StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Arthur has now formed off the Georgia coast as a Category 1 storm heading for the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
• California officials are cracking down on water regulations as the state's worst drought in over a century continues.
• Iran and the five permanent UN Security Council members, plus Germany, are heading into final rounds of nuclear talks ahead of a July 20 deadline.
• India's new ruling party is demanding answers from the US after a Washington Post article citing possible NSA spying on the party of current PM Narendra Modi.
• Goldman Sachs is demanding that Google "unsend" an email that the trading giant accidentally sent to the wrong address, and is willing to go to court over it.

Last Call For The GOP Goal

Joe Sonka reminds us that there is a difference between the two political parties, and that is the stated goal of the GOP is to end all abortion in America by criminalizing it.

The National Right to Life Commission (NRLC) held their national convention in Louisville this weekend at the Galt House, rallying supporters to their cause of ending legal abortion in America. Their featured speaker Saturday morning, Sen. Mitch McConnell, told a slightly more than half-full conference room that “the tide is turning” on the issue, and he would help the anti-abortion advocates win their fight. 

“I’m not sure when it first occurred to me that we are winning this debate, but there’s no question that we are,” said McConnell. “The signs are everywhere, and you have played a huge role in that.” 

One of those signs came two days later, when a 5-4 Supreme Court decision ruled in favor of the craft store Hobby Lobby, who argued that they should be exempt from an Affordable Care Act mandate that they must provide their employees coverage for four types of birth control the company considers “abortion,” because this violates Hobby Lobby’s religious freedom. Despite no legal or scientific basis for that claim, the court ruled that “closely held” private companies — which make up 90 percent of American companies — are exempt from this mandate if they claim it goes against their religious beliefs, granting such companies the same religious rights as persons. 

With the current makeup of Congress and the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade does not appear in eminent danger, but abortion opponents openly celebrated the Hobby Lobby ruling as an advancement for their larger cause of chipping away at women’s reproductive rights. At last weekend’s convention in Louisville, McConnell urged attendees to help elect him majority leader of the Senate this fall so he can push through legislation banning abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy, which has already passed the House. 

Two Republican congressmen from Kentucky, Representatives Andy Barr and Brett Guthrie, who also spoke Saturday morning, are co-sponsors of legislation that would not only ban all abortion in America — with no exemptions for rape, incest and health of the mother — but could go further than the Hobby Lobby decision, banning many forms of birth control.

And that's really the point for the American Taliban here.  If you take away reproductive health care choices, then women will have to remain celibate or have to be punished for being sluts, and that will magically fix everything that's wrong with America.  It's laughable, or would be, if it again wasn't the stated goal of one of the major political parties in this country and the position of tens of millions of their voters.

So yes, when people ask me how I can support Alison Lundergan Grimes when she's "just as bad as Mitch", I remind them exactly why that's not the case.

GOP Minority Outreach In Mississippi Continues

So in the last 48 hours we've gone from mildly racist accusations that GOP Sen. Thad Cochran won last week's Mississippi Senate primary runoff against state Sen. Chris McDaniel by promising to get free government stuff for us awful, lazy black people to definitely more racist accusations that Cochran actually bought us awful, lazy black people to vote for him at the low, low price of $15 a piece.

The claim is centered on a report by blogger Charles C. Johnson, who reported at his website GotNews.com that African-American activist Stevie Fielder brought "hundreds or even thousands" of African-Americans to vote for Cochran. Johnson alleges that Fielder motivated the voters by calling McDaniel a racist. Johnson identifies Fielder as a pastor at the First Missionary Baptist Church in Meridian, Mississippi, located in Lauderdale County, but a deacon at the church told the Clarion-Ledger that Fielder is not a pastor there and is instead a "self-proclaimed minister."

Some blogger reports some guy said this happened, so of course it's 100% truth now and the only possible explanation for how McDaniel lost a race he should have won by 47 billion points because FREEDOM.

