Mitch and AynRandy Promoting Charter School Scam

The charter school scam has nothing to do with public education or children. It has to do with turning the biggest remaining unprivatized chunk of local, state and federal tax dollars over to private corporations.

And if their obscene profits mean that tens of millions of children get cheated out of education, that's just capitalism, baby.

From the Courier:

Republicans in Kentucky are pressing the state to allow charter schools, saying state policy on the issue could determine whether the next generation succeeds.

Any future Kentucky governor who ignores education, and the benefits that many think charter schools would bring, would be holding the state back, said former Louisville Metro Council member Hal Heiner, who is considering a run for governor in 2015.

“We just can’t continue to languish in the bottom third of the country across the state and leaving countless children behind because we’re not willing to offer educational options to children that are not well served by the current system,” he said.

Heiner’s comments came after a roundtable discussion in Louisville sponsored by his new Kentucky Charter Schools Association, which favors legislation that would allow for publicly-funded charter schools to replace failing public schools in the state.

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who sponsored legislation earlier this year to encourage the use of charter schools, attended the discussion and said their need in Kentucky represents a genuine crisis.”

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, who has advocated for charter schools for years, said after the panel discussion that charter schools are “a huge issue” politically. “It really shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” he said. “I think there are some within the educational establishment that feel threatened by it.”

Interesting comment, Senator I-couldn't-pass-the-opthamology-board-exams-so-I-created-my-own-fake-board. It's not the "educational establishment" that charter schools threaten.

Tom Sullivan at Crooks and Liars:

The education reform industry is hungry for a bite of "the Big Enchilada," the trillion dollars in public money spent in this country each year on public education.

 The charter, voucher and online schools reformers promote have been plagued by financial scandals and a checkered achievement record. Lack of academic and state oversight, coupled with reduced teacher standards have shown that leaving our children's education to the Wild West of corporate capitalism is no way to guarantee our children's or our country's future.

David Sheriff and his daughter found out just how wild school choice has become when she tried to use her diploma from Wisconsin Career Academy, a Milwaukee Public Schools charter school, to get into college.

David’s daughter Amanda enrolled and attended all four years of high school. She graduated, and got her diploma in 2009. After working for a few years she decided this summer she’d like to apply to college, so she says she looked into the medical assistant program at the Milwaukee Career College.

Surprise.

The Admissions Director said she’d have to get her GED because the charter school she attended wasn’t accredited. Amanda says she was shocked.
“I’m like, so basically you telling me that I have a 8th grade education, right now?”

Luckily for Amanda, there was a mix up on dates. She'd graduated before the school lost its accreditation. But David is not exactly sanguine about the outcome and took her cautionary tale of school choice to the local news. It's buyer beware. Voters, too.

Under the rubric of freedom, choice, competition and reform -- even after disastrous the Crash of 2008 -- voters are being offered more chances to be played by sharks in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate industries by public officials elected to protect the interests and futures of people like Amanda. But even record corporate profits are not enough. Parents with children in primary and secondary education are now targets as well. And why? What is the largest portion of the annual budget in all 50 states?

Alison Lundergan Grimes: Do you agree with Mitch McConnell about charter schools?

"Higher education shouldn’t be a luxury, or a roll of the dice

Actually, Mr. President, higher education - including vocational training - should be free.  That's the system that built a strong, prosperous California, before repugs ruined it.



Full transcript here.

Industry Always Lies

As the Kentucky battle against the Bluegrass Pipeline heats up, keep that in mind.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Industry fought against all evidence that lead exposure hurt people since at least 1767. Robin Russell-Jones rightfully compares that to the battle against fracking today, with industry saying that there are no major environmental problems at all with the process, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The lesson is to never trust industry positions on the environmental or health effects of their products. In fact, we’d be better off assuming they are lying and forcing corporations to convince us they are not.

Same with tobacco, same with pharmaceuticals, same with air pollution, same with Love Canal, same with DDT and dioxin, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

They lie because they have to. If they told the truth, no one would ever buy their shit and they'd go out of business. Or to prison.

