Hobby Lobby Changes Everything
The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has been moving through Congress at the usual snail's pace, slowly picking up votes since the first similar bill was introduced in 1974. The Act would guarantee equal rights in employment for LGBT Americans. Well, there has been debate about the "T" part, as the Act could pass with gay and lesbian rights only, but many have been holding out for "inclusive ENDA," with protection for transgender citizens, as well.
The current bill has a religious exemption. If you are a religious organization you would still be permitted to discriminate under the law.
This has not mostly been seen as a huge thing. We can picture the little old lady in black hobbling into church, scowling at the bell-ringer in his rainbow t-shirt, who the church had to hire simply because he rang bells better than the other applicants and had more experience -- mostly people can accept that a judgmental church shouldn't be required to hire sinners. There were concerns about the religious exemption but it looked like something that might be negotiated without too much pain.
Until Hobby Lobby.
Suddenly the Supreme Court has opened the door for any corporation or company to claim it is a religious organization, and discriminate in whatever ways they say their religion dictates. And in case the world didn't get the message, the Court issued a couple of opinions after the ruling, expanding its reach.
LGBT groups have been devoting great effort, decades of effort, to getting ENDA passed. Even with the religious exemption, some guarantee of equal treatment would be much better than none at all.
Until Hobby Lobby.
Yesterday the Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Rea Carey, issued a press release:
Nobody really wanted to upset the crabby little old lady in black. Her church is the center of her life, and if she chooses to walk the straight and narrow then that's her business. But it has gone further than that now, the entire topic has changed. Now any company can be a "religious organization," even without declaring so officially (as in the Wheaton College ruling), and they can discriminate freely against anyone, justified by a preacher's word.
The current bill has a religious exemption. If you are a religious organization you would still be permitted to discriminate under the law.
This has not mostly been seen as a huge thing. We can picture the little old lady in black hobbling into church, scowling at the bell-ringer in his rainbow t-shirt, who the church had to hire simply because he rang bells better than the other applicants and had more experience -- mostly people can accept that a judgmental church shouldn't be required to hire sinners. There were concerns about the religious exemption but it looked like something that might be negotiated without too much pain.
Until Hobby Lobby.
Suddenly the Supreme Court has opened the door for any corporation or company to claim it is a religious organization, and discriminate in whatever ways they say their religion dictates. And in case the world didn't get the message, the Court issued a couple of opinions after the ruling, expanding its reach.
LGBT groups have been devoting great effort, decades of effort, to getting ENDA passed. Even with the religious exemption, some guarantee of equal treatment would be much better than none at all.
Until Hobby Lobby.
Yesterday the Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Rea Carey, issued a press release:
"The morning after the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling, we all woke up in a changed and intensified landscape of broad religious exemptions being used as an excuse to discriminate. We are deeply concerned that ENDA's broad exemption will be used as a similar license to discriminate across the country. We are concerned that these types of legal loopholes could negatively impact other issues affecting LGBT people and their families including marriage, access to HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention and access to other reproductive health services. As one of the lead advocates on this bill for 20 years, we do not take this move lightly but we do take it unequivocally - we now oppose this version of ENDA because of its too-broad religious exemption. We cannot be complicit in writing such exemptions into federal law."During the course of the day, the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, and Pride at Work also withdrew their support for the bill. As of this writing, Human Rights Campaign is the only major LGBT advocacy group still supporting it.
Nobody really wanted to upset the crabby little old lady in black. Her church is the center of her life, and if she chooses to walk the straight and narrow then that's her business. But it has gone further than that now, the entire topic has changed. Now any company can be a "religious organization," even without declaring so officially (as in the Wheaton College ruling), and they can discriminate freely against anyone, justified by a preacher's word.
posted by JimK at 1:50 PM
138 Comments:
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Hopefully the Human Rights Campaign will soon come out in opposition to this toothless Employment "non"-discrmination Act as well.
No way should Democrats let this pass and allow anti-gay bigots to pretend lesbians and gays have protection from discrimination. When all you need to do is say "Gayness is against my religious beliefs" anyone and everyone is permitted to discriminate against gays and lesbians under this E "N" DA.
No special rights for religious people!
The latest installment in global warming denialism syndrome comes from Kentucky where Republican senator Brandon Smith says man made global warming is impossible because Mars and Earth are the exact same temperature:
"I won’t get into the debate about climate change but I’ll simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that. Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There’s no factories on Mars that I’m aware of."
As probably most six year olds could tell you Mars is a great deal colder than Earth because its 50% farther from the sun. Nasa confirms the average temperature of earth is 57 degrees F while the average temperature of Mars is -81 degrees F.
The luminaries of global warming denialism: The likes of Brandon Smith and speakers at the July global warming denialism conference including two architects, a massage therapist with a BA in psychology, a medical officer from the Texas Sheriff's department, and liar-for-hire Fred Singer (the grandaddy of fake science) who theorized that the hole in the Ozone layer wasn't a big deal and cigarette smoking was actually pretty safe.
Republicans like to argue for "states rights" on the basis that the states are "laboratories of democracy" where states can choose to test and prove policies before they're more broadly applied.
So, if Republicans follow their one logic all Americans should be taking a page from Colorado when it comes to contraception. The Colorado Democratic governor started an initiative to address the teen birth rate. As a result Colorado has provided more than 30,000 contraceptive dvices to low-income women at low or now cost since 2009.
Since then Colorado has seen a 40% drop in the teen birth rate and the teen abortion rate has dropped 35% in the counties served by the program. For every dollar spent on the contraceptives the family planning program has saved $5.68 in Medicaid costs. The state saved $42.5 million in healthcare expenditures associated with teen births in 2010 alone.
Its a stark contrast to the results out of Texas where governor Rick Perry has pushed abstinence only education programs. How's that working?
Well, Texas isn't keeping up with the national drop in teenage births. The state has the nations fifth highest birthrate amongst teenagers. Texas also reported the highest rate of repeat births amongst teenagers aged 15 to 19. Teenage births cost Texas taxpayers $1.1 billion in health care, foster care, and lost tax revenue in 2010 alone.
The lab results are in and its clear which states policy is working.
And it ain't "abstinence only".
One of things its important to note about the Colorado example is that they were giving access to IUDs which is one of the most effective and expensive forms of contraceptives and this was also at the heart of the Hobby Lobby case.
One of the things Americans have to be aware of is that they can't let pseudo-science like the "science" that dictated Hobby Lobby prevent incredible gains in public health. Americans also need to understand is that if they're going to have systematic guttings of the social safety net then they're going to have to have investments somewhere so the colorado miracle should give anti-poor people Republicans pause to think that they need to make these investments to get the returns Americans want.
the Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court has absolutely nothing to do with discrimination
and it was a no-brainer
types of "birth control" that destroy created human life are evil and immoral per both common sense and religious belief
the government cannot force any citizen to participate in it
if the government would like to provide free contraception to every women in America, they are free to do so
but doing so by forcing the participation of those opposed on religious grounds is unconstitutional
they are easier ways for the government to do this but it would not be politically possible now
too bad
if you want to change that, work through democratic effort
that is, when enough legislative seats to do so
the government needs to just stop trying to force people to violate their religious beliefs
The Hobby Lobby decision seems to me to indicate that this court thinks corporations, in addition to having free speech rights, also may have religious rights, as though they were actual people.
I heard on the radio this morning that the insurance companies in the DC exchange want to lower their rates for next year.
"The Hobby Lobby decision seems to me to indicate that this court thinks corporations, in addition to having free speech rights, also may have religious rights, as though they were actual people."
Robert, corporation is just a plural form of people. Obviously, the rights of those people are not eliminated when they form a group to pursue some particular mission.
"I heard on the radio this morning that the insurance companies in the DC exchange want to lower their rates for next year."
Must be true if you heard on the radio, right?
Let us know if you get any confirmation.
"Hobby Lobby Changes Everything"
Yes, it does. It makes everything much nicer.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "the Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court has absolutely nothing to do with discrimination".
It has everything to do with discrimination. If corporations can refuse to follow the law on contraceptives due to the religious beliefs of their owners then corporations and individuals can refuse to follow anti-discrimination laws due to their religious beliefs. While the Hobby Lobby case didn't deal specifically with anti-discrimination laws, it opened the door for future rulings to do so.
The justices claimed the Hobby Lobby ruling was narrowly limited to contraception but they provided no legal principle that could be used to limit the decision in that way (because there isn't one). The Hobby Lobby decision makes it open season to discriminate against gays and lesbians as any law against it can be ignored if the person cites their religious beliefs against gayness.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "types of "birth control" that destroy created human life are evil and immoral per both common sense and religious belief the government cannot force any citizen to participate in it".
Hobby Lobby objected to types of birth control that don't prevent a fertilized egg from implanting so their claim that some methods of birth control were the same as abortion was untrue - the Hobby Lobby decision was also unscientific.
Further the affordible care act didn't force anyone to "participate in" birth control. Under the ACA individuals were free to refrain from using birth control, these business owners weren't compelled to engage in any behavior they themselves find objectionable, their complaint was that its sinful for others to use birth control. Therefore the interference with the right of business owners to act in accordance with their religious belief is trivial or insubstantial, and does not threaten actual religious beliefs or conduct.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "if the government would like to provide free contraception to every women in America, they are free to do so"
The Democrats wanted a single payer system that would have done just that but Republicans demanded that Obama retain a private insurance system where people got insurance through their employers so there was no alternative. If business owners don't want to follow the regulations businesses are required to follow no one is stopping them from closing shop and getting a job that doesn't "violate" their religious beliefs.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "but doing so by forcing the participation of those opposed on religious grounds is unconstitutional".
Nonsense. Justice Scalia contradicted his own legal precedent in the Hobby Lobby case. As he said in his previous legal precedent:
“Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. … Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
“To make an individual’s obligation to obey such a law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs, except where the State’s interest is “compelling” — permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, “to become a law unto himself,” Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. at 167 — contradicts both constitutional tradition and common sense.”
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Robert, corporation is just a plural form of people. Obviously, the rights of those people are not eliminated when they form a group to pursue some particular mission.".
Absolutely not. A corporation is a legal entity seperate and distinct from its owners. That's why its called a LIMITED corporation, to limit liability to the corporation and protect the owners as a distinct legal entity from any personal liability. Logically you cannot claim the corporation is distinct from you when you want to limit your liability and then also claim you and the corporation are the same thing when you want to give the corporation rights of a person. Corporations are in no sense people, they are a distinct entity, a business that people run just like a car is a distinct entity that people drive. Just because you control a car or a business doesn't mean either is a person.
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Either the corporation is a seperate legal entity from the owner, the owner has no personal financial responsibility for the financial misdeeds of the corporation and the corporation doesn't have the religious rights of the owner
OR
The corporation and the owner are the same legal entity, the corporation has the religious rights of the owner and the owner is personally responsible for the financial misdeeds of the corporation.
Logically you can't have it both ways.
The conservative justices on the supreme court are only in theory required to follow the law and reason. In practice they regularly contradict their past legal reasoning in order to arrive at whatever decisions they desire for political reasons. There is no one to force the conservative justices to follow reason and the law.
corporation laws are made to encourage the formation of business enterprises, which of a tremendous benefit to everyone in society
there is no quid pro quo where business owners agree to sacrifice their constitutional rights
indeed, business owners aren't given anything in exchange for such a sacrifice
corporation laws give special protection to those who engage in business enterprises in order to encourage as many as possible to start them
now, let's get fracking
Informative article, thanks Jim : )
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"the Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court has absolutely nothing to do with discrimination "
Except for all those who will be discriminated agai --- Oh I get it, you already discriminate against those who would not only put themselves in need of birth control, but then have the audacity to heap shame upon their pre-marital sin by killing their maybe zygote with a pill.
So you’re discriminating, but you can’t see it because it’s already right in the forefront of your mind everyday.
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"… and it was a no-brainer … types of "birth control" that destroy created human life are evil and immoral per both common sense and religious belief"
FAKE! FAKE! FAKE! FAKE! FAKE!:
"I think the answer offered by UpToDate an online reference source for doctors and patients, might help to clarify the confusion:"
"Miscarriage in early pregnancy is common. Studies show that about 10% to 20% of women who know they are pregnant have a miscarriage some time before 20 weeks of pregnancy; 80% of these occur in the first 12 weeks. But the actual rate of miscarriage is even higher since many women have very early miscarriages without ever realizing that they are pregnant. One study that followed women's hormone levels every day to detect very early pregnancy found a total miscarriage rate of 31%."
What happens to all those “created human lives?” And why is not even a portion of your concern devoted to help fund research that goes into the prevention of miscarriages?
--
"the government cannot force any citizen to participate in it"
But it’s ok with you if “the government” restricts those of us who may want to participate in it.
"the government needs to just stop trying to force people to violate their religious beliefs"
Wow, you play your ego like an synthezistic zither! Poor baby, that big bad government always forcing you to have abortions and get gay married and take birth control, it’s a crying shame.
---
You shriek of religious freedom, beliefs, persecution -- as a catch-all, because you know that NONE of this affects you directly. If it did, the religious part of it wouldn’t even need to matter.
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"..corporation is just a plural form of people. Obviously, the rights of those people are not eliminated when they form a group to pursue some particular mission."
A cogent argument for “those who have the most should make all the rules.”
Patrick, Patrick...
not long ago you made a couple of comments that actually made sense
I had thought you had turned a corner
I had thought there was hope
but, alas, it looks you've suffered some slippage
there's a reason the therapist prescribed those meds
take 'em
"Informative article, thanks Jim : )"
could you kindly tell us what in the blazes Jim posted that wasn't already known? :(~
the most brilliant of anons said:
"the Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court has absolutely nothing to do with discrimination "
improv the unmedicated said:
"Except for all those who will be discriminated agai --- Oh I get it, you already discriminate against those who would not only put themselves in need of birth control"
OK, Patrick, so by your "logic", any time someone doesn't pay for something, that represents discrimination against those who really want that thing
so you, for example, if the manager of the Baskin Robbins where you shovel sherbert doesn't want to pay for sex toys for your weekend in Key West, that's discriminatory
the most brilliant of anons said:
"… and it was a no-brainer … types of "birth control" that destroy created human life are evil and immoral per both common sense and religious belief"
improv the unmedicated said:
"FAKE! FAKE! FAKE! FAKE! FAKE!:
Miscarriage in early pregnancy is common. Studies show that about 10% to 20% of women who know they are pregnant have a miscarriage some time before 20 weeks of pregnancy;"
to say it's OK to kill embryonic life because miscarriage is common is like saying it's OK to push grandma down the stairs because old ladies sometimes fall anyway
only the unmedicated would say such a thing, my friends, only the unmedicated
"What happens to all those “created human lives?” And why is not even a portion of your concern devoted to help fund research that goes into the prevention of miscarriages?"
I'm not aware there's a lack of research on preventing miscarriages but if there is, I'm for more of it
the most brilliant of anons said:
"the government cannot force any citizen to participate in it"
improv the unmedicated said:
"But it’s ok with you if “the government” restricts those of us who may want to participate in it."
restricts?
murder should be outlawed with the highest of penalties
the most brilliant of anons said:
"the government needs to just stop trying to force people to violate their religious beliefs"
improv the unmedicated said:
"Wow, you play your ego like an synthezistic zither! Poor baby, that big bad government always forcing you to have abortions and get gay married and take birth control,"
actually, what the Obama Administration tried to do was force employers to pay for murdering unborn children
that was unconstitutional
fortunately, the Supreme Court stopped them
the Constitution lives
the most brilliant of anons said:
"..corporation is just a plural form of people. Obviously, the rights of those people are not eliminated when they form a group to pursue some particular mission."
improv the unmedicated said:
"A cogent argument for “those who have the most should make all the rules.”"
business owners aren't necessarily wealthy
"not long ago you made a couple of comments that actually made sense … I had thought you had turned a corner"
So the less sense I made, the more you understood it. Huh.
"could you kindly tell us what in the blazes Jim posted that wasn't already known? :(~"
Known to whom? EVERYONE besides me? All seven billion other ones of me currently occupying the Earth? (And yes, that includes you too. We’re all one (all the time forever))
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Me: "Except for all those who will be discriminated agai --- Oh I get it, you already discriminate against those who would not only put themselves in need of birth control"
Not me: "OK, Patrick, so by your "logic", any time someone doesn't pay for sex toys, that represents discrimination against those who really want that thing"
Capitalism is based on discriminating against people without money regardless of what they want. Was that new to you?
