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I was shocked to read in today's letters an opinion that churches are given a tax exemption because of what our communities benefit from their existence. What a sad misunderstanding of the tax exemption.

Churches have historically been given this exemption to reduce the connection between church policies and influence and those of the state.

I am not sure it is posted online yet, but the Norman Transcript letters page is here:
http://www.normantranscript.com/letters
posted by Carter at 8:41 PM

 
Much has been said and written over the possible Presidential candidacy of Al Gore in 2008. He still says he has no plans to run, but the draft Gore movement is building momentum.

The movement was moved up a notch upon the release of Gore's documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore has the ear of millions of Americans. Americans are worried that what environmental scientists have been saying for years is actually true. Gore has been raising their concerns for many, many years while in government and outside government. In recent years he's made himself the focal point, the spokesperson.

What better platform is there from which to run for President than as America's statesman on one of its most critical problems?

But, Gore's position goes much further. He's been a constant critic of the callous and illegal choices made by the current Republican in the White House. Gore has been in the lead of the loyal opposition throughout W's two terms. It would be a natural move to accept a draft for President in 2008.

Check out the draft Gore movement at www.algore.org.
posted by Carter at 10:19 AM

 
If you are concerned by the loss of America's core values you must read a new book by President Jimmy Carter. As always, Carter is diplomatic but on target in his assessment of current national policy and the trends that are pushing America toward the excesses of fundamentalist regimes and terrible tyrants.

For a well-written review by a reader try this one by a lifelong Republican.
posted by Carter at 9:41 PM

 
Demand ethical integrity. Never settle for an ethics based on arbitrary authoritarianism.

If you are told or if you think, "I can't always define what makes something right or wrong, but I know it when I see it," then suspend judgment until you can define the rightness or wrongness of a thing.
posted by Carter at 2:11 PM

 

Bush Free to Act

Was President Bush hog-tied waiting for a request from the Governor of Louisiana before he could send help after Katrina's furry flooded New Orleans? Not really. Read this account with the time line and references to the legal grounds that freed Bush to do whatever he needed to do to help the people of southern Louisiana.

A real eye opener video is the Hannity and Colmes show on I think Sunday, Sept 4, when Geraldo Rivera and Shephard Smith plead for the lives of the thousands inside New Orleans. They claim the people are locked in. They can't even walk over the bridge to the next parish, where power is on, where food and water are available. A government check point is in place on the bridge to turn them back, they say.

This is a fairly long video, but the download isn't too bad on broadband. It is worth the wait.
http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Hannity-Colmes-Smith-Rivera-freak-in-NO.mov
posted by Carter at 2:21 PM

 

Santorum Claims Right to Your Bedroom

Santorum is right - well, about one thing. He's right that it takes a family. The problem is that he has a very narrow-minded view of the family.

It is a great thing to see parents involved with their kids, even if those parents are non-traditional. Children need adults in their lives and Santorum's view that these adults MUST be one man and one woman is just limiting. It can sometimes be strong parental influence from aunts or uncles, grandparents, even a mother and her same-gender spouse.

Why do so many people flock to such restrictive viewpoints? The harsh nature of Santorum's worldview creates tensions and anxieties that can hurt growing minds.

Those with Santorum's choked view on what constitutes a family want to force that view on us all, precluding some wonderful extended and non-traditional families. They threaten the warmth of American culture.

What drives their desire to strip us of our right to choose our own families is their need for an authoritarian society. A world driven by moral imperative, created by a harsh law-giver, must have an authority structure, a chain of command. Santorum's family is simply the smallest unit in that chain of command. He then proposes a strict government dictating your every thought. He may not see himself as a divine-right monarchist, but that's where his line of reasoning ends up.

