It has happened again. The sick twisted intertwining of conservative ideology, religion, and violence. Violence that kills.

This time it was a killing the Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, TN.  The most recent report on this is that Adkisson killed two people and wounded 5 more because of the church's liberal views.  And of course he refers to gays. He selected this church, some 20 miles away from his house only because of their liberal views.

That apparently gave him the right to do this. Right.

Well what a surprise!  Our favorite Hillary Clinton surrogate, Lanny Davis, the man who scintillated us with his wit and charm, is now a political analyst for Faux News.

Well, not such a surprise.

The new/not-so-new opportunity for Mr. Davis was announced today. Now we can all receive wisdom on a regular basis from Mr. Straighttalk-who-calls-himself-a-democrat (?).

In my brand new Sojourners magazine, Jim Wallis has an editorial piece, A Generation Comes of Age, in which he suggests that young evangelicals are in fact very different than their parents.  This very fact may be an indication of an important shift that liberals should pay careful attention to, and point to a new alignment and new energy for the causes of human rights and our future.

Jim Wallis, of course, is in touch with emerging trends in the "evangelical" culture.

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In an interview with CNN Thursday, Chuck Hagel has become even more critical of Bush (and hence McCain) on Iraq, and come very close to supporting Obama.

Hagel said, contrary to a recent speech by President Bush, that the deteriorating situation in Iraq leaves much to be desired. As cited in a PressTV article,

"I think this is another episode of Alice in Wonderland. What's up is down, and what's down is up. What do you mean, 'stability and security?' Baghdad has been over the last year essentially ethnically divided,"

.

But he went on...

Now it seems fairly obvious that some of the significant economic distress we are now facing nationally (slowing employment, housing crisis, deficits) and internationally (staggering trade deficit, sinking dollar) must find their source in the massive federal spending on the war in Iraq.  

What should seem obvious, though, is rarely obvious to GWB, who actually thinks that the war has helped the economy:

President Bush denied that the there's any link between the faltering U.S. economy and $10 billion a month being spent on the Iraq war. In fact, according to Bush, the war is actually helping the economy.

Now, however, a leading figure has had the presence of mind to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Professor Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist and former World Bank Vice President, has noted that the Iraq War is behind the economic woes in the United States..  Perhaps now a more substantive discussion of the real cost -- both in lives and the economic vitality of the whole country -- of this tragic war can take place.

In most societies, we would look to the judiciary to uphold justice. After all, aren’t "justices" supposed to evaluate and enforce basic distinctions between right and wrong?  And behind this concept of justice must be a moral reckoning, a polar star, that guides them.

But in the U.S., guess again.  We have as (at least, maybe more) one of our Supreme Court justices someone who is obviously morally bankrupt. Instead of some undergirding concept of right and wrong is a negotiable scale.  

Let’s take a look at the most recent issue.  Antonin Scalia in Great Britain decided to not only raise questions about whether waterboarding is torture, but went on to tacitly suggest that torture as an interrogation technique might be legal.