For some reason people, especially the younger ones, find fault with Joe Biden, claiming he has done very little while they tout all the things Trump said he was going to do for the American people when most of what he did was tell us what he was going to do while removing rights of the various types of people of whom he and his needed and needy supporters disapproved.
They have grown so used to immediate presidential comments delivered after an event with no facts upon which to make a loud pompous proclamation of the image of America rife with super powers, people have found taking the time to pass on a message based on knowable facts but lacking the fireworks of military threats that we actually hope will not be delivered up as a sign of greatness, they reject thoughtful actions and words based on reality.
Since the prominent form of communications lately seems to be electronically transmitting repeated posts and texts without checking their veracity that has led many to believe that because he did not have an instant resolution and an angry speech complete with name-calling. regarding the present Israeli/Hamas conflict he has done nothing, here is a short list of the things Biden has done while we looked for anything that could be found to prove find that he wasn’t doing anything.
Directed USA to rejoin Paris Climate Agreement.
Halted the Keystone XL pipeline.
Repealed Trump’s travel bans.
Repealed Trump’s transgender military ban.
Ordered an additional 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine.
Pledged $4 billion to COVAX global vaccine alliance.
Signed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan into law.
Canceled $1.5 billion in student debt for victims of for-profit school fraud.
Ended the War in Afghanistan after 20 years.
Negotiated and signed the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act:
U.S. gross domestic product growth was the strongest economic growth in 37 years.
Approved a U.S. special forces mission that killed ISIS leader Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.
Nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Signed the Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).
Led international response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Signed the first major gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years.
Ordered the drone strike that killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the world’s most wanted terrorist.
Unemployment fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest rate in 50 years.
Signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law, providing $52.7 billion for chip manufacturing and research and $170 billion for scientific research, innovation, and space exploration.
Signed PACT Act strengthening health care and benefits for America’s veterans and their survivors.
Signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law.
Authorized $369 billion to provide energy security, fight climate change, and create clean domestic manufacturing jobs. I
Extending Affordable Care Act subsidies for 3 years, expanding vaccine coverage, and reforming prescription drug pricing.
Established 15% corporate minimum tax on companies with at least $1 billion in profits.
Hearing aids become available over the counter without a prescription, lowering costs.
avoided catastrophic rail strike
Signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law, ensuring federal recognition of marriage regardless of sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin.
Got congressional Republicans to swear off Medicare and Social Security cuts live at his televised State of the Union Address.
Went to war-torn Ukraine to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. Expanded access to long-term care and child care.
Invested more than $42 billion in the Broadband Equity Access and
Deployment (BEAD) Program to bring internet to the entire country.
Announced $39 billion in student debt relief for 804,000 borrowers.
13.68 million jobs created during first 30 months ]
Secured the release of more than 30 wrongfully detained Americans around the world.
Created the first-ever Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
First president to join a picket line with striking union members.
Named technology hubs for 32 states and Puerto Rico to help create jobs under the Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs program.
The truth is, we are bringing knives to gun fights.
As rational as a person might be in explaining what is wrong with Israel’s, well, actually, Bibi’s concept of a militarized, Old Testament, take-it-because-we are-convinced “this Land is Mine, God gave this land to me” Israel, and with that claim over centuries so easily massacred men, women, and children in God’s name so they could take what they claimed He wanted them to have with the only proof to justify what they did and why being a book they wrote, but that is based on the rational person’s thinking things through and not the mentality that produced what is happening now.
He may have led them to the Promised land, but any concept God may have had for the peaceful coexistence with those already there went out the window when the Hebrew people arrived hot and angry from the desert and just killed off the existing residents instead.
For Centuries Christians hated the Jews because they Killed Jesus, expelled them from European countries, went after them with various Inquisition based treatments, and, since Christians could not lend money because of the Christian interpretation of usury in the Bible while the Jews, who wrote the thing, did not see it that way and did the necessary banking and lending, eliminated the bakers along with the banks and the debts when too many people including kings found they could not repay the debts. Very convenient because they killed Jesus and were being unChristian.
