The President’s remarks were fully consistent with the principles described herein.

Complying with the letter mandate:

As promised, Attorney General Eric Holder today filed a 3-page, single-spaced letter with the Fifth Circuit outlining the department’s views on the concept of judicial review. Actually, the letter is two and a half pages, but let’s hope Judge Jerry Smith rounds up.

During arguments in a health-care case on Tuesday, Judge Smith demanded the Justice Department produce the letter, in light of President Barack Obama’s commenting that the Supreme Court would be taking an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” if it struck down the Affordable Care Act.

It’s basically a short summary of the broadest argument to uphold the law, so they used the demand as an opportunity to get it out there again.

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Open Thread: Yes – let the joyous news be spread!

I see that Megan has some flying monkeys in from the Cato Institute to run her blog while she is off on her broomstick on a salt-mining expedition in Nepal or hunting down the elusive gold Thermomix in the wilds of Manhattan.

I daren’t look too closely. Are the walls over there even more shit smeared than usual?

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More Banking System Incompetence

Payment processor Global Payments has been hacked and data about 1.5 million credit cards has apparently been released, including the “Track 1 and Track 2” data needed to re-create the magnetic stripe on a credit card. The goal of the hack was probably to get enough information to clone those cards so they can be used for fraudulent transactions.

Visa has dropped Global Payments from its registry of providers who meet security standards, which means nothing since Global Payments will still be processing Visa transactions. Since the credit card companies have to eat fraudulent transactions, this will be a lot of hassle for them and for affected card users, but hopefully nobody but the banks will pay directly for fraud (though we’ll all pay indirectly, of course).

I wonder if the media freakout will mention a couple of facts about the payment system. First, we’re way behind Europe in the use of smartcards, which are much harder to clone than the 60’s-era mag stripes on US cards. Second, the use of your cell phone as a means for payment has been working for almost a year in the form of Google Wallet, but that hasn’t been rolled out officially anywhere but on the Sprint network, because the rest of the cell carriers have grouped together to create their own standard to allow them to take a cut of transactions made using your cell phone.

I have Google Wallet on my non-Sprint Galaxy Nexus (officially unsupported and installed via a work-around) and it’s fun because the sales clerks treat me like Dumbledore every time I use it. Besides that, it has the potential to be more secure because I have to enter a PIN on my phone before any payment can be made. I’m sure everybody will have it in five years after the free market of a few huge cell providers, phone makers and banks all decide how we’ll all be charged more for the privilege of a secure payment system.

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Bully For You, America

Reasonoid Nick Gillespie takes to the WSJ to let America know there’s no such thing as a bullying crisis in schools and neighborhoods as he rips into the new film “Bully”.

Now that schools are peanut-free, latex-free and soda-free, parents, administrators and teachers have got to worry about something. Since most kids now have access to cable TV, the Internet, unlimited talk and texting, college and a world of opportunities that was unimaginable even 20 years ago, it seems that adults have responded by becoming ever more overprotective and thin-skinned.

Kids might be fatter than they used to be, but by most standards they are safer and better-behaved than they were when I was growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s. Infant and adolescent mortality, accidents, sex and drug use—all are down from their levels of a few decades ago. Acceptance of homosexuality is up, especially among younger Americans. But given today’s rhetoric about bullying, you could be forgiven for thinking that kids today are not simply reading and watching grim, postapocalyptic fantasies like “The Hunger Games” but actually inhabiting such terrifying terrain, a world where “Lord of the Flies” meets “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior,” presided over by Voldemort.

Stop whining.  Life is Darwinian.  Deal with it, you little ferrets.

When it comes to bullying numbers, long-term trends are less clear. The makers of “Bully” say that “over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year,” and estimates of the percentage of students who are bullied in a given year range from 20% to 70%. NCES changed the way it tabulated bullying incidents in 2005 and cautions against using earlier data. Its biennial reports find that 28% of students ages 12-18 reported being bullied in 2005; that percentage rose to 32% in 2007, before dropping back to 28% in 2009 (the most recent year for which data are available). Such numbers strongly suggest that there is no epidemic afoot (though one wonders if the new anti-bullying laws and media campaigns might lead to more reports going forward).

The most common bullying behaviors reported include being “made fun of, called names, or insulted” (reported by about 19% of victims in 2009) and being made the “subject of rumors” (16%). Nine percent of victims reported being “pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on,” and 6% reported being “threatened with harm.” Though it may not be surprising that bullying mostly happens during the school day, it is stunning to learn that the most common locations for bullying are inside classrooms, in hallways and stairwells, and on playgrounds—areas ostensibly patrolled by teachers and administrators.

Everything’s fine.  You know, except for the kids driven to suicide for being gay or fat or different or getting shot for walking down the street with an iced tea and a bag of candy, that is.  Jesus launch the helicarrier.  It’s funny how these guys believe in the free market so much until it comes to the flash mobs actually getting called on ruining a kid’s life, but I guess that’s just culling the weak, right?

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Here’s An Idea- Stop Financing the Elections of Nihilists and Crazy People

File this under cry me a river:

Big business groups like the Chamber of Commerce spent millions of dollars in 2010 to elect Republican candidates running for the House. The return on investment has not always met expectations.

Even though money for major road and bridge projects is set to run out this weekend, House Republican leaders have struggled all week to round up the votes from recalcitrant conservatives simply to extend it for 90 or even 60 days. A longer-term transportation bill that contractors and the chamber say is vital to the recovery of the construction industry appears hopelessly stalled over costs.

At the same time, House conservatives are pressing to allow the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which has financed business exports since the Depression, to run out of lending authority within weeks. The bank faces the very real possibility of shutting its doors completely by the end of May, when its legal authorization expires.

And a host of routine business tax breaks — from wind energy subsidies to research and development tax credits — cannot be passed because of Republican insistence that they be paid for with spending cuts.

Business groups that worked hard to install a Republican majority in the House equated Republican control with a business-friendly environment. But the majority is first and foremost a conservative political force, and on key issues, its ideology is not always aligned with commercial interests that helped finance election victories.

Some of what the teahadists want to kill is simply insane:

With its charter set to expire in May, the bank is the target of conservative groups. They are making the case to Republicans that the bank, created in 1934 to finance sales to the Soviet Union, has no place in a free-market system. Club for Growth is holding it up as the next Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, crowding out private lending and offering dangerous loans that ultimately could be left in the laps of the taxpayer.

“Those groups are just wrong, period,” said Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers and a generous personal contributor to Republican candidates.

The bank is financed with a small percentage of each loan it makes to foreign buyers of American exports, producing $3.4 billion in profits for the federal government over the last five years.

Drew Greenblatt, president and owner of Marlin Steel Wire Products, in Baltimore, said he recently got a rush order for wire baskets from a firm in Singapore, assuming he could finance the sale. He went to the Export-Import Bank and paid a one-half-percent fee on the loan. The bank guaranteed 95 percent of the loan. He kept the plant working through the weekend and completed the sale.

“Think about all the winners in this transaction,” he said. “Ex-Im got half a point. Baltimore City steelworkers got extra hours. I got extra profits to meet payroll, and hopefully I got a client who will reorder from me.”

If anything, the anger over the stalled transportation bill is even more acute, business lobbyists say. The Senate, in a bipartisan vote, has passed a surface transportation bill that would keep money flowing for two years. The House, however, appears stuck.

They don’t even want to pay for roads. Think about that. They don’t even want to pay for roads.

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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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Don’t Crack Open A Coaled One Just Yet

The EPA’s new regulations on building new coal-fired power plants are expected to go into effect today, requiring strict new pollution controls that energy companies say will make it “impossible” to build the plants, only that’s not actually true.

The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO₂ per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.

Industry officials and environmentalists said in interviews that the rule, which comes on the heels of tough new requirements that the Obama administration imposed on mercury emissions and cross-state pollution from utilities within the past year, dooms any proposal to build a coal-fired plant that does not have costly carbon controls.

“This standard effectively bans new coal plants,” said Joseph Stanko, who heads government relations at the law firm Hunton and Williams and represents several utility companies. “So I don’t see how that is an ‘all of the above’ energy policy.”

Except for you know, the coal plants being built anyway.

The rule provides an exception for coal plants that are already permitted and beginning construction within a year. There are about 20 coal plants now pursuing permits; two of them are federally subsidized and would meet the new standard with advanced pollution controls.

Oops.  It’s like the Obama administration is actually doing something to help the energy industry transition and to make sure new plants meet the new pollution standards.  Funny how that works.  And hey, natural gas plants are half the pollution and natural gas is cheap right now, because we produce so much of it.  It’s better than coal, and I say this living in a state where you can get “Friends of Coal” license plates.  From the state.  Official and everything.

Somehow, the dire predictions of the end of America over these rules keeps failing to come true.

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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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Symptoms Of A Syndrome

On a day where President Obama spoke about Trayvon Martin’s murder and said the following:

“All of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen,” President Obama said Friday morning following a White House Rose Garden ceremony when asked about the 17-year-old’s death.

The president called the shooting a “tragedy” and says “every aspect” of the case should be investigated. Obama gave his condolences to the slain teenager’s parents and said if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

We have this going on at a Rick Santorum event...

At a shooting range in Louisiana on Friday, an onlooker encouraged Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum to pretend the target he was firing at was President Barack Obama.

“Santorum is shooting a 1911 Colt,” Politico’s Juana Summers tweeted from the sheriff’s office shooting range in West Monroe. “Range master says ‘Well, it’s not your first rodeo.’ Someone here says ‘pretend its Obama.’”

...and this out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich....

In a radio interview on Thursday, Newt Gingrich returned to one of his favorite recent themes, what he calls the “elite media” and their conspiracy to aid and abet the Obama administration.

In an article at Huffington Post, the former Speaker of the House is quoted as saying to Sandy Rios of the American Family Association that the “elite media” are “in the tank for Obama” and will do everything they can to see him re-elected.

“It is just astonishing to me how pro-Obama they are,” he said, “Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends? Or two pages on the degree to which Obama is consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic church?”

...and I just shake my head.  I’m a black male who has survived to the ripe old age of 36 and is not incarcerated.  I’m an exception in this country, it seems.  I live in one of the 24 states that has a law that solely exists to justify the use of deadly force as the ultimate sanction against someone who is merely perceived to be a threat, without evidence, due process, or the right to face your accuser (because hey, you’re effing dead.)  The legislative need to create laws like this is a symptom of a much more awful syndrome, and in every case these laws were passed by “pro-life” Republicans led by the gun lobbyists.

These laws are designed to allow vigilantism, period.  It’s the worst impulse of the whole Glibertarian/Paulite/Somali Pirate anarcho-justice codified into “I get to decide who lives and who dies, and I reserve the right to exercise that impulse at any point.”  We’re all castles stomping around killing each other, and may the best, most heavily armed castle win.  And as far as Republicans are concerned, well that impulse extends to “We’ve decided that having a black President violates our right not to have one, so we’re going to do something about it from the ground up.”

Trayvon Martin’s awful, pointless murder is just a symptom of a much uglier sickness.

[UPDATE]  Newt doubles down.

“What the president said, in a sense, is disgraceful,” Gingrich said on the Hannity Radio show. “It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.

“Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him. That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban or if he had been white or if he had been Asian American of if he’d been a Native American. At some point, we ought to talk about being Americans. When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.”

Effing. Perfect.

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It Came From Above

This is one of those things that everyone knows, but at least it is nice to have verification:

Employees at major banks who churned out fraudulent foreclosure documents, forged signatures, made up fake job titles and falsely notarized paperwork often did so at the behest of their superiors, according to a federal investigation released Tuesday.

By now, it’s well documented that the nation’s biggest banks routinely “robosigned” legal papers to keep up with the wave of foreclosures brought on by the housing bust. But the new report from the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development reveals that those shoddy practices often came at the direction of managers at the banks, and that employees in some cases were judged by how fast they could get new foreclosure filings out the door.

“I believe the reports we just released will leave the reader asking one question: How could so many people have participated in this misconduct?” David Montoya, HUD inspector general, said in a statement. “The answer: simple greed.”

HUD investigators launched their inquiries soon after news of the banks’ practices caused a national uproar in late 2010, and government officials used their findings as they negotiated a recent landmark $25 billion settlement with the banks.

HUD reviewed foreclosure practices at all five banks involved in the recent settlement — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial. They issued subpoenas, pored over personnel files, conducted interviews with scores of employees and examined the quality control measures – or lack thereof – at the banks’ mortgage servicing units.

Repeatedly, according to the report, investigators were hampered by poor record-keeping at the banks, sluggish responses to requests for documents and an unwillingness to make employees available for interviews or to allow them to answer detailed questions at the virtual foreclosure factories where they worked.

Nevertheless, investigators pieced together a picture of a deeply flawed system riddled with errors, where employees often had little or no training, where managers encouraged wrongdoing and where haste trumped all else.

At Bank of America, for instance, performance reviews revealed that employees often were judged based on how quickly they worked and how many files they churned through, the HUD report stated. One manager noted in an employee review: “Your stats so far this year are as follows: Affidavits 46.97 per hour (standard is 49 per hour), Assignments 54.74 per hour (standard is 51 per hour) and DocEx 49.67 per hour (standard is 46 per hour).”

At Chase, operations supervisors “routinely signed foreclosure documents, including affidavits, certifying that they had personal knowledge of the facts when they did not,” nor did they bother to verify the accuracy of the documents they signed, according to the report.

In addition, the supervisors said in interviews with HUD officials that they often signed affidavits as an “assistant secretary” or “vice president” of Chase, when those were not their official titles. Rather, they were given those titles by Chase for the sole purpose of allowing them to sign legal documents; the title came with no other duties or authority, the report said.

What is stopping the HUD officials from handing over their research to the DOJ so we can start sending these people to jail?

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Live by the Freak Out, Die by the Freak Out

Over the weekend, the news got out that 98 advertisers have dropped not only Rush Limbaugh, but the rest of the right-wing radio crowd:

They’ve specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity). Those are defined as environments likely to stir negative sentiment from a very small percentage of the listening public.

The list of advertisers includes companies like GM, McDonald’s and State Farm who weren’t named sponsors of any of those shows, but whose ad network buys might have aired during those programs. As Media Matters has documented, Rush’s flagship station, WABC in New York, has mainly been airing public service announcements because of lack of advertisers.

Bill Maher got upset about the treatment Limbaugh’s been getting, saying it’s a free speech issue, but come on: Rush and the rest of the right-wing radio crowd aren’t being denied the right to speak. Instead, the twenty-five year fantasy that right-wing radio is a mainstream American phenomenon is finally ending now that radio hosts have decided to lead the fight against contraception, and when you’re no longer in the mainstream, you can’t attract mainstream advertisers.

Anyone who’s ever subscribed to Mother Jones is familiar with this phenomenon. I don’t subscribe now, but unless things have changed radically, McDonald’s, GM and the rest aren’t advertising there, for a simple reason: what Mother Jones prints is offensive to too many GM customers, not to mention GM itself. Mother Jones is financed by a mix of donations, grants and advertising from companies whose products are pitched directly at people with progressive values (like social investment firms). Similarly, Rush and the rest are going to have to re-tool with advertisers who cater to the 27%. Apparently this group is profitable for companies selling tinnitus cures and gold. Rush might not be able to make $50 million/year and fly around in a private jet by hawking quack remedies and begging the Koch brothers for donations, but he’ll no doubt be able to make a living.

Maher can quit being worried about Rush and his buddies for two more reasons. First, if anyone believes in letting the free market do its business in an unfettered fashion, it’s this crew, so they’re getting a dose of their own medicine. Second, the right loves to boycott just as much as any other interest group, even though they haven’t been very successful lately.

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Money Lenders 1, Temples 0

Belated Update (hell—it’s Saturday; I actually pretended to have a life): There seems a pretty good case to be made (as was, by several commenters, that I simply missed obvious sarcasm on Ed Kilgore’s part.  Apologies to him and to those more attuned to the nuances than I.  I’ve had a humorectomy recently, and it seems to have taken:  I just don’t find our religious freedom-loving friends on the far side of the political divide anything but terrifying, and hence am slow to pick up what seems more likely ridicule of same than not.

Tomorrow is another day….

_____________

Ed Kilgore’s been doing a fine job as Steve Benen’s successor at the Washington Monthly. He’s smart, he’s got a good bullshit detector, and he understands that the modern GOP is doing its best impression of a bunch of Kamikaze pilots taking the helm of the Queen Mary 2.

 

But even the good ones swing and miss some times, as here, in this take on the rise in foreclosures on churches:

Do you perhaps think the closure of churches in the midst of a Great Recession might be as much a threat to the free exercrise of religious expression as, say, a requirement that church-affiliated institutions allow their insurance companies to provide contraception coverage for their employees?

I mean, I think I get what he’s after here, as he writes in the last line of his post.

Bankers wanting their payments are apparently off-limits to criticism, unlike a president trying to ensure something within shouting distance of equality in access to health care.

I’m fine with the idea that there is something fundamentally cocked up about our banking system and the foreclosure industry.  If Ed’s point was that church leaders should imitating Christ in seeking mortgage fairness for all, I’d be happy to join an amen chorus.

But a religious freedom argument? This is one of the silliest things I’ve read in a month of Sundays.  To gloss the comment I posted over at Ed’s place:

The threat to religious freedom in the contraceptive battle is comes with what others’ fundamentalisms do to my religious beliefs and ethical commitments.*

Requiring institutions operating under the color of faith to meet their obligations, freely entered into?  Not so much.

In fact, if we were to do what Ed implies, and give some folks a free pass on their mortgages just because they say they talk to gods in the company of like-minded souls, that would be one more step in the horrendous theocratic power grab we see happening around us.

Hell, if all it took to avoid paying off my mortgage would be to incorporate as the Eleventh Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Reformed), sign me up. But the notion that a group or corporate body would claim immunity from basic life-crap like paying off the loan you signed up for just because you kneel in the right direction?  Oy.

IOW —this is just reflexive backward-collar genufluxion.  You own a piece of real estate; you borrow on it; you are subject to the same consequences that the rest of us face.

Again: if Ed were to argue that the steep rise in church foreclosure is another sign that our lending system has gone awry, and that there should be a  review of how to rescue underwater property owners of all stripes, that would be another matter.  But giving churches a break just because they are churches?  Dumb, dumb, dumb—and a sign that the first amendment really is hard for even smart people to grasp.

*More generally and formally, to allow one sect’s claim of religious authority to trump both other faiths and secular commitment to a public sphere is a bitter inversion of what it means to have liberty of faith and conscience in a anti-establishmentarian polity.

Image:  Amal Khurram, Shah Jehan with Angel musicians,  mid 1600s.

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Mitt’s Minimal Effort

The Marquis de Mittens and Larry Kudlow get their monocles and harrumphing on over the soshulist redistribution ploy known as “minimum wage”.  Now, Kudlow’s bad enough by himself…

“A lot of conservatives led by the Wall Street Journal editorial page were horrified when you said you want to index the minimum wage for inflation,” CNBC host Larry Kudlow said. “They said, look, that’s just going to raise the minimum wage. That’s going to raise the unemployment rate, especially for young people, especially for minorities. Why do you want to raise the minimum wage?”

Yeah, let’s pause here for a sec.  In Kudlow’s world, raising the minimum wage equals more unemployment, because really jobs exist out there where $7.25 an hour is just too awful.  Why, if we cut that in half, we could hire twice as many people and lower unemployment, especially for minorities (because hey, menial labor is all those people are good for.)  Heck, we eliminate the minimum wage, we could have zero unemployment!  Utopia accomplished!  Sure, it’s not like $3.50 a hour is a living wage or anything, but we can call it “workfare”.

Meanwhile Mittens devours his own foot again.

Romney responded by noting that as governor, he had vetoed a bill to raise the minimum wage in Massachusetts.

“I vetoed it and I said, look, the way to deal with minimum wage is this: On a regular basis, I said in the proposal I made, every two years, we should look at the minimum wage, we should see what’s happened to inflation, we should also look at the jobs level throughout the country, unemployment rate, competitive rates in other states or, in this case, other nations,” he said.

“So, certainly, the level of inflation is something you should look at and you should identify what’s the right way to keep America competitive,” Romney continued. “So that would tell you that right now, there’s probably not a need to raise the minimum wage.”

If we got rid of the minimum wage, we could be more labor-price competitive with countries like Haiti, Somalia, China and Tonga.  So, there’s that.   This is how President Bain Capital here would solve America’s problems.  We don’t have working poor.  They’re making $7.25 an hour!  How can you be poor if you’re making that much money?  Heck, we cut that minimum wage, have states compete for corporations by seeing how low wages they can offer to enslave their workers,and that profit will trickle down to the working stiffs automatically!  It’s the Laffer Curve of wage pricing, cut wages by enough and total incomes will skyrocket and lift all boats and stuff.  Boom, competition creates winning.

