It’s that most irritating of situations– a July 4th (or Christmas or New Year’s Day) that fall on a Wednesday, more or less screwing up the possibility of a long weekend for many, but nonetheless, still interfering with the flow of a week. Yes, we’re supposed to celebrate that day some 236 years hence when a curmudgeonly Boston lawyer and a slave-owning Virginia Renaissance man, both of whom would go on to be Presidents of the United States, collaborated on a Declaration of Independence cribbed from John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers. And it kind of worked for quite a...

For those interested, the incomparable Scotusblog has complete coverage of the Supreme Court’s affirmance of the constitutionality of “Obamacare.” The most surprising wrinkle is the (unexpected) pragmatism of Chief Justice Roberts, who, correctly, found that this Franken-statute exceeded Congress’s powers under the Commerce Clause, but also found, in a most unexpected and “anti-formalistic” way that the “individual mandate” that is the primary funding mechanism of Romneycare Obamacare Oromney care Affordable Care Act was within Congress’s power under its taxing power. I readily confess that as an employed individual with health insurance (btw, for which my share of the premium is...

What Jimmy Carter said. “A Cruel and Unusual Record. America’s Shameful Human Rights Record.” Pretty much nothing more than crackpots and cranks like, say, the author of this blog have been telling you for years.

I try to be sanguine about these things (our pretensions of not being a dictatorship ended around eight years ago with the S. Ct.’s ducking of Padilla, as I saw it)… but Candace pronounces Habeas Corpus officially dead now (as the Supreme Court ducks all seven D.C. Circuit cases for which review was sought), and I can’t disagree. (When she posted that yesterday, Candace didn’t even know the pretty much foregone result in her own client’s case (scroll down to this case: 06/12/2012 Civil Action No. 2010-1020, ABDAL RAZAK ALI V. BARACK H. OBAMA, ET AL. Doc No. 1500 (memorandum...

Since we don’t have a rational system– merely one designed to serve its most powerful members at the expense of everyone else, though “everyone else” will merrily go along with what the elites want (just so long as a few buttons get pushed along the way, and, of course, the WonderBread and NASCAR/Jersey Shore Circuses keep flowing)– none of these devilishly simple and comprehensive solutions will likely be implemented any time soon on these shores. But the great Charles Hugh Smith is such a visionary, I feel compelled to shout out his stuff… particularly his current trilogy: Income Tax Solution:...

Wendy Kaminer raises an interesting question: might Barack Obama’s shameless fawning on Wall Street oligarchs (via expansion of the all-important national security state,manifested “on the ground” with the surveillance of, spying on, labeling of as “terrorists”, pepper-spraying, etc. upon (mostly) youths who dare to question the social order even to the extent of shaming) not merely be evil and stupid and wrong in every sense of the word– might it actually be bad politics? In a razor-thin electoral margin situation, Obama’s deliberate targeting of members of his own base… just might not be the greatest of ideas in terms of...

I don’t know what to make of the Grey Lady’s op- ed lamenting an unsuccessful House bill to dial back part of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act providing for… wait for it… due process of law (by civilian law enforcement) for Muslims dark-skinned people terrrrrrrrrorism suspects. The Grey Lady’s op-ed rightly lauds a decision from Manhattan federal court Judge Katherine Forrest striking down certain portions of the loathsome NDAA. Good for Judge Forrest. I agree, Still… my problem with the whole tenor of these stories is that, now, ten years after September 11th and the demonstration project known as...

Alrightie then. First, a huge shout-out to our friend the Unseen Editor, who is under the weather. We know what that’s like. As the Presidential election campaign season gets going (the “outcome” is irrelevant; Big Finance has bought and paid for both major party candidates; new Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson isn’t going to be elected, nor is anyone who will not keep the wars going and the financial criminals un-indicted), one supposes things might turn on “the economy.” And so, we’ll turn to this supposedly “wonky” (but actually incoherent) piece by Ezra Klein on unemployment, which can’t seem to explain...

It’s a nice day; let the President play golf, says I (after we lay out our preconditions to talks with Iran presumably to assure that there won’t be any.) Sadly, long-time CBS news staple Mike Wallace passed way, though at 93, he certainly had a nice run. Of course, given the reports of the potential for the spent-fuel rods at Fukushima , Japan to discharge perhaps 85 times the radiation released from Chernobyl, and likely take out much of Earth’s life… he may be among the luckier ones. Also, the fact that their home might soon be uninhabitable should give...

Obviously, since this is my April 1st edition, everything I write here is some kind of April Fool’s joke. That’s how it’s been pretty much through the run of this blog. But I’m not going to go give you, say, a blockbuster April Fool’s Day interview, like I have in the past with, say, Rumsfeld, Cheney or Palin. Just, you know… interviewed out. So this year… I’m going to “keep it real,” and just give you April Fool’s Day… straight up. So, for example, the [hilarious!] idea that it would be House Republicans trying to curb the terms of the...