Adam Lipscomb of a violently executed blog has had the unmitigated effrontery to design a test about himself. Can you imagine that? But worse, he lied when he gave the answers.

This cannot stand. After virtually months (or minutes) of intense (or superficial) research, I am now in a position to state the truth. But in order to understand just how insidious this transparent attempt to simulate normality is, you must first read the test and then Adam's ridiculous answers. I'll wait.

Dum-dum-te-de-dum--

Ready?

Actually--and I say this with love--the only question on the test that matters is #15. The REAL answer is: 33rd degree Mason. This test is actually disinformation designed to hide Adam's true identity behind a facade of normality. But I have ferreted out the truth (from sources I am sworn not to reveal) and the REAL answers are these:

1. Deep in the land of Shambala, the end product of centuries of scientific breeding
2. In a top-secret ILLUMINATI lab, taught by alien/human organic hybrid computers.
3. Mount Ararat School for Cephalopods, Geek Division
4. Electrolytic Taupe
5. 744 BC--he was in the Original Cast
6. Yes, all the time, but it's not his fault--he was genetically engineered for it.
7. Fulcanelli
8. Stevie Ray Strangberb of Ur, who had a mean way of making the strings of his cametar scream like a chicken being strangled (in fact, the word 'strangle' is derived from Stevie Ray's name for that reason). A 'cametar' is a sort of guitar made by hanging (primarily) G-strings between the humps of a live camel. Strippers were sacrificed to its creation
9. This answer is actually correct, altho I think he's selling David Boreanaz short.
10. Vomit-flavored, with the little pieces of bubble gum in it
11. The records have been lost but my sources estimate that the earth had barely cooled
12. Atlantean Creole--very spicy
13. N/A
14. Chain-mail longies
15. As stated, although there are rumors he is slated to be the first 36th degree Mason ever invested. As such, he will have the power of life and death over Ashton Kutcher
16. Dr Moreau (who is actually real--he's retired now and living as a polar bear named Mindy at the San Diego Zoo)
17. Not under his real name. He was booked as 'Robert Downey, Jr', whom he resembles remarkably, especially around the eyebrows
18 & 19: Who cares?
20: The Amarna period of Ancient Egypt. He had a 'thing' with Nefertiti but it didn't end well and he doesn't like to talk about it. Something to do with the destruction of civilization and the birth of bad hair

I probably shouldn't be revealing all this, but I was in a mood. So sue me.

The weakest part of the Intelligence Community, and I don't care which branch you're talking about, is psy-ops--psychological operations. Psy-ops includes, among other things, the responsibility for spreading disinformation and propaganda. Radio Marti, for instance, began on the CIA payroll as a way to channel anti-Castro material inside Cuba. Along with other daffy initiatives, these are the geniuses who thought it would be useful to spend millions of dollars dropping leaflets--in English, by the way--over the Vietnamese countryside demanding that the VC surrender; who believed they could bring Castro down by spreading the rumor in the Cuban community in the 80's that he was secretly gay and dying of AIDs; whose attempts to influence Russian opinion in the Soviet era were so inept, so clumsy, so off-point that Sakharov and other Soviet dissidents were convinced their stories had been planted by the KGB.

The problem with psy-ops in the IC is the same as the problem with profiling in the law enforcment community: the techniques rarely work, and even when they do the backlash tends to be more severe--by far--than whatever small good they might have done. In the same way that profiling has destroyed tens of thousands of investigations by sending them off on useless wild goose chases for every investigation it helped narrow the field for, psy-ops eats up money and time to no conceivable purpose while producing marginally useful information. The hard-line propagandists in the Company used to defend psy-ops by insisting that if it was responsible for so much as a single Soviet defection then every penny it cost was worth it.

Well, it wasn't. In fact there isn't one significant or even insignificant intelligence goal that has ever been satisfactorily met by any psy-op. They have been failures almost without exception, yet the IC's blind faith in their efficacy has never wavered, not once in 50 years. Such loyalty is touching but severely misplaced.

