Denali’s name has long been seen as one such slight, regarded as an example of cultural imperialism in which a Native American name with historical roots was replaced by an American one having little to do with the place.
The central Alaska mountain has officially been called Mount McKinley for almost a century. In announcing that Sally Jewell, the secretary of the interior, had used her power to rename it, Mr. Obama was paying tribute to the state’s Native population, which has referred to the site for generations as Denali, meaning “the high one” or “the great one.”
The peak, at more than 20,000 feet, plays a central role in the creation story of the Koyukon Athabascans, a group that has lived in Alaska for thousands of years.
Mr. Obama, freed from the political constraints of an impending election in the latter half of his second term, was also moving to put to rest a years long fight over the name of the mountain that has pit Alaska against electorally powerful Ohio, the birthplace of President William McKinley, for whom it was christened in 1896.
The government formally recognized the name in 1917, and efforts to reverse the move began in Alaska in 1975. In an awkward compromise struck in 1980, the national park surrounding it was named Denali National Park and Preserve, but the mountain continued to be called Mount McKinley.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, introduced legislation in January to rename the peak, but Ohio lawmakers sought to block the move. In June, an Interior Department official said in testimony before Congress that the administration had “no objection” to Ms. Murkowski’s proposed change.
Friday Reads
Posted: September 11, 2015 Filed under: 2016 elections, morning reads | Tags: Bobby Jindal, Donald Trump, George RR Martin, Scott Walker, Team Romney, z Nation, zombie republicans 25 Comments
It’s Friday! Get ready for the Zombie Apocalypse!
Today’s another one of those remembrance days that stings all of us but is traumatic and personal for others. I’m not going to focus on the anniversary of the attack on NYC’s Twin Towers but I will point you to one of JJ’s posts from 4 years ago. JJ’s story is well worth the read as is everything she shares with us. It’s odd that JJ, BB, and I have all been through three of the nation’s recent defining moments. JJ’s is 9/11. BB’s is the Boston Marathon Bombing. Mine is, of course, Hurricane Katrina.
I’m just going to spend another day without TV news anxiously awaiting the second season premiere of Z Nation. This is the most creative and fun zombie show I’ve ever watched. It has a sense of humor and loves taking swipes at movies and pop culture in general. I had the pleasure of getting BB addicted to it within about 2 shows last year. She sent me this fun bit of news for the upcoming season.
Nothing is going to stop George R.R. Martin from finishing his Game of Thrones novels!
The bestselling author will have a cameo during the second season of Syfy’s post-apocalyptic thriller Z Nation playing himself as a zombie, EW has exclusively learned.
And as you can see from the photo above and the two others below, Martin is quite undead while signing his own books (and even tries to munch on one brainy copy). The title of Zombie Martin’s book is a fun tease — “A Promise of Spring,” which plays off A Dream of Spring —the expected title of his eventual seventh (and presumably conclusive) novel in his epic A Song of Ice and Fire saga. Currently Martin is working on Book 6, The Winds of Winter.
Declared Martin: “I just want to prove to my fans that even in the Zombie Apocalypse, the Song of Ice and Fire books will still come out!”
Martin will appear in the eighth epsiode of this year’s Z Nation, which returns to Syfy on Friday at 10 p.m. In the show, Martin has been imprisoned by a character called the Collector, who captures celebrity zombies and keeps George chained to a desk for his own nefarious purposes.
The ensemble cast is great! They cross the country and you never quite know where they will show up. The cast has evolved of the last season but the kick ass leader of the group is a fantastic black actress Roberta Warren who is helped by a stranded at the north pole national security nerd who goes by Citizen Z. You’ll never know what he’ll hack to get in contact with them. Cast members have been killed off, left, and lost but most of the central crew remains.
I had to laugh yesterday at Bobby Jindal. He held a press conference and attacked Donald Trump as being a narcissist and devoid of substance. I can imagine that at some level he feels his public life melting into a 
pool of irrelevance but right now, he’s trying every stupid thing possible.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump responded on Thursday to attacks from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal by suggesting he’d hardly even heard of his GOP rival.
Jindal has consistently ranked at the bottom of the polls, and the GOP frontrunner was happy to point out that out, according to a tweet by Bloomberg politics managing editor Mark Halperin.
Jindal called Trump a “narcissist” and “egomaniac” and released a video Wednesday suggesting actor Charlie Sheen as Trump’s running mate.
Trump dismissed the failed governor as some one below 1% in the polls and therefore not deserving of a response. Jindal’s not letting go, however. This is seriously a man with nothing to lose.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal launched a Twitter tirade against Republican frontrunner Donald Trump on Friday, continuing a 24-hour assault on the business mogul that’s skewered him on everything from his hair to his policy positions.
It started with Jindal’s charge during Thursday’s press conference at the National Press Club that Trump was “shallow,” a “narcissist and an egomaniac,” and a “non-serious carnival act.”
The real estate mogul fired back on Twitter later that day, saying that “Bobby Jindal did not make the debate stage and therefore I have never met him” and that he would “only respond to people that register more than 1% in the polls.”
“I never thought he had a chance and I’ve been proven right,” Trump’s tweet read.
In response, Jindal mocked the businessman with a line Trump has popularly used to criticize candidates like Jeb Bush.
“I’m disappointed,” he tweeted. “Is this the best you can do? Are you suffering from low energy today?”
I will say that Jindal’s pretty good with the come backs. That’s about all he’s good for, however.
