"My faith in the Constitution is Whole ..."

The most amazing and moving aspect of this to me has always been less what she says and more who she is to say such a thing.  This is an African-American woman born in extreme poverty who clawed her way into law school and becoming the first African-American woman in the Texas Senate.  She tolerate vicious, profane attacks on her personally but never backed down or sank to their level.

She sat as a legislator surrounded by the descendants of the slavers who tortured and murdered her ancestors, her people.  Some of her colleagues, especially in Texas, had probably participated in lynchings of black people, and definitely participated in Jim Crow-era abuse and discrimination.

Yet she rose above it all to begin impeachment hearings on Nixon by declaring her faith in the very document that allowed and justified that slavery, that torture, that discrimination.

Crook and Liars: 

Meet Your New ScapeGoat Class of Deportees: The Muslims!

This is the Constitution stating flat-out: No discrimination of any kind on religious grounds EVER. And the Supreme Court responding: Yeah, fuck religious freedom: discriminate all you want as long as it's against some brown ragheads.

Zandar, writing before today's decision:

Once again, this is all part of a plan to create a system where the government can rapidly detain and deport large numbers of people quickly.  It's only a matter of time of course before this mass deportation infrastructure, without due process, is used not just on those crossing the border now, but used on those already here.

Once you establish that those who are declared non-citizens by the government are not subject to due process, the government has the ability to strip citizenship -- and the legal rights that citizenship guarantees -- from anyone it chooses.  And once you have established that, that non-citizens have no legal rights, well, you can do pretty much anything to them.

I cannot overstate the dangers here.

History tells us exactly what authoritarian governments do in situations like this. 

And the ACLU, with reasons not to despair, but to fight:

It's a dark day in American history. The Supreme Court just allowed the Muslim ban to continue.

In a 5-4 ruling, justices sided with this cornerstone of Trump's discriminatory immigration policy. The latest version of the ban limits entry to the United States from citizens of five Muslim-majority countries in addition to a miniscule number of North Koreans and Venezuelans.

Let's be clear: This is a loss. But this isn't the end of the fight – we're committed to taking down this discriminatory ban on every front – in Congress, in the courts, and on the streets.

Here's what you can do to help RIGHT NOW:

• Take to the streets to shout NO MUSLIM BAN EVER and show your commitment to fighting back: Visit peoplepower.org to join a rally in your community today.
• Congress can end Trump's Muslim ban – but they won't do it unless we force them to: Sign the petition and demand action.
• Stand together: Attend a community forum bringing together Muslim communities and allies.
• Make it known that we're still fighting by posting this #NoMuslimBanEver graphic on Twitter and Facebook.

This isn't the first time the Supreme Court has gotten it wrong. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled in Korematsu v. United States to allow the government to rip Japanese people out of their homes and imprison them based on false claims of national security. It's one of the most shameful chapters of U.S. history – and now the Muslim ban decision joins it. History will judge today's decision harshly.

But I have hope. It's ultimately the people of this country who'll determine its character and future. In the first 24 hours of the Muslim ban, two of the defining themes of the Trump presidency emerged: Trump's determination to stamp anti-Muslim bigotry into national policy, and the key role of the courts and the public in stopping him. Today, the court failed. Now the public is needed more than ever.

I'm confident that our country will ultimately defeat the Muslim ban – as well as Trump's other hateful policies, like tearing children away from their parents at the border, hunting travelers on Greyhound buses, and turning away asylum seekers fleeing domestic violence. But we can't let up the fight – our rights depend on making our voices heard.

Thanks for keeping up the fight,



Omar Jadwat
Director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project

 

KY School Shows How to Create Atheists

Forced prayer will do it every time.

From the Herald:

An organization of atheists and agnostics has taken issue with a prayer circle held after a high school basketball game in northeastern Kentucky recently.

Players, cheerleaders and coaches from cross-county rivals West Carter High School and East Carter High School gathered on the court and joined hands in prayer after their game on Jan. 26, according to a post on West Carter School’s Facebook page.

A photo of the prayer time was posted with a caption that said, in part, “What a way to end the game! #cometpride #wearecartercounty.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation issued a news release Friday, asking that school employees stop praying with students and saying the school shouldn’t be using its official page “to endorse religion.”

The organization sent a letter to Carter County Superintendent Ronnie Dotson on Feb. 6, saying that “federal courts have held that even a public school coach’s silent participation in student prayer circles is unconstitutional.”

“These coaches’ conduct was unconstitutional because they endorsed and promoted religion while acting in their official capacities as school district employees,” the letter states.

It further argues that the posting on the West Carter Facebook page constitutes an endorsement of religion, which violates the Establishment Clause.

“We ask that Carter County Schools commence an investigation into the complaint alleged and take immediate action to stop any and all school-sponsored prayers occurring within any district athletic programs,” the letter states.

It also asks that the district remove “any posts on the district’s social media pages promoting religion” and make sure the staff members responsible for the post are “counseled that such conduct is not to be repeated in the future.”

Kentucky public schools are beyond broke and facing catastrophe when legislators forced them to start paying for teachers' pensions.

So Carter County schools will not waste money fighting this lawsuit.  Right?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

The Rights We've Been Waiting 80 Years For

These are the human rights FDR wanted to enshrine in our Constitution eight decades ago.  The repugs beat him back then, and have been beating the American people into the ground ever since.

These rights are not radical.  They are basic human rights available and affordable to hundreds of millions of people in civilized nations around the globe.

But we're not civilized.  We're corporate drones and peasants in a capitalistic, kleptocratic plutocracy. Because the obscenely rich have stolen every dime to ensure we never have the strength to demand our rights.

Noah at Down with Tyranny:

"Religious Liberty" Doesn't Save Bigoted Kentucky Judge

It's not like he refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding, but the Judicial Conduct Commission still slapped him down.

From the Herald:

A former judge who refused to handle adoption cases involving gay parents was publicly reprimanded Tuesday by the Kentucky Judicial Conduct Commission.

The commission found that W. Mitchell Nance, the former family court judge for Barren and Metcalfe counties, violated judicial rules. Bryan Beauman, a Lexington attorney who represents Nance, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Nance’s retirement became effective Saturday night. Nevertheless, the commission said in its order that “a public reprimand is warranted and is the only sanction available.”

SNIP

Nance issued an order in April requiring lawyers to notify him if they had an adoption case involving a gay parent or same-sex couple so he could recuse himself from the case.

Nance said his religious convictions prevented him from handling such adoptions, because adoption of a child by a “practicing homosexual” would never be in the child's best interest.

The commission charged that Nance violated a number of rules.

Those included rules that require judges to uphold standards of conduct, comply with the law and act in ways that promote public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary. Judges are barred from showing bias or prejudice based on race, sex, religion, national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation or socioeconomic status.

Nance also put his recusal rule in place without required permission from the state’s chief justice.
Nance’s attorneys said it is his sincere religious belief that “the divinely created order of nature is that each human being has a male parent and a female parent,” and that the only adoption that serves a child’s best interest would be one that would create the chance for the child to have a parent of each gender.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article190523074.html#storylink=cpy

Read more Nance issued an order in April requiring lawyers to notify him if they had an adoption case involving a gay parent or same-sex couple so he could recuse himself from the case.
Nance said his religious convictions prevented him from handling such adoptions, because adoption of a child by a “practicing homosexual” would never be in the child's best interest.
The commission charged that Nance violated a number of rules.
Those included rules that require judges to uphold standards of conduct, comply with the law and act in ways that promote public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary. Judges are barred from showing bias or prejudice based on race, sex, religion, national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation or socioeconomic status.
Nance also put his recusal rule in place without required permission from the state’s chief justice.
Nance’s attorneys said it is his sincere religious belief that “the divinely created order of nature is that each human being has a male parent and a female parent,” and that the only adoption that serves a child’s best interest would be one that would create the chance for the child to have a parent of each gender.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article190523074.html#storylink=cpy

here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article190523074.html#storylink=cpy

Take Your Bibbles to Bevin

Oooooh, our so-brave Governor Craven Heartless Worm really stood up to those godless libtards this time!  Making them all cry with his bold order to the Commonwealth's kids to show off by taking their bibbles to school!

No mention, of course, of the fact that the very godless Constitution guarantees exactly that right. Nor of the fact that the very same Constitution bars government-funded entities - like teachers, not students - from proseletyzing any religion to others under cover of government authority.

You can take a bibble or a koran or a bhagavad gita any public goddamn place you please.

I recommend taking a bibble to bevin's office in the capitol. Cover it in brown paper so he can't see what it is, and start reading jeebus' words from the new testament.  Set a stopwatch so you know how many seconds it takes before bevin screams at you for being a commiemuslinterrist and leftwingbleedinghearthippie, how dare you read that unamericanatheist shit to him.

This Is Not the Religious Freedom We Fought For, But It Is the One They're Looking For

The freakazoids don't have to get the constitutional convention they are drooling for if they just destroy the one we have one right at a time.

Charlie Pierce:

But, seriously, Ambassador At Large For Religious Freedom? How is that even a job under a secular Constitution? And given Brownback's history as a radically conservative Catholic, one of those Crisis/First Things types who look with great envy at how Pat Robertson does business and who long for the days when a pope could terrify people at a distance, I suspect that easing the pain of the prejudice that might be afflicting, say, Muslims in Europe is not going to be at the top of agenda.

Even so, how is this even a thing? Are we going to have Ambassadors to all First Amendment freedoms? Because I'd really like to be Ambassador At Large For Press Freedom. How about the whole Bill of Rights? I think, in some countries, Ambassador At Large Against Quartering Troops might be a tougher job than it sounds. No, alas, I suspect this, along with the bizarre presidential* announcement about transgender troops on Wednesday morning, is one of the opening shots in the 2018 midterm elections, which apparently are going to be conducted according to 1998 rules, and which I already hate with a considerable passion.

In 1817, in what have come down to us as his Detached Memoranda, James Madison discussed the appointments of congressional chaplains. Mr. Jemmy was not impressed.

Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom? In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. The Constitution of the U. S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion. The law appointing Chaplains establishes a religious worship for the national representatives, to be performed by Ministers of religion, elected by a majority of them; and these are to be paid out of the national taxes. Does not this involve the principle of a national establishment, applicable to a provision for a religious worship for the Constituent as well as of the representative Body, approved by the majority, and conducted by Ministers of religion paid by the entire nation. The establishment of the chaplainship to Congs is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles: The tenets of the chaplains elected [by the majority] shut the door of worship agst the members whose creeds & consciences forbid a participation in that of the majority.

Damn that little feller. He saw all of this coming, centuries down the road.

UPDATE -- To some of the Top Commenters, I am aware that the position was not created specifically for Brownback, which is why I didn't say it was. I don't believe it ought to exist at all.

Last KY Abortion Clinic Fighting for Life

Yes, Life.  The lives of women suffering from malignant unwanted pregnancies.  Scratch that redundancy: all unwanted pregnancies are malignant.

Yes, Malignant, as in Tumor.  Until it takes a breath outside the womb, it's a tumor.  Dictionary definition: a collection of rapidly growing cells endangering the health and life of the host.  That's what a fetus, an embryo, a blastocyst, a sperm-penetrated egg is:  a tumor.

Yes, Clump of Cells.  Not a baby.  Not a child.  Not a "preborn" anything. Not a human being of any description.

