StupidiNews!

• Two Americans and a German have won this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in optical microscopy, allowing science to peer into the workings of molecular functions.
• One day after the Supreme Court let rulings stand striking down state same-sex marriage bans as unconstitutional, the 9th Circuit has now overturned such bans in Idaho and Nevada.
• Canada is the latest country to join the anti-ISIS coalition in Iraq and Syria as legislators voted to send fighter jets to Iraq for participation in airstrikes against Islamic State forces.
• Wal-Mart is the latest company to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees, a move that will cut benefits from 30,000 workers.
• A new study finds using voice-activated technology while driving is nearly as distracting to drivers as texting or making phone calls.

Last Call For Unbelieveable Numbers

Last week I noted that the black community in Ferguson had gained more than 3,000 voter registrations in response to the shooting of Michael Brown.

Today I find out that never actually happened.

Last week, numerous news outlets, national and local, reported on a huge increase in registered voters in Ferguson, Mo., following the Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown. But it apparently didn't actually happen.

The St. Louis County elections board reported that 3,287 Ferguson residents had registered to vote. That is a huge surge for a city of 21,000, particularly as controversy swelled about the racial make-up of the city government after the shooting. Ferguson is two-thirds African-American, but its mayor and all but one member of the six-person city council are white.

But apparently that first report was in error. There was no voter registration spike. The county elections board reversed course on Tuesday and said that, actually, only 128 people had registered to vote since the shooting.

That sucks.  I mean, I'm glad that the 128 people registered.  It's a start.  But it's heartbreaking to see that the news was too good to be true, especially when it comes to voting.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

A whole bunch of people are asking why SCOTUS punted on Monday, allowing to stand the various Circuit Court rulings overturning of several state bans on same-sex marriage on Constitutional grounds.

Answer is simple.  It's a compromise.  And it has everything to do with Justice Kennedy.

Here's what I've come up with having had a day to think about it: you need four justices to grant a review for a case (cert).  If the four liberal justices who sided with Kennedy on striking down DOMA were confident Kennedy would join them and that they had five votes, they would have taken up the case in a heartbeat. Likewise, if the four conservative justices were confident Kennedy would side with them, they certainly would have taken the case.

Now, you would think given the usual impasse (which is "What the hell will Kennedy do this time?") they'd all decide it was worth taking up the cases and deciding for the nation.  But that didn't happen, which means there's a reason why.

The why is that I believe Justice Kennedy made it clear that he was going to take his decision on DOMA to its logical endpoint: giving LGBTQ Americans protected status as a minority, meaning that they would be protected from discrimination under a number of existing laws and the four liberal justices were going to back him.  I think Roberts worked out a deal where SCOTUS then punted to keep that from happening, with the understanding that the other justices wouldn't interfere with Circuit Court decisions overturning these state bans on same-sex marriages.  This would immediately put same-sex marriage into effect in a number of states, and did.

In other words, SCOTUS is saying "Hey, remaining Circuit Courts, we expect all of your guys to come to the same conclusion on this issue."  Liberals get same-sex marriage now, instead of next June.  Conservatives avoid a Kennedy decision that gives LGBTQ Americans special status under the law across the board.

The turd in the punchbowl is the Fifth Circuit, heavily stocked with conservatives.  If they uphold Texas's ban on same-sex marriage when all of the other Circuit Courts rule to overturn various state bans, then SCOTUS can no longer punt. (It's also possible the 11th Circuit could do the same thing with Georgia's ban, or on an outside shot, the 6th Circuit with Ohio's ban.)  That would force SCOTUS to take up the case and issue a ruling next year sometime (probably June).

But it would also completely mess up existing same-sex marriages in the states where SCOTUS punted on Monday.  I don't think they'd do that unless they had to.

Thing is, the Fifth or 11th Circuit may force it.

We'll see.  Meanwhile, there's evidence that Republicans have effectively given up on blocking same-sex marriage because it's bad politics.

I don't buy it yet, but as I said, we'll see.

The Republican Non-Reaction To Marriage Equality

As BuzzFeed's Kate Nocera notes, Republicans were virtually silent on the Supreme Court's surprise decision to pass on hearing any same-sex marriage appeals from the states this term, meaning that Circuit Court rulings striking down same-sex marriage bans as unconstitutional in five states are now settled law.

There has been one notable (and loud) exception to that GOP non-response, however:  Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who vowed to stop same-sex marriages across the country.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz likewise criticized the decision on the part of the court and announced that he would introduce a constitutional amendment that would allow the states to define marriage.

”I will be introducing a constitutional amendment to prevent the federal government or the courts from attacking or striking down state marriage laws,” Cruz said.

Now, Cruz isn't being totally stupid here.  He knows there's zero chance of getting two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate necessary for passing an amendment on to the states for ratification. But he's got the field to himself here on pushing that amendment, and that's going to mean intense fundraising from the millions of bigots who infest the GOP.  He knows what he's doing.

He also knows that he's put his 2016 competition in a bad spot.  Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and yes, Jeb Bush are going to have to answer some uncomfortable questions about whether or not they back Cruz on this.

How much this SCOTUS decision will play in 2014, I can't tell you.  Depending on how quickly appeals move in the states affected by the Circuit Court rulings, North Carolina and Colorado could have marriage equality before Election Day, meaning that the ruling could play a part for both Kay Hagan and Mark Udall.  How much that will affect turnout, well I don't know.

We'll see how this plays out.

StupidiNews!

• The Nobel prize in Physics has been awarded to the three scientists who invented the blue LED, for revolutionizing light sources across the world.
• Seattle's City Council has unanimously voted to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples' Day in response to Native American history.
• Islamic State fighters are pushing into the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani near the Turkish border, increasing the pressure on Turkey to send ground forces into the area.
• Spanish health officials are seeking those who may have come in contact with a nurse diagnosed with Ebola in Madrid on Monday.
• A new Pew Charitable Trusts study finds online payday lenders are much more likely to threaten delinquent customers with action, and that a third of loans are designed to automatically renew.

Last Call For Philly Staked And Cheesed

Pennsylvania GOP Gov. Tom Corbett's numbers are in freefall these days, and with a month to go before he loses in a landslide to Democrat Tom Wolf, Corbett is reminding everyone of what Republicans have done to Pennsylvania's union heritage: Philadelphia teachers have had their contract summarily canceled in order to take their health care benefits away.

The state panel that oversees Philadelphia’s cash-strapped public schools abruptly canceled a contract with teachers on Monday, despite nearly two years of labor negotiations, and said teachers would have to begin paying for healthcare benefits.

The move, which a labor expert said was likely unprecedented in the United States, would free up $43.8 million for the district this school year. Next year, it is facing a $71 million budget shortfall.

The system’s long-running financial woes have become a full-blown crisis over the past couple years, leading to thousands of layoffs, dozens of shuttered buildings and program cuts.

The move will affect the roughly 16,000 members of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers, assistants, nurses, counselors and others.

Keep in mind the Republicans on the state education board simply canceled the teachers' contracts.  No negotiation, no bargaining, no appeal, just zap and gone.  Contract law simply means nothing in the state now, because Republicans will crush teachers in order to destroy public education in the state.  Corbett and state Republicans simply decided that Philadelphia's school district was under this provision, and then they used it.

Poof.

That's what "right-to-work" means.  You have the right to work for what your bosses tell you you'll work for, or poof.

But please, continue to believe the problem is "greedy teacher's unions" because schoolteachers are such awful human beings who have to be punished whenever possible, the slime.  Meanwhile, more tax cuts for the rich!

Right?

Poof.

It's what you voted for, Pennsylvania.  Please fix that in November.

The State Of Red State Abortion

The recent 5th Circuit ruling allowing Texas's clinic-closing regulations on abortion to become law is, as the Washington Post's Paul Waldman reminds us, just the next step in the complete elimination of abortion in America by the right.

But the kind of law that Texas passed is aimed at shutting down clinics entirely. It does so by imposing a set of requirements on clinics that are designed to be nearly impossible to meet. The best known is the requirement that the physician performing abortions must have admitting privileges at a hospital within a certain radius of a given clinic. This would have precisely zero effect on whether a woman suffering complications from an abortion could get care at any hospital; a doctor without admitting privileges can still bring her patient to the hospital if it becomes necessary. It just means that one of the hospital’s doctors would have to officially admit the patient. 

Because of an organized campaign of terrorism aimed at abortion doctors over the last couple of decades, which has included bombings and assassinations, many doctors come from out of state to provide abortions, and therefore can’t have admitting privileges; hospitals are also reluctant to bestow the admitting privileges on a doctor providing abortions for fear they too could become a target. 

Like other restrictions, the admitting privileges requirement was concocted by Republican legislators precisely because they knew many abortion clinics would be unable to satisfy it and would therefore have to shut down. Texas’ law also requires that facilities performing abortions meet the building standards of ambulatory surgical clinics, which can mean millions of dollars in unnecessary upgrades. 

This decision wasn’t surprising, given that the 5th Circuit is a particularly conservative court. But the reasoning of the judges was breathtaking all the same. The Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision written by Sandra Day O’Connor in 1992 established the “undue burden” standard, which says that a state can restrict abortion so long as the restrictions don’t impose an undue burden on women. This court decided that despite the fact that Texas’ law would mean that one out of every six women in the state would live more than 150 miles from the nearest abortion clinics after the law shut so many of them down, that wouldn’t constitute an undue burden. As Jeffrey Toobin wrote: “The members of the Fifth Circuit panel seem to believe that anything short of a nationwide ban on abortion does not amount to an undue burden on women’s rights. This is the argument that will soon be heading to the Supreme Court.”

There's no reason to believe the result in the eventual Supreme Court ruling will be anything other than a 5-4 agreement with the 5th Circuit, with Anthony Kennedy's lasting legacy being the effective end of abortion in red states.

It just goes to show you that Republicans don't care about non-intrusive small government at all, they just want a government that punishes their political enemies and refuses to help them when they come looking for relief.  It also goes to show you that Republicans consider unmarried women to be their political enemies (as well as married ones who may not want to carry a child to term.)

But there's no war on women, and you should probably stay home because you're mad at Obama and not vote next month.

BREAKING: SCOTUS Punts On Marriage Equality

Today the Supreme Court denied requests to take up any of the five state cases appealing lower Circuit court rulings finding those state bans on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, letting those decisions stand.

Which means in Oklahoma, Virginia, Indiana, Utah, and Wisconsin, same-sex marriage is now 100% legal.

Oh, but there's more:

Other states under the jurisdiction of appeals courts that struck down the bans will also be affected, meaning the number of states with gay marriage is likely to quickly jump from 19 to 30.

The other states would be North Carolina, West Virginia, South Carolina, Wyoming, Kansas and Colorado. 

The high court’s decision not to hear the cases was unexpected because most legal experts believed it would want to weigh in on a question of national importance that focuses on whether the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment under the law means gay marriage bans were unlawful. 

The issue could still return to the court, but the message sent by the court in declining to hear the matter would be a boost to gay marriage advocates involved in similar litigation in states that still have bans on the books.

The Sixth Circuit's decision pending on Kentucky's appeal is still forthcoming, but I can't imagine SCOTUS acting now until a Circuit Court finds same-sex marriage bans Constitutional somehow.  At this point, without a ruling challenging this, SCOTUS will keep punting until all 50 states have marriage equality.

The Loan Rearranger Rides Again

Time for this week's helping of Right-Wing Millennial Shaming(tm) from an unlikely source, TIME Magazine via xoJane.com, as recent college graduate Jessica Slizewski gives her treatise on why those of us who took out student loans in the last ten years or so have only yourself to blame.

I can’t pretend I completely understand how these people feel after the fun is over and the repayments begin, but I can say that I really don’t feel bad for them.

Why not? Because I worked hard to avoid taking out loans. My wonderful parents and grandmother helped me pay for my education, but in the end, it was a few decisions I made that saved me the burden of borrowing money I would never have been able to pay back. Unlike the majority of my friends who went to schools less than an hour from their parents’ homes and chose to live on campus rather than commute, my college roommates were named Mom and Dad. I chose state schools that were half, sometimes one-quarter, of the cost of the schools my friends were attending and worked a part-time on-campus scholarship job in addition to full-time hours at my retail job. I spent the four years of my life designed for partying essentially reliving my high school years. And yes, it was awful.

Imagine the stereotypical American college experience. You pick some private university in the middle of a cornfield with a tuition price of about $36,000 a year, plus room and board, party it up every night since you’ve finally escaped the teenage hellhole known as your family’s home, and stumble into your Symbolism in Harry Potter seminar at 11 a.m. still half-drunk and probably reeking of Icehouse. You join a sorority, get vomit in your hair more times than you’re willing to admit publicly, and spend half the day on whatever flavor-of-the-week social media site the guy you currently like is active on.

Sounds fun — until you realize all this will probably leave you at least $30,000 in the hole upon receiving that diploma. And guess what? Unless you absolutely needed some highly specialized major that was only offered at a few schools, chances are you probably could have gotten your education/accounting/psychology degree at a much more affordable university closer to home. You might have even been able to — gasp — live with your parents.

