Fraud

Here's a 9 minute trailer from the movie Expelled due for release in February 2008. Oh boy, I can hardly wait. Pay attention and you will notice part of this trailer was filmed at the Voter Issues Conference sponsored by the Family Research Council. If the FRC's involvement hasn't sufficiently raised the alarm, how about two of their more infamous spokesman, James Dobson and Tony Perkins?

The FRC is a Christian political organization that promotes values such as anti-homosexual rights, prayer in schools, abstinence only education, teaching creationism in science class instead of or along side evolution, ending women's reproductive rights, anti-birth control and even stopping stem cell research that could better the lives of millions of Americans. Hmmm. I wonder why the FRC is so interested in the movie Expelled and Intelligent Design?

Some of you may already be licking your chops in anticipation of tomorrow's (Tuesday 11/13 8pm EST) PBS special called Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.

Others may be upset and ready to complain of bias.

I expect the program to be enlightening, educational and entertaining. As you can see from the second trailer posted, not everyone is happy about this event. The Discovery Institute is doing it's best to predispose creationist proponents towards their usual anti-science mindset.

So, after you get through the funnies and catch up on the news, pour yourself another cuppa and sit back to be completely terrified by this diary from dKos: BREAKING: George W. Bush closet "Joel's Army" member?

No, I didn't write it. I didn't even comment in it. But it sets forth a pretty convincing case that our president is actually an end-times dominionist, of the most strident premillennialist variety.

And when seen through this filter, a lot of the otherwise almost-insane words and actions of the president make a lot of very frightening sense.

So, read it. But be prepared to be scared.

Jim Downey

We all want a cleaner America, but corporate America wants us to do it for them.

It is interesting what happens when you read American news in foreign publications. I found the following article on the BBC news website. A NYC family stopped using all modern conveniences, including turning off the power in their apartment for one year. I found this intriguing, and started reading up on their progress. The Father created a blog called 'No-Impact Man' to track his progress.

On their blog, there is a post about the organization 'Keep America Beautiful,' which I remember from my youth as the organization with the Indian spokesperson. It always seemed like a good idea, with good motives. However, I found out something very disturbing about this group;

“Keep America Beautiful was founded in 1953 by group of businessmen from the beverage and packaging industries who were concerned that government would make them responsible for solving the litter problem by regulating their industries.”

Giving Landover Baptist a run for their money! Baptists For Brownback 2008!

[link] Today, in an America filled with adulterers and baby-killers, an even worse sinner casts a shadow over them all—the atheist. Yet atheists are difficult to spot. They hide their sinister cult behind masks of smiles, science and soft, pleasant voices. Your next door neighbor might be an atheist. You just can’t tell.

Imagine if it was simple to identify atheists and their tainted works. Would it not be grand? Think how much easier it would be to protect your children’s eyes, ears and souls from atheists’ influences if their websites, books, movies and yes, even their very clothes, were clearly labeled with a bright scarlet “A”.

Curses! Those godly folks have somehow conspired to place one of those scarlet "A"s on UTI as well! Now if I can only keep UTI from being listed on their Hellbound list... **shakes fist**

Hat-tip to Juan Cole: the neocon-slanted National Post has an article about a new law in Iran mandating "that all Iranians wear 'standard Islamic garments' designed to remove ethnic and class distinctions reflected in clothing... It also envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public."

It's a very revolting, very condemning story. Only it's not true. Iran's sole Jewish member of Parliament said that "It is a lie, and the people who invented it wanted to make political gain." Even the National Post published an official redaction.

In related news, Iraqi troops ransacked Kuwaiti hospitals, looting incubators and leaving babies to die. After all, someone with a vested interest in an American war on Iraq said so, so it must be true. Also, the CIA has never engaged in psyops, and no media outlet is ever slanted to the right.

Check out Mark Crispin Miller discussing “Fooled Again” at UMass Amherst on April 9. The recording is up at KPFA - Guns and Butter Archives. Miller’s passion is clear and he points directly at the fundamentalist religious energy behind stolen elections.Listen to the audio.

Miller makes it quite clear how a subset of the right is trying to build a theocracy. It is 40 minutes well spent and much faster than reading his book.

Tagged: mark crispin miller fooled again elections religious right election fraud

So I'm writing this little piece about "The war on terror" and for fun did a little Google search for "The War on Christians." Up pops a link to a christian site called "The Traditional Values Coalition" (I won't give them the benefit of a link).

