More Death in Texas – The Blood Red State

Should Texas Be Accountable For The Deaths Caused By Their Abortion Laws?

Reading this morning’s article in ProPublica’s daily email story regarding the death of another pregnant young girl in Texas, I was confounded by the lack of action or comment by the cretins running the state. According to the article:

“It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.” [Alexandra Zayas, Deputy Managing Editor, ProPublica]. Needless to say, as a result of this barbarous and cruel act of “legislation”, the doctors were fiercely panicked in their approach to this patient, now having to worry not only over the health and well-being of the patient, but would could potentially happen to them as a result of their treating her!

If she were my daughter or niece or granddaughter, I would be looking for justice and that would have to come from the state that implemented these odious laws without even the concomitant medical knowledge necessary to make such crucial, life-altering, even life-ending, decisions. An act so obviously bereft of even a modicum responsibility to anyone other than their mindless religious fanatics, in fact, seemingly doing everything they can to obfuscate, deny, avoid disseminating such vital information to the public as to allow for informed debate. No, the Texas governor and legislation went ahead and passed actual laws that deny medical services and attention to their own constituents, even when their very lives are in danger!

For me the answer is clear: Yes! The State of Texas and the scum that currently occupy their governing offices and legislation are indeed responsible for the deaths that are directly caused by their incompetence and their complete intransigence regarding a matter of such elevated urgency and importance.

Ms. Crain’s family and survivors should initiate legal action against the State of Texas, the Governor, and the entire GOP legislation, holding them legally responsible for the death of their family member.

My “Goodbye” to Jeff Bozos, WaPo & Amazon

Now that Jeff Bozos, owner of the WaPo, Amazon, among other entities, with enough money to piss away a billion or so on a 15 minute rocket ship ride to nowhere, has subordinated himself to the potential threats from Donald Trump it’s finally become time for me – and millions of others, by my calculation – to dismiss him from our minds and pocketbooks by cancelling my subscription to the Washington Post AND, since that isn’t a drop in the bucket to him, STOP USING AMAZON.

Remember that one of the last remaining powers that we have, “we” being us little people, is our power as CONSUMERS! Jeff Bozos need to be reminded of this!

Trump & The Christian Nationalists

Jesus once said: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” ~ Matthew 22:37-40

Is there anything that calls out Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians for their phony piety and maligned morality than their support for Donald Trump? Do they really believe that god – any god, pick one – would have anything to do with the four-time-indicted, 34-time-convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator and the most mendacious individual to ever occupy the Oval Office of the United States? If you’d like to see an example of the piety crowd at their most delusional, then look no further than their slavish devotion to Trump and their obvious excitement at the prospects of him occupying the office again. If they have achieved anything with this misplaced support it is to further reinforce the impression that their religion and their motivations are nothing more than a politically-motivated pretense to move the country further towards their goal of a Christian nation.

The demonic forces they claim lay behind the campaigns of Joe Biden, now out of the race since handing the baton to VP Kamala Harris, can only be defeated by, of all people, Donald Trump! Yes, according to these purveyors of religious delirium only Donald Trump can save our country from the depravity and debauchery into which it has been led by the “godless” Democratic party! Christian political activists are putting millions of dollars on the very man convicted of 34 felony crimes (and counting), multi-million-dollar business tax fraud in New York State, and an adjudicated sexual assault predator! This is the man that the phony piety crowd is putting their money on to save the country and bring us back to the god-fearing nation we once were, even though we have never been a Christian nation in any real respect. The very same man that can no longer participate in a charity in the state of New York due to his fraudulent mishandling of funds AND who sold phony university degrees to armed services veterans not worth the paper upon which they were written has been sent by god to save the United States. Yeah. And I’m the Easter Bunny.

Only the most seriously deluded and cognitively dissonant can rationalize such nonsense and, as it happens, that’s the very target audience many Christian organizations have focused their efforts. Those that believe in the invisible man in the sky, a 6,000-year-old planet Earth, (an Earth where dinosaurs and humans cohabitated) humans that literally “popped” into existence in our current, “unevolved” state, a worldwide flood that wiped-out humanity save a single family, talking serpents and asses, (although as “talking asses” go I believe Trump has proven this conclusively) and dead people rising from their graves and parading around city! The most adroit snake-oil salesmen in the country are focused on convincing their delirious sheeples of the truthfulness of their claims, even while their candidate demonstrates the very opposite of virtually everything and anything that Jesus ever said and taught. (See Matthew quote above; remind you of Donald Trump? I didn’t think so, me either!)

