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A little more biblical ammunition: The New Testament says very explicity Christians are to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. They are to turn the other cheek.
Never mind the Old Testament commandments to commit genocide (and livestock-cide ... those poor Amalekite animals!), the hero of one of Jesus' parables was a Samaritan.
Samaritans were those who stayed behind during a Babylonian exile, and whose Bible only consists of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the old testament), no prophets.
So Samaritans were not only traitors, they were heretics (worse than Muslims -- although Islam hadn't been invented yet)!
Yet Samaritans get to be the heroic, good people while the priests ("Levites") show up as the bad guys. To see Jesus' thoughts about those "good" people, see Matthew 23. He calls them "Whited sepulchres" (whitewashed tombs) full of unclean things while the outside looks good.
One other handy Biblical phrase from this passage that applies to the neo-cons in spades: "Straining at a gnat, swallowing a camel."
Why would an "American FAMILY Association" have any particular knowledge on military affairs?
Why not have a dentist?
Health Insurance Reform is Now Regressive
(I will no longer refer to health care reform, since legislation now under consideration only concerns itself with insurance, not CARE.)
With the Pitts/Stupak antiabortion amendment now part of the house health reform legislation, insurance companies who want to get part of the new government-created market of formerly uninsured will no longer be able to include coverage for abortion, even though premiums will be paid with PRIVATE dollars. This has the potential to effectively end safe abortions in this country. Rachel Maddow traced the relationships of the antiabortion legislators to "The Family":
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show#3381...
I have a personal story to inject here. Years ago, I took the responsible "prevention" step of pregnancy prevention by obtaining an IUD (the now-infamous "Copper 7". This IUD was later recalled.) Within a few months, I experienced hemorraging and terrible pain. I had it removed. However, my doctor told me at the same time that I was pregnant. Because of the possibility of complications, my doctor performed an abortion in the safe, sterile setting of a hospital. I am afraid to think of what would have happened had this not occurred.
Now, years later, we are here in this very anitabortion environment due to ignorance, religious fervor and male dominance. I am outraged that this has become the norm, when I believe that the procedure, just as with any other personal, surgical procedure, should be between a woman and her doctor (and the father, if the woman wishes.)
Abortion has been part of the human culture since humans were humans. Only in the last century did it become a powerful tool with which to create a political wedge issue.
This is another reason that I am an angry American.
John Lott has been a long time serial liar, do a Google search, and a terrible statistician. His work was torn to shreds in an appendix to a Congressional report on the Florida vote in 2000 and showed clearly as biased, unprofessional and grossly incompetent. He apparently made up much of the data for some of his books that made him a favorite of the right.
Thanks, Louise! I'll check it out!
The company I work for at the airport employs women from the U.S. territory American Samoa; I have to say these women are quite capable of holding their own with any man when it comes to performing manual labor. We probably could have used one or two at my former place of employment, looking back now on that experience. I called a former colleague to find out what was going on there, since I had heard the warehouse was closing. Apparently it is still inching along, the near empty warehouse staffed by a skeleton warehouse crew. The only employment sector that didn’t take a major hit was the one upstairs, where in good times it constituted 50 percent of the payroll, and now about 80 percent. The downstairs people were always the ones who had to make the sacrifices, to be under a constant cloud of paranoia and uncertainty, to take the blame for any failure in the business.
But this digresses from the point I want to make. I was given the names of the warehouse workers who were still there; all were female save for one male who was hired after I left. It caused me to remember how in my last few years there was this undercurrent of discontent among the male warehouse employees. When things were riding high, the warehouse manager was given a certain amount of authority in who he wanted working for him; he seemed to take a shine to people who had an assertive attitude, since these people tended to take their work seriously. When sales started to tumble (especially when competitors began snagging the company’s best sales reps), the Chief Operating Officer, a floozy-looking blond who I originally took for trailer trash (her bigotry bore that out), decided to take control of the minutiae of warehouse operations. The manager didn’t cooperate, so after he was gone, a guy with no management experience who could be controlled was brought in, along with his worthless daughter and her equally worthless boyfriend—whose parents had some money and threatened to cut him out of their will unless he got a job.
The COO was also one of those people with a certain amount of gender sensitivity, and when someone like that is in power, politics tends to take precedence over productivity—and physical wellbeing. The discontent was over the fact that the health of males in the warehouse was something the COO did not take into consideration in her hiring approvals; women had priority. If all there was to warehouse work was picking and packing, this would not be an issue; but we routinely had 40-60 foot shipping containers with up to a thousand 40-60 lbs boxes that had to be loaded or off-loaded, and unless we had temps who did that work during the summer, it was the five or six full-time male employees who were called off their regular responsibilities (which were stressful enough) to perform this function, sometimes all day. None of us were what you would call “young men,” but not old either.
The result was as follows: One man had a stroke, before he died of cancer; another man had a mild stroke, and went blind in one eye; another man developed Parkinson’s right before our eyes in a very short time. Another man had a heart attack; I recall the last time I saw him, the company gave him a rather belated farewell luncheon so that we could also see him in his last throes. The president of the company toasted him, and enjoined him to give a speech; unfortunately, he was so far gone, that speech escaped him altogether. Watching him make a painful effort to speak and failing, I decided to end this pathetic, embarrassing spectacle myself by initiating an applause. As for myself, I worked for the last three years as the shipper, usually by myself. Whenever I had to race to measure, weigh, manifest and label hundreds of packages in a few hours, and load them onto trucks myself, I would find myself needing to sit down, experiencing a sensation of lightheadedness. I could feel that my pulse was beating a few hundred beats a minute; the strange thing was that I wasn’t breathing hard, and hardly felt my heart beating. Had I continued like this—well, I don’t want to think of such things.
