RFK jr. Should Be Charged With Crimes Against Humanity, Not Running For President

 

the danger has already reached a level high enough that something has to be done, now

THE SUPREME COURT'S use of the "speech" clause of the First Amendment to relegalize denial of public accommodations to a covered group in civil rights law, LGBTQ+ people, in a bogus case phonied up by billionaire funded court-packing organizations troubled me a lot over the weekend.  That troubled me more than the reported speculative nature of the case or the erroneous report about a straight man who was alleged to want a site for his same-sex wedding figuring in the court filing.   Though, neither am I much troubled if that misconception enters into the folklore about this case and the Court that issued the ruling.  They're the ones who made lying a "right", afterall.

Unlike its use of "religion" in that same style of Republican-fascist maneuver,  "freedom of speech" especially as the extra-Constitutional expansion of that to mean "freedom of expression" has no possible limit to what this or another white supremacist or Republican-fascist court could do with it to do whatever they or their patrons want.  Their billionaire and millionaire patrons include some pretty serious bigots who will supply the motive to the "justices" for doing that, though through their own bigotries and political maneuvers and personal grudges seem to provide an explanation for what they're doing even without it. The Republican Party has been trying to harness racism and other bigotries as a political tool for longer than most of those presently on the Court have been alive.  That the filthy rich who originally tried to harness white supremacy don't seem to be keeping it in harness very well doesn't seem to bother those theorized to not be racists themselves, anymore.  Not that anyone making that kind of corrupt bargain should be suspected of being a big fat supporter of any kind of equality.  The "good" Republicans who used to be depended on were never really dependable, especially after Goldwater and Nixon.

I have no doubt that this white supremacist majority will, now or when they have paved the way with immediate "precedent," see it as a terrible denial of the "free expression" of a reincarnated Lester Maddox to legally force them to serve Black People or an insurance company to insure unmarried Women on an equal basis with men.  This is just the start of it, do you really want to bet me it isn't as the current six Republican-fascists overturned many more "justices" opinions, some of those previous rulings overturned by them declared as "settled" in their confirmation lying, along with duly adopted laws and regulations to destroy affirmative action and overturn Roe v Wade?

I didn't think my nightmare of the consequences of that use of "speech" would be so obvious so fast as it is in the absurdly expansive lower court ruling that tells the Executive branch that they can't talk to social media companies or even academics in so many areas of vital importance, dealing with a deadly pandemic which was the focus of so much life threatening misinformation, something which could have gotten millions more Americans killed or the Putin regime, very probably Chinese or Saudi interference with our electoral process.

But that has happened and God only knows how that is going to be overturned in the present Republican-fascist dominated Federal Courts and the damned Supreme Court with a Republican-fascist, billionaire bought majority on it.  The Supreme Court, many lower courts, are blatantly Republican-fascist partisan dominated, Leonard Leo-billionaire bought and ready to do whatever they can to solidify Republican-fascist power, even at the cost of millions of lives. Every ruling by this court emboldens those also put into place by the Republican-fascists and billionaires in their court packing operation.  The Supreme Court majority is bought and installed through corruption.

How that will happen to save us from them in the next election is something that has to worry anyone who still favors the right of government of, by and for The People on the basis of accurate information to inform their votes instead of lies empowered by the Supreme Court.

This is a perfect example of just how dangerous some of the rulings on the speech clause and other clauses of the First Amendment can get when the mere language of them, not their reasoning but the mere words of them can be twisted for anti-democratic purposes by corrupt judges and "justices."  As those familiar with what I post here know I often mention the Sullivan Decision as among the most dangerous of those rulings made in all innocence by the Warren Court only to see that metastasize into Buckley v. Valeo, a series of rulings overturning clean elections legislation and the Citizens United ruling that allowed Putin and others to ratfuck our elections with the collusion of the Republican-fascist party and those behind Trump.  

It should be noticed that in so many of their corrupt rulings the Republican-fascists on the court have weaponized words and slogans either provided to them or popularized through the "liberal" court during the Warren years or through the popular notions of libertarian liberty in movies, TV shows and political blather. I am certain that the learned Warren era and even other liberal justices had little appreciation for how thier attempts to expand the meanings of words to allow strip-tease artistes to work without risk of a police raid would be used to empower the enemies of equality and electoral democracy.  But, then, I doubt that the drafters of the Constitution ever imagined that the sloppily worded First Amendment would mean what Republican-fascists "justices" and judges make it mean nor that the as sloppily worded Second Amendment would be used to kill white people, it having been written to protect white slave-holders against slave insurrections.