And what does "doesn't want to pay" have to do with birth control in the context of health insurance or in regard to anything else I said?
--
Not me: "to say it's OK to kill embryonic life because miscarriage is common is like saying it's OK to push grandma down the stairs because old ladies sometimes fall anyway"
No. That’s not what I’m saying at all (those are your images and your images alone). I’m saying, If you want others to believe you truly care about embryonic life, then care about ALL embryonic life.
By not caring about every-day miscarriages, you’re basically saying that some souls are worth fighting for and some aren’t.
--
Me: "What happens to all those “created human lives?” And why is not even a portion of your concern devoted to help fund research that goes into the prevention of miscarriages?"
Not me: "I'm not aware there's a lack of research on preventing miscarriages but if there is, I'm for more of it"
Swing and a miss.
--
Not me: "..corporation is just a plural form of people. Obviously, the rights of those people are not eliminated when they form a group to pursue some particular mission."
Still a cogent argument for “those who have the most should make all the rules.”
Why are progressives in the press and on the Supreme Court bent on attributing to conservatives who seek to accommodate both religious liberty and women’s freedom the crude view, as Heidi Stevens puts it in the Chicago Tribune, that power is “a zero-sum game” in which a win for defenders of religious liberty is necessarily a devastating loss for women?
In part, the left is worried about a slippery slope. As with their opposition to limitations on partial-birth abortions and to various state requirements qualifying the exercise of abortion rights, progressives seem to think that any accommodation of conflicting considerations opens the gates to total victory for conservatives.
Still more pronounced, however, is the evident aversion among prominent progressives to living in a society with those who disagree with them about religion and reproduction. So great is their distaste for the diversity of views characteristic of a liberal democracy and so strong is their resolve to control the conduct of others that they are willing to mischaracterize the other side’s opinions, warp the facts, and politicize the law.
Practicing more of the empathy and compromise they preach would enable progressives to make a valuable contribution to containing the polarization they bewail.
You would never guess from the harsh reaction, starting with the principal dissent authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that, as Justice Alito stressed, the court’s holding is “very specific.” Nor would you have a clue that were the federal government to apply the accommodation created by HHS for nonprofit organizations to the closely held, for-profit corporations that brought the lawsuit, the impact, in Justice Alito’s words, “on the women employed by Hobby Lobby and the other companies involved in these cases would be precisely zero.”
Yet Justice Ginsburg characterized the decision as one of “startling breadth.” This would have been an accurate description if the majority had held that, as the dissent baselessly declared, “RFRA demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners’ religious faith.”
Unfortunately, Ginsburg’s gross misstatement of the court’s opinion appears to have been taken as gospel not only by Democratic politicians and liberal bloggers, but by establishment journalists who ought to know better.
A New York Times editorial preposterously proclaimed that Hobby Lobby gave “owners of closely held, for-profit companies an unprecedented right to impose their religious views on employees.” Yet the decision in no way affected the religious views of employees. It left their conduct unaffected as well.
Writing in the Washington Post, columnist Ruth Marcus asserted that “the interests of the contraceptive users are almost entirely absent from the majority opinion.” Her explanation was that the five men who signed it lack uteruses.
Marcus’ underlying rationale appears to be that there is only one way to think like a woman. But as Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ed Whelan observes, numerous formidable women agree with the Hobby Lobby decision, including “Seventh Circuit judge Diane Sykes and D.C. Circuit judge Janice Rogers Brown (each of whom wrote opinions holding that the HHS mandate violates the RFRA rights of for-profit companies and/or their owners); the many talented lawyers who supported the challenges to the HHS mandate; and individual plaintiffs like Elizabeth Hahn and Barbara Green."
Writing also in the Washington Post, columnist E.J. Dionne deplored the majority’s “profound class bias” supposedly exhibited in its having “focused on the liberties of the company’s owners, not of those who work for them.” In reality, the court fashioned a narrow holding that respected the company owners’ liberties without interfering with their employees’ rights.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor outdid the progressive press in the vehemence of her reaction to a related decision by her court, issued three days after Hobby Lobby. That decision temporarily exempts, pending further consideration by the courts, Wheaton College—a religious institution—from participating in the accommodation for nonprofit organizations outlined in Hobby Lobby. Sotomayor accused her fellow justices of ruling in a way that “evinces disregard for even the newest of this Court’s precedents and undermines confidence in this institution."
It is the recklessness of Sotomayor’s charge, however, that jeopardizes confidence in the Supreme Court. The decision she attacks expressly declared that the court was not ruling on the merits. Rather, it concluded that since the government may have an even less restrictive means for ensuring cost-free access to contraception than requiring Wheaton to deal directly with its insurance company to facilitate its employees’ receiving contraceptive services that violate its religious principles, further adjudication is necessary.
The feverish reaction of "progressives" last week to the Supreme Court’s thoughtful 5-4 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. shows that progressives could use more of the virtues they claim as their own.
The case involves three family-run, for-profit corporations. Norman and Elizabeth Hahn and their three sons own and operate Conestoga Wood Specialties. David and Barbara Green and their three children run Hobby Lobby, a nationwide chain of arts and crafts stores, and an affiliated business, Mardel, a Christian bookstore.
In originally separate lawsuits, the Hahns and Greens contended that under the 2010 Affordable Care Act the Department of Health and Human Services promulgated regulations that unlawfully required their companies to pay for insurance plans that included four FDA-approved contraceptives that have the potential to prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg—two types of the so-called morning-after pill and two types of intrauterine devices. Facilitating the use of these contraceptives violated the Hahns’ and Greens’ sincerely held religious belief that life begins at conception. To the other 16 forms of FDA-approved contraception that HHS requires insurance providers to cover, however, the Hahns and Greens had no objection, and their companies’ coverage of them was unaffected by the court’s decision.
The five more conservative justices cautiously agreed with the Hahns and Greens that the regulations infringed their religious liberty. In the principal dissent, the four more liberal justices strongly disagreed. Progressive journalists went ballistic.
“This should be a real wake-up call to every woman in America that the Supreme Court is at war with women,” thundered MSNBC’s easily excitable Ed Schultz.
The usually less excitable Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, exclaimed in the New Yorker that the Hobby Lobby decision could empower Taliban-like Muslims to organize in America closely held corporations that could provide insurance coverage to employees that excluded polio inoculations.
Writing in Salon, left-leaning columnist Paul Rosenberg hit on the “theocracy” theme, too. Hobby Lobby’s assertion of deeply held religious beliefs, he wrote, are “transparently bogus.” What is really happening is religious “tyrants” are imposing “slavery” on the majority, courtesy of five Supreme Court justices willing to rewrite “decades or centuries of precedent to further empower the most powerful elements in our society.”
The decision “is wrong!” tweeted syndicated columnist and frequent television commentator Donna Brazile. “Your boss will now get in your personal business.”
Well, no.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that the HHS requirement that the Hahns and the Greens provide health insurance plans that include the four forms of contraception in question violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Passed by a unanimous House and a nearly unanimous Senate, RFRA was signed into law by President Clinton in November 1993. RFRA prohibits the federal government from taking actions that impose substantial burdens on a person’s exercise of religion unless that action constitutes the least restrictive means of serving a compelling government interest.
The law reaffirms both the high importance the nation’s constitutional system attaches to religious liberty and its commitment to accommodation, balance, and calibration.
So too does Justice Alito’s carefully argued opinion, which, in response to the dissent’s wrongheaded criticisms, emphasizes a number of crucial points.
First, treating corporations as persons with rights involves a familiar form of legal reasoning whose purpose is to vindicate the rights of the persons who own and control corporations.
Second, there is no sound legal reason to deny to for-profit corporations the sort of exemption HHS had already implemented for nonprofit organizations.
Third, the exemption that the court upheld in Hobby Lobby was limited to “closely held” or family-run, for-profit corporations. The precedent is unlikely to be invoked by large publicly traded corporations because of the diversity of religious and nonreligious views of their owners.
Fourth, the majority opinion assumed that the government did have a compelling interest in providing cost-free access to contraception, including the four methods in dispute in Hobby Lobby.
Fifth, the court concluded that the federal government must honor the Hahns’ and Greens’ sincerely held religious beliefs because it had alternative means to accomplish its goal of ensuring women’s cost-free access to contraceptives. HHS, as the court pointed out, had already worked out an effective accommodation with nonprofit religious organizations.
Sixth, the court noted that the government could always directly pay for the contraceptives at issue in Hobby Lobby.
Lunatic liberal Democrats have always held the racist view that black are only allowed to agree with them. Harry Reid has now declared that any black person who holds traditional views is not a real black person.
Harry Reid:
“The one thing we are going to do during this work period, sooner rather than later, is to ensure that women’s lives are not determined by virtue of five white men. This Hobby Lobby decision is outrageous and we are going to do something about it.”
Clarence Thomas:
"I'm black."
ha, ha.....
guess we put a quick end to the liberal Hobby Lobby hype!!
ha, ha.....
"Still more pronounced, however, is the evident aversion among prominent progressives to living in a society with those who disagree with them about religion and reproduction. So great is their distaste for the diversity of views characteristic of a liberal democracy and so strong is their resolve to control the conduct of others that they are willing to mischaracterize the other side’s opinions, warp the facts, and politicize the law."
facts unloaded, right there!!
yeah, liberals are being taken down a notch
just wait until November
America will party!!
Advocates of the theory of man-caused global warming have taken another hit – a polar vortex is about to knock temperatures down by 10 to 30 degrees below average in parts of the United States, The Washington Post reports.
After a bitterly cold winter, expected temperatures in Minneapolis in the 50s and 60s in mid-July and overall Midwest temperatures slated to be 10 to 30 degrees cooler than normal, voters and experts are asking themselves whether global warming is all it's iced up to be.
After all, global warming advocates have been stung recently with the revelation that the levels of sea ice in Antarctica are at their highest level in recorded history and on the increase. While global warming was thought to be an unstoppable worldwide ice melter, Antarctica has added a section of new ice the size of Greenland, and it is still growing, covering 16 million square kilometers, or 2.1 million more than is expected in July, and the most ice since scientists started tracking it in 1979.
Weather forecasters are struggling to blame the polar vortex on climate change.
Michael Mann, professor of meteorology (ha-ha, not climatology) at Penn State, wrote at livescience.com, "So, is there a climate connection to this strange occurrence?"
However, a conservative radio commentator takes a different tack — "So despite the polar vortex freezing everybody's buns off, it's because Arctic air is getting warmer, and it's breaking down the boundaries of the polar vortex. Now, I'm here to assure you this is a crock, but this is how the left works, and you don't have anybody in the media questioning this."
While ice is melting in the Arctic, professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is beginning to question scientific findings on global warming, noting that global warming advocates have, in effect, been trumpeting the warming of Arctic ice while ignoring the growth in Antarctic ice.
"We do not have a quantitative, predictive understanding of the rise in Antarctic sea ice extent," she told the Daily Mail. "Convincing arguments regarding the causes of sea ice variations require understanding and ability to model both the Arctic and the Antarctic."
The Fifth Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found, "There is low confidence in the scientific understanding of the observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent since 1979, due to … incomplete and competing scientific explanations for the causes of change," the Mail reported.
The Mail’s Andrew Mountford openly speculated that the "relentless focus by activist scientists on the Arctic decline does suggest a political imperative rather than a scientific one."
Myself, I love the cold and the snow.
me too, Robert
actually, I like changing seasons and extremes
below 32 in winter, with a perpetual snow cover
above 90 in the summer
the saddest place is when I lived in Southern California and everyone started wearing ski vest and snow jackets in the winter, even though the weather was the same
Supply-side (or trickle-down) economics, the only economic plan the Republicans have had for the last four decades, claims that if you lower taxes you’ll boost the economy so much that it will boost tax receipts enough to make up for the lost revenue. That has never been true and here’s yet another example of it in Kansas, where reality has shown the exact opposite of what Republicans predicted.
In 2012, Kansas governor Sam Brownback signed a massive tax cut into law, arguing that it would boost the state’s economy. Eventually, he hoped to eliminate individual income taxes entirely. “Our place, Kansas, will show the path, the difficult path, for America to go in these troubled times,” he said.
National conservative activists raved. Patrick Gleason of Americans for Tax Reform said Kansas was “the story of the next decade.” The Cato Institute praised Brownback’s “impressive” tax cuts and gave him an “A” on fiscal policy. And the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol said that, if reelected, Brownback would be “a formidable presidential possibility.”…
After the cuts became law, it was undisputed that Kansas’s revenue collections would fall. But some supply-side analysts, like economist Arthur Laffer, argued that increased economic growth would deliver more revenue that would help cushion this impact.
Yet it’s now clear that the revenue shortfalls are much worse than expected. “State general fund revenue is down over $700 million from last year,” Duane Goossen, a former state budget director, told me. “That’s a bigger drop than the state had in the whole three years of the recession,” he said — and it’s a huge chunk of the state’s $6 billion budget. Goossen added that the Kansas’s surplus, which had been replenished since the recession, “is now being spent at an alarming, amazing rate.”
It did nothing to boost growth. In fact, Kansas trails the rest of the country in economic growth. And it dropped state tax revenue by more than 10% of the entire budget. And now Brownback’s approval ratings are lower than Obama’s, as they should be. This economic theory has never worked. The result is always the same — lower revenue and higher deficits, as anyone who can do basic math can predict.
While the sea ice has increased in Antarctica the sea ice in the Arctic is being lost at 5 times the rate the sea ice in the Antarctic is growing. Futher, land ice in Antarctica is decreasing and calving off of land ice is largely responsible for the sea ice increase there.
2013 was the warmest year on record, the overall climate has warmed more rapidly in the last 16 years than the 16 years before that. Climate change deniers keep trying to hang their hats on the extremely localized cooling in the eastern U.S which represents less than 1% of the planets surface while ignoring the overall heating of the other 99% of the globe - its lying through omission as you can see from the post Wyatt/bad anonymous copied.
If you look at this graph you can see that while atmospheric heating has mistakenly been believed to have slowed it represents only 2% of the overall warming of the global climate and the overall climate has warmed at an alarming rate.
And in fact the atmospheric warming since 1997 has been greatly underestimated
Don't by into the lies from the global warming deniers. They are not climate scientists, they don't argue their position in peer reviewed journals or scientific conferences on global warming where they can be judged scientifically. Instead they spend their time propagandizing in the media and lobbying politicians to avoid taking on the relatively small costs needed to address global warming now thus ensuring a terrible economic price will be paid for global warming down the road.
Global warming denialists have set up their own global warming denial conference. The key expert speakers they have presenting consist of two architects, a massage therapist with a BA in psychology, a medical officer from the Texas Sheriffs department and paid liar Fred Sings who for money has argued that the hole in the ozone layer was no big deal and cigarette smoking is pretty safe.
There is no debate about this in the scientific community, it is decided science. 97% of Climate Scientists Agree global warming is happening, man-made, and will have serious consequences.
"There is no debate about this in the scientific community, it is decided science"
here we have an example of a moron employing an oxymoron
when science is "decided" or "settled", it isn't science anymore
science is always open to new findings
lazy Priya above also speaks of "peer review" in the reverent tone of a religious believer
peer review is a process where the design of a study is considered by a small group of people and approved
these people don't generally examine the data leading to conclusions and never verify the data
in other words, even if the reviewers are objective, the scientists who did the study could simply have falsified the data
there is currently a crisis in the scientific community because the peer review process has been corrupted
I noted a few months ago the article released by scientific giant Francis Collins highlighted the growing problem of peer-reviewed studies that can't be replicated.
just last week, the Journal of Vibration and Control was forced to withdraw sixty past papers because it was discovered that researchers had abused the process to assure peer review passage.
In June, the National Academy of Sciences published a paper that later had to be retracted, a paper claiming to have proof that female named hurricanes are deadlier than male ones.
the list goes on and on...
Michael Eisen a biologist at UC Berkeley, founder of the Public Library of Science, said it best:
"We need to get away from the notion, proven wrong on a daily basis, that peer review of any kind at any journal means that a work of science is correct. What it means is that a few (1-4) people read it over and don't see any major problems. That's a very low bar in even the best of circumstances."
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "corporation laws are made to encourage the formation of business enterprises, which of a tremendous benefit to everyone in society there is no quid pro quo where business owners agree to sacrifice their constitutional rights".
Businesse owners have never had their rights taken away from them and no one is proposing doing so. As we discussed, the business owner is a seperate entity from the corporation, that's why its called a LIMITED corporation. Liabilities are limited to the corporation and the business owner is not responsible for them because the owner and the business are distinct entities. Therefore the owners have a constitutional right to religious freedom but the business does not. You can't have it both ways, you can't say I'm not liable for the corporation because we are seperate entities but the corporation has the same religious rights I do because we are one in the same.
Patric said: "But it’s ok with you if “the government” restricts those of us who may want to participate in [birth control]"
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "restricts? murder should be outlawed with the highest of penalties".
A zygote is not a person and has never been considered one so allowing it to die it is not murder any more so than cutting off a living mole is murder.
Wyatt/bad anonymous posted "Still more pronounced, however, is the evident aversion among prominent progressives to living in a society with those who disagree with them about religion and reproduction. So great is their distaste for the diversity of views characteristic of a liberal democracy and so strong is their resolve to control the conduct of others that they are willing to mischaracterize the other side’s opinions, warp the facts, and politicize the law.".
Talk about psychological projection (accusing those you don't like of your own worst attributes).
Liberals have no problem with conservatives living according to their religious beliefs in general or in regards to reproduction in particular. It is conservatives who seek to force their religion on all americans by denying gays the right to marry and trying to prevent women from accessing abortions and ironically the birth control that would reduce the number of abortions. As we can see from the post I made earlier providing free contraceptives to poor women reduces the number of abortions by 40% - conservatives should be all for this if their real concern was abortion. But the truth is their primary concern is not about abortion. Conservatives are apoplectic about women having consequence-free sex solely for enjoymnent and are deeply desirous of punishing such women with unwanted pregnancies and STDS like HPV.
Wyatt/bad anonymous posted "You would never guess from the harsh reaction, starting with the principal dissent authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that, as Justice Alito stressed, the court’s holding is “very specific.” Nor would you have a clue that were the federal government to apply the accommodation created by HHS for nonprofit organizations to the closely held, for-profit corporations that brought the lawsuit, the impact, in Justice Alito’s words, “on the women employed by Hobby Lobby and the other companies involved in these cases would be precisely zero.”
Yet Justice Ginsburg characterized the decision as one of “startling breadth.” This would have been an accurate description if the majority had held that, as the dissent baselessly declared, “RFRA demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners’ religious faith.”".
The five Catholics on the court claimed that their ruling was narrowly limited to this particular case about contraception but they expressed no legal principle under which it could just be limited to this case. Justice Alito claimed it couldn't be used to allow corporations to discriminate against black people but pointedly didn't say it wouldn't allow discrimination against gays and lesbians. That's what makes this ruling one of "startling breadth". Just as the conservative justices ignored the law and logic on this decision to reach the decision they wanted for political reasons its likely that when this case is cited to justify corporations asking for the right to discriminate against gays because of the religion of its owners the five Catholic justices will grant them that right.
In Hobby Lobby the Supreme Court ruled that it was a “substantial burden” on the religious freedoms of closely-held corporations for the government to require them to provide contraception as part of their employee health care plans. The court didn’t say that the government could never require a company to do something that violated its religious beliefs, but rather that the government had to use the “least restrictive alternative.” That means that if there is a slightly less burdensome way to implement the law, it needs to be used. To prove that the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate was not the “least restrictive alternative,” the court pointed to a workaround in the law for nonprofits: If there are religious objections to a medical treatment, third parties will provide coverage to the employees.
Yet in an unsigned emergency order granted four days later, the very same court said that this very same workaround it had just praised was also unconstitutional, that this workaround also burdened the religious freedom of religious employers. Overnight, the cure has become the disease. Having explicitly promised that Hobby Lobby would go no further than Hobby Lobby, the court went back on its word, then skipped town for the summer.
This new case involves Wheaton College, an evangelical Protestant liberal arts college in Illinois. A majority of the court granted Wheaton a temporary injunction allowing it to refuse to comply with the workaround, or “accommodation,” the court had just held up as the answer in Hobby Lobby. Under the ACA, churches have always been categorically exempt from the mandate. The law further allows religious nonprofits that don’t want to offer contraception to submit a short form, known as Form 700, which affirms their religious objection to providing contraception. Form 700 enables the company’s insurers or third-party administrators to cover the birth control instead of the employer. Easy peasy, right? Sign the form and you don’t have to provide the coverage that violates your religious beliefs. In Hobby Lobby, Justice Alito wrote that this solution “achieves all of the government’s aims while providing greater respect for religious liberty.”
Wheaton, however, along with many other religious not-for-profits, have long objected to this very workaround. They filed lawsuits claiming that the mere fact of signing a form noting their religious objection to contraception coverage triggered third parties to provide the contraception, which triggered women to have access to morning-after pills and IUDs, which in their view were akin to abortions, and thus violated their religious consciences. Signing the form, they said, was the same as actually providing the contraceptives themselves. It’s the butterfly effect of contraception. Any time Wheaton flaps its religious-conscience wings, a woman somewhere ends up with an IUD, and Wheaton’s religious liberties are "violated".
And four days later a majority of the court contradicted itself and agreed with Wheaton College. The order is a preliminary injunction. The court will need to decide this and dozens of similar cases in the future. The justices caution that this in no way reflects their views of the future cases. But the very workaround the court gave to religious objectors to justify its Hobby Lobby decision only four days earlier the court now says likely "violates" their religious liberty as well.
The hypocrisy of the five Catholic justices on the court is stunning.
"Don't by into the lies"
for goodness sake, lazy priya
stop being so lazy and use spell-check
if you can't even spell "buy", how can anyone trust your reading of the scientific literature
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "peer review is a process where the design of a study is considered by a small group of people and approved these people don't generally examine the data leading to conclusions and never verify the datain other words, even if the reviewers are objective, the scientists who did the study could simply have falsified the data".
That is an outrageous lie. If any data had been falsified the global warming deniers would be having a field day with it. They are paid millions by the fossil fuel industry to try to contradict the settled science on global warming and have failed to so so because the research is solid.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "there is currently a crisis in the scientific community because the peer review process has been corrupted I noted a few months ago the article released by scientific giant Francis Collins highlighted the growing problem of peer-reviewed studies that can't be replicated."
You mean your B.S. about this was debunked a few months ago. The so-called "crisis" was strictly in the bio-medical field and the claims there did not apply to all the myriad fields in science in general. Which of course didn't stop you from sleazily promoting the idea that it did. There is no evidence of any problems in the climatology research despite fossil fuel companies paying denialists millions to try and cast doubt on it by trying to find problems.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "just last week, the Journal of Vibration and Control was forced to withdraw sixty past papers because it was discovered that researchers had abused the process to assure peer review passage. In June, the National Academy of Sciences published a paper that later had to be retracted, a paper claiming to have proof that female named hurricanes are deadlier than male ones. the list goes on and on...".
No, the list doesn't "go on and on". You're lying about this just like you lie about global temperatures. There are a few isolated incidents of problems but the vast majority of peer reviewed articles in credible journals are rigorously done and without significant problems. Just as you point to cooler than average temperatures in the Eastern U.S. which represents less than 1% of the planet's surface while ignoring the other 99% that is hotter than average you point to the extremely small number of peer reviewed papers with problems and pretend this tiny minority of papers is typical of all peer reviewed papers - it most certainly isn't.
The proof that science works is overwhelming. We see it everyday in the technological miracles science has given us from modern medicine to computers to cars and planes. None of these would be possible if there was a "crisis" in peer reviewed science. If you don't believe peer reviewed science works then stop using the fruits of it. Get off your computer, sell your car and your house, go live in a cave hunting and gathering with sharpened sticks. Stop being a hypocrite and using the wonders science has given you if you truly believe science is largely crap.
And of course the alternative to highly trained scientists publishing in peer reviewed journals Wyatt/bad anonymous would have you accept is people without any training in the relevant fields who are paid by the fossil fuel industry to reach the conclusion that global warming isn't happening/isn't a problem.
People like architects, a massage therapist with a BA in psychology, a medical officer from the Texas Sheriffs department and paid liar Fred Sings who for money has argued that the hole in the ozone layer was no big deal and cigarette smoking is pretty safe.
Given the choice between laypeople and liars for hire with a strong incentive to be biased and highly trained scientists with nothing to gain from telling the truth its obvious who you should trust.
And note how Wyatt bad anonymous alternates between his own contradictory arguments. On one thread saying that no one disagrees with the fact that global warming has taken place but that it isn't a concern and then in another thread arguing that global warming isn't happening at all.
He has no problem contradicting his previous arguments if it suits his immediate purpose of promoting the false idea that global warming isn't a problem.
And if publishing in a respected peer-reviewed scientific journal is such a "low bar" to meet why don't the global warming denialists do so to give their arguments credibility?
Because their claims can't withstand the scrutiny of peer review, they are simply unable to get over that "low" bar because their claims are utter nonsense.
The War on Climate Scientists.
Climate change is increasingly making mainstream media headlines and this week was no exception.
On Tuesday, scientists said that the long-feared collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun, kicking off what they believe will be a centuries-long, irreversible process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet.
News reports like this show that climate change is serious, but corporations and even some governments seem recklessly determined to minimize or deny the reality of global warming, as well as undermine the authority of scientists.
In the second part of his conversation with me, Canadian scientist and environmental activist David Suzuki says killing the messenger is a 50-year-old strategy ripped straight from big tobacco's playbook: "This is a very effective thing that we know has been done by the tobacco industry [and] it's being done by the fossil fuel industry... You attack a person on the basis of their trustworthiness, their ulterior motives, anything to get away from dealing with the issues.
Just as the tobacco industry knew smoking caused cancer years before they admitted it and they paid unethical scientists to deny it the fossil fuel industry knew in the 1990's the use of fossil fuels is at the heart of global warming but they're taking a page out of big tobacco's playbook by trying to sow doubt by paying people like Fred Singer a professor of the University of Virginia to lie about global warming. Its an ironic fact that Fred Singer was once paid by the tobacco industry to produce pseudo-scientific propaganda saying tobacco wasn't harmful.
The problem is the fossil fuel industry's executives jobs are to make money for their sharefholders. If they begin to frame the situation in other than economic terms they'll be booted out of their positions so they've got no choice but to promote lies and disinformation.
The Canadian government in cahoots with the fossil fuel industry has called envionmentalists radical extremists and has characterized them as terrorists like Bin Laden. The goal is to demonize climate scientists and attack them on the basis of their trustworthyness, ulterior motives, anything to get away from dealing with the issues they're raising. We know this was very effective for the tobacco industry for a long time. But those darned scientists they won't stop talking about it so the effort is to shut them down and the Conservative government has fired a huge number of scientists from Environment Canada and yet Environment Canada scientists won't change their position on global warming despite Wyatt/bad anonymous's absurd claim that scientists only say there is global warming to get funding and preserve their jobs.
The Canadian government has closed whole libraries on environmental science and thrown out manuscripts in an effort to suppress the truth about global warming and this sort of thing is happening to scientists around the world where conservative governments are in power. Many conservative governments like in Canada have muzzled their scientists and prevent them from speaking in public about their findings. Meanwhile the global warming deniers go on right wing media and promote their lies and disinformation where they are free from scrutiny. Government scientists have to be vetted through the political party in power before they can say anything to the public and universities rely on government grants so it puts a chill on discourse as universites are afraid of speaking out for fear of the consequences.
And of course the same thing happens in the United States under Republican governments and even under Obama Republican politicians have used their positions of authority to muzzle scientists on the global warming issue. Despite the terrible negative consequences of holding the position that global warming is real climate scientists around the world refuse to lie about their findings even when it means sacrificing their own jobs.
Unfortunately its human nature to want to believe the worst can't happen and this motivates many conservatives to bias against the reality of global warming.
Republicans are back to their standard playbook of taking every step they can to harm the American economy and then planning on blaiming Obama for it.
Republicans are refusing to make a deal to finance the highway trust fund which pays for projects to keep roads and bridges safe. If congress doesn't act by August 1st highway and infrastructure spending will have to be cut by 28%. That would put 112,000 infrastructure projects in jeopardy and 700,000M jobs at risk.
Republicans could derail the entire U.S. economic recovery and no doubt that's what they hope will happen. Daniel White the senior economist at Moody's Analytics says "2014 has the potential to be a breakout year for the U.S. labour market...To get there though, we need a quick and painless solution to the shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund.".
Over the past three months the U.S. economy has been creating 270,000 jobs per month on average. Things that used to be business as usual: raising the debt limit, keeping the government from shutting down, passing the basic bills and funding needed to keep the country going. Thanks to the Republicans those things are no longer business as usual, that's how far out the Republican party has gone. Apparently they're too busy bringing a doomed lawsuit against the president to do anything worthwhile.
The best thing you can say about the Republicans this year is "So far they have not shutdown the government or threatened to force the U.S. to default on its financial obligations and ruin our credit rating." But its only July so who knows what they may cook up in the next few months.
This Highway Trust Fund is mainly supported by gas tax of 18 cents per gallon that hasn't been adjusted in 21 years. You've got inflation over those years and cars that are using much less gas than they used to. No one in their right mind can believe the U.S. can maintain a world class interstate highway system on a 21 year old federal gas tax. The investment on infrastructure is now as low as its ever been as a percentage of GDP. This is a necessity. Businesses rely on these roads to move their goods and build the economy.
What Republicans are doing is political malpractice.
Two Florida policemen are off the job following allegations they were in the Ku Klux Klan. They served in the Fruitland Park police department until an FBI report identified them as secret members of the KKK. Deputy chief David Borst resigned following the revelation and Corporal George Honeywell was fired.
When Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson was suspended for making anti-gay remarks he was heralded by the religious right as an unfairly oppressed hero. There's no difference between Phil Robertson's anti-gay beliefs and the anti-black beliefs of Borst and Honeywell but you can guarantee no chrisitan conservatives will stand up for their rights to express their sincerely held religious beliefs as they did for Phil Robertson.
Christian conservatives , epitomizing the double standard - as hypocritical as it gets.
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You can fool some of the people all of the time but Republicans can't fool all of the people all of the time - the truth is getting out.
A recent poll shows 78% of Americans signing up for healthcare under Obamacare are satisfied with their plans.
And even 74% of Republicans who signed up are satisfied with their plan.
And as for the lie that Obamacare is a job-killer? Proven 100% wrong by 52 straight months of private sector job growth.
Republicans - not fooling the people who know what Obamacare really is.
stupid and lazy Priya
here's a link to NUMEROUS polls
Americans detest Obamacare
they won't ever forgive and forget how Dems pushed it through by sneaky manuevers
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/obama_and_democrats_health_care_plan-1130.html
and when Dems lose the Senate because of their dastardly work, it will be a tremendous setback to all liberal causes
including the GAY AGENDA!!!
"The proof that science works is overwhelming. We see it everyday in the technological miracles science has given us from modern medicine to computers to cars and planes. None of these would be possible if there was a "crisis" in peer reviewed science."
Well, actually, it would be. The corporations who produce these miracles have quality control departments. It's got nothing to do with peer review.
I have no problem with the idea of peer review. My problem is with stupid ass liberals who misuse it and sell it to gullible public as proof that a finding is valid.
"If you don't believe peer reviewed science works then stop using the fruits of it."
Why would do that, you idiot?
"Get off your computer, sell your car and your house, go live in a cave hunting and gathering with sharpened sticks. Stop being a hypocrite and using the wonders science has given you if you truly believe science is largely crap."
Hmmm...adding to the list of words redefined by lunatic fringe gay advocates, we now have "hypocrite".
I don't think science is crap. It's exciting.
I think the way peer review is portrayed by liberal-gay-alarmist complex is crap. Actually, it's more than an opinion, it's a fact.
See earlier posts in this thread for elaboration.
the CDC is out with new numbers that show only 1.6% of Americans are gay
this further calls into question the necessity of the vast special protection that have been enacted for the benefit of this tiny number of deviants
that's right
callllls into question...
Archie Andrews, a staple of American comics since 1941, will die in Wednesday's issue of Life with Archie. And he'll say goodbye to the series with one last act of "heroism": Archie will take a bullet meant for best friend Kevin Keller, the first openly gay character in his comic universe. In doing so, he'll foil an assassination attempt against Keller and, according to the story's creators, give rise to greater "understanding and tolerance" in his fictional town of Riverdale. The final issue arrives as many homosexual advocates continue to work tirelessly to extend special rights to practitioners of deviancy and to redefine marriage to include partners on deviant relationships across the US.
Archie Comics first revealed that Andrews' death would mark the conclusion of Life with Archie back in April. The comic is a flash-forward series that catches up with Archie and his friends long after their high school and college days.
Kevin Keller was introduced to Riverdale in Veronica issue 202 almost four years ago. That issue proved so popular among deviants with lots of disposable income that Archie Comics needed to order a reprint — the first in its 70-year history. Created by artist Dan Parent, military brat Keller was featured in a four-issue miniseries and went on to headline his own comic. Kevin Keller earned the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comic Book in 2013.
The distorting reality of ‘false balance’ in the media
False equivalence in the media — giving equal weight to unsupported or even discredited claims for the sake of appearing impartial — is not unusual. But a major media organization taking meaningful steps to do something about it is.
Earlier this month, the BBC’s governing body issued a report assessing the BBC’s impartiality in covering scientific topics. When it comes to an issue like climate change, the report concluded, not all viewpoints share the same amount of scientific substance. Giving equal time and weight to a wide range of arguments without regard to their credibility risks creating a “false balance” in the public debate.
This is a lesson for all media on both sides of the Atlantic — and not just when it comes to science coverage. There are many sides to almost every story, but that doesn’t mean they are automatically equal.
Unfortunately, too much of the media has become increasingly fixated on finding “balance,” even if it means presenting fiction on par with fact. If media outlets wanted to present an accurate account of the climate change “debate,” for instance, they would have to follow comedian John Oliver’s lead and host a “statistically representative” face-off with three climate change deniers up against 97 scientists armed with proof. Instead, they contort themselves to find “balance,” and we’re left with segments like “Is the climate change threat exaggerated?” — presented on the always reliable Fox News — which promised to “weigh the evidence on both sides of the divisive topic.” It’s no wonder that only 60 percent of Americans know that most scientists agree that global warming is occurring — and almost 30 percent aren’t sure if there is any scientific consensus.
"There's no difference between Phil Robertson's anti-gay beliefs and the anti-black beliefs of Borst and Honeywell"
this is a racist insult, implying that someone's skin color is the equivalent of a desire to engage in deviant behavior
little wonder that blacks tend to less supportive of gay "rights" when this insult is constantly thrown at them by the lunatic fringe
remember that MLK famously said he desired that his children be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin
little did he know that liberal lunatics would someday hold that the color of their skin is the same as a character flaw
It’s not just right-wing megaphones that subscribe to this kind of journalism. As Media Matters has documented, when reporting on the 2013 United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fifth assessment report, mainstream outlets like the Wall Street Journal and The Post gave, on average, the three percent of doubters “over five times the amount of representation [they have] in the scientific community.” The result, as Bill McKibben has said, is “a massive failure of journalism to communicate the idea to the public that the most dangerous thing that ever happened in the world is in the process of happening.” (Indeed, the Los Angeles Times is unusual for its policy of not publishing letters to the editor that deny man’s role in climate change.)
As political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein have written, “A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.” And this isn’t just true when it comes to science coverage — the media has a similar tendency to issue unfiltered “he said, she said” accounts of political issues. The result is that every controversy seems to be reduced to a binary debate between two equal sides. In 2013, when congressional Republicans shut down the government over a health-care law that had been passed in Congress and upheld in the Supreme Court, many in the media continued to pretend that both sides were equally at fault.
My Nation colleague Eric Alterman once wrote that no matter how “outlandish, illogical, or simply untrue,” an argument may be, too many editors and journalists bind themselves to “an outdated commitment to the ideal of objectivity.” This approach has real consequences on the public’s understanding of society’s most pressing challenges — including the effects of global warming.
Gallup’s 2014 poll on the environment found that 42 percent of Americans believe that “the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated in the news.” Blinded by the veil of false equivalence, we believe global warming is happening, but that it won’t seriously affect us. As a result, we are not holding our elected leaders accountable for acting to curb the threat of climate change, which only grows more dangerous over time.
"Unfortunately, too much of the media has become increasingly fixated on finding “balance,” even if it means presenting fiction on par with fact. If media outlets wanted to present an accurate account of the climate change “debate,” for instance, they would have to follow comedian John Oliver’s lead and host a “statistically representative” face-off with three climate change deniers up against 97 scientists armed with proof."
Just for any newcomers, Priya is a lazy person up in Saskatchewan who has never worked, claiming to not be able to handle a "workplace" situation. This is something to keep in mind when Priya starts evaluating the scientific literature on climate change and attacking the credentials of anyone who disagrees with the alarmists.
The 97% number has been thoroughly debunked. All it means is that 97% of scientists agree that the planet is warmer now than in 1900. The cause, the extent, the effects, and much more is a matter of disagreement among scientists.
Climatology is a discipline not well advanced or well understood. There's a reason for that: you can't do experiments because there's only one specimen, the Earth. Perhaps at some point in the future, as move out into the stars this will change. For now, we don't even know what we don't know.
While it's true that laymen might not fully understand the science, there are two things anyone can see:
1. Do the scientists make accurate predictions?
Climatologists try to say what conditions will be like in 2100, 86 years hence, and, yet, 50 years ago, they were saying we're at the beginning of a new ice age.
Why would think they are right now?
2. Does the status quo in a given field support the free flow of objective research?
In this field, it seems that objectivity was long ago forsaken. Any suggestion that alarmism isn't justified is viciously attacked and unless one already has impeccable credentials, they will ostracized. And now the media is going to stop even mentioning dissenting opinions.
You don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "the CDC is out with new numbers that show only 1.6% of Americans are gay this further calls into question the necessity of the vast special protection that have been enacted for the benefit of this tiny number of deviants".
And as his his usual practice bad anonymous lies through omission Here's the whole story on what the CDC said:
1.6% said they were gay or lesbian
.7% said they were bisexual
.2% said they didn't know what their sexual orienation was
.6% refused to answer.
Given the stigma people like Wyatt/bad anonymous foist on gays and lesbians one thing we can say with certainty is any of these polls underreport the percentage of gays and lesbians as many, perhaps most will not disclose their orientation to a pollster and will habitually respond that they are straight even though they aren't. Its a virtual certainty that the people who said they didn't know their orientation and those that refused to answer are gay, lesbian, or bisexual. It is also a certainty that many who answered they are straight are really gay, lesbian, or bisexual but afraid to admit it due to the possibility of repercussions from people like Wyatt/bad anonymous who would evict them from their homes, fire them from their jobs, disown them from their families, or refuse to provide them with goods and services.
Futher this CDC survey is inconsistent with most other surveys which have shown the percentage willing to admit to a non-heterosexual orientation is 4.5 to 5% and this survey disagrees with the CDC's last survey where:
2.3 percent of men said they were homosexual
1.8 percent said they were bisexual
3.9 percent said they were not heteroseuxal, that they were “something else,”
1.8 percent did not answer the question
Or in other words, of those who would admit it almost 10% said they were something other than heterosexual.
A good indicator of how distorted such surveys are is shown by other research papers such as the following:
"A team of researchers from Ohio State and Boston Universities have conducted a new study to determine whether conventional public opinion surveys under-report the proportion of gays and lesbians in the population? And whether they underestimate the share of Americans who hold anti-gay views?
According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the answer is yes, and it cuts both ways. Polls underestimate the number of LGBT people in the U.S., and they underestimate the amount of homophobia as well.
“We find substantial under-reporting of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] identity and behaviors as well as underreporting of anti-gay sentiment …even under anonymous and very private conditions,” the researchers wrote in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The results showed that people will not honestly tell pollsters things that are too personal or that they think might put them in a negative light or outside the mainstream, also known as the social desirability bias. That includes revealing their sexual orientation or revealing their homophobic tendencies.
Researches found that when participants were directly asked about their orientation, 11%, of the respondents said that they were “not heterosexual.” But when given the chance to respond anonymously, that number jumped up to 19%."
“In 2003, Pathela’s team performed telephone interviews with nearly 4,200 New York City men. They conducted the interviews in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian; a translation service helped with interviews in Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Polish, and Haitian Creole.
In nearly every study of sexual behaviour, the percentage of men who report sex with men is higher than the percentage of men who report being gay.
– Nearly one in 10 men WHO SAY THEY'RE STRAIGHT have sex only with other men, a New York City survey finds.
And 70% of those straight-identified men having sex with men are married.
In fact, 10% of all married men in this survey report same-sex behaviour during the past year.”
So, as you can see even when Wyatt/bad anonymous doesn't lie directly, he only tells a partial truth and/or lies through omission. And even if it were true that only 1.6 percent of Americans were something other than heterosexual his claim that they don't deserve equal rights fails on the face of it. Only 1% of Americans identify as Jewish, you'll never hear Christian conservatives like Wyatt/bad anonymous screaming this justifies denying them the same rights other Americans have. And of course if bigots like him honestly believed virtually no Americans are gay it wouldn't concern them at all if gays got the right to marry as virtually no marriages would be same sex anyway.
"And even if it were true that only 1.6 percent of Americans were something other than heterosexual his claim that they don't deserve equal rights fails on the face of it"
I didn't see anyone say that deviants shouldn't have equal rights
everyone thinks homosexuals have the right to free speech and a jury of their peers for their trial on charges of sodomy
now that lazy Priya has admitted that the CDC can be wrong, it opens up the conversation in all sorts of ways
|I posted "Unfortunately, too much of the media has become increasingly fixated on finding “balance,” even if it means presenting fiction on par with fact. If media outlets wanted to present an accurate account of the climate change “debate,” for instance, they would have to follow comedian John Oliver’s lead and host a “statistically representative” face-off with three climate change deniers up against 97 scientists armed with proof."
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "The 97% number has been thoroughly debunked. All it means is that 97% of scientists agree that the planet is warmer now than in 1900. The cause, the extent, the effects, and much more is a matter of disagreement among scientists.".
And as usual, that is a standard Wyatt/bad anonymous lie as anyone can see if they check with the actual scientific literature. Not only do 97% of climatoligists agree the research shows global warming is real, they all agree IT IS MAN-MADE. Further, scientists ARE in agreement about the extend and effects of global warming.
The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report on how global warming is already affecting the way people live and what will happen in the future, including a worldwide drop in income.
The report says scientists have high confidence especially in what it calls certain "key risks":
—People dying from warming- and sea rise-related flooding, especially in big cities.
—Famine because of temperature and rain changes, especially for poorer nations.
—Farmers going broke because of lack of water.
—Infrastructure failures because of extreme weather.
—Dangerous and deadly heat waves worsening.
—Certain land and marine ecosystems failing.
"We've seen a lot of impacts and they've had consequences," Carnegie Institution climate scientist Chris Field, who heads the report, told The Associated Press on Saturday. "And we will see more in the future."
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Climatology is a discipline not well advanced or well understood. There's a reason for that: you can't do experiments because there's only one specimen, the Earth. Perhaps at some point in the future, as move out into the stars this will change. For now, we don't even know what we don't know.".
That is utter nonsense. Experiments can be done on small scale and for example, its without dispute that if you take a sample of air from the earth, increase the amount of carbon dioxide in it, and apply a consistent heat source the sample will retain more heat as the carbon dioxide increases. Obviously this holds true on a larger scale and while many factors affect climate the principle that more carbon dioxide traps more heat is not in dispute. Further, the argument that you can't experiement on the earth so we don't know anything could just as easily be applied to the field of geology but indirect measurments, observations and experiementation allow us to know a great deal about the planet and how it reacts over time. Just as is the case with global warming, their is an overwhelming scientific concensus that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, plate techtonics cause mountains for form, volcanic activity, and so on.
Religious conservatives have tried to make the same argument that Wyatt/bad anonymous used to claim we can't know if evolution is true or not. Once again there is overwhelming concensus in the scientific community that it is true and even though we can't do experiements over millions of years to prove it we can do artificial selection which shows animals like dogs can be dramitically altered over very short time periods to greatly alter their morphology. If we can make these dramatic changes in decades its no problem for evolution to turn a dinosaur into a bird over millions of years. We can see evolution in action with bacteria, our heavy use of anti-biotics has caused them to evolve and develop resistance to the very anti-biotics that used to so easily kill them.
While the global warming deniers will attempt to cast doubt on the issue there is no doubt in the scientific community that global warming is happening, is man-made, and will have serious consequences for future generations, some of which we are already experiencing.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "While it's true that laymen might not fully understand the science, there are two things anyone can see: 1. Do the scientists make accurate predictions? Climatologists try to say what conditions will be like in 2100, 86 years hence, and, yet, 50 years ago, they were saying we're at the beginning of a new ice age.".
Simply not true. Only a tiny minority of scientists thought the earth was entering an ice age. Scientists have in general been predicting global warming for over 100 years and as time has gone by and more evidence has come in the possibility that they are now wrong about this is vanishingly small. There is simply no comparing what science knew 50 years ago with what it knows today. Science is self-correcting and as time goes on it gets increasingly solid.
In fact far from making inaccurate predictions forecasts of global temperature rises over the past 15 years have proved remarkably accurate A paper, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, explores the performance of a climate forecast based on data up to 1996 by comparing it with the actual temperatures observed since. The results show that scientists accurately predicted the warming experienced in the past decade, relative to the decade to 1996, to within a few hundredths of a degree.
Scientists by training and nature are a notoriously conservative bunch. They don't make wild predictions when they err, its almost always on the side of being too conservative. In those predictions that have been inaccurate climate scientists have almost always underestimated the degree of warming and the degree of impacts. For example, 10 years ago most scientists were predicting the Arctic ice cap would be gone by the year 2100. Now its disappearing so fast its on pace to be gone by 2050, if not sooner.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Why would think they are right now? 2. Does the status quo in a given field support the free flow of objective research? In this field, it seems that objectivity was long ago forsaken. Any suggestion that alarmism isn't justified is viciously attacked and unless one already has impeccable credentials, they will ostracized. And now the media is going to stop even mentioning dissenting opinions.".
When scientists say there are no space aliens broadcasting messages into people's minds and controlling them media has a journalistic obligation not to give equal time to the people wearing tin-foil hats and saying they are.
Wyatt/bad anonymous was just trying to tell us what a low bar it is to get a paper published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal yet none of the global warming deniers has attempted to do so. Why? Because they know their lies and disinformation can't stand up to scientific scrutiny so instead of publishing in peer reviewed scientific journals or presenting at conferences on global warming they go on right wing media or lobby politicians where they can spew their propaganda without scrutiny or opposition.
Let's not forget who the global warming deniers are. Fred Singer is a professor from the University of Virginia who is a liar for hire who has previously worked for the tobacco industry to provide pseudo-science that says smoking isn't bad for you. He's now paid $5000/month by the fossil fuel industry to cast doubt on the settled science of global warming. He's the best they've got and the global warming denialism conference he set up to counter the truth features an all star line-up of scientists including two architects, a massage therapist with a BA in psychology, and a medical officer from the Texas Sheriff's department.
So, no, the quacks don't deserve equal billing in the media with real scientists who've done a huge volume of real reserarch on global warming.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "I didn't see anyone say that [gays] shouldn't have equal rights everyone thinks [they] have the right to free speech and a jury of their peers for their trial on charges of sodomy"
Thank you for making your disingenousness so plain.
Wyatt/bad anonymous has said gays should be imprisoned or even executed for being gay. He believes gays and lesbians don't deserve the same right to marry as heterosexuals. He believes gays and lesbians don't deserve the same protections from anti-discrimination laws that blacks and christians have.
He tries pathetically to justify his desire to deny gays the right to marry by saying "They have the right to marry, they don't have the right to have the government recognize that marriage".
Which is obviously nonsense - without government recognition there is no marriage. That's why the court in Lovging vs Virgina didn't rule that mixed race couples already had the right to "marry" but no right to have the government recognize their "marriage".
The court stated in no uncertain terms that marriage was one of the fundamental civil rights of man and that marriage doesn't exist if the government doesn't recognize it. They rejected the disingenous argument that "blacks have the same right to marry a person of their own race as whites do which means the law isn't discriminatory" just as courts since then have recognized that the argument "gays have the same right to marry a person of the opposite sex as heterosexuals do therefore there is no discrimination" is childish nonsense and the right to marry means nothing if it doesn't include the right to marry the willing person of your own choosing.
always a hoot to hear the web-surfin' sofa spud from Saskatchewan evaluates\ scientific credentials
Fred Singer is a professor in the field at major university and a founding father of modern meteorology
debunking the 97%:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/
"has said gays should be imprisoned or even executed for being gay"
no, that's wrong
unless they have homosex in public, I wouldn't favor imprisoning them
DADT
do you think it's OK to have homosex in public, lazy Priya?
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "here's a link to NUMEROUS polls Americans detest Obamacare".
No, that minority of Americans destests what Republicans have dishonestly told them Obamacare is. When you add those who like Obamacare with those who don't like it because they think it needs to go farther than it has that equals a majority of Americans. The majority of Americans either like Obamacare or wish it would go further than it has by providing things such as single payer.
The fact is Republicans have spent hundreds of millions on ads lying about Obamacare and its fooled many of the people who don't know what it really is. But when you ask people about the features of Obamacare they overwhelmingly support it:
80% support letting young adults stay on their parents plan
77% support free preventative care
74% support the medicaid expansion
70% support ending insurance discrimination based on pre-existing conditions
And when you ask the people who know Obamacare best, those who've signed up for it, 78% of them say they're satisfied with the plan they got and even 74% of Republicans who've signed up say they're satisfied with the plan they got. When people get the truth about Obamacare instead of Republican lies, they love it!
I said "There's no difference between Phil Robertson's anti-gay beliefs and the anti-black beliefs of Borst and Honeywell"
Wyatt/bad anonymous said with fake outrage "this is a racist insult, implying that someone's skin color is the equivalent of a desire to engage in deviant behavior".
Oh, puuuleeeze, spare us your childish B.S. A person's black skin colour is exactly the same as a gay person's sexual orientation in that they are both harmless characteristics of a person that can never be used to justify discrimination.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "little wonder that blacks tend to less supportive of gay "rights" when this insult is constantly thrown at them by the lunatic fringe remember that MLK famously said he desired that his children be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin little did he know that liberal lunatics would someday hold that the color of their skin is the same as a character flaw".
Of course its nonsense that gayness is a character flaw - every major mental and physical health organizaiton says gayness is a normal, natural, and healthy variant for a minority of the population.
Just as it is with a the colour of a person's skin, gayness says nothing about the goodness or character of a person. The woman who knew MLK best said he fully supported equal rights for gays and any honest person including him would say they desire their children be judged for the content of their character rather than their sexual orientation.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "no, that's wrong unless they have homosex in public, I wouldn't favor imprisoning them".
Liar. You just finished stating in this thread at July 15, 2014 1:37 PM "everyone thinks homosexuals have the right to free speech and a jury of their peers for their trial on charges of sodomy"
You sometimes claim you don't support imprisoning or executing gays but as you did above, from time to time you let your guard down and post the truth about what you believe:
Note the conversation in this thread
We were discussing the prison sentences Uganda proposed for people found having gay sex.
I said "Bad anonymous left out one situtation where the Uganda law called for the death penalty - if the person was a repeat "offender".
That meant if you had sex with more than one same sex partner, or more than once with the same partner they proposed putting you to death."
Wyatt/bad anonymous responded: "yes, Robert said that too I didn't leave it out on purpose, I didn't know about it. Of course, penalties should increase with repeated offenses but the death penalty would be wrong".
And in this thread Wyatt/bad anoymous offers unqualified praise for Peter Sprigg who seeks to criminalize gayness and deport gays.
And in this thread Wyatt/bad anonymous expresses support for India recriminalizing gay sex.
And in this thread Wyatt/bad anonymous recants his previous claim that he would only support imprisoning people for gayness but not execution and he says "in the U.S., you can be executed for doing nothing in Iran, you have to commit a serious crime, like homosexuality"
Once again, as you can see, Wyatt/bad anonymous has no integrity, he'll say anything and contradict what he's previously said at any time if it suits his immediate purpose. The truth doesn't matter to him, anything goes as long as it supports his anti-gay, anti-freedom, global warming denial agenda.
"everyone thinks homosexuals have the right to free speech and a jury of their peers for their trial on charges of sodomy"
lazy priya, you have yet to answer:
do you think it's OK for gays to have homosex sodomy in public?
it's a "yes-or-no" question
you can handle it
I think most people think that homosexuals who sodomize in public should be arrested
and they have a right to a jury of their peers
the fact that homosexuals often sodomize in public does not make this discriminatory
where do you take issue?
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "always a hoot to hear the web-surfin' sofa spud from Saskatchewan evaluates\ scientific credentials".
LOL, Wyatt/bad anonymous is fine one to talk. He's at work right now in an electronics factory and as you can see, rather than attending to the job he's paid for he's f'in the dog surfin' the internet and posting right wing propaganda
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Fred Singer is a professor in the field at major university and a founding father of modern meteorology".
No one describes Fred Singer as the "founding father of modern meteorology" other than Fred Singer and global warming denialists. Meteorology and climatoligy are two different fields and meteroligists are not qualified to make statments on climatology such as global warming. Fred Singer got his PhD in Physics in 1948 and hasn't produced any new research in over 20 years.
Prior to his climate change denialism activities he worked for the tobacco industry producing fake science that c laimed there were no health problems associated with tobacco use. He is now paid $5000/month by the fossil fuel industry to produce propaganda intended to create doubt about the settled science of global warming. In July 2014 the Heartland global warming denial organization is paying Fred Singer to hold a climate change skeptics conference in Las Vegas. The promises an all star line-up of scientists including a couple of architects, a medical officer from the Texas Sheriff's office, a massage therapist with a B.A. in pyschology. These are not serious people. This is the tin-foil hat crowd.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "debunking the 97%:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor"
Another standard page out of the bad anonymous "lying-through-ommission" playbook. Just as he points to extremely short term and very isolated cooler than average temperatures in the Eastern U.S. which represents less than 1% of the earth's surface and claims this proves global warming isn't happening while ignoring the other 99% of the planet that has much warmer temperatures than average, he posts a link to a pathetic article where people who wrote less than half a dozen of the 12000 papers reviewed on global warming complain they were misrepresented, not because they didn't say humans caused global warming but that they said humans didn't cause most or all of the global warming. And of course the article ignores the 99+ percent of papers where scientists did say humans have caused most, if not all global warming we've seen since the industrial revolution.
And of course solar output has been at a low since 1998 and a large number of La Nina events since then have been producing a cooling effect so the climate temperatures since then have been colder than average but the opposite has happened, The overall warming of the entire climate system has continued rapidly over the past 15 years, even faster than the 15 years before that. If you look at this graph you can see that the rate of temperature increase in the atmosphere has slowed, the atmospheric heating represents only 2% of the overall warming of the global climate. The rates of temperature increase for the remaining portions of the global climate such as upper and deep ocean temperatures, and land and ice temperatures have increased at a far greater rate.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "priya, you have yet to answer:
do you think it's OK for gays to have [sex] in public?".
I didn't answer because its a dumb question you pose solely to demonize gays and try and weasel out of your own plain words and my response goes without saying.
I know you're going to now try to pretend that all those times you were talking about imprisoning and executing gays for having same sex sex you were referring to gays having sex in public.
There's just one problem: You never qualified your statements saying gays should be imprisoned and executed to say you meant for "sex in public".
Because that's not what you meant. You meant gays should be imprisoned and/or executed for having sex period, regardless of whether it was in private, public, or in a paper bag.
You can try pathetically to weasel your way out of it now by dishonestly claiming you were referring sex in public, but no honest person is going to believe you because you didn't refer to sex in public.
And I "like" how you suggest arresting gays for having sex in public but not heterosexuals. Your purpose there is two-fold:
1) to dishonestly suggest only gays break the law by having sex in public
2) to demonize gays to promote hatred of and violence against them.
While some gays have sex in public, heterosexuals(by your claim) make up 98.4% of the population and so the vast majority of sex in public is done by heterosexuals, not gays.
If people like you didn't demonize gays far fewer of them would feel the need to try to hide their sexual orientation from their heterosexual spouses and society by seeking anonymous sex in public.
If people like you didn't do your best to make gays ashamed of who they are, far more of them would feel comfortable settling down with a same sex partner in the same house instead of fearing that their living arrangements alone would give up the truth and result in job loss, home loss, or worse.
Two Florida policemen are off the job following allegations they were in the Ku Klux Klan. They served in the Fruitland Park police department until an FBI report identified them as secret members of the KKK. Deputy chief David Borst resigned following the revelation and Corporal George Honeywell was fired.
When Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson was suspended for making anti-gay remarks he was heralded by the religious right as an unfairly oppressed hero. There's no difference between Phil Robertson's anti-gay beliefs and the anti-black beliefs of Borst and Honeywell.
If anti-gay christians think a person's religious beliefs give them the right to disparage gays without consequence for the harmless characteristic of their sexual orientation then it necessarily follows that they should be standing up for Borst's and Honeywell's right to disparage blacks for the harmless characteristic of their skin colour.
Christian conservatives epitomize the double standard - they're as hypocritical as it gets.
"There's no difference between Phil Robertson's anti-gay beliefs and the anti-black beliefs of Borst and Honeywell"
you've already spouted out this non sequitur
we know you'd like to appropriate the moral benefits of racial diversity and apply them to deviant sexual desires but they are not analogous
skin color is a physical characteristic
sexual desire and behavior are elements of character, a different matter
while I know you've convinced yourself that all desire is not metaphysical but merely physical
that's a religious viewpoint called materialistic determinism
you have a right to believe in it but not to impose it on others
few others believe it
further, even if your religious viewpoint were correct, there is still the issue that law enforcement officers are, and should be, held to certain standards that don't apply to characters on reality TV shows
in conclusion:
lazy priya, you're an idiot
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, says he remembers the morning he spotted a well-known colleague at a gathering of climate experts.
“I walked over and held out my hand to greet him,” Dr. Christy recalled. “He looked me in the eye, and he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Come on, shake hands with me.’ And he said, ‘No.’ ”
Dr. Christy is an outlier on what the vast majority of his colleagues consider to be a matter of consensus: that global warming is both settled science and a dire threat. He regards it as neither. Not that the earth is not heating up. It is, he says, and carbon dioxide spewed from power plants, automobiles and other sources is at least partly responsible.
But in speeches, congressional testimony and peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, he argues that predictions of future warming have been greatly overstated and that humans have weathered warmer stretches without perishing. Dr. Christy’s willingness to publicize his views, often strongly, has also hurt his standing among scientists who tend to be suspicious of those with high profiles. His frequent appearances on Capitol Hill have almost always been at the request of Republican legislators opposed to addressing climate change.
“I detest words like ‘contrarian’ and ‘denier,’ ” he said. “I’m a data-driven climate scientist. Every time I hear that phrase, ‘The science is settled,’ I say I can easily demonstrate that that is false, because this is the climate — right here. The science is not settled.”
Dr. Christy was pointing to a chart comparing seven computer projections of global atmospheric temperatures based on measurements taken by satellites and weather balloons. The projections traced a sharp upward slope; the actual measurements, however, ticked up only slightly.
Such charts — there are others, sometimes less dramatic but more or less accepted by the large majority of climate scientists — are the essence of the divide between that group on one side and Dr. Christy and a handful of other respected scientists on the other.
“Almost anyone would say the temperature rise seen over the last 35 years is less than the latest round of models suggests should have happened,” said Carl Mears, the senior research scientist at Remote Sensing Systems, a California firm that analyzes satellite climate readings.
“Where the disagreement comes is that Dr. Christy says the climate models are worthless and that there must be something wrong with the basic model, whereas there are actually a lot of other possibilities,” Dr. Mears said. Among them, he said, are natural variations in the climate and rising trade winds that have helped funnel atmospheric heat into the ocean.
Dr. Christy has drawn the scorn of his colleagues partly because they believe that so much is at stake and that he is providing legitimacy to those who refuse to acknowledge that. If the models are imprecise, they argue, the science behind them is compelling, and it is very likely that the world has only a few decades to stave off potentially catastrophic warming.
“It’s kind of like telling a little girl who’s trying to run across a busy street to catch a school bus to go for it, knowing there’s a substantial chance that she’ll be killed,” said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “She might make it. But it’s a big gamble to take.”
By contrast, Dr. Christy argues that reining in carbon emissions is both futile and unnecessary, and that money is better spent adapting to what he says will be moderately higher temperatures. Among other initiatives, he said, the authorities could limit development in coastal and hurricane-prone areas, expand flood plains, make manufactured housing more resistant to tornadoes and high winds, and make farms in arid regions less dependent on imported water — or move production to rainier places.
Dr. Christy’s scenario is not completely out of the realm of possibility, his critics say, but it is highly unlikely.
In interviews, prominent scientists, while disagreeing with Dr. Christy, took pains to acknowledge his credentials. They are substantial: Dr. Christy, 63, has researched climate issues for 27 years and was a lead author — in essence, an editor — of a section of the 2001 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the definitive assessment of the state of global warming. With a colleague at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Dr. Roy Spencer, he received NASA’s medal for exceptional scientific achievement in 1991 for building a global temperature database.
That model, which concluded that a layer of the atmosphere was unexpectedly cooling, was revised to show slight warming after other scientists documented flaws in its methodology. It has become something of a scientific tit for tat. Dr. Christy and Dr. Spencer’s own recalculations scaled back the amount of warming, leading to further assaults on their methodology.
Dr. Christy’s response sits on his bookshelf: a thick stack of yellowed paper with the daily weather data he began recording in Fresno, Calif., in the 1960s. It was his first data set, he said, the foundation of a conviction that “you have to know what’s happening before you know why it’s happening, and that comes back to data.”
Dr. Christy says he became fascinated with weather as a fifth grader when a snowstorm hit Fresno in 1961. By his high school junior year, he had taught himself Fortran, the first widely used programming language, and had programmed a school computer to make weather predictions. After earning a degree in mathematics at California State University, Fresno, he became an evangelical Christian missionary in Kenya, married and returned as pastor of a mission church in South Dakota.
There, as a part-time college math teacher, he found his true calling. He left the pastoral position, earned a doctorate in atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois and moved to Alabama.
And while his work has been widely published, he has often been vilified by his peers. Dr. Christy is mentioned, usually critically, in dozens of the so-called Climategate emails that were hacked from the computers of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Center, the British keeper of global temperature records, in 2009.
“John Christy has made a scientific career out of being wrong,” one prominent climate scientist, Benjamin D. Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote in one 2008 email. “He’s not even a third-rate scientist.”
Another email included a photographic collage showing Dr. Christy and other scientists who question the extent of global warming, some stranded on a tiny ice floe labeled “North Pole” and others buoyed in the sea by a life jacket and a yellow rubber ducky. A cartoon balloon depicts three of them saying, “Global warming is a hoax.”
Some, including those who disagree with Dr. Christy, are dismayed by the treatment.
“Show me two scientists who agree on everything,” said Peter Thorne, a senior researcher at Norway’s Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center who wrote a 2005 research article on climate change with Dr. Christy. “We may disagree over what we are finding, but we should be playing the ball and not the man.”
Dr. Christy has been dismissed in environmental circles as a pawn of the fossil-fuel industry who distorts science to fit his own ideology. (“I don’t take money from industries,” he said.)
He says he worries that his climate stances are affecting his chances of publishing future research and winning grants. The largest of them, a four-year Department of Energy stipend to investigate discrepancies between climate models and real-world data, expires in September.
“There’s a climate establishment,” Dr. Christy said. “And I’m not in it.”
"But in speeches, congressional testimony and peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, he argues that predictions of future warming have been greatly overstated"
THATSA RIGHT !!!!!
PEER-REVIEWED !!!!!
"Dr. Christy, 63, has researched climate issues for 27 years and was a lead author — in essence, an editor — of a section of the 2001 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the definitive assessment of the state of global warming. With a colleague at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Dr. Roy Spencer, he received NASA’s medal for exceptional scientific achievement in 1991 for building a global temperature database."
