Biden is summoning congressional leaders to the White House to talk Ukraine and government funding https://t.co/AMztUECTLq
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 26, 2024
In case you’re wondering about the shrieking noises from the FreeDumb Carcass and the Wingnut Wurlitzer… Per the Associated Press, “Biden is summoning congressional leaders to the White House to talk Ukraine and government funding”:
… The top four leaders include House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
During the meeting, the president will discuss the “urgency” of passing the aid package, which has bipartisan support, as well as legislation to keep the federal government operating through the end of September, said the White House official, who was granted anonymity to discuss a meeting not yet publicly confirmed.
The Republican-led House is under pressure to pass the $95 billion national security package that bolsters aid for Ukraine, Israel as well as the Indo-Pacific. That legislation cleared the Senate on a 70-29 vote earlier this month, but Johnson has been resistant to putting up the aid bill for a vote in the House …
Separate from the national security package, the first tranche of government funding is due to expire Friday. The rest of the federal government, including agencies such as the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, expires on March 8.
In a letter to his colleagues sent Sunday, Schumer said there was not yet an agreement to avoid a partial shutdown of the agencies whose funding expires this week. That includes the departments of Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs.
“While we had hoped to have legislation ready this weekend that would give ample time for members to review the text, it is clear now that House Republicans need more time to sort themselves out,” Schumer wrote in the letter. The Senate majority leader called on Johnson to “step up to once again buck the extremists in his caucus and do the right thing” by greenlighting funding to keep the government open…
NEW: Majority Leader Schumer calls on Speaker Johnson to visit Ukraine and put national security package on House floor.
“If Speaker Johnson put the national security supplemental on the floor today, it would pass with a large number of both Democrats and Republicans.” pic.twitter.com/iYfNGtjf8o
— Stephen Neukam (@stephen_neukam) February 25, 2024
Former GOP Acting Speaker Patrick McHenry is not happy with Mike Johnson killing the border bill, aid for Ukraine, and failing to pass a budget: “We need the Speaker to be better.”https://t.co/qAsOv6a3GX
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 26, 2024
… Speaker Johnson is just coming back from meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, followed by a “leadership conference” in Miami, which some of his Members grumbled to reporters that he turned into an evangelical revival rather than political strategy session. With a Senate border bill killed at Trump’s insistence, a foreign aid package ignored, and appropriations bills languishing, Johnson has left himself just three days before the government will shutdown when they return unless there is another Continuing Resolution.
Johnson is already playing games trying to blame Chuck Schumer and Democrats for his inaction, intransigence and inability to get anything done as a leader…
But McHenry, one of the most respected Republicans in the House, told CNN’s Manu Raju that he isn’t buying the nonsense that Mike Johnson is selling:
“We need to get in the mode of getting things done, not punting things and putting off into the future. It’s time to get on with the deal rather than dither.” Raju then asked McHenry if Johnson has been too indecisive. McHenry said, “We need the Speaker to be better.” He then criticized Johnson for killing the border deal…
On The Road – Albatrossity – The Bighorns – 1
mrmoshpotato
And now back to your regularly scheduled, ever-looming government shutdown brought to you by assholes!
Baud
Dems have a candidate that satisfies the criteria.
Karen S
Will she drop out soon?
No more Koch cash
Ken
Good morning, everyone. Remember, even if you’re feeling down about something, at least you didn’t wake up this morning owing an additional $87,501.89 to the State of New York, like Donald Trump did.
(I used this Saturday, but I’m still giddy about it. I’m certainly not planning to make it a daily feature.)
Jeffg166
I assume they will pileup on Johnson. Mike is playing with the big boys now.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Ken
@Jeffg166: If Biden were the dictator the Republicans are always saying he is, about half an hour into the discussion he’d bring out a file and casually say, “Oh, Mike; you’ll be glad to know that the FBI and IRS have tracked down that bank account you said you didn’t have….”
Kay
A little more than a month until we go to Yosemite! As a tree person I cannot tell you how excited I am to see the giant, ancient sequoias.
I know it will be snowy and cold and I’m prepared – I’m a cold weather person, which helps. We’ve been doing 2-3 mile hikes in 20 degree weather to get ready. I bought a merino wool undershirt for my middle son – he works outdoors- and he raved about it so much I got one for myself. Toasty.
Baud
@Kay:
You’ll love it. It’s beautiful there.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: That sounds like a great trip to look forward to .
OzarkHillbilly
Why not? I can’t be the only one here who enjoys reading that every day.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
Nothing beats wool. As long as one is not allergic to it.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Hope that you take lots of pictures and submit them to BJ 🤗🤗🤗
rikyrah
Johnson is a Russian tool
Mousebumples
Enjoy! I was there maybe 20-25 years ago in mid March. We needed to buy/rent snow chains for the rental car. The highway patrol would not let us pass a certain point on the road without them.
But Yosemite was amazing! The waterfall actually turned to snow as it was going over the edge. And lots of great hikes to enjoy.
Happy exploring!
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
A lineman I represent told me “alpaca socks” so I got him those too. He texed me and asked me for the name of the wool so he must be telling other people.
Ken
@OzarkHillbilly: I just think that repeating $87,501.89 every day would get boring. Though some people seem to like that song from Rent where they just sing “525,600” over and over.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: Yep, alpaca is wonderful too. I spent too many years working in the cold to not learn how to dress in it.
Kay
@rikyrah:
Well, I won’t. I hate taking pictures and I am bad at it. My husband has to declare that he needs “one picture” to send his friends to get me to do it so we ask a stranger. No one in my family takes pictures – probably afraid of a photographic record :)
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Unfortunately, we need the Speaker to be better well before January 3, 2025. Preferably in the next week or two.
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
Good morning!
Kay
@Mousebumples:
Oh, thanks. I love California and we vacation there at least every couple of years. You could vacation just in that state your whole life there’s so much variety.
New Deal democrat
Over the weekend, at the CPAC conference, Trump had another dementia moment. He was rambling on about how popular his wife is, and when the audience rose to applaud, he said, “Mercedes, that’s pretty good!” before going back to rambling about how much “she loves our country.”
GOPers are claiming that he was actually referring to Matt Sclapp’s wife, whose name is Mercedes, but from watching the video, it’s pretty clear that’s not the case.
Here it is, so you can judge for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v2BnB6jn2g
Ironcity
@mrmoshpotato: Is a problem that the shutdown is always looming, will happen on x day, we really mean it this time, etc? Like living next to a volcano that burps a little lava occasionally but hasn’t erupted in 8,000 years?
Make it clear that the shutdown they want is the shutdown they get and the shutdown shuts down everything federal. And let them explain it to everybody from the Masters of the Universe to Possum Hollow.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: How fun! I hope y’all have a great time!
TBone
Are the rethugs gonna do a shut down just long enough to short the markets and have a huge payday before they say “just kidding!” and try to shift the blame on to everyone else in the universe?
twbrandt
Respected by whom?
Ksmiami
@Jeffg166: they’re going to read him the riot act.
TBone
@twbrandt: I can’t imagine “respect” being accurate either, but that’s because I wasn’t ever aware that guy even existed before his flash in the pan.
OzarkHillbilly
@Ksmiami: He’s just gonna hold up the inerrant word of god in reply.
TBone
@New Deal democrat: maybe he had to give Melanoma some wheels in a secret deal 🤣
Scamp Dog
This is worrying:
Adam Silverman has said a few times that you can’t negotiate with someone who thinks he represents the Deity.
Frankensteinbeck
Mike Johnson is a man of neither wit, nor courage. I wish I could see him in that room with Biden, Jeffries, Schumer, AND McConnell glaring at him.
Nukular Biskits
The nihilists in the FREEDUMB!!11!!! caucus have absolutely no issues shutting down “teh gubbermint” (as long as they get to exempt their pet pony portions of it; i.e., defense, etc) – they’re never personally impacted by their shooting-the-hostage antics.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but congressional salaries (as well as the operating budgets for the respective congressional offices [meaning salaries for staffers, etc]) are never impacted by these shutdowns.
Ksmiami
@OzarkHillbilly: then I hope Mitch holds him down while Biden clocks him repeatedly
Chief Oshkosh
@Ironcity: Unfortunately (politically) that’s not how a shutdown goes. The responsible adults in the room try to keep things safe (typically air traffic control, checks to starving grannies, law enforcement, etc.) remain funded for a while. However, all the stuff that does come to a stop creates enormous problems and costs taxpayers a lot of money almost from the get-go. In fact, federal administrators have already been spending time and effort shuffling things around in the background just because of the nature of short-term continuing resolutions. That all takes money and is hugely inefficient.
IMO, the closest we came to what you’re talking about was first round of the sequester that Republicans forced on Obama. I still recall the whining from rightwing fucktards about their various ox (oxen?) being gored — statements similar to the now-infamous “But he’s hurting the wrong people!”
OzarkHillbilly
@twbrandt: @TBone:
I suspect the respect comes from the fact that he’s never been a showpony* or one to step all over colleagues in a quest for power or camera time. He’s just quietly “done his job.”
Not saying he did it well or anything.
