The Right Side of the News

If a convicted murderer were to take up residence in a woman's uterus without her permission, I'd be in favor of removing him even if it resulted in his death.

The New York Times also reported this: Deceased G.O.P. Strategist’s Hard Drives Reveal New Details on the Census Citizenship Question

Out of curiosity, how often do you ask yourself this question?

From The New York Times: With 2020 Looming, Parties Fight State by State Over Voting AccessAs is recognized by many, Republicans have trouble maintaining their majorities in a democratic system so they have been engaging in a variety of tactics to suppress voting and registration, especially among groups that tend to vote Democrat.These efforts lately have begun to stall and even be reversed because - surprise! - people actually like democracy! The article describes how attemps by Republican to enact their shenanigans into law have not been able to get out of the legislature, been vetoed by governors, or reversed by voter initiatives. Sometimes it is even Republican politicians that oppose anti-democracy! And heres the money quote: So Ugenti-Rita is admitting she wants to prevent something that is currently not a problem with a "solution" that has been shown to cause other problems.

From The New York Times: Deceased Strategist’s Files Detail Republican Gerrymandering in North Carolina, Advocates SayIt appears that the Hofeller drives may provide a smoking gun that the Republicans' redistricting of North Carolina was, indeed, racially motivated and partisan gerrymandering. 'Course, now that they have been caught with their pants down, Republicans are doing what Republicans do best: screaming! They are now claiming that Hofeller's daughter acquired her fathers records illegally and making threats. Ms. Hofeller is underred.

Yes, "My way or the highway" is not negotiation.Negotiation means there's something you're willing to give up in order to reach a mutually agreeable compromise.

From Saturday's New York Times: New Election Security Bills Face a One-Man Roadblock: Mitch McConnellThe article describes the continuing vulernability of US elections to foreign interference, the (Democratic) House's attempts to pass legislation to remedy this, and the (Republican) Senate's utter lack of action to deal with the issue.Some Senate Republicans would like to take up this issue, and there is bipartisan support in the Senate for some legislation: The problem is Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's intransigence on refusing to deal with this issue. Given the Republicans' alleged concern over election security, why would McConnell not want to allow legislation to be enacted? Because he's a complete fuck, but you already knew that. More detailed: -This isn't limited to just election security, though. Friday's New York Times describes how little is being done in the Senate at all. Tariff Threats Aside, the Senate Is Where Action Goes to DieEvidently McConnell is less interested in governing than in stuffing the courts with political hacks.Edited by Chiroptera, : Typos. Writing-to-text isn't perfect.

But... but... HILLARY'S EMAILS!

Wow! That's kind of an eerie prediction of today's rightwing.

Many Democrats.And many Democrats would be happy with a beefed up version of Obamacare - maybe with a public option - which leaves the insurance companies involved. Some non-communist countries have a system like this; I believe the Netherlands is an example. And this is even more not communist!

I admit I'm not too sure what Communism in the US was like in the '30s.But comparisons with a long ago movement is kind of irrelevant; I can see what the American Left today is actually doing or attempting to do. Most of what I can actually see are things I do support.

I see you missed my point. I probably wasn't being very clear.I can see, in real life, the real bills that are introduced by real legislators in real legislatures and by real members of Congress in the real Congress.I can see real legislation being passed or not being passed by real lawmakers.I can see real regulations being enacted by real agencies and real officials in real executive branches.I can see real lawsuits being filed by real people and real advocacy groups.I can see real court decisions rendered by real judges.I can read the real speeches, opinions, and articles written by real advocates to try to gain the support of the public.The labels applied by some book aren't all that relevant; what I see the Left doing and saying are, in the most part, things I support.To the point: I think that religious beliefs should be no excuse to disobey a state's anti-discrimination laws. If you want to try to talk me out of this, then calling it Communist isn't going to work; you'll have to argue the merits of the case.I think that most illegal immigrants don't need to be held in custody, and those that do deserve to be held in humane conditions. Am I wrong? You'll need to argue it's merits, not just label it Communist.I think the global climate change poses an existential threat to civilization and we need to stop using fossil fuels. Calling it Communist really isn't relevant; the facts and evidence need to be discussed.I think all people should have access to affordable and decent healthcare. To convince me... well, surel I've made the point.I am on the Left, and unashamed of it. (Hell, I even admit to being a socialist, although I don't mind being called a liberal.) If someone is going to try to convince me that I'm wrong, their going to have to present cogent reasons why the things I support are wrong on their merits, not by calling thema very bad name.Calling the Left Communists is really just a lazy way out of doing the hard work of presenting reasoned arguments based on facts.

I apologize, Faith. I misread your previous post and didn't realize that you were referring to a single article, and one short enough that there isn't much reason to avoid reading it.At any rate, having read the article, Harry Stein, the author of the article, doesn't show himself to be very credible when it comes to history. But the main point seems to be how the current left is supposedly like the Communists of the '30s, let's just get to that.Stein's errors can be summed up by his paraphrase of Eugene Lyons: - What makes this such a wonderful quote is that Stein doesn't acknowledge that just ten years after Lyons published his book, the McCarthy witch hunts (and Trump should look into this to see what a witchhunt really looks like) we in full swing and it was the Anti-Communists who were liquidating careers and disappearing reputations.Here is what Stein says about the witch hunts: Stein acknowledges that most of McCarthy's victims weren't even potential subversives, but their purge was somehow justified as because handful of Stalinists actually existed.I guess liquidated careers and disappeared reputations are okay if we do it, but bad when they do it.Just for yucks: Yeah, and one can shudder what might have happened if Eisenhower really was a secret Soviet agent, or if Stalin could fire laser beams out of his eyes!-Meanwhile, what are some examples showing how the contemporary Left is like 1930s Communism? First, I'll point out that unlike the majority of victims of the McCarthy purges (or, for that matter, the majority of victims of today's Islamophobia), the examples here actually did what they were accused of.Second, it wasn't even an organized witch hunt that led to these gentleman being fired; they were fired by their corporations for reasons that corporations have alway used, rightly or wrongly, to fire people: creating a hostile environment for their colleagues or creating a situation where the company may lose customers.-This is just a small portion of the article, but I found the rest of it to be similarly weak tea.

From The New York Times: Supreme Court Limits Agency Power, a Goal of the RightA long term goal of the Right has been to reign in the regulatory authority of the executive branch and regulatory agencies. The problem, of course, is that the regulations interfere with the redistribution of wealth from the working and middle classes to the Republicans' wealthy donors, but insincere blather about the unconstitutional usurpation of Congress' legislative function plays better in the media.In a 5-4 decision - I think, it's another weird fracturing of the Court in split opinions and separate concurrences - the Court in a very narrow way limited the abilitity of the Department of Veterans Affairs to resolve the ambiguities of the laws and regulations it is responsible for.In Kisor v Wilkie, a veteran was initially denied benefits of PTSD he had developed while deployed in the Middle East. He appealed and won the appeal, but his benefits were only retroactively applied to the date his case was reopened, not to the date of his initial application. He appealed this, but the courts recognized that agencies have broad latitude in interpreting the laws and regulations they are to enforce.(By the way, that the Dept of Veteran Affairs has been using "loopholes" to deny veterans of the Forever Wars necessary benefits is an old problem: here is an old article from The Nation.)At heart are two court cases: Bowles v Seminole Rock & Sand Co, decided in 1945, and Auer v Robbins, decided in 1997. I don't know much about these cases, but evidently these are the cases that established the interpretive authority of regulatory agencies to perform the duties Congress intended.The suit asked the Court to overturn these precedents.Kagan, writing for the majority, merely placed reasonable limits on the agencies' interpretive authority. The courts cannot just defer to an agency's interpretation; they must actually do the work of carefully examining the intent of Congress in enacting the law and the reasonableness and consistency of the agency's interpretation. In simply deferring the to the agency's interpretation, the lower courts had avoided their responsibility, and the case is now sent back to them.But what is fascinating it that the summary (I haven't yet read the opinions themselves) spends most of its length not on the case at hand, but speaking about the importance of legal precedence and these precedents in particular.In reading the summary, I got the impression that the majority, including Roberts, are getting pretty nervous about the "burn it all down" attitude of the Republican nihilists and the damage that can be done by the apparatechniks they managed to put on the Court.Although these issues aren't ordinarily ones I find very interesting, I am interested in reading the opinions written by the various justices in this case,

Paul Krugman wrote several columns last week that I thought were good. Here's one. The S Word, the F Word and the ElectionKrugman makes the point that nothing that any of the candidates advocated during last week's debates were socialist, yet we all know that no matter who gets the nomination (even Biden!) will be labeled "Socialist". He also predicts how the media won't bother to offer a correction since Republican extremism is simply accepted nowadays as normal.But he does point out the "tut tuts" and complaints about uncivil discourse if the Republicans were to be called "fascists" even though, as overblown as it is, it is closer to the truth than "socialist Democrats": -On the other hand, the US rightwing has largely stripped "socialism" of most of it negative connotations (except for its base, I guess) by labeling as "socialist" any commonsense policy that would improve people's lives. Polls show that more people have a more positive opinion of socialism, and Krugman has claimed before that this is because they've come to think that the "radical" Democrats' social democracy is "so cialism ", and that's what people want!Krugman isn't sure whether the Republicans' "that's socialism!" tactic will work overall, but he thinks it will at least be less effective than in the past.-Another tactic that may be less effective: Edited by Chiroptera, : Oops. Cut'n'pasted the wrong quote.