Biggest Small City Protest North of Boston

 I've ever seen.   Unfortunately no one around to make one of those guesstimates except the local cops and I don't trust them to tell the truth - too many Republicans on the force.   Though even they might have had enough of Republican-fascism. 

P.S. On Yesterday's Post

THERE IS A PARAGRAPH at the end of my footnote which I accidentally put in bold italics which I wrote but which some may have mistaken as part of the passage I borrowed from the excellent dictionary publishers.   I'm sorry if there was any confusion.  

The Reputation Of "Liberal" Supreme Court "Justices" Isn't What It Used To Be* - Hate Mail

 *AND IT NEVER WAS.  a repost because I've fought that battle to a decisive end once already and I'm backed up on work, now that I'm recovering from what ailed me.  

There has been a decided need for at least two different and never to be confused words for "liberal" because the dominant form of that in our de-Christianized American culture -  and there are none who have de-Christianized it more than those who proclaim their "Christianity" the loudest -  the worst aspects of the word have come to dominate over the best meaning of it.  It is that best meaning of the word that has earned it the enmity of those who disdain "liberals" and "liberalism" even as they champion everything that is worst in the use of the word,  what I call "libertarian liberalism" in which those with the most money and, so, the most power are allowed to do pretty much as they want to without much if any restraint of the law of the government - including corrupting the government with their money and so power which buys them influence and media the better to deceive the susceptible and gullible. *

In terms of the long history of putrid and corrupt Supreme Court "justicing" there is a perfect example of all the above in the figure of one of the most stupidly adopted of "liberal" heroes, the entirely illiberal Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.  So I'll repost what I said about him in 2013.   I used a slightly different font back then, I don't dare fiddle with it now because I'd have to spend a long time justifying the lines.  Sorry about that. 

 Wednesday, July 3, 2013

The Darwinist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made what might be the most infamous declaration on eugenics made in the United States, it may be his most well known quote.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

The fuller reading of the paragraph, near the end of his decision in the Buck v Bell case, is even worse:

The attack is not upon the procedure, but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment finds the facts that have been recited, and that Carrie Buck

"is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health, and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization,"

and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the legislature and the specific findings of the Court, obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and, if they exist, they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

If I had the time, I'd go through Holmes' famous dissents in matters of prior restraint in printed matter, even, as in the Gitlow case, against the restraint of publishing incitements to violent insurrection and revolution, even as Holmes contemplated that sufficiently eloquent incitements might succeed in that incitement.  I see his approval of the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck was a "prior restraint" on her ability to have another child.  Leaving aside Stephen Jay Gould's essay on the case, in which he quite conclusively shows that neither Carrie Buck nor her daughter were, actually, of below normal intelligence,  Holmes clearly saw the danger of her having another child as being a greater danger to "the state" than a possibly successful insurrection overturning the government.   In the Gitlow case, when it was merely the mode of expression and its contents that were at stake, he said:

Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us it had no chance of starting a present conflagration. If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.

However, clearly, in Buck v Bell, Holmes considered that people, their right to have children, the right to the ownership of their own body, was less important compared to the right of words.  

-----------

It would be possible to go through the decision and make point by point comparisons with what the great Holmes said and what such infamous figures as Galton, Haeckel, and their colleagues now considered less disreputable said and find who Holmes was very likely paraphrasing.  In fact, on the other end of the history of the first eugenics era, the defense of Nazi doctors at Nuremberg cited Holmes' decision as well as other American documents in their defense.  You have to wonder what that felt like for Francis Biddle, the chief judge at those trials, given that he had been Holmes' private secretary.   

His familiarity with Holmes gives Biddle's analysis of the effect that Holmes' thinking and reading a particular credibility that could stand alone as evidence of how he came to decide what he did.  In a series of lectures Biddle gave, which were published in 1960 he said.  

All society rested on the death of men or on the prevention of the lives of a good many. So that when the Chief Justice assigned him the task of writing an opinion upholding the constitutionality 

of a Virginia law for sterilizing imbeciles he felt that he was getting near the first principle of real reform— although of course he didn't mean that the surgeon's knife was the ultimate symbol. 

... He was amused at some of the rhetorical changes in his opinion suggested by his associates, and purposely used "short and rather brutal words for an antithesis," that made them mad. In most cases the difficulty was rather with the writing than with the thinking. To put the case well and from time to time to hint at a vista was the job. . . . 

The vista of which Biddle spoke was provided by Holmes' reading of Charles Darwin.  Biddle continued:

This approach is characteristic of Holmes, and constantly reflected in his opinions— to keep the law fluid and the doors of the mind open. For pedestrian lawyers it was often unsatisfactory— they wanted everything defined and settled and turned into everlasting precedents. 

Darwin's influence was strong on Holmes, and his theory of the survival of those who were fit to survive must have been constantly and passionately discussed in Dr. Holmes's house when 

Wendell was a growing lad and young man. On the Origin of Species had appeared when he was eighteen, and The Descent of Man in 1871, when he was thirty. Darwin led to Herbert Spencer, 

whom Holmes thought dull, with the ideals of a lower middle-class British Philistine, but who, with Darwin, he believed had done more than any other English writer to affect our whole way of thinking about the universe. All his life Holmes held to the survival of the strong, and did not disguise his view that the Sherman Act was a humbug, based on economic ignorance and incompetence, and that the Interstate Commerce Commission was not a fit body to be entrusted with rate making. However, as he said to Pollock, he was so skeptical about our knowledge of the goodness or badness of laws that he had no practical criticism except what the crowd wants. Personally he would bet that the crowd if it knew more wouldn't want what it does. 

Compared to the "right" of private businesses to do things that could have enormously effects, good or bad, on countless people, including deaths,  Holmes saw the danger of individual people asserted to be "imbeciles"  having a child as more deserving of the most extreme state intervention, even into their bodies with surgery, on the mere prediction that any child they had was of an increased potential to be intellectually or physically deficient.  

Yet Holmes is seen as some kind of great progressive force in the law, primarily, I'd guess, due to his free speech dissents and his usefulness to Franklin Roosevelt at the very end of his life.  There was the movie of the play "The Magnificent Yankee" which only adds weight to the case that historical fiction in the hands of the theater and Hollywood, is best considered to be fiction.  Liberals seem to be suckers for that kind of "history".

Since he lived until 1935, Holmes saw eugenics activity in the United States increase enormously after his decision, responsible for the forced and involuntary sterilization of scores of thousands of people.  He also lived to see the rise of fascists in Europe, the Nazis, he lived long enough and could have been quite aware of the Nazis eugenic laws, the first in Germany, in July of 1933, laws which were justified by the Nazis and their supporters by citing the eugenics laws in the United States, both at the beginning and, as mentioned before, after the fall of the Third Reich.  I don't know if he is recorded as ever having said anything about that,  other than his declaration that he felt he was getting at "the first principle of real reform" in his decision, I haven't yet found anything he said in its wake.  I would suspect there is something, I just haven't found it yet.

----------

David A. Hollinger, in an interesting essay, "The Tough-Minded Justice Holmes" gives more insight into what almost certainly influenced Holmes to write his most famous decision.  He notes the influence of Charles Darwin and his circle and how William James tried to broaden his friend, Holmes' views and lead him to be less unquestioningly accepting of them. 

This is not to claim that James developed his categories with Holmes in mind, but there is no doubt that this particular map of intellectual alternatives was suggested to James by a circle of mid-nineteenth-century British secular intellectuals with whom Holmes strongly identified himself and against whom Jame's own career as a philosopher was directed.  The members of this circle were often called “scientific naturalists” or, less helpfully, “positivists”;  they included Herbet Spencer, G. H. Lewes, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, W.K. Clifford, Henry Buckle and – although his reticence in philosophical and religious matters made his position in this movement ambiguous – the great Charles Darwin Himself.  To James, these “knights of the razor,” as he called them sardonically, were anathema on account of their parochial misunderstanding of science and their extraordinary ability to intimidate people who would prefer to make a more generous view of religious experience and individual volition. While James mocked the pretensions of Popular Science Monthly – the major American medium for the dissemination of the views of this circle, Holmes so rejoiced in its influence that he sent a fan letter to its militant editor, E. L. Youmans.  Holmes celebrated the triumphs of this truly “scientific,” reality-facing, ostentatiously stoic cadre over the sentimentalism he associated with his own father.  While James thought his friend Holmes was making rather a spectacle of himself by representing his marks of toughness the scars worn by the sword-fighting duelists in German universities, Holmes seemed convinced that the battle against sentimentalism was never won. 

