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.

              

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.

              

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 shortened lives.

              

At Schneier on Security I see the British are at it again, this time with DNA-tracking of youngsters.

Our unproductive and sometimes deadly system of public and private teen boot camps were first a British idea, one that wasn't working there when they became all the conservative rage here, and still don't work.

Yet we've enshrined Boot Camps as if they were a benevolent industry.

Apparently much of British law enforcement is drooling for this latest self-destructive thought-crime innovation, and they have Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard on board as DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo).

Forces of British good sense are pushing back, as Roger Graef of The Guardian did in his blog The usual suspects: Listing at-risk children on the DNA database risks breeding anger, resentment and defiance.

Shami Chakrabarti director of the British civil rights group Liberty takes a somewhat harder swing that the proposal, saying:

Targeting innocent children to expand the DNA database is the Government playing the wolf in sheep's clothing.
Any child who is stopped by police, even if under 10, can have his DNA taken and retained for life without being charged or cautioned.
If the Government wants a National DNA Database, they should say so and hold a public debate, not pick on our kids who can't fight back.

Bear in the mind the historic arc of the teen boot camp debate, and you can see that this isn't merely a British debate. Schneier isn't just being proactive by pushing back here, now. It's time.

              

San Antonio Pastor John Hagee, in 'NYT' This Sunday, Says McCain Sought His Endorsement, which he of course gave.

E&P Editor Greg Mitchell wrote:

In an interview that will appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, controversial televangelist Rev. John Hagee declares, "It's true that [John] McCain's campaign sought my endorsement."
Senator and soon-to-be Republican presidential candidate McCain has attempted to distance himself from some of Hagee's views, much as Democrat Barack Obama is doing in relation to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But unlike McCain, Obama has not stood on stage with Wright and accepted his accolades this year.

From Bill Moyer's Journal we learn that Hagee has suggested that Hurricane Katrina was punishment to the U.S. for its role in removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. He has called for war with Iran to facilitate "the rapture," and more.

McCain has a history of caring little about such radicalism, or not at all. He says he doesn't support every Hagee view. Which, as intended, leaves McCain in a position of considerable sympathy for the views of Hagee and others like him.

Of course. How else could McCain sustain his friendship and/or close working relationship with Hagee and others of like mind?

              

Associate Washington Post Editor Eugene Robinson's blog at the offers admiring insight into Democrat Barack Obama's Road Map on Race.

Faith in Public Life covers the Man Behind the Southern Baptist Climate Initiative. He is currently a seminarian at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina and gives an interesting interview.

Semi-Happy Seventh Birthday today to DangerBush's Faith-Based Initiatives. Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement, writes about them accurately and with clarity.

Republican soon-to-be Presidential nominee John McCain's relationship with his ultra-right pastor is covered by Mother Jones' David Corn in McCain's Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam. After reading that you may agree that McCain really wants A permanent war, as does the Bush Administration.

Changing days have of late frequently blessed the lives of politically powerful members of the Christian Right. Jeff Sharlet covers them with acid humor in This is Not a Religion Column: Christian Candidate Quiz Bowl.

              

Remember the nuts episode of Jericho, and the role it played in saving/reviving the show?

Jericho lives because "usall" on the Internet spoke up. So if we speak up for the writers ...

If you need an idea or two about how to make the statement as well as you can, maybe look in on the [Writers Strike] [blog] and [resources].

Whatever you decide to do, a visit can be enlightening.

              

Let us not feign confusion over the meaning of a noose, regardless of the material from which it is constructed, nor pretend that one can safely be ignored.

Anyone who has somehow forgotten the source of the terror inspired need only visit Without Sanctuary, and while there, bear in mind that hate crime is not merely our past.

Hate crime and hate groups are on the rise again, now:

• An average of 210,000 incidents a year were reported to police over a recent period, according to the U.S. Department of Justice study Hate Crimes Reported by Victims and Police
• The number of active hate groups grew from 602 in 2000 to 844 in 2006, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
• Of those active hate groups, 23 call North Carolina home and four are headquartered in Raleigh

There is no mystery about the meaning of a Southern noose, whether ready to do work at the end of a stout rope or writ small and in pencil, where someone will find it.

North Carolina State University's Chancellor struck the right note when, responding to the discovery on campus of a noose made of toilet paper, he wrote:

We want to resist the temptation to overreact to what appears to be an isolated incident. This could be someone's idea of a prank or it might constitute a crime. In either case, it is inappropriate. This is an act that has become symbolic of racial hatred.
There is no room for this kind of action on the NC State campus. Even if it is intended as a prank, it is disruptive and an offense to a safe learning and working environment.

Let us not quibble over the choice of particular words but note that a healthy, open debate ensued, and continues.

Upholding a constructive record that is at least four decades deep, NCSU's student newspaper, the Technician, took a strong position, saying in part:

Our campus needs to lead the nation and set a standard of how race issues are dealt with. Nooses are popping up all over the country and N.C. State must take a firm stance and develop sound policies stating we will not tolerate this type of action at our University -- N.C. State is no place for hate.

To the credit of those involved, on-campus debate was punctuated by a student government resolution "to formally condemn the act of hatred," thus calling the effect of that noose by its right name.

I was an undergraduate at NCSU when night fell on the day of Martin Luther King's assassination. Standing on a Lee Dormitory balcony I was restrained by my suite mates from voicing too loud an objection to the small cross that was burned that night while so many of my fellow students cheered as though there were cause for celebration. My suite mates believed I was in danger, and in retrospect, perhaps I was.

Let none of us stand silent and through silence or underestimation of the infectious malevolence of hate allow the behaviors of intimidation to find any comfortable place among us here.

              

Unastonished by the contents of the former press secretary's account, but brought up short by the fact that he may have chosen to tell it straight, I read and read again the Reuters story: Former press aide blames Bush in CIA leak case - Yahoo! News

Naturally unsatisfied that that half-helping, I wandered over to New York Times to read Ex-Bush Spokesman?s Tantalizing Snippet on C.I.A. Leak

It was informus interruptus in the end.

Perhaps former White Press Secretary Scott McClellan will attempt to cleanse his soul through public confession of the president's sins.

I don't believe we know, yet.

We do really know that his publisher wants to sell lots of copies of that six-months-away-from-the-store book McClellan has penned.

If McClellan does confess the president's sins, perhaps that confessional will give former CIA Agent Valery Plame and her husband just a little more of the satisfaction the are owned for the harm done them at the president's behest. Or move Congress to consider what is really in order here.

In either case, we still know from listening that clear and President Danger Bush is unafflicted by McClellan's apparent impulses.

Danger Bush in fact has no intention of allowing Harry S. Truman's lately fugitive "buck" to stop anywhere near him.

No. Stiff-lipped distance from the obvious was wonderfully practiced Tuesday at the increasingly soiled house.

So mannered with offended virtue the heat of his repressed outrage melted the starch in his collar, current Presidential Press Secretary Dana Perino choked out:

"The president has not and would not ask anyone to pass on false information."

Uh-huh, and I'm a cross-eyed polecat wearing diamond ear bobs.

              

Halloween for my family is a celebration of playful childhood. Wearing fanciful costumes, visiting and being visited by loving friends and eating chocolate are all embraced.

Now, chocolate that is tainted by slavery and oppressive labor conditions has to go, for I have studied 1991 BBC documentary which first broght this matter to public attention, the Knight-Ridder series and much more.

The memory of my sons as delighted firemen, happy in clown suits with honker noses so much more is not marred by today's knowledge.

It is today that I know.

It is today that both the secular ethics and faith require of me one quietly raised voice and the action I can bring to bear against the slavery, near-slavery, below-poverty wages and unsafe conditions.

Matters have apparently changed very little in the half decade since Mali's Save the Children Fund director, Salia Kante, spoke to BBC of child chocolate workers:

"People who are drinking cocoa or coffee are drinking their blood.It is the blood of young children carrying 6kg of cocoa sacks so heavy that they have wounds all over their shoulders. It's really pitiful to see."

Earlier this year in The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Save the Children Canada CEO David Morely wrote:

But still, not much has changed for most children working in the cocoa fields. Recent visits by Save the Canada staff to cocoa farms in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean found low bean prices, low wages, demanding and hazardous work, few heath and education services. We have given these findings to industry leaders with our offer to work with them to change child labour practices in growing and harvesting of cocoa.

As a first, small step, the only chocolate and coffee I'm buying has the fair trade label.

That will not stop the traffic of kidnapped children into slavery on the West African cocoa farms, and the employment at sub-poverty wages under what in this country would be criminal conditions of a great many others.

Changing those conditions is a complex matter.

Being choosy about my chocolate and coffee is simply an honest start, while I decide how this one Southern man can best address the politics of the issue.

              

"Unwaged work" sounds so much less disturbing than " slave labor, " don't you think?

Really, we are just talking about children who live in India who are working in "filthy conditions," without pay and motivated by "threats and beatings" to make garments for the sweetly promoted "Gap Kids" clothing line.

After all, in 2004 GAP fired a passel of subcontractors for using child labor, and says it has launched an internal investigation of this, er, ah, incident.

Ok.

The child-slave-made clothing is heading for the Christmas market. As the Guardian's Dan McDougall explained:

The Observer discovered the children in a filthy sweatshop working on piles of beaded children's blouses marked with serial numbers that Gap admitted corresponded with its own inventory. The company has pledged to convene a meeting of its Indian suppliers as well as withdrawing tens of thousands of the embroidered girl's blouses from the market, before they reach the stores. The hand-stitched tops, which would have been sold for about £20, were destined for shelves in America and Europe in the next seven days in time to be sold to Christmas shoppers.

Cranking up a nice fit of outraged astonishment seems to my ear just a shade more than a trifle disingenuous.

Contracting for the production of cut-rate embroidered textile products from the third world almost inevitalbly means contracting for child labor, as the Guardian also gently explained:

Professor Sheotaj Singh, co-founder of the DSV, or Dayanand Shilpa Vidyalaya, a Delhi-based rehabilitation centre and school for rescued child workers, said he believed that as long as cut-price embroidered goods were sold in stores across Britain, America, continental Europe and elsewhere in the West, there would be a problem with unscrupulous subcontractors using children.

As a Christmas season alternative, I plan to make use of directories like and including the alternative shopping sources promoted by GAP/Old Navy/Banana Republic critics.

In the same spirit, there will be far less chocolate on my Christmas gift and menu list.

Slavery is far too complex a problem to be solved by such strategies, and I do not propose boycott-like actions as a solution.

They are a way of speaking against child slavery, rather than avoidably using any part of my Christmas budget to vote for child slavery. If enough of us seek to be part of the solution, we may find one.

              

From Melissa Rodgers via the Biblical Recorder's Baptist Planet I learned of Women religious form global network to combat human trafficking

The Catholic News Service reports of 30 nuns in 26 nations launching "International Network of Religious Against Trafficking in Persons" during an Oct. 15-19 conference on human trafficking in Rome.

Once upon a time, the notion of human trafficking "was a kind of global family secret," said Msgr. Pietro Parolin, Vatican undersecretary of state. But now, he said, thanks to public awareness campaigns, more people know about this $12 billion business, which in 2005 was built on the forced labor of at least 12 million people.

News stories can be so wonderfully understated:

"People."

Yes. People. A great many of them apparently young women, right at the dawn of adolescence. And children.

Yes.

The little children, and let us disabuse ourselves of the colonialist notion that enslaving children is a practice simply of inadequately industrialized foreigners. Two blonde girls with whom I attended high school were compelled by their father for a time to spend part of their weekends selling their bodies. It began before high school and I was not alone in my knowledge, and I suspect I was not alone in seeking out an adult I knew would act on it.

Were they not slaves, until those of us who learned of what they were enduring found a way to stop it?

There are among us other adults who will not speak aloud of it but who were at some risk of being sold on the modern, domestic market in human beings. There are alive those who were, and escaped it, usually because someone saw and put out a helping hand.

Yes, people around us.

Perhaps people you know. For I have talked for hours to console friends who wept bitterly after learning their own recent ancestors had sold family members.

Like the others, this evil is not some pale, weakling, distant foe to be put off easily and required to show its passport to visit us. It is and has for at least my lifetime been a resident evil -- one that is to my mind as horrific as the overwrought movie by that name.

Yes, I admire the nuns. They are confronting the beast where they find it; where they live. Not easy and not safe. Ready violence defends this profitable enterprise.

Shall we join them and confront it here?

It is here. Not just in my memory of childhood conversations on the school bus and adult conversations with close friends.

Atlanta, one of 14 cities flagged by the FBI where children are most at risk of being exploited, and enslaved.

Yes, here. I have talked with others (kinfolk) in North Carolina who gave every indication of knowing. Yet lacked either the courage or (I weep) the heart to step forward.

Here. Next door?

How carefully have you looked? How long have you pondered the value of a single, helping hand, the moral authority of one raised voice? Yours.

              

What the Bush administration calls Telecom Amnesty is an attempt to escape not only legal judgment, but also the judgment of ordinary people, like you and like me.

The abstractions and rationalizations should not be allowed to confuse us.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues and the evidence says the Bush administration and AT&T funneled our private communications into the maw of National Security Agency analytical engines, and a judge has ruled that they knew it was wrong.

While the data collection is threatening, it is when accurately described so abstract that the plain meaning is obscured. It is hard to keep in the mind the key point that the electronically transmitted private messages and business records of people like us were, it seems, collected, winnowed, filed, analyzed and recorded as a form of "evidence" for unknown current and future purposes.

              

Scrappleface reports nicely the Nobel un-news:

Gore Wins Nobel ....

Deltoid explains how the Washington Post is dancing attack journalism to music the black-robed Supremes wrote RE:Florida. It's part of the Gore Derangement Syndrome.

Nisbet has it, and with hanging judges fortunately nowhere in evidence, still tries to frame Al.

From the Atlantic Monthly comes the clear, quiet voice of James Fallows, who remembers, with an eloquently understated call to conscience over shameful reactions to Al Gore's well-earned Nobel Peace Prize, which Gore never wavers in pointing out is shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

No, this time a Republican-stacked Supreme Court cannot deny this nation and the world the right leadership for this time of crisis.