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1. If you ever wonder what I'm talking about when I bring up depressing, de-industrialized midwestern America, visit Rockford.

It looks like it was hit by chemical weapons or the plague; all of the buildings are standing but nary a soul is to be found. The only businesses operating downtown are bars (about 30, of course), churches, and payday loan sharks. Rockford appears to be in a pitched battle with Fresno and Olathe, KS for the most depressing places I've ever seen.
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2. You should pay rapt attention to this blog, Apparatchicks. You should do so because it is good, which is the best of all reasons to do anything.

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For the next 10 days I will be van-touring with Tremendous Fucking – possibly coming to a city near you. Regardless of whether or not our music appeals to you, feel free to come out and say hello if we happen to be where you live.

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Don't worry, this site will continue to be updated daily.

Thursday, 6/12 – Chicago – Cobra Lounge (10 PM, free)
Friday, 6/13 – Manitowoc, WI – The Attic (9 PM, w/ IfIHadaHiFi)
Saturday, 6/14 – Rockford, IL – CJ's Lounge (10 PM)
Tuesday, 6/17 – St. Paul, MN – Big V's (9 PM)
Wednesday, 6/18 – Iowa City, IA (TBD)
Thursday, 6/19 – St. Louis – FUBAR (w/ the Murder Junkies)
Friday, 6/20 – Champaign, IL (still trying to figure this one out)
Saturday, 6/21 – Indianapolis – Melody Inn (9 PM w/ IfIHadaHiFi)

One of the great disillusioning moments of my young Catholic upbringing happened my senior year in high school.

While performing some task (I can't remember the specifics, but it didn't involve fingering) in my high school's rectory (giggle) I discovered a binder I can only describe as the Cliff's Notes of Catholic mass homilies. For the non-Papists, homilies are sermons of 5-10 minutes that follow the reading of the Gospel. The presiding priest uses this time to relate the message of the Gospel to current events or contemporary life.

As a young person I always thought it was pretty cool that priests were such good public speakers and could so readily connect the Gospels to current events. Needless to say, it was a little soul-crushing to learn that there is a book of canned sermons the clergy presumably rely on heavily. Of course it makes sense that such a thing exists (although today I assume this has migrated online). Only a child could to have thought that the world's people of the cloth were coming up with this stuff extemporaneously every day.
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Still, it bothered me quite a bit to realize the extent to which my priests were phoning it in. Essentially the church could have hired a temp, slapped a cassock on him, and had him read off cue cards.

It should come as no suprise that this practice not only continues but has become the province of interest groups. While ideally these "cheat sheets" would be written by jolly, rotund, white-bearded monks in the Carpathians who seek nothing more than to spread the message of Jesus, in practice they are one step away from being written by Karl Rove. Much like interest groups write complete bills because they know Congressmen are lazy and more likely to play along if the work is done for them, Christian extremists assume that clergy will be unable to resist the temptation of a pret-a-porter sermon. They're busy people, right?

Anus-obsessed religious right activists at the Family Research Council and Alliance Defense Fund are getting serious about pre-packaging politically appropriate sermons for their churches. According to the FRC's Kenyn Cureton, they are working with the ADF on "a series of sermons this fall for pastors to preach, so that they educate their people on the issues." OK, great. Sermons are about educating people on "issues" and tenets of religious faith. That's not quite what he means, though:

"We're gonna be talking about the value of life, the value of family and the value of freedom, basically talking about abortion and stem-cell research," he continued, "and then also about the gay agenda and then finally about our Christian heritage and how it's being stripped from every corner of society. And then finally we're gonna be doing a candidate comparison message that is going to ask pastors to cross the line."

First of all, I love the construction of the first part – mentioning larger issues like life, family, and freedom followed by "basically talking about abortion and stem-cell research." So it's not really about freedom, family, or life. It's about abortion. And stem-cell research. More importantly, the "candidate comparison message" appears to be little more than an inducement for clergy to break the law.

