My President is not a “subhuman mongrel.”!

Apparently in 2014 there are Conservative radical Republican Christians who believe it is acceptable and even godly to call The President of the United States of America a “subhuman mongrel.”

Many other Republican-leaning Conservative Christians say nothing whatsoever to condemn this kind of behavior as sinful; they merely continue their own personal diatribe’s against homosexuality and abortion, as per usual, as if these are the only sins worth taking note of or railing against.
Personally speaking, I don’t think Jesus Christ appreciates the Christian who slanders others or creates lies and gossip about anyone, including the President of the United States. You see, the bible tells us that God doesn’t like liars. God doesn’t like false religion, either, that claims to be following Christ, but openly exhibits rotting fruit for everyone to see.
Warning, sarcasm ahead:

The following kinds of Christians can instantly be spotted because they accuse and slander others; they bear false witness, and not just against the President either:

1. They bear false witness against their neighbor.
2. They gossip and spread vicious rumors that they cannot prove, that have no basis in fact whatsoever.
3. Their “ministry” is all about negativity and harming others under the guise of “good Christian love and witness.”
4. They claim prophetic knowledge of everything through their own allegedly-accurate (not) interpretation of the Holy Bible.
5. There are no mysteries of God that they cannot answer because they have deemed that they are the mind and the mouth of God. We must pay attention to them because they are always right.
6. If the Bible doesn’t actually name something sinful, these Christians determine for us what is and isn’t sinful because they’ve been blessed with an all-knowing mind and the ability to read God’s mind. They always knows what God is thinking about everything and everyone.
7. When they slander, lie, accuse, condemn, call foul names, and judge the President or others, it’s okay because theirs is a “godly righteous” judgment done out of “love” and “concern” for those in their sites.
8. When they accuse the President of not being a real Christian and insist that he is Satan himself or the antichrist, they are only rebuking and judging righteously — remember, they know bible prophecy.
9. These Christians are above praying for our leaders and wishing the best for their political office; the instructions from the bible don’t apply to these kinds of Christians — they follow those they feel like following, righteously.
10. These Christians know the heart of the President and yours and mine. They have that all-knowing eye. Beware their scary judgment and perspectives. They condemn you in Christian brotherly love.

(eye roll)

I submit that all of that is bologna. And the following is not sarcasm.

God told us how we can recognize a real Christian. We can recognize a real Christian by his or her fruits:

You Will Know Them by Their Fruits

15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Therefore by their fruits you will know them.
– Matthew 7:15-20

The Rachel Maddow Show,

September 8, 2008, was a good day for America -- even if I didn't know it at the time.
That day marked the debut of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, and the first real injection of intelligence into modern-day cable news. That was not my opinion of the program when it debuted. In fact, my now-former conservative friends and I mocked the idea of an Air America host being given a prime-time position on MSNBC.
I never listened to one second of Maddow during her Air America tenure, but I assumed that she must have been a self-righteous ultra-liberal shock jock; after all, I thought, Air America wasn't exactly a centrist network. In fact, I didn't watch a single segment of Maddow's program until a year after it began, when she brought on conservative author Jon Henke as a guest. Henke had called upon conservatives to disavow the wingnut website World Net Daily for its promulgation of conspiracy theories about President Obama; I was thrilled that there was another conservative writer who was embarrassed by such right-wing kookiness. I wrote Henke after the segment to tell him that while I was not a fan of Maddow, I thought that she was legitimately fair and balanced in her handling of the segment.
Several months later, in February 2010, I had a chance to watch Maddow, on NBC's Meet the Press, tear apart Representative Aaron Schock (R-IL) for his hypocrisy in showing up for ribbon-cutting ceremonies for projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- which he had both voted against and denounced. As someone who opposed both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the hypocrisy of Republicans who embraced the fruits of that Act after condemning it, I was thrilled to hear Maddow speak my language. I couldn't believe that Maddow was saying almost word-for-word what I had been thinking regarding this sort of two-facedness. I became a Maddow fan almost immediately.
It was initially awkward to be, in effect, a "Maddow Republican," especially when Maddow and then-Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) feuded over Brown's dubious allegation that Maddow was planning to run against him in 2012. I was still happy that Brown had defeated Martha Coakley in the January 2010 special U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, and felt some internal pressure to choose sides between Maddow and Brown before concluding that one could like them both for different reasons, despite the questionable nature of Brown's assertions about Maddow.
I also was happy to see Maddow call out then-Senate candidate Rand Paul for his rejection of the logic behind the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I was horrified that Paul had decided to effectively spit in the late Senator Everett Dirksen's (R-IL) face by scorning the Civil Rights Act's efforts to outlaw private-sector discrimination, and I was relieved to see Maddow debunking his nonsensical arguments. Maddow also called out Fox News and the late Andrew Breitbart for rhetorically assaulting former Obama administration official Shirley Sherrod, and highlighted the right-wing extremism that was beginning to manifest itself in House, Senate and gubernatorial races.
Looking back, it's clear that my support for Maddow -- and my frequent claims that despite her politics, she was far better than anything being promoted on Fox News -- caused a rift among my conservative "friends" that my later writings on climate change worsened. In February 2011, I got into a bitter e-mail argument with a libertarian ex-friend after I sent him a clip of Maddow's explanation for why conservatives were so fixated on destroying public-sector unions. He couldn't make a logical argument against Maddow's claims; he could only attack her personally as a far-leftist, a sign that he simply wasn't bright enough to go toe-to-toe intellectually with Maddow.
Most of Maddow's detractors can't make logical arguments against her claims; that's why they loathe her, and why they are horrified that she has lasted five years. May she be on air for five more years, and five more years after that. Maddow has become for this generation what William F. Buckley Jr. was for a previous generation -- the embodiment of the American public intellectual. Of course, because her politics are the opposite of Buckley's politics, this fact drives the right wing up the wall.
Intellectually honest Republicans have to give Maddow credit: she is one of the few hosts willing to give time to members of the GOP who were around before the party became fully incoherent, and who wish the party would return to some degree of rationality (i.e., Steve Schmidt, Meghan McCain, Michael Steele, Nicole Wallace, etc.). She gives voice to those who want sanity and comity back in American politics, and those who want an end to the "war on brains." For all these reasons -- and so many more -- we'd be lost without her.

 

Follow D. R. Tucker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/drtucker

The History of FOX news

You’d think a thing like FOX couldn’t happen in the United States. Although they’re free to be crazy and free to support the Republican Party, you’d think Americans would be too smart to fall for the made-up outrages, dishonest reporting and relentless appeal to our meaner nature. Unfortunately, many Americans are not as smart as we used to assume: a huge swath of Americans (especially elderly white Southerners) believe FOX is just another news media outlet. They aren’t.

What is FOX?

Pensitore Review pulled no punches in answering that question back in 2009.

FOX News is indisputably the most popular cable news channel. And yet in 13 years, Fox has never broken a story. That’s okay, because it is not in the news business. It is in the news-shaping business. Its programming is an admixture of right-wing propaganda and fear-porn for feeble-minded paranoiacs, served up by spokesmodels who have no clue what they are reading.

Whew! Could that be true? I report/You decide

Nixon White House aide Roger Ailes in the 1970′s created fake news stories that favored President Nixon. He shipped these pre-mixed video packages to TV stations around the country at the expense of rightwing extremist Joseph Coors. It was all b.s. all the time, but the TV stations, pretending they had a correspondent in Washington, ran this propaganda as straight news. Now that Ailes runs FOX News, his goals are the same: to spread republicanism by altering the news.

• FOX is a “relentless agenda-driven 24 hour news opinion propaganda delivery system” ~Jon Stewart
• “They’re a Republican brand. They’re an extension of the Republican Party with some exceptions” ~Larry King
• ‎”[Fox is] widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is.” ~Anita Dunn

Fox changes words, meanings, facts, and even actual news footage.

There are thousands of examples of FOX not just “leaning” in a particular direction on an issue… but actively changing around the words and meanings of interviews to make them seem to say the opposite of what the person interviewed actually said; of lies about what happened; of incorrect graphics…for example, calling Congressman Mark Foley a Democrat when he got caught in gay chatter with pages and calling Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords a Republican when there was an outpouring of sympathy for her after she got shot.

• FOX took a sparsely-attended tea-party rally in Washington and spliced in video of a heavily-attended event of an entirely different nature from months earlier.

• FOX has gotten caught using image manipulation software to edit the appearance of people they don’t like to make them appear more sinister.

• FOX alters poll results to mislead its viewers; in one case, their massacre of a Rasmussen poll on climate change ended up with a poll number of 120%–mathematically impossible, of course, except in FOX world.

• On 4-24-09… White House correspondent Wendell Goler cropped a comment by Obama and took it out of context — effectively reversing the statement’s meaning — to falsely suggest that Obama supports creating a health care system “like the European countries.”

• A 2010 Ohio State University study of public misperceptions about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” found that viewers who relied on Fox News were 66% more likely to believe incorrect rumors than those with “low reliance” on Fox News ~Wikipedia

• A study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes showed 67% of Fox viewers believed that the “U.S. has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization” (He wasn’t. He hated, feared and banned them, but you’d never know that by watching FOX).

The more you watch FOX, the less you know.

Wait, it gets worse: For all other networks and news sources, the MORE you watch them, the MORE you know about the actual facts. Those who view CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, & NPR the MOST, have the BEST grasp of the FACTS. With FOX it – is- the – opposite!! Which is what gave birth to the mocking slogan: THE MORE YOU WATCH FOX, THE LESS YOU KNOW.

• In the summer of 2003, 34% of Americans who did not follow the news very closely believed evidence had been found that linked Iraq with al Qaeda before the U.S. invasion. 42% of people who were moderate consumers of FOX news had that opinion. Among those who “watched FOX News very closely” … that number was 80% !! ~Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 118, #4 THE MORE YOU WATCH FOX, THE LESS YOU KNOW!

• FOX News’ Happening Now cropped clips of Obama from an April 3 speech in France to falsely suggest that Obama only criticized the United States. In doing so, Happening Now joined conservative commentators and Fox News hosts who have cropped or misrepresented Obama’s overseas remarks to falsely suggest, in the words of host Sean Hannity, that Obama was “blam[ing] America first” and, more broadly, that Obama’s earlier overseas trip constituted an “apology tour.”

• Fox News presented a clip of Joe Biden criticizing John McCain’s “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” statement…. Problem is, this was something Biden was QUOTING…from SIX MONTHS EARLIER… but it was edited by FOX to make it seem that Biden was stating it as his own opinion. The bogus clip was introduced by Live Desk co-host Martha MacCallum as comments Biden had made in interviews THIS WEEKEND.

• FOX pushed the bogus stat that cap-and-trade would cost “every American family $1,761 annually.” PolitiFact.com has labeled the statistic false and noted that the talking point has been pushed by Republicans.

• On 9/30/09 FOX Gregg Jarrett said on the air that the Obama Department of Justice “thinks it’s OK to intimidate white people, not OK to intimidate black people at the polls.”

‎”If we went back … to the fall of 2008, to the campaign, that was a time this country was in two wars that we had a financial collapse probably more significant than any financial collapse since the Great Depression. If you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election what you would have seen were that the biggest stories and the biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and a something called ACORN.” ~Anita Dunn

A 2011 Kaiser Family Foundation survey on U.S. misconceptions about health care reform found that Fox News viewers scored lower for factual knowledge than other news viewers.

Do you watch "Fox News" the cartoon network?

How many holes need to be punched into a lie before someone lets go of it? That’s the question the folks at Fox News may want to ask themselves. The network has run at least 85 segments in primetime alone about the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. Yet every time a new report on the events of September 11, 2012 is issued, more Fox talking points go down in flames. The most recent contradiction to Fox News claims about the event may best be described as “friendly fire.”
A February 10 report issued by the Republican controlled House Subcommittee On Oversight and Investigations destroys a major right wing talking point about the Benghazi attack — that military assets in Tripoli were ordered to “stand down.” As reported by Media Matters last October:

…Fox News reported that CIA operators in Benghazi had been told by their superiors to “stand down” rather than rush to the aid of their colleagues in the diplomatic compound. The right-wing media used the report to allege that President Obama and his administration had decided to willingly “sacrifice Americans” in Benghazi. But the CIA denied that any stand-down orders had ever been given, no additional evidence has ever emerged suggesting such orders were given, and reinforcements actually arrived from Tripoli in time for the second attack on the CIA facility.

The House subcommittee report, issued by its Republican majority, details six findings. Finding number five says

There was no “stand down” order issued to U.S. military personnel in Tripoli who sought to join the fight in Benghazi.

Testimony confirms that no “stand down” order was issued during the Benghazi attack.

Representative Martha Roby (R-AL) may have thought she smelled blood in the water when she asked Army Lt. Colonel S.E. Gibson during a hearing on June 26, 2013:

Do you agree that you and your team were ordered to . . . “stand down?”

Gibson’s reply should have put an end to any questions.

Madam Chairman, I was not ordered to stand down. I was ordered to remain in place. “Stand down” implies that we cease all operations, cease all activities. We continued to support the team that was in Tripoli. We continued to maintain visibility of the events as they unfolded.

The report goes on to say that Lt. Col. Gibson believes that remaining in Tripoli was the correct thing to do.

This report echoes the findings of a Senate committee report from January 2014, which states

The Committee has reviewed the allegations that U.S. personnel, including in the IC or DoD, prevented the mounting of any military relief effort during the attacks, but the Committee has not found any of these allegations to be substantiated.

Fox News deals with the House report by ignoring the finding that there was no “stand down” order.

The House and Senate reports agree — no stand down order was given. Yet, in the face of mounting proof that the network’s Benghazi line was created out of whole cloth, Fox News chose to completely ignore that finding. A headlines segment during Fox and Friends, that was captioned “Benghazi Bombshells,” highlights the House report’s criticism of the Obama administration, without any mention of the conclusion regarding a stand down order. The House report is just the latest in a series that has destroyed the network’s line about Benghazi, and so far the truth has failed to cause Fox News to correct any of their past reporting. Just because a few Republicans are actually saying that Fox is wrong, should that be any reason to change their story now?

What Foods Should I Avoid?

What Foods Should I Avoid?

Do you live in Florida?

The decision by Republican state lawmakers to put politics over people will mean as many as 17,000 premature deaths, when people who would have had access to health care through Medicaid expansion are denied it. Democrats should make this an issue in every single race this year. And one is.
Florida's former Gov. Charlie Crist, who's running against current-Gov. Rick Scott to get his job back, is challenging Scott in the starkest of terms.

"[Scott] said he was for it, Medicaid expansion, for about 30 seconds. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not much," Crist said on MSNBC's "Daily Rundown." "Didn't lift a finger to get it passed." "What are the results? About a million of my fellow Floridians are not getting health care today, and I am told by friends at SIEU (sic) that means that six people in Florida die every day as a result of that. Every day," Crist continued.

Analysists from Harvard University and the City University of New York estimate that deaths in Florida from lack of Medicaid access will range from 1,158 to 2,221. They don't put a time frame on that, but it's true that almost 1.3 million Floridians are being shut out of Medicaid, shut out of health care. It's thus entirely conceivable that six people could be dying every day in that state.
Scott did endorse expanding Medicaid, but Republicans in the state legislature blocked it, and Scott dropped the issue entirely, leaving almost 1.3 million people out in the cold. That's certainly an issue that should dominate in this year's election.

GOP strikes out at the poor

Yesterday a Farm Bill with $8 billion in food stamp cuts passed the Senate—having earlier passed the House. The Farm Bill will now become law, and these food stamp cuts will go into effect.

The result will be more poor Americans going hungry. 850,000 families with nearly 2,000,000 people will lose an average of $90 / month in food assistance. That is on top of an $11 billion cut to food stamps in November that cost 48 million people an average of $38 / month.

Still, our work had an impact. Back in June, only three Senate Democrats voted against an earlier version of the Farm Bill with food stamp cuts. Yesterday, nine Senate Democrats rejected the Farm BIll. In the House, over 100 Democrats (a majority of the caucus) said “no” to a Farm Bill that cut food stamps.

This is a sad day, but I am grateful to have fought against food stamp cuts with each and every one of you. There is a war against poor people in America, but you stood up and fought back. We are going to keep standing up and fighting back.

One day we will roll back these cuts and expand the food stamp program. For now, please consider making a donation to a food bank near you. There are people out there who are really going to need the help.