Was afraid that we'd lose some momentum if I let someone else step up to the plate though!
“Thanks. Was hoping you’d chime in! Since I don’t have a lot of experience in doing this I feel like I have a lack of ideas and would love help in that area. Other than that I’m pretty good at the actual organizing and getting the work done. Was afraid that we’d lose some momentum if I let someone else step up to the plate though!” ~ Roos_Girl
Glad you took the initiative. As far as ideas go, read the item below and I think you can see several things that we will need to discuss and EFFECTIVELY combat.
Here’s an email I received yesterday. My response to it is below. Please warn others — share this info far and wide.
-— On Sun, 2/15/09, G S wrote:
From:[..name snipped...]
Subject: Have you heard this song: “Born Again American”?
To:[...names snipped...]
Date: Sunday, February 15, 2009
http://www.bornagainamerican.org
Don’t fall for it !!! Warn others, too. Scroll down to “READ THIS”
The first thing I did was look to see who is behind the video. Why it’s none other than the left-wing Hollywood radical, Norman Lear, of “People for the American Way” who help elect B.O. and is now helping him to organize his “brown shirts”. This effort is just the opening phase of laying the groundwork for B.O.’s draft, which I warned you about long before the election last year:
BO’s back-door Draft: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2159649/posts?page=285#285
Bo’s back-door attack on free (political) speech: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2159649/posts?page=286#286
This “Born Again American” video is nothing more than just another one of Saul Alinsky’s “community-organizing” tactics being put into practice. “Wrap everything you do in morality if you want to fool the targets (the”middle class”) and get them on your side. I also warned you all about that tactic last year in my post entitled: “True psychopaths are often charming, seductive, and treacherous... Here’s a short excerpt of that email:
Saul Alinsky dedicated his book, Rules for Radicals: “... to the very first radical . . . who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer.” .....Alinsky scolded the Sixties Left for scaring off potential converts in Middle America. True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism, Alinsky taught. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.”
While his ultimate goal was nothing less than the “radicalization of the middle class,” Alinsky stressed the importance of “learning to talk the language of those with whom one is trying to converse.” “Tactics must begin with the experience of the middle class,” he said, “accepting their aversion to rudeness, vulgarity, and conflict. Start them easy, don’t scare them off.”
To appeal to the middle class, Alinsky continued, “goals must be phrased in general terms like ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’; ‘Of the Common Welfare’; ‘Pursuit of happiness’; or ‘Bread and Peace.’” He suggested, for instance, that an effective organizer “discovers what their [the middle class’] definition of the police is, and their language — [and] he discards the rhetoric that always says ‘pig’ [in reference to police]. Instead of hostile rejection he is seeking bridges of communication and unity over the gaps…. He will view with strategic sensitivity the nature of middle-class behavior with its hang-ups over rudeness or aggressive, insulting, profane actions. All this and more must be grasped and used to radicalize parts of the middle class.”
A related principle taught by Alinsky was that radical organizers must not only speak the language of the middle class, but that they also must dress their crusades in the vestments of morality. “Moral rationalization,” he said, “is indispensable to all kinds of action, whether to justify the selection or the use of ends or means.” “All great leaders,” he added, “invoked ‘moral principles’ to cover naked self-interest in the clothing of ‘freedom,’ ‘equality of mankind,’ ‘a law higher than man-made law,’ and so on.” In short: “All effective actions require the passport of morality.” ...” Continue in the BONUS article here: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=d6e27ece-9798-4f01-a378-3f1405f69704 [snip]
[I snipped the rest of the email I sent to all of you on 09/25/08 - if any of you want me to send you the whole thing again, let me know]
Now READ THIS:
Born-Again American: A Christian-Tinged Campaign From Norman Lear, a Foe [of religious conservatives]
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/02/03/born-again-american-a-christian-tinged-campaign-from-norman-lear-a-religious-right-foe.html
February 03, 2009 06:37 PM ET
By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
The music video for Born Again American, TV producer and liberal activist Norman Lear’s new campaign to promote service and volunteerism, might surprise you. The video, which features a new song that’s also called “Born Again American,” appropriates blatantly evangelical language: “I’m a Born Again American, conceived in Liberty/My Bible and the Bill of Rights, my creed’s equality.” How ironic, given that Lear has been battling the religious rightthe evangelical right, reallyfor nearly three decades. Lear founded People for the American Way shortly after the Moral Majority had opened its doors.
Has Lear jumped on the bandwagon of progressives who’ve “gotten religion” in recent years?
Not exactly. I found a Washington Post article describing People for the American Way’s 1980 founding, and it turns out that Lear has long used religion to battle [Christian conservatives]:
Two organizations, one made up entirely of mainline religious leaders and the other with them predominating, have sprung up in recent weeks ..:
One group, People for the American Way, will be launched formally today by a coalition that includes television producer Norman Lear, former senator Harold Hughes (D-Iowa), the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee and Dr. William Howard and Dr. William P. Thompson, the current and past presidents of the National Council of Churches [a left-wing organization of long standing].
Their plans call for distributing five 60-second TV spots, already produced by Lear, dealing with [Christian conservatives]. “We are trying to communicate to the American people that the Christian community understands that people must make up their own minds” about political issues, explained Thompson, who is the chief executive officer of the United Presbyterian Church.
“The church has the right to express its views,” Thompson continued, “but it does not have the right to tell people how to vote.”
A helpful reminder that liberals have been fighting religious conservatives with religionand not just arguments for church/state separationsince way before the religious left’s post-2004 revival. [With the help of the Marxist / Socialist Jim Wallis and his left-wing Sojourners magazine] See below:
Discover the Network profile of Jim Wallis
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1833
Jim Wallis
Activist preacher and editor of the leftwing Christian magazine Sojourners
Democratic Party operative who claims that God is “neither a Republican nor a Democrat”
Apologist for communist atrocities in Cambodia and Vietnam
Dedicated foe of capitalism
Contends that Biblical scripture calls for large central government to aid the poor
“..Giving voice to Sojourners’ intense anti-Americanism, Jim Wallis called the U.S. “… the great power, the great seducer, the great captor and destroyer of human life, the great master of humanity and history in its totalitarian claims and designs.” Sojourners is a member organization of the Win Without War and United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalitions. Sojourners is supported by the Cawley Family Foundation, Crystal Trust, the Delaware Community Foundation, the Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation, the Gannett Foundation, the Gill Foundation, the Laffey-McHugh Foundation, the Longwood Foundation, the MBNA Foundation, the [George Soros] Open Society Institute, www.soros.org the Peninsula Community Foundation, and the Philadelphia Foundation. ..” - David Jonsson