Last Call For Zombie Death Panels

Medicare end-of-life care is back in the news, and that's a good thing.

Six years after end-of-life planning nearly derailed development of the Affordable Care Act amid charges of "death panels," the Obama administration has revived a proposal to reimburse physicians for talking with their Medicare patients about how patients want to be cared for as they near death.

The proposal, contained in a large set of Medicare regulations unveiled Wednesday, comes amid growing public discussion about the need for medical care that better reflects patients’ wishes as they get older.

Expect Republicans to start screaming that Obama wants to murder your grandmother again. Well...maybe not all Republicans...

Two months ago, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, suggested that Medicare patients should sign so-called advance directives that spell out the care they want if they become incapacitated.

So Jeb Bush is pro-"death panels" huh.  This should be fun.

In all seriousness, as James Joyner points out, palliative care is a legitimate Medicare issue and should be discussed by doctors and their senior patients.

Aside from the cleverness of “death panels” as a mobilizing tool, capitalizing on longstanding American fears about government control of healthcare, I’ve never understood the argument against the practice. Of course physicians ought to discuss with their patients what their end-of-life options are once they become terminally ill or sufficiently advanced in age. And, so long as we maintain a fee-for-service model, of course they ought get paid for it. 

To the extent that government is a prime payer of healthcare expenses—and for those over 65, there’s little controversy over the fact that it is—there is something of a conflict of interest at work, in that care for terminal patients eats up an inordinate percentage of lifetime costs. But it strikes me as absurd that doctors are going to talk their patients into ending their lives prematurely mostly on the basis of cost savings.

Oh, an absurd idea that Republicans aren't going to run with at full throttle?  That would be a first. Because that's exactly the fear Republicans stoked in voters in 2009 and 2010 and they won huge.

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, urged her supporters to oppose Democratic plans for health care reform on her Facebook page. 

"As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!" wrote Palin in a note posted Aug. 7, 2009. 

She said that the Democrats plan to reduce health care costs by simply refusing to pay for care. 

"And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

It was PolitiFact's Lie of the Year, remember?

Republicans still won 60+ House seats.

I fully expect this Medicare rule change to be quietly pulled once again.  Republicans will keep winning that PR battle until the end of time.

Not Feeling The Bern

I've said this before and I'll say it again:  Bernie Sanders will not get my vote if he continues to attack President Obama's policies and his administration (Warning, Daily Caller story).

Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders undermined a key Obama administration talking point Monday when he said the actual unemployment rate in the U.S. is double what the federal government claims. 

“When you talk about the economy we also have to have an honest assessment of unemployment in America,” Sanders told a crowd of 7,500 gathered at a presidential campaign rally in Portland, Maine. 

“Once a month the government publishes a set of figures, and the last figures they published said that official unemployment was 5.4 percent,” the Democratic nominee continued, slightly misstating the Labor Department’s most recent report which put June’s unemployment rate at 5.3 percent. 

“But there is another set of government statistics,” Sanders continued, “and that that real unemployment if you include those people who have given up looking for work and the millions of others who are working part-time 20, 25 hours a week when they want to work full-time, when you all of that together, real unemployment is 10.5 percent.”

Wow.  Straight out of the GOP playbook.  Obama is lying to you about unemployment!  Reeeeeeeeal unemployment is in double digits!  Wake up, sheeple!

Dear Bernie Sanders:  you will never raise yourself up as a Democrat by trying to bring Barack Obama down.  This is the kind of glibertarian nonsense I expect from Rand Paul or Jeb Bush.  If Bernie Sanders is using it too (and it turns out he's been using that "real unemployment" right-wing talking point for a while now) then I have yet another problem with the Sanders campaign.

The Freedom To Discriminate

Republican lawmakers are gearing up their response to the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage ruling: a federal law that would effectively eliminate punishment for discriminating against same-sex marriage.

U.S. Representative Steve Scalise, the chief Republican vote-counter in the House, has signed-on as a co-sponsor of legislation described as an effort to protect people opposed to gay marriage from being penalized by the government.

The Louisianan, who as majority whip ranks No. 3 in the his party's leadership ranks, after Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, added his name Tuesday to the bill dubbed the "First Amendment Defense Act." The two Republican lawmakers who wrote the bill, Representative Raul Labrador of Idaho and Senator Mike Lee of Utah have cast it as a way to clarify and strengthen religious liberty protections in federal law, "by safeguarding those individuals and institutions who promote traditional marriage from government retaliation."

The Senate version, S. 1598, has 24 co-sponsors, including Republican presidential aspirants Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Scalise is among 20 House Republicans who have become new co-sponsors of the bill since the Supreme Court's ruling last month legalizing same-sex marriage—bringing the total to 87.

In statement his office provided Wednesday to Bloomberg News on his decision to co-sponsor the bill, Scalise alluded to the high court's decision.

"Religious freedom is a fundamental right established in the Constitution. Especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent judicial activism, defending religious liberty has become an even more pressing priority," said Scalise.

Scalise added the First Amendment Defense Act "helps ensure that Americans are not punished or discriminated against for exercising their constitutionally-protected religious beliefs.”

The measure, introduced in the House on June 17, nine days before the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage, has been referred to the committees on Ways and Means and Oversight and Government Reform. It is unclear if the bill has any chance to advance. But Scalise's co-sponsorship gives it an imprint of some House Republican leadership backing.

So the game plan is clear: sure, you can get married, but if Republicans have their way in November 2016, expect legislation that would allow all kinds of open discrimination against same-sex couples in the name of "religious freedom".  Hell, it might allow all kinds of discrimination, period.  Who draws the line and says that a person's beliefs that black people are inferior aren't worthy of protection under this legislation?  This is Indiana's comically bad law all over again. and Republicans know it.

But that's the point: nearly two-thirds of Republicans remain against same-sex marriage at all.  It's bigots like this who will decide the Republican nominee, and this nominee will almost certainly be willing to sign this legislation into law.

Republicans remain the party of legalized discrimination. That's their platform in 2016.

StupidiNews!

• South Carolina's state House has voted to remove the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds, the measure has already passed the state Senate and heads to GOP Gov. Nikki Haley's desk.
• GOP 2016 contenders have all declined to speak at this year's National Council of La Raza meeting in Kansas City despite efforts to increase the party's share of the Latino vote. 
• Pope Francis's tour of Latin America continues with a trip to Bolivia amid thawing relations with President Evo Morales, who in the past has denounced the Catholic Church.
• Australia's unemployment rate has risen slightly to six percent in June as commodity export prices are falling due to instability in China and Greece.
• A federal judge has thrown out a more than half a billion dollar patent verdict against Apple over jury instructions, the company suing the tech giant has no actual products, only patents.

Last Call For Trumping All Reality

Pretty sure I know what Saturday Night Live's cold open would be this week if the show wasn't on summer break.

Donald Trump said Wednesday that he believes he will win the Latino vote, slamming Hillary Clinton for promoting what he called an immigration policy that would "let everybody come in… killers, criminals, drug dealers." 

"I have a great relationship with the Mexican people. I have many people working for me - look at the job in Washington - I have many legal immigrants working with me. And many of them come from Mexico. They love me, I love them," the 2016 GOP contender said in an interview with NBC News. "And I'll tell you something, if I get the nomination, I'll win the Latino vote." 

Trump said that "there's nothing to apologize for" in relation to his controversial comments about Mexico, arguing that he'll win the support of Latinos because of his record creating jobs. 

"Hillary Clinton is not going to be able to create jobs, I will tell you right now," he said. "Neither is Jeb Bush going to be able to create jobs. I will create jobs and the Latinos will have jobs that they don't have right now. And I will win that vote."

Every time Trump opens his mouth he gains ground in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, and gets further behind in the general. It's amazing stuff. Calling Latinos criminals and killers and expecting to win their votes?

But remember, Trump doesn't represent the GOP position on Latinos.  Not in the least.

Turn The Machines Back On

We apologize for slightly breaking your economy.

The New York Stock Exchange shut down its main market because of a computer malfunction, forcing traders to steer orders elsewhere in the biggest disruption to an American equity venue in almost two years. 

The suspension, announced to securities firms through notices on the NYSE website around 11:32 a.m., dropped the largest U.S. share platform out of the network of trading platforms that make up the American equity market. That network kept running, however, as other exchanges such as the Nasdaq Stock Market and Bats Global Markets Inc. picked up the runoff.

It's good that the NASDAQ basically acted as a giant backup stock exchange for a while while the NYSE gets their crap sorted out, but increasingly in the world of high-speed, high-volume computerized trading, glitches like this will only keep getting more damaging to the economy.

