Headlines - Saturday April 7

With little fanfare, union-busting Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) yesterday signed a repeal of Wisconsin's equal pay act, which gave people who discover they've been discriminated against more time to file suit and the right to do so outside of federal courts. Read More

 

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Hey, we would like to see them investigated, so there's that... The anti-gay hate group that calls themselves the "National Organization for Marriage" wants a federal investigation of the Human Rights Campaign and the IRS after the HRC got their hands on and published the names of the bigots who donated to the group to oppose marriage equality but didn't have the balls to do so publicly. Mitt Romney was one of them. He wrote them a check for ten grand to oppose Prop 8 in California. 

 

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Start taxing these disgraceful motherfuckers already. The Catholic church has cut off funding for Companeros, a small Colorado organization that serves the healthcare needs of immigrants in rural Colorado because the group has a second-degree connection to One Colorado, a group that works to advance the rights of gays, lesbians and transgender people in the state. And all this time we thought that the primary mission of the church was to help the poor.

 

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Two Bishops from the Archdiocese of Seattle have sent out a letter to all registered parishoners in the city to oppose Washington's marriage equality act -- because who knows more about marriage than a couple of old dudes for whom bachelorhood is a job requirement? Archbishop J. Peter Sartain and Auxiliary Bishop Eusebio Elizondo called the effort to gather signatures to get a referendum to overturn the state's new marriage equality law and re-marginalize gays and lesbians and deny them their basic civil liberties a "critically important" effort.

Something tells me that they might be in for a surprise.

I used to live in the Pacific Northwest. People up there are populist and independent and not very religious at all; and they sure as HELL don't like to be told how they ought to be living their lives by the god-damned child-rapers in the catholic fucking church.

Let me tell you the story of Oregon's Death With Dignity act...

In the GOP wave-year of 1994, Oregon voters elected the Democrat, John Kitzhaber, Governor and they passed Measure 16 on the ballot, the Death with Dignity Act with 51.3% of the vote.

The Catholic church went apoplectic, and immediately filed suit to stop the law from going into effect and got busy trying to get a repeal referendum on a future ballot. They were successful in getting it on the ballot in 1997, an off-year special election that would draw out single-issue and ideologically-driven voters to the polls that should have been good for them (Oregoians weren't strictly voting by mail yet at that time).

It wasn't.

While Measure 16 passed with 627,980 votes and 51.3% of the vote in 1994, the repeal initiative, Measure 51, went down in flames and smouldering ruin in the 1997 special election, with more people -- 666,275 of them -- voting to uphold it than had voted for it in the first place. That's right. A measure that initially passed by a 51.3 - 48.7 was upheld 60 - 40.

My friends and neighbors were pissed that the Catholic church was trying to not merely tell them how they could live, but how they could die, too.

Something tells me that the Bishops efforts this time will backfire just as surely as they did back then.

So what am I thinking? Carry on, fellas. You'll get 'em this time for sure...

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Shale Shocked: 'Remarkable Increase' In U.S. Earthquakes 'Almost Certainly Manmade,' USGS Scientists Report

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Short on time, gotta run!