caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues and soul musician Luther Allison. Enjoy!

Gov. Paul LePage has ordered the Maine Human Rights Commission and state's the Department of Education to cease issuing rules protecting transgender students.

Schools instead are being given guidelines that lack the force of law.

LePage spokeswoman Adrienne Bennett said LePage has read the court decision and believes it requires the Legislature to take action, and that new rules are not required.

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Saturday February 5, 1916
From the United Mine Workers Journal: Imported Gunthug Walter Belk Acquitted

From the Journal of February 3rd:

Justice Ravished
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Organizer Gerald Lippiatt, Center
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In our last issue, commenting on the action of the miners' convention in pledging moral and financial support to the miners whom the men in power in the State of Colorado are attempting to condemn to felons' cells for daring to resist the oppression of the economic masters and their henchmen, their hired armies, we remarked that the counties of that State where the coal mines are located "were not ruled, but terrorized."

In the last week we have had further proof of the truth of that statement.

Walter Belk, imported from West Virginia to Colorado and there employed because of his reputation as a mankiller who could be depended upon to use his ready gun any time in the service of those who would pay him his price, was acquitted, on the instruction of the judge on the bench to the jury, of the charge of killing Gerald Lippiatt, union organizer, on the streets of Trinidad just before the opening of the strike in Southern Colorado in the fall of 1913.

Leipzig's police chief, Bernd Merbitz, had a very disturbing thing to say in a newspaper interview.

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features soul and blues singer Earl Gaines. Enjoy!

A bill to allow transgender people born in New Jersey to change the sex listed on on their birth certificate without being required to have undergone surgery rises for the third time today.

Though New Jersey has issued changed birth certificates to residents who undergo sex reassignment surgery since the nineteen-eighties, those who do not want or cannot afford surgery have no recourse. A new version of the bill goes to the Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee Thursday.

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Sunday February 4, 1906
From the Montana News: Mary Beals on Child Suicide and Heartless Churches

Readers of Hellraisers might remember a story from the Montana News, written by May Beals, about the suicide of a young cotton mill worker who was too worn out from her labors to go on living. The child sought the sure rest of the grave where her slumbers could not be interrupted by the factory whistle blowing at an early hour. That was a fictional story, but, in a letter to the News, Miss Beals claims that suicides among children who labor in the mines and mills are increasing, especially obvious in France where statistics on child suicide are available.

Writes Miss Beals:

Notice that it is "poor children"—the disinherited—who have no share in the earth, who take themselves out of it. Some good people say that the rapid increase in France is due to the spread of free thought—the decay of religion.

If the function of religion is to hold children in a life of torment, that nothing else can force them to endure, the sooner it decays the better. Truly religion is worth more to the masters than either the constable or the hangman if he can keep the children alive while they are being despoiled. Even capitalism cannot grind profits out of a dead child.

Frida Kahlo’s The Wounded Table

During the epic kerfuffle over Mark Ames (Pando Press) having reported on Pierre Omidyar’s financial support of the US-backed putsch in Kyiv back in 2014, and referenced in JP Sottile’s ‘Things are getting weird at First Look Media’, I was astonished that a large part of the commentariat at (then) Firedoglake was so gullible as to the actual nature of so many of the NGOs such as Centre UA, USAID, and NED (National Endowment for Democracy).  In spaces between writing other diaries, I collected information on the latter two, but never spun my findings into a post.

Stormi is a Girl Scout. She lives in Herrin, IL. When she tried to make a cookie sale to one of her neighbors, he told her,

Nobody wants to buy cookies from a boy in a dress.

You see, Stormi is transgender. She joined the Scouts last fall.

It made me sad, because I’m a girl.

--Stormi

She immediately wanted to go home, said Kim. She cried when she got home.

Stormi was put into foster care and placed with Kim three years ago through an emergency placement plan. She told Kim she wanted to donate cookies to other kids in foster care.

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues piano player Curtis Jones. Enjoy!