The Rev. Dr. Robert “Bob” Edgar is the general secretary of the National Council of Churches, a partnership of “thirty-six Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox member communions, with 140,000 local congregations and approximately 50 million congregants.” This week he did an interview with me about the role of NCC, their efforts to foster peace in Iraq, and NCC’s “Let Justice Roll” voter registration drive. Click here to read the interview.

The Political Animal takes bloggers to task for being too hard on the liberal hawks and neocons who are now having second thought about the war. He says we should warmly embrace them to our side. Since I just wrote about this last night, I feel I should answer that complaint.

First of all, it would be a lot easier if they didn’t feel it was necessary to insult the millions of people who did make the right call while they are expressing their regrets. That indicates to me that they are not very likely to pay any heed to those voices in the future. But, that’s not the real problem.

In order to truly understand what went wrong before this war, you have to look at what was being said and what was being heard before we went into it. I’m not seeing a lot of that from the Mea Culpa singers. Peter Beinert (with whom I regrettably proved Kevin’s point by being deliberately snarky) was one of the few to actually examined his prejudices and preconceptions as a way of explaining why he came to the conclusions he did. As far as I know, he is the only one to do that. All the others are based upon misplaced trust in the administration and a shock that they could have been so dishonest/incompetent/incoherent. They have not grappled with the fact that they chose to ignore plenty of evidence prior to the invasion that should have tipped them off. I can think of a handful right off the top of my head, and I’m sure there are plenty more:
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Bush supporters are hoping that anti-gay marriage initiatives in various states will help bring out large numbers of religious conservatives in November. What does the Bible actually say about homosexuality? It might not be what you think.

Since Gulf Preemption II is now officially over, and there will be no more attacks on Americans by the grateful Iraqis, I have turned my sights to winning the Culture War. I present examples of how useful tips for lashing liberals (and leftist artists) can be gained from old rightist fiction, in “La Sauce Pour Le Jars”, a June 30 entry on my blog. (That’s just on top of my June 28 entry that explains why The American Street REALLY went down this past weekend, “The Lone Star Civil War”.)

Hi, my name’s Jenny, and I’ll blogging here on the Street as delegate to the Democratic National Convention. I’m a Kerry delegate from Oregon’s 3rd congressional district. I’ll also be talking about my experience of trying to change the Democratic Party from the inside.

I’ve been an almost full-time volunteer for the Democrats since my dot.com dot.bombed in 2003. I have no elected position, other than as a local precinct person, nor do I work for any Democratic organization for pay. I have been volunteering for the state and county parties, and have learned a lot about the way the Democratic Party works in the process. Some of it’s pretty, some of it ain’t.

I ran for delegate because I want to change the Party. I have two issues: the direction the Party’s headed and the way the Party works.

I’m a progressive–the DLC simply doesn’t represent me, and sometimes I wonder about the DNC as well. As an early Howard Dean supporter, I’m glad that Howard managed to give the Party a spine transplant, but I believe that the Party needs to regain its soul as well as its backbone. For those of who call ourselves Democrats–just what does that mean?

I also believe that the DNC has failed to nurture its grass roots. By concentrating on national elections and media posturing, it’s left the state and county party organizations to fend largely for themselves. As a result, these critical local organizations atrophied and are largely ineffective in their roles of grooming candidates and turning out votes. I’ve read story after story on blogs about people going to join their local parties, only to find they’ve disappeared or degenerated into cliquish, insular social clubs that few people want to belong to. This is changing in some areas of the country, including Multnomah County in Oregon.

I wanted to find the movers and shakers who make the decisions for the DNC, so I ran for election as delegate. Much to my surprise, I got one of the coveted slots. So, I’m off to Boston this summer to ask questions and talk about strategies for fertilizing the lawn.

I’ll be commenting mostly from a personal point of view and hope to bring you a sense of what it’s like to be a convention delegate. This is my first time, so we’ll be sharing the experience! We’ll be treated to speeches in our morning delegation meetings and strategy sessions in the afternoons, so I should be able to talk directly with People Whose Names You Read in the Paper…or on the ‘Net.

Please send me your comments and suggestions; I’ll do what I can. Keep your arms and legs within the car, and enjoy the ride.

Short-ish post, to see if everything works.

From Josh Marshall today:

Who would have thought that this year’s presidential race would turn on whether a rebounding economy could save President Bush from the public’s congealing sense that his entire Iraq venture was a mistake?

Well, me, for one — and quite a few others ’round these parts.

I’m no economic expert, but it seems like the deep, dark, damn-the-country damage Bush’s economic plans lie in the long term, benefitting essentially the rich and people who are well-off and lucky enough to die fairly soon.

