I’m Sure This is Based on Originalism and Strong Jurisprudence

Another day, another victory for the authoritarian state the Roberts court so clearly pines for:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, joined by the court’s conservative wing, wrote that courts are in no position to second-guess the judgments of correctional officials who must consider not only the possibility of smuggled weapons and drugs but also public health and information about gang affiliations.

About 13 million people are admitted each year to the nation’s jails, Justice Kennedy wrote.

Under Monday’s ruling, he wrote, “every detainee who will be admitted to the general population may be required to undergo a close visual inspection while undressed.”

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the four dissenters, said strip-searches were “a serious affront to human dignity and to individual privacy” and should be used only when there was good reason to do so.

Again, I’m sure I’m just being ignorant and reactionary when I point out the ruling was once again made by the five conservatives in favor of the state. I’m sure this is just a coincidence, and not at all a pattern we’ve witnessed. And, of course, I am not taking “into account the unusual and promising alignments of Scalia and Thomas with the’liberal’ members of the court on criminal rights. It’s just generally ignorant, obscurantist, and unbefitting of the moderator of an otherwise informed blog.”

So y’all keep that in mind when you get a full body cavity search the next time you get arrested for jaywalking. In fairness to the conservatives on the court, I can understand why they think body cavity searches are necessary for misdemeanors. You may have hidden a broccoli mandate somewhere, and nothing scares the shit out of them more than that.

*** Update ***

And one of the first comments misses the whole point:

I doubt many get arrested for jaywalking, unless they deliberately try to avoid arrest.

That matters not. What matters is the court has now given the authorities to humiliate any one they want no matter what. Read this:

Albert W. Florence believes that black men who drive nice cars in New Jersey run a risk of being questioned by the police. For that reason, he kept handy a 2003 document showing he had paid a court-imposed fine stemming from a traffic offense, just in case.

It did not seem to help.

In March 2005, Mr. Florence was in the passenger seat of his BMW when a state trooper pulled it over for speeding. His wife, April, was driving. His 4-year-old son, Shamar, was in the back.

The trooper ran a records search, and he found an outstanding warrant based on the supposedly unpaid fine. Mr. Florence showed the trooper the document, but he was arrested anyway.

The man in this case WASN’T EVEN CHARGED WITH A CRIME. He was a passenger in his wife’s car when she was pulled over for speeding, and there was an invalid warrant for his arrest for unpaid fines. Even though he had proof in the vehicle the fines were paid, he was arrested for… NOTHING at all. Got it?

It doesn’t matter how many people are arrested for jaywalking or whatever, the court in this case just decided it was ok to stripsearch this guy for an INVALID ARREST.

Please stop making excuses for how fucking radical this court is. Jesus.

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Early Morning Open Thread: Sheep Folds

Trainers have a saying: You get the behavior you reward. That’s as true for humans as it is for any other organism. So, unfortunately, is the fact that negative reinforcement works at least as well as the positive kind… and for humans in groups, negative reinforcement of Us-versus-Them tribalism can be very profitable indeed. In the NYTimes, Rich Benjamin discusses “The Gated Community Mentality“:

... From 2007 to 2009, I traveled 27,000 miles, living in predominantly white gated communities across this country to research a book. I threw myself into these communities with gusto — no Howard Johnson or Motel 6 for me. I borrowed or rented residents’ homes. From the red-rock canyons of southern Utah to the Waffle-House-pocked exurbs of north Georgia, I lived in gated communities as a black man, with a youthful style and face, to interview and observe residents.

The perverse, pervasive real-estate speak I heard in these communities champions a bunker mentality. Residents often expressed a fear of crime that was exaggerated beyond the actual criminal threat, as documented by their police department’s statistics. Since you can say “gated community” only so many times, developers hatched an array of Orwellian euphemisms to appease residents’ anxieties: “master-planned community,” “landscaped resort community,” “secluded intimate neighborhood.”

No matter the label, the product is the same: self-contained, conservative and overzealous in its demands for “safety.” Gated communities churn a vicious cycle by attracting like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders. These bunker communities remind me of those Matryoshka wooden dolls. A similar-object-within-a-similar-object serves as shelter; from community to subdivision to house, each unit relies on staggered forms of security and comfort, including town authorities, zoning practices, private security systems and personal firearms.

