Texas Is Sinking!

Into A Quagmire of Delusions and Stupidity

The Texas House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on a resolution this week that honors former President George W. Bush. “The Bush administration met numerous foreign policy challenges, while also making constructive progress in relations with India and sustaining a solid relationship with China,” the resolution reads, according to the Austin Statesman. It adds that Bush “lived each day with the safety and prosperity of his fellow citizens foremost in his mind; he took a principled stance on a wide range of issues of great importance to every American, and his tireless efforts will not soon be forgotten.”

Texas has clearly lost its collective mind. "Met numerous foreign policy challenges." Bush didn't HAVE a foreign policy, unless you count his cowboy diplomacy of "shoot first."

Here was a man who didn't know a thing about any country he visited let alone the ones he invaded.

Here was a man who achieved the lowest approval ratings of any President in our history.

Here was a man who ignored the public right up until the ignominious end and the label of "worst president ever."

Here was a man who ran the country from behind closed doors.

Here was a man who had a sterling record for, well, God knows what.

So Texas honors him and strews rose petals in his path.

Don't expect great things to come out of Texas. A state this delusional cannot hope to produce a statesman for quite some time.

Not in our lifetime, anyway.

Just a thought.

Clinging To Guns and Religion: The Side Effects Of The Economy

What Does Jesus Want?
An Assault Rifle and Some Brand New Choir Robes!

RNC Chairman Michael Steele on Obama's reinstating the assault rifle ban:

The Obama Administration has revealed its intention to reinstate the so-called “assault” gun ban — Step One of their plan to repeal the 2nd Amendment.

Of course, Obama stated many times during his campaign how he considers the Second Amendment a fundamental right of all Americans, but Steele has to scream louder than Rush Limbow-wow these days in order to be recognized.

So much for the American public clinging to their guns, but what about their religion?

Actually there should be a lot of people rejoicing over our poor economic times: Priests, ministers and rabbis. During times like these, people turn to religion for solice. They flock (sorry) to churches to pray for fortitude (and in the case of Joel Osteen's church, that much-needed second car). And sometimes, religion turns to the people for, well, more than they can afford.

Take the controversial subject of tithing. Giving 10 percent of your gross income during good times is a bit of a stretch, but when you've lost your job and foreclosure on your house looks imminent, does the church expect you to tithe?

Glenn Latham (“Four Thoughts on Tithing,” Ensign, July 1982, 72)

1. It Takes Faith—Not Money—to Pay Tithing
2. Tithing Is Not Measured in Quantity of Dollars Paid, A tithing paid is still a tithe, no matter how many dollars a person pays.
3. Payment of Tithing Does Not Create a Hardship, No, tithing does not impoverish. Tithing enriches.
4. Tithing Money Is Not Our Money

Tithing enriches who? And just where does that tithe money go to? A church's leaky roof is one thing, new choir robes another. The pastor's wife might have to make due with last year's Cadillac or risk some very dirty looks from the congregation.

And what about those prosperity gospel churches? Will Joel Osteen or Creflo Dollar be able to sell the "seed" money concept? Will Rick Warren's church have a soup kitchen on campus next to the skateboard park?

My guess is that Osteen, Warren, Copeland, Parsley and megachurches all over the country will be bold enough to ask for blood from their turnips. They will point out that there are people much poorer than their own congregations - people who will be helped by the collection plate. And by giving as much as they can, good "Christian" believers will reap far greater rewards: the more they give, the more they suffer, the more they suffer, the greater their rewards will be in heaven. Hmmmm...

And what about the televangelists? Will their viewers act like thousands of Senator Ted Grassleys and ask/demand transparency? Exactly what will their largesse come in the form of? Will they eschew the trappings of their profession? Will some of them (gasp!) be forced to sell one of their villas? Or worse, will they be forced to fly business class? Our broken economy will put to the test churches all over the country.

It will be very interesting to see how they weather the economic storm.

Just a thought.

U.F.O. - Eyes in the Skies

U.F.O. - Eyes in the Skies
Originally uploaded by Tomitheos

In a Depression, anything's possible, I guess.

Family Research Council Denounces Obama as "Perverted"!!

Or at least his "science" is perverted.
Or his policies.
Or his blackberry.
Or his smile.
Or...ANYTHING!!!

Hey, when I'm right, I'm right. (applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Like anyone is listening!). I nailed it in my last piece: the first and foremost to scream about the reversal of Bush's stem cell policies was Family Research Council. Vehement and illogical, FRC's rant is pure Tony Perkins, grammatical errors, nonsensical title and all (remember Pelosi's visit to Syria billed as "She can't Be Syria-ous!"?) Tony Perkins starts his attack with the much-told and distorted story about President Obama and his requesting the removal of Churchill's bust from the Oval Office. On loan from Britain to George Bush (after 9/11), the loan was extended to Obama, but he respectfully declined.

...declined, shipping the bust back to England--and with it, the reminder of Churchill's great wisdom. It was he who warned that if evil prevails "all that we have known and cared for will sink into a new Dark Age, made more sinister...by the lights of perverted science."

Strange, I searched the net for that quote and could not find it. It also seems logical that if Churchill said it/wrote it, he was probably referring to Hitler, eugenics and Mengele's experiments on Jews in the concentration camps. Such deep thoughts, however, get Tony's grammar a bit mixed up: was the "reminder" shipped back with it? Sounds picky of me, but Perkins' unfortunate mangling of language and reason kind of gets to me. So is Obama evil or "perverted" or both? Another note: Obama did NOT ship the bust "back to England." The British Embassy took it back and that is where it resides today.

