StupidiNews!

• Secretary of State John Kerry is warning that Russia's military presence in Syria could worsen the nearly five-year-old conflict and resulting refugee crisis.
• Prolific horror author Stephen King will receive the National Medal of Arts from President Obama later this week in a White House ceremony.
• Jailed Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis is now suing Gov. Steve Beshear for violating her religious freedom and is once again petitioning for an emergency injunction.
• German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble says the flood of Syrian refugees into Europe is an "absolute priority" in Berlin's latest budget plan.
• Google says it will comply with Chinese censorship laws in order to get its Google Play app store into the largest mobile app market on Earth.

Last Call For Labor, Dazed

This Labor Day, we find that Ohio workers under Gov. John Kasich haven't had a good year.   Whereas America grew by 3.5 million more jobs in the last 12 months, Kasich's policies managed to cause to the state to lose 35,000 jobs since the 2007 recession began.  The state has yet to recover.

More than six years into the official recovery from the last recession, Ohio has not yet recovered the jobs we lost. The country as a whole and most states passed that threshold over a year ago. Ohio had 35,400 fewer jobs in June 2015 than it had when the recession officially started in December 2007, a 0.7 percent loss. The nation added 2.5 percent to its job base over that period. Ohio has underperformed the nation over various time periods – since June 2005 when Ohio passed tax cuts targeted to the wealthiest in the name of job creation; since January 2011 when John Kasich became governor; since December 2007, when the recession started; and over the last year, since July 2014. By June 2015, the most recent revised data available, we had 5,384,200 jobs in Ohio, still more than 240,000 jobs shy of 2000, the peak job year.

 Wages are down too under Kasich, no surprise there.

Ohio’s median wage, once more than 8.7 percent above that of the nation, was over 5 percent less than the national in 2014. Ohio’s median wage dipped slightly last year to $16.05 an hour and remains lower than in all but eight of the last 36 years, adjusted for inflation. This is at the heart of what remains wrong with the Ohio labor market – regular Ohioans are left out of our productivity growth. The entire bottom 80 percent of the earnings spectrum is earning less than comparable workers did in 1979, adjusted for inflation.

Kasich has taken aim at the unions and is desperately trying to turn Ohio into a right to work state.  His policies have cut wages dramatically.

And let's keep is mind he wants to do to America what he did to Ohio.

What did you expect from George W. Bush's budget director?

The Labors Of Obama

President Obama just made a lot of conservative heads explode with this badly needed labor reform.

President Obama will sign an executive order Monday requiring federal contractors to give their employees seven paid sick days a year.

It's the latest in a series of presidential actions on workplace issues, as Obama has taken unilateral action to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors, offer paid paternal leave for federal workers and encourage cities and states to enact similar policies.

Obama will announce the executive order in a Labor Day speech to a labor group in Boston, where the City Council passed an ordinance requiring up to six weeks of parental leave in April.

In all, 21 cities, counties and states have enacted paid leave policies since Obama called for local action in his State of the Union address — a key part of a White House effort to work around Congress on the issue.

That's great for federal employees, but what about the rest of us?

But many of those city ordinances, like Obama's executive orders, apply only to city employees and contractors, leading to big gaps in who's covered. So Obama will renew his call for has taken as he calls on Congress to pass legislation requiring allbusinesses with 15 or moreemployees to offer up to seven paid sick days each year.

Republicans have been lukewarm to that proposal, saying they would burden small businesses that already face too much government regulation.

Lukewarm?  They've been outright hostile to the notion that American workers are anything other than lazy losers who aren't working hard enough to be millionaires yet, and those Americans who are in the 1% are the only ones who should count. 

No, Republicans have made that very clear, blocking paid leave policies whenever possible, even though American productivity is up almost 250% from 1970.  Democrats have introcduced the Healthy Families Act in the last two Congresses, and it never got a vote.  Republicans saw to that.

Labor Secretary Tom Perez said the nation's paid leave policy is "stuck in the Leave it to Beaver era."

