Friday, December 20, 2013

Dear Phil 'duck dynasty' Robertson, (from Robbie Rist)

Dear Phil (duck dynasty) Robertson,
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.
a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
c) I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
d) Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
e) I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an Abomination (Lev 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
g) Lev 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev 19:27. How should they die?
i) I know from Lev 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
j) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev 24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help.
Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Love your pal,
Robbie
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The American People Need a Raise by Bernie Sanders

By:  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
There are at least four major economic issues facing this country: high unemployment; low wages; the growth in poverty; and the obscene level of income and wealth inequality that keeps getting worse. One important way to address all of these problems is for Congress to substantially increase the minimum wage.

Since 1968, the real value of the federal minimum wage has fallen by more than 30 percent. If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation since 1968, it would be worth more than $10.70 per hour today.

Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would increase the pay of nearly 30 million Americans, enough to lift a family of three out of poverty. Despite what opponents of raising the minimum wage suggest, almost 90 percent of Americans who would benefit from raising the minimum wage are adults over the age of 20.

The last time Congress raised the federal minimum wage was in 2007 when George W. Bush was president. As a result, the minimum wage was gradually raised from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour where it has been stuck since July of 2009. Since then, many of the new jobs being created have been low-wage and part-time. While millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, the prices they pay for food, gasoline, medicine, housing and almost everything else have gone up.

Meanwhile, as the middle class continues to shrink and we have more people living in poverty than at any time in our history, the people on top are doing phenomenally well. Since 2009, CEOs in America’s most profitable corporations received a 42 percent pay raise and now make an astronomical 354 times more than their average worker. According to the latest study, between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all new income went to the top 1 percent. Boosting the minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hour would be a modest but important step forward in reversing the record level of income inequality that is plaguing this country.

Increasing the minimum wage will also create jobs. According to the Economic Policy Institute, raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour will generate 140,000 jobs, expand the economy by more than $32 billion and increase the take-home pay of Americans by nearly $52 billion. When low-wage workers get a raise they spend their extra money at local grocery stores and small businesses throughout the country. That increases demand for products which boosts the entire economy.

This is an extremely important point. While unemployment is going down, the percentage of working-age Americans who have a job is the lowest it has been in 35 years. Counting those who have given up looking for work and those who are working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job, the real unemployment rate is 13.2 percent, much higher than the “official” 7 percent rate implies.

And let’s be clear: most of the 8 million new private sector jobs that have been created over the past 45 months are lowwage jobs in fast-food restaurants, bars, department stores, malls, hotels, and other low-wage industries. Meanwhile, six out of the ten jobs lost during the Great Recession were decent-paying jobs that paid up to $21 an hour.

Ironically, not only would increasing the minimum wage boost the economy and narrow the gap between the rich and the poor, it would also reduce the deficit.

Today, tens of millions of Americans working in Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Burger King and other multi-national corporations are being paid wages so low that they need food stamps, Medicaid, public housing, and other forms of government assistance just to survive. In fact, American taxpayers are subsidizing the poverty level wages of some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America at an annual cost of $283 billion a year from 2008 to 2012.

To understand just how absurd this situation has become, just take a look at what’s going on at Wal-Mart. The owners of Wal-Mart, the Waltons, are the wealthiest family in America worth more than $144 billion. Incredibly, the Walton family owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. Yet the average Wal-Mart associate makes less than $9 an hour. This means that in order to feed their children, get adequate health insurance and put a roof over their heads, many Walmart workers have to rely on taxpayer assistance from the federal government. Nearly half of the children of Wal-Mart associates are either on Medicaid or uninsured, and Wal-Mart has the highest percentage of employees receiving food stamps in several states in this country. American taxpayers should not have to subsidize the low wages at Wal-Mart to make the richest family in America even wealthier. That is not only morally grotesque, it is bad economic policy.

The working families of America are struggling. Raising the minimum wage will not solve all our economic problems. It will, however, be an important step forward. Let’s do it.
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Sarah Palin's Impressively Incoherent 'Duck Dynasty' Comments By Matt Taibbi

By

I miss Sarah Palin. I was bummed when she decided not to run for president the last time around. It would have been hard to find a challenger to Barack Obama less funny than Mitt Romney (notwithstanding Barrett Foa's outstanding "I Believe" Romney-musical spoof), and because the president himself isn't exactly a barrel of laughs, we ended up with one of the unfunniest (and also angriest) White House races in history.
That opportunity is lost, but it's still fun when Palin injects herself into the news. She's done so this week by jumping to the defense of Duck Dynasty's patriarch Phil Robertson, who remarkably got himself suspended from his own smash-hit reality TV show by extolling the virtues of the vagina over the anus in the pages of GQ (in an interview by the always-excellent Drew Magary). Robertson was professing, one might even say over-professing, his ignorance as to the appeal of gay sex – he put it this way:
It seems like, to me, a vagina – as a man – would be more desirable than a man's anus. That's just me. I'm just thinking: There's more there! She's got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes . . . But hey, sin: It's not logical, my man. It's just not logical.
There's more there. Take that, anus! Robertson went on to provide a less bizarre, more Biblical explanation for his opposition to homosexuality. Then, in a separate piece on the GQ site, he also offered a 20th-century America version of Holocaust denial.
He said that as a young person in pre-civil rights Louisiana, he "never . . . saw the mistreatment of any black person" and that black people were happy (happier?) back then:
Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.
After all of this came out, A&E suspended the show more or less immediately amid a blizzard of "That guy we just spent years turning into a rock star sure as heck doesn't represent the views of our ad-sales department!" denials. This of course immediately inspired howls of protest from Duck fans and conservative politicians alike.
Sarah Palin, ably staying in character in her new role as a professional media ambulance-chaser, was one of the first to rush to Robertson's defense. She posted a photo of herself with the Robertsons and tweeted the following:
Free speech is endangered species; those "intolerants" hatin' & taking on Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing personal opinion take on us all
Conservatives have always had trouble grasping the difference between public censorship and private enterprise. With a few exceptions, like whistleblower laws and National Labor Relations Board protections against being fired for off-site discussions about work conditions (exceptions that, in almost every case, conservatives bitterly opposed), there is no legal or constitutional right to free speech on private property.
You can be fired for calling your boss a dick, and you can just as easily be let go by a profit-seeking media company for imperiling its relationship with advertisers. And incidentally, this is the way true conservatives, and especially true hardcore speech advocates, have always wanted it.
Could you imagine the uproar if someone passed a law saying that Martin Bashir couldn't be bounced from a broadcast job for saying Sarah Palin was a good candidate to have feces shoved in her mouth? Now that would be censorship.
Remember, nobody heard a peep from Sarah Palin about free speech after that episode. Bashir earlier this year tiptoed across the line in an angry diatribe about Palin's invocation of slavery imagery, which she had somewhat amazingly used to describe the suffering (presumably white) middle Americans will feel when they are forced to pay for the "free stuff" the Obama administration is handing out, i.e. health care:
Our free stuff today is being paid for today by taking money from our children and borrowing from China. When that money comes due and, this isn't racist, so try it, try it anyway, this isn't racist, but it's going to be like slavery when that note is due. Right? We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.
She elaborated:
And it is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control.
Palin's mind is amazing. Slavery was purely a private-enterprise abomination. It had nothing to do with being subservient to the government. It was the opposite of that, actually. She was also wrong in the sense that the health care program isn't "free stuff" (even those who will receive subsidized care will be paying in one form or another for their policies).
