Family Guy: Jerry Falwell & Pat Robertson are the only 2 people left post Rapture!
From her final column, published January 12, 2007:
“We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there.”
Thank you Molly - for everything you ever were.
So, uh, you got my money?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1QTlUq3ClU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1QTlUq3ClU
OMG, WHAT!!!?!
Police Confirm Grammy Awards AppearanceRock band The Police have confirmed they will open the 49th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles next Sunday - fueling speculation they are planning a reunion tour. The hitmakers have so far refused to confirm rumors they are reforming to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of their massive selling song “Roxanne.” A Recording Academy spokesperson says, “The Police join a stellar list of past Grammy Awards opening acts, which includes reunions and once-in-a-lifetime performances.” The 1980s super group - featuring Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers - broke up in 1984 but reformed briefly in 2003 to celebrate their inclusion into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. This will be the first time the Grammy winning band have performed at the prestigious music show.
HELL TO THE YES!!
James Adomian returns with another dead-on sendup of Bush’s address. Watch it. Don’t miss the Democratic response at the end.
State of the Union 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqE_baKKkRI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqE_baKKkRI
• Bush defense secretary says GOP Senator John Warner (R-VA) is “emboldening the enemy” in Iraq.
TREASON!! TREASON = VOICE OF REASON!!
• The Daily Show on Stem Cell Brownback
“I see that the Democratic ideas are more related to reality,” said Ammar Tuma, a lawmaker who serves in Maliki’s ruling Shiite coalition. “They talk about the real problems that the Iraqis are facing every day.” To date, government officials said, they’ve also found Democratic visitors such as Pelosi, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois less parochial, more culturally sensitive and more willing to listen to Iraqi concerns than Republicans.
“Before, Bush used to order Iraqi officials to do this and that,” said one member of Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The Republicans were dictating the political process in Iraq. With the Democrats in control of Congress, the Republicans are now less influential than before. It helps us in a sense to breathe a bit more and to have more freedom.”
If you’ve ever given money to Planned Parenthood or the ACLU, D’Souza wants you to know, you’ve been aiding groups “at least as dangerous as any of bin Laden’s American sleeper cells.”
• Reproductive Freedom? That’s communist talk! As your physician, I own your uterus.
In April, Julee Lacey, 33, a Fort Worth, TX, mother of two, went to her local CVS drugstore for a last-minute Pill refill. She had been getting her prescription filled there for a year, so she was astonished when the pharmacist told her, “I personally don’t believe in birth control and therefore I’m not going to fill your prescription.” Lacey, an elementary school teacher, was shocked. “The pharmacist had no idea why I was even taking the Pill. I might have needed it for a medical condition.” Melissa Kelley, 35, was just as stunned when her gynecologist told her she would not renew her prescription for birth control pills last fall.
“She told me she couldn’t in good faith prescribe the Pill anymore,” says Kelley, who lives with her husband and son in Allentown, PA. Then the gynecologist told Kelley she wouldn’t be able to get a new prescription from her family doctor, either. “She said my primary care physician was the one who helped her make the decision.”
Lacey’s pharmacist and Kelley’s doctors are among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of physicians and pharmacists who now adhere to a controversial belief that birth control pills and other forms of hormonal contraception–including the skin patch, the vaginal ring, and progesterone injections–cause tens of thousands of “silent” abortions every year. Consequently, they are refusing to prescribe or dispense them.
[snip]
Limiting access to the Pill, these groups now say, threatens a basic aspect of women’s health care. An estimated 12 million American women use hormonal contraceptives, the most popular
form of birth control in the United States after sterilization. The Pill is also widely prescribed by gynecologists and family doctors for other uses, such as clearing up acne, shrinking fibroids, reducing ovarian cancer risk, and controlling endometriosis.“Where will this all stop?” asks Lacey.
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Singer Willie Nelson holds up the pump nozzle before filling his bus with Bio Willie diesel fuel at the Pearson Ford alternative fuel station in San Diego in 2006. Nelson was unveiling the first pump in California dispensing his brand of 20 percent biodiesel fuel. |
Annie Nelson on the ‘Fuel That Doesn’t Kill Us’
Annie Nelson, wife of Willie Nelson and co-chairperson of the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance, speaks to Truthdig about stomaching the State of the Union and the myth that alternative fuels are years away.
Truthdig: Did you see the State of the Union?
Nelson: Yeah, I stomached as much as I could.
Truthdig: Did you see what the president said about ethanol? … He did say one sentence or one line about biodiesel. Did any of that resonate with you?
Nelson: Yeah, about as much as it did the last time he said it. I mean, it’s all a bit of—it’s just talk. You know, they give 13 gazillion dollars to the oil and gas industry as some welfare for these people who are making phenomenal historic record-breaking profits, and less than—I think it’s 7.7 [billion] for research into alternative fuels which are already here. It’s lip service. It’s all lip service.
Nelson: Pretty much we’re proponents. I don’t know how else to say it. We’re in production. We have partnerships with Pacific Biodiesel Texas and Pacific Biodiesel, and we are doing community production of biodiesel. And our intent is to keep them community [based] and then promote that idea where each community … can and should create their own fuel, and let that be the market for the community.
Truthdig: What is biodiesel?
Nelson: It is the fuel that obviously powers—I’m going to go real elementary, right?
Truthdig: Yeah.
Nelson: The fuel that powers a diesel engine. Biodiesel needs to run in a diesel engine, and what it does—where it comes from are several sources. It can come from recycled cooking oil, which then keeps that junk out of landfills; several plant seed stocks from seeds and those types of things; the rendering of animals, just you name it. There are tons of ways to get it. There’s a process where they remove the glycerin—that’s biodiesel. You can put pure cooking oil into your car, but you have to have a converter inside of it. But just any regular diesel [vehicle] can run on biodiesel because it’s been refined, which means the glycerin has been taken out.
Truthdig: So … you can actually drive on recycled cooking oil?
Nelson: Yes, the diesel engine was designed to run on peanut and hemp oil, not petroleum. But then again Rudolf Diesel disappeared over the Atlantic. It never was intended to run on petroleum, and in fact I think an interesting connection is if you go—if you check out the Prohibition era, when the government was going after stills that were on farms and such, a lot of those stills were producing ethanol and biodiesel for—mainly ethanol—for farm production, for their machinery. That’s what happened. There were so many people involved in it, in that whole deal, that Prohibition was probably a whole lot less about alcohol and a whole lot more about killing the renewable energy possibilities. Obviously the petroleum companies were behind it.
Truthdig: What’s the difference between biodiesel and ethanol?
Nelson: Well, ethanol is almost like—and I’m not an expert on ethanol at all, so let me just put that disclaimer in there immediately—it’s more like a grain alcoh
ol, almost. It’s from sugar. It’s a plant that needs to have a particular cellulose to create a gasoline-type fuel. But it’s mainly turning the sugar into fuel.
Truthdig: With ethanol we know how much money has been given to Iowa and other states where ethanol is being produced. On Biodiesel.org, they say there’s no government program to support them. Do you have an opinion on that?
Nelson: Biodiesel.org is an actual biodiesel board and there are many others. They’re just one entity, and they’re fine. They tend to have a lot more large producers and a lot of soybean people. Our whole deal, and we just actually formed—Daryl Hannah and I are co-chairs and Kelly King and Laura Louie, who is Woody Harrelson’s wife, and a group of us just formed the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance, where our intent is to focus specifically on sustainable community biodiesel production. And if it ends up being ethanol as well at some future date, that’s fine, but the whole point is to keep it community—to eliminate the ADMs and the Cargills and those people … large oil companies from just transferring their monopoly on Middle Eastern oil to home-produced, naturally produced fuel. Right now they can … it’s really a matter of connecting the farm bill with our national security bills and those types of things without allowing one group or one industry to control our energy, whether it be from the Middle East or from our own country. If it’s domestically produced, that should be domestically distributed as well. We’re here to protect the family farmers and the community co-ops that want to produce their own fuel and sell it.
Truthdig: Are there stations where people can fill up? One of the problems with ethanol has been transporting it and getting it to the public.
