MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: April 6, 2008

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April 12, 2008

Ex-Bushie Still Pounding the Pavement

Loyalty took no one so far in the Bush administration as Alberto Gonzales. But eight months after he resigned amid allegations of possible perjury and enabling arguably unconstitutional activity, the former Bush administration attorney general still cannot find a job, the New York Times reports:

Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.

He has, through friends, put out inquiries, they said, and has not found any takers. What makes Mr. Gonzales’s case extraordinary is that former attorneys general, the government’s chief lawyer, are typically highly sought. ...

Despite those credentials, he left office last August with a frayed reputation over his role in the dismissal of several federal prosecutors and the truthfulness of his testimony about a secret eavesdropping program. He has had no full-time job since his resignation, and his principal income has come from giving a handful of talks at colleges and before private business groups. ...

The greatest impediment to Mr. Gonzales’s being offered the kind of high-salary job being snagged these days by lesser Justice Department officials, many lawyers agree, is his performance during his last few months in office. In that period, he was openly criticized by lawmakers for being untruthful in his sworn testimony. His conduct is being investigated by the Office of the Inspector General of the Justice Department, which could recommend actions from exonerating him to recommending criminal charges. Friends set up a fund to help pay his legal bills.

The price of loyalty indeed.

On Joss Whedon, Male Feminist

How I wish I'd remembered to link to this when I wrote earlier this week about the misogyny of the Horton Hears A Who movie.

It's Joss Whedon, the man who gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer (go ahead and laugh—LOVED it), Angel, Firefly, and much more. Here's a guy who builds killer vehicles around strong, female protagonists and gets rich.

It's his acceptance speech for an award from Equality Now and is one of the best indictments I've encountered of media pack mentality, intellectual laziness, and the near impossibility of having a national conversation around sexism.

Problem is: people think merely asking a seemingly feminist question, while tuning out on the answer, will suffice. Also, the speech is hilarious. Whedon is riffing about all the poseur 'journalists' who interview him and ask the same question, one to which they clearly never do more than type up the answer: How come you write about such strong women?

Enjoy, with my compliments.

April 11, 2008

Updated: Obama's Hebrew Blog

Earlier today I passed on the news that according to Israel's Ynet news, Barack Obama today became the first US presidential candidate to start a Hebrew blog.

But an Obama aide, Sam Graham-Felsen, has since been in touch with my colleagues to say the new site is not an official one. "Some supporters made it on their own," Graham-Felson writes. "Obviously any official blog would be on barackobama.com and I would know about it." Oy vey, the perils of blogging. My apologies.

John McCain's Age: An Issue?

Yesterday, the DNC released some internal polling it conducted on John McCain. There's nothing groundbreaking — some people know a lot about McCain, some don't; some can be swayed by new (presumably negative) information about McCain, some can't — but there is one interesting observation. When swing voters are asked about McCain, the "most frequently volunteered concerns" are his age (19%), his position on the Iraq War (18%), his support for continuing the policies of the Bush Administration (10%), and his positions on economic issues (8%).

That first number is pretty stunning: nearly twice as many people are worried about McCain's age — he'll be 72 in August — than his manifold similarities to a failed president who has an approval rating hovering around 30 percent.

But will the Democrats make an issue of McCain's age? Not according to party chairman Howard Dean, who said yesterday, "I doubt we will bring it up in the election." Dean tried to portray the decision as a moral one: "There is somewhat of a higher ethical bar on what we do. We don't have any Lee Atwaters or Karl Roves on our side." In reality, Dean is probably unwilling to risk upsetting the AARP vote, which turns out reliably and doesn't want to hear that an energetic man of its age should be disqualified from holding office. Age discrimination, and all that.

That doesn't mean age won't be an issue. There will be independent liberal groups, not to mention liberal blogs, that will be all too happy to suggest McCain is "too old-fashioned" or "out of touch with modern views." Heck, even the Democratic nominee can play this game — a surrogate can "accidentally" make a comment that inserts age into the national debate, and then apologize the next day after the damage is done.

And of course, every story and blog post that debates whether age should be an issue makes age an issue.

I'm Not Crazy, Sexism Is

More, as if we were running low, on sexism, its pervasiveness, and its actual effect on its victims.

From mindhacks.com:

Female anger at work seen as worse, a character flaw:

Psychological Science has just published an eye-opening study that found that women who express anger at work were thought of more negatively than men and were assumed to be 'angry people' or 'out of control'. Male colleagues who did the same were typically viewed in a more positive light and were assumed to be upset by circumstances.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)

So who's crazier: a woman who expresses basic human emotions appropriately based on relevant stimuli? Or the man who 'sees' anger differently based on the presence, or lack, of a penis on said angry person. But wait, female evaluators also came to the same conclusions when observing angry people in the workplace. Men get angry. Women go insane. And are professionally punished for it.

Medical Nonprofit Designed for 3rd World Helps Here at Home

This is a heartbreaking look at the uninsured and underinsured in America, and one nonprofit that is doing what it can to help them. If you've got 13 minutes, watch it through the end — the last two minutes are excellent.

If you were looking for a place to make a charitable donation...

Petraeus for Prez? Not Likely

The four-star tries to put this rumor to rest.

Exclusive: Read the Internal Documents Exposing the Former Secret Service Agents Who Went Through Greenpeace's Trash

A Mother Jones exclusive investigation has revealed that a security firm run by cops and former Secret Service agents spied on Greenpeace, Fenton Communications, the Center for Food Safety, and other progressive groups. The most interesting company communiques you weren't supposed to see? Check out the glow-in-the-dark Taco Bell emails and the handwritten notes about which green groups to dumpster-dive in D.C. We've made them public for the first time; they're available on the site here. You'll have to read James Ridgeway's story itself to find out about the Mary Kay cosmetics, Obama, and Scientology angles, though.

Yes, it's weird. Wait'll you get to the Greenpeace undercover operatives part.

BBI also conducted background checks for the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm; provided "protective services" for the National Rifle Association; handled "crisis management" for the Gallo wine company; engaged in "information collection" for Wal-Mart. It conducted background checks for Patricia Duff, a Democratic Party fundraiser then involved in an acrimonious child custody battle with billionaire Ronald Perelman. And for Mary Kay, BBI mounted "surveillance" and vetted Gayle Gaston, a top executive at the cosmetics company (and mother of actress Robin Wright Penn), retaining an expert to conduct a psychological assessment of her. Also listed as clients in BBI records? Halliburton and Blackwater.

April 10, 2008

Watch Bitter Enemies Make Nice on Bloggingheads.tv

Not really, but it's a great example of how we reach across the color divide to figure out how to learn to live in peace with each other. It's a video of me and Ross Douthat of The Atlantic. It was fun and I actually learned useful things about the quote-unquote white POV.

Iran: Sabers and Sobriety

Much has been written already about General David Petraeus' and Ambassador Ryan Crocker's two days of marathon testimony on Capitol Hill this week, including plenty about the degree to which they also testified about Iran's influence both in Iraq and in the greater Middle East. Petraeus was quick to call Iran's influence in Iraq "malevolent", but less quick to reconcile that influence with the fact that Iran is on friendly terms with the U.S.-backed Iraqi government. Just hours after the two men wrapped up their show, President Bush kicked up the rhetoric. According to the Times> of London, "President Bush warned Iran [] that if it did not stop arming and training Shia militia in Iraq then 'America will act to protect our interests and our troops.'"

Interestingly, while Petraeus and Crocker sat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, the National Iranian American Council hosted a conference, drawing on the expertise of journalists, scholars, former chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), to examine America's best options if it seeks to keep Iran's nuclear weapons program dormant. Iran, which recently claimed to be installing 6,000 new centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, could restart its weapons program, and preventing that, the guests noted, will likely require direct U.S. diplomatic engagement with the Islamic Republic.

That process would no doubt have an impact on Iran's influence in Iraq, and it might well prove to be a positive one. "Iran recently proved helpful in brokering a ceasefire between Prime Minister al-Maliki and Moqtada al-Sadr’s JAM militias in Basra, Feinstein noted. "Clearly, a more positive relationship with Iran might be helpful in stabilizing Iraq." That ceasefire is by no means destined to hold, and will by no means solve the fundamental political rifts that keep Iraq ablaze. But it has knocked violence down noticeably, which is something all sides no doubt welcome.

What Does Mike Huckabee Have Up His Sleeve?

I suspect that good dude and total crazy person Mike Huckabee is going to be in our lives for a while. Why? Because this development has to be connected to this little mystery.

Update: Let me add that I have high expectations for Mr. Huckabee. I think he could be the king of all (Christian) media if he doesn't get sidetracked by some quixotic FairTax crusade.

McCain Gets the Boot From Project Vote Smart

Project Vote Smart, the nonpartisan voter-education nonprofit, confirms today that it has kicked John McCain off its board. Mother Jones reported on Monday that PVS was prepared to make the move due to McCain's nine-month refusal to fill out its Political Courage Test. According to PVS President Richard Kimball, the nonprofit has a rule that bars nonrespondents from serving on its board.

PVS contacted the McCain campaign 25 times from June 2007 to February 2008 in the hopes of avoiding the embarrassment this move entails for both the organization and one of its long-time board members. Eventually, however, they were simply left with no choice. The senator who made his career on straight talk couldn't spare some for the organization he served.

You can see the full story in Monday's report.

Bush Limits Iraq Tours to 12 Months—Too Little, Too Late?

Bolstered by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker's assurances that progress is being made in Iraq, if a bit slower than they'd like, President Bush this morning announced that he plans to cut Army combat tours from the current 15 months to 12 months, restoring the pre-surge pace of deployments. The President also officially embraced Petraeus' recommendation that the Pentagon freeze troop levels at 140,000 this July, pending "a 45-day period of consolidation and evaluation," followed by "a process of assessment" before any further withdrawals take place. The strategy will effectively end the recent build-up of troops, returning the U.S. military's Iraq posture to what it was in January 2007, before the surge began.

The move to reduce the duration of combat tours enjoys the support of Bush's supporters and critics alike. Questions remain, however, about how the new 12-months tours will be implemented in practice and whether they will be sufficient to help the Army recover from the intense strain of its recent Iraq experience. Both the Army and the Marine Corps, the services bearing the brunt of the fighting in Iraq, have complained that the pace of deployment has severely undercut their overall readiness and, particularly in the case of the Army, may even threaten the future of the all-volunteer force. Following on his recent appearance on the Senate side, General Richard Cody, the Army's outgoing vice chief of staff, testified yesterday afternoon (.pdf) before the House Armed Services Committee, where he repeated his warning that the Army is "out of balance" and the current demand for its forces "exceeds the sustainable supply."

Cody's concerns may not be eased by today's decision to return to 12-month tours. According to the Washington Post:

Bush's decision will affect only those troops sent to Iraq as of Aug. 1 or later, meaning that those already there still have to complete 15-month tours. Bobby Muller, president of Veterans for America, an advocacy group, said that nearly half of the Army's active-duty frontline units are currently deployed for 15 months, and that Bush's decision leaves them out.

"In short, this is a hollow announcement; it has no immediate effect," Muller said. "It is nothing more than political posturing at the expense of our troops. Our soldiers are unraveling and they need their commander in chief to provide immediate relief."

House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) applauded Bush's move. "But it only resets us to where we were last winter," he added. "This pace will still wear our troops out." Ilan Goldenberg, a scholar at the National Security Network, said on a conference call organized by antiwar activists that Bush cannot portray the move as a sign of progress. "The military is so strained, the president really didn't have a choice," he said.

Cody earlier testified to the Senate that, in order to maintain the Army's readiness, tour cycles of 12 months on, 12 months off (like the one Bush announced this morning) would likely not be enough. "Where we need to be with this force is no more than 12 months on the ground and 24 months back," he said, an unlikely proposition given Petraeus' recommendation that troop withdrawals be indefinitely suspended in July. Be that as it may, Cody is not alone in sounding the alarm. The National Security Network, in advance of this morning's press conference at the White House, compiled a list of warnings from senior military leaders about the negative impact of Iraq deployments on the nation's armed forces. Read it here.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from klika100.

ABC: Top Bush Advisors Were "Personally Involved" in Planning Interrogations

You already knew that there was no way John Yoo was shooting around memos authorizing interrogation techniques that amount to torture without the White House and Bush's top advisers knowing about it. Now ABC News proves it — they have Cheney officially signing off and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft asking, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

That's the kind of administration this is: John Ashcroft is the most reasonable guy in the room.

More Evidence of John McCain's Naiveté on the Economy

John McCain has an economic plan for this country that could only be thought up in the mind of a Republican: somehow balance the budget while cutting taxes and continuing the war. That McCain's plan should strike any reasonable person as impossible is irrelevant: all McCain or any other Republican needs to do to brush those fears away is claim that cutting taxes generates money for the government in massive, fantastical ways.

But what's particularly dangerous about McCain is that he doesn't seem to understand his own voodoo economics.

When Senator John McCain was asked here this afternoon how he plans to balance the budget, he said that he hoped to do so by stimulating economic growth – and approvingly cited the example of President Ronald Reagan.

There was one thing he did not mention during his response: the deficit nearly tripled during the Reagan presidency, partly due to tax cuts and increases in military spending.

If you're going to pretend like supply-side economics work miracles, don't use the perfect counterexample as your example! You can read the full context of the episode, which happened at investment firm Bridgewater Associates, at the New York Times.

April 9, 2008

Multimedia Essay: The Torch's Secret Trail

UPDATE: /photos/monk-tank-500x331.jpg Hear the subject of this photo, and others in the photo essay, speak here. Read more coverage of the torch relay events by Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson here and here.

In a day of raucous protests and angry confrontations, human rights activists stalked the Olympic torch through the hilly streets of San Francisco in an elaborate game of cat and mouse. As planned, the torch was lit shortly after 1:00 p.m., but a phalanx of bodies clogging the streets prevented it from proceeding down the anticipated route along the downtown shoreline. Instead, a different torch was driven across town to Van Ness Avenue, a rolling artery that divides the city, where it proceeded towards the ritzy Marina District under the heavy cover of SUVs and motorcycles.

Shortly before the relay was scheduled to begin, a group of pro-Tibet activists blocked a bus that they believed to hold the torch. Laying down in the street as the driver and passengers made calls on cell phones, the activists draped themselves in Tibetan flags and chanted, "Long live the Dalai Lama!" The bus windshield had been smashed into a spider web but police wouldn't say who'd caused the damage. A few minutes later a man in an orange bandanna flashed a text message on his iPhone, announced that the torch was elsewhere, and some of the crowd dispersed.

Throughout the day, activists who'd poured in from around the country relied on text messages to keep time in a complicated dance with police. When a text announced that the relay had been relocated, I hopped on a bicycle and followed a demonstrator as he pedaled down a hill with a Tibetan flag fluttering behind him. We passed throngs protesters sprinting towards the new torch route. After awhile I asked if he knew where he was going and he said, "I have no idea, I'm from Minnesota." Even so, he found the new relay route in a matter of minutes.

Many protesters who gave up the chase took out their frustrations on a large group of pro-China demonstrators. Looking at times like opposing rugby hooligans, groups wrapped in Chinese and Tibetan flags squared-off on the street in protracted shouting matches. When a pro-Tibet protester shouted, "They will pop your head with a tank in China!" a young man with a Chinese flag painted on his cheek shot back: "Don't make use of the Olympics, terrorists!" By the end of the day several minor scuffles had broken out, but as of press time no major injuries were reported.

