Search Results for: Robertson

Last night, at Drinking Liberally, a handful of us liberal bloggers decided a few things: Jerry Falwell was an ass. Billy Graham, however, is not. And I offered this hypothesis: Pat Robertson has his moments of clarity, such as his sudden realization that global warming is happening and his association with George Clooney. Weirder things have happened, folks.

It’s posts like this that make me wish Joel Connelly wrote a “No on Impeachment” column every week, if only to see how few people know what exactly a columnist is.

At Monday’s fund raiser for the Parks levies, the food was amazing. If you’re going to an M’s game, check out King Street Bar and Oven. I recommend the BBQ Chicken pizza.

If you like Seattle and like blogging, you should consider blogging for Friends of Seattle. However, if you don’t like Seattle and like blogging, you should probably leave town, Mr. Sharkansky.

Here’s a clip of Ron Sims doing what no other Seattle pol can do- a kick-ass rally speech. Sims is like the Brett Favre of local politics. No matter which team he’s on, his team wins. I tried to tell him that the new parks levies are going to be gold at the ballot box, but he would have none of it. Even though parks are popular, a good pol doesn’t take anything for granted.

Also…

It’s a girl! Congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. You Know Who.

Bill Maher listed off some New Rules yesterday.

In doing so, Bill pointed out that a recent poll showed 25% of Americans think the second coming of Christ would happen sometime this year.

Those 25% may be on to something. You see, way back in the early 1990s, televangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson predicted, based on happenings in the Middle East and using some good old biblical numerology, that the world would end this year. In fact, he predicted that it would end tomorrow, on Sunday, 29 April 2007.

Its been nice knowing y’all. So long, and thanks for all the hits.

Just read Robert Jamieson’s column in today’s Seattle P-I: “Critics go after the wrong pastor.”

Hmm. I wasn’t aware that us critics were limited to going after only one pastor at a time.

It’s an embarrassment of riches out there with the likes of Mark Driscoll, Ken Hutcherson, Joe Fuiten, Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Fred Phelps, and the inimitably mule-fucking Rev. Neil Horsley routinely making headlines. So many pastors, so little time.

I was wondering when the shit would hit the fan regarding Mercer Island right-wing radio-rabbi Daniel Lapin, and his long and shady relationship with GOP scandal-monkey Jack Abramoff. Um… today in the Seattle Times:

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff funneled money through a Mercer Island religious foundation as he tried to influence a top aide to Republican congressional leader Tom DeLay, according to his guilty plea last week to corruption charges.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin confirmed Sunday it was his foundation, Toward Tradition, that took $50,000 from two Abramoff clients and, at Abramoff’s suggestion, used it to hire the aide’s wife to organize a conference for the group.

Lapin said he and his board had no idea the money was part of Abramoff’s vast scheme to influence Congress and, in this case, stop bills to raise postal rates and ban online lotteries.
…
“We were innocently hiring someone to do a job and not being aware that it was part of something else,” Lapin said.

Hmm. Well… maybe. But it’s hard not to judge a man by the company he keeps, and Lapin, the “The Republican’s Rabbi-in-Arms,” has been hanging out with crooks and liars.

Michael at blatherWatch has done a great job chronicling Lapin and his close relationships with the likes of Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, and Pat Robertson. I’m looking forward to what Michael has to say about the latest news.

UPDATE:
The Seattle Weekly has also spent a ton of ink on Lapin, Abramoff and Co., and I had missed a Jan 4 roundup that provides links to much of their coverage. Great reading.

I believe a good chunk of Michael’s information also comes from coverage in the old Eastside Weekly, which unfortunately is not archived online. Perhaps the Weekly could post that for its online readers?

The Venezuelan government reacted angrily to televangelist (and form GOP presidential hopeful) Pat Robertson’s call to assassinate President Hugo Chavez.

Jos

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It’s not often I get to be out in front of Frank Rich on an issue, but as usual, my favorite New York Times columnist, manages to make his point more eloquently and persuasively than I could ever hope to. [“Just How Gay Is the Right?“] Ah well, I suppose that’s why Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for the paper of record, whereas I’m… well… just some blogger.

Rich uses the DVD release of the 1962 political potboiler “Advise and Consent” as a springboard for discussing the right’s war on the judiciary and the violently anti-gay rhetoric that fuels it. The movie focuses on a McCarthy-era confirmation battle, and the gay secret of a conservative Senator from Utah. It depicts the gay-baiters as the real menace.

That message remains on target now. But in the years since, even as it has ceased to be a crime or necessarily a political career-breaker to be gay, unprincipled gay-baiting has mushroomed into a full-fledged political movement. It’s a virulent animosity toward gay people that really unites the leaders of the anti-“activist” judiciary crusade, not any intellectually coherent legal theory (they’re for judicial activism when it might benefit them in Florida). Their campaign menaces the country on a grander scale than Drury and Preminger ever could have imagined: it uses gay people as cannon fodder on the way to its greater goal of taking down a branch of government that is crucial to the constitutional checks and balances that “Advise and Consent” so powerfully extols.

Rich goes on to present a rogues gallery of right-wing notables “whipping up homophobia” including Jerry Falwell’s “Declaration of War” against homosexuality, Pat Robertson’s claim that activist judges are a greater threat than Al Qaeda, and former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore (of Ten Commandments monument fame) who has suggested the state has the power to prohibit homosexual conduct at penalty of death. And of course, Rich points out the irony that I have been somewhat dwelling on recently.