Mr. Zimmerman’s gated community, a 260-unit housing complex, sits in a racially mixed suburb of Orlando, Fla. Mr. Martin’s “suspicious” profile amounted to more than his black skin. He was profiled as young, loitering, non-property-owning and poor. Based on their actions, police officers clearly assumed Mr. Zimmerman was the private property owner and Mr. Martin the dangerous interloper. After all, why did the police treat Mr. Martin like a criminal, instead of Mr. Zimmerman, his assailant? Why was the black corpse tested for drugs and alcohol, but the living perpetrator wasn’t? ...

Those reducing this tragedy to racism miss a more accurate and painful picture. Why is a child dead? The rise of “secure,” gated communities, private cops, private roads, private parks, private schools, private playgrounds — private, private, private —exacerbates biased treatment against the young, the colored and the presumably poor.

And yet gated communities, not public projects, are where the big profits are made today. (‘Job creators’, good! Community organizers, bad!) Call me a cycnic, but I suspect many of Mr. Zimmerman’s former neighbors think the only problem is that the gates weren’t high enough to keep Trayvon Martin out, not that the real purpose behind those gates is to keep them paranoid and exploitable.

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Scary Diseases; Agribiz Denialism; and Why We Need Health Care Reform (It’s more than just coverage)

Update:  We’re going live in 3…2…1

Just a quick heads up.  I’ll be talking at 5 Eastern Time today with Maryn McKenna, aka Scary Disease Girl on Virtually Speaking Science. You can listen, but if you’re a virtual kind of person you can also head over to the open air theater in Second Life see Maryn’s magnificent avatar with its gloriously purple hair.  (One commenter compared the shade to Beaujolais Nouveau, but I’m not so sure.)

McKenna is a science and medicine writer who has focused the last several years of her career on the truly vexing and terrifying issue of antiobiotic resistance, focusing on the scourge of MRSA:  methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or drug-resistant staph.  She blogs at Wired.com, under a title shared with the book—Superbug—that will be the leaping off point for our conversation.

So check it out, if not synchronously, then via the podcast, available either at Blog Talk Radio (from about midnight tonight, I think, though it may be tomorrow), via the RSS feed, or as found within the greater Virtually Speaking iTunes podcast.

Just to give a tease of the conversation—we’ll start by talking about the great squander:  how, some 75 years into the antibiotic era, we’re on the verge of destroying what had once seemed to be a truly transformative gift, a way to salve so much human suffering…and we will start to look at the reasons why.  High among them will be the area Maryn’s focused on a lot since publishing Superbug, the use of antibiotics in agriculture in a non-therapeutic situations—that is, not as a response to an infection, but either as a prophylactic, or simply to fatten up livestock before slaughter.

There’s been some news over the last week that makes this issue genuinely hot, but the most interesting aspect of it, to me, is the way agribusiness and their congressional allies (on both sides of the aisle, alas) have simply changed a few of the nouns and then copied the denialist playbook written for the tobacco wars, and updated for use in turning the threat of climate change into a world-wide conspiracy of fanatical socialist-facist greens.

Which is to say, as readers of this blog know, the transformation of science from a source of public knowledge into a post-modern body of jargon to be manipulated by those with the biggest and most sophisticated megaphones, is literally killing us—as we will discuss in a bit.

Oh—and one more thing.  One of the key threads to emerge from Maryn’s work is just how badly we are served by the fragmentary system of health care delivery that we now have, that the GOP wishes to preserve, and that Obamacare goes some way to repair.  The lack of uniform systems of electronic charts, the failure to disseminate key medical knowledge outside of its silos—sometimes single hospitals, or even single services within hospitals—the inability to construct a truly national system of health care knowledge and the dissemination of best practices (Death Panels!) all have contributed directly to the deaths of kids, grown ups, grandma and grandpa from preventable or much earlier-treatable MRSA infections, as Maryn has documented—and much else besides.  Remember:  when our friends who decry the fascism inherent in public regulation of a public good seek to repeal without replacing, they are advocating a policy choice that will kill people.  This is a known, predictable consequence of any swerve to the status quo ante.  In other circumstances, taking actions that a reasonable person understands will lead directly to the deaths of others has a name, and the people who do so have names to.  Now we call them GOP Presidential candidates.  Just sayin.

Just the cheery kind of conversation that will set you up for a truly heroic cocktail hour.  May I recommend either one of these...or,  maybe, doses by mouth of this concoction, repeated as necessary.

Image:  Barent Fabritius, The Slaughtered Pig, 1656

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The Rock Biter Theory Of Health Care Reform Legislation

“So,” they said.  “We don’t think SCOTUS will repeal the entire health care reform law, or gut the law and effectively end it, because that would put all the pressure on the GOP to replace it with something.  There would be a hole in one-sixth of the US economy.  They’d have do something about it.”

And as anyone who is familiar with The Neverending Story can tell you, the GOP is all about embracing the Nothing as far as health care reform (and with it, government itself).  As the Rock Biter said when asked what was destroying his peoples’ lands and what was left as a result:

A hole would be something. No, it was…Nothing.

Steve Benen points out that the GOP is perfectly okay with the HCR Nothing taking over. Repeal and Replace is now just Repeal and The Nothing.

When the debate over health care reform got underway in earnest in 2009, Frank Luntz and other GOP pollsters/strategists warned the party that Americans expected improvements to the dysfunctional system, and Republicans couldn’t simply say “no” to everything.

Three years later, that’s effectively where the party has ended up: wanting to go back to the mess “Obamacare” is cleaning up.

But what about McConnell’s main idea? It’s one of the GOP’s favorite talking points: we don’t need real reform; we just need to let consumers buy across state lines. President Obama and the Affordable Care Act allow this, but set minimum standards that states must abide by. McConnell and his party want to go further, removing, or at least severely weakening, those standards.

This is generally called the “race to the bottom.” Under McConnell’s vision, state policymakers would tell insurers that if they were to set up shop in their state the rules would be written in the industry’s favor. The industry would go with the state that offered the sweetest deal—which is to say, the most lax oversight with the fewest restrictions—and before long, it would be consumers’ only choice. Why? Because every insurer would move to that state, leaving Americans with no other coverage to buy.

That’s exactly what happened with the credit card industry, and it’s a model to be avoided, not followed.

But tossing us all into The Nothing is what the GOP wants. They “want to give the power to the states” because it’s FREEDOM and junk, and instead we’ll get the same awful abuses that the credit card industry has been perpetrating on consumers for years, only far worse because this time it will involve health insurance and health care itself. The cheapest, meanest policies that cover the least in health care and have massive deductibles will be the only ones left for the vast majority of Americans and the insurance industry will pocket the difference.  Can’t afford it?  There’s Nothing you can do about it.  Keen observers will note that the Nothing applies to any social government functions:  Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and retirement, environmental protections, education, food safety, financial products, everything.  You can’t provide it yourself because you can’t afford it?  You get Nothing.

So no, I don’t believe for a second that the GOP will have to replace HCR with something. That would be something, after all. What they want is Nothing.

[UPDATE]  And the folks that are expecting single payer to rise from the ashes should HCR get mauled?  With a GOP House?  No.  the rocks must be delicious in your world, but single payer ain’t happening until there’s a seismic shift in the red/blue ratio.  Unless you think this particular SCOTUS is going to rewrite the universe and declare that Congress has to pass a single payer law, in which case the rocks are delicious in your world and they’re made of 100% unicorn poop.

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Krugthulhu Versus The Lobbyist With A Thousand Bills

And it came to pass that Shrill Krugthulhu rose from the Keynesian depths to fight the dreaded ALEC, the Lobbyist With A Thousand Bills, all eerily similar and wholly devoted to privatizing the hell out of local and state governments in the name of darkness and creating Stand Your Ground laws all over the place.  Thus, mighty Krugthulhu became Tired Of This Nonsense and spake:

What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law.

Many ALEC-drafted bills pursue standard conservative goals: union-busting, undermining environmental protection, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization — that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.

What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.

And in case you were wondering, no, the kind of privatization ALEC promotes isn’t in the public interest; instead of success stories, what we’re getting is a series of scandals. Private charter schools, for example, appear to deliver a lot of profits but little in the way of educational achievement.

But where does the encouragement of vigilante (in)justice fit into this picture? In part it’s the same old story — the long-standing exploitation of public fears, especially those associated with racial tension, to promote a pro-corporate, pro-wealthy agenda. It’s neither an accident nor a surprise that the National Rifle Association and ALEC have been close allies all along.

And ALEC, even more than other movement-conservative organizations, is clearly playing a long game. Its legislative templates aren’t just about generating immediate benefits to the organization’s corporate sponsors; they’re about creating a political climate that will favor even more corporation-friendly legislation in the future.

