Excuse me for a totally non-political post, but I wanted to acknowledge the death yesterday of a truly great man: Brother Roger, founder and Prior of the Taize ecumenical monastic community in France. He was murdered in his own church during evening prayers, apparently by a mentally disturbed woman whose motives are as yet unknown.Taize was founded by Brother Roger in 1940 at a small farm, which served as a sanctuary for refugees (especially Holocaust refugees) during World War II. Soon after the war, it developed into a formal monastic order with Protestant roots but an inclusive ethic that eventually attracted Catholic and Orthodox participants. Aside from its obvious value as an example of Christian unity, Taize’s central mission has been service to the poor and oppressed around the world. But as a byproduct of its own community life, Taize also developed a distinctive set of prayers and songs. It’s this last contribution for which Taize is probably best known in America, especially among my fellow Episcopalians, for whom “Taize worship” exerts a strong appeal on both sides of the High Church/Low Church divide. As an obdurate member of the former faction, I can say that Taize’s songs and chants stand out sharply in the wasteland of “contemporary” liturgical music as uniquely capturing both the simplicity and reverential spirit of traditional plainsong, without the self-conscious antiquarianism of High Church ceremony. Without diminishing Taize’s more important missions, I do think any force that can unite today’s warring Anglicans has miraculous healing properties.It’s obviously sad and ironic that Brother Roger, a man devoted to the pursuit of internal and external peace, died a violent death. But just as obviously, this reflects the original paradox of Christianity, and serves as a reminder of the “broken” nature of humankind that is symbolized by the Cross. I am grateful for the life of Brother Roger, who spent each day working quietly to forge the bonds of community near and far.

Most of the public still doesn’t know much about the series of scandals emanating from the toxic vicinity of Jack Abramoff. Lots of Republicans still scoff at the idea that there will be significant collateral damage from the multiple misconduct of Casino Jack, and even some Democrats wonder if those of us who have obsessed about the subject would be wise to look to more obvious GOP problems like Iraq.But aside from the fact that Democrats ought to be able to multitask: look, folks, the Abramoff scandals bid fare to strike at the rotten core of the whole latter-day GOP. He’s right smack in the middle of an elaborate and well-entrenched network of conservative movement and GOP activists who have been together since the 1980s. There’s no way he can be marginalized as a minor figure in the GOP, and no way its most important figures can pretend they somehow didn’t know he was trading his connections with them for giant bags of money, and sending at least some of that money back in their various directions. And the scale of the whole thing is really something else. As Josh Marshall summed it up today:

This is a huge sum of money Abramoff was sitting on. There was lots of money to keep Grover Norquist rolling in cash, lots of spare cash to fund Ralph Reed’s transition from Christian Coalition sachem to power lobbyist, money for skyboxes to use to raise more money without the in-kind donation of the use of the skybox, millions of dollars pushed through front organizations then passed on to others.This isn’t just a crooked lobbyist. This is someone managing a slush-fund. The sort of unregulated, unwatched pile of money patronage-based political machines always need to keep running.So who is he running it for?

That’s a very good question, and one that should be asked until it is answered. Abramoff has already implicated in his shady activities enough key GOP operatives to refute the idea that he was just a rogue wolf who strayed from the pack. But even if his friends did not specifically approve his every action, they sure as hell set him up as a major hustler in the hazy and lucrative limbo-land where big money is made off political connections, and politicians get a big cut of the action. And it got crazy out of control.As Yeats once put it:”Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”But who was the falcon, and who the falconer? We really need to know.

What really jumps out at you upon watching or reading about the Justice Sunday II sermon-o-ganza in Nashville yesterday is the contrast between the carefully process-oriented framing of the event–all about the separation of power, and checks and balances, and maintaining legislative prerogatives, and so on, bark bark, woof woof–and the underlying extremism of what the speakers actually were talking about.Sure, one theme of the event was the hoary pretense that somehow people of faith (or more accurately, of conservative faiths) are being persecuted for speaking their minds on political issues, which is pretty hilarious given the presence of the all-powerful Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, and the event’s object of promoting the judicial appointees of the President of the United States in the Senate controlled by that president’s party. There are a few of us who think the religious leaders participating in Justice Sunday II are dangerously shirking their spiritual duties by committing their flocks to a seamy alliance with Mammon through today’s Republican Party, but I don’t know anybody who denies their First Amendment right to sell their religious birthright for a mess of political pottage.But aside from all the paranoiac (and very un-Christ-like) whining, the big underlying message from Nashville was that reshaping the Supreme Court is necessary to stop the alleged baby-killing, sodomizing, and paganizing that characterizes contemporary America. And there is zero, zero doubt that each and every one of the speakers at Justice Sunday II would completely reverse themselves on every issue related to the Constitution, activist judges, and all the other stuff they blathered about, if the shoe was on the other foot and the judiciary was promoting their own ideology.Suppose, as a thought experiment, that a future Supreme Court embraced the implicit interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause embedded in the Human Life Amendment (still supported in the last Republican platform): that unborn children are endowed with all the rights and privileges of citizenship. Was there a single speaker in Nashville who would not hail such a decision as vindication of a Higher Law that binds all people and all times? I think not.In all their talk about legislative and democratic prereogatives, and the horrific arrogance of unelected judges, the Justice Sunday crowd is painfully reminiscent of the southern segregations who relied for many decades on Supreme Court decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson (the infamous “separate but equal” validation of Jim Crow), and then suddenly re-discovered a populist hostility to the federal judiciary the moment the constitutional winds started blowing in a different direction.It’s true that the Left as well as the Right has flip-flopped on this subject in the course of American history; reducing the power of the judiciary was a staple of the People’s Party and of the Progressive Movement back when judges interpreted the Constitution as prohibiting any and all legislation regulating private property rights.I don’t accuse today’s Cultural Right of a unique political heresy, but I do accuse them of a great and notable streak of dishonesty. They don’t give a damn about any of the constitutional and procedural issues they talked about in Nashville; they care about a particular policy outcome. They want to criminalize abortion, criminalize homosexual behavior, and sanction public displays of particular religious traditions. They will pursue those policies through any means available, and they ought to be pushed to the wall to admit it.

As you may know, the usual suspects of the Christian Right, led by Tony Perkins, Chuck Colson, and James Dobson, along with their political clients Rep. Tom (Trouble Man) DeLay and Zell (The Duelist) Miller, are holding something called “Justice Sunday II” in Nashville tomorrow night, to once again howl at the moon about the alleged conspiracy to keep people of faith off the federal bench. (There’s a counter-event being sponsored by a variety of religious representatives earlier in the day in the same city).This event is full of ironies. For one thing, the key guest speaker from Justice Sunday I, the man leading the charge for Bush’s judicial nominees, Sen. Bill Frist, has been conspicuously excluded from this one, even though it’s being held in his own state. That’s his punishment for (a) failing to invoke the “nuclear option” during consideration of Bush’s Court of Appeals nominees earlier this year, and (b) flip-flopping more recently on stem-cell research.For another thing, this very sanctimonious event will be graced by Tom DeLay, a man who’s under so many legal and ethical clouds at the moment that a thunderstorm may break out over his head the moment he mounts the rostrum tomorrow.But the main irony is that the intended beneficiary of all the sermonizing, Judge John Roberts, is a Roman Catholic. And you can expect many of the sermonizers to claim that any and all opposition to Robert is based on anti-Catholic bigotry, on the theory that questions about his position on a constitutional right to privacy, or of a woman’s right to choose, involve excluding judges with religious convictions that impinge on their judicial philosophies. Indeed, the whole point of both “Justice Sundays” is that religious views can, do and must affect judicial philosophy, and to think otherwise is to persecute people of faith.This is, of course, richly ironic, since the theological and denominational ancestors of the conservative evangelical Protestant leaders most prominently on display in Nashville frequently and vehemently made the opposite argument against earlier Catholic political figures.The evangelical Protestant inquisition of John F. Kennedy in Houston in 1960 is the most famous example of conservative demands that a Catholic leader swear absolute fealty to the principle of separation of church and state. But there was an earlier and much more savage inquisition back in 1928, when Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated for the presidency, was bitterly opposed by conservative Protestant ministers, especially in the South, for the possibility that his faith might somehow affect his policies in office.As it happens, I’m currently reading an interesting book (Happy Days Are Here Again, by Steve Neal) about the 1932 presidential campaign that has a short but fascinating section about Smith’s persecution for his faith, and his brave but futile response. And here’s what the preeminent American Catholic political martyr of the 20th century had to say:

