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Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial”, paired with his last name, currently racks up 21,100 hits on Google and about 575 on Google News.  

Raw STory writes “According to Woodward, insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret,” CBS News reports.”

The long and short seems to be that Bush is a victim of his own certitude.  Read more

It really is amazing how different this election is in the world of US Evangelicals than the last one.  There is no where near as much polarization.  The MN Star Tribune had an article on how the tone has changed at my alma mater Bethel University.  Apparently, “a new debate about faith and politics is flourishing,” where students are more ”hungry for dialogue and eager to find common political ground.” 

This is great news.  I posted about what Bethel U was like two years ago.  It was incredibly tensely polarized and focused on abortion and gay marriages.  It is good to see that students are caring more about Rwanda and global issues.  I think this may reflect the impact of the (re)Pub(lican)s not delivering too well on their values issues, the equalityride visit and the impact of Greg Boyd’s book on the campus community.  It’s good to see that Greg Boyd, who was a professor of theology at Bethel, still has an impact on the campus.  Read more

At the end of my last post on the likely passage of Bush’s bill that would permit “interrogation” of detainees, I suggested that maybe the best response would be for those of us who do not trust such “power over” tactics to guarantee our “security” to volunteer to be publicly subjected to the now-legal interrogation tactics. 

I’ve sent this idea along to Sojourners and Greg Boyd and we’ll see what comes of it, but I do believe that we need to make concrete for the US public what it is that we have made legal. 

On a further personal note, I would be willing to accept the legality of such practices if my leader was willing to submit himself to them before the country.  Part of my own ideology is a belief in the need for us to have servant-leaders, leaders who are willing to suffer for what they believe is right.  If my leader was willing to suffer the discomfort of certain interrogation tactics then that would send me the signal that he truly does believe they are justified for the greater good of our country.

dlw

After Bush went to the Senate Floor personally, the Senate voted 51-48 to reject ”an amendment that would have restored the rights of foreign suspects deemed as enemy combatants and mostly held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to challenge their detentions.” Read more

A friend sent me this and from what I’ve google-researched it seems to be possible that the BushAdmin plans to attack Iran prior to the coming elections. 

More evidence that Bush and Cheney want the Iran war now, before the November elections –Mike Billington, Asia Desk Editor

[sources:  Century Foundation, National Public Radio broadcast of
September 20, 2006.]
MORE SIGNS THAT BUSH AND CHENEY ARE HELL-BENT ON WAR WITH IRAN.
Two recent reports highlight growing belief among senior policy analysts that Bush and Cheney have already made up their minds to launch a preemptive strike against Iran, with the dual goals of knocking out Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program and overthrowing the regime in Tehran.  The key document adding to the assessment, is a report published by the Century Foundation, authored by retired U.S. Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner.  The 26-page, heavily footnoted document presents Col. Gardiner’s stark assessment:  the “summer of diplomacy” is over, and now the Bush White House–Bush and Cheney–have decided that there is no alternative to military strikes against Iran. 

Read more

Honestly, I can’t think of anything but real  honest brokenness on his behalf as preventing serious disaster from coming during the remaing two years of our seriously deluded and naive president. 

President Bush criticized his own intelligence agencies yesterday as “naive” for saying the Iraq war was spreading terror worldwide and rallying new recruits for Al Qaeda. In heated remarks, Bush said, “I think it’s a mistake for people to believe that going on the offense against people that want to do harm to the American people makes us less safe. 

Read more

My Brit Brother in Faith, Solly, posted recently the abstract of what looks like an interesting before and after study of the Roman Catholic Church. 

The Church and the Voice of the Other: The Growth of the Faith Community and Dialogue in the Church A Dissertation by John M. Amankwah March 18, 2005

Abstract

Since the Second Vatican Council ended over forty years ago, the Catholic Church has been struggling to find a firm ground in a world of ever-advancing technological change and increasing globalization. Prior to the convening of the Council, the church virtually isolated itself from the rest of the world because it considered itself as a societa prefecta. Dialogue as a communicative act of openness to the other with willingness to change did not exist in the Church because of its understanding of communication as uni-directional— from the hierarchy to the rest of the people.

Read more

Forget Hillary, let’s see if we can get Tony Blair to immigrate to the States and pass a constitutional amendment so he could be made president.

The man has given a rousing farewell speech.  We need more leaders like that over here.  One who won’t be as easily a source of needless controversy as Senator Hillary Clinton or her husband. 

dlw

ps, the Raw Story has posted an article that points out how a memo Condoleeza Rice received early on in her tenure flat out contradicts what she said recently, in her purported rebuttal of Bill Clinton’s remarks made on Fox News. 

I am glad to be able to point to Bart Campolo’s new and improved blog and how he’s blogging about his ministry, as a pomo revivalist, roviding his own interpretation to the revivalist spirit that got sparked twenty years ago at the Haystack Revival.   

My POV is that, while the US has never been a “Christian nation”, if it were not for so many revivals like that one in our history, things would have been far worse than they have been.  This is why we shd be praying for another revival.  We shd be praying that we will go beyond political labels and denomination groups to focus more on being the Church.  This would include learning from our Christian brethren and sistren in the two-thirds world and Europe.  

Anyways, I think I’m going to have a change in focus in my blogging in the coming weeks.  I am going to blog more about what I am reading for my classes and less about political stuff.  I am going to work out my end-game strategy for the politics of MN and focus more on schoolwork and seeking a teaching position at a college somewhere for next year.  

There are plenty of bloggers out there to write on faith and politics and I’m sure the topic will come up relatively frequently in what I blog about regarding my classwork, as it always seems to do so….

dlw   

The World is definitely changing.  I would take that as a given.  The issue is more about where do we draw the line and throw ourselves on God’s tender mercies and where do we bear our crosses in seeking to foster changes that show love to our neighbors and ourselves? 

I haven’t blogged lately.  It has been hard.  So much is happening so fast and it is hard to say that I would be adding anything to what others have written.  I am praying and hoping that Jim Wallis and others will listen to my ideas found in the pragmatic prolife manifesto.  And I’m hoping that even if they didn’t take it up, they’d at least provide me the dignity of a reply of some sort, as I think it merits as much.  Read more

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