Well, as the saying goes, it’s all over.
Kennedy is retiring from the Supreme Court.
The Times, twisting the knife, includes McConnell Says Senate Will Move Swiftly on a Replacement in the headline.
We’d all emigrate, but no one would have us, and who can blame them.
Trump will be able to impose authoritarian rule with the Court’s blessing (possibly literal).
Swamp.
Here's Attorney General Jeff Sessions making a joke today about separating families (to laughter and applause) pic.twitter.com/j38Oyhd313
— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) June 26, 2018
David Cole, national legal director of the ACLU, on today’s Supreme Court fubar:
The Supreme Court’s approval of President Trump’s travel ban barring entry to some 150 million people from five overwhelmingly Muslim countries is likely to be judged by history as one of the court’s greatest failures — in a league with Dred Scott v. Sandford, which helped bring on the Civil War, and Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the wartime detention of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans and noncitizens of Japanese descent.
Gee, what might the common element be? Singling out a particular group – a non-white group – for Special Treatment and thus general social odium? Yes, that’s the one.
… Read the restChief Justice
Adam Gopnik on commensality and the culture of eating together and eating together-but-apart and how central to our lives it all is.
… Read the restOn the issue of Sanders being expelled from a restaurant, mixed emotions are the only ones a rational person can have. On the one hand, one of the ritual functions of restaurants is to make a common place for commonplace civilization to proceed. They build social capital from their openness to all kinds. Think of how much the civilization of American cities depends on our being able to grab not just bite but a bit of anonymity—we eat alongside others without the others looking down too sharply upon us. It’s a fundamental liberal value, worth protecting in all
Why this is stupid:
Hi Kumail, Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews in a mass genocide. I lost family on both sides in the holocaust. The more you guys compare everyone to Nazis the more you’ll be blind when the real ones show up… https://t.co/ho7OdxRO9Y
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) June 25, 2018
Kumail Nanjiani:
I know there are a bunch of people upset at the Nazi comparisons, but the highlighting-crimes-by-immigrants move is literally what the Nazis did, with Jews instead of immigrants. A sure fire way to stop being compared to Nazis is to stop acting like them.
Dave Rubin:
… Read the restHi Kumail, Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews in a mass genocide. I lost family on both sides in the holocaust. The
And this ruling sucks too: no truth in advertising for you.
… Read the restThe U.S. Supreme Court has reversed a lower court decision upholding a California law requiring anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers to more fully disclose what they are.
The case pitted the right to know against the right of free speech. On one side are self-identified “crisis pregnancy centers” that seek to prevent abortions and on the other side is the state of California, which enacted a 2015 law to ensure that these centers do not intentionally or unintentionally mislead the women who walk through their doors.
In a 5-4 ruling, the court said the centers are likely to succeed in their claim that the law violates the First Amendment.
CFI on the Reactionary 5’s grotesque ruling:
… Read the restRuling on the case of Trump v. Hawaii, in a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court declared that the president has the authority to prohibit travelers from select countries to enter the U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, asserted that the travel ban did not unconstitutionally discriminate against Muslims because “the text says nothing about religion.”
“This ban is about religious discrimination, and to claim otherwise is completely absurd,” said Nick Little, CFI’s Vice President and General Counsel. “As far back as 2015, Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire to see Muslims banned from the United States, and promised to carry out this ban once in
The Supremes (the five reactionary ones) say sure go ahead ban Muslims from the country, we’re good with that.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld President Trump’s ban on travel from mostly-Muslim nations, delivering a robust endorsement of Mr. Trump’s power to control the flow of immigration into America at a time of political upheaval about the treatment of migrants at the Mexican border.
In a 5-to-4 vote, the court’s conservatives said the president’s statutory power over immigration was not undermined by his history of incendiary statements about the dangers he said Muslims pose to Americans.
Great. Flaming hate-mongering racist shit shouts his hate-mongering shit for a year and a half and the 5 Supremes say that’s a perfectly … Read the rest
Michelle Goldberg points out in her Times column that what we have here is not a crisis of civility but a crisis of democracy.
[T]here’s a moral and psychic cost to participating in the fiction that people who work for Trump are in any sense public servants. I don’t blame staff members at the Virginia restaurant, the Red Hen, for not wanting to help Sanders unwind after a hard week of lying to the public about mass child abuse. Particularly when Sanders’s own administration is fighting to let private businesses discriminate against gay people, who, unlike mendacious press secretaries, are a protected class under many civil rights laws.
