Random Politics & Religion #00

So back to the original point... What does this have to do with Obama again? lol...

So back to the original point... What does this have to do with Obama again? lol...

Obama was never involved in any of nausi's points.

Pretty sure obama doesn't layout the initial route of the motorcade on his travels. but if the man wants to cut in line for some bbq they will drive him to it.

He used this example to try and draw some kind of comparison allowing him to show everyone that obama is responsible for the path the motorcade took but it just doesn't seem to relate at all...

China has a growing number of Christians, and that's causing increasing tensions with the officially atheistic ruling Chinese Communist Party. China's solution is if you can't beat 'em, co-opt them.

"Over the past decades, the Protestant churches in China have developed very quickly with the implementation of the country's religious policy," says Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper. "The construction of Chinese Christian theology should adapt to China's national condition and integrate with Chinese culture," including its path of socialism.

Christians in China have to worship in state-approved and supervised churches, and official estimates number the country's Protestant population at 23 million to 40 million, with 500,000 more baptized each year. Wang was speaking at an event in Shanghai to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the National Committee of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches in China. He didn't address the estimated 12 million Catholics in China, about half of whom illegally follow the lead of the Roman Catholic Church while the other half worship in the officially sanctioned, Vatican-rejecting Catholic church.

Wang didn't elaborate on this new "Chinese Christian theology," but the Three-Self Patriotic Movement's Gu Mengfei explained that the year-old Chinese push to promote correct Christian theology encourages pastors and laypeople alike to extract moral teachings in line with Biblical times and with other religious faiths. "This will encourage more believers to make contributions to the country's harmonious social progress, cultural prosperity, and economic development," Gu added.

The Russian and Chinese monetary regulators have agreed a draft document on national currency swaps, the Central Bank of Russia said on Thursday.

“The draft document between the Central Bank of Russia and the People’s Bank of China on national currency swaps has been agreed by the parties” and is at the stage of formal approval procedures, the Russian regulator’s press office said.

The volume of national currency swaps and the time of their launch will depend on the demand for this instrument, the press office said.

The swap agreement will boost the potential for using Russian rubles and Chinese yuans in trade settlements, the press office said.

The agreement will also serve as an additional instrument for ensuring international financial stability and offer a possibility to obtain liquidity in critical situations, the Russian regulator’s press office said.

“The agreement will stimulate further development of direct trade in yuans and rubles on the domestic foreign exchange markets of Russia and China,” the press office said.

With Europe looking gloomy and the days of mega-growth in China over, the United States has offered some hope for the world economy.

Investors will seek to gauge the strength of the U.S. rebound by examining the latest figures for retail sales and producer prices there.

Many are looking for reassurance, as they are in Britain, that economic growth is trickling down to workers' pay - important proof that the recovery will stick when central banks make it more expensive to borrow.

But the Bank of England is set to acknowledge surprisingly weak pay growth on Wednesday when it publishes economic projections, raising questions about Britain's readiness for its first interest rate hike since the financial crisis.

Although unemployment is set to fall, earnings are also forecast to be lower than a year earlier. There is a similar gap in the United States between rising numbers of people in work and lagging pay.

"To have confidence in the recovery in the United States and United Kingdom, wages need to rise in line with credit," said ING's Knightley.

"The cost of living continues to exceed wage growth. People need to see that they have more cash at the end of the month so that they are not borrowing out of necessity."

In order to slow the spread of HIV, certain people who do not have the virus but are at risk should take medication to prevent becoming infected. That’s the recommendation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and just recently, the World Health Organization.

The preventive treatment includes a drug called Truvada, and it is known as PrEP, for pre-exposure prophylaxis.

Eric McCulley made the decision to start PrEP. He’s 40, he’s gay and he’s HIV-negative. Outside an Atlanta coffee shop, he pulls out a plastic baggy with a few blue pills.

“They’re a decent size, actually,” he says. “Some people might call them a horse pill.”

The treatment is a combination of two drugs that are also used to treat HIV.

After hearing about the treatment and doing extensive research on his own, McCulley consulted with his primary care doctor.

“He was very supportive about it. He encouraged me to do it,” he says. “He gave me a lot of stuff to read, gave me a lot of stuff to think about, and told me I was a good candidate for it. So off we went.”

A few months into treatment, McCulley says the only change has been is in his attitude.

“I have what I was looking for. I have peace of mind. I feel like I’ve taken responsibility for my health,” he says.