Why am I even talking about this? Because the Bush Admin--specifically Rumsfeld's Pentagon--is planning to take psy-ops in entirely new directions. As Jim Lobe reported in the Asia Times last week, the Defence Science Board just issued a report which is scathing in its indictment of the typically clumsy and incompetent attempts by the BA to sway opinion in Iraq using the same intimidation, spin, and manipulation of information it uses on the US press corps while refusing to acknowledge the differences between our culture and Iraq's--or anybody else's, for that matter.

WASHINGTON - Al-Qaeda and radical Islamists are winning the propaganda war against the United States, says a high-level Pentagon panel, which concluded that President George W Bush's administration's policies in the Middle East, its fundamental failure to understand the Muslim world and a lack of imagination in using new communications technologies are responsible.

In a report concluded in September but only released last week, the Defense Science Board (DSB) called for a major overhaul of Washington's "public diplomacy" and "strategic communication" apparatus that would include much more money and the creation of a new independent agency to enlist the support of the private sector, researchers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to promote US messages to an increasingly hostile Islamic world.

"Strategic communication is a vital component of US national security," stresses the 111-page report. "It is in crisis, and it must be transformed with a strength of purpose that matches our commitment to diplomacy, defense, intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security ... Collaboration between government and the private sector on an unprecedented scale is imperative."

The document also calls on US policymakers to spend more time "listening" to their intended audience and use messages that "should seek to reduce, not increase, perceptions of arrogance, opportunism and double standards".

The problem here is that none of their suggestions will make a dime's worth of difference in the execution of the war or in turning the attitude of the Arab populations in our favor. The fanatical belief of BushCo that perception is reality only works when reality can be kept at a safe distance. In a war zone, propaganda is clinical evidence of insanity. There's a fundamental flaw in the whole concept: IT DOESN'T WORK. It has never worked. Ever. Tokyo Rose didn't work, and neither will Baghdad Bob.

But now BushCo wants to take their 'arrogance, opportunism and double standards' in the direction of 'strategic influence', meaning they want to use psy-ops as part of a combat plan. Like this:

WASHINGTON — On the evening of Oct. 14, a young Marine spokesman near Fallouja appeared on CNN and made a dramatic announcement.

"Troops crossed the line of departure," 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert declared, using a common military expression signaling the start of a major campaign. "It's going to be a long night." CNN, which had been alerted to expect a major news development, reported that the long-awaited offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallouja had begun.

In fact, the Fallouja offensive would not kick off for another three weeks. Gilbert's carefully worded announcement was an elaborate psychological operation — or "psy-op" — intended to dupe insurgents in Fallouja and allow U.S. commanders to see how guerrillas would react if they believed U.S. troops were entering the city, according to several Pentagon officials.

And what exactly did they learn from this exercise? They're not saying, of course, but judging from past experience with similar attempts, the answer is most likely NOTHING. Although we won't find that out until the report on it is leaked a couple of years from now.

Post-modernism is usually defined as the attempt to break down the barriers that used to separate cultural genres and synthesize everything into a single organic whole. In that sense, George W Bush is the first post-modern president. Looked at from a wide perspective, the over-arching theme of radical conservatism as practiced by the BA is to break down barriers--between church and state, for example--and meld the culture into a forced reactionary mold in which diversity is homogenized and dissent is invisible. Like the Joes before him (Goebbels and Stalin), Bush is setting up a propaganda mechanism designed to erase the barriers between the disinformation aimed at an enemy and the disinformation aimed at the US public.

The Pentagon in 2002 was forced to shutter its controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which was opened shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, after reports that the office intended to plant false news stories in the international media. But officials say that much of OSI's mission — using information as a tool of war — has been assumed by other offices throughout the U.S. government.

Although most of the work remains classified, officials say that some of the ongoing efforts include having U.S. military spokesmen play a greater role in psychological operations in Iraq, as well as planting information with sources used by Arabic TV channels such as Al Jazeera to help influence the portrayal of the United States.

Other specific examples were not known, although U.S. national security officials said an emphasis had been placed on influencing how foreign media depict the United States.

These efforts have set off a fight inside the Pentagon over the proper use of information in wartime. Several top officials see a danger of blurring what are supposed to be well-defined lines between the stated mission of military public affairs — disseminating truthful, accurate information to the media and the American public — and psychological and information operations, the use of often-misleading information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle.

That's not a 'danger', guys. That's the whole point. As eRobin continues to demonstrate with her series of surgically accurate posts unveiling the underlying pro-Bush propaganda in the NYT, Karl Rove is successfully turning the largest and most influential news outlets in the country into American versions of Pravda where the truth has to be gleaned from between the lines because it will never--or rarely--be found in the lines. They are now moving to internationalize their propaganda effort by using the Second Gulf War as an excuse to synthesize civilian and military disinformation tactics into a single, harmonious (if totalitarian) whole. The proof is in the pudding:

• Item 1: The least credible Pentagon spokesman in history, Larry di Rita, a man with a track record of Orwellian lies longer than your arm if you're not a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, says it's not true and it isn't happening and even if it is, nobody actually ever suggested any such thing.

  Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said he recognized the concern of many inside the Defense Department, but that "everybody understands that there's a very important distinction between information operations and public affairs. Nobody has offered serious proposals that would blur the distinction between these two functions."
  
  Di Rita said he had asked his staff for more information about how the Oct. 14 incident on CNN came about.

  I particularly like the head-spinning implication that Larry, like Sgt Schultz, knew nothing--NOTHING--about deliberately tricking CNN into telling lies, but the important part is his insistence that there are no 'serious proposals' mixing civilian and military propaganda efforts. Given his propensity for claiming firmly and with a straight face that up is down and black is white and there are too WMD's in Iraq, di Rita's flat claim that nothing of the sort is going on may be considered virtual proof that, indeed, it is.


• Item 2: The recent creation in the Pentagon of a 'strategic communications' office.

  One recent development critics point to is the decision by commanders in Iraq in mid-September to combine public affairs, psychological operations and information operations into a "strategic communications" office. An organizational chart of the newly created office was obtained by The Times. The strategic communications office, which began operations Sept. 15, is run by Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, who answers directly to Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.
  
  Partly out of concern about this new office, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, distributed a letter Sept. 27 to the Joint Chiefs and U.S. combat commanders in the field warning of the dangers of having military public affairs (PA) too closely aligned with information operations (IO).
  
  "Although both PA and IO conduct planning, message development and media analysis, the efforts differ with respect to audience, scope and intent, and must remain separate," Myers wrote, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Times.
  
  Pentagon officials say Myers is worried that U.S. efforts in Iraq and in the broader campaign against terrorism could suffer if world audiences begin to question the honesty of statements from U.S. commanders and spokespeople.

Sorry, General, but that train done left the station 3 years ago and it ain't coming back anytime soon.

The upshot of all this is that psy-ops techniques that don't work in uncontrolled environments like a war zone or a foreign country are being grafted onto a civilian base. The good news is that psy-ops manipulation does work in one area: it fools a lot of your own people who deeply desire to be protected from 'bad news'. Most Russians chose to believe Pravda despite the evidence of their own eyes. Most Americans choose to believe Fox and CNN and the NYT despite the evidence--and even their admission--that they've been used, been sloppy, been too cozy with govt sources and therefore often 'inaccurate'.

We are about to find out what it felt like to live under the Soviet regime when news was rigidly controlled, the difference between news and propaganda virtually undetectable, at least that's the way it looks from here.

A high school principal in Athens, Georgia, apologized for reading a pro-prayer-in-school poem over the intercom. He claims it was meant 'to provoke thought and discussion' but what it mostly does is whine bitterly about modern society and complain about how unfair it is to keep Christianity out of classrooms. Here's the poem:

The New School Prayer

Now I sit me down in school

Where praying is against the rule

For this great nation under God

Finds mention of Him very odd.

If Scripture now the class recites,

It violates the Bill of Rights.

And anytime my head I bow

Becomes a Federal matter now.

Our hair can be purple, orange or green,

That's no offense; it's a freedom scene.

The law is specific, the law is precise.

Prayers spoken aloud are a serious vice.

For praying in a public hall

Might offend someone with no faith at all.

In silence alone we must meditate,

God's name is prohibited by the state.

We're allowed to cuss and dress like freaks,

And pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks.

They've outlawed guns, but FIRST the Bible.

To quote the Good Book makes me liable.

We can elect a pregnant Senior Queen,

And the "unwed daddy," our Senior King.

It's "inappropriate" to teach right from wrong,

We're taught that such "judgments" do not belong.

