Whew!  What a Friday!  I ran out, dropped off a urine sample at the vet, got to work, worked, went home, collected my poor Maggie, drove back to the same town I work in where the Vet is, and I just got back.  Today is Maggie's seventh birthday and second anniversary of coming to live here.  She has a horrendous urinary tract infection--not fair!  So I will stop for a sheeseburger for her, Zanz and Mom's dog Coco.  I may even get her a soft ice cream!

So, do you have any plans for the weekend?  I have to work tomorrow, but i will be finishing ripping up the living room carpeting.  The room is small, so you have to move everything around to get to the carpet.  Then I will scrub the subfloor.  I will put new carpet squares down after I paint.  Whoo Hoo!  Doesn't that sound fun??  

We had terrible storms yesterday--we even had a tornado!  One woman died when her house collapsed on her.  Eternal peace for Brenda Stevens and comfort for her friends and family.  Her husband was sucked out of the house and her 3 month old granddaughter remained in the house--both of them survived.

So, grab a libation, some food,  Pull up a chair on the deck--it is a glorious day here.  Sit and chat for a bit!  Tell us what you are up to!  What is the best thing that happened to you today?

You want to know how twisted my internet hookup is? Casa Pastor connects to the series of tubes not with a cable, not with a satellite, but with a radio.

Which means that if there's interference in the air, I'm pretty much out of business, unless I want to use the dialup over at the office.

That's sick.

Anyway, the royal magicians have been summoned from their caves on the mystic mountain of Neeka-tave. Until then, I'm at the coffee shop in Kewaskum, which hardly sounds weirder than Neeka-tave. Apologies if I'm a little scarce, or if I don't return e-mail right away.

But while we're at it, go take a look at this petition in support of marriage equality. I'm signing it, you should too.

Update: as Asbury Park points out in comments, the petition is for clergy. Pastors, priests, and rabbis, you know what to do.

Today's Meditation: thanks to Poet Seers

The Tree of Love


The tree of love its roots hath spread
Deep in my heart, and rears its head;
Rich are its fruits: they joy dispense;
Transport the heart, and ravish sense.
In love's sweet swoon to thee I cleave,
Bless'd source of love . . . ,

• St. Francis of Asissi, Into Love's Furnace I am Cast.

There's more......

By all rights, Mrs Pastor should be writing this today, since I filled in for her last night. But she's been dealing with hot, bored, and/or obnoxious children all day (one of whom is piling up consequences for himself on the front porch even as we speak).

I think I'll take my chances here, thank you. One lump or two?

Yesterday, I raised the question of why Democrats - really Obama's campaign and Faith in Public Life - felt obliged to attend the forum hosted by Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church.

The answer to that question turns out to be pretty simple: Rick Warren reaches millions and millions of people. He asks, the candidates respond. Nobody wants to piss off Rick Warren. Fine.

Instead of using a rhetorical question to make my point, however, let's lay it out in positive terms.

1. Obama's attendance at Saddleback is not a problem in itself. I have no idea why Faith in Public Life would want to get involved in the program, but perhaps they'll give me a perfectly reasonable justification.
2. Religious outreach to Evangelicals is not a problem. As Jesse Lava points out in the comments, it's analogous to the 50-State strategy: you work to extend your capabilities even in areas (or demographics) where the chances for an outright win aren't great to keep pressure on the other team and on the off chance that something breaks your way. Over the long run, it's a sensible strategy.
3. Here's where the problem comes in: the way Evangelical outreach gets sold is ZOMG, there's a huge field awaiting the harvest if only Democrats will do X, Y, or Z!! But the way it gets defended is: it's a long-term project that will pay off over time, so be patient. Well, which is it?

   The math seems to indicate that as a short-term strategy, it's not working very well. Other than Evangelicals moving away from a Republican partisan ID, there's not much solid evidence to say that they're prepared to vote Democratic in 2008. There's plenty of anecdotal stories coming out about Evangelicals flirting with Obama, but many of those stories originate with the Jim Wallis crowd, who obviously have a vested interest here, and again, the numbers just aren't there.