And lo, Krugthulhu was uninvited from even more Sensible Centrist Villager cocktail parties, which was a relief for the Villagers because to gaze upon Krugthulhu’s awesome beard was to behold sanity itself, something the Villagers were simply not equipped to deal with.  Meanwhile, the forces of ALEC skittered away from the light to cause chaos in November…

Seriously guys, pretty much every single evil-ass piece of legislation that seems to end up across all the red and purple states at once since 2009: Arizona’s “Papers, please!” immigration law, Texas’s transvaginal ultrasound law, the personhood movement in Mississippi, Wisconsin’s union attack, Florida’s private prisons, and Ohio’s heartbeat abortion law, and gun laws like Stand Your Ground all have ALEC’s ugly fingerprints all over them.  Karoli over at Crooks and Liars has been bulldogging these guys for months now.  The playbook is simple: send everything to the state legislature, the Supreme Court or to the” Tyranny of the Majority” constitutional referendum route, or all three, until they win.  If they don’t, do it again.  Eventually it becomes a “public groundswell” of the people “clamoring” for this stuff.

And always attack, attack, attack.

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Weight, Weight, Don’t Tell Me

Things truly are larger in Texas.  Just…not the employees at one Texas hospital, apparently.

A Victoria hospital already embroiled in a discrimination lawsuit filed by doctors of Indian descent has instituted a highly unusual hiring policy: It bans job applicants from employment for being too overweight.

The Citizens Medical Center policy, instituted a little more than a year ago, requires potential employees to have a body mass index of less than 35 — which is 210 pounds for someone who is 5-foot-5, and 245 pounds for someone who is 5-foot-10. It states that an employee’s physique “should fit with a representational image or specific mental projection of the job of a healthcare professional,” including an appearance “free from distraction” for hospital patients.

“The majority of our patients are over 65, and they have expectations that cannot be ignored in terms of personal appearance,” hospital chief executive David Brown said in an interview. “We have the ability as an employer to characterize our process and to have a policy that says what’s best for our business and for our patients.”

Employment lawyers say Citizens Medical Center’s hiring policy isn’t against the law. Only the state of Michigan and six U.S. cities — including San Francisco and Washington, D.C. — ban discrimination against the overweight in hiring.

As Americans are expected to get larger, expect hiring policies like this to become more prevalent, especially in the health care sector.  And I’m saying this as a big guy working in the health care sector who wouldn’t make the 35 BMI requirement.  Our friends in the GOP will tell us of course that employers should have the right to be able to hire and fire based on weight and that it makes good economic sense to do so in order to stay competitive with healthier employees, never mind that the same GOP tells us that pink slime in our burgers and pollutants in our food and water are FREEDOM and stuff.

I honestly think that weight is going to be the next major issue in employment discrimination, and you’ll see SCOTUS get a case involving this before too long.  Still, not everyone is okay with this policy at Citizens.  Existing employees will keep their jobs and will get help in losing weight, but…

A doctor at Citizens who declined to be named acknowledged that employees — and patients — who are overweight cost the health care system more. But he said body mass index as a primary measure of obesity is not a good indicator: A professional football player might have a body mass index of 32, which is technically obese, but only have 7 percent body fat.

And unless obese job applicants have other precipitating health factors, he said, their weight wouldn’t get in the way of being a successful hospital employee. “If more people knew about it,” the doctor said of the employment policy, “they would be justifiably pissed.”

Consider this my contribution to the whole The More You Know thing.

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Ross Douthat wants to bear Tebow’s little Christian babies

by Sarah, Proud and Tall

Amount that I know about American football: Nothing

Percentage chance that I will, nonetheless, be right in assuming that Ross Douthat will sound like a total wanker when babbling on about Tebow: 100%

O ye of little faith. Did you think that the Lord God of Hosts, having raised Tebow up as a Gideon of the gridiron, would pass up the opportunity to put his faithful servant to the test? Did you think that the angelic screenwriters responsible for scripting last year’s succession of Tebow-related improbabilities had nodded off after the Broncos were dispatched in the A.F.C. playoffs? Did you think that the archons and demiurges who preside over America’s culture war would be content to let Tebow fade into obscurity — some red-state-friendly endorsement deals, a few 6-10 finishes, and then early retirement and a lifetime of under-the-radar charity work?

Above all, did you think that Tebow himself, with his distinctive mix of missionary zeal and “give me the ball” confidence, would duck the Gotham opportunity? That he would pull a LeBron James and take his talents down to Florida instead?

No, this was where the Tebow story was always destined to end up. Denver was his Galilee; New York will be the Roman Colosseum. Or to be pop cultural rather than scriptural: Denver was District 12 in Suzanne Collins’s Panem, and the Meadowlands will be the Hunger Games arena.

Shoot me now.

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Goldman Sachs and the Galactic Empire from Star Wars. Mirror images in so many ways

Greg Smith is resigning today as a Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.  On the way out the door, he penned a little self-congratulatory op-ed for the NY Times, titled “Why I am leaving Goldman Sachs” about how Goldman has lost the plot and is no longer a great place to work after twelve years of service with the firm.  One would have thought that as a senior executive with the firm, responsible for hiring and mentoring new talent, that he’d be in a position to do something about that.  I’m just sayin.

The internet being what it is, there is already a parody of this letter out there on The Daily Mash.  “Why I am leaving the Empire” by Darth Vader.  It’s spot on, too.

Read the Smith op-ed.  It’s got some important points, but I think the most important feature, once one gets over the holier than thou moralizing and the self-reverential bragging is that an insider just confirmed what everybody else has known or suspected for a while now.  The Vader op-ed, conversely, reveals a deeply thoughtful individual who has matured greatly from the whiny bratty teenager of  episodes II and III.

UPDATE: Andy Borowitz has the reply letter from Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein (also a parody).

Open thread, while we’re at it.

 

 

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Open Thread: Kids These Days, They Just Don’t Respect the Old Ways

Slate examines the sorry tale of another American institution in decline:

... Membership totals are hard to track, because the Klan doesn’t willingly release member lists. Over the long term, the KKK is clearly contracting, since its rolls have shrunk from millions in the 1920s to between 3,000 and 5,000 today. But no one knows how membership has changed in the last few years.

Klan-watchers, however, suspect that the nation’s oldest domestic terrorist organization is indeed struggling to keep pace with other racist hate groups. Young racists tend to think of the Klan as their grandfathers’ hate group, and of its members as rural, uneducated, and technologically unsophisticated. The Klan doesn’t seem to have used the web and social media as well as its competitors. The group’s failure to effectively deploy technology is a bit of an irony, since one of those newfangled motion pictures, The Birth of a Nation, launched the KKK’s second era in 1915.

The Klan’s history of violence is another challenge to recruitment. The organization will always be associated with the lynching of innocent African-Americans in the 20th century, which puts off more moderate racists.

The KKK is also suffering from a proliferation of competitors. People who wanted to join a white supremacist movement back in the 1920s didn’t have a lot of choices. Today, there are countless options, enabling an extremist to find a group that matches his personal brand of intolerance. The more extreme groups in the burgeoning patriot movement cater to anti-Muslim, homophobic, and xenophobic sentiment, with less animosity toward African-Americans and Jews. Aryan Nations offers a heavy focus on Christian identity. Some groups preach more violence, while others offer a veneer of intellectualism. American Renaissance, for example, caters to “suit-and-tie” racists, offering pseudo-scientific papers on white supremacy. The group even holds conferences at a hotel near Dulles airport in Virginia…

Also—true story!—Fred Phelps’ Westboro-Baptist family cult picketed a Rick Santorum event. Top WaPo comment:

Gawd, that’s awesome. They were made for each other. I can just imagine Fred Phelps and Rick Santorum exchanging the passionate kiss they’ve always dreamed about. Afterwards I guess they’d have to light each other on fire or something.

Yeah, and you thought the ‘pink slime’ discussion was gross and uncivil…

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Early Morning Open Thread: Embracing the Ugly

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)

In case anybody missed Gene Weingarten’s snarkalicious assault-by-pig-bladder on this week’s biggest pig:

Were you as gratified as I was when Rush Limbaugh finally admitted on the air yesterday that he has gotten rich and famous by “pandering to the prejudices and insecurities of marginally literate, unfathomably ignorant jackasses who have to be told what to hate”?...

