Originally posted at http://www.opinionmill.com

Christine Craft, a Sacramento Area talk radio personality has published a column in the Sacramento News and Review that describes a “mission impossible” like infiltration into the Promise Keepers event at Arco Arena in October.

Craft worked with her audience to find and disguise a woman (known as D) as a man in order to gain entry into the event and report back to her audience. Her column does a pretty good job describing the “who, what, when, and where”, but she left me wondering “why”.

The obvious answer is that the left tends to dislike Evangelical Christians. But that is more of an observation than an explanation. Since Craft left this part out, we’re left to figure it out for ourselves and I believe that it has much to do with ignorance about Christian leadership and Christian politics.

Ignorance about Leadership:.

Christian fathers and husbands are called to build strong marriages and families through love, protection and biblical values. This is one of the 7 promises of the Promise Keepers. This call to leadership is all too often confused by non-Christians with male domination, control, and abuse.

I would never try to argue that abuse of this idea does not happen. And I’ll agree that sort of abuse is very ugly. But there is a difference between the leadership the Bible calls for and the abusive relationships that Craft suggests is being endorsed by the Promise Keepers.

It was the same type of talk that D heard as a child--a variation of the theme of giving it all up to make a covenant with the divine. She’d heard from her father the religious far right’s view that the man is the head of the household, at least in his own mind. The PK speakers have all sorts of saccharine ways of referring to respecting the wife or girlfriend. The woman is to be placed on a veritable pedestal of honor, except that the man is always to be the final “decider.”

When criticizing the Christian view of the family, all too often people forget that men are called to be the head of the family as Christ is the head of the Church. That is, Christ gave everything, suffered to protect, and in doing so demonstrated the perfect model of self sacrificial leadership and accountability.

The following comes from the Promise Keeper Mission Statement:

…In a world of negotiable values, confused identities, and distorted priorities, men are encountering God's Word, embracing their identities as His sons, and investing in meaningful relationships with God, their families and each other….

What family would not benefit from a father who can make decisions and at the same time be fully accountable for the outcome? What family would not benefit from a husband that does not become compromised in harmful and unhealthy relationships? There is no shortage of broken homes and failed marriages and I believe that an increased level of leadership and accountability coming from husbands and fathers could do wonders to reduce the frequency.

Ignorance about Christian Politics

All too often the groups labeled “Republican” and “Christian” are considered to be one and the same. Because of this, the political dialogue crosses over into the theological dialogue and vise versa. This confuses those that either don’t know where the boundaries are or are suited to ignore the boundaries. I’m not sure which camp the author falls into.

In her column Craft weaves in an observation of reverence to the President by the Promise Keepers.

D figured this group would probably “yup yup” the style of President George W. Bush, who is also a self-described “decider.” Sure enough, when one of the speakers referred to his own visit with Senator Bill Frist and Dubya, the crowd uttered a group “ahh” in reverent tones.

I’m not sure why this paragraph is in the column, other than to paint over the theological objectives of the Promise Keepers and suggesting a new set of political objectives making the group a more palatable object of ridicule.

All to often Evangelical Christians are stereotyped as the lackey of the RNC by the left. This is incorrect. Evangelical Christians are the lackey of Jesus Christ. If the RNC eliminated the Christian alignment of interest from their platform, Evangelicals would not support them. If the DNC aligned to the values of the Christian, they would win the Christian vote. It is as simple as that.

I have listened to Craft’s show and although I rarely agree with her, have found some of her positions to be well thought out. I’m not sure what drove her to take on a Promise Keeper infiltration project, but I must say that I find the fact that it even happened interesting enough to write about. But to really take the project to the next level Craft should explain why she took it on in the first place. This would help complete the picture for those of us who do not see the Promise Keepers in the same light as a hate group.

Originally posted at Opinionmill.com 

As we have been in the past, we will all be shocked next week when the polls close. Here is why:

1) Pollsters do not have control of their datasets.

One thing that everybody agreed on in the 2000 and 2004 elections was that they were surprised. Liberals claim that the election process is rigged. Conservatives claim that the polls are rigged. I believe that the pollsters do not have control of their data and therefore the results are simply incorrect. One statistic that I would love to see is how often people respond to a pollster with the words “please remove me from your list and don’t bother my family during dinner”. How often do people simply screen their calls?

The reason that this matters is that I believe that the evangelical community is less likely to participate in polling and is therefore excluded from the statistical population.

