Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

You need to also work in something about mandatory gun posession, mandatory car flag flying, and mandatory censorship of all non-biblical materials in schools!  Oh yah, mandatory 10 commandments must be displayed in all public schools and buildings so non-believers will be forced to see the light!

Are there other mandatory items for good Christians??  This is beginning to sound something like "being a redneck" rants

by NG on 12/03/2005 02:01:31 PM EST

None of this bilingual crap. Jesus didn't have the U.S. of A. founded by Columbus so we could have some foreign language spoken here.

As a wise man once said:

"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for you."

[Said by an Arkansas town school superintendent, about his refusing a request that foreign languages be taught in high school (cited in Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels (ed.), The State of Language, UC Press, 1990, p. 1.)]

by astraea on 12/03/2005 11:07:49 PM EST

He's the one who healed the sick, and protected the most vulnerable among us. He is the one that fought hypocrisy with all his might.

Jesus was a good guy. He was a staunch liberal that stood against virtually everything today's republicans stand for.

And it pisses me off to no end that he is used as their poster child for prejudice and hatred.

Political Cortex -- Brain Food for the Body Politic

by Tom Ball on 12/04/2005 03:48:00 PM EST

I think there is a slippery slope if one avoids these implications.  Most non-Christians are feeling more like second class citizens now under Bush than ever, and it is wrong.  Someday maybe Christians will have to put up with this discrimination against them, and anyone with half a brain should be able to realize this.  I think Alan Dershowitz expresses the feeling the best in the quotes below! Thanks to Revere at Effect Measure for pointing this phrase and site out!
Alan M. Dershowitz and more
Professor at Harvard Law School

"The very first act of the new Bush administration was to have a Protestant Evangelist minister officially dedicate the inauguration to Jesus Christ, whom he declared to be 'our savior.' Invoking 'the Father, the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ' and 'the Holy Spirit,' Billy Graham's son, the man selected by President George W. Bush to bless his presidency, excluded the tens of millions of Americans who are Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Shintoists, Unitarians, agnostics, and atheists from his blessing by his particularistic and parochial language.

The plain message conveyed by the new administration is that George W. Bush's America is a Christian nation, and that non-Christians are welcome into the tent so long as they agree to accept their status as a tolerated minority rather than as fully equal citizens. In effect, Bush is saying: "This is our home, and in our home we pray to Jesus as our savior. If you want to be a guest in our home, you must accept the way we pray."
-- Alan M. Dershowitz, "Bush Starts Off by Defying the the Constitution," Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2001

But the United States is neither a Christian nation nor the exclusive home of any particular religious group. Non-Christians are not guests. We are as much hosts as any Mayflower-descendant Protestant. It is our home as well as theirs. And in a home with so many owners, there can be no official sectarian prayer. That is what the 1st Amendment is all about, and the first act by the new administration was in defiance of our Constitution.
-- Alan M. Dershowitz, "Bush Starts Off by Defying the the Constitution," Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2001

by NG on 12/05/2005 12:14:06 PM EST

and business alike...that "black Friday" label is also a part of the hype...How else can you explain the major networks being set up with bright lights and cameras at the ready INSIDE the FRIGGIN' WAL-MART at 4:45 am before the doors open?  They were invited by the stores, and their cameras--pointed primarily at poor, ethnic people eager for bargains and slightly awe-struck by the potential for getting on TV--help feed the frenzy which makes ma and pa conservative voter momentarily shudder at the inhumanity of it all, then laugh at it.

And the goal of this charade? Get more people into the stores to spend money...or extend credit, as the case may be.

I realise that Xmas is a commercial season, and that we're culturally trained and conditioned to spend on those we love, but we also need to recognize the manipulation by the media--these people stepping on each other aren't animals, but they were treated as such, so when the time came, they acted as expected.

I encourage people to write to these store managers and demand that they employ crowd-control measures next year, or risk losing your business...how difficult would it be to set up a rope along the side of the building so that people had to enter in an orderly fashion...just for the first 15 minutes until the line was gone?  Sure, there will still be fights over a Barbie doll at 75% off, but there may be fewer fights, and that wouldn't hurt anyone.

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right

by darthstar on 12/05/2005 07:24:15 PM EST

credentials have gone down that much-talked-about slippery slope and are on the verge of being revoked, I'm proud to say. (Especially the P part of WASP, as demonstrated by the Worldview Test).

Completing the credentials revocation includes boycotting Wal-Mart all year round on principle and shopping on line, living in a multi-cultural, un-gated condo that has a little yard, driving a flagless, gas efficient Honda, ditching Jonah for Political Cortex editorialists like cscs and others, believing Bush and Cheney should be tried as war criminals and voting for Democrats.

Republican Jesus may be pissed off, but I'd like to think that Tom Ball's Jesus would approve.

 

All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss. (Douglas Adams)

by scoophound on 12/05/2005 09:45:06 AM EST

that Christian churches, both "liberal" (i.e. caring about peace, the poor, the environment, etc.) and "right-wing" (the Christian Taliban), have been exhorting their OWN believers for decades to do good deeds (as each group defines them) rather than SPEND so much; to spend TIME as a family praying and reflecting on Jesus, rather than rendering the family bankrupt while causing strive and greed between family members.

AND YET, the right-wingers know that the economy needs Christmas shopping to make corporations wealthy, so in THEIR churches, the silent wink goes out that we don't "really" mean all that about spirituality, just go out and SPEND.

Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. -- Mayor Salvor Hardin, in "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov

by DaneelO on 12/11/2005 12:00:31 PM EST

this is the only post i will make anywhere about xmas.  as a christian, i find that xmas is besmirched by almost all of us. the spirit of the holiday, a time for gathering and celebrating, has been drowned by the marketplace noise of carols and clinking registers, by rudolph and by watching mommy kissing santy claus.

i could not Believe My Ears/Eyes when i saw the us congress debating "merry christmas"!!!
double Ha Ha Ho Ho. the merry xmas campaign was a flop. christians were offended and non-christians were appalled. am i correct?

by ebbak on 12/17/2005 10:53:55 AM EST