We’re heading to the end of the year as measured by the Romans and their Sun God, who stole that calendar from the Greeks and other things from the Egyptians. The Egyptians were more interested in the Dog Star since it appeared in the east each solar year when the Nile flooded than the sun. Julius Caesar replaced the slightly confusing Greek Lunar Calendar with the Egyptian one in 45 BC. The Romans stole a lot from the Greeks, too. A later Pope, Gregory XIII, tried to correct the bugs in that one. However, we still have leap years and months with varying numbers of days. That’s why they constantly have to tinker with it. They’re forcing it to be what they want.
None of this is particularly relevant to the many folks who still follow the lunar calendar for important days. It shows you just how much conquerors can usurp everything meaningful to you as they rewrite your celebrations, history, and culture. I have a meeting next week where everyone is supposed to share their holiday traditions with pictures and stories before we go on the obligatory week off, which really is not the best time of year to have a forced week off. I always get to be the one who says there are no holidays in this month for me. But you can ask me on January 14th next year.
I just try to stay out of the way of all the money-centric activities during the month and the frenetic business that wears everyone out and causes many to be depressed. If you are one of those folks who experience depression this time of year, you are not alone, and do not hesitate to seek help. Also, please remind any of your friends and family who struggle this month that you stand by them and are willing to help them.
Fig. 2. Virginian Luxuries. Courtesy of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Williamsburg, Va.
There is a genuine effort to white-wash history in this country. Texas is a mainstay in these activities. This is from the Texas Monthly. “The Texas Historical Commission Removed Books on Slavery From Plantation Gift Shops. An agency spokesperson claimed that the move had nothing to do with politics. Internal emails show otherwise. ” There are many plantations here in Louisiana and many focus on the treatment of slaves in their presentations of history. It’s not pretty and it shouldn’t be, because it wasn’t.
After visiting the Varner-Hogg plantation an hour south of Houston, amateur historian Michelle Haas was incensed by what she had seen. At an exhibit that details the farm’s use as a sugar plantation worked by at least 66 slaves in the early nineteenth century, she’d watched an informational video. To her mind, it focused too much on slavery at the site and not enough on the Hogg family, which had turned its former home into a museum celebrating Texas history. She’d also seen books in the visitor center gift shop written by Carol Anderson and Ibram X. Kendi, two Black academic historians who have been outspoken on the issue of systemic racism. Outraged, she emailed David Gravelle, a board member of the Texas Historical Commission, the agency that oversees historical sites at the direction of leaders appointed by Governor Greg Abbott. “What a s—show is this video,” Haas wrote on September 2, 2022. “Add to that the fact that the activist staff member doing the buying for the gift shop thinks Ibram X. Kendi and White Rage have a place at a historic site.”
Over the next eight months, Haas continued to email Gravelle, advocating for such books to be removed. In turn, Gravelle, a marketing executive based in Dallas, took up the cause internally at the Historical Commission, calling on agency staff to do away with the titles Haas didn’t think belonged at the gift shops. By November of this year, it appeared Haas’s demands were met. The Texas Historical Commission no longer sells White Rage by Anderson or Stamped From the Beginning by Kendi, or 23 other works to which Haas later objected, at two former slave plantations in Brazoria County, including Varner-Hogg. Among the literature no longer available for purchase is an autobiography of a slave girl, a book of Texas slave narratives, the celebrated novel Roots by Alex Haley, and the National Book Award–winning Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
The Texas Historical Commission did not provide Texas Monthly with a list of titles no longer for sale. Chris Florance, a spokesperson for the agency, said many books were removed from the historical sites as part of an effort that he said was launched in March to reduce inventory as the agency transitions to a new point-of-sale software system. Emails acquired by Texas Monthly through an open-records request reveal, however, that Gravelle was concerned about the way those books presented Texas history and about potential attention from state lawmakers over what books were available for purchase. The emails also show that he had raised those concerns in February, before the agency decided to change its software system.
Texas Attorney General, and all around corrupt crook is going after the Ob/Gyn who will hopefully, still perform a necessary abortion approved by a Judge just days ago. This letter was sent to Three Hospitals where the Doctor would likely perform the surgery. AG Paxton has done nothing to protect the children of Texas from death by guns, but that is his response to procedure necessary to keep this woman healthy and alive. It his not his or the state’s business. This is from The Guardian. “Texas attorney general says he will sue doctor who gives abortion to Kate Cox. Ken Paxton issues threat after judge ruled this week that Cox, a pregnant woman with a lethal fetal diagnosis, can get an abortion.”
The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, has threatened to prosecute any doctor who provides an abortion to Kate Cox, a woman with a non-viable pregnancy, advising hospitals to ignore a court order issued on Thursday allowing her to get the procedure.
The rightwing Paxton issued the warning to three Houston-area hospitals after a Texas judge ruled this week that Cox, a pregnant woman with a lethal fetal diagnosis, may obtain an abortion under the narrow medical exceptions offered by the state bans.
In a brazen dismissal of the court’s decision, Paxton wrote that the judge’s order “will not insulate hospitals, doctors or anyone else from civil and criminal liability.”
Paxton also wrote that the hospital where Cox obtains an abortion “may be liable for negligent credentialing the physician” who performs the procedure.
The Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit on behalf of Cox after she learned last week that her fetus has trisomy 18, a fatal chromosomal condition, as well as other health issues, including a spinal abnormality. Continuing the pregnancy could threaten Cox’s life and future fertility. The 31-year-old mother of two has already rushed to the emergency room four times with severe cramping and fluid loss, but doctors have told her that their hands are tied by the state laws.
On Thursday, the Travis county judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, issued a temporary restraining order to permit Cox’s doctor to perform the abortion.
“The idea that Ms Cox wants desperately to be a parent and this law might actually cause her to lose that ability is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice,” the judge said, following an emergency hearing on Thursday.
Late Thursday night, the state appealed the judge’s ruling, in a motion asking the Texas supreme court to immediately block Gamble’s order.
