Gore Vidal Pages

How Much Money Could the Department of Defense Save if it Stopped Trying to Save Souls?

[T]he Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) began an investigation into just how much money the DoD spends on promoting religion to military personnel and their families. What prompted this interest...was finding out what the DoD was spending on certain individual events and programs, such as the $125 million spent on the Army's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program and its controversial "Spiritual Fitness" test, a mandatory test that must be taken by all soldiers.

via www.talk2action.org

Some DoD contract tax-dollar amounts.... Your tax dollars are work:

via www.religiousrightwatch.com

As Gore Vidal has noted, from 1958 until the start of the "war on terror," US defense spending had already topped $7 trillion ($7,000,000,000,000). Spending exploded after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. We have a defense spending problem, and allocating taxpayers' money to religious training and entertainment in the military isn't just something Constitutionally problematic, it's something we literally can't afford.

"Crashing the Tea Party," or belatedly lifting the wool from a few more Americans' eyes?

David E. Campbell, an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame, and Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, write of some of their surprising (to them) findings after a 2011 follow-up to their 2006 interviews of a representative sample of 3,000 Americans.

Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

via www.religiousrightwatch.com

One on One – Gore Vidal « P U L S E

Gore Vidal, the novelist, playwright, screenwriter and essayist has been a leader in American literary culture for six decades. He is nearly 86-years-old, but he still has his rich memory and trademark sense of wit and irony.

via pulsemedia.org