But some PrEP users worry that not everybody in the medical community is up to speed. Although Truvada has been on the market for a decade, only recently have prescribing guidelines been available.

Dylan West is a 25-year-old Atlanta resident and works in international aid. He is also gay and recently found out first-hand that not every doctor is as familiar with PrEP as McCulley’s.

Some gastro-intestinal issues recently landed West in the emergency department. He’d started PrEP after beginning a relationship with someone who’s HIV-positive. One of the doctors in the emergency room noticed West listed Truvada as a medication he regularly takes.

“She immediately, without asking any questions, just said ‘Well, we should probably test for gonorrhea, syphilis, HIV/AIDS — the list,’ ” he says.

West feels that physician made a “rash assumption” about his sexual practices because he was on Truvada. West knew stigma was something he might face.

“The assumption being, you’re on Truvada, so you probably run around having sex with whoever you can,” he explains.

Some health advocates and activists within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities have gone as far as to label those on PrEP as “Truvada ***.”

Dr. Melanie Thompson says she’s heard that before. She’s the principal investigator of the AIDS Consortium of Atlanta and has long worked in HIV research. She has encountered reluctance from some to prescribe PrEP because of lack of knowledge about it.

“This is an interesting thing to me,” she says, “because doctors who say, ‘I don’t want to prescribe PrEP to somebody who might be at risk for HIV because they might not use condoms.’ You know, it’s an approach we wouldn’t take in other areas of medicine. ”

Thompson says no doctor would refuse to prescribe cholesterol-lowering statins to patients because they’re overweight. Somehow, the conversation around PrEP is different.

“So I think it’s a very interesting moralistic attitude that soon will be outdated. But I do think that this is a barrier for some patients,” Thompson says. “They feel stigmatized. And honestly, health care providers need to step up their game and do better than that.”

A CDC spokeswoman said that lack of awareness and knowledge among health careproviders is one of the primary challenges to PrEP’s success.

But both Dr. Thompson and CDC officials hope the newly issued treatment guidelines will help overcome any barriers.

The fatal shooting of an unarmed black St. Louis teen Saturday has caused an outcry of anger toward the city’s police, with locals rallying in the streets and widening uproar on social media.

Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was being placed in a police squad car, eyewitness Piaget Crenshaw told the St. Louis Dispatch, when he put his hands in the air and attempted to flee. Several shots hit him as he ran away.

St. Louis County police chief Jon Belmar said Sunday that Brown struggled for the officer’s gun in the patrol car and that one shot was fired from the officer’s gun during the tussle. The officer fired multiple shots at Brown as he fled, Belmar said.

Anger flared the rest of the day after Brown’s death, as protesters screamed obscenities mixed with threats to “kill the police,” and more than 60 area police officers responded to the scene. More shots were reported, though no one was injured.

An uneasy calm settled over Ferguson, Missouri, early Tuesday after a second night of violent clashes between law enforcement and residents protesting the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, with another demonstration planned for mid-morning.

So far, more than 50 people have been arrested in protests following the death of Michael Brown, 18, in a largely black St. Louis suburb on Saturday after what police officials said was a struggle with a gun in a squad car.

The FBI has opened a civil rights investigation into the racially charged case, and St. Louis County is also investigating the shooting.

Police have not said why Brown was in the police car. At least one shot was fired during the struggle, and then the officer fired more shots before leaving the car, police said.

Chanting "hands up, don’t shoot," protesters overnight challenged police trying to seal off the neighborhood where Brown was shot, a low-income, high-crime area east of downtown Ferguson. Some protesters said they were outraged that Brown appeared to have been shot while holding his hands up in surrender, calling the shooting the latest in a long history of police harassment of area minorities.

"They brought this on themselves," said 25-year-old Adam Burcher of Ferguson, who stood outside the Ferguson Police Department on Monday night with a sign reading "Stop Killing."

Later on Tuesday, a protest is expected outside the St. Louis County prosecutor's office in Clayton, Missouri, and officials are also expected to identify the police officer involved in the shooting.

Riots rage on in St. Louis.

Public Outcry After Police Shooting of Black St. Louis Teenager

Another protest set in Missouri after riots over teen's killing

Former Secretary of State and all-but-announced presidential candidate Hillary Clinton offered her most public break yet from President Obama over the weekend, slamming his "don't do stupid [stuff]" foreign policy and suggesting he had not been aggressive enough in asserting America's role in the world.

"Great nations need organizing principles -- and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle," Clinton told the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg in a line that surely launched a thousand grimaces (or worse) in the White House. She went on to explain that she doesn't actually believe that statement sums up Obama's entire foreign policy. “I think that that’s a political message. It’s not his worldview," she said. “… I think [Obama] was trying to communicate to the American people that he’s not going to do something crazy."

But Clinton, of course, knew what she was doing -- picking a prominent foreign policy writer to make a pointed critique of the current Administration's policies at the very moment when President Obama's ratings are at -- or damn close to -- their lowest ebb of his time in office. So, why did she do it -- and what does her willingness to so publicly break with the Obama Administration tell us about how she's positioning herself for 2016?

Here are three thoughts.

1) Clinton isn't worried about the Democratic primary. At all. Consider the 2008 race. By this time in that contest, then Illinois Sen. Barack Obama had already emerged as a potentially potent political force who was running to Clinton's ideological left largely on his opposition to the Iraq war. Clinton would never have made such a hawkish statement as this one back then, worried that it would embolden an already-rising Obama. (It turned out that Clinton's vote for the use of force resolution and her unwillingness to back away from it was enough for Obama to capitalize.) Why do it now then? Because she is supremely confident that there simply is no serious primary challenger out there who would be emboldened to take on the race because of her more hawkish (than Obama at least) views on foreign policy. Sure, people like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders or former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer might run in 2016 against Clinton but she doesn't spend one second worrying about them. This positioning on foreign policy -- that America needs to be more aggressive in asserting its views on the world stage -- is entirely aimed at a general electorate.

2) Clinton as ready on day one. Remember that "3 a.m. phone call" ad? The idea was that Barack Obama was untested on the world stage and sought to raise the question in voters' minds whether the freshman Illinois Senator was the person they wanted dealing with a complex world. Now, six years later, there are many people -- Democrats, Independents and, obviously, Republicans -- who believe that Obama wasn't prepared to take on the various challenges the changing world presented to him. Clinton's "organizing principle" argument is aimed directly at those doubts about Obama. Her argument is a simple one: I know the world. I know how complicated it is. I know all of these things because I have spent decades in government (and out of government) studying them, building relationships with foreign leaders, developing best practices. On day one, I step into the job with a broad idea of how I want America to be seen in the world -- and a plan to make it happen.

3) Clinton wants people to remember she never always agreed with Obama. One of the challenges Clinton will face in 2016 -- although not the biggest challenge -- is her association with Obama, particularly on foreign policy. (She was, after all, the top diplomat in the Obama Administration for his first term.) What Clinton does not want to do, however, is be forced to own every decision the President made -- especially those that she disagreed with. On Afghanistan, Clinton -- along with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates -- advocated for putting more troops in the country. On Libya , Clinton was a lead voice making the case for a military intervention to topple Muammar Gaddafi. And, in the interview with Goldberg, Clinton calls the U.S.'s decision to not actively involve itself in the early days of the uprising in Syria a "failure". There will be plenty on the foreign policy front that Clinton will have to own -- "pushing the reset button" with Russia, anyone? -- but she also wants to make very clear that had she been president, our foreign policy might have looked very different over the past six years.

Clinton does very little by accident in the public space. This interview with Goldberg was no exception.

Yeah....six million+ dead Africans are sure fans of her hubby's foreign policy. Let's see if someone in the same family can do better?

Ugh.

Looking at another election without a horse worth backing.

You haven't seen the Republican nominee yet though....

Unless the party drastically shifts away from the Christian-morality, corporation-backed jerkasses who currently seem to run the show, I don't see it being anyone worthwhile.

Unless the party drastically shifts away from the Christian-morality, corporation-backed jerkasses who currently seem to run the show, I don't see it being anyone worthwhile.

Hillary for 2016! w00t!

Idk what will happen in 2020, but if the system is still there go for the full 8!

Well according to my favorite supermarket tabloid magazine the Earth will end in 2016 !

It's the end of the long year Muslim calendar.

Hillary Clinton called President Barack Obama on Tuesday to “make sure he knows that nothing she said was an attempt to attack him” when she recently discussed her views on foreign policy in an interview with The Atlantic, according to a statement from a Clinton spokesman.

You haven't seen the Republican nominee yet though....

I'm guessing it'll be Rand "Pubes-on-Head" Paul.

That made me laugh a little too hard.

Truth be told, I'm more interested with what's IN a presidential candidate than ON it.

That made me laugh a little too hard.

Truth be told, I'm more interested with what's IN a presidential candidate than ON it.