Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee is pouring a lot of energy into the investigation of the recent scandal involving the GSA’s lavish $822,000 Las Vegas conference. Atta boy, Darrell. Glad you’re looking out for our interests.
By the way, the real cost to taxpayers of the Bush/Cheney scandal otherwise known as the Iraq war was $3 trillion — and let’s not forget the precious lives lost. I wonder if Issa plans to look into this anytime soon.
Ann Romney is a nice lady, and I don’t want to say anything mean about her. She’s supporting her husband, and that’s a good thing. But when she says, “I know what it’s like to struggle,” I want to ask her if she knows what it really means to struggle. Has she ever worried about putting food on the table for her boys? Has she ever had trouble making the rent, or keeping the power turned on? Did she ever have to take one of her kids to the ER for a cold?
Super-patriot and tea party darling Allen West (R-FL) said recently while speaking at various town hall meetings in his district that 80 House Democrats were members of the Communist Party. The McCarthy wannabe did not reveal how many members of his own party were fascists.
Miami Marlins’ manager Ozzie Guillen was suspended for five days by team officials because he said he loved and respected Fidel Castro. Team officials punished Guillen in response to pressure from the Cuban community in Florida. It’s rather ironic that Florida’s Cubans encouraged the same kind of tactic to silence speech that Castro employed during his rule.
I wonder if Guillen would have been punished if he’d said he loved Fulgencio Batista, the cruel right-wing dictator Castro overthrew.
The first ten amendments to the Constitution, known collectively as the Bill of Rights, went into effect as Constitutional amendments in December of 1791 after being ratified by three-quarters of the states.
The language of the amendments was crafted during the latter part of the 1780s, following the drafting of the US Constitution, which replace the Articles of Confederation, our first stab at creating a set of guidelines for a democratic nation. I mention this to establish a time frame for the thoughts behind the various amendments, and for the conditions that prevailed. I mention this because I’m about to talk about the Second Amendment.
At the time, the arms we were guaranteed the right to bear as part of well-regulated militias (aside from swords and knives) were all single-shot weapons, ranging from small flintlock pistols to cannons. There wasn’t much between the pistols and the cannons — mostly the single-shot rifles that took anything from moments to minutes to reload, depending on the proficiency of the weapon bearer.
Things have changed. Today the weapons available to the average well-regulated militiaman range from pistols capable of delivering nine or more rounds in seconds to RPGs, tanks, and jet planes capable of dropping bombs. But have you noticed that the NRA doesn’t lobby for the right to keep a tank in every garage? Does this mean we have an NTA to look forward to — a National Tank Association?
The plain fact is that there would be no financial interest whatsoever in advancing our right to keep tanks, despite the fact that it would be very much in keeping with the Second Amendment. This suggests that the NRA isn’t interested in the Second Amendment at all — it’s in it for the money in the form of support from manufacturers of weapons that can practicably be kept by Americans who aren’t much interested in hunting.
I got a tweet from someone who took issue with my characterization in Twitter of the 99 percent as an interest group. He tweeted: “The 99% is a numeric distinction, not a group, not monolithic. It contains many ideologies, voting tendencies.”
While it’s true that the 99 percenters have many ideologies and voting tendencies, they neatly fit the definition of a group — “a number of individuals or things considered together because of similarities.” In the case of the 99 percenters, they all share this similarity: they make less than $380,000, the threshold for admission into the One Percent Club.
In my perfect world, the Supreme Court would be populated by nine William Brennans of assorted races and genders. In a realistic perfect world, the Court would be populated by nine relatively centrist jurists, or a mix of reasonable conservative and liberal intellects all capable of walking in someone else’s shoes.
The Court we have today elected a president, declared money to be speech, awarded personhood to bricks, and defended strip searches of motorists with broken taillights. The string of 5-4 decisions along political lines makes it clear that this particular court is indeed politically motivated, but it’s also clear that the opinions of the “left” wing of the court are based more in the law than their right-wing counterparts. What can one believe about the Court’s supposed impartiality when at least two of its members accept favors from arch-conservatives like the Koch Brothers, when the spouse of at least one of these members actively lobbies against one side in cases brought before the Court?
The last thing on voters’ minds in a presidential election is how their vote will affect the makeup of the Court for years, perhaps decades to come. It is one of the sad facts of life about what should be the perfect political system. You get some yahoo president with no clue about who would make a good Supreme Court judge, and a Senate that doesn’t have the balls to properly vet the nominee, and here’s what you get — Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. In my mind, the credibility of the Court rests in the hands of Roberts and Kennedy, and we’ll know if the Court has a future when it hands down its decision on Obamacare.
As conservatives try to elevate contraception to a pressing political issue, I am reminded that the war on women is not a new thing. In the European witch trials of the 15th-18th centuries, tens of thousands of midwives (perhaps many more) were accused of being witches, tried, and executed in the most horrible ways, as were men who defended them. It’s widely believed that charges of witchcraft were brought simply because women were encroaching on the domain of physicians. But these women were apprently also feared because of their knowledge of birth control during a time when Europe was struggling to repopulate following the plagues.
In our own nation, which was founded by men who were supposedly enlightened, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that women gained the right to vote, and they are still struggling for equality and fighting repression even as the 21st century reaches its teens. How interesting it is that birth control is once again at the heart of another inquisition. How unfortunate it is that so many men still fear strong women.
Even though the science supporting global warming is pretty sound, there’s one thing climatologists cannot predict: the Tipping Point. This would be the point at which climate change would be irreversible, no matter what we did. This would be the point from which the transition to a Venus-like state would be irrevocable.
If this is bad news, here’s even worse news: we can guess, but we’ll probably never know when we approach or pass the tipping point because the consequences won’t be immediately evident. Some scientists, like NASA’s James Hansen — one of the first to publicly sound the global warming alarm — believe we’ve already passed the tipping point and that Venus-like conditions are indeed in our distant future.
Of course, global warming deniers might just say, Well if we’re doomed anyway, why break our chops to try to prevent it? I guess it’s that kind of logic that has set us on a path to extinction.
While the Preamble to the Constitution doesn’t necessarily assign powers to the government, it does offer a set of principles that should guide those who make laws and interpret them. Here’s the Preamble; see if you can find those principles:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Do you see anything that says our government should not have a heart? Don’t you think the Preamble establishes a certain uniquely American spirit for governance?
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