My chosen form of exercise is the best, and indeed the only, way to get fit, and all of you are stupid for not realizing it.
Discuss.
by Sarah, Proud and Tall| 88 Comments
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize
My chosen form of exercise is the best, and indeed the only, way to get fit, and all of you are stupid for not realizing it.
Discuss.
by DougJ| 73 Comments
This post is in: The War On Women
Even in the early days of SlutGate, when it was all about Real Murkins heeding the might Bishops’ call to arms, and not yet about oxycontin-addicted perverts getting hit with boycotts, a bunch of you said this might be a Schiavo moment for the Republican party. You were wrong. It’s bigger:
“The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.”
[….]Romney pollster Neil Newhouse told USA Today that the numbers would narrow and that the drop was not Romney’s fault. He chalked the difference up to a partisan gender gap. That’s historically true — but not at the levels found in the poll. It showed: By 41 percent to 24 percent, women call themselves Democrats; men by 27 percent to 25 percent say they’re Republicans.
Even the liberal Atrios agrees that Obama has been good in the War On Women.
More and more, the culture war bullshit works in our favor. Democrats need to find new ways to draw Republicans into suicidal “cultural” jihads.
by DougJ| 36 Comments
This post is in: Bleg, C.R.E.A.M.
Some of you aren’t as nice to ABL as you should be, given that you’re not all that bad a group as human beings go. On this last Sunday of lent, why not atone for your sins by giving her some money (EDIT: her annual fundraiser, not a random bleg, people)?
Who but ABL would put this awesome video on her blog (I can’t find when she put it on but I remembered the video and found it)?
This post is in: An Unexamined Scandal, C.R.E.A.M., Food, Glibertarianism
When it comes to a libertarian, always Follow the Money. Kathleen Geier uses her weekend stint at Washington Monthly‘ Political Animal blog to pick the plutonium kernel out of Nick Gillespie’s shitty WSJ op-ed:
… I think the most awesome moment in the entire piece is when he actually comes out in favor of child labor. As In These Times has noted, “Advocates have for months been pressing the Labor Department to finalize a rule change that would help shield child farm workers from some of the most severe occupational hazards, such as handling pesticides and dangerous farm equipment, and would beef up protections for workers under age 16.” But Gillespie seems to believe that protecting kids from dangerous working conditions is for pussies: “What was once taken for granted—working the family farm, October tests with jack-o-lantern-themed questions, hunting your own Easter eggs—is being threatened by paternalism run amok.” Hey, if it was good enough for those Joad kids, it should be good enough for today’s spoiled brats! And while you’re at it, get offa my lawn!
Geier spells it out, in another post:
Gillespie refers to the children who would be affected as “kids” “working the family farm.”…
__
Actually, as Chen reports, the children affected would overwhelmingly be desperately poor Latino immigrants working on big industrial farms owned by the major agribusiness concerns. Gillespie’s dishonest representation of this issue is a common ploy among conservatives, however. Whenever business regulations are debated, they are quite fond of painting heartwarming pictures of the affected parties, spinning sentimental tales about idyllic family farms and plucky small business owners. But in fact the entities being affected almost always tend to be gigantic,very rich, and very powerful corporations.
Last week, not coincidentally, was National Farmworkers’ Awareness Week. Per Michelle Chen, at In These Times:
The Child Labor Coalition, which advocates for the rights of exploited children around the world, documents a cornupcopia of abuses in the backyard of a global superpower:
*More children die in agriculture than in any other industry.
*According to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), between 1995 and 2002, an estimated 907 youth died on American farms—that’s well over 100 preventable deaths of youth per year.
*In 2011, 12 of the 16 children under the age of 16 who suffered fatal occupational injuries worked in crop production, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
*When you include older children, more than half of all workers under age 18 who died from work-related injuries worked in crop production.Advocates have for months been pressing the Labor Department to finalize a rule change that would help shield child farm workers from some of the most severe occupational hazards, such as handling pesticides and dangerous farm equipment, and would beef up protections for workers under age 16 (currently, children as young as 12 can legally work on farms, thanks to a loophole in federal labor law, and many younger ones have worked illegally, according to recent reports)…
__
But common decency has again been overshadowed by a well-oiled campaign by the agricultural industry lobby, which has pushed to block the rule changes by claiming that child labor reflects good old American values.
__
The “Preserving America’s Family Farms Act,” proposed by Rep. Tom Latham of Iowa, targets the pending reforms as a threat to a time-honored “tradition” of child farm labor. Evoking an imaginary pastoral ideal of the American homestead, the bill argues that the strengthening of child labor protections would “adversely impact the long standing tradition of youth working on farms to gain valuable skills and lessons on hard work, character, and leadership” and would hurt their opportunities to “gain experiential learning and hands-on skills.”
Supplemental reading, from the Atlantic: “Do Children Harvest Your Food?”