The idea that Holmes' "tough-mindedness", an attribute given him by James, could have been reacting to the "sentimentalism" of his father, the poet, is interesting.  It's almost tempting to see Holmes as an example of that turn from 19th century liberalism of the kind that produced the reform movements of abolition, women's rights, temperance, various reforms to protect workers and consumers, etc. into a more "scientific" liberalism that still distorts, denatures and defeats liberals today.  But I think the case is that such denatured liberalism was unable to make the distinction between a mythical, liberal Holmes and the reality of his products.  Is it his "free speech" language that deceives liberals?  Liberals go all soggy when someone says those words.  Free speech, with its potential to incite violent struggle can be seen as a useful motivator of natural selection as much as it is a vital component of liberal reform.  In the hands of the rich and powerful it has that effect, often to the detriment of genuine liberalism, as our freest press ever proves 24/7/365.  In the beginning of his essay, Hollinger points out:

.....that a major folk hero of the liberal intelligentsia is a man who has been plausibly described by Grant Gilmore as “savage, harsh, and cruel, a bitter and lifelong pessimist who saw in the course of human life nothing but a continuing struggle in which the rich and powerful impose their will on the poor and weak.  The two issues are largely distinct from one another, but they do connect through the utility of a “scientific” persona held for proponents of a genuinely secular, de-Christianized liberalism for the public culture of the United States. 

This is what I meant by the wrong turn that liberalism took as it attempted to become more "tough-minded", more "scientific", less "sentimental".  Such liberalism equates whatever is held to be science with hard reality and whatever can be associated with the "sentimental" as being an illusion, including religion, including vast stretches of morality which comprise the genuine substance of liberalism.  This is how it mistakes Holmes for a liberal when he was no such thing, it's how eugenics, the negation of everything that liberalism comprises, came to be associated with liberalism.  

Post Script:  I can't say it any better than the atheist and materialist and friend of Stephen Jay Gould,  Richard Lewontin, did in his Essay:  Billions and Billions of Demons

The struggle for possession of public consciousness between material and mystical explanations of the world is one aspect of the history of the confrontation between elite culture and popular culture. Without that history we cannot understand what was going on in the Little Rock Auditorium in 1964. The debate in Arkansas between a teacher from a Texas fundamentalist college and a Harvard astronomer and University of Chicago biologist was a stage play recapitulating the history of American rural populism. In the first decades of this century there was an immensely active populism among poor southwestern dirt farmers and miners.7 The most widely circulated American socialist journal of the time (The Appeal to Reason!) was published not in New York, but in Girard, Kansas, and in the presidential election of 1912 Eugene Debs got more votes in the poorest rural counties of Texas and Oklahoma than he did in the industrial wards of northern cities. Sentiment was extremely strong against the banks and corporations that held the mortgages and sweated the labor of the rural poor, who felt their lives to be in the power of a distant eastern elite. The only spheres of control that seemed to remain to them were family life, a fundamentalist religion, and local education. 

This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. There was no serious public threat to their religious and family values until well after the Second World War. Evolution, for example, was not part of the regular biology curriculum when I was a student in 1946 in the New York City high schools, nor was it discussed in school textbooks. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. A group of biologists from elite universities together with science teachers from urban schools produced a new uniform set of biology textbooks, whose publication and dissemination were underwritten by the National Science Foundation. An extensive and successful public relations campaign was undertaken to have these books adopted, and suddenly Darwinian evolution was being taught to children everywhere. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children. 

Lewontin's is about the most realistic, most informed and most sophisticated analysis of the this struggle in the United States which I've read.

