Happy National Coming Out Day!

Come out, come out, whoever you are!!

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Rare Good News Out of Kansas

Here's a rare one.  Good news out of Kansas state government. Naturally, it comes from the Courts, where intelligence, so far, still rules. From the New York Times over the weekend:

A Kansas appeals court, in a split decision, held that the state Constitution, like the federal one, protects abortion rights, affirming a lower court order blocking enforcement of a restrictive 2015 law.

A bit from the article:

In a split decision, the Kansas Court of Appeals on Friday held that the state Constitution, like the federal one, protected a woman’s right to an abortion and affirmed a lower court order blocking enforcement of a restrictive 2015 law.

The ruling resulted from a 7-to-7 vote by the appeals court.

That, as I said, it the good news. Now, the bad. It's likely still not fully settled.

In a tie, the lower-court ruling is upheld, but the split suggested that the interpretation of abortion rights under the state Constitution is far from settled and is likely to be considered by the state Supreme Court.

Given how the Right Wing and Republicans seem to want to fight this issue until it's illegal in the nation, it will, no doubt, come up again.  And again.

But for now, anyway, intelligence and common sense ruled.

It's a rare, happy day in the Sunflower state.

Meanwhile, there is this, from the more national front:

Hillary Clinton rallies Planned Parenthood vote, fights all restrictions on abortions

Enjoy your Monday, y'all.

The Last Week in America

They're both improvements.

Missouri's state-sponsored inequality

The Kansas City Star has an excellent page in the op/ed section this morning, showing the winners and losers of the past week in the state capitols of Missouri and Kansas.

It's a terrific idea on their part.

It gives a pretty concise, if brief and encapsulated overview of what our legislators worked on and did or didn't do the past week.

It also tells, like 3 of my posts earlier this week, how they wasted their and so, our, time and money with their "work."

They pointed out that, nearly unbelievably, the Missouri legislature worked to make it illegal to discriminate against gun owners but that--wait for it--it's still legal to fire someone in the workplace if someone finds out they are same-sex attracted. Read: gay or homosexual.

And here you thought we were all equal in the United States.

As my brother will occasionally, for humor, say to me, quoting an old, favorite Doonesbury comic I love so much:

"Dream on you fascists."

(Click on comic for larger, better viewing)

These two legislatures seem to want to make us more and more like the worst attributes of the Right Wing, red-neck Southern states.

Pitiful.

Link: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/05/25/3627515/the-stars-editorial-lawmakers.html

Where are the probing journalists?

During George W. Bush's Presidency, we got the big-government, intrusive, a lot of us say unconstitutional "Patriot Act." Now we're getting the "National Defense Authorization Act" and an Executive Order from this President, according to the link below--which looks as though it's straight from the White House website, I might add--saying the government reserves the right to confiscate anything we own... So I ask you, where are the probing journalists from the extremely important "Fourth Estate" to ask the questions and find out a) what's going on?, b) why?, c) who's doing it? and d) how do we stop them? The big, major networks? Fugghedaboudit. We know they won't do it. They're too busy entertaining us. PBS' "Frontline" does some excellent expose's at times, telling us what the government or the wealthy or corporations did or are doing to us and/or in the country. And The New York Times does some good articles at times but first, look how they buckled for that Iraq War of George W. Bush's and second, I just haven't seen the kind of big, multiple-day story like this, that such a story should and would entail. They could do it but it doesn't seem like something they've done for a good while. There are blogs and websites online that do some good reporting like Politifact and Truthdig and Truthout, etc., but these are considered "Left Wing" and would be utterly discounted by the Right Wing, Republicans and too many in America. Besides, too many Americans are too busy just trying to cover the rent or the house payment and food on the table so they don't get to a lot of those things. We need some good organizations to perform this function/these functions of reporting on our government and institutions so we know what's happening and we can keep the wrong things from happening, in advance. A lot of people seem rather rightly concerned about the Constitution, the state of the nation, our rights and our collective and individual futures. Without someone reporting on these, we can't and won't know what's going on or by whom or why. Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act: http://m.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/16/executive-order-national-defense-resources-preparedness

Quote of the day

"It seems inevitable that we'll have same-sex marriage in most of the states within a decade." --Michael Dorf, a professor at Cornell Law School who studies the constitutional and social consequences of same-sex marriage in the United States. Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_gaymarriage_new_york_impact

What we're fighting right now

Dick Cheney's still at it.

Dick thinks all his papers and all his emails are his, you see.

Dick doesn't play well with others.

Dick wants to make sure that you and I--taxpayers and voters--don't get the mistaken idea that he was working for OUR government or on OUR tax dollar.

All those pesky materials that could finger him for oh, say, felonies of one kind or another? He wants them. He wants to take them with him.

From the White House.

From the Vice President's mansion.

From our government.

Even as we speak.

Those Enron papers the government still wants to read about?

Fugedaboudit.

The real hoot here, too, is that his friends over at his pal-zy Supreme Court are the ones who get to decide if he keeps 'em, too.

And I'll tell you, they'd better not agree with him.

This administration has trashed too much of our Constitution and this country to get away with more of this crap, I'll tell you.

That's not where it ends, though, either.

Dick is also fighting the GAO--the Governement Accountability Office--of all groups. He doesn't want his papers from his secret deals with Enron to be made public, of course.

And why would you, when what they came up with in private brought about incredible, cushy deals for the very energy companies that were there in the room?

So it ain't over, folks, not by a long shot. We can't "breathe easy", what with the Bush Administration being almost over.

There are still battles to be fought against these people and battles to be won.

We can't have them savage our country any more than they already have.

Awareness and some kind of action are what's required, even now.

Original links here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2871869/Dick-Cheney-fighting-to-keep-Enron-papers-secret.html

http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2007-06/2007-06-22-voa16.cfm?CFID=82953120&CFTOKEN=53401419

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/washington/22cheney.html

http://www.judicialwatch.org/cheneycase.shtml

There's not much time left, you know

No, there's not much time left, between now and January 20, 2009, when this administration is no longer with us. It's too much time, though, we're finding out, because these people are really trying to dismantle the environmental and constitutional protections that are already in place.

What am I talking about, beyond my entry a few days ago, when I showed how they were trying to take apart the Endangered Species Act?

Yesterday it was announced that the FBI, via Attorney General Michael Mukasey, is planning on getting rid of rules that were put in place after the Republican Watergate nightmare. Yeah. They want to make it easier yet for the FBI to spy on us, the American public.

Once again, unbelievable. Truly unbelievable.

They've already taken down so many protections that used to be in the Constitution, to protect the American people from the government and now they want more.

Remember Nixon's "enemies list"? That's what these post-Watergate rules were created to protect the country from, for pity's sake. AND THEY WANT TO TAKE THOSE DOWN.

For a refresher course on Tricky Dick's list, it included many, prominent US citizens. Several of them were senators, big-name media people (like Dan Schorr, for God's sake), a governor, the mayor of New York at the time, Union leaders, celebrities--Carol Channing, of all people--business people, heads of corporations, and more. For a complete list, go to this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_list_of_Nixon_political_opponents.
It's a real hoot.

Ol' Dick (Cheney, this time) must be dying to go after what he--or they--see as "enemies of the White House", ya' think?

In so many ways and on so many different spheres, it seems that we, as a country, as a people, don't learn our lessons from our actions, or preemptively, from history.

(For more information and the original story, go here:
http://www.truthout.org/article/fbi-get-freer-rein-gather-domestic-information)