Which is why anyone attempting to deny the bodily autonomy of a woman by restricting abortions is a sex-terrified, woman-hating, freakazoid piece of shit who should have been drowned at birth.  Which would be murder. Unlike abortion, which is simple removal of a malignant tumor.

Deborah Yetter at the Courier:

Gov. Matt Bevin's administration is seeking to shut down Kentucky's only abortion provider, prompting a federal lawsuit by the clinic to block the move it says would have “a devastating impact on women.”

Bevin’s administration has ordered the EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville to stop providing abortions starting Monday, claiming it lacks proper agreements for patient care in the event of a medical emergency.

EMW's lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Louisville, calls the order "blatantly unconstitutional" and asks a federal judge to bar the Bevin administration from revoking the EMW clinic's license.

"They've made it clear they won't stop until no woman can get an abortion in Kentucky," said Donald L. Cox, a lawyer for EMW. "It's just an attempt to ban abortion in Kentucky."

A Bevin spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

SNIP

But EMW, joined in its lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, said the clinic already complies with the law and says that if the state succeeds in forcing it to close, “abortion will be effectively banned in the commonwealth.”

The lawsuit asks a federal judge to temporarily block state efforts to stop abortions at EMW. It says the clinic has patients scheduled and an abrupt shutdown would deprive them of their right to the procedure.

SNIP

The state's new finding that the agreements are deficient amounts to a "bureaucratic sleight of hand," said Brigitte Amiri, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. "This is an attempt to ban abortion in Kentucky, plain and simple. We are fighting to keep this from happening."

SNIP

The dispute comes amid EMW's legal challenge to a new state law requiring doctors providing abortions to first perform an ultrasound and attempt to show and describe the image of the fetus to the patient. EMW and the ACLU argue the law passed in January by the General Assembly is unconstitutional.

The Crime of Existing

Existing while darker than a paper bag, that is.

From The Nation, first this:

“Get out of my country” may as well be the slogan of the Trump administration, directed at anyone who is not white or Christian or straight. But this country doesn’t belong to Trump; it belongs to all of us. We must stop it from being turned into a crime scene.

Then this:

Trump himself called for the DHS to go after nearly every undocumented immigrant, by pursuing those who (1) have been convicted of crimes, (2) have not been convicted but merely charged with a crime, (3) have committed any act that could be construed as a “chargeable offense,” (4) have used a fake Social Security number to work or pay taxes, (5) have availed themselves unlawfully of public benefits like food stamps or public assistance, (6) have a deportation order against them, or (7) pose a public-safety risk in the eyes of any immigration officer. These categories are so broad that they eliminate any veneer of “prioritizing” enforcement. The fourth category—using a fake Social Security number to work and pay taxes—is part and parcel of undocumented life. The seventh category offers immigration agents and law-enforcement officers so much discretion as to basically invite racial profiling. The second and third mean that immigrants will be particularly vulnerable in locales where policing and patrolling is discriminatory—which, in the United States, is many places.

SNIP

Herein lies the real messaging sleight of hand from a president who boasted that, on immigration, he has “the biggest heart of anybody.” The only way to achieve a mass-deportation agenda of the scope that Trump intends is to turn a person’s very existence into a crime. The DHS memos released last week show us just how that will be done.

 And yet again, no one who isn't 100 percent full-blooded Amer-Indian Native Americans has the right to criticize immigrants of any kind for any reason.  They're here, they're Americans.  You're American, you're an immigrant.

The Resistance: The Navy Follows Its Own Rules

Sometimes, presidents have to learn the hard way that the military has rules - based on U.S. Constitution - that trump even the Commander in Chief.

Andrew Wolfson at the Courier:

An unspecified number of Navy Special Warfare forces have been punished for flying a Trump flag on a military convoy seen traveling through Louisville last month, igniting fears of an authoritarian state among some motorists.

An inquiry by the unit’s commander found that the service members “violated the spirit and intent of applicable DoD regulations concerning the flying of flags and the apparent endorsement of political activities,” according to a statement issued Tuesday by Lt. Jacqui Maxwell of the Naval Special Warfare Group 2 in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

She said “administrative corrective measures” were taken with each individual based on their respective responsibility.” She declined to elaborate on the punishments or how many were punished.

The Navy had previously said flying the flag was inappropriate and that a command inquiry would be initiated.

The spotting of the flag-flying convoy on Interstate 65 on Jan. 29 ignited a furious national debate.

Dissent Being Outlawed

They've tried it before, many times, and failed.  But they never had an all-authoritarian government and judiciary to support them before.

Charlie Pierce:

For example, in North Dakota, they are considering a law that would decriminalize…wait for it…"accidentally" running over protesters. From KTLA:

Rep. Keith Kempenich introduced the bill, which states that if a driver "unintentionally" causes injury or death to someone blocking traffic on a roadway, then the driver will not be liable for damages. Kempenich said he was spurred to act after Dakota Access Pipeline protesters last year moved to block public roadways, scaring some of his constituents. "It turned from a protest to basically terrorism on the roadways, and the bill got introduced for people to be able to drive down the roads without fear of running into somebody and having to be liable for them," he told CNN.

What kind of a mind comes up with this? Presumably, if he'd been in Selma in 1965, Representative Kempenich would have run down those terrorists on the Edmund Pettus Bridge because they were keeping him from getting to the Piggly Wiggly. The problem is that there's a kind of fever for suppressing dissent out in the states that has been unleashed with the inauguration of an authoritarian president.

In Minnesota, a proposed law would increase the penalties for public protest on a highway, and another proposed law would force any protester convicted of illegal assembly or public nuisance to recoup the police expenses for monitoring the demonstration. In Indiana, they're pushing a similar bill, as The Indianapolis Star reports.

An Indiana lawmaker says disturbing newscasts of chaotic and sometimes violent protests across the U.S. helped lead him to propose a bill that would direct police to use "any means necessary" to breakup mass gatherings that block traffic.

Any means, Gracie? Boy, this must be a real problem.

When asked, Tomes could not cite specific instances where protesters prevented or delayed an emergency response.

But…but…scary newscasts!

But he said he's seen troubling scenes on the nightly news and thinks people are overcomplicating the issue. "People get off track and get off on sidebars on this. It's just to get the streets opened up for traffic flow, for emergency personnel, for commerce — that's all," said Tomes, who added that he thinks protesters should get a permit if they want to block-off a street. As written, the bill would give authorities 15 minutes to "dispatch all available law enforcement officers" after receiving a report of 10 or more people illegally blocking traffic "with directions to use any means necessary to clear the roads."

But leave it to the newly insane state of North Carolina to come up with a new law dedicated merely to the protection of delicate fee-fees. The News Observer tells the tale.

The proposed legislation would "make it a crime to threaten, intimidate, or retaliate against a present or former North Carolina official in the course of, or on account of, the performance of his or her duties," Bishop said. "Because lines are being crossed," Bishop, a Republican who represents the 39th District in the North Carolina Senate, wrote in an email from his Senate campaign account.

And who is brother Bishop? Glad you asked.

Bishop was one of the sponsors of House Bill 2, or "the bathroom bill" which McCrory signed into law. The bill was criticized for nullifying local non-discrimination ordinances statewide, directing transgender people to use restrooms and locker rooms matching the gender on their birth certificate in government-owned buildings and initially revoking the right to sue in state court for discrimination.

Which, it should be said, is the reason that people are so upset with McCrory in the first place. Nevertheless, Bishop is soldiering on.

Bishop said such behavior should come with a five-year prison sentence and said he'll introduce the legislation to make it so in North Carolina, similar to an ordinance in the District of Columbia. "So should it be in North Carolina," he wrote. "This is dangerous. Jim Hunt, Bev Purdue and other governors never faced riotous mobs in their post-service, private lives, without personal security." Bishop said he also will urge his fellow legislators "to take other appropriate steps to guarantee the personal safety of Gov. McCrory by all means necessary."

