The Seattle Star-Tribune reports that one of those hypersensitive born-again Christian protest groups finds Starbucks' new logo absolutely pornographic.

Here's the offending picture.

 

The Resistance, a Christian group out of San Diego says the new image "has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute,"  according to Mark Dice, founder of the group. The Resistance claims more than 3,000 members nationwide and has found a place  advancing various conspiracy theories.

Starbucks says the logo is based on a sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren. Bare-breasted and Rubenesque, that siren is meant to be as seductive as coffee itself. It's a somewhat bowdlerized version of the company's original logo from 35 years ago, on which you could actually see--gasp!--nipples. Most recently, the company has been using a stylized version of the Norse mermaid, as shown below.

These Christers, as Sinclair Lewis called them, are quite talented at discerning sexual content just about anywhere. Which might explain why so many of them have such large numbers of children. I'm of the opinion they ought to pray more and keep their pants zipped. 

Next, we have this tasty Reuters story about how obesity contributes to global warming.

A "study" done by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine claims that obese and overweight people "require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat," adding to food shortages and higher energy prices. This bit of pseudo-science actually found its way into The Lancet, which I have always assumed is a peer-reviewed journal.  The, um, scientists went on to say that because thinner people eat less and are more likely to walk than to rely upon automobiles, they occupy some sort of environmental high moral plateau.

I think they are missing something important. The ultra-thin, environmentally hip crowd includes a large proportion of vegetarians and vegans. A diet heavy in vegetable matter produces more intestinal gas than one laden with meat and fat. Thus vegans fart more copiously than normal people, and everyone knows that human flatulence is simply saturated with sulfur dioxide and methane, two of the most notorious "greenhouse gases."

Continuing on the subject of Obesity...

Philadelphia's CBS Channel 3 reports that if you are more wealthy and foolish than you are hungry, you can spend a hundred bucks on a cheese steak sandwich. Reporter Nicole Brewer tells viewers that Chef James Locascio, of Rittenhouse Square's Barclay Prime, created this "haute" cheesesteak, which includes butter poached lobster and shaved truffles. Locascio is quoted saying the sandwich has "every ingredient you want to try in a life time in one." Apparently without regard for whether you can actually taste lobster when it's combined with the other ingredients, and assuming there is something about the truffle--at $900 a pound--that makes it more desirable than the dozens of less expensive, and tasty, mushrooms that might be used. Of course this is not merely a sandwich: it's a status symbol, a paean to conspicuous consumption.

Brewer, on camera, sampled one of the sandwiches and pronounced it worth the price. Of course, you can bet the TV station picked up the tab.

To my cheese steak discerning eye, the thing looks puny and the roll looks overbaked. I may harbor a prejudice because I grew up two blocks from the place, and went to sleep every summer night to the aroma of sauteeing onions, but I don't think you can beat Captain Harvey's of Dundalk for steak sandwiches. True, the price of a half-sub has zoomed to nearly seven dollars, about double what it was a decade ago. But for your money, you get something about the size and heft of a truck driver's forearm, and infinitely more delicious. There is no eat-in, and I would recommend you wear something to protect your clothing from dripping juices. Last time I bought a Captain Harvey's sandwich, I ate my fill and had enough left over for a couple of hefty steak burritos for the next day's lunch.

Finally, this is not especially humorous, but it does involve someone who is overweight and tends to lunacy...

The new June edition of the Baltimore Beacon reports that President Bush signed into law last month S.845, known as the "Safety of Seniors Act of 2007," noting that Ms. Mikulski is a co-sponsor. This law, in the words of Beacon reporter Barbara Ruben, "authorizes new programs to help prevent falls among older adults." So we are now the beneficiaries of a program that is expected to cost at least $178 million over the next two years. Though I suspect the true beneficiaries will be the public health mavens who will be well paid to try to figure out who falls, where, when and why, and what troublesome architectural constraints can be put into place in a misguided effort to prevent it.

Mikulski bloviates, "Falls don't discriminate. This is a serious public health problem..." Except, of course that until the research is done, nobody knows how serious a problem it might be. Plus that little grammatical faux pas in her first sentence.

Having sent written testimony in favor of the school's plan, I received a copy of the summary of the hearing and the decision. I'm almost sorry I blew off attending the hearing, because it must have been a real circus. For one thing, the changes proposed at the school property are nowhere near as radical as they have been represented to be. And for another, the opposing neighbors appear, collectively, to be dumber than a box of hammers.

THE OPPOSITION AND ITS CASE

Graystone Community Association - an association without a community

Among the objectors were people claiming to represent two community associations, each of them suspicious in its own unique way. The Graystone Community Association claims to represent more than 100 households in the immediate neighborhood. Neglecting the minor detail that there is no such community as "Graystone," a few soreheads in this neighborhood whose plat is officially recorded as "Broadacres" incorporated early last December. During the time interval conveniently created for them by the undue and potentially unethical influence of two local politicians. The Association's web site describes the neighborhood thus:

Where is this development and when was it built?
Graystone is located in Woodlawn and built about the 19xxs. Homes in this area include a mix of mid-size single family homes and attractive townhomes.

Aside from the fact that there's not a "townhome" within half a mile of the residence of the association President, the members were too stupid or too lazy to know when their own houses were built. A thirty-second check on the Web revealed that the association president's house was erected in 1956, along with much of the surrounding neighborhood.

The Woodlawn Community Education & Development Association

What exactly does this group do? 

The other organization objecting calls itself the Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association, Inc. This outfit, a federal non-profit, was established in 2002, with the wife of a local Baptist preacher at its head. According to its corporate charter, this outfit was established for the following purpose:

"Establish a community based entity, formed to maintain a strong alliance between schools, police departments and our community. In addition, to strive to assure an active participative relationship with politicians through a focused, productive, educational and developmental agenda."

Now, having benefited from a privileged education at a public high school in a blue-collar neighborhood across town, it would be unfair of me to criticize the bad syntax of this statement of objectives, or to point out that it is a meaningless abstraction, so I will move on to other things. The officers of this corporation are listed as "V. Ross, D. Griffin, I. Zachary, C. Hayes, A. Truitt, M. Bowden and G. Jones," which makes them all but impossible to identify.

At the hearing, the preacher (husband of the Association president) spoke on their behalf. He "described his association as an umbrella organization representing a number of community groups on behalf of approximately 1,800 households."  That number represents approximately ten percent of the total number of households in the entire community known as "Woodlawn," and one would think that with such high participation and lofty goals, you'd be constantly hearing of the good works done under the auspices of the Association.

(Here again, let's ignore my personal experience: I've lived in the area this association purports to represent for 32 years, and have not heretofore heard of it. This, in spite of the fact that I was a regular contributor for several years to a community newspaper here, and spent more than six years canvassing the area as a real estate salesman.) As far as I can see, the Association has no presence on the Worldwide Web, in an era when Joe Sixpack might have two or three websites of his own.

There is a scant record of the Association's works. The county school board minutes from June 2006 note:

Dr. Manuel Rodriguez, Assistant Superintendent, Southwest Area, recommended that Woodlawn High School auditorium be renamed to the "Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association (WCEDA), Inc. Community Auditorium." ...

Ms. Shillman asked whether the funds for the auditorium had been donated by WCEDA, Inc. Dr. Rodriguez responded this group has applied for, and received a federal grant to renovate the auditorium.

Sure enough, Congressman Elijah Cummings managed to wangle a $65,000 federal grant for auditorium renovations. Exactly what role Rev. Ross' organization played in the process is not clear. But the Cummings "earmark" occurred in fiscal year 2004 [that's the year ending July 1, 2004], and according to a cached web page from the Association of School Business Officials of Maryland and the District of Columbia, a request for bids on the work was let only this year. That bid, number JMI-632-08 remains in limbo, the due date having passed on March 31st.  

Later that same year (October, 2006) the Reverend Ross testified as an "expert" on the idea of a light rail line connecting Woodlawn and Dundalk, tentatively named the Red Line. As the Daily Record reported [emphasis added],

The expansion of light rail and bus services on state government's Red Line was addressed by Daniel Pontious, regional policy director of the Baltimore City-based Citizens Planning and Housing Association, and Rev. Ezio Ross, a Baltimore County clergyman who heads the Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association.

One of the major points made by both men is that transit projects need to be better coordinated with economic development. Both said they saw transit as a way to boost commerce by creating "town centers" and "urban villages."

"It can bring developers into an area by creating amenities," Ross said, following a 15-minute review of transit projects in cities such as Boston, Denver and Los Angeles.

Transit establishes routes, something vital to fostering trade, they noted.

"A sense of permanence is important to economic development," Pontious said.

The Red Line is expected to create a transit corridor starting in Woodlawn and running through Baltimore City and out to Dundalk on the eastern side of Baltimore County, the presenters said, although the state Department of Transportation Web site labels it a 10.5- mile project that will only go as far as Fells Point/Patterson Park. The portion to be addressed within the next few months by state and local leaders is a section that will run from Woodlawn to Canton, Pontious and Ross said.

The article went on to say that even this truncated route would cost  between $525 million (for a surface rail line) and $2.6 BILLION for an underground line. And apparently nobody bothered to address the little complication posed by the fact that the route would probably not be allowed to run through the Leakin Park, owing to the same deed restriction that prevented I-70 from continuing eastward several decades ago, and resulted in the Interstate Highway to Nowhere, connecting Schroeder Street with Greene Street, a mere 45/100 of a mile distant, and through some of the most downtrodden housing in the city.

CONCLUSION: I still have no idea what the WCE&DA has been doing for the past five years, or what qualifies Rev. Ross as an expert on "development," since he is by profession (and presumably by education) a theologian.

The School's Proposal, and the arguments against it

The main part of the proposal was to create a dormitory to house 20 to 30 young male students. It was revealed only at the hearing that they'd be housed in the existing buildings, nearly all the changes would be invisible from the outside. A couple of neighbors made a great fuss over whether cars had been parked on the grass on this property. Bear in mind, it's slightly over an acre of land, and on a knoll overlooking the surrounding area, so while you can see whether or not there are cars parked, you can't tell where they are parked without trespassing on to the place.

Other neighbors contended they were worried that the tavern across the street and downhill from the school property would be a horrible temptation. Apparently this sub-group is so ignorant of Islam that they don't realize that alcohol consumption is strictly verboten to Muslims. And the bar is such a redneck joint that I can't imagine anyone looking remotely like a Middle Easterner, or even an American Jew, walking into the place and surviving. Not to mention that the students will all be between the ages of 12 and 20 years old. The protestors did note that police had to be called to break up brawls at the bar 21 times in the last six months of last year.

Still more protests focused on the miserable academic record and perpetual violence at the public high school about half a mile away. Nobody mentioned that there's a lot of parking-on-the-grass whenever the high school has a football game, and apparently nobody brought up the fact that this school is at the very bottom of the academic ranking in the county, despite the county's having dumped $13 million into it to graft a "pre-engineering magnet school" on to this otherwise ghettoized school, in the hope that the magnet school students would pull up the average numbers for the entire school. Which they didn't.

It was also revealed at the hearing that, in addition to the $628,500 the school's owners paid for the property being discussed, the man who will be its headmaster spent $380,000 on a new house built just across the street. Without enrolling a single student, this father-and-son team has invested more than a million dollars in a neighborhood where the average sale prices were below $150,000 before they nearly doubled during the short-lived boom experienced here in 2006.

The objectors weren't done yet, though. Besides the high school and the redneck bar, they noted that a commercial building across the street from the school houses a day school for what were described as "75 disruptive children." Now seeing that this bunch started out their opposition with the allegation that Darul Uloom would be yet another unwanted "group home" for the developmentally disabled, and that they subsequently brought up this day school, someone should have asked how many of them favored euthanizing problem children, since neither of these quite opposite alternatives satisfy them.

Yet somewhere along the line, they missed complaining about the "Adult Day Care" center for the elderly in another commercial property on the same intersection. Can you imagine the detrimental influence on young Muslim boys of seeing some Alzheimer's-addled geezer wheeling himself down the street, having escaped from day care? It boggles the mind.

For the county's part, they have managed to wipe away any public reference to the fact that the original hearing for Darul Uloom was pulled off the docket last October, due to the arguably unethical intervention of a state senator and a county councilman who is now under investigation for misusing his campaign fund as a personal bank account.

The Decision

Finally, on March 28, the Commissioner made his decision. The school will be allowed to operate, but with a few caveats:

• The size of the student population is limited to 20
• A privacy fence must be erected between the school property and the property to its immediate north, a place that has long been used for the storage of heavy contractor's equipment.
• The school will need to provide landscaping to screen its property from the three houses across the street to its east, one of which is owned by the headmaster!
• Parking will be permitted only in the designated (paved) spaces shown on the site plan. [How the county intends to enforce this without aerial surveillance, illegal search or surveillance, or further trespassing by disaffected neighbors remains to be explained.]
• The driveway into the place will need to be widened from 10 feet to 20 feet.
• [This is the one that makes me laugh] Petitioner shall use similar architecture and building material where applicable to assure compatibility with the surrounding neighborhood.*

* I will need to post some photos to illustrate the absurdity of this requirement. The Bauhof House, which is the site of Darul Uloom, was built as the home of the local baker, back in the twenties, and has a style of its own. The rest of the neighborhood is a mash-up of stuff, much of which Malvina Reynolds described as "little boxes made of ticky-tacky." There are a handful of the original farm houses predating the residential development of the area, ordinary little Cape Cods, a handful of stuccoed split levels, two faux-Spanish-mission houses, the general run of stuff built before World War II, and a couple of freshly-built split foyer disasters.

Then there's the real killer-diller: "Petitioner shall not utilize the property to perform religious services for the general public." Aside from the fact that this requirement appears to violate the First Amendment to the US Constitution, there again arise several questions: (a) How does one define "general public?" I don't believe you will find the "general public" at any religious service; only members of that particular religious denomination and prospective members. (b) Who is going to enforce this, and how? Does the county plan to station someone at Darul Uloom's entrance to "card" people going in and out of the place.

I maintain, and challenge anyone to convince me otherwise, that this matter would never have seen the light of day had the proposal been for a Pentecostal Christian church, like so many of the jump-up congregations operating in storefronts, converted warehouse space, and rented hotel conference rooms around this neighborhood.

This entire matter is shameful and un-American, but alas, it's business as usual in Baltimore County, where we have The Best Government Money Can Buy.

ITEM: This year is the earliest possible date on the calendar for Easter. The holiday falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. This dating of Easter is based on the lunar calendar that Hebrew people used to identify Passover, which is why it moves around on our Roman calendar. As it happens, 2008's equinox is on March 20, followed by a full moon the next day, making that Good Friday. According to some information I received (but have not verified),

This year is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives! And only the most elderly of our population have ever seen it this early (95 years old or above!). And none of us have ever, or will ever, see it a day earlier! Here's [sic] the facts:
 

1) The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you're 95 or older, you are the only ones that were around for that!).

2) The next time it will be a day earlier, March 22, will be in the year 2285 (277 years from now). The last time it was on March 22 was 1818. So, no one alive today has or will ever see it any earlier than this year!

The oldest member of my mother's church happens to be 94, with a great sense of humor. I can't wait until Sunday to rib her about having been "born too late" to have seen two March 23 Easter Sundays.

ITEM: The top story (front page, above the fold) in the March 20 issue of The Jeffersonian is a puff piece about a center for the practice of Wicca! This is an ongoing story of some interest in the county. It seems that a thirty-ish man here who won millions of dollars in the state lottery is a follower of Wicca, and he decided to convey quite a bit of money to this existing business for its expansion. The place is a café-cum-book-and-coffee shop run by a handful of people who consider themselves pagans-in the most charitable and innocuous sense of the word. The newspapers have been at pains to point out that this quasi-religion does not involve Satanism; in fact that the practitioners do not even acknowledge the existence of Beelzebub or his equivalent.

This is all very fine, and it's a nice, heartwarming tale, but the Jeff's timing is just awful. The grand reopening of this place occurred last weekend, which meant that the story could-with a bit of extra effort-been run in the Tuesday number of the paper. Or it could have waited until next week. To headline this story on the day before Good Friday seems like a deliberate slap in the face of the Christians who comprise the majority of the county's population.

I cannot imagine that the paper would have run a feature about  radical Islam three days before the start of Yom Kippur, just as it wouldn't have run a feature about the Jewish Defense League on the eve of Ramadan. But apparently Christianity is fair game for any sort of abuse.

ITEM:  Wednesday nights, I am out at a community band rehearsal across town, and on the way home it has become my practice to tune in to about ten minutes of the Les Kinsolving show on WCBM. There are several reasons: (1) ten minutes is about all I can abide of this old gasbag; (2) he occasionally gives half an hour or more of air time to one Larnell Custis Butler, arguably the greatest crackpot caller in the entire history of talk radio; and (3) when Kinsolving is on a tear about homosexuality, it's interesting to count how many times he can work the term "sodomy lobby" into the conversation in a short period of time.

As it happened, last night I managed to just miss Ms. Butler's diatribe, but shortly after I tuned in Kinsolving was hyperventilating with another caller, a man from Delaware who was in a lather about his local school system having ordered the removal of Easter decorations, as of Thursday.

Now this might have been an outrage if the decorations in question made even the most indirect reference to the betrayal, trial, crucifixion and rebirth of Jesus of Nazareth. But this caller's complaint dealt with nothing more than decorations depicting bunnies and colorfully decorated eggs.

Initially my reaction was to think that the school administrators were a bunch of old soreheads who found yet another excuse to make the public school experience dull and enervating. But as a bit of research this morning revealed, the caller was merely repeating an unsubstantiated rumor. WGMD radio reports in some detail that the story appears untrue. Moreover, perusing the web site of the Indian River School District, where this non-event occurred, reveals that the school administration had been the defendant in a recent lawsuit related to prayer in the schools, and has crafted a policy relating to prayer, religious symbols, teaching of religious history, and other forms of religious expression that seems quite fair and well-crafted, albeit a bit ponderous. But that's what you get when lawyers get their hands on an issue.

So, as usual, Kinsolving's blast was a waste of oxygen that someone else could have been using.

Look for a dispatch early next week about this Easter Sunday, which will be an interesting and bittersweet occasion for some of my friends and family.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, died Feb. 5 at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said. He was thought to be 91 years old. Once dismissed as hippie mysticism, the Hindu practice of mind control known as transcendental meditation gradually gained medical respectability. He began teaching TM in 1955 and brought the technique to the United States in 1959. But the movement really took off after the Beatles attended one of his lectures in 1967. Maharishi retreated last month into silence at his home on the grounds of a former Franciscan monastery, saying he wanted to dedicate his remaining days to studying the ancient Indian texts that underpin his movement.

The BBC reports that he was cremated on an open pyre, in traditional Indian fashion, with thousands attending. How most of the US media missed this, I don't know, other than to think that most people thought of him as irrelevant, a relic of the Sixties. Some even asserted that he was a fraud. How you square those reactions with the respect afforded the Dalai Lama, not to mention the obvious phonies such as Ted Haggard, I will never understand. 

As a one-time practitioner of TM, I had wondered years ago whether the old guru still lived. His public appearances had been limited to video at least thirty years ago. At left is is photo that WCBS ran with the story; it must have been made when he was about sixty.

It's too bad the meditation "movement" never truly took off, because the guru had this theory that if you got enough meditators together in one location, good things would begin to occur. He had the audacity to believe that if you got a few thousand people meditating in the political capitals of the world, peace would break out. A revolutionary idea, for certain, and one that flies in the face of Judeao-Christian doctrines that say each person is responsible for his or her own salvation from the wrath of an angry, jealous, difficult-to-please deity who appears to go about the universe looking for any excuse to smite people who don't follow seemingly arbitrary orders to the letter. ("If you really loved me, you'd cut off that nasty foreskin." or "You can only put certain kinds of food on the same plate.") There was little actual theology in what Maharishi preached: his message seemed to be that if you'd only shut up and listen, the universe would tell you things that could empower you in useful and productive ways.

I have seen the effects of the presence of one truly dedicated meditator. In the 1980s I worked in a defense-electronics company, where one of the engineers was one Vinod Patel, who had introduced me and several others to TM. For a time, three or four of us would skip lunch and sit in someone's car in the company parking lot, meditating together. Enough time has passed that I cannot say I genuinely recall any synergistic effect from this. But Patel himself was remarkable. Meetings in this engineering department were frequently loud and contentious, owing to the presence of several gigantic egos, whose owners had conflicting opinions on how things ought to be done. As a "components engineer," Patel was sometimes, but not always, present at these meetings. And not much time had passed before people noticed that any time Mr. Patel was in a meeting, things went smoothly and tempers did not flare, regardless of the issue at hand, or the fact that Patel rarely spoke a word in the sessions. He found himself invited more frequently, and on thinner pretexts, because of this phenomenon.

In death, Maharishi joins a number of other visionaries whose ideas failed to become commonplace, not because of any lack of absolute merit, but because of the manner of their presentation. In my opinion, the "vedic flying" business was just a little too loopy for most people. Better it had been presented as "hopping" rather than flying. There's also the matter of how much money all Maharishi's enterprises took in. There, I believe he was treated unfairly. Countless TV evangelists, mega-church ministers and other Christian luminaries live in comparable, if not superior luxury. And the flap over Dr. Chopra's alleged conflict of interest seems out of proportion, when measured against the standards of evangelical Christian pundits. At the root of these problems, I suppose lies the unbridgeable gap between East and West.

All things considered, I am grateful that he lived and took the path he did.

Last week, I emailed Barry Barber, Captain of the Second Police Precinct, and asked what data the police department might have about disturbances at or service calls to group homes.

Captain Barber replied:

We don't arbitrarily track statistics at all group homes in the Precinct.  When we start to notice an increase in calls for service, especially criminal calls, at a particular group home location, we then begin to track all calls there.

At the same time we start to target the location with increased enforcement. At the same time we contact the home administrator in a effort to relocate some of the problem residents and/or to close the facility all together.

For all other homes, if given an address, we can pull up calls for service over a given period.  We will not do this unless specifically asked to do so.

As for the location on Dogwood Road, it is not a group home.  The proposal is for this to be a dormitory for an Islamic School.  There are no known problems connected to the school and there is no reason to believe that its presence would cause a problem within the community.

Aside from the specifics about the Darul Uloom operation, it is significant that the police department does not track calls to group homes. If, as so many aver, they are a source of trouble, the county ought to be compiling data that either backs up this assertion or disproves it. The don't ask/don't tell approach is unacceptable, especially since the county already uses an (expensive!) GIS mapping system to track crime by category. At the very least, this system could easily show crime rates at non-owner-occupied addresses, compared with owner-occupied ones. God knows, this might also provide a grasp on whether the problem is houses occupied by groups of "retards," Section 8 housing, multiple-unit properties, or some factor nobody has imagined.

Meanwhile, it's worth asking Councilman Ken Oliver when, if ever, he plans to make good on the promises he made shortly after being elected the first time. County Vibe* no longer appears to exist, and somehow it escaped being cached by Google, but it was for a time another of those local newsletters aimed solely at black residents. In February 2005, this web site published an interview with Oliver, who had been elected in 2002. I had the foresight to do a screen capture of the interview, written by one "C. Green." Here's the interesting part, where group homes are concerned. See my footnotes:

Another major concern in the district is the group home issue. We’ve heard that upwards of 70% of group homes in Maryland are located in NorthWest Baltimore County. What impact have they had on the community and what initiatives, if any, are in the works to address this issue?
Good question and I am glad you’ve asked it. Group homes have been in Baltimore County for over 20 years. They have been in this district for over 20 years, and the first councilmatic district for over 20 years. The first and fourth councilmatic district have over 80% of all group homes in the state of Maryland. So they didn’t happen and come in the year 2002 when I got elected. They were here prior to that. I didn’t hear one word about group homes prior to 2002. (1)

Yes, I do have an initiative. The councilman from the first councilmatic district(S.G. Samuel Moxley) and I are sponsoring legislation to have a study done of the group homes so that they can take that information and pass it to our senators and delegates because everything that happens to group homes does not happen on a county level. It is a federal issue and than it becomes a state issue. The problem is that you have three agencies who are issuing licenses and they are not talking to one another. (2) What Senator Kelley has done is sponsor legislation where one agency will issue licenses for all group homes and no more will go in certain areas. They will have to go elsewhere because of the over saturation.

The group home issue is a hot button. Therefore, it is common for some residents to blame group homes for any number of issues in their community. Are some of the concerns and their impact overblown?
I think people are picking it to death and it is overblown.(3) They are not going anywhere. We didn’t pass the federal laws we just have to abide by them. No elected official wants to deal with it and that’s why I took the initiative to talk to my colleague in the first councilmatic district and we are sponsoring legislation to do something about it at least on the state level.

