6 WARNING SIGNS OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM IN US POLITICS 24AUG23

ANYONE unsure of the threat of Christian Nationalism, anyone not sure of what it would do to our democratic Republic only needs to look at the brutality of the theocratic governments of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, the U.A.E., Qatar, Oman, Iran and Kuwait just to name a few. These Christian Nationalist seek not only to protect and increase the wealth of the 1% but to impose a "Christian sharia" on the nation. They are so blinded by their own self-righteousness they don't realize so many of them and their families would not survive judgement by "Christian sharia" rule. This from Sojourners.....

6 WARNING SIGNS OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM IN US POLITICS

Adam Russell Taylor

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 Twitter @revadamtaylor.

 AUG 24, 2023

If the first debate for the 2024 Republican primary is any indication, we’re headed toward a combative and chaotic presidential race. The first debate, held last night in Milwaukee, was most notable for who didn’t attend, namely former President Donald Trump, who, despite facing four separate criminal indictments, is the leading Republican candidate by a margin of nearly 40 points. His refusal to debate his opponents does a disservice to Republican voters and the country, all of whom deserve to hear Trump defend his previous actions and 2024 campaign platform, which includes several dangerously authoritarian proposals such as making it easier to fire career civil servants or deploying the National Guard to fight street crime.

But my main interest in watching the first Republican primary debate was to get a sense of whether Republican candidates would challenge the growing anti-democratic forces within their party. For example, will Republican candidates continue to defend Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results? And will they continue to embrace the “us-versus-them,” fear and grievance-based politics that propelled Trump to power? I was also on the lookout for indicators of candidates’ support for white Christian nationalism, a set of ideas enjoying an alarming resurgence (and super-charging the anti-democratic forces) that pose a grave threat to both our democracy and the witness of the church.

The term “Christian nationalism” gets used in different ways, but some experts define it as “a constellation of beliefs — that the founding of the United States was ‘divinely inspired’ or that God is invested in the success of the U.S. — that manifest in political goals.” In politics (and some churches), these ideas are part of a coordinated strategy to ensure white Christians maintain their ongoing dominance in all sectors of U.S. society. When I think about examples of Christian nationalism, I think of the subtle ways some people imply that one must be Christian to be a “true” American, or argue that the growing presence of non-white people and non-Christians pose a threat to “traditional” values, or stoke fear by saying that Christianity is under attack.

But Christian nationalism exists on a spectrum — and we need to resist it in all its forms. Extreme and overt manifestations of Christian nationalism include those who displayed Christian symbols and prayed during the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Subtler and perhaps more insidious forms of Christian nationalism include people who say things like, “America has always been and should remain a Christian nation.” We also must be careful not to use “Christian nationalism” as a catchall term for anyone we disagree with, including social or political conservatives; while we may strongly disagree with those who want to make abortion illegal or support cuts to social welfare programs, we should not assume that someone who holds those beliefs automatically believes Christianity deserves a more prominent place in U.S. politics.

While there are some extreme politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) who proudly claim the label, it’s unlikely the top Republican presidential candidates will explicitly embrace Christian nationalism by that name. Instead, voters in the 2024 election will need to be on the lookout for how candidates’ behavior and rhetoric aligns with Christian nationalist ideals and anti-democratic beliefs. Or as Jesus put it: “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).

Here are some questions I’ll be asking throughout the upcoming election to evaluate whether any candidates seeking public office are advancing Christian nationalism and anti-democratic views:

1. Does the candidate perpetuate the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump?

In other words, do they seek to undermine trust in our electoral process and thwart free and fair elections? The correlation between Christian nationalist beliefs and the belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump has been documented in both surveys and reporting. Recent surveys have also shown 40 percent of people who adhere to Christian nationalist beliefs agree with the statement that “patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” compared to just 16 percent of all Americans. And though the 2020 elections are long over, the threat of election interference is not: Among the 2024 field of candidates, The Washington Post has documented that only seven of the 12 candidates they contacted would commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. Fortunately, in the first Republican debate, every candidate except for Vivek Ramaswamey agreed that former Vice President Mike Pence did the right thing when he exercised his constitutional duty to certify the 2020 election results. On the other hand, it was deeply disconcerting that all of the candidates (except former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie) expressed that they would still support Trump if he won the nomination and was convicted of a crime in a court of law.

2. Does the candidate stoke fear through “us-versus-them” rhetoric or by demonizing anyone deemed “other”?

Two recent studies show that Christian nationalism is highly correlated with racism, white supremacy, homophobia, patriarchy, and Islamophobia. While we certainly cannot say that a person who makes racist comments or expresses support for an Islamophobic policy is automatically a Christian nationalist, we can think of this connection as one of several things of which we should be wary. For example, hard line stances on immigration taken by most of the declared GOP candidates indicate that, at the very, these candidates are trying to exploit the degree to which many conservative voters fear the United States’ growing racial and religious diversity. During the first debate, Ramaswamy described migrants entering the country as “the invasion across our southern border”— language that dehumanizes migrants, evokes threat and warfare, and echoes similar language many candidates have used throughout their campaigns. We also need to be vigilant for candidates using any coded language, often called dog whistles, that signal to audiences that white Americans are the “true” or “real Americans” and others are therefore suspect and less patriotic or less truly American.

3. Does the candidate proclaim a revisionist history account of the U.S. being “a Christian nation”?

Our nation was founded around the First Amendment’s commitment to no established religion and the free exercise of religion, but last fall, some candidates for Congress and governor got a lot of attention for more overt and aggressive statements about America’s founding as a Christian nation. In the coming elections, we should watch for these blatant examples as well as softer statements that carry this connotation.

4. Does the candidate talk about America’s “chosenness” and greatness without acknowledging the way our nation has continually fallen short of its founding principles?

For example, in the first debate, South Carolina’s Sen. Tim Scott, who is Black, kept talking about his life story of overcoming adversity to underline American greatness and the American dream, saying that if he could succeed in the U.S., anyone can. Yet Scott failed to mention any of the systemic injustices deeply rooted in history that continue to disadvantage and harm Black and brown Americans.

5. Does the candidate only talk about faith or “biblical values” when it comes to hostility to LGBTQ+ rights and opposing abortion?

This misguided and overly narrow agenda says very little about so many other issues of grave moral consequence — from climate change to poverty to racialized policing and immigration, and more. For example, during the first debate, Pence repeatedly invoked his faith as he called for a national 15-week ban on abortion, ignoring that many people of his same faith do not share his moral position on abortion. Nor did Pence invoke his faith to call for a more urgent response to domestic or global poverty.

6. Does the candidate demonize racial justice commitments or dismiss them as being “woke”?

Christian nationalism is often tied to an ethno-nationalist identity, which in the U.S., means being white. Many candidates who claim to be “anti-woke” are simply refusing to imagine an America in which the promise of “liberty and justice for all” is truly extended to people of every racial group. Many of these people also deny that there is any need to seek repair or systemic change to correct past and current wrongs. At last night’s debate, Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis bragged about his record of banning Critical Race Theory (never mind that the theory isn’t something taught in primary or secondary schools to begin with) and what he called “gender ideology,” in schools. These are clear signals that he objects to a true accounting of American history that recognizes the role racism and sexism have always played. This myth that the the U.S. is an “innocent nation” is prevalent among Christian nationalists.

In Matthew 5, Jesus is clear that the way to discern whether Christian language is true or false is to look to the outcomes: the fruit. The questions above can help us recognize — and resist — the manifestations, or fruit, of Christian nationalism at the federal, state, and local level. The point of recognizing this unsavory fruit isn’t to then demonize the people who bear it; the point of recognizing this toxic ideology is to neutralize it and keep it from spreading. In the voting booth, this means rejecting candidates who embrace these ideas; in our churches, it means being resourceful and more courageous in finding ways to disciple Christians away from this heresy.

Editor’s note: This piece was corrected on Aug. 28, 2023 to reflect that Chris Christie said he would not support Donald Trump as Republican candidate if Trump were convicted of a felony.

16 JANUARY, TODAY IS RELIGIOUS FREEDOM DAY so why does The Christian Right Does Not Want You To Know About This Day - updated 16JAN16 & Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom & Presidential Proclamation: Religious Freedom Day, 2016

ESTABLISHED in 1992 in recognition of the freedom all Americans have to practice whatever faith they choose or none at all. This right, this freedom, is one of the things that make our nation so great, and establishing a day to recognize this right and to remind us we have this right was a good thing. It is too bad the right wing Christian extremist dismiss this day because it doesn't support their false revisionist history of America being founded as a Christian nation. They are blinded by racism, prejudice, ignorance and hate, characteristics not promoted in the teachings of Jesus Christ. From the article below "So before his death, Jefferson sought to get the last word on what it meant. The Statute, he wrote, contained “within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohametan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”  From +Daily Kos .....

The Christian Right Does Not Want You To Know About This Day - updated

By Frederick Clarkson  

Saturday Dec 27, 2014 9:15 PM EST

 

In the heat of our political moment, we sometimes don’t see how our future connects deeply to our past. But the Christian Right does — and they do not like what they see.
The Christian Right has made religious freedom the ideological phalanx of its current campaigns in the culture wars. Religious freedom is now invoked as a way of seeking to derail access to reproductive health services as well as equality for LGBTQ people, most prominently regarding marriage equality.
But history provides little comfort for the theocratic visions of the Christian Right. And that is where our story begins.

For all of the shouting about religious liberty — from the landmark Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case, to the passage of the anti-gay Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Mississippi, and more — there is barely any mention, let alone any observance, of the official national Religious Freedom Day, enacted by Congress in 1992 and recognized every January 16 by an annual presidential proclamation.
The day commemorates the enactment of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786.
Why is this seemingly obscure piece of Revolutionary-era legislation so vital? And why doesn’t the Christian Right want you to know anything about it?
The bill, authored by Thomas Jefferson and later pushed through the state legislature by then member of the House of Delegates, James Madison, is regarded as the root of how the framers of the Constitution approached matters of religion and government, and it was as revolutionary as the era in which it was written.
It not only disestablished the Anglican Church as the official state church, but it provided that no one can be compelled to attend any religious institution or to underwrite it with taxes; that individuals are free to believe as they will and that this “shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
As a practical matter, this meant that what we believe or don’t believe is not the concern of government and that we are all equal as citizens.
Following the dramatic passage of the Statute in 1786, Madison traveled to Philadelphia, where he served as a principal author of the Constitution in 1787. As a Member of Congress in 1789 he was also a principal author of the First Amendment, which passed in 1791.
Jefferson was well aware that many did not like the Statute, just as they did not like the Constitution and the First Amendment, both of which sought to expand the rights of citizens and deflect claims of churches seeking special consideration.
So before his death, Jefferson sought to get the last word on what it meant. The Statute, he wrote, contained “within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohametan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”
That is a powerful and clear statement. Jefferson, almost 200 years ago, refuted the contemporary claims of Christian Right leaders, many of whom not only insist that America was founded as a Christian nation, but that the framers really meant their particular interpretation of Christianity. (And they are sometimes encouraged by a surprisingly wide array of pundits.)
Jefferson further explained that the legislature had specifically rejected proposed language that would have described “Jesus Christ” as “the holy author of our religion.” This was rejected, he reported, “by the great majority.”
No wonder the Christian Right does not want us to remember the original Statute for Religious Freedom — it doesn’t fit their narrative of history! Nor does it justify their vision of the struggles of the political present, or the shining theocratic future they envision.
Religious Freedom Day is nothing but bad news for the likes of Religious Right leaders like Tony Perkins, who argue that Christians who favor marriage equality are not really Christians. They can believe that if they want, but it can make no difference in the eyes of the law. That is probably why on Religious Freedom Day 2014, Perkins made no mention of what Religious Freedom Day is really about — instead using the occasion to denounce president Obama’s approach to religious liberty abroad.
This barely commemorated day provides an opportunity for LGBTQ people, and progressives generally, to reclaim a philosophical, legal and constitutional legacy that the Christian Right is busy trying to redefine for their own purposes.
Alright. So the Christian Right really does not want us to know about this day, but if we do, they certainly don't want us thinking about this stuff -- and so the standard fare of faux outrage about president Obama and various conspiracies against faith in general and conservative Christianity in general is likely to dominate our foreseeable future.
But it doesn't have to be this way. And the Christian Right probably knows it.
When I say that the Christian Right does not want “us” to think about it, I mean everyone who is not the Christian Right and their allies, and especially not LGBTQ people and the otherwise “insufficiently Christian.”  I think that is why the Christian Right is mostly so eerily quiet about it, even though religious freedom is so central to their political program.
But what if we did?
What if we seized this day to think dynamically about the religious freedoms we take for granted at our peril; freedom that is in danger of being redefined beyond recognition.  What if we decided to seize this day to consider our best values as a nation and advance the cause of equal rights for all?
If we did, we might begin by recalling the extraordinary challenge faced by the framers of the Constitution when they gathered in Philadelphia. They met to create one nation out of 13 fractious colonies still finding their way after a successful revolt against the British Empire; and contending with a number of powerful and well-established state churches and a growing and religiously diverse population.
Their answer?   Religious equality.  And it is rooted in Jefferson’s bill. Let's remind ourselves about the origins of the bill.
Jefferson wrote the first draft in 1777 — just after having authored the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  And it was James Madison who finally got the legislation passed through the Virginia legislature in 1786, just months before he traveled to Philadelphia to be a principal author of the Constitution.  The Virginia Statute states that no one can be compelled to attend or support any religious institution, or otherwise be restrained in their beliefs, and that this “shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities . . .”
The Constitution, framed according to “The Virginia Plan,” drafted primarily by Madison, contains no mention of God or Christianity.  In fact, the final text’s only mention of religion is in the proscription of “religious tests for public office,” found in Article 6.
In other words — Jefferson’s words — one’s religious identity, or lack thereof, has no bearing on one’s “civil capacities.”
If we thought about the meaning of Religious Freedom Day, we might start thinking about things like that — and not capitulate to the Christian Right’s effort to redefine religious freedom to include a license for business and institutional leaders (both government and civil) to impose their religious beliefs on employees and the public.
If we thought about things like that, then we might consider them in light of a host of initiatives in recent years, often advanced under the banner of religious freedom, but which, in fact, restrict the religious freedom of others.
We might consider, for example, the recent federal court decision in the case of General Synod of the United Church of Christ v. Cooper, which found that North Carolina’s ban on clergy performing marriage ceremonies without first obtaining a civil marriage license, was unconstitutional.
Since state law declared that same-sex couples could not get marriage licenses, this subjected clergy in the United Church of Christ, the Alliance of Baptists, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis, among others, to potential prosecution for performing a religious ceremony.
As religious equality advances, so does equal rights for all. So you can see why the Christian Right might not want people—people like us—thinking like Jefferson. And that is why we must.
Religious Freedom Day was the brainchild of some of the town fathers and mothers of Richmond, Virginia, who have since created a museum dedicated to education about the Virginia Statute (PDF).
But we need more than a museum to breathe more life and liberty into the living Constitution.  Not much goes on around the country on Religious Freedom Day, January 16th.
There is no time like the present to seize this day.

This post is adapted from two recent columns at LGBTQ Nation, and is crossposted from Talk to Action.

UPDATE  There has been some understandable confusion about one important point. I have written elsewhere that the web site ReligiousFreedomDay.com, which comes up first in a Google search for Religious Freedom Day is not what it seems.  The group behind it is a small California evangelical Christian Right agency called Gateways to Better Education, headed by longtime activist, Eric Buehrer. This group is part of a wider movement with a long history of efforts to hijack, or compromise, public schools in order to promote its religious views and to evangelize children. (This is detailed in The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, by Katherine Stewart.) Gateways is unambiguous about its intentions:   “Gateways to Better Education is a nonprofit organization founded in 1991 to help public schools teach about the important contribution the Bible and Christianity make to the world.”  They insist that “Religious Freedom Day is not ‘celebrate-our-diversity day.'”

Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

Jefferson's tombstone. The inscription, as he stipulated, reads Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was drafted in 1777 (however it was not first introduced into the Virginia General Assembly until 1779)^[1] by Thomas Jefferson in the city of Fredericksburg, Virginia. On January 16, 1786, the Assembly enacted the statute into the state's law. The statute disestablished the Church of England in Virginia and guaranteed freedom of religion to people of all religious faiths, including Catholics and Jews as well as members of all Protestant denominations.^[2] The statute was a notable precursor of the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The Statute for Religious Freedom is one of only three accomplishments Jefferson instructed be put in his epitaph.^[3]

Text of statute

An Act for establishing religious Freedom.
Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;
That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,
That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;
That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;
That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;
That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,
That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,
That it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it;
That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;
That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;
That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;
And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:
Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.^[4]

Presidential Proclamation: Religious Freedom Day, 2016

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION 

Since our country's founding, religious freedom has been heralded as one of our most cherished ideals. The right to practice religion freely has brought immigrants from all over the world to our shores, often in the face of great adversity, so they could live their lives in accordance with the dictates of their consciences. Some of America's earliest settlers, the Pilgrims, arrived at our shores in search of a more tolerant society, free from religious persecution. Since that time, people of many religious traditions have added their own threads to the fabric of our Nation, helping advance a profound and continuous vindication of the idea of America.
When the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was adopted on January 16, 1786, it formed a blueprint for what would become the basis for the protection of religious liberty enshrined in our Constitution. Drafted by Thomas Jefferson, the statute proclaims that "all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." The First Amendment prohibits Government from establishing religion, and it protects the free exercise of every faith. Our Government does not sponsor a religion, nor does it pressure anyone to practice a particular faith, or any faith at all. The United States stands for the protection of equal rights for all people to practice their faith freely, without fear or coercion, and as Americans, we understand that when people of all religions are accepted and are full and equal members of our society, we are all stronger and freer.
Our commitment to religious freedom has fostered unprecedented religious diversity and freedom of religious practice. But these ideals are not self-executing. Rather, they require a sustained commitment by each generation to uphold and preserve them. Here at home, my Administration is working to preserve religious liberty and enforce civil rights laws that protect religious freedom -- including laws that protect employees from religious discrimination and require reasonable accommodation of religious practices on the job. We will keep upholding the right of religious communities to establish places of worship and protecting the religious rights of those so often forgotten by society, such as incarcerated persons and individuals confined to institutions. We will also continue to protect students from discrimination and harassment that is based on their faith, and we will continue to enforce hate crime laws, including those perpetrated based on a person's actual or perceived religion. This work is crucial, particularly given the recent spike in reports of threats and violence against houses of worship, children, and adults simply because of their religious affiliation.
As we strive to uphold religious freedom at home, we recognize that this basic element of human dignity does not stop at our shores, and we work to promote religious freedom around the globe. We are working with a broad coalition against those who have subjected religious minorities to unspeakable violence and persecution, and we are mobilizing religious and civic leaders to defend vulnerable religious communities. In addition, we are calling for the elimination of improper restrictions that suppress religious practice, coordinating with governments around the world to promote religious freedom for citizens of every faith, and expanding training for our diplomats on how to monitor and advocate for this freedom. All people deserve the fundamental dignity of practicing their faith free from fear, intimidation, and violence.
On Religious Freedom Day, let us recommit ourselves to protecting religious minorities here at home and around the world. May we remember those who have been persecuted, tortured, or murdered for their faith and reject any politics that targets people because of their religion, including any suggestion that our laws, policies, or practices should single out certain faiths for disfavored treatment. And as one Nation, let us state clearly and without equivocation that an attack on any faith is an attack on every faith and come together to promote religious freedom for all.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim January 16, 2016 as Religious Freedom Day. I call on all Americans to commemorate this day with events and activities that teach us about this critical foundation of our Nation's liberty, and that show us how we can protect it for future generations at home and around the world.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fifteenth day of January, in the year of our Lord two thousand sixteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fortieth.
BARACK OBAMA

Bill O'Reilly's new book says Jesus died to free the Jews from taxation 27SEP13

REALLY????? Really bill????? God didn't send His Son to die for our sins and offer all a way to salvation and eternal life, He sent Him to die on the cross to end the taxation of the Jews by the Romans????? I'm trying to find this in my New Testament, I'm even looking at the Old Testament prophets who foretold Jesus' birth and death. Can you give us chapter and verse????? From Daily Kos
 

I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

Bill O'Reilly has written a new book about Jesus. Wait, whut.

