From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
This is the latest marriage-equality map. Blue states are the ones where gay couples can go down to City Hall and get a marriage license. Orange states have favorable rulings being appealed. Red states still have bans in place or unfavorable rulings being appealed. One of the remaining red states turned a different color yesterday. Can you spot which one?
Hint: it's 77,000 square miles, has 64 counties, the state fossil is the triceratops, and the state soil is houdek. If you said South Dakota, which went from red to orange, you're either very smart or very quick with the Google.
Details:
U.S. District Judge Karen E. Schreier of Sioux Falls declared that the ban fails the most rigorous constitutional test that can be used---“strict scrutiny”---because marriage is a fundamental right that must be open to gays and lesbians, too. The judge also found that it violated the rights of six same-sex couples in the state to legal equality under the Fourteenth Amendment. … Although most of Judge Schreier’s reasons for nullifying the South Dakota ban on Monday were familiar from other decisions, she was among the first to reject what has been a more recent claim by state officials: that is, that marriage is a domestic relations matter, and that federal courts have no jurisdiction over such matters.
The full ruling is
here. The state isn’t blue yet because, as is often the case with these rulings, a stay was issued pending review by an appeals court, in this case the Eighth Circuit. But still…progress rolls on.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Note: Today is Tuesday the 13th. No need to take any special precautions, except perhaps an extra dollop of hand lotion and new deadbolts on your doors, windows, dryer vent and chimney. Also avoid ISIS strongholds---those people are rude. Have a sunshine day! ---Dept. of Homeland Security
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4 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til the State of the Union address:
7
Days 'til the
BrickFair Lego Festival in Birmingham, Alabama:
4
Percent of Americans with outstanding loans making less than $30k per year who believe they'll never be debt-free, up from 9 percent last year:
20%
(Source:
The Washington Post)
Percent chance that
Le Monde, Radio France and France Televisions will provide
Charlie Hebdo with the human and material resources it needs to continue publishing:
100%
Copies of the January edition that will be printed (in 16 languages), up from its normal run of 60,000:
3 million
(Source:
The Portland Press Herald, MSNBC)
Age of Social Security as of this year:
80
Number of words besides "dreamt" (and its derivatives) that end in "mt":
0
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Tuesday Words of Wisdom from the Right-wing Blogosphere:
No Bush again ever...sorry Jeb. Romney, no real fight in him. If he wouldn't fight for himself, will he fight for any of us voters? I want someone whose had to fight against the dirtiest, low down democrat, progressive, union goon squad cheats with brass knuckles and crooked judges backing them. If a politician has done that, then he's ready to fight for me and get my political contributions.
Walker had to fight that. Cruz has to fight those in his own party pulling that crap. Walker-Cruz 2016? Everyone else in the GOP is a p*ssy.
---Commenter Arlie at Powerline
All together now: 1…2…3…
Classy!
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Puppy Pic of the Day: 'Scuse me…hi. I'm looking for the Iditarod finish line, please…"
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CHEERS to Liquid Drano for tough trickle-down clogs. This isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but it's still an important big-picture framework for differentiating the Democrats' vision from the Republicans'. Rep. Chris Van Hollen announced it yesterday, and after letting the uber-rich hoover up all the money for decades, there's nothing wrong with calling it what is: free money for the rest of us:
The trickle-down scam explained
so we can understand it: with booze.
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Senior Democrats, dissatisfied with the party’s tepid prescriptions for combating income inequality, are drafting an “action plan” that calls for a massive transfer of wealth from the super-rich and Wall Street traders to the heart of the middle class. The centerpiece of the proposal...is a “paycheck bonus credit” that would shave $2,000 a year off the tax bills of couples earning less than $200,000. […]
The windfall---about $1.2 trillion over a decade---would come directly from the pockets of Wall Street “high rollers” through a new fee on financial transactions, and from the top 1 percent of earners, who would lose billions of dollars in lucrative tax breaks. The plan also would use the tax code to prod employers to boost
wages, which have been stagnant for four decades despite gains in productivity and profits.
A little wordy for a bumper sticker. But a good start.
CHEERS to revvin' up the intertubes. I don’t know if this is a subtle hint from FCC chair Tom Wheeler that he's going to preserve net neutrality (i.e. refuse to authorize the creation of fast lanes and slow lanes), but this sounds positive nonetheless:
"Faster! Faster!"
In a draft proposal provided to CNNMoney, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said he thinks broadband should provide minimum speeds of 25 Megabits per second. That's enough to seamlessly stream an ultra-HD 4K movie from Netflix or download an HD movie from iTunes in about 10 minutes. […]
The FCC's current standard for broadband is a minimum of 4 Mbps, which Wheeler called "inadequate for ... supporting today's high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video." The FCC says 55 million Americans (17%) don't even have access to 25 Mbps broadband service.
The national average is around 11 Mbps. To put that in perspective, that's faster than a freight train but slower than the time it takes Fox News to gin up a new Obama scandal.
CHEERS to one of the good guys. On this date 37 years ago, Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota---aka Mayor of Minneapolis, LBJ's vice president, and fierce advocate in the war on poverty---died much too young at 66. He was wise:
"Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism."
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"Behind every successful man is a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law."
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"Liberalism, above all, means emancipation---emancipation from one's fears, his inadequacies, from prejudice, from discrimination, from poverty."
And a special shoutout from Humphrey to the teabaggers:
"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously."
Amen.
CHEERS to thin skin over the pigskin. Sorry your team lost, Cowboys fans. But, c'mon, at least there was this to laugh at:
To quote the great philosopher Muntz: "Ha Ha!"
News Flash: cruise ships are not toys.
JEERS to the love boat on the rocks. The cruise ship
Costa Concordia sank off the coast of Italy on this date three years ago. Thirty-two people died, thanks to the carelessness and ineptitude of the lily-livered captain. The listing hulk was righted a couple years back in an
amazing feat of engineering, and last July it
arrived at the port where it was built so it could be, um, un-built. You can take a look inside, but fair warning: it's
pretty spooky. By the way, the traditional gift for the three-year anniversary of a ship that was wrecked by an idiot out to impress his buddies on the bridge is about what you'd expect: a brass dumbstick.
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Ten years ago in C&J: January 13, 2005
JEERS to...nothing. As in, no WMDs were found in Iraq so the search has formally ended and the New York times is SHOCKED:
Wouldn't it be nice...
We will…long remember the doomsday warnings from the Bush administration about mushroom clouds and sinister aluminum tubes; the breathless reports from TV correspondents when the invasion began, speculating on when the "smoking gun" would be unearthed; our own failures to deconstruct all the spin and faulty intelligence.
The search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may have been one of the greatest nonevents of the early 21st century, right up there with the failure of the world's computers to crash at the end of the last millennium. That Y2K scare at least brought us an updated Internet. Fear of the nonexistent W.M.D. brought us a war.
Will this finally...finally...
finally wake those comatose Republicans up from their Fox-induced trance? (You're right. Not a chance.)
[1/13/15 Update: Ten years later, a majority of the Fox News crowd still believes WMDs were found. On the bright side, only 42 percent believe in unicorns.]
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And just one more…
JEERS to the Minister of Silly Walks. That's what pedestrians around Portland look like as we try to negotiate the ice that even salt chunks the size of Buicks can't get rid of. And yesterday we got a light powdery snow that makes it even worse. But…we try to look on the bright side. We're keeping our orthopedic surgeons very happy.
Oh, and happy Rubber Ducky Day. C&J's mascot Kevin the Socialist Duckstick will be in the kiddie pool today, so be sure to say squeak. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
'The Hammer' Tom DeLay Thinks Bill in Portland Maine Is Too Mean
---Right Wing Watch
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