In a struggle that produces far more than its share of ironies, it is remarkable that as the fundamentalist anti-evolutionists who have made the best use of the history of American Eugenics, the eugenics history of Charles Darwin and his inner circle and the waves emanating from them as present day liberals are obsessively protecting the inspiration of eugenics, the lassie-faire capitalist, supporter of the 19th century British class system, anti-contraceptive, racist, flagrant bigot, etc. Charles Darwin on behalf of his science, which is long superseded by better explanations of the fact of evolution. 

How Darwinism became the great cause celebre of liberalism when it has nothing to do with a genuine liberal political agenda and, in the genuine history of Darwinism is antithetical to liberalism, is worth asking.  The separation of church and state is worth supporting but, frankly, if we've got to buy Darwinism to do it, it's not going to lead to liberalism.  I don't think liberalism has to make that deal.  At the very least it should face the real Charles Darwin and throw him off the sled.  Liberal struggle requires that. 

We borrowed liberal arts from French in the 14th century, and sometime after this liberal began to be used in conjunction with other words (such as education, profession, and pastime). When paired with these other words liberal was serving to indicate that the things described were fitting for a person of high social status. However, at the same time that the term liberal arts was beginning to make 14th century college-tuition-paying-parents a bit nervous about their children’s future job prospects, liberal was also being used as an adjective to indicate “generosity” and “bounteousness.” By the 15th century, people were using liberal to mean “bestowed in a generous and openhanded way,” as in “poured a liberal glass of wine.”

The word's meaning kept shifting. By the 18th century, people were using liberal to indicate that something was “not strict or rigorous.” The political antonyms of liberal and conservative began to take shape in the 19th century, as the British Whigs and Tories began to adopt these as titles for their respective parties.

Liberal is commonly used as a label for political parties in a number of other countries, although the positions these parties take do not always correspond to the sense of liberal that people in the United States commonly give it. In the US, the word has been associated with both the Republican and Democratic parties (now it is more commonly attached to the latter), although generally it has been in a descriptive, rather than a titular, sense.

The word has—for some people, at least—taken on some negative connotations when used in a political sense in the United States. It is still embraced with pride by others. We can see these associations with the word traced back to the early and mid-20th century in its combination with other words, such as pinko:

Thanks to The Dove, pinko-liberal journal of campus opinion at the University of Kansas, a small part of the world last week learned some inner workings of a Japanese college boy.

—Time: the Weekly Newsmagazine, 7 Jun., 1926

"To the well-to-do," writes Editor Oswald Garrison Villard of the pinko-liberal Nation, "contented and privileged, Older is an anathema.

—Time: the Weekly Newsmagazine, 9 Sept., 1929

Pinko liberals—the kind who have been so sympathetic with communistic ideals down through the years—will howl to high heaven.

—The Mason City Globe-Gazette (Mason City, IA), 12 Jun., 1940

The term limousine liberal, meaning "a wealthy political liberal," is older than many people realize; although the phrase was long believed to have originated in the 1960s, recent evidence shows that we have been sneering at “limousine liberals” almost as long as we have had limousines:

“Limousine liberals” is another phrase that has been attached to these comfortable nibblers at anarchy. But it seems to us too bourgeois. It may do as a subdivision of our higher priced Bolsheviki.

—New York Tribune, 5 May, 1919

Even with a highly polysemous word such as liberal we can usually figure out contextually which of its many possible senses is meant. However, when the word takes on multiple and closely-related meanings that are all related to politics, it can be rather difficult to tell one from another. These senses can be further muddied by the fact that we now have two distinct groups who each feel rather differently about some of the meanings of liberal.

One of these definitions we provide for liberal is “a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change”; it is up to you to choose whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. In other words, “We define, you decide.”

Of course, one of the ironies in this is that there couldn't be anything less "liberal" than the communists on the one hand and their American critics on the other.

We need a new designation for the best meaning of "liberal" that is derived from generosity to the least among us, the only "liberalism" that I care for because I've seen what the secular, scientistic kind of liberalism leads to.  

