The Hollywood Liberal

Late Late Nite FDL: The Incredible Bettye Lavette
Bettye Lavette performs Sleep to Dream & I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.

Bettye Lavette performs Sleep to Dream & I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.

What’s on your mind tonight?

Exposing Five Dangerous Lies in McCain’s Big Speech
McCain’s falsehoods on health care, oil companies, trade, taxes and worker training were egregious and covered up his pro-corporate positions.

McCain Gets Another Pass
On ABC World News Tonight, David Wright to John McCain: It sometimes seems, as an outside observer, that both of you guys sometimes get stuck in the past. Senator Obama’s kinda stuck in 2003 and whether the war was a…

An Ominous Growth
In the post immediately below I referred to Obama’s audition for the role of ‘head of state/commander-in-chief’. And as a potential wartime president and in the rhetorical universe we’re now living in, this CINC test is inevitable and important for…

The LiberalOasis Radio Show: UnPalinable Edition

Today at 10 AM ET, The LiberalOasis Radio Show was broadcast on WHMP-AM in Western MA. My special guest was Rick Perlstein of the Big Con blog at OurFuture.org, and author of the critically acclaimed “Nixonland”, who reported from the site of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

The audio podcast for the show is here: (iTunes / XML feed / MP3)

Video of the opening monologue below, about how the RNC may have failed to speak to the swing.

Rep. Chris Smith: ?Our Students Must Find The God Of The Bible And Biblical Values In The Classroom?
At a reception in St. Paul on Wednesday for Catholic Republicans, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) — a fierce opponent of abortion — said that he is “very concerned that many of our schools and universities have lost their way.” They have become “bastions of moral relativism and moral compromise with the culture of death.” As […]

At a reception in St. Paul on Wednesday for Catholic Republicans, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) — a fierce opponent of abortion — said that he is “very concerned that many of our schools and universities have lost their way.” They have become “bastions of moral relativism and moral compromise with the culture of death.”

As a solution, Smith suggested that “students must find the God of the Bible and Biblical values in the classroom”:

SMITH: Our schools need to become oases of goodness, sound moral teaching and, they must become agents of change in the culture. Our students must find the God of the Bible and Biblical values in the classroom, on the campus. I believe we need to do more to find effective ways to educate and inform policy makers and hold them to account.

Watch it:

Smith’s call for “Biblical values in the classroom” could easily be interpreted as a call for the promotion of Christianity in American schools. But, as the First Amendment Center has pointed out, “the courts have been clear that public school teachers cannot teach religion to their students or read the Bible to the class as a way of promoting their faith.”

Smith’s comments appear to be more radical than Rep. Steve King’s (R-IA) claim last year that “every child” in American schools needs to learn “the tenets of the Christian faith.” While King conceded that if “the tenets of Christianity” are to be taught in school, “other faiths” should be taught as well, Smith said no such thing.

Transcript: (more…)