A Parable For Our Times

TomPaine.com

O Strangled Town of Bethlehem

God's Politics Blog

Still True On This Christmas Day

FOR OUR WORLD

We need to stop.
Just stop.
Stop for a moment.
Before anybody
Says or does anything
That may hurt anyone else.
We need to be silent.
Just silent.
Heart Silent for a moment.
Before we forever lose
The blessing of songs
That grow in our hearts.
We need to notice.
Just notice.
Notice for a moment.
Before the future slips away
Into ashes and dust of humility.
Stop, be silent, and notice.
In so many ways, we are the same.
Our differences are unique treasures.
We have, we are, a mosaic of gifts
To nurture, to offer, to accept.
We need to be.
Just be.
Be for a moment.
Kind and gentle, innocent and trusting,
Like children and lambs,
Never judging or vengeful
Like the judging and vengeful.
And now, let us pray,
Differently, yet together,
Before there is no earth, no life,
No chance for peace.

September 12, 2001
© Matthew Joseph Thaddeus Stepanek

Learn more at Mattie's Website.

An Appeal for Redress From the War in Iraq

Many active duty, reserve, and guard service members are concerned about the war in Iraq and support the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Appeal for Redress provides a way in which individual service members can appeal to their Congressional Representative and US Senators to urge an end to the U.S. military occupation.

Please direct active military personnel to the Appeal for Redress website.

Jim Wallis: People Will Die Because Bush Won't Listen

God's Politics Blog

No More BU_ _ SH _ _ !!!

Impeachment proceedings should begin as quickly as possible!

Speaking of bu_ _ sh_ _, how about Cheney calling Rumsfeld the finest defense secretary this country has ever had! But what would you expect from someone who has not told the truth about anything yet!

Fox News Loves Little Baby Jesus, Not the Jesus as Lord of All

EthicsDaily.com

Left Behind... What in God's name are they thinking???

Following is an email from Vince Isner, director of FaithfulAmerica.org, with more insight on the Left Behind:Eternal Forces video game:

Despite a vigorous PR effort to downplay the violent, warring aspects of the game (blow away a non-Christian, lose a point...) the fact remains, the game is about blowing away non-Christians. That would mean Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and everyone else, including the healthy percentage of Christians who know better than to buy the idea that God would ever be part of such a nightmare.

The game's creator Troy Lyndon has stated, "There's no killing in the name of God." Yet the facts are, this is a game about a Christian fundamentalist-drenched end-time scenario in which the "enemy" is a dark army of non-believers pitted against converted Christians... containing as much violence as any we have seen in Grand Theft Auto. Despite poor gamer reviews its very premise remains troublesome.

What "Left Behind" leaves behind is Christ's central teaching. In fact, every major faith tradition offers the world a deep and simple well of goodness, tolerance, forgiveness, and above all, love. I would hate to think of a world in which those rich and nourishing expressions of God are extinguished, either in life or on a video screen. If there is a need for anything at all as we end this year scarred by hatred and war, it is a place where everyone's voice is heard, and where nobody's beliefs are assigned a point value.

Please allow a personal thought here. Those who believe in the end-time scenario have reasons that I may not understand. However, in Luke's gospel Jesus said that the kingdom of God is "within you." Over and over again I have seen that "kingdom" within so many - from the young mother I watched yesterday on a busy New York bus talking gently to her toddler, to my dear Muslim friend who sits daily beside his Christian wife while her body succumbs to Lou Gehrig's disease. If I have learned anything from these and so many other "angels" in this world it is that if the kingdom of God comes, it will not arrive by God overriding the worst that people can do to one another. The kingdom will come through God using the best of who we are and what we do for each other.

A well-meaning friend once asked me if I was ready for the rapture. "What if Jesus comes tomorrow? What are you going to do?"

I replied, "The more important question for me is What if Jesus DOESN'T come tomorrow? What will I do then?" So many need our expressions of care.

So here's what we are asking you to do. GO HERE and tell us how YOU hope to touch another person's life for good this Holy season. Maybe you want to share how someone has touched your life. That's good too! You can either write it to us, or (if you have a mic in your computer, and most laptops do), TELL us. We have made it very easy for you to share. We will post your entries on our website.

Imagine how grateful we are for your presence in this life and for the many acts of goodness that are "left behind" wherever you go.

The Left Behind video game!

Just in time for Christmas, the religious right has released a violent video game in which born-again Christians aim to convert or kill those who don't adhere to their extreme ideology. Disturbingly, the game's apparent attempts at religious
indoctrination are aimed at children and focus on violent, divisive, and hateful scenarios.

I continue to be amazed at how many people literally buy into this junk! Go HERE for a refresher course on the perverted theology that is behind all the "Left Behind" hysteria.

The Chickens Come Home to Roost

EthicsDaily.com

Outsourcer in Chief

Following are selections from yesterday's Paul Krugman column in the New York Times:

According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush has told aides that he won’t respond in detail to the Iraq Study Group’s report because he doesn’t want to “outsource” the role of commander in chief.

