October 25, 2004 by s.z.

Two Videos You Should Buy As recommended by Southern Baptist Convention News. First, that documentary about George Bush's faith (sure, we mentioned this previously, but the SBC News piece has some new details): The 70-minute documentary, "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House," includes interviews with friends and religious leaders and clips from Bush himself. [...] His uncle, William "Bucky" Bush, says that Bush's Christian faith helped the future president overcome a problem with alcohol in the mid-1980s. As the story goes, Bush made a promise to his wife, Laura, that he was going to quit drinking. "When he made that commitment to Laura, he was suddenly stone-cold sober," William Bush says. "And he had the character and the willingness and the capacity to remain that way the rest of his life. I'm sure it was his Christian faith that gave him the strength to do so." Yup, he was suddenly stone-cold sober after 20 years of living in a chemical wonderland.  Did the psychological problems he drank (and drugged) to escape disappear too?  Did he suddenly gain all the knowledge and maturity he should have obtained during those 20 years he drank away?  Um, no.  But that doesn't mean his sudden stone-cold sobriety isn't a testament to his Christian faith. [Bush friend Doug Wead] tells a story from the 1980s of how Bush pointedly turned away the advances of a woman in an office setting. The woman was being extra friendly to Bush, and Bush made it a point to be somewhat unfriendly in return, Wead said. "On one occasion," Wead says, "a public figure ... came in and said, 'She just wants you to relax, George. She's just trying to help you relax. You've hurt her feelings.' [Bush] said, 'Good.' -- he yelled it so loud you could hear it through all the offices. He said, 'Not interested. I'm a married man. I'm glad she got the message.'" The story underscores Bush's integrity, Wead says. Yes, being rude and obnoxious is how one demonstrates one's integrity.  Supposedly this Last Temptation of the Bush occured during the Bush-Quayle campaign in 1988 -- do you think the public figure who told George to just relax with the nice lady was Poppy Bush? Anyway, we still haven't set up Church O'Crap, and so haven't got our free copy of this video, but I imagine prices will really drop after November, so maybe we'll buy one then. SBC News also lets us know about a rockin', edgy, MTV for Christian teens video series called "Fuel."  It's for youth leaders to show during Bible study classes.  NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Whether playing games, flipping stations or watching a DVD, teens gladly stare at a TV screen. Jim Johnston notices this when his teenage son and his son’s friends congregate in his family’s bonus room. "Bonus room"?  Is that a Baptist thing, a Southern thing, or just a dorky thing? “Teenagers are so media-oriented,” said Johnston, interim marketing director in the church resources division at LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention. “The best way to bring them into God’s Word is by using all the technological tools we’ve been given.” So, LifeWay created “Fuel: Igniting a New Life with God’s Story.” Fuel is a digital Bible study aimed at seventh- through 12th-graders, designed to be a “rockin,’ edgy, life-changing experience,” Johnston said. I'm sure that's what is was designed to be, but ... “When we asked student ministry leaders, we found out that more than 80 percent of them wanted some kind of video component to use for Bible study,” Johnston wrote in an explanatory article on the Fuel website. “That said one thing to me -- these leaders knew their teenagers inside and out.” But hopefully, not biblically. York showed his youth group the promotional first segment of Fuel that tells the story of Noah’s flood and features a segment with a skateboarding theme. “I’ve never thought they actually heard the Bible study until now,” he said. “The material is the best I’ve seen.” You all recall how Noah took two of every kind of animal on his skateboard, right? “We’re trying to make sure and reach the kids that are a little different,” Johnston explained. “There are segments about skateboarding and other things that students are into. We wanted to make sure we appealed to the teenagers.” And all kids, even the different ones, are into skateboading!  To the max!  So, by mentioning it, the Bible is now relevent to them! Each volume of Fuel includes 12 sessions presented on two DVDs and three CD-ROMs. Each session has three parts: “The Spark” is designed to capture the students’ attention using themes such as skateboarding and prepare them for the more in-depth material to come; Wow, the kids these days sure love their skateboarding.  “Fanning the Flame” features straightforward interviews with teens who have a variety of opinions and backgrounds; and “Combustion,” the meat of each session, draws on the skills of an experienced youth leader to present the Bible story. “The videos relate to what they’re doing now, but it’s not cheesy,” York said. “The Combustion part presents it in a way that makes you want to hear more.” Gee, how could having a youth leader tell how the story of Noah relates to skateboarding be cheesy? “It’s stuff similar to MTV, but it presents the Word,” York said. And, as Dennis Prager informed us last week, MTV is "the greatest destroyer of young people's minds and souls in American history."  So we're glad the Baptist kids are going to hell along with everybody else now. To view sample materials, request a promo DVD and learn more about Fuel, visit www.lifeway.com/Fuel/ Wow, I could get a free fuel DVD for Church O'Crap's youth program!  I hope you guys like skateboarding, because that will be the theme of our Wednesday night Bible study group.   6:55:53 AM

'Any Sassy Children Living in YOUR Home?' That's the question WorldNetDaily has been posing for several days now.  Sometimes they ask it out of the blue, and sometimes it's in connection with an article on John Kerry winning the Nickolodeon presidential poll, or one on how a kid killed his mother's ex-boyfriend for making the family move.  (And maybe it's just me, but manslaughter goes beyond what I would call sassiness.)  But in any case, it's nice that WorldNetDaily Press has a book to go with every other WorldNetDaily news article.  So, let's learn about dealing sassy kids, won't we? After raising his own six children and learning many things the hard way, author and pastor Reb Bradley wrote a practical guide to bringing up kids that uses biblical wisdom as its basis. Entitled simply "Child Training Tips," Bradley's book presents common obstacles to successful parenting and solutions to help overcome them.  Child training, much like dog training, is mostly about swatting the dog (or child) with a newspaper when it misbehaves, like the Bible says. Bradley especially targets those parents who are exasperated with their kids.  "Parents who are exasperated with their children are missing the blessing that God says children are to bring to their lives. … If our children are not a blessing to us, it is not because an alien tampered with their genetic code as they grew in the womb. It is, most likely, because we have not succeeded in some element of their training." While Pete found a guy who claims that the Bible says that aliens (and the devil) HAVE been tampering with human DNA (it was part of some plan, probably dreamed up by Dick Cheney, to keep Christ from being born, or something), I agree with Pastor Bradley that that's probably not why your children are sassy. Among the obstacles Bradley covers are: parental defensiveness, confusing raising children with training them, misunderstanding human depravity and trust in worldly "experts." "For basic parenting principles … we must look primarily to God's Word. To look elsewhere guarantees trouble," Bradley writes. Yeah, what do those damned child psychologists or school teachers or Child Protective Services know about training children?  If the Bible says to beat your children, then you'd better not go against God's Word.  And never misunderstand human depravity -- while it might seem like sneaking a popsicle before dinner is no big deal, it's what caused God to destroy Sodom and Gomorra, so you'd better beat the depravity out of your kid before God destroys him or her. Bradley warns against the "child-run" home, where decisions are made or influenced by the children. Some statements that might be overheard in such a home, Bradley says, are: "I can't make that for dinner at our house, the kids just won't eat it." "We can't go there, the kids will be bored!" "We could never take our children into the church service. They wouldn't last." In an adult-run home, children eat what they're given, are fascinated by whatever their parents say they will take an interest in, and can last through even an 8-hour service.  Or else!  You sure don't want the children influencing any of the decisions that involve them -- if God had wanted them to be individuals deserving of some measure of respect, He wouldn't have made them little, would've He? To re-establish control of the home, he writes, parents must: "1) Keep your objective in mind – subjection of their will, 2) Require quick obedience, and 3) Teach your children to obey without being told 'why.'" Yup, once again it's all about breaking the kiddies' will, demanding quick obedience, and requiring blind obedience.  Because the only good child is a quiet, respectful, cowed child who will tamp down his rage until he has children of his own.  The subtitle to the book is "What I Wish I Knew When My Children Were Young."  But I imagine it might be rephrased as, "What I wish I knew before my children denounced me on Oprah." 5:52:06 AM

We Don't Need No Quaint Geneva Conventions  Today's NY Times features the first part in a series about the plan to do away with both the Geneva Conventions and the Bill of Rights when dealing with prisoners taken in the War on Terror. To me, the scariest thing detailed in the article was the way the group drafting the policy was soon excluding anyone who who argued for basic fairness for prisoners, since toughness and ruthlessness (or being "forward-leaning") was the official mind set (you know, since 9/11 changed everything, including our country's core values). The State Department legal adviser, William H. Taft IV, was shunned by the lawyers who dominated the detainee policy, officials said. Although Mr. Taft had served as the deputy secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, more conservative colleagues whispered that he lacked the constitution to fight terrorists. "He was seen as ideologically squishy and suspect," a former White House official said. Sadly, while this administration wanted to be Dirty Harry, it just ended up being Sledge Hammer -- sadly, in their efforts to be brutally efficient, they forgot to be, you know, efficient. In devising the new system, many officials said they had Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda in mind. But in picking through the hundreds of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, military investigators have struggled to find more than a dozen they can tie directly to significant terrorist acts, officials said. Also scary was how White House lawyers were using terrorism as a opportunity (or pretext) to expand the power of the President.  And really chilling was that many of the lawyers involved in this were members of the Federalist Society.  (When you recall that Ann Coulter is a member of the Federalist Society, you realize why this fact should keep you up at night.)  Also interesting (in an apalling way) is how how the people who should have been involved in formulating the policy (most notably Condi Rice and Colin Powell, but also the military lawyers) weren't included -- because the super-secret plan to catch evil doers, whisk them away to our torture chambers, and hold them without charges until they told us where they stashed the WMDs was too macho to share with girls or, you know, wimps. Senior officials of the State Department and the National Security Council staff were excluded from final discussions of the policy, even at a time when they were meeting daily about Afghanistan with the officials who were drafting the order. According to two people involved in the process, Mr. Cheney advocated withholding the draft from Ms. Rice and Secretary Powell. When the two cabinet members found out about the military order - upon its public release - Ms. Rice was particularly angry, several senior officials said. Spokesmen for both officials declined to comment. Mr. Bush played only a modest role in the debate, senior administration officials said. In an initial discussion, he agreed that military commissions should be an option, the officials said. Later, Mr. Cheney discussed a draft of the order with Mr. Bush over lunch, one former official said. The president signed the three-page order on Nov. 13.   So, it's Cheney who should be tried along with the military, intelligence, and contract employees implicated in the murder and abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, not Rumseld or Bush.  Also apallingly interesting is that the White House lawyers came up with a plan which even Ashcroft thought might have gone too far: one that didn't grant the defendants a presumption of innocence.  Some Justice Department officials also urged changes in the commission rules, current and former officials said. While Attorney General Ashcroft staunchly defended the policy in public, in a private meeting with Pentagon officials, he said some of the proposed commission rules would be seen as "draconian," two officials said. And here's an interesting  bit o' info about one of those White House lawyers : Mr. [Timothy E.] Flanigan was at the center of the administration's legal counteroffensive. A personable, soft-spoken father of 14 children, his easy manner sometimes belied the force of his beliefs. He had arrived at the White House after distinguishing himself as an agile legal thinker and a Republican stalwart: During the Clinton scandals, he defended the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, saying he had conducted his investigation "in a moderate and appropriate fashion." In 2000, he played an important role on the Bush campaign's legal team in the Florida recount.  Yup.  Fourteen kids.  I know that has nothing to do with anything, but I just wanted to point it out. Tomorrow, the Times details just how well this super-secret Dirty Harry plan actually worked out . . .   5:03:31 AM