John Cassidy at the New Yorker:

Around 4:30 P.M. Eastern time on Saturday, the San Antonio Express-News broke the news of the death of Antonin Scalia, the conservative Supreme Court Justice. Within a few hours, the Republican Party had placed itself on a trajectory that, if isn’t reversed, could throw the Presidential election to the Democrats.

In apparent contravention of precedent and the U.S. Constitution, the leader of the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, said that President Obama shouldn’t be allowed to name a replacement for Scalia. “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell said in a statement posted on his Facebook page. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”

It’s a little reminiscent of the open-air theft of Malheur, in a way – the flagrant contempt for the rule of law. But it’s also different, because Mitch McConnell isn’t a Nevada rancher with a stupid grudge, he’s a United States Senator. You’d think and hope he would agree with the basic rules and laws that apply to his job – his job which is making the laws for the rest of us.

He doesn’t get to refuse to do a part of his job. This isn’t Saturday at home with the kids, this is the god damn government.

A United Nations Population Fund report finds that more than half of teenage girls in Pakistan think men get to beat up women if they’re married to them. The Independent reports:

Refusing sex was just one of the reasons girls aged between 15 and 19 believed a husband would be justified in beating his wife, while more than 30 per cent of girls of the same age had already experienced physical or sexual violence in Pakistan.

The web of beliefs that must underlie that one is so depressing – that men own women, that marriage is the ownership of a woman (or women) by a man, that women are passive objects meant to be owned by men, that women have no right to a will of their own, that women have no right to say no to men, that women are essentially slaves, that girls and women deserve to be beaten for attempting to have a will of their own.

The report, entitled  ‘Sexual and Reproductive Health of Young People in Asia and the Pacific’, also included data from Cambodia, India, Bangladesh and Nepal which revealed similar attitudes about violence against women among teenage boys, the Express Tribune reported.

Between 25 and 51 per cent said that wife beating was justified.

It isn’t really surprising, I suppose…except that when it’s put into stark words like that, as opposed to just being how life is, it does seem surprising that the underlings say yes, we deserve to be subject to violence by our oppressors.

The Republicans have been stonewalling lower court judges. Politico last July:

The GOP-controlled Senate is on track this year to confirm the fewest judges since 1969, a dramatic escalation of the long-running partisan feud over the ideological makeup of federal courts.

The standoff, if it continues through the 2016 elections as expected, could diminish the stamp that President Barack Obama leaves on the judiciary — a less conspicuous but critical part of his legacy. Practically, the makeup of lower-level courts could directly affect a number of Obama’s policies expected to face legal challenges from conservatives.

They’ve been breaking the government, in short.

Republicans appear willing to absorb criticism that they’re interfering with the prerogative of a president to pick his nominees in the hope that the GOP can get its own judges installed in 2017, with one of their own in the White House. In the meantime, federal courts could be left with dozens of unfilled vacancies. More than two dozen federal courts have declared “ judicial emergencies” because of excessive caseloads caused by vacancies.

But hey, who cares about the law and the courts and getting the work done when there are political points to be scored.

Republicans say there’s little reason to shift gears with a lame-duck president in office and hopes running high that they will win the White House.

Wtf? So they get to stop doing what they’re supposed to be doing just because a president has only a couple of years left in office? That’s how that’s supposed to work? I don’t think so!

I guess it’s an illusion to think there are any grownups anywhere.

Already.

Republicans Vow to Block Obama Replacing Scalia on High Court

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to block President Barack Obama in his remaining months in office from replacing Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, a direct challenge to the White House that is certain to roil the 2016 presidential campaign.

“The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said in a statement shortly after Scalia’s death was made public. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

That’s a ludicrous thing to say. We don’t have a direct voice, we have the indirect voice of voting for a presidential candidate. We did that, and there is a duly elected president. There’s no rule that says once the endless presidential campaign has officially begun we have to wait until after the election. On the contrary, court vacancies are supposed to be filled reasonably promptly.

Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, quickly countered with a warning against trying to run out the clock on Obama’s presidency by holding up a replacement for Scalia, who was found dead Saturday at a resort in West Texas. He urged Obama to send a nomination to the Senate “right away.”

“It would be unprecedented in recent history for the Supreme Court to go a year with a vacant seat,” Reid said. “Failing to fill this vacancy would be a shameful abdication of one of the Senate’s most essential Constitutional responsibilities.”

Nothing new there then.

Democrats have sought to use the potential for court vacancies as an election-year issue to encourage voter turnout, saying the next president likely will replace three justices on the aging court. They have warned that a Republican president could tip the court more heavily against women’s reproductive rights and campaign finance reforms they favor and in support of corporations.

Not so much could as inevitably will.

Within minutes of the reports of Scalia’s death, conservatives began mobilizing to argue that President Barack Obama should not be allowed to appoint a successor.