“I don’t think it’s a hacking incident here or anything like that,” Joe Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading at Chatham, New Jersey-based Themis Trading LLC, said by phone. “Based on what I’ve seen in the past, these type of things are usually some sort of issues related to an upgrade, maybe to handle the excessive traffic that’s constantly coming in with high-speed trading.” 

The stock exchange operator said in a Twitter message the issue is internal and not a “cyber breach.” The Securities and Exchange Commission is closely monitoring the situation, according to an e-mailed statement from Chair Mary Jo White.

You don't suppose it has anything to do with China melting down amidst the Greek debt crisis, right?

Fleecing The Rubios

Sen. Marco Rubio is letting us see his cards, and surprise!  It's a race to the bottom to see which Republican would destroy the nation's public schools and universities first: Rubio or Bush.

On education, Rubio said he would establish a new accreditation process that would “expose higher education to the market forces of choice and competition” and create income-based loan repayment programs to make student debt more manageable.

“Our higher education system is controlled by what amounts to a cartel of existing colleges and universities, which use their power over the accreditation process to block innovative, low-cost competitors from entering the market,” he said.

“Within my first 100 days, I will bust this cartel by establishing a new accreditation process that welcomes low-cost, innovative providers. This would expose higher education to the market forces of choice and competition, which would prompt a revolution driven by the needs of students — just as the needs of consumers drive the progress of every other industry in our economy,” he said.

He also called for student investment plans and an increase in vocational and apprenticeship programs to encourage high school students to begin careers as mechanics, plumbers or electricians.

It’s a message that could appeal to some of the younger voters Rubio hopes to win over.

The Florida senator focused on taxes, saying he’d cut the corporate tax rate to the 25 percent average for developed nations, establish a territorial tax system that encouraged U.S. companies to bring money they’re holding overseas home, allow companies to claim more expenses for investing in creating jobs, and put a ceiling on the amount U.S. regulations can cost.

On immigration, he said he would push for an overhaul that encourages “skill and merit-based” immigration, rather than family-based immigration.

Pretty much every check box on the Chamber of Commerce corporate bonanza right there: massive business tax cuts, corporatized schools and colleges to turn them into profit centers (and hey, lower tax revenues will mean cuts to education, making for profit schools more "competitive" as public schools are starved) and exploitation of low-cost apprenticeship and immigrant labor.

There's nothing new about Rubio's plan, it's just the business wing of the GOP all day, every day. Think Kansas, only in all 50 states!

Won't that be fun?

StupidiNews!

• Subway spokesman Jared Fogle has been dropped by the company after 15 years after an FBI raid in Fogle's home Tuesday near Indianapolis.
• Baylor University has removed "homosexual acts" from the school's code of misconduct as the world's largest Baptist university calls the change part of "a caring community".
• European Union creditors are giving Greece until Sunday to come up with reforms or risk being ejected from the euro currency at an emergency summit this weekend.
• British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne will deliver the first Tory-majority budget to Parliament in nearly two decades in what is expected to be a major swing towards austerity.
• AT&T is reportedly offering a promise to make low-cost internet available to subscribers if lawmakers, the DoJ, and the FCC approve its deal to buy DirecTV.

Last Call For Hungry For More

Twinkies are back from beyond the grave, and two years into the comeback of Hostess, we finally are learning what the cost of putting Ho-Hos and Ding Dongs back on shelves really means: the new Hostess Brands, owned by a billionaire venture capitalist, who has automated more than 90% of the company's bakery jobs out of existence.

In 2012, Hostess, the iconic American bakery giant behind Ding Dongs, Ho Ho's and Twinkies, was bankrupt, with plans to slash more than 18,000 jobs and close its doors for good amid a crippling nationwide strike. 

Then, in 2013, a snack-cake savior appeared. The Missouri-based sweets maker was bought for $410 million by a partnership between private-equity giant Apollo Global Management and C. Dean Metropoulos, a billionaire turnaround artist known as "Mr. Shelf Space" for his revival of brands like Vlasic, Hungry-Man and Chef Boyardee. 

Now, the iconic dessert titan is resurgent, selling its golden, cream-filled Twinkies across the world under the name Hostess Brands and turning down $2 billion offers from a pack of hopeful buyers. On Tuesday morning, the company reached its latest peak when Reuters, citing anonymous sources, suggested Hostess would head to Wall Street with an initial public offering that would value the company at around $2.5 billion.

That's a huge turnaround, from Chapter 11 to IPO.  But the true cost has been thousands of jobs.