Many pro-China demonstrators had been bused to the event by the Chinese Consulate and Chinese-American groups from as far as Los Angeles and carried identical-looking signs and flags that suggested a coordinated effort to promote China's message. Still, others were native to the Bay Area and had come on their own. Chinese officials had chosen San Francisco for the torch's only stop in North America in part because of its large Asian populations and strong ties with country. Hongyu Li, the owner of a solar panel business in nearby Palo Alto, wanted to prevent the same kind of disruptions that plagued the torch relays in Europe. He wore a trucker hat with an image of the Chinese flag on the front. "I'm kind of angry," he said. "I think a lot of people are here because of what happened in London and Paris."

Demonstrators with Save Darfur, who'd adorned a section of the supposed torch route with green signs and green balloons, looked like they'd wandered out of a Saint Patrick's Day parade. They mostly declined to join the Free Tibet protesters in acts of civil disobedience or nationalistic shouting matches. Wearing a traditional Jalabiya robe and clutching a makeshift Olympic torch of his own, Sudanese refugee Mohamed Yahya told me the Sudanese army burned his village and killed most of the 1500 residents, including his family. In the years since, China has fueled the genocide in Darfur by buying the country's oil and selling it arms. He scoffed at the idea, expressed by many pro-China demonstrators, that the Olympics shouldn't be politicized. "It is not only a time to use the Olympics as a symbol of unity," he said, "it is time to use them to save the lives of the people of Darfur and Tibet. Only then can we celebrate the Olympics in Beijing."

Throughout the day it often seemed that some San Franciscans, being San Franciscans, had shown up simply to carry on the city's grand tradition of protest. Along the route, a three piece brass band played a morose polka for no apparent reason. A pro-China demonstrator waved a makeshift sign, fashioned from a golf club, that mentioned Iraq and deception and was topped off by a large stuffed teddy bear. And the recreation of the original naked Grecian torch relay was all the buzz (though, like the main relay, hard to find).

Even here in San Francisco, though, some activists complained of civil rights violations. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that protesters were turned away from some locations but police disputed the assertion. And the sudden, unannounced change in the route angered the ACLU, which on March 13th had filed an open records request seeking a map of the relay route and any changes as they became available. “We are dismayed by what appears to be an unnecessary and unconstitutional end run around the First Amendment,” Maya Harris, Executive Director of the local chapter of the ACLU, said in a press release. “If the route was changed at the last minute because of serious threats of violence, that would be one thing, but we have serious concerns that the route was changed to avoid the protesters.”

Of course, some of the protesters were impossible to avoid. Near the end of the relay, a torch bearer suddenly unfurled a Tibetan flag, according to a text message sent out by Free Tibet. As other protesters began to catch up to the torch along its new route, the closing ceremonies were canceled and the torch whisked off to the San Francisco airport. Loaded onto a China Airways flight, it will land in Buenos Aires, still flickering enough to start another fire.

What If There'd Been Fox News or CNN During Slavery?

If nothing else results from the conversation America is having, however dysfunctionally, about Rev. Wright and Obama's speech, we can't help but learn to take the black church seriously as the ultra-complicated reality it truly is. It's not just about rousing gospel songs, old ladies in big hats, and ministers foaming at the mouth—all insulting sins even I have long committed.

I was raised a hard-core black Protestant and considered myself well versed in its contours, but I now find myself challenged and informed in ways I'd never expected. I never really understood the significance of the black prophetic tradition, or that it even was one. Nor did I properly understand or evaluate the schism that the modern black church's focus on prosperity, vice prophecy, represents. That history is rich and troubling. It also situates the black church at a Gladwellian tipping point; will the current controversy silence the voice of black prophecy and strident critique and replace it with a 'feel good, get rich' religiosity to which whites won't object?

From CNN this week:

The contemporary white church has largely accepted King as a religious hero. Yet some observers say there is one religious community that continues to shun King—the largest black churches.

Forty years after his death, King remains a prophet without honor in the institution that nurtured him, some black preachers and scholars say.

They also say King's "prophetic" model of ministry—one that confronted political and economic institutions of power—has been sidelined by the prosperity gospel.
Prosperity ministers preach that God rewards the faithful with wealth and spiritual power. Prosperity pastors such as Bishop T.D. Jakes have become the most popular preachers in the black church. They've also become brands. They've built megachurches and business empires with the prosperity message.

Black prophetic pastors rarely fill the pews like other pastors, though, because their message is so inflammatory, says Henry Wheeler, a church historian. Prophetic pastors like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, often enrage people because they proclaim God's judgment on nations, he says.

"It's dangerous to be prophetic," said Wheeler, ...

Rev. Wright would certainly offer a hearty amen to that. And to this brilliant, beautifully written piece by Kelefa Sanneh in the April 7th New Yorker. I've read this very long piece three times now, along with Glenn Loury's eloquently indignant response to Obama speech and...boy does my head hurt. I praised Obama to Katie Couric loud and long for his Black But More Than Black speech, and I now have to admit, as publicly as I entered the fray, that I didn't know what I was talking about.