*he got the temporary speaker job because they all knew he wouldn’t claim it for himself
TBone
@Ken: I have the link you shared ($debt counting clock) as an open tab along with the time to pay countdown clock so I can roll around in schadenfreude like a dog on a smelly carcass. For shits and giggles.
https://trumpdebtcounter.com/
https://payuptrump.com/
They upgraded the time clock.
Chief Oshkosh
@Scamp Dog: Unfortunately that’s the drum I’ve been banging on ever since Li’l Mikey Wacko came onto the national stage. I doubt that Mikey cares about any of the things that motivate more normal people. If Mikey has decided that Trump is God’s instrument on Earth (and A LOT of Wackos do think this), then there is nothing within normal politics that will in any way alter Mikey’s course. He’s just going to keep saying and doing whatever God’s Orange Instrument tells him to do.
I hope I’m wrong.
Frankensteinbeck
@Scamp Dog:
If that were true, no peace treaty, even a temporary one, would ever have been made in a religious war in all history. It happens all the time. You can’t convince them they’re wrong, but there are a Hell of a lot of reasons people negotiate other than “I might be wrong.”
Ksmiami
@Chief Oshkosh: have the house run a discharge petition while he’s in the meeting then
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Long underwear in silk is also very warm and not bulky. LLBean used to make good ones.
Ksmiami
@Chief Oshkosh: I hate him from the bottom of my soul. Religious extremist fucktards are the worst
Jeffro
Yet another reason why Haley is continuing to run.
Most of us have noted that trumpov’s upcoming trials (and, one hopes, convictions) will probably erode a bit of his support in the GOP, and a lot of his support with swing voters.
But given how rapidly he’s deteriorating, and how detached from reality he is becoming, by the time we get to the RNC, they may well have to choose someone else.
Brit in Chicago
Reports of unhappy R members of the House—whey don’t they do something about it? There’s no shortage of ways forward, ways of bringing bills to the floor without the Speaker, ways of shutting down House business until the bills come up, ways of replacing the Speaker—probably just threatening to would do it. Spineless, infuriating.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Thanks. We’re going to do two days in San Francisco too – neither of us have been there in a decade. I’ll report back on the blasted, barren, post apocalypse landscape – and then drive to Yosemite. We also love touring by automobile so the drive is part of it for us.
Brit in Chicago
@Jeffro: “But given how rapidly he’s deteriorating, and how detached from reality he is becoming, by the time we get to the RNC, they may well have to choose someone else.”
One of my hopes has been that his unfitness for office will become evident even to the Maggats, but that by then it will be too late to replace him on the ballot, so the Rs will go down to a massive defeat. The problem is that it’s hard to make something evident to that bunch. They deny obvious truths all the time, and a few more probably won’t faze them.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
I loved those because you could wear them under dressy work clothes. The long sleeved undershirt was just heaven. The merino undershirt is like a shell – sleeveless. I wore it on a rails to trails hike of about 4 miles on Saturday, overcast and 20 degrees, and stayed warm.
MattF
Johnson is simply incompetent. Under water. A baby with no responsibilities. A long term back-bencher who normally just did what responsible parties told him to do. Sitting at a White House meeting with the likes of Biden, Schumer, McConnell, and Jeffries discovering that no one wants to play peek-a-boo.
Leto
@Frankensteinbeck: he’ll simply respond to them, “I’m on a mission from God…”, but there won’t be a funny car chase scene, no girlfriend trying to blow him up, nor any amazing music cameos. Just a dour christofascist doing his best to impose his form of patriarchy on the rest of us.
TBone
Maxine has the right idea. Better if they couldn’t trade during their entire tenure tho.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4618/text/ih
Spanky
@New Deal democrat: Yeah, there’s dementia going on, but I’ve decided the whole thing makes more sense if TFG has been banging Matty Schlapp’s wife while Matty watched. So the whole thing with Mercedes is rooted in a garbled but real memory.
Betty Cracker
Wow, the NYT finally figured out that Trump’s primary results have been lackluster so far! Nate Cohn offers three theories to explain why Trump underperformed the polling in the early states: (gift link)
My theory is simpler: Trump is a thoroughly repulsive person who was a terrible president, and even some Republicans know it. I assume most of them will come home in November, but if even a small percentage don’t, that’s significant since these are base voters. I’ll be over here waiting for the MSM think pieces demanding that Trump step aside for the good of the party. 🙄
Baud
@twbrandt:
The bow tie caucus.
Starfish
@mrmoshpotato: Sadly, this has become so common that we made need your sentence as a rotating tag line.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: You can get it in the sleeveless and full sleeve variety. I have a sleeveless silk shell. Its super warm!
I also have a 3/4 length one that you can wear under a wool or denim skirt that longer than knee length.
Will have to check the merino shell.
Jeffro
I did find this encouraging: the snooze media managed to stumble across some anti-trump Republicans(!)
I know that is a sample size of 15…BUT STILL!
TBone
Follow the money needs to be a lot easier.
RevRick
@rikyrah: I’m reading Tim Alberta’s book The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory, makes the point that the white evangelical sickness is rooted in their deep-seated belief that they’re under siege. And that’s attached to their fear of loss of status and privilege, that the tide of culture is out to get them. So they’ve become a tribe whose loyalty is to Trump, and whatever he wants, they want.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Visit Chinatown. SF suburbs also have great Indian food. Better than NYC and NJ IMHO. Best restuarant Indian food I have had in the US.
Spanky
@Leto:
Correct! It’ll be a Rent Boy.
Suzanne
LMAO.
This should be a clue that he doesn’t know the difference.
I think y’all picked the wrong guy!
Baud
@RevRick:
And we haven’t even fed any of them to the lions like the Romans did.
What sissies.
TBone
@Chief Oshkosh: I wish for the rapture too, but not how they think it means.
Jeffro
True. I think that – technically speaking – it’ll never be too late for the RNC to replace him on the ballot. But the longer that the MAGA crowd gets its rabid hopes up, the harder they’ll fall once he goes to prison, strokes out, or is led away by the tiny little hand.
And by “the harder they’ll fall”, I mean the more likely it is that they’ll tear the GOP to shreds in a frenzy of dashed white nationalist dreams.
OzarkHillbilly
Gavin Newsom launches red-state abortion ads over ‘war on travel’
Good on him..
MattF
@Betty Cracker: Yup. The pollsters always slide over the salient fact that Trump is a horrible person. How can that be ignored?
Baud
@MattF:
Because it was ignored in 2016.
Jeffro
Right?? Like…we booted his ass out of office at the first opportunity, pollsters? (Well, the extra half-million Covid-dead Americans didn’t, because they couldn’t, but the rest of us sure took note!)
I liked this lukewarm paragraph at the end:
man, we’re ALL going to be highly engaged this year, count on it!
zhena gogolia
@New Deal democrat: It’s absolutely clear he thinks he’s talking about his wife.
Nikki / Nancy, anyone? For minutes on end?
Suzanne
@RevRick: Every time I read a piece by Tim Alberta, I feel like he gets at something critical. I probably don’t share his politics, but he is a keen observer of that subculture.
I am really puzzled by a paradox in evangelical Christianity. In one sense, they have historically operated in the public sphere as majoritarian. “Positive World“.
It makes some degree of sense to act like you run the country when you have a numeric advantage and social privilege.
But they’ve also percolated in that language of victimization and preparing to suffer for the Lord, etc…. for so long. It makes no sense to me why they don’t embrace it.
And it makes me think that they really just want the suffering to be fun and comfortable?
Leto
@Spanky: Hope his son can catch him time…
Scout211
Liz Dye, at Public Notice this morning gives a nice explainer on the history of the Russian disinformation that led to the House GOP’s fake impeachment of Biden. If you’re interested in the timeline, it’s a nice wrap-up with a touch of her wry sense of humor.
Geminid
@Jeffro: There is a good article about Rep. Good in Cardinal News. Some Southside Republican lady rented space in a shopping mall to set up a Trump merch store. She says she intends it to be a gathering spot for the like-minded.
So she invited Good challenger Sen.. McGuire to the opening and he sent out an email telling supporters he’d be at the store from noon to 1:30. Someone forwarded this to Good,and he sent out an e-mail telling his supporters he’d be there 11am to noon.
McGuire is endorsed by Trump, and Trump henchman Chris LaCivita has promised to crush Good with attacks because he was a DeSantis supporter.
Someone forwarded Good’s email to the store owner, so she met Good at door and threw him out, and then chewed him out on Facebook for trying to hijack the event and then hanging out in front of her store for 5 hours.
Baud
@Suzanne: By “world” I assume he’s talking about a liberal world, which has gotten negative about Christianity over time, mostly because of the role of right-wing Christianity in Bush’s war on terror, then opposition to Obama, then their support for Trump and his agenda. But if he means a larger world, I don’t know if I agree with his framing.
Ken
@Jeffro: Well, let’s just fire up the old spreadsheet….
In South Carolina in 2020, Trump got 1,385,103 votes; Biden, 1,091,541 votes.
Nikki Haley took 39.5% of the Republican 2024 primary votes. That would be 547,116 of Trump’s 2020 voters.
We move 6/15 of the Haley voters, or 218,846, from Trump to third-party.
We move 4/15 of the Haley voters, or 145,898, from Trump to Biden.
For the 1 “undecided” voter of the 15, treat it as a coin flip, and move 1/30 of the Haley voters, or 36,474, from Trump to Biden.
Resulting 2024 South Carolina presidential vote: Trump 983,885; Biden 1,273,913.
I think I like these numbers more than the $87,501.89.
TBone
@RevRick: Kimmel points out what we’re dealing with here quite succinctly.
https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1761556751814398062
MattF
@Suzanne: The environment has changed and the Christians have changed. And the changes don’t appear to be reversible.
Scout211
@OzarkHillbilly: I posted the new ad targeted for Tennessee yesterday. It’s powerful. Hostage
Eolirin
@Ken: I think it’s highly unlikely that happens. 15 people is not a meaningful sample size. And there’s no way in hell they were randomly selected. The media went looking for them
If we were to have a result like that in SC, we’d win in Texas and Florida and by margins likely large enough that we take both senate seats as well. That’d be a more than 20 point swing in SC. Completely out of line with everything we’ve seen even in our best electoral results post 2020.
Baud
Obama and Biden are quite openly Christian. They just don’t wear it on their sleeves and respect the separation of church and state when it comes to public policy. Almost no one views them in a negative light because of it.
cmorenc
@RevRick:
One of the central motifs of Christianity is the persecution and crucifixion of Christ and his followers – that they are under siege by the government and secular non-believers just like the followers of Christ around the time of his lifetime and death. The Easter story is all about their faith’s victory over the non-believing secularists who tried to kill Jesus.
Suzanne
@Baud: I don’t know if I agree with Renn’s framing, either. But I think a lot of evangelicals align with his outlook. That whole piece at First Things that I linked to is a fascinating (and freaky) look inside their minds.
It just blows my mind that there are shit-tons of well-attended megachurches all across the country, and they command a lot of attention from political candidates, and they are wealthier on average than other Americans, etc etc etc…. and yet there is still this sense they have that identifying as Christian lowers their status. Like, how?
I am fascinated by this question of status. What, exactly, is it? Why do they feel they’ve lost it?
New Deal democrat
@zhena gogolia: That’s why I highlighted it.
Mis-remembering the name of your own wife is a sign of fairly advanced dementia.
And as I pointed out with the Pelosi/Haley mix-up, dementia is inexorable, so there will be more like this and probably worse as the year goes on.
smith
@Baud: Yeah, context is everything. I was particularly struck by this passage:
What “Christian morality” is he referring to? The one espoused by Jesus Christ or the cruel, perverted, opposite-world “Christian morality” displayed by the very public RW Christopaths? They are not the same, in fact they are antithetical. I know which one I find repugnant.
Baud
@Suzanne:
IMHO the power to veto the behavior of “others” who inhabit “their land”.
Scout211
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel announced she is “stepping down” from the RNC on March 8.
I thought she was already sent out to pasture. Huh.
Suzanne
@Baud:
Many evangelicals do not think the liberal or mainline denominations, or any of the Black churches, or Catholics, or Mormons, are Christian.
SFAW
@Mousebumples:
Just … wow. I’m not an enjoy-the-great-outdoors-in-winter kinda guy, but I might make an exception to see something like that.
Went to Yellowstone with my family, over 50 years ago. Don’t remember much about it, unfortunately, outside of Old Faithful. Maybe it’s time to try again.
Ken
@Eolirin: I agree with you that the sample is unrepresentative, and shouldn’t be used like I did.
However, where I’ll disagree with you is on the senatorial and other down-ballot results. I think most Republican voters that don’t vote for Trump this fall, will still vote straight R on the rest of the ticket. They’d probably see it as a necessary check on Biden.
SFAW
@Scout211:
Better that than “a farm upstate.”
Jeffro
@Geminid: omg that just made my WEEK, thank you!
How does the phrase go, again? “Rooting for injuries”? If GOP infighting costs the VA GOP the 5th, they will be able to hear me laughing all the way down in South Boston. =)
Suzanne
@Baud: Your answer, of course, aligns pretty closely with mine…. which is probably why we’re both here in this comment section.
But the people who feel that “loss of status” would probably say something different. The overriding theme I have seen is “respect”. They feel a loss of respect.
I think there’s a lot of patriarchy and white supremacy tied up in their understanding of respect. But what do I know.
Jeffro
I like them too (even if we probably ought to assume that most of the GOP and right-leaning independents will weakly, pathetically ‘come home’)
Regardless, I am thinking of post-election Biden/Harris landslide headlines and grinning: “HAD ENOUGH YET, GOP?”
The finger-pointing on the right is going to truly be something to behold.
Jackie
Saw this blurb this morning; for all of us concerned that Comer and Jordan and their ilk are trying to drive Hunter Biden to relapse, Hunter believes it, too, and he’s determined to deny them:
I’m not religious, but I hope his faith, along with his family and friends support continue to give him the strength he needs against those who wish him evil.
Frankensteinbeck
@Suzanne:
I have long said that this is an important factor in our situation. Back in 1980, you could say that God told you to do X, and you would be publicly applauded. If you do that today, most of society will think you’re crazy. They are infuriated that they can no longer be praised just for saying Jesus.
SiubhanDuinne
@New Deal democrat:
And during his E. Jean Carroll deposition, he identified a photo of EJC as his second wife, Marla Maples — despite the fact that he and his first wife, Ivana, were also in the photo!
Eolirin
@Suzanne: White Evangelical Christians are no longer culturally dominant in this country. They have lost status. Their reaction to other groups gaining ground and beginning to approach a kind of equality is what’s turning that status negative, and may, in time, turn their victimization narratives into truth. But they didn’t need to go down that path so I’m not terribly sympathetic.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I’m iffy on the “world” timeline too. IMO, (mostly) white evangelicals crossed the line into villainhood when they embraced far-right Republican politics with the “Moral Majority” nonsense in the run-up to the 1980 election.
IIRC, Jimmy Carter picked up most of the evangelical vote when he won, but thanks to hucksters like Jerry Falwell, many if not most white evangelicals became right-wing political activists. They alienated lots of my generation with their demonization of/unchristian indifference to AIDS victims and opposition to women’s equality.
Leto
@Suzanne: was going to say this. As well as the fact that conservatives don’t believe either of them to be “akshual “ Christians. The Kimmel clip that TBone posted at #78 shows that.
RaflW
McHenry is in an R+22 district. If he’s getting on-the-record grumpy and openly complaining about Johnson’s leadership (and lack thereof), things must look really bad in GOP internal polling.
Geminid
@Jeffro: There’s more good stuff in the article. Cardinal News has been covering the McGuire/Good contest closely. The reporting is objective, but I still get a sense that they don’t like Bob Good.
HinTN
@Kay:
Roll those windows down! I love the scent of the air af you approach the Sierra Nevada. There’s nothing like it “back east.”
Suzanne
@Eolirin: Have they really lost status? They’re wealthier on average. Presidential candidates talk to them and seek to align with their leadership. The mainline churches are losing membership and closing.
I see it more that identifying as Christian is no guarantee of status. But, of course, I’m me.
I find this part of Renn’s piece the most interesting:
See, they will say that they live in the Negative World, but don’t behave as if they do.
“The Benedict Option” was basically a proposed retreat from society into little enclaves. Essentially: become Amish…. live apart, do your own thing, and stop seeking influence. They don’t want to go that route. They want the influence. And they still have a lot of it.
smith
@RaflW: McHenry is retiring, so the politics of his district are irrelevant. It’s interesting how deciding to retire somehow jerks these Wingers back into the reality the rest of us inhabit. See also Ken Buck’s remarks on the Myorkas impeachment.
lowtechcyclist
@Ironcity:
The last lengthy shutdown (35 days) was in December 2018 and January 2019, just five years ago.
The last one before that (16 days) was in October 2013, five years before that.
So while most threatened shutdowns don’t happen, they happen often enough to be taken seriously.
lowtechcyclist
@twbrandt:
You don’t have to be very respected at all to be one of the most respected House Republicans.
RaflW
@Scamp Dog: We’re only seeing the surface cracks in the very strange and, I think, electorally nervous GOP House caucus. Johnson may have the faraway, glassy look of an anointed believer, but it won’t get his caucus through a shutdown unscathed.
Biden is smart to call this meeting. Johnson has to go, as I’d imagine McConnell more or less hates the guy, will definitely show up and mumble some nonsense, and if Mikey blows this off, he looks like a total wimp.
Biden is making it clear to a Beltway that needs a roadmap to everything, a shutdown is on Mike. Ukraine funding dragging any longer is on Mike.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Respect = loss of veto power, IMHO
Like when your kid doesn’t listen to you, he or she doesn’t respect you.
Some of these right-wingers believe they would be generous in their permission. But they insist on the right to give permission.
Suzanne
@Leto:
Yeah, I think about this every time the Annoying Commenter Who Must Not Be Named writes some anti-Christian dreck, and then someone responds that there are liberal Christians, Black Christians, etc.
The Christians he’s talking about pretty explicitly don’t think of those others as Christians. We have a terminology problem.
RaflW
@smith: Even if he’s retiring, one might think he cares about the Republican project, and what’s different is that he can now say what many of them know (and why there’s internal dissension): What Mikey is doing is not playing well to the general public, and marginal GOP seats are very much at risk.
Johnson keeps f’king around like this, he’ll be the former Speaker and not the next Minority Leader. One can hope!
Suzanne
@Baud: Agreed.
To me, respect is a part of an equal relationship. To respect someone means to see them as equal (maybe different, but of equal worth and validity) to oneself.
Respect, for them, is a relationship of a power imbalance. It’s more how I would characterize esteem. They want admiration. Attention. Flattery.
Fake Irishman
@Baud:
And it’s not just openly identifying as a Christian, but many senior Democrats practice. Biden is really devout! So is Nancy Pelosi; Harry Reid was a Mormon convert when he and his wife were young and he became a bishop; Steny Hoyer is actually a member of an evangelical sect.
Jackie
@RaflW: That could be why he’s not running for re-election – choosing to spend more time with his family, instead 🙄
BethanyAnne
Evangelicals were supposed to evangelize, not get into politics and command. They chose the prosperity doctrine over the Gospels and Trump over Jesus. They didn’t lose their status, they torched it on purpose.
lowtechcyclist
@Betty Cracker:
Miracles can still occur! ;-
I’m betting on Godot showing up first.
marcopolo
@Kay: So a while back (’92) when I drove 15K miles looking at grad schools, while I was in the neighborhood I planned on doing some camping in Yosemite. I arrived at the park and discovered pretty much every paved surface resembled a parking lot. I drove around for an hour looking for somewhere to park so I could get my camping permit (which I guess one probably gets online now) and gave up. Decided to rework my plans and went down the road to Sequoia/Kings Canyon & camped there instead. Place was empty compared to Yosemite (at least back then) and there were plenty of magnificent trees (though I am aware that the past few years of wildfires have hit some of those groves). Anyway, in case you need a backup plan or just want to see a little more. Have fun!
Eolirin
@Ken: If SC flipped by 20+ points (which I don’t think will happen), it’d suggest a national trend of double digit over performance by Democrats and the Republicans wouldn’t have the numbers to win any of those races.
You don’t get to numbers that massive just because Rs didn’t vote for Trump, you get to numbers like that because Rs stayed home in large numbers while Dems turned out massively. That’s a bigger collapse in support than Roy Moore had after being outed as a pedophile rapist.
The Texas and (probably) Florida races should be low single digit affairs. A national 10+ point swing to Democrats wins all of the races in that range.
RaflW
@Suzanne: It’s mostly about how white cis-het men can’t just command leadership roles everywhere they step in civil society now (or at least it’s more difficult to leverage their unearned privilege).
They map it to their Christianity, because that’s what GOP politicians and their conservative, white cis-het male clergy tell them.
TBone
@Suzanne: as illustration, when the Notre Dame cathedral burned down, my Rumpy neighbor kid made a comment to the effect of they didn’t do their praying because there weren’t any Xtians in France. I laughed so hard in his face and asked who he thought Catholics worship. It’s astounding.
narya
@Suzanne: They want deference. They do not offer respect for our views, and they demand that we defer to, not “respect,” their views.
Mel
@Kay: Yosemite is breathtakingly beautiful!
Share some photos via On the Road when you return?
Frankensteinbeck
@Baud:
Obama’s election demonstrated eloquently that there is a big chunk of racists who are fine with minorities as long as the minority remains a sidekick. They would vote for a black man! If the minority is actually in charge, making decisions, they start shitting kittens. They absolutely lose their nut. They don’t even know they’re like that and it can be a surprise to others.
Eolirin
@Suzanne: They want power. And they no longer have it, culturally. People keep doing things they don’t approve of and no one is stopping them. That’s why they’re so focused on using the state to enforce things. They can’t do it through social pressure anymore.
RaflW
OT. The StarTribune has a piece up about Dean Phillips. Seems some of his past supporters are fed up with him. Good!
— —
Democratic U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips is facing criticism from some of his Minnesota constituents as he prepares to take on President Joe Biden in Michigan’s Democratic primary election on Tuesday. Some who spent many hours volunteering for Phillips’ congressional campaigns said they can hardly recognize the man who’s now running for president.
“The tone is different. The tone is much more negative — it’s not an ‘everyone’s invited,’ it’s ‘you can’t trust the system, the system’s out to get us,'” said Karl Bunday, 65, who lives in Minnetonka. “It sounds very Trump-y.”
Julie Cole, another supporter-turned-critic, said she’s angry with Phillips for missing votes in Congress while campaigning for president.
“It just seems like he has completely abdicated his responsibility for being our representative,” she said. …
Phillips drew further criticism and befuddlement last week when he criticized some of his fellow Minnesota Democrats [lashing out at some of his fellow Minnesota Democrats for putting “self-preservation over principle.”] and then floated the idea of teaming up with Republican Nikki Haley on a bipartisan presidential ticket.
During an interview with Fox News over the weekend, Haley said no to teaming up with Phillips. “I’m a Republican. I’m running as a Republican,” Haley told Fox News
Spanky
@Baud:
Now that is a rotating tag.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Authoritarians want obedience without dissent. That to them is respect.
TBone
@schrodingers_cat: triggers my oppositional defiance disorder.
marcopolo
@Betty Cracker: After the polls closed in SC and results were pointing to another polling error a couple election number crunchers threw out the idea that 1) polling was quite accurately measuring Trump’s baseline support; 2) that baseline support was all he had; every (claimed) undecided voter was breaking for Haley; 3) so the normal way of distributing undecideds blows up when it comes to Trump. I am biased but it makes sense to me–Trump is a particularly deranged, disgusting, repellant person for anyone not in the cult. Not an expert, but I think if I were working to get Trump elected this would terrify me. Fingers crossed this is the dynamic, fingers xtra crossed that a majority or close to it of these undecideds vote Biden instead of staying home (which the Biden folks need to worry about).
Spanky
@Suzanne:
And Lincoln laid it all out in his Cooper Union Speech back in … hey! An anniversary coming up … February 27, 1860.
CaseyL
I adore my silk long underwear. Have had four sets for nearly 20 (!) years and wear them a lot during winter under regular clothes, and all year as needed for hiking. I am very curious about the wool or alpaca blends, but they’re a bit pricey and I don’t really need them.
TBone
@Eolirin: they do petty but effective revenge on outgroups around my neck of the woods.
Leto
@TBone: that’s the thing with evangelicals: every other flavor of Christian is heretical. They’re all lost, all of them will burn in the fiery pits of hell. Just like Jesus preached…
Ken
@RaflW: Is that the Phillips ticket proposal where the interviewer asked if he would be OK being Haley’s vice-president, and he just sat silently for a minute? He was apparently caught completely unprepared by the idea, though it was an obvious question, given that in the primaries she’s been getting an order of magnitude more votes than he has.
Leto
@narya: exactly this.
TBone
@Leto: exactly. Love thy neighbor is a difficult concept for far too many (in theory as well as practice).
Eolirin
@Suzanne: Yes they have. Gay people are allowed to walk around openly without being shunned. And they get in trouble if they even suggest it’s okay to murder them. Atheists don’t get run out of town. They do not have the cultural power to start panics about satanic cults in the mainstream media and be taken seriously about it anymore. It’s hard to process that QAnon level insanity used to be taken seriously because of how much cultural power these groups were able to exert.
And on and on.
Loss of status is in relative terms, not absolute ones. They’re accelerating the process by being complete assholes about it. If they didn’t, they’d be able to keep that slight edge probably forever. But it’d only be a slight edge, the world wouldn’t revolve entirely around them. And that’s apparently intolerable.
lowtechcyclist
@RevRick:
The whole ‘under siege’ bit always gets me. Is anyone shutting down CBN or the thousands of ‘Christian’ radio stations? Anyone shutting down their churches if they won’t accept LGBTQ persons? (This comment aimed at them, not you, obviously.)
No, ‘under siege’ means that while they are free to maintain their own moral standards (which mostly seem to be about sex, dope, and booze), the rest of us are free to live our lives differently.
The first-century A.D. Christians did pretty well as Christians in a society that was a good deal more secular than ours is, not to mention genuine persecutions rather than the incidental stuff that white evangelicals seem to regard as persecutions – stuff that ought to be like water off a duck’s back to anyone who actually has the presence of the Lord in their life.
Maybe they should read, say, the last three verses of Acts 5, and ask themselves why they’re not like that. Is it because nobody’s having them flogged?
TBone
@Spanky: 👍
Sanjeevs
@Leto: Emo Philips put it best
Baud
Wonder if she’ll become a Romney again.
TBone
@Eolirin: nailed it.
delphinium
@Betty Cracker: I’m old enough to remember the “The Moral Majority is neither” bumper stickers. Still makes me laugh.
TBone
On topic of Xtian bigots, I watched Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid in an ode to 1950s melodramas yesterday on TCM. Title: Far From Heaven. It’s pretty good.
Eolirin
@TBone: Yeah, localized control still exists, but that’s still a pulling back from being a culturally dominant force for the entire country. There is a pulling away and a growing isolation from the mainstream cultural position.
Jeffro
@Geminid: you are not kidding!
This
is just all kinds of awesome.
Bob. Freakin’. Good. being called a “never-trumper” and a “RINO”…man, if that doesn’t tell folks something about the downward spiral of the modern
GOPtrump cult I don’t know what would.Eolirin
@Jeffro: This is what happens when your party is made up almost entirely of grifters trying to out grift each other. The knives are always out.
lowtechcyclist
@TBone:
I actually do wish there’d be a Rapture that’s not unlike how they mean it. I wish everyone who claims to believe in the Rapture would get Raptured. And the rest of us would be going, “Thank you, Lord!!!!”
TBone
@Eolirin: yes and it makes their dwindling in-group vicious, wanting retribution so fiercely that they cannot recognize any “other” as human.
delphinium
@RaflW: Heh, maybe Dick Gephardt can give Dean a call.
(A previous commenter had noted that Gephardt had helped persuade Joe Manchin to reconsider a No Labels third party run).
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: I’ve tried to point out several times to some I know that the rapture is not actually in their book and where it came from (1970s grifters) with little success. I refuse to capitalize any of those words in this context. Grifters twisted the “meet in the air” phrasing. No one of them thinks of translation from ancient text. Or why it’s called King James.
Miss Bianca
@Frankensteinbeck: Oh, if only they *actually* shat kittens, instead of their usual crap! Then their losing-their-shit freakouts woud be cute and cuddly, instead of deadly noxious to the rest of the population.
Eolirin
@TBone: Yeah. A lot of what we’re dealing with now is effectively an extinction burst. The desperate thrashing of a dying power.
Unfortunately an open question whether they take us down with them.
Wag
@lowtechcyclist:
mid prefer a Rapture where truly Christian people like Obama get Raptured, leaving the GQP behind to say wtf?
catclub
Have you tried alpaca? Cashmere?
TBone
@Eolirin: I’m refusing to go down without a good fight. I do what I can. As do all of us here!
Baud
@Eolirin:
Some of them can even be Secretary of Transportation.
TBone
@Baud: 💙
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
I think you’ve hit on something. They want some sort of ‘persecution’ that they can wear as a badge, but that is more at the level of inconvenience than actual hardship.
Mel
@TBone: When I was teaching in a rural, isolated little Kentucky town, there was a very sweet, elderly nun doing social justice work in the next county.
My students, most of whom were backwoods evangelical Baptists or Pentecostals, seemed terrified of even the thought of her. Further conversation revealed that they and their families thought she was a (literal) witch b/c someone who had visited her apartment had seen her prayer candles lit during the day, and b/c of her religious dietary restrictions and the fact that she took in stray cats (?!?).
I tried to explain that, nope, none of that means witchery is afoot, and told them that they could feel free to ask my hubby (a very-happy-to-not-be-Catholic former Catholic), any questions that they might have about Catholic worship services, etc.
Instead of being reassured, they got big-eyed and very nervous, retreated and conferred for a few minutes, and then asked me if hubby still, “did the voodoo and drank blood”, or if he had “quit that” when he “left that devil church and found Jesus” and “became a Christian”.
I didn’t even bother trying to explain being agnostic. Better to not be burnt at the stake!
artem1s
@Ken:
Ask and the internet shall provide…
Trump Debt Counter
TBone
I’m grateful for the mandatory Bible education I got at Rosemont College from a Jewish professor. The Jesuit nuns are cool.
TBone
@Mel: JFC!!!!
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: they’re taught that suffering is being just like Jesus and the harder they can wear that disguise the prouder they get. It’s how they “beat the devil.”
Cheryl from Maryland
2024 is the 100th Anniversary of the awful 1924 Immigration Act. Here’s a link to an editorial from the Cardinal News on the links between eugenics and the Act and how long it took to get rid of the awfulness, some of which are still with us. https://cardinalnews.org/2024/02/26/100-years-ago-virginia-authorized-forced-sterilizations-and-a-paper-genocide/
Matt McIrvin
@Eolirin: The question I keep asking myself is: how much can they do with brute force? The right has lost the cultural mainstream, but they may be able to get back control of the government, and by their own statements, they are clearly willing to order the military and law enforcement to kill Americans to get what they want. Tyrants have been able to seize cultural dominance this way before. You just keep killing and brutalizing until the resistance breaks. And there’s always some substantial fraction of the people for whom that is attractive. Look at Putin’s popularity in Russia.
Baud
@Mel:
She might as well have worn a pointy black hat.
3Sice
What Evangelicals mean is they’ve lost the power of coercion. They can’t silence whistleblowers, force the gay kids to code straight, and browbeat wayward members back into the flock.
Various factors at play, like urbanization, the internet, and legal liability.
TBone
@Baud: my favorite Halloween costume! A black velvet, off the shoulder, full length formal gown split to the thigh, stiletto heels, spider web necklace and big pointy hat. I didn’t win the prize tho, the scary surgeons won that year. We dressed my bestie as a Greek Goddess in a toga and oak leaf crown, painted her skin gold.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mel
@Baud: I know! The fact that we had six cats at the time should probably have made me a little more vigilant about villagers with torches and pressing stones. 😸
The preferred Familiar!! And SIX of them, at that!
RaflW
@Ken: I guess he recovered from that shock of recognition (warning Hill link) that Nikki Haley does, no matter what one thinks of her politics, have a more robust resume.
2X governor of a state & former UN Ambassador vs. back-bench House member and cheap vodka scion.
Matt McIrvin
1830s grifters, originally! But, yes, the big revival that made it mainstream was 1970s.
lowtechcyclist
@cmorenc:
The fundamental problem with this is that the Book of Acts is not the tale of a church that acts and feels like they are under siege, even though the persecutions they faced were real. They believed they had something that was bigger and mattered more than what the world could throw at them, and they just kept on doing what they were doing.
So maybe today’s conservative Christians interpret the Gospel story like that, but the Christians who lived in that first century C.E. most certainly didn’t.
Jackie
@artem1s: TIFG has gone appealing AGAIN. He must not be getting any loan offers to pay bond!
Baud
@RaflW:
Yeah, I’d support any Dem over any Republican, but that idea that Haley would play second fiddle to him is ridiculous.
moonbat
@Baud: In the freaky sect in which I was raised, if you were not a member of our Christian sect — no matter what flavor of Christianity you belonged to — you were going to hell. Period. End of story. That attitude seems to have become more widespread in the intervening years.
schrodingers_cat
@Cheryl from Maryland: It was Republicans then and it is Republicans now. Republican party has been problematic for a long long time.
Baud
@moonbat:
Modern liberalism is the only thing that unites right wing religions. They hate each other in any other context.
TBone
@Mel: 🤣
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
And if they are Christians, why should it matter to them in the first place? The New Testament is chock-full of verses saying it damned well shouldn’t.
To pick just one, “the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” – Jesus
TBone
@Baud: 👍
Miss Bianca
@RaflW: And then Haley disses him by nixing the idea – “I’m running as a Republican.”
Honestly, Phillips seems to have devolved rather rapidly. At this rate, he’ll have achieved nothing except lose his House seat.
RaflW
@delphinium: Nikki has already shot down Dean’s brilliant idea. And No Labels seems pretty moribund.
I suppose Dean could offer to be the pathetic #2 on JFK Jr’s slow train to no where.
@Miss Bianca: The good news, as a Minnesotan but not in his district, we’ll probably get a better Rep out of this deal come Nov!
TBone
@moonbat: glad you got out in time
Baud
@RaflW:
He’d get more votes offering the #2 position to RFK’s falcon.
delphinium
@Jackie: Don’t do the crime if you can’t pay the fine.
cain
@New Deal democrat: I’m not so sure. I think it’s probably referring to Mercedes because she was there but it is odd he isn’t looking at Mercedes when he says it
UncleEbeneezer
@Kay: Nice. Are you staying in the park? We have floated the idea of going in off-season (not Summer) times but the limited lodging options in the valley are so damn pricey.
Captain C
@Chief Oshkosh: We need to find a way to do to Useless Mike what they did to Kent in Real Genius.
cain
@twbrandt: Why by hammer swingers everywhere ! The man knows how the use a hammer !
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@cain: Let TFG and his minions do the explaining. It’s our job to raise the questions.
Spanky
@TBone:
My costume too! And I DID win the prize! Two, in fact – both Best Male Costume and Best Female Costume. The long Elvira wig coupled with the mustache might have helped
ETA: That was in my bachelor youth, back in the early ’80s. {Sits back, reminiscing}
RaflW
@moonbat: My formerly Presbyterian former girlfriend in college pretty much believed back then that they had the only path to salvation. We had a huge fight about it after my parents and I took her to our heathen UU congregation on a Sunday.
She’s long since abandoned the church, and even apologized maybe 20 years ago. Which I never expected, nor had felt any need to receive. We’re still friends 40 years later.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: Their reasoning is motivated, I am certain of it. They deny climate change so they can drive gas-guzzling penismobiles without guilt. So there’s a reason that they want to believe that they’re persecuted and suffering, even though they don’t act like they genuinely believe it.
gene108
As every Republican is a good conservative God fearing Christian, why would they be upset with an evangelical revival style meeting?
lowtechcyclist
@Frankensteinbeck:
Too bad, so sad. :-D
They might try living it instead of saying it. Or they might just get pissed off at the world for being so cruel to them. I’m betting on the latter – not much of a bet, really, since it’s what they’ve been doing all along.
