David Barton is perhaps the leading proponent of the notion that the U.S. was once, and should again be a “Christian Nation.” He wants to sell you on that idea. He has books and tapes to sell too. The problem is that his slick products and presentations don’t stand up to scrutiny. For example, in 1996, the mainstream Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs wrote a detailed critique, debunking Barton’s Christian nationalist notions.

Barton is speaking in Worcester, Massachusetts at a Christian homeschooling convention at the end of the month — in the wake of a firestorm of criticism in Washington, DC about his bogus version of history, his attacks on the role of the federal judiciary, and concerns about his theocratic political agenda.

Barton is currently at the center of a series of controversies in Washington, DC regarding his association with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN).

Frist recently invited his congressional colleagues to participate in a “private tour” of the U.S. Capitol building with Barton. Frist described the tour as a “Fresh Perspective on Our Nation’s Religious Heritage” and that Barton is “a historian noted for his detailed research into the religious heritage of our nation.”

A simple Google search turns up other disturbing information about Barton. Not only does he disseminate biased and misleading materials, he has a profound, and profoundly alarming political agenda. Last year, Beliefnet reported that Barton is on the board of The Providence Foundation, a Christian Reconstructionist oriented organanizaton. Reconstructionism is an influential political theology whose proponents argue that the U.S. should be a Christian theocracy, under “Biblical law.” (I wrote about this movement and its role in the Christian Right in detail in my book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy.)

Lest anyone think that this is a tempest in a teapot, and that Barton is a fringe figure of no signficance, Roll Call reports that Barton often conducts such tours under the sponsorship of Members of Congress. He is also the Vice-Chair of the Texas Republican Party. In 2004, the notion that the U.S. is a Christian Nation was added to the Texas GOP platform. According to Americans United for Separation of Church and state, this action was denounced by both Jewish and Muslim groups.

Rev. Welton Gaddy, executive director of the Interfaith Alliance urged Frist to “disassociate” himself from Barton. “I first became acquainted with Mr. Barton in the early 1970′s,” Gaddy wrote, “when I was a staff member of the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. For the past 30 years, Barton has been evangelizing his extremist beliefs that the separation of church and state is a myth and that the United States was founded as and should be governed as a Christian nation; this is bad history and dangerous theology. By having Mr. Barton as a host of a religious heritage tour, you send a volatile message to all Americans that Washington has once again overstepped its bounds and is endorsing revisionist history along with advancing a right-wing agenda. Given the present mood of the country and the questionable role that religion has played in Washington recently, these are treacherous waters to be treading.”

Ralph Neas, president of People for the American way also urged Frist, to disassociate himself from Barton, citing one of Barton’s books. From Neas’ description, the book sounds like a field manual for the current attacks on the state and federal judiciary by Christian Right leaders and their allies in Congress.

“Mr. Barton’s 1996 book Impeachment!: Restraining an Over Active Judiciary,” writes Neas, [is] “a 50 page handbook on how and why the right should push for impeachment of judges whose decisions they disagree with on abortion, school desegregation, homosexuality, and other subjects.”

“Clearly stated,” Neas concluded, “is Barton’s agenda to intimidate federal judges, noting that even if impeachment does not succeed, the threat ‘serves as a deterrent’ and would cause judges to ‘become more restrained.’”

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) denounced Barton’s planned tour noting that Barton “intends to prove that the separation of church and state is a myth, and that America’s Founders intended for the United States to be a Christian nation.” He called on Frist to cancel his plan “to tour the U.S. Capitol with this man who says this should be a Christian-only country.”

The Barton controversy figures into the widening attack on the judiciary by Christian Rightists and their allies in Congress. Some of rhetoric has seemed to justify violence against the judiciary. According to a report in The Washington Post, author Edwin Vieira told a recent conference “Remedies to Judicial Tyranny,” in Washington DC, that Supreme Court justice Anthony M. Kennedy, “should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, ‘upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.’”

“Ominously,” the Post added, “Vieira continued by saying his ‘bottom line’ for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. ‘He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’” Vieira said.

“The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is ‘Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.’ Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush’s judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.”

“A judge in Atlanta and the husband and mother of a judge in Chicago were murdered in recent weeks. After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) said that “the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to ‘engage in violence.’”

“The people who have been speaking out on this, like Tom DeLay and Senator Cornyn, need to be backed up,” longtime Christian Right leader Phyllis Schlafly said to applause at the conference.

