Monthly Archives: February 2011

The Watering Hole: February 10 – The Basis

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This is a family saga in 3 parts.

Finding Nemo

Part 1: Back when my granddaughter was just 2, her family was moving. My spouse and I took on the responsibility of entertaining her during the transfer to the new home. We decided to let her take in a movie as part of the transfer. We choose “Finding Nemo” as a nice diversion. We even went to K-Mart and got a boat cushion that would raise her enough in order to see the movie. With a box of popcorn and a tippy of cola, she was on edge for the entire movie and talked about the movie well into the evening.

Part 2 comes tomorrow – the story then is heart rending.

This is our Open Thread. Please feel free to present your thoughts on any topic that comes to mind.

The Watering Hole: Wednesday, February 9, 2011: Hump Day!

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House Republican’s blew a head count – reauthorizing the Patriot Act goes down in flames – for now.

Republicans pushed a bill to reauthorize the Patriot Act to a vote in the House under a procedure that required a 2/3 vote, and failed to get the vote. But they can bring it again under regular rules and it will pass with a simple majority.

So, why is this important? This, from Republicans “Pledge to America”:

Read the Bill
We will ensure that bills are debated and
discussed in the public square by
publishing the text online for at least three
days before coming up for a vote in the
House of Representatives. No more hiding
legislative language from the minority
party, opponents, and the public.
Legislation should be understood by all
interested parties before it is voted on.

But Republicans didn’t put the bill through committee, “And a handful of the no-votes were freshmen who felt completely uninformed by their leadership.” For example, Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Ind.), said he “didn’t know anything about the vote until today.”

This also means Republicans can no longer count on all members of their party voting in lock-step.

This is our Open Thread. Feel free to freely feel.

The Watering Hole February 7 Back to the mines…

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“The first-century CE satirist Juvenal wrote, “Long ago the people shed their anxieties, ever since we do not sell our votes to anyone. For the people—who once conferred imperium, symbols of office, legions, everything—now hold themselves in check and anxiously desire only two things, the grain dole and chariot races in the Circus” (Satires 10.77-81). Juvenal’s famous phrase, panem et circenses (“bread and circuses”) has become proverbial to describe those who give away significant rights in exchange for material pleasures. Juvenal has put his finger on two of the most important aspects of Roman chariot races—their immense popularity and the pleasure they gave the Roman people, and the political role they played during the empire in diverting energies that might otherwise have gone into rioting and other forms of popular unrest.”

Barbara F. McManus, The College of New Rochelle

It’s the morning after this nations most lavish corporate media chariot insurance, soda pop and nachos extravaganza. An early highlight was a temple diva’s botch of the national anthem, for which the media will drag her through the cyber streets for a brief time. How ’bout those legions in Afghanistan, eh?

This is our Daily Open Thread, what’s in your mind?


Sunday Roast: Rebooting the American Dream, Chapter 10

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Chapter Ten of Thom Hartmann’s book, Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country, is called “Wal-Mart is Not a Person.”

This week’s chapter covers the outrageous concept of corporate personhood.  Corporations can’t hack the so-called free market, so they need special consideration by the United States

Supreme Court.

The funny thing is, this country was founded on the people’s desire for freedom and liberty, and the kicker was an act of protest — later known as the Boston Tea Party — against a special tax break for the biggest corporation of its time, the East India Company.

Now, after the egregious Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, corporations have all the rights and privileges of people (save voting, for now), without the bother of all the pesky responsibilities.

Weirdly enough, the slippery slope to Citizens United was paved by the crappy work of a clerk who wrote the headnote of an 1886 case known as Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.

From Thom’s chapter:

In 2003, after my book Unequal Protection was first published, I gave a talk at one of the larger law schools in Vermont. Around 300 people showed up, mostly students, with a few dozen faculty and some local lawyers. I started by asking, “Please raise your hand if you know that in 1886, in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons and therefore entitled to rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

Almost everyone in the room raised their hand, and the few who didn’t probably were new enough to the law that they hadn’t gotten to study that case yet. Nobody questioned the basic premise of the statement.

And all of them were wrong.

We the People are the first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution; and from its adoption until the Robber Baron Era in the late nineteenth century, people meant human beings. In the 1886 Santa Clara case, however, the court reporter of the Supreme Court proclaimed in a “headnote”—a summary or statement added at the top of the court decision, which is separate from the decision and has no legal force whatsoever—that the word person in law and, particularly, in the Constitution, meant both humans and corporations.

Thus began in a big way…the corruption of American democracy and the shift, over the 125 years since then, to our modern corporate oligarchy.

Un-frickin’-believable, huh?  Over 100 years later, the Roberts court rammed home what may turn out to be the final nail in the coffin of this country.  This topic truly pisses me off.

There’s lots more information in this chapter, and you can read the whole thing here.

This is our daily open thread — Discuss!