When All Anchor Babies Are Slaves, Only Full-Blooded Indians Will Have Slaves

One fucking drop of white blood, you motherfuckers, and it's out to the cotton fields!

My own ancestors pre-date the Articles of Confederation in America by 50 years, but that won't protect me or my 85-year-old parents.

Illegal, schmillegal.  Until 1924, any non-Asian who got any part of their body over the border into America was a citizen.

We needed bodies - lots and lots of big, strong, foreign bodies to build this country and do for pennies a day the work slaves used to do for free.

So they came in their millions, the ancestors of all of today's slope-headed, mouth-breathing morons screaming about "illegals."

Especially this motherfucker.  Mickelson, Mickelson ... sounds like anglicized bohunk to me.  Clap him in irons!

Charlie Pierce:

Submitted for your approval, one Jan Mickelson, radio talk-show host and power within the Bible-banging, hayshaking Iowa Republican base to which the party hands the first big test in its nominating process. Mickelson is a big deal; he was the host and maître d' of the Christianist festival at which Scott Walker made such a splash back in April. The party base in Iowa is Mickelson's audience. So Mickelson's views on important issues like, say, immigration, carry enough weight to affect the entire process going forward.​

I said, "Well I'd would put them on the end of the highway, on western part of the interstate system, and I'd put them on the eastern side of the state, right there on the interstate system, and in the north on the Minnesota border, and on the south Kansas and Missouri border and I would just say this: 'As of this date' -- whenever we decide to do this -- 'as of this date, 30--' this is a totally arbitrary number, '30 to 60 days from now anyone who is in the state of Iowa that who is not here legally and who cannot demonstrate their legal status to the satisfaction of the local and state authorities here in the State of Iowa, become property of the State of Iowa.' So if you are here without our permission, and we have given you two months to leave, and you're still here, and we find that you're still here after we we've given you the deadline to leave, then you become property of the State of Iowa. And we have a job for you. And we start using compelled labor, the people who are here illegally would therefore be owned by the state and become an asset of the state rather than a liability and we start inventing jobs for them to do.

Sanders Berns the Village

Have to agree with the youtube commenter who calls this the best Bernie video yet. Pass it on.

Condemning People in Pain to Ignore the Facts on Heroin, Still and Again

Did you see this? The Obama administration has a revolutionary plan to help law enforcement officials partner with health experts."  No, it doesn't.  Any plan that does not deal with the fact that bans on prescription painkillers are driving thousands of desperate people in chronic pain to heroin is a waste of time and money as well as a crime against public health.

It's spreading.  The stupidity of KASPER out of Frankfort has infected Washington.  Now everybody in the country gets to suffer in agony because the fucking War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs doesn't have enough victims.

Shame on you, President Obama. You know better.  Shame!

Tara Culp-Ressler at Think Progress:

The Obama administration unveiled a new strategy to combat heroin abuse on Monday, pledging $2.5 million in additional funds to target five “high intensity drug trafficking areas.” The plan, which aims to pair law enforcement officials with health experts, is notable for its emphasis on connecting heroin users with treatment rather than focusing on putting them behind bars.

In the 15 states participating in the pilot program, a public health official will coordinate “heroin response teams” and help track the number of overdoses in their region. More first responders will be trained about how to administer naloxone, a drug that can reverse overdoses from heroin and prescription painkillers.

The new strategy “demonstrates a strong commitment to address the heroin and prescription opioid epidemic as both a public health and a public safety issue,” according to Michael Botticelli, the Obama administration’s director of national drug control policy.

QOTD: Why Public Education Must Die

Zandar:

Public education is no longer a right for American kids.  It's a weapon to be used to keep them in poverty, to keep them weak, to keep them down.

Ragionevole for Governor!

No, there is no such county as Jonesburg in Kentucky, nor any county seat by the name of Sharp's Peak.

But there should be. Because atheists are way more justified discriminating against freakazoids than any freakazoid ever could be justified discriminating against anyone else.

Crooks and Liars:

James Schlarmann
Posted with permission from The Political Garbage Chute

SHARP'S PEAK, KENTUCKY - When Kentucky's Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis defied the most recent federal order to perform her job duties as prescribed, regardless of the sexual orientation of the people seeking services and denied marriage licenses to gay couples again, that was the last straw for Michael Ragionevole, another Kentucky clerk in nearby Jonesberg County.

"When Ms. Davis turned those couples away," Ragionevole told The Political Garbage Chute, "I just about lost my shit and threw my remote through my TV." Ragionevole says that in his 12 years as a clerk in Kentucky he has had to marry all kinds of people who didn't share his lifestyle or beliefs. "I'm an atheist in Kentucky. There are more of us than you'd think, but we're still very much so in the minority. So while I'm not gay, I can sympathize with people being treated as less than human, and I know for a fact there are a lot of people in this state and around the country that would have no problem banning atheists from getting married."

Ragionevole told us that he has decided to protest Davis' resistance court-ordered equality under the law in a way that he acknowledges "might be a touch hypocritical," but that will "hopefully serve to just prove a point and inspire Davis to stop being such a bigoted shithead." Mr. Ragionevole told our interviewer that he will begin denying marriage licenses to any couple that is of the Christian faith, and tell them that his "profound, deep, and personal views of religion" prevent him "furthering the damage that Christianity has done throughout its history.

"You see, unlike homosexuality, I can actually point to incidents of violence, murder, and lawlessness instigated by so-called ‘good, clean Christians," Ragionevole told us. "The Ku Klux Klan? They're Christians. The inquisitions? Perpetrated by Christians. Timothy McVeigh? A Christian nut job. Who bombs abortion clinics and threatens doctors that work at them regularly? Yup, that's right, violent Christian sociopaths. I don't see a lot of violence at gay pride festivals, do you?"

While he is ethically and legally forbidden from asking the religious beliefs of the couples who come into his office for a marriage license, Ragionevole says he can figure out who to disenfranchise through simple observation.

"If I see any crucifixes on the bride or groom, they're outta there. If I hear them hold a prayer, they're gone. If I get even a whiff of Christendom, I'm sending them packing. Ms. Davis can marry them if she wants to," Ragionevole told The Political Garbage Chute, continuing to add that he "will stop kicking Christians out of my office when Davis stops kicking LGBT couples out of hers."