In Paxton’s letter to the hospitals involved in Cox’s case, the attorney general wrote that Gamble was “not medically qualified to make this determination”.
“He is trying to bulldoze the legal system to make sure Kate and pregnant women like her continue to suffer,” said Marc Hearron, the senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, in a statement. “Fearmongering has been Ken Paxton’s main tactic in enforcing these abortion bans. Rather than respect the judiciary, he is misrepresenting the court’s order.”
Cox’s case marks the first time a pregnant person has asked a court for an emergency abortion since Roe v Wade was decided in 1973.
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Muslim speech is a topic of a debate over freedom of speech in this country. It has been especially focused on the speech of students and professors at Universities. Michelle Goldberg provides this Op-Ed for the New York Times. “At a Hearing on Israel, University Presidents Walked Into a Trap.”
On Wednesday, a dear friend emailed me a viral clip from the House hearing on campus antisemitism in which three elite university presidents refuse to say, under questioning by Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates school policies on bullying and harassment. “My God, have you seen this?” wrote my friend, a staunch liberal. “I can’t believe I find myself agreeing with Elise Stefanik on anything, but I do here.”
If I’d seen only that excerpt from the hearing, which has now led to denunciations of the college leaders by the White House and the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, among many others, I might have felt the same way. All three presidents — Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T. and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania — acquitted themselves poorly, appearing morally obtuse and coldly legalistic. It was a moment that seemed to confirm many people’s worst fears about the tolerance for Jew hatred in academia.
But while it might seem hard to believe that there’s any context that could make the responses of the college presidents OK, watching the whole hearing at least makes them more understandable. In the questioning before the now infamous exchange, you can see the trap Stefanik laid.
“You understand that the use of the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?” she asked Gay.
Gay responded that such language was “abhorrent.” Stefanik then badgered her to admit that students chanting about intifada were calling for genocide, and asked angrily whether that was against Harvard’s code of conduct. “Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘intifada,’ advocating for the murder of Jews?” Gay repeated that such “hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me,” but said action would be taken only “when speech crosses into conduct.”
So later in the hearing, when Stefanik again started questioning Gay, Kornbluth and Magill about whether it was permissible for students to call for the genocide of the Jews, she was referring, it seemed clear, to common pro-Palestinian rhetoric and trying to get the university presidents to commit to disciplining those who use it. Doing so would be an egregious violation of free speech. After all, even if you’re disgusted by slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” their meaning is contested in a way that, say, “Gas the Jews” is not. Finding themselves in a no-win situation, the university presidents resorted to bloodless bureaucratic contortions, and walked into a public relations disaster.
The anguished and furious reaction of many Jews to that viral clip is understandable. Jewish people of many different political persuasions have been stunned by the rank antisemitism and contempt for Israeli lives that has exploded across campuses, where Jewish students have been threatened and, in some cases, assaulted. This week, when I wrote that the backlash to anti-Israel protests threatens free speech, I received many emails from people who felt I was refusing to grapple with an evident crisis. “You are worried about an overreaction when there hasn’t yet been a sufficient reaction to the antisemitism terrifying Jewish students on campus,” said one.
But it seems to me that it is precisely when people are legitimately scared and outraged that we’re most vulnerable to a repressive response leading to harmful unintended consequences. That’s a lesson of Sept. 11, but also of much of the last decade, when the policing of speech in academia escalated in ways that are now coming back to bite the left.
Amid the uproar over the campus antisemitism hearing, many have claimed that if Stefanik were asking about attacks on any other ethnic group, there would have been no waffling. But Stefanik did ask about another group. Her first question to Gay was, “A Harvard student calling for the mass murder of African Americans is not protected free speech at Harvard, correct?” Gay started to respond, “Our commitment to free speech,” but Stefanik, perhaps realizing she wasn’t going to get the answer she wanted, cut her off and changed tack.
Yet clearly, at many universities, the defense of free speech has been inconsistent. Some elite schools now cloaking themselves in the mantle of the First Amendment to ward off charges of coddling antisemites have, in the past, privileged community sensitivity over unbridled expression. So when university administrators say, as Gay did, “We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful,” many in the Jewish community see a galling double standard.
But as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a libertarian-leaning civil liberties group, said in a statement about the hearings, “Double standards are frustrating, but we should address them by demanding free speech be protected consistently — not by expanding the calls for censorship.” Unfortunately, that is not what’s happening.
“The general point that there’s a hypocrisy around free speech and an imbalance around free speech on college campuses is right,” said Ryan Enos, a Harvard professor of government. But, he said, many of the people pointing this out “are not doing it to stand up for free speech; they’re just doing it because they want to shut down speech they disagree with.”
They are now bombing Nassar Hospital in the South. When will the world wake up? https://t.co/eC0NvTTUMA
— Sarah Jayne – We'll be alright 💙💚🌹🗡️ (@soppysomers) December 4, 2023
This is from ABC News. “Hospitals in southern Gaza are at ‘breaking point,’ international organizations say. The WHO said patients are being forced to be treated on the floor.”
Hospitals in central and southern Gaza are at a “breaking point” and struggling to care for the influx of patients amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, Doctors Without Borders and the World Health Organization say.
Two hospitals — Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza and Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza — are overwhelmed and are being forced to prioritize those with life-threatening conditions, according to Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which has staff working at both medical centers.
“We hear bombing around us, day and night,” Katrien Claeys, an MSF team leader in Gaza, said in a press release Monday. “In the last 48 hours, over 100 dead and over 400 injured people arrived at the emergency room of Al-Aqsa Hospital. Some patients were taken for surgery right away.”
The fog of war is perhaps the worst place to get actual information on atrocities be it the brutal rapes and murders of Israeli women at a Music Festival or the bombing of young and elderly at a hospital.
She got famous during this genocidal war for this video in a hospital, where she said "I'm older than Israel".
The fog of the NRA is also difficult to traverse. We have a lot of festivals and holidays surrounding light this year; Diwali, Channukah, the birth of the light of the world, etc. But it’s sure difficult to shine the light on so many thing things these days even with global internet and news.
This is from NBC News. “Man federally charged after firing shots outside New York synagogue, officials say. The suspect was identified as Mufid Al Khader, 28, officials said.”
A man arrested in connection with shots that were fired outside a synagogue in Albany, New York, on Thursday has been federally charged, officials said.
Mufid Fawaz Alkhader was arrested and charged with possession of a firearm by a prohibited person, FBI spokesperson Sarah Ruane told NBC News.
Alkhader, 28, was born in Iraq and is now a U.S. citizen. He recently lived in Schenectady, New York, according to the criminal complaint.
No one was injured in the incident, in which two shots were fired from a Kel-Tec KS7 12 gauge pump shotgun outside Temple Israel around 2 p.m., Albany Police Chief Eric Hawkins said. Police don’t know in what direction the shots were fired, he said.
“We were told by responding officers that he made a comment, ‘Free Palestine,’” Hawkins said at a news conference.
The shooter fled but was confronted by another person in a vehicle in a lot, Hawkins said.
“The suspect at that point made some statement to this person who was in the vehicle to the effect of he feels that he’s being victimized,” Hawkins said.
The suspect then dropped the shotgun, and officers arrived and arrested him, said Hawkins, who emphasized that Al Khader acted alone and that there is no further threat to the community. There was also no damage to the building.
Hawkins said his understanding is that the suspect made the “Free Palestine” comment around the time he was taken into custody.
This is from The Daily Beast. “Bystanders Stop Woman Torching Martin Luther King Jr.’s Atlanta Birth Home.”
Off-duty police officers and tourists on Thursday helped to stop a woman setting fire to the house where Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta after she doused the property in gasoline, authorities said.
The 26-year-old woman was confronted by a pair of visitors from Utah as she poured fuel on the porch of the house, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said. Two off-duty New York City Police Department officers who had been visiting the home then pursued the suspect and detained her until local law enforcement arrived, Schierbaum added.
“That action saved an important part of American history tonight,” the police chief said.
One of the tourists from Utah, Zach Kempf, said he initially thought the woman was watering shrubs in front of the house. Kempf told The New York Times he and the co-worker with whom he was visiting the home then asked the woman “what she was doing” as she tried to open the screen door, but “she didn’t respond.”
It was then that she allegedly emptied a five-gallon container on the porch and retrieved a lighter she’d left in the grass next to the porch. Kempf said he blocked the woman with his body as she attempted to get back onto the porch while holding the lighter.
He told the Times the woman had a “nervous energy” but “wasn’t aggressive” and eventually backed down, turning around and walking off down the street. Kempf said he called 911 and “yelled at the two guys down the street that she was trying to set the house on fire and to follow her.”
Kempf said the men—the off-duty NYPD cops—restrained the woman. He added that later, after local officers arrived at the scene, the suspect’s father and three sisters showed up after tracking her location from her phone. Her family described the woman as a veteran who was in mental distress, according to Kempf.
The Atlanta Police Department said the woman was arrested for attempted arson as well as interference with government property. In a statement, the King Center said an “individual attempted to set fire to this historic property” but was fortunately unsuccessful “thanks to the brave intervention of good samaritans and the quick response of law enforcement.”
“If the witnesses hadn’t been here and interrupted what she was doing, it could have been a matter of seconds before the house was engulfed in flames,” Atlanta Fire Department Battalion Chief Jerry DeBerry told reports.
From a poster dated c.1913. Force Feeding suffragettes during a hunger strike in the UK.
Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau1: “Improved means to an unimproved end”. This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within”, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.
This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man’s chief dilemma, expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.
These words do not get as much play on his birthday as many of his other speeches and writings, but I think it’s worth reading the details he provides on his three categories.
It is also important to realize that the more we bury past actions, the more likely we will tolerate their repeat. The struggle for peace and justice continues.
Let me add a quote from Abigail Adams. “Don’t forget the Ladies.” Also, love is love. People know who they are better than you. Embrace the LGBTQ+ community and their rights.
If you celebrate light this month, be the light you seek at all times. You have several calendars to choose from to keep track of your path.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
[Verse 1] Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage Suddenly it’s repression, moratorium on rights What did they think the politics of panic would invite? Person in the street shrugs—”Security comes first”
[Refrain] But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse The trouble with normal is it always gets worse
[Verse 2] Callous men in business costume speak computerese Play pinball with the third world trying to keep it on its knees Their single crop starvation plans put sugar in your tea And the local third world’s kept on reservations you don’t see “It’ll all go back to normal if we put our nation first”
[Refrain] But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse The trouble with normal is it always gets worse
[Verse 3] Fashionable fascism dominates the scene When the ends don’t meet it’s easier to justify the means Tenants get the dregs and the landlords get the cream As the grinding devolution of the democratic dream Brings us men in gas masks dancing while the shells burst
[Refrain] But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse The trouble with normal is it always gets worse The trouble with normal is it always gets worse The trouble with normal is it always gets worse
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I’ve never been a fan of Joe Biden, so maybe I’ve just ignored his stance on reproductive rights. I did not know Biden was wobbly on the issue. I had even forgotten that Biden is a Catholic.
When former Vice President Joe Biden was a freshman senator he said in a 1974 interview with Washingtonian that he believed the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling clearing the way for legal first-trimester abortions “went too far,” and that he didn’t “think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”
In the interview, which took place just two years after Biden’s wife and two-year-old were killed in a car accident, Biden — then the youngest senator in U.S. history — said his anti-abortion views were part of his “socially conservative” outlook.
“My wife said I was the most socially conservative man she had ever known,” he said. “When it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I’m about as liberal as your grandmother.”
Biden claims his remarks were “taken out of context.”
But Biden didn’t limit his anti-abortion views to rhetoric. He also advanced legislation on the subject.
In 1981, for example, Biden proposed the Foreign Assistance Act, which barred U.S. aid from being used for any medical research on abortion. It’s still in effect to this day. He has also voted in support of the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding for abortion procedures.
