BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
ONE can be forgiven if one comes to believe the cross karoline leavitt, White House FF* press secretary frequently wears is not a symbol of her faith but is mere jewelry, after all, there is no way a person of true faith, a person true to their faith, would not be able to come before the press and the American people to repeat and defend the lies, the hatred, the racism, the greed, the misogyny, class warfare and fearmongering being spread by the drumpf / trump-vance administration and the gop / greed over people-republican party. UNLESS of course they are believers in, followers of the neo-nazi, fascist religious right-wing extremist magat cult with it's alt-jesus icon and "christian" sharia anti-beatitudes beliefs. Oh and here is the truth about another of their lies, this one exposed by the Washington Post fact checkers....
In her maiden news briefing, Leavitt defended the Trump administration’s freeze on federal grants by pointing to a particular line item as “preposterous” — $50 million to fund condoms in Gaza.
Regular readers know that we have a high bar for fact-checking flacks, as they are paid to mislead and dissemble. We prefer to keep our scrutiny on policymakers and people with authority. But this was Leavitt’s first news conference, and she made an astonishing claim that spread rapidly on social media.
Could it be true? When we queried Leavitt, she responded by sending a Fox News article that initially just quoted her own statement. Quoting yourself is not evidence. Moreover, the article quoted an unnamed White House official as saying that the “State Department halted several million dollars going to condoms in Gaza this past weekend.”
That’s not the same as $50 million.
Last year, the State Department launched a five-year, $50 million program to improve health care in Gaza. But the contractor, Anera, said it was not supplying condoms.
“Definitely no purchase of condoms in our program, and there are no components for family planning in the GHRA [Gaza Health Recovery Activity],” spokesman Steve Fake said. “We have asked around, and no one is sure what this is referring to.”
Last night, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce posted a thread on X in which she cited examples of “unjustified and non-emergency spending.” The first example was “Condoms. Prevented $102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraception.”
She did not identify the contractor, but, in an email to State Department reporters, her office said it was “$102,236,000 to fund the International Medical Corps in Gaza.” IMC is a global first responder based in Los Angeles.
Could half — or even a significant portion — of that contract be for condoms? There is no evidence of that.
Let’s start with why the U.S. government distributes condoms overseas: It’s to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Perhaps the Trump administration believes that is a preposterous waste of money, but many of those condom purchases are for a George W. Bush program called the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which is credited with saving 26 million lives. No countries or territories in the Middle East are part of PEPFAR.
More broadly, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) distributes condoms to address gaps in their availability and use, especially in low- and middle-income countries, to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
A USAID report for fiscal 2023, the most recent detailing condom expenditures unrelated to PEPFAR, showed that about $46,000 was spent on condoms in the Middle East — but only in Jordan. The report said that was the first shipment of condoms to the Middle East since fiscal 2019, when $1 million was spent.
Indeed, according to the report, spending $50 million on condoms for an entity roughly double the size of Washington would be a huge increase in condom spending. From fiscal 2016 to 2022, USAID spent $118.6 million to buy 3.6 billion male condoms for 60 countries. That’s an average of $17 million a year for the entire world — one-third of the amount Leavitt said would be spent just on Gaza. (USAID also distributes female condoms, but that’s a small fraction of the spending.)
In effect, USAID has been buying condoms at an average price of 3.3 cents. Was the U.S. government really going to distribute more than 1.5 billion condoms in Gaza? That makes little sense.
Traditionally, family planning in the Palestinian territories, including Gaza, was handled by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The agency distributed oral contraceptives and condoms, but President Joe Biden froze U.S. funding a year ago after Israel claimed that 12 of the agency’s 33,000 employees participated in Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel.
The war that erupted after that attack created a family planning crisis in Gaza, according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation. “Contraception is also in very short supply, with reports of women sharing contraceptive pills leading to unintended pregnancies,” the IPPF said in a 2023 report. “The unavailability of condoms, which were already heavily restricted in Gaza, will lead to the transmission of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.”
With the ceasefire now in place, it’s possible there is a pressing need to fill. But we could not find any evidence that the International Medical Corps contracts called for condom delivery.
Todd Bernhardt, IMC spokesman, told The Fact Checker that “no U.S. government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms.”
