AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Saturday 31 July 2010
Romney Campaign to Surrender Evangelicals in 2012

Word from inside the Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign team is that Romney will abandon his 2008 strategy of seeking to win over social conservatives—evangelical or born-again Christians—for whom his Mormonism is a major deterrent.

In 2008, the Romney campaign had hoped the candidate’s clean-cut, family-man profile would be enough to win over socially conservative Christians, many of whom harbor deep misgivings about Mormonism fed in large part by a thirty-year campaign of “spiritual warfare” against Mormonism begun in the 1980s by evangelical Christian anti-“cult” ministries.

Romney’s 2008 candidacy was consistently shadowed not only by evangelical Christian anti-Mormon animus but also by general public misunderstanding of Mormonism and popular ridicule of Mormon beliefs and practices. Romney opponents and media personalities mocked everything from arcane nineteenth-century teachings by LDS Church leaders to the daily wearing by observant LDS Church members of devotional garments under one’s street clothes, a deeply personal form of religious practice dear to Mormons as an expression of personal commitment to the faith.

Is it time for 2012 presidential election campaigning already?

Yeesh.

/em seems to recall that it was just not long ago we were all celebratory for the onset of hope and change for America with the inception of the Age of Obama…

Friday 30 July 2010

072610 Cindy Word-Vimeo

Inception soundtrack created entirely from Edith Piaf song

Forty-seven years after her death, Edith Piaf is soundtracking the biggest, darkest, most bombastic blockbuster of the summer. Composer Hans Zimmer has revealed that Inception’s entire soundtrack, from the booming trombone theme to the strains of rising dread, originates from one of the chanteuse’s most famous songs.

Anyone who has seen Christopher Nolan’s movie will recall Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, the song used to signal a “kick” to another reality. But Piaf’s famous ballad does not just permeate Inception as a sample – it’s in the soundtrack’s DNA.

“Just for the game of it,” Zimmer told the New York Times this week, “all the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Edith Piaf track.” The clearest example is Inception’s theme, which an enterprising YouTuber has already deciphered, speeding up the booming trombones to reveal Piaf’s Gallic melancholy. “I was surprised how long it took them to figure it out,” Zimmer said. “[It] wasn’t supposed to be a secret.”

The other difficulty we all know too well is the human tendency to insist that some are not worthy of respect, that dignity doesn’t apply to the poor, or to immigrants, or to women, or Muslims, or gay and lesbian people. Prophetic work is about challenging human systems that ignore or deny the innate dignity of all of God’s creation. That’s the aspect of prophetic work that’s dangerous, for those systems often respond with violence – the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the disappearance of righteous gentiles who rescued Jews during the Second World War, or the expulsion of a Ugandan bishop because he asked the church to treat the gay and lesbian members of his society with dignity. Katharine Jefferts Schori

For all of its “Matrix”-like convolutions and “Alice in Wonderland” allusions, the new film “Inception” adds something significant to the ancient ruminations about reality’s authenticity—something profoundly relevant to this epoch of confusion. In the movie’s tale of corporate espionage, we are asked to ponder this moment’s most disturbing epistemological questions: Namely, how are ideas deposited in people’s minds, and how incurable are those ideas when they are wrong? David Sirota

xkcd

xkcd

We’ll hear from GOP candidates that Arizona had to act because the federal government refuses to “secure the border.” The fact is that President Obama has sharply increased border enforcement and deportations; the influx of undocumented immigrants is greatly reduced from what it was during the Bush administration. But there Obama goes again, trying to find a sane, moderate course of action. Predictably, he’s getting hit from both sides—the anti-immigrant crowd that claims he’s not doing enough, and the pro-immigrant crowd that complains he’s doing too much. Immigration wasn’t always a partisan issue, but that’s what it has become; even John McCain, once a strong advocate of comprehensive reform, now sides with the xenophobes. This is a huge long-term problem for Republicans, who risk becoming branded as the anti-Latino party—and driving the nation’s biggest and fastest-growing minority group into the arms of the Democratic Party for a generation or more. Eugene Robinson

The first mistake is surely to condescend to fundamentalism. We may disagree with it, but it has attracted millions of adherents for centuries, and for a good reason. It elevates and comforts. It provides a sense of meaning and direction to those lost in a disorienting world. The blind recourse to texts embraced as literal truth, the injunction to follow the commandments of God before anything else, the subjugation of reason and judgment and even conscience to the dictates of dogma: these can be exhilarating and transformative. They have led human beings to perform extraordinary acts of both good and evil. And they have an internal logic to them. If you believe that there is an eternal afterlife and that endless indescribable torture awaits those who disobey God’s law, then it requires no huge stretch of imagination to make sure that you not only conform to each diktat but that you also encourage and, if necessary, coerce others to do the same. The logic behind this is impeccable. Andrew Sullivan

Kirk Walters

Kirk Walters

We humans have choices about how we treat the natural environment and one another. We can be apathetic to destruction, or we can take a step of genuine faith by awakening from spiritual torpor and fighting for the lives of one another and the planet we depend on. Karen Baker-Fletcher

Man Faces Up To 16 Years In Prison For Videotaping The Police

The ACLU of Maryland is defending Anthony Graber, who potentially faces sixteen years in prison if found guilty of violating state wiretap laws because he recorded video of an officer drawing a gun during a traffic stop.  In a trend that we’ve seen across the country, police have become  increasingly hostile to bystanders recording their actions.  You can read some examples here, here and here.

However, the scale of the Maryland State Police reaction to Anthony Graber’s video is unprecedented.  Once they learned of the video on YouTube, Graber’s parents house was raided, searched, and four of his computers were confiscated.  Graber was arrested, booked and jailed.  Their actions are a calculated method of intimidation.  Another person has since been similarly charged under the same statute.

The wiretap law being used to charge Anthony Graber is intended to protect private communication between two parties.  According to David Rocah, the ACLU attorney handling Mr. Graber’s case, “To charge Graber with violating the law, you would have to conclude that a police officer on a public road, wearing a badge and a uniform, performing his official duty, pulling someone over, somehow has a right to privacy when it comes to the conversation he has with the motorist.”

(via digby)

Yet belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work. “Peace through strength” easily enough becomes “peace through war.” Israel succumbed to this temptation in 1967. For Israelis, the Six Day War proved a turning point. Plucky David defeated, and then became, Goliath. Even as the United States was flailing about in Vietnam, Israel had evidently succeeded in definitively mastering war. A quarter-century later, U.S. forces seemingly caught up. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush’s war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, showed that American troops like Israeli soldiers knew how to win quickly, cheaply, and humanely. Generals like H. Norman Schwarzkopf persuaded themselves that their brief desert campaign against Iraq had replicated — even eclipsed — the battlefield exploits of such famous Israeli warriors as Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin. Vietnam faded into irrelevance. For both Israel and the United States, however, appearances proved deceptive. Apart from fostering grand illusions, the splendid wars of 1967 and 1991 decided little. In both cases, victory turned out to be more apparent than real. Worse, triumphalism fostered massive future miscalculation. Andrew Bacevich

Why SAIC’s Yez Concept Car is a landmark automobile

When people hear the word fascism, they usually think of Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, where successful fascist movements seized state power and implemented totalitarian control of society. Yet fascism was an international phenomenon during the Depression, and the United States was not immune to its reach. General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in US history, testified before the Senate that wealthy industrialists had approached him as part of a “Business Plot” and tried to convince him to march an army of 500,000 veterans on Washington, DC to install a fascist dictatorship. Today we are approaching a similar crossroads. When I hear the story of the Business Plot I think about the Tea Party, which has sprung from a base of white supremacist anger, facilitated by right-wing elements of the corporate structure like Fox News. This is an extremely dangerous phenomenon. The tea-partyers have moved from questioning Obama’s citizenship, to now trying to reverse the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the ability of everyone, regardless of color, to enjoy public accommodations like restaurants. I think it’s fair to name the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Christian Right, etc. parts of a potential neo-fascist movement in the United States. Their words and actions too often encourage attacks on people of color, immigrants, Muslims, LGBT folks, and anyone they don’t see as legitimate members of US society. Ultimately, many in this movement are pushing for a different social system taking power in the United States: one that is more authoritarian, less compassionate, more exploitive of the environment, more militaristic, and based on a mythical return to national glory. This is not a throwback to Nazi Germany. It’s a new kind of fascism, a new American fascism. And it’s a serious threat. Alex Knight

RSA Animate - Smile or Die

A GNT creation ©2007–2010