Chris Clarke at Creek Running North has declared Dec 1 'Blog Against Racism Day' in honor of the 50th Anniversary of Rosa Parks' famous bus ride, Dec 1, 1955. I hope those of you who are bloggers will participate, and even if you didn't know about it or didn't have time today, make a space in the future for a contribution to keep the discussion going. If you add your post to Chris' trackback, he'll include it in a list so other people who find out about it later will be able to follow along.

This is an incident that happened to me around the same time as Rosa's ride and has haunted me off-and-on for more than four decades. It's a small incident, not earth-shaking, not world-beating, only personally traumatic. But as Egg Chen said in Big Trouble in Little China, 'See? That was nothing. But that's how it always begins. Very small.'

So, whether it's appropriate or not, a little personal history.

I was ten. I lived in a small town in New Hampshire. I'd never seen a black person. Ever. Not in the flesh, anyway. I must have seen them on tv, but maybe not. This was the 50's and black people were scarce on all the major media. I have a vague memory of seeing Nat King Cole singing 'Straighten Up and Fly Right' on Ed Sullivan. I really liked the song but I don't remember reacting to his color at all. It was a black-and-white set. Maybe his color looked natural to me because it didn't particularly stand out against the background.

So I guess I was pretty much neutral on the race issue until the day I was exploring the woods in back of the general store across the street and stumbled on an old shack, half-rotten and leaning against the wind. The roof was tarpaper, what had been windows were boarded up, and the door looked like it was hanging by a single hinge. To a 10-year-old boy full of Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys, it was obviously an adventure waiting to happen. It could be a hide-out for pirates (never mind that the ocean was 2 hrs away) or desperate criminals. It could be the home of a rich old miser who would give me all the money he had stashed away in a coffee can buried under an old oak that had been split by lightning. It could even be the headquarters of a family of ogres or an old witch who baked cookies to lure unsuspecting kids into her cooking pot. I could no more pass up inspecting that shack than I could have passed up a chocolate bunny on Easter.

I had just started to creep toward it when a huge black woman emerged suddenly from the door. I froze. She smiled.

'Hi, honey. You lost?'

I couldn't answer. All I could do was stare.

She saw the state I was in and smiled again, friendly, toothy. Even her eyes smiled. I remember that more clearly than what she was wearing, which I don't remember at all. 'Well, come on in, have a glass of milk and we'll figure out how to get you home.'

A witch!

And then I ran. I wasn't lost. I'd lived near woods all my life. I knew exactly where the store was and I made for it hell-for-leather, fully expecting her to chase me with her broomstick raised over her head and cackling like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. I didn't tell anybody what had happened and I never went near those woods again. What I did instead was wipe the whole experience from my mind. Inside a week, I'd managed to stop shaking by forgetting she existed.

Ten years later I was a professional jazz trumpeter. I'd auditioned for and been hired by a local jazz pianist who lived across the border in Massachusetts and had a regular route of clubs he played all down the Eastern seaboard as far as North Carolina. He paid me the munificent sum of $25 a week plus room and board. I was happy to get it.

He was black. Everybody else in the band was black. The clubs we played in were owned--or at least managed--by blacks, and the neighborhoods where the clubs were located were exclusively black neighborhoods. Even the audiences we played for were predominantly black (there used to be a sizable jazz audience in the black community in those days, which I understand is all gone now).

I had talent but it was unripe. Actually it was raw as a 3-second egg. I think he hired me for the novelty of the thing. Or maybe he hired me because I came cheap. Or maybe he hired me to have a white kid subordinate to him. If I was him, that's why I would've done it.

Whatever the reason, there I was, a white kid from New Hampshire living day after day, week after week, month after month without seeing another white face. It was an experience. If I had any prejudice when I started--and I did--I had it burned out of me before the year was up. Hatred can't survive knowledge--or everyday contact. Maybe that's why I was ready to remember The Witch again.

It happened one night when I wasn't playing well. In fact I was so bad that Charlie--the Boss--took me aside after the first set and told me to sit the second one out. He was right and I knew he was right but I was pissed anyway, maybe at him, maybe at myself, but anyway pissed. And scared. I'd been having trouble keeping up the last few weeks. As the band began to coalesce into a real unit, I was feeling more and more like an outsider, like I was somewhere I didn't belong. Like I was about to be fired. I was at that stage of my prejudice.

