Sunday features: Crony capitalism, Guavaween(?), war, CheneyGate, Katrina aftermath

Neil has picked up the Blue's News tasks for this week. But I thought I would poke through some of the Sunday feature stories for 10/30/05 and see what kind of stuff is there.

The St. Petersburg Times takes what is (sadly) a kind of old-fashioned approach to reporting, which is to encourage original investigative reporting. So they have some of the best quality stories to be found in the American print press. Today, they offer us Spiritual symbiosis: A surprising one - Some area churches are embracing teaching methods devised by the Church of Scientology. Tutoring. Anticrime. Antidrugs. Everyone seems comfortable, as long as it all stays secular. by Robert Farley. It sounds like a stealth program by the Scientology cult to infiltrate Christian churches:

It's Monday night, and 13 teenagers gather at the Glorious Church of God in Christ, a predominantly African-American church in a working class neighborhood of East Tampa.

The teens bow their heads and pray Jesus will make this a productive evening. Then one hands out pamphlets titled The Way to Happiness.

"Be worthy of trust" is the passage the kids read before launching into a discussion of moral issues touching on race, sex and honesty.

The concepts aren't unusual for a Christian teen group, but the author is. The Way to Happiness is a moral code written by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology.

And the Way to Happiness class is just part of a relationship between the Glorious Church of God in Christ and the Church of Scientology.

I'm all for ecumenical cooperation. But cooperation between legitimate religious groups and cults is a risky thing, no matter what we label it. The unholy "ecumenical" cooperation of the Christian Right and the Moonies is bad enough. Although the Moonies seem to be turning against the Iraq War, so it may be beneficial to the world by making the Republican coalition for preventive wars more unstable.

And in the you-learn-something-new-every-day category, they are also running a piece about a local celebration called "Guavaween":


Costumes, carousing, creepiness: Aliens, French maids and Richard Nixons all came out to Guavaween, but police say the crowd was relatively tame by Emily Nipps and Amber Mobley. If any of our readers has any idea what "Guaveween" is, please enlighten us further in the comments.

The Des Moines Register has been running columns by columnist John Carlson reporting from Iraq on Sundays. Today's installment: Scenes of war, routine life stay on mind.

You feel the concussion from the explosion in the bottom of your feet. Then it comes up through your legs and into your gut. You're down now, behind a concrete barrier or pile of sandbags, if they're around. Just in case there's a second rocket that falls short of the first blast. You know. Close. And you're in the kill zone.

"It's good if you hear it go over," a soldier told me after that first time. "If you hear it, you're not dead." ...

It's how to live what amounts to a reasonably normal life in Iraq. You don't worry about the politics of the war or wonder about the screaming experts on the cable TV shows back home.

You survive whatever craziness comes your way and, sometimes, laugh at the absurdity of it all.

The Toledo Blade has also earned something of a name for itself for its investigative reporting. Today, they have a new one: Bush fund-raisers reap millions in contracts, corporate subsidies.

Over the next four days, The Blade will introduce you to the 29 men and women who engineered a fund-raising landslide for Mr. Bush in Ohio and helped deliver him a narrow victory in the state. The series will show:

* How several of those fund-raisers tied their fortunes to government spending, sometimes through unbid contracts.

* How Republican leaders, including future Pioneers and Rangers, built what was a ragged state party into a rich, well-tuned machine. The GOP has dominated Ohio politics for a decade and a half and laid the groundwork for Mr. Bush's 2004 victory.

* How a half-dozen Democratic fund-raisers in Ohio corralled at least $750,000 for Sen. John Kerry's losing presidential bid, and what they stood to gain if he had won.

* How the increased mingling of money and politics raises questions about the electoral process, and what experts call Americans' best hopes for influencing public policy without writing or collecting large checks.

This one promises to be worth following this week. Sunday's edition has four articles in the series.

Gorbachev in Kansas? Lindsborg, Kansas at that? The Kansas City Star has the story: Cold War player gets warm reception by Laura Bauer.

It was Lindsborg's big day. The day Gorbachev would stand on Main Street and kick off a yearlong initiative, Chess for Peace, in which the goal is to teach kids to peacefully settle their differences over a chessboard. It was also a day, Rolander said, when residents could see the fulfilled dream of a man who moved here in 1999 and worked hard to bring international recognition to the town. ...

