Deutoronomy 25:11-12: My favorite Biblical references (really)

To all those people out there who hold up signs citing their favorite Biblical verse by chapter and verse without elaboration (as though we should all know what they intend to say), here are a few of my favorites that should send the Bible thumpers scrambling to the nearest Holiday Inn so they can actually read beyond their 2 or 3 favorite cherry-picked verses they have memorized:

Genesis 12:19  God punishes the Pharaoh for taking Abraham's wife as his own; the Pharaoh realizes Abraham lied when he said his wife was his sister,  confronts Abraham, telling him to take his wife and leave Egypt.
Genesis 22:2  Abraham believes god wants him to murder his own son so prepares him for slaughter, only to then believe god calls it off at the last minute.
Genesis 4:1  First sex in the Bible.
Genesis 5:8  Seth lives for 912 years
Genesis 5:3  Adam was a proud father at age 130 when he fathered Seth
Genesis 5:20  Jared lived for 962 years!  Whoah!
Genesis 6:3  God shortens man's life to "only" 120 years
Genesis 6:5  After taking all the trouble to create the earth and life and everything, God said he would kill everything he had created including animals because "every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually"
Genesis 1:14 Shout out to astrology - god creates stars "for signs"
Ezekiel 20:25-26  God shows he's a badass by killing a bunch of babies, so that everyone can know how awesome he is:  "I also gave them over to statutes that were not good and laws they could not live by; I let them become defiled through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the LORD. "
Leviticus 20:9  "If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death."
Deuteronomy 22:20-1  A girl caught having premarital sex must be stoned to death by the men of the town.
Deuteronomy 22:13-21 A woman who marries and is found not to be a virgin shall be executed.
Exodus 35:2  Anyone caught working on the Sabbath should be killed (I'm looking at you, Super Bowl players, staff, and announcers!)
Deuteronomy 14:6-7 You can't eat rabbits or camel.
Leviticus 11:20-22  Insect-eating is OK except "you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper."
Psalms 104:5  The Earth is not hurtling through space but resting on a Foundation, whatever that is, and can never move.  God said so.
Genesis 2:23 Adam goes to sleep and God "took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof" and made the rib into a woman.
Judges 11:35  Jephthah murders his daughter because he made a bet with god, promising he would kill the first family member to cross his threshold if god would let him slaughter his enemies on the battlefield.
Genesis 19:8 Lot offers his daughters to be gang-raped in Sodom.
Genesis 19:32-6  Lot while drunk is seduced by each of his daughters (one each night) who have sex with their father, getting pregnant by him. "Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father."
Mark 8:12  Jesus says to stop looking for signs of god's arrival - there won't be any.
Mark 8:33  Jesus calls Peter Satan.
Mark 9:43  Jesus advocates amputating your hand or plucking out your eye rather than risk going to hell whole.
Mark 10:11-12  Divorce and remarriage is the same as adultery.  (Sorry, Newt)  "Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery."
Leviticus 20:10  Those who commit adultery should be killed (when is General Petraeus's execution?  And does this mean that those who divorce and remarry should be killed?)
James 5:14-15  Faith-healing works, doctors don't.
Genesis 6:15  Noah's house boat is only 450 feet long
Genesis 7:6  Noah was 600 years old when the flood hit.
Quran 29:14 (if you really want to confuse folks)  Noah was 950 when the flood hit.
Genesis 7:19-20  "The mountains were covered" with 15 cubits to spare, meaning Noah's ark must have had oxygen and some kind of heating system and ice-breaking technology (since this would have been higher than Mount Everest, where water freezes and oxygen is thin).
Luke 14:26  If you don't hate your family, you can't really be Christian.  "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."
John 14:27 AND Matthew 10:34 (this will really confuse them)  Jesus says he DID bring peace and also that he DIDN'T.  "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you."  but "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword."
James 5:1  Rich people are going to hell. "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you."
Matthew 19:23-24  Ditto.  "Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
Mark 10:23-25  And again, more rich people burning.
Deutoronomy 25:11-12  No penis, no testicles, no hope of heaven.  "A man whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off may never join the assembly of the Lord."
Titus 2:9  Slaves should be submissive to their masters "in everything" and be "well-pleasing and not argumentative."
Leviticus 25:44-45  You can own slaves, but only from neighboring countries or from temporary residents in your own country.
Exodus 21:20-21  If you beat a slave to death, you have to pay the slave owner some money.
Deuteronomy 20:10-17  God wants you to commit war crimes, killing every last man, woman, child, fetus, and animal, even if they try to surrender.  "When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. . . . This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.  However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them —the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you."

Contraception Access Could Prevent a Million Abortions in the US a Year
Thursday, February 23, 2012

You can oppose abortion.  You can oppose contraception.  But you cannot logically oppose both.

You don't have to be a gynecologist to understand that abortion's final common pathway is unintended pregnancy.  Preventing an unintended pregnancy makes abortion impossible.

Using 2008 data from the Guttmacher Institute, I came up with this admittedly speculative extrapolation.  Using retrospective data is always risky, but if I worked in an emergency room and noticed that the most severely injured car accident victims were not wearing their seat belts or intoxicated (or both), it would not be difficult to extrapolate what would happen if seat belt usage were universal and stricter drunk driving laws were followed.   In fact, the public health campaigns addressing these two issues were launched based on exactly those sorts of observations.  

In the same way, data about who gets an abortion can allow us to estimate what might happen if access to and use of contraception were improved.

Opponents of contraception are fond of pointing out that over half of those who seek an abortion were using contraception at the time of the conception.  Since contraception does not work perfectly, it must not work at all, right?  

Wrong.  54% of women who had an abortion used a contraceptive method the month prior to their unintended pregnancy.  The most common type of contraception was the condom or the pill.  But of these women, 76% of pill users and 49% of condom users admitted to not using the method consistently.  In fact, only 13% of pill users and 14% of condom users reported correct use.  

Since people have a tendency to over-report things that make them look good in the eyes of the surveyor, it's likely that this 13-14% "correct use" number is higher than reality.  

Besides, there are many ways someone deprived of rigorous education on contraception use might inadvertently misuse them.  A condom might be worn properly, for example, but how many people check the expiration date prior to use or avoid exposing a condom to excess pressure (as in a wallet in a back pocket) or heat (as in a car left in the sun)?   Did the condom also have a spermicidal lubricant or was it used in conjunction with spermicidal foam?  Did someone who was on an oral contraceptive forget to take it one day, then doubled the next, or simply dropped that pill from the cycle?  Studies of parents of children taking a 10-day course of antibiotics indicate 30% fail to give at least one dose by day 3, and that almost three-fourths fail to complete the full 10-day course, so the probability of a woman missing a dose of a regimen running over a much longer period is even higher.  

The bottom line is that the vast majority of those who have abortions were either not using contraception at all or using it inconsistently.  So what would happen if we improved these numbers (something the bishops are fighting fiercely to prevent)?   

Let's imagine a group of 100 women seeking abortions in 2008.  On average, 46 did not use any contraception whatsoever.   This is the low-lying fruit:  the biggest improvement would be to encourage all women who are sexually active but not ready to get pregnant to use contraception as religiously as they wear a seat belt.  Such a change in behavior would mean 46 more women would use contraception.

Admittedly, that would not prevent 46 abortions because - as the 13-14% of women obtaining an abortion who reported using contraception consistently reminds us - some unintended pregnancies can occur even with proper use.  

Note:  the fact that 13% of those taking who were on oral contraceptives and who got abortions in 2008 reported regular use does NOT indicate that the pill's failure rate is as high as 13%.  According to the CDC, oral contraceptives are 92-99% effective, meaning their "failure rate" is between 1-8% (probably closer to 1% if used properly and combined with other methods).  This is a classic Bayesian probability problem - the fact that you know the rate of exposure to proper use of oral contraceptives given an unintended pregnancy tells you nothing about the rate of unintended pregnancy given proper use of oral contraceptives.  

But let's assume for sake of argument that of the 46 additional women who now use contraception, 13% get pregnant anyway.  That still means 87% do not get pregnant, so even in this dismally unlucky scenario, contraception use has prevented 40 abortions (87% x 46).

Let's return to the other 54 women who already use contraception.  Of these, only 6 (about 13%) used it consistently and correctly.  That means 48 women in the contraception group are not using it consistently or correctly.  If we could - through an outreach and education campaign perhaps, or by eliminating financial barriers to filling their prescriptions or buying condoms - get that number up to 100%, even if we used the ridiculously high 13% failure rate, proper contraception use would prevent another 42 abortions (87% x 48).  

Adding the 40 abortions prevented by getting those who used no contraception to use it to the 42 abortions prevented by getting those who used contraception irregularly to use it regularly, even with the artificially high 13% failure rate of properly-used contraception, 82 total abortions of the original 100 would be prevented.  

Bottom line:  universal access to contraception, used properly, would reduce the abortion rate by 82%.  Extrapolated to national data, 82% of 1.21 million abortions in 2008 translates into 980,000 prevented abortions!  

So when Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich say they are "pro-life", ask them why they are attacking policies that - in combination with other efforts, such as poverty reduction and universal access to healthcare - could easily prevent a million abortions a year.   If they really wanted to prevent the intentional loss of embryonic life why wouldn't they do whatever it took?  

            Yes, some who oppose contraception on theological grounds might sincerely believe that Jesus would prohibit the use of estrogen-progesterone pills or latex condoms, but since Jesus never said any such thing they cannot be sure.  Some rudimentary contraception existed in his time, but if it bothered Jesus, he never spoke against it, just as he never said a word about that other sexual litmus test of modern Christianity - homosexuality.   

What Jesus did teach was a variation of Rabbi Hillel's Golden Rule.  It's hard to imagine that when he said we should do unto others as we want them to do unto us that he would support preventing poor women in a wealthy nation from accessing technology that might break their cycle of poverty  compounded by unintended pregnancies leading to children born into a society that is appallingly indifferent to their post-natal existence.   It's hard to see how the man who saved a woman from being stoned to death for adultery would have wanted women today to be barred from an entire class of medicine because men they never met fear other women might use them to control the timing and number of her children.  

At any rate, it's unfair to claim to speak for Jesus or Yahweh or any entities, real or imagined, or are unable to speak for themselves, particularly when the 34,000 denominations of Christianity who all claim to be channeling the same spirit of Jesus disagree about what he actually meant.   Why not do as the Good Samaritan did, and not let the obtuse, abstract, legalistic religious ritual prevent us from doing the obvious good right in front of us.  If a man is bleeding to death in the road, help him.  If you have the means of preventing a million abortions a year, then for god's sake use it!.  

Shouldn't Women Demand Men Filling Viagra Prescriptions Be Screened if Not Barred?

 Why not mandate a 24 hour waiting period, followed by a thorough prostate exam for anyone wanting to fill a prescription for medications such as Viagra?  If a man is either not married or married to a woman who is postmenopausal then clearly this is the kind of sex that many religiously-minded people who believe that all sex must have a chance at causing pregnancy would find objectionable. Is it not a violation of their religious freedom to have to fill a prescription for a man who is clearly past his reproductive prime, especially if he is most likely to be filling the prescription, as Newt was in the 90s, so he could go have sex with his mistress? Since some man somewhere might theoretically be having sex for the sheer pleasure of it, isn't it safer to allow pharmacists and healthcare administrators to refuse to fill this entire class of medications for every man all the time? Also, if you believe that the timing and number of children should be left to chance and that any use of technology to intervene artificially is morally offensive, why would this not apply to erectile dysfunction agents? After all, if you really believed that no blade of grass falls without god having willed it, why would divine intervention be any less present in a wilting erection? In this view of reality, isn't impotence simply god's way of saying your breeding days are over? If so, then isn't it flouting god's will to do anything to upset that divine plan, which leads always and everywhere to the best of all possible worlds? Unfortunately the bible is as useless in answering this question as it is with so many other matters (go ahead and search for Viagra, erectile dysfunction, or estrogen in any online bible - you won't get any hits) but do we really think that god wants Newt Gingrich to be able to pleasure Mistress #4 more than he wants a poor woman in Alabama to be able to access a condom that will protect her from contracting HIV from her philandering husband?

If fundamentalists are right, then we are all in deep, deep trouble... especially fundamentalists!

If the vision of god depicted by modern Christian fundamentalists is correct, we are all truly hosed. 
Jesus said a camel could get through the eye of a needle easier than the rich could get into heaven and by world standards, certainly by historical standards, even the poorest of us in the West is very, very rich. We wear mixed cotton-polyester blends and all enjoy vegetables, whether we realize it or not, that have been raised using biblically forbidden methods such as crop rotation and not observing every seventh year of letting fields lie idle. Some of us eat shellfish, even rabbit, and don't get me started about bacon and pork. We work on Saturday (a capital offense - try explaining to Yahweh that we changed the Sabbath on him) and have abolished slavery without compensating the slave-owner, two biblical offenses. 
We allow women not only to enter a temple while menstruating (we don't even ask anymore) and to argue with her husband (both explicitly forbidden in the Bible) but to own property and vote. (The whole idea of voting and limited government has no basis or precedent in biblical teachings.)  Fathers who beat their children as the Bible commands are now prosecuted, not praised, and parents no longer have the biblically-guaranteed right to kill their children or sell them into slavery if they talk back or if  father, who is, as the Bible tells us, lord of the home in the same way god is lord of the world, thinks it best.  
Yes, our penal code has become more compassionate, but in doing so, it has deviated dangerously from biblical teachings.  We do not stone adulterers or cut off the hand of thieves.  We no longer pull out people's tongues for saying religiously offensive things as the Bible commands, nor do we pour molten liquid down their throats.  
We no longer practice animal sacrifice, the heart of religious service in the time of Jesus;  I honestly can't remember the last time I made a burnt offering to the Lord. 
Since Jesus said we should not just forgive our enemies but love them, I imagine that excluded pre-emptive war and torture, so anyone who participated or supported those un-Christian activities might have a lot of explaining to do. 
Many of Jesus's followers were quite confident they were following his teachings but again and again he reminded them that 
  a.) they were coming up short and 
  b.) that god, not they, would be the judge of that, and that some of them would be in for a nasty surprise, especially those - surprise, surprise! - who had abandoned the poor, the homeless, the imprisoned, and by so doing had abandoned Jesus. 
Now I'm not saying that I endorse this belief system but if I became "born again" tomorrow unless I suffered a head injury that made me incapable of reading or thinking, I would be filled with dread and humility, not joy and self-congratulatory pride.  Accepting the "many are called but few are chosen" view of reality is dark enough; why rub it in by going around telling everyone that you are among the few (and by implication everyone else is going to hell forever and ever, amen)?  
Accepting the Christian world view as it is understood by fundamentalists of the American variety would be like accepting that you are enrolled in a course set up so that most people will fail, with a cranky professor prone to fits of homicidal rage who never directly tells you what you have to do (he doesn't even bother to make his presence known) to pass the course ready not just to fail you but to torture you for failing.
I just don't see how this could be comforting to anyone and doubt anyone who has really thought it through could either (which is why I believe most fundamentalists have not done much thinking).  There is a reason generations of Christians described themselves as god-fearing instead of the current batch of god-gloaters. 
If Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, and Glenn Beck are all going to heaven because they have decided they are, then I am not all that sure I would want to go there anyway.