So, it’s not that Nick Gillespie, Fonzie of Freedom, is necessarily a sociopath who defends turning a blind eye when kids torture other kids, in the name of ‘traditional values’. Gillespie, devout Libertarian, is getting paid to defend child abuse by giant corporations, because keeping desperately poor teenagers in the fields instead of the classroom (hey, they’d only get bullied anyways!) is profitable. And asking a Libertarian to choose the welfare of a bunch of random children he’ll never have to meet over his fat foundation paycheck and cheap produce… well, that would be a violation of his religious freedom!
Migrant Child Labor: Why Nick Gillespie {Hearts} Bullying, Right NowPost + Comments (25)
by John Cole| 53 Comments
This post is in: Activist Judges!
I suppose we should expect a few more months of this:
When the incoming Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. came before the Senate for confirmation seven years ago, President Reagan’s solicitor general gave him a warm endorsement as a “careful, modest” judge.
“He’s not a man on a mission,” Harvard Law professor Charles Fried testified, adding that Roberts was not likely “to embark on constitutional adventures.”
But two years ago, the Roberts-led Supreme Court struck down the federal and state laws that for a century had barred corporations and unions from pouring money into election campaigns.
***After the healthcare arguments, Fried was among those who worried aloud about the prospect of the Roberts court embarking on a new era of judicial activism.
If the court were to invalidate the healthcare law, “It would be more problematic than Bush v. Gore,” Fried said in an interview, referring to the case that decided the 2000 presidential race. “It would be plainly at odds with precedent, and plainly in conflict with what several of the justices have said before.”
Look- there is no way of knowing how the Court will eventually rule. None. But what is troubling to many is that it is even up in the air at all, considering the general consensus among our legal elites is that this a no-brainer and of course it is Constitutional (.pdf). Here’s the overwhelming opinion from everyone not wearing a tri-corner hat and a “Don’t Tread On Me” t-shirt with two pistols tucked into the waist band of their depends and a pocket Constitution in the bucket of their electric scooter:
When Congress passed legislation requiring nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance, Randy E. Barnett, a passionate libertarian who teaches law at Georgetown, argued that the bill was unconstitutional. Many of his colleagues, on both the left and the right, dismissed the idea as ridiculous — and still do.
But over the past two years, through his prolific writings, speaking engagements and television appearances, Professor Barnett has helped drive the question of the health care law’s constitutionality from the fringes of academia into the mainstream of American legal debate and right onto the agenda of the United States Supreme Court.
“He’s gotten an amazing amount of attention for an argument that he created out of whole cloth,” said one of his many critics, Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School. “Under existing case law this is a very easy case; this is obviously constitutional. I think he’s going to lose eight to one.”
Could the Court rule that it is Constitutional- of course they still could. But again, what is most troubling is that this is even in question. The implications of them over-ruling would be far and wide:
The thing is, as of the time the law was passed, *everyone* across the political spectrum thought this thing was constitutional. The Heritage Foundation started it, the D’s finished it, and the whole way down no one thought it ran afoul of the Constitution (save for people considered fringe at the time).
What this says is that Congress and the entire country were relying on the precedents SCOTUS set to pass the law—and they spent almost two years and untold legislative resources doing it. That’s the whole point of stare decisis, allowing for predictability with respect to what the law allows. Stare decisis is what makes sure the courts don’t act arbitrarily by constraining them to fit within precedent.
Acting in ignorance or with disregard for precedent (and precedent’s practical attendants, like reasonable beliefs in the public about what the law is) undermines rule of law, makes it impossible to pass laws confident of their legality, etc. It is, in a word, arbitrary. It’s the kind of thing they do in developing countries.
If SCOTUS ditches stare decisis here, sure their credibility will take a hit, but more importantly: we, as a polity and individuals, would have no reason to think we could pass any major regulatory legislation (unless, of course, we took the political commitments of the justices as our guide). SCOTUS would be potentially freezing the statutory law in place. What is Congress supposed to do with its time if everything it thought it knew about the law gets chucked out the window? How does it pass legislation? How does it change *existing* legislation? Are only Republican Congresses allowed to pass laws?
At any rate, it’s just funny listening to all the pearl-clutching from Fried and other “respectable” Republicans. Will the Court overturn it? In my more cynical moments, I say absolutely, by a 5-4 vote. In my more hopeful moments, I say of course not- it will be upheld 6-3. What will probably happen- anyone’s guess, but I think the best guess is that one or part will be struck down. They may split the baby and nuke Medicaid and keep the mandate.
Oh, and the answer to the question “If the law fails, what’s next” is that every single person who gets royally screwed, kicked out of their health insurance, etc., should be forcefully and repeatedly asked how they like their GOPcare/teabaggercare. Make the right wing own the mess. They broke it. They bought it. Make them own the misery they create.
*** Update ***
Read this, also too.
