Condoms to the Taliban! (Or Was It Hamas?)

Once again, I am in receipt of a communications from my not-so-esteemed Congressional Reprsentative, Robert Aderholt of the 4th district of Alabama.

Actualy, Representative Aderholt was responding to a phone call from my wife.  She was expressing concerns of some of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) actions. One of her concerns was the cancellations of funds going to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and foreign aid through the State Department.

The respresentative's letter to her listed a litany of MAGA/DOGE talking points.  No surprise there.

It was the conclusion about USAID that caused me to pay particular attention.

Representative Aderholt cited a statement by Representative Brian Mast, Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which concerned waste, fraud, and abuse by the agency.  The list included:

• $15 million for condoms for the Taliban through USAID.  (The White Huse Press Secretary had it for Hamas, but details don't matter do they?)

Now let's think critically about that for a minute.  Is it likely that the oh-so-forward-thinking Taliban are even interested in family planning, especially family planning where the male has responsibility?  That leftist pinko publication Forbes refuted this and other silly claims in Forbes.  There have been disbursements to the International Medical Corps that provides aid to victims of war, totaling more than $100 million, in which “family planning programming,” including contraceptives, were included, which is typical for aid packages to developing countries, the Associated Press reported.  In the last three years, there have been no disbursements for condoms to any countries in the Middle East.

(Man, this fact checking can be exhausting!)

Other equally suspect items on the list:

• $1 million to boost French LGBTQ in west and central Africa through the State Department.
• $20,600 for a drag show in Ecuador through the State Department.
• $446,700 to promote the expansion of atheism in Nepal through the State Department.

From Newsweek:  The source for his claim is likely the U.S. government proposal from April 2021, which offered funding to help overseas groups "combat discrimination, harassment and abuses against atheist, humanist, non-practicing and non-affiliated individuals of all religious communities."

Read in detail, the proposal from the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) is an offer to fund these groups so they may practice their views with safety and support—much like American citizens do under the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution.

The money, to be used over an 18 to 30 month period, was made available to groups and organizations in South/Central Asia and Middle East/North Africa (excluding Libya, Syria, and Yemen) only.

Not exactly the same as "promoting" atheism, is it?  It's more like we're promoting the spirit of the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

The point I guess is we have a department of the government, Treasury, making misleading statements to Congress and Congress (two of the representatives) simply repeating those statements.  Joseph Goebbels couldn't do it any better.

Oh, and Representative Aderholt proudly tells us that he has joined the DOGE caucus.  It's all very cringe worthy.

 

Note to Senator Katie Britt February 14, 2025

 February 14, 2025

Senator Katie Britt

660 Gallatin Street Southwest

Suite 1400

Huntsville, AL 35801

Dear Senator Britt,

I write to you to express my dismay at your support of President Trump’s executive actions.  Here are two examples.

1. First, thank you for your response to my earlier email. I found that the content of that response to be dismally lacking in fact, parroting the “declarations” by President Trump of wholesale waste, fraud, and inefficiency in the various agencies of our federal government and referring to “foreign entities and radical leftwing causes.”  No one in the administration or DOGE is bothering to cite specific examples of these deficiencies. Forgive me, but my experience with the first Trump presidency makes it difficult for me to accept these declarations as true.

2. I see where you have introduced legislation attempting to codify the removal of birthright citizenship as guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Refer to an episode of Throughline, NPR's history podcast on birthright citizenship. After much thought, I believe revoking that clause implies none of us are citizens. Going back to our earliest ancestors to come to America, their children would not have been citizens. Nor would their children, and theirs, and so on until the present generation. 

I could go on, but you get the idea. In my opinion and with apologies to our Latin American neighbors, President Trump is acting more like a banana republic “El Presidente.”  He lies and his minions, including Elon Musk, repeat those lies. 

Please do your job. Exercise some oversight into the Executive Branch and please, please find a spine.

Jim Coleman

2099 Hickory Trail NE

Arab AL 35016

256.640.0405

jcole724@gmail.com

What's Goin' On

 With apologies to Marvin Gay.

