There have been reports that the tech-savvy youth movement that was so instrumental in getting Barack Obama elected has been relatively silent (or at least unheard) in the healthcare debate.

Well, NOW IS THE TIME FOR US TO BE HEARD!

This Saturday, August 29th, I urge ALL OF YOU to participate in an ONLINE PROGRESSIVE REVOLUTION.

If you're a blogger, no matter how large or small your following, devote a blog to outlining your progressive views on healthcare reform.

If you're a Twitterer, Tweet your heart out about healthcare.

If you like making YouTube videos, make one about our need for healthcare reform and post it to the site.

For the rest of you, write the best email you can explaining why we need healthcare reform, what kind of reform we need, and how we need to get it accomplished. Whatever your thoughts are, put them in the email. Be sure to share any relevant personal healthcare stories you have. THEN FORWARD THE EMAIL TO YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS, YOUR CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVES, AND LOCAL AND NATIONAL MEDIA OUTLETS.

We need to be heard on this issue if we are going to succeed, and there are very loud voices trying to drown us out. We need to be LOUDER.

Tell every progressive you know to get on board and do whatever they can online this Saturday to promote true progressive healthcare reform in the United States.

Yes, we can!

If you've heard of her, you already know the deal. If you haven't, she's one of the most talented, most entertaining, most insightful vocalists you've never heard of.

Jeni Fujita's album "This Little Light of Mine" is available NOW. Definitely worth checking out. It makes a great "stocking stuffer" or Kwanzaa gift. I highly recommend it.

With love to every single person who reads this,

Matt

P.S. Here is the info:

Grammy Nominated Jeni Fujita is releasing her debut solo album this December 18th 2008 entitled "This Little Light of Mine" on amazon. com which like Jeni is an eclectic soulful blend. The album has a sultry neo soul feel, vocals are reminiscent of Minnie Ripperton and Jill Scott and the message is one of her personal journey to discovering her "little light" within.
Produced by DJ Hen Boogie of The Dereliks myspace. com/henboogie and DJ BLM of remarkablecurrent. com. All lyrics, vocals, and vocal arrangments by Jeni with a Sassy Feature by FemCee Aima The Dreamer myspace. com/aimathedreamer on their version of Denise William's "Free". She performs with a full band or a smaller configuration of just piano and vocals...she has been said to "bring happiness, chills and tears to her audience as she bares her soul and shines her light on everyone she touches."
.. type=text/javascript> MySpace.Util.applyWBRToElement($get('ctl00_ctl00_cpMain_UserViewCommentsControl_viewComments_commentRepeater_ctl01_bodyLabel'), {frequency: 20});..>  

Always interested in finding random things to do with myself, I decided to become a lender at kiva.org. We'll see what happens.

http://www.kiva.org/lender/matt8899

If not, vote tomorrow.

For real.

It's important.

You might have to wait in line, so bring some snacks with you in case you get hungry.

But vote.

Bring a book to read or a PSP or Nintendo DS or something. Or just bring your iPod and rock out.

Better yet, bring a friend who also hasn't voted yet.

But vote.

Please.

We all know that John McCain and George W. Bush have a lot in common -- an affinity for "trickle-down" economics, an aversion to market regulation, an insatiable thirst for oil, etc. -- but what is the one thing that both men have in common with Barack Obama?

The answer?

Each of the three men has his father's first and last name.

The difference?

George W. Bush would not have been elected Governor of Texas, much less President of the United States, if it weren't for his father's name.

John McCain probably would not have graduated from the Naval Academy (fifth from the bottom of his class) if it weren't for his father's name (his father and grandfather were both Navy Admirals).

Arguably, neither man would be where he is today if it weren't for his father's name.

For Barack Obama, on the other hand, his father's name was a liability that he had to overcome. It made his life more difficult in many ways, but he persevered and made it where he is on his own merit. He is the only self-made man among the three.

Food for thought.

Peace.

You won’t find this on Fox News

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/21/the-full-story-behind-rev-jeremiah-wrights-911-sermon/..:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/21/the-full-story-behind-wright%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cgod-damn-america%e2%80%9d-sermon/?s-%20?god-damn-america%20?-sermon/

Senator Clinton’s claims about her visit to Tuzla, Bosnia—and the footage disproving her account—have created quite a stir. And with good reason. As the Associated Press wrote yesterday:  "What makes Clinton’s situation unique—and the Bosnia embellishments so damaging—is the fact that the New York senator has built her candidacy on the illusion of experience. Any attack on her credentials is a potential Achilles heel."

Unfortunately, Clinton’s fantastic invention of a sniper-raked landing is only one in a growing list of instances in which she has exaggerated her role as First Lady, particularly with respect to domestic policy.

Clinton has credited herself with "creating" the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and "helping to pass" the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Like the Tuzla story, both of these claims turn out to false—raising serious questions not just about the rationale for Senator Clinton’s campaign, but about her willingness to adhere to the truth.

 

"Creating" the State Children’s Health Insurance Program?

Ø      Question: Did Hillary Clinton "create" SCHIP as First Lady? That’s what her web site says. But it’s not what the program’s congressional sponsors say.