The basic argument of the book is that Jesus died because he interfered with the taxation-heavy Roman revenue stream. The reason the Jews eagerly anticipated the Messiah, writes O’Reilly, is, “When that moment arrives, Rome will be defeated and their lives will be free of taxation and want.”

Lest that sound like the most tortured reinterpretation of the New Testament ever attempted, Bill wants you to know that God told him to do it.

The Fox News anchor explains in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" that one night he awoke with the title of the book in his head. He says he believes he got that message from the Holy Spirit.

That's … that's a new one. There are many politically inspired alternate history books out there, but there are very few whose authors claim that their books were inspired by God Himself. Nor am I aware of any other books that claim the messages of the New Testament are not to feed the poor and help the sick, but that tax rates should be zero point zero percent. You've got me stumped, Bill, I can't think of a single funny thing to say about that.

ORIGINALLY POSTED TO HUNTER ON FRI SEP 27, 2013 AT 10:51 AM PDT.

ALSO REPUBLISHED BY DAILY KOS.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/27/1241865/-Bill-O-Rielly-s-new-book-says-Jesus-died-to-free-the-Jews-from-taxation?detail=email

WAR CRIMINAL George W. Bush’s presidency, in 24 charts 24APR13

THE war criminal george w bush, known to some as shrub, opens his presidential library today. There will be the usual celebration and the speeches full of hypocrisy and revisionist history by the other four living Presidents lauding his "service" to the nation, but I hope he is visited by the ghost of the thousands of American men and women he sent to be slaughtered in his illegal and immoral war in Iraq, the ghost of the thousands of American men and women he failed to provide for and so who died in Afghanistan and by the ghost of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan children, women and men whose deaths he is responsible for. I expect a common theme of protest at this library will be the spilling of blood on the floor, I hope it happens often. From the Washington Post's Wonkbook, 24 graphs reviewing shrub's presidency.....
by Dylan Matthews on April 24, 2013 at 9:00 am
Good news for George W. Bush! His approval rating is the highest it’s been in years, just as he’s set to open his presidential library at Southern Methodist University. Forty-seven percent of Americans approve of Bush, up from 33 percent when he left office as the economy cratered.
Bad news for George W. Bush! His newfound popularity comes, as my colleague Dan Balz notes, because of “the passage of time and Bush’s relative invisibility” rather than any re-evaluation of his record. Majorities still oppose his decision to invade Iraq and disapprove of his handling of the economy.
But in the interest of history, let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at Bush’s record, issue by issue, and, of course, in charts.
1. Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terrorism.

Might as well start with the big one. In 2003, before the invasion, Iraq was a brutal dictatorship suffering under a sanctions regime which, according to UNICEF, killed at least 500,000 children. How does it look in 2013? Well, it’s a dictatorship again, at least according to Freedom House, a highly respected arbiter of regime type. Freedom House rates 2013 Iraq as “not free,” giving it scores of 6 (out of 7, with 7 being as unfree as is possible) on both political rights and civil liberties. By comparison, Russia also gets a 6 on political rights, and a 5 on civil liberties, and many critics believe that Putin is running a dictatorial regime at this point.
What explains this? I’ll leave it to Freedom House:

Iraq’s political rights rating declined from 5 to 6 due to the concentration of power by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and increasing pressure on the political opposition, as exemplified by the arrest and death sentence in absentia of Vice President Tariq al Hashimi, the country’s most senior Sunni Arab politician.

Maliki is obviously less brutal than Saddam Hussein, but still, that’s not exactly the ideal result. As for Afghanistan, it’s a similar story. Hamid Karzai is a step up from the Taliban but the country is still “not free,” according to Freedom House:

To be fair to Bush, though, at the end of his tenure the country had snuck into the “partly free” category according to Freedom House. It’s slid back under President Obama.
And what did it cost to get there? Well, a lot of money, for one thing. The Cost of War project puts the economic tally of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at about $4 trillion – with a “t”. And if we don’t pay off the debt accumulated as a consequence of going to war, the interest alone could add over $7 trillion more to that by 2053:

