Hey, a good day! Here’s a long song of the week. What are you listening to tonight?
Pharoah Sanders, “The Creator Has a Master Plan” (1969)
by JPK| 49 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Hey, a good day! Here’s a long song of the week. What are you listening to tonight?
Pharoah Sanders, “The Creator Has a Master Plan” (1969)
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
(Tony Auth via GoComics.com)
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People misunderstand the Eeyore philosophy — what the classicists call Cynicism has been degraded into a cheap wiseguy excuse for inertia. But when you understand the Way of the Donkey, you know that of course the house always wins, that rust never sleeps, and that Coyote is always hungry. The joy of life is to understand all this and still celebrate the joys (however fleeting) of the wins (however compromised). To quote Mr. Pierce, and President Obama:
To hang your fortune on chance.
The president finally has found the six-word answer on why health-care reform — any health-care reform — couldn’t wait until the second term, or on a jobs package, or on a Wall Street bailout, or something else that tickled Rahm Emanuel in his funny places. People were getting sick because they couldn’t afford to stay well. People were dying because they couldn’t afford to get well. This is a moral imperative with which every industrialized nation on the planet, except this one, had grappled successfully. And today, in reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision largely upholding his own admittedly flawed attempt to come to grips with it, the president was more eloquent, and more convincing, than he’s been at any point during the prolonged — and occasionally ridiculous — fight over the law itself. He talked about all those American citizens who had to worry “not just about the cost of getting sick, but the cost of getting well.” Those people, he said, shouldn’t be forced to “hang their fortunes on chance.”…
The popular opinion among the pundits is that the president should now walk softly on this issue, or that the issue will fade as the campaign rolls on. I think that would be as big a mistake as his pulling back in the face of the manufactured outrage of 2010 was. The president should talk about this every day….He got a win today. So did the people who no longer have to hang their fortunes on chance. To hell with repeal-and-replace. The president should run on maintain-and-improve. His defenders back when the law passed kept saying that the ACA was worth passing because it was the first step toward the progressive goal of universal coverage. If he really meant what he said today, that should be the president’s position now and forever…
Although, if I’m being totally honest, I was betting Doghouse Riley’s line:
Did you feel this coming? I thought I did, but only a fool predicts Court decisions, even in this benighted 5-4 age. It’s a political decision, and the political winds just shifted alee. Roberts’ “tax-based” decision sounds for all the world like the sort of thing that happens whenever any Grand High Poobah decides to get tricky. It’s overwrought and stupid, and transparently does what it was really designed to do, except for the fooling people part. I guess we can’t ask for more, except the massive stroke that Scalia has deserved for years now.
(Guess I better be careful, or I’ll be infringing on DougJ’s Moore Award turf.)
What other fleeting, incomplete, flawed wins are up for celebration on this evening’s agenda?
by Dennis G.| 94 Comments
This post is in: Crazification Factor, Open Threads, Post-racial America, Assholes, Good News For Conservatives
<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/59124558@N06/7461781238/” title=”6-28-12,-GOP-holds-a-lynching-party-under-the-dome by dengre.bj, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7122/7461781238_15a9e36393.jpg” width=”356″ height=”500″ alt=”6-28-12,-GOP-holds-a-lynching-party-under-the-dome”></a>
It’s good to have back-up plans. The wingnuts have a major sad over Health Care, but House Republicans have planned a small ray of hope for their fellow travelers. They have decided that today will be the day that they vote to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to give them non-existent documents to help “prove” a non-existent scandal concerning events that never actually happened.
The Holder contempt vote is just a Congressional lynching designed to feed red meat to the wingnut base–at the hour of their tears.
I suspect that a little racism is involved, but saying that out load would really hurt their feelings, so let’s just name it a vote motivated by an irrational hatred of President Obama and leave it at that. So naturally, all Republican will vote for it along with a handful of cowards with a (D) after their names.
What a bunch of assholes.
Cheers
Next up for the GOP: A lynching party for Eric HolderPost + Comments (94)
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Open Threads, Teabagger Stupidity
From a gentleman waiting to pick up his prescription meds, right after the SCOTUS announcement:
“Obamacare is government-run healthcare! It’s an abomination!”
To which he was asked “so how do you feel about the VA?”
To which he replied “I love it!”
I wish I was joking.
Open Thread
by $8 blue check mistermix| 345 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Here’s a thread for the wailing and gnashing of teeth that will follow this morning’s decision.
Yesterday, I saw a Romney sticker on a Prius. Is that a sign? Perhaps it’s like a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. No little voice in my head said “don’t look back”, so I’m not sure.
I’m leaving for a vacation today and won’t be posting regularly for a couple of weeks. No matter what happens today, it’s good news for Republicans in general and Mitt Romney in particular, but I will miss writing about it.
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Assholes
(Jeff Danziger’s website)
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While we’re waiting on SCOTUS’s pleasure, a reminder that when it comes to public displays of venal idiocy, the Repubs are multi-taskers. Dave Weigel digs up sour memories of “the Last Time the House Held a Contempt Vote… “
February 14, 2008 — a date which will live in almost nobody’s memory — brought the first contempt vote on an executive branch official since the 1980s. Democrats had spent the better part of a year investigating the dismissal of seven U.S. attorneys, who (it’s pretty well agreed now) had refused to jump high enough when asked to pursue voter fraud claims. White House Counsel Harriet Miers and Chief of Staff Josh Bolten refused to appear before committee, citing executive privilege on the in-demand information. So Democrats brought their vote….