What utter nonsense.   But the most striking thing is that once again, Mitt can’t help himself.  He honestly believes this stuff because to him, $7.25 isn’t an hourly wage, it’s a breakfast tip amount.  In America, you can get that waiting tables.  How can there be poor people in America when that happens?  So why raise the minimum wage?  You guys making $11,500 a year?  You’ll be fine.  Just get a better job.  This is America.

Just look at Mitt Romney.

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Root For Injuries

This is like a Browns/Cowboys Super Bowl, and I’m just rooting for pain:

Billionaires Charles and David Koch filed a lawsuit yesterday against the Cato Institute in a fight for control of the influential libertarian think tank.

The complaint centers on the the handling of the shares of William A Niskanen, a former chairman of the Cato Institute, following his death October 26, 2011, The lawsuit calls into question whether or not Niskanen’s shares should be transferred to his widow. The lawsuit also names Cato’s president Edward Crane, according to court documents.

The Cato Institute, originally founded as The Charles Koch Foundation in 1974, was formed as a corporation with shareholders. It was re-named The Cato Institute in 1976.

Also, this correction is priceless:

Correction: The original version of this story referred to the Cato Institute as libertarian. Through the editing process, Cato was mislabeled as conservative. This inaccuracy was corrected and properly identifies the Cato Institute as libertarian.

Six in one, a half dozen in the other.

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Open Thread: Gold Gnome from Brazos

For political completists, the New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh has a nice meaty summary of Ron Paul’s actual political career to date, as opposed to the gauzy claims and fables of both his supporters and his opponents:

... Paul is running for President again this year, in a field that many Republicans find disappointing. And yet, while Paul is doing better, state by state, than he did in 2008, he has conspicuously failed to establish himself as this year’s Tea Party candidate. Polls have shown that voters who support the Tea Party are actually less likely to support Paul—some have gone for Newt Gingrich, whose denunciations of Obama are pithier, or for Rick Santorum, who is more forthright in his defense of “traditional American values.” In South Carolina, where Paul received thirteen per cent of the vote, behind Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Santorum, he did his best among voters opposed to the Tea Party. The Ron Paul movement has grown, but the events of recent years—the rise of the Tea Party, the fights over corporate bailouts, the messy passage of Obama’s health-care reform bill—have done surprisingly little to raise Paul’s standing among Republicans. Last summer, Jon Stewart mocked cable news channels for “pretending Ron Paul doesn’t exist,” and asked, “How did libertarian Ron Paul become the thirteenth floor in a hotel?” The answer is embedded in the question. People don’t think of Paul as a top-tier Republican candidate partly because they think of him as a libertarian: anti-tax and anti-bailout, but also antiwar, anti-empire, and, sometimes, anti-Republican…

If Ron Paul doesn’t win the Republican nomination, he will have to decide whether to support the candidate who does. Four years ago, he was incredulous when the John McCain campaign asked for his endorsement. “The argument was he would do a little less harm than the other candidate,” Paul said. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t like the idea of getting about two or three million people angry at me.’ ” Instead, he convened a press conference to announce an alliance between four independent candidates: Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman, of the Libertarian Party; Cynthia McKinney, a former Democratic congresswoman, of the Green Party; Ralph Nader, running as an independent; and Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist preacher, of the Constitution Party. When Barr declined, at the last minute, to join the press conference, Paul praised the remaining three—they all pledged to end the wars, uphold civil liberties, slash the debt, and audit the Federal Reserve—without endorsing any of them. Two weeks later, Paul changed his mind and endorsed Baldwin, partly, it seemed, out of spite for Barr. Together, the four candidates won about 1.6 million votes: a respectable sum, but a confusing statement, and a deflating end for Paul’s campaign…

There is only one politician whom Paul regularly praises in his speeches—a man he coyly refers to as a “senator from Kentucky.” If Paul sees a future for himself in the Republican Party, it is through his son Rand, who might have an easier time than his father in attracting traditional conservatives to his cause. (During his campaign for the Senate, for example, Rand Paul declined to rule out using force to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.) Unlike most politicians on the verge of retirement, Paul can’t accurately claim that he has nothing to lose by breaking with the party that has been his home for all but one of his years in politics. Hope for his son’s prospects—and a disinclination to put him in an awkward position—might be enough to keep Paul from ending his political career with another third-party campaign. If he split the vote, indirectly helping to reëlect Obama, it might be a long time before Republicans were willing to get behind anyone named Paul.

What’s on the “quirky and unpredictable” agenda for the start of the weekend?

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