Gun nuts’ new gambit: scaring the hell out of coffeehouse customers
And this one sparks the quote of the day (so far):
“If you want to dress up and go out and make a little political theater by frightening children in the local Starbucks, if that’s what you want to spend your energy on, go right ahead,” said Peter Hamm, a spokesman for the Brady campaign. “But going out and wearing a gun on your belt to show the world you’re allowed to is a little juvenile.”
Read the full story. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s Corporate Four Plus One More take up a landmark gun rights case, McDonald v. City of Chicago. Given the distaste for precedent among this particular group, in addition to national parks, churches and bars in Arizona and Tennessee where people are getting sloppy drunk, look for guns to be legally brandished soon in federal buildings, courthouses and at your child’s preschool. Yee haw! We watched the 1985 flick “Silverado” this weekend. I think they should change the name of that particular movie to “The Shape of Things to Come II” since “Back to the Future” is already taken.
Meanwhile, RawStory has a post up about the potentially disastrous, far reaching consequences of what I’m assuming will be a SCOTUS ruling the NRA will love, and the interesting way the plaintiff in the case was chosen.
The SCOTUS Five: making the world safe for corruption?
Three of the court's conservatives, Scalia (left) Chief Justice Roberts (center) and Alito (right)
Apparently, public corruption is NOT like pornography. Tony Scalia doesn’t know it when he sees it. And that’s not just because Supreme Court justices live sheltered, sexless lives (had a Coke lately, Clarence…?) No, it’s because like corporations, including multinationals with substantial foreign ownership, investing unlimited sums in American elections, politicians should be allowed to trade their votes for money from time to time. Read more
Friday round-up: prefab homes for Haiti, Alito and Obama not friends
President Obama goes into the lion’s den today, to meet with House Republicans who have already made clear they’re not planning to cooperate with him, because they still see political advantage in saying “no.”
Oh, and before I forget: bye-bye, healthcare!
A South Florida architect has a great idea for housing Haiti’s estimated 800,000 homeless in the wake of the 1/12 earthquake: lightweight but sturdy, modular, temporary housing that can be built just down the road in Miami Gardens. The Miami Herald reports the easy-up homes, by influential Miami architect Andrés Duany (a stalwart on green building), are made from “nearly indestructible, space-age materials,” sleep eight people in bunk-like beds, and fold down to a 2-foot package than could easily be shipped to the island. Story here. Schematics of the modulars here.
Also in the Herald, get your Obama flip-flops! Perfect for wearing to the store in Miami, instead of those damned, fuzzy bedroom slippers!
The L.A. Times (and last night on CNN, Jeff Toobin) reports that there has been no flip-flop in the Barack Obama-Samuel Alito relationship. In short, it appears that Alito’s Joe Wilson moment at the SOTU after the president dared to call out the 5 judicial activists’ dreadful decision in the Citizens United / Corporations are People Too case, was just the latest opportunity for “Scalito” to show disdain for this president and his administration. According to Toobin, Alito was overheard at a dinner party not too long ago taking swipes at Joe Biden. But at least he showed up. Per the L.A. Times, Alito was the lone no-show at a reception Chief Horseman Roberts held for the soon-to-be-inaugurated president last January. Apparently, the animus has roots in Obama’s time as a Senator: Read more
You’re welcome: SCOTUS decision lets foreign companies buy U.S. elections
Scalia and the other conservative justices give new meaning to the term "activist judge."
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick put it, the John Roberts “Pinnochio project” turned a corporation into a real boy, is bad on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. But one area in which the decision is particularly bad is the potential the decision has to give foreign nationals, and maybe even foreign governments, enormous influence over American politics. Until Roberts, Scalia and company discover some other hidden intent of the founders, foreign nationals are still prohibited from giving money directly to U.S. political campaigns. But the new corporate superman that the court created in Citizens, has the distinction of being not just an American “person,” but a citizen of the world (something Republicans normally hate, but in the in the case of corporate superman, it’s all good.) In short: nothing in the SCOTUS decision prevents multinational, or even foreign, corporations from spending unlimited sums to effect the election or defeat of American politicians, up to and including the president of the United States.
UPDATE: Slate’s Explainer explains where this dreadful idea of corporate “personhood” came from.
Read more
A ruling only a Republican could love
Chief Justice John Roberts, corporate and Republican activist
The SCOTUS ruling in Citizens United vs. the FEC was a breathtaking feat of judicial activism that the New York Times editorial board this morning rightly called a “shameful book-end to Bush v. Gore, ” in which a slightly different conservative 5-4 majority “stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. … Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.” Viewed that way, the decision was actually worse than judicial activism — it was political activism being practiced by the judiciary, something the founders of this country surely never intended. Read more
The SCOTUS ‘corporate cash for candidates’ decision: left, right and tea
Republicans are celebrating the ruling that will open the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending on campaigns, and to the buying up of whatever remaining real estate is left on the souls of our members’ of congress. But the GOP may not be on the same page with the tea partiers (at least not all of them) on this one. More on that after the jump. First, via ThinkP, some GOP reactions: Read more
Roberts court to corporations: make it rain
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to bust open the limits on corporate (and union) campaign spending should, if there were a real media out there, be the big story of the day (it won’t, at least not until the Scott Brown fever breaks) — because unlike giving Republicans one more seat in their 4 in 10 share of the Senate, the SupCo decision can really change the landscape in 2010 and 2012. And if you think corporations own the United States Congress now, just wait … Read more
A little perspective on Democrats and Brown, plus something really imporant
I realize that Politico’s meme of the day, based on 2/3 of the articles on the front page this morning is that based on the Massachusetts election, in which a majority of voters elected someone who still hasn’t call himself a Republican, and despite the fact the Republicans continue to poll considerably lower than both Democrats and the president, Democrats all across the country should just put all their stuff on Ebay and jump off the nearest tall building. And yes, being Democrats, many of them (especially the elected ones) are probably photographing and tagging their worldly posessions at this very moment And the media has already begun what is sure to be a full week of feverish, adoring, breathless over-coverage of Scott Brown, who in a single master stroke cemented the Republican Party’s 41-59 majority in the Senate, and who every Republican in America wants to BE (except the pro choice part) … hey, didn’t every Republican wanted to be Bob McDonnell like, a few days ago???
But while the White House and D.C. Democrats clearly messed up last year, let’s keep a little perspective, people. The president still polls considerably higher than any other politician, and higher than both his own and the opposition political party. Americans still trust this president much more than they trust anyone around him in Washington. Despite his mistakes, Obama can rebound. He’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and darn it, people like him. Even Politico was forced to admit that. Meanwhile, an AP poll conducted last week finds that while Obama’s right track/wrong track number is still on the wrong side of 50, at 44/50 percent, it’s only 4 points lower than it was at its highest point in 14 moths (48/46 percent in April) and a damn sight higher than Bush’s exit rt/wt number of 17 /78 percent in October 2008. Obama’s approval rating in the AP poll is 56 percent, down a lot from the 73 percent he enjoyed before the inauguration, but not half bad, compared to other first term presidencies including Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s. So let’s get a grip, people. Democrats still control the House and Senate (and if you go by Michael Steele, they still will after November, though with smaller majorities … btw on that he and I agree.) More perspective from Slate.
Besides, the big news today isn’t how fascinating Scott Brown is. It’s this: Read more
Supreme Sonia!
Score one for the Bronx. Sonia Sotomayor is officially confirmed as the nation’s first Hispanic justice to the Supreme Court, and only the third woman. The vote was 68-31, including who cares how many Republicans (okay, it was nine.) Watch the historic vote, presided over by one Senator Al Franken:
You GO girl!
