What a concept! Catholic nuns are actually living Christ's message in the Gospels...

i'm a product of catholic elementary and secondary school and spent my freshman year of college at a catholic university... from my time in elementary school, i remember some outstanding sisters as well as some petty, mean and outright physically and emotionally abusive ones, the latter the object of much scorn and spoofing in later years... they were also no small source of clientele for therapists...

i was 14 years old when vatican ii was held in 1962... the reforms and enlightened thinking it spawned were both a relief and a breath of fresh air to most all catholics except the dyed-in-the-wool, hide-bound conservatives, who were much like the ones you hear so much about today, led on by cardinals defending child-abusing priests and a pope with his head firmly up his ass...


interestingly enough,  ones who took vatican ii most seriously and used it as an opportunity to fully embrace christ's message in the gospels were nuns... even though i am decades removed from my early catholicism - and from religion in general - and even though some negative experiences with nuns in my youth are still crystal clear in my memory, i've done a complete 180-degree turn and have been in total support of the sisterhood for years now... nuns are doing the kind of social justice work that is written into my heart and my dna, the kind of work that should be both welcomed and supported by all, regardless of their faith or lack thereof... to see the warped and twisted church authorities trying to mute their voices and deflect them from such all-important work is more than an embarrassment to one of the world's major religions, it is a rejection both of christ's teachings and of the basic principles of humanity... for shame...

from raw story...

Tuesday night on Current TV’s “The Young Turks,” host Cenk welcomed Sister Diane Donoghue of #NunsOnTheBus, a group of progressive Catholic nuns who are traveling coast-to-coast by bus. The women are bucking the Catholic church’s male hierarchy and spreading what they hope is a message of social and economic justice by protesting the slew of federal cuts to programs for the needy proposed in the Republican budget outlined by Wisconsin Congressman Rep. Paul Ryan (R).

Their plan has sparked an uproar among conservatives, who are accustomed to the Catholic Church and its adherents being staunchly on their side. Right wing AM radio host Jan Mickelson asked Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA) in an interview if there was a plan in place “to pull the nuns on the bus over and pistol whip them?”

Uygur asked Donoghue how she would answer allegations that the rebel nuns are instigators who “threw the first punch” in the fight for the rights of the poor.

“We’ve been doing this a long time,” Donoghue told him, saying that nuns have been on the forefront of all human frontiers of exploration and settlement, bringing aid and comfort to the needy and helping the sick and helpless.

“We are based in Washington, DC,” she said, “but we work for social justice.”

“Sister Diane,” said Uygur, “There’s something weird in this country with Republicans who claim they have the mantle of Christianity on their side and yet, when you go to help the poor, they say, ‘How dare you!’” He asked if he was wrong in his reading of the New Testament of the Bible. Didn’t Jesus care a lot about the poor?

“Jesus talked about sheltering the homeless, clothing people, feeding people, and always with compassion,” Donoghue replied, adding “He spent more time with poor people than anybody else, and that’s what we want to be able to do in terms of saying, ‘This is not fair.’ We want to turn it around."

 damn straight...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Why bail out the banks? As my grandma used to say, it's like bringing coals to Newcastle*.

why not bail out the people who, through no fault of their own, have gotten screwed and are in the most pain...

Cenk Uygur: Iceland Shows Bailing out Middle Class Works, Not Bailing Out Banks

On The Young Turks yesterday, Cenk Uygur spoke about two different approaches to the economic bailout.

There's the US m.o., where we gave "everything to the banks, and nothing to the homeowners" and are, predictably, still struggling. Then there's the divergent example of Iceland, where initial efforts at complete deregulation failed and the government switched course by indicting those who had "caused the mess" and bailing out the middle class instead.

Take a look at what they did, and how it worked.

*Coals to Newcastle - Something brought or sent to a place where it is already plentiful; it is a reference to the English town of Newcastle upon Tyne, historically a major coal exporter.

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

The United States is the most heavily armed nation in the world, with 90 guns per 100 people. Yemen is in second place, but only has 60 guns per 100 people

the post title is drawn from a study by the graduate institute of international studies small arms survey as quoted by cenk uygur in a story on his young turks show about guns in the u.s...

from raw story...

Friday night on Current TV’s “The Young Turks,” host Cenk Uygur charged that there’s one party in the Trayvon Martin slaying that is truly, undeniably guilty, but it isn’t a person.

[...]

Citing the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies’s Small Arms Survey, Uyger pointed out that the United States is the most heavily armed nation in the world, with 90 guns per 100 people.  Yemen is in second place, but only has 60 guns per 100 people.  David Hemenway, director of the Harvard University Injury Control Research Center, authored a paper in 2011 called “Risks and Benefits of Guns in the Home,” which stated that children in the U.S. are 11 times more likely to die in a gun-related accident than children in other developed nations.  The Centers for Disease Control’s statistics for gun fatalities in 2009 include 11,493 homicides, 18,735 suicides and 554 accidental deaths, a combined 31,347 gun deaths for the year.

i have never owned a gun, never wanted to own a gun, never will own a gun... hunters...? not a problem... weapons...? obscene...

what uygur doesn't mention is the united states role in the world's arms trade...

The unit in this table are so-called trend indicator values expressed in millions of US dollars at 1990s prices. These values do not represent real financial flows but are a crude instrument to estimate volumes of arms transfers, regardless of the contracted prices, which can be as low as zero in the case of military aid. Ordered by descending 2000–2010 values. The information is from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

2006–10 Rank	Supplier						2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
1	United States						7453	8003	6288	6658	8641
2	Russia						5095	5426	5953	5575	6039
3	Germany						2567	3194	2500	2432	2340
4	France						1643	2432	1994	1865	1834
5	United Kingdom						855	1018	982	1022	1054
6	China						597	430	586	1000	1423
7	Netherlands						1187	1326	530	545	503
8	Sweden						432	366	454	383	806
9	Italy						502	684	417	514	627
10	Israel						299	438	281	807	472
11	Ukraine						553	728	330	320	201
12	Spain						843	590	610	998	513
13	Switzerland						285	301	482	255	137
14	Bulgaria						5[13]	9[13]	286[14]	198[15]	354[16]
15	Canada						226	334	227	169	258
16	South Korea						94	220	80	163	95

arms manufacturing and sales is a huge business globally and no country is heavier into arms manufacturing than the united states...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

What's worse, the Defense Authorization Act or the Stop Online Piracy Act?

as soon as i read the story about hillary's unbelievably hypocritical speech at the hague extolling OTHER countries to espouse unfettered internet freedom, i just KNEW glenn would be all over it like white on rice...

Hillary Clinton and Internet Freedom

Hypocrisy from the U.S. Government — having U.S. officials self-righteously impose standards on other countries which they routinely violate — is so common and continuous that the vast majority of examples do not even merit notice. But sometimes, it is so egregious and shameless — and sufficiently consequential — that it should not go unobserved. Such is the case with the speech delivered by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday at a Conference on Internet Freedom held at the Hague, a conference devoted to making “a stand for freedom of expression on the internet, especially on behalf of cyber dissidents and bloggers.”

[...]

She astutely observed that “those who push these plans often do so in the name of security.” She added that “the first challenge is for the private sector to embrace its role in protecting internet freedom,” which — she lamented — has not always happened: “A few years ago, the headlines were about companies turning over sensitive information about political dissidents. Earlier this year, they were about a company shutting down the social networking accounts of activists in the midst of a political debate.” She concluded with a real flourish: “Our government will continue to work very hard to get around every barrier that repressive governments put up” even though such governments will try to maintain those barriers “by resorting to greater oppression.”

What Hillary Clinton is condemning here is exactly that which not only the administration in which she serves, but also she herself, has done in one of the most important Internet freedom cases of the last decade: WikiLeaks. And beyond that case, both Clinton specifically and the Obama administration generally have waged a multi-front war on Internet freedom.

[...]

Perhaps worst of all, many of the administration’s key allies in the Senate are now pushing a bill – in the name of stopping online piracy (SOPA) — that would vest the U.S. government and the largest corporations with draconian powers literally to shut down or otherwise disable Internet sites without due process. Hillary Clinton personally ”tacitly endorsed that bill,” enabling the bill’s key Democratic Congressional supporters to tout State Department support for it. As EFF’s Trevor Timm recently wrote: “Ironically, we know from the WikiLeaks cables that the State Department has also aggressively lobbied many other countries for strict new laws similar to SOPA. They have even offered to fund enforcement and literally draft the laws that sacrifice free speech for greater copyright protection for Hollywood.”

here's glenn talking with cenk uygur on current's young turks...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 3 comments

A partial and incomplete explanation of why I'm less than interested in voting in November

cenk uygur talks about the total fail of the democratic strategy as orchestrated by rahm emanuel...



cenk focuses on how obama has failed on various domestic issues but manages to skip the most egregious abuses perpetrated by the biggest political, policy and leadership disappointment of my lifetime (domestic surveillance, detainee rights, state secrets privilege expansion, etc., etc.)...

i'm not going to sit here and vow that i'm not going to vote in november but i can tell you that, since i will be out of the country, i will have to expend a certain amount of energy that i'm not sure i care to expend to arrange for absentee voting... the only thing that will motivate me to bestir myself is so that i can vote for the odious harry reid to keep the mental-patient-on-unsupervised-release, sharon angle, from becoming my united states senator...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

"We keep expecting the politicians and the mainstream press to do the right thing. That is profoundly naive."

every once in a while, in the midst of the mindless democratic cheerleading, someone on a liberal/progressive blog makes sense...

from cenk uygur's diary, currently on the recommended list at daily kos...

We keep expecting the politicians and the mainstream press to do the right thing. That is profoundly naive. Why is a television anchor making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year going to look to change the system? He loves the system. The system pays the bills.

That's even truer of our politicians. The status quo got them elected. The status quo will get them - and their staffers - great salaries when they retire and become lobbyists. They'd have to be crazy to change the system that put them up on top.

That's why change must come from outside the system. We keep waiting for the Obama administration to bring us the change they promised. What are we, children? The current system got Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, etc. where they are. They have gotten to the pinnacle of power by playing within that system. They've made millions in that system. That's why they have no intention of actually upending it. They just want to tweak it and do exactly what Obama said he wouldn't do if he got elected - play the Washington game just a little better.

This doesn't mean you give up all hope. There are some good guys in DC. I recently talked to a House staffer who said that Senator Franken's staff is excellent. The staff is so important because they are the ones who actually write the bills. I asked him why Franken's staff was better than the others. And he had a simple answer - they don't plan to work as lobbyists in DC when they're done serving in his office.

It's not just the honest senators that should give you hope. What should give you the most hope is that the motivations of people are actually quite simple. So, we can change the results by changing the incentives.

For example, if we pay the campaign expenses of politicians instead of letting the lobbyists pay them, then the politicians might actually work for us. If we ban the politicians and their staff from working as lobbyists, they might not have as much incentive to sell us out.

I know the people inside DC think that last proposal is absolute heresy. How would they get rich if they can't work as lobbyists? And that's precisely what the problem is. They're getting rich at our expense. We're crazy to allow this system to continue.

The nobles will never change it. This is how they got to where they are. This is how they maintain their power and salaries. We have to make them change it.

what cenk doesn't touch on is one of those topics that continues to remain "undiscussable," particularly on sites like daily kos where electing "more and better democrats" is a rigidly enforced mantra... i am now at the point where i no longer believe that it's possible to elect a "better" politician of any party... the system, as it's presently constructed, means that, to get someone pure and holy enough to weather the constant blandishments designed to buy unconditional support for the well-heeled donors, we'd have to elect a canonized saint and, in case you haven't noticed, saints are in remarkably short supply these days...

so, how do we "make them change it?"... take to the streets...? try to out the bastards by sitting in our pajamas and putting up posts on our blogs...? electing "more and better democrats"...? i think we're way beyond that... those things haven't worked in the past and they won't work now... so, what then...? personally, i don't have a friggin' clue... do you...?

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 4 comments

Your chances of getting killed or kidnapped in Baghdad as an unprotected Westerner? One hundred percent.

cenk uygur in daily kos...

We were talking to Newsweek's correspondent in Baghdad, Babak Dehghanpisheh, on Friday's show. I asked him if a Westerner, journalists or otherwise, could walk around in Baghdad unprotected by the military. He said it would be "suicidal."

I don't really know what I expected. I knew it was dangerous and I suspected that no Westerner went outside of the Green Zone without protection, but I didn't get the sense of how perilous it was until we talked to Dehghanpisheh.

So, I followed up by asking him if being harmed was a certainty if you were unprotected in Baghdad. He answered that your chances of getting killed or kidnapped in Baghdad if you were an unprotected Westerner was "one hundred percent."

whaddaya think of THEM odds, bucko...?

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments