Elizabeth Warren, my favorite politician

This is Sen. Elizabeth Warren at the 2016 American Constitution Society convention.

She's great, isn't she? The whole speech is great, but the part about Donald Trump - which seems to be getting the most attention - starts at 13:44 (if you don't have time to watch the whole thing).

You know, Bernie Sanders should be more like Elizabeth Warren. Warren knows what's important. Sanders seems to be letting his personal ambition, and his unhappiness at losing the Democratic nomination, get in the way of doing what's right for America.

Look at Sen. Warren. She doesn't just point out how despicable Donald Trump has been, she ties that into the rest of the Republican Party.

And yes, despite their frequent unhappiness at Trump's blatant racism and crude language, this is exactly what Republican Party leaders have been doing for years. They just don't like it being expressed so bluntly.

Well, Elizabeth Warren isn't going to let them get away with that. This is why she's my favorite politician, and although it would be a step down for her, I'd love to see Hillary Clinton choose her as our next vice-president.

Elizabeth Warren: America's rigged justice system

This is the person I want to elect President of the United States! Oh, I'll be happy enough with either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. But if I really had my choice, it would be Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

PS. I'm always being told, usually by particularly clueless progressives, that there's no difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties. Look at what Republicans are trying to do in the House of Representatives, as Sen. Warren explains so well, and tell me that.

Hell, look at the plethora of 5 to 4 decisions - disastrous decisions, when all five Republicans have their way - in the Supreme Court and tell me that.

You won't agree with anyone about everything. (I hope not, at least.) But there are huge differences between the parties - and yes, I mean between Hillary Clinton and any Republican, too.

Bathing in the tears of the religious right

"I would love to bathe in the tears of Republicans who are just like... meh, because they didn't get their way." Heh, heh. That's why I'm posting this. I feel the same way. All the whining from the hate-filled and the bigoted is like music to my ears.

If you don't want to marry someone of the same sex, don't marry someone of the same sex. Problem solved. But if you just want to force your own beliefs on everyone else, you'll have no sympathy from me. Weep on, conservatives.

Of course, this is all about religion. There is no secular reason to ban gay marriage, none at all. This is a free country. Believe whatever you want, no matter how crazy I might think it. But don't force your beliefs on everyone - on anyone - else.

Jaclyn Glenn had other great lines, too. For example: "But... for this guy, marry your lamp. I approve. You're marrying up."

This Supreme Court ruling was great, but it was very close, just 5 to 4. Only one Republican was willing to join the sane justices in this decision. And the others are absolutely furious about that.



Right-wing Republicans already dominate on our Supreme Court, more often making decisions based on what's best for the Republican Party than on the law. (Make no mistake, this decision and the recent decision upholding Obamacare are both very beneficial to the GOP, much as Republicans may hate to admit it.)

And there's another presidential election next year, with the next president almost certainly going to select a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, if not for other justices. Even with a Democratic replacement, that will leave the Supreme Court dominated by right-wing Republicans. With another far-right Republican, we'd be screwed for generations.

Still, this is a time for celebration, so let's continue with right-wing tears:



Hmm,... I wonder if bathing in Republican tears will keep me young? Probably just the reverse, huh? Probably turn me into Rupert Murdoch. :(

Forgive Dylann Roof?

This is the judge saying that - the white, Southern judge presiding over this case of race-based murder.

Funny, but I never heard this kind of talk immediately after incidents of Muslim terrorism. Were we so concerned about the terrorist's family then? Were we so ready to forgive, immediately, without the terrorist expressing any regret for his actions whatsoever?

I wonder what's so different about Dylann Roof? Gee, there must be something...

The astonishing goal of Supreme Court Republicans

The U.S. Supreme Court is now going to hear a case, brought by a right-wing political group in Texas, to change America's traditional "one person, one vote" political system.

Astonishing, isn't it? And frightening, given the continued 5 to 4 dominance of Republican political activists on the court. They've already decided case after case by rejecting precedent and pushing Republican political interests in that strict 5 to 4 voting (just as, I should point out, they gave us George W. Bush as president, also 5 to 4).