We now know about the vast and various Christian power bases behind this most despicable candidate and the dystopic society they would have us living in given their ability to do so. Consider the so-called Ziklag organization, a Christian organization supported by wealthy Christians such as the owners of Hobby Lobby and described by investigative journalists ProPublica as: “A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.” Christians collaborating to steal the election as I assume they would have us believe Jesus would as well.

Another Christian organization dedicated to the election of Trump is the Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based Christian conservative legal nonprofit. According to the Washington Post: “The organization has had nine successful cases before the court in the past seven years, including Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which allowed corporations to opt out of covering contraceptives based on religious beliefs. And it was ADF that created model legislation for “bathroom bills,” which bar students from using restrooms that don’t correlate to their sex at birth.”

There are many, many more. Christian organizations across the country are working diligently to re-craft our society into the white-washed and white-dominated country they contend their imaginary savior endorses and represents a real and present danger to the democratic life that our relatives and ancestors fought and died for, and of which the rest of the world looks upon with envy. These groups are not community volunteers nor are they motivated by altruism. These are people of power for whom money and power are virtually everything and they want control, complete and boundless; of the government and the rules of our society, and they see Donald Trump as the vehicle to their ends.

As it has become painfully obvious, the self-designated “Freedom Party” and “Freedom Caucus” in Congress, AKA the GOP, which includes the likes of such political standouts as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, has been the party that takes your freedoms from you while telling you it is in your best interests and those of society at large. Yes, it is in our collective best interests not to be able to decide what we or our children can read which is why the repugnant red states are purging our libraries of such radical tomes as “Animal Farm” and “Anne Frank’s Diary”. We simply cannot be responsible to choose reading material on our own, it must be done for us and by those that claim to know better and, therefore, will make these decisions for us. Similarly, women cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about their health, particularly their maternal health. We need the government to intercede on behalf of woman, even as some women cling to their very lives for lack of medical care while the government dawdles in the courts. Hopefully, they’ll still be alive when the government finally arrives at its’ decision about their healthcare. The party that has been extolling the virtues of getting government off our proverbial backs would now like for the government to, not just share in the most intimate decisions of our lives but will actually have the last word over these matters.

And these kinds of behaviors go on and on and into all areas of life. Consider the solutions to “voter fraud” legislated by red states that always seem to include making it more difficult to vote and overwhelmingly in areas of black or brown people. Texas has closed over 700 polling places since 2022 exclusively in areas where minorities vote while positioning the changes as solving some colossal threat to democracy from non-whites and/or “illegal aliens”, undocumented workers that already have no lawful right to vote.

There is much more to reveal about this, we haven’t even begun to discuss the introduction of the Bible into our public schools complete with morning prayer and Creationism being taught as a legitimate alternative to evolution, as if there is any legitimacy at all to the Judeo-Christian mythology that warrants such special status over both the Constitution as well as other religions. They don’t seem to have any anticipation of the obvious battle over which of the 12,000 variations of Christianity in the U.S. will be the universally accepted version. We’ll wait with bated breath, I am sure.

When Kamala Harris wins the presidency and, with a lot of effort and hard work, the Democrats take the House and retain the Senate, they will need to pass new legislation aimed at securing the secular nature of the government complete with a new and vigorous reinforcing of the Johnson Amendment. The Johnson Amendment is a provision in the U.S. Tax Code that prohibits all 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates. Section 501(c)(3) organizations are the most common type of nonprofit organization in the United States, ranging from charitable foundations to universities and churches. The amendment is named for then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, (of all places!) who introduced it in a preliminary draft of the law in July 1954. With a new emphasis placed on the Johnson Amendment and a reform of the Supreme Court including term limits and an ethics code with teeth, we can make tremendous progress towards a more compassionate and representative government for all Americans regardless of race, sexual identity, or any other discriminating factor.

We have less than 97 days; let’s stay focused and vigilant. Kamala Karma is Koming!

Thank You Sam Alito & SCOTUS!

You Did What No One Else Has Done; United the Democrats!