Republicans Deserve To Go To Hell

TRUMP RECENTLY TOLD THE TRUTH,  or got as near as he has ever gotten to that increasingly rare thing among Republicans in the United States when he doubted he'd go to heaven.  I thought when I heard that that he was expressing doubts about his own mortality, but maybe he's aware that he early and eagerly sold his soul to the Prince of Liars, a deal he's regularly signed on to again and again. 

But he's not alone.  The entire Republican Party deserves to go to hell.   And this says it all. 

 

Let Me Explain "The Bob Rule"

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MUSIC STUDENT at a land grant university, in a very tight knit department as music departments need to be, there was a person who was the source of constant annoyance, always doing things that were annoying and mildly inconveniencing, saying things that were mildly but effectively annoying and even upsetting.   

When that happened people would say,  "Well, that's just Bob.  He doesn't do it on purpose, he doesn't do it maliciously. " 

Finally, as I recall during the second year of Bob doing that I finally said,  No.  No one could be so persistently annoying by accident, he intends to do what he does.  He does it on purpose. 

The same is true of what John Roberts and his majority of thugs on the bench are doing with their eyes wide open, if not by reading the proposed dissents of their colleagues predicting the very predictable consequences of their rulings BUT BY THE RECORD OF THOSE DISSENTING BEING RIGHT IN PREDICTING HORRIFIC RESULTS.   And those horrific results, themselves.   They're not stupid, they're not uninformed, THEY WANT THE CORRUPTION THEY ARE FACILITATING. 

Roberts is a manicured, clean handed thug who fully intends the harm to People, to the environment, to equality, to democracy and, now, with his antics of the past three years,   TO THE VERY EXISTENCE OF REPUBLICAN GOVERNANCE IN THE UNITED STATES.   His goal, from the start, as that list of just some of the damaging rulings made by him and under his steering of the Supreme Court WAS TO CREATE CORRUPT GOVERNMENT BECAUSE HIS PARTY AND CLASS AND IDEOLOGY CAN'T WIN IF THE SYSTEM IS CLEAN.  

He has surpassed Taney in the corruption of his term as Chief "justice" of the so often corrupt Supreme Court, he is the filthiest of them all. 

Still Ill

SO I'M NOT UP TO WRITING very much,  I won't speculate I'm getting better because I don't want to take a chance on tempting fate.

Listening to the audio-only Rachel Maddow feed about Trump thanking the dictator of Egypt for financing his defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016,  which it is certain did happen, to the tune of ten million dollars shortly before the narrow election which Hillary Clinton won but under our crooked system lost the Electoral College to the loser, Trump who has destroyed democracy, as she and many others warned would happen. 

But it should never be forgotten that that road to near total corruption and the destruction of anything like an honest election in the United states was paved by the Roberts Court following on the work done in that direction by the Berger and Rehnquist Courts.  Those earlier courts did serious damage but the damage done under John Roberts and the Republican-fascists  who vote his way on the Supreme Court (note, the Republicans Stevens And Souter dissented from those corrupt rulings) has brought the country to ruin, twice in the form of the stupidest, most criminal, most corrupt and most vulgar scumbag of a president, Donald Trump. 

I'll give you her show which has many though hardly even a large list of what Roberts and his fellow thugs on the bench have brought us to.

And since we are talking about what the Roberts Court did to produce that complete corruption of our government and country,  I'm going to give you the complete list as listed BEFORE THE 2016 ELECTION as compiled by the Brennan Center for Justtice:

The Supreme Court’s McCutcheon v. FEC decision further increases the influence of big money in elections. But McCutcheon is just the latest in a long string of cases weakening campaign finance rules. Since Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the Court in 2005 and 2006 respectively, six decisions have significantly reshaped the legal landscape dictating how much big money can flow into political races. Here is some background on what the Court did, how it affected American elections, and what could happen next.

2007:   Federal Election Commission (FEC) v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc.