Joe Biden interview with American Magazine, September 2015
“Those of us who are opposed to abortion should not be compelled to pay for them,” Biden wrote to a constituent in 1994.
He also supported former President Ronald Reagan’s “Global Gag Rule,” which prohibits the U.S. funding any nongovernmental organizations that offer or advise on reproductive health care if they also offer abortion. President Trump was quick to revive it in 2017.
Biden’s approval rating from the pro-choice activist group NARAL has fluctuated throughout his career. In the 1990s, his score wavered between 34 and 46 percent ― a pretty abysmal scorecard for a Democrat. In recent years, however, it’s shot up to 100 percent.
Biden has also consistently voted in support of banning so-called “partial-birth” abortions ― the medical term for which is “dilation and extraction.” These procedures are often politicized despite heart-wrenching stories from women whose lives were saved because of them.
In an exclusive interview with America released at the beginning of this week, Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. affirmed that pro-life people “absolutely, positively” are welcome in the Democratic party and that he believes, as a Catholic, that “abortion is always wrong.” His comments, very different from most contributions to the political conversation about abortion, are blurring some long-established lines in the culture wars and generating significant interest in the media and among commentators….
“It has been hard…I’m prepared to accept that at the moment of conception there’s human life and being, but I’m not prepared to say that to other God-fearing [and] non-God-fearing people that have a different view,” Biden said. He continued, “Abortion is always wrong…But I’m not prepared to impose doctrine that I’m prepared to accept on the rest of [the country].” (See the exchange, which begins at the 13:30 mark, in the full interview embedded at the bottom of this post.)
Fr. Malone also asked Mr. Biden if there was room for people who are pro-life in the Democratic party. The Vice President responded resolutely: “Absolutely. Absolutely, positively. And that’s been my position for as long as I’ve been engaged.”
No. Just no. Anyone who is “pro-life” in the sense of opposing women’s reproductive rights should not be welcome in the Democratic Party.
Biden has been an inconsistent supporter of reproductive rights, sometimes backing the legal right of women to choose how to handle a pregnancy, while often hewing to his Catholic faith and moralizing against all abortions. Even today, when he and Clinton would most likely agree on most of the policy substance of ensuring access to abortion clinics, Biden sticks to a pro-life view in his personal politics.
Biden the gaffe machine
During the early part of his career, abortion rights groups griped about Biden as an unreliable ally. “Joe Biden moans a lot and then usually votes against us,” a Planned Parenthood official said in 1986.
When he first entered national politics, Biden was willing to stand alongside politicians who wanted to make abortion illegal. In a Washingtonian profilepublished the year after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a nationwide right to abortion, Biden unequivocally criticized the ruling. “I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion,” he said. “I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”
He put that view into practice in 1982, voting in the Judiciary Committee for a proposed constitutional amendment that would have overturned Roe v. Wade by declaring that the Constitution offered women no inherent right to abortion, and that the federal government and states would be free to regulate or ban abortion as they pleased. Under that amendment, state laws that restricted abortions would have superseded more permissive federal laws.
Read the rest at Mother Jones.
As Biden continues to agonize about getting into the 2020 presidential race, this is something that needs to be spread far and wide among Democrats. With Roe v. Wade likely to be overturned soon, Women cannot accept a candidate who doesn’t wholeheartedly support women’s right to control their own bodies.
In late October 2017, Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East adviser, dropped into Saudi Arabia for an unannounced visit to the desert retreat of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was in the process of consolidating his power. The two men talked privately late into the night.
Just a day earlier, Mr. Kushner’s younger brother, Josh, then 32, was flying out of the kingdom.
Jared came to talk policy, but Josh was there on business.
The founder of an eight-year-old venture capital firm, Josh Kushner had spent the three days before his brother’s arrival at an investor conference, where Prince Mohammed had promised to spend billions of dollars on a high-tech future for Saudi Arabia.
As others sat through speeches in a gilded conference hall, several participants said, the younger Mr. Kushner frequently ducked out for more exclusive conversations with Saudi officials.
Some government ethics lawyers say those conversations — never hidden, but not previously reported — create the appearance of a potential conflict of interest. Although Jared Kushner severed his ties with his brother’s company and divested his interest in his brother’s funds around the time he entered the White House, he was nonetheless discussing American policy with the rulers of the kingdom at virtually the same time that his brother was talking business with their top aides.
Franklin Graham, America’s most prominent evangelical leader, says Vice President Mike Pence signed off on his trip to Russia earlier this month. While there, Graham met with sanctioned Kremlin officials — even as U.S. investigations ramped up into Moscow’s election interference efforts. One official Russian governmental social media account touted the meeting as a way to “[intensify] contacts between the State Duma and the U.S. Congress.”
In an interview with RIA Novosti, a major Russian state-run outlet, Graham said he called Pence directly to tell him of the trip. “He was very happy to hear the news,” Graham said. “And he admitted that he fully supported my decision.”
Neither Pence’s office nor the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association responded to ThinkProgress’s requests for comment.
According to interviews in Russian media and photos on his own social media accounts, Graham, currently the chair of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, traveled to Moscow earlier this month to meet with a number of prominent Russian figures. Most notably, Graham had a sit-down meeting with Russian Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, who is close to President Vladimir Putin and who has been sanctioned by the U.S. since 2014 for his role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I’ve spent this week getting used to some changes in my schedule and activities while trying to find a way to get all the things paid for above and beyond teaching for what seems like next to nothing any more. One of the things I learned this week is that some things really never change.
Bourbon Street, New Orleans is pretty much an endless parade of the same kinds of people in the same groups with the same clothes and looks on their faces. I’ve never gigged on Bourbon Street until this week even though I’ve gigged around New Orleans and the French Quarter a lot over the 20 years I’ve lived here. I usually play at upscale restaurants so mostly, I’m very much in the background.
I’m still somewhat in the background but now it’s more like being the music behind the performance. I’m accompanying a very talented drag performer with an awesome voice and having great fun! I hope you enjoy the pictures! I’m going to share a few other stories that are locally relevant and not as happy. So, this top picture is Miss Jessica Duplantier singing with me checking out her show last week. You’ll see a lot more of her and Eureka Starfish as the post goes on.