This attitude got so out of hand we got the Holocaust and even that did not alleviate anti-semetism until the Moral Majority entered politics and needed allies finding the best ones were those they had been hating on by adopting the term Judeo-Christian hoping, as former Boston mayor Jame Michael Curley asserted, that the Community memory lasts 21 days, the Jewish people would forget how these very same people had demonized them and accept they had always been friends while being used by them to get what they wanted, power.
The history for the last fifty years is out there to review for those who choose to review actual history as opposed to repeated tweets and DMs.
Long story short, when it was realized religion would have more clout unified, the idea of a Judeo-Christianity was born, and suddenly, Jesus became a Jew again, but a relatively Christian leaning one, and the Old Testament God and his uneven demands like “Thous shalt not kill” and then ordering the massacre of whole cities and collecting foreskins as proof, a rather phallic form of scalping replaced the one that gave the Sermon on the Mount.
The weak allowed the loud to take over assuming volume determined veracity and here we are.
We now face the international pimple popping that has been produced by the marriage of politics and religion and those using this to get what they want, usually riches, from its days of being only in scattered pockets.
We face all sorts of attacks on human rights based on religion and even as they revel in the self evident truth that we are all equal and that we have been endowed by our creator with rights, they blasphemously decide they will decide for God if he really meant to give rights to everyone and not just those of whom they approve.
Twenty years ago I was part of a fight against book banning. It was basically a battle between the Bible and the Constitution and in that case the Constitution won .
The initial assumption then was, as it is now, if you presented enough reasons, that should influence thought and action of those pushing “right to life until birth”, a hetero-nomative society, limiting the rights that God, their God, gave us, and attempting to pass laws based on the Bible as opposed the Constitution We The People chose, not some belief system that was forced upon us like the French had to endure with Charlemagne. He may have driven a whole village into the river to face drowning or accept Christianity, in the distant past but that whole comply-or-die approach was used again in the 1980s as AIDS proved very useful in the attempted genocide of Gay people, of course in the name of religion, and seems to have more modern application, perhaps a more subtle approach, by ensuring the genocide looks like security and the victims of it demonic.
However, many of the arguments that had been applied regionally to support book banning are the ones being used nationally now which shows that no matter how effective anyone may be presenting facts for consideration, expecting them to turn away from He who is commanding them forward is a totally naive one.
Onward Christian Soldiers,
You can present the history of the Middle East all the way back to when God messed up His own plans with the only resolution being to send Ishmael and the mother that God had Abraham impregnate so he could begin the Hebrew religion out in the desert to die. An all-seeing, omniscient, not bound by time supreme entity should have seen what was coming and would have waited for Sarah to get pregnant.
But, no, He had not done well with the angels who rebelled against a supreme being, Adam and Eve who screwed up immediately like a faulty prototype with too many bugs, Noah’s daughters getting him drunk and beginning the repopulation of the earth by having sex with him in his drunken state after already producing the next two human generations that came though intergeneration incest with Adam and Eve, so what would give anyone the idea that divine plans should not be reviewed before implimentation.
Comparing the book banning twenty years ago to now and seeing the arguments for it are the same, it is clear that any reasonable explanation that any reasonable person might advance that one assumes would at least be considered, those opposing bans forget that while they are basing their arguments on reason, law, and the Constitution, like the Hebrews justifying their land grabs and massacres on it, they are following the dictates of their God and their version of Jesus, the White guy from the South who wrote the Bible all by Himself in English.
While we are attempting to be rational in finding a solution to the situation with Bibi’s vision of an Israel dependant on more biblical genocide, we tend to forget that the other side of the issue isn’t.
They hold to the belief that these days are the eschatological last days and Jesus is coming after the battle of Armageddon, and between the end times, the second coming of Jesus, and reading a book about a Gay child, getting Jesus to love you when he comes back makes the choice clear,
Too many Christians see current wars, natural disasters, illnesses, and just about any negative thing no matter how small as the signs that the big battle is coming and right where it should, in the Middle East, specifically the Valley of Megiddo in Northern Israel.
According to the End Timers, the road to Amageddon began in earnest in 1914, the year World War I began because it was then that God’s Kingdom began ruling in heaven. Why it took Him that long to get control of what He had created and allowing Himself to finally be in charge is a mystery, but His ways are not ours so we are told. Although the whole Lucifer story takes place before creation, an event from the way distant past according to the Bible, it would seem, in reality, expelling Satan and the demons from heaven who have since been wreaking havoc on God’s creation took much longer and at no time did it dawn on Him that He could eliminate the problem by recalling and undoing His faulty creation of angels.
After the Battle of Armageddon when Jesus returns, there will be a lot of explaining to do and He does not seem the type of entity that would accept just any old excuse for one’s behavior and so, to be saved and to enjoy the benefits of the thousand year reign of Jesus on earth, since Jesus said, “The one who has endured to the end will be saved”, these people will do what they have convinced themselves it will take to make the cut.
You cannot change these people’s minds once convinced of the end times signs because with the world ending soon and Jesus coming back, this time as a king so we don’t kill Him again, they are trying to impress Jesus and not you.
We see a battle between the rational and irrational, fundamentalist Christians and reasonable, non-fanatic ones. We see attempts to remove rights and ban books and people. We assume a rational discussion could change minds.
We forget that in their minds it is us versus Jesus and they are siding with Jesus.
I have seen it. You cannot change their minds and you cannot build your strategy on the foolish idea that any human explanation is equal to what they have convinced themselves is what Jesus wants.
That realization has to become a strong basis of approaching these people.
If we do not accept that these people are convinced they are proving themselves worthy of salvation and sitting on someone’s right hand during the thousand years of Heaven’s reign, we are spitting in the wind.
I am hearing the same arguments for banning books that were debunked twenty years ago but by humans, non-biblical, non-believing ones and, considering the outcome, reason has no chance against God’s very human will.
And if we think that Joe Biden is going to be able to convince the Christain Nationalists in Congress to side with any human solution he or anyone can come up with to bring peace to the Middle East, we forget with Amageddon on the horizon, any solution from anyone will be opposed.
These are the end times and they look forward to the Israel/Palestine conflict igniting the battle they so crave.
The battle for real solutions and fighting the march of religion over our rights is lost if we engage as they want us to. We have all experienced the closed mind of the other side when,after saying something specific, you get “so what you are saying is…,” with that person returning to a pet point totally unrelated to what you had said and now you are getting the lecture you allowed to happen..
We will win by being rational with the vast majority of people and stepping up and being seen so the empty barrels making the most noise eventually get muffled by the size of the actual crowd.
The number of rational people is greater than the fundamentalist crowd. They are just louder and more visible.
We should be appealing to the majority as this vocal minority will never change their minds or actions. They just won’t.
Between the needs of humanity and making Jesus happy, they do it for Jesus.
The Conflict now between Hamas and Israel is the spark for the giddily anticipated final battle. Thousands of innocent Palesrinians who are not part of Hamas just like all Republicans aren’t MAGA, thousands of children dying are just a necessary part of the process.
In God’s plans Herod had to kill every first born child under the age of three because of Jesus, a plan He obviously found useful and reusable after doing that earlier in Egypt working out any bug, and apparently seems useful now, although just showing up as God and telling us He was taking over for the next thousand years, while causing some degree of annoyance mostly, would not need genocide.
One state, two states, no states, no longer existing states, apartheid, unity, no solution will work until the world looks away from those whose religion is based on the end of the world signaled by a big battle in the Middle East and ignore the toddlers in the high school hallway and do what is necessary in spite of Jesus coming back and letting them all keep their cars and mansions.
Look at the Biblical record. It is up to humans to rectify a really bad plan and take a human approach and just dismiss all the religious considerations as the track record in that regard kills children and the fans of Armageddon are not only okay with that, but will accept that.
Since Hamas, a political organization, attacked Israel, an opposing political organization, over 4,000 Palestinian children, not members of Hamas, have been killed because one side claims God gave them someone else’s land according to their records and no one else’s.
4,000 children, excuse me, 4,400 children have died for politics.