Jackie
@Miss Bianca: Phillips has already lost his congressional seat; so he’s achieved that goal 😁
Eyeroller
@TBone: Rapture mythology is much older than that. It first emerged in the 1830s in adherents of Edward Irving (1792-1834) and is especially associated with John Darby (1800-1882). It actually originated in the UK and Darby played a big role in bringing it to the US in the 1860s. Like so many other theological issues, it is partly about translations and interpretations thereof, particularly for certain Greek words. Edit: and as Matt said, it was popularized a lot in the 1970s, plus late 90s by the “Left Behind” books.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: The dates on that analysis have always been a bit hilarious to me since they’re so late– they were saying the same thing when I was a kid except the time when society went all to hell was the 60s.
There’s something real there since it’s far more acceptable to be non-religious than it used to be. But the idea that being Christian is now a negative is bizarre. Being a homophobic, bedroom-policing, creationist bigot is now a negative.
Spanky
New news from WaPo:
smith
Hey, RFK Jr is poised for a surge! He just came out against child support — that’ll win the women’s vote for sure!
Soprano2
@Suzanne: It’s because they don’t control the culture anymore. It used to be that Hollywood made movies based on what they found acceptable, same with radio and then TV, same with music and magazines and books and pretty much everything else. The vast majority of people in the U.S. identified as Christian in some way, and the majority of those attended church at least semi-regularly. They controlled most of the culture so it was comfortable for them. My theory about what’s happening now is that they want to make everything comfortable for themselves again, which means massive changes in popular culture that most people don’t want. That’s why they feel persecuted, because there are openly gay people on TV and movies and everywhere else, and because interracial relationships are now seen as normal, and because it’s now acceptable for people to get divorced and women to work outside the home and use birth control and have sex outside of marriage, and they want to get rid of all of that. If they can’t do it by popular demand, then they’ll try to do it through the law.
Baud
@Spanky:
👍
TBone
@Captain C: 😆
schrodingers_cat
RWNJs want to be obeyed without any dissent. They want to be loved when they have their boot on your neck. That to them is respect. They use religion to satify their sadistic urges. I have dealt with people like these all my life. They will also tell you that they are doing this for your own good.
Christians don’t have a monopoly on religious nutjobs who want respect. India is a very traditional country and even before BJP weaponized religion as a political force they have existed since millenia. Now their proclivities have the seal of approval from the state.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I agree. Like, it’s fucken ludicrous to me that anybody could look at the country today and conclude that it’s a social negative to be Christian. (Or a dude, or white, or straight, or whatever.)
Equality looks like oppression, etc etc etc.
Mel
@Spanky
@TBone: A trio of witches are we!
This was my favorite Halloween ensemble as well!
Dressing as Hester Prynne for a Catholic school Halloween staff party, with my friend the failed novice priest dressed as Dimmesdale, was a close second…
Baud
@smith:
Wait, women can still vote?
TBone
@Spanky: I LOVE THAT!
TBone
@RaflW: that’s doin it correctly!
Glidwrith
@Kay: Are you used to high altitude? The sequoias are significantly above sea level.
TBone
@Mel: ❤️
Ksmiami
@lowtechcyclist: my take is if it’s fiery pits or eternity with fundamentalist Xtians, pass me a margarita and I’ll plunk down a towel by the fire. I pray everyday they get raptured and leave the rest of us alone
moonbat
@TBone:
Yup, at age 12 I bailed. And was told by my own mother I was going to hell.
Spanky
@Baud:
They’re still working at that one.
Soprano2
@New Deal democrat: People with dementia have good days and bad days, too, so it doesn’t surprise me that he might seem OK some of the time. Confusing names in and of itself doesn’t mean much – how many parents with more than one child don’t call them by each other’s names on a fairly regular basis – but not correcting it, or not knowing you did it, is something else. Taken with everything else we’ve seen for the past few years, I tend to lean more and more toward the idea that he does indeed have some type of dementia, which they are doing their best to conceal from everyone. Most people of his age don’t regularly take that test he made famous; my husband has taken it twice now, because with dementia patients they give it every six months to chart declines. I think everyone over 65 should take it every year, to have a baseline if nothing else.
TBone
@Soprano2: if you like movies, Far From Heaven is pretty good on these themes.
Spanky
@Ksmiami:
Just out of curiosity, who are you praying to?
Yarrow
@Matt McIrvin:
This seems apt in response to your observation on those dates:
moonbat
@RaflW:
I’m glad she saw the light, so to speak.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Suzanne: Well, I actually agree that fundamentalist Christians have lost status and the space in which they can thrive openly is more constrained. I believe this because hostility to homosexuality and sex outside of marriage (for women at least) is frowned on, not just broadly in the culture, but the workplace too. Plus, they do feel that God ordained that women must submit to men, have, and raise children. Part of that is the belief there are only 2 genders and that men and women have different roles in society. These things used to be the social consensus and now they aren’t.
If I’m honest, if someone declares themselves Christian, I’m like, ‘Uh oh.’ I’m instantly on guard. That means, whether I mean to be or not, I’m not going to be as warm or welcoming to them. I don’t trust that they won’t be hostile to me as a lesbian, to me as a woman leader, or to other people I know (especially trans people). So the view that being Christian is perceived as a negative, particularly in metropolitan areas where the money and opportunities are, is not wrong.
Suzanne
@Soprano2: I agree that popular representation/imagecraft is much more diverse than it used to be. I still can’t think of any media that depicts Christians negatively.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: thank you! I’ll be rereading up on that.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Matt McIrvin:
That is the same thing as being a fundamentalist Christian.
smith
@Baud: Well, if their husbands are generous enough to let them.
I just found out yesterday that in three states women can’t get divorced, with no exceptions for domestic abuse (overlooking, of course, the fact that the chances of a woman being abused go up when she’s pregnant).
TBone
@Cheryl from Maryland: that’s important, thank you for posting.
Cheryl from Maryland
@schrodingers_cat: Yes. The descriptions in the article of the state of Virginia threatening to prosecute women whose children “didn’t look white’” is appalling. So reminiscent of accusations now of women who “look male.”
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: we’ll have to smite them in advance.
Jackie
@Spanky: Heard that great news last Fri, I believe! Hope it happens this week so we can celebrate another Putin loss!
Kay
@Glidwrith:
I’m not. I was caught unware by higher altitude hiking in Arizona but now I know it’ll be different and how it will be different. My husband plays a lot of tennis and pickleball and basketball and he swims – he’s really fit- and he was winded easily too. We just went super slow. I like to try to identify plants and trees in the west – I love that they’re unfamiliar to me – so going super slow is okay with me. I have to look :)
TBone
@Suzanne: here’s a prize winner.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_from_Heaven
UncleEbeneezer
Right? Yeah let’s look at all those terribly unpopular people like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B, most K-pop stars, most Country artists, Travis Kelce, Patrick Mahomes, Tom Brady, Lebron James, Steph Curry, Serena and Venus Williams, Coco Gauff, etc.
The list of the most popular people on the planet (at least in America and the West) is still predominantly filled with open Christians.
TBone
@Jackie: 😆👍
lowtechcyclist
@TBone:
It’s often far from easy in practice. But you’d think that the theory, at least, would be pretty straightforward.
moonbat
You know, it’s not a coincidence that the strongest white evangelical Christian movement is based in the southern states and they now equate Trump and his racist rhetoric with him being “God’s instrument”. He’s resurrected for them the the old Biblical justifications that white southern Christians told themselves back in the day made slavery part of God’s plan for the Negro. They want that god-given white superiority back with a vengeance.
As Kay would say, Obama’s eight years in office broke them. They saw his success the same way the Reconstruction states saw the election of their first black representatives as a perversion of the natural order of things.
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: it’s too beta.
Betty Cracker
@Suzanne: I agree, and the same is true of so-called “heartland” locales and small town life. They very often get more favorable depictions than they deserve.
TBone
@moonbat: exactly correct.
lowtechcyclist
@Wag:
Oh, they’d come up with some excuse why these people had disappeared, probably coming up with a verse here and there to claim that God had hauled them all off to Hell.
Nah, my ‘Rapture’ would actually do this world some good, by getting rid of a whole lot of people who are doing the opposite.
Subsole
@lowtechcyclist:
That’s also part of the ‘reverse racism’ crap. They want sooooo bad to suffer like blacks have. Just without actually being, y’know, inconvenienced.
Suzanne
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: See, I almost-but-don’t-quite-agree with you. I think right-wing Christians absolutely can still operate the way they want to. They still hold plenty of positions of power and authority and responsibility and access to resources.
What has changed is that more people don’t automatically see them positively. But I don’t see any active discrimination or even social marginalization.
More like the “public square” has gotten bigger and broader so their piece of it is a smaller percentage….. but they haven’t actively lost anything.
cain
@Jeffro: If GOP voters are considering to vote for Biden then they are deep shit. What I’m hoping is that we start making in-roads in local legislatures. This needs to happen if we want to save ourselves.
it’s not about the federal – it’s about state and local legislatures who are gerrymandering and doing other things to keep a hold on power. We need to break it utterly.
