Religion – Page 30 – Politics Plus

Open Thread–6/18/2013

Posted by TomCat at 2:34 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

Jun 182013

The struggle continues into day four tomorrow. I’m writing early, I’m here.

jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:05 (average 5:18). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From TruthDig: You don’t need me to tell you, but it’s a whole lot tougher leading a garage band than being a superstar. What you might not have known is just how much harder.

If you want an example of growing inequality, try the rock ‘n’ roll industry. Between 1982 and 2003, the share of concert income taken home by the top 1 percent of performers more than doubled, rising from 26 percent to 56 percent. The top 5 percent collected almost 90 percent of all concert revenues…

Dang! I did not realize that I’ve been listening to InsaniTEA. 🙁

From Christian Science Monitor: At the adolescent-unfriendly hour of 7:10 on this rainy spring morning in tiny Loachapoka, Ala., classes won’t start for another half hour in the public school. But already the science lab at Loachapoka High School is coming alive with the banter of 13 teens sloughing off backpacks and settling in to learn – not about chemistry or biology, but about faith…

Click through for a comprehensive and interesting article. I have no problem with using school facilities for religious purposes on the students’ own time, if and only if, those facilities are equally available to every religion, including the atheist faith. Otherwise, this practice violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

From Salon.com: Failed Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain warned attendees at the annual Faith and Freedom Conference that America is headed toward communism and socialism, and called for supporters to “take our country back” in 2014.

“This train is running full speed down the tracks towards socialism and towards communism,” Cain said, The Washington Post reports. “Yes, I said it. Before we stop it and reverse it, we got to slow it down. That’s what we do in 2014.”

Like most Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians, Mr. 9-9-9 displays complete ignorance. Socialism and Communism are mutually exclusive. Under actual Communism, there is no state. It will have withered away, no longer needed. Under actual Socialism the government owns all the means of production. Neither comes even close to describing the Republican Welfare state handed down by the Bush Regime: Vulture Capitalism.

Cartoon:

18Cartoon

Republicans celebrate the day by counting how many they can violate.

Open Thread–4/17/2013

Posted by TomCat at 12:10 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

Apr 172013

I’m still down and feeling like I should be buried in the deepest corner of my kitty box. Nevertheless, I could not ignore today’s international holiday.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:07 (average 4:43). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it…

Click through for much more. This is what would happen if there were a criminal investigation into the Republican War Crimes committed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al. It is years past due.

From Alternet: It’s a sign of how well relentless propagandizing works that Joe Stiglitz has to devote a lengthy op-ed in the New York Times to debunking the idea that our income tax system, whose salient characteristic is low tax burdens for the rich, is good for anyone other than the rich. Economists have increasingly taken note of the fact that the US experiment in lowering taxes produced the opposite of the outcomes that were claimed for it, namely, spurring growth and increasing incomes in all cohorts (the barmy “trickle down” theory). Cross-country comparisons show that advanced economies with higher growth rates, like Germany, typically tax their wealthy more, showing that high taxes on the rich are not a negative for growth. Instead, giving tax breaks to the rich has turbo-charged rentier capitalism…

Click through. The class warfare propaganda, inflicted on America by the Republican Party, needs to be debunked again and again and again.

From Right Wing Watch: On a recent "Faith and Freedom" radio broadcast, Matt Barber and Mat Staver were discussing the current Religious Right outrage over an Army Reserve briefing [faux noise dekinled] in which "Evangelical Christianity" was listed among various kinds of "religious extremism."

A spokesperson said the slide was not produced by the Army and was removed and the person responsible for it has apologized, but Staver and Barber know who is really to blame: the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Staver is correct that this is like what happened in Nazi Germany, except that it is Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians that are dehumanizing gays, Muslims, and others, and in the case of gays, are even sponsoring their murder by the Ugandan courts. Talk about projection! There is only one reason SPLC designates groups as hate groups; they are groups that spread hatred.

Cartoon:

17Cartoon

…why Democrats should not follow through with Republican plans.

Open Thread–4/16/2013

Posted by TomCat at 12:33 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

Apr 162013

Yesterday my COPD was more severe, leaving me sleepless. I’m still down.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:24 (average 4:32). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times:

For more than two years, European leaders have pushed a cocktail of fiscal austerity and structural reforms on troubled countries like Portugal, Spain and Italy, promising that it will be the tonic to cure their economic and financial ailments. All the evidence shows that this bitter medicine is killing the patient.

Portugal’s highest court recently ruled against cuts to the wages and pensions of government employees. Protesters in Spain have picketed the homes of lawmakers to demand better treatment of homeowners behind on their mortgages. And frustrated Italians cast such a large vote for an anti-establishment movement that the country still does not have a new government more than a month after its national elections.

From the beginning, it was clear that economic austerity (cutting government spending and public benefits) and structural reforms (relaxing tough labor laws and privatizing state-owned companies, for example) could not be accomplished simultaneously during a deep recession. And that painful reality is playing out with no end in sight…

The one European group that have profited from austerity is the 1%, and that goes a long way to explaining why Republicans still demand these same policies that Europe have proven catastrophic.

From The Grist: Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground.

That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.

Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute — the (typically stodgy and backward-looking) trade group of U.S. investor-owned utilities — released a report [PDF] that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press. That’s a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I’ve ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence…

Click through for much more. Such an occurrence could destroy the Koch Brothers and other billionaire polluters. No wonder Republicans want to hang onto 19th century technology.

From CNN: President Barack Obama said he ordered the "full resources" of the federal government to respond to the Boston bombings on Monday, and that he also called for increased security around the United States as necessary.

"We still do not know who did this or why," he said from the Brady Press Briefing Room, cautioning people against jumping to conclusions. "But make no mistake, we will get to the bottom of this, and we will find out who did this, we’ll find out why they did this."

Any individuals or groups responsible for the "senseless" bombing, he added, will "feel the full weight of justice."

"The American people will say a prayer for Boston tonight," he said.

Notably absent from his remarks was the word "terror," though federal investigators are classifying the bombings as a terror event. It is not clear if it’s from a domestic or foreign source, a federal law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation said…

There has been a cry from the extreme right that Obama is covering up for Muslims, by not calling the bombing ‘terrorist’, but assuming it was Muslim without evidence is absurd, and unless the motivation was political, it was not terrorist. Now, if I were a pseudo-Christian hatemonger, desiring to kill a few libruls for Republican Supply-Side Jesus, I might consider an attack in the city where the original tea party took place on Patriots Day, which is also infamous to TEAbuggerers as tax day. I’m not saying that’s what happened. I am saying that there are enough possible scenarios that extremists should shut up with their accusations until we have evidence to determine what happened and why.

Cartoon:

16Cartoon

Open Thread–4/11/2013

Posted by TomCat at 3:46 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

Apr 112013

Yesterday I got the rest I needed to recover from my long volunteer day in prison. I’m current with replies. Tomorrow appears routine.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:24 (average 4:51). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: The military prosecutors seeking to have Pfc. Bradley Manning convicted of violating the Espionage Act over his release of secret government files to WikiLeaks will face an additional burden at his court-martial under a ruling on Wednesday by a military judge.

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, ruled at a pretrial hearing that prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Private Manning had “reason to believe” that the files could be used to harm the United States or to aid a foreign power. Prosecutors had contended that they should be required to prove only that he willfully disclosed defense-related files to win a conviction under the spying law.

I think the judge made the right decision. Unlike many on the left, I believe that Manning should receive some punishment. In Civil Disobedience (one of my favorite books), Henry David Thoreau made it clear that the moral authority for civil disobedience is that the perpetrator considers the issue so important that he or she willingly accepts the consequence of punishment to emphasize that point. That said, I also believe that after being convicted of a charge less than espionage, he should be sentenced to time served and released. He has been punished more than enough already.