"If they can cite their religious beliefs, I can site my deeply-held irreligious beliefs. See how that works? It's all wrapped up in the First Amendment," Ragionevole said.

The Other Anti-American Flag KY Has Not Taken Down

It still flies under every U.S. and Kentucky flag in the Commonwealth, over post offices and state government buildings and veteran cemeteries, to the eternal shame of every jingoistic motherfucker propagating its lies.

It's the POW/MIA (sic) flag, and it needs to come down now. 45 years of lies is enough.

Rick  Perlstein at TPM:

You know that racist flag? The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down.

Oh, wait. You thought I was referring to the Confederate flag. Actually, I’m talking about this.

I told the story in the first chapter of my 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan: how Richard Nixon invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam in a way that rendered the United States as its sole victim.

It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.” During the Nixon years, the Pentagon moved them into a newly invented “Missing in Action” column. That proved convenient, for, after years of playing down the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam, in 1969, the new president suddenly decided to play them up. He declared their treatment, and the enemy’s refusal to provide a list of their names, violations of the Geneva Conventions—the better to paint the North Vietnamese as uniquely cruel and inhumane. He also demanded the release of American prisoners as a precondition to ending the war.

This was bullshit four times over: First, because in every other conflict in human history, the release of prisoners had been something settled at the close of a war; second, because these prisoners only existed because of America’s antecedent violations of the Geneva Conventions in bombing civilians in an undeclared war; and third, because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists (and incidentally paid forward by us in places like Abu Ghraib): see this as-told-to memoir by POW and future senator Jeremiah Denton.

And finally, our South Vietnamese allies’ treatment of their prisoners, who lived manacled to the floors in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages” in prison camps built by us, was far worse than the torture our personnel suffered. (Time magazine quoted one South Vietnamese official who was confronted with stories of released prisoners moving “like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms,” and responded with incredulity that such survivors even existed: “No one ever comes from the tiger cages alive.”)

Be that as it may: it worked. American citizens enacted a bizarre psychic reversal. A man from Virginia Beach, Virginia, described to a reporter the supposed treatment of American prisoners in North Vietnam: “they just dig holes in the ground and drop them in. They throw food down to them, and let them live there in their own waste.” In fact, that was how prisoners were treated in South Vietnam—as recently revealed in a shocking Life magazine exposé.

SNIP

Actually, as I document in The Invisible Bridge, it’s more complicated than that: many of the prisoners were antiwar activists. One member of the “Peace Committee” within the POW camps, Abel Larry Kavanaugh, was harassed into suicide after his return to the U.S. by the likes of Admiral James Stockdale, who tried to get Peace Committee members hanged for treason. Stockade would become one of the nation’s most celebrated former POWs and a vice-presidential candidate. Kavanaugh took his life in his father in law’s basement in Commerce City, Colorado, in June 1973. Americans would agree that one of them—Stockdale or Kavanaugh—is not a hero—though they would disagree about which one is which.

That damned flag: it’s a shroud. It smothers the complexity, the reality, of what really happened in Vietnam.

We’ve come to our senses about that other banner of lies. It’s time to do the same with this.

Better Without God

Not just good.  Better. Way fucking better than freakazoids.

 

Ronald Lindsay in Free Inquiry:

We humanists can achieve a better understanding of the practices and policies that will lead to a better world because—if and when we actually engage in the critical thinking we espouse—we use reason and evidence to examine the consequences of different courses of action and how these relate to the promotion of common human interests. In other words, we give serious thought to the moral aspects of our policies and practices. By contrast, too many religious people still adhere to their religious doctrines (or to religious leaders who interpret the doctrines for them) as a guide for moral decision-making. These doctrines are not typically justified by showing how adherence to them will improve the human condition. Instead, they are justified because they supposedly reflect the will of God. In practice, this means that they reflect the musings of some semiliterate, God-intoxicated, self-designated prophet from centuries ago.

This is no way to reason about moral issues, especially moral issues that relate to public policy. As indicated, humanists do have a significantly better way of addressing these issues. We don’t look for answers in scripture. We have no holy texts. We don’t defer to some authority who will instruct us on what to do. We have no authorities. Instead, we carefully consider the objectives of a particular policy or practice, examine the relevant evidence, and then reason together. Humanists don’t look above for answers; we look to each other. Humanist ethics is far superior to religious ethics if for no other reasons than it is focused on the good of humanity and its principles are subject to rational debate, testing, and revision.

Freakazoid Fail

Divine Irony:

Because a few facts just might be enough to undo a lifetime of indoctrination by parents and pastors.

"Improve Community Policing" Does Not Cut It

No, Mr. President.  Dusting around the edges of "community policing" is not going to solve the problem of roid-ranging KKKops killing blacks with impunity.  Only withholding federal funds from an entire state until they implement Guardian training and purge the fucking oath keepers will turn this catastrophe around.



Full transcript here.

Obamacare Bending Poverty Curve in Kentucky

It's happening. In Kentucky, bad health and poverty go hand-in-hand.  Get people healthy, and you've won half the battle against poverty.

Floyd County Times:

The number of Kentuckians receiving preventive health services has risen dramatically since Medicaid expansion took effect in late 2013, new data from the state Department of Medicaid Services (DMS) show.

In calendar year 2014, more than 159,500 Medicaid recipients received preventive dental services, nearly 51,300 were screened for breast cancer and more than 35,600 received colorectal cancer screenings – more than double the number of people who received those services in 2013.

“I have said from day one that giving every Kentuckian access to affordable quality health care coverage will help us tackle our ongoing abysmal health outcomes,” Gov. Steve Beshear said. “We are now seeing our citizens take even greater advantage of the opportunity to receive these life-changing screenings for cancers like breast and colon. No longer are their medical choices limited to emergency room or charity medical visits. As these preventive health services increase so does the compensation to our medical providers who are helping to improve the wellness of our Kentucky families. I’m excited about the enormous gains we’re seeing and even more excited about the long-term implications for our state’s health.”

AynRandy the Losingest Loser of All the Losing Losers

The Tribble-Toupeed One is failing as a presidential candidate not because he couldn't compete with Trump on the crazy train, but because he can't shake off the label of "loser."

Trump's campaign is all about labeling himself the all-time winner of everything, and everybody else a loser.  That doesn't really stick to anyone who has actual accomplishments, but it shines a spotlight on Rand Paul being forced to create his own fake "board of certification" because he couldn't pass the real certification board exams for eye doctors.  Loser!