The Court is the epicenter of the danger to America's democracy, it is the source of the dangers, from the insane invention of a "right" to lie right down to putting automatic weapons in the hands of American mass murderers.  And the foremost tool which it has used to do most of that is the idolized Bill of Rights.  The idols of secularism would seem to be a lot more dangerous than those made of  false gods.  That they could do that, especially with that Court created power to overturn duly adopted Federal legislation and to openly lie about the legislative record of other amendments to the Constitution proves that the Supreme Court, now exposed for its monumental corruption, has to be reigned in and stopped as soon as possible.  And we don't know what is possible until it is tried.

When the now Murdoch owned Völkischer Beobachter of American Mammonism, The Wall Street Journal is whining about court reform in terms of disempowering the stolen Court majority it should be taken as a certain signal that doing that is absolutely in the interest of the American People.

That the Supreme Court is the epicenter is a combination of it not being a legitimately democratic branch of government wit the possibility of removal by the voters, the folly of giving them lifetime appointments who are no more removable by impeachment than the most criminal presidents of our lifetimes have been, and the flagrant corruption that is bound to happen when any group of people with power are left to police themselves.  It was one of the telling follies of the amateurs who drafted the Constitution that they thought a group of people given the power they gave the Court such as the Supreme Court would be any less prone to corruption than a single monarch would have been. The history of the Roman Republic should have told them otherwise, the Imperial system came out of only one of those schemes of shared power.  The extra-Constitutional power to nullify legislation the court gave itself should stand as the first, worst and most successfully sold corruption in the history of our corrupt Supreme Court.  The Constitution makes the court unaccountable to anyone else, in fact. Their imaginary limit of impeachment by the Congress as laid out in the Constitution has never worked.  We should face that is a reality which makes the members of the court unanswerable to anyone, not even each other.

Its actual history, as told by the self-interst of "justices" such as John Marshall and the other slave holding "justices" those who could be counted on to rule in favor of slave-holders, oligarchs, plutocrats, aristocrats and other rich, especially white people and corporations is the real, non-amber tinted, non-Nina Totenberg narrated history of that body.  It is remarkable the extent to which the popular history of the Supreme Court has been told in its remarkable exceptions, its short epochs of justice ignoring the majority of its history.  That John Marshall is held in such regard as he is shows how successful the PR con job has been.

President Biden should study Jefferson's warnings about Court power and Lincoln's response to the meddling of the Taney Court in the conduct of the Civil War, he should look into the criticism made by law scholars of the Dred Scott decision and the others who have been critical of that power which started out modestly enough in Marbury v Madison but which led directly to the Civil War.  He should look at the criticism by Louis Boudin of the Marbury decision* which pointed out that not only did the authors and Congressional and Executive adopters of the provisions in the Court Act overturned in Marbury comprise many of those who drafted and adopted the Constitution but which included a founding father, John Marshall's immediate predecessor as Chief Justice, Oliver Ellsworth, who, if I recall, drafted both the Court Act and had a direct hand in the drafting of the very creation of the Court in the Constitution.  Marshall declared that he, not a drafter of the Constitution, knew what it meant better than those who wrote it, voted for and adopted the Court Act, including Madison and Adams and Washington, himself.  I am pretty certain that if the Constitution had included that Court created ability for unelected "justices" to overturn duly adopted legislation and to, actually, create law from the bench, the Constitution would never have been adopted.  As Marshall, himself, wrote in his biography of Washington, the adoption of the Constitution was remarkably close, as it was.  I would bet that the founders, themselves, would have concluded it should be sent back for further work on it if it contained that Court power, so obviously dangerous is such a power.

The Court has to have that power stripped from it, it has to be restored to what a normal supreme court in a democracy is because in this Robert's Court as the Rehnquist one before it, it is again proven to be a danger to democracy.  Especially the only democracy that is legitimate, egalitarian democracy.  And, now, it is even proven to be a danger to our personal safety against automatic weapons in the hands of psycopaths and open AND CONCEALED carrying crackpots.  It is an immediate danger to the the security of the country in opening up our elections to the influence and lies peddled by fascists foreign and domestic and the proven influence of dictators such as Putin. It is a danger which is reestablishing white supremacy and male supremacy.  It is a weapon against widely discriminated against minorities and poor people. The present day Court has to know that these reforms and reigning in of their power are openly being discussed as a reaction to their florid corruption and outrageous power grabbing and their service to the corruption of modern Mammonism.  Roberts should know that if they continue to pull anything like they've been pulling that it is a danger to their position. AND THAT INCLUDES BOTH BY THEIR ACTION AND ALLOWING CORRUPT LOWER JUDGES RULINGS TO STAND THROUGH THE SHADOW DOCKET.  I would favor rewriting the rules to term out the majority of today's majority at the quickest possible date, ALONG WITH A LIFETIME BAN ON FORMER "JUSTICES" PROFITING OFF OF ANYONE WHO PROFITED FROM THEIR RULINGS MADE DURING THEIR TENURE ON THE COURT.

I think it's time for the Executive and Legislative branches to assert their legitimacy OVER the court.  They must acknowledge the normal powers of a Supreme Court in a democracy but they should absolutely reject the Court created powers which were never ratified by anything but that Court.  It's a dangerous maneuver, considering how strong white supremacist fascisim in the country, how dangerous the billionaire class is.  But the danger has already reached a level high enough that something has to be done, now.  If, by a miracle, Biden wins the election with a strong enough majority in both houses of the Congress, they should immediately adopt a new Court Act which, among other things, explicitly rejects Marbury v. Madison's nullification provisions.  They should formally overturn the Dred Scott and other decisions of that kind and they should disempower the fascists on this court by swamping them with new judgeships and justices.  They should adopt a term limit for the court which would get rid of some of the worst.  The best long-lived "justices" in all of our history have not made up for the worst long-lived "justices" in our history.  

As the tragic legacy of one of the best justices of my lifetime, Ruth Bader Ginsberg proves, it is extremely dangerous to allow them to decide when they are leaving the court, since there is no removal of them by the Voters or a term limit.  It is the tragedy of her life that she didn't have the wisdom to retire in the repeated warnings of her own mortality that she was given.  If someone of HER character and wisdom can't be counted on to know when it's time to leave, no one now or in the future should be trusted to know that.  No one, not the best of them, is worth keeping a Clarence Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Taney, etc. on the court till they decide to leave or they die.  There are so many more Scalias and Taneys in the Court's history than RBGs.  So many fewer John Paul Stevenses than Clarence Thomases and Roger Taneys.  

* Marshall accomplished his purpose by convincing the Associate Justices of the unconstitutionality of that section of the Ellsworth Judiciary Act of 1789 which expressly conferred upon the Supreme Court the power to issue writs of mandamus and prohibition, and in persuading them to allow him to announce that conclusion as the opinion of the court.  When we consider that, while all of the Justices agreed with Marshall that the provision of the Ellsworth Judiciary Law requiring them to sit as circuit justices was unconstitutional, and yet refused to act upon the belief as Marshall wanted them to act,* we can realize the measure of his triumph in inducing the same men to hold unconstitutional another provision of the same act - a provision, too, even less open to objection than the one they had sustained.

The Theory of the Chief Justice that Section 13 of the old Judiciary Law was unconstitutional was absolutely new, and it was as daring as it was novel.  It was the only original ideal that Marshall contributed to the entire controversy.  Nobody ever questioned the validity of that section of the statute which Marshall now challenged.  Ellsworth, who preceded Marshall as Chief Justice, had drawn the act when he was Senator in the First Congress;  he was one of the greatest lawyers of his time and an influential member of the Constitutional Convention.
 

One of Marshall's associates on the Supreme Bench at that very moment, William Paterson, had also been, with Ellsworth a member of the Senate Committee that reported the Judiciary act of 1789, and he, too, had been a member of the Constitutional Convention.  Senators Gouverneur Morris of New  York, William S. Johnson of Connecticut, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, William Few of Georgia, George Read and Richard Bassett of Delaware, and Caleb Strong of Massachusetts supported the Ellsworth Law when the Senate passed it;  and in the House James Madison and George Wythe of Virginia, Abraham Baldwin of Georgia, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut heartily favored and voted for the act.  Most of these men were thorough lawyers and every one of them also helped draft the National Constitution.  Here were twelve men, many of them highly learned in the law, makers of the Constitution, draftsmen or advocates and supporters of the Ellsworth Judiciary Act of 1789, not one of whom had ever dreamed that an important section of the law was unconstitutional.  

Furthermore from the organization of the Supreme Court to that moment, the bench and bar had accepted it, and the Justices of the Supreme Court, sitting with National district judges, had recognized its authority when called upon to take action in a particular controversy brought directly under it.  The Supreme Court itself had held that it had jurisdiction, under Section 13, to issue a mandamus in a proper case, and had granted a writ of prohibition by authority of the same section.  In two other cases this section had come before the Supreme Court, and no one had even intimated that it was unconstitutional. . . .

