The Commentariat -- July 4, 2014
Internal links, photo removed.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....
Punctuation Matters. Jennifer Schuessler of the New York Times: "A scholar is now saying that the official transcript of the document produced by the National Archives and Records Administration contains a significant error -- smack in the middle of the sentence beginning 'We hold these truths to be self-evident,' no less. The error, according to Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., concerns a period that appears right after the phrase 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' in the transcript, but almost certainly not, she maintains, on the badly faded parchment original. That errant spot of ink, she believes, makes a difference, contributing to what she calls a 'routine but serious misunderstanding' of the document. The period creates the impression that the list of self-evident truths ends with the right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,' she says. But as intended by Thomas Jefferson, she argues, what comes next is just as important: the essential role of governments -- 'instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed' in securing those rights.'" ...
... CW: If you look at Jefferson's draft (excerpted above; full page 1 here), the punctuation following "happiness" is a semicolon, & there is another semicolon following "consent of the governed." That is, he meant it as one long sentence, with independent clauses meant to hang together.
That action evinces disregard for even the newest of this Court's precedents and undermines confidence in this institution. -- Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent on an order for temporary injunction in Burwell v. Wheaton College ...
* ... Adam Liptak of the New York Times: "In a decision that drew an unusually fierce dissent from the three female justices, the Supreme Court sided Thursday with religiously affiliated nonprofit groups in a clash between religious freedom and women's rights. The decision temporarily exempts a Christian college from part of the regulations that provide contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The court's order was brief, provisional and unsigned.... The order, Justice Sotomayor wrote, was at odds with the 5-to-4 decision on Monday in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, which involved for-profit corporations. 'Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word, Justice Sotomayor wrote. 'Not so today.'" ...
... The brief order, Scalia's one-line concurrence, & Sotomayor's long dissent are here. ...
... Lyle Denniston of ScotusBlog: "Expanding the rights of religious opponents of birth control, a divided Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon spared an Illinois college -- and maybe hundreds of other non-profit institutions -- from obeying government regulations that seek to assure access to pregnancy prevention services for female workers and students. In the same order, the majority essentially told the government to modify its own rules if it wants to keep those services available. Three Justices wrote a sharply worded dissent, accusing the majority of creating on its own a 'new administrative regime' that will seriously complicate the operation of the birth control mandate under the new federal health care law." ...
... Micah Schwartzman, Richard Schragger & Nelson Tebbe in Slate:" Hobby Lobby is for religion what Citizens United was for free speech -- the corporatization of our basic liberties. But Hobby Lobby is also unprecedented in another, equally important way. For the first time, the court has interpreted a federal statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (or RFRA), as affording more protection for religion than has ever been provided under the First Amendment.... The court has eviscerated decades of case law and, having done that, invites a new generation of challenges to federal laws, including those designed to protect civil rights.... The Roberts Court is now unconstrained by precedent. It has loosened itself from decades of First Amendment doctrine and has begun remaking the law of free exercise." ...
... CW: Yeah, not bound by precedent set way back on Monday.
... Caitlan MacNeal of TPM: "A reverend in Illinois organized a demonstration to hand out condoms outside of a local Hobby Lobby store in order to protest the Supreme Court's ruling on contraception, the Daily Herald reported. Rev. Mark Winters of the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Naperville, Ill..., told the Daily Herald that he wanted the protest to show that not all Christians oppose birth control. He also said he hoped to get people to question whether the Supreme Court's decision was fair to Hobby Lobby employees' religious freedom. 'You can make the religious freedom argument, you can make the argument about contraception, but ultimately, for me, this is about power,' he said. 'Jesus had a lot of issue with powerful people using power over the powerless.'" ...
... Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post: "A flurry of Supreme Court decisions this year on reproductive rights, executive power and other issues could play a prominent role in the midterm elections this fall, rallying base voters on both sides and laying the groundwork for the larger fight to come in 2016."
Paul Krugman: "The basic story of what went wrong [with the economy] is, in fact, almost absurdly simple: We had an immense housing bubble, and, when the bubble burst, it left a huge hole in spending. Everything else is footnotes. And the appropriate policy response was simple, too: Fill that hole in demand. In particular, the aftermath of the bursting bubble was (and still is) a very good time to invest in infrastructure.... But what actually happened was exactly the opposite: an unprecedented plunge in infrastructure spending.... And it's about to get even worse. The federal highway trust fund ... is almost exhausted. Unless Congress agrees to top up the fund somehow, road work all across the country will have to be scaled back just a few weeks from now.... The combination of anti-tax ideology and deficit hysteria (itself mostly whipped up in an attempt to bully President Obama into spending cuts) means that we're letting our highways, and our future, erode away."
