Vice President Mike Pence delivered the commencement address to graduating students at a small, private, ultra-conservative Christian college in Michigan Saturday afternoon. Many consider the former Indiana governor a devout Catholic, and his speech certainly supported that perception.
The Vice President told the Hillsdale College graduating class that because Donald Trump is now president, more Americans believe in God.

At what appears to be a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in California, a virulently racist white man was captured on camera delivering a hate-filled rant to a Muslim woman wearing a burqa.

“Is this Halloween or something?” the man asks in a threatening manner.

If you don’t think this administration has quietly declared war on women, you aren’t paying attention.

The Trump administration last year reinstated — and expanded — a rule banning family planning clinics that get aid money from the United States from performing abortions or even discussing abortion with their patients. Often called the “global gag rule,” it’s led to clinic closures and reductions in crucial services around the world. And now it might be coming to the United States.

The White House is reportedly considering a domestic gag rule that would essentially apply the restrictions of the global rule to providers that receive federal Title X funds, which help low-income patients get services like contraceptive counseling and testing for sexually transmitted infections. Such a rule would force Planned Parenthood and other reproductive health providers to either stop discussing abortions with their patients or stop receiving Title X money.

Cell phone video shot by a bystander shows how a white police officer in Wisconsin repeatedly punched a black teenager in the face. Police in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin responded to a call from security at Mayfair Mall on Friday that reported five disorderly teenagers. An officer was able to spot several of the teens in the mall parking lot and attempted to speak to them, according to a statement from the police.

The cell phone video shot by a bystander shows how a security guard was struggling to hold on to a teenager before an officer violently punched the teenager in the face. That makes the teenager fall to the ground, at which point he is again punched multiple times. “Why’d he punch him like that?” a person can be heard saying in the video. “Ain’t he a minor?” The man who shot the video said he immediately knew that kind of violence was inappropriate from a police officer. “I knew it was wrong, that punch was wrong,” Tyrone Jackson said. “If it was just a tussling, trying to get him down, okay that would be something different. But the punch to the face, twice, to a minor, it was something serious to me.” Police arrested a 17-year-old male, who was cited for disorderly conduct, battery and resisting an officer.

Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.

The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.

Small business owners who supported Donald Trump are complaining about troubles hiring foreign seasonal labor the Lexington Herald-Leader reports.

The newspaper interviewed multiple landscaping business owners who claim they are unable to hire Americans for the same wages.

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“I think there’s a war on brown people,” he argued. “I want to know why it’s OK for him to get his workers, but supporters like me don’t get theirs.”

“We live and die by these visas,” said Ken Monin, owner of Monin Construction. “Last year we about went bankrupt. The workers we were supposed to get in March didn’t show up until August because they couldn’t get visas.”

From The Globe and Mail:

It is not a subtle drift – Canadians were overwhelmingly positive about the United States as recently as 2016, until Donald Trump’s inauguration put a majority into the anti-American column. The proportion of Canadians who see the United States as “a negative force in today’s world” is now almost 6 in 10, a 12-per-cent rise over 2008, making America by far the most negative country in the eyes of Canadians (even North Korea comes a distant second, at 46 per cent).
…

When asked what foreign countries are “standing out as a positive force in today’s world,” Canadians’ answers swung sharply, between 2008 and 2018, away from the United States and Britain. The most positively viewed foreign country is now Germany – 17 per cent of Canadians named it as “positive,” up from only 4 per cent in 2008. Sweden has risen to third place (one in eight Canadians identified it, double the 2008 level). Second-place Great Britain saw its popularity fall by 12 per cent; fourth-place United States by more than a quarter.

Judge Jeanine Pirro opened up her Fox News show on Saturday with a bizarre riff claiming President Donald Trump was fulfilling a Biblical prophecy by moving the embassy to Jerusalem.

Speaking from Jerusalem, at one point Pirro claimed that the embassy move sent “a huge signal to Iran, and Shiite Muslims, that we stood with the more moderate Sunnis.”

She then said Israel is the basis of America’s Judeo-Christian nation before saying this:

“Donald Trump recognized history, he like King Cyrus before him, fulfilled the Biblical prophecy of the God worshipped by Jews, Christians and, yes, Muslims, that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish state and that the Jewish people finally deserve a righteous, free and sovereign Israel.”

As it turns out, laws forbidding sexual contact between law enforcement and the people they have detained are far from the norm across the United States.
The Kansas City Star reported that until the measure was signed into law there, Kansas was one of 33 states where consensual sex between police and individuals in their custody was not forbidden.

The legislation was introduced by state Representative Cindy Hoslcher, (D-Olathe). She told the newspaper that she was moved to introduce the measure following a notorious case in which a Kansas City police officer preyed upon black women, arresting them and then threatening to throw them in jail unless they agreed to have have sex.