PARDON ME WHILE I LAUGH

Below is part of a rather pathetic news report to which I have added a few comments:

"Hundreds of progressive Christians from around the country are coming to Berkeley next week to plan how to take Christianity back from the right wing. [Only hundreds! How amusing! Probably more like dozens. And THEY are going to convert millions of Christians to Leftism?]

"'Progressive Christian' is not an oxymoron [just an ordinary moron], despite what the right says," said Diane Thomas, director of advanced placement programs at the Pacific School of Religion, part of UC Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. PSR is sponsoring the event. "Our goal is to put the soul back in Christianity, to focus it back on what it's always been about," said Thomas.

The event will be held Monday through Thursday at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. PSR Dean of Faculty Emeritus Delwin Brown, one of the main speakers, says the left has itself to blame for its present powerless condition. "We assumed that a more humane, more compassionate, more intellectually serious interpretation of Christianity would inevitably win out," he said. "We forfeited the argument to the other side." Brown said the left also has a tradition of hostility to religion that handicaps its ability to talk to people of faith. [A sudden rush of reality to his head]

"There's been a long-seated suspicion of authoritarianism [including Communism?], primary of which is organized religion [Organized religion is the main source of authoritarianism? He must have forgotten about the whole history of the Left from the French revolution on -- but in this guy's weird religion maybe the Communists were not authoritiarian!].

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ELSEWHERE

Thomas Holsinger makes the case for invading Iran: "All the reasons for invading Iraq apply doubly to Iran, and with far greater urgency. Iran right now poses the imminent threat to America which Iraq did not in 2003. Iran may already have some nuclear weapons, purchased from North Korea or made with materials acquired from North Korea, which would increase its threat to us from imminent to direct and immediate." [And even Pat Buchanan seems to agree!]

V.D. Hanson on Leftist self-contradiction: "At home, much about Iraq has been turned around in Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass fashion. Indeed the debate over Iraq has too often descended into Jabberwocky-like gibberish. We were once slandered as hegemonic; but when we didn't steal anything in Iraq, and instead spent billions in aid, suddenly we were called naive by the now realist Left. The war was caricatured as all about grabbing oil. Then when the price skyrocketed, we were dubbed foolish for tampering with the fragile petroleum landscape, or with not charging Iraqi price-gouging exporters for our time and services. Americans tried to remain idealistic on the principle that Iraqis, if freed and helped, could craft a workable democracy, and that such consensual governments would make the volatile Middle East safer, since elected and legitimate governments rarely attack their own kind. In response, the supposedly idealistic Left charged that we were bellicose and imperialistic - as if being on the side of the purple-fingered Iraqi voter was not preferable to being on the side of the terrorist and insurrectionist, who masked his fascism with national rhetoric."

Religious freedom to be restricted in EU : "Clergymen across the United Kingdom have been left highly concerned by a European Union report which has recommended that clergy not be allowed a right of conscientious objection to conducting gay weddings if the Parliament decides to enact legislation permitting same sex marriages. The EU ruling states that the rights of access to abortion, euthanasia, birth control and marriage trump the right of conscience to opt out of conducting gay weddings, reported The Church of England Newspaper. The highly controversial report by the EU's Network of Independent Experts on Human Rights said that where "euthanasia or assisted suicide are partially decriminalized, the right to religious conscientious objection, while it should be recognized to the medical doctors asked to perform euthanasia or to assist a person in committing suicide, should not be exercised in a way which leads to depriving any person from the possibility of exercising effectively his or her rights as guaranteed under the applicable legislation." The report also stated that the "right of access" should take precedence over the right for clergy or registrars to object to solemnizing gay weddings, where the law permitted them.

German government scammed: "Part of the ransom money alleged to have been paid by the German government to win the freedom of Iraq hostage Susanne Osthoff last month was found on Osthoff after her release, the German magazine Focus said on Saturday. Without citing its sources, Focus said officials at the German embassy in Baghdad had found several thousand U.S. dollars in the 43-year-old German archaeologist's clothes when she took a shower at the embassy shortly after being freed.... Osthoff, who converted to Islam and lived in Iraq, was seized heading north from Baghdad on Nov. 25 by gunmen who threatened in a videotape to kill her and her driver unless Germany ended all support for the Iraqi government... Two days after her release, the German government freed a Hizbollah member jailed for life in 1985 for the murder of a U.S. Navy diver. Berlin has denied a connection between the two events. Osthoff herself caused a stir when she said in an interview at the end of December that she did not believe her kidnappers were criminals.

Some readers may be aware of the Italian Muslim leader who is PRO-Israel. As he says here: "Israel exists by Divine Right, confirmed in both the Bible and Qur'an." There is also video of a recent interview with him (in English) here

Walter Williams explains that the poor get RICHER!: "Talk about the poor getting poorer tugs at the hearts of decent people and squares nicely with the agenda of big government advocates, but it doesn't square with the facts. ...The authors analyzed University of Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics data that tracked more than 50,000 individual families since 1968. Cox and Alms found: Only five percent of families in the bottom income quintile (lowest 20 percent) in 1975 were still there in 1991. Three-quarters of these families had moved into the three highest income quintiles. ...Cox and Alm's findings were supported by a U.S. Treasury Department study that used an entirely different data base, income tax returns. The U.S. Treasury found that 85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom income quintile in 1979 had moved on to a higher quintile by 1988 -- 66 percent to second and third quintiles and 15 percent to the top quintile".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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