This isn’t all Bush, as Obama made the decision to continue the war in Afghanistan. But Bush set in motion policies that wound up costing about $4 trillion.
It’s also cost a lot of lives. The most accurate data we have are on  U.S. military casualties: 6,648 service members have died in Iraq and Afghanistan to date, a large majority of the deaths occurring under Bush’s presidency. Civilian casualties are harder to count. The UN mission in Afghanistan estimates that 14,728 civilians died there between 2007 and 2012. That, of course, does not include casualties of the invasion and occupation between 2001 and 2006.
Iraq is even harder to track. Iraq Body Count, an NGO devoted to tallying deaths in that war, puts the number at between 112,114 and 122,644. The real number could be much higher. The World Health Organization published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine putting the death toll between 2003 and 2006 at 151,000. The medical journal Lancet published a study in 2006 estimating that around 655,000 had died. That survey in particular was very controversial, but regardless of whether upwards of 600,000, or “only” over 100,000, have died, the war has killed a whole lot of people.
And of course, this leaves out harder to quantify costs. The U.S. tortured people in the course of all three wars. We flew people to secret prisons and brutally interrogated them, including by using methods that most people would classify as torture. It’s hard to put a number on that, but it’s a real moral cost.
What about the wars’ benefits? Well, it’s hard to say, and harder to quantify. Did the war in Afghanistan reduce terrorist attacks on the United States and related targets? Terrorism as a phenomenon is so extraordinarily rare that it’s quite possible it didn’t, and that’s before taking into account potential recruitment effects due to the invasion, which could have made the overall effect positive.
This is a problem for counterterrorism policy more generally. Criminologists Cynthia Lum, Leslie Kennedy, and Alison Shirley did a critical review of the literature in 2008 and found no evidence that any widely used counterterrorism practice actually reduces the incidence of terrorist attacks. Twelve studies found that metal detectors and security screening worked, for instance, but another 13 found they were actually harmful to counterterrorism efforts. All 11 studies on military strikes either found no effect or that the strikes backfired. “Perhaps what is equally (if not more) interesting is what we didn’t find from our review,” they write. “Most interventions have never been evaluated, which speaks to the lack of an evidence base for counter-terrorism policy.”
That counts for Obama too, but it underscores a key problem with the war on terrorism, including as it was conducted by Bush: it never relied on evidence-based practices to address the problem at hand.
As for Iraq, it is, again, tough to draw conclusions. The country has liberalized considerably, to be sure, but all counterproliferation and counterterrorism benefits touted pre-invasion weren’t forthcoming. Indeed, according to Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, the war actually ended up increasing worldwide terrorism sevenfold, due to copycat attacks and recruitment effects.
2. The economy.
Overall, the economy under Bush (and Alan Greenspan, and Ben Bernanke) was pretty much all right. Unemployment was low, though not sub-4 percent, as it was under President Clinton:

And while growth was under the 4-5 percent rates it was averaging during the 1990s, it was hardly bad:

Median compensation (or, wages plus benefits) stagnated after growing under Clinton. The bottom three lines are all real average hourly compensation.

Indeed, the Hamilton Project’s Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney find that median annual earnings for men actually fell under Bush, after rising under Clinton.
Inequality actually rose more slowly under Bush than it did under Clinton:

Poverty increased, after having fallen under Clinton:

Extreme poverty continued the upward trajectory it’s been on ever since welfare reform:

But then 2008 happened. While almost all of the Great Recession has taken place under Obama’s presidency, the groundwork was laid during George W. Bush’s, and the crisis started in his final year.
Take, for instance, housing prices. One root cause of the financial crisis was the continued overvaluation of housing stock in the United States. That really took off when Bush was in office, though it began under Clinton:

Interestingly, though, the share of the economy devoted to finance didn’t grow a lot while Bush was president. “Finance and insurance,” in particular, was only 8.2 percent of the economy when Bush took office, and never went above that. The main growth was under Clinton:

The most obvious case for Bush’s culpability in the crisis is negligence, that he — or his appointees — should have noticed the housing bubble forming, or the dangers of unregulated securities, and acted to stop them. But Bush was also an active deregulator, as his Securities and Exchange Commission exempted large investment banks from limits on their debt-to-equity ratios in 2004, following a lobbying push by, among others, future Bush Treasury Secretary and then Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson.
That led to a sharp increase in the debt-to-equity ratio, or the share of bank assets that are borrowed from somewhere. Many analysts believe high debt-to-equity ratios are the defining danger that caused the crisis, as it increased the damage that certain loans going bad could do to banks. Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, for example, argue that ratios more like 2 to 1 mean that events like those in 2008 would have just challenged banks rather than sinking them outright.

All the same, Bush’s initial response to the crisis was better than some imaginable alternatives, though one could find fault with his administration’s failure to bail out Lehman Brothers, which arguably precipitated the crisis outbreak. He worked with Nancy Pelosi to craft a fiscal stimulus package in early 2008, which some researchers concluded increased consumer spending by an average of 3.5 percent. And, of course, Bush and his Treasury secretary Hank Paulson devised the bank bailout package which Alan Blinder and many others credit with preventing an actual depression.
In any case, it’s left us with a lot of debt. Even if you don’t blame the crisis on Bush, at least half the debt is directly attributable to his policy choices. Racking up debt isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and some have even argued that surpluses can be economically dangerous, but for whatever it’s worth, Bush played a big role there:

It’s also worth noting that Bush was increasing the deficit at a time when the economy was expanding — which is exactly the opposite of what Keynesians believe makes sense, and which also made it more difficult for the country to respond to the recession.
3. Taxes
Another enduring legacy of the Bush administration is the creation of the current tax structure. With the exception of some minor changes for earners making above $400,000, or $200,000 if you include changes to some tax deductions, the tax code is roughly as it was after Bush’s second tax cut in 2003. That means a lot less revenue:

Even at its highest point, revenue under Bush was a full percentage point of GDP below where it was in 2001. That means billions of dollars in annual lost revenue. If, in 2009, the government had taken in as much revenue as a percent of GDP as it had in 2001, it would have gotten about $600 billion more.
What about distribution? Well, let’s take a look at the Tax Policy Center’s distributive breakdown of Senate Republicans’ proposal late last year to extend the tax cuts, relative to letting them expire totally:

Millionaires would have gotten an 8.1 percent tax cut, while those making under $10,000 got an average tax cut of $4. Of course, everyone making under $200,000, and most making between $200,000 and $400,000, got this exact deal. The public perception is correct: the Bush tax cuts were heavily tilted to benefit wealthier taxpayers.
4. Health care
Under Bush, insurance premiums as paid both by workers and their employers roughly doubled, as you can see in this Kaiser Family Foundation chart:

And according to KFF, the percentage of firms offering health benefits fell from 68 percent to 59 percent during his tenure.
But Bush did inaugurate Medicare Part D, which has provided prescription drug coverage to 73 percent of Medicare recipients. As this Kaiser chart shows, the program came in way cheaper than expected:

Then again, that’s largely because prescription drug prices have fallen due to lackluster pharmaceutical innovation.
5. Education
Bush’s crowning accomplishment in this regard is No Child Left Behind, which established testing standards for all elementary and secondary schools for the first time ever. However, its implementation was been somewhat shaky, with many local districts recoiling against its mandates. One frequent cause of grievance is that, as this New America Foundation chart explains, the Bush administration repeatedly signed budgets that provided less than the authorized funding levels for NCLB:

Whether or not that money would have actually helped student achievement is, of course, another question. So what happened to student achievement? On math, it rose.FFourth grade math scores, for example, rose for students of all races:

But for reading, the results were less impressive. Here’s fourth grade again, by race:

Some progress, but not of the same scale you see with math.
6. Environment
The Bush administration was pretty hostile to most efforts to combat climate change, between withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol to needing to be sued for the EPA to do anything to combat it. As a consequence, greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise (update: before falling in 2008/2009, as Brad points out to me):

As did the sea level:

And U.S. temperatures:

The overall trend is still troubling, and even if year-to-year temperatures didn’t rise, they’re still higher than they’ve ever been. It’s really really bad, you guys.
7. HIV/AIDS

Map source: PEPFAR Worldwide Activities Map.
One bright spot on Bush’s record is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program to fight HIV/AIDS in the developing world by, among other things, distributing anti-retroviral drugs, preventing transmission from mothers to children, and preventing initial infection through abstinence and condom programs. It worked. One study found that the program saved 1.2 million peoples’ lives, and reduced HIV-related mortality by about 10 percent. It directly supports 5.1 million peoples’ antiretroviral drug regimens.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/24/george-w-bushs-presidency-in-24-charts/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein&wpisrc=nl_wonk

