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Notes from the War Room
A historian of Christian martyrdom attends a Christian Right strategy session in the "War on Christians.”

...Speakers repeatedly juxtaposed “Christianity under assault worldwide” and the American political and cultural situation. For example, Lt. Gordon James Klingenschmitt, a Navy chaplain who has been disciplined for praying in Jesus’ name (in violation of Navy protocols) at public Navy-sponsored events, was a panelist in the first session of the conference, “Christian Persecution: Reports from the Front Lines.” Klingenschmitt made a striking and explicit argument from analogy by opening and closing his PowerPoint presentation with two paired photographs: a photograph of himself and one of Abdul Rahman, the Christian convert who had recently been on trial in Afghanistan for having abandoned Islam. In Klingenschmitt’s analysis, he and Rahman are the same in every way that matters: both persecuted Christians, both equal victims of the suppression of religious freedom, both casualties in the war on Christianity.


Other speakers were more modest in their efforts to connect the situation of American conservative Christians to the circumstances of Christians in other parts of the world, reminding the audience that Christians in China, North Korea, or “the deepest, darkest recesses of the Middle East” are, indeed, worse off. But such admissions also became the ground for dire prophecies: “Things aren’t so bad here…yet,” Tristan Emmanuel, a Canadian activist and author of Christophobia: The Real Reason Behind Hate Crime Legislation, commented from his post as the moderator of the Christian persecution panel. Yet, when Tom DeLay, the former majority leader of the House of Representatives who is currently under indictment for violations of campaign-finance laws, arrived on the second day of the conference to a standing ovation, Scarborough asserted that DeLay’s criminal indictment was simply the result of his being “the target of all who despise the cause of Christ” -- in short, DeLay is clearly another persecuted Christian. (Scarborough punctuated DeLay’s speech with the comment, “God always does his best work just after a crucifixion,” implying that DeLay’s prosecution is just such an act of imperial violence and judicial activism.)...

...Beginning with the premise that there is a war on Christianity, conference organizers and participants were eager to issue calls to arms in response. “We are under spiritual invasion!” intoned Rod Parsley, an evangelist from Ohio. “Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! LOCK AND LOAD!” (The audience responded to these imperatives with a raucous and exuberant standing ovation.) Parsley also claimed that those Christian churches not sharing the perspective of the Christians represented at the conference constitute “the devil’s demilitarized zone,” naïvely and fatally embracing “peace at any price.” Meanwhile, Laurence Wright, a Lutheran pastor and co-president of Vision America, announced that the time of a peaceful and contemplative Christianity is over; that Christians have been AWOL (“absent without Lord”) in the battle; and that “We must attack the evil now where it is strongest” in order to restore America, the city high on a hill....

...Perhaps the most explicit call to arms came from Ron Luce, the president and founder of Teen Mania, a Christian revivalist youth ministry, and the author of Battle Cry for a Generation, a multimedia campaign that deploys military images and language to recruit soldiers in Christ’s army. Toward the end of his speech, Luce invoked the biblical story of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19. (In the story, the Levite’s concubine is gang-raped by men who wanted to do sexual violence to the Levite. When the Levite’s host refuses to deliver the Levite to the assailants, he offers them his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine instead. When the assailants reject such an exchange, the Levite simply expels the concubine from his house, leaving her to be raped repeatedly throughout the night. The following morning, upon finding the concubine’s dead body on his host’s doorstep, the Levite dismembers her and sends her body parts out to the twelve tribes of Israel as a provocation to revenge.) “I kind of feel like the Levite,” Ron Luce confessed. And then he uttered a battle cry of his own: “CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE!” ...

...Critics of the conference and the individuals and groups that promote its point of view have suggested that “The War on Christians and the Values Voter in 2006” is simply a right-wing political project cynically framed as a project to protect a persecuted religious group. Such an analysis fails to recognize the sincerity of the 400 people who were gathered in that ballroom in Washington -- not that sincerity ought to serve as a bulwark against challenge and critique, to be sure. The menacing part of this project is not that it is political rather than religious, but that it is unapologetically a form of political religion. Which is what makes the calls for Christian militarization, for putting on the armor of God, for rising up in righteous revolution against “the culture” -- however metaphorical at this point in time -- particularly alarming. Students of Christian history will be well attuned to this kind of rhetoric and its materialization and embodiment in the actions of the righteous. Early Christian historian Michael Gaddis, for example, offers a brilliant and textured analysis of these dynamics in late ancient Christianity in his recent book, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ”: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire. As Gaddis illustrates, righteous Christian violence in the fourth and fifth centuries -- violence against non-Christians and “heretics” -- was justified in the first instance by reference to the persecution of Christians. With God on their side, everything is permitted. ...

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Growth in federal spending unchecked
WASHINGTON — Federal spending is outstripping economic growth at a rate unseen in more than half a century, provoking some conservatives to complain that government under Republican control has gotten too big.

The federal government is currently spending 20.8 cents of every $1 the economy generates, up from 18.5 cents in 2001, White House budget documents show. That's the most rapid growth during one administration since Franklin Roosevelt. ...

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Kyoto and a climate of moralism
The debate about global warming has become a moral crusade against our allegedly 'excessive' lifestyles.

'Climate change means that business as usual is dead. It means that economic growth as usual is dead. But the politics of economic growth and business as usual live on.... Our economic model is not so different in the cold light of day to that of the Third Reich - which knew it could only expand by grabbing what it needed from its neighbours. Genocide followed. (1)'

Comparing Britain's failure to miss its carbon emission targets with the Nazi attempt to conquer Europe seems melodramatic, bordering on distasteful. But this crankish quote isn't from some member of the lunatic green fringe; it was uttered by backbench Labour MP Colin Challen, who is also chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group....

...None the less, we should be grateful for Britain's failure on this one. Environment secretary Margaret Beckett, presenting the report's findings, blamed economic growth for missing the target. If even government ministers are now guiltily confessing that the UK's anaemic growth rates are too high, we should all be concerned. It is the increased productivity of our society which holds open the potential for solving many of the problems we will face in the future, including environmental ones. Restricting growth will do little to affect the climate but a lot to reduce our capacity to respond to change, whatever form it takes.

The truth about climate change is that the world is likely to get a bit warmer in the future but whether things will get a lot warmer is really not known - and there are plenty of legitimate criticisms that can be made of the way the science has been distorted to present a particular political message....

...Still, such a discussion of human adaptability is at odds with the spirit of the age. The environment debate has become increasingly moralistic: restraint is good, production and consumption are bad. At a time when the decision to live a 'green' lifestyle is recast as 'ethical living', the ability to debate alternatives is closed down. As long as the debate about climate change is cast in such terms, we can expect more attacks on the notion of economic growth - and we will all be, literally, poorer for it.

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Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says
LONDON — In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and President Bush arriving for a White House news conference on Jan. 31, 2003, after a meeting about Iraq that would be summarized in a memorandum by an adviser to Mr. Blair.

But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."...

... Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein....

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Study challenges prayers for the sick
...Each night of the trial, the team faxed a list of the patients to be prayed for to three Christian groups, whose members prayed for successful surgery and a quick recovery. Each of these patients was on the prayer list for two weeks. The doctors then monitored all the patients for medical complications in the 30 days following surgery.

The investigators found that praying made no difference to the health of patients who didn't know whether they were being prayed for or not. But the group who knew that they were being prayed for was approximately 14% more at risk of complications, mainly abnormal heart rhythms. Perhaps, the investigators suggest, this was because it made them more anxious.

The study, which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation, an organization that sponsors research examining science and religion, is published in the American Heart Journal....

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ALL THE WORLD OVER IT'S SO EASY TO SEE
In the words of The Rascals and George W. Bush, people everywhere just want to be free. The point seems almost trivial: We want to be able to do what we want, and we don't want people stopping us.

