Wow! Did you SEE all those dark skinned faces on teevee just now?

[Stinky The Clown]

Hairballz is doing a story on the IRS looking into churches advocating for candidates. They showed more black faces as a percentage of all the faces shown for this story than for any non-racial story I can remember.

Now, I'm not foolish enough to think this is a racial issue. It simply isn't. It is a matter of law and of the separation of church and state.

My beef is in the telling of the story and the choice of background footage to illustrate the story for teevee.

The tactic of using churches as campaign machinery, to my mind, is overwhelmingly the province of the Republics and the leaders of the religiously insane - mostly white, fundamentalist Christians.

Have black churches not done the same thing? Probably they have done exactly the same thing. But the black churches are not what come to MY mind when I think of the mxing of religion and politics.

Am I mistaken in my view? Or is this the way this going to get spun?

Or ..... is this a purposeful tactic? Just as the issue is getting some traction *as an issue* - and maybe getting some traction on our side as a tactic - they make it look like all's going to be taken care of?

[ThomCat]

1. Republicans never miss a chance to prosecute others

for allegedly doing exactly what they are openly doing.
x(

[MadMaddie]

2. Here's what they are doing...

They determined years ago that to get black votes that they had to go to the one strong piller in the black community-churches....

Some not all black churches fell for the dangling carrot of getting money and anti gay legislation....

Now that Americans are starting to pay attention guess who is getting sent to the back of the bus....maybe under the bus....? The Black churches....what do you want to bet the first churches that lose their tax exempt status are black churches......?

Oh I forgot......dance with the devil...and you get burned by the devil.....just sayin...

[file83]

3. I'd have to see the segment - but I can agree with you that when I think

of the mixing of Church and State - I think of Bush and his loyal voters that still carry the W'04 stickers on their SUV's.

[durtee librul]

6. I carry a blasck

sharpie and write the word, IMPEACH over all the W stickers I see on cars.....I have NEVER been stopped and in one case, one guy offered to buy me a new marker!

[Skip Intro]

4. Yep, and all those diebold machines are rigged to put Dems in office

didn't see the report you referenced, but don't doubt for a minute the spin.

[sweetladybug]

5. Husb2Sparkly, I noticed the same thing

Lots and lots of black folks. The truth was totally TWISTED!

[wildeyed]

7. These days I believe the mostly white, fundamentalist

Christians are the ones using churches most effectively as campaign machinery. Take a look at Focus on the Family.

That said, the civil rights movement came out of the church. I know many black churches in my community are active with making sure their members are registered to vote and get out on election day. They are not supposed to tell their members who to vote for, but they can advocate on individual issues, and the majority of black americans vote democratic anyway.

Since voter disenfranchisement seems to take a larger role in the repub election strategy every year, it would not surprise me if the plan was to scare the black churches out of organizing for their communities by siccing the IRS on them.

[mntleo2]

8. Faith-Based Government

...the Repigs targeted black churches for faith-based money therefore in essence buying them off for proselytizing votes from the pulpit with promises of government grants in exchange for services such as the Marriage Proposal where they want to marry all poor women off. As they did with Tony Blair, if there is any trouble over this, do not think for a minutes, that those white mega-churches you see in the suburbs that are also getting this money will be the ones who are blamed. They will use the black churches because racism is alive and well in America and using a black face rather than a white one (except in the case of injustice to someone white or runaway brides) are the ones to show on the teevee.

They know they are teetering on some dangerous ground to blend church and state and because it is not working very well and there is rampant mismanagement of grants as well as outright bias as to who these churches will serve (Christians only, for instance. Forget being served if you are a W African Muslim women with three kids who has AIDS because your father gave you away at 13 to a husband who screws anything that moves).

The mixing of religion and the government while allowing discrimination is a blatant thumbing of the nose to the separation of church and state. Churches have taken federal money before ~ but only with the explicit agreement that they serve everyone and that they do not discriminate by race,sexual orientation, age, religion, etc in their hiring practices.

Do not think for any reason that those mega-churches are not getting tons more federal money than black churches and that they are not discriminating while building those mega-buildings that are sprouting up in your neighborhoods, because they are. And do not think for a minute that the minister is not receiving a juicy handsome paycheck for giving "services".

Yeah they give "services' all right ~ and tho it isn't sex ~ though we all know about those sick repressed ministers who thunder from the pulpit and then seceretely visit the gay bar or strip joint> Nope, it is prostitution, they just spread their legs for the administration is all.

My 2 (disgusted) cents

Cat In Seattle

[Donald Ian Rankin]

9. Does anyone have any statistics on this?

Has anyone actually looked at what fraction of political advocation from preachers comes from blacks/whites and to Democrats/Republicans?

[pretzel4gore]

10. during the democratic convention a few years ago

abc news focused on a small group of black delegrates, giving the impression the crowd was overwhelmingly black. during a later pbs news show about the election, abc's footage was played, with a direct comparison of its own footage only at a wider angle - which showed the mostly white crowd. This single story, a well known example of network racism from 10 years ago or so, remains so blatant yet noone ever got punished for it ....and how many people have even heard of it? time magazine once famously doctored a picture of oj simpson and got caught red handed (i've seen both the doctored pic with simpson's eyes darkened like he was evil) and the original and recall how time magazine was forced to admit it, and presumably promise not to do it blah blaah blah...and there are still people who wonder how simpson got away with his wife's and her friend's, murder!
using black rightwingers/xians etc to push the racist agenda of the gopigs is just normal proceedure in geebushamerica...

[tom_paine]

11. A large part of Bushevik Propaganda is the "Squirting Ink Cloud"

By which I mean the way they use Orwellian technique to cast aspersions on the victims and cast the victims as the perpetrators.

They will cast the problem and then point to the small Democratic infrigements (statistically it is almost certain such exist) while ignoring the 800 lb. Bushevik gorilla in the room.

It also innoculates people to the "he said, she said" mode of thinking which is death for a free society (not EVERYTHING is a matter of fucking opinion). When they see (IF they see) coverage of the actual rgeimented Fundamentalist Movement to turn churches into campaign headquarters for one party, they will think "oh both sides do that".

Game over.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. It's like the way news reports on poverty and crime suddenly

turned from featuring both white and black people to featuring only black people during the Nixon administration.

When the War on Poverty was announced, the PR for it featured Americans of all races, and the "poster children" for it were residents of the rural Appalachians, although black sharecroppers and residents of Indian reservations on the Great Plains were also featured.

By the time Reagan came into office, you would have thought that only black people were poor in America, and that they were all gang members or the mothers of ten children by ten different fathers--living on welfare, of course. :sarcasm: