Friday Reads

Good Morning from the land of resplendent PTSD triggers!

August is my least favorite month.  I basically try to slog through it.  I can’t recall anything good EVER happening in August.  This year is no different.

They say criminals always return to the scene of their crimes.  Today, Dubya Bush returned to New Orleans to “commemorate” Katrina. But, it’s a brief hit and run before he heads off to Mississippi.  That should remind every one that what they asked Louisiana to do before getting help was not what they required of Mississippi where Haley “white council” Barbour reigned. Mass Murderer Heckuva Job Brownie needs to be reminded of this fact still.  This sentence from the ABC link pretty much says it all.

Bush largely took a hands-off approach, frequently saying that rebuilding was best left to locals.

All over our country, Republican government officials are refusing to do their jobs in a hissy fit of  selfishness and ideology.  I mean really, if you don’t like government, maybe you shouldn’t be an elected government official or a government worker.  We generally call them public servants for a damned good reason.

Kim Davis is doing everything she can to avoid doing her job. Now the Rowan County, Kentucky clerk is petitioning the Supreme Court to allow her to not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Davis was slapped down just yesterday by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which said that she or anyone in her office must issue marriage licenses to all couples regardless of gender.

Davis’ office just this morning again refused a same-sex couple the right to marry. Her office has until Monday to comply with the federal courts’ rulings.

Davis is represented by the founder of a certified anti-gay hate group, Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel.

“Davis will appeal one more rung up the ladder, to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who can intervene in 6th Circuit cases, Staver said,” according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.

“It is disappointing, certainly for our client, because the ramifications of the ruling is that there are no religious freedom rights for individuals if you can say a case is just against the office,” Staver told the newspaper. “The problem with that is, individuals who hold public office don’t forfeit their constitutional rights.”

But Right Wing Watch notes Staver is incorrect.

“While Staver claims that the clerk’s ‘constitutional rights’ are being violated when she is required to perform her job duties, the appeals court points out that this is not a case of individual free speech: ‘[W]here a public employee’s speech is made pursuant to his duties, ‘the relevant speaker [is] the government entity, not the individual.'”

She’s free to believe whatever nonsense she wants to believe on her own time and dime. She needs to comply, quit, or go to jail for breaking the law.  PERIOD.  Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to Elena Kagan ripping her a new one.
Hillary Clinton, however, tells it like it is.   “On women’s health, Clinton compares Republicans to ‘terrorist groups'”

Republican presidential candidates are striking back Friday after Hillary Clinton compared some of them who hold conservative views on abortion and women’s reproductive rights to “terrorist groups.”

During a riff Thursday where Clinton name checked Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Clinton said Republicans are “dead wrong for 21st century America.”

“Now, extreme views about women, we expect that from some of the terrorist groups, we expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world, but it’s a little hard to take from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States,” Clinton said at a speech in Cleveland. “Yet they espouse out of date, out of touch policies. They are dead wrong for 21st century America. We are going forward, we are not going back.”

Meanwhile, Ben Carson has women reduced to vessels with “contents”.  This is yet another Republican attack on woman’s autonomy and moral personhood.  How did this guy pass an anatomy course?

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is dismissing the notion that there is a “war on women,” saying the real war is on “what’s inside of women.”

“They tell you that there’s a war on women,” Carson said at a rally in Little Rock, Ark., on Thursday.

“There is no war on women — there may be a war on what’s inside of women, but there is no war on women in this country,” he continued, referring to abortion.

Democrats have accused Republicans of waging a war on women, citing efforts to limit abortion rights or access to birth control. But Republicans have pushed back on that language.
Carson said such rhetoric is only being used to divide people.

“All of those people who are trying to drive wedges between us, they are the enemy, they are not our friends, and we must learn to recognize them, and not allow them to manipulate us,” he said.

Carson’s comments come as the GOP contender’s anti-abortion-rights stance has come under fire after it was revealed that the retired neurosurgeon had co-authored a paper in which research was done on tissue acquired from fetuses aborted at nine and 17 weeks’ gestation.

“I have never actually worked with fetal tissue,” he told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly earlier this month.

Carson also took flak when he said that RU-486, which has been dubbed the “chemical abortion pill” by some anti-abortion-rights groups, should be administered to women in cases of rape and incest.

However, some have speculated that Carson mistakenly referenced RU-486, which is administered five to seven weeks into a pregnancy, when he really meant to refer to emergency contraception known as the morning-after pill.

The man is not an ob/gyn.  He needs to stfu.

Anyway, I’m making this short today.  I have a blanket fort to defend for a few more days and we’re running low on our supplies of red wine and pet treats.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?