wpeltz's blog

From Newsmax, a far right news project, here's a promo for a new book which attacks Obama as an extreme liberal:

The Case Against Barack Obama

The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate

He's the media's darling, the fresh face of the Democratic ticket. But what does Barack Obama really stand for — and will his extreme liberal agenda and complete inexperience in global affairs endanger the country? That's what David Freddoso, investigative reporter and National Review Online columnist, examines in The Case Against Barack Obama. In this shocking exposé, Freddoso explores the reality behind the rhetoric, the plans behind the promises, and the faults behind the façade, revealing:

• Why Obama's inexperience and extreme left-wing voting record is more dangerous than any threat we face today
• Why the Rev. Wright debacle reveals Obama's poor judgment of character and deceitful nature
• Why it won't be politics of change with President Obama — it will be liberal politics as usual

Freddoso exposes the real Barack Obama: a typical big-government politician, the #1 most liberal U.S. senator, and — if he were commander in chief — a serious threat to our national security.

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LABOR in the PULPITS, on the BIMAH, in the MINBAR

Planning a Labor Day Weekend service focused on worker justice issues

Organizing a service on worker justice over Labor Day weekend is a great opportunity for your congregation to recognize the sacred work of all its members and support low-wage workers’ struggles for justice. If there is a local Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) group in your area, that group can connect your congregation with a union member or labor leader who can talk about the connection between his or her faith and the struggle for justice in the workplace. Labor Day speakers receive special training and sample reflections to help them develop their presentations. Congregations organize Labor Day services on the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before Labor Day or special services on Labor Day Monday. (In some cases, congregations organize services, or reflect on worker justice issues, in the week or two after Labor Day.)

Despite the limited amount of time left to the Bush administration, I worry about what might happen before he leaves office. In addition to signaling that he will support an attack by Israel on Iran, he's supporting aggression within Iran right now, as detailed in Acts of War by Scott Ritter, Truthdig, July 29, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080729_acts_of_war/

Scott Ritter is a former UN arms inspector who accurately diagnosed, as it was taking shape, the fakery that led to the US invasion of Iraq. He's a very large ex-Marine, former Republican, and a forceful speaker. He lives right next to Albany NY's southwest border in the hamlet of Delmar, where I do my supermarket shopping, in the little town of Bethlehem (roughly 30,000 population).

I recommend that everyone read this article. Ritter's been warning of war against Iran since early 2005 and this is his latest update.

It begins with some things that have been reported before but have not been taken up by most of the media: the current US acts of war going on within Iran.

What's most interesting, however, is his account of what he says is the fabricated evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran, former or current.

In my inbox this morning:

URGENT: need your help -
Impeachment Petition Deadline Midnight Wednesday

Dear Friends,

Because of your vigilance and support for democracy, last Friday was a day of singular importance in Washington. The House Judiciary Committee met to discuss the Bush Administration's abuse of executive power and for the first time the case for Impeachment was discussed in front of a Congressional committee, in depth, at length and with authority.

Twenty members of the Judiciary Committee attended the six hour hearing, during which twelve witnesses, including myself and four members of Congress testified. In this hearing I called for the Impeachment of the President for misrepresenting a case for war.

This week I will present members of Congress with Impeachment petitions submitted by those of you who have signed the on-line impeachment form.

I need your help. In the next few days we must redouble our efforts to get more signatures on the online petition at kucinich.us. I'm asking each of you to please contact at least ten of your friends to go to www.Kucinich.us now and sign the Impeachment petition that will be delivered by me. Wednesday night is the deadline.

Please send out an email to all your friends and family, post this link, http://kucinich.us to your blogs and make this effort count as this is the only petition that I will deliver.

Here's an article about neighborliness. It's one of a series our local newspaper has done on interesting neighborhoods in the Albany-Schenectady-Troy NY area. My neighborhood is the first one of this summer's series.

While the reporter slightly exaggerates the close-knit quality of the neighborhood, it's still the most neighborly I've ever lived in, by far. And in almost 77 years, I've racked up 25 neighborhoods in 12 cities or towns in 6 states in the Northeast, the Far West, the Deep South, and the Midwest.

Neighborhoods are important. But with changed geographic and demographic patterns, particularly since the end of WW2, churches play less and less of a local parish role. Hence the appeal of house churches. Yet even they, judging from my one experience with a house church, draw from beyond neighborhoods. It makes me think about our social origins in bands, tribes, and villages, where religion expressed and reinforced the social bonds that already existed. Our situation is very different now. We talk about 'community' a lot, perhaps because we have so little of it. We keep trying to reinvent it and are inclined to redefine 'community' in terms of categories of people rather than in terms of face-to-face social interactions and closely-linked networks of interactions.

In our phone Theology Discussion on Monday night, in connection with the subject of greed (avarice) I brought up the issue of power as another "source of (all) evils". It seems to me that in the contexts of states, empires, and world-spanning corporations, the love of wealth and the love of power are tightly connected.

Although material resources and their control are the subjects that Marxist/Marxian approaches take as basic -- a point of view which I, as a "cultural materialist", share -- human society also seems to be afflicted with the presence of an all too common free-floating urge to dominate for domination's sake, as well as for economics' sake.

Control freaks, psychopaths/sociopaths, and dominators/empire builders of all sorts, regardless of their particular psychopathologies, seem to me to be disproportionally involved in the creation and operation of the institutional "structures of sin" that some of us have been discussing.

Someone on the Mennonite peace list forwarded this excerpt from a monologue on an NPR radio show.

It aired on the afternoon of the 4th. Original airing was on Memorial Day in 2005. The title of the monologue is "Ode to War and Peace", by Joe Frank.

"There are no medals to peace, no honors, no marching bands, no great
monuments to peace, no hymns sung, no great odes, no martial melodies, no
parades to peace.

"There are no gigantic fireworks displays, no champagne corks popped to peace,
no last cigarette smoked in its honor. There is no night before peace, no
declaration of peace. The very absurdity of a nation declaring peace on another
shocks the imagination.

"And who among us can say that he has heard of the spoils of peace? Is there
such a thing as a peace hero? Who among us have gathered with his old cronies
late at night, hoisted a glass and told peace stories? What valiant young man has
been welcomed back from peace?

"What young boy has gazed longingly at his father, saying that he would willingly
go to peace to save his country?"

Joe Frank has a dark sense of humor, so this excerpt is the close of a satirical piece extolling war, in the vein of Mark Twain's famous story (and prayer), The War Prayer. The lines immediately preceding "There are no medals to peace" are:

Is Bob Barr a "Looney Tune"? I don't think so. He may be a nasty attack dog for the manner in which he went after the Clintons, but that's personal ugliness, which is matched by other ugly aspects of his personal life. (You could look it up.) However, in terms of policies, I perceive some good stuff in his very brief issues statements. Some of it sounds more progressive than what Obama has proposed.

My main problem with the Libertarians is that I think they completely misunderstand the nature of our corporate-based economic and political system. Therefore they buy into the notion that we have a "free market". They assume that this hypothetical free market will always work its magic. Always for the good. Just get Big Government out of the way.

Nevertheless, despite seeming to be oblivious to the problem of corporatism, Barr and the Libertarians aren't conscious corporatists. They hate taxes so much that they want to end "corporate welfare". However, they're corporate-enablers in that they want government to get out of the way and let the high rollers play.

The part of the "Cut Big Spending" section of Barr's platform that refers to the military reads like this:

* The federal government must take the lead in making significant cuts in spending.
Focusing on earmarks risks distracting attention from the broader problem of a

Given the racism that Obama is confronted with, and that presumably will become more prevalent and vicious later on in the campaign, it's a lot easier for Nader to make a (nuanced) commitment to Affirmative Action than it is for Obama. So don't take my posting of this part of Nader's platform as a criticism of Obama for not stating a position on Affirmative Action. Rather, it's a defense of Nader from the charge of "racism".

Obama has suggested in one of his debates with Hillary Clinton that affirmative action in higher education might switch from a focus on race to one on class. See http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/17/qt and http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/05/12/kahlenberg. That's probably a viable way to go for all forms of affirmative action. Class has been under-emphasized for too long, so that's a plus for those of us who think that "class consciousness" is a good and necessary component of progressive strategies for change. A broad and expanded program of affirmative action based on class would be of practical value to African-Americans, although many are wary that they might be short-changed in its politically sensitive implementation. And there's some loss of historical consciousness and sense of social responsibility if the idea of "reparations" is embedded so deeply in a class-based program that reparations disappears as a distinct factor.

The following quotes were gleaned from one NY Times article today. I was going to post them in "Quotes" but then I thought they would be more visible as a blog post. I think they deserve to be seen and reflected upon. Here's a global phenomenon, a catastrophe in the making, and it exists outside the range of our political discourse.

No candidate makes the connection that here's a common cause for all humanity, located where climate change, tight oil supplies, water shortages, and food shortages intersect and interact. Talk about a Moral Equivalent to War and a replacement for the Global War on Terror. What an opportunity to approach our "enemies" in peace.

If we only had "the will and vision". The problem is that many people do -- it's the institutional dominance of money and power that keeps humans' political will and vision limited to a narrow range of "realistic" options.

I read these quoted words and think of all the Biblical texts about widows and orphans, the feeding of the multitudes, and what are treated. in effect and ineffectually, as just the pious platitudes of the Beatitudes. Read 'em and weep:

Haitian consumer of mud-cooking oil-and-sugar patties sold at street stalls: “It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt. It makes your stomach quiet down.”