I know that Republican legislators generally aren’t picked for their brainpower — intelligence might make it harder for them to follow orders, and the idea is for the mass of them to do whatever their staffers (who often are hand-picked by their top donors or their patrons within the party) tell them to do — but really, is there a dumber member of Congress, at least in Minnesota, than John Kline?

Here’s a nice example from the town hall he held in the junior high school of Shakopee, a Twin Cities suburb in his congressional district. Now you all know how Congress is scrambling, in the wake of last Sunday’s 60 Minutes exposé, to pass the STOCK Act to outlaw insider trading by members of Congress. It’s not passed yet, but it might be by the end of the week.

According to John Kline, it’s already illegal — as he repeatedly states to an audience filled with people who know better — and he seems to imply that it’s been illegal for some time.

Even better: He claims that he never got a Congressional pay raise over the last four years, but the truth is that he got two pay raises, both pretty sizable ones. I don’t know how rich, dumb, or both one has to be not to notice when your take-home pay starts going up; I’m sure most of the folks filling that Shakopee junior-high auditorium aren’t so rich or so stupid that they wouldn’t notice a few extra bucks in their paychecks.

Just watch the video. Kline has to be seen to be believed. I almost suspect he’s really a wannabee Grecian Formula model who took a wrong turn on his way to the casting call and wound up at Republican headquarters instead; that’s the only explanation that makes sense for his career.

Tomorrow, February 2, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has announced they will rule on the appeal of District Court Judge James Ware’s ruling that videos made by now-retired Judge Vaughn Walker of the entire Prop 8 federal trial should be released to the public, according to the San Jose Mercury News:

A federal appeals court is expected to rule Thursday on whether the video tapes of the historic Proposition 8 trial should be released publicly.

However, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will not rule yet on the legal battle over California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage.

Last year, Chief U.S. District Judge James Ware ordered the videos of the trial made public over the objections of Prop 8 supporters.

It’s unknown at this time when the Appeals Court plans to rule on the main event, and also unknown whether the supporters (or opponents) of Proposition 8 will carry this appeal to the US Supreme Court. Supporters of Prop 8 have argued that their witnesses are intimidated by (non-existent) threats to their safety and that the US Supreme Court allowed Judge Walker to make the videos for his own exclusive use during his decision-making. Whether these arguments receive any respect from the Appeals Court may help them decide whether to ask SCOTUS to intervene.

It is also unknown whether the Appeals Court would stay its own ruling pending an appeal to SCOTUS. We may not see these videos anytime soon, even if the ruling tomorrow favors releasing them.

(image: screenshot by ee382, photobucket)

Written by Editor-in-Chief Jodi Jacobson for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

This week it became clear there are things more important to the Susan G. Komen Foundation–the fundraising giant that each year during breast cancer awareness month virtually swathes the United States in pink, a la Christo–than ensuring women are able to access exams for early detection of breast cancer.

What could be more important to an organization ostensibly dedicated to the elimination of breast cancer? Answer: The politics and personal agendas of the organization’s senior staff and board, both of which have been infiltrated by right-wing ideologues and both of which were instrumental in a decision to deny further support from Komen affiliates to Planned Parenthood clinics that provide breast exams. In fact, it is now clear that Komen has been infiltrated at various levels by anti-choicers willing to actually sacrifice women to breast cancer to satisfy their own agendas.

Nationwide, Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses provide nearly 750,000 breast cancer screenings annually, offering risk assessments, breast exams, breast health information and education, and diagnostic and surgical referrals. Over the past five years, Planned Parenthood health centers have conducted nearly 170,000 clinical breast exams with funds from Komen, out of a total of more than four million clinical breast exams performed nationwide by Planned Parenthood clinics. Komen grants also supported more than 6,400 out of 70,000 mammogram referrals made by Planned Parenthood.