There's An Objection To My Supposedly Slighting "The Public Understanding Of Science" - Hate Mail

TAKE THIS DESCRIPTION from Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Python 3, 2nd edition:

The most important difference between a computer and an old-fashioned calculator is that you can "teach" a computer new operations by defining them in terms of old ones.  For example,you can teach the computer(*) that "Take the average" means "add up the numbers in a sequence and divide by the sequence's size."  You can then use the operations you have just defined to create still more operations, each layered on top of the ones that came before.  It's a lot like creating life by putting atoms together to make proteins and then combining proteins to build cells, combining cells to make organs and combining organs to make a creature.

That is from three authors, all of them working at the elite University of Toronto, two of them, Paul Gries and Jennifer Campbell teaching in the Department of Computer Science and Jason Montojo who is a research officer at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research at the same university.  He writes software for their projects.

These scientists may have given a reasonable description of how computer programming is done but their simile allegedly related to biology describes something which is entirely imaginary and not real, never having been done or observed, something which is science fiction and which has no demonstrable connection to how life came about in the beginning or how life is, in fact, propagated now.   Nor is it mentioned how it's supposed to clarify what was said about computer programming. The complexities of how cells and then a zygote and then a fetus form organs WITHIN A LIVING ORGANISM is not like making programming routines and putting them together, and that's just one aspect of how incompetent that conception of life is.  Our bodies, our cells are not like computer programming, our cells (or "DNA" in the imaginations of the authors, since they talk about protein synthesis) don't work that way and how organs are formed is hardly understood except that it's far more complex than that. I think it's far more likely that the way in which that happens is not discoverable by science as it's deemed to be now. I doubt human beings will ever discover how that happens before our species destroys itself.

I would bet you most scientists who works in the relevant areas would find that description absurd, or would as soon as its absurdities are questioned.  The simile is totally ridiculous but I will bet you not one out of a thousand college-credentialed readers of what is actually a rather good book on computer programming would notice that as they had the general sense that it was accurate based on what of neo-Darwinian lore they'd already imbibed.  I would expect that if they hadn't thought much or read much about it, that simile would enter permanently into their "public understanding of science"  much as Dawkins' "first bird to call out" fable has.

In one of my recent go-rounds on these topics I noted that even fine scientists are pretty much at sea once they've left their own specialty, when they get as far afield as computer science or a casual layman, it gets really absurd.  That Oxford seat endowed for Dawkins by a computer jillionaire hasn't really helped at all.

Essentially the idea that any of us has "an understanding of science," as if science was a comprehensible entity for any one of us is ridiculous, even the most eminent of scientists has no such "understanding" of science. That realization came to me when I was interested in reading about the calculation of an 8-dimensional object back in the 00's when someone said if the mathematical calculation of it were written on paper it would cover the island of Manhattan, I immediately realized that not a single member of the team who worked on it could possibly hold all of that in their, no doubt brilliant, minds.  There is no such a thing as a composite of human understanding, "mind meld" is a creation of cheesy sy-fi.  Someone can only understand as much as they understand, whatever they don't know is not part of their understanding.  

* I have to wonder why we don't call making a gear of a specific size for a watch "teaching" a watch what that does, or, rather, teaching the watch to understand what the movement of the hands of a watch in relation to the face of the watch means. For that matter why not call drawing the clock face "teaching the clock" that the Earth rotates in relation to the Sun.  It is pretty much the same thing as the idea that you can "teach a computer" anything.  Whether it is by making the gear to specification to produce a result or making a routine in a computer program to produce a result, it's the same thing.  It's absurd to think the machine understands it or "learns" anything.

Which reminds me of the idiot professor of psychology I read about who once came up with a chart of the IQs of various entities.  As I recall he said that an alarm clock had an IQ of 5. I almost am convinced that I recall he rated a typewriter higher.  Considering how much the clock would have to "know" to function, I think the man of science did what most everyone who talks "IQ" does, and decides those they don't respect are stupider than what they hold in higher esteem.  Which also falls within "the popular understanding of science," which includes the "understanding" of many esteemed and powerfully influential scientists who are so stupid as to believe that something deemed to be an "intelligence quotient" is determinable, observable, measurable and subject to scientific knowledge is real.
 