And compared to Ben Carson, a world-famous neurosurgeon, Rand Paul with his pathetic practice in rural Bowling Green, Kentucky looks like even smaller and weaker. Loser!

John Amato at Crooks and Liars:

Oh, how the mighty Libertarian has fallen. When Rand Paul held his filibuster, the media, RNC and many in the conservarazzi were joyous. Not only did he take a principled stand, they said, but he also had the supporter of his Dad's followers by his side to win straw polls and raise tons of cash off of. He seemed like a top tier 2016 presidential candidate. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened so far. In fact, he's fallen so far that his campaign produced a Donald Trump attack ad.

SNIP 

Attacking Trump hasn't been fruitful for any candidate so far, including Rick Perry, so I'm not sure why Paul's campaign thought this was a good idea. It's probably more the fact that he's slipping into the second tier of candidates and feel pressured to try something, anything, to get the poll numbers up. It won't work.

As usual Trump responded. Donald Trump mocks Rand Paul, calls on him to quit presidential race

Repug Judge Bunning to Criminal Clerk: Fuck Your Religion, Do Your Job

Yes, he did.  And the freakazoid bitch is still using taxpayer dollars to deny human rights to human beings.

Enough! Charge the dominionist piece of shit with domestic terrorism and ship her to Guantanamo. See if her invisible friend in the sky can protect her from rectal feeding.

Zack Ford at Think Progress:

According to District Judge David L. Bunning, Davis’ job of authorizing valid marriage licenses does not violate her religious liberty nor her freedom of speech. “Our form of government will not survive unless we, as a society, agree to respect the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions, regardless of our personal opinions,” he writes. “Davis is certainly free to disagree with the Court’s opinion, as many Americans likely do, but that does not excuse her from complying with it. To hold otherwise would set a dangerous precedent.”

Davis’ primary objection was Gov. Steve Beshear’s (D) directive ordering county clerks to comply with the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling. She has separately filed suit attempting to hold him responsible for any costs she might face from the same-sex couples’ suits. But Bunning found that the directive simply “serves the State’s interest in upholding the rule of law” and upholding Obergefell.

Davis claimed Beshear’s directive requires her to “authorize” same-sex marriage, which violates her religious beliefs. Bunning refutes this claim: “The form does not require the county clerk to condone or endorse same-sex marriage on religious or moral grounds. It simply asks the county clerk to certify that the information provided is accurate and that the couple is qualified to marry under Kentucky law. Davis’ religious convictions have no bearing on this purely legal inquiry.” It’s the government’s speech to authorize the marriage, not Davis’.

Bunning also addressed the claim that this job requirement creates a religious test for the office of County Clerk, a point also made in a satirical video posted this week by Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink. Because Davis’ job is simply to confirm that a couple has met the legal requirements to marry, “it is not a sign of moral or religious approval,” nor is Kentucky requiring her to “express a particular religious belief as a condition of public employment” or “forcing her to surrender her free exercise rights in order to perform her duties.” She is free to practice her religion however she wishes, but “her religious convictions cannot excuse her from performing the duties that she took an oath to perform as Rowan County Clerk.”

Will Matt Bevin Let Fracking Poison Mammoth Cave?

He's a repug bidness man full of anti-gubmint FREEDUMB.  Of course he will.

James Bruggers at the Courier:

Pushing a toxic mixture of natural gas liquids through an aging pipeline near Mammoth Cave National Park threatens the world-famous cave’s unique and fragile ecological systems, the National Park Service is warning.

“The National Park Service is concerned about the potential for a catastrophic failure of the ... pipeline” within areas designed to protect endangered cave shrimp and other rare park resources, park superintendent Sarah Craighead wrote recently in a letter to federal energy regulators.

The pipeline is 70 years old and was designed to carry a different product, natural gas, said Bobby Carson, chief of science and resource management for the park. “It’s been underground for a while” and may not be safe for carrying the liquids, which if spilled could damage the park’s rare natural resources, including a variety of endangered species, he said in an interview this week.

The proposal by Kinder Morgan to convert part of its subsidiary Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. operations from carrying natural gas to moving natural gas liquids has stirred controversy all year along a 256-mile path through Kentucky, with citizen groups, environmental organizations and some local officials objecting. Many have asked for a full environmental study rather than the less extensive review now underway.

Yeah, it's a federal agency decision, but Bevin vows to defy the EPA on coal rules; why would he obey the feds on fracking?

Independent Curtis Unlikely to Affect KY Governor's Race

Repugs are going to hold their noses and turn out to vote for Bevin no matter how much they may hate him.  If Conway continues to pander to repugs who will never, ever vote for him or any other Democratic candidate, he'll chase away even more Democratic voters than repug-lite Alison did last year.

Disillusioned Democratic voters stay home; they don't go to the polls hoping to find a third option.

Jack Brammer at the Herald:

Digital entrepreneur Drew Curtis and his wife, Heather Curtis, paid $500 and submitted more than 9,000 signatures Monday morning to enter the race for Kentucky governor and lieutenant governor as independents.

The secretary of state's office said a few hours later that the husband-and-wife team from Versailles had submitted at least 5,000 valid signatures of registered Kentucky voters, as required by law, and therefore would appear on the Nov. 3 ballot.

The major party names on the ballot are Democrat Jack Conway and running mate Sannie Overly, and Republican Matt Bevin and running mate Jenean Hampton.

Tuesday is the deadline for independent candidates to enter the race.

Drew and Heather Curtis, both 42, are not the first married couple to run for the state's two highest elective offices. Steven Maynard and his wife, Bonnie, of Inez ran for governor and lieutenant governor in the 1995 Democratic primary. Paul Patton won the nomination.

The Conway campaign said it had nothing to say about the Curtis campaign. The Bevin campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

 Of course not.  Curtis is irrelevant.

Responsible Gun Ownership Kills 12-year-old in Eastern Kentucky

No, restricting just hand guns or semi-automatics doesn't solve the problem. There are too many fucking guns of all kinds in the hands of people too fucking stupid to keep them from killing their own fucking children.

From the AP:

CATTLETSBURG — A coroner says a 12-year-old girl has been killed by her brother in an apparent accidental shooting.