A large share of the clients served at Planned Parenthood clinics are low-income African-American and Latina women. The National Cancer Institute identifies lack of access to early and effective screening for breast cancer (and hence lack of early treatment) as a primary reason that African American and Latina women die of breast cancer at higher rates than the general population. In fact, Komen itself recognized these links in a 2011 statement on its relationship with Planned Parenthood:

While Komen Affiliates provide funds to pay for screening, education and treatment programs in dozens of communities, in some areas, the only place that poor, uninsured or under-insured women can receive these services are through programs run by Planned Parenthood.

Komen further stated:

These facilities serve rural women, poor women, Native American women, women of color, and the un- and under-insured. As part of our financial arrangements, we monitor our grantees twice a year to be sure they are spending the money in line with our agreements, and we are assured that Planned Parenthood uses these funds only for breast health education, screening and treatment programs.

As long as there is a need for health care for these women, Komen Affiliates will continue to fund the facilities that meet that need.

But apparently those women no longer matter as Komen’s support has now been withdrawn.

Rep Kymberly Pine (Hawaii Republican State Legislator) is hopping mad at her ex-website designer.  According to Eric Ryan, her website designer, she didn’t pay her bill so he…er….”redesigned” her website and the changed  header on her email list.  Next time she sent out an email blast to her supporters and the press the header read, “Kymberly Pine is a Crook”.  Uh Oh.  Bad idea to piss off your web designer while he still has access to your site, Kym.

Getting  no relief from the courts, (sorry, Kym, if you don’t pay your website bill, it isn’t yours) she decided to take things into her own hands and use her position on the Hawai’i State Legislature to get vengeance for her humiliation.

This was not a very bright decision on Kymberly Pine’s part because it brought national attention to her, the KymPineIsACrook.com website and her ludicrous bills.

First up – The bill that got the national attention: HB2288. HB2288 would have required that all entities providing Internet access track and store every page every customer visits and keep that information for two years.  In one fell swoop she got the Internet citizens mad at her (and they were primed having just finished blacking out sites on Stop SOPA day) AND she got the guys on the other side mad at her too (ISPs, Telcoms and even coffee houses – we’ll get to the coffee houses later)

She even made CNET news. And not in a good way.

So why did coffee houses weigh in?  The bill was so poorly written that even places offering their customers wi-fi could have been required to track and store their customer’s Internet history.

Testimony poured in. Two letters favored the bill: The Honolulu Police Department and a woman that I’m betting was Rep. Pine’s friend.  Right after the HPD’s letter (which was salivating over the prospect of being able to track every citizen in Hawaii’s Internet use) the Honolulu County IT Manager weighed in, saying he’d have to shut down his LAN system if the bill passed.  Apparently HPD didn’t check with IT about the technical downside of this bill.

The ISPs, Tmobile, Verizon  all sent testimony pointing out that with shared IPs, identifying who was accessing what page would be technologically challenging and storing all that information would require acres of data equipment.

The ACLU pointed out that the Fourth Amendment prohibits actions like this without a warrant.  Voters mentioned the First Amendment and the chilling effect of having every website you visit stored for easy perusal by police.

Within an hour someone registered JohnMizuno.com and redirected it to an article bashing the bill.

Here’s the inside story of what happened and how the bill was killed.

On Dec. 18, a dozen retirees, men and women in their 60s, 70s, even 80s, began occupying a median strip along Route 33 in front of the closed Century Aluminum smelter in Ravenswood, W.Va. In tents and under tarps, a small group stays overnight, despite hypertension, arthritis and other old age ailments. One has suffered a stroke.

These vulnerable people expose themselves to weather extremes although some have no health insurance at all. Century cancelled it. That’s why they’re occupying Century.

The retirees labored their entire lives for wages and pensions comparably lower than those of other aluminum workers. They did it believing they made those sacrifices in exchange for good, lifelong health coverage. Over the past two years, however, Century evicted them, about 540 retirees altogether, from the insurance plan.

The betrayal burns. Executives at Century, corporate 1 percenters, committed the same sort of treachery that is being condemned by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators representing the victimized 99 percent across the country. Thus the retirees adopted the grandchildren’s protest tactic of encampment.

