Month: May 2014

The Supreme Court secretly revises its opinions? Wow.

by digby

How can this possibly be ok?

The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice. The revisions include “truly substantive changes in factual statements and legal reasoning,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard and the author of a new study examining the phenomenon.

The court can act quickly, as when Justice Antonin Scalia last month corrected an embarrassing error in a dissent in a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency.

But most changes are neither prompt nor publicized, and the court’s secretive editing process has led judges and law professors astray, causing them to rely on passages that were later scrubbed from the official record. The widening public access to online versions of the court’s decisions, some of which do not reflect the final wording, has made the longstanding problem more pronounced.

Unannounced changes have not reversed decisions outright, but they have withdrawn conclusions on significant points of law. They have also retreated from descriptions of common ground with other justices, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor did in a major gay rights case.

The larger point, said Jeffrey L. Fisher, a law professor at Stanford, is that Supreme Court decisions are parsed by judges and scholars with exceptional care. “In Supreme Court opinions, every word matters,” he said. “When they’re changing the wording of opinions, they’re basically rewriting the law.”

So the court is the final arbiter of disputes over the constitution. But they can, without notice, change their rulings and not tell anyone.

But hey, Michael Kinsley says that if the government has to keep secrets from people and they are the only ones capable of knowing which secrets to keep. So never mind.

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Not that it matters …

by digby

Still, it’s good to know:

A majority of likely voters in swing congressional districts and states this year support stricter background checks on gun purchasers, and the support spans both parties, a new POLITICO poll finds.

Seventy-nine percent of those surveyed would support tougher measures while 21 percent are opposed.

Ninety percent of Democrats support stricter checks —as do 71 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of independents, the survey found. Three-quarters of the overall survey respondents said the issue was “important” in evaluating candidates in the midterm elections, including 68 percent of Republicans, 87 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents.

A bipartisan background checks bill failed in the Senate last year.

Unsurprising, I suppose. After all, people who are armed to the teeth usually get their way. That’s called liberty.

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Blue America contest: The Alan Grayson Experience 
This one’s from Howie at Down With Tyranny:

You’re probably aware that we’re getting into the final stretch of our Alan Grayson Jimi Hendrix fundraiser. Because of the Memorial Day holiday, we’ve extended it until Tuesday– one extra day. You can get in on it here— and possibly win the rare, collectible Jimi Hendrix Are You Experienced? platinum record award.

Do you remember the Blue America-endorsed candidate in Illinois, George Gollin, a particle physicist? Unfortunately, he didn’t win his primary against Steve Israel’s heavily-funded mystery meat candidate, Ann Callis, who has virtually no chance whatsoever of unseating weak Republican Rodney Davis in IL-13. George, however, hasn’t withdrawn form politics. He’s still working to make the progressive movement stronger and this is the introduction he wrote urging his supporters to contribute to Grayson’s campaign this week:

Howie Klein is a progressive political blogger who writes the DownWithTyranny.blogspot.com blog. He is also helps with BlueAmerica, which raises funds for progressive candidates. Howie passed to me a message asking for help in support of Alan Grayson, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives who represents a district in central Florida. 

I met Mr. Grayson for the first time a few weeks ago in Washington. Grayson is smart, progressive, quick, and fearless. He has advanced degrees. And he not only speaks truth to power, but willingly mocks the king who comes into the room unclad. I was not surprised that he was kept off the Democratic side of the House panel that will watch the Right make political hay from the deaths in Benghazi. 

One of Grayson’s gigs is serving on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. One of the many reasons we need to help him stay in office is to protect us from the Republican crazies on SS&T. Recall that this is the committee which features Paul Broun (R-GA-10) as a subcommittee chair; Broun is the guy who declared that “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.” And before he lost his seat in 2012, Todd Akin (R-MO-02) was also a Republican member of the committee. He’s the yahoo who explained that women who have been raped will not become pregnant because “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” 

So I encourage you to read Howie’s appeal below, and contribute to Alan Grayson’s campaign fund. 

We need better people in office than the Democratic organization will tend to support; most recently, they’ve backed one guy with a fake college degree who isn’t even a Democrat and others who appear to have been laundering campaign contributions from their parents to increase their cash intake. 

I don’t plan to send you very many messages of this sort, and thank you for your indulgence, and your consideration. 

best regards,
George Gollin
Champaign, IL
IL13

You can read all about the “contest rules” and contribute to Grayson’s campaign here. Any amount goes, even one dollar. And if you don’t have any cash on hand at the moment and want a chance to win anyway, just send us a post card to Blue America, PO Box 27201, Los Angeles, CA 90027 and you’ll have the same chance as anyone else.