“It would be wise for everybody to wait until the next president is chosen,” Hatch said Saturday on Fox News. “Seeing the type of judges that the president has appointed, there aren’t many Republicans who are going to differ with Majority Leader McConnell.”

If you know what’s good for you.

Good teachers? We don’t need no stinkin’ good teachers.

Tom Porton is used to drama: Since arriving at James Monroe High School as an English teacher 45 years ago, he has taught and staged plays. Outside, in the Bronx River neighborhood where the school is, there was plenty of drama in the 1980s, when AIDS and crack ravaged the area. His response then was to establish a group of peer educators who worked with Montefiore Medical Center to teach teenagers about H.I.V. prevention. His efforts earned him awards, including recognition from the City Council and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and led to his induction into the National Teachers Hall of Fame.

So therefore the new principal decided to hassle him into quitting.

Last month he clashed with Brendan Lyons, the school’s principal, who disapproved of his distributing H.I.V./AIDS education fliers that listed nonsexual ways of “Making Love Without Doin’ It” (including advice to “read a book together”). This month, he said the principal eliminated his early-morning civic leadership class, which engaged students in activities such as feeding the homeless, saying it was not part of the Common Core curriculum. Mr. Porton was already skeptical of that curriculum, saying it shortchanged students by focusing on chapters of novels and nonfiction essays rather than entire works of literature.

So he’s leaving.

Mr. Porton has been teaching and coordinating student activities long enough to see Monroe go from a large urban high school to one housing several smaller schools, including his, the Monroe Academy for Visual Arts and Design. Mr. Lyons — who repeatedly replied “no comment” to questions during a telephone conversation — arrived at the school at the start of the academic year. A previous tenure at a Manhattan high school was marked by his replacing paper hall passes with toilet plungers, which students used to wreak havoc on property and one another.

Um…what? Was that a move to shame students for having to pee? Captain Queeg in the Bronx?

H.I.V. and AIDS may have faded from the public mind, but they remain a danger in places like the South Bronx, especially among young blacks and Latinos. Mr. Porton said the school has failed to meet Department of Education mandates to educate students about the diseases, making his work all the more necessary.

Mr. Lyons, who would not say if the school met the mandates, never explained his objections to Mr. Porton. At the start of this semester, Mr. Porton said, the principal eliminated the 40-student leadership class because he said it was not part of the standard curriculum, even though the class met before the formal start of the school day. Because of that, combined with Mr. Porton’s disappointment over the standardized test frenzy that rules in many schools, he chose to leave.

“School is not pleasant, the way it was when I started,” he said. “They pay lip service to the social and emotional well-being of the child. My generation of teachers had a mind-set about how to teach a child. Today, many young teachers see teaching as a way to kill time on the way to something else.”

Selling real estate, probably.

So the students lose and toilet plunger guy wins.

Among the things people shouldn’t waste their time doing: fretting about festivals and celebrations that come from other cultures and therefore are not local and Authentic. That’s especially true for government officials, and even more so when their fretting intensifies into forbidding.

The president of Pakistan for instance:

Pakistan’s president has denounced St Valentine’s Day, saying the festival has no connection with Pakistani culture and should be avoided.

President Mamnoon Hussain told students that it was a Western tradition and conflicted with Muslim culture.

So what? We can learn from each other’s cultures. I find over-the-top commercial Valentine stuff rather silly, but that’s just me. Let’s have celebrations of everything. It was Darwin day yesterday; maybe today could be birdwatching day or daffodil day.

His remarks came after a district in north-western Pakistan banned Valentine’s Day celebrations.

Valentine’s Day is popular in many cities in Pakistan, but religious groups have denounced it as decadent.

Religious groups specialize in forbidding things that are completely harmless, simply because humans enjoy them. God the Massive Grouch, taking away all our ice cream.

In past years, conservative social groups, who view the day as a festival of immorality detrimental to traditional marriage, have declared the day to be “shameless”.

Renowned civil society activist Sabeen Mahmud once set up a demonstration with slogans including “Karachi says Yes to Love”. (Last April, she was killed in a drive-by shooting, although not necessarily for that particular issue.)

In neighbouring India, Valentine’s Day also garners opposition, usually from Hindu conservatives who say it is alien to Indian culture and – as argued by Pakistani Muslims – contrary to traditions such as arranged marriages.

Ah yes, well it would be, wouldn’t it – and a good thing too. Oddly enough it’s not a particularly brilliant idea to force people to live in intimate proximity for life regardless of whether or not they can stand each other. Humans aren’t machines for the production of more human machines for the production of more human machines ad infinitum. Why should we be made to live with people we don’t like and didn’t choose?

Knock yourselves out, Valentine people.

Now that’s how Malheur is supposed to be occupied.

The same day four final holdouts ended the armed occupation of a remote wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon, a new occupation was just getting underway.

According to two decades’ worth of federal data, Feb. 11 is, on average, the earliest date migrating tundra swans begin appearing at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, exiting the Pacific Flyway to rest in the vast wetlands of the high desert oasis.