I wasn't wrong entirely, just far from well informed enough to be taking stands. My analysis was simplistic and inadequate. It makes me nerd-happy now to be getting the schooling I need to be a worthy voice in this national consciousness-raising. I'm also happy to have helped enrage enough well-informed, fearless thinkers to set us all straight. We've all got a lot to learn about each other (not to mention, ourselves) and Hallejuah! we're having the full frontal dialogue which alone will make ours a more perfect union.

I've always been baffled by blacks' fervent embrace of Christianity during, and certainly since, slavery. Christianity justified slavery! Though I was raised in the church, mine wasn't a Wrightian one. Our preachers were 'jack leg'. No theological training, or even much beyond a grade school education, Jim Crow sharecroppers that they all were. Our only requirement was that they'd been 'touched by God' and 'called to preach'. Drive a cab or work the assembly line by day, lead a flock come Sunday.

My religious training at Emmanuel Missionary Baptist, and others like it in the St. Louis inner city circuit, was about how dreary this life was, and that its only point was to persevere until we got our eternal reward in the great by and by. Far from prophecy and denunciation of white supremacy, classism, or god forbid sexism, we were exhorted to humble ourselves, wretches that we were, before an inscrutable God whose decision to stake us to the bottom of the totem pole was not ours to critique. That was blasphemy! Which was a word hurled at us routinely. My church years were the 1960s; my mother ignored the Movement and my father furiously opposed it. "Those knuckleheads need to take they fists out the air and get jobs!" Both were afraid that whites would be so enraged by the calls for change that we'd end up worse off. Back picking cotton, I guess. My five siblings and I were totally shielded from those wild political times; both the Movement and Vietnam raged throughout my childhood. I didn't know a thing about either until I was in college. When change came, no one was as thunderstruck as my two uneducated manual laborers.

So you'll understand why the prophetic tradition takes me by surprise. No one was taught to be as humble, self-effacing, grateful, silent, and well-mannered as an inner city black girl in the 60s, so the Wrights of the world seem...rude to me. Suffer in silence he does not. I abandoned my religion because it was so passive and determined to make me keep my peace in the world. What if I'd been exposed to a Wright?

Now I see the line that connects those 'rude, kinda crazy' Christian leaders one to the other—Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Dr. King...Jeremiah Wright? I'm not saying that Obama is now wrong and Wright is, you know, right. I'm saying that most of us have a lot more articles to read and a lot more nuances to incorporate into our opinions. Giving black religiosity its due as the voice of a historically oppressed group might be a good place to start. We have to ask ourselves—is black anger still legitimate? If no, discussion over. If yes...? As Jesse Jackson once quipped, "you can't tell a man who's hurting how to holler."

I'm beginning to understand how the slaves and the Jim Crow'd had to embrace Christianity&mdashwhat else could get them through those terrible days? But ain't nobody stupid; the hypocrisy of Christianity was quite obvious to them. They wouldn't have been human had they not found a way to surrender into its soothing embrace while also fashioning it into a militant counter narrative that told the truth on America and racism. Why wouldn't we be angry and open to 'seeing' America's flaws?

You must read Sanneh's piece. Here's a long excerpt that will force you to engage with it in its entirety. Unless you already know everything about black religiosity. You know, like me:

"Christianity is the white man's religion." That was Malcolm X's verdict, and though he meant it to be final, a generation of black Christian leaders decided to treat it as provisional. In 1969, a thirty-one-year-old theologian named James H. Cone published "Black Theology & Black Power," a short, astringent book that Wright would use as a blueprint for Trinity. Cone proposed a reciprocal arrangement: just as the Black Power movement could find redemption in the Church, so the Church—dominated and distorted by generations of white men—could find redemption in the Black Power movement. He wrote that there was "a need for a theology whose sole purpose is to emancipate the gospel from its 'whiteness' so that blacks may be capable of making an honest self-affirmation through Jesus Christ." And he argued that, since African-American suffering was such a powerful metaphor for the suffering of Christ, color-blind Christianity was a contradiction in terms. "To be Christian is to be one of those whom God has chosen," he wrote. "God has chosen black people!" ...Cone was careful to explain that a black-centered Church need not be a black-separatist Church. And even the simplest phrases—"black people," for instance—turned out to be slippery. It wasn't about being "physically black," he wrote. "To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are." In his view, blackness was as radically inclusive as Christianity itself, and just as demanding. ...

"It was the riots in Detroit, in Newark, both in '67—that was what shook me," he recounted. "I said to myself, 'I have to have a theology that speaks to the hurt in my community. I want a theology that would empower people to be more creative. To be just as aggressive as they are in the riots, but more constructive.' "

The doctrine he laid out was a response, too, to the paradox at the heart of black Christianity: the new religion of enslaved Africans was also the old religion of the American enslavers. In abolitionist tracts (like David Walker's "Appeal") and slave narratives, black writers struggled to find a way to distinguish between righteous Christianity and its monstrous opposite. Frederick Douglass, in an appendix to his "Narrative," earnestly assures readers that he is not an atheist, then redoubles his attack on the theology of slaveholding America: "Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked." (Or, rendered into cable-news crawl: "CONTROVERSIAL MEMOIRIST ATTACKS RELIGION. DOUGLASS: AMERICAN VALUES 'WICKED.' ")

San Francisco Dispatch: The Torch's Gauntlet of Protesters

The outcome of today's Olympic torch relay in San Francisco could determine whether the torch will continue along its planned route—the longest in Olympic history—or be cut short due to the boisterous, disruptive protests that have accompanied it in Athens, London, and Paris. International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge said the Committee's executive board will discuss on Friday whether to end the relay after this afternoon's event, which is shaping up to be a tense stand-off between police and protesters.

