A little noted decision by the Supreme Court has overturned a precedent on anti-trust law regulating retail pricing dating back to 1911.

The court ruled that manufacturers may fix the retail costs of goods. Prior to today the retailer fixed the price, leading to the famed “manufacturers suggested retail price” sticker in car windows. The Supreme Court (in a 5-4 split decision featuring the same Roberts/Scalia/Alito/Thomas/Kennedy majority that combined so often to swerve the court rightward this term) ruled that the precedent setting retail pricing for this nation since 1911 was outdated, and out of step with modern economics.

Believe you me, I don’t make any pretense at being an economic wizard, but frankly this opinion is baffling. The forces of economics guiding this nations entire financial engine since early last century are what have brought us to where we are today.   Surely one of those basic forces is the mechanism by which prices paid by consumers for every day common retail goods is set.  The Supreme Court is meddling with the fundamentals here. As the famous line from Mr. Beale goes: YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

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Today in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (read the opinion here) the Supreme Court ruled that voluntary school assignment plans that took race into account as a small factor violated the U.S. Constitution, specifically Clause 4 of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment which mandates that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This ruling is disturbing, if not shocking, and, for reasons I will explain below, an unfortunate continuation of an unfortunate drift in equal protection jurisprudence.

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This is a continuation of an ongoing series which I started long ago, calling upon the White House to do themselves and the nation a favor by retiring President Bush from the public speaking circuit. Thus far my well meaning advice has not been heeded (or even freaking noticed for that matter) by the White House… But the President was given the crux of this message when it came to Iraq just a couple of months ago.

Remember when that gaggle of house Republican moderates went to the White House and had a frank one on eleven discussion with President Bush? One of the messages they had for the President was that he had lost all credibility with the American people regarding the Iraq war. If future statements on the situation in Iraq were to be believed, those statements would have to come from General Petraeus.

I knew when that meeting occurred that the President would not be able to help himself. Just today Americans were provided the latest example of President Bush taking the bully pulpit and providing less than candid talking points on the Iraq war. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I really hate it when someone claims some sort of moral high ground for their position, which position is based largely upon lies and deceptive talking points. (Which position additionally is working at cross purposes to the best interests of the nation resulting in the wasting of blood and treasure on a biblical scale, but this little aside doesn’t really fit with the theme of this post so I’ll leave it at that.)

After getting through the pleasantries and acknowledging the notable attendies at today’s speech, Bush gets straight to dissembling with the very first substantive statement on affairs in Iraq: (more…)

Whenever anything goes wrong in America or one of its operations abroad, the media always frames it by reporting, “Poor President Bush!” Iraq War worsening? Poor Bush! American health care in serious danger? “Oh, poor poor poor George!”

Today’s defeat of the immigration bill is just the latest example. Bush himself did not work particularly hard to make the bill fair or sane, although the media falls upon itself to give him credit. What decency was in the bill largely came from Democrats (Republicans being great on the principle of “Hey, once I got in the door, I want it locked and barred so no one else can get in!”)

Yet, rather than note that so-called American values were injured by Congressional GOP xenophobes, CNN is one of many media outlets practically wiping tears from its eyes as it announces how terribly disappointing this is for our Felon in Chief.

Although the story has been getting precious little attention in the mainstream media (which is still busy faulting Elizabeth Edwards for telling poor, poor Ann Coulter it’s not nice to cheer the death of Edwards’ son or wish husband John dead of a terrorist assassination plot), Sally Quinn writing in The Washington Post gave us a hell of a story I find all too believable for an administration and a Republican Party committed to lying and cheating and subverting democracy and the will of the American voter every way possible.

Namely, wrote Quinn, Vice President “The Dick” Cheney is such a liability these days that the GOP can’t depend solely on rigged electronic voting to steal the 2008 presidential election as it did successfully in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. Thus, elements within the GOCheat Party want to force Cheney out on claims of “illness” and replace him with Fred Thompson who certainly is as much of a cold-hearted, miserable SOB as Cheney so that Thompson has a “leg up” on taking the White House in 2008 (just in case Bush doesn’t declare martial law and unconstitutionally give himself another eight years of naps, vacations, warmaking, and pretzel choking).

Now, this manuever isn’t exactly unprecedented. Nixon helped do this to his Veep, Spiro Agnew (who, unlike Cheney, hadn’t ever shot anyone and then made the victim apologize to him). This is how we ended up ultimately with President Jerry Ford (and I won’t even go down the dark street of how the VP select after that, Nelson Rockefeller, ended up dying in his mistress’ bed during strenuous and not-exactly-Biblically-approved adulterous sex).

Yet, as I’ve written before, the Bush Administration makes Nixon and Watergate look like child’s play. Even if there are 200 ways for the Bushies to get what they want honestly and without using the U.S. Constitution to wipe their dirty rumps, they ALWAYS opt for the most egregious, criminal, slimy, and undemocratic method.

If America was a fair democracy, we wouldn’t be talking about letting Thompson replace Cheney; no, we would be filing not just impeachment proceedings against this crew, but arresting them and trying them on charges of treason. I believe there has to be a way we can prevent the GOcheats from making this play, and I strongly advise we do so.