It seems to me that the real problem is the ridiculous cost of a college education in 2014, and in several states, cuts to state university systems are only making this worse.  The college system we have and the methods we have of paying for it aren't going to survive this generation, I expect.

But the cost of college isn't the fault of the Millenials.  You might not feel bad for this Jessica, but you should.  Like it or not, we're all in this together, and this is badly hurting our economy, including wherever you're employed at.  It's great that you worked your way through college, that takes a lot of discipline.  Apparently however, it took more discipline than you have to realize that it doesn't make you a goddess, nor does it fix the fact that you're still dependent on a bunch of Millennials with huge college debt to power the economy you're a part of going forward.

Of course, the article notes she lives in New Zealand now.  That actually says a lot.

StupidiNews!

• It's Nobel Laureate week, and this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to three European scientists for their work on the brain's positioning system in the hippocampus.
• New research shows that the upper layers of the oceans in the Southern Hemisphere may have warmed twice as quickly as originally thought.
• The Dallas Ebola patient is now in critical condition as health officials look for a homeless man who may have come in contact with him.
• Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff placed first in Sunday's elections, but the surprise is that forcing a runoff is Aecio Neves, who was largely expected to finish third behind Marina Silva. 
• Redbox Instant, the joint streaming venture between Verizon and Redbox, is slated for demolition on Tuesday as lack of account security and massive competition forced it under.

Last Call For The GOP Solves Ebola

Best way to deal with anyone who might have come in contact with a virus with a 50% mortality rate, according to GOP adviser and pundit Todd Kincannon?

Make it a 100% mortality rate, of course.

People with Ebola in the US need to be humanely put down immediately. RT @AP: Dallas hospital: U.S. Ebola patient in critical condition
— Todd Kincannon (@Todd__Kincannon) October 4, 2014

The protocol for a positive Ebola test should be immediate humane execution and sanitization of the whole area. That will save lives.
— Todd Kincannon (@Todd__Kincannon) October 4, 2014

Ebola has a strong transmission vector through health care personnel. No effective way to contain while treating.
— Todd Kincannon (@Todd__Kincannon) October 4, 2014

GOP.  The party of ideas!  Ideas like, you know, genocide.  But don't you dare compare them to those wacky kids in Germany in the late 30's and early 40's just because they had similar solutions.

Oh, and please tell me again how there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats.

Social Media Branding 101

Next time you see some intern get a company into serious trouble with a botched "official" tweet, remind yourself that it could always be worse if the boss is a real killer.

An apparently errant tweet by the Taliban's spokesman in Afghanistan gave his location as being in neighboring Pakistan.

On Friday, a tweet by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claiming an attack included geolocation information that suggested he sent the message from Sindh, Pakistan.

Mujahid later sent a tweet Saturday describing the location leak as an "enemy plot." He also offered his Afghan telephone number to confirm his identity and wrote: "With full confidence, I can say that I am in my own country."

Oops.  Hope he doesn't get, well, you know, fired.

Your Sunday Long Read

The White House and CDC have been telling hospitals to prepare for possible Ebola patients for a while now.  It would have been nice if the hospital where one of them showed up last week actually listened, because the entire process was a carnival of errors that came close to a medical disaster in Texas.

Health officials’ handling of the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States continued to raise questions Friday, after the hospital that is treating the patient and that mistakenly sent him home when he first came to its emergency room acknowledged that both the nurses and the doctors in that initial visit had access to the fact that he had arrived from Liberia.

For reasons that remain unclear, nurses and doctors failed to act on that information, and released the patient under the erroneous belief that he had a low-grade fever from a viral infection, allowing him to put others at risk of contracting Ebola. Those exposed included several schoolchildren, and the exposure has the potential to spread a disease in Dallas that has already killed more than 3,000 people in Africa.

On Thursday, the hospital, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, released a statement essentially blaming a flaw in its electronic health records system for its decision to send the patient — Thomas E. Duncan, a Liberian national visiting his girlfriend and relatives in the United States — home the first time he visited its emergency room, Sept. 25. It said there were separate “workflows” for doctors and nurses in the records so the doctors did not receive the information that he had come from Africa.

But on Friday evening, the hospital effectively retracted that portion of its statement, saying that “there was no flaw” in its electronic health records system. The hospital said “the patient’s travel history was documented and available to the full care team in the electronic health record (E.H.R.), including within the physician’s workflow.”

The hospital had said previously that the patient’s condition during his first visit did not warrant admission and that he was not exhibiting symptoms specific to Ebola.

The admission came on a day when health officials narrowed down to 10 the number of people considered most at risk of contracting Ebola after coming into contact with Mr. Duncan. They also moved the four people who had shared an apartment with him from their potentially contaminated quarters, as local and federal officials tried to assure the public that the disease was contained despite initial missteps here.

Now, this could be the hospital administration throwing the ER staff into the grinder, and it certainly wouldn't be the first time that ever happened in the annals of hospital administration politics (yes, my mother was indeed a hospital nurse for 25 years) but it seems to me that somebody dropped the ball here and sent the guy home.

The larger issue is that Texas's healthcare system is overloaded and that of course Gov. Rick Perry and the state's GOP controlled legislature turned down billions in Medicare expansion money to help fix that, so the real responsibility lies in the hands of the Republicans running the show.

As you read the article, keep in mind that Republicans are demanding a better healthcare system, but refuse to do anything to actually pay for it, administer it, or take federal dollars for it, some of which have already been paid for by Texas taxpayers.  Hey, if Texas wants to pay for Medicare expansion for California and New York and get nothing in return, well, that's your call, guys.

As Oily As They Come

Meet Charlotte Lucas, co-founder along with her Forrest husband of one of Indiana's largest corporations, Lucas Oil.  If the name sounds familiar, it's probably because the NFL's Indianapolis Colts play at Lucas Oil Stadium.  In 25 years, the company has gone from local to international on the strength of its sales of petroleum products and fuel additives in the hot rod crazy Midwest.

And it took all of one Facebook post to show the world just what kind of horrible person Charlotte Lucas really is.

"I'm sick and tired of minorities running our country!" Lucas wrote in the post. "As far as I'm concerned, I don't think that atheists (minority), muslims [sic] (minority) nor any other minority group has the right to tell the majority of the people in the United States what they can and cannot do here. Is everyone so scared that they can't fight back for what is right or wrong with his country?"

In a phone call with Call 6 Investigator Rafael Sanchez, Lucas confirmed the Facebook post.

"I was very upset when I wrote that," she said. "I will not elaborate other than to say that there are certain people who are trying to make the whole world eat what they want to eat and do what they want to do. I don't think it's any of their business what I put in my mouth. Thank you."

Must be really hard being a multi-millionaire.  You still have to put up with those nasty, sub-human brown people, right?  I wonder how many "minorities" work for Lucas.  Nice to know the woman who co-founded the company thinks we're all vermin, right?

PS, I bet she voted Republican all her life.

A House Afire Situation

The Supreme Court named on Thursday some of the cases it will take up starting later this month as the new term begins, and one of those cases could end up meaning the effective end of the Fair Housing Act.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide whether people suing for housing discrimination must prove they were victims of intentional bias, in a case that may give long-sought protection to the lending industry. 

The justices today said they will hear an appeal from Texas officials sued under the U.S. Fair Housing Act over tax credits for low-income building projects. The question is whether people can sue by showing a practice had a “disparate impact” on racial minorities, or whether they must meet a higher standard by proving intentional bias. 

The court will consider jettisoning the disparate-impact theory, which has helped the Obama administration get hundreds of millions of dollars in fair-lending settlements with Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) and other financial institutions. The court has twice before granted review on the issue, only to have settlements scuttle the case. 

“The far-reaching scope of disparate-impact liability makes this a question of exceptional importance,” Texas officials led by Attorney General Greg Abbottargued in their appeal.

So without the disparate impact theory, Texas will be able to get away with this:

Texas is fighting a lawsuit by the Inclusive Communities Project, a Dallas-based group that advocates for integrated housing. The organization accuses Texas of allocating a disproportionate number of federal low-income housing tax credits to minority neighborhoods.

“That practice makes dwellings unavailable in particular areas, thereby perpetuating residential segregation in the Dallas area,” the group said in court papers.

But oh well, banks need protection from those people.   Oh, and just in case you think this won't affect you as a minority because you don't live in low-income housing:

The case could also affect the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the law used by the administration against Bank of America and Wells Fargo. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has relied on the disparate-impact doctrine in enforcing that law, which contains language similar to that in the Fair Housing Act.

So without disparate impact, punishment for lenders who discriminate en masse against minorities by denying them credit goes away too.

Because you know racism is over.  Chief Justice Roberts said so.  And I fully expect him to be joined by four other votes too.