And She Didn't Even Have a Taser

From Firedoglake:

In Decatur, GA a remarkable woman, an unarmed school clerk, convinced a would-be mass killer of school children to disarm and allow himself to be arrested.

More details here.

Meanwhile, the stupid prevails in Arkansas.

Annie-Rose Strasser at Think Progress:

A school in Arkansas wants any potential shooters to know: Its teachers are armed, and ready for a showdown.

Since the Arkansas Christian Academy is a private school, it is not subject to the rules for public schools in the state that prevent teachers from carrying firearms. To that end, the school has between one and seven staff members carrying a weapon on any given day, according to Pastor Perry Black, who this week posted signs that say “Staff is armed and trained. Any attempt to harm children will be met with deadly force.”

Hey, Racist Morons: Kynect IS Obamacare

And no, you can't have any. Fuck you.

Kevin Drum:

It comes from HuffPo's Jason Cherkis, and what I'd forgotten is that the state programs don't even call it ACA. They all have their own names:

A middle-aged man in a red golf shirt shuffles up to a small folding table with gold trim, in a booth adorned with a flotilla of helium balloons, where government workers at the Kentucky State Fair are hawking the virtues of Kynect, the state’s health benefit exchange established by Obamacare.

The man is impressed. “This beats Obamacare I hope,” he mutters to one of the workers.

“Do I burst his bubble?” wonders Reina Diaz-Dempsey, overseeing the operation. She doesn’t. If he signs up, it’s a win-win, whether he knows he’s been ensnared by Obamacare or not.

This is officially too good to check, but I checked anyway. If you go to the Kynect website, you can look far and wide and never get a clue that it has anything at all to do with Obamacare or ACA or even the federal government. "kynect is here to help you find the right coverage," the fact sheet says cheerily. "It’s a new kind of health insurance marketplace — convenient and easy to use. With one application, kynect will check your eligibility for programs that can help you pay for health insurance for yourself, your family or your employees." Roger that.

You don't want Obamacare? Fine. You don't get Obamacare. Fuck off. Pay the fine and don't even THINK about getting on-the-taxpayer medical care from an emergency room.

Also, fuck you Steve Beshear and all you oh-so-clever kynect creators. What are you going to do in five years when everybody knows how much better-than-Social-Security Obamacare is and they start demanding you replace Kynect with Obamacare?

Racist morons, ALL of you.

Not Even Medieval Feudalism Was This Cruel

Nine hundred years ago in Europe, lepers were allowed to beg on the streets, as long as they rang a bell to advertise their malady.

No such compassion today in South Carolina.

Think Progress:

Police officers will now be assigned to patrol the city center and keep homeless people out. They will also be instructed to strictly enforce the city’s “quality of life” laws, including bans on loitering, public urination, and other violations. And just to ensure that no one slips through, the city will set up a hotline so local businesses and residents can report the presence of a homeless person to police.

In order to accommodate all the homeless people who will now be banned from downtown, the city will partner with a local charity to keep an emergency shelter on the outskirts of town open 24 hours a day.

However, it’s unlikely the shelter, which can handle 240 guests, will be enough to handle the local homeless population, which numbers more than six times the available beds.

Homeless people can stay at the shelter, but they’re not permitted to walk off the premises. In fact, Columbia will even post a police officer on the road leading to the shelter to ensure that homeless people don’t walk towards downtown. If they want to leave, they need to set up an appointment and be shuttled by a van.

In other words, the 1,518 homeless people in the Columbia-area now have a choice: get arrested downtown or be confined to a far-away shelter that you can’t readily leave. Jail or pseudo-jail.

Not "pseudo-jail." Kidnapping and imprisonment, that's what that is.

And all you Columbia residents who still have a home - for the moment - forget a quick response to your 911 calls.  All your police officers are rounding up poor people and guarding your city boundaries against poverty cooties.

No, the Rich Are Not Paying Anywhere Near Their "Fair Share" in Taxes

If you're rich, it's highly unlikely you got that way entirely by yourself. You were born into a well-off family, and benefited from the many handouts, privileges and bonuses available only to the children of the wealthy. Everything you have you got because of the education, health care, safety, personal networks and experiences denied to the non-rich.

