What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers?

As Ryan Koopmans first reported at On Brief: Iowa’s Appellate Blog, at least one Iowa Supreme Court justice seems to have changed his mind about the unanimous ruling issued last December in a gender discrimination case. The decision drew national media attention after justices determined that the plaintiff, Melissa Nelson, was not discriminated against for being a woman, but fired as “an isolated employment decision based on personal relations.” Koopmans wrote this week, “Chief Justice Cady issued an order withdrawing the December opinion and stating that the court would resubmit the case, without oral argument, this Wednesday, June 26.  There’s no indication of when the court will issue its new decision […].”

Nelson’s attorney filed a petition to rehear the case soon after the ruling was announced. The Iowa Supreme Court has granted only five requests for re-hearings in the past decade, Jeff Eckhoff reported for the Des Moines Register. Koopmans commented, “I expect that there will be at least one opinion coming out in favor of Melissa Nelson. The question is whether that opinion is the majority or the dissent.”

For those sympathetic to Paula Deen, who says she’s not a racist and no longer uses “the N-word,” I recommend reading what’s been alleged in the lawsuit filed against her. Her disturbing behavior goes way beyond using offensive language from time to time. She deserves to lose her Food Network show and her various endorsement contracts. I’ve disliked Deen ever since she started profiting from a diabetes drug after promoting an unhealthy diet for years. DeWayne Wickham said it well in this column, which I’ve excerpted after the jump.

This is an open thread: all topics welcome. Congratulations to the Cedar Rapids Gazette’s Todd Dorman on 20 years working in journalism.

Syndicated column by DeWayne Wickham, Forgive Paula Deen for epithet, but not butter:

I’m willing to give Deen a pass on something she confessed to saying years ago. What I have a problem with is not the racist talk for which she has apologized. It’s her years of hawking of unhealthy eating — such as her recipe for two glazed doughnuts wrapped around a cheeseburger patty. That should have pushed Food Network executives to give her the boot before her n-word scandal broke.

The time Deen spent on television publicly urging people to eat gooey butter cakes, fried butter balls and skillet fried apple pie was an attack on the health of millions of Americans that the Food Network condoned.

Even after discovering she has Type 2 diabetes — a disease fueled by the obesity that springs from the high-fat, high-calorie recipes she extoled on her TV show — Deen waited three years before telling her audience. During that time, she cut back on her meal portions and lost 30 pounds, but she gave her viewers little warning that the food she pushed on TV could shorten their lives.

“I wanted to bring something to the table when I came forward, and I’ve always been one to think that I bring hope, because I’ve had lots of obstacles in my life,” Deen said during a January 2012 appearance on NBC’s Today show.

What she brought to the table was a paid gig to be the commercial face of a pharmaceutical company that sells a treatment for Type 2 diabetes. Of course, Deen could have pushed the prevention of diabetes through a healthier diet, but instead she took the money to shill a drug to treat the victims of the kind of bad eating she promotes.