The Colorado Springs-based ministry and media empire has been struggling to make ends meet in recent years, Cara DeGette writes, as it steadily lost market share for its line of evangelical books and movies to online outlets and the likes of Wal-Mart. But critics are holding up the most recent round of layoffs, as a sad commentary on the true priorities of the ministry.

Mark Lewis, a longtime Colorado Springs activist who helped organize Proposition 8 protests, put it succinctly: “I would imagine their supporters have got to be asking the question about whether their church is really practicing their theology,” he said.

MNIndy

Messenger’s Alexa Stanard investigates Michigan’s two fusion centers and finds that their original purpose-counterterrorism-has become almost an afterthought. Since one center’s creation two years ago in East Lansing, for example, no staffers have been hired who speak Arabic, despite Michigan’s enormous population of Arabic speakers.

So what are the Lansing center’s greatest accomplishments? A spokesperson trumpeted a recent apprehension in an identity-theft case and pointed to a local slowdown in meth production.

“[The fusion center program] has nothing to do with gathering information on terrorism,” one local critic of the program said. “It has to do with gathering all police information in one place.”

Michigan’s other fusion center, founded earlier this year in Detroit, is so mysterious that no one Stanard interviewed, including government sources, knew anything of its operations.

You can read more about fusion centers in Colorado, Minnesota, and Iowa at our sister sites, and look for reports from New Mexico and TWI in the coming days.

This morning at the Colorado Independent, Erin Rosa takes a close look at a fusion center based in a Denver suburb, where intelligence officials work around the clock monitoring such “suspicious activity.” Civil rights advocates told Rosa they fear that the data center could be used to conduct unwarranted spying on Americans exercising their First Amendment rights at next month’s Democratic National Convention.

“It seems like a lot of the purpose around these centers is to accumulate data that can be mined,” one civil-liberties expert said.

You can read more about fusion centers in Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa at the Center for Independent Media sites, with reports from New Mexico and Michigan coming later in the week.

Today at Colorado Independent, Naomi Zeveloff observes that local historians are getting their spectacles all fogged up over the fact that August’s Democratic convention is coming exactly 100 years after that city hosted Democrat William Jennings Bryan’s nomination to run against William H. Taft.

Meanwhile, Minnesota Independent’s Andy Birkey combs through the history of Minneapolis’s 1892 Republican convention (Benjamin Harrison! Four more years!) to find that, while a lot has changed in American politics, just as much has stayed the same. Then as now, Birkey writes, the GOP decided to convene in Minnesota "to tint a purple state a few more shades of red."