I recognize no power in the institutions of my church to interfere with the operations of the Constitution of the United States or the enforcement of the law of the land. I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and in equality of all churches, all sects, and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I believe in the absolute separation of church and state.

Today, peculiarly enough, such views are considered by the likes of the Justice Sunday crowd as “secular humanist,” “anti-Catholic,” and “anti-Christian.” It’s clear that poor Al Smith, were he resurrected today and lifted to public office, would again suffer persecution from the same people, but for the opposite reasons.I’d be real curious to know how Judge Roberts would feel about that.

One of my long-time pet peeves is about how political pollsters often decide to frame important questions in public opinion surveys. Some insist on false choices that simply reinforce stereotypes about candidates and political parties and ignore ambivalent public sentiments that actually influence voting behavior. Some endlessly search for bite-sized policy formulations that poll extremely well, at the expense of larger questions facing the country. And some, in the search for trend-lines, insist on asking the same questions for years even as the context radically changes.It’s this last habit that Chris Bowers skewers at length in an excellent post on MyDD about polling questions on Iraq. Here’s a sample:

Since the start of the war, polling firms have asked the public whether or not they thought the decision to go to war was correct more than five hundred times. Further, in that same time frame, they have asked the public if they approve or disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war more than 1,000 times. By contrast, they have asked the public how long they would like to continue fighting the war only twice. Considering that how long we intend to keep fighting the war is the number one issue when it comes to Iraq right now, it is the responsibility of those who frame the debate to at least pose that question to the American people. That question is a lot more important than whether or not we think what we did two and a half years ago was the right thing to do, because we can’t do anything about that now.

I might add to Chris’ observation that the preoccupation with what we did two and a half years ago isn’t terribly helpful to Democrats, since we were divided on the subject while Republicans were not. Moreover, where you were on the original war resolution isn’t neatly correlated with what you think the U.S. should do today. There are plenty of people who opposed the war but who are reluctant to support a quick withdrawal today. And I personally know a fair number of Democrats who supported the war but now think Bush and Rumsfeld have screwed it up beyond retrieval. I suspect there are a growing number of Republicans who share that view. As Chris says, the only way to find out what Americans want to do now in Iraq is to ask them in a way that explores the real choices.

Word is that Republican mega-lobbyist Jack Abramoff may finally get indicted late today or tomorrow on fraud charges related to casino operations. But not for his more famous involvement in casinos, the Indian Casino Shakedown Scandal. No: the impending indictment in Miami relates to alleged bank fraud by Abramoff and several partners in securing a loan to buy a casino cruise company, SunCruz Casinos, which later went belly-up during a legal battle over the deal. The seller, BTW, got murdered in the middle of all this in what authorities called a likely gangland hit. Nice.The incredible and ever-increasing web of dubious activity surrounding Abramoff and his political cronies is evidenced by this deadpan line in the AP story on the probable indictment: “[Rep. Tom] DeLay, R-Texas, was not mentioned in any lawsuits involved in the SunCruz deal.” This disclaimer tells you everything you need to know about how closely DeLay, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, and other key Republicans are tied to Casino Jack’s not-very-promising fate.

As someone who’s deeply into the Abramoff/Scanlon/Norquist/Reed Casino Shakedown Scandal, I’m aware it’s a complicated game where it’s hard to keep the players straight. That’s why I recommend you read a post by Josh Eidelson up on TPMCafe’s Auction House section that gives a quick but thorough rundown of the key figures other than Casino Jack himself. And while you’re roaming around the Auction House (the site’s forum for news on various House GOP scandals), be sure to read Austin Bonner’s earlier post about Abramoff’s pricey Washington restaurant, which has served as a feedbag and watering whole for those involved in Jack’s various schemes. After all, as they say at the ballpark, you don’t know your players without a program–or in some cases, a menu.

Wow, that was fast. ReformOhioNow, a group that began a late-breaking effort to get a package of election and redistricting reform initiatives on the November 2005 ballot, appears to have succeeded in meeting the state’s ballot requirements by the August 1 deadline.RON filed 520,000 petitions for the ballot measures. If 322,000 of them are valid, then the three initiatives–one on redistricting, one reversing a GOP effort to relax the state’s campaign finance laws, and one stripping election administration from the highly partisan secretary of state’s office–will go before Ohio voters.How big a deal is this? Well, big enough that the Ohio GOP–with backing from Republicans in Washington–is scurrying into court to try to stop the initiative. And it’s apparently the redistricting measure that has them really worried. Here’s what the anti-reform leader told The New York Times:

A former Republican president of the Ohio Senate, Richard Finan, last week filed a lawsuit in the Ohio Supreme Court pre-emptively challenging the petitions because they did not identify the passages that would be deleted from the Constitution.In a telephone interview, Mr. Finan said if the suit failed, a new group he had founded, Ohio First, would take up the cause with the expected backing of Republicans in Washington. Mr. Finan predicted that if the redistricting amendment became law, Republicans would lose six seats in the House of Representatives and that “you’ll see this idea spread to other states.”

Sounds good to me.

As George W. Bush set a new record for vacationing among American presidents, he sought to gussy up the latest down-time by summoning down to Crawford his “economic team”–i.e., the appointees who can be counted on to grin at the cameras and support the party line that everything’s hunky-dory.I don’t know what these folks did down there. Maybe they helped W. clear the sage brush. But they sure as hell didn’t confirm, adjust, or create any kind of national economic strategy, because we don’t have one.The President of the United States came out from the clambake and said that latest job numbers confirmed his tax cut plan.This photo op was obviously caused by (a) a relatively good job creation month, combined with (b) poll numbers showing Bush’s approval ratings on the economy dropping to 41 percent.The Bush economic plan, such as it is, depends on a cyclical rebound after the dot.com bust and the 9/11 swoon; the short-term stimulus caused by massive public and private debt and federal spending; a surge of cheap imports; and exceptional and dangerous foreign government investment.Our economy is balanced on a pin, and unfortunately, our economy is being guided by empty minds hiding behind empty grins.

It’s now getting pretty obvious that weird things are going on within the Bush administration’s national security apparatus.First, there’s been the peculiar and very atypical open disagreement about what it is the United States is involved in with respect to terrorism, with the Pentagon wanting to drop the Global War on Terrorism (in favor of something called the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism), and Bush rather pointedly repudiating the change of terminology in a couple of public appearances last week.And second, there’s the constant drumbeat of suggestions from the Pentagon that things are going so swimmingly in Iraq that we might be able to begin bringing home troops by next spring–in sharp contrast to Bush’s repeated argument that any talk of withdrawal prior to the military defeat of the insurgency, or a dramatic increase in Iraqi security capabilities, offers encouragement to the enemy.A lot of Democrats think the Pentagon is finally getting out of denial. But on the Republican side of the punditocracy, there’s neoconservative editor Bill Kristol , who thinks Rummy and the boys are turning coat and undermining Bush after having concluded that Iraq is a military disaster that’s redeemable only by an Iraqi government that’s showing us the door, even as Bush still holds out for a U.S.-led victory over the insurgents.Is this, the most “disciplined” administration in memory, about to be torn apart on the issue it has made its very signature? Hard to imagine, but it’s starting to look that way. It would sure be ironic if Rumsfeld finally got the sack not for his incompetent handling of Iraq, but for his belief that a change of course is necessary.