more animals

YOU'RE PROBABLY GOING TO WANT TO SHARE THIS PARTICULAR ITEM WITH THOSE AMONG YOUR FRIENDS AND E-MAIL CIRCLES who are still hard-wired in their Zealotry and True Belief in the John McCain/Sarah Palin Presidential ticket, seeing in the same the Complete and Final Triumph of the American Will over the forces of the New World Order's Evil Empire.

Especially considering these rather interesting revelations, originally by way of the forums @ Democrats.com:

As of this writing we have: (thanks to Chip for his valuable input!)

Palin's membership in an apocalyptic, militant, neopentecostal dominionist movement called Joel's Army  (unless she repudiates the group, which is unlikely, this could be an extremely serious liability!)

Palin's membership in a radical right stealth group called "Feminists For Life"

Palin's apparent sympathies for and possible connections to the Alaska Independence Party, a secessionist group

A brewing scandal involving her firing of a police chief

The revelation that Palin's 17-year old unwed daughter is 5-months pregnant (not likely to appeal to evangelicals who prefer abstinence to unprotected teen sex)

Brewing mini-scandals like "Broken Water-gate"

A news interview in which Palin asks, What is it that the VP does anyway?

Troopergate

Reports that she has made many enemies of both parties in the Alaskan state legislature

Reports that she is a poor administrator

The news (from Stephanopoulous) that she was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it.

Her assertion that "the founding fathers" put "Under God" in The Pledge of Allegiance

Her implication that energy independence can be achieved solely through domestic drilling.

Her questionable involvement with a 527 group for Sen Stevens

Palin's earmark requests: more per person than any other state

Clearly, this is not a candidate who was well-vetted, let alone qualified for the job of VP.

If this doesn't reflect on McCain's poor judgment, and his sense of desperation, then I don't know what does.

Come to think of it:

Speaking of Joel's Army and suchlike threats to liberty and democracy based on warped and perverted interpretations of Holy Scripture, some interesting insights about the movement come from the Southern Poverty Law Centre's Intelligence Report, whose fall number features an item on the movement:

Those sounding the alarm about Joel's Army are not secular foes of the Christian Right, few of whom are even aware of the movement or how widespread it's become in the past decade. Instead, Joel's Army critics are mostly conservative Christians, either neo-Pentecostals who left the movement in disgust or evangelical Christians who fear that Joel's Army preachers are stealing their flocks, even sending spies to infiltrate their own congregations and sway their young people to heresy. And they say the movement is becoming frightening.

"The pitch and intensity of the military rhetoric of this branch of the global Dominionist movement has substantially increased since the beginning of 2008," writes The Discernment Research Group, a Christian watchdog group that tracks what they call heresies or cults within Christianity. "One can only wonder how long before this transforms into real warfare with actual warriors."

[***]

[Todd] Bentley is considered a prophet both by his followers and by other leaders of the Joel's Army movement, whose adherents claim to be reviving a "five-fold ministry" of prophets, apostles, elders, pastors and teachers, as outlined in the Book of Ephesians. Not every five-fold ministry is connected to the Joel's Army movement, but the movement has spurred an interest in modern-day apostles and prophets that's troubling to the Assemblies of God, the world's largest Pentecostal church, which has officially disavowed the Joel's Army movement.

In a 2001 position paper, Assemblies of God leaders wrote that they do not recognize modern-day apostles or prophets and worried that "such leaders prefer more authoritarian structures where their own word or decrees are unchallenged." They are right to worry. Joel's Army followers believe that once democratic institutions are overthrown, their hierarchy of apostles and prophets will rule over the earth, with one church per city.

[***]

The story of how an ancient insect invasion came to be a rallying flag for 21st-century dominonists begins just after World War II in Canada. Out of a small town in Saskatchewan, a Pentecostal preacher named William Branham spearheaded a 1948 revival in which he claimed that his followers lived in a new biblical time of "Latter Rain."

The most sinless and ardent of his flock would be called "Manifest Sons of God." By the next year, the movement was so strong — and seemed so subversive to some — that the Assemblies of God banned it as a heretic cult. But Branham remained a controversial figure with a loyal following; many of his followers believed him to be the end-times prophet Elijah.

Michael Barkun, a leading scholar of radical religion, notes that in 1958, Branham began teaching "Serpent Seed" doctrine, the belief that Satan had sex with Eve, resulting in Cain and his descendants. "Through Cain came all the smart, educated people down to the antediluvian flood — the intellectuals, bible colleges," Branham wrote in the kind of anti-mainstream religion, anti-intellectual spirit that pervades the Joel's Army movement to this day. "They know all their creeds but know nothing about God."

The Gates of Hell
Branham was killed in a car accident in 1965, but his Manifest Sons of God movement, the direct predecessor of Joel's Army, lived on within a cluster of hyper-charismatic churches. In the 1980s, Branham's teachings took on new life at the Kansas City Fellowship (KCF), a group of popular self-styled apostles and prophets who used the Missouri church as a launching pad for national careers promoting outright Joel's Army theology.

Ernie Gruen, a local pastor who initially promoted and gave citywide credibility to KCF pastors in the early 1980s, cut his connections in 1990. Concerned about KCF's plans to push its teachings worldwide, Gruen published a 132-page insider's account, based on taped sermons and conversations and interviews with parents who had enrolled their kids in KCF's Dominion school.

According to Gruen's report, students at the school were taught that they were a "super-race" of the "elected seed" of all the best bloodlines of all generations — foreknown, predestined, and hand-selected from billions of others to be part of the "end-time Omega generation."

Though he'd once promoted these doctrines himself, Gruen became convinced that the movement was turning into an end-times cult, marked by what he summarized as "spiritual threats, fears, and warnings of death," "warning followers to beware of other Christians" and exhibiting "a 'super-race' mentality toward the training of their children."

Those not convinced of the depravities and perversions of Christian doctrine @ the heart of Joel's Army teachings may want to watch this actual YouTube video from a detractor, as appears in the online version of this particular article:

Not to mention the likelihood that the more fanatical specimens of religiopolitical zealotry generally are probably (and @ once unwittingly) close to the Dregs of Society, if not already there, using religion to hide their alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual mania (especially where perverted fetishes, homosexuality, pedophilia and animals come into the equation), propensities for violence against spouse and/or children (and prepared to excuse such as Christian Love Manifest), gaming or other "asocial tendencies."

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AS FOR MS. PALIN'S ABSURD NOTIONS ABOUT HOW THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE CAME ABOUT BY WAY OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS, especially so the line "under G-d," it may be worth recalling that it was the 1892 creation of Francis J. Bellamy, editor of The Youth's Companion magazine, as part of a suggested school programme to commemorate Columbus Day; its original form was:

I pledge allegiance to my flag, and to the republic for which it stands: One nation, indivisable, with liberty and justice for all.

By 1923, "my flag" was changed to "the flag of the United States of America," with "under G-d" added in 1954 as part of the enforced adventures in jingoistic patriotism brought about by the Red Scare of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and subsequent exercises in anti-Communist Zealotry and True Belief pro Deo et patria.

No wonder suchlike among her ilk have such warped visions of history as they do.

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ONE THING MORE: People For the American Way (PFAW) would like you to sign this Open Letter to Ms. Palin, to tell her that her real views do not represent those of the American Mainstream, but rather an idealised Bransoner Muzikschaukultur vision therefor.