More Pearl Clutching from Right Wing ElitesPost + Comments (53)
by John Cole| 70 Comments
This post is in: Clown Shoes, Sociopaths
I guess that is one way of describing it.
by Kay| 145 Comments
This post is in: Rare Sincerity
I’ve been reading your comments on the oral arguments on the health care law and I sympathize. I’m a lawyer but I’m not an expert on the Supreme Court nor am I even much of a “court watcher.” I have enough trouble keeping current with state law and local rules in my area of practice. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ll wait for the decision like everyone else, and like everyone else, I’ll learn to live with it. However, I think those who are disappointed and depressed are justified in feeling disappointed and depressed. I think that’s a completely reasonable reaction to what we heard out of that court last week. I’m with you.
I went to the opera for the first time last week, and I sat in front of an older man who is an opera lover. I could tell by how he was pleading with his teenage kids, hoping they would love it. I like fanatics, they’re always so enthusiastic and earnest and they so want you to love what they love, so I made sure to tell him it was my first opera. He approached me at intermission and asked me what I thought and I told him it was “wonderful”, because it was. He was thrilled (a convert, he’s thinking) and he gave me the whole career history of the soprano, and then we talked about other things. On the health care hearing, he said he was worried that the conservative justices were going to “get back” at Obama, because Obama called them out on Citizens in the State of the Union. When I hear things like that, and I hear things like that a lot, I suppose I could leap to the defense of the justices, or the Rule of Law, or the court as an institution, but I find that I don’t have any snappy comebacks or bullet-pointed persuasive arguments for the defense anymore. I’m right there with him, worrying, and I’m no longer wondering what’s wrong with him, us, that we have so little faith because he sounded a little like some very prestigious Reagan-era conservative lawyers:
Fried had confidently predicted the law would be easily upheld. He said he was taken aback by the tone of the arguments. “The vehemence they displayed was totally inappropriate. They seemed to adopt the tea party slogans,” he said.
Pepperdine law professor Douglas W. Kmiec, another top Justice Department lawyer under Reagan, said he hoped the justices would “come to their senses” and uphold the law as a reasonable regulation of interstate commerce.
I’m finding I’m with the opera-lover, nervous and speculating. I’ve been listening to John McCain and Russ Feingold talk about the fall-out from Citizens, and I think they’d sympathize with us, too:
The McCain-Feingold law itself did not take effect until the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in McConnell v. FEC in 2003. Seven years later, McCain recalled going with Feingold to the Supreme Court, now under new and more conservative leadership, to hear the Citizens United oral arguments.
“Very seldom in my life have I been more depressed,” McCain said, “because the absolute ignorance of campaign finance reality by many of the judges, especially [Antonin] Scalia, astounded me.”
Feingold, who now heads a PAC dedicated to reversing Citizens United, suggested the Supreme Court may come to regard that ruling in a different light. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer suggested recently that the Citizens United ruling should be revisited.
Feingold said: “I think they’re taking judicial notice of the fact that the court has opened up an incredible loophole in our system and has fundamentally changed the way that our democracy works, in a negative way.”
McCain and Feingold were interviewed together by This American Life and McCain went even further:
Ten years ago, Congress voted to reform campaign finance, after Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold took up the cause. Here they reunite on the radio, to reminisce and lament how that reform failed.
McCain spoke in this interview about Scalia’s inappropriate “sarcasm” and the justices “cluelessness” on the reality of political campaigns, and he spoke with real anger and bitterness. No one does “bitter” better than John McCain, so if you’re upset with the Supreme Court, you’ll feel perhaps your first real connection with John McCain when you listen to it.
Last week, reading that Scalia was spouting political slogans when access to health care for 50 million people was on the line, well, like McCain, I am not amused by Justice Scalia. I’m not laughing. The thing is, I don’t think it’s funny. I think we’re right to expect preparation from the justices, I think we’re right to expect some familiarity with the basic facts. If they were familiar with the basic facts but were just putting on some kind of show, we’re right to expect that they use some restraint and an appreciation for the gravity of the situation in both their statements and their questions, and decline to indulge themselves at the expense of the people hanging on their every word. All they have is credibility, and appearances matter. What they say matters, because they are enormously powerful. When I read this:
Paul Clement said, ‘Well, just strike the whole thing down. Congress can come along and just enact everything that it wants back in a couple of days.’ The entire courtroom burst into laughter.
I’m not chuckling along. I’m either exhausted at the absolute cluelessness or disheartened by the cynicism of that statement, depending on whether Clements believes what he’s saying. I don’t know if he does or not, and I don’t much care. I’m a little taken aback by this blithe and breezy attitude towards 50 million people. I’m wondering how we got here, how so many of got to this place, and who is responsible for that. I suspect it isn’t our job to retain or protect or repair the credibility of that court, and we can’t do it for them anyway, even if we wanted to. Ultimately, that’s their job. if we are disappointed and dismayed when we hear them at their work, and we were, I think the responsibility for that is not with us, it is with them.
I heard two things last week, and I loved one of themPost + Comments (145)