Boyd County Coroner Mark Hammond told The Independent (http://bit.ly/1UANbHC) that Halee Marshall, who was a seventh-grade student at Boyd County Middle School, was shot once Monday evening and died at the scene.

He said the family was unloading a pickup truck as they moved into a new home in Catlettsburg when Marshall's brother accidentally fired the gun. Hammond said the girl's brother said he had cleaned the gun and didn't remember reloading it.

The newspaper reports grief counselors were sent Tuesday to Boyd County Middle School.

 And you know what those counselors are saying to that captive audience of 12-year-olds? "Don't worry about the guns lying around your house, honey.  This was just a freak accident.  It won't happen to you."

Lying to children about guns should be a felony.

Forget Tree-Hugging: DoD Says Global Warming Is A Security Threat

The Pentagon is a funny old dog.  When it says stuff like "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction," conservatards cheer and liberals scoff.  (Guess who was right.) 

But conservatards scoff and liberals cheer when it says stuff like this (and guess who's right again):

DOD Releases Report on Security Implications of Climate Change

The "Report on National Security Implications of Climate-Related Risks and a Changing Climate" was provided to Congress yesterday.

The report responds to the request by the Senate Committee on Appropriations for information on the National Security Implications of Climate Change made in the report to accompany H.R. 4870, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2015.

Specifically, the committee requested that the undersecretary of defense for policy provide a report that identifies the most serious and likely climate-related security risks for each combatant command and the ways those commands integrate risk mitigation into their planning processes. Further, the report was to provide resources required for effective responses and the timeline of resource needs.

The report reinforces the fact that global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national security interests over the foreseeable future because it will aggravate existing problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions that threaten domestic stability in a number of countries.

The report finds that climate change is a security risk because it degrades living conditions, human security, and the ability of governments to meet the basic needs of their populations. Communities and states that are already fragile and have limited resources are significantly more vulnerable to disruption and far less likely to respond effectively and be resilient to new challenges.

The Department of Defense's primary responsibility is to protect national security interests around the world. This involves considering all aspects of the global security environment and planning appropriately for potential contingencies and the possibility of unexpected developments both in the near and the longer terms. It is in this context that the department must consider the effects of climate change -- such as sea level rise, shifting climate zones, and more frequent and intense severe weather events -- and how these effects could impact national security.

To reduce the national security implications of climate change, combatant commands are already integrating climate-related impacts into their planning cycles. The ability of the United States and other countries to cope with the risks and implications of climate change requires monitoring, analysis, and integration of those risks into existing overall risk management measures, as appropriate for each combatant command.

The report concludes the department is already observing the impacts of climate change in shocks and stressors to vulnerable nations and communities, including in the United States, the Arctic, Middle East, Africa, Asia, and South America.

The report is posted at http://www.defense.gov/pubs/150724-Congressional-Report-on-National-Implications-of-Climate-Change.pdf.

Remember that catastrophic global warming is not, repeat not, a threat to the planet.  The planet will survive no matter what we do.  What's at risk is human civilization.  A super-heated, runaway-greenhouse-effect planet will keep orbiting the sun and many of its organisms will continue to live and reproduce, albeit under vastly different conditions.

But it will finally be rid, after several million years, of the parasite that thought itself beyond destruction simply because it had the power to destroy itself.

True Story of the Bluegrass Pipeline Premiering at the Kentucky This Thursday

I saw the preview and it is wonderful. If you are not moved after watching it to take action for justice yourself, at the very least you will learn why it is a bad idea to get on the wrong side of nuns.

​

Please spread the word!

You can invite your friends on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/events/1640998036148861/

DVDs will be available at the screening, and can be ordered online at www.selluswilder.com/dvd.

Not Even Pretending Anymore

I'd recommend this ...

These, on the other hand, are persons:

but the "debate" has already moved on. It's not about whether blastocyts are human; it's about what to do with the living, breathing, sentient adult women who are really just disposable vessels for said blatocysts.

It's been a long time coming and those who track this issue closely have been sounding the alarm for a while. Presidential candidates for one of America's two major parties are explicitly saying that a fetus is more important than the live woman inside whom it is gestating. If they had to choose, they would not choose the woman.

I don't know how they can make their misogyny more obvious. Whatever reverence they have for fetuses is equalled by their disdain for women as anything but human sacrifices.

SNIP

The lesson here is that anyone who takes their rights for granted is a fool. It's all well and good to say "it's over" and now we can put all that unpleasantness behind us. But we are dealing with primal issues here and they do not change easily. Don't ever assume that we can't go backwards. We're watching it happen before our eyes.

Secular Suggestions

How do atheists and other freethinkers live a moral life without the threat of hell or promise of heaven?  By following the non-religious moral sense with which we are all born, and which living among other human beings hone and improve.

No, NOT secular "commandments."  The whole point of freethinking is to make your own decision, not obey orders.

Divine Irony:

confrontingbabble-on:

Suggested secular humanist principles…to live by…

From http://time.com/3582354/heres-a-secular-alternative-to-the-ten-commandments/

It May Be Your Opinion, But It's Still Wrong

Divine Irony:

I have had so many conversations or email exchanges with students in the last few years wherein I anger them by indicating that simply saying, “This is my opinion” does not preclude a connected statement from being dead wrong.

It still baffles me that some feel those four words somehow give them carte blanche to spout batshit oratory or prose. And it really scares me that some of those students think education that challenges their ideas is equivalent to an attack on their beliefs.

-Mick Cullen

http://www.houstonpress.com/arts/no-it-s-not-your-opinion-you-re-just-wrong-7611752

Flying

Divine Irony:

(Source: atheismwethinkmore)

"one of the most fundamental rights of any democracy"

And it's being restricted to rich, white, straight xian men not by some anonymous historical force or an invisible sky wizard, but by republican elected officials in Congress and every state in the union, Mr. President. Stop pretending that's not the case.  Call out the voter-suppression motherfucking liars for lying about fucking their mothers over suppressing the vote.



Full transcript here.

We're Number 27: KY Almost Cracks the Top Half for Economic Strength

Coal's fading fast and renewables are growing, which is why we're no longer languishing at the bottom with Mississippi and Kansas.

But that will all change when Matt "Sam Brownback is a genius" Bevin gets elected governor in three months.

