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Herschel...such GREAT one to showcase the repubs.../e
Gas Prices Drop For 21 Straight Days, Destroying GOP Narrative
By Gloria Christie -July 6, 2022
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Americans look to the outrageous gasoline prices and the price increases throughout their grocery stores to judge how well the economy is doing. And they blame President Joe Biden who is releasing one million gallons of oil every day from our reserves. He also urged states to halt their normal taxes on gasoline at the pump. There are not many things a president can do to help with the price of gas, but apparently, he has succeeded.
The national average now is at $4.77 a gallon, reinforcing the 21 days drops, according to The AAA. The war in Ukraine caused the price of oil to skyrocket. This even though America is at its summer peak and the war continues. The losing streak continued, making this the largest decline since April 2020. These were right at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
Initially, there were $7.00 per gallon prices, but they fell to $4.77. Why? That was partially due to oil companies’ move to drive prices so high Americans simply quit driving as much, The Business Insider wrote:
‘PRICES ARE FALLING, IN PART, BECAUSE THEY’VE GOTTEN SO HIGH THAT DEMAND MAY BE WANING. CONSUMPTION FOR GASOLINE HIT ITS LOWEST POINT FOR THIS TIME OF YEAR SINCE 2014, EXCLUDING THE PANDEMIC MONTHS.’
The oil stockpiles have gone up to four-plus million barrels “during the past two weeks.” This shows what normally happens, the decline in oil heats up. But overall they go up in the summer months.
Tuesday saw crude oil prices decrease to $100 a barrel or nine percent. But should it go down to $65 per barrel, that could play a part in a possible recession.
Sharia Law...we're pretty much already there w/Repubs.../e
There IS a difference in substance...
https://www.facebook.com/1303427044/videos/10218655076590429
Choices have consequences...as they always do...no one is "forced"...you just don't like the consequences...being a member of a sane society requires choices...
No one was forced....../e
An open letter to white evangelicals: We’re done with you.
By North Carolina Pastor John Pavlovitz
Dear White Evangelicals,
I need to tell you something: People have had it with you. They’re done. They want nothing to do with you any longer, and here’s why: They see your hypocrisy, your inconsistency, your incredibly selective mercy, and your thinly veiled supremacy.
For eight years they watched you relentlessly demonize a Black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity. They watched you deny his personal faith convictions, argue his birthplace, and assail his character—all without cause or evidence.
They saw you brandish Scriptures to malign him and use the laziest of racial stereotypes in criticizing him. And through it all, White Evangelicals—you never once suggested that God placed him where he was, you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family, you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities, you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance, you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy, your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership, your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him, you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure.
You violently opposed him at every single turn—without offering a single ounce of the grace you claim as the heart of your faith tradition. You jettisoned Jesus as you dispensed damnation on him.
And yet you give carte blanche to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth—that the mind boggles.
And the change in you is unmistakable. It has been an astonishing conversion to behold: a being born again.
With him, you suddenly find religion. With him, you’re now willing to offer full absolution. With him, all is forgiven without repentance or admission. With him, you’re suddenly able to see some invisible, deeply buried heart. With him, sin has become unimportant, and compassion no longer a requirement. With him, you see only Providence.
And White Evangelicals, all those people who have had it with you—they see it all clearly. They recognize the toxic source of your inconsistency.
They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities. They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus. They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself.
They see that all you’re really interested in doing is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it. They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus—not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth.
And I know you don’t realize it, but you’re digging your own grave these days; the grave of your very faith tradition.
Your willingness to align yourself with cruelty is a costly marriage. Yes, you’ve gained a Supreme Court seat, a few months with the Presidency as a mouthpiece, and the cheap high of temporary power—but you’ve lost a whole lot more.
You’ve lost an audience with millions of wise, decent, good-hearted, faithful people with eyes to see this ugliness. You’ve lost any moral high ground or spiritual authority with a generation. You’ve lost any semblance of Christlikeness. You’ve lost the plot. And most of all you’ve lost your soul.
I know it’s likely you’ll dismiss these words. The fact that you’ve even made your bed with such malevolence, shows how far gone you are and how insulated you are from the reality in front of you. But I had to at least try to reach you. It’s what Jesus would do.