The SCOTUS Ruling: The Court struck down a law regulating sham issue ads — television advertisements that clearly target specific candidates, but avoid regulation by posing as “issue” ads. For example, an advertisement referring to a candidate by name close to the election, but instead of explicitly advocating voting for or against the candidate, tells the viewer to “call Rep. Smith and tell him to stop corporate polluters.”

The Majority Opinion: Chief Justice Roberts on the continued regulation of issue ads: “Enough is enough. Issue ads like WRTL’s are by no means equivalent to contributions, and the quid-pro-quo corruption interest cannot justify regulating them.”

The Dissenting Opinion: Justice Souter: “Neither Congress’s decisions nor our own have understood the corrupting influence of money in politics as being limited to outright bribery or discrete quid pro quo; campaign finance reform has instead consistently focused on the more pervasive distortion of electoral institutions by concentrated wealth, on the special access and guaranteed favor that sap the representative integrity of American government and defy public confidence in its institutions.”

The Result: By rejecting Congress’s decision to regulate political spending, the Court encouraged the creation of more and more political ads that circumvent campaign finance law by leaving out “magic words” such as “vote for” or “vote against.” As any voter who lives in a battleground state knows, these ads now dominate many elections, often funded by shadowy groups that do not reveal their donors.

2008:   Davis v. FEC

The SCOTUS Ruling: The Court struck down the so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment,” which had permitted congressional candidates facing wealthy opponents who spent more than $350,000 of their own money on the race to raise larger contributions until they achieved parity with their wealthy opponents.

The Majority Opinion: Justice Alito: “While [the law] does not impose a cap on a candidate’s expenditure of personal funds, it imposes an unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises that First Amendment right.”

The Dissenting Opinion: Justice Stevens: The law “does not impose any burden whatsoever on the self-funding candidate’s freedom to speak, it does not violate the First Amendment, and . . . it does no more than diminish the unequal strength of the self-funding candidate.”

The Result: Opponents of extremely wealthy candidates are left without an effective way to overcome their significant financial disadvantage. By striking down the “Millionaire’s Amendment,” the Court helped to ensure that Congress would continue to be dominated by the very wealthy, a state of affairs recently described by the Center for Responsive Politics.

2010:   Citizens United v. FEC

The SCOTUS Ruling: The Court opened the door to allow unions and corporations, including for-profit corporations, to spend unlimited amounts on elections, as long as that money is not given directly to or used in coordination with a candidate.

The Majority Opinion: Justice Kennedy: “Ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption. . . .” “The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.”

The Dissenting Opinion: Justice Stevens: “In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.”

The Result: The Citizens United decision laid the groundwork for the creation of Super PACs, or independent political groups that can take in and spend unlimited sums. These groups, paired with newly unrestrained corporations and unions, have contributed to astronomical growth in independent political spending. Outside groups spent more than $1 billion dollars on the 2012 election, which is more than the total outside spending reported to the Federal Election Commission from 1980 to 2010. Outside spending in Senate races alone went from about $18 million in 2008 to about $260 million in 2012. Much of this money remains untraceable, as groups have taken advantage of loopholes in the election law and tax code to hide the identities of spenders.    

2011:   Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett

The SCOTUS Ruling: The Court struck down part of an Arizona program that provided public funds to candidates who agreed to only raise very small contributions from the public and to abide by campaign expenditure limits. Specifically, the program could no longer provide additional money to these candidates if they faced big-spending opponents. 

The Majority Opinion: Chief Justice Roberts: “Laws like Arizona’s matching funds provision that inhibit robust and wide-open political debate without sufficient justification cannot stand.”

The Dissenting Opinion: Justice Kagan: “Some people might call [it] chutzpah” that those who challenged the law claim that it “violated their First Amendment rights by disbursing funds to other speakers, even though they could have received (but chose to spurn) the same financial assistance.”

The Result: Public funding programs can no longer provide candidates with additional funds if they are vastly outspent by their opponents.

2012:   American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock

SCOTUS Ruling: The Court struck down a Montana ban on corporate political spending and refused to reconsider Citizens United even as outside spending skyrocketed.  The Court rejected the evidence relied upon by the Montana Supreme Court that outside spending can cause corruption and the appearance of corruption.