Half-way through the second set, I got up to go to the john. Just as I got to what I thought was the door, a big black woman burst through it, laughing. She was wearing a bright orange-and-yellow muu muu, an orange turban, and large red earrings. She looked to me like the queen of an ancient people not given to suffering fools. That was probably the mood I was in. We were practically nose-to-nose. She looked at me, smiled, and said, 'Hi, honey. You lost? The Gent's is over there. This one's for ladies only.' Then she patted my head and swept on by, back to the music and the crowded, smoky room.

As she did, it all came flooding back. The shed. The huge black woman. The thoughtless, panicked flight. I'd buried it for ten years but it wasn't buried any more. It was burning a hole in what was left of my self-satisfaction.

I had run away from a perfectly nice woman like I was escaping from a plague or a monster, and I had done that because she was black. Because her skin color was different from mine. Because she was different from me.

I tried to tell myself it was because she lived in a run-down shack, or because she emerged at just the moment my over-wrought imagination was running away with me, but it wouldn't wash. The bare truth was that if she'd been white I wouldn't have run. I might have still been scared but I wouldn't have run away. I would've stayed to see what happened next and run later if I had to. I'd have been careful, I'd have been wary. But I wouldn't have run.

For the first time since it happened I wondered what she must have thought of me when I bolted like that, some skinny white kid so terrified of her blackness that he'd run away like the Hounds of Hell were after him. That must have hurt her. Then I remembered what my recent experience had taught me: that it might be worse. It might be that it hadn't hurt her because she was used to it, because she'd know exactly where my reaction had come from, because she lived in a world where that reaction was, gawd help us all, normal.

Suddenly there were tears. I couldn't stop them. Why didn't I ever go back when I got older? How could I have forgotten that day? That woman? Who was she? And what was she doing in the shack? Did she live there? Why?

It's hard as hell on you when you run into your own stupidity and prejudice without warning like that. It's like driving your car into a bridge abutment at 60 miles an hour. Your head caves in. The world changes.

There are a lot of things that contribute to racism, from a tribal identity-set to a general fear of strangers, but the one I'm most aware of is the separateness of the Other. The Other is unknown, maybe unknowable. It is different, it is strange, it is not Us. If we are good, the Other must be bad.

I think racism, at root, is simply a self-indulgent fear of the Other given form and rationalized by ignorance. Hating the Other is easier and less painful than facing our own Otherness. Us v Them gives us purpose, gives our world shape and texture, gives our self-defined identity a meaning. Us v Us means seeing ourselves in the Other and hating ourselves if we are to hate at all. It means blinding ourselves to our own faults and tying ourselves forever to our grievances and lust for revenge. Once we acknowledge that there is no 'Other', that it is all Us in different guises, hate becomes impossible and ignorance is no longer bliss.

Racism is, then, the result of a refusal to grow up, an irrational cleaving to the stupid, selfish child in all of us. We're afraid to leave that child behind. Will there be something to replace him? Or will we simply vanish because without the identity we know, we do not exist?

You cannot be a mature human being and a racist. The two are mutually exclusive. They cannot exist in the same space at the same time. For me, it's that simple.

None of this, of course, helps to define what exactly a 'racist' is or how to determine what is or is not 'racism'. That is a different discussion I will have to leave for another post. But maybe some of this will help us understand where racism comes from and what it feeds on in us. That's important, too.

(Link to Chris via eRobin at Fact-esque)

So the Emperor unveiled his 'Plan for Victory' yesterday in a speech that was more bumbling and incoherent than usual. (Jeff Alworth offers an interesting translation of the speech.) The 'plan' consists of 35 glorious pages chock full of back-patting and somewhat low on, you know, detail of any sort. A shorter version might go like this:

'We've been victorious in Iraq, and as long as we keep on being victorious there's a good chance we won't fail. We will have achieved victory as soon as we're victorious, which we already are, so it's important not to leave before victory is achieved or else terrible things will happen to us which we're not going to say what they are exactly but they're BAD TERRIBLE and you don't want them to happen to you so that's why we're staying in Iraq until hell freezes over or the oil runs out, whichever comes first.'

This 'plan' is somewhat light on what you might call particulars. In fact, I couldn't find any. Not one specific of any kind. Vague generalizations, bald assertions backed up by nothing, and explanations that are strings of empty cliches is about all you get. Here's one of the 'Victory Stages' that will 'define Victory'.

In the short term:
An Iraq that is making steady progress in fighting terrorists and neutralizing the insurgency, meeting political milestones; building democratic institutions; standing up robust security forces to gather intelligence, destroy terrorist networks, and maintain security; and tackling key economic reforms to lay the foundation for a sound economy.

