In the great state of Oregon this week, Carmen Kontur-Gronquist , mayor of the small town of Arlington, managed to get herself recalled. What did she do to anger her fellow citizens? Blow up the budget? Tick off the small town aristocracy? Some kind of bizarre sexual deviance? No, no my friends - long before she ever considered running for office, she had a picture taken of herself in your basic set of underwear. At some point, the photos managed to get up on her personal and private myspace account. Someone who had access to the account copied the photo and it eventually got around to the citizenry.
In being asked why the recalled the mayor, school board member Grant Wilkins provided the nugget:
People aren’t laughing with us, they’re laughing at us
Well, to be honest Grant, I wasn’t laughing at anyone until YOU RECALLED YOUR MAYOR OVER A PHOTO TOO TAME FOR A TARGET CATALOGUE.
Barack Hussein Obama
Informed Comment talks about Barack Hussein Obama’s name.
I want to say something about Barack Hussein Obama’s name. It is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of General Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin.
Anglican Church Continues to Fracture
Three Anglican churches have voted to split with the church of Canada and join the South American province.
In all, ten parishes have now split with the Canadian church, all of them because of a fundamental disagreement over its stance on blessing same sex unions.
We spoke to Steve Schuh from Vancouver. Also joining us was The Most Reverend Gregory James Venables, Presiding Bishop of the Province of the Southern Cone. He’s also the Bishop of Argentina and the leader of the parishes that have split with the Anglican Church of Canada. Archbishop Gregory James Venables spoke to us from Buenos Aires.
Audio interview here.
Atheist on Atheist Media
Reason magazine reviews Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, concluding that he is unfailingly critical of religion.
Pullman paints every character connected to the Church or religion, from the fascistic zealots of the Magisterium to the crazed monk in the world of the dead who stubbornly believes he’s in paradise, with an antipathy that sometimes recalls Ayn Rand’s demonization of her welfare-state bureaucrats.
More Linkage
Map of America’s most sinful cities. Who would have though that Salt Lake City managed to make the top 7 in couple categories?
The Pew Forum has published a thorough survey on religious identity in America. Among the findings: one-tenth of Americans are ex-Catholics and the Jehovah Witnesses lose two-thirds of their children but still manage to grow.
Lew Rockwell writes about the triumph of the Red-State fascists. Microsoft fined EU899 Million for “non-compliance” with anti-trust laws. The company overcharged for patent licenses that rivals needed to connect products to the Windows platform, the European Commission said.
Eskimo village sues over global warming.William F. Buckley dead!
To whom it may concern:
I can’t get into the forum, although I can get into the blog. So here’s my error message.
It’s broken for me too. Thainamu, if you need to get to the forums, you can use this link: http://forums.zealfortruth.org/index.php?f=13
The forums work except for the main front page of the forums. You can use the “Jump to” dropdown list to browse to a particular subforum that you want to see.
I sent an email out to Chris earlier this morning. I think it is something with all his domains, as I see error messages on top of his websites too.
I find it hard to believe that a mayor was recalled over photos as tame as these. There must have been significant existing disatisfaction with her already.
For some reason I cannot log in properly at the moment, but here is a follow up link in the ongoing Anglican Church schism:
JI Packer threatened with suspension
Do we really need to have the photo right there in the article? I know it’s fairly tame, but that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate.