A progressive political blog that highlights the infringement of religion upon today’s government.

Today, along with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This recognizes everything that he has done to get the message to the world that we are in a global climate crisis. He has shown millions of people how this has come about, what man’s role in it is, and also things to do to correct the situation.

Not only did he take the opportunity in his acceptance speech to further talk about his important message, he is also donating his part of the $1.5million recipients receive to the Alliance for Climate Protection. This is a non profit that works to spread the message about global climate change, it’s source, and the dangers.

Many have wondered if a win by Gore would throw him into the presidential race mix. He has not addressed that since the win so, of course, it’s only conjecture at this point. His advisers say that he is showing no interest in the 08 bid. This does not deter thousands of Democrats who have stepped up the heat in the last several days to get Gore running. Draftgore.com took out a full page ad in the NY Times this week beseeching the former Vice President to give it a go.

Because most Americans see global warming and understand our role in it, they may see Gore as the go to candidate to make sure something is done. It also helps that he is seen as the real winner of the 2000 election, who had the office of president stolen from him. Name recognition is not a problem for Gore, as millions have seen his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, watched him on countless news programs, and of course know him from American politics.

I am giving Al Gore the title of Saint today, not because I would love him to run for office, but because he is perhaps the largest voice in the world urging man to change the things that are destroying our planet. He’s the reason that I now have compact fluorescent bulbs in every fixture of my home. Thank you Al Gore for bringing the discussion of global warming into most homes in America and millions all over the world.

Welcome to the first installment of our weekly RSS Roundup feature. Here at WWJV4.com we read hundreds of news articles every day but only have time to cover a couple. Instead of letting our readers miss out on these excellent and important stories we have decided to create a weekly story with the top 7 Sinners and top 7 Saints of the week. Enjoy.

The Saintly Seven

• Naomi Wolf, the author of The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. She has written a post that is an absolute must read at Firedoglake.com titled Won’t Back Down.
• Blackwater, the dubious mercenary group, is being sued by The Center for Constitutional Rights. This is a good thing as their cowboy behavior is making it harder on our guys in uniform to do their job.
• Ron Paul’s “Read the Constitution” answer from yesterdays debate deserves a high spot here. Yeah hes Republican but we support anyone who actually wants to protect the constitution. Ron Paul as the Republican nominee would put the U.S. in a win/win for the next election.
• Qwest gets a special nod today for thier efforts to resist the illegal domestic spying after 9/11. They get an extra nod because we now learn that the NSA retaliated against them because of this. I wonder how Qwests coverage is around here?
• Muslim leaders are extending the olive branch to the world’ Christians in an unprecedented letter. This would be news if only a handful of powerful Muslim leaders had signed the letter, with 138 its pretty incredible. Now we just have to wait and see how badly the Christians screw up this opportunity.
• While this is a little old I really like this song and think that it is very fitting. So, Pink is a Saint today!

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DEh0eSpNvY

• We know there are only 6 Saints, it’s amazing how difficult it is to find good political news.

The Sinning Seven

• Hypocrites vote for “voter integrity” by cheating. This is a bit old (September 28th) but I just found this excellent blog and wanted to share. In this posting CLS shows Republicans running around and placing votes for colleagues who are absent. This is against their own rules, and would be considered by virtually anyone to be cheating (or fraud if you’re less polite). What makes this story important is that this was a vote to require ID to vote so that PEOPLE CAN’T VOTE IN THE PLACE OF OTHERS. Fucking hypocrites.
• Shakespeare’s Sister has a creepy story about Christian pedophile clowns. No I’m not kidding. I have been trying to think of something more disturbing all morning and not much has come to mind.
• Mitch McConnel’s office is responsible for leading the smear campaign against a 12 year old. What a piece of work.
• John Gibson knew the Cleveland shooter was white because “[h]e killed himself. Hip-hoppers do not kill themselves. They walk away. Now, I didn’t need to hear the kid was white with blond hair. Once he’d shot himself in the head, no hip-hopper.”
• Ann Coulter said something else offensive on TV. She reminds me of a child who after being ignored starts being bad just to get attention. Sad.
• Tucker Carlson described Obama’s campaign as having “a Khmer Rouge Quality”. So, to Tucker getting 17 year olds involved in politics is similar to a brutal regime that killed millions. I can’t wait to hear him go off on Rock the Vote.
• TalkLeft has a good story on Obama attacking Clinton for her vote on the Kyl/Lieberman Amendment. We both feel that Clinton definitely deserves the criticism but that Obama doesn’t have a leg to stand on after missing the vote. This was an important issue and he should have been there to denounce it and make his vote.

Unless you have been living in a cave, I’m sure you know about the recent veto of the popular and bipartisan SCHIP expansion. I feel it is important to bring to light how the religious right is using lies and personal attacks because they simply cannot win if they fought fair. It is a common Karl Rove tactic to attack and discredit your opponent when they are stronger on the issues and that is exactly what is happening here.

After reading story after story by the religious right attacking private citizens and democrats alike, I decided it was time to cut through the crap. You would think an intelligent person would stop saying something once it is discredited. Sadly for the religious right’s base that is not necessary as they will apparently believe anything their masters tell them.

Issue #1: SCHIP is funded by Democrats’ Cigarette Tax
Every single attack story I have read or heard lately has included this one yet not a single one of those told the whole story. The cigarette tax was originally suggested by Senator Gordon Smith a Republican out of Ohio and had broad approval by both Republicans and Democrats. So where are the attacks on the Republicans for supporting the tax or the attacks on Gordon Smith for proposing the tax? Oh right, they’re Republicans so they’re off limits.

Senator Gordon Smith on the tax. “”I have a long record of opposing tax increases, but I have a consistent record of supporting tobacco tax increases because of the strong nexus that exists between the use of tobacco products and the costs that are then borne by public health,” Smith said.” So there you go right wingers, now that you know who to attack I’m waiting to read the stories tomorrow.

Issue #2: SCHIP will Cover incomes up to $83,000
This was a lie when Bush said it and it is still a lie. That hasn’t stopped virtually everyone from repeating it though. The $83K ($82,600) number was determined when New York wanted to cover families with incomes 400% of the poverty level. The president has the authority to deny any similar requests and had already done so when he made his now (in)famous assertion.

he more realistic number is $51,625 for a family of four which is 250% of the federal poverty level. This is due to stricter state guidelines from the Center on Medicare and Medicaid Services. 11 States currently allow families of higher income and 33 allow less. North Dakota’s limit is only 140% of the poverty level or $28,910 for a family of four.

Issue #3: SCHIP is Socialized Health Care
If one of you would click on my Google Adwords for each time I have read this nonsense today (hint hint, lol) I would be a very happy man. This program is almost the polar opposite of socialized health care as it helps put millions of uninsured children onto PRIVATE HEALTH CARE. Seriously, what the hell about private health care is so hard to figure out?

Issue #4: SCHIP is meant to help the poor
Another great fallacy that our president helped get started is this crazy notion that SCHIP is to help the poor get insurance. Poor families already have a program to help with medical care, its called Medicaid. SCHIP, when established in 1997, was to help out those that make too much for Medicaid but too little for private insurance.

SCHIP was never intended to help the poor but that hasn’t stopped the right wing smear machine from pumping their base with lies which they eagerly eat up and regurgitate onto the internet.

The Bottom Line:
The SCHIP expansion promises to provide insurance to millions of children at a relatively low cost of 35 billion over 5 years. While to the average Joe that seems an unthinkable amount of money it is important to place that in perspective. Over the same time period our country has spent more than 2 TRILLION on the war in Iraq.

What does it say about our national priorities when spending a relatively small amount of money to provide health insurance for our children is less important than an optional/illegal war? I can’t speak for you but the health of our children is a much higher priority than a war that isn’t accomplishing anything.

References:
CommonDreams.org (September 23, 2007 ) War Costing $720 Million Each Day, Group Says

FactCheck.org (September 21, 2007) Bush’s False Claims About Children’s Health Insurance

Tax Foundation (March 30, 2007) Tax Fairness Would Suffer under Senator Smith’s Cigarette Tax Hike

The Oregonian (February 27 2007) Smith supports federal tobacco tax hike to fund children’s health coverage

I am active on the religious and political blogs of our local online newspaper, CJOnline. Recently the Hot Topics author Carisa Wells blogged about Gays in the Military. Carissa starts out by stating that she feels gays should be allowed to serve in the military and ends with how having to shower with them would make her feel uncomfortable. While she is attempting to appear to be very open minded and “tolerant”, she comes off as homophobic and sanctimonious, something she manages in pretty much every blog article.

I was curious as to how others would respond and I have to admit that I was pretty incensed by the responses of the Christian conservatives. I knew that they would be against it for the most part but I wasn’t ready for the reasons that they actually put into print. It seems as though they all feel that being gay means you have no control over your animal like sexual instincts, and will sexually harass somebody because of it.

They were horrified at the thought that a gay person may see a straight person of the same sex naked and not be able to control their impulse to jump on them then and there. Another commenter thought that gay men would not be able to take someone giving them stern orders and become emotional and endanger the lives of the others in his unit.

The entire logic behind their argument is ignorant at best. They each brought up how “real” of a problem this is to our average service man or woman. In an effort to shed some light on what actual service people feel I posted the link to the Zogby poll of service people about this very issue. This is the same poll that was partially responsible for the change of heart John Shalikashvili had regarding the necessity of keeping our military openly-gay free.

Out of 500 returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, 3/4 of them were just fine with openly gay soldiers serving with them. Hmmmm, so apparently a majority of ACTUAL soldiers have no issues with the gayness so what gives? Oh, yeah the bible says it’s wrong. It doesn’t matter that the bible is only taken by them literally when it serves the purpose to discriminate against whichever group is in fashion at the time. The bible was quoted to justify slavery, oppose women’s rights, and now it’s homosexuals.

It doesn’t seem to matter to them that we specifically have separation of church and state mentioned in the constitution of this country, what the bible says on anything should have no bearing on our political decisions. Now that the fight to repeal “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is heating up, it’s time to know what your representatives in government support. Please go HERE to find out and to let them know what you think.

That’s how modern day Christians are viewed by America’s youth according to a survey by The Barna Group posted on September 24th. The survey included 440 non-Christians who overwhelmingly described Christians as anti-gay (91%) judgmental (87%) and hypocritical (85%).

The message of Jesus was one of acceptance, love, and forgiveness. A message that can be respected even by non-believers. The numbers above clearly show modern Christians are not following in his footsteps. This may explain why 84% of young non-Christians have an unfavorable view of Christianity. It appears that in the modern liberal world where more and more people are pushing for equal rights, peace, and tolerance the Christian message of intolerance and bigotry is becoming less and less appealing. I can’t help but think that this is a good thing.

Kinnaman is quoted in the story as saying “It started to become more clear to us that what they’re experiencing related to Christianity is some of the very things that Jesus warned religious people about, Which is, avoiding removing the log from your own eye before trying to take the speck out of someone else’s.”

We have all experienced these things when dealing with the radical religious right so the survey results are not surprising. What is surprising to me is that 75% of the non-Christians polled still believe for some reason that modern Christianity is following the teaching of Jesus. They must have some really bad ideas about the kind of man Jesus was.

This is running long so please comment and let me know what kind of experiences you have had that either refute or reinforce the poll results. If you want, Classically Liberal has an excellent piece written up on this same subject. I strongly suggest giving it a read.

~ William ~