Source: WDRB/AP

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a Kentucky gay marriage case, meaning Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis must issue licenses despite religion.

Davis has refused to issue marriage licenses, citing her Christian faith and constitutional right to religious liberty, despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

U.S. District Judge David Bunning had already ordered Davis to issue marriage licenses two weeks ago. He later delayed that ruling until Aug. 31 or until the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling.

Davis was one of a handful of local elected officials across the country that stopped issuing marriage licenses after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in June. She said issuing a marriage license to a gay couple would violate her Christian beliefs and argued the U.S. Constitution protected her religious freedoms.

Read more: http://www.wdrb.com/story/29927097/supreme-court-rejects-ky-gay-marriage-case-forcing-rowan-co-clerk-to-issue-licenses

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

Hold all calls. We have a winner.

There was no reason for the judges even to consider either This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, or Face The Nation, where John Dickerson is ably filling the greaves of former Laeodician war correspondent Bob Schieffer. The House Cup this week went almost instantly into the dark, mysterious halls of broadcasting's Hotel Overlook at NBC, where my man Chuck Todd always has been the caretaker. He was joined this week by Scott Walker, the thrice-elected goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, and Walker did everything except drop his drawers and dance the hootchie-koo. There is neither a box of rocks nor a bag of hammers big enough to analogize to this guy. Dunces look at him and think, Jesus, maybe I should look into a career in astrophysics after all. In villages all over Europe, idiots look at Scott Walker and get out of the business. Look, I achieved the degree Scott Walker never quite caught up with, and I'm not exactly Stephen Hawking here.

Let's start with the single most hilarious thing said by any candidate in the current field. Asked about the possibility of building a fence, not along the country's southern border, but along the nearly 4000-mile border that separates the United States and Canada, this is what Walker told my man Chuck Todd.



There is some ensuing flubdubbery about "securing the homeland" and about "counterintellig…er…ah…wubba…wubba…counterterrorism" in there, too, but consider the vast and staggering vista of stupidity opened up by the idea of building a fence from upper Maine to the shores of the Pacific. Leave aside the basic impracticality of the entire idea – What the hell are you going to do about that part of the border that runs through Lake Superior? Submarine nets? Sonar? Volunteer muskie fishermen with AK's in their boats? Yikes. Forget I said that last part. – and concentrate solely on the fact that, what Walker believes makes this a "legitimate issue for us to look at" is the fact that "some people" at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire brought it up to him. I will pay anyone a shiny buffalo nickel if they will show up at a future town hall meeting in New Hampshire and ask Scott Walker if we should fire sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads into synchronous low earth orbit to prevent undocumented immigrants from Zontar from entering the country. It probably would be declared a "legitimate issue for us to look at."

(And this is not even to mention the fact that, apparently, Walker is opposed to people crossing our Canadian border but has no problem at all with the world's dirtiest fossil fuel being pumped across that same border and through the richest farmland in the United States. Tar sands don't kill people. People kill people.)

more

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a37529/what-are-the-gobshites-saying-these-days/

By Greg Sargent

Brian Beutler has an important piece in which he raises an unsettling question: Could the next Republican president nominate one or more Supreme Court justices who would seek to restore a pre-New Deal judicial conception of liberty of contract, with the goal of undermining much of the regulatory state that many Americans take for granted today?

Beutler reports on a movement among legal-minded libertarians to rehabilitate the Lochner decision, the notorious 1905 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a state law limiting the working hours of bakers, giving its name to the “Lochner era” of Supreme Court rulings in which economic regulations established by popularly elected officials were struck down as unconstitutional. The Lochner era is widely seen to have ended during the New Deal, when the Court upheld (among many other things) a state minimum wage law, concluding that liberty of contract is not an “absolute” right.

Sam Bagenstos, a liberal constitutional scholar at the University of Michigan, tells Beutler that “a full fledged return to Lochner” could ultimately undermine a whole host of economic regulations, including minimum wage, overtime, and worker safety laws and even possibly laws protecting customers from discrimination based on race.

One leading libertarian lawyer tells Beutler frankly that the goal is to invalidate much social welfare legislation “at the federal level,” though I would add that a Lochner restoration might invalidate a fair amount of it at the state level as well. Libertarians are frustrated with the Roberts court for its rulings preserving Obamacare — decisions that have been widely interpreted as a sign of Roberts’ judicial restraint and deference to the elected branches — and the hope is that a Republican president will appoint more unabashedly activist judges when it comes to placing limits on federal power to regulate the economy

more

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/08/31/so-who-wants-to-roll-back-the-new-deal/

The Beutler article:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122645/rehabilitationists-libertarian-movement-undo-new-deal

By Christinia Crippes

WATERLOO | The Rev. Frantz Whitfield was ready for Hillary before she announced her second bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. But now he’s feeling the Bern.

Whitfield, a pastor at Mount Carmel Baptist Church, had been a vocal and loyal supporter of the Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton since her first bid in 2008, but as of last week, he’s decided to back her main challenger Bernie Sanders.

Whitfield’s decision, announced on social media site Twitter, did not come lightly. He remembers being impressed with Sanders when he heard the Vermont independent speak at a conference in New York in April, but he still maintained his loyalty to Clinton. It wasn’t until Whitfield recently looked at Sanders’ priorities -- at the urging of a local organizer -- that his support began to waver.

“One of the big reasons and the main reasons that I switched my support isn’t because of the fact that Hillary is a bad person, you know, but it’s just because of the fact that Bernie has so much more issues that he is running on, and he’s just genuine in what he does,” Whitfield said.

more
http://wcfcourier.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/rev-frantz-whitfield-switches-support-to-sanders/article_396232d3-78b3-5e81-a15d-83f1a891804a.html

Plus bonus:

At least, none I could find on a cursory search.

'All Lives Matter' march draws more than 20,000 to Birmingham

Led by conservative activist and talk show host Glenn Beck, more than 20,000 people chanting "All Lives Matter" marched the historic civil rights route from Kelly Ingram Park to Birmingham City Hall this morning.

"It's about taking our church out in the streets," Beck said. He said marchers came from as far away as China, Dubai and the Netherlands.

Actor Chuck Norris, a conservative activist known for his martial arts, action movies and TV show "Walker, Texas Ranger," marched about two rows behind Beck. Alveda King, a niece of civil rights activist the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., marched in the front row. Bishop Jim Lowe, pastor of the predominantly black Guiding Light Church in Birmingham, co-organized the march with Beck and marched with him at the front. As a child, Lowe attended Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where the march started, a headquarters church for the civil rights movement in Birmingham. Lowe and his sisters were in the church when a KKK bomb blew up the church and killed four little girls on Sept. 15, 1963.

http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2015/08/all_lives_matter_march_draws_m.html

Disturbing.

A flight test body for a B61-12 nuclear weapon



Engineers at the United States' nuclear weapons lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have spent the past few years designing and testing the B61-12, a high-tech addition to our nation's atomic arsenal. Unlike the free-fall gravity bombs it will replace, the B61-12 is a guided nuclear bomb. A new tail kit assembly, made by Boeing, enables the bomb to hit targets far more precisely than its predecessors.


Using "Dial-a-yield" technology, the bomb's explosive force can be adjusted before launch from a high of 50,000 tons of TNT equivalent to a low of 300 tons—that's 98 percent smaller than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima 70 years ago.

Despite these innovations, the government doesn't consider the B61-12 to be a new weapon but simply an upgrade. In the past, Congress has rejected funding for similar weapons, reasoning that more accurate, less powerful bombs were more likely to be used. In 2010, the Obama administration announced that it would not make any nuclear weapons with new capabilities. The White House and Pentagon insist that the B61-12 won't violate that pledge.

The B61-12 could be deployed by the new generation of F-35 fighter jets, a prospect that worries Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists. "If the Russians put out a guided nuclear bomb on a stealthy fighter that could sneak through air defenses, would that add to the perception here that they were lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons?" he asks. "Absolutely."

more

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/nuclear-weapon-obama-most-expensive-ever

The Donald is getting the backing of the white supremacist crowd, and the GOP from Priebus on down says nothing. Draw your own conclusion.
Let me offer some friendly advice to the Republican Party that I learned firsthand as a Muslim American: You don’t want to be defined by your most extreme members. And here’s a little more advice. The longer the GOP leadership remains silent as Donald Trump garners increasing support from white supremacist organizations, the more likely the GOP will become known as the party of racists.

I know, some of my progressive friends will say that’s already the case. But that’s not fair. Sure there are racists drawn to the GOP, just like we have seen psychopaths attracted to Islam. I’m sure not all Republicans are racists and I bet some are even disgusted by bigotry.

We are, however, seeing a bone chilling attraction to Trump by white nationalist groups. It’s almost like they view Trump’s candidacy as their last stand against the changing demographics of America. He’s become the poster child for their philosophy that “White Lives Matter More.”

For example, just last week David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux, publicly praised Trump as the best Republican candidate in the 2016 field because he “understands the real sentiment of America.” Duke applauded Trump’s views on immigration that call for mass deportation of families, saying that Trump is ”speaking out on this greatest immediate threat to the American people.”

Trump’s tepid response to Duke’s glowing praise was troubling to say the least: “I certainly wouldn’t want his endorsement. I don’t need anyone’s endorsement.” When pressed by a reporter to repudiate Duke, Trump responded, “Sure, I would if that would make you feel better.”

more

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/31/behind-trump-the-gop-really-is-becoming-the-racist-party.html

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