Anybody know what any of that actually means? If you're going to define a victory to separate it from a loss, don't you have to, you know, define the terms? What does 'steady progress' mean? How will we recognize 'neutralizing' when--if--it happens? What does 'robust' mean, that they win one once in a while? Not one of the indeterminate, intangible adages with which this 'plan' is so stuffed--page after page after page..do they really expect anybody to read all that junk?--is defined anywhere in the document.

You know what? I think I can do it even shorter.

We have acheived Victory in Iraq whenever we say we've acheived Victory in Iraq.

In other words, the Emperor will steal a page from Nixon's book in time for the 2006 elections. He'll declare Victory and get out. Youi think there ought to be a real plan with timetables and logistics and clearly-defined political or military milestones?

You should have elected a different president.

Oh, wait. You did. Twice.

PS. What was with that Hollywood backdrop? Where was he, the Harvard Club? Edinburgh? And what's with all those imperial-style crests? Who does he think he is, Charlemagne?

God isn't happy with the West, I guess.

The first big snowstorm of the season closed hundreds of miles of major highways across the Plains states Monday, part of a treacherous system that also sent tornadoes ripping through Arkansas and Kansas.

Six-foot drifts were common in eastern Colorado, western Kansas and Nebraska, the National Weather Service said. Wind up to 60 mph piled drifts 3 feet high in Pierre, S.D., where state government offices were closed. Snow fell as far south as the Texas Panhandle.

Four highway deaths were blamed on the weather.

What did you guys do to piss him off?

I'm sure Pat Robertson will explain to us what sin they committed that caused God to punish them by sending blizzards and tornados. Terrible weather is a sign of sin, Pat's been telling us that for months. Arkansas deserves it, of course, because they dared to vote for the traitorous, unrighteous, atheistic Democrats, but how is Pat going to explain Kansas? Kansas--who voted to send science back to the Stone Age and replace it with Biblical mythology to the Greater Glory of God. Kansas--who went Red State GodWarrior Bush the whole way and elected such stalwart Xtians as Tom 'There's lesbians in my bathroom' Coburn? What could they possibly have done to incur God's wrath?

Pat? Where are you, Pat? We need you to tell us why God is punishing Kansas.

Pat? Are you there, Pat? Hello? Come on, Pat, you're the expert on why bad weather is a PUNISHMENT FROM GOD. Well?

Pat? Come in, Pat.

Hmmmm. Maybe the chicken entrails didn't tell him anything this time. Or maybe GOD isn't talking to him any more. Wouldn't that be a kick in the tushie.

Jack Balkin of Balkinization does a nice job of summarizing David Lubin's attempt in the WaPo to summarize the Bush Administration's definition of torture, but it seems to me they're both missing the point. I can do it a lot quicker.

If we do it, it isn't torture.

The Emperor's definition of torture is as fluid as the techniques we do or do not use and changes with the circumstances. Waterboarding, for example, used to be considered torture. Now that we're doing it, it isn't.

The 'Bush lexicon', as Lubin calls it, is no more complicated than that.

The Movie Of Your Life Is A Black Comedy

In your life, things are so twisted that you just have to laugh. You may end up insane, but you'll have fun on the way to the asylum. Your best movie matches: Being John Malkovich, The Royal Tenenbaums, American Psycho

Yup. In fact, my life was a black comedy. It's over now, and that's probably just as well.

Maybe it's all the pressure--half the Brain Trust either under indictment or scrambling to avoid it; plunging popularity; disintegrating trust; his own party starting to run away from him--but the Emperor's real attitudes are beginning to surface from the crumbling facade of his shameful presidency. Viz, that laws are just guidelines, especially when they're laws in bills written by Democrats but even when they're written by Pubs if they inconvenience his corporate bosses to even the slightest of degrees. We know he's always felt that way but this week he actually said it. Out loud. In public. To the press.

The Louisville Courier-Journal reported this week that when Bush signed a bipartisan bill sponsored by Kentucky Pub Rep Anne Northup, he warned that even though he was signing it into law, he considered it only 'advisory'.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush and Rep. Anne Northup of Kentucky clashed yesterday over legislation intended to open America to imports of cheaper prescription drugs.

Bush signed a spending bill with Northup's provision in it but said he considered the language "advisory."

That prompted a sharp response from Northup, R-3rd District.

"The intent of the provision is crystal clear. It is not advisory," she said in a statement. The administration "cannot negotiate anti-drug importation provisions behind Congress' back."

Northup had won bipartisan approval in the House and Senate this year for the amendment that bars future trade agreements with other nations from prohibiting imports of lower-priced drugs from those countries.

The amendment is part of the fiscal 2006 spending bill for the Departments of Commerce and Justice and the Office of the United States Trade Representative, among other agencies.

Because the spending bill is for one year, the amendment is in effect only until Sept. 30, 2006. But Northup is sponsoring separate legislation, still pending, for a permanent ban on anti-importation provisions in trade pacts.

Three recent trade agreements -- with Australia, Singapore and Morocco -- barred Americans from buying drugs from those countries, even if the United States allowed imports from other countries.

Northup and other critics of such provisions call them an "end-run" around Congress, which they believe is moving toward approval of drug imports from other nations.

The administration and the pharmaceutical industry opposed Northup's amendment.

Note the sly last sentence: it was a bipartisan bill and the only two entities to oppose it were the drug companies whose immense profits it might put a small ding in...and the White House. This despite the fact the Northup is a Pub and the E's own party supported it.

See, we finally have an explicit explanation for why the Emperor doesn't veto bills: he doesn't have to. If he doesn't like them, he just ignores them. As far as Georgius is concerned, the Congress is only there in an 'advisory' capacity, not to, like, make laws or dumb shit like that. In the Emperor's Bubble, laws are made by Executive Fiat--the American equivalent, apparently, of the Imperial Decree. Anything the Imperial Senate Congress comes up with is just a, you know, suggestion.

It's refreshing to have him put it right on the table like that after all these years of skulking around, hiding under weasel-words and double-entendres. It makes one feel that one's near-fanatic death-grip on the actual meanings of words in the face of the Emperor's loosey-goosey, Orwellian, 'They mean what I say they mean' approach has not been entirely in vain.

O Happy Day.

My new diary at Talk to Action is up and I wrote my first entry tonight. You'll find it here. Please check it out and comment if you like (although be aware you need to register to comment). While you're there, be sure to look at some of the other diaries. This site is already shaping up to be just as good as I hoped.

Incidentally, some really good news in that direction: John McKay saw my post about T2A, checked it out, and has decided to sign up for a diary. John--well done you, as the Brits say. See you there.

We all have different things to be thankful for on this holiday but there must be some people who wonder if they have anything at all. Like Abu Ali, for example. Ali is the new poster boy for extraordinary rendition, thanks to a Virginia jury who didn't believe or didn't care that he might have been tortured in Saudi Arabia to obtain his 'confession'.

Washington -- In what the Justice Department has described as a crucial terrorism trial, an Arab American student from Virginia was convicted Tuesday of plotting with operatives of al Qaeda to assassinate President Bush and hijack airplanes.

A federal jury in Alexandria, Va., found Ahmed Omar Abu Ali guilty on numerous charges of conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism. The jury rejected the defendant's accounts that his Saudi captors beat and tortured him into confessing.

Abu Ali, 24, a U.S. citizen who is the son of a Jordanian father and grew up in northern Virginia, faces the possibility of life in prison when he is sentenced by Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of U.S. District Court on Feb. 17.

The Justice Department has seen the case as an important test of its ability to use foreign intelligence sources for a criminal case in an American court.

The department described Abu Ali before the trial as "one of the most dangerous terrorist threats that America faces in the perilous world after Sept. 11, 2001: an al Qaeda operative born and raised in the United States, trained and committed to carry out deadly attacks on American soil."

Paul McNulty, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said after the verdict that Abu Ali had posed "a grave threat to our national security." He said that the defendant had scouted nuclear plants in the United States at the behest of his al Qaeda confederates and that the hijacking plot he engaged in was "substantially similar to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

But no evidence was presented to show that any plot had reached an operational stage. The defense said Abu Ali was just an American student who went to Saudi Arabia to pursue his religious studies. (emphasis added)

It's interesting that the Gonzales Justice Dept has just declared openly that it believes the greatest terrorist threat to America is from other Americans. That might explain why the FBI has been looking at library records all over the country and why Imperial Surrogate Cheney spent so much time convincing the Pub Congress to pass the extraordinary rendition bill in the first place. No, Ali wasn't rendered, but his case shows the value of its use.

Prosecutors maintained that Abu Ali had gone to Saudi Arabia in 2002 with the idea of becoming a terrorist because he saw Bush as "the leader of the infidels" and eventually met a high-ranking leader of al Qaeda. McNulty said terrorists trained the defendant in weapons, explosives and document forgery.

