Second life for a bad idea
The National Rifle Association has gone over the edge. That's not news. I think many of us gave up on the NRA ten years ago when they were practically defending Timothy McVey. Still, this week's outrage is an especially ugly development, even for them.

All options should be considered to prevent rampages like the Minnesota school shooting that took 10 lives — including making guns available to teachers, a top National Rifle Association leader said Friday.

"I'm not saying that that means every teacher should have a gun or not, but what I am saying is we need to look at all the options at what will truly protect the students," the NRA's first vice president, Sandra S. Froman, told The Associated Press.

Surprisingly, the NRA is not the first group to suggest this bad idea. Back during the Columbine aftermath Larry Pratt, director and founder of a group called the Gun Owners of America, made the same suggestion. His exact phrasing was, "We're saddened that there were not teachers and principals who had access to a gun, who might have been able to stop the mayhem," creating the the image of a firefight across a crowded cafeteria. GOA is a group that considers the NRA too soft on gun control.

Pratt is quite a figure on the farthest right. According to PublicEye, Pratt:

Has founded several groups that are to the right of their right-wing counterparts: English First (as opposed to U.S. English), Gun Owners of America (as opposed to the National Rifle Association), U.S. Border Control (as opposed to FAIR) and the antichoice Committee to Protect the Family. Resigned as co-chair of Pat Buchanan’s national campaign in 1996 after allegations linked him to militias and White supremacist organizations. A ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in the United States.

At the time of Columbine, Pratt was ignored because it was obvious that only a complete idiot would suggest such a thing. Now the NRA has embraced his position.

There is a very ugly dynamic going on here; David Neiwert discussed it in detail in his fascism monographs. The flirtation with the extreme right conducted by the Republican Party and right wing media creates a mechanism for extremist ideas to become legitimized and transported into the mainstream public consciousness. Repetition and familiarity make the ideas sound less extreme. It's actually a two way transmission.

Radical ideas and positions are moved into the "center" during their adoption by progressively more mainstream figures while those same mainstream figures are progressively radicalized. In time the whole political spectrum moves right. When the inarticulate guy in fatigues outside his bunker says it, it's crazy. When the angry guy on the radio says it, it's wild, but not completely over the edge. When the glib white men with good haircuts say it while sitting around their table on TV, it's an idea whose time may have finally come.

But it’s still a bad idea.

A Letter to The National Press Club
Sean-Paul over at The Agonist is politely asking The National Press Club to improve the quality of their Blogging and Journalism panel.

Members of The National Press Club,

We, the undersigned bloggers, are very concerned about how liberal political bloggers are being systematically under-represented and belittled in the mainstream media, academic settings and media forums. By being intentionally excluded away from these venues, we are effectively pushed out of the discourse of opinion-leaders. The result is that the conventional wisdom about blogging, politics and journalism, as it concerns liberal blogs, becomes a feedback loop framed by the Conservatives and their media allies.

Go read the whole letter and join in if you agree.

Personally, I'm less annoyed about this particular panel (with Gannon/Guckert representing which side, bloggers or journalists?) than I am about the general exclusion of liberal bloggers in general from press coverage. The representatives of news blogging in press stories and on these kinds of panels are too often established journalists who blog on the side, wingnuts, Glenn Reynolds, or Wonkette. And while Wonkette is an entertaining gossip columnist, she isn't a good representative of news blogging or the left.

Gentlebeings of the press, expand your sources! Hundreds of us would sell our little sisters for a chance to be a talking head. Some of us are even presentable.

Uno
When my Mom and my clever wife get together, at some point after the drinking, the planing of meals, the drinking, the making of meals, the drinking, the eatingof meals, and, of course, the drinking, they play cards. Sometimes I play too, but usually I sneak off and blog or read. Lately, their favorite game has been Uno, a sort of Crazy Eights on steroids.

The normal play of Uno is that you play until someone plays out. At that point the other players count up the point value of their remaining cards. The official rules allow two versions of how to procede beyond this point. In version one, the winner of a hand takes the points of all of the other players. The grand winner of the game is the first to score 500 after enough hands have been played. In version two, the other players keep the points in their hands and you keep playing until the grand loser scores 500.

Lately, I have been reading my Lakoff on the different intreperative metaphors for American politics. Which play do you think better fits the lefitist, nurturing parent, metaphor and which fits the rightist, strict father, metaphor? Is it more appropriate to choose a grand winner to be praised by all or a grand loser to be condemned by all? Why do you think that, and what the hell is wrong with you?