The City of San Francisco has called in extra law enforcement officers from the California Highway patrol and nearby suburbs, banned flights above the city and boats near the waterfront where the torch will pass, and sequestered the the flame in an undisclosed location. During the relay the city plans to encase the torch in a three-layer babooshka doll of police officers: cops on foot, cops on bikes, and cops on motorcycles. If protesters still manage to block the relay, the city will load the torch onto a boat and sail around them.

Only once crowds begin to line the route this afternoon will anyone be able to tell whether San Francisco is in for the same experience as Paris. An activist with Save Darfur in Paris told me roughly 15,000 protesters showed up for the torch relay there. Organizers in San Francisco predict half as many. Some American activists, particularly on the left, are reluctant to protest China's human rights record while the U.S. government continues to occupy Iraq and operate Gitmo. Moreover, many leaders of San Francisco's Chinese-American community (Asians comprise 30 percent of the city), see the protests as a pall on what they'd hoped would be Chinese-American community's moment in the sun. Near the start of the route this morning, protesters exchanged shouts with supporters of the Chinese government as police stood between the two groups. San Francisco was chosen as the torch's only stop in North America because of its sizable Chinese-American community, but the strength of feeling on both sides could prove to be a powder keg of a kind not seen across the Atlantic.

Few people (other than Chinese officials) dispute the protester's grievances: In Darfur, where a government-sanctioned genocide has killed 400,000, the regime buys arms from China with money earned from selling it oil. China returns the favor by defending Sudan from scrutiny by the U.N. Security Council. Similarly, in Burma, China sells arms to the ruling Junta even as it imprisons pro-democracy activists. In Tibet, China refuses to speak with the Dalai Lama about greater cultural and religious freedom for the region even though he long ago met the government's demand to relinquish calls for Tibetan independence. Add to this rap sheet the qualms of Reporters Without Borders and Falun Gong and it's easy to see (in retrospect) why the road to the Olympics is sprinkled with land mines.

In the Olympics of ancient Greece, feuding nations set down their arms for a few days of peaceful battle in the discus ring. Opponents of the torch protests long for that ideal (if not for the original naked torch relay that a group of San Francisco nudists plans to recreate), but they also ignore how the Olympics has become a global P.R. tool, helping enrich big business and tighten China's grip over its citizens. With imperial chutzpah, China plans to carry the torch over Mount Everest and through Tibet. Any unrest this inspires among Tibetans is sure to be censored on Chinese television just as were the protests in Europe. Downplaying the attacks on the torch in Paris as the work of seperatists, one Chinese paper cheered that the torch was met with "French Passion."

So far, San Franciscan passion hasn't disappointed the human rights crowd. Yesterday's dramatic unfurling of a "Free Tibet" banner on the Golden Gate Bridge (after activists smuggled the it onto the span in baby strollers) won't be the only big surprise during the torch's U.S. visit, Free Tibet activists have said. The major activist groups have urged their supporters to be peaceful and respectful of the Olympics, but the the pattern of escalation (competitive derring-do, even) seems to have been well in place since London.

Mother Jones photographers and reporters will be on the scene. Stay tuned for a dispatch from the streets later this afternoon.

Asbestos Company Settles, Leaves Montana Residents in the Dust

W.R. Grace & Co., the mining company responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Libby, Montana residents, is finally going to pay for the damage it did. Well, sort of. On Monday, the company reached a $3 billion settlement with the families of people killed and those made ill by asbestos from the company's vermiculite mine between 1963 and 1990.The problem is the effects of asbestos don't immediately present themselves, so Grace's battle with Libby residents should be far from over because future diagnoses and lawsuits are sure to arise. But this week's settlement encompasses all future lawsuits as well, meaning current and future victims are going to get measly sums. The company isn't saying how it will calculate everyone's share but if the $3 billion were to be evenly dispersed to settle only the existing 120,000 lawsuits, each victim would receive $25,000. And that doesn't even account for the folks who will undoubtedly contract cancer and other asbestos-related diseases in the years to come. As the company's vice president told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Grace "want[s] to get on with business."

Mother Jones investigated the presence of asbestos in Eldorado Hills, CA in our May/June 2007 issue. But unlike the people in Libby, residents there only have government officials and themselves to blame.

—Celia Perry

Former Polygamist on Polygamy

It's been five days since authorities raided the Yearning for Zion Ranch, a compound outside Eldorado, Texas owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Tipped off by a phone call from a 16-year-old girl who said she had been repeatedly "beat and hurt" by her middle-aged husband, the cops stormed Yearning for Zion and took 419 children into custody, accompanied by 139 of their mothers, into custody.

To be sure, Yearning for Zion sounds like a horror show. But is it polygamy's fault? I mean, "the principle" seems to work okay on Big Love, right? I wanted a plural marriage expert to weigh in. After an admittedly quick Internet search, I decided on John Llewellyn, a retired Salt Lake County Sheriff's Lieutenant who has been involved with a bunch of polygamy investigations. Once he started talking, though, it was clear that Llewellyn had some pretty strong opinions about plural marriage, and with good reason: He used to be a polygamist himself.

At the beginning of his career with the Salt Lake City Sheriff's Department, Llewellyn and his young family became active in Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (the Mitt Romney kind of Mormons; they will be the first to tell you that they have noting—they said NOTHING—to do with polygamy). A young single mother asked him to be her children's godfather, and somehow that turned into a request to be his second wife. To Llewellyn's surprise, his first wife acquiesced, and thus began his involvement with the Apostolic United Brethren. He quickly discovered that polygamy wasn't for him—he didn't like how it pitted women against each other. Twenty years later, he left the church with his second wife. (His original wife, he says, chose to be "the fifth wife in a more affluent family.")

Since then, Llewellyn has written several books about life in polygamist communities. These days, he's made it his mission to spread the word about the evils of plural marriage, which he calls "a barbaric custom...to accept it is like going back to the Middle Ages." And he's given up church life, too. "I don't want anything to come between me and God," he says. "If there is a God, I'll handle my own salvation. I don't need a pope or a prophet to come between me and God." I asked Lewellyn a few questions about the Yearning for Zion raid, and, uh, he didn't mince words. Q&A after the jump.

Me: What's so bad about polygamy?

John Llewellyn: It's unnatural for a woman to want to share her husband with other women. The typical woman who converts to polygamy is a single mom who has had a bad relationship, and she is struggling. She finds that in becoming a plural wife there is some security and unity and she is accepted. It's a hard lifestyle. There's jealousies, and when these pro-polygamists tell you they're no longer jealous, that's malarkey. There's always jealousy and competition for who is going to be the favorite wife, or the dominant wife, and which children are going to be the favorite children.

Me: The Texas authorities have known about this for a while. Why did they just raid now?

JL: I haven't been in touch with them, but I think because of my law enforcement experience I can tell what is happening. It appears to me that they were waiting for something like this to happen. You have to have probable cause before you can go onto this private property. The phone call established that probable cause. Once on the property, they couldn't help but observe these young pregnant girls. So all the stories they heard had been confirmed. They had to take some action. They would have been derelict if they hadn't. What they are doing is what Utah should have done years ago, but they were timid because of the debacle that occurred in 1953 when they raided Short Creek. Everything backfired on them, and public support was with the polygamists because they had photos of law enforcement tearing little babies out of mothers' arms.

Me: They haven't found the teenager who made the call yet. Do you think she's real?

JL: I think she really exists. It sounds very credible, what she has said. It was two days before they entered the premises looking for her, and that would have given them ample time to get her out of there, and they've done that in the past with young, rebellious women. She might be in Canada now, she might be in one of several places. They have communities in South Dakota and Nevada, for example.

Me: What consequences would she face on the ranch if they found out she had made the call?

JL: She would be isolated, shipped off someplace, locked up, and continually brainwashed until she finally submitted. This is standard procedure. They don't like these young girls leaving because of what they could say.

Me: They've taken 419 children from the ranch into custody. What'll happen to them?

JL: They can't deprive those children of their parents without some good reason. I think in the meantime the big challenge for the Texas authorities will be to change the kids' thinking. These children have been raised to believe that the government and the nonbelievers are their enemies. They're going to have to convince those kids that there's a better life outside. But to be free is really quite scary when every aspect of your life has been controlled. These kids are brought up to believe that if they leave the group they will go to Hell.

Me: Have you seen the show Big Love? Is it plausible?

JL: In some respects. But that family, they are the exception, rather than the rule.

Obama Swamping the Airwaves; Plus, the Expectation Game in PA

Wow:

Barack Obama has spent a record breaking $60 million to run more than 100,000 political television ads in pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, a new analysis conducted for CNN shows.

In contrast, John Kerry ran a little more than 19,000 TV ads four years ago in his successful bid for the Democratic nomination, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG, CNN’s consultant on political television advertising spending.

Kerry wrapped up the nomination in the first week of March 2004, while there is no end in sight in the battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton for the right to be the 2008 Democratic nominee.

Clinton, who trails Obama in fundraising by about $60 million, has run just over 60,000 TV ads in her bid for the White House.

Also, it appears that Obama is making a massive, massive ad buy in Pennsylvania — three times the size of Clinton's. I guess he thinks he might as well go for the jugular: the polls show PA tightening, and if he can pull out a surprise victory there, the campaign is effectively over.

That won't stop the Clinton campaign from spinning, however. "If Senator Obama is not able to win Pennsylvania," said Howard Wolfson on a conference all today, "it will again demonstrate that he has serious problems winning the large states and serious problems closing the deal with voters." Wolfson also said it would be a "significant defeat for [Obama]" if he can't come out ahead in PA. Hard to ignore that 20-point gap from a month ago, though.

On 5th Anniversary of Iraq Museum's Looting, New Attention to Antiquities Trafficking

Iraq's National Museum, home to artifacts of the world's oldest civilization, was looted five years ago tomorrow. A collection of academics, lawyers, law enforcement officials, and former military personnel commemorated the anniversary with the release of a new book, Antiquities under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War, and an event for interested parties at the National Press Club. That included me.

