TPM Cafe

I’ve discovered this from hard experience.

If I go out to speak to Jews in college or in their 20’s and 30’s about Israel. I’ll get an enthusiastic response. But if the event is dominated by seniors — as most Jewish events are — I’m in big trouble.

Young Jews are either dovish on Israel or, most commonly, not interested in Israel at all (that latter group tends not to show up). But Jews in the 65-100 year old range skew heavily to the right. When I spoke in Rhode Island recently, I think I would have been murdered by rampaging (and racist) seniors if Lincoln Chafee had not been there to offer me ex-senatorial protection.

Why are young Jews so dovish on Israel (or indifferent)? Simple, they do not buy into the ethnic solidarity thing that the WW2 generation adheres to. They are friends with all kinds of people. They are not ethnic chauvinists or racists. They like the nice things about being Jewish (the culture, faith, food, the good parts of Israel) but do not buy into the paranoid “the whole world hates us” shtik. They are Americans. They aren’t scared. And, with rare exceptions, they would not go near the mainstream Jewish organizations with a mile long pole.  Source Article

Huffington Post

by Mary Shaw

www.opednews.com

A letter to the editor in Friday’s Chicago Tribune has got my blood boiling.

In it, Dan Schuchardt of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, wrote:

I am getting tired of President Barack Obama’s pandering to Muslims.

Despite his pronouncement America is not a Christian nation, the facts say otherwise. It’s about time for Americans to wake up to the fact that Obama wants to change America into a secular nation, and the media is helping him accomplish that mission.

If I’m wrong than let’s see Obama proclaim his Christian faith as he did when he was running for office — or was that just another lie?

First of all, despite the insistence of the Christian right-wing extremists, the U.S. is not a Christian nation. And, in fact, many of our most prominent Founding Fathers were not Christians. They were Deists. They did not believe in a personal god. And they did not believe in the Christian God.Dan needs to reacquaint himself with the U.S. Constitution, which makes absolutely no mention of God or Christianity.

It was with good reason that this nation’s founders wrote the “establishment clause” into the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Source Article

Aljazeera.net

An Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush, then US president, has been given a three-year jail sentence after pleading not guilty to assaulting a foreign head of state.

The sentencing of Muntadher al-Zaidi, 30, by the Central Criminal Court in Baghdad on Thursday, was announced by Al-Baghdadiya television, his employer.

The journalist, who became a hero to many Iraqis after the December 14 incident, arrived at the court under a heavy police escort.

Judge Abdulamir Hassan al-Rubaie said he had taken into consideration that al-Zaidi is young and it was his first offence, the defence lawyers said. Source Article

I know I’m going to catch a lot of flack here but I just can’t see putting a man in prison for three years for throwing a pair of shoes. I don’t care if his target is the President of the U.S.A. He caused no harm. All he did was insult and embarrass him. If he was tortured and beaten that makes the whole thing worse. I know Iraq has a different justice system but I would hope that they would show more mercy and humanity than the Bush Administration has shown to it’s victims.

Courtesy TPM:

It’s official: Rep. Virgil Goode, the Virginia Republican best known for denouncing the election of Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) as the first Muslim member of Congress, has conceded defeat against Democratic Rep.-Elect Tom Perriello.

Goode asked for a recount after the certified total gave Perriello a 745-vote lead out of over 300,000 votes cast. The chance of turning around that kind of deficit was nearly non-existent, and now that the recount has finished Goode has conceded via press release.

-Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

(CNN) — The Roman Catholic Church is cutting off funds to the community organizing group ACORN, citing complaints over its voter registration drives in the November 4 election as part of the reason

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development froze its contributions to the group in June amid allegations that Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly $1 million.

This week, as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops met in Baltimore, Maryland, the campaign’s chairman said it was cutting all ties with the group.

“We simply had too many questions and concerns to permit further CCHD funding of ACORN groups,” Roger Morin, the auxiliary bishop of New Orleans, Louisiana, told his colleagues in a letter to the conference. Watch why fired board members allege a cover-up »

The CCHD has donated more than $7.3 million to ACORN-related projects over the past decade, including $40,000 to an ACORN chapter in Las Vegas, Nevada, that was raided before the election in an investigation into fraudulent voter registration forms. Among other questionable documents, the ACORN chapter submitted registration forms for members of the Dallas Cowboys football team.

