Saturday, June 27, 2015

Thinly disguised homophobic comments from Republicans over gay marriage ruling

                                 Good Day World!

Just as race continues to be a hotbed issue, homophobia is still prevalent in America.

Dire warnings are coming from GOP party members over the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage in all 50 states.

Many are framing it as an assault against Christians and American values. To hear them talk you’d think this country is now cursed by allowing equality for all people.

With the ruling the LGBT community can assume their rightful place in our society. That’s repugnant to Republicans who feel the LGBT community should be content to be second class citizens.

What they’re saying:  

Ted Cruz

Today is the worst day in American history.”

Bobby Jindal

“…the decision will pave the way for an all out assault against the religious freedom rights of Christians who disagree with this decision. Marriage between a man and a woman was established by God, and no earthly court can alter that.”

Mike Huckabee

"I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch. We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat."

Rick Santorum

“Today, 5 unelected judges redefined the foundational unit of society. Now it is the people's turn to speak #Marriage

Bryan Fischer

“June 26, 2015: the day the twin towers of truth and righteousness were blown up by moral jihadists.”

Scott Walker

"As a result of this decision, the only alternative left for the American people is to support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to reaffirm the ability of the states to continue to define marriage."

Carly Fiorina

"This is only the latest example of an activist Court ignoring its constitutional duty to say what the law is and not what the law should be."

Rick Perry

“I fundamentally disagree with the court rewriting the law and assaulting the 10th Amendment. Our founding fathers did not intend for the judicial branch to legislate from the bench, and as president, I would appoint strict Constitutional conservatives who will apply the law as written.”

Related:

Ridiculous Video shows Americans “coming out” as anti-gay

A Conservative Backlash To Court Rulings Is Coming. Bet On It.

Time for me to walk on down the road…

 

Friday, June 26, 2015

Despite reality, GOP presidential candidates continue Don Quixote-like assault on Obamacare

Editor’s Note: Updated conservative comments below

    Good Day World!

I spoke too soon about Republicans looking for a new boogeyman when the Supreme Court kicked out their last ditch challenge against Obamacare yesterday.

That would have been the sensible thing to do. Move on. But, no!

Instead of conceding defeat and turning their attention elsewhere, some Republicans are going to continue their Don Quixote – like quest to destroy our new health care system that’s already proven it’s working.

Ask over six million Americans who wouldn’t have been able to afford or even get healthcare until the Affordable Health Care Act was enacted.

Like Alonso Quixano in Don Quixote who read so many chivalric romances that he lost his sanity and decided to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, the GOP lost it’s sanity and set out to destroy a healthcare system that was working.

However, there are some Republicans (who remain nameless) that realize they dodged a bullet by losing their challenge against the health care law.

Think about it. 

Had the Supreme Court invalidated the subsidies in some 30 states operating on the federal insurance marketplace, that would have affected nearly 6.4 million Americans, who would have seen their health costs skyrocket by about 300 percent.

Republicans were ready to blame Obama for the potential chaos. But some of them acknowledged the GOP would get the brunt of the blame, especially since they backed the lawsuit challenging the subsidies.

The rest will continue to rail against the law.

Jeb Bush:

"As president of the United States, I would make fixing our broken health care system one of my top priorities I will work with Congress to repeal and replace this flawed law with conservative reforms."

How about that for a ridiculous statement? Nothing is broken, the GOP has tried to break it, but failed. Meanwhile it’s working for millions of Americans. That in itself should be proof.

But not for ideologues like Bush “..replace flawed law with Conservative reforms.” What reforms?

Marco Rubio

"Despite the Court's decision, ObamaCare is still a bad law that is having a negative impact on our country and on millions of Americans. I remain committed to repealing this bad law and replacing it with my consumer-centered plan."

Then we have the “savior” Marco Rubio promising that HIS consumer-centered plan is better than Obamacare. Despite reality – millions being helped and all challenges against the law refuted, Rubio claims the law has had a negative impact.