But many events give me pause as I stand to mutter my Bushy cliches about the universal love of liberty. Here's one: Tens of thousands of people gather to mourn the death of their beloved dictator. One might think it difficult to regard the regime of Slobodan Milosevic -- featuring war, ethnic cleansing, rape camps and other hijinks -- with affectionate nostalgia. And yet, after his richly deserved croak, people were sobbing on the streets of Belgrade.

In St. Petersburg, a group of Russian communists renamed a scenic boulevard "Slobodan Milosevic Street." This made sense, as the Russian people responded to the chaotic Yeltsin administration with an explicit nostalgia for forced collectivization, one-party elections, hilarious show trials and the gulag. And now that they've got a good, strong leader in Vlad Putin, their desires are well on the way to realization.

Lest one think an enthusiasm for personal subordination is limited to the Slavs, let me assert that it is a universal feature of our admirable species. Indeed, since the development of the political state, human history is incomprehensible on any hypothesis other than that people hate and fear their freedom. On the hypothesis that everyone aspires to freedom, it is difficult to explain why we are continuously subordinated....

... We want the government to guarantee our health, deflect hurricanes, educate our children and license us to drive; we want to be told what to eat, what to smoke and whom to marry. We are justly proud of the fact that no enduring society has ever incarcerated more of its people. Noting that the policeman has a pistol, a club, a stun gun, a can of pepper spray and a database that includes us, we feel happy and secure.

Our submission is absolute: We want to be operated like puppets and provided for like pets.

The terrorists hate our freedom. But we should be comfortable with that. We hate our freedom, too.

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The Fear of Freedom
...Advocates for liberty are increasingly facing a new challenge. Used to be that our main fight was against the ever expanding size and scope of government. But it's fast becoming the case that half the battle is convincing people that freedom is actually a good thing in the first place. People would rather have a massive government that makes all of their decisions for them, ostensibly because they'd rather have someone other than themselves to blame when they make the wrong decisions. Hence, the uncomfortable number of smokers who support smoking bans because they think it'll help them kick the habit.

Another outgrowth of fears of freedom are those trendy attacks on choice itself, where choice was once seen as an almost universal positive.

The phrase for this is parentalism (as opposed to paternalism), or the idea that grown adults are distubingly beginning to see the government as a parent, someone to watch over them, and guide their hand toward good decisions....

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The Battle for the Mainline Churches
...These days, the battle lines are drawn over such issues as same sex marriage and ordination of gay and lesbian priests and ministers. But as important as these matters are, the stakes are far larger. They go to the extent to which the mainline churches will continue to play a central role in American public life, or the extent to which they will be marginalized, perhaps forever.

People outside of the churches may wonder, why they should care? Methodist minister Andrew Weaver, who has researched the Institute and its satellite groups, explains that the member churches of the National Council of Churches account for about 25% of the population and half of the members of the US Congress. “NCC church members’ influence is disproportionate to their numbers,” he says, “and include remarkably high numbers of leaders in politics, business, and culture.... Moreover, these churches are some of the largest landowners in the U.S., with hundreds of billions of dollars collectively in assets, including real estate and pension funds. A hostile takeover of these churches would represent a massive shift in American culture, power and wealth for a relatively small investment.”...

...In retrospect, it seems inevitable that powerful external interests would organize and finance the conservative rump factions into strategic formations intended to divide and conquer—and diminish the capacity of churches to carry forward their idea of a just society in the United States—and the world.

When the strategic funders of the Right, such as Richard Mellon Scaife, got together to create the institutional infrastructure of the Right in the 1970s and 80s, they underwrote the founding of the IRD in 1980 as a Washington, DC-based agency that would help network, organize, and inform internal opposition groups, while sustaining outside pressure and public relations campaigns.

IRD was started as a project of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), an organization of conservative Democrats (many of whom later defected to the GOP), who had sought to counter the takeover of the party by liberals associated with 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern. IRD was originally run by Coalition chief, Penn Kemble—a political activist who did not attend church.3 According to a profile by the International Relations Center, IRD received about $3.9 million between 1985 and 2002 from The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, Castle Rock Foundation, The Carthage Foundation, and JM Foundation.4

The Institute remains a well-funded and influential hub for a national network of conservative factions called the Association for Church Renewal. The member organizations, called “renewal” groups, variously seek to neutralize church tendencies of which they don’t approve; drive out staff they don’t like; and seek to take over the churches, but failing that—taking as many churches and assets out as possible. The network’s spokespersons are treated as credible voices of conservative dissent by mainstream media.

IRD’s program is currently focused on the NCC’s three largest denominations, together comprising 14 million members: the United Methodist Church, The Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA). They also find the time to target the NCC, and the World Council of Churches. For example, interim IRD president Alan Wisdom personally attended the recent World Council of Churches (WCC) meeting in Brazil, issued critical dispatches for the IRD web site, and sound bites for the press.

One Association for Church Renewal (ARC) member group, The Presbyterian Layman, a nationally circulated publication edited by Parker Williamson, has been notable for being particularly caustic and divisive. At a press conference sponsored by ARC in connection with the 50th anniversary meeting of the WCC in Zimbabwe in 1998, Parker declared, for example, “Rhodesian blacks were in no position to run this sophisticated and highly efficient infrastructure… Theirs had been a tribal life, governed by a worldview that could not easily comprehend ideological assumptions on which the Rhodesian economy was based.”5 Most recently, Williamson joined Alan Wisdom, (a Presbyterian renewal leader), at the WCC meeting in Brazil, from which he posted critical reports in The Presbyterian Layman Online....

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Sinners in the hands of an angry GOP
At a messianic "War on Christians" conference, Tom DeLay warned that "the future of man hangs in the balance" as other righteous souls demanded that gay sex be explicitly described to restore "shame."

Introducing Rep. Tom DeLay at the War on Christians and the Values Voter in 2006 conference in Washington Tuesday, master of ceremonies Rick Scarborough described him as "the man God has appointed in this last day." The conference began on Monday and was saturated with millennial anxiety. A succession of preachers, talk-radio hosts, religious right operatives and, significantly, major Republican politicians took to the stage at the posh Omni Shoreham hotel to rally the troops for an epic battle between the forces of national renewal and those of vice and enervating perversion. So it wasn't surprising to hear Scarborough, a Baptist preacher who has made it his mission to organize "patriot pastors" for political action, talk about DeLay's legal troubles as part of a culminating war between heaven and hell.

"I believe the most damaging thing Tom DeLay has done in his life is take his faith seriously in the public office, which made him a target of all those who despise the goals of Christ," said Scarborough, a former college football player and longtime DeLay ally. Taking the stage before the 200 or so adoring activists in the banquet hall, DeLay ran with the end-times theme. "We have been chosen to live as Christians at a time when our culture is being poisoned and our world is being threatened, at a time when sides are being chosen and the future of man hangs in the balance," he said. "The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will."...

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DeLay says he sees war on Christianity in U.S.
WASHINGTON - American society looks down on Christianity, U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay asserted Tuesday at a conference of religious conservatives, but God and Jesus Christ have chosen Christians to stand up for faith.

DeLay, who is facing tough times of his own, offered a half-hour speech that was part history lesson and part sermon to a crowd of about 300 gathered at a Washington hotel for a two-day conference titled "The War on Christians and the Values Voter in 2006."...

...The conference was convened by Vision America, a group founded by the Rev. Rick Scarborough to mobilize "patriot pastors" of all denominations to promote Christian involvement in government.

Scarborough, the former pastor of the First Baptist Church in Pearland, is a long-time DeLay ally.

"This is a man, I believe, God has appointed ... to represent righteousness in government," Scarborough told the audience, which included Eagle Forum Founder Phyllis Schlafly, former ambassador Alan Keyes, and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan....

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They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Excerpt from pages 166-73 of "They Thought They Were Free" First published in 1955

...What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter....

..."You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have....

..."But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D....

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Health system 'neglects elderly'
Elderly people are being neglected and poorly treated by England's health system, inspectors say.

...One of the worst areas, the report found, was mental health care, where older people found services deteriorating as they passed the age of 65.

