Peter Steiner sums it all up. Thank you for coming and don’t forget to tip your waitress.
But, no, I’ve never been known to avoid elaboration, and there’s a lot more to be said, even if you shouldn’t say it in Louisiana. Or Texas or Arizona or in any of a number of other places and don’t you wish they were all strung together like they were back in 1861 so they could all just leave?
We just had another heavily armed screwball picked up by the feds because he planned to go from his home in Arizona to a rap concert in Georgia to kill a bunch of people and start a race war.
I say “another screwball” because that was Charlie Manson’s plan when he sent his devoted followers out to murder people.
It’s not as easy to start a race war as these folks appear to believe, but we’ve got a whole other level of screwballism emerging, with the same basic goal but more practical ways to touch it off.
As you no doubt have heard — and as Joel Pett (Tribune) illustrates — Dear Leader and his minions at Fox News are spreading the scary theory that undocumented migrants are committing murder at a prodigious rate.
It is, of course, a lie. Migrants actually commit fewer homicides than people who were born here. That’s not politics. It’s arithmetic, and I’d say “math” but I’m trying to keep things as simple and basic as possible.
The True Believers have been deliberately pre-programmed to reject any facts that don’t fit the tale they’ve been told, and would dismiss statistics on the topic as more lies from the enemy, so I’ll direct you to this report from the Cato Institute, and if you think they’re a bunch of liberals, well, I can’t help you.
And I probably can’t, because Trump began ginning up hatred of brown people back when he first ran for president, with a deliberate, racist lie:
He’s continued to lie about Mexico “sending” people and about how many miles of wall he built. And his faithful MAGAts continue to lap it up and to denounce any attempts at setting the record straight.
So it’s not surprising that he and his GOP cohorts are now actively blaming all migrants for a few murders, nor is it surprising that they don’t apply that same finger-pointing logic to gun owners, even though we’re all aware of the genuine flood of gun murders in this country.
As noted here yesterday, his gang — both on the street and in state and federal legislatures — have an uncanny ability to avoid reality no matter how clearly it is presented to them.
I certainly don’t blame all gun owners for the actions of maniacs, but John Auchter is both right and wrong here, because, while ammosexual lunatics have indeed managed to slaughter innocent people in an astonishing variety of places, they haven’t run out of new outrages yet.
However, those who are planning to build concentration camps for 12 million migrants because of the actions of a very few refuse to apply the most common sense regulations to gun safety.
Which, as Clay Jones puts it, will be a great benefit for the next well-regulated militia who decides to go into a school and defend our nation by slaughtering tiny children.
But we do care about our children, or at least the ones who belong to politically correct Protestant religions. Dear Leader has said so!
Jones is one of several cartoonists pointing out the absurdity of Trump promoting the 10 Commandments, since he violates them so regularly and shamelessly.
Steve Brodner is more specific both in bringing home the charges and in expressing his disgust with the hypocrite claiming to uphold them.
But I think Pedro X. Molina (Counterpoint) scores best by skipping the enumeration of offenses and cutting straight to the lesson Louisiana is teaching their children through their absurd law.
As for the balance of messages we send, it’s covered in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
The point is this: We have no real interest in the safety of our children, or of each other, or we would enact sensible gun laws.
Still, however asinine the reasoning SCOTUS employed in the bumpstock decision, they left open the opportunity for Congress to pass a law banning them.
That is a good reason to vote Blue in November, but don’t hold your breath hoping for legislators to solve our gun issues.
Our obvious preference for putting children through active shooter drills rather than genuinely protecting them is no more hypocritical than posting a collection of Protestant religious laws that we don’t follow.
People ask how evangelical Protestants can support a man who has cheated on all three of his wives, boasts of sexual assault and so on and so forth. The answer is simple: A substantial portion of people who claim to be evangelical are not members of a church, don’t attend services regularly and are not, in fact, any more religious than the Bible-selling huckster they follow as he whitewashes sepulchre after sepulchre.
The good news is that while atheist groups are suing to overturn Louisiana’s 10 Commandments law, they’re being joined by a variety of religious groups who point out that preaching in public schools is bad enough, but preaching the beliefs of a specific sect is an outrage.
Plus, whether bearing false witness is Commandment VIII or IX, they came out agin’ it:
That’s hardly a breakthrough point: As Moira Donegan points out in the Guardian, rightwing arguments in front of the Supreme Court have often succeeded despite — or because of — being built on fabrications and outright lies.
But this lawsuit is a long way from SCOTUS, and so young Louisiana students may have the King James Bible crammed down their throats, as Pat Bagley puts it, for several years before anyone can step in.
However, SCOTUS has just announced that it will take Tennessee’s hateful, bigoted law against medical treatment for trans kids — illustrated here by Clay Bennett (CTFP) — under consideration in next year’s session.
That’s not a guarantee that the Court will rule against abusive cruelty, so vote for humane candidates.
Because Jojo From Jerz is brilliant, but she can’t reverse all this hate by herself.
I generally assume vocal Fundy zealots are hypocritical, judgemental and intolerant. It saves time. Some are fine people who ask WWJD but the rest seem to want to hate with God on their side. Apache girls are being kicked out of school for practicing their coming-of-age ritual. Administration says it’s Satanic.