Nelson: People actually produce it all over the country. We do our tours through this whole country, and we do it on biodiesel. At least a blend. At minimum, it’s a blend of biodiesel. We try to do 100 percent whenever we can…. So, it’s out there. It’s already available. The funny thing about why $7.7 billion was given to renewable fuels—and that 7.7 is spread out between wind and geothermal and biomass and ethanol and biodiesel and others—that’s spread out amongst all of them. When 13 point something billion is given to the oil and gas industry and coal, and then another 12 to nuclear. So it’s kind of serious, but instead of doing that, let each community—that’s our deal—to connect communities and make sure that they can produce their own fuels so they’re not dependent on one of these corporations that have already proven that they could care less about these people’s interests, and do their own. Make their own fuel. Make their own security, which gives everybody in this country security because not one person or organization is controlling the market. What’s the difference between OPEC and a group of American oil companies who control our prices?
Truthdig: There’s a list of gas stations on Biodiesel.org and a few other of these sites….
Nelson: There are gas stations. What they have a list of is people who are members. There are other people besides them—many, many other people that are producing biodiesel. When we put the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance online, it will be to help people connect to where they can get fuel around the country and, at the same time, promote community-based fueling stations where people can pull off the highway and fill up with whatever blend they need or 100 percent. So that is something that just hasn’t been put together. That’s what we’re going for. It exists out there—a lot of people making fuel. We’re some of them. In fact, if there was even more help, this would go big guns, but it also takes the profit away from some people that are in control right now.
Truthdig: During the State of the Union, the president said he would try and reduce foreign fuel by [20] percent by 2017. You’re saying….
Nelson: We’re already doing it. There are so many people already doing it. In fact
, taking people and putting them back on land. Even if we just put them back on their land and let them buy their farms back. Put them back on land that’s sitting fallow right now. Let them grow food for ourselves and fuel. Then each community would start thriving again. You’ve got people out of the city, so there would be less congestion in the city. People on land, where they’re not [driven] insane by the inner city, where that’s not where they belong anyway. Put them back on the land, let them grow our fuel, let them grow our food, have it be sustainably grown, and then we eliminate—well, first we would eliminate, by getting them out of the city, the congestion of carbon fibers in the air, plus if they’re going to be using renewable fuels—and specifically I can speak for biodiesel, if up to 100 percent, you can eliminate 99 percent of particulates in the air.
So why wouldn’t we do that? People don’t want to be in the city, people want to be on their land; they never wanted to leave it to begin with. They got thrown off their land because the market is manipulated. So we put them back on it and allow them to earn ownership—we did that in the ’30s—but allow them to earn their ownership back, and let them produce food and fuel for us—fuel that doesn’t kill us, and grow it sustainably so it doesn’t kill the water and everything around us either. It doesn’t make sense not to. Then you have thriving communities … when you put people back on the land then you need a grocery store, you need businesses that sustain those people. They have to buy their farm products somewhere, they have to buy their feed somewhere, when you get them back out there, you get those communities thriving again, and the heartbeat of America gets a little defibrillation—and certainly the economy. How is that bad? It’s not. It’s good for everybody; it’s just not great for those few who want it to be just good for them.
Annie Nelson is the wife of Willie Nelson and the co-chairperson of the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance Inc. She is a supporter of sustainable, community-based biodiesel production as a method for restoring the dignity of small family farmers, the environment, the economy, energy independence and U.S. national security.
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Supporters of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore kneel in prayer outside the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery in 2003. The Alabama Court of the Judiciary was reading its verdict against Moore at the time. The court ruled Moore should be removed from office for failing to follow a federal court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument from the building. |
Christianists on the March
by Chris Hedges
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age—he was then close to 80—we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”
The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.
Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” were stories of this failure—personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers—those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.
es, one I witnessed repeatedly as I traveled the country, remains unaddressed by the Democratic Party, which has abandoned the working class, like its Republican counterpart, for massive corporate funding. The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic—to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true—the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens. We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial. Arthur Schlesinger, in “The Cycles of American History,” wrote that “the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense—not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide.”
Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S. liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand-wringing by Democrats, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them “demonic” and “satanic,” would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.
His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me, I suspect half in jest, that if the Nazis took over America “60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute.” But this too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to100 percent from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups—the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. President Bush h
as handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right.
Bush will, I suspect, turn out to be no more than a weak transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck—who also used “values” to energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched “Kulturkampf,” the word from which we get culture wars, against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck’s attacks, which split Germany and made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse, paved the way for the Nazis’ more virulent racism and repression.
The radical Christian right, calling for a “Christian state”—where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens—awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement—the most dangerous mass movement in American history—will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance. The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism.