That’s pretty ironic. You see, outsourcing of the government’s responsibilities — not to panels of supposed wise men, but to private companies with the right connections — has been one of the hallmarks of his administration. And privatization through outsourcing is one reason the administration has failed on so many fronts.

For example, an article in Saturday’s New York Times describes how the Coast Guard has run a $17 billion modernization program: “Instead of managing the project itself, the Coast Guard hired Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, two of the nation’s largest military contractors, to plan, supervise and deliver the new vessels and helicopters.”

The result? Expensive ships that aren’t seaworthy. The Coast Guard ignored “repeated warnings from its own engineers that the boats and ships were poorly designed and perhaps unsafe,” while “the contractors failed to fulfill their obligation to make sure the government got the best price, frequently steering work to their subsidiaries or business partners instead of competitors.”

In Afghanistan, the job of training a new police force was outsourced to DynCorp International, a private contractor, under very loose supervision: when conducting a recent review, auditors couldn’t even find a copy of DynCorp’s contract to see what it called for. And $1.1 billion later, Afghanistan still doesn’t have an effective police training program.

... the Bush administration outsourced many responsibilities of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For example, the job of evacuating people from disaster areas was given to a trucking logistics firm, Landstar Express America. When Hurricane Katrina struck, Landstar didn’t even know where to get buses. According to Carey Limousine, which was eventually hired, Landstar “found us on the Web site.”

It’s now clear that there’s a fundamental error in the antigovernment ideology embraced by today’s conservative movement. Conservatives look at the virtues of market competition and leap to the conclusion that private ownership, in itself, is some kind of magic elixir. But there’s no reason to assume that a private company hired to perform a public service will do better than people employed directly by the government.

In fact, the private company will almost surely do a worse job if its political connections insulate it from accountability — which has, of course, consistently been the case under Mr. Bush. The inspectors’ report on Afghanistan’s police conspicuously avoided assessing DynCorp’s performance; even as government auditors found fault with Landstar, the company received a plaque from the Department of Transportation honoring its hurricane relief efforts.

Underlying this lack of accountability are the real motives for turning government functions over to private companies, which have little to do with efficiency. To say the obvious: when you see a story about failed outsourcing, you can be sure that the company in question is a major contributor to the Republican Party, is run by people with strong G.O.P. connections, or both...

Focus on the Family Web Site Endorses 'Left Behind' Video Game

EthicsDaily.com

Turning on the Puppet

Following are selections from today's Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times:

In Latvia, President Bush vowed yesterday that “I’m not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.” But his words about Iraq long ago lost their meaning. Especially the words “mission” and “complete.”


Regarding the leaked memo written by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley:

“The memo suggests that if Mr. Maliki fails to carry out a series of specified steps,” he writes, “it may ultimately be necessary to press him to reconfigure his parliamentary bloc, a step the United States could support by providing ‘monetary support to moderate groups,’ and by sending thousands of additional American troops into Baghdad to make up for what the document suggests is current shortage of Iraqi forces.”

Just what the election said Americans want: More kids at risk in Baghdad. (W.’s kids, of course, are running their own risks, partying their way through Argentina.)

Mr. Hadley bluntly mused about Mr. Malaki: “His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans, and sensitive reporting suggests he is trying to stand up to the Shi’a hierarchy and force positive change. But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.”

It’s bad enough to say that about the Iraqi puppet. But what about when the same is true of the American president?

Ten Months or Ten Years

Following is a selection from today's Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times:


On Feb. 12, 2003, before the war, I wrote a column offering what I called my “pottery store” rule for Iraq: “You break it, you own it.” It was not an argument against the war, but rather a cautionary note about the need to do it with allies, because transforming Iraq would be such a huge undertaking. (Colin Powell later picked up on this and used the phrase to try to get President Bush to act with more caution, but Mr. Bush did not heed Mr. Powell’s advice.)

But my Pottery Barn rule was wrong, because Iraq was already pretty broken before we got there — broken, it seems, by 1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions. It was held together only by Saddam’s iron fist. Had we properly occupied the country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new course. But instead we created a vacuum by not deploying enough troops.

That vacuum was filled by murderous Sunni Baathists and Al Qaeda types, who butchered Iraqi Shiites until they finally wouldn’t take it any longer and started butchering back, which brought us to where we are today. The Sunni Muslim world should hang its head in shame for the barbarism it has tolerated and tacitly supported by the Sunnis of Iraq, whose violence, from the start, has had only one goal: America must fail in its effort to bring progressive politics or democracy to this region. America must fail — no matter how many Iraqis have to be killed, America must fail.

This has left us with two impossible choices. If we’re not ready to do what is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it, then we need to leave — because to just keep stumbling along as we have been makes no sense. It will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces.

Bush still does not get it!

The following headline is just another reminder of how delusional this man is! But it also reminds us of how narrow minded right wingers can be - they see nothing outside the scope of their own agenda and prejudices.


RIGA, Latvia (CNN) -- President Bush on Tuesday rejected suggestions that Iraq is in a civil war and vowed again he won't support the removal of U.S. troops from the war-torn country "before the mission is complete."