How so? It’s obvious that Rubio also lives in that ideological fantasyland as Bush and most of the other GOP presidential candidates.

Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz attacked Chief Justice John Roberts and other members of the Supreme Court in unusually harsh terms Thursday, referring to them as "rogue justices" and "robed Houdinis"

No one is sure what Cruz meant by ranting about robed Houdini’s. Chances are he doesn’t either, but it made a good sound byte. As for rogue justices, those would be the three who voted against Obamacare.

John Boehner

"Obamacare is fundamentally broken and repeal efforts will continue.”

Presumably that will be for as long as there is a Republican Party and enough idiots dedicated to dismantling a health care system that is working.

John Barrasso

"We'll continue to pick away at the law. But ultimately our goal is to repeal and replace, and that's not going to be possible until after the 2016 elections and a Republican gets in office.”

It’s obvious that I over-estimated the intelligence of most of the GOP players by assuming they’d move on to another windmill to tilt their lances against. Apparently not.

Where’s Sancho when you need him?

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Obamacare haters lose again! Justices reject challenge

Maybe now those Republicans who have made it their mission in life to subvert health care in this country will pack it in.

The latest legal challenge by Obamacare haters was stifled with a 6-3 vote in the Supreme Court.

The justices said consumers qualify for a subsidy that lowers the cost of premiums whether they buy their coverage through federal or state exchanges. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion.

So, will this latest challenge be the last?

It’s hard to say. Since the inception of the Affordable Health Care Act Republicans have gone on a crusade to upend it. The moment the law was passed the GOP set their sights on trying to sabotage it.

Never mind the over six millions Americans who now have insurance where they didn’t before. There was never a groundswell movement to destroy Obamacare. It was a carefully organized attack by GOP politicians and their industry cronies.

Perhaps now the GOP will turn it’s attention to something more positive, like trying to reach more bipartisan agreements in Congress, instead of trying to hold Americans hostage to their ideologies.

One can only hope.

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Professional home run catcher snags A-Rods 3,000th ball

zack_on_tv_with_number_3000

                                      Good Day World!

Who knew?

Some baseball fans are professionals at snagging home run balls.

Take Zack Hample (photo above), who is credited with collecting more than 8,000 home run balls and has written books about the art. Zack Hample has snagged 8,149 baseballs at 51 different major league stadiums since 1990. Find out how and see what else he's been up to.Here’s his blog.

Quote:

“So . . . as you may have heard, Alex Rodriguez’s 3,000th career hit happened to be a home run, and I happened to snag it. (Un-REAL!!) I’m planning to write a long blog entry with lots of photos, but things are so crazy right now that I wanted to get this up quickly.”

Zack Hample, who's retrieved 8,000 baseballs, won't give HR back to A-Rod

It isn’t easy being a home run ball collector. A few years ago Zack was kicked out of this game:

Ballhawk Zack Hample Was Kicked Out Of Nationals Park Last Night, And He Is Pissed About It

In Hample’s own words:

“I was approached by a police officer. He told me he'd gotten a call from someone who reported that I was selling baseballs. I was like, WTF, and told him very calmly that it simply wasn't true and that there must've been a mistake.

Then more cops showed up. Then the head of stadium security showed up, along with his assistant and other stadium personnel.

There were seven of them, and they insisted that I'd sold a baseball, which they told me is illegal to do on their private property.

I told them that I'd snagged more than 6,300 baseballs in my life and never sold one — that I was proud of never having sold one . . . that I once turned down a $10,000 offer for a Barry Bonds home run that I caught, that I'd turned down a $500 offer last year after catching the Mike Trout homer, that I give away baseballs to kids at just about every game I attend, that I've raised all that money for charity, and so on.

I even offered to take a lie-detector test, but they didn't want to hear any of it. They simply insisted that I'd sold a baseball, and they ejected me from the stadium.”

Hample is considered a ballhawk—a member of that fraternity of obsessive dudes who hang around ballparks snagging baseballs. For some reason teams don’t like that – especially when a home run ball by a superstar like A-Rod is caught by a collector like Hample who isn’t interested in selling it!

I see Hample as a super collector, and there’s nothing wrong with what he’s doing. I think his detractors envy his success.

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

No praise here for liars, regardless of stupid studies!

Good Day World!

It’s unsettling to see how crazy things are in the 21st century.

The parameters of society that I grew up in during the 50’s & 60’s aren’t so clear now. What was once wrong, is now right. In some cases.

My peers and I were told a story where George Washington supposedly chopped down a cherry tree (a rebellious thing if I ever heard one), but later admitted his misdeed, saying “I can not tell a lie.”

The moral of the story was always tell the truth. Even if that story itself wasn’t true, we got the message… lying is bad.

Which leads me to stupid studies. You know the kind I’m talking about. Frivolous research projects that involve flawed methodologies and idiotic conclusions. Here’s a recent example:     

University of Sheffield psychologists recently tested 135 children (hardly an empirical sampling) to see which ones were liars, and which were honest. They then came to the conclusion it was better to be a liar than to be honest.

Say what?

I’m not making this up. In the study, which was published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, children between ages 6 and 7 were allowed to look at answers in a trivia game. Those who checked and denied that they had later proved more skillful on a second memory test.

The conclusion was that the liars were smarter because they had to use more memory skills – a kid who lies needs to be able to keep his/her story straight. Back in my day that was called cheating.

ONE MORE EXAMPLE

In 2014 a Canadian-led study noted that being able to lie convincingly was a skill all children needed to grasp if they were to understand how other people think and feel.

But get this, children who were informed that lying was wrong were more likely to be truthful (go figure!). How 20th century. No praise for liars here!

Time for me to walk on down the road…

 

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Fear Flakka! It’s Deadly Delirium is Worse than Crack Cocaine

                                             Good Day World!

That’s all our society needs right now, another drug that is cheap, deadly, and rapidly becoming popular.

It’s called “Flakka,” and has other nicknames.

If you live in Florida the chances are that you’ve heard of it. Flakka has also shown up in parts of Ohio, Houston and Chicago. But the substantial U.S. inroads have been in South Florida, making it the epicenter of the outbreak.

RECENT NEWS REPORT

“For decades, South Florida has battled drug traffickers who ship boatloads of cocaine from South America. Now the region is dealing with a new epidemic - cheap, synthetic drugs that arrive from China through the mail.

As authorities in the Sunshine State battle with the surge of Alpha-PVP, better known as "flakka" or "gravel," police departments have begun equipping officers with field detection kits, employing sniffer dogs at mail facilities and training patrol units to look for signs of delirium.

Users are said to feel a sense of super human strength and delirium.

Unlike cocaine, flakka, is both cheap and accessible. The drug is widely advertised for sale online by Chinese companies and can be shipped in large quantities to U.S. addresses by established global delivery companies. Once it hits the streets, a single dose can sell for as little as $5.

Flakka, which was placed on the U.S. list of illegal controlled substances in 2014, is chemically designed to mimic cathinone, a natural stimulant found in the leaves of the khat plant, chewed traditionally in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.

The drug's popularity, however, is only growing.

In 2014, the first year it appeared in the state, authorities in Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood, recorded 190 incidents involving flakka. By early May of this year, the number of incidents involving the drug had already raced past 275.

"Cocaine was king, until this year," said Detective William Schwartz, a veteran narcotics officer with the Broward County Sheriff's Office.

What has law enforcement and drug treatment professionals most concerned are flakka's long-term effects. First-time users can take three to four days to return to a normal state of mind, while for repeat users, it could be 14 to 16 days, according to drug treatment professionals.

Some 27 people have died from flakka-related overdoses in the last eight months in Broward County alone.”

(Reporting by David Adams and Zachary Fagenson, editing by Jill Serjeant and G Crosse)

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Monday, June 22, 2015

Justice Scalia Stricken with Faith, Derangement, Syndrome

Good Day World!