I can't help wondering about several statements attributed to Oliver here. In fairness, the article is quite badly written, and the Councilman may have been misquoted or quoted out of context. Nevertheless:

(1) Councilman Oliver's curriculum vitae includes nearly twenty years with the county's planning commission. How can anyone say they "didn't hear one word about group homes prior to 2002," given that experience?

(2) Even if three different agencies are empowered to license group homes, why has the county never managed to provide an accurate count of them, much less district-by-district? It seems to me that this information is knowable, although admitting that you know it poses several problems: (a) it could blow a hole in the assertion that X percentage of the county's group homes are in such-and-such an area; (b) it makes even more questionable the Police Department's policy of not tracking service calls to these homes; (c) shouldn't the number of these residences in a given area be an important factor in planning ambulance and hospital facilities?

Or is the truth that nobody has the slightest idea how many physically handicapped and developmentally disabled people live in any given part of the county? I realize, this seems difficult to believe, in an era when the US Census Bureau collects an inordinate amount of personal information, and when the Transportation Security Authority has been revealed to be keeping track of what reading material people carry on to airplanes. Obviously, someone, at some level of government is lying about the existence of this data.

(3) Has Mr. Oliver changed his view, that the group home matter is overblown and being nitpicked? If so, how would he explain his decision to intervene in an otherwise ordinary request for a zoning variance?

* If you try to pull up the domain CountyVibe.com on your web browser, you will find yourself redirected to "YourPrintCafe.com," which is a parking spot for semi-inactive domains. The WhoIs database reveals the following about CountyVibe.com:

Registrant:
ATTN: COUNTYVIBE.COM
c/o Network Solutions
, Yukon Territory Box 447
Zimbabwe

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: COUNTYVIBE.COM
Created on: 13-Mar-02
Expires on: 13-Mar-08
Last Updated on:

Administrative Contact:
Green, Clinton gu4ec74v9nw@networksolutionsprivateregistration.com
YourPrintCafe.com ATTN: COUNTYVIBE.COM c/o Network Solutions P.O. Box 447 Herndon, VA 2017

It would not be a huge leap to assume that the administrative contact  for the domain is the same guy whose name appears on the byline of the Oliver interview. But what's his connection, if he simply works for some outfit in Virginia? And obviously the registrant information is bogus: Yukon Territory in Zimbabwe?

It's not unusual to find domain registrants hiding their identity behind bogus names and addresses, or registration tracking services like GoDaddy. As revealed in a blog entry in 2006 George Soros, one of the major bag-men of the Democratic Party does this.  By contrast, it is relatively easy to find at least some sensible registration info for domains owned by companies you might think are vulnerable to attack by the net, such as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, eBay, etcetera.

Conclusion:

1. Someone should demand that the police track, and make public, data about group homes, whether or not it fits the convenient story that they are such a pestilence.

2. If there is a third alternative for housing people unable to care for themselves besides so-called institutions and so-called group homes, someone should propose it. By appearances there would be a boat-load of money to be made.

3. Someone needs to ask Councilman Oliver about the inconsistencies I've noted here. Since he no longer answers my emails or phone calls, someone else will need to try.

-30-

Early this week, WBAL Radio reported that the town of Walkersville in Frederick County is working on a zoning change that would prohibit the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community from building a mosque and conference center on farm land there.

A Google search revealed another story, which relates how yet another Muslim community experienced the same sort of treatment when they tried to buy land in Frederick County near Buckeyestown. This earlier incident happened back in 2000, even before the September 11th attacks poisoned American attitudes toward Islam.

But as I have observed in previous blog entries, the "concerned citizens" of Woodlawn lack the courage to admit that prejudice is at the root of the opposition to Darul Uloom, which has been aided and abetted by the efforts of Emmett Burns and Kenneth Oliver--both elected officials sworn to uphold the state constitution--to thwart the legal process.

Personally, I do not feel charitable towards any flavor of organized religion.  All too often, religion is used as a cheesy method of coercing people, and all too frequently they are coerced out of their money. Within the past week, I have seen a friend's wife flee to North Carolina in a state of absolute angst over being maltreated by her fellow church parishoners. And in that same week, another friend--this one in the clergy--was arbitrarily dismissed by her congregation, leaving her potentially unable to support herself.

It seems to me that at the root of things, religion is about sex and death: rules about who gets to copulate with whom and under what circumstances, and cockamamie theories about what happens to us after our bodies die. Not to mention the dietary restrictions, which in all honesty remind me of the poutings of a three-year-old kid who does not want the spinach on his plate to touch the mashed potatoes. In the interest of brevity and decency, I will not reveal what I think about circumcision as a religious practice...

Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Mormon, Hindu, Pagan, whatever--I don't have much use for any of them. I cannot envision a Creator as childish and hostile as most religionists believe their deities to be.

But I do recognize people's freedom in the USA to be duped and deluded by the religion of their choice. And I recognize that religious tolerance was one of the important--if not THE most important--principles upon which the State of Maryland was incorporated, nearly 400 years ago.

Particularly where the fear of Islam is concerned, there is a danger. Too many people have said--or come dangerously close to saying--that they would have Islam made illegal, and wiped out from the USA. If that happens, everyone's freedom of religion (which is to say freedom of speech and assembly) will have been weakened.

Since then I have heard a few rumors floating around, but no new information has been published, and as far as I can tell, the zoning variance process for the school is on permanent "hold." However, I did stumble across an article I had missed in The Community Times.

As I digested this article, I became increasingly convinced that the objections posed by the so-called concerned neighbors are terribly thin, and that the only fathomable reason for all the fuss is an irrational fear of all things Muslim.

Read a few quotes from the article, along with my observations:

Thomas H. Bostwick, the deputy zoning commissioner, found Sept. 27 that even though the school property in the 6300 block of Dogwood Road had been duly posted, the surrounding community was not informed "in a timely manner."

This is a genuinely weird assertion, for which the newspaper article offered no support. I learned of the matter through a legal notice in The Jeffersonian, the county paper in which all zoning matters are announced. The scheduling for the hearing did not appear to provide any less time than the others posted alongside it. Aside from posting the property and placing a legal notice in the paper, neither the county nor the property owner has any obligation to "inform the surrounding community." If you are concerned about this kind of stuff, you get a subscription to the paper and read the notices regularly. If you don't then you have no right to complain about something you missed.

The zoning hearing had been set for Oct. 1 on a request to grant a special exception and variance for a dormitory for students attending the Darul Uloom school.

The commissioner received several letters of concern from neighbors and decided to allow more time before proceeding.

As of this writing, the case has not reappeared on the zoning commission's schedule. One might ask how much time Mr. Bostwick plans to allow.

In addition to the special exception, Kabiruddin also sought a zoning variance for a slimmer side-yard setback and for a narrower driveway.

The next-door property has been operated as a storage yard for heavy equipment for at least a decade, and continues to be zoned for commercial use. Its driveway is scarcely larger than that of the Darul Uloom property.

The school, ... is intended to offer religious education for students in grades six through high school, according to Kabiruddin. The school Web site says Darul Uloom will also offer secular home schooling for students using the Calvert curriculum and Keyton program.

This sounds as though it would be a welcome addition to the neighborhood, especially since the local high school ranks dead last in the county, and the middle school serving the area is near the bottom of the heap.

Kabiruddin said he finalized the purchase of the dormitory property in February.

It would be correct to say that Kabiruddin finalized the purchase of the entire property in February. The dormitory is proposed for the site of a large carriage house on that property.

The property is in the district of state Delegate Emmett C. Burns (D-10th), who attended a Sept. 27 community meeting where some neighbors of the property voiced concern that the dorm could generate too much traffic or even become a group home for troubled youths.

"People are not concerned that it's an Islamic school but they're concerned about traffic patterns and group homes and they don't know much about the intention," Burns said in a telephone interview after the community meeting. "The overwhelming concern is that there's too much congestion. A pub is across the street and just down the street is Woodlawn High School."

That particular high school built a football "stadium" several years ago, and most of the traffic congestion in the area stems from illegal parking of cars and buses during games. But the football field--which has a much greater impact on the neighborhood--was built without public discussion, and ballyhooed as a grand addition to the area.

Kerri Lastner, who lives a block from the property, said that speculation is flying because neighbors weren't sufficiently informed about the project.

"You wonder what kind of families these kids are coming from, what kind of background they are coming from," she said. "We haven't been given any information."

In a telephone interview, Kabiruddin sought to correct the group home misconception.

"This is a religious school. We only take students that are the opposite background of that. . These are not disturbed kids," Kabiruddin said. He added that the students would be models and be an asset to the community.

***
Neighbors of the school wrote Bostwick contending that neighborhood calm is threatened by non-residential development.

The closest non-residential uses added recently include two auto repair shops, both of which maintain junkyard conditions on their properties; two Pentecostal-flavored churches, at least one of which creates a traffic jam whenever it holds an event; the football field; and several home-based day care centers.

Where were the concerned citizens when this stuff arrived? 

(Three blocks away, the local volunteer fire department built a new station, and a hundred yards north of that, the old station was purchased and converted into an automobile repair shop. Compared to the other two shops, that place is a model of responsible ownership. Yet the owner of the place was put through an expensive ordeal by one of the same busybodies who appear to be behind the objection to Darul Uloom.)

 One neighbor used the example of rowdies who spilled from the nearby tavern one night, leaving a trail of broken glass to be swept up.

The tavern in question has been a neighborhood trouble spot since I moved nearby in 1975. To draw a connection between that joint and any other neighborhood activity requires a huge leap of logic.

If you go back to my original blog entry on this subject, you will find a somewhat different set of citizen concerns being voiced. There's the so-called "group home" objection. This has been the pet arguing point of a handful of neighborhood busybodies for as long as I can remember. They have yet to provide any concrete evidence of the problem that they claim exists.

More to come...

(CBS) OAK LAWN, Ill. A southwest suburban school district has taken action, responding to the concerns of a Muslim parent. [ed. note: that's "a," as in "one."]

But now, as [TV newsie] Suzanne Le Mignot reports, other parents are angry that traditional school holidays will be renamed or even eliminated.

"That does not represent all the Muslims, all of the Arabs at that school," said Qais Nofel, the father of a student in Ridgeland School District 122.

There was some heated discussion between parents outside Columbus Manor Elementary School in Oak Lawn on Friday. The thought of no more traditional holiday celebrations has many parents really upset.

For now, children in Ridgeland School District 122 will celebrate fall festival instead of Halloween and winter festival instead of Christmas.

Brenda Elvidge said, "It's not fair to our kids. This is America and that's an American tradition."

The decision affects the children at four elementary schools in Oak Lawn and one junior high school in Bridgeview.

The district has a 30 percent Arab-American population, many of whom practice Islam. The superintendent says the reason for the change in tradition comes after one parent wanted Ramadan decorations put up inside Columbus Manor Elementary. They were taken down.

Superintendent Tom Smyth said, "I go back to our policy which says that public schools are to remain neutral in this respect."*

Ridgeland School District 122 has called for an emergency meeting on the issue, to be held on Tuesday.

Meantime, Muslim children are being allowed to pray during what's being called their own time, that's lunch time, during Ramadan.

Parent June Quigley said, "They get to pray in our schools. That is religion in a public school."

Muslim parents have different views on the issue.

Sala Abour said, "To take away Halloween and Christmas from little kids, that is very wrong."

Nofel said, "We go and we celebrate the holidays and traditions here, but we do have the right to be Muslims as well."

Other parents say the controversy is overshadowing what really needs to be addressed at all five schools in the district.

Ronnie Carroll said, "The fact that they are cash strapped. Our classroom size is way above the average mean, 38 children in our first grade classroom. The concern should be our school, not the whole holiday issues."

Those issues along with the holiday controversy are going to be addressed at a school board meeting on Tuesday. Members will decide if holidays will be celebrated or not.

Meantime, the Illinois PTA district director says the state is now investigating this issue and there's a meeting with the superintendent next week.

A few observations, if I may.

ONE parent objected to the more traditional American holidays. Thirty percent of the school district population (which is not to say 30% of the school's students) are "Arab-American," and MANY (not "most," in fact the percentage is not quantified) practice Islam.

Public schools have always been "sold" as the place where children learn to get along with other children who are not just like them. Removing any holiday from the mix defeats that mission.

Superintendent Smyth's statement that the schools are to "remain neutral in this respect" represents a huge departure from the philosophy of having the public school system teach the important cultural stuff about the USA, even if some of it involves (God forbid!) religion. Peruse any pre-WWII public school textbook for a perspective on this.

Until recently, parents in the USA who favored separatism for their children in areas of religion and culture formed "private" or "parochial" schools to serve this need. In some cases, those schools were an alternative to the government-funded school; in others they were supplemental education. This way of doing things has always worked adequately, has harmed no one, and ought to be left in place.

Here in Woodlawn, a suburb of Baltimore, the high school has made many concessions to Muslim students, unbalancing the privileges granted to the student body at large. I won't leap to the assumption this is the entire cause, but I don't think it is altogether coincidental that Woodlawn High School (in spite of having a "magnet" school subdivision) has the lowest standard test scores among all the county's high schools.

Iran is pressing on with one of its toughest moral crackdowns in years, warning tens of thousands of women over slack dress, targeting "immoral" cafes and seizing illegal satellite receivers, local media reported on Monday.

The Iranian police launched the crackdown in April in a self-declared drive to "elevate security in society" that encompassed arrests of thugs, raids on underground parties and street checks of improperly dressed individuals.

Reza Zarei, commander of police in Tehran province, said that since the drive began police in his region have handed out 113,454 warnings to women found to have infringed Iran's strict Islamic dress rules. "Of these 1,600 cases have been given to the judiciary" for further investigation, he said. He added that 5,700 people -- including 1,400 men -- have been sent to "guidance classes" on how to behave in society.

Zarei said police have been targeting billiard halls and coffee shops -- the latter hugely popular in Tehran as a meeting place for men and women -- as certain establishments promoted immorality. "One of the main grounds for the creation of social and ethical crimes are billiard halls and coffee shops," he said.

The student news agency ISNA and the Kargozaran newspaper quoted Zarei as saying that police had shut down 3,000 coffee shops and billiard halls although the official IRNA news agency said the establishments had merely been given warnings. "I am pleased to have carried out this plan to elevate security in society," Zarei said.

Watching satellite television is illegal in the Islamic republic as it is deemed to spread decadence and has long been the target of periodic crackdowns by the police.

Zarei said police had closed down 68 warehouses selling satellite equipment, seized 27,000 receivers and arrested 535 people linked to the underground industry.

Some reformists in Iran have argued that the authorities would be better off combating poverty or traffic rather than moral laxity but conservatives have applauded the police for seeking to restore revolutionary Islamic values.

Gosh, this sounds drearily familiar. Is this what the USA would look like, if Focus on the Family and other "Christian Conservative" organizations had their way?

Associated Press

GALVESTON — A woman blames the devil and not her husband for severely burning their infant daughter after the 2-month-old was put in a microwave, a Houston television station reported.

Eva Marie Mauldin said Satan compelled her 19-year-old husband, Joshua Royce Mauldin, to microwave their daughter May 10 because the devil disapproved of Joshua's efforts to become a preacher.

"Satan saw my husband as a threat. Satan attacked him because he saw (Joshua) as a threat," Eva Mauldin told Houston television station KHOU-TV....

This reads like the headline of a supermarket tabloid, doesn't it?

I find it interesting, how so many self-defined "Christians" manage to blame Satan for their own misdeeds, while condemning others' misdeeds as Bad Character at work. Immediately, this story reminded me how quickly Ted Haggard's congregation "forgave" him after he admitted to homosexual acts, drug use, adultery, and having lied about all of it.

It's all just a little too convenient.

“Has it been marked by historians that the late William Jennings Bryan’s last secular act on this earth was to catch flies? A curious detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most sedulous flycatcher in American history, and by long odds the most successful. His quarry, or course, was not Musca domestica but Homo neandertalensis . For forty years he tracked it with snare and blunderbuss, up and down the backways of the Republic. Wherever the flambeaux of Chautaqua smoked and guttered, and the bilge of Idealism ran in the veins, and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the saved, and men gathered who were weary and heavy laden, and their wives who were unyieldingly multiparous and full of Peruna--there the indefatigable Jennings set up his traps and spread his bait. He knew every forlorn country town in the South and West, and he could crowd the most remote of them to suffocation by simply winding his horn. The city proletariat, transiently flustered by him in 1896, quickly penetrated his buncombe and would have no more of him; the gallery jeered at him at every Democratic National Convention for twenty-five years. But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy day, and men still fear the powers and principles of the air--out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance to the end. There was no need of beaters to drive his game. The news that he was coming was enough. For miles the flivver dust would choke the roads. And when he rose at the end of the day to discharge his Message there would be such a breathless attention, such a rapt and enchanted ecstasy, such a sweet rustle of amens as the world has not known since Johannan fell to Herod’s headsman.

