Tuesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Pro-Trump Neo-Nazis Plan Armed March Against Jews

Absent Donald Trump's incitements to violence and empowering of alt-right and Neo-Nazi groups does anyone believe an armed march against Jews and those who support them would be in the planning stages for a confrontation before Der Fuhrer's inauguration next month?   Its as if every foul racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic group now feels free to crawl out from under the rocks and social slime they have hidden under for decades.  Just as frightening, silence of any form of condemnation of such behavior coming bot Herr Trump and "good Republicans" is deafening.  To my GOP "friends," if you do not support this type of viciousness and hatred as you claim, why are you silent?  Or am I correct in assuming that you actually support it even if you will not admit so in polite society?  A piece in LawNewz looks at troubling events being planned by Neo-Nazi groups and "news" outlets.  Here are highlights: 

The neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer, is advertising an “armed protest” in the city of Whitefish, Montana “against Jews, Jewish businesses and everyone who supports either.”  The event is being organized by the site’s publisher Andrew Anglin as a result of ongoing controversy involving white nationalist Richard Spencer, and his mother who lives in Whitefish.

The announcement, which went up on Friday, says that the march will take place in the second week of January, “just before the inauguration” of President-elect Donald Trump. The post on the Daily Stormer instructs participants not to actually engage in violence, but does call for hundreds of people to walk the streets with guns, citing Montana’s “extremely liberal open carry laws.” People from outside the local community are being called on to join in the armed intimidation tactics, with the announcement saying that they are “busing in skinheads from the Bay Area” to increase their numbers. Anglin has also posted the names and addresses of various individuals, organizations, and businesses to target.

Montana Senator Steve Daines tweeted his opposition to the building anti-Semitic activity in his state.

The Anti-Defamation League said on Friday that they have “been in regular contact with the victim families, as well as relevant law enforcement authorities and other public officials,” including the U.S. Department of Justice.

I find this very frightening and can only imagine how much worse things may get after the inauguration of  Der Fuhrer on January 20, 2017.  

Monday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

Russell Moore and Exposing Evangelical Christian Hypocrisy

For the record, I am no fan of Russell Moore or the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission ("ERLC") of the Southern Baptist Convention ("SBC") which Moore heads.  Moore and the SBC peddle a toxic form of Christianity which is built largely on hatred and condemnation of others, fear, and feigned piety even as SBC members daily betray the gospel message.  That said, Moore was among the handful of leading fundamentalist and evangelical Christians who opposed Donald Trump, noting the mans many moral failings and lack of any redeeming character.  In return, Moore received a great deal of blow back from morally bankrupt evangelicals who seemingly had no qualm voting for a serial adulterer, con-artist and general moral low life.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the morally bankrupt state of evangelical Christians.  Here are excerpts:

Since 2013, Rev. Russell Moore has been president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, this country’s biggest Protestant denomination. While deeply conservative on traditionally religious issues such as abortion, gay marriage and religious freedom, Moore was one of the few prominent evangelicals this election season to remain an outspoken critic of Donald Trump throughout the presidential campaign. He challenged the candidate on issues that seemed fairly obvious to any practicing Christian (the serial lying, immoral business practices, questionable sexual ethics, etc.) in surprising contrast to many others on the religious right who ignored or even made excuses for the candidate’s behavior.

Trump won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote. And for his trouble, Moore is now under fire from prominent voices within his own church. According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, a number of Baptist pastors are considering cutting funding to the organization he heads “in a potentially dramatic rebuke” for his behavior. “Since Dr. Moore has taken over [the ERLC], there are a lot of things that are being said on various issues that the Southern Baptist people at large don’t agree with,” one pastor told NPR.

The criticism being leveled at Moore by his religious counterparts says more about what the evangelical establishment mistakenly values today than it does about anything that Moore has done wrong. And it misunderstands the true role that Christians could — and should — play in the public square under a president who is likely to be dismissive of their cause.

So what is it that Moore said that these ostensible moral leaders don’t agree with? The statement that “if character matters, character matters”? His argument that if social conservatives were willing to argue against Bill Clinton in the 1990s, evangelical voters today should ask hard questions about a potential president’s personal morality and fitness for office?

