July 1, 2015

Open Call - It is Time to Fix or Replace the Republican Party (God's party must go)

PoliticusUSA

The Republican Party, through its response to the Supreme Court’s Obamacare, and then Marriage Equality rulings, has signaled its end of usefulness as an opposition party.

I have argued before – based on their reaction to the Charleston shootings – that they have disqualified themselves from running the country, and I still believe they have, but look, it’s time something was done.

It’s one thing when they hurt themselves, but this is going to end up hurting all of us, because a healthy democracy calls for more than a single political party, and a religious hate group doesn’t qualify.

Rather than debates on the relative merits of a position, what we’ve gotten, even from the politicians, is “God vs. Government” arguments. You can’t tell the religious demagogues from the elected officials anymore. Some, like Gordon Klingenschmitt, are both.

More
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/06/30/time-fix-replace-republican-party.html

June 30, 2015

Roberts appeared to scold conserv lawyers for using courts as a tool to fight political battles

ThinkProgress

Chief Justice Roberts' Marriage Equality Dissent Has A Hidden Message For Conservatives

Friday’s landmark victory for marriage equality was handed down over the dissents of four justices, each of whom wrote their own dissenting opinion. Of these, by far the most thoughtful and the most significant was Chief Justice John Roberts’s dissent. Roberts rejected the Constitution’s promise of marriage equality — a view which The Onion quipped will someday lead to him being a villain “in an Oscar-winning film about the fight for marriage equality.” Yet, in the process of reaching his conclusion, Roberts also rejected a particularly aggressive brand of judicial conservatism that is rapidly becoming ascendant in conservative legal circles.

Obergefell v. Hodges, in other words, is a double defeat for conservatives. At the same moment that a majority of the Court declared the United States to be a marriage equality nation, Chief Justice Roberts announced to his fellow conservatives that their most ambitious legal cases are doomed to failure.

Roberts’s Obergefell dissent, moreover, needs to be read alongside the decision he handed down just one day earlier — his remarkable majority opinion in King v. Burwell, which appeared to scold his fellow conservative lawyers for using the courts as a tool to fight political battles. “In a democracy,” Roberts wrote in that opinion, “the power to make the law rests with those chosen by the people.” He then added language that will render the Affordable Care Act unusually resistant to legal challenge.

. ...

Read together, Roberts’s King and Obergefell opinions may mark a turning point in American law. They suggest that the chief justice has grown tired of efforts to politicize the judiciary, and that he is particularly annoyed with his fellow conservatives for trying to achieve through litigation what they could not win in elections. If this interpretation of Roberts’s actions proves true, then the chief justice’s dissent from a decision bringing the blessings of equality to all 50 states may, ironically, be one of the most positive developments for liberals in the last several Supreme Court terms.

More
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/06/29/3674897/roberts-obergefell-dissent-conservatives/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tptop3&elqTrack=true&elqTrackId=9d717e20bcb54ef7b29ee710093f48af&elqaid=26133&elqat=1

June 28, 2015

Proof that it's a racist symbol lies in its designer's description:

From Twitter:

@DyjstraDame: To those claiming the Confederate Flag's sentimental, not racist, it's creator William Thompson disagrees. #FreeBree pic.twitter.com/KIDYQL4twS




8:50pm - 27 Jun 15


•••

Want to tell us more about that 'heritage' argument?

June 27, 2015

Video: Brainy octopus and its coconut |Plus: Masters of camo

Video: Brainy octopus and its coconut
Jun 26, 2015
by Eleanor Imster in Videos » Earth, Science Wire

We can’t get enough of the coolness of octopuses here at Earthsky. Watch what this octopus does with coconut shells.

The footage, shot by a diver in Lembeh, Indonesia April 2015, shows the a small octopus, known as the ‘coconut octopus’ because of its habit of using coconuts and shells to protect itself. It’s found on sandy bottoms in bays or lagoons in tropical waters of the western Pacific Ocean.

More and more research is revealing that humans aren’t the only animals that use tools – chimpanzees, dolphins, and crows – use tools as well. But what about an octopus? Is the coconut octopus using tools? Some scientists say yes.

Researchers from the Melbourne Museum in Australia claimed the coconut octopus uses tools for concealment and defense by gathering available debris to create a defensive fortress. The researchers filmed octopuses collecting coconut half-shells discarded by humans from the sea floor. The octopuses carried the shells for up to 20 meters (66 ft) and arranged them around the body to form a hiding place.

http://earthsky.org/earth/video-brainy-octopus-and-its-coconut?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=55f72d295d-EarthSky_News&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-55f72d295d-393525109


The vid wouldn't load in the article on my phone so I went to youtube. Found right one, plus more:

Kleptopus


Mimic octopus



But the master of camouflage...



Natl Geographic doc:

June 24, 2015

Diff is that this country has a fetish for honoring military

Confederate officers like R E Lee & Stonewall Jackson were graduates of West Point. While that may enhance their crime of sedition, they were respected as brilliant military strategists even by Union officers.

On that, one may make a case for certain honors, at least in their home states. But for Confeds such as Davis and N B Forrest, no similar justiication can be made and I fully support erasing any hint of honor for them.

June 23, 2015

Justice Sotomayor Hides Good News For Abortion Clinics In An Obscure Case About Hotels

ThinkProgress

Justice Sotomayor Hides Good News For Abortion Clinics In An Obscure Case About Hotels

Los Angeles v Patel not a particularly closely watched decision this Supreme Court term, although Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion for the Court may prove to be one of the seminal precedents civil libertarians cite to ward off government invasions of personal privacy. The most surprising aspect of Sotomayor’s opinion, however, is that it may also give a boost to abortion clinics that are fighting for their life in states such as Texas. Sotomayor — in an opinion joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the one justice pro-choice groups typically must sway to win a case in the Supreme Court — includes language in her Patel opinion that is inconsistent with a recent lower court opinion upholding Texas’s efforts to restrict access to abortion. (emphasis added)

Patel concerns a Los Angeles ordinance that requires hotel operators to keep certain records, such as the names and addresses of their guests, and which provides that those records “shall be made available to any officer of the Los Angeles Police Department for inspection.” Hotel operators who refuse to do so face up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. The Court, in a 5-4 decision that includes the four left-of-center justices plus Kennedy, holds that this ordinance violates the Fourth Amendment’s safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures because it does not afford these hotel operators “an opportunity to obtain precompliance review before a neutral decisionmaker.”

The most significant aspect of Sotomayor’s opinion, however, is the Court’s holding that the plaintiffs in this case may bring what is known as a “facial” challenge to the Los Angeles ordinance. Generally speaking, facial challenges seek to invalidate a law altogether, while less potent “as-applied” challenges merely seek a decision holding that a particular law cannot be applied to a particular plaintiff or plaintiffs. Prior to Patel, the Court’s precedents were not especially clear regarding when facial challenges are appropriate, and one seminal case indicated that, to bring such a challenge, “the challenger must establish that no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid.”

Patel clarifies this rule, and it relies on one of the Court’s most important abortion decisions to do so. When assessing if a facial challenge is proper, Sotomayor explains, “the Court has considered only applications of the statute in which it actually authorizes or prohibits conduct.” Thus, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the only major abortion case where Justice Kennedy cast a pro choice vote,

More
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/06/22/3672394/justice-sotomayor-hides-good-news-abortion-clinics-obscure-case-hotels/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tptop3&elqTrack=true&elqTrackId=b0754f9ff6d249b49dedd6de23569786&elqaid=26029&elqat=1


x p Women's Rights

June 23, 2015

Eight South Carolina Lawmakers Explain Why They Are Opposed To Removing The Confederate Flag

ThinkProgress

. ...