Writing to his supporters today, Grayson decided to put the Hendrix context into some context, “so you recognize,” he wrote, “just how mind-boggling this opportunity is.”

Are You Experienced? was Jimi Hendrix’s first album. Rolling Stone ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist of all time. 

In the year that Are You Experienced? was released, the readers of Melody Maker voted Jimi Hendrix the Pop Musician of the Year. The following year, Billboard named him Artist of the Year, and Rolling Stone called him Performer of the Year. 

Rolling Stone called Are You Experienced? “epochal,” and rated it the 15th greatest album of all time, as well as the third greatest debut album of all time. Rolling Stone also ranked “Purple Haze,” the lead song on the album, as the 17th greatest song of all time. 

Noe Goldwasser, the founding editor of Guitar World, called it “the album that shook the world.” He added that it is “the measure by which everything in rock and roll has been compared since.” 

The album was distributed by Polydor Records. When the head of Polydor first heard the album, he said, “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.” 

The album contained several innovative effects, like “amp howl” guitar feedback and backward guitar and drum music. It was so unprecedented that when the recording studio master tapes were sent to Reprise Records for remastering, they wrote on the box “Deliberate distortion. Do not correct.” 

Are You Experienced? reached the Billboard Top 40– for 27 weeks. 

The Library of Congress chose Are You Experienced? as one of only fifty recordings to be added to the National Recording Registry. The archivist of the Smithsonian Institution called it “a landmark recording,” because “it altered the syntax of the music,” he explained, “in a way I compare to James Joyce’s Ulysses.” 

At the insistence of one Paul McCartney, Hendrix was invited to play songs from Are You Experienced? at the Monterey Pop Festival. Hendrix closed the set by smashing his guitar, and setting it on fire. 

I haven’t done that on the Floor of the House. Yet. 

So how special is the RIAA-certified Platinum Album Award for Are You Experienced? Very special. Very, very special. 

And thanks to Blue America PAC, if you contribute to our campaign this week, you have a chance to own a special piece of music history and legend, by winning the Jimi Hendrix Platinum Album Award. It’s your chance for Musical Paradise. 

Jimi Hendrix released only seven albums in the United States. Six of them went platinum, selling over a million copies. If you have a way to get the RIAA-certified Platinum Album Award for one of those other five albums, go for it. And if you already happen to have one of those other Jimi Hendrix Platinum Album Awards, then by all means, please disregard this offer. But if not, then contributing to our campaign today is the only chance that you’re ever going to have to get one. 

Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t blow it. 

Plus, we could use your help. Thanks. 

Courage,
Rep. Alan Grayson

Excuse me, while I kiss the sky ….

Oh, he was really gay. That explains it.

by digby

According to Dr. Robi Ludwig, a Fox news psychologist, Elliot Rodger wasn’t a violent misogynist who hated women because they didn’t want to sleep with him:

“When I was first listening to him, I was like, ‘Oh, he’s angry with women for rejecting him,’” Ludwig recalled. “And then I started to have a different idea: Is this somebody who is trying to fight against his homosexual impulses?’”

“Was he angry with women because they were taking away men from him?” she continued. “But this is a kid who couldn’t connect, and felt enraged, and wanted to obliterate anyone that made him feel like a nothing.”

Ludwig later declared that Roger’s could have been “angry at the men for not choosing him.”

Do they hand psychology credentials out to just anyone?

I’m actually surprised that there hasn’t been more of this. It’s a sign that some of the insulting stereotyping of gay men has begun to disappear that it hasn’t. There was a time that any young guy like Rodger who proclaimed a hatred for women would have been suspected of being gay before anything else. Despite all evidence to the contrary, when I was a kid it was taken as fact that gay men hated women (and gay women hated men.) And that was “their problem.”

That this assumption is relegated to a far corner of the fever swamps is a sign of progress.

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Meanwhile, in bizarroworld

by digby

Courtesy Josh Marshall on twitter, I was led to this bizarroworld essay about violent liberal intimidation:

If you want to know why the culture has become so “divisive,” this is why. Liberal elites are so threatened by the collapse of their narrative on every level, that they cannot help lashing out in a primitive manner.

