Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
U.S. District Judge Mary Scriven ruled on Tuesday that Florida’s law that required welfare recipients to have drug tests before getting benefits violated the 4th amendment against unreasonable search and seizure. The state failed to show that poor people are more likely to use drugs or that testing poor people should be squeezed into the limits allowed by the US Supreme Court.
The judge’s ruling pretty much followed my line of argument on this topic in a previous post:
One problem with our overcomplicated and biased election system here in the US is the rare occurrence of a write-in candidate winning a contested seat. It happened on November 5th when John Harrington won the 5th Ward seat on the Findlay Ohio City Council. The news isn’t that a write-in won but about the battle between establishment Republicans and Tea Party Republicans in a civil war for the soul of the party.
Findlay Ohio rarely elected a democrat for any office the exception being maverick John Sausser. He was the Mayor in the late 60’s and early 70s and returned to council in 2001. He was more of what we now call a Blue Dog type of Democrat. He hated most taxes for example. For the most part Findlay and Hancock county is deep red Republican.
An article published on Salon this weekend made the claim that I’ve been making for some years. It is impossible for an atheist to identify with the Republican party. CJ Werleman offers some evidence why atheists need to “grow up”. I agree with most of the article.
As we start the third week of Republican extortion about the Affordable Care Act and the false idea that our government needs more austerity, I created an image as reminder to what they are really doing.
At Midnight on October 1st, the federal government began to shut down because the Republicans in Congress decided to do it to appease their Tea Party radicals. It’s all big theater and spitting in the eye of the Constitution. They claim it is to stop the Affordable Care Act but is really just a continuation of their plan to gut anything in the government that doesn’t benefit their corporate owners. These are the same guys that got the sequester passed and like common extortionists they are back for more.