Author: susie

No excuses

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Charlie Pierce:

Over the weekend, I watched the PBS documentary on Freedom Summer, the effort 50 years ago to register African Americans to vote in the state of Mississippi, the effort that cost so many people so dearly, especially the families of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner, who were beaten and shot to death, and buried in a dam, because the state of Mississippi had local police forces shot through with the Ku Klux Klan. Now, five decades later, with a Republican House far gone into nihilistic vandalism, and with the Senate hanging in the balance, and a Supreme Court one septuagenarian’s heartbeat away from a return to the golden days of the last Gilded Age, and a Democratic president in the White House on whom those responsible for the previous three phenomena have painted a bullseye, we keep hearing about how hard it is going to be for the Democratic party to turn out its voters this fall to take advantage of the opportunities for which Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner gave their lives, and did so in my lifetime, not in a distant antebellum episode in some backwater.

So there really isn’t any excuse any more.

Quite simply, if the Republican party gains control of the United States Senate, and if it maintains that majority in 2016, neither Barack Obama, nor Hillary Clinton, if she were to succeed him in office, will be allowed to appoint a Supreme Court justice. It will not happen. There will be nobody whose views and judicial philosophy will be satisfactory to the majority Republicans unless whoever the president is happens to nominate Antonin (Short Time) Scalia’s left nut. Yesterday, the bare 5-4 majority of Federalist Society Papists demonstrated that it is heedless of concern for women’s health, and poised to eliminate the ability of public employees — and, later, any employees — from organizing themselves.

(For an interesting historical view, I can highly recommend the redoubtable Thers at Whiskey Fire, who draws on his academic experience to explain how, in regard to human sexuality, the United States Of America is turning into the Irish Free State, circa 1935.)

So there really isn’t any excuse any more.

And it’s not like the raw material isn’t there. In a number of states in which the Democratic candidate was thought to be in desperate trouble, those candidates remain stubbornly—and narrowly—ahead. In the newly insane state of North Carolina, Kay Hagan has opened a little daylight over Thom Tillis. It should be significant that Hagan and Tillis are on opposite sides of the Hobby Lobby ruling. In Arkansas, Tea Party heartthrob Tom Cotton is giving a master class in how a promising candidate can fail to launch, and Mark Pryor has been the beneficiary. (Hint: the farmers you represent will not be pleased if you vote against a farm bill, even if it’s because freedom.) Mary Landrieu is still Mary Landrieu, but she’s still in a virtual tie.  Reproductive rights—as defined yesterday by Samuel Alito—could be enough to save Mark Udall in Colorado, who is running a bit ahead of onetime Personhood champion Cory Gardner.  (Gardner already has tried to walk that back, stepping on another rake as he did so.) And, in Michigan, Terri Lynn Land put out a commercial in which she ridiculed the idea of a “war on women.” She’s now running behind Democratic candidate Gary Peters among the women of Michigan.

So there really isn’t any excuse any more.

H/t Thomas Soldan Attorney at Law.

These are not ‘narrow’ decisions

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supremecourt

Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker:

The Supreme Court concluded its term today with a pair of decisions widely described as “narrow”—that is, of limited application except to the parties in the lawsuits. Don’t believe it.

In fact, the Court’s decisions in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Harris v. Quinn conform to an established pattern for the Roberts Court. It’s generally a two-step process: in confronting a politically charged issue, the court first decides a case in a “narrow” way, but then uses that decision as a precedent to move in a more dramatic, conservative direction in a subsequent case.

Harris, about the rights of workers and their unions, provides a classic example of the process in action. The larger issue here concerns government workers who are covered by a union contract but don’t want to pay dues. Excusing these employees from contributing to union coffers would cripple the political and economic power of unions. This particular case concerned home-health-care workers in Illinois. By a vote of five-to-four, the five Republican appointees to the court allowed these workers—and only these workers—to avoid contributing to the union. But in his opinion Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts, clearly indicates that the majority would have been willing extend its judgment to all government workers—and wound unions even more deeply.

The Hobby Lobby decision follows the same pattern. Again, Justice Alito’s opinion (for the same five-to-four majority) expressed its ruling in narrow terms. Alito asserted that the case concerned only a single “closely held” private company whose owners had religious objections to providing certain forms of birth control. According to the court, federal law required that those wishes be honored.

But, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent, there is almost no limitation on the logic of the majority’s view. Almost any closely held companies—which make up a substantial chunk of the American economy—can now claim a religious orientation, and they can now seek to excuse themselves from all sorts of obligations, including honoring certain anti-discrimination laws. And after today’s “narrow” rulings, those cases will come.

Thanks, Steve Duckett.

Bad policy

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

And how it’s making the recession damage permanent.

Still, some countries have managed to avoid, or at least start to climb out of, this “lowflationary” trap. Australia, for example, defines “price stability”more liberally than other countries—2 to 3 percent averaged over the business cycle—and that’s helped it keep rates and inflation from falling too far to begin with. And then there’s Japan: after decades of deflation, it’s finally raised its inflation target, started printing money again, and promised to permanently double its monetary base.

All of these, though, are further than most central banks are willing to go. That’s because their unconventional policies are still circumscribed by conventional concerns. Or, to paraphrase Keynes, it’s better for their reputations to fail with the “right” unconventional policies than to succeed with the “wrong” ones.

The problem is we live in an upside-down economic time. Prudent policies are dangerous, because they could turn temporary losses into permanent ones. And dangerous policies are prudent, because they could keep this from happening—keep the economy’s growth trajectory from getting knocked down.

It’s a radical time. Policymakers need to be too.

H/t Kaveh Miremadi.

New FBI records on 9/11 terror activities in Florida

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saudihouse

Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers of BrowardBulldog.org have been literal bulldogs in pushing the U.S. for information about the activities of 9/11 hijackers in Florida — and how much the U.S. knew. For years, the FBI has been denying they even investigated Florida connections. Fascinating:

Freshly released, but heavily-censored FBI documents include tantalizing new information about events connected to the Sarasota Saudis who moved suddenly out of their home, leaving behind clothing, jewelry and cars, about two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The documents were released to BrowardBulldog.org Monday amid ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation. The news organization sued in 2012 after being denied access to the Bureau’s file on a once secret investigation focusing on Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his wife, Anoud and her father Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a Saudi prince.
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