wedge issues, and the evil that is the tax-free pulpit

WEDGE ISSUES

Wedge issues are nothing new. BOTH SIDES ARE NOT EQUAL (sorry I shouted) and the #GOP has become especially adept at engaging low-information voters to vote against their own interests, mostly for things that will never become law. Starting with the Southern Strategy to capture rural, Southern Democrats, Republicans have been wanting to keep Jim Crow alive, women subjugated, and African Americans as second class citizens.

We are one nation. When we eliminate the social wedges, we mostly want the same things. There will always be a rabid right wing that flares up or is inflated by Koch-sized money, but we can mostly just get along and work on the day-to-day issues of running a government. The GOP is making it particularly hard these days...

At their 2012 convention, they are proposing a platform that is surely designed to take our country back - to 1850.

-They propose to repeal #PPACA. This would immediately put us on track to trillions more in national debt, unless we make it up in taxes or decimate our military and social investment programs.
-They would deny a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy, no matter whether it would save her life, or she was raped. This is slavery, pure and simple. I do respect their consistency - if they believe a zygote is a baby, then it still is a baby no matter how the pregnancy started and no matter what it's outcome will be - but their hatred is vile.
-They would deny contraception, in-vitro fertilization, and other common practices that don't even terminate a pregnancy. Outlawing abortion doesn't end abortion, it only denies abortion to those who don't have the money, and makes them dangerous to all. With more pregnancies, because women don't know about contraception and can't get it if they do know, we will have more abortions.
-They would voucherize Medicare, causing an immediate increase of appx. $7,000 a year to seniors, and trust me, this is the difference between security and poverty. To throw the health care of Medicare recipients to the corporate market is simply murder.
-GOP will send Social Security to Wall Street. Good luck if you plan to retire in a down period, when your Social Security is upside down.
-They will destroy Welfare as we know it. More single mothers have to work - family values at its best! Clinton folded in the face of strong opposition, he didn't need to do this, and they still impeached him. The same will happen to Barack Obama during his second term, mark my words, and it won't necessarily be about welfare, but it will be about race.
-"We don't need more fire fighters" - Mitt Romney. We don't need more teachers. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, educate your self, 2nd graders. Save your own homes - buy more hoses!

POLITICAL PREACHERS

-"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." —Matthew 7:15

I have been preached at. "There is evil in Washington" "We need to take our country back" "The president hopes to change our country to a communal, European nation"

Every week, from the pulpit, tax-free, preachers are telling their congregations how to vote, how to hate.

"I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?-Barry Goldwater knew the truth, and he lost, in part, because he didn't embrace the fringe elements of his party. There were many things I didn't like about his policies, but he seems like a moderate compared to today's GOP.

Insurrectionists like http://www.speakupmovement.org/church/LearnMore/details/4702 have events like Pulpit Freedom Sunday. They have convinced congregations that they are under assault, that some government entity wants to take away their freedoms and tax the church into submission. A big danger is that these seditionists spread hate, fear, and malaise to their congregations so their people can be controlled. This is so their vote can be controlled, not that their souls can be saved. Their votes can be channeled toward hate and repression. It's the people of these congregations that must stand up to the dangerous moneyed interests that control their church. Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit legal defense group whose founders include James Dobson, the founder of hate group Focus on the Family, collects money by passing the plate in church and funnels it toward policies that subjugate women, blacks, gays, etc.

Rev. James Garlow, senior pastor at Skyline Church in La Mesa, Calif., who led preachers in the battle to pass California’s Proposition 8, has subjugated our democracy. Out of state, mostly Morman money, was used to puff up hate legislation. They lied to make people believe that P8 would take away their rights, when it was only extending rights to those who have been disenfranchised.

There is some hope. Rev. Greg Boyd gets it http://astore.amazon.com/christusvicto-20/detail/0310267315 In his book Myth of a Christian Nation, he defends the strong right for religious institutions to stand outside the reach of government influence.

The GOP platform wedges sane Americans from fringe Americans. We just need more people to see clearly the importance of keeping our government outside the reach of extremist, seditious Religious Industrial Complex influence.

One Delusion to Top Them All

Of course, Cassidy's ten delusions are shared by half of America, and many of them vote.

America’s Twin Delusions and a Proposed Constitutional Amendment | TPJmagazine:

He's missing the one that unites them as one-issue voters: the delusion that life begins at or before the sperm fertilizes the egg.

There is no evidence from or agreement among scientists that this is so. Life exists just as much in the sperm or the egg, or the cells that the sperm was made from, as it does in the fertilized egg. There is no statement or agreement among religious texts that state anything other than life begins with the Breath of Life.

We are born with rights, and one of the greatest things about our country is that it was formed largely to protect these rights. We recognized that no king or country or incorporation had rights superseding those of the People. Much of the Constitution, and certainly the Bill of Rights, was to specify some of these rights we were born with, and how the Federal Government was built to protect them.

Each of these are exclusive rights. We each have a right to our thoughts, and to express them, but we can exclude expression such as shouting fire in a theater. We have a right to bear a musket in a militia (the British had outlawed that so the Colonists couldn't defend themselves), but luckily there are some modern weapons that are limited to law enforcement and military. Each of us is born with the right to our private medical decisions with our physician, including the right, as settled law with Roe v. Wade, to choose to carry a pregnancy to term or not.

This doesn't mean that we can't regulate it reasonably. I, too, think that unless it is absolutely necessary to save a woman's life that there is a stage late in a pregnancy where it is too late to terminate, for example, and we have to make sure every patient is making an informed decisions. To do less, especially with the case of a pregnant woman, is to make her a slave, a soul-less incubator, subjugated to the will of a government.

