Ann's Mega Dub

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Gilbert Arenas thought someone needed to hear his thug rambles

Overgrown thugs make up far too many sports teams these days. I was reminded of that when priss-pot Gilbert Arenas decided to share his homophobia. I was putting gas in the car and happened to look over at those little mini-screens and there he was, Gilbert in all his fat and lazy nonsense trashing gay people. He thinks they're entitled. You mean like pituitary freak who think they have talent but are just an overgrown giants with no real talent? At any rate, here's the 211 on the freak:

On December 24, 2009, it was reported that Arenas had admitted to storing unloaded firearms in his locker at Capital One Arena and had surrendered them to team security. In doing so, Arenas not only violated NBA rules against bringing firearms into an arena, but also violated D.C. ordinances as well.^[32] On January 1, 2010, it was also reported that Arenas and teammate Javaris Crittenton had drawn guns on each other in the Wizards' locker room during a Christmas Eve argument regarding gambling debts. The D.C. Metropolitan Police and the U.S. Attorney's office began investigating,^[33] and on January 14, 2010, Arenas was charged with carrying a pistol without a license, a violation of Washington, D.C.'s gun-control laws.^[34] Arenas pleaded guilty on January 15 to the felony of carrying an unlicensed pistol outside a home or business.^[35]

On January 6, 2010, Arenas' 28th birthday, the NBA suspended him indefinitely without pay until its investigation was complete. By nearly all accounts, the league felt compelled to act when Arenas' teammates surrounded him during pregame introductions prior to a game with the Philadelphia 76ers, and he pretended to shoot them with guns made from his fingers. NBA Commissioner David Stern said in a statement that Arenas' behavior after the investigation started "has led me to conclude that he is not currently fit to take the court in an NBA game." He also said that Arenas was likely facing a lengthy suspension.^[36] The Wizards issued a statement of their own condemning the players' pregame stunt as "unacceptable".^[37] On January 27, 2010, Arenas and Crittenton were suspended for the rest of the season, after meeting with Stern.^[38] On February 2, 2010, Arenas wrote an open editorial in The Washington Post, in which he apologized for his actions, particularly for failing to be a better role model to young fans and for "making light of a serious situation."^[39] On March 26, 2010, Arenas was convicted for his crimes and was sentenced to two years' probation and 30 days in a halfway house.^[40] Arenas started his sentence in the halfway house on April 9. He was released on May 7.^[41] The punishment for Arenas was significantly stiffer than for Crittenton, who received a year of unsupervised probation, or Delonte West, who had been driving around in a three-wheeled motorcycle in Prince George's County with several loaded guns including a shotgun in a violin case.^[42] For his crime, West received eight months of home detention, two months of unsupervised probation, and forty hours of community service.^[43]

I understand that in the NBA, he was known as "princess tiny meat." That truly does not surprise me.

This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

Wednesday, July 5, 2023. Iraq's showing us right now how this planet's going to end and whack job Junior would be the type of 'leader' to bring us to that point.

Grasp that this is how it will end.

CGTN reports:

Thousands of dead fish have washed ashore in southeast Iraq, prompting an official investigation into the wildlife disaster that officials said Monday may be linked to drought conditions.

Recently, a large number of dead fish were washed up on the banks of the Amshan river in Maysan province, which borders Iran.

Khodr Abbas Salman, a Maysan province official, has verified that some of the factors that led to these dead fish were the lack of oxygen in the river and the rise in salinity.

An environmental campaigner, Ahmed Saleh Neema, also acknowledged that it is the rising temperature that contributes to the increasing salinity and low oxygen levels in the water. It has not yet been ascertained whether toxic chemical substances also caused the huge numbers of dead fish.

AFP notes, "In a similar phenomenon in 2018, fishermen in the central province of Babylon found dead carp in their thousands, but an investigation failed to discern what had caused it." Rebekah Evans (THE WEEK ) observes:

When many thousands of Iraqis turn on their taps “nothing comes out”, said Hayder Indhar for Phys.org.

So dire is the country’s water crisis – 7 million of its citizens have reduced access to water, according to the UN – many villagers are relying on “sporadic tanker-truck deliveries and salty wells” for drinking water.