The second paragraph of their post reads:

The campaign to destroy religious freedom has already started in Canada with the passage of C-250, a bill that adds "sexual orientation" to Canada's hate crime laws. The legislation was pushed by anti-Christian legislator Svend Robinson. This activist has recently been picked up by police for shoplifting a $50,000 piece of jewelry to give to his sex partner.

If you read this correctly, the "christians" are, by a rational person's standards, endorsing crime against gay people. If not, why would they complain about an amendment to an anti-hate crime bill that protects gay people.

To distract the susceptible reader from their endorsement of the hate crime, they throw in the fact that one of the amendment's supporters has been "picked-up" for shoplifting. This of course has no bearing on the hate crime bill, so why did the "christians" include it in their post?

One reason is the "shoot the messenger" or "ad hominum" attack. If the person delivering the message is "bad" then the message is also "bad."

Ihlin’s post today at Daily Kos While you were bitching about the Democratic Party... got me wondering. Can we progressives agree on anything?

Ihlin is right, lots and lots of attention was paid to Alito and domestic spying while the double-speak titled Budget Reconciliation Bill squeaked through the house and “saved” the government a mere $39 billion (against a deficit of $400 billion, a whopping 10%).

Where are our priorities? Who is out there setting them? Why can’t we be consistent? Yes, yes, I know these questions have been asked many times before. But I bet they still have not been answered?

If we use dKos as an indicator of priorities, it would appear that Cindy Sheehan and what she wears to congress is number one, Jack Abramoff is number two, and until recently, Alito was number three. I’m sorry, but Cindy, Jack, and Anthony are not our agenda. In fact, two of the top three items are republican in nature.

Face it, until we progressives can agree on anything, we will always come in second in race with only two runners. Quick, who lost the Super Bowl last year? You get my point?

In the Kingdom of the Half Blind is a beautiful piece by Bill Moyers. In about as harsh a tone Moyers can muster, he chastises the Bush administration on its secrecy.

Moyers, a long time journalist, puts us into LBJ's shoes at the beginning of the Vietnam war and what happend to drive the US into that mess.

With this as a backdrop and the the role of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Moyers paints a bleak and scary picture of the current administration and the press. He also tells the story of his own run-in with the Bush administration during the production of his PBS program Now with Bill Moyers.

A key quote from the article:

It has to be said: there has been nothing in our time like the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy. This may seem self-serving coming from someone who worked for two previous presidents who were no paragons of openness. But I am only one of legions who have reached this conclusion. See the recent pair of articles by the independent journalist, Michael Massing, in The New York Review of Books. He concludes, "The Bush Administration has restricted access to public documents as no other before it." And he backs this up with evidence. For example, a recent report on government secrecy by the watchdog group, OpenTheGovernment.org, says the Feds classified a record 15.6 million new documents in fiscal year 2004, an increase of 81% over the year before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. What's more, 64% of Federal Advisory Committee meetings in 2004 were completely closed to the public. No wonder the public knows so little about how this administration has deliberately ignored or distorted reputable scientific research to advance its political agenda and the wishes of its corporate patrons. I'm talking about the suppression of that EPA report questioning aspects of the White House Clear Skies Act; research censorship at the departments of health and human services, interior and agriculture; the elimination of qualified scientists from advisory committees on kids and lead poisoning, reproductive health, and drug abuse; the distortion of scientific knowledge on emergency contraception; the manipulation of the scientific process involving the Endangered Species Act; and the internal sabotage of government scientific reports on global warming

I got a strange call the other day. Perhaps someone can help me out. I need some advice from my theistic friends. The conversation went something like this:

DS: Hello?

Caller: Hi! My name is Bob and I'm trying to help out one of your neighbors who was blinded saving a bus full of children. It's a very sad story. Your neighbor Jesse was blinded and needs your help.

DS: Wow that's terrible! What happened?

You might enjoy my post about Thomas Paine at my blog "A Rational Being" (Formerly Non Sequitur *)

Just follow this link to read seven (7) small paragraphs that simply dismiss the idea of God's revelation to Moses, Jesus, and Mohamed.

Paine's simple logic and language should be quoted often in the current exchanges about "God". Though he was a Deist.(Deist's believe god exists but he has not revealed himself to us). We can still use his logic and ideas.

ARB