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https://www.studioeight.tv/phpbb/
...Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause.In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.
Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.
--end excerpt
Sam Harris: Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
The extremist teach their child to kill themselves for Jihad, and the women are willing to do the same, including being suicide bombers.(11-04) 04:00 PST Gaza City, Gaza Strip -- About 200 veiled Palestinian women broke through an Israeli troop and tank cordon around a mosque Friday to serve as human shields for dozens of armed militants.
The militants, some dressed in women's clothes, escaped but two of the women were killed by Israeli fire, and another 17 listed as wounded, on one of the deadliest days of fighting in the coastal territory this year.
The women's uprising brought a dramatic end to a 15-hour standoff and served as a surprise setback for Israeli forces that had stormed the town of Beit Hanoun on Wednesday to root out stockpiles of crude Qassam rockets and the militants who launch them into Israel.
--end excerpt
LA Times: Gaza women's bold move
Oh yes I have plenty of faith, heretical faith, I expect to burn any day now. Coward that I am. It seems the trouble starts when two or more people gather together. The god gene is wired into our brains. Where is Magellan when we need him?The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.
Ferdinand Magellan
Hey Jack! (waving!)stilltrucking wrote: Hey Deb:
just say hi-jack
gimme a couple of hours and I will delete this.
don't mean nothing
move on.
DEMOCRATS GET RELIGION
Left-leaning politicians have a come-to-Jesus moment, bringing their faith out of the closet to challenge conservatives' claimed moral hegemony
Vicki Haddock, Insight Staff Writer
Sunday, November 5, 2006
The religious right may have to make room for the religious left.
Source:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... M44301.DTL
Additional update (emphasis added by me)whimsicaldeb wrote:DEMOCRATS GET RELIGION
Left-leaning politicians have a come-to-Jesus moment, bringing their faith out of the closet to challenge conservatives' claimed moral hegemony
Vicki Haddock, Insight Staff Writer
Sunday, November 5, 2006
The religious right may have to make room for the religious left.
Source:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... M44301.DTL
If you haven't seen the preview forhttp://www.jesuscampthemovie.com/ or heard this thought reformer Becky Fisher speak - then check them out, and see for yourselves.One of the issues raised by radio host Mike Papantonio in our film Jesus Camp is the concern by some Christians that a marriage between a political party and a religious group is a dangerous and slippery slope for both. The intertwining of the GOP and Evangelical Christianity is currently playing itself out on the national stage via the Ted Haggard saga.
In one scene in Jesus Camp - now fervently making its way around the blogosphere and late night talk shows - Haggard unabashedly speaks out in his Sunday sermon against homosexual behavior, as he often did on the national political scene. His devoted parishioners were proud of Pastor Ted's outspoken nature and strong relationship with the Bush administration, which included regular phone calls to the White House. He represented the interests of 30 million Evangelicals, voicing their desire to overturn Roe v. Wade, stop stem cell research and assure that homosexuals did not benefit from the the slew of social and economic protections of marriage.
That is, until last week's shocking revelation of the Reverend's sexual dalliances and drug use forced him out of his position as moral authority and protector of Evangelical interests.
If a drug and sex scandal by an Evangelical minister in Colorado Springs can actually suppress conservative Republican voter turnout nationwide--possibly altering the results in several states--hasn't the merging of political and religious interests gone too far?
Haggard's oft-publicized ties with the White House leave born-again voters with a bad taste in their mouth for both him and his party affiliation. While this may delight Democratic voters this time around, liberals should also be concerned with this problematic pattern. As Hillary Clinton has begun to cultivate strong ties with conservative Evangelicals, further empowering the religious right by tacitly acknowledging that she cannot win the presidency without them, the cycle continues.
Haven't the prophecies of the Jesus Camp radio host come to pass before our eyes?
Hypocrisy and outrage over Haggard's double life aside, the goings on here speak to a bigger trend relevant to all of us: allowing religion and politics to manipulate each other to their own ends taints both the political process and the credibility of religious groups--a lose-lose scenario for everyone.
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are the co directors of JESUS CAMP
"I knew I had to rise above it allSEC, Accounting Board Officials To Weigh Sarbanes-Oxley Update
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 11, 2006; Page D01
Cox, in a telephone interview yesterday, rejected the notion that regulators would gut the internal control standard, which was put in place to help detect fraud and financial errors. Instead, he said, the goal was to retool the provision using "the lessons learned from the past four years," including making sure that "things that don't have to do with financial statements don't have excessive attention" and ensuring that small companies do not bear "disproportionate" cost burdens. Cox declined to be more specific, adding that some of the language mentioned earlier in the week was flatly inaccurate or had already been "overtaken by events."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01542.html
I could not disagree more. Dick Cheney is plenty scary. Just as scary as any jihadist. For me anyway.Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.
I don't find it nearly as troubling, I find it just as troubling, I find it no different than the theology of the lunatics in the muslim world. They both have so much moral clarity it is a shame.it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies.
So many problems facing us, the fall out from BUsh is going to be a bitch. Meanwhile in more mundane matters the middle class is on the run, subtle little changes to the accounting laws seem minor on the surface but it facilitates the continued rape and pillage of our economy. All those baby boomers going to their pension funds to find IOU's same with social security they say. SO the answer is the stock market they say, private investments, rugged individualists can take care of their own money. They don't need big government. We need to get big government off the back of big business so they can both climb our backs and stick it to us."The dirty little Republican secret is that they rely on religious rhetoric and strategy because they have to. If they don't, Americans might notice that they're not walking the walk when it comes to policy. They're not caring for the sick, the poor, the widowed, the orphaned. They're not acting as stewards of God's green earth. They are suffering the little children, but not in the way that Jesus meant."
Time To Socialize MedicineHow Democrats can make themselves useful.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2006, at 4:33 PM ET
May I put in a word for socialized medicine?
Have you been inside a hospital lately?
The signs of breakdown are everywhere, from the emergency room overflowing with uninsured people to the film labs unable to locate MRIs that cost thousands of dollars to produce (usually because a doctor misfiled them) to the medical chart whose privacy is guarded so fervently that the patient may need a law degree to get his hands on it, only to discover that results of his last three blood tests never made it out of the fax machine. (Before she died of liver cancer, my wife found that the only place she could read her medical chart unmolested was the hospital ladies' room.) The National Academy of Sciences estimates that 3 percent to 4 percent of all people admitted to hospitals end up suffering some sort of injury due to medical error and that the number who die as a result may approach 100,000 annually, which exceeds the number of people who die annually in car crashes. The problem isn't incompetent doctors or medical technicians; it's the seat-of-the-pants way medical care must be delivered under the current jerry-built system. By comparison, your local Department of Motor Vehicles is a model of efficiency and cheery service.
http://www.slate.com/id/2153275/
I agree hate is not helpful, but I think our enemies in the so called christian world are just as dangerous. One of the conclusions to the BBC documentary was that the world wide al Qaeda terrorist network was a myth of the neo cons. There may be one now but we helped to create it. Remember Bora Bora? The underground cave bunkers of al Qaeda, equiped with all sorts of high tech equipement, those immense underground complexes we were searching for? Rumsfeld even had power point slides showing diagrams of how sophisticated they were. Never existed, never found.Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration — especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.