"It is American families who pay the real price of [the House GOP radicals'] extreme policies" (CAP Action War Room)

Mike Keefe (click to enlarge)

"The party's leadership gave in to a minority of its members who are devoted to pushing devastating cuts to working- and middle-class families in pursuit of rigid and impractical ideological principles. The result has been a government in a state of perpetual dysfunction. And while House Republicans may be paying the price with negative news coverage, it is American families who pay the real price of their extreme policies."

-- the CAP Action War Room, in the
ThinkProgress post "Banana Republicans"

by Ken

Let me just say a couple of things about the current House speakership follies before more or less turning the floor over to the CAP Action War Room.

(1) A singularly insightful take today on Wait Wait ...  Don't Tell Me!: that the House speakership has now become one of those jobs that no American wants to do, and therefore will presumably have to be filled by an undocumented immigrant.

(2) Then, there's the comical take of the cards in the House "Freedom" Caucusites: that the problem with the previous House GOP leadership, and what they plan to make sure doesn't happen with its successor, is that it isn't democratic. This was said even as the "Freedom" militia was requiring candidates for the speakership to fill out a lengthy questionaire in which they were asked to pledge support for a laundry list of the miltia's most radical positions, all aimed at bringing the country closer to the shithole lodged in their heads. In other words, under this cabal, no House speaker could be elected without pledging support for the agenda of 40 rampaging mental defectives.

Ah, it's a lovely thing, "democracy" as imagined by a cabal of crackpots, thugs, and economic predators.

IN FAIRNESS TO THE CRACKPOTS, THUGS,
AND ECONOMIC PREDATORS: A QUESTION

If we on the Left were ever able to bring to bear the political diligence -- and muscle -- to elect 40 House members willing to go the mat for the basics of our political agenda, would we not cheer them on if they played this kind of we're-not-kidding hardball with the Democratic Party leadership? (Would the other side not be denouncing us as "extremists" and "radicals"?)

Just asking.

"THE LATEST HOUSE GOP MELTDOWN HAS BEEN A
LONG TIME COMING, AND IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT THEM"

This is the proposition advanced in the post I alluded to earlier from the CAP Action War Room, called "Banana Republicans." In the introductory portion, the post notes:

The media frenzy surrounding these events has focused on intrigue like it is an episode of House of Cards." Was there something behind why McCarthy took himself out of the running? Will Paul Ryan step up and run for speaker despite repeatedly pledging not to?

"But," the post continues (with lots of links onsite),

here’s what is much more important: this self-inflicted leadership breakdown is just one more chapter in a story of House Republican recklessness – and their own caucus hasn’t been the only victim. House GOP dysfunction has resulted in a string of harmful policies and American families have paid the price.

The post proceeds to offer "just a few examples":

• The GOP orchestrated the reckless government shutdown in 2013 which had a devastating impact on our economy. Republican leaders bowed to the will of their extreme right wing to shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act. The shutdown lost Americans at least 120,000 jobs, prevented sick Americans from enrolling in clinical trials, forced Head Start programs for children to shut down, stalled veterans’ disability claims, delayed $4 billion in tax returns for Americans, and severely hurt small businesses. Overall, S&P estimates that the Republicans cost the United States economy a whopping $24 billion with their shutdown.

• The GOP has repeatedly used the debt ceiling to manufacture crises. In order to maintain the full faith and credit of the United States and avoid global economic collapse, Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling from time to time. Yet, GOP leaders have repeatedly joined with their unyielding Tea Party caucus to manipulate these once run-of-the-mill debt ceiling increases for their own gain. In 2011, the GOP threatened to force the United States into a default – to “crash the global economy,” as Time put it – which was only averted after both sides agreed to $1.2 trillion in economically damaging sequestration cuts. This behavior led to a U.S. credit rating downgrade. In 2013, the GOP used this brinksmanship again to attempt to make cuts to programs like Social Security, Medicare, and the SNAP food program, again putting the credit-worthiness of the United States in jeopardy.

• The GOP also used a manufactured crisis to force sequestration cuts that are still hurting the economy today. The Republican-induced sequester disproportionately hurt low-income and middle class families. It led to significant cuts to funding for education, small business, and health research. Sequestration overall will cause approximately 1.8 million people to lose their jobs.

"CLEARLY, THE GOP'S INABILITY TO CONTROL THEIR
OWN PARTY HAS ALREADY CAUSED A LOT OF DAMAGE"

That's damage, the post continues, "to our economy and the well-being of American taxpayers. "

And yet, as their conference devolves again into chaos, they have no inclination to change their backwards policies or irresponsible behavior. They have no plans to avert the upcoming shutdown or increase the debt ceiling, even though the United States could default on its obligations if Congress doesn’t act by November 5th. House Republicans are not only distracted by their internal pandemonium, going into the upcoming budget negotiations they remain committed to the backwards, policy ideas and reckless political strategy that have caused so many problems for themselves, but more importantly for the American people.

BOTTOM LINE: The GOP’s current state of disarray has been a long time coming. The party’s leadership gave in to a minority of its members who are devoted to pushing devastating cuts to working- and middle-class families in pursuit of rigid and impractical ideological principles. The result has been a government in a state of perpetual dysfunction. And while House Republicans may be paying the price with negative news coverage, it is American families who pay the real price of their extreme policies.

Yes, I think that about sums it up.

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Has the NRA finally admitted it's been lying all this time about its reason for existing?

by Ken

Yesterday ThinkProgress's Judd Legum put together a smashing post called "5 Indefensible Tweets From The NRA Since The Oregon Gun Massacre." Basically here I'm passing on Judd's post with just a few notes of my own added. But afterward, I'll have something to say about one of these tweets from NRA TinyPenisWorld which I find kind of staggering.

First, let's let Judd set his piece up:

After a mass shooting, the NRA traditionally goes silent for a period of time. In the case of the gun massacre in Oregon, the NRA stopped tweeting on Thursday, October 1 at 1:44 p.m., shortly after the news broke. The account resumed tweeting at 12:07 p.m. on Friday, October 2 with an innocuous tweet about gun safety.

By Monday, the NRA twitter account was aggressively tweeting out information intended to head off any efforts to increase gun control in the wake of the massacre at Umpqua Community College. Much of this information, however, was wildly misleading or just plain inaccurate.

With that, we're good to go. "Here," says Judd, "are five of the NRA’s most egregious recent tweets."


"1. There is no gun show loophole."

This is an easy one: Yes, of course there is. And everyone -- except perhaps this tweeter from TinyPenisWorld -- knows it. Judd:

There is a gun show loophole. At gun shows, unlicensed sellers can sell guns without any background check, waiting period, or paperwork. These are referred to as “private sales.” There are thousands of gun shows in the United States each year.

These unregulated “private sales” of guns also take place on the internet or other physical locations. The NRA disingenuously claims that these additional loopholes mean that there isn’t a specific gun show loophole.

"2. The Australian gun buyback didn’t work."

Another easy one: It sure as shootin' did work. Judd:

After a gun massacre in Australia in 1996, the government “instituted a temporary gun buyback program that took some 650,000 assault weapons (about one-sixth of the national stock) out of public circulation.” At the same time, the government banned semi-automatic rifles and tightened licensing requirements.

A 2011 Harvard University study concluded that the buyback program was “incredibly successful in terms of lives saved.” There have been no gun massacres — defined as the killing of four or more people at once — in the 17 years since the buyback took place. There were 13 gun massacres in the 18 years prior to the program.

Additionally, the number of firearm suicides and homicides was reduced dramatically. This reduction was directly tied to the buyback program. The Harvard study found that “the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback” and “firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.”

The article cited by the NRA does not dispute the reduction in firearm deaths after the buyback program but simply asserts, without much analysis, that the drop was a coincidence. It relies almost exclusively on a deeply flawed study produced by the Australian gun lobby.

