Jeff, I think it seems odd for anyone to think of leaving faith out the mix.

That said, the present day Republican party has tried to bring in the libertarians *and* the fundamentalists. These two camps, there’s no way they’re going to co-exist for long, let alone sing Kumbaya around the bonfire.

jcburns, why AREN’T you doing PR for the Big 3? That is truly a great idea for a campaign.

JGW, hang in there. It’s going to get better.

And when you try to codify faith, well, that’s just unConstitutional. And that’s exactly what these bastards have attempted. If their faith ws anything but Halliburton and Enron, and Norman Podhoretz, they might deserve audience. And they’ve attempted to make huge bucks doing it. Jesus, who believed in the Commonweal, would not approve.

When I worked in downtown LA, I started going over to the Bradbury building on my lunch break to look around. It was only two blocks from the California Plaza. The Bradbury building had movies filmed there as soon as it opened in 1913 including Chinatown (Jake’s office) and Blade Runner with the Asian images on the skylight over the atrium. The oak and iron exposed stairs and elevators are something. Just act like you belong, it is actually a working office. The LA Times has office space there. I could look down on the atrium from my office on the 43rd floor.

I was always trying to find the building that Harold Lloyd climbed in the film “Safety First”, but couldn’t, maybe torn down. It was on Bunker Hill which gave the illusion that it was much higher than the other buildings. Most of the victorian mansions on Bunker Hill was torn down in the late 1960s to make room for the skyscrapers that now inhabit the area, including the California Plaza.

I will say that the airport does look like it had never advanced beyond the 1940′s and some Ong Beach residents would like it to stay that way, despite Jet Blue’s activities contra.

Again, you were right.

Also, I don’t think Parker had in mind booting religious people out of the GOP. Yesterday, Ana Marie Cox commented on this in a WaPo web chat. She said:

I actually had drinks with Kathleen last night — she had just turned in her column and was preparing for the barrage of bile that did in fact come forth today. We sort of wound up fine-tuning her thesis a bit: The problem is not evangelicals, it’s social conservative evangelicals who see social conservatism as their PRIMARY political point of entry.

[I've made this point before here, stop now if the tune sounds familiar.] Younger evangelicals — who started to make their voices heard with Huck — have a very different coloration than those currently leading the political faction of their church. For them, issues like abortion are just PART of a wider, almost civil-rights like approach to “social conservatism,” which would also include environmentalism and using the machinery of government to address poverty and (now a very hot topic) usury. Those guys could be very useful in rebuilding the party — the problem is they don’t necessarily identify as Republican. And don’t necessarily see electoral politics as the way to get things done. They are more like — ahem — community organizers.

Sounds like Parker might actually be hoping for a bigger place in the party for people like you!

That said, the present day Republican party has tried to bring in the libertarians *and* the fundamentalists. These two camps, there’s no way they’re going to co-exist for long, let alone sing Kumbaya around the bonfire.

jcburns, why AREN’T you doing PR for the Big 3? That is truly a great idea for a campaign.

JGW, hang in there. It’s going to get better.

I think that if the fundies would get down off their high horses on the abortion issue, they could find allies in minimizing abortions from among their more liberal Christian brethren, and even among the nonreligious liberal crowd. I don’t know of anybody that actually wants more abortions. It would be great if it were an extremely rare procedure used only in the most onerous circumstances.

I think that the hypocritical mass finally imploded from the bizarre “America-is-the-new-Jerusalem,” Rapture/Millennialist theology that the theocons were pushing. It was the local preachers and congregations that began breaking with them on issues such as social justice, the environment, and immigration. That has given this liberal Christian hope.