Mitch McConnell was dealt a serious blow in the Senate yesterday as Senate Democrats found their spines and stood up for the 
President’s Iraq deal. The GOP is showing signs of major butt hurt. I’m enjoying this one.
It may be years before the political fallout of the Senate’s mostly party-line vote Thursday to preserve the Iran nuclear agreement becomes clear. But it’s already a defining campaign issue — and like the Iraq War and Obamacare votes last decade, looks likely to remain a stark dividing line in many election cycles to come.
Republicans are plotting to make Democrats pay dearly for backing an agreement the GOP argues hinges on an historic enemy of the United States playing nice. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to return to the floor next week to force Democrats to take more votes Republicans say they’ll regret as soon as Iran violates the terms of the deal or sponsors terrorist attacks, which critics believe is just a matter of time.
After that will come the attack ads, national GOP officials say. It’s expected to be a key cog of Republicans’ electoral strategy: some GOP senators are already comparing it to Obamacare in its scope and potential to damage Democratic supporters politically.
“It will be very harmful to their chances,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi.
“I don’t know what else the Democrats could do to chase the pro-Israel community in the United States any further in the Republican direction,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former NRSC chairman. “This is the same mistake they made on the Affordable Care Act. They made this a partisan issue.”
Democrats acknowledge the political risk of the vote — 42 Democrats successfully filibustered a resolution to scuttle the Iran deal — but say Republicans are overplaying their hand. If the agreement succeeds in curbing Iran’s nuclear program, the GOP effort will at the very least fizzle, they say, if not hurt Republicans for opposing a move toward peace.
The Boston Globe is reporting that zombies are heading towards Trump Towers. Yes! Team Romney is back!
Some of them go back to 2002, the win. Others slogged through Iowa, twice, and rode aboard the Mitt Mobile. In 2012, they were so close to the White House they could taste it.
Now, the Mitt Romney diaspora — an army of former aides and advisers from Romney’s long political career — are arrayed among a host of Republican presidential campaigns. But, through no concerted effort, they are curiously aligned once again in common cause, a stem-to-stern effort that has united old comrades even as they nominally play for different teams: stopping Donald Trump.
“We are united,” said one former Romney aide now working for another campaign, which he said would not permit him to speak for attribution.
“It’s a common goal and not just for Romney people, but for anyone invested in Republicanism, conservatism, and anyone who gives a flying [expletive] about what we’re trying to do here. Even if you’re not getting paid, this isn’t good for anybody,” he said.
“It would be ironic if it wasn’t like every single person in the political wing who can stare more than five seconds into the future wasn’t mortified or petrified at the prospect of Trump being the nominee,” said Florida-based GOP strategist Rick Wilson who called a Trump nomination “an existential threat” to the party.
Yes, the insurgent base of the Republican party is certainly to going to love it when the Party Establishment goes down the war path for an identifed “existential threat”. I can just see Huckabee’s gang of Baptist Thugs cockblocking Ted Cruz for the photo op on this one!
Making her 2015 debut in Scott Walker’s home state of Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton on Thursday unleashed her harshest and most extended diatribe yet against a Republican rival not named Donald Trump, accusing the governor of being a tool of the billionaire Koch brothers.
“It seems to me, just observing him, that Governor Walker thinks because he busts unions, starves universities, guts public education, demeans women, scapegoats teachers, nurses, and firefighters, he is some kind of tough guy on a motorcycle, a real leader,” Clinton said to a packed audience at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Well, that is not leadership folks. Leadership means fighting for the people you represent.”
While Clinton frequently criticizes her Republican opponents on the campaign trail, her barbs are rarely so extended or pointed. She also mentioned Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul on Thursday evening — but Walker faced the brunt of her fire.
“It looks like he just gets his marching orders from the Koch brothers and just goes down the list,” she added.
Opening her speech, the Democratic front-runner recounted her time spent in Wisconsin while growing up in Chicago. “What happened?” she asked the crowd in feigned disbelief, implying that the state had declined.
“Scott Walker!” the riled up crowd responded, jeering.
Minutes later, the crowd again drowned her out after she started asking, “What happens when you’re a proud union member and your governor wants to—?”
That’s our gal!
Well, I’ve got papers to grade and popcorn to pop! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Labor Day Reads
Posted: September 7, 2015 Filed under: Labor unions, morning reads | Tags: drought, income inequality. Wages, ISIS 12 Comments
Happy Labor Day!
Today I thought I’d give you some long, interesting reads to fill what I hope is a nice quiet day for you! Some of these are related to the holiday we celebrate today. You’ll notice that I’ve put up some photos of what it meant to be worker back in the day including pictures of child labor which was made illegal with the help of Union activism. No Labor Day celebration would be complete without a generous selection of Pete Seeger tunes. Check the bottom and listen to this American Treasure!
My first offering is from TP and salutes Seven Union Heroes.
This Labor Day, while you’re enjoying the three-day-weekend, take a moment to celebrate the heroes of the union movement. These noteworthy people left behind a legacy that we enjoy today, from the end of child labor to the more humane treatment of farm workers.
My next selection is from the UK Guardian and explains why the US middle class started really losing ground during the Dubya years. This is especially true of wages.
Until recently, an examination of the labour market relied on the annual publication of average wages. That is how the story of flat wages for the many and super-returns for the few over such a long period has emerged. Each calculation of average wages is a snapshot of all the people in the workforce. Unfortunately, millions of people quit the labour market during the year and others join. It is not the same cohort, and not just at the outer margins.
