Baptist Planet writes in Post-marital about Tom Ackerman’s instructive head game.

              

Selection of Eric H. Holder Jr. as his attorney general was another history-making step by President-elect Barack Obama, and a good one.

First, Holder has the right experience.

Yesterday the New York Times wrote:

Now in private practice as a partner at the Washington law firm of Covington and Burling, Mr. Holder served as a federal prosecutor, a trial court judge, and United States attorney for the District of Columbia before becoming the top-ranking aide to Attorney General Janet Reno in 1997. He was the first African-American to serve in that post.

Second, Holder has the right values and stands for the right policies. He is "not a proponent of the death penalty" and Michael Iskoff of Newsweek, who broke the story, wrote today:

A New York City native who graduated from Columbia University and Columbia Law School, Holder spent years as a federal prosecutor - a job in which he earned a reputation as tough and aggressive foe of public corruption. After serving in the public integrity section of the Justice Department's Criminal Division and later a District of Columbia Superior Court judge, Holder was named by President Clinton as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. He became deputy attorney general in 1997 under Janet Reno and was viewed as a centrist on most law enforcement issues, though he has sharply criticized the secrecy and the expansive views of executive power advanced by the Bush Justice Department.

Since the Obama staff has let it be known that they have the Senate votes required for approval, we can consider the task Holder faces.

Michael Tomasky of the Guardian got it right today when he wrote that Holder "will need Herculean fortitude to clean out the sewage that has polluted the Justice Department in the Bush years. God bless him."

Indeed.

Addendum

Eric Holder on the Rule of Law - 2008 American Constitution Society National Convention

Below is a Windows Media Video of Holder blistering the Bush administration for "the disastrous course" it has set in pursuit of the war on terror.

"Our needlessly abusive and unlawful practices in the 'War on Terror' have diminished our standing in the world community and made us less, rather than more, safe,” Holder told the American Constitution Society 2008 Convention. He went on to say, "For the sake of our safety and security, and because it is the right thing to do, the next president must move immediately to reclaim America’s standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights."

It is not condensed, is not brief and IMHO it is well worth listening to in full.

              

President elect Barack Obama 's speech via video to the bi-partisan Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles this morning renews his stand against global warming, giving it to us correctly as a national security and economic issue.

This is in sharp contrast with the Bush administration's attempts to manipulate and censor the science in order to justify inaction.

"Refreshing to have an adult as incoming president," writes Greg Sargent in his coverage of the speech at TPM.

              

I was born legally blind. My first sharply focused view of the stars was through my maternal grandfather's binoculars as he cradled me in his arms. From him I first learned which of those stars were planets; which suns. From both grandfathers I acquired the yearning to see and visit the planets we agreed must orbit those other suns.

My overwhelming impulse Thursday when I learned astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet orbiting another star, was to call Grandaddy Hinnant.

HR 8799 and planets

A group led by astronomer Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, used infrared to image a family of three planets orbiting HR 8799, a star some 130 light-years away.

This is a caption version of one of those infrared images.

B.L. Hinnant has been gone more than four decades, but seeing the images of Fomalhaut b, a tiny point source of light orbiting the nearby, bright southern star Fomalhaut, was somehow no less the realization of a shared dream.

The team which discovered Fomalhaut B was led by astronomer Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley.

Later I learned another group, led by astronomer Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, used ground-based, infrared to image a family of three planets orbiting the start HR 8799. And I yearned to somehow sit down and talk this over with both grandfathers, as I would while they were lived.

Of course it is impossible for me to visit either of those planetary systems. Fomalhaut is 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, and the cloud you see in the false-color image above is a debris disk about 21.5 billion miles across.

Fomalhaut b is orbiting 1.8 billion miles inside the debris disk's sharp inner edge.

Indeed, the images in which Fomalhaut b was discovered were made in October 2004 and July 2006, and scientists were not able to pick out the planet until the end of May of this year.