ACORN contends it has tried to help head off election fraud.

-Article continued @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy Huffington Post:

Pundits declared evangelicals among of Election Day’s losers. Conservative Christian leader James Dobson confessed he was grieving. Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State said religious right leaders “kept their own flock in line, but the majority of Americans were unmoved.”

But few are writing obituaries this week for the Christian right, which has been wrongly considered dead after setbacks like the demise of the Moral Majority and crumbling of the Christian Coalition.

White evangelicals remain a large, loyal and organized Republican voting bloc that delivered Tuesday for John McCain but could not offset the battery of factors working against Republicans in 2008.

One pressing question in the wake of Barack Obama’s historic victory is whether the Christian right can grow its own ranks or take positions with broader appeal. Some Republicans believe a tight embrace of social conservative values turns off independents and moderates, but many Christian right leaders resist compromise and contend that, if anything, the GOP has strayed too far from its principles.

Once again, conservative evangelicals engaged in politics find themselves at a crossroads.

“Do they want to be an oppositional force, lambasting the administration at every turn, which can help their organizations raise money?” said Mark Rozell, a political science professor at George Mason University. “Or do they find ways to intersect with new leadership and either try to minimize damage to their agenda or move forward issues where they can find consensus? It’s an important turning point for the movement.”

Exit polls showed McCain carried white evangelicals 74 percent to 24 percent _ not far off George Bush’s 79 percent to 21 percent margin over John Kerry in 2004.

Six in 10 white evangelicals ranked the economy as their most important issue _ slightly less than the voting population as a whole. One difference that emerged was over terrorism: 14 percent of white evangelicals identified that as their top issue, compared with 7 percent of all other voters.

-Article Continued @ Sourced Site.

Huffington Post

Steven Waldman

Posted October 15, 2008 | 11:44 AM (EST)

With all the attention showered on evangelical Christians and Catholics, we’ve neglected the religious group partly driving Barack Obama’s recent surge in the polls: mainline Protestants.

This bucket includes the historic American churches that once dominated the spiritual landscape but have been losing members in recent years: United Methodist Church, Lutherans, Presbyterian Church in the USA, American Episcopal Church, United Church of Christ. Their members represent 18% of the population. Source Article

Huffington Post

Bruce Wilson

Posted September 24, 2008 | 12:19 PM (EST)

“Muthee exclaimed, “We come against the spirit of witchcraft! We come against the python spirits!” Then, a local pastor took the mic from Muthee and added, “We stomp on the heads of the enemy!” – Journalist Max Blumenthal, describing Palin-anointer Thomas Muthee’s appearance at the Wasilla Assembly of God, September 20, 2008

Despite concerted efforts, disturbing evidence pointing towards the likely nature of Sarah Palin’s religious beliefs continues to emerge. Yesterday “scrubbed” footage, from a 2005 “anointing” of then-Alaska gubernatorial contender Sarah Palin, resurfaced on the website of the net-based alternative news service The Irregular Times. The footage showed Kenyan minister Thomas Muthee not only praying over and blessing Sarah Palin, to advance her bid for the Alaska governorship and protect Palin from a “spirit of witchcraft”, but, prior to the blessing, Muthee gave a seven to eight minute speech in which he called on believing Christians to “infiltrate” a number of key areas of secular society including Banking and finance, schools and education, media, politics and government.   Source Article

Huffington Post

Bruce Wilson

Posted September 13, 2008 | 03:09 PM (EST)

Palin was baptized at Wasilla Assembly of God and attended the church for over two and a half decades, and she has been publicly blessed by a number of pastors and religious leaders employed by and associated with that church.

Last Sunday our research team released a video, a ten-minute mini-documentary, focusing on the Wasilla Assemblies of God and the video seemed on the verge of a massive “viral” breakthrough when YouTube pulled it down, citing “inappropriate content.” Source Article