#Obama's faith

[jarviskingston]

🏀⛹🏿‍♂️⛹🏿

[nana-glass-chillhop-radio-hour]

When Mitch McConnell said "Senate elections are different. They're statewide races and candidate quality matters" to the press...

[shegeekery]

Trying to mostly stay away from politics on this blog, but today there’s something I just need to say.

Kamala Harris just defied DECADES of inside-the-Beltway “wisdom” by picking Walz as her running mate instead of Shapiro. The gray-hairs were probably all telling her she had to go with Shapiro to court the independents. Instead of picking the moderate, staunchly pro-Israel guy, she went with a full-on progressive with a strong LGBTQ+, pro-choice, pro-union record.

She’s making a leap of faith here. She’s betting that progressives, young people, and marginalized people will show up for her if she shows that she’s listening. As someone who lived through several decades when progressives didn’t have a voice even in the Democratic party, I can’t begin to tell you how huge this is.

In the coming months, you will no doubt read/hear things about Harris or Walz that you won’t like. Some of it may even be true. There may well already be things you don’t like about her.

Unfortunately, the choice isn’t between a perfect candidate and an imperfect candidate. The choice is between an imperfect candidate and possibly the most disgusting man on the planet, a guy who isn’t even trying to hide his plans to destroy the US. If Palestine is your #1 issue, know that he will do everything he can to pour gas on the flames until there’s nothing left.

Harris made the choice to listen to progressive voices. If she loses because we didn’t show up for her in huge numbers, we’ll likely be wandering in the wilderness for decades more while the planet burns around us.

(Oh, and we’ll need to show up again in ‘26. Let’s not make the same mistake we made in 2010, when the left stayed home after electing Obama and Republicans won big everywhere, which led to the extreme gerrymandering we’re still dealing with in many states.)

[kmac4him1st]

https://rumble.com/v59x2qi-jon-voight-civil-war.html 🙏🙏🙏

https://rumble.com/v59x2qi-jon-voight-civil-war.html

[baldwillow]

[wutbju]

Merry Christmas from Caleb Phelps, the pastor of Faith Baptist Church, Taylors, and son of the infamous Chuck Phelps.

Ten years prior to this -- when Caleb was an undergrad at BJU -- this same ventriloquist dummy was kicking around campus for Campaign 2012.

Yes, for Obama's second presidential election. That was their humor at BJU.

And it's still Caleb Phelp's.

[cleolinda]

So last night at the Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris pulled off, in my opinion, the most glorious flex in all of American politics. It was petty as fuck and I am here for it:

Harris, in a Show of Force, Holds a Large Rally 80 Miles From Her Convention

Choosing Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee [the smaller venue used for the Republican National Convention] as the venue for Ms. Harris’s rally also served as an intentional rejoinder to Mr. Trump, who has fumed over the size of her crowds since she replaced Mr. Biden on the Democratic ticket. The campaign said about 15,000 people attended the rally in Milwaukee, and the 23,500-person convention hall in Chicago was packed.

Someone on Reddit then linked to the Kamala HQ video of her brief Coming To You Live From My Rival’s Venue acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination. And Redditors pointed out that you could actually see the juxtaposition, and the sold-out crowds could see each other, and it was beautiful.

Posters on r/politics constantly say to any positive discussion, “None of this matters if you don’t vote.” While this is true, the constant doomer nihilism of “None of this matters” pisses me off. I know they’re afraid people will get complacent. They’re afraid people will see, for example, pictures of these massive crowds and think, I don’t have to leave the house. I don’t have to vote. Everyone else will get this. But that’s not what I think when I see news like this. It DOES matter. I was always going to drag my carcass out to my polling station in a blood-red state, whether I have to use a cane or not, whether the Electoral College even gives a shit about my vote or not, but this is exciting. Whenever I see Kamala’s packed, enthusiastic crowds, I think, This is a movement forward and I get to be part of it. We are gonna run up the popular vote as a statement that will make bad-faith actors think twice before meddling, and we are gonna flip some battleground states. We are gonna nail down the electoral votes, and I am going to sit there and watch on TV as they certify the electors in December, and then I am going to sit there and watch them officially count it out like they did on January 6, 2021, and I am going to know that I was part of that.

It’s not about getting complacent. It’s about feeling the agency and possibility that we can actually get this done. It’s about saying, I get to do this, even if it’s just one ballot, one I Voted sticker, one day. We’re gonna get our first female, first South Asian American, and second Black president into that office. The enthusiasm is our running rebuke to that fucking guy, and we’re gonna get the numbers as even Republican politicians turn on him and support Kamala Harris. And any time someone tells you that being hopeful is getting complacent, come back and look at those crowds. Or better yet, get hyped up by Michelle Obama:

Hope is energy, not complacency. We can do this.

[drthomasmaples]

Faith: An Oasis 4 the Heart

In today's post, Dr. Tom answers the question, what can I do, when I don't have hope for the future? #hope #faith #psychology #depthpsychology #depression

What can I do, when I don’t have hope for the future?Hope in FaithWhat can you do when you lack hope? A Sacred Journey Podcast What can I do, when I don’t have hope for the future? Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking. Khalil Gibran Hope in Faith Have you got faith? Although many in the psychology profession will not agree with this statement,…

[grison-in-space]

Has Biden actually done anything at all? There's evidence going around and I think it's compelling, the alternate to voting is instead doing actual social work and participating in protests and organizing political action, which is a good idea i think

1) Yes. Inarguably this has been the most effective progressive domestic administration since I have been alive, and I'm in my thirties. What in the fuck are you talking about? It's not perfect, but it's better than we've seen in fifty years: Obama tried, but Democratic Congressional organization was just not yet used to working with a completely obstructionist GOP Congress in the wake of the tea party.

Even in terms of foreign policy, this is also pretty much as good as US involvement gets. Sorry. Our foreign policy has been shaped by monsters for decades, and that's even without dealing with our huge and active branch of Christian doom cultists. There ain't a candidate in the world that could stop the entire accumulated momentum of geopolitics with a snap of the finger, and I'm not really willing to pretend that Biden is particularly notable for not managing to fix Israel/Palestine relations.

2) In your own words, anon, what precisely does organizing political action entail without participating in the political process? Do you think that abstaining from the part of the gig where you, the citizen, get to say which official gets the job somehow makes your opinions matter more to your elected public officials? Have you ever organized to get so much as a municipal one-time library project budget expanded? Are you perhaps only skilled at political argument with people who already agree with you on the Internet?

What is your leverage, and could it reasonably be described as "extortion" or "blackmail" or "political corruption?" Because those are pretty much the only things on the table that can work more effectively to drive an elected official than a disciplined coalition of political allies (who can be purchased with, you guessed it, votes) or a reliable bloc of voter support. Your vote matters less than the ones you bring with you, sure. Do you think that not voting yourself somehow helps people organize to drive more votes? Have you perhaps replaced your complex reasoning skills with a rapidly dying jellyfish?

3) Holy passive vagueness, Batman! "Evidence is going around." What a masterpiece of a sentence! How it suggests everything while providing nothing! What evidence? Who collected it? Who is talking about the evidence "going around?" Who is listening? How many of them are there? What did they think before? The more I think, the more questions I have, and damn if they ain't predisposing me to be even less charitable.

Like, this is so catastrophically poorly supported that I have to confess that I not only believe this is probably an ask in bad faith (i.e. by someone who is expecting to piss me off or otherwise engage with me adversarially, probably spammed to a whole host of blogs at once with no expectation of response) but I actively hope that it is. The alternative is to have to grapple with the reality that some people are so uncomfortable with the responsibility of moral agency that they're willing to release useful levers of legal and social power just so that they never do anything problematic with that power. Much better, of course, to wash one's hands of anything that might have the stink of responsibility clinging to it. Might fall from the membership of the Elect if you actually get yourself all muddy by doing things, I reckon.

I don't even believe that voting is the only lever we have when it comes to our elected officials or that votes are necessary to secure change, and I am certainly not talking about the presidential ticket alone when I talk voting. What I do believe is two things: one, that voting is a potential lever of power on the emergent chaos of the society in which we live. And two, that anyone telling me to leave a lever of power on the ground without a damn good reason is either incompetent, malicious, or both.

[mondoreb]

End Times Prophecy Headlines: December 12, 2022

End Times Prophecy Headlines: December 12, 2022

End Times Prophecy Report.com HEADLINES MONDAY December 12, 2022 And OPINION “And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.” —Matthew 24:4 ===INTERNATIONAL UKRAINE: There have been 50,000 alleged war crimes in Ukraine. We worked to solve one – Only one side commits war crimes? RUSSIA:  Kremlin offers ‘unprecedented military support’ to Iran and North Korea in return…

[batboyblog]

Bless you for combatting misinformation about Harris!!!! I saw all this exact same copy-pasted garbage about her during the last primary, and I’m so glad people are pushing back so much harder this time on all the lies and out of context nonsense.

Yeah I mean clearly there's a lot of bad faith shit going around, I just....

When a race is between the "we do believe in Democracy" party and the "We don't believe in Democracy" party, people aren't being helpful to "examine the record" or "hold accountable" the pro-democracy side, they're adding nuance to a conversation that isn't nuanced. It just depresses voters by leaving low-info voters with the impression that the side that isn't the fascists is somehow bad or equally an issue.

People on the left of American politics should be very thankful that the pro-democracy party in our current horrible situation is a center-left, left party interested in Progressive change and not a center-right Conservative Party facing off with the far right (see French Presidential election 2002)

any ways on Harris one thing I've seen a few times is this idea that she's particularly against sex work or cracked down on them. This is untrue, in fact she drew the wrath of the SFPD when she was San Fran's DA for refusing to prosecute prostitutes

Her office de fact decriminalized prostitution in San Fran

in 2019 getting ready to run for President Harris called for the decriminalization of sex work

lets stop and set back and think about that for a moment, it is UNIMAGINABLE! not possible to think of President Obama for example having said that at any point in his 8 years in office, it 8 years ago was not imaginable for a real candidate for President to support that. So I'm sure people will pop in and get big mad and say "decriminalization isn't legalization!" okay but you get no one else before this point was willing to even go this far? and we have a real chance here to get a President who (Still) supports a major change in how this country deals with sex work.

people are using out of context and bad faith attacks, because their world view depends on change not really being possible, but it is, and its happening.

[drdemonprince]

what was your journey from libertarian to leftest/anarchist like?

well, as a teen i hated authority and society and wanted complete freedom so i was a libertarian. then i realized i was gay and trans and libertarianism weren't gonna do shit for me. when obama won in 2008 i noticed that i felt relieved, even though i had not voted for him. I went away to academia shortly after that, and became surrounded by liberal people, all of them doing research with a liberal point of view, and what do you know, product of my social environment and queer and desperate for acceptance among the group that said they cared about me, I became a liberal too.

over time academia mistreated me and rejected me for who i really was, and i started to transition and realize that i was disabled. i became more left-leaning frankly because it seemed like that was the only way to be able to survive as what i was, identity wise, and find anyone at all who would correctly gender me or tolerate me. if you want to be able to hang out with other trans people and have them treat you right, there are values you basically have to say that you subscribe to. anyone who didn't subscribe to those political values was mistreated, viewed skeptically, talked to like they were dumb, and ostracized. and some of those values did make sense to me, whereas others didn't.

i saw people pushed to the social margins for being libertarians, for instance, as if that is a political ideology that carries any danger when some random trans woman with a very weak social support system says in a support group that she maybe kinda subscribes to it. i was even terrified of people finding out that i used to believe in anything "wrong" according to the social dogma, for a while. but i tried to make the most sense of the confusing tangle of community held beliefs as i could, so that i wouldnt be completely ostracized from both straight and queer society at once. and so I was vaguely leftist, but with a confused understanding of systemic oppression based on identity (among lots of other things, like abolition and anti-colonialism), and a deep terror of ever saying anything that would ever get me criticized/cancelled/viewed as a bad person.

and then the pandemic happened and i wasn't so beholden to mass community scrutiny anymore. i read a ton i looked at how politics actually plays out, and i got a little bit more capable and secure in myself and came to similarly feel awed by how much people are really capable of when they aren't being controlled or dependent upon approval in order to survive. and anarchy basically asserted that it had always been there in me, i just hadn't known the name for it. and by then i felt safe and strong enough and had enough faith in others to decide it was okay to have opinions that others disagreed with, and that i wouldn't starve out in the cold if i gave voice to them.

like a lot of people, i had misconceptions about what anarchism really was and writers like Graeber, Wengrow, Solnit, etc really disabused me of that notion and made me understand that it wasn't a scary worldview at all, it was the most human and accepting one there really was out there.

My political journey has not been especially principled or philosophical, it has been emotional, intuitive, and rooted in a lot of social influences. i think that's what most political ideologies are about for people, ultimately, belonging and safety.

I was originally a political scientist by training and in that field's body of research we see that most people do not have consistent political belief systems, they agree to a mish-mosh of statements and support various policies that don't all add up in a logically explicable way. they also don't tend to have stable views over time. just as i think morality is a pretty bad explanation of why humans do what they do, and why we help eachother and avoid doing harm, it's very evident that political ideology is a piss poor predictor of political behavior or affiliation. the far clearer explanation far more consistent with the evidence is that people politically align themselves based on their social milleu and their feelings.

this is why i always feel myself holding back from dying for a cause, and blanch when MLMs start talking about needing to do all they can to bring about communism with an almost religious fervor (beyond the fact that such thinking also doesn't line up with a lot of communist thought and theory about how capitalism falls anyway). i dont think that any of these ideologies really carry all that much weight or influence people's actions, affiliations, or political behavior on the level we all pretend that they do. i dont think they're "real". anarchy is more of a philosophy of how to relate to other people in daily life, for me, rather than a religion about how the world needs to be or where we specifically need to be heading. it's more big-I Ideological for plenty of other people, and again, i blanch when they start preaching about it as if their whole life is in service to the idea of it. I think we do anarchism by living as if we're free, every day. and that's what i care about, if i'm being honest. feeling free, safe, and cared for by some other people, without conditions, right now.

