Friday, May 22, 2009
Joke of the Week: Liberty University
From the 2008 Republican Party Platform:
From the 10 Commandments:
Thou Shalt Not Kill
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Liberty University Revokes Democratic Party Club's recognition on Moral Grounds.
By Ray Reed
Published: May 21, 2009
Liberty University has revoked its recognition of the campus Democratic Party club, saying “we are unable to lend support to a club whose parent organization stands against the moral principles held by” the university.
“It kind of happened out of nowhere,” said Brian Diaz, president of LU’s student Democratic Party organization, which LU formally recognized in October.
Diaz said he was notified of the school’s decision May 15 in an e-mail from Mark Hine, vice president of student affairs.
According to the e-mail, the club must stop using the university’s name, holding meetings on campus, or advertising events. Violators could incur one or more reprimands under the school’s Liberty Way conduct code, and anyone who accumulates 30 reprimands is subject to expulsion.
Hine said late Thursday that the university could not sanction an official club that supported Democratic candidates.
“We are in no way attempting to stifle free speech.”
Hine said the university had recently completed a policy that would govern clubs and organizations on campus.
“We looked at each club and organization to determine where it stood and unfortunately this one kind of got in the sights of policy, if you will,” he said.
Hine’s e-mail mentioned that he had expressed a concern to Diaz about the national Democratic Party’s platform during a meeting earlier in the semester.
Last fall, Diaz said, Hine had complimented the club for being a faith-based organization working within the Democratic Party.
Jan Dervish, secretary of the club, and Maria Childress, its staff adviser, said they met with Hine after the revocation and asked for a further explanation.
“He said it wasn’t us. It was the national Democratic Party,” which the campus club’s constitution supports, Dervish said. The campus club also opposes abortion and supports the traditional view of marriage, Dervish said.
“His bottom line was, ‘You can’t be a Democrat and be a Christian and be a university representative,’” Childress said.
Hine denied saying that.
Part of Hine’s e-mail said, “The Democratic Party platform is contrary to the mission of Liberty University and to Christian doctrine (supports abortion, federal funding of abortion, advocates repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, promotes the “LGBT” agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.)” LGBT refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Mark Lawrence, chairman of the citywide Lynchburg Democratic Party, called The News & Advance Thursday after he learned about the revocation.
“My issue with this is the statement that the Democratic Party platform is contrary to the mission of Liberty University and to Christian doctrine,” Lawrence said. “They are essentially saying, ‘you cannot be a Christian and a Democrat.’”
Lawrence said he doesn’t personally support every plank in the party’s platform, and many Democrats also have their own differences with the document, which is assembled every four years for the national convention.
Hine’s e-mail said, “The candidates this club supports uphold the platform and implement it. The candidates supported are directly contrary to the mission of Liberty University.”
The goals of the Democratic Party and LU “run in opposite directions,” the e-mail said.
LU has had a College Republicans club for several years.
Claire Ayendi, who was chairman of the Republican club last year and graduated this spring, said she didn’t regard the university’s disbanding of the Democratic group as a political act.
“I think it’s more like a moral issue,” Ayendi said. “Letting a club like that exist goes against what the school is founded on,” she said.
Democratic Party club adviser Childress, an administrative assistant in the university’s honors program, said she sees her role as supporting students, especially their academic status.
“I love and support the university,” said Childress, who earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from LU in 2004. “But my support is to the students as well. My number one goal is protecting them,” she said.
Dervish said he asked Hine whether LU would let him work off campus in Democratic Party activities. Dervish said Hine told him and Childress that students’ activities outside the school were not affected by the university’s decision to revoke the club’s recognition.
In a written statement sent to The News & Advance Thursday night, Hine said, “Among other things, Liberty University stands for the sanctity of human life. The loss of human life through abortion is a great tragedy and we cannot remain silent when the political policies or politicians themselves promote the destruction of innocent human life.
“While those who are members of the LU Democratic Club are well intentioned and honorable, the platform and policies of the national Democratic Party and the candidates supported by that party, and thus the student organization itself, are inconsistent with the mission of the University.”
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Labels: Right Wing Hypocrites
Friday, October 19, 2007
Dean Wormer's Wife: Oral Roberts University Presidents Wife spent the night with underaged males 9 times in ORU "guesthouse."
By JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS, Associated Press Writer
Thu Oct 18, 1:42 AM ET
Oral Roberts University President Richard Roberts asked for and was granted a leave of absence Wednesday amid accusations of lavish spending at donors' expense and illegal involvement in a political campaign.
