Someone had a horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad week

Someone had a horrible, terrible, no-good very bad week, and it wasn't TPP. Oh, this was a depressing, disappointing week what with the unrelenting crappy weather and all, and bad weather can make you a bit crabby.  But, wow, talk about crabby! TPP's favorite SCOTUS justice, Tony Scalia, is in an extremely bad mood!  Just read his blistering, but poorly reasoned, dissents on the ACA and same-sex marriage! You may search a long time before you find two better-written temper tantrums than these. You really get the sense that Scalia thinks he is actually smarter than anyone else and that his opinions should therefore be respected and deferred to. When you find such an attitude in a colleague (and TPP speaks here from experience), you find them insufferable and generally irritating. How can anyone not recognize and appreciate such an intellect? You cannot have a rationale interaction with someone like that. For our general entertainment a contest of bombastic egotism needs to be arranged so that Scalia can square off against someone who is really in his league: Bill O'Really!  This idea and the SCOTUS decisions in general have really cheered TPP up!

SCOTUS to decide case: Partisan Hackery vs. Obvious Intent

Once again Tom Tomorrow depicts the USA's real exceptionalism, which isn't partisan politics above the best interests of citizens, but is actually the cartoon itself. The only thing that keeps TPP from despair is that cartoons like this are still allowed. Of course, stupidly, some of us thought the GnOPe can stoop no lower in its irrational partisan behavior toward the Obama administration. But nooo! The Iran letter from GnOPe senators intended to undercut nuclear negotiations lowers the bar so bloody far that it is only too obvious this political party cannot lead, cannot rule, cannot be trusted to have the best interests of the USA in mind. And our junior senator from Lincolnland is one of those fools.  So take notice Senator Kirk before you continue on where no one has gone before; you don't represent this citizen in any way, shape, or form. You put partisan politics ahead of the best interests of the USA. 

Horrible, terrible, no good, very bad changes - SCOTUS to blame

Nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing is as discouraging, as disgusting, as bad as the roll back on voter rights sanctioned by SCOTUS. What the ever loving hell are these black-robed morons thinking?  OK, not all of them, but the majority. Voting rights were hard fought to give minorities and the poor access to the ballot box, and it was not pretty at all. But now all sorts of states are doing everything they can to disenfranchise voters, especially minorities and the poor. So what gives? One party, the GnOPe has rightly concluded that they do not represent a majority, so voter suppression can limit the voter participation improving the chances of their  minority party winning. None of this is a bit surprising, but you think that maybe SCOTUS would protect voter rights.  Their failure to do so provides certain evidence of conservative justices acting on ideology rather protecting rights. This is the worst thing that has happened in the USA in the 5 decades TPP has been paying attention to politics. Expectations for the likes of Scalia and Thomas are pretty low, but until now it seemed as though Roberts might be more principled. But this does show how far this country has not come. Remove the government protections for voter rights, and Jim Crow laws pop right back up again. Sad.

Monday, monday

Monday started early when a cat woke TPP to tell him that a thunderstorm was approaching, a fact he would find out himself in another 10 to 15 minutes. She's got good hearing and is a little afraid of thunder. The morning news confirmed that here in Lincolnland politics particularly the state's gerrymandered election districts were not going change because a political hired gun of a legal persuasion managed to convince a judge that the half a million signatures, more than twice the total needed, were invalid so the voter initiative would not be on the ballot. Democracy in action. Yeah, sure. BTW you only need 5000 signatures to become a candidate for governor. And then SCOTUS amazes us with the contorted legal logic they use to empower corporations at the expense of individuals. This after the most buffered branch of the government decides that women entering clinics don't need any spatial protection from the friendly counselors attempting to harass and intimidate them. SCOTUS needs a good dose of their own medicine.  Actually some of the justices just need to get out every year or so and see how people actually live and behave. On the good news front, more rain fell and Costa Rica won at the world cup. Ole mis amigos. Maybe the cat has the right idea; find a quiet place safe from thunder boomers and go back to sleep. 

Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?