As I have often said, the Supreme Court of the United States isn’t populated with judges on the Conservative side; it’s populated with political operatives. When John Roberts is the moderate you know you’re in deep doo-doo when it comes to rights. Remember Roberts, (along with Ted Cruz), was one of the crooks in Florida in 2000 trying to shut down the vote so George W. Bush could steal the election which, of course, he did. This SCOTUS has taken away any sense of safety we once had because of their abhorrent and false interpretation of the Second Amendment, scraped the Voting Rights Act giving license to the GOP to pass laws almost exclusively aimed at keeping minorities from the polls, and stripped a woman’s right to manage her own body and healthcare. This seems to be the “final straw” for many if not most American voters, repeatedly certified by the voters in states where abortion is now actually baked into the state constitutions by referendum. It appears that the “Freedom Party” is the party that actually strips our rights away, and in a way that the people of United States adamantly oppose. Under their egregious oversight the government will decide what you can and cannot read, what can and cannot be taught in our schools, and whether a woman would be granted rights to decide their own healthcare. For a political party that’s been decrying “small government” and working to minimize the effect of big government on our personal lives, this seems to be the very opposite of their political rhetoric. I cannot think of a more oppressive big government idea than having the state decide what we can read or how a woman manages her own body. Thankfully the repeal of the Roe v Wade by the “best Supreme Court that money can buy” seems to have been the move that awakened the “Sleeping Giant” that is the US voter.

The problem with this court is their fanatical belief in their religious dogma which they now seem hell-bent on imposing upon the rest of us whether we like it or not and a plurality of Americans are saying they do not like it at all. They seem to be genuine theocrats looking to impose the Bible into our laws. For all their screaming about the “impending“ imposition of Sharia law during the Obama administrations, it seems as though it’s quite another story as long as it’s the Judeo-Christian law being imposed.

But let’s give the devil his due, Samuel Alito and the Conservative Theocrats on the court have done what no one else has been able to do, i.e., unite the herd of cats that is the Democratic Party. This, coupled with the myriad clips of Donald Trump gloating over his single-handedly overturning Roe v Wade, should all but put the cherry on Joe Biden’s second presidential run. You should be prepared to see those clips over and over again in 2024.

Thank you, Samuel Alito, et al. We’ll see you all next November.

Christian Persecution?

Wait Until You See The Persecution They Perpetrate Given The Power To do So!

Listen to Christian radio and you will hear an awful lot of lying; from what the Bible says and means to the so-called persecution of Christians around the world. I try and listen to it everyday, at least for a while, to understand how they still are able to sell this mythological nonsense to the sleepy-sheep at large and in the 21st century. It is mind boggling. Often I think the speaker is either lying or doesn’t know his real scripture and, of course, his audience doesn’t know theirs at all, making things much easier. But the real threat coming from the delusional mythology crowd has to do with their intrusion into our government and their (phony) insistence that the United Stated was founded as a Christian nation which, of course we know, it was not. If there is anything about our history – our real history, not the “cooked-up”, white-washed nonsense they’d have you believe – it is absolutely clear that we are no friend of any deity’s.

Look at the absolute chaos and cruelty they have already perpetrated just with their new abortion laws; and this despite the facts that a majority of Americans believe that abortion services should continue to be available. Pregnant ten year olds forced to have the child of a rapist or a parent, women forced to carry an underdeveloped fetus to term knowing it will not survive after birth. Doctors refusing to conduct the procedure, not because they don’t believe an abortion is necessary or warranted, but because they are afraid of the legal ramifications brought on by the phony-baloney fundamentalists and conservatives. Look up the recent case of Milo in the papers and see how both the child and the parents suffered through the process; the child struggling to breathe (the poor babe never even cried) and the parents left to hold him until he expired 99 minutes later. I wonder how the doctors felt about having to put the unfortunate family into the senseless and cruel despair their actions propagated. “First Do No Harm?” Again, it is not enough for them to live by their own mindless sensibilities, we ALL have to be subjected to them as well. (Oh, wait, I forgot; we have their thoughts and prayers to get us through. Well, you know what you can do with their specious “thoughts ands prayers”.)

And this is just the beginning. You can bet there will be MUCH more in store for us as they continue their unconstitutional trek towards a theocracy. Keep in mind that whatever persecution Christians were subjected to in the first couple of centuries of their existence (nothing like they assert, they are many sources to confirm this) pales in comparison to the mind-boggling numbers of those tortured, murdered, executed, and exiled in vast numbers after Christianity became the new game in town. Entire towns, villages or faiths exterminated for having a different belief – sometimes only a slightly so – as soon as the new power holders took over. No one kills like those in the name of a god. Just crack open a religious history book, probably one of those banned from their libraries, and you will see what I mean.

From banning LGBTQ+ and transgender individuals from healthcare and other societal privileges, to banning books they just don’t want anyone to read, to forging a minority rule whereby they can implement a theocracy, you can believe we are just on the precipice. If we don’t fight this vehemently we will lose our democracy, our freedoms, our country.

