GOP Senate candidate Eric Greitens, the disgraced ex-governor of Missouri, has released a second campaign ad promoting violence against his political opposition.
Greitens, who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, was widely condemned after the release of a spot last month in which he encouraged his supporters to “hunt” Republicans who have broken away from Trump.
“Because I fought for you, they came after me. But we’re back, wiser, stronger, and still fighting. And this time, with an army of patriots,” Greitens says. Three camouflaged individuals emerge from a field behind Greitens, who then destroys a secondary target.
Read the full article. Greitens claims that he previous ad was meant to be humorous.
What a horrible, perverted, dangerous human being. He does not belong in civil society, much less than a position of public trust https://t.co/51CUN1iAkO
What could be more “humorous” than a campaign ad that glorifies gun violence against your political opposition? I’m sure the survivors of all the US mass shootings will agree.
This is long but describes an incredible intertwining of the religious fanatic justices with the religious legal hate group arguing cases in front of them to restrict rights for others and expand them for religion. Things the court then did. Also when the court has refused to restrict protesting at abortion clinics they did severely limit demonstrations at their court establishing an exclusion zone that this religious group had headquarters with in. This is where the long game came in, the religious right just kept working their way in until they won. Hugs
A right-wing evangelical activist was caught on tape bragging that she prayed with Supreme Court justices. The court’s majority cited a legal brief that her group filed while overturning Roe v. Wade
Peggy Nienaber, left, the vice president of the Faith & Liberty evangelical group, prays outside the Supreme Court in 2009. Next to her is the Rev. Rob Schenck, who led the group’s predecessor organization, Faith and Action, for years before leaving in 2018.
Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
At an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week, a prominent Capitol Hill religious leader was caught on a hot mic making a bombshell claim: that she prays with sitting justices inside the high court. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber said.
This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling.
In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.
Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. She spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!” The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”
Nienaber intended her comments, broadcast on YouTube, to be “totally off the record,” she says in the clip. That’s likely because such an arrangement presents a problem for the Orlando-based Liberty Counsel, which not only weighed in on the Dobbs case as a friend of the court, but also litigated and won a 9-0 Supreme Court victory this May in a case centered on the public display of a religious flag.
The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment. Liberty Counsel’s founder, Mat Staver, strenuously denied that the in-person ministering to justices that Nienaber bragged about exists. “It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.” He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.”
But the founder of the ministry, who surrendered its operations to Liberty Counsel in 2018, tells Rolling Stone that he hosted prayer sessions with conservative justices in their chambers from the late-1990s through when he left the group in the mid-2010s. Rob Schenck, who launched the ministry under the name Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, described how the organization forged ministry relationships with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Antonin Scalia, saying he would pray with them inside the high court. Nienaber was Schenk’s close associate in that era, and continued with the ministry after it came under the umbrella of Liberty Counsel.
Louis Virelli is a professor at Stetson University College of Law who wrote a book about Supreme Court recusals. He’s blunt in his assessment: “Praying with a group that filed an amicus brief with a court,” he says, “is a problem.”
Peggy Nienaber, right, at an event outside the Supreme Court led by Christian faith organizations on the eve of the Supreme Court arguments on President Obama’s health care legislation in 2012.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP Images
In the shadow of the high court, across the street from its chambers, sits a cluster of unassuming row houses known only to the initiated as “Ministry Row.” The strip is host to evangelical political groups that have spent the past several decades pushing Beltway conservatives to embrace the religious right’s political causes — and, most of all, reverse Roe v. Wade. The street view offers few clues as to what transpires behind the painted brick facades, save for a granite slab inscribed with the Ten Commandments planted in the grassy patch before a modest cream-colored Victorian with maroon trim.
The home serves as Faith & Liberty’s headquarters. The Ten Commandments statue had been placed there by Schenck, an evangelical minister famous for orchestrating high-profile anti-abortion stunts, such as shoving an aborted fetus in a plastic container into the face of former President Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign. Schenck had opened the ministry in the 1990s as Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, a nonprofit dedicated to ending federal abortion rights. The organization operated on a “utopian ‘trickle-up’ theory” of influence: building access “higher and higher up within the government, until we got to the top, my ultimate target — members of Congress, U.S. senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices — even presidents,” Schenck wrote in his 2018 autobiography.
The group established a strong foothold in both chambers of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But Faith and Action ultimately directed its energies toward the judicial branch. “There were no pro-life groups directly approaching the judges and justices, who shaped abortion law simply by their precedent-setting decisions,” Schenck wrote. “We knew we were stuck with members of the federal bench — they were appointed for life — so why not convert them while in office?” (Schenck has since reversed course: He is now a fierce critic of evangelical politicking and says Liberty Counsel assumed Faith and Action’s operations in 2018. He says he has no knowledge of the group’s inner workings after he left.)
At first, the high court regarded Faith and Action and its peer organizations as nuisances, according to Schenck. “Justice Thomas would say to me, ‘You know those groups outside? Are they crazy or are they good people?’” Schenck recalls in an interview with Rolling Stone. When Schenck first began his approach in 1994, prayer activities on the Supreme Court’s property was considered an act of demonstration, and therefore illegal. Eventually, Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas would embrace Schenck, he says, and pray with him in various corners of the high court’s grounds — including, occasionally, in their chambers. (Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, remained more guarded and skeptical of such groups’ influence.)
To pray with the justices was to perform a sort of “spiritual conditioning,” Schenck explains. “The intention all along was to embolden the conservative justices by loaning them a kind of spiritual moral support — to give them an assurance that not only was there a large number of people behind them, but in fact, there was divine support for very strong and unapologetic opinions from them.” Prayer is a powerful communication tool in the evangelical tradition: The speaker assumes the mantle of the divine, and to disagree with an offered prayer is akin to sin. “It’s just not common to interrupt or challenge a prayer,” Schenck explains. “That’s not something a devout Supreme Court justice would ever consider doing.” That was true even for the devout Catholic justices, such as Scalia, who joined the evangelical Faith and Action members in prayer, Schenck says.
Sometimes the prayers would be general; other times, on specific subjects, such as ending abortion, according to Schenck. He says Faith and Action took assiduous care to avoid speaking blatantly about cases in the Supreme Court’s pipeline, discussing the political agenda only in broad strokes. Even so, under the time period Schenck describes, prayers with the justices occurred as Faith and Action signed onto several amicus briefs for landmark SCOTUS cases such as Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, which ultimately upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.
Schenck walked away from his life on the Hill after receiving a late-career doctorate on the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who questioned the collaborative relationship between Adolf Hitler and 1930s German evangelicals. He drew parallels between the Republican Party and American evangelicalism, concerned that he’d weaponized worship to fuel a hate-filled agenda. No longer an anti-abortion activist, Schenck views his past efforts with regret. “Prayer is a positive exercise, until it’s politicized — and too many prayers that I and my colleagues offered in the presence of the justices were political prayers,” he explains. He also believes the work “contributed to the internal moral and ethical corruption of the justices at the court,” he says.
“I was sure, while we were doing it, it would be a positive contribution to our public life,” Schenck says. “It didn’t have the effect I thought it would. In some ways, it set the stage for the reversal of Roe, which I now think of as a social catastrophe.”
When Liberty Counsel absorbed Faith and Action in 2018, Peggy Nienaber, who had worked alongside Schenck since at least 2005, continued with the group. In a July 2021 conversation with Staver, Liberty Counsel’s founder, Nienaber described the group’s new incarnation as similar to Faith and Action’s mission. It’s “the ministry right here on Capitol Hill,” she said, devoted to “changing the hearts and minds of not only our elected officials, but the staffers all the way down.” Nienaber highlighted Faith & Liberty’s proximity to the court by pointing to the window of the conference room where the justices decide their cases. ”When you’re sitting in that conference room, you cannot miss those Ten Commandments,” she said. (Faith & Liberty sits so close to the Supreme Court, in fact, that it has been included in the “buffer zone” surrounding the high court, shut off to protesters and the public. There’s irony here, given that Liberty Counsel has for decades litigated to abolish buffer zones near abortion clinics.)
“There’s a lot of things that Faith & Liberty does — and that you do — that obviously we can’t put in an email, can’t put in a newsletter, can’t put in a press release,” Staver said to Nienaber during their chat, “because it’s private relationships that are spiritually transformative.” Nienaber’s social media accounts show her hobnobbing with high-profile Republicans such as Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and former Vice President Mike Pence. She hung close to the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018: She posted photographs from inside the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing room, as well as a screenshot of her invitation to Kavanaugh’s swearing-in ceremony.
