Trump's Big CON: He Might Be the Devil

UPDATE:  "At the Family Research Council’s recent Values Voter Summit, the religious right effectively declared its conversion to Trumpism.

The president was received as a hero. Stephen K. Bannon and Sebastian Gorka — both fired from the White House, in part, for their extremism — set the tone and agenda. . .

There is no group in the United States less attached to its own ideals or more eager for its own exploitation than religious conservatives. Forget Augustine and Aquinas, Wilberforce and Shaftesbury. For many years, leaders of the religious right exactly conformed Christian social teaching to the contours of Fox News evening programming. . .

Do religious right leaders have any clue how foolish they appear?"

Read the Washington Post, The religious right carries its golden calf into Steve Bannon’s battles.

For evangelical conservatives Trump is a "God-chosen president [who] can do no wrong, tell no lie, make no error. And that, it seems, has been the default setting for many of Trump’s most loyal supporters among the religious right.

The notion that lies don’t matter, that politics is akin to a religious mission, strikes many Americans as a scary repudiation of the Constitution’s establishment clause. Protecting Trump and dodging critics who raise legitimate issues about his behavior have now become acts of faith. . .

We’ve tracked the evolution of Christian conservative leaders from public moralists to leaders of tribal identity. Their most visible leaders increasingly consider themselves the vanguard of white rural America (where so many of their flock reside), a group resentful of its demographic and cultural decline. Trump’s coterie of evangelical pastors is among the inaptly named 'values voters' leadership that, having lost on gay marriage, on legalized abortion and on cultural decay, now takes refuge in nativism, xenophobia and white grievance. For these evangelical figureheads, 'us vs. them' has replaced a message of brotherly love and Christian charity.

Robert P. Jones, author of 'The End of White Christian America,' observes, 'One of the most astounding shifts in modern politics has been the utter transformation of white evangelical Protestants from being confident self-described ‘values voters,’ who measured candidates for office against a high bar of moral character, to anxious and unwavering Trump supporters who have largely dropped these standards for a candidate they believe will deliver policies that benefit them.' He explains that 'white evangelicals have exchanged an ethic of principle that might hold a political leader accountable to consistent standards for a consequentialist ends-justify-the-means posture that simply stops interrogating character, the quality of leadership, or the morality of actions when it’s beneficial.' . .

Under a president who now actively courts theocratic leaders and seeks to widen racial and religious division, the United States is being seriously tested. It will take people of faith and of no faith committed to democratic norms and American diversity to repel this assault on the country’s animating principles."

Read the Washington Post, Evangelical conservatives are proving their harshest critics right.

Trump's Big CON: A Man Without Principles Demands Allegiance to a Symbol and Not the Ideal

UPDATE V:  "The most fitting slogan for Donald Trump’s populist campaign, which continues nearly a year after the 2016 election ended, might be “us against them.” I don’t know Latin, but I do know that what we saw from the president this weekend is the opposite of e pluribus unum. He is the divider in chief.

Trump, who was a developer before he became a reality TV star and then a politician, has long been a builder of straw men. Everyone knows that he trades on controversy, but his chaotic approach to governing also depends on constantly presenting the American people with false binary choices.

Picking a fight with professional athletes who kneel during the national anthem, a controversy from last year that had mostly blown over, is just the latest example. . .

Trump talks about the world in black-and-white terms: You’re either with him or against him. He’s been around long enough to know that this is a time-honored form of civil disobedience, but he recognizes that his base hates such displays. So Trump is using the bully pulpit of the presidency to seize a political opening that might keep his core supporters from losing faith in his leadership.

He is also looking for distractions. Trump went all-in last week on the Cassidy-Graham health-care bill, which could fail this week. The candidate he endorsed in Alabama could go down in a GOP primary. Puerto Rico has been ravaged by a hurricane, and there are mounting questions about the federal response.

This is part of a pattern. Trump is still campaigning against Hillary Clinton as a foil because he wants conservatives to judge him against her, not on his own merits. He called her 'Crooked Hillary' during his Friday rally in Alabama. 'Lock her up,' the crowd chanted. He didn’t stop them. At this point, what difference does she make? . .

Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote 'The Art of the Deal' for Trump, identifies what he believes are deeper origins for the president’s divisive behavior: 'To survive, I concluded from our conversations, Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world,' Schwartz wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post this spring. 'It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: You either dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear, or you succumbed to it … This narrow, defensive outlook took hold at a very early age, and it never evolved. 'When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now,' he told a recent biographer, 'I’m basically the same.' His development essentially ended in early childhood.”

Read the Washington Post, Why the divider in chief embraces culture wars.

UPDATE IV:  "They’re both Christian football players, and they’re both known for kneeling on the field, although for very different reasons.

One grew up the son of Baptist missionaries to the Philippines. The other was baptized Methodist, confirmed Lutheran, and attended a Baptist church during college.

Both have made a public display of their faith. Both are prayerful and devout.

This is the tale of two Christian sports personalities, one of whom is the darling of the American church while the other is reviled. And their differences reveal much about the brand of Christianity preferred by many in the church today.. .

The bifurcation of contemporary Christianity into two distinct branches is leaving the church all the poorer, with each side needing to be enriched by the biblical vision of the other.

Biblical Christianity should be, as Walter Brueggemann expresses it, “awed to heaven, rooted in earth.” We should, as he says, be able to “join the angels in praise, and keep our feet in time and place.”

Sadly, with the suspicion and animosity shown toward each side of the divide by the other, I can’t see a coming together any time soon.

In the meantime, Christianity remains on its knees in the West."

Read the Washington Post, Colin Kaepernick vs. Tim Tebow: A tale of two Christians on their knees.

UPDATE III:  "IN 1943, with the nation mobilized for war against fascism, schoolchildren in West Virginia were required each morning to salute the American flag. The purpose, seemingly unexceptionable — and in fact not objected to by many — was 'teaching, fostering and perpetuating the ideals, principles and spirit of Americanism.'

However, to Jehovah’s Witnesses the flag was an 'image,' which, under their religious beliefs, their children were forbidden to salute. Students refused to do so and were expelled from school; parents were prosecuted; eventually, the case reached the Supreme Court.

There, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, Justice Robert Jackson wrote for a 6-to-3 majority that the state could not compel children to salute the flag. Reversing a court decision from just three years earlier, Jackson wrote, in the midst of war, what remains one of the enduring statements of confidence in what truly makes America great. 'To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous, instead of a compulsory routine,' he wrote, 'is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.'

What brings this to mind, of course, is President Trump’s latest bilious eruption. The first inclination, when he starts calling people 'sons of b-----s' and waxing nostalgic for days when more concussions were inflicted for the entertainment of football fans, is to look away. It’s embarrassing, after all, to have to explain to the children that we have a president who speaks so rudely. It’s playing into the diversion he may seek when he finds himself flummoxed by Kim Jong Un or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). And shouldn’t we be worrying about more important things — health care, tax reform, the inundation of Puerto Rico, the dangers of nuclear war? . .

[W]hen the president uses his bully pulpit to declare some speech legitimate and some beyond the pale; when his response to protest is to question patriotism rather than engage on the issue of unequal policing — then it is Mr. Trump who 'disrespects our Flag & our Country.'

As Justice Jackson wrote three-quarters of a century ago, 'If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.'"

