Plague Diary

I planted garlic today and will plant some more tomorrow.   Other than that I just needed the day away from the computer.   I'm going to have someone living with me for a while, she needs a place to work from home from and her home doesn't have wi-fi.  So I'll probably have more time to type out posts while she's using mine so I can't be distracted as I typically am.   Don't know if I'm going to last till this election is over and, depending on the outcome, maybe I will or maybe I won't. 

Another case of Covid in my family, a niece I used to baby sit, so far her symptoms haven't been too severe she's worried about her husband who had a kidney removed and her father who has a condition that would likely make it fatal for him if he caught it.  Another niece told me one of her friends from college died from it.  She was about 24.  

To Quote Stormy Daniels "Ugh! Here We Go" Get Ready For The Blow Dry Trump Of 2024

RMJ listened to the "debate" so I wouldn't have to, though I've heard a large part of it in the process of listening to various comments on it. At one point he noted that the PBS NewsHour had more or less declared Trump's performance to be presidential. I listened to it and that is an accurate summary of its post-"debate" spewage. To get much of the American media, such as CNN to call a Republican-fascist "presidential" all he has to do is avoid pulling a chicken's head off and eating it raw on camera. Only I count on PBS to do it more consistently and more servilely. I listened to it and that was about the sum total of it. I think anyone who figures they need to be asked back on PBS knows they've got to present such "balance."

The most informative thing about it was the Republican hack from the WaPo Gary Abernathy who wistfully wondered what a Trump who could lie less bizarrely so as to scare off voters, who could do the "debate" act, who could do a good imitation of "presidential" while doing the terrible things that he's done, which he clearly likes. I think that's what the same crew who brought us Trump is hoping to find next time, Tom Cotton or whoever, and who they can package as "presidential" to rope in the suckers in 2024. I have no doubt that you will see venues such as the NewsHour and C-Span's morning programming doing what they've always done and help to sell Republicans' latest model to the more superficial among the American Voters.*   I think anyone who trusts the NewsHour, C-Span's produced programming or CNN is probably about the most susceptible to that kind of thing.  No doubt, in their research departments including many of those "suburban women" who the louche lounge lizard begged to like him last week.

PBS is a corporate whore house, literally, a more obvious whore house than a certain legal cult I've done my best to expose as one here over the past week. It is a whore house that has large numbers of suckers believing it's some temple of civic piety. The "PBS Newshour

* It's remarkable how we will capitalize "President" "Senator" "Justice" but we leave the real sovereign entities "The People" "The Voters" and the supreme authority in egalitarian democracy "The Vote" uncapitalized as if they, the only means by which there is any legitimacy in any of the rest of it, only deserves  lower case.  Hey, it's not my means of showing respect but if they're going to do it, nothing deserves it more than the only legitimate source of government.  I think that's a good symbol of what's wrong with the American system, from Constitution to the government it produces and everything from the way we are encouraged to think about things to the mechanics of putting letters on a computer screen or a piece of paper.   Maybe those should be put in all caps to make up for that.

Hate Mail - The Last One For A While Mentioning The ACLU

IT is one of the prices of being a thought criminal that when you take a stand that is clear in both the language and content of it, people read into it more than was in your words or, really, in the logical conclusions of what it said.

When I said that I had become convinced that secularism was deadly to democracy because secularism is damaging to the moral basis that democracy absolutely depends on and cannot live without, I was not talking about the administrative necessity that the government be non-sectarian and secular in that sense that it doesn't favor any religion or religious orientation, including the religious orientations that you expressed worry for, atheists, agnostics, "pagans" in all of the myriad things that can mean.

However, that doesn't mean that the government, especially the courts can have any legitimacy if they are morally neutral. There are things which a pretense of moral neutrality, of a very sloppy, very dishonest claim of "secularism" can allow to happen on the pretense that that isn't what the politician or the judge or the "justice" wanted to happen to start with or which they are willing to allow happen if it means that something else they want will be included with it.

I think with Amy Coney Barrett being pushed onto the court illegitimately, with her pretenses of morality and propriety we are going to see a flood of such insincere, rather openly hypocritical instances of such "secularism" which will have the unsurprising outcome of producing exactly what we could expect someone with Barrett's background - and yes, I do mean the right-wing cultic Catholicism that she has sworn herself to - among other poses of "Christian" morality but more so her political and legal ideological orientation. Her pose of "textualism" and her admiration for the self-serving "originalism" of Scalia.

More so, though, when I condemn secularism I specifically mean that anti-religious, anti-Christian program of the rather dumb secular left to delegtimate the role of religion in society so as to encourage irreligion and the abandonment of morality which, I've noticed, loosens the moral convictions of those in the first generation of such secularism and eventually eventuates in children and grandchildren who not only abandon and mock and ridicule Christianity but also Judaism and other religions (based on who it's fashionable to mock, which can change rather rapidly, see the atheist "left" on Islam over the past twenty years). Eventually they either tacitly or explicitly join onto the Republican-fascist, corporatist right in great numbers, the neo-cons of the 1940s and after are the model of taking that tiny step from the anti-religious, often Marxist "left" to the hard right. I measure the distance based on the ease with which that step has so often been taken and the fact that the moral basis of their Marxism or other starting ism was never that far from the Republican-fascist right. I'd love to go into the case of the brother of Crystal Eastman, one of the founders of the ACLU, Max Eastman whose letter announcing his quitting the "left" written to Corliss Lamont lamented that the good ol' days of them trashing religious belief were over due to Lamont's Stalinism. Reading it was one of those things that led me to see this phenomenon for what it was.

While I am deeply skeptical of "Christian" parties and, with what I'm reading about People of Praise and other "charismatic" groups, of those kinds of organized often political entities and their inclusion under the badly written First Amendment and tax laws for non-profit groups which allow con men in collars to bilk everyone, I don't think American democracy can live without the foundation in morality based on the radical egalitarian-economic, social and, yes, uncomfotable as it may make some, personal committment to doing to others as we would want them to do to us, of what Habermas called the "universal ethic of love." I don't think that any kind of decent, equal, democratic anti-gangster government is possible without a consistent majority of voters, citizens and residents subscribing to that in real life instead of Sunday recitation.

Any number of relgions subscribe to that in a negative form, of not doing to people what you wouldn't want them to do, though I think it's a rather unfortunate and weak way to put it. Some religious traditions, many Christians are worse at it despite subscribing to the stronger, positive statement of it.  Some are better at it, I don't think anyone much does it every time, some do it more often than others and religious profession doesn't much seem to be a good predictor of that. Many non-Christians and non-Jews have been very good at it, even a few "seculars" have been, though when they do I believe it is a vestige of cultural and personal habit having no secure basis in metaphysical belief. Some of the religious traditions that would be called "pagan" have a very strong form of it articulated in their religious practice and social practice. Clearly a large percentage of that critical mass of the population who will have to hold it in their hearts and in their actions will not be Christians or Jews or Muslims. I don't think anyone who does not at least aspire to it is a reliable person to exercise influence or have power though keeping them out of power should never be a matter of law or of legal rulings, I don't trust the courts and especially Supreme Courts to exercise that power, it should be a common understanding of things among The People that you don't vote for people who don't practice universal egalitarian justice and mercy and charity because such people cannot be trusted to do anything but try to instill gangster government such as the one we are on the verge of having now, likely through the actions of the anti-democratically constituted Senate, acting on the choice of the loser of the 2016 election, made law by the Roberts Court following in a long history of appalling rulings by that non-democratically appointed and conducted Court.

I think that with the de-Christianization of not only American society but, let's be honest, the de-Christianization of Christianity the great desideratum of the anti-Christain, anti-religious "left" of the past and up till today will come gangster government by what was claimed to be their ideological opposites. That, as so much that was claimed by those "leftists" was a lie. They, especially the Marxists, are not their ideological opponents, they are merely their rivals for power.

