I'm fed up with not being superrich! I'm going to be a Republican now! They have the best of everything!

Republicans always have money. When they run out, they just steal some more.

Republicans never have to worry about the law, because the law never applies to them.

Republicans have a never-ending gang of shock troops in freepers, who are so stupid they will willingly beat their own heads against a brick wall until they die, just by telling them that it will keep Clinton from coming and having sex with their wives.

Republicans can walk down the street in almost any city and shoot people in the head for fun, and get away with it because they're Republican. All they have to do is say to the police "Hey, I'm a Republican!" and the police will go get a red carpet to roll out in font of them and provide them free bullets.

Republicans get everything, and the worst thing is, THEY GRIPE 24 HOURS A DAY ABOUT HOW TERRIBLE THEY HAVE IT!

16He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, 17so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.















Not attacking Christians, but Dominionists. I don't think the fetishism of Christ is good for Christianity. And I find it interesting that the dominionists, who so love the book of Revelation and like to think it's a literal installation guide to the Apocaypse, at the very same time are the ones who are flaunting their beliefs in the marketplace (these are only a few examples) and often willonly patronize "christian" businesses (as indicated by the fish stickers on the front door). Their activity is a perversion of the true meaning of Christianity.

I just got back from Christmas with the family. Stayed at my sister's house. She is (like so many are) an ex-drug addict/alcoholic turned religious fanatic. For years and years, literally since junior high school (and she's in her late 40's now) she was addicted to cocaine and drinking, and stayed that way until her mid-30's. Now she's changed her addiction to drugs to an addiction to Christ. She's better now, because she's no longer poisoning her body, but her way of thinking is so black and white that she's poisoned her mind.

Her worldview is very simple: as she puts it, she has given herself to God. Therefore, God lives her life for her. She no longer has any responsibility for her decisions, nor can she take any kind of real pleasure in what she does, because God is the one that does it. She claims to enjoy her life and what she does (and she has done some things to be proud of) and at the same time she doesn't even believe that she did them, and every time she mentions anything she says that God did it through her.

What's the point in living if you're not living your own life? If you aren't actually responsible for your own achievements, then why even make any? And if you're not responsible for your achievements, then what about your failures? If she hit a kid on the way to work, wouldn't that be God's fault too?

She has actually told her kids on occasion that things like storms that occur when they are going out to party are signs to not go out from God, and never obnce thinks about how that storm may have caused an accident which killed someone (it happend while we were there actually). What kind of God would send a storm which kills other people as a message to someone to not go out and have fun?

She believes that everything is a potential test by Satan to turn her away from God. Every event, every object, every action. Satan is behind every bush (no pun intended BTW) trying to turn her away from her righteous path. So every decision she "makes" is actually prayed on. She literally cannot open the door without asking God whether she should.

How do you live your life being constantly afraid of the boogeyman? doesn't this sound less like Christianity and more like voodoo? It seems really animistic. Everything is possessed by a demon that's trying to deceive you.

She's got serious trouble with raising her kids, who are now all adults. She mad a lot of mistakes in raising them, and they show the damage. But now, she refuses to let them live their own lives, she continually undercuts their authority with their own kids, and she goes on about how she wants to keep them from making the same mistakes she did - which of course makes them rebel all the more, and make the same mistakes. As much as I would like to talk to her about what is going on, I can't. Her worldview is such that if she has an idea, God must have put it there, therefore it's infallible so anything she does is sacrosanct. There's mo room for discussion.

Her middle daughter was actually trying to tell me that Christianity started at the same time as the United States! Anyone before the US was founded wasn't a Christian, and anyone outside the US isn't a Christian either. I set her straight in short order, and she did realize what she was saying, but she had been indoctrinated to the point that she could spew crap like that and not know it was crap.

I really worry about these people. They're not sane. They no longer live in reality. and they do believe that it is their right to convert everyone around them. Fundie churches target the drug-addicted on purpose: not because they are really interested in saving those people, but because they make the best shock troops. She goes off and witnesses all the time, and forces her kids to come along when she can get them to. It doesn't matter that that is trying to force beliefs on someone else, or that that turns people away more that anything else, or that if someone is forced into religion then it isn't because they believe and really doesn't count, she does it anyway and nothing will stop her. Christ addicts will stop at NOTHING to get what they're after, because they truly believe that they will go to hell if they fail. My sister is a Christ addict. She may have given up the physically-damaging effects of drugs, but the addiction is still there, along with the extremism that makes it damaging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_...