AOL has the study from Business Insider:

We ranked the economies of these states, and DC's, on seven measures: unemployment rates, gross domestic product per capita, average weekly wages, and recent growth rates for nonfarm payroll jobs, GDP, house prices, and wages.

27. Kentucky

Kentucky is famous for its bourbon, its horse races, and its coal. All three are disproportionately big employers in the state: About 4,000 Kentuckians work in distilleries, 1,300 in horse ranching, and 11,000 in coal mining.

Kentucky fell in the middle on most of our metrics. The state saw nonfarm payroll jobs rise by 2.2% between June 2014 and June 2015, close to the national rate of 2.1%. The state's average weekly wage was a bit lower than average, however, at just $836 compared to the national average of $1,035.

Dear Business Insider:  It's horsing farming, not horse ranching. East of the Mississippi they are horse farms. Not ranches.

Cult Sacrifices

The greatest immediate and existential religious danger to America is no longer the freakazoid god-botherers; it's the insatiable Baal-maw of gun worship.

Rude Pundit:

If we continue to do nothing, we are all mentally ill and we are all extremists. We are just another bunch of Mayans, watching the high priest politicians cut out the hearts of the children in Newtown, the churchgoers in Charleston, the women in Lafayette, all to appease the malicious gods of the NRA, holding the gore aloft so all may see it, hoping that our sacrifices are deemed worthy, not realizing that the gods are illusions and that we're just killing our way into oblivion. 

Taibbi: Bland Was Murdered

I think a more accurate word is "lynched," but Matt Taibbi nails it:

We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the job. Of course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of depression during an illegal detention should be the same kind of crime. It's especially true given our long and sordid history of overpolicing misdemeanors.

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for such absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."

In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even had stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where any black male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around written proof that he had a job.

What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness" and being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"? What's the difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest for "disorderly conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's anything more than a semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.

Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can avoid getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting cops like dangerous dogs or bees.

But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some instances, it won't stop police from stopping people without reason, putting their hands on suspects or jailing people like Bland for infractions that at most would earn a white guy in a suit a desk ticket. That's not just happening in a few well-publicized cases a year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or even millions of incidents we never hear of.

That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was stopped and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but it's even worse than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass people, using misdemeanors and violations as battering ram – a campaign that's been going on forever, and against which there's little defense. When the law can be stretched to mean almost anything, obeying it is no magic bullet.

KY Caves to Traitors in Defense of Slavery

Jefferson Davis' only connection to Kentucky is that he was born here.  He grew up in Mississippi and lived in Tennessee.  His statue in the Capitol Rotunda serves one purpose only: to pander to modern confederates pining for slavery days.

And Cowardly Worm is back:

Gov. Beshear’s Statement on Jefferson Davis Statue  

FRANKFORT, Ky. (Aug. 5, 2015) – “The Historic Properties Advisory Commission by law has control over the statues in the Rotunda of the State Capitol, and recently I asked the Commission to review the appropriateness of the Jefferson Davis statue remaining in the Rotunda. 

The Commission received thousands of public comments and consulted with state historians. After reviewing all the information, the consensus it reached is that the Jefferson Davis statue represented a part of the state’s history and will remain in the Capitol. However, the panel voted to establish a committee that would determine ways to ensure the statues, including Jefferson Davis, are displayed in the appropriate historical context.

While many Kentuckians feel that it would be preferable for the Jefferson Davis statue to be in a museum setting, the addition of this educational and historical context is critical. The generations to come must understand the enormous toll of the Civil War that tore apart this nation and the tragic issue of slavery at the root of that war.

Kentucky played a unique historical role as the birthplace of the presidents of both sides of the conflict. We must ensure that dark chapter of our nation’s past serves to educate in ways that ensure such a tragedy can never happen again.” – Gov. Steve Beshear.

Fifty Years of Voting Rights, and It's Just Getting Harder

Kentucky may not demand photo ID, but it still makes it next to impossible for anyone who works or doesn't have a car to get to the polls during the 12 hours on Election Day that is the only time you can vote.

And is Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, running for re-election, making easing Kentucky's voting restrictions part of her platform?  Is gubernatorial candidate Jack Conway or attorney general candidate Andy "I Shill for MotherFrackers" Beshear?

They are not.  Repugs with Ds next to their names, all of 'em.

Ed Kilgore:

Thursday is the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And since said act was largely vitiated by a conservative majority of SCOTUS in 2013, and congressional Republicans have barely lifted any fingers to restore it, the president’s going to do everything possible to force voting rights into the national consciousness that day, and perhaps even into the GOP debate, as reported by The Hill’s Jordan Fabian:

President Obama will call for the restoration of the Voting Rights Act on its 50th anniversary Thursday, the White House said.

Obama will hold a teleconference to commemorate the landmark legislation and call for its renewal, following a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that voided one of its central provisions.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who rose to prominence in the 1960s as a civil rights leader, will participate.

The event will allow Obama to draw a sharp contrast with Republicans, many of whom argue some provisions of the 1965 law went too far. It will take place on the same day as the first GOP presidential primary debate.

Also in no coincidence, there's a new book out on voting rights.

In Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, journalist Ari Berman looks not just at the significance of this landmark civil rights law, but at what's happened to voting right in America since Lyndon Johnson signed the VRA in 1965.

Rolling Stone recently spoke to Berman about his new book, the trauma of the 2000 Florida recount and what the gutting of the VRA means for the upcoming presidential election.

Corporate Greed, Not High Wages, Causes High Prices

In the '80s, at the beginning of the Reaganomics destruction of the middle class, pundits wrung their hands over the greedy CEOs paying themselves 40 times what their lowest-paid workers earned.

Today that gap is 200 times, and those same pundits are wringing their hands over workers wanting a tiny slice of the massive productivity and profit gains that have gone solely to the obscenely rich.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

This is a good discussion on the bogus connection between higher minimum wages and higher prices. The real issue leading to higher prices are CEO salaries and corporate profit margins, not a slightly higher minimum wage.

Chipotle is just the latest company in the city to claim labor costs as the reason for price hikes. It sounds logical. Wages go up 10%, prices of menu items go up 10%. It’s fair, right? But Chipotle co-CEOs Steve Ells and Monty Moran’s earnings in 2014 were $28.9m and $28.2m, respectively. Ells also brought in around $42m in stock options in 2014, yet prices must go up because the lowest paid workers received a $1 raise? This is yet more evidence that executive pay and corporate profit margins must be maintained, at the expense of minimum wage workers.

