Pastor Wiley Drake, former second vice president to the Southern Baptist Convention and former running mate with professional loon Alan Keyes said that he was praying for Obama to die. He didn’t even say it with a wink and a nudge. Alan Colmes asked, “So, you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States of America.” and Drake said, “Yes.”

Given that so many right-wingers seem willing to put hate speech into action these days, I assume the FBI and secret service will be all over this, right?

I also assume, of course, that all the Republicans all over my teevee and news will immediately condemn this type of language, right? Right? Because not only is this sort of language disgusting and horrifying in the best of times. When we are seeing almost monthly right-wing terrorist attacks, it is incredibly irresponsible to allow this sort of talk to take place.

My Transcript Below:

Colmes: When you say you were praying for the death of someone using imprecatory prayer, you then said, I asked for whom else are you praying in that fashion and you said President Obama. Are you praying for his death?

Drake: Yes.

Colmes: So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States?

Drake: Yes. Are you concerned that by saying that you might find yourself on some secret service call or FBI most wanted list. Do you think it’s appropriate to say something like that or even pray for something like that?

Drake: I think it’s appropriate to pray the Word of God. I’m not saying anything, what I’m doing is repeating what God is saying, if that puts me on somebodies list then I’ll just have to be on their list.

Colmes: Uh…You would like for the president of the United States to die?

Drake: If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around I am asking God to enforce in imprecatory prayers that are throughout the scripture that would cause him death, that’s correct.

Colmes: If your view of scripture and Christianity the only right one?

Drake: No!

Colmes: It’s not?

Drake: No. There’s… you know, everybody forms their own opinions, everyone has their own opinion about, for example, imprecatory prayer. Uh, I have seen people over the last few years that orginially, initally, did not even know what imprecatory prayer was! And once they found out they realized that they had been missing a part of what God was telling them to do.

This is getting worse and worse. Sara at Orcinus has a run down of all the attacks we’ve seen since Obama has been elected. Who knows who Drake will now push over the edge.

(h/t John Amato at Crooks and Liars, and Pam Spaulding at Pandagon.)

(h/t Pam Spaulding and John Amato)

TPM is on the case with information about the suspect, James W. von Brunn, a right-wing, white supremecist.  David Neiwert at Crooks and Liars, is, unsurprisingly, all over this as well, and I’m sure will have a lot of information and insight in the coming hours and days.

This would be disturbing no matter the circumstances.  But it follows close on the heels of Dr. Tiller’s murder and not too long after the shooting at the Unitarian church in Knoxville, and one can’t help but wonder what kind of world we’re entering into.  And I don’t understand how anyone can deny that the eliminationist and violent rhetoric from the right, and the two-minutes-of-hate at each Sarah Palin rally don’t stoke the fires of extremism, and legitimize the disturbed violent goals of these crazies.

For now I suppose we should just be grateful that no one was killed (so far), and that this wasn’t much, much worse, and hope it isn’t a signifier of what’s to come.

UPDATE I: The security guard has now died.

UPDATE II: Talking Points Memo has lots of information about the shooter.  Among other things, he’s written articles questioning Obama’s citizenship and birth certificate, written extensively on all the problems with Jews, and once tried a “citizen’s arrest” on the Federal Reserve.

A tent city is burgeoning in Sacramento, Calif., prompting local officials to consider whether such an encampment should be made permanent, with plumbing and all.

The primitive settlement sits in the shadow of the state capitol and is home to about 300 people who have no toilets or running water, creating unsanitary conditions that advocacy groups worry could promote diseases like cholera. With the downturn in the economy and more working-class people losing their jobs and their homes, the tent city is expanding.

In the US we might like to call this a “tent city,” or a modern-day “shantytown.”  But let’s face facts.  A large group of makeshift homes with no services is called a “slum,” people.   To Sacramento’s great credit, they are looking at how they can make this a more permanent settlement, with sanitation and some regulations to make the slum safer for children.  To our societies shame, the mayor Kevin Johnson, admits that doing so would be very difficult politically.

And here is where I really part ways with Randians and the hypocrites who cheer on Rick Santelli and take government bailouts.  Let’s pretend that I can understand being so selfish and bitter and hatefilled that you can’t stand any of your money going to someone in need.  Even if you really don’t care about anyone else’s well being, shouldn’t it be a point of pride in your country that we don’t have slums?

The article I linked to discusses the possibility of cholera breaking out in the tent city.  Cholera. Whatever else I may think of America, and I do criticize our country quite a bit, I do appreciate that for the most part, things are pretty good here.  And while we still have intense poverty, we have, for the most part, eliminated the diseases that are associated with poverty elsewhere-like cholera, typhoid, even tuberculosis rates are very low.  For those who think that America is number one, I’d think it would be a great shock to our national pride to have slums and cholera outbreaks.

(h/t Atrios)

An investigation of the U.S. Interior Department found serious flaws related to 15 decisions on policies for species at risk of becoming extinct, said the report delivered to Congress by Inspector General Earl E. Devaney.

One of those decisions involved reducing the number of waterways considered critical habitat for the endangered bull trout, The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) reported Tuesday.

The report describes “something akin to a secret society residing within the Interior Department that was colluding to undermine the protection of endangered wildlife and covering for one another’s misdeeds,” said Rep. Nick J. Rahall II, D-W.V., who leads the House Natural Resources Committee.