Only a simply majority vote is needed to remove the flag, contrary to what many media outlets have reported. On Tuesday, Charleston newspaper The Post & Courier asked lawmakers what they think about the Confederate flag. Many said they would vote to remove it and some wouldn’t answer or were undecided, but eight House representatives said they were sure they would vote no. Here’s a closer look at those eight.

Rep. Mike Burns (R-Greenville)
Burns, a South Carolina native, said the flag shouldn’t be taken down because people view is as a way to honor their heritage and their ancestors who fought in the Civil War.

Rep. Bill Chumley (R-Greenville, Spartanburg)

A son of Confederate veterans, Chumley said the issue of the flag didn’t need to be discussed further, as it was decided in a 2000 compromise to move the flag from the Statehouse dome to the Capitol grounds. “This needs to go no further,” he told the Post. “It has been settled already. A compromise is a compromise.”

More
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/06/23/3672910/south-carolina-lawmakers-publicly-opposed-removing-confederate-flag/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tptop3&elqTrack=true&elqTrackId=71fe5ae62fb34491aead93c7f43752df&elqaid=26029&elqat=1

••

So who's surprised they're all Repubs? And why don't any bring up the fact that that 'heritage' they're so proud of is sedition? Oh, and since when do Repubs want anything to do with compromise (Rep Chumley)?

And I bet they all call their seditiously-proud selves 'patriots.'

June 22, 2015

Religious House Republicans Plan To Deny Contraception Access to 4.6 Women

PoliticusUSA

by Rmuse

There is something to be said about Republicans and their never-change direction agenda that may be related to their “conservative” affliction. For the past five years one of the primary goals of Republicans they just cannot abandon is fulfilling the demands of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to ban contraception use in America. It was not enough that the Papal-5 on the Supreme Court ruled that religious employers could restrict their employees’ use of birth control, so now Republicans have resorted to their annual attempt to eliminate the Title X program that provides family planning services, including contraceptives, to roughly 4.6 million impoverished women. As usual, since Republicans in the House control the nation’s purse strings, they are using the 2016 budget to eliminate all funding for Title X and finally end the program that has been one of their cherished goals since taking control of the House in 2011.

When the Title X program was created in 1970 under Republican president Richard Nixon, the concept of federally-funded family planning services had overwhelming support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who acknowledged the pressing need to make birth control more accessible to impoverished American women.  Republicans and Democrats both agreed with former president Nixon that being poor should not mean a woman had to be perpetually pregnant. But that was long before Republicans won control of the House in 2010 when, instead of fulfilling their campaign pledge to create jobs, they declared a religious war on women and defunding the federal program became their raison d’être as hardcore theocrats. One of the first items the Republican-controlled House voted on in 2011 was dismantling Title X and they did vote to completely eliminate the then-forty one year old program along strict party lines.

Over the past five years, the evangelical Republican war to abolish the now 45 year old family planning program was successfully thwarted by a Democratic-controlled Senate. However, now with a Koch Senate repaying evangelicals for getting out to vote in 2014, it looks like Republican theocrats will finally do right by the Vatican, eradicate Title X, and deprive at least 4.6  million women from having access to reproductive care including safe, dependable contraceptives, cancer and STD screenings, and assistance in planning when to start their families. It would be the ultimate wet dream for evangelical Republicans and Vatican loyalists to see several million, mostly poor women, denied family planning services and access to contraception; it is just what good evangelical and Catholic Republicans have panted to accomplish for the past five years.

Before 2010, support for Title X had broad bipartisan support and most legislators agreed with then-president Richard Nixon who said on Title X’s inception that, “It is my view that no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition.” Of course that was long before Republicans became Vatican puppets and women, although still thought of as second class citizens in 1970, were not yet relegated to the role of being perpetual birth machines by evangelical Republicans.

More
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/06/20/religious-house-republicans-plan-deny-contraception-access-4-6-women.html


x p Good reads

June 21, 2015

5 fm RWWatch: Coulter the misogynist; God's a terrorist; Pope's the antiChrist; usual fetish f/gays

Here are the top five most popular posts on RightWingWatch.org this week:

Ann Coulter: 'Women Should Not Have The Right To Vote' (But They 'Can Still Write Books')

http://site.pfaw.org/site/R?i=tpudd8PEmCdAE1XDqJbzDw


'Homosexuals Worship Their Own Genitals'

http://site.pfaw.org/site/R?i=JV_a9-jf5quJIQD12n3A9w



Franklin Graham: 'The End Is Coming' Thanks To Gays, Obama

http://site.pfaw.org/site/R?i=TUkR5P-1h7-35zAN5S5chA


Anne Graham Lotz Says Terrorist Attacks Are Just God's Way Of Demonstrating His Love

http://site.pfaw.org/site/R?i=yrCmP8OttwqE-TfFw_jQXw


Michael Savage: Pope Francis Like False Prophet 'Directing Mankind To Worship The Antichrist'

http://site.pfaw.org/site/R?i=8OlImtURo1s7MwNDnnsf_Q

June 21, 2015

Race -- the power of an illusion

PBS

Background Reading

The Historical Origins and Development of Racism

by George M. Fredrickson

Racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable. An ideological basis for explicit racism came to a unique fruition in the West during the modern period. No clear and unequivocal evidence of racism has been found in other cultures or in Europe before the Middle Ages. The identification of the Jews with the devil and witchcraft in the popular mind of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was perhaps the first sign of a racist view of the world. Official sanction for such attitudes came in sixteenth century Spain when Jews who had converted to Christianity and their descendents became the victims of a pattern of discrimination and exclusion.

The period of the Renaissance and Reformation was also the time when Europeans were coming into increasing contact with people of darker pigmentation in Africa, Asia, and the Americas and were making judgments about them. The official rationale for enslaving Africans was that they were heathens, but slave traders and slave owners sometimes interpreted a passage in the book of Genesis as their justification. Ham, they maintained, committed a sin against his father Noah that condemned his supposedly black descendants to be "servants unto servants." When Virginia decreed in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage, not because they were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for black servitude was thus changed from religious status to something approaching race. Beginning in the late seventeenth century laws were also passed in English North America forbidding marriage between whites and blacks and discriminating against the mixed offspring of informal liaisons. Without clearly saying so, such laws implied that blacks were unalterably alien and inferior.

During the Enlightenment, a secular or scientific theory of race moved the subject away from the Bible, with its insistence on the essential unity of the human race. Eighteenth century ethnologists began to think of human beings as part of the natural world and subdivided them into three to five races, usually considered as varieties of a single human species. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, an increasing number of writers, especially those committed to the defense of slavery, maintained that the races constituted separate species.

The Nineteenth century was an age of emancipation, nationalism, and imperialism--all of which contributed to the growth and intensification of ideological racism in Europe and the United States. Although the emancipation of blacks from slavery and Jews from the ghettoes received most of its support from religious or secular believers in an essential human equality, the consequence of these reforms was to intensify rather than diminish racism. Race relations became less paternalistic and more competitive. The insecurities of a burgeoning industrial capitalism created a need for scapegoats. The Darwinian emphasis on "the struggle for existence" and concern for "the survival of the fittest" was conducive to the development of a new and more credible scientific racism in an era that increasingly viewed race relations as an arena for conflict rather than as a stable hierarchy.

The growth of nationalism, especially romantic cultural nationalism, encouraged the growth of a culture-coded variant of racist thought, especially in Germany. Beginning in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the coiners of the term "antisemitism" made explicit what some cultural nationalists had previously implied--that to be Jewish in Germany was not simply to adhere to a set of religious beliefs or cultural practices but meant belonging to a race that was the antithesis of the race to which true Germans belonged.

The climax of Western imperialism in the late nineteenth century "scramble for Africa" and parts of Asia and the Pacific represented an assertion of the competitive ethnic nationalism that existed among European nations (and which, as a result of the Spanish-American War came to include the United States). It also constituted a claim, allegedly based on science, that Europeans had the right to rule over Africans and Asians.

MORE
http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-01.htm