"3. Gun-free zones are magnets for murderers."

This sounds to me like something the gun-massacre fans in TinyPenisWorld simply made up in their heads, and assume must be true. The facts say otherwise. Judd:

86 percent of mass shootings occur outside of gun-free zones. Studies have found no evidence that people purposely choose gun-free zones for mass shootings. Rather, there is usually another clear motive for the choice of location. In most school shootings, for example, “the killers had personal ties to the school they struck.”

"4. Over the last 5 years, twice as many people were killed with someone’s bare hands than with a rifle."

What??? Even beyond the bizarreness of the comparison, the tweeter has in fact misread his sources for both of the statistics being "compared." In a larger perspective, though, this is also the claim I want to come back to when we're done with Judd's piece. Meanwhile, here's his response:

This is misleading to the point of parody. The statistic comes from this chart from the FBI that looks at murder victims from 2010 to 2014. The data found no more than 769 homicides each year with a “personal weapon” — a category that includes hands, feet and any other part of the body. Meanwhile, there were over 8000 homicides by firearms each year.

The NRA isolates the category “rifles” to make guns seem relatively safe — there are around 250-350 homicides with rifles each year — but this just reflects the popularity of handguns over rifles. Additionally, there are between 1600-1900 firearm homicides each year where the type of firearm could not be identified by the FBI. So the NRA’s claim, in addition to being highly misleading, also might not be true.

"5. Fewer than 1 percent of criminals get guns at gun shows."

M oh my, the gun-massacre fans do seem concerned about keeping the free flow of guns flowing at loophole-blessed gun shows! Judd:

This statistic vastly understates the nexis between gun shows and criminal activity by focusing only on the proximate source of the gun. The same study found that “sixty-nine percent of criminals surveyed reported acquiring guns from a friend, family member, or street seller.” And where did those people acquire their guns? In many cases, at a gun show. Overall, “3 out of 10 guns that criminals use in crimes changed hands at a gun show somewhere in their chain of custody.”

NOW, ABOUT THAT EYE-POPPER OF A TWEET

As I mentioned, the TinyPenisWorld tweet that blew my mind is (4), "Over the last 5 years, twice as many people were killed with someone’s bare hands than with a rifle."

Does someone connected to the NRA really think this advances their cause? Even setting aside the numerical mumbo-jumbo performed with both numbers being compared, can you believe they're arguing in terms of the (claimed) relative safeness of rifles? While this might seem a point worth making for an organization that calls itself the National Rifle Association, an organization that purports to defend the rights of rifle-bearing hunters, if that was ever the mission of the real-world NRA, it certainly hasn't been in the time since the NRA took over the American gun franchise and took all of our political institutions hostage.

No, the real-world NRA is an organization whose reason for existence is to secure the right of virtually every man, woman, and child to carry a handgun or automatic weapon, whether concealed or openly carried, into church, into fast-food outlets, or into any other damned place in the country he/she wants.

This is the mission that has driven the power grab that culminated in the abduction of the Constitution by a hoodlum of five ideologically crazed Supreme Court justices so brain-impaired or ideologically determined that they (a) showed themselves incapable of performing the simple act of reading the Second Amendment, and (b) lacked even the most minimal knowledge of the actual circumstances the amendment was written to address and adopted to cover.

Do we all get the significance of this tweet? It tells us that every propaganda utterance of the NRA and its supporters having anything to do with any weapon except rifles has been a conscious, calculated lie. What the NRA propagandists have always been out to secure is not the rights of hunters, who at least have some understandable reason for wanting to protect their access to rifles, but the right of TinyPenisWorld thrill-seekers to seek out the thrill -- as spectators if not perpetrators -- of gun violence.


MORE FUN WITH GUNS (ALSO NOT RIFLES)

Check out Jen Hayden's Daily Kos account yesterday of gun fun in Auburn Hils, MI, "Home Depot customer with a concealed handgun opened fire on shoplifting suspect," which began:

Apparently a Michigan woman with a conceal-carry permit and a loaded handgun thought it was her duty to step in and help a Home Depot employee stop a suspected shoplifter. Did she follow their car? Nope. She opened fired on the suspected shoplifter's SUV as they drove out of the parking lot.

Jen's got this one covered, so do check out her post. But I hope everyone understands without further commentary what's crazy wrong with this picture.

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"Pope Francis Looked Happier To Be With The Homeless Than With Members Of Congress" (ThinkProgress headline yesterday)

ThinkProgress caption (yesterday): "Pope Francis greets supporters during a visit to Catholic Charities in Washington, D.C."

"The Son of God came into this world as a homeless person. . . . We can imagine what Joseph must have been thinking. How is it that the Son of God has no home? Why are we homeless, why don’t we have housing?"

-- Pope Francis yesterday in Washington, during his visit to a
Catholic Charities lunch for the needy, many of them homeless

by Ken

While I was rummaging around some of the online coverage of Pope Francis's visit yesterday, I stumbled across a reader comment on one of the nytimes.com posts that I meant to copy but didn't get around to as I tried to nail down assorted stuff for my post. It voiced the commenter's wish that the NYT, instead of describing the pope as left-leaning (or left-something) had described him as humanity-leaning (or humanity-whatever).

This is, of course, driving American right-wingers, Catholic and otherwise, positively batty, but the commenter is quite right, because Pope Francis really and truly isn't "left-leaning," or left-anything-else. There's nothing un-conservative about the pontiff -- it's just that his views about what needs conserving are clearly very different from those of the crack-brained fascists into which American conservatives have evolved.

What could possibly be more conservative, after all, than trying to save the planet? Or, for that matter, wanting to ensure that its resources are made fairly available to all its inhabitants? If you fancy yourself a conservative, after all, isn't this kind of Ground Zero?

The pope's big speeches -- like the one to Congress yesterday, or to the U.N. today -- have been getting most of the attention on his U.S. visit. But some other events on his crowded schedule have gotten perhaps less attention than they deserve. I was grabbed, for example, by the headline on a ThinkProgress Economy post by Jack Jenkins, reporting on his visit to the free lunch for the hungry at Washington's St. Patrick's Church provided on Wednesday afternoons by St. Maria's Meals, a Catholic Charities undertaking. The headline is the one I've put atop this post: "Pope Francis Looked Happier To Be With The Homeless Than With Members Of Congress."

It isn't just American so-called conservatives who have settled into this anti-human view of basic humanity. The pope has been taking on the vast machinery of the church over which he now presides, which has similarly settled somehow into a worldview that it's mission is the preservation and enrichment of its elites. Lip service continues to be paid to Jesus, of course, but my goodness, how little present-day Christianity -- and here I emphatically don't mean just Catholicism -- has in common with Christ. And notice how violent the reaction is when a cleric of Pope Francis's standing has the chutzpah to dust off what are supposed to be his institution's core values.

Remember the episode when the archbishop of San Francisco, Sal "The Faucet" Cordileone, actually installed a sort of overhead sprinkler system to deter homeless people from seeking shelter under the overhang of St. Mary's Cathedral? Wouldn't you think that Sal "The Faucet" might have tackled the problem of homeless people in need of shelter by asking what Jesus would have done? I don't think this is it.

Can there be any doubt that, like Pope Francis, Jesus would have been happier spending time with the homeless -- and people who dedicate themselves to providing some nourishment to them -- than with members of Congress?

Here's Jack Jenkins's report (lots of links onsite).

Pope Francis Looked Happier To Be With The Homeless Than With Members Of Congress

By Jack Jenkins | Sept. 24, 2015, 2:33pm

Shortly after finishing his historic address to Congress Thursday morning, Pope Francis declined to stay and talk with lawmakers, choosing to spend his time with a very different group of people: The homeless.

After receiving a standing ovation from Congress, Supreme Court Justices, and various other governmental officials, Francis left the U.S. Capitol to travel to nearby St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. There he spoke before roughly 250 staff and volunteers before joining another 300 people — many of them homeless — for lunch with St. Maria’s Meals, a project of the local branch of Catholic Charities.

“The Son of God came into this world as a homeless person,” Francis told the group, referencing the birth of Jesus Christ, who was born to Joseph and Mary in a stable according to the Biblical account. “[He] knew what it was to start life without a roof over his head. We can imagine what Joseph must have been thinking. How is it that the Son of God has no home? Why are we homeless, why don’t we have housing?”

“Joseph’s questions are timely even today; they accompany all those who throughout history have been, and are, homeless,” Francis said.

Francis was reportedly mobbed by gleeful supporters when he reached the site, but proceeded to work the crowd, wearing a grin noticeably broader than when he addressed Congress earlier that day. Chefs were said to prepare chicken and pasta for the event, creating dishes the local Catholic Charities CEO called “easy to serve, but very healthy, very nutritious.”

The food program began roughly three years ago, and reportedly serves dinner to anywhere from 250 to 500 poverty-stricken or homeless people each Wednesday. Catholic Charities helps run six homeless shelters throughout the city.

Washington, D.C. has been fighting a homelessness crisis for several years, only recently seeing a dip in the homeless population after launching several assistance efforts.

“We can find no social or moral justification, no justification whatsoever, for lack of housing,” Francis said. “There are many unjust situations, but we know that God is suffering with us, experiencing them at our side …[Jesus] tells us this clearly: ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’”

The gesture is part of Francis’ longstanding support for the homeless since becoming pope. In addition to speaking out on behalf of the poor in Evangelii Gaudium, his first exhortation as pontiff, he has also made headlines for personal attempts to help the impoverished: Francis celebrated his birthday in 2014 by giving sleeping bags to the homeless, is rumored to sneak out of the Vatican at night to minister to those sleeping on the streets, and announced last November plans to install showers in St. Peter’s Square to serve those with no place to bathe. He also promised in January that the Vatican will soon start offering free shaves and haircuts to those who otherwise can’t afford them.

Okay, there's one more paragraph, but it falls more under the heading of Strategies for Dealing with the Homeless Which Sal "The Faucet" Cordileone would endorse:

Francis’ trip has not been a joyous occasion for all homeless people, however. New York City police dispersed about a dozen homeless people from the foot of a Harlem train station on Wednesday, attempting to clear the area ahead of the pontiff’s visit to the city later this week.

YOU MIGHT TAKE A LOOK AT IAN WELSH'S NEW
POST, "IT'S ALMOST AS IF THE POPE IS CATHOLIC"

The post focuses on the wrong-direction radicalizing of the Church, and includes tidbits like these:

So. The Pope told Congress to welcome immigrants, house the homeless, feed the poor and stop selling weapons to murderous regimes.

It is almost as if he is Catholic. . . .

Francis isn’t a radical Pope. He hasn’t said abortion is ok, or even birth control, or homosexuality.  He’s pretty doctrinaire.  What he has done is shift emphasis to the issues Jesus spent more time talking about, and extended those issues to modern concerns like climate change. . . .

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The Supreme Court takes a (small) stand in favor of pregnant women, and it's (real) news

Peggy Young with her daughter Triniti, now seven

"The U.S. Supreme Court sided with a woman who was faced with the choice to either work her labor-intensive job during pregnancy at the United Parcel Service or go on unpaid leave without benefits. In an opinion issued Wednesday morning, the justices ruled 6-3 that Young should at least be given a full opportunity to make her case in court that she was not given the same accommodation as other employees considered injured or disabled."

-- ThinkProgress's Nicole Flatow, in "U.S. Supreme Court Sides With Pregnant Worker In Major Discrimination Case"

by Ken

They didn't do all that much for the petitioner. In fact, you could describe it as what most observers would have considered the very least they could, in good conscience, have done. Be that as it may, though, it counts for something that the Roberts Court -- with, in fact, Chief Justice "Smirkin' John" Roberts voting in the minority -- ruled today, in Young v. United Parcel Service, Inc., that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals erred in refusing to allow Peggy Young to present her case to the court that UPS had violated the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act by refusing to allow her to go on "light duty" during her pregnancy.

Still, the High Court at least did that much. As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in an opinion joined by the three other moderate justices and Chief Justice Roberts, "Ultimately the court must determine whether the nature of the employer's policy and the way in which it burdens pregnant women shows that the employer has engaged in intentional discrimination." (Kind of amazingly, Justice "Sammy the Hammer" Alito also sided with the plaintiff, accounting for the 6-3 vote, but had to offer a concurring opinion to explain how you get to that point in Hammerland. I assume you don't need to be told who the left-behind "3" are.)

Let's let ThinkProgress's Nicole Flatow summarize the case:

Young was tasked with lifting boxes as heavy as 70 pounds in her job as a UPS worker. When she got pregnant, her midwife recommended that she not lift more than 20 pounds, and wrote a note asking her employer to put her on light duty. Had Young been written a similar note because Young broke her arm carrying boxes, or suffered from a disability, UPS would have put her on what is known as “light duty.” But UPS wouldn’t do it for Young on account of her pregnancy. The alternative was to take unpaid leave without medical benefits.

It shouldn't come as a titanic shock that the Fourth Circuit said "F.U." to the plaintiff. There's been personnel movement since the late Sen. Jesse Helms was forced to give up his guardianship of Big No. 4, but his spirit still hovers over it. And the mighty Fourth decided, as Nicole puts it, "that granting 'light duty' to Young would give pregnant employees an advantage over other other employees and that Young didn't suffer pregnancy discrimination," and couldn't for the life of it think why the bitch plaintiff should be allowed "to go to trial and prove all the elements of her claim."

That's the "oops" the High Court today declared on the Fourth Circuit.

"The Pregnancy Discrimination Act," Nicole explains (links onsite),

prohibits employers from treating pregnant women differently from other employees who are “similar in their ability, or inability, to work.” The act was passed in response to rampant mistreatment and misperceptions of women workers. But these misperceptions persist, even as women now make up about half of the workforce and a large proportion of them will either leave the workforce at some point to have a child, or may be viewed as a woman with the potential to one day leave the workforce for that reason.

In fact, complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging pregnancy discrimination have only increased, prompting the Commission to remind employers recently that they still can’t discriminate against pregnant women.

As a group of women’s advocacy groups and law professors pointed out in their brief, a ruling against Young would have harmed the women most in need of pregnancy discrimination protection — those in “low-wage jobs and traditionally male-dominated occupations who are most likely to experience temporary conflicts between the physical effects of pregnancy and job requirements,” and who already experience disproportionate discrimination, according to recent statistics.

Which brings us to the counter-arguments brought before the Supreme Court. Um, well, and this is kind of embarrassing for the judges of the Fourth Circuit, there don't seem to have been any.

UPS didn’t have many advocates in this case other than the federal appeals court judges. Briefs filed on behalf of state and local lawmakers, national medical associations, the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Solicitor General, and even 23 pro-life organizations defended Young’s right to a work accommodation. They said the Fourth Circuit’s ruling was counter to the intent of anti-discrimination laws, that it was bad for the health of mothers and children, that it was bad for the economy, bad for business, and even could encourage women to get abortions. In all, 11 amicus briefs were filed supporting Young and none supporting UPS.

Then comes one of my favorite touches:

Even the members of Congress who passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act explained that they intended for the act the court was interpreting to protect people just like Young, and that the court ruling against her “ignored the unambiguous mandate of the PDA requiring employees to consider only the ability or inability to work in determining a pregnant worker’s entitlement to benefits.”

Oh my! If the question was what's covered by the PDA, and you know, it kind of was, then you might think the case should have been open-and-shut. As long as you bear in mind that this Court only considers the actually expressed intent of Congress that actually expressed intent reinforces the justices' personal blind prejudices.