Hm. Collusion within the Bush administration to undermine the integrity of a department’s stated mission. Shocking.

Boy, good thing that never happened anywhere else like, say, the Justice Department. Then we’d really have a mess.

Sarcasm aside, this is emblematic of what’s been happening all over the executive branch for the past eight years: replacement of people who know what they’re doing with vacuous ideologues whose only purpose is to push the ideology. It’s going to take years upon years to clean up this mess.

Have we figured out yet why it’s a bad idea to give governmental power to people who don’t like government?

Yeah, no worries. It’s not like there’s a crisis or anything. (h/t TPM)

It’s quite unsettling to talk to members of Barack Obama’s transition teams these days, especially those who are helping with the economics portfolio. Without going into details, the sense I get from them is that they are very worried that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better. Not just worse… a lot worse. As in — double digit unemployment without the wiggle factors. Huge declines in aggregate demand. Significant, persistent deficits. That’s one reason why the Obama administration seems to be open to listening to every economist with an idea and is stocking the staff with the leading lights of the field. In one sense, the general level of concern among Obama advisers and transition staffers is reassuring; they get the magnitude of the problems, and they’re not going to assume that, just because the bottom has never dropped out before — certainly not in the lifetimes of most people doing policy these days, the bottom will never drop out.

Where the discussion isn’t going, at least in public,  (or the PR level ), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already). The U.S. won’t have the resources to, say, engineer the rescue of the peso again, or intervene in Asia as in 1997.

…

The question: what’s the administration’s policy in this area? Which countries can we afford to let fail? Which unstable states would concern us the most? Is there something the U.S. can do, in advance, should do, in advance, to forestall the collapse of other economies?

One of the problems, of course, is that whatever the US can or should do, we should probably be doing it right now, but instead we’ll have to wait two months to have real action. The Republicans can’t seem to find themselves willing to bailout three of the largest corporations in the United States right now, despite the fact that their failure would lead to thousands upon thousands of people in an economically marginalized area to be without jobs, and even more people to suddenly see their pensions disappear.* Our president has all but disappeared, and certainly isn’t doing much presidenting,† so I doubt we’ll be seeing anything done on a global scale. Being in the middle of the worst economic crisis most of us have ever seen, facing a global depression, a couple wars, and a growing environmental catastrophe, all while being without any actual government is enough to make the most Polly Ann-ish lose hope.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Barney Frank: “[Obama's] going to have to be more assertive than he’s been. At a time of great crisis with mortgage foreclosures and autos, he says we only have one president at a time. I’m afraid that overstates the number of presidents we have. He’s got to remedy that situation.”

*No matter what your position on unions, surely we can all agree that depriving a good number of people of their expected income when we’re in a recession and consumer spending keeps falling is a Bad Idea.

†Although let’s face it, Bush being MIA is probably for the best.

]]> http://www.mouemagazine.com/blog/2008/12/all-we-ask-of-obama-is-that-he-save-the-world/feed/ 0 http://www.mouemagazine.com/blog/2008/10/an-entire-campaign-based-on-hate/ http://www.mouemagazine.com/blog/2008/10/an-entire-campaign-based-on-hate/#comments Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:47:03 +0000 acallidryas http://www.mouemagazine.com/blog/?p=1126 The past few weeks we have heard of any number or horrendous things being yelled out at Palin/McCain rallies, and seen any number of racist demonstrations from the crowd.  So far, however, Sarah Palin, John McCain, and “official” Republican outlets have tried to stay away from the precipice.  No more.

Sacramento County Republican leaders Tuesday took down offensive material on their official party Web site that sought to link Sen. Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden and encouraged people to “Waterboard Barack Obama” – material that offended even state GOP leaders.

And, of course, the appeal to false equivalency: “Hector Barajas, a California Republican Party spokesman,

Sacramento Republicans Website

said Democrats have been playing the race card, but that the local party went too far in this instance.”  I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.  The “race card”?  This wasn’t about drawing attention to racial distinctions.  This is about a Republican Party website calling for the torture of a presidential candidate.

I’m just curious.  At any point, do you think anyone involved in this wonder to themselves how we got to this point?  Because there was a time not so long ago when calling for an opposing politician to be tortured and/or killed was beyond the pale.  Now it’s just part of the political landscape.

H/T Jesse.

I did, however, want to draw attention to this bit of information in the article, which makes me ever so much less interested in any sort of a bailout package that is used in any way to pay corporate salaries:

Many WaMu employees came to work Friday wondering about their jobs. JPMorgan executives said that it was too early to know how many employoees might be laid off, but industry analysts said the number could be as high as 5,000. Analysts expect the bank to close about 540 branch sites, many that overlap with JPMorgan offices.

…

But the seizure and the deal with JPMorgan came as a shock to Washington Mutual’s board, which was kept completely in the dark: the company’s new chief executive, Alan H. Fishman, was in midair, flying from New York to Seattle at the time the deal was finally brokered, according to people briefed on the situation. Mr. Fishman, who has been on the job for less than three weeks, is eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep his $7.5 million signing bonus, according to an analysis by James F. Reda and Associates. WaMu was not immediately available for comment.

So, for his three weeks of heading up a failing company, without even partcipating in the deal that sold off the company, he will get $19.1 million.  Well.  Hopefully the other 4,999 people who are losing their jobs over this will at least get some office supplies to take home.