This California case comes about as close to the line as any. The state judge held that the baker did not violate either the CA or US Constitutions since she had an artist's right to decline to prepare a cake for a same sex wedding. Two women requested a cake for their impending nuptials without any special adornments. Nevertheless, the judge held, the baker had the legal right to refuse because she would have known while she was preparing the cake that it would be used to celebrate an event she found for religious reasons to be abhorrent.

I think this decision is wrong but it's close. Identical reasoning would justify a refusal to bake for a mixed wedding or an African-American couple. This makes me even more uncomfortable defending the decision. Still, I don't want the government to force people to do work that they don't wish to do.

In the end, I think the judge got it wrong because the specific service sought by the gay couple is no different than service that the baker apparently provides for straight weddings. Thus, the absence of a request for a same sex decoration makes the difference for me.

Ultimately, this decision if upheld could be cited by racist restaurant managers or homophobic store clerks as permitting them to deny service to African American patrons or gay customers. I'd have ruled in favor of the couple.

By Patricia Mazzei & Agustin Armendariz @ NYTimes.com, Feb. 6

[....] Four months after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, a picture is emerging of the contracts awarded in the earliest days of the crisis. And examples like the Tribute contract are causing lawmakers to raise questions about FEMA’s handling of the disaster and whether the agency was adequately prepared to respond.

On Tuesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, which has been investigating the contract, asked Representative Trey Gowdy, the committee chairman, to subpoena FEMA for all documents relating to the agreement. Lawmakers fear the agency is not lining up potential contractors in advance of natural disasters, leading it to scramble to award multimillion-dollar agreements in the middle of a crisis.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a bipartisan congressional investigation found that a failure to secure advance contracts led to chaos and potential for waste and fraud. Democrats asserted that FEMA was similarly inept preparing for this storm. “It appears that the Trump Administration’s response to the hurricanes in Puerto Rico in 2017 suffered from the same flaws as the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005,” [....]

By Valentina Zarya @ Fortune.com, Feb. 6

One of the unintended consequences of the #MeToo movement seems to be the alienation of male mentors.

A new set of findings from women’s empowerment non-profit LeanIn.Org and online survey platform SurveyMonkey reveal that, since the media reports of sexual harassment first emerged last fall, male managers are three times as likely to say they are uncomfortable mentoring women and twice as uncomfortable working alone with a woman. The hesitation to meet with women outside of work is even more pronounced: Senior men were 3.5 times more likely to hesitate having a work dinner with a junior female colleague than a male one–and five times more likely to hesitate to travel for work with a junior woman.

In a Facebook post Tuesday morning, LeanIn.Org founder Sheryl Sandberg explained that men’s increasing unwillingness to mentor their female colleagues [....]

By Harry Enten @ FiveThirtyEight.com, Feb. 1

[....] while California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Virginia account for only a small percentage of Republican-held seats overall, they are home to a disproportionate share of vulnerable Republicans. According to the Cook Political Report, these five states are home to 38 percent of all the Republican-held seats that are truly in play in 2018.1 [....]

[....] The most interesting thing about these states, though, is the total number of Republican seats that are rated as at least somewhat vulnerable.2 If you add them all up, a total of 25 Republican seats in these five populous Clinton states could flip to the Democrats. That’s one more seat than Democrats need to gain a majority. In other words, they could take back the House without flipping a single seat in a state that Trump came close to winning in 2016.

Now, Democrats are probably not going to win a House majority based solely on heavily populated blue states. The competitive districts in these Clinton states aren’t all alike. Some are well-educated, like Virginia’s 10th Congressional District. Others are best described as working-class, like New York’s 22nd District. Some are whiter than the nation as a whole, like New Jersey’s 11th; others are majority non-white, like California’s 39th. The national political environment — what turnout looks like in November, and which groups Democrats over- or underperform with — will therefore manifest itself differently in each of these districts [.....]

Link @ top of home page @ The Kansas City Star, Feb. 3, 2018

Kansas runs one of the darkest state governments in the nation, and its secrecy permeates nearly every aspect of service, The Kansas City Star found in a recent investigation. Readers responded with calls for change in Topeka. Now it's your chance to be heard. 

The Star will host a town hall beginning at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 8, at the Capitol Plaza Hotel in Topeka. We are partnering with the Kansas Press Association, which is holding its annual convention at the hotel. The town hall will take place in the hotel's Emerald Ballroom. 

READ MORE
‘One of the most secretive, dark states’: What is Kansas trying to hide?

All are welcome, but space is limited so we're asking those interested to fill out the following form [....]

WASHINGTON — Speaker Paul D. Ryan faced a backlash on Saturday after he pointed to a secretary’s $1.50 weekly increase in take-home pay as a sign of the Republican tax plan’s success.

“A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week ....

By Timothy Rammers @ ScreenRant.com, Feb. 2

Facebook says it has shut down the group page that was recruiting members to help sabotage Black Panther‘s Rotten Tomatoes score in an effort to alter the public perception of the film. Following the exciting debut of the character played by Chadwick Boseman in Captain America: Civil War in 2016, fans are only two weeks away from the Black Panther solo movie and the anticipation is already at a fever pitch. Early reactions to Marvel superhero extravaganza have been overwhelmingly positive, and fans are clearly hyped, too, as the film is projected to pull in at least $120 million (and as much as $150 million) in its opening weekend.

Despite all the positive vibes about Black Panther, a specter of negativity has been looming over the film in the past couple of days. It began Wednesday when word surfaced that a group claiming to be DC fans said they were organizing an effort to storm Rotten Tomatoes to trash the film’s audience score as revenge for the low scores that DC Extended Universe’s films have received on the site. And while director Ryan Coogler said he wouldn’t let the trolling effort affect him, Rotten Tomatoes stepped up in an effort to prevent people from meddling with the film’s audience score on its site. Now, in a further effort to prevent the anti-Black Panther initiative, the people behind the social media platform where the movement began is taking action [....]

By Barbara Starr & Zachary Cohen @ CNN.com, Feb. 2, 4:18 pm

Washington -- Just as the White House is caught in a political minefield over the Russia investigation, the Pentagon is taking its toughest line yet against Russia's resurgent nuclear forces. In its newly released Nuclear Posture Review, the Defense Department has focused much of its multibillion nuclear effort on an updated nuclear deterrence focused on Russia. "Russia considers the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to be the principal threats to its contemporary geopolitical ambitions," the report says [....]

The report also publicly acknowledges, for the first time, that Russia is "developing" a "new intercontinental, nuclear armed, nuclear-powered, undersea autonomous torpedo."Known in English as the "Status-6" system, the program is described by US officials as essentially a drone-type device fired underwater that can potentially travel thousands of miles and strike US coastal targets such as military bases or cities. Upon detonation, the device is designed to cause large zones of radioactive contamination. Some analysts have called it a "doomsday weapon," and US Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, has labeled the concept "destabilizing." [....]

Neither Trump in the SOTU nor Joe Kennedy, III, in the Democratic response mentioned global warming. But Americans are still finding all sorts of creative and effective ways to fight the fossil fuels industry.