Thursday, July 28th, 2011
Stephan: I certainly think they are corrupt. Only a few in the crude bags of money way -- Vice President Spiro Agnew getting bulging paper envelopes of cash in his office. But we have legitimized bribery, and now that the conservative, and ethically compromised Supreme Court has opened the floodgates, it is growing exponentially. Rasmussen is a conservative polling organization.
Voters are more convinced than ever that most congressmen are crooks.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 46% of Likely U.S. Voters now view most members of Congress as corrupt. That’s up seven points from June and the highest finding yet recorded. Just 29% think most members are not corrupt, and another 25% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Similarly, a whopping 85% of voters think most members of Congress are more interested in helping their own careers than in helping other people. That’s a record high for surveys stretching back to early November 2006. Only seven percent (7%) believe most of the legislators are more interested in helping others.
These findings come at a time when voter approval of the job Congress is doing has fallen to a new low. Just six percent (6%) of voters now rate Congress’ performance as good or excellent. Sixty-one percent (61%) think the national legislators are doing a poor job.
Rasmussen Reports has asked these questions monthly since June 2008 and sporadically before that.
While some believe that people hate Congress in general but love their own representative, just 31% believe their own representative is the best person […]
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Thursday, July 28th, 2011
JASON COPPOLA, - truthout.org
Stephan: This is part of the emerging trend in which Atlantic Caucasian cultural values will no longer be the dominate worldview. Some will find this very uncomfortable, but research data makes it clear it is true. It is the history no one wants to teach, and it isn't just peculiar to us. Throughout history come cultures have dominated and others have been dominated. But we live in this swing of the pendulum.
Ask of Me and I shall Give to thee the Heathen as Thine Inheritance and the Uttermost parts of the Earth for Thy Possession. -Psalms 2:8
Margarita Gutierrez Romero is the president of the State Coordinator of Indigenous Women Organizations in Chiapas, Mexico. In New York City to participate in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), Romero told us, ‘Indigenous peoples are being permanently alienated from our being. We are being stripped, ripped off, and plundered of our values, our spirituality, our spirits, even of our gods,’ she said.
During the two weeks of the annual May forum, indigenous peoples and nations from every corner of the globe converge on the original Lenape island of Manhattan in order to have their voices heard by the world body concerning the violations of their rights, environmental destruction, rising suicide rates, water contamination, as well the effects of climate change.
Romero was speaking at a side event about the root of the problems affecting her people – the dehumanization caused by the ‘Doctrine of Christian Discovery.’
The ‘doctrine,’ which will be the theme of next year’s highly anticipated UNPFII, would have sounded like conspiracy not too long ago.
Today, thanks to exhaustive research by indigenous […]
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Thursday, July 28th, 2011
LAURIE GOODSTEIN, - The New York Times
Stephan: I take this as good news for believing Catholics. I think the Church has three choices: evolve, wither, or schism. The first stages of this rising recalls for me abolition, the suffrage movement, and civil rights.
More than 150 Roman Catholic priests in the United States have signed a statement in support of a fellow cleric who faces dismissal for participating in a ceremony that purported to ordain a woman as a priest, in defiance of church teaching.
The Rev. Roy Bourgeois has received letters from the Vatican threatening dismissal for his role in a ceremony that purported to ordain Janice Sevre-Duszynska, far right, as a priest.
Related
The American priests’ action follows closely on the heels of a ‘Call to Disobedience
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Thursday, July 28th, 2011
Stephan: I haven't had a story offend me to this degree in some time. This is where the trend of our fear and paranoia has taken us, a level of moral corruption I never thought to see in my country. That it is being done in my name outrages me.
This was one story from our open-ended war: Last year, in a remote area of Afghanistan, 10 medical aid workers were ambushed and killed by militants. The New York Times Magazine and Slate published moving remembrances of some of the victims: Karen Woo, a British doctor who wanted to make a documentary about the lives of people in remote areas of Afghanistan; Tom Little and Dan Terry, who had spent decades bringing health care and other aid to the country. President Obama awarded Little the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a posthumous ceremony earlier this year. After the killings, the Taliban reportedly added a final insult. The victims, they claimed, were not really medical personnel. They were spies ‘on a clandestine mission against mujahideen in the area.’
Only: How do we know this was a vicious insult? The question should be obscene and unthinkable. Yet this month, the Obama administration admitted that the Central Intelligence Agency had staged a fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan as American intelligence closed in on Osama Bin Laden. Health care workers were used on a clandestine mission-not in the paranoid imagination of America-hating fanatics but as part of the deliberate policy of the United States government.
As […]
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Wednesday, July 27th, 2011
Stephan: This is part of the ongoing trend transforming the American population, and it is already easy to assess how badly we are handling it. This trend has enormous international implications as you can see.
WASHINGTON — Children now make up less of America’s population than ever before, even with a boost from immigrant families, according to census figures. Currently, the share of children in the U.S. is 24 percent, falling below the previous low of 26 percent of 1990.
And when this generation grows up, it will become a shrinking work force that will have to support the nation’s expanding elderly population — even as the government strains to cut spending for health care, pensions and much else.
The latest 2010 census data show that children of immigrants make up one in four people younger than 18, and are now the fastest-growing segment of the nation’s youth, an indication that both legal and illegal immigrants as well as minority births are lifting the nation’s population.
Currently, the share of children in the U.S. is 24 percent, falling below the previous low of 26 percent of 1990. The share is projected to slip further, to 23 percent by 2050, even as the percentage of people 65 and older is expected to jump from 13 percent to 19 percent because of the aging of baby boomers and beyond.
In 1900, the share of children reached as high as 40 percent, […]
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