Jonathan's blog

Grandma B picked up some kids golf clubs at a yard sale, so Grampa B gave the boys some lessons on Sunday afternoon. Here are some photos:

From an AP article of the same title by Sandy Cohen on Yahoo News:

Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber always had a moral message in their long-running "VeggieTales" video series. But now that the vegetable stars have hit network television, they can't speak as freely as they once did, and that's got the Parents Television Council steamed. The conservative media-watchdog group issued a statement Wednesday blasting NBC, which airs "VeggieTales," for editing out some references to God from the children's animated show... "VeggieTales" creator Phil Vischer, who was responsible for readying episodes for network broadcast, said he didn't know until just weeks before the shows were to begin airing that non-historical references to God and the Bible would have to be removed. Had he known how much he'd have to change the show - including Bob and Larry's tagline, "Remember kids, God made you special and he loves you very much," that concludes each episode - Vischer said he wouldn't have signed on for the network deal. "I would have declined partly because I knew a lot of fans would feel like it was a sellout or it was done for money," he said, adding that "there weren't enough shows that could work well without those (religious) references."

I had seen a little bit of one of these episodes as the kids were watching it, and I wondered if the religious content had been toned down. It has.

Here are some more pictures from Coby's birthday party.

Christians often have a sense that they are disrespected by the left (I heard it in Bible class this morning when we were visiting at Troy). I'm sure there is some truth to that feeling with regard to a certain element of the left. However, I'm also sure that that there is a lack of respect for Christians by a significant segment of the right as well. From an article of the same title in the NY Times by David Kirkpatrick:

A former deputy director of the White House office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is charging that many members of the Bush administration privately dismiss its conservative Christian allies as "boorish" and "nuts." The former deputy director, David Kuo, an evangelical Christian conservative, makes the accusations in a newly published memoir, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction" (Free Press), about his frustration with what he described as the meager support and political exploitation of the program. "National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,' ‘out of control,' and just plain ‘goofy,' " Mr. Kuo writes. In an interview, Mr. Kuo's former boss, James Towey, now president of St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pa., said he had never encountered such cynicism or condescension in the White House, and he disputed many of the assertions in Mr. Kuo's account.

Kuo was on 60 Minutes tonight. The video is here. I wouldn't argue that Christians should have no involvement with politics, though that argument has its merits. I would argue that when the line between faith and politics is as blurred as it is these days, faith is soiled by the relationship between the two.

Provocative...from an opinion piece of the same and subtitled "If blasting people to bits on the battlefield is OK, then why isn't electrocuting genitals?" by Joel Stein in the LA Times:

I AM PRO-TORTURE. And I don't mean just the music-blaring, sleep-deprivation, forced-standing kind. I'm for tearing out lamp wires, wetting a guy down and shocking his nipples while staring at him with your one crazy blue eye and one crazy green eye and screaming, "I am not going to ask you again! Where is the bomb?!" Admittedly, most of what I know about interrogation is from the TV show "24." Although we have killed more than 50,000 Iraqis for reasons that no one is able to explain other than that letting crazy, anti-Western, death-cult Arabs vote for their own crazy, anti-Western, death-cult Arab leaders is awesome, we have decided that we cannot accept mistreating captured enemies. Apparently we are under the impression that countries fond of using "shock and awe" are actually judged on how many Michelin stars their prisons get. Compared to murder, maiming or the firebombing of entire cities, torturing for information is clearly the lesser moral crime. The reason we don't like torture is that it makes us squeamish. When we drop bombs on a village from thousands of feet above, we picture clean, video-game annihilation - not severed limbs and charred skin and babies killed in front of their parents. But it's impossible not to visualize dunking a man's head underwater until he believes he's drowning. We may not have had our homes bombed, but we have been in a pool with older kids. This is why not even Donald Rumsfeld would sign off on interrogation by extreme wedgie. Torture seems wrong because it involves hitting a guy when he's down. It's fine to fight for the survival of civilization by shooting your enemy in the field, but once he's captured, warfare is suddenly a civilized game with lots of rules. This idea is so patently ridiculous that they made a sitcom out of it with Bob Crane. My fear is that by banning torture, we get to pretend that the rest of war is a rational diplomatic tool instead of a desperate and brutal survival response. If something is important enough to kill and die over, then it's important enough to torture for. For me, that list would include protecting my freedom, my family and a few of my friends whom I would name here if I had that kind of room. If "waterboarding" really isn't effective, yielding only lies told to please captors, then maybe that's a good reason to end it. But if shooting people to get them to embrace pro-Western democracy also doesn't pan out, we might want to lighten up on that too.