Death Throes

You gotta wonder, don't you, who gets info from whom among the RWS™. Where do the lies start, what's their plan for dissemination? How is it that, first, a Justice of the Supreme Court affirms a falsehood, and then the lie is repeated on Fox "news?" Corollarally (is that a word?), you might also ask if Scalia was deliberately lying, or is he just ill-informed; i.e., stupid? Who put whom up to what? Because, in the end, it actually does matter.

I refer to the falsehoods about the so-called "Cornhusker kickback." He admits he hasn't read the bill; but he makes the claim. Yes, it did exist at one point, as a (pathetic) attempt to court Ben Nelson into voting for the ACA. Sadly, that's how politics works in this corner of the world, and it's only part of the story of why we got a gift to insurance companies instead of a rational solution to health care access in the US. Nevertheless, as was known within moments of the original proposition, the clause was removed from the legislation. And, by golly, it has stayed removed. It was gone when the law was passed, gone when Scalia brought it up, and it's still gone as Fox "news" continues to suggest to its sheep that it's the opposite of gone. As, in other words, Fox deliberately falsifies history.

Don't be surprised, though: it's their business plan. Their very successful business plan.

But there's the matter of a sitting Justice spreading the same bullshit. Maybe it got fed to him when he and Clarence politicked their way into a right-wing festivus of anti-healthers. Or maybe it was the other way around: maybe the tyrannical twosome brought the blueprint to the gathering. Whatever went on, and when, it's disturbing to witness the coordination of the spreading of a lie; a lie so easily falsified, a lie that's been pointed out over and over. A lie that Fox "news" has to know is a lie (I mean, you know, they're a news organization, right?), but which it deliberately keeps trumpeting.

However you spin it, it's corrupt. Not only is it a fundamental perversion of what little is left of our democracy; it speaks volumes about the low regard in which Fox holds its viewers. And why not? It never seems to matter how blatantly they lie: like spray from the sea, credulity abounds among their following.

Well, the fait is pretty much accompli. All that remains is the time it takes to hear a couple more death rattles, as the careful, patient, soulless efforts of the Murdochorovian plan have their final unfolding: pandering to the religiously vulnerable, the paranoid and the hate-filled; the taking over of media to spread continual falsehoods; corrupting education; spreading distrust of expertise and of knowledge itself; until there's a critical mass of uneducated, misinformed, terrified people, unwilling and, finally, no longer even able to see what's happening, only too happy to elect representatives who'll vote against their and their country's interest while claiming to do the opposite. Going to hell in a hannitybasket.

They have their nonstop propaganda network, the reins of (so far) one house of Congress, and the Supreme Court, and now it's only a matter of not much more time before the end is at hand. It could be as soon as November, 2012: only a month before the world is supposed to end, we will have done it to ourselves, blindly and blithely giving away our democracy to corporations and billionaires, blissfully turning the country over to those who'd suck it dry now, take what's left, live out their lives in luxury, and exit the ruins without a second thought.

Yeah, I'm having a bad day. But am I wrong?

Scalia Is A Horse's Ass

I mean no offense to horses or their prodigious excretory abilities. But "horse's ass" is the nicest description up which with I could come in describing that darling of conservatives, Antonin Scalia. And if he is indeed a horse's ass (indeed, he is), I don't know what to call those who love him so much, but it's probably prohibited by most sacred and civil law. Kentucky, possibly, excepted.

As RWS™ holler nonstop about liberal judges legislating from the bench, letting personal politics affect their decisions (ie ruling in ways they don't like), there is none so prone to doing it as Mister Justice Scalia. Here's what he said today about the Affordable Care Act:

In the morning session -- in which the court weighed how much of the law should stand if the mandate is ruled unconstitutional -- Scalia cited the horsetrading required to pass the bill -- including the politically embarrassing, and failed, Cornhusker Kickback. He also admitted that he'd like to see the whole law fall if the mandate is ruled out of bounds.

In the afternoon, he took pains to remind the court of the unpopularity of the individual mandate.

The exchange occurred when Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. rejected a hypothetical that relied on the notion of Congress passing a massive new tax. This, he argued, would have to overcome massive political constraints.

At that point Scalia chimed in: He would've thought the individual mandate would also be too much of a political liability to ever pass Congress.

Now I'm hardly a constitutional scholar, and I have no idea how the court will eventually rule, except to predict that, with Kennedy as the wild card, it'll likely follow the usual predictable split along party lines; and to point out how pathetic it is that it's nearly always possible to predict how our most supreme jurists will individually decide cases. (And I'll say once again that I've never liked the fact that the plan relies on private insurance, which is what makes the "individual mandate" necessary -- as Mitt Romney acknowledged again, just last night.)

But it doesn't take much more than a Palinesque mind to recognize that nothing Scalia said is relevant to the question of constitutionality of the Act, nor should have any role at all in deciding the case. In fact, in those cases I've taken time to read about, Big Tony nearly always seems to have extra-legal justifications for his decisions. In this case, it was right-wing talking points.

Seems to me Hizzoner is the Platonic ideal of a judge who lets his prejudices, his religion, his politics guide his judicial decisions; the exact opposite, in other words, of the sort of judge conservatives claim they want in courtrooms.

It's almost as if they're hypocrites or something...