via Think Progress.

When Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) proposed his 2012-2013 budget this week, he admitted that it was “inadequate for the needs” of the state’s people.

Move out now!

The budget makes $286 million in cuts, including a 6.4 percent cut to a higher education system that has been plagued by funding cuts and rising tuition for years.

Who needs college?  I’m sure they are still funding k-12. Right?

…it will result in less spending on Kentucky’s students and schools, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports:

…resulting in a cut of more than $50 million to that funding formula.

Well, when you are broke you have to make tough choices.  You cut the things that aren’t needed.

At the same time, the $43 million tax break Kentucky approved for a Bible-themed amusement park — which will include a 500-foot by 75-foot reproduction of Noah’s Ark — could go into effect for the first time under Beshear’s budget.

What?  Screw the kids of the state twice.  Once by taking away education and then a second time by filling their minds with this bull shit.

In addition, the budget includes $11 million to improve a highway interchange near the park. Proponents of the park, Beshear included, have claimed it will boost tourism and create jobs, but those assumptions are based on a report done by the park’s developers.

Those teacher can get jobs booking church tour groups.

Unfortunately, that means lawmakers could jeopardize Kentucky’s substantial gains in K-12 education and ensure ballooning tuition rates at its colleges and universities, all while they preserve tax breaks for what critics have dubbed the “Ark Park.”

There have been a few changes to the pledge…

Rick Perry has left the field. Thank goodness. After having Santorum win Iowa with a 34 vote margin in a state that doesn’t allow recounts and probably can’t count them right in the first place. But then it’s all about state rights, Perry is history. Remember Virginia where they wouldn’t put candidates on the ballet having lack of sufficient, validated petition signatures?

It seemed like the GOP would soften and go for Romney but in fact they didn’t, or I should say haven’t yet. Louise, my spouse, had been warning me about Santorum and I refused to believe that such a kook would ever be able to effectively run.

It only shows how incredibly desperate the GOP is. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised since more people believe the rapture is near than go out and vote. Hell, more people read the Left Behind series than go out and vote–at least that’s what it would seem here in the backwaters of West Virginia where even the squirrels attend church. I suppose it takes a hellfire, brimstone, family candidate to stir up enough interest to go prove them elitist, snobbish, expensive-coffee drinkers wrong. Everyone knows we’re the righteous travelers to heaven and the rest of you be damned.

So I thought to myself, who’s crazier, Perry or Santorum. Almost by definition Santorum had to be now because Perry dropped out but I typed in ”Rick Perry Crazy” and hit search.  I wanted to prove that Perry had been too crazy to even be considered, kind of like Harold Camping, the Michigan Pastor who after being wrong several times still insists he knows the exact date when the streets will flow with blood and the righteous shall ascend.

Why not? The GOP has not been in such a disarray and confused about who to nominate since, since, I don’t know when…hmm…since Kennedy was assassinated; Johnson was promoting his great society and Barry Goldwater from Arizona was shaking conservative trees while espousing religious tolerance and endearing himself to corporate types. No good pubcon wants a tolerant believer in office.

Johnson won in 1964 with 61% of the vote. The widest margin since 1820 and the sixth most lopsided election ever, the fifth most popular margin. No election since has been so lopsided. My grandfather could hardly pass a day without cursing Johnson, without slang, as he saved that for niggers, wops, kikes,and jeuws; though he respected jews they worked harder than anyone else and he was mindful of my sour looks as my dad was a jew though I never met him. I wrote three letters to President Johnson and Ladybird which earned his ultimate respect–but they weren’t castigations.

Johnson portrayed Goldwater as a dangerous extremist and Goldwater couldn’t get support from the real extremists. He was too soft. He actually got support form deep south Democrats. The same ones that would, when they came to their senses, become Republicans. And those gentile southern ladies who charmed with hospitality decided the Democratic party was anathema for helping the poor by using public money. After all as the bible says “there will always be the poor”. Who needs social welfare programs if humans are such sinners that there will always be the poor. Get a job, go to church, and mind your manners!

This kicked the seat of the modern conservative movement ushered in by William F Buckley Jr, an intelligent, eloquent but crazy bastard, who in 1955 started the National Review with:

“It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government (the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. In this great social conflict of the era, we are, without reservations, on the libertarian side. The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order. We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience. On this point we are, without reservations, on the conservative side.”

Buckley described his faith by saying, “I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith.” Once again proving you are the faith you are raised in and and it has nothing to do with any content of the faith itself.

In any case, still suffering from the war of yankee aggression who on south earth would want big government to come down and tell them those black boys could date their gals. Hell they couldn’t even socialize with them even if they did attend their church, which they shouldn’t, couldn’t. Everybody, and I mean everybody went to church. Lack of attendance was the worst sin of all. By this rule secularists were pure evil and really quite suddenly school prayer, abortion, and homosexuality became the rallying call of the modern conservative movement.

In 1973 Michael Harrington, coined the term neoconservative against the policy ideas of Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol. But it would be Kristol who would become the godfather and would abandon his New York Secular Jewish friends like Irving Howe and other New York intellectuals discussing socialism in the sixties, after their intellectual fathers had bashed Stalinism in the 30’s and 40’s as leftists, for being too argumentative against tradition. A departure well described in the documentary “Arguing the World”. Neocons were leftists who abandoned their friends for reality. Kristol is famous for saying a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Clearly the mugger clipped Kristol’s head before taking the money and running.

Kristol a classicist, anti-utopian, and believer of “persuasion” and not ideology objected to welfare programs, international “revolution” through nation-building/militarily imposed “democracy” and application of Fabian Socialism/Keynesianism models.

And so here we are today looking up “perry crazy” and wondering how the even more crazy Santorum is looking good to pubcons. What? I see link after link of Perry bringing home a dead baby for a day and an interview where the host gawffs and then has to retract his lack of manners concerning their privacy.

Puhllleeeze, you mean the Perry who brings faith into politics and has no qualms telling the rest of us we’re going to hell because our private belief is wrong and lying, telling us we’re going to hell in the public square is the moral thing to do.

Even worse that he and his ilk hide behind the bible saying they are not judging but knowing damned well that no one can read the bible and not get that you’re going to hell unless you believe the word of God. Isn’t that what evangelism is all about? You are going to hell unless you believe the bible is the word of God and you go through Christ!

I find this far more offensive than bringing a dead baby home. Hell, he could have cannibalized it and I’d be less offended. Grossed out but not offended. Aside from legal considerations, bury it in the yard, mummify it and keep it in the  bedroom, stuff it for the sofa, bronze it and put it on the shelf but keep your damned faith out of politics and out of my house!

If you are motivated by your perverse faith, fine. Tell me you think abortion is wrong because a couple cells are a person but don’t tell me God told you a soul became the instant that sperm broke the cell wall and that’s why you vote like a fool. It’s just not politically moral that I hear it. It’s private. Go take your religious pornography elsewhere.

Too much, this is too much. I can’t even go on to the next search on “santorum  crazy”. I have to have some coffee and take a walk-jog.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com

Bits and pieces excerpted from President Obama’s 2006 speech, on faith and religion, are floating around recently. It is worth reading in its entirety. It is a full discussion of his gripes about liberals, conservatives, and their inability to come together based on faith; how and when does a person interject their religion or not into politics. Here is the entire most-quoted section in his “Call for Renewal”:

“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

This paragraph is slammed as renouncing bringing faith into politics. Religious folks do not want to consider whether their politics are good for everyone. It is as if they want Kant’s categorical imperative to be the realm of personal choice: “I believe the bible and so should everyone else and if I can’t make everyone believe the bible everything I believe in because of the bible should also be believed by all.” By this standard any personal choice could be universalized as insistence: I believe everyone should read Darwin and let’s make it law. Darwin is certainly more relevant than the bible. If I were stranded on a desert island I would bring Russell’s History of Western  Philosophy and only because I don’t know of a more comprehensive single volume history; perhaps for you it would be Shakespeare or the Engineer’s Handbook, maybe a guide to rural technology?

“Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

Unfortunately these pretty words are an assertion and not a description. By hesitating to use the word pluralism in the previous paragraph he missteps and by the time he gets to the second it’s too late. Obama misses a huge political framing. Pluralism is not liberal. Pluralism is constitutionally conservative.

“Democracy in its purest or most ideal form would be a society in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives.”

We weren’t a democracy until indentured servants, slaves, and finally women in 1920 were given the vote. Democracies are by definition pluralistic. Pluralism does not even require democracy. Obama is supporting the secularist James Madison, and it would have been nice had he noted this. Madison feared factionalism and wrote such in Federalist paper #10.  A faction is:

“a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Madison defines the most serious source of faction to be the diversity of opinion in political life which leads to dispute over fundamental issues such as what regime or religion should be preferred.