Pastor Greg Locke and the Insanity of Evangelicalism

Pastor Greg Locke, of Mt. Juliet’s Global Vision Bible Church, near Nashville, previously told his congregation that he considered Democrats to be “baby butchers.”

Yes, baby butchers. This all for allowing a woman, perhaps a couple, her/their right to choose how to conduct their pregnancy. Of course this insane accusation conjures up visions of…well, you can imagine. “You cannot be a Christian and vote Democrat in this nation. I don’t care how mad that makes you. You can get as p***ed off as you want to. You cannot be a Christian and vote Democrat in this nation. They are God-denying demons that butcher babies and hate this nation.” he said in one of his many off-the-rails sermons to his congregants. Even in and among the supernatural world religious minions, Greg Locke is a stand-out. Whether it’s witches in his congregation or demons speaking to him, he wants you to believe he’s all-in on Jesus!

Well I have a declaration for you, Mr. Locke: you can not be a Christian and belong to the Repugnantcan Party; sorry, can’t be done. Jesus simply would not have you. Beyond their inherent racism; their contempt for immigrants, African Americans, and, of course, women, is their policy of handing out guns; assault rifles, huge-capacity magazines for carry ridiculous amounts of ammunition, to any shit-kicking a-hole that wants one. They will not lift a finger – even in view of the unspeakable events we’ve watched unfold in Newtown and now in Uvalde, TX – in order to stave off future events of gun violence. They watch while children are murdered seemingly without a clue as to how to stop this insanity or even slow it down. ”We already have enough gun laws” they’ll tell you. ”None of the gun laws would have prevented this” they ”reason”. “We need less doors and more armed personnel in our schools.” And so it goes on and on while we get only the benefits of their ”thoughts and prayers” which, as you can see, have had absolutely no success. Besides, which American politician’s prayers is Jesus listening to anyway? I’m sure that’s a very short list.

The problem is that Christians like Mr Locke are perfectly ok with the unforgivable carnage their policies cause as long as it gets abortion off of the rolls of legal medical procedures and so they vote overwhelmingly for the ”More Guns” crowd. Unfortunately, the ”More Guns” crowd also comes with the ”More Death” crowd to our school children while they are ”safely” tucked away in their classrooms. Only I don’t remember doors being a problem when I went to grammar school or junior high school or high school and we had lots of doors leading into the schools and, yes, some of them were even unlocked or – heaven forbid – open! We even had windows so you can see inside the school! What I DO remember is that we didn’t have 300,000,000 guns in the hands of, in some cases, very scary people, people that should never be candidates for gun ownership.

The Republicans of today would have you believe that there simply isn’t anything we can do to circumvent the murder of our children in schools because there are too many doors and not enough armed guards! And we also know that Evangelicals vote overwhelmingly for Republicans. Meanwhile, back in the imaginary realm where the spirits and demons play, Pastor Greg is whipping his crowd into a frenzy over abortion rights and paying absolutely no mind to our BORN children being murdered in schools. That is one consistent thing about the GOP and the Religious Right; they care passionately about the unborn but they don’t give a hoot about them once they are born. The problem with this of course is ”What would Jesus do?” Do we mean to believe that he would be ok with voting for people that facilitate the arming of our population at the expense of public safety? At the expense of the lives of children?

What do you think? Should we put pressure on the Religious Right to help protect our BORN children by protesting the GOP’s addiction to gun money?

Christians, Religious Right: You must account for your votes to the GOP

You don’t get to ”wash your hands” of the blood of the murdered children killed due to their refusal to improve gun laws!

While the Christian right, fundamentalist Christians, the Bishop of San Francisco and all the rest of the ”Funny Hat Club” Catholics are high-fiving each other over their apparent victory (although, I wouldn’t count my embryos just yet) I’m sure they now have their heads under the covers hoping no one will notice their culpability in the slaughter of our children in schools. And so they should; if my elected politicians that I pulled the lever for enacted such a “wall” around the gun lobby, gun manufacturers, trade-show gun dealers and entities, and background checking, you’d better believe I be heading for Switzerland right now. But do you know what, Ken ”Four Planes” Copeland, or Joel ”Giorgio Armani” Osteen (btw: one of the world’s wealthiest evangelists in the whole world!! Jesus would besoooooo proud!), or Franklin ”Bang Bang” Graham, and the rest of the ”blessed ones” that simply can not wait for Jesus to get here, they’re so certain they’ll be leaving with him? You must answer for your support of the GOP and their steadfast unwillingness to do anything about the absurd amount of gun violence in our country. You “Holy Rollers” don’t get to help put these vile excuses for human beings into office and then walk away scott-free. You have blood on your hands that will not be washed off; will not be ”thoughts & prayer-ed” off, will no longer be forgotten. You have the blood of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, graders – 5 & 6 year-old children – mid-schoolers, high schoolers, and many, many more. Their blood be on you and on your children!

