Alaska Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller is a Scared Bunny

Bold Tea Party candidate starts to hide - After more damaging revelations, Alaska Republican declares he will no longer answer questions about his past

In a bizarre press conference Monday, Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller announced he will no longer answer questions about his past and blamed the media for focusing on personal attacks instead of the issues.

"We’ve drawn a line in the sand. You can ask me about background, you can ask about personal issues — I’m not going to answer. I’m not," he said, continuing:

This is about the issues. This is not about continuing the personal attacks, it’s not about continuing the diversions based in illegal acts. This is about moving the state forward. And that’s our commitment.

There have been a steady stream of revelations in recent weeks about Miller, who was a little-known attorney until he beat Sen. Lisa Murkowski in an upset in the August primary (she is now running as a write-in candidate). It has emerged in recent weeks that Miller took advantage of various programs that he thinks are unconstitutional or should be gutted, like Medicaid and federal farm subsidies.

One of Miller's former employers would not comment on Miller except to say that no one tried to keep him from leaving. A high recommendation indeed.

8 Ways to Fight the Right-Wingers Conservative Republicans Buying Off Our Government

Not only is income and wealth in America more concentrated in fewer hands than it's been in 80 years, but those hands are buying our democracy as never before -- and they're doing it behind closed doors.

Hundreds of millions of secret dollars are pouring into congressional and state races in this election cycle. The Koch brothers (whose personal fortunes grew by $5 billion last year) appear to be behind some of it, Karl Rove has rounded up other multimillionaires to fund right-wing candidates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is funneling corporate dollars from around the world into congressional races, and Rupert Murdoch is evidently spending heavily.

No one knows for sure where this flood of money is coming from because it's all secret.

But you can safely assume its purpose is not to help America's stranded middle class, working class, and poor. It's to pad the nests of the rich, stop all reform, and deregulate big corporations and Wall Street -- already more powerful than since the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators.

Credit the Supreme Court's grotesque decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates. (Even though 8 of 9 members of the Court also held disclosure laws constitutional, the decision invited the creation of shadowy "nonprofits" that don't have to reveal anything.)

According to FEC data, only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.

Last week, when the Senate considered a bill to force such disclosure, every single Republican voted against it -- thereby revealing the GOP's true colors, and presumed benefactors. (To understand how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)

Republicans have always been for the best government by and for special interests. They shipped off American jobs to China and called it patriotism. Many middle-class American still believe conservatives have their best interests at stake. Which explains why some people believe burying a potato in the backyard will heal whooping cough. Some people will believe anything.

Conservative Republican and Terrorist Byron Williams attack follows numerous right-wing terrorism incidents in recent years

As journalist John Hamilton wrote, Byron Williams was arrested after he allegedly opened fire on California Highway Patrol officers. Williams reportedly told investigators that "his intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU." Williams' alleged actions follow numerous right-wing terrorism attacks in past years.

Williams is a big Glenn Beck and Fox News fan.

What Does Republican Dan Webster Stand For?

What Does Republican Dan Webster Stand For? Well, it is not good math or honest debate. Does Washington need another dishonest Republican that is great at babbling nonsense but has no honest answers.

Despite their history of running up the national debt when they are actually in power, leading conservatives have made complaining about the national debt a central theme of their political campaigns.

It was this theme that GOP candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives Dan Webster was touting at a meeting with voters late last month. While fearmongering about the amount of public debt the United States now holds, the congressional candidate went as far as to say that “you could combine all the economies of the world and you could not sustain the borrowing that we’re doing”:

WEBSTER: We’re borrowing 4 billion dollars a day, that’s impossible. We are in trouble. We’re in big trouble. Even Hillary Clinton said two weeks ago that if the borrowing continues it will be a threat to national security. That’s not us. That’s them saying that. Even the congressional budget office has said that is unsustainable. You could combine all the economies of the world and you could not sustain the borrowing that we’re doing. So we have to turn off the faucet.


