Why is this organized destruction of the reputations of innocent people allowed to go on like this? The DA down there should be bringing all the powers of the justice system to bear on this group of jihadists like a ton of bricks.  Arrest Grisham immediately for libel, criminal harassment, and violating citizens’ constitutional rights of life and liberty under the law.

The first amendment shouldn’t protect this crap. They can spend the rest of their lives compensating their victims for the injury and suffering they’ve caused. Not another person should be terrorized by these law-breakers. I have two words for this so-called Army of God: David Koresh. It’s past time to line up the battle wagons against Grisham and his goons.

Wrong country, wrong century, wrong god. Unacceptable on every level. Only twisted religious freaks could believe Jesus would ever endorse this kind of hate and persecution. Oh, and Grisham is also a security guard at a nuclear weapons storage facility? Great. General Ripper meets Randall Flagg. No reason to be concerned about that.

Here’s what you do, Dave. Move your operation to a repressive place like Iran. You’d fit right in over there. Of course, you’d probably have to switch religions. Better yet, save yourself the inevitable court costs and legal fees and drink the Kool-Aid now.

It’s disgraceful that the City of Amarillo is evidently content to do nothing but watch this happen to their neighbors. And always shameful to see some employers in town piling on the people who were libeled instead of turning against the holier-than-thou inquisitors. That they still have a long way to go in Texas has sure become a tiresome observation.

Reverbo

Critic-At-Large

Courtesy Spiegel Online.

Electric cars, intelligent washing machines, mini power plants in your basement: Germany is on the verge of an energy revolution. SPIEGEL ONLINE looks at the latest developments in the smart grid and how it will change the relationship between consumers and energy suppliers.

The power grid of the future is one of humanity’s boldest visions. Gigantic wind farms in the sea and enormous solar fields in the desert are to generate the bulk of our power in the years to come. But consumers and companies are also producing energy with mini-power plants in their own basements and solar panels on the roof. And intelligent appliances are saving energy in our homes: washers, dryers and refrigerators that communicate with each other wash, dry or cool when electricity is cheapest. The information age is arriving at a new level: It’s becoming the electricity age.

The electricity age is imminent in six German regions: The technology of the future for smart energy management is going to be developed and tested, under the label E-Energy, in several cities. A number of projects will kick into high gear this month. Tens of thousands of homes and hundreds of companies are expected to participate in the field tests. Research will be conducted into the possibility, for example, of homes that can largely produce all the electricity required by a household, as well as energy exchanges that enable consumers to sell any excess, self-produced and environmentally friendly electricity at a profit back to the energy grid.

Together with firms like Siemens, SAP, IBM and energy giants like EnBW, RWE and Vattenfall, Germany’s economics and environment ministries have already mobilized €140 million for the development of the associated technologies and the tests. The government has provided €60 million and the industrial partners are raising the rest together with public utilities and smaller, innovative technology partners. According to Ludwig Karg, one of the researchers working together with scientists and communication experts in the model regions, E-Energy is intended to jump-start a greater energy revolution in Germany. “We are providing German companies with future access to markets worth billions,” he said.

Companies Create New Super Sector

-Article continues at source.

Poster Comment: We could have led this revolution, but no, we gotta give wellfare to that good ol’ 19th century tech.  God’s followers (and the money changers who support them) don’t like smart, independent Americans.  Truly Independent and smart Americans scare them and make them feel inadequate. They’d much rather have the blood, guts and Travail‡.

‡ coutesy Alternet

Courtesy NYTimes:

Discord is nothing new for Roman Catholicism. But the controversy surrounding the appearance of President Obama at the University of Notre Dame’s commencement on May 17 suggests that run-of-the mill discord among American Catholics is escalating into something closer to civil war.

Just watch that airplane circling over the famous Golden Dome of Notre Dame’s Main Building and the spire of the university’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart. The plane pulls a banner with a picture of an aborted fetus.

The group flying the banner is unhappy not just with the university but also, according to a spokesman quoted in The South Bend Tribune, with “the pro-life community at Notre Dame.”

“If they were doing a good job of reaching the campus,” he said, “it’s unlikely Obama would have been invited.”

Now listen to Bishop Robert W. Finn, bishop of the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese in Missouri. “We are at war!” he told an anti-abortion convention on April 18. “We are engaged in a constant warfare with Satan.”

-Article Continues…

What is Frank Donatelli on? Just too much truth for some.

YouTube Link

Courtesy Bob Geiger:

Showing once again that whenever a transformational leader like Barack Obama comes along to lead the nation into the future, the Republican party is always there to drag us backwards, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) tried to delay the grand opening of the new Capitol Visitor Center in Washington because be thinks there just isn’t enough mention of God in the facility.

Saying that the $621 million historical exhibit is “left-leaning” and leaves out America’s “history of faith,” DeMint tried to use his Senatorial clout to delay the center’s opening on Tuesday and, among other things, wanted the original national motto of “E. Pluribus Unum” — “from many, one” in Latin — replaced with “In God We Trust.”

“The Capitol Visitor Center is designed to tell the history and purpose of our nation’s Capitol, but it fails to appropriately honor our religious heritage that has been critical to America’s success,” said DeMint.

What DeMint’s religious-right stunt leaves out is that the purpose of the center is to provide an “…educational environment for visitors to learn about the unique characteristics of the House and the Senate and the legislative process” and to teach about our system of Government – not to talk about the private religious practices of the nation’s Senators and Representatives.

DeMint, who was joined in his silly protest by Republican Senators Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, has managed to strong-arm the Visitor Center into plastering over “E. Pluribus Unum,” changing the motto to “In God We Trust” and committing to add the Pledge of Allegiance to the displays.

Of course, you know DeMint probably doesn’t care about pledging one’s loyalty to the U.S. as much as he does about the “one nation, under God” part.

And the South Carolina Senator apparently really objected to a prominent statement near the facility’s entrance that says “we have built no temple, but the Capitol. We consult no common oracle but the Constitution,” which is attributed to Representative Rufus Choate, who represented Massachusetts in Congress in the 1830s and 1840s.

-Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy The Campaign Silo:

A group of at least five Utah legislators have asked the Mormon leadership to join their call for state legislation protecting LGBT rights to hospital visitation, medical care, fair housing, inheritance, and non-discrimination in employment, based on a statement from the Church itself last week that the Church “does not object to rights for same-sex couples” in any of these areas.

Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints have said they do not object to rights for same-sex couples, as long as those rights do not infringe on the integrity of the traditional family.

Now, gay-rights activists and at least five Utah legislators are asking the Church to demonstrate its conviction.

The group Equality Utah says the Church made the invitation, and they’re accepting it. “The LDS Church says it does not oppose same-sex couples receiving such rights as hospitalization and medical care, fair housing rights or probate rights,” said Mike Thompson, executive director of Equality Utah. 

In their attempt to appear non-bigoted the day after Prop 8 took away marriage equality rights throughout California, the Mormon leadership detailed a long list of rights of same-sex couples to which they do not object. Now, these legislators will introduce bills to protect all of these rights, and they ask the Church leadership to support them.

“Setting aside the marriage issue for now, there is so much in that space that is short of marriage that we need to talk about; and we’re saying, ‘Let’s talk about it,’” said Utah Sen. Scott McCoy.

Those issues include rights in medical care and hospital visitation, housing and employment protections, insurance rights for a partner, a statewide domestic partner registry. Repealing the second part of Utah’s Amendment 3 would officially recognize gay couples.

-Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy Vimeo

vimeo Link

The above video was shot on November 7th at around 8 PM Mountain Standard time, according to The Referring Page.  The No on 8 Demonstration was taking place at Temple Square in Salt Lake City Utah. Please click link above for more Info. -Shinai.

Courtesy Alternet:

Among the local ballot measures to be decided on Election Day, California’s Proposition 8 is perhaps the most fiercely contested. Backers of the proposition to ban same-sex marriage in the state cast their campaign in apocalyptic terms. “This vote on whether we stop the gay-marriage juggernaut in California is Armageddon,” born-again Watergate felon and Prison Fellowship Ministries founder Chuck Colson told the New York Times. Tony Perkins, the president of the Christian right’s most powerful Beltway lobbying outfit, Family Research Council, echoed Colson’s language. “It’s more important than the presidential election,” Perkins said of Prop 8. “We will not survive [as a nation] if we lose the institution of marriage.”

The campaign for Prop 8 has reaped massive funding from conservative backers across the country. Much of it comes from prominent donors like the Utah-based Church of Latter Day Saints and the Catholic conservative group, Knights of Columbus. Prop 8 has also received a boost from Elsa Broekhuizen, the widow of Michigan-based Christian backer Edgard Prince and the mother of Erik Prince, founder of the controversial mercenary firm, Blackwater.

While the Church of Latter Day Saints’ public role in Prop 8 has engendered a growing backlash from its more liberal members, and Broekhuizen’s involvement attracted some media attention, the extreme politics of Prop 8’s third largest private donor, Howard F. Ahmanson, reclusive heir to a banking fortune, have passed almost completely below the media’s radar. Ahmanson has donated $900,000 to the passage of Prop 8 so far.

I first met Ahmanson in 2004, when he and his wife, Roberta, agreed to an interview request for an article I was writing for Salon. Their exchanges with me marked the first time since 1984 that Howard had agreed to make contact with a journalist, and the first time since 1992 for Roberta. Howard agreed to answer questions only by email because, according to Roberta, his Tourette’s Syndrome made chatting on the phone with a stranger nearly impossible. He functions “like a slow modem,” she said. Her dual role as her husband’s spokesperson and nurse quickly became apparent.

Few Americans have heard of Ahmanson—and that’s the way he likes it. He donates cash either out of his own pocket or through his unincorporated Fieldstead & Co. to avoid having to report the names of his grantees to the IRS. His Tourette’s syndrome only adds to his mysterious persona, as his fear of speaking leads him to shun the media. While Ahmanson once resided in a mental institution in Kansas, he now occupies a position among the Christian right’s power pantheon as one of the movement’s most influential donors. During a 1985 interview with the Orange County Register, Ahmanson summarized his political agenda: “My goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives.” 

The campaign to teach “intelligent design” in public school classrooms, the Republican takeover of the California Assembly, and the rollback of affirmative action in California—Ahmanson has been behind them all. He has also taken a special interest in anti-gay crusades. Ahmanson’s most controversial episode related to his funding of the religious empire of Rousas John Rushdoony, a radical evangelical theologian who advocated placing the United States under the control of a Christian theocracy that would mandate the stoning to death of homosexuals. With Prop 8 organizers claiming in a virtual mantra that their measure will not harm gays or take rights away from heterosexual Californians, Ahmanson has good reason to conceal his involvement in the campaign.

When Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. was born in 1950, his father, then 44 years old, was feting visiting kings and queens and basking in the opulence of his mansion on Harbor Island, an exclusive address in Southern California’s Newport Harbor. Howard Junior was tended by an army of servants and ferried to and from school in a limousine. Watching the world glide by through darkened windows, he was gripped with a longing to cast off his wealth and disappear into anonymity. He burned with resentment toward his father, a remote, towering presence, referred to by friends and foes alike as “Emperor Ahmanson.” While Ahmanson Sr. showered local institutions in the Los Angeles area with charitable gifts from the fortune he amassed as the founder of Washington Mutual, his son was starved for attention.

Article continues with Video @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy Salon:

The only real sign that this wasn’t just any other Sunday at New Life Church was the pickup truck perched just off church property, on the shoulder of the road between the highway and the parking lot. Enormous pictures of smiling babies covered the truck and the extra-large camper attached to its bed. “Let me live!” the photos implored. The truck — and a group of demonstrators waving and greeting worshipers as they arrived at the corner — was part of a get-out-the-vote effort for Colorado’s Amendment 48, a ballot initiative that would amend the state Constitution to say that life begins at conception.

 

 

The amendment was cooked up by an antiabortion group calling itself “Colorado for Equal Rights.” When sponsors pulled together the votes this spring to land Amendment 48 on the ballot, it seemed like it would drive turnout among conservative activists. But it may not be having the desired impact. Already, Democrats have turned in several thousand more early and absentee ballots than Republicans, according to state statistics, even though Republicans hold a slim edge in registered voters. And polling shows the amendment itself may be defeated by a wide margin.

 

 

Against that backdrop, politics were muted Sunday at New Life Church. The main theme of the week at the church was “Heaven Defined,” a month-long series of sermons that promised to tell worshipers exactly what their relatives were up to in the afterlife, right down to their heavenly recreation. The church’s weekly video announcements opened with a mock disclaimer, like the federally mandated ones on campaign ads, from the Rev. Brady Boyd, its senior pastor. “My name is Brady Boyd, and I approve these announcements,” the video began, as the pastor smiled down in front of a waving flag. The congregants laughed.

 

 

New Life isn’t just any megachurch. Its founding pastor, the Rev. Ted Haggard, once led the National Association of Evangelicals. He helped rally his flock — and conservative Christians around the country — behind George W. Bush’s reelection campaign four years ago. For a time it seemed New Life, the largest church in Colorado, was set to be the vanguard of a political movement that would put the Bible into policymaking for years to come, as Karl Rove and evangelical leaders like Haggard teamed up to turn the country red.

 

 

But that was before Haggard was forced out of his post after a scandal involving methamphetamines and a gay hooker, two elements that don’t go over that well among fundamentalists, and especially not when mixed together. Two days later, Republicans lost control of Congress in the 2006 elections. Now, two days before another election, with the polls pointing toward a Barack Obama victory both in Colorado and nationwide, the country no longer quite seems to be going New Life’s way.

 

 

Sitting outside the sanctuary between the morning’s services, congregants worried about what might happen Tuesday. “I’m afraid Obama is going to change our country into a Muslim country,” said Melody Edwall, 51, a manager for an air carrier who lives in Colorado Springs. “I do. I’m afraid of him.” Edwall was pretty sure Obama wanted to change the country too much. “This is America — you don’t like it, leave,” she said. She’d heard Obama wanted to change the flag and the symbols of the country somehow. “He wants it to be this one big — I don’t know — it’s not America. It’s going to be something else, and I don’t know what it’s going to be.”