On her website, Senator Clinton goes so far as to laud what she calls "her successful effort to create the SCHIP Children’s Health Insurance program." 

"Create" SCHIP? Once again, Senator Clinton’s claim simply doesn’t hold up. 

The Boston Globe recently conducted an investigation into Clinton’s purported role in the legislation, concluding that:  "Hillary Clinton, who has frequently described herself on the campaign trail as playing a pivotal role in forging a children’s health insurance plan, had little to do with crafting the landmark legislation or ushering it through Congress, according to several lawmakers, staffers, and healthcare advocates involved in the issue." 

Not only is Senator Clinton’s claim of authorship false, but the White House actually opposed SCHIP during it’s creation:  "But the Clinton White House, while supportive of the idea of expanding children’s health, fought the first SCHIP effort, spearheaded by Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah…" 

Representative Henry Waxman, a leader on the bill who remains unaffiliated in the race, said he has no memory of any involvement by Clinton:  "It was a bipartisan bill. I don’t remember the role of the White House," said Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who has not endorsed a candidate in the presidential race and who was the chief Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which deals with health matters. "It did not originate at the White House." 

And Senator Kennedy, the Senate’s undisputed leader on universal health care and one of the actual creators of SCHIP, does not agree with Clinton’s assessment: "Asked whether Clinton was exaggerating her role in creating SCHIP, Kennedy, stopped in the hallway as he was entering the chamber to vote, half-shrugged.  ’Facts are stubborn things,’ he said, declining to criticize Clinton directly. ’I think we ought to stay with the facts.’"

Leadership on the Family and Medical Leave Act?

Ø      Question: Did Senator Clinton "help to pass" FMLA? Her White House schedules and the timeline of the bill’s passage call that claim into question.

Clinton claims on the trail and on her website that she played a significant role in "helping to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to enable new parents to take time off without losing their jobs…" But there is no evidence that this is the case.

For starters, the bill was signed into law only 16 days after Bill Clinton took office—not much time for the new First Lady to play much of a role. On top of that, the Associated Press reported that an existing version of the bill that had already been passed "by majorities in the last Congress" was altered only slightly and "recycled for enactment" [AP, 2/9/93]. 

In addition, Senator Clinton’s recently released White House schedules show that she didn’t have a single meeting on the bill she now touts. And in her own autobiography she discusses FMLA without making any mention of having a role in its passage. 

Now that she’s running for President, however, the facts seem to have changed.  Or at least her allegiance to them has.

 

Experience: Foundation of the Clinton Candidacy

The refrain that Senator Clinton "has the experience to lead on Day One" has been repeated endlessly since she entered the race. ..r inspection, the claims Senator Clinton makes turn out to be little more than stories. 

With the next primary less than a month away, it’s time for Senator Clinton to finally face the "vetting" she’s so fond of discussing. Badly trailing in delegates, votes, and states won, she’s going to need more than a new script to win the nomination. But if she wants to regain the trust of the American people, it would be a good place to start. 

The writer of this piece is white and does anti-racism work.

V
  
>> Here is my latest essay, addressing the dust up over Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s
>> pastor, and the white backlash that some of his comments are engendering in
>> many circles. Although Obama may have to distance himself from Wright, those
>> of us in the antiracism struggle must take this opportunity (or so it seems
>> to me) to raise the issues that Wright has raised, so many of them with
>> accuracy and courage, and force our white brothers and sisters to confront
>> that history and legacy (and contemporary reality of racism) honestly. If
>> from the Obama campaign we can end up with a more honest, albeit tense,
>> conversation about racism, it will have been for the better. So here is the
>> link: please, if you like it, please pass it around...As always, I’m
>> long-winded and so I apologize for the length, but there was a lot that I
>> felt needed to be said...
>>  
>> http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/NationalLies.html
>>
>>  
>> Thanks everyone,
>>  
>> tim wise
>>
>> Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia:
>> Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Unacceptability of Truth
>>  
>> By Tim Wise
>>  
>> March 18, 2008
>>  
>> For most white folks, indignation just doesn’t wear well. Once affected or
>> conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have
>> fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere
>> above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.
>>  
>> Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine
>> about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the
>> years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous
>> persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best
>> examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And
>> once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of
>> sincerity.
>>  
>> But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of
>> Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama’s
>> pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to
>> Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have
>> remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that
>> bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these
>> last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever
>> anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon
>> us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.
>>  
>> But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot
>> drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it
>> (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear,
>> Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.
>>  
>> Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn’t
>> he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn’t he say that
>> black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of
>> the African American community throughout the years?
>>  
>> Well actually, no he didn’t.
>>  
>> Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that
>> they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming
>> home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to
>> endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to
>> note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion
>> with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has
>> indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make
>> it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about
>> an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.
>>  
>> He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in
>> Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye."
>> That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He
>> is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither
>> city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of
>> remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most
>> Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed
>> to end the war and "save American lives."
>>  
>> But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently
>> worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes,
>> Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the
>> long-declassified documents, and President Truman’s own war diaries, all of
>> which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the
>> war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping
>> of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is
>> simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in
>> those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no
>> justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate
>> mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will
>> those who suggest that no body count is too high when we’re the ones doing
>> the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much
>> prefer the l ogic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President
>> he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what
>> the facts are."
>>  
>> And Wright didn’t say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was
>> suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has
>> treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of
>> dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of
>> non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who
>> do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more
>> often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon
>> was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what
>> should or shouldn’t happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in
>> keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely
>> disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don’t believe that any God
>> either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement
>> itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a
>> demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence
>> and history suggests it has yet to do.
>>  
>> Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion
>> that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for
>> instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn’t the only one who has
>> said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the
>> one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black
>> poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early ’90s in
>> an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get
>> rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and
>> racial minorities.
>>  
>> So that’s the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly
>> arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America’s favorite black
>> man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context,
>> and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is
>> pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama
>> may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic
>> nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike
>> most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity
>> ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like
>> Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like
>> Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would
>> have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential
>> candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Roberts on,
>> Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.
>>  
>> What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they
>> already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of
>> terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color,
>> was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one
>> in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of
>> thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage;
>> thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years
>> after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at
>> the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth.
>> No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day
>> that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years
>> ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some,
>> everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave
>> shi ps at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some,
>> everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch
>> it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation
>> initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of
>> terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in
>> fact.
>>  
>> But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it
>> almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed,
>> what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent
>> episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that
>> black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black
>> people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in
>> fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently,
>> that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a
>> dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.
>>  
>> This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No
>> Name in the Street, wherein he noted:
>>  
>> "White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with
>> a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as
>> deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have
>> managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but
>> black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way
>> John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a
>> raving maniac."
>>  
>> And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall
>> declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he
>> noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and
>> to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of
>> the past three or four decades.
>>  
>> We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop
>> who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we’re shocked to
>> learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist
>> nation--we’re literally stunned that people who say they experience
>> discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back
>> them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually
>> say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.
>>  
>> Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and
>> Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our
>> understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the
>> most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they
>> have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the
>> mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black
>> people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way
>> white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for
>> they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully
>> committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes
>> that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for
>> they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were
>> enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who d ared move into
>> previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering,
>> as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.
>>  
>> Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black
>> folks cannot afford to forget. I’ve seen white people stunned to the point of
>> paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when
>> they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a
>> truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and
>> letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were
>> often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving
>> hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken
>> salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity
>> were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut
>> off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards
>> of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including
>> members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.
>>  
>> Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites
>> take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we
>> need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of
>> an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials
>> literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass
>> killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an
>> excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for
>> over seventy years.
>>  
>> Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies
>> when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything
>> resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national
>> past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so
>> thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not
>> only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to
>> the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the
>> face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially
>> irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken
>> seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable
>> of grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and "Father Knows Best,"
>> portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they
>> were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity o f those who
>> found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic
>> representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than
>> false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were
>> being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and
>> laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.
>>  
>> These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white
>> folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as
>> representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return,
>> still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a
>> nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil
>> rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour filibuster
>> speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor
>> Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from
>> entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was
>> introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they
>> represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the
>> screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing
>> wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of
>> the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the
>> miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie,
>> year after year after year.
>>  
>> No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your
>> teenager’s textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this
>> great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it
>> is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it
>> is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of
>> American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that
>> is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not
>> merely a love of country but the turning of one’s nation into an idol to be
>> worshipped, it not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.
>>  
>> It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame
>> to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in
>> warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we
>> are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has
>> anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy,
>> fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When
>> individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as
>> deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though
>> it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.
>>  
>> So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth?
>> A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions
>> allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the
>> respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and
>> offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt,
>> derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is
>> signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is
>> missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right,
>> to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can
>> never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms
>> with that which lay behind.
>>  
>> What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from
>> their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be
>> noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who
>> tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the
>> stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares white folks, who have
>> long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a
>> coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed
>> whole?
>>  
>> And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill,
>> fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or
>> lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped.
>> They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to
>> represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in
>> their tabernacles, every children’s story book in their Sunday Schools, every
>> Christmas card they’ll send to relatives and friends this December. But to
>> lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to
>> who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.
>>  
>> Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who
>> don’t believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a
>> belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy
>> belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would
>> burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the white folks who now
>> condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when
>> President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking,
>> responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by
>> saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one’s personal savior, the Bible
>> made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you’d be heading.
>>  
>> So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God’s part is
>> surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren’t Christians, and no
>> one says anything. That isn’t considered bigoted. That isn’t considered
>> beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming
>> President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that
>> shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions
>> do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
>>  
>> So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views
>> about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers
>> and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright
>> serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.
>>  
>> Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be
>> found at Trinity United Church of Christ.
>>  
>> The White Privilege Conference is April 2-5, 2008!
>> Visit: www.uccs.edu/~wpc/ <http://www.uccs.edu/~wpc/>  
>> <http://www.uccs.edu/~wpc/ <http://www.uccs.edu/~wpc/> >
>> __._,_.___