Daily Archives: July 2, 2007

A new generation of evangelical leaders…

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“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. …

The Rev. Joel Hunter is part of a new generation of evangelical leaders — OrlandoSentinel.com

The Rise and Fall of Immigration Reform

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Drew Westen: Speaking the Right Language about People Who Don’t Speak our Language: The Rise and Fall of Immigration Reform – Politics on The Huffington Post

To be compelling, and to defuse the morality tale on immigration of the right and righteous, our story needs to begin with the most important truth, for which we needed no reminder this week from London and Glasgow, that the protection of our borders and safety is the first task of government. It then needs to steal the thunder from the right that readily reverberates through the middle by adding to the incantation, “If they’re going to live in our country, they need to learn to speak our language,” the simple, progressive, and quintessentially American phrase, “because if they don’t, their children will never know the American Dream, and we will have done nothing for them but to relegate them to second-class citizenship.”

Waterspouts

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Waterspouts common off coastal Florida in summer

“Although they’re small, it doesn’t imply they are totally harmless,” said Robert Molleda, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Miami. “They could contain 40, 50, even 60 mile per hour winds.”

Because these funnel-shaped clouds over the water are often fair-weather formations, relatively small and typically short-lived, don’t expect any advance warning from Doppler radar. The weather service often hears about waterspouts after they have happened from eyewitness calls to their offices.

Thousands of vested lots in southwest Marion County challenge future water supply

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Thousands of vested lots in southwest Marion challenge future water supply

Most of the thousands of lots in southwest Marion were vested during the late 1960s and ’70s, when platting rules and water use regulations were far less stringent than they are today. That means the rules under which the lots were approved years ago are still applicable. These lots also are mostly immune to many of the new water conservation codes the County Commission is considering.