Eolirin
@Suzanne: It enables violence and the persecution of others they engage in and push for.
louc
@Betty Cracker:
Anecdote is not data but I have RWNJ relatives on Facebook and one of them has come out for Nikki Haley. Trump’s appeal is waning. This guy is a Robert Heinlein fan (yeah, he’s scary).
Geminid
@Spanky: Sweden has been integrating it’s military forces with Nato’s for some time now, but their accession to the Nato Alliance will formally end over 200 years of neutrality dating from 1815.
Baud
@Geminid: What Napoleon established, Putin destroyed.
Eolirin
@Suzanne: They’ve actively lost the ability to drive out dissenting voices from the square. That’s what they’re upset about. It’s never coming back either, except at the end of a gun. And they know it.
rikyrah
@MattF:
Clap clap clap
lowtechcyclist
@TBone:
It’s how they “beat the devil.”
Beat the Devil? Not one of Bogart’s best movies, but still worth watching. ;-)
Kay
@UncleEbeneezer:
We are staying in the park. I spent two days looking online and kept ending up back at the park so finally just committed.
I think we’ll like the olde timey park rooms – they look like every midwestern lake cottage – weird paneling on everything and 1970’s colors :)
Very wooden. Rooms with wood in them.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: A few years ago I watched Joe Scarborough interview a fellow Baptist. The guy was a theologian and they were talking about End Times beliefs. The guest attributed the popularization of these ideas among modern Evangelicals to Hal Lindsey’s book The Late, Great Planet Earth, published in 1970.
Huh, I thought. I remember looking at the NYT Best Sellers list back then and seeing that book a lot. It turns out that the New York Times labeled The Late, Great Planet Earth the best-selling “nonfiction” book of the 1970s.
Subsole
@Soprano2:
Also, he keeps adding things on to the dementia test.
‘Man. Person. Camera.’
Has now become ‘Man. Person. Camera. Whale. Radio.’
Also, too, the man lies more than he breathes. No way in hell, heaven, or limbo he aced that puppy if he’s up there bragging about passing it. Man has refried pudding between his ears.
The thing is, if he and his followers were just…not even good, just marginally less repulsive…I’d feel kind of bad for him.
lowtechcyclist
@Eyeroller:
Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth was the book that the Rapture believers were all into in the 1970s.
scav
It seems to really piss many of them off that they can announce themselves as “Christian” and not immediately be embraced and hailed as necessarily good in all thoughts, opinions, and actions. They actually have to do good — as defined by a general culture, no less! — things to get the gold star.
lowtechcyclist
@Spanky:
I think the WaPo misspelled ‘Baltic’ Sea.
lowtechcyclist
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
I feel the same way, and I’m a Christian.
Jinchi
@OzarkHillbilly: Evangelicals are usually very good at twisting the word of God to say whatever they need it to in the moment.
Unfortunately for Johnson, the Republican god speaks directly from the temple at Mar a Lago.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I think they equate Christianity not always being depicted as positive (for example, saying it’s bad to be bigoted against gay/transgender people) as being discriminated against. For example, there is a lot of braying on the right about the jury where two conservative Christians were disqualified because the defendant was a lesbian; her attorney asked the judge to disqualify them because they thought the Christians couldn’t judge her case fairly because they were openly prejudiced against gay people. It was upheld by the court, and this is being portrayed on the right as “discrimination against Bible-believing Christians” rather than what it is, disqualification of people who have a pre-existing prejudice against the defendant. Open racists would be disqualified from being on a jury where the defendant was the race they are racist again, too. They thought they could be fair even though they are openly bigoted against the defendant already!
Uncle Cosmo
@Baud: So Ronna is being pasturized while the GOP is becoming homogenized.
(I intend to milk that concept for all it’s worth…;^p)
Uncle Cosmo
I keep holding out for the Crapture – when every Old Testament “Christian” gets lifted up bodily & dropped face-down into the intake pond of a nearby sewage treatment facility.
Jinchi
@UncleEbeneezer: When I moved to Texas for college I was surprised to discover that the type of person who’ll ask a stranger “are you a Christian?” usually don’t include Catholics among their number.
I expect most other Christians don’t count, either.
FelonyGovt
@Suzanne: That “Positive World” analysis is very interesting, but his time frames may be off. I remember when so many people were putting that Christian “fish” on their cars and their business cards, etc,, I think as early as the 1980’s. I always made sure to count my fingers after dealing with any of those people, and I remember rejecting one or two job applicants who put that fish on their resumes!
ETA: bottom line, I think they created the backlash their own damn selves.
RaflW
@Spanky: Hoping this makes it easier for Saab to sell fighter jets.
(Defense News – Feb. 22) “Stockholm has been touting the possibility of sending the Gripen JAS39 to Ukraine for several months now, but has made any decision on this contingent upon the country’s accession to NATO. …
“There remains a big push coming from inside and outside of Sweden for us to send the Gripen to Ukraine, and we stand ready to provide these should a decision be reached by the government on this,” Mikael Franzén, chief marketing officer at Saab said.
Anyway
@Kay:
Yet to visit Yosemite but love Armstrong Redwoods Grove in Sonoma County. Those trees are simply magnificent .
Matt McIrvin
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Yes… I can see that being the type of Christian who pointedly declares “I am a Christian” would be a social negative. Because most people figured out that those people mean something very specific and nonstandard by “Christian” that does not, in fact, include most Christians.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
Not sure he’s in cahoots but he is a tool. A very, very dull, useless, rusty door stop.
How a piece of wood gets rusty is pretty damn amazing.
But he manages…..
Ksmiami
@Spanky: the universe and Mrs. Karma. I’m actually an atheist now
cain
@Baud: Wait till they get a load of Hinduism and all the lamps we burn!
Mr. Bemused Senior
@FelonyGovt: when did the Darwin fish start to appear?
Suzanne
@FelonyGovt:
I could not agree harder.
UncleEbeneezer
@Kay: Oh I assume you are staying at the Wawona or Ahwahnee. Both look great but pricey. We stayed in the tent-cabins in Curry Village during the Summer and those are a cool option if you don’t mind very basic setups, and the crowds, which get pretty bad in Summer.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
The people who would self-identify as “Christians” are usually the nondenominational evangelical kind. Most mainline Christians and members of historically Black churches would identify as their denomination or as Protestant, Mormons will identify as LDS, most Catholics will say that they’re Catholic or even identify with their order. Thats why I say that we have a terminology problem: there’s a lot of people who are aligned with some form of Christianity but who usually don’t say so, and then there’s people claiming the term “Christian” who don’t actually include those other people and would like to make it more exclusive.
ETA: And that’s to say nothing of the Orthodox.
artem1s
@Suzanne:
They want the
influencemoney.The shift of evangelicals television and radio networks grifting 24/7/365 has a lot to do with the secular world turning away in disgust. Robertson and his ilk on the 700 Club never missed an opportunity to down punch on the downtrodden if they thought they could get Papaw or Meemaw to send them a couple of bucks out of their SS checks every month.
Spanky
@lowtechcyclist:
You were not alone:
Spanky
A half century ago, a bunch of friends went on a camping trip to Central PA. They happened to be in Saint Marys, PA on Sunday morning and asked a local where the nearest Catholic church was. He looked them up and down and said “We’ve got a lot of mighty fine churches in this town, but we don’t have one of those.”
Well alrighty, then! Time to skip town.
Matt McIrvin
@Mr. Bemused Senior: I remember the Darwin fish being really big in the 1990s. Not sure if they’re older than that.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: Yes, there was even a movie (TV movie?) adaptation that I think was narrated by Orson Welles, unless I’m mixing it up with the “Prophecies of Nostradamus” one (he’d do just about anything for a buck at this point).
wjca
Of course women can vote!
They get their ballots, they fill them out as their husband directs, and send them in. Or, if not yet married, their father fills the ballot in for them. Or, if widowed, a son or brother takes on the burden. But yeah, definitely allowed to cast (carefully vetted) ballots.
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: ❤️
Matt McIrvin
@Spanky: You know, I’d have expected the name “Saint Marys” to indicate a place where there WOULD be a Catholic church, but names can fool you I guess.
wjca
Not true. Being a fundamentalist Christian is merely a subset. Lots of other religions’ fundamentalists are all in on the same bigotry.
Citizen Alan
@Frankensteinbeck: Prior to the mid-90s, God generally wasn’t telling people to do demonstrably evil things. People forget that pre-Moral Majority, the SBC was cautiously approving of Roe v Wade. It still astonishes me that evangelicals now overwhelmingly insist that personhood begins at conception, even when conception refers to a doctor injecting a spermatozoa into an embryo in a petri dish when, as recently as the 1970s, Baptist seminaries generally agreed that personhood began with the first breath.
Citizen Alan
@Frankensteinbeck:
Also, this reminds me of the absurdity of this attitude about “God told me”: Does anyone remember an incident where the Fifth Circuit (yeah, even they thought it was crazy) had to step in when the Texas Supreme Court, in two cases decided within a few months of each other, announced that a person who murdered their children because God told them to was obviously insane but a person who did so because the Devil told them to was not, because, as everyone knows, God is good and would never tell someone to drown their kids in the bathtub, whereas anyone should know not to do something that the Devil told them to. Anybody else remember that?
