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lees1975

lees1975's Journal
lees1975's Journal
December 29, 2024

The Legacy of Evangelicals: Their Own Flawed Doctrine Helped a Right Wing Extremist Demagogue Win the White House Again

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-flawed-inconsistent-doctrine-of.html

It's more than just ironic that the branch of American Christianity which touts itself as the "true church," criticizes mainline Protestants as "liberal," declares the Catholic church apostate by labelling the veneration of the saints as idolatry and claiming they "worship Mary," has more of its leaders and members than any other branch of Christianity bowing the knee to an unrepentant adulterous, womanizing, sexually assaulting, pathologically lying business fraud and cheat who openly denies their own version of Christian faith for himself, supporting him for President of the United States.

The term "conservative Evangelical" covers a broad spectrum of the most diverse branch of American Protestantism that is set apart from mainline Protestants by its own definition of the term "liberal" when it comes to comparing and contrasting its doctrine and theology with the latter. It is also set apart from those denominations and churches that are historically African-American, or predominantly Latino or Asian, by both the racial makeup of the congregations as well as the predominance of Democrats among the membership of the congregations of color. So when I use the term "conservative Evangelical," or just "Evangelical," I'm referencing those who are mostly white, and who include right wing extremism as part of their doctrine and theology.

They've come up with some really convoluted, and outlandish excuses to try and disassociate themselves from his open moral bankruptcy that only make their heretical twisting of the Christian gospel, and the text of the Bible they claim is "inerrant and infallible," even worse. I've heard everything from, "I'm not voting for a pastor in chief, I'm voting for a commander in chief," to "Well, King David wasn't perfect either, and God still used him." These are fallacies that can't be reconciled to any legitimate, historical interpretation of the Bible, or practice of the Christian gospel. They look Christian, but there is no theological or doctrinal foundation to distinguish this intrusion of a licentious, ungodly intruder who perverts the word of God [see the book of Jude, verse 4].

December 25, 2024

Why do we have Democrats planning to work with Trump, after Mitch McConnell's infamous statement that the GOP

would resist and oppose everything President Obama did?

No Democrat who declares they are going to help Trump achieve his ends, which are not American idealism's ends, will ever get my vote.

December 25, 2024

Civics education must be improved in American education. Now.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/12/civics-education-must-be-improved-in.html

The results of the 2024 election are just one more in a long string of examples giving us reason to reconsider the place civics education has in the mandated elementary and high school curriculum in this country. An educated electorate is one of the major keys to preserving the values of democracy and of the American Republic. The deterioration of education has become obvious in the results of multiple elections and in the divisiveness and the agenda-driven politics that have delivered gridlock
and partisan loyalty over patriotism.


For being as prosperous and influential in the world that we are, our education system doesn't match the responsibility that we have in the world. Our education system isn't world class. There are few places where students in this country have an opportunity, through the publicly funded education system, to get what their European counterparts get. For the most part, that kind of academic rigor is available mostly in private schools, though they are also not prepared or capable of teaching social studies at a high level.

And while there are social issues and community issues that are obstacles to education in many parts of the country, the biggest problem is that improving and funding education at a high level has become a progressive, left wing, Democratic party owned political issue. Republicans don't care. And when they're in charge of education, mainly at the state level, they generally underfund the whole system, and there's little in the way of any kind of educational initiatives included in the budget. Their solution to solving the difficulties and problems of American education is to teach the Bible in public schools, and cut the budget to eliminate anything innovative or that works.

The biggest hint we've been given, indicating where the GOP is headed as far as improving American education is concerned is that they're not going to improve it. Trump wants to disband the Department of Education, which will move public schools in exactly the opposite direction from which they need to go. Most Republicans see the public schools as the agent of progressive liberalism in society and their control of it involves doing anything to avoid that happening, including undermining the curriculum.

Elections do indeed have consequences. It's no accident that the states which have the highest achieving public schools are the ones who put the most money into them, and who are blessed with the best teachers. They pay well. They provide reasonable benefits. They require a high level of continuing education, which they help pay for. And they get good results, which set the example for those states who are struggling to provide quality education.
December 24, 2024

Who else got away with the crimes they committed because of Attorney General Merrick Garland's incompetence and refusal

to prosecute?

What a terrible black mark on an otherwise highly successful Presidency, full of remarkable achievements.

December 21, 2024

How many Democratic voters stayed home in November because of the failure to prosecute Trump for insurrection?

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/12/how-many-democratic-voters-stayed-home.html

Was it enough to cost Kamala Harris the election?

The slow-walking, almost deliberate and intentional failure to bring Trump to trial by Attorney General Merrick Garland and the United States Justice Department hasn't been the topic of discussion in any post-election coverage in the mainstream media. I haven't even heard anyone on MSNBC put together the inconsistency between Democratic party rhetoric that Trump is "an existential threat to American Constitutional Democracy," and the complete and total failure of Garland and the justice department of the Biden administration to prosecute him for obvious crimes he committed that would have made him ineligible to run for President and neutralized the threat he posed.

I don't expect the mainstream media to provide an honest assessment of the factors leading up to Harris' "razor thin" election loss. They've done nothing but cover every move Trump has made every single day since he left the White House in 2021, giving him a much larger platform than they did to the sitting President of the United States. We won't hear anything they don't want us to hear.

Personally, the painfully and deliberately slow movement of the justice department under Garland's leadership in pursuing the incitement of the January 6th insurrection by Trump, was a huge frustration. How is it that the House of Representatives can conduct an investigation, uncover mountains of irrefutable, obvious and direct evidence that Trump was directly responsible for all of the planning and organizing, including having right wing militants already at the Capitol when the crowd he incited arrived, and lay that out in a nationally televised series of hearings, which convinced over 60% of the American people that he was directly responsible for it, but the justice department doesn't actually get around to prosecuting it in a timely matter?

That makes me damn angry.


I haven't seen any exit polling or any research that has been done to indicate the effect the failure of the justice department to prosecute Trump and end his threat to American democracy on democratic voters staying home, or independent voters deciding that the Democrats weren't really serious. But it would be an educated guess, considering how razor thin the margins were in enough swing states to change the election results, that Merrick Garland's failure to prosecute Trump for serious crimes against the American people was one of the major causes for Democrats staying home, and for Harris losing the election.
December 20, 2024

This can't last very long.

If what we've seen so far is an example of a second Trump administration, and we know that it is exactly that, people are going to get frustrated in a hurry.. We're already seeing the results of his inability to communicate and make decisions as his dementia and senility just get worse. Public pressure not only terrifies him, it makes him more stupid than he already is.

He won this election on the margins, razor thin as the pollsters kept saying it was. If this keeps up, he'll be at 35% job approval by the time the inauguration rolls around, and I won't believe any poll numbers any news media puts out at this point. It will all be manufactured garbage.

Years ago, when I lived in South Texas, I saw a t-shirt that a guy was wearing that said, "Lord, please let there be one more oil boom and I promise to save some money this time."

"Lord, let the Democrats have just one more shot at controlling the White House and Congress at the same time and we promise to take steps to preserve Democracy this time."

https://indivisible.org/

December 19, 2024

Conservative Evangelicals are paying a financial price for the intrusion of Trump extremism into their churches.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/12/significant-decreases-in-funds.html

It's been a little over nine years since Trump came down the escalator in his New York office building and announced he would be a candidate for President of the United States in 2016. That same period of time happens to coincide with a staggering decline in the membership and attendance within the churches of the nation's largest Evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. Is there a correlation? Of course there is. And similar drops in membership and attendance are occurring in other segments of the broader spectrum of conservative Evangelicalism that are overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly influenced by right wing political extremism.

Southern Baptist leadership has, until recently, been very tight lipped about the decline of their membership. Membership plateaued at 16.2 million around 2000, and remained there, with tiny annual increases until 2008, when a drop of about 38,000 members was recorded. The decline continued at about the same rate, just under 50,000 annually, until 2016, when a loss of just over 200,000 was reported. The membership dropped by 240,000 in 2017, and 280,000 in 2018 before a sharp drop of 435,000 happened in 2019. Then, from 2019 to 2022, the annual losses exceeded 450,000 until the decline slowed in 2023, with a reported loss of 241,000 brought the total down to under 13 million for the first time since the 1960's.

Altogether, since 2006, the Southern Baptist Convention has lost 3,324,156 members, Average weekly attendance has dropped, over the same period of time, by more than 2.2 million. That is a loss of 38% of its total average weekly attendance, and over 20% of its total membership, most of that occurring in the last decade, and the steepest declines occurring since 2016. Only someone blind to reality would insist that the intrusion of the very worldly, immoral, corrupt style of right wing extremism into the churches of this denomination, in which over 75% of its members are self-identified Trump voters, didn't have anything to do with the decline.

Of course it did.

December 18, 2024

So, maybe there are those who don't like Rahm Emanuel, but I think we need to carefully consider his words.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/12/rahm-emanuel-outlines-road-back-to.html

Yeah, So What's the Point?

Well, the point is that, 1.) He's right, and 2.)There are plenty of Democrats who see this and take this seriously who are saying almost exactly the same thing.

I think the theme of "abandon failed orthodoxies" can be applied to every single point that has been made here. We've lost the free press, it no longer exists in the world of corporate billionaire controlled media for profit. We don't need "out own outlet, like Fox News is for the GOP," as is the solution that is often proposed, what we needed to do, when we had majorities in both houses and the White House, was to pass legislation that would have protected the free press, and broken up the gigantic billionaire corporations that own media networks. That means getting rid of the damned filibuster in the Senate, packing the damned Supreme Court and passing legislation defining and defending constitutional free press, ruled on by a court that understands how essential it is to the preservation of Democracy.

And I'll add this to the rest of it. We cannot affort to be irresolute in the face of direct threats to American Constitutional Democracy, like Donald Trump's insurrection. If that danger materializes into the dissolution of the American Republic, as many of our political scientists, experts, and many Americans, think that it very well could, then the failure of Merrick Garland to take hold of a Congressional investigation and turn it into guilty verdicts then history will blame President Biden for allowing it to happen, along with Trump being blamed for carrying it out.

Rahm Emanuel has to be regarded, not only as one of the more successful Democrats in electoral politics in recent history, but also as an expert in the behind-the-scenes kind of organization, political knowledge and skill required to chair congressional party campaigns, and serve as one of the chief advisors to two of the more successful Democrats to serve as President of the United States. And it's not possible to serve in those kind of positions, along with municipal government and Congress, without making a few enemies along the way.

As I said up front, I'm a lifelong Democrat. During a relatively short part of this election cycle, we experienced panic, and then confusion and disorder, following the first Presidential debate, the aftermath of which was having the President, and the party's nominee, step down just three months before an election. The loss of the White House, and control of the Senate, while razor thin, as the polls predicted, has left the party in a bad spot, still trying to cope with the loss while at the same time preparing for an existential threat to democracy to materialize. So what Rahm Emanuel has to say is important to consider, if we ever want to think about the possibility of a recovery.
December 17, 2024

Pardon my ignorance here, but isn't Biden still President until January 20?

What's with this almost complete radio silence? Other than the pardon of his son, it's like he's not there. It doesn't seem like Congress is there, either. Where's our party leadership and how are they preparing for resistance against this existential threat to our democracy.

Or are those just words, and they're going to be content sitting around, holding office, collecting my tax dollars to pay their salary and riding it out until circumstances change. But who's going to be the leaders who have the courage to help bring about the change?

Yeah, I guess I'm on a ledge, waiting to be talked down. I cared, I contributed, I made calls, I knocked doors, I argued with and lost friends on social media. Did that count with any of our leadership? What are they doing for us now? Where are they leading us? Because if it is not to immediate resistance and a pathway to get back in control in two years, then what?

December 16, 2024

How will Democrats handle themselves moving forward?

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/12/a-month-away-from-presidential-transfer.html

There is no shortage of speculation, in the aftermath of the most consequential election of our time, about what Democrats should do, or ought to do, or aren't doing, or won't do. I've read plenty of speculation, but I think I'm capable of making my own observations without the assistance of a journalist pundit who is missing some critical thinking skills and analytical thinking ability.

My first step, and it's one I highly recommend to anyone else in this country who understands exactly what we are about to face in a second Trump Presidency, is to read through Timothy Snyder's book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century. That's an important piece of information which will guarantee the ability to define exactly what is occurring in order to form reasonable, effective resistance.


If we consider the causes that motivated the Democratic party in this election as priorities, then blame for the loss is a dead issue. Gone are the days in American politics when the opposition party that lost an election shook hands, congratulated the winner and pledged bi-partisan support for whatever it was that could be supported. We Democrats set up the parameters for this election, rightly so. We called it "the most consequential election of our time," and we declared that Trump "was an existential threat to Democracy."

Well, was it? Was he?

If we act like it wasn't either of those things, then we have no credibility. We're liars, just like they are. It was all a political game and it's back to business as usual and politics as usual and hope we can do better in 2026. It will be very tempting for those Democrats who are now still in office as a minority party to try and protect what they have through self-interest, to try to hang on to their perks and privileges rather than take the kind of risks that are necessary to unify this party, fight Trump's real threat to this constitutional democracy, and find a way to defeat creeping facsism once and for all.

Real leaders will step up and take risks, rather than try to hover and protect their piece of what's left. Real leaders will take the risks that will bring genuine unity, and will motivate followers to get up off their rear ends, inform themselves about what is going on and fight for their constitutionally protected liberty.

So we need leaders who are not afraid to act like this was the most consequential election of our time, and that Trump is an existential threat to constitutional democracy. And we need to start acting like that now, before he ever takes a second oath of office that he will ignore.

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Gender: Male
Hometown: Tucson, Arizona
Current location: Chicago, Illinois
Member since: Wed Dec 25, 2019, 12:02 AM
Number of posts: 6,238
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