These are going to be hard days for public protest and, if things keep up the way they're going, there are going to be more and more public protests. I genuinely fear for the safety of the protesters at the Standing Rock camp. But, more than that, I'm afraid that too many people don't understand the purpose of public protest anymore. We're going to have to remember that there is no provision in the Constitution providing for freedom of convenience.

More from Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

Thus, someone's "right" to make money (enumerated in the Bill of Rights somewhere?) would be considered superior to another's exercising 1st Amendment rights, both according to state law and Ericksen's values. If the protesters carried guns, it would become a 2nd Amendment issue and a different matter altogether. Ericksen was Donald Trump's deputy campaign director in Washington.

Keeping Us Safe From Arthitic Octogenarians

Digby on one of the many airport detainee horror stories:

This is just awful. And for no good reason, none. Our threat level from refugees and foreign visitors from these countries is minuscule compared to the threat from some sick person with an AR-15 coming in an mowing down little children in a grade school or people watching a midnight movie or workers in an office or any of the tens of thousands of shootings, purposeful and accidental, that happen every single year in this country.
Donald Trump wants to make that situation worse by letting loose a flood of weapons on the streets of America even as he detains 75 year old ladies from Iran. It is insane.
You tell me who's keeping us safe.

The Resistance: Vow to Preserve and Protect

A gesture, sure, but one that stirs something in people who still value citizenship.

Crooks and Liars:

In response to the most unqualified person in history taking the oath of office as President, the ACLU is organizing a movement to get all of us to swear to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. You can do this on your own, and/or you can visit their website and download a shareable statement for social media and blogs.

PS. The ACLU isn't wasting any time. They have as of this writing, filed a FOIA request for Donald Trump's financial records to conduct an audit of his conflicts of interest.

It will be the first of many opportunities the ACLU will take to say to Donald Trump

The Resistance: Destroying One Weapon

That list of Muslims that Smirky/Darth started and the Orange Menace was hoping to use to launch his unconstitutional deportation of non-christians?

It's gone.  President Barack Obama destroyed it.

Alex Daugherty
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted with permission from Tribune Content Agency 

 

Republish
Reprint

WASHINGTON — In 2001, Roskana Mun was a 16-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant living in one of New York City's most diverse neighborhoods. After 9/11, the U.S. government started tracking foreign Muslim men and boys, and Mun's neighborhood changed as men were detained and in some cases deported.

"Women had to juggle raising a whole family and face the threat of detention," Mun said. "Girls had to step up, and young people who were 13 or 14 years old had to quit school to work."

Mun now works for DRUM, a New York-based advocacy group for South Asian immigrants. She said the U.S. government's tracking of men from Muslim-majority countries for a decade had disrupted daily life, causing shops to close in neighborhoods like Midwood, Brooklyn, after hundreds of men were deported.

The tracking program administered by the Department of Homeland Security, called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, required males 16 and older from 25 countries to undergo additional vetting in the interest of national security.

After 10 years and 13,000 deportations, President Barack Obama stopped enforcing the program in 2011. It hadn't caught a single terrorist.

On Thursday, the DHS announced that the regulatory framework for the system has been dismantled, effectively gutting a quasi-Muslim registry just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House. The move prevents the dormant program from being quickly restarted to track the movements of certain Muslim men living in the United States.

The Constitution.  It's not just for white, straight, christian, male wingnuts.

Molly Knew

Via Political Animal:

The Only Free Speech is Praise For the Orange One

Try it, motherfucker.  The smoke from burning flags across the country will block out the sun.

TPM:

President-elect Donald Trump sent out an early-morning tweet Tuesday musing that burning the American flag should result in jail time or “loss of citizenship."