 Read the Washington Post, This is what the flag stands for, Mr. President.

UPDATE II:  "Despite President Trump's harsh words about NFL players protesting racism, there's one thing you aren't likely to hear him say: 'Stay in your lane.'

Trump respects — even invites — athletes to weigh in on political matters, as long as they are pro-Trump policies. During the 2016 election, Trump counted legendary boxing promoter Don King, storied former college basketball coach Bobby Knight and NASCAR chief executive Brian France among his supporters."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s problem isn’t with athletes being political. It’s with athletes speaking out against racism.

UPDATE: "Talking to reporters on the tarmac of a New Jersey airport as he left his golf club in Bedminster, President Trump insisted Sunday that his barrage of tweets about protests in the NFL were simply a defense of patriotism.

'This has nothing to do with race,' he said. 'I’ve never said anything about race. This has nothing to do with race or anything else. This has to do with respect for our country, and respect for our flag.'

And, of course, race.

It’s somehow become trite to note the difference in Trump’s tone when criticizing the NFL protests, in which a number of players have chosen to sit or kneel during the national anthem, and his tone when discussing the protests in Charlottesville last month. But it’s still worth noting.

Trump was slow to condemn the white supremacists and overt Nazi sympathizers who crept from the shadows to defend a Confederate statue in Charlottesville. The president eventually offered a forceful condemnation, read from prepared remarks — that he then undercut the next day in a news conference by saying that “many fine people” had joined the racists and Nazis at that protest.

The NFL protests? Anyone engaging in them was a 'son of bitch' who should be fired, he said at a rally in Alabama. On Sunday, he retweeted a call for a boycott of the NFL, along with a number of other complaints. That the participants in the NFL protests happened to be black and that Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors (whom Trump disinvited from the White House on Saturday) is, too, was cited as evidence that Trump was more aggravated at black protesters than white ones.

Whether that’s the case doesn’t really matter. What matters is the reason for those protests. They are one of the endpoints of a years-long racial divide that Trump leveraged explicitly as part of his 2016 campaign. . .

Trump’s entire campaign was about race, explicitly — whether he realizes it or not. So, too, was his fervent insistence about the NFL over the weekend. If he truly doesn’t realize that (which is certainly debatable), it shows a remarkable lack of awareness of the nuance that drives much of our politics at the moment."

Read the Washington Post, Of course Trump’s outrage at the NFL protests had to do with race.

A flag is just a symbol, a constitution gives substance to a country's principles.

So of course, a man without principles would worship a symbol while contemptuously rejecting the country's ideals.

Read the Washington Post:

In showings of protest and solidarity, NFL teams respond to Trump’s criticisms, and

The NFL beat Trump. Soundly., which noted:

"At a rally in Alabama on Friday night, Trump shouted: ‘Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!' You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, 'That guy disrespects our flag; he’s fired.' And that owner . . .  they’ll be the most popular person in this country.’

It’s all part of his new agenda: To put the sports world — which happens to be full of rich athletes, many of whom are minorities, who have huge followings and aren’t afraid to live as independent thinkers — in its supposed place. How dare ESPN’s Jemele Hill call Trump a ‘white supremacist,’ even though he treated Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville with more fairness than Steph Curry? How dare Curry and the Golden State Warriors not jump at the chance to visit him at the White House? The invitation is withdrawn! And how dare these NFL court jesters have concerns about equality? Stand for the flag! And while we’re talking football, change the rules back and let them beat their brains out like they did during the good ol’ days!

What’s another player suffering from CTE and committing suicide mean to the current president? It’s as far down his list of priorities as the fears of the oppressed. It shouldn’t be shocking that Trump cares so little about NFL players. They’re just the latest on a long list of people he wishes would shut up and allow life to be shoved down their throat. . .

In many stadiums, fans booed players who took a knee and chanted for them to respect the flag. That was expected after Trump’s version of a pep talk Friday night. It is also within those fans’ First Amendment rights. Protesting during the anthem, with the flag on full display, is a complicated and infuriating gesture. But that’s the essence of a protest. If you meekly stand behind your concerns and follow every rule, no one will notice and care about your cause. Disobedience gets attention. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not like the athletes are fighting for more money. They want our country to stop moonwalking on equality. Bury the sentiment with your disgust, but that’s the origin of the disagreement. And it’s unlikely to end without an honest recognition of the issue. . .

Unity defined Sunday — not oversimplified tripe about unity, not an attempt to make everyone obey and seem unified — but true unity. The stadiums weren’t full of like-minded players or fans. Players didn’t stand for the same reasons; they didn’t kneel for the same reasons. Fans didn’t boo for the same reasons; they didn’t show support for the same reasons. But they came together, tens of thousands of people all over the place, and they made the points they needed to make. And hostility couldn’t measure up to how good it felt just to be heard.

Then the games started, and people rooted for their favorite colors, and a good sports meal wasn’t ruined because you had to eat your vegetables first. The NFL beat Trump. Soundly.

To twist the sports cliche du jour, perhaps Trump should stick to trying to run a country that barely resembles itself right now. The sports world will continue what it does best: embrace differences and manage conflict on a field of play."

The End of the World, Again, Cont., Again, Part 2 (It Never Ends! (Pun Intended!!))

 UPDATE: Who ever thought that after the Rapture I'd have to update this post ;)

"The man whose biblical doomsday claim had people worried about Sept. 23, 2017, is not backing down.

The world did not end over the weekend, and David Meade, a self-described 'specialist in research and investigations,' is saying that’s exactly what he had expected. Now, he is focusing on another date, Oct. 15, 2017, which he claims is the beginning of the world’s destruction.

It is 'the most important date of this century or millennium,' Meade wrote on his website. The action starts that day, he claimed, when the world will enter what’s called a seven-year tribulation period, a fairly widespread evangelical belief that for seven years, catastrophic events would wreak havoc on Earth.

'Hold on and watch — wait until the middle of October and I don’t believe you’ll be disappointed,' Meade wrote, before going on to promote his book, which he claims has all the details.

'You don’t have long to read it,' he added."

Read the Washington Post, The man who had people worried about a Sept. 23 apocalypse is peddling a new doomsday date.

Trump's a CON Man, but who cares!

"Unsealed, an evangelical Christian publication, foretells the Rapture in a viral, four-minute YouTube video, complete with special effects and ominous doomsday soundtrack. It’s called 'September 23, 2017: You Need to See This.'

Why Sept. 23, 2017?

Meade’s prediction is based largely on verses and numerical codes in the Bible. He has homed in one number: 33.

“Jesus lived for 33 years. The name Elohim, which is the name of God to the Jews, was mentioned 33 times [in the Bible],” Meade told The Washington Post. “It’s a very biblically significant, numerologically significant number. I’m talking astronomy. I’m talking the Bible … and merging the two.”

And Sept. 23 is 33 days since the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse, which Meade believes is an omen.

He points to the Book of Revelation, which he said describes the image that will appear in the sky on that day, when Nibiru is supposed to rear its ugly head, eventually bringing fire, storms and other types of destruction.

The book describes a woman 'clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head' who gives birth to a boy who will 'rule all the nations with an iron scepter' while she is threatened by a red seven-headed dragon. The woman then grows the wings of an eagle and is swallowed up by the earth.

The belief, as previously described by Gary Ray, a writer for Unsealed, is that the constellation Virgo — representing the woman — will be clothed in sunlight, in a position that is over the moon and under nine stars and three planets. The planet Jupiter, which will have been inside Virgo — in her womb, in Ray’s interpretation — will move out of Virgo, as though she is giving birth.

To make clear, Meade said he’s not saying the world will end Saturday. Instead, he claims, the prophesies in the Book of Revelation will manifest that day, leading to a series of catastrophic events that will happen over the course of weeks."

Read the Washington Post, The world as we know it is about to end — again — if you believe this biblical doomsday claim., which notes that Hedgehog News published a "story with a headline that appears to give credence to the doomsday claim — and was published in the Science section under the label “Planets.”

Republi-cons are such suckers for snake oil salesmen.

Any question how The Donald got elected.

Trumps' Big CON: Even If He Is Not Racist, Trump Uses Racism, CONt. (AKA Another Big Shout Out to Birthers & Other Racist, CONt.)

UPDATE IV:  "It’s a long-running talking point spouted by Trump administration members and the president himself: Undocumented immigrants are taking jobs away from black and Hispanic Americans. . .


Here’s the problem: immigrant and native-born workers are imperfect substitutes. There is no evidence that the unemployed Americans, be they black, white or Hispanic, have the skills necessary to hold the same jobs occupied by the young beneficiaries of the five-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. . .

Trump and his supporters have often pitted minority groups against one another. But there is no broad economic justification to do so.

'Cannibalizing stigmatized and marginalized groups against each other serves the wealthy interests that benefit from such divisive colonial and labor segmenting tactics,' [Darrick Hamilton, an economics and urban policy professor at The New School] said."

Read the Washington Post, White House claims ‘dreamers’ take jobs away from blacks and Hispanics. Here’s the truth.

UPDATE III:  "President Trump’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was both unsurprising — given the campaign he ran — and politically perilous. It also highlights a divide that goes deeper even than immigration, one we can see in vivid detail in a couple of new surveys that were just released.

While Republicans have long been the party for those who want to conserve the past and Democrats the party for those who are more inclined to embrace change and progress, Trump has driven a gigantic wedge through that divide. Seldom have we seen a president whose message to voters is so clearly, 'If you can’t stand what our country has become, I’m your man.' This is only secondarily about policies and programs; mostly it’s about culture. And it’s possible that 2016 was the last time the GOP can be successful with that kind of appeal, at least in the near future. . .

But stoking anger at immigration wasn’t the whole story — it fit into a larger argument about an America that Trump voters felt had been lost. Their economic opportunities are more limited, their communities aren’t as vibrant as they once were, and the dominant culture embraces a set of cosmopolitan and socially liberal values they find alienating. Not only that, they feel, not without reason, that the culture sends them a message that their values are outdated, small-minded and in many cases simply wrong.

Now add in the fact that patterns of immigration have changed in the last decade or two, where Spanish-speaking immigrants are moving beyond the places they’ve always been (California, Texas, New York) and moving into areas that hadn’t had large numbers of these immigrants before. For some people, that change has been jarring — they see signs going up in Spanish, they see people who don’t look like them in communities that used to be nearly all-white, and it seems like one more symptom of change they don’t like.

Combine that with the kind of alienation older people in particular are always prone to feel from a culture that is in fact leaving them behind, for the simple reason that they’re getting older and cultures change. Their music is no longer what’s popular, current fashion trends seem stupid to them, they don’t feel comfortable navigating this new multicultural environment, and they long for a time when they were young and on top of the world.

Then along comes Trump, telling them that all those trends can be reversed. That’s what 'Make America Great Again' was about: turning back the clock to the time you look back on fondly, when it all made sense. You and people like you were in charge, creating the culture, making the future. . .

Whatever you think of their reaction, just like the broader group of Trump voters, white evangelicals are right in their assessment that their hegemonic cultural position has been eroded. It’s not just that their proportion of the population is dwindling, though it is. It’s also that the assumption that their culture is the culture no longer holds. Now they have to accommodate themselves to a diverse society, in the way everyone else used to have to accommodate to them. They really have lost something, whether you think they should ever have had it in the first place.

Despite being in the minority, all these alienated voters were able to push Trump to victory in 2016".

Read the Washington Post, Trump won by championing alienated white and Christian voters. But will that ever work again?

Read also NBC News, Clinton Voters Divided Over a Changing America, which includes this graph:

UPDATE II:  "The Public Religion Research Institute recently conducted a massive poll of more than 100,000 Americans. Its results go a long way toward explaining the transformation of the GOP from a conservative party into one fueled and animated by white grievance. . .

In sum, if you want to know why white grievance (a burning anger about the loss of status and influence of 'people like them') and know-nothingism play such an enormous part in today’s Republican Party, look for the answer in these numbers. The views of the shrinking white evangelical population now dominate the GOP. Other polling shows that the group dismisses the extent of racism directed at minorities, immigrants, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans, while exaggerating the extent of discrimination against whites. It’s this group that was motivated in the 2016 election not by economics but by cultural and racial grievance, which now is at the heart of President Trump’s message . . .

Trying to explore the economic dislocation associated with globalism is a worthy policy exercise. It is not, however, going to explain Trumpism, which has little to do with economics and everything to do with race.

One can understand why logic and facts are no match for irrational resentment. Trump captured, stirred and magnified the animosity these voters feel about their laundry list of villains (immigrants, elites, urbanites, the media or any other sources of information that undercut their irrational views, etc.) As a political matter, it is hard to figure out how to wean people from the grip of an irrational sense of persecution and racial resentment. They are unmoved by data showing that immigrants are not harming them. They refuse to acknowledge that by every measurement, whites are not disadvantaged in our society."

Read the Washington Post, The demographic change fueling the angst of Trump’s base.

UPDATE:  "One of the biggest mysteries of Donald Trump’s presidency has been white evangelicals’ steadfast and enthusiastic support for him. Unlike Mormons, who saw a nearly 20-point falloff in support for Trump compared with their typical support for Republican presidential candidates, white evangelicals' support for Trump was in line with, and even slightly higher than, their 2004 support for fellow evangelical George W. Bush (81% vs. 78%, respectively), according to the exit polls.

And unlike Trump’s arts council and economic advisory councils, which saw so many resignations that the committees themselves dissolved, Trump’s evangelical advisory committee has seen just one resignation and is standing by their man.

While many may want to simply dismiss this turn of events as pure hypocrisy, anyone seeking understanding will want to look deeper. White evangelicals branded themselves as “values voters.” That they could support Trump as strongly as Bush and more resolutely than arts and business leaders ought to serve as a signal that something dramatic has happened in the interim. . .

The engines of white evangelical decline are complex, but they are a combination of external factors, such as demographic change in the country as a whole, and internal factors, such as religious disaffiliation — particularly among younger adults who find themselves at odds with conservative Christian churches on issues like climate change and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. As a result, the median age of white evangelical Protestants is now 55, and the median age of religiously unaffiliated Americans is 37. While 26% of seniors (65 and older) are white evangelicals, only 8% of Americans younger than 30 claim this identity.