While Iraq is known in Arabic as the Land of the Two Rivers, split as it is by the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, the water levels of both have fallen markedly. The results have been no less than devastating.

For Firas Mohammed, a former fisherman, life has been totally transformed by the shortage. Gesturing towards a “trickle of lime green liquid nearby”, he told Al Jazeera that “even dogs avoid it”. “If the government decided to move us to a camp with freshwater to cope with this crisis, we would even accept being moved to Ukraine,” he added.

Mou’ad Abel was able to return to his village in 2016 “after the area was liberated from ISIL”, but despite also working as a fisherman in his youth, he was shocked to discover “there are no fish anymore”, the news site added.

The reasons behind the crisis are numerous. Some cite shortages and low river levels in neighbouring countries; others point to the alleged mismanagement of water by local authorities. Regardless of who is to blame, one thing is abundantly clear: the issue must be solved before it becomes too late for the millions of people reliant on a clean water supply.

According to the United Nations, some “90 per cent of the country’s rivers are polluted”. Iraq is facing a “critical climate emergency”, said Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the UN special representative for Iraq, as by 2035 it is thought the nation will have the capacity to “meet only 15 per cent of its water demands”.

Desertification – the process by which fertile land becomes arid – is also a growing concern within the nation. It can be caused by both human factors and climate change.

Back in March, Amr Salem (IRAQI NEWS) quoted the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq and Head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, stating, "There is an urgent need to find solutions to the water crisis in Iraq."

Urgent and it only gets more urgent each day. Climate change is predicted to impact us all in the next few decades and one of the hardest hit areas, per climate models, will be Iraq. Already problems are evident. January 10th, Yale's School of Environment published Wil Crisp's article which opened:

Three years ago, the vast marshlands of southern Iraq’s Dhi Qar province were flourishing. Fishermen glided in punts across swathes of still water between vast reed beds, while buffalo bathed amid green vegetation. But today those wetlands, part of the vast Mesopotamian Marshes, have shriveled to narrow channels of polluted water bordered by cracked and salty earth. Hundreds of desiccated fish dot stream banks, along with the carcasses of water buffalo poisoned by saline water. Drought has parched tens of thousands of hectares of fields and orchards, and villages are emptying as farmers abandon their land.

For their biodiversity and cultural significance, the United Nations in 2016 named the Mesopotamian Marshes — which historically stretched between 15,000 and 20,000 square kilometers in the floodplain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The marshes comprised one of the world’s largest inland delta systems, a startling oasis in an extremely hot and arid environment, home to 22 species of globally endangered species and 66 at-risk bird species.

But now this ecosystem — which includes alluvial salt marshes, swamps, and freshwater lakes — is collapsing due to a combination of factors meteorological, hydrological, and political. Rivers are rapidly shrinking, and agricultural soil that once grew bounties of barley and wheat, pomegranates, and dates is blowing away. The environmental disaster is harming wildlife and driving tens of thousands of Marsh Arabs, who have occupied this area for 5,000 years, to seek livelihoods elsewhere.

Experts warn that unless radical action is taken to ensure the region receives adequate water — and better manages what remains — southern Iraq’s marshlands will disappear, with sweeping consequences for the entire nation as farmers and pastoralists abandon their land for already crowded urban areas and loss of production leads to rising food prices.

The Mesopotamian marshlands are often referred to as the cradle of civilization, as anthropologists believe that this is where humankind, some 12,000 years ago, started its wide-scale transition from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement. Encompassing four separate marshes, the region has historically been home to a unique range of fish and birdlife, serving as winter habitat for migratory birds and sustaining a productive shrimp and finfish fishery.

AP notes, "Climate change for years has compounded the woes of the troubled country. Droughts and increased water salinity have destroyed crops, animals and farms and dried up entire bodies of water. Hospitals have faced waves of patients with respiratory illnesses caused by rampant sandstorms. Climate change has also played a role in Iraq’s ongoing struggle to combat cholera."

And this is how it will end. Governments will do nothing to address climate change and other failures. Instead, they'll distract the masses with useless garage: "Look, in Sweden! A holy book burned!"