It doesn’t make sense considering Chipotle’s growth in both sales and profits over the past year. The company saw a 47.6% increase in profits to $122.6m, while sales were up 20.4%, to $1.09bn. Yet, with the company wanting to maintain specific profit margins, prices go up, even when they don’t have to.

Ells and Moran saw their own personal pay increase 15% year-to-year, according to Chipotle’s own reporting – that’s millions of dollars – but sadly, minimum wage debates over the past year have highlighted how companies, from Chipotle to McDonald’s to Walmart, just can’t afford to give their workers a living wage.

Ells and Moran could easily have taken a pay cut, or frozen their income for the year, but instead Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold was clear about what the company wanted:

California, and San Francisco in particular, has a high cost of doing business. In San Francisco, for example, our occupancy costs are about double the Chipotle average as a percentage of sales, and our menu prices there are right around the average for Chipotle restaurants around the country, so increases to wages can have a greater impact than they might elsewhere.

Of course, people largely blame higher prices on lazy workers, supporting the CEOs destroying this country’s middle class in order to buy another ivory backscratcher.

Bryce Covert at Think Progress:

If the minimum wage were increased to $15 an hour, prices at fast food restaurants would rise by an estimated 4.3 percent, according to a new study. That would mean a McDonald’s Big Mac, which currently goes for $3.99, would cost about 17 cents more, or $4.16.

The study from Purdue University’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management also found that in order to compensate for the higher cost of employee compensation at limited-service restaurants, or those without table service or tipping, if they decided to change food sizes rather than prices, the Big Mac would shrink somewhere between 12 and 70 percent.

The price increases would be a good deal larger if the minimum wage were raised to $22 an hour, or average private sector pay: the authors found they would increase by 25 percent, raising the price of a Big Mac by about a dollar.

The study notes that it doesn’t take into account the costs of turnover or any savings gained from higher wages. “People often hypothesize that if you raise pay and offer benefits, turnover will go down. I don’t think we answered the question of whether that reduces turnover,” Richard Ghiselli, professor and head of the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, said in a press release. In 2013, the turnover rate for franchises was 93 percent, and it can cost $4,700 per worker who leaves. A previous study found that for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, turnover drops by 2.2 percent, and a $15 wage would come with $5.2 billion in savings for the fast food industry.

That study also found that between the extra money from higher prices, savings from lower turnover, and greater overall economic growth, the fast food industry could easily cover the increased costs of having to pay a $15 minimum wage without reducing any jobs and still have money left over. Other research has found that all employers could react to higher minimum wage costs in the same way — through savings from reduced turnover, higher prices, improved efficiency, and increased demand — and therefore avoid layoffs.

Real world evidence also supports the idea that fast food would deal with higher wages without cutting jobs. In the face of a planned minimum wage increase in Georgia and Alabama, for example, fast food restaurants were going to respond by raising employees’ performance standards. A major review of all the available research on how minimum wage increases impact job growth found that it’s close to zero, and state-level reviews found that those that have raised wages over recent decades haven’t hurt job growth.

The research showing that the fast food industry has ways to cope with a $15 minimum wage comes as workers in that industry, who have staged widespread strikes over the past three years demanding they be paid at least that much, have experienced recent victories. San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles have raised their minimum wages to that level, while fast food workers across the state of New York notched a recent victory that means they will likely be guaranteed that minimum. A $15 minimum wage proposal has even reached Congress.

If the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity gains since 1968, it would be $20 per hour.  If it had kept pace with the increases in corporate profits and CEO pay, it would be $25 per hour.

And to make up for the theft of our pay for the last 40 years, minimum wage should be $50 an hour, with those earning more but still less than the lowest-paid CEO getting proportionately more.

Yes, that's how out of whack wages and corporate profits have gotten.

Beshear Whines Like a Little Bitch About Weak-Ass New Coal Rules

If every ounce of coal vanished tomorrow, life in Kentucky would go on without a hiccup. Steve Beshear, Jack Conway, Matt Bevin, Mitch McConnell and every other Big-Coal-cock-gobbling politician in the state knows it.

Gov. Beshear’s Statement on EPA Rule Announced Today

FRANKFORT, Ky. (Aug. 3, 2015) – “I am extremely disappointed and frustrated by the huge changes the EPA made from the proposed rule. What is being proposed for Kentucky is disastrous – disastrous for our declining coal economy and equally disastrous for our very important manufacturing economy. The EPA claimed that it listened to the comments received on the proposed rule for the Clean Power Plan. It is clear from the emissions numbers the EPA has set for Kentucky that the agency did not listen to us. This rule leaves the Commonwealth with few, if any, alternatives to formulate a plan without significant harmful impact to rate payers, manufacturing companies and the overall economy.

Attorney General Jack Conway and I will continue to fight this onerous rule in the courts. During my entire term as Governor, I have remained steadfast in my support of Kentucky’s important coal and manufacturing industries, and the affordable energy and good jobs they provide the Commonwealth and the nation.

This is an extensive rule, and we will be meeting with stakeholders to assess its potential impacts. We will, however, continue to explore ways for Kentucky to comply with the rule should it become law, because we believe that a Kentucky specific plan would be better than a federal plan imposed on us.” – Gov. Steve Beshear.

Lies, motherfucking lies, and motherfucking liars lying about fucking their mothers.

Meanwhile in Reality World, here's Kevin Drum:

But Michael Grunwald isn't buying the hype. He's not impressed with Obama's plan to reduce power plant emissions 32 percent by 2030:

That’s nice, but by the end of this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the power sector’s emissions will already be down 15.4 percent from 2005 levels — about half the anticipated reductions in just a decade, and before the plan goes into effect. In other words, even under the strengthened plan, the rate of decarbonization is expected to slow over the next 15 years. What, did you think the strongest action ever taken to combat climate change would actually accelerate the nation’s efforts to combat climate change?

....If you’re really ranking them, the Clean Power Plan is at best the fourth-strongest action that Obama has taken to combat climate change, behind his much-maligned 2009 stimulus package, which poured $90 billion into clean energy and jump-started a green revolution; his dramatic increases in fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, which should reduce our oil consumption by 2 million barrels per day; and his crackdown on mercury and other air pollutants, which has helped inspire utilities to retire 200 coal-fired power plants in just five years.

