The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision upholding Obama’s Affordable Care Act led to rejoicing on the left and fiery, petty, and glum denunciations on the right. On Thursday, we saw conservatives pass through eight stages of grief. The first: denial. A representative example came courtesy of freshman Sen. Rand Paul, who said in a statement: “Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be ‘constitutional’ does not make it so. [He's right. It takes at least five.] The whole thing remains unconstitutional.”
Sarah Palin’s Facebook page opened a window onto the reverse psychology and delusional chest-thumping stage. “Thank you, SCOTUS. This Obamacare ruling fires up the troops as America’s eyes are opened! Thank God,” the former vice presidential candidate posted.
The politically grief-stricken are also sometimes known to exhibit melodramatic rage. In a private House GOP meeting, Indiana Rep. Mike Pence outrageously compared the SCOTUS verdict to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, reports Politico. ... And Ben Shapiro of Breitbart added: “This is the greatest destruction of individual liberty since Dred Scott. This is the end of America as we know it. No exaggeration.”
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Like many conservatives, Matt Davis, the former spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party, was upset that the Supreme Court upheld most of President Obama’s health care law on Thursday.
But unlike those who simply saw it as a rallying cry to elect more conservatives in November, Davis wants to know whether an “armed rebellion” will be necessary to overturn the law.
Michigan Capitol Confidential got a copy of an email the Michigan attorney sent to fellow conservatives after the ruling. The news service posted it online:
If government can mandate that I pay for something I don’t want, then what is beyond its power? If the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday paves the way for unprecedented intrusion into personal decisions, then has the Republic all but ceased to exist? If so, then is armed rebellion today justified? God willing, this oppression will be lifted and America free again before the first shot is fired.
Davis told the news service he was serious about his email.
“You can’t have people walking with lattes and signs and think the object of your opposition is going to take you seriously,” he told Capitol Confidential. “Armed rebellion is the end point of that physical confrontation.”
A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust.
Some call it the "parade of ants"; others the "river of iron." The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. into Mexico. The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws. For six years, due to Beltway politics, the bureau has gone without permanent leadership, neutered in its fight for funding and authority. The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF's congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one. [my emphasis] ...
[Dave] Voth's mandate was to stop gun traffickers in Arizona, the state ranked by the gun-control advocacy group Legal Community Against Violence as having the nation's "weakest gun violence prevention laws." Just 200 miles from Mexico, which prohibits gun sales, the Phoenix area is home to 853 federally licensed firearms dealers. Billboards advertise volume discounts for multiple purchases.
Customers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in Arizona as long as they're 18 or older and pass a criminal background check. There are no waiting periods and no need for permits, and buyers are allowed to resell the guns. "In Arizona," says Voth, "someone buying three guns is like someone buying a sandwich."
By 2009 the Sinaloa drug cartel had made Phoenix its gun supermarket and recruited young Americans as its designated shoppers or straw purchasers. Voth and his agents began investigating a group of buyers, some not even old enough to buy beer, whose members were plunking down as much as $20,000 in cash to purchase up to 20 semiautomatics at a time, and then delivering the weapons to others. ...
Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. [Republican Darrell] Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.
How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It's a story that starts with a grudge, specifically [John] Dodson's anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent [Brian] Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election.(A Justice Department spokesperson denies this and asserts that the department is not drawing conclusions until the inspector general's report is submitted.)
Irony abounds when it comes to the Fast and Furious scandal. But the ultimate irony is this: Republicans who support the National Rifle Association and its attempts to weaken gun laws are lambasting ATF agents for not seizing enough weapons—ones that, in this case, prosecutors deemed to be legal. ...
Issa's claim that the ATF is using the Fast and Furious scandal to limit gun rights seems, to put it charitably, far-fetched. Meanwhile, Issa and other lawmakers say they want ATF to stanch the deadly tide of guns, widely implicated in the killing of 47,000 Mexicans in the drug-war violence of the past five years. But the public bludgeoning of the ATF has had the opposite effect. From 2010, when Congress began investigating, to 2011, gun seizures by Group VII and the ATF's three other groups in Phoenix dropped by more than 90%.
Have you seen this thing? The Texas Freedom Network has a breakdown of its contents.
- Declares separation of church and state is a “myth” and calls for Congress to withdraw federal court jurisdiction over cases involving religious freedom and the Bill of Rights
- Calls for teaching creationist arguments in public school science classrooms
- Opposes the sale and use of emergency contraception and backs the Legislature’s war on women’s health programs
- Rejects “any sex education other than abstinence until marriage” in public schools
- Adopts a radical position that would essentially bar abortion even in cases of rape, of incest or to save a woman’s life
- Advocates for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act, minimum wage laws and the Endangered Species Act as well as the abolishment of the Environmental Protection Agency
- Attacks LGBT Texans as a threat to families and objects to laws that would protect them from job discrimination and hate crimes
- Calls for further funding cuts for public schools following draconian cuts by lawmakers in 2011
- Seeks to change the 14th Amendment to limit citizenship by birth only to those born to a U.S. citizen
- Threatens federal judges with impeachment if they don’t toe the far right’s line in controversial court cases
It also says we should end the Social Security program, arm college students, requiring presidential candidates to submit a birth certificate, and a return to the gold standard.
But the thing about these state platforms is that they expose the primal id of the party. I’ve been to local Democratic caucuses, for instance, and I see the extremists of that party at work — and also most of their ideas get pared away at the state and national level, too, smoothed out to a blander, more conservative muddle. You can see better where the party faithful want us to go, while the party leadership always steers a more middling course.
At the Democratic caucuses, you see people exposing the real dreams of their group. And at Democratic events, they want things like: free education for everyone; free healthcare for everyone; more open immigration policies and education and healthcare for immigrant children, legal or otherwise; an end to all wars; reduction of the defense budget; more support for labor unions; protection for endangered species; more environmental restoration; full civil rights for gay people; closing Guantanomo Bay; and just generally making the universe a friendlier place. They’ll also toss in some nonsense about organic herbal medicine or increasing subsidies for corn ethanol production, so they aren’t perfect, but one thing they are is idealistic.
Contrast that with what the dedicated Republicans propose. Sure, Democratic dreams are too often impractical, but they at least value human beings, every one of them, and want all of us to live safely and securely, with hope for personal improvement. The Republicans always sound so sour and stupid, dedicated to shutting down everyone who isn’t a white heterosexual male; it’s an “I got mine” attitude that seeks to influence the state to enhance their privileges.
At least in theory, there lives a beautiful creature that inhabits lochs and bayous. Evidence of its existence is anecdotal, with minimal and much-disputed photographic material and journalistic accounts. Unfortunately, this creature, "the Louisiana Republican state legislator that makes a modicum of sense," is most likely a modern myth.
The latest strike against this elusive creature's existence came in the form of legislation signed by Governor Bobby Jindal, making Louisiana the leader in privatizing public education. Beginning this fall, thousands Louisiana schoolkids will receive taxpayer funded vouchers covering the full cost of tuition at private religious schools, while the public school they previously attended will lose funding.
But whatever the damage done to the separation of church and state, at least the kids will be getting a solid education…
Thousands of American school pupils are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real — in an attempt by religious teachers to disprove Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Pupils attending privately-run Christian schools in the southern state of Louisiana will learn from textbooks next year, which claim Scotland's most famous mythological beast is a living creature… Youngsters will be told that if it can be proved that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man, then Darwinism is fatally flawed…
"Have you heard of the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland? 'Nessie' for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur."
Another claim taught is that a Japanese whaling boat once caught a dinosaur.
And to think, Muslims almost ruined this great innovation in American education policy, just like they ruin everything! An Islamic school had briefly applied for the voucher program, drawing ire from Republican lawmakers, before withdrawing its application.
"I won't say that what Turing did made us win the war," his statistical clerk, Jack Good, told me later, as I was researching a book that would be the first history of artificial intelligence, called Machines Who Think, "but I daresay we might have lost it without him."