The invasion of Iraq actually did surprisingly little damage to Iraq's historic sites, in part because McGuire Gibson, an expert on ancient Mesopotamia based at the University of Chicago, gave the military coordinates of thousands of sites it should avoid on its way to Baghdad. "Iraq is Mesopotamia," said Gibson, who spoke at the Press Club. "It is the root civilization for all civilizations." The military did make mistakes, however. On April 10, looting of the Iraq Museum began and, due to a lack of postwar planning (and due to the Bush Administration's unwillingness to treat culture like a legitimate facet of post-war reconstruction), it took six days for American soldiers to show up to help museum staff defend the premises. In all, 15,000 items from the Museum's collection disappeared or were damaged. Theft and vandalism occurred at archaeological sites across the country.

Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine colonel, led the effort to investigate the looting of Iraq's artifacts and to secure their return. Speaking at the Press Club today, Bogdanos showed slides of stolen or damaged artifacts from the Iraq Museum — the first naturalistic depiction of a human face in stone, for example — that could be found nowhere else in the world. Speaking of the unique nature of Iraq's treasures, Bogdanos said, "Everything in Iraq can be prefaced with the word 'first.'"

The reason why people like Bogdanos are needed to investigate the looting is because theft by neighborhood thugs is only the first step is a sophisticated chain that eventually puts fine artifacts in the hands of wealthy buyers in New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. Smugglers who traffic guns and drugs across the Middle East also carry high-value historical treasures: Bogdanos identified one artifact that had traveled from Baghdad to Damascus to Beirut and then to Geneva. Tracing that network and working to end it is a full-time job for units within the American military.

Many of the artifacts from the Iraq Museum have been recovered and restored. The point, the speakers at the Press Club agreed, is not Iraq. The point is calling attention to antiquities trafficking and its ability to destroy a nation, likely already ravaged by war, by stealing its history and culture. The book provides procedures and strategies that can protect historic sites and artifacts in future war zones. The world's preservers of culture — monuments, museums, libraries, and archives — are an underlooked casualty of war. The group behind Antiquities under Siege aim to change that.

House Democrats Go Soft on Petraeus, Crocker

Following on yesterday's lackluster performance by their Senate colleagues, House Democrats, if this morning's Armed Services Committee hearing is any indication, will show themselves to be equally cowed by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the top-ranking military and diplomatic figures in Iraq, and just as unwilling to bring serious challenge to the larger theme promulgated by the morning's testimony—namely that, while "reversible," security (if not political) gains in Iraq are real and the result of an enlightened strategy. Certainly, in this morning's hearing, Democrats failed to subject their witnesses to the sort of aggressive questioning we might have expected from a party that took control of the Congress determined to challenge Bush administration policy in Iraq and, as of last summer, remained determined to affect significant short-term troop withdrawals.

This is not say that there was no loyal opposition to the Petraeus/Crocker message of cautious optimism, but simply to call attention to how exceedingly, excessively, and deferentially loyal it was. Perhaps the most significant challenge to the administration's narrative came from Rep. John Spratt, Democrat of South Carolina, who used his allotted five minutes to display charts showing the tremendous cost of the war to date, as well as projections from the Congressional Budget Office (the Pentagon refuses to speculate on such things) that by 2018, assuming troop levels have already declined to 75,000 by 2013, the U.S. government will have shelled out more than $2 trillion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The point, Spratt said, was that "whenever you spend $2 trillion on one thing, you don't have it for something else"—whether that "something else" is stepped up operations in Afghanistan, reinvestment in the strategic readiness of U.S. forces for future high-intensity conflicts, or any number of other things you can imagine the federal government might do with a couple trillion bucks.

Don't get me wrong, the war's costs are certainly an important consideration and one that, as with so many things, highlights a significant miscalculation by the Bush White House in its planning for the war, but complaints about dollars and cents lack emotional force and are far from the sharpest arrows in the Democrats' quiver. If they want to reignite the Iraq debate, why not concentrate on how, five years after the invasion, tonight folks in the Green Zone will be sleeping under their desks to avoid incoming mortar and rocket fire? Why not focus on how our arming of Sunni militias, as beneficial as it may be in the short-term, could fuel an ethnic civil war after our departure from Iraq? Why not hammer away at the continuing lack of readiness among Iraqi security forces, as demonstrated by their recent embarrassment in Basra? (When asked about the latter, Petraeus deflected the question with praise for the Iraqi military's growing logistical capability. "The deployment was very impressive," he said, and "never could have happened a year ago.")

Yes, it seems the fire and brimstone the Democrats promised has become a drizzle. Rather than aggressive questioning from an outraged Congress, the only real challenge Petraeus and Crocker are likely to face in their one remaining appearance, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee this afternoon, may simply be to stay awake through the many hours of softballs being tossed in their direction.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from dbking.

Tick, Tock: Time Running Out on McCain's Membership on Non-Profit's Board

As Mother Jones reported Monday, the nonpartisan voter-education non-profit Project Vote Smart (PVS) has spent nine months trying to get John McCain to respond to its Political Courage Test. The test is a survey that PVS sends to state and federal c