The vast majority of older people surveyed said they had not been asked their views on the NHS or council services in the last year, and 80% did not think they had influenced the planning of services.

The report did find that steps had been taken to address age discrimination in public services and more people were being supported to allow them to live at home.

Gordon Lishman, director-general of Age Concern England, said it was "shocking" that so many social services departments were still failing to meet the needs of older people - the main users of these services.

He said: "Sadly, too many older people in need of public services are currently treated as second-class citizens."

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Steve Webb said: "The needs of older people are not a priority for this government."

Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, said the report highlighted the possibility that government targets for assessing patients in Accident and Emergency departments had led to the rushed discharge of older people.

He also highlighted concerns about inconsistencies in community rehabilitation of stroke patients. ...

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Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?
Last November, U.S. Marines killed 15 Iraqi civilians in their homes. Was it self-defense, an accident or cold-blooded revenge?

The incident seemed like so many others from this war, the kind of tragedy that has become numbingly routine amid the daily reports of violence in Iraq. On the morning of Nov. 19, 2005, a roadside bomb struck a humvee carrying Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, on a road near Haditha, a restive town in western Iraq. The bomb killed Lance Corporal Miguel (T.J.) Terrazas, 20, from El Paso, Texas. The next day a Marine communique from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi reported that Terrazas and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the blast and that "gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire," prompting the Marines to return fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding one other. The Marines from Kilo Company held a memorial service for Terrazas at their camp in Haditha. They wrote messages like "T.J., you were a great friend. I'm going to miss seeing you around" on smooth stones and piled them in a funeral mound. And the war moved on.

But the details of what happened that morning in Haditha are more disturbing, disputed and horrific than the military initially reported. According to eyewitnesses and local officials interviewed over the past 10 weeks, the civilians who died in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a roadside bomb but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the village after the attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women and three children. Human-rights activists say that if the accusations are true, the incident ranks as the worst case of deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. service members since the war began. ...

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No choice, no peace in Upper St. Clair
...Most people don't question our system of public education. But it's not only absurd and consumer-unfriendly, it's creepily un-American. Imagine if we had to get our groceries this way. Imagine a state Department of Groceries. Imagine a public food system where citizens are assigned defined grocery districts.

If you wanted "free" public food, you'd shop at your local taxpayer-supported district supermarket. If you went to a private supermarket, crossed the grocery district line, or grew your own food, you'd still have to pay local food taxes.

Imagine a system of public grocery stores where every un-fireable union employee has to have a certificate from a state grocery college. Where a local food board sets food taxes, hires top grocery store bureaucrats and ultimately decides how many organic items should be stocked or whether the meat section should be expanded.

Imposing such a horrible, inefficient and stupid food-delivery system on Americans would cause a revolution. But an even less democratic system of public grocery stores -- with far less choice for consumers -- actually existed for decades. I saw it in 1988 in communist East Berlin.

Being forced to buy food in a depressing, pathetically understocked East Berlin government supermarket was a bit like being forced to buy public education in America. ...

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Afghan Christian Could Get Death Sentence
KABUL, Afghanistan Mar 19, 2006 (AP)— An Afghan man is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death on a charge of converting from Islam to Christianity, a crime under this country's Islamic laws, a judge said Sunday.

The trial is believed to be the first of its kind in Afghanistan and highlights a struggle between religious conservatives and reformists over what shape Islam should take here four years after the ouster of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime.

The defendant, 41-yer-old Abdul Rahman, was arrested last month after his family accused him of becoming a Christian, Judge Ansarullah Mawlavezada told The Associated Press in an interview. Rahman was charged with rejecting Islam and his trial started Thursday. ...

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The "Myth" of Bush's Loyalty
...The key element that binds Christianism with Bush Republicanism is fealty to patriarchal leadership. That's the institutional structure of the churches that are now the Republican base; and it's only natural that the fundamentalist psyche, which is rooted in obedience and reverence for the inerrant pastor, should be transferred to the presidency. That's why I think Bush's ratings won't go much below 25 percent; because 25 percent is about the proportion of the electorate that is fundamentalist and supports Bush for religious rather than political reasons. They are immune to empirical argument, because their thought-structure is not empirical; it is dogmatic. If the facts overwhelm them, they will simply argue that the "liberal media" is lying. Bruce poignantly thinks the GOP is still the secular, empirical, skeptical party it once was. It's not: it's a fundamentalist church with some huge bribes for business interests on the side, leveraged by massive debts. So all criticism is disloyalty; and disloyalty is heresy. The facts don't matter. Obey the pastor. Or be damned.

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Time Warner promotes terrorism and anti-Christian bigotry in new leftist movie, 'V for Vendetta'
It has only been two weeks since the Oscar ceremony celebrated left-wing politics and anti-Christian bigotry with such movies as "Brokeback Mountain" and "Syriana."

Today, Time Warner is continuing that policy by releasing "V for Vendetta" – a vile, pro-terrorist piece of neo-Marxist, left-wing propaganda filled with radical sexual politics and nasty attacks on religion and Christianity. ...

...The whole movie, in fact, is a thinly veiled attack on the War on Terror now being waged by Prime Minister Tony Blair in Great Britain and President George W. Bush in the United States. The movie's story was actually updated from a graphic novel that attacked the conservative administration of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one of the greatest political leaders of the 20th century....

...The rest of "V for Vendetta" not only depicts Christians as evil people who oppress and torture "innocent" people, it also depicts homosexuals as a persecuted, harmless minority of "nice" people....

...The Christian view of art sees God as the ultimate ruler of all creation and all communication. The Christian view of art also sees Jesus Christ as the ultimate standard of all artistic excellence.

Armed with this basic theology of art, we can fight the evil influence of such movies as "V for Vendetta."

Knowledge of theology can lead to understanding, but the fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom. In other words, God hates it when institutions and people like Time Warner and the filmmakers behind "V for Vendetta" pervert mankind's ability to create art. When we behave so sinfully, we should all fear His righteous judgment....

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Cass Congratulates Alito at White House
Dr. Gary Cass had the honor Wednesday, February 1, to represent thousands of ministry supporters at the White House, when Samuel Alito was sworn in as the nation's 110th Supreme Court Justice. Dr. Cass, Executive Director of the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, met and spoke with both Justice Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts at the White House reception that followed Mr. Alito's oath-taking.

Dr. Kennedy celebrated the confirmation of Justice Alito, stating that he "will move the Court toward its proper function as an arbiter of the rule of law and away from its dangerous role as an agent of social change."

"It is my hope," Dr. Kennedy said, "that he will join those already on the Court who recognize that Roe v. Wade is a constitutional aberration and vote with them to reverse this most destructive ruling."

Just days before the Senate confirmed Alito to the Supreme Court, Coral Ridge Ministries delivered to the Senate more than 25,000 hand-signed petitions, urging a vote and Alito’s confirmation. ...

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Dobson: Alito Sent Thank You Note for Backing His Nomination
DENVER — Focus on the Family founder James Dobson said Wednesday that new Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito sent him a letter thanking him and his radio listeners for their support during his Senate confirmation hearings.

Alito wrote that "the prayers of so many people from around the country were a palpable and powerful force. As long as I serve on the Supreme Court, I will keep in mind the trust that has been placed in me," Dobson said on his radio broadcast.

Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said Alito's note was in response to a letter Dobson sent congratulating him on his confirmation. ...

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Go to church, back the war
Protestants and frequent churchgoers are most supportive of the war in Iraq, according to research released yesterday by Gallup.

"In general, the more frequently an American attends church, the less likely he or she is to say the war was a mistake," noted Gallup editor in chief Frank Newport, who analyzed a series of polls that posed the question, "Is the war a mistake?" to 4,000 adults from January 2005 to February 2006.

Overall, 45 percent of Protestants and 47 percent of "other Christians" thought the war was a mistake. The figure was 52 percent among Catholics, 58 percent among other religions and 62 percent among those who had no religion.

