Not an elegant title, but I am still blown away by the Rachel Maddow interview regarding The Family , which you can either see or read here . Only to make it imperative that you visit, I will give you this snippet about a powerful, secretive Washington DC Christianist group that includes Senators and Congresscritters among its converts: Maddow: Wow. When I read your book, The Family, when it first came out in hardback, my notes on um, I write notes in the flyleaf about what I was thinking about. And my notes about it, I went back and looked, were that it was essentially to promote, it saw its role as promoting American power, world wide, unfettered capitalism with no unions, no programs to help poor people, all with this idea that godly powerful rich men should get as many resources as possible personally, and they should just privately help everyone else. That is the impression that I was left with. Was I close? [Author Jeff] Sharlet: That's dead on the money. The family began, it...

I'm waiting for somebody to discount this one : The president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is repudiating statements made by a former convention official regarding President Barack Obama and the recent murder of abortionist George Tiller. On a recent webcast of his daily radio talk show, Wiley Drake, former second vice-president of the SBC, called last Sunday's murder of Tiller "an answer to prayer." Then during an interview with Alan Colmes on Fox News Radio, Drake said he was praying the same type of "imprecatory prayer" against the president of the United States. For years, Drake has encouraged the practice of praying words of judgment found throughout the Book of Psalm, back to God, against enemies. But Dr. Johnny Hunt, pastor of First Baptist Church of Woodstock, Georgia, and president of the SBC, says Drake's comments are out of line. "[That's a] terrible statement, [a] very unbiblical statement," Hunt responds. "...