The PPP poll also revealed that [Sarah] Palin has more support among voters who believe interracial marriage should be illegal than among those who are OK with it. Mitt Romney's numbers reveal just the opposite. He has a higher favorability among Mississippi Republicans who want interracial marriage to remain legal.
Interesting.
One thing I hear all the time from well-intentioned supporters of marriage equality is "Just be patient. The next generation is more accepting. Things will change in another ten or twenty years." Well check out this result from the poll:
In this case, Congressman Steve Pearce (White, Straight, Baptist, Republican, New Mexico) argued that after gay couples marry and polygamy reigns that one gay will marry every uninsured person in California with AIDS so that they can all get health insurance benefits. That's about as slippery as the slope gets. (There's a simple solution to calm his fear: nationalized healthcare or at least a public option.)
Pearce (who Sarah Palin just endorsed) went on in the video to claim that children adopted by same-sex couples are sewing their homo-parents in droves, because these children want to be raised by one man and one woman and not have a "social experiment" run on their lives. Pearce claimed that this "push-back" happened "nationwide." You may wonder why I'm mixing my tenses, that's because this video is from Pearce's 2008 campaign. His prophesies failed.
Where is the nationwide push-back of straight children sewing their homo-parents? Why did the Mormons, historical practitioners of polygamy, fund California Proposition 8? If same-sex marriage really was going to lead to legalized polygamy, this seems illogical. Of course it is: This is a multiple-term congressman who's making laws that govern our lives.
The current administration's health reform bill has not yet gone into effect. Who knows if what I'm about to report would be different were the reformed plan in effect. Until everyone has access to a public option for health insurance, what I'm about to report is probably going to remain the status quo. Praise to the 37th best healthcare system in the world!
SHE was fired a year ago from his job, and who knows if turning sixty and his health insurance premium going up by 25% had any effect upon his being let go. SHE's been applying for jobs ever since, while working various part time gigs, that don't provide employee health insurance. Four days before SHE was unexpectedly fired, I quit my job to return to graduate school. My student loans were already drawn, and thanks to George Bushdestroying Pell Grants and Republicans privatizing student loans, the majority of my loans were already accruing interest on the day SHE was fired. We've been living on my student loans and work study, SHE's unemployment and part-time wages, and our retirement savings since. Praise be to the American Dream!
Thankfully, SHE had health insurance coverage through his old job over the past year. Now that has expired. Here's the true choice offered by the current "death panel" running our national healthcare system: choose between death to your financial security or possible death because you can't go to the doctor any more. Praise to the myth of the free market offering healthcare choice! Praise to spineless Democrats, who spent their mandate paying for an August Tea Party!
I'm sure COBRA has helped some people, but not SHE. In order to keep his previous job's health insurance coverage (which has high deductibles and horrendous prescription coverage) through COBRA, SHE would have to pay the following:
When someone is unemployed, how are they supposed to have $1100/month to pay for health insurance? Imagine having a family and needing to pay over $2300/month. That's nearly $28,000 per year. All glory and honor to the prescription drug conglomerates!
If you live in Los Angeles, with your children and have a meager two bedroom apartment for your housing in a moderately safe neighborhood, you're paying an average of $2665/month for housing. That's an additional $32,000/year. And, how do you move to a cheaper place when you owe one months rent down and one and a half months as a security deposit? Praise to the rent control loop-holes, glory and honor them forever!
Whenever there is a major disaster, of either natural or human making, religious folks feel the need to use that disaster to promote their understanding of their individual gods' will. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is currently that rapturous religious appetite for blame.
Carl Gallups of the Hickory Hammock Baptist Church in Milton, Florida, thinks the oil spill is his Christian god's judgement on the United States because President Obama announced that the U.S.A. will no longer automatically support Israel in the United Nations. (Gallups also blamed hurricane Katrina on U.S.-Israli relations.) Here's the video that explains how Gallups knows the mind of his god.
Other Christian fundamentalists are blaming those with insufficient faith for the oil spill, which is the beginning of the apocalypse (Newsweek):
Now blogs on the Christian fringe are abuzz with possibility that the oil spill is the realization of Revelation 8:8–11. “The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed … A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.” According to Revelation, in other words, something terrible happens to the world’s water, a punishment to those of insufficient faith.
