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  1. SiriuslyLong is offline
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    Joined: Jan 2009 Location: Ann Arbor, MI Posts: 3,560
    07-26-2011, 12:19 PM #181

  2. Atypical is offline
    07-29-2011, 01:35 PM #182

    Censorship at 'Fox News U'

    Students at ultra-right Harding University planned a conference on poverty, but school administrators had other ideas.

    In the summer of 2008, a dozen undergraduates at Harding University, a small Christian college in Searcy, Arkansas, decided to organize a daylong conference on the loose theme of “Social Justice from a Christian Perspective.” The idea was to bring in Christian experts to address issues such as poverty, trade and agriculture. The students raised thousands of dollars and spent months planning everything from audiovisual tech support to the lunch buffet.

    A few weeks before the event, Harding administrators finally get around to reading the conference website. They didn't like what they found. Officials summarily informed the students they would have to find another home for the rapidly approaching conference. Harding would have nothing to do with it.

    “They said that the conference was not in alignment with the mission of Harding,” remembers Zachary Seagle, one of the event organizers and a 2010 Harding graduate. The conference was also not in alignment with the politics found on Fox News, Harding’s de facto campus network. But more about Fox in a minute.

    In America, the squashing of free expression and debate on campus is generally known as “political correctness,” or PC, a term with origins in the totalitarian lexicon of Maoist China. Since the 1980s, all of the most prominent professional critics of PC have been found on the right. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind pressed a refined template for the conservative case against PC in 1988.

    A decade later, Dinesh D’Souza dumbed Bloom’s argument down, way down, with his breakout bestseller, Illiberal Education. Although the PC debate of the '80s and '90s now seems passé, it remains true that any investigation into the phenomenon pretty much guarantees favorable attention on right-wing television and radio. When conservative filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney in 2007 released a documentary called Indoctrinate U, which investigated “the assault on free speech and free thought on college campuses,” it was no surprise that he landed one of his most sympathetic and high profile media appearances on "Hannity’s America." The other documentary film of recent years to focus on alleged P.C. on campus, Expelled, was made by Fox regular Ben Stein.

    It is a rich if unsurprising irony, then, that Fox News should have such close relations with private Christian colleges that restrict student expression to a much greater degree than anything found at allegedly liberal private and public colleges. Last month, Media Matters disclosed Fox D.C. bureau chief Bill Sammon’s noteworthy appearance on a fundraising cruise for that bastion of right-wing academic orthodoxy, Hillsdale College. In academia, Hillsdale is known for bearing a relation to academic freedom that parallels Fox’s relation to credible journalism. According to a profile in Lingua Franca, Hillsdale is unique in American higher education for its promise of “ideological purity” as reflected in the campus newspaper, theCollegian, which “undergoes regular administrative censorship” that can be “reminiscent of the Soviet media before glasnost.”

    Then there is Harding University. With a student body of just over 7,000, Harding provides Fox News with a disproportionate number of its interns and, like Hillsdale, runs a lecture series that frequently features Fox employees and personalities. Harding also shares a reputation with Hillsdale. Professors, students and alumni describe the campus environment as uniquely intellectually repressive and stultifying — a paragon of conservative “political correctness” run amok.

    "Harding is a very restrictive environment,” says Becca Burley, a 2011 Harding graduate. “A lot of my teachers are afraid to say what they think because they know they’ll be fired. I’m afraid to speak openly about being gay for fear that my professor will try to report me to the counseling office, or lead a prayer for God to ‘save us from the gays.’”

    Burley’s suspicions were borne out during the 2011 spring semester, when Harding officials made national headlines by restricting web access to State of the Gay, a new student gay publication. Hours after an online version of the magazine appeared at huqueerpress.com, the school blocked access to the site on campus servers. The decision was based, as Harding president David Burks said in a public address, because of “what [the site] says about Harding, who we are, and what we believe.” He went on to note the Bible’s classification of homosexuality as a “sin.”

    Some Harding students agreed with the administration’s action; others did not. All could follow the resultant controversy in various local and national media, from the Arkansas Times to the Huffington Post. One outlet that did not cover the story was Fox News.

