Bust a move

When I heard about Dallas pastor Robert Jefress's recent comments on local TV denouncing Islam as an evil religion, I felt compelled to do some googling. I was disappointed to find out that Dallas's mayor attends Jefress's First Dallas Baptist Church, although I'll admit I was never a big fan of Tom Leppert anyway.


Monika Diaz, WFAA: "Controversial comments about Islam from Baptist leader"


see also, Emily Pothast, "God, Gays, and the Gilded Age: First Baptist Church of Dallas and the New Satanism"

(via Fort Worth Weekly.)



"Virginia's Stalin Problem,"

Matt Welch, Reason, June 9, 2010:

The city of Gori in the formerly Soviet Republic of Georgia is not the only place in the world with controversial commemorations to mustachioed mass murderer Josef Stalin. Take, for example, um, Bedford, Virginia?

The small town of Bedford, Va., is home to 21 men who sacrificed their lives on D-Day, June 6, 1944. It is now also the home of one of the world's few public memorial busts of communist dictator Josef Stalin.
Local citizens and organizations have expressed their outrage over the installation of the bust at the National D-Day Memorial, which honored the 66th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy over the weekend.

Spencer Ackerman, Wired: "Colonel Kicked Out of Afghanistan for Anti-PowerPoint Rant
"

Consider it a new version of death by PowerPoint. The NATO command in Afghanistan has fired a staff officer who publicly criticized its interminable briefings, its over-reliance on Microsoft’s slide-show program, and what he considered its crushing bureaucracy. Army Col. Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year old reservist from New Jersey who served in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to this deployment, got the sack.

Dean Baker, Counterpunch, "A Pointless Waste of Money: Pierce the Housing Bubble"