There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, and that death found him there. The man felt at home in such scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main Street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust--so accoutred and on display he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. I believe that this liking was sincere--perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. His nose showed no uneasiness when a hillman in faded overalls and hickory shirt accosted him on the street, and besought him for light upon some mystery of Holy Writ. The simian gabble of a country town was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I suspect, annoyed him, and he was suspicious of their too delicate manners. He knew all the while that they were laughing at him--if not at his baroque theology, then at least at his alpaca pantaloons. But the yokels never laughed at him. To them he was not the huntsman but the prophet, and toward the end, as he gradually forsook mundane politics for purely ghostly concerns, they began to elevate him in their hierarchy. When he died he was the peer of Abraham.... His place in the Tennessee hagiocracy is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.

But what label will he bear in more urbane regions? One, I fear, of a far less flattering kind. Bryan lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write school-books. There was a scattering of sweet words in his funeral notices, but it was not more than a response to conventional sentimentality. The best verdict the most romantic editorial writer could dredge up, save in the eloquent South, was t the general effect that his imbecilities were excused by his earnestness--that under his clowning, as under that of the juggler of Notre Dame, there was the zeal of a steadfast soul. But this was apology, not praise... The truth is that even Bryan’s sincerity will probably yield to what is called, in other fields, definitive criticism. Was he sincere when he opposed imperialism in the Philippines, or when he fed it with deserving Democrats in Santo Domingo? Was he sincere when he tried to shove the Prohibitionists under the table, or when he seized their banner and began to lead them with loud whoops? Was he sincere when he bellowed against war, or when he dreamed himself into a tin-soldier in uniform, with a grave reserved among the generals?... Was he sincere when he pleaded for tolerance in New York, or when he bawled for the fagot and the stake in Tennessee?

This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without any shame or dignity. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition--the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine. His last battle will be grossly misunderstood if it is thought of as a mere exercise in fanaticism--that is, if Bryan the Fundamentalist Pope is mistaken for one of the bucolic Fundamentalists. There was much more in it than that, as everyone knows who saw him on the field. What moved him, at bottom, was simply hatred of city men who had laughed at him so long, and brought him at last to so tatterdemalion an estate. He lusted for revenge upon them. He yearned to lead the anthropoid rabble against them, to set Homo neandertalensis upon them, to punish them for the execution they had done upon him by attacking the very vitals of their civilization. He went far beyond the bounds of any merely religious frenzy, however inordinate. When he began denouncing the notion that man is a mammal even some of the hinds at Dayton were agape. And when, brought upon Darrow’s cruel hook, he writhed and tossed in a very fury of malignancy, bawling against the baldest elements of sense and decency like a man frantic--when he came to the tragic climax there were snickers among the hinds as well as hosannas.

Upon that hook, in truth, Byran committed suicide, as a legend as well as in the body. He staggered from the rustic court ready to die, and he staggered from it ready to be forgotten, save as a character in a third-rate farce, witless and in execrable taste. The chances are that history will put the peak of democracy in his time; it has been on the downward curve among us since the campaign of 1896. He will be remembered, perhaps, as its supreme impostor, the reduction ad adsurdum of its pretension. Bryan came very near being President of the United States. In 1896, it is possible, he was actually elected. He lived long enough to make patriots thank the inscrutable gods for Harding, even for Coolidge. Dulness has got into the White House, and the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing to compare to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in Tennessee. The President of the United States doesn’t believe that the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and that Jonah swallowed the whale. The Golden Text is not painted weekly on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors waiting while Pastor Simpson, of Smithville, prays for rain in the Blue Room. We have escaped something--by a narrow margin, but still safely.

That is, so far. The Fundamentalists continue at the wake, and sense gets a sort of reprieve. The legislature of Georgia, so the news comes, has shelved the anti-evolution bill, and turns its back upon the legislature of Tennessee. Elsewhere minorities prepare for battle--here an there with some assurance of success. But it is too early, it seems to me, to the firemen home; the fire is still burning on many a far-flung hill, and it may begin to roar again at any moment. The evil that men do lives after them. Bryan, in his malice, started something that will not be easy to stop. In ten thousand country town his old heelers, the evangelical pastors, are propagating his gospel, and everywhere the yokels are ready for it. When he disappeared from the big cities, the big cities made the capital error of assuming that he was done for. If they heard of him at all, it was only as a crimp for real-estate speculators--the heroic foe of the unearned increment hauling it in with both hands. He seemed preposterous, and hence harmless. But all the while he was busy among his old lieges, preparing for a jacquerie that should floor all his enemies at one blow. He did the job competently. He had vast skill at such enterprises. Heave an egg out of a Pullman window, and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost anywhere in the United States today. They swarm in the country towns, inflamed by their pastors, and with a saint, now, to venerate. They are thick in the mean streets behind the gasworks. They are everywhere that learning is to heavy a burden for mortal works. They are everywhere that learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds, even the vague, pathetic learning on tap in little red schoolhouses. They march with the Klan, with the Christian Endeavor Society, with the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, with the Epworth League, with all the rococo bands that poor and unhappy folk organize to bring some light of purpose into their lives. They have had a thrill, and they are ready for more.

Such is Bryan’s legacy to his country. He couldn’t be President, but he could at least help magnificently in the solemn business of shutting off the presidency from every intelligent and self-respecting man. The storm, perhaps, won’t last long, as times goes in history. It may help, indeed, to break up the democratic delusion, now already showing weakness, and so hasten its own end. But while it lasts it will blow off some roofs and flood some sanctuaries.

American Mercury, October 1925, pp. 158-160.

But I have to draw the line at the latest from Focus on the Family, an announcement about putative Presidential candidate Fred Dalton Thompson. If this is not bigotry, I am at pains for a better word to describe it.

Dobson Offers Insight on 2008 Republican Hopefuls

Focus on Family Founder Snubs Thompson, Praises Gingrich

By Dan Gilgoff

Posted 3/28/07

Focus on the Family founder James Dobson appeared to throw cold water on a possible presidential bid by former Sen. Fred Thompson while praising former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is also weighing a presidential run, in a phone interview Tuesday.

"Everyone knows he's conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for," Dobson said of Thompson. "[But] I don't think he's a Christian; at least that's my impression," Dobson added, saying that such an impression would make it difficult for Thompson to connect with the Republican Party's conservative Christian base and win the GOP nomination.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Thompson, took issue with Dobson's characterization of the former Tennessee senator. "Thompson is indeed a Christian," he said. "He was baptized into the Church of Christ."

In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson's claim. He said that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith."

"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added. "Dr. Dobson wasn't expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to 'read the tea leaves' about such a possibility."

Thompson has said he is leaving the door open for a presidential run and has won plaudits from conservatives who are unenthusiastic about the Republican front-runners. A Gallup-USA Today poll, released Tuesday, showed Thompson in third place among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, behind former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Sen. John McCain.

While making it clear he was not endorsing any Republican presidential candidate, Dobson, who is considered the most politically powerful evangelical figure in the country, also said that Gingrich was the "brightest guy out there" and "the most articulate politician on the scene today."

Gingrich recently appeared on Dobson's daily Focus on the Family radio program, carried by upward of 2,000 American radio stations, where he made headlines by discussing an extramarital affair he was having even as he pursued impeachment against President Bill Clinton for his handling of the investigation into the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Dobson's phone call to U.S. News senior editor Dan Gilgoff Tuesday was unsolicited. It marked Gilgoff's first discussion with Dobson in over two years, since the magazine's political writer began work on The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Culture War, published this month by St. Martin's Press. Dobson had agreed to answer only written questions for the book.

Dobson's comments yesterday about the 2008 presidential race appear to be his first to a secular news organization in months.

Dobson recently sat down with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at Focus on the Family's Colorado Springs headquarters, marking his only meeting to date with a top-tier Republican presidential candidate. While Dobson would not comment directly on the Romney meeting, he stood by comments he made late last year that many evangelicals would find it difficult to support Romney because of his Mormonism.

It's interesting that the evangelicals might throw their support to Gingrich, who while not as bad as Bill Clinton has a problem keeping his pants zipped. Of course, the evangelical movement has a rich history of sex scandals, not least of which have involved Ted Haggard and Jimmy Swaggart. It would be tempting to make a snarky remark about the number of offspring born to Evangelical families, but I'll hold my tongue...

The real message here is that Dobson and his henchmen don't consider a person a Christian unless he's an "evangelical Christian." I have had some direct experience with these folks, when I was running an old-book shop in Baltimore. Though I have never figured it out, apparently there is some kind of secret sign or password that these folks use to recognize each other. I've lost track of the number of times an Evangelical started hammering on me about what he perceived to be my apostasy, with no evidence one way or another.

Here in Baltimore, the evangelicals put out a little yellow-pages book of their own, called the "Shepherd's Guide." While anyone can advertise in it, if you take a pledge that you agree with their creed, the publishers will put a little silhouette-type logo on your ad. So perhaps all these bookshop customers were just consulting their little book before they hit my shop, and not seeing me as an advertiser, assuming the worst.

For what it's worth, the evangelicals were also the only people who would come into the book shop and demand that a particular title be removed, because it upset their Christian sensibilities. Of course, if I'd removed the books that pandered to their particular flavor of belief, they'd have sworn there was a "war against Christians," or some such exaggeration.

Without exception, the central feature of each has been a cross: some makeshift, others quite elaborate.

The obvious question is this: don't Jews, Muslims and Mormons die in highway crashes?

I have yet to see a crescent moon, mogen david, or likeness of Moroni on the shoulder or in the median strip. But if I ever do, you can be certain I will chronicle it here.

The Vatican newspaper denounced an Italian journalist who posed as a penitent and confessed fake sins in order to write an expose on the sacrament of reconciliation.

"Fake confessions in search of a shameful scoop," the newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, headlined a commentary condemning the cover story of L'Espresso magazine, one of the country's leading weeklies.

"Shame! There is no other word to express our distress toward an operation that was disgusting, worthless, disrespectful and particularly offensive," the newspaper said.

The commentary said the article had exploited the good faith of confessors and offended the religious sentiments of millions of people.

"It was a sacrilege, because it violated the sacred space in which a self-recognized sinner asks intimately to receive God's merciful love," it said.

The reporter made his false confessions to 24 different priests in five Italian cities, including Rome. The magazine said the idea was to see how priests handle difficult pastoral situations and whether they followed the strict norms laid out by church teaching.

The reporter, for example, told two priests he was HIV-positive and wondered whether he should use a condom when having sexual relations with his girlfriend. One told him no, and the other said it was a question of conscience, the magazine reported.

More than once, the magazine said, priests gave quite different advice on his supposed "sins," which included matters relating to homosexuality, divorce, stem-cell research, euthanasia and prostitution.

One issue that found unanimous condemnation by confessors was abortion, the magazine said.

 There's no better tactic to deflect attention away from yourself than to adopt the role of the injured party, as the Catholic News Service has done in defense of the church.

When you think it over, it's interesting how Rome, with all its heirarchy and doctrinal details, conducts nothing akin to quality-assurance testing among its priests.  I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some were still selling indulgences, which is one of the practices that led to the Protestant Reformation, 490 years ago.

Moreover, the practice of priest-shopping when it comes to the confessional is well-known and of long standing among U.S. catholics. Growing up Protestant in a highly Catholic neighborhood, I would constantly hear my peers advise one another to avoid Father So-and-So, because he gave out more severe penances than some other choice.

Like the issue of priestly buggery that blew up several years ago, this is an open secret among Catholics, and it is almost laughable that only now--when forced to do so--will the Powers That Be even acknowledge this misfeasance, much less attempt to remedy it.

Why Is Colorado’s Governor Calling PETA “A Bunch Of Losers”?
And Why Don’t Snowbound Cattle Deserve “Animal Rights”?

Last Wednesday, on Denver radio station KRFX, Colorado Governor Bill Owens leveled words like “losers” and “frauds” at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), an organization that’s no stranger to controversy. Owens told listeners: “What a bunch of losers. Don’t give your money to PETA.”

Why did the elected leader of the 8th-largest U.S. state unleash his feelings about the animal rights group? As many as 340,000 cows and steers were stranded by southeastern Colorado's latest snowstorm. National Guard units have been mounting a frantic bid to save the freezing animals. Faced with 15-foot snowdrifts, rescuers airlifted bales of hay and hoped for the best.

And when local media asked PETA for help … well … let’s just say the wealthy activist group wasn’t enthusiastic about “saving” future T-bones and rib roasts. On the air, a PETA spokeswoman sniffed: “I don't know that it's really the most noble cause.”

PETA, famous for lobbing rhetorical grenades at hunters, had no sympathy for Colorado’s wildlife either. Asked if her group would intervene to save deer, elk, and other wild animals, the PETA spokeswoman snapped that “there’s really nothing to be done.”

Does PETA care more about hurting ranchers and crippling the beef industry than about “saving” flesh and blood animals? Did Governor Owens finally say out loud what most Coloradans are thinking?

The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) keeps tabs on the lunacy of today’s animal rights movement. On the CCF website, you can listen to interviews with PETA’s spokeswoman, and hear Governor Owens in his own words.

And at PetaKillsAnimals.com, you can also learn about two PETA employees who will face felony Animal Cruelty charges later this month (yes—you read that right) in North Carolina. They allegedly killed dozens of healthy, adoptable animals in the back of a PETA-owned van, and tossed the bodies into a rural trash dumpster. According to government records, PETA killed more than 14,000 dogs, cats, puppies, and kittens between 1998 and 2005.

I have opined elsewhere that executions ought to be both public and brutal, as a matter of "deterrence."  There is no point in repeating that argument here. Aside from this fact, and the cathartic effect of seeing Saddam hanged, there is a very pragmatic reason that the execution should have been public, and the body paraded about the town square (as it were): we don't know that the Iraqis actually hanged Saddam!

Now, I don't want to sound like one of those tinfoil hat-wearing whackos who are perpetually claiming to have found new evidence proving that the US government actually destroyed the WTC towers, Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was staged in a studio, and that Michael Jackson is actually of the male gender.

But the operative fact in Saddam's execution is that he was turned over to the Iraqi authorities (whoever they might happen to be this week), and that the hanging was carried out at a secret location. So, does the world have any proof positive it was done, and that Saddam won't pop up alive and well somewhere down the road, like a comic-book villain? At the very least, we should have insisted that David Kay and Hans Blix witness the hanging, and retrieved a DNA sample, to ascertain they actually killed Saddam Hussein, and not some "ringer."

Meanwhile, the Vatican continues its silly and insincere protest of Saddam's execution. The AP reports thus: (emphasis added)

(AP) -- The Vatican spokesman on Saturday denounced Saddam Hussein's execution as "tragic" and expressed worry it might fuel revenge and new violence.

The execution is "tragic and reason for sadness," the Rev. Federico Lombardi said, speaking in French on Vatican Radio's French-language news program.

In separate comments to the station's English program, Lombardi said that capital punishment cannot be justified "even when the person put to death is one guilty of grave crimes," and he reiterated the Catholic Church's overall opposition to the death penalty.

Executing Saddam "is not a way to reconstruct justice" in Iraqi society, the spokesman said. "It might fuel the spirit of revenge and sow seeds of new violence."

Lombardi expressed the hope that leaders "do everything possible" so that "from this dramatic situation ways might open to reconciliation and peace."

In an interview published in an Italian daily earlier in the week, the Vatican's top prelate for justice issues, Cardinal Renato Martino, said executing Saddam would mean punishing "a crime with another crime."

Odd, how selective the Cardinals' memories. To my recollection, the Vatican has never officially repudiated the Spanish Inquisition, the excess of the Borgia popes, or their murder of William Tyndale. For a church whose doctrine claims to hinge so much upon confession and repentance, this is especially curious.

Quoting from this site:

Church Is Denied Waiver of Noise Restriction
St. John Neumann's Bells Disturbed Some Residents

By Bill Turque
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 1, 2006; B02

 Fairfax County officials have issued a ringing non-endorsement of the bells at St. John Neumann's in Reston, ruling that they must toll within the limits of the county's noise ordinance or not at all.

The Board of Supervisors asked the zoning staff this year to see whether the law could be amended to accommodate the church, whose bells ring at a volume slightly higher than the 55-decibel maximum permitted in residential areas.