Perhaps it was that he pointed out how it was “a scandal and a disgrace” that when the sexually predatory “Access Hollywood” tapes were released, virtually all of the reaffirmations of support for Trump came from religious conservative leaders.

Or maybe it was Moore’s writing that “what affects black and Hispanic and Asian Christians ought to affect white Christians.” As one conservative Christian friend of mine observed, nothing says “white identity comes before Christian identity” quite like a prominent evangelical organization trying to oust an otherwise-orthodox pastor for daring to promote racial reconciliation.

Really, what the majority of Moore’s statements have in common (apart from being, well, correct — at least according to traditional, values-first Christian teaching) is that they might offend those being criticized, the president-elect included. That, in turn, might result in — gasp — a loss of political power.

Evangelical Christians still make up a healthy swath of the U.S. population, but they’re firmly in the minority and shrinking fast. Some scholars argue that the rising number of people who have decided against affiliating with any religion is due to a rejection of how Christianity especially often finds itself amorally entangled with conservative politics.

 

Many Christian leaders have made the bet that, as their numbers dwindle, their best hope for promoting the ethically sound policies on topics such as abortion, marriage and gender is maintaining access and influence where it counts — the White House and the Supreme Court.

But where Christian leaders should be seeking influence, especially in a rapidly secularizing society in which their views seem ever more countercultural, is in trying to remain a respected moral voice worth engaging with — not by setting aside their most distinctive values in a grab for shifting political power. . . .  Attacking the most principled among themselves is an attack on Christians’ best chance for survival in the public square.

The GOP's War on Medicaid

Tom Price, President-elect Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human services, has made proposals to deeply cut Medicaid. Credit Joshua Roberts/Reuters        

The reality is that many of the working poor and elderly facing the need for long term care in their declining years depend greatly on Medicaid.  By extension, so do many health care providers, especially non-profit hospital systems that must treat all whether they have insurance or not.  Despite these realities, the Republican Party led by the always heinous Paul Ryan (born into wealth himself) seeks to dismantle the Medicaid system as well as Medicare.  If successful, America will return to the Gilded Age when the wealthy had quality health care and most of the rest of society did not.  The GOP message to the working poor and non-wealthy elderly is "please die and do us a favor."  This from the political party that feigns to cherish "Christian values."  The big question remains on e of when the idiots who gave into appeals to hate and bigotry and voted for Trump and Congressional Republicans wake up and realize that they have cut their own throats and figuratively signed their own death warrants.  As stated before, I have zero sympathy for adults who did this, but the price paid by millions of children will be deadly.  An article in the New York Times looks at this foul GOP agenda.  Here are highlights:

Progressives have already homed in on Republican efforts to privatize Medicare as one of the major domestic political battles of 2017. If Donald J. Trump decides to gut the basic guarantee of Medicare and revamp its structure so that it hurts older and sicker people, Democrats must and will push back hard. But if Democrats focus too much of their attention on Medicare, they may inadvertently assist the quieter war on Medicaid — one that could deny health benefits to millions of children, seniors, working families and people with disabilities.

Of the two battles, the Republican effort to dismantle Medicaid is more certain. Neither Mr. Trump nor Senate Republicans may have the stomach to fully own the political risks of Medicare privatization. But not only have Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Tom Price, Mr. Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human services, made proposals to deeply cut Medicaid through arbitrary block grants or “per capita caps,” during the campaign, Mr. Trump has also proposed block grants.

If Mr. Trump chooses to oppose his party’s Medicare proposals while pushing unprecedented cuts to older people and working families in other vital safety-net programs, it would play into what seems to be an emerging strategy of his: to publicly fight a few select or symbolic populist battles in order to mask an overall economic and fiscal strategy that showers benefits on the most well-off at the expense of tens of millions of Americans.

Without an intense focus by progressives on the widespread benefits of Medicaid and its efficiency, it will be too easy for Mr. Trump to market the false notion that Medicaid is a bloated, wasteful program and that such financing caps are means simply to give states more flexibility while “slowing growth.” Medicaid’s actual spending per beneficiary has, on average, grown about 3 percentage points less each year than it has for those with private health insurance, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — a long-term trend that is projected to continue. The arbitrary spending caps proposed by Mr. Price and Mr. Ryan would cut Medicaid to the bone, leaving no alternative for states but to impose harsh cuts in benefits and coverage.