When Webster refers to the “the borrowing that we’re doing,” he’s talking about the $1.3 trillion dollar budget deficit. It is simply incorrect that the rest of the world’s economies combined would not be able to sustain those levels of debt. The CIA World Factbook estimates that the Global World Product — the sum of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the world’s nations — was approximately $58.15 trillion for 2009. Meaning that the global economy produced 44 times as much in 2009 as it would take to completely pay down the U.S. budget deficit.

Webster is one of those guys who have to lie and exaggerate to make a point. Maybe that is part and parcel of also believing that women are second class citizens. From 2000 to 2008 Bush Republicans like Dan did a lot of whining about the deficit even as they created the largest debt in history - leaving the mess for Democrats to clean up ( not very responsible or patriotic behavior). Right-wing conservatives like Webster are doing a lot of complaining now - and as before they have no serious plan - complaining and making up math is not a plan, Neocons Talk Deficit but Won’t Budge on Defense Cuts

This hypocrisy was on full display on Oct. 4, as American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks, Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner, and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol penned a joint op-ed for the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page on why the defense budget should be totally off limits to budget cutters.

First, they claim the military is not the “true source of our fiscal woes.” No one is saying the defense budget is the sole source of the deficit, but the fact is that it has risen from 3 percent of the gross domestic product in fiscal year 2001 to 4.7 percent this year. That additional 1.7 percent of GDP amounts to $250 billion in spending — almost 20 percent of this year’s budget deficit. And according to a recent Congressional Research Service report, the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone accounted for 23 percent of the combined budget deficits between fiscal years 2003 and 2010.

Brooks, Feulner and Kristol then claim that “terrorism and piracy in sea lanes around the world,” potential future threats from a “nuclear Iran” or a China “that can deny access to U.S. ships or aircraft in the Asian-Pacific region” justify a defense budget only slightly smaller as a share of GDP than at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear missiles targeted directly at the United States.

Tufts University foreign policy expert Daniel Drezner was underwhelmed by the argument. “Terrorism and piracy are certainly security concerns — but they don’t compare to the Cold War,” he said. “A nuclear Iran is a major regional headache, but it’s not the Cold War. A generation from now, maybe China poses as serious threat as the Cold War Soviet Union. Maybe. That’s a generation away, however.”

American University defense expert Gordon Adams was equally unimpressed by the trio’s rationalization:

It is little more than a façade to justify growing defense budgets as far as the eye can see, affordable or not. First, we are leaving Iraq as we speak and will be drawing down in Afghanistan starting next year… [which] frees up a considerable amount of military personnel. Second, anyone who thinks terrorists and pirates justify a $700 billion defense budget and a 2-million-person force (actives and reserves) has clearly drunk way too much Kool-Aid. These missions are important, but they do not drive anywhere near that number of forces. Third, …The U.S. has ample sea and air power to cope for decades with a rising China, whose economic pursuits pose a much more significant problem for the U.S. than their military pursuits.

The fact of the matter is that China spends half the share of its GDP on defense as the U.S. — less than $100 billion last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the primary source for internationally comparable data on military expenditures. That’s less than 15 percent of what we spent. According to SIPRI, the military budgets of every nation on earth other than the U.S added together would only come to 46 percent of the total. In other words, the U.S. defense budget is 54 percent of world military spending.

Republicans lied us into Iraq and bungled victory in Afghanistan the least they could have done is pay for their treachery. Instead they left it and now claim to be pissed off at how slow it is taking to pay for their screw-ups.

Sharron Angle's pastor on Harry Reid: "His religion's a cult". - The pastor of the Reno church where Nevada's GOP Senate candidate worships shares his opinions on Mormons. gee what happened to conservatives who said they believed in freedom of religion. Does Angle realize that Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is a Mormon.

Another tolerate conservative Republican Glenn Beck - How many anti-Semites does Glenn Beck have to cite?

