Virus update and still getting worst.....starting to get extremely worried and depressed

The virus cases spike in Texas

The virus is out of control..the Gov is being asked to resign bc he opened the state too early bc he wanted to do what the prez wanted. Alos, the DOJ has been interferring into the prez's friends in prison and trying to get them out....now the prez no longer wants anyone tested bc it would make him look bad- no shit! Now, Europe is looking into banning US americans from traveling to Europe bc the virus is worst her then over there, what kind of shit is that?! these times are so fucking crazy, I'm scared to go anywhere, can't leave the house, can't visit the family, I've missed several family events and now I'm worried that my family who keeps visiting each other are in danger......

My new pair of shoes- thanks Jaime!

Amazing street mural in Austin!

GAY Victory in the Supreme Court!

With LGBT ruling, Supreme Court hands liberals a surprise victory

Two of the court’s Republican appointees joined the court’s Democratic appointees to deliver an unexpected 6-3 triumph for LGBT advocates.

Joseph Fons holds a pride flag in front of the Supreme Court building June 15 after the court ruled that LGBTQ people can not be disciplined or fired based on their sexual orientation. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

By JOSH GERSTEIN and REBECCA RAINEY

06/15/2020 10:21 AM EDT

Updated: 06/15/2020 05:20 PM EDT

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LGBT rights advocates triumphed at the Supreme Court Monday, winning a sweeping decision from the justices that protects gay, lesbian and transgender employees from being disciplined, fired or turned down for a job based on their sexual orientation.

Two of the court’s Republican appointees, Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts, joined the court’s Democratic appointees to deliver the surprising 6-3 victory to those arguing for anti-discrimination protections

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Writing for the court’s majority, the conservative Gorsuch embraced arguments that seemed radical to many liberals just a few years ago: that the 1964 Civil Rights Act's prohibition on sex discrimination in employment also effectively banned bias based on sexual orientation or gender identity, even though few if any members of Congress thought they were doing that at the time.

The decision was a rout for social conservatives and a defeat for President Donald Trump's administration, which had urged the justices to take a narrow view of the half-century-old law.

Some Trump allies immediately denounced Gorsuch's opinion as a betrayal from the Trump appointee. A top Trump aide quickly criticized the ruling, but when the president himself was asked about it he offered a mild response and passed up a chance to try to make political hay out of the court's decree.

"I've read the decision," the president said of the various opinions, which ran to 119 pages in all. "Some people were surprised, but they've ruled and we live with their decision. That's what it's all about. We live with the decision of the Supreme Court. Very powerful, very powerful decision, actually."

Trump asked about Supreme Court LGBT discrimination ruling

While the cases ruled on Monday garnered less attention than the showdown five years ago that led to the court's landmark decision finding a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the latest ruling could be even more impactful, providing millions of LGBT Americans with new workplace rights and ushering in similar legal guarantees of equal treatment in private businesses, schools and elsewhere.

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Yet, the high court's edict also seemed far less earth shaking than the 2015 ruling, perhaps due to ongoing racial unrest and perhaps because polls show an increasingly broad consensus in support of LGBT rights.

Explaining the ruling, Gorsuch said Congress may not have intended to ban discrimination against gays, lesbians and transgender individuals, but that the logic of their protection by the statute was inescapable.

"Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. Likely, they weren’t thinking about many of the Act’s consequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees," Gorsuch wrote.

"But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands," he continued. "When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit."

LGBT activists were thought to face an uphill battle at the high court because Congress has spent more than four decades considering, but failing to pass, measures intended to expand the coverage of the 1964 law by explicitly adding sexual orientation to the list of protected traits.

Such legislation passed the Democrat-controlled House in 2007 and again last year and was approved by the Democrat-controlled Senate in 2013, with the latter two efforts also explicitly aimed outlawing workplace discrimination against transgender people. The bills never cleared both chambers in the same Congress.

That Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion was viewed as a major coup by gay rights advocates. They hoped his professed devotion to “textualism” — an often literal approach to reading Congressional enactments — would persuade him to embrace a view that LGBT discrimination is sex discrimination because it involves treating someone differently at least in part due to gender.

Gorsuch did just that, sounding unequivocal in his conclusions about the half-century-old workplace discrimination ban, known as Title VII.

"An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids," wrote Gorsuch, an appointee of President Donald Trump.

Gorsuch also took a jaundiced eye to suggestions that the court should try to divine why Congress never passed language explicitly adding LGBT protections to the workplace discrimination law.

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"Speculation about why a later Congress declined to adopt new legislation offers a 'particularly dangerous' basis on which to rest an interpretation of an existing law a different and earlier Congress did adopt," he wrote, quoting a prior case.

Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway initially lamented the ruling, arguing that the court departed from Congress' clear intent.

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"We've had the Civil Rights Act for 56 years. Everybody has understood what it meant," she said on Fox News Monday. "It's very important though to stick to a statute or a law as it is written....If people want to change the law they should go to the Congress. Our Congress doesn't seem to like to work as hard as the other two branches."

Some activists who supported Gorsuch as Trump's first Supreme Court nominee were even more vocal, fuming about his betrayal and arguing he'd cast aside the legacy of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, whose vacancy Republicans held open through 2016 so it could be filled by a Trump nominee.

"Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today, for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards," Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network said on Twitter. "This was not judging, this was legislating—a brute force attack on our constitutional system."

Roberts' vote to back LGBT rights in the new ruling was also notable, since he joined the rest of the court’s conservatives in 2015 in vocal dissent from the same-sex marriage decision.

Because the decision Monday is a matter of statutory interpretation, it is not an all-out guarantee of workplace protections for LGBT people in the future, since Congress is free to tinker with the law. But as a practical political matter, it seems highly unlikely Congress would reach a consensus to repeal those rights anytime soon.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh dissented from the new ruling, arguing that Gorsuch's claimed humility about simply interpreting the law's language was belied by the huge gulf between what lawmakers intended and what the court held.

Alito leveled one of the gravest insults one conservative can train on another as he accused his colleague of legislating from the bench.

"There is only one word for what the Court has done today: legislation," Alito, wrote in a fiery dissent joined only by Thomas. "The document that the Court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive...A more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall. The Court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous."

Alito also insisted that textualism doesn't mean reading a statute so literally that the purpose of the authors is ignored.

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"It calls for an examination of the social context in which a statute was enacted because this may have an important bearing on what its words were understood to mean at the time of enactment," he wrote. "Textualists do not read statutes as if they were messages picked up by a powerful radio telescope from a distant and utterly unknown civilization."

Kavanaugh's solo dissent was more restrained in its tone. He said courts must give force to the "ordinary" meaning of the laws Congress passes, not a "literal" one.

"Both the rule of law and democratic accountability badly suffer when a court adopts a hidden or obscure interpretation of the law, and not its ordinary meaning," the court's newest justice wrote.

Kavanaugh said the majority was making "a mistake of history and sociology" because even a rudimentary look at the motivating forces behind the 1964 law shows that it wasn't seeking to advance gay rights.

"Seneca Falls was not Stonewall. The women’s rights movement was not (and is not) the gay rights movement, although many people obviously support or participate in both," he wrote.

The Trump stance was a reversal of positions taken during the Obama administration, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission held that both anti-gay and anti-transgender discrimination violated existing law, although courts divided on those issues.

Social conservatives who argued against finding protections for LGBT Americans in the existing statute sounded dejected Monday about the court's ruling and warned that it will have unexpected effects.

"Redefining ‘sex’ to mean ‘gender identity’ will create chaos and enormous unfairness for women and girls in athletics, women’s shelters, and many other contexts. Civil rights laws that use the word ‘sex’ were put in place to protect equal opportunities for women," said John Bursch of the Alliance Defending Freedom.

By contrast, LGBT activists were ecstatic about the high court's decision.

"This is a landmark victory for LGBTQ equality,” said Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David.

Backers of the new decision said it could spell doom for some Trump administration policies, particularly an effort to roll back protections for transgender individuals seeking health care.

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Prior to Monday’s ruling, court decisions or enforcement authorities in nearly half of U.S. states interpreted state law to prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. In the remaining states, LGBT workers had no legal protection against being fired, demoted or paid less on account of those traits.

LGBT individuals in many states still have no legal protection against other forms of discrimination, such as in housing or public accommodations, although the new decision could bolster efforts to win such protection in the courts or in Congress.

"In many aspects of the public square, LGBTQ people still lack non-discrimination protections, which is why it is crucial that Congress pass the Equality Act to address the significant gaps in federal civil rights laws and improve protections for everyone," David said.

The gay and transgender rights cases decided Monday have been lingering on the court’s docket for more than seven months. They were argued last October, on the second day of the court’s current term.

• Filed Under:
• Discrimination,
• John Roberts,
• LGBT Community,
• LGBTQ,
• SCOTUS,
• Workplace,
• Neil Gorsuch

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Town Lake- all to myself.....

Virus update

NASCAR bans all confederate flags at their events....

Historic! but there is still things to change, Georgia has a chaotic primary with long lines, folks not knowing how to work the voting machines, etc.......scary times for NOV. I scheduled a day off and the next day- one to vote and the next day to celebrate or cry.

Tia Angie funeral info

Surplus notification- I'm safe, at this time

ran 2 mile and walked another 3 miles...this weekend I hope to walk/run a couple of miles to help with my anxiety

Former Gen Mattis rips into Trump for his leadership (or lack of)

 This while folks are still protesting in the streets, folks are dying from the Pandemic (yes, that is still around) and the economy is still struggling.......

In Union There Is Strength

I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.
When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.
James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.
Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.

Finally got a haircut

Update on the virus in Austin:

Historic times.......

We are living through the worst health crisis since the flu pandemic of 1918, the largest economic crisis since the great depression of 1929 and the greatest social unrest since the late 1960s!

So, what happened today at work, lots of retirement announcement from the top executives, forming of new organizations and preparations for massive layoffs in the coming weeks......so, yeah......