Thus William Kristol writes of “the Agenda Project,” a major progressive group which “has launched the ‘Fuck Tea’ project,” the purpose of which is to “to dismiss the Tea Party and promote the progressive cause.” 

“The ‘Fuck Tea’ movement — that’s what the left has come to. They can’t defend the results of Obama’s policies or the validity of Krugman’s arguments. They know it’s hard to sustain an anti-democratic ethos in a democracy. They realize they’ve degenerated into pro-am levels of whining and squabbling. So they curse their opponents.” 

That’s about as primitive as one can get and still remain in the realm of language. The only thing left after “fuck you” is violent action. But it is critical to bear in mind that state violence is different from personal violence. The state is a giant bully that has a kind of infinite reservoir of violence behind it, so it needn’t necessarily behave with overt violence, since merely the threat is usually sufficient.

Change can be progressive, or it can be violent. Organic growth is a kind of change, but so too is a bullet to the head. Our Constitution is supposed to protect us from the violent predation of government, which is why it is Job One for the left to transform it from a document that protects us from the state to one which defines what the state can do to you.

Thus, “If a judge (or ultimately the Supreme Court) says the Constitution allows the government to force you to buy health insurance, then it’s a done deal, regardless of whether the Constitution says so or not. Under such a scenario, the Constitution thus becomes a tool for social engineering rather than a protection against government excess, as it was originally intended.” 

And “as the ruling class has more and more isolated to themselves the power to dictate what is and is not an appropriate use of the blessings of liberty, we have seen a corresponding decrease in the actual liberty we enjoy.”

So in Arizona, a judge says that the people have no right to protect themselves from illegal aliens, while in California another judge decides that henceforth marriage will means something it has never meant and cannot mean. It is not so much that marriage between two men is “illegal.” Rather, it is impossible, like being the father of your mother. But what is the left but violent insistence on the possibility of the impossible? 

Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. Whatever happens in November, it certainly won’t be a cause for joy. Transient relief, maybe, but not joy, because when narratives break down, people are truly capable of anything.

It’s always bracing to catch up with the right’s inverse view of the state of the world. It’s a reminder that we can all construct narratives to fit our worldview. This one is fairly elegant in its way although I’d love to know how they expect “the Constitution” to be upheld if judges and the Supreme Court are not allowed to adjudicate it.  Priests? Psychics?

*Oh, and if you think this is just the mental meanderings of some blogger, take a gander at the triumphal 2010 William Kristol piece this fellow linked. In his mind liberals were on the verge of going extinct at that point:

The left has collapsed.

Its political support has collapsed. Public opinion polls point to a historic repudiation of the president and the Democratic party this fall, something on the order of a 60-seat Republican gain in the House. The GOP has an outside shot at taking the Senate as well.

Its claim to intellectual integrity has collapsed. Paul Krugman, Ivy League professor, New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate (the holy trinity of the liberal establishment), has humiliated himself with a startlingly dishonest attack on Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. Krugman, called out by Ryan, rebuked by honest analysts and unwilling to concede his errors, has retreated into uncharacteristic abashed silence.

Its Leninist discipline has collapsed. Last week, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs complained about the craziness of the professional left in the punditocracy. “Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs explained. “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality. … They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

Members of the professional left hit back at Gibbs, dubbing the Obama White House the “amateur left.”

Its democratic credibility has collapsed. In recent weeks, the left has the arbitrary rulings and sophistic arguments of federal judges who have overturned an immigration statute that mirrors federal law passed by the state legislature in Arizona, and a constitutional amendment defining marriage as it has been defined for all of American history, enacted by the citizens of California.

Good times.

QOTD: Margaret Atwood

by digby

Who gets these dynamics better than any other writer, in my opinion:

‘”Why do men feel threatened by women?” I asked a male friend of mine. So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. “I mean,” I said, “men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power.” “They’re afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their world view.”

Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.’ 

Margaret Atwood, Writing the Male Character (1982)

The irony, if that’s even an appropriate way to think about it, is that out of his deep hatred toward women, Elliot Rodger killed two women — and four men — on Friday night. No one is safe from violent misogynists.

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No matter the murderous motive, the common denominator is always the gun

by David Atkins

Yesterday a deeply disturbed man committed an unspeakable crime in Isla Vista. He was motivated by the worst forms of misogyny, sexual entitlement, racism, and privileged narcissism, and engaged in a horrific murder spree as a form of deranged personal protest that women would not submit to his ownership. It is true that that sort of entitled patriarchalism is a sickness that besets our culture, and should be curbed in all its forms.

But it’s also important not to focus too much on this one man’s motive. The motive is less important than the common denominator between this crime and all the other massacres that have become a dull roar in America: easy access to guns.

Because the fact is that in all these shooting sprees, the motives tend to be very different. Hasan, the original shooter at Fort Hood, was motivated by Islamist religious fundamentalism–a fact that the Right hyped strongly for their own prejudicial reasons, and still do. The Columbine shooters seemed to be motivated by a different sort of social resentment. Adam Lanza’s issues remain unclear to this day. The Navy Yard shooter had personal grievances related to his service. Gabby Giffords’ shooter was driven by paranoia. The Virginia Tech shooter had still other problems. That the Isla Vista shooter was motivated by a disturbing, manic, entitled misogyny seems more accident than pattern in this context.

All of these shootings do seem to have some form of mental illness at work, but that itself is a cop out. The vast majority of the mentally ill do not engage in mass violence, and many of the mass shooters were not formally identified as mentally ill until they performed their barbaric acts.

The single common denominator in all of these incidents is the gun. It’s that simple. Most of the shooters either obtained the firearms legally (as the Isla Vista shooter did), or had easy access to them by living in a household with someone who had obtained them legally.

Without the gun, these killing sprees would have been far less deadly. Yes, the Isla Vista shooter killed his first three with a knife, but it would not have gone much farther than that had it started at all. Knife sprees are extremely rare and extremely difficult to accomplish. Guns depersonalize killing, embolden deranged killers who might otherwise be on the fence, and make their jobs infinitely easier once they decide to go through with the grim task. They also provide an easy blaze-of-glory suicide mechanism for them, when otherwise they might be looking at the possibility of a far less glamorous lifetime in prison.

Mental illness exists in other developed countries. Radical Islamism does, too. Sexual entitlement and misogyny certainly do. Unpopular loner kids exist, too, as do disgruntled employees. But none of these things are causes of mass murder sprees in, say, Germany, France, England or Japan.

The common denominator is the gun. It is always the gun, and it will always be the gun. We can try to fix the other social problems all we want–and we should. But until we fix the gun problem, we will continue to offer the lives of ourselves and our children on the altar of this insatiable, bloodthirsty Lord we euphemistically call the “gun rights movement.” Year after year, month after month we will continue to propitiate this monster with our blood and tears until enough of us decide that we have had enough, overthrow its foul priests and sack the tainted officials corrupted by its bloodstained lucre. Until that day the NRA will simply take our children, group by group, to its yearly Lottery because, after all, that’s the way we’ve always done it. For freedom.

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Saturday Night at the Movies




SIFF-ting through cinema, Pt. 2

Wealth inequality you say?

by digby

I don’t know about you, but this just shocks the hell out of me. Apparently Judge Judy is more popular than ever and her ratings are among the very few that are going up. Why that might be, I can’t say. If you want to watch an older lady in a robe yelling at people and telling them to shut up, you just say hello to my neighbor Mrs Wilton.

Maybe this is really a good sign that people like older ladies in authority, I don’t know. But that’s not what’s shocking. It’s this:

Judge Sheindlin, who tapes only 52 days a year, for which CBS pays her an estimated $47 million, has her own theories about her program’s continued popularity.

By all that is decent in this world how can that be right? I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve to be rich when she has a popular daytime television program. But that’s obscene. In fact, it’s enough to make me sick, particularly when I came upon this NY Times story directly after reading this one in Mother Jones:

Living in a wealthy nation, it’s easy to forget that a whopping one-sixth of the world’s population subsists without stable sources of food, medical care, or housing. More than a billion people around the world are believed to live on a dollar a day—and often less. While the circumstances leading to that sort of extreme poverty are varied and complicated, the situations faced by the planet’s poorest are depressingly familiar. A new book out this week painstakingly documents the circumstances of some of them. Written by Thomas A. Nazario, the founder of a nonprofit called The Forgotten International, and vividly reported and photographed by Pulitzer Prize winner Renée C. Byer, Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World’s Poor offers a window into these people’s everyday lives, and calls for action on their behalf.

Here’s another elderly lady in a robe. She lives on a dollar a day:

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Map ‘O The Day

by digby

This one is very disturbing. Those dots represent mass killing incidents in America.  Mass killings are defined as more than four dead victims:

Here are the details.  In case you’re wondering, the red dots refer to spree killings and the others are mass killings in a single incident. Amazing that we have to break it down that way.

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