When Barton is not giving capitol tours with Senator Frist, he often speaks at Christian Right political conferences, and conventions of Christian homeschoolers. Homeschools are key markets for the historical revisionist materials produced by Barton’s and like minded groups. For example, Barton will be the keynote speaker at a Massachusetts statewide homeschooling convention at the Worcester Centrum on April 29th.

“We are pleased to welcome David Barton of WallBuilders,” according to the conference web site, “as one of our keynote speakers this year. David will bless us with his passion for the clear truth of the Christian founding and principles of our nation. He will be presenting one workshop on Friday afternoon and a keynote address on Friday evening.”

Barton will certainly not be the only controversial Christian Rightist in Worcester. One of the many exhibitors seeking to seek to sell thier wares and services at the Worcester conference, and at similar events around the country, will be the Home School Legal Defence Assocation, (HSLDA) headed by longtime Christian Right activist, Michael P. Farris, who was a featured speaker at the anti-judiciary conference. Farris said, according to The Washington Post, that Justice Kennedy, a Republican appointee of Ronald Reagan, “‘should be the poster boy for impeachment’ for citing international norms in his opinions. ‘If our congressmen and senators do not have the courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, they ought to be impeached as well.’”

Farris, Barton, and others are disseminating Christian nationalist propaganda through a nationwide network of sectarian Christian schools and home schools, which many Christian Rightists see as the base for the longterm takeover the of the U.S. As I reported in Eternal Hostility, Chris Klicka, HSLDA’s Senior Counsel and Director of State and International Relations has written, “Sending our children to public schools violates nearly every Biblical principle… It is tantamount to sending our children to be trained by the enemy.”

People concerned about the growth of the Christian nationalist movement, and its propagation through the Christian homeschooling network, might want to check out this list of home school conventions, and the speaking schedule of David Barton and his staff.

I will be on “Religious Talk,” with Dr. Bruce Prescott, Sunday morning April 10th. Live. 11am-noon, Central Time. KREF 1400 AM. The show is broadcast in Oklahoma City and Norman, OK and via Streaming Audio.

Visit his web site for toll-free call-in, and other information.

The show will be recorded and available later for podcasting.

The events of the past few weeks, from the Terri Schiavo drama, to the attack on the state and federal courts by Christian Rightists in Congress, underscores the power and significance of the Christian Right in American politics.

I was present, undercover, at the first national strategy conference of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coaltion in 1989. I wrote about thier plans to become the most powerful force in American politics. I spoke all over the country, and was a source for other journalists seeking to understand the new movement. Fifteen plus years later, they have substantially acheived their objective. Not, as it turned out, the Christian Coalition alone, but the Christian Right political movement they came to epitomize.

Still, the Christian Right is a mystery to many. They find it difficult to understand, to discuss, and to attempt to counter it. Joe Bageant has written, “Until progressives come to understand what [fundamentalists] read, hear, are told and deeply believe, we cannot understand American politics, much less be effective.”

Fortunately, there is a conference coming right up that seeks to help us begin to understand.

Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right, April 29-30 in New York, is an opportunity to hear as remarkable and impressive a group of experts on the Religious Right as has been assembled anywhere in a long time. I am honored to be included along with Rev. Bob Edgar, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, Rev. Joe Hough, president of Union Theological Seminary, authors Karen Armstrong, Chip Berlet and Skipp Porteous, among many others.

Most of us get information and analysis about the Christian Right from rather narrow bands of sources and perspectives. This conference offers an engaging mix of journalists, academics, religious leaders and independent thinkers and activists who I think will broaden and deepen our knowledge and understanding of the Christian Right.

Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right

A Two-Day Conference
[printable conference flyer]

Friday April 29 7:30-10pm
Saturday April 30 10am-5:30pm

Co-sponsored by the NY Open Center and CUNY Graduate Center Public Programs

“Most Americans outside the Bible Belt have little idea of the beliefs held by millions of fundamentalist churchgoers,” according to the conference description. “We have an almost total lack of awareness of the rise of Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism, forms of theology that advocate a biblical vision of God’s kingdom on earth. Some fundamentalists also foresee events such as The Rapture, the Times of Tribulation, Armageddon, and the Second Coming of Christ as we enter The End of Days…

The 2004 election tells us that socially conscious citizens need to awaken to the ambitions of this influential religious movement. What do fundamentalist theologies advocate regarding theocracy, abortion and homosexuality? What is the nature of the world order under God’s law that they anticipate? How do many fundamentalists interpret the role of Israel? How does this affect U.S. policy? Why are so many fundamentalists opposed to environmentalism and the UN? Why are millions in America drawn to this form of belief, and how can we come to understand them?”

