Mother Earth buffeted on both side of continent by fossil fuel trolls

In West Virginia, out of work coal miners join the Trump neo-fascist parade to the presidency when The Donald shamelessly lies to them he'll bring back their landscape damaging, black lung producing jobs gouging coal from Mother Earth. 3,000 miles away, Mother Earth has to rely on a colossal forest fire to prevent the defilers of her precious depths from injecting colossal amounts of steam to force Her dirtiest tar sands to the surface where they should never appear. With 40% of Alberta's filthy racket shuttered, underground steam chambers may collapse, adding more woe to Mother's defilement. As Pete Seeger presciently opined in 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone', "When will they ever learn...when will they ever learn."

Obama's nuclear free world includes $trillion nuclear buildup

President Obama has been promoting a nuclear free world since taking office in 2009. His most visible stance on that early pledge will come May 27 when he visits the Hiroshima nuclear bombing memorial with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to highlight his continued commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. But talk is cheap when you're planning a trillion dollar modernization of our nuclear capability over the next decade while America continues to crumble. Advocates for nuclear disarmament call this 'Obama's trillion dollar trainwreck.' Once again when it comes to doing the right thing about nuclear weapons, it's 'Do as I say, not as I do." The nuclear weapons suppliers are happy. The generals are happy. The neocons are happy. The rest of us? We just fret as the Doomsday Clock moves a tick or two closer to nuclear midnight. 

51 families didn't reach high enough in transgender lawsuit

Fifty-one families in Palatine School District 211 have filed one of the most bizarre lawsuits in Illinois history. These families, represented by anti-LGBT non-profits Alliance Defending Freedom and the Thomas More Society, are trying to overturn the district's agreement with the Department of Education to allow a transgender girl to use the girls locker room. She has already been accepted by her classmates as a girl, uses the girls' restrooms and even competes on girls' sports teams. But when the district agreed with the Department of Education that this girl must have access to the girls'  locker room as well, the Finicky 51 reached out for legal help from two groups in disarray from seeing all their work opposing gay marriage end in failure. Preventing transgenders from changing in the locker room of their sex has become the new battleground in their anti LGBT wars, along with allowing anti gay businesses to refuse serving their gay brothers and sisters. 

The folly and shame of their lawsuit is their refusal to accept that the young lady they wish to banish to the boys locker room is in fact female. The tide of human and social progress will never turn back the strides achieved in granting transgenders the identity, dignity and place in society they so richly deserve. Yet, the lawsuit brands the District 211 transgender a boy with this cruel and heartless description:

“Protecting students from inappropriate exposure to the opposite sex is not only perfectly legal, it’s a school district’s duty. Allowing boys into girls’ locker rooms, a setting where girls are often partially or fully unclothed, is a blatant violation of student privacy."

Like parents who sued to prevent their lily-white kids from sitting in the same school room with blacks, the Finicky 51's anti-transgender lawsuit will fail. What they don't realize is that the God they likely all believe in sometimes makes mistakes. With district Student A, like the thousands of other transgenders who are finally coming out of the shadows to gain a fulfilling life, He simply assigned the wrong genitals at birth, a situation that modern medicine can correct. The Finicky 51 would save our vastly overworked legal system a lot of time and trouble if they would simply withdraw their lawsuit against District 211 and the Departments of Education and Justice, and re-file it with The Man Upstairs. 

President Obama: Visit Hiroshima...and apologize

This month, President Obama makes his fourth and final visit to Japan. He's never seen fit to visit either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the two cities we nuked 71 years ago this August...but he should. If he does visit, he should apologize for our unspeakable acts of violence, using atomic weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, and killed many additional thousands slowly and agonizingly over the decades.

The biggest lie to emerge from our self serving narrative of WWII is that those two nukes saved half a million US military deaths (Truman's guess, that George H.W. Bush inflated to a million) from an invasion to end the war. Having endured the incineration of 100 cites from B-29 dropped napalm, two more cities wiped up using nukes didn't push Japan to surrender. It was the Soviet invasion of August 8, 1945, plus the hope (eventually realized) that Japan could keep Emperor Hirohito. Why did we drop them? Because we could, and we needed to intimidate the Russians, likely triggering the Cold War that lasted for 45 years. Sadly, many in government today seek to re-start it.

It took 65 years for a US government official to visit Hiroshima. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Hiroshima recently and believes Obama should complete the ceremonial and healing process by the last guy in government to get the buck. And the last guy who gets the buck, gets to apologize.