Currently Browsing: Religion
Posted by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief | Nov 19th, 2009
There’s the cliched phrase: “It’s like watching a train wreck.” In “Terror in Mumbai,” which airs tonight 8 pm ET/PT on HBO, you get to see what no documentary has shown before: a “360 degree view” of a multi-pronged terrorist act, seen partly and genuinely from the terrorists point view. The reason: “Terror in Mumbai” uses actual cell phone instructional...
Posted by KATHY KATTENBURG | Nov 19th, 2009
The entire text is online. It’s 2,074 pages. Via Ron Chusid, who has a reading plan:
Posted by KATHY KATTENBURG | Nov 18th, 2009
A new study out from George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services concludes that the Stupak-Pitts Amendment will have an expansive effect on abortion coverage over the entire insurance industry, “eliminating coverage of medically indicated abortions over time for all women, not only those whose coverage is derived through a health insurance exchange.”
Posted by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief | Nov 18th, 2009
Some Christian conservatives are now praying for God to kill Barack Obama.
Posted by WILLIAM KERN | Nov 18th, 2009
In the years that we have pursued this project, today’s posting is one of the strangest international press articles I can recall. And while it indicates that Hamas may be allowing more press freedom than we thought – the conclusions of the author are anything but comforting.
Keeping in mind that the accused killer is of Palestinian origin, the author of this article from the Al Watan Voice, a newspaper...
Posted by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Deputy Managing Editor, Columnist | Nov 15th, 2009
Brain Chemicals, Not Will Alone
We don’t know the qualified diagnoses of Nidal Hasan. But it may have markers of a serious chemicological and brain disturbance.
The subject about how the brain chemicals in the body can go haywire, wrongly signaling a person about events and stimulii around them, causing interpretations and behavior that are either too much or too little– is a subject so large that...
Posted by POLIMOM | Nov 15th, 2009
There seems to be a deep-seated need by some folks to cast Major Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, as something — anything – other than a religious fanatic who killed in the name of his religion.
In spite of the ever-mounting information regarding his extremism, his self-declared status as a “Soldier of Allah”, his statements that he viewed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war on his...
Posted by JERRY REMMERS, Columnist | Nov 14th, 2009
Americans such as myself step into troubled waters when we try to understand why an Army shrink would kill 13 and wound 33 on the pretext he didn’t want to be assigned to Afghanistan.
Therefore, I find it not at all unusual that today’s authors of Op-Ed columns in today’s Los Angeles Times argue amongst themselves. The issue is not whether Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan committed a terrorist act. He...
Posted by WILLIAM KERN | Nov 13th, 2009
CAPTIONS SAYS: ‘DREAM OF THE ARABS’, AS A ‘ZIONIST’ ARM PUNCTURES THE BALLOON OF THE DREAM
Continuing our coverage of the global reaction to the Fort Hood killings, this morning we posted this Arabic op-ed from the United Arab Emirates – a moderate Arab state considered friendly toward the United States.
Writing for the Dar Al Khaleej, columnist Saad Mehyo suggests a common Arab...
Posted by KATHY KATTENBURG | Nov 12th, 2009
Steve Benen:
Posted by JAZZ SHAW, Assistant Editor | Nov 12th, 2009
One of the few fundamental rights in America which should never have really generated any controversy is the freedom of religion. On the surface, it seems pretty simple. In layman’s terms, this is a country where you can follow any religion or none at all, as you see fit, and the government shall make no law, etc. etc. etc. And yet, I begin to wonder about the wisdom of the founders when I read stories...
Posted by Guest Voice | Nov 12th, 2009
More than Political Correctness or Victimhood at Work in Fort Hood Attack
by Rick Moran
We all like things to be simple. This is probably due to an evolutionary quirk that rewarded simpleminded hominids who didn’t expend the enormous energy in calories that would have required us to think hard about something. The brain eats up about 40% of our caloric intake so it makes sense that those early pre-homo...
Posted by KATHY KATTENBURG | Nov 12th, 2009
Digby is fed up with paying for Viagra:
Posted by JERRY REMMERS, Columnist | Nov 11th, 2009
I’m facing a moral crises over some fundamental issues regarding health reform legislation.
First, I believe a woman has the right to choose an abortion, not the government nor any religious organization. At the same time, I would not encourage my wife to abort our child unless it would save her life.
Second, as a policy issue, I have no moral grounds to oppose the Hyde Amendment which essentially prohibits...
Posted by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Deputy Managing Editor, Columnist | Nov 11th, 2009
This GUEST VOICE piece is by Rafael Jesús González from California, on Veterans’ Day 2009. It is a perspective on ’supporting the troops’ …or not. I brought it here to give a small x-ray into how one family’s three generations of soldiers is evolving nearly ninety years after what was supposed to have been ‘the war to end all wars, World War One’
…GUEST VOICE...
Posted by DAVID ADESNIK | Nov 11th, 2009
“Having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently.
I feel like this may be a license for mis-behavior. (If you’re interested in the context of Rabbi Schochet’s remark, click here.)
Cross-posted at Conventional Folly
Posted by MARC PASCAL | Nov 11th, 2009
Anti-abortion and pro-life advocates successfully added an Amendment to the House Health Reform Bill that prohibited any Federal Funds from subsidizing private insurance purchases by individuals and families on public exchanges that would cover abortions. Pro-abortion and pro-choice advocates cried foul and the amendment constituted an impermissible limit on a woman’s right to choose. The President also...
Posted by KATHY KATTENBURG | Nov 10th, 2009
David Brooks had me going there, with the first several paragraphs in his column today. He had me thinking a new David Brooks had suddenly emerged, as a butterfly from its chrysalis, with powers of insight and perception the old David Brooks could only dream of having.
Posted by KATHY KATTENBURG | Nov 10th, 2009
Dear, sweet Pat Robertson. Such a gentle, kindly Christian gentleman:
Posted by DORIAN DE WIND | Nov 10th, 2009
Tomorrow is Veterans Day.
During the past few days I have been writing about the sacrifices made by and heroism exhibited by our veterans—both living and departed.
We often forget, however, that many of the sacrifices made, heroism and patriotism displayed and just plain honorable service to our country is by men and women who at one time were not even permitted to legally serve, and who today can serve...
Posted by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Deputy Managing Editor, Columnist | Nov 10th, 2009
Fourteen were killed at Fort Hood, not thirteen as reported all week long. Which official is correcting the death toll? I am. On the authority of being a mother who is multi-paragravida, meaning one who has given birth more than once, and on the authority of being a grandmother of five souls, I can, I think, count straight about this particular tragedy.
Francheska Velez was a 21-year-old woman, shot to death...
Posted by MARC PASCAL | Nov 9th, 2009
The original 1787 National Convention assembled 55 delegates in Philadelphia. Over a period of four months this small group drafted the U.S. Constitution that was formally adopted by a supermajority of existing States and became effective in 1789. For most of its 220 years, it has provided the national governmental structure to create one of the most important, democratic, economically wealthy, influential,...
Posted by KATHY KATTENBURG | Nov 9th, 2009
UPDATED: House Democrats are laying down the gauntlet on abortion rights (emphasis in original):
Posted by KATHY KATTENBURG | Nov 8th, 2009
Formerly Democratic, now Independent, Sen. Joseph Lieberman formally and officially confirmed to Chris Wallace this morning that his conscience requires him to vote no on health care reform when a bill reaches the Senate floor kill health care reform by joining a Republican filibuster to prevent the Senate’s health care reform bill from ever getting to the floor for a vote:
Posted by KATHY KATTENBURG | Nov 8th, 2009
Yes, it’s an historic achievement: