Just your daily reminder that you now live in a country where this guy is the president.

I typically don't like to fat shame, but remember this is a guy who made fat jokes about Rosie O'Donnell and judged women by their breast size.

In my opinion that makes it open season on Mr. Visible Panty Line here.

Self taught mapmaker creates the saddest map depicting the fate of the Native Americans ever.

Courtesy of NPR:

Aaron Carapella, a self-taught mapmaker in Warner, Okla., has pinpointed the locations and original names of hundreds of American Indian nations before their first contact with Europeans. 

As a teenager, Carapella says he could never get his hands on a continental U.S. map like this, depicting more than 600 tribes — many now forgotten and lost to history. Now, the 34-year-old designs and sells maps as large as 3 by 4 feet with the names of tribes hovering over land they once occupied. 

"I think a lot of people get blown away by, 'Wow, there were a lot of tribes, and they covered the whole country!' You know, this is Indian land," says Carapella, who calls himself a "mixed-blood Cherokee" and lives in a ranch house within the jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation. 

For more than a decade, he consulted history books and library archives, called up tribal members and visited reservations as part of research for his map project, which began as pencil-marked poster boards on his bedroom wall. So far, he has designed maps of the continental U.S., Canada and Mexico. A map of Alaska is currently in the works.

These were proud people, living a subsistence lifestyle that was in harmony with the nature around them.

Just imagine how different America would look today if the white settlers had respected their sovereign right to the lands that they had lived on for thousands of years.

But sadly they were non-Christian heathens and were at the mercy of Manifest Destiny: 

The religious fervor spawned by the Second Great Awakening created another incentive for the drive west. Indeed, many settlers believed that God himself blessed the growth of the American nation. The Native Americans were considered heathens. By Christianizing the tribes, American missionaries believed they could save souls and they became among the first to cross the Mississippi River. 

At the heart of manifest destiny was the pervasive belief in American cultural and racial superiority. Native Americans had long been perceived as inferior, and efforts to "civilize" them had been widespread since the days of John Smith and MILES STANDISH. The Hispanics who ruled Texas and the lucrative ports of California were also seen as "backward."

Just another shameful chapter in the book of horrors visited upon those ethnically impure heathens who  dared to stand in the way of the Christian Caucasians who felt duty bound to destroy their cultures and bring them to Jesus whether they wanted it or not.

Fox's Shepherd Smith is disgusted by the rush to condemn Sgt. Bergdahl as a traitor. Update!

Courtesy of Media Matters:  

Many Fox News hosts and pundits rushed to brand recently released Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl as a deserter and a traitor, but Shepard Smith took a different line by saying he was "disgusted" by the rush to judgment, cautioning that Bergdahl is innocent until proven guilty.

You know I often wonder if Shep is being held at Fox News against his will.

I mean he really does not seem to be on the same wavelength the majority of the time.

I am sure MSNBC could provide a time slot for him. Hell as far as I'm concerned he can have Chris Matthews' slot.

Update: Speaking of Sgt. Bergdahl I think that before passing judgment on the man that everybody needs to read this Rolling Stone article.

The bodies of almost 800 children hidden for decades by the Irish Catholic orphanage. Can you say "pro-life?"

Courtesy of Salon:  

They have no headstones, no coffins. No memory boxes of toys and photographs. There are nearly eight hundred of them – and counting. They are the 796 babies and young children aged between two days and nine years whose grave, “filled to the brim with tiny bones and skulls,” was found last week in an unmarked site that once housed a septic tank near a County Galway home for unwed mothers. 

Local death records show that the children, mostly babies and toddlers, died during the years The Home, run by the Bon Secours Sisters, was in operation — between 1926 and 1961. The causes of death listed include “sicknesses, diseases, deformities and premature births.” A full tally of the bodies has not yet been made, and it’s unknown yet if investigators will find more bodies than the ones whose deaths were recorded. 

The grave was first discovered nearly forty years ago. In 1975, two boys playing in the area first uncovered a broken slab that revealed small skeletons underneath. As the Guardian reports, “a parish priest said prayers at the site, and it was sealed once more, the number of bodies below unknown, their names forgotten.” But more recently, local historian Catherine Corless spearheaded a long overdue investigation into what happened to the bodies of those children. She was inspired in part by her own memories of the children from The Home that she grew up with. “They were always segregated to the side of regular classrooms,” she recently told Irish Central. “By doing this the nuns telegraphed the message that they were different and that we should keep away from them. They didn’t suggest we be nice to them. In fact if you acted up in class some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies. That was the message we got in our young years.” When Corless contacted the Galway registry to find out how many children had died there, she said the person at the office asked her, “Do you really want all of these deaths?” It was only then she learned the magnitude of her task. 

The bodies of 796 children left to rot in a hole in the ground by people who are the very definition of "good Christians. "

The same "good Christians" who will aggressively shame a young woman for choosing to terminate her pregnancy, or choose to utilize birth control, claiming that "all life is a gift from God."

And yet hundreds died in their care. And once dead their bodies were tossed aside like unwanted garbage.

I think this next portion of the article sums up my feelings quite adequately.

Remember all of this the next time someone uses the words “dead babies” to talk about reproductive choice. Tell them there’s a place in Ireland full of dead babies. Babies who were born to women who were exiled from their homes, even if they were pregnant as the result of rape. Babies who were not loved, not cared for, not treated with dignity even when they died. Say that they’ll have a hard time finding that place now, but someday, Catherine Corless hopes, it’ll be easier. She has the names of the children who died at The Home, children whose bodies were cast into the grounds near a septic tank. “I have the full list,” she says, “and it’s going up on a plaque for the site, which we’re fundraising for at the moment. We want it to be bronze so that it weathers better. We want to do it in honor of the children who were left there forgotten for all those years. It’s a scandal.”

Yes, yes this exactly.