Call it what you like: Right Wing Losing is still losing!

Kim Davis and the religious right wing nuts claim they have somehow 'won' in their fight to deny marriage civil rights to gay couples. Losing is a series of decisions that the bigot beliefs of the religious right don't entitle them to special privileges to hurt other people.

And the other big 'win' came nearly two weeks ago; Kentucky is going to have to pay, and pay big, for their bigotry under the false label of religious freedom to discriminate and hate.  From the AP and WCPO news, there is this little nugget underlining that loss for the right:

Kentucky to pay $1.1 million in same-sex marriage case
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- A federal judge awarded a team of Kentucky attorneys more than $1 million for their role in the landmark United States Supreme Court case that struck down bans on same-sex marriage.
The state will have to pick up the $1.1 million tab.
In 2014, U.S. District Judge John Heyburn ruled the state's ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Attorney General Jack Conway refused to appeal. But former Gov. Steve Beshear hired outside attorneys to continue defending the ban.
The case, and others like it, made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which effectively legalized same-sex marriage last summer.
Jessica Ditto, spokeswoman for Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican who took office last month and opposes same-sex marriages, said in an email Wednesday evening that the governor's general counsel is reviewing the ruling.
"We are pleased that the court did not award any bonus attorney fees and eliminated certain fees and expenses that the court deemed unnecessary," Ditto said.
Federal law mandates that losing parties in civil rights cases pay the winning side's attorneys' fees and expenses.

Now the right likes to deny and lie when the facts are not on their side - as is the case here with who won and who lost.

If you follow the lame logic of the evangelical crazies, those like Michele Bachmann (who has been strangely silent for a while) or lunatic fringie Sarah Palin, then the recent east coast blizzard that shut down the coastal states with snow must mean God, aka Jebus, does not support those who are anti-abortion.

Readers here may remember the push-back in 2011 when Bachmann asserted, as an example of right wing 'magical thinking', a form of mental illness:

"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?'"

Hello anti-choicers? Apparently God just slapped you down with his fluffy white wrath in unmistakeable terms, clearly intending to block your efforts. Not a peep out of Bachmann or Palin on the topic. Shutting down early and being stranded on a turnpike is not 'winning', it is not an endorsement of your position from God.

Women's History Month - 4

In the 2012 campaign, it is a lesson of history we should learn from the 2008 presidential race.

Sarah Palin at the time, appeared to those of us not blinded by the obsessive loyalty, or driven by ideology and partisan conformity, to be a disaster, an umitigated and unqualified mistake.  There have been many women in politics and roles in government, on both the right and the left, who are not so severely flawed as Palin was and is.

I find myself wondering about the qualifications for this year's right wing candidates, and how many of them are a significant improvement.

Or NOT much of an improvement at all?

Palin just announced she would not 'close the door' on being the candidate selected by a brokered GOP convention.   IS the GOP that stupid, that desperate, that flawed?  Palin certainly hasn't appeared to learn her lessons, to improve and correct her mistakes or to strengthen her weaknesses.

Anything is possible, but those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

A dramatization of that very history lesson, one which is more accurate than say Tennessee Tea Partiers attempts to make education more dishonest, untrue, and factually INaccurate is this:

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Certainly neither of these women in right wing presidential politics, Palin or Bachmann, have the qualities that one finds in women like Hilary Clinton or Condi Rice.  It is about quality, not gender, and not ideology, that success and failure hang.

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Michele Bachmann would have had different flaws, mostly different weaknesses, but would have been in many ways a poor choice for the GOP and the Tea Party for the same reasons as Palin. The party and the voters appeared to have figured that out; Bachmann, not so much, based on her assertions throughout the campaign before she quit. I guess either God changed his mind after telling her to run for the Presidency, OR, she has been hearing voices in her head that aren't really there all these years.  I have always been deeply unconvinced, profoundly skeptical, of the premise that God likes some people, or some countries, better than others.

In any event it appears the religious right, at least some of them, wanted her out, because they did not feel that it was appropriate for a woman to fill the role that was in authority over so many men. Some of our citizens, on the right, are not fully living in the current century, when they believe such things. Heck, if you go back to the Victorian era, and further, you could successfully argue they have missed some very important eras of world history relating to strong women leaders.

Sadly, not only is the right making the same mistakes which have garnered for them record high DISapproval ratings, worse for the Republicans than the Democrats; worse for the Tea Party than the Republicans; but they are doubling down on those mistakes, going further right, hurrying faster off the cliff of extremism and over-reaching arrogance.

The Brilliant STrib Cartoonist, Steve Sack hits two more out of the park

This home grown Minnesota cartoonist is the best kind of locally grown genius.

These are two of my favorites of his recent work.

Personally, I'd like to see both parties - BOTH PARTIES - refuse to give a party endorsement to any candidate who does not genuinely live in the district where the candidate is running.  I don't care what state office, what federal office, even what county or local office.

If the conservatives are going to try to penalize and make voting more difficult by forcing voters to prove where they live, and that they are legal to vote there, shouldn't they be just as insistent about where their candidates live and that they represent those voters, including LIVING THERE?  Otherwise, I think it is legitimate to challenge that the candidates genuinely and fully represent those voters.

It is worth noting that the REPUBLICAN Secretary of State of Indiana violated this law in that state, and was subsequently convicted of voter fraud, perjury and theft, despite the state having enacted a very restrictive voter ID law.

If there was ever any proof that voter ID doesn't prevent voter fraud, that is the classic, strongest possible example.



and this one!
 
 When I volunteered to help candidates in the 2010 election races, going door to door was a big part of that campaigning.  It is equally a big part of people distributing informative material (and sometimes disinformative material), but also where candidates introduce themselves, and one way for polls to be conducted.  Like the Census takers, delivery people, service people from utilities, there are lots of people who may make an unscheduled visit for legitimate reasons to a person's doorstep.

The shoot first law makes it legal for a person to shoot based on their feelings, right or wrong, instead of them being required to do so on the basis of objective fact, objective threat not 'feelings, nothing more than Feeeeeeeeeeeeeeelings'.

Well done Steve!  Well done STrib!