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My skin is crawling because I just had a creepy epiphany about the power of religious story in politics.

I've been listening on CNN to Barack Obama preaching, I mean campaigning, in Selma, Alabama. Demagoguery is alive and well in southern churches; in the hands of a master, it does send shivers down your spine one way or another (either because you buy it utterly or conversely because it's frightening to see the congregation buy it so utterly.)

Looks like this will be an even more uneasy election cycle for me than the last two -- and this time not because of far-right Christian activists manipulating lesser-educated minds (always assumed to be headquartered in the South, sigh) with simplistic, storybook preaching to motivate and direct that base straight to the polls like lordly lemmings.

This time I may have to fight the so-called liberals too, those willing to dominate civic and global matters from the pulpit if need be, with an army of God behind their politics . . .

Obama kept evoking "Generation Joshua" this afternoon, to hallelujahs from the crowd (congregation?) If you're a secular homeschooler, that'll send shivers down your spine and if you're not, let me 'splain --

There's a well-financed, evangelical-dominated national organization of lawyers, lobbyists and speakers/advisors in the homeschool movement, known as the HomeSchool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA.) Its heft and heat tend to blot out the sun -- with the Son? -- in homeschool politics and the public mind. AS if that weren't plenty of power for me to fret over, in 2003 HSLDA leaders launched a kiddie "education" project aimed at getting conservative Christians to steer children into Republican politics and government at the highest levels.
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(That's a movie quote, read on to make it make sense.)

The idea of community colleges (and education generally) as the engine of economic progress and social mobility came up in comments here, and I think it's worth many separate blogposts and discussions. I mean only to start it off with this one, but I feel the need to set the table with a little common context first, because I've been struggling mightily to find it in a few other discussions lately, and maybe I'm not the only one. Even if I am, that counts for something, right?

I think reasonable folks understand that ideas, beliefs and practices ought to stand on their own, independent of our personal feelings about any idea's advocates and detractors. Yet I've drawn a couple of dismissive responses here because I am a "homeschooling" parent, as if that were a disqualifier to be taken seriously in mainstream education or progressive discussion of any kind. And even among context-sharing progressives, political thought about education so predictably veers off into the hypocrisy of personal affinity and animosity (for these guys, against those guys) rather than doing the tough work of separating our lizard brain instincts and impressions from our highest-order systems thinking and power of story.

So merely to balance that wrong assumption --but not to confer any special authority on myself, even though I'm pretty sure someone or other will accuse me of that -- I state for the record that I wrote my doctoral dissertation in education leadership and policy on community college effectiveness criteria; my major professor was considered the father of Florida's community colleges, James L.Wattenbarger, who was a longtime colleague of my management professor dad. (They also shared demography as white southern officers and gentlemen, along with generational history and education-economic-patriotic values as children of the Great Depression, both of whom joined the Air Force and later studied their way to doctorates and academic careers.)
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promoted to front page by Lorraine
I hold the Democratic leadership's feet to the fire because I have loved this party for 40 years. I come from a time when liberal values and principles were the ripples on the river that ran over the basement of time, the bedrock principles that engendered pride when these words were spoke, I am a Democrat.

I come from a time when the very word liberal wasn't bracketed but was a driving force, I come from a time when women began to stand up and insist our voices were heard. When equality and justice were at the forefront of the national party, a time when we could hold in our hands the knowledge that we were the party, a time when the leadership fought for the Voter's Rights Act, a time when the leadership fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, when they fought for Roe v. Wade and said out loud and proudly that we were the party of choice.

Because much has changed over the past two decades and because the Democratic leadership was all that stood between this administration and us, the American people, when the leadership didn't do their job in protecting us, when the leadership concentrated more on being elected instead of enforcing our rights through denying the passage of such legislation as the Patriot Act and the Bankruptcy Bill, when the leadership consistently refused to say one word about the war against women, it was then that I started to look outside the party it has become to the party it can be, a more progressive party, a party that embraces its liberal base once again.
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Location

Liza's of the opinion that we progressive blogger types shouldn't vote for Democrats just because they're Democrats, we should only vote for the good ones. And in an ideal world, she'd be completely correct in that.

But if this was an ideal world, Yoko would have jumped in front. And this is anything *but* an ideal election season. I'm usually of the same opinion that Liza is, but this year things are different.

How? Because the non-Republicans are on the brink of wresting control of the House and even the Senate away from the greedhead Neandercons that have so wrecked and ruined our country during their decades-long reign.
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Earlier this morning I posted about how the way some liberals are pushing the Foley scandal makes me nervous. I would like to expand more on the idea of why I agree with Terrance that Foley's case is another example of the rampant abuse of power by the so-called moral majority of the Republican party.

In that post I quote our Jeffrey Langstraat's, "The Children" is Us; highlighting how "The Chidren" has become an effective rhetorical device used by Republicans and conservatives to develop policy which, might encroach on our civil rights and liberties but, hey, if it is for "The Children" it has to be good.

Let's take the issue of illegal wiretapping.

Back in 2002 Alex Galloway, created a whole software and digital art show based on the FBI's Carnivore project. The point of the show was to use the FBIs most infamous (and at that point still debatably illegal) spyware unleashed on the internet. Napier's contribution to the project was a data visualization client called Black and White.

First deployed in 1999, Carnivore is supposed to "surgically" read emails of suspected criminals and nothing else. Questions and outrage dogged the project, especially after reports that Earthlink would do the surveilling for the FBI given their servers could not handle the packet sniffers. Then the Electronic Privacy Information Center successfully sued the government under the FOIA. This opened the gates for privacy rights advocates, internet law experts and journalists to delve deeper into the inner workings of the software.
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