More importantly, though, I sat in silent astonishment that Rove and Co. seemed to genuinely think that Iraq would be an electoral winner. This, more than anything else, shows how naive they were, when even the cynics behind their electoral shenanigans thought that they had timed this war right — if they’d thought it might be anywhere near as disastrous as it has been, they’d be starting it right about … now. I guess I just had more faith than most in this administration’s reverse Midas touch. From ignoring wargames to constant infighting to the ascension of the insane Perle-ites, it didn’t take much to forsee it being at least as bad as it’s gotten. It was a well-enacted divide-and-conquer strategy for 2002, but it’s coming back to bite them.

I think the post-war, post-needless chaos arguments show that the Saddam-is-bad-and-should-be-pressured-to-go-by-many-different-means-but-on-no-account-should-we-trust-this-administration-to-plan-and-execute-such-an-action position, which seemed counterintuitive, was in fact cogent and compelling.

Amid the flurry of Supreme Court rulings yesterday, it was easy to overlook their decision that determined free speech protections secured the rights of individuals to call Dick Cheney a ‘petrol-huffing corporate shill’, to refer to Don Rumsfeld as a ‘twisted Machiavellian misanthrope who views himself as MacArthur, but lacking in strategy, troop support, sense and body temperature’, to point out to Condi Rice that ‘her Freudian slip is showing as is her inability to grasp global geopolitical politics beyond the level of Elementary Redneck’, to deride Richard Perle as a ‘teeny-tiny dink who gets off playing the submissive to Big Daddy Mossad’, to jeer at John Ashcroft as a ’sexually repressed ethical infant who rubs himself while viewing photos of Judge Roy Bean,’ and to point out to all of them that their ‘pet monkey is ugly, too.’

The 7-2 ruling, which provoked the vociferous dissents of Antonin Dungbeetle and Clarence the Clown, overturns last year’s prosecution of the whole freaking planet and legal experts suggest may even release Congress from its state of suspended animation.

John Kerry has unveiled his plan for a technology based economy (PDF format) that will create millions of high-wage jobs and restore America’s technology leadership making us competitive once again.

Kerry’s plan is based on the following principles:
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As part of a settlement in a lawsuit brought by future Washington State Governor and, I hope, U.S. President (I’m not kidding–keep your eye on her) Attorney General Christine Gregoire against the record industry, Washington schools received 115,241 music CD’s, gratis.

The terms of the settlement required that the companies provide popular G-rated CD’s. Unfortunately, the record companies, being record companies, sent something else. Imagine a grade school librarian’s surprise when he or she eagerly slit open the box only to find “87 CDs containing explicit lyrics by the late Puerto Rican rapper Big Punisher, along with 356 copies of “Staying Power” by the late Barry White,” not to mention Lou Reed’s “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” and the Wu Tang Clan’s debut album–third graders dig Ol’ Dirty Bastard. And no doubt today’s kids will love the Tammy Wynette and Buck Owens albums.
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OK, this is not what the testing regimen was designed to do, but they may have found BSE (mad cow) in the US food supply anyway

The beef industry and processors such as Tyson Foods are in “wait-and-see” mode after an inconclusive test for mad cow disease.

The discovery Friday afternoon as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s enhanced bovine spongiform encephalophathy, or BSE, testing program is awaiting confirmation.

Further testing of tissue samples from the animal are needed at the USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa.

The inconclusive result does not mean a new case of mad cow disease is present in the United States, said Dr. John Clifford of the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service division of USDA.

“Inconclusive results are a normal component of most screening tests, which are designed to be extremely sensitive so they will detect any sample that could possibly be positive,” he said via a statement on the organization’s Web site.

Results are expected back within a week, Clifford said. He added because of the uncertainty of the initial finding, the type or location of the animal wasn’t revealed.

[?]. It’s what’s for dinner.

A little background on the USDA and its whimsical approach to protecting the public from a brain full of holes is here (I’ll go ahead and provide them, since links to these posts in searches for “cow,” “BSE,” “USDA” and “mad cow” have apparently disappeared from Google. As an abstract data point, this is not the first subject area within which I have noticed this problem).

edit: Well, Ag Secretary Venneman is right on top of this one.

Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman Monday defended USDA’s procedure for notifying the public that a U.S. animal was tested inconclusively for BSE. USDA made the announcement late Friday without divulging specifics about the animal or its location.

“It was even difficult for me to understand initially why we would release results when we didn’t know the results,” Veneman told Farm Journal Media journalists in the company’s Philadelphia headquarters. “But the fact of the matter is when you’re testing and holding, the risk of market rumors is probably more damaging to the industry than is telling people what’s going on.”

…”I would anticipate, I think we’ve said all along, that we’ll not only have these inconclusives, but we may find a few more cases of BSE in this country,” Veneman said.

…

The announcement came as a team of Japanese officials was bound for a visit to Colorado to discuss technical aspects of resuming imports of U.S. beef . Despite the test result, Veneman said, “I think we will get it opened up and hopefully that will be soon.”

