Why Are So Many Christians So Un-Christian?

The Article: Why Are So Many Christians So Un-Christian? by Amanda Marcotte in Alternet.

The Text: In an age where your average Republican politician is thumping the Bible with one hand and trying to strip food from the mouths of the poor with the other, it’s become a sad cliché to point out how little the most outspoken Christians have in common with their charity-preaching, forgiveness-loving messiah. It’s only gotten worse in recent years, with the followers of the man who cured lepers threatening to shut down the government if Obama insists on giving more people access to healthcare.

But while a nudge and a laugh at the silly Christian hypocrites is a good time, it’s worth looking deeper at what’s really going on with the parsimonious haters of the poor who claim to speak for Jesus. The fact of the matter is that right-wing Christians refuse to see their differences with Jesus as hypocrisy. To really understand how religion works in the world of politics, it helps to understand that it’s usually more about rationalizing what you already want to believe than it is about actually studying your religious texts and drawing intelligent conclusions from it.

Continue Reading

WTF? Government Mandated Healthcare…In 1798

The Article: by Rick Ungar in Forbes.

The Text: The ink was barely dry on the PPACA when the first of many lawsuits to block the mandated health insurance provisions of the law was filed in a Florida District Court.

The pleadings, in part, read –

The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.

State of Florida, et al. vs. HHS

It turns out, the Founding Fathers would beg to disagree.

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed – “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.

Continue Reading

How Wall Street Robs Public Workers

The Article: Looting the Pension Funds by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.

The Text: In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo – an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist – the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.

Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn’t even know how to react. “She’s Yale, Harvard, Oxford – she worked on Wall Street,” says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. “Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about.”

Continue Reading

The Reign Of Morons

The Article: The Reign Of Morons Is Here by Charles P. Pierce in Esquire.

The Text: Only the truly naive can be truly surprised.

Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

Continue Reading

Chronicling The Hours Before The Shutdown

The Article: My Shutdown Diary by David Weigel in Slate.

The Text: Monday, Sept. 30, 2:08 p.m. If the House GOP’s Saturday night vote-a-rama had a point, it was pure PR. House Republicans were at work while Americans were watching baseball; Senate Democrats were AWOL. On Sunday, led by Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a gaggle of House Republicans had stood between the Capitol and C-SPAN cameras and hectored Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Democrats for not moving the newest continuing resolution—the one with the one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act. “Come back and do what is required in a democracy!” said Arkansas Rep. Tim Griffin. “O Senate, where art thou?” asked Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn.

The Senate was biding time until Reid brought it back to kill the resolution. Senators filed in to table it, all 54 Democrats versus all 46 Republicans. Arizona Sen. John McCain stuck around after his vote to tell reporters, who have rekindled their affection for him, why the House GOP was careening toward death and destruction.

Continue Reading