Thank You, Gov. Veto

Showing the level of prudence we've come to expect from our governor, Jim Doyle has summarily rejected a proposed campaign spending limit for the 2006 gubernatorial election.

Apparently, his challenger, US Rep Mark Green naively suggested that not only they limit the amount of money the two spend on the campaign to $1/WI resident (about $5.5 million), but he also ask that the two campaigns publicly denounce 527s from running attack ads this fall.

Mark Green is being, well, to put it frankly: Naive. I mean, did he really think Governor Doyle could accept such an offer. Doyle already has over $5.5M in his campaign fund so if he were to accept, that would functionally end his ability to raise money.

Does Green not realize that the primary way things get done in Madison these days is by contractors donating money to the Doyle campaign (see here or here)? If they stopped accepting these donations the governor's office would actually have to start a legitimate bidding process...which would be noble...but he'd have to train his staff on a whole new way of determining which corporation gets a state contract.

Right now Doyle's guidelines are pretty easy to follow: whoever gives the most money to Doyle's campaign wins the bid. In Green's simplistically ideal world the state contract would have to go to...get this...the lowest bidder! It would take months to train Doyle's staff with this new outlook.

Furthermore, I was really looking forward to a big money, mud-slinging campaign. Thanks, Gov. Doyle, for doing the right thing for a change.

Edit-
Then again, Doyle may have missed an opportunity here. He could have gotten his list of Wisconsinites from the Wisconsin's voter roles. Had he done that he would have found thousands, if not millions of more people living in Wisconsin than Green!

Bite me, PeTA

I never thought I'd do so much posting on local Racine news...but this place is so crazy I can't resist. Today the Racine Journal Times received a letter from PETA which they promptly posted on their website.

Now, I won't go into how much it pains me that a PETA form letter gets instant credibility from the Journal Times and has their Xeroxed correspondence posted immediately whereas my original letters are summarily ignored. Oh, well. No big loss.

Anyway, PeTA took the escaped lion incident to send out one of it's standard letters to remind the Racine community that

A tiger’s home range, for example, is about 18,000 times bigger than a typical zoo enclosure. Neurotic behaviors such as pacing are common when these animals are caged.

I wonder if members of PeTA have ever been out in nature before...heck have they even seen a National Geographic film? I mean, come on! They make it sound like life in the wild is blissful for these animals. Tigers in the wild are subject to disease and starvation, two things they will rarely if ever have to face when in captivity (in fact, if they're held at the Racine Zoo they may not only escape starvation, they may get the delicacy of eating a zookeeper some day!) I know the cages are small...but they are just animals and for all the bad things they suffer for being in a zoo, there are many more blessings. Remember, Nature is cruel, not loving. It is kill and be killed. The Racine Zoo may not be great...but last time I checked their slogan wasn't Racine Zoo: a place where chaos and death reign."

The PeTA letter continued.

Captive tigers and lions are afforded so few opportunities to engage in their natural behaviors that zoologists with Oxford University concluded that wide-roaming predators should not be kept in captivity.

That's just super. There's apparently two people at Oxford who say that lions shouldn't be caged! I guess two Oxford professors is all the proof that PeTA needs to set policy. How stupid do they think people are? I could just as truthfully say,

"The fate of humankind rests in the balance. And the situation is so bad that according to several theological and philosophical experts at Oxford University, if people do not submit to the lordship of Jesus of Nazareth people will continue to suffer in increasing numbers."

...but something tells me that the people at PeTA could care less what a couple of professors I cherry-picked from the Oxford faculty care about the plight of the poor...so I'll return the favor and ignore their Oxford comments.

What do you call a bunch of battles? (part 1)

Tom Krattenmaker's editorial in the USA Today has some very good points, but it's deeply flawed. It's flaws are rooted in the fact that he writes with wreckless abandon when he speaks of American Christianity. He mentions "conservative" Christians and "right-wing" Christians, but those labels are used more as political lightning rods than as carefully chosen designations of groups within the diversity of America's milieu of religious expression.