It's no secret that much of what non-profit, tax-exempt interest groups do politicially (i.e., their hilariously one-sided, myopic, and biased "voter guides") are little more than thinly-veiled electioneering that happens to tiptoe around FEC and IRS guidelines to the satisfaction of a few attorneys. Clergy can legally talk about "the issues" until they are blue in the face and they have plenty of leeway to drop all kinds of not-so-subtle hints about what parishoners should do on Election Day.

What the FRC fails to realize is that clergy also have the right to tell parishoners to vote for a specific candidate – so long as they're willing to kiss their tax exempt status goodbye.
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While some groups are going out of the way to remind churches and clergy the risks they run by taking the FRC's negligent advice, some of the less intellectually gifted will no doubt take the bait. It's imperative that we allow houses of worship to act as partisan political organizations whenever they feel like that is worth relinquishing their tax exemptions. If they believe this is an unjust law, follow the example of Emerson (or the Book of Daniel) and break it – but don't forget the part in which Daniel and Emerson emphasize accepting the practical consequences of that decision. Above all, don't lightly disregard the lessons to be learned from pastors who "crossed the line" in 2004.

I'm aware of the fact that access to the site has been choppy for the past 36 hours and I am in the process of migrating it to a new host.
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Hopefully said host will suck less.

There's this. New album's on iTunes now too. Speaking of horrible aural spectacles.

Just because.

I happen to know an extraordinarily talented carpenter, and if you have money burning a hole in your pocket (and a hole in your soul that can only be filled with commerce) ask yourself if you need a Triforce cutting board. Or a Space Invaders cutting board. I think you do.

But wait. There's more. As in, floor-to-ceiling modular Tetris bookshelves. Hold on, let me say that one more time: modular Tetris pieces which can be assembled into a bookcase.

You know you want it.

No, not the post-World War II plan. The Thurgood Marshall plan.

He's often remembered as a piece of trivia – America's first black Supreme Court justice – but his tenure on the Court was relatively inconsequential. Marshall should be better remembered for masterminding the NAACP legal strategy that culminated in Brown v Board of Education. He understood that the Court would never declare segregation unconstitutional in one fell swoop. The way to win was to paint them into a corner with an incremental, interrelated series of cases. Baby steps, essentially. Everyone remembers Brown, but there would have been no Brown without Sweatt v Painter. There would have been no Sweatt without Sipuel v Oklahoma. No Sipuel without Gaines v Canada. And so on. It was calculated, it required phenomenal patience, and it worked. Each case poked a small hole in the legal basis for segregation until so little remained that it was crushed under the weight of Brown.

Quaint story. I wonder if the anti-death penalty folks have ever heard it. Or if they have a plan. Or, if what they're doing constitutes a plan, why it's awful.

To absolutely no one's surprise, the Supreme Court rejected the arguments in Baze and Bowling v Rees on Monday. The basis of the challenge was that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment – because people performing the procedure can botch it and cause considerable pain to the condemned.

Seriously. That's the argument. That's the argument that anti-death penalty organizations apparently thought was going to do it. This is what they devote their limited resources to.

What's the strategy here? Anti-death penalty arguments based on the 8th Amendment haven't worked for 225 years. Was there a reasonable expectation that the Scalia-Alito-Thomas-Roberts court was suddenly going to be the one that bought it? They didn't buy it, and they didn't buy it because it is an absolutely retarded argument.

Yes, there are dozens of citeable examples of botched executions. Cruelty-based arguments are what eventually phased out Ol' Sparky in favor of lethal injection. But for anti-death penalty people, getting one method replaced with another is not even a hollow victory. It's nothing.

I absolutely detest the death penalty, and not because I think it's "cruel" or "uncivilized" or any other nonsense. It is statistically proven to be applied disproportionately to blacks and Latinos. Period. Since reinstatement in 1976 (note that it was briefly unconstitutional thanks to an Equal Protection-based argument) there have been 15 white people executed for killing a black person. There have been 223 black people executed for killing white people. In 1990, the Reagan-Bush era GAO concluded:

"In 82% of the studies [reviewed], race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty, i.e., those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks."

Texas manages to have twice as many blacks and Latinos on Death Row as white people (268-121) despite the fact that the state's population is 71% white. I guess white people in Texas don't commit many murders. More accurately, when they do commit murder "something" about their crime just isn't as heinous as when those scary brown people do it.

The Supreme Court isn't simply going to change its mind on the death penalty. Eighth Amendment challenges will, at best, produce new methods of execution. A coherent strategy based on chipping away at various states' inequalities in seeking capital punishment (and getting it from overwhelmingly white juries) might succeed in a 10 to 15 year timeframe. An non-strategy of randomly litigating of every half-assed idea the 25 year-olds at Legal Aid concoct is guaranteed to accomplish nothing, especially when the basis of the latest lawsuit sounds suspiciously like Rush Limbaugh's impression of a whiny liberal argument.

So, remember when Gen. Saint Petraeus made his first appearance before Congress in the fall? Remember how it was anticipated by the media with all the fanfare of a new Harry Potter novel? Well, he did it again this week. Am I completely off the rails to say that it attracted as much interest as a new collection of Cathy comics?

I feel like we are just so goddamn tired as a nation. Seven years' worth of scripted, stage-managed sheep shows with pre-determined outcomes, seven years of pointing-out-the-obvious critical commentary in response, and seven years of none of it making the slightest difference. At this point we're too tired to put any energy into going through the motions. Media coverage of the recent Petraeus Day was noticeably half-hearted. It's as if they are far too tired to play along with the "Gee, I wonder what he's going to say?" game a second time. My friends over at Crooks & Liars covered it critically, but it's obvious that their hearts aren't in it. There are only so many times one can say the same thing over and over and over again. I think someone wrote a melancholy song about this sort of thing.

I've long been of the opinion that this is all by design; they rely on the fact that Americans will simply get tired of protesting things they can't change. For seven years it has been made perfectly clear that nothing you say, do, or think will have the slightest bearing on the political process. When challenged, people either fight back or withdraw into a shell. Devoted Obama acolytes aside, are a lot of Americans going the latter route? I can't wait to see what a McCain-Clinton race will do to whatever remains of our nation's faith in the efficacy of politics.

In case anyone was wondering, the miracle of the IP address reveals that the comments about how America isn't even remotely racist on today's post got to this website via an old picture of Pat Buchanan I'm hosting which is linked on the "NEW YORK WHITE PRIDE" blogspot page.
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Ha ha! Ha. Ha. Oh man. Good times.

Well, I'm happy with that explanation.
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I was starting to think my regular readers suddenly turned into a bunch of backward, cousin-fucking racists. Fortunately the backward, cousin-fucking racists are a merely visitors.
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The bridge between our worlds is temporary and they will soon go back to tending their meth labs.
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I'm busy preparing for an academic conference (which, as a species, share much in common with the old PC game "Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time") so this is brief. Apologies.

The more conspiratorial are doubtlessly agitated by this Wired piece which reveals that military higher-ups (including Gen. St. Petraeus) discussed a plan to "clandestinely recruit or hire bloggers" to "verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message." Certainly many folks must cast skeptical glances at the month-long mouth-frothing frenzy over the Petraeus/MoveOn advertisement in light of this information. From my perspective, though, I have to think the military considered this briefly before determining that it was a wasteful, redundant use of resources. Have the people who suggested this ever seen Free Republic? Instaputz? Jonah Goldberg? Little Green Footballs? Fox News? Come on. These people need no encouragement and no compensation.

That said, we know that neither the military nor the incumbent administration are above paying right-wing media hacks to try extra-hard to push the faith.

(h/t Left in the West)