McDaniel supporters, since he lost the runoff, have accused Cochran of engaging in foul play to win the election by seeking out African-American and Democratic support. Laura Van Overschelde, a member of the Central Mississippi Tea Party, a group that strongly supports McDaniel, echoed Johnson's report on her Facebook.

"You lame stream media, Thad bought this election paying black voters harvested by black pastors at $15 a vote," Van Overschelde wrote. "Do your investigative reporting before you start spouting off printing false narratives."

See,  it's truth now, and the "false narrative" is that McDaniel somehow lost.  It's hysterical how racist and stupid these clowns are.  Of course it's all the fault of them dirty (insert racist expletive here.)  And you'd better believe that these assholes now believe it's their godly, Christian duty to punish as many black people as possible.

It's still 1964 in Mississippi, and about as deadly.

America The Counter-Productive

If you want to know why Republicans have now scrapped plans for immigration reform entirely, it's because their rabidly xenophobic base will crucify them for anything short of land mines, moats, army brigades and a 100-foot wall on the border to get rid of "those people".

More than 100 demonstrators forced buses full of immigrants to be rerouted from Murrieta, California nearly 70 miles south while hurling derisive chants toward them, KFMB-TV reported on Tuesday.

The protesters chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A,” and “Go back home” at the caravan, which was originally headed to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Murrieta carrying 140 undocumented immigrants, many of them women and children, who had entered the country after journeying from Central America. Federal officials put them on the buses after they were flown into San Diego from Texas earlier in the day.

“Send them back to their countries,” one unidentified male protester told KFMB. “Send them back to where they came from.”

It’s not clear if the demonstrators realized, however, that the purpose of facilities like the one in Murrieta is to help authorities prepare to send the immigrants leave the U.S., and to account for individuals who could pose flight risks. But because the protesters blocked the buses, they were shuttled out of the area and taken to a similar center in San Ysidro, close to the U.S.-Mexico border, where they arrived late Tuesday afternoon.

“This was a victory for the American people,” another protester was quoted as saying.

Congratulations, anti-immigration meatheads demanding undocumented immigrants be "sent back where they came from".  You blocked buses full of immigrants being processed so they could be deported out of the country, so they had to stay inside the country longer.

And no, Republicans have become the party of "us" versus "them", and "them" is a very long list of ethnicities, sexual orientations, religions, and beliefs.  I have been saying for years that Republican xenophobia would end any immigration deal, and in the end they've resigned themselves to that fact.

Demographics will be unforgiving.

StupidiNews!

• A cargo plane in Kenya crashed into a building shortly after takeoff from Nairobi, killing all four aboard, the Kenyan Red Cross says nobody on the ground was injured.
• Six LA County Sheriff's officials were convicted on federal charges of obstruction of an investigation into police violence against prisoners in county jails.
• Despite a record 16 saves, US goalie Tim Howard couldn't prevent a loss to Belgium 2-1 in extra time in yesterday's Round of 16 World Cup match, sending the Yanks home.
• Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been charged by French investigators with influence peddling as part of three corruption cases pending against him.
• With public comments savaging the deal, Time Warner Cable customers in New York are not happy with the planned merger of the two broadband and cable giants.

Last Call For Damage, Limited

Yesterday's Hobby Lobby decision was ugly, and the right went out of their way to call critics of the ruling all kinds of names, with Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post calling the reaction "caterwauling", Sean Davis at The Federalist complaining of "stupid arguments by dumb liberals" and the braintrust at Power Line going so far as to call the decision "meaningless".

Only the funny part is, the liberal point that the decision means private, for-profit companies can now refuse to cover any birth control is actually 100% correct.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday confirmed that its decision a day earlier extending religious rights to closely held corporations applies broadly to the contraceptive coverage requirement in the new health care law, not just the handful of methods the justices considered in their ruling.

The justices did not comment in leaving in place lower court rulings in favor of businesses that object to covering all 20 methods of government-approved contraception. 

Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby Inc. and a Pennsylvania furniture maker won their court challenges Monday in which they refused to pay for two emergency contraceptive pills and two intrauterine devices. 

Tuesday's orders apply to companies owned by Catholics who oppose all contraception. Cases involving Colorado-based Hercules Industries Inc., Illinois-based Korte & Luitjohan Contractors Inc. and Indiana-based Grote Industries Inc. were awaiting action pending resolution of the Hobby Lobby case. 

Do we understand now what's going on?  If a "closely-held" business objects to any or all 20 forms of covered contraception under the Affordable Care Act on religious grounds, they no longer have to offer health insurance coverage for any of them.  This includes standard birth control methods like the pill.

Sure, that seems like freedom to me, right?

So yes, this decision is very much an attack on women, who now can be denied health insurance coverage because of their boss's religion.

Might want to keep that in mind when you vote in November.

Ethics Schmethics, We're Flying To Aruba

Republicans continue to respond very quickly to the needs of their real constituency: the corporate lobbyists who have bought and paid for our political system.

It's going to be a little more difficult to ferret out which members of Congress are lavished with all-expenses-paid trips around the world after the House has quietly stripped away the requirement that such privately sponsored travel be included on lawmakers' annual financial-disclosure forms. 

The move, made behind closed doors and without a public announcement by the House Ethics Committee, reverses more than three decades of precedent. Gifts of free travel to lawmakers have appeared on the yearly financial form dating back its creation in the late 1970s, after the Watergate scandal. National Journal uncovered the deleted disclosure requirement when analyzing the most recent batch of yearly filings. 

"This is such an obvious effort to avoid accountability," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "There's no legitimate reason. There's no good reason for it."

Free trips paid for by private groups must still be reported separately to the House's Office of the Clerk and disclosed there. But they will now be absent from the chief document that reporters, watchdogs, and members of the public have used for decades to scrutinize lawmakers' finances.

Now why would House Republicans suddenly want to start hiding  disclosures of which corporations are giving them free trips?  It's not like lobbyists are spending millions buying members of Congress in order to get billions in favorable legislative deals, right?

The change occurs as free travel, which critics have criticized as thinly veiled junkets, has come back into vogue. Last year, members of Congress and their aides took more free trips than in any year since the influence-peddling scandal that sent lobbyist Jack Abramoff to prison. There were nearly 1,900 trips at a cost of more than $6 million last year, according to Legistorm, which compiles travel records. 

Now none of those trips must be included on the annual disclosures of lawmakers or their aides.

But the real problem is Obama playing golf, right?

BREAKING: Federal Judge Overturns Kentucky's Same-Sex Marriage Ban

And another unconstitutional ban on marriage equality falls, this time right here in the Bluegrass State.

A federal judge today ruled that same-sex couples have a right to marry in Kentucky. 

"In America, even sincere and long-hold religious beliefs do not trump the constitutional rights of those who happen to have been out-voted," U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II wrote to invalidate Kentucky's constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. 

Heyburn in February had ruled that Kentucky must recognize gay marriages performed in other states. 

Heyburn upheld the right to marry today, but put his ruling on hold pending a decision by a higher court. Heyburn rejected the only justification offered by lawyers for Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear — that traditional marriages contribute to a stable birth rate and the state's long-term economic stability. 

"These arguments are not those of serious people," he said. 

Heyburn held that the ban on gay marriage within Kentucky violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law and that there is "no conceivable legitimate purpose for it." 

He held that the state's 2004 constitutional amendment and a similar statute enacted in 1998 deny gay couples lower income and estate taxes; leave from work under the Family and Medical Leave Act, family insurance coverage; and the ability to adopt children as a couple. 

"Perhaps most importantly," he added, the Kentucky law denies same-sex couples the "intangible and and emotional benefits of civil marriage." 