The Majority Opinion: Per Curiam: “The question presented in this case is whether the holding of Citizens United applies to the Montana state law. There can be no serious doubt that it does.”

The Dissenting Opinion: Justice Breyer: “Montana’s experience, like considerable experience elsewhere since the Court’s decision in Citizens United, casts grave doubt on the Court’s supposition that independent expenditures do not corrupt or appear to do so.”

The Result: By doubling down on its conclusion that corporate election spending may not be limited, the Court blocked future efforts to regulate outside money at the state level.

2014:   McCutcheon v. FEC

SCOTUS Ruling: The Court struck down aggregate contribution limits — the amount one contributor can give in federal elections to all candidates, political parties, and PACs, combined. This marks the first time the Supreme Court has ever declared a federal contribution limit unconstitutional. The Court also defended giving access and influence to donors as a key democratic right, and ruled that donors have the same right to influence officials as do the constituents those officials are elected to represent.  

The Controlling Opinion: Chief Justice Roberts: “[G]overnment regulation may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford. ‘Ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption.’ They embody a central feature of democracy—that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be respon­sive to those concerns.”

The Dissenting Opinion: Justice Breyer: “[This is] a decision that substitutes judges’ understandings of how the political process works for the understanding of Congress; that fails to recognize the difference between influence resting upon public opinion and influence bought by money alone; that overturns key precedent; that creates huge loopholes in the law; and that undermines, perhaps devastates, what remains of campaign finance reform.”

The Result: The decision allows candidates and parties to collect substantially larger sums from individual donors. A single politician may now use a joint fundraising committee to directly solicit more than $3.6 million from one donor in an election cycle. That’s about 70 times the median annual family income in America. The decision will embolden political spenders to wield their influence more freely and directly. And by striking down a federal contribution limit, the Court has endangered other contribution limits that remain on the books.

NOTE: In a 2006 case, Randall v. Sorrell, the Court struck down Vermont’s contribution limits as “burden[ing] First Amendment interests in a manner that is disproportionate to the public purposes they were enacted to advance.” The Court reasoned that the state’s relatively low limits inhibited electoral competition, a claim that has been rebutted by the Brennan Center. When Randall is included, the Roberts Court has struck down a total of seven campaign finance laws since 2006. Due to the limited reach of the decision, however, it was not included above as one of the cases to significantly reshape the money in politics legal landscape.

And there has been much more since they set the table for producing Donald Trump before 2016.   The Roberts Court is the most corrupt court in our history, overtly corrupt with the documented grift of Thomas, Alito, Roberts and Coney Barrett - and that's only what we know about,  there's every reason to believe there is more.   And when you have a corrupt Supreme Court monkey wrenching the electoral system to hand elections to millionaires and billionaires and the corrupt politicians who are all too willing to sell the country to them - in their case Republicans, the politicians of their own party and administrations they have worked for and in.   There are no Stevens or Souters in the modern Republican Party, they are all corrupt.   The Supreme Court is now the general danger to all Americans that it has been most of its history to Black People,  other People of Color, Women and members of other minority groups.  

It Is The Mainstream Right In the United States Who Endorse And Support Political Violence

 As so often, Mehdi puts it perfectly:

Canadians All Over Must

be being thankful on their Thanksgiving Day that they're not Staters living under Trump and Republican-fascism.  

If only Americans were less ignorant of the world they'd realize that among the biggest things Canadians have to be thankful for is their national healthcare system and a constitution that doesn't leave them prey to the millionaires and billionaires to the same extent that the U.S. one does here.   Bless Tommy Douglas.  

But watch out for your Supreme Court,  don't trust them like we suckers have trusted ours, here.   Lawyers are trained liars and they don't necessarily get any more honest as they rise up in the hierarchy of secular government. 

Pete Hegseth: Everything You Didn't Know About His Sh*tty Past

 

It's hard to know which of the Trump thugs is the most contemptible but keg-breath-Hegseth is among the most dangerous.  

Picky-Picky Hate Mail

NO, I HADN'T NOTICED that I wrote "lock him up and trow away the key" until you pointed it out.  I don't recall, exactly but I may have heard my Irish grandfather say that when i was very young.   He had the vestiges of an Irish accent, no doubt from his mother who stepped off the boat from County Cork as a girl of 15 before she married the next year and settled in one of the smaller towns around Boston.  Alas, she died before I was born so I never met her.  I believe she spoke Irish though she didn't teach that to her children.  I really wish I could speak it but only know a few phrases.    

I won't fix it because I rather like that pronunciation in that phrase and because it bugged you enough to point it out.  Eejit. 

God Bless Congressman Raskin Who Has Put The Big Bankers On Notice That He And The Democrats Have Got The Goods On THEM

DINA DOLL is one of the better Meidas Touch lawyers in that she either uses a script or she is just better at winging it than the guys tend to be.   This posting from her about the honorable Jamie Raskin sending a letter to the big banks that were part of the Epstein-Maxwell sex-trafficking and blackmail operation (handling transactions for them of at least A FRICKIN' BILLION AND A HALF DOLLARS! including AFTER EPSTEIN WAS SENTENCED AS A SEX CRIMINAL*) telling them to cough up information on that, giving enough details of an e-mail exchange one of them had with Epstein that certainly points to the banker having raped the children being trafficked by Epstein with really pervy Disney princess content included.   It's clear that Democrats already have a lot of really damning information in that trove of stuff they got from the Epstein estate and have been holding it back to leverage it to get other information from the guilty.   

I've been so critical of lawyers and Constitutional scholars that I thought I should point out one of the better ones and the good work he's doing.  I'm sure he'd disagree with me about a lot of what I've said but I do have some respect for Mr. Raskin as I do for those like Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse and Adam Schiff.   I still think the whole legal system stinks and needs to be cleaned out and restructured right down to the Constitution but there are better and worse and THE WORST among those who have lived in it and who practice it, still. 

* If anyone is naive enough to think that a college drop-out and his sleazy panderer were capable of generating that kind of income on the basis of no known talents, skill or actual work without them being a blackmail and information peddling outfit,  selling their videos and records of the white, the male, the straight, the stinking rich and, or, so stinking powerful to foreign and likely domestic intelligence then their ability to do so for so long with so many rich and so powerful straight, white men knowing what they were doing not giving them up to law enforcement certainly is powerful evidence that that is how they got away with it for as much and as long as they did.   And even in the period AFTER THE GOVERNMENT KNEW THAT EPSTEIN AND MAXWELL WERE TRAFFICKING IN THAT KIND OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING,  he got a sweetheart deal from a federal prosecutor (albeit in one of the most corrupt states of the fifty) and went on with what he was doing.    This has American as well as foreign spy-service assets written all over it.   I mentioned Robert Maxwell's obvious ties to both Israeli and Soviet intelligence as well as the obvious conclusion that British intelligence certainly would have been aware of that so I conclude he was at least a triple agent and there is lots to lead me to conclude that he was an asset of American intelligence too.   And Ghiz was his favorite child who shortly after his death and the confiscation of her daddy's wealth to cover his massive theft and other crimes hooked up with Epstein.   And she's getting a sweetheart deal from a man who is certainly as in on what Epstein was doing as the banker whose name has yet to be exposed, the one who said he enjoyed "Snow White" during his stay at Jeffrey's place and, when Jeffrey asked him which character he wanted next time said,  "Beauty and the Beast."   I'm going to stop pretending we don't all know what's going on.  Trump was certainly one of those who raped girls Epstein provided to him and I'll bet you anything that, as Ghiz implied to the thug lawyer Todd Blanche, there are others in the Trump cabinet who did as well as others she, no doubt, has authorized her estate to spill the beans on in the event of her untimely death.  She'd be as dead as Epstein if she hadn't taken that precaution.   I suspect what we know she said to Blanche was similar to what Epstein said to Barr shortly before Epstein was killed so my guess is that Epstein was too arrogant to have taken such precautions figuring he didn't need them.  I'll give this to Ghiz, she's certainly smarter than he was or she'd be dead, too.