Individual mandate unconstitutional?

So says the appeals court.

Court strikes down Obamacare's individual mandate as unconstitutional

And what is the opposed argument in defense of its constitutionality?

Well, back when the flap started, it was this.

Defending the constitutionality of the mandate, the government’s primary argument was that Congress can require everyone to buy health insurance using its power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, because the failure to buy insurance shifts the costs of health care for the uninsured to health care providers, insurance companies, and everyone who does have health insurance.

. . . .

Justice Ginsburg (joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) agreed with the Chief Justice’s bottom line – that the mandate is constitutional under Congress’s ability to tax – even while disagreeing with his Commerce Clause conclusion; those four Justices would have held that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce to pass the mandate. 

Vlad's boy in DC

Trump's latest call with Putin raises more questions than it answers

Per Trump, the real bad guy and corrupt guy and enemy of the US is the president of Ukraine, and not the president of Russia.

That he takes this line is more important and more revealing than the Biden shtick.

He said what?

Joe Biden says he would consider a Republican for his running mate

Doddering off into senility, is he?

Almost as idiotically offensive to the true blue as Clinton's repulsive kiss of the Republican ass, "The era of Big Government is over."

What is Big Government?

The regulatory and welfare state.

The progressive state.

Everything built to tame capitalism and protect everybody who isn't a capitalist since McKinley's day.

Add it to the list

POTUS outs whistleblower.

Trump has now tweeted out the alleged identity of the whistleblower who anonymously accused him of abusing his office in a complaint that has since been broadly corroborated. 

Federal law protects the whistleblower from retaliation and POTUS just outed him.

People are fundamentally good? Americans are fundamentally good?

A mother was sentenced to 7 years in prison for injecting feces into her son's IV during cancer treatment

The Wolcott, Indiana, mother was arrested and charged in 2016 after she used a syringe to inject feces into her son's IV while he was undergoing cancer treatments at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. 

She knowingly placed him "in a situation that endangered the dependent's life or health," Marion County Superior Court documents said.

Alberts said her actions were meant to get her son moved from the intensive care unit to another Riley unit, where she believed "the treatment was better," the documents state.

Her son had been receiving treatment for leukemia since early August 2016 at the hospital, a Marion County police affidavit said. He was released and returned to the hospital a few days later, in early September 2016, with a fever, vomiting and diarrhea, according to the report.

Blood tests of the boy showed organisms that are normally found in feces caused a bacterial infection and sepsis, which an extensive medical evaluation could not to explain.

So, the presidency actually is an entry level job?

AOC for president? The buzz has begun

What, now?

Nah.

In the future, after some years or a decade or so in federal elective office, sure.

A little bit of the cursus honorem is good for a would be president.

Trump derangement syndrome

From the night of the election many of the more committed Dems have cast about for ways to get rid of the Duce, delegitimate his presidency, of even impeach him.

Their venomous hatred has been abundantly obvious to all.

But it is also abundantly obvious the president is exactly the stupid, ignorant thug, the mob boss, the political ass, the crook, the sexual predator, the instinctive racist, and the national disgrace they have always said he is.

And it is equally true that his crimes, at least as bad as Nixon's and in many ways similar to Nixon's, do justify removal from office.

The truth of the complaint that the Big Dog also deserved to be removed from office makes Trump no less worthy of removal.

But it does remind us payback is a bitch.

Dems can be as repulsively partisan as Reps

N.Y. Gov. Cuomo blocks some federal judges from officiating at weddings — because they might be Trump nominees

Payback is a bitch

Joe Scarborough is fine with the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump but he will not let  anyone get away with denying that Clinton, too, committed impeachable offenses.

It wasn't about Lewinsky so much as perjury before congress and in court, suborning perjury, witness tampering, and more.

A whole lot of Democrats in the senate seem to have been as impervious to evidence as today's senate Republicans.

And as unwilling to agree that the offenses involved deserved removal from office.

Like Scarborough, I always loathed the Big Dog.

But I suspect for opposite political reasons, if perhaps for very similar ones related to Clinton as a person, a human being, and a man.

Yes, I'm thinking a whole lot of Republicans believe, like Scarborough, that the Democrats' refusal to remove Bill from office was sheer partisan defiance of his manifest just deserts.

And that may provide them much peace of mind concerning their own current refusal to remove the Duce.

I could see this as a capital crime, if we Americans could be trusted with a death penalty.

A boy missing for more than two years found in the closet of a child pornography suspect

This is just too dangerous and repugnant.

And these leopards don't change their stripes, eh?

Or maybe tigers don't change their spots?

Obama is right, this bitch is wrong, and women and men are innately different.

You're not helping, Obama – just reinforcing myths about men v women

What do people with a byline have that most others don't?

A shitload of totally unjustified self-confidence.