Senators Whitehouse and Merkley Are Continuing The Fight By Exposing the Depths of Corruption That Govern the Supreme Court Barrett Is About To Be Put On

 

When I pointed out that the big money interests who fund alleged public interests groups are mostly interested in paying a little go get a lot the other day, I didn't know that the ever way ahead of me Sheldon Whitehouse along with other Senators, Senator Merkley prominently among them, would have the numbers of just how profitable capturing the Supreme Court has been for them. As I noted, though they might not be in the same sleazy pipeline of the Federalist Society and its two fellow front groups that Senator Whitehouse exposed during the confirmation hearings last week, they certainly seem to have a similar effect in the results of their advocacy.

Only it's only when they do the "free speech - free press" thing that they seem to have much in the way of success with the court. Their few flagship cases in which they've had some effect on some of the more outrageous instances of right wing damage to people without money or power seen to me to have little real life consequence as compared to, for example, their advocacy for industries that produce addictive, health damaging and dangerous products, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and for getting the right of the media to lie in their own interest (I doubt the media ever much carries lies that are not to their interest) and on behalf of billionaires and millionaires to finance those lies, the same source of corruption in our politics that recent decisions in which the ACLU joined with the dark money that Sheldon Whitehouse exposed to get the ability of foreign billionaries to fund.

I don't recall who it was who pointed out that it was a remarkable thing that the Scalia-Barrett style "originalists" somehow always seemed to find that their ideology never seemed to much come up with results they didn't like and that if it did you could bet they would never stick with "originalism" or its even more extreme "textualist" method. And the same can be said of any ideological position, ideological committment, or the pose of it, will not be kept by someone who finds it does things they don't like. I think that holds for when you call an ideological position a "principle" such as the free-speech-free-press absolutism of the ACLU. It has corrupted our politics over the course of the past fifty six years, driving it ever to the right and into corruption from the high point of the early Johnson years when the major landmarks of, not only the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed into law which the present Supreme Court is destroying but also things like Medicaid and Medicare.

I don't think the lawyers of the ACLU are much bothered by the results of their advocacy in destroying the very things that liberals are supposed to praise them for because if they were bothered by those things they wouldn't keep doing them seeing the results their advocacy has gotten since Nixon took power and the media was free to lie and vilify Democrats and to make "liberal" a dirty word. And "Democrat" another one.  

 

I don't think they much mind because I think those at the top of that organization have an interest in the little that is paid to them to get those who pay them a lot. And it's small change compared to what the groups that Sheldon Whitehouse et al are concentrating on. Though I think that for length of time at it and the damage it has done there is no group quite like the ACLU for clean-handed corruption, being allowed to escape anyone noting that what seems to be incidentally unfortunate in results from their advocacy seems to be one of its most consistent and persistent results.

When You Let The Mass Media Broadcast Lies Why Can't People Who Believe They're Smart See That's Related To People Believing LIes

I've gone through the basic hypocrisy over the media pretending that their content has no effect in the world - that pornography is unrelated to things like sex crimes, for example - and the fact that they make huge amounts of money selling time for content that is precisely claimed by the media to have those effects they deny, ADVERTISING.

It is a basic hypocrisy that is the very substance of the Trump phenomenon, Trump as a public figure is 100% the creation of the mass media, both "entertainment" and "news".  Brought to us by lies, not least of which were the endless CNN, other cabloid, and other media told lies about Hillary Clinton, right up to and during the late days of the 2016 campaign, in the New York Times, the paper that got the media the ability to lie with impunity with the ACLU supporting them.

Like his previous Republican-fascist airhead puppet of a president, Ronald Reagan before him, they came into politics through the mass media. The great actor Derick Jacoby said that actors understood if you wanted money you did movies, if you wanted fame you did TV, going on to say that for real artistic satisfaction, you got that from the hard work of acting on the stage. Well, Ronnie wasn't much of an actor but he did Death Valley Days and it made him famous enough to have a horribly destructive career in politics, leaving many deaths in his wake.   Trump has been the second success story of that terrible reality. That people mistake TV for reality and it can have an effect on their votes and bring a democracy to the brink of obliteration. Though he hasn't, yet, funded terrorists in Central America, though he encourages them right here in the good ol' USA.