Century shuttered the 50-year-old Ravenswood smelter in February of 2009, throwing 651 workers out of jobs. Century, headquartered in Monterey, Calif., didn’t go bankrupt though. It still operates aluminum plants in Kentucky, South Carolina and Iceland. And it didn’t immediately cancel promised insurance for retirees.

Nine months after the shutdown, it announced it would terminate as of June 1, 2010 health benefits for retirees eligible for Medicare. Then on Nov. 1, 2010, Century told its retirees who weren’t yet eligible for Medicare that it would stop paying for their coverage as of Jan. 1, 2011.

This revoking of earned benefits isn’t an isolated incident or a fluke. It is part of a pattern documented by Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Ellen E. Schultz in her new book “Retirement Heist.” The subtitle is, “How companies plunder and profit from the nest eggs of American workers.

She describes in gory detail how corporations raided worker pension accounts, siphoning off surpluses that would be needed later to prop up plans damaged by the Wall Street collapse. She provides detailed accounts of executives gouging the funds to pay for their own exorbitant retirement packages. She tells of corporate executives ending retiree health insurance and freezing pensions but deceptively calling the changes improvements, so that CEOs could pump up company profits with money that had been pledged to workers.

While breaking promises to workers and violating contracts, these CEO 1 percenters falsely portrayed themselves as beleaguered champions of workers, valiantly attempting to preserve underfunded pensions. Like Costa Concordia Captain Francesco Schettino saving himself while abandoning passengers on his sinking cruise ship, the captains of industry padded their own pockets with pension and health care funds intended for retirees, then deserted the workers. Schultz describes the CEO scams this way in the book:

Imagine if a bunch of the craziest war-hungry Republicans in the House filmed themselves in a nutty bat-guano video packed with lies addressed to the President of the United States.  And then imagine President Barack Obama almost immediately agreeing with them.  I can think of two ways in which such a series of events could go unnoticed, as it just has.

First, it could be about something insignificant. But this was about undoing the automatic cuts to the military mandated by the failure of the Supercommittee (remember, the top news story of a few months back?).  The military, across various departments, swallows over half of federal discretionary spending, and there’s no greater obsession in the corporate media than the great Spending vs. Cuts issue.  This is NOT insignificant.

Second, it could be about something that the elites of both major parties agree on, the media therefore ignores, most Republican voters love, and Democratic voters pretend not to notice because the President is a Democrat and an election is less than a year away.

If you’re guessing the second option, you are right. (Tell them what they’ve won, Leon!)  You are now the proud owners of the most expensive military ever seen, plus coming increases that will be presented as “cuts.”

When the Supercommittee failed, automatic federal budget cuts were to kick in — half to things we need and half to the bloated military.  The military cuts would take us back to 2004 spending.  We seem to have survived 2004 and the years preceding it OK.

The Pentagon claims to be making other cuts already, but they are “cuts” to dream budgets resulting in actual budget increases — and that’s not even counting increased war spending through other departments.

House Republicans have sent President Obama this crazy video opposing military cuts and introduced legislation to slash 10% of non-military government jobs instead. In the Senate, John McCain is said to be working on a similar bill.

Wednesday, 1 February, is the day the House Judiciary sub-committee will hold a hearing on HB 2638/SB 2508, a broadly worded, vaguely inclusive bill that would make “a person’s use or assembly upon publically-owned property” a Class C Misdemeanor, subject to removal and a $50 fine.

Bill Howell of “Tennesseans for Fair Taxation” penned an op-ed in The Tennessean today, claiming the bills

would curtail the First Amendment rights of Tennesseans and deprive unhoused people of most of the few safe places where they may live.

ON has a series of actions planned, including attending the hearing, and is asking for supporters to meet in Legislative Plaza at 2:30. You can also  email Gov. Haslam and the bill’s sponsors, and call the House Judiciary Subcommittee, if you can’t be there and wish to help.

Jason and Joe from ON offer more details about the actions.