Northern pintails have probably already arrived. Red-winged blackbirds, too. This weekend, expect snow geese, then killdeer and sandhill cranes. They will keep coming deep into May – fresh wing beats descending unarmed and unintimidated.

And not talking about freedom while stealing public land at gunpoint.

On the other hand the occupation has made Malheur better known.

“We do have the migratory bird festival in April, and my hunch is that festival is going to be bigger than ever because Malheur being in the news has increased the awareness of an awful lot of people,” said Harv Schubothe, the president of the Oregon Birding Assn.

Membership in the Friends of Malheur has soared in recent weeks, as has the number of people offering to volunteer with the Oregon Natural Desert Assn. As Jeff Holm, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Oregon, which operates the refuge, put it: “Make lemonade out of lemons, I guess.”

But there’s stuff that needs doing, water management and invasive species control, that’s not getting done because of the occupation and now the investigation.

The FBI said Thursday it was bringing in an expert from its Art Crime Team to work with the service and the Burns Paiute Tribe “to identify and document damage to the tribe’s artifacts and sacred burial grounds.” Greg Bretzing, the head of the FBI in Oregon, said the investigators would determine whether there had been violations of federal laws protecting tribal and archaeological sites.

Charlotte Rodrique, tribal council chairwoman for the Burns Paiute Tribe, said in an interview on Friday that she was concerned after seeing videos of armed occupiers rifling through tribal artifacts stored at the refuge and that they had apparently used heavy equipment to carve out a roadway near an area where tribal members who died in the 19th century were reburied.

She said that in the long memories of wildlife and of the tribe, the refuge is essential and sacred. It is never truly off limits and it has no firm borders.

If only people like the Bundy gang respected that sort of claim.

PZ is recruiting new people to join Freethought Blogs.

So if you want to blog here, here’s what you do: send an email to ftbapplications@googlegroups.com, in which you give us this information:

Name

Contact email

Do you want your email public?

Twitter account, if any

Link for donations, if any

Links to your current blog, any biographical material, or best examples of your writing in comments or forums or other media

Why do you want to write for us?

It’s that easy. This is a private communication to the bloggers here; none of this information will be made public without your permission.

Good luck, applicants.

Serious applications will be examined for their suitability. Our requirements are simple: we want godless Social Justice Warriors. If that’s you, why aren’t you writing for us already?

Hmm, good question, why is that? Why aren’t I writing for them already? Oh yes, I remember! It’s because several of the bloggers there united to trash me on their blogs because they decided I wasn’t orthodox enough on one plank of the Social Justice Warrior Platform. That’s why. So actually their requirements aren’t as simple as PZ makes it sound. Good luck, applicants, but be warned: it’s not true that there’s no orthodoxy enforced.

What are the rewards, you ask?

• You get space for a blog of your very own!
• You get to join a group of supportive people!

Ah, no. That’s really not one of the rewards. That shouldn’t be claimed as one of the rewards, because it’s not accurate. It’s not a group of supportive people, at least not currently. It could become that but it’s not that now.

Mind you, the chances are very good that it will improve, because nearly all of the most toxic ones are leaving to create their own super-toxic little network. There are some terrific people at FTB, like Taslima and Maryam and Yemisi and the Nirmukta crew. But don’t go expecting a whole group of supportive people, because that’s just not the reality. I know, I was there.

Peter Walker is reporting from the no-longer-stolen Malheur NWR. He was allowed in with the journalists today and posted a bunch of photos. This one coupled with his commentary is very striking.

Peter Walker

An example of how things have changed. When I visited the refuge during the occupation, there were always armed militants in this fire tower. They watched everything and had their long guns ready. It was unnerving. Now it’s a fire tower again and getting near it doesn’t give me a sense of deep anxiety. An example of things getting back to some sanity.

Can you imagine? That’s a public facility, and that structure is a fire tower – for spotting wild fires. Armed men who stole the facility stood up there with rifles threatening everyone below.

A happy ending though.

Peter Walker

The liberation of the refuge came just in time. Between early January (when the occupation started) and now, there’s already a dramatic difference in the landscape–the marshes are mostly thawed, there are geese in some areas, and the landscape is warming up for literally millions of birds in April. Life on the refuge, and in the community I believe, will return to normal soon.

Millions of birds, and zero Bundys.

The Guardian posted this video by Julie Bindel yesterday. It’s had 2.5 million views already.

It’s a specialty gallery.

Oenotrian’s Virginia:

David Richards’s Merlyn:

If you have any tilted cats you would like to add to the gallery, send them.

New: Peter Nothnagle’s Gus sharpening his claws:

latsot’s Fortran:

Rich Roberts’s Sugar:

iknklast’s Sir Winston and Mr Murphy:

Minnie The Finn’s Shiftie:

Josh Spokes’s Shredder: