Well…I really didn’t plan on writing a second day about the courts but the actions of the judges appointed by repubs have gotten to the point where someone has to say something….after Obama a went on record saying he believed that the ACA should and would be upheld and if the supreme court struck it down it would need a very good reason…and not the “broccoli” defense that Scalia put forth in oral arguments…a republican appointed appeals court judge, Jerry Smith, had the gall to demand that the justice department and by extension, Obama, explain his comments in a written response to the judge…nevermind that the president gets to express his opinion about the political ramifications of court cases….this judge doesn’t have the power to request anything from the executive branch. I just marvel at the audacity of the repubs these days who spent the last 3 years decrying the “overreach” of the courts, and then cheer when one of their own vastly oversteps his power to score political points with the fox news talking points of the day. This just shows the rot that has permeated the “modern” repub party where the traditions of the separate branches of government and the checks and balances that are outlined in the constitution are just to be ignored when they sense a political advantage can be gained….and this rot has reached all the way to the supreme court and the right wing judges who are poised to impose their warped view of justice on the American people….geez…
Category Archives: Politics
Activist judges and the right…
Well…I find it funny how things flip and flop in the political arena, especially when it comes to “activist judges” that the right seems to decry until the judges are the conservative bloc on the supreme court. I don’t even know why the right calls themselves conservatives anymore…that used to mean a reverence for the institutions and traditions of the country including hundreds of years of legal precedence know as “stare decisis” that they now want ignored by the court to further their radical right wing agenda. That is not conservatism, it is radicalism cloaked in the robes of Scalia, Roberts, and the others that blatantly lied about their reverence for the traditional role of judges…to find the facts in relation to the law leaving politics outside of the courtroom….but these “justices” see their roles as co-equal legislatively to the congress and are ready to ignore the constitution to further the goals of the tea party whose rise has done more to coarsen the political discourse and ruin the art of compromise on which democracies function. I hope the Roberts court does throw out the ACA….then we can get to where we need to be in healthcare…poised to go to a single payer system whose purpose will be to provide affordable care for all Americans…not profit for a few…geez…
More shenanigans by Michigan Republicans…
Well…it must be nice for the relatives of the Michigan republicans these days when they can lose money, get sued, and then get a law passed that wipes out 2.4 million dollars in debt. If you haven’t heard, that is just what happened last week when Snyder signed into law a bill that relieved the brother of the house repub chair here, Bobby Schostak, of the 2.4 million dollar loss that the appeals court said he owed on a failed property in Traverse City. The gist of the story is that the Schostaks are wealthy developers here, and the younger Schostak signed a contract that said he would be personally responsible for losses on this property…when the economy tanked, he walked away from the property that was worth 2.4 million less than he owed on it, the bank sued, and all of the courts here said he owed the money. So, what does a connected republican do here in Michigan? As always, they change the rules and use crony capitalism to pass this law that retroactively immunizes the leader’s brother from the loss…wouldn’t you like to be able to do that with the house you are upside down on? It is a breach of the public trust for the repubs to cheat the system for personal gain…but, what else should you expect from these guys? After all they are the ones who raised taxes on workers so they could hand a 2 billion dollar tax cuts to the corporations that bought them the election….and it just goes on and on…geez….
One last thing…the bill was written by the Schostak brothers attorney…..
It’s about the social contract…not healthcare…
Well…just another short one on the arguments that happened on the ACA in the Supreme Court and the fact that I think that people are missing the point of the whole thing….I can understand why some on the right don’t want to be “forced” to buy healthcare under the new law…but, how many of them are already forced to by the fear that a health problem will bankrupt them? What’s the difference between the two? How many of them have ever canceled their insurance in the name of freedom? You can probably count them on one hand. But, this whole argument has never been about healthcare to me….it is whether or not we we still have a social contract where we work for the common good of the society and where, sometimes, in that society we have to make compromises that will benefit the whole while placing a small burden on each of us as individuals. That is what the individual mandate is…a small burden for the majority of us that will help the 50 million people who can’t afford the peace of mind that comes with being insured….but, those on the right, including the debate audience that when asked about an uninsured person needing care to save his life and chorus sung out “let him die” are actively tearing down the social contract that has served this nation so well over the past 200 plus years….what kind of a country will we have left when those on the right get what they want…back to the days of “I’ve got mine, everyone else can go to hell” that prevailed in the early 20th century….I’m glad I’m getting older and won’t be around to see it if the right wins…geez…
The law and ACA…
Well…don’t know how long this one is going to be but I did want to comment on the supreme court and the ACA…aka Obamacare and the arguments that have been going on this week….one of the things that strikes me is how the conservatives have strayed from the traditional role of the court; deciding on whether a law is constitutional or not…with the questions that have come back from Alito et al…I can see the worst kind of judicial activism at work…where they are trying to set policy and write law when that is not their job, and I can see the ignorance of the roles of the three branches government that these conservative justices are showing. It is not their job to look at policy and implementation of laws and the effect of those policies, but that is what those on the right on the court have been doing during the arguments, usurping the traditional role of the legislative branch to write laws and placing themselves as equals to that lawmaking. We can see from the decisions that this court has made in Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, and now the ACA that the conservative justices feel they are only there to further the right-wing conservative agenda…ignoring precedent that reaches back to the founding of this nation for crass political advantage….now that we have seen this worst kind of judicial activism, it should make you realize that the court needs to be reformed…and the only way to do that is to re-elect Obama and hope that just one of the conservatives leaves the court so a justice who has respect for the law can replace him…geez…
The rich get even richer..
Well…if you didn’t think that there was something wrong with America and how the rewards of the economy are shared across all of it’s citizens…all you have to do is look at the recent study done by the University of California that revealed that in 2010 93% of all income growth went to the top 1% of earners…yep, you read it…the top 1% took away virtually all of the income growth while the other 99% of us were left to feed on the scraps that these folks have not figured out how to steal yet….I’ll come back for more later..but right now I need to read something else so I don’t fall into the pit of despair that these kind of numbers normally induce…geez…
Not much going on….
Well….someone needs to do something pretty soon or I am going to run completely out of things to write about….just haven’t been able to work up the outrage necessary to do these things justice lately….I could comment on the concerted effort on the part of police and prosecutors to cover their asses by smearing Trayvon Martin but the effort is so transparently self-serving that I can’t take it seriously….or I could comment on the open mike gaffe that Obama made a few days back talking to Medvedev where he said he’d have more flexibility to get things done after the election…and ole Mitt jumped on it as the president promising to give away our security if he’s reelected….I see it a little differently…Obama was just telling the truth of the political situation here in the US in front of the election…and truth is something that ole Mitt doesn’t even have a passing acquaintance with and can’t stand when he sees it….hmmmm…what else? That’s enough for now…I’m taking off out of here in a few to go shoot pool with Tom so it will be a while before I come back to add to this one….or I may do that sports one I talked about…
The republicans are just not serious…
Well…I have been struggling lately to come up with topics that really mean something and I think the problem may be that I have stopped reading the newspapers in the morning….but I have made a little cash lately so maybe I should resume going out…who knows? The one thing that I wanted to deal with today is the new budget proposal put forth by Paul Ryan in the last week or so and the fact that it is just more of the same nonsense that he proposed last year…more tax cuts for the rich, more safety net cuts for the middle class and the poor, and exploding the deficit that the repubs say they are concerned about but their actions say otherwise. This document just reeks of dishonesty with the most egregious lie or omission being how to pay for the tax cuts for the rich and corporations that he wants…saying “trust me” with some vague statement that waste and fraud can be eliminated to pay for them but does not say where that waste and fraud lies….and the cheers on the right for this piece of crap have been long and strong with the self congratulatory pats on the back and the attack line that the repubs produced a budget when the dems haven’t…but I think a bad budget proposal like this one is worse than not doing anything…but I do thank ole Paul for pulling the cover back on what American would look like if the repubs were in control….now, all we have to do is vote these idiots out of office…geez….
A few things….
Well…don’t really have a long form topic for today so I think I’ll just take a few things and add them into this one just to see where it goes…first, let’s look at the unintended consequences that are coming from many of the laws that the Koch brothers have sponsored through the right wing legislative organization called ALEC, whose sole purpose is to push the right wing agenda by writing laws that they hand to captive repub legislators across the US who then ram them through state legislatures. One of these laws is the “stand your ground” law in Florida that has been copied across 17 other states that says that people can’t be prosecuted if they shoot someone and claim self defense…the most recent case in Florida concerns an unarmed young black man that was chased by an armed citizen and shot and killed…with the killer claiming self defense…now, I’ve never seen anyone who thought they were in mortal danger run toward the person they felt was threatening…the NRA, ALEC, and the Florida legislators who passed this bill are as responsible for this young man’s death as the shooter. Okay….after that, the rest of the things I wanted to talk about seem pretty trivial so I’ll just leave it here….how can this happen in 2012 in the US?
Paul Ryan is still an idiot…
Well…just a short one on the new budget plan that ole Paul has put forth…I’m not going to bog you down with all of the numbers but just the two that define this mess that continues the repubs war on the middle class and poor….5.3 trillion dollars in cuts to programs for the poor and middle class…including gutting Medicare and social security…and guess who gets tax cuts? I’m sure you guessed it…the rich will get 4.3 billion in tax cuts…so, what this idiot has just said that we are no longer even going to pretend that we give a damn about anyone but the rich…and he justifies it by saying that anything that benefits the less fortunate will just take away their incentive to work and get ahead…never mind that the rich and corporations get much more in subsidies every year…does that mean that corporations will no longer have incentive to compete since they are getting corporate welfare? Oh, no….corporations are different since they are “job creators” so the rules don’t apply….as they don’t to the 1%…how did we get here? I am losing hope for our country if guys like this are allowed to stay in power…geez…