Did you hear the one about how Romney met with a supersecretive billionaire who had a dead man in his tub?

When, I wonder, did it become de rigeur for presidential candidates of this country to go abroad and wow the foreign crowds (if they can; there are disconcerting signs that sometimes they can't?)

Mitt Romney is in the middle of a tour that involves the U.K., which is what we are supposed to call England when we are being political, Israel, because Republicans now must kowtow to Israel in person rather than simply at AIPAC fundraisers, and Poland?

Why is Romney going to Poland? I'm not the only person to ask that question -- The Atlantic did, too, and answered the question with "missile defense" and "Polish-Americans":

Polish-American voters: Romney may be hoping to score points with American voters of Polish extraction, who happen to be concentrated in many of the Midwestern states that could be crucial to his campaign. As of the 2000 Census, the state with the largest proportion of Polish voters was Wisconsin, with a nearly 10 percent Polish-American population; Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire were also in the top 10, and Ohio had more than 400,000 Polish Americans. These white ethnic Catholic voters are the classic Reagan Democrats who have soured on Obama, and whom Romney is trying to capture.

Remember when McCain chose Palin to run for VP because he thought women would vote for her solely because she's a woman?  Remember when Dick Cheney just a few days ago openly acknowledged that the GOP ought to pay attention to sex and ethnicity in picking a VP? Now, the GOP thinks you will vote for Romney if (A) you have Polish heritage and (B) he goes to Poland.

That might we the worst Polish joke ever told: How many Polish people does it take to convince a Polish-American to pay attention to nothing but where Mitt Romney went on his summer vacation when it comes time to vote?

Romney's campaign swing has more to do with the Olympics and fundraising than foreign policy; his horse was taking part in Rhythmic Horse Gymnastics, and he was meeting bankers at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London.  Among his guests, there?  Louis Bacon, founder of Moore Capital Management and hedge fund billionaire, and Karl Peterson, head of European operations for the Texas Pacific Group, a private equity firm.

(There was also a Bain Capital manager, in case you were wondering.)

Louis Bacon is described in some places as "super-secretive," so he and Romney probably traded some gripes about how the public always demands to know where a presidential candidate is squirreling away his offshore income to avoid taxes.

A piece on Louis Bacon in February  by CNN Money says Bacon doesn't want to reveal details of his finances (SOUND FAMILIAR?) as required by the Dodd-Frank law; Bacon is so loathe to provide legally-required disclosures that he might close up shop entirely.

Bacon's company was fined -- $25,000,000, one of the largest fines ever -- for failing to supervise traders who were manipulating markets.  (Romney's meeting with Bacon comes in London, which is LIBOR-Gate central).  Another of Bacon's traders was arrested two years ago in insider trading scandals.  And Bacon had a guy die in his hot tub in the Bahamas-- but it's okay, CNN Money points out, because the crooked people working for Bacon were cheating mostly for their own gain, and the dead guy wasn't Bacon's fault, even if he was decomposed by the time anybody reported it.

Bacon's secrecy appears to be legendary in the industry, so you didn't hear much about how JPMorgan's London Whale hurt Moore Capital, Bacon's company, with the risky trading that somehow still is allowed under regulations that are supposed to ban risky trading. But you were able to learn, in CNNMoney, that annually Bacon's assistant negotiates an allowance with Bacon's children, and once they come to terms, each child is invited to a "sit-down" chat with Bacon.  (Bacon told CNN Money the story was erroneous:

"I strongly disagree with this characterization. My longtime assistant has assisted me in collating financial records of my kids in order to come up with a budget upon which I base their allowances after my meeting with them, the kids. She has also helped in actually paying for their bills when there have been issues and straightened out bank accounts given the headaches of dealing with banks in two countries in two currencies."

He said, and didn't bother correcting the "sit-down" part, so far as I could see.

So while I was wondering when presidential candidates started having to campaign in Europe, and The Atlantic was explaining that the GOP thinks its voters care about nothing beyond where Grandpa came from and did Mitt go there, was the press bothering to report on Mitt's ultrasecret meetings with UltraSecret Hedge Fund Billionaire Louis Bacon?

Nope.

But aren't you glad you know what Mitt thinks of the London Olympics? Let's get votin'!

Treat your in-laws well.

I wish I'd known about this a month ago!

A month ago, my in-laws celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, and we did all the usual stuff for them: threw them a party, invited the kids, apologized for the way the kids trashed the party, you know: the usual.