That's why industrialized democracies have progressive taxation: the more money you have, the greater percentage of your wealth you pay in taxes.  Because the more money you have, the more you're benefited from the civilized society those taxes pay to build.

But that's gotten lost in the only-the-rich-are-really-human economy of the last 30 years.

Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Silicon Valley mogul opines:

According to the latest 2012 IRS income-tax data, the top 1% of American taxpayers earned 20% of all income and paid 36% of all taxes. The top 5% earned 36% of all income and paid 58% of all taxes. Will even higher taxes help the economy? My experience in Silicon Valley tells me that high and so-called progressive taxes are a major cause of the country’s current economic problems, not the solution.

In fact the quoted numbers are the percentages of personal federal income tax paid by the referenced groups, not “all taxes.” This is a critical distinction, because the vast majority of taxes paid by most Americans are not in the form of personal federal income taxes. When one looks at all taxes, the share paid by the richest 1% falls by nearly half, from 36.7% to 21.6%. Since the top 1% “earned” (very loosely speaking) 21% of all income, this means the U.S. basically doesn’t have a progressive tax system.

 In the 1950s, under President Eisenhower, millionaires paid 90 percent of their marginal income in taxes - a policy that contributed to a world-beating economy that allowed middle-class workers to support a family, suburban mortgage, cars, vacations and college educations on a single income.

Now billionaires pay barely 30 percent of their incomes in taxes, and not even Somalia envies us our no-jobs, no-benefits, no-safety-net hellhole of an economy.

That's not a coincidence.

Commie KY Officials Charge Patriot On Gun Violation

Obviously, he was just teaching the boy personal protection.

From the AP:

A 25-year-old western Kentucky man has been charged with wanton endangerment after his girlfriend's first-grader son took a loaded handgun to school in his backpack.

Caldwell County school superintendent Carrell Boyd said the man put the.38-caliber revolver in the child's backpack to hide it from friends. Boyd said the child and the boy's mother weren't home at the time.

Nobody fired or even aimed the gun, nobody got hurt, what's the big deal?

When Fossil Fuels Have to Compete on Level Playing Field

They lose.

From Firedoglake:

“Fossil fuel power plants to be shut down in Germany because they’re no longer competitive.”

When Do the War Criminals Manning Exposed Go on Trial?

 The crime isn't the crime; exposing the crime is the crime.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

I don’t object to Manning being charged with a crime. I certainly strongly object to the way he was treated in prison. And I think the idea that his leaks merit a 35-year sentence is absurd. And as I said before, it’s particularly appalling when you consider the Obama administration’s “look forward not back” approach on torture. It’s hard to square this life-ruining sentence with the fact that no torturer was even considered worthy of being charged. I’d also say that at this point that it’s pretty hard to the American government to complain when other countries refuse to extradite whistleblowers.

Charles Pierce cuts to the heart of it.

Coming Soon to A School System Near You

Look out, Louisville, Lexington and Covington: this is your very near future. Kentucky has already starved urban schools of the funds they need to maintain high standards in teaching and infrastructure. We've already started reading the concern-troll stories about "problems" in city schools - as if they happened magically and not deliberately by malicious budget hackers. Any minute now the hysterical calls for privatized corporate schools will start.

karoli at Crooks and Liars:

You don't want to miss today's Salon article about Tom Corbett's systematic dismantling of the Philadelphia Public School system.

Want to see a public school system in its death throes? Look no further than Philadelphia.

There, the school district is facing end times, with teachers, parents and students staring into the abyss created by a state intent on destroying public education.

On Thursday the city of Philadelphia announced that it would be borrowing $50 million to give the district, just so it can open schools as planned on Sept. 9, after Superintendent William Hite threatened to keep the doors closed without a cash infusion. The schools may open without counselors, administrative staff, noon aids, nurses, librarians or even pens and paper, but hey, kids will have a place to go and sit.

The $50 million fix is just the latest band-aid for a district that is beginning to resemble a rotting bike tube, covered in old patches applied to keep it functioning just a little while longer. At some point, the entire system fails.

