itt we act disgusted at right wing savages

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/12/louis-ck-fox-news-masturbation_n_925348.html

Great episode.

Some dimwit governor apparently realized blaming working moms for societies ills in front of the press was a not so good idea about half a second after doing that very thing earlier today.

Caught the tail end of that story on ABC's late night news. Apparently the dude's wife worked while they had children. I guess if your base is never going to hold you accountable for hypocrisy, then go for the gusto.

Google tells me it's Mississippi's governor. Shocker. Can we burn that place to the ground yet?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/11/russia-law-banning-gay-propaganda


didn't know where else to post this

Have you seen the Femen/sextremism video on Vice? I don't know if there is any relation to the law against gay propaganda in Russia and Femen but I would assume there is. Check it out if you haven't. It is the only time in my life that I saw that many boobs and stayed flaccid. They really know how to weaponize them titties, doggs.

Thanks for the tip.  Just beat off to this.

Legendary

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html?emc=edit_na_20130625&_r=1&

NYTimes wrote:The majority held that the coverage formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, originally passed in 1965 and most recently updated by Congress in 1975, was unconstitutional. The section determines which states must receive preclearance from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington before they make minor changes to voting procedures, like relocating a polling place, or major ones, like redrawing electoral districts.

The current coverage scheme, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, is “based on 40-year-old facts having no relationship to the present day.”

“Congress — if it is to divide the states — must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions,” he wrote. “It cannot simply rely on the past.”

the Supreme Court Chief Justice believes that "40-year-old facts" have "no relationship to the present day"

what a fucking cynical asshole

i'm astonished by people trying to defend this decision on the grounds that "congress had years to update the law!" and that it is somehow unfair to split the country up to first and second class states based on their "distant" civil rights history.

it's so willfully ignorant to believe that something that was the social reality when most peoples' parents were still alive has "no relationship to the present day" and signifies to me that you have such a ideologically warped and ahistorical mind that you aren't fit to interpret the law.

furthermore, the nine states that have been subject to Section 4 of the law could have put forth new data and exempted themselves from the restrictions. of course, they would never be able to do that because they are all run by Republican legislatures and Attorney Generals and have been manipulating the voter rolls for decades.

the last two presidential elections have demonstrated that there needs to be, in fact, more consistency and transparency in voting laws. so what does the Supreme Court do? they take up a highly charged political issue that really didn't need any action because it was working fine and blow it up in everyone's faces. the rebuilding of the electoral process in all of these states will encourage scrambling and tampering for political gain. they specifically targeted the federal oversight that prevented even more widespread fraud in Florida and Ohio in 2012.

indefensible. everyone who doesn't understand the fundamental importance and relevance of this issue today is speaking from a position of privilege and fantasy because they take their access to the process for granted.

the camp that believes that we must have colorblind laws to have a colorblind society will always be wrong. the camp that believes that we can ever truly achieve a colorblind society will always be wrong. and that camp seeks to downplay the importance of the Voting Rights Act because they falsely believe that enacting colorblind legislation is the first step in fighting racism. they believe that if we declare everyone equal under the law, they will become equal. they believe that somehow the Civil Rights Act is a law that can't properly fight racism, but that laws against Affirmative Action actually do fight racism. they acknowledge that it was the Civil Rights Act that made our electoral system less racist in the past, but somehow it's not any good at doing that any more. they are fuckers.

jasperness wrote:i'm astonished by people trying to defend this decision on the grounds that "congress had years to update the law!"

Well, they did, and they blew it. I don’t like the probable effects of this decision any more than you do, but this seems like it’s really on Congress more than the Court.

they take up a highly charged political issue that really didn't need any action because it was working fine and blow it up in everyone's faces.

They tried the hands-off approach when they heard Northwest Austin Municipal v. Holder. The Court can’t just ignore completely valid appeals seeking cert because some of the justices might not like the possible outcome.

and that it is somehow unfair to split the country up to first and second class states based on their "distant" civil rights history.

But for how long? Should every single township on the list be guilty until proven innocent, forever? Some governmental bodies can surely argue that they deserve a second look after more than 40 years.