"You shouldn't have to win the boss lottery to have access to paid leave, just as you shouldn't have to win the geographic lottery in order to get a minimum wage that allows you to feed your family," he told reporters Sunday, previewing the president's executive order.

You would think red state Republicans would actually respond to that message.  Sadly, their response is "Well, those people get leave and benefits and I don't.  I will do everything I can to take that away from them and maybe my company will let me have them.  Any day now."

And they've been waiting for 40 years.

Pro-Arson, I Guess

At some point, the right-wing smear machine spewing ridiculous lies against Planned Parenthood has to take responsibility for actions of the fanatics they stir up.

An early-morning fire at Planned Parenthood in Pullman Friday was arson, according to the Pullman Fire Department and the Inland Northwest Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The fire, which started around 3:30 a.m., caused significant damage that may keep the health center closed for a month or more, Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Tanya Riordan said.

Karl Eastlund, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, said in a statement, “This is an appalling act of violence towards Planned Parenthood, but unfortunately a predictable ripple effect from the false and incendiary attacks that fuel violence from extremists.”

FBI Special Agent Frank Harrill said federal agencies were involved because of the history of domestic terrorists targeting healthcare providers offering abortion services.

By the way, you idiots who like "burning down abortion clinics"...

Planned Parenthood’s Pullman health center offers abortion referrals but does not provide abortion services, according to its website.

So yes, all you've accomplished is denying women in the area health services.  Oh wait, that's the point because those dirty sluts had it coming, right?

I mean, these nutjobs bomb clinics, they assassinate doctors, but we're supposed to be shocked and appalled at the edited videos they put up?

Please.

Last Call For Martyr And Meathead

Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis remains in jail for not doing her job as Republicans gleefully co-opt black civil rights history and compare her to every icon they can find.

Davis, the elected Rowan County clerk, was sent to jail in contempt of court on Thursday after openly defying multiple court orders to obey the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in all U.S. states. Davis has maintained doing so is against her Christian beliefs.

This has prompted her attorneys and supporters to come up with some wildly fanciful comparisons.

“Kim joins a long list of people who were imprisoned for their conscience,” her Liberty Council attorney Mat Staver said. “People who today we admire, like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jan Huss, John Bunyan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and more. Each had their own cause, but they all share the same resolve not to violate their conscience.”

Staver also said Davis is being persecuted the same way Jewish people were under Nazi Germany, while others have compared her to the “tank man,” an unnamed man who faced down Chinese military tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising.

According to a Twitter account that appears to be run by Davis’ husband Joe, Davis reportedly also wrote “a letter from a Carter County jail,” possibly mimicking Martin Luther King’s legendary and tide-turning Letter from Birmingham Jail.

“I have no doubt your opinion of me has been swayed by the liberal media gotchyas,” Davis allegedly wrote. “I am here because there is a war on Christians in America. This country was founded on the beliefs of Christianity. This is a fact.”

Davis also wrote in her letter that she believed Rosa Parks “had it easy.”

“The whole world is watching me,” the letter reads. “Under this microscope, I am now not only an example for my family but for the millions of Christians in America facing persecution and the loss of their fundamental right of Religious FREEDOM!!!”

Rep. King is apparently not a fan of honoring Supreme Court rulings he doesn’t agree with. The 1963 Abington Township School District v. Schempp King’s tweet refereed to didn’t ban prayer from schoools, according to the First Amendment Center. It enforced the Establishment Clause by making it illegal for public schools to force students to participate in prayer or promote religion. Students are free to express religion or pray on campus as long as it doesn’t interfere with lessons.

It’s unclear which “award” King believes Davis should receive, but some pointed out that Davis’ actions are more similar to the bus driver that had Rosa Parks arrested for refusing to give her seat up to a white passenger.

I'm not at all surprised by this, Republicans, particularly evengelical Christians, love to believe themselves to be persecuted when other people get rights they've had for decades or even centuries.   That's not persecution, of course.  Nobody is say, burning a gay flag on Davis's lawn or you know, firebombing her church with little girls inside it at the time.  Nobody is physically assaulting her, turning water cannons or dogs on her.