In a November report describing its activities in Gaza, IMC said it deployed two state-of-the-art field hospitals — the first in January 2024, with 200 beds, and the second in July 2024, with 50 beds. The hospitals operate 24 hours per day, seven days per week. Each day they see as many as 2,000 patients, perform an average of 45 surgeries and deliver an average of 10 babies, the report said. It did not mention any family planning efforts. CBS News last year aired a report on American doctors working at the hospitals.
“Since January 2024, International Medical Corps has provided health care to more than 383,000 civilians who had no other access to services or treatment, including performing about 11,000 surgeries, with one-third of those categorized as major or moderate procedures,” Bernhardt said. “We have assisted in the delivery of some 5,000 babies, about 20 percent of them via the Caesarean section. In addition, International Medical Corps has screened 111,000 people for malnutrition, treated 2,767 for acute malnutrition, distributed micronutrient supplements to 36,000 people, and more.”
“If the stop-work order remains in place, we will be unable to sustain these activities beyond the next week or so,” he said.
After this fact check was published, a White House official sent The Fact Checker a statement claiming, without providing documentation, that two $50 million buckets of aid for Gaza via the International Medical Corps that were suspended included “family planning programming including emergency contraception; Sexual health-care including prevention and management of sexually transmitted infections (STIs); and Adolescent sexual and reproductive health.” The statement added that this included contraceptives and that “condoms have traditionally always been used for family planning in developing countries by USAID.”
The White House official declined to say how much money in these contracts related to family planning. From our review of International Medical Corps contracts, we did not find any funds earmarked for contraception or family planning. In any case, the White House statement appears to be a pullback of the original claim.
On the face of it, Leavitt’s statement that $50 million was going to be spent on condoms is preposterous. That figure is three times the yearly average spent by the U.S. government for the entire world. Moreover, neither she nor the State Department could provide documentation supporting this claim. The department identified a contractor that it claimed was distributing condoms in Gaza, but the organization says no U.S. money is involved.
Leavitt earns Four Pinocchios. Not an auspicious debut.
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BEWARE OF FALSE TEACHERS AND FALSE PROPHETS
SO many people are blinded by their own self-righteousness they are unaware the "christian" sharia the leadership of the new apostolic reformation sees them as expendable pawns in the nar's campaign to destroy our democratic Republic and replace it with a theocratic oligarchy. The nar is nothing more than a cult that blends ignorance, hate, misogyny, racism and greed with perversions of Judaism and Christianity. If successful the nar leadership will turn on these pawns with an Old Testament vengeance that will destroy families. BESURE to listen to the Reveal podcast on the NAR in the second article of this post. Examples of theocratic oligarchies are saudi arabia, yemen, afghanistan, iraq, israel and syria just to name a few. From Mother Jones.....
Vicki Kraft, who traveled from Washington state to attend the rally, wore all white and a bridal veil that, she told me, symbolized the “bride of Christ.” Kraft, who served in the Washington State House of Representatives for the 17th legislative district from 2017 to 2023, said she was “certain” the last election had been stolen from Trump. She worried about “the integrity of our elections—if that degrades and the Lord doesn’t bring that back by his grace and cause people to fear and have integrity again.”
Stephanie Liu had traveled from New York to attend the rally, but it wasn’t her first time in DC. She goes every month with a group from her Chinese American church to visit the January 6 insurrectionists in prison. “We came from a communist country,” she said. “We know Americans should not have political prisoners. But sadly, now they have more than 1,000 political prisoners.” Liu wore a T-shirt that bore the slogan “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my president.” She explained, “Jesus is my Savior because Jesus is our Lord. He’s the greatest. He’s our strength. He is the master. But President Trump is chosen by God, and he works for we the people.” She added, “I just pray that God will protect America again, and anybody who has common sense, if they truly know the Christian value, they will support Trump.”
There’s a quickly growing religious movement whose followers believe Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. The New Apostolic Reformation, as it’s known, seeks an explicitly Christian command of the highest levels of the government, including the presidency and the Supreme Court—but its leaders are working on the hyper-local level, too.
In the latest episode of Reveal, my colleagues traveled to a church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to see how these Christian nationalists have inserted their ideology into the very fabric of local civic life rather than merely be the “head-in-the-sand, Jesus-loves-you kind of Christians.”