1) They don’t trust the mainstream media, associate pollsters with that group, and simply don’t participate.

2) They value evening time with family and consider pollsters no different than telemarketers. The result, they hang up without giving a response or they screen their calls.

If you fail to include the evangelical population in your dataset, your results will be incorrect (as we have observed). Common wisdom tells us that the United States is a conservative country. Democrats try to distance themselves from the word liberal, they never run on liberal policy, and they are constantly inventing euphemisms to disguise their positions (choice, progressive, etc.) You wouldn’t know that our nation was conservative by looking at the polls.

2) The democrats have been campaigning non-stop for the republicans for two years.

The Democrats frequently insult the values of Evangelical Christians. In doing so, they continually campaign for the GOP.

Here is an example that just broke this morning. In the video clip below, John Kerry makes a statement that Soldiers are uneducated, unwilling, and unappreciated. To fully understand the impact, you should know that evangelical churches across the United States pray for the safety of American troops in Iraq and around the world on a daily basis. They are seen as our children, courageous, just, and standing between those who would massacre innocent life to drive a wicked agenda operating in polar opposition to the values that we hold dear.

To watch over and over how liberal media and Democratic Senators such as John Kerry attack our armed services is like a punch in the stomach. Evangelicals are required to turn the other cheek, but they will delight in punching a hole in the little R box on a ballot.

More about this at hotair.com

3) The long tail and its impact on voter education.

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine) and describes certain business and economic models that, through the removal of technological barriers, open potentially unlimited distribution channels. Examples of leveraging the long tail in business are Amazon.com and Netflix (technology provides unlimited choices vs. tradition brick and mortar model).

This concept applies to new media (blogging, talk radio, google news, etc.) and the result is that evangelicals (and conservatives in general) consume this information to become more educated and aware of liberal bias in the media and culture. Smear and disinformation campaigns do not work as well as they did in old media, in fact the dishonesty fuels the opposition.

4) The discipline of the evangelical lifestyle.

Evangelical Christians strive to live a lifestyle that produces fruit (love, peace, patience, joy, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self control) in their lives. They also are called by Christ to be the salt (the preservative) of the earth and work towards applying these attributes to their communities. To think that the evangelical community would overlook the democratic process in this election (stem cell research, nuclear Iran proposing an Israeli Holocaust, and the opportunity to strike against judicial activism) is simply naive. Evangelicals will turn out in droves.

 Originally Posted at Opinionimill.com

As we have been in the past, we will all be shocked next week when the polls close. The evangelicals will impact and turn the election and here is why:

1) Pollsters do not have control of their datasets.

One thing that everybody agreed on in the 2000 and 2004 elections was that they were surprised. Liberals claim that the election process is rigged. Conservatives claim that the polls are rigged. I believe that the pollsters do not have control of their data and therefore the results are simply incorrect. One statistic that I would love to see is how often people respond to a pollster with the words “please remove me from your list and don’t bother my family during dinner”. How often do people simply screen their calls?

The reason that this matters is that I believe that the evangelical community is less likely to participate in polling and is therefore excluded from the statistical population.

1) They don’t trust the mainstream media, associate pollsters with that group, and simply don’t participate.

2) They value evening time with family and consider pollsters no different than telemarketers. The result, they hang up without giving a response or they screen their calls.

If you fail to include the evangelical population in your dataset, your results will be incorrect (as we have observed). Common wisdom tells us that the United States is a conservative country. Democrats try to distance themselves from the word liberal, they never run on liberal policy, and they are constantly inventing euphemisms to disguise their positions (choice, progressive, etc.) You wouldn’t know that our nation was conservative by looking at the polls.

2) The democrats have been campaigning non-stop for the republicans for two years.

The Democrats frequently insult the values of Evangelical Christians. In doing so, they continually campaign for the GOP.

Here is an example that just broke this morning. In the video clip below, John Kerry makes a statement that Soldiers are uneducated, unwilling, and unappreciated. To fully understand the impact, you should know that evangelical churches across the United States pray for the safety of American troops in Iraq and around the world on a daily basis. They are seen as our children, courageous, just, and standing between those who would massacre innocent life to drive a wicked agenda operating in polar opposition to the values that we hold dear.

To watch over and over how liberal media and Democratic Senators such as John Kerry attack our armed services is like a punch in the stomach. Evangelicals are required to turn the other cheek, but they will delight in punching a hole in the little R box on a ballot.

More about this at hotair.com

3) The long tail and its impact on voter education.

