And, closing out your Sunday service....

I don't believe the U.S. really has a political left. It just has personalities who consider themselves leftists and make an identity gig of it. If we really had a left, then I could walk out this door to a leftist party headquarters and take political action. It's not like I can call up the local chapter of the Rifondazione Comunista, as in Italy. It's not like I can stop by the newsstand and buy a copy of Liberazione. Americans kid themselves about having choices. Hell, they won't even dare call themselves leftists. They've backed off into calling themselves "progressives." That is totally gutless. What is the alternative to “progress?” The Stone Age? I think the U.S. has a cottage culture industry called the left. And it has a body of middle class professionals and semi-professionals who cannot bring themselves to associate with Republicans, so they call themselves “liberals”. But liberals are too comfortable. So they deny reality. They are not going to do anything so long as they are comfortably insulated in the middle class. They are not going to wade into that hate filled ditch of political action, real political action that requires sacrifice, to battle for America”™s soul---not as long as they are still living on a good street, sending their kids to Montessori and getting their slice of the American quiche. I guess what I'm saying is that until we get a real left in this country, one capable of creating change through radical action, one willing to risk everything for what they believe, we should not be talking about what our pseudo-left should be doing. Our pseudo-left is doing exactly what it should be doing. Posturing, bickering amid itself and boring the hell out of the rest of America.

  Joe Bageant

The Covert Kingdom: Thy Will be Done, on Earth as it is in Texas
by Joe Bageant

Excerpt:

As much as liberals screech in protest, few understand the depth and breadth of the Rightist Christian takeover underway. They catch the scent but never behold the beast itself.

[...]

Christian Reconstruction strategists make clear in their writings that homeschooling and Christian academies have been and continue to create the Rightist Christian cadres of the future, enabling them to place ever-increasing numbers of believers in positions of governmental influence. The training of Christian cadres is far more sophisticated than the average liberal realizes. There now stretches a network of dozens of campuses across the nation, each with its strange cultish atmosphere of smiling Christian pod people, most of them clones of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. But how many outsiders know the depth and specificity of Reconstructionist political indoctrination in these schools? For example, Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia, a college exclusively for Christian homeschoolers, offers programs in strategic government intelligence, legal training and foreign policy, all with a strict, Bible-based "Christian worldview." Patrick Henry is so heavily funded by the Christian right it can offer classes below cost. In the Bush administration, seven percent of all internships are handed out to Patrick Henry students, along with many others distributed among similar religious rightist colleges.

Also, try Sleepwalking to Fallujah

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway