Andy Borowitz: Economy is rising according to S&P Birther Index

I've been noticing the same thing. since far righters can't blame obama for poor economy anymore. so, back to the birther claims.

Republicans are so predictable!

March 3, 2012

In Positive Economic Sign, Republicans Starting to Say Obama Wasn’t Born in US Again

S & P Birther Index Posts Big Gains

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – In what some experts are calling a strong indicator of improvement in the economy, Republicans in recent weeks have begun renewing their claims that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

While most economists agree that any significant improvement in the US economy is generally accompanied by an uptick in GOP questions about Mr. Obama’s place of birth, there is now an econometric tool for measuring the increase in those claims: the so-called S & P Birther Index.

The Birther Index, established in 2008, measures the occurrences of such words as “birth certificate,” “Kenya,” and “wasn’t born here” in Republican statements about the President, and has proven to be a surprisingly reliable tool for tracking improvements in the economy.

Harland Dorinson, the economist who devised the S & P Birther Index, said that as the economy recovers the index also shows a strong surge in statements questioning the President’s Christianity.

“As unemployment started going down, we saw an increase in references to Mr. Obama being a Muslim,” he said. “This is generally a very bullish sign for the economy.”

But Mr. Dorinson was quick to add that while the surge in references to Mr. Obama being “an Islamic socialist born in a mud-hut in Nairobi” is encouraging, the economy is not out of the woods yet.

“We won’t be fully in a recovery until the Republicans start calling him a Wiccan,” he said. “And if they start saying he’s a Satanist who practices human sacrifice and drinks the blood of children, then it’ll be time to pop open the champagne.”

Read More

Warning: JEB Bush is waiting in the wings

This article tells the truth about where the real power lies, in our country--and the world.  When We, the People all learn this and stand up against the cabal--and only then--can real changes be made.  Watch the DVD THRIVE and go to www.thrivemovement.com for additional information.  For more on the Bush family’s unknown past and the full gamut of its network with the wealthiest interests in the US and around the world, see Russ Baker’s book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. For details on Jeb Bush’s relationship with the Cuban exile community, see Ann Louise Bardach’s Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana.

CAN YOU SAY PRESIDENT BUSH AGAIN?
By Russ Baker

More and more GOP politicians are realizing their party has a big problem. What once seemed a great idea—a drawn-out Republican Primary slugfest intended to take the limelight from President Obama—may have only served to get their entire field on the wounded list. And what option does that leave?

Well, one solution is to forget about the entire bunch.

Maine’s Republican Governor Paul LePage, elected in 2010 with heavy Tea Party support, thinks the circular firing squad scenario might open things up for someone else. The Associated Press quoted LePage the other day on this:

“I would love to see a good old-fashioned convention and a dark horse come out and do it in the fall,” LePage said, adding that he didn’t have a particular alternative candidate in mind.

Whoever this is, it doesn’t need to be a “dark horse,” a term signifying a generally unknown prospect who surges to prominence. Instead, as in racing, this competitor out of nowhere could be the progeny of a previous winner. Maybe even a sibling of another.

In other words, he—and it will be a he—could be what Donald Rumsfeld might call a “known unknown”—a major brand name that has not been sullied by the current non-stop mud wrestling. For one has been hanging out at the steps to the arena all this time. His name is Jeb Bush.

***

Before anyone races to declare that Americans will not stand for another Bush presidential campaign—and certainly not for another Bush presidency—let me just say that they’d be sorely underestimating the Bush family.

The Bushes are nothing if not resilient. George W. Bush, he of so few qualifications but with his own distinctive Bush personality and formidable charisma, came out of the dust of his father’s re-election defeat in 1992, stronger than his father ever was politically. And though W. is now persona non grata to many, his brother would come back as a significantly different brand. He’s widely regarded as more capable, much more focused, much better at delivering points. He’s able to pull off a kind of sober, reasonable persona, more stable than a Santorum or a Gingrich or most of the other contenders. Rich but not entitled. A kind of Romney—without the Romney.

And yet….And yet he is still a Bush. That means a great deal, because, putting aside all the stylistic differences, this is a clan with a mission. It’s a mission they’ll never talk about, beyond vague statements about a sense within the family of Duty to Nation. No, the Bush clan is the ultimate representative of the game plan of the one percent of the one percent. What they stand for in private is much, much more troubling than most Americans know. What I learned in the five years I spent investigating them—as they were going out of power the last time—shook me to my core.

***

There isn’t space to get into the hundreds of disturbing things about the long-term agenda and covert worldview of this family and their friends, going back not just years but generations. Suffice it to point out a few things that might seem innocuous, but aren’t.

One is the propensity the Bushes have for long-term alliances with those on the other side of the aisle. This is emphatically not about bipartisanship. It is about the same kinds of things that bring Republican and Democratic elites together, that explain the 2004 nominees of both parties being members of the same Yale secret society. It is about why the same people stay on top forever.

The Bush family made friends with Bill Clinton at the very start of his administration—right after he defeated George H.W. Bush—a relationship that is sustained to the present moment. Although a Democrat, Clinton never did take on the big issues that would have upset the people behind the Bush dynamic. Indeed, he deregulated the financial markets and outsourced government, and carried out a foreign policy comfortable to those used to extracting resources from wherever needed, no questions asked; he failed to challenge the national security establishment or generate a post-Soviet-collapse “peace dividend.”

The Bush family has now attempted the same thing with another Democratic “opponent,” Barack Obama. Shortly after Obama took office, George H.W. Bush and Jeb (but not W.) paid the new president a private visit in the White House. That’s not a common thing, but the media essentially ignored it and we never did learn the real nature of that trip, beyond the notion that the Bush family just wanted one more peek at the West Wing.

Recently, Obama got another visit from the duo. Jeb and his father, known familiarly as Poppy, were ostensibly in town to attend the Alfalfa Club’s annual banquet, also attended by Obama—one of those seemingly harmless events where the press is kept out and government officials and rich people frolic and reaffirm each other’s credentials in this country’s elite.

The publications reporting on the Bush White House visit intimated that it seemed a little weird to them, but nobody came right out and said it. To be sure, this is one family with a lot of weird little coincidences, and famous excuses for happening to have to be somewhere. Examples: George H.W. Bush said he couldn’t remember where he was the day JFK was shot, but documents show that he was right there in… Dallas. Working covertly for the CIA. Before publicly not remembering, he went to the trouble of creating a hodgepodge of competing scenarios for where he was—and why.

Another oddity: George H.W. Bush ran against Ronald Reagan in 1980, lost, and, barely suppressing his disgust and disappointment, became Reagan’s veep. Like Lyndon Johnson a decade earlier, he faced an eight-year wait for another chance at the top. Two months after the inauguration, Reagan was shot by John Hinckley—son of a family that had been close with the Bushes for decades. Of course, this was so very bizarre and statistically improbable (and chilling), that virtually no media organization even mentioned the connection. (For more on odd security incidents surrounding the presidency, see this.)

***

With a third Bush on the horizon, we need to consider the gap between the way the Bush clan is presented in the media and the reality. The media tell us that they are a family like every other family in pursuit of the American dream, perhaps blessed with just a little more drive and luck than most. As if.

In fact, Jeb owes his current political stature to family influence that soared when Poppy headed out from Connecticut along with many other old-money people to get in on the oil boom (with more than a little intelligence work mixed in—much of it involving anti-Castro Cubans.) Then Jeb grew up and moved to Florida, where Poppy’s CIA ties with the anti-Castro Cuban community got the son quickly fixed up, professionally, financially, and, soon enough, politically.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff concerning Jeb that any budding investigative reporter should find good teething material. In 1980, after his father’s election as vice president, Jeb set up the Bush family franchise in the Sunshine State, with its increasing national political importance. He promptly got involved with the wealthy Cuban exile community that had long and deep covert connections to his father, and that wanted continued access for favors. One of those Cubans, Armando Codina, a self-made millionaire, took the veep’s son under his wing, and Jeb was soon on his way to his own fortune in real estate deals that often did not pass the smell test. This was, helpfully, under the shingle of “Bush Realty” in case anyone did not already know his father was in the White House and that Jeb was “open for business.”

These guys don’t “beat around the Bush.” They don’t have to. As Jeb told the Miami News in 1983, “I want to be very wealthy–and I’ll be glad to tell you when I’ve accomplished that goal.”

Jeb waded into Florida politics in 1984 as Dade County GOP Chair. One of Jeb’s closest associates was Camilo Padreda, a former intelligence officer with the Batista dictatorship overthrown by Fidel Castro. Padreda and a friend had previously been indicted for embezzlement, but the charges were dropped, it has been said, after the CIA assured prosecutors that Padreda’s friend had worked for the agency. (At the time, the elder Bush, a former CIA director, was vice president). Padreda later pled guilty to defrauding the Bush administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, though his worst punishment was two months of house arrest. Jeb also was on the payroll of another Cuban businessman, Miguel Recarey, who had been involved with CIA attempts to assassinate Castro. He lobbied his father’s administration on behalf of Recarey. Later on, Recarey was charged in what is believed to be the largest Medicare fraud in history, but managed to flee the country with a handy “expedited” $2.2 million tax refund he received from the IRS that same day.

In 1990, when George H.W. was president, Jeb got him to release the convicted terrorist Orlando Bosch, who had participated in more than 30 terrorist acts (among other things, Bosch was implicated in the bombing of a Cubana plane that resulted in the deaths of 73 civilians). In 1998, with heavy help from the Cuban community, Jeb was elected governor, and thus emerged in a prime position to help his elder brother, George W., prevail in the 2000 Florida election fiasco, and thereby become president. As governor, Jeb nominated Raoul Cantero, the grandson of the Cuban dictator Batista, to the Florida supreme court, though he was lacking in experience—Cantero had been the terrorist Bosch’s spokesman and attorney.

In the aftermath of September 11, while the George W. Bush administration was pushing the colored panic light like crazy, and targeting terrorist suspects of all kinds and levels of probable guilt and innocence, it consented to the release of Cuban exiles convicted of terrorist offenses. Jeb advocated for these releases as well.

***

Jeb has been carefully laying a scenario in which he could indeed run—and could be very well received. He’s traveled the country extensively as a kind of elder statesman. And recently he criticized the GOP presidential candidates’ behavior:

“I watch these debates and.. it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective and that’s kind of where we are…I think it changes when we get to the general election. I hope.”

In an interview with CBS News after the event, Bush added, “I think it’s important for the candidates to recognize they have to appeal to primary voters, and not turn off independent voters that will be part of a winning coalition.”

This “bring us together” appeal would allow him to jump in, should he be needed, in 2012, and, run or not, win or lose, would position him seriously for 2016.

That we are not already paying enough attention to this prospect is telling about the state of the American media – and electorate—today.

Our lack of collective memory, our failure to examine deeper forces and patterns in this country, our perpetual rush to “move on” and our staunch resistance to possible insights and lessons from the past, will come back to haunt us.

**

My hunch is that the Bushes and the real establishment (that’s not the Tea Party, not the Santoriacs or the Gingrichites, folks) just love how bad the GOP field is. Obama is almost certain to be reelected. Which is just fine. Like Clinton, he’s played ball on all the big issues that really matter to the One Percent of One Percent—foreign intervention, oil, Wall Street bailouts. They figure he won’t do anything more radical in his second term, while, like another young president (Bill Clinton), looking forward to cashing out to an extremely comfortable life after the White House. And they figure as long as Obama does not make Hillary his veep, that the electorate will tire of the Democrats in 2016 and be ready for….another Bush.

Small wonder these Democratic and Republican administrations are all kissing cousins now. Competitive democracy? Bah—that’s language for columnists. These guys all have it made—and as ever, they’re busy divvying up the pie.

For more on the Bush family’s unknown past and the full gamut of its network with the wealthiest interests in the US and around the world, see Russ Baker’s book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. For details on Jeb Bush’s relationship with the Cuban exile community, see Ann Louise Bardach’s Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana.

Read More

An Intelligent Woman versus a Conservative Dolt

Which one impresses you in the best way?

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/01/sandra-fluke-on-limbaugh-i-was-stunned-then-outraged/

Watch this interview of Sandra Fluke, an obviously intelligent articulate woman who gets her point across without rants or condemnation of anyone.  If you have llstened to Rush Limbaugh's vile denunciation of her and all women who practice birth control, you will come away with the understanding that Ms. Fluke and Limbaugh belong in different universes.  She is light years ahead of Limbaugh in evolution. 

I wonder how Republican conservatives can continue to listen to Limbaugh and give support to his ignorant rantings, while denying evolved people like Ms. Fluke the chance to speak at a Congressional hearing on women's rights to contraceptives (masked as a hearing on the right to religious freedom, which only right-wing lemmings could possibly believe).  The right wing fanatics have devolved the entire Republican Party into a medieval travesty that cannot be taken seriously by intelligent people.  I doubt that the party can survive its takeover by fundamentalist nutcases.  I know a couple conservative Republicans who must be cringing at what they are hearing from so-called leading representatives of the GOP.  Limbaugh seems to be the head of the party these days; if so, woe is them.

Read More

Psychopaths in our world are not rare

My daughter and I were talking yesterday about sociopaths/psychopaths we have met in our lives and how lucky we have been to have good-hearted compassionate people in our family and extended families.  Sociopaths/psychopaths are defined as self-centered people who cannot feel empathy with others and have no conscience, so they do ruthless unethical acts on a daily basis without a twinge of guilt.  Of course, Wall Street is full of this type -- as is the political world and the religious world (think of the present Pope, Cardinals, and bishops of the Catholic Church who covered up pedophilia, for instance). 

Relatively, the top 1% has far more psychopaths than the 99%, of that I am certain!  An overabundance of wealth and power position in the world, especially when one is born into it, gives the rich a sense of privilege that overrides feelings for others and allows them to believe they are "special." The sociopathic type blatantly reveals itself when it obtains positions of authority over others. They love power.  Think about how many of this type you have met in your own life, in the workplace, in your church, and in your daily interactions in the business world. This is the type that runs the world -- and we are all the poorer (literally and figuratively) for it.  

ONE OUT OF EVERY TEN WALL STREETERS  IS A PSYCHOPATH, SAY RESEARCHERS
By Alexander Eichler

One out of every 10 Wall Street employees is likely a clinical psychopath, writes journalist Sherree DeCovny in an upcoming issue of the trade publication CFA Magazine (subscription required). In the general population the rate is closer to one percent.

"A financial psychopath can present as a perfect well-rounded job candidate, CEO, manager, co-worker, and team member because their destructive characteristics are practically invisible," writes DeCovny, who pulls together research from several psychologists for her story, which helpfully suggests that financial firms carefully screen out extreme psychopaths in hiring.

To be sure, typical psychopathic behavior runs the gamut. At the extreme end is Bateman, portrayed by Christian Bale, in the 2000 movie "American Psycho," as an investment banker who actually kills people and exhibits no remorse. When health professionals talk about "psychopaths," they have a broader range of behavior in mind.

A clinical psychopath is bright, gregarious and charming, writes DeCovny. He lies easily and often, and may have trouble feeling empathy for other people. He's probably also more willing to take dangerous risks -- either because he doesn't understand the consequences, or because he simply doesn't care. (A perfect description of 99% of politicians. We see them daily on television, in political debates and giving interviews and speeches that are filled with lies, from start to finish. They will often switch their stated positions 180 degrees, even in the middle of a speech or interview. I have one word about that: Romney)

An appetite for risk can seem like a positive business trait on Wall Street, where big gambles sometimes lead to big rewards. But for the people DeCovny is talking about, the outcomes matter less than the gambles themselves -- and the chemical rush of serotonin and endorphins that accompanies them.

This is hardly the first time that mental illness has been equated with a certain capacity for professional success -- especially in the financial sector, where some stock traders have actually scored higher than diagnosed psychopaths on tests that measure competitiveness and attraction to risk.

Some psychologists have long claimed that the qualities that make for a high-achieving politician or stockbroker are also the same traits that psychopaths have in abundance.

Other researchers generalize it to bosses as a species, saying that about 4 percent of all executives are psychopaths -- and that their relative lack of scruples is what helps them excel in business.

At the same time, the fast-moving, high-pressure environment of Wall Street probably compromises the mental health of some of its employees. A recent study found that many young bankers develop alcoholism, insomnia, eating disorders and other stress-related ailments within just a few years on the job.

Stockbrokers have also been shown to experience clinical depression at a rate more than three times as high as the general population.

DeCovny writes that for someone with a "latent" compulsive gambling problem, a job trading stocks can trigger pathological responses that send the person into an escalating pattern of lies, debts and even embezzlement and fraud.

A person with this problem would feel gratified by an enormous loss, because of the way their brain's reward system works -- which DeCovny says may explain the activities of such notorious rogue traders as Kweku Adoboli, Jerome Kerviel and Nick Leeson, three men who gambled and lost the combined equivalent of $10.3 billion for their respective institutions over the past 17 years.

Read More

Good essay by Bill Maher

THE GREAT THING ABOUT HAVING BEEN POOR
By Bill Maher

f you grow up in America, it's pretty rare if you don't love money. One of the first things I ever remember being punished for was stealing money. Five dollars, off my father's dresser. I was so little, I don't think I even knew it was wrong to take something that wasn't specifically mine - I recall this being my introduction to the concept of "larceny is bad." But somehow, I knew it was good to have cash.

After I left my middle class household at 18, standard of living took a real tumble for a while. At Cornell, I had no money, and boy did I look it. They called where I lived the last three years Collegetown, but Collegetown was really slums in a rural setting. Landlords did not have to work that hard in Ithaca, N.Y. - every year, there was fresh supply of eager tenants among the students who didn't want to live in a sorority or fraternity. It was a sweet market for a slumlord.

But even that looked good compared to what was waiting for me as I began my illustrious career as a standup comedian in New York City in 1979. First year I lived on 99th Street in Spanish Harlem, a five-floor walk up, toilet down the hall. No shower - a tub that sat in the kitchen with a snake-like attachment that hooked up to the kitchen sink. Walked home every night from the comedy clubs on the tony Upper East Side, watching the neighborhoods become poorer and scarier as I made my way north, and I'm sure the only reason I was never robbed was, they took one look at me and knew it wasn't worth the trouble. Sometimes, freedom really is just another word for nothing left to lose.

And yet, in a short 33 years, things had turned around enough so that I was able to give a million dollars to the super PAC of a certain mixed-race president who, I would like to remind all my overconfident progressive friends, does NOT have this election in the bag. And a lot of people this last week have said the same thing to me: "You're not picking up the drinks tonight?"

The great thing about having been poor is how liberated it makes you if you eventually become rich. There's nothing like the knowledge that you don't need money to survive. That the money cushion you lie on every night doesn't have to be three feet thick, and you can still get to sleep.

Other people seemed surprised I had a million dollars, which amused me. I've had a television show since 1993; television pays well - I may even have another million lying around somewhere. Every year when I visit my accountant in December to see how the year went, he always says I'm the best saver of all his clients, which amazes me, because I feel like I deprive myself of absolutely nothing. I once asked him, what do your other clients spend their money on? Because I know who some of his other clients are, and I know they make WAY more than I do. He said that what they spend their money on is always changing, and that's not even the point - the point is, however much money they make that year, they always spend all of it! That's how they think: have money, spend it, because the real tragedy would be to die and have money left over.

Me? I just don't have expensive tastes I guess - I don't collect cars or paintings or jewelry, and I gave up my heroin habit years ago. But I also know that, as I said when I presented that giant check to Priorities USA Action last Thursday at the end of my stand up special on Yahoo!, "This hurts!" I was trying to make the point that if I could do it, a lot of other people could do it a lot more easily than me. You know, the only place in America where the millionaires and billionaires are predominantly liberal is here in Hollywood - with the possible exception of Silicon Valley and Ben & Jerry's ice cream. There's a reason that of the 16 billionaires that have contributed to super PACs this year, 14 have given to Republicans. It is generally the party of the rich. And in a post-Citizens United world, the party of the rich has an advantage like they've never had before. In 2008, the most you could give to a candidate was $2,300. Now it's Infinity. No, the election is not in the bag.

Read More

Should be read by conservative Catholics and the last-sentence warning taken

But most evangelical-type conservatives are only interested in what they hear in their rigid-right "bubble" from the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, and Coulter--and their new hero, Santorum.

WHY EVANGELICALS LOVE SANTORUM AND HATE JFK
By Michael Wolraich

Michael Wolraich is a founder of the political blog dagblog.com and the author of "Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual."

(CNN) -- Sen. Rick Santorum, who is campaigning to become America's second Catholic president, disagrees from the bottom of his gut with the first Catholic to hold the office.

In October, he told a Catholic university audience that when he read the 1960 speech in which John F. Kennedy said: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," he "almost threw up." More recently, he elaborated on his dyspeptic condition in an ABC television interview, calling JFK's credo "an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960."

But the Baptist ministers who witnessed Kennedy's speech surely felt differently. In the 1960s, evangelical leaders were not concerned that Kennedy was too secular; they were concerned that he was too Catholic.

For most of American history, the Protestant majority has regarded Catholics with deep suspicion. Many of the 13 colonies banned Catholics from public office and prohibited Catholic rituals. Priests were banished and sometimes executed.

After independence, the Constitution protected Catholics from the worst persecutions of the Colonial period, but discrimination persisted, and anti-Catholic paranoia raged with an intensity that would have made Glenn Beck blush. One popular book, "Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States," warned of a secret Jesuit plot to deliver America to the Austrian empire. Its author was Samuel Morse, co-inventor of the telegraph.

Such fears diminished as Catholic immigrants assimilated in the 20th century, but many Protestants remained hostile toward Catholic politicians. During JFK's presidential campaign, the Department of Justice documented 144 producers of anti-Catholic campaign literature. The pamphlets warned of Vatican influence over American policy and the prospect of state-funded Catholic schools. Most of the opposition came from evangelical groups like the National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention.

In the face of unrelenting hostility, Kennedy decided to address concerns about his religion directly. Speaking to a group of Baptist ministers in Houston, he reassured them:

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president -- should he be Catholic -- how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote, where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him."

Perhaps Rick Santorum's father, an Italian immigrant who came to the United States in 1930, heard these words and understood the prejudice that JFK struggled against. But Rick Santorum was only 2 years old when they were spoken. If he has any memory of Catholics' difficult history in this country, he does not publicize it. Nor do other Catholic champions of the religious right in their determination to wash away the old hostilities that divided American Christianity.

Evangelicals and Catholics began collaborating politically in the late 1970s. The architect behind their reconciliation was a political strategist named Paul Weyrich. Frustrated by the Republican Party's preoccupation with business interests, Weyrich sought to reorient the party toward religious and cultural issues. To this end, he founded the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and the Moral Majority, the first organization to represent what we now call the religious right.

Weyrich, a Melkite Greek Catholic, knew that a Catholic leader would not appeal to evangelicals, so he tried to recruit televangelist Pat Robertson to lead his cause. When Robertson turned him down, Weyrich enlisted the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Falwell would later say that Catholics and evangelicals found common ground in their opposition to abortion, but Weyrich remembered it somewhat differently. He had tried to mobilize evangelicals over abortion and failed. Most Protestants regarded abortion as a "Catholic issue," and many prominent Baptist leaders had even endorsed the Roe v. Wade decision.

What actually brought Catholics and evangelicals together was a common enemy. This imaginary enemy has gone by many names. In the 1970s and '80s, it was known as "secular humanism," a fiendish anti-religious movement that had supposedly taken over the schools, the courts, the media and the government.

In the 1990s, it was called "political correctness," and rampaged through the universities. When Bill O'Reilly of Fox News announced that Christmas was under siege in 2004, he blamed "secular progressives" in the media. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum decries "cultural liberalism" and warns that the government is trying to destroy religious freedom by forcing Catholic organizations to insure birth control.

Regardless of the name, the supposed enemy's goals remain the same: to eradicate Christianity from the public sphere and replace traditional Judeo-Christian values with a liberal agenda. Its agents are progressive politicians, journalists, professors and nonprofit organizations. Its creed is the separation of church and state that JFK once appealed to in his campaign to become the first Catholic president.

The construction of such a villain has been devastatingly effective in uniting the religious right. The same evangelical groups that once attacked JFK as an agent of the pope have become the foundation of Santorum's support in the Republic primary, and his only rival for their vote is fellow Catholic Newt Gingrich. Times have changed.

But should Santorum and his conservative Catholic allies succeed in breaking down the barriers between state and religion, they may reap a bitter fruit. For without the secular menace to distract Protestants from their doctrinal differences with Catholics, the old enmities may rise again. And just as religious right leaders seldom extend their demands for religious freedom to Muslims and other non-Christian religions, Catholics might one day find the freedoms that they have come to take for granted are no longer assured.

