Posted by Mary Mancini on December 22, 2005 under Uncategorized | 
Get your mind out of the gutter and into Grimey’s New and Pre-loved Music, with our guest, Doyle Davis, funk-music aficionado, “West Wing” fan, and owner/operator of the best independent record shop in Nashville. Doyle schools us on what it’s like to run a small business in the age of big-box retailers (”Wal*Mart, those Bastards”) as well as the importance of shopping locally (Putting your money where your house is), and taking care of your employees the best you can instead of encouraging them to rely on government programs (*cough* wal*mart). God bless us, every one!
Listen: http://www.liberadio.com/audio/liberadio2005_12_22.mp3
Subscribe to Liberadio(!) Podcast.
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Posted by Mary Mancini on under Uncategorized |
And when we say Happy Holidays, we mean it, boy-o. The sentiment is meant to include any holiday you and your loved ones celebrate between November 24th and January 1st, so be happy and jolly and merry and enjoy the festive air that surrounds all of us.
Your present: A free download of Lambchop’s one and only Christmas song, Christmas Time is Here. ***WARNING*** The band drops the “F” bomb (aka the F-word) in the middle of the song so be careful where you play it. You don’t want Santa to leave coal in your stocking, do ya?
Here’s to more peace, love and joy in 2006.
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Posted by Mary Mancini on December 21, 2005 under Uncategorized |
“Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist under criminal investigation, has been discussing with prosecutors a deal that would grant him a reduced sentence in exchange for testimony against former political and business associates, people with detailed knowledge of the case say.” Read more…
Posted by Mary Mancini on under Uncategorized |
Johnny Damon in pinstripes????? This has got to be the worst month ever.
Posted by Mary Mancini on December 20, 2005 under Uncategorized |
“By ordering the National Security Agency — the N.S.A, so secretive that in Washington its initials are said to stand for “No Such Agency” — to wiretap and eavesdrop on thousands of American citizens without a court order, Bush committed actions specifically forbidden by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Passed in 1978 after the Senate’s Church Committee documented in detail the Nixon administration’s widespread use of U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on the anti-Vietnam war movement and other political dissidents, FISA “expressly made it a crime for government officials ‘acting under color of law’ to engage in electronic eavesdropping ‘other than pursuant to statute.’”, as the director of the Center for National Security Studies, Kate Martin, told the Washington Post this past weekend.”
Read more…
Posted by Mary Mancini on under Uncategorized |
Bill Moyers, that is.
(Tip o’ the hat: Freddie!)
Posted by Mary Mancini on December 17, 2005 under Uncategorized |
John Spencer, Who Played a Dedicated Politico on ‘The West Wing,’ Dies of Heart Attack at 58.
Thank you, Mr. Spencer, for your years of portraying a character that allowed us to escape into a fantasy world where politics is a higher calling and politicians are cerebral, far-sighted, reasonable, devoted, and know that serving the needs of the American people is their most important job.
Rest in Peace.
Posted by Mary Mancini on December 16, 2005 under Uncategorized |
You know. It’s a bunch of horse hockey to say that this kind of thing has to be done in the name of “national security.” How un-American. Unless you’re idea of an ideal American is Joe McCarthy.
And here’s another load: “I will make this point,” Bush said. ”That whatever I do to protect the American people — and I have an obligation to do so — that we will uphold the law, and decisions made are made understanding we have an obligation to protect the civil liberties of the American people.”
Hey! It’s ol’ George “Say one thing but do another” Bush. Bleech.
“…some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.” Uh, ya think??? Senators Spector and McCain, apparently, do think.
Posted by Mary Mancini on under Uncategorized |
Stephen Colbert reminded us on The Colbert Report last night that the word “Holiday” is based on the Old English words holy and day (halig dæg). “Happy Holy Days? Crap. Now what’s a secular humanist supposed to do?!?!?!
I kid! When most people wish you Happy Holidays it pretty much means, you know, have a great holiday season no matter what you celebrate. So, what’s the big deal? I mean, if I never met you before, can I really know what you celebrate just by looking at you and then based on what I think you celebrate wish you the appropriate sentiment?
“Happy Holidays,” with its modern-day meaning of “have a happy >>insert the special day you celebrate here< < is more than appropriate.