Making distinctions is very important since there are many Christianities that exist in America today, all of whom are battling their surrounding culture...the problem is some are at odds with the socially liberal forces and others are at odds with society's conservative forces.

I'm going to oversimplify things here, but given that my oversimplification will be 100 times more complex than the portrait Krattenmaker paints, I don't feel like I'm pandering to people's ignorance...at least I'm doing less than he Krattenmaker.

The people Krattenmaker is talking about in his article are people who are obviously unnerved by the liberalizing that is occurring in some segments of Western society. All of the people he mentions in his article would probably all be comfortable being identified as "Evangelical Christians."

The other group of Christians which I'm guessing would not like Krattenmaker's portrayal are those I will call "Peace and Justice" Christians. This group should be offended by Krattenmaker because they have been working hard over the past decades...and I'll use their terminology here...to de-marginalize gays and ensure women aren't oppressed by others who say what they should do with their bodies. They have also been hard at work trying to change public policy so improve stewardship of natural resources, end the death penalty, and restore race relations, among other things.

Confusion often exists since many Christians who are not part of the modern Evangelical movement carry the banner "evangelical" before themselves...the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) immediately comes to mind. Conversely, Evangelical Christians are concerned about peace and justice issues too. They just tend to view the plight of the poor through the eyes of the book of Proverbs which commends responsible living rather than the compassion invoking Beatitudes.

Evangelicals have traditionally spent more of their dollars on ministries which are designed to explicitly tell people about Jesus so to bring about personal conversion. "Go and make disciples" is the hallmark of Evangelicals. Whereas "Be doers of the Word" is the hallmark of the Peace and Justice crowd.

At this point one thing must be made clear: These groups are not mutually exclusive. This is best evidenced by the existence of a third major group within American Christianity: Roman Catholics. The word "Roman" is very important here since by its inclusion I mean to refer only to those Catholics who are loyal to Rome's (more accurately, the Pope's) social agenda. There are many "Peace and Justice" Catholics out there...but with very few exceptions, they fall into the "Peace and Justice" group I described above. Roman Catholics are beneficial to Christian dialog in America today for many reasons, not the least being that they prevent American Christians from being pigeon-holed into either "Conservative" or "Liberal" camps.

Although the Roman Catholic church in America would probably be best characterized as Christians motivated by the "Be doers of the Word" mantra, they have many similarities with both Evangelicals and Peace and Justice Christians. Roman Catholics find themselves on the same side of many issues as the Evangelical Christians (pro-traditional marriage, traditional role of women in family and society), but groups like Catholic Charities and many parish priests' work on behalf of the poorest Americans looks a lot more like what the Peace and Justice Christians are working on, i.e., lots of dollars are sent to support soup kitchens, prison ministries, legal advocacy for the poor, etc. Conversely, they are against abortion, but they are also against the death penalty, a policy many Evangelical Christians do not have a problem with.

The Roman Catholics demonstrate that there is a viable third way in American Christianity that needs to be addressed whenever someone wants to make broad sweeping statements like Krattenmaker does. I could go on and identify other major sub-groups of American Christians. Groups like the Eastern Orthodox churches and even Mormons are major groups who long to be considered as part of what it means to be Christian in America, and they have their own unique distinctions.

But the vast majority of Americans fit into one of these three groups: Evangelicals, Peace and Justice, and Roman Catholics. Even if these were the only three Christian traditions in America it would be enough to conclude that before you can say whether or not Christianity is at war in America, one must identify which Christianity you are talking about.

Test Post

Testing Tim's ability to post.

Remember

They just released the newest trailer for the movie formally known as Flight 93. See it on Apple trailers.

I gotta say, although I am looking forward to other movies this summer, e.g., Superman Returns, M:I:III, X3: The Last Stand, and Lady in the Water, I'm most curious about this film. I'm a big fan of Bourne Ultimatum and I think that a film like this is exactly what this country needs.

It's been over five years since any major media outlet has displayed footage that was taken on 9/11. I'm not suggesting that Americans should dwell on the terror of that day...but when a modern, visual society such as ours chooses not to show images of the planes hitting the towers or the terror on people's faces as they realized that people were jumping 100 stories to their death to escape the evil that had been inflicted on them, it's easy to see why NSA wiretapping is actually controversial.

Some may accuse me of justifying a culture of fear...and to be fair, I can't say that they're completely incorrect on that accusation. On the other hand, I think a culture that forgets is even worse. One only needs to read the book of Exodus to see that the God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims is a God who places a top priority on remembering your history. I think that United 93 will help Americans do just that.

I'm also glad to see that Universal got its act together and got this movie out ahead of Oliver Stone's 9/11 drama, The World Trade Center. Over time 9/11 is becoming a New York thing (heck, all the imagery for United 93's poster are even NYC landmarks). Seems like with NYC being one of the power centers of our media that because most of the deaths occurred in NYC, we can virtually ignore the attack on the Pentagon or Flight 93. If this movie does well...and I expect it will do respectable business...it should help people remember the evil and the heroism of that fateful day.

Shoot that Kitty!

I don't know why I think this is funny, but I do. Yesterday, about a mile down the street from the illegal immigrants rally, one of the lions "got loose" at the Racine zoo. When I first read I freaked. And then when I saw the first published picture depicting the situation on the Racine Journal Times blog I thought the same thing you must be must be thinking, "Gee, I hope the lion didn't eat anyone!"

Well, thankfully, this is just another example of stellar reporting by Racine's professional journalists. The lion didn't really "get loose". He simply was able to move from his holding area to the secured holding area that the zoo keepers generally chill in. Granted that's not good, and I'm glad the keeper was unharmed. but ya gotta love the Journal Times' first two posts about the lion. (see here).

Posted at 11:45 a.m. --
Police are responding to a report of a possible loose tiger at the zoo.
Developing ...

Updated at 11:50 a.m. --
A Journal Times reporter and photographer each are headed for the zoo. We'll have more info shortly.

Well, they promised "more" and they delivered. A shot of a police office looking down the barrel of his high-powered assualt rifle certainly is worth a thousand words...unfortunately, none of those one-thousand words are "the lion was always safely contained." I mean, what did the reporter and the photographer do? Walk into the zoo entrace, snap a picture of the first exciting thing they saw and then send it back for publication before they even talked to a zoo employee or an officer? Come on!

For the complete rundown see their latest story.

What a flag says

Yesterday there were a bunch of rallies across the country supporting illegal immigrant rights, including a rally here in Racine (see Journal Times blog). Apparently the fact that Mexican flags were displayed at several of these rallies really riled people up.

Now, when I first saw images of these rallies with both American and Mexican flags it didn't even occur to me that there was an "issue" to respond to. But as I heard people talk about it and read blogs I realized that the presence of a non-American flag at these rallies is kinda weird.

When you think of it, what's the point of a flag anyway? My first guess is that it functions as a primary symbol of your national loyalty. In that case it's only natural that people with Mexican citizenship would proudly display the Mexican flag...but does it really make sense to display this loyalty when you're at an event where you're trying to convince people that you're really deserving of the benefits of American citizenry? I mean, come on! By doing that aren't you really making the case against yourself even stronger?

On the plus side, I'm guessing that most Americans won't even give the Mexican flags presence at these events a second thought...and that's a good thing. We live in such a diverse country where contrasting loyalties can live harmoniously side-by-side that having the presence of non-American flags is nothing new. Heck, I can't begin to count the number of times I passed this farmhouse on the south side of Racine that has a Norwegian flag out front, and I never thought "Go back to Scandinavia, ya bum!" Nor should I have.