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I was surprised to find that the Tea Party is calling people to a “virtual march” before the Republican convention. I thought such vacuous gestures were the copyrighted property of liberals. After all, the 99% had a number of such “virtual marches,” as did supporters of the Arab Spring, and countless other causes. While the causes may have been noble, it should be pointed out that the “marches” took place while the “marchers” sat on their ever broadening duffs.

At some point, the organizers of such events could introduce virtual dogs and fire hoses so people can feel persecuted as they “march” there in their air conditioned homes.

The marches of MLK changed history, but his was a strategy for those without vote. For people who can but don’t vote to sit at a computer terminal and call it activism is the closest thing a citizen can get to doing nothing at all.

The real hope for America has never rested on the shoulders of any political candidate. When candidates are cast as saviors in a political election, disappointment is never far away. Democracy sinks or swims due to the sometimes boring work of grassroots activism. So while it was fun to pretend Obama could come in and save us, it is time to grow up and get to work. The nurses’ union is doing precisely that. The only way America will get health care coverage for all of its citizens in Obama’s second term is for the President to feel more pressure coming from the left than he does from the right. The first agenda for most politicians is to stay in power, and then to have a legacy when they are through. As important as it is to prevent the current Republican Party from destroying what is left of the republic, it is also true that as long as liberals consider themselves as nothing more than cheerleaders for Obama, corporations will rule anyway.

To read story, click here.

As a child I always wanted to be like St. Francis.  My childish understanding of him was of some nice person who had birds sitting on his shoulder and deer eating out of his hand.  It was only later that I realized that his kindness had made him controversial in his own day.

Perhaps you have heard the story of St. Francis as a rich young man in fine clothes riding on a beautiful horse which is also richly decorated.  Suddenly, Francis sees one of the most horrifying sights in all the ancient world: a leper.  Today we call it Hansen’s disease, and do not recoil in hysteria, but living in the superstitions of his own time Francis must have thought to touch such a person would mean his own hideous death.  For a time, the rich young man sits frozen on his horse.

Some strange calling arises from within Francis.  Dismounting, he places money in the beggar’s white misshapen fingers.  His original intent was only to give charity, but suddenly his heart bursts open and he embraces the leper with a kiss. Francis’ conversion story is more than the healing of one sick person; it was the healing of the fear that dominated Francis’s soul.  The poor and the sick had been a threat to his position, safety and wealth.  By cutting himself off from the suffering of his sisters and brothers, Francis lost his own place in the family of God.  After renouncing his own status and wealth, Francis spent the rest of his days in joyous conversation with every other living being he encountered.

Such was the beginning of St. Francis’ ecstatic life of love.  Nowadays, we decorate our fancy gardens with statues of this saint and fence him off from the poor, but we must remember that his journey did not begin with birds alighting on his shoulder.  The way of St. Francis began by renouncing everything that came between him and the entire family of God.

The Texas Civil Rights Project has revealled that four inmates died last summer due to a lack of air conditioning in prisions where temperatures can rise to 126 degrees or higher. In a state where being “tough on crime” is almost a necessity for holding office, it is hard to find a politician who will stand up for this vulnerable population. It is much safer to talk about law abiding citizens who could use help getting air conditioning, as though our state could not afford to make our brutal summers safe for both populations. The article follows:

By MANNY FERNANDEZ

AUSTIN, Tex. — In the brutal heat of summer, many Texans flee to shopping malls, movie theaters and other air-conditioned havens to keep cool. But for one segment of the population, there is literally no escape from triple-digit temperatures: state prison inmates.

Only 21 of the 111 prisons overseen by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the state prison agency, are fully air-conditioned. Many of the prisons that do have air-conditioning in areas where medical services or educational programs are provided to inmates do not offer it in the sections where they live.

Inmates and their families have complained for years about the heat and lack of air-conditioning in the summertime, but the issue has taken on a new urgency. An appeal is pending in a lawsuit initially filed in 2008 by a former inmate claiming that 54 prisoners were exposed to Death Valley-like conditions at a South Texas prison where the heat index exceeded 126 degrees for 10 days indoors. And several inmates at other prisons died of heat-related causes last summer; a lawsuit was filed Tuesday in one of those deaths.

Texas has long had a reputation for running some of the toughest prisons in the country, but inmates and their advocates say the overheated conditions violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. They accuse prison officials of failing to supply enough fans, ventilation and water and refusing to follow local and national prison standards.

“These conditions are shockingly dangerous,” said Scott Medlock, director of TCRP’s Prisoners’ Rights Program. “Housing prisoners in these temperatures is brutal. If TDCJ officers locked a dog in a hot car, they would go to prison for animal cruelty. . . ” — See the press release at TCRP Blog

A Texas law requires county jails to maintain temperature levels between 65 and 85 degrees, but the law does not apply to state prisons. The American Correctional Association recommends that temperature and humidity be mechanically raised or lowered to acceptable levels.

