Tuesday, July 10, 2007

WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES OF THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE

BUSH GIVES BILLIONS TO FAITH BASED PROGRAMS AT TAXPAYERS EXPENSE

George W. Bush's Faith Based Initiative.
Unmentioned in the president's State of the Union speech, the program nevertheless continues to recruit religious participants and hand out taxpayer money to religious groups.
The president's religious patronage system is now pouring more than $2 billion in federal funding into church- affiliated organizations around the country annually.
With several domestic policy proposals unceremoniously folded into President Bush's recent State of the Union address, two pretty significant items failed to make the cut. Despite the president's egregiously.. tardy response to the event itself, it was nevertheless surprising that he didn't even mention Hurricane Katrina: He didn't offer up a progress report, words of hope to the victims, or come up with a proposal for moving the sluggish rebuilding effort forward. There were no "armies of compassion" ready to be unleashed, although it should be said that many in the religious community responded to the disaster much quicker than the Bush Administration. In the State of the Union address, however, there was no "compassionate conservatism" for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.


HIS FAITH BASED AGENDAS ARE IN CONFLICT WITH THE CONSTITUTION...AND AMERICAN TAXPAYERS ARE PICKING UP THE TAB.
Faith-based confidential
A new book from administration insider confirms faith-based initiative is little more than political-religious patronage system
David Kuo, the former second-in-command of the White House Office and a true believer in the power of faith-based organizations to help the poor, has published a new book titled "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction," which provides an insiders look at how the Bush White House politicized the initiative, sometime rejected applications for federal faith-based funds because they came from non-Christian applicants, mocked leaders of the Christian Right, and betrayed the very essence of the faith-based initiative's charge to help the poor.
InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a faith-based prison program operating in Iowa's prisons is unconstitutional, Colson, one of President Richard Nixon's key operatives during the Watergate years and currently the head of Prison Fellowship Ministries is using a new report about the growing threat of Islamic terrorists being recruited in U.S. prisons to argue that support for his faith-based prison program is essential if terrorist attacks in this country are to be prevented.
$14 million in federal faith-based money goes to Pat Robertson
Televangelist's claim that Ariel Sharon's stroke was an act of God may have cost him the friendship of some Israelis, but it hasn't prevented his charity, Operation Blessing, from garnering faith-based grants from the U.S. government
While the Reverend Pat Robertson was flayed recently over his suggestion that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was an act of retribution by God for the transfer of land in the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians, the Reverend's charitable organization, Operation Blessing, was raking in wads of faith-based money from the Bush Administration.
Prison Justice Ministries' InnerChange Freedom Initiative is a 'government-funded conversion program' says Americans United's Barry Lynn


It isn't celebrity-laced like the trials of OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson or Robert Blake. It hasn't drawn the attention of CNN's Nancy Grace or the Fox News Channel's Greta Van Sustren, television's mavens of mystery. It appears to have little to do with whether or not President Bush's faith-based initiative is achieving "results." Nevertheless, the outcome of the legal proceedings currently underway in federal court in Des Moines, Iowa, could have a major impact on issues related to the separation of church and state for years to come.Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and its co-plaintiff, Jerry Ashburn, an inmate at Iowa's Newton Correctional Facility, located about 23 miles east of Des Moines, have filed suit against the Virginia-based Prison Fellowship Ministries and its Christian rehabilitation program, the InnerChange Freedom Initiative. The suit, currently being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa Central Division in Des Moines, argues that the state gives preferential treatment to inmates enrolled InnerChange -- a program that has been operating at the Newton facility since 1999. According to Baptist Press, "the Iowa legislature has appropriated $310,000 in the current fiscal year for a 'value-based treatment program' at the Newton facility."
The Federal Emergency Management Agency's decision to reimburse faith-based organizations for services rendered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina signals another triumph for the president's faith-based initiative


During an early-October trip to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Jim Towey, an assistant to President Bush and the director of the White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, told a group of more than 120 pastors, pastors' wives, and other leaders of faith-based organizations meeting at First Baptist Church's downtown campus that "if there was a gold medal ... given out for compassion, Baton Rouge would have the best claim." In other recent appearances, Towey has praised the yeoman work faith-based organizations performed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.Towey's acknowledgements appear to fit well with a decision by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to use taxpayer money to reimburse faith-based organizations that provided relief services after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. "Religious organizations would be eligible for payments ... if they operated emergency shelters, food distribution centers or medical facilities at the request of state or local governments in the three states that have declared emergencies -- Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama," FEMA officials declared.


Faith-based charity fuels housing bubble
Empty houses, falling prices: A boom dies
"Homebuilders across the country, including Dominion Homes, have found a way around a Federal law barring [home] sellers from giving money directly to buyers for a down payment. They route the money through charities such as the Nehemiah Corp. of America, a faith-based group in California. Nehemiah provides down payments for both existing and new homes, and its relationship with Dominion is the largest of its kind in central Ohio between a builder and charity.
The Bush Administration tries again to institutionalize its Faith-Based Initiative with legislative action
One of the first orders of business for George W. Bush in January 2001 was to establish a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, thus kicking off the cornerstone social policy of his presidency. At a ceremony attended by numerous religious leaders Bush announced executive orders that instructed the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, Justice, Education and Housing and Urban Development, to set up Centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives within their agencies.
That done, Bush moved to cement his executive actions in congressional legislation. There he was rebuffed, however, over objections that government money would be used for religious proselytization, and that recipients of government grants would be allowed to discriminate in their hiring based on religion.