That lie, I suspect invented for the porn industry, certainly benefiting any profit-making person or corporation, that the media telling lies created and sold to have malignant influences in our electoral politics is not something that we must prevent or they will have exactly the effects they have in, first, the Reagan presidency (I believe still the record holder for generating indictments and convictions) and now the Trump one which may outdo Reagan in criminality.

The ACLU was one of the most useful tools for freeing the media to lie with impunity and I am fully convinced that other than stupid liberals who fell for those lines about "there's no proof that" media content has the effect on peoples' behavior that the very same media funding that lie then claims it does when they sell advertising. I think the rights of virtually every group or many of the individuals they claim to promote in their frequent fund-raising comeons to idiot liberals and brain-dead lefties would have been better off if the ACLU had not ever existed. I think given the help they have been in bringing us Trump, alone, cancels out everything else they've done. And I haven't even mentioned their "gun rights" action, probably helping to arm the "militias" that the Roberts Court counts on to prevent majority rule from breaking out.

No, the ACLU is a consumer fraud and a legal fraud and a bulwark to the Republican-fascists and the real fascists and the Nazis, as I pointed out it was their work on behalf of the Nazis that was the final eye-opening event for me. Anyone who thinks we should tolerate the possibility of Nazis even if they're called the KKK or any of the myriad of gaudy names dreamed up by the psychotics of the "militias" they enable gaining political power again, even in any region of the United States, any group that says we should tolerate that possibility has every reason to be totally de-funded, exposed and discredited. 

 

It may come as a shock to many a white liberal but it has, in fact, happened here, slavery and Jim Crow, the campaign to wipe out the Native Inhabitants of the Americas, the efforts against Latinos, all of those were it happening here as is, in fact, the Republican-fascist campaign to completely wipe out the gains of the great Civil Rights movement as the end of Reconstruction wiped out the gains of the Civil War Amendments to the Constitution.   Including violence, police violence as an intrinsic part of that suppression of equal rights and egalitarian democracy.  The Roberts Court, soon to be bolstered with another fascist "justice"  will do that,though, no doubt, they will rule in accord with the amicus briefs churned out by the ACLU in support of "free speech - free press" especially when that "speech" is in the form of money.   Lies, in other words, supporting the "right" of lies to be spread in the mass media.  That's what it comes down to. 

An Alternative Model That I Think Is Better Than What I'm doing:Interrupting Silence: Chapter 1: "The Oppressed Break Silence"

 

 

A combination of politics and what I hope is only a really bad cold is interrupting my posts from The Prophetic Imagination. Luckily, I came across this very current and ongoing zoom meeting study of another of Walter Brueggemann's books, Interrupting Silence. I'm posting the first of them because what the participants are coming up with is much better than what I'm coming up with on my own, many of the insights and ideas are better than I've got and probably better expressed than I can.  This is a better way to do what I've been trying to do, though I intend to continue with my postings, too.

From The New Calvary Baptist Church of Detroit. 

Wish I Could Push This Scandal In The Face Of Every Stupid Mainer Who Has Told Me For 30 Years "But Susan and Olympia Are Different"

“So if you give to somebody from one of those PACs, you are expecting something in return.” Al Diamon, longtime Maine political reporter

If you have been busy with how your own state is going to hell, you might not have seen the story that "moderate" Republican Susan Collins' political action committee gave $400 to two Republican-fascist candidates for the Maine Legislature who are all-in on QAnon.

Sen. Susan Collins is financially supporting the state legislative campaigns of two fellow Maine Republicans who fervently believe in QAnon, the perverse conspiracy theory whose adherents are considered a domestic terror threat by the FBI. In recent days, Facebook and YouTube have announced actions to curb the spread of QAnon content due to mounting fears that its followers — who deify President Trump and believe his enemies are a global cabal of pedophilic Satanists — will engage in violence before or after Election Day.

Kevin Bushey and Brian Redmond, the QAnon believers supported by Collins, are both military veterans who eagerly anticipate a political bloodbath will soon erupt nationwide, ultimately leading to arrests, military trials, and “God-declared executions” for “traitors” like top Democratic politicians and donors, socialists, Planned Parenthood, and Black Lives Matter and Sunrise Movement activists.

