Emails

Earlier this week we noted that Rep. Randy Forbes had been a guest on James Dobson's new radio program where he unveiled his plan to create a series of state-level "prayer caucuses" that would monitor legislation, court rulings, and elected officials and mobilize activists to fight them.

The latest issue of World Magazine profiles Forbes and his Congressional Prayer Caucus and reports that he has already created one state-level caucus in Mississippi, with others in Virginia and Florida coming soon: 

Forbes says anti-faith groups have raised vast sums of money to pick fights with religious organizations. "For decades now people of faith have said, 'We are just working our own ministries, and we are going to wait and play defense when they come after us.' Our strategy is different. We think we need to push back."

To do so Forbes set up the nonprofit Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation to raise both awareness and money. The foundation's website, which asks churches and individuals to sign up to pray for the nation on a "digital prayer wall," also offers $5,000 annual memberships to a club called the "300"—a reference to Gideon's army in Judges.

The money funds Forbes' signature strategy: franchising out the Congressional Prayer Caucus concept to state legislatures.

Mississippi became the first state to partner with the caucus. Mississippi's GOP Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant spearheaded the effort after Forbes visited his office in February. At that meeting Forbes enticed Bryant by telling him Mississippi could help spread the movement around the country. "I immediately accepted the challenge because Mississippi is one of the most religious states in the nation," Bryant told me.

On April 22, a bipartisan group of more than three dozen Mississippi lawmakers crowded onto steps inside the state Capitol for a press conference on prayer. To make it official the state legislature even put it to a vote, unanimously passing in both the House and Senate a resolution that formed the state caucus. Next year a Senate Republican will lead the weekly prayer group while a House Democrat will take over in 2012.

Legislatures in Virginia and Florida are at work on similar partnerships.

It is through these state groups that Forbes hopes to change the debate over religion in public life. Many of the nation's legislatures already have prayer groups, but Forbes wants to bring them together into a nationwide network that tracks threats against religion. The D.C. caucus would serve as the clearinghouse where policy makers formulate and coordinate strategies.

"Here is the new world, if you send 100 lobbyists against us, we send two and a half million emails raising this issue," said Forbes. "Do you really want to fight that battle?"

Back in 2008, Gordon Klingenschmitt found a new crusade, demanding a reversal of the policy implemented by Virginia State Police Superintendent Col. W. Steven Flaherty telling policy chaplains to offer nondenominational prayers at department-sanctioned public events.

Chaps organized rallys protesting the policy, but to no avail ... at least until Bob McDonnell became Governor, who has now ordered the policy changed thanks to lobbying by state-based Religious Right groups:

After months of lobbying by conservative activists, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has quietly reversed a policy banning Virginia State Police troopers from referring to Jesus Christ in public prayers.

McDonnell this afternoon sent Col. W. Steven Flaherty, the State Police superintendent, to tell the nine troopers who serve as chaplains about the change in policy.

"The Governor does not believe the state should tell chaplains of any faith how to pray,'' McDonnell spokesman Tucker Marin said. "Religious officials of all faiths should be allowed to pray according to the dictates of their own conscience, and in accordance with their faith traditions, while being respectful of the faith traditions of others.

...

Donald Blake, president of Virginia Christian Alliance, said last week that he spoke to McDonnell about the change at a recent fundraiser at the governor's mansion and at a private meeting with McDonnell's chief of staff Martin Kent.

Other groups, including the Family Foundation of Virginia, also support a change and have been lobbying for one. The governor's office has received a handful of letters, faxes and emails in support of a reversal.

...

"We are obviously thrilled that Governor McDonnell has fulfilled his campaign promise to restore the religious liberty rights of state police chaplains,'' said Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation of Virginia. "His action reverses the discriminatory policy of the previous administration and ensures that chaplains can remain true to their faith at public events."

• Sarah Palin is writing another book, one that will "reflect on the key values—both national and spiritual—that have been such a profound part of her life and which continue to inform her vision of the future." I can hardly wait.
• The Arizona Republic looks at the behind-the-scenes influence the right-wing Center for Arizona Policy has in shaping public policy in the state.
• Do you ever get the impression that Mat Staver just doesn't like gay people?
• Thanks to the AFA, the Chairman of the NCAA Division I Board of Directors has been inundated with more than 40,000 emails protesting the NCAA's decision to drop the Focus on the Family ad from its website.
• The Traditional Values Coalition pretty much loses it over DADT.
• Finally, the quote of the day from Don Feder in a lengthy attack on CPAC: " Gay rights is about indoctrinating your children in behavior that would make a proctologist gag. It’s about criminalizing dissent via speech codes and hate crimes laws. It’s a frontal assault on First Amendment free speech and religious freedom. This is freedom only in the sense that killing unborn children is choice."