And we got them... I don't know. Something. A frame, perhaps? Who knows?

What we COULD have gotten them, if we'd known, was one of the photo albums from Photo Productions -- but they're more than just photo albums, they're professional quality photobooks, suitable not just for weddings or anniversaries or other special occasions, but even used as portfolios for professional photographers and artists.

Each photo album from Photo Productions ("Premium Photobooks, Not Premium Prices") is higher quality than the do-it-yourself ones you'll find online, but they don't cost all that much more (if at all), and there are lots of different varieties available.

In fact, it's not too late to get the in-laws one of these -- we could give it to them for Christmas. (Am I the first blogger to mention the Christmas Season, 2012? PRIZES ALL AROUND!)

SUNDAYS SUNDAYS SUNDAYS

SUNDAYS SUNDAYS SUNDAYS is new; each week I'll feature, on all my blogs, the latest post from one of my blogs.

Today's is the latest from Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!, an ongoing sci-fi/erotic/serial/humor/something/something else/etc. story that follows Rachel, who was just a waitress in New York, kind of, until her Octopus told her to walk South.  There, she fell in love with Brigitte, got attacked by demons from Hell, kidnapped by tiny bubbles, and eventually found out that she might be not only the Queen of The Lesbian Zombies, but also the key to deciding who's going to win in the Battle of 73 Dimensions and open up Heaven.

Your typical story, in other words.  Here's the latest installment:

* * * * *

Part 22D: You know what this story needs? ANOTHER RACHEL.

Things like is Rachel okay and let's get the hell outta here and back to Valhalla go right out of my mind and I stare at the Mosaic, as do the Valkyries and Target A, who has this gray, pale look about him but I don't notice much because seriously, this Mosaic thing talked.

"Free me," it says now, and we all look at each other, Czaranya and me and the other Valkyrie, but Target A is just shaking and drooling and Rachel is lying there woozily.

"From... um... from what?" I ask, taking the lead.

There is a shimmer in the golden squares that make up the Mosaic and it sort of ripples and shudders a little.

"From this wall," it says.

I have been looking more closely at it and I've realized it's made up of little squares and that the squares are chips, like the kind that are put in people.  Not even like the kind that are put in people. They are the kind that are put in people, on Earth, to let them Share, which is sort of like telepathy but not, as I understand it.

"Who are you?" I ask the Mosaic.

"I'm Rachel," it says.

I look down at Rachel, and think another one?  That's kind of a natural thought, maybe, when you are one of perhaps thousands of clones of one woman, and your whole life has been geared towards proving you are the best of those thousands and then the one that you are the clone of shows up suddenly and not only do you not mind that she's there and you might just have become totally irrelevant but you also fall in love with her.

There's a lot of Rachel's, is my point.

"You are not," Czaranya says, and her frown tells me she's been trying to communicate with the thing telepathically but had to speak. Valkyries hate talking.  Czaranya points to the Rachel on the ground, the one I'm kneeling over.  "That is Rachel."

"I am Rachel," the Mosaic says.  Then a shimmery thing happens and it says "I am Sonja."  The shimmer, again, and "I am Darlene."  Shimmer: "Angela." Shimmer: "Doris."

Now I'm backing away a little as the shimmers get faster and the names get faster, each one said in a different voice, each one clearly a different person:  "LisaJenniferRebeccaAlisonBreeAshleyKellyGretchenAlyssaKaren" it is going on and then there is a flash of light from all of them and it says

"I am Rachel" and things seem to calm down.

For the moment.

"What are you?" I ask.

"I am Rachel," it says.

Target A suddenly wails "It's true! They were all trapped and it's true!" and he goes even more pale and makes a gurgle sound and lunges at the cabinet, trying to I think close it up but Czaranya elbows into him and he falls to the side, clutching at the cabinet door.  The cabinet itself starts to fall forward towards Czaranya and she pulls back but it falls down onto her, trapping her halfway underneath it.  It's nothing for her, I'm not worried about her because the cabinet is really light and the fact that it fell on Czaranya means that it didn't fall directly on Rachel, who was just starting to sit up.

Then a bunch of things happen.  Czaranya starts to lift the cabinet off of her, but Target A is trying to get at it, too, and there's a glow of light from underneath it as Czaranya lifts it up and as I start to try to see if Rachel is okay, she's rolling away from the cabinet and towards Czaranya.  Before I realize what's happened, Rachel has grabbed Czaranya's spear and has pulled it towards her, the spear crackling with the energy that's supposed to kill anyone who's not a Valkyrie but dares to touch it, and the energy is dancing all over Rachel's body and making this fierce acrid smoke.