It’s no use laying blame for these things that all happened in the five years worked for that company. I am just saying that there are reasons why men have shorter life spans than women.
It is fascinating what the alternative to the public option that Texas' two Republican senators are offering their constituents, where one-quarter of all residents have no health insurance--the highest in the nation. They claim, of course, that they want health care reform--but only the kind that amounts to tax cuts ("tax credits") and malpractice reform, which only means more money in the pockets of insurance companies. Basically, these two senators (along with Texas' state lawmakers) are showing the uninsured their pallid, flabby posteriors.
Hi Nora - if you click chatroom when the show is live on tool bar- you'll see the chatroom - after you sign up with a username and password. Let me know if you have any difficulties. Best, Louise
The issue about the recent Fort Hood shootings that, to my knowledge, no one is addressing, is the absence of MPs at Fort Hood who have been replaced by contractors. Our government buildings have metal detectors to check for guns; were there such precautions at the base?
It's time to stop using the Dominionist/Rightwing meme of abortion this and abortion that. The Far Right really does want to stop more than abortion -- as the Bush Years proved with life-damaging Abstinence Only school curriculum and no condoms/family planning with foreign aid, etc.
So let's get tough and stop using their attempted guilt word of choice, "abortion". Leap right over it and use REPRODUCTIV?E RIGHTS instead! Then the topic leaves the sexist, beat-up-on-women-only dimension of the issue and puts it square in the entire population too -- because both WOMEN AND MEN have a right to plan their lives and families and reproductive behavior without religious authoritarian Dominionist interference.
Is this the show "chatroom" Thom mentions on the show?
It was tumeric
Need the spice that Thom talked about on Thursday concerning a possible cancer cure. I think he said cuminder? Got the correct spelling anyone?
quark - right site, wrong artist. love them both though. this pic by brian froud .
http://ofearna.us/art/froud.html
you can get one for you!
gerald --- thinking to share your sense of humor. but then again, i get into enough trouble with my own comments on facebook! lol lucky i have not been censored. a fewfriendson facebook have been reported but just get a few days of posts not showing. not sure why or how considering some of the stuff I have read!
Lore, I have limited computer skills and I know little about facebook and twitter.
Richard L. Adlof, DDay, mstaggerlee and all others on this blog, people who know me, enjoy my dry sense of humor. Please try to enjoy it as well!
Brian Baird of Washington State (not Cal) was the other Dem voting against the House bill (...mentioned in last few minutes of today's show...)
http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/archives/184344.asp
DRichards,
Re: Fort Hood psychiatrist self medicating
That possibility has been raised in the media and on the internet, but is not confirmed the last I heard or read.
I have heard that the Orlando shooter has now been confirmed to be on psychotropic drugs. I wonder if the Fort Hood psychiatrist was self medicating?
Richard ---
advocating to least common denominator- that is what happened when Russia became communist. it went to the least common denominator.
you are spot on!
We must effect change or self-destruct !
@DDay:
I meant the metaphorical “YOU” and not the personal . . . Spiked by my own languaging . . . Damn.
There has got to be a way to effect America's lexicon. We have to re-write what has been unwritten.
Rising Military Expenditure: The Coming U.S. Budget Attack
By Shamus Cooke
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15964
Global Research, November 8, 2009
The United States is moving backwards... fast. State budget cuts are decimating essential health and social services; public education is being destroyed; the social safety net is in tatters. To make matters worse, all of this is occurring when the loss of jobs stands at a twenty-six year high with no end in sight.
But this is only phase one. The federal government intends to balance its books too, at the expense of society's neediest. Instead of governors presiding over painful cuts, the President will be doing the gutting. And although his proposed budget isn't due until February, the President's spokespeople are priming the media to play a major propaganda role in what will be a colossal blow against working and poor people.
Obama's Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, has been particularly busy promoting the future cutbacks, repeating that “the country must live within its mean;” “deficits must be brought down dramatically” — something that will “require very hard choices.”
What are these hard choices? One possible option is no longer available. The biggest annual deficit producer is the U.S. military, which Obama will not radically reduce. Instead, he will increase it; Taxpayers will pay $660 billion (!) in 2010 toward the military. And maybe more — military commanders see more fighting in the future, not less; consequently, they want more money. The New York Times reports:
“...Admiral. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not say how much additional money would be needed, but one figure in circulation within the Pentagon and among outside defense budget analysts is $50 billion.” (November 4, 2009)....
reminds me of the 'new' show last year that was pulled quickly. 'King'?? showed that King was prevented by banks of stopping war. banks would call in money due and bankrupt country. king told what to do by business.
i wonder who complained??
@DDay:
This is no bliss in Adlof’sville and I am all too aware of our situation. Advocating for for playing only to the least common denominator will be Democracy’s undoing. There can be no freedom or even the concept of freedom in Newspeak. Ride that pony if you choose . . . Only Hell awaits you on that path.
Even complete farging idiots are smarter than that.