May 13, 2011 · 5:33 pm

Chris Matthews: Bush Was ‘Wise Ass Rich Kid’ About bin Laden

And as a follow-up to my previous post…

Another perspective:

MSNBC host Chris Matthews said Tuesday that former President George W. Bush had a “wise ass” attitude about terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

“I’m not a Bush hater, but that was wise-ass behavior there,” he said. “Just wise-ass. I mean this is the rich kid acting like I don’t care about that old girlfriend that dumped me. That was behavioral weirdness right there.”

Matthews’ guest Joan Walsh suggested Bush tried to downplay the importance of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden so that Americans would focus on Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

via Chris Matthews: Bush was ‘wise ass rich kid’ about bin Laden | Raw Replay.

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May 13, 2011 · 4:30 pm

Former Colin Powell Chief of Staff: Bush didn’t want to get bin Laden

Interesting information here….

Confirms what I always suspected….

The Bushies wanted binLaden free so they could use him to drive fear and their political agenda…

Former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Wednesday that President George W. Bush wasn’t interested in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice.

“I don’t think they really wanted to get bin Laden,” Wilkerson said.

“You could be very cynical and say he didn’t want to get him because once they got him the war was over and that left all the political advantage gone,” he added. “Or you could say that they knew that it was almost an impossibility to get him given what they had done to the intelligence and other aspects of the government that you needed to get him. They just about ruined it.”

via Former Colin Powell Chief of Staff: Bush didn’t want to get bin Laden | Raw Replay.

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May 13, 2011 · 12:28 pm

Good Without God: Why “Non-Religious” Is the Fastest-Growing Preference in America | | AlterNet

Very interesting article….

My theory is that Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the Religious Right have made Christianity appear so hard, judgemental and unforgiving, that they made it safe for Americans to be open to alternatives.  In the long run, they did more to hurt the “moral majority” than to help it….

Add to that, the expansion of our ability to easily access information on the Internet, increased travel and the internationalization of the world economy that exposed Americans to other cultures and beliefs and we have a much more open society.

Currently more than one billion people around the world define themselves as agnostic, atheist or nonreligious — including 15 percent of Americans. Perhaps more striking, “nonreligious” is not only the fastest growing religious preference in the U.S., but also the only one to increase its percentage in every state over the past generation.

Phil Goldberg and Greg Epstein have provocative perspectives on who these people are, what they believe, and how they arrived at their worldviews and their moral codes.

In February, 1968, the Beatles went to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It may have been the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those 40 days in the wilderness.

With these words, interfaith minister Goldberg begins American Veda, his look at India’s impact on Western culture. From Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, succeeding generations absorbed India’s “science of consciousness,” and millions have come to accept and live by the central teaching of Vedic wisdom: “Truth is One, the wise call it by many names.”

Acccording to Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, recent bestsellers from Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris stress the irrationality of belief and what’s wrong with religion, while offering few positive alternatives. In Good without God, Epstein explains how humanists strive to live well, build community, uphold ethical values, and lift the human spirit…all without a god. “It’s not enough to just ‘discover’ the meaning of life. Humanism is concerned with one of the most important ethical questions—what we do once we’ve found purpose in life.”

via Good Without God: Why “Non-Religious” Is the Fastest-Growing Preference in America | | AlterNet.

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May 13, 2011 · 10:31 am

Friday The 13th Superstitions: Where’d They Come From?

Beware!

Only kidding…

It usually works out that I’m usually on an airplane on Friday, the 13th…

This year, I’ll be on the road….

Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

From the Huffington Post:

Friday the 13th happens at least once a year due to the modern calendar. Like last year, there’s just one this year, but watch out: there are three in 2012 (January, April, July).

When you combine an historically unlucky day (Friday) with an unlucky number (13), all sorts of weirdness is bound to ensue. Hence the obsession with Friday the 13th.

