Trailblazer

It begins, unfortunately, not with the likes of  Mary Spaulding Balch, state legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee,  Ms. Balch opposes abortion rights because she believes it constitutes the destruction of human life. Nonetheless, speaking at the annual convention of the National Right to Life Committee, recently held in Louisville, she admitted

If we were to argue, for instance, that abortion should be banned at, say, 20 weeks because late abortions are dangerous to the mother’s health, let’s look at the fact of abortion,” Balch said to an auditorium of roughly 100 people, many of them members or leaders of state National Right to Life affiliates. “You know that a mother’s risk of death by abortion after a particular time—in this instance let’s say 20 weeks pregnant—the risk to the mother’s life rises to .09 [for] every 1,000 abortions. But let’s compare the other risks of a woman’s health. We know, for instance, that if she was to get liposuction that there’s .19 deaths for every 1,000 procedures. If you look for facelifts, it’s .2 per 1,000 procedures. For C-sections, 1.98 per 1,000, versus vaginal deliveries, which are .63 per 1,000.”

It begins not with facts, nor with an honest acknowledgment of them, nor with "dialogue."   The facts have been there on the pro-choice side and have not carried the day.  As of now, Balch's remarks seem to have come and gone with little fanfare, enraging few and changing the minds of none.

It begins with people such as Assemblywoman Lucy Flores (photo from the AP via Salon), now the Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor in Nevada. TPM's Benjy Sarlin recently reported that in 2003, she

testified in support of a bill expanding school health programs. As she explained from the witness table, her school’s failure to teach sex education had a direct impact on her family.

“I had six other sisters … all of them became pregnant in their teens – all of them,” Flores said. “One of them was 14 years old when she got pregnant with twins.” 

Then, with a nervous laugh, Flores told her colleagues something she had never admitted to anyone.

“Since I’m sharing so much this session, I might as well keep going,” she said. “I always said that I was the only one who didn’t have kids in their teenage years. That’s because at 16, I got an abortion.”

Flores' testimony has been met with 'torrent of abuse via phone, e-mail, and text messages, including death threats. The 'absolutely horrific' response, as Flores described it to msnbc, led her to question whether 'perhaps, the sharing has just gone too far.'"

No, it hasn't, though there need to be more like her, willing to describe an experience of tens of millions of American women, very few of whom- understandably- have the remarkable courage it takes to speak up. Salon's Katie McDonough writes

This is a real opportunity for Democrats who have only just begun to play offense on reproductive rights to start turning things around. For years now, anti-choice politicians have used bogus science and faux concern for women’s health to own the terms of the debate, and the consequences have been devastating. If more women like Flores started coming out with their own experiences about abortion care — how far they had to drive to reach a clinic, how much it cost them, the protesters they confronted on their way, their experience with the doctors and clinic staff — it would demystify the experience for the many Americans who are getting their information about reproductive healthcare from caveman fools like Lindsey Graham and Rick Perry.

We’re long overdue for some common sense and reality checking in our debates about reproductive healthcare. Lucy Flores was willing to step up. Who’s next?

Perhaps no one now.. Eventually, though, there will be others. We have seen the blueprint, in which. public acceptance of same-sex marriage has not soared in the past 2-3 years because of a reconsideration of the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process and equal protection of the laws. Prominent individuals such as Dick Cheney (several years ago), Rob Portman, and Jim Petro have publicly declared their support while revealing a member of their family is gay. Doubtless countless others have reassessed their position now that they've found a person or persons they know to be gay, making continued opposition to same-sex marriage rather uncomfortable.

Obviously, other factors are involved, such as the ability to cast support as faithfulness to the traditions of marriage and monogamy, as well as the realization that gay marriage (unlike abortion rights) does not chip away at the power relationships in society. When Justice O'Connor in Planned Parenthood v. Casey declared "The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive rights," she probably did not realize she was inadvertently encouraging the mobilization of anti-choice sentiment.