Lisa Miller of Newsweekblames the greed of Republican and the oil lobby:
Yet through a biblical lens, it’s hard to see the oil spill as anything but God’s punishment for greed and a disrespect of Creation—and both of those sins fall mostly on the shoulders of the Republicans, who have been aggressively lobbying for more offshore drilling, without, obviously, ensuring that appropriate safeguards are in place. (Remember “Drill, baby, drill”? According to OpenSecrets.org, Republicans in the last decade have far outstripped Democrats in donations from big oil, sometimes by a factor of four.) So the question for biblical literalists becomes one of political alliances. Does God wreak apocalyptic wrath on members of one’s own party—or only on the opposition?
Yes, because prayer has worked so well for the protection of people and the environment of the Gulf region in the past. Pray, baby, pray! Pray, baby, pray! Pray, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill!Oops.
Here's my idea. Instead of hoping for a deus ex machina to magically clean things up, let's get respirators to those in gulf doing the actual cleanup. Let's take control of the healthcare for cleanup workers from BP, because BP doesn't have the best interest of the people and the environment at heart. I think this is something that reasonable persons of any creed or political disposition can agree upon.
BP can't admit that there are health risks, because that would open them to lawsuits. Is it just me, or is letting BP control the crime scene and the care of those working in it insane? Would a murderer be allowed to clean-up his own victim or a pyromaniac the property she torched?
Kerry Kennedy of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights has been doing incredible work reporting on the oil spill's impact on local communities and cleanup crews. The health of these people is at risk, because BP is discouraging people from wearing respirators, saying everything's all right. Where is Palin's drill-thirsty god in all of this?
Spill Fighters reports some of what Kennedy said in an interview after being in the Gulf and talking to the residents and clean-up crews:
“In all three states that I’ve visited, fishermen said when they went out to work on the cleanup, that if they tried to bring respirators they were told it was unnecessary equipment and would only spread hysteria,” Kennedy told Fox News Friday. “When I went out with eleven people, we had respirators on and within half an hour, all of our eyes were burning and our throats were closing and we all had headaches,” she explained. Kennedy was also concerned that BP was refusing to release information about the contents of the dispersant being used.
Anyone who remembers high school chemistry and biology will know that oil, gas, and their fumes contain benzene, which is a carcinogen. For a list of the health problems, including various cancers, caused by benzene exposure see BenzeneExposure.org.
Like other cleanup workers, Jackson had attended a training class where he was told not to pick up oil-related waste. But he said he wasn't provided with protective equipment and wore leather boots and regular clothes on his boat. "They [BP officials] told us if we ran into oil, it wasn't supposed to bother us," Jackson said. "As far as gloves, no, we haven't been wearing any gloves."
To Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist who studied the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska, it's "deja vu. What we saw with Exxon Valdez was a parallel track — sick animals and sick people. Harbor seals were looking like they were drunk and dying … and autopsies showed brain lesions.…What are we exposing these poor fishermen to?"
Some fishermen suspect that health problems are going unreported because, with so much of the gulf closed to commercial fishing, unemployed shrimpers and oystermen are grateful for the cleanup jobs. "It an unwritten rule, you don't bite the hand that feeds you," said George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fishermen's Assn. in St. Bernard Parish, who said many fishermen have told him about feeling ill.
At a recent meeting fishermen complained to a BP representative about illness, Barisich said, but got little response. "BP has the opinion that they are not getting sick," he said. Barisich said the company is not providing respirators because "if they give us that type of equipment then they admit there are health hazards."
Just like what occurred after the Sept, 11th attacks, brave workers are doing what they can to try to help in a disaster. These workers will likely have to suffer for years and years, just like those workers of 9/11 did. Some might even die from their clean-up efforts. But these workers are knowingly risking their health and maybe even their lives. Guidry says, "I spoke to several individuals. It was a choice between not paying the bills and having food for their families and maybe taking a chance of getting sick."
BP is a despicable company that has been engaged in all types of environmental and safety violations... BP is contributing to the sickness of the clean-up workers because it won't allow them to wear respirators. It is all about money for BP.
Last week, Diane Sawyer of ABC's World News reported on how BP and Transocean have treated the family of Dale Burkeen, a father of two young children. Dale died in the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20, which was also the date of his wedding anniversary. Here's bit of the ABC report:
Dale's family said BP waited days to tell them he was gone, and they have never offered an explanation or apology.
"It makes me angry in a way, because there's got to be an explanation," said Felicia Hamilton. "It makes me wonder, what if it was their son or brother out there? Would they still say I have no explanation?"
"Does BP have any real compassion?" Sawyer asked.
"They have not called us one time to say we're sorry your son has lost his life out there," said Mary, who wants to travel to the site of the rig to lay a wreath for her son. "I feel the only way I can come to a closure is when they get all this oil up."
Good Christian and real American Sarah Palin is full of sludge. She now blames "extreme environmentalists" and "Extreme Greenies" for the BP oil spill, saying that it's their fault that BP had to drill in deep waters because the environmentalists have blocked drilling onshore in places like ANWR, and environmentalist are forcing oil companies to move their jobs to other countries where they can pollute the earth worse than they do here. She posted her manifestos on Twitter and Facebook (where the comments are frightening).
The former half-term governor is also using Twitter to get her message out: "Extreme Greenies:see now why we push"drill,baby,drill"of known reserves&promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?"
There's nothing to get. On Planet Sarah that tweet might make sense, but here on Earth, which is spewing the lifeblood of the 2008 Republican National Convention into the Gulf of Mexico at a unprecedented rate, "Drill, Baby, Drill" and all Sarah's lies that offshore drilling was safe indicate a different truth: the Republicans are on the wrong side of history (again). They are letting big oil lace their pockets to the detriment of the American people and future generations, chaining them to an early twentieth century technology rather than moving into the twenty-first century.
The goal of environmentalists is not to outsource U.S. jobs but to create an entire army (to put it in Sister Sarah's Tea Party tongue) of new, green jobs that are both good for the American working class as well as for the environment, and the technology developed here can be used in other parts of the world to curb pollution there as well.
By the way Sarah, you and your oil drilling brood aren't about the wealth of middle class Americans. BP stands for British Petroleum. The billions of dollars of tax cuts you provide them are putting hardworking Americans' tax dollars (including those of the eleven people killed on the Deepwater Horizon) into British bank accounts. You are a traitor to the American Revolution and the War of 1812.
Finally, there's just no credible way to recant on "Drill, Baby, Drill." No matter how they spin it, Palin, McCain, Romney and the others can't pass the oil-laced buck on this one. There are just too many sound bytes.
Here is Rachel Maddow's latest coverage of the environmental disaster care of BP, our government, and our culture's addiction to oil that is literally destroying our planet. Maddow discusses whether BP's promise to clean up every last drop is even possible.
Keith Olbermann covers the environmental hypocrisy of BP's use of dispersants that the United Kingdom outlawed ten years ago due to their toxicity. BP continues using the dispersants, even after last week the EPA ordered an immediate end to their use. He also calls President Obama to task, for not taking charge of the situation.
Do you ever get sick of hearing politicians, like Sarah Palin, talking about the "Real America"?
In this video Jon Stewart deconstructs Palin's Tea Party rhetoric, exposing the underlying hypocrisy involved in pitting a rural "Real America" against an urban "Fake America" where people shop at Target, eat at KFC,and don't know how to be patriotic.
Vote in the left hand column of the Holy Blog, but before you do, consider John McCain's recent hypocritical actions that indicate he is no longer the same person.
The hypocrisy of the Family Research Council comes in their pretending to have no connections to their founder Rekers, while fueling rumors of Kagan's lesbianism. Here's a clip from Rich's op-ed:
Thanks to Rekers’s clownish public exposure, we now know that his professional judgments are windows into his cracked psyche, not gay people’s. But there is nothing funny about the destruction his writings and public activities have sown. His fringe views have not remained on the fringe. His excursions into public policy have had real and damaging consequences on a large swath of Americans.
The crusade he represents is, thankfully, on its last legs. American attitudes about homosexuality continue to change very fast. In the past month, as square a cultural venue as Archie comic books has announced the addition of a gay character, the country singer Chely Wright has come out as a lesbian, and Laura Bush has told Larry King that she endorses the “same” rights for all committed couples and believes same-sex marriage “will come.” All of this news has been greeted by most Americans with shrugs, as it should be.
But the rear-guard remnants of the Rekers crowd are not going down without a fight, and their focus on Elena Kagan has been most revealing. There are many grounds to debate Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court, wherever you are on the political spectrum. There are many questions about her views and record that remain unanswered. But from the get-go the preponderance of the debate on the right has been about her handling of military recruitment as dean at Harvard Law School. Here her history is unambiguous.
Despite her critics’ cries, Kagan never banned military recruitment of law students and never denigrated the military in word or deed. She followed Harvard’s existing (and unexceptional) antidiscrimination policy while a court battle played out over a Congressional act denying federal funds to universities barring military recruiters. She was so cautious — too cautious, I’d argue — that she did not join the majority of her own faculty in urging Harvard to sue the government over the funding law, limiting her action instead to the signing of an amicus brief.