"Rachel!" I yell.  "Let it go!"

But she doesn't, and she turns the spear head towards the Mosaic, touches it, and the energy leaps through the gridwork pattern and crackles around it and there is an explosion.  The cabinet is gone, and standing before us is an identical copy of Rachel, only instead of Rachel, or even me, she's basically this woman that looks like us, exactly, only she's made entirely of gold, and her skin is patterned in a tiny grid of golden squares, all over, making her look like a golden mirror ball that has been stretched into a beautiful woman's shape, and her eyes are dark and hollow, and her hair, somehow, is both golden and flowing and slinky and also made of tiny little squares, too.

"I am Rachel," she says again.

We're all just sort of staring there, and Rachel's still holding the spear, which is going nuts, there are blue and gold bolts of energy just arcing around the entire room, and Target A has to duck for it and crawl away, and the horse is backing out and Czaranya, I see, reaches for the spear but then Rachel-Mosaic raises her hands and says

"ENOUGH!"

and they are gone:

Her,

Rachel,

the spear,

and Czaranya, and the other Valkyrie who I didn't even know her name.

It's just me and Target A.

We stare at each other in the dim light of the workshop for a second, the stench of dead bodies and energy and fighting clouding our senses.

Then, the horse sticks his head in the door and says "I think you better see this."

Want to read more? Click here to go to the story online, at the beginning.

Or click HERE to go to Scribd and download the entire story for free!

Parsing The ObamaCare Decision, Part Four

And so we come to the Opinion itself, the Obamacare Decision that allows something to be both a tax and not a tax at the same time; in his (apparent, supposed) desire to avoid a 5-4 decision that would make the Court seem "partisan," Chief Justice John Roberts parsed words finer than CERN parses atoms, and ended up delivering a 4-4-1 decision that has its cake and eats it, too, deciding that what Congress said matters only when Roberts decides it matters.

Or, to put it as the Syllabus of the opinion -- the part of the opinion not written by the Justices themselves -- puts it:

The Affordable Care Act describes the “[s]hared responsibilitypayment” as a “penalty,” not a “tax.” That label is fatal to the application of the Anti-Injunction Act. ... In answering that constitutional question, this Court follows a functional approach,“[d]isregarding the designation of the exaction, and viewing its substance and application.” ...Such an analysis suggests that the shared responsibilitypayment may for constitutional purposes be considered a tax.

 The ObamaCare Decision begins with such Twistifications (the term supposedly used by Thomas Jefferson to describe John Marshall's manner of deciding cases on narrow but far-reaching grounds) and moves into limitations on Congress' power and expansions of the Court's power, all things little marked by commentators and politicians hellbent on proclaiming all kinds of things about the Court, the decision, and the status of American Democracy (TM).

There are 193 pages of words in the Decision; I don't think I'll get to them all today.  But I'll start with Roberts declaring fealty to judicial conservatism and balancing Lochner-era thought with what sounds like the beginning of an opinion upholding States' Rights:

We do not consider whether the Act embodies sound policies. That judgment is entrusted to the Nation’s elected leaders. We ask only whether Congress has the power under the Constitution to enactthe challenged provisions.

In our federal system, the National Government possesses only limited powers; the States and the people retain the remainder. Nearly two centuries ago, Chief Justice Marshall observed that “the question respecting the extent of the powers actually granted” to the Federal Government “is perpetually arising, and will probably continue to arise, as long as our system shall exist.” McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 405 (1819). In this case we must again determine whether the Constitution grants Congress powers it now asserts, but which many States and individuals believe it does not possess. Resolving this controversy requires us to examine both the limits of the Government’s power, and our own limited role in policing those boundaries. 

I do not believe that Roberts believes the Court has a "limited" role in policing the boundaries of the government's power; his decision allowing the Court to say what power it is Congress is exercising -- or not, depending on the challenge -- greatly expands the Court's "limited" role.

Roberts then, on only page 9, further limits the powers of the federal government, discussing the average person's view that the limits on the federal government come chiefly from the "Bill of Rights":

These affirmative prohibitions come into play, however, only where the Government possesses authority to act in the first place. If no enumerated power authorizes Congress to pass a certain law, that law may not be enacted, even if it would not violate any of the express prohibitions in the Bill of Rights or elsewhere in the Constitution.

Did Roberts actually preserve the Lochner area? Or is he using ObamaCare to set the stage, Marshall-esquely, for a recursion to State primacy in the future?  Consider:

The Framers thus ensured that powers which “in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives,liberties, and properties of the people” were held by governments more local and more accountable than a distant federal bureaucracy. [That is, the States.]  The Federalist No. 45, at 293 (J. Madison). The independent power of the States also serves as a check on the power of the Federal Government: “By denying any one government complete jurisdiction over all the concerns of public life, federalism protects the liberty of the individual from arbitrary power.” Bond v. United States, 564 U. S. ___, ___ (2011) (slip op., at 9–10). 

 The first 10 pages of the opinion, so far, all written by Roberts, read like a Wordsworth Ode to the power of the States, and Roberts in that last quote cited not to a Founding Father but to an Anthony Kennedy opinion from 2011, in which the Court unanimously held that a woman convicted of violating a law passed to help enact a chemical weapons' treaty could challenge the validity of the law on 10th Amendment grounds -- the 10th Amendment being the "tautology" that reserves to the States powers not given the federal government.  In that case, Bond v. United States, the Court unanimously held that the woman could challenge the statute on 10th Amendment grounds (to try to avoid conviction for a crime), but the Court allowed challenges to be brought on broad grounds -- challenging not just whether a statute was enacted by Congress without an authorizing power from the Constitution, but also whether a statute simply violated federalism --

The individual, in a proper case, can assert injury from governmental action taken in excess of the authority that federalism defines. Her rights in this regard do not belong to a State.

That holding ruled that Bond could assert an individual right to federalism -- a right we each possess to keep the federal government limited and hence maximize our freedoms. As Roberts goes on, in Bond:

The federal system rests on what might at first seem a counterintuitive insight, that “freedom is enhanced by the creation of two governments, not one.” ... The Framers concluded that allocation of powers between the National Government and the States enhances freedom, first by protecting the integrity of the governments themselves, and second by protecting the people, from whom all governmental powers are derived.

Federalism has more than one dynamic. It is true that the federal structure serves to grant and delimit the prerogatives and responsibilities of the States and the National Government vis-à-vis one another. The allocation of powers in our federal system preserves the integrity, dignity, and residual sovereignty of the States. The federal balance is, in part, an end in itself, to ensure that States function as political entities in their own right.

And we each, according to Roberts, and Bond, have a right to that federalism, a right apparently embodied in the Constitution because it is not enumerated anywhere.

I spent the first three parts of this series commenting in large part on how much damage people do when they ascribe to the Court political motivations; the fact that the Obamacare Decision seems not so much concerned with whether ObamaCare is a constitutional law and far more concerned with further defining Roberts' view of America as a country where States are co-equal participants with the federal government -- if not the primary unit of government -- is not a political viewpoint, it is a judicial viewpoint.  Roberts, it looks like, feels that States have been underserved in the modern era, and has been busily adjusting the role of the Court to have the power to decide what powers Congress used to enact laws, while also granting to individuals a variety of rights that are not expressly delineated in the Constitution.

Make money online using a new currency trading system.

Are you into currency trading?  I don't understand it much, myself, but I know a lawyer who used to do some currency trading for fun.  He used to explain to me  the system that he used to make money online, and I won't pretend to understand it.

But whatever system he was using, it wasn't the new "Binary Money Machine System," because that system has only just come out.

If you do trade currency, you'll want to read up on this new way of trading; what I understand is that it's set up to let you not have to sit and monitor exchanges for hours, but instead checking in from time to time and exchange to exchange, using only a few hours instead of days to profit from a trade.

As for me, about the only currency trading I do is when Mr Bunches or Mr F ask to go to the dollar store -- where I trade currency for toys.  Get it?

Parsing the ObamaCare Decision, Part Three

I broke down yesterday and read a reprint of some article from The Atlantic, I think, in which the author, whoever he was, talked about how Chief Justice John Roberts had as one of his goals in deciding the Obamacare case the preservation of the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, an interesting topic to think about:  Should a judge care if a decision "undermines the legitimacy" of the Court, if the decision is, in fact, the right one?

And can the right decision undermine the legitimacy of an institution? 

Assuming, of course, that the decision on Obamacare was the right one, which I do not think, at present, that it was, but, of course, I haven't read the decision yet, and so I have to withhold judgment.

The idea that the Supreme Court's decision on Obamacare could, or could not, determine whether the Court was viewed as legitimate begs the question: by whom?  Consider this: Most commentators prior to the decision were suggesting that the Roberts Court would uphold Obamacare not because of the law's being constitutional, at all, but because the Court wanted to preserve it's credibility, to keep people from doubting the Court's role in our society...

...which, of course, is exactly the kind of thinking that delegitimizes the Court -- to suggest that the Court would make a political decision (political, in the broad sense of making decisions to appeal to a broad base of people, and as opposed to judicial) to avoid being seen as political is what leads people to protest the Court and try to sway the justices' opinions through public demonstrations and pressure (such as when Obama suggests that a ruling against his law would be illegitimate). 

So those commentators were part of the problem, giving people the notion that the Court rules on something other than the facts before it and the issues of law before it -- and can the public be blamed if the 'experts' tell them something and they believe it?

And they persist, in that idea -- that Atlantic article continues the idea that the Obamacare decision was made, by Roberts alone, really,  not because it was right but because it was expedient, that Roberts made the decision he did not because he truly believed that the law was based on the taxing power, but because he truly believed that siding with the liberals today would mean that later on they would side with him or he would have political cover for doing other things.

That is a political act, and The Atlantic and other commentators are feeding into the notion that the Court is a political body, one that can engage in horse-trading and consider the ramifications of its decisions on public policy, which is a twistification (I got the word from The Atlantic article) of what the Court (the Courts) are supposed to do. 

Courts ought not be concerned with whether a law is a good or bad one; that is what legislatures are for.  Courts ought not be concerned with whether the public views them as legitimate or not; Courts are in fact the bulwark against public opinion.

We've started twistifying what courts are for, and the public now has the perception that the Courts are in fact a superlegislature, sitting above the other two branches and determining not just if something is legal, or not, but if something is right or not. 

But the public didn't get that perception on its own.  It got that belief from the "experts" who talk about the Court, experts who are anything but because those experts themselves have a wrongheaded view of the Court.

Every time some talking head on TV suggests that Roberts' decision -- his unilateral upholding of the Obamacare law -- was based on something other than Roberts' sincere belief that the law was a proper exercise of taxing authority, that 'expert' does damage to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

It may be a mere pretext that the Court does not find itself influenced by political beliefs -- but if so, it is a valuable pretext that we must maintain, because the more we suggest that the Courts are swayed by the same concerns that affect the legislature and the executive branch, the more we make people believe that, and the more people believe that, the less they are willing to believe in the rule of law and the more they will believe only in the rule of a current political party.

We in America have, at all levels, a degree of trust in our government that is unprecedented around the world.  That degree of trust comes from the longstanding idea that we have a system of "checks and balances," that there is a part of the government that is responsive to our every whim, and that there is a part of the government that is not.

Experts talking about the Roberts' decision are undermining that latter belief -- and doing so on the basis of their own imagination, since they do not know why Roberts ruled the way he (and he alone) did.  Those "experts" are a worse threat to democracy than all the Eric Cantors of the world.

It's a vicious circle, really.

Time for another update on the cool stuff I found on the Think Geek website, where every day they post tons and tons of new stuff that people like me -- people who are cool enough to admit they like geeky stuff, love.

New stuff like the wristband charger for gadgets:

I'm constantly running out of power on my phone, Kindle Fire, and the boys' iPad, and the problem with that is that you can't use it easily while it's plugged into a wall.  But this wristband charger solves that because it has a cord that only needs to stretch from your wrist to the thing you're holding, so if you're, say, playing Plants v Zombies and the power starts to go down, slap on the wristband and plus in the Kindle Fire and keep on playing.

That's an awesome idea, and I can't wait to get me one of those so that I never have to stop being entertained again while my devices charge up.

Think Geek is full of stuff like that and Millenium Falcon cufflinks and Firefly t-shirts and more, but that's not all it's good for.  There's also promos and coupons and discounts on things you need, like a Go To My PC promo code that'll let you try out that service without investing too much money, or Nordstrom Coupons to save you money on the other stuff you need.

I seriously have this website bookmarked and I check it every day, looking for things I want or can give to my friends who like those kinds of things, too -- so you ought to do the same. If only because that way, you'll always have fresh ideas for getting me cool gifts.  You want to get me cool stuff, don't you?  I mean, geez, I'd get you a present, if I had any money.  Which I don't.  Because I spent it all at Geek Alerts.  Which is why I need you to get me presents, now.  Because there's still stuff I want.

Parsing Out The Obamacare Decision, Part Two

I haven't read hardly any of the "news" coverage over the Obamacare decision, in part because almost immediately, most major news organizations revealed themselves to be incapable of properly reporting on the legal system (as Stephen Colbert noted, many of the reporters were surprised to learn that there was more than one page to the decision), but that lack of understanding about how the judicial system works is not limited to reporters: politicians and "regular folks" seemingly have no concept of how the courts are supposed to work, at all.

I've noted before that protesting outside of the Supreme Court appears to be either ignorantly or willfully misunderstanding how the Courts are to work: the role of a lifetime appointment for a judicial officer (all federal judges are appointed for their lifetime, including Supreme Court justices) is to insulate them from public pressure and let them make decisions that are unpopular... but correct.

(The Obamacare decision was not both of those things).

The longer the term granted an office under our Constitution, the more the person holding that office was to be buffered from the whims of the public and the impositions of the factions.  That is why all tax bills must start in the House of Representatives, after all: because with two-year terms, Reps are the most subject to public pressures and therefore least likely to raise taxes without a very good reason. 

There were other failsafes built into the system to remove the influence of the short-minded, easily-swayed public, but we've removed many of them.  Senators, with their 6-year terms, were to be picked by state legislatures, and so would be answerable to the control of the States, not the public directly.  Presidents, originally unlimited in their terms, were to be picked by smart people -- electors -- we would pick to make a decision for us.  We got rid of both of those protections, and are now surprised the the Senate and the Presidency are battered by the currents of public opinion.  We then decided that no president can be elected more than twice, thereby creating a lame duck for the final four years of the President's term of office: A president can use his popularity (and that of his programs) to get a second term, or to threaten Congress into having to run against programs, but what of a President once he gets that second term?  Has there been a second term of a presidency since 1950 that was good?

(Obama is already setting the bar low for Obama 2.0: if re-elected, he said recently, he will make sure that we escalate the "War On Drugs"... presumably by dusting off all those Just Say No banners Nancy left in the closet.)


I digress, but only a little, because one point to take away from the Obamacare decision is that it marks a low-water moment for conservatives and reporters in more respects than just "we lost" and "we didn't understand."  In the run-up to what should be called the "It's A Tax!" Day,  a great many commentators and reporters speculated about how the Roberts court would rule -- would they undermine the legitimacy of the court (not my term) by ruling against Obamacare, making a partisan decision? some wondered, while others said that ruling for Obamacare would mean that the Court would be free to make extremely conservative decisions in the future without seeming partisan.

Which is to say: "distinguished" commentators and court-watchers and lawyers and jurists all suspected that the Court would rule not on the merits of Obamacare but instead would rule with an eye towards how the Supreme Court was viewed and how that would affect future decisions.

Which is to say: those people viewed the Court not as a judicial body, but as a political body, concerned with how the public perceives it and wondering whether it can do some horse-trading and logrolling: we'll give you Obamacare but then watch out, people who don't want the 10 Commandments on Courthouse steps!

The media's feeding the public that idea -- the Court can be swayed by your opinions!-- helps fuel the protests outside the Court, protests joined by people like John McCain, who protested the Citizens United decision in hopes that he could sway the Court to rule in favor of his law, and if Senators don't understand how the Courts are supposed to work, then how can we expect the media or the citizen to understand that?

I haven't even started reading the decision yet, and I'm upset with it and the Court and our society; that's how bad things have gotten.

This warped view of the Court isn't as warped as it might seem.  I pointed out that originally John Marshall granted to the Supreme Court a power not found in the Constitution:  it is emphatically the province and duty of the Court to say what the law is, he said, more or less, and in doing so made the Constitution come alive with inherent powers and a little less tension between the parties.  Did the Framers intend that the US Supreme Court be the arbiter of what is Constitutional?

Nevermind: It's enough that we do, because someone has to say "This law is constitutional or not" and our society has decided that the Court can do it; we've accepted that premise, on the right and the left (and everyone is on the right or the left, even you people who say you're not; claiming to be moderate is being afraid to admit you have a position) and so we have granted the Court the power to be the final arbiter, even when we don't really think the Court should be the final arbiter (see, e.g., Bush v. Gore, 2000).

