What a healthy church needs, a healthy political party needs too This message from a retired minister in Knox County, Tennessee has wider application than southern churches: God may not be dead, but his church is headed for hospice if we don’t get our heads out of our ecclesiastical backsides. My wife and I visited a mainline church on a Main Street in a deep red southern town last month and found … the audience from a 1972 episode of Lawrence Welk. Every hymn sounded like a dirge from the funeral I feared we had stumbled in on. But, no, the only thing dying was this church. We couldn’t count five people under the age of 50. That is a problem Democrats have as well in many places. Political life in this country is dominated by a gerontocracy. That is one reason so many younger people are rejecting political parties and opting to register to vote unaffiliated. If they register. If they vote. Churchgoing is on a steady decline. Buzz Thomas suggests that if churches don’t evolve, they will die.
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Protest votes are not. They only help the worst people. To anyone contemplating not voting for Biden over the Israel war, it’s probably a good idea to also contemplate what will replace him if you do that: Trump: All the resident aliens that joined in the pro jihadist protests this month.. Come 2025, we will find you and deport you. pic.twitter.com/n00sGlzSnH — Acyn (@Acyn) October 28, 2023 Trump on murdered Israels: “They’ll be avenged even beyond what you’re thinking about” pic.twitter.com/gIFcOvxSLa — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 Trump brags about cutting off all aid to Palestinians while he was president pic.twitter.com/bOtvT3DcKV — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 Trump promises to cancel student visas of Hamas sympathizers pic.twitter.com/3uN6dgCuxN — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 To all those who say that it’s simply too painful for them personally to vote for the lesser of two evils, I’ll just quote that old establishment puppet Noam Chomsky who famously said, “of course you should vote for the lesser of two evils — you get less evil.”
Mike Johnson’s “commitment is not to democracy” “If Republicans vote for a medieval insurrectionist, and nobody knows, does it count?” Brian Beutler recommended on Friday at Off Message, meaning the new Republican speaker from Louisiana. Make Mike Johnson famous: Instilling an idea about a person in the social consciousness and making it stick is an unending and tedious process. Republicans didn’t define Al Gore as a wooden teller of Big Fish tales in one day, it required relentless scoffing; same with John Kerry as the out-of-touch cheese-eating surrender monkey, Hillary Clinton as Mrs. Emails. Nancy Pelosi as Mrs. San Francisco values, and so on. Nancy Mace wants to wear a Scarlet Letter? How about two? MJ. Republicans hung “Nancy Pelosi liberal” around Democratic candidates’ necks for decades. Two parties can play that game. The press is obliging. Politico’s Katelyn Fossett spoke with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian of evangelical Christianity and politics.
Another admission of conservative impotence Put us in charge, say Republicans. We pledge to do nothing. “The end of the day, it’s, the problem is the human heart. It’s not guns. It’s not the weapons. At the end of the day, we have to protect the right of the citizens to protect themselves, and that’s the Second Amendment.” — House Speaker Mike Johnson, asked by Fox News’s Sean Hannity about demands for more gun laws or more legislation in the wake of mass shootings Alexandra Petri translates: The problem is the human heart. Gun violence is an unchangeable, immutable fact of the human condition. That is why it is localized so strongly to this country and this time period. This is not a problem with a solution. It is the price you pay for being human. This is not unique to the United States, although you see it only here. Maybe it’s something to do with the water. Not laws, though; as we know from our efforts to impose vicious lawsuits and increasingly draconian restrictions against anyone who seeks an abortion, it is pointless to legislate about a problem.
Update: Also this: I wonder why they would think the economy is so terrible? Whatever would make them think that?
Mike Johnson is a delusional zealot He’s an educated man but his knowledge of history is nil. Someone should tell him about the centuries of religious wars in Europe that shaped the founders beliefs about religion and the state: Mr. Johnson, a mild-mannered conservative Republican from Louisiana whose elevation to the speakership on Wednesday followed weeks of chaos, is known for placing his evangelical Christianity at the center of his political life and policy positions. Now, as the most powerful Republican in Washington, he is in a position to inject it squarely into the national political discourse, where he has argued for years that it belongs. Mr. Johnson, 51, the son of a firefighter and the first in his family to attend college, has deep roots in the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. For years, Mr. Johnson and his wife, Kelly, a licensed pastoral counselor, belonged to First Bossier, whose pastor, Brad Jurkovich, is the spokesman for the Conservative Baptist Network, an organization working to move the denomination to the right. Mr.
Lately, it seems like all the very richest, most successful people (men, mostly) are batshit crazy. Here’s a primary example: The Adidas team was huddled with Kanye West, pitching ideas for the first shoe they would create together. It was 2013, and the rapper and the sportswear brand had just agreed to become partners. The Adidas employees, thrilled to get started, had arrayed sneakers and fabric swatches on a long table near a mood board pinned with images. But nothing they showed that day at the company’s German headquarters captured the vision Mr. West had shared. To convey how offensive he considered the designs, he grabbed a sketch of a shoe and took a marker to the toe, according to two participants. Then he drew a swastika. It was shocking, especially to the Germans in the group. Most displays of the symbol are banned in their country. The image was acutely sensitive for a company whose founder belonged to the Nazi Party. And they were meeting just miles from Nuremberg, where leaders of the Third Reich were tried for crimes against humanity.
You can’t win if you don’t show up to play David Rothkopf described new House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana as representing “a movement that is actively seeking to institutionalize the religious beliefs of evangelical Christians into law.” Rothkopf was just getting warmed up (Daily Beast): The term Christofascism may seem inflammatory. It is not. It is intended to provide the most accurate possible definition of what Johnson and those in his movement wish to achieve. Like other fascists they seek to impose by whatever means necessary their views on the whole of society even if that means undoing established laws and eliminating accepted freedoms. Christofascists do so in the name of advancing their Christian ideology, asserting that all in society must be guided by their views and values whether they adhere to them or not. Johnson has ties, Rothkopf claims, to the Christianist New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and Seven Mountains Dominionism. Read more at Daily Beast. David Corn has another chilling account of Johnson’s beliefs at Mother Jones. Men in Afghanistan who don’t think the same things as Mike Johnson think the same way.
Upcoming “Corporate Bullsh*t” David Dayen reviews an upcoming book by Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, Donald Cohen and Zachary Roth. “Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America” examines the boilerplate arguments corporate shills have used to object “to virtually every government and social program, from the abolition of slavery to the increase in the minimum wage.” Dayen writes: These timeworn tactics have been successful, the authors write, because “they offer a civic-minded, reasonable-sounding justification for positions that in fact are motivated entirely by self-interest.” It’s an attempt to set the terms of debate and to make those terms unchanging and unmovable. The endless repetition of these talking points is a source of their strength. But identifying their history and application to virtually everything can be a source of their weakness. The six categories of corporate bullshit begins with pure denial.