The Mound of Sound

Henry VIII must be rolling in his crypt. A story in the Sydney Morning Herald reports that Roman Catholics have reclaimed their spot as the dominant faith in England.

CATHOLICS have overtaken Anglicans as Britain’s most dominant religious group, reflecting great waves of migration from Catholic countries.

More people are now attending Mass every Sunday than are worshipping with the Church of England, confirming that the established church has lost its spot as the most popular Christian denomination after more than four centuries of unrivalled influence following the Reformation.

Leading figures warned on Saturday that the Church of England faced becoming a minority faith and that the findings should act as a wake-up call.

The International Herald Tribune reports on a newly released document showing that FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover hatched a plan in 1950 at the outbreak of the Korean War to suspend Habeas Corpus and lock up 12,000 people he considered “disloyal.”

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The FBI would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

In September 1950, Congress passed and Truman signed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. But no known evidence suggests any president approved Hoover’s proposal.

“(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom.” – Idaho Senator Larry Craig

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and Iraq and everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children.” – Miss Teen USA contestant Lauren Upton of South Carolina .

“That’s some nappy-headed hos there.” – Morning radio host Don Imus

“There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.” – Delaware Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden on Republican Rudy Giuliani

““I’m not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9 percent approval rating.” – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, delivered this zinger while talking about Republican Vice President Dick Cheney

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.” – Former president Jimmy Carter

No big deal, really. Tony Blair has switched sides from Anglican to Roman Catholic. The missus and kids are all RC anyway so Tony was just joining the flock. However the former Brit p.m. was so thrilled with his conversion that he went to the Middle East and took a picture of himself standing in front of his handiwork.

For reminding us just how greasy Conservative leadership gets (and why we threw his party into the sewer). Canada’s Misfit of the Year – Lyin’ Brian Mulroney

For showing us that new Conservatives can be just as arrogant as the old bunch. First runner-up, our very own Furious Leader, the Smugmeister himself, Little Stevie Harper.

For showing us that honesty, integrity and mental stability are optional in a Conservative cabinet – Second Runner Up – EnviroMin, Mad Dog the Bali Buster, John Baird

For showing Canadians that the Conservative party is so lacking in talent that a guy who looks (and acts) like this guy can get into Cabinet, Third Runner Up – Tony Clement.

Ferdinand Porsche, that’ll be Herr Doktor Porsche to the likes of you, left a rich legacy known worldwide today in the names Porsche and Volkswagen. Now his namesake company is poised to acquire a controlling interest in its much larger, lower-end sibling.

The automotive pioneer’s grandson, Wolfgang, heads Porsche and soon hopes to head Volkswagen. VW, by the way, is 14-times as big as Porsche so the takeover is a Herculean chore. Wolfgang told the New York Times that uniting the companies is essential to keep VW from falling into the wrong hands:

“My father and my grandfather would have been very pleased to see this, but that wasn’t the reason we did it,” Mr. Porsche said at Porsche’s headquarters in a rare interview. “It’s a nice side effect.”

Porsche, he said, needed to bring Volkswagen into the fold to ensure that others do not get their hands on it. The two carmakers already collaborate in building sport utility vehicles and in developing hybrid engines. Porsche plans to use a Volkswagen assembly plant to stamp out the body of its eagerly awaited four-door sedan, the Panamera, due in 2009.

The takeover, which was the brainchild of Porsche’s chief executive, Wendelin Wiedeking, is intended to lock in that partnership. By acting when it did, Porsche headed off private equity investors, which it says were circling Volkswagen in 2005.

Americans have come to hate and distrust their government as perhaps never before in their nation’s history. From AlterNet:

“Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University released a little-noticed study showing that one-third of Americans now “believe in a broad smorgasbord of conspiracy theories” revolving around government complicity in everything from the 9/11 attacks to the Kennedy assassination. The same survey last year found that “anger against the federal government is at record levels.”

…the feelings are not motivated merely by a fear of the next bogeyman around the corner. The sentiments are symptoms of a deep crisis of confidence in our public institutions — a crisis that is a predictable reaction to a government that now all but admits it breaks laws, hides information and disregards the public.

We have seen troops sent to war based on manipulated intelligence. We have discovered phones wiretapped without warrants. Just last week, we found out the CIA destroyed tapes of potentially illegal torture sessions. So many scandals now plague the government, it is hard to remember them all. And they have all happened with almost no consequences for the perpetrators.

Industries essentially bribe politicians with campaign contributions. Government employees regularly move into six-figure jobs lobbying for the industries they once regulated. Presidential candidates of both parties take time off from their small-town stump speeches about the middle class to hold big corporate fundraisers in New York penthouses and D.C. law firms. All of it is legal and treated as ho-hum by the media.

When [media] lobbyists recently pushed the government to relax ownership regulations and allow for further media consolidation, FCC chairman Kevin Martin provided just one week’s notice for a required public hearing on the issue. Officially, the FCC held the hearing to consider public input about the proposed rule change. But Martin later told Congress that before the hearing ever happened he was already putting the finishing touches on his New York Times op-ed formally endorsing the media consolidation plan. And surprise! This week, the FCC officially ratified Martin’s deregulation scheme, making it the law of the land.
Like so much of our government’s behavior these days, it was kabuki theater at its most obscene — an obscure yet powerful agency getting caught leaking profit-making secrets to lobbyists, and then telling the public its hearings are all a put-on, taking place well after the corrupt deals have already been cut.”

This is possibly George w. Bush’s greatest accomplishment, completing the corporatization of his nation’s government. Halliburton has taken over much of the military’s role on a massive-profit basis, routinely fleeces the government on its billings and then shelters all that revenue in offshore tax havens. Defence spending has returned to the levels of the height of the Cold War with no rival superpower worthy of the name. Tax dollars are pumped, by the truckload, into shoring up mortgages for predatory lenders who would otherwise have to bear the losses of their greed even as those tax dollars come increasingly from the working class whose children will also pay for the deficits now racked up year after year by a tax cut and spend like mad government.

Bush may be America’s Battista. No wonder he’s so admired by our own Furious Leader, Stevie Harper. No wonder Stevie is such an adherent to paranoia politics.

Republicans talk of “class war” as some despicable tactic exploited by politicians seeking to enrage the masses, the great unwashed. Some day, rank-and-file, average Americans may wake up and realize they’ve been on the receiving war of a very real, very powerful and very destructive class war that their alleged president has been waging against them, almost from the first day he took office.

You can tell a lot about a politician by how it approaches the topic of global warming.

For the purposes of this discussion we’ll leave out the deniers. They’re going the way of the dinosaurs, at least the honest ones are. Most of the rest have slithered over into the “we get it camp”, sort of.

The other two groups are the leaders, Group A, and the fearmongers, Group B.

The leaders are those who do what legitimate politicians are supposed to do – lead. They’re the sort who come to the fore in tough times such as depressions or wars. They rally the people, rationally explain the problem, what must be done about it and why remedial action is necessary, worthwhile, even desirable. In a word, they’re “leaders.” They generate awareness and consent. That’s Group A.

Then there’s the other kind, Group B. This is the bait and switch type of lowlife. In the face of challenges they begin with denial and, as that option closes, invoke the next option, delay. To buy as much time as possible to do nothing, they pull out their tried and true weapon – fear.

This is the face of our very own Furious Leader, Stephen Harper. Have a Merry Christmas, he says, warning that, come the New Year, we’ll all be wearing sackcloth and ashes as the government is forced to choke the very joy of life out of us in order to reduce industrial carbon emissions.

Hey Stevo, the Europeans are way ahead of us on climate change and just how are they doing anyway? Have they reverted to living in mud huts and eating grass? No? Why not? Maybe it’s because they’re focusing on ways to deal with the carbon problem that actually minimize the economic and social consequences. Maybe because they’ve explained to their people the positive side to this. Maybe because they’re not working to protect something as environmentally vile as the Tar Sands.

Now no one is saying the Euros are there yet but they’re a long way further down the road than we are, sitting on our fence watching them fade into the distance.

So Steve, take your fearmongering and shove it. Either lead or quit. Better yet, just quit. We’ll all be better off without you.