My favorite rename for the GOP comes from Bob Kincaid of the Head On Radio Network (headonradionetwork.com) when he refers to them as the "Repiglican Party".

Often during the years of the Bush takeover, when the cabal was getting too much attention for its illegal deeds some scary thing would suddenly rise up to distract the country. Some of the scares came in the form of raising the terrorism alert level, anthrax scares, and the bird flu warnings.

Torture and Tamiflu

Now the heat is turned way up on Cheney/Bush and company and their role in torture.

So gee, what happens? Another flu scare that came at a convenient time and seemed fishy from the get go.

And where does it appear that the flu came from? The company that makes Tamiflu, Gilead.

And who is connected to Tamiflu? Torture leader - Donald Rumsfeld, who was Chairman of the Board and owns millions of stock in Gilead, as do other Cons such as former Secretary of State, George Shultz.

Hmmmmm. Further examination is essential.

I just received a phone call. It was a recording! It DID NOT say who paid for this crap call! The message? Many people are expressing their views through the Tea Bagging campaign and will be out protesting today! Really? The only campaign of protesters that I have heard of being active today are those fighting to get Single Payer on the table and at the table and the Union buses doing the 'made in America' drives this month! Does this mean that Americans are about to be 'tea bagged' by the anti-democratic press misrepresenting the reasons? Makes me wonder how the protesters will be reported!
Who has heard of tea baggers out today?

“Tax cheating” isn’t merely the province of corporations; every day I see or hear an ad from some tax attorney who tells listeners if they owe back taxes, call us and we’ll insure that the IRS treats you with “respect.” They promise to reduce your tax liability to pennies on the dollar. Frankly, as someone who insures his taxes are paid by having no exemptions—and winds-up saving money in the end—I have no respect for such people who dodge their responsibilities to society.
On yesterday’s topics, I wonder if people like Rep. Bachus are at all concerned how they will look in the history books. The funny thing about history is that the “right” side is generally on the left. When the right tries to rewrite history, as it has tried to do with Reconstruction, they always reveal more about themselves than the history they are re-interpreting. They forget, for example, that killing Yankees and lynching freed slaves was not exactly civilized or lawful behavior, and what followed—peonage and Jim Crow—was hardly worthy of merit in a civilized society. It is hard to figure people who are so far removed from reality that they believe their own lies.
On the gay marriage issue, I think that the only people who have a problem with gays at all are those who are uncomfortable with the state of their own sex lives. Otherwise, gays, especially those who are white, do not suffer (so long as they are not “in your face” with it, like those “take back the night” marchers with their hetero-hate and misandrist slogans) the same kind of prejudices as, say, someone who cannot hide what society has defined them as. Back in ancient Roman times, the Romans regarded Germanic peoples in terms of physical characteristics and habits that are little differentiated from how so many people today disparage Latino immigrants (and, frankly, even those who are not). It is interesting that even though Germanic immigrants wanted to “assimilate” into the Roman world, incomprehensible prejudices barred that from occurring—even when the empire was on the verge of disintegration (a thousand years later, with the Byzantine Empire in its last throes, the people of Constantinople refused military help from the West due to religious bigotry). It also should be noted that Roman society was economically as stratified as this country is increasingly becoming.

I would say that your car is one of your effects, and that being secure in your effects (according to the 4th Amendment) means not just that the police can't take things out without a warrant, but that they can't put things in (such as a wiretap) without a warrant. Therefore, the government shouldn't be allowed to put a tracker in your car without either a warrant or your consent.

Unless this decision is overturned, I expect the consent will end up being included in boilerplate contracts for purchase or lease of cars and that the text will be buried pretty deeply in the contract and be quickly glossed over by the seller. "Just initial here."

Someone will probably also figure out how to market the tracker as a convenience, just like putting an RFID chip in your child, or OnStar (which gives someone outside your car, whom you don't know, the ability to unlock your doors).

Thom,
I side with you on just about every issue, so I'm offended when you hedge on your arguments. Correct me if I'm wrong: Social Security is not progressively taxed. In other words, you take out of it based upon what you have put in. People who earn more than 100k a year do not put any additional into the system, but they also do not draw any additional. If you want to convert it to a progressively taxed program, then please be honest with yourself and your listeners, and say so.
Secondly, you erroneously and repeatedly say that the program is "funded only by people making less than $100K". I don't think you mean it that way, but you say it that way more times than not.
Please address BOTH issues as you present a responsible and important discussion of Social Security. Real solutions only come out of an accurate assessment of the problem.
Thank You, and keep up the fight!

Does the SS Trust have any possibility of being repaid for the money that has been taken for other government purposes?

The Reagan double-taxing, like the idea of investing SS funds in the stock market is just another way that some are trying to destroy the program.

Well, my above post has taught me that there are no quotes possible here.

I was referring to the post of FrJon @9:53.

I think that saving "christians" should be declared a new mission field. In talking with the Pharisees-the religiously pious people of the day, Jesus says, “How terrible it will be for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your mint, dill, and cummin, but have neglected the more important matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.These are the things you should have practiced, without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You filter out a gnat, yet swallow a camel!"...I love that smart ass remark. I have no doubt that mainstream "christians" today are swallowing the same camels. They boast a remarkable 51% divorce rate, while blaming fractured traditional marriages on homosexuality. It's absurd. I claim Yeshua bar Yosef, as my rabbi, and even hold the Bible in very high regard, as God inspired through the pen of men and women. When people get into a literal vs. figurative debate, they completely miss the point. So much to say, not the right forum.

As the Bible was written from the underbelly of power and the oppressed, I tend to put much more trust in the hermeneutics of those who see through a similar lens. Desmond Tutu, has some remarkable things to say about the denial of homosexuals in the church as being the greatest heresy. He also talks about the emphasis of Rom. 1:26 as the denial of God's intended purpose (against nature). Also, look at the evolution and importance of the eunuch...from being banned from the temple to having a special place in the Kingdom of God. People love to pick and chose, w/o seeing the grand narrative. That is not only dangerous but also intellectually dishonest.

There is some great writings coming out of the emergent church movement, particularly w/ Brian McLaren and Tony Jones.

I think FrJon is on the right track with Romans (1:26): in my Bible, the passage comes under the heading, "Punishment of idolaters" - if you look at the prior verse (1:23), it declares the subjects have changed God's image into that of "corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things," which describe the forms of pagan idols. Thus Paul (and I agree with Thom his writings are problematic) was deploring Roman pagan cults, some of which were characterized by gender segregation and sexual ritual, meaning that homosexual acts were practiced in the context of sacred ceremonies by the members, regardless of their individual orientation, which promoted lust devoid of romance as in a loving relationship, as a divine moral imperative. Paul goes on to decry other activities of such cults, which must have been politically active, as various forms of conspiracy (1:29-31). Notice the following portion (2:1-3) warns those who judge such people condemn themselves: "man who judges those who do such things and does the same yourself" - which seems to refer to the conspiratorial nature of activities involving "malice, avarice, envy, murder, deceit, pride, plotting evil," etc. In divorcing this passage from the context of pagan ritual, the detractors of same-sex affection are practicing deceit.

The verse from Leviticus (18:22) used to declare male homosexuality an abomination is similar: a Dominican priest informed our class that scholars know this regarded worship of the pagan deity Baal, whose priests had as one duty personally inseminating farmers to insure the fertility of their crops (thus again, not the context of a loving relationship); the prior verse (18:21) specifically denounces consecrating one's child to the fire deity Moloch, which meant burning them to death.

Same-sex loving relationships are reported in the Bible objectively, but the fanatical, ill-informed crowd do their best to trivialize, distort or ignore such references: these include David and Jonathan (Jonathan's father King Saul wanted to kill them both for being "ravishers of men"), Elijah and Eliseus (regarded as "twin souls" to each other), and possibly Jesus and John (the latter described himself as "the disciple whom Jesus loved"). Jesus performed a long-distance cure of a centurion's slave boy, denoted with a word implying a sexual bond; it was Christ's love for Lazarus that brought him back from the dead; the arrest leading to the Crucifixion came when Judas kissed Jesus in a public place; Jesus on the Cross instills a mother-son bond between Mary and John; when the risen Christ speaks to Simon Peter of his future tasks, Peter wonders how John fits in ("What of this man?" "If I wish him to remain until I come, what is it to thee?") Anyone who claims they know about the sexuality or chastity of Jesus is simply deluded.

The efforts of so-called Christian groups motivating our citizens and lobbying our government in refusal to recognize committed loving relationships between people of the same gender, thereby depriving them of a variety of civil rights and financial benefits enjoyed by their opposite-sex counterparts, is an act of cruelty being propagated by willful ignorance and deliberate misrepresentations. Such people harbor no guilt that their toxic falsehoods lead to tragedies such as the despair of the youngster destroying himself, or the vicious murder of an honest innocent like Matthew Shepard: they instead likely feel delight that their lies have taken hold in people's minds, oblivious to the fact that the judgment spoken of in Revelations that awaits us all will be conducted via criteria with which they have yet to contend.

In anticipation for yet another discussion on the fall of the moral standards of the U.S. government, I thought I'd post this "food for thought." I've been reading through the writings of Cuba's national hero, José Martí. In my opinion, the things he was saying about the government of colonial Spain ring poignant with our U.S. government. Here are a few of my favorite quotes he had for Spain that I think we can use for the U.S.

Quotes from José Martí (1853-1895)

“When countries go astray and from cowardice or indifference commit or excuse grave errors, when the last vestige of energy disappears, when the last – or perhaps the first – expression of political will remains awkwardly silent, then countries weep long, pay for their crimes, and perish, mocked, humiliated, and torn to shreds, as they themselves once mocked and humiliated and tore to shreds.

No idea can ever justify an orgy of blood.

No idea can ever excuse crime, and barbaric refinement in crime.”

“They begged yesterday and are still begging today for greater freedom for themselves, and on the very same day they applaud an unconditional war to crush another’s petition for freedom.

They did wrong.

Spain (the United States) cannot be free while it is stained with blood…”

“And as Cuba (the U.S. middle class) was benevolently restoring your strength, you put your arm under hers and reached for her heart, and ripped it out and tore open the arteries of morality and science.

And when she begged some miserable alms from you as a reward for her hardships, you stretched out your hand and showed her the shapeless mass of her trampled heart and laughed and threw it in her face…

And she felt the blood rise to her throat, and it choked her and rose to her brain and needed to burst forth, and concentrated in the strength it found in her breast, and made her whole body boil with the heat provoked by mockery and outrage. And it burst forth in the end. It burst forth because you yourselves caused it to, because your cruelty made the opening of her veins necessary, because you had crushed her heart many times and she did not want you to crush it again.

And if this was what you wanted, then why do you find it strange?

And if it is a matter of honor for you to continue writing your colonial history on pages such as these, why do you not temper – with justice, even – your supreme effort to affix the tattered remains of your conquistador’s cloak to Cuba forever?…”

I don't care what the Bible says about homosexuality. I don't have to follow it's rules, I can live my life my way. Christians can have their own values and opinions on the subject, but they should not be able to use government to force their ways on me, as a homosexual. There is no Christian nor religious requirement for FULL citizenship rights in the U.S.

The only reason I would care what the Bible says about it is to try and educate some "Christians" that so misuse and misunderstand the Bible,or worse, cherry pick some sins and ignore others.