Celebrate something
Today, Christians, or at least Western Christians, are celebrating Easter. In the last week, Zoroastrians and certain varieties of Muslims celebrated Nawruz; Jews everywhere had Passover; wicking and some earth goddess worshipers celebrated the Vernal Equinox under a variety of names; ancient Romans, if any are still alive, and many types of pagans celebrated New Years; Mustang Bobby celebrated his 50,000th visitor; my old friend Kenzo had her birthday; and archy celebrated its second blogoversary. I hope you have something to celebrate and someone to celebrate it with.

Good day to all.

The Pope is dead!
Well, not that pope, another pope.

The leader of a secretive Spanish sect who said he was the true Pope and that the Vatican was controlled by the devil has died, a town hall official said Tuesday.
Gregorio XVII, 58, was the leader of a self-styled church whose followers believed he would be crucified before a kind of apocalypse would take place.

Gregorio believed God crowned him after Pope Paul VI's death in 1978 and he rejected changes made to the Catholic church in the 1960s such as saying mass in local languages rather than Latin and dialogue with other branches of Christianity.

[...]

The sect, based in the southern Spanish town of El Palmar de Troya but with members from as far away as the United States, conferred sainthood on former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

Last summer, Taipei Times did profile on Gregorio that explanes how he became pope:

Before crowning himself "pope", the man formerly known as Clemente Dominguez said he had visions of the Virgin Mary and messages from God that the church in Rome, and Pope Paul VI, were being misled.

"Satan is governing in the Vatican," Gregorio was told in a vision in 1971, according to one booklet. A year later he was told, "Masons and Communism have infiltrated the Vatican."

Gregorio lost his sight in a 1976 car crash but the Virgin Mary promised he will regain it one day, church documents say.

Two years later Paul VI died and Clemente Dominguez, on a trip to Colombia, proclaimed himself pope.

Gregorio's church, which he called the "Carmelite Order of the Holy Face," is not the only schismatic church to emerge in opposition to Vatican II. Last year, during the brou-ha-ha that erupted before the release of "The Passion," it was revealed that Mel Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, is a Holocaust Denier and member of one such church (The Society of Saint Pius X). Mel himself appears to be a Catholic traditionalist, a member of a congregation that still performs the Latin mass, but hasn't fully broken with Rome yet.

The other day, TBogg made a compassionate prediction about Popes dying (I think he meant the other one, but he could have meant this one):

As an added note: you do realize that if both Terri Schiavo and the Pope leave this mortal coil within days of each other, the Brides of Jesus (that would be Peggy Noonan & Kathryn Jean Lopez) will have a meltdown that will make Chernobyl look like a snuffed birthday candle.

Even if this doesn't make their heads explode, if we announce, it right it might give one of them a wee aneurysm.

Strange bedfellows
This article just came to my attention via MyDD. It's by Jon B. Eisenberg, a lawyer who has been involved in the Schiavo case since last year, when he filed an amicus curiae brief 55 bioethicists and a disability rights organization opposing governor Jeb's intervention in the case. According to Eisenberg:

Two months later I participated in a public debate on the case at Florida State University. Among the participants supporting Gov. Bush's position were Pat Anderson, one of multiple attorneys who have represented the Schindlers, and Wesley Smith and Rita Marker, two activists whose specialty is opposing surrogate removal of life-support from comatose and persistent vegetative state patients. I found myself wondering: "I'm doing this pro bono; are they?"

I did some Internet research and learned that many of the attorneys, activists and organizations working to keep Schiavo on life support all these years have been funded by members of the Philanthropy Roundtable.

The Philanthropy Roundtable is a collection of foundations that have funded conservative causes ranging from abolition of Social Security to anti-tax crusades and United Nations conspiracy theories. The Roundtable members' founders include scions of America's wealthiest families, including Richard Mellon Scaife (heir to the Mellon industrial, oil and banking fortune), Harry Bradley (electronics), Joseph Coors (beer), and the Smith Richardson family (pharmaceutical products).

These are the usual suspects to anyone familiar with the funding of the "Might Wurlitzer" the highly effective right-wing propaganda and lobbying machine that has developed over the last thirty years. Eisenberg goes on to examine the whole network of anti-abortion groups and right-wing funding giants that have underwritten and encouraged the Schindlers' legal efforts all these years.