Kevin thinks that's a little unfair, but generally agrees on the main point.

In the meantime, Grunwald is right to say that the new mandates aren't really all that tough. At the same time, the fact that we have any power plant mandates at all really is a big deal. Just setting the precedent that the federal government should regulate carbon emissions from power plants is a critical first step, and if it survives court challenges and congressional temper tantrums it will likely lead to further cutbacks in the future. And that's a big deal.

No. Outlawing all fossil fuel use starting yesterday would be a big deal. Anything short of that is sucking Big Oil cock while the oceans rise.

How Country Music Gets Class Wrong

The true heir to the class-infused folk and protest music of Woody Guthrie and his contemporaries is not jingoistic and xenophobic - when not outright racist - modern Country, but rather Rap and Hip-Hop.

Erik Loomis on Anglaeena Presley:

Presley is also mostly wrong about what her father’s money funded. That tax money went to a military buildup, the nation’s oversized and racist prison system, servicing the nation’s debt, and replacing the high tax rates once paid by the rich. In 2012, the 1 percent became the richest in recorded history earning 19.3 percent of American income, surpassing the previous record of 18.7 percent, set in 1927, just before this income inequality contributed to the Great Depression. Between 1979 and 2007, the one percent captured 53.9 percent of the increase in U.S. income while average income for our elites grew by 200.5 percent versus just 18.9 percent for the bottom 99 percent. Between 1978 and 2011, CEO pay rose 726.5 percent versus 5.7 percent for workers.

This doesn’t mean the song is wrong or bad. Presley may well be presenting her and her father’s point of view, one typical of much of the white working class. Presley grew up in Beauty, Kentucky. That is in Martin County, on the West Virginia border, deep in Appalachia. Martin County is over 99 percent white. Thirty-seven percent of the county’s residents live below the poverty line. Despite this, Martin County gave Mitt Romney 83 percent of its vote in 2012, compared to 15 percent for Barack Obama. This was one of the highest votes for Romney in the state, with more than 89 percent of nearby Leslie County voting for Romney being his highest. If these people vote, it’s overwhelmingly for a political party with the open agenda of destroying the social safety net they benefit from at higher rates than most of the country. Even when some of the mine jobs were union, these were not middle class folks; coal mining was always dangerous and not well-paid. But the mythology of the middle class can exist when you see people who are below you in social class. In Martin County and evidently for Presley, that’s largely black people, people who do not live there, who are in Louisville, Cincinnati, New York City. These are the others taking money from the hard working taxpayers of Martin County, even as social services flow into that impoverished place.

This nation has a toxic relationship with class and race. The politics of middle class mythology reinforce the corporate powers that increasingly control our lives. If all whites are middle class–or all whites who include lifelong coal miners left with nothing–then politics that actually promote the interests of the poor are undermined. If the poor consider themselves “middle class,” how do we create institutions that effectively demand a more robust welfare state and worker power? I’m not sure we can until we disconnect popular ideas of class from race. And given the upsurge in racism over the past seven years, we are far from accomplishing that goal.

No, Your Religious Delusions Do Not Trump the Law, Science, Medicine, Other People's Rights or a Pair of Clubs

And everyone who doesn't understand that doesn't deserve any rights at all. When are we going to start restricting the massive illegality and criminal abuse committed by freakazoids?

Ian Millhiser at Think Progress:

Missouri state Rep. Paul Joseph Wieland (R) does not want his daughters’ health plan to cover birth control — even though two of those daughters are adults. So he and his wife sued the Obama administration. Though this lawsuit was rejected on jurisdictional grounds by a federal trial court, a panel of three appellate judges reinstated the suit on Monday. Should the Wielands ultimately prevail in their effort to deny birth control coverage to their daughters, the decision could have implications far beyond the Wieland family, potentially forcing insurance companies to maintain elaborate records to track many of their customers’ views on religion and sexual morality.

Wieland v. Department of Health and Human Services seeks to expand the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which allowed many private businesses to ignore federal rules requiring them to include birth control in their employee’s health plans if the business’ owners object to contraception on religious grounds. The Wielands claim that a similar rule should apply in their case. Because they claim that they “cannot provide, fund or in any way be a participant in the provision of health care coverage” that includes birth control “without violating their sincerely-held religious beliefs,” they argue that they should be given a special health plan that does not include contraceptive care.

Are these adult daughters chained in their parents' basement that they cannot get jobs and apartments and buy their own contraception?  Because that's a crime and Wieland should be in prison.

But the daughters are just an excuse to make it impossible for anyone in the U.S. to get any kind of health care the Wielands and their freakazoid friends don't like.

The Wielands’ legal theory, moreover, could stretch far beyond families led by parents who object to contraception.

[I]magine a plaintiff who doesn’t just object to their daughters having birth control — they object to anyone having birth control. The nature of health insurance is that all of an insurance plan’s participants pay into a pool of money than any other participants can draw money out of when they need medical care. So even if a particular plaintiff’s own insurance doesn’t cover contraception, they would still be paying into a pool of money that other people could draw upon to pay for coverage that the plaintiff might object to. Moreover, while the insurance company might try to solve this problem by “walling off” the plaintiff’s premiums so that they could not be spent on contraceptive care, this would impose additional administrative costs on the insurer, and money is fungible. The only truly reliable way to ensure that a given insurance customer’s premiums are not used in a way that helps some woman, somewhere in the country to obtain birth control is to forbid the insurance plan from offering contraceptive coverage to anyone.

That might be an acceptable outcome for Paul and Teresa Wieland, but it would be a truly extraordinary expansion of American religious liberty law. A law intended to give religious objectors personal exemptions to laws they oppose would instead permit those objectors to impose their beliefs on thousands — potentially even millions — of individuals who do not share those beliefs.

Conway Wins Fancy Farm; Bevin Disses Whole Event

It's hard to imagine a deeper insult to Kentucky's oldest and most revered political event than a candidate for U.S. Senate refusing to attend as AynRandy did, but Matt Bevin managed to top it.

Sam Youngman at the Herald:

The annual political picnic here has long been a partisan battle of wits and one-liners, where the politicians trade barbs and laughs and the crowd eggs them on.