So she pulled off a Friedman-esque anatomical impossibility there, getting three feet in her mouth at the same time.
First, she was wrong about slavery. Then she was wrong about health care. Then, thirdly, she was almost insanely insensitive and inappropriate in her use of the word slavery at all, comparing white middle class angst over having to partially subsidize health care for their poor (and mostly nonwhite) neighbors to being whipped and tortured across generations of institutional racist terror.
Bashir reacted to this by telling a story about slaves who were forced to defecate in each others' mouths, and then suggested that Palin, having "scraped the barrel of her long-deceased mind," was a "good candidate" for the same treatment. Soon after, he was essentially forced out of the network.
Again, Palin had no problem with that. In fact, Palin lauded the network once Bashir was out:
It was refreshing to see though, that many in the media did come out and say, 'Look, our standards have got to be higher than this . . .'
The thing is, Robertson's ouster by A&E was exactly the same sort of move – a network sucking it up and distancing itself from an on-air figure because of controversial speech. But because Robertson's views were ones Palin apparently agrees with, suddenly she wasn't talking about anything being refreshing, but instead cried that "free speech is an endangered species."
Palin's inability to grasp the difference between a first-amendment violation and corporate calculation is amazing because she literally just published a book on the subject. Her newly-released War-on-Christmas diatribe, Good Tidings and Great Joy, is all about the efforts by evil Jesus-hating atheists to sue the Christmas out of our public lives. (It's one of the funniest things ever written, by the way. I would write a review but I don't think I could make it all the way to the end without a cardiac episode).
In writing this new book, Palin presumably spent the whole of the last year or so staring right at the issue of what may be said on private property versus what may be said on public property – the difference between putting up a nativity scene in front of a courthouse and putting one up on your lawn. Yet as this latest controversy shows, the underlying issue is still a total blur to her.
Of course, Palin has a long history of getting things not just wrong, but exactly wrong. In the book, for instance, she describes buying her husband Todd "a nice, needed powerful gun" in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings and resulting anti-gun fervor. She described this warm act as a "small act of civil disobedience" that was "fun."
As Alex Falcone for the Portland Mercury noted in this humorous review, this gets the term "civil disobedience" perfectly backwards:
Not only is that a hilarious re-purposing of a term with a noble history, it's also a perfect misuse of BOTH WORDS. Buying guns is both legal and dangerous, making it an act of uncivil obedience.
Anyway, this whole episode speaks to a bigger dilemma facing the Republican Party. Like Palin, the party itself hasn't seemed to grasp the fact that the country's broad rejection of its base's more extreme views on things like race, class and gender isn't some injustice to be railed against, but plain demographic truth.
If your "moderate" presidential candidate from 2012, the guy who was bashed by the party base for being insufficiently hardcore, is a guy who essentially said, after a failed speech to the N.A.A.C.P., that all black voters want is "free stuff," then you're just not going to win a lot of elections in a country that's going to be majority nonwhite within a few decades.
Similarly, if your party's political rhetoric is full of suggestions that poor people are poor because they don't like to work, well, you're not going to win a lot of votes from poor people, who also happen to be increasingly many in number. That's not a misunderstanding or an injustice, that's just a fact.
Whether or not Robertson and his entertainingly hairy family should have been fired is beside the point. The point is that A&E realized there was no way to make the numbers work if they had a guy who thinks black people were happier before civil rights as a front man.
It surely wasn't personal, but just a business decision, and not a terribly hard one, either. It's weird that the Republican Party has such trouble making the same kind of call in choosing its leading characters.
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Thursday, December 19, 2013

Fast-Food Strikes: Minimum Wage Would Be $16 If It Kept Up With Inflation

http://thecontributor.com/economy/fast-food-strikes-minimum-wage-would-be-16-if-it-kept-inflation

Fast food workers have been conducting one-day strikes for better wages and working conditions in several American cities. They’ve also been doing much more than that: They’re shown the entire country real leadership. They’re fighting for all of us, and their fight is our fight.
We can choose to see that, or we can ignore this struggle and continue our slow economic decline. It’s up to us.
Follow the Money
Workers at McDonald’s, Popeye’s, Taco Bell, and Long John Silver, most of whom earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25, are asking for an increase to $15 per hour. That’s exactly what they should do. It robs workers of their dignity and their rights – “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” remember? – to ask for anything less than a living wage.
And the current minimum wage is not a living wage.
In fact, if the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, it would be more than $16 today. These fast-food workers have pitched their wage request exactly right.
What’s more, corporations like McDonald’s can easily afford it. McDonald’s makes a perfectly acceptable profit in Australia, where the minimum wage is $14.50 and workers just negotiated a 15 percent raise. Its profit margins are very high – 19.82 percent in 2012, compared with the consumer services industry average of 4.9 percent – which means that greed, not the desire for a decent return, is why it underpays its workers.
Similarly, Yum! Foods, which owns Taco Bell, is a $12 billion company. AFC Enterprises, which owns Popeye’s, has an extremely high gross profit margin of 71.2 percent. (Where the money goes after that, we’re not sure; its net margins slightly lag behind its industry, but are nevertheless very good – and much better than the overall consumer services industry.)
Fix Whose Debt?
The fiscal argument for raising these workers’ wages parallels the argument for raising the national minimum wage. Most minimum wage workers work for large corporations, and large corporations are making historically high levels of profit.
What’s more, by keeping millions of their workers below the poverty level, these corporations are draining the public’s coffers whenever the government is forced to step in to provide Medicaid, food stamps, and other supplemental assistance.
Funny how many corporate CEOs tell us the federal deficit is “urgent,” then suddenly disappear when this issue is raised.
Moral Margins
But in another, very real sense, even the fiscally-based argument which I just used is morally off-base. While its fiscal points are all correct, the balance sheets don’t need to add up to change the fundamental truth: It’s immoral to pay people less than a living wage for full-time work.
And we know that McDonald’s wages are less than a living wage. The corporation proved that itself with its ill-conceived “financial planning” exercise for employees.
Arguing that corporations “can afford to pay decent wages and still be wealthy,” as I just did, ignores the greatest ethical problem: Wages which can leave households in poverty, even with full-time work, are as immoral today as indentured servitude was in colonial times.
This nation didn’t abolish indentured servitude because our moral leaders reviewed the books of the Virginia Company and the great Southern plantations and decided that their bottom line could handle it. We abolished indentured servitude because it was wrong. Our consciences wouldn’t allow us to continue the practice.  They shouldn’t allow us to treat fast-food workers this way, either.
“Young People’s Work”
They tell us that fast-food employees are young people who don’t need the money. But that argument merely ghettoizes these workers, more than a quarter of whom are raising one or more children. In that sense they reflect the entire minimum-wage workforce: Only 16 percent are teenagers, most are women, and collectively they’re raising more than seven million children.
It’s an old trick, this ghettoizing of workers we don’t want to pay. In fact, it’s as old as slavery. It’s as old as the building of the railroads, back when laying down tracks was “Chinese people’s work.” It’s as old as the days when teachers didn’t need a living wage because teaching was “women’s work,” and women only did it until they found a man to marry them.
As with those jobs, turning employees into the “Other” is a way of dehumanizing them. No human being, young or old, should be forced to work for inadequate wages.
Sweat Shops
They shouldn’t have to work in inhumane conditions, either.  But workers at a McDonald’s in New York City’s Washington Heights chose to strike because they were forced to work without air conditioning in sweltering July heat. Some of them became physically ill before their colleagues finally walked off the job, demanding that the air conditioning be repaired.
The same thing happened at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Chicago, where workers in a West Lake Street shop walked out after repeated requests to have the air conditioning repaired were ignored.
That’s inhumane, at any age.
We are all fast-food workers …
Sadly, the fate of low-wage workers, especially those who work in retail sector, is increasingly that of the American workforce. Job growth in this country is deeply inadequate, and far too much of it has come with the wrong kinds of job: retail, low-paying, and part-time.
We should demand that more be done to create well-paying jobs. But we also need to make sure that every job in this country pays a living wage. Those on the right who argue otherwise are trying to have it both ways: On one hand they tell us that, thanks to “structural changes,” all the good jobs are gone. But they also tell us we shouldn’t expect a survivable income from the jobs that are left. That’s a recipe for mass tragedy.
Fortunately, both of their assumptions are wrong: We can have good jobs in manufacturing and other sectors, and we can earn a decent living from minimum-wage jobs too.
The fight for both – good jobs and a higher minimum wage – is a fight to improve the economy for all of us. Economies don’t grow by trickling down from the rich. They grow from the bottom up, as lower-income people improve their standard of living and increase the consumption of consumer goods. They also grow from the middle out, as the middle class is once again able to spend its way into a better life – for itself, and for everyone.
Don’t Just Celebrate. Organize.
These fast-food workers should be celebrated for their courage. They began their actions without the benefits of union membership or the support of organized colleagues around the country. That’s not an accident. Our increasingly corporate-dominated political process has systematically weakened the rights of workers to organize and work toward their own best interests.
As a result we’ve seen an erosion of many other workplace rights, too: The right to healthy working conditions. The right to a decent income. The rights of privacy. Even, in some cases, the right to go to the bathroom when necessary.
Fast-food workers are frequently the front-line for new attempted assaults on employee rights. A case in point was McDonald’s recent attempt to force employees to receive their payments using ‘payroll debit cards’ that provided banks with large service fees. A minimum-wage worker was forced to lose a half-hour’s pay just to cash their paycheck.
This company-store move was beaten back by employees’ objections.  Now they’re fighting for better basic wages.
So while we celebrate these employees for the bravery of their actions, we should also rededicate ourselves to restoring workplace rights. That effort begins by restoring the right to organize, unionize, and demand change.
In a very real sense, these fast-food employees are fighting for all American working people. From debit-card charges to working conditions to a living wage, it’s not rhetoric or metaphor to say: Their fight is our fight. They deserve our gratitude for taking the first step, and they deserve to have us walking beside them in the steps yet to come.
- See more at: http://thecontributor.com/economy/fast-food-strikes-minimum-wage-would-be-16-if-it-kept-inflation#sthash.9w2aJYaJ.dpuf
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Friday, December 13, 2013

Robert Reich: budget agreement is being hailed as the start of a new era of bipartisanship shows how low our expectations have fallen

Robert Reich
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That yesterday’s budget agreement is being hailed as the start of a new era of bipartisanship shows how low our expectations have fallen. It’s a minor agreement that puts off the worst of the sequester cuts for two years but doesn’t extend unemployment benefits, or close tax loopholes for the rich, or invest in new jobs. As the House goes home for the holidays, the 113th Congress has accomplishing nothing on immigration reform, gun safety, the minimum wage, the environment, campaign-funding disclosure, or the nation's crumbling infrastructure.
Tea-Party Republicans got slapped down yesterday by House Republican leaders but they’re still calling many of the shots, allowing John Boehner and Paul Ryan to play good cops to their bad cops and thereby pushing American politics ever further right. Tea Partiers in Republican-led states, meanwhile, are doing what they can to undermine the Affordable Care Act – allowing insurance companies to violate it, hobbling enrollment, and refusing to expand Medicaid even though the federal government will pay almost all of it. Right-wing groups such as the Koch-funded “Generation Opportunity” are actively trying to dissuade young people from signing up.
Your political activism in the midterm election year of 2014 is as urgently needed as ever. Don't let up. Don't despair. Organize, mobilize, energize.
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Wednesday, December 11, 2013

How To Listen To The Norman Goldman Show In Your Car

The Norman Goldman Show
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Have you seen the video yet? It is the way to end run the corporate owners of radio.....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu5L_Yjihfw
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Norman Goldman Tweets Dec. 11th

  1. 10m
    This is the article I was discussing about ALEC and punishing those who install solar panels....
    View summary
  2. 1h
    Have you seen the video yet? It is the way to end run the corporate owners of...
    View media
  3. 2h
    Today on the show, justice is served on John Boner; Republicans; social issues; political moralizing; President...
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  4. 5h
    It's always these guys....
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  5. 5h
    YOU sacrifice. WE share in the gains.
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  6. 22h
    Uruguay Legalizes Marijuana via . Looks like I have to add Uruguay to my travel plans! End war on drugs
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  7. 10 Dec
    Today on the show, justice is served on Nelson Mandela; communists; the Republican Civil War; Senior Legal Analyst...
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  8. 10 Dec
    We have an entire YouTube channel with many videos on there - many from me explaining stuff in free, short...
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Randi Rhodes on iHeartRadio.com!

http://www.iheart.com/live/Randi-Rhodes-6443/
Sign up - Listen when ever you want - where ever you want - on line, on your phone, etc.


