News on Youtube Oct 1 2018

Recently, 16 states filed an amicus brief with the US Supreme Court trying to argue

that these states should be allowed to fire people based on their sexual orientation alone,

or their gender identity alone.

These states include Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska,

Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Unless I'm wrong, all of these are Republican-controlled states, and the attorneys general for every

one of these states signed on to this amicus brief telling the Supreme Court that if they

take up an upcoming case that says that employer is allowed to fire someone for being gay,

that they want to make sure that their state is allowed to let their employers do that

too.

That's what's at stake here.

16 different states want to allow employers in their state to fire someone based on their

sexual orientation.

This is a threat to the entire LGBTQ community, as well as to everyone else.

That is a thing people have to understand.

You know, there's still people out there who think that, "Oh, well, it's LGBTQ.

That's not me.

Why should I care about this?

What does this matter?"

Because there's always a slope and it always starts somewhere.

If you don't speak up for Group A, but you happen to be in Group B, well guess who's

next on the agenda?

Maybe you're in Group E, so you got five more groups that are going to go down before you

do, but it is coming for you as well.

Everyone should be concerned about this, not just because, oh, it may come for me later,

but because of the gross injustice that these people in the LGBTQ community have to live

with every single day.

A nine year old kid this week committed suicide after being bullied for coming out as gay.

A nine year old kid killed himself because of that, and here we have states, 16 of them,

that want to say, "You know what?

We want discrimination to be legal."

Their reasoning, their legal reasoning for this. is because they're arguing that the

1964 Civil Rights Act, when it mentions you can't be fired based on your sex, that only

includes your sex at birth.

You know?

Whatever you were born with.

That's the only thing it protects.

It doesn't protect any kind of gender identity later on in life, or any kind of sexual orientation,

because it just says sex which means gender at birth, and so that's what we're going to

go with.

Totally strict interpretation of this.

Laws cannot ever evolve or mean something different as things change over time.

That's what these states are afraid of.

Change over time, but change is inevitable.

Time is inevitable, and no matter how much Republicans want to try and stop time, there

is nothing they can do to stop progress from happening, so they can file their amicus briefs.

The Supreme Court may even rule in their favor, but that is not going to stop.

That is not going to stop these people from trying to just live their lives, and go to

work like any other human being wants to do, and be treated as an equal regardless of sexual

orientation, race, religion, gender, whatever.

But these states trying to take that away from people because they're run by a bunch

of bigots and there is no other way to say that.

To lighten things up a little bit, let's talk about climate change.

It's always a fun story.

Well, in this case it actually is.

You see, Texas Republican Representative John Culberson, Republican from Texas again, serves

in the US House of Representatives, recently got busted taking $50,000 from his campaign

funds and spending that money on trinkets and knickknacks for his office at home.

When he finally got busted for it, which by the way, that is 100% illegal, he came up,

he and his aides, came up with what might be the best response I've ever seen to somebody

who got popped for corruption.

And that is, he was buying these things because he wants to better understand climate change.

Now there is a reason they tried to use this defense here.

Some of the things, not all, but some of the things that he purchased were fossils, and

they said, his aides, said that he bought these fossils because he wants to learn more

about paleo-climatology.

He's going to allegedly study these fossils to determine what the levels of carbon were

at the time, millions of years ago, when the animal whose fossil it is was alive.

So this man, John Culberson, with no advanced degrees at all, has no idea how to even study

a fossil, or determine carbon levels in the atmosphere from said fossil, he is still somehow

managing to do that, all in an attempt to avoid some kind of conviction for illegal

use of campaign funds.

God, I wish that was the end of the story, but it gets so much funnier, because it turns

out the place where Culberson bought those fossils, they don't usually actually sell

fossils.

What they sell are replicas of fossils.

So, Culberson going to take a replica fossil, a piece of plastic, and use that plastic to

determine how much carbon was in the atmosphere when the animal that it allegedly came from

was alive.

Again, I so wish that was the end of it, but it gets much worse again because Culberson,

as it turns out, the man who wants to study climate change by looking at fossils and making

sure everything checks out, he's also a science denier who does not believe that climate change

is real.

So, all of this big grand excuse to cover up his massive corruption unravels, literally

at every point in his story.

It's not a real fossil.

You don't have an advanced degree to even do the things you're claiming you're going

to do, and you don't even believe in the things that you claim that you're going to be able

to do from the thing that you bought that's not even real.

This is the level of insanity, folks, that we're dealing with, with Republicans in office

today.

I have to say this was probably my favorite story that I have read this year, because

it encapsulates everything that Republicans have become.

The arrogance of thinking you can get away and fool the people.

The stupidity of being duped into buying fake fossils in the first place.

And three, the downright corruption of misusing campaign funds.

John Culberson from Texas represents the Republican Party today better than anyone else in this

country except for Donald Trump, because he is everything that the Republican Party stands

for.

Arrogance, stupidity, and corruption.

The Holy Trinity of today's GOP.

We'll be right back.

For more infomation >> States BEG Supreme Court To Let Them Fire Gay Employees - Duration: 7:46.

-------------------------------------------

Weyerhaeuser Company v. United States Fish and Wildlife Service [SCOTUSbrief] - Duration: 4:37.

The Endangered Species Act recognizes that the biggest challenge facing endangered and

threatened species is the loss of habitat, and so one of the ways that it goes about

trying to solve the problem of species extinction is to identify and protect a critical habitat

for those species.

The issue in this case is whether it makes sense and whether it's lawful for the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service to designate land as critical habitat and, therefore, impose

pretty significant regulatory burdens if the land isn't currently habitat for the species

and in its current condition can't contribute to the species recovery.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is an unfortunate spot.

The amount of habitat that exists for this frog is not enough to provide for its recovery.

Everyone recognizes that the only way for the dusky gopher frog to recover is for new

habitat to be created that it can grow into, and this case arose because the service was

trying to figure out how to do that and chose to designate land as critical habitat even

though in its current condition it can't be used as habitat.

And the critical habitat designation is an odd federal process that doesn't immediately

trigger any additional regulatory requirements, but it can have a significant impact on property

owners if their use of their property down the road requires any sort of federal funding

or federal permit.

So, for example, in the Weyerhaeuser case, the concern is that, once the timber harvesting

plan is done and the property owner wants to build housing or do some other change to

the use of the property, other regulatory permit requirements may trigger a process

under the Endangered Species Act that can be extremely costly and time consuming and

could perhaps, result in the denial of any use of the property whatsoever.

The service estimated what the impact on the property owners would be under these scenarios

and found that it could be high as a $34 million loss to the property owners.

The species was listed as endangered in the early 2000s.

The service initially posed to only designate occupied habitat as critical habitat but a

peer review recommended expanding and looking at other areas where the species could grow into.

So in the late 2000s, the service proposed to designate this area of Louisiana also as

critical habitat.

That was immediately challenged by the property owners.

This land has changed substantially from what it was as the historic habitat for the species.

People have not allowed wildfires to burn through the area like they did historically.

There's been increased development, both urban and suburban, and most of the forest that

the frog needs for its habitat is no longer there.

The longleaf pine has been replaced with other species that grow faster and are better for

the timber harvesting industry.

So if you were to put frogs there now, no population could be established without substantially

changing the land.

Weyerhaeuser's best argument is that when Congress authorized the designation of critical

habitat, it used the word habitat, and Weyerhaeuser says it did so for a reason.

It didn't want to give an agency carte blanche to regulate all land in the country.

It was focused on a particular problem.

It wanted to provide for the protection of the areas where species actually lives or

could live.

And when you go beyond that and allow the designation of areas that are currently not

habitable you've created an open-ended power that enjoys no support in the text of the

statute.

The service's best argument is that it's not about broad principles and broad statutory

interpretation questions.

It's how do we protect and recover the dusky gopher frog when we have this problem of not

enough habitat in existence.

They're focusing on the values and the purposes underlying the statute, that the reason why

Congress enacted the Endangered Species Act was to protect and recover species.

And the service says that the only way to do that for this species is to protect land

like this, which even though it's not currently habitat, has characteristics that makes it

possible to restore it and create habitat there.

Every survey shows that 99% of Americans support the underlying purposes of the Endangered

Species Act.

And this is a critical question of how the statute works and the way we pursue species

protection and recovery.