    “Fox News is the only news network available for public viewing in the student center, cafeteria, workout rooms, and lobby of the university’s on-campus hotel,” says a veteran Harding employee.“The television monitor in the Heritage Center is ‘locked’ to Fox News and cannot be changed. There is no doubt that this is an effort to ‘brand’ Fox News as the news channel of record on the Harding campus.”

    Members of the Harding community who don’t feel like watching Fox News shouldn’t bother trying to change the channel.

    “Once I brought a universal remote to the Heritage Center and tried to change the channel,” says Sarah Evertt, a Harding political science major. “I put in the code, but it didn’t work, like it would on any other TV. The set was literally locked to Fox News.”

    Other sets on campus are easily changed, but not for long. “We used to go around and change the TVs to CNN,” says another liberal Harding student. “And within minutes they’d be changed back to Fox.”

    Unchangeable televisions are just one sign of Harding’s coziness with Fox. In any given semester, the school most likely has at least one communications major interning at Fox News studios in New York. This past summer, the school sent four students to intern on programs such as "The Huckabee Show"and "Your World With Neil Cavuto."This achievement was trumpeted in a school press release titled, “Harding students intern at Fox News in record numbers.”

    Harding’s American Studies Institute keeps the flow between Harding and Fox News running both ways. The ASI routinely brings Fox employees and Fox-connected activists to campus. Recent speakers have included David Barton, Steve Forbes, Laura Ingraham, Cal Thomas, Fred Barnes, Bill Bennett, and Sean Hannity. In 2007, shortly after Hannity interviewed the director of Indoctrinate U., the champion of academic freedom broadcast his radio and television program from the Harding campus, thanking his “Harding friends” for the hospitality. When a liberal is invited to speak on campus, they are always “Fox liberals” such as Bob Beckel.

    “A lot of the ASI events are absolutely ridiculous, with speakers and students making anti-Muslim, anti-gay slurs, just open bigotry that gets applause,” says Zachary Seagle, who graduated from Harding last year with a Bible and Religion degree. “When Ben Stein came to speak, all he did was bash poor people for an hour, then thanked God for schools like Harding. He’s pretty representative of the level of speaker we get.”

    “It has become a safe bet each year that at least one of Harding’s ASI speakers will be associated with Fox News, to the point where you have to think there is definitely an informal institutional relationship,” says a Harding source. “Sadly, most of the faculty at Harding would probably agree that ‘Fox News U’ is an appropriate moniker for the university and many of them would not have a problem with that.”

    Those who dissent from the school’s hard conservative line have good reason to fear speaking out. Unlike the vast majority of credentialed institutions, Harding does not have a tenure system. Two years ago, a popular adjunct professor did not have his contract renewed after he posted criticisms of George W. Bush on his private blog, shortly after the former president spoke on campus. “It wasn’t the official reason he was let go, but everyone on campus knew that’s what happened,” says a Harding source familiar with the situation. “The lack of tenure makes it difficult for professors to voice any kind of disagreement with the administration.To put it mildly, many are frightened to raise objections.”

    No current professors felt comfortable being identified speaking about Harding’s political climate. When contacted, many sounded more like Chinese dissidents than mid-career American academics. But some alumni are speaking out against the loss of academic freedom at a school founded in 1924 by freethinking Christian liberals and pacifists. Harding alumnus Ed Carson last year published an open letter to Harding’s American Studies Institute on his blog. “The role of the academy is to promote discourse, not to indoctrinate students with only one point of view,” wrote Carson. “Why do conservative schools feel they must espouse conservatism to the point of anti-intellectualism?”

  3. Atypical is offline
    07-29-2011, 01:38 PM #183

    Conclusion

    The answer is because they can.

    “Some private religious colleges like Hardingstate clearly that they hold a certain set of values above a commitment to freedom of speech,” says Adam Kissel, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “These colleges are exercising their First Amendment right to uphold their own values.”

    But the fact that private religious schools like Harding can control and constrict campus debate without crossing into unconstitutional behavior does not lessen the hypocrisy of the conservative media’s line on “political correctness.” Fox News employs a roster of anti-PC warriors who have aligned with and routinely take checks from schools that lack even the pretense of commitment to the right to free speech. In the case of Fox ally Harding and its locked television sets, the network finds itself starring in an Orwellian set piece. The next time you hear a Fox News talking head railing against “PC run amok,” think of Harding University and do what its students cannot: Laugh and change the channel.

    http://act.alternet.org/go/9633?akid...018.0ltGVc&t=8

    __________________________________________________
    Yeah, PC is a leftist plot, right?

    Cons are hypocrites, as usual.