Matt McIrvin
@artem1s: I remember being struck by how much those televangelists went on about the POWWWR of the Loooorrd-uh. You got a definite sense that power was the main thing about God that impressed them. If they thought Satan was more powerful they’d jump ship in a heartbeat.
Citizen Alan
@Suzanne: Hell, I am convinced that most of them wouldn’t be Christian if they didn’t believe that it would (or at least should) give them unearned status. I truly believe most Evangelical Christians, if some contrived circumstances forced them to move to an Islamic country, would convert to Islam within six months at most. And after two years, all of them would have beards down to their navels and be screaming that America is the Great Satan.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: Silk long underwear is the best, IMO. For the innermost layer.
TBone
@moonbat: my mom told me I was a mistake once when she was really, really mad. Might’ve felt similar to how you must’ve felt upon hearing that. I said “Well, YOU made it!”
Paul in KY
@Kay: Sure hope y’all have a great time in the dystopian, irradiated, wasteland that San Francisco must be…
TBone
@Soprano2: my mom, in the middle of her raging dementia, saw a chyron on TV that said “President” Trump. She shouted at the top of her lungs “THATS IMPOSSIBLE!!!” It took me twenty minutes to calm her down. “We’ll keep a good eye on him.”
We lived on Long Island when I was little, mom loved NYC.
Paul in KY
@Jeffro: I think we should always focus on how incompetent he is and how he punches down in business (stiffs good hard working men & woman). The many icky points about his social personality don’t seem to phase people who I think are receptive to the ‘he just sucks at being president’ argument.
Citizen Alan
@lowtechcyclist: Well, I wouldn’t want that, because if the Rapture actually happens like Evangelicals expect it to, it would mean that God really is the depraved monster they all proudly worship and the rest of us would be fucked to hell … literally.
That said, I vaguely recall reading a short story many years back in which “the Rapture” happened and ever devout fundamentalist Christian disappeared in a flash of light and then reappeared in Heaven … which turned out to be an alien space craft piloted by duplicitous aliens who realized that fundamentalist Christians would willingly become a slave race to anyone who could trick them into thinking they were in Heaven and the aliens are actually angels.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: At the time, I lumped The Late, Great Planet Earth in with Chariots of the Gods and the Atlantis books; so much New Age crap. I had little idea how influential Lindsay’s book was. But I also thought that fundamentalist Christianity was fading and could not conceive it becoming a political force.
I wonder if fundamentalist preachers of the time sensed that their brand of Christianity was fading and politicized it in order to maintain relevance.
They might have latched onto Lindsay’s book for similar reasons. It’s premise was arguably non-Biblical but it sure was popular among unchurched people who were potential recruits.
Paul in KY
@Mel: My parents toured all around the country when they retired. They thought Yosemite was the prettiest.
Citizen Alan
@TBone: The deciding factor in my rejection of Christianity was the realize of just how cruel Christianity can make people. I think w/o Christianity, good people would still be good people and bad people would still be bad people. But I strongly believe you would see a lost less of good people doing bad things like thinking a 10yo incest victim should be forced to carry her step-father’s baby to term because “God can accomplish good things through bad people, and so he put a soul in that incest baby at the moment of its conception. As a way of testing the 10yo mother.”
Citizen Alan
@Geminid: To be fair to the NYT book reviewers, unlike the Left Behind excrement, The Late Great Planet Earth had no plot and was presented as a straightforward summation of biblical prophecies re the End Times and speculation about how then-current real world events seemed to fulfil said prophecies. I read it when I was in junior high and found it compelling … because I was in junior high. As I recall, the author, Hal Lindsay, was riding high because the European Council (precursor to the EU) was on the cusp of getting 9 members at the time, with a 10-member EC satisfying Lindsay’s interpretation of the “Great Beast with Ten Heads” prophecy. And then the EC got it’s tenth member … followed quickly by it’s eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, etc etc all without the Antichrist ever coming to power.
Citizen Alan
@lowtechcyclist: “Declare”? Yeah, I’m the same. I know a lot of good people who go to church every Sunday and read their Bibles regularly and aren’t in your face about it. But anyone who five minutes into your first conversation with them announces that he’s a Christian for some reason is a red flag in my book. When I was in private practice in MS, without fail, the lawyers who put Bible verses in their advertising were always the shadiest.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: Nothing will ever top A Thief In the Night, which I was forced to watch the night before I “spontaneously” made my profession of faith and joined my parents’ Baptist Church. It started with the Rapture and ended with the main character being dragged to a guillotine for refusing to take the Mark of the Beast. I was 9.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: One of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen on TV that wasn’t completely fictional was a bit of religious programming on a local cable access show that featured “Power Lifters for Christ” or something like that. A bunch of ridiculously swole men who would do things like tear apart phone books with their bare hands “in the name of the Lord!!!” while a hysterical emcee would scream at the audience, exhorting them to pray for the muscle-head to succeed in his holy task.
Ruckus
@RevRick:
I think they don’t really know what they want. Turn back time? First it’s SURE, and then they look around and well no, not really. Second it’s any republican/conservative and then they look at the participants and the world they live in and well no, not really.
The point is that they are lost. The world has changed and now their way works even less than it use to, which was always not well at all. I’m an old, and I’ve watched the world grow from very restrained, people who breathed in and out and didn’t do any more because they might antagonize someone or some one might call them out because they were trying to stop time, except that never, ever works. Most of us know that the world has changed dramatically in the lifetime of anyone older than a 6th grader. And a lot of people don’t have a clue how to deal with that. Or want to deal with it. But that is what we have, what we are, and we learn or stuff our heads up our behinds, which seems like it would be a bit stupid, uncomfortable, and gross. The world is not the same as it was, it never has been, but the change happens a lot faster now and affects a lot more people. And that is hard for many to deal with. Take shitforbrains – please. His world has never made sense or been what he thinks it is. He is a person who should NEVER have been put into the job of being in charge – NEVER. First of all he can’t even run his own life, how did anyone think he could run a country? He’s the doofus who thinks that money is the linchpin of life. And yes it has a level of importance because it’s how most get food and shelter but hoarding it, and giving it a level of importance over every other thing and thinking it’s the meaning of life only makes everything else worse. He’s just in the public vision, a person who has zero concept of anything but money, and even there he’s wrong 99.99% of the time. And while he can’t even reasonably run his own life, how many people thought he’s the one – all because he has money and thinks that money is the end all – and it’s not, it is only a way to value the things we trade – work for money to buy food, shelter and maybe some entertainment.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@SiubhanDuinne: One of my favorite moments from that trial – total (inadvertent) repudiation of his earlier statement that E. Jean “wasn’t his type”. Ha!
Ironcity
@Ironcity:
@Chief Oshkosh: You are right that that is not how shutdowns have gone and your description of experience is right on, it’s been mine for the last 40+ years of civil service. What I’m thinking is the thing to do is not play it business as usual and allow the Republican Lucy to pull the football away at the last second from the sane people Charlie Brown but switch it up a little. I’m thinking on the order of run up toward the ball Lucy is holding and then kicking Lucy in the whatever is handy, repeating as necessary, while calmly explaining that this is what is happening this time when they play their stupid game. If they feel like playing the same stupid game again, they may and we will have another interesting consequence for them. From the outside at least it appears something like this is what the administration is going for and the new rules may be explained at the meeting tomorrow.
Ironcity
@Matt McIrvin: That part of Pennsylvania has a number of French names from the pre and colonial eras so it can fool you. Especially some where the pronunciation is butchered by the very non-French inhabitants.
Ruckus
@SiubhanDuinne:
He’s never been all that tightly anchored to reality, he’s like a helium filled balloon with a very, very long string. His direction varies, depending on the winds, the company he keeps, and how good a grasp he has on reality, and those tiny hands have a very hard time getting a good grasp on anything resembling reality. His tiny brain makes it even more difficult.
Nelle
@OzarkHillbilly: Some of the best is merino-possum, a blend in New Zealand. Different kind of possum altogether. And, since I am in New Zealand, I’m about to go get some for my DIL, a Minnesota gal who swears by them.
By the way, I’m in bliss at my heart home. My grandchildren are my heart people, but my heart home is here in New Zealand 🇳🇿. As my sisters noted, I am more at peace here than anywhere. Iowa will be hard to go back to. I’d go back and forth more often, but that 12 hours across the Pacific is harder the older I get.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@wjca:
Fair point.
Chris T.
@Nelle: Long dead thread but:
Huh, never tried that. I got a nice merino wool sweater-jacket-y thing one Feb in NZ before a flight back to a freezing airport in the US because the day I’d left for NZ it was not nearly so freezing and I hadn’t brought a big heavy winter coat with me. Still have the merino wool thing, use it here in the Pacific NorthWet sometimes because it’s light and warm and holds up when it gets damp etc. I’ve long been convinced that merino is the best, but maybe there’s something even better…
Yeah, alas. Though I now also have the Spousal Unit so it’s also twice as expensive. 😀
evodevo
@Citizen Alan:
With or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” Steven Weinberg, physicist and Nobel Laureate