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POPSThe Family: The Hidden Christian Fundamentalist Power in the U.S. A journalist's penetrating look at the untold story of christian fundamentalism's most elite organization, a self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful They are the Family—fundamentalism's avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen—congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a "leadership led by God," to be won not by force but through "quiet diplomacy." Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside its walls.
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POPSFlag Pin Festish The flag fetish strikes me as a case of Protesting Too Much. If you’re confident in your possession of something, you don’t have to wear it on your sleeve, your gable, your bumper, or your T-shirt. In fact, the latter used to be considered disrespectful, a kind of desecration. Americans live surrounded by other Americans; there’s no need for a show of defiance. We’re not like the English and the French, who fought one another for centuries, still have cultural misunderstandings, and can see each other’s countries on a clear day. So why this bravado, even insecurity, which I think must lie beneath gratuitious, context-free displays of patriotic devotion
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POPSRapid Deployment of Bibles to US Troops Linked to from Rush Limbaugh site. Funny how he decries Mike Huckabee's populist win while advertising Bibles to troops. This is a fight to decide who will own and manipulate the words, name, likeness and image of the American God. Go to site to learn more about the contents of the kit.
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POPSHuckabee and the Fascist Evangelical Revolution A chilling vision of what America could become. The entire article is worth reading - these people will do everything they can to destroy the earth and inhabitants to fulfill their belief in the biblical apocalypse. http://www.apocalypsesoon.org/count.html Huckabee may stumble and falter in later primaries, but his right-wing Christian populism is here to stay. the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Labor unions, civil rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the work force to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship.
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POPS24: Torture Nation With the help of the hit TV show, 24 , torture has reached pop-culture (even punchline) status in America. Mayer helps show how Charles Krauthammer's near-non-existent "ticking clock" scenario has been popularized by "24" in such a way as to normalize torture in the public consciousness. In five seasons of "24", there have been sixty-seven torture scenes, and all of them are portrayed as effective, productive, and justified. Military cadets, weaned on '24", now tend to see nothing wrong with it. Soldiers in the field have internalized the show's ethics. One witness to this is Tony Lagouranis, a former army interrogator in Iraq. He tells Mayer that some soldiers in Iraq just replicated the "24" scenes in real life - even though torture is still nominally illegal under American law for the regular military (the Bush administration has created a special CIA torture unit to do the job instead).
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