  4. Atypical is offline
    08-05-2011, 03:50 PM #184

    Cantor says extending unemployment benefits is just 'pumping up' jobless Americans

    House Majority Leader Eric Cantor recently said that government just can't keep its promises to Americans. In that case he was talking Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Now he's including extending unemployment compensation in the promises he wants to break, on the grounds that extending the insurance program is "pumping up" the jobless.

    In response to today’s jobs report, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) declared that “unemployment is far too high” and that Congress “must push pro-growth policies to get back on track.” Noting Cantor’s apparent concern as “spot on,”, CNBC host Jim Kramer told Cantor that obviously, “you’re for extending unemployment benefits given the chaotic situation.” Cantor’s response? Nope, because “for too long in Washington now we’ve been worried about pumping up the stimulus moneys and pumping up unemployment benefits”. Cantor declared that “the most important thing we can do for somebody who’s unemployed is to see if we can get them a job” and declared that the only way unemployment benefits could be extended is if “we find commensurate cuts somewhere else”:

    CANTOR: Jim, the most important thing we can do for somebody who’s unemployed is to see if we can get them a job. I mean, that’s what needs to be the focus. For too long in Washington now we’ve been worried about pumping up the stimulus moneys and pumping up unemployment benefits and to a certain extent you have states for which you can get unemployment for almost two years and I think those people on unemployment benefits would rather have a job. *So that’s where our focus needs to be.

    KRAMER: I just want to be very, very clear, on a day when we have a good unemployment number, that’s terrific, but not a great one and you confirmed not a great one, you are not in favor and will go against the president’s wishes to extend those unemployment benefits?

    CANTOR: What I have said all along, Jim, is if we’re going to spend money in Washington, we better start to make choices and we’ve got to set priorities. If we’re going to spend money, we better cut it somewhere else.

    In other words, they're retaking the long-term unemployed hostage. The last time they did it, they got a great deal in return: the extension of the Bush tax cuts. Who knows what ransom they'll demand this time around, because this situation is becoming critical. As Meteor Blades writes, "unless Congress acts to extend unemployment benefits, some 3.71 million more Americans are going to lose them during the next five months."

    In the meantime, I recommend all unemployed people send their resume and a request for a job interview to Rep. Cantor, since he says the most important thing he, as part of government, can do is to get unemployed people jobs. Maybe he'll share his bootstraps with the rest of us.

    http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/...blessAmericans

    ______________________________________________

    *Cons want to provide jobs for the unemployed??? But they don't want to spend any money?? How does that work? (It doesn't. It's a lie!)

    Okay, folks. Repeat this catchy conservative slogan every day to your favorite tune.

    YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN MF'ER! YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN! DIE SOON YOU 'LAZY' BASTARD. YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN!
    Last edited by Atypical; 08-05-2011 at 03:53 PM.

  5. Atypical is offline
    08-11-2011, 01:42 PM #185

    Bachmann starred in movie warning public education would spark new Holocaust

    By Stephen C. Webster

    In a strange revelation Thursday, Mother Jones magazine unearthed a mostly forgotten 2002 movie that stars none other than Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann during her days as an education activist, warning Americans about a coming second Holocaust brought on by the U.S. public education system.

    As if that weren't bizarre enough, her co-star, activist Michael Chapman, got even more specific: He claimed that a globalist plot to destroy Christianity was underway in the U.S., warning that schools helping teens find jobs would ultimately lead to a new Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi concentration camp where countless Jews were slaughtered.

    The film, called Guinea Pig Kids II according to the report, was made in conjunction with a conservative group called the Maple River Education Coalition. Consisting mainly of two presentations -- one by Chapman and one by Bachmann -- building upon conspiracies that sound like Glenn Beck's worst nightmares.

