There’s a wicked little meme is going around and it seems to have infected a lot of people we’d have hoped were immune. Unfortunately this mental and linguistic virus is particularly virulent, and left untreated it has the potential to be lethal.

I’m referring, of course, to the “Lone Wolf” Flu. It’s precisely the sort of bug we’d expect to strike conservative talk show hosts across the nation - and it has - but lately it’s turned up in what were once considered to be some of the most objective and sanitary environments in the American media landscape.

I’ll stop torturing the metaphor now, lest it seem like I’m treating the subject too lightly. Instead, let’s examine a couple of news items that do considerable damage to the truth of our domestic terror problem. First, a June 13 AP story bylined by Devlin Barrett and Eileen Sullivan came across the wires with this headline: “Shootings show threat of ‘lone wolf’ terrorists.” And yesterday the Wall St. Journal joined in with “FBI Seeks to Target Lone Extremists,” which explained that “[l]one-wolf offenders continue to be of great concern to law enforcement.” Full Story »

Regarding Bill O’Reilly’s campaign against George Dr. Tiller, as reported by Gabriel Winant at Salon, a recent precedent exists for a civil lawsuit against O’Reilly.

If you have read the book A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America by Elinor Langer, you’ll no doubt agree with her (though no white power advocate, she) that the godfather of American white power, Tom Metzger, was railroaded. But this Wikipedia passage accurately explains in brief how he was convicted: Full Story »

Note: Relevant updates will posted to the bottom. By all means, read all the way to the end, where it gets interestinger and interestinger.

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Dr. George Tiller was murdered at his church this morning. According to the New York Times:

Dr. Tiller, who had performed abortions since the 1970s, had long been a lightning rod for controversy over the issue of abortion, particularly in Kansas, where abortion opponents regularly protested outside his clinic and sometimes his home and church. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by an abortion opponent but recovered.

He had also been the subject of many efforts at prosecution, including a citizen-initiated grand jury investigation. Full Story »

Inspired by Dr. Slammy’s insightful and illuminating piece, Is America ready for an honest conversation about abortion yet?

My wife’s wise words notwithstanding, they’re representative of those who view abortion as a women’s rights issue. But to pro-lifers, that concern is dwarfed by one much larger: preventing murder. Furthermore, to them, a woman’s right to control her own body not only palls before the need to save a life, but is indicative of the me-first syndrome that threatens to rend the fabric of society as sure as abortion does. Full Story »

Well, here’s a fine howdy-do: Rick Warren, pastor of the mother of all mega-churches, has been tapped to channel Jesus conduct a seance deliver the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Because Warren is, you know, a “moderate.”

…in 2004 Warren declared that marriage, reproductive choice, and stem cell research were “non-negotiable” issues for Christian voters and has admitted that the main difference between himself and James Dobson is a matter of tone.  He criticized Obama’s answers at the Faith Forum he hosted before the election and vowed to continue to pressure him to change his views on the issue of reproductive choice.  He came out strongly in support of Prop 8, saying “there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … Full Story »

In this season’s eighth episode, Boston Legal - the relentlessly liberal ABC dramedy starring William Shatner and James Spader - lobbed an absolute bomb at those of us on the pro-choice side of the Roe v. Wade question. The bunker-buster was posed, predictably enough, by Crane Poole & Schmitt’s resident conservative, the gleefully Republican Denny Crane, portrayed by Shatner. BL fans know Crane to be positively Cheney-esque in his politics (although he did finally cross the aisle to vote for Obama because even he couldn’t stomach four more years like the last eight), and he routinely plays the straw man for the passionate liberalism of Spader’s litigator par excellence, Alan Shore.

This time, though, Crane (who’s battling through the early stages of Alzheimer’s) breaks through to a moment of pristine, Emmy-worthy clarity. Full Story »

On the eve of the election, the New York Times editorial board wrote up an excellent critique of Bush’s last minute, lame duck executive orders that he signed on November the first. Here are some excerpts:

Agents will be allowed to use informants to infiltrate lawful groups, engage in prolonged physical surveillance and lie about their identity while questioning a subject’s neighbors, relatives, co-workers and friends. Full Story »

That’s the debate I’ve been having with an old college friend whom I’ve recently reconnected with. He’s become a Catholic since we knew one another back in the ‘80s, and is a deep-thinking, deeply principled man. He will not be voting for Barack Obama in November. Nor will he be voting for John McCain. He will vote, but he will cast a blank ballot. He urges me, if I am serious about my moral commitments, to do likewise. Neither candidate, in his opinion, cares enough about ‘life issues’ to merit an affirmative vote.

