Let There Be Peace on Earth and Let It Begin With Me!

"Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Barack Obama continues his amazing efforts at bringing unity to America by making Rick Warren one of his choices to speak at his inauguration. Sure, many don't look at it that way, but it's quintessential Obama to choose a diverse cast, nay-sayers be damned!

And plenty of nay-sayers there are. Conservatives on the right:

“In my view, the new president is trying to exploit Warren,” Gary L. Bauer, the Christian conservative organizer and former Republican presidential candidate, wrote on Friday in an e-mail newsletter. He urged supporters not to take Mr. Warren’s role as an endorsement, calling attention to Mr. Obama’s distance from the pastor on social issues..." ~ NYTimes.com

...and liberals on the left:

"Picking Rick Warren to give THE invocation," wrote John Aravosis on AmericaBlog, "is abominable." ~ Huffington Post

"Let me get right to the point," Joe Solomnese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a harsh letter to the president-elect, "Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans." ~ Huffington Post

Lee Stranahan of the Huffington Post said it well:

"There's something bigger at play here and you can't say Obama didn't warn you. He talked about reaching out, about expanding our politics and that crazy bastard actually meant it. Nobody on the left or right quite knows what to make of it. We want to cram Obama into our old, divisive, two toned ideological and political frame and if he doesn't fit, we'll attack him too."

And attacked he has been. But Obama is nobody's puppet. He'll make his own decisions throughout his presidency, not based on any interest group or political party.

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of extreme, divisive, right-winged Christians. What I like about Rick Warren is that he's looking for common ground. I LOVE that he spoke Saturday night to about 800 members of the Muslim Public Affairs Council at its convention in Long Beach. He pronounced his love for everyone - Muslims, Democrats and Gay and Lesbian folks included. Is that not the CORE of Jesus' teaching? And it may surprise Christians, but Obama is a Democrat AND a Christian!! Unbelievable!! I'm telling you, sometimes I'm hugely embarassed by some very vocal and very visible members of my global Christian family, and now is no exception. I heard that some of these people criticized Warren for even PRAYING with Obama. It literally makes my adrenaline surge and my heart pound to hear poop like that. Absolutely assinine.

Let there be no confusion: I'm pro-life, believe marriage is for a man and a woman, and any silly 'What party are you?' test I take confirms I'm a Republican. That doesn't mean I can't understand the perpectives of proponents of pro-choice and gay marriage advocates. I continue to re-evaluate my political leanings and try to educate myself at every opportunity.

Several months ago I wrote about an NPR interview with Rich Cizik, Vice Pres of the National Association of Evangelicals. Check this out: he was FIRED because of that interview. Read on:

"As noted by Jim Wallis in his "Hearts and Minds" Sojourners post (December 19, 2008) a leading evangelical -- Richard Cizik -- who is progressive on environmental issues and gay rights, was just fired from the vice presidency of the National Association of Evangelicals for only daring to say he is warming up to the idea of gay civil unions.

As Wallis notes:

'Rich Cizik has been a pioneer in the "new evangelical" movement... Rich has helped lead the way to putting "creation care" and climate change on the mainstream agenda of the evangelical movement... because of things he said in an NPR interview with Terry Gross [he was fired]. The controversy of some of Rich's statements, in particular his "shifting" feelings about gay civil unions, admitting that he voted for Barack Obama in the primaries, and implying that he did so in the general election, caused so much controversy in some quarters of the NAE's constituency that the Executive Committee felt they had no choice but to suggest resignation, which Rich quickly but sadly accepted...'

One step forward and two steps back....but maybe now it will be TWO steps forward and ONE step back with Barack at the wheel. We can only hope and continue in our individual efforts at promoting love and unity.

"Thank you for my life"

"Dear God
Whose Name I do not know
Thank you for my life
I forgot how big....
Thank you
Thank you for my life"

I've thought about this clip a million times since I saw it many years ago. It comes to mind when I feel that same spontaneous urge to lift my arms to praise God and to thank Him for whatever....for my life, my family, for beauty. It's the same feeling I've felt all my life, before I knew Who it was I was thanking. I never want to forget how big He is.

May I recommend...

I was turned onto Studs Terkel's work through This American Life - really amazing stuff. I would love to record peoples' experiences like this someday...priceless history.

http://www.studsterkel.org/





This looks amazing too, can't wait to spend a day working on spreadsheets, listening to every single audio clip.

http://www.historicalvoices.org/

I'm sure there are a million like these...can't wait to hunt them down...

First snow!

The person who authorized all the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib is the president

Really sickening. I'm so done with Bush. I remember being so MAD at those guards who humiliated the prisoners the way they did. Come to find out, they were just pawns...obeying orders. Unbelievable.

Article below is from this site: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/12/the-architects.html

"Last week, we reached some closure on a burning and controversial question that has occupied many for many years now. That is the simple question of who was responsible for the abuse, torture, rape and murder of prisoners in American custody in the war on terror, most indelibly captured by the photographic images of Abu Ghraib. The Senate's bipartisan report, issued with no dissents, reiterates and adds factual context to what we already know. And there is no equivocation in the report.

The person who authorized all the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib, the man who gave the green light to the abuses in that prison, is the president of the United States, George W. Bush.

Again: there is no longer any reasonable factual debate about this (hence to near total silence of the Republican right), and the Senate report finally holds the president responsible in bipartisan fashion:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

Those ghastly pctures of naked, hooded prisoners? Bush approved nudity and hooding of prisoners. Hypothermia? Sleep deprivation? Bush signed a memo removing the most baseline protections for all human beings under the Geneva Conventions. Waterboarding? Bush knew full well. As did Rice and Tenet and Powell and that poseur in defense of human rights, Paul Wolfowitz. But even before the memo, before any prisoners were captured, the Bush administration was working on how to torture them:

In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel’s Office had already solicited information on detainee “exploitation” from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

Let's be absolutely clear what this means: When we saw an image of Lynndie England pulling a naked prisoner around on a leash, we assumed at the time that she improvised this, or was some kind of "bad apple." This is and was a conscious lie to the Congress, and to the American people, and to the world. The person who authorized the use of nudity and leashes on prisoners was not Lynndie England or any of the other grunts thrown to the wolves. The man who authorized the technique shown below is the president of the United States:



The report itself is not that long and I highly recommend reading it all closely. It is the most sobering indictment of high government officials in the U.S. since Watergate. And, in the gravity of crimes, it is a far more profound violation of the law and the constitution and the security of the United States than Watergate ever was. Bush's crimes are far greater than Nixon's - because war crimes are far graver than burglaries. And there is no statute of limitations for war crimes."