HR 8799 is some 130 light-years away and the final images of the orbiting objects were captured this year. There are questions about whether all of the orbiting objects are even small enough to be properly called planets, and they are all apparently huge by planetary standards.

Still, it was Grandaddy George Frink who taught me to accept the impossible. Accept it as impossible, and find a way around it. So I remain confident that in defiance of current capabilities and current understanding of physics, the sons of men will yet walk on the surface of extrasolar planets.

Making and interpreting the images reproduced here was itself impossible all those years ago when a child who could see nothing clearly that was more than a few inches from his eyes, first looked up in wonder through his grandfather's field glasses and saw the field of stars.

              

Eager for another pseudoranking of their social networking cred, large numbers of twitter users have sheepishly filled in their passwords when requested, apparently with no thought of security.

              

Osama bin Laden may have disappeared from public view for the same reason that rich dilettantes withdraw, computer in hand and young writing assistant in tow, to well-appointed seaside or mountain retreats.

Yes, he is rumored to be writing a book. With the help of a younger writer.

              

There are fractures on the right.

Focus on the Family's Dr. James Dobson had a Sarah Palin conversion to Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain, and American Right to Life Action has called him out for breaking his pledge before god. Christian News Wire reported:

On April 28, 1990 at the Washington D.C. Rally for Life Dr. Dobson stated, "I want to give a pledge to you on a political level... I have determined that for the rest of my life, however long God lets me live on this earth, I will never cast one vote for any man or woman who would kill one innocent baby." James Dobson is violating this pledge by voting for John McCain for president, a Republican who has recently voted to authorize funding to kill some children by surgical abortion.

American RTL Action director of research, Darrell Birkey, said of Dobson's turnabout:

Dr. Dobson is openly violating the pledge he took before God by voting for John McCain. Both the Sarah Palin distraction, and the candidate's rhetoric to Rick Warren claiming he believes that human rights begin at conception, are belied by McCain's long tolerance of chemical abortifacients and funding the dissection of the tiniest embryonic boys and girls.

On Thursday, the group staged a sit-in at Focus on the Family headquaters in Colorado Spring, Colo. Eight people were escourted out by police.

Dobson's ethical flexibility, and that of others like him, is not shared by all.

              

Southern Baptist votes must have been a target when presumptive Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee.

With 80% of Baptist ministers supporting McCain but congregations tiring of church in involvement in politics, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission made it clear an August 8 that he saw her as the breath of life for the Baptists-as-Republicans electoral strategy which twice did so much to elect George Bush the younger.

In an interview with CBS News, Land recommended Palin because:

... she's a person of strong faith. She just had her fifth child, a Downs Syndrome child. And there's a wonderful quote that she gave about her baby, and the fact that she would never, ever consider having an abortion just because her child had Downs Syndrome. She's strongly pro-life.
She's a virtual lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. She would ring so many bells. And I just think it would help with independents because she's a woman. She's a reform Governor. I think that, from what I hear, that would be the choice that would probably ring the most bells, along with Mike Huckabee, of course, who's a Southern Baptist.

He greeted the announcement of her candidacy with the proclamation that she is "straight out of veep central casting."

With that recommendation followed, Land and other SBC leaders are trying to deliver the vote with a 40-day Prayer Vigil for Spiritual Revival and National Renewal.

Starting Sept. 24, those involved are to offer daily prayers will include requests for God's guidance in voting, for the election of more "godly" Christians, for God to "help churches find ways to help Christians get to the polls" and for public officials to be protected "from the attacks of Satan."

Richard V. Pierard, professor of history emeritus at Indiana State University, writes in Beliefnet that:

More than 1,300 churches [out of the SBC's reported 42,000] have allegedly signed up for the prayer campaign, which the denomination is promoting through Internet links, conference calls with pastors and a promotional DVD.

The effort is, according to the Associated Press, a companion to the iVoteValues and iLiveValues efforts being carried out jointly by Land's group the the right-wing Family Research Council.