Saturnalia
Festivus
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Here’s an op/ed opinion piece that the Tennessean decided not to run. Charles over at the Nashville chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State thought it needed wider circulation and so do I.
80 Years after the Monkey Trial: Why It Still Matters
Eighty years ago, in Dayton, TN, the “Monkey Trial” of John Scopes came to an end. Scopes, a high-school teacher, was fined $100 and the Tennessee law that prohibited teaching Darwinian thought was upheld, repealed only in 1967. Sometimes called the trial of the century, it pitted William Jennings Bryan, a great leader in progressive politics, against Clarence Darrow, the ACLU, and friends of progressive science. Nashville’s leading institutions, including Vanderbilt, Fisk, the Tennessean and the Banner all played roles in the national drama.
Why does the Scopes trial still matter? Politically, controversies over so-called “Intelligent Design” beliefs with newly organized efforts to control high-school textbooks in many states are rekindled across the United States. Having created a controversy, advocates of “Intelligent Design” now urge schools to teach the controversy (as President Bush put it) as if it were a scientific issue. The vast majority of scientists see this as slight of hand and refuse to take part. They point out that no science offers perfect explanations and that Darwinian thought has triumphed in numerous areas of biology and natural science.
Is the controversy, therefore, a matter of fools holding back the progress of science? No, for the core issue of the Scopes trial is religious. The “anti-evolutionists” do not debate the rise of plants and animals. Rather, the battle is over the theological struggle of how to understand being human.
The notion of human being is tied inextricably to the notion of God (or the gods). In every instance of religious reflection, we find the same question: what is human being? How did we, with our almost infinite capacities for thought, change, and domination come to be? Imbued with powers far beyond any other animal, humans are too faulty to be considered gods themselves. Yet, the idea of God (or the gods) appears in all distinctive human cultures: it names the other pole of human it designates a being who realizes perfectly our imperfectly realized nature.
Welded together and inseparable, the idea of god and the idea of human being provoke questions answered by narratives. These tell us who we are, what we should do, and what we may hope for at the end of our lives and at the end of human history. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the Genesis narratives about the origins of humans provide a way to judge all competing accounts. When Darwinists challenged the na‹ve world views imbedded in Genesis, numerous persons found themselves terrified that the ethical core of civilization was under attack. These were not foolish concerns. By 1935, 35 states had enacted laws using “eugenic” theory. Persons deemed mentally ill, retarded, habitual criminals and epileptics were castrated. In Summer for the Gods, an account of the Scopes trial, Edward Larson cites George Hunter, a leading biology textbook author, who wrote: “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.” But, we lack that option: “Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibility of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race” (Harvard, 1997, p. 27). Nazi authorities, who cited American eugenic legislation, took the murder option when they assumed power in Germany in 1933.
William Jennings Bryan, the progressive politician savaged in the play and movie “Inherit the Wind,” argued against eugenics and linked that theory to Darwinism. Ignorant of how science works, Bryan aligned himself with the repression of scientific theory. Yet, his complaint that the Genesis account was under attack is valid. By linking human being to God, Genesis establishes humans as unique among all the animals. When Adam names the animals, he assumes dominion and superiority: one might say this is arrogance, yet it preserves a categorical difference between humans and all others. This, in turn, preserves human beings as sacred in themselves. They take on a dignity and stature which transcends all ordinary reasoning about means and ends. The burden of depriving a person of this inherent dignity rests on the state; it must show why this person should die, or that person should not reproduce. Debates over the status of African Americans in the 1960s, the morality of abortion, the death penalty, the role of religion in the founding of the United States, and our place in the world all turn on the question of human being. We see this in the American-Iraq war begun three years ago. To what degree does the American Bill of Rights correspond to something that is true for all humans and thus for Iraqis? Is there a common human nature, grounded on freedom of the will and a universal ethic announced in the Koran as well as the Bible that will emerge in Iraq? A war, with all its terrible consequences, hangs in the balance.
Volney Gay
Vanderbilt University
DRAFT Op Ed piece for The Tennessean.
10/2/2005 2:13 PM
Volney Gay is Chair of Religious Studies, and Director of the Center
for the Study of Religion and Culture at Vanderbilt University.
