The site for ranting and reporting by John Masters
This is for those posts that we wish to feature here at Deep Sand. It implies that these are a bit extra special.
This story, just based on the headline is a sad enough story. According to a story on UPI from Cumberland County Kentucky (where else), “Caroline Starks, 2, was shot and killed by her 5-year-old brother while he was playing with a .22-caliber rifle he’d been given as a gift.” Young kids can get their hands on lots of things they shouldn’t have, but that’s not the case here. And it’s what makes this story all the more sad.
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President Obama says all the right things, if he’d just use the powers he does have to put some of his convictions into practice, I’d be happier. Today, at the end of a press conference, the President pivoted and returned to the podium to take one last question about Jason Collins coming out.
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At the end of last week, the SPLC designated hate group, American Family Association’s (AFA) Brian Fischer became incensed when he was supposedly contacted by someone using the U.S. Army network to access the Southern Baptist Convention Website (sbc.com). Fischer claimed, as he so often does, that Obama’s military was blocking Christian websites (despite the fact this was only one website). It turns out the SBC site contained malicious code that would have compromised any computer or network which accessed the site. 24 hours after they know what happened, they knowingly lie about what took place.
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We start today’s edition with Louie Gohmert managing to tie gun control to same sex marriage to beastiality. Gohmert contends that if you restrict the size of gun magazines, then gay people can marry and that leads to beastiality. Topping today’s list though is the North Carolina legislature which sought to establish Christianity as the official state religion. No clarification on which version of Christianity would be the official one.
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Georgia’s reigning Ms Helmet Hair and GOP Chairwoman, Sue Everhart, called it correctly when she recently told the Marietta Daily Journal, “Lord, I’m going to get in trouble over this. She got right when she went on to claim that ending DOMA would cause straight people to get gay-married just for the benefits. And, of course, since every negative event in the world must be blamed on gay people, Southern Baptist Convention President, Frank Luter, had to blame the SCOTUS hearings about gay marriage for North Korea’s increasing anti-American rhetoric. Because, you know, they’ve never been anti-American until now.
Read moreIt’s not hard to cast Kentucky as a backassword state when they do things like pass a “religious freedoms” law which has no intent other than to allow people to discriminate against LGBT people in cities where non-discrimination regulations have been passed. In order for the bill to be more palatable, the legislators involved in this little scheme made it clear they were targeting gay rights. This was to make the people of Kentucky take their eye off the underlying scope of this bill.
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Finally, the Republican craziness rears its ugly head somewhere besides Florida and Virginia. This time, it is Washington State Representative, Ed Orcutt (Republican), who’s firing the next shot in the Republican war on science. Orcutt recently argued that bicycling is equally bad for the environment as driving cars, because when we bike, we breathe out CO2. Wow! The craziness is strong in this one.
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It really doesn’t get more appropriate than this. National Organization for Marriage (NOM) head, Brian Brown, tweeted out the picture below a couple of days ago from his “commencement.” The Coalition of African-American Pastors, a co-sponsor of NOM’s hate march on the Supreme Court next week, awarded Brian an honorary doctorate of letters degree from the American Urban University. A University with is Corporate Charter suspended, and it’s address a townhouse in Long Beach, CA.
Read moreApparently, some Republicans didn’t get the memo from Gov. Bobby Jindal about not being the “stupid party.” Because if you live in Montana, you can thank state Rep. Steve Lavin (R) for taking the Supreme Court’s misguided notion that “corporations are people” to new heights of stoopid. Lavin introduced a bill to allow corporations to vote in local elections. Under Lavin’s bill, under the proposal, “if a firm, partnership, company, or corporation owns real property within the municipality, the president, vice president, secretary, or other designee of the entity is eligible to vote.”
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There was, in the 19th century, an Italian Monk named Gabriel Possenti. According to a legend, Saint Possenti saved a village from a marauding gang of soldiers by scaring them off with his hand gun prowess. So that was enough for a group of handgun enthusiasts to form the St. Gabriel Possenti Society to lobby to get the Pope to designate St. Possenti as the Patron Saint of handgun enthusiasts.
Read moreYou read it right. Radio host Janet Mefferd says that it’s a civil rights violation (the right to freedom of religion) to not even have to “see” gay people. This is how over the top and vitriolic the krazy kristian kooks of the conservative right have become. Last week, a teacher at a school in Indiana decided that if gay and lesbian students were going to get to come to the prom, then there should be a separate prom for the “christian” children (that “c” is intentionally not capitalized). So Mefferd decided she had to weigh in on the topic.
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