The "religious freedom" sword cuts both ways, motherfuckers. This is gonna be good.Boston's Satanic Temple has been granted tax-exempt status by the IRS. The group says it will now launch legal battles against religious discrimination and pursue faith-based government grants, as well as access to public spaces used by other religions. HAIL SATAN!
National news outlets were fighting for comments, but nobody in Kentucky was surprised.
Joe Gerth at the Courier:
Matt Bevin doesn’t think like you or me.After an incident like the one Thursday at the Louisville Rotary Club, one has to wonder if he thinks at all.During his speech, Bevin went on the attack against teachers who called in sick to protest changes to their pension plans. Jefferson County Public Schools had to shut down six days over a two-week span because of the absences."One thing you almost didn't hear anything about while we had people pretending to be sick when they weren't sick and leaving kids unattended to or in situations that they should not have been in — a little girl was shot, 7 years old, by another kid," he said.He was apparently talking about a girl who was shot by her brother who somehow got his hands on a loaded gun while their uncle, who was supposed to be watching them, was outside.He was blaming teachers for the girl getting shot.Then, after the Rotary Club meeting ended, he blamed journalists for having reported the utter hogwash he had uttered moments before.
e
I don't have to "understand" the people who cheer this maniacal prattle—even though that's not particularly hard. For the good of the country, their political power has to be crushed, repeatedly, election after election, until we are sure this mockery of democracy never happens again.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has done nothing to hurt Kentucky or Kentuckians.
Candy Barr, however, has done nothing in Congress BUT hurt Kentucky and Kentuckians with every suck-up vote supporting the Pumpkin Traitor and his efforts to impoverish, imprison and immiserate every non-male, non-white, non-christian, non-straight, non-rich resident of the Commonwealth.
Not to mention Barr and every repug lying non-stop about everything progressive Democrats say and do.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is fighting for economic, environmental and healthcare legislation that will lift Kentucky out of its repug-created morass of lethal dependence on coal, poverty and corruption.
Shame on you, Candy. If AOC deigns to notice your stupidity, she might tweet a response that will make you look even more foolish than you are.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, you are welcome in Kentucky any time. Come for Derby! And bring your friends Reps. Pressley, Tlaib, Haaland and Omar with you.
There are lots of progressives in Kentucky. We'll show you horse country and have fun pointing and laughing at the silly repugs.
From the Herald:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is welcome to come to Kentucky and tour a coal mine, but first she needs to apologize, says Rep. Andy Barr.
Barr, a Kentucky Republican, wants Ocasio-Cortez to offer a mea culpa to “our colleague and patriot to our country” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, before she accepts Barr’s invitation to tour a Kentucky coal mine.
In a letter Friday to the New York Democrat, Barr said her recent comments about Crenshaw “demonstrate a lack of civility that is becoming far too common in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
An apology won’t be forthcoming, a spokesman for the congresswoman said Friday.
SNIP
“We’re very proud and thankful for (Crenshaw’s) service, but what we are talking about is his fanning the flames of hate,” said Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez.
He added, “Luckily, we still have open borders with Kentucky. We don’t need Congressman Barr to meet with coal miners and have a town hall, though we’d love his participation if we do.”
Louisville is not taking this lying down.He was homecoming king at Central High School and had just graduated with several scholarships.He had never been arrested or in trouble before and had a steady job selling new cars at a major dealership.But 18-year-old Tae-Ahn Lea is black and lives in Park Duvalle, in Louisville’s West End. And when he borrowed his mom’s car to go get a slushie one day last August, he found himself being pulled over by the Louisville Metro Police Department's Ninth Mobile Division for the most minor of traffic violations — making a "wide turn" onto another street.Before he was let go 25 minutes later, he was pulled from his car, frisked and handcuffed. His car was searched by a drug-sniffing dog, then by police officers who went through his wallet and even looked under the lid of his drink for contraband.He was forced to stand on the street, embarrassed, as traffic drove by, with the cuffs chafing his wrists, as one officer asked him, "Why do you have this negative view towards the police?"Nearly 1 million people have since viewed a video of the traffic stop on YouTube, and more than 17,000 have commented on it. Many said it shows exactly why minorities distrust law enforcement.