Why are so many Republicans overweight?

This is a very delicate area, and completely unscientific (there are many overweight people who are not Republicans, after all), but Republicans do seem to blather on the most about personal responsibility and the importance of taxpayers not having to bail people out of poor choices, especially poor health choices.
Fair enough, but have you ever noticed that Republicans all have the same body habitus?  



Notice the chin of Karl Rove as it flows liquid-like over his collar. 


Look at Karl Rove,




Dick Cheney has aged since this picture, but notice also the flow of chins over the collar.  What is often mistaken as a scowl is simply a facial asymmetry perhaps the result of an old stroke (notice the left palpebral fissure is narrower than the right and the labial folds are flatter on the left), itself the result of longstanding cardiovascular disease worsened by decades of alcohol abuse. 

Dick Cheney, and



Here Limbaugh illustrates 2 modifiable health risk factors:  obesity and tobacco abuse.  His illicit narcotics addiction is allegedly in remission.  

Rush Limbaugh.  Then look at





Glenn Beck here illustrating multiple folds under his chin.  Of the cases presented here, Beck's is perhaps the least severe on the Body Mass Index front, but this could be because his drugs of choice (cocaine and amphetamines) are powerful appetite suppressants. 


Glenn Beck and


New Gingrich.


I had a full frontal shot of Newt which reveals what his suit was partially concealing:

That's not Newt's granddaughter, but his third wife, his mistress when Newt was impeaching Clinton for having a mistress.  But I don't want to focus on his inability to control his appetite for sex here, instead focusing on his inability to inhibit his intake of food.   Notice the fully-developed man breasts, generous paunch, and (if you zoom in) distended varicose veins, all evidence of decades of over-eating and insufficient exercise.  The man is a walking cardiovascular time bomb and of course when he requires healthcare, he will get the best and the most expensive, and since he is Medicare-eligible, we will all pay for it.  

Remember Jerry Falwell, the man who said feminists, not anti-feminist religious fundamentalists, had caused 9-11?   He suffered multiple medical stigmata of obesity, including advanced atherosclerosis requiring a stent to be placed in 2005 to open a 70% coronary artery obstruction; he died of a probably heart attack on May 15, 2007, being found down without pulse-less and unconscious in his office.   He died at 74, which is relatively young for such a wealthy white man with access to the best medical technology (including dieticians and physical trainers whose advice he apparently did not or could not follow).  Again, the man who was spent so much time telling everyone that the Antichrist would appear by 2009 (and "of course he'll be Jewish") should have spent more time watching his caloric intake and cholesterol level.
But all these "do as I say, not as I do" personal responsibility Republicans look like hell.  They all have this soft, jowly look, as though some mother has been spoiling them, giving them extra portions, telling them what a smart boy they are.
What is it about people who think they have found Jesus that makes them also think they don't need to lose a few pounds?  
All this personal responsibility stuff seems to end with the guy in the mirror for these Republicans; what on earth was Dick Cheney, a man with a pacemaker, 5 heart attacks, heavy smoking history, and at least 2 DUIs, doing DRINKING ALCOHOL when hunting before he shot his friend in the face on February 11, 2006?      


Cheney's friend, Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Texas attorney, shot in the face after Cheney had "a beer" for lunch prior to hunting; the taxpayer-funded healthcare necessitated by this accident was never reimbursed by the shooter.  Whittington was quite lucky he did not die; he suffered a myocardial infarction and atrial fib as a result of irritation from pellets lodged in his pericardium. 

 We as taxpayers had to pay for that aftermath; why do we not send the bill to Cheney who clearly was not showing personal responsibility by hunting after drinking (the amount of alcohol is unclear, but irrelevant; personal responsibility dictates that firearms and alcohol do not mix, particularly when the firearm is handled by a man with a history of 5 heart attacks and 2 convictions for Driving Under the Influence).
We are well beyond the days when it was thought you could tell a man's moral character by his physical appearance (although Hollywood directors and novelists often forget this), but when one's physical appearance is a direct byproduct of individual decisions made over a lifetime, the consequences of which all of us must ultimately pay for, do Republicans or conservatives in general really have the moral high ground from which to preach to the rest of us about personal responsibility?  No more than Dick Cheney, a man who sought and obtained 5 deferrals to avoid military service in Vietnam, has a right to lecture us about patriotism.  

Guess who wants you to think Bush, not Obama, should get credit for taking out Osama bin Laden? The same people who want us to believe Clinton caused 9-11 in 1998....

May 4, 2011   Don't look now, but the same people who brought us 9-11, the "slam dunk" invasion of Iraq, and the quagmire of Afghanistan, are trying to wrest credit for President Obama's recent military strike against Osama bin Laden and give it to... you guessed it .... his predecessor, President George W. Bush.
Now even setting aside the observation that Bush left office over 2 years prior to Obama's strike, and had 7 years to do the same thing without success (8 if you take seriously Bush's denial of counter-terrorism co-ordinator Richard Clarke's charges that the pre-9-11 Bush administration did not share Clinton's anti-al Qaeda urgency), this is still an audacious claim.
But the revisionist historians are not even letting Osama bin Laden's body return to the biosphere without weighing in with this spin:   President Bush, the man who created the need to kill Osama bin Laden in the first place (9-11 happened on his watch), should now get credit for another administration's success.
To those of us who inhabit the reality-based community, this might seem like a stretch, especially since Bush famously stated 6 months after 9-11  that he was not spending much time on Osama bin Laden.

Who knows if he’s hiding in some cave or not. We haven’t heard from him in a long time. The idea of focusing on one person really indicates to me people don’t understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person. He’s just a person who’s been marginalized. … I don’t know where he is. I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.

And here is the email in question:

As more of the details of the Bin Laden killing come out it looks like we need to extend our congratulations backwards ...who set the conditions to make the operation successful.  Anyone who played a part in the capture and interrogation of KSM that led to the identification of the courier that proved the vital piece of evidence to get Bin Laden deserves our thanks, as well as those who made the difficult decisions to authorize the success of that intelligence-gathering effort in spite of vicious criticism.  

This "vicious criticism" was apparently a jab at those who felt that our legal and moral obligations to abide by the Geneva Convention and various torture protocols signed into United States law should be respected.  This is the first allegation I have heard that anything useful, much less the elimination of Osama bin Laden, came out of the repeated drowning (there is no simulated about it) of KSM.   Bush has now admitted in writing in his book that he authorized this torture (lest there be any doubt that it is torture, please refer to its inventors, the Spanish Inquisition who called it the "water torture"), even though he publicly lied at the time, stating "we don't torture."

It also appears from public accounts of those in the know that some of the changes in procedure made by officers like Stan McChrystal in the early-to-mid 2000s paid dividends long after his departure... And even those of us who have not been supporters of our current president should be wise enough to extend our congratulations and realize that even though he was given the full plate, he had to make the tough decision.  Obama was surely aware that the last time we knew exactly where Bin Laden was (1998) we could not muster the political courage to order his death and the result was Sept. 11th.  He most likely did not want to repeat that failure in leadership and while we will learn over time how long he dithered or what conditions were put on the raid, for the time being we owe him a well-done.

Let's examine this paragraph for a snarky phrase count:

   1.  "even though he [President Obama] was given the full plate"
   2.  "we [meaning Democrats in 1998] could not muster the political courage" to kill Osama bin Laden
   3.  "and the result was Sept. 11th."
   4.  "failure in leadership"
   5.  "how long he dithered"
   6.  "what conditions were put on the raid"

Personally, I would prefer honest hostility to a dishonest, backhanded thank you.  And so, I imagine, would President Obama.

Newt Gingrich: To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine - my review

Newt Gingrich:   To Save America:  Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine - my review

This is how your review will appear:  Beyond Garbage, March 10, 2011 By  Mark Vakkur - See all my reviews     This review is from: To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (Paperback) To really save America, you might start by pledging never to read this book. Not only is it bad history (stunning for a man who apparently taught the subject and wrote a few works of historical fiction), but it advances as facts spurious, disrespectful, inflammatory charges that have virtually all been widely discredited. The fact that Newt Gingrich must know this, but writes it anyway, indicates that his fidelity to the truth is no greater than his fidelity to his first two wives. Mr. Gingrich can't even get the title right. First, it's PRESIDENT Obama. He earned that title by winning the election, receiving more votes than any American president in history. Second, President Obama is a Democrat, not a socialist. There is only one member of Congress who is a socialist, an easy fact for Mr. Gingrich to check. Third, the breathless reference to a "secular-socialist machine" is simply not supported by anything President Obama has done, stated, or written, and it most certainly is not backed up by anything Mr. Gingrich writes. Fourth (and perhaps this is technical) socialism by definition is secular, so the secular part is gratuitous and redundant (and probably should not be hyphenated). It does add a certain alliterative punch though, which is perhaps why the author chose to throw it in there. Mr. Gingrich alleges that there is a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy with the diabolical aim of empowering government to rule the people rather than serve them. As evidence of this, he cites the Justice Department's respect for the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions in the treatment of suspected terrorists (in Newt Gingrich's world, they are already guilty, and trials and attorneys are a redundant (and tax-supported) burden. I always find the idea of an American Left (which Mr. Gingrich capitalizes for emphasis) as amusing, considering that in Europe, where I live, the Democrats would be considered a right-of-center party and the Republicans a far right party. Issues the Republicans view as socialist plots to deprive us of our liberties - such as universal healthcare, worker's rights, federally-funded daycare, extensive public transportation - have long been settled here with generally outstanding results. In fact, the United States spends more on health care but (as I write this) leaves 59 million of its citizens without health insurance, a problem Newt Gingrich does not address directly (although he has two chapters on health care, mostly about how to reduce costs and the dangers of death panels, a Sarah Palin fabrication whose critics he ridicules (p. 56)). Perhaps Gingrich feels his audience will not get his message unless he overstates it, but instead of saying that he opposes healthcare reform, he titles the chapter in question, "The Secular-Socialist Machine's Health Bill Disaster" (p. 85). Wow, if that doesn't make you run into the street waving a Lipton's tea bag, I don't know what will. It's interesting that the same man who does not believe our children need health insurance believes that what we do need is a gun in each household and that - even with our government's advanced arsenal - a family could and should be able to keep those weapons just in case that government ever gets tyrannical (p. 294). This myth of the gun lobby - that guns can protect you not just against intruders but against your own government - is reminiscent of Sharron Angle's "second amendment remedies" rant and her intent to "take out" Senator Reid. If Gingrich's first name was Saddam, he likely would be getting a visit from the Department of Homeland Security for making even veiled terroristic threats against his government, but Newt is very, very white, and a new convert to Catholicism, so apparently gets a free pass. The book is not only sloppy in its logic, but mean-spirited. Mr. Gingrich tells us he is a Christian, but don't expect any evidence of charity or compassion in these pages. People who are on the Left are not like you and me, Gingrich assures us. They believe in theft rather than work, union bureaucracy rather than "productivity", corruption rather than honesty, and "secular oppression" rather than "religious belief." Now, I'm not sure how much stock to put in a lecture about honesty from a man who cheated on two wives with much younger women (one while crucifying the President of the United States for cheating on his wife), and I don't know how committed Gingrich is to "religious belief" if he has been one of the most vocal critics of his fellow citizens exercising their religious beliefs in lower Manhattan. But this collection of cartoon-like false dichotomies which he lists on page 7 is not only insulting, but completely uncorroborated by anything that follows. If you want a reference to any of these dastardly traits from that oppressive Secular Left (did I mention they have a Machine?), you won't find one. If many of these stereotypes sound familiar, that's because they are rehashed talking points from Fox News, who pays Gingrich $1 million a year for repeating them. The fact that Mr. Gingrich's personal life is so sordid and deviates so widely from what he pontificates should matter to us all, since he has advocated repeatedly that the personal, sexual life of public officials is not only fair game, but a fantastic litmus test for measuring their righteousness. By that measure, Gingrich fails, and this book does nothing to explain the yawning gaps between his serial adultery and his preaching of Christian morality. Comparing the president of the United States to Mao or Hitler while calling him something Gingrich knows (or should know) he is not is beyond irresponsible, especially during a time of war. The idea that a president who just extended massive tax cuts for the rich, who has advanced or passed no serious firearm legislation, who has kept Guantanamo Bay open and escalated the war in Afghanistan is a socialist is beyond nonsensical, and Gingrich should be ashamed for advancing such a lie, especially in the title of a book. But a man who can present his wife with a divorce agreement while she is recovering from cancer surgery probably has a much higher threshold for shame than the rest of us. Your Tags: fascist, tea party, hypocrite, adultery, cancer, multiple sclerosis, fat, islamophobia

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There is a Difference Between Losing Some Elections and Losing Your Country

Unlike Sarah Palin, I won't whine and snivel about wanting my country back.  There are no tanks in the streets, no midnight knocks on the door, and we didn't even completely lose this election.
There is a huge difference between being a minority party and an outlawed one, as is the case in China or Egypt, for example. 
The Republicans will probably obstruct, but since they control the agenda of the House, they will be expected to do something other than just say no.  Gingrich found this out the hard way when he shut down the government, losing his job and his majority in the process.

