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Alt-President Bannon Presides and Other Tales of Trump

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Today we’ll look at some recent developments as the divisions of power within the White House are coming into focus.

So-called President Donald Trump is there for the fame and fortune. Vice President Pence and his buddy Reince Priebus are there to oversee the dismantling of the new deal social contract. And ‘Economic Nationalist’ Steve Bannon is overseeing the reshuffling of the world order while tweaking domestic social policies.

The rise of a nationwide resistance continues. While Senate Democrats won’t actually achieve the historically rare feat of denying cabinet confirmations, the drip, drip, drip of damning information combined with an increasingly aware and active electorate will continue to challenge the administration’s priorities.   [Read more…]

The Separation Clause of the Constitution and the Johnson Amendment

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By Michael-Leonard Creditor

Our president has a bug up his ass about the Johnson Amendment, part of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 prohibiting 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations from conducting political campaign activities to intervene in elections to public office. He thinks it unfairly restricts free speech.

But here’s the thing: the Johnson Amendment doesn’t stop church leaders from speaking out. Firstly, political activity is allowed so long as pastors stop short of directly or indirectly endorsing. But, even if pastors do actually endorse a candidate or ballot measure, only one church is known to have actually lost its tax-exemption due to electioneering. Also, some defiant clergy have repeatedly and for years, deliberately disregarded the Johnson Amendment. Some have even sent transcripts of their speeches to the IRS. That one church that lost its exemption, that was back in 1995.

All this rule does is pose a choice for clergy: do you wanna be a church or in politics? If you want the tax-exemption of being a church, you should simply stay out of politics. Can’t do both; choose. And this gets to the heart of the whole separation clause thing. I think the amendment solidifies the separation-of-church-and-state intent of the founding fathers.   [Read more…]

Zuni Tribe Returns to Sacred Ceremony

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The Southwest tribe is rebuilding sacred buildings critical for teaching Zuni youth the pueblo’s core values of community and devotion to collective prosperity

Michael J. Dax / Yes! Magazine

“Do you know the secret of the kachinas?”

It was a whispered question, between two young girls—one Zuni, one white—as they watched Zuni night dances in 1979.

Bronwyn Fox, then 9 years old, had moved to the town of Zuni in far western New Mexico for her mother’s teaching job. Fox found that, because of her age, she was treated like any of the other children and allowed to attend and participate in festivals and ceremonies, like the series of six night dances held each spring, that might otherwise be closed to a non-Zuni-member.   [Read more…]

Anti-War Legend and Boxing Great Muhammad Ali Dies at 74

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“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America… How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”

By Jon Queally / Common Dreams

Boxing great Muhammad Ali, known around the world as a humanitarian who spoke out forcefully against racial inequality, social injustice, and the Vietnam War during the 1960’s, has died at the age of 74.

The news of the athlete’s passing was confirmed by several news outlets late Friday night as well as a brief statement released on behalf of the family.

“After a 32-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, Muhammad Ali has passed away at the age of 74. The three-time World Heavyweight Champion boxer died this evening,” said family spokesperson Bob Gunnell in the statement.
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Geo-Poetic Spaces: New State of Being

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The first time
i heard the call to prayer
Nicosia’s Venetian walls
melted into mosaic pigments
colors bleeding into anonymity

The first time
i heard the call to prayer
i was released
from a prison of architectural semantics

Carried
above lilting cities of clouds   [Read more…]

Compared to Rest of World Americans Are Delusional, Prudish, Selfish Religious Nuts: Study

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We have some fairly odd opinions

By Kali Holloway / AlterNet

Cultural differences exist across borders, and because monoliths are mostly fantasies, often within them, too. That said, America, in particular, is culturally perplexing, and even confounding, to a lot of the rest of the world. I am not, as Americans are wont to do, laboring under the delusion that people in other places spend all that much time thinking about us. We are all, as a species, just trying to get through this thing called life. The conservative American notion that people with far better healthcare, civil rights laws and gun control “hate our freedom” is a wishful imperialist delusion. Worse, it’s not fooling anybody at this point.

That said, if all the world’s a stage, America is a prime player: a rich, loud, attention-seeking celebrity not fully deserving of its starring role, often putting in a critically reviled performance and tending toward histrionics that threaten to ruin the show for everybody else. (Also, embarrassingly, possibly the last to know that its career as top biller is in rapid decline.) To the outside onlooker, American culture—I’m consolidating an infinitely layered thing to save time and space—is contradictory and bizarre, hypocritical and self-congratulatory. Its national character is a textbook study in narcissistic tendencies coupled with crushing insecurity issues.   [Read more…]

Daniel Berrigan Dead at 94

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Jesuit priest lived life of peace activism

By Andrea Germanos / CommonDreams

Daniel Berrigan—Jesuit priest, peace activist, poet, author, and inspiration to countless people—died on Saturday. He was 94 years old.

When America magazine asked a then-88-year-old Berrigan if he had any regrets over the course of his long life, he replied, “I could have done sooner the things I did, like Catonsville.”

In 1968, Berrigan and eight other Catholic activists, including his brother Philip, a group subsequently known as the Catonsville Nine, took hundreds of draft files and burned them outside a Selective Service office with homemade napalm.   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: Idyll of Pomos

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Eyes closed into hands
touching the womb

Grass grows greener
where the goddess of Pomos
bent legs in birth
arms stretched out
over infant earth   [Read more…]

Meet a Doctor Who Provides Abortion Services Because of His Christian Faith

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What made a Christian doctor start what Esquire magazine deemed “The Abortion Ministry”?

By Valerie Tarico / AlterNet

What kind of person becomes a full-time abortion provider, traveling across state lines to end unhealthy or unwanted pregnancy despite screaming protesters threatening death and damnation? Whatever image you may have in mind, Dr. Willie Parker probably doesn’t fit it.

Parker is a bald, athletically built African American whose soft-spoken presence contrasts his size. A committed Christian, Parker says he provides abortion care not in spite of his faith but because of it. When filmmaker Dawn Porter met Parker, she was inspired to spend the next phase of her life making the documentary Trapped, which focuses on the challenges faced by abortion providers—and Parker in particular—in the Deep South. Parker was “so open and thoughtful in talking about the work and about the whole political climate that it got me thinking about the intersection of politics, abortion and power. So I asked if I could follow him,” Porter says.   [Read more…]

The Language of Pinyon-Juniper Trees

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After two months of struggling to write anything coherent about pinyon-juniper forests, I was on the verge of giving up.

Members of the group I am campaigning with to stop pinyon-juniper deforestation began brainstorming about applying for grants to support the campaign. Many of the grants they discovered required us to demonstrate that pinyon-juniper deforestation harmed wildlife populations, poisoned water supplies, or had a tangible effect on human populations.

Thinking that I could support our grant application process with an essay, I sat down many times to write about the countless beings that call pinyon-juniper forests home. But, I never wrote anything worth reading.

It took me a long time to figure out why.   [Read more…]

The Price of Beauty: ‘Guards at the Taj’ at the La Jolla Playhouse

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By Mukul Khurana

Shah Jahan translates roughly into the English “King of the World.” As such, Shah Jahan was an impressive ruler. In the seventeenth century, that meant that wars of conquest and constant expansionism were the order of the day. That also meant that the spoils of war and all that made the fifth Mughal Emperor of India a very wealthy man.

Having access to beautiful things made Shah Jahan want to replicate that beauty and he did that with great abandon when it came to architectural structures—he wanted to leave legacies behind. Ironically, he isn’t mainly remembered for many of those things. He is remembered for the Taj Mahal, the tomb and resting place for his favorite wife—Mumtaz Mahal.
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Scalia Death Could Impact El Cajon Anti-Abortion Clinic Case

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By East County News Service

The East County Pregnancy Care Clinic in El Cajon is among the plaintiffs in a case set for appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. At stake is whether or not the state of California can require “crisis pregnancy clinics” established by religious or other anti-abortion groups to post notices informing low-income women patients of their rights to obtain free or low-cost abortion, contraception and pre-natal care through public programs—including a phone number to call.

The clinics have lost in court three times, most recently in early February. They have vowed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia means the case could deadlock, in which case the lower court’s ruling against the clinics would stand.   [Read more…]

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