The problem with conspiracy theories (well, one of the problems with conspiracy theories) is that they function as a playground for bigots. Theories like birtherism or 9-11 trutherism come to be popular in anti-Semitic and racist circles because they help to validate in the minds of these people that which they already believe to be true -- that the world's problems can be laid at the feet of ethnic group X or religion Y.

For someone like Glenn Beck, who tries (and fails) to walk the line between conspiracy theorism and legitimate history, encountering anti-Semitic cranks is unavoidable. This puts him in the somewhat comic situation of having to carefully weed out the bigoted aspects of already disreputable theories, and then trying to convince everyone that he's a historian, and not a lunatic.

Beck, it seems, isn't up to that challenge. Over the past few months, several anti-Semitic authors and theories have popped up in his TV and radio monologues, and Beck's audience of millions is, unwittingly or not, being exposed to some of the most hateful rhetoric of the last century.

Sarah Palin's Alaska Buddy Joe Miller Admits He Got Government Health Care

Despite Bashing 'Obamacare' As Unconstitutional, Joe Miller Admits He Got Government Health Care

Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller says his family benefited from Medicaid and a state-run health care program for low-income children and pregnant women.

Miller previously acknowledged receiving federal farm subsidies for land he owned in Kansas in the 1990s, as well as low-income hunting and fishing licenses for him and his wife in Alaska.

As a conservative candidate, he's criticized certain entitlement programs. Sitting Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who's running for re-election as a write-in candidate against him, called Miller a hypocrite.

As The Huffington Post has reported, Miller on his campaign website clearly defines his position on the health care issue:

I support the repeal of ObamaCare. First and foremost, there is no Constitutional authority for it. Currently nearly half of the state governments have filed suit in federal court because they share this view.

Second, even if ObamaCare were Constitutional, its baseline benefit is built upon a crumbling foundation, and it will do nothing to control costs. This legislation adds millions of new beneficiaries to the already broken Medicaid program and relies in part on finding hundreds of billions in savings from the broken and going bankrupt Medicare program. The reimbursement rates on both of these programs are so low that many doctors in Alaska will not see patients or greatly limit the number of patients they will see.

The Tea Party-backed candidate has also reportedly communicated a desire to phase out Medicare.

Miller belongs to a long line of Tea Nuts who have derided various government programs from which they benefited either directly or indirectly.

Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) - Bachmann Farm Subsidies: Anti-Handout Rep. Personally Got $250K . In several polls of tea baggers many of them admit to receiving or even depending on government programs. What they seem to be against is the use of those programs by "other" people, but it is Ok for tea baggers to collect government benefits.

Nevada's smiley faced proto-fascist Republican wacko Sharron Angle And Her Husband Receive Government Health Care

Stimulating Hypocrisy: 114 Anti-American Conservative Republican Lawmakers Block Recovery While Taking Credit For Its Success

Rand Paul Runs From His Own Medicare Record With TV Ad Edits - Why does Rand hate America's senior citizens?

Connecticut Republican right-winger and candidate for senate Linda McMahon's Body Count
Imagine if someone ran for the Senate on the strength of their experience as CEO of a billion-dollar company. Now imagine if, as an aside, their employees kept ending up dead. They would routinely die [1] of heart attacks, drug overdoses, suicides and strokes before the age of 50. Imagine if their company had put a "death clause [2]" in their contracts that prevented employees and their families from suing the company. Imagine if they had gag orders to prevent family members from speaking out against what could be fairly called the most dangerous working conditions in the United States. Imagine if this candidate was so sociopathic that she would look at this billion-dollar business built on broken bodies and death as a source of pride and even as a motivator for why she deserves the power of public office. And lastly, imagine the media happily joining in with the sociopathology and giving her a free pass.