The most interesting element of his mea culpa yesterday was his frank contempt for Republican politicians “who were without the testicular fortitude” to unambiguously criticize him for his unjustified, vicious, baffling, and falsehood-filled three-day-long sexually obsessed attack on the blameless Georgetown law student. Singling out Mitt Romney and John Boehner, Limbaugh surmised that neither of them dared to take him on because “they know I can turn the bucktoothed rubes and nitwits against them in a heartbeat, and bucktoothed rubes and nitwits are now pretty much the base of their party, which has splintered into competing posses of angry, intolerant, ill-informed pinheads braying at each other ungrammatically.”...

Much more at the link. And while we’re on the topic of coldblooded unregenerates, here’s Tom Junod of Esquire on Georgia’s own “Goodtime Gingrich”:

... At a hotel in a Cobb County shopping-mall-and-office complex that used to be the last word in suburban fancy, there was liquor, there were men and women of a certain age who had real-estate licenses, and there was Newt, as the voluble and surprisingly sentimental toastmaster. I had spent the previous day among Santorum Republicans in Gwinnett County, and now I realized that Gingrich Republicans are a more familiar breed, and at the same time a much more endangered one. The conservatism of Rick Santorum is a cult of renunciation, and so the men pray before they eat, the women are as modest as Mennonites, and the devil is always at the door. At the Gingrich victory party, the devil was not only already inside; he was right there on stage, with a red-dressed Callista at his side, and one woman slurred her determination to get on the floor and crawl through people’s legs if that’s what it took to shake his hand. There was no pretense that he had the ticket to some special claim of virtue; that his relationship to sin was anything but personal; that he was a particularly good man or even a particularly nice one. The only thing that mattered was that he was theirs, and that he would fight to keep the party — their party — going a little while longer, even if he had to grow horns and sprout a forked tail in the process…

I talked to one of them on my way out, after Newt and Callista had made their way through the cologne-and-cocktails scrum and out the door… I told him that if Santorum won in Ohio, it would change the party as well as the race, and make Newt completely irrelevant if he wasn’t already. He thought about that for a bit; then he said, “People like Santorum because he’s a conservative. Newt’s not a conservative. He just gives lip service to being a conservative because he has to. He’s a radical. If he gets to Washington, he’ll be just as radical as Barack Obama, just on the right side and with more respect for the Constitution. I like him not just because he thinks like me but because he has fallen down like me. I’ll tell you what I know about him — he’s a dirty dog. He’s still a dirty dog. He’s a reptile. He doesn’t have the same blood running in his veins that we do. I’ll get out there and get in people’s faces, but when they get in mine my feelings get hurt. That just shows I’m human. But Newt’s not human. He doesn’t have feelings. And you know what? That’s why we need him. Isn’t that wild?”...

“Evolution is overrated. Go old school—vote Reptile in 2012!”

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How many ways can you say Republican?

Because I believe Americans Elect is made up of a few wealthy Republicans, I’m not really surprised that they may be having trouble attracting small donors:

One of the most salient criticisms of Americans Elect —a group that bills itself as seeking to “open up the political process” and “change politics as usual” — is its dogged refusal, using the legal shield of its status as a 501c4 corporation, to disclose the names of its financial backers.
Americans Elect got off the ground with $20 million of seed money given by only 50-some anonymous donors. That’s 50 nameless investors ponying up an average of $400,000 apiece, although, in one rare case in which the name is known, Americans Elect founder and CEO Peter Ackerman has given at least $1.55 million and, according to Bloomberg — the news organization, not the draft Americans Elect presidential candidate — more than $5 million.
Americans Elect has sought to rationalize its financial secrecy, by assuring the public that all of its early high-dollar contributions are structured as loans that will be repaid, and that, when all is said and done, no single donor will have contributed more than $10,000.
Americans Elect says it “is funded by individual contributions, and intends to pay back the bulk of our initial financing as more delegates join, so that no single individual will have contributed more than $10K.”
Underscoring the point, Americans Elect last October published an open letter, signed by Americans Elect CEO Kahlil Byrd, saying that “every donation above $10,000 is structured as a loan. We aspire for these loans to be paid back by the time this organization completes its core mission in 2012. If the American people embrace the Americans Elect mission as their own, then no one will have given more than $10,000. Growing evidence suggests that this will happen.”
And, just last week (video above), Americans Elect COO Eliot Ackerman, appearing with Americans Elect Advisory Board member Mark McKinnon on MSNBC, told Chuck Todd — who had asked Ackerman (starting at 6:14) when and if Americans Elect was going to disclose its funders — that “all of [the funders’] donations have been given as loans.”

