The site for ranting and reporting by John Masters
This category is a main category for post dealing with political issues and politicians at any level of government.
I’m getting tired of hearing about and talking about public restrooms. I don’t particularly like having to use them, but I’m sure thankful they’re there sometimes. I suspect most folks feel the same. But alas, the public restroom is under attack. Where once one could go for some semi-private release, it’s now a place where evil-doers and gender-obsessed perverts lurk.
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I was recently involved in an exchange with someone in a discussion thread about elections, candidates, and what a sad state we’ve reached in this country. We seem no longer interested in extending the right to free and fair elections, but have allowed Republican controlled legislatures and Congress to withdraw that freedom. And that doesn’t even take into account the Republican Clown Car of candidates they’ve posited for President.
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I respect and would defend everyone’s right to pick the candidate they believe best represents their interests. With that said, I have to tell I’ve moved past being worried to being disgusted at the way some people are deciding on who to vote for, and I am especially looking at Trump’s supporters.
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This is how it starts, we know how it ends. History has taught us, but as too often the case, we have decided to forego the lessons of history. Trump’s campaign has given permission to the racists and xenophobes in this country to take off the masks of civility, and revel in their hate.
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Just in case you’ve forgotten, U.S. Senators were not always elected by the people. The Constitution allowed the state legislatures to determine how their states’ Senators would be chosen. In the early days after the Constitution was ratified, legislatures often chose the Senators themselves. This was changed in 1913, by the 17th Amendment, which provided that Senators would be chosen by the people in the same way the Representatives were.
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It’s no surprise that Ted Cruz wants an ultra-conservative justice to replaced Antonin Scalia. What is surprising is how much he’s willing to lie about the consequences if that doesn’t happen. (But then again, he’s been lying for Jesus for quite a while now.) On Meet the Press Sunday, Cruz told host Chuck Todd that a liberal justice would mean the end of religious liberty — adding that religious symbols would be “sandblasted off of the tombstones of our fallen veterans”:
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So, by now everyone knows that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died over the weekend. As is usual, everyone is rushing to the airwaves to talk about what a nice and brilliant person he was. Of course I don’t know him personally, but certainly his public personae were not so nice, and I don’t think his legal reasoning, considered by many to be smart and original (pun intended), was all that brilliant. It was merely partisan and theocratic. Scalia was not really interested in the original intent of the framers. He was interested in creating a facade of intellectualism around his rulings. His genius was not in a new form of thought around the Constitution, but in a way to package his rulings so that people thought they had a grand origin.
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So, Rafael “Ted” Cruz wants to be President of the United States. That should scare the crap out of any sane person. Ted and his supposed pastor father (I say “supposed” because there is scant evidence of his ever pastoring a church) subscribe to a very dark end-times religious doctrine referred to as Dominionism, and the two of them have decreed that Ted is ordained by God to lead the Government. There is a reason none of the people like him who know him, and there is a very good reason people who find themselves in his presence get a sense of creepiness. But he’s way more than just an unattractive, vindictive demagogue…he’s a downright scary person with a set of religious beliefs that make the most radical Muslim clerics look tame.
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I was going to write about Ted Cruz, but lo’ and behold, the Palin family reappeared. Sarah Palin popped up and tossed up one of the biggest bowls of word salad ever in support of Donald Trump. This coming on the heels of her daughter being sued for child support and shared custody or a second out-of-wedlock child, and her son’s arrest on a range of charges related to firearms and domestic abuse. And, no surprise here, she blames most all of that on Obama.
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By now you’ve likely heard the craziness of some conservatives about Starbuck’s holiday cup design. You’ve probably heard about it because of one idiotic attention whore, who claims to be a pastor, Josh Feurerstein. He apparently managed to finally have a video go viral (trust me, he’s produced some doozies in his efforts to get attention), where he raises a stink about Starbucks, because of their holiday cup design…plain red with their green logo.
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Unless you live under a rock, you know the Pope visited the US last week. There was much hope that this Pope might further soften the exclusive tone of Catholic doctrine as espoused by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and while never moving to change doctrine, he did give several speeches indicating that he believed the Church’s emphasis needs to move away from culture war issues to caring for the poor and taking care of our planet. This, of course, set the hair on fire of many of America’s evangelical wing. When Ratzinger was Pope, they had a friend in Rome, but now the two branches of Christianity seem to be, once again, going their separate ways.
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