New breed of evangelical leaders

"The new breed on the right The Rev. Joel Hunter seems emblematic of a kinder, gentler generation of evangelical leaders.

Source: Orlando Sentinel 07/02/2007
he abortion question had to be asked. In a broadcast where the leading Democratic presidential candidates talked about faith, the preachers and CNN producers agreed, it was arguably the single most important issue to America's evangelical voters.

So the Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of the Longwood congregation at Northland Church and a strong opponent of abortion, volunteered. He acknowledged Hillary Clinton's pro-choice position but asked whether she could envision any common ground with an anti-abortion community that seeks to reduce the number of abortions "to zero."

Clinton leapt at the opportunity to give her standard response that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare. And, by rare, I mean rare."
The nondenominational minister passed up the opportunity to attack a favorite evangelical target -- and instead, reached out to an opponent.
"Our focus on arguments and opponents is not working," said Hunter, 59, "and it prevents even incremental progress."

It was vintage Joel Hunter. And that's what made him the natural choice to ask such a tough question on national television. In the past 18 months, he has become emblematic of a new generation of evangelical leaders: younger mega-church pastors putting a kinder, gentler face on a conservative religious movement known for strident and sometimes divisive rhetoric.

Since the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Hunter has become a face in this emerging cohort. He has been cited in front-page articles in The New York Times and Washington Post, in op-ed columns in the Los Angeles Times, and he has been interviewed by National Public Radio, BBC programs, CNN and ABC's Nightline.

Hunter's provocative book -- Right Wing, Wrong Bird: Why the Tactics of the Religious Right Won't Fly With Most Conservative Christians, which was published by the church -- has been picked up by a commercial publisher and will be rereleased next year.

But it will have a different title: A New Kind of Conservative.
"Hunter exemplifies the New Guard of American evangelical leaders," said Jeff Sheler, author of Believers: A Journey of Evangelical America. "This is a group of successful pastors, mostly, who are more centrist and less partisan than the Old Guard of the Religious Right, and who present a more winsome and moderate face of evangelical Christianity."

A wider range of issues In Hunter's church, there is no fire and brimstone.
Instead, the message and the presentation are the same: clear, practical, reasonable, upbeat and Bible-based. Hunter's success in the Sunbelt is an anomaly in some ways. He is a funny, folksy Midwesterner in a congregation that is largely Southern. A Hoosier, he is a storyteller as much as a preacher, often using self-deprecating anecdotes.
"I don't want to bore myself," said Hunter, a compact, energetic man with a reflexive, sometimes impish smile. He reads widely and deeply, including publications such as The Economist and Foreign Affairs.

Hunter and others in this new breed of church leaders want to push the evangelical agenda beyond the traditional opposition to abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research. They endorse those positions but also want to be involved in the national dialogue about immigration, global warming, AIDS, war and peace, the genocide in Darfur, human trafficking and concern for the poor. Hunter also opposes the death penalty.
And, he does not want the Republican Party to take for granted the evangelical vote.

In the 2008 campaign, the conservative Christian vote will be a "jump ball," Hunter said, especially if the choice in the voting booth is between faith and competence. "If it's not possible to have both, you go for competence every time."

Experts disagree whether mega-church pastors such as Hunter, T.D. Jakes and Rick Warren are leading their flocks or simply understanding that many worshippers now appreciate a more toned-down approach.
"Clearly Rick Warren and Joel Hunter are trying to put a new public face on American evangelicalism," said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center. "That is, a faith that isn't predictably knee-jerk right wing, that wants to look at a wider range of issues."

The Rev. Jim Wallis, of the liberal Sojourners community, said the pastors are responding to "dramatic changes in the evangelical world, especially in the younger generation."

And that generation, more than others, cares about the environment, global warming and matters of war and peace.
Until recently, the national evangelical leadership included those who denied the scientific consensus that global warming exists. They rejected the notion that climate change is primarily a result of human activity and feared that significant remedies would cost too many jobs.
Hunter and his allies reject these notions and have adopted the term "Creation Care" as an evangelical euphemism for environmentalism. "We're approaching it with a biblical agenda rather than a political agenda," he said. "The church should be about replenishing as much as repenting."
This should have been obvious, said the Rev. Fred Morris, former executive director of the Florida Council of Churches, who has long urged Hunter to become involved in environmental issues.