Things have gotten so bad that at least one school has asked parents to chip in $613 per student just so they can open with adequate services, which, if it becomes the norm, effectively defeats the purpose of equitable public education, and is entirely unreasonable to expect from the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

The needs of children are secondary, however, to a right-wing governor in Tom Corbett who remains fixated on breaking the district in order to crush the teachers union and divert money to unproven experiments like vouchers and privately run charters. If the city’s children are left uneducated and impoverished among the smoldering wreckage of a broken school system, so be it.

To be clear, the schools are in crisis because the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania refuses to fund them adequately. The state Constitution mandates that the Legislature “provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education,” but that language appears to be considered some kind of sick joke at the state capital in Harrisburg.

Philadelphia and Detroit are the victims of a manufactured crisis, created in order to serve billionaires' desires to privatize and profitize public education. As the author points out in this article, public education is a constitutionally guaranteed right that Corbett is intentionally removing from those without resources to fight back.

SNIP  

Philadelphia schools are being victimized by conservatives in order to do battle with their #1 enemy -- Unions. Tom Corbett, like most of his conservative governor pals, is floundering for support and looking to shore up his base. That base loathes unions. A secret Republican poll taken in June revealed that education was a concern across the state, and also that Corbett was in danger of losing his seat to a Democrat in 2014.

SNIP 

Also, let's not forget that conservatives are not alone in their efforts to balkanize and destroy universal public education and teacher's unions. Corporate Democrats like Cory Booker are just as anxious to reward their hedge fund pals with a new market, ripe for guaranteed profits at the expense of our kids' education.

The bills to permit "charter schools" should be pre-filed in the Kentucky General Assembly any day now. That's how it starts.  Beware.

Community Policing Done So, So Wrong

To protect, serve and set new standards of counter-productiveness.

Digby, on the firefighter who was almost tazed because he waved at local police officers:

Such "disrespect" can cost you your life on the mean streets of many inner cities. But the police are supposed to be different. Nowadays, a whole lot of them have adopted this gangster ethos of demanding instant "respect" and total compliance. They just use a taser to do it instead of a gun. Homicide requires a whole lot more paperwork.

This isn't confined to police officers either. My husband was in a TSA security line at LAX earlier this week and got into a conversation with a women who told him she'd been harassed at a Canadian airport recently. He said to her that she should always comply with the TSA because they have a lot of power over individual citizens and it makes no sense to fight it. He was yanked out of the line by TSA agents and taken to a secure corner where they quizzed him about what he meant by saying that TSA has "power" over people. They went through every item in his carry on bags and he almost missed his plane. He tried to explain that he was only telling the woman that she should comply with their orders, but they were apparently upset at being characterized as people who might abuse their power. So they abused their power and harassed a citizen for saying something completely obvious.

This is creeping authoritarianism. We've got millions of people in America wearing uniforms and carrying some kind of government authority and we're all going to have to learn that they will not be disrespected, even if they are delusional idiots. No, it's not the end of the world and we're not being rounded up and sent to the gulag. But it's not exactly freedom and liberty either.

And fifty years later it's still the hippies with their organic gardens that really piss them off.

While the Seattle PD is showing remarkable common sense during Hempfest, down in Texas they're sending in paramilitary SWAT teams to put a stop to unauthorized okra:

A small organic farm in Arlington, Texas, was the target of a massive police action last week that included aerial surveillance, a SWAT raid and a 10-hour search.

Members of the local police raiding party had a search warrant for marijuana plants, which they failed to find at the Garden of Eden farm. But farm owners and residents who live on the property told a Dallas-Ft. Worth NBC station that the real reason for the law enforcement exercise appears to have been code enforcement. The police seized "17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, 14 tomatillo plants ... native grasses and sunflowers," after holding residents inside at gunpoint for at least a half-hour, property owner Shellie Smith said in a statement. The raid lasted about 10 hours, she said.

Local authorities had cited the Garden of Eden in recent weeks for code violations, including "grass that was too tall, bushes growing too close to the street, a couch and piano in the yard, chopped wood that was not properly stacked, a piece of siding that was missing from the side of the house, and generally unclean premises," Smith's statement said. She said the police didn't produce a warrant until two hours after the raid began, and officers shielded their name tags so they couldn't be identified. According to ABC affiliate WFAA, resident Quinn Eaker was the only person arrested -- for outstanding traffic violations.

