Category: Uncategorized

From the NY Times:

April 26, 2005

Three Boys Die in Fire Caused by Stove Left on for Passover

By ANDY NEWMAN

A fire caused by stovetop burners left on for Passover killed three boys as it whipped through a Brooklyn apartment before dawn yesterday, a few hours after the family had gone to bed at the end of a night of feasting, singing and celebrating.

Ten other people were injured in the fire, including two sisters who jumped out a second-story window and three firefighters. The boys who died were two brothers, Shyia and Yidal Matyas, 15 and 13, and their 7-year-old nephew, Shlomi Falkowitz.

A fire official said that the Orthodox Jewish custom of leaving a flame burning during Sabbath and holidays has caused 35 kitchen fires at Bedford Gardens, the 600-unit apartment complex in Williamsburg, in the last several months.

Judaic law prohibits any work on days of rest, including lighting or extinguishing a flame, a rule many families deal with by leaving fires burning so they can heat food when it is needed. This year, Passover began at sundown on Saturday, as the weekly Sabbath was ending, so many stoves were left burning for days. The Matyas family told fire marshals that they had at least two burners lighted continuously since Friday, a fire official said.

Will the Lord now be pleased that the flames were left on? Even if human deaths resulted from the strict observation of an irrational and dangerous religious edict?

According to The NY Times: “At its height, “Today” had two million more viewers than ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Now NBC’s most profitable program may be in danger of falling behind: for the first time in years, the gap between “Today” and “Good Morning America” recently narrowed to just 270,000 viewers.”

Blame is falling on perky Katie Couric, the paper says: ” her image has grown downright scary: America’s girl next door has morphed into the mercurial diva down the hall. At the first sound of her peremptory voice and clickety stiletto heels, people dart behind doors and douse the lights.”

It isn’t fair to character assassinate Couric………the dog and pony farce these news entertainers put on every morning is really the issue. “Today” is a profit whore employed by NBC to seduce and sell to America as it crawls out of bed.

Rather than put the onus on “the strained chemistry between Couric and Matt Lauer”, NBC should examine the content of Today: children, Christianity, and celebrities. The network, led by the militaristic General Electric Corporation, is tripping over itself to promote Red State values. Such stalwart guys as Tim Russert and Lauer, lob softball questions at the Bushes, while trying to ooze worship for the Papacy. Could “conservative” Americans actually be turning to “Good Morning America” because it is more liberal and less strident?

Typical morning segments on Today might include lengthy reports on the Michael Jackson trial, the latest contestant fired from “The Apprentice” and how soccer moms can balance children and fitness. NBC panders to the narrow and narcissistic, letting the entire rest of the world go to hell. If there is a publicist promoting a book, a brand new NBC show to push, or the latest news on Jen and Brad, then Katie is right on top of it.

The fakeness of “Today” means that authors or directors or actors are never questioned honestly, their publicists pre-approve all the questions. What the audience sees is propaganda, pure and simple. TV viewers have caught on and no longer accept the BS.

Global warming, child poverty, the war in Iraq, mass slaughter in Africa, revolution in South America, North Korea’s nuclear weapons, child prostitution in Thailand, India’s race to surpass America in technology and medicine…none of it compares to Al Roker reporting from a cheesecake eating contest in Texas or Ann Curry discussing Nicole Kidman’s favorite brand of nail polish.

Congressional corruption, from Tom DeLay to Bill Frist is barely given a ten second report, while countless time and money is spent on the latest “box office smash” or “best seller” or “hottest SUV” or “newest teen trend”. They are hysterical and frantic at Rockefeller Center in the maddening race to make the rich richer, the famous more infamous. Katie and company are only following orders.

washingtonpost.com: . . . Smearing Christian Judges: “washingtonpost.com

. . . Smearing Christian Judges

By Paul Gaston

Saturday, April 23, 2005; Page A19

People calling themselves Christians are gathering once again for a crusade against what they consider to be the secular humanist subversion of Christian values. This time the object of their wrath is the judiciary. In the wake of the fanatical and fruitless assaults against the judicial system for letting Terri Schiavo die, the Family Research Council will convene tomorrow what it calls ‘Justice Sunday,’ a live simulcast to pit Christian values against ‘our out-of-control courts.’

The burgeoning assault on the American judicial system by right-wing Christians is an integral part of their attack on ‘godless’ secular humanism. According to them, secular humanists nurture a culture that promotes abortion; encourages gay marriage; prohibits prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance in permissive schools that indoctrinate students with Darwin’s ‘theory’ of evolution; preaches moral relativism; and generally threatens to subvert the Christian foundations of the republic.

What these self-avowed Christians do not acknowledge — and what the American public seems little aware of — is that the war they are waging is actually against other people calling themselves Christians. To simplify: Right-wing and fundamentalist Christians are really at war with left-wing and mainstream Christians. It is a battle over both the meaning and practice of Christianity as well as over the definition and destiny of the republic. Secular humanism is a bogeyman, a smoke screen obscuring the right-wing Christians’ struggle for supremacy.

The assault on the judiciary is especially revealing. The vicious attacks on Judge George Greer, the Florida jurist who presided over the Schiavo case, reveal the bizarre nature of right-wing Christian fantasies. A regular recipient of hate mail and threats against his life that required him to walk to court with an armed marshal, Judge Greer is a lifelong Southern Baptist, a regular in church and a conservative Republican. None of those credentials protected him from the assaults of fellow Christians, including messages saying he would go straight to Hell. What he found ‘exasperating,’ he told a journalist, ‘is that my faith is based on forgiveness because that’s what God did. . . . When I see people in my faith being extremely judgmental, it’s very disconcerting.’

Nearly all of the demonized judges are, in fact, practicing Christians, not secular humanists. Perhaps half of them are Republican appointees, and at least that many regard themselves as conservatives. In addition to Greer, most of the judges of the 11th Circuit who upheld his rulings, as well as most of the Supreme Court justices who declined to intervene, consider themselves Christian. And so it goes around the country, even including many, if not most, of the judges in the California-based 9th Circuit, the regular object of President Bush’s ridicule. And, lest we forget, Charles Darwin himself was a serious Christian.

The history of a Christian church divided against itself is a long and bloody one. People calling themselves Christians have stood for war and peace, subjugation and brotherhood, communism and capitalism, privilege and equality, enslavement and liberty, imperialism and isolation.

That is one reason Thomas Jefferson insisted on religious liberty in the new republic. In his Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, he wrote that ‘millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity.’

The present war within the Christian fold is perhaps more threatening to the republic than any of the previous intramural disputes. Right-wing religious zealots, working in partnership with the secularists who have advised President Bush, are a threat to the most fundamental of American principles. The founders of our nation welcomed and planned for spirited debate over public policies, including the role of the judiciary. But as sons of the Enlightenment, they looked to found a republic in which the outcome of those debates would turn on reason and evidence, not on disputed religious dogma. They planned wisely for principles that are now under wide assault.

All Americans, of whatever religious or non-religious persuasion, need to be on the alert to preserve those principles. The burden falls especially heavily on the mainstream Christians who are slowly awakening to the gravity of the challenge facing them. Too long tolerant of their brethren, too much given to forgiveness rather than to confrontation, they need to mount a spirited, nationwide response to what constitutes a dangerous distortion of Christian truths and a frightening threat to the republic they love.

The writer is professor emeritus of southern and civil rights history at the University of Virginia.

� 2005 The Washington Post Company”