    "They redefine words," Chapman claims in one segment. "'Civic virtue.' Doesn't that sound wonderful? It is now redefined as 'the dedication of citizens to the common good -- even at the cost of their individual interest.' Now you're starting to see where we're going. Because once you throw out God, that includes your individual liberty. So who's the new God? Government."

    He goes on to assert that school-to-work programs, which help students identify core skills needed to get jobs in their chosen fields, are an echo of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's concentration camps. Later the film shows an image of a deserted, foggy area bearing the words "Work Makes Free!," a rough translation of the phrase that hung in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

    "As I was listening to Mike, I wondered -- perhaps you had this same thought -- I was wondering: Is this something that's coming?" Bachmann says in another segment, endorsing Chapman's conspiracies. "Or is this something that's already here?"

    "It's already here, and it's something that we have to deal with," she concluded.


    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFUY4...layer_embedded


    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb65s...layer_embedded


    http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheRa...3/8LSXhhtGM9c/
    __________________________________________________ ________

    Now think about this for awhile. This woman is a contender for the presidency; she has also gotten govt money almost 20 times. She now claims getting govt money is BAAAD! She is also a member of a dangerous christian faction.(read Frank Schaefer) http://act.alternet.org/go/9999?akid...18.AGoq5j&t=19

    Other current and past republican candidates for the presidency have been climate deniers, creationists and otherwise christian fanatics who want to have this country become a theocracy.

    Why would anyone think that these people and their sympathizers deserve anything but ridicule and contempt?

    Yet, the media and others never call them what they are. Ask yourself why...and be very afraid.
    Last edited by Atypical; 08-11-2011 at 02:33 PM.

  6. Atypical is offline
    08-19-2011, 05:20 PM #186

    Goldman Sachs VP Helped Blow Up Economy, Changed Name, Then Went to Work for a

    Republican.

    By BooMan | Sourced from Booman Tribune

    No matter how bad you think the Republicans are, they can always surprise you by being even worse. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has jurisdiction over regulatory affairs, including of the financial services sector of the economy. He has actually hired a former Goldman Sachs vice-president to work on his staff. That, by itself, would be worrisome. But the man is actually working under an assumed name. When he worked at Goldman Sachs he was known as Peter Simonyi. But, as he was leaving Goldman Sachs in 2009, he adopted his mother's maiden name. Why would someone do that? Why would a grown man change his name?

    Initially, he went to work for the law/lobbying firm Brickfield Burchette Ritts & Stone, but as soon as the Republicans retook the House, he was hired to work on Darrell Issa's staff. In that capacity, Peter Simonyi, now known as Peter Haller, began lobbying against new financial regulations concerning collateral requirements for firms who trade in derivatives. One of those firms is Goldman Sachs.

    So, in a nutshell, after helping to blow up the global economy and cause mass joblessness and home loss, Goldman Sachs sent a vice-president under an assumed name to work as a lowly congressional staffer on a committee that has oversight of the departments that regulate Goldman Sachs.

    Don't tell me that you thought they could be this unethical.

    http://act.alternet.org/go/10297?aki...018.uMUpOV&t=5

    __________________________________________________ _________

    Every one of these conservatives are phonies and out to wreck whatever they can so that their corporate paymasters get what they want. And the Dems let them!

    This is a great example of conservative schmucks giftin' others with my money!
    Last edited by Atypical; 09-02-2011 at 12:31 PM.

  7. Atypical is offline
    09-02-2011, 12:41 PM #187

    Inside the Christian Right Dominionist Movement That's Undermining Democracy

    By Chip Berlet / Public Eye

    Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin have all flirted with Christian Right Dominionism, but there's lots of misinformation about just what that means.

    Dominionists want to impose a form of Christian nationalism on the United States, a concept that was dismissed as eroding freedom and democracy by the founders of our country. Dominionism has become a major influence on the right-wing populist Tea Parties as Christian Right activists have flooded into the movement at the grassroots. At the same time, legitimate questions have been raised about whether or not potential Republican presidential nominees Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Sarah Palin have moved from a generic form of Christian Right Dominionism toward the more totalitarian form know as Dominion Theology.

    Clueless journalists and crafty Christian Right pundits have mocked the idea that Dominionism as a religiously motivated political tendency even exists. Scholars, however, have been writing about Dominionism for over a decade, some using the term directly, and others describing the tendency in other ways.