The whole article is worth studying, but two connections in particular jumped out at me:

Wesley Smith ... work[s] for organizations that get funding from Roundtable members. Smith is a paid senior fellow with the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that advocates the teaching of creationist "intelligent design" theory in public schools. Between 1993 and 1997, the Discovery Institute received $175,000 from the Bradley Foundation....

Roundtable members also played a role in financing the Bush v. Schiavo litigation.

The Family Research Council, which uses its annual $10 million budget to lobby for prayer in public schools and against gay marriage, filed an amicus curiae brief in Bush v. Schiavo...

It makes sense that the same theocratic groups that work for creationism and prayer in schools would have a finger in high profile end of life and medical ethics cases. These are the same groups that poured tons of money into the "Marriage Amendments" last year. While it's not surprising to see them involved, it is discouraging to witness the extent of their reach and their funding. We have a long way to go to catch up with these people and reverse their momentum.

Blue and red
My new National Geographic arrived yesterday. I was excited to see that it had a map. I have most of the maps going back to the mid-forties. Though I don't think they're quite as good as the used to be, I'm still excited to get a new one. This month is a map of the Civil War campaigns. I believe the last time they printed this map was in the early sixties on the occasion of the centennial of the war; it was included as part of the do-it-yourself atlas they put out in those days.

I was a bit taken aback when I noticed that the Union armies were represented by blue arrows and the Confederacy by red ones. With the way "blue state" and "red state" has forced its way into our vocabulary over the last four years, I had an image of the Volvo riding forces rolling back the pick-ups and marching on to Richmond, with only a brief stop to warm croissants over the glowing embers of Atlanta. I pictured Lincoln and his generals, decaf, sugarless mochas in hand, as they debated strategy long into the night. I visualized the last ragged defenders of the lost cause making a final stand outside the No Spin Zone.

Then I remembered that red and blue arrows have been used to represent opposing armies on campaign maps as long as there has been four-color printing, perhaps longer. But even this morning, I'm still a little tickled to think that they chose red to represent the armies of treason and rebellion in their doomed attempt to demolish the United States, and blue as the color of the saviors of the republic. I'll take my inspiration anywhere I can get it.

More mysteries
Riggsveda over at Corrente points us to very latest news about miraculous apparitions (Jesus on a brick, God's finger on a tree, and Satan on a turtle). I'm always amazed that whenever someone sees a bearded face on a tortilla, they jump to the conclusion that it must be Jesus. There must be lots of dead bearded guys floating around in the ether. How do they know that it wasn't some other guy who spotted their burrito and thought that it would be a neighborly thing to do to drop by and say howdy?

Blogswarm
Majikthise is calling for a blogswarm in reaction to the transparently political interjection of the Republican majority in Congress into the Schiavo case.

Their motives are despicably impure: Tom DeLay wants to draw attention away from his ethics problems and the White House wants to drew attention away from the failure of President Bush's plans to gut Social Security. Their sudden discovery that baseball players were taking steroids didn't do the trick, so they have turned to an issue that Jeb Bush has been disgustingly manipulating for the past year.

They are shamelessly exploiting one family's personal tragedy to make points with their core supporters. Meanwhile, they don't care if they demonize and destroy a man who has struggled with this case for fifteen years.

They are undermining the Constitution. They are using the legislative process to interfere with the judicial process. Article One, Section Nine specifically forbids passing laws that punish or benefit an individual. Laws should deal with general principles. In passing a patently illegal law, they are encouraging disrespect and contempt for the very principle of rule of law.

Their cynical manipulation of our norms of government rises far beyond any levels that I've ever seen in my life. And I remember Nixon.

Write to your paper. Write to your congresspersons. Write to the national media. We are literally fighting for the future of the republic.

Majikthise has addresses.

Have I mentioned lately that I really hate these guys?

Look at this picture

The woman's eyes are closed. From the small part of her body we can see, she appears to arched in a posture indicating an extreme physical or emotional state. In other words, she is either in pain or having an orgasm. I doubt as if either state is true. So why did the photographer move in to get a close-up of this one young woman as opposed to all of the other protesters? Simple. She presented the best theater. She's moderately pretty and she is faking an dramatic and, therefore photogenic, state. Once upon a time, liberals were the masters of street theater. At sometime in the last twenty years, we forgot how to do it. I'll have more to say about this later.