"Anyone who professes to believe in a Creator God has a moral and spiritual obligation to care for and defend God's Creation," Morris said. "I think he is going to get into hotter and hotter water with his evangelical colleagues, but he is willing to do that, because he knows it is a crucial issue."

Making waves if Hunter ends up in hot water, it won't be the first time.
His most public misstep came in 2006, when he accepted an invitation to lead the Christian Coalition. It soon became apparent that it was a mismatch; the organization built by Pat Robertson was not willing to move toward a broader political agenda.

"The whole thing was a mystery," said Cromartie, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, "that they asked him, and that he accepted."
In any event, Hunter said, the experience was, for him, "a clear signal that there has to be a new voice for the evangelical community."

Toward that end, Hunter works tirelessly in his church community.
In a typical week, he teaches a nighttime class on Creation Care, meets with a visiting Turkish minister who has been beaten for his beliefs, then swoops into Florida Hospital South to see two ailing parishioners.
His schedule is punctuated by frequent visits across the parking lot to Northland's new 3,200-seat, state-of-the-art sanctuary, which will be dedicated in August. The hall will enable Hunter to move out of the converted skating rink where he now leads worship and reduce the number of weekend services from seven to five.
Those in the 7,000-member congregation seem supportive of their pastor's higher profile.

"It wasn't until we listened to Joel Hunter preaching that we were drawn back into the church," said Marie Carling, 57, of Sanford. "I heard him addressing social needs. He was speaking as a leader of the church about working together with government, with civic organizations."
Still, Hunter acknowledges that not everyone is pleased with his emergence.

"There is some push-back on issues," he said, "from a very small but emotional percentage of the congregation."

And Hunter is not blinded by his growing prominence.
"It could all go away tomorrow, and I wouldn't miss it," he said. "Things are only seductive if you're not satisfied with what you have. I'm satisfied with my church, with my family and with my life. The rest is kind of icing." "

777-Lucky Day

"Its not luck that creates miracles, but it is the power of hope"
-A.T. Brooks

Liberals Could Move to Retake USA

“A little less conversation and more action.”

It is apparent that the public must elect even more liberals to Congress not for the purposes of moving the country toward the left but in order to bring balance and moderation upon these radically conservative incompetent Republicans now abusing the powers of the White House.

Gridlock in Orlando

""CREATING GRIDLOCK Development is supposed to stop when roads get too congested. But politicians and developers are finding exceptions to the rules.

Source: Orlando Sentinel 06/25/2007
Traffic jams madden drivers throughout Central Florida because many roads handle more cars than they are supposed to, or close to it.

A policy called concurrency is supposed to stop development if the roads are too crowded. But that rarely happens.
Many policymakers argue that concurrency is a failure because it encourages sprawl. In theory, it forces development outward to where roads haven't been congested yet. That "consumes unspoiled land and requires that you have to build roads to get there," said Jon Peck, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Community Affairs, which regulates growth.

There are ways around it.
Some cities have chosen to establish "transportation concurrency exception areas." More than 30 communities across Florida have designated portions of land -- sometimes, huge ones -- as TCEAs.
Even though roads are congested, development can continue as long as planners encourage transportation alternatives such as buses and carpooling and plan for dense development.
Orlando planners say the city's exception area has allowed big downtown redevelopment projects that might not have otherwise existed because, realistically, there's no way to widen the streets.
"All of this high-rise development downtown probably would have had trouble," said Kevin Tyjeski, Orlando's chief planning manager.
The exception area takes up almost half the city limits, but Tyjeski said it makes sense because so much of the city has been densely developed.
TCEAs took hold in 1990s
The exception areas were designed in the mid-1990s after it became apparent that there were many problems with tying development to road capacity, said Tom Pelham, secretary of Florida's Department of Community Affairs.