The New York Times reports that other Catholics are struggling with what do with in the upcoming election. The most troublesome issue for many remains abortion. Some, like Joe Biden, believe we must make accommodations for differing views in a pluralistic society, despite his own embrace of personhood at conception. Others, like my old friend, see Biden’s support for legal access to abortion as no different from espousing the Holocaust – if not in deed, then in complicity.

Can a Catholic possibly vote for a Democratic candidate who has regularly received a 100% approval rating from Planned Parenthood and indeed, as a state senator, voted against an Illinois version of the Born Alive Infant Protection bill passed by Congress? Can I, as a person of faith who believes all life is sacred? I am going to answer ‘yes,’ and in so doing, proclaim myself also a utilitarian and a realist, with all the moral conundra that pragmatism involves. Full Story »

Yes, I know.

Whatever the private depths of American bigotry may be, one thing is clear. In publicly sanctioned discourse, a powerful black man is no longer anybody’s nigger, but a powerful woman is still every misogynist’s bitch.

Yes, I’m angry about that. No, I don’t plan to get over it, shut up about it or stop working to change it. It seems you’re even angrier than I am, because your rage has evidently destroyed any principles or intelligence you may once have had. Hillary Clinton tried to show you the big picture, but if it’s only about women’s issues for you, let this woman point out what your resentment vote for John McCain will buy you and me and all of our daughters and sisters and friends for the next eight years or so. Full Story »

Mr. Donohue:

The Catholic League’s request to Leah Daughtry to ban the blogs BitchPhD and Towleroad from the Democratic National Convention came as something of a shock to those of us here at Scholars and Rogues. Frankly, Mr. Donohue, we are hurt. Our offices contain no balloon figures of Jesus, with or without genitalia (you say “apparently albino penis,” I say “loincloth” – oh wait! There’s the penis! Or should it be Penis?). Our site features no links to intensely homoerotic coverage of the hottest Olympic athletes, despite insistent lobbying from at least two of our staff members. Our humble blog, unlike Daily Kos, may never become the Internet apotheosis of evil radicalism. We know our place. We are what we are.

What we are, Mr. Donohue, is a blog at least ten times as offensive to the Catholic League as the so-called “patently obscene” publications to which you so vehemently object.

Full Story »

According to the laws of the land, anyone who qualifies as a person is granted certain rights. One of those rights is to be left alive. The life of persons cannot be ended without due legal process, otherwise known as a trial. It’s for this reason that Colorado’s proposed Amendment 48, granting legal personhood to a newly fertilized egg (aka an zygote) is such a problem - granting personhood to an zygote leads to all sorts of consequences, ranging from the absurd to the criminal. The most serious and intentional consequence is that anything intended to end a pregnancy would be legally defined as murder without the level of public debate abortion truly deserves.

Earlier this week, new information was published at the Colorado Independent by investigative reporter Wendy Norris that raises very serious questions about the individuals and organizations backing the non-profit that got the amendment on the ballot, Colorado for Equal Rights (CER). Specifically, it appears that some of CER’s backers have long associations with militant anti-abortion groups. And by militant, I mean groups that actively espouse murdering obstetricians who perform abortions. Full Story »

In our most recent S&R poll, readers were asked the following: Two children of a family belonging to the Followers of Christ Church have now died after “faith-healing” was chosen over medical treatment. What do you believe authorities should do?

The results looked like this:

• Pursue appropriate criminal sanctions. Religion is no defense for child endangerment. (75%, 101 Votes)
• Nothing. These kinds of cases fall under the absolute right to freedom of religion. (25%, 33 Votes) Full Story »
  

Most folks don’t realize it - even people who know me fairly well - but I used to be a Republican. Back when I was younger and, one supposes, more naïve about the relevance of certain kinds of economic theory, I was a pretty mouthy GOPper. I voted for Reagan twice and Bush the Elder once, and while I can defend myself by saying things like “Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Mike Dukakis,” I think it’s now clear that history will regard those voting decisions as, at best, insufficiently considered.