Last month, Collins’ personal political action committee, Dirigo PAC, contributed $400 each to Bushey and Redmond. Both are challenging Democratic incumbents for seats in the Maine House of Representatives representing parts of Aroostook County — the poverty-plagued, northernmost area of the state, where Collins was born and raised. The Maine GOP’s campaign fund for House races also gave Bushey and Redmond $400 each last month. For Redmond, those contributions amount to more than half the money his campaign has raised so far.

“Given the closeness of her race, [Collins] should have been really careful about who she gives money to,” said longtime Maine political columnist Al Diamon. He said there’s “no way” the donations to Bushey and Redmond “would not be carefully vetted” by Collins and her staff.

PACs like Dirigo “are very specific about who they give to, because they’re entirely designed to advance your political career,” Diamon said. “So if you give to somebody from one of those PACs, you are expecting something in return.”

Collins’ communication team did not respond to a request for comment.

Redmond is the less prominent of the two QAnon believers Collins is backing, but his advocacy of the conspiracy theory has been on open display. Before his Twitter account was banned earlier this month, his cover photo read “Q’s Army/Irregular Warfare Division” and declared “WWG1WGA,” shorthand for the QAnon rallying cry, “Where We Go One We Go All.” Media Matters reported last month that his account “repeatedly tweeted the QAnon hashtag and the QAnon slogan,” and his Facebook account also includes QAnon posts.

In an interview with Mainer, Redmond said he discovered QAnon in the comments section of Zero Hedge, a far-right, libertarian economics blog notorious for spreading conspiracies. “I was hooked right off the bat,” said Redmond, who now considers himself an investigative journalist. “It was an opportunity to wrestle back control of our government from subvertists and treasonists. … As a veteran, I was called to arms.”

I had been planning on writing a piece about how Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Lisa Murkowski's names all appeared on Sheldon Whitehouse's poster of the Senators who signed onto the lawsuit to overturn the ACA, all of those "moderates" did that. But I thought this was more timely. There will be plenty of time for recriminations over the gutted or destroyed ACA after Coney Barrett and her Bush v Gore buddies throw tens of millions of Americans off of health care coverage during a pandemic.

Remembrance Of Zings Past

OH for pity sake.

Yeah, I've heard of David Gorski before, I had a number of brawls, at least three with him back when he was blogging at Jeffrey Epstein's and Ghislaine Maxwell's groovy sceincy project of the 2000s, The Science Blogs, back when he styled himself "Orac"and spouted in a predictable way about a number of things. Some of those things he was right about, the man is competent within his subject matter but like so many self-styled men of science, as soon as he leaves it he tends to go for the common received wisdom of his  youth which is only as good as it was ever wise, or at least founded in evidence and primary documentation. Since encountering such people online I've found you can load their unevidenced claims with huge amounts of primary documentary refutation and it won't make the slightest bit of difference.  And the resistance to evidence seems to climb instead of diminish with the level of credentialing they can tack onto their names. 

After being told about his piece condemning the "Great Barrington Declaration" (about which he's, of course, right)  the ass had to use his piece to take a pot shot at "creationists".    

 

I went looking for the brawl I had with him over his contention that "only creationists use the word Darwinism" contained in that piece from last week.  Then, during our brawl I proved to him with citations starting in 1860 when Darwin's bulldog Thomas Huxley used the word repeatedly and gave it its present day meaning of someone who believed in Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. Since he hadn't yet given himself cooties back then and he was the darling of the bloggy, atheist-sceincy set, I included quotes from Richard Dawkins claiming Darwinism for himself.

 

 Previously "Darwinism" had meant someone who believed his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin's theory of evolution, I believe I included that bit of trivia. 

 

Alas Orac doesn't seem to have preserved the record of our brawl. I gave him, oh, half a dozen to a dozen different conventional Darwinists using the term to name their own biological faith in natural selection, such as that was variably believed by them over the more than a century and more after Thomas Huxley used it. The parade of eminent scientist who have called themselves Darwinists is an extremely long one.

Nothing made a dent in the asses claim, for which he produced quotes by creationists. I pointed out that if they got the habit of using the word it would probably be because Darwin's acolytes used the word to mean the same thing the creationists use it for. IT'S THE DEFINITION THAT'S LISTED IN STANDARD DICTIONARIES, FOR PETE'S SAKE. Much as Gorski might not like it, his ideological opponents have every right to use standard English vocabulary as much as an arrogant surgeon scribbler does.

As an aside, it was one of the few times one of my sworn enemies at Eschaton blog supported something I said, she pointed out that as a surgeon it's not surprising that Gorski thinks he's beyond questioning.

As to his unsurprising attempt to blame "herd immunity" on creationists, there is absolutely no doubt, whatsoever that the many hundreds of signatories to the appalling Great Barrington Declaration, all of those I looked at members of faculties at big name universities, Oxford, Harvard, etc. SO ONE THING IS ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN, NOT ONE OF THEM IS LIKELY TO BE ANYTHING BUT A CONVENTIONAL DARWINIST. I can't imagine that anyone who is suspected of such unacceptable heresies as creationism or even scientific assertions of intelligent design would be allowed to sign onto it. Though I can well imagine that some creationists, especially the stupider, more cultish ones who are Republican-fascists and Trumpists might sign onto it for that reason, I would suspect there are others, especially those who have done what I doubt Gorski ever has done, read Darwin and the literature of Darwinism - much of it eugenic literature - would recognize "herd immunity" as a concept that may well have originated in Charles Darwin's scientific assertions.

Look at this famous and famously infamous passage from The Descent of Man 

 

There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

That is "herd immunity" from start to finish, "herd immunity" is not only a thoroughly Darwinist concept, the entire thing including comparing human beings and human society to animals kept in a commercial breeding operation, where they would be disposed of as economically desired and with an eye to improving the economic "fitness" of the animals in a herd (which is in no way comparable to their survivability and reproductive success in the wild) his complaint that one of the most successful public health measures in history, smallpox vaccination, had a dysgenic effect on the human species is essentially the one the GBD signers attribute to containing the disease.  

No, Gorski, you ass, "herd immunity" was promoted by ol' Chuck in his own words, as science, you don't get to lie without someone pointing that out.

I'm kind of surprised, looking for the old Science Blogs post, I don't find that but I find that Gorski perserved his wrongheaded screed which I answered, brawl ensuing, but not the comment thread where I kicked his ass. He does, though, preseve others. One of those where I also brawled with him. I wonder why he didn't post the one about Darwinism.

The ACLU Has To Be Either Corrupt Or It's Just As Stupid As A Rock

IN   his series of brilliant exposures of the corruption of the Supreme Court and the federal courts through dark money and manipulation by the super-rich, Sheldon Whitehouse noted that while he was sitting in his house, looking out the windows on the pond and trees while contemplating and reviewing that record of corruption, he could see the effects of the wind though he couldn't feel the wind which is how he could be 100% confident that the wind was blowing. I think it's a very good metaphor for the presence of dark money and corruption, because of the effects it has in rigging the law, legal proceedings, legal decisions up to and including that list of 80 5-4 Supreme Court cases making things so corrupt, the reason I said that the Supreme Court was the major source of corruption in our politics among the three branches. I have noted that it is the branch most remote from the direct consent of We The People, its lofty and lousy priesthood of black robed aristocrats and other thugs able to do terrible things to us based on nice sounding, or at least obscure language.

I think I don't have to see every bit of direct evidence that the ACLU, as lawyers so often do, have come up with some of that nice sounding language to ease the off chance that they feel many qualms about their role in bringing about some of the worst of those split decisions that have damaged, perhaps destroyed egalitarian democracy, I don't have to see the receipts of money for amicus briefs and actions drafted to believe, completely that the ACLU has acted on behalf of those billionaires and millionaires because they've got deep pockets and are ready to pay a little to get a lot.