It is unclear what prompted the message.

Flag burning is a protected act of free speech under the U.S. Constitution. In Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 ruling, the Supreme Court invalidated prohibitions on desecrating the American flag that were enforced by 48 states. A law passed the same year by Congress making it a federal crime to desecrate the flag was also struck down by the Supreme Court.

A constitutional amendment to ban flag burning or desecration has been proposed multiple times in the years since, but failed to pass, most recently in 2006.

Despite this precedent, Trump spokesperson Jason Miller remained unconvinced by CNN’s Chris Cuomo’s insistence that flag burning is a “protected constitutional right” during a Tuesday appearance on “New Day.”

“Can we agree on that?” Cuomo asked.

“No, we completely disagree,” Miller replied.

Miller repeatedly said that such a “despicable” act “should be illegal” and tried to pivot to a discussion of Trump’s cabinet appointees.

“You have to defend what is legal in this country under the Constitution. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean that it's not legal, it's not right for somebody. What do you want this country to be, only what you like? Only what President-elect Trump likes?” Cuomo asked.

“Flag burning should be illegal,” Miller said again, insisting there was a “big difference” between protecting the First Amendment and burning the American flag.

You know what's "despicable" and already is illegal? Profiting from your position as an elected official.  Like shaking down foreign leaders for bribes if they want a meeting with El Presidente.

Ian Millhiser at Think Progress:

But even setting aside Trump’s unconstitutional call to criminalize flag burning, which became a staple of American conservative politics long before Trump emerged as a presidential candidate, Trump is calling for something even more extraordinary. He wants to strip citizenship — and with it, voting rights — from political dissidents. Federal law does permit Americans to lose their citizenship after “committing any act of treason against, or attempting by force to overthrow, or bearing arms against, the United States,” but flag burning is a far cry from treason or armed rebellion. It is a political statement, and democracy depends on the free expression of political ideas.

The president-elect of the United States has proposed stripping a political protester’s very status as an American. In the process, he would take away that person’s ability to vote — and thus to vote for someone other than Donald Trump. Today, Trump proposes this consequence for a very specific category of speech that most Americans view as odious. But once a person’s voting rights can be made contingent upon their beliefs, or their silence, then elections become increasingly meaningless.

Not to mention that criminalizing protest is yet another dead give-away of fascism, as if we needed another example.

His Precious Religious Liberties

In case you've forgotten just how narrow and exclusive are the rights that repugs claim to defend, here's a reminder from Erik Looms at LGM that with Scalia dead, the new U.S. Supreme Court defender of white, straight, right-wing male freakazoids is Sam Alito:

... his precious religious liberties that apply only to right-wingers seeking to oppress women or gays.

Schools Warned Away From Myth-Promoting ArkPark

Because deliberately shoving anti-science lies down the throats of innocent children should be a crime.

Linda Blackford and Bill Estep at the Herald:

A secular foundation has contacted hundreds of public schools in Kentucky to warn them against taking field trips to the Ark Encounter, the new amusement park featuring a 500-foot replica of Noah’s Ark and a belief that the world is only 6,000 years old.

That's a representation of a myth, not a "replica" of anything real.  And if it were, the fraud built by modern construction equipment is still orders of magnitude too small to carry what they myth-mongers claim it did.

Officials with the Freedom From Religion Foundation say field trips would expose children to religious proselytizing that would violate the constitutional separation between church and state.

In reply, Kentucky Education Commissioner Stephen Pruitt sent a message to school districts late Monday saying that neither outside groups nor the Kentucky Department of Education should dictate field trip selection. But, he wrote, “it is important to remind educators that at all times and under all circumstances, field trips should be a direct extension of classroom learning. As a result, all off-site trips should be directly related to the school curriculum and should seek to maximize student learning by enhancing the classroom experience.”