I’ve been thinking once again on how tribal human beings can be and how easily we forget how badly we can treat each other. I also think we all have convenient short memories and long standing insensitivities to wrong done to others. I’m getting tired of watching racism parade its ugly head. I’m also getting extremely tired of people acting willfully ignorant about things that seriously represent injurious historical actions.
The 2015 Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival poster was unveiled Tuesday (March 17), and immediately provoked a social media debate, with some calling the image racist.
The poster, created by artist Kalle Siekkinen, depicts two faceless children rendered in dark brown or black paint. One holds a flat of strawberries. The poster made the rounds on various Facebook pages, with some saying the image, done in a folk art style, implied cultural insensitivity. Others wrote that such concerns were misplaced.
Shelley Matherne, public relations director for the Strawberry Festival, said that the annual poster is produced by the Ponchatoula Kiwanis Club and that officials of the festival had not seen the work until Thursday’s unveiling. They became aware of the controversy via social media. Festival organizers are meeting with Kiwanis representatives Thursday (March 19) evening to discuss how to proceed, Matherne said.
I have followed, spoke to and seen most of the social media storm. I cannot believe that folks do not recognize the “pickaninny” stereotype and what it means to the historical movement to dehumanize and infantilize Black Americans. You can look at the variety of comments there exclaiming that it’s racist free ‘folk art’ showcasing black children and judge for yourself. The Festival people are standing by the poster and the poster’s defenders are vociferous. I’m still appalled and I stand by that.
U.S. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 3 House Republican who has been criticized in the past by civil rights leaders, stayed at a posh Georgia resort with his wife earlier this month rather than attend events in Alabama marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma civil rights march.
A newly filed congressional “post-travel” disclosure dated Wednesday shows Scalise skipped the Selma event to attend a Republican “off-the-record” retreat hosted in Sea Island, Ga. The event was hosted by the American Enterprise Institute from March 5-8.
CLAIBORNE COUNTY, MS (Mississippi News Now) –The FBI and the MBI are investigating a suspicious death in Claiborne County.
A body was found on property located off of Rodney Road.
The Coroner, J.W. Mallett, confirms the man was found hanging from a tree. Officials say the body was hung using bed sheets.
According to the Coroner the body has not yet been identified because the body has apparently been there so long that identification, by visual means, is nearly impossible. The body has been sent to the State Crime Lab for autopsy.
The Claiborne County branch of the NAACP is indicating the man found hanging is Otis Byrd.
The FBI is only saying that he is a “man last seen March 2nd; and his family filed a missing persons report with the Claiborne County Sheriff’s Department on March 8th.”
In a news release, the FBI say the body was found during a ground search by the Claiborne County Sheriff’s Department and the Mississippi Wildlife Fisheries and Parks.
54-year-old Otis James Byrd was last seen when a friend dropped him off at Vicksburg’s Riverwalk Casino earlier this month.
His family and friends hadn’t heard from him since then.
The NAACP has now sent an email requesting the US Department of Justice “join the current investigation of the suspicious hanging death of Mr. Otis Byrd.”
The email goes on to say: “Mr. Otis Byrd’s body was [found] today, Thursday, March 19, 2015. After several days of missing, [he] was found hanged to death.”
The FBI says the body was found “a half mile from his last know residence.”
Some odd things have been happening in the city that relate to a really strange true crime case. I thought I’d bring up the arrest and extradition of Robert Durst. It’s one of those stories that makes you wonder how our society can manage to let so many folks rot in jail for very little while a true sociopath can wander about at will. I guess you shouldn’t wonder too much because the guy is and was rich and can pretty much afford to work the justice system. It’s a strange story, nonetheless.
Durst was arrested Saturday in New Orleans in connection with the 2000 fatal shooting of Berman at her Benedict Canyon home. He was charged Monday with murder, and the next day transferred to the mental health facility at a state-run prison in Louisiana.
His extradition to California has been delayed as authorities in New Orleans deal with the drugs and weapons allegations.
Meanwhile, New York authorities remain interested in Durst as they continue to investigate what happened to his first wife, Kathleen, who disappeared in 1982.
Kathleen Durst vanished after she expressed the desire for a divorce. To a friend, she had confided worries about what her husband might do.
Following the disappearance, Berman acted as an “informal spokesman” for Durst. The pair had met at UCLA, where they went to school together.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles allege that Durst killed Berman to prevent her from speaking to police about the disappearance of his wife. Durst could face the death penalty for the murder charge with special circumstances.
Less than a year after Berman’s death, Durst turned up in Galveston, Texas, in connection with the killing of an elderly neighbor, Morris Black. Black’s dismembered body, in several plastic bags, was discovered in the waters offshore. A trail of clues led to Durst’s arrest.
Durst didn’t deny dismembering Black, but he said he inadvertently shot him while wrestling a gun from him.
A jury acquitted him in 2003.
Although Durst’s life has seen a series of high-profile brushes with the law, suspicions about him exploded into a national sensation as they played out in a six-part HBO series, “The Jinx.”
Murder suspect Robert Durst, subject of HBO’s ‘The Jinx,’ had more than $42,000 in cash, a fake ID and a latex mask when authorities arrested him in New Orleans last weekend, newly obtained records show.
Inside Durst’s hotel room at the J.W. Mariott on Canal Street, police say they found $42,631 in cash, mostly in $100 bills packed in small envelopes, according to an affidavit for a warrant to search Durst’s home in Houston, signed by a judge in Harris County, Texas, on Tuesday (March 17).
The new details were made public Wednesday after authorities in Houston searched the real-estate scion’s home at the request of Los Angeles officials, who have charged Durst in the 2000 death of his longtime confidante and spokesperson, Susan Berman.
According to the document, members of the FBI’s Violent Offenders Task Force found Durst on in the lobby of the hotel a little before 7 p.m. Saturday. When FBI Special Agent William Williams approached the 71-year-old man from behind and identified himself, Durst had a small backpack with him but claimed he did not have any type of identification.
When agents searched Durst’s room — he was staying in room 2303 under the name Everette Ward — they found a Texas ID with the same alias, and not his real name, the record states.
“That’s pretty good,” Durst said to the agents when confronted with the fake ID, according to the Texas document.
So, now I suppose I will have to watch the HBO thing.
Well, that’s enough for me today. I’m going back to sleep for awhile! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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When a very pregnant Felicia Allen applied for medical leave from her job at Hobby Lobby three years ago, one might think that the company best known for denying its employees insurance coverage of certain contraceptives—on the false grounds that they cause abortions—would show equal concern for helping one of its employees when she learned she was pregnant. Instead, Allen says the self-professed evangelical Christian arts-and-crafts chain fired her and then tried to prevent her from accessing unemployment benefits. “They didn’t even want me to come back after having my baby, to provide for it,” she says. Her allegations—as well as those brought by other former Hobby Lobby employees—call into question the company’s public claims when it comes to protecting life and operating its business with Christian values. Additionally, they highlight a practice by which Hobby Lobby prevents its employees from seeking justice through the courts.
Yeah, you can read more details at the link. But as Eric Loomis, LG&M points out: That Pro-Life Hobby Lobby
And here I thought Hobby Lobby was acting out of very strong principle for life and not because it hates women and wants to punish them for having sex. There’s also this gem:
When Allen applied for unemployment benefits, she says Hobby Lobby’s corporate office gave the unemployment agency a false version of events, claiming she could have taken off personal leave but chose not to. In the end, Allen says she won her claim for unemployment benefits, but she felt she had been wrongly discriminated based on the fact that she was pregnant. In February 2012 she sued Hobby Lobby, but her lawsuit was swiftly dropped because, like most—if not all—Hobby Lobby employees, Allen had signed away her rights to sue the company. Though the multibillion-dollar, nearly 600-store chain took its legal claim against the federal government all the way to the Supreme Court when it didn’t want to honor the health insurance requirements of the Affordable Care Act, the company forbids its employees from seeking justice in the court of law. Allen had signed a binding arbitration agreement upon taking the job, though she says she doesn’t remember doing so. The agreement, which all Hobby Lobby employees are required to sign, forces employees to resolve legal disputes outside of court through a process known as arbitration.
Lying so she couldn’t get unemployment is very special, but forcing employees to sign documents waiving their right to sue the company in order to be hired should be as illegal as the yellow-dog contract. I would ask how something like that is even legal in this nation, but of course I already know why–because corporations control our lives in ways they have not in a century.
Millions of people were forced from their homes because of their religious beliefs last year, the U.S. government said Monday, citing the devastating impact of conflicts in Syria, Iraq and the Central African Republic. Secretary of State John Kerry called the displacement of families and devastation of communities from sectarian violence a troubling trend in the world, as he launched the State Department 2013 report on religious freedom. The report said that in much of the Middle East, the Christian presence is becoming “a shadow of its former self.” Hundreds of thousands of minority Christians have fled Syria after three years of civil war. It also highlighted more than one million people displaced in the Central African Republic during 2013, amid an upsurge in Christian-Muslim violence. In Southeast Asia, the spread of anti-Muslim violence spread from Myanmar‘s volatile west to central Meiktila, with up to 100 deaths and 12,000 displaced. Kerry further cited the “savagery and incredible brutality” by the al-Qaeda-inspired militant group active in Iraq and Syria, known as the Islamic State, saying it had slaughtered Shiite Muslims and forcibly converted Christians under threat of death. The report, released annually, reviews how religious freedoms are respected and violated in almost 200 countries and territories.
In 1963, a 17-year-old Indiana youth named Robert J. Dowlut reportedly confessed to police — amid a pile of evidence — that he’d killed a local woman. The next year, a jury of his peers heard the case and found Dowlut guilty. What happened next? A) He died in the electric chair. B) He lived a long life and is currently the chief lawyer for the National Rifle Association.
“I’ve always thought of being in love as being willing to do anything for the other person—starve to buy them bread and not mind living in Siberia with them—and I’ve always thought that every minute away from them would be hell—so looking at it that [way] I guess I’m not in love with you.”
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, teeny tiny goddess of judicial feminism incarnate, has authored many a badass piece of legal writing in her day. Now, thanks to some devoted brainiacs who are better at this sort of thing than I am, you can read the sharpest work of the grand dame in one place.
The folks at People for the American Way (a progressive think tank) have put together a lovely treasury of RBG’s greatest hits. Perfect light reading for the next time you put your head in a big pile of curls on your head and take a bubble bath, or lie out on a Caribbean beach, or a good thing to read to the kids when you’re trying to get them to bed. Yep. Just a little light legal reading.
On his blog entry, Mass goes into much more scientific detail on climate effects for the Lower 48 (complete with loads more charts). But even from this map, we can glean a few key takeaways.
You’ll notice Mass highlighted most of the Eastern seaboard, the Gulf of Mexico, and sections of California in bright red. Areas of sea-level rise? Ohnonononono. You misunderstand completely. Those are spots where candy will grow on trees — because adaptation! Florida’s famous orange groves will evolve into chocolate orange groves and just work their way up the coast to Connecticut. Delicious!
Take a look at all that yellow in the Southwest. Any guesses? Correct: That is precisely where state and local governments are likely to enforce three-day workweeks. And if you worry that moving to Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Austin means you’ll spend every extra-long weekend wearing spikes and riding in a rusty dune buggy on your way to bludgeon the neighbors to death over water resources, here’s a tip: Don’t!
Orange! This DOES NOT mean this area gets more oranges (duh, pay attention; that was yellow). It does signify that every day will be Christmas. It also signifies that more Christmases will be wetter, windier, and generally more hurricane-y. P.S. I got you galoshes. (AGAIN, I know. Tee-hee!) Merry Christmas!