From Huffington Post: Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) turned to the Bible on Wednesday during a congressional hearing, using the Great Flood to support his claim that climate change isn't man-made…

The Great Flood really exists! It is a flood of BS, and the B stands for Barton.

From The New Observer: An N.C. House lawmaker is equating any prayer to the Islamic God with terrorism.

In an email exchange with a constituent, Republican state Rep. Michele Presnell of Burnsville was asked whether she was comfortable with a prayer to Allah before a legislative meeting. Presnell responded: “No, I do not condone terrorism.”

The first-year lawmaker who represents a district in the North Carolina mountains is a co-sponsor of House resolution 494, a measure asserting that North Carolina can establish a state religion. She did not return a call for comment Monday about the string of emails obtained by Dome.

This is what happens when bigoted Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians ignore the First Amendment.

Cartoon:

11Cartoon

Targeted by Republicans for repeal.

Republicans on Parade–4/9/2013

Posted by TomCat at 2:57 am Politics, Religion

Apr 092013

Here is the fifth article in our Republicans on Parade series, featuring individuals who personify what the Republican Party has become. Today’s honoree is Liberty Law School’s Dean, J. Matt Barber, who shows his Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christian love by supporting the Ugandan effort to invoke the death penalty for being gay.

How are we not surprised that Liberty Counsel attorney and Liberty University Law School Associate Dean Matt Barber is a big fan of Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa…

…Of course it makes sense that Barber praises Ssempa, the champion of legislation that makes homosexuality punishable by death who helped orchestrate media campaigns to “out” homosexuals.

According to reports, Ssempa’s speeches included references to “homosexual cults [that] were kidnapping children and raping them and drugging them to brainwash them and turn them gay” and homosexual Satanists who were killing people for their blood.

Inserted from <Right Wing Watch>

Here is an example of the Ssempa’s hatred, that is supported by Barber sponsored by several C Street Republicans.

If these Republicans think that this is appropriate there, it seems certain that they would support it here.

Open Thread–4/4/2013

Posted by TomCat at 1:31 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

Apr 042013

Here’s the plan. Today I’ll make the rounds of sites where I share our articles and clean out message boxes, and then, will try to hit the ground running tomorrow. I’m current with replies to comments on yesterday’s Open Thread, as I don’t want to overtire myself by going way back. Keep your fingers crossed.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’;s took me 3:05 (average 4:30). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: The National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre today defended his decision to purchase the former congressman Asa Hutchinson, after an outspoken N.R.A. member complained that the organization should be using its funds to buy current congressmen only.

Shortly after Mr. Hutchinson appeared at a press conference in Washington to present the N.R.A.’s plan to arm teachers and other school personnel, N.R.A. dissident Tracy Klugian blasted the purchase of the former Arkansas representative.

“Members of the N.R.A. fork over millions of dollars to this organization,” he said. “That money should be used to buy people who are actually in Congress now, not some has-been like Hutchinson who doesn’t even have a vote anymore.”…

Now, Let's compare the satire with the truth.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Isn't it quite Republican that the fiction against them is not as bad as the truth? These Republican massacre mongers just make up their own facts… as usual.

From Huffington Post: North Carolina state Rep. Carl Ford backs a religion bill that would allow the state to declare an official state faith.

Is it any wonder that Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians do not believe that elections have consequences, when they refuse to acknowledge that the Constitution and the Civil War have consequences?

From MSNBC: Rachel shared the latest fronts in the ongoing Republican War on Women.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

They are no longer Mississippi style trap laws. They are just Republican trap laws, designed to return women to chattel status.

Cartoon:

4Cartoon

…demonstrating, along with the assassinations of JFK and RFK, that opposing the military-industrial complex can be fatal.

Happy Easter!

Posted by TomCat at 2:33 am Editorial, Holiday, Politics, Religion

Mar 312013

EasterStill

Whether or not you are a Christian, I respectfully invite you to join me in the celebration of the my faith’s most central holiday.

Jesus was a fascinating man. He associated most closely with the social rejects of his day. He respected people with faiths different from his. He did not burn their religious writings or try to prevent them from their own forms of worship. He had a heart for meeting the needs of the poor, and admonished us to care for them. His concern for the rich was that their own greed would blind them. He had no trouble getting along with sinners. He met people at the point of their need, and accepted all except for the religious hypocrites who used their position to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor and to force their own piety codes, which they often ignored themselves, onto others. Those were only people Jesus condemned.

If we are followers of Jesus, our faith will help us to act the way he did. Of course, none of us is perfect in that way. God knows that I fall short every day. But it is important to know that those who offer an example of the things Jesus was against, but condemn those who contend for the things Jesus supported are not followers of Jesus. The only authentic Christians are those who are followers of Jesus, a distinction lost on far to many.

Open Thread–1/21/2013

Posted by TomCat at 3:41 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

Jan 212013

Yesterday I slept most of the day. I even slept through the games. I’m still pretty groggy, and current with replies. I hope a couple more days will do the trick.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:28 (average 5:26). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From AlterNet: The Christian right in America, like all organized religions, claims to have a correct and exclusive understanding of God’s will. To hear them tell it, the almighty creator of the universe has strong opinions about corporate tax rates, firearm ownership and what consenting adults do with their genitals, and he’s delegated them to speak on his behalf.

But if they want us to believe they have this authority, it seems only fair to consider their track record. After all, the Bible itself tells how to identify false prophets, saying that if they’re not really speaking for God, their predictions won’t come true — a very sensible test!

It’s a test that the American religious right should be worried about, because their history, to put it politely, doesn’t inspire confidence. Many of the most powerful and influential members of their movement, including presidential candidates, media moguls and the founders of churches, have repeatedly claimed to have God-given visions of the future that proved to be completely and utterly wrong. Here are some of the more notable (and hilarious) examples of their prophetic blunders.

Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians are infamous for proving that right and wrong are synonyms. Click through for many examples.

From Addicting Info: The “populist” Senator from Kentucky, having sold his constituents a sack of bullpucky that he’s just one of them, is once again showing his true colors, this time in the arena of tax dodging. He’s helping his rich buddies hide their wealth overseas by blocking three treaties that would help the U.S. government find them and make them pay their taxes. Hiding money in Luxembourg, Hungary and Switzerland is common practice among the very wealthy (so I hear) and these countries are very secretive about their clientele. The Obama administration has been trying to hunt down these tax dodgers to make them pay their fair share, running into opposition from… you guessed it, the party of the rich.

As we all know, as the filibuster rules in the Senate now stand, any Senator can block a bill (or treaty, as it turns out) by merely making his objection known. And that’s exactly what Rand Paul has done.

What a shame it is that Ron Paul (R-InsaniTEA) had to be a litterbug, befouling the US Senate with his rancid litter This emphasizes the need for Jeff Merkley’s (D-OR) version of filibuster reform.

From AMERICABlog: Michelle Malkin and her flying monkeys seemed to have an issue with my tweet criticizing the poorly-attended “Gun Appreciation Day,” held Saturday. (Twitchy is run by Malkin.)

While citing the rallies as an expression of “Second Amendment” fandom, both ignored the fact that the event was not a regularly-held observance, but instead vindictively created by gun advocates in response to gun control talks following the Sandy Hook massacre.

Yes, gun nuts are actually spitting on Sandy Hook families in order to wage war on a non-existent “We’re Coming for Your Guns” government plan. But their insanity doesn’t stop there. Enter the Sandy Hook hoax crowd.

Click through. The way I see this, the NRA has to be hurting their own cause, by sponsoring so many rabid fools to act not just inappropriately, but insultingly so.

Cartoon:

Older Entries Newer Entries