Planning for those efforts dates back many months and suggests that while McCain's culture wars electoral strategy was to some degree forced upon him, Southern Baptist involvement was well-engineered.

              

(update below)

Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain gave a misleading answer to his first Faith Forum question, and so tarnished his entire performance.

As Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren put it to McCain on Saturday, "Now, my first question: Was the cone of silence comfortable that you were in just now?"

McCain answered, "I was trying to hear through the wall" and thus told a charming lie.

His dishonesty first became apparent when NBC News' Andrea Mitchell reported Sunday the Obama campaign's objection that McCain was not secluded.

Affirming Mitchell's account the New York Times' Kit Seelye wrote today:

Senator John McCain was not in a "cone of silence" on Saturday night while his rival, Senator Barack Obama, was being interviewed at the Saddleback Church in California... The matter is of interest because Mr. McCain, who followed Mr. Obama's hourlong appearance in the forum, was asked virtually the same questions as Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain's performance was well received, raising speculation among some viewers, especially supporters of Mr. Obama, that he was not as isolated during the Obama interview as Mr. Warren implied. ...
Mr. Warren, the pastor of Saddleback, had assured the audience while he was interviewing Mr. Obama that "we have safely placed Senator McCain in a cone of silence" and that he could not hear the questions... Interviewed Sunday on CNN, Mr. Warren seemed surprised to learn that Mr. McCain was not in the building during the Obama interview.

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis confirmed the allegation in a heated letter of protest to NBC. Davis wrote, "The fact is that during Senator Obama's segment at Saddleback last night, Senator McCain was in a motorcade to the event and then held in a green room with no broadcast feed."

Davis was of course protesting Mitchell's report by using the time-honored "seppuku strategy" of affirming the accuracy of the report and then screaming that the accurate and relevant report should not have been aired or published.

McCain's dishonesty regarding "the cone of silence" gave additional force to the allegation that his Saddleback account of Christmas in Saigon was freely adapted from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's accounts of his time in the Soviet Gulags.

McCain talked of a Vietnamese prison guard drawing the sign of the cross in the sand (an account which absent from McCain's detailed, 1973 account of his time in North Vietnamese prison, and apparently first emerged in 1999 when his bid for the Republican presidential nomination made it convenient.).

Solzhenitn's strikingly similar account in "The Gulag Archipelago" (published in the U.S. in 1973) is:

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.
As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible

McCain attends a Baptist Church and certainly knows that actual faith in the way of the Cross requires one to tell the truth about both trivial and important things, not fudge one's account of events three and half decades past. And not fudge one's account of events an hour or so past.

I don't think the right name for those who fudge is "straight shooter."

McCain's behavior in both of these instances appears to have been that of a "hypocrite."

The Baptist Center for Ethics publication Ethics Daily has called Rick Warren out for his failures to tell the truth.

In "How Fast Can Rick Warren Spin," Mark McEntire, an associate professor of religion at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., carefully contrasts the claims Warren made during the Aug. 16 ":Faith Forum" at Saddleback Church with the revelations and admissions which have followed.

McEntire ends with a call for public repentance and abandonment of any plans for future fora:

What I believe is certain is that Warren needs to apologize to the candidates and his audience, first, for not telling the truth, and second, for arguing, after he was caught not telling the truth, that the truth does not really matter.
The first "Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency" was a bad idea from the start, and Warren and his church proved ill-equipped to handle it. Let's hope it was the last.

              

A recommended Southern Baptist church planting method is at the center of the $1.3-million Baptist General Convention of Texas scandal which recently spawned a liability suit.

The Southern Baptist Convention apparently believes it has good reasons for investing heavily in Church planting efforts. Church planting is, wrote C.Peter Wagner, "the most effective evangelistic strategy under heaven." In theory, it generates rapid denominational growth by establishing new churches, which are then filled mainly by new members.