Parody of Beyond Parody - I don't think I need to add anything

 

The Republican-Fascist Majority On The Supreme Court Is Arguably Worse Than The Taney Court Which Issued The Dred Scott Decision

I SAY THAT because they are in the process of overturning the second wave of hard  and long won progress towards equality by the fiat of the white supremacist 6 votes on the court.  The first wave of progress was abolition, which the Taney Court tried to kill with the Dred Scott decision which claimed that Black People under the Constitution had no rights that the federal courts or the federal government was bound to uphold and protect.  They declared, in effect, that the entire country was comprised of slave states, where slave holders were free to move anywhere and set up a slave household, plantation or other operation where Black People could be enslaved and even state law could not free the People held in slavery as long as they were Black.  Free Black People could be kidnapped and brought into slavery as, in fact, the Supreme Court had previously allowed in cases where it was clear they were legally free in the free state or slave state they'd been abducted in.  No Black Person was safe from enslavement under the Taney decision.  

The Taney decision led directly to the election of Abraham Lincoln, who ran for president on his opposition to it including the usupratory  overturning of the Missouri Compromise of 1820.  The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court was decisive in the treason of those who created the Confederation, their attack on the legitimate government of the United States starting the Civil War and once the Union won, legal slavery was abolished through the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th and other Civil War Amendments which settled the citizenship status of Black Americans, at least in so far as the Constitution was supposed to be concerned.  It took a terrible civil war to overturn the work of Taney and his fellow Dred Scott majority.  That blood and carnage added to that shed in the struggle for abolition, many abolitionists, Black but some White Peoples' blood, added to that lost in that war and its aftermath. One of the Civil War Amendments, the 14th, has been lied by the Court into meaning the opposite of what it means, they prove by that that, for purposes of the law, the Constitution is far less than what the words on paper and even the legislative record of its adoption means, it means whatever a majority of dishonest "justices" says it means and the real history of that court proves that even some of the most illustrious names on the court were thoroughly dishonest in their decisions.

For a too brief period under Reconstruction there was considerable progress in enforcing equality in the former Confederate states but that was overturned with the corrupt Electoral College bargain that Rutherford Hayes made with the slave power, which were never really defeated since their powers in the Federal Government under the slave-holder parts of the Constitution were actually enhanced because the former slaves formerly counted as 3/5ths human beings, in a provision that allowed slave holders to exercise power by counting those they held in slavery for purposes of congressional representation, stealing their political rights for themselves while stealing their lives and labor, was extended to 5/5ths under emancipation - once the slave power reasserted terror, oppression and in many cases de facto slavery over Black People and prevented them from voting.  

The recent rulings that mostly aided the drawing of dishonest gerrymandered maps and allowing the suppression of the votes in Republican-fascist controlled states is a repeat of that theft of not only the political power that rightly belongs to those whose votes are suppressed, but, in fact, all voters everywhere whose government is stolen by the same powers that have blighted the United States for our entire history, starting with the rigged adoption of the Constitution.  It is estimated that, largely by design, a mere 6% of even eligible white, male, property holding voters had a hand in the ratification of the Constitution, with its many provisions enhancing slave power and protecting that evil while also giving powers to the Northern financiers who largely made up the remnant of the Constitutional Convention who drafted the Constitution.  The Supreme Court has been the foremost force in thwarting the efforts to reform and clean up our corrupt system, efforts by Voters and the political branches, the two which have some claim to legitimacy since they are the product of a vote.  Not least of all by the absurd interpretations of the First Amendments that created a right to lie in the mass media, only one of the many evil purposes to which that most absurdly idolized passage in the Constitution have been put to by the Court.

The subsequent Supreme Courts eventually got around to establishing America's apartheid system of de facto slavery in place of legal slavery in other infamous rulings, the Plessey v Ferguson (I hear Clarence cites that atrocity as precedent for some of his claims in his recent concurrence with his fellow injustices) one that made a pretense of "separate but equal" which even the most addled of those "justices" knew was nothing like equal anymore than the Roberts Court majority really believes that the United States is not rigged for white privilege, they should know, all of them having been beneficiaries of that privilege except the one who was a major beneficiary of the affirmative action he voted with his fellow white supremacists to kill.

The many decades of struggle for abolition which was older than the Constitution, the post Civil War struggle against American Apartheid, culminated in the adoption of Civil Rights laws in the 1960s, the most important of which were the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and relatively few Supreme Court decisions, few considering the number of those which upheld and extended slave power and then its changed for into white supremacy power.  The Roberts Court and the Rehnquist Court before it has been destroying that in order to send the country back to the status of legally protected American apartheid, the six "justices" doing that work as much as they dare to, for now.  And it's clear they dare to go quite far, as of now, they no doubt would like to go much farther.

