Haunting Heaven still

Am I seeing things, or does Rick Santorum’s weird photoshop morphing of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney look kind of like Jason Robards?

“Woman Who Isn’t Racist But vs. Guy Who Doesn’t Hate Gays He Is Just Saying That’s All”

“I don’t write to them. I don’t write for them. And I don’t write at them.”

“These are impulses born of panic in the face of modernity, and fear before an amorphous ‘other.'”

“If there is no clearly stated directive in the Bible to marginalize and ostracize gay people, then Christians continuing to do so is morally indefensible, and must cease.”

“Many Christians are not well-versed in what Jesus had to say about the poor.”

“How can this passage possibly be interpreted as a Biblical free market principle that ‘labor is rewarded’ when, if interpreted as though an economic lens, it is actually teaching the exact opposite?”

“No, you don’t understand it. Let it grow on you.”

“Over 90 percent of persons killed in US military ‘engagements’ since Vietnam are, in fact, civilians.”

“This way of practicing war cannot find any excuse within any Christian description of the just war, and no war as actually practiced actually lives up to those just war standards at their most morally compelling.”

“The number of deaths is so immense that it becomes incomprehensible and anonymous, and yet the dying was not spectacular. Violence only directly caused 2 percent of the reported deaths.”

“Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you have been paying ‘food insurance’ premiums — with some of your purchases excluded from coverage at the whim of the insurer.”

“If you truly value families, you shouldn’t play politics with a woman’s health.”

“Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

“I think the American people are hungry, looking for some way out of this mess that we’re in and I think they’re saturated [with] these sort of quick-fix type things — that we can’t be bold, we can’t grow, we’ve got to, as the Ryan budget says, just keep shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.”

The man who planted trees just like The Man Who Planted Trees.

“Instead of giving all that money to fossil fuel companies who are currently posting record profits, why not simply send everybody a check for that amount?”

“The Interrupters: One year in the life of a city grappling with violence.”

Post title comes from a song by Emmylou Harris, who turns 65 today. That song seems appropriate: