Things That Just Piss Me Off

Nationalism is the belief that as a citizen it is your duty to back your government in the decisions that they make for you. That for better or worse these are our representatives, our President, and as long as they are in office we should back them. It is the belief that because we love America, we have to believe that America is right and just and that whatever we are doing is for the good of all.

Patriotism is the love of your country America. A love so deep that you will not allow governments including our own to damage this great country or it’s citizens. A Patriot questions EVERY step our elected government takes to make sure they do not infringe upon our rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution. Thomas Jefferswon said, “It is not your right to question your government, it is your duty to do so.”

Now this pisses me off. All of these baseball players get caught using steroids, basically get caught cheating to achieve their records.

I know people try to say that barry Bonds and others would have achieved their records even without steroids. It isn’t rue. You can’t prove it is. And it’s the players who are at fault of not being able to prove it one way or the other.

They cheated. people lose gold medals because of cheating but everyone wants to give these baseball players their records and their entrance into the baseball hall of fame even though they cheated just like those olympic athletes who had to give their medals back.

Why are baseball players being treated any different? Pete Rose gambled. They won’t induct Pete Rose into the baseball hall of fame for what he did as a baseball player even though the gambling he did was long after that when he was a manager.

How can people justify taking medals away from olympic athletes and keeping pete Rose out of the baseball hall of fame and not take anything away from these baseball players who cheated to get their records?

Even the dictionary gets it wrong by having the definitions of these two words the same. They are far from the same thing. Most people in the US, whether democrat or republican, liberal or conservative, have one thing in common. They loove our country and they want to be patriots.

It’s said that if you focus on the 1% we have in common rather than the 99% we don’t, we can relate to each other better and I believe that.

But before we can agree about what being a patriot actually means, we can’t even agree to that 1%.

Nationalists believe in their country AND it’s government. Nationalists believe that whatever our government does is right because we are who we are. We are the greatest nation on earth, therefore what we are doing is right.

Hitler used this very thing to get the german people behind him. He used fear of people who were different than they were to unite the nationalist population behind his agenda. This was true of Stalin in Russia also.

Patriotism is entirely different. Patriotism is loving your country and recognizing that governments are inherently flawed and that we should watch every step they make to make sure they do not trample on our rights.

During this administration, everyone who questions the actions in Iraq has been accused of being a traitor, of not supporting the troops, and of not being a patriot. These are all lies and propaganda by the extreme right.

Questioning the war in Iraq is our patriotic duty.

Questioning wiretapping American citizens is our duty as patriots of this country.

Questioning our government when it says it wants to know what books we check out at the library is our duty as patriots.

Questioning attacking a country that has not attacked or directly threatened to attack our country is our duty as patriots.

Questioning the use of torture is our duty as patriots.

Blindly following whatever a president or our government in general decides to do is nationalism and is dangerous. That is not what the founding fathers intended at all.

The actions and words that created this country are very clear. They spelled out the need to watch those elected into government office with both eyes open and not to just “trust” they will do the right thing.

Bush supporters want us to blindly trust a guy who, throughout his life has not accomplished much of anything his daddy didn’t help him with, with the fate of our country that we love.

This is like putting your single neighbor who is 40, lives at home, has bad hygeine, can’t speak well, and has no job so he sits in the park and schoolyard watching kids play, to babysit your children.

Bush Regime Preaches Democracy, Proposes Tyranny
by Paul Craig Roberts of LewRockwell.com

Americans had best rethink the “war on terror” while they still have the liberty to do so. For all of President Bush’s blah-blah talk about bringing democracy to the world, the Bush administration has proved that it is no friend of liberty at home.

The Bush administration has violated constitutional principles, US law, and the Geneva Conventions as no previous administration has done. Here is a short list of the Bush administration’s crimes:

Spying without court warrants on Americans in violation of both the US Constitution and the FISA statute.

The denial of habeas corpus, attorney-client privilege, due process, and Geneva Conventions protections to those, American or foreign, designated without evidence as terrorists or enemy combatants.

The justification and use of torture to coerce confessions and the kidnapping of foreign nationals who are sent to be tortured in foreign prisons.

The initiation of military aggression against states based on intentional deception by the Bush administration of the US public and the United Nations, and the intentional fabrication of “evidence” to justify unprovoked aggression against sovereign states, which is a war crime under the Nuremberg standard established by the US.

Violation of the oath of office to defend the US Constitution by practically every member of the Bush administration and Congress.

Bush has assaulted the separation of powers and the rule of law with “signing statements” and “executive orders” that President Nixon’s White House Counsel John Dean says are commands that treat the co-equal branches of government and the electorate as subservient to executive authority. In April 2006, Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage listed 750 laws “challenged” by the Bush administration. Not even the demonized president of Iran claims to be above the law.

Genocide against the people of Iraq where one million Iraqis have died as a result of Bush’s invasion and several million Iraqis are displaced persons.
Massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan, which is a form of genocide in which military force is routinely applied to unarmed noncombatants.

Massive corruption in which no-bid contracts are issued to Republican corporations in exchange for kickbacks to political campaigns.

The theft of two national elections as documented in books by Mark Crispin Miller and Greg Palast.

I can’t help but point out how bad monday night football has gotten since it went to ESPN.

Lets start with halftime. I tune in because I am a football fan. Their toyota halftime report consists of the fastest 3 minutes in football where they show some highlights of sunday’s games in fast forward.

The for the next 15 minutes they interview nascar drivers.

Then at least during the game you might think you would hear something about the game we are actually watching. Or at least something about football in general.

But no. Instead they get someone on like drew carey for a whole quarter where they discuss the price is right, the show drew carey now hosts instead of the football game that is playing.

Then finally drew leaves. Now they talk about every quaterback in the league and who they know and don’t know and what they think of each quarterback.

Through all of this, every now and then they will point out that there is a timeout or they have to go to a commercial.

Rarely do they actually talk about a play that is going on. Yet they will also interject their opinion of what is going on in the game. How can they form an opinion when it seems they haven’t even been watching the game at all?

Couldn’t ESPN find any announcers that are actually interested in football? Couldn’t they find anyone in all of football to do interviews with at halftime instead of nascar?

What’s next? Interviews with figureskaters during halftime? Yes ESPN is about all sports, bit NOT during the football game! Drew Carey has nothing to do with football. Nor does the price is right!

Can you guys at ESPN give us football when football is on? Can’t you do more at halftime than speed through the football highlights to make sure you have time to promote the nascvar race you will be showing next weekend?

I hope so because I am beginning to think monday night football is dead and thinking od going on to do something else on monday nights.

Hey I know how to get ESPN’s attention. I can go to any sporting event besides football on monday night and ESPN will likely be covering that during the monday night football game anyway.

I’m a Dallas Cowboys fan for life, not a patriots fan, but I just had to comment about all the haters out there.

I was watching ESPN the other day and some of the announcers were crying that the patriots were runnming up the score on the poor washington redskins the other day because they did a QB sneak on 4th down.

They were in field goal range. If they had kicked a field goal, it would have run the score up and these whiners would still be crying.

If they had thrown a touchdown, these guys would still be whining about running up the score.

They couldn’t punt because they were in the red zone.

What do these crybabies think they should have done? Taken a knee to give the redskins the ball on downs? That would be pretty insulting and embarrassing wouldn’t it?

These are pro football teams. There is no mercy rule in football. To revise what tom hanks said in that baseball movie, “There’s no crying in football”.

If the patriots are good enough to score 100 points per game, let them score the points. Brady is setting all kinds of records this year. Why should he curb his ability to set the bar even higher for future quaterbacks and set records that will be hard to break.

Should they play below their skill level to keep from hurting the other team’s feelings?

This post by Lou Dobbs makes some really good points related to my recent blog post on The Religious Right and Politics so I wanted to share it here.

Dobbs: Keep religion out of politics
By Lou Dobbs, CNN

Editor’s note: Lou Dobbs’ commentary appears every Wednesday on CNN.com

The political strategists, campaign managers, and the partisan savants will be working overtime to excite their conservative, liberal, Republican and Democratic bases, trying to get at least 50 percent of us who’ve registered to vote to actually go to the polls.

Which is one of the biggest problems we have. When less people vote, special interest groups find it easier to get their way. They motivate their base to go to the polls while many independent thinkers don’t bother.

As in election years past, they’re going to have a lot of help, and not just from PACs, labor unions and 527 groups like MoveOn and Progress for America. Oh no, we’re going to be treated to something akin to, and as close as we should expect to get to, divine intervention. Evangelical Christians, Jews, Catholics, Muslims and Mormons are already getting rowdy, not only on their respective pulpits, but in the mail, on the air and certainly on the campaign trails.

Now I know you’re thinking that this is America, what is religion doing in politics and what is politics doing in religion. As it turns out, just about everything. And the politically correct orthodoxy would prefer you and I not take notice.

The First Amendment of our Constitution declares that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” But the devil’s in the details, if you will, and the often demonized Internal Revenue Service has taken up the issue where other federal agencies and branches of government have feared to tread: This summer the IRS sent out a warning letter to more than 15,000 churches and tax-exempt nonprofit organizations throughout the nation. The letter is meant to serve notice that any sort of politicking could endanger their tax-exempt status.