Nienaber told Rolling Stone, “I do not socialize with the justices.” Yet she has posed for photos with Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas, calling the latter a “friend” in a Facebook post, praising him for “passing by our ministry center to attend church and always taking time to say hello.”
In addition to her proximity to conservative power players, Nienaber has championed the plaintiffs who have brought right-wing religious causes before the Supreme Court. Ahead of oral arguments, she prayed with Joe Kennedy, the football coach who recently succeeded in his suit to allow prayer during football games. Liberty Counsel also filed an amicus brief in that case, calling on the court to rule that the school district “engaged in viewpoint discrimination against Coach Kennedy’s private speech.”
Nienaber was recorded telling the livestreamer that she prayed with Supreme Court justices on June 27, the Monday after the high court issued the Dobbs ruling. She was at a celebration she helped organize with Sean Feucht, a prominent Christian-worship musician. Nienaber identifies herself only as “Peggy” in the footage, but she references the ministry she runs behind the court and its 850-pound replica of the Ten Commandments. For most of the interview, Nienaber is not on camera. But when the video pans on her briefly, she can be seen wearing the same dress and necklace she has on in a selfie with Feucht posted to Faith & Liberty’s website.
Last week, Rolling Stone spoke to Patty Bills, the director of constituency affairs at Faith & Liberty. Bills did not want to discuss Faith & Liberty’s ministry practices, citing privacy concerns. Bills would not, however, deny that Faith & Liberty ministers to Supreme Court justices. “I never said we didn’t — I just said we provide privacy,” she said.
Staver, in denying that members of Faith & Liberty prayed with Supreme Court justices, says that such prayers would have been inappropriate, especially given Liberty Counsel’s litigation efforts. “That’s why we wouldn’t do that,” he says. “And especially on cases that are pending before the Supreme Court, we would make a very clear firewall. We just would never do something like that.”
In a written statement to Rolling Stone, Nienaber says of her hot-mic comments: “I do not recall making such a statement. I listened to the livestream, and I did not hear such a statement.” She adds that Covid restrictions have limited public access to the Supreme Court: “The public has not been allowed access, and I am no different.” When she has had access to public areas of the court, she says, “I will generally silently pray for the justices, their staff, and the Court.”
But after this story was published, Nienaber acknowledged her remarks and conceded she has prayed personally with Supreme Court justices. Despite speaking in the present tense on the livestream, Nienaber asserted, “My comment was referring to past history and not practice of the past several years.” Nienaber added: “During most of the history up to early 2020, I met with many people who wanted or needed prayer. Since early 2020, access to the Supreme Court has been restricted due to COVID. It has been many years since I prayed with a Justice.”
Liberty Counsel was founded in 1989 by Staver. The organization is an uncommon hybrid of religious ministry and legal practice, dedicated to “advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the family through strategic litigation.” Staver is the organization’s senior pastor as well as its top litigator. This mix of law and religion is central to Staver’s career; he previously served as dean of the law school at Liberty University, founded by the televangelist Jerry Falwell.
Staver has argued numerous cases in front of the Supreme Court. He started in 1994 in a case that struck a blow against protest-limiting buffer zones near abortion clinics. In the court’s most recent term, Staver argued and won a 9-0 judgment in Shurtleff v. Boston, a case in which the court ruled a Christian flag couldn’t be excluded from a public flagpole that displayed a rotating assortment of secular flags.
Staver also wrote an amicus brief in the Dobbs case that purports to tie abortion and birth control to eugenics. Calling Roe “the low watermark in this Court’s history,” it argued that Dobbs was ”an ideal vehicle for the Court to finally overrule Roe v. Wade and its progeny, which have constitutionalized eugenic abortions as a fundamental right.”
In the Dobbs majority opinion written by Justice Alito, he cited this brief to impugn the motives of pro-abortion-rights advocates, arguing that “some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” adding, “it is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect,” because “a highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are Black.”
When Roe v. Wade was reversed, Staver was triumphant: “I have dedicated my life to defend life and overturn the bloody decisions of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,” he wrote. “This global earthquake will impact the world.”