The city of Arlington said in a statement that the code citations were issued to the farm following complaints by neighbors, who were "concerned that the conditions" at the farm "interfere with the useful enjoyment of their properties and are detrimental to property values and community appearance." The police SWAT raid came after "the Arlington Police Department received a number of complaints that the same property owner was cultivating marijuana plants on the premises," the city's statement said. "No cultivated marijuana plants were located on the premises," the statement acknowledged.

Hey, these police agencies all have enough military gear to fight a small war. Do you think they aren't going to find reasons to use it?

This story about an ex marine officer testifying before his town council made the rounds this week and well... it's not exactly wrong:

"What we're doing here, and let's not kid about it, is we're building a domestic army and shrinking the military because the government is afraid of its own citizens ... "

"The last time more than 10 terrorists were in the same place at the same time was September 11th, and all these [armored] vehicles wouldn't have prevented it, nor would they have helped anybody."

"We're building an Army over here and I can't believe people aren't seeing it, is everybody blind?"

But what about the scourge of narco-terrorists growing illegal okra and blackberries, huh? What are we going to do about that?

This is how you do it right: 

See what happens when you legalize? Common sense, community and good humor.

by digby

Check out the bags of Doritos the Seattle Police Department is handing out to the Hempfest revelers:

That's called common sense community policing.

I can't go along with the Dark Side of the Moon thing though. It really must be heard at the highest volume possible.

H/T@GrahamKIRO7

 

Rallying Against Catastrophic Austerity in Kentucky

Protest rallies can seem futile to participants. Even with large turnout and good media coverage, the deafening silence from public officials discourages the most enthusiastic advocates.

But that government silence hides fear - fear of an aroused public suddenly aware of just how much they're getting screwed.

Beth Musgrave at the Herald:

Eighteen years ago, Sharon Yelton was living in public housing in Northern Kentucky with a new baby, few job prospects and no child care for her daughter.

Because Yelton was working part time and was going to college, she qualified for state child care assistance grants that paid for her daughter's child care for four years. She graduated with a degree in biology and later accepted a position at Harvard University's Natural History Museum.

"I don't know where my child and I would be without child care assistance," Yelton told a crowd of several hundred people Monday at a rally in the state Capitol. "It's not a hand out; it's a hand up."

Yelton, who has since moved back to Covington, recently graduated from law school. Stories like hers will become less common now that the state has slashed spending on its child care assistance program for poor working families, she said.

Kentucky isn't poor.  Kentucky's obscenely rich parasites and corporations are stealing from Kentucky's workers.

And Kentucky's governor and legislature are letting it happen and making it easier.

Don't enable the theft by refusing to add your voice to the resistance.

What Happens When Government Fails to Regulate

Corporate motherfuckers steal your precious resources, that's what.




Firedoglake:

Swiss company Nestlé , through its Nestlé Waters Canada “takes 265 million litres a year of fresh water from a Fraser Valley well”–for free.  British Columbia has no groundwater regulations.

Natural Gas Is Not the Answer - to Anything

Proponents of natural gas fracking (and extracting natural gas today does require fracking - all the easy-to-reach gas is gone) sound like that old Saturday Night Live parody: "It's a floor wax AND a dessert topping!"

Their frantic justifications, however, fall apart on close inspection.

Madeline Ostrander at The Nation:

The question remains, is fracking a climate solution or just a greenwashed version of “drill, baby, drill”? In the last two years, reports, models, and studies of natural gas extraction paint a less rosy picture. A number of think tanks and analysts are cautious, even pessimistic, about natural gas. Following are the main reasons:

—Fracking may not decrease our reliance on coal globally. It just sends the coal somewhere else. Guardian editor and energy researcher Duncan Clark recently crunched some numbers on coal and natural gas extraction. While American coal use has dropped in recent years (letting the United States claim that we’ve reduced our emissions), we are mining more of it than ever—and exporting it. Last year, for instance, Europe imported more American coal, leading to “a corresponding dramatic increase in coal generation” there, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The same report says natural gas may actually be competing with renewables, rather than helping to create a smooth transition to wind and solar. “Preliminary analysis suggests that access to investment capital for renewables may be tighter due to competition from gas,” says the report.

—Investing in natural gas could postpone our transition to renewable energy. The IEA’s Energy Technology Perspective 2012 suggests that spending money on natural-gas infrastructure might actually delay efforts to curb climate change, committing the economy to longer-term dependence on fossil fuels than is necessary:

The specific emissions from a gas-fired power plant will be higher than average global CO2 intensity in electricity generation by 2025, raising questions around the long-term viability of some gas infrastructure investment if climate change objectives are to be met. If near-term infrastructure development does not sufficiently consider technical flexibility, future adaptation to lower-carbon fuels and technologies will be more difficult to achieve.

—Fracking threatens water resources in an increasingly water-scarce world. The toll fracking takes on water supplies makes unconventional natural gas a dubious energy source for a warming world, where droughts are more common in some regions. Fracking uses 70–140 billion gallons of water every year, according to the EPA. Currently, nearly half of fracking industry wells are located in parts of the country facing high water stress, based on a report by the organization CERES.

—It’s not clear whether natural gas is actually as clean as it claims to be. Some analyses suggest that methane emissions at fracking sites make unconventional natural gas more polluting than coal.

Some of fracking’s worst environmental impacts could be reduced. A report by the IEA last year offered guidelines for the fracking industry to curb greenhouse gas emissions, water demand and pollution problems. That, of course, would require new regulations.
 Many analysts, including the IEA, acknowledge that the natural gas economy isn’t going to disappear soon. But full-bore, large-scale investment in natural gas fracking may not lessen our climate change problems (even if the industry stopped fouling or overusing water supplies).

According to economic forecasts by the Canadian think tank Pembina Institute, policies to rein in climate change (such as carbon taxes or fees) might decrease North America’s reliance on natural gas and certainly would not boost it significantly. Moreover, Pembina argues that we don’t need more natural gas to transition to wind and solar. Energy grids can use “smart” technology that manages and integrates different power sources until we build technologies to store energy generated by renewable sources.

 If that weren't enough, natural gas fracking is destroying clean water supplies.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Among the many problems with fracking is how we have prioritized the fossil fuel industry’s access to precious water supplies over that of regular citizens. In Texas, where fracking goes unchallenged and where extraordinary drought has challenged all users of water, towns are losing their water supply while water-intensive fracking operations drive precious water far underground.

I mean, when you are praying for a hurricane to replenish your aquifer, you know you are at the end of the line as a town.

Perfectly Legal to Terrorize Doctors Now

But only doctors who Trust Women.

Digby:

Meanwhile, the anti-abortion rights zealots won another big one the other day. They're now free to threaten and harass doctors as much as they want to:

An abortion opponent’s letter to a Wichita doctor saying someone might place an explosive under her car is constitutionally protected speech and not a “true threat” under existing law, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten summarily found in favor of Angel Dillard in the 2011 civil lawsuit brought by the Justice Department under a law aimed at protecting access to abortion services. The 25-page decision handed down comes after a flurry of sealed filings seeking summary judgment.

The judge wrote that the government supplied no evidence that actual violence against Dr. Mila Means was likely or imminent.

“It was a great victory for the First Amendment,” said her attorney, Don McKinney. “Obviously, we agree with the opinion. I appreciate the court held the U.S. Department of Justice accountable to the law and the evidence.”

He portrayed his client’s reaction to the ruling as “joy,” noting she had been deposed for eight or nine hours by the government.

“It was a long, difficult case,” McKinney said. “The government was very energetic and all the government lawyers worked very hard.”

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in an emailed statement that it is reviewing the court’s order and evaluating its options.

“The right of doctors to deliver lawful reproductive health services free from threats of violence is protected by federal law,” the department said.

The government sued Dillard under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) after the Valley Center woman wrote Means a letter in January 2011 when Means was training to offer abortion services at her Wichita clinic. At the time, no doctor was doing abortions in Wichita in the wake of Dr. George Tiller’s murder by an abortion opponent.