I interviewed Good in the mid-1970s, when the Official Secrets Act still silenced many. Only decades later were Turing's associates, and then, historians of computing, mathematics, and cryptography, able to reveal in detail how crucial Turing's contribution had been to the war effort, to the ultimate Allied victory, and to hungry babies like me, born into what then looked like a losing effort.
But he was also homosexual, which in his time in England was a punishable offense. A brief liaison in January 1952 with a common criminal brought this to light, and both he and the other man were charged with gross indecency.
Convicted, Turing had to choose between prison, or "chemical castration," injections of estrogen, then thought to kill the homosexual libido. He accepted chemical castration; his conviction and punishment were public, degrading, and lost him his security clearance.
He was found dead of cyanide poisoning on June 8, 1954, his death ruled a suicide, though Turing's mother protested that it was accidental, and the consequence of her son's carelessness with laboratory materials. He was 42 years old.
Turing's homosexuality, and the tragic circumstances of his death, were known and spoken of among the people I interviewed for my book, but several of his colleagues were dismayed that I would say it in print. For me, who owed my very life to Turing's work, this petty delicacy was unconscionable.
A man who had saved his country had been hounded to death by it.
Three years after Turing's death, the Wolfenden Report was published in 1957, recommending that homosexuality be decriminalized in the U.K., though it took another ten years to change the law. Honors were eventually heaped upon Alan Turing's shade: the highest award in computer science is the Turing Prize; plaques appear on buildings where he lived and worked, a road is named for him. Two biographies have appeared, a play, and at least two films. In 2009, Gordon Brown, on behalf of the British government, formally apologized for its treatment of Turing, "one of those individuals ... whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war." On the 100th anniversary of his birth, elaborate tributes and celebrations have been held in San Francisco, London, Cambridge, and Manchester.
Of course we will never know what Turing might have contributed to human knowledge if allowed to live out his natural life, surely our very great loss. This is the cost of human bigotry.
Our text books like to illustrate evolution with examples of optimal design--nearly perfect mimicry of a dead leaf by a butterfly or of a poisonous species by a palatable relative: But ideal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution--paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.
And what do you know? Michelle Obama happens to grow organic carrots and cabbage at the White House. That can only lead to creeping Sharia slaw!
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A recent Public Policy Polling survey found that 66% of Republicans, 66% of Democrats and 58% of Independents agreed that brothels should be legal, as opposed to just 23% of all Nevada voters who believed they should be banned. Even the ideological landscape divide is muted, with 72% of "very liberal" voters supporting brothels compared to 50% of "very conservative voters."
But though there's no prohibition on gay sex in brothels, there is a prohibition on gay and lesbian partners forming state-sanctioned families together. And many brothel-supporting Nevadans would like to keep it that way. According to a recent survey, Nevadans are split on same-sex marriage by a 45-44% margin, with 67% of Democrats supporting equality, compared to just 20% of Republicans.
The results highlight the strength of traditional family values. After all, historically, marriage is an institution involving a man, a woman, and the the women with whom the man is cheating on his wife.
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Texas A&M University researchers say controversial ”stand your ground” laws have increased the number of murder and manslaughter cases – rather than serve as a deterrent to crime.
The study, which looked at 23 states that have passed the castle doctrine laws, comes at a time when many critics say such self-defense statutes encourage vigilantism and escalate violence. At the center of that debate is the case of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was fatally shot in February in Sanford, Fla., by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. ...
In their study, Texas A&M associate professor Mark Hoekstra and grad student Cheng Cheng analyzed crime data from 2000 to 2009, finding that murder and manslaughter cases increased between 7 to 9 percent in those states with castle doctrine laws. The castle doctrine term is derived from the idea that people have a right to defend their home or castle using lethal force, if necessary.
The homicide rates in states that had not adopted castle doctrine laws remained steady, the study found.
The study concludes that the laws “do not appear to offer any hidden spillover benefit to society at large.”
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