Chess for Peace will consist of a series of Internet chess matches between young people around the world. Winners will be invited to a festival in Lindsborg in June. The goal is for the youths to get to know their opponents and talk with them about their interests and the world's shared problems. Organizers hope to show the young people that differences can be settled peacefully.

"Chess is a board game, but it is a peaceful board game," said Susan Polgar, the four-time women's world champion of chess, who was scheduled to play the men's champion, Karpov, on Saturday afternoon. "...People who play the game can settle their differences with it instead of with war games." ...

Once the parade ended and the chess clubs circled in front of the stage, Gorbachev spoke to the crowd. He talked about his country's restructuring in the mid-1980s, known as perestroika.

"That turned out to be a very difficult match, and there is still a debate on whether we won that match or lost it," he said through an interpreter. "We won it, or this kind of meeting couldnÂ’t have happened."

Naturally, the CheneyGate scandal also attracted Sunday newspaper attention. The San Francisco Chronicle looks at what the scandal tells us about the Dark Lord's role in this administration: Indictment raises questions about whether Cheney directed Libby to reveal identity or lie about leaking it by Zachary Coile.

The indictment, however, does not indicate whether Cheney was involved in the discussions.

At times, according to the indictment, Libby appeared to be trying to protect the reputation of the vice president's office. In a June 14, 2003, meeting with a CIA briefer, Libby "expressed displeasure that CIA officials were making comments to reporters critical of the vice president's office." In the same discussion, Libby talked about Wilson and Plame.

Cheney and Libby were known to be close, both personally and ideologically. Every morning, an official limousine picked up Libby at his home in McLean, Va., and then picked up the vice president at his residence so the two men could discuss the day's agenda on the ride to their offices in the Old Executive Office Building.

Legal experts say the major unanswered question is why Libby allegedly gave FBI agents and the grand jury a misleading account of his role in the leak case. Was he trying to protect himself from prosecution for violating the federal law that prevents the disclosure of the name of cover intelligence agents? Was he trying to protect Cheney, who had told him about Plame's identity? Or, as his attorney Joseph Tate described it, is it that, months after the events, Libby and witnesses in the case simply have different recollections of events?

The Los Angeles Times features an op-ed by Jamie Court, reminding us once again that "moderate" Republicanism has vitually lost any meaning:

When President Bush came to Los Angeles earlier this month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger treated him like a rival Mafia boss crossing a turf line. Schwarzenegger didn't want Bush raising money from the same right-wing Beverly Hills donors who the governor wanted to help underwrite his November ballot measure campaigns.

"We would have appreciated if he would have done his fundraising after the Nov. 8 election, because you know we need now all the money in the world," said Schwarzenegger, who ran for office saying that he was so rich he didn't need anyone else's money.

By turning to those donors, Schwarzenegger has revealed a truth about his proposals. He presented them as nonpartisan, but they are unquestionably rooted in a gene pool of conservatism.

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger brings us an AP story about a notable memorial: Ole Miss planning Meredith statue: Monument of first black student to be part of civil rights memorial.

The memorial is expected to be completed by May. The statue of Meredith, who was admitted to Ole Miss amid riots in 1962, will be done by Oxford artist Robert Moorehead.

Chancellor Robert Khayat came under criticism when he earlier rejected a previous design by students, civil rights veterans and artists after nearly a decade of planning.

The addition of the Meredith statue will enhance the memorial, said Andy Mullins, Khayat's executive assistant.

"He is a heroic figure as far as what he did as a student," Mullins said Friday.

The qualification Mullins made about Meredith (who is now 72) is understandable. In his later years, he became a rightwinger and anti-Semite. In a weird way, that in itself provides a refutation of the whacko segregationist theory that integration was a Communist plot to destroy what the White Citizens Council viewed as civilization.

The Biloxi Sun-Herald reports Gulf area ripe for fraud: Dead people seeking relief. This kind of fraud is stupidly high-risk and easy to detect. The real scandal is the hogs feeding at the trough of the New Reconstruction funds.

And the devastation of Katrina may take an exceptionally long time for both New Orleans and southern Mississippi to recover from, particularly given the crony-capitalism orientation of the federal authories. Today's Hattiesburg American reports: Nearly 4,000 still without phone service (by Nikki Davis Maute) in three Mississippi counties, none of which is directly on the coast. The old, the poor, and those living in rural areas are the most neglected in the relief efforts.