Nicole notes that today's ruling, "as expected by many advocates," was "rather narrow in its holding," and it's not just that the ruling gave Peggy Young nothing more than the right to make her case in court. In addition, the ruling --

took into account neither a 2008 change to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, nor new 2014 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines that bolster protections for pregnant women. What’s more, UPS announced since Young’s lawsuit that it would change its policy going forward and allow workers to stay on the job performing light-duty work.

But the ruling is important nevertheless.

[T]he National Women’s Law Center’s Emily Martin told ThinkProgress earlier this year that any ruling for Young would help many pregnant women. “Even if the law has changed, it will only make it easier for those women,” Martin said. A recent survey by NWLC found that many women who felt they needed to alter their work duties or take more frequent breaks still fear requesting those accommodations.

What’s more, the ruling comes as a sigh of relief to many who worried about what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg referred to as the court’s “blind spot” on women’s issues. In 2007, the court’s five conservative male justices rejected Lilly Ledbetter’s fair pay lawsuit, in a decision later overturned by an act of Congress. In 2011, they turned back the largest-ever class of women alleging gender discrimination by Wal-Mart. And in 2013, that same voting bloc held that many corporations get to decide when their female employees should have access to contraception. Commenting on this blind spot, Ginsburg said in an interview recently, “[T]he justices continue to think and change so I am ever hopeful that if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow.”

Well, in this case two of the Court's right-wing extremists went off the reservation. (Note that "Slow Anthony" Kennedy, wearing his right-wing-extremist robe, stayed behind, as the sole support for the Scalia-Thomas axis.) That counts for something, no? If only for a day.

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No, don't even ask -- Aaron Schock doesn't want to talk about his manly new "Downton Abbey"-inspired office

The red room at Downton Abbey? No, fooled you! Yes, that is the inspiration, but in fact this is the new office of Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL). Only the congressman doesn't wanna talk about it.

"I don't even know if he watches it; I don't know what shows he watches. But I don't think he watches much TV."

-- Benjamin Cole, Aaron Schock's communications director
("he" would be Benjamin's boss, and "it" is Downton Abbey)

by Ken

Isn't this just like us rancid media types? Here I am pouncing on this story by the Washington Post's Ben Terris, "He’s got a ‘Downton Abbey’-inspired office, but Rep. Aaron Schock won’t talk about it," about how Ben was offered the opportunity to talk to the congressman about, well, other stuff but no, insisted on following up the congressman's exasperated communications director, Benjamin Coles, insisted would be "some gossipy story," about the congressman's new office in the Rayburn House Office Building -- a major upgrade from his old perch on the fifth floor of the Cannon House Office Building, which reporter Ben (I have to be careful here, since we have two Bens) calls "one of the least desirable pieces of congressional real estate."

Yes Communications Director Ben said just that to reporter Ben: "You’ve got a member willing to talk to you about other things. Why sour it by rushing to write some gossipy piece?"

Exactly what other things the member might have been willing to talk about isn't clear. Not, presumably, about being gay, because as we all know the member doesn't talk about. For all I know, the member may still be pretending he isn't. Which could be one reason why his staff went into such hysterics when they discovered that a Washington Post reporter was on the premises taking pictures.

Beyond the question of what our Aaron might have been willing to talk about, there's the larger question of what else anyone might want to talk to him about. Color me stumped. If the member gets naked, or some reasonable semblance thereof, always assuming he's kept up that tight little body that has made so many hearts flutter, then he has something to show us. But talking? Talking, to put it mildly, is not generally, shall we say, the member's strong suit.

To get back to the outbreak of hysterics occasioned by reporter Ben's visit to the new office, probably we should let him tell the story.

The Rayburn House Office Building is a labyrinth of beige offices.

And then, there’s . . . Rep. Aaron Schock’s new digs.

Yes, there are pheasant feathers.

Bright red walls. A gold-colored wall sconce with black candles. A Federal-style bull’s-eye mirror with an eagle perched on top. And this is just the Illinois Republican’s outer office.

“It’s actually based off of the red room in ‘Downton Abbey,’ ” said the woman behind the front desk, comparing it to the luxurious set piece at the heart of the British period drama.

This was a bold room. But the confidence was a mirage. For on Capitol Hill, caution is king when it comes to the micromanagement of one’s image, even in the case of how a congressman decides to decorate his office.

And sometimes, a friendly outsider can inadvertently ruin a communications director’s day.

A blond woman popped out of an inner office. “Want to see the rest?” she asked.

She introduced herself as Annie Brahler, the interior decorator whose company is called Euro Trash. She guided me to Schock’s private office, revealing another dramatic red room. This one with a drippy crystal chandelier, a table propped up by two eagles, a bust of Abraham Lincoln and massive arrangements of pheasant feathers.

Then, my phone rang.

It was Schock’s communications director, Benjamin Cole.

“Are you taking pictures of the office?” he asked. “Who told you you could do that? . . . Okay, stay where you are. You’ve created a bit of a crisis in the office.”

A staff member then came and asked me to please delete the photos from my phone. So started a day of back-and-forths with a congressman’s office about interior design.

"Washington," says reporter Ben "has always been more 'Veep' than 'House of Cards.' " I always bristle when I hear about how D.C. folk dote on Veep. After all, it's a show that seems to be written by morons, peopled by morons, and aimed at the amusement of morons. But the "insider" Veep fans always insist that this is the real Washington. This story suggests that they have a point.

Since not all of us are up on the ins and outs of congressional office decorating, luckily reporter Ben fills us in:

When a member of Congress moves into an office, the bare essentials are provided by the House of Representatives. Furniture and computers are often handed down by other offices. New members are also entitled to a new paint job, although there are only a limited number of available colors — beige, eggshell, light blue, light gray or light yellow — that the House will provide. Additional decorations must come out of the lawmaker’s pocket.

And it sure looks as if our Aaron opened his coffers for the new office, though Illinois-based decorator Annie Brahler (who had also done his Cannon Building office) was reported by the congressman's office to have "offered her services for free," The congressman, we're told, had been a big fan of her work even before he meet her -- "in his district years ago" -- from examples he had seen in magazines.

But that leaves the cost of the furnishings. And while I haven't priced peacock feathers lately, the job doesn't look to have been done on the cheap, even though decorator Annie "likes to say that she can turn things ready for the trash heap into something beautiful." It doesn't look like the office was done entirely with materials ready for the trash heap.

Which still doesn't explain why camera-wielding reporter Ben's presence in the office created "a bit of a crisis," as Communications Director Ben put it. "An office decorated in a unique way would hardly be surprising," writes reporter Ben. "It would just be another interesting fact about a congressman who has built a brand as not just another politician" -- whom he has described as "one of the rising stars of the Republican Party."

He’s young, has six-pack abs that landed him on the cover of Men’s Health and is a prodigious fundraiser. He’s also one of the most media-savvy members of Congress, with an Instagram feed that features him surfing, hiking across glaciers, tangoing on the streets of Buenos Aires and smiling next to duck-faced pop star Ariana Grande.

"America's Fittest Congressman!" -- our Aaron in 2011. (Yowza!)

"SO WHY WAS THIS A CRISIS?"

Reporter Ben would dearly love to know, but he doesn't seem to have gotten an answer. Unless maybe we can sort of glean a hint of one in the drama's second act.

“You see, the congressman hasn’t even seen the office yet,” Cole told me later. “Surely, it wouldn’t be fair for you to write about his office until he has the chance to see it.”

I told him if I could be there when Schock first saw the office, I would hold off till then. Cole agreed, and we reached the Red Walls Accord of 2015.

That is, until Schock decided he wasn’t interested in doing a whole story about how his office is decorated.

“He’s happy to talk to you, just not about the office,” Cole said, sounding very tired of the ordeal. “I’m really sorry and want you to know this is not fun for me.”

Which was almost the last word on the story. The exception? The quote I've put at the top of this post.

Cole was back in touch later to add one more piece of information relating to Schock and “Downton Abbey”: “I don’t even know if he watches it; I don’t know what shows he watches. But I don’t think he watches much TV.”

Noted, thanks, Communications Director Ben. By the way, readers, in case you hadn't heard, as of the last tally, I believe the congressman still isn't gay.


HOWIE ADDS THIS THOUGHT --

"Voters in Schock's district didn't see any subtle signals in his way of dressing and they won't understand his office decor choices either."

"Signals"? "Understand his office decor choices"? Is there something to understand?

And if there were something to understand, would we want those voters to hold that something against Aaron? Except maybe for his perceived need to lie about it to them, and to the rest of us -- though surely not to himself. He can't be that clueless, can he?

Not just pretty in pink, but with those tight white pants,
and the turquoise belt, you could just eat our Aaron up.

But of course there isn't anything to "understand," is there?


FOOTNOTE: COULD OUR AARON BE IN TROUBLE
FOR ACCEPTING FREE DECORATING SERVICES?

ThinkProgress's Josh Israel reports, in "Congressman Who Voted To Defund Public Broadcasting Got 'Downton Abbey' Office Redesign For Free" (links onsite):

The Washington Post reported on Monday that Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) recently had his House office redecorated in the style of the popular television series Downton Abbey. But a detail in the post — the fact that the interior decorator who oversaw the design did so for free — may land the Congressman in ethical hot water.

According to the report, interior decorator Annie Brahler designed the plans for Schock’s office in the Rayburn House Office Building. “Brahler offered her services for free, according to Schock’s office, although he had to pay for the objects.” She also had designed his old Cannon House Office Building workspace.

House rules prohibit Members of Congress from accepting most gifts valued at $50 or more — including “gifts of services, training, transportation, lodging, and meals, whether provided in kind, by purchase of a ticket, payment in advance, or reimbursement after the expense has been incurred.”

Stephen Spaulding, policy counsel for the non-partisan Common Cause, told ThinkProgress that this donation of services from a professional decorator could well violate both the spirit and letter of the House gift rules: “It certainly raises plenty of questions that I think [Schock] needs to answer.”

“There’s been scandal after scandal of politicians accepting gifts and returning the favor,” Spaulding noted, “Here’s an interior designer, I don’t know if she has any business before Congress, but we expect our leaders to follow the rules and hold themselves to the highest standards.” He described this situation as an example of a politician “far more interested in the accoutrements of a nice office on Capitol Hill than in doing the peoples’ business.”

UPDATE: ALL QUIET ON THE PEORIA FRONT?

As I noted in reply to a comment, I didn't realize till after I'd basically written my piece how explosively the office story had spread yesterday, presumably thanks to the clumsy effort by the congressman's office to squelch it. But the comment to which I was replying, from BrianG, raises the question of whether the story will ever reach Preoria. I thought it worth yanking out of the comments section for general perusal:

Ken, tell Howie that the media in Peoria embargoes all negative stories about Schock. It was AP and the Chicago Tribune that broke the Notarygate story when he first ran. They dragged their feet when it comes to reporting his numerous ethics violations. They don't write about his penchant for traveling on the taxpayers' dime. No one reports about his fabulous Instagram account. Did anyone report on his twitter relationship with Court AndersonX? Did he mainstream media actually do any investigative work on his campaign donor bundling with Mike Grimm? How many people in Peoria ever saw a picture of Congressman Schock in his teal belt outfit? Google this story in a few days and tell me if the Peoria Journal Star or the local television stations cover this?

One other note: Our colleague Noah, loooking at that picnic (or whatever it is) shot of our Aaron in that darling little outfit, which we've seen a zillion times, there's one obvious question: What about the shoes? And he's right, of course -- the shoes could make or break the look, couldn't they? I haven't attempted to photo-research it, but you'd think there must have been other pictures taken that day, including at least one that shows the delicate tootsies. Unless shoe shots were officially embargoed.

Oh yes, I'd also like to submit one last question to Communications Director Ben, with maybe one little follow-up. The question: As of this moment, is the congressman still not gay? The follow-up: Just how catastrophic would it be if he one of these days turns gay?

This further update received from BrianG:

I was wrong. The paper of record in Peoria had a piece from columnist Phil Luciano. However, the Peoria media's track record is abysmal.

Thanks, Brian! So the congressman's office's efforts at damage control, which appeared so spectacularly unsuccessful, have turned out to be even less successful than we thought!

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Lee Camp on the NYPD slowdown: "I bet there are now PLENTY of police available to respond to REAL crime or REAL emergencies"

As dimwitted, dishonest, or peer-intimidated NYC cops dishonor their ranks, Lee Camp notes about the current slowdown: "Has all hell broken loose? Has there been a crime spree across Gotham worse than anything seen in the Batman movies, with catwomen throwing people out of windows? . . . Well, no. There's been . . . um . . . peace and quiet."

by Ken

We haven't touched base in a while with crusading comic Lee Camp, whose uproarious maximum-voltage performing style often masks what pops out at you when you read him in print: that he's one of the most lucid real-world commentators around.

As you've probably heard -- and if you haven't, you're hearing about it now -- here in New York City we're in the grip of a police slowdown that the cop-union boss says isn't one (apparently unconcerned about the spectacle of the head of the police union standing up for the media and lying his silly-billy guts out). The cops, you see, are madder than wet hens at Mayor Bill de Blasio, for reasons , . . well, we'll come to that. For now let's just say they're so mad, they could turn their backs on him at public events and even boo him. Okay, it's not that they "could," they did. (See Howie's post last week "The Next Generation Of NYPD Looks To Be About As Rotten As The Current One.")

First let's take a look at this missive Lee Camp has sent out to his e-mail list, with the subject line "Something I noticed recently":

Hey Fighters,

Because they're mad at NYC's mayor, the NYPD decided to largely stop working over the past couple weeks. (Yes, really.)¹

They decided to only arrest people "when they needed to be arrested," rather than arresting people all day simply to keep our backdoor class system in place and make money for the state.² Arrests are down 66% and traffic violations are down a whopping 94%.

And WHAT HAPPENED? Has all hell broken loose? Has there been a crime spree across Gotham worse than anything seen in the Batman movies, with catwomen throwing people out of windows?

...Well, no.

There's been... um...peace and quiet.

Turns out that NOT arresting every Black person because they got annoyed with you after you threw them up against a wall for having the nerve to walk down the street does NOT bring about Armageddon.

Turns out that NOT giving out thousands of parking tickets and hundreds of summonses for riding a bicycle the wrong way down an empty street does NOT turn NYC into a Mad Maxx world of mob rule.

And on top of that I bet there are now PLENTY of police available to respond to REAL crime or REAL emergencies. Perhaps arresting people only when they "need to be arrested" is a better plan, and the NYPD just accidentally proved it to the nation.³

We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners. So either you need to believe that we are a uniquely criminal society OR that we have a uniquely fucked up criminal justice system.

I'm going with option B.

Thank you -- and as always...

Keep fighting,
Lee

Citations for the above stories/claims:
1. New York Magazine, NYPD Continues That Whole ‘Not Really Arresting Anyone’ Thing
2. Rolling Stone, The NYPD's 'Work Stoppage' Is Surreal
3. Think Progress, How Low Income New Yorkers Are Benefiting From The NYPD’s Work Stoppage

NOW IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE --

about the police slowdown, and what exactly their grievances might be (they don't seem very clear about this, or at least not very honest), the sources Lee cites above happen to be excellent.

The ThinkProgress piece, called "How Low Income New Yorkers Are Benefiting From The NYPD’s Work Stoppage," by Kira Lerner and Igor Volsky, has some interesting things to say about this business of the police being used as what the old cartoons might have called "revenooers" for municipal government, apparently now forced to drum up a significant portion of the city budget (links onsite):

Although it’s not the intended goal of the work stoppage, the decline in arrests could save New Yorkers money. The city residents who are normally hit with tickets for minor violations tend to be low income individuals who are forced to pay up a hefty portion of their paychecks.

The city began following the broken-windows style of policing in the early 1980s, a strategy championed by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton which focuses on eliminating low-level crime to prevent more violent offenses in the city’s neighborhoods. But a report earlier this year by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan found that the NYPD’s practice of arresting more people for minor offenses since 1980 has disproportionately affected young black and Latino men.

While de Blasio and Bratton have followed through on their promise to reform the city’s stop and frisk practices and the mayor announced in November that police would stop making arrests for low-level marijuana possessions, there are still racial biases in police practices throughout the city that result in a tougher financial burden on those already struggling to make ends meet.
And New Yorkers of all income levels are also saving money on one of the most consistent ways the city can slam people with tickets— parking violations are down by 92 percent, from 14,699 to just 1,241 this year.

NYPD officers have long spoken about quotas which require them to issue a certain number of summons per month to maintain statistics showing a reduction of crime in the city’s neighborhoods. Although Bratton promised an end to arrest quotas when he took office in January, the city’s police are still operating under a quota system which is illegal under state law, according to a recent report by the Police Reform Organizing Project. The group called on Bratton and de Blasio to end the quota system in its October report, which described how police are still using the quota system, as evidenced by the number of misdemeanor arrests and the poor quality of those arrests under Bratton.

The Rolling Stone citation is a piece by Matt Taibbi called "The NYPD's 'Work Stoppage' Is Surreal," and naturally you should read in its entirety, because it's, you know, Matt Taibbi. Let's focus on what Matt has to say about the cops' enforced revenue-generating activities (again, links onsite):

I don't know any police officer anywhere who would refuse to arrest a truly dangerous criminal as part of a PBA-led political gambit. So the essence of this protest seems now to be about trying to hit de Blasio where it hurts, i.e. in the budget, without actually endangering the public.

So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different constituencies about modern law-enforcement tactics.

First, it shines a light on the use of police officers to make up for tax shortfalls using ticket and citation revenue. Then there's the related (and significantly more important) issue of forcing police to make thousands of arrests and issue hundreds of thousands of summonses when they don't "have to."

It's incredibly ironic that the police have chosen to abandon quality-of-life actions like public urination tickets and open-container violations, because it's precisely these types of interactions that are at the heart of the Broken Windows polices that so infuriate residents of so-called "hot spot" neighborhoods.

In an alternate universe where this pseudo-strike wasn't the latest sortie in a standard-issue right-versus left political showdown, one could imagine this protest as a progressive or even a libertarian strike, in which police refused to work as backdoor tax-collectors and/or implement Minority Report-style pre-emptive policing policies, which is what a lot of these Broken Windows-type arrests amount to.

But that's not what's going on here. As far as I can tell, there's nothing enlightened about this slowdown, although I'm sure there are thousands of cops who are more than happy to get a break from Broken Windows policing.

I've met more than a few police in the last few years who've complained vigorously about things like the "empty the pad" policies in some precincts, where officers were/are told by superiors to fill predetermined summons quotas every month.

It would be amazing if this NYPD protest somehow brought parties on all sides to a place where we could all agree that policing should just go back to a policy of officers arresting people "when they have to."

Because it's wrong to put law enforcement in the position of having to make up for budget shortfalls with parking tickets, and it's even more wrong to ask its officers to soak already cash-strapped residents of hot spot neighborhoods with mountains of summonses as part of a some stats-based crime-reduction strategy.

NOW IF THE COPS WERE BITCHING ABOUT THIS --

they'd have not only a point but a fair amount of deserved sympathy in the metropolis. Instead they're claiming that what they're really steamed about is the fact that Mayor de Blasio has this crazy idea that the cops who are charged with enforcing the law also have certain obligations to follow the law. This is apparently an intolerable departure from the practice of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani and, in particular, Emperor-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who treated the cops as his personal imperial guard, and a law unto themselves -- except, of course, for all that revenue-raising he forced them to do, which apparently matters less in memory than their implicit 007-style License to Kill. Or rather more-than-007-style, since James Bond, after all, had to listen to M natter on about all those guys he killed who he was supposed to bring in alive -- and listen without so much as talking back, let alone going on strike.

Instead our cops are either dimwitted enough or dishonest enough or intimidated enough by their brethren to scream about blood on the mayor for the recent murders of the two ambushed cops, which is bullshit. And alas, they probably are garnering public sympathy, for dangerously wrong reasons, among similarly dimwitted or dishonest or peer-intimidated New Yorkers. This will only make it harder for the city and its residents to find real ways of dealing with our real problems.

Of course, if the cops did make a federal case, or at least a union-rulebook-slowdown case, out of this whole business of their forced participation in the city's revenue-raising rackets, they probably wouldn't get a much happier response from city government. And this has nothing to do with this particular mayor, because he inherited this fiscal from predecessors who didn't get backs-turned-on or booed by New York's Finest.

Which brings us to the sad reality that for us New Yorkers to maintain this gaudy lifestyle we're accustomed to, the municipal treasury is dependent on: (a) taxes paid from the bloated wages and bonuses paid to the Wall Street moguls and stooges, and (b) the racket revenues raised this way, with the burden falling on New Yorkers least able to pay.

Sheesh! I wish there was somebody I could turn my back on and boo.


FOR MORE ON LEE CAMP --

and his ever-growing assortment of offerings and activities, visit his website, leecamp.net.

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40,000 votes here, 40,000 votes there, after a while it could start to add up -- or could it?

ThinkProgress caption: "Dr. Francys Johnson with the NAACP leads an occupation of the Georgia State Capitol to protest voter suppression."

by Ken

Howie has been manning the 2014 voter-suppression beat, which following recent custom has been one of the big stories of the election campaign, or at least it should have been. It matters even more in an election with so many races that are looking so close in states that are so polarized that each side's voter turnout could be the deciding factor.

Nevertheless, despite occasional minor setbacks to the Republican voter-suppression juggernaut -- which seem hardly consequential compared with all the successes -- the effort is going so well that it seems now well established that Republicans get to decide who can and can't vote. It's an impressive accomplishment given the complexity of the machinery involved, which includes all those crooked state secretaries of state plus warriors in the ranks of those cracker-brained judges stuffed onto the state and federal benches for just such purposes.

Take Georgia. (Please!)

There was, of course, a recent hullabaloo about those estimated 40,000 new voter registrations racked up by Georgia activists which somehow don't seem to have shown up on the state's voter rolls. This seemed to be quieted as shocked state officials denied indignantly that there was any such registration shortfall. Yet groups like the New Georgia Project seem to keep finding names of new registrants missing.

This doesn't even seem to have been an issue for another of those judicial geniuses, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Christopher Brasher, in Atlanta, who yesterday, reports ThinkProgress's Alice Ollstein, "denied a petition from civil rights advocates to force Georgia’s Secretary of State to process an estimated 40,000 voter registrations that have gone missing from the public database." Voters missing from the rolls? His honor doesn't seem to have been interested in hearing about it. He thought the petitioners were getting ahead of themselves. Nothing to worry about yet in the judge's mind.

Here's some more of what Alice had to report (links onsite):

Though early voting is well underway in the state, Judge Brasher called the lawsuit “premature,” and said it was based on “merely set out suspicions and fears that the [state officials] will fail to carry out their mandatory duties.”

Angela Aldridge, an organizer with the group 9 to 5 Atlanta Working Women who has been working to register voters for several months, told ThinkProgress she was “furious” when she learned of the outcome: “That impedes people’s rights,” she said. “People need information before they go out to vote and they don’t even know if they’re registered or not. They were discouraged, upset, kind of frazzled, not really knowing what was going on. What can you even say to people who want to vote but possibly can’t? They might get disengaged and say, ‘Why vote? It doesn’t matter.’ It’s really disheartening.”

The New Georgia Project, who spearheaded the voter registration drive and brought the lawsuit against the state, vowed Tuesday to “continue to pursue all legal avenues available.” But with the election mere days away, there may be little remedy for the tens of thousands of people who submitted all necessary documents, but have still not received a registration card. Four of those impacted voters were present at the court hearing, but were denied the opportunity to testify.

Dr. Francys Johnson, President of the Georgia NAACP, who represented the 40 thousand voters in the court, called the ruling “outrageous.”

“All in all – a republican appointed judge has backed the republican Secretary of State to deny the right to vote to a largely African American and Latino population,” Johnson wrote in a press release.
On Monday, dozens of Georgians occupied the Secretary of State’s office to demand he meet with them and explain what happened to the tens of thousands of missing registrations. At that protest, in which eight activists were arrested, former American Government teacher and civil rights lawyer Marsha Burrofsky told ThinkProgress she suspects foul play.

“When we started registering people this spring, people were saying, ‘You know, I registered six months ago, but I haven’t gotten anything yet!’ We thought that was strange,” she said. So we sat down with our list of registrations and checked, and about 20 to 20 percent were not showing up. We truly don’t know where things stand with them.”

Burrofsky said the people she registered in Dunwoody, Georgia, a more affluent and conservative community, did show up in the system, while those in more diverse and low-income communities in DeKalb County mysteriously disappeared.

“It just hadn’t occurred to me that this would be a tactic that the Secretary of State could use. I was very naive, I guess. I feel absolutely sick that this election is being stolen,” she said.

With the races for the state’s governor’s mansion and Senate seat too close to call, the missing voters could not only sway the political control of the state, but the political control of Congress’ upper chamber. . . .

I guess the judge thinks there'll be oodles of time to reconsider the question if it's really necessary -- after the election.

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Would you trust your delicate Constitution to a marauding band of thug-justices? (Do we have a choice?)

For the full version of the infographic, visit the Center for American Progress website.

by Ken

For people who continue to cling forlornly to what remains of the Constitution and American values, there aren't many words scarier than "The Supreme Court is headed back to town." We all remember the phrase "First Monday in October," which is when the new Court term always begins. Ahead of that date the gang will do some conferencing.

And in this term, a lot is hanging on the preliminaries. As ThinkProgress's Ian Millhiser and Nicole Flatow wrote in a much-circulated piece earlier this week, "What To Expect When The Supreme Court Returns To Work Next Week": "Much of the drama that will unfold in this coming term . . . is likely to come from cases the justices have yet to agree to hear." And they have a fair amount to say about six cases that the Court has already accepted as well as the more conspicuous possibilities among cases that could yet find their way onto the docket.


BEFORE WE GET TO THE FORECAST, LET'S RECALL
WHAT OUR SUPREME DUNDERHEADS DID LAST TIME

Two words: Hobby Lobby. The Court's Band of Thug-Justices ruled that these fine Christian folk who run the company are so danged God-lovin' and God-fearin' that it would just be a shame to make them follow the law as it applies to providing employees with contraception under the ACA, the kind of a shame that these good Christian thug-justices could stand idly by and allow to happen to such, you know, God-lovin' and God-fearin' folks.

(This is, by the way, a stunt that committed religionists of a non-Christian persuasion might want to think twice before attempting to emulate. The heartland of America is filled with a lot of gullible dimwits jest itchin' fer a fight, 'specially with damn furriners -- and a lot of them have guns and an itch to use 'em.)

Besides, the thug-justices ruled, the relevant government bureaus already have a plan in place designed for actual religious organizations that were exempted from ACA requirements whereby their employees will get their legally mandated medical coverage, just not paid for by their religious institutions. Since there's already a simple, efficient plan in place, it's hardly a big deal to apply the same plan to a few private employers who are just as God-lovin' and God-fearin' as, you know, those religious institutions.

Of course this turned out to be almost entirely lies. (Among the recommended texts: Ian's own "Obama Administration Calls The Supreme Court’s Bluff In Hobby Lobby" (Sept. 9) and "Religious Conservatives Finally Admit What They Really Want Out Of Hobby Lobby" (Sept. 22); and CAP Action War Room's "Hobby Lobby Grows: Hobby Lobby's Effects Are Being Felt Beyond Birth Control" (Sept. 23).)

• It turned out to be untrue that it would be just a tiny handful of similarly God-lovin' and God-fearin' folks in need of relief from this horrible religious oppression. In fact, to the surprise of no one except apparently some of the thug-justices, God-lovin' and God-fearin' folks have been crawling out of the woodwork all over the country sayin' how they shouldn't hafta follow no goddamn law if it gets in the way of their God-lovin' and God-fearin'.

• it turned out to be untrue that this tiny bit of judicial relief would apply just to this tiny goddamn matter of providing contraceptives under the ACA. In fact again, to the surprise of no one except apparently some of the thug-justices, the case is already being made that any goddamn law that's viewed as hurtful to their God-lovin' and God-fearin' by good God-lovin' and God-fearin' Christian folk should be shoved up the gummint's constitutional ass -- and judges are startin' to say so too.

• And, most delicious of all, it turned out to be untrue that the thug-justices would have the minimum level of honesty and decency to pay heed to their own lies. You remember those already-under-construction simple and efficient federal procedures that made it possible for the thug-justices to extend relief for the Hobby Lobby God-lovers and God-fearers and maybe a couple of others, well, no sooner had the thug-justices pronounced their verdict than they turned right around and, three days later, faced with other God-lovers and God-fearers saying those stinin' procedures, whatever they are, aren't no damn good no how, and the thug-justices said, you're right, and thank God for such God-lovin' and God-fearin' folks like you. Fuck those procedures! As I put it at the time, "The Supreme Court opens a drive-through window for right-wing zealots with (right-wing Christian) religious objections to the law."


RETURNING TO IAN AND NICOLE'S
FIRST MONDAY FEARLESS FORECAST

As noted, the authors look at six cases the justices have already agreed to hear, listing them according to the legal issues likely to be at stake. I'm using their categorizations to head my paraphrases of the cases.

"Pregnancy Discrimination"

Peggy Young's complaint involves the refusal of her employer, UPS, to put her on "light duty" while she was pregnant -- lifting cartons no more than 20 pounds, rather than up to 70 pounds, as the job normally called for. Rather amazingly, UPS got a federal appeals court to agree that doing so would put the company in violation of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which of course was enacted to protect women against being unreasonably discriminated against.

"Despite all of the support and very little public opposition for enforcing pregnancy discrimination laws," say Ian and Nicole (links onsite),

the five justices on the Roberts Court most likely to vote against Young are known for having what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg referred to as a “blind spot” when it comes to women. In 2007, these five men rejected Lilly Ledbetter’s fair pay lawsuit, in a decision later overturned by an act of Congress. In 2011, they turned back the largest-ever class of women alleging gender discrimination by Wal-Mart. And in 2013, that same voting bloc held that many corporations get to decide when their female employees should have access to contraception. Commenting on this blind spot, Ginsburg said in an interview recently, “[T]he justices continue to think and change so I am ever hopeful that if the court has a blind spot today, its ey"es will be open tomorrow.”

"Racial Gerrymandering"

This is the case of the Alabama congressional districting plan that pretended to be following the letter of the Voting Rights Act by seeking to retain or even increase black representation -- by the now-popular Republican redistricting trick of packing as many "them" voters as possible into the fewest districts possible. In fact they assured that no black candidate could compete anywhere except the ghetto districts.

Ironically for the Alabama racists, the Roberts Court hates the Voting Rights Act and has been whittling away at it. As Ian and Nicole note: "The thrust of the Court’s recent affirmative action cases has been that “racial categories or classifications” are subject to the most skeptical level of constitutional scrutiny. If the Court treats Alabama’s racially conscious redistricting process with similar skepticism, it is difficult to see how it survives."

"When What You Say On Facebook Lands You In Jail"

What constitutes a legally definable "true threat"? When Anthony Elonis's wife left him, taking their children with him, he wrote on Facebook:

There’s one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts. Hurry up and die, bitch, so I can bust this nut all over your corpse from atop your shallow grave. I used to be a nice guy but then you became a slut. Guess it’s not your fault you liked your daddy raped you. So hurry up and die, bitch, so I can forgive you.

Even Mr. Elonis seemed to grasp that this might be problematic if taken literally, and claimed that it wasn't meant to be taken literally. It's like rap lyrics, he says. Which has opened a giant can of worms, with the little pretties slithering in wildly various patterns. Just think what would happen, various purported defenders of the First Amendment are saying, if we were to try to apply an "objective standard" to everything people say in public. Ian and Nicole note, "No domestic violence or other groups have weighed in to defend the objective standard."

This is a difficult and perplexing case, but if anybody can make it more difficult and perplexing, it's our Supremes.

"Religious Liberty in Prison"

"There's no question," say Ian and Nicole, that Arkansas inmate Abdul Maalik Muhammad "is a very dangerous man," but can his "history of violent behavior" be grounds for "strip[ping] him of his right to practice his relious faith"? Arkansas authorities won't even let him grow a half-inch beard, arguging that he could hide a razor blade in it, or that it could conceal a facial bulge that might otherwise suggest the presence of contraband in his mouth.

"Israel and Palestine"

The plaintiff is trying to force the State Dept. to follow a portion of a 2002 law that says U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem can have Israel listed as birthplace on their passports, even though "Every president since Harry Truman, the president who was in office when the State of Israel was formed, has maintained a policy of neutrality over the question of whether the city of Jerusalem is part of Israel — or, indeed, whether it is part of any other nation." The DC Circuit Court of Appeals bought the position argued by both the Bush and Obama administrations that the law is unconstitutional, since it would infringe on the president's foreign-policy powers. The question, say Ian and Nicole, "is whether Congress can, in effect, trump the president's judgment on a matter of foreign policy such as this one, or whether the executive branch's authority in this area is truly exclusive."

"When Cops Stop You By Mistake"

Ian and Nicole take note of the well-established legal principle that "when someone violates the law, it doesn't matter whether or not they knew what the law said" -- if the case against them can be proved, they're guilty. But what about a law-enforcement officer who fucks up on the law?

Nicholas Heien was pulled over on a North Carolina interstate for having a broken tail light. But it turns out that one broken tail light is not a violation of North Carolina law so long as one of the two lights are working. Nonetheless, the cops used that purported violation as a reason for pulling Heien over, and then found cocaine once they searched his car.

But if the stop was illegal, says the plaintiff, isn't the search as well? But the law is ambiguous, and the North Carolina Supreme Court by a 4-3 vote backed up the cop. "The ruling gives the justices an opportunity," say Ian and Nicole, "to re-examine the leeway of officers to make traffic stops, at a time when stops continue to fall disproportionately on African Americans and other minorities." What's more, they say, "Underlying this case is a larger question: Will justices draw the line?"


WHICH STILL LEAVES ALL THOSE CASES
THE COURT CAN STILL AGREE TO HEAR

Ian and Nicole list three "high-profile issues that could come before the justices in the coming months":

• Will the justices "agree with nearly every single federal judge who has considered the issue that the Constitution forbids marriage discrimination against same-sex couples"?

• They think it "fairly likely that the Court will need to clarify just how far its recent Hobby Lobby decision cuts into the ability of workers to obtain birth control coverage.

• "There is also an unusually high chance that the justices could take a major abortion case this term," and they sketch the kinds of cases that could be available to the Court if it chooses to take them on.

There's also '"a small-but-not-zero chance that the justices could take a lawsuit seeking to gut the Affordable Care Act by cutting off subsidies to millions of Americans who currently enjoy subsidized health insurance under the law." You'll recall, though, that the full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals withdrew the ruling by two far-right judges on a three-judge panel that accepted the right-wing talking point here. (See my September 4 post "The full DC Circuit Court of Appeals pulls back from the brink of health-care loony-tune-itude.") It would be a huge stretch for the Court to take this case on, but the Court needs to take a case is four votes for doing so.

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Living on a $77-a-week minimum-wage budget: Lessons of the "Live the Wage" Challenge

Here's the link for the Live the Wage Challenge PDF. The challenge, which invited everyone to try living on a minimum-wage budget of $77 a week, took place July 24030, but it's never too late to try it.

by Ken

It's a point that Howie keeps coming back to in this space: that our political world -- our Congress, to pick a hardly random example -- is populated by way too many way too rich people. Of course, like any other group in our society, rich people are entitled to represent and advocate for their interests. But we have developed a political system where, to an eerie extent, only the interests of the rich are represented and or advocated for.

It's not that rich people can't understand or identify with the problems of the nonrich. There are famous cases to the contrary, like Franklin D. Roosevelt and certain Kennedys. It's just that by and large rich people not only don't care about the problems of the nonrich but literally have no idea what they might be.

So when it comes to what it means to try to live and support a family on the current minimum wage, again, no clue. Which is where the "Live the Wage" Challenge, which just took place, from July 24 to 30, came in.

THE CHALLENGE

The Live the Wage Challenge asks elected officials, community leaders, advocates and anyone concerned about the growing inequality in this country to walk in the shoes of a minimum wage worker by living on a minimum wage budget for one week. That’s just $77.

The Challenge is not easy, and it’s not supposed to be. Workers who make the minimum wage have little, if any, leeway in how they spend their money each month. All too often, $77 is not enough to make it through a week, much less reinvest into a community. Many people who decide take this Challenge may simply spend more than that before the week is done – and that’s okay. The Challenge is meant to give a glimpse into just how little the minimum wage provides a working family in this country.

Share your experience every day using the hashtag #LivetheWage. By sharing your experience, you’ll participate in an active conversation on how important it is to raise the federal minimum wage.

The folks in the CAP War Room worked up a swell ThinkProgress "Progress Report" post, "A Nearly Impossible Task," by sorting through the results of the challenge. Here's how they explain what they've done:

Members of Congress and thousands of paycheck fairness advocates across the country wrapped up the “Live The Wage” challenge yesterday, after working to live on a minimum wage budget for a week. On just $77, these leaders hoped to gain just a small understanding of the challenges and decisions faced by minimum wage workers every day. Earning just $7.25 an hour, the average full time minimum wage worker struggles to survive on only $77 a week after paying taxes and housing expenses.

We’ve rounded up 8 examples of the challenges they faced. While they pale in comparison to the challenges that low-wage workers face every day, they provide a glimpse of why we need to raise the minimum wage so that hardworking Americans can make ends meet.

The Progress Report post reproduces a sampling of the tweets filed. I've included a sampling of their sampling. Here are their "8 examples" of the challenges reported by people who took the "Live the Wage" Challenge:

1. Everything needs to be planned. There’s absolutely no room for spontaneity on a minimum wage budget.



2. Transportation really cuts into a budget. The price of gas and even public transportation quickly adds up.



3. Medical costs can easily destroy a budget.



4. There’s little to no room for any other expenses. Standard expenses like home costs and school supplies just don’t fit in.



5. It’s pretty much impossible to save on just $77 per week. And the understanding that having savings is key in case of an emergency.



6. It’s hard to eat healthy on a minimum wage budget. The fast food dollar menu is sometimes a more affordable alternative to fresh fruits and vegetables.



7. This is a reality everyday for millions of people. Women and families have it especially hard.



8. An appreciation for the challenges low-wage workers face. And, accompanying that, a desire to see more elected officials share the experience and vote to raise the minimum wage.

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