The Zong

As our country wages war, we are told by our government and its supporters that our enemies, wherever they may be, are religious fanatics who wish to do us harm, zealots who are not to be reasoned with. Their unwavering religious views shape their lives every day, from the laws they abide by to their skewed views of science. My question is, why do we need to spend so much time and money killing religious zealots abroad when we have so many of them right here in River City?

Just for “fun,” I read an article last Friday in the Baptist Press about Al Gore’s Oscar and climate change. To be fair, it bills itself as “News With a Christian Perspective,” but the article reads like a half-assed attempt to use religion to discredit actual science. I mean, it obviously isn’t the first time or even the brazillionth time, but that doesn’t make it okay. They kick the article off with this assertion:

When Former Vice President Al Gore won an Academy Award for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” Feb. 25, a key assertion in his film on global warming — that human-induced climate change will cause a rise in sea levels of some 20 feet in the near future — had already been refuted by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That’s one hell of a lead, don’t you think? Well, maybe it isn’t, but it might have some integrity behind it if it were true. The assertion cited is listed on the film’s website reads as follows, under the heading “If the warming continues, we can expect catastrophic consequences”:

Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide.

See, this “assertion” is really more of a “prediction” made by actual “scientists.” The website cites the Washington Post, a “newspaper” that in 2006 won four “Pulitzer Prizes.” The article is entitled “Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change,” and it is about the consequences of catastrophic climate change. Here’s what it says could happen:

Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer, who also advises the advocacy group Environmental Defense, said one of the greatest dangers lies in the disintegration of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold about 20 percent of the fresh water on the planet. If either of the two sheets disintegrates, sea level could rise nearly 20 feet in the course of a couple of centuries, swamping the southern third of Florida and Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village.

That sounds pretty drastic, but nowhere on the film’s website or in the article does it say this level of water rising is a certainty, it simply states that it could be a catastrophic result from continued global warming. At any rate, the IPCC report doesn’t really strike me as much of a refutation or even a contradiction (at no point does it discuss the Greenland Ice Sheets, as far as I can see), but the conservative press trots it out all over the place, using a report that actually refutes everything conservatives have been peddling for decades to “refute” a tiny little part of Al Gore’s (Oscar-winning) documentary. Kind of gives you some insight into how scared shitless conservatives are that he might run for president.

But this is kind of beside the point. After this lame attempt at a gotcha, the Christian perspective really starts speaking in tongues.

Gore is at least partly right in his call for “creation care,” according to Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Human beings, Land said, have a responsibility to care for the planet, including cutting pollution in the atmosphere.

“We don’t have the right to treat the earth as if it is our own,” Land told Baptist Press. “It is God’s and He will hold us accountable for the stewardship of His creation. We should stress divine ownership, human stewardship and human responsibility.”

You heard him, folks. God is gonna be pissed if we don’t get our shit together. Maybe that’s why, for the first time ever, there are some evangelicals who actually read what the “scientists” on Al Gore’s side are saying. Or maybe it’s just the overwhelming evidence that they’re being presented with.

Jim Ball, a Baptist and director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, also said CO2 emissions may cause permanent damage to the world’s poorest communities if fossil fuel consumption is not curtailed and new energy sources remain untapped. Ball’s network, together with Creation Care magazine, sponsored a discussion in recent years that attempted to answer the question, “What would Jesus drive?”

“We are not the adjudicators of the science. But when we see major reports from scientists, signed off on by government officials, we have to take it seriously,” Ball told Baptist Press in an interview. “We need to accept what the majority of experts are telling us and move on from there.”

Hallelujah! I would say it’s a real sign of the times when a Baptist is asking if Jesus would want him to drive a hybrid, but then I realized that Mr. Ball is probably in the minority when he admits he is not one of the adjudicators of the science.

Because there has been no scientific consensus on the cause of global warming and other topics related to global climate change, Land and more than 20 other Christian public policy experts, such as Focus on the Family’s James Dobson and Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, refused last year to sign a statement on climate change that encouraged President Bush to seek a solution to environmental problems. The men also encouraged the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) not to take a position on the matter.

Let me take this moment to say, “what the fuck?” The consensus reached by the scientists in the report that this very article just fucking cited said, and I quote:

“The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment Report (TAR), leading to very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming…”

“Very high confidence” in this report means greater than a 90% chance of being accurate. I’ll bet global warming really likes those odds, but hey, I’m no adjudicator of the science or nothin’. The general consensus is actually that when an immobile, clunky international body of scientists like the IPCC says something is “very likely,” the debate isn’t just over; it was probably over several years before.

This article actually seems relatively balanced (if you’re the Pope) until you get to the wacky stuff about “creation care.” I’m no theologian, but it sounds like “creation care” states that God has our back as long as we assert our place as the center of the universe by taking out the garbage and hunting and legislating against gay people and stuff like that.

Even with several evangelical groups conceding that the world has been warmer in recent years, many confess that they are uncomfortable with the religion of global warming, a seemingly elevated and sometimes virtually divine view of nature offered by the political left. They have, as a result, taken steps to ensure that Christian evangelical teachings on climate change and human responsibility keep both man and nature in their respective positions in relation to God and to each other.

“It certainly is good theology to exercise creation care,” Land said. “And you have to balance the command in Genesis to have dominion over creation with the command to till it, or take care of it. Human beings are, of course, the highest form of creation, so anything we do should show the world that human beings come first. Nature is there to serve man, and it becomes unbiblical when you start talking about nature with a capital ‘N.’“

I know it’s silly to be pointing to this article and getting all in a snit about it, but the truth is, there’s a pretty large circulation for these kinds of publications, and when they continue to insist that there is somehow still a debate on climate change, it comes from a type of fear and ignorance that I have a hard time understanding. I realize that everyone’s a little nervous now what with Jesus’ tomb being found by James Cameron, and I realize that accepting the fact that God isn’t going to just keep global warming away with his holy magic wand doesn’t really jell with the omnipresence of a forgiving deity, it’s just hard for me to take it when quotes like this get bandied about:

“It is an expression of God’s determination that He is going to sustain all the normal cycles of this ecosphere that make it habitable for man and all God’s creatures. So we have God’s promise as a starting point for investigating the claims about global warming. This gives Christians and Bible-believing persons grounds for defending a more conservative position than environmentalists who not only ignore God’s promise to Himself, but also the fact that God wisely designed this earth to be resilient, with positive and negative feedback mechanisms that prevent great global catastrophes.”

I find it incredible, even by the standards of the Church, that an institution founded and built around faith in things that cannot be proven is so reticent to accept proven scientific fact. It speaks volumes upon volumes about the GOP and their alignment with these fundamentalists, and stands as yet another shining example of what fuels the stone-age mindset of our rickety republic.

It looks as if the threat of subpoenas by Senate Democrats has given the attorney general a bit of pause.

Gonzales told Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and other senior members of the committee that the administration will no longer oppose legislation limiting the attorney general’s power to appoint interim prosecutors. Gonzales also agreed to allow the committee to interview five top-level Justice Department officials as part of an ongoing Democratic-led probe into the firings, senators said after a tense, hour-long meeting in Leahy’s office suite.

This all comes too late for the prosecutors fired last December, but it is an encouraging example of a newly progressive congress attempting to roll back some of the rampant cronyism that has been a brazen signature of this administration.

Arlen Specter went all mafia-esque for his part, breaking Gonzales’ balls a little bit, or maybe he’s looking to have a sit-down.

“One day there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later,” Specter said sharply. In an interview with Reuters after the meeting with Gonzales, Specter said his comments did not imply he thought the attorney general should be replaced.

Of course not. And I’m sure he had nothing to do with the horse’s head in the attorney general’s bed.

I know the Giants don’t have a closer, and I know that Rich Aurilia is batting third, but fuck it. It’s baseball season, and Salon’s Video Dog went ahead and posted the George Brett pine tar incident videos to get people all revved up. I guess I’ll shamelessly echo their idea and post up some videos of great moments in Giants History to get myself all revved up.

How about Kevin Mitchell’s bare-handed catch? I was watching this game when it happened!

Here’s a better catch. Willie Mays in 1954, and what you don’t see is that he actually held the runners by firing a bullet back to second base.

Then there was the time that Fletch punched that picture of Tommy Lasorda. That was awesome.

And because I couldn’t find any decent online videos of the Shot Heard Round The World, here’s a really pissed off cat.

UPDATE: EZ’s right again. Although he did throw it to second, Willie Mays didn’t throw anyone out on that play, he simply held the runners. My bad, and I’ve changed it. Sheesh…

I’m not sure what we’ll end up calling this brewing scandal. “Wrongfully Terminated Federal Prosecutergate” has a certain ring to it, but I’ll abide by whatever Fox News wants to call it.

Six fired U.S. attorneys testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that they had been the target of complaints, improper telephone calls and thinly veiled threats from a high-ranking Justice Department official or members of Congress, both before and after they were abruptly removed from their jobs.

In back-to-back hearings in the Senate and House, former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico and five other former prosecutors recounted specific instances in which some said they felt pressured by Republicans on corruption cases. One said he was warned by a Justice official to keep quiet or face retaliation.

Technically, Alberto Gonzales and President Bush can hire and fire whomever the hell they want for these jobs, and they don’t have to give reason one for doing it. Trouble is, some of these prosecutors - most of whom are conservative appointees - got their knickers in a twist when the Gonzales claimed the firings were performance related.

“It should never have come to this,” said John McKay, former U.S. attorney for the Seattle-based western district of Washington, who was among those fired and is now an adjunct law professor at the Seattle University law school. “I resigned quietly and left. But when they started saying it was for ‘performance reasons,’ I couldn’t keep quiet any more.”

Whoops. Turns out that the paper trail here suggests that there were no real problems with these attorneys’ performance, after all.

Internal Justice Department documents, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, show evaluations offering positive reviews for all the prosecutors’ work as recently as last March. Mr. Gonzales said the written reviews were among several factors the department used to evaluate prosecutors, which include numbers and types of prosecutions and management issues.

It’s a scary thing when the executive branch of our government decides to throw the Justice Department under the bus for political gains. Back in the good ol’ days, Nixon basically fired everyone in the country who had a law degree in what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” (Begin time-warpy sounds)

In the most traumatic government upheaval of the Watergate crisis, President Nixon yesterday discharged Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus.

The President also abolished the office of the special prosecutor and turned over to the Justice Department the entire responsibility for further investigation and prosecution of suspects and defendants in Watergate and related cases.

(End time-warpy sounds)

So while this new move by the Bush Administration doesn’t on the face of it seem as drastic or quite as dirty as things got in the 70s, It’s fair to say that the details being provided by these prosecutors paint an unseemly picture of an administration willing to short-circuit any judicial continuity without any compunction, and one willing to actually make threats against those who might go public with it.

A fired federal prosecutor told a Senate committee Tuesday that he felt “leaned on” and sickened as Republican Sen. Pete Domenici hung up on him in disgust last fall when told that indictments in a corruption case against Democrats would not be issued before the fall elections.

“He said, ‘Are these going to be filed before November?”’ former federal prosecutor David Iglesias, one of eight U.S. attorneys summarily fired in recent months, told the panel. “I said I didn’t think so. And to which he replied, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ And then the line went dead.”

Damn, that’s rude. I guess they don’t call him Domenici for nothing.

The Bush administration also applied a heavy hand after the firings of eight prosecutors became public and some of the dismissed U.S. attorneys had been quoted in media, according to one of those ousted, Bud Cummins of Arkansas.

Cummins’ e-mail also shed light on the way some of those who were fired saw the dismissals. If they voluntarily agreed to testify before Congress, “they would see that as a major escalation of the conflict meriting some kind of unspecified form of retaliation,” Cummins wrote in the Feb. 20 e-mail.

Now, I’m not a very good lawyer, but I think it’s safe for me to assume that U.S. Attorneys have a lot of stuff on their plate already without having some rude-ass Bush crony calling them up to try and get them to discuss sealed indictments. Maybe none of this is criminal, but it certainly calls into further question the integrity of this Justice Department and how effective it can be if all the attorneys working for it feel like they could lose their jobs if they don’t prosecute Democrats fast enough. Along with Scooter Libby’s conviction for lying and obstructing justice, this is looking like a pretty twisted time for America’s judicial system as a whole.

While I wasn’t looking, the 49ers went and got themselves in a whole heap of trouble, signing free agents like they’re the frigging Yankees and instantly raising the Faithful’s expectations by millions of dollars in guaranteed money. Maybe it was the fact that I was a little late in renewing my season tickets, or perhaps John York realizes that his life may actually be in danger if he continues to piss off a city with such a liberal District Attorney. Whatever the reason, some serious spending has taken place, and all of a sudden Mike Nolan has some proven talent to help school the young-uns, and Alex Smith can count on having a few more snaps to work with, as one of the worst defenses in football just got a brazillion-dollar makeover.

How does that makeover look?  Well, to me it looks like they’ll have to be pretty good to justify the price-tag. Reading a headline about the San Francisco Football 49ers awarding a cornerback the richest contract for any defensive player (ever!) in this day and age made me think maybe my hangover had raged out of control, but there it is: 80 million dollars (22 million guaranteed) to Nate Clements. They also nailed down safety Micheal Lewis, DT Aubrayo Franklin, and WR Ashley Lelie for good measure, who for the record has the girliest football name in recent memory.

This certainly should make the 49ers better, and I don’t really care how much it costs to do that, but it’s right about now that the the old phrase “be careful what you wish for” comes to mind. While this doesn’t yet rival a Dan Snyder spending spree-cum-disaster, this team should already be expected to compete for the title of a horrendous division, and so one can only hope that Nolan and his staff are ready to walk the tightrope without a net. He’s never been one to make excuses and I respect him for that, but we’ve all made those excuses for him. When training camp opens, this is going to look like an actual football team for the first time in years, and my excitement is only slightly dulled by the fact that Young Master York is still hell-bent on bringing the Lombardi Trophy to Santa Clara.

I try not to think about Ann Coulter too much, much less write about her on these pages, but my boy Marco left me a voicemail imploring me to write something about the shit she said at CPAC 2007, and so I must. I’ll give you a call sometime tonight, brah.

The thing is, the more people write and gasp about the feces that Skullface Coulter craps out of her word-hole, the smellier and more relevant said feces becomes. That said, my general opinion of her reads something like this: She’s hard to look at, and the only reason she offends me is because she isn’t funny. Much like the rest of this country’s political pundits (on both sides), her jokes are tired, badly delivered, and nothing she says really interests me at all. She’s basically like Jay Leno without the tits. This isn’t the first time she’s called someone a faggot, and it definitely won’t be the last.

It should be noted that, at the time I’m writing this, the CPAC website has a header with a picture of Skully herself, along with a picture of Tom DeLay. Most of the Republican presidential candidates spoke there this weekend and later tried to disassociate themselves from Coulter, and as the New York Times says:

The criticisms by the Republican candidates put them in a difficult position because the Conservative Political Action Conference has been gathering for conservative and Republican leaders for over 25 years.

It’s certainly not a surprise to see that the GOP base is so supportive of homophobes and corruption at the highest levels of government, especially when you look at what happened with them at the helm for six years, so this is a pretty stupid news item in general. I imagine they’re not too concerned with losing the gay vote, anyhow.

Actually, in the long run, I think that this meaningless utterance will have a positive affect on gay rights in this country. As with the Hardaway incident a few weeks back, these plain-speaking morons are making it real obvious in national public forums how similar the Gay Rights movement today is to the Civil Rights movement back in the day, and one can only imagine what the public reaction would be if Ann Coulter had instead called Barack Obama a “nigger.” I’ll bet a bunch of people at CPAC would still have applauded.

The thing is, the more airtime that is granted to people like Skullface, the more Americans will see that the liberals really aren’t making it up: Republicans are assholes. I wasn’t born an optimist, but I’d like to think most people in this country are decent folks who don’t want the country to be run by crotchety old white shitheads. At least, not any more.