Furthermore from Madison:

“the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” … ”A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party.”

Dang, Madison sounds like a materialist, Marxist even. From Wikipedia:

Madison particularly emphasizes that economic stratification prevents everyone from sharing the same opinion. Madison concludes that the damage caused by faction can be limited only by controlling its effects.

He then argues that the only problem comes from majority factions because the principle of popular sovereignty should prevent minority factions from gaining power. Madison offers two ways to check majority factions: prevent the “existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time” or render a majority faction unable to act.

Republic and minority rights. Obama’s point on pluralism would more fairly be aimed at representatives who’s job it is to mediate the self interest of the voter. In the following statement he should be saying he would rather have representatives, grounded in morality and ethics.

“In fact, because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they’re something they’re not. They don’t need to do that. None of us need to do that.”

“But what I am suggesting is this – secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Whew, did your head spin? Mine did. He tries to mollify this contrasting approach, of a religious citizen and a secular representative,  by appealing to what John Rawls in the major point of his rewrite of A Theory of Justice  Political Liberalism calls overlapping consensus.

“Thus, to repeat, the problem of political liberalism is to work out a political conception of political justice for a (liberal) constitutional democratic regime that a plurality of reasonable doctrines, both religious and nonreligious, liberal and non liberal, may endorse for the right reasons…

“Yet the outcome of the vote is to be seen as reasonable provided all citizens of a reasonable just constitutional regime sincerely vote in accordance with the idea of public reason…

“Some may, of course, reject a decision, as Catholics may reject a decision to grant a right to abortion. They may present an argument in public reason for denying it and fail to win a majority. But they need not exercise the right of abortion in their own case. They can recognize the right as belonging to legitimate law and there fore do not resist it with force. To do that would be unreasonable:… That the Church’s nonpublic reason requires its members to follow its doctrines is perfectly consistent with their honoring public reason.”

Obama seems to be trying to forward this without calling it liberal, or more accurately constitutionally conservative, but ends up not recognizing that most pubcons wish to change the country period to promote their own cause and are unwilling to stop until there is a theocracy founded not in reason but biblical authority. It’s almost like he has to chastise secularists to make it look like he is beating everyone equally. Pubcons must shed some of their absolutism at the door and secularists can’t expect them to do so.

“Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of “thou” and not just “I,” resonates in religious congregations all across the country. And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to the evangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of American renewal.”

In a way I think this is cowardly and in another way I see him desperate to get mutually hating people to come together. Really, the Koran does list Jesus as a prophet. Really, the Mormons do believe Christ was a prophet. Really, the old, Jewish testament did predestine Christ’s sermon on the mount. Really, the Thetans of Scientology are the sins of humanity. It is appealing to try to cut through the Gordian knot of life-defining differences with the sameness sword but at some point you just can’t. The most egregious act is not secularist but theocratic. Secularism is the house and theology is the guest.

Obama then decides he needs to bash progressives a bit and support minority, democratic political input by saying how religious folks are self-correcting as if atheists and agnostics were not the real movers and shakers of change–bet the founding fathers, white-boy plantation owners, are rolling in their graves having given up fortunes to help develop a country in which they believed with all of their pocket books as travels absentia and war ruined them. In a republic it is the job of our politicians to moderate these interests as secularists in office; that it may be our wish that citizens could be informed enough for a direct democracy but they also may not or even wish not. Of course, when a representative votes or speaks as a citizen they can vote or blather for whatever they want. While pretending to chastise conservatives he actually goes for secularists.

“While I’ve already laid out some of the work that progressive leaders need to do, I want to talk a little bit about what conservative leaders need to do — some truths they need to acknowledge.

“For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice. Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn’t the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was the persecuted minorities, it was Baptists like John Leland who didn’t want the established churches to impose their views on folks who were getting happy out in the fields and teaching the scripture to slaves. It was the forbearers of the evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they did not want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it”

Once again he disses those late, great plantation owners who gave up their fortunes to support this great Republic. Religious freedom was  more in response against Episcopalianism which was legally mandatory and monarchical. Our founding citizens were most motivated by Calvinistic Presbyterianism which was the second most popular church in America at the time of the revolution and certainly the most activist of them all.

“Only the Presbyterian Church lined up solidly behind the colonists, and without them independence would not have been possible. Oh, and that Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson? It came along a full year after Scots-Irish Presbyterians in Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote their own declaration of independence. The Mecklenburg Declaration, written on May 20, 1775, “by unanimous resolution declared the people free and independent, and that all laws and commissions from the king were henceforth null and void.”

I really want to believe in Obama. I really want to think we elected him for a reason and not equal opportunity. He does a great speech for the most part and is intelligent and has been thwarted at every angle but he just can’t get religion right in spite of his notion he is an anthropologist studying religion.

“I was not raised in a religious household. For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness. However, in her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology.

“On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.

Detachment? Do you see much detachment about religion? This is as hypocritical as saying he is not going to have a war on drugs and then condoning more arrests than ever before. In 2007 before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ Obama asked for evangelicals to abandon their faith-based principles by denying they were really, truly faith based.

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart,”

This is simply silly. Faith was used to bring people together against others, as a source of power. Exclusion is the other side of inclusion. In some cases it was against oppressors. In others it was to maintain status quo. In others to oppress. I find it difficult, if at all, to find examples where it was to bring everyone, and I mean everyone, together, unless they were willing to follow their particular faith universalized.

Even today in so called interfaith meetings, why is it not intrafaith, they do not even try to address secular issues, they are incomprehensible. Islam is about peace, my ass. Christians turn the other cheek, my ass. Jews seek solace in gentiles, my ass. That their exclusion is somehow divorced from their inner humanness has no evidence or ideology. This is as ridiculous as my 17 year old son exemplifying George Orwell’s deservedly paranoid fear by saying war is peace because you have to have war to have peace.

“Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us.”

They are eager to fight not for division but principle of faith. Evangelicals truly believe you must go through Christ to get to heaven and the world would be a better place if everyone followed their faith to the letter. Without faith, chaos reigns, and the end is coming soon. Faith didn’t get hijacked, absolutism is the logical result of their faith.

“At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design.”

“There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich.” “I don’t know what Bible they’re reading, but it doesn’t jibe with my version.

What? I appreciate rhetoric but the bible is so mishmoshed that, for example, abortion folks can use “thou shalt not kill” for fetuses but can also justify killing people being heretics, apostates, and fellow killers. Nevertheless, unless he wishes to discuss hermeneutics between the Greek testament and the Hebrew Pentateuch they are, for the most part, reading some bastard version of the King James. In any case any translation, devoid of hermeneutics, cannot deny the specific statements concerning slavery, gay bashing, and misogyny. I am not being facetious here. As a lawyer knowing the constitution is interpreted through legal precedence Obama shouldn’t demean a crowd by being folksy. Bush got away with it because he was a fool, a shrub. Obama should be too smart to role model folksiness.

The problem is while reading the same damned sacred text people won’t come to a coherent conclusion and it’s because it is a bad book. That is the entire issue. That is why Catholics don’t even read it as a whole and rely on a priest and pope to cherry pick phrases and extrapolate broadly–a dead baby is really saved because it shouldn’t have to remain in purgatory and so doesn’t have to really receive Christ. While I appreciate the postmodern aspect that every reading is a writing, and every interpretation is a misinterpretation, when it comes to bible talk this is the equivalent of saying those disagreeing aren’t good Christians. What arrogance. Of course they are reading the same version. I say get rid of the accursed book, as Jefferson hoped in 1821:

“that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago. This country which has given the world an example of physical liberty, owes to it that our moral emancipation too.”

Pubcons truly and deeply do believe in the covenant of the 10 commandments and truly and deeply believe that the abortion issue, the gay issue, and intelligent design issue cause the big problems like war, theft, and utter economic collapse. It is really simple to them. That’s why you don’t see pubcon intellectuals right now and why they are aggressively and openly anti intellectual. A cow can clearly follow the sacred text.

In their mind analysis, reason, and deep thought take away from the utterly simple and clear truths available to everyone. The purity and value of individual interpretation was not so much democratic as a deep belief that everyone should arrive at the same conclusion, if they follow the bible, and if you don’t we’ll make our own sect and try to universalize that. The rhetoric is done, the argument over, let the final judgement begin. That is why they are called fundamentalists, nuances and intelligence are as valuable as zits on a kid.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com

Jessica Ahlquist and Taylor Grenga are still fighting to keep the illegal prayer out of Cranston High School.  After Taylor talks – she gets booed by crazy christian parents.
The superintendent speaks up and explains to the adults that they are begin huge douche bags!  I am impressed.  They need to have this guy talk to the GOP debate crowds.

Hemant has a much longer post at Friendly Atheist.

Jessica’s school had this banner on the wall.

When Jessica saw that banner over a year ago, she knew there was something wrong. She created a Facebook page to rally support to bring it down. For that, she was insulted and threatened by students and strangers. When the ACLU planned to file a lawsuit to bring the banner down, Jessica wanted to be the plaintiff.

Well, the court has made a ruling.

The Court rules that Plaintiff [Ahlquist] has standing in this matter and rules in her favor on the merits of this dispute. The Court also orders the immediate removal of the Prayer Mural from the auditorium at Cranston West.

…

The Court refrains from second-guessing the expressed motives of the Committee members, but nonetheless must point out that tradition is a murky and dangerous bog. While all agree that some traditions should be honored, others must be put to rest as our national values and notions of tolerance and diversity evolve. At any rate, no amount of history and tradition can cure a constitutional infraction. The Court concludes that Cranston’s purposes in installing and, more recently, voting to retain the Prayer Mural are not clearly secular.

…

Plaintiff is clearly an articulate and courageous young woman, who took a brave stand, particularly in light of the hostile response she has received from her community.

She faced a lot of grief from the people in the town and the students in the high school but, now she has WON!  A scholarship has been set up and you can go to the friendly atheist blog to contribute.

Post by Sarah Moglia

———————-

Via “The New Civil Rights Movement” and The Des Moines Register

Rick Santorum, 2nd place finisher of the Iowa caucus and big fan of Dan Savage, apparently knows more than Harvard doctors and evolutionary biologists. In two separate occasions in Iowa, Santorum mentioned that his opinions superseded that of actual scientific evidence.

On December 9th, Santorum

said he is concerned that schools will be forced to teach that all forms of sexual activity are normal, healthy and good behavior. He said that would be “counter to the belief structure of many people who have students attending those schools” and they would have little grounds to object.

Discussing controversial classroom subjects such as evolution and global warming, Santorum said he has suggested that “science should get out of politics” and he is opposed to teaching that provides a “politically correct perspective.” (source)

So, despite the fact that homosexuality is actually healthy and completely natural,  climate change is real, and evolution is not even questioned by any real scientists in the field, Rick Santorum still thinks they don’t belong in the classroom. Should we also start teaching phrenology to students?

While we’re on the subject of just making shit up, Santorum said on December 6th:

“The answer is not what can we do to prevent deaths because of a lack of health insurance. There’s — I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance,”

“People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to,” he said. “And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit. (source)

Of course, that’s patently false, but who needs facts these days? Actually, Santorum can’t even keep his own ‘facts’ straight anymore. After being criticized for saying he “didn’t want to make black people’s lives better,” he claimed he never said that. He said “blah people.” Because, you know, that’s a thing.

“In fact, I’m pretty confident I didn’t say black. What I think — I started to say a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — mumbled it and sort of changed my thought.” (source)

Right. Blah people. Makes perfect sense.

Of course, if he did just say “blah,” that just means he actually said, “I don’t want to make people’s lives better.” And trust me, Rick, we already knew you wouldn’t.

I’ve been surrounded by a little too much Santorum today. I think I need to go take a shower.

(If you’d like more sass, please check out my twitter!)

via Scribd.com

(A Proposed “On Day One” Executive Order of Newt Gingrich’s 21st Century Contract with America)

This is what Newt would do on his first day in office!

Establishing a presidential commission to examine and document threats or impediments to religious freedom in the United States and to propose steps for reaffirming and protecting the foundational principle of freedom of thought,conscience, and religious belief upon which our republic is built and thrives.

Today, the foundations for religious freedom in America are being eroded.

No they are not!

The meaning of the First Amendment has been twisted to fit a post-modern world.

Wrong again.  People can say what ever they want.  However, the government is not to speak for the people.  When this happens – our liberty is gone!

As a result, public expressions of faith in some quarters have gone from normal to unacceptable. The abuses are well documented. Year after year, our courts are filled withhundreds of cases based upon the anti-religious misconceptions of the First Amendment,which are then reinforced by judges determined to impose their own views on other citizens.

We are going to be in deep shit if this or any other GOP nutter gets into the office of president.

The mission of the religious freedom commission will be to advise the president on issues that threaten or impede the religious freedom that all Americans enjoy as an unalienable right from our Creator…

Saw this on reddit and thought you might like it.