Josh Marshall at TPM makes a good point about all of these terrible Supreme Court decisions:

It is increasingly difficult to find any unifying theory or rationale behind the Supreme Court's election and election financing decisions other than the goal of securing the electoral interests of the Republican party. That sounds harsh. But a simple process of elimination leaves little other conclusion. States rights, originalism, deference to legislatures, various constructions of democratic theory and a lot else are controlling except when they're not controlling. Most of the decisions line up with the conservative jurisprudence espoused by the Court's conservative semi-majority. Except when they don't. Cases are plucked out of the lower courts long before the high court has any obligation or need to intervene. The new case which will review the 'one person, one vote' rule which has been reining law for half a century would likely diminish the voting power of cities vs rural areas, minorities vs whites and Democrats vs Republicans, if decided on behalf of the plaintiffs. In other words, why not?

When the Republicans on the court selected George W. Bush as president in 2000, they decided against states' rights for pretty much the first time ever. It was pretty clear, I thought, that they just wanted a Republican president.

Since then, as Marshall points out, there's been no guiding principle whatsoever. The five Republicans (all men, all Catholic) simply seem to make their decisions on what will benefit the Republican Party.

That's political activism, not deciding cases of law. And indeed, some of them have remained active in right-wing politics, despite being on the bench of the highest court in the land. They don't even pretend to stay impartial.

Republicans have broken America's political system. They've broken Congress by refusing to do anything our first black president wanted, just because he wanted it. They agreed to do that before he'd even taken office for his first term, while America was embroiled in two wars and while our economy was collapsing in the worst economic crash since the Great Depression.

It didn't make any difference what Barack Obama wanted, because they agreed to this before he'd even taken office or proposed anything at all. Indeed, they held to it even when the Democrats adopted the Republican Party's own health care plan!

And now, Republican Supreme Court justices are apparently deciding legal cases based on what's best for the Republican party. Our nation cannot function like this. Our democracy cannot function like this. The Republican Party is deliberately harming America for partisan political benefit.

And by and large, they're getting away with it.

Prosecute torturers and their bosses

Way to go, New York Times! This is from their editorial yesterday (which had the same title as this post):

Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.

Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.

Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”

These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.

So it is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these acts anything but torture, which they clearly were. As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they intended to do was illegal.

In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be prohibited by the torture statute.” They asked the department to promise not to prosecute those who used these methods. When the department refused, they shopped around for the answer they wanted. They got it from the ideologically driven lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a legal foundation for the methods. Government officials now rely on the memos as proof that they sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the report changes the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good faith.

The editorial ends with:

The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.

But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.

One would expect Republicans who have gone hoarse braying about Mr. Obama’s executive overreach to be the first to demand accountability, but with one notable exception, Senator John McCain, they have either fallen silent or actively defended the indefensible. They cannot even point to any results: Contrary to repeated claims by the C.I.A., the report concluded that “at no time” did any of these techniques yield intelligence that averted a terror attack. And at least 26 detainees were later determined to have been “wrongfully held.”

Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.

Sadly, they're absolutely right about it being hard to imagine Barack Obama "having the political courage to order a new investigation," especially since Americans, by two to one odds, support torturing prisoners of war.

Embarrassing, isn't it? How disgusting is that! Americans support the torture of prisoners of war! I found it hard enough to believe that we'd sink so low as a nation that we'd torture people in the first place. Now, I'm even more disgusted to discover that nearly 60 percent of us are such cowards and such morons that we actually think it justified.

This is wrong. And the only way we can drag ourselves out of the slime - while teaching my fellow citizens that slime isn't good - is to hold these criminals responsible for their crimes. My respects to the New York Times, not just for getting it right, but for having the courage to take a stand.

A shot in the dark

The Daily Show
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Jon Stewart was sick last night, so that's what's going on at the start and the end of this clip. Funny, huh?

But, as usual, the clip addresses a very serious issue, too - a nearly unbelievable situation, in fact. This is funny, yes,... if you can keep from weeping.

Militarizing... public schools?

The Colbert Report
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Yeah, it's not just police forces we're militarizing, but school districts, too! But of course every school district needs a grenade launcher. Just think of how useful that would be!

Again, this is the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about. Defense contractors don't have to stick with pushing weapons to our, and other country's, militaries. Sure, we spend more money on our military than the rest of the world combined, but it's never enough.

So now, they've got our military distributing gear to police departments and public schools, too - thus wasting even more money requiring even bigger purchases and even bigger bonuses for defense industry lobbyists and contractors.

Well, thanks to Republicans on our Supreme Court, we've already sold our country to the highest bidder. So what else did you expect?

PS. And yeah, speaking of the Supreme Court, it's not just Citizens United, either. We're starting to see problems from their incredibly inane Hobby Lobby decision now, too:

A federal judge in Utah has ruled that a member of a fundamentalist offshoot of the Mormon faith may refuse to answer questions in a child labor investigation as a result of the Hobby Lobby ruling on birth control. ...

Erwin Chemerinsky, the Dean of UC-Irvine School of Law, said Sam's decision reveals the pitfalls of Hobby Lobby, calling it "stunning" and contrary to precedent for a judge to use RFRA to let a person get out of testifying.

"I think it is quite predictable that the court's decision in Hobby Lobby would open the door to such claims of an exemption from laws for religious reasons," he said. "I fear it is just the start of cases of people claiming religious exemptions from general laws."

Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA, said the ruling shows how "Hobby Lobby threatens to make religious believers a law unto themselves."

30 years of injustice

This is why I don't support capital punishment.

I have zero sympathy for violent criminals. I'd execute them myself, no problem. Yeah, I don't care about your hard life. Some things, you shouldn't get a second chance.

But we're not infallible, and we're never going to be infallible. Sometimes, we convict innocent people. We know we've executed innocent people before - not many, I hope, but it's happened. Certainly, there have been many cases like this, where innocent people spent decades in prison for something they didn't do.

That's a real tragedy, but how much worse would it be if we had killed them? These guys were on death row! Assholes like Antonin Scalia don't care about that. The entire Republican Party doesn't care about that. But I do.

Your bloodlust is simply not worth the fact that we'd end up killing innocent people, sometimes. And it is just bloodlust. There is no other reason for capital punishment. (It's not a deterrent.) Right-wingers just love the idea of punishing people. Well, that's why they invented Hell, too.

So if you believe in Hell, what's the problem? What's executing someone, next to an eternity of torture. Of course, that assumes that you really do believe in your religious fantasies, huh? Do you actually believe what you claim to believe?

Greece does a bait & switch

You knew this was going to happen, didn't you?

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court gave its blessing to local governments that want to open their public meetings with religious prayer.

It was a victory for the town board of Greece, N.Y., which stressed that it was fighting not just for Christian prayer but for the right of all people [to] express their views regardless of their faith. In a 5-4 ruling along ideological lines, the Court ruled against the Jewish and atheist plaintiffs, who argued that the practice violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

Less than four months later, the town of Greece has adopted an invocation policy that excludes non-religious citizens and potentially shuts out faiths that aren't well-established in the town, according to a top secular group.

That's not quite what the five Republicans on the Supreme Court claimed, is it?

In [his decision], Justice Anthony Kennedy described public prayer as a "larger exercise in civic recognition" designed to "represent rather than to exclude or coerce nonbelievers." ...

Justice Elena Kagan warned that the decision in Greece v. Galloway could lead to discrimination against minority faiths. In her dissent for the minority, she accused the conservative justices of "blindness" to the "essential meaning of the religious worship in Greece's town hall, along with its capacity to exclude and divide."

No, no, it's inclusive. All Christian sects approved by the town board are welcome to pray to Jesus in their own way. LOL

Note that this was another terrible Supreme Court decision in which the five Republicans on the Supreme Court overruled the four Democrats. However, as the LA Times put it when the decision was announced, the court isn't just divided along political lines:

The Supreme Court's decision Monday to allow Christian prayers at city council and other public meetings divided justices not only ideologically, but along religious lines as well.

The five justices in majority are Catholics, and they agreed that an opening prayer at a public government meeting, delivered by a Christian pastor, brings the town together. ...

Three of the four dissenters are Jewish: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. The fourth, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, was raised as a Catholic, but she is said to be not a regular church goer.

Justice Elena Kagan faulted the majority for approving an official policy of "religious favoritism." In her dissent, she said the majority might view the matter differently had a "mostly Muslim town" opened its session with Muslim prayers or if a Jewish community invited a rabbi every month.

The Catholic Church is the biggest Christian sect in America and the world. Is it really surprising that five right-wing Catholic men see no problem here? No one is going to discriminate against the Catholic Church in America.

