Nancy Reagan passes away.

Courtesy of NBC News:

Nancy Reagan, one of the most high-profile and influential first ladies of the 20th century, has died, according to a spokeswoman with the Reagan Library. She was 94. 

The cause of death was congestive heart failure, according to her rep Joanne Drake. "Mrs. Reagan will be buried at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, next to her husband, Ronald Wilson Reagan, who died on June 5, 2004," Drake wrote in a statement.

I actually have a lot of conflicted feelings about Nancy Reagan.

On the one hand she was married to, and  helped enable, a President who I think helped to delay progress in this country at least twenty years or more.

She was also the spokesperson for that stupid "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign that was not only ineffective but which set the stage for the zero tolerance drug policies of the Reagan administration and the war on drugs that we are still waging on minorities to this day.

Nancy also consulted an astrologer to help set the President's agenda, which is a fairly frightening idea, but then again it probably was no worse than allowing Reagan's ultra conservative advisers help set it.

Yep all in all I have pretty mixed feelings about the passing of Nancy Reagan.

The same cannot be said for those who have deified Ronald Regan, such as our own northern necrophiliac Sarah Palin:

See right over there is where you can go fuck yourself for endorsing Trump.

Rest In Peace, Nancy Davis Reagan. Thank you for your service, and for sharing your life with America as you helped inspire our nation to believe we could be that shining city on a hill. God bless your legacy. - Sarah Palin 

Damn, she is so predictable sometimes.

As if she has not pissed all over Reagan's memory by endorsing Donald Trump in this election cycle.

In fact has anybody considered that Trump's inevitable nomination might be what finally killed the 94  year old? I sure wouldn't count that out.

US soldiers raped and sexually assaulted dozens of Colombian children between 2003 and 2007, filmed the attacks to distribute as pornography, and face no charges due to treaty granting immunity.

Colombian children

Courtesy of WSWS:  

US soldiers and military contractors were responsible for the rape and sexual abuse of scores of Colombian children, but faced no legal repercussions because of a treaty between Washington and Bogota granting them full immunity. 

A fresh revelation of these appalling crimes came as a byproduct of ongoing peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement taking place in Havana, Cuba. 

Last month, a Historical Commission on the Armed Conflict and its Victims in Colombia, formed jointly by the Colombian government and the FARC, presented an 800-page report documenting the causes and consequences of the decades of civil war that have claimed millions of victims in terms of dead, wounded, abused and displaced. The commission was composed of leading Colombian academics and intellectuals acceptable to both parties. 

A section prepared by Renan Vega Cantor, a professor of history at the National Pedagogical University of Bogota, dealt with the role played by the US military. The Pentagon has sent advisers and contractors to the country as part of Plan Colombia, which has included $6 billion in mostly military aid directed at combatting both drug trafficking and the anti-government guerrilla movements. 

The report cites 54 cases of rape and sexual abuse of minors, some as young as 12. “In one of the best known cases, in Melgar and in Giradot [both are to the southwest of the capital of Bogota, with a major Colombian air base that housed US “advisers” located in Melgar], 53 minors were abused sexually by mercenaries, who also filmed it and sold the tapes as pornography,” the report states. The young girls were subsequently threatened with death, and they and their families had to leave the area.

This post is the result of a late night message from my daughter demanding that I write something about this and let people know what we have done. 

She was of course quite horrified and wanted to know how we could not only allow this to happen, but also protect those who committed these atrocities.

My response is of course to refer to the Ted Cruz post from earlier today.

After all how can Americans be held accountable when they are clearly agents of the "American civil religion" whose every action is divinely inspired?

This is the result when you see the military, and military contractors, through rose colored glasses and believe that their every action overseas "protects us over here."

How dare we even think of prosecuting them for helping to keep us free by spreading American exceptionalism to every corner of the planet?

For those who want to learn more about this you can read here, here, and here as well.

America is the greatest country on earth? Really?

You know REAL patriots don't simply spout patriotic slogans while their country suffers, or falls behind.

Real patriots admit the shortcomings of their country and endeavor to do whatever it takes to fix them.