Charlie screws up
Well, it’s finally happened. The happy-go-lucky Senate candidacy of Charlie Crist has hit a speed bump, and it’s one of Charlie’s own making. For weeks, Florida Democrats have been goading Crist to tell us whether or not he would have voted to confirm Judge Sotomayor, who is headed to the Supreme Court (with or without his consent.) The wily, hard-to-peg, super-tan governor (who is one of the few Republicans widely considered a shoe-in candidate in 2010) refused to say. After all, Florida is heavy with Hispanic voters, and Crist was on a glide path to take a good chunk of their votes, along with those of Florida’s large, mainly moderate Independent block.
But Charlie just couldn’t resist. With Marco Rubio looming (though not very largely) on his right, and himself opposing Sotomayor, giving wingers who hate her guts cover to say an Hispanic guy agrees with them, Crist took the bait, and came out (no pun intended) against Judge Sotomayor. In opposing the inevitable Supreme Court justice, Crist joins hands with his buddy John McCain and the rest of the elected Republicans who seem determined to jettison the Hispanic vote by any means necessary, the better to whittle the GOP down to its hard right, white core (plus Michael Steele.) And his stated reason for opposing Sotomayor: his fear that she won’t be sufficiently “strict constructionist” when it comes to gun rights, is so transparently political, it actually makes you want to laugh out loud. I can just see Miss Charlie in the duck blind now, inspecting his hunting outfit to make sure it isn’t too matchy-matchy.
Dumb move, Charlie.
See Governor, and this falls under the category of “free advice.” (Just ask Jim Greer. He’ll explain…) the wingers already despise you, and no amount of pandering to them on Sotomayor is going to change their brownshirt minds. Meanwhile, you just made yourself look like every bit the crass opportunist you appeared to be when you declared yourself willing to whore out Florida’s coastline to the oil companies in exchange for a place on John McCain’s ticket (spoiler alert: he picked that hillbilly gal from Wasila instead.) Yes, yes, I know that you desire nothing more than for everyone to like you, but you see, Charlie … no matter how hard you try, the RedState/dittohead set think you’re a RINO — a phony GOPer — an evil, Socialist, Obama-loving (they can’t say “n-word-loving” anymore, since there are no more Palin rallies … well, maybe when they’re storming a Democratic healthcare town hall…) stimulus welfare check-cashing moderate. Saying you would have voted the opposite of Mel Martinez on Sonia Sotomayor buys you nothing.
And by the way, if what you are afraid of is Marco Rubio, keep in mind that no matter how many teabaggers fall in love with him, he still hasn’t raised enough money to beat me, let alone you. So all you’ve done is buy him some airtime, and reminded the winger qaida about the guy they like better than you.
Meanwhile, Hispanics and moderate Independents and Democrats who actually like you — and there are a lot of them — now have reason not to trust you. A friend of mine who is a big-time Kendrick Meek supporter (one of the few that I know, by the way, and I’m a Democrat…) told me that the danger of a Senator Crist is that in the end, he won’t be reliable — when the chips are down, he’ll throw President Obama under the bus in exchange for some love from the GOP base, and a shot at 2012. Crist, the argument goes, seems pleasant enough for now, but send him to Washington, and you’re gambling that he would be the right’s Arlen Specter, when he could turn out to be Democrats’ John McCain — the politician Dems pined away for in 2000, only to find out what he was really like in 2008.
You just made my friend’s case. And you really didn’t have to. You could have said nothing, taken the hits from the Florida Democratic Party, and maintained a bit of mystery — plus a decent shot at wooing Hispanic voters. Instead, you look less politically savvy than Bill McCollum (who hasn’t said where he stands on Sotomayor.)
And that ain’t easy to do.
Next up: Charlie decides that hey, the earth isn’t warming up THAT much…! (Can a special session to save Dinosaur Adventure Land be next???)
Connect
Book deals
Links
Finalist: Best Liberal Blog
Poll
Loading ...
