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Google News informed me today that Al Jazeera has a story on the way the US military is planting madeup stories in Iraqi News outlets in hopes that the spun news will bleed into the western media. It also shares about the extent the western media self censor in the coverage of news stories and has a disturbing picture of a camera with blood splattered on it.

It’s serious news. Apparently, things are far worse in Iraq than many of us think it is and our leaders are willing to bend the rules to manipulate us at home.

dlw
ps, it gets much worse.
pps,I like Josh Marshall’s quote selection:

Even as the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development pay contractors millions of dollars to help train journalists and promote a professional and independent Iraqi media, the Pentagon is paying millions more to the Lincoln Group for work that appears to violate fundamental principles of Western journalism.

I just can’t wait for that Complete Victory!
dlw

I had two letter responses to my past week’s letter in the Evangelicals for Social Action’s Prism E-pistle. I wrote back a letter that replied to both of them. Read more

A quick note on the case on parental notification for abortion before the Supreme Court. I think the underlying theme here needs to be that “all choice takes place in a moral/legal framework, Let’s talk about the framework!” For teens that framework is the sovereignty of their family. There is no good reason for them to have the same rights to abortion on demand as an adult would. Their parents can and should discourage them from being sexually active, especially at that particularly vulnerable age.

We don’t need to make ridiculous statements like, “The idea that we should have the government come between a child and her parents is a violation of everything we believe in this country.” Our gov’t is not an autonomous entity. There are regulations of the abortion industry, just like all other industries, and they are open to reforms to make them more consistent with the value judgments of the majority of the country’s citizens. Women have the right to due process in the determination of the defined circumstances under which they may elect an abortion, but the precise nature of those defined circumstances ought to be deferred to the legislative branch, not subject to judicial review.

dlw

Martin van Creveld, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one of the world’s foremost military historians, has written an article where he describes GWII as the most foolish war in over 2000 years and demands that Bush be impeached for misleading the US into the war. Read more

I decided to write my own version of the Calvinist TULIP. A version that follows the original from a thematic standpoint.

Total divine Trust in human receptivity to and transmission of the Word of God and the leadings of the Holy Spirit.

Uncompromising Divine Pursuit of Reconciliation with and among Humanity.

Limited Atonement for the Receptive Faithful.(The elect is a set of individuals, not a specific set of specific individuals.)

Inevitable Victory of Christ’s Church over the Gates of Hades(Matthew 16:18).

Perseverance of the Church, despite our ability to fall short as we most certainly have in the past and present, particularly with the Constantinization of Christianity.

It’s a bit different from the usual fare here, but the usual fare tends to be quite broad-ranging as it is…
dlw

Mark Schmitt, at his blog the Decembrist, gives a good overview of the many ways that campaign contributions can buy favors from politicians and how just publicizing the amounts of the contributions on the internet will not be an effective check on such influence-buying. He thinks there is no alternative to some kind of regulatory system involving limits on contributions, and public financing.

I wrote him a comment, where I shared with him my idea for CFR from the CPPP Platform. Read more

I am hoping to get the Minnesota Baptist Conference, who have supported extensive short-term missionaries with sister churches in Ukraine, to pay for some chapters of John M Perkins’s book, “A Quiet Revolution” to be translated into Russian so that they can be shared with the Christians in the former Soviet Union.

I’m thinking of Chapt 7, “Discovering Real Evangelism” and chapter 14, “Organizing at the Grass Roots”. I’ll keep you posted on how things develop. It’s only a total of 12 pages and, perhaps, could be translated and put on the internet relatively quickly so as to take advantage of the one year anniversary of the Orange Revolution. But I imagine the wrangling over the legal aspects may keep the translation from happening too quickly.

dlw

Ecumenical News International has an important article on how Christian leaders “want universal suffrage for the chief executive and legislative council elections. Currently, Hong Kong’s chief executive is picked by a Beijing-backed committee of 800 electors and only half of the 60-seat legislative council is directly elected.” They are calling on all Christians and the people of Hong Kong to stand in solidarity with each other and act with a march on December 4th to demand for universal suffrage in Hong Kong.

This is well worth keeping tabs on and holding up our fellow Christians in Hong Kong in prayer on the 4th of December.

dlw

A good friend of mine shared with me about this book that has just come out that gives a revealing look at the life of Mao, drawing on many diverse sources. It corroborates Mao’s love of violence and says that Mao was responsible for the death of 70 million people.

This is an important book, inasmuch as the fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union came about with the fall of the Communist ideology as people learned about the terrible things that had been done under Communism. The same thing will likely happen in PRoChina, particularly if one points out how it is the extreme concentration of power that made Mao’s holocaust possible.

dlw
ps, US and EU generosity, particularly from Christians, to those affected by quakes or the toxic water crisis may be the best sort of witness we can give to the Chinese.

dlw

Josh Marshall points out the irony of how the BushAdmin experts are now saying “our job [in Iraq] appears to be almost done. ” And so when we withdraw prior to the 2006 election, it’s not “cutting and running”.

I hope the US people see through this game of charades and the BushAdmin’s popularity drops even further.

dlw

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