Gary Bauer reports the shocking news that Sarah Palin is the Religious Right's choice for President in 2012:

My Inbox was overflowing this morning with responses to yesterday’s question on preferred presidential candidates in 2012 – and they are still pouring in. But as my staff worked furiously to sort through the barrage of e-mails, two things stood out.

First, I was surprised by the wide range of names that came back. Granted we asked a very open-ended question, but folks obviously are thinking outside the box and willing to consider many options. Quite a few people insisted on a fresh face, such as Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, who tied for fifth place with Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Other suggestions included Senators John Thune and Jim DeMint, as well as General David Petraeus.

Nevertheless, the final results were quite surprising. There was a spirited contest for second place with Mike Huckabee edging Mitt Romney, while Newt Gingrich finished fourth. But to say there was a clear favorite is an understatement. In fact, one individual got more votes than the other 23 names combined. If my emails and her book sales are any indication, Sarah Palin has a very bright future indeed!

And it's not just emails to Bauer that Palin dominates, as she's also running away with this OneNewsNow poll:

I think the GOP should just do away with its primary process entirely and simply pick its next presidential candidate based solely on the contents of Gary Bauer's email inbox. 

Of course, in 2000 and 2008, Bauer was John McCain's biggest (and pretty much only) Religious Right supporter... and that didn't work out too well for McCain either time.  

In yesterday's "Newscall" post on the Family Research Council's "Cloakroom" blog, Krystle Weeks, FRC's web editor, included this item:

HotAir.com asks a good question: Does Obama plan to spy on social networking sites? After all, CNet, there is a bill proposed in the Senate that would give the President emergency control of the internet.

I have a question of my own:  did Weeks even bother to read the Hot Air article?  Because if she had, she would have known that Hot Air was not "asking" this question, but was rather debunking this claim, which is being circulated by the National Legal and Policy Center:

NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites.

The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”

Ed Morrissey points out that NLPC's claims are entirely bogus:

I’m not sure that highlighting a public contract offer amounts to “uncovering” a conspiracy, especially since their analysis turns out to be faulty. Contrary to NLPC’s take, the contractor would be collecting data required to be kept by the White House — by law.

...

Which brings us to the common-sense check on the rumor. How much time and resources would it take to effectively monitor every entry on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and every blog in the blogosphere? And to do that secretly, while archiving all of it? The NSA would have to take that on full time, and even then … best of luck just keeping up with the archiving, let alone surveillance ... [T]his is nothing more than a big, pointless archiving project, one which may stimulate the economy of a handful of people, but otherwise inconsequential. There are a lot of good reasons to be worried about the Obama administration, but this doesn’t appear to be one of them.

Note to Weeks: if you are going to try to spread unfounded rumors about the Obama administration, be sure to link to the people creating those rumors, not the people debunking them. 

• The Religious Right's healthcare webcast was held last night and you can listen to the audio here. It was apparently such a success that the Family Research Council has decided to hold its own webcast next week.
• Boy, it seems like Republicans can't even send around racist emails about President Obama any more with getting into loads of trouble.  What is this world coming to?
• Al Mohler explains why the Southern Baptists aren't going to be changing their stance on the role of women in the faith any time soon: "Ultimately, I'm not so fearful that the times will judge us as I'm aware that God will judge us, and I hope with all my heart that he will find our church is faithful to his word."
• Alan Chambers talks to Focus on the Family about his new book Leaving Homosexuality: "The key thought here is the opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality. It’s holiness. There are people who are conflicted with their sexuality, involved with homosexuality, and there is a way out for those who want it. But it doesn’t say that they’re going into heterosexuality, because that’s not the point. The point is that people can leave whatever it is that God calls less than His best and move into something that is His best, becoming more like He is."

Yesterday we noted that Manuel Miranda and his Third Branch Conference (formerly known as the National Coalition to End Judicial Filibusters) had returned and sent a letter to Republican Senators demanding that they carry out a "traditional filibuster" against Sonia Sotomayor.

Though the letter was signed by more than a hundred right-wing leaders and activists, Miranda is and always has been the leader of these efforts ... and now he's taking his demands one step further:

[I]n an interview with POLITICO, Manuel Miranda – who orchestrated the letter – went much farther, saying that Mitch McConnell should “consider resigning” as Senate minority leader if he can’t take a harder line on President Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee.

Miranda accused McConnell of being “limp-wristed” and “a little bit tone deaf” when it comes to judicial nominees.

"Limp-wristed" seems to be Miranda's insult of choice when it comes to sitting US Senators, because it is the same term he used in attacking Sen. Orrin Hatch several years ago when Hatch refused to defend Miranda when he was forced to resign from his positon on the Hill when it was learned that he had improperly obtained hundreds of internal Democratic memos:

I do admit that reading Democrats' documents on an unprotected server to help defend the president's embattled nominees was political hardball, and I have learned that one shouldn't play hardball with a limp-wristed team captain. 

It seems as if Miranda is not only calling out leading Senators like McConnell, but other right-wing judicial groups as well:

Miranda also declined to ask the Judicial Confirmation Network, one of the leading conservative judicial groups, to sign on to his letter, calling the group “an arm of [Republican] leadership” in the Senate.

Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network said the group is not affiliated with the leadership and said she didn’t “really understand” the comment.

Now, we'll agree that the JCN is essentially an arm of the Senate Republicans, but they have also been among the most vocal critics of President Obama's judicial nominees David Hamilton and Sonia Sotomayor.  They've also led the charge against several of his Department of Justice nominees, including Dawn Johnsen David Ogden, and Elena Kagan.

While we obviously have fundamental disagreements with the Judicial Confirmation Network, nobody can deny that they have been leading the right-wing opposition to President Obama on these issues and have a far greater impact than does Miranda and his gaggle of letter-signers.  

And it seems as if Miranda's superiority complex is, not surprisingly, starting to alienate people:

Miranda, now the chairman of the conservative Third Branch Conference, served as counsel to McConnell’s predecessor, then-Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist. He left that job in 2004 amid allegations that he improperly accessed thousands of memos and emails from Democratic staffers – circumstances McConnell’s supporters recalled as they pushed back hard against Miranda’s arguments Monday.

“It’s unfortunate that one disgraced former employee of previous Senate leadership has decided to air out his grievances rather than join the conservative effort to examine Judge Sotomayor’s record,” said a senior GOP Senate aide. “Not only did this guy steal the Democrats’ playbook, he seems to be implementing it.”

I've written several posts recently debunking the claim that the James Dobson and, by extension, the Religious Right are about to throw in the towel. While the Republicans are out of power at the moment and the Religious Right is growing fearful that it is being marginalized as the GOP seeks to regain its footing, that didn't mean they had any intention of giving up the fight.  As Dobson put it recently, "we're not going anywhere."

And they aren't, but it looks like the Right's irrelevance at the moment is starting to absolutely terrify its leadership. That's because, as Dan Gilgoff reports, Dobson is admitting that they have no power at the moment and cannot prevent the "utter evil," by which he meant things like hate crimes legislation, coming from Congress from getting passed and he literally cannot understand what is happening to this nation:

I've been on the air for 32 years and I've never seen a time quite like this. It just illustrates what happens when we don't have what the Founding Fathers referred to as checks and balances, where the excesses of one party or one branch of government limit the reach of power hungry and self-serving people and keeps them form doing things that are harmful to the country. That's the way the system was designed. We have 2 major political parties in this country, not one. And bipartisanship is a media creation that's designed to promote one point of view instead of the debate that should occur. And that's why media doesn't talk about bipartisanship when conservatives are in power...[today] the radical left controls the executive branch through the president, and the Congress... and the Judiciary through the courts... now they control it all, including every department of government. As a result, the legislation that should shock the nation, if people were paying attention, is being rushed into law.

...

I want to tell you up front that we're not going to ask you to do anything, to make a phone call or to write a letter or anything.

There is nothing you can do at this time about what is taking place because there is simply no limit to what the left can do at this time. Anything they want, they get and so we can't stop them.

We tried with [Health and Human Services Secretary] Kathleen Sebelius and sent thousands of phone calls and emails to the Senate and they didn't pay any attention to it because they don't have to. And so what you can do is pray, pray for this great nation... As I see it, there is no other answer. There's no other answer, short term.

Of course, this isn't to say that Focus on the Family isn't trying to prevent passage of hate crimes legislation, because they are. 

In fact, Dobson dedicated most of his program to this legislation as he was joined by Tom Minnery, Gary Bauer, Rep. Louie Gohmert, and Rep. Steve King, who then proceeded to spread just about every right-wing lie about this legislation. Listening to the program, the sense of panic among the group was palpable:

Dobson: I love my country. And I love the institution of the family. And I love the church. And I love the clergy. And almost every good thing is under attack today.

Gohmert: And I'm told sometimes, when I get passionate and upset about this, that I don't sound as sane as I would like to.

Dobson: Are you kidding? What you're doing is desperately needed and there are very few people who are willing to say it like it is.

Bauer: We need about 250 members of Congress as insane as you.