Frequency of church attendance also held sway. Overall, among those who never went to church, 62 percent said the war was a mistake. Among those who attended services once a week, the figure was 44 percent. ...

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US evangelicals warn Republicans
Prominent leaders from the Christian right have warned Republicans they must do more to advance conservative values ahead of the US mid-term elections.

Their message to Congress, controlled by Republicans, is "must do better".

Support from about a quarter of Americans who describe themselves as evangelicals was a factor in President George W Bush's two election victories.

The Republicans will need to keep them onboard if they are to retain control of Congress in November....

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Half of Americans Say Bush Misled on WMD's
Many adults in the United States remain sceptical of their government’s justification to launch the coalition effort in Iraq, according to a poll by Gallup released by CNN and USA Today. 51 per cent of respondents believe the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction....

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Christians Have as Many Abortions as Everyone Else, Catholics Have More
A new study by The Center For Reason (www.CenterForReason.com) finds that Christians have just as many abortions as their non-Christian counterparts. The study concludes that in the year 2000, Christians were responsible for 570,000 abortions. Catholics were found to be the worst offenders, with abortion rates higher than the national average.

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Why Gun-Barrel Democracy Doesn’t Work
Over the past half century, the United States has repeatedly sent its military forces abroad in the name of democracy. Yet very few of the countries we have invaded have become democratic.

When it involves itself in the affairs of others, the United States likes to say that it is doing so in defense of freedom and democracy. That's what we said in Iraq, among other things, when we toppled Saddam Hussein. That was part (though not all) of our argument for going after the Taliban in Afghanistan. But it's also what we said in Vietnam in the 1960s, in Grenada in 1983, in Panama in 1989, and in numerous other interventions during the twentieth century.

In fact, presidents rarely fail to trot out "democracy" as a justification for their actions abroad. That's because it is popular with Americans, who like to feel they are on the side of the angels. But if it’s democracy we’re after, we are failing miserably.

Between World War II and the present, the United States intervened more than 35 times in developing countries around the world. But our research shows that in only one case—Colombia after the American decision in 1989 to engage in the war on drugs—did a full-fledged, stable democracy with limits on executive power, clear rules for the transition of power, universal adult suffrage, and competitive elections emerge within 10 years. That’s a success rate of less than 3 percent. ...

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Decadent Elite Laugh At Torture During Gridiron Club Dinner
Russert dresses in drag, sings 'rendition' song

The mainstream press is having a hearty chuckle about the capers and the chicanery witnessed at the annual Gridiron Club dinner, a get-together of media and government elites. The highlight was an "amusing" rendition of a torture song by a dragged-up Tim Russert.

I for one don't find it funny that a bunch of war criminals and their sycophantic collaborators are cackling and patting each other on the back about the 'hilarious shortcomings' of the administration.

Ahhh isn't Cheney cute for shooting a man in the face? Isn't it rollicking that those kids got raped and those Abu Ghraib prisoners were tortured to death?

Even the CIA controlled Washington Post had to admit it went too far.

"Tim Russert, making his first appearance as a new member, decked out in a blue dress and a shiny blond wig as one of the cable news bunnies. But there were also some true clunkers. Singing about torture, subbing "rendition" for "tradition" and borrowing the "Fiddler on the Roof" song was not funny at all. The chumminess of the politicos and the press corps can be cloying."

You would think these power whores would learn to act with a modicum of decorum, especially after last time's fiasco, when Bush caused worldwide anger by making a comedy routine about Iraq's missing WMD, an 'intelligence mistake' (or lie to rational thinking people) that has already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 2,000 US troops....

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The liberal baby bust
What's the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here's one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs.

This curious fact might at first seem trivial, but it reflects a much broader and little-noticed demographic trend that has deep implications for the future of global culture and politics. It's not that people in a progressive city such as Seattle are so much fonder of dogs than are people in a conservative city such as Salt Lake City. It's that progressives are so much less likely to have children.

It's a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future - one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default. Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families....

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The Return of Patriarchy
Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It’s more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe that father knows best.

...Today, by contrast, childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have just one. Tomorrow’s children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents’ values, as always happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.

Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or not. In addition to the greater fertility of conservative segments of society, the rollback of the welfare state forced by population aging and decline will give these elements an additional survival advantage, and therefore spur even higher fertility. As governments hand back functions they once appropriated from the family, notably support in old age, people will find that they need more children to insure their golden years, and they will seek to bind their children to them through inculcating traditional religious values akin to the Bible’s injunction to honor thy mother and father.

Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father.

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Air Force Sued Over Religious Recruiting
DENVER -- A vocal critic of Pentagon policies on religion in the ranks filed court papers Thursday alleging that an Air Force recruiter in New Mexico was asked "to use Jesus Christ as a recruiting tool."...

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'Over-efficient' surgeon must delay operations
A senior surgeon has made a public apology to patients whose operations are being postponed - because he has been too efficient.

Peter Cox, a general consultant surgeon at the West Cornwall Hospital, Penzance, and his colleagues have been told to slow down by the local health authorities.

Not only has Mr Cox met the current six-month waiting list target but he has surpassed it. As a result, more than 50 of his patients are being sent letters telling them that their surgery dates will be put back.

The perverse state of affairs has come about because the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust - which yesterday announced 300 redundancies and an £8 million deficit - has treated 4,600 patients more than were budgeted for in this financial year.

Mr Cox said yesterday: "This is all about finance. The thing that really annoys me is that I cannot see how this will really save any money. All they are doing is deferring the payments to a later date.

"Now I will have spaces in my operating list. They may give me other patients who are close to the waiting time deadline but this will take some time to organise."

In a letter to The Cornishman, newspaper Mr Cox said: "I am writing this letter to apologise to the 50 or more patients who have been given dates for operations under my care, who will shortly receive letters explaining why they have been delayed.

"Although I have tried to prevent this, I am powerless to do so. The directive has come from the Primary Care Trust for the next financial year.

"They have informed the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust that they will not pay for routine operations unless the patients have waited at least 18 weeks from the time that they were put on the list....

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Is Heaven Populated Chiefly by the Souls of Embryos?
What are we to think about the fact that Nature (and for believers, Nature's God) profligately creates and destroys human embryos? John Opitz, a professor of pediatrics, human genetics, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah, testified before the President's Council on Bioethics that between 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women's normal menstrual flows unnoticed. This is not miscarriage we're talking about. The women and their husbands or partners never even know that conception has taken place; the embryos disappear from their wombs in their menstrual flows. In fact, according to Opitz, embryologists estimate that the rate of natural loss for embryos that have developed for seven days or more is 60 percent. The total rate of natural loss of human embryos increases to at least 80 percent if one counts from the moment of conception. About half of the embryos lost are abnormal, but half are not, and had they implanted they would probably have developed into healthy babies.

So millions of viable human embryos each year produced via normal conception fail to implant and never develop further. Does this mean America is suffering a veritable holocaust of innocent human life annihilated? Consider the claim made by right-to-life apologists like Robert George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, that every embryo is "already a human being." Does that mean that if we could detect such unimplanted embryos as they leave the womb, we would have a duty to rescue them and try to implant them anyway?

"If the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions: Alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined," declared Michael Sandel, a Harvard University government professor, also a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.

As far as I know, bioconservatives like Robert George do not advocate the rescue of naturally conceived unimplanted embryos. But why not? In right-to-life terms, normal unimplanted embryos are the moral equivalents of a 30-year-old mother of three children.

Of course, culturally we do not mourn the deaths of these millions of embryos as we would the death of a child—and reasonably so, because we do in fact know that these embryos are not people. Try this thought experiment. A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing 10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue? ...

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Armageddon Lobby

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The Framers and the Faithful
How modern evangelicals are ignoring their own history.

...Even though Jefferson was labeled anti-religion by some, he had become a hero to evangelicals—not in spite of his views on separation of church and state, but because of them. By this point, Jefferson had written his draft of the Virginia statute of religious freedom, and he and James Madison were known as the strictest proponents of keeping government and religion far apart. Because Baptists and other evangelicals had been persecuted and harassed by the majority faiths—the Anglicans in the South and the Puritan-influenced Congregationalists in the North—these religious minorities had concluded that their freedom would only be guaranteed when majority faiths could not use the power of the state to promote their theology and institutions.

Each side of our modern culture wars has attempted to appropriate the Founding Fathers for their own purposes. With everything from prayer in school to gay rights to courtroom displays of the Ten Commandments at stake, conservative and liberal activists are trying to capture the middle ground and win over public opinion. Portraying their views as compatible with—even demanded by—the Founding Fathers makes any view seem more sensible, mainstream, and in the American tradition. And in truth, you can find a Jefferson or Adams quote to buttress just about any argument. But there are a few facts that might actually be stipulated by both sides in the culture wars. First, the original Constitution really didn't say all that much about religion. God is not mentioned, and the only reference to religion is a ban on providing religious tests for holding office. (Ask why, and the arguments would resume with fury: Conservatives say the Founders left it out because they wanted the states to regulate religion; liberals say it was because the framers were secularists who wanted strict separation between religion and government).

Second, there was a widespread view among religious people of all flavors that the Constitution would be much stronger if it had a Bill of Rights that more explicitly guaranteed religious freedom. The 18th-century evangelicals were among the strongest advocates of this view and of the Bill of Rights, which declared that "Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion." Throughout the states, evangelicals pushed hard for ratification of the Bill of Rights in the state legislatures....

...It is ironic, then, that evangelicals—so focused on the “true” history—have neglected their own. Indeed, the one group that would almost certainly oppose the views of 21st-century evangelicals are the 18th-century evangelicals. John Leland was no anomaly. In state after state, when colonists and Americans met to debate the relationship between God and government, it was the proto-evangelica1s who pushed the more radical view that church and state should be kept far apart. Both secular liberals who sneer at the idea that evangelicals could ever be a positive influence in politics and Christian conservatives who want to knock down the “wall” should take note: It was the 18th-century evangelicals who provided the political shock troops for Jefferson and Madison in their efforts to keep government from strong involvement with religion. Modern evangelicals are certainly free to take a different course, but they should realize that in doing so they have dramatically departed from the tradition of their spiritual forefathers....

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850 WORDS OF RELEVANT
...These twentysomethings routinely say things like "I’m just trying to find God’s will for my life" or "I’m wondering what God’s will is." Their very language implies that deep down they believe God is playing a big game with them. He’s created a great riddle for them to try and solve … a divine round of hide-and-go-seek in which they are forced to participate. But I don’t think God delights in making things difficult for His creation. Although we might all wish that God would spell out His thoughts regarding what job to take or whom to marry, that’s generally not how it works.

People who become obsessed with finding and doing God’s will right before they have to make big life choices often miss the point entirely. That’s because the only time we really need to know and do God’s will is right now—in this present moment. Whether we follow His will in the small choices we make during the next hour of our lives has the greatest significance.

St. Francis of Assisi offers a good example of this. While he was raking leaves one day, a neighbor asked, "If you knew for certain that Christ Himself were coming back in a half-hour, what would you do?"

St. Francis replied, "I’d finish raking the yard."...

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How Southern Baptists Have Changed
...In traditional Baptist thought all members of the church were seen as equal ministers with different spiritual gifts -- a doctrine referred to as the priesthood of believers. The role of the pastor in this context was to preach and teach, to train the congregation for service, to care for the needs of the congregation, and to provide administrative coordination to the work of the church. Pastors were viewed as servants of the church.

The Patterson-Pressler coalition insists that the pastor is the unquestioned ruler of the church. W. A. Criswell said, "Lay leadership of the church is unbiblical when it weakens the pastor's authority as ruler of the church . . . a laity-led church will be a weak church anywhere on God's earth. The pastor is ruler of the church." In 1988 the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution affirming that the pastor was the ruler of the church....

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Alito’s note to Dobson debated
...Here is the text of a letter that Focus on the Family founder James Dobson said he received from Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Dobson read the letter on his radio broadcast Wednesday.

Dear Dr. Dobson:

This is just a short note to express my heartfelt thanks to you and the entire staff of Focus on the Family for your help and support during the past few challenging months.

I would also greatly appreciate it if you would convey my appreciation to the good people from all parts of the country who wrote to tell me that they were praying for me and for my family during this period.

As I said when I spoke at my formal investiture at the White House last week, the prayers of so many people from around the country were a palpable and powerful force.

As long as I serve on the Supreme Court I will keep in mind the trust that has been placed in me.

I hope that we’ll have the opportunity to meet personally at some point in the future.

In the meantime my entire family and I hope that you and the Focus on the Family staff know how we appreciate all that you have done.

Sincerely yours,

Samuel Alito

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Gitmo: The Worst of the Worst?
A report, based entirely on Defense Department documents, exposes the truth about Guantánamo

Four years ago, the president was assured by his lawyers in the Justice and Defense departments that, as commander in chief, he had the ultimate power to determine which of our captives in the war on terrorism are "enemy combatants"—and to imprison many of them indefinitely at Guantánamo.

Then, after the Abu Ghraib photographs went around the world (recently, even more repellent pictures from that prison have been internationally distributed), Gitmo became a recruiting tool for our enemies, while causing increasing disquiet among our allies.

On February 16, a British high court judge, Sir Andrew Collins, emphasized: "America's idea of what is torture is not the same as ours and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilized nations."

He was referring to a February 15 report by five independent U.N. special rapporteurs on torture that Guantánamo be closed and its prisoners be tried or released.

What has newly inflamed human rights critics of Guantánamo's treatment of its prisoners—whom Donald Rumsfeld has described as "terrorists" and "the worst of the worst" of the suspected terrorists we have captured—are confirmed reports of the force-feeding of desperate prisoners, held for four years with no end in sight. At one point, 130 had refused food, but that number is now down to four because of the methods used to prevent one or more of the resisters from dying, thereby further shaming the United States.

As described to me by Tom Wilner, a Washington-based attorney for a number of the prisoners, and further detailed in the following February 9 National Public Radio account by Neil Koslowe, another attorney for a detainee there, the hunger strikers are tied down to a metal restraint chair as officers "force open their mouths and then they shove down their mouths through thick tubes in their noses nutritional supplements mixed with milk of magnesia and other ingredients. Removal of the tubes is often violent. The prisoners get nauseous, they vomit. They defecate over themselves. They urinate over themselves."

This goes on for hours a day, and screaming doesn't make it stop.

Responding to this vivid account of what the president has often called the "humane treatment" of prisoners at Gitmo, White House press secretary Scott McClellan brushed aside rising condemnations of the brutal force-feeding:

"We know that these are dangerous terrorists being kept at Guantánamo Bay. They are people determined to harm innocent civilians." ...

... Now dig this about "the worst of the worst" of the "bad guys" intent on killing Americans:

There are now about 490 prisoners at Gitmo, and "55 percent of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or coalition allies.

"Only 8 percent of the detainees were characterized as Al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40 percent have no definitive connection with Al Qaeda at all and 18 percent have no definitive affiliation with either Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

"Only 5 percent of the detainees were captured by United States forces. [A total of] 86 percent of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86 percent of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were turned over to the United States at a time at which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies." (Emphasis added.)

The Northern Alliance included Afghan warlords—not noted, to say the least, for their concern for any due process in rounding up "suspects" or the quality of the "evidence," if any, connecting their captives with terrorism. But these warlords were attracted by the generous sums the U.S. gave them for these suspects—many of whom were then warehoused at Gitmo. ...

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Radar Didn't Get Her; Radiation Did
The large, black SUV passed the woman on the left, abruptly slowed down, and then dropped behind her. Suddenly, flashing red and blue lights lit up her rearview mirror.

"Ma'am, you were pulled over because you set off a nuclear radioactive alarm," a man dressed in a blue jumpsuit-type uniform and a baseball cap said in a monotone.