"There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented in my opinion because of the attacks by al Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal," he said, calling the violence part of a plot.

Race Denial Is a River in the Heart of America

EthicsDaily.com

The danger of this damaged administration

Dick Cheney has been, is, and will continue to be the most dangerous person in this country. Bush has never had a clue, and he has let neocons led by Cheney continue to run this country right into the ground!

The Next Act by Seymour Hersh

Lost in the Desert

Following are a couple of quotes I particularly like from a Maureen Dowd editorial on the Iraq fiasco:

"The good news is that the election ... dismantled the president’s fake reality about Iraq..."

"Dick Cheney and his wormy aides, of course, are still babbling about total victory and completing the mission by raising the stakes and knocking off the mullahs in Tehran. His tombstone will probably say, 'Here lies Dick Cheney, still winning.'"

A Come-to-Daddy Moment

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote the following today:

Poppy Bush and James Baker gave Sonny the presidency to play with and he broke it. So now they’re taking it back.

They are dragging W. away from those reckless older guys who have been such a bad influence and getting him some new minders who are a lot more practical.

In a scene that might be called “Murder on the Oval Express,” Rummy turned up dead with so many knives in him that it’s impossible to say who actually finished off the man billed as Washington’s most skilled infighter. (Poppy? Scowcroft? Baker? Laura? Condi? The Silver Fox? Retired generals? Serving generals? Future generals? Troops returning to Iraq for the umpteenth time without a decent strategy? Democrats? Republicans? Joe Lieberman?)

The defense chief got hung out to dry before Saddam got hung. The president and Karl Rove, underestimating the public’s hunger for change or overestimating the loyalty of a fed-up base, did not ice Rummy in time to save the Senate from teetering Democratic. But once Sonny managed to heedlessly dynamite the Republican majority — as well as the Middle East, the Atlantic alliance and the U.S. Army — then Bush Inc., the family firm that snatched the presidency for W. in 2000, had to step in. Two trusted members of the Bush 41 war council, Mr. Baker and Robert Gates, have been dispatched to discipline the delinquent juvenile and extricate him from the mother of all messes.

Mr. Gates, already on Mr. Baker’s “How Do We Get Sonny Out of Deep Doo Doo in Iraq?” study group, left his job protecting 41’s papers at Texas A&M to return to Washington and pry the fingers of Poppy’s old nemesis, Rummy, off the Pentagon.

“They had to bring in someone from the old gang,” said someone from the old gang. “That has to make Junior uneasy. With Bob, the door is opened again to 41 and Baker and Brent.”

W. had no choice but to make an Oedipal U-turn. He couldn’t let Nancy Pelosi subpoena the cranky Rummy for hearings on Iraq. “He’s not exactly Mr. Charming or Mr. Truthful, and he’d be on TV saying something stupid,” said a Bush 41 official. “Bob can just go up to the Hill and say: ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there when that happened.’ ”

Bob Gates, his friends say, had been worried about the belligerent, arrogant, ideological style of Rummy & Cheney from the start. He fretted at the way W.’s so-called foreign policy “dream team” — including his old staffer and fellow Soviet expert Condi — made it up as they went along, even though that had been their complaint about the Clinton foreign policy team. A realpolitik advocate like his mentor, General Scowcroft, he was critical of a linear, moralizing style that disdained nuance, demoted diplomacy and inflated villains. In 2004, he publicly questioned the administration’s approach to Iran.

While Vice went off to a corner to lick his wounds, W. was forced to do his best imitation of his dad yesterday, talking about “bipartisan outreach,” “people have spoken,” blah-blah-blah — after he’d been out on the trail saying that electing Democrats would mean that “the terrorists win and America loses.”

“I share a large part of the responsibility” for the “thumpin’ ” of Republicans, he told reporters. Actually, he gets full responsibility.

W. has stopped talking about democracy as a standard of success in Iraq; yesterday, he said that Iraq had to “govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself.”

He was asked if his surprise at the election results showed he was out of touch with Americans. “I thought when it was all said and done,” he replied, “the American people would understand the importance of taxes and the importance of security.”

So it was just that the American people were too dumb to understand? W. also managed to bash Vietnam vets, saying that this war isn’t similar because there’s a volunteer army, so “the troops understand the consequences of Iraq in the global war on terror.” Is that why W. stayed out of Vietnam? Because he understood it?

An ashen Rummy was also condescending during his uncomfortable tableau with W. and Bob Gates in the Oval Office, implying that he was dumped because Americans just didn’t “comprehend” what was going on in Iraq. Actually, Rummy, we get it. You don’t get it.

“Baker’s no fool,” a Bush 41 official said. “He wasn’t going to go out there with a plan for Iraq and have Rummy shoot it down. He wanted a receptive audience. Everyone had to be on the same page before the plan is unveiled.”

They don’t call him the Velvet Hammer for nothing. R.I.P., Rummy.

Even Bush's puppeteers are angry with him!

Vanity fair interview