The evangelical alliance with Trump can be understood only in the context of these fading vital signs among white evangelicals. They are, in many ways, a community grieving its losses. After decades of equating growth with divine approval, white evangelicals are finding themselves on the losing side of demographic changes and LGBT rights, one of their founding and flagship issues. . .

Thinking about white evangelicals as a grieving community opens up new ways of understanding their behavior. Drawing on her interactions with dying patients and their families in the 1960s, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified at least five common “stages” of grief, which have become staples of understanding responses to loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. As Kübler-Ross found, when the stubborn facts of one’s own demise don’t yield to denial or anger, people commonly attempt to make a grand deal to postpone the inevitable.

While there are some lingering pockets of denial, and anger was an all-too-visible feature of Trump’s presidential campaign, thinking about the white evangelical/Trump alliance as an end-of-life bargain is illuminating. It helps explain, for example, how white evangelical leaders could ignore so many problematic aspects of Trump’s character. When the stakes are high enough and the sun is setting, grand bargains are struck. And it is in the nature of these deals that they are marked not by principle but by desperation."

Read USA Today, Fading white evangelicals have made a desperate end-of-life bargain with Trump. 

"The Public Religion Research Institute released a massive new survey of American religious adherence today. Among other things it contained this stunning insight into the current state of our political parties:

Today, roughly three-quarters (73%) of the Republican Party is white Christian, but fewer than one-third (29%) of the Democratic Party identifies this way. . .

From a demographic standpoint, the modern Republican Party looks much like the America of 40 years ago — in 1976, for instance, 81 percent of Americans were white and Christian. Today white Christians account for just 43 percent of the population.

President Trump, who campaigned on a platform of making America great again, capitalized on white Americans' anxieties about these demographic changes in 2016. In September of that year he told Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network 'if we don’t win this election, you’ll never see another Republican and you’ll have a whole different church structure.'

He added 'I think this will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning because you’re going to have people flowing across the border, you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote, and once that all happens you can forget it.'

Previous polling from PRRI showed how these messages resonated with white voters. After the election, fully two-thirds of Trump voters told PRRI the election represented 'the last chance to stop America’s decline.'"

Read the Washington Post, The stark racial and religious divide between Democrats and Republicans, in one chart.

Trump's Big CON: Is God Trying to Tell Us Something?

UPDATE:  Read the Washington Post, Earth’s revenge and demons in the wind: the most baffling theories about Hurricane Irma.

First, the (biblical?) floods in Houston.

Now read:

CNN, There are now three hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, and

The Washington Post, Hurricane Irma just slammed into Trump’s Caribbean estate — and is headed toward his Florida properties.

Of course not, but if this was Obama, the fundamentalist Christians would be spinning all types of claims.

Trump's Big CON: Evangelicals Are Praying for Armageddon (Formerly North Korea Calls the Bluff (Originally Titled 'North Korea May Call the Bluff'), What Now?)

UPDATE X:  The Donald's hyper-machismo enablers include his entourage of sycophants.

Read the Washington Post, The perks of being a hyperpower.

UPDATE IX:  The Donald is scaring even some of his most ardent supporters.

Read the Daily Mail, PIERS MORGAN: If the President thinks he can handle the North Korea crisis as if it's a Twitter-spat with CNN he could trash talk us into a war.

UPDATE VIII:  More delusional encouragement of Trump's mega-narcissistic personality.

Read the Washington Post, At a time like this, Trump’s team sure seems heaven-sent.

UPDATE VII:  My God, is the babysitter out again?

"Judging by the last few days, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly has made little progress in creating an aura of calm, sanity and competence. In the last few days we’ve seen a never-ending stream of threats, boasts, accusations and whiny denials (I am NOT losing my base!) from President Trump.

Trump embarrassed himself and unnerved Americans on Tuesday by echoing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s belligerent tone, rekindling concerns that he will either overreact or just not be taken seriously in an international standoff that could spin dangerously out of control. This morning there was no improvement. The Post reports:

    President Trump continued to forcefully threaten North Korea on Wednesday, asserting that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is 'far stronger and more powerful than ever before.' . .

His boast is as gratuitous as it is inaccurate in suggesting he improved our arsenal in just seven months. . .

This sort of slow-motion meltdown and loss of discipline is precisely what Kelly was brought on to prevent. But, unfortunately, he seems to have a view of his job that is ill-suited to serve his current boss. . .

Kelly apparently has not impressed upon Trump the impossibility of conducting a war on short notice. . .

Making the trains run on time in an administration in which the conductor is reckless, unskilled and irrational misses the point, to put it mildly. If Kelly is to save Trump’s presidency and serve his country, he has to step out of his role as executing the president’s will and start shaping the president’s behavior. He needs to be able to level with the president, explain how Trump is diminishing his own authority and give him some easy-to-follow directions as to how to conduct himself in a crisis. If Kelly won’t do that or Trump won’t listen, the administration, as we have seen this week, will continue barreling out of control. That puts Trump in political peril and the country in real danger."

Read the Washington Post, Kelly cannot treat Trump like a normal president.

UPDATE VI:  "Your ability to locate North Korea is related to how you think about what we should do about the country."

Read the Washington Post, Nearly two-thirds of Americans can’t find North Korea on a map. Can you?

UPDATE V:  "Yet again, there is an old Trump tweet for every situation:

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

Be prepared, there is a small chance that our horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us into World War III.
4:46 AM - Aug 31, 2013 " [Twitter link added.]

UPDATE IV:  Babysitter to the rescue.

"Secretary of State Rex Tillerson this morning defended President Trump’s reckless threat to rain 'fire and fury' on North Korea, but make no mistake: In the course of doing so, Tillerson quietly erased the red line that Trump laid down, and redrew it in a relatively more reasonable place.

Tillerson’s comments will in this sense have a calming effect. But they are also cause for a different sort of alarm: They raise additional questions as to why Trump made the comments in the first place; what process went into the creation and delivery of them, if any; and what will — or won’t — be done to ensure that there is a sane process in place to shape further comments from Trump as this crisis unfolds. . .

As many have already observed, by vaguely vowing an overwhelming nuclear response to continued threats from North Korea, Trump sounded a lot like North Korea itself, employing a formulation that is both vague and menacing, which in combination increases the risk of miscalculation and, with it, unspeakable horror. Tillerson plainly tried to undo that today by redrawing the line more sharply, while defending the impulse behind Trump’s comments.

But that still leaves us guessing in a way that raises worrisome unknowns about what’s to come. We don’t know what Trump really meant. What has now been confirmed, however, is that Trump will use vague and reckless language in the most dangerous conceivable contexts. “If one had any doubt that Trump was going to be incredibly reckless with language at the worst possible times, he just did it,” Lewis said. “Tillerson’s efforts suggest that everyone around Trump knows that was crazy.”

But that raises an additional question: What process went into the creation and delivery of this statement in the first place? Michael Warren of The Weekly Standard suggests this morning that the White House, including Trump’s national security team, was not aware that Trump was going to deliver this statement. And The New York Times adds, alarmingly, that “White House officials did not respond to questions about how much planning went into his brief statement.”

This urgently needs to be teased out. We need to know more about the process, if any, that went into the creation of this statement, and we’ll need to know more about this process going forward, as Trump delivers more similar statements in what looks like an escalating situation."