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy The Guardian (UK)

Voting for a Republican president runs in the blood of places like Gainesville. The pretty little town of 15,000 sits in north Texas ranch country and it is safe to say that Barack Obama has few fans here. Certainly Jim Farquhar, who works in the justice system, has taken to heart warnings that Obama has links with dangerous radicals, such as former 1960s militant Bill Ayers.

‘Obama scares me. He has all these friendships. You just don’t know how that might effect him once he gets into office,’ Farquhar said as he stood outside Gainsville’s sturdy old courthouse. ‘I’m voting for John McCain.’

Such worries are increasingly not shared by many other Americans. Weeks of relentless attacks on Obama by McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin have not succeeded in denting Obama’s lead. Instead it has strengthened. Across America, battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania are falling into Obama’s column and southern states such as Virginia and North Carolina are going from red to blue. Some Democratic insiders are even whispering about the prospect of a landslide.

The flipside of that is a potentially devastating Republican loss. If current polling holds true, the party may be reduced to its core support in the solid red heartland that runs through Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia and other southern and western states. That would trigger a profound crisis for a party that just three years ago was basking in the afterglow of a convincing presidential win and dreaming of creating a ‘permanent majority’.

Now that same Republican party could face a prolonged period in the political wilderness, working out how to appeal to an American public that seems prepared to send a pro-life, black senator from Chicago to the White House and reject a conservative Republican war hero.

‘The Republican party is going to have to work out what sort of party it actually wants to be. It’s a changing world for them,’ said Professor Shaun Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California at Riverside. It might not be easy. A powerful Democratic win could wipe out Republican moderates. It could leave the party in the grip of its conservative and evangelical base who remain critical of figures such as McCain but who are wildly enthusiastic about politicians such as Palin. The Republican party could end up in a bitter civil war for its political future.’

One of the key battlegrounds in that conflict will be the role of religion in Republican politics. The evangelical base has been a key part of the political coalition that has brought the party such success in recent years. Political guru Karl Rove cemented evangelical ideas into President George W Bush’s brand of conservatism and used them to inspire a very effective ‘get out the vote’ team in elections.

Rove focused on social issues such as gay marriage and abortion as a way of ensuring fanatical evangelical support. Nothing came to symbolise the power of the evangelical movement more than the rise of mega-churches, especially in staunchly Republican areas. These enormous edifices now dot the landscape of many states and Texas is no exception.

In the northern Dallas suburb of Prosper, a new mega-church has just opened. It is called Prestonwood North and is a branch of its mother church a few miles south in Plano, a fast-growing city of some 260,000 people. At first glance the church looks like a sparkling new office development, identical to many other buildings popping up on farmland as these ‘exurbs’ of Dallas succumb to development. But the large cross on its front reveals the truth. Taken as a whole, Prestonwood now has almost 30,000 members, making it one of the largest churches in America. It was recently named as one of America’s 50 most influential churches.

It certainly fits in in Prosper. Once a hamlet, it is gradually being swallowed by the suburbs, but its politics remain God and guns. ‘People around here all voted for Bush. That has not really changed. It’s a churchgoing kind of place,’ said Michelle Williams, 32, a dental nurse.

In Texas, church and politics have been mixing. In recent weeks, leading evangelical leaders in the state have endorsed McCain from their pulpits. They include Pastor Gary Simons, who heads a church near Dallas. He compared Obama to King Herod, the biblical child killer, because of his support for abortion. ‘How many of you would want to go to the polls and vote for Herod?’ Simons asked his congregation.

But increasingly such nakedly political preaching is looking out of step with many religious voters. Obama, who is a regular churchgoer and looks at ease in religious surroundings, has made huge strides in appealing to evangelical voters. His campaign has aggressively courted the religious vote, holding regular meetings with evangelical leaders.

That is in marked contrast to the 2004 Democratic nominee, John Kerry. It has worked too. A recent survey showed Obama and McCain in a virtual dead heat among born-again Christians, with support for McCain running at 45 per cent and Obama on 43 per cent. In 2004, Bush won 62 per cent of that vote. ‘If Obama goes on to win, one of the significant stories will be the profile of the faith vote … the Democrats are poised to make up significant ground among born again and evangelical voters,’ said David Kinnaman, president of the evangelical research group that carried out the poll.

The trend is also likely to reflect growing differences in the evangelical movement itself; changes that are leaving the Republican party behind. Far from being a monolithic bloc, evangelicals have increasingly embraced a wider variety of causes. Some are just as likely to campaign on fighting Aids and issues in the developing world as to crusade against abortion and gay marriage. One of the hottest topics in conservative Christianity at the moment is environmental conservation and global warming, neither of which is a Republican strong suit.

-Article Continues @ Sourced Site.