THATSA RIGHT !!!!!!!!!!!
EXCEPTIONAL SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT !!!!!!
THIS GUY AIN'T NO WEB-SURFIN' SOFA SPUD !!!!!!!!!!!
"I didn't answer because its a dumb question you pose solely to demonize gays and try and weasel out of your own plain words and my response goes without saying."
Priya says the "response goes without saying", but after reading all these exchanges with anon, I still don't know. I would initially guess Priya means she's against homosexual activities perpetrated in public places but then, later, Priya seems to say it's OK because heterosexuals do it too.
Priya, you aren't being clear.
Indulge us: do you think it's OK for homosexuals to commit sodomy in public or not?
"I know you're going to now try to pretend that all those times you were talking about imprisoning and executing gays for having same sex sex you were referring to gays having sex in public."
Priya is being a bit extreme here. I don't think anyone has suggested that long-term imprisonment or execution is the answer to the menace of homosexual exhibitionism. There are myriad other options. A brief period of institutionalization with a regimen of electro-shock therapy might actually do the trick. There is room for creativity on the part of law enforcement.
"There's just one problem: You never qualified your statements saying gays should be imprisoned and executed to say you meant for "sex in public"."
Well, anon has clarified now, so what's the problem?
"Because that's not what you meant. You meant gays should be imprisoned and/or executed for having sex period, regardless of whether it was in private, public, or in a paper bag."
Paper bag? Hmmm...that hadn't occurred to me.
Is that some kind of environmental thing? Makes sense, I guess. Using paper bags for sexual purposes would tend to make for fewer trees to hug.
"You can try pathetically to weasel your way out of it now by dishonestly claiming you were referring sex in public, but no honest person is going to believe you because you didn't refer to sex in public."
So, everyone who doesn't see it your way is dishonest, huh?
A lot of people in nuthouses think that.
"And I "like" how you suggest arresting gays for having sex in public but not heterosexuals."
Interesting. I haven't heard there's a big problem with heterosexuals having sex in public.
I think if that did happen, most people would agree that the police should intervene.
"Your purpose there is two-fold:
1) to dishonestly suggest only gays break the law by having sex in public"
Let be honest. It's a standard part of the homosexual experience.
Recently saw "A Normal Heart" on HBO. In one scene, the guy (gay) went to a party at a friend's house on Fire Island. Out on the deck overlooking the ocean, groups of guys were randomly sodomizing one another. He just mingles around like it's nothing out of the ordinary. Next morning, he goes for a walk on a dune path and encounters some guys having a threesome in the bright morning sun where anyone could walk by.
It's a true story. Face it, just part of the gay experience.
"2) to demonize gays to promote hatred of and violence against them."
This is part of a post-modern fallacy common among the fringe lunatic set these days. Anyone who disapproves of your behavior is, ipso facto, committing an act of violence against you. It's a fallacy, and a dangerous one.
"While some gays have sex in public, heterosexuals(by your claim) make up 98.4% of the population and so the vast majority of sex in public is done by heterosexuals, not gays."
Another fallacy.
"If people like you didn't demonize gays far fewer of them would feel the need to try to hide their sexual orientation from their heterosexual spouses and society by seeking anonymous sex in public."
Hiding in public?
Sounds like an oxymoron.
Priya has opened new frontiers in illogic.
"If people like you didn't do your best to make gays ashamed of who they are, far more of them would feel comfortable settling down with a same sex partner in the same house instead of fearing that their living arrangements alone would give up the truth and result in job loss, home loss, or worse."
Oh, for heaven's sake.
Homosexuality is so mainstreamed, it's ridiculous.
The biggest problem we have is that people are now afraid to speak up against homosexual exhibitionism.
The Angry Kenyan sure does have a good head on his shoulders.
He really cuts through lazy Priya's baloney.
The GOP’s Plot To Convince You They Support Birth Control
There’s a war over birth control brewing in the Senate, and Republican lawmakers want to make it clear that the GOP is on the right side.
On Tuesday, after Senate Democrats introduced a measure to override the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on Hobby Lobby and clarify that for-profit companies must offer contraceptive coverage, their Republican colleagues announced some forthcoming legislation of their own. As the Hill reports, GOP leadership will introduce a bill that appears to be supportive of women’s access to birth control.
“We plan to introduce legislation this week that says no employer can block any employee from legal access to her FDA-approved contraceptives,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said. “There’s no disagreement on that fundamental point.”
If the final bill is along the lines of the initial reports, however, the GOP’s competing legislation wouldn’t do anything to change the status quo. It certainly wouldn’t ensure that Hobby Lobby employees have insurance coverage for contraception. Instead, it’s simply a way for Republicans to reinforce the point that the high court’s ruling on Hobby Lobby doesn’t inhibit women’s legal access to birth control.
The fact that women are still allowed to purchase every type of FDA-approved birth control has become the central argument used to downplay the impact of the Hobby Lobby case. Of course, it’s certainly true. Contraception remains legal, and the decision to allow some for-profit companies to refuse to cover some types of birth control on religious grounds doesn’t mean that all IUDs, for example, are now banned.
But legality isn’t exactly the same as accessibility. And the Hobby Lobby case was about the latter.
Hobby Lobby supporters typically argue that birth control is still widely accessible because it’s cheap. Conservatives have claimed birth control can cost less than four dollars per month and women can simply buy their contraception at any 7/11. However, it’s important to remember that Hobby Lobby won the right to drop coverage for one of the most expensive types of birth control, intrauterine devices, which can cost up to $1,000 out of pocket. Previous research has confirmed that cost is a serious barrier for the low-income women who may otherwise choose to use IUDs. As the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists noted in its brief in opposition to Hobby Lobby, “Lack of insurance coverage deters many women from choosing a high-cost contraceptive, even if that method is best for her health and lifestyle.”
In that context, it doesn’t matter that IUDs aren’t technically illegal. If women don’t have the insurance benefits to make them affordable, they’re still just as far out of reach.
This issue extends to other types of birth control, too (particularly since it’s possible that other for-profit companies will eventually win the right to drop coverage for all forms of contraception). The oral birth control pill isn’t actually as affordable as some Obamacare opponents make it out to be, and can run up to $1,210 each year in doctor’s visits and prescription costs. Those type of extra costs are partly why women of reproductive age spend 68 percent more on their out-of-pocket medical expenses than men do, and that’s why women have historically been forced to make some tough choices about their reproductive health. Before Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate took effect, some women reported that they tried to save money by failing to take their birth control as directed or by switching to a less effective method.
“What we’re saying is that of course you can support both religious freedom and access to contraception,” McConnell told the Hill. That’s a convenient narrative for a party that is eager to win back female support. But what kind of access are we really talking about?
At the end of the day, if McConnell’s potential legislation is any indicator, Republicans are simply willing to go on the record to affirm that they don’t support outlawing birth control altogether. That shouldn’t necessarily be incredibly reassuring to women. Successful efforts to limit access to women’s health care services don’t typically result from outright bans — for proof, look no further than the fight against abortion. It’s easier to slowly chip away at women’s ability to afford their health care, and the first step in that bigger strategy is to cut off their insurance coverage for it.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "we know you'd like to appropriate the moral benefits of racial diversity and apply them to deviant sexual desires but they are not analogous skin color is a physical characteristic sexual desire and behavior are elements of character, a different matter".
Its irrelevant that skin colour is a physical characteristic and that sexual orientation is a mental characteristic. What matters is that both are harmless characteristics and there is no justification for discriminating against a person based on either one. Skin colour and sexual orientation are exactly the same in that neither says anything about the goodness or badness of a person. You can scream all you want that gayness is a bad thing but the reality is anything which does not harm others is not a wrongdoing.
Religious beliefs are a mental characteristic and unlike with gayness no one would deny that they are a chosen characteristic. But bigots like you never claim that means people should be able to disparage and discriminate agiant without repercussions religious people.
Anti-gay christians are hypocrites. The believe religious beliefs should allow people to disparage without repercussions harmless gays. If religious beliefs give people that right then it necessarily follows that they should allow people do disparage without repercussions harmless blacks. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE.
Anti-gay chrisitans who don't stand up for Borst's and Honeywell's rights to disparage blacks without repercussions OR who don't attempt to justify the disparagement of BOTH blacks and gays are nothing but disgusting immoral hypocrites.
Wyatt/bad anonymous posted "Dr. Christy is an outlier on what the vast majority of his colleagues consider to be a matter of consensus: that global warming is both settled science and a dire threat.".
And that's all you need to know about "Dr." Christy - he's one of the tinfoil hat crowd who time and science have passed by. He's one of a tiny fringe element of global warming deniers who's out of touch with reality, not one of the 97% of ethical scientists who agree the research virtually without exception shows global warming is man-made and will have serious consequences for man-kind if nothing is done about it.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Priya is being a bit extreme here. I don't think anyone has suggested that long-term imprisonment or execution is the answer to the menace of homosexual exhibitionism. There are myriad other options. A brief period of institutionalization with a regimen of electro-shock therapy might actually do the trick. There is room for creativity on the part of law enforcement.
I said "There's just one problem: You never qualified your statements saying gays should be imprisoned and executed to say you meant for "sex in public"."
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Well, anon has clarified now, so what's the problem?".
No, you haven't clarified, you've just lied about what you originally said. The Ugandan and Indian laws that criminalized gayness had nothing to do with any laws those countries may or may not have against sex in public. You explicitely expressed your support for those laws and the Iranian laws that called for the imprisonment and execution of gays for having sex in private. You're just desperate undo the results of you letting your guard down and showing your true beliefs - you support imprisoning and executing gays merely for having same sex sex, regardless of how private it is.
I said ""If people like you didn't do your best to make gays ashamed of who they are, far more of them would feel comfortable settling down with a same sex partner in the same house instead of fearing that their living arrangements alone would give up the truth and result in job loss, home loss, or worse."
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "|Oh, for heaven's sake. Homosexuality is so mainstreamed, it's ridiculous.".
That's childish nonsense. If gayness were "so mainstreamed" there would be marriage equality, anti-discrimination laws that protected gays without any religious exemption (religious people don't get an exemption from discriminating against blacks or jews), people like Phil Robertson would be fired from their jobs and ostracized from society for disparaging gays, and people like you wouldn't be on blogs like this demonizing gays, calling for their imprisonment and execution, trying to pressure them into being heterosexuals, and trying to deny them equal rights. No, gayness is far, far from being "so mainstreamed". Self-loathing gays like you have so internalized societal homophobia you desperately try to suppress who you are and deflect suspicion away from yourself by being rabidly anti-gay.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "The biggest problem we have is that people are now afraid to speak up against homosexual exhibitionism.".
Nonsense. No one has any problem with people speaking up against sexual exhibitionism as long as you speak against heterosexuals doing it as well and not just gays.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Interesting. I haven't heard there's a big problem with heterosexuals having sex in public.".
Of course you haven't heard about the majority of public sex being performed by heterosexuals. That's because anti-gay extremists distort reality by screaming from the rooftops in every conceivable media outlet when gays have public sex while remaining silence when several times as many heterosexuals have public sex. Its just like with anal sex. When people think of anal sex they think of two men, but half of all heterosexuals have anal sex and the vast majority of anal sex is performed by heterosexuals. Just google "sex in public" and you'll see the vast majority of it is heterosexual.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Let be honest. [sex in public] a standard part of the homosexual experience".
You most certainly are far more known for your dishonesty than your honesty. That statement is just another example of that.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Recently saw "A Normal Heart" on HBO. In one scene, the guy (gay) went to a party at a friend's house on Fire Island. Out on the deck overlooking the ocean, groups of guys were randomly sodomizing one another. He just mingles around like it's nothing out of the ordinary. Next morning, he goes for a walk on a dune path and encounters some guys having a threesome in the bright morning sun where anyone could walk by.".
This is like your arguments against global warming. You take one or two incidents that fit with your anti-gay agenda and pretend what's true for those incidents is true for millions of gays - tell that to a real social scientist and you'll be laughed out of the room. Further, the 80's were a very different time than now, gayness was more underground and people more ashamed of it so they were less likely to be willing to come out of the closet by having a long term relationship in the view of society so random anonymous sex helped gays then hide their orientation. And of course what happened on Fire Island is no more typical of gays than what happens in a "girls gone wild" video or Mardi Gras is typical of heterosexuals.
I said "Wyatt/bad anonymous's goal is: 2) to demonize gays to promote hatred of and violence against them."
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "This is part of a post-modern fallacy common among the fringe lunatic set these days. Anyone who disapproves of your behavior is, ipso facto, committing an act of violence against you. It's a fallacy, and a dangerous one.".
LOL! You've repeatedly said on this blog you WANT TO IMPRIOSON GAYS FOR HAVING SAME SEX SEX IN PRIVATE AND THAT YOU'D LIKE TO SEE THEM EXECUTED. And obviously your going on and on about having sex in public being intrinsic to being gay and constant talk about gays destroying society is intended to promote hatred. There's no denying that.
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I said ""If people like you didn't demonize gays far fewer of them would feel the need to try to hide their sexual orientation from their heterosexual spouses and society by seeking anonymous sex in public."
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Hiding in public? Sounds like an oxymoron.".
I like how you play dumb when you see you can't refute the obvious. Some gay men are afraid and ashamed to reveal their sexual orientation. So they marry women to create a facade of heterosexuality for society and then cruise parks and other secluded public places in the dark of night to have anonymous sex so their secret isn't revealed. One can have sex in a public place secretively, having sex in public does not necessarily mean having sex in view of the public. And of course if there were marriage equality, no oppression, stigma, violence, loss of job and home for the harmless act of having a gay relationship these gay men who marry women to hide their orientation would marry men and live in the view of society and no longer have any need for secret furtive sex outside of the home.
One of your own comments shows you are aware of this even though you won't admit it. You once posted "Having broken societal taboos against sexual activity with those of their own gender, it's hard for [gays] to think of any compelling reason to follow any of society's other little rules [against promiscuity]."
There's a lot of truth to that. When you set unrealisitc boundaries like "You can't have a same sex romantic relationship without being an evil pariah" its impossible for most gay men not to cross that unrealistic line. So once they inevitably do it puts them in the frame of mind where they think "I'm already considered an evil pariah for having same sex sex with one partner in private, there's no further down for me to go in societies view, so it doesn't matter if I have anonymous sex with multiple partners, do it in public or anything else, I'm a bad person either way". People like you are largely responsible for the promiscuity and exhibitionism amongst gays that you falsely claim to oppose. The truth is you want gays to misbehave because it helps your promote-hate-and-violence-against-gays agenda.
Australia is drying out thanks to our carbon dioxide emissions
Australia is drying out, and it's largely our fault. The south-west of the country can expect to see average annual rainfall drop by 40 per cent compared with the mid-20th century, and a new model suggests that the main cause is human greenhouse gas emissions.
Since 2000, the average annual amount of water flowing into reservoirs in Perth, the capital of Western Australia, has dropped to less than a quarter of the yearly average between 1911 and 1974. As a whole, the south-west of Australia has seen a 20 per cent decline in winter rain since the 1960s.
Studies suggest this drop in rainfall is because westerly winds around Antarctica are moving closer to the pole, sucking moisture away from Australia, New Zealand and South America. The culprit was initially thought to be the southern ozone hole, until it was shown that greenhouse gas emissions probably shared the blame. But quirks in the models have made it difficult to definitively blame the long-term drying in south-west Australia on climate change. The resolution on climate models tends to be too low for this.
Now, Thomas Delworth and Fanrong Zeng at Princeton University have tested a high-resolution climate model on Australian climate. The great detail of the model substantially improves their ability to simulate localised rainfall. They found they were able to faithfully reproduce rainfall levels over the continent for the last century, but only if greenhouse gas emissions were included.
The picture was very different when the pair stripped human emissions out of the model, effectively simulating a world without climate change. "The observed drying over south-west Australia does not occur in our model without human greenhouse gas emissions," says Delworth.
Delworth and Zeng then looked to the future. They show that if no further action is taken to curb our emissions – which models predict will result in global warming of up to 4.8 °C by 2100 – average annual rainfall in south-western Australia will drop by about 40 per cent compared with the period between 1911 and 1974.