Read then Washington Post, Rex Tillerson just erased the reckless red line Trump drew on North Korea., which also noted: 

"Tillerson has already erased this red line. But for how long? We all know how heavily the prospect of looking weak weighs on Trump."

UPDATE III: At a time when minds should not be cluttered with delusions, this is scary:

Read the Washington Post, ‘God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un,’ evangelical adviser says.

The adviser is "Texas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, one of President Trump’s evangelical advisers who preached the morning of his inauguration . . .

Jeffress last met with Trump in July when a group of pastors laid hands on the president in the Oval Office. He said now that health care is off the table, evangelicals are hoping for tax reform, though he didn’t have any specifics in mind.

Jeffress, who was was an early supporter of Trump, has said that after sharing Wendy’s cheeseburgers in Iowa, he believed Trump would be the next president and that it would be because God placed him there. In July, his church choir and orchestra performed a song called 'Make America Great Again' at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts where Trump was in attendance."

Trump doesn't realize that his mega-narcissistic personality makes him easily manipulated.

UPDATE II:  "The North Korean nuclear threat is a 'hinge' moment for the United States and China, and for the new international order both nations say they want.

If Washington and Beijing manage to stay together in dealing with Pyongyang, the door opens on a new era in which China will play a larger and more responsible role in global affairs, commensurate with its economic power. If the great powers can’t cooperate, the door will slam shut — possibly triggering a catastrophic military conflict on the Korean Peninsula.

President Trump’s bullying style, even in dealing with trivial matters of domestic politics, obscures the extent to which he has tried to marry U.S. policy on North Korea with that of China. For the most part, he has been surprisingly successful. Beijing and Washington have mostly been aligned, as in this past weekend’s unanimous U.N. Security Council vote in favor of additional sanctions against Pyongyang to punish its continued missile tests.

Washington’s diplomatic goal, although it hasn’t been stated publicly this way, is to encourage China to interpose itself between the United States and North Korea and organize negotiations to de-nuclearize the Korean Peninsula. The U.S. threat is that if China doesn’t help the United States find such a diplomatic settlement, America will pursue its own solution — by military means if necessary. . .

Among the clearest points of consensus among former officials was that the North Korea crisis provides what one participant called a “catalytic” moment. If China and the United States can find a common path and resolve the crisis peacefully, they will succeed in “modernizing the global order,” which was the broad topic of the Aspen discussions.

And if they fail? If Trump’s fiery rhetoric alienates Beijing rather than motivates it? If Pyongyang decides to test its doctrine of self-sufficiency with a roll of the nuclear dice? If Trump becomes the first president since John F. Kennedy to truly find himself at the nuclear brink? One way or another, the coming months will shape global security for many years ahead."

Read the Washington Post, This is the moment of truth on North Korea.

UPDATE:  "Yesterday, president Trump took a break from his 17-day vacation to threaten North Korea. His words:

North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state. And as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.

This threat was a response to a continuing series of provocations by North Korea. However, it only took a couple of hours for North Korea to respond – by escalating their threats. North Korea’s official news agency reported a couple of hours later that Pyongyang was 'threatening' missile strikes near Guam, where the US has several military bases.

This faces the U.S. with a problem. U.S. leaders have traditionally been careful with their language, especially when dealing with nuclear powers, and for good reason. If the U.S. cares about its credibility, then it only wants to make threats that it will deliver on. Now, North Korea has effectively called Trump’s bluff. If the U.S. responds as Trump has promised, it will mark a very dangerous escalation. If the US does not respond, then Trump’s credibility – and perhaps U.S. credibility – will be damaged. . .

[Now that Trump's bluff has been called, the U.S. will] have to deliver on the threat, risking nuclear conflagration, or face the risk that [North Korea will] not believe in their threats in future, greatly damaging their ability to influence their adversaries’ actions. . .

North Korea seems to have decided that Trump’s threat was unbelievable.

This is unsurprising – there are a number of reasons why North Korea might have calculated that Trump was bluffing. . .

The U.S. is now in a difficult situation of Trump’s making. It will be highly costly, and possibly greatly damaging to the United States to deliver on Trump’s threat, even in its minimal form. There is furthermore a significant risk that a spiral of threat and counter-threat might lead to actual nuclear war, which would have devastating consequences."

Read the Washington Post, North Korea just called Trump’s bluff. So what happens now?

"North Korea is approaching the Trump administration's red line faster than previously thought.

According to The Post's Joby Warrick, Ellen Nakashima and Anna Fifield, a previously secret Defense Intelligence Agency analysis indicates that Kim Jong Un's regime has produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside one of the intercontinental ballistic missiles that it has been testing."

Read the Washington Post, North Korea is fast approaching Trump’s red line.

Like the dog that caught the bus, I can hear The Donald saying now: Oh $#!+, now what!!

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, North Korea Edition,

Trump's Big CON: North Korea Will Not Develop a Nuclear Weapon Capable of Reaching the U.S. "It won't happen!", and

Trump's Big CON: He Has No Plan, But Could He Tweet Us Into Nuclear War?

Trump's Big CON: To Evangelicals: I Will Protect You'

"Even in an era of marriage diversity, it remains the most unlikely match: President Trump and his loyal evangelical base. In the compulsively transgressive, foul-mouthed, loser-disdaining, mammon-worshiping billionaire, conservative Christians 'have found their dream president,' according to Jerry Falwell Jr.

It is a miracle, of sorts. . .

The essence of Trump’s appeal to conservative Christians can be found in his otherwise anodyne commencement speech at Liberty University. 'Being an outsider is fine,' Trump said. 'Embrace the label.' And then he promised: 'As long as I am your president, no one is ever going to stop you from practicing your faith.' Trump presented evangelicals as a group of besieged outsiders, in need of a defender.

This sense of grievance and cultural dispossession — the common ground between The Donald and the faithful — runs deep in evangelical Christian history. . .

Evangelicals have become loyal to a leader of shockingly low character. They have associated their faith with exclusion and bias. They have become another Washington interest group, striving for advantage rather than seeking the common good. And a movement that should be known for grace is now known for its seething resentments."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is evangelicals’ ‘dream president.’ Here’s why.

Who Was He?

A man with 'a troubled background, born out of wedlock, a jobless thirty-something of Middle Eastern origin.

He had had previous run-ins with local authorities for disruptive public behavior and vandalism, and associated with the members of a fringe religious group. He spent his time in the company of sex workers and criminals.

When he was arrested, he had not held a fixed residence for years, and led an itinerant lifestyle, staying at the homes of friends and advocating the redistribution of wealth.'

Read the Washington Post, Crucified man had prior run-in with authorities.

Christmas To Be Canceled: The End of the World, Again, Cont., Again!!

UPDATE: So the world didn't end in 2016. There is always 2017!!

Read the Daily Mail, Will the world end in October? Conspiracy theorist claims mysterious planet Nibiru will smash into Earth.

"'In the fall [autumn] of 2016, the 6,000 years of sin on earth will come to an end, everlasting righteousness will be brought in, and Jesus will come again to take His people to heaven.'"

Read the Daily Mail, Will the world END this month? Computer programmer claims Jesus will return to destroy the planet in latest bizarre claim.

Where have we hard that before?!!

Read also: The End of the World, Again, Cont.

What If Jesus Was Born Today

Repost:

Watch a what if -- the story of the Nativity in the time of the web, social media, and mobile phones:

God's Chosen One?

UPDATE II:  What more can I say:

Read the Daily Mail, Inside Ben Carson's eccentric Maryland mansion - complete with a shrine to himself, gold leaf columns and a portrait WITH Jesus.

UPDATE:  After Carson's odd claims of violent behavior as a young man, CNN interviewed "nine friends, classmates and neighbors who grew up with the retired neurosurgeon say they have no recollection of violent incidents that Carson has claimed, including fights and an attempted stabbing."

In response Carson denies he is a liar, saying 'This is a bunch of lies attempting to say I’m lying about my history, I think it’s pathetic, and basically what the media does is they try to get you distracted.'

Later, Carson's campaign admitted that "Carson’s application and acceptance into West Point — a key part of the inspirational narrative of Carson’s rise — was fabricated."

Read USA Today, Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point story, report says.

And don't forget "Carson flat out lied about his relationship with a shady nutritional company."

Could the Chosen One actually be the Great Deceiver?

"In his various autobiographical and self-help books, Ben Carson writes of occasions in which God helps him, protects him and looks out for him, sometimes unsolicited, usually in direct response to prayer. Carson, a neurosurgeon and the current front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, invokes his mother’s teaching — 'If you ask the Lord for something and believe He will do it, then it’ll happen' — and sees the influence and intervention of the divine in his medical work and other aspects of his life. "

Read the Washington Post, 11 times God intervened directly in Ben Carson’s life, according to Ben Carson.

Read also the Washington Post, Ben Carson’s striking ignorance, which notes that "Carson has changed his Medicare plan from “End Medicare” to a new version that doesn’t make any sense. He refuses to acknowledge that his tax plan would force trillions of dollars in spending cuts to reach the balanced budget he wants, partly because he or his advisers appear to have no idea what does and doesn’t get taxed. (For example, Carson’s calculation would include taxing all government spending, including defense.) And he has confused the budget and the debt ceiling. Those are just some of the specifics he has actually talked about — even the conservative Heritage Action says he needs to release more detailed plans. We haven’t even touched on his many offensive comments about women, the Holocaust, Muslims, gays and so on.

Happy Shopmas!

UPDATE V:  "[T]here is reason to think that the modern celebration of Christmas is incompatible with Christianity. This can be understood most simply by juxtaposing the birth, life and message of Jesus of Nazareth with the civic rituals of Christmas.

According to the Gospel of St. Luke, Jesus was born in a barn, there being no room for him and his parents in the inn at Bethlehem. His way of living forsook the acquisition of wealth and worldly goods. His message celebrated and elevated the poor, and he was quick to warn of the danger of materialism: 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.'

Two thousand years later, observe the Christmas celebration in our modern, capitalist culture: a shocking emphasis on gifts, material exchange and consumption. Christians believe that it is imperative to know Jesus and that to know him we have to live like him. It is very difficult to argue that the civic rituals of modern Christmas reflect Jesus’s way of living."

Read the Washington Post, Has capitalism devoured Christmas?

UPDATE VI:  You have a choice, you could "Worship Fully, Spend Less, Give More and Love All".

'Turn Christmas upside down', with Advent Conspiracy:



Need help giving more, see GreatNonprofits, GlobalGiving, or Charity Navigator.

UPDATE V:  Happy Shopmas, earlier than ever!

Read U.S. News and World Report, The Holiday Shopping Season That Never Ends.  

UPDATE IV:   "Thanksgiving is just a preamble to the holiest day of the year, Black Friday, when Americans come together to bow before their lord, the Wal-Mart rollback guy, because Jesus isn't the only one that saves." 

Watch the Colbert Report, Stephen's Thanksgiving & Holy Black Friday:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

UPDATE III: You might also read the Pensacola News Journal, Advent Conspiracy reinvents Christmas, Movement encourages people to spend less on gifts and work to help others.


UPDATE II: "As I was reading 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas!' with my kids, I couldn’t help but marvel that the book (and the animated television special) endures as a holiday favorite, even as its core anticonsumerism message goes completely ignored.

Consider these lines, describing the Grinch’s reaction after those darn Whos join hands and celebrate in Who-ville, even after he has robbed them of their Yuletide baubles and Roast Beast:

'Maybe Christmas,' he thought, 'doesn’t come from a store.'

'Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!'"

Read The New York Times, The Movement Toward a 'Buy Nothing' Christmas.


UPDATE: A repost:

Those defending Christmas are not being true to their traditions and teachings. "There are no Christmas dinners in the Bible, which is why America’s Puritans, strict adherents of what that venerated text offers, never sat down by the raging fire awaiting St. Nick; indeed, they briefly banned Christmas in Massachusetts. Yule as we celebrate it today owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas. . . Christmas is a product not of Nazareth but of Madison Avenue."

Read The New York, Faith and Modernity.

Republi-CON Clowns and Jokers Make HRC Look Presidential (Thank God the End Is Near ;-)

UPDATE III:  Tired of the bozos getting all the attention and lovin, establishmnet candidates are readyto quit.

Read the Washington Post, The GOP candidates are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

UPDATE II:  "With Thursday's interminable, pointless, haranguing, disorganized, utterly amateurish attempt at a smear job, the Republicans and their tenth-rate congressional attack schnauzer, South Carolina's Trey Gowdy, got people feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton. Over the course of 11 long hours, they made the most eloquent argument for a Hillary Clinton presidency yet offered by anyone, including Clinton herself."

Read Rolling Stone, Trey Gowdy Just Elected Hillary Clinton President.

UPDATE:  "Apocalyptic rhetoric is more than the evidence of historical ignorance and bad speechwriting. It leads to a distorted politics. If the United States has reached its midnight hour, it means that the institutions that have gotten us here are utterly discredited. . .

Trump and Carson can succeed only if the end times are upon us. And I don’t mean that in a theological way. In normal times, innovative policy and governing skill would matter most in selecting a president. Successful governors and legislators would naturally rise to the top. Only in a crisis of institutional legitimacy does the outsider become the savior. This means Trump, Carson and other apocalyptic politicians must encourage a mental state of emergency among Republicans. Lacking any relevant qualifications in the current political system, these candidates must bring that system into complete disrepute. Since the politicians have made such a hash of things, they insist, a businessman or a neurosurgeon couldn’t possibly do worse.

Oh, yes they could."

Read the Washington Post, Why Trump and Carson want to bring about America’s apocalypse.

"You can choose from a litany of insurrections, government shutdowns and other self-inflicted wounds. But this year’s carnival-like GOP presidential primary makes one event, in retrospect, stand out as a crucial turning point on the road to upheaval: the 2008 embrace of then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be a heartbeat from the presidency.

Palin’s blatant lack of competence and preparedness needs no belaboring. What’s critical is that substantive, serious Republican leaders either wouldn’t or couldn’t declare, before or after the election: “This is not what our party stands for. We can and must do better.”

By the campaign’s end, GOP operatives were shielding Palin from even the simplest questions. . .

[Then] Palin became a Fox News fixture, reinforcing the newly formed tea party’s 'never compromise' demands. Bombast, not reason, reigned. . .

Whether McCain actively sought Palin in 2008 or passively yielded to aides’ pressure, he set a new standard for GOP candidates who rely on lots of sizzle and little substance.

Once McCain put Palin on the ticket, Republican 'grown-ups,' who presumably knew better, had to bite their tongues. But after the election, when they were free to speak their minds, they either remained quiet or abetted the dumbing-down of the party. They stood by as Donald Trump and others noisily pushed claims that Obama was born in Kenya. And they gladly rode the tea party tiger to sweeping victories in 2010 and 2014.

Now that tiger is devouring the GOP establishment. . .

It’s hard to feel much sympathy. The Republican establishment’s 2008 embrace of Palin set an irresponsibly low bar. Coincidence or not, a batch of nonsense-spewing, hard-right candidates quickly followed, often to disastrous effect."

Read the Washington Post, The GOP’s dysfunction all started with Sarah Palin.

Read also the Washington Post, Republicans are ‘in denial’ about Hillary Clinton. 

Don't Ya Just Love Those Republi-CON Family Values

UPDATE IV:  "Five women are suing the Institute in Basic Life Principles, a radical Illinois-based Christian ministry that espouses a stringent patriarchal worldview, for permitting the systemic sexual abuse and harassment of its members.

The negligence suit comes more than a year after fundamentalist leader Bill Gothard resigned from his position as head of the organization after more than 30 women alleged that he harassed or molested them, some when they were minors.

In their lawsuit, the five plaintiffs claim that the Institute in Basic Life Principles acted with willful and wanton disregard for their well-being and conspired to cover up the allegations of abuse. . . conducting a bogus internal investigation of the abuse, for appearances only."

Read Slate, Five Women Sue Duggar-Connected Ministry for Sex Abuse Cover-Up.

See also Republi-CON Family Values, All In the Family Edition. 

UPDATE III:  BTW, the lawsuit "is searing in its criticisms of Doug Phillips. 'Phillips’s patriarchal movement teaches that men are, and should be, in the absolute control of women,' reads the complaint, claiming that Torres-Manteufel was therefore bullied into believing she had no choice but to submit to Phillips' alleged sexual abuse, even though she feared it made her 'damaged goods.'

In other words, women within this movement are perceived to exist only for the end-goals communicated by the male leaders that perceive themselves as the 'patriarchs' of this world,' the lawsuit reads. . .

The scandal around Phillips is just the latest in a long line of ugly shocks to the far Christian right that threaten to destabilize and possibly capsize the community. As The Wire reported in early March, Bill Gothard, the leader of the Institute in Basic Life Principles, resigned his position in the wake of a series of accusations of alleged sexual abuse from dozens of women in the organization. IBLP, like Vision Forum Ministries, is a major clearinghouse for adherents to Biblical patriarchy, teaching members to shun contraception, embrace extreme forms of female submission, and, of course, use homeschooling to shelter young people from the outside world.  Unsurprisingly, IBLP is also associated with the Duggar family, who participated in the organization’s many training seminars on embracing Biblical patriarchy and who called Gothard their 'number one recommended resource' for family advice. He has exerted political influence in other ways, as well, befriending Sarah Palin and bringing her in for his International Association of Character Cities conference.

Similarly, both Bob Jones University and Patrick Henry College—schools that were established in no small part to give these homeschooled and sheltered kids from far Christian right backgrounds a place to go to college—have been at the center of accusations of indifference and even of allegedly covering up reported sexual abuse on campus. BJU received a lot of heat when they fired an outside firm that had been brought on to investigate accusations of sexual abuse, only to rehire them when it looked like they were punishing the firm for being too thorough in exposing the problem. Patrick Henry College was the recent target of an exposé in The New Republic that explored how young women who brought sexual abuse complaints to the school were frequently drummed out of the college or made to felt that they had somehow brought the abuse on themselves.

The 'pitch' of Biblical patriarchy, as epitomized by Michelle Duggar, is that women will be coddled and worshipped in exchange for giving up their ambitions and the autonomy to practice an extreme form of female submission. The unpleasant truth is that a culture that teaches that women are put on earth for no other purpose but to serve men is not going to breed respect for women. Instead, these incidents show a world where men believe they can do whatever they want to women without repercussions. Is it any surprise that a subculture that promises absolute control over women will attract men who want to dominate and hurt women? Don’t believe the TLC hype. Biblical patriarchy is a sour, dangerous world for women, and luckily, that reality is finally being outed."

Read The Daily Beast, Sex Scandal Rocks The Duggars’ Christian Patriarchy Movement.  

UPDATE II:  On the issue of using religion and sex, meet Douglas Phillips, friend of the Duggar family and former "president of the extreme Christian right group Vision Forum Ministries, [who] admitted to, in his words, having 'a lengthy, inappropriate relationship with a woman.' . .

Phillips resigned in October, but now it seems that his public pronouncement regarding that 'inappropriate relationship' may have seriously downplayed what actually happened. Lourdes Torres-Manteufel, who says she was the woman Phillips confessed about, is now suing Phillips and Vision Forum for what she alleges was an abusive and manipulative relationship that caused her serious mental harm and distress."

The link is to the lawsuit, which describes something much worse, including sexual assault and battery under the guise of religion.

Read Slate, Woman Sues Christian Right Leader Douglas Phillips for Alleged Sexual, Mental Abuse.

Apparently Phillips has a history of "Ecclesiastical Tyranny and Abuse".

UPDATE:  The staffer is/was the wife of a "high school pal and campaign donor of McAllister's . . .she started working for McAllister the day after he won his seat.

Her husband, Heath Peacock, said McAllister 'has wrecked my life' and that he and his wife are 'headed for divorce.' He also claimed that, by the way, McAllister faked his devotion to religion to win votes."

Read CNN, Congressman a kissing hypocrite.

And guess who was "'removed from the payroll' within the 24 hours after their embrace was exposed"? Hint, it wasn't the Republi-con CONgressman.

"Just four months on the job, U.S. Rep. Vance McAllister, R-Swartz, has landed himself in hot water after a video surfaced Monday purportedly showing Louisiana's newest congressman kissing a married staffer."

He had won a special election to Congress in November, campaigning on 'Faith, Family, and Hard Work'. 


Read The Times-Picayune, Vance McAllister on video showing kiss with staffer: 'I've fallen short and I'm asking for forgiveness'. 

The End of the World, Again, Cont.

UPDATE VII:  "Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again." ~William Shakespeare

Read the Washington Post, Why the group eBibleFellowship believes the world will be annihilated today. 

Read also the Daily Mail, Don't make any plans for Thursday: Christian doomsday group predicts world will be 'destroyed by fire' tomorrow.

UPDATE VI:   Doesn't look like Hurricane Joaquin is God's wrath upon Obama in Washington DC after all.  How could that be after yesterday's prediction?

Does God have bad aim? Or is Carl's God just inept?  Or perhaps Carl doesn't actually know God, he is listening to Satan.  Which is it?

Maybe Imam Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Truthiness and Pastor Poppins) can explain.

UPDATE V:  The clock (below) now counts the time since Imam Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Truthiness and Pastor Poppins) and his sidekick's September 2015 'Blood Moon' end of the world.

UPDATE IV:  Now our local Imam Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Truthiness and Pastor Poppins) and his sidekick say the end is near -- in December, as evidenced by the news de jour.

Today's claim is that Hurricane Joaquin is God's wrath upon Obama in Washington DC because of gay rights, or Israel, or whatever.

Don't forget to buy the book you sheeple!

Read also The End of the World is Near, Again.And I might add again and again and again . . .

Why are Republi-cons such suckers for snake oil salesmen? 

UPDATE III:  Read also the Washington Post, Despite this mysterious theory, world survives supermoon eclipse.  

UPDATE II:  Did the world end yet?

Read Slate, Mormon Leaders Reassure Faithful: Sunday’s “Blood Moon” Isn’t Sign of Apocalypse, which notes the appeals for calm made through the state's major newspaper. and TV.

UPDATE:  "There will be blood in September -- literally, according to the Internet postings of end-times believers.

The night of September 27-28 will bring a 'blood moon.' To skywatchers, it simply refers to the copper color the moon takes on during an eclipse, but to some Christian ministers, the fourth and final eclipse in a tetrad -- four consecutive total lunar eclipses, each separated by six lunar months -- fulfills biblical prophecy of the apocalypse. (The first three in the series took place April 15, 2014; October 8, 2014; and April 4, 2015.) . .

[These] assertion was quickly debunked by scientists and skeptics. . .

The astronomical site EarthSky.org added that tetrads, of which there have been 62 since the first century, follow natural cycles and are easily calculated. Moreover, three of the four most recent eclipses were not visible in Israel itself. 'What good is a blood moon if God's chosen can't see it?' wrote Seidensticker.)"

Read CNN, Blood moon has some expecting end of the world.

More claims of the end times by our local Imam Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Truthiness and Pastor Poppins).

Despite the failure in April 2014 of the universe shattering, now we have predictions of the end times in September 2015.  Here is the countdown to the end of the month:



Read also The End of the World is Near, Again.

Religious CONservatives

"[C]onservatives lament that Francis has de-emphasized the church’s traditional fear and loathing of women and sex. How a church governed by male celibates should have come to view its areas of core competency as gender relations and reproduction is a good question. By returning to the kind of issues that St. Francis and the Nazarene focused on — stewardship of the Earth, championing of the have-nots — Francis has been a great disappointment to those Catholics nostalgic for the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inquisition.

A pope infused by the spirit of St.Francis of Assisi and Jesus poses a threat to the current economic order. Conservatives are right to fear and despise him, as they would be right to fear and despise his role models."

Read  the Washington Post, Pope Francis poses a threat to the current economic order. 

The Business of Religion (And Birthers)

UPDATE IV:  "You can't fault Sheriff Joe Arpaio for lack of chutzpah. The guy continues to beg for campaign donations while his contempt of the federal court in the ACLU's big civil rights case Melendres v. Arpaio is costing us beaucoup bucks. . .

As New Times has previously reported, the price tag for Arpaio's defense in Melendres and the cost of the subsequent reforms imposed by the court after Arpaio's May 2013 loss will be more than $50 million by the end of fiscal year 2016, money that comes straight out of the county's general fund."

Read the Phoenix New Times, Arpaio Begs for Money While His Lawyers Make Bank in Melendres.

UPDATE III:  "Televangelism is still allowing preachers to amass staggering—often tax-exempt—wealth by robbing their congregation’s most vulnerable members blind."

Read Slate, Praise Be to John Oliver, Who Started a Church Just to Expose Televangelists.

And watch:

UPDATE II:  Read CNN, How passing the plate becomes the 'Sunday morning stickup'. 

UPDATE:  "Over the past two years, Arpaio has raised nearly $5.5 million for his next election in November 2016, according to his campaign-finance reports filed with Maricopa County. . .

Arpaio boasts a fundraising list of more than 250,000 active donors in all 50 states, with the average contribution being $44.26, according to Willems. . .

If Arpaio's campaign coffers exceed $10 million, that would be more than in some congressional races.

'He's made a national reputation for himself. He has capitalized on raising funds nationwide, which many sheriffs cannot do,' Noble said."

Read The Arizona Republic, Arpaio campaign gets $5.5 million from donors past 2 years.

Proving once again the old saying -- a fool and his money are soon parted.

"Pastor Creflo Dollar has spoken to God, and God wants him to buy a $65 million private jet. His congregation, thus far, has obliged his every whim."

Read The Daily Beast, Jesus Wants Me to Have This Jet.

He's not the only 'pastor' who shears his sheeple.

Did You Know That Early Christians Were Communists?

In "a practice of early Christians, reported in the Book of Acts in the New Testament . . . people in a community handed the church ownership of all their possessions. The church then gave each member of the community the use of enough property to provide for the needs of their families.

It was, in effect, a religious form of communism."

Read the Washington Post, Someone once tried Ben Carson’s Biblical tax plan. 

The Republi-CON 'Creationism' Myth

UPDATE:  For "a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans", read the Washington Post, How a history of eating human brains protected this tribe from brain disease.  

It is also interesting if you have any interest in religion and societal development.

UPDATE:  A new video from science advocates Stated Clearly provides an 11-minute examination of the evidence behind the theory of evolution that should come in handy for anyone debating the issue with creationists.

"Thousands of observable facts from completely independent fields of study have come together to tell us the exact same story: all living things on Earth are related," the group’s founder, Jon Perry, states.

Read Raw Story, Next time your creationist friends reject evolution, show them this video:

"Evolution is nothing more than a fairly simple way of understanding what is unquestionably happening. You don't believe in it — you either understand it or you don't. But pretending evolution is a matter of faith can be a clever way to hijack the conversation, and pit it in a false duality against religion. And that's how we end up with people decrying evolution, even as they eat their strawberries and pet their dogs, because they've been led to believe faith can only be held in one or the other.

But there's no reason for people of faith to reject the mountains of data and the evidence of their own senses. Reconciling is easy: Believe, if you want to, that God set up the rules of evolution among His wonders, along with the laws of physics, and probability, and everything else we can see and measure for ourselves. But don't deny evolution itself, or gravity, or the roundness of Earth. That's just covering your eyes and ears. And only monkeys would do that."

Read The Week, Why you should stop believing in evolution.  

Read also National Geographic, Was Darwin Wrong?

For less technical detail, read George Johnson, The Evidence for Evolution.

For more technical detail, read The TalkOrigins Archive, 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, The Scientific Case for Common Descent.

The Republi-CON "Religious Freedom and Heritage" Myth

Slavery was "God’s will, desegregation was Satan’s work, and the federal government was the Antichrist [and the Confederate flag as a historic symbol] . . .

[So said] a hard-working, Christian man that loves God and wants to further (God’s) work throughout the world . . .

[Who could] doubt [his and other's] sincerity. Why wouldn’t they believe racism was God’s will? We white Southerners heard that message on weekends from the pulpit, on school days from our segregated schools, and every day from our governments. When Richard and Mildred Loving left Virginia to be married, a state trial judge convicted them of violating the Racial Integrity Act. That judge wrote that 'Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents … The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.'

That’s a good background against which to measure the uproar about the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law by Governor Mike Pence last week. I don’t question the religious sincerity of anyone involved in drafting and passing this law. But sincere and faithful people, when they feel the imprimatur of both the law and the Lord, can do very ugly things."

Read The Atlantic, What Makes Indiana's Religious-Freedom Law Different?

One man's so-called religion is another man's discrimination.