Missouri Tea Partiers Scream Their Support for Cruel Puppy Mills

Missouri Tea Partiers Scream Their Support for Cruel Puppy Mills

The state of Missouri is known throughout the humane community as "puppy mill central," a state which by some reckonings is home to nearly a third of the nation's wretched breeding factories that churn out litter after litter of puppies that can be high-priced and sometimes less than healthy, from mothers that are kept like brood sows and wind up exhausted and ailing after delivering endless litters -- I know; I've adopted one or two of such poor exploited ladies.

Dog-loving groups have been hopeful that Missouri's Prop. B, the Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act, would help to put a stop to some of this, by requiring commercial breeders with more than 10 breeding females who produce puppies for the pet trade give those dogs clean facilities, enough food and water and exercise, and what I would call decent intervals between pregnancies.

Simple, right?

Well, not according to some. As reported on Talking Points Memo, Tea Partiers are claiming that this is a manifestation of the Humane Society's sinister plan. Some, including people who either can't read or won't read -- to paraphrase Mark Twain, the latter has the same disadvantage as the former -- are applying Tea Party politics to this, declaring that the Missouri measure saving animals from misery and exploitation is part of a "radical" agenda.

The group calls itself the Alliance for Truth -- don't you love the grandiose labels these groups bestow on themselves? -- and one member, astonishingly, told the TPM site that Prop. B supporters "don't like animals."

Now, let's figure this one out. Who doesn't like animals? The Humane Society, with a decades-long track record of trying to give animals healthy and safe living conditions, or the people who seized on this, either with deliberate, cynical political intent or by a misreading of the law, to cast Prop. B as another effort by traitors and socialists to destroy the American way of life, which way of life also evidently includes the right to destroying animals' lives and health if that's what some red-blooded real American wants to do. What does the Alliance for Truth think about dog fighting? Maybe Michael Vick can show up at the next rally, so long as it doesn't interfere with his NFL schedule.

JoeThePlumber Overlaying the tragicomedy of this is the involvement of not-Joe-and-not-a-registered-Plumber, the supposed Everyman of the John McCain presidential campaign. Here's what he wrote: that the Humane Society is "cowardly [sic] hiding behind animal cruelty, lying to our citizens and taking our constitutional rights away -- one state at a time."

Today, humane conditions in puppy mills -- tomorrow, ending states' rights!

Come on, 'fess up, Comedy Central -- did you sneak a plant into Missouri and start up this group just to gin up good material for your writers?

Another of this group's contentions is that the Humane Society's real goal is "making it more difficult for middle-class American families to be dog owners."

Do I laugh or cry at that one, or both? Humane organizations would love for every middle-class American family to be a dog owner, and there's a really easy way, a cheap way, to make that happen -- without having to pay the hundreds or even thousands of dollars that puppy mills can charge per pet.

Millions of American-born dogs are waiting for you -- to live with your middle-class American family -- in shelters and with rescue groups all across America. There's just about any breed you want, any age, either gender, and all the all-American mutts you could hope for. None of your fancy hundreds or thousands-of-dollar price tags, either. Most shelters, you can walk out with the canine of your dreams for a hundred bucks or so, sometimes less.

In as you folks in the Show-Me State know, that's a demonstrable bargain.

Take a tour of a puppy mill - maybe we can get the Missouri tea nuts and Joe the Idiot plumber to stay caged up for a few years and tell us how they are enjoying their "constitutional" right o be treated like living garbage.

Over in Florida Republican weirdo Rick Scott - when he is not busy stealing millions from Medicare and screwing over senior citizens enjoys telling lies about his opponent Alex Sink. It is the only way a criminal sleazeball conservative like Scott can get into office.

Fox News Has Almost All Republican Presidential Candidates on Their Payroll

Fox News Has Almost All Republican Presidential Candidates on Their Payroll

A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you’re starring in “The Birth of a Nation,” but you’re actually just extras in a remake of “Citizen Kane.”

True, there have been some changes in the plot. In the original, Kane tried to buy high political office for himself. In the new version, he just puts politicians on his payroll.

I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

Now Mr. Santorum is one of those paid Fox contributors contemplating a presidential run. What’s the difference?

Well, for one thing, Fox News seems to have decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan.

Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.

Something else has changed, too: increasingly, Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O’Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there’s not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage.

As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox” — literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril.

So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications?

Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that when billionaires put their might behind “grass roots” right-wing action, it’s not just about ideology: it’s also about business. What the Koch brothers have bought with their huge political outlays is, above all, freedom to pollute. What Mr. Murdoch is acquiring with his expanded political role is the kind of influence that lets his media empire make its own rules.

Thus in Britain, a reporter at one of Mr. Murdoch’s papers, News of the World, was caught hacking into the voice mail of prominent citizens, including members of the royal family. But Scotland Yard showed little interest in getting to the bottom of the story. Now the editor who ran the paper when the hacking was taking place is chief of communications for the Conservative government — and that government is talking about slashing the budget of the BBC, which competes with the News Corporation.

So think of those paychecks to Sarah Palin and others as smart investments. After all, if you’re a media mogul, it’s always good to have friends in high places. And the most reliable friends are the ones who know they owe it all to you.

As Krugman notes money has always played a huge role in U.S. politics. Now with Fox and Murdoch's News Corp already determining who will be the next Republican nominee for president it is at last official that the winners in the right-wing political machine are not determined by the self deluded tea baggers who think they're part of a "grass roots" movement. Glenn Beck once admitted that anyone who listened to him was an idiot. Thus admitting that is is playing his audience to make himself extremely wealthy ( some estimates put his current annual income at $32 million). It turns out the tea baggers are just rubes. It is difficult to fell sorry for them since they seem so willing to dive head long in the anti-American propaganda put out by the likes of Fox.

Glenn Beck, the conservative television and radio host, is an amateur historian. Very amateur.

Alaska right-wing nut Joe Miller Adds The Minimum Wage To The Long List of Things He Thinks Are Unconstitutional


Republicans put corporations ahead of citizens in their view of the Constitution.

The Tea Party and The Founders

The Tea Party and The Founders

As they wrap themselves in the Constitution they mean to shred, that is the self-evident Truth the Tea/GOP Party ultimately cannot face.

Our legal godfathers---the ones Glenn Beck loves to conjure---were Deistic liberal humanists whose core beliefs he hates.

They dumped that tea because they despised the corporation that owned it and the idea of empire it (and today's corporate-military right) stood for.

The very first phrase of this nation's defining document, the Bill of Rights, says:

"Judaeo-Christian? Not a chance."

The grassroots farmers that made the Revolution were free-thinking hemp growers. Their favorite scribe, Tom Paine, was the son of a Quaker whose Age of Reason assaulted the church with unsurpassed fury. Today's Tea/GOP would have it burned.

Our greatest genius, Ben Franklin, was a proud and joyous sexual adventurer. His very presence today would induce howls of (envious) outrage from the religious right.

It was Franklin who most loved Native America. He introduced himself to the French as "an American savage." He stamped the Hodenosaunee (Iroquois) gifts of personal freedom and a democratic confederation into the soul of the new nation.

More formally, our tradition of direct voting, still alive in many New England towns, where the Revolution was born, was conceived in Athens, 508 BC. The Republic ("if you can keep it," as Franklin warned) came from Rome, 509 BC. Long before the "Christian Era."

The federal structure adopted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, was---with Franklin's mentoring---based on the Iroquois Confederacy. That union was born at latest 1540 AD. It sustained a functioning democracy for at least 250 years, still longer than the US has been in existence.

The matriarchal Hodenosaunee were defined by a love of nature and communal land stewardship. Open dialog was as easily accepted as abortion and homosexuality. Along with so many other lethal diseases, Original Sin was an unwanted import.

It is the humanistic liberalism of America's Founders that STILL enrages today's neo-Puritan Tea/GOP. The Jefferson they love to claim fathered at least five children with his slave Sally Hemings, thirty years his junior. Some were conceived while he lived "alone" in the White House.

He and Franklin and Madison and Paine had no time for the Christian faith. It's by their intelligent design that Jesus appears nowhere in the Constitution. Their liberal Deism said a Creator got the universe going, installed the laws of nature, endowed humans with free will (and inalienable rights), then left.

Franklin's disdain for church services spices his autobiography. Jefferson clipped all references to a divinity for Jesus out of his personal Bible. Paine's Age of Reason still enrages the official church. Madison's First Amendment enshrines disdain for an official religion. Unitarianism in all its liberal diversity was shared by presidents two through six, including two Adamses, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.

Their system of checks and balances was based on the Socratic proposition that with the freedom to dialog, human reason will prevail. Thus the First Amendment's very first phrase exalts freedom from Religion, ie separation of church and state, a phrase coined by Jefferson, demanded by the new nation as a whole.

Like virtually all other American farmers, Washington and Jefferson raised serious quantities of hemp, and made good money from it. Franklin owned a paper mill that ran on it. All may well have smoked its psycho-active cousin, now known as marijuana. If you told them the nation they founded would make this versatile herb illegal, they would laugh at you.

They'd be equally horrified to hear the Foxist Tea/GOP claiming them as icons in a sectarian crusade for repression and empire.

Today's religious right is an unholy fusion of theocratic authoritarianism---which our Founders hated above all---and corporate tyranny, whose tea they pitched in Boston harbor.

Along with George III, there's nothing they loathed more than the anti-human hypocrisy we hear from the Foxist Legion.

Likewise, Beck, Pailn, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and their ilk would have shrieked with rage at the actual Franklin and Paine, Jefferson and Madison, not to mention the populist farmers and sailors, workers and women who fought and died for the Revolution we all Revere (yes, him too!).

So next time those Tea/GOP phonies gaze off in the distance to claim kinship with the Founders, remind everyone you know who really did win that Revolution and write that Bill of Rights.

Those hemp-growing, tree-hugging, corporate-hating deistic free loving and free thinking present-at-the-creation Americans believed above all that the Truth would keep us free.

Now more than ever, it's our patriotic duty to prove them right.

The truth will only set those free for who facts matter. The Tea Party - who are conservatives who didn't give a damn what Republicans did to our constitutional rights or the deficit during the Bush years- are just right-wing Republicans who have avowed never to take responsibility for their part in running the economy into the ground and starting a baseless counterproductive war in Iraq.

Republican Congressional candidate Daniel Webster Tied To “Biblical Stoning” Movement

Republican Congressional candidate Daniel Webster Tied To “Biblical Stoning” Movement

So how close is Republican Congressional candidate Daniel Webster, running against Democratic Representative Alan Grayson for Florida’s 8th Congressional District, to evangelist Bill Gothard? That question is now politically salient because of Gothard’s participation in a radical Christian political movement called Christian Reconstructionism that seeks to impose stoning as a form of capital punishment for crimes including murder, adultery, “heresy,” and “witchcraft.” (for more on Christian Reconstructionism, see story appendix)

The answer to that question would be, very close. The first section of this story documents Daniel Webster’s relationship with Bill Gothard, so close that the religious leader could reasonably be described as a mentor or spiritual guru to the Republican congressional candidate. The second section describes Bill Gothard’s affinity for Christian Reconstructionist ideas.

Daniel Webster and Bill Gothard

As a February 16, 1997 story in the St. Petersburg Times described,

“Last summer, Daniel Webster journeyed to South Korea on a religious mission, meeting with the country’s president and other political and spiritual leaders. He was joined by Bill Gothard, the head of a $30-million Christian evangelical group. Four months after the trip, Webster ascended to one of the most powerful positions in Florida: speaker of the state House of Representatives. He brings with him 14 years of experience with Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles, where Webster has not only attended seminars, but also taught classes and even made an instructional video that raised money for the institute.”