Abu Ali was arrested at a university in Medina in June 2003 as the Saudi authorities were investigating a wave of bombings.

What happened next is at the heart of the case.

Prosecutors said Abu Ali had willingly confessed to joining al Qaeda and engaging in various terrorist plots, including one to personally kill the president. Defense lawyers suggested their client was falsely implicated by terrorists to protect cell members still at large and that Saudi security forces had extracted a confession after brutalizing him for 40 days.

Abu Ali testified in a pretrial hearing that his captors had repeatedly whipped his back, kicked him in the stomach and yanked on his beard to obtain a videotaped confession in which he said he had joined al Qaeda because he hated the Untied States for its support of Israel. (Abu Ali did not testify at the trial.)

Prosecutors called his account of torture fabrication. They quoted from telephone conversations Abu Ali had with his parents in Virginia while he was in Saudi custody. "I am very healthy," prosecutors quoted him as saying. The prosecutors also offered accounts from Saudi officers, who said that they had treated the prisoner well and that he had talked voluntarily.

The Gonzales Justice Dept--and Gonzales himself, needless to say--believed that American juries would discount tales of torture in other countries, eliminating the problem of defending confessions obtained by torture in the US: you just claim it didn't happen and you count on calls the defendant made while in custody and the statements of guards that nothing happened and everything was fine fine fine to dismiss the issue. You claim the defendant made the confession 'freely' and you expect American jurors ignorant of the Saudi history of routinely torturing political prisoners to accept that the accused 'terrorist' is lying about it.

And they do. At least, they just did in Virginia. Extraordinary rendition gives the Justice Dept--an entity that has not just a poor record of prosecution but an abysmal record (not one successful terrorist prosecution in the last five years, NOT ONE)--a lot of cover to obtain convictions through confessions they got offshore through torture when they didn't have the actual evidence to justify a trial. In Virginia, this trick worked like a charm. With extraordinary rendiditon, they won't have to wait until a suspect goes overseas to a partner country that tortures to arrest him, they can arrest him here and ship him there directly where a confession will be tortured out of him that American juries will buy hook, line, and sinker.

Of course, there is the legal question of why the confession had even been admitted, with or without torture, when the govt apparently had no corroborative evidence. In US courts, it has been standard procedure for 40 years to throw out confessions when there isn't a stick of independent evidence that anything said in them is true. Judge Lee ignored that tradition, and I for one would like to know why.

At long last, ex-Atty Gen John Ashcroft's signature anti-terrorist prosecution against Jose Padilla is going to see the light of day. The Justice Dept is dumping the case into open federal court. After 3 1/2 years of illegal imprisonment without access to a lawyer, Mr Padilla is going to have his day. But not on Mr Ashcroft's charges. Oh, no. The accusations that Padilla intended to make a 'dirty bomb' and plotted to blow up apartment buildings with natural gas have been dropped and replaced by vague charges that he 'supported terrorism' and intended to join in a 'general...conspiracy to kill and maim overseas'.

This is, I believe, the last of Mr Ashcroft's celebrated terrorist prosecutions. The others have already blown up and been dropped or thrown out of court for lack of evidence. A German court dismissed one of Mr Ashcroft's cases not for insufficient evidence but for the lack of any evidence whatsoever; when the JD was forced by German rules to open its files and show the court what it actually had, what it actually had turned out to be raw, unconfirmed and unsupported...gossip. No proof, much less legal proof, of anything.

But the Emperor's whole attitude toward the law since the coup of 2000 has been if it doesn't support his--and his radical supporters'--prejudices, it doesn't count. They've consistently either ignored them or re-written such laws to conform to their bias. Consider the Bush and Goss statements.

The Emperor had then presidential counsel, now Atty Gen, Alberto Gonzales 'interpret' the laws against torture to mean that there were no laws against torture if Republicans in the US did it. Bush then went on tv and said, 'We don't torture.' CIA Director Porter Goss is now saying that the Company doesn't torture because it doesn't break the law that Gonzales said didn't exist.

"This agency does not torture," he said in an interview this week with USA Today. "We use lawful capabilities to collect vital information, and we do it in a variety of unique and innovative ways, all of which are legal and none of which are torture." (emphasis added)

Basically, this is Pinochet's argument that what he did in Chile was legal because he said so. (By the way, don't you just loooove the language? The Company used a 'variety of unique and innovative' techniques. Beautiful. It makes torture sound almost artistic, doesn't it?) So for Bush and Goss, like Pinochet and the Argentine Junta, torture isn't torture once it's been declared legal.

These are the kinds of illogical--indeed, insane--contradictions common to dictatorships. In order to justify their crimes, they have to remove the criminality of them and/or deny that they're being done. In his play Largo Desolato, Vaclav Havel drew a devastating portrait of what official insanity and illogical law do to both their victims and practitioners: nothing means what it seems to mean. Meanings are as fluid as emotions and change with the wind. There's no solid ground to stand on, no predicting if a law that means this today will mean the exact opposite tomorrow. Laws are driven by the whims or temporary needs of the Leader. It's a world where the head of a supposedly sane western country can openly contemplate bombing a newspaper he doesn't like.

Sending out troops to kill reporters who give you bad press. I'm sure most politicians daydream about this sort of thing, but very few are clueless enough to say it out loud or actually make plans. The only politicians who go through with this sort of thing are tinhorn dictators from the worst sort of banana republics.

---

And if he had really done it? What effect would that have had on other critics? I'm sure it would have intimidated many into silence, or, at least, into thinking twice before criticising the Bush administration. There is a word that we all know that describes an act of violence intended to intimidate a whole group of people. That word is "terrorism."

Like Havel in Czechoslovakia, we live in Bizarro America, a place governed by a man who envies dictators because they have an easier time getting their way, contemplates killing reporters because he doesn't like what they write, deliberately reverses the definition of torture so he can claim he doesn't even though he does, and re-writes history (shades of Stalin) when he doesn't like what it says.

Even Ronnie Ray-Guns looks good compared to the Emperor Quack.

I know there are those who believe that when the radicals who now own and operate the GOP with the Emperor Georgius as their figurehead are defeated, we'll be able to get back to the business of running the country sanely. I understand both the belief and the desire to believe, but not so fast. With or without the Pub radcons pushing their Pinochetian agenda, there is one group that has gained enormous strength in the last five years who aren't going away and aren't going to give up: the fanatic members of the Dominionist/Xtian Reconstruction Movement. They are the theocrats fighting to turn the US into a fundamentalist religious state along the lines of Iran, except Xtian instead of Islamist.

If you follow the news, you know they've been making inroads into our political system from local boards of education to the national govt. They control a lot of local govt, especially in the South and West, and have been pushing hard to force their beliefs on everyone. The idiotic 'debate' over so-called 'intelligent design' is their work, as are the paranoia over the 'destruction' of Christmas, faith-based initiatives, fighting to put the Ten Commandments into law, the brouhaha over Terry Schiavo, halting stem cell research, the demand that politicians hew to their beliefs in their votes or face a tidal wave of Xtian hostility, and--of course--the war on women. They are focused, dedicated, and vote in large blocs on single issues. Their ultimate goal is to create an America governed not by the Constitution but by the Bible, and they have no intention of quitting until they get it.

I've thought lately of dedicating EWF to this threat alone, but somebody with a lot more resources at their disposal has fortunately beat me to it. Frederick Carlson--who has written on religion for better than 20 years and is the author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy--and 13 other bloggers and journalists have just started a new website called Talk to Action devoted to just that. Set up along the lines of dailyKos or MyDD, it's a community site of diaries on only one subject: the theocratic movement in America. From the press release I received yesterday by email:

"We favor religious equality and separation of church and state," Clarkson said. "We support reproductive freedom and gay and lesbian civil rights -- including marriage equality. Therefore," he says, "debates about abortion and gay rights are off topic on this site. We understand
that there are those who may be concerned generally about the politics of the Christian Right, who may not completely share our views on these matters. They are welcome to participate anyway, but bearing this in mind. Our purpose is to take the conversation forward, and not let it be held back by debating what, in our view are or should be, settled matters of human, civil and constitutional rights."

I hope T2A, as they call it for short, becomes a must-read for every visitor to this blog and every blogger who hears about it. I hope the best of our bloggers on right-wing religion, people like KathyB of Citizen's Rent, John McKay at archy, Melanie at Just a Bump on the Beltway, RJ Madison at Adventus, and Philocrates, among others, will sign up and contribute generously.

In the coming years, Talk to Action could be invaluable. Check it out regularly. The theocrats are preparing for a sort of political war, and if we aren't just as ready to oppose them, we could, in our lifetimes, find ourselves living under the rule of what has come to be known as 'The American Taliban'.