And again, I can't stress this enough: Kim Davis was arrested for refusing to do the job she swore an oath to, and refusing to serve the people in the office she was elected to serve in.  Her reasons for doing so are irrelevant as to why she's in jail.

Same-sex marriage is not persecution of millions of Christians, no matter how badly you dislike it.

And co-opting the memory of civil rights leaders who fought for justice, not bigotry in the name of a God who hates, is really, really the most awful thing here.

But it continues.

Return Of The Podcast

Hey guys, got a surprise for ya.

Podcast Versus The Stupid is back for the 2016 election season!

Check Out Politics Progressive Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on BlogTalkRadio

Give a listen to this week's episode, and be on the lookout for more...

Feeling The Pressure

You think DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is aware of how bad voting against the President's Iran deal would look, considering she's already in a position where she should lose her job for incompetence?  Today she's out in favor of the deal in an opinion piece in the Miami Herald:

In July, I committed to an exhaustive review process to carefully examine the facts and consider the intangible elements of this agreement, basing my decisions exclusively on what I believed would be most likely to prevent Iran from achieving its nuclear-weapons goals.

I have subsequently come to the conclusion that the agreement promotes the national-security interests of the United States and our allies and merits my vote of support.

I do not come to this decision lightly. I have probed the details of this agreement page by page, word by word, and had personal meetings with President Obama, Vice President Biden and Treasury Secretary Lew. I heard directly from Secretary of State John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and had numerous highly classified briefings. I also spoke or met with independent economists, nuclear experts, military and intelligence experts in Israel and the United States, and ambassadors from our allies that are parties to the agreement as well as Israel’s ambassador.

Finally, before I finished my lengthy review, I held a series of meetings with my constituents so I could hear their concerns directly. I am proud to represent such an engaged constituency on the issues that matter, and I am proud of the time, energy and thoughtfulness the hundreds of individuals I met with or spoke to put into their review, whether for or against.

Vice President Biden saw these attributes on display firsthand when he led a roundtable discussion last week in my district, in an effort to answer questions and dispel myths for both me and some of my constituents.

This agreement is not perfect. But I join many in the belief that with complex, multilateral, nuclear non-proliferation negotiations with inherent geopolitical implications for the entire world, there is no such thing as a “perfect” deal.

I am somewhat pleasantly surprised at her decision, and her reasoning is what we've heard from other Democratic lawmakers supporting the bill.  It doesn't change the fact she presided over the disastrous 2010 and 2014 cycles and lost more than 80 House seats and nearly 20 Senate seats total in those two elections, and she still needs to be replaced.

But she did the right thing here, for once.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article34233213.html#storylink=cpy

Sunday Long Read: More Tales Of Two Cincys

CityBeat Cincinnati takes a look at the Queen City's race and inequality problem and finds that there are no easy answers, and a whole hell of a lot of hard questions.

Cincinnati’s economic and geographic segregation hasn’t gone unnoticed. A 2011 study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Social Science Data Analysis Network found that Cincinnati is the eighth most-segregated city in America. A study of major U.S. cities by social science journal New Geography published in January ranked Cincinnati 50 out of 52 cities when it came to the economic prospects of black residents. 

A CityBeat analysis of 2010 Census neighborhood and census tract-level demographic data shows the disturbing extent of the economic isolation in Cincinnati’s black neighborhoods. And that isolation seems to be getting worse. 

Of the city’s 10 neighborhoods with the lowest median household incomes, nine are more than 70-percent black. Six of those neighborhoods with considerable populations — The Villages at Roll Hill, Winton Hills, West End, Millvale, South Cumminsville and Avondale — are more than 90-percent black. 

Each of these neighborhoods has a median household income around half, or less, than the city’s median of about $34,000 a year. In these places, life expectancies are five to 10 years lower than the city as a whole. 

At least one of these neighborhoods, Over-the-Rhine, is undergoing a kind of revitalization, and its triumphs and travails are well-covered by the media. But the others are neglected, rarely considered places. 

One Cincinnati neighborhood, English Woods, today consists almost entirely of a single housing tower looming over vast, empty, fenced-off fields that once contained the rest of the housing project. It is home to about 400 people, 90 percent of them black. Its median household income is just $8,474 a year. 

Together, these lowest-income and predominantly black neighborhoods account for more than 36,000 people, a quarter of the city’s black population. 

The history behind why black neighborhoods in Cincinnati are not the kind of things you read in history class.  Redlining, white flight, urban renewal and gentrification have all come at the expense of the city's poorer, black neighborhoods.  It's still going on today and in fact things have gotten worse.

Black Cincinnati has never recovered from the financial devastation in 2008.  It was left behind, yet again.  The systemic issues in this country have blown a hole in the side of the boat, and the rising tide only serves to drown millions in poverty.

Still A Champion

Remember Bengals player Devon Still, who the Cincinnati NFL team rallied around for his daughter Leah, who was diagnosed with cancer? Still played several games with the Bengals last season, and has in fact not made the team this year after the pre-season cut.

But the team will pick up the tab for Leah's insurance for the next five years.

Devon Still has been released by the Cincinnati Bengals, the teamannounced Saturday.

Still played 12 games for the Bengals last season. He recorded 19 total tackles.

In 2014, the Bengals kept Still on the team's practice squad to help him financially with his daughter Leah's cancer diagnosis. He eventually joined the 53-man roster.

In March of this year, Still announced his daughter Leah's cancer was in remission. As of July, Leah's cancer is still in remission.

Because Still was on the Bengals’ roster last year, he and his daughter will have five years of NFL health insurance, even if Still is not on an NFL roster, reportsThe Cincinnati Enquirer's Paul Dehner.

Some good news out the Bengals camp this year, even if the team itself is probably destined for another first-round playoff exit.

Waging War On The Poor

The NY Times editorial board takes on the $15 minimum wage on this Labor Day weekend, and does a pretty good job of dismantling the Republican objections to it.

States should decide: Mrs. Fiorina has said that setting a minimum wage should be “a state decision, not a federal decision,” because of differences in the cost of living around the country. Many Republicans who want to leave the federal minimum where it is, including Jeb Bush and Gov. Scott Walker, make basically the same argument.

Experience shows that state minimums are inadequate without a robust federal minimum. Today, 21 states do not impose minimums higher than $7.25, which was already too low when it was mandated by Congress in 2007. None of the other 29 states have minimums high enough to cover local expenses for an individual worker. In New York, including New York City, the minimum will top out at $9 at the end of this year, even though it takes an hourly wage of $12.75 for one person to cover living costs in the state.

If there were no federal minimum, states would be free to perpetuate poverty level wages. Under the law in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, there is no state minimum wage; in Georgia and Wyoming, the state minimums are $5.15 an hour.

The market should decide: Jeb Bush has said that ideally each state’s minimum wage would be decided by the “private sector.” Mr. Walker and Senator Rand Paul have said much the same thing; Mr. Paul could have been speaking for the pack when he said the “minimum wage is only harmful when it’s above the market wage.”

Markets do reliably establish the prices of goods and services when businesses have to compete. When businesses compete for workers, for example, wages rise because employees gain a modicum of bargaining power. The law has long recognized, however, that low-wage workers seldom have bargaining power. An adequate federal minimum wage effectively substitutes for that lack.

Businesses will be hurt: Donald Trump has said a higher minimum wage would make it impossible for American companies to compete with low-paying foreign rivals. That stance is baffling given his stated aim to “make America great again,” because broad prosperity requires rising wages, not a race to the bottom with countries whose economies are built on low pay.

Robots will replace workers: Senator Marco Rubio has been trotting out this scare tactic at every opportunity: “I don’t want to deny someone $10.10. I’m worried about the people whose wages are going to go down to zero because you’ve made them more expensive than a machine.”