Dillard wrote in her letter that thousands of people from across the nation were scrutinizing Means’ background and would know “your habits and routines.”

“They know where you shop, who your friends are, what you drive, where you live,” the letter said. “You will be checking under your car every day because maybe today is the day someone places an explosive under it.”

The judge noted in his decision that Dillard sent the letter openly with her return address on it.

Dillard had testified in her deposition that “I did what the Lord asked me to do. He impressed upon me that I needed to write the letter and I did.”

Let's turn this around a little bit, shall we? What if a young American Muslim sent a letter with exactly the same wording to a US government official saying: "you will be checking under your car every day because maybe today is the day someone places an explosive under it?" Is that free speech too? Or is only ok for anti-abortion terrorists to make such threats?

If so, it's kind of odd because there aren't a whole lot of homegrown terrorist groups that have made good on their death threats over the years, but the anti-abortion movement is one that has quite an impressive body count.

Not that any of this matters really. The threats worked:

The judge also rejected the government’s request for a permanent injunction prohibiting Dillard from again contacting Means. He was persuaded by the defense argument that she would have no reason to do so since Means no longer has any plans to offer abortion services in Kansas.

The court also noted the government’s argument that Dillard had refrained from contacting Means while the lawsuit was pending.

“If the glare of publicity and the prospect of additional government legal action are sufficient by themselves to prevent further communications by Dillard, they would remain even in the absence of separate injunction relief,” the judge wrote. “That is, the government effectively concedes that Dillard is a rational person, at least in sensing the folly of additional communications with Dr. Means.”

In other words, because the threats succeeded in stopping the legal act the terrorist opposed, there was no reason to pursue this any further. Also, since the terrorist is rational rather than crazy, there's no reason to fear that her threats were real. Good to know.

We talk a lot about progress in this country and are proud of having overcome some of our deepest injustices by acknowledging the basic human rights of everyone. But anyone who thinks that once acknowledged it's then impossible to lose should take a look at what's happening to women's fundamental rights, right now, in state legislatures and courtrooms all over this country.

Hoist With Their Own Petard

If only we could trap all the corporate motherfuckers the same way.

Via Divine Irony:

Your Daily Government-Established Religion

It happens thousands of times a day in towns large and small in every state: before an official meeting of our Constitutionally Secular government, some freakazoid asshole gets up and says a prayer.

Most of the time, an elected official of our Constitutionally Secular government demands everyone present stand and bow their heads.

It's precisely the government-established religion the First Amendment specifically bars in so many words, and it just doesn't get more unconstitutional.

It's christianist sharia, as theocratic as anything Saudi Arabia or the Taliban can come up with, and it's a deadly insult to the majority of Americans who don't want their government tainted with religion - or vice versa.

It's a huge step on the lethal road to Dominionism, and it has to fucking stop right now.

maddowblog:

The Supreme Court is set to hear a case out of upstate New York, challenging the constitutionality of opening sessions of the town board with an official prayer. This week, both Congress and the White House weighed in, siding with the town practice. In a rather crass move, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has begun fundraising on the issue (thanks to reader R.B. for the tip).

Go on, Alison: tell the world that you're an even bigger Talibangelical than Mitch is. Just be sure to add that your position against the First Amendment puts you squarely on the side of the commiemuslinterristkenyannigger in the White House.

Running for office is a bitch, ain't it?

Budget Cuts and Privatization Deny Cancer Screenings to Kentucky Women

No, this is not because of Obamacare. This is because the austerity hysterics demanded budget cuts in the middle of a deep recession and forced the formerly effective state agency to contract out the service.

Mary Meehan at the Herald:

Once able to make appointments for breast and cervical cancer screenings at HealthFirst Bluegrass, women are now having to line up outside the clinic at 7:30 a.m. to be seen and still might not be screened that day.

Hundreds have had to seek screenings elsewhere, and some are being asked to pay $25 for what is supposed to be a free service, said Vicki Blevins, founder of Pink Connection, a Lexington-based nonprofit focused on breast cancer.

The process involves "too many hoops," Blevins said, and she fears many women will just go without the screenings, which are critical to early detection of cancer and the potential for successful treatment.