"This research paints a very worrying picture for future rainfall," says Abram. "It adds another compelling piece of evidence to the idea that we can expect southern parts of Australia to keep getting drier over the coming century unless strong action can be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
Severe drying near Perth is not the only way in which climate change is hitting Australia. Several reports have warned that the extreme events that have battered the country in recent years, including catastrophic mega-droughts, floods, heatwaves and bushfires, have been linked to climate change. The Australian Climate Council says the country needs to prepare for more of the same in future.
Dr. Christy, 63, has researched climate issues for 27 years and was a lead author — in essence, an editor — of a section of the 2001 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the definitive assessment of the state of global warming.
And yet, the ignorant web-surfing sofa spud with the poor spelling habits says:
"he's one of the tinfoil hat crowd who time and science have passed by"
So, lazy Priya admits that the IPCC is not what it's cracked up to be.
And how about this:
"He's one of a tiny fringe element of global warming deniers who's out of touch with reality, not one of the 97% of ethical scientists who agree the research virtually without exception shows global warming is man-made and will have serious consequences for man-kind if nothing is done"
So now, we have a highly credentialed fellow who has written PEER-REVIEWED papers prving his point, something that lazy Priya lied and said no non-alarmist has done.
And the latest attack is he's unethical. Any proof, or is a foregone conclusion of oxymoronic "settled" science?
yes, Dr Christy is part of the 97%
the only thing the 97% have in common is that the planet is warmer than it was 120 yeas ago
that's it
that's the list
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "So, lazy Priya admits that the IPCC is not what it's cracked up to be.".
I never said any such thing, I fully accept the findings of the latest IPCC report on global warming - findings which categorically reject the pooh-poohing of Christy. What I said is exactly the same as the article you posted said - "Dr". Christy is an outlier on the overwhelming scientific concensus that global warming is a settled science and a dire threat.
Wyatt/bad anonymous said "So now, we have a highly credentialed fellow who has written PEER-REVIEWED papers prving his point, something that lazy Priya lied and said no non-alarmist has done.".
I never said any such thing. I said the vast majority of global warming deniers are not scientists and don't publish in peer reviewed journals or present at global warming conferences. Christy hasn't done anything of significance in decades and he played a minor role in the 2001 IPCC report a large number of people were involved in. His peer-reviewed papers agreed that global warming has happend and is at least partly man-made and he has written no papers nor presented any evidence that global warming won't continue to happen or that its not a concern - he most certainly hasn't written any papers proving his "point" as you put it. He's one of a tiny fringe out of touch with the overwhelming concensus on global warming.
Contrary to Christy's unsupported claims forecasts of global temperature rises over the past 15 years have proved remarkably accurate. The results show that scientists accurately predicted the warming experienced in the past decade, relative to the decade to 1996, to within a few hundredths of a degree.. The scientific predictions about the effect of global warming on drought have also proven remarkably accurate.
In almost every case where climatoligists predictions of global warming have been off they've underestimated the degree of warming and the degree of impact. For example, in the early 1990s scientists predicted the Arctic ice cap would be gone by the year 2100 - its now on pace to be gone by 2050 or perhaps even earlier and sea levels have also risen faster than predicted
And while global warming deniers like to pretend the increase in Antarctic sea ice (arctic sea ice is being lost 5 times as fast as Antartic sea ice is growing) is the whole story on the climate the rate of loss of land glaciers such as Antarctica's and Greenland's have also increased much faster than predicted
The latest IPCC report on the consequences of global warming shows a violent, sicker, poorer future
Once again, Wyatt/bad anonymous is asking people to focus on what the 3 scientists say that dispute the seriousness of global warming and to ignore the 97 scientists that say we need to do something about it sooner rather than later.
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Dry as a Bone: Lake Mead's H2O
The days of millions of Sin City residents and visitors who love swimming in, boating on, and drinking water siphoned from Lake Mead could be numbered. After 14 years of drought in the Southwest, the water reservoir created by the Hoover Dam has officially dipped to its lowest water level since it began filling up with water from the Colorado River in the 1930s.
On Sunday, the lake’s water level dropped to 1,081.7 feet above sea level, leaving the reservoir only 39 p
ercent full. The body of water hasn’t been full since 1998, when it was about 1,296 feet above sea level. As the hot, dry summer months continue, the water level is expected to recede even more.
"It's time for us to wake up. If this drought continues, we're going to be in a terrible situation within the next 12–24 months," Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told The Desert Sun.
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation regional chief Terry Fulp said, however, that there's enough water to meet the needs of the 40 million people who call the region home, including folks who live in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.
"We continue to closely monitor the projections of declining lake levels and are working with stakeholders throughout the Lower Basin to keep as much water in Lake Mead as we can through various storage and conservation efforts," said Fulp in a statement.
People living in Nevada and Arizona will see their water supply affected by shortages if Lake Mead's water level falls below 1,075 feet above sea level. The lake would need to drop another 80 feet from its current level for California, which has the oldest water rights to the water and which is experiencing such severe drought that the state’s economy is set to lose $2 billion, to see severe shortages.
"It's very likely that the allocations need to be rethought," Famiglietti said. "Is it going to be a congressional thing? Is it going to be the western governors that get together or some combination? It probably has to be a top-down thing."
It’s anticipated that winter snow, and melting snowpack in the spring, which will feed the Colorado River, will keep California from a worst-case scenario. But that annual replenishment allows officials to stick with short-term, year-to-year planning instead of long-term preparation for the effects of climate change in the Southwest.
"We know about solutions that must be scaled up across our arid lands—water recycling, water banking, water pricing,” Kimery Wiltshire, executive director of Carpe Diem West, a nonprofit organization that works on the connection between climate change and water supplies, told The Desert Sun. What's less sure is whether policy makers and politicians have the political will to improve what's become a dire situation.
The media has a blind spot, it likes to focus on conflic and bad news. So, you might know a lot more about how the Obamacare website had problems or how Republicans are suing over it again than about how its actually working. So, how is it working?
Really well.
According to a new independent survey from Gallup the number of uninsured Americans has been crashing since it kicked in. Its chipping away at the core problem it was designed to solve, the unusual, expensive, and high rate of uninsured Americans. Those gains alone don't mean the policy is sustainable. As critics warned Obamacare needs to support lower income people who otherwise couldn't buy care and also it needs to pull in young healthy Americans, not just sick people.
In the first enrollment period Obamacare achieved that goal as well. A comprehensive report from the Commonwealth Fund counted which age groups saw insured rates climb the most. It was young people, adults under 34 - check. The report also found the uninsured rate also fell significantly for people with low and moderate incomes - check.
Now its not good news everywhere. Those gains for lower income Americans mostly happened in states where Obamacare has been fully implemented. So, that 21% drop in the number of uninsured for people below the poverty line is an average. If you go in and look at the states that expanded healthcare through the law's Medicaid bonus its actually bigger, its a 39% drop which is great. But in the states that didn't expand Medicaid there's less than a 1% change.
Where Obamacare is actually allowed to work its working really well. In places where Republicans have sabotaged the Medicaid expansion we can now see they've sabotaged one of the core benefits and purposes of the law. Yet even that manouevering by Republican politicians isn't necessarily winning over their own base. Americans who actually experienced Obamacare's benefits like it.
The vast majority of people with new coverage are pretty satisfied with it. So unlike so many issues in the U.S. when you break those numbers out by partisanship (Independents, Democrats, Republicans) they all overwhelmingly are satisfied with that new coverage) - 74% of Republicans, 85% of Democrats , 82% of Independents.
So this law is working and working best in places where its been fully implemented and this law is popular with people directly impacted by it rather than people who are just talking about it or politicians trying to use it for politics.
The good news here is that many more Americans have health care and so many more families have peace of mind and many more people will actually live longer, literally, longer healthier and safer lives.
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Events in the real world continue to mock the assertion by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that his majority opinion in the Hobby Lobby case is a "narrow" one.
Alito maintained that his June 30 decision concerned only the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act and, practically speaking, exempted only closely-held family companies from its enforcement.
But Hobby Lobby's children keep proliferating. The big issue at the moment is a pending executive order from the White House barring discrimination by federal contractors against LGBT (that is, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people.
We still live in a nation with different beliefs about sexuality. We must find a way to respect diversity of opinion on this issue.- Faith leaders, asking President Obama for a religious exemption from an anticipated LGBT anti-discrimination order
In recent days, President Obama has received letters from more than 70 civil rights groups, including the NAACP and ACLU, asking him to resist calls to soften the order by including a religious exemption. A similar letter came from 54 law professors and legal scholars.
The trigger for all this was a letter sent to Obama on July 1 -- the very day after the Hobby Lobby ruling came down -- by 14 self-described "religious and civic leaders" seeking a religious exemption from the coming anti-discrimination rule. Among the signatories, some of whom have been close to Obama or even worked for him in the White House, are Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, and Father Larry Snyder, chief executive of Catholic Charities USA.
This remarkable letter implicitly raises questions about what it means to be religious in general or Christian specifically in America today, what role supposedly sincere religious beliefs have in the workplace, and how anyone can seek to discriminate on moral grounds.
The most eloquent answer to these questions came from Martin Luther King in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail." More on that in a moment.
The theme of the July 1 letter is that while no one likes prejudice -- "We agree that banning discrimination is a good thing," the authors state generously -- there's a time and place for everything. And this may not be the time and place to force religious organizations to accept LGBT equality, because it might make them very uncomfortable. And you don't want to make charitable people uncomfortable:
"We are asking that an extension of protection for one group not come at the expense of faith communities whose religious identity and belief motivate them to serve those in need."
Let's not move too fast, they write. "We still live in a nation with different beliefs about sexuality. We must find a way to respect diversity of opinion on this issue." A religious exemption would allow for "balancing the government's interest in protecting both LGBT Americans, as well as the religious organizations that seek to serve."
Essentially, they want to be allowed to continue to accept money from the federal government to fund their good works without being "disqualified or disadvantaged in obtaining contracts because of their religious beliefs."
The remarkable thing about these words is that faith leaders could still utter them in 2014, despite the blot on churches' moral standing left by religious leaders' resistance to desegregation in the 1960s.
the religious leaders think they should be able to discriminate based on beliefs and values
that is, if you have certain beliefs and want to work with those who also want to support those beliefs and values, that's an acceptable form of discrimination
in short, it shouldn't be unlawful to seek to hire and partner with those who share a commitment your mission
it's really common sense and, when it's a religious mission, it's constitutional sense
it's hard to see why homosexuals would want to work at places whose mission they disagree with
the purpose, just like the purpose of seeking gay "marriage", is to destroy
the Constitution defends religious belief from this type of maliciousness
can't believe how much money I've saved this year because, in the nation's capital, the weather has been so mild that we rarely turn on the AC
must be global warming only affects unpopulated areas
152
guess this is the ENDA TTF !!
appropriate
the gay agenda is in shambles
the whole homosexual-liberal complex is divided
good night to all...
Obama Signs Executive Order On LGBT Job Discrimination
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama on Monday signed an executive order banning workplace discrimination against millions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees of federal contractors and the federal government.
The executive order has two parts: It makes it illegal to fire or harass employees of federal contractors based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, and it explicitly bans discrimination against transgender employees of the federal government. The part targeting federal contractors affects 24,000 companies employing roughly 28 million workers, or about one-fifth of the nation's workforce.
"America's federal contracts should not subsidize discrimination against the American people," Obama said during remarks at the White House just before signing the order. "I'm going to do what I can with the authority I have to act."
The provision affecting federal employees takes effect immediately, while employees of federal contractors will have their new protections in place by early next year, according to senior administration officials.
To the relief of the LGBT community, Obama did not include a sweeping religious exemption in the executive order -- something the community feared could happen in the wake of last month's Supreme Court ruling in the Hobby Lobby case.
Instead, Obama simply added the categories of sexual orientation and gender identity to an existing executive order that protects employees of federal contractors from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. President George W. Bush amended that executive order in 2002 to allow religiously affiliated federal contractors to prioritize hiring employees of their particular religion, however, and Obama is keeping that language intact.
Obama is fulfilling a 2008 campaign promise with his action targeting federal contractors. His action affecting federal employees, meanwhile, responds to what some have described as a shortcoming in existing governmental rules. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in 2012 that the federal ban on sex discrimination covers transgender discrimination, but those affected by that rule change say the government hasn't been enforcing it and that they continue to be discriminated against.
It is still legal in 32 states to fire or harass someone at work for being LGBT. Congress could remedy that by passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which already passed the Senate. But Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has refused to bring the bill up for a vote in the House.
For the past few weeks, dry and warm weather have fueled large forest fires across Canada's remote Northwest Territories. The extent of those fires is well above average for the year to-date, and is in line with climate trends of more fires burning in the northern reaches of the globe.
Of the 186 wildfires in the Northwest Territories to-date this year, 156 of them are currently burning. That includes the Birch Creek Fire complex, which stretches over 250,000 acres.
The amount of acres burned in the Northwest Territories is six times greater than the 25-year average to-date according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.
Boreal forests like those in the Northwest Territories are burning at rates "unprecedented" in the past 10,000 years according to the authors of a study put out last year. The northern reaches of the globe are warming at twice the rate as areas closer to the equator, and those hotter conditions are contributing to more widespread burns.
The combined boreal forests of Canada, Europe, Russia and Alaska, account for 30 percent of the world's carbon stored in land, carbon that's taken up to centuries to store. Forest fires like those currently raging in the Northwest Territories, as well as ones in 2012 and 2013 in Russia, can release that stored carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. Warmer temperatures can in turn create a feedback loop, priming forests for wildfires that release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause more warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark climate report released earlier this year indicates that for every 1.8 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperatures, wildfire activity is expected to double.
In addition, soot from forest fires can also darken ice in the Arctic and melt it faster. The 2012 fires in Siberia released so much soot that they helped create a shocking melt of Greenland’s ice sheet. Over the course of a few weeks in July that year, 95 percent of the surface melted. That could become a yearly occurrence by 2100 if temperatures continue to rise along with wildfire activity.
Forest in other parts of the globe are also feeling the effects of climate change. In the western U.S., wildfire season has lengthened by 75 days compared to 40 years ago. Additionally, rising temperatures and shrinking snowpack have helped drive an increase in the number of large forest fires. In Australia, fire danger is also increasing, if not the total number of fires, due to a similar trend of hotter, dryer weather.
Perhaps not surprisingly then, the current Northwest Territories fires have been fueled by hot and dry weather. Yellowknife's June high temperatures were 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal highs while rainfall was only 15 percent of normal. Through July 15, high temperatures have been running 4 degrees Fahrenheit above July averages and the city has only seen 2 percent of its normal rainfall for the month. While these conditions can't be tied specifically to climate change, they're in line with those trends.
The fires have shut down parts of territory's Highway 3, a main thoroughfare, and inundated Yellowknife with a thick haze of smoke and ash. The city's 19,000 residents are also under a health warning. At points last week, the smoke plume was whisked south across the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan and even reaching the Dakotas, 2,000 miles away.
World marks hottest June since 1880: US scientists
WASHINGTON: Last month was the hottest June since record-keeping began in 1880, according to a monthly report out Monday by US government climate scientists.
The combined average temperature over land and ocean surfaces was a "record high for the month at 61.20 Fahrenheit (16.22 Celsius)," said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That meant June was a total of 1.30°F (0.72°C) warmer than the 20th century average for the month, surpassing the last record high temperature for June set in 2010, said NOAA.
Taken alone, the ocean´s global surface temperature in June was the highest for any month on record, breaking the past record set in 1998, NOAA added.
"Most of the world experienced warmer-than-average monthly temperatures, with record warmth across part of southeastern Greenland, parts of northern South America, areas in eastern and central Africa, and sections of southern and southeastern Asia," NOAA said in a statement.
"Similar to May, scattered sections across every major ocean basin were also record warm."
Sea ice in the Arctic declined faster than normal for June, and was nearly five percent below the 1981-2010 average, NOAA said.
The findings are part of an ongoing trend of rising global temperatures.
June has been warmer than the 20th century average for 38 years in a row, the agency said.