A short story by Cyril Kornbluth written in 1951, the Marching Morons postulates a world of the future where the average IQ is 45, because the educated and well-informed stopped their reproduction but the mentally deficient didn't. It's an interesting story, although trapped in the mentality of 1951.

One of the points of the story was how the average person in that society was so stupid that they had to be literally programmed in order to function. The protagonist, a modern-day man who was put in suspended animation for hundreds of years and awoke in the moron society, begins to notice this when he sees an ad for a TV comedy which has the punchline of "Would you buy it for a quarter?" A line which in and of itself has no real meaning or comic value. (This line was paraphrased in the movie Robocop by the way, to imply similar things.) Kornbluth used the example of the comic line, along with other examples, to show how stupid the public had become - the TV show would base the entire script around using the line "I'll buy that for a quarter!" in and of itself, and the audience had become programmed to laugh simply because it was told to laugh when someone would use the line. They found the line funny because they were told to, and not because of any kind of humor value inherent in it or some allusion to something funny. They were programmed.

So...I can't help but laugh a little inside, when I see a pickup truck that has a sticker on it which reads "Git 'R' Done!"

Democrats join the Democratic party because they see it as the lesser of two evils.
Republicans join the Republican party because they see it as the greater of two evils.

I was just watching a documentary on LinkTV about Somali refugees resettling in Lewiston ME. It included several interviews, one of which was with a leader of the World Church of the Creator - a white supremacist "church". He said that a lot of the information he uses comes from the O'Reilly Factor website! So, it's true after all: The O'Reilly Factor is racist!

is like saying people shouldn't eat if they don't want to crap.

Waddya think of my new slogan?

Seriously, I know this is extreme, and not really a valid comparison. I'm not trying to compare having a baby to defecating, or trying to say that babies are feces, or anything of the sort. I know some people will try to take it that way.

The human sex drive is as innate and fundamental to the human psyche as the feeding drive. This point is the elephant in the room that fundamentalists refuse to talk about. It is a necessity for a healthy human being to have some sort of sexual expression. Prolonged abstinence is simply not psychlogically healthy, any more than starvation is biologically healthy, and promoting abstinence only as a means of birth control and of behavior in society is just as destructive as trying to promote starvation as a method for weight loss. In some cases absitnence may be mentally clearing, but that doesn't make forced abstinence a healthy option for living.

30 Days last night had a pro-choice activist live in an anti-choice maternity home for a month, and one of the things discussed in the show was that the mothers were able to (forced, actually) watch anti-choice propaganda videotapes on a daily basis. Yet, information on birth control was not available, because they believed birth control to be a bad thing. Even though it would give the women living in the shelter the opportunity to control their lives and not have another pregnancy they could not support, birth control was still considered a bad thing, and abstinence was presented to these women as the only moral option to not carrying a baby to term. What this really comes down to is: live in misery, or be prepared to have a baby.

I'm surprised at the people on DU who have been making fun of what they call 'tinfoil hatters'. If this isn't a textbook case of a conspiracy, then real conspiracies can't ever happen! This administration knew as of last week that the arrests were going to happen, they started in hammering Democrats as being terrorist enablers 2 days before the story broke, they are cynically using this non-event to scare everyone into believing that we were only minutes away from having 10 airliners blown up, and The Fucktard-in-Chief lands for an 'impromptu' press conference 5 MINUTES before it is scheduled!

The arrests don't have to be faked for this to be a conspiracy. All that has to happen is that the government fabricate an issue for an ulterior motive, and seeing as how:

1) we didn't have anything at all to do with the arrests,
2) this was in the works for quite some time (some sources say over a year),
3) nothing happened anyway, and
4) it appears that the plot was nowhere near completion to begin with,

the attention this has gotten from the media and from The Fucktard-in-Chief is a complete hoax. What else do we need for this 'conspiracy' to actually be a conspiracy? Does anyone seriously believe that the media and the administration response is justified at all, and that it isn't solely politically motivated?