He has to defend the government's right to monitor your bedroom and to dictate what you do in your most private moments. It is a necessary view in his world of dictated beliefs and his world of an absolute religious dictator.
posted by Carter at 4:22 PM

 
One hundred years from now we will probably get email via a wireless Ethernet from an implanted network interface directly into the language processing centers of our brain (or stored for later processing in a memory chip). Some of us may get to experience this, given the accelerating rate of increase in life expectancy due to advances in health sciences. The big question is whether the barrier of light speed in either communication or travel will have been broken in 100 years. Undoubtedly, we will be served (or we will be managed) by robot devices from molecular level up to macro level. Most of our internal organs will have been replaced over time with manufactured devices constructed by nanobots inside our bodies using the existing organs as blueprints. The new organs will be constructed of more durable materials and operate at greater efficiencies. However, it will be interesting to see how we deal with the exponential rate of change in technology after another 100 years. If we slept the next 100 years we might be overwhelmed with what can be accomplished in a single day of research when we awake.

Finally, the biggest question is whether the rapid advance in technology has helped us cope with each other or not. The world has become one, small community in many ways and will only shrink further. It seems this is actually increasing tensions rather than decreasing them. If we cannot embrace the "other" as our brother, even while maintaining our differences, even when the "other" is shoved shoulder to shoulder with us, we may not survive long enough to see what creativity and innovation can achieve. Our fear of the infidel and our need to validate our own view by converting others are our biggest challenges to survival.
posted by Carter at 9:39 AM

 
He's at it again. Bush is saying specifically that we are in Iraq because we were attacked on 9/11.


How often can he drag out this old lie? The only grain of truth in that claim is that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 gave Bush his excuse to cloak an already planned invasion of Iraq in the fear of his newly-formed war on terrorism.

He's dragging out the old lie of a relationship between his attack on Iraq and the 9/11 attacks in hopes of regaining his drooping approval ratings. We must keep the truth out there. We can write to publications and sign petitions. For example, MoveOn.org still has Rep. Conyers' Tell The Truth letter up to sign. I believe he's aready presented it with the 500,000 signatures, but more won't hurt.

The fact is that this President used the intelligence community to bolster his personal plans for empire building. Sounds exactly like the administration of Richard Nixon. Nixon used the intelligence community to improve his chances for election and reelection. George W Bush has manipulated the intelligence community to apply the military force of our country and to force his will on the Middle East.

Nixon had to resign to avoid facing impeachment and likely removal from office. It is one thing to enact wrong policy, but quite another thing to lie to Congress and the American people in general.
posted by Carter at 9:52 AM

 
Our state House spent time Monday debating and passing House Resolution 1039, calling on Oklahoma libraries to "confine homosexually themed books and other age-inappropriate material to areas exclusively for adult access and distribution."

You can get the story and even an audio clip (aren't we getting fancy at the Media Division) at http://www.lsb.state.ok.us/house/MEDIAHME.htm.

The resolution is in response to a controversy taking place in the Oklahoma City Library system. Parents of a young library patron objected when their child came home with King and King, by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland. The book apparently follows a classic tale. A prince comes of age and is expected to find a mate, but the ending is that he falls in love with the brother of one of the princesses coming to meet him.

This is a local controversy between a library system and the patrons it serves. Our legislature creates dangerous tones when getting involved in such matters. As a body with powerful control over public funds it casts a thinly-veiled threat to public libraries everywhere that such decisions shouldn't be left to local library boards.

By passing this resolution legislators also move the matter from administrative rules to a step away from legislation. The reason this is damaging is that legislation must be precise to be enforceable. Administrative rules can be more flexible and follow local standards. Past efforts at defining what is offensive at a legislative level have proven to be failures. We fight every charge of obscenity in the courts. One person's and one community's definition of offensive material doesn't hold to the next.

The saddest part of this move by the legislature is that such books can have a positive effect on young readers. It could lead to a learning moment where a child learns that not all families look like his or her family and that we live in a world filled with people who have different ideas, appearances and dreams. Respecting even those whose ideas bother us is far better than trying to force them to be like us. What a wonderful opportunity to teach peace over violence.

Carter
posted by Carter at 10:59 AM

 
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Archbishop of Genoa, yesterday denounced Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code as "shameful and full of lies." A quote run by an Italian newspaper seems kind of ironic to me.

From the BBC:
The cardinal told an Italian newspaper: "It astonishes and worries me that so many people believe these lies."

Cardinal Bertone told Il Giornale: "The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true."
...(end quote)

Here we have a man who preaches a story we are expected to accept on faith and he denounces another story that some people gullibly accept as true.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4350625.stm
posted by Carter at 7:50 AM