The con game cloaked in Christianity.

Can someone please explain to me what exactly is a "religious liberty task force"? I ask because apparently Jeff Sessions and the trump administration just formed one.

"WASHINGTON (CNN) - Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday announced the Department of Justice's creation of a "religious liberty task force" to "help the department fully implement our religious guidance."

In a speech at the Department of Justice's Religious Liberty Summit in Washington, Sessions said the goal of the task force will be protecting religious groups from persecution.

"The task force will help the department fully implement our religious liberty guidance by ensuring that all Justice Department components are upholding that guidance in the cases they bring and defend, the arguments they make in court, the policies and regulations they adopt and how we conduct our operations," Sessions said. "That includes making sure that our employees know their duties to accommodate people of faith."

Sessions cited "a dangerous movement" aimed toward stripping away the First Amendment right to freedom of religion as a basis for forming the new task force." [Source]

This is interesting, since it would seem to be that it is trump and his attorney general who are "stripping away" the First Amendment" by trampling all over the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. Some Americans love Thomas Jefferson but not necessarily his words: "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof', thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."

Clearly Mr. trump and his overzealous AG have no intention of keeping the wall between church and state intact. A true president who cares about the Constitution would spend his time and energy protecting this wall, and not trying to build one to keep out immigrants coming in from our Southern border.

Make no mistake, folks, this latest stunt from the AG and the president is a lame attempt to push their version of religion down our throats.  "A dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom," ...There can be no doubt. This is no little matter. It must be confronted and defeated." 

What movement? The movement of the people who might not believe in your god, and who might want to worship Allah, Buddah, or Haile Selassie I? Or, who might want to worship at the church of  Emayatzy Corinealdi for Christ sake?! (For the record, that happens to be my church.) What if you happen to be an atheist or agnostic? Will this so-called task force protect you then?

I wish I could say that this too will pass, but it won't. Because, as I write this post, trump is stacking the courts up and down with dimwitted conservative zealots. These are people who share some of his dangerous totalitarian views when it comes to religion and other social issues.

The irony is, of course, that there is not a religious bone in trump's body. This is all a scam to shore up his base and keep his 35% loyal to him. If these people were really as religious as they claim, and if they had some real connection to their god or whatever higher being they worship, they would be able to spot the con from a mile away.  Of course we all know that they won't, because the brilliance of the con is that it understands that deep down inside their love of power and control is more powerful than any religion that they claim to follow.

Fortunately, it doesn't take a task force to figure that out. 

When autocrats rule children suffer.

An unarmed young woman was shot in the head and killed by a border patrol agent, recently. The agency also tried to cover it up and lie about how the woman was executed. Her crime? Being a poor immigrant who was trying to get into this country to further her education and improve her lot in life. If you saw how some conservatives commenting on the story rejoiced in her death,  you would be sickened by the thought of being an American.

Under the current trump regime this type of behavior by those in law enforcement---- who enforce immigration laws have been encouraged and praised.  Incredibly, it is actually a policy of this administration to separate children from their families.

 ICE agents are now known for breaking up hardworking loving families and snatching loved ones from the arms of each other. They are known to go after illegal immigrants in the most inhumane ways. And they have been known to do it in what we thought were the most sacred of places: Church.

We are also now learning that some 1,500 children of immigrants have gone missing, and that the trump administration and their inhumane policies are to blame. These children have been put in the homes of "sponsors" but many are still unaccounted for.  

There are even some conspiracy theories floating around out there. Sadly, given what we know about the evil in the hearts of some of these people, they are not too far fetched.

Here is an interesting take on this issue from The Root:

"Donald Trump has been the conspiracy whisperer throughout his entire public life. Even before he was president, he was convinced that the Central Park Five were guilty (they weren’t). He spent years claiming that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya (he wasn’t). He suggested that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death may have been Democratic foul play (it wasn’t). Those are just the theories he was spouting before he got into office.
This week, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed the half-dozen unfounded or disproven conspiracy theories that Trump and his administration have spewed since getting into the White House. These include everything from Obama using transformer microwaves to spy on the Trump White House (Optimus Hot Pockets?); Black Lives Matter being a terrorist organization; and the Democrats running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza place in Washington, D.C. (also known as “pizzagate”).

Of course, all of these theories are unfounded or disproven, but they still rile up the base and keep Reddit full of traffic, so why should khaki-wearing “alt-righters” have all the fun? Now it turns out that the Trump administration may have an equally implausible conspiracy on its hands: Is the administration involved in child sex trafficking or just white nationalism? Follow me down the rabbit hole and see for yourself.

August 2017: Immigration and Customs Enforcement asks permission from the Trump administration to start destroying old files and documents relating to 11 subjects. These include reports of violence, solitary confinement, death and sexual abuse inflicted on those detained by ICE agents while still in their custody. It is still being determined how long these reports would be held before being destroyed. Two years? Twenty years? Six weeks? ICE isn’t saying. Some congressional candidates have found this policy so disturbing, they’ve begun to campaign on it.

April 26, 2018: During a Senate hearing, Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, says that the department has lost nearly 1,500 unaccompanied minors who had been placed in homes or facilities since being picked up at the border. Over a thousand human beings lost, like luggage, a cellphone or a fancy hat.

Our government can track what porn sites ISIS, or the Islamic State, is clicking on in the mountains of Afghanistan, but can’t find 1,500 kids in America? What’s worse, nobody seems to know what to do about it. This is despite reports that children have been placed in homes where they were sexually assaulted, abused or possibly trafficked.

May 8, 2018: Attorney General Jeff Sessions announces that if you are caught sneaking across the border as a family, you will be prosecuted and separated from your children. Which will lead to more children being taken from the safety of their parents and then suspiciously “lost” in the system somewhere in America.

May 11, 2018: White House Chief of Staff John Kelly doubles down on the new Trump white nationalist and human-rights-violating policy of separating parents from minor children. When asked what will happen to separated kids, Kelly states:

Obviously, “whatever” includes everything from being placed in a nice, loving home and adopted by Daddy Warbucks, or Mitt Romney, to falling off the grid and being abused, sold or worse by any random stranger who shows up at Homeland Security offering to “help” these displaced kids.

We’ve seen this before with “good samaritans” from the United States attempting to snatch Haitian children temporarily separated from their families and take them who knows where. Now Trump and Sessions—with the help of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen—are putting even more children at risk, breaking up families and contemplating throwing kids into internment camps or sending them off into homes with unvetted or unmonitored adults, and losing kids right and left. If someone did want to traffic a bunch of barely literate, frightened, lost brown children fleeing poverty and violence in South America, Trump and Sessions just made it a lot easier.

Now, of course, none of this means that Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump are part of some vast conspiracy to sell minority children to the highest bidder like some scene out of Taken 4: Bad Hombres. This could all just be a series of unfortunate policies and events. It could just be white nationalism at work, destroying black and brown families seeking a better life, and demonstrating a careless disregard for nonwhite children.

However, why be hamstrung by the facts, as bad as they are? Trump has shown America that you can get away with whatever salacious, ridiculous and unfounded conspiracy you want as long as you say it loudly enough and find enough other people to repeat it.

Which story sounds better: Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions continue their white nationalist policies by destroying refugee and undocumented immigrant families, or Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions let missing children fall prey to sex traffickers? If you can’t figure out which is the better conspiracy, imagine any of this happening at this level—the missing children, the separation of families and lack of concern for finding them—under the Obama administration. Which story do you think Trump would actually tweet? He’s never been one to let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy. "
[Source]

Today, in an unbelievable tone-deaf and insensitive act, Ivanka trump channeled her inner Marie Antoinette and tweeted a picture of herself and her child for all the world to see. She wrote, My love! in case we didn't believe that a mother could actually love her own child.

For her sake, I hope that she realizes that there are at least 1,500 mothers who will not be able to do what she did in that tweet this morning because of her father's inhumane policies.      

Justice trump style.

We learned a lot today about where we will be going for the next four years.

Jeff Sessions is one of the most powerful men in America. He is the attorney general and he runs Donald trump's justice department.

 So let's take a look at what he has been up to since taking office. 

"It is hard to believe this is happening, but it’s real: The US Department of Justice is literally prosecuting a woman for laughing at now–Attorney General Jeff Sessions during his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this year.

According to Ryan Reilly at HuffPost, Code Pink activist Desiree Fairooz was arrested in January after she laughed at a claim from Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) that Sessions’s history of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented.”

Sessions, in fact, has a long history of opposing the equal treatment of all Americans under the law. He has repeatedly criticized the historic Voting Rights Act. He voted against hate crime legislation that protected LGBTQ people, arguing, “Today, I'm not sure women or people with different sexual orientations face that kind of discrimination. I just don't see it.” And his nomination for a position as a federal judge was rejected in the 1980s after he was accused of making racist remarks, including a supposed joke that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was okay until I found out they smoked pot.”

Given this history, Fairooz laughed at Shelby’s claim.

But federal prosecutors have pushed forward with the case against Fairooz. As Reilly reported, prosecutors argue that “the laugh amounted to willful ‘disorderly and disruptive conduct’ intended to ‘impede, disrupt, and disturb the orderly conduct’ of congressional proceedings.” In court, they have tried to emphasize that the laugh was extraordinarily disruptive, with a US Capitol Police officer claiming that Fairooz laughed “very loudly” and people in the hearings turned around when they heard it.

Fairooz’s defense, meanwhile, has argued that her laughter was a reflex and not meant to disrupt the hearings. Fairooz was also in the back of the room, and her laughter had no noticeable impact, based on video of the hearings, on Shelby’s introductory speech for Sessions.

The trial will continue at the Superior Court in DC this week. If convicted, Fairooz faces a fine up to $500 and up to six months’ imprisonment for the laugh-related charge. She is also charged with another misdemeanor for “allegedly parading, demonstrating or picketing within a Capitol, evidently for her actions after she was being escorted from the room,” Reilly reported.

Fairooz has a history of disruptive protests. During protests over the Iraq War, she put fake blood on her hands and confronted then–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

This time, however, Fairooz claims she was not trying to be disruptive — but merely laughing. " [Source]

So she will be prosecuted for laughing, but.......

"The Justice Department has decided not to bring charges against the officers involved in the death of Alton Sterling, whose videotaped shooting by police in Baton Rouge last summer prompted unrest across the city, and is planning to reveal in the next 24 hours that it has closed the probe, according to four people familiar with the matter.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Sterling family had yet to be informed by the Justice Department of the decision, and it is unclear how and when the department will announce its findings.

“We have not heard nor received an update and are unaware of any charges that may or may not be filed,” said Ryan Julison, a spokesman for the Sterling family’s attorneys. “We have not received word, nor has the family been given any notice of upcoming updates regarding this case.”

The case will be the first time under Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the department has publicly declined to prosecute officers investigated for possible wrongdoing in a high-profile case, and officials in Baton Rouge have been girding for a possible reaction there." [Source]

I bet former President Obama did not know that Beauregard Sessions would be running the justice department.

So to recap: laugh during Mr. Session's  confirmation and you get prosecuted. Shoot an unarmed man to death, and you are not. Got it.

What a country.