round 2005. fight.

I was trying to write a witty boxing match intro between Christianity and Atheism... (not just atheism, but every other religion practiced in the United States), but that turned out to be a lot lamer and a lot less funny than I had though.

Has anybody been catching the O'Reilly factor, Fox "News", or maybe just www.crooksandliars.com lately? If you have, you might have noticed that there is something going on called "the war on Christmas". If you're like me, you have no idea what the hell, the war on Christmas is. Last time I checked, the only war we were waging was the one on Terror (with a capital "T"), and that wasn't going so well.


Sidenote (vaguely amusing):
from www.anncoulter.com - "The only Republican congressman who did not offer to have sex with John Murtha on the House floor was Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio. While debating Murtha's own proposal to withdraw American troops from Iraq in the middle of a war waged to depose a monstrous dictator who posed a threat to American national security"

Since when did we wage a war to depose a monstrous dictator? I thought we waged a war against the terrorists who flew a plane into the World Trade Center a hundred and some blocks south of me. Also I thought we already established that he did not pose a threat to American National Security. Sometimes you wonder when these people, Bill O'Reilly, Coulter, etc. claim to be fair and balanced, are they just talking from underneath the payroll of the Republican party? If they were I wouldn't be suprised, these days, who isn't?

Moving on. Christmas. I was wondering since when has the United States been waging a war on Christmas? I must have missed the email. Fox News posted just recently a talking point that "economic disaster if liberals win the war on Christmas". Apparently there is some sort of secret plan by the political left to "undermime" the holiday season as apparently in America, Christianity has monopolized the month of December in all forms of material wealth (I thought Jesus wasn't big on material wealth). The big outrage apparently is that the right says that the left believes that since we live in a country whose constitution (at least by most people's interpretation of the First Amendment) does not embrace one religion over another's we should not be so blatant about Christmas, aka our tax dollars don't go toward funding a giant Christmas tree in the middle of NYC when not all of us are Christians. Bill O'Reilly gave a lot of heat to Boston for their short lived use of the "holiday tree".

At what point do we realize that the Christmas Tree has nothing to do with Christ? It's funny that such things are never mentioned in the Bible, yet we are brainwashed into believing so. Christianity was an aggressive animal during the outset, it was smart and calculating and realized it needed to incoorperate other beliefs if they ever wanted to increase their flock with the as of yet unconverted pagan masses.

At what point do we realize that Christmas, for very few has anything to do with Christ, but has everything to do with your bratty sons and daughters hoping that they find an Xbox 360 under their Christmas Tree? Christmas, the ultimate celebration of materialism and excess.

But war on Christmas? To me it sounds like an excercise in political correctness and making sure we follow the constitution.

The war on Christmas is entirely fabricated and designed to embolden everyone to buy more. "Gosh those fucking liberals don't want Christmas, we'll show them how much we love Christmas, let's goto Wal-Mart kids!". Democrats in the Senate and the house, I don't even need to research before saying that most of them are Christians and celebrate Christmas and have Christmas trees, etc. I would go so far as to say that the majority of this country is Christmas and uses all the Christian terminology for the late December time frame. So who is behind this left wing anti-Christmas conspiracy that threatens, according to Fox News, to spell immenent economic catastrophe (funny because if Bush's economic strategy continues to stagnate... we can blame those crazy now Christmas people)? Scare tactics. We've had our ups and downs for major retailers forever, there is no 1% of the population war on Christmas that is going to make a difference.

The funny part is Bill O'Reilly is advocating for a boycott of all stores that don't use "Merry Christmas" in their advertising, FOX blames radical lefties for not supporting the economics of Christmas time. flip flop flip flop.

The left is stupid if it keeps fielding people to go on FOX to further pronounce this war on Christianity. It doesn't exist, stop falling into the trap.

Let's actually do research for once.
http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/cda/doc/content/DTT_DR_HolOut2005_Nov05.pdf
Deloitte Consulting has put out their 2005 Holiday season prediction on consumer retail spending. 65% of companies expect stagnant sales. They have reasons why the Holiday season spending will be lower this year, here's a hint, it's not the "war on christmas" conspiracy. Thank god FOX isn't in the consulting industry. All of their inaccuracies and outlooks leave me wondering, how are so many academics fans of Fox news? It bewilders the mind. The deviation in data and conclusions from FOX and EVERYONE who does this for a living is astounding.

Reasons for Holiday 2005 downturn:
Here is an interesting paragraph-
Since the spring of 2003, retailers have enjoyed a strong selling environment. The combination of steady job growth,stable prices, tax cuts and low interest rates pushed real consumer spending up at an annualized rate of 3.8% over this 24 month period, well above the 2.4% pace of the
previous 2 years. However, this overall performance was somewhat below average for the typical upswing of an economy recovering from recession.
The business cycle does not remain in the upswing forever. After 18 to 30 months of improving sales growth, any pent up consumer demand is spent. Consumer debt levels rise, income and employment growth slows, and, with them, consumer
spending grows at a more tepid pace.

And here I was thinking that Republican economic policies were largely long term plans that I didn't understand, this makes it seem like all of our economic policies during Bush Term II have been patches and temporary fixes.

1. Hurrican Katrina
2. Energy Prices
3. Real Wages deteriorated
4. Employment Growth low
5. Savings and Debt (near 0 and getting larger, respectively)


"Real wage growth has turned negative, employment growth has flattened, and
savings rates are approaching zero."

What happened to stimulating the economy? What happened to the administration claiming we were creating more and better jobs? Truth is that we created lots of temp jobs, wages are going down, people are saving less... I think it's about time to get serious about the economy. We live in a spend spend spend spend lifestyle, we aren't as competitive in the global market anymore, we are hating on intellectualism, pushing religion as actual science, have we gone crazy?