Listen! That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract. - Bill Moyers
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| Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, late 1950s (photo Chuck Stewart via USA Today) |
The testimonies herein concern Fort Hood—as the country’s largest Army installation; as a place that experienced high deployment and redeployment rates throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; as a post with a notoriously under-resourced and over-taxed mental health care and service infrastructure; and as a community grappling with the effects of those shortfalls. But the Fort Hood testimonies also concern something much broader—the Army’s attempt to hold down combat and counterinsurgency operations in two theaters with volunteer forces over the course of a decade; the long legacy of multiple deployments; and the ongoing health care needs of a generation of veterans on whose labor and bodies these wars have depended.This section is not a long document, but it is a difficult read... you may want to wait to read it until you are in a calm frame of mind.
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| A great reminder... unfortunately for Americans, she is in London |
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| Actually, this one plays ping-pong... |
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| The basics of global climate change |
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| FCC's Net Neutrality |
A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported on Monday. If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.
Global warming caused by the human-driven release of greenhouse gases has helped to destabilize the ice sheet, though other factors may also be involved, the scientists said.
The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.
“This is really happening,” Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research, said in an interview. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”
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| Thwaites Ice Shelf, late 2013 (Photo: James Yungel, NASA) |
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| Moyers |
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| Tom Wheeler: FCC Chair, former Telecom CEO, etc. |
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| The Parties are |
So... just how far did they go? Kennedy's opinion, treated as controlling because it bridged a gap between two conflicting opinions of the Court's majority, was described by Denniston as follows:Stopping just short of abandoning a historic barrier to religion in government activity, a deeply divided Supreme Court ruled on Monday that local governments may open their meetings with prayers that are explicitly religious and may turn out to be largely confined to expressing the beliefs of one faith.
Narrowly defining what is not allowed in such prayers, the Court said they may not be used to praise the virtues of one faith and may not cast other faiths or other believers in a sharply negative light. Courts have no role in judging whether individual prayers satisfy that test, but can only examine a “pattern of prayer” to see whether it crossed the forbidden constitutional line and became a form of “coercion.”
The majority clearly moved the “coercion” test to the forefront of analyzing when government and religion are too closely intertwined. The alternative test — whether government action “endorsed” a particular faith — was nearly cast aside as taking too little account of the role of religion in America’s history and civic traditions.
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Treating the Kennedy opinion as controlling, because it spoke to a middle-ground approach between blocs of Justices who wanted to go further in one direction or the opposite, this is the constitutional prescription it provided for legislative prayers:(Bolds mine. - SB)
- First: Such prayers are not confined to meetings of Congress or state legislatures, but may also be recited in the more intimate and familiar setting of local government meetings.
- Second: The prayer portion of the meeting must be conducted only during a ceremonial part of the government body’s session, not mixed in with action on official policy.
- Third: The body may invite anyone in the community to give a prayer and (if it has the money) could have a paid chaplain. The officials on the body may also lead the prayer.
- Fourth: The body may not dictate what is in the prayers and what may not be in the prayers. A prayer may invoke the deity or deities of a given faith, and need not embrace the beliefs of multiple or all faiths.
- Fifth: In allowing “sectarian” prayers, the body’s members may not “proselytize” — that is, promote one faith as the true faith — and may not require persons of different faith preferences, or of no faith, to take part, and may not criticize them if they do not take part.
- Sixth: The “sectarian” prayers may not disparage or discriminate against a specific faith, but officials need not go to extra lengths to make sure that all faiths do get represented in the prayer sessions — even if that means one faith winds up as the dominant message.
- Seventh: Such prayers are permissible when most, if not all, of the audience is made up of adults — thus raising the question whether the same outcome would apply if the audience were a group of children or youths, such as the Boy or Girl Scouts, appearing before a government agency or a government-sponsored group. (The Court did not abandon its view that, at public school graduations or at events sponsored by public schools, prayers are not allowed because they may tend to coerce young people in a religious way.)
- Eighth: A court, in hearing a challenge to a prayer practice, is confined to examining “a pattern of prayers,” and does not have the authority to second-guess the content of individual prayer utterances. In judging such a pattern, the proper test is not whether it tends to put forth predominantly the beliefs of one faith, but whether it has the effect of coercing individuals who do not share that faith.
...And there you have it, your stool sample for the day.
... Here’s the essential fact about health care policy, which in turn fundamentally shapes health care politics:
Obamacare looks the way it does because it has to.Once again, for those who missed it: if you want to cover people with preexisting conditions, you must have community rating. If you want to have community rating without a death spiral — that is, if you want to keep an acceptable risk pool — you have to have an individual mandate. If you want to have an individual mandate, you have to have subsidies for lower-income Americans. And that’s Obamacare: a three-legged stool, with all three legs essential.
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Opponents contend that such fraud is rare — in Pennsylvania’s case, the state could not point to a single incident — and that the laws were intended to suppress Democratic turnout, since those who do not possess a state-approved photo ID are more likely to be in groups that tend to vote Democratic.In Wisconsin, says the AP via TPM,
... [Judge] Adelman sided with opponents, who said it disproportionately excluded poor and minority voters because they're less likely to have photo IDs or the documents needed to get them.I have to agree with those who say voter ID laws are all about voter fraud: specifically, the GOP's attempt to render whole elections fraudulent by fraudulently eliminating voters who favor their opponents.
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| "My opinion was off by only THIS much!" |
Guarantee:
• Equal rights
• Reproductive rights
• Equal pay for equal work!