And Dana Milbank updates us on the Weeper-in-Chief:
… Tying up this administration is Job One for the opposition party, and never more so than this week. Republicans have been awaiting with giddy anticipation a Supreme Court decision Thursday that they expect will overturn Obamacare, the signal achievement of Obama’s presidency. “If the court does not strike down the entire law, the House will move to repeal what’s left of it,” Boehner vowed.
At the same time, Republicans decided to dedicate Thursday to a spectacle on the House floor: voting to hold Holder, the attorney general, in contempt of Congress for declining to hand over certain documents related to the Operation “Fast and Furious” guns program on the Mexican border.
Fox News Channel’s Chad Pergram asked Boehner (R-Ohio) whether he thinks “the American public is buying the narrative that you’re here to talk about jobs, when in the next 24 hours . . . everything emanating from the House floor is about contempt of Eric Holder?”
“We’re going to continue to focus on jobs,” Boehner repeated.
Seems fair to assume that no matter what may happen, on the floor, there will be tears.
Apart from rightwing intransigence, what’s on the agenda this morning?
by Dennis G.| 79 Comments
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Open Threads, Assholes, Good News For Conservatives
In downtown Baltimore we have a statue of one of the worst Americans in our collective history. That would be Roger B. Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. Everything about Taney screamed partisan hack. It was his life’s story. He was a white supremacist who firmly believed that “American Exceptionalism” was “White Exceptionalism”. It is a world view that still fuels the Romney campaign and the modern conservative movement.
The Dred Scott decision was infamous for many things. It overturned decades of settled law in an attempt to force a political solution in favor of the Southern Aristocrats that Taney sought to please. The ruling also sought to end any powers of the Federal government to limit the Galtian overlords of his day.
In his Dred Scott decision Taney defined the term “American citizen” in a manner that is still fully embraced by today’s conservative movement:
The words “people of the United States” and “citizens” are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the “sovereign people,” and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The question before us is whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.
It was exclusionary. Only white people had rights in Taney’s America and some white folks–the elites–had more rights than “regular” citizens. In Taney’s America, folks had to bend the knee to their betters–especially the white elites of his time who ran an economic system based on the theft of labor. This notion that citizenship in America is a limited and restrictive “right” is a core belief that the conservative movement has been working to fully reestablish ever since they got their ass kicked in the Civil War. And now to their collective horror one of the “subordinate and inferior class of beings” that Taney identified in Dred Scott has become President of the United States. This, more than anything else, is the source of wingnut rage at Barack Obama.
Conservatives and White Exceptionalists has always fought to defend Taney and his ideas, but for a long, long time Taney and his Court have been a stain on the integrity and honor of America. That is changing. His views that American Exceptionalism = White Exceptionalism is the core principle of conservative politics. The Taney Court is a role model for Teabaggers, wingnuts and the Roberts Court–and Roger B. Taney is the Chief Justice role model for John Roberts.
Like Taney, Roberts practiced considerable judicial overreach so that his Court could be in the business of deciding who is a proper “American Citizen” and what kinds of rights various classes of “citizens” should be allowed to enjoy. Both decided that only “American Citizens” who fit within the boundaries of their biases should be entitled to most rights and that any lessor classes of “citizens” that they establish should have fewer rights. Both Courts decided that the definition of these rights should be always be decided in a manner that helped the elites who put them into power. For Taney that meant subtraction: he identified an entire groups of people in America–people of color–and decided that they would no longer have any rights. Taney made them all non-citizens with a scratch of his pen. For Roberts it was addition. In his Citizens United case he created a super class of citizens–corporations and the wealthy–whom he granted rights and privileged far, far beyond the rights regular Americans enjoyed as a birthright. In both cases these partisan hacks twisted the Constitution and overturned decades of established law to please their galtian overlords.
During his years as Chief Justice, Roger B. Taney destroyed the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and the rule of law in the United States. That destruction led to the Civil War. I think that it is a safe bet, that by this time Thursday, John Roberts and his conservative majority will have followed in the footsteps of Taney and destroy the legitimacy of the SCOTUS and the rule of law in our era.
If the Health Care Law had been passed by Bush, Roberts and company would vote for it–no questions asked. But it was passed by that Black man in the White House, so they must reverse themselves. No wonder Tony was so bitchy on Monday, he’s been twisting himself into knots trying to justify his coming flip-flops of long standing legal opinions.
In his Dred Scott decision, Roger B. Taney made his white surpremacist views painfully clear when he wrote that Negroes in America:
…. had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…
For the Roberts Court and the conservative movement in America that is still painfully true. They can find nothing about Barack Obama to respect. They will say or do anything to make this painfully clear. To prove the point, the Republican House will hold a vote to symbolically lynch Eric Holder on Thursday, just because they feel like it and just because they can.
This is how a Nation of Laws is destroyed.
I expect John Roberts to lead that destruction. I expect a ruling on Thursday that will complete the transition of the SCOTUS into just another ultra-partisan body that puts short term “victories” and their political team above the Law, the Constitution, and the Nation. Once the rule of law is destroyed, we will pay the price as a Nation. It happen before and it will happen again. I only hope it will not be a price steeped in blood, but that is what we had to pay to cover tab for the Taney Court. I expect that paying the tab of John Roberts and his Court will lead to a similar outcome.
I would like to be wrong, but somehow when it comes to wingnuts, things always turnout worse than you can imagine. And under John Roberts, the SCOTUS is wingnut central comand.
Cheers