Fables of the reconstruction

$100 for Obama's Birth Certificate

Absolutely brilliant:

In an attempt to end the "birther" myth that President Obama was not born in the United States (and thus not qualified to serve as president), five Democrats on the Hawaii state legislature have introduced a bill that would allow anyone to obtain a copy of President Obama's birth records for a $100 fee.

For that price, they should send the customer a framed copy of the thing, printed on vellum, with a little brass plaque on the frame that says, "He's an American, you stupid asshole."

Weather Is So Interesting, I Know

The rate of snowfall after the ice storm in center city Philly is rather alarming. My flat roof is the least of it; I'm hoping the weight doesn't bring down wires.

Obama and Social Security and Whatever

For the past several weeks, I've been hearing Obama would announce plans to cut Social Security in the State of the Union speech and that I should join with the Jane Hamshers of the Left to prevent it. Well, it didn't happen, which proves ... what?

It proves that a bunch of anti-Obama Dems are opportunistic motherfuckers who are just positioning themselves to make bank in the next couple of years.  And people who believe their bullshit are fucking fools.

Ahem.

Obama Makes Another "Pro-Business" Move: Solicitor General Pick

Oh, goody:

President Obama is preparing to nominate a White House deputy counsel and prominent litigator, Donald B. Verrilli Jr., to be solicitor general of the United States, the White House confirmed on Monday. The position has been vacant since Elena Kagan became a Supreme Court associate justice last year.

Why is this move "pro-business"?

A specialist in First Amendment, telecommunications and intellectual property law, he played a role in several important cases about copyright law in the Internet era – including representing the music industry in a 2005 lawsuit against the file-sharing service Grokster, and Viacom in a 2007 case against Google.

So Verrilli helped the music industry destroy P2P, and most recently was trying to destroy Google and YouTube on their behalf, too.

On the plus side, he's clerked for Brennan and is good on First Amendment issues.  But Solicitor General is a stepping stone to the Court, and I would hate to see this corporate lackey on the Court.

Justices Attending Meetings of Political Organizations

Compare:

When the conservative financier Charles Koch sent out invitations for a political retreat in Palm Springs later this month, he highlighted past appearances at the gathering of “notable leaders” like Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court.

A leading liberal group is now trying to use that connection to argue that Mr. Scalia and Mr. Thomas should disqualify themselves from hearing campaign finance cases because they may be biased toward Mr. Koch, a billionaire who has been a major player in financing conservative causes. 

The group, Common Cause, filed a petition with the Justice Department on Wednesday asking it to investigate potential conflicts by Justices Scalia and Thomas and move for their disqualification from the landmark Citizens United case ... .

Contrast:

On June 8, 2008 more than 1,800 ACLU members, staffers and volunteers flooded in to Washington D.C. to attend the ACLU’s annual membership conference. ...

We got to hear from both clients and the people leading the charge in such diverse fields as Privacy, LGBT issues, Capitol Punishment, Affirmative Action and a whole score of other issues. ...

We also had such stand out guests as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and featured speakers like Arianna Huffington, Senator Arlen Specter, Helen Thomas and Kal Penn among others.

The Common Cause letter to Holder argues that a reasonable person would question Scalia's and Thomas' impartiality in the Citizens United case because (a) their attendance at the Koch retreat was highlighted in the invitation, (b) the Koch retreats are "highly political" and designed to garner support for a particular political course of action, (c) the retreats are secretive and proceedings are unpublished, (c) Koch was the moving force behind Citizens United, which was pending during the retreat Scalia and Thomas attended, and (d) "[r]egardless of the timeframe, we believe it is inappropriate for a Supreme Court judge to be 'featured' at or attend closed-door strategy meetings with political donors, corporate CEOs, candidates and political officials, and thereby lend the prestige of their position to the political goals of that event." The letter separately argues that Justice Thomas' wife's involvement with a conservative political group also is grounds for his disqualification from the Citizens United decision.

I believe that Scalia and Thomas are not "impartial" in any meaningful sense.  They are movement conservatives whose jurisprudence is deeply slanted to reach their preferred politicals outcomes and occasionally is totally unprincipled. But if attending a meeting of like-minded people who are actively involved in pursuing political goals disqualifies a Supreme Court Justice from hearing a case, then Ruth Bader Ginsberg should be disqualified from hearing every ACLU case that comes before the Court. (She doesn't just attend their meetings and speak to their staff and donors, she used to work at the ACLU as the head of the Women's Rights Project!)

Important appellate judges have legal ideologies. People want to hear from appellate judges whose views they agree with. Absent the appearance that the judge is receiving some kind of specific, tangible benefit from an interested party to a case, then I think that these kind of celebrity appearances are relatively harmless.

 

Christian Gang Members

Duncan:

[A] piece of religion in this country for a lot of people is a basic kind of ethnic tribalism. Most people aren't genuinely very religious and most of those who profess to be don't have any kind of sophisticated understanding of what their religion is supposed to be. They do know what team they play for, and that's important.

Right. See this local example from a few years ago:

Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read "Jesus Saves," she recalled. Her son had written a short statement, but he felt so intimidated that his sister read it for him. In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: "I feel bad when kids in my class call me 'Jew boy.' I do not want to move away from the house I have lived in forever."

Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several witnesses, "If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell him to give his heart to Jesus."

Humans are social animals, but belonging to a tribe - otherwise known as being in a gang - is a basic unit of "society". It requires a higher level of abstract reasoning to consider yourself a member of a group that primarily includes people you don't know and who may look and behave in ways very different from you. 

Nationalism is a common way of conjuring this higher level of belonginess. In America, nationalism was made possible by the exclusion of blacks from the definition of "American."  Once that notion was undermined, whites started either turning away from nationalism or re-defined "the nation" using their own idiosyncratic measures. The rise of the Christian gang as a political force in America is the result of both of these reactions.  On one hand, white conservatives have to some extent become Christians first and Americans second. On the other, Christians have conflated Americanism and Christianity, and thereby imported the requirements of the bigoted form of the first - xenophobia, militarism, exceptionalism - into the second. To conservatives, they are the nation, and anyone who is "other" must be silent or be driven out.