The Hostess Brands of today, launched in 2013 under an Apollo-Metropoulos holding company, owns sweets and cakes under the Hostess and Dolly Madison brands, including Cupcakes, Donettes, Snoballs and Zingers. 

But it looks and operates very differently than the chain from whence it came. The newer, thinner bakery giant kept only five of the 14 original dessert plants: Of those five, one was sold and another, an eight-decade-old bakery in suburban Chicago with 400 employees, closed in October. 

The investment helped bring the classic American snack food into the 21st century. One 500-worker Kansas bakery outfitted with a $20 million Auto-Bake system, according to Forbes, now spits out more than a million Twinkies a day, doing 80 percent of the work once done by 9,000 workers across 14 plants.

From 9,000 bakery employees at 14 plants to 500 at one plant in Kansas.  That's just the bakery division.  Thousands of more supporting jobs were lost when the plants closed for good. This may be an extreme example of automation in the 21st century, but more of it is coming, and it's going to put a lot of people out of work very quickly.

In fact, we're seeing it now.  How much of the "labor participation rate" being the lowest in 50 years is due to automation as a factor?

Do those Twinkies still taste good to you now?

The Revenge Of Flagging Support

Having somehow missed the cattle call when the rest of the conservative strawmen arguments were being set up on the issue of the Confederate flag,WaPo’s Marc Thiessen instead goes for sheer construct size instead.

Did you know that this newspaper is named for a slaveholder? It’s right there on our masthead, the name of a man who for 56 years held other human beings in bondage on his Virginia plantation — a man, according to the official Mount Vernon Web site, who “frequently utilized harsh punishment against the enslaved population, including whippings.” This dreaded symbol of oppression is delivered to the doorsteps and inboxes of hundreds of thousands of people each morning. 

Sure, George Washington also emancipated his slaves in his will, won our independence and became the father of our country — but no matter. It is an outrage that this paper continues to bear the name of such a man. 

It is time to rename The Washington Post! 

Think that’s stupid? You’re right. But there’s a lot of stupid going around today. The latest example: The TV Land network has pulled the plug on reruns of one of America’s most beloved shows, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” because the car in the show, the General Lee, bears a Confederate flag. There is nothing racist about “The Dukes of Hazzard.” It is a show about moonshine, short shorts and fast cars. What is accomplished by banning “The Dukes of Hazzard”? Nothing. 

Our country is in a miasma of political correctness. So where does it end? Are we going to rename our nation’s capital (and Washington state for that matter)? Should we close the Jefferson Memorial (named for a man who never freed his slaves)? How about renaming Arlington (which is named after Robert E. Lee’s estate) . . . or Washington and Lee University (names for not one, but two slave owners) . . . or Fort Hood (named for Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood) and Fort Bragg (named for Braxton Bragg, military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis). 

This impulse to wipe away history is Stalinist. Just like Joseph Stalin once erased people from photographs, we’re now erasing people from our collective history.

I mean this is a hell of a lot of straw in one place, and it’s covered in manure to boot. Nobody’s demanding we rename anything currently named for George Washington, and nobody demanded the cancellation of the Dukes of Hazzard reruns on cable, either.

Most of all, nobody’s asking to “wipe away history” of white Southerners, either. What people actually wanted was the state government of South Carolina not to fly the Confederate flag on state grounds, especially since the state only started doing that in the 60’s in order to insult and degrade the civil rights movement.

The only thing being wiped away here is the reality that this flag stands for slavery, racism, and hatred. We wiped that history away out of textbooks and social taboo quite some time ago and covered it up with idiotic platitudes like “heritage not hate”. We wiped out that history of why the South went to war in order to preserve the enslavement of human beings with moronic bleatings of “states’ rights” and “economic sabotage of the South”.

Maybe Thiessen knows. Frankly, I don’t give a damn.

Obama Derangement Syndrome Update

Here's the problem with the Republican Party, at residents of Bastrop, Texas are still quite freaked out about Jade Helm '15 exercises.

The office of the Bastrop County Republican Party is in an old lumber mill on Main Street, with peeling brown paint and a sign out front that captures the party’s feelings about the Obama administration: “WISE UP AMERICA!”

Inside, county Chairman Albert Ellison pulled out a yellow legal pad on which he had written page after page of reasons why many Texans distrust President Obama, including the fact that, “in the minds of some, he was raised by communists and mentored by terrorists.”