And a lot has changed, even in places that still discriminate. There should be a new formula based on modern data and modern voting discrimination. And the decision leaves room for that to happen.

Is it going to happen, politically? Of course not. Not in the short term, certainly. But I don’t think the Court has an obligation to account for political realities in the House of Representatives.

I don’t like this decision either for the same reason as you – practically speaking it means voting discrimination is going to be easier. But in principle, it’s Congress’s job to fix the law, not the Court’s.

raj gibson wrote:Well, they did, and they blew it. I don’t like the probable effects of this decision any more than you do, but this seems like it’s really on Congress more than the Court.

the court was by no means required to strike down Section 4 because congress didn't update the data on their preclearance map. it is the court who decided that new data was soooooo necccesssarryyyy that the law is invalid without it.

i think. right?

raj gibson wrote:The Court can’t just ignore completely valid appeals seeking cert because some of the justices might not like the possible outcome.

doesn't the court decide what a valid appeal is? i may be wrong on this, but isn't it completely the Justice's judgement when enough time has passed that we should reevaluate the law? why is 2013 the year that this has to change? if the law was actually clear about when it needed to be rewritten or evaluated, four justices wouldn't have voted to uphold it. the conservative justices of the court are, as usual, making an activist decision that decides that an act of congress is invalid because they don't like it any more. there may be non-specific language (which i have seen mentioned) in the Voting Rights Act about how it should eventually expire or be phased out, but i don't think anything is set in stone with that. it's all up to the interpretation of the Justice's that maintaining these restrictions are an undue and unfair burden on the states affected. i don't think that where we have documented instances of voter suppression in the LAST ELECTION WE HAD, that the burden of proof for resetting our electoral system should be lax. the federal government spent almost 200 years gumming up the electoral system with hoops and restrictions to disenfranchise people and now we've decided that in 40 years we have effectively solved the problem?

this is what i don't understand about your frequent takes on the Supreme Court, which are very formalist and grounded in the "conventional wisdom" of accepted legal theory. in the end, in the most important of 5-4 decisions that actually change policy are totally made up! that is not to say that the Justice's don't all legitimately believe what they write and subscribe to legitimate and widely held legal ideologies, it's that the literal word of the law can be interpreted in a multitude of different ways once you filter it through an ideological prism. no ones hand was forced in making this decision. if one Justice subscribed to a slightly different set of legal theories the decision would have come down 5-4 the other way. in this case, what is a Fourteenth Amendment issue, that amendment is so broad as to allow a crazy range of powers if the justice so chooses. that's what is immensely frustrating about people that treat the Supreme Court as if it's about objective process and not outcomes. all the Justice's are biased in their process. they can also bring whatever type of thinking they would like into their process whenever they want. if you are Chief Justice Roberts and you realize that striking down Section 4 if the law is ridiculous, you interpret the Fourteenth Amendment more broadly. if you are trying to be a post-racial doofus, you claim that clearly 40 years is enough time to reverse discrimination and that preclearance is not "equal protection".



i have a distressing lack of respect for our most powerful institutions i guess.

jasperness wrote:this is what i don't understand about your frequent takes on the Supreme Court, which are very formalist and grounded in the "conventional wisdom" of accepted legal theory.

not to say that you're not right. or that i don't find constitutional law interesting in an academic sense. it just feels so ridiculous to be constrained by utter legal formality in the face of actual consequences. or to pretend like an unchecked branch of government is a slave to precedent.

there's also a huge disconnect between the court which cloaks its decision in this legal formalism and the court of public opinion which is almost exclusively focused on outcomes. so when i discuss the court i walk that line.

i try and engage the legal framework in an honest way so i'm not a no nothing that would argue for a decision that flies in the fact of strong legal facts, but i just can't buy into the notion that you can reach a legal opinion objectively, or that one side could be more legally correct than another at the highest levels of the legal field. i think that the Supreme Court is truly the court of splitting hairs.

jasperness wrote:the court was by no means required to strike down Section 4 because congress didn't update the data on their preclearance map. it is the court who decided that new data was soooooo necccesssarryyyy that the law is invalid without it.

No, they weren't required to do anything. But this feels more like "this law needs to be updated for the modern day, practical implications be damned" rather than "yep, racism is gone, everything's fine now."

doesn't the court decide what a valid appeal is? i may be wrong on this, but isn't it completely the Justice's judgement when enough time has passed that we should reevaluate the law? why is 2013 the year that this has to change?

The judges presumably thought the Shelby petition raised some particularly critical questions, especially with the amici attention it received. I think the decision in Northwest Austin indicated that they would take this up again, and nothing about it strikes me as improvidently granted. It's an important issue that wasn't going to go away and couldn't be ignored indefinitely.

the conservative justices of the court are, as usual, making an activist decision that decides that an act of congress is invalid because they don't like it any more.

I don't like the "activist judge" concept. I think people use it to characterize decisions they disagree with and ignore it when they agree with them. The VRA was a very unusual infringement of states rights because of an agreed-upon overriding interest. I don't think it's "activist" to say that that extraordinary interest has changed and needs to be addressed differently, even if you disagree with that evaluation.

it's all up to the interpretation of the Justice's that maintaining these restrictions are an undue and unfair burden on the states affected. i don't think that where we have documented instances of voter suppression in the LAST ELECTION WE HAD, that the burden of proof for resetting our electoral system should be lax.

I don't think this was a decision that the system should be lax, although that may well be the practical implication. A new formula could actually be stricter in that it more accurately targets current voter suppression. Or it could better geographically target discrimination rather than using a half-century-old map. I think you would agree that modern voting discrimination is much more subtle than the Jim Crow laws the VRA was created to combat.

the federal government spent almost 200 years gumming up the electoral system with hoops and restrictions to disenfranchise people and now we've decided that in 40 years we have effectively solved the problem?

Well, the Court didn't strike down the whole law. The instruction to Congress to create a new formula pretty much acknowledges that the law does still have a purpose.

this is what i don't understand about your frequent takes on the Supreme Court, which are very formalist and grounded in the "conventional wisdom" of accepted legal theory. in the end, in the most important of 5-4 decisions that actually change policy are totally made up! that is not to say that the Justice's don't all legitimately believe what they write and subscribe to legitimate and widely held legal ideologies, it's that the literal word of the law can be interpreted in a multitude of different ways once you filter it through an ideological prism. no ones hand was forced in making this decision. if one Justice subscribed to a slightly different set of legal theories the decision would have come down 5-4 the other way. in this case, what is a Fourteenth Amendment issue, that amendment is so broad as to allow a crazy range of powers if the justice so chooses. that's what is immensely frustrating about people that treat the Supreme Court as if it's about objective process and not outcomes. all the Justice's are biased in their process. they can also bring whatever type of thinking they would like into their process whenever they want. if you are Chief Justice Roberts and you realize that striking down Section 4 if the law is ridiculous, you interpret the Fourteenth Amendment more broadly. if you are trying to be a post-racial doofus, you claim that clearly 40 years is enough time to reverse discrimination and that preclearance is not "equal protection".

I don't imagine that the Court is perfect or that biases don't exist, but I also do not think that interpretation of the law is so broad that judges can ride willy-nilly over it regardless of precedent or legal logic. Certainly some of the most famous cases in Supreme Court history were disastrously biased exercises in ideology... but they were overturned, and broadly speaking the Court has a pretty impressive record of defending the Constitution and protecting citizens' rights. The Dred Scott-type decisions are the exceptions, not the rule.

And yes, I do think it's about processes (even flawed ones) rather than outcomes. When it becomes about outcomes it's little more than a partisan tool, and a particularly undemocratic one at that.

jasperness wrote:not to say that you're not right. or that i don't find constitutional law interesting in an academic sense. it just feels so ridiculous to be constrained by utter legal formality in the face of actual consequences. or to pretend like an unchecked branch of government is a slave to precedent.

there's also a huge disconnect between the court which cloaks its decision in this legal formalism and the court of public opinion which is almost exclusively focused on outcomes. so when i discuss the court i walk that line.