All public school field trips should be approved by the school’s Site-Based Decision Making Council, made up of the principal, teachers and parents, and local school boards. Brad Hughes, spokesman for the Kentucky School Boards Association, said districts are encouraged to make sure that field trip approval policies are in place at the school and district levels.

Foundation co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said the group sent letters to more than 1,000 school districts in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia warning against organizing trips to the Ark.

The foundation has heard from parents concerned their districts will organize trips, such as year-end field trips.

“That would be completely inappropriate,” Gaylor said. “This is an attempt to proselytize children. The public school is to educate, not indoctrinate.”

Donald Ruberg, an attorney for the Grant County schools and an expert in education law, said he thinks the foundation’s position that school field trips would be impermissible in all cases is wrong.

“I think they are grossly overstating their case,” he said. “That’s not a correct interpretation of the law, in my opinion.”

You want to challenge the Establishment Clause, motherfucker, you better be stacking up piles of money taller than that fake boat to defend all the lawsuits from parents who don't want their children abused by freakazoid grifters.

How Austerity Budgets Make Politicians Stupid, Broke and Criminal

And Kentucky Governor Lying Coward is following this script with his costly and ridiculous cuts to Medicaid, kynect, higher education and everything that makes the Bluegrass state worthwhile.

First Kansas, which has no money to open the public school system this fall because of massive tax cuts for the rich and big business.  Then Louisiana, which has no money for anything at all.  Now Colorado.

Think Progress:

Colorado Springs will pay back destitute people it illegally jailed because they couldn’t pay court fines, the city announced Thursday.

The city will also discontinue its debtor’s prison policy, which violated both the U.S. Constitution and a 2014 state law in Colorado. The system usually targeted non-jailable offenses like jaywalking, violating park curfews, or drinking in public.

More than 60 victims of the city’s debtor’s prison policy are getting repaid with interest under the $103,000 settlement with the state’s American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chapter. Under the city’s previous “pay or serve” sentencing policy, people who couldn’t afford fines for non-criminal violations like panhandling near highways were forced to spend one day behind bars for every $50 the court said they owed. The settlement sets compensation for 66 pay-or-serve victims at the rate of $125 per day they were jailed.

SNIP

Three quarters of the time, the people jailed for being broke had been brought to court for an offense that carries no jail time under the relevant statute. Yet jailed they were, as the city treated poverty as a criminal offense.

Debtor’s prisons are banned by the Constitution, as the Supreme Court established in the early 1980s. Yet the practice has made a resurgence in communities around in the country in recent years, as cash-starved states and towns enacted a huge number of new fines, process fees, and related courtroom charges associated with non-criminal offenses. All but two states have added fees or increased existing ones since 2010, according to a 2015 review by the Alliance for a Just Society. The threat of jail time for non-payers gives teeth to those stiffer fee structures — and politicians too focused on fee revenues often fail to notice they’re spending more to illegally jail the poor than the fees are even bringing in, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The increasing reliance on criminal fees for revenue, and the corresponding debtor's prison revival, coincide with the severe budget crunch most communities experienced during and after the financial crisis and Great Recession. Some of that budget pressure was inevitable given how deep a crater the Wall Street crisis created. But in many corners of America, those conditions were exacerbated by decades of starve-the-beast fiscal policy designed by conservatives hell-bent on shrinking government down small enough to "drown it in the bathtub."

The tax-cutting obsession promoted by generations of conservative lawmakers has harsh consequences for all manner of public programs.

That's it, right there. Cutting taxes forces slashes in public services, which hurts the economy, which sends revenues plummeting, which forces more cuts in public services and so on until we have the lords-n-serfs economy Matt Bevin and his billionaire buddies want.

When State Governments Go Bad

Outlawing abortion.  Criminalizing peeing in public restrooms. Restricting religious freedom to freakazoid bigots.

Undercover Blue at Hullabaloo:

Perhaps there should be a national registry to monitor state governments with a history of committing terrorist acts against the United States. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least eleven.