It sounds like a scene from the movie "Men in Black." A select group of state troopers and inspectors from the state Department of Motor Vehicles now wear ultra-sensitive, portable radiation detectors on their belts to check for dangerous materials inside large trucks.

But the 45-year-old Suffield woman wasn't hauling nuclear waste. She had been injected with a radioactive substance for a common medical test....

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Health Care: Is the Canadian Health Care System Better Than America's?
...A February 2004 Canadian Medical Association poll revealed that only 14 percent of Canadians believe their country has a sufficient number of doctors. 49 percent of Canadians said either they or a member of their household had to wait "longer than you thought was reasonable" to see a medical specialist within the last year. 38 percent gave the same answer when asked about access to their family physician, and 31 percent said so about access to advanced diagnostic procedures.2

A whopping 74 percent of Canadians were concerned about long waits for access to emergency room services, while seven percent said they or a member of their household had suffered deteriorating medical conditions as a result of delays in access for care over the past year. Two percent of Canadians actually reported that a member of their household had died waiting for health care.3

Why the waiting times? In Canada, says Dr. Robert J. Cihak, M.D., former president of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, "If the Canadian government says it provides a particular medical service, it is illegal for a Canadian citizen to pay for and obtain that service privately. At the same time, the Canadian government bureaucracy rations medical services."...

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That 'harmless' and 'neccessary' Patriot Act
...They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn't call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn't try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn't changed.

So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called.

"When you mess with my money, I want to know why," he said.

They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted....

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The Return of Patriarchy? Fatherhood and the Future of Civilization
Will the world soon experience a return of patriarchy? That is the question raised by Phillip Longman in the current issue of Foreign Policy.

The magazine's cover features a rather stunning headline: "Why Men Rule--and Conservatives Will Inherit the Earth." That headline would be surprising in almost any contemporary periodical, but it is especially significant that this article should appear in the pages of Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The publication of this article is likely to set a good many heads to spinning.

Phillip Longman is Bernard L Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is a well-respected author and researcher, whose books have included The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do about It (2004). In his previous works, Longman has projected how falling birthrates throughout advanced societies will lead to financial, political, social, and demographic decline.

In this new article, he presses his argument to the next stage--announcing the return of patriarchy--the concept of male leadership--as essential to a recovery of higher birthrates and reproduction....

..."Yet, for more than a generation now, well-fed, healthy, peaceful populations around the world have been producing too few children to avoid population decline. That is true even though dramatic improvements in infant and child mortality mean that far fewer children are needed today (only about 2.1 per woman in modern societies) to avoid population loss. Birthrates are falling far below replacement levels in one country after the next--from China, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, to Canada, the Caribbean, all of Europe, Russia, and even parts of the Middle East."

Throughout human history, a persistent fall in birthrates has served as a harbinger of cultural decline and a warning of cultural collapse. The reasons for this are many, but center in the fact that the cause of falling birthrates is often a loss of social cohesion and confidence and the effect of falling reproduction rates is a decline in economic prosperity and erosion of the social structure....

...Nevertheless, Longman argues that the return of patriarchy is almost assured, given the social crisis that will be produced by a catastrophic fall in birthrates.

"Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule," Longman explains. "Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles."

Longman understands the simple fact that a great deal of cultural capital is required in order to encourage young men to marry and men of all ages to fulfill responsibilities as husbands and fathers. The normative picture of the "good life" for men, at least as presented in the dominant media culture, does not include the comprehensive responsibilities of fatherhood. When men are not stigmatized for failure to be faithful as husbands and fathers, young men will take marriage and parenthood with little significance, as many will avoid marriage and fatherhood altogether.

To some extent, the statistics tell the story. Almost twenty percent of women born in the late 1950s are nearing the end of their reproductive lives without ever having had children. Longman's assessment is blunt: "The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will have no genetic legacy."

Beyond this, the falling birthrate contributes to many other social ills. "Falling fertility is also responsible for many financial and economic problems that dominate today's headlines," Longman asserts. "The long-term financing of social security schemes, private pension plans, and health-care systems has little to do with people living longer. . . . Instead, the falling ratio of workers to retirees is overwhelmingly caused by workers who were never born."

The effects within the society are psychological as well as demographic, political, and financial. As Longman understands, declining birthrates can also affect what he calls "national temperament." He attributes the fact that the American voting population has become more conservative in recent years to anxiety over falling birthrates. Beyond this, we must now add the fact that millions of voters, who would have been raised by more liberal parents, were simply never born. ...

...But, why is patriarchy so important? Longman answers that question with great care. "Patriarchal societies come in many varieties and evolve through different stages," he explains. "What they have in common are customs and attitudes that collectively serve to maximize fertility and parental investment in the next generation."

A culture of patriarchy directs men to their responsibilities as husbands and fathers. Men who fail in these responsibilities are seen as inferior to those who are both faithful and effective. Furthermore, a patriarchal structure holds men accountable for the care, protection, discipline, and nurture of children. In such a society, irresponsibility in the tasks of parenthood is seen as a fundamental threat to civilization itself.

Longman quotes feminist economist Nancy Folbre, who observed: "Patriarchal control over women tends to increase their specialization in reproductive labor, with important consequences for both the quantity and the quality of their investments in the next generation." As Longman explains, "Those consequences arguably include: more children receiving more attention from their mothers, who, having few other ways of finding meaning in their lives, become more skilled at keeping their children safe and healthy." ...

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SESAME statement on HB 1088
..."The Department of Justice reported, in 1998, there were 103,600 reported cases of sexual misconduct in our nation’s schools and most of them involved a teacher. In contrast; there were 10,667 reported cases of sexual abuse by clergy between 1950 and 2003"...

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As Canada's Slow-Motion Public Health System Falters, Private Medical Care Is Surging
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Feb. 23 — The Cambie Surgery Center, Canada's most prominent private hospital, may be considered a rogue enterprise.

Accepting money from patients for operations they would otherwise receive free of charge in a public hospital is technically prohibited in this country, even in cases where patients would wait months or even years in discomfort before receiving treatment.

But no one is about to arrest Dr. Brian Day, who is president and medical director of the center, or any of the 120 doctors who work there. Public hospitals are sending him growing numbers of patients they are too busy to treat, and his center is advertising that patients do not have to wait to replace their aching knees.

The country's publicly financed health insurance system — frequently described as the third rail of its political system and a core value of its national identity — is gradually breaking down. Private clinics are opening around the country by an estimated one a week, and private insurance companies are about to find a gold mine.

Dr. Day, for instance, is planning to open more private hospitals, first in Toronto and Ottawa, then in Montreal, Calgary and Edmonton. Ontario provincial officials are already threatening stiff fines. Dr. Day says he is eager to see them in court.

"We've taken the position that the law is illegal," Dr. Day, 59, says. "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years."...

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Iraq's death squads: On the brink of civil war
Most of the corpses in Baghdad's mortuary show signs of torture and execution. And the Interior Ministry is being blamed.

Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations' outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed.

John Pace, who left Baghdad two weeks ago, told The Independent on Sunday that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the city's mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Much of the killing, he said, was carried out by Shia Muslim groups under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.

Much of the statistical information provided to Mr Pace and his team comes from the Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute, which is located next to the city's mortuary. He said figures show that last July the morgue alone received 1,100 bodies, about 900 of which bore evidence of torture or summary execution. The pattern prevailed throughout the year until December, when the number dropped to 780 bodies, about 400 of which had gunshot or torture wounds.

"It's being done by anyone who wishes to wipe out anybody else for various reasons," said Mr Pace, who worked for the UN for more than 40 years in countries ranging from Liberia to Chile. "But the bulk are attributed to the agents of the Ministry of the Interior."

Coupled with the suicide bombings and attacks on Shia holy places carried out by Sunnis, some of whom are followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qa'ida's leader in Iraq, the activities of the death squads are pushing Iraq ever closer to a sectarian civil war....

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U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% Say End War in 2006
...An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows....

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ENCYCLICAL LETTER DEUS CARITAS EST OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF BENEDICT XVI
TO THE BISHOPS PRIESTS AND DEACONS MEN AND WOMEN RELIGIOUS AND ALL THE LAY FAITHFUL ON CHRISTIAN LOVE
...Love—caritas—will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbour is indispensable.[20] The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces: she is alive with the love enkindled by the Spirit of Christ. This love does not simply offer people material help, but refreshment and care for their souls, something which often is even more necessary than material support. In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live “by bread alone” (Mt 4:4; cf. Dt 8:3)—a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human....

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Deadly riots continue in Nigeria
Mobs of Christian youths, armed with clubs, machetes, and gas cans, beat several Muslims to death in the southern Nigerian city of Onitsha and set fire to two mosques. The rioting, which began yesterday and continued today, has left at least 20 people dead, Reuters reports. At least 39 people were taken to the hospital. A Red Cross official told Reuters, "Thousands of people who have been displaced from their homes are now sheltered at the police and army barracks." The violence comes as Muslim attacks, largely tied to outrage over the Muhammad caricatures, have left at least 50 people dead in Nigeria's northern cities. The attacks come a day after a dark statement from Church of Nigeria Archbishop Peter Akinola, in which he told "our Muslim brothers that they do not have the monopoly of violence in this nation" and that groups such as the Christian Association of Nigeria (which he leads) "may no longer be able to contain our restive youths should this ugly trend continue." It will be interested to see whether that message is seen as prescient or provocative, insightful or inciting.

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The Apocalypse Will Be Televised
Armageddon in an age of entertainment

... “How fading and insipid,” Swift wrote, “do all Objects accost us that are not convey’d in the Vehicle of Delusion?” And indeed, such preposterous views haven’t prevented LaHaye from advancing in the world. As an ecclesiastical go-getter, he has few peers. A co-founder, along with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, of the Moral Majority, LaHaye now heads something called the Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy, at Liberty University in Virginia. Another of LaHaye’s visionary projects is the secretive Council on National Policy, which functions as a sort of theological popular front of evangelical preachers and politicians on the far right. And his alliance with Jerry B. Jenkins (writer of the Gil Thorp comic strip, former editor of the Moody Bible Institute magazine, and author of more than one hundred quickie books, including celebrity “autobiographies” of Billy Graham and Orel Hershiser) has turned LaHaye into a best-selling novelist.

As the careers of such disparate authors as Ayn Rand and D. H. Lawrence demonstrate, eccentric ideas are no impediment to writing novels. Almost any worldview compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, can serve as the scaffolding of readable fiction. Orwell wrote about what he called “good bad books,” arguing that “intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as it would be to a music-hall comedian”; what is necessary are strong convictions, an interest in individual human beings, and a powerful instinct for narrative. We’re all capable of suspending disbelief for the sake of a good story. So how seriously should we take the dust-jacket blurbs from reviewers who compare the Left Behind series to the work of pop-fiction luminaries like Tom Clancy and John Grisham? Or, to put it another way, can anybody not infatuated with LaHaye and Jenkins’s theological views read the novels for pleasure?

The answer, I fear, is no. On a purely mimetic level, the novels scarcely exist as realistic or even as allegorical fiction. These are novels for people who don’t read novels. Far too much of it is sheer didacticism: the characters don’t converse so much as they preach....

...By no means are all, or even most, evangelical Christians comfortable seeing their faith turned into fortune-telling. Rossing quotes an array of contemporary theologians who reject what one disapprovingly describes as “this perverse parody of John 3:16: ‘God so loved the world that he sent it World War III.’” As noisy zeal overwhelms more reasonable voices, however, the Left Behind hubbub strikes me as symptomatic of the degraded state into which American Puritanism has fallen. In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the runaway religious bestseller of the seventeenth century, Christian’s allegorical journey to the Celestial City involved an essentially inward quest. His encounters with the Giant Despair and Mr. Worldly-Wiseman forced him continually to search and re-search his mind and spirit for evidence of Satan’s wiles. LaHaye and Jenkins convert what was once the spiritual and psychological drama of salvation into escapist melodrama, Puritan self-examination into messianic narcissism. Satan is the Other, basically anything you fear and don’t understand. The books are pagan tribalism writ large, complete with soothsayers and magic spells. All of history has conspired to turn suburban Americans into apocalyptic superheroes. The end is near, and dude—you’re, like, the star!

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On the menu today: horse penis and testicles with a chilli dip
The menu at Beijing's latest venue for its growing army of gourmets is eye-watering rather than mouth-watering.

China's cuisine is renowned for being "in your face" - from the skinned dogs displayed at food markets to the kebabbed scorpions sold on street stalls - and there is no polite way of describing Guo-li-zhuang.

The waitress presents a dish combining the male organs of the ox and snake
A dish combining the male organs of an ox and a snake

Situated in an elegantly restored house beside Beijing's West Lake, it is China's first speciality penis restaurant....

...For beginners, Miss Zhu recommended the hotpot, which offers a sampling of what the restaurant has to offer - six types of penis, and four of testicle, boiled in chicken stock by the waitress, Liu Yunyang, 22....

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The Dark Side of Global Evangelicalism
This diary is not an in depth study but the result of a little googling which produced some food for thought. Counterpoints and further information are welcome.

I have read several worrying articles recently about bad social effects related to the spread of evangelical Christianity in developing nations, but this is one of the saddest....

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The Myth of Spending Cuts for the Poor, Tax Cuts for the Rich
...More broadly, the accusation that poor families are shouldering more of the tax burden while receiving less of the spending is empirically false. From 1979 through 2003, the total federal tax burden on the highest-earning quintile (one-fifth or 20 percent) of Americans—who earn 52 percent of all income—rose from 56 percent to 66 percent of all taxes. Their share of individual income taxes jumped from 65 percent to 85 percent.[2] On the spending side, antipoverty spending has leaped from 9.1 percent of all federal spending in 1990 to a record 16.3 percent in 2004.[3]...

...[3]Total antipoverty spending is calculated based on data from Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2007 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2006), pp. 55–72, Table 3.2, and pp. 137–142, Table 8.5, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/pdf/hist.pdf (February 4, 2006). The spending consists of budget functions 604 (housing aid), 605 (food aid), 609 (other income support), and Medicaid and S-CHIP for health care....

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DIGGING INTO GUANTANAMO
...To summarize then: According to the National Journal's research, upwards of half of all prisoners at Guantanamo weren't captured on the battlefield. Rather, they came into our custody by way of third parties "who had their own motivations for turning people in, including paybacks and payoffs." Many — perhaps most — of the men rounded up in these sweeps have no connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and the evidence against them is often weak, sometimes nonexistent, and all too frequently known to be fabricated. And yet they remain in prison....

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Democrats misplay "God Card"
...Shoot, Jim Wallis’ bestselling book on the subject of faith in public life is ostentatiously titled God’s Politics.

But a strange thing happened on the political Left’s offensive to become the party of God: their image as a “religion friendly” party actually deteriorated in the year immediately following their electoral disaster.

According to Pew Research Center data from October 2004, just one month before Election Day, 40 percent of the American public saw the Democrat Party as “friendly toward religion.” That number tumbled to 29 percent by August 2005, almost a full year (and a lot of misquoted Bible passages) later.

Moreover, as Tony Carnes points out in a recent Christianity Today article, “While overall support for George W. Bush has plummeted, evangelicals remain surprisingly loyal.”

Democrats have some serious decisions to make about the future of their party and its message. The Democrat Party cannot long stand as one that demands separation of church and state in all -- even symbolic -- matters while at the same time claiming Biblical substantiation for liberal public policies. They cannot imply John Roberts’ queasiness about Roe v. Wade breaches the “impregnable wall,” as Sen. Dianne Feinstein did during Roberts’ confirmation hearings, while at the same time urge income redistribution because “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:25). They cannot call Republicans “theocrats” for trying to save Terri Schiavo while they also claim John the Baptist endorsed their welfare state when he said, “He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none …” (Luke 3:11). ...