For the jillionth time, the tomato is a fruit. That this question went to the Supreme Court is totally silly, but then to add that the justices had to consult a DICTIONARY, well, that's just insulting! You consult your friendly neighborhood botanist to answer such questions.  That's what we're here for. Typical though that SCOTUS justices didn't know enough to know who to consult. Very simply they should have just contacted a botanist, someone like John Kress (the Indiana Jones of ginger) at the Smithsonian, and gotten an authoritative answer in 5 sec or so, if he was in the country. So the next time you get your tomato jam out (often called ketchup), remember the tomato is a fruit.

Not feeling any safer here in Lincolnland

The fire-arms prohibited signs like this one were put on our academic building sometime during the past few days, but TPP is not feeling any safer.

Nonetheless, with quite a few restrictions, like no firearms at football tailgate parties (duh!), concealed firearms are now allowed on public university campuses because Lincolnland finally caved in to the SCOTUS rulings that certified citizens' right to bear arms without the necessity of well-regulated militias because apparently conservative judges cannot conjugate sentences.  Consider what typically occurs on campuses even before such signs became necessary.  First you take 20,000 to 40,000 eighteen to twenty-somethings and put them altogether with little or no adult supervision. OK that's actually all it takes. Most of them don't know how to drink alcohol in a mature manner even when they're old enough to be legal. Let's add up the other variables: a lot of raging hormones, some immaturity, peer pressure, various tribal affinities, and bad or impaired judgment.  During any particular period of say 2 days, stupid, crazy, regrettable stuff will happen just because, but mostly they live and maybe learn.  Now add concealed firearms to this equation and solve. What possibly could go wrong?  The campus environment doesn't need another variable that makes it so bloody easy for even a behavioral moron to kill someone, but they will. You can already hear the NRA chuckling over their antics. "Oh, those crazy college kids; always shooting each other." "Remember when we were in college and it was never anything worse than a fist-fight?" "Boy, do kids today have it easy."

Do SCOTUS justices have defective memories?

50 years is a long time, but not so long that TPP has forgotten the 1960s, his high school and college years.  In those days TPP was very involved in social justice and civil rights, a typical activist and supporter of civil liberties.  The lessons of those years certainly helped bolster my "liberal" (in the classic sense) attitudes and political leanings.  True many of the outward manifestations of racism have disappeared.  As a child brought up in upstate NY, when visiting his southern kin (up north we had relatives), he got very confused about the notion of "colored" water provided by an obvious choice of drinking fountains, and he wanted the colored water of course.  Now there's only one fountain, but you can bet certain people will not use it as a result. The voting rights act may be based upon out-dated data, and quite reasonably SCOTUS could have ruled that the data should be updated, say based on the past decade, but no.  The conservative justices' ruling seemed to suggest that racism is gone, that no attempts were being made to disenfranchise minority voters, or change voting districts or rules to limit minority representation.  Don't the SCOTUS justices remember the 1960s?  Did the SCOTUS justices check the record to see how many recent voting rights litigations there have been?  The list was easy to find.  Here's a recent one, and fairly typical.
United States v. Town of Lake Park, FL (S.D. Fla. 2009)
On October 26, 2009, the Court entered a consent judgment and decree replacing the current at-large method of election with a limited voting plan providing for the election of four Commissioners with concurrent terms. On March 31, 2009, the Department filed a complaint against the Town of Lake Park in Palm Beach County, FL for violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The complaint alleges that the Town's at-large system of electing its Commissioners denies black voters an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. Although black voting age citizens compose 38% of Lake Park's total citizen voting age population, no black candidate ever has been elected to office since the Town's founding in 1923.
That's only 86 years!  How could this be a problem?  Is this part of the out-of-date data that invalidated the VRA?  This was the whole point of Voting Rights Act wasn't it?  Voting units from towns to states were routinely and regularly violating people's rights particularly racial minorities, and they still do.  Well, those who forget the past are doomed to let these mistakes repeat, and the big mistake of the conservative justices is to forget that the primary constitutional freedom they are to protect is equal treatment under the law.  But as Justice Scalia has so amply demonstrated in his descent of the DOMA ruling; you can put a black robe on a bigot, but you still got a bigot.