On the other hand, three of the four dissenters are Jewish. (Three of the four are women, too.) I don't know whether Justice Sotomayor still considers herself to be Catholic or not ("not a regular church goer" could mean anything), but it's not just politics that's separating our Supreme Court justices.

We saw this exact same thing in the court's terrible Hobby Lobby decision, too, where the five Catholic men on the court tried desperately to limit the decision to birth control, which (a) mostly affects women, and (b) is a longtime Catholic Church issue (though Catholics in America still use birth control just as much as everyone else, despite the wishes of the church hierarchy).

You don't care about freedom of religion if you're in the majority, right? After all, the majority doesn't need defending from the minority (the right-wing's ridiculous hysterics about "Sharia Law" notwithstanding).

Maybe I can understand that - not agree with it, just understand it - when it comes to ordinary people. But these are justices in the highest court in the land. They're supposed to be defending our Constitution. Why are they acting like political/religious activists who are determined to undermine it?

Satanists cite Hobby Lobby decision

(TPM)

You've probably seen this, since it's more than a month old now, but just in case:

In a statement, the Satanic Temple said that it will use the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision to exempt its believers from state-mandated informed consent laws that require women considering abortions to read pro-life material. ...

Because the Satanic Temple bases its belief “regarding personal health…on the best scientific understanding of the world, regardless of the religious or political beliefs of others,” it claims that state-mandated information with no basis in scientific fact violates its “religious” beliefs.

Spokesperson Lucien Greaves said that the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision bolsters their case. “While we feel we have a strong case for an exemption regardless of the Hobby Lobby ruling,” he said, “the Supreme Court has decided that religious beliefs are so sacrosanct that they can even trump scientific fact. This was made clear when they allowed Hobby Lobby to claim certain contraceptives were abortifacients, which in fact they are not.”

The Satanic Temple set up a website where women seeking an abortion can print out a letter for her healthcare provider explaining why she is exempt from informed consent mandates.

Funny, isn't it? I've never been wild about the Satanic Temple, which is basically a religious parody created by nonbelievers. But they're starting to turn me around.

First, it was the goat-headed statue they designed for the Oklahoma state capitol. Now, it's using the terrible decision of the five right-wing Catholic men on the Supreme Court in a way that makes perfect sense, but in complete opposition to their political goal.

In both cases, being a "religion" has its advantages. Sure, freedom of religion means freedom from religion, too, if that's your choice. Nonbelievers shouldn't have to give up any rights.

But whether you can grasp that or not, it's absolutely undeniable that all religions should have equal rights in America. So these efforts by the Satanic Temple should certainly make it clear to the dullest, dumbest American that the separation of church and state is the best policy, don't you think?

Hobby Lobby

OK, OK, I'm woefully late, but I really should say something about the Supreme Court's latest idiotic decision, I suppose.

Where do I begin? How about with the fact that corporations aren't people and can't actually have religious beliefs? People own corporations. People run corporations. People work in corporations. But the corporation itself is not a person. That's just a legal fiction.

If the corporation were a person, it still couldn't decide which laws it wanted to obey. I mean, can you do that? Go ahead. Try it. Decide for yourself which laws you agree with and which you refuse to obey.

So the five Republicans on the Supreme Court have decided that corporations aren't just people, they're people with special rights that lesser people - like you and me - don't have. Certainly, they have rights that their employees don't have.

Note that those five Republicans - Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy - are all men and all Catholic. Yup, it just so happens that birth control is something they don't need and something that their own church opposes. (The three women on the court - one of them also Catholic - dissented.)

The Republicans tried to write their decision as narrowly as possible. After all, what would happen if a corporation had some other religion? What if a "Muslim corporation" imposed Sharia law on its Christian employees? Somehow, I think the decision might have gone differently, then, don't you?

In a way, that's kind of what happened. In Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon vs. Smith, the case that led up to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which was the issue here, both Scalia and Kennedy found for the government - the exact opposite of what they decided here. (The other justices weren't on the court back then.)

Of course, that was about some other religion (the Native American Church), not their own. And it was about real people, not corporate people. Republicans wouldn't care about them, right?