[qqueenofhades]

Shapiro posted a very gracious statement supporting the Harris-Walz ticket and implying that it was partially his decision to fulfill his term as governor(whether this is wholly true or not is mostly irrelevant) and committing to campaigning hard for them in PA for the next 90 days. Dare I say, the dems are...in array?

Look, I like him (I hung onto his tweets in 2020 when he was Pennsylvania AG and the Republicans were trying all their fuckery, which he slapped down with verve and style) and I think he could be a great candidate in the future, but... not this year. Israel/Gaza is just too flammable an issue, especially with the young voters who are re-energized with Kamala, and it would have been very treacherous to jeopardize that. As I said, we can argue about whether it's fair or not, but politics are not fair, etc., and we needed to do the thing that has the best choice of defeating Trump and keeping the party as (amazingly!) united as it's been since Biden's exit and Harris' ascent. And that is 100% Walz.

Likewise, Walz has more experience than Shapiro (who is only in his first term as PA governor and has a lot to do to protect the state from crazy PA Republicans), and that is another strike against the Trump-Vance looney tunes ticket of inexperience. Plus this is the best of both worlds: park Shapiro in Pennsylvania where he is very popular and where the Democrats obviously need to win, but turn the Midwestern Dad of Doom loose on JD Vance's fake hillbilly ass and be the driver of more effective Democratic messaging than we have seen in literally years (seriously, can anyone else remember a more united message since "Hope" in 2008 with Obama?) We avoid the pitfalls with young voters that would come rightly or wrongly with putting Shapiro on the ticket, especially with bad-faith actors desperate to maximize any hint of more DEMS IN DISARRAY. So yes. I think all of us are kicking ourselves because we are so not used to it, but whatever it is, I desperately want more.

[liberalsarecool]

Ben Shapiro is an authority on boosting con artists. He uses his conservative pea brain to equate off the record con artists who claim sex with Obama with women victims of sexual assault who testified under oath.

The bad faith insincerity and breathless stupidity are the design. The judgment is horrendous. This is how indoctrinated morons utilize dog whistles.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Emma Mae Weber at MMFA:

Right-wing media attacked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, for not owning stocks, bonds, or real estate. While some have celebrated Walz’s portfolio, or lack thereof, some right-wing media figures have drawn absurd conclusions about Walz’s ability to understand the economy or his support of capitalism because of his economic standing.

According to recent financial disclosures, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz doesn’t own stocks or securities. He also does not currently own any real estate. Walz and his wife Gwen Walz sold their most recent home and moved into the governor’s mansion in 2019 when Walz became the governor of Minnesota. Per the disclosures, the only investments Walz holds are his retirement, pension, and life insurance accounts. [The Hill, 8/7/24; The New York Times, 8/9/24]

It’s rare for elected officials not to hold financial assets, and some people are celebrating the modesty of Walz’s portfolio. Walz and his wife also reported no mutual funds, bonds, private equities, book deals, speaking fees, cryptocurrency, or racehorse interests. [Axios, 8/7/24; The Wall Street Journal, 8/12/24] 

Most Americans don’t own stocks, bonds, or cryptocurrency. A Federal Reserve report on Americans’ economic well-being shows that just 31% of non-retirees in America own “Stocks, bonds, ETFs, or mutual funds held outside a retirement account.” The number only goes up to 35% for all adult Americans. The report also shows that 64% of Americans in 2023 owned a home, and that just 7% of Americans held or used cryptocurrency in 2023. [Federal Reserve, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2023, 5/24]

As a member of Congress in 2011, Walz co-sponsored the STOCK Act in an attempt to combat insider trading. Signed into law in 2012 by then-President Barack Obama, the STOCK Act aimed to prevent lawmakers and congressional staffers from trading on non-public information. While pushing for the legislation, Walz spoke about the importance of “restoring faith” among Americans that their lawmakers are not in office only to enrich themselves. [USA Today, 8/9/24; Twitter/X, 8/7/24]

What will the right-wing media whine about this time in regards to Tim Walz? Having a financial portfolio of an average American, and one that doesn’t have any stock market or bond investments.