We can get our condoms and birth controls,

Study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles.

But the Ten Commandments are not allowed,

No word of God must reach this crowd.

It's scary here I must confess,

When chaos reigns the school's a mess.

So, Lord, this silent plea I make:

Should I be shot, my soul please take!

I particularly like the deft touch of the last two lines wherein chaos only reigns because students aren't allowed to pray in school, and the lack of a posted Ten Commandments in every school room leads to students being shot, I suppose by somebody who forgot the Fifth because it wasn't emblazoned over his head every day.

There's something of the 'magical reality' school of thought in fundie Xtianity, as if having monuments dedicated to 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' will somehow deter people from doing it, and the simple act of praying in school will make them safer despite rampant poverty and an inbred gun culture. An...unlikely...hypothesis, to say the least. Fortunately, as in the case of the attempt to force religious dogma into the Georgia science curriculum, there were some parents who weren't about to stand for a principal pushing his religious beliefs on an entire school.

Some parents have complained to both Craft and Clarke County School Superintendent Lewis Holloway.

"Basically, I found the poem offensive, but even if I didn't, I still would believe it crossed the line between church and state," said Ginger Smith, whose daughter is a junior at Cedar Shoals.

Smith also objected to misrepresentations in the poem. She said, for example, that students are allowed to wear crosses or other religious items, to wear clothing with religious messages and to pray in school in some circumstances.

Holloway said the district had received "several calls" from people who were upset about the poem.

Somebody should raise a monument to them for protecting the Constitution.

Two unions representing government employees in the Homeland Security Dept have gone public with the disclosure statements Tom Ridge wants them to sign in order to work for HSD. The statements, usually pledges not to disclose secrets, are so much broader than standard ones that they may be unConstitutional.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The Homeland Security Department is requiring employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement so restrictive that it might be unconstitutional, two unions for thousands of border workers said Monday.

The agreement, which was introduced in May, prohibits department employees from giving the public "sensitive but unclassified" information. It also says the government "may conduct inspections at any time or place" to ensure that the agreement is obeyed.

The two unions, the National Treasury Employees Union and the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement that the agreement gave the government "unprecedented leeway to search employee homes and personal belongings in violation of the Fourth Amendment." The unions, which together represent about 35,000 Homeland Security Department employees, include a large number of Customs and border workers.

This month, lawyers for the unions wrote to the general counsel of the department, Joe D. Whitley, asking that the agreement no longer be distributed and that a directive that outlines the policy for identifying and safeguarding sensitive but unclassified information be withdrawn. The letter also says that the directive gives officials a device "to suppress and cover up evidence of their own misconduct or malfeasance by stamping documents 'for official use only.' "

A spokesman for the department, Brian Roehrkasse, said in a telephone interview, "The notion that this would be used to cover up evidence of wrongdoing is baseless."

Sure it is. Nobody in the Bush Administration would ever 'cover up' incompetence or malfeasance. Ever. Right? They would never NEVER stamp documents 'ultra super secret' just to keep politically embarrassing material hidden. Would they?

Nah.

In the name of 'security', Tom Ridge has just declared war on potential whistleblowers.

A lawyer for the American Federation of Government Employees, Mark Roth, said the policies would discourage employees from talking to the public and Congress about "matters of public concern." Mr. Roth said he was also worried that the government would use the agreement to pick out and discipline outspoken workers.

"I think, sadly, it will probably be used to keep information that the public needs to know out of the public's hands until we challenge it in court," he said.

And maybe then. The disclosure agreements could also function as a major red herring, focusing litigation on whether the employee violated an oath rather than on the thornier issue of incompetent management. It always works out better for the employer if they can claim the issue the employee is reporting is irrelevant and the real issue is the reporting itself. It takes all the legal and PR heat and puts it on the employee. The Red Lion Foods case showed all employers--even the government, apparently--that you can successfully undermine discovery of a crime you've committed if you can find a way to blame the one who discovered it. The disclosure agreements not only give them the tools to hassle suspected whistleblowers, they give them the opportunity ignore the message and shoot the messenger.

Which is the way Junior likes to do business, after all.

Mark Fiore tries really really hard to look on the bright side....