Japan banned U.S. beef imports after initial case was discovered last year. Japan has asked for testing of all U.S. cattle for BSE, for which there is no scientific justification, said Veneman.

Japan’s 100% testing stems from that government’s lack of openness after BSE was first discovered there on Sept. 10, 2001, she said. “Their consumer lost confidence in the food supply and therefore the consumption went down. They are clearly in a different position that we are, where our consumers have well-founded confidence in our regulatory systems and the safety of our food supply.”

See, that’s the difference between us amurkins and the japanese.

I think most of us probably feel a fair amount of confidence in the japanese government.

“Executive detention of subversive citizens, like detention of enemy soldiers to keep them off the battlefield, may sometimes be justified to prevent persons from launching or becoming missiles of destruction. It may not, however, be justified by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado detention for months on end is such a procedure. Whether the information so procured is more or less reliable than that acquired by more extreme forms of torture is of no consequence. For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny.”

And with those words, America, the Colossus arose, its democracy restored to life, and strode forth to tell Vice-President Cheney: “Miss on you, pister, you ain’t so mucking fuch.”

All except Justice Thomas, proving again, that some will accede to surrender essential liberty in pursuit of security, asserting that survival demands cowardice, when it remains better for the nation to die with its freedoms intact and its head held high, than to survive through the surrender of all that ever gave it its value.

okay, the conversion is complete, all posts have been restored and we don’t have to worry about the MT scripts sucking the very life out of the server it’s on anymore.

however, there now appears to be some funkiness in the templates between the main page, the archives pages and the comments page.

this doesn’t affect the accessibility of the site, nor the actual content, just the layout of said newly-ported content.

to all Street Drivers, consider this the dropping of the green flag. post away.

i will continue to tweak the css and the templates to figure out what exactly broke (i tried fixing the funky dangling “v id=”links”>” code you see at the top of some of the pages; see the main Archives pages for an example… i fixed the dangly bits on the main page, but ended up with broken divs)

anyone who’s more fluent in css than i am is more than welcome to drop me an email or comment here to help fix this…

The archives are wack. But our able site admins, overloaded with work and school, have slaved to rebuild us so far, piece by piece. Posting may be little or none for another day or two, till all systems are go.

Look for the greenlight post from Desert Jo, and then we’ll come back full force.

In the meantime, please note The Street Gang and Drive-By posters in our sidebar have changed a bit. You may wish to familiarize yourself with Carpeicthus, dabrooklyn, Ginger Stampley and M. Prophet - our newest regulars. Or visit any team member blogs till our MT breakdown is fully over and the meds have kicked in.

We’ll also soon have Jenny Greenleaf aboard. She’s a state delegate to the Democratic National Convention and will be our blogger-at-large covering that. But she’ll post beforehand to demonstrate that our delegates are smarter, cuter, and goshdarnit, we like ourselves.

Now go visit the team; we’ll be back within 48 hours.

OK, Greens and Nader fans, now YOU get to choose — between Nader and the Greens.

From the story Nader Plays Down Green Party Rebuff“

“A day after not getting the Green Party’s endorsement for president, Ralph Nader brushed off the rejection as an inconvenience, described the party as “strange,” called the party’s national nominating convention “a cabal” and predicted who the big loser in its decision not to endorse him would be.”

So … shoe. foot, other foot. For those of you who don’t get it, I’m saying the shoe is on the other foot. For those of you who don’t get THAT, I’m saying that now it’s the Greens who are the targets of unfair attacks and insults. And for those of you who still don’t get what I am saying, think about this: if you don’t feel it is fair for these things to be said about the Greens, and feel that the convention was not a “cabal”, and don’t think the TRUE Progressive vote should be divided up into smaller and smaller chunks, shouldn’t that also make you think again about the things said about the Democrats — the People’s coalition that has historically banded together to oppose the moneyed interests, brought us worker protections and Social Security and Medicare and Civil Rights and overtime and weekends and vacations and environmental regulations and everything else that we have been able to accomplish over the objections of the rich and powerful?

So, are the Greens just ANOTHER hack political party?

What is most important, getting WHAT you want (or at least, as much of it as you can get?) or getting WHO you want?

It’s not easy carrying the weight of The Forever Crusade on your shoulders, as Prince Humperdinck pointed out. We should be delighted that Our Noble Leaders can still find time for relaxation, as shown by this picture, found by The Sideshow. I can only assume it was taken at a costume party where they all got to dress up as their favorite comic characters. Perhaps it was even a skit they performed. If so, let us hope that Frank Miller scripted it.

What light from yon window breaks? Hey, gentle readers and scurvy scalawags, it looks like we may be close to back in action here. I’m still not sure what happened. Everything changed after that black helicopter flew over.

Hey, who put this skirt on me?! It clashes with my Hawaiian shirt!

Which is odd, since we’re not using blogger. But we are having technical difficulties.