    Dominionism is a broad political impulse within the Christian Right in the United States. It comes in a variety of forms that author Fred Clarkson and I call soft and hard. Fred and I probably coined the term “Dominionism” back in the 1990s, but in any case we certainly were the primary researchers who organized its use among journalists and scholars.

    Clarkson noted three characteristics that bridge both the hard and the soft kind of Dominionism.

    Dominionists celebrate Christian nationalism, in that they believe the United States once was, and should again be, a Christian nation. In this way, they deny the Enlightenment roots of American democracy.

    Dominionists promote religious supremacy, insofar as they generally do not respect the equality of other religions, or even other versions of Christianity.

    Dominionists endorse theocratic visions, believing that the Ten Commandments, or “biblical law,” should be the foundation of American law, and that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing Biblical principles.

    At the apex of hard Dominionism is the religious dogma of Dominion Theology, with two major branches: Christian Reconstructionism and Kingdom Now theology. It is the latter’s influence on the theopolitical movement called the New Apostolic Reformation that has been linked in published reports to potential Republican presidential nominees Perry, Bachmann or Palin. All three of these right-wing political debutantes have flirted with Christian Right Dominionism, but how far they have danced toward the influence of hard-right Dominion Theology is in dispute. It would be nice if some “mainstream” journalists actually researched the question.

    “While differing from Reconstructionism in many ways, Kingdom Now shares the belief that Christians have a mandate to take dominion over every area of life,” explains religion scholar Bruce Barron. And it is just this tendency that has spread through evangelical Protestantism, resulting in the emergence of “various brands of ‘dominionist’ thinkers in contemporary American evangelicalism,” according to Barron.

    The most militant Dominion Theologists would silence dissenters and execute adulterers, homosexuals and recalcitrant children. No…seriously. OK, they would only be executed for repeated offenses, explain some defenders of Christian Reconstructionism. Even most Christian Right activists view the more militant Dominion Theologists as having really creepy ideas.

    Much of the controversy over the issue of Dominionism is caused by writers who use the term carelessly, often conflating the broad term Dominionism with the narrow term Dominion Theology. Some on the Left have implied that every conservative Christian evangelical is part of the Christian Right political movement; and that everyone in the Christian Right is an active Dominionist. This is false. Some critics even state that the Christian Right is neofascist. Few serious scholars of fascism agree with that assessment, although several admit that if triggered by a traumatic societal event, any contemporary right-wing populist movement could descend into neofascism.

    Advocates of Dominion Theology go beyond the democracy eroding theocracy of Dominionism into a totalitarian form of religious power called a “theonomy,” in which pluralistic democracy and religious tolerance are seen as a problem to be solved by godly men carrying out God's will. Karen Armstrong calls Christian
    Reconstructionism “totalitarian” because it leaves “no room for any other view or policy, no democratic tolerance for rival parties, no individual freedom.” Matthew N. Lyons and I call Christian Reconstructionism a “new form of clerical fascist politics,” in our book Right-Wing Populism in America, because we see it echoing the religiously based clerical fascist movements that existed during World War II in countries including Romania and Hungary.

    According to Fred Clarkson:

    Reconstructionists believe that there are three main areas of governance: family government, church government, and civil government. Under God’s covenant, the nuclear family is the basic unit. The husband is the head of the family, and wife and children are "in submission" to him. In turn, the husband "submits" to Jesus and to God’s laws as detailed in the Old Testament. The church has its own ecclesiastical structure and governance. Civil government exists to implement God’s laws. All three institutions are under Biblical Law, the implementation of which is called "theonomy."

    Christian Reconstructionists believe that as more Christians adopt Dominion Theology, they will eventually convert the majority of Americans. Then the country will realize that the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are merely codicils to Old Testament biblical law. Because they believe this is God’s will, they scoff at criticism that what they plan is a revolutionary overthrow of the existing system of government. Over the past 20 years the leading proponents of Reconstructionism have included founder Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, Gary North, Greg Bahnsen, David Chilton, Gary DeMar, and Andrew Sandlin. Kingdom Now theology emerged from the Latter Rain Pentacostal movement and the concept of Spiritual Warfare against the literal demonic forces of Satan. It has been promoted by founder Earl Paulk as well as C. Peter Wagner, founder of the New Apostolic Reformation movement.