Its report last month also found that May was a record-setter, also topping the previous high set in 2010. The last time June broke records for being cooler than normal was in 1976. (AFP)
"President Barack Obama on Monday signed an executive order banning workplace discrimination against millions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees of federal contractors and the federal government"
oh look
in further confirmation that the gay agenda in shambles, the most out-of-touch individual in America does something unconstitutional to give special preferences to homosexuals and their ilk
good thing he's not running again
there's not a Hispanic in America that would vote for him now
the only thing he's good for is fundraisers in California
"The executive order has two parts: It makes it illegal to fire or harass employees"
"harass" is a nebulous term
if a Christian employer says he thinks homosexuality is opposed to God's plan, would that be harassment?
if so, this violates freedom of religion
if an irreligious employer tells an employee he thinks homosexuality is bad for society, would that be harassment?
if so, it violates freedom of speech
"of federal contractors based on their sexual orientation or gender identity,"
I know it will come as a shocker to TTFers, but some people think homosexuality is a preference, not an orientation
in a further shock, they think you are born with a gender and if you later decide you feel like something you aren't, that's a mental illness
both these ideas are subjective, metaphysical, untestable and unprovable
Barack Obama has no place siding against them in such a matter just because gays have a lot of discretionary money to contribute to Dems
"America's federal contracts should not subsidize discrimination against the American people," Obama said during remarks at the White House just before signing the order. "I'm going to do what I can with the authority I have to act."
another confirmation made a big mistake gambling on electing an inexperienced and accomplished guy for President
"To the relief of the LGBT community, Obama did not include a sweeping religious exemption in the executive order"
he must have wanted to assure the order will be overturned by SCOTUS
do you know how many times the SCOTUS has had to slap him down?
hint: more any other President
does he think this is a game?
Mr. Harvard Law School knows better
"Obama is fulfilling a 2008 campaign promise with his action targeting federal contractors"
they don't call him Speedy Gonzales for nothing
when's he closing Guantanomo?
"The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in 2012 that the federal ban on sex discrimination covers transgender discrimination, but those affected by that rule change say the government hasn't been enforcing it and that they continue to be discriminated against"
just shows that Obama is just playing politics
"It is still legal in 32 states to fire or harass someone at work for being LGBT"
and the rest of America when Obama is brought to justice by impeachment
"Congress could remedy that by passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which already passed the Senate"
no, this is the ENDA the gay agenda
"For the past few weeks, dry and warm weather have fueled large forest fires across Canada's remote Northwest Territories. The extent of those fires is well above average for the year to-date, and is in line with climate trends of more fires burning in the northern reaches of the globe"
as lazy Priya has often observed, the small part of the world that is populated is doing fine
it's the nine-tenths not in use by dense human population that is affected
we're having a great summer here
Copy and Paste: "A New York Times editorial preposterously proclaimed that Hobby Lobby gave “owners of closely held, for-profit companies an unprecedented right to impose their religious views on employees.
Yet the decision in no way affected the religious views of employees. It left their conduct unaffected as well."
It never had anything to do with changing anyone's religious beliefs, but perhaps Mr. C&P would prefer the term “imposing their religious 'lifestyles' on employees,” so that he knows what he’s talking about?
--
Copy and Paste Man: "In part, the left is worried about a slippery slope."
A valid concern.
Copy and Paste Man: "…progressives seem to think that any accommodation of conflicting considerations opens the gates to total victory for conservatives."
Conservatives are not accommodating, they are largely and self-righteously selfish to the core.
Copy and Paste Man: "Practicing more of the empathy and compromise they preach would enable progressives to make a valuable contribution to containing the polarization they bewail."
Bewailing polarization?
Try this sometime, every once in awhile stop and think to yourself: “I am connected to the air.”
It’s More about unnecessary polarization. The more unity, the more peace. But whose better at using real live human beings as political “wedge” / “polarization” issues than conservatives?
To slave the free by destroying Unions and decimating wages.
To Give Trillions in subsidies to muli-billion dollar corporations and blame it on unwed-motherhood.
Fiscal responsibility and moral character:
-In addition to the 3 Trillion, 2 hundred thousand murdered-Iraq war, you’d have us go to Iran, Stay in Iraq and Stay in ----Afghanistan -- WITH NO END EVEN SUGGESTED.
-A 26 billion dollar government shut down at a TIME OF WAR!
To institutionalize your threat to national security.
Arabic translators, fired after 911 JUST because they were gay?
-Valerie Plame: what happened to her contacts? And what kind of message does that send to those around the world who would share intelligence with us? Especially now after Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gun Addicted:
-Constitution despising. You’ve twisted the Second Amendment into meaning ‘everyone should have to have, and walk around with.
-Scorched Earth Policy: Make billions more carbon-fueled everything, cut down every forest, then blame the liberals for orchestrating a global conspiracy.
-Couldn't possibly be those with the motive.
Racist -- It’s the snideness in your tone that gives you away.
-Voter Suppression: Anti Democratic
-I’m not prejudiced, I tolerate black people just fine. And the gay, no problem, you can see there is one across the street and I’m not beating him up, praise Jesus.
-Romans 1-28-32: "...Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them."
You’ve demonstrated that you are incapable of taking responsibility of the mess we’re in -- individual and planet-wise -- and are determined to blindly break it no matter how many times it’s been shown to you how important it is.
Has it ever occurred to you that your positions, beliefs, actions and goals aren’t worthy of empathy?
And how are we to compromise with those who want something for nothing?
This comment has been removed by the author.
"Americans detest Obamacare"
Don’t you mean “Americans detest scary-black-man-in-the-white-house-care,” or does that sound racist?
--
Copy and Paste Man: "A New York Times editorial preposterously proclaimed that Hobby Lobby gave “owners of closely held, for-profit companies an unprecedented right to impose their religious views on employees. Yet the decision in no way affected the religious views of employees. It left their conduct unaffected as well."
It never had anything to do with “converting” their employees. Saying that just changes the subject, or would Mr. C&P prefer the term “imposing their religious lifestyle on employees” so that he knows what he’s talking about?
Copy and Paste Man: "Sixth, the court noted that the government could always directly pay for the contraceptives at issue in Hobby Lobby."
Except now *sniff* *sniff,* the government is FORCING us other religious institutions to sign an opt out piece of paper *sniff* *sniff,* that means women can make decisions about their own body's somewhere else, and *sniff* *sniff,* we won’t be able to force our religious misogyny down the rest of society's throat. *sniff* *sniff* -- We’re being persecuted like Jesus! Waaaaaaaa!!!
--
"MLK famously said he desired that his children be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin …
little did he know that liberal lunatics would someday hold that the color of their skin is the same as a character flaw"
Clever. You say people should be judged by their character and then you define whomever you despise as a character flaw, guaranteeing that the one you hate gets the shaft every time. But you never define what that flaw is as far as how it negatively affects others. Natural, of course, for the pants on fire type.
Clearly you’re biased and like those who think as you do, are in few positions to judge others on any moral basis.
MLK knew, and he knew better. Openly gay, Bayard Rustin, was instrumental in the civil rights movement. They were friends, why? Because they judged each other only by the content of their character.
Last year, not long after the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, President Obama posthumously granted Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Openly gay, Bayard Rustin, was one of MLK’s prime mentors.
"King was inspired by an existing tradition of nonviolent resistance to injustice. One of the men who helped shape King’s ideas -- he’s often been called a leading mentor to King -- was Bayard Rustin.
Last year, not long after the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, President Obama posthumously granted Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom."
-
So, tell that to those bigoted other-colored folks who feel so unjustly violated by the thought of same-sex attraction being just as much an immutable trait as skin color that a homosexual -- a homosexual who KNEW was hated by most of them -- helped to secure them the civil rights they have today.
Does that fact now “ruin” civil rights for them? Better get those talking points out and run with this before the KKK does. You can start saying civil rights are a product of the devil, they were inspired by a sodomite.
Think of it, you can now make voter-suppression laws a matter of religious freedom.
"This comment has been removed by the author.
July 22, 2014 2:28 AM"
it staggers the imagination
how incoherent must this post have been for improv to disown it
you always get the impression he doesn't give a crap whether what he says makes any sense
Looks as though Patrick has lost his meds..
again
"the small part of the world that is populated is doing fine"
More Washington state residents told to flee Carlton Complex fire
"It wasn't the way the regular City Council meeting was supposed to begin, but Monday wasn't a regular day here in the charred wake of the Carlton Complex fire, which officials described as the most serious in the nation as more residents were ordered to flee.
"In fire dynamics in the U.S., of all the incidents in the country, you're No. 1," Rocky Opliger, one of four incident commanders charged with overseeing the conflagration, told more than 100 residents who gathered by the shores of the Columbia River for an evening disaster update.
The fire, one of several in Washington state, has consumed about 240,000 acres and destroyed at least 150 homes, which will probably make it the biggest in state history, officials said Monday.
The fire is 2% to 5% contained. Residents near the Okanogan County town of Carlton were ordered to evacuate Monday afternoon, and a stretch of State Highway 20 was closed.
A man died over the weekend in the same general area as Monday afternoon's evacuation order. Robert E. Koczewski, 67, “and his wife had been the fighting the fire for three days,” Okanogan County Sheriff Frank T. Rogers told the Los Angeles Times in an interview Monday. “She said no firetrucks had come through. They did everything they could to save their home, and they did. But on Saturday, he had a heart attack.”
He was the sole casualty so far.
Pateros Mayor Libby Harrison opened the Monday evening meeting with a tearful welcome.
"First of all, I would just like to welcome the community and say how sorry I am to everyone out there who has lost a home," she said, choking up, as a generator hummed in the background. "I have lost a home, and I just want you to know that we as a community are going to pull together and make this town even better."
The crowd, which gathered outside because there were too many people to fit into City Hall, cheered. But the news at the meeting was grim.
Utility crews are working double shifts to restore power to the small city, although no one could say when the lights will come back on. There should be information in coming days about whether the water is safe to drink.
Mail delivery has returned to the small city about 200 miles northeast of Seattle for the first time in three business days.
"The reason we didn't get mail before was that our mail trucks did not go through," Pateros Postmaster Toni Roberson told the crowd. "I know the old saying, 'Rain, sleet, wind.' Fire was not on there."
The Carlton fire is one of about 20 major wildfires burning in the arid Northwest. It began July 14, the result of lightning strikes..."
ever hear of Smokey the Bear?
forest fires are nothing new and most experts consider them part of the natural cycle, necessary for renewal
still having a very nice summer here
lower utility bills should prop up the economy
well, kids, looks like Uncle Harry and Aunt Nancy was drinking when they wrote up that Obamacare bill that no Dems read afore passin'
turns out that the bill nowhere authorizes people on the federal HealthCare.gov exchange to receive subsidies
the bill only allows subsidies if the health exchange is run by the state
unfortunately, only 14 states have their own exchange
the rest just let their residents use the exchange set up by the ever-popular Uncle Barry
no big deal, right?
just have Congress pass an amendment
ooops!!!
that's right...
the Senate has voted repeatedly to overturn Obamacare so they're unlikely to vote for expanding it to 36 more states
if I was Obama
I'd quit right now
HAHAHAHAHA!!!
Barack Obama !!
what a loser !!!!!
"f I was Obama
I'd quit right now
HAHAHAHAHA!!!"
If you were Sara Palin, you'd have quit halfway through your first term.
can't even spell "Sarah"
must be a TTFer
you might remember how the media was obsessed with the woman candidate who dared to be a conservative
the carnival they took to the 49th state was in no one's best interest
Sarah Palin put the welfare of her constituents ahead of her own
more than anyone will ever say about Barack "let's play some pool while the world explodes" Obama
our first a-hole President
Judgments About Fact and Fiction by Children From Religious and Nonreligious Backgrounds
Abstract
In two studies, 5- and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories. In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine intervention, claims about the status of the protagonist varied sharply with exposure to religion. Children who went to church or were enrolled in a parochial school, or both, judged the protagonist in religious stories to be a real person, whereas secular children with no such exposure to religion judged the protagonist in religious stories to be fictional. Children's upbringing was also related to their judgment about the protagonist in fantastical stories that included ordinarily impossible events whether brought about by magic (Study 1) or without reference to magic (Study 2). Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional. The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children's differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.
""harass" is a nebulous term…
Harass: annoy, pester, bother, pursue, worry, badger, hound, bully, trouble, stress, harry, hassle
Nebulous: unclear, vague, imprecise, hazy, unformulated, tenuous, ill-defined, indefinable
Wow you’re right, they're practically synonyms.
"if a Christian employer says he thinks homosexuality is opposed to God's plan, would that be harassment?"
If an atheist employer says he thinks Christianity is the embodiment of evil, would that be harassment?
"if an irreligious employer tells an employee he thinks homosexuality is bad for society, would that be harassment?"
If an employer of any kind tells a christian employee he thinks public displays of Christianity increase child abuse, would that be harassment?
Hurray for Virginia!
Hooray for VA!
Appeals court upholds decision overturning Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban
And Hooray for U.S. too!
US GDP grows at strong 4 percent rate
"Remember how satanists are building a statue of a 19th century goat-man occult symbol to place outside the Oklahoma State Capitol because there is already a Ten Commandments monument on display? Well, those same satanists are now using the Supreme Court’s sweeping Hobby Lobby decision to challenge coercive mandatory counseling laws by requesting a religious exemption for satanists (and non-satanists).
“While we feel we have a strong case for an exemption regardless of the Hobby Lobby ruling, the Supreme Court has decided that religious beliefs are so sacrosanct that they can even trump scientific fact,” Satanic Temple spokesperson Lucian Greaves said in a Monday statement. ”This was made clear when they allowed Hobby Lobby to claim certain contraceptives were abortifacients, when in fact they are not. Because of the respect the Court has given to religious beliefs, and the fact that our our beliefs are based on best available knowledge, we expect that our belief in the illegitimacy of state mandated ‘informational’ material is enough to exempt us, and those who hold our beliefs, from having to receive them.”
The claim here is not quite as apples-to-apples as the Ten Commandments/goat-man hybrid statue, but you can easily follow their thinking. The Hobby Lobby decision granted 90 percent of the corporations in the United States a kind of religious personhood under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. So now the government can’t require Hobby Lobby or any corporation to include comprehensive contraceptive coverage in its employer health plan if that coverage violates the corporation’s religious beliefs.
Because medicine and scientific fact are the tenets of satanists’ faith, then medically inaccurate and coercive counseling laws present a substantial burden, according to Greaves. This is pretty much what Ruth Bader Ginsburg was talking about in her dissent when she said the justices had “ventured into a minefield.” It just so happens that these are satanists making a faith claim under the legal precedent, and not, you know, a company that produces soy milk and hates birth control. But it’s the same idea.
According to data from the Guttmacher Institute, 35 states require people seeking abortion care to undergo counseling before they can have the procedure. In South Dakota, a state-mandated script forces doctors to tell patients that having an abortion will lead to an “increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide,” based on a refuted but often-cited study linking abortion care to mental health problems. According to the same script, the procedure “will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being.” (In addition to providing patients with inaccurate information, the mandatory counseling session is another way states can force people seeking care to make multiple trips to the clinic, adding a time and cost burden to the procedure that can make it harder to access. But since “don’t waste my time” is not yet a tenet of any religious faith, those burdens may not apply in the satanists’ claim.)
As Greaves notes, the Satanic Temple isn’t the first organization to challenge the mandatory counseling laws, but it is the first to do so as a matter of faith. Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights groups challenged much of the South Dakota “informed consent” script, and succeeded in getting certain portions of it — including false medical claims — invalidated. But other parts of the script that doctors must read, like the line about “the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being” and the suicide ideation stand because other courts — including the Supreme Court – have made it clear that states are allowed to restrict access to abortion based on really dubious claims.
The Satanic Temple has provided a pre-written letter that people can present to their doctors in an attempt to be exempted from mandatory counseling. So while doctors in South Dakota and elsewhere in the country read patients their state-mandated script, patients can now come back with a satan-mandated rebuttal:
"I regard any information required by state statute to be communicated or offered to me as a precondition for an abortion (separate and apart from any other medical procedure) is based on politics and not science (“Political Information”). I regard Political Information as a state sanctioned attempt to discourage abortion by compelling my consideration of the current and future condition of my fetal or embryonic tissue separate and apart from my body. I do not regard Political Information to be scientifically true or accurate or even relevant to my medical decisions. The communication of Political Information to me imposes an unwanted and substantial burden on my religious beliefs.""
The two scandals in Virginia in today's Post (front page and lead on the Metro section)are not such a hooray factor.
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