This is what I was posting about in my blog post. Nonprofit organizations that are not listed as political organizations are not allowed to endorse candidates, yet you hear them doing it all the time and no one has been enforcing this against nonprofit religion-based organizations.

The IRS discovered a disturbing amount of intervention by religious groups in national politics in 2004. It determined nearly five dozen churches and charities violated laws against political activities, and there are now 40 active investigations into the politicking of various churches.

The mixture of religion and politics is on public display throughout the country. The Mormon Church rolled out the red carpet for Mexican President Vicente Fox, embraces illegal immigrants in the state of Utah and helped pro-amnesty incumbent Congressman Chris Cannon with a get out the vote campaign.

Apparently nobody in the federal government is too concerned that the Catholic Church has repeatedly lobbied on behalf of millions of illegal aliens and their supporters for wholesale amnesty and open borders. Until the Supreme Court ordered him to, the head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, Cardinal Roger Mahoney, didn’t think he should cooperate with the law when it came to divulging information on priests accused of pedophilia, and he believes it is entirely correct to encourage his parishioners to civil disobedience in the case of legislation that secures our borders and punishes those who cross them illegally. The Cardinal disavows the will of the people in opposition to current law. Ironically he’s now spearheading a drive to register a million new voters by 2008. Where he’ll find them, only heaven knows.

The role of religion in politics and the role of politics in religion in this country has never deserved more attention and merited more intense examination than now. Religion is dominant in the lives of most Americans: The latest Gallup Poll reveals that nearly two-thirds of us are members of a church or synagogue and about one-third of us attend church or synagogue at least once a week.

Surveys show as many as 250 million Americans are Christian and 70 million of us describe ourselves as evangelicals.

That is a lot of votes and in my opinion as long as christians are voting their own opinions on who is best to serve our country in political office, then there is no reason they should not have this influence. It’s a democracy. Majority rules. Like it or not, that is our system.

However, when any type of organizations conspire to influence the voters, it skews the results. When religion is used to push people into choosing the candidate their church or nonprofit religious organization tells them which candidate is the moral choice, it exerts even more influence. Many of these church leaders use guilt to drive people to vote the way they want them to.

Now that it is legal for religious organizations to get federal funding, there is a conflict of interest for these nonprofits. You have to ask if they are choosing a candidate based on religious and/or morals or they are choosing the candidate that promises to keep federal funding available to them.

First of all, let me say I am proud to be a follower of Jesus Christ, a christian. However, being a christian and being associated with the so-called religious right are two very different things.

I do not believe that churches should be involved in politics at all. I do not believe that as christians we are supposed to attempt to get any laws passed by man at all.

Jesus did not try to get the romans to change the law. Jesus did not endorse one king over another king. Jesus did not endorse governors or other political offices or candidates.

Jesus taught people how they should live. He gave them a choice as to whether or not they should follow him and his ways. He still gives us that same choice.

The thinking that christians should attempt to have laws made to force people to live the way they believe they should live is not what Jesus taught or asked us to do. Show me any place in the bible that says we should enact laws to force people into morality.

If we as christians do our job of teaching people as Christ did, there won’t be a need to make those laws.

Here is an article I wrote related to the topic.

Religion: Institution or Revolution?
by Chris McElroy

In writing any article about religion you run the risk of people not agreeing with you or the risk of offending people. Does that mean we should not write about religion? Absolutely not.

Should we worry that people might be offended? No. We should not go out of our way to offend people, but as long as you write your true beliefs, then you are doing what is in your heart and should share that with others.

For many churches, Christianity and religion have become institutions. Power, politics, money, and other worldly things have become the focus of these institutions.

Many people who read this article will find what I have to say uncomfortable. Jesus never promised that you or I would be made comfortable in this life and in this article I don’t promise to make you feel comfortable either.

Jesus calls the church to reach out to the community, to the poor, the sick, and to those who do not know Christ. Jesus promised that He would provide for our needs as long as we use what he provides to do His will and to bring Him glory. He taught us to believe him for this promise and to act as knowing that He will fulfill that promise.

Instead, these days many churches focus on survival. They plan their budgets to make sure they bank enough money for a rainy day, hire business managers and treat the church as if it is a business entity rather than a church whose mission it is to do GOD’s work.

Politics is one area that many churches and religious institutions have focused much of their attention. They lobby politicians, get involved in campaigns, and donate money that does not belong to them to politicians who promise much but deliver very little.

Does not belong to them? What do I mean by that? Tithes do not belong to the church they belong to GOD. Tithes are to be used for GOD’s purposes. Nowhere in the bible can I find where helping politicians get elected is a proper use for money tithed to GOD.