How much money do you pour into the coffers of the GOP in order for you to eventually achieve your long-desired theocracy and have Christianity become the founding basis of the country? How many sermons have been peppered with your lies and misrepresentations about the damage being done to our country by liberals, progressives, Democrats, and atheists? How many lies told by the various Ted Cruzs, Josh Hawleys, Greg Abbotts, and all the rest of the Republican ”Murderer’s Row” have you paved over in your sermons and speeches and radio shows in order to smooth over their culpability in Amerika’s mass shootings?

Remember that almost 10 years ago when the unthinkable happened in Newtown, CT resulting in the deaths of TWENTY schools children – babies, really, babies – the Republicans shot down ANY chance at all to even improve the background checking process so that mentally ill would be disqualified from gun ownership! Even that small step would not be allowed to pass. The smallest, almost gestural in nature, was unanimously shot down by the Republicans.

Now you need to step up and take responsibility for the seemingly unending carnage taking place in Amerika thanks to your votes and endless endorsements of Republican candidates.

I pledge not to let you forget it.

Prepare for more ”Thoughts & Prayers” as Abbott, Cruz & GOP Look to Cover for the Gun Manufacturers, Again!

When Will the American People Finally Wake Up to the Blood on their Hands?

It is beyond time – well beyond time really – for the America people to wake up and take responsibility for the senseless carnage perpetrated against the people and CHILDREN – for goodness sake, CHILDREN – in the United States by gun violence! Specifically I call on the Religious Right, the Fundamentalist Christians of Amerika that financially support, vote for, and are complicit with, the GOP and their immoral policies that ultimately result in the senseless deaths of our people and our children. Amerikans can no longer send their children to school each day and even reasonably expect that they will return home ALIVE!! Our children can’t even attend school and expect that they are protected by us; their parents, teachers, elected officials, and all for the efforts of the Republican party and their selling out of the Amerikan people in order to preserve the cash flowing into their pockets from gun manufacturers, the NRA, Conservative politicians, and the Religious Right. Yes, the Religious “Right.” You phony snake-oil salesmen! You don’t get to support these scum and then exonerate yourselves from the horrors of their policies. You have the blood of these children on YOUR HANDS TOO! Let me hear you say it you phony sycophants: What Would Jesus Do? You fucking hypocrites! You fucking Philistines! I curse you and your families and your houses! Joel Osteen, Ken Ham, Jerry Falwell, Franklyn Graham, and the purveyors of the man-made scripture you preach to the helpless for which they get NOTHING and all the rest of you pernicious hypocrites, you will not – YOU CAN NOT – wash their blood off of your hands! You care so much for the lives of the unborn but not at all for the lives of the born! You purveyors of vacuous, religious nonsense! You false prophets! You have been exposed for the egregious villains you are! Now we can truly see you for who you are! Empty vessels of inequity! Jesus WOULD NOT know you – DOES NOT know you! You are the very Anti-Christs you have forseen!

I can just hear Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Chuck Grassley, Majorie Taylor Green, Donald Trump and the miscreants that support and follow them saying ”Unfortunately todays gun laws wouldn’t have done anything to stop this.” Yes, Ted, you lying piece of shit, but you have had the opportunity the CHANGE the GUN LAWS and you willfully decided not to! You have had the power to CHANGE the gun laws for YEARS and you and your immoral party have refused to do so time and time again knowing that it is only a matter of TIME before this happens again and you’ll be sending out your useless and vacuous ”thoughts and prayers” to yet even more grieving, heart-sick, and broken families. I can only hope that someone will send those same reprehensibly phony thoughts to your family some day. And You, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Cavanagh, Amy Barrett, et al. You fucking phony ”Judges”! You are not JUDGES!! YOU ARE POLITICAL OPERATIVES in black robes. Nothing more! You are responsible for perpetrating more violence and injustice in this country than any ten of the most debased criminals!

I call on ALL Amerikans to rise up and throw these so-called ”CHRISTIAN” hypocrites out of office and take control of our country and re-establish laws of safety, morality, and compassion which we lived with for so long before our government was overtaken by corporate and phony religious fanaticism!!

WE MUST FINALLY ACT!!!!