The St. Petersburg Times story underscored Daniel Webster’s devotion to Gothard and laid out Bill Gothard’s teaching on female submission :

“[Gothard's] group preaches a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the belief that women should submit to their husbands’ authority. With programs for lawmakers, judges, doctors, juvenile delinquents and home- schooling courses, the institute’s reach is wide. It says that 2.5 million people around the world have participated in its programs.
Webster is an enthusiastic supporter. His six children learn at home, taught by his wife, Sandy, using the institute’s curriculum. The family, which also is active in its Orlando Baptist church, has participated in numerous institute seminars over the years.

[...]

A central tenet of the institute’s teaching is a command structure that makes the husband the head of the household. The man’s wife and his children are to submit to his authority, though the man has the responsibility to treat his loved ones with respect and devotion.

It would not be natural for a woman to work outside the home and the man to raise the children, one institute director said.
“That puts a wife in a role that she’s not equipped for inwardly or outwardly and puts the man in the same position,” the Rev. Tom Brandon said.

“A man is the lover and leader. (The wife’s) role is to trust God to supply her needs through the leadership of her husband and to serve with him and fulfill his needs.”

Teaching such philosophy, Gothard’s institute has expanded dramatically during the past decade, opening training centers across the country and around the world.”

The St. Petersburg Times story concluded by quoting Daniel Webster on Bill Gothard – “I enjoy the advice he’s given. I think it’s been a major part of my life. I’m not ashamed of that. What he has said I believe to be the truth.” An August 5, 1996 article in the Gainesville Sun that also underlined the close nature of Webster’s relationship with Gothard, quoted Daniel Webster concerning his 1996 trip with Bill Gothard to Korea, ‘I respect (Gothard) as much as anybody. As Webster told the Gainesville Sun, “I wouldn’t have gone [with Gothard to Korea] but he wanted me there.”

At Link: diagram from workbook used in Bill Gothard’s “Basic Youth Conflicts” course, with student notes, circa 1974

A March 9, 1997 1997 story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune by Alan Judd also covered the Daniel Webster / Bill Gothard relationship and provided additional details both on Webster’s extremely close ties ties to Bill Gothard and his Institute For Basic Life Principles and on subject matter taught in Gothard’s courses. As the story noted, “News articles and editorials have questioned why Webster gave high-level legislative staff jobs to four people who have worked with the [Gothard IBLP] institute.” Like the 1997 St. Petersburg Times story, Alan Judd’s account also noted that Gothard’s influence on Webster had been profound, extending into child rearing methods Webster and his wife have used to homeschool their children:

“Webster’s spokeswoman, Kathy Mears, one of the four former [IBLP] institute associates working for the Legislature, said: “We’re getting a little weary of questions on it. He’s the speaker of the House and he’s had an involvement in a Christian organization. His family home-schools and this Christian ministry had influence on rearing his family.” “

The 1997 Sarasota Times Herald-Tribune story also provided details gleaned from a Gothard promotional video produced in 1984, about the time Daniel Webster became a follower of Gothard’s teaching which, as Alan Judd described, included the following recommendations:

“Moral impurity” – in the form of “evil” rock music, television programming, alcohol or even newspaper horoscopes – must be avoided, lest future generations suffer “psychic disturbances.”

Public education, which teaches children “how to commit suicide,” is the enemy of spirituality, so children should be educated at home, isolated from their peers.

And fathers must lead their families, while women must be “submissive” and “obedient” to their husbands.

Judd’s description of Gothard’s 1984 video provided clues into Bill Gothards’ strange views on mental health and addiction – in a claim remarkably similar to the discredited early 20th Century genetic theory of Lamarkism, which claimed that behaviors could become genetically encoded and passed down through family lines, Gothard claimed that heavy drinking of alcohol could cause a hereditary inclination to alcoholism that could be passed down to the fifth generation.

Bill Gothard, according to Judd, quoted an unnamed “Jewish psychiatrist” that the condition of schizophrenia merely amounted to “varying degrees of irresponsibility” and declared that the study of psychiatry had “polluted” the minds of psychiatrists so that “they had to wash them out with scripture.” Gothard can be seen making the claim in the video below.