LISTEN TO REVEAL'S PODCAST ON THE NEW APOSTOLIC REFORMATION 'IN GOD WE VOTE'
To Pastor Don Lamb, this is not a Christian takeover. Yet his congregation is influenced by the elusive, hard-to-pin-down New Apostolic Reformation movement whose followers believe that Christians are called to control the government and that former President Donald Trump was chosen by God.
There are prophets and apostles, and a spiritual war is underway, not just in Pennsylvania. “Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million,” wrote Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler in her feature story on the movement in our latest magazine issue. As Butler noted, “Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR ‘the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.'”
This week, Reveal’s Najib Aminy and Butler explain what the New Apostolic Reformation is and what happens when it seeps into small-town churches like Lamb’s.
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DO not discount the threat project 2025 is to our democratic Republic. This document is not an outline of the neo-nazi, fascist, authoritarian, unchristian proposals to do away with the United States of America we know and love. No, it is a 922 page game plan documenting the steps the theocratic supporters of "christian sharia", the followers of their alt-jesus and their allied right-wing extremist must follow to take power and rule our country a la hitler, stalin, mao, pol pot, khomeini, the taliban and the saudi royal family. This from Sojourners, and here is a link to join the ACLU's fight against project 2025. Everyone opposed to project 2025 needs to support the Harris-Walz campaign by volunteering and donating (if you can afford to).
Rev. Adam Russell Taylor is president of Sojourners and author of A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community. Follow him on X @revadamtaylor.
If you’ve been following the 2024 U.S. presidential election, you’ve likely heard of Project 2025.
The project, created by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, rose to the top of the headlines once again this week when it was reported that the director of the project, Paul Dans, was stepping down and that the project wouldn’t be drafting any new policy ideas. This news arrived after former President Donald Trump and his campaign repeatedly tried to distance themselves from the project in increasingly aggressive ways. But what is this project in the first place?
First unveiled in April 2023, and endorsed by more than 100 conservative organizations, Project 2025 is a 922-page document that serves as a to-do list for the next conservative president to accomplish. Activists, journalists, and many religious leaders have been warning the public for months about what they see as some of Project 2025’s more extreme policy proposals and the ways in which the blueprint would push our nation toward autocracy and Christian nationalism. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts even said, “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the Left allows it to be.” It’s troubling that many on the far-Right are determined to enact this extreme agenda, even if for some that means violence.
While I’m encouraged that this policy agenda has now been deemed too politically toxic for the Trump campaign, the inescapable reality is that several parts of the 2025 agenda are identical to his campaign’s policy promises, including commitments around mass deportations, closing down the Department of Education, politicizing the Justice Department, and more. And the link between Heritage proposals and Republican administration policies is not new. Heritage Foundation proposals issued prior to previous Republican administrations have often been similar to what those administrations have actually done in office. Perhaps even more to the point, about 140 former Trump administration officials helped shape Project 2025 — or even wrote parts of it. These include six of Trump’s former Cabinet secretaries, four of his nominees to ambassadorships, several of his immigration officials, and his first deputy chief of staff.
In an explainer piece, Vox breaks down Project 2025’s priorities into three main areas: Concentrating power in the presidency, longtime conservative priorities, and a hardline religious-right agenda.
As I said in my most recent book, A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community, our country needs to move beyond our broken and polarized politics to a shared moral vision — one that is grounded in a larger story of us, rooted in our common civic and religious values, and is capable of bringing people from across political and cultural persuasions together as one nation. The most promising moral vision for our country today is the same concept that animated the 20th-century’s Civil Rights movement: the Beloved Community. In a Beloved Community, everyone is equally valued and is able to thrive locally and nationally, and our growing diversity is embraced as a strength rather than something to be feared. In other words, a nation in which our promise of “liberty and justice for all” becomes a reality for all.
Christians and people of all faith backgrounds (and no faith background) can and should disagree on the best ways to enact what each of us value most. But I fail to see any biblical justification for the vast majority of the proposals laid out by Project 2025. At a time when competing platforms and visions about the future of the U.S. are being issued across the political spectrum, I want to take the time to see how Project 2025’s priorities and prescriptions stack up to what I see as the principles — or Beatitudes — of the Beloved Community.