The 58-year-old son of the evangelist who founded the school said he would continue in his role as chairman and chief executive of Oral Roberts Ministries, and decried what he said were untrue allegations.
"I don't know how long this leave of absence will last, but I fully trust the members of the Board of Regents," Roberts said in a news release issued by the university. "I pray and believe that in God's timing, and when the Board feels that it is appropriate, I will be back at my post as president."
The board said Billy Joe Daugherty, the senior pastor of Victory Christian Center in Tulsa, will temporarily assume the president's duties with help from Oral Roberts, 89, who is chancellor of the 5,700-student university but has left day-to-day operations to his son.
An Oct. 2 lawsuit filed by three former ORU professors says they were wrongfully dismissed and accuses Roberts of misspending at donors' expense, including numerous home remodels and a senior trip to the Bahamas for one daughter on the ministry's dime.
It also accuses Roberts of illegal involvement in a local political campaign, which would jeopardize the university's nonprofit status.
The professors say they were forced out after turning over this information to the ORU Board of Regents.
George Pearsons, the board's chairman, said he will meet Friday with the outside firm charged with investigating the allegations.
"Nothing is being swept under the rug, nothing is being hidden," he said late Wednesday.
The professors' suit was amended last week to include new allegations that documents were shredded and destroyed days after the initial lawsuit was filed, and hours after ORU and Richard Roberts fired the school's comptroller.
The amended complaint also included an internal ministry report, titled "Scandal Vulnerability Assessment," documenting allegations of misconduct by the university and the Roberts family. Only a partial report was included in the Oct. 2 lawsuit.
The more detailed account alleges Richard Roberts' wife, Lindsay, spent the night in the ORU guest house with an underage male "on nine separate occasions," and was photographed 29 times with an underage male in her sports car, among other allegations.
The internal report was prepared by Stephanie Cantees, Richard Roberts' sister-in-law. An ORU spokesman said Cantees would not comment on the report.
An ORU student repairing Cantees' laptop discovered the document and later provided a copy to one of the dismissed professors.
In a statement issued Saturday, Lindsay Roberts said, "I live my life in a morally upright manner and throughout my marriage have never, ever engaged in any sexual behavior with any man outside of my marriage as the accusations imply."
"The last three weeks have taken a serious toll on me and my family," Richard Roberts said in the news release Wednesday. "The untrue allegations have struck a terrible blow in my heart. The untrue allegations of sexual misconduct by my wife have hurt the most."
Gary Richardson, attorney for the dismissed professors, said his clients "stand ready and prepared at the appropriate time to prove the truth of those allegations, and also prove the truth of the fact they were fired after providing the information off Stephanie Cantees' computer to the Board of Regents.
"I want to know why they fired these guys," Richardson said.
Oral Roberts, who lives in California, said last week that the allegations against his family had blindsided him, "but we have been through some tough experiences in building Oral Roberts University in the 1960s, and we have surprised them all and have built a university that we believe is for the glory of God."
The Roberts family ministry grew from Southern tent revivals to one of the most successful evangelical empires in the country, hauling in tens of millions of dollars in contributions a year. The university reported nearly $76 million in revenue in 2005, according to the IRS.
The elder Roberts founded the school, known for its 60-foot-tall bronze sculpture of praying hands, in 1963. He famously told viewers in 1987 that God told him to raise $8 million for the university or he would be "called home."
The week the lawsuit was filed, Richard Roberts said at a chapel service that God told him to deny the allegations. He said God told him: "We live in a litigious society. Anyone can get mad and file a lawsuit against another person whether they have a legitimate case or not. This lawsuit ... is about intimidation, blackmail and extortion."
Labels: American Taliban, Right Wing Hypocrites
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
IOKIYAR
Now:
"It's bad enough when politicians turn their backs on a war they voted for and supported when it was popular," Cheney said Monday. "But no one in politics, regardless of party, should hesitate to object when an American soldier at war is mocked and insulted."
Then:
Delegates to the Republican National Convention found a new way to take a jab at Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam service record: by sporting adhesive bandages with small purple hearts on them.
Do they even believe the shit they say?
Labels: Right Wing Hypocrites
Friday, June 15, 2007
Doing the jobs Americans aren’t willing to do
Given the recent rhetoric in Republican circles about immigration policy, I found this story spectacularly amusing.
The California Republican Party has decided no American is qualified to take one of its most crucial positions — state deputy political director — and has hired a Canadian for the job through a coveted H-1B visa, a program favored by Silicon Valley tech firms that is under fire for displacing skilled American workers.
Christopher Matthews, 35, a Canadian citizen, has worked for the state GOP as a campaign consultant since 2004. But he recently was hired as full-time deputy political director, with responsibility for handling campaign operations and information technology for the country’s largest state Republican Party operation, California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring confirmed in a telephone interview this week.
In the nation’s most populous state — which has produced a roster of nationally known veteran political consultants — “it’s insulting but also embarrassing … to bring people from the outside who don’t know the difference between Lodi and Lancaster … and who can’t even vote,” said Karen Hanretty, a political commentator and former state GOP party spokeswoman.
Wait, it gets funnier. Matthews was hired by Michael Kamburowski, the state GOP’s chief operations officer, who is … wait for it … an Australian citizen.
“There are talented Republicans in California, and the message that (party chair) Ron Nehring is sending is that there’s no talent pool here,” Hanretty said.
Just to be clear, I don’t care who the California Republican Party hires. I’m sure these two guys are perfectly capable political professionals.
But given the GOP’s immigration policy, and it’s take on the H-1B visa program, these hires are a little surprising, aren’t they?
The hiring of two immigrants at top Republican Party posts has handed ammunition to critics who note that many Republicans have spoken critically about the impacts of waves of Mexican immigrants.
“The hypocrisy is disgusting,” said longtime Democratic Party activist Gloria Nieto, policy director at San Jose-based Services Immigration Rights and Education Network, or SIREN, an immigrant advocacy nonprofit organization.
Nieto argued that the party has painted Latinos “as the brown menace. … But it’s perfectly OK to hire people from outside the country? What does it say about the Republican Party that they import their hired guns?”
As for the H-1B visa program in specific, it’s supposed to focus on “specialized workers” whose unique skills are unavailable in the American workforce. According to Labor Department regulations, employers are supposed to make a good-faith effort to hire Americans, and then rely on “specialized” immigrants if necessary.
So, in other words, the California Republican Party is suggesting that in the largest state in the Union, there were no qualified people to serve as the state deputy political director.
Too funny.
Labels: immigration, Republican Party, Right Wing Hypocrites
Friday, June 08, 2007
Tort reformer Robert Bork sues Yale Club
Claiming the Yale Club of New York City “wantonly, willfully, and recklessly” failed to provide easy to climb staging, conservative uber-activist Judge Robert Bork is suing the club for $1,000,000 in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages from a fall Bork sustained while mounting the dais at the club for a scheduled speech. Bork, an infamous tort reform advocate, hasn’t always been such a fan of suing for punitive damages, at least when other people do it.
Labels: punitive damages, Right Wing Hypocrites, Robert Bork, tort reform, Yale Club
Friday, April 06, 2007
The American media's fringe ideological view of Pelosi's trip
The media's hysteria-driven coverage of Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria is a real clarifying moment. As Greg Sargent notes (with video), it actually prompted CNN's increasingly absurd Suzanne Malveaux to ask: "And, Nancy Pelosi in Syria and in the crosshairs of Vice President Cheney. Is she on her way to becoming the most controversial House Speaker yet?" For doing what?
The American media, taking its cues from the Limbaugh/Cheney/AEI faction -- the world in which negotiating with a country like Syria is some sort of radical and highly "controversial" idea -- simply does not recognize how isolated and on the fringe this right-wing faction is, a fact which even the faction itself is beginning to acknowledge. Today, National Review's Rich Lowry warns of what he says is a scary group that is "on the verge of becoming the most significant force in the West, one that perhaps will shape our world for years, even decades, to come":
It is the Capitulation Caucus.It sounds like the Capitulation Caucus pretty much includes everyone other than Sean Hannity, Dick Cheney, Michael Ledeen and Lowry. And Lowry forgot one other part of the Capitulation Caucus: the majority of the American people, who clearly share the subversive Capitulation agenda.Its membership consists of most nationally elected Democrats in the United States, much of the American foreign-policy elite, the balance of the U.S. media, most international bureaucrats and nongovernmental organizations, and the European political elite.
They are loosely united around their beliefs that the Iraq War is lost or not worth trying to win, that we have to accommodate ourselves to anti-Western thugs in the Middle East and that the United States today is a reckless, malign influence in the world.
Lowry's colleague, Cliff May, this week had what he complained was a day-long exchange with readers of this blog over his false statements about American public opinion regarding foreign policy. But to May's credit, he now consequently seems to have recognized the reality which the American media is apparently incapable of ingesting -- namely, that it is May and his warmongering comrades who are the fringe. May -- citing the polling data (i.e., reality) with which he was bombarded this week -- acknowledged in his latest Townhall column (h/t sysprog):
We like to think of our politicians as leaders but most are followers: They do what they think the voters want them to do (that's the smoothest path to political power), and they divine the will of those voters by reading polls.The warmongering Right that the American media venerates and depicts as the mainstream is, in reality, an ever-shrinking fringe group. Other than the right-wing spectrum in Israel, their mentality and worldview really does not really exist anywhere else in the world, certainly not to any meaningful degree. It is a way of thinking that is widely scorned and discredited around the world -- that our country has been ruled by them is precisely why America's standing in the world is at an all-time and dangerous low point -- and their mindset really is confined strictly to (shrinking) right-wing elements in the U.S. and Israel (along with the Australian Prime Minister).Back in November, even after the Democrats bested Republicans in the elections, it was assumed that most Americans would be furious over any attempt to de-fund troops engaged in combat. But recent polls, taken by such organizations as Pew, CNN and the Washington Post suggest that a substantial number of voters no longer see it that way: Confidence in the possibility of salvaging a successful outcome in Iraq is running low; support for Congress legislating a specific date when American troops will come home is running high.
The idea that we should use military force against Iran, or simply refuse to negotiate with Iran and Syria, or stay in Iraq indefinitely and continue to wage war there, or that a visiting politician's decision to wear culturally appropriate clothing when visiting a mosque is a sign that we are about to live under Islamic law and submit to our new Al Qaeda Rulers -- those ideas come from a fringe and radical group which lies outside of mainstream thought both in the West and around the world, yet those are the ideas that comprise the American media's dominant narrative.
A very astute blogger recently travelled abroad for the first time in several years, and was in England during the time Iran was detaining the British sailors. She sent me an e-mail which included this observation, one which is indisputably true for anyone who pays substantial attention to foreign media:
Even though I didn't bring a laptop and I was sightseeing and visiting as many museums and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, etc ... as I could, I still couldn't help hearing the news about the soldiers. It was unavoidable.This cheap, artificial, mindless Charles Krauthammer/Bill Kristol/Ann Coulter/Dick Cheney chest-beating faux-warrior-against-the-world mentality is now really a distinctly fringe American phenomenon. It does not even exist to any substantial degree in one of America's closest allies, Britain, the country historically most closely aligned with American political thought.What I did not hear was anything resembling the bloodthristy right-wing rantings I (correctly) imagined were being broadcast over here. Perhaps if I paid closer attention to the news while I was there I would have heard something unreasonable, but in my limited exposure to the television, it was nothing -- nothing -- like what you were probably hearing.
And yet the crux of our American media is beholden to that group, takes its cues from it, and treats it like it defines the mainstream. Hence, Nancy Pelosi's belief in engaging the Syrians in dialogue -- a belief endorsed by, among others: (a) the uber-establishment Baker-Hamilton Commission, (b) the Israeli government, and (c) the vast majority of American people ("By 64% to 28%, respondents favored the group's recommendation to open direct talks with Iran and Syria") -- is, in American Media Land, depicted as some sort of radical and fringe idea, something which threatens to make Nancy Pelosi, two months after she took office, "the most controversial House Speaker yet."
Of course, the American media has been working overtime to depict Pelosi as a failed and weak joke before she even was inaugurated (recall the grave, grave crisis over whether Jane Harman would become Intelligence Committee Chair -- have any of the Very Serious Pundits who exploited that very grave matter to suggest that Pelosi's leadership was "crippled" even mentioned the name "Silvestre Reyes" a single time or written a word about the House Intelligence Committee, once the fun, gossipy, petty, manufactured "Pelosi scandal" over the Harman-Hasting drama went nowhere? Highly doubtful).
It is staggering just how out of touch and frivolous our media is. Just contemplate all the substantive scandals during the Bush presidency which they have all but ignored -- they could barely contain their scornful, bored indifference over the fact that the U.S. Attorney General repeatedly lied to Congress about why federal prosecutors were suddenly fired -- but they can hardly contain their giddiness and their compulsive and bizarre cattiness over an event (Pelosi's meeting with Syrian leaders) that, to the normal world, is completely natural and mundane. But the media lives in the Limbaugh/Hannity/Cheney world (Matt Drudge rules it), and in that world, what is in reality fringe and discredited is, to them, the barometer of mainstream.
