KENTUCKY’S MATT BEVIN TURNS GRINCH

Less than a month after taking office, Kentucky’s newly elected Republican Gov. Matt Bevin reversed a move by his Democratic predecessor that had restored the voting rights of about 140,000 former felons.

Those impacted - who are overwhelmingly African American and lower income, had already completed their felony sentences but remained permanently disenfranchised. The order excluded those convicted of violent crimes, sex crimes, bribery or treason.

Bevin’s move Tuesday night goes against promises he made during the campaign to keep the restoration of voting rights in place. He even told reporters in November that he would stand up to his own party on the issue and convince them it was the right thing to do. Now, thanks to his order, tens of thousands of Kentuckians will not only lose the opportunity to regain their voting rights, they will also be permanently unable to serve on a jury, run for office, or obtain a vocational license.

The only explanation Bevin offered for the reversal is that he believes “it is an issue that must be addressed through the legislature and by the will of the people.”

Kentucky is one of a tiny handful of states where former felons have to individually petition the governor to restore their civil rights after they have fully completed their sentences — a process that can be arbitrary and humiliating. As a result, one in five African Americans in the state are disenfranchised. Studies have found that ex-felons who have their voting rights restored feel more invested in their communities and are less likely to end up back in the criminal justice system.

In another executive order this week, Bevin reversed former Gov. Beshear’s move to raise the state’s minimum wage for government workers and contractors to $10.10 an hour, bringing it back down to $7.25 an hour. About 800 state workers who have already gotten raises will be able to keep them, but new hires will now have to start at the lower pay rate. In the order, Bevin hinted that he would prefer the state have no minimum wage at all: “Wage rates ideally would be established by the demands of the labor market instead of being set by the government,” he said.

Bevin also used his new executive power to grant the wish of Kentucky clerk Kim Davis to remove all clerk names from marriage licenses to accommodate religious objections to same-sex marriage. Though all gay and straight couples retain the right to marry, thanks to the Supreme Court, LGBT rights groups in the state lament the governor’s move. “It’s a clear signal to Kim Davis and her camp that if you object to doing portions of your job — even if you’re an elected official — the executive branch will give you an out,” said Chris Hartman with the Fairness Campaign.

Others claim the governor is overstepping his legal bounds and inviting lawsuits by making unilaterally changes to the state marriage license form.

Bevin, who has previously said he believes legalizing same-sex marriage could lead to parents marrying their children, was swept into office in November in an election marked by dismally low voter turnout. Less than a third of the state’s eligible voters cast a ballot. Had the state’s former non-violent felons been able to vote, they could have easily swayed the election.

Matt Bevin, even with Trump being the ass that is Fuckface Von Clownstick, you sir are this week’s worst person of the week! Congrats numbnutz, you earned it!

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Blogger-In-Chief

Roger West

KIM DAVIS, KENTUCKY CLERK SUFFERS FROM SABS

KENTUCKY CLERK AND SABS SUFFERER KIM DAVIS

Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who has staged a weeks-long campaign of resistance to marriage equality, came under fire from an unexpected source on Tuesday — the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Davis, who suffers from the hypocritical Christian disease - which allows ignoramuses like Davis to invoke SABS [Selective Application of the Bible Syndrome] while on the job. Davis a three time divorcee; on her fourth marriage, two kids out of wedlock, and once again, refused yesterday to issue marriage licenses to a same-sex couple despite a recent order from the Supreme Court denying her request for a temporary stay enabling her to ignore the Constitution. Just a few hours later, a federal judge ordered her to appear in court this Thursday, where she is likely to be held in contempt.

RELATED: Dan Savage destroys thrice-divorced Kim Davis: ‘This is about someone hypocritically cashing in’

According to Ryan Anderson, Heritage’s most visible anti-gay voice, Davis is indeed wrong to refuse to issue marriage licenses altogether in order to spite same-sex couples who wish to marry. “The citizens of Rowan County have a right to receive in a timely and efficient manner the various government provisions—including licenses—to which they are entitled,” Anderson writes for one of Heritage’s websites.

He adds, in an argument that closely maps criticisms of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, that “saying your religion requires your entire office to stop issuing marriage licenses to everyone . . . cannot be reasonably accommodated without placing undue hardships on the citizens unable to receive their licenses in their county and forced to drive to another.”

