Bundbuster
Bundbuster's Journal"I just want to thank my Lord & Savior Jesus Christ, without whom this would not be possible."
Anyone watching sports hears that increasingly familiar unsolicited refrain launched by proselytizing evangelical athletes into TV cameras and cringing interview microphones - always after a win, never following a loss. This refrain is stating that Jesus loves the proselytizing winner more than the loser, and it is intended to convert you to their Faith. Does God really care about the results of a sporting match? Instead of caring about genocide, poverty, environmental destruction, or the host of problems facing the globe He has decided to focus on a sporting match?
Tom Krattenmaker, who has written on Christian athletes remarks that these athletes are promoting a particular type of evangelical Christianity that has an us vs. them mentality. It's good vs evil, winner-take-all. Therefore, the team that has won clearly is favored by God. Krattenmaker has argued a unique problem is that the same players that praise God for winning are usually silent about issues like racial discrimination, which you would think a Christian would be fighting against.
These proselytizers are the same hypocrites who drove Colin Kaepernick clear out of the NFL for silently taking a knee in support of Black Americans murdered by police brutality. These are the hypocrites most likely to oppose a woman's right to choose, and to call for banning any support by sports teams for LGBTQ rights, such as one Pride Day a year. These are the same hypocrites most likely to identify with the Christian Nationalist movement threatening our democracy as I write.
I have seen athletes literally grab the microphone from the hands of a shocked tv announcer to forcefully inject their propaganda onto the airways and into your mind. They just cannot be content keeping their religious beliefs where they belong - in their own hearts, minds, and churches.
My message - Keep your damned preaching and evangelical proselytizing out of my face!
Ratcheted up a few levels of influence and danger is the insidious militaristic evangelizing of sports coaches, managers, and owners. I need only look at my own small Blue State of Colorado for 3 quick examples:
"Evangelicalism Is the Official Religion of the Air Force Academy"
"Chaplain of the Year" Maj. Warren Watties reportedly told incoming cadets last summer they "will burn in the fires of hell" if they are not "born again." The Air Force ruled in late April that Watties' remarks, calling for cadets to evangelize bunkmates during basic training, as well as warning of burning in hellfire, were "appropriate and consistent" with federal workplace rules.
https://ffrf.org/component/k2/item/13195-evangelicalism-is-the-official-religion-of-the-air-force-academy
"McCartney’s Views on Homosexuality Draw Fire : Football: The Colorado coach is criticized for using his position to gain publicity for a fundamentalist group."
Regents, faculty members and others were outraged. Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) accused McCartney of “hate-mongering” and called him a “self-anointed ayatollah.” Students protested. The furor isn’t McCartney’s first brush with controversy. Three years ago, he endorsed the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-03-25-sp-4239-story.html
"Baseball's Rockies Come Out as "Christian Organization"
Colorado, headquarters of Christo-fascist leader James Dobson and his Focus on the Family cult. Not surprisingly, the Colorado Rockies are owned by Republican wingnut and brewery magnate Pete Coors. Quotes from Scripture are posted in the weight room. Chapel service is packed on Sundays. Prayer and fellowship groups each Tuesday are well-attended. It's not unusual for the front office executives to pray together.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2006/6/3/215665/-
This all reeks the same stink as House Speaker Mike Johnson, which should nauseate you. I call for the separation of Church & Sport, asking holier-than-thou jocks and coaches to Keep your damned preaching and evangelical proselytizing out of my face!
(Nov. 22) Do you believe the Warren Commission JFK assassination report?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_CommissionIt concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and that Oswald acted entirely alone; that the three shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were fired from the sixth-floor window at the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository; that Jack Ruby acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later; that there is no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.
Much more at link.
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8 billion people. Our planet never had a chance.
Genesis 1:28 – “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Human nature - greed, denialism, and religion - wrote the script we and the earth are suffering now.
https://time.com/6234864/8-billion-people-climate-strategy/
*snip*
Global population surpassed 8 billion this week, a shocking milestone because back in the 1990s this threshold was not expected to be breached until 2050. Whether you’re a dour Malthusian or a technological optimist, one thing is undeniable: The 2.7 billion people added to global population since 1990 makes the task of averting a climate catastrophe vastly more challenging than it was when global warming first arose as a mainstream concern.
Population growth is the elephant in the room for climate change, but it is also the elephant in the room for ecological issues such as tropical deforestation, desertification, the extinction crisis, the destabilizing of earth’s life support systems on land and in the oceans; demographic issues such as involuntary migration, fresh water, and food insecurity; and political issues such as civil unrest and state failure. Slowing population growth will reduce pressures on all of these issues and threats.
Rude Pundit: The Media Won't Make Republicans Own Trump's Fascist Rhetoric
Trump's rhetoric in the last few months has taken the racism and general hatred of anyone who doesn't unabashedly love him and his awful family and amped it into explicit calls to round up and deport or imprison or flat-out murder large swaths of the population. It's not just that he now regularly says some variation of his "vermin" line: "We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country." That shit is frightening enough.
But he's broadened his targets. Look at this from a speech on November 11, which starts with a rant against the "deep state," that weird imagined cabal of, I guess, people who are loyal to the Constitution and not Donald Trump: "We're going to expel those horrible, horrible war mongers from our government. They want to fight everybody, they want to kill people all over the place, places we've never heard about before. Places that want to be left alone. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxist fascist. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media until they become real." So the plan is to gut the government by defining, as broadly as possible, the criteria that makes you an enemy to the nation. Along with that, the government will be used to attack the media and destroy it.
What's probably most ironic here is that the "fake news" media Trump is describing is still mostly giving him a pass on this move to openly saying full-on, actually fascistic dictator shit. Sure, they're reporting on it. But they are letting other Republicans get away with not owning Trump or his rhetoric. Today on one of the goddamn Sunday shows, Ron DeSantis was asked about Elon Musk's antisemitism but not Trump's tilt into totalitarianism. Some Republicans have been asked about the "vermin" line, and, predictably, the response is a wimpy half-swat, like 2028 GOP presidential nominee Nikki Haley, who said, "I don’t agree with that statement" before turning to Trump's weird statements about Israel and Hezbollah. Well, groovy, Nikki.
That's not good enough. They need to be asked if they agree with, say, Trump's desire to end the DACA program and deport 800,000 migrants who were brought to the United States when they were children and are American in every sense except immigration status. They need to ask if they agree when Trump says, "We'll stop the invasion on our southern border and begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history." According to meth-faced Trump advisor Steve Bannon, that means the deportation of 10 million people. Ask Republicans from farm states how they feel about that. Ask if they agree and will support Trump, and ask the rest if they're okay with Trump opening up giant internment camps for migrants and having no due process. Hell, ask them if they agree with shooting shoplifters, as Trump has also said he'd allow.
https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-media-wont-make-republicans-own.html
Poll: The most heinous DeSantis/Florida legislation?
Details on most of these bills can be found here:
https://www.axios.com/local/tampa-bay/2023/06/29/gun-regulation-sexual-orientation-florida-laws-take-effect-july-1
https://apnews.com/article/ron-desantis-education-gop-debate-723e18d19912b97696f3ad2c9d77e099
View from the top of Wyoming
Wind River Range, looking 100 miles north to the Tetons (upper right)
John Kerry - 3 Purple Hearts, Silver Star, Bronze Star - Swiftboated by war deserter Bush's vile, cowardly henchmen.
(from 2004, Salon)
Two months ago, their opening salvo against the Democratic presidential nominee fizzled -- in part because it was revealed that several of the same officers now criticizing Kerry had written strongly positive evaluations of him as a young lieutenant decades ago.
The largest donor by far is Houston home builder and religious right activist Bob Perry. According to the group's latest IRS filing, Perry gave $100,000 to the "Swift Boat Veterans" on June 30... He has close ties to White House political director Karl Rove and to Tom DeLay. Since 2000, Perry has donated nearly $800,000 to GOP political action committees associated with DeLay and other Republican congressional leaders.
https://www.salon.com/2004/07/17/swift_boat_veterans/
Kerry's 1971 Vietnam Veterans Against the War speech to the U.S. Senate:
Malevolent republican operatives did the same to Vietnam War triple amputee Georgia Senator Max Cleland, in his 2002 loss to scumbag Saxby Chambliss, running ads impugning Cleland's courage and leadership.
*snip*
The advertisement was denounced by members of both parties, including Republican senators and fellow Vietnam veterans John McCain and Chuck Hagel. “I've never seen anything like that ad,” McCain told The Washington Post in 2003. “Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to a picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield – it's worse than disgraceful, it's reprehensible.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/max-cleland-vietnam-war-soldier-obituary-b1955102.html
There is nothing too despicably low for republicans - then & now. I loathe them with my every fiber.
The uncle I never knew, shot down in WW2
He enlisted in the Navy right after Pearl Harbor, a pilot lost in the Pacific war several months later.
Hillary Clinton likens Trump to Hitler and warns he would end democracy
(The Guardian)
Hillary Clinton has compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler as she offered a blunt warning about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.
Trump back in the White House, Clinton said during an appearance on ABC’s daytime talkshow The View on Wednesday, “would be the end of our country as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly”.
The former first lady, senator and secretary of state said: “When I was secretary of state, I used to talk about ‘one and done’. What I meant by that is that people would get legitimately elected and then they would try to do away with elections, and do away with opposition, and do away with a free press.”
Then Clinton added: “Hitler was duly elected. All of a sudden somebody with those tendencies, dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies, would be like ‘OK we’re gonna shut this down, we’re gonna throw these people in jail.’ And they didn’t usually telegraph that. Trump is telling us what he intends to do.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/09/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-adolf-hitler
