LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY codeman38)

From Talk To Action, via Crooks and Liars, which in turn I stumbled across through Digg:

George Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General has drawn a lot of heat for among other things, his crack-pot anti-gay views as a leader in the United Methodist affiliate of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. But a new report may finally sink his already controversial nomination in a sea of conflicts of interest that have marked his career.

Dr. James Holsinger has also been a longtime leader of the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church. The Confessing Movement is a rightwing “renewal group” affiliated with the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), whose purpose for a generation has been to divide and disrupt the historic churchs of mainline protestantism in the interests of advancing neoconservatism and the religious right. [...]

Now, an investigation Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D. and Lawrence H. McGaughey, Esq., and published at Media Transparency, shows that Holsinger used the sale of a United Methodist Church-owned hospital in Kentucky, as a cash cow for his personal ambitions. It took years of litigation by the church to find out what had happened to its money, only to learn that Holsinger had diverted millions to endow professorships at the Chandler Medical Center at the University of Kentucky where he served as Chancellor and fundraiser-in-chief.

Full story here.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY nebris)

From BS Alert

Bill Nye, the harmless children's edu-tainer known as "The Science Guy," managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.

As even most elementary-school graduates know, the moon reflects the light of the sun but produces no light of its own.

But don't tell that to the good people of Waco, who were "visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence," according to the Waco Tribune.

Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College's Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: "God made two great lights -- the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars."

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled "We believe in God!" and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they'd always suspected.

This story originally appeared in the Waco Tribune, but the newspaper has mysteriously pulled its story from the online version, presumably to avoid further embarrassment.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY stormwardenace)

http://www.larrykilgore.com/ (BEWARE, MAY DRAIN IQ POINTS).

Okay, this is an idiot who clearly belongs on Encyclopedia Dramatica. Definite Dominionist ties, with groups like Repent America and Minutemen United endorsing him for Governor. Below is an email I sent to him on the site.

To whom it may concern,

I must say, Mr. Kilgore, I am most impressed with the laughter you have provided me. The jokes you have on your site about reconstructionism and the need to end Texas' welfare, prison system, and all other important functions. Yours is a satire worthy of being compared to Landover Baptist itself! You literally sounded like some out-of-touch dominionists from South Carolina who seek to turn it into a theocracy!

Keep this up, and I can see a bright future for you, good sir. I can see you as the next George Carlin, Robin Williams, or Dave Chapelle. First, you will have to expand a bit on your repertoire, maybe an appearance on the Daily Show or the Colbert Report will be in order.

By all means, keep up the good work!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY nebris)

Book Description

After thirty years spent scratching together a middle-class life out of a “dirt-poor” childhood, Joe Bageant moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, where he realized that his family and neighbors were the very people who carried George W. Bush to victory. That was ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not have high school diplomas. Nearly everyone over fifty has serious health problems, and many have no health care. Credit ratings are low or nonexistent, and alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape.

A raucous mix of storytelling and political commentary, Deer Hunting with Jesus is Bageant’s report on what he learned by coming home. He writes of his childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced; the mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt, i.e., “white trashonomics”; the ubiquitous gun culture—and why the left doesn’t get it; Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England; and the blinkered “magical thinking” of the Christian right. (Bageant’s brother is a Baptist pastor who casts out demons.) What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of “the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.”

Deer Hunting with Jesus is a potent antidote to what Bageant dubs “the American hologram”—the televised, corporatized virtual reality that distracts us from the insidious realities of American life.

The Amazon listing

~You cannot effectively work against Dominionism until you understand that is is only one piece of the puzzle, albeit an very important piece. In this book, and in a very readable fashion, Bageant lays out the entire landscape within which The Dommies not only operate, but are born into, live, work, and die. It is required reading, even if y'all grew up 'there'.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gloucester)

The preacher at my church has announced that a Fresh Fire/Foursquare church has bought property in the highest crime area of Lubbock. I am unclear whether they have bought church property or residential rental property. I will be meeting with my preacher to give him all the information on Fresh Fire/Foursquare I can get my hands on. He knows someone inside the ministry, but when I asked him how much he knows about the tradition, he said very little. Between now and then, I need to compile all their dirty laundry into something coherant. I'll be exercising my google-fu, and I'll appreciate any other facts you all can direct me to.