Heyburn stayed the ruling until the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decides gay-marriage cases from Kentucky and three other states. Oral arguments are scheduled for Aug. 6.

Still a perfect record for overturning state same-sex marriage bans since last year's DOMA ruling by the Supreme Court.  Folks, if Kentucky has fallen, and we'll see about the 6th Circuit, I'd have to finally start believing that it's going to be up to SCOTUS, maybe this time next year.

Govern Mental Problems

The Age of Obama has also been the Age of Republicans Refusing To Govern, so it's no surprise that Gallup's annual poll on US confidence in the three branches of government has hit new lows.

Americans' confidence in all three branches of the U.S. government has fallen, reaching record lows for the Supreme Court (30%) and Congress (7%), and a six-year low for the presidency (29%). The presidency had the largest drop of the three branches this year, down seven percentage points from its previous rating of 36%.



These data come from a June 5-8 Gallup poll asking Americans about their confidence in 16 U.S. institutions -- within government, business, and society -- that they either read about or interact with.

While Gallup recently reported a historically low rating of Congress, Americans have always had less confidence in Congress than in the other two branches of government. The Supreme Court and the presidency have alternated being the most trusted branch of government since 1991, the first year Gallup began asking regularly about all three branches.

But on a relative basis, Americans' confidence in all three is eroding. Since June 2013, confidence has fallen seven points for the presidency, four points for the Supreme Court, and three points for Congress. Confidence in each of the three branches of government had already fallen from 2012 to 2013.

The Supreme Court took a nasty hit during the Dubya Years (Alito and Roberts will do that, along with the ridiculous nomination of Harriet Miers), recovered slightly with President Obama's election, and has dropped again.  Dubya still holds the record lows for the least trusted Executive Branch for now, but Congress has never been above 30% and is at 7% now.

The larger issue is Republicans are handily winning their war on the federal government, and dangerously so.  That's the entire point of modern Republicanism, after all.  Maybe we don't need
"united" states so much anymore.

StupidiNews!

• After the bodies of three missing Israeli teens were found near the West Bank early Monday, Israel has retaliated with dozens of air strikes on Hamas positions in Gaza.
• Arthur, the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, is expected to form off the coast of the US this weekend, which could bring heavy rains to the East Coast for 4th of July.
• Iraq's new parliament met yesterday to try to form a new unity government and replace PH Nuri al-Maliki, but failed to reach any agreement after Sunni lawmakers walked out.
• Embattled Toronto Mayor Rob Ford says his recent stint in rehab for alcohol and drug abuse saved his life, and that he must work harder to earn the city's trust again.
• The sixth season of canceled NBC sitcom Community will be made after all, as the series goes to Yahoo's new online streaming service.

Last Call For Executive, Now With Action

President Obama, after finally being informed by Orange Julius that there will be no immigration vote in the House in 2014 because Republicans hate his guts and want him to die or something, has decided that it's time for some good old fashioned executive orders.

A clearly angry President Obama announced Monday that he plans to move forward with administrative action by the end of the summer on steps he can take without Congress, but within his existing authorities, to “fix as much of our broken immigration system as we can” because of Republican inaction on an immigration overhaul.

The announcement comes a week after Speaker John Boehner and Obama spoke before the PGA golf event where Boehner told him the House will not take a vote on immigration reform this year.

Remember, Boehner not doing his job is Obama's fault.  Because everything is Obama's fault.

“Today I’m beginning a new effort to fix as much of the immigration system as I can on my own without Congress,” he said, later adding that “it’s very rare that you get labor, business, evangelicals, law enforcement all agreeing on what needs to be done.”

The most important expected policy shift is “administrative relief,” which activists have been calling for for all of 2014, a plan that would reset enforcement priorities and lessen record deportations. The president previously directed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief Jeh Johnson to look at its policies to make sure they are “humane.”

So, looks like border policy and immigration and detention policy will get a major rewrite.  House Republicans will snivel and choose to not vote on the bill and it will die, just like Republicans killed immigration reform seven years ago under a Republican President.

So nothing will get done.  Remember which side is choosing to do nothing.

SCOTUS-Palooza

The final two rulings of this Supreme Court term were 5-4 decisions written by Justice Samuel Alito, and they're just as terrible as you'd expect.  First, in Harris v. Quinn,  the decision came down that public unions cannot force non-union members in a union shop to pay dues.

In a 5-4 decision by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court dealt a serious blow to public sector unions on Monday, although the opinion fell short of the claim made by the anti-union litigation shop that argued that case, which sought to undermine the finances of all public sector unions. The plaintiffs in this case, and their anti-union attorneys, argued that non-union members cannot be required to reimburse unions that bargain on their behalf for the costs it incurred during that bargaining. Without those reimbursements, the financial viability of the unions is in jeopardy. 

Alito’s opinion in Harris v. Quinn recognizes a category of “partial public employees” who cannot be required to contribute funds to the collective bargaining that they benefit from. This case involved Medicaid home health workers who are paid by the state but who work directly for individual patients. Nevertheless, the case hints that the Court will deal additional blows to public sector unions in the future. Alito labels a seminal Supreme Court opinion allowing unions to collect reimbursements from nonmembers “questionable on several grounds.”

That case is 1977's Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which upheld that public employees could unionize.  Alito dropped several hints in his decision that an open challenge to that ruling would find fertile ground (or at least five votes to sink it.)

Alito then went on to blow a hole in 120+ years of established legal precedent involving the religious rights of corporate entities in the Hobby Lobby case.

If you’re one of the estimated 14,000 individuals who work at Hobby Lobby or Conestoga Wood — the companies who represented the two plaintiffs in the case — then you’re most immediately affected by Monday’s decision. Your employers no longer have to cover several types of birth control that they’re opposed to. 

Both companies object to covering emergency contraception, which they falsely claim is a type of abortion despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. Hobby Lobby’s owners also take issue with two forms of intrauterine devices (IUDs), long lasting forms of birth control inserted in the uterus, for the same unscientific reason. So the workers employed by those businesses won’t be able to use their insurance coverage for those types of birth control anymore. They’ll presumably be able to continue using their health plans for other methods, like hormonal birth control pills, that their bosses don’t have a problem with.

But even if you don’t work at Hobby Lobby or Conestoga Wood, there’s a chance that your birth control coverage may be put into question. More than 70 other companies also sued for the right to stop following Obamacare’s contraceptive provision. According to the National Women’s Law Center, 48 of those cases are still pending. Now that the Court has sided with Hobby Lobby, it will be much easier for some of those companies to win their suits and opt out of covering certain types of contraception.

And now that this decision has opened the door to "closely-held" corporations having the same religious freedoms as the family that owns them,, and being able to subject their employees to those beliefs, a whole lot more douchebaggery is coming down the pike.

In her epic dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that the Senate blocked an amendment to the Affordable Care Act that would have given Hobby Lobby the religious exemption they later sued for.  In other words, this is a perfect example of real judicial overreach, and litigating from the bench.

But that's how SCOTUS works these days, slowly rolling back laws passed by Democrats.

The Darkest Of Waters

Remember our old Iraq War military contractor friend Blackwater (now the cryptic "Xe") and founder Erik Prince?  Turns out this awful bunch of mercenaries weren't just immoral, they liked to push our government around too with death threats against anyone investigating them.  TPM's Josh Marshall recounts the NY Times investigation:

Over the course of the last decade, Blackwater became a notorious symbol of military contracting run amok, with price-gouging, reckless behavior and your occasional atrocity. So it's hard to imagine anything coming out that would genuinely shock anyone. Until this.

According to documents reviewed by The New York Times, State Department investigator had already begun probing Blackwater a short time before the infamous Nisour Square shooting in 2007. But the probe broke down when Blackwater's top guy in Iraq threatened to kill the lead investigator, suggesting, not improbably, that amid the anarchy of Iraq it could be easily covered up as just another moment of sectarian violence or a terrorist attack.