I think that's part of what makes American democracy work. I like that the court is removed from both outcomes and the court of public opinion. The other two branches are beholden enough to those things as it is.

i try and engage the legal framework in an honest way so i'm not a no nothing that would argue for a decision that flies in the fact of strong legal facts, but i just can't buy into the notion that you can reach a legal opinion objectively, or that one side could be more legally correct than another at the highest levels of the legal field. i think that the Supreme Court is truly the court of splitting hairs.

No one is arguing for perfect objectivity, but to give up even the pursuit or ideal of it is to abandon the rule of law, and democracy shortly thereafter.

This ruling is judicial over reach.  Congress has the authority to do what they were doing and voted overwhelmingly to continue the VRA. 

Ginsberg got it absolutely right in written minority opinoin.

15th Ammendment--
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Activism, judicial overreach, no one likes it when the other side does it. If DOMA is overturned tomorrow, conservatives will be saying the exact same thing.

i don't have a problem with judicial activism (i use the buzzword mostly because people understand it fairly well), i just a problem with the notion that activist judging is liberal and judicial restraint is conservative. i think that judicial activism is the status quo now for judges of all ideological stripes.

i was just trying to say that the courts conservatives are being activist on this decision, not that activist decisions are somehow wrong.

raj gibson wrote:I think that's part of what makes American democracy work. I like that the court is removed from both outcomes and the court of public opinion. The other two branches are beholden enough to those things as it is.

how is the court removed from outcomes though? hasn't the liberal wing of judicial thought always argued for greater emphasis on outcomes? don't conservative judges cite outcomes frequently in their opinions? i thought this was a general trend.

raj gibson wrote:No one is arguing for perfect objectivity, but to give up even the pursuit or ideal of it is to abandon the rule of law, and democracy shortly thereafter.

i don't think that the justices shouldn't keep doing what they're doing, i just think we need to look at their motivations and the process realistically. Supreme Court decisions aren't right or wrong, they are just the choice that is made based on the ideologies and biases of the nine people on the court.



if i had more time i would respond to this more thoughtfully.

Some bizarre shit happening in TX last night.
13 hour senate filibuster devolves into parliamentary disorder in last 10 minutes of the day, a scrambled vote was held amidst the noise & deafening shouting of bill opponents in the state house, some state senate members aren't sure if they are voting on the bill or a parliamentary procedure vote.
The bill passes, although records show the vote was after midnight, thus invalid. The ruling party backdated the votes (screenshots captured data manipulation) to claim bill passes.
After closed door session they decide to reverse previous action & admit vote was not valid, likely to save face & wait for Gov Perry to call another special section where bill has a better chance of passing.

Also, during the filibuster a TX state rep referred to the filibustering TX State Senator as a terrorist.

Wendy Davis is a genuine champion and I can't remember the last time I felt so genuinely happy about something political as I did when hearing the news that she had successfully stood up to those fuckers and stopped that gross abortion bill from passing. What a triumph, what a woman.

As I said yesterday on the twitters, I dislike filibustering in principle, but I despise Texas legislators' attempt to return to the dark ages of women's health care.

Great job using the tools available to you, Wendy. You know for damn sure the other side wouldn't hesitate to filibuster the fuck out of you.

jasperness wrote:how is the court removed from outcomes though? hasn't the liberal wing of judicial thought always argued for greater emphasis on outcomes? don't conservative judges cite outcomes frequently in their opinions? i thought this was a general trend.

Well, to a relatively lesser degree than the legislature and executive.

i don't think that the justices shouldn't keep doing what they're doing, i just think we need to look at their motivations and the process realistically. Supreme Court decisions aren't right or wrong, they are just the choice that is made based on the ideologies and biases of the nine people on the court.

And on the Constitution, legal precedent, and the arguments and briefs the Court gets for each case. Of course biases exist, but I don't see them going to the level of right wing savagery here.

I don't feel good about the things that happened in Texas.

What will stop them from passing a bill like that next time?

undo wrote:
What will stop them from passing a bill like that next time?

pretty much nothing but elections and the eventual passing of time. in the meantime, wendy & everyone she motivated just have to stay as vocal as the opposition.