Day: March 27, 2006

Raw Story says so:

According to one source close to the case, Rove is providing information on deleted emails, erased hard drives and other types of obstruction by staff and other officials in the Vice President’s office. Pentagon sources close to Rove confirmed this account.

Rove’s lawyer says, “There is no basis whatsoever to the matters you allege that Mr. Rove has related.”

Post re-natal depression: As the Bush administration continues its inexorable push toward an Ametrican theocracy, it appears that more and more of us — especially we “of an age” — are turning into born again Bible thumpers. At least that’s the finding of Ventura, Calif.-based Barna Group.

A recent survey by Barna found that 75 percent of senior pastors at U.S. Protestant churches consider their church to be “evangelical.” Barna says this is explained by the findings of his most recent national survey. In that study, 1,003 adults from the 48 continental states were randomly interviewed. The number of adults who could be classified as “born again Christians” based upon their beliefs (not on their use of that phrase to describe themselves) was 45 percent.

Barna defines “born again Christians” as “people who said they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today and who also indicated they believe that when they die they will go to Heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.”

I’m sorry, but I find it very difficult to believe that nearly half of Americans can be described as born agains. But Barna’s historical numbers do support his trend:

In 1983 the number 31 percent; from 1992 through 2005, the percentage hovered in the 36 percent to 43 percent range. Barna attributes the increase to — you guessed it — a 16-point rise in rebirths in Jesus among us Baby Boomers since 1990. Barna says 53 percent of Boomers meet his born again criteria, surpassing the percentage of born again adults in the two preceding generations.

Here are some more Barna findings:

Other demographic comparisons indicate that women are 16 percent more likely than men to be born again. African-Americans are the ethnic group most likely to be born again (59 percent), while Hispanics were barely half as likely (32 percent). Residents of the South remain the most committed to Christ (57 percent were born again), while those in the West (33 percent) and Northeast (37 percent) were least committed.

The rest of the U.S. populace can be broken down into the following categories:
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Saw this at 10,000 Monkeys and a Camera. (Click the graphic above to see a larger version.)

Sen. Napoli, in case you’re just tuning in, is one of the authors of South Dakota’s ban on abortion. In particular, he was a strong advocate of the ban having no exclusions for rape and incest, saying that “simple rape” — whatever that is — was not a sufficient cause for terminating a pregnancy.

We are on the receiving end of an economic diaspora out of Mexico. The only way to stop Mexican citizens from swarming across our borders is to attack the root cause of the calamity. Since the source of the disaster is the Mexican political system, which fails to provide jobs or social services for its citizens, the only way to solve the problem is by using the Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War.

That’s right. The only way we can stop work-starved Mexicans from coming to the United States is to invade Mexico, take over the government and fix the Mexican economic and political system so that it takes responsibility for its citizens who have no resources or prospects.

Mexican society today looks much like American society will look in 20 years if the Republicans stay in power: The country is run by a tiny, corrupt, uber-wealthy class of elites who allow the appearance of democracy to play out to appease the meager, mostly urban middle class. Meanwhile, millions of Mexican citizens live in the kind of poverty I remember around the Cherokee Indian Reservation in the Appalachians in the 1960s.

To be clear, I’m not advocating preemptive war with Mexico; I’m saying it is the only way we can stop the immigration. I oppose the Bush Doctrine, which as applied to the invasion of Iraq has led to what has to be the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.

But all the other solutions on the table range from draconian to pie in the sky:

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