That's beyond stupid and it's beyond stupid to blame the government of Sweden for it. But that's what Iraqi politicians are using to distract from reality: "Someone burned a holy book in Sweden!" Someone? An Iraqi. Guess all this rage should be directed at your own country for producing someone who did that. But failing countries, like all other countries, are so much better at finger pointing than introspection.

And this is how it ends. Real issues don't get addressed as politicians harness the needed outrage onto a scapegoat. In the US, the hucksters and the hate merchants use transgender people as their scapegoat to account for delivering nothing to the people. All around the world, there are scapegoats and nothing gets done. If you're one of the unfortunates, the ones who live to see the end of this earth, hope -- if you were one of the ones tricked and fooled -- you can handle it watching it all go out.

Last night I dreamed I saw the planet flicker
Great forests fell like buffalo
Everything got sicker
And to the bitter end
Big business bickered
And they call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence

Oh these times, these times
Oh these changing times
Change in the heart of all mankind
Oh these troubled times

-- "Three Great Stimulants," written by Joni Mitchell, first appears on her album DOG EAT DOG

Iraq's predicted to be one of the ones hardest hit by climate change in the next years, but the whole earth will suffer. And con artists posing as public servants will have distracted us until the planet's dying days if they're not forced by the world's population to act and to act now.

In other news, Rebecca Traister (INTELIGENCER) reports:

While waiting for his plate of meat loaf, gravy, and an iceberg wedge at an empty restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire, on the first day of June, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was gently explaining to me that nobody knows whether HIV is the sole cause of AIDS.

“They were doing phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people,” he said of the scientists laboring through the 1980s on the array of protease inhibitors and other anti-retroviral drugs that would eventually stem mass death in countries where access to the medicines was made available, “without really being able to understand what HIV was, and pumping up fear about it constantly, not really understanding whether it was causing AIDS.”

That HIV infection causes AIDS is long-established science. But the conspiracy theory Kennedy is laying out, alongside several of its associated tendrils — that HIV is a free rider on a more dangerous virus, that scientists stifled debate in order to profit from the production of AZT, the first drug approved by the FDA to treat HIV and AIDS in 1987 — has deep roots and has borne tragic fruit. For instance, Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa from 1999 to 2008, shared Kennedy’s skepticism, and his distrust kept crucial therapies unavailable in his country for years, resulting in an estimated hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. Still, Kennedy — who has in other instances acknowledged that HIV causes AIDS — insisted to me over lunch, “There are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS.”

These mythologies are the chronological starting points for opinions Kennedy puts forth in his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who has spent the past two decades ever more beholden to repeatedly disproved arguments about a link between vaccines and autism, jumped thirstily into the COVID fray, becoming a vocal critic of almost every government-funded or endorsed COVID-mitigation approach, from masking to social distancing to vaccine development and mandates. His chosen nemesis was Fauci, the immunologist veteran of the AIDS fight, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, and chief medical adviser to Joe Biden from 2021 to 2022.

In his book, Kennedy characterizes Fauci as “the powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’etat against Western democracy” and claims that his “remedies,” including the COVID vaccines that stopped people from dying, were “often more lethal than the diseases they pretend to treat.”

COVID, like the AIDS epidemic before it, provided fertile ground for conspiracy theorizing. A new disease of unknown origin, it exploded lives and families and the global economy; it provoked fear and a longing for answers that those in charge could not initially provide. Public-health officials and political leaders made choices, some of which proved misguided, some of which led to solutions. And, of course, as Kennedy himself will eagerly explain, corporate entities — from Amazon to Pfizer to Moderna — profiteered, in grotesque fashion, from people’s pain, loss, and confusion.

See, that's democracy. Any idiot fool can try to become president. Low IQ or non-functioning brain need not disqualify.

He's a hate merchant so he gets in bed with other hate merchants. He's a hate merchant so he makes insulting and degrading remarks about Anne Frank and steers people towards hate as an excuse for having no real plans to address anything. Con artist. Key passage in Rebecca's piece may be this:

Lesser threats than Kennedy have played spoilers in elections before, and if he succeeds in helping burn us all to the ground, it will not be because he is an outsider, as he claims, but because of a political and media culture that has protected and encouraged and fawned over him his whole life -- handing a perpetual problem child, now 69 and desperate for attention, accelerant and matches.