What's goin' on:

• The president has broken our country's promises and moral obligation to people from Afghanistan by turning his back on them.
• During the campaign, he promised that he knew nothing about Project 2025.  Yet, his executive orders are carbon copies of the Project's playbook.
• Multiple administrations from both parties have long supported USAID.  Its efforts served as "soft diplomacy" to encourage friendly relations with many countries in the world whose people were on the margins.  But now it's gone.
• I pity my children and grandchildren who will suffer the effects or the president's cancellation of funding for renewable energy projects and general rejection of climate change as a reality.  I see irony in his continued denial of climate change but insisting that climate change has changed the shipping lanes so that Greenland suddenly becomes an object of his avarice.
• What he has done to the immigration system is morally reprehensible.  Why do people want to come to the United States?  They see it as a land of opportunity and hope, when they live in hopelessness.  
• Why does he lie so much?  And his administration doubles down on the lying.  I don't know how his new press secretary can look herself in the mirror in the morning.
• Then there's the whole Elon Musk business.  If that's not frightening, I don't know what is.  Allowing unvetted persons to have access to some of our country's and its people's sensitive data borders on treason (and maybe more than borders on).
• Now he's rambling about turning over the air traffic control system to Musk's Starlink network.  What's the worst that can happen?
• Now he's charged his new Attorney General with wiping out "anti-Christian bias" from the government.  Really?  Where are Christians under attack?  Christians are the least discriminated against sector of the population.  We're not a Christian country, but that hasn't stopped us from building churches on every other street corner!
• He's questioning funding for the United Nations.  Really?  How many of us remember trick or treating for UNICEF?  His attitude oward international bodies like the UN, the International Criminal Court and the World Health Organization is very suspicious.  There's isolationism but this is ridiculous.
• While we're on morally reprehensible topics, there's Gaza.  He actually thinks he can simply declare that he's going to relocate people from their homeland and build a fabulous resort after clearing away the ruins of the Gaza war.  "It's going to be beautiful!"  Maybe that's why he gets nervous when the International Criminal Court is mentioned.
• He's signed an executive order instructing his successor to obliterate Iran if Iran is reponsible for his assassination.  He thinks he can control things from the grave.
• Where did this idea about Canada becoming our fifty-first state?  How insane is that?
• He thinks the United States should take back the Panama Canal.  Ludicrous!
• He falsely, of course, claimed that the US sent fifty million dollars in condoms to Hamas.  That makes me think someone has a worm in his brain.

I could go on but I'm sure there will be more to add to the list.

Never, and I mean never, have we had such a deranged President fostering so much corruption in our government.

Some Thoughts on a Different Kind of Evolution

It appears to me that we Christians have had it all wrong for some period of time.

Let's talk about God, first and foremost.

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) starts us off with two stories of creation.  God speaks all  things into existence.

It's time for us to grow up and recognize the Bible for what it is and isn't.

Implicit in Genesis is a common acceptance that some things are wrong:

1. Murder -- Cain and Abel.
2. Deceit -- Jacob "stealing" his birthright.
3. Theft -- see #2.
4. More deceipt -- Joseph's brothers and their treatment of him.  Selling a brother into slavery.  Envy.  Lying to Jacob about what happened.

On the flip side, some things are "right":

1. Mercy -- God does not exact retribution on Cain.
2. Forgiveness -- the reconciliation of the two brothers Esau and Jacob and the reception Joseph gives his brothers in Egypt.

As we move into Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers, the law is laid out.  First the ten commandments, broken into two sections:  how the people treat God and the people should treat each other.  These are followed by the six hundred elements of the laws of the Hebrew Testament.

What is their intent?  I believe they were primarily meant to help people live together.  Seems obvious, doesn't it?  Don't murder each other, don't lie, don't want what your neighbor has, don't steal, don't take your neighbor's spouse.  In hindsight, it is obvious; in fact, it's the basic bedrock of any society, large or small.

Now, let's take a brief detour from the Bible and into science.  Darwin's theory of evolution is a theory, it can't be proven.  But you would be hard pressed to cite instances of where it has been disproven.  So, let's assume it describes the way life came to be on planet earth.

From one-celled creatures in the swirling waters of the seas to fish to reptiles that crawled upon the land, then birds, dinosaurs (they are gone, thank goodness), mammals, primates.  At some point, one of these creatures became aware of its own existence.  It congregated into communities of similar beings.  Eventually, one of these self-aware creatures realized, for the tribe/family/community to survive, there needed to be some rules for living together.  The earliest of these rules were no doubt passed around verbally or orally, writing not having been invented.  Later, in the cradle of civilization in what we now call the Mideast, laws were written down.  Several have been discovered, the oldest and best known being the Code of Hammurabi.  

Later, the Hebrews came along and committed to writing the stories of their history and the laws that had been formulated.  If you declare that they came from God, they have a certain amount of weight!

Now the other idea that early humankind shared is a need to explain how everything came to be.  And, to make a very long story short, that explanation is given a name:  in English, God; in Arabic, Allah; in Hebrew Yahweh or Jehovah; in Hindu India, the gods have many names and many purposes.

So, you can believe that some being created everything including the rules to live by or you can believe that the rules came about naturally, as a means for community survival.