“No, [Jerry] Falwell isn’t facing anything like the academic equivalent of the death toll, economic ruin, and social upheaval that’s now occurring on [his buddy and role model] Trump’s watch, but beneath Liberty’s gleaming exterior, there are signs of trouble. 

In fact, if you’re an academic, you’ll recognize the significance of numbers like these. Here is the shocking decline in Liberty’s freshman applications.”

See how the Devil and the Demon Rum Deceive!

Oh Lord, our President Falwell

Doth really really ball well.

Thou madest his cock

To roll and to rock.

Amen! He hath answered thy Call well.

With everyone talking about Sonny Boy’s cock-on-a-yacht display, it’s time to remind you that the Trump-BFF president of Libertine University has long been a laughable hypocrite. (Only a few at Libertine seem to mind.) He got it from his daddy, whose valedictory Christopher Hitchens memorably provided in this famous clip.

As if one needed any more reasons to loathe Liberty U.

Another powerful rabbi shares not only his gift for science, but his love of Donald Trump.

[Shmuel] Kamenetsky said it doesn’t matter how the president talks. “That’s because he’s a gvir, a wealthy man,” he said. “Wealthy, powerful people have a way of speaking and acting that is not refined. That’s not a reason not to vote for him.”

… is a for-profit college (and if you read University Diaries, you know about those skeezy joints) whose founder – a Tennessee state senator – seems to have stolen gobs of federal grant money in order to pay for every stage of the beautiful cycle of life (wedding, honeymoon, divorce). In a heavily religious press event (no questions, please!), Robinson and her spokeswoman describe a martyr for whom we are asked to pray and pray and pray. Pray away the Hey did you really use $600,000 of taxpayer money to buy a Louis Vuitton handbag, a Jeep Renegade, a Jamaican vacation, and an end to your personal debt? Pray it away! Give God the burden!

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* More on the Center for the Absorption of Federal Funds here.

Sing it with me.

Sinners!  Thou shalt die in sin.
Sound this warning out to all:
Praise hydroxychloroquin
Or thy servers all shall fall!

Tweet it with Immanuel:
Facebook, die!  In Jesus name.
Brother Trump shall tweet as well:
Let the deep state take the blame.

Three Israeli politicians call for the state to legitimize preemptive newbie strikes, and many other policies and points of view that are difficult to hold so long as the scurrilous irreligious in that country continue to “subjugate eternal Jewish law to the ratification of attorneys and the state attorney’s office.” Israel’s rabbis say many things that might seem hateful; but everything they say comes straight outa eternal Jewish law, which is ever so much better than whatever some … whaddaya call em? … state attorney (?) thinks.

Years ago, UD watched Theodore McCarrick, then Catholic Archbishop of Washington DC, preside over some fancy schmancy ecumenical event in a stately church in the city. She vividly recalls looking at the people around her, wondering how she could be the only one in the pews who perceived the patent smugness, arrogance, and insincerity of this man.

This, she remembers thinking, is one of the highest-ranking priests in the world??

Now everyone knows what UD sensed and so much more; but so prodigious a rapist of young men was the archbishop that new accounts and lawsuits keep emerging.

A 2019 lawsuit from James Grein claimed that he was abused by McCarrick for 20 years but nothing was done about it, even after he told Pope John Paul II during a visit to the Vatican.

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[A] blog post written by a former priest secretary of Mr. McCarrick’s, K. Bartholomew Smith, … labeled the disgraced cardinal “a devourer of souls.”

… for Israel.

… ME!

Christians who are supporters of the president have braided themselves to a man who in just the past few days and weeks tweeted a video of a supporter shouting “white power” (he later deleted it but has yet to denounce it); attacked NASCAR’s only Black driver, Bubba Wallace, while also criticizing the decision by NASCAR to ban Confederate flags from its races; threatened to veto this year’s annual defense bill if an amendment is included that would require the Pentagon to change the names of bases honoring Confederate military leaders; referred to COVID-19 as “kung flu” during a speech at a church in Phoenix; and blasted two sports teams, the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, for considering name changes because of concerns by supporters of those franchises that those team names give undue offense.

These provocations by the president aren’t anomalous; he’s a man who vaulted to political prominence by peddling a racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States—he later implied that Obama was a secret Muslim and dubbed him the “founder of ISIS”—and whose remarks about an Indiana-born judge with Mexican heritage were described by former House Speaker Paul Ryan as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

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And what have evangelicals gained from supporting such a grotesquely unchristian man?

Based strictly on the standard of advancing causes that conservative evangelicals most care about, a fair-minded assessment of the Trump record is that some important things were achieved, especially in appointing federal judges. That clearly would not have happened in a Hillary Clinton presidency. But in virtually every other area, including the outcome of several key Supreme Court decisions, Trump has fallen short of the promises and expectations.

God moves in mysterious ways.

An Orthodox Israeli, desperate to find evidence that the haredim are something other than catastrophic for the state of Israel, quotes an article that, far as I can tell, has been taken down, in which a haredi person claims big improvements are in store for that cult. Yeah, turns out the haredim are even angrier than we are about their having spread covid all over that country because they’re too ignorant to credit the germ theory of disease. Dump our wretched rabbis and replace them with benevolent enlightened leaders!

On March 23, well-known haredi activist Avigayil Heilbron wrote a piece on the liberal news site Ynet entitled “The Criminals Among Us: We Are Angrier At Them Than [You] Secular Jews Are.” “Something historic is happening now,” wrote Heilbron. “Rabbis of perhaps a lesser status [than those who called for schools and synagogues to stay open] are openly expressing [their objection] to blind obedience to a leadership that has for years been a sad joke. There has been an unbelievable fear to voice criticism, but now, little by little, it’s happening…The majority of us are law-abiding citizens, and we are also angry.” These are strong words, of a kind rarely heard.

Right. Rarely. As in never. Babe, you don’t know what godly submission is, do you? (See this post for details.) Remember what haredi means. It means tremble. These are the people who above all, as their basic identifier, tremble before the word of God as expressed by that pale little coot in the corner over there. They don’t rebel, babe. They tremble.

Her other piece of evidence for exciting changes among the haredim? Mr One-Man Fraud Op himself allows as how all those haredim killing themselves and everyone around them because they’re too ignorant to credit the germ theory of disease maybe should do a little reflecting on the carnage their community has caused.

Ooh la la!

The utterly corrupt chief rabbinate of Israel (put the words in Google and go to town) may halt all rabbinical ordinations — rather than let us cows become rabbis, of course – which would give Israel a chance to do some serious thinking about that institution.

Let these wise elders shut down their shakedown, and see if Israel can’t come up with something at least a little cleaner.