Day: May 30, 2005

Tom Cruise is jumping on the anti-psychiatry Scientology bandwagon. Despite Florida Gov. Jeb Bush vetoing a bill last week after the cult sent heavyweight (and I told myself I wouldn’t make Kirstie Alley jokes) lobbyists to champion the cause, they aren’t giving up. And Cruise is mouthing his lines well.

Palm Beach Post:

Ignoring the pleas of Scientologist celebrities, Gov. Jeb Bush on Thursday vetoed a measure that would have prohibited school administrators and teachers from keeping children who chronically misbehave out of school unless they take medication.

It will be awhile before Florida legislators get the image of a sobbing Kirstie, who testified in April, out of their minds. St. Petersburg Times:

Kirstie Alley was weeping so hard she could barely get the words out…

As she spoke, Alley held up pictures of adolescents who committed suicide after taking psychotropic drugs.

“None of these children were psychotic before they took these drugs. None of these children were suicidal before they took these drugs,” Alley said.

But the Scientology celebrity firepower, which included actor Kelly Preston, wife of actor John Travolta, wasn’t enough to convince the council.

Before they even heard from Alley and Preston, council members stripped the most controversial language out of the bill (HB 209).

The original bill said that before a school could refer a child for mental health treatment, it would have to tell parents there are no medical tests to diagnose mental illness. It also would have required schools to tell parents a mental disorder diagnosis will go on a student’s permanent record…

The council approved a watered-down version that simply prohibits schools from denying services to children who refuse psychotropic drugs. A similar federal law passed last year.

Why are Scientologists appearing before the Florida legislature? Scientology took over the west-central Florida town of Clearwater, starting in the 1970s. Today it’s their Salt Lake City, according to their web site.

Clearwater is the spiritual headquarters of the Scientology religion… [It] is the hub of the Scientology worldwide community, a dynamic, multilingual organization and is the largest single church of Scientology in the world.

Historically, when a small group of Church of Scientology staff first came to Clearwater in December 1975, acquiring the Fort Harrison and Clearwater Bank building, no Scientologist lived in the area.

Today, with more than a dozen buildings, the Church of Scientology’s 1,200 staff and more than 2,000 out-of-town visitors in any given week are only a small part of the Scientology community in the City, which is estimated to be in excess of 12,000.

Now, why would longtime residents feel they’d been taken over? The Travoltas live in nearby Ocala, by the way, which is why every John Travolta movie lately is filmed in or around Jacksonville.

Anyway, Cruise is mad as hell and he’s pledged to kick some psychiatric butt. After all, psychiatry isn’t a true science like, you know, Scientology. Tom, as quoted on Internet Movie Database:

“I’m going right after psychiatry and these false labels and this pseudo-science. I was diagnosed as dyslexic; I had a lot of energy as a child. They wanted to put me on drugs… Had I been put on those drugs, I never would be here today… I never would have had the career that I’m having. Am I making people aware of it by discussing it openly and saying what a fraud psychiatry is? You bet I am…”

Geez Tom, take a chill pill, why don’t cha?

The Los Angeles Times reports that conservative black pastors are not only enjoying total access to the State Department, but might get their own office soon.

Black pastors meet Rice, claim Africa ‘mandate’

Escalating its courtship of a politically powerful constituency, the Bush administration is teaming up with some of the nation’s best-known and most influential black clergy to craft a new role for U.S. churches in Africa…

The Rev. O’Neal Dozier, pastor of the Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach and a Republican [for more on Wingnut Dozier, read on], said Rice’s decision to huddle with the pastors gave them a “mandate” to craft Africa policy…

If it goes forward, the collaboration could substantially expand black-church participation in the faith-based initiative, from a largely domestic focus to an overseas portfolio that pastors think could make hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars available for black-church work combating AIDS and related social ills internationally. Rice and the pastors discussed establishing an office of faith-based initiatives within the State Department that would direct federal funds for overseas aid to church and community groups.

Blacks have traditionally been not only counted on to vote Democratic, but according to many, taken for granted by the Democratic party. Those days best come to a screeching halt.

The Democratic party isn’t just losing blacks to extreme religious causes. Many black business owners, just as white ones, see more value in aligning themselves with the GOP.

The Lakeland (Florida) Ledger:

The Frederick Douglass Republican Club of Central Florida will hold its chartering ceremony June 7.

The guest speaker will be Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele.

In 2003, Steele became the first black in Maryland to be elected to a statewide office…

[Insurance agent Phillip] Walker changed his registration from Democrat to Republican three years ago. He said the party — with its low tax, low regulation message — better aligns with his political beliefs and religious convictions…

Anthony Broadnax, an engineer technician with Lakeland Electric, said he hopes the club will groom potential candidates for public office. He’s hoping the club will bring awareness to the black community.

“We need to educate our people regarding the party,” he said.

I hope the Florida, and national, Democratic parties will take note. The civil rights era is over, and blacks need new reasons to be Democrats.

I’m not sure Howard Dean, who wanted to be the candidate for guys with rebel flags on their trucks, fully appreciates the nuance of race in this country. And I don’t think New England/Massachusettes whiter-than-white guys like John Kerry or Michael Dukakis will ever carry the day.

Attention, Democrats: our ship could well be sailing.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

In exchange for our uniformed young people’s willingness to offer the gift of their lives, civilian Americans owe them something important: It is our duty to ensure that they never are called to make that sacrifice unless it is truly necessary for the security of the country. In the case of Iraq, the American public has failed them; we did not prevent the Bush administration from spending their blood in an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes. Perhaps it happened because Americans, understandably, don’t expect untruths from those in power. But that works better as an explanation than as an excuse.

The “smoking gun,” as some call it, surfaced on May 1 in the London Times. It is a highly classified document containing the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting at 10 Downing Street in which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair on talks he’d just held in Washington. His mission was to determine the Bush administration’s intentions toward Iraq.

At a time when the White House was saying it had “no plans” for an invasion, the British document says Dearlove reported that there had been “a perceptible shift in attitude” in Washington. “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The (National Security Council) had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

It turns out that former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill were right. Both have been pilloried for writing that by summer 2002 Bush had already decided to invade…

As this bloody month of car bombs and American deaths — the most since January — comes to a close, as we gather in groups small and large to honor our war dead, let us all sing of their bravery and sacrifice. But let us also ask their forgiveness for sending them to a war that should never have happened. In the 1960s it was Vietnam. Today it is Iraq. Let us resolve to never, ever make this mistake again. Our young people are simply too precious.