LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY britzkrieg)

From Law.com:

When FBI supervisors in Miami met with new interim U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta last month, they wondered what the top enforcement priority for Acosta and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be...

The agents were stunned to learn that a top prosecutorial priority of Acosta and the Department of Justice was none of the above. Instead, Acosta told them, it's obscenity. Not pornography involving children, but pornographic material featuring consenting adults...

With the rapid growth of Internet pornography, stamping out obscene material has become a major concern for the Bush administration's powerful Christian conservative supporters. The Mississippi-based American Family Association and other Christian conservative groups have pressured the Justice Department to take action against pornography. The family association has sent weekly letters to U.S. attorneys around the country to pressure them to pursue the makers and distributors of pornography.

"While there are crimes like drugs and public corruption in Miami, this is also a form of corruption and should be a priority," said Anthony Verdugo, director of the Christian Family Coalition in Miami. "Pornography is a poison and it's addictive. It's not a victimless crime. Women are the victims."

Full Story

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY brigidsblest)

by G. Jefferson Price III

The similarities among the radical wings of religious fundamentalism are striking and frightening.

In Iran, for example, the mullahs issue fatwas, the exhortations to assassinate people they don't like. The most notorious of these in recent times was the fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against the Indian-born author Salman Rushdie. The ayatollah was incensed because Mr. Rushdie's novel Satanic Verses seemed to insult Islam.

We have our own religious nuts here in America. They issue their own fatwas. The latest example of this came last week from one of the nuttiest of them all, the so-called Rev. Pat Robertson, who urged the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

( It gets scarier. )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kalibex)

"What I see in America, on the religious right, is a paradox I've
never observed before, at least on a mass level, in the US.

"For the first time I can recall in US history, a sizeable number of
otherwise rational people have divorced themselves from the American
dream---in a very specific way, but a conscious divorce nonetheless.

"Millions of people now believe God, not themselves, is the prime
mover of will and event in their lives.

"This strikes me as unprecedented, not least because the voices of the
centre and centre-left---you have no social democratic consensus in
the US as we know it in Canada or Europe---have little grounding to
identify the reasons for this.

"As a lapsed Catholic from a very conservative Irish immigrant family,
I think what I see is what I see, if you know what I mean. The
irrational is in the ascendance, just as it was in the late 1920s in
both the US and, far more evilly, in Germany, having been well set
loose in Russia

"The implications are huge: the rugged American individualist
philosophy of pragmatism and utilitarianism and the Horatio Alger
myth no longer seem to apply. The notion of social mobility itself
may well be in peril in this culture of 'inshallah'---'God wills it'."

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Just wanted to let everyone know that I am back from my trip. More tomorrow. What happened to Britzkreig?