Read More

Romney now begging for small money donations

Charles P. Pierce | The Great Humbling of Romneybot 2.0

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine
Pierce writes: "After Rick Santorum gave a heartfelt, weepy performance of almost transcendental mendacity, complete with props, Romney came out and appeared to be attempting to sell his audience some handy home-cleaning products. He even plugged his website and begged for some small-money donations. The guy makes the average Amway salesman sound like Demosthenes."
READ MORE

Read More

New Entity will be called "Sturch" by Santorum: Andy Borowitz

Oh, how i love andy borowitz! 

February 28, 2012

Santorum Proposes Replacing Church, State with New Entity Called ‘Sturch’

Would Offer Salvation, Motor Vehicle Renewals on Sunday

LANSING (The Borowitz Report) – Telling a crowd of supporters that the separation of church and state “makes me want to throw up,” GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum today proposed replacing church and state with a new entity he called “sturch.”

“Merging church and state into sturch will benefit all Americans,” he said.  “Except maybe Jews.”

Mr. Santorum said that the combined entity would offer greater convenience to the American people than the separation of church and state currently does, since Americans would be able to get salvation and motor vehicle renewals at the same place every Sunday.

Turning to another campaign theme, Mr. Santorum told the crowd, “I support the rights of the unborn child until it is born and wants an education."

He contrasted himself with President Obama on the education issue, stating, “Barack Obama speaks in complete sentences.  What a snob.”

In other campaign news, singer Kid Rock endorsed Mitt Romney, which means that his music is no longer the worst thing about Kid Rock.

An upbeat Mr. Romney visited the Daytona 500, where he told a reporter, “I love this stuff.  I’ve always been a big NASDAQ fan.”

Read More

6 Essential, Timeless Tips for Building Self Confidence -- an excellent online site

From the Positivity Blog at: http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2009/02/20/how-to-build-self-confidence/

How to Build Self Confidence: 6 Essential and Timeless Tips

by Henrik Edberg

Image by *Zara (license).

“Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.”
Helen Keller

“Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Brian Tracy

“Confidence is courage at ease.”
Daniel Maher

I believe that one of the most common wishes is simply to feel more confident in various situations in life.

But how?

Confident friends may say: “Well, just be confident, man!”. However, to a person that doesn’t feel that confident this piece of advice may not be very helpful. At all.

There are however some time-tested and timeless advice. And in this article I’ll explore some of those tips. You can learn much more about becoming more sure of yourself and building your inner strength and assertiveness in my 12-week Self-Esteem Course.

Now, I hope you will find something useful in this article to help you improve and maintain your own levels of confidence.

1. Take action. Get it done.

“Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.”
Thomas A. Bennett

“Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.”
Thomas Carlyle

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”
Dale Carnegie

The most important step in building self confidence is simply to take action. Working on something and getting it done. Sitting at home and thinking about it will just make you feel worse. Simple. But not always easy to do. To make it a bit easier, here are a three of my favorite ways to make it easier to take action:

• Be present. This will help you snap out of over thinking and just go and do whatever you want to get done. This is probably the best tip I have found so far for taking more action since it puts you in a state where you feel little emotional resistance to the work you’ll do. And it puts you in state where the right actions often just seem to flow out of you in a focused but relaxed way and without much effort. One of the simplest ways to connect with the present moment is just to keep your focus on your breathing for a minute or two.
• Lighten up. One way to dissuade yourself from taking action is to take whatever you are about to do too seriously. That makes it feel too big, too difficult and too scary. If you on the other hand relax a bit and lighten up you often realize that those problems and negative feelings are just something you are creating in your own mind. With a lighter state of mind your tasks seems lighter and become easier to get started with. Have a look at Lighten Up! for more on this.
• Really, really want it. Then taking action isn’t something you have to force. Taking action becomes a very natural thing. It’s something you can’t wait to do.

2. Face your fear.

“The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear.”
William Jennings Bryan

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

Look, I could tell you to do affirmations or other exercises for months in front of your mirror. It may have a positive effect. Just like preparing yourself it may help you to take action with more confidence.

But to be frank, if you don’t listen to the quotes above and face your fears you won’t experience any better self confidence on a deeper and more fundamental level. Having experiences where you face your fear is what really builds self confidence. There is no way around it.

However, there are ways to face your fears that do not include that much shaking of the knees. There are ways to make it easier for yourself.

• Be curious. When you are stuck in fear you are closed up. You tend to create division in your world and mind. You create barriers between you and other things/people. When you shift to being curious your perceptions go SWOOSH! and the world just opens up. Curiosity is filled with anticipation and enthusiasm. It opens you up. And when you are open and enthusiastic then you have more fun things to think about than focusing on your fear. How do you become more curious? One way is to remember how life has become more fun in the past thanks to your curiosity and to remember all the cool things it helped you to discover and experience.
• Realize that fear is often based on unhelpful interpretation. As humans we like to look for patterns. The problem is just that we often find negative and not so helpful patterns in our lives based on just one or two experiences. Or by misjudging situations. Or through some silly miscommunication. When you get too identified with your thoughts you’ll believe anything they tell you. A more helpful practise may be to not take your thoughts too seriously. A lot of the time they and your memory are pretty inaccurate.

Image by *Zara (license).

3. Understand in what order things happen.

One of my favorite snippets of movie-dialogue is this one from the 1999 film “Three Kings”.

In this scene Major Archie Gates (George Clooney) wants the small team to save a fellow soldier and steal Saddam’s gold just after the first Gulf War has ended.

The young soldier Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze) has his doubts about the plan:

Archie Gates: You’re scared, right?
Conrad Vig: Maybe.
Archie Gates: The way it works is, you do the thing you’re scared shitless of, and you get the courage AFTER you do it, not before you do it.
Conrad Vig: That’s a dumbass way to work. It should be the other way around.
Archie Gates: I know. That’s the way it works.

Great movie. Great little piece of dialogue. Even though it may not be what people want to hear.

The thing is, when you do things you don’t just build confidence in your ability to handle different situations. You also experience progressive desensitization. What that means is that situations – like for example public speaking or maybe just showing your latest blogpost to an audience out there – that made you feel all shaky become more and more normal in your life. It is not longer something you psyche yourself up to do. It just becomes normal. Like tying your shoes, hanging out with your friends or taking a shower.

It may seem scary now. But after having done whatever you fear a few to a dozen times or so you may think: “Is that it?”. You almost feel disappointed of how anticlimactic it has become. You may even get a bit angry with yourself and wonder why you avoided doing it for so long.

4. Prepare.

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self- confidence is preparation.”
Arthur Ashe

When you know nothing of what you are about to do it’s very easy to get lost in vague, foggy fear and start building big horror scenarios in your mind of what may happen if you give it a try.

Preparing yourself and educating yourself can be a big help here. By for example rehearsing and rewriting your speech over and over you can pretty much learn it by heart. By doing research you can find breathing techniques that can quickly make your calmer and present. Or simple visualization techniques that make you feel more confident and positive as you step out on the stage.

This is obviously more work than not doing anything about the speech at all before you start giving it. But it can make a huge difference in your confidence levels if you take the time to prepare yourself. And of course, the speech and the delivery of it will most likely be a lot better too.

So prepare and you will feel more comfortable and confident. Just don’t make the mistake of getting stuck in the preparation phase and using it as a way to avoid taking action and the possible pain that it may result in.

5. Realize that failure or being wrong will not kill you.

“Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.”
Peter T. Mcintyre

“I quit being afraid when my first venture failed and the sky didn’t fall down.”
Allen H. Neuharth

Again, you have to face your fear. Because it is only then that you discover the thing that billions of people throughout history have discovered before you. Failure won’t kill you. Nor will being wrong. The sky will not fall down. That’s just what people that haven’t faced their fear yet think.

The thing is to reframe failure from being something that makes your legs shake to something useful and important for the growth of your self confidence and your overall growth as a human being. Here are four ways that failure can help you out:

• You learn. Instead of seeing failure as something horrible you can start to view it more as a learning experience. When standing in the middle of a failure, you can ask yourself questions like: What’s awesome about this situation? What can I learn from this situation?
• You gain experiences you could not get any other way.  Ideally, you probably want to learn from other people’s mistakes and failures. That’s not always easy to do though. Sometimes you just have to fail on your own to learn a lesson and to gain an experience no one can relate to you in mere words.
• You become stronger. Every time you fail you become more accustomed to it. You realize more and more that it’s not the end of the world. And, again, you get desensitized. You can handle things that would have been very hard to handle a few years back. Failing can also a have an exhilarating component because even though you failed you at least took a chance. You didn’t just sit on you hands doing nothing. And that took quite a bit of courage and determination.
• Your chances of succeeding increases. Every time you fail you can learn and increase your inner strength. So every failure can make you more and more likely to succeed.

And remember, the world doesn’t revolve around you. You may like to think so. But it doesn’t. People really don’t care that much about what you do. They have their own life, problems and worries that the world revolves around them to focus on. They don’t think that much about you or are constantly monitoring what you do wrong or when you fail.

Maybe a disappointing thought. But a liberating and relieving one too because now you can let go of that worry that everyone is watching you.

Image by Son of Groucho (license).

6. Get to know who you are and what you want out of life.

“The world has the habit of making room for the man whose words and actions show that he knows where he is going.”
Napoleon Hill

“Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do this or that. That’s nonsense. Make up your mind, you’ll never use crutches or a stick, then have a go at everything. Go to school, join in all the games you can. Go anywhere you want to. But never, never let them persuade you that things are too difficult or impossible.”
Douglas Bader

To build and find more confidence in yourself you have to get to know yourself better. Go exploring. Face some of your fears. Fail over and over and understand that it isn’t really that big of a deal. Grow stronger through such experiences and also become more internally relaxed. Figure out what really excites you by simply trying a whole bunch of stuff out.

