September 29, 2015:
John Boehner trashes conservative groups who force agenda
By Eric Bradner , CNN
Updated 12:54 PM ET, Sun September 27, 2015
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COMMENT: After all the pressure on Mr. Boehner, from his own party, over such a long period of time, he has decided to leave. It is an incredible move, especially since he describes his Republican enemies as “false prophets.” |
Washington (CNN) John Boehner lashed out at "false prophets" in the right's ranks, blaming them for political strategies that "never had a chance" even while taking the government into fiscal crises.
"Absolutely, they're not realistic," the retiring House speaker said of hard-line conservatives and outside groups in a Sunday interview on CBS' "Face the Nation."
He pointed to the October 2013 shutdown after conservative House Republicans demanded the repeal of President Barack Obama's signature health care law as one maneuver -- led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz -- that was never going to succeed.
"The Bible says beware of false prophets. And there are people out there, you know, spreading noise about how much can get done. I mean this whole notion that we're going to shut down the government to get rid of Obamacare in 2013 -- this plan never had a chance," Boehner said.
Boehner said conservative, Washington-based groups knew the goals they were championing couldn't be accomplished but pressed for them anyway.
"And so, we've got groups here in town, members of the House and Senate here in town, who whipped people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know -- they know -- are never going to happen," he said.
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http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/27/politics/john-boehner-ted-cruz-conservative-groups/
Why John Boehner quit
Updated 8:32 AM ET, Sat September 26, 2015 |
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(CNN)House Speaker John Boehner on Friday seized control of an ending that was beginning to feel inevitable.
Boehner had wanted to end his run last year, but was concerned about destabilizing the House Republican caucus. He was ready to announce his resignation on his birthday this November. But Friday, one day after the emotional, historic visit by Pope Francis to Capitol Hill, Boehner found his moment.
"I decided today is the day I'm going to do this, simple as that," Boehner said at a Capitol Hill press conference, saying his decision came after a night of sleep and prayers.
The decision marked a tumultuous end to Boehner's nearly six-year tenure leading the fractured Republican caucus, a time marked by repeated fiscal clashes with the White House, failed deal-makings with President Barack Obama and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, but also a rare bipartisan accord on trade and the historic papal visit.
Boehner was elevated to the speakership thanks to the power of tea party candidates in 2010 and then limited by what he could accomplish because of them. The conservative bloc of lawmakers consistently pressed Boehner to take a harder line with Obama and Democrats, a strategy Boehner, a consummate dealmaker, did not always embrace.
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http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/25/politics/why-john-boehner-quit/
We are a corporate theocracy now: The Christian right seeks cultural and political domination
Christian rights plan is simple: Dominate courts, state legislatures, and push their twisted morality on all of us
July 3, 2014 | C.J. Werleman
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“If fascism comes to America, it will not be identified with any “shirt” movement, nor with an “insignia,” but it will probably be “wrapped up in the flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution,” wrote in a 1936 issue of The Christian Century. Nobel Laureate recipient Sinclair Lewis put it even more succinctly when he warned, “It [fascism] would come wrapped in the flag and whistling the Star Spangled Banner.”
No one who has followed the rise of the Christian Right in national politics over the course of the past three decades should be surprised by Monday’s Supreme Court decision to grant corporations religious personhood. It was as predictable as Pat Robertson saying something stupid about gay sex. The hyper religious conservatives on the bench of the nation’s high court, all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, see the federal government as being controlled by ‘secular humanists’ who wish to make war against the purity of the Christian belief system. Like the 89 million Americans who count themselves as evangelicals, they seek total cultural and political domination.
Not only is the Christian Right the most politically agitated and reliable voting bloc of the Republican Party, but it is also emboldened like no other time in their warped history. With recent efforts to legalize discrimination against gay Americans defeated, the Hobby Lobby case against the Affordable Care Act has reenergized the theocratic wing of the GOP base — the wing that is now the party’s fuselage. Throw red meat to their holier than thou rationalizations and they won’t care what big business does to this great nation. They care for one thing – turning America into a theocratic regime. Don’t be fooled by the flag-waving and the obnoxious hyper-masculine jingoistic platitudes; the Christian Right does not love America unconditionally. They love America on the condition that representatives they help get elected are carrying out their political agenda.
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GOP insider: Religion destroyed my party
A veteran Republican says the religious right has taken over, and turned his party into anti-intellectual nuts
Sunday, Aug 5, 2012 12:00 PM EST
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COMMENT: Mike Lofgren doesn’t use the description “false prophet” and yet, he details an environment that precisely parallels the prophetic application of the term. |
Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.
Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.
The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.
Click on Link:
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/05/republicans_slouching_toward_theocracy/
David Lane: Republican Presidential Hopefuls' Favorite 'Christian Nation' Extremist
Submitted by Peter Montgomery on
Wednesday, 7/17/2013 11:02 am
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COMMENT: Is this then, the true intent of these persons listed below who are presently running for President of the United States in the year 2016? |
Senators and presidential hopefuls Rand Paul and Ted Cruz will head to Iowa this week as featured speakers at a closed-door event for conservative pastors that has been organized by David Lane, an anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-Mormon, Christian-nation absolutist who has declared war, not only on secularism and separation of church and state, but also on establishment Republicans who don’t embrace his vision of an America in which the Bible serves as “the principle textbook” for public education and a “Christian culture” has been “re-established.” He decries Supreme Court rulings on prayer and Bible reading in public schools, and says, “It’s easily defended that America was founded by Christians, as a Christian nation.”
To be fair to Paul and Cruz, they are only the latest Republican presidential hopefuls who have allied themselves with the zealous David Lane in order to tap his network of politically engaged pastors. Lane has been holding “pastors briefings” in 15 states since the mid-1990s. He wrote last year that state Restoration and Renewal projects had hosted more than 10,000 pastors and spouses in ten states since 2005 alone, in events that have been used to engage pastors in anti-gay initiative battles and introduce them to politicians favored by Lane. Pastors’ expenses are covered with money from the American Family Association and other religious right mega-donors. The American Renewal Project operates as a project of the AFA; Lane also operates the California-based Pastors and Pews.
Texas Governor Rick Perry is also reportedly scheduled to participate in this week’s Iowa gathering, which may confirm his apparent interest in another run for the presidency. Perry has a long-term relationship with Lane. In 2005 and 2006, Lane and his network played a huge role in mobilizing support for Perry’s re-election as governor. Six pastors briefings were held around the state, and all six were addressed by Perry. As Governor, Perry hasn’t disappointed Lane and his friends.
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57% of Republicans Say Dismantle Constitution and Make Christianity National Religion
Wednesday, February, 25th, 2015, 3:58 pm
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COMMENT: Dismantling the constitution. What a thought! Oh yes! Came across a statement written in 1885: “By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shallrepudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government , and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near.” Testimonies for the church, vol. 5, p. 451. Notice the Dictionary definition of the word “Repudiate.” Repudiated, repudiating: to reject as having no authority or binding force: to repudiate a claim. To refuse to acknowledge and pay (a debt), as a state, municipality. |
A Public Policy Polling (PPP) national survey conducted between February 20th and February 22nd of Republican voters, found that an astonishing 57 percent of Republicans want to dismantle the Constitution, and establish Christianity as the official national religion. Only 30 percent oppose making Christianity the national religion.
Although the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment clearly states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” GOP voters want to cast aside that provision and impose Christianity as the official American religion.
While a number of red states have passed statutes forbidding the implementation of Islam-based sharia law in their states, Republicans apparently have no misgivings about turning the United States into a Christian theocracy. The poll’s crosstabs reveal that support for making Christianity the official religion is strongest among Mike Huckabee (94 percent), Rick Perry (83 percent), and Ben Carson (78 percent) supporters.
Ben Carson is the preferred presidential candidate of those who want to impose Christianity on the nation with 24 percent support. Mike Huckabee and Scott Walker are tied for 2nd place at 16 percent. Scott Walker (35 percent) and Jeb Bush (22 percent) are the leading candidates among GOP voters who do not want to establish a national religion.
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