There was a time that approval of same-sex marriage seemed out of the realm of possibility.Since that time, a deluge of individuals has come out ("come out of the closet." as it once was termed) and for abortion rights, a public proclamation like that provided by Lucy Flores eventually will result in the attainment of reproductive rights throughout the nation.

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Or She Can Have Boehner And McConnell Over For A Barbecue

You're forgiven if sometimes you think "is she serious?" But then you remember that Hillary Clinton (in all likelihood) is running for President, and it begins to make sense. Sort of.  The Wall Street Journal online edition notes that, at "an event in Colorado" last week.

Partisanship in the 1990s was as grave as it is today, she suggested at the Colorado event. Nevertheless, Mr. Clinton made inroads with hostile Republican lawmakers, Mrs. Clinton said.

"My husband had some really serious problems with the Congress when he was in office," she said. "They shut down the government twice. They impeached him once. So it was not the most pleasant of atmospheres. But I will say this: Bill never stopped reaching out to them."

Building those relationships on Capitol Hill "is something there is no rest from," she added.

Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Obama has "worked so hard and reached out so often, and it gets discouraging because you don't feel like you're getting much back." She added: "I don't think you can ever stop. And I think that's part of whoever the next president is just has to be ready to do."

While at the State Department, she found money in the budget to offer visiting diplomats tea, cookies and coffee in hopes of forging personal ties, she added in her remarks in Colorado.

There is little likelihood that John Boehner, who has announced his intention of getting the U.S. House of Representatives to sue President Obama, would have been satisfied with tea and cookies. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who once maintained "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president," can get all the coffee he needs or wants from any Starbucks store in the District, or even in Kentucky.

 Even President Obama now indirectly concedes he had been a little naive, stating at a campaign event in May "I hear folks saying, 'Oh, you know, if you just play golf with [House Speaker] John Boehner more and we're just trying harder to be more bipartisan, then we'd get more stuff done,' That's not the problem."

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.  Or as the nearly-elected President Bush might have put it, "fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again." (Perhaps he was thinking about The Who's conservative song, way below. Shameless visual addition.)

 On Inauguration Day 2008, author Robert Draper (according to The Huffington Post) revealed that at a private dinner in Washington, D.C.

the guest list that night (which was just over 15 people in total) included Republican Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), along with Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.). The non-lawmakers present included Newt Gingrich, several years removed from his presidential campaign, and Frank Luntz, the long-time Republican wordsmith. Notably absent were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) -- who, Draper writes, had an acrimonious relationship with Luntz.

For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama's legislative platform.

"If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority," Draper quotes McCarthy as saying. "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."

Let it not be said that politicians never keep their promises.  Still, Mrs. Clinton suggests that the relentless effort to block all things Obama has fostered an atmosphere no worse than that faced by President Clinton who, she neglects to mention, may have committed high crimes and misdemeanors by lying to a grand jury about periodically being involved in sex acts in the Oval Office.

But yes, Bill Clinton did enjoy "reaching out" to Republicans (video of remarks of 11-12-99 at signing of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, below).  Last October, Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, explained

Clinton installed Robert Rubin and Larry Summers in the Treasury, which resulted in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which officially did in Glass-Steagall and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which left the derivatives market a laissez-faire Wild West (not to mention a disastrous strong dollar policy that was a critical and underrated factor in the bubble). He also reappointed Ayn Rand-acolyte Alan Greenspan, who has as much responsibility as anyone for creating the crisis, as Fed chairman—twice.

Now it’s true that Clinton faced an extremely hostile Republican Congress for the last six years of his presidency. But his administration actively encouraged the big deregulatory legislation, and squashed its own dissenters, like Brooksley Born, who saw disaster ahead.

Clinton would have you believe that he signed those bills because his administration was forced to by a GOP that was beholden as usual to Big Business, but then what about the deregulatory legislation he signed in 1994, before Gingrich & Co. took Congress?

Riegle-Neal hasn’t got a tenth of the press that the CMFA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley have, but it was a milestone in the creation of Too Big to Fail, allowing banks to cross state lines, effectively gutting state regulation of banking. The Christian Science Monitor that year quoted a Wall Street analyst saying that, “‘It also didn’t hurt that NationsBank president Hugh McColl has a working relationship with President Clinton or that the comptroller of the currency, Eugene Ludwig, was a successful lawyer at Covington & Burling and NationsBank had been a major client.’” Hugh McColl gave us Bank of America.