She did declare that “don’t ask, don’t tell” was “a moral injustice of the first order.” Given that a Washington Post-ABC News poll in February showed that 75 percent of Americans want that policy rescinded — as do the president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense — this is hardly a view out of the American mainstream. Yet if you went to the Web site of the organization Rekers co-founded, the Family Research Council, and clicked on “Tony Perkins’ Washington Update” last week, you’d have found a head shot of Kagan with the legend “Deep Ties With the Gay Agenda.” What those “deep ties” are is never stated. Indeed, Kagan said only last year that “there is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.”
The Family Research Council’s line has been embraced by the non-fringe right, including some Republicans in the Senate. In mid-April, a full month before Kagan’s nomination was even announced, The Wall Street Journal preemptively hyped this plan of attack with a conspicuously placed news article headlined “Kagan Foes Cite Gay-Rights Stand.” The only foes cited were religious right organizations.
Baptist, monogamous, cheating, remarried, future president, bi(partisan), moderate, Republican, Tea Party appeasing, maverick, Joe-the-Plumber loving, Sarah Palin touting, principled, Senator John McCain is running for election this year, for Hypocrite of the Decade.
He’s telling the world he’ll never support immigration reform until the border is sealed. Now he’s praising Arizona’s Legislature for passing a bill that makes every Latino — citizen or not — a potential criminal defendant. It obligates the police to stop people who look like illegal immigrants and arrest them if they don’t have papers on them. And here he is warning Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that drivers of cars full of “illegals” are “intentionally causing accidents on the freeway.”
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Mr. McCain did his share of contortions to win over a right-wing base that never trusted him. Now he is fighting for survival against a radio host endorsed by border vigilantes. But this pandering is tragic for a man who was one of the architects of the humane, comprehensive approach to immigration he has now disowned — threatening a filibuster to prevent its even coming to a vote.
Mr. McCain has long said border control must be a prelude to larger reforms. But he always insisted on realistic solutions, on respecting immigrants’ humanity and giving them the chance to become legal. He never played the rancid, dangerous game of portraying Latinos as criminals, as Arizona’s new immigration bill does. Mr. McCain used to be the anti-demagogue. Here he is defending his bill in the Senate on May 25, 2007, one of many times he said the same thing:
“We need to come up with a humane, moral way to deal with those people who are here, most of whom are not going anywhere. No matter how much we improve border security, no matter the penalties we impose on their employers, no matter how seriously they are threatened with punishment, we will not find most of them, and we will not find most of their employers.”
John McCain is desperate to stay in power and will do whatever it takes, including selling out principles that guided his political career for decades.
"Maverick" is a mantle McCain no longer claims; in fact, he now denies he ever was one. "I never considered myself a maverick," he told me. "I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities." Yet here was Palin, urging her fans four times in 15 minutes to send McCain the Maverick back to Washington.
Carrie Prejean isn't just opposed to gay marriage, she's also opposed to paying more than $64,000 to the "Christian-focused" PR firm who helped her out, this according to a new lawsuit. The group -- A. Larry Ross Communications -- claims Prejean contacted them back in April, 2009 and logged "hundreds of hours" helping Prejean spread her "biblically correct" message. But according to the lawsuit, filed earlier this month in Texas, Prejean's actions were the opposite of Christian -- because she never paid the $64,857 bill.
My guess is that Prejean thinks she's being "biblically correct" in not paying her bills. Leviticus 25:36-37 says:
Do not exact interest from your countryman either in money or in kind, but out of fear of God let him live with you. You are to lend him neither money at interest nor food at a profit. [Also stated in Exodus, Deuteronomy, Nehemiah, Psalms, Proverbs, and Ezekiel.]
Prejean probably interprets this passage to mean that a good anit-gay Christian doesn't have to pay her bills. That greedy PR firm just wants profit! They should be opening their doors to let her live with them (a.k.a. represent her) for free. That gluttonous (not that she would use a word that large), biblically correct PR firm is just another attempt of the liberal media and gay mafia to try and take her down.
Well I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And, you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there. But that’s how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman.
Here's what Palin, Prejean, Ashley's Christian-authored New Testament has to say about how women should dress:
Women should adorn themselves with proper conduct, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hairstyles and gold ornaments, or pearls, or expensive clothes. (1 Timothy 2:9)
Your adornment should not be an external one: braiding the hair, wearing gold jewelry, or dressing in fine clothes,but rather the hidden character of the heart, expressed in the imperishable beauty of a gentle and calm disposition, which is precious in the sight of God. For this is also how the holy women who hoped in God once used to adorn themselves and were subordinate to their husbands. (1 Peter 3:2-5)
So much for the unification of church and pageant.