When you know more about who you are and what you want out of life – not what other people say you want – you will have more confidence in yourself and what you can do.

What other people say or think will have less of an impact than it used to because you know who you are better than they do. And since you have had all these experiences, since you have taken time to really get to know yourself and stretch yourself you will trust your own opinion and ability more than anything outside of you. You become stable and centred in yourself.

This will of course take time. It may be something that never really ends. So you might as well get started now.

Read More

Great quote about education

Unless one is fortunate enough to have that rare teacher who says, as did the poet Robert Frost, "I am not a teacher, but an awakener,"  the following quote by Doris Lessing holds true for our time:

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgments. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Read More

Obliviously On They Sail...

Read More

OBAMA MIGHT HAVE SOME THINGS GOING FOR HIM IN NOVEMBER.

Yeah -- the Republican ticket.

____________________________________________________________

Read More

GOP Greek Tragedy by Maureen Dowd

Rick should scat.

Mitt Romney needs to be left alone to limp across the finish line, so he can devote his full time and attention to losing to President Obama.

With Sanctorum and Robo-Romney in a race to the bottom, the once ruthless Republican Party seems to have pretty much decided to cave on 2012 and start planning for a post-Obama world.

Not even because Obama is so strong; simply because their field is so ridiculously weak and wacky.

John McCain has Aeschylated it to “a Greek tragedy.” And he should know from Greek tragedy.

“It’s the negative campaigning and the increasingly personal attacks,” he told The Boston Herald, adding, “the likes of which we have never seen.” When a man who was accused of having an illegitimate black child in the 2000 South Carolina primary thinks this is the worst ever, the G.O.P. is really in trouble.

The Arizona senator, who’s supporting Romney, grimly noted: “I know he’s going to be the nominee, but I also worry about how much damage has been done.”

As they battled for Michigan, Arizona and beyond, Romney called Rick Santorum an “economic lightweight,” and Santorum called Romney “a lightweight on conservative accomplishments,” “uniquely unqualified” and “a bully.”

In the old days, the Republican ego had control of the party’s id. The id, sometimes described as a galloping horse or crying baby, “the dark, inaccessible part of our personality ... chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations,” as Freud called it, was whipped up obliquely by candidates. Nixon had his Southern strategy of using race as a wedge, Bush Senior and Lee Atwater used the Willie Horton attack, and W. and Karl Rove conjured the gay marriage bogyman.

Once elected, those presidents curbed the id with the ego, common sense and reason. But now the G.O.P.’s id is unbridled. The horse has thrown the rider; the dark forces are bubbling. Moderates, women, gays, Hispanics and blacks — even the president — are being hunted in this most dangerous game.

Asked in Michigan why he couldn’t excite the base, Romney said he is not willing to make “incendiary comments” or “light my hair on fire.”

In the latest sign that moderate Republicans feel passé, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine shockingly announced her retirement, decrying “ ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies” and a vanishing political center.

The apogee of apathy for Romney was on Friday, when the man who says he’s an expert manager spoke to a mostly empty football stadium in Detroit. Stephen Colbert defended Romney, saying he connected with the sea of empty chairs because they, too, were “plastic and uncomfortable.”

Some Republicans at the annual winter governors’ meeting here murmured that it was over for Mittens even before he cited his wife’s two Caddies and his Nascar team-owner pals, and awkwardly mocked the plastic ponchos of Daytona racing fans: “I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks.”

They said Mitt was damaged as a contender against Obama when he was forced to admit that he had a 15-percent tax rate (given, as The Huffington Post points out, that Romney averaged $6,400 an hour at Bain Capital while creating lots of jobs with paltry wages).

Romney defended himself in an interview to Fox News on Tuesday, sitting in front of a poster of his dad with the slogan: “Romney Great in ’68.” Romney père lost his dream of becoming president when he claimed he was brainwashed on Vietnam.

Now Santorum should forfeit his chance after making a far dumber remark: Kids should beware of college because they’ll get brainwashed.

Pandering to Tea Partiers, Santorum, who has a B.A., M.B.A. and J.D., and who supported higher education in his 2006 senatorial campaign, absurdly turned the American dream inside-out and into sauerkraut.

He called the president “a snob” for encouraging people to get more educated and asserted that Obama only wants Americans to go to college so they can be remade in his image, while being indoctrinated by liberal college professors.

Does he think that defining ambition down and asking kids to give up hope is a good mantra? Even Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, who was trying to mandate that women seeking abortions be shamed with vaginal ultrasounds that Democrats dubbed “legal rape,” thought Santorum went too far.

As Mitt’s remarks get curiouser, Rick’s get creepier.

In an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, Santorum offended the Catholics he’s courting by saying that the J.F.K. speech ratifying the separation of church and state made him want “to throw up” because Kennedy had thrown “his faith under the bus.”

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute,” Sanctorum said.

If he is willing to cross that line, the only two possibilities are that he doesn’t understand the nature of the United States or that he wants to do damage to the United States. Neither is acceptable.

Read More