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine) and describes certain business and economic models that, through the removal of technological barriers, open potentially unlimited distribution channels. Examples of leveraging the long tail in business are Amazon.com and Netflix (technology provides unlimited choices vs. tradition brick and mortar model).

This concept applies to new media (blogging, talk radio, google news, etc.) and the result is that evangelicals (and conservatives in general) consume this information to become more educated and aware of liberal bias in the media and culture. Smear and disinformation campaigns do not work as well as they did in old media, in fact the dishonesty fuels the opposition.

4) The discipline of the evangelical lifestyle.

Evangelical Christians strive to live a lifestyle that produces fruit (love, peace, patience, joy, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self control) in their lives. They also are called by Christ to be the salt (the preservative) of the earth and work towards applying these attributes to their communities. To think that the evangelical community would overlook the democratic process in this election (stem cell research, nuclear Iran proposing an Israeli Holocaust, and the opportunity to strike against judicial activism) is simply naive. Evangelicals will turn out in droves.

Originally posted at Opinionmill.com

Earlier this week, I was critical of Michael J Fox and compared him to John Kerry and Cindy Sheehan (deploying the “unless you have walked in my shoes, you can not argue with me” argument). I watched him on the George Stephanopoulos show this morning and thought that he did a great job redirecting the dialogue from the Rush vs. Fox spectacle to his cause. Now that we are all back on topic, he said two very important things that need to be addressed.

First, Fox admitted that he had not read the Missouri amendment that much of this fuss is about.

Stephanopoulos: In the ad now running in Missouri, Jim Caviezel speaks in Aramaic. It means, “You betray me with a kiss.” And his position, his point, is that actually even though down in Missouri they say the initiative is against cloning, it’s actually going to allow human cloning.

Fox: Well, I don’t think that’s true. You know, I campaigned for Claire McCaskill. And so I have to qualify it by saying I’m not qualified to speak on the page-to-page content of the initiative. Although, I am quite sure that I’ll agree with it in spirit, I don’t know, I— On full disclosure, I haven’t read it, and that’s why I didn’t put myself up for it distinctly.

Entire Transcript Here

Video Here.

Not knowing weather or not an amendment allows or forbids the cloning of human beings is a pretty important detail for the leader of a cause to overlook.

Second, Fox conceded what many in the pro embryonic stem cell research camp will not: that what we are talking about is sacrificing tiny little lives to extend others.

Stephanopoulos: Do you think there's any way to finally find common ground with people who do believe in the end that this is tampering with tiny lives?

Fox: Well, again, the point has been made that these lives are going to be thrown away, anyway. They are marked for destruction -- thousands of frozen embryos that are a byproduct of in vitro fertilization. We have routinely, before this conversation started on stem-cell research, we have for years thrown them away.

And that's the other thing, you know, this idea of snowflake babies: We're in favor of that. The truth of the matter is that it is only going to account for a tiny fraction--

Stephanopoulos: Those are the embryos that are adopted and then brought--

Fox: Absolutely. Who would have a problem with that? That's fantastic.

But it will, in the end, account for only a tiny fraction of those eggs. And so our point is that the pro-life position is to use that -- what up to this point is waste, of literal waste that is going to be thrown away -- use it to save lives and to ensure lives for the future. I mean, they talk about unborn. Unborn kids are going to be born with diabetes. People are going to be dealing with a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's or to Parkinson's or kids that are going to be injured, have spinal cord injury.

That those kids may be born into a world that has the answers for that. That's our position.

Entire Transcript Here

Fox agrees that this is about trading life to save life. This alone is enough to take a pause and consider the ethics, but he ups the ante and agrees that these lives could be (and have been) rescued and adopted.

And we've decided that we would like to take this step and to do it with caution and to do it with oversight and to do it with the strictest adherence to ethics and all of the principles this country stands for…..

Entire Transcript Here

The first ethical question should be: Why does the need to conduct this research trump the notion that we should save these lives that are marked for destruction? We are not limited by technology.

CBS News reported in July of last year that Marlene and John Strege were the first couple to adopt frozen embryos, and in 1998, their daughter Hannah was the first snowflake baby born. In testimony before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Reform in July 2001, Marlene spoke out against the use of embryos in stem cell research, and said, "Any woman can carry an embryo; tissue or blood matching is not necessary. As embryo adoption proliferates in the wake of this controversy, the 'excess supply' of embryos will evaporate."