So it should come as no surprise, Ellison said, that as the U.S. military prepares to launch one of the largest training exercises in history later this month, many Bastrop residents might suspect a secret Obama plot to spy on them, confiscate their guns and ultimately establish martial law in one of America’s proudly free conservative states.

They are not “nuts and wackos. They are concerned citizens, and they are patriots,” Ellison said of his suspicious neighbors. “Obama has really painted a portrait in the minds of many conservatives that he is capable of this sort of thing.”

It's Obama's fault anyway.  Never mind military exercises under the previous president were no problem whatsoever.

Here in the soft, green farmlands east of Austin, some say the answer is simple: “The truth is, this stems a fair amount from the fact that we have a black president,” said Terry Orr, who was Bastrop’s mayor from 2008 to 2014.

Orr said he strongly disagrees with those views, and he supports Jade Helm. But he said a significant number of people in town distrust Obama because they think he is primarily concerned with the welfare of blacks and “illegal aliens.”

“People think the government is just not on the side of the white guy,” Orr said.

Bastrop’s current mayor, Kenneth Kesselus, who also supports Jade Helm, agrees. Kesselus said the distrust is due in part to a sense that “things aren’t as good as they used to be,” especially economically. “The middle class is getting squeezed and they’ve got to take it out on somebody, and Obama is a great target.”

These ideas didn't just magically appear out of a vacuum.  Republican candidates have been saying this publicly about the Obama administration for seven years now, and surprise, people believe it.

Dock Jackson, 62, an African American who has been on the Bastrop City Council for 24 years, grew up when the town was still segregated, literally by railroad tracks. Today, Bastrop is 34 percent Hispanic and 8 percent black, and a wonderful place to live, he said, a place where the races generally get along.

But the Jade Helm backlash has been a “red flag” that our county “still has a lot of things they need to come to terms with,” Jackson said, including the anger and disrespect being directed at the president.

At a recent family reunion at a Bastrop community center, Mark Peterson, who is black, said he has been “shocked” by what he views as racist undertones in much of the objection to Jade Helm.

“What I hate to hear most is, ‘We want to take our country back.’ This is still your country. Where did it go?” said Peterson, 42, a technology manager for a financial firm in Austin. “If it were any other president but Obama, it would not be an issue.”

The politics of racial resentment, that white America is being destroyed by a black President, has been part and parcel of the GOP years now (and several decades in the South).  This is all they have left.

StupidiNews!

• One person was killed and four injured in the collapse of an ice cave in Washington State's Mount Baker National Forest.
• New York City will pay $330,000 to settle lawsuits stemming from a police pepper spray incident during Occupy Wall Street protests in September 2011.
• Greek PM Alexis Tsipras will present proposals today at an emergency eurozone summit in Brussels, in what is largely seen at Greece's last chance to keep the euro currency.
• China has halted trading on a total of nearly 750 stocks to prevent panic selling as the Shanghai Composite Index has dropped 28% since June 12.
• Microsoft has rebranded its Xbox Music service as Groove in order to keep up with Apple Music's introduction this month.

Last Call For The Man We Thought He Was

So yes, turns out Bill Cosby is an admitted sex criminal after all, and really is the person the dozens of women who have come forward to say he's awful say he is.

Comedian Bill Cosby testified in 2005 that he had obtained Quaaludes with the intent of giving the sedatives to young women in order to have sex with them, according to court documents unsealed on Monday.

Cosby, 77, made the admission during testimony in a civil case brought by a former Temple University employee, Andrea Constand, who alleged that Cosby tricked her into taking drugs before he sexually assaulted her.

The case was settled for an undisclosed sum in 2006 but the documents in the case were unsealed on Monday after the Associated Press went to court.

Cosby's lawyers had argued that the documents would cause severe embarrassment to the comedian-actor, who is best known for playing lovable father figure Dr. Cliff Huxtable on the hit TV comedy series "The Cosby Show" in the 1980s and 1990s.

A representative for Cosby did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

More than 40 women have come forward in the past year alleging Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them in incidents dating back decades. His attorneys have consistently denied the allegations.

Can  we stop with the defense of the guy now?  He was, frankly, completely indefensible before, but now under his own admission he's a criminal and a rapist.  Eventually he'll get justice, I'm thinking, but at this point the damage has been done time and time again.

It's infuriating, and yet we know that he's far from the only one.

Darth Nader Strikes Back

It wouldn't be a Democratic presidential primary season without Ralph Nader showing up to depress the vote at best and at worst commit outright sabotage the Democrats in favor of the GOP like he did in 2000.  It seems 2016 will be no different. 

"I have always preferred the ink-and-paper, written letter method of communicating with elected officials,” writes Ralph Nader, consumer advocate and former presidential candidate, who has been writing letters to American politicians, with some success, for more than 50 years.

But he’s been disappointed with the last two administrations. “Rhetoric by both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama would have you think that these presidents encourage and support citizens sharing their opinions with their commander in chief,” he writes in a new collection of his correspondences, Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015. But “once delivered to the White House, my letters could not penetrate the multi-layered White House bubble.” Perhaps, Nader says, if presidents these days didn’t spending so much time raising money, waging unnecessary wars and taking photo ops with sports stars, they might find more time to engage with a concerned citizenry.

Perhaps if Nader hadn't screwed the country in 2000 and cost Al Gore the state of Florida and the White House, we wouldn't need to have this conversation at all.  Here's just a taste of how much of a condescending asshole Nader has been to President Obama in particular:

Dear President Obama,

Little did your school boy chums in Hawaii know, watching you race up and down the basketball court, how prescient they were when they nicknamed you “Barry O’Bomber.”

Little did your fellow Harvard Law Review editors, who elected you to lead that venerable journal, ever imagine that you could be a president who chronically violates the Constitution, federal statutes, international treaties and the separation of power at depths equal to or beyond the George W. Bush regime.

Nor would many of the voters who elected you in 2008 have conceived that your foreign policy would rely so much on brute military force at the expense of systemically waging peace. Certainly, voters who knew your background as a child of Third World countries, a community organizer, a scholar of constitutional law and a critic of the Bush/Cheney years, never would have expected you to favor the giant warfare state so pleasing to the military-industrial complex.

Now, as if having learned nothing from the devastating and costly aftermaths of the military invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, you’re beating the combustible drums to attack Syria—a country that is no threat to the U.S. and is embroiled in complex civil wars under a brutal regime.

This time, however, you may have pushed for too many acts of war. Public opinion and sizable numbers of members of both parties in Congress are opposed. These lawmakers oppose bombing Syria in spite of your corralling the cowardly leaders of both parties in the Congress.

Never forget that Nader's 97,000 votes in Florida, most taken from Gore, when George W. Bush won the state by just over 500 votes is the reason George W. Bush was elected we ended up in Iraq, Afghanistan, and oh yeah the worst recession in 80 years.

So when this asshole starts running off at the mouth, remember he's why we got Dubya in the first place.

Tyranny Of The Majority Update

A pretty disturbing poll from Rasmussen: in the wake of June's Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and same-sex marriage, a third of Americans now believe that judicial branch should be able to be ignored. 

Following last week’s controversial U.S. Supreme Court rulings on Obamacare and gay marriage, voters believe more strongly that individual states should have the right to turn their backs on the federal courts.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 33% of Likely U.S. Voters now believe that states should have the right to ignore federal court rulings if their elected officials agree with them. That’s up nine points from 24% when we first asked this question in February. Just over half (52%) disagree, down from 58% in the earlier survey. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Perhaps even more disturbing is that the voters who feel strongest about overriding the federal courts – Republicans and conservatives - are those who traditionally have been the most supportive of the Constitution and separation of powers. During the Obama years, however, these voters have become increasingly suspicious and even hostile toward the federal government.

Fifty percent (50%) of GOP voters now believe states should have the right to ignore federal court rulings, compared to just 22% of Democrats and 30% of voters not affiliated with either major party. Interestingly, this represents a noticeable rise in support among all three groups.

Fifty percent (50%) of conservative voters share this view, but just 27% of moderates and 15% of liberals agree.

Half of Republicans and half of conservatives no longer believe in the federal judicial branch as a check or balance to the other two branches.  I'm betting you'd find even higher numbers among these same groups that the executive branch should be ignored if the mob of WE THE PEOPLE is large enough.

This line of thinking should be terrifying, because we went through it 150 years ago at the cost of hundreds of thousands dead and a war that split the nation.

But we're at the point where tens of millions of Americans no longer believe their government is legitimate simply because they disagree with it.  That's not how a representative democracy is supposed to work. It is however a recipe for another disastrous period in American history and one of our two major political parties is now openly advocating for such conflict.

Increasingly I think we're heading for some dark days ahead.