I’m so excited I am skipping the Worst Chefs finale.
Balloon Juice Fitness Thread
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.
The little girls, they understand
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.
You don’t always show your sweet side
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)?
Migrant Child Labor: Why Nick Gillespie {Hearts} Bullying, Right Now
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.”…
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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)…
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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.
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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!
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More Pearl Clutching from Right Wing Elites
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)
Impossibly Stupid
I guess that is one way of describing it.