November 24, 2015

Radical Christian holy warriors really need to stop throwing stones

The following is a long article with over 400 comments. It shows the absurdity of so-called Christian outrage over militants, known as ISIL, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, et al, who are mistaken as representatives of the Muslim faith.


Daily Kos

Radical Christian holy warriors really need to stop throwing stones

-snip-

The base argument has been that Da’esh and other terrorist death cults have all been Islamic and that this kind of barbarism is a unique and inherent portion of Islam, as one recent comment noted to me here:

Violent jihad was baked right into Islam by Muhammad himself, who used militancy to spread Islam.

Some argue this same militant streak is a base feature of Islam because of passages such as this:

Quran, 048:29: Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and those with him are firm of heart against the unbelievers, compassionate among themselves;

Yet the truth—which is often forgotten—is that the origins of Islam stem directly from both Christianity and Judaism, and that you can find similar passages in both the Old Testament and Talmud. You can also find more than a few Christian death cults not only in history, but in the present.

Buckle in, because listing just the highlights of radical extremist Christianity is gonna take some time.

Let’s proceed onward, Christian soldier, starting with the very first two commandments:

Much more:
http://m.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/22/1451631/-Radical-Christian-holy-warriors-really-need-to-stop-throwing-stones?detail=email

November 12, 2015

The Very Worst Of Fox Business, Host Of Tuesday’s GOP Debate

Article is long, both Vids & recaps. Shows why #FauxNews watchers are so damn ignorant and misinformed as to reality.


National Memo

The Very Worst Of Fox Business, Host Of Tuesday’s GOP Debate

This piece originally appeared on Media Matters.

Fox Business will host the fourth Republican presidential debate tonight. Unlike its sister network Fox News, many are unfamiliar with the low-rated Fox Business. But Media Matters has been watching since the network’s debut in 2007. Here are 35 of the worst things to appear on the “business” network.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/the-very-worst-of-fox-business-host-of-tuesdays-gop-debate/

November 12, 2015

Weird coincidence (and info request)

I found this photo on Twitter:



I immediately thought of a painting I did ages ago while in college. I copied it from a hardback edition of NY Metropolitan Museum catalog. (I painted several from it as practice.) I didn't intend this as an exact copy, but as a present f/ parents. My painting (photo is a bit washed out):




Now the request: I can't find that catalog, and I've forgotten the original artists name. The original is more rectangular than mine. If anyone recognizes it, please let me know.

November 2, 2015

YES, THEY WANT TO TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY

Daily Beast

YES, THEY WANT TO TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY

-snip-

We do indeed know there are “ways” to stop gun violence in the United States, yet we adamantly refuse to name them. The perennial “national conversation” about guns is predictably stale because its contestants—those favoring a largely unfettered right to personal gun ownership and those opposing it—are talking past each other. Prevarication characterizes the debate, as each side adheres to a core principle that, for reasons of propriety and political calculation, it is unwilling to admit publicly.

For the gun-control side, the unspoken belief is that nothing short of all out confiscation will have an appreciable effect on decreasing gun deaths. Then again, it’s not that unspoken—gun-control advocates just prefer tergiversation to clarity. Democratic candidates, officeholders, and liberal websites frequently invoke the example of Australia, for example. After a 1996 shooting rampage killed 35 people, the Australian government outlawed an array of firearms and instituted a compulsory buyback program that effectively eliminated private gun ownership. Since then, gun violence has dropped precipitously.

Rarely in American gun-control advocates’ references to the Australian policy, however, do they acknowledge that the program amounted to confiscation. ...

-snip-

Holding up Australia as a model of sensible gun policy without mentioning how that government forced its citizens to turn over their weapons is like praising Chinese population-control efforts without mentioning the one-child policy.

These advocates of gun control note the efficacy of the confiscations they only hint at while sidestepping the fact that none of the restrictive measures they explicitly endorse—banning so-called assault weapons, limiting the size of magazines, or requiring background checks on the private transfer of firearms—would have prevented these mass shootings, committed as they were by individuals using legally obtained firearms that did not fall under the definition of “assault weapon.”

-snip-

To understand why, we must first recognize the incompatible nature of the values at stake. Those advocating for stricter gun laws believe that the harm produced by private gun possession outweighs whatever benefits it entails.

More
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/02/yes-they-want-to-take-your-guns-away.html?source=socialflow&via=twitter_page&account=thedailybeast&medium=twitter

October 26, 2015

Hobby Lobby invests in contraceptive, abortion drug manufacturers

Daily Kos

Hobby Lobby invests in contraceptive, abortion drug manufacturers

It's peculiar how a group of individuals who are so devoted to their religious beliefs that they demand the very laws of the nation be rewritten to accommodate them can be so lax about those same religious beliefs if ignoring them will net them a little dough.

So the company demands it not have to pay for any employee insurance that might purchase such things, but investing in their manufacture? Not a problem.

Oh, but it gets worse. The assertion from Sharia Lobby is that whether or not those contraceptives actually cause abortions, the company owners have a religious belief that they do, so the law must not only be rewritten to eliminate the possibility of the company spending money on abortifacients but rewritten to allow the company to deny insurance for anything that the company feels is an abortifacient. What's still all right, at least from the investor side of things, is actual abortions.

More
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/01/1288906/-Hobby-Lobby-invests-in-contraceptive-abortion-drug-manufacturers?detail=emailclassic



What fkn hypocrites!


X p GD

October 25, 2015

The Case For Tammany Hall Being On The Right Side Of History

Interesting POV on beneficial side of corruption, the beginning of the ties between Democrats and immigrants, and beginnings of social safety net.

Via @nprbooks: The Case For Tammany Hall Being On The Right Side Of History

Back in 1900, when Americans in cities counted on ice to keep food, milk and medicines fresh, New York Mayor Robert Van Wyck's career ended when it emerged that a company given a monopoly on the ice business was doubling prices while giving the mayor and his cronies big payoffs.

Van Wyck was one of a long list of scoundrels associated with the political machine known as Tammany Hall, which influenced — and at times dominated — New York's Democratic Party for more than 100 years. Among its more notorious figures were William "Boss" Tweed, who went to jail for corruption, and George Washington Plunkitt, who's remembered for insisting there's a difference between honest and dishonest graft.

Historian Terry Golway has written a colorful history of Tammany Hall, which takes a more sympathetic view of the organization than many historians. He says the Tammany machine, while often corrupt, gave impoverished immigrants critically needed social services and a road to assimilation. According to Golway, Tammany was responsible for progressive state legislation that foreshadowed the New Deal. He writes that some of Tammany's harshest critics, including cartoonist Thomas Nast, openly exhibited a raw anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice.

Golway tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies, "What I'm trying to do in this book is present this other side of Tammany Hall. ... Every history of Tammany Hall is told as a true-crime novel, and what I'm trying to suggest is that there's this other side. I'm arguing, yes, the benefits that Tammany Hall brought to New York and to the United States [do] outweigh the corruption with which it is associated. I'm simply trying to complicate that story... Tammany Hall was there for the poor immigrant who was otherwise friendless in New York."

More
http://n.pr/1e1kVXT

October 24, 2015

Republican Legislation Will Use Religion to Defund Planned Parenthood and Obamacare

PoliticusUSA
Thu, Oct 22nd, 2015
Republican Legislation Will Use Religion to Defund Planned Parenthood and Obamacare
By: Rmuse



There are myriad reasons for Americans to have animus for the media, and one will add that those same Americans should hold their political representatives in contempt for covering over a gross violation of the Constitution on a fairly regular basis. It is stunning that no matter how simple and straightforward the Founding Fathers and Constitution’s framers prohibited “establishing religion” by government fiat, there has been a very successful crusade to pass federal and state laws founded on some bizarre bastardized version of the Christian religion. Tomorrow, House Republicans are slated to pass “filibuster-proof” legislation founded on religion.

Now, it does not matter if it is the President of the United States, women’s reproductive rights advocates, or even religious Republicans’ favorite target, Planned Parenthood, they portray the religious attacks on women’s rights as “ideological.” ... Passing legislation to control women’s sexuality and deny their constitutional right to choose their reproductive health is NOT ideologically driven; it is driven by religion.

Tomorrow, the religious Republicans in the House are expected to pass a bill that will use the reconciliation process with the Senate to, as a Catholic website steeped in mendacity wrote: “put a quick end to the Planned Parenthood abortion business that was caught red-handed, on video, selling dead babies and their body parts.” Apparently, it is not just religious Republicans that lie pathologically. The Catholics are still livid that after the House approved a Planned Parenthood “defunding measure” in the resolution to keep government open, the dirty Senate Democrats defeated the bill and went ahead and funded the government instead of shutting it or Planned Parenthood down.

-snip-

One really wonders why Catholics, like evangelicals, never pick up their holy bible and take a look at, and contemplate, the ninth commandment that forbids lying. ...

The religious right has been on a crusade to destroy Planned Parenthood since Reagan’s first term when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) persuaded them to make abolishing contraception and abortion its cause célèbre to inspire Christians to elect more Republicans. This present attack, based on heavily-edited, and universally discredited, videos depicting Planned Parenthood as ripping fully-formed live babies apart and selling off the body parts is just the weapon du jour in the religious assault on women. The proof Republicans are pandering to the USCCB and evangelical fanatics is that three of the Republicans condemning Planned Parenthood’s practice of donating fetal tissue for research the loudest voted for the legislation that allows it to do so.

In 1993, the United States Congress passed the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act which allowed research on human fetal tissue regardless of whether or not the tissue came from a voluntary abortion. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell voted for that bill, and so did Representatives Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Fred Upton (R-MI). Now, all three of the cretins have joined the USCCB and extremist evangelicals in condemning the practice as patently illegal and plotting the demise of Planned Parenthood for adhering religiously to that law.