Can we allow the Taliban their own state in which to aid and abet terror attacks, maybe nuke attacks, on the US?

The Israelis have been essentially fighting a forever war against unyielding and unrelenting Arab attacks aimed at their very existence for as long as Israel has existed.

Better a forever war than utter destruction, eh?

The Lessons of the Afghanistan Papers

While the anti-warriors are all gloating, and all, let's hope they don't lose sight of the genuine threat posed by an entire state controlled by as mad an Islamist ideology as that of ISIS, a Muslim terrorist movement we felt the need to deny control of its own state.

These people really and truly would nuke us if they could, and who is to say that with a little help from others who hate us equally and would love to cheaply put us in check they could not actually do it?

Remember the Axis of Nuts?

With all his stupid bluster, Trump has been totally unable to prevent North Korea from become a nuclear power with the actual capability of nuking the continental United States.

And also with his stupid bluster he has provided an occasion for Iran to resume efforts to join the nuclear club with the idea of at least holding the Great Satan in check.

How do we feel about the idea of Iran holding us in check?

Or North Korea, come to that?

The great thing about non-proliferation was that it kept the number of enemy states capable of keeping us in check - and so immune to the reverse - to a very small minimum, none of them actually crazy enough to nuke us in a purely aggressive move.

That moron Trump just absolutely doesn't see it.

There is so much he is just too stupid to see.

Only the top 4 are plutes. And only Bloomberg is not a merely piddling plute

The Net Worth Of Every 2020 Presidential Candidate

The worst thing he is doing is accelerate the destruction of the Amazon rain forest.

Brazil: Bolsonaro in homophobic outburst as corruption scandal swirls

But is it true?

The human hope in God, in Providence, in Karma, or in whatever it is, is that it will all be all right in the end.

The unbroken circle. Universalism. Karma leading everyone home.

That we are not abandoned, that nothing is lost, that no one is broken forever beyond salvation or repair.

And who could plausibly deny that such a thing, or such things, could be true, even absent any particularly convincing picture of what it or they might actually be like?

But are they?

Or is any of them?

Somehow?

a contingentia mundi

What need not exist cannot and would not unless made to do so by something that cannot not exist.

Alternatively, only what cannot not exist can exist without being made to do so by something other than itself that cannot not exist.

A crucial premise in any argument for the existence of God a contingentia mundi.

Contemporary atheism supposes it is false, and that to the contrary contingent things, a whole world of contingent things, or a contingent (possible but not necessary) world can exist without being made to do so by anything necessary.

(Some put the point by saying existence is de trop or absurd.)

Or at any rate they refuse to believe otherwise absent proof.

But if you can prove everything you're going in a circle, someone wise once said.

And anyway nobody can prove most of the philosophically interesting - indeed crucial - claims by which we live.

People who go in for that sort of thing might even claim the thing is epistemologically basic.

Another age would have said self-evident.

Plantinga once suggested the existence of God, itself, be regarded as epistemologically basic.

That might be a bridge too far.

The GOP impeachment of Clinton for a blowjob . . . .

. . . . was actually about perjury, witness tampering, obstruction of justice, sexual assault, and even rape.

So, really, what the Duce did doesn't rise to an impeachable offense?

PRESIDENT TRUMP IMPEACHED!!!

As expected, a majority of the House of Representatives voted Wednesday to impeach the Prez for high crimes and misdemeanors. 

The vote marks only the 3rd time in U.S. history the House approved articles of impeachment against the President.

Trump now joins Bill Clinton in 1998 and Andrew Johnson way back in 1868 as the only presidents to be impeached.

Bill should have resigned or been removed, and it was right he was disbarred.

Democrats' claims about Trump, monarchy, dictatorship, and destruction of democracy are ridiculous.

But Republicans' claims that the pig in the White House did nothing wrong or at any rate nothing impeachable are contemptible.

That China trade deal

I hear it subordinates the national economic interest to Bozo's interest in buying back those farm votes.

After subordinating our national defense interest in Ukraine to his need to torpedo Joe Biden.

The Expanse. The new season.

Production values don't seem as good.

And why did Naomi get so butch?

Why did all but Amos and Bobbie so change their looks?

Even Avasarala, some.

And she seems to have a different husband.

OK, same husband, different actor.

Trump's PC of the right

I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it

Trump's own version of a PC attack on the First Amendment.

Delusions or Lies?

No, it's not that they are ignorant, or confused, or short on information, or misled by fake news.

They truly admire these guys and agree with what is most vicious in and about them and their programs.

The False Romance of Russia

Anne Applebaum joins those who try valiantly to hide - or evade - the ugly truth.

Just as well claim the Nazi voters didn't vote for all that mad, anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic, racist shit.

Or deny their profound and forthright embrace of state criminality, violence, and an agenda of war.

