Enemy within: Dominionists

[happydreams]

Mods. Please do not put this in the religion section. This is about the larger issue of how Dominionism seeks to steal our vote and do away with the Constitution.

Helen Thomas should ask Bush about this.


November 17, 2004—On December 24, Christmas Eve 2001, Pat Robertson stepped down as President Of The Christian Coalition. Lo and behold behind the nativity scenes religious conservatives believed Robertson’s step was taken so that President Bush could take his place as head of the American Holy Christian Church. So reported Katherine Yurica in "The Despoiling of America—How George W. Bush became the head of the new American Dominionist Church/State." <1>

In fact, it was the sign that the Bush government under God was led by an anointed American president, the first regent in a dynasty of regents waiting for the return of Jesus to earth. The prez would now be the minister through whom God would execute (don’t take that word lightly) His will in these United States. Of course, Dubya accepted scepter and sword with grace and a humble sense of exultation. It was a kind of mandate from God if not the people: Junior, a savior was born, and a Dominionist star shone.

As Supreme Court Jusitce Antonin Scalia pointed out a few months later, the Bible teaches and Christians agree, "government . . . derives its moral authority from God." Funny, I thought it was our “unalienable rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" that our "Creator" gave us. At least that’s what the opening of the Declaration of Independence said. Nevertheless Scalia tells us, it is the "minister of God" who has powers "to ‘revenge,’ to ‘execute wrath,’” of course "including wrath by the sword." I never remember seeing that in the Declaration or the Constitution. Yet somehow George began to wield his sword like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, though a lot of folks missed the gore, not Al.

Leo Strauss, putative father of the neocon movement, added this bit of bowdlerized text from Machiavelli: "One ought not to say to those whom one wants to kill, ‘Give me your votes, because your votes will enable me to kill you and I want to kill you,’ but merely, ‘Give me your votes,’ for once you have power in your hand, you can satisfy your desire.’" Well, isn’t that the moral high ground? Now we know what George was smirking about all along....lots more


http://www.onlinejournal.com/TheocracyAlert/html/111704mazza.html

[flvegan]

1. "Dominion" is such a bastardized term

Again, flipped for one's own use in one's own terms, this "dominion" granted man by God via The Bible being something meaning "ownership" that we can do as we please with all things and all creatures.

What absolute shit.

As translated, it also means "caretaker" and "steward" which are two things that most folks playing the dominion card know nothing about.

Whatever. Most folks will spin it to mean that we can do as we feel we want, as we, humans, have mastery of the earth and all her inhabitants. Indeed. Such disrespect.

[seemslikeadream]

2. Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm

In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S’s originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS). California newspapers have long documented the Ahmanson family’s ties to right-wing evangelical Christian and Republican circles.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported, “. . . primarily funded by evangelical Christians – particularly the wealthy Ahmanson family of Irvine – the institute’s $1-million annual program has produced 25 books, a stream of conferences and more than 100 fellowships for doctoral and postdoctoral research.” The chief philanthropists of the Discovery Institute, that pushes creationist science and education in California, are Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. was a member of the highly secretive far-Right Council for National Policy, an organization that included Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other Iran-Contra scandal notables, as well as former Klan members like Richard Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a savings and loan fortune, is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press. But, English papers like The Independent are a bit more forthcoming on Ahmanson’s politics.

“On the right, figures such as Richard Mellon Scaife and Howard Ahmanson have given hundreds of millions of dollars over several decades to political projects both high (setting up the Heritage Foundation think-tank, the driving engine of the Reagan presidency) and low (bankrolling investigations into President Clinton’s sexual indiscretions and the suicide of the White House insider Vincent Foster),” wrote The Independent last November.

The Sunday Mail described an individual as, “. . . a fundamentalist Christian more in the mould of U.S. multi-millionaire Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who uses his fortune to promote so-called traditional family values . . . by waving fortunes under their noses, Ahmanson has the ability to cajole candidates into backing his right-wing Christian agenda.

Ahmanson is also a chief contributor to the Chalcedon Institute that supports the Christian reconstruction movement. The movement’s philosophy advocates, among other things, “mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards.”

The Ahmanson family sold their shares in American Information Systems to the McCarthy Group and the World Herald Company, Inc. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel disclosed in public documents that he was the Chairman of American Information Systems and claimed between a $1 to 5 million investment in the McCarthy Group. In 1997, American Information Systems purchased Business Records Corp. (BRC), formerly Texas-based election company Cronus Industries, to become ES&S. One of the BRC owners was Carolyn Hunt of the right-wing Hunt oil family, which supplied much of the original money for the Council on National Policy.


:hi:

[seemslikeadream]

3. Ahmanson: bagman for Christian Reconstructionist movement

Ahmanson: bagman for Christian Reconstructionist movement

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2003/09/19/120.html

Vanishing Act

It's a shell game, with money, companies and corporate brands switching in a blur of buyouts and bogus fronts. It's a sinkhole, where mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants, crazed Christian fascists, CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms dealers -- and presidential family members -- lie down together in the slime. It's a hacker's dream, with pork-funded, half-finished, secretly programmed computer systems installed without basic security standards by politically partisan private firms, and protected by law from public scrutiny. It's how the United States, the "world's greatest democracy," casts its votes. And it's why George W. Bush will almost certainly be the next president of the United States -- no matter what the people of the United States might want.