Ultimately, in other words, “the people” will be the ones to reimburse the hedge funders and private-equity types who seeded the initial $20 million. Thus will the role of Americans Elect as a catalyst of democratic renewal be authenticated in financial terms.
That’s been the story — and Americans Elect has been sticking to it.

SO IT WAS jarring to read the following new ruling of the Americans Elect Board of Directors, posted this morning to the Americans Elect Web site:
The Americans Elect Board unanimously voted to ensure that no supporter would cover more than 20% of AE’s budget. In the event that any one supporter exceeds that percentage, there are provisions created to expedite repayments to that supporter.
What this Board decision basically says is that as few as five people can fund the whole damned thing.It also strongly suggests that Americans Elect is not getting — and does not expect to get — significant financial support at the grassroots level of delegates, Web site registrants and Facebook “like”-ers. At least, not significant enough — and not quick enough — to make good on all of the promises that it may have made to all of the seed investors from whom Americans Elect has taken high-dollar loans.
Indeed, the counter-scenario that this new ruling opens up is that it will not be the grassroots, “the people,” who repay these seed investors in Americans Elect — but, rather, that wealthy donors who have not yet topped out the new 20% maximum (or maybe even some who have) are being asked to increase their donations by way of reimbursing investors who are having second thoughts.

Is Americans Elect like the Tea Party? Just a new label and new branding for a certain group of Republicans who no longer want to call themselves Republicans? A very select group, sure, but just Republicans by (yet) another name?

h/t election law blog

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Everyone stay calm! This is not happening!

I’ve been stone drunk for the last two days celebrating the fact that one of my voodoo dolls finally seems to have worked. I’ve been sticking pins in that fucking thing for months and had all but given up hope. Megan McArdle had better watch her back.

Now, I’m choosing to blame the fact that I’ve consumed Rush Limbaugh’s body weight in vodka in the last week, but I have a disturbing feeling that Erick Assupwardsson has written a column [WARNING: Redstate link] that is not a complete steaming pile of raven poo. I didn’t guffaw or want to claw out my eyes at all when I read it, and I even found myself nodding in agreement several times.

It must be the drink. The alternative is that Ragnarök is upon us, and I’m not nearly drunk enough to cope with that. More »

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Breitbart Still At the Front of the Noise Machine

Via NYMag’s Daily Intel, Gawker does the first round-up of conspiracy theories about his death:

...”They killed Breitbart? Natural causes? What was natural cause? They use cancer to kill a lot of people. Ruby for one, Aaron Russo 4 another”...

“Andrew Breitbart was going to expose Barry’s colledge “issues” and now he’s dead. The Bush/Clinton clan kills again.”...

“Ok, I read Tom Clancy. Breitbart was definitely assassinated.”...

And so Breitbart died the way he lived: surrounded by partisan rancor and conspiracy theories. He would have wanted it this way.

(For the record, I’m sad for his family. And Shirley Sherrod. And the ongoing existence of James O’Keefe.)

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Religious freedom

Classy:

Deep in grief, Barbara Johnson stood first in the line for Communion at her mother’s funeral Saturday morning. But the priest in front of her immediately made it clear that she would not receive the sacramental bread and wine.

Johnson, an art-studio owner from the District, had come to St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg with her lesbian partner. The Rev. Marcel Guarnizo had learned of their relationship just before the service.

“He put his hand over the body of Christ and looked at me and said, ‘I can’t give you Communion because you live with a woman, and in the eyes of the church, that is a sin,’ ” she recalled Tuesday.

She reacted with stunned silence. Her anger and outrage have now led her and members of her family to demand that Guarnizo be removed from his ministry.

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Bring On the Asteroid

Todd Palin’s Alleged Prostitute Releases “Tell All” book.

Boys Will Be Boys: Media, Morality and the Cover-up of the Todd Palin Shailey Tripp Sex Scandal is the true story of how Shailey Tripp (Wait, what?), a young single mother of two special needs children became sexually involved with Todd Palin, husband of former Alaska Governor and 2008 GOP Vice-Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin.

This book explains the many factors that culminated in Shailey becoming not only the mistress of ” Alaska’s First Dude” but also a prostitute working for him which ultimately resulted in Shailey being arrested in March of 2010.

The end is officially fucking nigh.

I mean it.  We, the human race, deserve to die a fiery, pulverized death if so much as one tree is killed for this abomination.

Also too, open thread.

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