Obama Succeeded Where Bush Failed: Osama Bin Laden Rhetoric And Reality 2MAI11

THE revisionist historians will try to use the death of bin laden to bring some sort of honor to the presidency of george w bush. He had nothing to due with this operation, and his policies delayed this day for years. If bush is to be remembered for anything it is his decision to logistically abandon the American troops in Afghanistan in the war against the taliban and al-qaida, leaving them short of troops, life saving body armor, weapons and all other vital material for the war effort. He will be remembered for his decision to turn his back, and take away the nation's military and intelligence resources from the effort in Afghanistan to crush the taliban and al-qaida and waste them on his illegal and immoral war in Iraq, a war for which he and many of his cabal are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity as well as an assault on the freedoms and civil liberties of all Americans. He too will be judged so day for all the blood on his hands, for the death and destruction, the pain and suffering he brought to so many in the world. This from HuffPost...
WASHINGTON -- As he announced the death of infamous terrorist Osama bin Laden on Sunday night, President Barack Obama struck an extraordinary contrast with his predecessor, George W. Bush.
That was to some degree unavoidable. Bush’s consistent failure to respond appropriately to bin Laden -- as a potential threat, as a fugitive, or as a public enemy no. 1 -- represents one of the greatest shortcomings of his presidency.
Obama has now succeeded where Bush failed. And it was impossible to hear Obama declare that "justice has been done" without thinking about how long it went undone.
But Obama also went out of his way to draw distinctions between how he approached the problem and how Bush did.
For instance, as the months and years went by after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- and Bush’s initial bluster about capturing the al Qaeda leader “dead or alive” became a source of embarrassment -- Bush began to insist that bin Laden himself wasn’t so very important.
"I truly am not that concerned about him," Bush said at a White House press conference on March 13, 2002. And of course the following March, he shifted America’s focus to Iraq, which proved to be a gigantic diversion.
Obama took a different tack."Shortly after taking office," the president explain Sunday night, "I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network."
Obama's comments on Sunday night were clearly directed not just to the American public but to the world, evoking images of the horror of 9/11 in an effort to dampen any possible al Qaeda propaganda value from bin Laden’s death.
By contrast, the tactics and the rhetoric of Bush’s “war on terror” -- most notably his decision to invade Iraq and the torture of Muslims in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere had served as al Qaeda’s most potent recruiting tools.
And to a nation of people who, nearly ten years after the terrorist attacks in America, are overwhelmingly despondent about both of the wars launched by Bush, Obama was at long last able to deliver something that, at least for a moment, seemed like victory: "The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda,” he said.
Ironically, Obama’s announcement came eight years to the day after Bush famously and prematurely declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq after landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier.
And if all that weren’t clear enough, Obama made an explicit appeal to set the clock back to those days of national and international unity right after Sept. 11 -- before Bush took the nation to war in Iraq, subverted historical prohibitions against torture and domestic surveillance, and used fear of terror to achieve partisan goals.
"[T]onight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11,” Obama said. "I know that it has, at times, frayed."
As Obama noted, the U.S. was virtually a different country then.
"On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together," the president reminded the nation on Sunday night. "We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood. We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country. On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.”
The Bush record on bin Laden, of course, starts with him failing to prevent the attacks in the first place. As has been exhaustively documented by now, during the summer of 2001, his White House waved off repeated warnings of an imminent attack from former counterterrorism director Richard A. Clarke and then-CIA director George Tenet.
Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, were said to be more focused on their pet issue, missile defense, and the hunt for a reason to attack Iraq. Bush, according to Bob Woodward, said he wasn't interested in "swatting flies."
The unsuccessful attempts to engage Bush culminated in a briefing he got while vacationing on his Texas ranch. As investigative reporter Ron Suskind reported in his book, "The One Percent Doctrine," an unnamed CIA operative flew to Crawford to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
"All right," Suskind reported Bush saying after hearing out the operative. "You've covered your ass, now."
Former President Bill Clinton in 2006 notably complained that he came close to killing bin Laden in a 1998 missile strike, while Bush and the "right wingers ... had eight months to try [before 9/11]. They did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted."
Bush’s post-9/11 swagger may go down as one of history’s worst examples of false bravado. After the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban government quickly fell and al Qaeda retreated into the hills. But in December 2001, when bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora, Bush didn’t pull the trigger.
Then for more than three years, Bush treated bin Laden a lot like the wizards in the Harry Potter books treat He Who Must Not Be Named.
In the summer of 2005, Bush started invoking bin Laden again -- but this time, to win support for his Iraq policy, which was very much on the ropes.
"Hear the words of Osama bin Laden," Bush said, "'This Third World War is raging' in Iraq."
By 2006, on the stump for his fellow Republicans, Bush was citing bin Laden extensively. The president cast bin Laden as the oracular leader of a global movement, and warned of the possibility of an Islamic caliphate "stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia" -- an unsubstantiated fantasy with only one thing going for it: It served the political agendas of both men.
Meanwhile, in an Oval Office session that same month, Bush told to a group of conservative columnists that focusing on bin Laden didn’t fit with his military plans. Putting "100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work," he explained.
Yet, in his attempts to persuade the voting public of the dangers it faced, Bush gave bin Laden exactly the attention he seemed to crave.
After the 2008 presidential election, during which politicians from both parties publicly renounced him, Bush finally admitted some regret in an ABC News interview.
"Do I wish we had brought Osama bin Laden to justice? Sure," Bush said. "But he's not leading a lot of parades these days."
Bush stalwarts are now trying to make the case that their president deserves some, if not most, of the credit for dispatching bin Laden.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Sunday night called bin Laden’s death "a victory for the United States and a tremendous achievement for the military and intelligence professionals who carried out this important mission." As for Obama’s role? "I commend President Obama who has followed the vigilance of President Bush in bringing Bin Laden to justice," Cantor said in a statement.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney similarly credited "the military and intelligence professionals who carried out this important mission,” citing their "tireless work since 9/11." It was those years of effort, the majority of which were during the Bush administration, that "made this achievement possible, and enabled us to capture or kill thousands of al Qaeda terrorists and many of their leaders,” Cheney said in a press release.
A small group of young fans gathered outside Bush's house in Dallas Sunday night with a sign that read, "President Obama forgot to say... THANK YOU PRESIDENT BUSH."
Bush himself issued a brief statement congratulating Obama and declaring, "[t]he fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done."




************************* Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for The Huffington Post. You can send him an email, bookmark his page; subscribe to his RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get email alerts when he writes.