Because HealthFirst is taking women on a first-come, first-served basis and performs a limited number of procedures a day, Blevins said, "We have women go and line up and get to the door and be turned away."

There has been a dramatic change in this service since HealthFirst took over the program for the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department in July 2012, she said. Beginning in 2008, when Pink Connection was founded, Blevins worked with the health department to get poor women free breast and cervical cancer screenings through a state-funded program.

When the program was offered by the health department, appointments could be made over the phone, and the health department would follow up with patients with results and, if needed, referrals for care.

"We were so fortunate for so long," Blevins said.

No, not "fortunate." Women were receiving public services provided by a public agency, and it worked beautifully.

As soon as those services were contracted out to a private company, the program went to hell.

Who will be the first woman in Lexington to die of cancer because she was turned away for screenings by Health First?

Or rather, because the conservatards and privatizers put ideology ahead of women's lives.

The Man Who Might Have Made A Difference

I don't subscribe to the "Great Man" theory of history. Without Columbus, some other European would have established the principle of "massacre the natives and steal their land" in the Americas. Without Washington, the colonists would still have beaten the redcoats.  Without Lincoln, the Union would have ended slavery. Without Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler would still have lost.

But.

Ten years ago, one man might have stopped the Iraq clusterfuck before it got out of control. He was killed before he got the chance.

On August 19, 2003, Sergio Veira de Mello died - slowly and painfully - in the rubble of bomb in Bagdad.

A lot of powerful groups wanted to stop de Mello: al Qaeda, for cooperating with the U.S.;  Dick Cheney's neocon cabal, for trying to cut short their Excellent Iraq Adventure; Big Oil, for interfering with their Iraq oil fields takeover; Blackwater, for almost denying them hundreds of billions in security contracts.

al-Qaeda got the blame, justly or not. But of all the ironies and tragedies inherent in de Mello's death, the one that cut deepest and got me screaming in rage at the television was part of the heroic attempt to rescue him.

Hank Stuever in the Washington Post in 2010, on the HBO documentary "Sergio.":

As Sergio Vieira de Mello lay dying under the bombed rubble of the United Nations compound in Baghdad almost seven years ago, two U.S. soldiers worked to dig him out.

One admired the selfless way Vieira de Mello kept asking if everyone else was okay -- several U.N. staffers had been killed; dozens injured. The other soldier was disturbed by Vieira de Mello's steadfast refusal to accept his offer to pray with him. "I don't want to pray," Vieira de Mello reportedly told the reservist, Andre Valentine. "[Expletive] God. Please, just get me out."

"He really failed me," Valentine says in the new documentary "Sergio." "God sent two angels . . . and [Vieira de Mello] didn't believe in me. He didn't believe in the miracle."

Listening to the two soldiers talk about their attempt to save Vieira de Mello, the U.N. special representative in Iraq, is what helps lift "Sergio" from straightforward hagiography into a more gauzy and artful rumination on the miscommunications and opposite worldviews that culminated in the American war in Iraq. "Sergio," former war correspondent Greg Barker's film based on Samantha Power's biography ("Chasing the Flame"), airs Thursday night on HBO.

The soldiers who squeezed themselves into that hole did not (could not) know the complexity of the man they spent hours trying to rescue. Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian, was worldly in a style the movie celebrates -- son of a diplomat, Marxist in college, participant in the 1968 Paris riots; a multilingual, lifelong U.N. employee with a brilliant resume; a dashing philanderer; a man distrustful of religions, dictators and foreign policies that give off a whiff of imperialism.

"Sergio" takes care of all that, embroidering upon the now legendary narrative of Vieira de Mello as a serious and heroic man; a handsome and coolly charismatic peacekeeper (there are several references to Vieira de Mello as a cross between RFK and 007) who, if he'd not been tragically killed, might have made a real difference in rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq.

Motherfucking freakazoid wasted precious, irretrievable minutes trying to force mythology down de Mello's throat instead of saving his life. And the motherfucker brags about it. Blames and attacks de Mello, a man who, if he had lived, might have prevented the deaths in combat of thousands of Valentine's fellow soldiers.

Why are we atheists so angry?  Because of shit like this.