All Good Christians Should Buy Their Cars Here

And the rest of us should send them a nice letter telling them to just please kindly STFU.

Keiffe and Sons, a Ford dealership in Mojave, California, has a new radio ad in which they try to court Christian car buyers by announcing that they believe that non-Christians in America should "sit down and shut up."

"Did you know that 86% of Americans say they believe in God? Since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians, who believe in God, we at Keiffe & Sons Ford wonder why we don't tell the other 14% to sit down and shut up. I guess I just offended 14% of the people who are listening to this message. Well, if that is the case then I say that's tough, this is America folks, it's called free speech. None of us at Keiffe & Sons Ford is afraid to speak out. Keiffe & Sons Ford on Sierra Highway in Mojave and Rosamond, if we don't see you today, by the grace of God, we'll be here tomorrow."

http://undergroundunbeliever.blogspot.com/2008/05/some-exciting-newsabout-ad.html

Quote of the Week

For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Albert Camus

On Flattened Cities and Drowned Cities

I was getting dressed at the locker room of my gym the other morning. The TV in the corner, tuned to one of the news channels, was droning and humming monotonously. I wasn’t really listening to whatever the talking head was saying. Suddenly the picture changed to a scene of many parachutists pouring out the side door of a cargo plane, sailing down towards the ground with a sense of purpose. The talking head came back on camera and said:

“The Chinese response has been extraordinary. As a point of reference, after Katrina it took the US government twice as long to get less than half as many people on the ground.”

Those words put the hook in me, and I sat down in front of the TV and got to thinking about the question: Why was the US response to Katrina so shameful? And why was the Chinese response to the earthquake so much better?

While there are undoubtedly many factors involved, two immediately elbowed their way to the front of the queue and demanded to be heard.

First, credit must be given to China’s “activist” concept of government. Regardless of what one may think of China’s strange mélange of communism, corporate fascism and free-market enterprise (I personally am not a fan), one is forced to acknowledge the fact that the people in power in Beijing view it as a proper function of government to be part of the solution. Unfortunately for the American citizens living in New Orleans, their government was being run by members of a political movement whose core belief was that government was, by definition and in all circumstances, part of the problem. This movement was openly committed to slowly and painfully starving government to death, forcibly downsizing it until it was “small enough to drown in a bathtub.” Instead, all their political philosophy succeeded in doing was drowning a major American city.

Second, and in many ways much more important, is the strong element of communitarianism in Chinese culture, a cultural element that is very old and exists independently of the communist political philosophy of China’s current government. Communitarianism privileges the interests of the community over the needs of the individual. The concept of social solidarity – especially in times of crisis – is understood as something mandatory, not optional. Tens of thousands of ordinary Chinese citizens, some from as far as a thousand miles away, got themselves to the earthquake zone any way they could and threw themselves into the rescue efforts. It never occurred to them not to do this; in Kantian terms, they were faced with a categorical imperative. In the US, on the contrary, in spite of some relatively small islands of solidarity and volunteerism, no mass commitment by the people took place. With the population conditioned to worshipping that uniquely American “I got mine, so fuck you” form of “rugged individualism” – what might be more accurately and honestly described as a form of Social Darwinism – the best among us felt a brief twinge of conscience and eventually wrote out a check for twenty or thirty bucks and considered that we’d done enough. And the rest? We stared at the horror on TV, and we tsk-tsked, and we blinked in bovine incomprehension, and then we flipped the channel to watch American Idol as our fellow citizens suffered and died.

The Iraq invasion made me feel anger at my country for the first time in my life. But our response to Katrina – especially when compared to the disaster in China, where the people and the government dealt with the situation properly – made me feel something even worse: shame.

Quote of the Week (one of my all-time favorites)

The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.

--Thomas Paine

We need more heroes like this

More and more career military types are bravely stepping forward and refusing to play their assigned roles in the farcical "legal" proceedings at Gitmo. Sometimes, a loud and clear "Sir, no Sir!" is the real heroism.

http://www.slate.com/id/2191301/

More members of the military turn against the terror trials.

By Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Tuesday, May 13, 2008, at 6:35 PM ET

Legal commentators have argued for years about whether there might ever be legitimate trials for the so-called "enemy combatants" we're holding at Guantanamo Bay. Some say no. Others, like our friend Ben Wittes, argue that the evidence is inconclusive. They want to see what the Guantanamo military commissions produce before pronouncing them a failure.

We may never get there. Key actors are declining to play their part in a piece of theater designed to produce all convictions all the time. These refusals, affecting two trials this week, suggest that the whole apparatus—seven years and counting in the making—cannot ever be fixed. The trials are doomed, and they are doomed from the inside out.

Robert Rauschenberg R.I.P.

I'm with the Abstract Expressionist who, upon seeing one of Rauschenberg's atrocities, was heard to exclaim: "If this is Modern Art, then I quit!" That being said, I have to honor the man for having lived life "with no time out," and with having made his vision of what art means visible and commercially viable. I can't stand his stuff, and the fact that he's died doesn't make me like his stuff any more than I did before he died, but all artists in all media are ultimately kindred spirits, so I say "Well done, and well lived."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080513/en_afp/usartrauschenberg

NEW YORK (AFP) - Robert Rauschenberg, 82, one of the towering figures of 20th century art, died at his home in Florida overnight, a spokeswoman for the Pace Wildenstein gallery in New York told AFP Tuesday.

I wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises," he said in a 2005 interview with Art Info magazine, in which he discussed the iconic series.

"If it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was," he explained. "The object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing."

Rauschenberg worked across genres, and was known for assemblage, conceptualist methods, printmaking, painting, sculpture and was even active in the field of choreography.

Obama field workers experience American race relations in the year 2008

Despite all the rainbow-coalition hugs and kisses at the Obama rallies, his campaign's field workers on the ground and on the phones get to experience another side of 21st-century America. When I see the naive Obama supporters on the internet saying "Race will NOT be a factor in this election! America's beyond all those old fashioned attitudes!" I don't know whether to laugh or cry. This is going to be one seriously ugly election; I'll be curious to see how many ways the McCain campaign can cook up to hint at the N-word without actually coming out and saying it. I have this very bad feeling that Obama is going to lose -- and racism (which I have taken to calling "America's birth defect") will be the reason.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24588813/

For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.

Meeting cruel reaction
Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"