Civil rights leaders and several Metro Council members said Thursday they were enraged by a traffic stop in which a teenager was pulled from his car, frisked and handcuffed last summer after an alleged minor traffic violation.
I give it three days before Conrad absolves the cops and gives them medals for refraining from killing Lea, which they could have done with no consequences.Councilwoman Jessica Green, who chairs the council’s public safety committee, said she has asked Louisville Metro Police Chief Steve Conrad to appear before Metro Council to answer questions about the stop of Tae-Ahn Lea and the department’s tactic of "hyper-policing" to fight violent crime in the West End.
Green, D-District 1, said the stop described in a Courier Journal story and viewed a million times on YouTube shows how Louisville residents are "hunted down because of the color of their skin and where they live."
Sadiqa Reynolds, president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League said when she watched the video with a group of black parents on spring break, "We found ourselves talking back to the video, holding back tears.""We understand the violence, we understand the drugs," she said. "But one fact remains, many of our children are innocent.
"Police need to find a better way."
Conrad has declined to comment on Lea’s stop, saying it is the subject of a pending internal-affairs investigation, although he has defended the department's strategy of aggressive policing in high crime corridors. A police spokeswoman said the department has no plans on dropping the strategy.
A federal appeals panel has upheld a 2017 Kentucky law requiring doctors who perform abortions to first perform an ultrasound and attempt to show and describe the image to the patient, as well as play an audible heartbeat of the fetus.
In a 2-1 vote, with Judge John Bush writing for the majority, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday struck down a lower court ruling that said the law known as House Bill 2 was unconstitutional because it violates the free speech rights of physicians.
Bush, in his opinion, rejected the opponents' argument that forcing the physician to perform an ultrasound that may not be necessary and describe in detail the results to the patient is a violation of free speech rights.
"We hold that HB 2 provides relevant information," Bush wrote. "The information conveyed by an ultrasound image, its description and the audible beating fetal heart gives a patient a greater knowledge of the unborn life inside her. This also inherently provides the patient with more knowledge about the effect of an abortion procedure: it shows her what or whom she is consenting to terminate."
Bush, of Louisville, was appointed by President Donald Trump.
But in a blistering dissent, Judge Bernice Bouie Donald, a Tennessee native appointed to the appeals court by former President Barack Obama, said she found the reasoning to be deeply flawed and a setback for the freedom of physicians and their patients."I am gravely concerned with the precedent the majority creates today," she said. "Its decision opens the floodgates to states in this Circuit to manipulate doctor-patient discourse solely for ideological reasons."
She added: "HB 2 is a restriction on speech that has no basis in the practice of medicine."Gov. "What women? They're just incubators" Bevin hailed the decision, of course, as "victory for life." Because the only lives that matter are white, straight, freakazoid, rich, repug men.
I have been saying for too many years now that the freakazoids are a clear and present danger to this nation and the world.
In the Pumpkin Traitor, they finally have a vessel for their power-mad fantasies.
Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:
All of this is cultish and disturbing on many levels—not the least of which is the fact that our foreign policy is being managed by a man who thinks he’s playing out some kind of biblical prophecy. But the most dangerous part is that cults are inherently authoritarian, which takes me back to what Stewart wrote.
I have attended dozens of Christian nationalist conferences and events over the past two years. And while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Mr. Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.The fact that Christian nationalists have anointed the most amoral man to ever occupy the White House as their savior tells us that their allegiance to him isn’t grounded in principle, but in authoritarian power that puts them above the law. That’s the kind of political leadership they’ve been looking for.They want it all. And in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.
To the trumpies trying to hide it, I quote every fascist, authoritarian asshole who ever crushed civil rights in the name of false national security:
What are you afraid of?
Speaking of I Got Mine Fuck You billionaires, Thomas Massie is far worse than just a selfish, piece of shit libertarian.
He's playing treason with the trumpies.
For most of the last decade, former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) held the title of the most Kremlin-friendly member of the House of Representatives. But with Rohrabacher’s loss in his reelection bid last year, a new contender has laid claim to the crown.Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), first elected to represent Kentucky’s 4th District in 2012, may not be as bombastic as Rohrabacher or have as many colorful anecdotes about drunkenly arm-wrestling Russian President Vladimir Putin as the former California congressman. But he’s distinguished himself in the House for pushing and voting for Russia-friendly measures, time and again.Massie did not respond to ThinkProgress’ request for an interview.Widely considered one of the most prominent libertarian members of Congress, the Kentucky congressman made news last month as one of the few Republicans to vote against President Donald Trump’s emergency declaration, describing Trump’s national emergency plans as “overreach.”
But despite his recent vote against the president’s pet project, Massie has taken plenty of opportunities to lavish praise on Trump, from backing the president’s abrupt foreign policy decisions — including when Trump unexpectedly announced American troops would be leaving Syria — to claiming that Trump “probably saved the GOP from itself” when the president signed the 2017 tax bill.Most notably, Massie has taken steps to slow criticism of Russia, as well as deflect questions about the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, along the way.Massie has regurgitated many of the conspiracy theories Trump has pushed to discredit the ongoing Mueller investigation. He has repeated the baseless claim that the FBI secretly spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign, playing up the evidence-free notion that the campaign’s attempts at Russian collusion were, in reality, traps laid by the Obama administration.There’s no evidence the Obama administration attempted to trick the Trump campaign into colluding with Russian agents, but it’s a line Trump routinely pushes to distract from questions about his own ties with Russia. In an editorial following Massie’s statement, the Lexington Herald Leader wrote that Massie’s “feverish parroting of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims” was “disturbing.”It’s unclear whether Massie believes Russia interfered in the 2016 election, even though America’s own intelligence community, along with any number of journalists and academics, has thoroughly established those interference efforts.In a 2017 survey of Cincinnati-area politicians, The Cincinnati Enquirer asked whether they accepted the intelligence community’s assessment that Russian hackers stole Democratic emails in order to aid Trump’s election. According to the Enquirer, Massie “did not directly answer,” but later in the interview claimed the investigation into Russia’s hacking was “a political effort to de-legitimize the incoming administration,” a line often peddled by the president himself.
Because refusing to vaccinate your children then sending them out into the community to infect defenseless infants, and cancer patients is terrorism.
From the Herald:
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said in a radio interview that he deliberately exposed his children to chickenpox so they would catch the highly contagious disease and become immune.During a Tuesday interview on Bowling Green radio station WKCT, Bevin said his children were "miserable for a few days" after contracting chickenpox but said "they all turned out fine.""Every single one of my kids had the chickenpox," Bevin said in the interview. "They got the chickenpox on purpose because we found a neighbor that had it and I went and made sure every one of my kids was exposed to it, and they got it. They had it as children."
Bevin and his wife, Glenna, have nine children, four adopted.Public health authorities strongly discourage the practice of deliberately exposing children to chickenpox, a medical expert said Wednesday."It's unfortunate and not an example for any of us," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
"We should vaccinate all our children. It's a great triumph of public health in the United States. Let's not take a step backward," he added in a phone interview.SNIP
You read that right. Governor "I fight for life (of tumors, not adult women)" is deliberately and with malice aforethought attempting to severely injure or kill pregnant women.Kentucky requires that children entering kindergarten be vaccinated for chickenpox, but parents may seek religious exemptions or provide proof that a child already had the disease.Bevin's comments followed reports this week of a chickenpox outbreak at a Kentucky Catholic school.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends two doses of chickenpox vaccine for children, adolescents and adults who have never had chickenpox and were never vaccinated, according to its website. Children are routinely recommended to receive the first dose at 12 through 15 months old and a second dose at 4 to 6 years old, it said."What the governor and other like-minded folks are unaware of is that there are potentially serious complications of chickenpox," Schaffner said.Complications from chickenpox can include bacterial infections, pneumonia and encephalitis — inflammation of the brain, according to the CDC. Complications aren't common in healthy people with the disease, it says, but high risk groups for complications due to a serious case of chickenpox can include infants, adolescents, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems.
Down with Tyranny:
by Noah
A Trifecta of Truth, presented in a simple meme. Perspective matters even when based on bullshit.
Plus, I would add that Trump is lunatic man's idea of a sane man, or, more specifically and accurately, a Republican man's idea of a sane man, and, a traitor's idea of a great president.
Tonight's meme is adaptable to all genders of course.
Within minutes after the Kentucky Senate approved a bill Wednesday that restricts abortions, the American Civil Liberties Union said it will file a lawsuit against it on behalf of the only remaining abortion provider in the state.The Senate gave final passage to House Bill 5 on a 32-4 vote and sent it to Republican Gov. Matt Bevin.Bevin indicated on social media that he will sign it into law. “Bring it!” said Bevin. “Kentucky will always fight for life... Always!”
The bill would take effect immediately upon his signature.It basically bars a woman from having an abortion if she decided to have one because of a fetal diagnosis. It also would ban abortions based on the sex, race, national origin or ancestry of the fetus.
After the Senate vote, the ACLU said in a release it will file a lawsuit on behalf of EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville, the only licensed center in Kentucky offering abortion services.“Decisions about whether to end a pregnancy must be made by the woman and her family. But this law takes the decision away from them and hands it over to politicians,” Brigitte Amiri, deputy director with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a release.“Kentucky women must be able to have private conversations with their health care providers and must be able to decide whether to have an abortion. We see this legislation for exactly what it is — part of a campaign to prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion if she needs one — and we won’t stand for it.”Heather Gatnarek, staff attorney at the ACLU of Kentucky, said passage of the bill “represents a thinly veiled effort of the Kentucky General Assembly to advance their anti-abortion agenda under the guise of an anti-discrimination bill.“This law will do nothing to improve the lives of Kentuckians with disabilities. In fact, a number of bills that would have addressed health care, housing and updated anti-discrimination protections were not even given a hearing of this legislation session.”Crystal Staley, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Andy Beshear, who is a Democratic candidate for governor this year, said Wednesday night Beshear “thinks this legislative session was an opportunity to come together and get things done on jobs, the opioid crisis and protecting access to health car“Unfortunately, we have instead seen the legislature focus on issues that divide us. A challenge to this legislation has already been announced and he believes the challenge will be successful in court.”
You read that right. A dangerous* clump of cells and a non-consensual sperm donor have more rights over a woman's body than the woman herself.
Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist:
This is the logical bottom of the slippery slope created when the government says a clump of cells is a person: A judge is allowing an Alabama man and an embryo to sue the people that made it possible for a girl he impregnated to get an abortion. It’s the first time an embryo has ever been treated as a human being with legal rights in a court of law.Seriously, you gotta see what this guy looks like.
The lawsuit is over the “wrongful death” of the embryo (wrongly called a “fetus” in some articles and really wrongly called a “baby” in others). Ryan Magers (below) says he wanted the 16-year-old high schooler he impregnated to have “Baby Roe” (even though it’s not a baby and it doesn’t deserve a name), but she decided against it.
Magers and The Embryo are now suing the Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives in Huntsville as well as a(n unknown) pharmaceutical company that made the abortion pill taken by the girl.
Rather than toss out the absurd lawsuit altogether, Madison County Probate Judge Frank Barger gave it the green light to move forward with Magers representing the embryo’s “estate.”
That means a six-week-old embryo — a clump of cells the size of a pea — is now legally going after the people who “killed” it.* the death rate for abortions is 0.6 in 100,000. The death rate for failing to excise that tumor and suffering pregnancy is 8.8 in 100,000 - 10 times more dangerous than abortion.
Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, tweeted Tuesday that the Alabama lawsuit is a “very scary case.” It asserts that a woman’s rights are “third in line,” after the rights of a man who impregnates her and the fetus she aborts, she said.None of this is surprising, because it’s precisely what anti-abortion legislators were hoping for when they passed the state’s “personhood” law. They want this case to be challenged so they can keep appealing until Brett Kavanaugh can force women to give birth whenever an unemployed teenager pressures them into sex. Jill Filipovic explains the potential ripple effects this case could have:
A “pro-life” victory here would give free rein to men like Ryan Magers, who allegedly coerced his teenage girlfriend into sex, allowing them even more control over those same girls’ reproductive lives and, by extension, their futures. A great many women and girls have sex with men who are abusive, controlling, or simply not men who they want to be tied to for the rest of their lives. A “pro-life” victory here would give any man jurisdiction over any woman with whom he has had sex.In this case, the girl was pressured into sex (though her family is not calling it rape) and chose to end the pregnancy early. A judge now thinks that’s all it takes for an embryo to sue an abortion clinic.
Magers, by impregnating a girl who didn’t want his baby, now has the power to shut down methods of abortion for women everywhere, a move that would force many of them to resort to unsafe and illegal actions to procure something that’s a routine procedure in most other parts of the developed world.
Congratulations, “pro-lifers.” Your dream of ruining women’s lives is inching closer.
We were warned. The late, great, lamented Molly Ivins warned us. When it comes to daily life, it's our state legislators who have the most control over what we can do and whether we can do it safely.
Take Kentucky's General Assembly. Please.
Since repugs took over the state house in 2016 for full control of the legislative and executive branches, they have been systematically dismantling the structures of civilization Kentucky progressives have managed to erect.
Many people think it's odd that evangelical Christians love a president who's a thug. But it was clear long before Trump entered politics that right-wing Christianity isn't about living by the moral code of Christ. It's about declaring that your and your allies have a monopoly on morality -- and, more important, declaring that people you don't like are immoral and despised by God, and therefore should have no influence on how we run society.
When your ethic already divides the world into good people and mortal enemies who must be destroyed because they can't be reasoned with or accommodated, of course you're going to be attracted to a leader who shares your political goals and conducts his life like a Corleone ordering a hit. To evangelicals, there's a clear line dividing the saved and the damned, the fit and the unfit -- just as, to Trump, the world is divided into loyalists who should be rewarded and traitors who must be crushed. So of course the evangelicals love Trump. He has a pure sense of right and wrong.
Is it obvious yet that the original source of all the lethal stupidity in this county is religion? Specifically white xian fundamentalist freakazoids. On everything from global warming to gay rights to public education to racial justice, they are quite simply a clear and present danger to the nation.
Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette:
Aside from abortion, the number one issue for people who don't know what the hell they are talking about is vaccines. People who don't know anything about vaccines feel very confident that they are the ones who should be going around enacting legislation based on shit they have made up themselves, which is rather inconvenient for the rest of us! Especially those who have immuno-compromised children who need to rely on herd immunity to stay alive. The entire gist of the anti-vaccine movement is "Other people need to die to protect my right to be stupid."
SNIP
You don't get to have a religious belief that kills people. Human sacrifices are against the law. I can't just go and start a religion that demands I rob banks. So either vaccinate your kids or keep them the hell away from other children.
Frankly, not giving kids vaccines ought to be considered child abuse. It should not be allowed, period. If parents refuse to vaccinate their kid and that child or someone else's dies because they refused vaccinations, parents should be charged with manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide just as they would if their stupidity caused that child's death in some other way. I mean, if someone left the gas on their stove, lit a cigarette and blew up the house and killed their kids, "I thought scientists were lying to me about gas being flammable, so I made up my own science" would not be a valid excuse in a court of law.
People can personally believe any stupid thing they want, up to and until it affects other people. That is where the line needs to be drawn. If Bill Zedler wants to believe that antibiotics cure measles, that's fine. If someone else wants to believe in werewolves? Go right ahead! But no one should be able to push or draft legislation, or put other children in danger, just because they believe their own pipe dreams over actual science.
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