That the white supremacist majority have a "justice" deputed to be Black is of little importance, other than to mark him as someone as detestable as Roger Taney, himself. That is as significant as the fact that they voted to nationalize Women's' bodies with the aide of one deputed to be a Woman.  As has been pointed out by many in the past few days, Clarence was one who enjoyed considerable benefit from the Civil Rights struggle and, especially, affirmative action for himself before he decided to shaft all other Black People in the country over his own personal perceived slight BY WHITE PEOPLE after the head of one of the most corrupt political families in American history working on consent with such Republicans as John Danforth who hired him on the basis of his race, put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court because he was Black.  His record of service to the wealthy and racist put him where his pathology and corruption has flourished and been protected by Republicans who will never vote to impeach him no matter how corrupt he is and the damned Constitution that makes impeachment of even the most corrupt Supreme Court member as impossible as the most dangerously corrupt president in our history, Trump, who, working with the Republican Senate and the billionaire serving criminal lawyer network of which Leonard Leo is a member protect not only him but some of the other corrupt members of that damnable Court.  That Clarence's wife was thick as thieves with the January 6th insurrection, something he certainly knew as he ruled on cases relevant to that massive crime, only proves how dangerous a criminally vile "justice" he is.

The original evil of the Dred Scott decision included the second time that the Court dared to use a completely Supreme Court created power to issue the Dred Scott decision which, among its worst features, overturned a decades old law that allowed Missouri to become a state, the slave power having blocked the admission of Maine to become a state on its own, independent of Massachusetts of which it was a part until 1820.  The reason for that was, of course, it would have added two free-state Senators while Free State members of Congress would have resisted allowing even more of an imbalance of slave power from the admission of Missouri without Maine.  

That was the second time in its history that the Court used the power John Marshall gave him and the Supreme Court, without any ratification process, to nullify duly adopted laws passed by the Congress and signed by the President.  It is a power that has steadily increased in use since then, it is, in fact, how the Roberts Court has overturned the most important parts of the Voting Rights Act.  

The romantic fiction that had grown up about the Supreme Court, especially during the Warren Court years, that held it was the part of government that was most protective of the rights and even freedoms of us, that, in the lying phrase over the gaudy entrance of that hideous building the Court built for itself, Equal Justice Under Law, is a disgraceful lie, in the Roberts years, one of the most shameful hypocrisies as it would have been had anyone claimed that of the Court for most of its history.  

The keys to doing something about this corrupt court have to include definitively removing that power that John Marshall, one of the most consistent slave-power enhancing figures of American history, created for the court.  It was a power which Abraham Lincoln opposed and, in fact, ignored when Taney and his colleagues tried to meddle in his efforts to preserve the United States against the slave power they favored.  In the many posts I did on "Government By Judiciary" and associated texts that prove both the illegitimacy of that power and its danger, I asserted that the Court will never agree to give it up, it will have to be taken from it by the other two branches of the federal government.  

The theory of extending the bench of the court, while good in the short term, will not really protect us from the Court which is unelected and which can't be changed by involuntarily removing corrupt members from it.  The only way to protect equality and democracy from them is to remove that power from them and give them a status which practically every Western democracy gives its supreme courts which don't have that power to overturn legislation by mere fiat.  Whatever dangers there might be in that, which could be said to enhance the powers of the legislature and executive, are more than matched by the danger of a court that can nationalize Women's reproductive systems and send us back into the worst era of white supremacist supremacy and never have to face removal by the Voters.  How much worse can it be that the Court using that power threw us into the Civil War?  Do we need to rerun that, this time with the automatic weapons in the hands of the white supremacists by Supreme Court ruling and Republican-fascism during the Bush II regime?  

I think those are going to be the stakes in this struggle, which has become increasingly bad during my lifetime.  I've watched it develop since 1969 as Nixon took office and started the process of changing the Court to a Republican partisan, and so billionaire bought one which would overturn any progress which had been made or would be made, still, for a little while.  And the Supreme Court has been becoming increasingly bad in that period. We have to do something serious about it as soon as possible and it will have to be bold and decisive.

In the largely suppressed knowledge of how the Constitution was written and adopted, one of the more interesting objections to it was the theory of three branches holding a balance of power, if I had the time I would look up the critique of an opponent to ratification who, rightly, pointed out it was an entirely novel theory of governance coming largely from the head of John Adams.  If there is one thing that is certain of the original Constitution, as adopted in the 1780s, it was the work of some rank amateurs whose conceptions of republican governance was taken from systems which were pretty bad while they were working and which all failed.  They looked with the typically romantic affluent, white, male, college-credentialed eyes on the Roman Republican system which, of course, was extremely unstable, resulting in civil wars among the gangster families that ran the Republic and which corrupted into the Roman Imperial system.  I think that is what the present Republican-fascist party is doing to the United States.  