That “not wanting to help Sanders unwind” is good.
… Read the restWhether or
Charles Pierce burning up the page on the subject of “civility” and not being rude to those neatly-dressed people approaching us with whips and flaming torches.
By all accounts, the most civil action taken in L’affaire Poule Rouge was the way Stephanie Wilkinson handled her refusal to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia.
She talked to her staff, she took a vote, she took Sanders aside, she asked her to leave with an explanation why, she comped Sanders and her party for their cheese plate.
… Read the restShe did not use an official government Twitter account to discuss the episode, as Sanders did later. She did not use the power of the Oval Office to try
Fresh Air the other day featured a book about Trump’s family, and there was one part that jumped out at me rather.
… Read the restGROSS: Each of the three women that have been married to Donald Trump, including the first lady, had some period of their life where they were models. And after Donald Trump met Melania, you say he wanted to, like, nudge forward her career, and he wanted her to pose for a photo shoot for British GQ, a special edition headlined “Naked Supermodel Special!” Tell us about that edition and Donald Trump’s role in having Melania pose for it.
FOX: He has always wanted his wives to be famous – same with his daughter. He wanted them to
Ah yes, making America great again.
… Read the restHarley-Davidson, the American motorcycle manufacturer, said on Monday that it would shift some production of its iconic bikes overseas to avoid retaliatory tariffs imposed by the European Union in response to President Trump’s trade moves.
The decision, announced in a public filing, is the latest and most high-profile example of how Mr. Trump’s trade war is beginning to ripple through the United States economy as domestic companies begin struggling with a cascade of tariffs both here and abroad. While Mr. Trump says his trade policy is aimed at reviving domestic manufacturing, Harley-Davidson’s decision shows how the administration’s moves could have the unintended effect of reducing employment and economic growth in the United
An item from January 25 2017 which I don’t recall seeing at the time:
… Read the restWhile U.S. citizens could once claim to be part of the 9% of people in the world governed by a “full democracy,” they are now part of the near 45% who live in a “flawed democracy.”
That’s according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, which downgraded the U.S. in their 2016 Democracy Index published Wednesday. The move puts the U.S. in the same category as Poland, Mongolia, and Italy.
To arrive at this conclusion, the paper analyzed over 200 countries and considered factors like political culture and political participation.
“Popular trust in government, elected representatives and political parties has fallen to extremely low levels in the
WILL YOU LOOK AT THAT
Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2018
God, that’s a fiendish detail.
The children have been through hell. They are babies who were carried across rivers and toddlers who rode for hours in trucks and buses and older kids who were told that a better place was just beyond the horizon.
And now they live and wait in unfamiliar places: big American suburban houses where no one speaks their language; a locked shelter on a dusty road where they spend little time outside; a converted Walmart where each morning they are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, in English, to the country that holds them apart from their parents.
They are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance in English. What … Read the rest
Melania Trump says to be nice.
Melania Trump on Sunday urged students at a conference of a youth and safety organization to be a “positive force” in the lives of those around them and to treat their peers with respect.
“You have the power to be the positive force in so many people’s lives,” the first lady said at the Students Against Destructive Decisions gathering in Tysons Corner, Virginia. “Kindness, compassion, and positivity are very important traits in life.”
That’s true, but it’s abrasive mockery coming from her. She’s married to a relentlessly hateful, hate-fomenting, malevolent man who hate-mongered his way into the presidency. She joined her husband in pushing birther lies about Obama. She sued a disabled blogger … Read the rest
The squalor we are being dragged into:
Online calls for violence against immigrants have surfaced in recent weeks as the border crisis continues to dominate the national conversation. Last week, the Oregonian reported that an Oregon Department of Transportation employee was placed on leave pending an investigation after an outcry over a Facebook comment.
“I personally think they should shoot them all at the border and call it good,” the state worker, Lori McAllen, wrote online, according to the paper. “It’ll save us hard working AMERICAN’S billions of dollars on our taxes! ;)”
Winky winky.
… Read the restAlabama-based musician Phillip McCain also became the target of a social media outcry after an image of a Facebook comment he made began circulating