As for the ludicrous, glowing (at least in their terms) portraits of the enemy societies and their leaders by useful idiots of the left and, now, the right, they are not evidence of delusion but flat out dishonesty.

They are just flat out lies.

But I can't help but laugh.

She may be the only critic of this new idiotic and contemptible right who sees the grandfather role of Pat Buchanan.

And her exposé of Russian realities as well as the loony leaders of the pop stupid right is an extremely important piece.

She is the kind of conservative I admire, and I have loved her work for many years, now.

Not just her columns but her books.

Her excellent books.

There is hunting and there is, well, serial killing

Hunting animals you can and someone will eat is per se unobjectionable.

Killing maneaters is unobjectionable.

Trophy hunting is just killing for the love of killing. Or proving what big balls you have.

And intentionally hunting endangered species is not just killing an individual animal for the sheer deplorable love of killing, it is animal genocide, it is intentionally putting at further risk an already endangered species, not for any defensible reason (killing a polar bear in self-defense, say), but for its own sake.

Donald Trump Jr killed rare endangered sheep in Mongolia with special permit

On a hunting trip to Mongolia earlier this summer the president’s son Donald Trump Jr killed a rare species of endangered sheep. 

A permit for the killing was retroactively issued after Trump met with the country’s president, according to new reporting from ProPublica.

Trump was accompanied by security from both the US and Mongolia on the trip, the outlet reported. 

The argali sheep, with its large horns, is considered a national treasure there, and permission to kill one is “controlled by an opaque permitting system that experts say is mostly based on money, connections and politics”.

So, you think this is an accident? Not intended? Innocently stupid or stupidly innocent?

Trump’s use of a personal cellphone means Russia could have intel about Ukraine calls

The Duce and his crooked lawyer betraying secrets to their pal Putin in plain sight of all the world.

How dare he tell the truth?

Jesse Jackson, on the other hand, during his run for the nomination, always sounded like he was talking through a mouth full of mashed potatoes.

Michael Bloomberg under fire for calling Cory Booker 'well spoken'

Joe nails a Trumpist heckler

'You're a damn liar': Joe Biden lashes out at voter in Iowa

Remarkable how many people think Biden here revealed wicked, retrograde attitudes and that his remarks were gaffes.

How they are paying for those tax cuts by punishing the poor

Nearly 700,000 will lose food stamps with USDA work requirement change

The cruel, insulting, and unspeakably offensive rhetoric of the rich kicking the poor in the face.

“We’re taking action to reform our SNAP program in order to restore the dignity of work to a sizable segment of our population and be respectful of the taxpayers who fund the program,” Perdue said. 

“Americans are generous people who believe it is their responsibility to help their fellow citizens when they encounter a difficult stretch. That’s the commitment behind SNAP, but, like other welfare programs, it was never intended to be a way of life.”

Pelosi angrily rejects a question that slanders her with a Trumpist talking point

They cannot deny he did what he did and cannot convince anyone it wasn't illegal or it doesn't matter.

So it's all bullshit about Democrats hating him for his unexpected victory over Hillary that they wish out of hatred and resentment to delegitimate and overturn.

She's not one to make it easy.

Nancy Pelosi tells Sinclair reporter James Rosen: ‘Don’t mess with me!’

“Do you hate the president, Ms. Speaker?” the reporter, James Rosen from the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group, asked during Pelosi’s weekly press briefing at the Capitol.

“I don’t hate anybody. We don’t hate anybody. Not anybody in the world. Don’t accuse me,” she said, leaving the podium to approach Rosen and pointing at him as she spoke.

He then interrupted her, saying he was asking about a charge from a GOP lawmaker during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing Wednesday that Democrats wanted Trump gone only because they didn’t like him.

“I did not accuse you. I asked you a question. Rep. [Doug] Collins yesterday suggested that the Democrats are doing this simply because you don’t like the guy. I think it is an important point,” he said, referring to the Georgia lawmaker, a fervent Trump backer.

He was as good as heckling her, making very sure to repeat the allegation to her face as provocatively as possible.

Pelosi then walked back to the podium and continued to lecture Rosen.

“This is about the Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the president’s violation of his oath of office. And as a Catholic, I resent your using the word hate in a sentence that addresses me,” she said, adding that she prays for Trump.

Mass politics

It could be said that an essential attribute of a successful regime in the age of mass politics is vulgarity.

But there is a considerable difference between the mere vulgarity of style and propaganda of the liberal regimes and the profound vulgarity of values of authoritarian and, even worse, fascist, racist, or Nazi regimes.

And right now many leading Western nations are sliding from the former toward the latter.

Are regimes, parties, or movements of the further left also committed to vulgar values?

Or is that another difference between them and regimes of the vicious right, from the merely authoritarian even to the totalitarian?

Questions that arise while watching on Amazon video Detective De Luca.