An unpleasant week, and it ain't over

Weekly mop-up of chaos and unpleasantries:

Some Plain Dealer  non-union support staffers lost their jobs last week in what they will surely remember as their 90-minute date with destiny.  That's how the PD's front office arranged their painful departure from the payroll.  The company had told a hand-picked group of uncertain numbers to sit by their telephones for 90 minutes and await a possible phone call.  If the phone rang, the staffer was informed  he or she had drawn the unlucky straw in Newhouse's Advance Publications' mission to  "realign " the workforce.   The owners are using the same torturous  tactic at its other papers.  I'm told the next cuts  will come by Aug. 1 as the paper nears the launching of a  three-day home delivery plus a Saturday "bonus" in early August. Not much  else is known about the PD's game plan. Guild President Harlan Spector says he's told very little by the company, and doesn't even know how many people got pink slips in the latest round.  Anybody recall the newspaper crowd's faux Scout motto to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted"?

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It's been mind-blowing  to see the wingers' reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court 's decision to widen democracy's space for same-sex marriages.  Justice Scalia,who dissented, said the 5-4 decision was "jaw-dropping", which for him, is a lot of jaw to drop.  But the most stupendous non-sequitur from the gallery came from forever hyperactive  Bill Donahue, the head of the Catholic League,  who accused the court of engaging in an attack on "religious liberty" while fuming that the ruling was a "malicious effort to  punish people of faith".  Religious liberty?  Until now I had thought that such liberty was the accepted  catalyst of so many different faiths in America.

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Poor Justice Clarence Thomas, the morose  silent majority of one on the hard right who doesn't even speak when spoken to.   Here's a beneficiary of affirmative action who once again voted to keep blacks in their place when he joined the white guys on the bench who shot a big hole in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Do you think he  ever has a sleepless night?

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Still reeling from Texas Rep. Michael Burgess, a Republican  who asserted  that fetuses can start masturbating  in 15 weeks. Who knew?  

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 July's Harper's Index  reports that the highest paid public employe in 37 states is a sports coach.  Note to parents: Do you really want your kid to study to be a doctor?