More
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/10/22/republican-legislation-religion-defund-planned-parenthood-obamacare.html

October 15, 2015

Anti-choicer Admits Regulating Women’s Sexuality, Not Abortion, Drives Planned Parenthood Attacks

PoliticusUSA

It is not very often, if ever, that Republicans, or any of their conservative cohort, tell the truth; it just is not a part of their character. However, for some mysterious reason a few of them are abandoning their penchant for mendacity as of late. First it was House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) coming clean about the Benghazi Select Committee illegally using taxpayer money for the RNC’s 2016 presidential campaign against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Then it was the typical lying Mormon Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) being honest and confessing that he could find no wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood despite a very thorough and comprehensive investigation. Now, unbelievably, an anti-choice activist was honest in boasting that the attacks on Planned Parenthood, and women’s reproductive rights in general, have absolutely nothing to do with abortion and everything to do with controlling when women have sexual relations; something evangelicals and Catholics consider a mortal sin unless it is in servitude to a man or to produce offspring.

When Republicans and their evangelical base were desperate to restrict women’s access to any form of birth control, one of the complaints was that just the idea of a woman, married or not, having “consequence free sex” was an abomination that religious Republicans would not allow or condone. In their minds there has to be a severe, usually an 18 year and nine month, “consequence” for any woman who has sexual relations; even when their “man” demands being serviced” and the woman is ill. Now, a representative of one of the anti-choice cabals planning to harass Planned Parenthood clinics around the nation this weekend has admitted that the crusade against Planned Parenthood is a purely religious assault founded on ending the corrupt sexual ethic of promoting sex not intended for procreation.

The spokeswoman for Citizens for a Pro-Life Society explained why evangelicals, the personhood movement, anti-choice fascists, Catholic bishops, and their Republican facilitators are so intent on destroying Planned Parenthood, and it is not about banning abortion or protecting zygotes and fetuses. Monica Miller is one of this weekend’s ‘harass Planned Parenthood” rally organizers who was honest and angry when she said,

“Planned Parenthood from the top to the bottom is a corrupt organization… corrupt in its view of the sanctity of life and corrupt in its view of human sexuality. I say even if Planned Parenthood didn’t perform one single abortion, just the mere fact that its sexual ethic is corrupted means right there, should be the reason right there, that they should not receive any federal money. The kind of sexual ethic that Planned Parenthood promotes is sex for recreation, sex for mere pleasure.”

More
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/10/14/pro-lifer-admits-regulating-womens-sexuality-abortion-drives-planned-parenthood-attacks.html


¤¤
As if we didn't know... Fkn theocratic, self-righteous misogynists


x p GD

October 8, 2015

The GOP is Our Self-Made Punishment for Tolerating the Intolerable

PoliticusUSA

By: Hrafnkell Haraldsson


-snip-

So much for their claim to stand against moral relativism. There is nothing more morally relativistic than a Republican who wants to scare people into doing what they want.

Back to Bachmann: She is wrong. We are not suffering God’s punishment, but our own. This sort of bizarre utterance should never have become so familiar to us that we barely bat an eye anymore. And it needn’t have.

-snip-

... irrational actions in Congress, is obviously a problem for not only the world but for the rest of us, who find ourselves hostage to volatile and unstable right-wing ideologues who rival the Islamic State for extremism. ...

-snip-

We often say that the GOP’s current problems with extremism (in the form of Donald Trump most spectacularly) are self-created, and they are. But we cannot ignore our own guilt in tolerating the intolerable.

For far too long Americans have tolerated this nonsense. ...

More
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/10/07/gop-self-made-punishment-tolerating-intolerable.html

October 1, 2015

How journalism helps lunacy become reality

Al Jazeera

How journalism helps lunacy become reality

If the US is to return to a ‘fact-based world,’ reporters need to recommit to objective reality

by Larry Beinhart

After the second prime-time Republican presidential debate on Sept. 16, The New York Times published an astonishing editorial. It said the candidates must be “no longer living in a fact-based world” and described what they said as “a collection of assertions so untrue, so bizarre that they form a vision as surreal as the Ronald Reagan jet looming behind the candidates’ lecterns.”

It was about time that someone as authoritative as The New York Times editorial board said it as bluntly as that.

One of the things that made the editorial so striking is that the news coverage of the same events, in the same paper as well as in the rest of the media, treated what the candidates said as almost entirely unremarkable.

That prompts interesting questions. Why was this only an editorial? Why wasn’t it in the news? Shouldn’t it be newsworthy that the leading contenders for the Republican nomination are “no longer living in a fact-based world” and that what they say is “untrue … bizarre … surreal”?

More
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/9/how-journalism-helps-lunacy-become-reality.html?utm_campaign=wklynewsletter100115&utm_medium=email&utm_source=editorialnewsletter