AddieStan

Andrew Sullivan just made an amazingly ignorant comment while psychoanalyzing, on "The Chris Matthews Show," the leader of the arguably free world. President Bush's problem, Sullivan asserted, is that, as "a recovering alcoholic," the president sees everything as either black or white, and therefore cannot deal with all "the grey" that has occurred over the course of the last few weeks.

It seems that Mr. Sullivan is in need of a 12-step refresher course. It is drinking alcoholics who typically have the black-white worldview; in most recovery programs, alcoholics are taught to accept nuances (key phrase: accepting life on life's terms).

Persuant to your blogstress's previous post on the nation's presidential primary set-up, herewith some useful statistics on race within the states discussed. Numbers represent the percentage of people who, on the 2000 Census, identified themselves as "Black or African American":

12.3 percent - United States of America

02.1 percent - Iowa

00.7 percent - New Hampshire

06.8 percent - Nevada

13.6 percent - New Jersey

The notion of an early presidential caucus in Nevada (advanced, of course, by favorite son, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) seems to be gaining ground among Democrats. From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - Democrats were lobbied hard by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and organized labor before they picked Nevada as the best bet to energize the party's early presidential voting in 2008.

A Democratic rules panel on Saturday recommended that Nevada hold a caucus after Iowa's leadoff contest in mid-January 2008, but before New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary. South Carolina was awarded an early primary a week after New Hampshire.

While this would probably prove to be something of a bone-warming respite for us frostbitten reporters who flock to Des Moines and Manchester in January, your blogstress offers an alternative, if only slightly less frigid, plan. Rather than have all the early candidate-settling voting taking place in states with unique characteristics, why not have an early primary contest in a state that is a virtual microcosm of the nation as a whole? Your cybertrix speaks, of course, of her beloved home state of New Jersey.

An early contest in Jersey makes sense in all kinds of ways -- not least of which, your Webwench's delight in being so near to her homies. But dig this: in terms of racial and ethnic make-up, as well as land-use mix and economic diversity, N.J. really does come closest of all the states to offering an electoral topography that is representative of America's.

New Jersey is also served by two major media markets, New York and Philadelphia, and is geographically small enough to traverse in three hours, in any direction.

Furthermore, unlike New Hampshire and Iowa, New Jersey has enough black people to constitute actual African-American communities. If the first three contests amount to New Hampshire, Nevada and Iowa, it would give the appearance that the major parties did not want black people anywhere in the mix of the early voting that determines who the actual candidates are. And we wouldn't want that, now, would we?

(Just asking.)

Your blogstress has a new essay posted at The American Prospect Online that offers a suggestion for how to do just that.

CLICK HERE TO READ "FIGHTING RIGHT" AT THE AMERICAN PROSPECT ONLINE

Reader Steve Bartin asks:

How does the religious left overcome the fact that it has lost over half its' membership since 1980? While the RR has grown? What went wrong with the RL?

Well, Étienne, mon ami, your blogstress must dispute your analysis that "religious left" has lost half its membership since 1980. A certain group of churches -- mostly mainline Protestant denominations -- may have lost a number of congregants, but to contend that they make up the whole of the "religious left" is a mistake. And they have lost no where near to half.

Because of the querant's lack of specificity, your cybertrix presumes that he refers to the much-vaunted membership drop in the mainline Protestant churches, a group comprising the Episcopal Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church USA.

While all but the Presbyterians have suffered losses, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives, the losses suffered by the others since 1989 range between 4 and 20 percent:

Episcopal Church USA

1980 2,786,004

2000 2,333,327

Loss: 452,677


Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

1980 5,384,271*

2001 5,099,877

Loss: 284,294


*Comprising Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, Lutheran Chruch in America and the American Lutheran Church, which merged in 1988 to the present-day Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.


Presbyterian Church USA

1980 3,262,086**

2001 3,455,952

Increase: 193,866

**Comprising United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and Presbyterian Church in the US, which merged in 1983.


United Methodist Church

1980 9,519,407

2001 8,298,145

Loss: 1,221,262


United Church of Christ

1980 1,736,244

2001 1,359,105

Loss: 377,139

Although it is fashionable to attribute these drop-offs to the liberal actions of the main church bodies (with regard to acceptance of gay and lesbian people, ordination of women, support for affirmative action, immigrant rights and a woman's right to choose), a greater use of birth control among women in the liberal congregations when compared to their conservative and right-wing counterparts seems to have had the most profound effect on membership numbers in the mainline churches, where populations are showing their age.