As time passed and I grew more … educated … I became more and more conflicted. Full Story »

I ran into the story of The Political Candidate Formerly Known As Marvin ‘Pro-Life’ Richardson this morning.

Long story short, an Idaho strawberry farmer has pared his legal name all the way down to ‘Pro-Life,’ that being the only way for him to appear specifically as Pro-Life on the upcoming ballot to succeed Senator Larry Craig (and every subsequent Idaho ballot until he meets Janis Joplin).

Considering he advocates murder charges for those who seek and perform abortions, he could have gone the Prince route and changed his name to an ultrasound picture. (Or one of those other ones… you know… *full-body shiver* from the protests. How would the DMV handle that?)

Well, duh.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Monday endorsed a proposed Colorado Human Life Amendment that would define personhood as a fertilized egg.

Of course, Preacher Huck hasn’t stopped to ponder all the practical and logistical nightmares this kind of silliness would engender. For instance:

• If my wife is pregnant, can I claim Unborn, Jr. as a tax exemption?
• Does this make the legal drinking age 20 years, 3 months? Full Story »
  

It’s good that everybody knows that the people involved in the pro-life movement are directly responsible for the decline in abortions.

— Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee, on a report that the abortion rate nationally has fallen 25 percent from 1990 to 2005.

Yes, we won 35 years ago — but women have been losing ground, losing rights, losing options, losing access, losing availability and just plain losing nearly every day since.

— Nancy Keenan, head of NARAL Pro-Choice America, in a recent speech.
Full Story »

Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’

— President Bush in Aug. 22 speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Kansas City.

The only relevant analogy of Vietnam to Iraq is this: In Iraq, just as we did in Vietnam, we are clinging to a central government that does not and will not enjoy the support of the people. Unless the president acts on that lesson from history and works toward a federal solution in Iraq, there is no prospect that when we leave, we will leave anything stable behind. In fact, the president’s policies are pushing us toward another Saigon moment — with helicopters fleeing the roof of our embassy — which he says he wants to avoid. Al Qaeda in Iraq didn’t exist before we invaded. It is a Bush fulfilling prophecy.

— Presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, criticizing the president’s speech, saying the president “continues to play the American people for fools.”
Full Story »

[C]learly this was not something that we expected to happen, given the history of this bridge, the inspection process, and how this bridge was rated.

— Mary Peters, secretary of Transportation, during an Aug. 4 White House press briefing about the collapsed Minnesota I-35W bridge that “[s]tate bridge inspectors [had] warned for nearly a decade before its collapse that the Interstate 35W bridge had ’severe’ and ‘extensive’ corrosion of its beams and trusses, ‘widespread cracking’ in spans and missing or broken bolts … [with] certain components were ‘beyond tolerable limits’ … ”

This record is not tainted at all, at all. Period. You guys can say whatever you want.

— San Francisco Giants right fielder Barry Bonds at a press conference after breaking Hank Aaron’s career home-run record of 755 home runs Tuesday night.
Full Story »

The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any country in the industrialized world; Texas has the highest teen pregnancy rate (63 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19) of any state in the nation, according to a newly released study of children’s health, KIDS COUNT Data Book, issued by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Texas achieved this title in 2003 and it seems nothing really changed in 2004. More concerning, Texas surpasses the national average of 41 births per 1,000 teens by nearly 20 points. According to the National Vital Statistics Reports, in 2003 the number of teen births in Texas was 51,091. Full Story »

We were afraid long before 9/11.

As so many have observed, fear causes us to trade freedom for security, real or perceived. Fear makes us sheep, a lesson that’s not lost on those who seek to acquire, retain and extend power. Fear causes us to follow not those who’d deliver us from fear or its causes, but rather those who profit from it.

But why are we so afraid?

This is a question I’ve been thinking and studying on for some time - longer even than I realized. As it turns out I did a good bit of research in the ’90s that bears directly on the issue, and while I don’t claim to have a definite answer nailed down, I do believe I have a theory, and maybe it’s one we can leverage as we try to infuse the Republic with a bit more reason. It’s longish, but bear with me - hopefully the payoff will reward your patience. Full Story »