progressive involvement

Which is why we were "pop" people

Click to enlarge

Who knew?

Diversity is good business.

Friggatriskaidekaphobia

"Fear of Friday the 13th."  Frigga is the name of the Norse goddess for whom Friday is named.  (Oh, you didn't know our days of the week and months of the year were named after pagans?)

Triskaideka is a conflation of the Greek words for Friday and 13.  The "phobia" part is, of course, fear.  

"Frigga-tris-kai-dek-a-phobia" afflicts about 20 million citizens in the USA.

Oh, the irony

Corporations are people, money is speech.  Believe those two idiotic things, enact them into law, and you make a travesty of democracy.  

The Romney campaign spent somebody's bag full of money and bombed Newt Gingrich with attack ads in Iowa.  This targeting was effective.  The military wishes it could bomb with equal precision.  Mitt's anonymous millions took Gingrich out.  Four million big ones and Gingrich went from odds-on favorite to limping into fourth place with 13%.

Not that I'm shedding a tear for Newt Gingrich, who thoroughly deserves all the calumny that he manages to stir up against himself, but why hasn't anyone asked any questions about this?  Why hasn't this been the main story out of Iowa the past two weeks?

The Citizens United decision, brought to you by our corporate-sponsored Supreme Court--Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy--means this:  Anybody can spend any amount of money to say absolutely anything they want and no one's fingerprints have to be on anything.  This is legal, believe it or not.  (Funny.  If I remember correctly, Newt supported that decision.)

While this is going on, the media acts as if these behind-the-scenes machinations don't really exist.  To put it another way, the media pretends that the whole system isn't bought.   This means that we're all being spoonfed a billionaire-bought media narrative that is largely concocted out of thin air.

 

The--ahem!--"dictatorship of relativism"

That's Pope Benedict's phrase, which means "we don't run things anymore, people think for themselves, and ain't it awful."  What he calls "dictatorship of relativism," others would call "freedom of thought."

Catholic Charities of Illinois has provided foster care and adoption services on behalf of the state of Illinois for many years.  The state then passed a civil unions law.  Catholic Charities sued the state of Illinois because they didn't want to serve LGBT couples.

Catholic Charities has now withdrawn the lawsuit, and said they will go out of the foster care and adoption business rather than treat gay and lesbian couples as couples.

They're claiming persecution of their religious beliefs.  They believe they shouldn't have to treat gays and lesbians the same as other people, and if you argue with this stance, or refuse to fund it, you're persecuting them.

“In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill., a civil and canon lawyer who helped drive the church’s losing battle to retain its state contracts for foster care and adoption services.

Bishop Paprocki is invoking the "dictatorship of relativism."  The question, however, is not toleration.  Of course you're being tolerated.  What you're not being is funded.  Why should the taxpayers of Illinois be expected to fund an organization that refuses to treat everyone equally?

Tim Kee, a teacher in Marion, Ill., who was turned away by Catholic Charities three years ago when he and his longtime partner, Rick Wade, tried to adopt a child, said: “We’re both Catholic, we love our church, but Catholic Charities closed the door to us. To add insult to injury, my tax dollars went to provide discrimination against me.”

The New York Times article also cited the work of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) in Illinois.  The LCMS position on homosexuality is similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church.  They, however, have chosen to follow the law in order to continue to provide adoption and foster care services for children.

 

If it was with Mussolini, you could kind of understand

A 99 year old Italian man is divorcing his wife of 77 years over an affair she had in the 1940's.

The Archdiocese of Chicago has fallen a long ways since the days of Cardinal Bernardin

First, Chicago's Cardinal George said:  "You don't want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism." George said.

Then, a day later, given a chance to modify or take it back, he said:  “The rhetoric of the KKK and the rhetoric of some of the gay liberation people -- Who is the enemy? The Catholic Church,” George said.

The comments were made in the context of a Catholic priest who worried that a gay pride parade was going to march past his church, which, he said, would force them to cancel Sunday morning mass.

Yes, the KKK and gay pride marchers are just alike.  The KKK hates blacks, browns, yellows, reds, liberal whites, Catholics, Muslims, and Jews, and has used violence against them.  

The gay pride marchers don't hate anybody, but would appreciate it if people would acknowledge them as human and stop beating them up.  Yep, just the same.

Which is why gay pride marchers should be burned at the stake for heresy.

Something is wrong here

41% of young people have been arrested for something at least semi-serious by age 23?

Some, of course, will read this as a sign of the further Deterioration of Our Nation's Youth.  

Nonsense.  Adolescents aren't any crazier today than they ever were.  Alexander the Great slaughtered untold thousands for no particular reason.  No adolescent I've ever known did anything that cruel and stupid.

But what does it say that 40% of the country's young people have had run-ins with the law?

Those are police state numbers.

 

On not mourning Christopher Hitchens

Not to speak ill of the dead, but Christopher Hitchens, though a very gifted writer, was also a misogynist, a neo-con war hawk, and a drunk.  

In his argument with Sidney Blumenthal as to whether or not Blumenthal called Monica Lewinsky a "stalker" during a private dinner between two (then) friends, I find Blumenthal's argument more persausive than Hitchens, which means that Hitchens trashed a friend in order to score a trumped-up point against Bill Clinton.

And another thing:  His books on religion were simplistic.  Knocking conservative religion is easy.  Hitchens did what anybody could do:  He wrote a compelling rant against fundamentalism.  After knocking down that strawman, Hitchens didn't engage any real Biblical scholarship or any real Christian theology. 

"Christian" bookstore chain halts sale of Bible

One dollar ($1) of every purchase of a Bible published by B&H Publishing Group goes to the Susan B. Komen Foundation.  The Komen foundation offers various programs oriented toward a cure for breast cancer, including ""Planned Parenthood-sponsored breast cancer health programs."

The inappropriately-named LifeWay Christian Bookstores has decided to remove the Bible from their shelves because they don't want to have any connection, even a very slim one, with Planned Parenthood.