Among the problems Pelham cited: Traffic-study numbers can be manipulated. Also, policies allow developers to buy their way out by paying for partial transportation improvements.
There are many ways to measure whether roads are too crowded, and different agencies use different methods -- sometimes yielding conflicting results.
What it all means is that despite so many crowded roads, concurrency rarely puts a stop to growth, said Pelham, who was recently in Orlando for his agency's growth-management summit.
While at times project sizes might get reduced, Pelham said, "I think in practice, the players generally find a way to get approval" of their developments.
Proponents of the exception areas say they instead require cities to consider other ways of moving people around besides simply widening roads. Many exception areas are in places where the city is trying to encourage redevelopment, often downtowns.
Widening roads to allow more cars to travel comfortably often isn't the answer in those places, many say.
"The great cities of the world get to a point where the automobile is no longer the preferred method of transportation," said Charles Lee, director of advocacy for Audubon of Florida.
Sanford already has an exception area in its downtown along Lake Monroe. Now the city, along with Seminole County, is trying to create another one along U.S. Highway 17-92 south of downtown, an aging road where officials hope to attract vibrant new businesses.
Altamonte Springs is having public hearings on the exception area it will create for the city's central core. That includes the Uptown Altamonte development of high-rise apartments and condominiums, shops and offices.

Maitland also wants to establish an exception area for the portion of U.S. 17-92 that it wants to redevelop.
There has also been informal talk of exception areas in Tavares and Casselberry.
While many "smart-growth" proponents say it's advantageous to allow parts of cities to opt out of the road-capacity requirements, others say things have gone too far.
Have cities overreached?
Many governments have very small exception areas, but other planners have exempted huge portions of their cities.
In Tampa, where planners say more than 30 percent of the roads are operating at failing levels, one member of the local transportation-advisory board wants the exception area scaled back from its current size of more than 40,000 acres.
"That's a horrible thing," said Margaret Vizzi, a Tampa resident. "All of this development is occurring, and they don't have to pay a bit of attention to traffic."
Cities say they have encountered little resistance from residents or state officials when establishing exception areas. Peck could not cite an instance when the DCA, which oversees growth management, had blocked an attempt for one.
But officials said requirements for exception areas have become tougher since the Legislature enacted a growth-management overhaul in 2005.
Not just anything can get exempted. There are limits on amounts of vacant land and requirements for dense development.
And "you don't just forget about mobility," said Mike McDaniel, chief of comprehensive planning for DCA. Programs must be in place to encourage other modes of transportation, he said.
Putting onus on employers

In Sanford's first exception area along Lake Monroe, commercial developments with 50 or more employees will have to help pay for transit or create a program that details how employers will reduce employees' time on the road. That could include plans for on-site day care or incentives for carpooling.

Still, Sanford principal planner Antonia Gerli said it's uncertain how the city will make sure employers follow their plans. "Those are issues that probably need to be worked out still," she said.
And other goals have not been met. For example, the city was to encourage Lynx to start Sunday service and increase its frequency in the area by 2006, but the service has stayed the same, city officials said.

Many of the roads within Central Florida's exception areas aren't yet over capacity, but they can still be miserable to drive on during the wrong times -- namely, rush hour. And the roads are expected to get increasingly crowded as time goes on. Many more major roads will be over capacity, transportation officials say, unless there are radical changes in planning and more emphasis on alternate ways of getting around.
In Altamonte Springs, where State Road 436's capacity is considered close to a failing level, much of the development in its core commercial and business area doesn't have to meet concurrency standards because plans were approved in the 1980s, before current policies went into place. But having an exception area would likely make approval of land-use changes easier.

In the meantime, other cities are looking at variations on the theme.
In Kissimmee, officials are considering a similar type of district for downtown. Concurrency isn't ignored, but it has a more flexible definition.
City officials must fix transportation problems "with alternate modes of transportation," said Craig Holland, the city's development-services director. "Walking is the big one. Bicycle paths, buses." "

Clinton urges Bush to talk to Iran

"Clinton, Richardson urge Bush administration to continue talking to Iran
Associated Press Newswires 06/27/2007

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Richardson on Wednesday urged the Bush administration to continue a dialogue with Iran as the U.S. tries to thwart the country's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

In separate speeches, the candidates offered a broad indictment of President Bush's foreign policies, from the Iraq war to the use of unilateral force to relations with Iran and North Korea.
Clinton said the administration has given Iran "six years of the silent treatment."