Purple, purple, purple — Big Purp practically owns the map. Good thing, too, because from Montana to Maine, climate-changed citizenry will THRILL to the incredible cellphone coverage. No more dropped calls in Chicago. No more blips in Butte. Just blazing-fast downloads and crystal-clear audio, from your hot, cracked lips to your heatstroked fingertips. (Caveat: Customers will notice an increase in dropped calls from underground bunkers and heat hovels.)
Say what about the green dots? Oh, those are flooding rivers and total shitholes.
Lately I’ve been remarking about how slow the news is in these dog days of summer. Suddenly there is lots going on–even on a Friday–and the news isn’t good. It’s difficult to say which is worse: the escalating battle between Israel and Hamas in Gaza or the downing of a Malaysia Airlines jet over Ukraine. And of course there is the ongoing war on women’s reproductive freedom. This post is going to be a link dump without a lot of commentary because, quite frankly, I’m at a loss for words.
After 10 days of Israeli airstrikes and rocket attacks by Palestinian militants, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered ground troops into the Gaza Strip on Thursday night, escalating an exchange of fire that has claimed more than 240 lives, all but one of them Palestinian.
Under cover of darkness, tanks rolled across the northern border of the coastal enclave, backed by intense shelling from the land, air and sea all along the frontier, witnesses said.
The immediate objective was to strike at tunnels Hamas and its allies use to smuggle weapons and fighters into Israel, according to a statement issued by Netanyahu’s office….
Israeli officials said Netanyahu made the decision to send in ground forces after Hamas, the militant movement that has controlled the enclave since 2007, rejected a cease-fire brokered by Egypt this week and fired rockets at Israel during a five-hour truce Thursday that was requested by the United Nations. The truce was meant to allow Gaza’s battered residents to stock up on food, cash and other necessities.
As rockets continued to rain down on Israeli cities, a military spokesman said the mission’s expansion was “not time bound” and was aimed to ensure Hamas operatives were “pursued, paralyzed and threatened” as it targeted “terrorist infrastructure” in the north, south and east of Gaza “in parallel.”
As midnight approached Thursday, residents of some sparsely populated farmland in northern Gaza were cowering in their homes, afraid to answer mobile phones or peek out windows. Some sent text messages reporting that they could hear tank shelling, heavy artillery, and F-16s dropping bombs. Moussa al-Ghoul, 63, who lives northwest of Beit Lahiya, said his neighborhood had turned into “a war zone” with tanks surrounding his home, having destroyed those of two of his sons. He said shells were landing “everywhere.”
Gaza news outlets reported that electricity had been cut to 80 percent of the coastal territory after cables bringing power from Israel were damaged….
“We will strike Hamas and we are determined to restore peace to the state of Israel,” the military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, told reporters in a conference call. “It will progress according to the situation assessment and according to our crafted and designed plan of action to enable us to carry out this mission.”
Israel began to call up 18,000 reservists, adding to 50,000 already mobilized in recent days; Colonel Lerner said the ground forces would include infantry and artillery units, armored and engineer corps, supported by Israel’s “vast intelligence capabilities,” air force and navy.
Israel intensified its land offensive in Gaza with artillery, tanks and gunboats on Friday and warned it could “significantly widen” an operation Palestinian officials said was killing ever greater numbers of civilians.
Palestinian health officials said 27 Palestinians, including a baby, two children and a 70-year-old woman, had been killed since Israel sent ground forces into the densely-populated strip of 1.8 million Palestinians on Thursday.
The Israeli military said it killed 17 Palestinian gunmen while another 13 surrendered and were taken for questioning after the infantry and tank assault began in the Islamist Hamas-dominated territory.
One Israeli soldier was killed and several others were wounded in the operations, in which some 150 targets, including 21 concealed rocket launchers and four tunnels, have been attacked, according to the military.
Read more at the link.
I don’t even know what to say about this conflict other than I’ve pretty much lost any sympathy I once had for Israel. I can’t understand why the Israeli people keep electing far right warmongering leaders.
Downing of Malaysian Airlines Jet Over Ukraine
After the downing of a Malaysian Airlines plane with nearly 300 people on board, the conflict in Ukraine has become a full blown international crisis.
Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was allegedly shot down by a group of Russian-backed Cossack militants near the village of Chornukhine, Luhansk Oblast, some 80 kilometers north-west of Donetsk, according to recordings of intercepted phone calls between Russian military intelligence officers and members of terrorist groups, released by the country’s security agency (SBU).
One phone call apparently was made at 4:40 p.m. Kyiv time, or 20 minutes after the plane crash, by Igor Bezler, who the SBU says is a Russian military intelligence officer and leading commander of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. He reports to a person identified by Ukraine’s SBU as a colonel in the main intelligence department of the general headquarters of the armed forces of the Russian Federation Vasili Geranin regarding the shot down plane, which is about to be examined by the militants.
The second intercepted conversation released by the Security Service of Ukraine was apparently between militants nicknamed “Major” and “Greek” immediately upon inspection of the crash site.
“It’s 100 percent a passenger (civilian) aircraft,” Major is recorded as saying, as he admitted to seeing no weapons on site. “Absolutely nothing. Civilian items, medicinal stuff, towels, toilet paper.”
In the third part of conversation Cossack commander Nikolay Kozitsin talking to an unidentified militant cynically suggests that the Malaysia Airlines airplane could’ve been carrying spies, as, otherwise, it would have no business flying in that area.
Read the rest of the transcript at the link–lots of “Oh shit”-type quotes.
Over the last couple of months, pro-Russian separatists have beendowningUkrainian military planes with increasing regularity—and mounting casualties on the Ukrainian side. Just earlier Thursday, separatists had shot down another one. All of that seemed to undermine the narrative, propagated by the Kremlin, that the separatists were just a ragtag people’s militia who didn’t stand a chance against a proper, organized military. The constant downing of Ukrainian jets showed that these men were equipped with some pretty serious stuff: You can’t really shoot down a jet with a Kalashnikov.