I will write about the conference, and I hope others will as well. I will link to interesting reports I hear about.

There has been a conference going on at Harvard Law School this week about Rebuilding the Democratic Party and the Left. Certainly a fine theme for a conference, and I am sorry I was not able to attend. But fortunately fellow blogger .08 Acres (And a Donkey) was able to go on the first day, and hear a distinguished panel “on the role of the Internet in democracy, the Democratic party, and infrastructure building.” The panel included noted political bloggers Jerome Armstrong of MyDD and Matt Stoller of bopnews, Amanda Michel of the Berkman Center at Harvard, and former Howard Dean campaign manager, Joe Trippi.

But judging from his must-read report, it sounds to me like they would have done well to have had him on the panel:

“At one point, Trippi described the Democratic party as “brain dead” and constantly operating thirty or forty years behind the Republicans. His implication was that we could not count on the party and if we wanted to change how campaigns are run, we’d have to accomplish it in spite of the Democrats, rather than with their support. Of course, the obvious question was asked: “What should we be doing?” How do we go about taking matters into our own hands if the party is going to resist innovation and change? There were no easy answers presented. Start your own blog, someone said, build an online community, etc. But how do you start something from scratch and turn it into something that wields influence?”

“I think, though, that while Trippi’s pessimism is certainly warranted, he has a very narrow view of Democratic politics. His experience is working on Presidential campaigns, and when he talks about the party, he’s speaking of the national party. But that’s not the whole story. The power of an individual is at its most dilute at the national level.”

Indeed. The key to restoring democracy to the people — civic engagement as the buzz goes these days — is for us reclaim our citizenship. We need to increase our knowledge of electoral politics as well as our skills. And we need to do it over the long haul with like-minded folks in our own communtities. That’s one reason why I am involved with Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts. We are citizens doing it for ourselves.

The powerful House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay (R-TX) is off to the funeral of Pope John Paul II. But politics as he knows it may be forever changed by the time he returns. Corruption scandals have been closing in on Mr. DeLay, who has been clinging desperately to ebbing power. Prior to her death, he even compared his situation to that of Terri Schiavo.

Now there are stories on the news wires today summarizing new examples sleazy dealings by Mr. DeLay.

The Dallas Morning News (subscription) picked up the story that DeLay’s wife and daughter received more than a half million dollars in “unusually generous” payments since 2001 by Mr. DeLay’s PACs and campaign, from the New York Times, which reviewed documents on file with the Federal Election Commission, and other records in Texas. The article continues: “Most of the payments… were described in the disclosure forms as “fundraising fees,” “campaign management” or “payroll,” with no additional details about how they earned the money. The payments appear to reflect what Mr. DeLay’s aides say is the central role played by the majority leader’s wife and daughter in his political career.”

The Houston Chronicle, DeLay’s hometown paper, reprinted a separate investigative piece from The Washington Post which reported “that a six-day trip to Moscow in 1997 by Mr. DeLay was underwritten by business interests lobbying in support of the Russian government, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the trip arrangements.”

This is the third such trip that has surfaced allegations of having been bankrolled “directly or indirectly” by lobbyists or foreign agents.

Mr. DeLay apparently misreported that the trip was sponsored by a Washington-based nonprofit organization. But the Post learned that the trip was actually underwritten by “a mysterious company, Chelsea Commercial Enterprises Ltd., which was registered in the Bahamas and also paid for an intensive $440,000 lobbying campaign.” The cost for the trip for DeLay and four others was reportedly $57,238.

While on the trip, DeLay dined with the Russian executives and lobbyists for Chelsea, one of whom was Jack Abramoff, who is embroiled in a major federal influence-peddling and corruption investigation.

Much, much more is likely to emerge about DeLay and his associates.

“One of the surest paths to riches in Washington,” according to a Bloomberg business news story this morning, “is to have these five words on a resume: ‘Office of Representative Tom DeLay.’ Eleven lobbyists who once worked for the Texas Republican and House majority leader helped bring in at least $45 million in fees for their firms in the past two years… Many of the more than 200 companies, coalitions and trade groups that have hired former DeLay employees as lobbyists since he became House Republican leader in January 2003 have gained from those ties as he championed their causes.”

To borrow from Dr. Seuss, writing about Richard M. Nixon nine days before his resignation:

[updated]

The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go. Go. Go!
I don’t care how.

You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Tom Delay,
will you
please go now!

You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But please go.
Please!

I don’t care.
You can go by bike.
You can go on a Zike-Bike
if you like.

If you like
you can go
in an old blue shoe.
Just go, go GO!
Please do, do, Do!

Tom Delay,
I don’t care how.
Tom Delay,
will you please

GO NOW!

You can go on stilts.
You can go by fish.
You can go in a Crunk-Car
if you wish.

If you wish
you may go
by lion’s tail.
Or stamp yourself
and go by mail.

Tom Delay!
Don’t you know
the time has come
to go, Go, Go!

You can go
by balloon …
…or broomstick.

OR

You can go by camel in a bureau drawer.
You can go by Bumble-Boat …
…or jet.
I don’t care
how you go.
Just GET!

Get yourself a Ga-Zoom.
You can go with a … BOOM
Tom, Tom, Tom!
Will you leave this room!

Tom Delay!
I don’t care HOW.
Tom Delay!
Will you please
GO NOW!

I said
GO
and
GO
I meant …

The time had come.
SO …
Tom WENT!

A new web site — Deval Patrick.com — popped up on April 2nd. If if you click on it — what you will read is, “Coming Soon!”

Deval Patrick, for those who don’t know, is about to announce his candidacy for Governor of Massachusetts. He is the former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Clinton administration — and he is positioning himself as the progressive, outsider candidate. He has been getting positive reviews as he has toured the state, hearing whats on the minds of citizens, elected officials, and party leaders. While he has received encouragement and advice from Bill Clinton, of greater importance is that interest and enthusiasm has been building here in the Bay State. Some say he may be Massachusetts’ answer to Barak Obama.

Patrick is very smart, gracious, charismatic, honest and earnest. He comes across as a non-pol who is capable of broad appeal. He clearly cares deeply about the lives of ordinary people — his extensive resume in corporate America not withstanding. (Although that continues to worry some.) He has a broad, non-parochial vision of the Commonwealth. With the cooperation of an increasingly progressive and overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature, he would have a largely unencumbered opportunity to take bold and sweeping initiatives instead of tiny incremental steps in such areas as health care — which he said would be his highest priority. Progressives hope he may emerge as their standard bearer in the Democratic primaries against the much more conservative Attorney General Tom Reilly and Secretary of the Commonwealth, William Galvin.

A few weeks ago, Peter Vickery, the elected Governor’s Councilor from western, MA [the Governors Council ratifies judicial nominations in MA) convened a group of about 20 progressive democratic activists and leaders. He reports that “the people who were in the room, were enthusiastic about Deval’s candidacy and agreed that they would urge thier organizations to back him. I came away from the meeting, agreeing to support him openly.”

“Deval Patrick is a progressive democrat in the broadest sense,” Vickery concludes, “and he is getting the support of progressives who are determined to win the gubernatorial election in 2006.”

Columnist David A. Mitchell at the Quincy Patriot-Ledger, reporting from the home town of the state Democratic Party, says a star it born.

Patrick, Mitchell writes, has the “Barak Obama factor” working for him. He describes this as “the realization, 40 years after the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, that there is a largely untapped reservoir of white support for excellent black candidates.”

“Massachusetts demonstrated that a year after the Voting Rights Act was enacted”, Mitchell continued, “when, in 1966, Edward W. Brooke was elected to the U.S. Senate.”

“Thomas I. Atkins, running citywide, was elected to the Boston City Council in 1967; and John O’Bryant, also running citywide, was elected to the Boston School Committee in 1979.”

“Such black electoral successes with white support were admittedly exceptional in the racial hurly-burly of the 1960s and ’70s, and tend to be forgotten today. But the effect of historical amnesia is an erroneous presumption that black candidates are unelectable in white-majority districts.”

