January, 2007

“Ten Commandments” ex-judge writes day may be “already here when speaking out in love against sin … will become criminal conduct.”

Constitution Party reportedly considering Minuteman leaders Jim Gilchrist and Alan Keyes, and “Swift Boat” co-author Corsi, for 2008.

Calls bilingualism “worst kind of racism imaginable.”

To divine their “philosophy.”

Less than three months after ban passed in SD was rejected by voters, this measure would go into effect if Supreme Court overturns Roe.

Priests for Life head calls Brownback “hero for the unborn.” Meanwhile: Brownback introduces bill to stymie First Amendment lawsuits.

Montana bill would ignore national ID requirements, Maine urges Congress to overturn it. Also: Hawaii, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Vermont and Washington.

After weeks of campaigning at Right Wing events and jostling for the mantle of “most conservative” candidate, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback visited Iowa and struck a completely different chord:

Kansas senator and presidential candidate Sam Brownback said Tuesday that he would focus his campaign on issues that have a bipartisan consensus, a break from his trademark social conservatism.

"The political discourse automatically goes to the most difficult issues, and then we can't talk about them," said Brownback, in Iowa for the first time since announcing his bid on Jan. 20.

"I'd rather work on a core set of issues that we can agree on.

Brownback’s next stop was Michigan: This afternoon, he spoke at a conference of non-profit managers, where he apparently focused his remarks on alternative fuels. But the real test of the senator’s claim will come with reports of his speech this morning at Ave Maria Law School, founded by right-wing funder and Domino’s Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan. Monaghan has endorsed Brownback, saying he “doesn't want to be associated with anyone who’s going to compromise.” The topic of Brownback’s speech was the judiciary, and in the past few months, Brownback has tried to block a nominee who once attended a lesbian commitment ceremony. How will the new, “bipartisan” Brownback address his divisive actions in the Senate?

Vision America is angry about the new Alexandra Pelosi documentary “Friends of God,” a documentary airing on HBO that takes a look at the evangelical movement and, as the New York Times stated, serves as a “colorful reminder of how George W. Bush became president, why Fox News has the highest ratings of any 24-hour cable news network and why Democrats didn’t win an even greater landslide in the 2006 elections.”

Vision America’s Rick Scarborough reportedly appears in the documentary and is not happy about it:

The special, directed by Alexandra Pelosi (daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), focuses on every oddity imaginable -- including "Christian wrestling" and "Christian miniature golf" -- to make 80 million Americans from all walks of life seem freakish.

"I wasn't even aware that such things existed until someone alerted me that I was in the documentary and I began investigating it," Scarborough said.

…

"If you choose to watch 'Friends of God,' understand that what you are seeing is an attempt to denigrate evangelical Christians. Take it for what it is -- a cleverly packaged assault, designed to undermine the valuable contributions to our country of 80 million Bible-believing Americans," Scarborough cautioned.

Scarborough “wasn't even aware” of the Pelosi documentary?  Well, others at Vision America obviously were, judging by this giant announcement on their website:

If “Friends of God” is nothing but an “attempt to denigrate evangelical Christians,” why is Vision America trumpeting Scarborough’s involvement and providing its supporters with info on scheduling?

Last summer, when Washington, DC was suffering through a spate of murders, the Christian Defense Coalition responded by sponsoring “six days of around the clock prayer vigils under a large tent on the National Mall, from July 21 to July 26, seeking God to reduce the crime rate in the nation’s capital over the next six months.” 

Following the week-long vigil, the CDC announced that “there were no murders in Washington” during that time period, but then issued a correction stating that there had actually been one.    

Six months later, the CDC has returned to announce that its vigil was a rousing success:

The Christian Defense Coalition is delighted to report that there were 27% less murders in the final five months of 2006 compared with final five months of 2005.

The Coalition encourages churches across the nation to begin to reach out in public prayer regarding pressing social concerns facing their local communities.

Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Director of the Christian Defense Coalition, comments, “The Christian Defense Coalition promised at the end of July we would announce the numbers concerning Washington, D.C.’s murder rate for the final five months of 2006.  We are delighted to report, after a season of concentrated and regular prayer, there was drop in the murder rate of 27%.

CDC initially said it was seeking to reduce the “crime rate in the nation’s capital over the next six months,” though now it looks as if they have retroactively decided to cut it to five months – maybe because the DC murder rate in January is up 10% over last year.   

Incidentally, Mahoney failed to note that the murder rate in DC has dropped every year since 2002 and has dropped 65% since its high in 1991.

On top of that, he made no mention of the role that DC police undoubtedly played in lowering the murder rate:

This grisly sequence caused then-Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey to declare a "crime emergency," giving himself the power to reassign officers immediately to the times and areas where they were most needed. The declaration also prompted then-Mayor Anthony A. Williams to propose a broad package of anticrime measures.

In the end, the District Council gave the police $8 million for extra overtime, imposed a 10 p.m. curfew for youths 16 and younger, and authorized installation in high-crime areas of surveillance cameras and an acoustic shot-detection system.

Officials also took a number steps to increase public awareness. Inside buses and subway cars they put up posters bearing head shots of 20 young victims of gun violence, complete with names, life spans and the message: "Real guns kill real people."

In the months that followed, the number of homicides dropped. After 24 in July, there were 12 in August, 13 in September. And the numbers didn't spike when the police overtime money was spent and the emergency expired.

"I think all that was done mattered a great deal," City Councilman Jim Graham said in an interview last week. "I think if we hadn't spent the money, we'd be having a very different conversation today."

As more Republican politicians announce their presidential aspirations and seek to curry favor with the party’s right wing, the Right continues to question their credentials. This week, The Weekly Standard carries more accusations that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at one time took a moderate position on abortion and gay rights. (Romney is still working on his right-wing bona fides: He’s hired long-time religious-right attorney James Bopp.)  And when former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee announced on Sunday that he was forming an exploratory committee, anti-tax group Club for Growth was ready on Monday with a report questioning Huckabee’s commitment to “limited-government, pro-growth, free-enterprise policies.”

Huckabee is no stranger to the Religious Right. He’s a prominent advocate of teaching creationism in public schools, and along with fellow candidates Romney, Sam Brownback, and Newt Gingrich, Huckabee spoke at the Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Summit” last September, exhorting the crowd to be more positive but failing to set much of an example, saying of same-sex marriage, “Until Moses comes down from Brokeback Mountain with two stone tablets saying we've changed the rules, let's keep it like it is!”

The Club for Growth, an anti-government political action group dominated by Wall Street investors and executives, was the top-spending independent PAC in 2006, but spent most of its money attacking Republicans from the Right, attempting to purge the GOP of supposedly “liberal” politicians. While its efforts made it a number of enemies among other Republicans, the group’s willingness to spend millions to topple incumbents in vicious primary battles may have succeeded in establishing the Club as a feared and influential player on the Right. The group’s eager attack on Huckabee – who, the Club acknowledges, signed on to many of its pet projects, such as cutting the Arkansas’s capital gains tax – is likely to dog the former governor up through the primary, and it may cause some right-wing activists, already inundated with candidates competing for their favor, to look elsewhere.

Kansas Republicans have selected Kris Kobach, a law professor and anti-immigrant activist allied with the Religious Right, to be their state party chairman, widening the gap between GOP moderates and the Right that has already led some to leave the party and run as Democrats, including the current lieutenant governor and attorney general.

Kobach first made headlines shortly after September 11, 2001, when he played a leading role defining immigration policy under Attorney General John Ashcroft; Kobach was instrumental in implementing a mass registration and questioning of “enemy aliens” (as the World War II-era law put it) – predominantly legal immigrants and visitors from Muslim countries. He moved back to the Kansas City suburbs in 2003 to run for Congress, while at the same time launching lawsuits in Kansas and California against laws granting in-state college tuition to undocumented immigrants who live in the state, attended U.S. high schools, and are pursuing citizenship.

During his unsuccessful congressional campaign, he came under fire from his own party for extreme rhetoric during the GOP primary, and was criticized for special appearances as a “constitutional expert” in churches in the midst of campaigning, such as at several “pastors’ policy briefings” with Jerry Falwell in the weeks leading up to the general election.

Since then, Kobach has continued his campaign against in-state college tuition for immigrants and against the federal DREAM Act. He also took part in a handful of immigration hearings last year held by House Republicans who were pushing their draconian enforcement bill. Most recently, he joined the legal defense of local anti-immigrant ordinances in Hazleton, Pennsylvania and Valley Park, Missouri.

For weeks, the anti-immigration wing of the GOP’s base has been up in arms over the 10+ year sentences handed down to two border patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, for shooting an unarmed man as he attempted to flee in 2005.

WorldNetDaily has published dozens of articles about the issue, many written by Jerome Corsi, and FrontPage named Ramos and Compean its “People of the Year.”  The Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly attacked President Bush for refusing to grant the agents a pardon, as did Grassfire.org, which called the President a “fraud” and accused him of creating “an unbreachable chasm between his administration and millions of Americans who are concerned about our nation’s border security.”  Rep. Dana Rohrabacher even went so far as to invite Ramos’s wife as his guest to the recent State of the Union address in order to send "a powerful message" to the President.  

And it does not look like they have any plans to give up soon, as CNSNews reports that “Several members of the House are drafting legislation to cut off funding specifically for the incarceration of border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, sentenced to 11 and 12 years respectively.” 

The Right is livid because the man who was shot, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, was later discovered to have been attempting to smuggle nearly 750 pounds of marijuana into the country and was granted immunity in exchange for his testimony.  As Friends of the Border Patrol stated:

This ruling … is the most disgraceful act that I have ever heard of in the history of our great nation and both she and the prosecutors should be ashamed of themselves for taking the word of a drug smuggler, caught in the act, while ignoring the facts.

But not everyone on the Right is so willing to blindly defend Ramos and Compean.  In the last week, two separate right-wing publications hammered their erstwhile allies on the issue, accusing them of completely ignoring the agents’ obvious guilt.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, Republican candidates for president, have both been hard at work courting the Right Wing – from Romney speaking at “Liberty Sunday” to Brownback suiting up for the mythical “War on Christmas” to both signing Grover Norquist’s no-taxes pledge within a day of each other – and filling up their dance cards with endorsements from the Religious Right. Romney, though considered a more viable candidate, has been at a disadvantage in accruing right-wing points following revelations of his past support for gay rights.

Now, Brownback himself is questioning Romney’s right-wing credentials, reports CBN News:

“I think you have to look at where he stood on the issues and what he said publicly,"  Brownback said. “At times he's said different things on these issues. I think that's all going to come out during a long campaign."

Brownback wouldn’t flatly say if Romney is a reliable conservative. He said, “We'll see and that will be for him to discuss. I do think when we get out on the campaign trail and when the campaign really gets fully engaged, there's going to be a lot of discussion about where do people actually stand on the issues and where have they been and where are they now and how reliable are they to stay that way."

At the same time, CBN posted an article alluding to a similar problem haunting Brownback – his alleged pro-choice position at the start of his political career.

Presidential candidate Sam Brownback told CBN News that he's always been pro-life despite his decision to stay away from the pro-life label at the beginning of his race for Congress in 1994.

"I was in the same position in 1994 as I am today as far as being pro-life," said Brownback. "I didn't articulate then. I thought - and this is just getting into politics - that I would be better off saying the specific areas of the issue rather than 'Are you pro-life or pro-choice?'"

In particular, Brownback’s campaign said he had no recollection of telling Tim Golba, then president of Kansas for Life, that his position on abortion was “more in line with” that of pro-choice Sen. Nancy Kassebaum. The campaign has sent out a letter to supporters asking for job references: “Can I please ask those that are capable and willing to send me a testimonial quote highlighting Senator Brownback's work on pro-life issues?”

Both of these stories were reported by Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Robertson expressed enthusiasm early for Brownback, a point noted by conservative columnist George Will, reporter Jeff Sharlet, and others. Now, Robertson might be backing down a little bit, according to Sharlet.

To prevent courts from hearing cases on Pledge. Sponsor Akin has described it as part of strategy leading to impeachment of judges over rulings Congress doesn’t like.

Had been at issue in former AG Kline’s defeat. Activists cite Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly.

Walks line on immigration issue. “I am pro-immigration.” Meanwhile: Unsuccessful Senate candidate Michael Steele joins Newt’s GOPAC.

In State of the Union speech. But Heritage’s Lips wants to scrap No Child Left Behind. Meanwhile: Vouchers debated in Georgia.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins isn’t the only right-wing leader unhappy with President Bush’s State of the Union speech.

“We're disappointed that he didn't mention cultural issues at all,”