Robert J Shapiro, a former economic adviser to Bill Clinton who now runs the Sonecon consultancy in Washington, grabbed the opportunity to look at the raw census data when the US statistical office published it a few years ago.
He tracked the median incomes of average households as they travelled through the decades, checking on the progress of men versus women, Hispanic people versus black and white people, college graduates and different age groups. The report presents us with a more nuanced picture of the workforce and how it has fared.
He found that the 1980s boom, which gained traction in the middle of the decade, boosted the wages of all but the oldest group of workers. So large, steady income gains characterised the average household whether they were headed by men or women, or by people with high school diplomas or college degrees, whatever their ethnicity.
As Shapiro said: “This evidence contradicts the narrative told by those who track the value of aggregate income from the 1970s to present the claim that most Americans have made little progress for decades.”
The momentum dissipated in the first Bush presidency between 1989 and 1993 and accelerated again in the Clinton years before running out of steam in the early 2000s
Then came the downturn. The second Bush era, under George W, was painful for almost all but twentysomething college graduates, who even survived the 2008 crash with barely a scratch, and was worst for those without a high school diploma. Shapiro says the least educated saw their incomes “devastated” after 2001.
“Across the three younger age-cohorts, the median income of households headed by people without high school diplomas fell an average of 1.9% per year as they aged through the 2002-2007 expansion; and over the entire period from 2002 to 2013, their median incomes fell by an average of 1.8% year as they aged,” the report says.
Between 2010 and 2013, households where the main earner had been aged 25 to 29 back in 1982 suffered even more if they quit education before going to high school. They lost 7.1% in income in each year as vast numbers either took a cut in pay, in hours or were made unemployed.
The rise and fall of the average workers’ wages documented in the report chimes with the business cycle and the trend in Europe, which followed a similar trajectory.
The average German worker made income gains through the same period before a deregulation of the labour market under the Social democrat Gerhard Schroeder brought about an effective freeze in wages from 2003.
In the UK, the chancellor at the time, Gordon Brown, reacted to the downturn by switching on the government spending taps. He introduced tax credits as an income top-up to offset the trend for flat or falling real wages. It was a policy that insulated British workers from a trend that clobbered Americans and to a lesser extent German workers.
Retelling the economic story of the 1980s, Shapiro says the US benefited from a mix of Reagan’s expansionary policies in defence and infrastructure and the collapse of commodity prices after the inflationary oil shocks of the 1970s.
George Bush senior was forced to cope with the borrowing hangover from the Reagan years before Clinton assumed the presidency.
Another Guardian article explains how US and British policy in Iraq and Syria actually grew and predicted and WISHED for the rise of ISIS.
A revealing light on how we got here has now been shone by a recently declassified secret US intelligence report, written in August 2012, which uncannily predicts – and effectively welcomes – the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and an al-Qaida-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. In stark contrast to western claims at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency document identifies al-Qaida in Iraq (which became Isis) and fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” – and states that “western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria.
Raising the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, the Pentagon report goes on, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)”.
Which is pretty well exactly what happened two years later. The report isn’t a policy document. It’s heavily redacted and there are ambiguities in the language. But the implications are clear enough. A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.
That doesn’t mean the US created Isis, of course, though some of its Gulf allies certainly played a role in it – as the US vice-president, Joe Biden, acknowledged last year. But there was no al-Qaida in Iraq until the US and Britain invaded. And the US has certainly exploited the existence of Isis against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control.
The calculus changed when Isis started beheading westerners and posting atrocities online, and the Gulf states are now backing other groups in the Syrian war, such as the Nusra Front. But this US and western habit of playing with jihadi groups, which then come back to bite them, goes back at least to the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which fostered the original al-Qaida under CIA tutelage.
It was recalibrated during the occupation of Iraq, when US forces led by General Petraeus sponsored an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads to weaken the Iraqi resistance. And it was reprised in 2011 in the Nato-orchestrated war in Libya, where Isis last week took control of Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte.
In reality, US and western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule. American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria, and mount what are effectively joint military operations with Iran against Isis in Iraq while supporting Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. However confused US policy may often be, a weak, partitioned Iraq and Syria fit such an approach perfectly.
Music sounds better when you’re under the influence of LSD. I think I learned this lesson as a sophomore at university but evidently there’s research so we don’t have to rely on my anectodotal evidence.
The right music can evoke powerful emotions seemingly out of the blue, but under the influence of LSD the musical experience is enhanced even further. This according to the Beckley/Imperial Psychedelic Research Programme whichtested this long held assumption under a modern placebo-controlled study for the very first time.
Ten healthy volunteers listened to five different tracks of instrumental music during each of two study days, a placebo day followed by an LSD day, separated by 5–7 days. After listening to each track, participants were asked to rate their experience on a visual analogue scale (VAS) and the nine-item Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS-9). According to the participants’ subjective ratings, LSD enhanced the emotions they felt while listening to the instrumental tracks, particularly those described as “wonder”, “transcendence”, “power” and “tenderness”.
This article from The Atlantic on how universities are helping student protect themselves from ideas and philosophies they don’t want to hear was really quite astounding to me.
Among the most famous early examples was the so-called water-buffalo incident at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1993, the university charged an Israeli-born student with racial harassment after he yelled “Shut up, you water buffalo!” to a crowd of black sorority women that was making noise at night outside his dorm-room window. Many scholars and pundits at the time could not see how the termwater buffalo (a rough translation of a Hebrew insult for a thoughtless or rowdy person) was a racial slur against African Americans, and as a result, the case became international news.
Claims of a right not to be offended have continued to arise since then, and universities have continued to privilege them. In a particularly egregious 2008 case, for instance, Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis found a white student guilty of racial harassment for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The book honored student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan when it marched on Notre Dame in 1924. Nonetheless, the picture of a Klan rally on the book’s cover offended at least one of the student’s co-workers (he was a janitor as well as a student), and that was enough for a guilty finding by the university’s Affirmative Action Office.
These examples may seem extreme, but the reasoning behind them has become more commonplace on campus in recent years. Last year, at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an event called Hump Day, which would have allowed people to pet a camel, was abruptly canceled. Students had created a Facebook group where they protested the event for animal cruelty, for being a waste of money, and for being insensitive to people from the Middle East. The inspiration for the camel had almost certainly come from a popular TV commercial in which a camel saunters around an office on a Wednesday, celebrating “hump day”; it was devoid of any reference to Middle Eastern peoples. Nevertheless, the group organizing the event announced on its Facebook page that the event would be canceled because the “program [was] dividing people and would make for an uncomfortable and possibly unsafe environment.”
Because there is a broad ban in academic circles on “blaming the victim,” it is generally considered unacceptable to question the reasonableness (let alone the sincerity) of someone’s emotional state, particularly if those emotions are linked to one’s group identity. The thin argument “I’m offended” becomes an unbeatable trump card. This leads to what Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor at this magazine, calls the “offendedness sweepstakes,” in which opposing parties use claims of offense as cudgels. In the process, the bar for what we consider unacceptable speech is lowered further and further.
Since 2013, new pressure from the federal government has reinforced this trend. Federal antidiscrimination statutes regulate on-campus harassment and unequal treatment based on sex, race, religion, and national origin. Until recently, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights acknowledged that speech must be “objectively offensive” before it could be deemed actionable as sexual harassment—it would have to pass the “reasonable person” test. To be prohibited, the office wrote in 2003, allegedly harassing speech would have to go “beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive.”
But in 2013, the Departments of Justice and Education greatly broadened the definition of sexual harassment to include verbal conduct that is simply “unwelcome.” Out of fear of federal investigations, universities are now applying that standard—defining unwelcome speech as harassment—not just to sex, but to race, religion, and veteran status as well. Everyone is supposed to rely upon his or her own subjective feelings to decide whether a comment by a professor or a fellow student is unwelcome, and therefore grounds for a harassment claim. Emotional reasoning is now accepted as evidence.
If our universities are teaching students that their emotions can be used effectively as weapons—or at least as evidence in administrative proceedings—then they are teaching students to nurture a kind of hypersensitivity that will lead them into countless drawn-out conflicts in college and beyond. Schools may be training students in thinking styles that will damage their careers and friendships, along with their mental health.
Also from The Atlantic is this great article by Economist Jared Bernstein on how the poorest among us are not getting the help they need. We’re beginning to find out how the Welfare Reform of the 1990s has been as big of a failure as the Drug Wars of the 1980s.
People who pay attention to poverty, including the poor themselves, know one thing all too well: Over the past few decades, anti-poverty policy in this country has evolved to be “pro-work.” This means that if you’re a low-income parent who’s well connected to the job market, the government will help you in a variety of ways. But, if you’re disconnected from the job market, public policy won’t help you much at all.
How do people in that second group survive?That’s a question that Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, a sociologist and a social-work professor, answer in their new book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. It is, as the title suggests, a devastating portrait of families struggling to get by on impossibly low incomes.
A few of their strategies: availing themselves of charities and public spaces (like libraries), selling food stamps for cash (illegal, and they typically get just 60 cents on the dollar on the street), relying on relatives (who can be as hurtful as helpful), selling scrap metal or aluminum cans, selling plasma (which involves considerable angst as to whether a person’s blood’s iron levels are sufficiently high, especially difficult around menstruation), receiving some public support (housing vouchers, nutritional support, disability payments), occasionally holding a job, and—the most common strategy of all—just going without.
Check out these astounding pictures of a small town in California that’s running out of water if you’d like to be stimulated both visually and mentally. This is from Mother Jones who is one of the Labor Leaders we should be celebrating today.
Glance at a lawn in East Porterville, California, and you’ll instantly know something about the people who live in the house attached to it.
If a lawn is green, the home has running water. If it’s brown, or if the yard contains plastic water tanks or crates of bottled water, then the well has gone dry.
Residents of these homes rely on deliveries of bottled water, or perhaps a hose connected to a working well of a friendly neighbor. They take “showers” with water from a bucket, use paper plates to avoid washing dishes, eat sandwiches instead of spaghetti so there’s no need to boil water, and collect water used for cooking and showers to pour in the toilet or on the trees outside.
East Porterville is in Tulare County, a region in the middle of California’s agriculture-heavy Central Valley that’s been especially hard hit by the state’s historic drought. More than 7,000 people in the the county lack running water; three quarters of them live in East Porterville. The community doesn’t have a public water system; instead, residents rely on private wells. But after years of drought, the nearby Tule River has diminished to a trickle and the underground water table has sunk as more and more farmers rely on groundwater. Last week, I spent a few days interviewing residents in the town, also known as “ground zero” of the drought.
Happy Labor Day!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads
Posted: September 4, 2015 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Donald Trump, Kim Davis, marriage equality, Syrian Refugee Crisis 17 Comments
It’s the Labor Day weekend which usually puts people in the mood for autumn!