The thing has failed NOW, it needs enough reform that what would come out of that would be an entirely new government with an entirely new Constitution, hopefully one that would require a legitimate and informed vote by the entire People of the country.  Among its many provisions written out of the experience of OUR HISTORY, not that written by aristocratic "historians" who were almost all members of one faction of crime families or other who wrote the history the "founders" relied on in the 1700s.  It should certainly make it clear that Voter suppression and prevention of voting, rigging of elections is 100% unconstitutional, that lying is not a right but telling the truth is a right, in most cases an absolute right.  It should also make it clear that the powers created by John Marshall to enhance the power of the branch without the legitimacy of the popular Vote in Marbury v. Madison are abolished, once and for all.  If the Voting Rights Act was in full force, if the Electoral College had been abolished, we would never have had Bush II or Trump, the Supreme Court would not have done what it did this or last term. 

The presently constituted Roberts Court is arguably more evil than the Taney Court was, it has overthrown the entire struggle for equal rights fought, the blood and work and struggle, the hopes against oppression of all of the generations after the Dred Scott decision was issued.  I'd include the blood shed in the Civil War in that calculation because the evil idiots who issued that most damned of decisions stupidly thought they were preventing a civil war, "restoring national harmony" in that ruling.  The corrupt 6 Republican-fascists on this court have no possible excuse of that kind of innocence as to what they are doing. 

 

You Have To Be The Contented Affluent Kind Of Movie Addled Commie Fan Boy To Think There Is Something Wrong With What I Said

Normal People Know Better, Or Should.  

THIS IS THE POST I'LL POST instead of the long piece I'd thought of to answer the silly comment that me saying I was an "anti-anti-anti-communist meant I was a big fat fan of such things as the House Unamerican Activities Committee from the late 40s through early 60's, Red Channels, Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, Westbrook Pegler - actually I doubt the commenter knows the history of that other than what they saw in some stupid movie treatment so he probably doesn't understand what I just said.  Instead of a long drawn out answer I'll give you this wisdom on opposing our opponents and why some of that is worthwhile and some isn't from the very good young evangelical LGBTQ+ equality champion Matthew Vines.

All of those questions don't take place in a vacuum. That experience of alienation (of LGBGTQ+ Christians) is difficult to undergo at any time.  But it's been even harder in the last few years as so many of us who have grown up in the evangelical church have had reason to lose confidence and trust of many of those who have played a formative role in nurturing our faith.  

Flagrant hypocrisy and the pursuit of power seemingly at any cost have damaged the church's witness and felt like a betrayal for many of us who've watched as the Jesus we invited into our hearts as children has been reduced, too often, to a team mascot in our increasingly ugly and mean spirited culture wars.

If the People who introduced me to Jesus can live in such contradictory ways to the values they once taught me it's natural for many to ask how much of this was ever true in the first place?  How much of what I was taught about Christianity is actually real?  And how much of it should I still believe?

The term that's now widely used for those who are going through this extensive questioning of what they'd once been taught about their faith is "deconstruction."  For many of us this is an unavoidable process once we come to believe that any significant aspect of the theology and beliefs we were taught growing up is untrue. That could be about same-sex relationships but it could also be about the role of Women in the church, about questions of science or about whether Christians all need to vote for the same political party.

But whatever the impetus for it or the term that's used to describe it this process is one that millions of People today and especially millions of younger People in the church have gone through or are going through.  And that reality and how wide spread it is can provoke different responses. Including responses that I think err in two different directions.

On the one hand, seeing deconstruction lead to a loss of faith for many can lead to a fearful or condemning response from some in the church who prefer to interpret this phenomenon as merely People falling away from the faith because of the attraction of sin and cultural relevance in an increasingly secular and post-Christian society.  But that sort of perspective overlooks the many real problems in the church that are pushing People away.  Rethinking beliefs and attitudes that aren't true or that aren't faithful to Jesus and Scripture isn't a bad thing. It's a helpful and necessary thing and it can help to make the church better.

But, at the same time, just as deconstruction shouldn't be uncritically dismissed or condemned, it also isn't something that should be uncritically praised regardless of what beliefs somebody is deconstructing or what measuring stick they're using to judge what's true and what's not in the process.

As Paul reminds us in First Corinthians 10:23, - I have the right to do anything, you say, but not everything is beneficial. I have the right to do everything but not everything is constructive.  If deconstruction is pursued in an overly reactive way then it can easily lead to a whip-lash inducing rush to embrace the opposite of whatever beliefs someone started with.  And that almost inevitably involves sweeping away some beliefs that are good and true along with those that are flawed.  The proverbial baby with the bath water.  And even when someone seeks to maintain a Christian identity this highly reactive approach is usually unsustainable.

This, "it can easily lead to a whip-lash inducing rush to embrace the opposite of whatever beliefs someone started with," is certainly at work in the typical liberalish, leftishish anti-anti-communism which was just such a reaction and with catastrophic and counter-productive results, as the high point of liberal political life in the United States, which I measure from the short period when the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and Medicare and Medicaid were adopted and made law.  Of course that short period  was no epoch of human perfection, it was just the high water mark of achievement.  It wasn't long before one of the most idiotic rulings of the Warren Court made lying in the mass media, the corporate media and the minuscule lefty media immune from action resulting directly in Nixon and our long slide into Republican-fascism.  American involvement in Vietnam and a number of other countries was a disaster for egalitarian democracy, as well.

The anti-anti-communism was in full swing leading too many on the left to feel pity for those poor, put-upon commies, so many of them falling for the legends and lies of their tales of self-pity as told on stage, on screen and in novels and in the pages of small, little read lefty magazines.  That was some of the most misplaced pity in the history of the American left, pretty much all of those who were, in fact, communists or Marxists of some other denomination were supporters of some of the most evil dictators in human history, some who would not blacklist them if they were dissidents but would shoot them in the head or torture them to death, not unlikely, their families.  Shoot them in the head with no due process or send them to die in the gulag slave-labor camps. Communism has been, in fact, as thoroughly tied into slavery as any other gangster system of governance, American communists have championed some of the worst enslavers in human history.  

They may have been due their due process under the law that, with its terrible imperfections and downright corruptions was superior to what they advocated for millions and, with time, far over a billion other people lived and still live under.  I wonder why those dear old commies never seemed to really be concerned about the scores of millions murdered, enslaved, starved to death, etc. under their heroes' rule.  Only as most of them were affluent to comfortable white Americans (the passion of Dalton Trumbo, really), I really don't wonder how they could do it any more than I wonder why the majority of the present Supreme Court can administer such brutal injustice to the large majority of Americans right now.

Anyone who doesn't understand that is bound to be about as helpful to saving our imperfect democracy as the RFK jr. supporting-Trump voting Bernie or buster-Green Party repeat ratfucker-Putin supporting enemy of Ukrainian freedom and egalitarian democracy as the Stalin lovin' later Mao lovin' play-left were all along.

I hate the anti-democratic poseur left and anything "moderate," "liberal" or other which advocates doing anything other than voting for Democrats for the foreseeable future so as to get and keep Republican-fascists out of power, expand the damned Court, swamping the billionaire tool white supremacists.  

And let me take a second to ask, is Clarence Thomas not the most vile person to ever have sat on that court?  I would put him right down there with Taney and the other champions of slavery and white supremacy, only he sold out all other People of Color to do what they did. AND THAT REALLY DOES FIGURE INTO HIS EPIC VILENESS.  

Those traitors to the genuine left should be called out and exposed for what they are and always were and definitively, publicly and permanently be kicked out of the real left. Wash, rinse, repeat as often as necessary.  Once you get past their self-generated fake hagiographic "history," there is so little that the most leftiest lefties in the room ever accomplished as compared to Democrats from FDR on to make real radical change, changing laws and making lives better.  And there is so much that is counterproductive and destructive in that real as opposed to phonied up lefty history that the safest thing to do is to forget nuance and scrap the entire thing.  Their legend is a millstone around the neck of the real left that gains office, holds office and changes things and it always will be.  Junk it, be done with it once and for all.  

If there's one thing I have learned from my original reluctance to see Joe Biden win the Democratic nomination, it is that there is nothing that can compare with having someone with his extensive experience in government as a Democratic President, along with the extensive experience of the greatest Speaker of the House in American history, Nancy Pelosi and the skilled Chuck Schumer as the Democratic leader of the Senate.  One of the most impressive acts of politics I've ever seen was Nancy Pelosi convincing her leadership team hand over that role to entirely new but also very skilled and experienced successors.  I have never seen anything like that happen on the play-left.  But if I went into the disgusting details I won't get anything else done.  

I'm too busy to waste time arguing that bullshit history again.