My vision of the Beloved Community is to build a nation in which neither punishment nor privilege is viciously attached to one’s race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, ability, or any other category of human difference that’s been used to divide and exclude. It’s creating a nation where everyone matters, everyone belongs, and everyone can thrive. That starts with commitments that honor the image of God, the imago dei, in each and every person, and the recognition of our mutual interdependence.
Project 2025 so often tramples on these commitments by seeking to eliminate the Department of Education; undermine Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work throughout the government; and roll back progress around women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. While I share the desire to strengthen families, the plan has a narrow vision of what families should look like and opposes policies that would alleviate many of the economic pressures and inequities that are hurting families of all types. Project 2025 has plans for major cuts to Medicaid and other social safety net programs. This is incompatible with my view that the Beloved Community requires us to work toward a nation and world that achieves dignity for all, in line with the biblical mandate to prioritize the welfare of the widow, orphan, immigrant, and people experiencing poverty.
When it comes to other longtime conservative priorities, my own sense of what it would take to build the Beloved Community often clashes with Project 2025’s wish list. For example, one of the Beatitudes of the Beloved Community is a commitment to radical welcome. As I say in A More Perfect Union: “In our best moments, America has been a refuge for the persecuted and downtrodden, believing that our strength derives from our compassion and commitment to radical welcome.” This posture should inspire efforts to transform our immigration system by providing an earned pathway to citizenship to undocumented immigrants, addressing the root causes of migration, reforming our asylum system to more efficiently process new cases, and implementing humane efforts to strengthen effective security at our border. In contrast, Project 2025 calls for measures such as banning non-citizens from living in federally assisted housing, even if they live with a citizen; creating a new “border and immigration agency”; resurrecting Trump’s border wall; and deputizing the military to deport millions of people who are already in the country illegally.
Environmental stewardship is crucial to building the Beloved Community. Instead of the false theology of dominion, God commands that we serve and protect the earth, as articulated in Genesis: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (2:15). In the face of environmental degradation and rapid climate change, this commitment requires combatting environmental racism and reducing our carbon emissions. So, I note with alarm that Project 2025 aims to roll back environmental regulations and deprioritize the fight against climate change, in part by breaking up and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.
If Project 2025 came to fruition, the presidency would hold more concentrated, unchecked power. The proposed policies would take power away from career federal civil servants — those who are not appointed by any particular administration and cannot be easily fired. Instead, it would give that power to political appointees — those more likely to go along with the president’s actions, since the president can dismiss them at any time, for any reason.
The plan would also move the Justice Department, along with all of its law enforcement arms, like the FBI, directly under presidential control and would further undermine voting rights.
Given Trump’s documented authoritarian rhetoric and instincts, these Project 2025 recommendations would embolden and enable authoritarianism. They also run directly counter to my view that building the Beloved Community in the U.S. will require us to revitalize and reinvent our democracy. As Christians, we should be wary of efforts to remove the checks and balances that enable us to restrain the abuse of power. Jesus consistently confronted abuse of power, wherever it cropped up: He condemned the greed of merchants in the temple, called out the hypocrisy of religious leaders, and challenged the brutality of Roman soldiers.
Instead of consolidating power at the top of the government, we must empower all Americans by fortifying voting rights and access, ensuring that we have a professionalized and depoliticized federal workforce, and increasing accountability for those in power. In A More Perfect Union, I warn that we need to move away from politicians of either party who prioritize “rapacious partisanship or cult-of-personality loyalty,” and counsel that it would be crucial in the years ahead for people of all political stripes to focus on “healing public trust and revitalizing the norms and institutions that are necessary for civic health.” In contrast, Project 2025 would push our nation toward autocracy rather than a healthier and more inclusive democracy.
This is only a snapshot of the extreme Project 2025 agenda, a platform that seems more rooted in nativism, xenophobia, and ethno- and Christian nationalism than in the core values and priorities of Jesus. In Matthew 25, Jesus doesn’t mince words in proclaiming that both individuals and nations will ultimately be judged by how we treat and care for immigrants as well as people who are hungry, imprisoned, dealing with sickness, and many other forms of hardship. It is time that Christians of all stripes work together in the U.S. to advocate for polices and priorities that are consistent with those priorities and the moral vision of the Beloved Community. Only then can we become a country where we protect everyone’s dignity and freedoms, defend and uplift the most vulnerable, advance the common good, and embrace our nation’s growing racial diversity and religious pluralism.