“The Constitution doesn’t require a comfortable prison, but it requires a safe and humane prison,” said Scott Medlock, director of the prisoners’ rights program at the Texas Civil Rights Project, which is representing the former South Texas inmate who sued prison officials. “Housing prisoners in these temperatures is brutal.”

Four inmates died of heat-related causes last summer. Eugene Blackmon is suing over conditions in a prison in the summer of 2008. “It felt like an oven,” he said.

A prison agency spokesman, Jason Clark, said that many prison units were built before air-conditioning was commonly installed, and that many others built later in the 1980s and 1990s did not include air-conditioning because of the additional construction, maintenance and utility costs. Retrofitting prisons with air-conditioning would be extremely expensive, he said.

As a result, the agency takes a number of steps to assist inmates, Mr. Clark said, and he disputed the criticisms of inmates and their lawyers about inadequate fans, water and ventilation. On hot summer days, he said, prison officials restrict outside activity, provide frequent water breaks, allow additional showers, permit inmates to wear shorts and increase airflow by using blowers normally used to move warm air in the winter.

“The agency is committed to making sure that all are safe during the extreme heat,” Mr. Clark said in a statement.

TCRP 22nd Annual Bill of Rights Dinner featuring Equal-Pay Plaintiff Lilly Ledbetter, Oct. 27, 2012, UT Alumni Center, Austin. Click here for program info and tickets

Despite those measures, four inmates — Larry Gene McCollum, 58; Alexander Togonidze, 44; Michael David Martone, 57; and Kenneth Wayne James, 52 — died last summer from heat stroke or hyperthermia, according to autopsy reports and the authorities. Advocates for inmate rights believe that at least five others died from heat-related causes last summer.

On Tuesday, the Texas Civil Rights Project and an Austin lawyer filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Mr. McCollum’s wife, son and daughter. They accused prison officials of causing his death by keeping him in the sweltering Hutchins State Jail outside Dallas, where he had a seizure around 2 a.m. on July 22 and fell from his bunk bed.

When Mr. McCollum, who weighed 345 pounds and had hypertension, arrived at a Dallas hospital, his body temperature was 109.4 degrees. He died six days later. The cause of death was hyperthermia, the autopsy report said. Mr. McCollum was “in a hot environment without air-conditioning, and he may have been further predisposed to developing hyperthermia due to morbid obesity” and use of a diuretic for hypertension, the report noted.

“For this to happen to any human being is beyond my belief,” said Mr. McCollum’s son, Stephen, 30, at a news conference in Austin announcing the lawsuit. “There’s pets in pounds that have better conditions.”

Nearly two weeks after Mr. McCollum died, Mr. Togonidze and Mr. Martone died of hyperthermia on the same August day in different prisons. Five days later, Mr. James was found unresponsive at 3 a.m. at a prison near the East Texas town of Palestine. His body temperature was 108 degrees, and the cause of death was “most likely environmental hyperthermia-related classic heat stroke,” according to the autopsy report. Like Mr. McCollum, Mr. James had hypertension.

Mr. Clark, the prison agency spokesman, said it was unknown whether the lack of air-conditioning was a factor in the deaths. The agency does not comment on pending litigation, he said.

Eugene Blackmon, 67, the former South Texas inmate who sued, said the conditions inside the C-8 dormitory at the Garza East prison caused him to have headaches, blurred vision and nausea. Mr. Blackmon was an inmate there in the summer of 2008 for a parole violation on a stolen-goods charge.

After he filed his lawsuit, his lawyers hired an expert who took measurements inside the dorm in 2010 and retroactively calculated the indoor temperatures for the summer of 2008. The heat index inside reached a high of 134, the expert determined.

“It felt like an oven,” said Mr. Blackmon, whose lawsuit was denied by a lower court and now awaits a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. “These bodies are throwing off heat. We would take a wet towel sometimes and put it over us to try to keep cool. The water we drank was from the sinks. If you had a cup, you drank with the cup. If not, you drank with your hand.”

In court documents, the state attorney general’s office, which is representing the prison officials, denied Mr. Blackmon’s accusations, saying that he made no complaints of a heat-related illness or vision problems at the time and that his blood pressure readings improved rather than worsened over time. An air handler ventilating the dormitory, an industrial fan and a rooftop purge fan — in addition to extra shower privileges and ice water three times a day — increased the level of comfort in the C-8 dorm, the state’s lawyers argued.

State Senator John Whitmire, a Democrat from Houston and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, said he was concerned about the inmate deaths but wanted to examine the circumstances of each. He said he was not sympathetic to complaints about a lack of air-conditioning, partly out of concern about the costs, but also out of principle.

“Texans are not motivated to air-condition inmates,” he said. “These people are sex offenders, rapists, murderers. And we’re going to pay for their air-conditioning when I can’t go down the street and provide air-conditioning to hard-working, taxpaying citizens?”

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The Bible says that love of money is the root of all evil, but the Bible is mistaken. Most people don’t love the money itself, we love what money can do, which is get us what we want. People forget that money is a symbol of power, but it does not always add up to power itself. As Machiavelli pointed out, gold will not always procure good soldiers, but good soldiers will always procure gold. What we want is power, of which money is the symbol.

It is true that whoever has the most money gains some ability to write the laws. But someone with real power can turn other peoples’ currency into play money overnight. Being raised in the South, I saw tons of Confederate money when I was younger. Those dollars were a reminder that it’s not really about who has the money, it is about who has the power.

There probably isn’t one factor we can locate as the root of all evil, but love of power comes close. More precisely, it is the love of domination that seems to silence the voices of decency within us and to awaken the demons that live in every cellar of every soul. It is not money per se, but wanting to be seen and recognized as superior that closes the gates of heaven and opens the gates of hell. Maybe that’s what the Bible is really trying to say.

Several of you sent this article by a conservative New York Times columnist with some very valid criticisms of liberal Christianity.

I disagree with the author that liberals like Bishop Spong are the reason the mainstream denominations are in decline, but I do agree that Spong and most of the liberal theologies never identified an organizing principle for a reformation radical enough to lead us into the future. Instead, like the new atheists, many liberals gathered a crowd by beating the dead horse with ever more exotic weapons.

All of us can see the mainstream denominations in decline, but we also see brilliant and wonderful nontheistic alternatives failing to develop sustainable communities. What few are willing or able to see is that “liberal” and “conservative” are arcs on a cultural continuum which is itself collapsing. The answer lies off the pallet of acceptable conversational topics.

These are times that call us to our roots, which means to be “radical.” The answers we need will not be found in any of the religions or anti-religions of our culture. The answers we need lie in nature, in our common humanity, and in the mystery out of which it all comes.  If religion can make those connections, it will help us find our way, if it does not, religion becomes our worst problem. The failure of liberal theology like any philosophy of our age lies in not being radical and universal enough. In navigating a stormy ocean, only a deep rudder will save the ship.

 
To read NY Times article, click here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/opinion/sunday/douthat-can-liberal-christianity-be-saved.html

I tried to watch “Atlas Shrugged” the other night and remembered why the libertarian philosophy disgusts me so.    I can understand how a traumatized Russian immigrant such as Ayn Rand could become so jaded and stunted that she would come to define selfishness as “freedom” and the death of her own empathy as “objectivity.”  And I suppose I can understand why adolescent white males should flock to her philosophy as way of justifying their own unearned privilege in our culture.

As the American Libertarian Party became a snake pit of selfish sexist white males, it justified the freedom of men from any responsibility to the public sector, but not women’s right of reproductive choice over their own bodies. It justified the right of those born rich to exploit workers, but not the right of workers to unionize in self protection.

The word “republic” refers to our common life. A philosophy of selfishness cannot help but be a cancer to that public sphere.  It can be argued that not even Osama bin Laden has done as much to turn the American Dream into a nightmare as has Ayn Rand. I would go so far as to say that individualistic libertarianism is a perfect philosophy for fish and crocodiles, but is unfit for any higher mammal.

Unilateral military intervention is ethically dangerous for any nation, but is ethically fatal for a capitalist nation. Secret wars that begin with humanitarian concerns, quickly become business opportunities. There are many overlords we in the West could helpfully remove, but we should never forget that those thugs are usually products of earlier Western interventions, not symptoms of an inferior people needing to be rescued from themselves. In the past, the primary thing the West has rescued from Africa has been its natural resources. The fact that the continent richest in natural resources has the poorest people is a result of our own crimes, not proof of their inferiority. Any future interventions into that traumatized continent should be strictly bound by international law and submissive to the will of the African people as represented by legitimate governments.

To read more, click here.

Yes, I know it’s considered class warfare to point this kind of thing out. I know my place and defer to platinum and preferred customers as they stand on their six feet of red carpet before boarding a flight. As I enter my plane I shuffle my feet and avert my gaze as I pass my first class betters. But, it feels different when security laws are enforced differently for the higher and lower classes. I realize most shoplifters come from my class, but wasn’t bin Laden was one of theirs?
To read, click here.

Gail Dines is a feminist. She writes about pornography from a feminist perspective, which means her voice is usually ignored when mainstream media discusses the topic. What follows is her experience of being invited to be on MSNBC to discuss pornography only to be bumped for people who would be friendlier to the industry and more fun to listen to. Like capitalism or empire, the topic of our culture’s misogyny is too brutal to ever really be discussed because we refuse to leave our comfort zones for that long. Warning: she actually describes some of the practices that are overlooked when the topic is discussed by “friendly and fun” voices.

To read Gail’s article, click here.