What happens when you have a person in a position of power and they’re a complete asshole?

Imagine someone responsible for making or breaking our laws and who is completely out of touch with reality. It’s scary, but it’s happening.

How do you go about declaring a magistrate appointed for life of unsound mind and thus unfit to serve?

That’s my question regarding Antonin Scalia, one of our chief justices in the Supreme Court, and a world-class jerk. Arguably one of the most visible members of the nine-member body charged with the decisive resolution of our republic’s most contentious legal matters, Scalia rejects the fact of evolution.

He doesn’t believe in Global Warming, although 97% of the scientists in the world do, and even Congress reluctantly acknowledged it’s a fact. He can’t be relied upon to adjudicate without prejudice and should be removed from the bench…period.

The fact is, Justice Scalia has Faith, Derangement Syndrome (FDS).

According to writer/editor JEFFREY TAYLER, “ …people with Faith, Derangement Syndrome (FDS) exhibit the following symptoms: unshakable belief in the veracity of manifest absurdities detailed in ancient texts regarding the origins of the cosmos and life on earth; a determination to disseminate said absurdities in educational institutions and via the media; a propensity to enjoin and even enforce (at times using violence) obedience to regulations stipulated in said ancient texts, regardless of their suitability for contemporary circumstances; the conviction that an invisible, omnipresent, omniscient authority (commonly referred to as “God”) directs the course of human and natural events, is vulnerable to propitiation and blandishments, and monitors individual human behavior, including thought processes, with an especially prurient interest in sexual activity.”

Here’s more evidence of Justice Scalia’s FDS-related impairment, at the website of the New Civil Rights Movement.

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Sunday, June 21, 2015

Father’s Day means many things – foremost, it’s about love!

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years," - Mark Twain

                                     Good Day World!

Happy Father’s Day!

I’m thinking about my father today, Richard Wayne Stancliff, who raised me and my two sisters and brother. He’s going to be 87 in 8 days. Still going strong, and still a very important part of my life.

I’m proud to be a father too. My three sons, Richard Ryan, Nathan David, and Elijah Sundance, are father’s also.

Did you know that Father’s Day didn’t become a permanent holiday until 1972 when president Richard Nixon (aka Tricky Dick) signed it into law?

BRIEF HISTORY

Grace Golden Clayton may have been inspired by Anna Jarvis' crusade to establish Mother's Day; two months prior, Jarvis had held a celebration for her dead mother in Grafton, West Virginia, a town about 15 miles (24 km) away from Fairmont

After the success obtained by Anna Jarvis with the promotion of Mother's Day in Grafton, West Virginia, the first observance of a "Father's Day" was held on July 5, 1908, in Fairmont, West Virginia, in the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South, now known as Central United Methodist Church.

Grace Golden Clayton was mourning the loss of her father when, on December 1907, the Monongah Mining Disaster in nearby Monongah killed 361 men, 250 of them fathers, leaving around a thousand fatherless children. Clayton suggested her pastor Robert Thomas Webb to honor all those fathers.

In 1910, a Father's Day celebration was held in Spokane, Washington, at the YMCA by Sonora Smart Dodd, who was born in Arkansas. Its first celebration was in the Spokane YMCA on June 19, 1910.

Her father, the Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart, was a single parent who raised his six children there. After hearing a sermon about Jarvis' Mother's Day in 1909 at Central Methodist Episcopal Church, she told her pastor that fathers should have a similar holiday honoring them.

Although she initially suggested June 5, her father's birthday, the pastors did not have enough time to prepare their sermons, and the celebration was deferred to the third Sunday of June. Several local clergymen accepted the idea, and on 19 June 1910, the first Father's Day, "sermons honoring fathers were presented throughout the city.

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972. (Wikipedia)

“The most important thing in the world is family and love," - John Wooden

Time for me to walk on down the road…

 

It's Time to Pay Up Donnie!

It's looks like there will be some prime real estate going on the market soon in New York City. Convicted rapist and former president ...