Historically, some unlucky events are believed to have occurred on the day too. French King Philip IV rounded up hundreds of monks and tortured them for heresy on Friday, October 13, 1307. Some say Jesus Christ was crucified on Friday the 13th. More recently, on Friday, March 13, 1992, an earthquake in Turkey killed nearly 2,000 and left 50,000 homeless.

The No. 13 itself has driven people crazy for centuries, in large part due to Friday the 13th. Some people are so obsessed that triskaidekaphobia was born — the fear of the number 13.

That fear has led the human race to make some strange decisions. Here are 13 examples. Vote on the most ridiculous and be extra careful today!

via Friday The 13th Superstitions: Where’d They Come From?.

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May 13, 2011 · 8:27 am

AFA Writer Condemns Christians Who Practice Yoga | Right Wing Watch

I am so tired of these people at the American Family Association….

They want to drag everyone back to the Dark Ages.

Just for reference and in the interest of full disclosure, the Southern Poverty Law Center, to whom I contribute, has named them a Hate Group and put them on their Hate Watch List along with militia groups and other militant right wing organizations that are potentially dangerous.

Writing for the American Family Association, Marsha West is insisting that Christians stop practicing yoga. West defends Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention and Douglas Groothuis of the Denver Seminary, who drew controversy for criticizing Christians who practiced yoga, lamenting that “we have blended into the dishonest, destructive and debase culture so thoroughly that it’s near impossible to tell the difference between Christians and heathens!” West calls Buddhism and Hinduism “evil” religions and argues that yoga is “diametrically opposed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ”:

via AFA Writer Condemns Christians Who Practice Yoga | Right Wing Watch.

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May 13, 2011 · 8:02 am

US Preacher Warns End of the World is Nigh: May 21st Around 6pm

I’ll be on the way home from Ocracoke Island…

Let me know if I miss it…

From the Independent in the UK:

The end of the world is nigh; 21 May, to be precise. That’s the date when Harold Camping, a preacher from Oakland, California, is confidently predicting the Second Coming of the Lord. At about 6pm, he reckons 2 per cent of the world’s population will be immediately “raptured” to Heaven; the rest of us will get sent straight to the Other Place.

If Mr Camping were speaking from any normal pulpit, it would be easy to dismiss him as just another religious eccentric wrongly calling the apocalypse. But thanks to this elderly man’s ubiquity, on America’s airwaves and billboards, his unlikely Doomsday message is almost impossible to ignore.

Every day Mr Camping, an 89-year-old former civil engineer, speaks to his followers via the Family Radio Network, a religious broadcasting organisation funded entirely by donations from listeners. Such is their generosity (assets total $120m) that his network now owns 66 stations in the US alone.

Those deep pockets were raided to allow Family Radio to launch a high-profile advertising campaign, proclaiming the approaching Day of Judgement. More than 2,000 billboards across the US are adorned with its slogans, which include “Blow the trumpet, warn the people!”. A fleet of logoed camper vans is touring every state in the nation. “It’s getting real close. It’s really getting pretty awesome, when you think about it,” Mr Camping told The Independent on Sunday. “We’re not talking about a ball game, or a marriage, or graduating from college. We’re talking about the end of the world, a matter of being eternally dead, or being eternally alive, and it’s all coming to a head right now.”

via US preacher warns end of the world is nigh: 21 May, around 6pm, to be precise – Americas, World – The Independent.

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May 12, 2011 · 10:00 pm

Rand Paul: ‘Right to Health Care’ is Slavery

I still can’t believe this man is a U.S. Senator….

He’s a pompous, self-important, ignorant jackass- so that may mean he is qualified to be a Senator in today’s Senate…

Still, I somehow don’t find it funny for a rich white man to compare himself to a slave…

A hearing of the Senate HELP Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging looked at emergency room use and took an odd turn Wednesday when Sen. Rand Paul compared the “right to health care” to slavery.

“With regard to the idea whether or not you have a right to health care you have to realize what that implies. I am a physician. You have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. You are going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants, the nurses. … You are basically saying you believe in slavery,” said Paul (R-Ky.), who is an ophthalmologist.