This subjugation, if carried to an extreme like outlawing abortion in any case, is an example of the Biggest of Big Government. The Tea Party types who rail against Big Government need look no further that how their government regulates what people do in their bedrooms and with their physicians as the first example of what we really need to do with government and its increasing reach into our rights.

Rape Victims' Bill of Rights - Constitutional Amendment

1. If a rape results in pregnancy, no Local, State, or Federal government will restrict the woman's right to a safe and affordable abortion.

2. If a rape results in the birth of a baby, the Rapist and his family will relinquish all visitation rights in perpetuity.

3. If a rape results in the birth of a baby, the Rapist will pay child support in the amount of $6,945/year, adjusted for inflation, until the child turns 18.

4. No state law shall undermine federal minimum standards of punishment for rape.

5. Rape is defined as a sexualized attack on any person by one or more others. Gender of the rapist or victim is irrelevant.

Rape is a crime of sexual domination. I see this in dogs all the time. We are not dogs! Humans live our lives a step above our instincts.

No female is a slave, required to incubate a fetus, give birth to, and nurture a child if she did not consent to its conception. Our nation was founded on one principle: we are born with rights, and the nation exists to ensure those rights. One of the rights is the Right to Bear Children (and not in a militia with a musket). To deny the choice to bear the child or not is subjugation, and in the United States of America, we are all equal.

No person in power is a master, decreeing what contraception can or can not be used, or whether a woman is required to carry a child to term. This is not to say that we can not agree, through our representative government, on reasonable regulation of procedures. All of our rights, including and especially ones involving weapons, are and can be regulated.

It's time to go enforce a Constitutional government and enforce the rights of women.

Love Boss, but Kelsey Grammer, you are not entitled to an Emmy

Kelsey Grammer: I was snubbed for an Emmy because I'm a Republican

Oh, come on.

Boss is one of the best shows on TV. Fearless in its storytelling, takes no political prisoners, draining each actor of the truth, in every scene. The details are as astounding as the scenery-chewing.

Grammer's acting is not a revelation. You could always see this in him - the stone professionalism, the ability to inhabit a character, the tools to show an ego without (reportedly) being consumed by one. The combination of confidence and resignation he showed in his first appearance as Frasier Crane, wooing Diane in Cheers, embodied every entitled over-educated guy-who-had-more-money-than-you who was stealing your girlfriend.

Grammer's Republicanism is no surprise. He has drifted toward patrician roles, even laughably military (was the movie Periscope Down?), and he has made sure we knew that he was one of the few conservatives in Hollywood. This is not technically true - the entertainment business is one of the most divided in the world between haves and have-nots. Many of the wealthy and powerful in this world will pay lip service to socially liberal causes while paying actual money to the Republican party - they'd like to hang on to some of their largess, and they hang around a potent world of Big Money.

Kelsey, drop the drug abuse, drive like you're one of us instead of one of them, respect your spouse and love yourself enough to be a willing participant in a marriage, hold on to whatever political views you want as long as they're based in fact, and embrace the work you are able to do and the accolades you have already received.

NPR, why do you interview idiots in your First and Main Series?

Wis. Business Owner Relates To Romney's Resume : NPR:

NPR, why do you interview idiots in your First and Main series?

This woman, running a restaurant with 46 employees, can't possibly identify with Mitt Romney if she has the slightest bit of knowledge about his resume. He wouldn't have patronized a restaurant like yours, let alone known how to run or turn a profit from it. If you would have been 10 times bigger and part of a chain of restaurants, you might have been on his radar - Bain Capital could have bought the chain, fired you and many of your employees, cut full time employees to part time, shown an improved quarterly profit, and sold their interest in the company at a profit - THIS IS HIS BUSINESS EXPERIENCE!

Come to think of it, how do you run your business? I'd assume you pay most of your employees well below minimum wage, split their tips, expect them to be taxed as if they were working for a full wage full-time, offer them no benefits...

You think Mitt Romney, who never had to run a business or work for a boss in his life, understands you better than Barack Obama, who started with nothing, worked his way through some of the best schools, worked for the common good as a Community Organizer, worked as a lawyer and a law professor in the private sector, etc?

Obama doesn't understand business? He has lowered your taxes! If Mitt Romney is elected, your taxes will go up by at least $6,000 (unless you earn more than $250,000 from your restaurant, in which case you are just a lying idiot).

Don't know what #PPACA will do for you? READ!!! http://www.healthcare.gov/law/index.html http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/healthreform/ and hundreds of other legitimate references. By 2014, all of your employees might have full medical coverage, as opposed to the un-covered employees (I assume) you have now, at no extra expense to you!

Don't feel a "connection" to Barack Obama that you did to Bill Clinton? Sucks to be you, trying to survive with a Black Man in the White House.

Religion in government? Birth Control has a place in government only if religion has taken over government. Fortunately, it's only taken over voters...in a good political environment, people will let their beliefs inform their vote, or their leadership if they are in government, but instead, we've let the most extreme of religious influences infiltrate many layers of government, and we are all suffering for this. Do you actually want more unwanted babies, venereal disease, and abortion? If not, you should be fighting for equal access to birth control for all women, not fighting to demonize birth control and those who use it.

And yes, your pitiful, limited world view comes down to one issue, and one issue alone to determine your vote: abortion. Why do you  want the biggest of Big Governments? Why do you want a government so big it can regulate the most personal and private medical decision you, as a woman can make? What is missing in you that you want to control the lives of other women? How many unwanted children have you adopted, sick children have you healed, or hungry children have you fed?

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