SCOTUS affirms the American police state

Cagle Post » Five Reasons Why The Very Rich Have NOT Earned Their Money

Romney: Moms Need "Dignity Of Work'

The right's betrayal of Christ?

Before I get rolling on this allow me to share that: 1) I have no use for any religions because religions make folks crazy.  2) I'm a practicing Taoist, which some may argue invalidates point 1 even though Taoism isn't a religion, it's a philosophy.  3) There are practitioners of Taoism who DO follow it as a religion.  4) I was born and raised a fundamentalist Christian through the Assembly of God churches and remained so until I was about 22 years old.  As that old forged epistle Timothy urged, I studied to show myself approved unto God and spent a whole year using the Hope College seminary library spending whole days burning my eyes out doing just that, so I've forgotten more about Christianity than any layman will ever know in the 1st place.  This isn't a boast but a fact proved time and again when life has brought other Christians across my path and the subject turned to the Bible. 

I mention all this in fairness because I'm about to lay some unpopular observations down for all those Republican voting fundamentalists Christians like my dad (well, most of my family to be specific) whose seething hatred of President Obama has them ready to betray their Christ  by voting for cultist Mitt Romney.

And Mormonism is a cult my friends, even though it has been watered down over the decades to seem like just another branch of Christianity.  At least, that's what they used to tell me back there in Sunday school.  And they argued it pretty persuasively, to my young teenage mind.  After all, fundamentalists will tell you knowingly, Revelations 22 clearly states:

"¹⁸For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
 ¹⁹And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book."

Sure, it's a stretch to apply this to the whole Bible (the author clearly meant his own book, the Revelation), but that never stopped a good fundamentalist before, kinda like when they say all the promises Yahweh made to Israel in the Old Testament applies to Christians because of Jesus.  Anyway, the point is that the Bible is the complete, whole Word of the LORD, so the minute Joe Smith finished penning his ode to Jesus and the American Indians and called it another testament of Jesus Christ, he entered the world of Satan Himself because he was pushing unbiblical nonsense like we were all pre-existing souls until God came along and convinced us of a plan to go to Earth to get bodies.  Or saving the dead through stand in baptisms.  Or that whole polygamy and celestial marriage thing.  Yeesh!  I may have mentioned religion makes people crazy?

Anyway so let's look at it this way: fundamentalist Christianity is like a box of Trix and Mormonism is like a box of Froot Loops.  The may taste the same but they look nothing like the other.  And therein lies the rub: how can fundamentalist, die hard Christians vote to put their version of the Antichrist into office?  Let's face it, Romney hardly meets the definition of a good Christian.  He uses his substantial power to wreck people's lives by happily firing them or destroying their jobs through his predatory Bain Capital days; he doesn't care about poor people; he hasn't sold all his belongings, given them to the poor, taken up his cross and followed Jesus; he bears false witness against Barack Obama.  And so on and so forth.  I mean, if the Catholic church merits the Whore of Babylon title (and Catholicism was the very parent of protestant religions like fundamentalist Christianity), then what must a Mormon be?

Still, what real choice do people like my dad have?  I mean they HATE Barack Obama with a vehemence I don't think I've ever seen from the right before, which is saying something.  I mean, I lived through the Clinton presidency but William J. Clinton got off easy compared to the verbal lynchings our current president gets.  And before anyone gets their panties in a bunch about my choice of words allow me to add that the Kenyan, Socialist, Communist, Islamist, Atheist, Hitler, anti-colonial (whatever the hell that means), alien from another planet president that we have now has received death threats, impeachment threats, had right wing white dudes packing guns to his public speaking events, had his beloved family lambasted, been drawn as a monkey (no racism there!) and been depicted dragged behind a pickup truck which invokes when some good ol' boys down in the not-so-great state of Texas dragged a defenseless black man to his death when the strung him to the rear bumper of their pick up truck.  Mind you, Barack Obama is a practicing Christian.

Is a Mormon really so bad by comparison then?  Is this South Parkian dilemma of choosing between a giant douche and a turd sandwich as easy as it seems when fundamentalist Christians are the only "real" Christians?  I mean, voting for a Mormon would be akin to voting for a Scientologist and the Bush Base, as the fundamentalist Christians used to be called, would have none of that nonsense.  So why are they putting up with it now?  Is all of Romney's SuperPAC money convincing the faithful that it better to go with the devil you know?  Because Mormonism is a cult.  At least, that's what they used to say until Barack Obama came along.

Police handcuff Ga. kindergartner for tantrum - Yahoo! News

MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. (AP) — Police in Georgia handcuffed a kindergartner after the girl threw a tantrum, and the police chief is making no apologies.

WMAZ-TV (http://on.wmaz.com/I0ZrNE ) reports the 6-year-old is accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing furniture at school in the central Georgia city of Milledgeville. The police report says the girl knocked over a shelf that injured the principal.

The elementary school called police after the Friday tantrum. The report says when an officer tried to calm the child, she resisted and was handcuffed. The girl was charged with simple assault and damage to property.

Police Chief Dray Swicord says the department's policy is to handcuff people in certain situations, and "there is no age discrimination on that rule."

The child was suspended from school until August.

the child is obviously a dangerous felon; thanks police state!  i feel safer already!

Republicans to slash food stamps - David Rogers - POLITICO.com

Food stamps moved front-and-center in the budget wars Monday morning, as House Republicans began rolling out a first wave of $33.2 billion in 10-year savings that will have an immediate impact in the farm bill debate and come November, the 2012 elections.

An average family of four faces an 11 percent cut in monthly benefits after Sept. 1, and even more important is the tighter enforcement of rules demanding that households exhaust most of their savings before qualifying for help. This hits hardest among the long-term unemployed, many of whom never before used the aid –now titled SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program)—but have found it valuable in trying to stay afloat in the current recession.

Indeed food stamp enrollment and costs have exploded since the financial collapse four years ago, making SNAP a target for the right— but also far bigger political issue in swing states like Florida, Nevada and Ohio.

National food stamp enrollment reached 46.4 million people in January 2012, a nearly two-thirds increase from the average participation in fiscal 2008. The annual costs—now running in excess of $80 billion—have more than doubled in the same period. And even the most ardent food stamp proponents will sometimes say SNAP is a program “asked to do too much.”...

If you are anything like me and was raised properly, you know that greed is a Very Bad Thing and in some faiths a Very Great Evil.  As a Taoist I try not to attach labels to things or to define them or to judge greedy people, yet even so, my inner compass tells me that greed is a remnant of our ape ancestor's days in the trees where survival of the fittest was the law of the land, not all this liberal idea of equality for all, and ought be a thing firmly planted in the graveyard of humanity's past.

 

Yet,  at least in America today, there are a lot of folks on the right who have a veritable shrine to greed and they find it to be as virtuous as the old practice of letting the old or infirm apes of the tribe to fall to our ancient predators in order to save their own hides.

 

For reasons that cannot be fully understood by someone like myself raised to have standards and ethics, the right, while claiming the mantle of Christ and liberty really, really love money, which the Bible declares the Evil's Root and this has led to the mess we have today in America because rich people have been redistributing the wealth upwards in the grandest entitlement scheme of them all.  And as this wealth flows upwards to people who don't really need it but gladly gobble up the excesses while children in this nation go hungry, we see the end results because more and more people on the bottom have to resort to food stamps that the rich bitch about because they don't want to part with their wretched, ill gotten, filthy lucre.  It would be enough to start riots and revolts if the masses weren't so fat and lazy, content to watch TV instead of getting as angry as they ought be by this slight of hand.

 

The real, moral, ethical question is how much money does one need before it's enough?  How many mansions or yachts or solid gold umbrella stands does one need to own before the plight of one's fellow brothers and sisters becomes a serious issue for contemplation.  True religion and philosophies know that answer instinctively yet the right, professing God out one side of their mouth while asking for still more tax cuts to inflate their wealth to an even more unconscionable figure that the lower classes will have to pay for out of their pockets because --haha!-- the money has to come from somewhere.  It is a great game of 3 card monty that has a lot of well intentioned people snookered into believing that they too can be as obscenely wealthy as say the Romney's even though the odds against schleps like you and me making that sort of cash are astronomical to say the least.

 

And speaking of the Romney's, Ann Romney needs to sit down and shut the fuck up.  As a wife of privilege she cannot honestly compare herself to other stay at home moms because she has maids, butlers and nannies to do most of the heavy lifting for her.  I should imagine that if you spoke with a normal stay at home mom (read as: a mom not so rich she could buy her own country kinda like she and Mitt are trying to do now with this presidential bid) and she listed her day to day chores and Ann Romney listed hers, you would find Ann spent an inordinate time by the swimming pool while normal moms are pulling their hair out at the supermarket stuck with her bratty kids, cleaning the house, making dinner, getting oil changes et al.  Regular stay at home moms work their asses off; I've seen them.  But if you suggest Mrs. Romney works that hard (and worse, believe it when you said it), I would have no choice but to suggest a professional therapist because you my friend are fucking insane.

 

Yet if the Romney's and the Republicans have their way, they would steal much needed food assistance from a good many stay at home moms (and working moms for that matter) so they could give the savings to-- you guessed it!-- rich folks who don't need it, already have too much and yet greedily, strangely, unethically, hunger for more.  

 

I don't think much of either political party, the Democrats enabled the illegitimate Bush White House to cut taxes in a time of war (that Bush created when he allowed 9/11 to happen purposefully or otherwise) but at least the Dems want some sort of social safety net, which is more than I can say for the money grubbers of the Republican party who just want all of us in the lower classes to be out on the streets begging for their spare change, which they wouldn't give us anyway because they would tell themselves we would spend it on booze or drugs and not our hungry kids at home.