But apparently nobody told Matt Bevin, the Republican candidate for governor in the November election.

On Saturday, while Democrats, including gubernatorial nominee and attorney general Jack Conway, used their time on stage to remind voters of Bevin's rocky past as a politician, Bevin took the stage to decry the nature of the event and call for unity.

In a sharp departure from the theme of the picnic, Bevin said he was glad to be at the event, which primarily serves as a fundraiser for St. Jerome's Parrish, but said that the people there "literally are celebrating the very worst elements of the political process."

 Now that, my friends, is chutzpah.  Bevin, running on the repug ticketm, representing the party suffering from what Charlie Pierce calls a prion disease, and having run one of the dirtiest primary campaigns in state history against Mitch McConnell last year, pleading for bipartisan unity.  At Fancy Farm.

Matt Jones, host of Kentucky Sports Radio and the emcee of the event, approached the lectern after Bevin finished, noting how unusual the speech was.

"Matt I've got to give you credit, that was a strong speech, coming to Fancy Farm and saying you don't like Fancy Farm," Jones said. "It's like me going to Rupp Arena and saying Rick Pitino is a better coach than Calipari."

 For you non-roundball fans out there, that would be suicide.

But Conway was on-message, reminding voters that McConnell's campaign last year called Bevin an "East Coast con man" and a "pathological liar," noting the size of the crowd and saying, "normally he's got to go to a cockfighting rally to get a crowd this big."

Conway said that Bevin "lies to us about the big things and the small things (and) we can't trust Matt Bevin to look out for us."

Conway and the Democrats that followed talked about Bevin's New Hampshire upbringing, his history of tax liens and his attendance at a pro-cockfighting rally.

And that's exactly how it happened last year: Alison Lundergan Grimes gave a great Fancy Farm performance, as Youngman puts it , "on the way to a 16-point loss."

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/08/01/3969995/at-fancy-farm-bevin-takes-an-unusual.html?sp=/99/164/#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/08/01/3969995/at-fancy-farm-bevin-takes-an-unusual.html?sp=/99/164/#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/08/01/3969995/at-fancy-farm-bevin-takes-an-unusual.html?sp=/99/164/#storylink=cpy

How to Tell the Difference

Divine Irony:

"A great country keeps the promises it made"

Just say it, Mr. President: Medicare is the socialistic foot in the door of American health care. But with no further inroads after 50 years, it's moving awfully damn slowly.



Full transcript here.

Kentucky Rejects Freakazoids; Keeps Anti-Discrimination Rule

No, not a statewide law to add sexual preference and gender identity to the state non-discrimination law.

But for the state that offered $40 million in tax dollars to the creation museum morons to take even this small step is a big fucking deal.

From the Herald:

The Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice on Friday said it's standing by a year-old policy that prohibits anti-gay comments to youths held at the state's juvenile detention centers.

The Liberty Counsel, a private religious group, threatened to sue the agency in a June 23 letter that said the policy violates the free speech of volunteers who want to counsel young inmates about homosexuality. The letter gave state officials until Friday to repeal the policy and reinstate David Wells, a Baptist minister asked to leave the Warren Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Bowling Green after he would not agree to restrict what he told inmates about their sexual orientation.

The Department of Juvenile Justice hopes to "foster an open and inclusive culture," Commissioner Bob Hayter wrote in a letter on Friday to Richard Mast Jr., an attorney for the Liberty Counsel in Lynchburg, Va.

"The department's regulation is neutral as to religion and requires respectful language toward youth by all staff, contractors and volunteers," Hayter wrote. "The regulation advances a compelling government interest in developing a trusting, therapeutic relationship with the children in DJJ custody, which requires an environment of unconditional acceptance."

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/07/31/3968722_kentucky-juvenile-justice-department.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

We Need A New Reconstruction

I've been reading Eric Foner's "Reconstruction:  The Unfinished American Revolution" and I am stunned by how many recent new stories fit perfectly in the unconstitutional, defiant-traitors mold of the confederates and ku klux klanners who refused to admit defeat and accept the end of slavery.

Gen. Sherman was certain that only permanent military occupation of the South would ensure that the traitors accepted Union control, and he was right.

Even 150 years later, the motherfuckers still think they can defy the federal government.

 

Ian Milhiser at Think Progress:

“The federal courts don’t have the authority to make us kill babies,” according to Oklahoma Republican Party Chairman Randy Brogdon. “Are the Supreme Court justices going to come down to Oklahoma and make us stop?”

Brogdon, a former state senator who once called for Oklahoma to form its own militia separate from that National Guard — and who previously cast doubt upon the Pledge of Allegiance because he objects to the line “one nation, indivisible” — offered his interpretation of the Supreme Court’s lawful authority on Friday. One day earlier, he signed a fundraising email making a similar pitch. “As Chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party, I call on the Governor and legislators to completely end the practice of abortion in Oklahoma,” Brogdon wrote in that email, adding that the state should “[s]hut Planned Parenthood down immediately for their illegal actions, and prosecute the abortion doctors who violate their oath to ‘do no harm.'”

The party chairman’s call to simply ignore court decisions protecting reproductive choice seeks to escalate many of his fellow Republicans’ attacks on legal abortion. Other states, however, have already gone so far in restricting abortion that it’s not clear that Brogdon’s proposal is as much of an escalation as it immediately appears to be.

And this:

Pharmacy owners do not have a constitutional right to refuse to dispense medicines that they object to on religious grounds, according to a decision handed down Thursday by a federal appeals court. Had the plaintiffs in this case prevailed, it would have not only permitted them to refuse to fill many birth control prescriptions (which is what these particular plaintiffs hoped to achieve), but it could have also potentially enabled pharmacists to refuse to fill a long list of prescriptions, including “diabetic syringes, insulin, HIV-related medications, and Valium.”

Stormans v. Wiesman concerned a Washington state rule that permits individual pharmacists to refuse to fill a particular prescription “so long as another pharmacist working for the pharmacy provides timely delivery,” but does not generally allow the pharmacy itself to refuse to deliver a prescription “even if the owner of the pharmacy has a religious objection.” Intervenors in the case, who joined on the side of the state officials defending the rule, include an HIV-positive man and a woman with AIDS who feared that they would be denied “timely access to their prescription medications” if the court sided with these plaintiffs.

 The motherfuckers never, ever quit.