Prayer unto itself in no way presents a conflict of interest for the justices, says Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, not even with a group like Faith & Liberty that has business before the court. Justices are allowed to visit there with whomever they’d like in their private chambers, and have socialized with interested parties throughout the court’s history. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, routinely played cards with the high court’s magistrates, and Scalia went duck hunting with former Vice President Dick Cheney. What would amount to an ethical concern would be if they’re discussing those cases as they pray — “or if the prayer sessions would influence how justices rule in a particular case,” says Adam Winkler, a Supreme Court expert at the University of California Los Angeles.
But even among legal experts troubled by the court’s ties, they acknowledge there are few remedies to address ethical conflicts. A federal statute governs when judges and justices should step away from cases, but the Constitution leaves questions of partiality to the justices themselves. Their general unwillingness to step aside isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Virelli, the Stetson law professor, says: When justices recuse themselves from a case, no one replaces them, a scenario that can create more problems than it solves. “The court changes shape,” he explains. “That makes the decision to recuse difficult.”
That the justices are their own keepers in regard to those rules creates complications, however, says Steve Vladeck, a constitutional-law expert at the University of Texas Law School. The relationship between Faith & Liberty and Liberty Counsel, as described by Rolling Stone, “could make a reasonable observer worry about the appearance of partiality,” he says. But the concerns the scenario raised shouldn’t be about recusal. “What that really reveals is how problematic it is that there isn’t an objective mechanism to resolve these sorts of questions.”
For Winkler, the greater concern is not prayers, but the “religious-themed” decisions he’s seen come down from the high court this term, pointing to not only the Roe reversal but also opinions that permit unchecked free exercise of First Amendment rights. “The problematic aspect isn’t whether they’re praying,” Winkler says, “but that several justices seem committed to reading their religion into the Constitution.”
Let’s just get one thing straight: there are 5 rogue SCOTUS justices and 1 more not too far behind them. They are going to take power away from state courts next year and that will be the end of democracy. And nothing is going to be done about it. So plan accordingly.
Distractions are working but more importantly the gravity of the situation either hasn’t hit with the right people or they don’t care/are in on it (Manchinema).
“Again, there is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
“It’s derived from a single letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Convention.
“Of course, we should have church and state mixed together. Our Founding Fathers believed in that.
“We can go through the details of that. They established, literally, a church in Congress.” – Charlie Kirk, today.
When Keith Ellison became the first Muslim elected to Congress he was sworn in using a koran — Thomas Jefferson’s koran, as matter of fact. You could hear the sound of conservative heads exploding across the country.
The problem with the US Constitution is that it was written 200 years ago by intelligent, educated people, and it’s being read and interpreted and mis-understood today by ignorant uneducated people.
There are exactly 2 mentions of religion in the constitution, both negative. No religious test for office, no establishment of religion. 200 years of constitutional interpretation, until recently, upheld this idea.
So now Christian adoption agencies that take taxpayer funds can discriminate against the LGBTQ+ and other religions. Originally the SCOTUS said it was ok for the public to pay for these religious groups that discriminate against the LGBTQ+ because the worstdiscrimination is against religion itself, and by not letting them not serve the gays was discrinimating against the religion. Now it seems the rule is the Christian religion is the one that must not be discriminated against but may discriminate against all other religion. One more step on the path to Christianity being the national religion and another few steps toward the US theocracy. Hugs
Tennessee judges have dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Knoxville couple who alleged that a state-sponsored Christian adoption agency refused to help them because they are Jewish.
The lawsuit challenged a 2020 state law that installed legal protections for private adoption agencies to reject state-funded placement of children to parents based on religious beliefs.
The challenge by Elizabeth and Gabriel Rutan-Ram said Holston United Methodist Home for Children in Greeneville barred them from taking state-mandated foster-parent training and denied a home-study certification while they attempted to adopt a child last year.
A three-judge panel of the Chancery Court in Davidson County ruled 2-1 to grant a motion to dismiss the lawsuit against the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services and DCS Commissioner Jenifer Nichols.
The panel majority also ruled that “the Plaintiffs have not shown that the Defendants would not contract with a Jewish agency similarly situated to Holston United Methodist Home for Children; therefore the Act does not single out people of the Jewish faith as a disfavored, innately inferior group.”
Holston CEO Bradley Williams told CP he believes “forcing Holston Home to violate our beliefs and place children in homes that do not share our faith is wrong and contrary to a free society.”