In yesterday's post, river at Baghdad Burning reports that rumors are flying around Iraq that the American Army used chemical weapons in Fallujah.

The situation in Falloojeh is worse than anyone can possibly describe. It has turned into one of those cities you see in your darkest nightmares- broken streets strewn with corpses, crumbling houses and fallen mosques... The worst part is that for the last couple of weeks we've been hearing about the use of chemical weapons inside Falloojeh by the Americans. Today we heard that the delegation from the Iraqi Ministry of Health isn't being allowed into the city, for some reason.

I don't know about the chemical weapons. It's not that I think the American military is above the use of chemical weapons, it's just that I keep wondering if they'd be crazy enough to do it. I keep having flashbacks of that video they showed on tv, the mosque and all the corpses. There was one brief video that showed the same mosque a day before, strewn with many of the same bodies- but some of them were alive. In that video, there's this old man leaning against the wall and there was blood running out of his eyes- almost like he was crying tears of blood. What 'conventional' weaponry makes the eyes bleed? They say that a morgue in Baghdad has received the corpses of citizens in Falloojeh who have died under seemingly mysterious conditions.

If this is true, a) the words 'irony' and 'hypocrisy' don't begin to do justice to the criminal insanity of invading a country to keep it from using chemical weapons only to use those same chemical weapons on the citizens we're supposedly there to 'liberate'; and b) you will never hear Word One of this in the complacent, cheerleading US press. There is no Peter Arnett this time to report on the destruction of Bin Te and quote the anonymous Army colonel who summed up the entire Viet Nam experience with those immortal words, 'We had to destroy the village in order to save it.' US reporters nowadays rarely stray from their hotels, and swallow military press releases like bon-bons. After all, their job is to report just what the military tells them, not check on it.

My god, what have we become?

There's a special room in Hell reserved for these people, and I hope it's in the section where they serve eggs Maledict 24/7.

GLASGOW, Scotland — A British company said Sunday it was releasing a video game recreating the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.

The Glasgow-based firm Traffic said "JFK Reloaded" was an educational "docu-game" that would help disprove conspiracy theories about Kennedy's death. The game is due to be released Monday, the 41st anniversary of the shooting in Dallas.

Traffic said the game challenged players to recreate the three shots fired at the president's car by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository.

Traffic's managing director, Kirk Ewing, said the game — available as an Internet download for $9.99 — would "stimulate a younger generation of players to take an interest in this fascinating episode of American history."

By trying to kill the last True Liberal? Again?

Rumor has it Cheney ordered six of them.

Among the many things George W Bush should give thanks for on this holiday, along with the silver spoon lodged in his craw at birth and the many Family-connected saviours who have bailed his butt out of every one of his abject failures except his sorry excuse for a presidency, is the insistently puerile state of arrested adolescence in which American culture is caught like a spy in a honey-trap. Like adolescents, we habitually over-react to threats; like adolescents, we are focused on appearances to the exclusion of everything else; and like adolescents, we are easily distracted by our hormones. The only thing the Bush Invitation-Only Campaign Tour was missing was a string of Vegas dancing girls high-stepping on stage behind him. Maybe next time, assuming he bothers with the fraud of an 'election' at all.

Grownups knew better than to be fooled by his pig-ignorant posturing and propagandistic sloganeering; the adolescents among us took those the way they would take a cheerleader's pump-you-up excesses during the local Turkey-Day matches. Grownups knew that his simple-minded repetition of a few key phrases showed how thinly he grasped the concept--any concept; adolescents took it as Deep Thought, MTV-style. Grownups understood that his refusal to adapt, instead focusing like a laser on making sure he never admitted a mistake, meant that his mind was solidly closed to any new idea that threatened to intrude on its blissfully ignorant serenity; adolescents thought it meant he was 'strong', since being blindingly stubborn is how they measure strength.

George W Bush and an adolescent society were made for each other, let's face it. The only real surprise in retrospect is that there turned out to be as many grownups as there were. But they've all gone back to their books and blogs and are listening to NPR right now, so we can spend some time meditating on what might have been had the culture been more 17-ish than 16-ish.

Purely as an exercise, for instance, we could always amuse ourselves with the spectacle of how 'news' cheerfully debases itself for the 15 and 16 yr-old minds who dominate tube-watching.



