White evangelicals want a puncher, not a preacher, in the Oval Office
Earlier this year at a huge "Evangelicals for Trump" rally in Miami, Florida, a pastor welcomed the President by shouting a prayer that sounded like the introduction to a heavyweight title bout: "Lord I thank you," he bellowed. "America did not need a preacher in the Oval Office, did not need a professional politician in the office. It needed a fighter and a champion for freedom and Lord that's exactly what we have." Cheers of adoration resounded.
This moment captured much of what is complex, confusing and disturbing about the highly politicised religious landscape of America today and the bearing it will have on the presidential election. Eighty-one per cent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and that figure looks like holding. That statistic is the accentuation of a pattern that has existed since the 1980s when an alliance emerged in the Republican Party between big business, populism and the religious right.
You can't understand America without understanding its religion and that, you might say, is something of a riddle. The non-conformist origins of the US spawned a bewildering array of denominations and expressions of belief. Even the term "evangelical" means so many different things depending on who is using it. Traditionally it signified a devout faith that, as historian David Bebbington describes it, prioritises conversion, the Bible and a personal relationship with God. But in popular usage today it most often simply means "politically conservative Christian".
The Republican Party has most successfully captured those who self-identify as evangelical. (That's if the person is white. Black protestants, themselves often theologically conservative, reliably vote Democrat to the tune of nine to one). The widely held perception among believers is that the Democratic Party has become secularised to the point where there is no room for the specific commitments of religious adherents.
Andy Crouch, former editor of Christianity Today Magazine, a leading evangelical publication, believes the brutally contested nature of contemporary American politics signifies something much deeper than the surface issues surrounding presidential elections and the appointment of Supreme Court judges.
"The best word I can think of is respect or recognition," he tells me. "The recognition of parts of our society that feel very unseen, or when seen, feel held in contempt … And the people who feel least respected and feel least included by the systems and institutions of American life … are looking for someone to validate them, and say, I see you. I recognise you. You matter." Crouch says this is by no means limited to religious people but says all kinds of groups who feel left behind in American life are looking for someone in their corner.
When it comes to evangelicalism as a cultural and historical movement, Kristen Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation believes this desire for a strong leader to offer protection and power has led to a distorted faith that favours rugged masculinity, of the John Wayne-type, alongside a misplaced Christian nationalism. "Love your enemies" and "turn the other cheek" can start to sound a bit awkward in such an environment. "Jesus becomes the warrior Christ and he's going to slay his enemies," says Du Mez. "And so they actually change the Jesus of the gospels to fit this ideal and in doing so, I argue, change Christianity itself."
A figure like Donald Trump fits perfectly the image of tough masculine protector uninhibited by virtues of kindness or self-control.
But not all believers buy it. Christians against Trumpism and Political Extremism is a recently birthed movement of influential Christian leaders who are calling for an end to the poisonous rhetoric and "extreme and dangerous methods of civic engagement" they see as characteristic of the current administration. The movement says it stands against political extremism of both "left" and "right" that uses "violence, chaos and degrading language", seeking instead justice, truth and unity.
It remains to be seen exactly what role religious communities will play in the election. But Christianity at its best centres on its founder who defied easy categorisation – being socially conservative and politically radical, as he was.
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From Tiffany to Target, stores are boarding up windows in case of election unrest
Retailers in Democrat cities are boarding up shops in preparation for a Democrat election loss. Lefties know they are the violent ones
Retailers across the US are stepping up security measures to try to head off any damages to their stores during election-related protests in the coming days. Tiffany, Saks Fifth Avenue, CVS, Target and Macy's are among the chains that are boarding up some of their stores' windows in preparation.
"While we intend to remain open where possible, out of an abundance of caution the windows of select stores in key cities will be boarded in anticipation of potential election related activity," said Nathan Strauss, spokesperson for Tiffany.
Stores around the US were damaged this summer, and merchandise was stolen during protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Retailers are hoping to prevent this from happening again.
CVS said it is boarding up stores in areas where they have been damaged by unrest in the past. Stores where windows are covered "will continue to be open to serve customers as long as it is safe to do so," said CVS spokesperson Mike DeAngelis.
Tom Buiocchi, CEO of ServiceChannel, an online platform that connects retailers with local contractors, said 750 stores have requested orders on the platform to board up their windows around the country since October 27, with the most in California, New York and Illinois.
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My Kid Has Cancer and ObamaCare Is Making Everything Worse
‘Before ObamaCare went into effect, the private marketplace offered us a wide range of relatively inexpensive plans.’
Joe Biden has been running an ad in which he says he can’t imagine what it would be like to have a child with cancer and no health coverage. I don’t have to imagine. Under the health “reform” championed by Biden when he served as President Barack Obama’s vice president, I live that reality every day.
Twice over the past three years, ObamaCare has had no plans to sell us that covers little girls ravaged by cancer or recovering from that ordeal—and it might leave us floundering again.
In November 2015, my wife got the most dreadful call a parent can get. The doctor knew why our daughter Colette, then 2 ½ years old, hadn’t been feeling well: Blood work had revealed leukemia.
Thanks to ObamaCare, we were already in financial straits. In 2014, the law had eliminated a great plan we had had for years. Before ObamaCare went into effect, the private marketplace offered us a wide menu of relatively inexpensive plans that covered specialist care, even out of state.
Afterward, however, all that was left were increasingly costly plans with fewer benefits. Premiums swelled. In 2017, I took my family into the ObamaCare marketplace to escape at least the crushing premiums.
But things were about to get much worse than expensive. In mid-2017, President Trump merely suggested scrapping massive ObamaCare subsidies to insurance giants that only delivered lousy care at ever-greater cost. In response, every insurer in northern Virginia with a family plan pulled out for the following year.
That is, except one. But Cigna Connect wouldn’t cover Colette at Inova Fairfax, the one hospital in the region with a pediatric cancer ward. Under ObamaCare, our daughter was effectively without coverage for cancer.
Panicked, we called the politicians, the media and Cigna. We retained an attorney. Nothing changed. No full policy coverage from Cigna. Without options, I shut down part of my consulting business and started work at a friend’s organization for its group insurance—and got saddled with monthly premiums far in excess of what we could afford.
Thanks to the publicity and some strong-arming by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Cigna agreed to cover the hospital—but it was too late for us. Then, for 2020, we purchased a better plan from Anthem, newly returned to the ObamaCare marketplace. We thought we might be done with insurance crises.
How naïve. In mid-March, with the novel coronavirus sweeping the country, Colette’s cancer doctors told us Anthem had decided that, in two weeks, it would no longer cover her clinic. Once again, thanks to ObamaCare, we were left without coverage for our daughter recovering from cancer.
Perhaps the marketplace would grant us a waiver to buy the Cigna plan still for sale in our ZIP code? Nope. So, like in 2017, we were forced to turn to Warner, to bully Anthem into its covering the clinic—at least through April 1, 2021.
After that? Who knows.
Open enrollment for next year starts Nov. 1. I could beg Warner to gear up for another round of veiled threats to a private company, to force one to cover us. Perhaps President Trump could issue an executive order prohibiting the insurance companies from pulling out of the market midyear, leaving children stranded.
But none of these is the right long-term answer. We must repeal ObamaCare and put into the hands of Americans real, automatically renewable insurance products curated to individual needs. Too many Colettes will suffer, and possibly die, waiting for the personal carve-outs only a few of us can ever get anyway.
To solve the inherent instability of ObamaCare, the state could just take over all medical facilities. It’s called single-payer. But then we would all be at the mercy of the same government bureaucracy that has been working for years to slowly kill my daughter.
And that has taught us a lesson. Turns out there is a nightmare worse than one’s watching cancer brutalize one’s little girl. It’s having Obama’s law—which his vice president rightly claims as his own—collude with the disease against her.
Mr. Biden, you might try imagining what that feels like.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13305&omhide=true
*************************************Does vitamin D protect against COVID-19?
Recent studies have found a link between low vitamin D levels and an increased risk of COVID-19 infection, but they don't prove that the vitamin is protective.
In the absence of a COVID-19 cure or vaccine, scientists are investigating whether vitamin D can reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection or the severity of the disease. Indeed, the idea of taking a vitamin to ward off COVID-19 infection certainly is appealing.
But although some recent studies have suggested a link between low vitamin D levels and a higher risk of catching the disease, experts say it's not enough to prove that vitamin D itself protects against the disease, or if other factors are playing a role.
One study, published Sept. 3 in JAMA Network Open, found that the risk of COVID-19 infection in people with vitamin D deficiency was nearly two times higher than in people with sufficient levels of the vitamin. Another study, published Oct. 27 in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, found that hospitalized COVID-19 patients had higher rates of vitamin D deficiency than a control group of patients who didn't have COVID-19 but whose vitamin D status was measured pre-pandemic.
These associations don't prove that vitamin D deficiency causes increased COVID-19 risk, said Adrian Martineau, who studies respiratory infections and immunity at Queen Mary University of London, and , who was not involved with either study. "But it's suggestive and it's enough to justify doing further research to find out whether or not there is a true cause-effect relationship," Martineau told Live Science.
A protective effect?
There are several reasons to hypothesize that vitamin D might reduce COVID-19 risk, Martineau said. Vitamin D has been shown to boost the immune system's response to viruses and dampen its inflammatory response; an excessive inflammatory response characterizes severe COVID-19 cases, he said.
According to a meta-analysis by Martineau, first published in 2017 in the journal BMJ and updated to include more recent studies this July on the preprint server medRxiv, vitamin D supplementation reduced the risk of acute respiratory tract infections in general compared with a placebo. (However, the meta-analysis did not include studies about COVID-19.)
Additionally, there's an overlap between the groups of people with higher risk of vitamin D deficiency, such as older people and people with darker skin, and those at higher risk for COVID-19, Martineau said. "People put two and two together and thought, 'Well, this is quite a striking coincidence, if it is indeed a coincidence.".
An earlier study published May 6 in the journal Aging Clinical and Experimental Research found that in 20 European countries, the lower the average vitamin D levels, the higher the rate of coronavirus cases and deaths were for a given country.
Still, not all studies have suggested a protective effect. A study published May 7 in the journal Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome found no statistically significant association between vitamin D levels and COVID-19 risk once the researchers took into account other factors that could affect COVID-19 risk.
https://www.livescience.com/vitamin-d-covid-19-risk.html
************************************IN BRIEF
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a top swing-state newspaper, hasn't endorsed a Republican in almost 50 years — but is backing Trump now (The Blaze)
Twitter restores New York Post account — and all it took was a Senate hearing (Washington Times)
Trump adviser Jason Miller hints legal battle to stop Dems from stealing the election (Washington Examiner)
Biden pledges to "collaborate" with the Chinese Communist Party (Free Beacon)
Scranton Joe's final Philly gaffe: says he's wearing an Eagles jacket, but it's a Delaware Blue Hens jacket (Washington Examiner)
Biden staffers can't stop calling Kamala "the next president" (Post Millennial)
Facebook removes 29K-member pro-Trump group, reinstates after Trump blasts on Twitter (Disrn)
Boston Globe columnist suggests no "difference" between Trump supporters and ISIS (Fox News)
Gavin Newsom sends kids back to class at fancy private school while public schools remain closed (Daily Wire)
Walmart reverses decision to remove guns and ammo (The Hill)
Study finds 20% of grocery workers had coronavirus, most without symptoms (New York Post)
Kyle Rittenhouse, dubiously charged with killing two Kenosha protesters, extradited to Wisconsin (NBC News)
Fraudster attempts to register dead Americans as Democrat voters in Florida (Fox News)
U.S. Postal Service likely lost thousands of Pennsylvania mail-in ballots (Free Beacon)
So close: Alyssa Milano dresses as RBG for Halloween, misspells name. Deletes and reposts. Misspells name again. Deletes. (Daily Wire)
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http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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