Search for "my name is wrong on my airline ticket cheap tickets problems phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Obama Signs Executive Order Making Changes to Faith-Based Office, but Frustrations Remain

By Sarah Posner

…isappointing,” noting that it “fails to correct significant constitutional problems and leaves important civil rights issues unresolved.” Although the group applauded the White House for some parts of the order — like providing secular alternatives and greater transparency — its executive director, the Rev. Barry Lynn, expressed frustration that Obama’s action “leaves much of George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative in place.” The administration’s…

New Spencer Book Denies Existence of Muhammad

By Hussein Rashid

…obe, has a new book coming out in which he attempts to show the historical problems with the historical record of Muhammad and Muslims. Unfortunately, the Islamophobia industry will likely get the book wide exposure. A press release about the book, lays out several “questions” about Muhammad and the origins of Islam. I show below why the book is really a “so what” rather than a “oh wow.” How the earliest biographical material about Muhammad dates…

GOP War on Caterpillars

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s Political Capital with Al Hunt airing this weekend. “It’s a fiction.” So, dude, quick question: What if a lot of caterpillars themselves said their rights were being attacked? Would it still be obvious fiction? Oh, except, ha ha ha, that’s a ridi…

Irish Priest Accidentally Shows Gay Porn

By Katie Toth

…is incident could bring up echoes Ireland’s history of massive child abuse problems in the Catholic Church, it’s easy to see why the diocese is moving so quickly. But even if he mixed his files up and this particular gentleman enjoys watching consenting adults do consenting adult things to each other when he’s not at work, it would make him a hypocrite, not a criminal. The ailing Church wouldn’t look good in either case. Had the Catholic Church in…

October “Baby” is a Grown Woman

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…-but-sick college student who learns that her multiple physical and mental problems all stem from the fact that her mother tried unsuccessfully to abort her at 24 weeks. This, uh, discovery comes to light after Hannah collapses during a school performance. In the hospital, the doctor reads, in front of Hannah’s parents, a passage from Hannah’s journal. “I feel dead inside,” Hanna evidently wrote days or weeks earlier. “No, something worse than dea…

The Economy is Sacred, Stupid

By Gary Laderman

…t action,” “save the entitlement programs,” “more taxes will solve all our problems,” etc.). As we get further into the holiday shopping season, the take-home message from the current political shift is clear and unequivocal, at least to me: it’s not the economy, stupid, but that the economy is sacred. Thanks to a combination of new school Tea Party spice and flavoring from the old-school Religious Right, the Republican Party miraculously disguise…

Does the Inquisition Explain the Modern World?

By Gordon Haber

…and seven centuries of torture, intimidation, public humiliation, incarceration, and execution. I would like to see Guantanamo Bay closed, but it is not a gulag; medieval popes did not have term limits. But Murphy does have a point. If I have problems with his argument, it is merely a matter of degree. For the Inquisition indeed echoes loudly in the hysteria over Muslims and illegal immigrants. And the story of Elvira del Campo teaches us to ask t…

What’s the Problem With a Good Placebo?

By William Grassie

…even an insult in the contemporary research climate; but there is nothing wrong with a good placebo, especially when you choose it yourself. The cup of herbal tea I’m drinking may have no pharmacological effect: I might just as well drink hot water. But the herbal aroma sure makes me think and feel like I am getting better. Placebos may be the most effective and important tool in any healer’s toolbox, though they certainly raise complex medical a…

A Neoconservative Jesus, Certified Kosher

By Ira Chernus

…ces of light must now preserve civilization itself. In the face of today’s problems—“financial crisis, decline of our values, the deterioration of the family, rampant greed and materialism… terror and war”—the only way to overcome our “hopelessness” and “fear” is to “return to the values and principles that define us. The Jewish Jesus I have laid out before you embodies these Judeo-Christian values.” In Boteach’s Rohrschach test, the Jews, includi…

Huckabee Teams Up with Citizens United to Promote Fetal Personhood

By Sarah Posner

…/GYN who formerly performed abortions. Levatino and his wife had fertility problems and were seeking to adopt a child; at one point he describes his regret as he was performing a first trimester abortion while he and his wife were undertaking that process. They eventually adopted a child who was later tragically killed after being hit by a car. Levatino describes a second trimester abortion he performed after the death of his daughter, after which…