Happy Easter, everyone! Have you gotten to the part of the day where you and yours are creating new tortures for those horrifying Peeps?
Pope Francis’ Easter message called for peace in the world:
As popes before him have, he urged Israelis and Palestinians to resume peace talks and end a conflict that “has lasted all too long.” And, in reflecting on the two-year-old Syrian crisis, Francis asked, “How much suffering must there still be before a political solution” can be found?
The pope also expressed desire for a “spirit of reconciliation” on the Korean peninsula, where North Korea says it has entered “a state of war” with South Korea. He also decried warfare and terrorism in Africa, as well as what he called the 21st century’s most extensive form of slavery: human trafficking.
Francis, the first pope from Latin America and a member of the Jesuit order, lamented that the world is “still divided by greed looking for easy gain.” He wished for an end to violence linked to drug trafficking and the dangers stemming from the reckless exploitation of natural resources.
More adventures in GOP idiocy that includes an expansion of AZ government that seems to want to now check your ID (or look in your underpants) before you use a restroom:
Arizona is at it again. Just one month after the Phoenix City Council voted to amend an anti-discrimination law to include lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals, Arizona lawmakers have just passed a bill that overrides some of those protections. Arizona Senate Bill SB 1045, authored by Rep. John Kavanagh (R-AZ), originally sought to make it a Class 1 Misdemeanor for transgender individuals to use a bathroom other than one that aligns with the gender on their birth certificate.
Look who the Virginia Voter ID disenfranchises:
[Augustine] Carter is 85. She was born at home in Baltimore, and she never had a birth certificate. After Carter moved to the commonwealth in the 1950s, she eventually got a state ID card – she’d never learned how to drive because “the highways petrified me.”
When that card expired in 2006, the state wouldn’t renew it. The 9/11 attacks brought stricter regulations.
Carter, who spoke to me by phone from her Richmond home, told me she had to contact a genealogist, research the 1940 census and request help from the federal government. The six-year effort finally ended in 2012, when her new documents passed state muster.
There is something genuinely screwed up about a culture that would make it way easier to buy a gun than it is to vote. but I think that if I was in that situation, I might just buy a gun and point it at election officials to let me vote. Sounds like it would align with the gun nuts desire to be able to counter government tyrrany. (h/t From Pine View Farm)
What interests you today?