In New Orleans, tis the season of Southern Decadence! I imagine the Kim Davis costumes will be everywhere! I’ve already seen a tremendous number of her face photoshopped onto an orange jumpsuit with various members of the cast of Orange is the New Black. My guess is there will be plenty of that in the flesh on Bourbon Street this weekend. She’s in jail but her staff is putting out marriage licenses for all couples while she stews in her martyr soup.
When the Rowan County Courthouse opened for business Friday, deputy clerk Brian Mason was waiting at the front counter, behind a sign reading: “Marriage License Deputy.”
James Yates and William Smith Jr. entered the media-filled courthouse shortly after 8 a.m. and began the process of applying for a marriage license. Again.
They had been rejected five times previously, as Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to any couples since the Supreme Court declared in June that gay couples had a constitutional right to wed.
On Thursday, Davis was sent to jail by U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning, who also ordered five of the six deputy clerks in the county to begin issuing marriage licenses to all couples. The deputies agreed, under oath.
By 8:15 Friday morning, Yates and Smith — together since 2006 — had finally obtained the elusive $35 license.
Mason, the deputy clerk, congratulated the couple and shook their hands.
Three GLBT couples have now gotten their licenses. It must have been hell as a work place since most of the clerks indicated to the judge they had no problem issuing licenses but were stopped by the self-righteous Davis. Her husband (who is both #2 and #4 of her marriages) is a piece of work too.
The husband of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis said early Friday that Kim remains in good spirits and is prepared to remain in jail for months.
Joe Davis appeared outside the Rowan County Courthouse, calling U.S. District Judge David Bunning a bully for jailing his wife on Thursday for contempt of court.
“She won’t resign I promise you,” he said. “Until something gives, she’ll be there.”
Joe Davis said he went out to eat with the five deputy clerks who agreed in court Thursday to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He said he anticipates that they will keep their word and has no hard feelings against them despite Kim’s adamant refusal to authorize the forms.
At least two couples plan to return to the Rowan County Courthouse on Friday to request licenses from the five deputy clerks who say they will comply with the court to avoid jail.
The husband referred to the Bush-appointed Judge as a “butt”.
Joe also had some important words for Judge Bunning, who presided over his wife’s contempt case.
“Bunning cannot bully me, my wife or my son,” Joe Davis said on Friday of the judge, via Louisville television station WDRB. “I taught my son how to stand up for what’s right and what he believes in at any cost. Bunning doesn’t know how to pick on somebody that can handle him. The only thing he knows how to do is to pick up on the weak people.”
As for Judge Bunning, he told the New York Times: “The court cannot condone the willful disobedience of its lawfully issued order. If you give people the opportunity to choose which orders they follow, that’s what potentially causes problems.”
David Cay Johnston is an author, lecturer, and investigative reporter who has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting who has presided over the board of the non-profit organization Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. His areas of expertise include tax law, accounting, economics, business and finance. He is also an outspoken Progressive whose thoughts and ideas echo those of Bernie Sanders. Since 1988, Johnston has been watching Trump closely. Recently, he came up with a list of questions that would reveal much about the GOP’s “Golden Boy” – assuming Trump would provide frank and forthcoming answers, as he claims to do.
For example, how many of our readers knew that Trump was successfully sued by the Attorney General of New York for running an “illegal educational institution”? Students at “Trump University” paid a whopping $35,000 for “Elite” mentorships – but never even saw their mentor. And here’s a juicy little fact that fans of The Godfather and The Sopranos should appreciate: the contracting firm that constructed Trump Tower was owned by a pair of gentlemen who went by the monikers of “Fat Tony” Salerno and “Big Paul” Castellano.
When it comes to charity, Trump doesn’t even donate to his own foundation. Instead, he donates other people’s money – specifically, those who do business with him.
Can you say, “kickbacks”?
It only gets better: Trump was found guilty in federal court of cheating immigrant workers hired to demolish a multi-story building. He paid them less than $5 per hour under the table. He didn’t even furnish them with hard hats. Oh, and all that talk from Trump about how he’s a “self-made billionaire”? It turns out that he had a bit of help from the taxpayers of New York. The mayor of NYC at the time, Abe Beame, happened to be good buddies with Donny-boy’s Daddy, Fred Trump. That little connection got Donald a tax abatement on a mid-town Manhattan property (right next door to Grand Central Station) in 1976. That was the old Commodore Hotel, which today is the Grand Hyatt New York. As of 2016, that little deal that his daddy made for him will have cost taxpayers $400 million.
So much for being a “self-made” billionaire.
One of the Donald’s biggest troupes is how he’s made so much money. Actually, he would be far wealthier had he just put his inheritance into S&P 
Index Fund. I really wish the media would ask him about this little tidbit.
“It takes brains to make millions,” according to the slogan of Donald Trump’s board game. “It takes Trump to make billions.” It appears that’s truer than Trump himself might like to admit. A new analysis suggests that Trump would’ve been a billionaire even if he’d never had a career in real estate, and had instead thrown his father’s inheritance into a index fund that tracked the market. His wealth, in other words, isn’t because of his brains. It’s because he’s a Trump.
In an outstanding piece for National Journal, reporter S.V. Dáte notes that in 1974, the real estate empire of Trump’s father, Fred, was worth about $200 million. Trump is one of five siblings, making his stake at that time worth about $40 million. If someone were to invest $40 million in a S&P 500 index in August 1974, reinvest all dividends, not cash out and have to pay capital gains, and pay nothing in investment fees, he’d wind up with about $3.4 billion come August 2015, according to Don’t Quit Your Day Job’s handy S&P calculator. If one factors in dividend taxes and a fee of 0.15 percent — which is triple Vanguard’s actual fee for an exchange-traded S&P 500 fund — the total only falls to $2.3 billion.
It’s hard to nail down Trump’s precise net worth, but Bloomberg currently puts it at $2.9 billion, while Forbes puts it at $4 billion. So he’s worth about as much as he would’ve been if he had taken $40 million from his dad and thrown it into an index fund.
It takes a massive ego and a whole ton of hubris to suggest he’s actually “made” money given that it’s less than the opportunity cost of doing an 
investment that any one could easily access with a small balance and some stick-to -itness.
Adam B. Schiff, a Democrat from California who is the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and who serves on the Select Committee on Benghazi, is calling on Congress to disband the Benghazi committee.
Since its formation, the Select Committee on Benghazi has been aimless and slow moving, not knowing what it was looking for or where. It has acted in a deeply partisan way, frequently failing to consult or even to inform Democratic members before taking action, and selectively leaking information to the press. After 16 months and more than $4 million, the committee has gained no additional insight into the attacks in Benghazi. It has nothing new to tell the families of those killed or the American people.
But it does have emails. Lots of emails. Some of them are from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But none of her emails tell us anything of consequence regarding the events of Sept. 11, 2012. They don’t substantiate the bogus theory that the State Department ordered the military to “stand down” or that there wasgun running, or that the secretary somehow interfered with the security provided at the diplomatic facility or annex.
Nor were any of the secretary’s emails marked classified at the time she received them. Some in the intelligence community believe that a subset of them should have been, a conclusion with which the State Department disagrees. That’s not an uncommon clash of views. As the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, I am deeply interested in making sure that all classified information is protected. And yet, as a member of the Select Committee charged with finding out the truth about the attacks, I am appalled at how much we have lost sight of the mission — if indeed that was ever the point.
Whatever their original purpose, the Select Committee’s leaders appear no longer to have any interest in Benghazi, except as the tragic events of that day may be used as a cudgel against the likely Democratic nominee for president.
The committee is solely concerned with damaging her candidacy, searching for something, anything, that can be insinuated against her. With all of the committee’s obsessive focus on Mrs. Clinton, you would think that she was a witness to the killings, instead of half a world away.
There is a refugee crisis around the world as the western world’s imperialist and colonial policies of the last century come home to roost. I’ve been 
following the crisis in Syria and the number of refugees dying on their way to Europe. Syrians are some of the greatest people I’ve ever met and it’s completely disheartening to see so many die because of our failed Middle East policies. We already know how Texas and other places have met refugee women and children coming from South American to our country as a result of our failed drug war policies. How is Europe handling its worst refugee crisis since World War 2? This depends on the country and the degree to which right wing nationalism still rules the day. Nadia Khomami of the UK Guardian has listed all the signficiant developments at the link.
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David Cameron has bowed to overwhelming domestic and international pressure and announced that Britain will accept thousands more Syrian refugees. The prime minister said his government would “act with our head and our heart” in response to the crisis and refugees’ suffering. This afternoon, he also pledged an extra £100m in humanitarian aid, which would bring the UK’s total contribution to over £1 billion.
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The UN said that Britain had agreed to take 4,000 more Syrian refugees. “Those spaces are going to be critical to the lives and future of 4,000 people,” spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told AP. It later said it may have spoken out of turn and that it had not received confirmation of the number of additional refugees to be taken by the UK.
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The humanitarian agency ActionAid said Cameron’s pledge to resettle thousands more Syrians falls well short of what’s need. Its head of humanitarian Response Mike Noyes said: “The promise that the UK will only take 4000 refugees, if correct, is nowhere near enough. It is the equivalent of only six refugees per parliamentary constituency and represents only 0.1% of the total number of Syrian refugees.”
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Scotland’s first minister Nichola Sturgeon said Scotland should accept 1,000 refugee as a “first step”. She said: “When the world is looking for leadership, courage and a simple display of common humanity, we will be found standing eagerly at the front of the queue.”
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The UN high commissioner for refugees has called on the European Union to admit up to 200,000 refugees as part of a mass relocation programme that would be binding on EU states. António Guterres said the EU was facing a defining moment.
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The Syrian boy whose death galvanised public opinion and put pressure on European governments to tackle the continent’s refugee crisis has been buried in the town of Kobani alongside his mother and brother. Aylan Kurdi’s father, Abdullah, who survived the capsizing that killed his family, wept as the bodies were buried in the predominantly Kurdish Syrian border town.
That site is continually updated and is a good source of information.
So, that’s the three big things that I’ve beeen following. What’s on your blogging and reading list today?
Monday Reads
Posted: August 31, 2015 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Climate change, Denali, glaciers, Obama visit to Alaska 23 Comments
Good Afternoon!
In the latest binge of white privilege hissy fits, Republicans and Fox News are up in arms about changing the official name of the tallest mountain in the country back to the name that it was known by historically. It’s also the preferred name of the mountain for the folks that live in Alaska. Denali National Park has been in existence for some time. Denali mountain was renamed Mt McKinley in 1896 in a commonly done thing to do when privileged white men discover or climb natural wonders and regions that the folks living there have done, known, and named for thousands of years. I never knew the backstory on this event. It’s a typical story of appropriation.
Here’s the history of the name Denali and what caused it to be renamed.
Numerous native peoples of the area had their own names for this prominent peak. The local Koyukon Athabaskan name for the mountain, the name used by the Native Americans with access to the flanks of the mountain (living in the Yukon, Tanana and Kuskokwim basins), is Dinale or Denali /dɨˈnæli/or /dɨˈnɑːli/).[2] To the South the Dena’ina people in the Susitna River valley used the name Dghelay Ka’a (anglicized as Doleika or Traleika in Traleika Glacier), meaning “the big mountain”.[3][4]
The historical first European sighting of Denali took place on May 6, 1794, when George Vancouver was surveying the Knik Arm of the Cook Inlet and mentioned “distant stupendous mountains” in his journal. However, he uncharacteristically left the mountain unnamed. The mountain is first named on a map by Ferdinand von Wrangel in 1839; the names Tschigmit and Tenada correspond to the locations of Mount Foraker and Denali, respectively. Von Wrangell had been chief administrator of the Russian settlements in North America from 1829–1835.[4]
During the Russian ownership of Alaska, the common name for the mountain was Bolshaya Gora (Большая Гора, “big mountain” in Russian), which is the Russian translation of Denali.[5] The first English name applied to the peak was Densmore’s Mountain or Densmore’s Peak, for the gold prospector Frank Densmore who in 1889 had fervently praised the mountain’s majesty; however, the name persevered only locally and informally.[2]
The name Mount McKinley was chosen by William Dickey, a New Hampshire-born Seattleite who led four gold prospectors digging the sands of the Susitna River in June 1896. An account written on his return to the lower 48 appeared in The New York Sun on January 24, 1897, under the title Discoveries in Alaska (1896).[6][7] Dickey wrote, “We named our great peak Mount McKinley, after William McKinley of Ohio, who had been nominated for the Presidency, and that fact was the first news we received on our way out of that wonderful wilderness.”[7][6] By most accounts, the naming was politically driven; Dickey had met many silver miners who zealously promoted Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan‘s ideal of a silver standard, inspiring him to retaliate by naming the mountain after a strong proponent of the gold standard.[7]
In the 1900 report of the US Geological Survey (USGS), Josiah Edward Spurr refers to “the giant mountain variously known to Americans as Mount Allen, Mount McKinley, or Bulshaia, the latter being a corruption of the Russian adjective meaning big”.[8] The 1900 report otherwise calls it Mount McKinley,[8] as does the 1911 USGS report The Mount McKinley Region, Alaska.[9]
McKinley was assassinated early in his second term, shot by Leon Czolgosz on September 6, 1901, and dying of his wounds on September 14. This led to sentiment favoring commemoration of his memory. The Federal government officially adopted the name Mount McKinley in 1917 when Congress passed and President Woodrow Wilson signed into law “An Act to establish the Mount McKinley National Park in the territory of Alaska”, which singled out the area in the Mount McKinley region.[10]
So, originally, some crazy gold bug from Seattle via New Hampshire decided to make a political statement by renaming the big mountain and it stuck. I guess it’s the Ohio delegation that’s stopped the Alaskan’s delegation’s annual attempt to put the name of the mountain back to the one given it by its indigenous peoples. So, of course, Boehner’s orange face has gone a slight shade of red with the announcement. Well, it’s just another excuse for a Republican and Fox News hate and anger fest. How dare the President do something that so many folks–mostly Alaskans–have asked him to do for so long?
It’s official: Denali is now the mountain formerly known as Mount McKinley.
With the approval of President Barack Obama, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has signed a “secretarial order” to officially change the name, the White House and Interior Department announced Sunday. The announcement comes roughly 24 hours before Obama touches down in Anchorage for a whirlwind tour of Alaska.
Talk of the name change has swirled in Alaska this year since the National Park Service officially registered no objection in a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C.
The tallest mountain in North America has long been known to Alaskans as Denali, its Koyukon Athabascan name, but its official name was not changed with the creation of Denali National Park and Preserve in 1980, 6 million acres carved out for federal protection under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The state changed the name of the park’s tallest mountain to Denali at that time, but the federal government did not.
Jewell’s authority stems from a 1947 federal law that allows her to make changes to geographic names through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, according to the department.
“I think for people like myself that have known the mountain as Denali for years and certainly for Alaskans, it’s something that’s been a long time coming,” Jewell told Alaska Dispatch News Sunday.
Every year, the same story plays out in Washington, D.C.: Alaska legislators sometimes file bills to change the name from Mount McKinley to Denali, and every year, someone in the Ohio congressional delegation — the home state of the 25th President William McKinley — files legislation to block a name change.
Members of Alaska’s congressional delegation said they were happy with the action.
“I’d like to thank the president for working with us to achieve this significant change to show honor, respect, and gratitude to the Athabascan people of Alaska,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in a video statement recorded on the Ruth Glacier below the mountain.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said in an email that “Denali belongs to Alaska and its citizens. The naming rights already went to ancestors of the Alaska Native people, like those of my wife’s family. For decades, Alaskans and members of our congressional delegation have been fighting for Denali to be recognized by the federal government by its true name. I’m gratified that the president respected this.”
Alaska. The George Parks highway looking south to Mt McKinley (20,320 ft) in autumn.
It seems McKinley never even visited Alaska or showed any interest in the place. Most of the National Parks and historic sites that have Presidential names actually have some relationship to that president. Like I said, I never even knew any of this before but I know it now and it’s amazing to me it’s taken this long.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said on Monday morning he was “deeply disappointed” by President Barack Obama’s decision to rename North America’s tallest peak.
Here’s his statement in full:
There is a reason President McKinley’s name has served atop the highest peak in North America for more than 100 years, and that is because it is a testament to his great legacy. McKinley served our country with distinction during the Civil War as a member of the Army. He made a difference for his constituents and his state as a member of the House of Representatives and as Governor of the great state of Ohio. And he led this nation to prosperity and victory in the Spanish-American War as the 25th President of the United States. I’m deeply disappointed in this decision.
Obama announced Sunday ahead of a historic visit to Alaska that the mountain’s name will revert back to Denali, its traditional Alaska Native name.
Frankly, McKinley isn’t one of the Presidents whose name routinely comes up with “great legacy”. He also has nothing to do with Alaska and Alaskans basically wanted the name returned to Denali.
It is the latest bid by the president to fulfill his 2008 campaign promise to improve relations between the federal government and the nation’s Native American tribes, an important political constituency that has a long history of grievances against the government.
There’s more interesting, record breaking news that’s undoubtedly associated with climate change. That’s something the President will speak about
Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) mother and cubs. Churchill, Manitoba, Canada
in Alaska on his visit. There are 4 category 4 hurricanes in the Pacific.
NASA’s Terra satellite just released this August 29 image of Hurricanes Kilo, Ignacio, and Jimena, all Category Four Hurricanes. According to the Weather Channel:
This is the first recorded occurrence of three Category 4 hurricanes in the central and eastern Pacific basins at the same time. In addition, it’s also the first time with three major hurricanes (Category 3 or stronger) in those basins simultaneously, according to hurricane specialist Eric Blake of the National Hurricane Center.
The Central Pacific Hurricane Center (CPHC) in Honolulu Hawaii is issuing advisories on all of the hurricanes. On Sunday, August 30, from west to east, Hurricane Kilo was located 1,210 miles west-southwest of Honolulu, Hawaii, Hurricane Ignacio was located 515 miles east-southeast of Hilo, Hawaii, and Hurricane Jimena was located 1,815 miles east-southeast of Hilo, Hawaii.
Obama will be visiting many folks in Alaska just shortly after visiting folks here in New Orleans. His focus will be on how much lives have been changed by climate change. His trip to Lousiana focused on the amount of wetlands and Louisiana itself, lost to the Gulf and how that played into the destruction around the Gulf. Loss of Glaciers is one noticeable climate change in Alaska. I’m really confused, however, why Shell gets to drill in the Arctic when the President has visited two states whose oil and gas industry has ruined the environment while enriching oil interests. Here’s another thing I never knew. President Obama will be the first sitting president to visit Alaska.
The trip to the Alaskan Arctic — the first by a sitting president — is the culmination of an increasingly forceful climate change policy push over the past two years by the Obama administration.
The White House has honed in on climate change as a core policy priority with a domestic and international approach that has met with mixed response among both liberals and conservatives. This week alone he invoked the perils of climate change during visits to the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas and New Orleans’ storm ravaged Lower Ninth Ward to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
“No challenge poses a greater threat to our future than climate change,” the president told a crowd in Las Vegas.
With these trips, along with his trek to Alaska where he will speak at a State Department-sponsored conference on the Arctic, Obama is attempting to set the stage for a major international climate change agreement he hopes will come from a summit in Paris in December.
That agreement could help secure his legacy as the first sitting president to address global climate change in a substantive way, environmental policy experts said.
“The president has from the beginning recognized that climate change is an existential challenge to the country and the world. It may be the issue that is the most important long-term issue of his presidency,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former adviser to the Clinton White House on climate policy. “Future generations will look back at him as the first global leader to take decisive action on climate change.”
The Obama administration’s work of lifting the issue of climate change from the periphery to the fore began in a series of fits and starts.
There will be a Climate Change Conference in Paris this coming November. The President hopes to move the United States more into line with other countries seeking to reverse the damage caused by overuse of fossil fuels. Obama has announced his desire to reduce US carbon emissions. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are committed to the cause.
Obama’s announcement of a final rule to reduce carbon emissions on Monday (03.08.2015) drew international attention to the United States. The administration appears to have responded to a growing desire for politicians to take the fight against climate change more seriously. The American public has been demanding more government action as severe droughts and forest fires ravage the western US.
The 21st Conference of Parties in Paris this December will be the real test for this seemingly renewed American environmental consciousness. World leaders will be hoping to sign a new, legally binding international agreement on reducing emissions.
Although momentum toward taking action on climate change does appear to be building in the US, whether the US can truly lead in these negotiations remains uncertain.
On the one side, Obama’s new legislation is only one sign of mounting political will on tackling climate change. Environmental discussions are taking center stage in the Democrat nominee race.
Candidate Hillary Clinton has promised that 33 percent of the country’s electricity will come from renewables by 2027. Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s opponent with a strong environmental record, has called climate change “the single biggest threat to our planet.”
For Philip Wallach, a policy analyst at the Brookings Institute, this green surge is a strategy to appease public opinion ahead of elections in November 2016.
“[Democrats] think [climate] puts Republican candidates in an awkward position, where in order to satisfy some of their voter base, they’re pressured to reject [climate] science,” Wallach told DW.
Candidates for the Republican nomination were quick to criticize Obama’s new regulations – but remained mum about plans to tackle climate change during recent debates.
Hopefully, this will start a conversation on what seems like more years of excessive heat, land loss, extreme weather, drought, and fires ahead.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads
Posted: August 28, 2015 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: George Dubya Bush, Hillary Clinton, New Orleans, Republican war on everyone but white christianist men 14 Comments
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?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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