The myth at the heart of the praying Bremerton coach case
June 29, 2022 at 6:00 am Updated June 29, 2022 at 10:26 am
The case of Bremerton assistant football coach Joseph A. Kennedy had nothing to do with a “personal and private” prayer. That didn’t stop the U.S. Supreme Court from stripping away precedents protecting the separation of church and state. (Ruth Fremson / The New York Times)
Kennedy, center, later claimed he lost his job because of a personal, private on-field prayer. Pictured in an Oct. 16, 2015, file photo, Kennedy, in blue, covers his eyes as he kneels and prays, surrounded by Centralia players, at Bremerton Memorial Stadium after the game. (Lindsey Wasson / The Seattle Times)
1 of 2 | The case of Bremerton assistant football coach Joseph A. Kennedy had nothing to do with a “personal and private” prayer. That didn’t stop the U.S. Supreme Court from stripping away... More
Danny Westneat By Danny Westneat
Seattle Times columnist
The praying Bremerton coach won a great victory in the U.S. Supreme Court this week. But to get that win, he lost his way.
The high court ruled Monday that former Bremerton High School assistant football coach Joseph Kennedy was entitled to offer a “short, private, personal prayer” on the field after games and that the school district had discriminated against him when it tried to restrict him.
This ruling sounds reasonable, as who is against short, private, personal prayer? The problem is that the only part of the phrase “short, private, personal prayer” that is accurate to what was going on in Bremerton in the fall of 2015 is “prayer.”
We know this because it all played out here. One piece of evidence in the court record was a Seattle Times article from Oct. 15, 2015.
It was an account of a news conference Kennedy gave before the team’s big homecoming game against Centralia. “Football coach vows to pray” was the print headline. It describes — in Kennedy’s own words — how he was inspired to start holding midfield prayers with students after he saw an evangelical Christian movie called “Facing the Giants,” in which a losing team finds God and goes on to win the state championship.
Kennedy “has held his postgame ritual at midfield after each game for a motivational talk and prayer ever since,” the story recounted. By doing so, Kennedy said he is “helping these kids be better people.”
But school employees simply cannot lead prayers with students to try to make them better people, no matter how well-intended the effort. In private school, OK, but not in a public school where the students may be Jewish, Muslim, atheist or who knows. It’s not a close call that this breaks through the wall separating church and state, and it’s why the school district asked him to stop.
So to get around this problem, Kennedy, his lawyers and, ultimately, six U.S. Supreme Court justices made up an alternate storyline.
In this new telling, students were nowhere around and had nothing to do with Kennedy’s praying. He was a lone and silent sentinel, joined only by his convictions. As Justice Neil Gorsuch preposterously wrote, “He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.”
“This is just me thanking God for 15 seconds after a football game,” Kennedy told The Seattle Times on Monday, after the ruling.
That may have been true at times, but Kennedy himself announced at that news conference in 2015 that it was much more than that. He not only prayed with students, but was doing it to help the kids. That was two days before the game that became the central event of the Supreme Court case.
Here’s how a former player at Bremerton High School described that homecoming game in a brief to the court:
“To this day, I don’t remember who we played or if we even won. … All I remember is the aftermath of that game” in which there were “over 500 people storm[ing] the football field … from both sides, hopping the fences and rushing to the field to be close to Kennedy before he started his prayer.”
The short, private, personal prayer.
There’s more — the lawyers and Kennedy keep saying he was “fired for praying,” though he was not fired, he never applied for the next season. It all caused a judge in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Milan Smith, to call out the whole case last year as built on a “deceitful narrative.”
“The facts in the record utterly belie [Kennedy’s] contention that the prayer was personal and private,” Smith wrote. Smith, a George W. Bush appointee, later dubbed what the coach was doing as “‘everybody watch me pray’ staged public prayers (that spawned this multi-year litigation).”
“I hope as this case proceeds that the truth of what actually happened will prevail,” Smith wrote.
It did not. The mythmaking story of a persecuted lone believer is what prevailed.
Why does any of this matter now?
Well you’d hope facts matter to the U.S. Supreme Court. This particular court of “originalists” is increasingly looking to historical tradition, back to the days of the Founding Fathers when the Constitution was written, to determine modern-day rights. That’s what they did in the recent gun case, and the abortion case that threw out Roe v. Wade.
If they’re going to parse 250-year-old histories, it’s worrisome how much trouble they had getting a seven-year-old story straight.
This seems by design. Myth is more potent than fact. The dissenting judges noted that this case was not even about public employees being allowed to give short, private prayers. Instead, some precedents that have long formed the backstop for the separation of church and state were tossed aside in making this ruling.
So the case used a gauzy history to achieve a concrete goal — to try to push Christianity into the public schools. Not in an educational role but a proselytizing one.
The coach, for his part, now says he just wants his 15 seconds.
The dishonesty at the heart of this case though suggests the movement that brought it — and the justices that bought it — are hardly going to be content to stop at that.
Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com; Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.