beep beep!

So–you don’t have a lot of money, so you call someone quickly and then hang up so they call you back–if you only pay for outgoing calls, it works out pretty well for you.  When is it right and when is it wrong?  Ah, sociology–you just show up in the weirdest places!

They (well, it’s really just one guy, Sam Beam) are indie darlings. Here’s a review of their latest album and a live concert from NPR.

A great man. 

“I cannot teach you violence, as I do not myself believe in it. I can only teach you not to bow your heads before any one even at the cost of your life.”

Will the right be split this election?

A powerful group of conservative Christian leaders decided Saturday at a private meeting in Salt Lake City to consider supporting a third-party candidate for president if a pro-choice nominee like Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination.

The meeting of about 50 leaders, including Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who called in by phone, took place at the Grand America Hotel during a gathering of the Council for National Policy, a powerful shadow group of mostly religious conservatives. James Clymer, the chairman of the U.S. Constitution Party, was also present at the meeting, according to a person familiar with the proceedings.

“The conclusion was that if there is a pro-abortion nominee they will consider working with a third party,” said the person, who spoke to Salon on the condition of anonymity. The private meeting was not a part of the official CNP schedule, which is itself a closely held secret. “Dobson came in just for this meeting,” the person said.

Why isn’t anyone angry about Republican overuse of Nazi-as-insult?

One of the rules of political discourse that we had until quite recently — enforced most vigorously by groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and The Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others — was that nobody was allowed to invoke Hitler and Nazis as a political insult. To do so, we heard constantly, was to trivialize Nazisim and the Holocaust and exploit that imagery for cheap political gain.

Several years ago, when MoveOn.org sponsored a contest for producing the best anti-Bush ad of 2004, it received well over 1,000 ads — one of which compared Bush to Hitler. Upon learning of the ad’s content, MoveOn immediately removed the ad, but that did not stem the tidal waves of outraged protests. The ADL’s Executive Director, Abraham Foxman, roared that the ad was “shocking,” “vile” and “outrageous.” RNC Chair Ed Gillespie denounced it as “political hate speech” and demanded that all Democratic presidential candidates condemn it. The Simon Wiesenthal Center said comparing political opponents to Hitler is “shameful and beyond the pale and has no place in the legitimate discourse of American politics.”

Similar outrage ensued when Sen. Dick Durbin invoked the behavior of the Nazis in a speech condemning Guantanamo. The very idea of even mentioning Americans and Nazis in the same breath was Despicable, said countless right-wing pundits such as Jonah Goldberg. After all, “The Nazis performed medical experiments on children and gassed whole families” and Hitler thus possesses a “singular villainy.” Goldberg protested:

In the circles frequented by the likes of Durbin — where Howard Dean is a statesman and Michael Moore deserves the Nobel Prize — evil must automatically be associated with “Nazi.”

Now, however, “Nazi” and “Hitler” comparisons have become, by far, the most common political insult on the Right, and these same Jewish advocacy groups are defeaningly silent. It is not merely that every new country on which the Right’s war-crazed faction wants to wage war is “Nazi Germany” and every new leader — or even every political functionary — that does not submit completely to America’s will is “Hitler.” That is true, and it provokes no protests. But the casual, indiscriminate use of “Hitler” and “Nazism” as political exploitation is much more pervasive even than that.

Okay.  Thomas Peters has a good point here about how Catholic liberals got self-righteous about the war in Iraq while ignoring issues of Church teaching on homosexuality.

BUT: what’s wrong with coming out, even from a conservative perspective?  Wouldn’t you want gay people to at least know that they’re gay and admit that to people they trust?  Isn’t any form of self-deception evil?

And as for homosexuals living their homosexual lifestyle, well that’s another ball of wax.  Though, honestly, I’m all for people loving each other in whatever consensual, life-centered way they want.  But that’s another conversation: the question here is, is it okay to come out?

Why the hell not?  Even if you’re going to stay abstinate, isn’t that important?

Greg Mankiw, noted economist, on the moral problems of advising.  He’s right.  It’s thorny.

Does it work in Turkey?  And would it work elsewhere?  And is there an Islamic precedent?  All shall be revealed.

Read more here.  I love good science!

Another blogger agrees: the problem with the Christian right is not one of emphasis; it is of omission.