Paul, who is the subcommittee ranking member, said he believed that the notion of expanding federally funded community health centers to ensure that everyone had a “right” to care was not constitutional and would enslave doctors. Doctors, he said, should care for patients because of their own moral code.

“Our founding documents said you have a right to pursue happiness, but there’s no guarantee about physical comfort. When you say you have a ‘right’ to something there is an implication of force. … I will always treat people who come into the ER because that is what we always have done and because I believe in the Hippocratic Oath.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who chairs the subcommittee turned to one of the hearing witnesses, Dr. Dana Kraus and asked her if she believed she was a slave working at a federally qualified health center.

“I love my job. I do not feel like a slave,” Kraus said.

via Rand Paul: ‘Right to health care’ is slavery – Kate Nocera – POLITICO.com.

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May 12, 2011 · 7:05 pm

Was Your High School Boyfriend Gay?

I have to keep checking this site to see if I show up….

I figure it’s only a matter of time before someone turns me in…

The site is My High School Boyfriend Was Gay…

Love it!

http://www.myhsboyfriendwasgay.com/

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May 12, 2011 · 5:44 pm

Catholic Scholars To GOP Speaker Boehner: Your Agenda Defies ‘Church’s Most Ancient Moral Teachings’

I’m glad to see more and more religious leaders focusing on the hypocrisy of the Republican Budget process.

The GOP has counted on the Religious Right and Right to Lifers – including Catholics- to get them into office for years…

Then they ignore them and serve the Rich…

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) will give the commencement address at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. this weekend. Ahead of the visit, dozens of faculty members from the school and other other Catholic universities are writing to Boehner — who is himself an observant Catholic — challenging his willingness to “gut” social programs while protecting “new tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.” “Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings” of caring for the poor, they write:

“Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.”

“The 2012 budget you shepherded to passage in the House of Representatives guts long-established protections for the most vulnerable members of society. It is particularly cruel to pregnant women and children, gutting Maternal and Child Health grants and slashing $500 million from the highly successful Women Infants and Children nutrition program. When they graduate from WIC at age 5, these children will face a 20% cut in food stamps. The House budget radically cuts Medicaid and effectively ends Medicare. It invokes the deficit to justify visiting such hardship upon the vulnerable, while it carves out $3 trillion in new tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.”

More:   ThinkProgress » Catholic Scholars To Boehner: Your Agenda Defies ‘Church’s Most Ancient Moral Teachings’ On Helping Poor.

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May 12, 2011 · 2:40 pm

McDonald’s Revamps Stores to Look Like Starbucks

I’m glad they are so focused on the aesthetics, but what about the food?

Remember that Happy Meal Test?

They are still serving those hamburgers that never decompose when left outside for months….

McDonald’s is looking less like McDonald’s and more like Starbucks.

By Brian Blanco, for USA TODAY

At a time when most of McDonald’s competitors are still shell-shocked from the recent recession, the fast-food giant is undertaking its biggest store-by-store makeover in the chain’s 56-year history: The 500-pound clown of fast food is trying to look more like a grown-up.

It’s a $1 billion-plus undertaking that McDonald’s and its franchisees hope, by 2015, will have the vast majority of America’s 14,000 McDonald’s looking comfortable enough to hang out in long after you’ve gobbled down your burger, fries — and smoothie.

For the next generation of McDonald’s customers, the notion of what a McDonald’s restaurant looks like inside and out could be turned on its head. Goodbye, fiberglass tables and industrial steel chairs. Adios, neon-yellow, bright-red interiors. Hello, wooden tables, comfortable faux leather chairs and interiors newly painted in muted oranges, yellows and even subtle greens.

Take away all the McDonald’s signage — and the familiar front counter area — and customers who were to drive by or step inside wouldn’t likely know they were face-to-face with a McDonald’s. Even from the street, many of the changes are immediately apparent. No more clown-red roofs. No more confusion about what door to use. And that all-too-familiar white facade has been replaced with more inviting earth tones and glass.

More:  McDonald’s revamps stores to look more upscale – USATODAY.com.

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