himself as a member of the Albu Nasir tribe. It was once all important to be an Albu Nasirman as the tribe dominated the government of Iraq in Hussein’s era. His inner circle was made up of fellow tribesmen and family, for in Iraq tribe and family are often the only entities you can trust.

To understand the ebb and flow of today’s wars, Americans have to know about the poisonous mix of familial, tribal, ethnic, linguistic, racial, and religious factions at play in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Bush keeps referring to Japan and Germany when he speaks of the kind of post-war settlement he hopes to get out of Iraq. But Germany and Japan after World War II were as homogenous as countries get, while Iraq and Afghanistan are crazy quilts of disparate and competing identities.

In times of stability and adequate prosperity, peoples from different backgrounds can forge a unified whole. The United States has been among the most successful in this endeavor. But in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, where colonial masters drew borders that had really nothing to do with their tribal and ethnic makeup, stress and the breakdown of the state cause people to retreat snarling into their primary identities.

Read more Poisonous Mix

From The LA Times
By Tim Rutten

Social and religious conservatives are placing an increasingly large wager on a strategy they believe may overcome their constituents’ lack of enthusiasm for Sen. John McCain, giving him a competitive edge over Sen. Barack Obama even in states as deeply blue as California.

Essentially, the strategy is a reprise of one Karl Rove used to push George W. Bush to victory in 2004, when he helped place measures banning same-sex marriage on the ballot in 11 key states. The Republican incumbent carried them all as religious conservatives — particularly evangelical Protestants — flocked to the polls to support the initiatives. This time around, similar measures denying marriage to gay and lesbian couples will be on the ballot in California, Florida and Arizona.

The Family Research Council, which supports all three propositions, believes that McCain could win in California. “It’s been a long time since California was in play for a Republican,” said David Nammo, who directs the council’s legislative efforts. In part, his optimism is based on a private survey in which 58% of all likely voters said they “would be more likely to support a presidential candidate” who favors banning same-sex marriage.

McCain supports the proposed amendment to the California Constitution forbidding same-sex marriage; Obama opposes it, as does Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This time around, however, religious and social conservatives aren’t banking on opposition to gay marriage alone. Across the country, close to 100 statewide questions already have qualified for the ballot in the November election. As many as 60 could be added. Many of these involve social questions about which ideological and religious conservatives have strong feelings.

Read more Initiative

From The Boston Globe
By James Carroll

What makes the Lambeth Conference, the world meeting of Anglican bishops now taking place in England, worthy of attention? Not the intra-religious squabble. Last month, dissenting bishops met separately in Jerusalem to protest church affirmations of gay people, and earlier this month, the General Synod of the Church of England approved the eventual consecration of women as bishops. These pro-gay and pro-woman breaks with biblically justified traditions are prompting talk of schism (although conservatives accept Anglican liberalism on divorce - which, unlike homosexuality and gender equality, Jesus expressly condemned).

But if these religious disagreements have an urgent larger meaning, it is because the conflict encapsulates one of the major challenges of our time: how humans preserve precious values of the past in a world of radical change.

The story of the Anglican communion, in a dynamic largely shaped by the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, is as moving as it is instructive. Before World War II, true to its Tory roots, the American Episcopal Church defined the epitome of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment culture. J.P. Morgan, when criticized for the opulence of the mansion he had funded for the bishop of New York, supposedly replied, “I think the bishop should live like everyone else, don’t you?”

But such self-satisfied social privilege changed. Led by ministers and laity who had been sobered by the mid-century war, Episcopalians took seriously the great lessons of the civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights, and a new skepticism toward violence. They recognized even in secular initiatives arising outside the church core values of the Gospel. Embracing such values meant letting go of lesser ones.

Over the last 50 years, the Episcopal Church has been a very model of how a conservative institution can progressively evolve step by step - beginning with the social justice witness of figures like bishops James Pike and Paul Moore, continuing with the ordination of women in the 1970s, the affirmation of gay relationships in the 1980s, the 2003 consecration as bishop of New Hampshire the openly gay priest V. Gene Robinson, and the election two years ago as presiding bishop of Katharine Jefferts Schori. At each point in this progression, some Episcopalians protested, but few defected.

Read more Vision