From across the pond, The Independent wrote in a piece that was prescient in more ways than one:

“In effect, Congress has said let the merger mania begin. There is virtual consensus that the legislation will allow both the big US banks and their foreign rivals in America - British banks among them - to grow much bigger.

Nor was that the only thing the banks got that year. The American Banking Association wrote about Riegle-Neal, the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1994, and the Community Banking Development Act that “the 103rd will be remembered as the first Congress in recent memory to pass “clean” pro-banking legislation.”

Clinton, on signing Riegle-Neal, praised McColl and the head of Chase Manhattan, and said, ” It represents another example of our intent to reinvent Government by making it less regulatory and less overreaching and by shrinking it where it ought to be shrunk and reshaping it where it ought to be reshaped.”

Again, this was before the Republicans took over Congress.

In 1999, on signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley into law, Clinton said, “This is a day we can celebrate as an American day” and that ” the Glass-Steagall law is no longer appropriate for the economy in which we live” and “today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down these antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority” and “This is a very good day for the United States.”

The past five-and-a-half years have been marked by a President collaborating with the opposition in ways unimaginable in a Repub administration. But at least he understands the pitfalls, and the problems his efforts have fostered.  But even with the benefit of hindsight, Hillary Clinton says "bring it on,"  as the "Ready for Hillary" movement rolls on.

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Hillary Clinton Endorsed The Sixth Amendment. John Kerry Won't Go That Far.

It has been only a few hours but at least as of now, there is no response from Hillary Clinton or John Kerry to the article in today's Washington Post in which Barton Gellman reports

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents....

The material spans President Obama’s first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.

Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge. One program, code-namedPRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks....

The NSA treats all content intercepted incidentally from third parties as permissible to retain, store, search and distribute to its government customers. Raj De, the agency’s general counsel, has testified that the NSA does not generally attempt to remove irrelevant personal content, because it is difficult for one analyst to know what might become relevant to another.

Nearly lost in the controversy over the relatively trivial matter of the wealth of Bill and Hillary Clinton provoked by the latter's interview with ABC News, and then the Guardian of the UK, were comments the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee made about Edward Snowden.

Mr. Snowden remains in asylum in Russia while his attorneys try to work out a deal which would allow him to return to the U.S.A.  Thirteen months ago The New York Times explained he "has been charged with violating the Espionage Act and stealing government property for disclosing information to The Guardian and The Washington Post."

This would come as a surprise to Mrs. Clinton, who told the Guardian during a recent interview. (Relevant portion begins at 13:22 of video.) "I have no idea what he's been charged with."  Still, if Clinton chooses to feign ignorance about the charges against Snowden, she clearly knows her U.S. Constitution. Asked whether Snowden should have the right to mount a defense based on the public interest, Clinton deftly dodged the question, instead stating "In any case that I'm aware of, as a former lawyer, uh, he has a right to mount a defense and he certainly has the right to mount both a legal defense and a public defense, which of course can affect the legal defense."

A former First Lady, United States Senator, and Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton has clearly and forthrightly determined that Snowden should not be stripped of his rights under the Sixth Amendment, in which

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Clinton questioned Snowden's motives, contending he had added little to the debate on national security and privacy, should return to the USA without any promises, and should not have sought asylum in Russia- though with the USA State Department having revoked his passport, he had little choice.

But at least Mrs. Clinton  maintained a rough approximation of objectivity, unlike the current Secretary of State, who told CBS News "This is a man who has betrayed his country.  He should man up and come back to the US.”  Were the infantile macho man on the playground, his preferred wording would have been "Don't be so gay." That would have been condemned as "man up"should have been.  (And good luck on that fair trial thing, Edward.)

Come back to the land of the free and home of the brave, the former and the current secretaries of state say. But as Kerry and probably even Clinton know

Snowden's legal team have stated that lack of recourse to a public interest defence is a key obstacle to the whistleblower returning to the US.

Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said: "The laws would not provide him any opportunity to say that the information never should have been withheld from the public in the first place.

"And the fact that the disclosures have led to the highest journalism rewards, have led to historic reforms in the US and around the world – all of that would be irrelevant in a prosecution under the espionage laws in the United States."

Fortunately, somebody gets it right.  Asked whether the former private sector contractor to the NSA is a traitor or a whistleblower, the man elected President in 2000 refused to

put him in either one of those categories. But I'll be candid and give you want you want. If you set up a spectrum... but I would push it more away from the traitor side. And I will tell you why. He clearly violated the law so you can't say OK, what he did is all right. It's not. But what he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the US constitution that were way more serious than the crimes he committed.

In the course of violating important law, he also provided an important service. OK. Because we did need to know how far this has gone. 







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Just Plain Folks

Bob Somerby, a nearly-constant critic of Chris Matthews, has slammed the MSNBC talk show host for promoting the inconsequential story about the wealth of the Clintons.  He quotes Matthews, periodically posing as the working-class guy from the streets of Philadelphia, on Hardball asking Nia-Malika Henderson "Why don’t we accept them as they are and stop making them like us? Because I don’t know the answer why we want them to be frauds to us. If she’s a little elitist, let her be a little elitist."

Somerby remarks

Matthews is extremely wealthy, apparently with the filthy lucre he gained from a deal with the devil. 

Reportedly, Matthews’ salary went to $5 million in the year 2001. Beyond that, his wife, Kathleen Matthews, holds an upper-end corporate job with Marriott.

Chris Matthews is very wealthy. His summer home, the crib on Nantucket, was purchased in 2004 for $4.4 million—about the price of the Clintons’ two houses combined. 

But it's not only Chris Matthews.  Politico reports

Matt Lauer and the rest of NBC’s “Today” show cast took time out of its Thursday morning broadcast to discuss what critics are calling gendered questions from Lauer to General Motors CEO Mary Barra.

“I got a lot of criticism and I said I always thought this was not a gender issue, this is a human issue of work and life balance,” Lauer said in reaction to backlash from his interview that aired one week earlier. “It’s a parenting issue for men and women, moms and fathers, a question I ask myself every single day. But clearly it still touches a nerve.”

Lauer found himself facing critics after he asked Barra, a mother of two, how she handled both tasks of a parent and a CEO. According to Lauer, he asked the question after the GM CEO publicly spoke about missing her son’s junior prom for work. After the interview aired June 26, Lauer issued a statement on his Facebook page.

“It’s an issue almost every parent including myself can relate to,” he wrote. “If a man had publicly said something similar after accepting a high-level job, I would have asked him exactly the same thing … [Work-life balance is] an important topic, one that I’m familiar with personally, and I hope we can continue the discussion.”

Martha Stewart and Kathy Lee Gifford were also on “Today” to join the conversation, and agreed that the subject should not be “taboo.” While Gifford expressed that she feels that women can “have it all,” just not at the same time, Stewart said parents “can’t have it all, but you can try.”

Having more self-awareness than media giants such as these, you know what is missing from this discussion.  "Barra" is the married name of Mary Theresa Makela (photo below from Forbes) who, Wikipedia notes, "is married to consultant Tony Barra, whom she met while studying at Kettering University, and has two children."   Perhaps when asked "Given the pressures of this job at General Motors, can you do both well?"  Mrs. Barra, wife of a man lacking a 9-to-5 job, might have responded "I have a husband to help me."

Lauer doesn't understand. Martha Stewart doesn't understand. Kathy Lee Gifford doesn't understand. These multi-millionaires don't quite understand (or, as they might put it, "get it") as they pretend to be average Joes, people just like the rest of us.  They are far wealthier. Mary Barra- Chief Economic Officer of a company worth a mere $37.4 billion, which recently announced a recall of 8.2 milion vehicles- is far wealthier and far more important.   Her job is more consequential than yours, mine, or those of our neighbors.  If Mary Barra doesn't get it right, an automotive company could go down, with disastrous results for millions of consumers, including workers who rely on her company to get themselves to and from their job.

The ultra-rich are not like the rest of us.  The husband of Mary Barra- whose total compensation this year may top $14 million- can help with the two children.  It's merely a guess but... Tony and Mary probably could put food on the table if Tony quit his job or even retired forever. If his job is so important that he cannot do so (fat chance), $14 billion would go a long way in hiring the best household help, nannies, and the like.

Of course, Mary's involvement in her children's' lives would be ideal. But even without that, the children should do quite well, thank you, with enrollment in the finest secondary schools and colleges and a leg up in the business world. (Their mother is well-connected.) Mary herself ( though evidently thoroughly qualified to be GM's CEO) is the daughter of a long-time Pontiac die-maker.  She earned a B.S. in what was once called "General Motors Institute," then scored a GM fellowship and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.  Mrs. Barra may always have been an extraordinary individual, but this is no coincidence.

The Barras can do it any way they want- that comes with the territory when a couple earns more than $14 million a year. Good for them.   But this pretense of Lauer, Stewart, Gifford, Matthews and other fabulously wealthy celebrities that they are just like the rest of us must come to an end.  Mary Barra needs only a husband who can suck it up, be a stay-at-home parent, and recognize that marriage to a tremendously wealthy and influential woman can soothe the pangs of not being able to brag at cocktail parties about your own job.

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No, Both Sides Don't Do It.

Barry Ritholtz of Bloomberg View is annoyed- and Steve M. of There Is No Spoon, Hullabaloo, and the Ventura County (CA.) Democratic Central Committee is annoyed with Barry Ritholtz.

Ritholtz cites the increase in student loan interest rates as "but one example out of thousands of an inability to perform basic duties." He maintains "there are three groups to blame for he gross dereliction of duty we have seen from  this do-nothing Congress": the Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court, and the American voter for the lowest turnout rates of any democracy.

Atkins will have none of it, noting

"Congress" could have fixed the student loan problem? Not with Republicans in charge. "Congress" could have fixed the corporatocracy? Really? The last major act of Congress saw Democrats singlehandedly create a slightly more humane healthcare system that, for all its marked progressive improvements, was still a corporate giveaway--and get flamed as Communists for their trouble with little media pushback as Republicans told seniors that Democrats were taking away their Social Security to give it to poor people.

Maybe the reason that voter turnout is higher in other countries might have something to do with their parliamentary systems and better protections for workers? Maybe it has to do with not having elections bought and paid for, or a system of government expressly designed to protect the status quo as much as possible?

The student loan debacle, singled out by Ritholtz, demonstrates the vacuousness of the argument made by the Bloomberg columnist.  The Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act would have permitted individuals with outstanding student loan debt (generally around 7 percent) to refinance their loans at 3.86%, the rate set for new borrowers under the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act passed by Congress last summer. Sponsored by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the bill was co-sponsored by 44 members, 35 of them before it was reported by committee, nine additional afterward.  All 44 Senators were Democrats. Supporters failed to obtain cloture by four votes, on a vote of 56 to 44.  Out of 40 Republicans casting a vote, three (3) supported cloture.   Out of 52 Democrats only one, Majority Leader Harry Reid, voted "nay," in his case so as not to foreclose the possibility of the bill being reintroduced.

Every Democrat supported cutting the rate on the affected student loans; 7.5% of Republicans did so.

Atkins is uncharacteristically wrong (though barely) when he describes the High Court as "stacked with 4 arch conservatives and one regular conservative against 4 left-of-centers." The Court is stacked with 5 arch conservatives, of whom one is speculated to be favorable to same-sex marriage. It suffers, Atkins observes, not from an "institutionalized" problem but "a right-wing ideological" bias.

The problem with the legislative process is not Congress, nor partisanship, nor the failure of voters to ensure their members of Congress are not the "idiots" Ritholtz labels them (graph below, from Brookings, of Democrats becoming slightly more liberal over time while Republicans have become dramatically more conservative).  It is Republicans. As Atkins concludes, "both sides aren't to blame. Just one side is."

                                                   
                                                HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY



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A Liberal Gets Confused, Caught Up In The Enthusiasm

There are extraordinary blogs on this site's blogroll, ones whose authors consistently exhibit tremendous insight in an entertaining fashion.  And then there are others of  a more hit-and miss- variety. Both were on display recently when two addressed the issue of patriotism, one in the context of Ann Coulter and the World Cup, and the other in reaction to comments by two aging musicians.

Talking Point Memo's Catherine Thompson slams Ann Coulter's recent column denouncing soccer (including, but not limited to, the World Cup) in which the conservative pundit equated the sport with liberalism, foreigners, and light rail (no, really). Thompson believes

Leave it to Ann Coulter to try and spoil the fun ahead of Thursday's pivotal USA-Germany World Cup soccer match.... It's worth noting that aside from the Olympics, the World Cup is really the only occasion when an American audience gets a chance to cheer on a national -- rather than a regional -- sports team. But apparently that doesn't jibe with Coulter's vision of patriotism.

Coulter's column may have been written with cheek set firmly in tongue but it's irrelevant, given her habit of being so outrageous the line between absurdity and remarkable intolerance is typically blurred.

Compare Thompson's suggestion that Coulter's failure to cheer on Team USA demonstrates a lack of patriotism with the criticism of No More Mister Nice Guy's Steve M. of the remarks of conservative celebrities Larry Gatlin and Ted Nugent.

Over-the-hill country music star (yet, to his credit, not a star of modern "country" music) and thoughtful intellectual Larry Gatlin (photo below, from Wikipedia) remarked of President Obama "Who elected  this doofus anyway? The liberals and the low-information voters."   Recipient of a student deferment at the height of the Vietnam War, Gatlin added

... we're also being ruled by children of the children of the '60s, who not only don't think -- the difference between right or wrong, they don't even think there is a right or wrong. So when America stands up, patriots stand up, when they believe that it is right to storm beaches in the name of what's right and wrong, and to jump out of airplanes behind enemy lines, and to troop through triple-canopy jungles or the December snows of Chosin Reservoir -- they believe it's right to go do that, that torques these people off, because they don't believe there's a right or wrong!

Steve M. recognizes "Gatlin hates the majority of people who turned out to vote in America in 2008 and 2012- but he loves America!"  He notes also three tweets by over-the-hill (actually, never on top of  the hill) rock guitarist, singer and longtime right-wing Republican Ted Nugent (photo, from Wikipedia, below the other), who on June 28 tweeted "MD MA IL CA NY NJ CO CT DE RI aren't real America anymore," followed by "what a tragedy that only TX SD & AZ are the only states with real freedoms," and finally "with all the clueless ignorant sheep no wonder obama runs amok."  (Stay classy, Ted. And one hit doesn't make a career.)

SM identifies Nugent as "another guy who loves the bejeezus out of America while hating a huge swatch of Americans."

So Catherine Thompson, finding a pundit who rejects World Cup enthusiasm, is annoyed because "the World Cup is really the only occasion when an American audience gets to cheer on a national....sports team. "In this view, those who chant USA! USA! (USA! In your face!) loudest and longest love their nation most.

Appropriately and righteously, just in time for Independence Day, false patriotism has come to an end.  It's hard to define love of country and difficult to identify the most patriotic Americans.  But two things are sure: it's not people who look down on other Americans with contempt oozing for their countrymen because, in their view, the latter are "low information voters."  Nor are they people who wave the flag for an athletic event while screaming at the top of their lungs because it's too early in the day to find a real party.

                                       

                                                HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY



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One Nation, One Religion Interpreted One Way

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.




We found out June 30 that the U.S. Supreme Court- or rather five Justices of it- believe the Court is not a co-equal, but rather superior, branch of the U.S. government (plaintiff's attorney pictured below, from Slate).  For though Congress "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," the Supreme Court evidently may interpret a law, in this instance the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as an acceptable establishment of religion.  It was hardly surprising, though still revolting, when (text of decision, here)

Some corporations have religious rights, a deeply divided Supreme Court decided Monday in ruling that certain for-profit companies cannot be required to pay for specific types of contraceptives for their employees.

The 5-4 decision on ideological lines ended the high court's term with a legal and political setback for a controversial part of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law.

It also set off a frenzied partisan debate over religious and reproductive rights that will continue through the November congressional elections and beyond.

All five conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents ruled in favor of closely held for-profit businesses -- those with at least 50% of stock held by five or fewer people, such as family-owned businesses -- in which the owners have clear religious beliefs.

There was interest- but little doubt- in how Antonin Scalia would rule, given that when two guys were fired from their jobs because they used peyote for sacramental purposes in their Native American Church, Scalia had written- correctly-

To permit this, would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind, ranging from compulsory military service, to the payment of taxes, to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, compulsory vaccination laws, drug laws, and traffic laws; to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, child labor laws, animal cruelty laws, environmental protection laws, and laws providing for equality of opportunity for the races.

But that was then (1990) and this is now, or rather, that was a Native American/American Indian church, and Scalia belongs to a very different church indeed, as do the other four members of Monday's majority. Charles Pierce, himself a (lapsed) member of that faith, remarks

... let us look also at the religious discrimination embedded in the Court's logic. There are established religions in this country—Jehovah's Witnesses, to name one—that forbid their members to accept blood transfusions and to resist vaccinations. These are not small things. They are the basis for Christian Science. There have been religious objections to compulsory vaccinations going back to a movement among some clergy in Boston in the late 18th century. Until such time as a Jehovah's Witness owns a multibillion-dollar scrapbooking empire, and thereupon declines to offer blood transfusions to the employees of said company, and until such time as someone pushes that case all the way up the ladder, it looks very much to me like the Court, in limiting today's finding in this way, has decided to define what are acceptable religious beliefs and what it considers to be merely weird ones. And, moreover, the Court's curious limit as described above lends an undue amount of credence to specific manifestations of Christianity—namely a segment of fundamentalist Protestantism, and the conservative elements of Roman Catholicism. 

Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who earns $244,400 per year and who with the other Justices constitutes the Court From Which There Is No Appeal, has an answer to the notion that members of other religions will be held in equally high esteem:

This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to mean that all insurance mandates, that is for blood transfusions or vaccinations, necessarily fail if they conflict with an employer's religious beliefs. 

Dahlia Lithwick responds

As the court extends the personal protections of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to for-profit corporations, like the one belonging to Hobby Lobby’s Green family, with its more than 500 craft stores and more than 13,000 employees, it does so with the promise (pinky swear) that it will not ripple into a series of disastrous outcomes when employers decline to afford their workers vaccinations, or psychiatric care, or equal pay, based on similarly strongly held religious convictions. 

"Nor does" the decision, Alito intones, "provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice."  Employers who wish to discriminate now are on notice not to label their choices "discrimination."  Instead, if birth control is heretical, choose a retirement plan with mutual funds with holdings in the specific forms of birth control you're condemning, and import plenty of products from mainland China, in which women refrain from abortion at their peril.. Principle has its limits, of course.

As does this ruling, which Alito warns must not be used as precedent, reminiscent of Bush v. Gore, in which the majority held "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities."   That decision was issued not in the name of a particular Judge but per curiam, used only in minor cases and for selecting a President. The only principle was the necessity for a Republican to be chosen President.  Principle has its limits, of course.

Alito allegedly based his ruling on the RFRA (passed in the Administration of progressive hero William Jefferson Clinton), about which Peters comments:   "And yes, you are still entitled to ask, "Restoration? Where's it been?" One suspects, however, any old excuse would have worked. The decision did not violate the First Amendment in word:  Congress is enjoined from acting in service of establishment of religion.  In spirit, though, the Court has done its part in establishing religion, and one particular religion, and one interpretation of that religion.   To which Justice Scalia might reply, as he has to critics of Bush v. Gore: "Get over it."

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