Latter-Day Politics

Published May 25, 2012 | By Iowadawg

What is wrong with talking about Mormonism when talking about Mitt Romney and his run for the Presidency? On CNN last Sunday, David Axelrod, President Obama’s strategist, promised that his campaign did not consider Romney’s faith “fair game.” The implication, there, is that Mormonism is a weak point to be exploited—a card that one would only expect the Obama team to play from the bottom of the deck. And given that suspicions about Mormonism are widely thought to have cost Romney votes in the South, there may be good reasons for thinking so. It might be that, in the interest of civility and electoral prudence, neither Obama nor Romney can initiate a conversation about what it means to be Mormon in this country. But perhaps the rest of us should, because the story is complicated, fascinating, and utterly American.

There are two ways, at least, to draw the line between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Presidential election. One can take Mormonism as a starting point, and try to use it to understand Mitt Romney. Or one can take Mitt Romney’s candidacy as an opening for a discussion of the story of Mormonism. It would be absolutely wrong to vote against Mitt Romney because he is a Mormon, rather than because of his political position. At the same time, it is hard to see what would be lost by anyone, on either side, if we were to seize this moment to talk about a faith whose history is a narrative of change, tolerance, exploration, and reinvention.

Read all HERE.

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Memorial Day’s lessons in amnesia

If nothing else, the holiday allows us to reflect on our commitment to forgetting bloody conflicts
By Tom Engelhardt

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two — those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform,” or sometimes something vaguer like “while conducting combat operations,” “supporting Operation Enduring Freedom,” or simply no explanation at all); and the unit the dead soldier belonged to. They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Sometimes they include more than one death.

They are essentially bureaucratic notices designed to draw little attention to themselves. Yet cumulatively, in their hundreds over the last decade, they represent a grim archive of America’s still ongoing, already largely forgotten second Afghan War, and I’ve read them obsessively for years.

Into the Memory Hole

May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan. It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate any declines in deaths on our roads and highways.

Read it all HERE>

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A paradox

After turning the machine on, its only function is to turn itself off.

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The Perfected Self

He’d be in good company: a 2007 study by TheJournal of the American Medical Association found that each year, 160,000 Americans die early for reasons related to obesity, accounting for more than one in 20 deaths. The costs are not just bodily. Other studies have found that a person 70 or more pounds overweight racks up extra lifetime medical costs of as much as $30,000, a figure that varies with race and gender. And we seem to be just warming up: cardiologists who have looked at current childhood obesity rates and other health indicators predict a steep rise in heart disease over the next few decades, while a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development projected that two-thirds of the populations of some industrialized nations will be obese within 10 years.

MORE.

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Wow diabetes and heart disease used to be soooo cheap! On a better note, those were the day!

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US Senate Redefines ‘Palestinian Refugee’
The State Department and Jordan are unhappy that US lawmakers want to know how many “Palestinian refugees” actually lived in Israel in 1948

The US State Department and Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan are trying to block a Senate bill that would require an accurate accounting of how many ‘Palestinian refugees’ receive American aid dollars.

The push came after the US Senate Appropriations Committee approved on Thursday language that would distinguish between Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 and their descendants.

The new language, introduced by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), seeks to distinguish between those “whose place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 and who were displaced as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict; and who are descendants” of those people.

Using the new language, the US definition of who is a ‘Palestinian refugee’ would drop from 5 million to 30,000, which could directly impact the 1.2 billion in aid dollars the US pumps into the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) agency each year.

UNRWA, the main body assisting ‘Palestinians refugees,’ unlike other UN agencies, assigns refugee status to descendants of Arabs who fled the area during the 1948-1949 war, although in its definition it is careful to distinguish between the two populations.

CIA

“The CIA is a state-sponsored terrorists association. You don’t look at people as human beings. They are nothing but pieces on the chessboard.”
— Verne Lyon, former CIA agent in revealing documentary Secrets of the CIA

Secrets of the CIA is a revealing 45-minute Turner Home Entertainment documentary available for free viewing at the link below. In this riveting exposé, five former CIA agents describe how their initial pride and enthusiasm at serving their nation turned to anguish and remorse, as they realized that they were actually subverting democracy and killing innocent civilians all in the name “national security” and promoting foreign policy agendas.

VIDEO HERE

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high speed photography

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A User’s Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama

Barry was quite the accomplished marijuana enthusiast back in high school and college. Excerpts from David Maraniss’ Barack Obama: The Story dealing with the elaborate drug culture surrounding the president when he attended Punahou School in Honolulu and Occidental College in Los Angeles. He inhaled. A lot.

Check it all out HERE.

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CISPA, the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act that passed the House in April, likely is headed for a Senate vote in early June.

To drum up opposition to the legislation, which would create “a ‘cybersecurity’ exemption to all existing laws,” Fight for the Future, Democrats.com, The Liberty Coalition, and the Entertainment Consumers Association have created a new website called Privacy Is Awesome. The site outlines the top five ways to help defeat CISPA:

Call your senators and tell them to oppose the Lieberman-Collins bill (CISPA), and ask for a constituent meeting during the Memorial Day recess to help change their mind.
Email senators offices about CISPA, expressing your opposition.
Keep calling senators until they plan a constituent meeting.
Donate to anti-CISPA organizers — the same teams that helped defeat SOPA/PIPA.
Share your opposition online — Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is spearheading opposition to the legislation, concluding a recent Senate floor speech with:

I believe these bills will encourage the development of a cyber security industry that profits from fear and whose currency is Americans private data. These bills create a Cyber Industrial Complex that has an interest in preserving the problem to which it is the solution.

Watch the full video here. It’s terrific.

From here : death+taxes

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There’s something seriously wrong with Chris Mattews.

Beltway Confidential:

MSNBC host Chris Matthews described George Washington as an “elite” and a slaveowner in order to strengthen his criticism of Mitt Romney for campaigning on his successful business record.

“Let me try the class warfare the other way,” Matthews said, prefacing an argument that Romney is engaging in class warfare when he argues that “‘you benefit from having a guy as successful as me’ — that was his word, ‘successful.’”

Newt Gingrich, Matthews guest at the time, countered that “that’s what George Washington would have said,” at which point Matthews went on offense.

“They were elites!” he said of Washington and Founders like him. “Well, just remember Washington had a couple hundred slaves, and there was a different kind of politics [then].”

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The Four Big Problems with Obama’s Energy Subsidy Push

Rubio Criticizes Obama’s ‘Troubling Chest-Thumping’ on bin Laden

Obama Outs Navy SEAL Team 6 Leader For Movie He is a commie, a fuckjob, something! But certainly not an AMERICAN!!!

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