"In this vacuum, Tehran continues its progress toward developing nuclear weapons and increasing its influence in the region," she told the Center for a New American Security. "After initial talks with Iran and Syria on Iraq, the administration says it isn't sure that we need any more discussions with either of them. I think we should keep talking."

Richardson, who served as U.N. ambassador for Clinton's husband, said that instead of lecturing Iran's leadership, the United States should talk with them without preconditions. And instead of using inflammatory names, such as "Axis of Evil," the U.S. and its allies should seek and find common ground, particularly with moderates unhappy with the current leadership.

"If we want Iran to improve its behavior, we would do well to stop threatening to attack them," he told the Center for National Policy. "We must remember that no nation has ever been forced to renounce nukes -- but many have been persuaded to do so with a combination of carrots and sticks."
Richardson, the New Mexico governor, said he would not seek immediate face-to-face negotiations with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hardliner elected in 2005, but with others around him.
The administration has rejected direct negotiations with Ahmadinejad and has instead pursued international economic sanctions to stop the country's nuclear weapons development.

Meanwhile, nearly all the Republicans vying to replace Bush said during a recent debate they would not rule out using nuclear weapons to halt the program. Vice President Dick Cheney has repeatedly said the administration is keeping all options on the table for dealing with Iran, even as efforts continue to resolve the dispute diplomatically.

The New York senator said U.S. priorities should be bringing troops home from Iraq, demanding that Iraqis take responsibility for their country or lose U.S. aid and intensive diplomacy to restore frayed relationships.
"We have a long road ahead to repair the damage that has been done these past six years," she said.

She said she would introduce legislation soon to deal with nuclear terrorism. She said the administration has abandoned nonproliferation efforts, cutting off dialogue with Iran and allowing North Korea to reprocess enough material to make nuclear bombs and test a nuclear weapon.

Clinton said she would increase funds for the global threat reduction initiative, ensure the removal of highly enriched uranium from research reactors around the world and create a senior adviser to the president for nuclear terrorism. "

Visiting the North East

Vacation is over, back to the work of Checks & Balances. “Loyal to the Struggle of Restoring balance and integrity in government.”

*THE TRUTH ABOUT ABU GHRAIB*

Jennings loses court appeal

"By JEREMY WALLACE


Christine Jennings' push for a new congressional election suffered another major setback in court Monday, increasing her need for Congress to step in.The 1st District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee denied Jennings' latest effort to get access to voting machine computer source code that her attorneys deem critical to her legal challenge of Republican Vern Buchanan's 369-vote margin of victory in the 13th Congressional District election.Without the source code, Jennings' legal team said they would be "crippled" in trying to prove touch-screen voting machines malfunctioned in last November's elections, costing her the victory.

Hayden Dempsey, an attorney for Buchanan, said the ruling is "devastating" for Jennings, and in all likelihood ends her legal case in Florida.But Jennings, a Democrat, dismissed the significance of the latest ruling, instead saying she was already more focused in pursuing her challenge in Congress, which has the final say on whether there will be a new election.A House panel on

Thursday approved a plan to review the 2006 election. The Government Accountability Office, the independent investigative arm of Congress, said it would submit a report in September after analyzing prior state audits of electronic voting machines and related data to determine what, if any, additional tests should be conducted.

Jennings is disputing the election results because about 13 percent of the voters who went to the polls in Sarasota County did not have a vote tallied for them in the congressional contest.Monday's setback is not the first snag Jennings has encountered in the courts.In January, a lower court ruled against her initial attempt to get access to the computer source code, saying her arguments were nothing more than "speculation and conjecture."Jennings appealed, but grew frustrated waiting for the appeals court to issue a ruling. Jennings said the wait has been the most troubling aspect of her legal case.She said, given the fact that there are questions about people's votes, she expected the courts to move much quicker."What surprises me most is how many months it has been," Jennings said.It has been so long that, in May, Jennings asked the court to put the brakes on her court challenge while she instead focused on Congress.Despite the court ruling, Congress will continue with its inquiry into the dispute. U.S. Rep. Charles Gonzales, the Texas Democrat leading the investigation, has said his panel is working independent of the courts in Florida and needs to run its own probe.

Jennings has refused to say if she would run for Congress again in 2008, insisting she is holding out hope that Congress will rule in her favor and make her the congresswoman or set a special election."

Clinton issues warning to Iraq

"Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton on Tuesday warned Iraqis must decide if they want to stop killing one another, and pledged to bring US troops home.

Clinton had harsh words for the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, as she called on President George W. Bush to begin withdrawing US troops from the country immediately.

"The Iraqis have to decide whether they want to continue killing each other," Clinton told a forum organized by AFSCME, America's largest public employee and healthcare union in Washington.

"It is not just one group against another group, it is multiple groups," she said referring to raging sectarian violence in Iraq.

"When our young men and women are on the street in Baghdad they often don't know what is happening, they don't know who's side they are supposed to be on," said Clinton, in remarks tailored to rampant anti-war sentiment among grass roots Democrats.
"I think it is time that we start bringing our troops home."

Clinton has faced tough questions over her stance on the war after voting in 2002 to authorize Bush to wage the conflict, and has refused to apologize for her vote.

Last year, at the "Take Back America" conference of liberal activists which she is due to address again on Wednesday, Clinton was booed, after declining to endorse a date for withdrawing US troops from Iraq.

Last month, Clinton voted against Bush's new 100 billion dollar emergency war budget in the Senate, after the president forced Democrats to remove troop withdrawal timelines."

'Signing statements' add presidential powers

"WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration sometimes fails to follow all provisions of laws after President Bush attaches "signing statements" meant to interpret or restrict the legislation, congressional examiners say.

Signing statements, in which the president appends bills he is signing into law with statements reserving the right to revise, interpret or disregard provisions on national security and constitutional grounds, have become a major sticking point in the power struggle between Congress and the White House.

Lawmakers who asked the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study said it was further proof that the Bush White House oversteps constitutional bounds in ignoring the will of Congress.

"Too often, the Bush administration does what it wants, no matter the law. It says what it wants, no matter the facts," Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, said Monday. Byrd and House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Michigan, requested the report.

The White House, in issuing the statements, has argued that the president has a right to control executive branch employees and officers, that he has authority to withhold from Congress information sometimes considered privileged or that Congress should not interfere with his constitutional role as commander in chief.

The GAO report, which did not assess the merits of the president's arguments, said signing statements go back at least to President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, while citing other congressional studies that such statements have become increasingly common since the Reagan administration.

Conyers made signing statements the topic of his committee's first oversight hearing after Democrats took over control of Congress in January.

The limited GAO study examined signing statements concerning 19 provisions in fiscal year 2006 spending bills. It found that in six of those cases the provisions were not executed as written.

In one case the Pentagon did not include separate budget justification documents explaining how the Iraq War funding was to be spent in its 2007 budget request. In another, the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not submit a proposal and spending plan for housing, as Congress directed.

Byrd and Conyers said Bush has issued 149 signing statements, 127 of which raised some objection. They said the statements often raise multiple objections, resulting in more than 700 challenges to distinct provisions of law.

The GAO said signing statements accompanied 11 of the 12 spending bills in 2006, singling out 160 specific provisions in those bills.

The issue gained attention last year after Bush -- after lengthy negotiations on renewal of the Patriot Act with language backed by Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, that banned the torture of detainees -- attached a signing statement in which he reserved the right to interpret that provision.

The White House defends the statements, saying presidents have the prerogative to address matters of national security and express reservations about the constitutionality of legislation.
"We expect to continue to use statements where appropriate, on a bill-by-bill basis," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. "The opportunities in this Congress have been limited since we've mostly only received bills to name post offices and federal buildings."

The American Bar Association, at an annual meeting last year, approved a resolution condemning use of signing statements, saying presidents should not resort to diluting or changing laws passed by Congress rather than using their veto powers."