    For many, President Obama and the Democratic Party are among these “demonic forces.” This has real world consequences.


    In 2006 former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris told thousands of cheering Christian Right activists that beating the Democrats in the upcoming elections was a battle against “principalities and powers,” which many in the audience would hear as a Biblical reference to the struggle with the demonic agents of Satan. Harris (who played “ballot bowling” in Florida to elect George W. Bush in 2000) told the audience at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington DC that she had studied religion in Switzerland with the godfather of the Christian Right, theologian Francis A. Schaeffer. Her speech there, which I witnessed and wrote about, qualifies her as a Dominionist.

    In 2004 Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, another Dominionist, oversaw the election apparatus giving his favored candidate George W. Bush a boost into the Oval Office.

    Religion scholar Bruce Barron explains that “unlike the Christian Right, Reconstructionism is not simply or primarily a political movement; it is first and foremost an educational movement fearlessly proclaiming an ideology of total world transformation.” According to sociologist Sara Diamond, Christian Reconstructionism spread the “concept that Christians are Biblically mandated to ‘occupy’ all secular institutions” to the extent that it became “the central unifying ideology for the Christian Right.”

    William Martin is the author of the 1996 tome With God on Our Side, a companion volume to the PBS series of the same name (Martin and I were both advisers to the PBS series). Martin is a sociologist and professor of religion at Rice University, and he has been critical of the way some critics of the Christian Right have tossed around the terms “dominionism” and “theocracy.” According to Martin:

    “It is difficult to assess the influence of Reconstructionist thought with any accuracy. Because it is so genuinely radical, most leaders of the Religious Right are careful to distance themselves from it. At the same time, it clearly holds some appeal for many of them. One undoubtedly spoke for others when he confessed, ‘Though we hide their books under the bed, we read them just the same.’ “

    Martin reveals that “several key leaders have acknowledged an intellectual debt to the theonomists.” The late Christian Right leaders Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy “endorsed Reconstructionist books” for example. Before he died in 2001, the founder of Christian Reconstuctionism, R. J. Rushdoony, appeared several times on Christian Right televangelist programs such as Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and the program hosted by D. James Kennedy.
    Last edited by Atypical; 09-02-2011 at 01:40 PM.

  8. Atypical is offline
    09-02-2011, 12:42 PM #188

    Conclusion

    “Pat Robertson makes frequent use of ‘dominion’ language,” says Martin. Robertson’s book, The Secret Kingdom, “has often been cited for its theonomy elements; and pluralists were made uncomfortable when, during his presidential campaign, he said he ‘would only bring Christians and Jews into the government,’ as well as when he later wrote, ‘There will never be world peace until God’s house and God’s people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world.’ “

    Martin also pointed out that Jay Grimstead, who led the Coalition on Revival, “brought Reconstructionists together with more mainstream evangelicals.” According to Martin, Grimstead explained “‘I don’t call myself [a Reconstructionist],” but “A lot of us are coming to realize that the Bible is God’s standard of morality...in all points of history...and for all societies, Christian and non-Christian alike....It so happens that Rushdoony, Bahnsen, and North understood that sooner.”

    Then Grimstead added, “there are a lot of us floating around in Christian leadership—James Kennedy is one of them—who don’t go all the way with the theonomy thing, but who want to rebuild America based on the Bible.”

    So let’s choose our language carefully, but let’s recognize that terms such as Dominionism and Theocracy, when used cautiously and carefully, are appropriate when describing troubling tendencies in the Christian Right that are helping push the current political scene toward confrontation and intolerance.

    http://act.alternet.org/go/10726?aki...18.kAEZPg&t=21

    __________________________________________________ _

    Do not make a mistake thinking that these are just 'believers' doing what they have a right to believe.

    These hard-core fanatics are dangerous to all of us - even other christians - as the essay points out. They want to remake everything into, what they think, is the 'best way to live'. THEIR WAY!

    They are already having an effect that can be easily seen. More hate, less tolerance, rigid absolutism and indifference to compromise, excessive nationalism, and vicious militarism.

    This is a danger to everyone as excessive religiosity has always been.
    Last edited by Atypical; 09-02-2011 at 01:00 PM.

  9. Atypical is offline
    09-07-2011, 03:19 PM #189

    Conservative Columnist: Poor People Shouldn’t Vote

    This is one of those moments in politics when an ideology unleashes its id. In a stunningly out-of-touch recent column, right-wing commentator Matthew Vadum said that poor Americans—or what he calls “nonproductive segments of the population”—really just have no place voting.

    The column published in the conservative online magazine American Thinker opens with this gem:

    Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

    Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

    Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country—which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.


    Vadum’s conspiracy-theory nonsense of a thesis is this: registering welfare recipients to vote amounts to a targeted effort to undermine American democracy because Richard Cloward and Frances Scott Piven (who are also long-time targets of Glenn Beck) tried to overwhelm the welfare rolls of New York City to prove a point—in the 1970s.

    “Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn’t about helping the poor,” Vadum writes. “It’s about helping the poor to help themselves to others’ money."

    It’s a stomach-churning argument that dismisses the disadvantaged and the unemployed as pawns whose interests don’t matter. While Vadum’s argument is extreme, it sheds an ugly light on conservative motives for passing restrictive Voter ID laws. Such laws disproportionately affect low-income persons as well as young people, people of color, older Americans, and the disabled.

    Conservative officials across the country say the laws are intended to reduce voter fraud but, as Campus Progress has revealed, they actually result in mass disenfranchisement of disadvantaged populations.

    (Voter ID Laws: Fake Solution to a Fake Problem)http://campusprogress.org/articles/v..._fake_problem/

    As TPM notes, “Vadum's column is notable because he isn't just pretending to be worried about the nearly non-existent threat of in-person voter fraud -- he just doesn't think poor people should be voting.”

    In a follow-up post, Vadum says:

    "Of course those who are legally qualified to vote should be allowed to vote but our tax dollars shouldn't be used to underwrite the destruction of the republic."

    Translation: “I’m not saying poor people shouldn’t vote. I’m just saying they shouldn’t vote.”

    Presumably, Vadum would see no problem with voter registration drives at country clubs, nor with rich people “voting themselves more benefits” in the form of corporate tax loopholes.

    And it’s been a few years since the recession started, so Vadum’s probably forgotten that when *Wall Street bankers “helped themselves to others’ money” in the form of wild speculation, it made a whole lot more people “non-productive” than before.

    It is clear that Vadum doesn’t trust the poor at the polls, just as other conservatives don’t seem to trust students or multi-lingual Americans.

    Talk about paternalism.

    http://act.alternet.org/go/10891?aki...018.06Pf4Q&t=4

    __________________________________________________ _

    This is what conservatives stand for. Only the wealthy and powerful get rights. FU to everyone else. *Another example of conservative schmucks taking my money and giftin' it to others.

    Here is a post from someone after this article that says it well.

    Charley James

    By the same token, then, I assume that Vadum doesn't believe the rich should vote, either, because they simply vote themselves more tax cuts, fewer regulations, and dismantling anything that tries to hold their greed, wealth and power in check. It's the same principle, after all, as not allowing the poor to vote, And since he wants only "productive" members of society to vote, then let's strike hedge fund managers and investment bankers from the registration rolls, too, since they don't contribute anything productive to society - ours or anyone else's.

    If we're going to start cutting undersireables from voter rolls, then I believe that the stupid shouldn't vote either, and we ought to start with Matthew Vadum.
    Last edited by Atypical; 09-07-2011 at 03:40 PM.

  10. SiriuslyLong is offline
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    SiriuslyLong's Avatar
    Joined: Jan 2009 Location: Ann Arbor, MI Posts: 3,560
    09-07-2011, 05:25 PM #190
    You missed the point. It's the powerful using the powerless to keep their power, and you loathe that, or at least have in the past. I'm surprised you didn't recognize that. The left creates a fictitous war on free enterprise and uses that to encite and enrage the "sheeple" (you've used that word) to get their votes so they can stay in power. It's pretty convoluted in my opinion.

    Need evidence? Here are some sound bites.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ojd1...eature=related

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg98B...eature=related

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgfA2...eature=related

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