And, in fact, Russian a state media report from late June indicates the rebels got a hold of a Buk missile system, a Russian/Soviet surface-to-air missile system. Rebels are now denying that they shot down the plane, but there are now screenshots floating around the Russian-language internet from what seems to be the Facebook page of Igor Strelkov, a rebel leader in eastern Ukraine, showing plumes of smoke and bragging about shooting down a Ukrainian military Antonov plane shortly before MH17 fell. “Don’t fly in our skies,” he reportedly wrote. If that’s true, it would seem rebels downed the jetliner, having mistaken it for a Ukrainian military jet….
Make no mistake: this is a really, really, really big deal. This is the first downing of a civilian jetliner in this conflict and, if it was the rebels who brought it down, all kinds of ugly things follow. For one thing, what seemed to be gelling into a frozen local conflict has now broken into a new phase, one that directly threatens European security. The plane, let’s recall, was flying from Amsterdam.
For another, U.S. officials have long been saying that there’s only one place that rebels can get this kind of heavy, sophisticated weaponry: Russia. This is why a fresh round of sanctions was announced yesterday. Now, the U.S. and a long-reluctant Europe may be forced to do more and implement less surgical and more painful sanctions.
This also seems to prove that Russia has lost control of the rebels, who have been complaining for some time of being abandoned by President Vladimir Putin. There is no way that, a day after criticizingthe recklessness of American foreign policy, his military shoots down a passenger plane. Rather, it seems that the rebels made a mistake that paints Putin into a corner. Putin hates corners, and when he’s backed into one, he tends to lash out.
MOSCOW—Ukraine on Thursday accused Russia’s armed forces of shooting down one of its fighter jets over Ukrainian territory, marking Kiev’s most direct accusation yet of Moscow’s involvement in the separatist conflict in the country’s east.
The accusation came hours before a Malaysia Airlines3786.KU -11.11% plane carrying 295 passengers and crew crashed while flying over the east Ukraine region of Donetsk.
A Russian military plane fired on and downed a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet that was flying over the town of Amvrosiivka in Ukraine’s Donetsk region on Wednesday night, Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Spokesman Andriy Lysenko said at a briefing.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said the jet was shot in the tail section from the direction of the Russian border while it was turning around at approximately 7 p.m. on Wednesday night. (Follow the latest updates on the crisis in Ukraine.)
“In this way, Russia has executed another provocation,” the ministry said in a statement. “The bombardment probably came from air-to-air missiles fired by a pair of Russian Armed Forces aircraft patrolling the border in a certain area.”
The Department of Labor updated its website to indicate that closely held for-profit corporations must include in their insurance plans “a description of the extent to which preventive services (which includes contraceptive services) are covered under the plan.” If the company chooses to opt out of covering any of the 20 contraceptives required by the Affordable Care Act, it has 60 days to disclose the change to its employees.
A senior administration official said the move was in response to the Senate failing to pass a bill Wednesday that would have required all for-profit employers, regardless of their owners’ religious objections, to cover the full range of Food and Drug Administration-approved contraception in their health care plans. The bill would have overridden a recent Supreme Court decision that allowed Hobby Lobby, a craft supply company owned by evangelical Christians, to opt out of covering certain contraceptives to which the owners religiously object.
“Yesterday, a majority of the Senate voted for a bill to keep bosses from interfering in a woman’s health care,” the official said. “Now the House should act. In the meantime, we are making clear that if a corporation like Hobby Lobby drops coverage of contraceptive services from its health plan, it must do so in the light of day by letting its workers and their families know.”
The clarification is not a new rule. Current law already states that employers must disclose changes in their health benefits to employees. But the new guidance on the ACA makes clear that the disclosure requirement applies to those corporations opting out of birth control coverage after the Hobby Lobby decision.
After the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision went down, many women wondered if they would suddenly find themselves at the mercy of their boss’s heretofore unknown beliefs that women who take birth control are abortion-happy harlots. Unfortunately, the answer is still yes. Fortunately, thanks to new rules set forth by the White House today, your boss has to inform you if and when this is happening….
Ideally, today’s directive will force companies with “religious beliefs” to be straightforward with their employees rather than sneaky about how badly they’re hosing everyone. And critics of this directive might wonder what the benefit is. If companies are run by zealots, then what good will telling the employees do?
Here’s what this “inform your employees of your conscientious objections” mandate will do: it will leave a paper trail that disgruntled employees could easily pass onto media outlets, which media outlets can then convey to the general public. The public can then avoid shopping at places run by people who think that birth control is murder.
And now’s as good a time as any to say this: if your boss informs you that your birth control is no longer covered because Jesus Loves Zygotes, let us know.
Those are my recommendations for today. What stories are you reading and blogging about?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
The fog of the NRA is also difficult to traverse. We have a lot of festivals and holidays surrounding light this year; Diwali, Channukah, the birth of the light of the world, etc. But it’s sure difficult to shine the light on so many thing things these days even with global internet and news.
I’ve never been a fan of Joe Biden, so maybe I’ve just ignored his stance on reproductive rights. I did not know Biden was wobbly on the issue. I had even forgotten that Biden is a Catholic.
“It has been hard…I’m prepared to accept that at the moment of conception there’s human life and being, but I’m not prepared to say that to other God-fearing [and] non-God-fearing people that have a different view,” Biden said. He continued, “Abortion is always wrong…But I’m not prepared to impose doctrine that I’m prepared to accept on the rest of [the country].” (See the exchange, which begins at the 13:30 mark, in the full interview embedded at the bottom of this post.)
Good Morning!
I’m appalled on many levels by several recent events indicating that the struggle does indeed continue on many fronts. There were several notable absences in the Selma commemoration including the Congressman that spoke at a White Supremacist gathering on his way to his seat. He was in a posh resort being wined and dined by the AEI. That’s obviously much more important than making a symbolic gesture to his constituents many of whose lives were profoundly changed by the civil rights movement.
how our society can manage to let so many folks rot in jail for very little while a true sociopath can wander about at will. I guess you shouldn’t wonder too much because the guy is and was rich and can pretty much afford to work the justice system. It’s a strange story, nonetheless.
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