So where did Tony get the idea that Obama hated it and shipped it back to England? Guess. Take a wild guess. Yeah, Limbow-wow had a hand in it. Not to be left out, Limbow-wow wannabe Glen Beck chimed in with his whole two cents worth (or less):

So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing – remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it science. Let’s put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don’t we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it!

...The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up.

Correct me, please: is Beck's reasoning sound in any way? Is Perkins' sound? Here we're going from a bust of Churchill to "perverted science" to spending money on stem cell research to eugenics to putting "science in her place" and on to (of course) evolution. Somehow all of these things rolled up equal wanting Obama's policies to fail. Of course, if you're going to hate science, I suppose you should throw in that terrible demon, Aristotelian rhetoric aka reason.

The following is a video in Oct., 2006 just after Limbow-wow mocked Michael J. Fox about his stem-cell commercial. The statement is clearly made by "Reluctant redneck": Limbow-wow is a bully.

It's Amazing What Brains Can Do For The Presidency: Obama's First 45 Days

Signing the orders on Gitmo

Watching the President work through his first 100 days is almost as tiring as being the President during that short period of time. To say that he hit the ground running after his inauguration would be an understatement. And while anyone in the office could have done better than backslapping George, Barack Obama managed to do more in less time and under the worst conditions ever presented to a President since Roosevelt.

Since Jan. 20th, President Barack Obama has:

• Suspended all pending federal regulations so that they could be reviewed. Bush had done the same thing when he first came to office. Difference: Bush sneaked in over 200 deregulations while Clinton issued only 12 executive orders.
• Enacted a wage freeze for Senior White House Staff.
• Announced stricter guidelines regarding lobbyists.
• Signed executive order suspending all on-going proceedings for Guantanamo Military Commission and that the facility would be closed within a year.
• Signed an order to restrict interrogations to the Army Field Manual.
• Issued Ethics Commitment by Executive Branch Personnel setting stricter limits on incoming executive branch employees.
• Signed two memoranda regarding energy independence.
• Rescinded the Mexico City Policy, banning funds to international groups that provide abortion services. ·
• Established the policy of producing a weekly Saturday morning video released through Whitehouse.gov and YouTube.com.
• Signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
• Increased Afghanistan troops by 17,000.
• Outlined an exit strategy for the Iraq war.
  
• Formulated and signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

In contrast, George Bush (first term):

• Proposed a $1.6 Trillion tax cut - Unsuccessfully.
• Established The Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, but didn't fund it with the promised $2 billion.
• Abandoned The Kyoto Protocol.
• Built up the country's missile defense system.

(second term):

• Failed attempt to privatize Social Security
• Signed the Class Action Fairness Act
• Five-day European Tour to repair alliances
• Nominated John Bolton as the US Ambassador to the United Nations while congress was in recess because both parties filibustered the nomination.
• Proposed an energy plan that gave subsidies to oil, coal, nuclear and gas industries.
  

The Fair Trade of Hatred: Who's Importing and Who's Exporting?

Hatred Does Globalization

(With a little help from the Christian Right,
Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and right-wingnuts overseas)

When Fred Phelps and his daughter were denied access to Great Britain because of their reputation as hate mongers, we all cheered for Britain. Britain then gave an encore performance in the form of its Prime Minister coming out against California's famous Proposition 8:

From 365gay.com:

"This attempt to undo good that has been done is unacceptable,” Brown said. “This shows why we have always got to be vigilant, always got to fight homophobic behavior and any form of discrimination.”

While most of America's hate groups are home-grown (KKK, Christian Identity) some, like Watchmen on the Walls have come in from other countries. Watchmen comes from Latvia (one of the few foreign places that embraced Bush when he came for a conference in Riga). It preaches hatred against gays and Jews.

From Wikipdia:

In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland.

Watchmen on the Walls is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Of course, since America has an overabundance of hate groups and far-right supporters, it's only natural that we should start exporting some of them: in the form of good will and religion, of course.

From PinkNews UK.:

(New York, March 4)- The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) and Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) condemned a seminar designed to attack lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Ugandans under the cloak of religion.

The American religious right is finally showing its hand and revealing the depth of its support for homophobia in Africa," said IGLHRC's Executive Director Cary Alan Johnson.

In African countries as well as other countries around the globe where right-wing Christian ministries are now rooted, HIV rates have gone up amongst gays because they are denied treatment and prevention programs. In some countries, being gay is a criminal offense. And missionaries do little or nothing to stop the hatred from spreading. As in the above, they actually help the stigma to proliferate. Even though prominent churchmen such as Desmond Tutu have come out against discrimination, the powers of the American missionaries (bearing medicine and preaching abstinence-only prevention) is too strong:

Afrol News:

Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of Cape Town and a Nobel Peace Price winner, has lent his name to the fight against homophobia in Africa and around the world. The prominent South African says homophobia is a "crime against humanity" and "every bit unjust" as apartheid.

Here's a belated but (hopefully) related thought: just how much hatred is exported by authors/media people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? A good deal of their books have been translated into foreign languages and Ann herself can boast just how many copies of her books have floated overseas.

And how many viewers overseas do the televangelists have? Certainly more than we have progressives.

Rick Warren's largesse in Africa still demands conversions, and along with those conversions come new crops of right wing righteous zealots. After all, his motto is "Whatever it takes."

Just a thought.

*Lively is also a renowned Holocaust denier.

Back Tomorrow!