What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks. Allen Drury would have been incredulous if gay-baiters hounding his Utah senator had turned out to be gay themselves, but this has been a consistent pattern throughout the 30-year war. Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man, ran the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which as far back as 1980 was putting out fund-raising letters that said, “Our nation’s moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians).” (Dolan recanted and endorsed gay rights before he died of AIDS in 1986.) The latest boldface name to marry his same-sex partner in Massachusetts is Arthur Finkelstein, the political operative behind the electoral success of Jesse Helms, a senator so homophobic he voted in the minority of the 97-to-3 reauthorization of the Ryan White act for AIDS funding and treatment in 1995.

But surely the most arresting recent case is James E. West, the powerful Republican mayor of Spokane, Wash., whose double life has just been exposed by the local paper, The Spokesman-Review. Mr. West’s long, successful political career has been distinguished by his attempts to ban gay men and lesbians from schools and day care centers, to fire gay state employees, to deny City Hall benefits to domestic partners and to stifle AIDS-prevention education. The Spokesman-Review caught him trolling gay Web sites for young men and trying to lure them with gifts and favors. (He has denied accusations of abusing boys when he was a Boy Scout leader some 25 years ago.) Not unlike the Roy Cohn of “Angels in America” – who describes himself as “a heterosexual man” who has sex “with guys” – Mr. West has said he had “relations with adult men” but doesn’t “characterize” himself as gay. This is more than hypocrisy – it’s pathology.

Some of my readers have criticized me for trying to tarnish the image of the far-right Christian movement by focusing on the personal hypocrisy of a few of its leaders, but as Rich points out, this is more than just the ironic tale of a handful of secretly-gay gay-bashers… it is politics, pure and simple.

A likely inspiration for the gay plot line in Drury’s “Advise and Consent” was the real-life story of a Wyoming Democrat, Lester Hunt, who shot himself in his Senate office in 1954 after the Republican Campaign Committee threatened to make an issue of his gay son’s arrest in Lafayette Park on “morals charges.” Those were the dark ages, but it isn’t entirely progress that we now have a wider war on gay people, thinly disguised as a debate over the filibuster, cloaked in religion, and counting among its shock troops politicians as utterly bereft of moral bearings as James West.

People have always hated gays, but anti-gay sentiment is now being politicized, much in the same way the Nazis politicized long standing anti-Jewish sentiment to help secure Hitler’s ambitions in the early 1930’s. So if you think I’ve just been writing about sex or religion or hypocrisy, you’ve missed the point entirely. I’ve been writing about the politics of hate, and warning about the dire consequences to our republic should it be allowed to triumph.

I’ve already commented on Stefan Sharkansky — the Jeff Gannon Jim Guckert of the Washington press corps — rudely heckling Ron Sims at a press conference yesterday. The Snark snidely blogged about the “hails of derisive laughter” at Sims claim that the November election “had an accuracy rate that any bank would envy.” What Snark doesn’t tell his readers is that the laughter came solely (and deliberately) from him and one fellow malcontent.

Perhaps one of the reasons the assembled media didn’t laugh at the comparison, is that it’s not all that laughable. As TorridJoe and Daniel Kirkdorffer point out on their respective blogs (Also Also and On the Road to 2008), the banking system is not as error free as one might expect, and Washington state elections not quite so error prone as the righties make it out to be.

Both Joe and Daniel site an article by Bank Technology News, that says errors account for about 0.2 percent of online transactions.

“There is always going to be an error rate that they have to live with,” notes Beth Robertson, senior analyst at TowerGroup. But she says rates are remarkably low and roughly half of what they were in 2001. Nonetheless, a 0.2 percent rate is still about 3.4 million payment mistakes that occur either because of customer error or some other glitch in the system, including problems stemming from billers who may switch bank accounts and fail to notify banks so they can change the routing of customer payments. Banks also may fail to cancel a recurring payment either because the request wasn’t processed in time or the customer didn’t make the change correctly on the front end.

Hmmm… 0.2 percent? Doesn’t that come to a 99.8 percent accuracy rate, exactly the rate Snark claims for King County elections?

Daniel takes his analysis further, pointing out the similarities between the types of banking errors described, and those alleged during our recent election.

So the banking systems seem to be plagued the same type of errors we’ve seen in the elections:

-customer error , much like voters who couldn’t fill out their ballots correctly, or didn’t sign them.

-glitches , not unlike voting machines that counted wrong, or lost votes, or couldn’t read valid votes marked in pencil.

-switched bank accounts , kind of like change of addresses.

-failure to cancel a recurring payment , similar to deaths that went unrecorded, and felons who were kept on the voter lists.

That’s pretty uncanny!

The article sums it up by saying, “the equation will likely never be perfect.” .

Of course, online banking isn’t the only area where errors occur in our financial system. Identity theft has become the largest category of fraud, and the fuel behind our nation’s multi-billion dollar credit card fraud racket. The banks are reluctant to release actual fraud rates, but some foreign credit cards are estimated to have rates as high as 0.47 percent! And according to Jupiter Media Metrix, worldwide credit card fraud rates range between 25 cents and 28 cents out of every $100.00 US charged online.

If King County’s election truly was 99.8 percent accurate (as the mathematically infallible Snark argues) then Ron Sims and Dean Logan have the right to be proud. Not only was it more accurate than the banking system, but it was also far more accurate than the 0.5 percent margin the Caltech/MIT Voter Technology Project recommends as the threshold for automatic recounts.

I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement. The King County Council will be holding an open session on election reform (Monday, 9:30 AM, Council Chambers), and I encourage everybody who cares about this issue to be there. Hopefully, those attending will contribute more to the discussion than just jeers, heckles, and derisive laughter.