At any rate, Democrats still control the Senate and the White House.  

So those of us who believe in those radical progressive concepts such as insuring our children or fully funding the obligations we have to the least among us should all cheer up.
It is natural for the incumbent party to lose seats in the midterm election.  The  proportion of this loss is directly proportional to the unemployment rate.
The Republicans, if they are smart (and many are), will put away the champagne and look at how they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in several key races.  Perhaps they will realize that running right wing nut jobs like Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle is a bad substitute for a strategy.  Sarah Palin and the Koch brothers might have a little less influence in 2012 than they had in 2010.
  
Ironically, this could be bad for the Democrats, since the Republicans are less likely to run an unelectable extremist, but good for the country, since even an unelectable extremist can drag the political discourse into the mire, as Palin's addition to the McCain ticket illustrated.

At any rate, reading too much into the Congressional races to glean hints of the 2012 presidential race is dangerous.  Most of the anger of Americans is with Congress (over 70% disapprove) not with the president (who enjoys about evenly split approval to disapproval, something Bush with mid-teens approval ratings could have only dreamed of).  

Since there is no evidence that the economic cycle has been abolished, it is highly likely that the economy will be roaring by 2012.  If so, discontent with the Presidential and Senate incumbent party will be lower (although watch Republicans try to take credit for the recovery from the recession that they created under Bush and that ended (according to economists) under Obama before election day).   That recovery plus the inevitable disillusionment that will follow from sending telegenic, tea bag-waving rabble rousers to Washington  will likely undo some of the damage done yesterday to the progressive cause.
The Dems did a poor job of getting out a simple message and repeating it often.  In contrast, this is the core of the Republican strategy. Democrats should have trumpeted the many meaningful things they got done:
 -  Healthcare reform has been unsuccessfully tried for the better part of a half century; President Obama and the Democratic Congress got it done in under 2 years despite a vicious right wing smear campaign and Sarah Palin's fabricated death panels.  

 - President Obama delivered on his campaign pledge to end our combat mission in Iraq. 

 - Democratic Congress passed meaningful financial regulatory reform that protects consumers and makes a future financial melt-down and bailout less likely.

 - President Obama turned around what could have been a complete meltdown of the Western financial system by injecting billions of liquidity into the system; many economists believe unemployment would be 20% and the economy in far worse shape had Obama not continued the Bush-Paulson bailout that the Tea Party successfully blamed him for.

Like the stock market, politics follows a sometimes volatile trajectory but the longterm trend is up.  Just think:  only 6 years ago, Republican strategists were able to use homophobia as the central pillar of their campaign strategy (distracting people with gay marriage prohibition amendments when we should have been talking about Abu Ghraib).  Now we know that many prominent Republicans are gay and homophobia does not sell to most voters anymore, even conservative ones (Sarah Palin tried to ban a library book on homosexuality from her local library when mayor but hardly mentioned the subject this election cycle).

If history shows anything it's that Americans swing wildly from one election to the next.  Nothing is ever over.  If people are still out of work in 6 months to a year, they will demand results from Boehner.  All the platitudes about getting government off their backs mean nothing to the guy who lost his job and is losing his house and (thanks to Boehner if his threats to "kill" healthcare reform are delivered) his health insurance.  A tax cut does you no good if you have no taxable income and hopefully many Americans will understand that campaigning for massive tax cuts they will never enjoy does them no good if their neighborhood is losing cops, firemen, and teachers.
Progressives needs a pit bull - imagine a Karl Rove or Sarah Palin but with ethics.  This should not be hard, since we enjoy a huge advantage:  as Stephen Colbert once lamented, reality has a well-known liberal bias.  The truth is on our side.  We don't have to lie to make the other side look ridiculous.
Advocating tax cuts while howling about the deficit makes no economic sense.   Saying tax cuts pay for themselves when they clearly haven't makes no sense.
Saying that giving people tax deductions to offset taxes they don't pay anyway to buy health insurance they can't afford from for profit companies who won't insure them makes no sense.
Saying that the world is only a few thousand years old and our 99% genetic congruence with chimpanzees is a wild coincidence and that we should teach this to our children in science class makes no sense.
Saying that oil companies and coal mining companies and hedge funds should get to self regulate when clearly they have never been able to do this makes no sense.
Calling a centrist president who has been friendly to a fault to a for-profit insurance industry a Marxist-Leninist makes no sense.
It is not enough to say this once; we have to hammer it home at every opportunity.  That's what Republicans do; they take a message, even an inherently dishonest or nonsensical one (that more tax cuts will help balance the budget, for example) and repeat it ad nauseum until people at the margin absorb it.
So it will be easier in some ways to hold the Republican sound bites up to scrutiny because they will have a living laboratory in which to put up or shut up.  No more chanting "treason!" or "kill him!" from the sidelines.  They are controlling part of the government so many of them have ranted against in the most graphic terms, describing it as a "beast" that needs to be drowned or  bludgeoned.
Of course, turning a government over to those who hate it gives them an opportunity, as did Bush and Cheney, to illustrate how inept government can sometimes be.
Let's hope the voters - and the surviving Democrats - hold them to account.