Let me be clear in what I mean. I know that the Religious Right is entwined in this administration so fully that it's hard to tell who is who anymore. I also know that they are using the administration to promote Rapture philosophy. Some of the backers (ex. Moon) are blatant about it. However, a statement in another post by LiberalEsto made me pause:

What a weird thing it must be to sit around waiting for The End to happen any day now. Why would anyone bother saving for college, getting an education, or planning for the future?

He's right. why bother to invest in the future in any way if you think there won't be one?

We know that this administration is also backed by corporatists like no other. The excessive wealthy has always held the rest of the population in contempt-they call us 'useless eaters' and picture themselves as being the only truly important citizens, while the rest of us exist just to keep them living their state of ease. The ownership class has been trying to erode all the progress which the working classes have made since FDR. What better way to continue to do so, than to convince the population that there is no future anyway? Why should anyone save, or try to better themselves, or do anything to improve their standard of living, if they believe the world is going to be destroyed next week? I begin to wonder if the emergence of the Rapture as the dominant philosophy isn't part of the Olin-Scaife-Murdoch agenda to trick the poor into ruining themselves. It certainly would make more sense as to why it has taken off like it has.

On edit: see, the thing is that it occurred to me now that this could be more than about some people getting rich. After a while, it's not enough for the rich to have money-what's another million when you have billions? The only way to keep the self-important buzz going is to start stepping on the poor, by making their lives worse in every way you can. Take away their savings, their property, and their ability to take care of themselves, and you can keep adding to the distance you have between you and the great unwashed. so, the Rapture may be about more than making money. It might be about getting the poor to give up everything they have, making them so impoverished that they are helpless.

Beautiful day yesterday! not a cloud in the sky. and though it was a little chilly, we made a fire which kept us warm in the sun.

Here's Cathyclysmic, The Prophetess and myself sitting down to some cheddar brats...


Believe it or not, XemaSab flew in from California for the picnic!


My personal hero, President Jimmy Carter came by. We were honored.


Keith Olbermann stopped by. He wanted to do a segment on us, but I think his producers won't let him.


Lo and behold, Leonid Brezhnev came too! He looks good for being dead since 1982!


Y'all missed out!

This was taken from the opening of one of the Six Feet Under episodes:

Let's all plan to get several inflatable dolls, fill them with helium, and let them loose all at once. The fundies will theink the Rapture is going on.

Let's say that our worst fears are true, and the voting machines are rigged. Couple that with a co-opted media, and the idea of doing away with exit-polling, and what do we have?

We have a permanent Republican majority, and no way to prove otherwise.

Everyone assumes in the back of their mind that we would be able to prove Republicans stealing the elections, but without proper, reliable exit polling, there's no evidence. There wouldn't even be a need for the contest to be close-with a compliant media, they could just say it was close, and that would be it. 100% of the country could vote for the opposition, and we would never be able to tell. the Democratic party could easily just be a cardboard-cutout of a political party, a permanent party out of power in opposition.

In 2004, the exit polling said that the election should have had very different results. Exit polling has always been the most accurate check on election manipulation. We even backed one side over the other in the Ukraine, based on exit polling.

So the media threw out the exit polling. They didn't even give substantive reasons-they just said it wasn't reliable.

How do we know the same thing won't happen in November? How do we know that we will kick the Republicans asses, like we hope we will?

How do we even know there's a real Democratic party anymore?

I'm not too old yet, but I'm old enough to remember a different America.

I remember an America that held promise. I remember when parents worked hard to get us through school, so that we would have a future. Now, education no longer matters-what matters is whether your company will be outsourced.

I remember Jimmy Carter daring to talk about the importance of nuclear disarmament in his inauguration speech. Now we use depleted uranium in our wars without batting an eye.

I remember Carter fostering peace between Egypt and Israel. I remember how stunned and moved we all were. Now America actively tries to promote war for unjustified ends, and americans are proud of this.

I remember a time when my mother could raise 2 kids on a secretary's salary with no college education. Try that now. Try even getting by alone on a salary with no college education.

Where is America? It's gone now. It's been replaced by a wannabe Rome full of proudly uneducated bullies. The whole world is ashamed of us.

it was Good Night and Good Luck, not Brokeback Mountain which received Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Score. Aren't 3 oscars enough? Good Night and Good Luck ended up with NOTHING, and it was far too engaging and important a movie to get shut out. Fuck the Academy and fuck Annie Proulx' sour grapes.