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd.
Dylan Stableford of Yahoo! News: "New York Times columnist David Brooks gets a lot of hate mail. And he doesn't read the comments section. 'I used to read them, but it was just too psychologically damaging,' Brooks said in an interview with Yahoo News' Katie Couric at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Tuesday. 'So then I would ask my assistant to read them.' Brooks was shocked at the volume of 'punishingly negative' comments when he joined the Times in 2003. 'It was the worst six months of my life,' he said. 'I had never been hated on a mass scale before.' CW: The post includes video of the full hour-long Couric-Brooks interview."
Beyond the Beltway
Michele Richinick of NBC News: "New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a gun control bill on Wednesday that would have banned magazines with more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate called the restriction of the number of bullets 'trivial,' and denied such a limit could prevent future mass shootings.... Hours before Christie's decision, several families from Newtown, Conn., personally delivered a petition to Christie to encourage him to reduce the legal limit of magazines. More than 55,000 individuals supported their request. The governor wasn't available to meet with the parents...." CW: In other words, Gov. Confrontational & Mr. Straight Talk didn't have the guts to face the parents & tell them that their children's deaths by weapons equipped with high-capacity magazines were "trivial." Coward. Hypocrite. Huge sack of shit.
Ryan Takeo of KPIX: "The city of Berkeley[, California,] will require medical marijuana dispensaries to give away two percent of the amount of cannabis they sell each year free to low-income patients."
I don't want to get into the debate about climate change, but I will simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that. Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There are no factories on Mars that I'm aware of. -- Kentucky state Sen. Brandon Smith, at a Natural Resources & Environmental hearing, explaining why coal can't possibly be contributing to climate change
... while the average temperature on Earth is roughly 58 degrees Fahrenheit, the average temperature on Mars is approximately -80 degrees Fahrenheit. In Sen. Smith's defense, he's only off by about 138 degrees or so, which happens sometimes.... There were plenty of other amazing and 'insightful' quotes in this hearing ... where the people who say Mars is the same temperature as Earth allege that climate scientists don't know what they're talking about. -- Blogger Joe Sonka
An Upside to Manhattan's One-Way Avenues: Danielle Tcholakian & Murray Weiss of DNAinfo: "A man who was driving the wrong way on Seventh Avenue early Wednesday was caught with assault rifles, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and several knives -- and police found a note in his car saying he wanted to die in combat, police said." Via New York.
Senate Race 2014
Physicians Against Birth Control. Bruce Alpert of the Times-Picayune: "The Bill Cassidy Senate campaign announced Thursday that the candidate's unmarried 17-year-old daughter is pregnant as she prepares for her senior year at a Baton Rouge high school. Cassidy, a Republican congressman from Baton Rouge, said in a statement provided NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune that his daughter faces 'a more challenging future' and that she has his and his wife Laura's unconditional support. The baby is expected later this summer.... Both Bill Cassidy and his wife, Laura, are physicians." Cassidy is the front-runner in the Louisiana GOP Senate race. ...
... CW: I doubt his daughter will be getting an abortion. Cassidy, who is "staunchly pro-life," opposes abortion even in the case of rape or incest. Planned Parenthood gave Cassidy a zero percent rating. So did the National Education Association & the Human Rights Campaign. He has a 100 percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee.
Senate Races 2016
Dave Weigel of Slate: "... the 2016 election map gives Democrats a chance to refight the troublesome 2010 elections, and to do so with Hillary Clinton atop the ballot. The best case 2014 scenario for Democrats is that they only hold the Senate by one or two votes." Weigel lists "seven Senate races Democrats should be optimistic about in 2016."
News Ledes
New York Times: "In the latest turn in the yearlong tensions with Germany over American spying, a German man was arrested [by the German government, I surmise] this week on suspicion of passing secret documents to a foreign power, believed to be the United States. The American ambassador, John B. Emerson, was summoned to the Foreign Office here and urged to help with what German officials called a swift clarification of the case."
New York Times: "Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh philanthropist and reclusive heir to the Mellon banking fortune, whose support for right-wing causes laid the foundations for America's modern conservative movement and fueled the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton, died on Friday. He was 82. Mr. Scaife's death was reported by the The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a newspaper he owned. No cause of death was given." ...
... For your amusement, here's a 2008 Vanity Fair story on how Scaife's second marriage went.