But James P. Zook, director of Fairfax's Department of Planning and Zoning, recently told the board in a memo that creating an exception for church bells could be constitutionally problematic, leaving the county open to court challenge.

"Localities cannot enact different standards for noise emanating from a place of worship," Zook said. If Fairfax did that, he said, the new rules would have to apply to "all other types of bells, chimes or carillons." Zook noted, however, that at least two other cities, Morgantown, W.Va., and Seattle, did make exceptions for church bells.

St. John's, a Catholic church in south Reston, installed a $50,000 electronic bell system in 2004 as part of a major expansion. When the bells began ringing, in three-minute bursts -- three times on weekdays, once on Saturdays and before each of five Sunday Masses, starting at 7:30 a.m. -- neighbors complained.

The county discovered that the bells registered at an average of 75 decibels (roughly equivalent to a vacuum cleaner at close range), which is considerably above the 55-decibel limit in residential areas.

The church reduced the power flowing to the three bells, which brought the reading down to 60 decibels, softer (about the sound of an air conditioner at 50 feet) but still above the limit.

The dispute has kept the bells silent for 23 months.

"It's frustrating, because the sound is so much a part of our tradition," said the Rev. Thomas Murphy, the church's pastor. "Anybody who has grown up in a city atmosphere is familiar with the ringing of bells."

But the church, named for a 19th-century Philadelphia priest who founded the first national parish for Italian Americans, is in the suburbs, where noise of virtually any kind can become a quality-of-life problem.

Sean Walsh, who has lived on nearby Pegasus Lane for 20 years, said the county's ruling was good news for most of his neighbors.

"No one here is anti-church or anything," Walsh said. "People just want some peace and quiet."

Church members have said the complaints about the bells have come from only a few disgruntled neighbors.

The church says that it is not possible to further reduce the power flowing to the bells. And even if the power could be reduced, the ringing would be so inaudible that the bells would hardly be worth operating, Murphy said.

"We've done as much as we can, according to the manufacturer," he said.

If St. John Neumann were elsewhere, it would be able to ring away. Prince William and Arlington counties allow a daytime maximum of 60 decibels. Montgomery County permits 65 decibels during the day.

Supervisor Catherine M. Hudgins (D-Hunter Mill) will host a community meeting at the church Dec. 11 to discuss the situation. The board could decide to overrule zoning officials and establish an exception for the church. But Hudgins sounded doubtful.

"What's melodious to some people is just not that way to others," she said.

With all due respect, Father Murphy is full of crap. When I first took note of this article I was sympathetic to the church. Tradition, and all that, as the good padre said.

However, this morning I had the opportunity actually to hear one of those electronic bell substitutes, emanating from the St. Agnes church in Catonsville, MD. The sound was nauseating: not pleasing at all, and unrecognizable as ersatz bells, except that the change being rung was the Westminster Chime.  Calling this noisemaker a "bell" system is like having your cell phone ringer play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and claiming it is the Philadelphia Orchestra. I have heard programable air horns on cars that sound more musical, although they are generally playing "La Cucaracha."

So, for the Reverend Murphy to refer to "tradition" is just plain baloney. And while you may be able to consecrate bread and wine...

My personal feeling is that if a church has genuine bells, ring away. Otherwise, nope. It's noise pollution, no matter who's making it.

For what it's worth, I feel the same about the "electronic bugles" that are now widely used to play Taps in honor of a veteran who is being buried. It's an insult, not an honor, to hear such cacophony.

By Audrey Hudson THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published November 28, 2006

Muslim religious leaders removed from a Minneapolis flight last week exhibited behavior associated with a security probe by terrorists and were not merely engaged in prayers, according to witnesses, police reports and aviation security officials. Witnesses said three of the imams were praying loudly in the concourse and repeatedly shouted "Allah" when passengers were called for boarding US Airways Flight 300 to Phoenix. "I was suspicious by the way they were praying very loud," the gate agent told the Minneapolis Police Department. Passengers and flight attendants told law-enforcement officials the imams switched from their assigned seats to a pattern associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks and also found in probes of U.S. security since the attacks -- two in the front row first-class, two in the middle of the plane on the exit aisle and two in the rear of the cabin. "That would alarm me," said a federal air marshal who asked to remain anonymous. "They now control all of the entry and exit routes to the plane." A pilot from another airline said: "That behavior has been identified as a terrorist probe in the airline industry."

But the imams who were escorted off the flight in handcuffs say they were merely praying before the 6:30 p.m. flight on Nov. 20, and yesterday led a protest by prayer with other religious leaders at the airline's ticket counter at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, called removing the imams an act of Islamophobia and compared it to racism against blacks. "It's a shame that as an African-American and a Muslim I have the double whammy of having to worry about driving while black and flying while Muslim," Mr. Bray said. The protesters also called on Congress to pass legislation to outlaw passenger profiling. 

This is all the more reason to "profile" passengers, and Muslims in general. The daily prayer ritual is one thing; conducting it in such a flagrant way seems inconsistent with what so-called mainstream Muslims say about themselves and their faith.

Certainly, this bunch has a lot to answer for, what with the seat-switching behavior.

I think what we've just experienced is a slightly different flavor of terrorism, but terrorism nevertheless. These guys, apparently with no weapons whatsoever, managed to disrupt quite a number of innocent Americans' travel plans and create justifiable fear.

This sort of behavior constitutes harrassment of the other passengers, at the very least. It is the same sort of thing that urban dwellers experience when a flock of thugs loiter outside someone's house, cursing and making noise at all hours of the day. They are technically doing very little that's actionable, but managing to spread quite a bit of fear and misery in the process.

Mr. Bray should realize that the same kind of actions would have resulted in trouble if they'd been undertaken by any other group of people easily identifiable as "brothers" by their dress: homies in baggy shorts, tattooed bikers, Hassidic Jews, or fat white guys dressed to attend a football game.

I would not call it "profiling" to stop a bunch of people from scaring the shit out of a bunch of other people.

A teenager carrying a Bible and shouting "I want Jesus" was shot twice with a police stun gun and later died at a St. Louis hospital, authorities said. In a statement obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, police in Jerseyville, about 40 miles north of St. Louis, said 17-year-old Roger Holyfield would not acknowledge officers who approached him and he continued yelling, "I want Jesus."

Police tried to calm the teen, but Holyfield became combative, according to the statement. Officers fired the stun gun at him after he ignored their warnings, then fired again when he continued struggling, police said. Holyfield was flown to St. Louis' Cardinal Glennon Hospital after the confrontation Saturday; he died there Sunday, police said. An autopsy was planned for Tuesday. The statement expressed sympathy to Holyfield's family but said city and police officials would not discuss the matter further.

Let's re-state this in plain language. Teenager has a religious epiphany, and is wandering on the street, enraptured. Some sorehead calls the cops. Cops show up, start yelling at the kid. Kid, still enraptured, is apparently unaware of them. With hurt feelings about being so rudely ignored, cops decide to zap the kid with a stun gun. Twice. Kid dies from electric shock injuries.

What's wrong with this picture? Fact of the matter is, the average police does not have a clue how to handle someone who is irrational, angry, depressed, or in some kind of walking trance. They fall back upon the old standby, muscling the citizen into submission.

I have had personal experience here. My wife once made the mistake of telling a cop I was having "an episode of depression." Actually, I was depressed, but coping pretty well until the cop showed up, on the pretext of giving me a traffic ticket. I had just finished a six-hour stint of moving boxes of books, and dealing with a very demanding customer. Being yelled at by a cop, in my own front yard, was the last straw. I refused to talk to the guy. The result: I am handcuffed, manhandled, jailed for a few hours, have to pay bail in spite of strong financial and personal ties to the community. While I am in custody, precinct captain condescendingly asks "do you feel like hurting yourself?" (Of course, the rational answer would have been, "No, dumbass. But I'd love to have a crack at YOU.")

Now, the interesting thing here is that if I had walked away from the cop, saying that I had the flu and was about to soil my pants, I would have gotten a green light. While I was on the crapper, he would have lost interest and gone about his business.

Incidentally, three independent psych evaluations were done. I was pronounced perfectly sane, although "resentful." Imagine that?

I consider myself lucky, to have only been mugged by the legal system, not killed outright. Because it is apparently legal for police in the USA to kill taxpayers whom they consider mentally disturbed.