The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players -- Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia -- with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation, coming on strong. These companies -- all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid -- have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled systems -- many using "touch-screen" technology that leaves no paper trail at all -- are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other universities.

-snip-

Who's behind these private companies? It's hard to tell: The corporate lines -- even the bloodlines -- of these "competitors" are so intricately mixed. For example, at Diebold -- whose corporate chief, Wally O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, has publicly committed himself to "delivering" his home state's votes to Bush next year -- the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked in the vote-count business by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing "steering group" stacked with Bushist faithful.

Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist "Christian Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a theocratic takeover of American democracy, placing the entire society under the "dominion" of "Christ the King." This "dominion" includes the death penalty for homosexuals, exclusion of citizenship for non-Christians, stoning of sinners and -- we kid you not -- slavery, "one of the most beneficent of Biblical laws."

Ahmanson also has major holdings in ES&S, whose former CEO is Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes; needless to say, his initial victory was reported as "an amazing upset." Hagel still has a million-dollar stake in the parent company of ES&S. In Florida, Jeb Bush's first choice for a running mate in his 1998 gubernatorial race was ES&S lobbyist Sandra Mortham, who made a mint installing the machines that counted Jeb's votes.

http://www.tabletnewspaper.com/politics/73_tftgk.html

Theonomic Reconstructionism:
One God, One Vote:

"We protect the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Now, we protect the most sacred treasure we have, our secret ballot." -Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell, May 2002.

"My purpose is total integration of biblical law into our lives." -Howard Ahmanson

How does a fervent belief in the End of the World and a conviction that the Bible (King James only, thank you ma'am) is the actual revealed word of God factor into one's long-term investment strategies? A strange question to be sure, but one that must have been posed by at least a few of the eclectic crowd who believe in Theonomic Reconstructionism.

Theonomic Reconstructionism is a belief that the only true authority is God's, that allegiance to biblical laws trumps that of civic law and that the Kingdom of Heaven needs to be built on Earth before Jesus will come again. In addition to that, homosexuals should be put to death, women should be banned from civic office, apostates and heretics should be stoned to death and there is a great need for more Christian politicians.

Not content to philosophize about such things, the TR movement sprang into action. Funded by billionaires such as Howard Ahmanson and the Coors and Hunt families, Reconstructionists formed think tanks such as the Chalcedon Institute and the Rutherford Institute (the friendly guys that funded Paula Jones' lawsuit against Clinton) to give the Christian Right a philosophical base to draw from, and political action committees to finance their elections.


According to the Reconstructionists, Jesus would do what Howard Ahmanson did. Ahmanson inherited his money from his father, owner of Home Savings & Loan (during the S&L scandal of the Reagan years, Home's investors, mostly small family investments, lost over $150 million dollars. No one went to jail). In addition to funding PACs and think tanks, Howard Jr. parlayed his fortune into the majority stock of a business called American Information Systems (AIS) started by two enterprising brothers, Todd and Bob Urosevich. AIS later merged with Business Records Corporation (BRC) and became Election Systems & Solutions (ES&S). ES&S is the number one provider of touch-screen voting machines. Their website claims that their products were used in collecting 56% of the national vote in the last presidential elections
more


http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3667&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Once upon a time there were two brothers: Bob and Todd Urosevich. In the 1980's, with the financial backing of the right-wing extremist Christian billionaire Howard Ahmanson, Bob and Todd founded a company called American Information Systems (AIS) that built voting machines. They were also certified to count votes. It is interesting to note that back then there was no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. Even more interesting is the fact that this is still true today. Not even the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has a complete list of all the companies that count votes in U.S. elections.


Voting Fraud in the USA
Did you know....

80% of all votes in America are counted by o­nly two companies: Diebold and ES&S.

There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.

The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

35% of ES&S is owned by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who became Senator based o­n votes counted by ES&S machines.

Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.

Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.

Diebold is based in Ohio and supplies almost all the voting machines there.

None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.

30% of all U.S. votes are carried out o­n unverifiable touch screen voting machines.

Bush's Help America Vote Act of 2002 has as its goal to replace all machines with the new electronic touch screen systems.

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel owns 35% of ES&S and was caught lying about it

ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.

Exit polls for the 2004 elections were accurate within 1% or less in areas where ballot machines were used.

Major exit poll data discrepancies were noted in counties where touch screen machines were used, especially in Ohio and Florida.

[happydreams]

6. Real interesting stuff SLAD!

:hi:

[OneBlueSky]

4. Articles on the Rise of Dominionism in America

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/DirectoryRiseOfDominionismInAmerica.html

[happydreams]

7. Thanks for the links.

:hi:

[Ladyhawk]

5. I live around these people. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

"It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our
own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."---C. S. Lewis

[WiseButAngrySara]

10. I am very very afraid. We live under BOTH robber barons and under

omnipotent 'moral' busybodies. (And for all of their rhetoric to the contrary, their 'morality has nothing to do with God, and everything to do with political power, self interest and insatiable human greed.)

[SheWhoMustBeObeyed]

8. "Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost."

Scarey motherfuckers.

http://www.rickross.com/reference/fundamentalists/fund166.html
...plus lots more links at the end.

K+R

edit: thread too old to recommend. Sorry. :(

[happydreams]

9. Rushloony wants to execute atheists.

They are scarymofos.