“Obama belatedly exploded that presumption with his election to the U.S. Senate from Illinois last year. The Obama effect, I think, is a release of pent-up political energy, multiracial in its composition, that is newly willing to support, and finance, candidates of Obama’s – and Deval Patrick’s – caliber… “

“As President Kennedy put it about himself, ‘The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.’”

“It is the sense of a fair prince,” Mitchell concludes, “arrived in the presence of tired men and tired ideas, with new inspiration. Patrick is articulate, friendly and relaxed, but serious. I expect him to be an effective phenom!”

But the nature of the phenom is not all, in Mitchell’s view, charisma and buzz. Its also about being a smart and efffective pol.

“He has impressed many of the Democratic ward and town committee members who will select, and in many cases be, the delegates who will endorse a gubernatorial candidate at the state convention. I am told he is ahead of Reilly in getting out among these people.”

Not bad for the outsider, first time, and as yet unannounced candidate.

Bloggers have also been tracking Patrick’s emerging candidacy.

Charley from Blue Mass Group had reports from Patrick’s recent meeting with Democrats in Cambridge. And .o8 Acres and a Donkey had this account: “While some Massachusetts progressives may have oversold him, I have to admit that he is the most charismatic of the current presumptive crop of Democratic candidates for governor. He took a page out of the Dean playbook by saying that he hoped his campaign would revive a sense of civic engagement… What really impressed me, though, was that his prepared remarks lasted roughly half an hour and he spent the rest of his time taking questions from the crowd. He knew that many of us were there just to check him out and he wasn’t afraid to devote the majority of his time to respond to the group.”

While we are waiting the official announcement and the launch of the campaign web site, here is a basic Patrick bio, and an interesting interview with Teen Ink, a Newton, MA-based magazine.

Of course, there will certainly be no shortage of opportunities to hear Patrick and for that matter the other likely candidates, Tom Reilly and Bill Galvin, who are far better known and been elected to statewide office. Here are a few such opportunities.

Patrick will be addressing the Lexington Democratic Town committee on April 14th. All are welcome to attend.

He will also be addressing the Cape and Islands Democratic Council (CIDC) Jefferson-Jackson Dinner at the Radisson on April 30th. For more information on tickets, time, etc., contact Kathy Ohman, CIDC chair at ohmankathy@comcast.net.

Meanwhile it looks like the MA Democratic Platform Convention on May 14th in Lowell will feature presentations by all three, all-but-declared (and they all may be declared by then) Democratic candidates for governor. U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy is scheduled to speak — and possibly Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean.

I will be on the second hour of the Laura Flanders Show, on Air America this Saturday, April 2nd from 8-9 pm Eastern Time.

Check here to find an Air America affiliate — and on the first anniversary of the liberal talk radio network — there are 51 of ‘em! Not all carry this show (you might want to talk with them about that!)

You can also listen online or on one of the satellite networks.

We will be talking about the role of the Christian Right in the Terri Schiavo situation, particularly the role of Randall Terry.

Those of you who are more plugged in than I, know all too well how
Terry has been all over the media denouncing the state and federal judges who for 15 years have consistently upheld the right of the Shiavos to make their own decisions: that’s every court, state or federal; every judge, Democrat or Republican.

While sincere people have differences of opinion about the rightness of all this, there is a larger issue at stake. Randall Terry and his cohort are theocrats. They believe in the implementation of “Biblical law” in a Christian Nation. A narrow, sectarian version of Christianity to be sure: one rooted in religious bigotry and the most outrageous religious supremacism.

If Terry’s vision of Christian theocracy gains traction, we will see increasing vigilante interference in the private lives of private citizens — not unlike the religious police in Saudi Arabia. We will also see rising bigotry against people of other faiths; aggression against those whose idea of Christianity differs from Terry and his theocratic allies; and relentless efforts to damage the constitutional protections of equal rights under the law gained by women, and gays and lesbians, among others.

Terry, the founder of the militant antiabortion group, Operation Rescue, has made a career of exploiting the circumstances of others to promote his religious and political agenda. He has led militant efforts to directly interfere with people exercising their constitutional right to receive and to provide abortions. And now he has used his considerable demagogic skills to interfere with the court-recognized, private decisions of a husband seeking to honor his wife’s wishes that extraordinary means be not be used to keep her alive.

In each case, Terry and his cohort have sought to impose their religious beliefs on others either through mob action, or through inciting government officials to use the power of the state or federal government to override the power of the courts to protect the rights of citizens.

