Microcosm of GOP’s future

Texas Governor Rick Perry is looking for a third term, but he faces some stiff opposition from within his own party in Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who is also running. The race is shaping up to be a microcosm of the national debate over the GOP’s future, with the ultraconservative Perry taking on the more moderate Hutchison. “This is a civil war,” Perry said in an interview with The New York Times, “brother against brother.” Perry drew jeers from critics for flirting with secessionists this year and Hutchison has argued that the governor has shrunk the state’s Republican Party with his antics. “I do not want a governor who is going to narrow our base, make it dwindle,” Hutchison said in a speech this week. “That is what has happened at the national level, and that is not going to happen in Texas.”

Read more at The New York Times

fnord

C Street and the Family

Doug Coe, the leader of the Family,  has said “One of the things [Jesus] has said is ‘If any man comes to me, and does not hate his father, mother, brother, sister, his own life, he can’t be a disciple.’ So I don’t care what other qualifications you have, if you don’t do that, you can’t be a disciple of Christ.”

This is the foundation of the quasi-religious group called the Family.  Abraham Vereide founded the group in 1934 in response the Franklin D Roosevelt’s new deal. He felt Roosevelt’s new deal would allow unions to take over the Seattle’s  government. He organized prayer breakfasts that included politicians and business leaders that included anti-communist and anti union discussions, thinking both were one in the same.  The prayer breakfast discussions took off until they were in over forty cities, and in 1943 incorporated into the the national committee of Christian leadership, with it’s offices in Chicago. The following year he changed its name to International Christian leadership, and moved to Washington D.C..

Flash forward to today:  The Family represents “Jesus plus nothing,” as its leader, Doug Coe, puts it, the “totalitarianism of God,” in the words of an early Family leader, a vision that encompasses not just social issues but also the kind of free-market fundamentalism that is the real object of devotion for core members and insiders. At the heart of the Family’s spiritual advice for its proxies in Congress is the conviction that the market’s invisible hand represents the guidance of God, and that God wants his “new chosen” to look out for one another.

This is the basis of the politicians who belong to the group. Coe has stated on numerous occasions the group is at its best when it can act like the mafia: acting in secret can accomplish more than in public.

Fellowship leader Doug Coe repeatedly urges a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that he compares to the blind devotion that Adolf Hitler demanded from his followers. Coe has stated “Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies from nowhere,” and later in the same sermon: “Jesus said, ‘You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself. With Hitler, that was the demand to be in the Nazi party. You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people.”

Is the influence this group appears to have with politicians violate the separation of church and state? I think that’s a good question, considering their background and stated mission.

Read further here:

And here:

jammer5

Saturday, 08/15/09, Public Square

I’m not going to let the turkeys get me down!  The Democratic Party has the votes to get meaningful health-care reform done!  I suppose even President Obama must be discouraged by all the hateful misinformation, all those fighting against what would prove to be best even for them.  OK, I think we can, I think we can…  Let’s help each other stay positive and get to the point we can say, “I know we can!”

Big plans for the weekend?  Those with school age children are getting everything together for the big day.

fnord