But keeping worker pay low to discourage capital investment is a recipe for a faltering economy and ignores history, in which new technology has bothreplaced and created jobs.

Here's the greater argument as to why every single Republican take on the minimum wage is complete hogwash: All of them at some point include the absolute falsehood that businesses will invest profits in worker wages. You have only to look at our current economy, with wages having stagnated for 40 years, productivity up dramatically, and and record corporate profits to see that unless federal law is there to set a floor, businesses will pay workers as little as possible whenever possible in order to "maximize shareholder value".

American businesses have been doing everything they can to reduce wages.

Poll Position Update

Well now, things have come a long way for The Donald, haven't they.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump leads Democrat Hillary Clinton head-to-head, according to a new poll released Friday.

The poll by SurveyUSA finds that matched up directly, Trump garners 45 percent to Clinton’s 40 percent.

In other head-to-head matchups, Trump beats out Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) by 44 percent to 40 percent; Vice President Joe Biden by 44 percent to 42 percent; and former Vice President Al Gore by 44 percent to 41 percent.

The poll also found that 30 percent of respondents believe Trump will eventually be the Republican nominee, leading the field.

Kind of interesting to see this, as it proves that Trump motivates the GOP base, unlike depressing it like, say, Rick Perry or Jeb Bush.

It's also just one poll, but Republicans are certainly ready to vote for him, and Democrats are still at the "meh, whatever" stage.

We'll see.

Last Call For Rowan County Calculus

Lexington Herald-Leader political columnist Sam Youngman weighs in on the situation in Rowan County and how it will affect Kentucky's gubernatorial election in two months.

The longer Davis sits in a Carter County jail cell, the worse it is for Conway. Bevin is enjoying daily opportunities to motivate his base and present a clear, if at times misleading, message. 

Keep in mind that there are two other county clerks refusing to issue marriage licenses, and really it's anybody's guess how Davis eventually gets out of jail or what she will do when that happens. 

Regardless, this is not a story that will end in the next few days. 

Time is running out before Election Day, and the longer the saga endures, the harder it will be for Conway to get voters to focus on state issues — jobs, education, pensions — and his opponent's flaws. 

The bottom line is that we don't know how this will impact the fall elections. 

It could be the first ripple in the water that becomes a wave that wipes out the entire Democratic slate. Or it could marginalize Bevin and make Conway look more palatable to the broader electorate. 

It has been a quiet race so far, and the general consensus is that very few Kentuckians have been paying attention. 

But given the attention this episode is generating, it seems like a safe bet that voters will be tuned in from here on out.

Youngman's take is pretty much in line with my own opinions here.  It's is a safe bet to say that yes, as long as this election remains about "Barack Obama persecuting the good white Christian people" of Rowan County, Matt Bevin is going to be the commonwealth's next governor by double digits.

On the other hand, Bevin really, really, really tends to overplay his hand and he clearly doesn't know when to shut up while being ahead.

But if Huckabee, Paul, etc. show up and make constant news, it's only going to be helping Matt Bevin.

That means Jack Conway had better work damn hard to get this election back to being about what Matt Bevin will destroy if he's allowed to win, and fast.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/09/04/4020284_sam-youngman-unpacking-the-political.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&rh=1#storylink=cpy

A Bad Judgment Call In Kansas

I've been talking for months about how Kansas Republicans have effectively decimated the state, cutting taxes to the point where the state can no longer fund itself, under the nightmare tenure of Gov. Sam Brownback.  But now the state is rapidly going from permanent Laffer Curve punchline to third-world banana republic status with blinding speed.

On Wednesday night, a district judge in Kansas struck down a 2014 law that stripped the state Supreme Court of some of its administrative powers. The ruling has set off a bizarre constitutional power struggle between the Republican-controlled legislature and the state Supreme Court. At stake is whether the Kansas court system will lose its funding and shut down. 

Last year, the Kansas legislature passed a law that took away the top court's authority to appoint chief judges to the state's 31 judicial districts—a policy change Democrats believe was retribution for an ongoing dispute over school funding between the Supreme Court and the legislature. (Mother Jones reported on the standoff this spring.) When the legislature passed a two-year budget for the court system earlier this year, it inserted a clause stipulating that if a court ever struck down the 2014 administrative powers law, funding for the entire court system would be "null and void." Last night, that's what the judge did. 

The Republican legislature has threatened to destroy the state's court system unless the GOP can strip the power the judiciary has to appoint judges and give that power to lawmakers instead.  The judiciary called the legislature's bluff.

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt warned that last night's decision “could effectively and immediately shut off all funding for the judicial branch.” That would lead to chaos. As Pedro Irigonegaray, an attorney for the Kansas judge who brought the legal challenge against the administrative law, put it, “Without funding, our state courts would close, criminal cases would not be prosecuted, civil matters would be put on hold, real estate could not be bought or sold, adoptions could not be completed."  

Both parties in the case have agreed to ask that Wednesday's ruling remain on hold until it can be appealed to the state Supreme Court, so that there is a functioning court to hear the appeal. On Thursday, a judge granted the stay. Meanwhile, lawyers involved in the case and advocates for judicial independence are preparing a legal challenge to the clause of the judicial budget that withholds court funding. Sometime in the next few months, the state Supreme Court is likely to rule on whether the legislature has the right to strip the Supreme Court of its administrative authority, and whether it can make funding for the courts contingent on the outcome of a court case. 

“We have never seen a law like this before," Randolph Sherman, a lawyer involved in fighting the administrative law, said in a statement, referring to the self-destruct mechanism in the judicial budget. "[I]t is imperative that we stop it before it throws the state into a constitutional crisis.”

So depending on the outcome, Kansas may or may not have courts.  Amazing.

Imagine if a Republican Congress and Republican president passed a law that said the President could no longer appoint federal court or Supreme Court judges, and that instead they would be appointed by the Speaker of the House and approved by the Senate, and that the law also said that if the Supreme Court struck the law down, that Congress would automatically end all funding for the federal court system.

That's the kind of thing you find in a dictatorship, not a representative, Constitutional democracy. But here we are.

The most broken state in the Union continues to stay broken.

Under A Snow, Hill

Guy who exposed bunch of classified information to the world and fled the country to hang out with Putin:  Hey, Hillary Clinton is a dirty leaker!

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden said on Thursday that 2016 Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is likely aware her personal email server exposed sensitive national intelligence.

Snowden added that lesser employees would have lost their jobs for copying Clinton’s actions during her tenure as secretary of State. 

“This is a problem because anyone who has the clearances that the secretary of State has, or the director of any top level agency has, knows how classified information should be handled,” he said, according to excerpts of an Al Jazeera interview airing Friday. 

“If an ordinary worker at the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency … were sending details about the security of the embassies, which is alleged to be in her email, meetings with private government officials, foreign government officials and the statements that were made to them in confidence over unclassified email systems, they would not only lose their jobs and lose their clearance, they would very likely face prosecution for it,” he added.

Or they would, you know, fly to Moscow with even more info and get Glenn Greenwald's merry team of assholes to cover for you.

Coming from Snowden, that's frigging hysterical.

StupidiNews!

• Rowan County, Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis remains in jail on contempt charges for refusing to issue marriage licenses, her deputies are expected to issue them starting today.
• Vice President Joe Biden says the decision to run for president in 2016 depends on his "emotional energy to run" after the recent death of his son Beau Biden.
• Former Clinton State Department aide Bryan Pagliano says he will plead the Fifth rather than testify to Republicans over Clinton's private e-mail server.
• The number of people grilling out this Labor Day weekend is on the decline as record beef prices and fewer barbecue grills mean a decline in cooking outside.
• Two North Carolina teenagers face child pornography charges after consensual "sexting" for nude pictures on their own phones.