Bush called on Senators Ric Santorum (R-PA) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) to craft a legislative compromise. When they failed to win a consensus, the president went back to issuing executive orders. Now, House allies are trying to come up with a legislative package that will pass muster. One of the keys to the compromise is a "Sense of the Congress" resolution dealing with the religious hiring question.


The Bush Administration awarded $
2 billion in grants to religious organizations in 2004. Is Team Bush setting up a National Endowment for Religion?
On March 1, President George W. Bush told the more than 250 religious leaders attending the White House Faith-Based and Community Initiatives Leadership Conference at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC, that he was committed to his faith-based initiative "despite congressional apathy and criticism from some that he hasn't done enough to push the agenda," the Scripps Howard News Service reported.

How the president has used religion to control American politics
American presidents beginning with George Washington have included religious language in their public addresses. Claims of the United States as a divinely chosen nation and requests for God to bless U.S. decisions and actions have been commonplace. Scholars have labeled such discourse "civil religion," in which political leaders emphasize religious symbols and transcendent principles to engender a sense of unity and shared national identity.
George W. Bush is doing something altogether different.


Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the president and his administration have converged a religious fundamentalist worldview with a political agenda -- a distinctly partisan one, wrapped in the mantle of national interest but crafted by and for only those who share their outlook. It is a modern form of political fundamentalism, that is, the adaptation of a self-proclaimed conservative religious (Christian) rectitude, that uses strategic language choices and communication approaches designed for a mass-media culture to shape and implement political policy.
Motivated by this ideology, the Bush administration has sought to control the national discourse by engendering a climate of nationalism in which large parts of the public views supporting the president as a patriotic duty, and where Congress and the United Nations are compelled to rubber-stamp administration policies.


In the process of institutionalizing its faith-based initiative the Bush administration has handed over $1 billion to religious organizations and more is coming to a state near you
"It's true that much attention is being placed on the war in Iraq, but there's also another war that's going on. It's a culture war that really gets to the heart of the questions about what is the role of faith in the public square." – Jim Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, during a conference promoting the funding of religious groups engaged in social service activities, July 2004.


"President Bush does not want to proselytize or fund religion. We're talking about things like job training and substance abuse prevention, and opening up to small groups that have been shut [out] by the ACLU and a radical fringe that wants an extreme separation of church and state." – Jim Towey, San Francisco Chronicle, August 17, 2004.


In the coming year, while secular organizations providing much-needed social services to the poor will likely need the Jaws of Life to pry money from the Bush Administration, faith-based organizations will be taking in money hand over fist. In 2003 alone, the administration handed out $1.17 billion in grants to religious organizations, and if the president has his way, individual states will soon be handing over hundreds of millions of dollars to faith-based organizations.
A report titled "The Expanding Administrative Presidency: George W. Bush and the Faith-Based Initiative," issued this past summer by the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, N.Y., pointed out that religious organizations have now become involved in a wide range of "government-encouraged activities...from building strip malls for economic improvement to promoting child car seats." The report also noted that Bush's faith-based programs "mark a major shift in the constitutional separation of church and state."


Bush recruits religious youth groups as ground troops for the 'drug wars'
What does advocating "religious hiring rights," a $4 billion workplace retraining bill, and the war on drugs have in common? The short answer: Bring on the faith-based organizations!
Although 30 months have passed since President Bush announced the centerpiece of his domestic agenda - his faith-based initiative - and no significant broader efforts to fund his initiative has emerged from Congress, the administration continues to move ahead on a number of fronts.
Bush's latest faith-based proposal involves enlisting religious youth groups in the war on drugs. According to the Washington Times, the administration recently printed 75,000 copies of a guidebook to the drug wars called "Pathways to Prevention: Guiding Youth to Wise Decisions." The 100-page pamphlet "seeks to teach youth leaders how to handle questions and concerns about substance abuse." The new anti-drug project is built around three premises which are spelled out in a fact sheet titled "Marijuana and Kids: Faith": 1) "Religion plays a major role in the lives of American teens;" 2) "Religion and religiosity repeatedly correlate with lower teen and adult marijuana and substance use rates and buffer the impact of life stress which can lead to marijuana and substance use;" and 3) "Youth turn to faith communities [but] most faith institutions [with] youth ministries [do not] incorporate significant teen substance abuse prevention activities."
Thousands of Head Start workers and volunteers could be displaced as Bush Administration claims faith-based organizations have 'religious hiring rights'
What does the Head Start program have to do with President Bush's faith- based initiative? Nothing -- and everything.


Last week, the House Education and the Workforce Committee passed "The School Readiness Act of 2003," H.R. 2210. If a Republican-sponsored provision in the bill -- which allows religious organizations receiving government funds to provide Head Start services to discriminate in their hiring practices -- is retained in the final version, thousands of Head Start workers could lose their jobs. In addition, hundreds of thousands of parent volunteers who serve as teachers' aides and chaperones could also be displaced.


IT IS OBVIOUS THAT BUSH'S HIGHEST PAID WHORE IS THE CHURCH. THE PROBLEM IS WE THE TAXPAYERS ARE COUGHING UP THE GREENS FOR THIS BEDROOM POLITICS.

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