The approach at the focus of an Oct. 31, 2006, investigation by the BGCT was developed by Otto Arango, who filed the liability suit mentioned above. It is called "Church Planting Training Centers."

According to SBC North American Mission Board literature, the "Church Planting Training Centers." technique involves using Arango's twelve-volume set of materials at church-based centers to train individuals to become church-planting laymen and pastors.

The laymen and pastors thus trained form groups in their own homes, and those groups go on to become self-sustaining, free-standing churches.

Apparently, the pastors of those new churches then make use of Arango's training materials to train others to repeat the process, thus quickly proliferating Southern Baptist Churches through target populations where there are few.

The process, according to the BGCT investigation, didn't work and it isn't clear how the money allocated to it was spent. In a May 25, 2007 story headlined No lawsuits planned; too costly & complex, lawyer suggests, the Texas Baptist Standard wrote:

Last year, a five-month independent investigation uncovered evidence that 98 percent of the 258 new churches reported by three church planters in the Rio Grande Valley between 1999 and 2005 no longer exist, and some never existed -- except on paper. Those churches received more than $1.3 million from the BGCT. The investigative team faulted the BGCT Executive Board staff for poor oversight, uneven management, failure to abide by internal guidelines and misplaced trust.

Broad questions have also been raised about other Baptist church planting programs. For example, in may of 2007 the Georgia Christian Index reported:

One critic stated, 'I would predict that if someone were to take the thousands of church plants that have been reported to trustees and try to pinpoint them on a map, that maybe 5 to 15 percent of them could be found and it would be impossible to locate the others.'

That's in keeping with the findings of the Texas study, although the Georgia Christian Index was writing about Church Planting Movement claims made by the International Mission Board.

The IMB Global Research Department said that "the number of churches increased globally by 21.5 percent in 2005 from 111,286 to 135, 252 for a net gain of 23, 966 churches. Since 2001 the number of reported churches has more than doubled, reflecting a five-year average annual growth rate of 18.1 percent."

The Georgia Christian Index answers, not with audited or otherwise authoritatively verified data, but an assertion that the IMB should be trusted:

However, the criticism seems to be invalid simply because the leadership of the IMB insists upon a meticulous and precise accounting of churches in their Annual Statistical Reports.

Logically, all of this is small comfort to church professionals who are involved in church planting and to church members trying to understand how well their offering money is being spent.

              

Texas Baptist blogger Spiritual Samurai is no longer almost alone in bringing to light a lawsuit filed by a pastor named in a 2006 Texas church-starting scandal.

Details have been published by the N.C. Biblical Recorder and others (1, 2, 3).

The suit was filed on June 20 in Hidalgo County (Texas) District Court by Otto Arango, one of three pastors at the center of an in-house Baptist General Convention of Texas. It alleges libel, slander and defamation over allegations that Arango misappropriated church funds.

The suit is against the Texas Baptist Standard; Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT); David Montoya (Spiritual Samurai); Calvary Baptist Church in Mineral Wells, Texas; the Palo Pinto Association; David Tamez; Dexton Shores; Roberto Rodriguez; Primera Iglesia Bautista; and Eloy Hernandez. Moreover, the suit specifically accuses the Baptist Standard, the state convention's official newspaper, of publishing allegations against Arango "with malice and lack of good faith."

In a May 25, 2007 story headlined No lawsuits planned; too costly & complex, lawyer suggests, the Standard wrote:

Last year, a five-month independent investigation uncovered evidence that 98 percent of the 258 new churches reported by three church planters in the Rio Grande Valley between 1999 and 2005 no longer exist, and some never existed--except on paper. Those churches received more than $1.3 million from the BGCT. The investigative team faulted the BGCT Executive Board staff for poor oversight, uneven management, failure to abide by internal guidelines and misplaced trust.

Arango says in the suit that success for his innovative strategy for planting new Hispanic Baptist churches was foreclosed when the BGCT hired lawyers to investigate rumors that he was using BGCT funds for personal gain. Arango argues the state convention exhibited "extreme callousness and reckless disregard" for his reputation," causing him to suffer "tremendous loss not only in the United States, but also in Latin American countries.

The "five-month independent investigation" and subsequent inaction laid the foundation for this lawsuit. The investigative report [.pdf] documented inadequacies in BGCT record-keeping and recorded allegations against Arango. Yet the BGCT failed to move on to attempt to prove wrongdoing, thus leaving the door open to counteraction.

They reasoned that further action would be unjustifiably expensive, and this lawsuit is the test of that judgment.

              

Almost alone, Texas Baptist blogger Spiritual Samurai is reporting that a Valleygate-related lawsuit has been filed against the Baptist General Convention of Texas, the Texas Baptist Standard ecclesiastical newspaper, himself and others.

"Valleygate" is a term coined by Spiritual Samurai to describe a Rio Grande Valley church-planting program which was distinguished by its cost, lack of accountability and questionable results.

As the Baptist Standard described it in an April 11 "please stop talking about this" editorial, the BGCT gave $1.3-million to three pastors to start 258 churches, some 98 percent of which did not exist when the program ended, and a number of which never existed at all, save on paper.

Ethics Daily has argued, and I agree, that had Spiritual Samurai not beaten the blogosphere drums long and hard, the Valleygate investigation and report might never have come to pass.

I suspect there might simply never have been a move to clean up the mess. In fact the investigation and such cleanup as have occurred appear to have started down an unproductive path. Montoya argues that questions raised via his blog led to a decision hire an attorney for a full investigation, instead of an accountant who had a personal relationship with the BGCT executive director.

Spiritual Samurai is actually David Montoya, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Mineral Wells,Texas. Like many a crusading blogger before him, Montoya now finds himself short on resources to continue to pursue the issue, even though he believes it should be pursued.

On August 12 he wrote:

... if anyone knows an attorney who has the time, resources, understands that the samurai lives from paycheck to paycheck (keeps one’s prayer life active), and who would like to get to the bottom of this (he will have subpoena power) then please have him contact me.

Is anyone down Texas way interested in helping a pastor with a sword?

              

Think Progess collected the numbers. During the week following the debate I believe calls for a recourse to a fair, third party -- specifically the League of Women Voters -- NBC news beat ABC news by some 600,000 viewers. And yes, according to TVNewser, that is an unusually wide margin.

              

Last night, performer/journalists went after audience emotional reaction, passed on questions all of us need answered and the result was an uninformative train wreck.

Whatever the effect on this presidential campaign, the impaneled questioners demonstrated conclusively the overarching need for nonprofit, nonpartisan League of Women Voters oversight of political campaign debates.

That's the only approach proven to restrain the otherwise commercially irresistible drive of full-time performer/journalists to use presidential debates the same way they use other forums -- by doing whatever they feel they can get away with to build their own audience numbers and so better pay the bills.

Only the oversight of an impartial gatekeeper who has the authority to bar them from participation can restrain the impulse to ask eyebrow-raising questions which consume time better-used for questions about the issues which will actually preoccupy the time of whoever is actually elected president.

              

Marian Wright Edelman pulled me from my slumber in comfortable memories to the present, where nonviolence is still a moral discipline which permits good people to overcome evil without becoming it, and there is much to do.

Writing on April 4 in the Root, the Children's Defense Fund president said:

Too many of us would rather celebrate than follow Dr. King. Some of us have enshrined Dr. King the dreamer, but have ignored Dr. King the disturber of all unjust peace. Many celebrate King the orator, but ignore his words and warnings about the need for reordering the misguided values and priorities he believed to be the seeds of America's downfall. Many remember King the vocal opponent of violence, but not King who called for massive nonviolent civil disobedience to challenge the stockpiling of weapons of death and the wars they fuel.

Ms. Edelman gently provoked me to the thought that a living Martin Luther King would have recast yesterday's civil spectacle over his death into action against poverty and war.

No abstraction-preoccupied dreamer wrote in Letter from Birmingham Jail:

Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

He had been imprisoned for defying a 1963 court injunction forbidding the peaceful protests with which the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) confronted segregation there, and was responding to a published statement by "eight Alabama clergymen."

While in agreement with the SCLC's goals, they called the Birmingham demonstrations "unwise and untimely."

His reply, scribbled in the margins of a newspaper and smuggled out by an aide, is a gentle, philosophically complex call to action against injustice.

For me the letter's core is his argument that oppressed and oppressor are bound together, so that both are harmed by evil done one by the other:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

I was still in high school when I first read those words. My response was then and is now that there is much work to do; everyone's work. Without exception.

              

Gunfire silenced and stilled one man 40 years ago, without ever fully arresting the progress of his cause.

He and his lessons are remembered while the violent who sought to repress the Civil Rights Movement tend to be forgotten, as if their names were being somehow borne away by the nature of their deeds.

As I write, I cannot recall who burned a small cross in front of North Carolina State University's Lee dormitory that night -- only the words and faces of other students who strove for peace and reconciliation then and afterward.

The courage of peacemakers has always been brought back to me by the muffled, never quite inaudible footfalls punctuating the loud ascendancy of the American right which followed Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

Those gentle taps and rustlings are Americans stepping forward without fanfare, choosing to emerge from the darkness Dr. King sought to dispel by faith, reason and nonviolent spiritual example.

Were he alive, Dr. King would, I suspect, hear the movement of their feet as the subtle melody of nonviolence.

Nonviolence is by nature surpassingly patient. It speaks to the fragment of our Creator which mirrors within all of us something of the original Craftsman. Nonviolence invites, and will not compel us to turn toward and follow the good in ourselves to the greater good we can embrace.

The faith-driven strategy of spirit-led inner reform, helped along from time to time by nonviolent civil disobedience, was our collective inoculation against the rise of a persistent American terrorism. As a result, there has never been a living rationalization for the false logic of repression which has stalked us these past four decades.

Instead, the nonviolence he lived and taught has been amplified by the response of Americans to it as their fellow citizens strove to live and through example teach the change for which they yearned.

Much as I love the song, it is not precisely speaking true that "We shall overcome." We are in our various ways deciding to be comfortably side by side, opening our eyes to see one another with new egalitarian clarity and conversing more freely.

The Americans of whom I write, who were once secure in their racism and other, related prejudice, were not exhausted and at last overcome.The persistent footfall I have heard these forty years is the sound of individuals freely answering the call of the good within them to the good offered them by Dr. King and his spiritual heirs.

Conscience by conscience, we have become a nation which willfully accepts a black man and a woman and an old man as presidential candidates and which is learning to reject the jingoism which distracted earlier generations.

Our ongoing change is I believe the highest honor we can offer the memory one who was assassinated when, knowing the risk, he stepped forward to speak to the needs of underpaid sanitation workers.

              

Under Republican Sen. John McCain's health plan, he and Elizabeth Edwards have something in common, Ms. Edwards has explained in several contexts.

The text of McCain's proposals suggests that neither his melanoma nor her breast cancer would be covered, because both are pre-existing conditions.

She was more pointed in The Wonk Room, a blog sponsored by The Center for American Progress.

Wife of former Democratic presidential candidate and vice presidential nominee John Edwards, she wrote:

... I do understand exactly how devastating it will be to people who have the health conditions with which the Senator and I are confronted (melanoma for him, breast cancer for me) but do not have the financial resources we have. In very unconfusing language: they are left outside the clinic doors.

On MSNBC's Morning Joe (4.2.08), Ms. Edwards elucidated those points and others:

McCain and his staff argue that his plan is more efficient, and it is, although the savings are captured by way of increased human pain and s