The rest, I believe, can be chalked up to the fact that we live in a time of great change and great fear, and the mainline churches rarely offer the worshipper a visceral experience of the divine in the same way that evangelical and Pentecostal churches do. Nor do they offer scapegoats -- gays, immigrants, blacks, uppity women -- on which to hang those fears.

President Bush just conducted a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at which the president conceded that more troops are needed in Baghdad. So, he's going to move some in from elsewhere in Iraq.

For his part, Maliki declined, when offered the chance via a reporter's question, to condemn Hezbollah.

Earlier in the day, the U.S. Senate's Democratic leaders called a press conference (via Real Player) of their own at which they warned Maliki that he's no friend of ours if, in his scheduled address to a joint session of Congress tomorrow, he neither denounces Hezbollah or his earlier plan to grant amnesty to insurgents who have killed U.S. troops. [Maliki's criteria for amnesty, according to Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) exclude only those who have shed Iraqi blood.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said he planned to attend the joint session, but would leave it up to the consciences of the individual senators as to whether or not they would stay away in protest.

CLICK HERE FOR WHITE HOUSE TRANSCRIPT OF REMARKS BY BUSH AND MALIKI

Meanwhile, in answer to Hans Johnson's missive on the defeat of Ralph Reed in the Georgia GOP primary for lieutenant governor, one of your blogstress's favorite writers reached out with this eruption:

Only the most delusional liberal could see Ralph Reed’s glorious defeat as anything other than Republicans cutting their losses. These people will chew off a foot to avoid losing the Senate or House in November, and they don’t need another high-profile grifter in the mix, even if he’s not running for Congress himself. The GOP threw Reed in front of the train, not the progressives.

--Yellowboat

Okay, Y, but what do you really think?

When your blogstress wrote, for The American Prospect Online, an essay in which she threw up her hands at the notion of a cohesive, politically effective religious left, she knew not what she had done. Somehow, she managed to anger religious people on both the left and the right, and places in between.

Your écrivaine based her conclusion on the latest turmoil in the Episcopal Church over the place of lesbians and gay people in church life, deducing that while all the mainline Protestant churches in the US remain engaged in similar internal battles, there is no hope for producing a religious left movement that is up to doing full-scale battle with the forces of the religious right.

It is your cyberscribe's description of the Episcopalians' travails that rankled the Rev. Glynn C. Harper of Christ Church in San Augustine, Texas, who writes:

Dear Ms. Stan:

I am writing to tell you that I have seldom read as misinformed and misleading an article on any subject as your article "A Schismatic Canterbury Tale," which appeared as an opinion on the CBS News web site.

Not only were your statements evidence of a basic ignorance of the issues involving gays and lesbians in the church, but the entire thrust of the article was not merely misleading but, in fact, untrue. It would be difficult to point out all your errors of fact in the time I want to waste on refuting the article, but first of all the Archbishop of Canterbury has not even come close to "put[ing] forward a proposal for the schism of his own church." In fact, in an address he made to the synod of the Church of England, he has specifically rejected such an interpretation of his remarks.

Secondly, the statement that "half of the church’s 38 provinces to break with the its U.S. governing body, [has deprived] the latter of financial support" is either a complete fabrication on your part or evidence of the most profound ignorance.

The Episcopal Church is totally self-supporting and in fact is a major provider of funds for poorer provinces in other parts of the world, including the Anglican Church in Nigeria, whose archbishop Akinol is one of the Episcopal Church's major critics for its actions regarding the place of gay people and women in the body of Christ. The Anglican Church in Nigeria, may be the largest province in the communion in terms of membership, but it is also one of the poorest in terms of resources.

The greatest falsehood in your article, however it to suggest that the Episcopal Church is in any way near collapse. While it is true that the diocesan bishops of seven of the over 100 independent dioceses of the Episcopal Church have asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to provide "alternative oversight," which would remove them as part of the Episcopal Church, there is no indication whatever that the Archbishop of Canterbury will do so or, in fact, that he has the authority to do so. His position in the Anglican Communion while influential is without authority over any of the autonomous provinces of the Communion. It is extremely unlikely that he would jeopardize his position of influence by undertaking an action that would not only offend the Episcopal Church, but the Anglican provinces in Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and South Africa as well as other moderate and progressive Anglican provinces who in some cases have been even more progressive than the Episcopal Church.

To place the problems in the Episcopal Church and other Protestant denominations in the United States as being central to a collapse of liberal Christian sentiment is to grossly misrepresent the facts and to indulge in pure fantasy. I hope you will belatedly research the subject you have written about so incorrectly and write an article apologizing for your ignorance and misinformed assertions.

Sincerely,

The Reverend Glynn C. Harper
Vicar, Christ Church, Episcopal
San Augustine, Texas

Your blogstress does concede that she got the issue regarding the Episcopal Church's funding apparatus wrong, the result of haste and attendant sloppiness on her part. She is most sorry about this, both for having misinformed her readers and for the resulting impression that she is something less than impeccable in her journalistic habits. On the rest of her assertions, however, your net-tête is far less yielding.

MORE TO COME

Earlier this week, mes amis, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was taken to task by Senator Patrick Leahy, ranking Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, for the administration's thwarting of an inquiry, undertaken by DoJ Office of Professional Responsibility Director H. Marshall Jarrett, into the role of Justice Department officials in signing off on the administration's domestic spying program, which is being conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). Jarrett's inquiry was undertaken at the request of members of Congress, but was quashed by none other than President George W. Bush himself, according to Gonzales.

The indefatiguable Murray Waas has led the reporting on this constitution-crushing executive branch gambit.

Herewith you will find the attorney general's response to the committee regarding the stymied investigation and, more importantly, three memos penned by Jarrett expressing his frustration that his investigators were denied the security clearances they needed to complete the investigation, which was closed without conclusion. Your blogstress directs you to pages 7 and 8 of the posted PDF file, wherein Jarrett observes:

Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving Executive Branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at the highest levels. In all those years, OPR has never been prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation.

NOTE: If you have a problem with the embedded links, try clicking here: Jarrett-Gonzales-NSA-memos.pdf

Your blogstress's good friend (and certified hottie -- see photo #5) Hans Johnson, president of the data and strategy firm Progressive Victory, writes to remind us of a little-celebrated victory enjoyed by progressives this week: the defeat of GOP strategist and former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed in his primary race for his once-certain spot on the ballot as the Republican candidate for the office of lieutenant governor of the great State of Georgia. Seems that progressives were able to leverage the unravelling story of Reed's role in the Jack Abramoff scandal to liberal advantage. Herewith, Mr. Johnson's missive:

It is with relief and some reflection that we can all celebrate the defeat of Ralph Reed, purveyor of prejudice and candidate for Lt. Gov. in Georgia, in yesterday's GOP state primary.

His trouncing by a nearly 4-3 margin statewide in a primary vote -- where a late poll showed him running neck and neck with his opponent -- is testimony to 2 important dynamics:

1. The combined charges of intolerance, influence-peddling, and his corrupt profiteering through Abramoff schemes dented his moralistic armor. Evidence and journalistic exposé do indeed have an impact; they dissuaded even conservative GOP primary voters.

2. The hordes of allegedly malleable right-wing voters over which he enjoyed supposed dominion failed to materialize on his behalf. The notion of a spoon-fed, easily-led religious conservative voting bloc is a stereotype, fostered by lazy reporting, against which Reed has often railed. Yet he has also fed this myth when convenient, and sought to exploit it throughout his career.

On Tuesday, it exploded in Reed's face. A group of crossover Democratic voters who deliberately took a GOP ballot to vote against Reed may have played a role in the margin of his loss. Credit for this bump in anti-Reed votes goes in part to savvy Georgia activist Christie Ayotte; her wry encouragement to dump Reed through strategic voting ricocheted around the Web in the 48 hours before the vote.

The vote totals in the Georgia primary races should also give Democrats some heart -- and an added kick in the pants - heading into the fall. "D" total primary turnout in several bellwether races exceeded "R" turnout by 5 and in some cases 10 percent. At the very least, this shows Democrats to be viable against conservatives' operation in a state that many national progressives have wrongly written off for dead (Zell Miller rants still echoing in their memories). Democrats should not have to rely on such small margins for consolation in the state that sent Jimmy Carter to the White House, and which did not have a post-Reconstruction GOP guv till '02. But so it is. In short, the state is still competitive.

National Democrats neglect the Peach State at their peril. Republican strategists are eyeing it as another laboratory for redrawing state congressional lines. In the wake of the June Supreme Court ruling allowing mid-decade redistricting, their knives and scissors are sharp, should the GOP capture the state House of Reps. this fall and retain the state Senate and guv seat.

Dems have now moved back to near parity (seven R, six D) in the federal House delegation, after having sunk to just three seats before 2002. An '07 DeLay-mandering of the state might once more reduce them to that level. That would be a loss of three House seats, so the stakes are high. For progressives, there are strong federal and state grounds for keeping Georgia on our minds -- and in our contribution plans -- this election year.

In solidarity--
Hans

CLICK HERE TO READ HANS JOHNSON ON RALPH REED AND WHITE SUPREMICISTS

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM HANS JOHNSON AT IN THESE TIMES