The adoption agency is represented by the anti-LGBTQ hate group, the Alliance Defending Freedom. In 2003, the ADF filed a Supreme Court brief in defense of the criminalization of homosexuality.
A Tennessee court dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Jewish couple that alleges religious discrimination in a state adoption law. https://t.co/VkJTCuwGft
Tennessee passed a law designed to allow adoption agencies to turn away same-sex couples on the basis of "written religious or moral convictions or policies."
Now a publicly funded adoption agency is declining to work with Jews too.https://t.co/X9rrvehr84
I know. I think most of us in this forum see what is happening
Even those who think they’ll be fine because they’re whites and Christian are in for a rude awakening when they have a terminal pregnancy or want conception or want to watch a porn movie or get arrested for getting a blow job
the Plaintiffs have not shown that the Defendants would not contract with a Jewish agency similarly situated to Holston United Methodist Home for Children.
A quick search seems to indicate there are NO Jewish agencies in Knoxville, TN.
Of course not, its the same bullshit the SCOTUS uses when they write terrible decisions. Its not based on facts, its based on a predetermined outcome and working backwards from there.
If it was a jewish agencie doing this against a Catholic or Christian couple you better believe they’d rule in favor of the couple.
The Jewish couple should take this up to the SC and see what happens.
What is alarming is that at the beginning of Nazism in Germany, the police stopped responding to Jewish citizens reporting vandalism. Having people who are worthless trying to make you feel worthless is a spooky concept to process. We had a cop tell us he won’t take samples of the vandalism. We are concerned that is could be toxic. But then again he may already know what it is and is not telling us. Scary times.
Said it before and I’ll say it again. Anyone who is a religious minority etc. who thinks “religious freedom” laws will only target LGBT citizens is a fool. They will be coming for you sooner or later.
“So, why didn’t anyone raise an alarm? Well, maybe because he didn’t stand out. Maybe because there are a lot of young men in America who suddenly look and act a lot like this guy.
“And of course, they’re angry. They know that their lives will not be better than their parents’. They’ll be worse. That’s all but guaranteed. They know that. They’re not that stupid.
“And yet the authorities in their lives – mostly women – never stop lecturing them about their so-called privilege. ‘You’re male, you’re privileged!’
“Imagine that. Try to imagine an unhealthier, unhappier life than that. So, a lot of young men in America are going nuts. Are you surprised?” – Tucker Carlson, last night.
Tucker Carlson just blamed the 4th of July mass shooting on “mostly women” who “never stop lecturing [men] about their so-called male privilege.” He also blamed “social media, porn, video games,” and “government-endorsed weed.” (h/t @acyn) pic.twitter.com/jpmMstbuvV
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) July 6, 2022
there are a lot of young men in America who suddenly look and act a lot like this guy. “And of course, they’re angry.
Because they and their parents have been carefully indoctrinated by Fox “News”, the Republicans and the entire right wing bubble.
Blacks are taking your jobs Mexicans are taking your jobs Drag queens / liberals / teachers / Hollywood are grooming your children Obama / liberals / deep state want to take your guns Vaccines have micro ships etc. etc. etc.
The right wing echo chamber indoctrinates for thoroughly and effectively than ISIS.
Right; I’m thinking of the many people around the world whose situation is truly hopeless. Being white, American, and lectured doesn’t rank high on that list.
It’s anything but white supremacist propaganda and the easy availability of military-grade weapons that leads these people to kill folk. Anything. It’s so desperate it would be funny if it wasn’t for the pile of bodies.
So which is it? Strong mothers used to be accused of creating gay men (for some reason these creeps never seem to obsess over lesbians) NOW strong mothers create mass murderers?
Tucker Carlson Spent A Week In Brazil Slobbering Over Strongman President Bolsonaro
“We can add Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to the list of right-wing authoritarians who make #TraitorTucker Carlson swoon as he poops all over the U.S. while on foreign soil.
“Tucker Carlson’s vicious anti-Americanism is disturbing enough, especially coming from a network that presented tweets about enjoying Memorial Day Weekend, from President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as insufficient love for the troops and America. Not so coincidentally, Carlson actually smeared the troops on the next day, Memorial Day, saying on the air, “Our military, at times, does not seem interested in protecting the country.”
