David Crary, - PBS/Associated Press
Stephan: I have published and commented upon stories about the correlation of religiosity and sexual dysfunction involving Roman Catholics, Fundamentalist Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and Mormons, noting the fact that the greater the religious orthodoxy the greater the dysfunction. The interesting nuance to this is that explicit atheists, just a different kind of fundamentalist, also have this issue. The universal seems to be self-righteousness hypocrisy. The correlation is so strong one has to ask, why isn't this discussed more? The answer, I think, is that it gets covered, but as a sectarian issue, not as the meta-denominational issue it actually is and the correlation gets lost.
Retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick stands before the Mass of Installation for Archbishop Donald Wuerl at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington June 22, 2006. Reuters/Joshua Roberts
It has been a wrenching season for three of America’s largest religious denominations, as sex-abuse scandals and a schism over LGBT inclusion fuel anguish and anger within the Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist and United Methodist churches. There’s rising concern that the crises will boost the ranks of young people disillusioned by organized religion.
“Every denomination is tremendously worried about retaining or attracting young people,” said Stephen Schneck, a political science professor at Catholic University. “The sex-abuse scandals will have a spillover effect on attitudes toward religion in general. I don’t think any denomination is going to not take a hit.”
“You have very top-down, patriarchal institutions representing a kind of power that civil society has left behind.” – Natalia Imperatori-Lee, religious studies professor at Manhattan College
For the U.S. Catholic church, the clergy sex-abuse scandal that has unfolded over two […]
1 Comment
Alex Lawson and Stephanie Taylor, Executive Director of Social Security Works / co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and the Progressive Change Institute (PCI) - Alternet
Stephan: Prescription drug spending per capita is far higher in the United States than in the nine other high-income countries studied by the Commonwealth Fund. For instance, insulin that is $16 in Italy can be $1500 in the U.S.. American drug prices are absurd, and we are one of the most over medicated nations in the world. This is one of the worst aspects of the American illness profit system. Here is some background information.
It doesn’t matter where you live in this country or what your political identification is; nobody likes getting ripped off by pharma. Everybody wants their members of Congress to drastically lower drug prices by taking on big pharma’s greed and breaking up pharmaceutical monopolies.
Our organizations, Social Security Works and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, recently commissioned
new polling by Public Policy Polling that shows that lowering drug prices is not a partisan issue. Republicans, Democrats and Independents overwhelmingly agree that Congress must act aggressively to lower drug prices. The only people who don’t want bold, aggressive action are the drug corporations and the members of Congress who are listening to them instead of their constituents.
Public Policy Polling surveyed Americans in three House districts—Iowa’s 4th, represented by Republican Steve King; New Hampshire’s 1st, represented by Democrat Chris Pappas; and South Carolina’s 1st, represented by Democrat Joe Cunningham. These are all swing, frontline congressional districts, the kind where both parties worry most about winning control. They are all also in early caucus or primary states for the 2020 presidential races. Together […]
1 Comment
MARK JOSEPH STERN MAY, - Slate
Stephan: In almost every state controlled by Republicans, there is an aggressive effort going on to strip women of the power Roe v Wade gave them to control their own bodies. Georgia leads the way, and this is what they have come to. This is what the majority of voters in Georgia, who bothered to vote, voted for. In the mid-term 2018 federal elections 55% of women who could vote did vote, and 52% of men. The rest watched television or played video games or something else they thought more important than voting.
Anti-abortion activists participate in the March for Life, an annual event to mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 18.
Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty
On Tuesday, Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a “fetal heartbeat” bill that seeks to outlaw abortion after about six weeks. The measure, HB 481, is the most extreme abortion ban in the country—not just because it would impose severe limitations on women’s reproductive rights, but also because it would subject women who get illegal abortions to life imprisonment and the death penalty.
The primary purpose of HB 481 is to prohibit doctors from terminating any pregnancy after they can detect “embryonic or fetal cardiac activity,” which typically occurs at six weeks’ gestation. But the bill does far more than that. In one sweeping provision, it declares that “unborn children are a class of living, distinct person” that deserves “full legal recognition.” Thus, Georgia law must “recognize unborn children as natural persons”—not just […]
1 Comment
By RUSS BUETTNER and SUSANNE CRAIG, Investigative Reporters - The New York Times
Stephan: When you think about Trump's trade policies and what they are doing to the Trump supporters who are farmers, or manufacturers, you might keep this very interesting and revealing report in mind. It is obvious Trump is a disaster as a businessman. His only success is as a grifter.
And yet his supporters are undeterred, which tells you that the problem in the United States is not that the president and most of the people around him are rich crooks and grifters but that about 40% of average Americans are too angry, too racist, too dumb, to see or worse care about the truth concerning the man for whom they have voted.
By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.
Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.
The data — printouts from Mr. Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994 — represents the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes, information he has kept from public view. Though the information does not cover the tax years at the center of an […]
1 Comment
Stephan: Chris Hedges has written an essay about what really concerns me, and should concern you. Americans through their voting choices are destroying their democratic republic and replacing it with a christofascist tyranny.
Credit: Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The destruction of the rule of law, an action essential to establishing an authoritarian or totalitarian state, began long before the arrival of the Trump administration. The George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and implementation of a doctrine of pre-emptive war were war crimes under international law. The federal government’s ongoing wholesale surveillance of the citizenry, another legacy of the Bush administration, mocks our constitutional right to privacy. Assassinating a U.S. citizen under order of the executive branch, as the Obama administration did when it murdered the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, revokes due process. The steady nullification of constitutional rights by judicial fiat—a legal trick that has enabled corporations to buy the electoral system in the name of free speech—has turned politicians from the two ruling parties into amoral tools of corporate power. Lobbyists in Washington and the state capitals write legislation to legalize tax boycotts, destroy regulations and government oversight, pump staggering sums of money into the war machine and accelerate the largest upward […]
1 Comment