Labels: American Media, Nancy Pelosi, Right Wing Hypocrites, Right Wing Misinformation Campaign, Suzanne Malveaux, Syria
Monday, March 12, 2007
U.S. Military "emboldens the enemy." U.S. Military Hates America. U.S. Military supports Al-Qaeda. U.S. Military plans "cut and run."
Here's the story:
U.S. military plans Iraq fallback strategy: report
Mon Mar 12, 2007 6:13 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. military planners have begun work on a fallback strategy in case the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq fails, including a gradual pullout of U.S. forces and more emphasis on training and advising Iraqi forces, the Los Angeles Times reported in Monday's editions.
The strategy, based partly on the U.S. experience in El Salvador in the 1980s, is in the early planning stages, the newspaper said, citing U.S. military officials and Pentagon consultants who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It is a fallback if the Bush administration's plan to send about 26,000 more U.S. troops fails to stabilize Iraq, or if the Democratic-led Congress limits that move, it said.
The newspaper quoted a Pentagon official as saying "This part of the world has an allergy against foreign presence. You have a window of opportunity that is relatively short. Your ability to influence this with a large U.S. force eventually gets to a point that is self-defeating."
The United States sent 55 Green Berets to El Salvador to help its military fight rebels from 1981 to 1992, in a drive to make the U.S. military presence less visible, the newspaper said.
It said Pentagon officials said the Iraq plan would have to entail many more advisors, but that the El Salvador model had influenced planning.
There are currently about 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
Shifting from a troop increase to more reliance on an advisory role would bring the administration more in line with the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel that recommended a gradual reduction in U.S. combat forces in Iraq.
________________________________Notes:
Today, at his first Pentagon news conference since taking office in December, Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared that any Iraq resolution opposing President Bush’s escalation plan “certainly emboldens the enemy and our adversaries.” “It seems pretty straightforward that any indication of flagging will in the United States gives encouragement to those folks,” Gates clamed.
Donald Rumsfeld from 11/20/05: “[W]e also have to understand that our words have effects. … Put yourself in the shoes of the enemy. The enemy hears a big debate in the United States, and they have to wonder, maybe all we have to do is wait, and we’ll win.”
In response to Democratic plans to question parts of the USA Patriot Act during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, John Ashcroft suggests that people who disagree with the administration's anti-terrorism policies are on the side of the terrorists. "To those who pit Americans against immigrants, and citizens against non-citizens; to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil."
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle expresses mild disagreement with US anti-terror policies, saying US success in the war on terror "is still somewhat in doubt." In response, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) says that Daschle's "divisive comments have the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to exploit divisions in our country."
After the disclosure that President Bush received a general warning about possible Al Qaeda hijackings prior to 9/11, Democrats demand to know what other information the administration had before the attacks. In response, White House communications director Dan Bartlett says that the Democratic statements "are exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do."
President Bush says, "You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message... You send the wrong message to our troops by sending mixed messages."
Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) claims that terrorists "are going to throw everything they can between now and the election to try and elect Kerry," adding that Democrats are "consistently saying things that I think undermine our young men and women who are serving over there."
Presidential adviser Karl Rove responds by suggesting that Durbin and other liberals seek to put US troops in danger, saying that "Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."
President Bush says that "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will."
Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) states that "Many on the Democratic side have revealed their exit strategy: surrender"
Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) says that "[T]he liberal leadership have put politics ahead of sound fiscal and national security policy. And what they have done is cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies.
December 2005: After DNC chairman Howard Dean says "The idea that we're going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong," Republicans reiterate the same line of attack. House Speaker Dennis Hastert says Dean "made it clear the Democratic Party sides with those who wish to surrender" and GOP chairman Ken Mehlman says Dean's statement "sends the wrong message to our troops, the wrong message to the enemy, the wrong message to the Iraqi people."
January 2006: President Bush suggests that "defeatists" on Iraq are disloyal by contrasting them with a "loyal opposition," stating that the American people "know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right."
June 2006: In response to Democratic calls for a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, President Bush suggests that Democrats want to surrender. "There's a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done," he said. "They're willing to wave the white flag of surrender. And if they succeed, the United States will be worse off, and the world will be worse off." However, Bush adviser Dan Bartlett is unable to name a single Democrat to which this description applies.
Labels: American Media, Right Wing Hypocrites, Where's Fox News?
