Tag Archives: christian

Republican Candidates Demand Opening and Closing Statements at Next Debate

by AXDDorothy Posted on October 15, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

From Alex Isenstadt’s Politico account of a leaked RNC conference call that ended in chaos:

Ken McKay, Chris Christie’s campaign manager, expressed worry about stating his position on an open conference call line, saying that it could expose his campaign to leaks.

I would expect the Christie campaign to understand the need for operational secrecy pretty well, and sure enough, they were apparently the only ones to think about this. And they were right: the entire conversation was immediately leaked.

But here’s the best part: the chaos was over the pressing question of whether candidates would be allowed to give opening and closing statements at the next Republican debate. Seriously. CNBC wants to ditch them, for obvious reasons I think. But the candidates are fuming over this brazen display of disrespect toward their God-given right to give mini-stump speeches on national TV. Rand Paul’s representative put it the most pungently: “If we don’t have opening and closing statements, CNBC can go fuck themselves.”

Trump and Carson later sent a letter to CNBC promising to boycott the debate unless opening and closing statements were allowed.1 The others didn’t go that far, but in a display of their shaky grasp of what what the TV-watching public wants, they did all agree on the crucial need for the viewing audience to hear 30 minutes of tedious speechifying from their own silver tongues. However, that doesn’t mean there was a completely united front on this issue:

Christian Ferry, a representative for Lindsey Graham, who’s been relegated to undercard debates, chimed in. If any of the top-polling candidates didn’t want to participate in the Colorado debate, Graham would gladly take their place.

Atta boy, Lindsey!

1They also want assurances that the debate won’t go longer than two hours. This just goes to show that Trump and Carson can occasionally be right about something.

Visit link: 

Republican Candidates Demand Opening and Closing Statements at Next Debate

Posted in Casio, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republican Candidates Demand Opening and Closing Statements at Next Debate

Sovereign Citizens Leapfrog Islamic Extremists as America’s Top Terrorist Threat

by YaniraAWOQ Posted on August 31, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Who do actual law enforcement officers see as the biggest terrorist threats in America? Surprise! It’s not Islamic radicals:

Approximately 39 percent of respondents agreed and 28 percent strongly agreed that Islamic extremists were a serious terrorist threat. In comparison, 52 percent of respondents agreed and 34 percent strongly agreed that sovereign citizens were a serious terrorist threat.

….There was significant concern about the resurgence of the radical far right following the election of President Obama, but it appears as though law enforcement is, at present, less concerned about these groups.

That’s odd. The authors of this report apparently don’t consider the sovereign citizens part of the radical right. But their roots are in the Posse Comitatus movement, and they identify strongly with both the white supremacist Christian Identity movement and the anti-tax movement. That’s always sounded like the right-wing on steroids to me.

I’m not trying to foist responsibility for these crazies on the Republican Party, any more than I’d say Democrats are responsible for animal rights extremists. Still, their complaints seem like preposterous caricatures of right-wing thought, in the same way that animal rights extremism bears a distant but recognizable ancestry to lefty principles.

In any case, this comes via Zack Beauchamp, who explains the sovereign citizens movement in more detail for the uninitiated.

See original:  

Sovereign Citizens Leapfrog Islamic Extremists as America’s Top Terrorist Threat

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LeapFrog, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sovereign Citizens Leapfrog Islamic Extremists as America’s Top Terrorist Threat

Did Donald Trump Discover Religion in 2011?

by FerminGee87 Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here is Donald Trump on religion in a 2011 interview:

“I believe in God. I am Christian. I think The Bible is certainly, it is THE book,’ Trump told CBN’s David Brody.

….When asked by Brody about whether he keeps a lot of Bibles, Trump said, “Well I get sent Bibles by a lot of people… we keep them at a certain place. A very nice place. But people send me Bibles. And you know, it’s very interesting. I get so much mail, and because I’m in this incredible location in Manhattan, you can’t keep most of the mail you get.

I put this up for two reasons. First, Trump’s claim that he puts all the Bibles he receives in “a very nice place” is pretty amusing. I’d like to see this Taj Mahal of Bible storage! Second, it’s the earliest reference I can find to Trump talking about religion.

I don’t have access to a good news database, so I can’t really say for sure that Trump never displayed any religious tendencies before this. I can say that even though he’s a Presbyterian, he got married in 2005 in an Episcopalian church. And when his daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism, he apparently had no problem with it. That’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got.

So what’s the deal with Trump and religion? He seems to have discovered it pretty conveniently during his slow-but-steady conversion process into a viable Republican presidential candidate, but maybe not. Maybe he’s been a regular churchgoer all along. Does anyone know?

Link to original – 

Did Donald Trump Discover Religion in 2011?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Did Donald Trump Discover Religion in 2011?

Hey Denver: Give Chick-fil-A a Break

by FlorrieBroadhurs Posted on August 21, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I can’t recall ever agreeing with John Fund about anything, but he thinks this is ridiculous and I guess I do too:

Chick-fil-A’s reputation as an opponent of same-sex marriage has imperiled the fast-food chain’s potential return to Denver International Airport, with several City Council members this week passionately questioning a proposed concession agreement.

Councilman Paul Lopez called opposition to the chain at DIA “really, truly a moral issue on the city.”…Robin Kniech, the council’s first openly gay member, said she was most worried about a local franchise generating “corporate profits used to fund and fuel discrimination.” She was first to raise Chick-fil-A leaders’ politics during a Tuesday committee hearing.

….Several council members — including four on the six-member committee — raised questions related to Chick-fil-A’s religion-influenced operation, which includes keeping all franchises closed on Sundays.

Most focused on political firestorms sparked by remarks made by Chick-fil-A’s now-CEO Dan Cathy, reaching a peak in 2012 after court decisions favorable to same-sex marriage. The company also came under fire for donations made by charitable arms to groups opposing LGBT causes.

This stuff happened four years ago, and the company halted contributions to anti-gay groups a year later. Cathy presumably still doesn’t support gay marriage, but I really don’t think that should be a precondition for winning a bid with a government agency.

And when several council members go beyond that, raising questions about “Chick-fil-A’s religion-influenced operation,” all it does is confirm the worst hysteria from the right wing that merely being Christian is enough to arouse the hatred of the left. That’s just wildly inappropriate.

If the Denver City Council were giving a popular fast-food outlet a hard time because its CEO contributed to Planned Parenthood four years ago, we’d be outraged—and rightly so. I don’t blame conservatives for being equally outraged about this.

More:  

Hey Denver: Give Chick-fil-A a Break

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hey Denver: Give Chick-fil-A a Break

How Far Will GOP Candidates Go to Get Into Next Week’s Debate?

by rogalski_adam@o2.pl Posted on July 28, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Trailing in the polls, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee grabbed the media’s attention this weekend by claiming that President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran is “marching the Israelis to the door of the oven.” On Friday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz made headlines by calling fellow Republican Mitch McConnell—the Senate Majority Leader—a liar on the Senate floor. A few days before that, Rand Paul literally took a chainsaw to the tax code over an electric-guitar rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner.”

The first Republican presidential debate is next Thursday on Fox News. And under rules set by Fox (with the blessing of the Republican National Committee), just 10 of the 16 declared major candidates—those with the highest average in the five most recent national polls leading up to the debate—will get a spot on the stage. Participants in the second debate, hosted by CNN in September, will also be selected based largely on polling averages. The result is a last-minute scramble by the candidates to crack the top 10 any way they can.

Continue Reading »

Read article here – 

How Far Will GOP Candidates Go to Get Into Next Week’s Debate?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, oven, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Far Will GOP Candidates Go to Get Into Next Week’s Debate?

Pope’s climate encyclical divides American opinion

by Aiden1130odf Posted on July 24, 2015

Pope’s climate encyclical divides American opinion

By on 24 Jul 2015commentsShare

A clear-cut majority of swing-state voters agreed in a recent Quinnipiac poll: Pope Francis was right to call on the world to do more to address climate change. There is, however, a deep divide along party lines – Democrats and Republicans split on the topic by a margin of more than 40 percent in every state polled.

Overall, 62 percent of voters polled in Colorado, 65 percent in Iowa, and 64 percent in Virginia said they supported the pope’s encyclical on climate change. It’s likely more than a coincidence that those percentages matched up almost identically with the percentage of voters that Quinnipiac found accept the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.

But broken down by party, the gap was stark. In Colorado, for example, 93 percent of Democrats agreed with the pope’s climate message, but only 38 percent of Republicans.

Other polling by Gallup released this week shows that the pope’s favorability rating among Americans dropped from 76 percent in February 2014 to 59 percent this month. He said a lot of things during that time that could rub conservatives the wrong way, including embracing aspects of evolution. But his strongest campaign yet, which has come to the fore in recent months, is for action on climate change. It got the angrier aspects of the Republican base worked up; Rush Limbaugh labeled the encyclical a “Marxist climate rant.” Francis’ unfavorability rating increased from 9 percent in 2014 to 16 percent this month, according to Gallup.

The pope is not a politician, so he doesn’t really have to worry about polls. But in theory, his encyclical and other pro-climate-action stances by Christian groups have the power to make inroads with conservatives who are more likely to put the opinions of their faith leaders over those of both scientists and politicians. That, at least, is what many climate hawks have hoped — but the party split observed by the Quinnipiac folks raises questions about whether that will work.

The pope is coming to the U.S. in September to speak before Congress and tour the Northeast. That could put some Catholic climate deniers in a tricky spot, especially prominent Republican ones. Don’t bet on that visit mending the gap between Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of his activism.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work. A Grist Special Series

Meat: What’s smart, what’s right, what’s next

Get Grist in your inbox

Continue reading:

Pope’s climate encyclical divides American opinion

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pope’s climate encyclical divides American opinion

Jeb Bush Stiffs Christian Group on Poverty Video

by FranciscoErickso Posted on July 21, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

More than 100 Christian leaders from the right and the left working under the umbrella group Circle of Protection recently asked all of the presidential candidates to make a three-minute video answering this question: “What would you do as president to offer help and opportunity to hungry and poor people in the United States and around the world?” Ben Carson, Bernie Sanders, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Carly Fiorina each responded with videos specifically produced for this project that to varying degrees answer the question. Jeb Bush replied by sending the group a stock campaign ad.

The non-Bush videos are mostly mediocre in production value and content. The Republican candidates couch most of their rhetoric in religious terms, suggesting that they would encourage families and churches take care of their own, with no help from the government. Cruz, in an awkward video, talks directly to the camera to declare the War on Poverty an abject failure. He promises to “reward” Americans who give money to Christian ministries. Fiorina barely manages to eke out a whole minute talking about the subject, but she works in lots of references to God. Carson suggests that big US agricultural companies working in Cameroon hold the key to helping the hungry. Sanders’ video is low-budget but at least presents specific proposals, including funding infrastructure improvements to put people to work. Huckabee’s video shows his childhood home in Hope, Arkansas. He vows to protect Medicare and Social Security.

Jeb Bush didn’t bother to cut a video for the Circle of Protection, which includes the National Association of Evangelicals. Instead, he sent in the “Making a Difference” video he released last month to “introduce himself to the nation” before officially announcing his presidential campaign. The spot has high production values, music, and lots of other people talking: the mother of a developmentally disabled child; a formerly battered woman; a kid who got a private school voucher. It’s easier to watch than Cruz’s. But it’s just a campaign ad.

Chris Ford, media relations manager for Bread for the World, one of the founders of the Circle of Protection, says that the group is not commenting on the individual videos and is “letting the voters decide” what to think. More videos, which will be circulated to churches across the country, are expected in the next week or so from Hillary Clinton, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Martin O’Malley and Rand Paul. Ford says that the group has reached out to Donald Trump, but he hasn’t responded to its requests.

You can watch the Bush video here:

View original article – 

Jeb Bush Stiffs Christian Group on Poverty Video

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jeb Bush Stiffs Christian Group on Poverty Video

Three Things I Don’t Care About

by RuthieHemmant Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

There are lots of topics I don’t write about (or write very little about), and normally nobody notices. Or, if they do, they don’t know why I haven’t written about any particular one of them. Maybe it’s just uninteresting to me. Maybe I’ve gotten temporarily bored by it. Maybe I don’t know enough about it. Maybe I can’t think of anything interesting to say that hasn’t already been said. Could be lots of reasons.

That said, here are three things I haven’t written about, and probably won’t:

Should we call Dylann Roof a terrorist? In the dim past, back when we used to blog earnestly about such things, I always argued that this was a silly distraction. You can call members of Al-Qaeda terrorists or extremists or militants or whatever. For Republicans, this eventually became some kind of weird litmus test designed to show that Democrats were appeasers, and it was ridiculous. Ditto today, coming from the Democratic side. Call Roof a terrorist if you want, or call him a madman or a racist psychopath. I don’t care.

The pope on climate change. I’m not Catholic. I’m not even Christian. Pope Francis seems like a relatively good guy as popes go, but I don’t care what he thinks about much of anything. I’m certainly not going to opportunistically start now just because he happens to be saying something I agree with.

Donald Trump. Oh please.

That’s it. We’ll soon be back to our regularly scheduled program of stuff I do write about.

IMPORTANT NOTE! I almost forget to add a caveat that’s critical in the blogosphere: this is just me. Everyone else should feel free to write about all these things. This post should not be taken as a personal condemnation of anyone who chooses to do so. First Amendment. De gustibus. Etc.

Excerpt from: 

Three Things I Don’t Care About

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Three Things I Don’t Care About

Josh Duggar Resigns From Family Research Council Amid Molestation Allegations

by LaurenMussen Posted on May 22, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Thursday, Josh Duggar resigned as head of the Family Research Council’s lobbying arm amid allegations from a sealed police report obtained by In Touch Weekly that he sexually molested multiple underage girls when he was a teenager.

Duggar, the eldest son of the reality TV family on TLC’s 19 and Counting, expressed regret for his actions in a statement on the Duggar family’s Facebook page:

Twelve years ago, as a young teenager, I acted inexcusably for which I am extremely sorry and deeply regret. I hurt others, including my family and close friends. I confessed this to my parents who took several steps to help me address the situation. We spoke with the authorities where I confessed my wrongdoing, and my parents arranged for me and those affected by my actions to receive counseling. I understood that if I continued down this wrong road that I would end up ruining my life.

Josh’s parents Jim Bob and and Michelle Duggar reportedly knew about the alleged sexual misconduct, which began in 2002, for more than a year before reporting it to the authorities. After the Springdale Police Department received an anonymous tip in 2006, they investigated, but Duggar was never charged with anything. You can read the partially redacted police report here.

The Duggars emerged as political players for the social conservative right in 2007, when Jim Bob, a one-time state representative, endorsed former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for president. After the 2012 election, when the family backed Rick Santorum, Josh Duggar catapulted into conservative circles in Washington as the executive director of FRC Action.

The family remains an influential force among social conservatives due to its pro-life views and strong Christian faith. In December, Michelle Duggar pushed for the repeal of a measure in Arkansas that would have prevented housing and employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

In May, Jim Bob and Michelle endorsed Huckabee, calling him “a man of faith.” As of Thursday night, Jim Bob’s endorsement is still on Huckabee’s presidential campaign site. Mother Jones has reached out to the Huckabee camp for comment.

mikehuckabee.com

View post: 

Josh Duggar Resigns From Family Research Council Amid Molestation Allegations

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Josh Duggar Resigns From Family Research Council Amid Molestation Allegations

When Homemade, Untraceable, Military-Style Semi-Automatic Rifles Go Bad

by ScarletXHU Posted on May 14, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s perfectly legal to build your own unregistered and untraceable semi-automatic firearm if you buy the components online and craft the gun “for personal use.” But handing off such a gun in private sale that doesn’t require background checks is another matter. Last March, a team of state and federal law enforcement agencies concluded a five-month investigation by charging four California men with illegal firearms trafficking for doing exactly that. Many of the 50 weapons seized were home-assembled assault-style rifles, constructed from parts purchased legally.

“These weapons are particularly dangerous because they bear no manufacturer markings or serial numbers, making them virtually impossible to trace,” said Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Special Agent in Charge Carlos A. Canino in a statement.

Continue Reading »

See the original post: 

When Homemade, Untraceable, Military-Style Semi-Automatic Rifles Go Bad

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on When Homemade, Untraceable, Military-Style Semi-Automatic Rifles Go Bad