Herndon seeks re-election

I recieved word today that Jefferson County Judge/Executive will file for re-election to the post as an incumbent. He currently serves as Vice President of the Old Louisville Neighborhood Council.

I don't know who made such comment but I did not post with the alias "DCCC Insider".

The Jewish Week reports that the Salvation Army may be anti-Semitic.

The employees — among them Jews, Catholics, Evangelical and mainline Protestants, and one ordained Lutheran minister — said they also rejected the army’s demands beginning in 2003 for details about what churches they had attended over the past 10 years. They would not permit the army to contact ministers of these churches for information on them. And one manager said she refused a request from her superiors to identify gay workers on her staff.

"The whole time I was there no one had asked me about my own religion," said Lown, a soft-spoken woman with a master’s degree in social work from Smith College. "There was never any kind of litmus test."

Lown’s father, Dr. Bernard Lown, won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He had fled Lithuania during World War II to escape the Nazis. Many of her family members, she noted, had died in the Holocaust.

"To find this happening in your workplace, where I’d given my total commitment, was really incredibly enraging and disheartening," she said. "I’d always believed because they took public money that that protected us."

But last month, a federal district judge in New York ruled that even if the Salvation Army did all this, it broke no law, even though the programs in question are funded almost entirely by the government.

The White House’s director for faith-based initiatives exulted publicly over the ruling.

From what I have read, they "discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, and sexual orientation...with federal dollars."

Last year, the Republicans attempted to dominate the moral values debate by placing wedge issues on the ballot. It turns out that they have no morals with the latest budget cuts. In an email from the National Jewish Democratic Council:

The bill will cut 300,000 working families from the food stamp program; it will cut Medicaid funding by $12 billion over five years; and it will shave $14 billion from student loans just as college tuitions are skyrocketing.

Democratic Rep. Chet Edwards of Texas commented, "Name just one religion in the world that preaches the value of asking the most of those who have the least and asking nothing of those who have the most. Sadly, that is what this budget does."

House Republicans claimed the painful cuts are necessary because of spending on the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina; the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, Rep. John Spratt, responded, "After the tax cuts are passed, there won't be a dime to pay for [hurricanes] Katrina or Rita" -- referring to a tax-cut bill being advanced shortly by the House GOP that will cost more than the savings in this bill.

From what I can tell, the GOP has flip-flopped on the moral values debate. Feeding the poor is a moral value. So is providing health care for those that don't have the capabilities to pay for it. Providing affordable education is a moral value. But tax cuts for the wealthy? I'm afraid not.