Gohmert: But, you know, this is the way we lose nations. It's like Colson said several years ago: "you cannot have the morality of Woodstock and not expect a Columbine."  Or not expect a Madoff. You can't have those morals and not get where we are today and so we've got a tough fight ahead of us, but I know in my heart, in my soul, that we can have another 200 years, but there is only one way - and that's if we have another awakening.  If we don't, I'm not sure what's left.

Dobson says he's "never seen a time quite like this" and I have to agree because I have never seen the Religious Right as utterly terrified as it is at the moment.

Update: Media Matters has posted this clip of Dobson once again claiming the legislation would protect necrophilia, pedophilia, and incest:

One of the “perks” of this job is that we end up on lots of right-wing email lists and then our email addresses are sold to others who use those lists to pitch all sorts of fringe ideas and products, which means that our inboxes get cluttered with rambling, over-the-top messages like this one recently sent out through Townhall:

This briefing is a critical, time-sensitive warning.  Please read what I am about to say carefully, because your very life may depend on it.

A whole lot of already shell-shocked people are going to learn the hard way that the veneer of “civilization” is far thinner than most realize.

U.S. Preparing a Military Response to Coming Social Chaos

As the shocking confidential information contained in this briefing shows, the threat of social meltdown and chaos is so large a domestic law-enforcement arm of the U.S. military (referred to by The Army Times as the "Consequence Management Response Force") has been created to deal with what U.S. officials believe to be a coming, unprecedented wave of massive social chaos.

Later I'll show you why many Washington insiders (including officials directly involved in homeland security) are personally making emergency preparations for social chaos. In addition, outgoing Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told Sen. James Inhofe and Rep. Brad Sherman that so much financial mayhem lies ahead U.S. troops may have to impose martial law to deal with social unrest.

Yes, U.S. Officials Are Quietly Preparing for BIG Trouble Ahead

A new report by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute states flatly the U.S. military must prepare for "a violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States" that could be provoked by "unforeseen economic collapse" or "loss of functioning political and legal order."

Late last year, The Washington Post noted the incoming Obama Administration is going to "earmark" at least 20,000 troops returning from Iraq to deal with "domestic emergencies." Since then, the Army Times has broken the story that the domestic emergency army unit has been increased to 80,000 troops, who are being trained right now in Georgia.

In short, U.S. officials expect big trouble ahead — but they are not warning the general public about the danger (much less urge the unsuspecting masses to make basic preparations).

A rare critic of the government's keep-the-public-in-the-dark mentality is former head of the U.S. Commission on National Security, Stephen Flynn.  He noted in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial: "Too many officials believe telling the truth to Americans about the risk would set off a nationwide panic. Thus, they keep us sheep in the dark for our own good."

Boiled down, you need a real plan to deal with massive social dislocations that are headed our way. And you need to get started right now, because the government isn't going to give you a heads-up.

My name is Lee Bellinger, publisher of the monthly financial, health, and taxation intelligence advisory Independent Living. In my two decades of publishing discreet information about threats to your liberty, health and prosperity, never before have we produced as important a document as my best-selling Social Chaos Survival Guide: Smart, Savvy Precautions To Make You Self-Reliant in These Dangerous Times.

This is literally the first one-tenth of the email, which goes on for another fourteen pages and five thousand words.  It’s not even worth trying to debunk this nonsense because it is a) so obviously insane and b) too easy … like merely pointing out that quote attributed to Flynn comes from a five year old op-ed he co-wrote with Warren Rudman, Leslie Gelb, and Gary Hart urging Congress to stop playing politics with the Department of Homeland Security and its spending priorities.

But on and on it goes about how society is about to “come completely unglued,” food, gas, and medicine are going to disappear, and that the government will be forced to unveil a “draconian response to social chaos … when all hell breaks loose.”  

But of course, there is hope in the form of Bellinger’s “Social Chaos Survival Guide” which tells you how to stockpile food and water, plan your escape route, and live off the land … all for the low price of $79.

And here’s where it gets really odd:

Enter your risk-free trial subscription to Independent Living for two full years for a mere $79 (24 information-packed issues at an inflation-busting rate) and I will rush you the 2009 edition of my Social Chaos Survival Guide. And as always, this offer comes with my full guarantee of your total and complete satisfaction.

So society as we know it is about to disintegrate, but Bellinger can offer me a “risk-free” subscription of his insights? And a two year one at that? When the world crumbles, how exactly is Bellinger still going to be able to not only produce his books, newsletters, and DVDs, but also get them delivered to me?  To where, the cave I’m living in?

Anyway, the most entertaining aspect of this screed is just who Bellinger seems to think his target audience is, considering that while we received it via Townhall, it has also been sent out to Newsmax and GOP USA readers as well.