Alan Judd’s story concluded with a quote from Ronald Enroth, a sociologist of religion at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., who had written a book about “abusive” churches:

“It almost defies reason that thinking people can swallow this stuff. It indicates to me there are a lot of folks out there who want this kind of authoritarian leadership.”

Gothard and Christian Reconstructionism

Bill Gothard, in turn, was a close ally of R.J. Rushdoony, considered the father of Christian Reconstructionism and founder of the movement’s flagship institution, the Chalcedon Institute.

As Vice President of the Chalcedon Institute Martin Selbrede stated in the Institute’s March/April 2010 issue of Faith For All Of Life, the only reason Bill Gothard didn’t agree to use Chalcedon founder R.J. Rushdoony’s monumental Institutes of Biblical Law tome in Gothard’s sprawling evangelical empire is that the two couldn’t agree on divorce. Rushdoony’s Institutes was a template for instituting Biblical law in government (for more on Reconstructionism, see story appendix.)

As Selbrede wrote,

“[T]he divide between Gothard and Rushdoony on divorce was a deep and abiding one. Gothard proposed using Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law as a resource for his massive ministry; the sheer volume of the resulting sales would have made Rushdoony both rich and famous. Gothard’s condition for moving forward on this was letter-simple: Rushdoony merely needed to remove the section on divorce from his book, and the highly profitable deal would be sealed.

Rushdoony refused the offer.”

So, while Gothard was categorically opposed to divorce, Rushdoony, a virulently racist Holocaust denier who espoused Geocentrism, was a little more liberal on divorce. In other words, the two men were otherwise in substantial agreement – except for the sticking point of divorce, they both agreed that Rushdoony’s vision for Biblical law should be imposed upon America.

That vision included instituting stoning as a form of capital punishment for rape, kidnapping, murder, heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, “sodomy or homosexuality,” incest, striking a parent, extreme juvenile delinquency, and “unchastity before marriage.”

A 1999 report from a writer identifying herself as a former columnist for the Chalcedon Institute’s Chalcedon Report emphasizes the close ideological affinity between Bill Gothard and R.J. Rushdoony and even states that Gothard has provided his employees with copies of R.J. Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (note: Theonomy is the implementation of Biblical law in government):

“Not all Theonomists agree with Rushdoony, nor will all Theonomists agree with Gothard. Both are pretty much in the same camp, however, with the difference being Gothard is much more practical and usable. Gothard encourages his students to apply even the OT laws on diet and sexual abstinence after childbirth. I understand he put a copy of Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law in the hands of everyone on his staff.

[ ]...According to Gary North, women who have abortions should be publicly executed, “along with those who advised them to abort their children.” Rushdoony concludes: “God’s government prevails, and His alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or God invokes the death penalty against them.” Reconstructionists insist that “the death penalty is the maximum, not necessarily the mandatory penalty.” However, such judgments may depend less on Biblical Principles than on which faction gains power in the theocratic republic. The potential for bloodthirsty episodes on the order of the Salem witchcraft trials or the Spanish Inquisition is inadvertently revealed by Reconstructionist theologian Rev. Ray Sutton, who claims that the Reconstructed Biblical theocracies would be “happy” places, to which people would flock because “capital punishment is one of the best evangelistic tools of a society.”

The Biblically approved methods of execution include burning (at the stake for example), stoning, hanging, and “the sword.” Gary North, the self-described economist of Reconstructionism, prefers stoning because, among other things, stones are cheap, plentiful, and convenient. Punishments for non-capital crimes generally involve whipping, restitution in the form of indentured servitude, or slavery. Prisons would likely be only temporary holding tanks, prior to imposition of the actual sentence.

Webster claims he is not as cruel and fundamentalist as the Taliban, yet he adheres to a philosophy - which he wants to impose on the American people - which is very close to Muslim Sharia Law.