A long time ago, I asked a conservative fellow student of mine who had filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate distribution of fees by a student government whether she had first gone to the legislature -- the student government itself, or the state legislature -- to seek to pass a law outlawing the complained-of distributions.

"No," she told me.

"Isn't running to the Courts to get a law overturned what conservatives dislike about liberals?" I asked her.

She tried to assure me things were different in her case, but were they?   

Isn't running to the Courts to get a law overturned what conservatives dislike about liberals?  Well, sure -- but when the liberals do stuff conservatives don't like, what are they supposed to do? Run for office and win and vote the law back?  That takes time!  And so they sue.  The NRA started suing a while back.  Conservatives groups began suing to overturn abortion rulings.  Right-wing groups sued to overturn McCain-Feingold, and now a bunch of conservatives sued to overturn Obamacare, all because judicial activism isn't activism if it's the outcome you want.

Justice Potter Stewart knew pornography when he saw it; to paraphrase him, we could say that when it comes to judicial activism in the courts, it ain't pornography if we like what we're looking at.

And so we come to the caption of the Obamacare case and the syllabus, the first things I noted about it:  there are three cases combined here, and the Court notes that the opponents of the law include twenty-six states, some individuals, and the National Federation of Independent Business.

Do you know why businesses provide health insurance as a benefit to their employees?  Because of taxes, ironically enough.  Back in the olden days when businesses weren't so overburdened by regulation that they couldn't possibly think about creating jobs, the taxes were higher and it became difficult to pay employees enough money to reward them properly.  Clever businesses were looking for ways to pay their employees without incurring a higher tax on that payroll, and they hit on the idea of providing health insurance as a benefit: they would pay the benefits for the employee and that way the employee would not be taxed on that payment.  So the business could provide an incentive for its workers, who then would have more money in their own pocket by not paying the premiums for their health insurance.

We never think about the unintended consequences of our policies.  No other insurance is routinely provided by an employer.  As an employer myself, I'm not looking to offer car insurance as a benefit, or homeowner's insurance.  But we provide health insurance, which meant that a few years back, when the premiums went up, we had to sit down and have our office manager become an expert on health insurance so she could summarize for us what the options were so we, a select few lawyers in charge of 35 people, could decide what insurance plan would best suit them.

Let's hope we got it right! 

I'm almost out of time today, so let me preface the next segment of this series by noting this:

The Supreme Court didn't really decide that Obamacare was okay, not the way we think it did.

What!?!?!?!?  More on that later.

 

Payday loans are becoming more commonplace?

I read an article the other day that said that some regular ol' banks were getting into the payday loan business, only they don't always call it that -- when banks do it, "payday loans" are called "short-term loans" or "microloans," but however you want to slice the rutabaga, it's still a payday loan.
Payday loans, if done correctly, aren't a bad thing. A typical payday loan might be needed because of an unforeseen emergency -- a car breaks down, a hot water heater doesn't do it's job -- and in that case, it's tough to come up with money fast and for only a little while. Most banks will require that you borrow more than a couple of hundred dollars, and they'll make you wait -- wait while they do credit checks and wait while they check out your background and wait while their underwriters get things underwritten (whatever THAT means!) -- but when you get your payday loan online you can avoid some of the hassle. And hassle is what you want to avoid, isn't it? You're already having enough hassles -- that's why you need a short-term payday loan. So the new payday loans offered by http://www.paydayloansbitu.com/ may be the right option for you: quick decisions and short verification procedures mean that you can focus on getting your situation corrected and getting on with your life. I always warn people -- even if you're getting your payday loans online, don't borrow more than you absolutely need, check out the lender and make sure it's a reputable one, and pay the loans back promptly -- those are the same warnings I give anyone borrowing money from anyone. But payday loans can serve a valuable need, and if used properly open a whole world of financial options to people the banks don't want to help out.

Parsing out the Obamacare decision, Part One

I heard about the Obamacare -- we should just call it that, and get Obama to finally start taking credit for the law that does more to protect people than any prior law ever -- decision while I was standing in the World's Largest McDonald's*

*that claim has not been verified

In Orlando, Florida -- the news had broken several hours before but I had been at a swimming pool several hours before, and so had only just wandered near a television, and heard that the law was upheld.

So I didn't immediately have much information about the decision itself or how it was arrived at; in the two weeks since the decision broke, I have read a lot of coverage and heard a lot of discussions about it but haven't had a chance to sit and think about what the decision means, and, more specifically, whether it was a good or bad thing that the law was upheld, especially given that the reasoning for upholding the law is, let's face it, suspect.

While I don't mind at all that the President said the law isn't a tax and then the Supreme Court upheld it on the basis of it being a tax -- whether the President thinks something is or is not a tax is not in any way the measure of whether a law is constitutional and/or a good idea, those two things being entirely separate concepts in reality, if not in most people's minds, -- I do mind that the Court found it to be a tax, because from the snippets of coverage that I read, the Court was wrong about that: the law almost certainly isn't a tax, and that begs the question of just how the Court reached that conclusion, and whether reaching the so-called right decision via the wrong route is a good or bad thing.

That is, if the ends never justify the means, as they cannot, does it matter that Obamacare was found to be a violation of the Commerce Clause power, an unjustified extension of it (as I suspected it would be so found, rightly), only to then uphold the law on a potentially-specious basis?

What will be the ramifications of a ruling made ostensibly for one purpose but potentially for another?  What will be the outcome of not confronting the question before the Court head-on, so to speak, and instead allowing the Court to slightly twist the law and give itself a little more power?

This has happened once before, at least, in Supreme Court history -- in Marbury v. Madison, remember, where the Court faced a seemingly untenable decision: Order the president to do something he was not going to do, and admit the Court has no power to enforce its orders, or let the President essentially dictate to the Court how the outcome of a case must present itself.

John Marshall, then, famously sidestepped the question by deciding that the Court could strike down laws -- granting the U.S. Supreme Court a power we now take for granted, the power to determine if a law is Constitutional, and a power that is not in the Constitution -- and that has shifted the balance of power in our government, a sea change of 200 years that altered the constituencies of what the founders intended more surely and more subtly than eliminating indirect election of Senators or essentially voiding the Electoral College.

What has happened now thrice in just the past 12 years is a mostly conservative, increasingly activist Supreme Court has determined that it will intervene in state procedures if there is a federal impact (Bush v. Gore), but that it can limit the effect of that ruling by essentially declaring nobody will ever follow it, making that case the first unpublished Supreme Court case, in a way; the Court has then reversed a century of jurisprudence on electoral regulations in Citizens United, and, with Obamacare, has not only declared the outer limits of, and an end to, the Lochner era of free regulation of commerce, but has now declared that taxes are what the Court says they are.

Is that a good thing?

Sure, we have health care -- health care that conservatives, outraged by John Roberts' strange decision won't obey -- but what has the price of that health care been?

I don't know, yet -- but I want to read the opinions and share my thoughts over the next few posts on this subject, so stay tuned.

Ringtones! Get your ringtones!

There's an XKCD comic that says something about how although the author may have done something good or bad or something like that, there is one thing he will never regret when he dies -- that his phone always sounded like a phone.

On the one hand, that may seem kind of admirable: phones sounding like phones, after all, is the natural order of things.

 On the other hand, it's stupid -- phones sound like phones no matter what phones sound like; the only reason we think phones should "ring" is because phones have always rung. If Alexander Graham Bell, when he was stealing the alien technology he would slightly alter and call his own invention (as revealed in my stunning new book "Alexander Graham Bell Stole From The Aliens: How Every Invention Ever Is Explained by Alien Technology We Got From The Roswell Crash In 1945 Because One Of Those Things Was A Time Machine"), had instead made phones "quack," or play Hothouse Flowers' song "Christchurch Bells," we would think THAT is what a phone is supposed to sound like. I think, though, your phone should sound like what you want it to sound like, which is why I'm sharing with you the iphone ringtones app available at that link, there.

 No more boring ringtones! Forget bells and beeps and buzzers -- this app will help you browse over 500,000 ringtones right from your phone, searching by category, name, or other criteria.

And the app lets you use songs from your own library as a ringtone, or even record and customize your own ringtone with the microphone. No more spending on ringtones, and you get the ringtone you want, exactly -- so if you've dreamed of having as your ringtone the neighborhood kids playing Supertramp's "Fool's Overture" on toy instruments, that's finally within your reach (better pay royalties to Supertramp, though).

Reviews of the app say it's better than any other -- intuitive and easy to use and with a "Huge" ringtone bank with new ones added all the time.

So forget XKCD and Alexander Graham Bell: let your phone sound like YOU.

Mitt Romney proves Daniel Tosh wrong.

 

Mitt Romney outsourcing fun to his wife.