Racism Is Used to Defend Vote Against Protecting Abuse Victims

found online by Raymond

 
From Tommy Christopher:

Rep. Steve Chabot defends a despicable vote with an even more despicable explanation.

Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) expects voters to understand his vote against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 2013 because he thought protecting immigrants from domestic violence was a bridge too far.

At two recent debates with Democratic challenger Aftab Pureval, Chabot offered increasingly despicable explanations for his vote against VAWA, which funds critical services like rape crisis centers, community violence prevention programs, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

At their first debate, Chabot said he voted against the bill to combat domestic violence because “the Senate added a whole bunch of illegal immigrants to be covered.”

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WATCH: Oprah Campaigns For Stacey Abrams

found online by Raymond

 
From Frances Langum:

Excerpts:

“I want to tell you…no one paid for me to come here. No one asked me to come here. I came for myself and I approve this message.”

“If you are a woman, you need to recognize, it hasn’t even been 100 years since we had the right to vote… We as women people need to stand united & vote our values. Vote your conscience… we have discernment… you can’t be influenced by propaganda & fear.”

“When I go to the polls and cast my ballot, I cast it for a man I never knew, Otis Moss Sr. I cast a vote for my grandmother Hattie Mae Lee who died before the VRA was passed and when I stand in the poll I do what Maya Angelou said, I come as one but I stand as 10,000.”

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How Can I Be Certain the Evangelical God is a Myth?

found online by Raymond

 
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

…concluding that the Bible is NOT what Evangelicals claim it is, and that its words were written by humans, will not erase all doubt one might have about the existence of God. Answering these questions will get a person almost to home, but there could still be, as in the case of the person who emailed me, niggling doubts.

These doubts are the vestiges of Evangelical indoctrination. Sunday after Sunday, these “truths” were preached from the pulpits of the churches we attended. Spend enough years hearing such sermons, and you are going to think these beliefs are true. The essence of faith is believing without seeing. Evangelicals believe in God, Heaven, Hell, and the afterlife, not because they have ever seen them, but because their churches, pastors, families believe them to be true. Surely, all these people can’t be wrong, right? Actually, they can be (and are) wrong. Faith, for the most part, bypasses reason and intellectual inquiry. Evangelicals believe what they do because everyone they know believes the same. It is only when Evangelicals step outside of the Evangelical box that they see their resolute beliefs are not as solid as they think they are.

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Speaking Truth to Lies

found online by Raymond

 
From Iron Knee at Political Irony:

On Saturday, Trump tried to justify his decision to hold two campaign events (a campaign rally in Illinois and a speech at an agricultural convention) the same day as a mass shooting killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

And with what happened early today — that horrible, horrible attack in Pittsburgh — I was saying maybe I should cancel both this and that. And then I said to myself, I remember Dick Grasso, a friend of mine, great guy. He headed up the New York Stock Exchange on September 11. And the New York Stock Exchange was open the following day. He said — and what they had to do to open it you wouldn’t believe. We won’t even talk to you about it. But he got that exchange open.

There’s just one problem.

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Facing the Truth in Our New Political Climate

found online by Raymond

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

We can’t specifically connect individual actions to the overall political atmosphere, just as we can’t specifically conclude that a specific hurricane is the consequence of climate change. Perhaps the bigots in Kentucky and Pittsburgh would have acted anyway; perhaps in a different political climate, the attempted bomber would have found other targets.

What we can do, however, is face the climate honestly. And the truth is that people who watch the news within the Republican-aligned media, and listen to Republican politicians including the president of the United States, are being fed a nonstop diet of crazy conspiracy theories and phony scare stories.

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Loose Lips

found online by Raymond

 
From nojo at Stinque:

America always turns into a bad-faith ethics seminar in moments like this. Where the conversation should be moral — and political — we jump to legal framing. Of course no one is responsible for the deeds of another. Any system of justice that cast implied blame would be heinous, and heinously manipulated. It is the man who sent the pipe bombs whose guilt must be proved in court, not the man who egged him on.

But the law is limited that way, and understandably so. The law is the state, and the state must be constrained.

We are under no such constraints.

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Trump Treason Again: Real Story Behind Broken Nuclear Treaty

found online by Raymond

 
From Green Eagle:

The United States did in fact destroy about 1,000 nuclear missiles after this treaty was signed (the Soviet Union destroyed about 2,000.) But other than the financial loss, the treaty meant little to us because our supposed enemies, the Soviet Union and China, were well over 5500 kilometers from our missile bases, which were located in the middle of the United States.

The situation for the Soviets, however, was considerably different, as can be seen from a glance at this map …

In fact, the forbidden range for Russian nuclear missiles includes virtually all of Europe. And that is the point:

The U. S. abrogation of this treaty will allow Vladimir Putin to deploy nuclear missiles targeting the entire continent of Europe.

Let the NATO nations try to stand up to Russia then.

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Trump Strips Citizenship from Children of Immigrants and Gets Disqualified as President

found online by Raymond

 
From the Borowitz Report:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order stripping the children of immigrant mothers of their citizenship, thus disqualifying himself from being President of the United States.

The constitutional crisis came to light moments after the signing ceremony, when a fourth grader visiting the Oval Office on a school tour pointed out the far-reaching legal ramifications of the order.

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Trump Slams Jewish Conspiracy For Not Preventing Synagogue Shooting

found online by Raymond

 
From The Onion:

“I condemn in the strongest possible terms the shadowy global cabal of Jewish people who, despite the fact that they control everything on Earth, weren’t even able to stop a single shooter,” said Trump in a press conference, adding that he didn’t understand why the worldwide Jewish conspiracy didn’t simply hypnotize the killer through the television or create a massive storm that would have stopped him from leaving his house.

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