There are a number of things I find crazy about this decision, but the biggies - that a corporation is a "person," which can have religious beliefs, and that those beliefs trump federal law - have already received a lot of attention. These two aren't so important, maybe, but they shouldn't be overlooked:

1. The five Republicans on the court are letting corporations opt out of federal laws, but specifically not tax laws. Why not? Well, taxes pay their salaries. Without taxes, they wouldn't have a job.

Oh, I'm sure that wasn't their stated reason for the exception, if they even bothered to give a reason. But it's funny, isn't it?

2. Reality is irrelevant. As long as a corporation 'believes' something (and yeah, I have to use quote marks, because the idea that a corporation can believe anything is just laughable), it doesn't have to be a true belief.

Hobby Lobby opposes certain forms of birth control, because... it claims those methods cause abortion. That's wrong. The science is clear on that. But it doesn't matter to the majority on the court that this 'belief' is wrong. A corporation could believe anything, and it simply wouldn't matter how crazy it was.

Of course, practically-speaking, it would matter. If this hadn't been in opposition to birth control and to 'Obamacare,' the five Catholic Republican men on the Supreme Court wouldn't have been so enthusiastic about opening this Pandora's Box. You can bet on that!

___
I'm going to add a couple of postscripts here. First, if you're wondering about my pointing out the religion of those five Supreme Court justices, well, Fox 'News' has your back:



Funny, isn't it? Fox 'News' expresses outrage about an ad they claim is offensive to Catholics by... being offensive to Muslims. Heh, heh. But what's really funny is that they don't even notice what they're doing!

Obviously, it isn't bigotry to point out that the five Supreme Court justices who decided a case involving religious opposition to a woman's access to birth control are all men and all Catholic (given that the Catholic Church, as you know, opposes all birth control).

In fact, it's clearly so pertinent, so relevant, so material, it should be mentioned by the media in every article/video about the case ("should be," but almost certainly isn't).

But Fox 'News' thinks it's bigoted. And they argue their point by being - unconsciously, obliviously, cluelessly - bigoted about Muslims. And unlike the target of their wrath, they really are being bigoted.

But even that's not as funny as this one. Holly Fisher is a right-wing Christian gun nut who celebrated the Hobby Lobby decision by posting a picture of herself with assault rifle, Bible, and flag. Yeah, that's sane, isn't it?

Happily, someone noted this remarkable similarity:

Which one looks holy and patriotic to you, and which one looks like a nightmare of theocracy and violence, probably depends on your cultural background.

To me, they look virtually identical.

JAG in Space

(cover image from Amazon.com)

John G. Hemry also writes under the pen name Jack Campbell, and I've been enjoying his Lost Fleet series - and the sequels - so much that I wanted to try the books published under his real name. His very first series, starting with Stark's War (2000), didn't sound appealing, so I went with JAG in Space.

Yeah, the series title is terrible, and it's not even particularly accurate. But I'll get to that in a minute. This is military science fiction with significant differences from what you might expect. Indeed, it's quite unusual, and if I wonder about the setting - which I do - I can't complain about the results.

I've enjoyed both of the books I've read so far. In A Just Determination (2003), we're introduced to Paul Sinclair just before he boards the USS Michaelson. He's a grass-green ensign on his very first deployment after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy

In the second, Burden of Proof (2004), Sinclair has just been promoted to lieutenant jg, but he still functions as the ship's collateral duty legal officer, thanks to a one-month course he was assigned just to fill in a gap in his schedule.

Sinclair is a line officer in the U.S. space navy. He's not a lawyer and has no desire to be a lawyer. But in each book, he gets involved in a court martial proceeding against a fellow officer from his own ship. Thus the "JAG in Space," I guess.

(cover image from Amazon.com)

For science fiction - certainly for military science fiction - this is set in a very odd time. Sinclair is an officer in the U.S. Navy, and their ships patrol some undefined part of the solar system which is claimed by the United States of America.

There doesn't seem to be anything there, not anything worth the claiming. They're just patrolling in order to maintain their claim to that particular part of space. Why they'd even want it? Who knows?

This doesn't seem to be too far in the future, and it's never explained why America spends that much money for no apparent reason. There's no hint of FTL flight, nor even of colonizing other planets within our own solar system. (Then again, we learn almost nothing of civilian society and see nothing but the inside of a space ship and a tiny bit of a naval space station.)

All in all, the setting doesn't seem to make much sense. America isn't even at war - this is a peacetime navy - although there's apparently the potential for a violent confrontation with the South Asian Alliance. But it's certainly unique, at least in my experience. After all, there's plenty of military science fiction set aboard starships in the far distant future.

Most of those seem to follow the pattern of Horatio Hornblower, C. S. Forester's great series set during the Napoleonic Wars. In that pattern - copied by countless authors since, both those writing military fiction set on Earth and science fiction authors, too - you follow the officers and crew of a military ship, getting to know them, until finishing with a climactic battle against overwhelming odds.

These two books do the first part of that - indeed, Hemry makes military life aboard a space ship seem very realistic - but they end, not with a battle, but with a trial. It's still a desperate situation for the accused, I guess, but the real drama is more about the courage of Paul Sinclair in risking his career to see justice done.

It's unusual, but it works. And it probably works mostly because Hemry's characters are superb. We like Sinclair right from the start, and most of the other characters are appealing, too. But all of the characters seem realistic, and they're all individuals.

This is character-based fiction which presents an interesting and very plausible view of both military law and life on board a military ship in space. It's a combination I've never seen before (a blurb on the back cover of A Just Determination calls it "The Caine Mutiny in space"), but it's as entertaining as it is unusual.

There are two more books in the series, and I've already got them on order. So far, the series has stuck to a very distinct path, and I just don't know if it stays that way in the next two books or not. I'd like to learn more about their society in general, but I have real doubts that he could make it seem plausible.

So maybe he'd be wise to stick with "The Caine Mutiny in space" for every book? I really don't know. Again, the characters are great, so at this point, I'm pretty confident that I'll enjoy the rest of the series, anyway.

___
Note: All of my book reviews can be found here.

The air must be pretty thin up there

(Tim Eagan)

The inevitable result of our Republican-controlled Supreme Court

(Tim Eagan)

(John Cole)

(Tom Toles)

(Steve Benson)

(Mike Thompson)

(John Cole)

(Pat Bagley)

(Jeff Danziger)

Bank notary refuses service to American Atheists

Can you imagine the uproar if this notary had refused - for "personal reasons" - to do business with Jews or Muslims,... or Catholics?

The fact is, it wouldn't even have occurred to her. So what if the bank's customers didn't share her religion? And if she had done that, the uproar would have been huge, and she certainly would have been fired.

So why would she even think of discriminating against atheists? Why is it that atheists aren't automatically included in our respect for diversity and the freedom of religion? Buddhists don't believe in your god either, you know.

As this article points out, the Supreme Court is currently hearing a case about this very subject:

This is really the same issue which the Supreme Court is deciding in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. At stake is quite literally the ability of corporations or the individuals that work for them to legally discriminate for "personal" reasons. (We can call them religious reasons, but why bother? One need only cite a religion -- any old religion -- to qualify.) We are talking about 70 years of civil rights law being swept away in one fell swoop. If one bank employee can refuse to provide service for an atheist, why shouldn't a pharmacist be able to refuse to sell heart medicine to a Muslim?

Freedom of religion means that you can believe whatever you want in America. You can worship, or not, as you please. You can speak as you wish. You can gather together with like-minded people and try to convert the heathens, if you want.

But you still have to live in peace in a diverse nation, where other people might not share your beliefs. So what? That's none of your business. You can't dictate to your neighbors. You can't dictate to your employees. You can't dictate to your customers.

This is America. If you want to force other people to believe as you do - and that's exactly what this is all about - then move to Afghanistan and join the Taliban.

Suppressing the (Democratic) vote

The Daily Show
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Voting makes you gay? Heh, heh. Maybe voting turns you atheist. But then, that would probably suppress voting from Republicans and Democrats alike, huh?

What America is all about

(Jae C. Hong, AP)

The New Mexico Supreme Court this week ruled that a wedding photographer had violated state law by refusing to serve a lesbian couple. TPM has the details here.

The owners of the photography studio argued that their actions were justified as freedom of religion. The high court disagreed. You can read the whole decision here, if you wish.