Originally posted at OpinionMill.com

Democrats demonstrated strategic agility in bringing Jim Web from Virginia forth to deliver today’s Democratic Radio Address. They communicated a coherent message, they demonstrated that they can take a powerful nuanced position if they have to, and most importantly they protected the secrecy of their operational plan in Iraq.

Earlier this week while trying to understand the Rush Limbaugh vs. Michael J Fox exchange, I used the metaphor “flat-world Molotov cocktail” to describe an internet campaign in which questioning the messenger (content or motive) is designed to result in the questioner being burned. Examples given were Fox, Max Cleland, John Kerry, and Cindy Sheehan.

I think that documenting the mechanics of … what do you call this…. Media manipulation, explosions of buzz…. in the internet age is important because as never before in human history, information from or to the masses can and will set the agenda of democratic nations.

As Tom Friedman pointed out, anybody can upload anything to the internet. But millions of people are naive about the ever growing scale of influence that the internet (and those that can influence or create a buzz) have on the global town-square.

I am not a media professional by any stretch of the imagination, but I am fascinated by these types of techniques. I am sure that those more closely linked to politics and media could open my eyes to much more than this (and I welcome comments and links to more information).

I am using the Flat World category on Opinionmill.com to capture and break down these types of deception techniques. The folks over at the Mudville Gazette have recently turned me on to two called “astroturfing” and “puppet socking”.

Astroturfing has been around for decades (the term was coined by Lloyd Benson) and describes a grass roots campaign designed, deployed, and backed by hidden corporate or political entities. The Mudville Gazette provides a great example here, with analysis here.

Puppet socking is pretending to be somebody you are not in an internet community to avoid accountability for the information you are spreading.

Finally, here are some select Wikipedia references about astroturfing and puppet socking. This is great reading if you are not familiar with these techniques:

From Wikipedia:

In politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations (PR) campaigns which seek to create the impression of being a spontaneous, grassroots behavior. Hence the reference to the "AstroTurf" (artificial grass) is a metaphor to indicate "fake grassroots" support.

The goal of such campaign is to disguise the agenda of a political client as an independent public reaction to some political entity —a politician, political group, product, service, event. Astroturfers attempt to orchestrate the actions of apparently diverse and geographically distributed individuals, by both overt ("outreach," "awareness," etc.) and covert (disinformation) means. Astroturfing may be undertaken by anything from an individual pushing their own personal agenda through to highly organised professional groups with financial backing from large corporations.

Word origin

The term, said to have been used first in this context by former U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen (Democrat-Texas), is wordplay based on "grassroots democracy" efforts, which are truly spontaneous undertakings largely sustained by private persons (not politicians, governments, corporations, or public relations firms). "AstroTurf" refers to the bright green artificial grass used in some sports stadiums, so "astroturfing" refers to artificial grassroots efforts.

Astroturfing techniques usually consist of a few people discreetly posing as mass numbers of activists advocating a specific cause. Supporters or employees will manipulate the degree of interest through letters to the editor, e-mails, blog posts, crossposts, trackbacks, etc. They are instructed on what to say, how to say it, where to send it, and how to make it appear that their indignation, appreciation, joy, or hate is entirely spontaneous and independent. This makes their campaign seem "real" rather than the product of an orchestrated campaign. Local newspapers are often victims of astroturfing when they publish letters identical to those received and printed by other newspapers.

It has become easier to structure an astroturfing campaign in the electronic era because the cost and effort to send an e-mail (especially a pre-written, sign-your-name-at-the-bottom e-mail) is so low. Companies may use a boiler room full of telephones and computers where hired activists locate people and groups that create enthusiasm for the specified cause. Also, the use of psychographics allows hired supporters to persuade their targeted audience. This correlates with the merge-purge technique that combines information about an individual from multiple databases. Companies can then turn hypothetical supporters into activists for the cause. This leads to misuse of the Internet, for one person is able to play the role of a whole group of like-minded people (see also Internet sockpuppet).

Sockpuppet (sometimes known also as a mule, glove puppet, alt(alternate) account, or joke account) is an additional account of an existing member of an Internet community to invent a separate user. This may be used for fictional support of separate people in a vote or argument by falsely using the account as a separate user, or for acting without consequence to one's "main" account. It is often considered dishonest by online communities, and such pretending individuals are often labeled as trolls.

Although the "sock puppet" concept has been applied to different sender names of the same e-mail account on different computers, such alternate IDs to identify a particular computer may not always be for deception.

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