Would Newt return our lost colony?

The BBC's Mark Mardell asks this question in an intriguing post related to Gingrich's remarks that President Obama can only be understand through the prism of Kenyan anti-colonialism.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  If it's bad, does it mean that the former history professor who once wrote somewhat wistfully of the Belgian colonial experience in the Congo (an experience so brutal that another observer Joseph Conrad turned into the novel Heart of Darkness).

Is Newt Gingrich a Closet Jihadist?

Is Newt Gingrich a Closet Jihadist?

Mark Vakkur, M.D.
9/22/10

Before dismissing that question, consider the following:

While playing Grand Inquisitor against President Bill Clinton for having an affair, Gingrich now admits he was cheating on wife #2, Marianne Ginther (who he married after cheating on wife #1).   Unlike Clinton's fling with Monica Lewinsky, Gingrich's affair with Congressional aide Callista Bisek, 23 years his junior, destroyed his marriage (Callista and Newt are now married, at least for now; give it time though - they have been married only since 2000 and Gingrich's pattern seems to be a marriage-ending affair every 10-15 years).

So, if history is any guide, then the man who was so publicly outraged about adultery but was privately engaging in it who is now so publicly outraged by the threat of radical Islam may be secretly embracing it.   Gingrich's rants against radical Islam may be a signal that  he has privately converted.   

It would not be the first time Gingrich has made a religious conversion after all.  Raised a Southern Baptist, the party that once condemned the Pope as an anti-Christ (the disproportionately Southern Baptist KKK was as anti-Catholic as it was anti-black and anti-Jewish), he converted to Catholicism in 2009.   To outsiders this may seem like a small change among interchangeable denominations of a shared Christian faith, but not to anyone privy to the ugly politics of the Jim Crow south where Gingrich spent his formative years.  He  graduated high school in segregated Columbus, Georgia, 2 years before Martin Luther King was to give his "I Have A Dream" speech in Washington, and the better part of a decade from implementation of the historic civil rights legislation passed by a process of judicial activism Gingrich later condemned as overreaching.  

So a man who condemns adultery but commits it and who has a history of being flexible when necessary (his conversion to Catholicism was apparently to please his wife) might now be praying in the direction of Mecca five times a day.  

Not that I have anything against that, but then again, I am not Newt Gingrich, who seems to be doing his best to make Islam the new Red Menace.  He describes a vast left wing Islamic conspiracy (left wing because of course Democrats, the same ones who he once claimed would inspire mothers to drown their children if elected, appease closet jihadists).  I did not realize it, but by embracing secularism and separation of church and state, I am actually helping Islamic fundamentalists impose Sharia Law on unsuspecting Americans.  

Frankly, when Newt first told me what I was really doing without knowing it, I thought it sounded like his latest attention-grabbing gimmick to differentiate himself from the right wing pack (if you really fear Islam, vote for me, that sort of thing).  But as I considered the possibility of Gingrich's conversion to Islam, I realized he might be far more intelligent than I imagined. 

This is a twist so deep and drenched in irony it just might be true.  Imagine a plot to implant radical Islam in America spearheaded by a cranky white man who alleges to hate Muslims!  Brilliant. 

Of course, many will say that this is nonsensical, that baseless accusations that a public figure is Muslim (as though being a Muslim is a crime) require proof, or that making these charges against all contradictory evidence is irresponsible.  To which I have to agree except that the right wing of the American right - Gingrich's base - continues to make identical speculations about the winning candidate in the last presidential election cycle.  Am I then not free to make a similar charge against one of the losers (of the campaign that is)?

There is at least as much evidence that Newt is a closet Muslim as there is that President Obama is.  Newt is, as his political allies once said of Valerie Plame Wilson, fair game.

So now Newt Gingrich, whose serial adultery became Exhibit A as to why those who proclaim their personal honor the loudest are most likely to steal your family silver (to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson), tells us he sees religious extremists under every school desk.   Eugene Robinson points out in a recent editorial in the Washington Post "there is no left-of-center movement dedicated to fighting the steady, stealthy insinuation of sharia into America's legal system because no such thing is happening. Gingrich invents an enemy and then demands to know why others haven't sallied forth to slay it."

Or does he?  If Gingrich cries shrilly enough that the sharias are coming!  the sharias are coming! then when they really do.... ah, you see where this is going now.

Very deep, Mr. Gingrich.  Very deep.  We should all watch carefully to insure he does not order a matching set of prayer rugs from IKEA or avoid pork at the next fund-raising Tea Party Barbecue.