"What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy."

See also, Romans 8:1,2

"Christ Jesus has set you free from the Law..."

The cigar smoke is a very sharp touch.



http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/08/10939/...

Usually, revolutions occur in support of the notion of restoring or upholding Law or Righteousness, not overturning them.

The people are sovereign.

If injustice permeates society, it is because the people give it tacit consent. It is our collective will and action that can remove it, and only OUR will and action.

This is an excellent diary. You're on the money. k&r

Americans for Prosperity, the right wing astroturf front group for Freedom Works and the Koch Brothers oil and gas empire is offering $20,000 in prizes on their website.

This is something we should all enter, en masse.

The prizes are for using new media to influence corporate news coverage. So, what they want are blog and video submissions that address 1) Government spending, 2) cap and trade & 3) card check.

Please go to http://www.americansforprosperityfoundatio... and make your submission! Who knows, you could be the prosperous lucky winner!

Even if we don't win the cash, it will be rich to flood their contests with progressive treatises on these important issues.

Is Bill Maher a member of this forum?

Seriously, these rules seem fair and very flexible. As a frequently dissenting Democrat/Socialist, I rely on the literal meaning of "liberal" to apply to these discussions.

Open discussions can be free from bias and unfair strictures when everybody knows the rules and agrees to follow them.

Even games have rules.

I just hope that in the name of improving the site we don't squeeze out dissent and reasonable criticism.

Capitalism without limits is tyranny. Those with more increase their wealth while the rest remain poor or fall deeper into poverty. The more that assets become concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, the easier it is for the wealthiest to gain more and more control over the wealth of others. This gives the rich political power and control over government, the mass media, the economy, the laws and education.

It results in fighting destructive, unnecessary wars for the profit of a few, in fouling the commons and the environment to enrich wealthy industrialists, investors, and banks, not to mention incarcerating those outside the system for fear that their liberty will destabilize the socio-economic power structure.

However, self-government is not government of by the individual, but cooperation by consensus of self-governing individuals. That's why thoroughly informative media are so critical. People need to know the issues, who the actors are, what is at stake, and what they can accomplish as a group. Without REASONED DIALOGUE, there's no hope of successful government. Instead of government by the people we are left with government by the giant corporations.

If banks protected savings and lent money to small local businesses people would be able able to act in the interest of progress for their communities. The government could encourage free enterprise by protecting against monopolies like Halliburton, Starbucks and AOL/TimeWarner. Instead we're faced with four or five giant chemical and agricultural companies controlling our food supply.

Socialism means the good of society establishing the paramount organizing principle, whereas capitalism means ordering society for the benefit of the rich and wealth-controlling minority.

The tea party movement initiated by Ron Paul's followers a couple of years ago has now officially been co-opted by "anti-big government" anti-Obama populists who complain of unemployment, the mortgage crisis, runaway government spending and taxes.

The only problem is that just about all these symptoms originate with the same disease--and it isn't big government, or even Obama's "socialist agenda."

As Moyers and Winship point out, while the tea parties are subsidized and led by corporate lobbyists and their political emissaries like Sara Palin, Steve King, and Michelle Bachman,

The banking industry and corporate America are fighting against proposed financial reform with all the money and influence at their disposal, attempting to preserve a system that would enable them to ransack the country once again.

Tea parties criticize the bailouts and the deficits, but overlook the big banks that engineered them and the business roundtable and chamber of commerce that promoted the insane supply-side economics and global "free" trade policies that shipped 10s of millions of American jobs overseas and bankrupted the government with unfunded tax cuts for the rich and wars fought on credit cards.

It's a shame progressives can't join the tea parties so we can fight together against our real enemies: the corporate chiefs and their mega-capitalist corporations that have bought elections,and corrupted and weakened Congress so they can swallow up our economy and incapacitate our middle class.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/041710a...

It's hard to believe that voters would be wooden-headed enough to put double dealing profiteers on the school board!

School is not about "free market competition!" Schools in America have always been about the communities cooperating and working together to help everybody they can, so that LIVING standards are raised in the community, the state, and the country.

To talk about profit-driven education is to talk about something other than education.

Thanks for stuffing the whole essay in. Yeah, Consortium News is one media outlet the Republican Noise machine will never own. It's incredible how the American public lets the corporate media launder our news.

My take on the docility of Democratic politicians is that Parry is right about the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy and the US Association for International Development. The Democratic politicians know that these organizations operate outside the light of public scrutiny and utilize any subterfuge to defeat their opponents.

So, they go running to the apron strings of corporate chiefs with absurd trade and economic policies, union-busting, globalization, financial deregulation and defunding of public institutions--like public schools and universities. Clinton and Obama hope these gestures will "buy off" their corporate overlords and help restore the balance of Republican good will in their favor.

In the American Revolution, the wealthiest men like Hancock, Washington, John Adams, and the others, were willing to sacrifice everything--not for their freedom from responsibility for their countrymen--but for the benefit of their country.

Today, the wealthy power brokers are willing to sacrifice not only their countrymen--but the country itself--for their own individual gain.

This quotation is the necessary new mantra for America, because the corporate media--controlled by the money party ("TMP")--are trying to stifle this message from circulating throughout the public discourse. If we can't circulate this message about the Money Party, then the Money Party will hold onto power, uncontested.

Obama provides TMP with the scapegoat that keeps the people divided and half of us suborned to their agenda's message: race.

Let the credit dry up, the dollar shrink in value, the US public investments implode and the states go bankrupt. The media will use Obama as a scapegoat, and close to half the country will believe it. It's the same half of the country who believes that what's on television is true and that politician's are being honest when they say they work for us.

Blame the 95%'s collapse on Obama.

That's TMP's plan for staying on top for the next few years.

It sounds to me like what they're really trying to say is,

"If you're not as irrational or ignorant as we are, you just can't understand what we're trying to say!"

(You're either with us or the terrorists!)

But many of the attendees blamed their anger on the government and what they described as its increasingly socialist slant.

“This is the Soviet Union, this is Maoist China,” one man yelled to him. “The people in this room want their country back.”

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08...

It's hard to accept that Obama is not serving the American people who elected him, or even the Constitution he swore to defend. He is a prisoner of draconian powers "in the shadows, as it were." Everything he does is dictated by the forces that threaten, blackmail, intimidate, coerce and undermine honesty and justice in American politics.

Oh yeah, and don't forget, "bribe."

But that's the way it is. They control the media, they control the military, they control the financial system, they control the energy and food supplies, and they are very jealous of their control. Just ask Obama.

Who are they? Some vast, right wing conspiracy? No. They are the ruling class, whose interests no longer correspond with those of the American people.

We're not a democracy, we're an oligarchy. That's who Obama is working for now. Accept it and change it.

No wonder the newspapers are folding. They can't offer their readers this. Its only blogs and journals -- the commercial media can't handle the truth.

http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/03/obama-speec...

I stumbled upon an article at the Live Feed about the networks' displeasure at having to shuffle programming for Obama's next press conference.

The article was good. But the comments were stunningly partisan and embittered.

No wonder O needs to muster the troops for a pr blitz on his budget this weekend. The corporate media have the masses worked up into a lather over everything!

I always knew conservatives had bigger muscles than those faggy, flabby libbs, even if they ARE Democrats! lol