Holy week is a special time. As Lent draws to a close with the celebration of Easter, Christians are ending a time of reflection and entering into a time of celebration. On the third day He rose...

Throughout all the arguing over involving religion together with politics and no matter how angry I get over some of the actions of some Christians, it is my own Faith and my own relationship with my beliefs that make this a special time.

I think if there weren't the perversion of religion in this country by zealots, fanatics, greed-mongers and manipulators of the Holy Text we would be a better people for it.

But not in a good way.

Something is. Police Chief Art Acevedo is having to make statements a lot lately. He's firing folks and disciplining people and coming up with new ways that the citizenry can complain about how they were treated by an officer. Which is great, if that's what we need to do to clean some stuff up, but I think they should let us know what all they think is wrong over there.

In the past few months we've had a police officer in trouble for picking up a hooker, one fired for shooting a suspect. In the back. Twice. Today I read some officer is fired for some sort of vague lesbian comment.

I want to see crime statistics for the past six months. Up or down? The incidence of the S.W.A.T. being deployed in this town is certainly up over last year.

I'm beginning to wonder if the job is too much for Acevedo or is the Austin Police Department just in that big a mess that we are only just now finding out about it?

This clip from SNL is a great example of why fake news works. With something as obvious as the story about Elliot Spitzer, the news should have just done the story this way in the first place.

So that guy said this:

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law, and then wants us to sing God Bless America? No, no, no. Not God Bless America, God damn America, that’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating us citizens as less than human.

And everyone on cable is upset, saying it's so mean and untrue and insane.

Um, but the treatment of black people is one of the country’s most shameful legacies, and it continues today. Knowing that is a part of what makes us liberal. We know, or have at least heard, that the CIA assisted in the production and distribution of crack in poor LA neighborhoods to fund the Nicaraguan rebels so they could try and overthrow the Sandinista government. We also know, because it’s in all the papers and by using our eyes, that black men go to prison way more than any other kind of American, and often for nonviolent drug offenses, like the having or using of said crack. We also know that three strikes laws put more people—again, usually the black, male kind -- in prison for those nonviolent crimes. So yeah, God damn any place that treats its citizens like that, like stray dogs if not worse. A lot of people are pissed off about a legacy of shitty treatment. Nothing to denounce here.