Jesus did not lobby the Pharisees and the Roman government for laws that force people to follow His way. Jesus taught people right from wrong, then gave them a choice of whether or not they would follow Him. Through the bible, Jesus still teaches us right from wrong and offers us that same choice.

It is our job as Christians and as church leaders to teach GOD’s word to others and let them know that Jesus has offered them that choice. We cannot rely on governments to pass laws to do our job for us. Saying that we need to lobby for those laws to be passed to force people to do what is moral is saying we as Christians and the church cannot or will not do the job GOD intends for us to do.

Most people have an image of Jesus Christ as meek and mild, a healer of the sick, a helper to the poor, and our Lord and Savior who loves us. Jesus is all of those things, but Jesus was and is also a revolutionary!

Jesus stood up to those in power in both religion and in government. Jesus challenged them. Jesus told them they had no right to oppress His people. Jesus went out and consorted with the poor, the sick, prostitutes, tax collectors, and other sinners. He ministered to the unbelievers. He did not spend all His time at the sanctuary preaching to believers.

Rather than churches becoming institutions they should be leading revolutions. Rather than just surviving and preserving traditions and rules, they should be throwing all of GOD’s money forward to help those in need and to reach those who do not know Christ as their Savior.

Rather than worrying about building new roofs, buying stained glass windows, and buying new carpet and pews, we should be worrying about breaking down walls and calling unbelievers to join us.

Church is not just a place where believers gather to worship, it is also a place where believers gather to teach unbelievers about Christ.

So many Christians today think all they need to do is attend church, pray, and do good things, then wait for Jesus to return. Jesus charged us with much more than that. Jesus charged us to change those around us, to change communities, to change the world. He charged us with teaching his word and to bring more people to him so they can have everlasting life.

Cowards hide and wait to be rescued and GOD despises cowards more than any others. Become the revolutionary that Jesus called you to be. Allow Him to use you to achieve His purpose rather than praying that he will help you achieve yours. It is not about you.

About the Author: Chris McElroy did things his own way to benefit himself most of his life. After joining Mosaic Church in Miami a couple of years ago and asking Jesus to come into his life, he now devotes much of his time to learning more about Jesus and the purpose He has for all of us. The views expressed by Chris McElroy are his own. Visit www.mosaicmiami.org and mosaicmiami.blogspot.com to learn more about Mosaic.

I would also like to add that IF the religious right is going to be involved in politics, lets’ be concerned about more than just the abortion issue.

The religious right has consistantly swayed there vote strictly based on whether a candidate is for or against abortion.

Yet they continue to support those who use torture on human beings. They continue to support those who start wars. They continue to support those with no morals at all.

Still on my tv pisses me off kick here, but dr. steve-o really takes the cake when it comes to network tv reaching for ever dumber and dumber content to fill time slots.

What’s next? TV shows hosted by real mental patients. Episodes like drool and all the uses for it. How to sit comfortably in a straight jacket? And this week an all new episode, “How to save up all that lithium for one big party!”

One thing is for sure, it would be a lot more interesting and would appeal to aa more intellectual audience than dr. steve-o does.

I know I’ve been on a tv kick lately, but tv is getting so bad it prompts me to post about it.

Today it’s paid programming.

I know networks need to make money. The Internet is breaking them. They do not know how to adapt it seems. They just keep making tv worse rather than better in response to the revenue the Internet is taking away from them.

It seems like networks have the ability to hire the best and brightest people, but they obviously don’t. If the networks were smart, they would find ways to make tv better so they can compete with the Internet. Instead it just keeps getting worse.

Don’t want to compete for a time-slot? Just put on a reality show that costs little to produce or sell it to someone who wants to sell the latest diet craze, the latest exercize equipment no one will use even if they buy it, nothing down real estate dreams, or the latest item you don’t need from RONCO.

These paid programming shows are ridiculous infomercials, yet people must be buying from them or they wouldn’t put them on. So it’s the people that buy these ridiculous products and schemes that are at fault right along with the networks for us having this many of them on the air.

The one I saw last night really got me. “You can buy 10 websites for just $39.95!. No need to know html. Our website editor is easy to use. You could making as much as $2500 per day just by building these 10 websites on our server and domain name! You don’t have to know anything about promoting your website! You probably don’t know how email works, but you know how to send and receive email. This is just as easy. You don’t need to know how it works, just buy these 10 websites and start making money today! Then they follow with all the fake testimonials of people getting rich from their $39.95 websites.

If you buy from these paid programming infomercials, you deserve to lose all of your money because you’re just too stupid to keep it.