For now, he gets in bed with the hate group Moms For Liberty.

Chris Lehman (THE NATION) notes the vile Moms For Liberty:

Even before Moms for Liberty had wrapped up its second annual national conference—bearing the Margaret Atwood–esque sobriquet “Joyful Warriors Summit”—in Philadelphia on Sunday, the event was a messaging triumph. That’s because the Florida-based right-wing school takeover group, launched in 2021 to protest Covid lockdowns, could count on an amnesiac and credulous press to dress up its race-mongering, anti-LGBTQ+, and hard-right organizing profile in the image of a standard-issue interest group steeped in the homespun politics of local citizen outrage at the grassroots level.

Don’t take my cranky left-critic word for it. NBC News’s Bianca Seward and Gabe Gutierrez attended a breakout session at the five-day Philadelphia confab dedicated to media strategizing. Leading the training workshop was Florida Republican Party chair Christian Ziegler, the husband of Moms for Liberty cofounder Bridget Ziegler—who now helps run Governor Ron DeSantis’s Disney oversight commission. “The media is not your friend,” Ziegler announced, and advised the group’s culture-war faithful to pursue a starve-them-out strategy: “If you give [the media] the least amount possible, you’re fully controlling the message. The more you give them, the less you control. The less you give them, the more you control.” This approach, he went on to note, exploits the key weakness of political reporters: “They’re lazy. They have no idea what’s going on at school board meetings. Oftentimes they don’t even know how local government works.”

The press wasted little time in proving Ziegler right. New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman opens his own report on the event with an account of a recent PR fiasco for the group, when the Hamilton County, Ind., Moms for Liberty chapter quoted Adolf Hitler in a newsletter and issued a shamefaced retraction along with a public apology. But instead of allowing readers to dwell on the autocratic tendencies of a Hitler-quoting political faction, Weisman instead cites the Hamilton County chapter’s antics as a case study in movement-building by means of “controversy”:

The group’s reputation for confrontation and controversy is very much intact, but as Moms for Liberty convenes on Thursday in Philadelphia, it is doing so not as a small fringe of far-right suburban mothers but as a national conservative powerhouse—precisely because of chapters like Hamilton County’s and their energized members.

It’s true that admirers of fascist leaders are generally a high-energy cohort.

Junior's not a Democrat. You only have to listen to his raving for a moment or two to grasp that.

Bevan Hurley (INDEPENDENT) reports:

Robert F Kennedy Jr was left grasping for answers after being confronted with a lengthy list of his conspiracy theories in a new interview.

The Democratic presidential candidate, 69, sat last week for a wide-ranging interview with Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller from Reason, which bills itself as the nation’s leading libertarian magazine.

Mr Kennedy told the publication he had “always been aligned with libertarians on most issues”, and that he would consider appointing Tulsi Gabbard as his secretary of state.

Towards the end of the hour-long interview, Mr Gillespie, Reason’s editor-at-large, noted that RFK Jr routinely trafficked in conspiracies and displayed a “kind of conspiracist mindset where almost everything that we take for granted is bad”.

Mr Gillespie went on to list the numerous conspiracies that RFK Jr has peddled, including his anti-vaccine stance and claims that 5G and Wi-Fi are “controlling our mind”, that AIDs is not caused by HIV, that boys are becoming transgender due to chemicals in the drinking water, and that his cousin Michael Skakel was not guilty of a murder he had been convicted of.

Murder. Rape. The Kennedys have a really bad history with women. Most feel William Kennedy Smith got away with rape. You could argue he got away with sexual harassment as well but in those cases, he had to pay settlements at least.

The one who'll bury Camelot will be the crazy fool Junior. He'll bury all the good the family could have been remembered for. But don't worry, hate merchant Tulsie will be his roll dog. He can't get any clearer that he has no love and no respect for the LGBTQ+ community. He's a huckster, he's a liar. And he had many chances to be something. But the elevator doesn't go up to the top floor and, at this late date, it never will.

Kat's "Kat's Korner: Rickie Lee Jones provides songs of wisdom for unwise times" went up last night. The following sites updated:

Monday, July 3, 2023

The Proud Boys are the equivalent of Nazi Germany's SA

I hope you already read Ava and C.I.'s "Media: Corrupt Court, Corrupt YOUTUBE" from yesterday. I want to note this section:

Clue to the Court: Freedom of religion means the rest of us don't have to suffer from your religious delusions that call for hatred and discrimination.

When the ruling came down, we flashed on two things -- fetish porn and a NETFLIX documentary. Sadly, we aren't joking.

Benjamin Cantu's ELDORADO: EVERYTHING THE NAZIS HATE is a documentary that started airing last week on NETFLIX. It deals with the rise of Nazism in Germany and the way it rose by targeting groups of people.

And it echoes in the US today because, as one person points out, "Even now you can have these liberties and they can be taken away from you."

As The Proud Boys -- little boys in mannish bodies -- have spent the last months showing up at drag events -- obviously horny and envious -- with guns and threats, bigots like Jonathan Turley have ignored this while freaking out over ANTIFA repeatedly. He's a Nazi, Turley is. And his Proud Boys are the SA in Nazi Germany. As historian Ben Miller explains in the documentary, "The SA is the Nazis' paramilitary. They do the dirty work. They destabilize democracy. They fight other people on the street. They beat people up outside events."

Yeah, that's The Proud Boys.

Miller also explains, "The SA is a really huge part of the Nazi's plan to take control of Germany and to establish a racially pure empire, free of Jews, free of Communists, free of disabled people, free of Roma and Sinti people, and free of queers."

Are you getting what's happening right now?

These are not isolated incidents. This a path that certain people want to take this country down.

Get it? If you don't, Candace McDuffie (The Root) reports:

On Friday, a judge awarded more than $1 million to Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Washington, D.C. The historic Black church sued the Proud Boys for tearing down and burning a Black Lives Matter banner during one of their racist protests in 2020.

In addition, Superior Court Associated Judge Neal A. Kravitz banned the hateful group and its leaders from being anywhere near the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church or making threats or defamatory remarks against the institution—or its pastor—for five years.

However, the ruling turned out to be a default judgment issued after the defendants refused to show up in court. In December 2020, two Black Lives Matter banners were ripped down from Metropolitan AME—as well as another historically Black church—and burned during battles between Trump supporters and the former president’s detractors.

Desecration left behind by the Proud Boys happened after weekend rallies by thousands of Trump supporters who believed his false claims that he won a second term. These events were the cause behind dozens of arrests, stabbings and police officers being injured.

Please note that Jonathan Turley defends and excuses Proud Boys. And, no surprise, he's a raging homophobe. A hate merchant. If you're an African-American going to GWU, show some solidarity and avoid his classes. We don't need to reward bigots.

This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

Monday, July 3, 2023. The corrupt Court has decimated American lives and, in one decision, has taken the full rights away from a group of pepole.

Patrick Martin (WSWS) notes:

Since the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision 13 months ago, which overturned Roe v. Wade and deprived women of the constitutional right to access abortion, the ultra-right majority on the court has engaged in a rampage against basic democratic rights and the social rights of the working class.

This culminated Friday in two decisions with the same 6-3 split among the justices: to declare unconstitutional the Biden administration’s limited reduction of student loan debt owed to the US government; and to endorse the “right” of a commercial web designer to refuse to create materials for the wedding of a gay couple.

The class character of the first decision is obvious: an executive action by the federal government to bail out wealthy bank depositors is constitutional, but not a limited action to help debt-burdened students. The second decision destroys a constitutional right to be free of discrimination, while paying lip service to the First Amendment. The court declares that the web designer can justify her bigotry on the basis of “freedom of religion.”

I'm stuck here. These are appalling decisions that need to be called out and they are part of many others including MARCUS DEANGELO JONES V DEWAYNE HENDRIX from the week before last. At THIRD, we didn't do "truest" statements this week -- where we quote from an article, report or video segment or speech. I'm glad. Because I know one of the nominees would have been a Friday piece at WSWS. And I didn't agree that it deserved a truest. WSWS published an article covering the student loan debt decisions. A bad decision by the Court that will have real consequences. WSWS then published an article about the bad decision where the Court overturns Affirmative Action -- a monumental injustice. And it tried to fold into that article what Patrick Martin calls above 'refuse to create materials for the wedding of a gay couple.'

That is the worst decision from a legal stand point and I get that most people do not grasp the law in this country. But if you want to destroy a community, that's the decision to use.

They can build on it, they can expand to include other groups.

It is a decision out of Nazi Germany.

The Court no longer believe in equaltiy.

Any legal scholar should look at the decision and tell you what happened is there is now a two-tier system of American citizenship. There is a system where straights (and assumed straights) have full rights and gays and lesbians do not. There is no pretense of equal in the eyes of the law.

That should frighten the hell out of everyone.

This is not minor. We are supposed to be built on a system where the law is fair and the law is equal.

You have the right to this, I have the right to this.

We have to go back to the 1800s to find something similar.

Discrimination is okay -- legally okay -- and we're pretending this is something minor.

Again, don't think, "Well I'm never going to have a same-sex wedding." This can be expanded. This is something out of A HANDMAID'S TALE and the fact that so many people do not appear to grasp that goes to how easy it is for rights and liberties to be stolen from all of us.

If you're not getting this, you are part of the problem. You need to grasp what the law now says and what a huge shift this is.

And on the right, those who are openly on the right-wing, are celebrating. They grasp what just happened.

The ones who are hiding their right-wing nature? Well I don't see a word on this from RFK Junior. I see Junior Tweeted repeatedly on Sunday about releasing the records on his uncle's death. Because that is the most important thing right? Oh, and he made time to apologetically call out the case overturning affirmative action -- apologetically and pathetically because if he doesn't hold onto his right-wing base, he has nothing.

The last name means very little when, many, many weeks later, you still can't pull together a campaign. You're still trying to hang out with Moms For Liberty and you're too much a boy to stand up. RFK -- Senior -- was not a saint by any means -- as many women could have attested -- but at the end he did find a voice. I'd say, "Took him along enough," but he was only 42. Junior is 69 and can't find his voice.

RFK, at the end, spoke for the people in need, the migrant workers, the people under assault.

Having to wear a mask during the height of COVID was not an assault.

And I'm getting tired of all the freaks on this issue.

It was a pandemic. We never told you what to do here. We didn't shame Eric Clapton or try to -- I even noted that he would probably come out of the pandemic looking good. We didn't worship at Fauci. He was lousy at his job and he should have been fired.

But we also grasped that it was a pandemic and that many people were just trying to survive it, not to hurt anyone and not to hurt themselves. That reality is lost in RFK Jr.'s campaign of crazy.

You didn't want the vaccine, you really didn't have to get it.

I didn't get it until the end. I was on chemo and a hundred other things and my doctors wouldn't let me -- a fact that I made known here repeatedly.

I don't know of anyone who went to prison for refusing the vaccine.

But it's a big issue to Crowd Crazy to this day.

Because they felt so damn impotent.

Guess what, butt hurt, so did the rest of the world. It's what happens when something no one is expecting sweeps up the planet.

But that's all he and Naomi Wolf and other increasingly unhinged people have to offer.

Did Fauci lie?

He lied repeatedly. We noted it repeatedly. It's why he should have been fired. He certainly should have been fired when Joe Biden was sworn in. He had repeatedly contradicted himself and lost the trust of too much of the public.

COVID continues. The COVID measures are gone. We have real problems to deal with. That doesn't mean journalists shouldn't look into what took place or how consensus was formed or forced behind closed doors. It does mean it's not really a campaign issue.

Unless you're some right-wing crazy who can't deal with the fact that COVID actually scared you. As it should have. A world-wide pandemic is scary. But you can't deal with your own fear, so you're scared and pissed off and looking for the craziest fool who'll speak to that and you run to Junior.

Ava and I wrote about the two-tiered citizenship that now exists in the US in "Media: Corrupt Court, Corrupt YOUTUBE" on Sunday at THIRD and here I posted multiple interviews and commentaries and statements.

An e-mail asked why I didn't include the ACLU?

This is their statement:

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court this morning issued its ruling in 303 Creative v. Elenis. David Cole, Legal Director for the American Civil Liberties Union, offered the following response:

“The Supreme Court held today for the first time that a business offering customized expressive services has the right to violate state laws prohibiting such businesses from discrimination in sales. The Court’s decision opens the door to any business that claims to provide customized services to discriminate against historically-marginalized groups. The decision is fundamentally misguided. We will continue to fight to defend laws against discrimination from those who seek a license to discriminate.”

The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Colorado filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to reject the First Amendment challenge to a Colorado civil rights law requiring businesses open to the public to treat customers equally.

Yeah, I took a hard pass on that weak ass statement from a group made of attorneys. Instead, we offered the Center for Constitutional Rights:

June 30, 2023 - In response to the Supreme Court ruling that businesses may deny services to LGBTQI+ people, the Center for Constitutional Rights released the following statement:

Today, in its latest display of its political activism, the Supreme Court sanctioned discrimination by giving businesses that engage in "expressive conduct" a license to deny services to LGBTQI+ people. We have known for a long time that in the eyes of the Court, there are only two Constitutional rights that matter: the First Amendment right to religious expression and the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Nonetheless, today’s decision was crushing. It deals another blow to a community already under attack in legislatures across the country, by the very same movement that claims the allegiance of six justices on the Supreme Court.
Public accommodations laws regulate what businesses must do, not what they must think, if they seek the public benefit of accessing the public marketplace. Such nondiscrimination laws, like the one in Colorado, are designed to ensure that LGBTQI+ people can freely shop for services like everyone else, rather than being required to shop for businesses that don’t discriminate against them. The right-wing justices have once again signaled that their mission is to dismantle laws that protect marginalized communities and to use the law to back punitive and exclusionary social hierarchies. As Justice Sotomayor lays out in the dissent, “[t]hose who would subordinate LGBT[QI+] people have often done so with the backing of law.”
In this case, the Court was so determined to carry out its mission that it bypassed Constitutional requirements of standing by weighing in on an imaginary dispute concocted by conservative legal activists and issuing an advisory opinion, so that they could legislate policy.
The Religious Liberty Clauses of the First Amendment have been historically used to protect minority religions against discrimination by majoritarian orthodoxy and to advance a pluralistic, egalitarian democracy. It is thus especially perverse that this Court would delight in producing the exact opposite, anti-democratic result: granting orthodox Christianity an imagined constitutional freedom to discriminate against the minority LGBTQI+ community. And, as Justice Sotomayor emphasized, the decision is not limited; it could give license for businesses to discriminate against interracial couples because of the (pervasive) extremist-evangelicalist commitment to segregation.
Together with yesterday’s decision invalidating affirmative action, this ruling lays bare the values of this Court. In six justices’ view, the Constitution says it is just fine for a business to exclude someone on the basis of their protected status (LGBTQI+), but it is unconstitutional for a university to include someone on the basis of their protected status (race). This is bigotry masquerading as law. And, in so ruling again, this Court continues to advance a Jim Crow jurisprudence in which the white, male, Christian insider’s freedom is made meaningful only through the subjugation of vulnerable populations. For this conservative movement, as for John Calhoun or George Wallace, discrimination fuels their feelings of freedom. These six individuals somehow retain the power to impose their 18th Century values on a democratic majority that believes in equality and fairness. The Court has little legitimacy left.
We reject these cruel and unlawful decisions, and the cowardly attempts by a right-wing movement to wield the Constitution to protect white power and deny the human rights of the multitude. But human rights cannot be suspended by reactionaries in robes. And they cannot be secured by even enlightened court rulings. If there is solace to be found today, it is in the knowledge that that task before us is the same as it was yesterday: to resist, organize, and unite. Our potential collective power, and only that, offers hope of liberation and full human dignity for LGBTQI+ people and other marginalized communities.

I cannot believe how many people are missing the point on this. I have nothing against a gay but I own a bed and breakfast and I just can't allow a gay into my home with another gay because my Bible tells me it is wrong. Or: I own a small hotel in New Hampshire and I rent rooms out by the hour but not to a gay because of my Bible. You have no idea how this can expand out. The Court knew. They knew what they were doing.

They are a corrupt Court and there needs to be change immediately.

Julia Conley (COMMON DREAMS) reports:

Condemning the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court as corrupt and "heavily politicized," U.S. Reps. Ro Khanna and Don Beyer on Friday reintroduced legislation to impose term limits for the nine justices in order to "restore judicial independence."

Hours after the court ruled that businesses can refuse services to LGBTQ+ people and struck down President Joe Biden's student loan debt relief program, Khanna (D-Calif.) said that the framers of the Constitution established lifetime appointments for justices on the nation's highest court in order "to ensure impartiality," but recent rulings by the six right-wing members of the panel's supermajority have not held up that standard.

"The Supreme Court's decision to block student debt relief will put many hardworking Americans at risk of default and will be a disaster for our economy," said Rep. Ro Khanna. "Our Founding Fathers intended for lifetime appointments to ensure impartiality. The decision today demonstrates how justices have become partisan and out of step with the American public. I'm proud to reintroduce the Supreme Court Term Limits and Regular Appointments Act to implement term limits to rebalance the court and stop extreme partisanship."

The legislation would create an 18-year term limit for justices appointed after the law was enacted. Justices would be permitted to serve on lower courts after their term was up.

Beyer (D-Va.) said the time has come to impose term limits following numerous partisan decisions by the Supreme Court, including its overturning of Roe v. Wade last year, and revelations about undisclosed financial ties that right-wing Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch have had to Republican megadonors and operatives who have had business before the court.

"For many Americans, the Supreme Court is a distant, secretive, unelected body that can make drastic changes in their lives without any accountability," said Beyer. "Recent partisan decisions by the Supreme Court that destroyed historic protections for reproductive rights, voting rights, and more have undermined public trust in the Court—even as inappropriate financial relationships between justices and conservative donors raised new questions about its integrity."

Currently, said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), "six extremist, unelected activists" are doing "the bidding of billionaire Republican donors from the bench."

"This illegitimate Supreme Court has become a cesspool of corruption and is in urgent need of reform," she said. "It's time to end lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court."

A poll by Marist College in April found that 68% of Americans back term limits for Supreme Court justices while just 37% of respondents said they had confidence in the high court.

The judicial watchdog group Fix the Court endorsed Khanna and Beyer's proposal, noting that from the nation's founding until 1970, Supreme Court justices served 15 years on average.

"That number has nearly doubled in the last few decades, as the power the court has abrogated to itself has also increased exponentially," said the group.

The current system has allowed Supreme Court justices to "possess unchecked power for life," said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court. "Luckily, there's a popular, apolitical way to fix this: by requiring future justices to take 'senior status' after 18 years, at which point they'd fill in at SCOTUS when needed, rotate down to a lower court, or retire."

"This idea forms the basis of Rep. Khanna's bill," he said, "and I'm pleased to support his work to establish fundamental guardrails for the most powerful, least accountable part of our government."

Affirmative action is a needed program. Programs can be ended and they can be restarted. Congress, for example, can (and should) pass a new program.

But when we're dealing with the highest court in the land stripping rights from citizens? Do you know how hard that is to come back from?

If you work for THE NATION, you clearly don't because they have nothing on their main page about this decision. They've got the student debt decision, they've got affirmative action, nothing on this.

And yet a group of Americans have been given less-than citizenship by a corrupt Court. They are no longer full citizens worthy of full equality. They are less-than.

And that should leave everyone outraged and apalled.

But some idiots don't grasp how it starts and how, if it's not called out, it builds. The Bible was a justification for slavery, for example. The Bible's not a manual for no-fault divorce. You want to see where the Court builds next as they go through the list of denying full rights to American citizens?

You didn't read history? You didn't Margaret Atwood? You can't catch a documentary on Nazi Germany?

All the decisions handed down were awful and unfair. Only one, however, gives the Court the power and the way forward to remove rights from citizens.

The Court needs to change and it needs to change now.