Once upon a time, Spencer Tunick's nude group photographs inspired criticism of our adolescent snickering and Puritan outrage over nudity and sexuality, challenging us to look at nude bodies in a more adult way: not as objects of what the SCOTUS might call 'prurient interest' during one of its periodic convulsions of sexual hysteria, but as simple, natural forms--something we all have whether we hide it or not. As Sandra Bernhart put it: 'I'm naked under my clothes.' So aren't we all.

But forget all that intellectual junk. Forget art. And for gawd's-sake forget 'social commentary'. What we want on our tv screens is a good-looking female body strutting all her stuff for the camera--and us. And please let it be a 'news reporter' so we have a sort-of socially-acceptable excuse to feast our eyes all the way through the photo 'installation'.

Local 'news' has been a joke for decades, ever since the small cadre of news 'consultants' got their hooks into station managers, scaring them with how big an audience the competition was going to get by listening to their 'advice', advice that centered around exploiting sensationalism at every conceivable opportunity: 'If it thinks, it stinks. If it bleeds, it leads.' For 20 years, local tv news has descended further and further into the same pit which housed the National Enquirer and the NY Post, avoiding by mere inches the mother-gives-birth-to-cow and aliens-have-abducted-Madonna stories. But they always loomed on the horizon.

Well, after this, there may be no stopping them. Given the whopping success of this 'story' in the ratings, we can no doubt look forward in the future to features like 'Tonight's Nude', the tv equivalent of the Post's famous Page Six centerfold, only there won't be any namby-pamby cheesecake: full-frontal all the way. And hard news, barely more than three minutes of headlines per hour now, will be cut to a whisper that races by your consciousness without a chance to register as we speed along to the 5 minutes devoted to yet another 'human interest' story that involves yet another beautiful young woman yet again shedding her outer garments for the glory of 'reporting' the 'news'.

Let's be clear: lord knows I have nothing against naked bodies. I like them, especially attractive female ones (and in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I find almost any naked female body attractive, especially if I like the woman living in it). I like looking at them. I find them...inspiring. And I don't have anything against showing them on television. I had some bad moments when my daughter was growing up that centered around my fear that she would think she wasn't attractive if she didn't look like Heather Locklear or Pam Anderson, never mind Brooke Burke or Cindy Crawford. But although there were a couple of scary years when she went out of her way to prove how sexy she was, ultimately, by 19, her native good sense and down-to-earth, blunt honesty had asserted themselves. She spared herself the buleimia that way too many of her friends practiced, and escaped the damage to her self-esteem that I had imagined would be her inevitable fate. She emerged from adolescence liking herself and liking the way the man she eventually married responded to the way she looked. He didn't care if she didn't look like Cindy Crawford. He was in love with her (still is, I hasten to add), and to him she was (and always will be, I think, although these things are hard to predict) beautiful because of who she was, not because of what she looked like, nude or not.

So what's my problem if it isn't nudity on tv? I'll put it as simply as I can for the cheap seats:

IT WAS A RATINGS STUNT. IT WASN'T, ISN'T, AND NEVER WILL BE 'NEWS', AND IT DOESN'T BELONG ON A 'NEWS' SHOW UNLESS WE'VE GIVEN UP ALL HOPE OF EVER AGAIN HAVING ANYTHING THAT APPROACHES A RESPONSIBLE PRESS.

There. So? Have we given up? Is the circus all we want? Sure looks that way from here.

After weeks of talking about this, or so it seems to me, the first issue of my first webzine devoted to highlighting a few of the best blog-posts I could find has finally been published.


Blog Tower

Blog Tower will, I hope, serve several purposes. First, it will give people a second chance to read great posts they may have missed the first time around. Second, it will start to call attention to the great writing in blogs that's been going largely unnoticed not just by the general public but by blog readers themselves. And third, it will foster continuing conversations about issues that tend to get picked up and dropped along with the daily news by re-publishing posts on those issues in special sections.

In this first issue, for instance, the Religion page is devoted to posts about the role of faith in public life and includes two posts written by evangelicals--one who still is and opposes an evangelical litmus test, and one who left the movement and talks about why--as well as a centrist's thoughts on the 'Great Awakening' and what it might mean.

But there's lots more: pages on politics, the arts, and humor, as well as a page that will showcase a featured article in every issue. This issue it's a moving, beautifully written piece by a soldier serving in Iraq who finds her father's face in the faces of the Iraqis around her. In a way, it's a meditation on the universality of laugh lines, and how to read them.

I suppose Thanksgiving week wasn't the best time to launch an effort like this. What can I say? I forgot. But I hope when things calm down next week you'll take a few moments to check out the work presented by Blog Tower, and then check out the sites where the pieces come from. A few of them regular readers of the Alley will be familiar with, but quite a few more they may not be, and they're all worth more than one look.

Fresh from their 'victory' installing a theocrat back into power, chief Xtian fundie Jerry Falwell is readying the Band of Angels who will transform American law according to Old Testament Biblical standards by attaching a law school to his Baptist college, Liberty University, which you may take it from me is an oxymoron since it intends to remove 'liberty' from a Godless secular society and replace it with obedience to my-way-or-prison canonical law.

LYNCHBURG, Va. — What Debra Meador read disturbed her. It didn't seem right that schoolchildren were once barred from holding prayer groups after class. Or that the Ten Commandments couldn't be displayed in a government building.

So at 34, the human relations specialist from Lynchburg made good on a longtime interest by enrolling in law school. But unlike most prospective lawyers, she applied to only one place.

"I wanted to take it in a Christian setting," said Meador, a member of the inaugural law class at Liberty University, a Baptist college founded here in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. "I don't believe anyone could be neutral. We're willing to tell you what we believe and to follow that."

The school, like Meador, who aspires to argue cases before the Supreme Court, has grand designs. Right now, it has only 60 students and six faculty members. Provisional accreditation by the American Bar Assn. — which certifies that a school has been evaluated on the quality of its legal education and allows students to sit for the bar exam in any state — is at least two years away.

But by teaching law from a Christian perspective, Falwell hopes to train a cadre of Christian lawyers to fight what he sees as the growing secularization of public life across the country.

Imagine that--a secular society daring to be secular. How dreadful! We'll have none of that nonsense if Jerry has anything to say about it. And he does. His little theocratic law school is only the beginning. It will be the precursor of an entire movement, bolstered by lawyers he's trained, which aims to 're-interpret' the Constitution for a while before it despenses with it entirely and uses the Book of Leviticus instead. Think I'm kidding?

The school plans to offer select students hands-on experience with a law firm that takes on constitutional issues. That would occur when Liberty Counsel, a legal organization in Orlando, Fla., that focuses on cases involving religion and traditional values, moves its legislative arm to the campus.

Best known for establishing in 1979 the Moral Majority, one of the first evangelical efforts to affect political discourse, Falwell sees the law school as an extension of his mission.

"We certainly are training Christian activists," Falwell, who this month announced the creation of a 21st century version of the Moral Majority that aims to re-energize religious conservatives, said in an interview last week. "We're turning their attention to understand the Bible is the infallible word of God, that the American Constitution is a sacred document and that the Christian worldview is their matrix of service."

But Jerry, the 'sacred' Constitution and the Bible conflict in some very important ways. Like separating church and state, just as an example I pulled out of a hat. Which gets priority when they clash? Wait, wait, don't tell me....

But not to worry. Jerry isn't actually doing the teaching. Yet...

But for many students, the Christianity at the school's core does not mandate that they promote religion in the courtroom. Nor do faculty members see producing such graduates as their goal. As they point out, lawyers — not Falwell — do the teaching.

For Brad Fraser, a 23-year-old Pennsylvanian who completed his undergraduate degree at Liberty, the law school's purpose is not "to legislate morality. Our goal is to get back to the underlying principles that form the law."

Sure it is. Oddly enough, it's centrist Christians who are most disturbed by this development.

It's a direction that has raised eyebrows among some civil libertarians and constitutional law scholars who fear that schools like Liberty are designed to preach, not teach.

"I don't believe that the understanding of Jerry Falwell about the history of America and of the American Constitution is remotely accurate, nor is it ethically responsible," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a longtime critic of Falwell. "It is designed to turn America into his view of a Christian nation…. When you get these insular institutions who believe they are right and fighting the entire world, you get extremists coming out as graduates."

No kidding.