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My conclusion is that Obama is not a socialist, any more than McCain is a socialist. Though their rhetoric differs (in non-essential ways), they both advocate some mixture of statism and capitalism. Both will increase the size of the federal government. Both support government intervention in the banking system, as we saw a few weeks ago. Both support welfare, Medicare, and Social Security. Both support reducing "emissions" to save Mother Earth. On nearly every major policy issue, Obama and McCain are indistinguishable.
So the believer can insist that there really is a God, and that he really wants us to believe in his existence, but he has gone to extraordinary lengths to make that difficult. Then the believer can construct some elaborate justification for thinking that this sort of God exists, but he has complicated reasons for keeping his existence perfectly hidden. And then the believer must engage in elaborate conceptual gymnastics and ad hoc justifications in order to make the whole implausible story consistent with the seemingly Godless world. Or the believer can ask himself this question: isn’t it more reasonable to just acknowledge that the world looks just like there is no God because there is no God?
My journey down the path of porn addiction began at a very early age. I recall being about 7 years of age when I saw my first Playboy. The neighbor boy across the street had smuggled the magazine from his father’s stash and we would frequently hide out in his backyard to peruse its pages. Gazing at those images, I began to feel stirrings in my body the likes of which I had never experienced before. I was amazed to think that these beautiful women would willingly take off all of their clothes and display their bodies for the entire world to see. I burned those images into every corner of my memory so that I could easily access them anytime I wanted.
I confess that I am guilty. I have looked at photographs (many!) that are indeed indecent, photographs presented in ostensibly up-scale magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, or some such 'proper' website. I apologize to the women that I've exploited, unwittingly perhaps, with each mouse click. I stand ashamed.
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 2 Corinthians 5:17
This has always been the Republicans' war, no matter how enthusiastically most of the Democratic leadership initially supported it. The war we're supposedly "winning" has been the overarching theme of the McCain campaign, and he doesn't seem comfortable talking about anything else – unless it's why we must guarantee the borders of every obscure ex-Soviet "republic" for all time. The prime-time speakers at the Republican convention echoed the party line on the war, ad nauseam, and the entire event was one long paean to militarism and the glory of war. There were more uniforms in that convention hall than at the graduating ceremonies of West Point and Annapolis combined, and all the talk was of valor on the battlefield. Perhaps they should change their name to the Praetorian Party.
Justin Raimondo explains.
The history of this crew (the neocons) is too well-known to go into here in any detail: indeed, their narcissism has provided researchers with an overabundance of material that documents their hegira from far Left to far Right. Suffice to say that this vexatious faction entered the bloodstream of the conservative movement during the Cold War years, when pro-war (that's the Vietnam War) Democrats jumped ship and joined the GOP in protest over "McGovernism," i.e., a Democratic Party that rejected the politics of LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, and the neocons' favorite Democratic politician, Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Boeing).
The sudden infusion of a bunch of highbrow leftist intellectuals into the conservative movement was welcomed by the organs of respectable conservative opinion, such as National Review. A few dissenters, such as Russell Kirk, Pat Buchanan, and the editors of Chronicles magazine, warned their fellows of trouble to come, but they were ignored. The neocons were bringing not only intellectual respectability and attention from liberal redoubts in the media and academia, but also hauling in plenty of dough. The big conservative foundations poured money into neocon projects and subsidized their up-and-coming intellectual dromedaries, driving out dissenters and imprinting the movement with their peculiar obsessions – first and foremost, an unmitigated militarism.
I was watching Sarah Palin give a speech (with the lines we've heard her say over and over) this morning in Maine. That "unmitigated militarism" was on display again, with Palin repeating her ridiculous mantra about thanking our veterans for our freedoms (that they are somehow "fighting for" all the way over in Iraq) as if we would somehow be less free if we weren't occupying a country THAT DID NOT ATTACK US. I suppose we were less free as well after our defeat in Vietnam, eh, Sarah? Did we suddenly lose our right to protest when we left that southeast Asian country in humiliation?
“I would hope at least that those protestors have the courage and the honor of thanking our veterans for giving them the right to protest.”
-Sarah Palin hilariously scolding her own supporters when they simply couldn't hear her.
U.S. Senator John McCain's recent attacks on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), are puzzling given his historic support for the organization and its efforts on behalf of immigrant Americans. As recently as February 20, 2006, Senator McCain was the keynote speaker at an ACORN-sponsored Immigration Rally in Miami, Florida at Miami Dade College - Wolfson Campus....source
History has no true golden eras. Stagnation, unjust authority, slavery, poverty and oppression are the rule in the story of humanity. It was only though many centuries of intellectual and cultural development that human civilization overcame the tyranny of antiquity and embraced the doctrines of liberalism. Liberty is always in peril. Today is no exception. But it is still hardly the worst time to be alive, for the average person.
Take heart. In the long-term, after all, we are the optimists. The Hobbesians on the right believe humanity is forever doomed to be immoral, thus the need for ever more prisons, police and war. The left finds society dysfunctional when acting on its own without centralized coercive organization. They are both on the side of reaction and pessimism. We on the other hand believe in a flourishing and peaceful tomorrow, thanks to voluntary commercial and cultural exchange.
And the reason that it's a problem to go shopping state by state, you know what insurance companies will do? They will find a state -- maybe Arizona, maybe another state -- where there are no requirements for you to get cancer screenings, where there are no requirements for you to have to get pre-existing conditions, and they will all set up shop there.
That's how in banking it works. Everybody goes to Delaware, because they've got very -- pretty loose laws when it comes to things like credit cards.
And in that situation, what happens is, is that the protections you have, the consumer protections that you need, you're not going to have available to you.
-Barak Obama, from the second debate with that other one
One clear example is bankruptcy reform, which made it tougher for consumers to rid themselves of debt. Biden supported it. Critics say the stand he took in favor of legislation that made it harder to escape credit card debt typifies his long career of siding with big corporations.
Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1971 and no doubt has spent more than three decades getting financial support from the banking interests that call Delaware their home.
According to the New York Times, Biden was seen as so close to MBNA, the credit card company that was purchased by Bank of America, that he was referred to as the "senator from MBNA." Instead of the standard senate designation (D-Delaware), he was (D-MBNA).
The Times notes that Biden's son Hunter was actually employed by MBNA and that the senator had close ties to MBNA executives: "Employees of MBNA Corporation had heavily contributed to Mr. Biden, pouring more than $214,000 into his campaign coffers going back to 1989, making the company his single biggest supporter, according to the Center for Responsive Politics," according to the Times.
Biden supported passage of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Reduction Act while Obama voted against the measure. The banking industry lobbied heavily for passage. But consumer advocates have criticized the law because it has meant financially distressed consumers must wait longer and go through more steps before they can seek protection from their creditors.
Ann Rodgers, in her review of Bill Maher's new film, also brings out that old "millions killed by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot in the name of atheism". It was Marxist-Leninist Communist ideology that killed millions, and the religion they were sacrificed to was Statism, not atheism; organized religion has never had a problem with the state when its holy men have controlled or influenced it.
His fears focus on scripture, but at no point does he interview an actual Bible scholar or theologian. Here Ms. Rodgers misses the point of this sort of film (it was directed by the same fellow who gave us Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) it is obviously not meant to be a serious critical examination of the bible that requires interviewing scholars. Now, such a work would have its place, and perhaps someone should make that kind of film, but not Bill Maher (get serious yourself Ms. Rodgers!). As for theologians, I don't think much of them and neither should anyone else.
Dangerous distortions come from people who try to teach scripture without a background in history or ancient languages and literature. The guy who wrote "88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988" wasn't a theologian, he was a rocket scientist. Osama bin Laden isn't a theologian, he's a civil engineer. Bill Maher isn't a theologian, he's a comedian.
Of course, one wonders then how such a book could be God's message to mankind when you have to be a learned scholar and an expert in ancient languages to understand it properly. If anything proves it isn't from any god, that does.
I do like her last sentence, though. Yes, he is a comedian. She finally got it!
Over the weekend of September 13 and 14, a historic gathering in Andover, Massachusetts, took place and garnered little media attention. But at that two-day conference, serious plans were laid for a war-crimes trial of the Bush administration. Read the rest, from Nat Hentoff
The myth that we have no hypotheses, and no explanations for the origin of life on earth persists. In fact, biologists are considering and testing a long list of possibilities that would explain the shift from non-living to living materials.
A new low, however, is the wearing of McCain/Palin campaign buttons to church. This is very disturbing. I never remember Christians wearing Reagan buttons, Bush Sr. buttons, or Bush Jr. buttons to church--even though many Christians voted for these men because they were Republicans. On second thought, if I had a picture of McCain on a button with a red line through his face and the words "war criminal" underneath, I might just wear it.