Morality is not determined by the church you attend nor the faith you embrace. It is determined by the quality of your character and the positive impact you have on those you meet along your journey
Courtesy of CNN: The mother of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who died during the 2012 Benghazi attacks, penned a short letter to the editor of The New York Times asking that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and the GOP stop invoking her son's death. "I know for certain that Chris would not have wanted his name or memory used in that connection," Mary Commanday wrote in the letter, which was published Saturday. "I hope that there will be an immediate and permanent stop to this opportunistic and cynical use by the campaign." The Benghazi attacks were frequently mentioned in speeches at this week's Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where speakers used it as a reason presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is unfit for the presidency.
I seriously doubt that the Republicans will stop.
After all they are really scraping the bottom of the barrel to find things with which to attack Hillary Clinton, and they only have respect for the dead when bringing up those deaths make THEM looke bad.
So as you all know his initial attempts hit a brick wall called Bristol Palin, who at that time had all of the power, all of the money, and no reason whatsoever to give him his rights as a father.
Ultimately that led Levi to my door, and what happened next I detailed in this post.
Now let me point out that even at that time Levi was adamant about taking the high road and not attacking Bristol. And in fact he never once said that she was a bad mother.
However as we talked about all that had happened up until that point it was pretty clear that she was certainly not going to be nominated for mother of the year.
Nor was it likely that she was going to give up control without a serious, costly battle.
Courtesy of a Johnston family confidant.
Yep, a costly battle indeed.
So after two years of the back and forth filings which were designed to drain Levi's financial resources (Sorry Bristol I screwed that up for you didn't I?), finally both parties came to an agreement and everything appeared to be settled.
Note that I said, "appeared to be settled."
It was around then that some misleading stories were leaked to the
press saying that Levi owed over $80,000 in child support.
Life & Style Weekly has exclusively learned that Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin’s son Tripp, 7, has been actively trying to have a fling with her.
“He’s been texting Bristol, asking her to hook up again. He actually wrote, ‘Come cuddle me,’ and ‘Come lay that sexy a-- down right up tight next to me and watch a movie with me,” a source reveals.
For the record what's written is not exactly accurate. But it did hurt.
Ultimately Levi and Sunny's relationship grew stronger, and today they are doing very well. Very well indeed.
So surely, I thought, now Levi would want to release me from my promise and let me do my thing.
But nope. Still wanted to be the good guy.
Pissing me off here buddy.
So I made a deal, once I revealed our friendship I would not post anything directed at Bristol specifically, and focus instead on the bigger story about his time with the Palin family and what he saw, IF Bristol did not go after either me, him, or Sunny directly.
I can't say that either he nor Sunny agreed to that, but then again it was not up for discussion.
Happy Mother's Day from some favorite moms & daughters way up North who love their families and their country oh-so-much. We're with the ones still proudly clinging to God, guns, and our Constitution! 🇺🇸
I'm not sure why she tagged the end of the sentence with the "us" but know that if I spend too much time trying to make sense of the things Sarah Palin does I will start to bleed from the ears.
You know you might think that Palin would take a break from pushing her pro-gun, pro-conservative, and pro-religious agenda at least for Mother's Day, but then she would not be Sarah Palin now would she?
I am going to resists commenting on her looks and her attire, but I imagine that all of you will take up the slack.
Republican representatives John D Cavaletto and Keith Wheeler sponsored the bill that would amend the state’s Vital Records Act. Here is the bill’s draconian thrust:
‘…provides that if the unmarried mother cannot or refuses to name the child’s father, either a father must be conclusively established by DNA evidence or, within 30 days after birth, another family member who will financially provide for the child must be named, in court, on the birth certificate.’
‘Provides that absent DNA evidence or a family member’s name, a birth certificate will not be issued and the mother will be ineligible for financial aid from the State for support of the child.’
This the kind of thing that might actually keep Bristol from throwing her panties at every Tom, Joey, and Dakota.
However on the serious side this is an extremely punitive bill that would place a victim of rape, or incest, in a terrible situation.
And there is NO reason to punish a child for a situation that is clearly no fault of their own.
Just another bill written by men to punish women, and their children, while letting the man get off scott free, if he makes his escape quickly enough that is.
America is the worst developed country in the world to be a mother, ranking 61st globally in maternal health, a groundbreaking analysis of global health inequalities has found.
The US performed worse than last year, when it was in 31st place overall. This year it is 33rd. Although it did well on economic and educational status, according to this year's Mother's Index the country lags behind on children's well-being, where it is 42nd, and on maternal health, ranking 61st.
A woman in the United States is more than 10 times as likely as a woman in Austria, Belarus or Poland to die from a pregnancy-related cause, according to a comprehensive report, State of the World's Mothers 2015, published by Save the Children.
Women in the US face a 1 in 1,800 risk of childbirth-related death. It's the worst performance of any developed country in the world, the report, released ahead of Mother's Day, celebrated on the second Sunday in May, has warned.
Save the Children also scrutinized infant mortality rates in 25 capital cities of wealthy countries and found that Washington DC had the highest, at 6.6 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2013. This rate is a historic low for the District of Columbia, but is still three times the rates in Tokyo and Stockholm. In 2012, the district had an infant mortality rate of 7.9 deaths per 1,000 live births (while Stockholm or Oslo had infant mortality rates at or below 2.0, according to the report.)
Many major American cities, meanwhile, have even higher infant mortality rates. In 2011, Cleveland and Detroit reported infant mortality rates of 14.1 and 12.4 per 1,000 live births, respectively.
And yet conservatives continue to work to cut social services that help low income women and help provide foods and medical care for their infants.
And I imagine campaigning to close all of the Planned Parenthood clinics is not exactly helping things either.
Let's just add this to the list of things about my country for which I am ashamed.
Hey let's take a trip in the way back machine shall we?
Remember back around Halloween when the President said this:
"Too often parents have no choice but to put their kids in cheaper daycare, that maybe doesn't have the kinds of programming that makes a big difference in a child's development. And sometime there may just not be any slots, or the best programs may be too far away. And sometimes someone, usually mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result. And that's not a choice want Americans to make."
And then afterwards the conservatives edited the remarks to make it sound like the President was dissing stay at home moms, and oh did they have themselves a fine little freakout over that.
Well apparently somebody forgot to rouse Bristol from her alcohol induced slumber and she missed the entire thing. Oh the humanity.
But fear not, on Friday Bristol, with the help of the ever punctual Nancy French, penned a much too late, and completely unnecessary response.
It is essentially full of the same kind of stupid as those other conservative responses (Including one from her mother twelve days earlier.) were.
However it also adds this to give it that oh so personal touch:
As a single mom, I have to work. In fact, I drive to Anchorage every day and clock in and out — just to make sure I have a steady income to put bread on the table for my son. However, I don’t think that we should look down on moms who have the option of staying home!
Yeah, no she doesn't. This job, which I assume is the same dermatologist office job that she has been bragging about for the last five years, is not a real job in the sense that she ever even has to show up for work.
How else to explain her ablity to take huge leaves of absence to do DWTS?
Not once..
but twice?
Or have her own reality show?
Or make that appearance on Celebrity Wife Swap?
No this is not the lifestyle of either a stay at home mom OR a working mother.
This is the lifestyle of a person whose family has millions of dollars to spend, and who has personally made over a million dollars herself by trading in on her mother's famous name.
The President was speaking of real workign families who have to scrimp and save in order to meet their monthly payments, and who sometimes have difficulty affording good childcare.
He was NOT speaking about a spoiled little brat, who convinced her boyfriend to impregnate her and then told the world he raped her, who drunkenly picks fights a parties and then claims to have been assaulted, and who flies all over the country appearing on various television shows while claiming to work a 9 to 5 job in an office in Anchorage, Alaska.
This would have been an ignorant post if it had happened two weeks ago, but now it is simply a pathetic cry for attention.
"Too often parents have no choice but to put their kids in cheaper daycare, that maybe doesn't have the kinds of programming that makes a big difference in a child's development. And sometime there may just not be any slots, or the best programs may be too far away. And sometimes someone, usually mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result. And that's not a choice want Americans to make."
Clearly the President was talking about the problems facing two income families who are faced with problems finding quality childcare. It was NOT directed at families where the male earns an income which allows his wife to be a stay-at-home mother.
However THAT is exactly how it is being purposefully misinterpreted by the Right Wing professional outrage machine. And right now the conservatives smell blood in the water and the sharks are beginning to circle.
And if there is any hint of weakness on the President's part, you know who will soon come sniffing around for a taste.
And gee the headline of her Facebook post starts off so reasonably:
Obama Declares Stay-at-Home Moms Aren't Worth a Hill of Beans; Says It's a Choice 'We Don't Want Americans to Make’
I will spare you the entire thing as I think you can already imagine how ugly and fact free it will be.
However here are a few moosenuggets for your perusal:
On behalf of former and current stay-at-homers, including my girlfriends who still get together to bake cookies for the bake sale (see photos in my kitchen above), and volunteer to coach kids ball teams, and man the church's food bank, and entertain latchkey kids, and all that other obnoxiously "housewifey" stuff, the President needs to be spanked.
Number one I think most of her "girlfriends" are on the SarahPAC payroll, and number two waht kind of person suggests that the President of the United States should be "spanked?"
It seems you'd shackle us by your snobbish shunning of one traditional lifestyle choice while taking advantage of power to manifest your liberal view by manipulating public opinion and resources to diminish moms who put career on hold to raise a family. You are really messed up. And you're so 1960's.
Now she is talking about "shackles?" You really are stuck in a contorted kind of '60s feminism where you obviously don't trust women to make their own decisions, so you're frustrated.
And now she is suggesting that the President is "frustrated?" Anybody else picking up on a theme here?
Now, I'm sure your star struck female minions in the media will writhe and wiggle in defense of you on this, they always do, even though you just marginalized a most valuable sector of American society while having the gall to admit that, for you, it's only all about the money.
"Female minions" will "writhe and wiggle?" Well so much more subtlety.
And then Palin goes for the jugular.
Perhaps you never witnessed the benefits a "full-time mom" provides a family, a community, our schools, our nation, but you're a big boy now so figure it out yourself without me lecturing you on the beauty of a homemaker. Suffice it to say "stay-at-home moms" make the world go 'round.
- Sarah Palin
Okay now that was just uncalled for. Suggesting that the President does not appreciate stay-at-home mothers because his worked out of the home is a low blow even for Palin.
I understand that it undermines Sarah Palin, and the conservatives, sense of outrage to recognize that the President was NOT suggesting that he did not want mothers to stay at home with their children, but the fact is that what he was saying is that he did not want either parent to be forced out of work due to poor childcare choices.
The President was making his speech at the Rhode Island College in Providence, and the topic was "Women and the Economy." I think THAT audience had little difficulty understanding that the President was discussing ways in which the government could assist parents and help them to compete financially with their counterparts at work who do not have to worry about also meeting the needs of their children.
Sadly that is a sophisticated message which rings hollow in the ears of the ignorant.
Former Gilberton, PA police chief Mark Kessler has released a new expletive-laden video in which he threatened his critics, then angrily fired an assault rifle.
The video opened with Kessler off-camera, trying to secure the camera to the tripod. Then, wearing a black baseball cap and a pair of matching black ear protection earmuffs and carrying an AR-15 assault rifle, he entered the frame and began to rant.
“Chief Kessler here,” he began, “and I want to tell all my supporters out there that I thank you very much.”
For his detractors, however, Kessler had a different message.
“And for all the people out there that are against me, you can all go f*ck yourselves,” he said. “Go f*ck yourself! Okay? If you think for one minute that I forgot, or that I’m gonna f*ckin’ forget any of this, you have another thing coming.”
I am still amazed that this guy was put in charge of law enforcement in Pennsylvania.
And even more disturbing is that it seems that he is not an aberration among the community of fanatical 2nd Amendment defenders.
A top target for gun extremists has been the women of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, the grassroots group that began after Sandy Hook and has since merged with Michael Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns under the Everytown banner. The battle has grown particularly ugly in Texas, where gun groups such as Open Carry Texas have conducted demonstrations showcasing their right under state law to openly carry rifles in public. The sight of groups of (mostly) men carrying semi-automatic rifles along a busy road or inside the local Jack in the Box has prompted bystanders to call police. In response, Open Carry Texas has begun making open-records requests, identifying callers and threatening to publicize their personal information.
On April 10, Brett Sanders, a member of Open Carry Texas in Plano, a midsize city in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, posted a video on YouTube highlighting the name and cellphone number of a woman who'd called the police after seeing heavily armed men on her way to a shopping mall. The post drew condemnation not only for outing the woman but also because it was misleading: It claimed that the woman had called 911, though she'd called the nonemergency line of the Plano PD. And the footage it used came from friendly-looking demonstrations elsewhere—not from the one that the woman encountered. ("Feel free to contact me when you work for a real news organization," Sanders replied to my request for comment.)
The woman—a high school teacher who asked not to be identified—quickly got pummeled with text messages and voicemails, copies of which she provided to Mother Jones. Callers told her she was a "stupid bitch" and "motherfucking whore."
"They fought for their right to carry guns," said another. "You're a piece of shit." One caller threatened to come after her with a gun.
Over the next four days she received nearly two dozen such calls and text messages. Someone put her information into a phony profile on a large e-commerce site, and she got a barrage of calls about agricultural products and security systems.
Included in the Mother Jones article was the story of a wheelchair bound woman, paralyzed by an attackers bullet, who had a man walk up to her in an airport and spit in her face, and another assailant jump out of the shadows to shoot her with a water gun while mocking her with, "Don't you wish you had a gun now, bitch?"
And these are the type of people demanding to have access to high powered rifles, automatic weapons, and the right to openly carry their arsenal in public.
The mothers of Jonah Hill, Alicia Keys, Adam Levine and Jennifer Lopez appear in the two-minute video, entitled “#YourMomCares,” alongside a conclusion from First Lady Michelle Obama. The moms recall stories about the childhood personalities of their famous kids before explaining the importance of getting insured.
“Trust me: us moms put up with a lot,” said Hill’s mother Sharon Feldstein. “But one thing we should never have to put up with is our kid not having health care. Seriously, do you want your mothers to have a nervous breakdown? You need health insurance. It’s imperative. Taking care of yourself so your mothers can sleep and have a nice life after all they’ve done for you is not too much to ask.”
Michelle Obama ends the video by delivering the age-old motherly adage: “We nag you because we love you.”
You know when I was a teenager nobody could get me to do ANYTHING I did not want to do. You could not bribe me, or trick me, or threaten me into anything.
However my mom had no such problem and she was able to manipulate the snot out of me and get me to do exactly what she wanted.
After all it's your mom, without her you are nothing. Literally.
Tiffany Wait said she, her husband and their 7-month-old baby went to Bible Baptist Church's Toy Shop on Christmas morning to get gifts for their child, but were met with animosity because Wait did not want to give her baby to the volunteers while she selected gifts.
"I am poor and would not be able to celebrate Christmas this year without their charity," she said. "I went last year and it was a life saver. This year, however, I was treated shockingly bad."
Wait said her baby doesn't like strangers and she'd prefer to be with him. She said the volunteer said it has to be done that way, or the family wouldn't be able to participate.
"I stood there, fighting back tears and asked, 'You would turn a baby away on Christmas?'" said Wait.
The volunteers held their ground, and according to Wait, one woman tried to forcibly take her child.
Eventually, a woman brought a toy out to Wait.
But Wait soon took to the internet, posting her story on various social media sites, and that is when Oklahoma Atheists' Director Red McCall and members of his group set out to save Christmas.
"We had several people donate things and send her money through a PayPal," said McCall.
Christmas is a secular holiday now, according to McCall. He said everyone deserves to have a happy holiday.
"The Christians turned my baby and I away, and a group of atheists showed us compassion, kindness, and charity," Wait said. "They brought us toys, dinner, gift cards, donated money and really saved our holiday."
Okay I am not sure what that whole "Let us hold your baby while you look for gifts" thing is all about, but it seems a little odd to me.
Perhaps the young mother misunderstood, or their was some safety concern? I don't know, but clearly it could have been handled differently.
I am glad the Atheists came to her rescue, though to be fair I am sure there were plenty of Christian organization that would have offered help as well.
By the way the head pastor of Bible Baptist said they tried to contact the mother but failed in that attempt. Hopefully that is true, and is not simply a case of CYA.
Christmas should be for everybody, and this Atheist group demonstrated that the spirit of giving is certainly NOT something that simply belongs to the religious.
P.S. By the way if somebody had tried to grab my baby out of my arms what they would have received for Christmas would have been a gaping head wound. Just saying.
On Saturday, nearly 40 armed men, women, and children waited outside a Dallas, Texas area restaurant to protest a membership meeting for the state chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a gun safety advocacy group formed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
According to a spokeswoman for Moms Demand Action (MDA), the moms were inside the Blue Mesa Grill when members of Open Carry Texas (OCT) — an open carry advocacy group — “pull[ed] up in the parking lot and start[ed] getting guns out of their trunks.” The group then waited in the parking lot for the four MDA members to come out. The spokeswoman said that the restaurant manager did not want to call 911, for fear of “inciting a riot” and waited for the gun advocates to leave. The group moved to a nearby Hooters after approximately two hours.
MDA later released a statement calling OCT “gun bullies” who “disagree[d] with our goal of changing America’s gun laws and policies to protect our children and families.” The statement added that the members and restaurant customers were “terrified by what appeared to be an armed ambush.” A member of OCT responded by tweeting, “I guess I’m a #gunbullies #Comeandtakeit.”
So to be clear, this group of pro-gun nuts decided to state their case that Americans should be allowed to carry any gun they want to openly, and they did so by demonstrating EXACTLY why many of us feel that is dangerous and unwise to allow that without having comprehensive background checks and guidelines.
These individuals are pathetic excuses for men and should serve as an embarrassment to every responsible gun owner in the country.
This kind of thing literally makes me seethe with anger.