Mr. Price’s own proposal, which he presented as the chairman of the House budget committee, would cut Medicaid by about $1 trillion over the next decade. This is on top of the reduction that would result from the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which both Mr. Trump and Republican leaders have championed. Together, full repeal and block granting would cut Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program funding by about $2.1 trillion over the next 10 years — a 40 percent cut.

The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that a similar Medicaid block grant proposed by Mr. Ryan in 2012 would lead to 14 million to 21 million Americans’ losing their Medicaid coverage by the 10th year, and that is on top of the 13 million who would lose Medicaid or children’s insurance program coverage under an A.C.A. repeal.

The emerging Republican plan to “repeal, delay and replace” the A.C.A. seeks to further camouflage these harmful cuts. Current Republican plans to eliminate the marketplace subsidies and A.C.A. Medicaid expansion in 2019 would create a health care cliff where all of the Medicaid funds and subsidies for the A.C.A. expansion would simply disappear and 30 million people would lose their health care.

Sweeping cuts to Medicaid would hurt tens of millions of low-income and middle-income families who had a family member with a disability or were in need of nursing home care. About 60 percent of the costs of traditional Medicaid come from providing nursing home care and other types of care for the elderly and those with disabilities.

While Republicans resist characterizations of their block grant or cap proposals as tearing away health benefits from children, older people in nursing homes or middle-class families heroically coping with children with serious disabilities, the tyranny of the math does not allow for any other conclusion.

Democrats at all levels of government must aggressively communicate the degree to which these anodyne-sounding proposals would lead to an assault on health care for those in nursing homes and for working families straining to deal with a serious disability, as well as for the poorest Americans. With many Republican governors and local hospitals also likely to be victimized by the proposals of Mr. Ryan and Mr. Price, this fight can be both morally right and politically powerful. Republicans hold only a slight majority in the Senate. It would take only three Republican senators thinking twice about the wisdom of block grants and per capita caps to put a halt to the coming war on Medicaid.

America, largely thanks to Republicans and their "Christian" voting base, remains the only advanced industrial nation that views the bulk of its citizens as disposable garbage.    We have the least efficient healthcare delivery system and spend far more per capita on healthcare while receiving less benefit. Congressional Republicans want to make a bad system far worse and in the process likely kill thousands, if not millions of Americans over time if their agenda is realized.  It is because of these "Christian" politicians and their evangelical supporters that I no longer call myself Christian.  To me, being a Christian is something reprehensible and evidence of moral bankruptcy.   Sitting in the pews each week while voting for Republicans who push this agenda is the height of hypocrisy.  The Biblical Pharisees were far better than today's "conservative Christians."

Monday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Christmas Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

GOP Plan to Destroy America’s Safety Net and to Kill Democracy

On Christmas day it is also important to recognize the war that Donald Trump and the Republican Party plan to relaunch against the middle and working classes.  Yes, the GOP claims that it is the champion of "Christian values," but as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. The irony, of course, is that Donald Trump voters - other than the wealthy - will me among those most harmed by the Trump/GOP agenda.   The evangelicals who voted for Trump will learn a harsh lesson as to how the GOP's prosperity gospel does not and never truly did include them.  What is sad is that the 70% plus of Americans who did not vote for Trump will suffer as well.  A piece in Salon looks at the toxic plan that will roll out early next year.  Here are excerpts:

Newt Gingrich openly bragged recently at the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were going to “break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model.”  That “model,” of course, created what we today refer to as “the middle class.”

Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been working overtime to kneecap institutions that support the American middle class. And, as any working-class family can tell you, the GOP has had some substantial successes, particularly in shifting both income and political power away from voters and towards billionaires and transnational corporations.

In July of last year, discussing SCOTUS’s 5/4 conservative vote on Citizens United, President Jimmy Carter told me: “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” He added: “[W]e’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

As Princeton researchers Gilens and Page demonstrated in an exhaustive analysis of the difference between what most Americans want their politicians to do legislatively, versus what American politicians actually do, it’s pretty clear that President Carter was right.