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Reader Comments (10)
Back in June, 2012 Jill LePore wrote a long piece in the New Yorker on the Supreme Court. Here's a paragraph that sticks out like a sore thumb:
"Under the Constitution, the power of the Supreme Court is quite limited. The executive branch holds the sword, Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist No. 78, and the legislative branch the purse. “The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever.” All judges can do is judge. “The judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of powers,” Hamilton concluded, citing, in a footnote, Montesquieu: “Of the three powers above mentioned, the judiciary is next to nothing.”
Hear! Hear! "LONDON: Google has restricted access to a BBC blog posting and several British newspaper stories under a legal ruling granting people a right to be "forgotten" in search engines, it emerged on Thursday."
Extremely puzzling is the rationale for why those items/stories described as having been removed by Google were selected.
There is push back, (AND RIGHTLY SO) including "...Martin Clarke, the publisher of Mail Online who said the website would regularly publish lists of articles removed from Google's European search results, while the BBC and The Guardian also published links to the restricted stories."
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/google-forgets-stories-on/1233226.html
...and the Gray Lady covers the story. In the Technology section. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/technology/google-starts-erasing-links-for-searches-in-europe.html?ref=technology
The deleted links included those to a BBC blog post by Robert Peston, the organization’s economics editor, in 2007 about E. Stanley O’Neal, the former chief of the investment bank Merrill Lynch, and his role in the demise of the company during the financial crisis. (The NYTimes includes a screen grab of this blog post, click on it to blow it up...)
...and then somebody 'splain to me WHY this should be removed?
MAG: Cuz it looks bad on O'Neal's resume.
Does anyone else despise Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA?"
I am so sick of that phony patriotism. I'm also sick of being told that my service "protected our freedom." I guess so, but I don't recall any Viet Cong or North Vietnamese in our neighborhood. When people say "Thank you for your service" I say "You're welcome" and move on. That is, if they can even understand my slurred speech. Most people mean it sincerely, so I guess I shouldn't gripe.
As a coda to my post the other day (as well as to numerous others) on our patriarchal Supremes' belligerent indifference to the way "rights" differently affect one's gender and class, and to simple, one would think undeniable, reality, could what we're seeing be an exhibition of "male pattern blindness?"
@Ken: Agreed.
Question: How do you pronounce your last name?
@James: Too bad for O'Neal, but I have read far more scathing articles (in print, books on the 2008 market crash) and there's no where to hide.
Just suppose, hypothetically that Gov. Chris Christie reads today's RC. OMG he and his supporters bombard Google with request to remove links for Reality Chex from search engines...'cause nobody should be called a 'sack of shit." Pardon me, make that a "Huge sack of shit."
Or, say Blake Farenthold prevails upon Google to remove those adorable images of him in pjs
Or, over on Driftglass, where it seems it is David Brooks, David Brooks most all the time (one of my reading pleasures)...but, since Brooks stopped reading all those nasty, hateful comments about himself, he might be unaware. But, suppose his 'assistant' discovers the blog and says, "...(Driftglass) is horrid to you, we need to have Google pull all links to it. We need you to be forgotten..."
Hmmmm, I'd go along with that forgetting part!
It all smacks of a weird, uneven sort of censorship.
75 years ago today, Lou Gehrig gave one of the most famous speeches in American sports: the "Lucky Man" Speech. He concluded with this: "I might've been given a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for."
I've decided to adopt that as my motto from now on.
Unfortunately, Lou died from ALS almost exactly two years later. Through the generosity of his widow, research into the causes, treatments, and a possible cure for Lou Gehrig's Disease lives on.
If you haven't donated to the ALS Association, and desire to do so, go to
http://webga.alsa.org/goto/BobsWarriors
I can't begin to express my gratitude for the generosity and kindness of the RC family.
Bob Hicks
PALS since 2010
Barbarossa,
Should have said I suffer from MPB, too, but aware of it as I am, I try to watch myself. I trust no one, not even the guy in the mirror.
As for the pronunciation: I'm told it's Wink-us or Wink-ess (I prefer the latter; it's more precise), the initial "W" sound probably an Americanization of the German pronunciation of "W" as "V."
And that reminds me of one of my favorite stories. Years ago in the days of operator-assisted person to person phone calls, I called my home in Arlington, WA. I reached an operator in Everett, WA, and asked her to connect me with Everett (coincidentally, my father's first name) Winkes' residence. She said. "Oh, I know him; he has that store in Arlington, Winks' Hardware..."
More (for me, memorable) proof one part of our brain often has trouble talking to the other.