There is much that could be said about Mr. Terry, but let’s just take a sampling of his views. Unlike some in the Christian theocratic movement, he does not mute his true colors. In a 1995 speech titled Our Goal: A Christian Nation, he declared among other things:

“You better believe that I want to build a Christian nation, because the only option is a pagan nation. Not that the government can make someone a Christian by decree. A Christian nation would be defined as ‘We acknowledge God in our body politic, in our communities, that the God of the Bible is our God, and, we acknowledge that His law is supreme.’”

Referring to abortion providers he declared:

“When I, or people like me, are running the country, you’d better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we’ll execute you. I mean every word of it.” He added, “I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed.”

“You say, ‘This is extreme!’” he continued, “Yeah, you’re right. But imagine God Almighty sending people to hell just because they didn’t follow His son? That’s extreme. That’s intolerance. Imagine Jesus saying that all other religions are false. Christianity claims to be the only way.”

And in case anyone missed the point he continued:

“God established patriarchy when he established the world. God established a patriarchal world. If we’re going to have true reformation in America, it is because men once again, if I may use a worn out expression, have righteous testosterone flowing through their veins. They are not afraid of the contempt of their contemporaries. They are not here to get along. They are not even here to take issue. They are here to take over!”

There’s lots more, but lest you think Terry was just having a bad hair day, let me stress that these are the kinds of thing he says all the time.

Here is a passage from my book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy. “Randall Terry has joined the ranks of potential theocratic revolutionaries. Although he has distanced himself from those justifying murder and clinic violence, he told a 1995 Operation Rescue gathering in Kenner, Louisiana that Christians may have to ‘take up the sword’ in order to ‘overthrow the regime that oppresses them.’ He called for a theocratic state founded ‘on the Ten Commandments,’ and ‘a culture based on Biblical Law.’” (page 150.)

The rhetoric we hear today from the likes of Terry, Roy Moore, James Dobson, and Tom DeLay about “unelected judges” is exactly the rhetoric we heard from demagogic Southern governors like George Wallace of Alabama, as he and others defied federal court orders to desegregate the public schools and other institutions in teh 1950s and 60s.

We need a fair and impartial judiciary that can rise above the heat of the moment, and the rancor of partisanship. Randall Terry and his vigilante mob almost persuaded Governor Jeb Bush to send in the state police to seize Terri Schiavo in defiance of the courts. Perhaps he noticed from the polls that the public didn’t approve of the Terry’s theocratic vigilantes, let alone the Congress and president George Bush’s crass political opportunism.

Although the courts and the court of public opinion rejected all this, this was but one battle in what will likely be a long war of attrition against the courts in the Congress and in the streets.

Next week’s National Press Club panel on journalism and blogging (now retitled “Who is a Journalist?”) has suddenly become a hot topic. Not so much because of the subject matter, but because the featured panelist is none other than James Guckert, best known by his stage name, Jeff Gannon. Guckert has been noted for his convincing portrayal of a conservative journalist in the White House press room for almost two years while simultaneously running a male escort service.

But the panel has been oddly constructed.

“This panel,” notes The Agonist in a letter to the members of the National Press Club signed by over 100 bloggers including this one, “portends to discuss the meanings of the words ‘journalist and ‘blogger’ and whether the two are different things or one and the same… As Gannon is not a blogger, we feel his inclusion means that the panel is largely about Gannon himself and what his specific case means in context of the discussion. We also note… that Gannon’s presence on the panel will allow him to once again air his side of the story. Who will air the other side?”

John Aravosis of AMERICAblog who has covered Gannongate extensively, has volunteered to appear on the panel and is recommended by over 100 of his peers.

“The institutional press is giving the investigated his voice while not allowing the investigator to have its say,” the letter continues.

“As we have noted above, you’re discussing a story broken by the blogosphere yet cutting out the very people who made it a story there. This exclusion is shortsighted and raises questions of journalistic imbalance and ethical malfeasance. Thus, we again must raise our collective voice and insist that John Aravosis sit on the panel.”

Please join us in politely calling on Julie Shue or Rick Dunham at the The National Press Club to request that they include John Aravosis of Americablog.org at their event. Here are their numbers: 202-662-7500 or 202-662-7501 or email at tglad@press.org and info@npcpress.org.