Relatives separated by deportation and immigration wave to people standing on the US side from the border during a brief reunification meeting at the banks of the Rio Bravo, a natural border between U.S. and Mexico, October 29, 2016.Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
The US-Mexico border wall is worth standing up to. We have some experience and momentum to leverage from Standing Rock. This odious toad of a genuflecting tyrant deserves a ire rebuke where it matters.
I am not Charlie. I don’t support being inflammatory when feelings are so raw. But I don’t like being bossed around. What about something more harmless? You know, where the right thing is being rejected. Just as the extremists don’t speak for all of Islam, responding to them by ridiculing what all Muslim’s regard as holy is equally non-reciprocal. But what about meta-irony, like the New Yorker cover showing the Obamas as terrorists fist bumping in the Oval Office?
What does it mean to be American? It means you get to be anything you want to be. – “Papa Sam”
A recent spate of conservative rulings from the Supreme Court found me holding contempt for their allowance of public speech of a different sort. It seems it is fine to start every town hall meeting with claims about how Jesus Christ came back from the dead or how he is the ultimate judge. Do some research of your own and you’ll agree, some of the quotes about what we are all supposed to believe surfacing in the non-sectarian public space are downright scary. The ruling in question here, The Town of Greece v Galloway (http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/town-of-greece-v-galloway/) was indeed close, a 5-4 vote, with the usual right wing and left in their respective corners.
I recently came across a piece by the mother of Israeli soldiers, Paula R. Stern, whose blog is called “A Soldier’s Mother.” People can say what they want about Israel, but there’s nothing like hearing about it from the inside. So rather than me talk this time, I thought I’d let her tell it in her own words. Here’s an excerpt from her story: What’s it actually like in Israel?
Israel is a country like no other. It is a country of joy, in a place where all others would think there should be none. It is a country of miracles, of unbelievable awe. It is a country built and sustained on faith – the deep kind that simply fills you with the knowledge that this land is yours and all is right with the world so long as you can awaken here each morning, go to sleep here all night and know your children will do the same.
This Dobson Accuses Obama of ‘Distorting’ Bible set of headlines is really one of the sickest flailings yet to emerge from the McCain side of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
In a nutshell, James Dobson, a right wing evangelist who has a huge following and a radio show called Focus on the Family, has said of Obama: “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson went on to say: “He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”
So what did Obama do? He simply raised the very important question about how to interpret the Bible, asking what do we want to take literally and what don’t we. Obama preached tolerance and acceptance of our emerging diversity. He said, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers. And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s?”
Obama pointed to passages such as the Sermon on the Mount, and sections of Leviticus that refer to Jewish dietary law and asked questions such as whether we accept the slave-owning laws along with the more relevant laws. It was this attempt by Obama to refer to these different sections that most offended Dobson. Dobson essentially said how dare Obama equate these Old and New Testament portions — hence his “gutter” comment.