I know, right? I wreaked havoc on a Facebook page called Right Wing News for a long time when I saw articles in favor of religion [only Christianity of course!] or opposing women's rights, freedom of choice, or marriage equality. I was thinking about bookmarking Betty Bowers YouTube videos, lol. To give you a feel for this "community," they were ALL for the death penalty for child molesters, but were SUPER supportive Of Josh Duggar in that ordeal, which I found hilariously hypocritical. I thought it was funny when the page finally banned me.

Anyway, yeah, I absolutely hate it when people say things like that. The founding fathers SPECIFICALLY DID NOT want religion in government. They wanted a secular government under which individuals could practice their personal religion. One even said that religion was harmful. It's incredibly aggravating to see people wanting religion to mix with government because it's like, did you not take basic history in middle and high school? Government mandated religion was ONE of the main reasons why we broke away from England. Religion had DEEPLY corrupted the government. The Pope had supreme power and church officials could [and did!] get away with murder. If anyone spoke out against the church, they were excommunicated, which was worse than death in that time period and culture. The Pope could make changes to Bibles as they were being written, I don't think we even know what the original text said. They also decided what the greatly translatable verses *actually* meant, and ministers could stretch and reword verses to lead the churchgoers to believe whatever they wanted due to how Bibles were printed in a language that only more educated people could read, I seem to remember Latin but I might be wrong. Liberation from the church began with the invention of the printing press. As people became educated, they started asking questions and stepping away from the government-church monster.

Also, God wasn't added to the pledge and money until the 1960's during the Red Scare. I did not mean for this to turn into a history lesson lol.

But yeah, I don't understand why people can't learn from the past. It's like, Christian government. We did that. It was horrible. It was why we broke away from England. Corruption was rampant. Illegal abortion. We did that. Pre-Roe v. Wade. It sucked. Pregnancy was dangerous. Abortions were not sterile or safe. It was common for women to bleed out on bathroom floors in motels and die of infections. She couldn't go to the hospital, they'd know what she did and call the police. Perforated uteruses were a thing. They still are in some countries. With the founding of Planned Parenthood and the Roe v. Wade decision, our nation became healthier overall. I'm 21 and, for me, it makes sense to learn from mistakes. It blows my mind how so many adultier adults throw this over their shoulders and make laws that don't even affect their sex, but SIGNIFICANTLY and negatively affect the opposite. Cruz doesn't care if it's rape or incest. Or complication.

I'm noticing that Trump's campaign is in chaos. One source described it to Politico as like the Hunger Games. Yikes...

I also noticed that he's cancelled all his West Coast appearances to focus on the New York primary. That's a huge mistake. New York has 95 delegates to offer, but the winner of the vote only gets some of those delegates. On the other hand, California has 172 delegates and its winner take all. Seeing as how Trump's main weakness right now is his lack of delegates it seems absurd to just stop campaigning on the West Coast entirely.

I mean, I certainly take a lot of pleasure watching his campaign fall apart like this, but its also deeply frustrating to see how close someone can get to the presidency when they don't understand the first thing about how that actually happens. I mean, I think delegates and superdelegates are as fundamentally unconstitutional as the next average citizen, but I don't think we should get rid of them in the middle of an election. There were a set of rules in place that everyone agreed to when they declared they were running for president and it may not be an ideal system (or even, in many cases, a tolerable system) but if you change the rules in the middle of the game everything will end in anarchy.

We're already getting there...Did you guys hear that one of Trump's closest allies, Roger Stone (who used to work for Nixon, so that should tell you what kind of political operative this guy is), has been threatening to release the hotel rooms of the delegates in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention and organize posses of Trump supporters to go to the delegates' rooms? It's like a thinly veiled threat only instead of a threat being veiled in vagueness its being veiled in bizarreness.

All I know about Gary Johnson is that he's a former governor of New Mexico and he's the presumptive Libertarian Party nominee. There was a profile on him recently in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/us/po ... arian.html)

One of the interesting things about this election cycle is its providing a rare opportunity for smaller parties, like the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, because so many people are dissatisfied with the Republican and Democratic choices they're seriously considering a third party. Johnson has been doing reasonably well for a third party candidate (he also ran in 2012, and according to the NY Times he got around a million votes and came in with 11% of the vote in a recent poll) and its possible, though not probable, that he might qualify for the presidential debates in the general election (which is usually based on averaged poll numbers).

Personally I don't vote Libertarian because I think regulations are too important, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for Libertarians. Theirs is a very principled political party--and I can understand their argument even if I don't agree with it.

One way to tell if politicians are serious about attaining national office is to look at whether or not they've traveled abroad recently, especially to Israel.

American politicians often take fact finding and research trips to Israel when they want to boost their foreign policy credentials. They do this so frequently its almost like a right of passage. And it makes sense, in a way. Israel is an international country, has some of the world's longest running and most complicated conflicts, has vast symbolic significance as the holy epicenters for three of the worlds largest religion, and has an extremely large and diverse community of respected policy experts to meet with.

Hint: Paul Ryan just got back from a trip to Israel.

I still don't know if this guy is secretly running for president or if he's just trying to keep the Republican party together by presenting an actual leader instead of the clown car running for office. Oh! Or maybe he's trying to create his own party? Eh...probably not, the Washington politicians are probably not super excited about the possible demise of the two party system, but hey, you never know. I may not know what he's up to but it's clear he's up to something.

Well, he needs to protect around 30 seats in Congress to maintain Republican majority control in the House. If he's operating under the assumption that the Republicans will lose in November (which is a reasonable assumption to say the least) then his priority might be to portray himself as a very different kind of Republican than the party nominee in the hopes that the voters will make a distinction between the candidate and the Republican members of Congress, so that even if voters vote for the Democratic candidate or a third party candidate they'll still vote Republican in congressional, senate and state races. A lot of Republican governors are probably figuring out how to do the same thing.

However, those Republican governors aren't being pressured by the spin cycle to jump into the presidential race like Ryan is.

It makes you wonder, who's feeding these stories to the press? When you read the articles they're all full of anonymous sources and unnamed individuals. Are these sources people who are close to Ryan and are they, with his knowledge, launching a whisper campaign in the media to lay the groundwork for his eventual candidacy? Are they perhaps delegates who are secretly organizing a Ryan coup at the RNC? Are they wealthy Republican donors? The Koch brothers? Maybe they are democratic operatives hoping to stir up more trouble? These are all just wild speculations of which I have no evidence, but the point is the possibilities are very intriguing.

Weeeelllllll.... the other day the Director of the CIA said in an interview that he would not authorize torture and now Trump is saying that's ridiculous. So basically...

Trump: We should torture people!
People: No.
Trump: Cowards!
People: The CIA and the military wouldn't do it even if you ordered them to.
Trump: You're all a bunch of stupid losers!
The CIA and the Military: ...Yeah, there's no fucking way we're doing this.
Trump: See! Stupid losers!

Sadly, the reason we don't have some new fresh hell from straight from the Trumpian mind this morning is Donald Trump skipped the talk shows this weekend for the first time in, like, 20 weeks. Normally he takes advantage of the free media opportunities and spends all weekend sticking his foot in his mouth.