My iHeart page is now available--listen whenever, wherever: Tell a friend!

http://RandiRhodes.com
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Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Please Help keep KTLK Talk Radio Progressive!!

Everyone call the offices before they remove all progressive voices from the air.


Clear Channel Radio
Los Angeles
3400 W. Olive Ave., Suite 550
Burbank, CA 91505

(818) 559-2252
 
 KTLK is clearing its lineup of Randi Rhodes and the other progressive talkers, and replacing them with crazy right-wing blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, as though guys weren't already on every other radio station in the US? WTF are you thinking? This is one listener who will be clearing KTLK from my menubar and my I heart radio lineup. I will find Randi streaming from another station. Good bye forever! Now, please move Randi to the old Limbaugh spot on KFI.
KTLK-AM - LA\'s Voice
www.ktlkam1150.com
KTLK AM 1150 is Your Voice in Los Angeles and Orange County. Listen live to Stephanie Miller, Diverse L.A., Randi Rhodes, David Cruz, Clark Howard, Joe Escalante, KTLK News, and much more.
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History Palinized By Martin Longman

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_12/history_palinized048099.php
If you could turn stupid into a fuel, you could use Sarah Palin to leave the Solar System. Her appearance at Liberty University set a new standard for idiocy in a public figure. Before I quote her, I want to remind you that Thomas Jefferson was so dissatisfied with the New Testament that he cut out all the references to miracles and the resurrection, creating a new book we call The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.
He explained his rationale this way:
“Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.”
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, April 13, 1820
He was actually hostile to several forms of Christianity. Of Catholicism, he said, “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government,” and “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.” In a letter to John Adams, dated April 11, 1823, Jefferson wrote “I can never join [John] Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did.”
Finally, as a prelude to introducing you to Palin’s comments, I want to introduce you to Jefferson’s thoughts on Christmas. Christmas, after all, is a celebration of the miraculous birth of Jesus. Here is what Jefferson thought about that subject:
“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.”
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
So we are clear here, Thomas Jefferson revered many of the sayings attributed to Jesus. But he actively hoped that people would stop believing in the story that we all celebrate on Christmas.
With all of that as precursor, I give you Palin at Liberty University:
She told the audience of students that the U.S. Constitution was written by and for moral and religious people, and that nonreligious people probably were incapable of appreciating its principles.
“If you lose that foundation, John Adams was implicitly warning us, then we will not follow our Constitution, there will be no reason to follow our Constitution because it is a moral and religious people who understand that there is something greater than self, we are to live selflessly, and we are to be held accountable by our creator, so that is what our Constitution is based on, so those revisionists, those in the lamestream media, especially, who would want to ignore what our founders actually thought, felt and wrote about in our charters of liberty - well, that’s why I call them the lamestream media,” Palin said…
“Thomas Jefferson and his thinking, I believe that much of it fundamentally came from this area, having spent his summers here, having spent influential years here, two miles away from Liberty University,” Palin said. “Man, there’s something in the water, perhaps, around here - again you are fortunate you get to taste it.”
Palin said Jefferson would likely agree that secularists had set their sights on destroying the religious themes in Christmas celebrations.
“He would recognize those who would want to try to ignore that Jesus is the reason for the season, those who would want to try to abort Christ from Christmas,” she said. “He would recognize that, for the most part, these are angry atheists armed with an attorney. They are not the majority of Americans.”
Palin said there was a double standard that protected atheists at the expense of the religious.
“Why is it they get to claim some offense taken when they see a plastic Jewish family on somebody’s lawn - a nativity scene, that’s basically what it is right?” she said. “Oh, they take such offense, though. They say that it physically even can hurt them and mentally it distresses them so they sue, right?”
“But heaven forbid we claim any type of offense when we say, ‘Wait, you’re stripping Jesus from the reason, as the reason for the season,’ but heaven forbid we claim any type of offense,” Palin said. “So that double standard, I think Thomas Jefferson would certainly recognize it and stand up and he wouldn’t let anybody tell him to sit down and shut up.”
Here are a couple of other things that Thomas Jefferson had to say about religion.
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1, 1802
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814
Also, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, served as a delegate at the 2nd Continental Congress, was governor of Virginia, a minister to France, our first Secretary of State, our second vice-president, and our third president. He even codified the rules of the Senate. But he didn’t write the Constitution.
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6 Most Absurd Christian Conspiracy Theories About the Nonexistent 'War on Christmas'

http://www.alternet.org/belief/6-most-absurd-christian-conspiracy-theories-about-nonexistent-war-christmas
Every year, the right-wing freaks out about an imaginary war on Christmas.

It’s an article of faith among the Religious Right that there’s a war on Christmas underway in the United States. Shoppers would be hard-pressed to see evidence of this seasonal conflict, as anyone who stared mystified at stores decked out with Christmas garlands even before Halloween can testify. Christmas would seem as ubiquitous as ever. Nevertheless, every year groups like the American Family Association, the Liberty Counsel and others, aided and abetted by the zealous elves at the Fox News Channel, spread horrific tales of state-sponsored yuletide banishment.
This year they have help: Sarah Palin’s new book, Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas, is burning up bestseller lists. The tome recycles several Religious Right claims about the war on Christmas, but in typical Palin style, the hard evidence remains thinner than dollar-store wrapping paper.
What’s really going on? I’ve been an unwilling combatant in this conflict since it was hatched by the Religious Right some years ago. Believe me, there’s less here than meets the eye—much less.
Upon even cursory examination, the Religious Right’s “war on Christmas” claims melt faster than a snowman in Belize.
1. Public schools have banned the colors red and green. This one has been floating around the web for years. It has morphed into a classic Religious Right urban legend. The claim is made, but the details are few. Key questions are left unanswered: Where did this happen? When? How was the ban enforced? Was teal included?
The claim, which appears to have been made up out of whole cloth, was pinned on several unnamed schools. Finally, in 2005, a public school in Michigan was accused by name. Asked about the matter, the principal laughed and said there was no such color ban. It would be hard to ban green at the school, he added: It’s the school’s color.
These wild tales can cause schools real harm. A Dodgeville, Wisc., public school that was falsely accused of banning Christmas carols was flooded with hateful emails and calls. The school had to spend thousands of dollars mounting a public campaign through the media to set the record straight.
2. Public schools can’t recognize Christmas anymore. It all depends on how they do it. Like it or not, Christmas has become a holiday with significant religious and secular aspects. Public schools can teach the religious aspects in an objective way, but they can’t celebrate them in a religious way. That’s for church.
What does this mean on the ground? A public school holiday concert that includes only sacred music is a no-no. But a concert that includes secular and religious tunes is all right. A play reenacting the nativity is better for a church than a public school, but other types of pageants may be acceptable. Sectarian symbols and signs are OK for use in objective instruction but shouldn’t be posted in the school. And finally, it’s no big deal if terms like “winter concert” and “holiday concert” are used. A public school serves youngsters from many different backgrounds. Inclusive terms make everyone feel welcome—job number-one for any public school.
3. Special laws are needed because it’s illegal to say “Merry Christmas." So-called “Christmas protection” laws have surfaced in a handful of states this year. They are unnecessary and amount to little more than grandstanding.
State legislators are free to pass any silly measures they like, even ones that merely restate the obvious. Such is the case in Texas, where a new law ensures that everyone has the right to say “Merry Christmas.” Of course, no one had been told not to say this. The measure’s sponsor, Texas Rep. Dwayne Bohac (R-Houston) couldn’t point to any specific examples of Christmas censorship when asked and would instead just insist that public schools are afraid to use the term “Christmas tree.”
 Continue reading pages 2 & 3 @ http://www.alternet.org/belief/6-most-absurd-christian-conspiracy-theories-about-nonexistent-war-christmas
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