So if you can’t be a coddled white supremacist who should consider the privileges from the accident of your birth and consider how others can be helped to improve their lives, killing random people with a military weapon is justifiable?
Stop and think that about how it is those very people–entitled, white, rich–in search of ever greater profit and damn the consequences for “little people” who created this world where you might not do as well as your parents.
And then consider that the anti-social cynicism, expressed by this clown is just a trick to keep you watching the advertising that pays for this.
“They know that their lives will not be better than their parents’. They’ll be worse. That’s all but guaranteed. They know that.”
Notably, Tucker neglected to point out that the depressing future he describes for those kids is almost entirely due to Republican policies that have pushed all economic gains to the top 1/10th of 1%.
He should rename his show the “Tucker Carlson Nightly Disinformation and Propaganda Spectacular”
There is an entire world of discourse in those four words. We should definitely blame women for the poor choices of these poor, stupid, snowflake, violent, unmanly boys. We can take the blatant misogyny all the way back to the very first poor, stoopid, Snowflakey, unmanly boy.
“The woman you made for me gave me of the fruit of the tree, and I did eat.”
It is hard to tell whether Cucker‘s low opinion of males is exceeded in bottomlessness only by his low opinion of AMerican women.
In this brilliant new rant for MeidasTouch, Texas Paul breaks down how GOP governors and leaders would make the the worst business leaders and CEOs. Texas Paul uses governors like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis as examples and asks us to imagine a CEO who instead of solving the business issues facing the company, blamed the corporate problems on the LGBTQ community or immigrants instead of solving the problems before them and how quickly they would get fired. Texas Paul concludes by discussing the importance of competent leadership so that government can function for the people. It’s time to get rid of these incompetent Republican leaders.
The gun was legally bought! Law abiding people shouldn’t have their 2nd amendment rights hindered is the talking point of the right. It is a dodge. All gun owners are law abiding until they break the law. Right. The issue is the guns. This country has too many guns that are far too easy to get. Full stop. The new ruling from SCOTUS ensures more guns carried in public by more people. Of course the Justices don’t care, they are well protected by several police forces, people can not even protest near their homes, they have personal security details, and they never have to go out among the unwashed masses. The rest of us do not have that protections, we have to be out in the community wondering who is carrying a gun and having a really pissy day. Who came out armed after a fight at home or with the neighbors? The fact is the gun situation is going to kill the US economy. We have a service economy built on people shopping and eating out. Already people started buying online. A lot of people won’t go out of eat, to movies, to events if the are afraid of the gun violence. So that stuff stops. People will gather at home in small groups, they will leave the public spaces to the young and the gangs. This is going to radically change the way people in the US live. Plus schools may end up going fully remote. As a parent do you want to send your kid to a building that is regularly attack and kids die? What about going to the office to work? Who there is carrying a gun? People will want to work from home. See the effect of that one weapon on the entire society that the protected elite don’t care about? Hugs
Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering said while she didn’t know where the gun used in Monday’s mass shooting in her city came from, she told NBC, “I do know that it was legally obtained.”
Rotering said she had known the shooting suspect, Robert E. Crimo III, as a child. “I know him as somebody who was a Cub Scout when I was the Cub Scout leader,” the mayor told NBC. “He was just a little boy.”
Rotering said the focus in the discussion about the shooting should be about “the fact that there are weapons of war on our streets, that people can legally obtain these and then take out dozens of people.”
Any gathering of any crowd is now a risk of a shooting. We had one in Philly last night at The Welcome America concert on the Parkway. No one was killed.
The mayor said he was going to be happy to not be mayor when his term is up having to deal with the shooting rates in Philly. One big problem is the state won’t let Philly write a gun control law for the city.
Bambino🇺🇦🌻•3 hours ago•edited The fact that it was legally obtained, what does that says about assault rifles that belong in the war zone are okay to be use in a civilize society?
It’s as clear and obvious as it can possibly be that GQP politicians *WANT* massacre victims within our borders to sustain war injuries. They’re not happy unless everyone is thoroughly engaged with their continuous, endless war. Without this war they can’t win the hearts and minds of their target demographic: evangelicals who worship a genocidal deity.
And why do they want it? Because they are paranoid that a Democrat president will take away their guns. So they need to guns to protect their right to own guns.
Yes, that’s what we’ve been saying for years, no one should possess a weapon of war, legally or otherwise. That’s what we’ve been screaming into the deaf GOP ears and they just make it easier for people to get their hands on one.
I came here to say similar. I liken it to the nightly body count during Vietnam where even we lost Walter Cronkite to help turn the public against the senseless war. Emmitt Tills’ mother insisting his body be shown to make the public aware of the brutality.
At this point I’m beyond caring what either a democrat or republican says about gun control, It’s too fucking late to try closing the barn door now. There’s literally millions of assault style weapons or actual weapons made for theatre’s of war out there to try to put a lid on it now. The population as a whole would need to be on board with confiscating and destroying those already obtained WoW and that just isn’t going to happen, no matter how horrific the body count goes, there are a significant number of 2A zealots out there that will fight tooth and nail to keep their precious symbols of “freedumb”. This problem is our new reality, trying to educate or legislate away having and keeping these guns is a fallacy in today’s America. There is a lot to be said about serious mental health care and spotting the behaviors of those that have been responsible for the thousands of mass shootings in the past. But until we has a nation respond to it, that won’t change either.
Grenades and rocket launchers, also known as bazookas, are considered “destructive devices” by the National Firearms Act. They are also classified as firearms and are therefore legal with proper registration.
I’ve told this before, but I have a nephew in Missouri who honestly believes that the 2nd amendment allows all Americans to be free to own any type of weapon, up yo and including atomic bombs. He scares me. He also has a bug out place hidden somewhere in the Ozarks that only he, his wife, parents and younger brother know the location. Sadly, in this part of the world that isn’t uncommon. I’ve often wondered if he belongs to some of the nationalist groups the Ozarks is full of.
Twelve members of a religious group in Toowoomba have been arrested after the death of an eight-year-old girl, who Queensland police say was allegedly denied life-saving medication in the belief she would be healed by God.
Elizabeth Rose Struhs had type 1 diabetes and died in her family’s Rangeville home, west of Brisbane, on 7 January. Police allege her parents, who have previously been charged with murder, began withholding insulin six days earlier.
Police allege paramedics were not called to the scene until 5.30pm the next day, with the Courier Mail reporting members of the church group believed she would be resurrected.
Her dad, Jason, 50 and mum, Kerrie, 46 allegedly chanted prayers and hymns with up to 20 members of their breakaway Christian church who surrounded their child rather than get her life-saving medication.
Some of the members of the group, who call themselves ‘The Saints’ as they believe they are at the height of Christianity, even played the guitar as the little girl lay dying and no one called an ambulance.
The parents have now been charged with murder, torture and failing to provide the necessities of life for the youngster – alongside 12 other members of the group who were taken into custody for murder charges on Monday (July 4).
Queensland police arrest 12 members of religious group over death of eight-year-old Elizabeth Rose Struhs https://t.co/cs2d41KLWp
Fundamentalism is the ultimate expression of narcissistic hubris. They pray and they claim God speaks to them. Think about that for a second. They prey. And then they believe the voice inside their own head is the literal voice of the creator of the universe. They believe their own thoughts are God.
Let’s just be honest here, there are people who are fundamentally broken, or lost, or in such pain that they’ll gladly reach out to anything that gives them some solace or structure. Then there’s just the large swath of folks who want to feel like they’re in on something special (see QAnon)… thus Kabbalah, numerology, a sparkling variety of cults and quasi-cults, and groups like these.
And that doesn’t even get to the people whose whole social structure is based on their church membership, and the churches are designed intentionally for that purpose. Why else have a church with a theater, day care, gym, and so on if not to make it near impossible for people to leave because they’d have to give up just about everything?
A legitimate question is where do their religious rights ends, and the state’s interest in protecting the child begin. I thought, and all of you thought that we knew where that boundary is. I’m not sure that we do any more.
I was taught in the fourth grade (back in the ’50s) that my right to swing my fist ends just before it hits another person. In other words, as I read the constitution, I cannot use MY rights to suppress or deny another person THEIR rights. The Handmaid’s SCOTUS just blew up the wall of separation between church and state.
Under the new regime a woman’s uterus and any byproducts thereof (i.e. children) are considered the property of the nearest male relative and are exempt from state oversight, since men can do whatever they want with their own property.
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