Anderson’s solicitude for the Constitution, it should be noted, only goes so far. He devotes much of his piece denouncing Davis to an alternative proposal that permits individual state officials to recuse from issuing licenses to same-sex couples while also “mak[ing] clear that no one can be denied a marriage license.”

This proposal is unconstitutional. As the Supreme Court explained in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Constitution “does not permit the State to bar same-sex couples from marriage on the same terms as accorded to couples of the opposite sex.” So if an opposite-sex couple will be served by whichever clerk happens to be on duty when they arrive seeking a marriage license, a same-sex couple must be allowed to obtain a license on the same terms.

Nevertheless, the fact that this prominent anti-gay luminary believes that Davis has gone off the deep end - is a sign of just how off the reservation this lunatic is.

Kim Davis, you are today’s asshat and worst person of the world. Congrats numbnuts!

NFTOS

Blogger-In-Chief

Roger West

Democalypse 2014 - The Battle Hymn of the Republicans

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Editor-In-Chief

Roger West

KENTUCKY SCIENCE DENIERS BE ADVISED

FACTS AND SCIENCE ELUDES THE GOP

Last Wednesday, a Kentucky review committee voted down the state’s plan to incorporate new federal science education guidelines into its curriculum. But Kentucky’s governor is making sure the committee doesn't get the last word on science education in his state.

Gov. Steve Beshear (Democrat) said Wednesday that he plans to implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) “under his own authority,” despite the Kentucky legislature’s Administrative Regulation Review Subcommittee’s 5-1 decision that the standards are deficient. The governor’s announcement will ensure the standards will move forward for the time being — they could still be killed by Kentucky’s general assembly when it returns in January, but the governor would then have the option to veto that decision.

Kentucky’s path to implement the NGSS — which are voluntary guidelines that, if adopted by states, provide standards for science education that include the teaching of climate science and evolution — has been a rocky one. The state Board of Education approved the standards this June, but since then, the state’s Tea Party along with religious and family-based groups have lobbied hard against the adoption of the rules — lobbying that Robert Bevins, president of Kentuckians for Science Education, a group that supports the NGSS, said resulted in the subcommittee’s vote against the standards.

Kentucky’s Senate Education Committee’s chairman Mike Wilson has also taken issue with the standards, saying in a May op-ed they included “troubling assumptions” on the topics of climate change and evolution. Those assumptions included the NGSS’s statements that “human activities, such as release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature” and “outcomes predicted by global climate models strongly depend of the amounts of human-generated greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere each year.”

Only five other states so far — California, Vermont, Maryland, Kansas and Rhode Island — have approved the NGSS, which represent the first major overhaul of science education in the U.S. in more than a decade. The standards are facing big challenges in some other states — in 2012, Texas Board of Education Chair Barbara Cargill said there was a “zero percent chance” the state would approve the guidelines. Texas updated its science education standards in 2009, an overhaul which resulted in a curriculum that required students to learn the “strengths and weaknesses” of all scientific theories, notably Darwin’s theory of evolution. And this month in Texas, state-appointed textbook reviewers are pushing the state to go even further in downplaying the legitimacy of largely scientifically-agreed upon topics like climate change and evolution.

Lisa Hoyos, co-founder and director of Climate Parents, a group that’s been vocal in its support of NGSS and testified in support of the standards in front of the Kentucky state legislature earlier this year that the group was thankful for the governor’s support of NGSS and was planning to continue to monitor the situation in the state. The group also organized a petition in Kentucky in support of the standards, which Hoyos said garnered about 6,000 signatures and many comments from parents and grandparents urging the state legislature to adopt the standards.

“A very small percentage of kids are actually receiving climate change education in their public school experience, and at the same time climate change is clearly something that is going to affect every child not even over the course of their lifetime but in their immediate future,” she said. “We need to prepare our kids to build a low-carbon economy and they need to know the basics about climate change in order to do that.”

Ignorance can be forgivable Kentucky, taking pride in it cannot!

Congratulations, Gov. Steve Beshear, you are today's hero of the day!

NFTOS
Editor-In-Chief

Roger West