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Born May 18, 1953; got saved at Truett Memorial BC in Hayesville, NC 1959. On rigged ballot which I did not rig got Most Intellectual class of 71, Gaffney High School. Furman Grad, Sociology major but it was little tougher than Auburn football players had Had three dates with beautiful women the summer of 1978. Did not marry any of em. Never married anybody cause what was available was undesirable and what was desirable was unaffordable. Unlucky in love as they say and even still it is sometimes heartbreaking. Had a Pakistani Jr. Davis Cupper on the Ropes the summer of 84, City Courts, Rome Georgia I've a baby sitter, watched peoples homes while they were away on Vacation. Freelance writer, local consultant, screenwriter, and the best damn substitute teacher of Floyd County Georgia in mid 80's according to an anonymous kid passed me on main street a few years later when I went back to get a sandwich at Schroeders. Had some good moments in Collinsville as well. Ask Casey Mattox at www.clsnet.org if he will be honest about it. I try my best to make it to Bridges BBQ in Shelby NC at least four times a year.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Miguel De La Torre or Al Mohler? I lean toward the Christian

  In this case for the legacy of L.D. Johnson and Stewart A Newman the bent is toward de la Torre


http://abpnews.com/opinion/commentaries/item/7980-equal-time-with-al-mohler

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Political opponent; Still my Friend, John Killian new Prez of Bama SBC

    My friend John Killian was elected President of the Alabama Southern Baptist Convention a week after Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected President of the United States.
      In the spring of 2007 I visited his Maytown Baptist Church on the Jasper Road NW of Bham to hear the Larry Nelson Family singers who'd come in from Arkansas. The day before they had been in concert for my friend Mart Gray in Elba, Mart the former Director of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship for the state.
      I was crying by the time the Nelson Family got to their Song about Momma. It was a sweet time in Jesus.
      So yes,  there is common ground.
     John Killian is my friend. We had lunch at the Bright Star in Bessemer--a favorite of Senator Richard Shelby, and in his time Bear Bryant--a few years ago with a former President of the Samford SGA. One of the most delightful conversations of my 25 years in Alabama. I think the Right Reverend Dr. Killian asked the blessing. He is a graduate of Tennessee Temple Independent Baptist School in Chattanooga where my father went for one year before he went toward brighter light at Carson Newman and then to study with Randall Lolley and Bill Self at SEBTS before Paige Patterson brought it to Bill Friday's attention.
     But I digressed.
      I've never spoken to President Obama, but have talked to one of his D.C. Baptist pastors; and President Obama called my Gaffney friend Fletcher Smith on Fletcher's cell phone as he was riding to Columbia, S.C. in 2008 to spend 20 minutes one on one with Hillary Clinton.
     Fletcher, obviously, was high cotton in that primary season. Talked about it on Charlie Rose on PBS.
     
      I first met Killian in Montgomery in April 2002. He was there to hear President Bush 41's Ethics nominee Paul Pressler speak to Baptist fundies to bring the state in the Judge Roy Moore Camp. Looks like they finally sealed the deal here in Bama with Deacon Gov Bentley and the straight party voting urged on by Billy Graham's prayerfully posed picture in several papers throughout the state.
      John has prayed and spoken at several tea party rallies including one two years ago in Ft. Payne. Killian is distant kin to Boston Killian (born 1874) a former mayor of Collinsville, a contemporary of my Lincoln Republican Grandfather, J.C. Jordan, born 1881. Grandfather Jordan ran for Dekalb School supe in the 1910's and was soundly defeated.

   Killian and I talked before and after the Presidential election. He may know more about the voting boxxes on North Sand Mtn than Lowell Barron does. He was naming county politicians left and right wanting to know.
     John was on a panel with Richard Land at Samford earlier this year. Land has worked in concert with Karl Rove and Franklin Graham to bring the SBC nationally into a bloc for the Tea Party wing of the Republican party.
   Killian was even to the right of Richard Land on immigration that day at Samford; apparently in lockstep with Kris Kobach, Governor Bentley and Scott Beason.
     I think The Bible and history have left Killian on immigration reform.
     It will be interesting to see how Killian, Kobach, Gov Bentley going forward explain themselves to Nick Saban's wife, Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chic Fil A; not to mention Robert Parham of ethicsdaily.com and recent North Alabama Bishop Will Willimon and S.C. US Senator Lindsay Graham.
    Also at some point soon, early in the new year I hope, Killian needs to come to NE Alabama and have a town hall with the ringers in Dekalb and Cherokee Counties we now have for School Superintendents.
      Giberson and Stephens The Anointed will be great reference point for that conversation. I hope the President of the Bama SBC, and the new School Supes don't come to that conversation ignorant of The Anointed's insights.

John Killian in Context of the Bigger Picture
http://blog.al.com/times-views/2012/11/alabama_left_behind_on_immigra.html#incart_m-rpt-2

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Excerpts from Crespino's Strom Thurmond's America

  Page 128 in the chapter "Outside Agitators." 
   Isolated and superannuated though they seemed to many opinion makers, Strom's Americans--that misshapen collection of Dixiecrats and John Birchers, conservative businessmaem and Kennedy haters--were no marginal group in American politics in the early 60's. They were at the center of a fight that would soon transform the Republican Party--and, by extension, national politics.

    In 1962 right winger Will Workman whose rhetoric Roger Milliken was sending on through Harry Dent to Thurmond, ran as a Republican against sitting sitting Democrat US Senator Olin D Johnston. Workman got 42 percent of the vote, which Dent explained to Thurmond as a pretty good poll going forward. Soon Thurmond had changed parties and was backing Goldwater. Of Workman's 62 race Crespino says on page 134: "It was a flash frame of future party politics in South Carolina and the nation."

And last paragraph of the intro which for me nullifies the reservations in the following TNR review

   As galling as Thumonds hypocrisy was, the disclosure that he fathered a black child has made it all the more easier to relegate him to a distant past that is no more.  There he remains as a caricature of an older, unambiguously racist south, not a flesh and blood person who helped create the America we live in today. It is easier that way. By categorically condemining Thurmond, we reaffirm our own morality. Liberals can remember him as the simpleminded dinosaur evoked in the southern strategy narrative, a villain who party switching and kingmaking explain all one needs to know about the rise of the Republican right. Conservatives can dismiss him as an anachronism a colorful but ultimately irrelevant figure in the rise of "real" conservatism. In truth, Thurmond was neither. He remains today one of the great American hypocrites yet there is more than just hypocrisy to his story. And the hypocrisies that exist are not just his or the White South's alone; they were also America's. Staring these facts in the face is uncomfortable, yet it is what makes our looking all the more essential.


The New Republic Review:

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-hypocrite-strom-thurmond%E2%80%99s-lasting-legacy-joseph-crespino#

Thursday, November 08, 2012

Soul Molesting, The Bama SBC and GOP

   About March of 1998 when Tyler Coker and Vivvee Monteagudo were in the 8th grade they were on the stage in Montgomery with a Pacers gathering with Will Campbell. Will was the only white man on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis the night Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.
    But he also had friends in the Ku Klux Klan. The great Episcopalian preacher Fleming Rutledge has written a sermon about him titled God Damned Christians.

    Campbell coined the phrase "soul molesters" to describe the fundamentalists who took over the Southern Baptist Convention.

    Now a version of them are at work in Joseph Morgan and Mike Hubbard's Alabama Republican Party. All indicators are Mary Anne Cole of the Ft Payne Tea Party and her FBC Ft Payne pew sitter Mrs. Don Stout are in with em too and their Alabama Values Crusade that with Billy Graham unseated David Rains in Ft. Payne and put Judge Roy Moore back on the State Supreme Court.

   I hear Jackie Myers and his wife weren't too happy about Rains. And Donnie Myers said the Bama Immigration law was crafted with "malice."

    So here we are. You can google the Norm Ornstein interview on Fresh Air of NPR to get some truth. Norm aint a communist. He is with the conservative American Enterprise Inst.

    At ABP news dot com you can google for Christians calling for an end to the culture war. But I've never known Mrs Stout or Ms Cole to lay eyes on Baptists Today though their pastor and my friend Pat McFadden was on the cover a few years ago at the BWA in London.

     Ed Kilgore was on NPR Monday mornin. He is from Marietta Ga, a national correspondent and has Ms Stout's number on the abortion issue. As a political wedge of Karl Rove and Al Mohler it has helped keep white southerners voting against their economic interests ever since George Wallace decided you couldn't play the race card any longer.

   I've talked to Ed Kilgore. Listen to him on abortion. He has known Jerry Vines for about 40 years. He knows the results of Jerry Vines Politics and the Birch politics of West Rome BC that shaped Mary Anne Cole. Kilgore knows the Ga 7th.

    Listen to Ornstein, the Conservative talk about the Koch brothers in Kansas and how they bought it and how Alabama is trying the same thing in the blasphemed name of Jesus saying the fetus raped or otherwise has more value than the five of the top ten Collinsville grads this year who were Hispanic.
      Listen closely to Ornstein on Fresh Air. He says it's the Tea Parties fault and me and looks like Mrs. Nick Saban believe him

  Quoting from the Fresh Air Transcript. Again Ms Stout get a lap top and take it Sunday School Sunday and listen online with an Open Bible and the Holy Spirit guiding your listening

   So you wrote an article in April that got a really big response that was headlined "Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem." And in that article you wrote: We have criticized both parties - because this was co-authored with Thomas Mann from the Brookings Institution, with whom you've co-authored your new book - and so you wrote: We have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies within the Republican Party.




The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly possible for the political system to deal constructively with the country's challenge.



What did it take for you to say that, since you've tried to have this kind of, you know, nonpartisan, bipartisan outlook?

 End of Quote from the Nov 7 NPR Fresh Air easy google.




      But the religion card works well for Ms Stout and her kind. Gives her more money to give to the Lottie Moon Christmas offering and adorn the FBC Church Ft. Payne as a Chapel for Terrapin Hills.
    There are some good folks at First Ft Payne. Several have been gracious to me on occasion. But Ms. Stout, Judge Roy Moore got elected some how, now didn't he. And how are you gonna explain evolution to that new school supe you and mary anne elected on your straight ballot party voting on Tuesday.

   All indications are Mrs. Betty Saban's values aren't your values. Paul Finebaum hinted that devout Catholic woman voted for Obama.

    So where does that put you. Well bout the same place as me. Me and You and Ms Cole are gonna die out in about ten years; and hopefully your politics and those of the Bama Eagle Forum, Tea Party, Birch Society Bama Values GOP will die out too, and a fresh air and memory of Judge Frank Johnson and Atticus Finch and Martin King will once again flower, and the Dream Act will pass and the promise of Democracy will indeed take root; even in Alabama and a more perfect Union with Liberty and Justice and Fair Economic Play where those born on third base who thought they hit a triple will indeed be in a meritocracy where Bruce Springsteen says We Take Care of Our Own no matter if they were born inside or outside the gate at Terrapin Hills. Amen.

Tuesday, November 06, 2012

Mrs. Don Stout, Joseph Morgan and the Bama Crimson Tide

  Mrs. Stout is active in First Baptist Church Ft Payne and wears her social issues GOP convictions on her sleeve. She had a letter in Friday's Ft. Payne Times Journal that stuck in my craw.
   Joseph Morgan has a masters for U Bama and is the fourth son of the Collinsville Pastor. Jojo now works on staff of the state GOP, creators of the Alabama Values campaign to make Bama a one party state.
    This morning on NPR there was a grand program on religion and politics

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-11-06/religion-and-politics-2012

 About the 40th minute it drove home the point Catholics by a margin of two to one emphasize social justice issues over abortion and other darlings of Mrs Stout's tea party religious right.
  That puts Ms Stout and Joseph Most likely at great odds with Mrs Terry Saban. Her husband's Crimson Tide beat LSU Saturday night on CBS. Paul Finebaum talked about it a good bit yesterday.
     So on Immigration, what is JoJo and Kris Kobach and Ms Stout and all the Lilly White Baptist Preachers who preached from the pulpit that Obama is a Muslim; how they gonna explain all that to the Crimson Tide.
     How is the Bama SBC and Ex Dir Rick Lance and Deacon Gov Bentley gonna explain Kris Kobach to Ms Saban and the St. Francis Catholic Church in Tuscaloosa.
    Are these the Alabama Values of Condi Rice and Colin Powell, Michelle Norris and Tom Corts.

    Come back to this blog. I hope some version of this will be in the Ft. Payne Times Journal for Ms Stout and Pastor Morgan to consider soon.

   And I hope my alma mater, Furman University; who poli sci office I called this morn will reference the link above and the wisdom therein in the High Noon lecture in the Upstate History Museum tomorrow on the outcome of today's voting and all the metrics therein.

Friday, November 02, 2012

Billy Graham and Bama SBC/GOP; Roy Moore and Tom Corts

    Lot of GOP Trash hitting Bama in the last few days and I hate to see Billy Graham get entangled in all of it. I was about to give him the benefit of the doubt with the recent Steven Miller book on him stoked by the Greenville, S.C. 1966 crusade as Miller testified at Vanderbilt.
   I was there in Greenville, during that Crusade. Drove 50 miles from Gaffney with the family and Steve Wright. Steve Wright got saved best I remember and my Daddy baptized him a few weeks later at Bethany Baptist Church.
    
     But Billy has a black mark on his name here in what he says may be his last election. On Tuesday of this week, I pick up the weekly Postpaper.com; the print issue of Centre Alabama with distribution in West Georgia (Rome) and here in Deekalb County. So that covers US Congressman Mike Rogers district, parts of it; and here in Bama some of Robert Aderholt.

    There was a full page picture of Billy in prayerful pose endorsing Mitt Romney for President as part of the Bama GOP  "Alabama Values" campaign.
   Add said it was paid for by "friends in Cedar Bluff".
   So who are Billy and Mitt's friends in Cedar Bluff. Could be the Mother in Law of former Atty General of the US Alberto Gonzalez who had a place on Weiss Lake there, or wealthy tea partiers up from Marietta Ga who have a 2nd home on the lake, or this retired Princeton grad I met not long ago who hates Obama and told me twice; or maybe the First Baptist Church of Cedar Bluff; we just don't know.

    George Talbot of the Huntsville Times has been reporting here about Jimmy Jackson former president of the Bama SBC

    As you see in the article it is coordinated by Collinsville Alabama's Casey Mattox and former Bush 43 Judicial nominee Charles Pickering Alliance Defending Freedom's effort. Reagan operative Allan Sears is part of that outfit too.
     Talbot had an online live chat with one of casey's colleagues in Weds Times you should be able to google up.
    Upshot is with all the straight ticket GOP voting in Bama likely to happen Tuesday, the Bama SBC and Billy Graham will most likely be complicitous, and in Billy's case outright abettin, the re-election of Judge Roy Moore as chief justice of the Bama Supreme Court.
     See my thoughts below in a separate blog about that and a real Republican, Judge Frank Johnson.
 
    In March 0f 93 I was in the pews at FBC Birmingham with about 1,000 other Baptists, about 400 of em preachers, when Bircher and one term US congressman Albert Lee Smith staged an inquisition of another Baptist and many believe mainstream Republican Tom Corts, then president of Samford University. Smith and his wife Eunie--look up how she works with Kris Kobach on immigration in bama--Eagle Forum were trying to take over Samford and do to it what Nelson Price has done to Shorter College in Rome Georgia.
     The Birchers and their fundamentalist baptist preachers went at Corts for about 90 minutes. Its as if John C. Calhoun and Nathan Bedford Forrest had put Abraham Lincoln on trial.
       They mentioned my friend Vicki Covington's name at one point, the novelist who wrote for John Grisham's then Oxford American Magazine.
     Samford still remains a grand school in the best of the Baptist tradition. Corts stood firm.
      But now this coming Tuesday, Billy Graham and the Bama GOP and Charles Pickering and the ADF may be able to vomit in the face of Corts grand legacy and his noble moment of March 93. With the likely election of Judge Roy Moore, they will put Alabama Southern Baptists in the whorehouse of Karl Rove and the Bircher Tea Party GOP.
   Riding to Ft Payne, Alabama I saw a big billboard this morning touting the Bama GOP and Freedom. Billboard was a GOD DAMNED LIE!.
      In a visceral disconnect I was listening to Johnny Cash sing about Freedom. Johnny Cash died a great American; Billy Graham is going out in the shadows.

   And here is an update to put larger apocalyptic perspective to all this

  http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/election2012/6562/electionpocalypse%2C_part_i_%28christianity%29/