The effects that lead me to place the ACLU right in the heart of that dark money mold that is killing democracy are there and has been there for decades, as is their obviously corrupting effects of those "free speech" "free press" rulings that have gotten us the lies that gave us the biggest liar in the history of the America presidency and the liars who control the Senate, as I said if they weren't doing it for the money, seeing the effects their reasoning and words have gotten, the explanation isn't that the ACLU is a corrupt con game, suckering daffy liberals and lunatic leftists into supporting what the billionaires and millionaires won't fund, if they aren't getting that graft from the super-rich, it's that they're incredibly stupid or as stupid as the Trump supporters. Though I think anyone in the public who supports it from better motives, after the last several decades has to be as uniformed and stupid as an October undecided voter.

That corruption has even led some of those who were thick as thieves with them on things like tobacco advertising to be horrified at it. And that's not a new thing. As with the 1990s article by the eminent investigative reporter Morton MIntz, there was an article in, of all places, The Nation on March 21, 2012 by former ACLU lawyer Burt Neuborne:

I’ve marched proudly behind the ACLU’s First Amendment flag for almost fifty years. On campaign finance reform, however, I believe the ACLU’s adamant opposition to limits on massive campaign spending by the superrich gets the constitutional issues wrong. Limiting the power of a few individuals and corporations that exercise disproportionate political influence solely because of their enormous wealth has nothing to do with censoring a speaker’s message; it is desperately needed to preserve the integrity of the egalitarian democracy the First Amendment was designed to protect.

The campaign finance mess rests on three erroneous arguments the ACLU advanced in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo case before the Supreme Court: (1) that spending unlimited amounts of money in an electoral campaign is “pure” speech entitled to the highest level of First Amendment protection; (2) that any attempt to equalize political power by limiting massive electoral spending by the superrich is flatly unconstitutional; and (3) that “independent” expenditures on behalf of a candidate (as opposed to contributions to the candidate) are incapable of corrupting the democratic process. In 2010, in Citizens United, five Supreme Court justices made the Buckley system even worse by ruling that corporations have the same electoral free-speech rights as individuals, which unleashed a torrent of electoral spending by corporations seeking a financial return on their political investments.

I confess to having supported the ACLU position in Buckley. As the corrosive effects on democracy of uncontrolled campaign spending became increasingly clear, however, I joined several former ACLU leaders—Norman Dorsen, Aryeh Neier, John Shattuck and Mort Halperin—in opposing the organization’s campaign finance position. We have argued, before the Supreme Court and the ACLU board, that spending massive amounts of money during an election campaign is not “pure” speech when the spending level is so high that it drowns out competing voices by repeating the same message over and over at higher decibel levels; that a compelling interest in equality justifies preventing wealthy speakers from buying up an unfair proportion of the speech in settings like courtrooms, classrooms, town meetings, presidential debates and elections; that massive campaign spending by “independent” entities poses a serious risk of postelection corruption; and that corporations lack the attributes of conscience and human dignity that justify free-speech protection.

I believe that that list of the repentant leaders didn't include the more recently departed in 2012, or then current ones, who would seem to be all-in on this enabling of the super-rich to buy elections and to put Republican-fascist Supreme Court majority in place who will then destroy any of that less seamy legislation that managed to get trough after a huge effort by the real American left. Since the Rehnquist and Roberts courts have been destroying the high-points of that progress, most of all and most effective in having the same deadly political effect as Buckley v Valeo and the subsequent weaponized rulings attacking electoral democracy, they gutted the Voting Rights Act.

Like a true believer in the dangerous rule by the court and magical thinking about how egalitarian democracy can work Neuborne goes from a realistic rejection of the ACLU campaign to free the billionaires and millionaires to corrupt the electorate to panglossian idiocy that believes with all it's secular heart that magic is going to happen, and throught the agency of some of the members of the same Court, even some of the liberals being relied on fully bought into the ACLU "free speech" language as they are supposed to fix it.

 

We’ll keep repeating those arguments. The shift of a single vote on the Supreme Court will make them law one day. But we needn’t wait for a new Court. The State of Montana has leveled a powerful challenge to Citizens United that is making its way to the Court. Since 1912, in an effort to shield its democracy from a takeover by out-of-state mining interests, Montana has banned corporate political spending. When the Montana Supreme Court recently stubbornly upheld the corporate electioneering ban in the teeth of Citizens United, corporations asked the US Supreme Court to overturn the Montana Court without a hearing. Instead, the justices temporarily stayed the Montana law and invited the parties to file papers discussing whether the case should be accepted for full-scale review. In reluctantly voting to stay the Montana statute even temporarily, justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer asserted that Citizens United should be reconsidered because massive “independent” spending in the 2012 presidential election has undercut the assumption that such spending is incapable of corrupting democracy. The absurdity of the fiction that election winners will ignore huge debts owed to wealthy supporters who have spent millions to get them elected is now apparent even to the Supreme Court. In Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. (2009), the Court recognized that massive independent spending by a litigant to elect a member of the West Virginia Supreme Court risked influencing his postelection rulings, requiring the judge to step down in cases involving his electoral sugar daddy. Step one in untangling the current mess is persuading the Supreme Court that in light of the experience in the 2012 presidential election, unlimited independent campaign expenditures pose a significant risk of postelection corruption of elected legislators and executive officials, as well as elected judges.

 

I certainly don't need to point out this week that Ruth Bader Ginsburg  died and is about to be replaced with someone, chosen by the dark money backed Federalist Society, someone who is reasonably considered to subscribe to ideological positions that can reasonably believe she will come out to the right of Antonin Scalia, so give up that pipe dream. Oh and, I won't build suspense, those cases, the Montana case, American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock  was reversed without hearing arguments, 5-4 reaffirming Citizens United, I would imagine it was one of the 80 5-4s cited by Sheldon Whitehouse to show the influence of dark money on the court.  And, in light of how the rest of Neuborne's argument puts his money on Anthony Kennedy, one of the 5 in that choice to overturn the decision of the Montana Supreme Court, without hearing arguments (part of the "shadow docket" a major part of the corrupt Court practices also mentioned this week), I have to ask is there anyone more clueless about how things work than an ACLU lawyer?

 

Second, in Citizens United Justice Anthony Kennedy responded to the argument that corporations lack the attributes of conscience and human dignity needed for free-speech protection by insisting that First Amendment protection does not depend on the speaker’s identity. As long as a speaker is generating speech of value to voter/hearers, Kennedy argued, the speech itself enjoys protection. Like Yeats (and the Eagles), Justice Kennedy declined to separate “the dancer from the dance.” The Court has swept away that prop for Citizens United. In Bluman v. FEC, a Canadian graduate of an American law school working at a New York law firm and an Israeli citizen working as a medical resident argued that the Congressional ban on independent electoral spending by lawful resident aliens violates the First Amendment. In January all nine justices rejected the resident aliens’ First Amendment claim without even issuing an opinion. Frankly, it isn’t surprising that the justices disposed of Bluman without an opinion. You just cannot write a principled opinion distinguishing corporate speakers from resident alien speakers without jettisoning Kennedy’s insistence that the speaker’s identity doesn’t matter. Step two in untangling the campaign finance mess is to recognize that after Bluman, the identity of the speaker matters a good deal. Bluman makes it much easier to question whether corporations, lacking the attributes of human dignity, should be treated as protected First Amendment speakers, especially when more than a century ago the Supreme Court denied them the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in Hale v. Henkel, precisely because corporations lack the attributes of human dignity.

 

Oh, yeah, right, because Kennedy "declined to separate "the dancer from the dance," there was every reason to believe that as strictly rational beings the Republican-fascist majority, even eight years ago, was reliably going to see the error of its ways. Two elections cycle later, Trump's not only getting but openly inviting foreign money for his campaign - his "free speech" and the debacle the ACLU was in on bringing us to, Neubourne's well trained legal mind is full of shit. 

 

Any liberal who gives money to the ACLU is a sucker and a chump. It is an integral part of the dark money network, maybe not one that will reasonably make one of Sheldon Whitehouse's charts, but it might be the most useful of all of them to the billionaire-millionaire effort to turn the United States from a prospective egalitarian democracy into a gangster governed hell hole.