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Religion and Political Power
...Despite the revolutionary power of religion--something that one should expect given the often radical nature of various prophet's pronouncements against their rich and powerful contemporaries--the historical fact is that when all is sorted out, religious forces usually end up on the side of power. This phenomenon is explored and instances of it are enumerated throughout Siegel's text, whether he is discussing evangelical Christianity and the robber barons in the US or Orthodox Judaism and Zionism in Israel.

Each and every time god was revived by those opposed to the power structure, whether it was the prophecies of Moses against the pharaoh and his gods or Jesus' Christian underground against the Pharisees' and their temples; to Mohammed's pronouncements against the excesses of Islam's monotheistic predecessors or Buddhism's proclamations against the Emperor's Confucianism; the oppositional religion evolves into that which it opposed. According to Siegel, this is due to religion's easy manipulation by the ruling classes- a manipulation that is facilitated by the contradictory nature of religion. ...

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The CIA Leak: Plame Was Still Covert
Feb. 13, 2006 issue - Newly released court papers could put holes in the defense of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, in the Valerie Plame leak case. Lawyers for Libby, and White House allies, have repeatedly questioned whether Plame, the wife of White House critic Joe Wilson, really had covert status when she was outed to the media in July 2003. But special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done "covert work overseas" on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA "was making specific efforts to conceal" her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge's opinion....

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Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information
Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Beyond what was stated in the court paper, say people with firsthand knowledge of the matter, Libby also indicated what he will offer as a broad defense during his upcoming criminal trial: that Vice President Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war. Later, after the war began in 2003, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE, to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war. ...

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Government
Ever since there was government, there have been those who want to purify it from its excesses and corruptions, rid it of its grafters and operators, and cleanse it from any taint of the sin of private interest.

Government should serve the people with an eye to the common good, they declare, and it should be part of the solution to the problem of evil in the world, and not contribute to the problem itself. Government, in short, should be good!

The naïveté of good government ideology is more widespread than is usually supposed. Those who want government to do some things always, but do other things never, embrace the same ideal.

The left is scandalized by a government that plunders foreign nations and spies on its citizens' private lives but urges that same government to plunder property owners and spy on their commercial lives. The right is disgusted by a government that slathers billions on deadbeats and ne'r-do-wells but wants the same government to squander billions on military contractors and goons that enforce bad law....

...He drinks the potion again, and turns back into Dr. Jekyll. But there is a hitch. Whereas Dr. Hyde was pure evil, Dr. Jekyll is not pure good. He is the same mix of tensions that he was before. Reverting to his old self, he was nothing more than "that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse."

Well, that's a pretty good description of the results of most good-government legislation. It creates new obstacles for the old evil forms to get through but strengthens the evil by making the public less wary of it. A government perceived as righteous is more dangerous than one that is looked upon with suspicion. Sometimes corrupt government can actually be better than good government, if it means that unjust and unworkable laws can be bypassed through bribes and graft.

Every few years, for example, Washington, D.C., elects a mayor who promises a clean sweep of the bad and a restoration of the good. A bar owner there once told a reporter that he always dreads these changes, because it means that absurd fire codes and license requirements are enforced to the hilt. Under a corrupt regime, he needs only to bribe a few policemen and bureaucrats. Under good government, he has to cough up tens of thousands for lobbying groups, lawyers, and legislative specialists in order to keep his business running.

Good-government seeks to give us all the government we pay for, and who can but rue the day that this happens?

In the Stevenson book, Mr. Hyde grows stronger as he spends time separate from Dr. Jekyll. He is unleashed, unchecked by conscience. Whereas he was once a temporary indulgence, he eventually becomes a full-time obsession even as the good side of Dr. Jekyll seems to become less robust and shrink.

So it is with good-government movements. Once the state is reformed, the next step is obvious: a clean state that does wonderful things, untainted by nefarious practices, should be permitted to expand to do those good things with more liberality and efficacy. Thus has every government reform movement in the last century and a half ended up expanding rather than shrinking the state. And the expanded state does not end up doing good; it draws ever more evil to its side and results in an expansion rather than a shrinking of corruption.

The same is true of the pressure groups that have a selective interest in the activities of the state. The right believes the government should provide for the common defense but in so believing turn a blind eye to ghastly abuses that occur in wartime. The left believes that the government should redistribute wealth and thereby pretends not to notice that this requires increasing violence against property and subsidizes the worst propensities of human nature.

As government grows ever bigger in the guise of doing good, its capacity for doing evil expands at a far more rapid rate. Whatever true good that government might be capable of doing is swamped by growing levels of corruption, graft, payoffs, violence, arbitrary rule, and all the rest of the institutions that the movement was trying to make go away....

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Surprisingly Few Adults Outside of Christianity Have Positive Views of Christians
(Ventura, CA) - One reason why evangelical churches across the nation are not growing is due to the image that non-Christian adults have of evangelical individuals. In a nationwide survey released by the Barna Research Group of Ventura, California among a representative sample of people who do not consider themselves to be Christian, the image of "evangelicals" rated tenth out of eleven groups evaluated, beating out only prostitutes....

...In terms of the actual positive and negative percentages awarded to different groups, the study points out that less than half of the non-Christian public has a favorable impression of any of the three religious groups evaluated. Just 44% have positive views of clergy, only one-third (32%) have a positive impression of born again Christians and just one-fifth (22%) have a positive view of evangelicals....

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Gaza shopkeeper stocks up on Danish flags to burn
GAZA, Feb 6 (Reuters) - When entrepreneur Ahmed Abu Dayya first heard that Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad were being reprinted across Europe, he knew exactly what his customers in Gaza would want: flags to burn.

Abu Dayya ordered 100 hard-to-find Danish and Norwegian flags for his Gaza City shop and has been doing a swift trade.

"I do not take political stands. It is all business," he said in an interview. "But this time I was offended by the assault on the Prophet Mohammad."...

..."I knew there would be a demand for the flags because of the angry reaction of people over the offence to Prophet Mohammad," said Abu Dayya, whose PLO Flag Shop also sells souvenirs and presents....

...Abu Dayya sources some of his flags from suppliers in Taiwan, but he buys Israeli flags from a merchant in Israel, even though he sells them to be burnt at anti-Israeli rallies....

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Exclusive: Can the President Order a Killing on U.S. Soil?
Feb. 13, 2006 issue - In the latest twist in the debate over presidential powers, a Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States. Steven Bradbury, acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, went to a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week to defend President George W. Bush's surveillance program. During the briefing, said administration and Capitol Hill officials (who declined to be identified because the session was private), California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Bradbury questions about the extent of presidential powers to fight Al Qaeda; could Bush, for instance, order the killing of a Qaeda suspect known to be on U.S. soil? Bradbury replied that he believed Bush could indeed do this, at least in certain circumstances.

Current and former government officials said they could think of several scenarios in which a president might consider ordering the killing of a terror suspect inside the United States....

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Blair-Bush deal before Iraq war revealed in secret memo
PM promised to be 'solidly behind' US invasion with or without UN backing

Tony Blair told President George Bush that he was "solidly" behind US plans to invade Iraq before he sought advice about the invasion's legality and despite the absence of a second UN resolution, according to a new account of the build-up to the war published today.

A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 - nearly two months before the invasion - reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme.

"The diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning", the president told Mr Blair. The prime minister is said to have raised no objection. He is quoted as saying he was "solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam".

The disclosures come in a new edition of Lawless World, by Phillipe Sands, a QC and professor of international law at University College, London. Professor Sands last year exposed the doubts shared by Foreign Office lawyers about the legality of the invasion in disclosures which eventually forced the prime minister to publish the full legal advice given to him by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith.

The memo seen by Prof Sands reveals:

· Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours". Mr Bush added: "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]"....