Bush Campaign Is Seeking Help From Congregations. The Bush campaign is seeking to enlist thousands of religious congregations in distributing campaign information and registering voters. By David D. Kirkpatrick. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

Hmmm, the new Frontline documentary The Jesus Factor, while extremely fair to George Bush and his religious conviction does make the point that Gee-dub figured out in his dad's presidential race that evangelical Christians were the reliable voting block for his dad and co-ordinated those efforts. That's fine.

But this seems like an abuse of power from both church and state. Do we go to church to be evangalized about a candidate? And, as Bush's new efforts target specific Bush-friendly churches, should he be allowed to shill during worship?

The interesting aspect of the article is that many churches aren't biting and respect the serparation of church and state more than the state seems to.

On another front of Bush's campaign to reel in the churchgoers, he's brought up the faith-based wedge issue again. Interestingly, no money has been earmarked for Muslims, Hindus, and other non-Christian denominations. A few bucks was thrown to some Jewish organizations, but Pat Robertson and Billy Graham got a boatload. The division of money kind of mirrors the support he received from the denominations that supported him last election. Kind of like all the corporation support he's given out.

Is America a Christian nation or a nation with a lot of Christians in it?
11:52:24 PM  #  Oh yea! []

Guestblogger Russ Kick's MemoryHole -- banned in Iraq?. Posted by a member of Declan McCullagh's politech mailing list:

I've received email from a person with an [army.mil] address. This person is stationed in Iraq, and he/she tells me that The Memory Hole is blocked on military computers. Trying to get to the site results in the following message:

Access Denied (content_filter_denied)
Your request was denied because of its content categorization: "Extreme;Politics/Religion". For assistance, contact your network support team.

How interesting. I post raw documents created by the government, military, and corporations. These days, that apparently amounts to "political extremism." Naturally, I've filed a FOIA request about this blocking.

Link [Boing Boing]

I've been getting back to reading Russ Kick's Abuse Your Illusions, fascinating book. The book uses lots of raw documents to weave alternate truths. There's a lot of sites archieving the web and other information, only because seems like we're living in revisionist times. The truth is no longer the truth, but like a 50/50 poly-blend, 50 percent truth/50 percent spin.
11:29:28 AM  #  Oh yea! []