   And if this is a long-haul strategy, boy, we sure seem to be putting a lot of eggs in one basket, don't we? Obama has done a few events with mainline Protestants, most notably speaking at the UCC General Synod last year, but I can't remember the last time he spoke to a primarily Catholic audience, and lately his religious outreach seems laser-guided on Evangelicals.

4. So it's not so much that I have a problem with the Evangelical strategy per se, but I do have to wonder whether it's going to pay the dividends promised. That's a particular concern because more and more it seems to be pushing out any other outreach. Jesse suggests that focusing on Evangelicals is worthwhile because they're the most responsive to religious messages, which very well might be the case. But my question is whether it's worth it to try to draw in a few Evangelicals with a religious message when an economic message, or one based on the war, could bring in many more Catholics and mainline Protestants?

   Put differently, the Evangelical strategy seems to be predicated on this being a swing election. But it's not. This appears to be a base election, with the Democratic base swelling.

To sum up, spending so much time on Evangelicals might be a good strategy under the right circumstances. But it's probably not worthwhile to pursue them to the exclusion of other religious groups - not to mention the secular folks - and nobody so far has been able to demonstrate concretely why these are the right circumstances and what the returns are likely to be.

I'm listening, I really am. But I'd like to hear more than "boy, there's a lot of Evangelicals out there." There's lots of other folks, too. Show me the math, somebody. Anybody?

Take a look at the video that unfortunately would not embed for me.

A petition opposing racially charged commentary on Fox News that so far over 600,000 people have signed was delivered by Nas to the network’s New York offices.  Fox did not accept it but Stephen Colbert did on his show last night.

People are still signing it – see Color of Change.

Today's Meditation:

Oh yes, fix me, Jesus, fix me.
Fix me so that I can walk on
a little while longer.
Fix me so that I can pray on
just a little bit harder.
Fix me so that I can sing on
just a little bit louder.
Fix me so that I can go on despite the pain,
The fear, the doubt, and yes, the anger,
I ask not that you take this cross from me,
only that you give me the strength to continue carrying it onward `til my dying day.
Oh, fix me, Jesus, fix me.


--"Fix Me, Jesus, Fix Me"
African-American Spiritual

Today's photo is with thanks to Ken!


Please join us in praying for the requests of our community.


There's more......

Will Native American women finally get equal protection under the law?

Right now Native American women on reservations are 3 times as likely to be raped as a white woman. Due to an insanely complex series of jurisdictional issues, limited law enforcement, minimal political will and racism, perpetrators of sexual assault and domestic violence against Native American women often commit their crimes with impunity, knowing they will likely never face prosecution. All of this was documented in sickening detail last year by Amnesty International's report Maze of Injustice

Today, Senator Byron Dorgan introduced the Tribal Law and Order Act in the Senate.

The legislation is designed to boost law enforcement efforts by providing tools to tribal justice officials to fight crime in their own communities, improving coordination between law enforcement agencies, and increasing accountability standards.

Will this legislation stop the violence?

I'm getting this in while I can - the interwebs are acting up at Casa Pastor today.

But did anybody else see that our own br t got quoted in the Boston Globe?

This may not make me very popular, but I do have to wonder what it is anybody thinks a non-debate between John McCain and Barack Obama at Rick Warren's church is going to accomplish, other than stoke Warren's ego. The candidates aren't actually going to interact, and they won't take questions from audience members. They might just as well unveil a matched set of campaign ads and save us all 59 minutes.

This is indeed a curious event. What does Faith and Public Life get out of co-sponsoring the forum? Rick Warren is hardly a liberal. While he's good on a couple of issues like poverty and HIV/AIDS, " he opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and supports the death penalty" - and he's endorsed some truly nasty African homophobia.

I was all in favor of the last such event at Messiah College. That allowed Democrats to explore their values in a novel context. I'm sure that this one gives my friends at FiPL a higher profile, but the cost for that is putting a blessing on Warren as a centrist, a benediction I'm not sure he deserves.

But the powers that be within the Democratic party have apparently decided that their top priority in religious outreach this year is getting the kind of people Rick Warren represents. I don't know if that has anything to do with Leah Daughtry's program, or the influence of the usual suspects. It's a bad idea, whoever it belongs to. Here's the partisan ID among selected religious groups, according to the Pew Forum:

And here's how those same people broke for the candidates in a recent poll:

Given the first results, I'm willing to bet that the second is a bit of an outlier, especially since the second is based on Registered Voters, not a solid measure at this stage of the game. But the point remains the same either way. If you look at the numbers, Catholics and mainline Protestants are the swing vote this year, not Evangelicals. So what makes the latter so much more desirable than the former? I've never gotten a straightforward answer to that question.

My dear grandmother, God bless her soul, used to talk about Chuck Grassley as "her Senator." Why a Danish immigrant who worked her way up from having barely two nickels to rub together - before the Depression hit - would endorse a conservative toad like Grassley over an ex-miner like Tom Harkin, I cannot say. She just did.

What would she have said about this?

Evangelical Christians in Iowa, dominant in the state's Republican Party, have denied Sen. Charles E. Grassley his request for a place on the state's delegation to this summer's Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.

Mr. Grassley may attend the party's Sept. 1-4 nominating convention in St. Paul, but not as a voting delegate.

With a majority of nine out of 17 members on the Iowa Republican central committee, religious conservatives made Iowa Christian Alliance President Steve Scheffler chairman of Iowa's 40-member delegation in a vote immediately after their state party convention July 12.

"The Republican Party of Iowa is moving significantly to the right on social issues," the just-ousted Iowa Republican National Committee member Steve Roberts told The Washington Times. "It hurts John McCain's chances to win this state."

Other party officials said money for the party is drying up because of past mismanagement and current religious dominance, which has turned traditional Republican politics upside down.

"It's pretty well controlled now by the Christian Alliance," Mr. Roberts said. "If somebody came to me and wanted to be a delegate to the national party convention, I used to say, 'Talk to the state party chairman or to Grassley.' Now it's very simple. You go to the Christian Alliance, and they determine who is a delegate, and you have to do exactly as they say."

In recent weeks, religious activists replaced Mr. Roberts as the national Republican committeeman and also replaced the national committeewoman with pro-life advocates who also oppose gay marriage.

Barring Mr. Grassley from voting-delegate status is seen as a blow to him as the senior Republican official in the state, who normally might have led the convention's delegation.

Mr. Grassley had said "yes" when asked by Iowa Republican Chairman Stewart Iverson if he wanted to be a voting delegate to the national convention, Mr. Iverson said.

Political observers in Iowa saw the move against Mr. Grassley as retribution for his having tangled with evangelical pastors in his state. He initiated a Senate Finance Committee investigation of six televangelists for conspicuous personal spending.

Now, there's no love lost for Grassley, who's demonstrated his willingness to use religion to suit political purposes before.

But in addition to demonstrating how state GOP's are marching steadily to the right and on out of the mainstream, this story provides a huge opportunity for progressives willing to use it. Religious concern trolls constantly berate the Democrats for supposedly refusing Bob Casey Sr. a speaking spot at the '92 convention because of his pro-life positions. Can we pretty please with sugar on top do the same here? Oh, sure, the Republicans will deny it. But you and I know better. The modern GOP is so off-the-hook that they bounced a Senator from his delegation for the sin of demanding financial accountability from religious con men.

Repeat as necessary.

(Via our friends at Right Wing Watch.)

Please join our community in prayer.  Just leave your prayer requests and pray for the requests of the community. I welcome all people to join in as the power of prayer/good energy is undeniable.

If you have any favorite prayers or passages or quotes or meditations, please send them to me to share, meeshka1@msn dot com

Please do not argue about the requests of others--you may do that elsewhere!!! If you wish to offer comments of support--please do so! If you choose to rate prayer requests, I like to use a "4" as an AMEN! If you disagree with a request, please just refrain from rating--this is a place where people need to feel they can reveal and unburden their hearts without being criticized. Should any trolls come our way, just surround them with prayer.

Prayer requests remain on the list based upon my judgment.  Removing requests is my decision.  I have no hard and fast rules--I simply act when the list seems to get too long or it seems the request no longer applies.  If I take one off which you would like to remain, please simply request it again.  If the request can be removed earlier, please let me know.  I'm sure we all would appreciate an update.

Thank you!