They found that while the legislative priorities of the top 10 percent of Americans are consistently made into law, things the bottom 90 percent want are ignored. In other words, today in America, democracy only “works” for the top 10 percent of Americans.

For thousands of years, economists and economic observers from Aristotle to Adam Smith to Thomas Picketty have told us that a “middle class” is not a normal by-product of raw, unregulated capitalism — what right-wing ideologues call “the free market.”

Instead, unregulated markets — particularly markets not regulated by significant taxation on predatory incomes — invariably lead to the opposite of a healthy middle class: They produce extremes of inequality, which are as dangerous to democracy as cancer is to a living being.

With so-called “unregulated free markets,” the rich become super-rich, while grinding poverty spreads among working people like a heroin epidemic.

Smith noted, in 1759, that, “All constitutions of government are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end.”

Jefferson was acutely aware of this: The Declaration of Independence was the first founding document of any nation in the history of the world that explicitly declared “happiness” as a “right” that should be protected and promoted by government.

That was not at all, however, a consideration for the architects of supply-side Reaganomics, although they appropriated JFK’s “rising tide lifts all boats” metaphor to sell their hustle to (boatless) working people.

A 30-year-old in the 1970s had a 90 percent chance of having or attaining a higher standard of living than his or her parents. But, since the 1980s introduction of Reaganomics, there’s been more than a 70-percent drop in “social mobility” — the ability to move from one economic station of life into a better one.

So, if our democratic republic is to return to democracy and what’s left of our middle class is to survive (or even grow), how do we do that?

History shows that the two primary regulators within a capitalist system that provide for the emergence of a middle class are progressive taxation and a healthy social safety net.

As Jefferson noted in a 1785 letter to Madison, “Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”

Tragically, Republicans are today planning to destroy both our nation’s progressive taxation system and our social safety net, in obsequious service to their billionaire paymasters.

Flipping Jefferson and FDR on their heads, Republicans are proposing multi-million-dollar tax breaks for the rich, with a few-hundred-dollars bone tossed in for working people.

Meanwhile, Republicans are already hard at work.

As Ian Milheiser notes, “Republicans in the House hope to cut Social Security benefits by 20 to 50 percent. Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to voucherize Medicare would drive up out-of-pocket costs for seniors by about 40 percent. Then he’d cut Medicaid by between a third and a half.”

If Gingrich, Ryan, et al succeed in destroying FDR’s legacy programs, not only will the bottom 90 percent of Americans suffer, but what little democracy we have left in this republic will evaporate, and history suggests it will probably be replaced by a violent, kleptocratic oligarchy.

 Our only hope is that at some point the working and middle class voters who voted for Trump and Republicans wake up to their betrayal quickly and stop falling for GOP appeals to their racism, religious extremism, and general bigotry and hatred of those who are "other."

Christmas Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Five Myths About the Nativity

Not to play the role of Scrooge, but as Christians around the world celebrate today the supposed birth of Jesus - including falsely pious Christofascists and hate filled evangelicals who betrayed the Gospel message they pretend to honor by voting for Donald Trump - it is necessary to remember that much of the day's celebrations are based on myths that have little or no historic basis. Even the day December 25th was picked by Pope Julius I in the 4th century most likely to in an effort to adopt and absorb the traditions of the pagan Saturnalia festival and/or other pagan festivals held in December around the time of the Winter Solstice.    More troubling yet to the Christmas story is the fact that the human genome project has proven that Adam and Eve never existed as historic persons, so the myth of the Fall due to Adam and Eve's sin is purely fabricated. No Fall, then no need for a savior. I find it disturbing in the year 2017 that so many base their lives on and justify their hatreds based on myths and legends. A column in the Washington Post by a historian reminds us of myths surrounding Christmas.  Here are highlights:

[T]he story of the birth of Jesus is more complicated than many people think. Between the difficulty in reconciling different versions of the tale and the 2,000 years of popular interpretation and culture layered on top of them, much of what people commonly know about the story of Jesus’ birth, from the date to where it took place, is wildly different from what the Gospels have to say. MYTH NO. 1Jesus was born on Dec. 25.The overwhelming majority of Christians mark the birth of Jesus on Dec. 25. But there’s no biblical reason to celebrate Christmas on this particular day.

According to the Gospel of Luke, shepherds were watching their flocks at night at the time Jesus was born. This detail — the only clue in the Gospels about the timing of the birth — suggests that Jesus’ birthday was not in the winter, as shepherds would have been watching their flocks only during the lambing season in the spring. In the colder months, the sheep probably would have been corralled.

As late as the 3rd century, Christians didn’t celebrate the birth of Jesus. The earliest discussion of the birthday is found in the 3rd-century writings of Clement of Alexandria, who raises seven potential dates, none of which correspond to Dec. 25. The first record of a celebration of the birth of Jesus on Dec. 25 comes from a 4th-century edition of a Roman almanac known as the Philokalia. Alongside the deaths of martyrs, it notes that on Dec. 25, “Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.”

Some have argued that the date of Jesus’ birth was selected to supplant pagan festivals that were held at the same time. But while Pope Julius I set the date of Christmas (for Western Christians) in the 4th century, Christians did not deliberately adapt pagan rituals until the 7th century, when Pope Gregory the Great instructed bishops to celebrate saints’ feast days on the days of pagan festivals.

MYTH NO. 2Jesus was born in a stable.As depicted in Nativity creches and Renaissance paintings such as Giotto di Bondone’s Nativity scenes and Sandro Botticelli’s “The Mystical Nativity,” Jesus was born in a simple stable. Generations of pastors and priests have used this notion as evidence that Jesus had a humble birth. As a theological argument, that’s true. But this particular detail of the story isn’t in the Bible.

The more likely interpretation, as New Testament scholar Stephen Carlson has argued, is that Joseph and Mary intended to stay with his relatives in Bethlehem and that there wasn’t enough room in the guest quarters — typically located in the upper level of a house — to accommodate an imminent delivery. So, Mary had to give birth elsewhere, most likely in the main room of the house, on the lower floor. There’s no mention of animals being present, but the detail of the manger seems to be what has led to the image of a stable — and many live Nativity scenes featuring farm animals. MYTH NO. 3‘Manger’ is another word for ‘stable.’When people talk about a manger scene, or Jesus being born in a manger, or a star shining down on the manger, it’s not clear they always understand that “manger” refers not to a barn but to Jesus’ makeshift crib. . . . In 1st-century Judean houses, mangers were found both outside and inside the home, sometimes separating an interior space for people from a space where animals were kept. Thus, in the Nativity story, Mary may have had one at her disposal, despite not being in the immediate vicinity of a stable.

MYTH NO. 5Three wise men attended Jesus’ birth.According to the Christmas creche on display in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, the best-dressed attendees at the birth of Jesus were the three wise men. Often mistaken for kings — think of the Christmas carol “We Three Kings” — these visitors from the east are described in the Gospel of Matthew with the Greek word “magoi,” or wise men. Nothing about the story’s language suggests that these visitors were monarchs or even that they were three in number. People commonly think there were three because of the gifts enumerated in the Gospel of Matthew: We are told that they brought gold, frankincense and myrrh, but there could as easily have been two, four or eight wise men as three.

There’s also no indication that the wise men visited Jesus as He lay in the manger, as is often shown on Christmas cards. When King Herod anxiously meets with them in Matthew 2:16, he thinks his reign might be threatened by the child they’ve come to visit, so he orders all boys 2 years old and younger slain. Thus Jesus could have been as old as 2 — a walking, talking toddler — when the wise men arrived.

I fully support Christmas as a time for family and loved ones and for charity for towards others, but this behavior can - and should - fully exist without reliance on myths.  To me, it is telling that those who bloviate the most about Christmas the most and shriek about the "war on Christmas" are the Christofascists and evangelicals who in their daily lives do not reflect Jesus' purported values but instead resemble the Pharisees that the Gospels say he so harshly condemned. Better to stay home away from church and do an act of kindness to someone less fortunate than go to church and be filled with hate and bigotry throughout the year.