But I wanted to quote just a brief passage from Justice Richard C. Bosson's concurrence:

On a larger scale, this case provokes reflection on what this nation is all about, its promise of fairness, liberty, equality of opportunity, and justice. At its heart, this case teaches that at some point in our lives all of us must compromise, if only a little, to accommodate the contrasting values of others. A multicultural, pluralistic society, one of our nation’s strengths, demands no less. The Huguenins are free to think, to say, to believe, as they wish; they may pray to the God of their choice and follow those commandments in their personal lives wherever they lead. The Constitution protects the Huguenins in that respect and much more. But there is a price, one that we all have to pay somewhere in our civic life.

In the smaller, more focused world of the marketplace, of commerce, of public accommodation, the Huguenins have to channel their conduct, not their beliefs, so as to leave space for other Americans who believe something different. That compromise is part of the glue that holds us together as a nation, the tolerance that lubricates the varied moving parts of us as a people. That sense of respect we owe others, whether or not we believe as they do, illuminates this country, setting it apart from the discord that afflicts much of the rest of the world. In short, I would say to the Huguenins, with the utmost respect: it is the price of citizenship. I therefore concur.

Nice, isn't it? This really needs to be more widely understood.

You are "free to think, to say, to believe" as you wish. Absolutely. But we don't live as isolated hermits, each on our own mountaintop. We're social animals. We live together. We survive or not, thrive or not, in groups.

And these days, we live in an advanced society with very diverse people. America, in particular, has thrived on that diversity. That freedom of religion these people are using as their argument was established as a way for diverse people to live together in peace. It was specifically designed as an instrument of tolerance, not intolerance.

You can believe whatever you want, but this is about your conduct, not your beliefs. It's not your business to demand that everyone else follow your own religious beliefs. In fact, that would be turning freedom of religion upside down. Again, freedom of religion is about tolerance, not intolerance.

You can believe that lesbians are going to 'Hell,' if you wish. But that shouldn't influence your conduct towards them. This is a diverse nation. Other people believe differently than you do. So feel free to run your own life, but don't try to run theirs.

If you want to operate a business, you need to treat your customers equally. Fairly. Look at it as the price you pay for civilization. After all, you'll benefit, too. Your neighbors may not like bigots, but you'll still be able to buy the goods and services you need, yourself.

This deserves repeating:

In the smaller, more focused world of the marketplace, of commerce, of public accommodation, the Huguenins have to channel their conduct, not their beliefs, so as to leave space for other Americans who believe something different. That compromise is part of the glue that holds us together as a nation, the tolerance that lubricates the varied moving parts of us as a people. That sense of respect we owe others, whether or not we believe as they do, illuminates this country, setting it apart from the discord that afflicts much of the rest of the world.

If we've learned anything from history, it should be this. As an American myself, I find it embarrassing that any of us would think otherwise.

Gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act

I'm not going to add much, since Cenk Uygur does such a good job here, but just remember that it's the five Republicans on the Supreme Court who decided this (just as it was the five Republicans on the Supreme Court who gave us George W. Bush as president).

You don't think they have a partisan political reason for gutting the Voting Rights Act? Ha!

Let me just close with some quotes from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent:

1. "The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the [Voting Rights Act] has proven effective ... Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

2. "When confronting the most constitutionally invidious form of discrimination, and the most fundamental right in our democratic system, Congress' power to act is at its height."

3. "Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court's opinion today. The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story. See supra, at 18–19. Without even identifying a standard of review, the Court dismissively brushes off arguments based on "data from the record," and declines to enter the "debat[e about] what [the] record shows"…One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the Nation's signal piece of civil-rights legislation."

4. "Just as buildings in California have a greater need to be earthquake­ proofed, places where there is greater racial polarization in voting have a greater need for prophylactic measures to prevent purposeful race discrimination."

Judgment Gay

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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This is progress - major progress - but note that the vote was 5 to 4 (again). This time, Anthony Kennedy sided with the four Democrats on the Court.

But note that he joined the right-wing crazies just the day before in striking down the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And he was part of that terrible majority decision in Citizens United, too. It's that close at the Supreme Court.

The far right-wing justices tend to be young, too. They'll be with us for a long time. And all it would take is just one more Republican president picking one more justice. That's how close this remains for America - not just for this particular issue, but many others. It's scary.

There was more on the Daily Show last night that was pretty good (here and here), but I did want to post the following brief video clip. This is exactly the right response to Michele Bachmann:



Who cares what Michele Bachmann thinks? Only the media.