Nice guys, huh.  Would be a shame if anything happened to your State Department investigation team, right?

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports. 

American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.

Nobody was going to mess with these guys, and they probably got away with all kids of truly horrific if not criminal acts for years in Iraq.  And the American people paid them billions to do it.   Who in the Bush administration would ever question Blackwater about a dead US civilian sent to a war zone to poke around where they shouldn't be?

It's not like anything happens to these guys even if people do ask questions.

StupidiNews!

• The Supreme Court is expected to hand down the final two decisions of its term today, one involving the future of public unions, the other, religious objections by corporations to birth control.
• Evacuations due to massive flooding in southern Brazil has forced 50,000 out of their homes already in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul states, a week of torrential rainfall has flooded towns.
• President Obama is expected to formally nominate former Proctor & Gamble CEO Bob McDonald to replace Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki on Monday.
• California grocers wanting to charge fees for paper bags are teaming up with environmental groups to lobby for a statewide ban on plastic grocery bags.
• Scientists have discovered a new species of elephant shrew in Namibia's Namib desert, the smallest of the family of shrews with long, trunk-like snouts.

Last Call For The Bufferless Zone

With the Supreme Court having struck down the Massachusetts "Buffer Zone" law around abortion clinics to prevent violence (indeed the ruling of SCOTUS was unanimous in that the law was an arbitrary violation of the free speech rights of anti-choice protesters) the first Saturday without the 35-foot distance between protestors and clinic workers and patients at a Boston-area clinic got ugly and fast.

At its height, the protest drew about 70 people — three times more than the average Saturday morning crowd, typically the largest gathering of the week — a turnout inspired by Thursday’s US Supreme Court ruling that struck down the Massachusetts law that since 2007 had kept them outside the yellow line.

“I have a friend that had an abortion 45 years ago. I saw what she suffered, and that’s why I come,” said Mary O’Donnell, 82, of Arlington, clutching a handful of pamphlets, rosaries, and medals. “To let them know there’s another option.”

The Supreme Court ruling, she said, “just gives us the chance to be a little bit closer, to let them know that we care.”

Yes, show them your caring and compassionate side by intimidating and berating them.

Many of the young women entering the clinic, however, appeared upset by the crowd, and hustled through with their heads down, some clutching the hands of their partners.

“You have to walk through this circle of people staring at you and talking to you and judging you,” a young woman named Julie said after leaving the clinic. “It’s very intimidating.”

Julie, who was not at the clinic for an abortion and asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her privacy, said that as she walked in, one person tried to hand her pamphlets and another shouted to her: “Fetuses have fingernails and a heartbeat.”

To her, the Supreme Court’s ruling felt hateful to women.

“Sitting in there today, I was thinking about all these protesters outside, and what if somebody just threw a bomb in?” she said. “That’s what was going through my mind when I was getting my blood pressure taken.”

Not like it hasn't happened before, folks.  But in this new era, pro-choice Americans are adapting.

Marty Walz, president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, said the clinic will now need escorts to shepherd patients through the crowd every day it is open, not just on Saturdays.

“We know there’s horror at the court’s ruling,” Walz said. In anticipation of that ruling, Planned Parenthood received about 100 applications from people volunteering to work as escorts, she said. In the first 24 hours since the ruling, they were overwhelmed with nearly 200 more.

Since the ruling, said Walz, Planned Parenthood has received many complaints from patients about the protests, and more patients than usual have canceled appointments.

“Our patients and staff are subjected to this extreme, aggressive behavior, but that’s what the Supreme Court thinks is appropriate for the women of this country,” Walz said.

You have a constitutional right to harass women at abortion clinics, you know.  Unanimously decided by the highest court in the land.

You know, until all the clinics are gone.