Whether it’s free speech, religion, campaign finance reform, the U.S. constitution, “Bong Hits for Jesus”, or just how quickly one dangerous fool (the foulest 4-letter word of all: B-u-s-h) can destroy the nation’s highest court, anyone paying attention to the schizophrenic and patently partisan rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court this week isn’t apt to be just disappointed, but thoroughly sickened. I recommend reading the entire Tuesday oped from The New York Times and definitely follow it up with the LA Times’ editorial on the Bong Hits 4 Jesus decision, but here’s a snippet from NYT:

The Supreme Court hit the trifecta yesterday: Three cases involving the First Amendment. Three dismaying decisions by Chief Justice John Roberts’s new conservative majority.

Chief Justice Roberts and the four others in his ascendant bloc used the next-to-last decision day of this term to reopen the political system to a new flood of special-interest money, to weaken protection of student expression and to make it harder for citizens to challenge government violations of the separation of church and state. In the process, the reconfigured court extended its noxious habit of casting aside precedents without acknowledging it — insincere judicial modesty scored by Justice Antonin Scalia in a concurring opinion.

[...]The decision contained a lot of pious language about protecting free speech. But magnifying the voice of wealthy corporations and unions over the voice of candidates and private citizens is hardly a free speech victory. Moreover, the professed devotion to the First Amendment did not extend to allowing taxpayers to challenge White House aid to faith-based organizations as a violation of church-state separation.

The media has been pretty damned disappointing for several years now, especially since the stealing of the 2000 presidential election and yet worse in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, when men like Dan Rather teared up on national TV and promised to do whatever he possibly could for “this president” and the fight against terrorists. But the media’s response to Elizabeth Edwards, a woman fighting not only metastatic breast cancer but for her husband John’s efforts to become the 2008 Democratic nominee for president, having “the nerve” to confront hatemongerer Ann Coulter and chief GOP delusionist on Chris Matthews’ LardassHardball on MSNBC, was shameful and embarrassing.

In less than a week, Coulter has said “anyone named B. Hussein Obama shouldn’t be telling anyone about terrorists” and referred to Barack Obama as “Godless” because he belongs to a “strange” church where they support Khaddafi of Libya, and stated that in the future when she speaks of John Edwards she will say (to paraphrase): “I wish him dead from a terrorist assassination plot.”

Yet, with Matthews giving Coulter an hour to peddle yet more lies and hate without any real challenge, the media chose to attack Elizabeth Edwards, saying she had no right to speak up against Ann, who can dish it (packed with outrageous lies and at least as much hate as an Osama bin Laden video message to Bush) but demands that no one is ever allowed to criticize her.

The media should be ashamed, which is more than Ann Coulter could ever be, since sociopaths have no conscience.

For the last few days, as first Republican Senator Richard Lugar and then Senator George Voinovich broke ranks with the Bush Administration’s “Iraq Surge - and Record Oil Profits - At Any Cost” agenda, the media treats these GOPers with a completely different perspective than they did Congressional Dems last month in the great capitulation that removed any timetables from Bush’s latest Iraq war funding bill.

Oh, trust me, I’m not apologizing for what many of these Dems did. I would have much preferred they stood their ground and risked the failure of the funding and/or Bush’s veto of their bill than give the American voters one more graphic example of the Bushies forcing blue partyites to bend over and be sodomized “with a smile on their faces and a song in their hearts.”

But, as long as the media still treats so harshly the Democratic response last month, how is it that they are so willing to congratulate as “brave” and “noble” Senate Republicans who knew last month that the surge would not work, that it would cost too many lives (both among U.S. soldiers and even more among innocent Iraqi civilians), that the American people did NOT support their support of Bush and yet they voted to uphold Bush’s bill rather than the will of the American people, the safety of Iraqi citizens, and the lives of American troops?

Sure, it’s great that Lugar and Voinovich have edged ever so few millimeters closer to sanity while the Bushies continue their ever right-ward march into extreme fringe lunacy. But it’s too little, too late, and doesn’t change a damned thing. Does it?

Walter Pincus has a write up in the Washington Post about a speech given by former FISA judge Royce Lamberth.  (Sidenote:  great stuff from WAPO lately…  their editorial side can cause heartburn sometimes, but we should give props when they are due.)

When the NSA spy program initially came to the nations attention the administration claimed that the FISA law was outmoded, that applications for warrants caused delays, and the entire FISA system was cumbersome. Lamberth gives details which tend to prove the exact opposite of the administrations talking points.

For example, Judge Lamberth was caught up in the immediate aftermath of the Pentagon attack on 9/11, but describes how he was able to respond to the attack in his role as FISA Judge even before he had been freed from the mess: (more…)

I’ve added a new page and features to help readers and bloggers find information faster.

A new “Blogosphere” page lists post headlines from some of the top lefty blogs. 

And a new “see detail” feature will display the blog headline detail in a new window (click the magnifying glass image next to the titles).  This same feature is also available in the “Headlines” page.

Both pages are in the navigation bar at the top of the site.

Mike Bloomberg and Unity ‘08 have been getting a fair amount of press recently because they supposedly represent a “third way” out of our current fiasco in Washington.

They are “nonpartisan” and/or “nonideological.” But what exactly does that mean?

Even the most personality-centric candidates propose something and these nonideologues are proposing programs as well. Balanced budgets, a multi-lateral, but engaged foreign policy, improving health care, and addressing global warming are the big ones.

It seems to me that these “nonpartisans” fit squarely within the moderate wing of the Democratic Party.

The fact that George Bush has taken the Republican Party so far to the right as to turn everyone else into a Democrat is not a reason for moderates to start their own party. It is a reason to unite under one banner and actually win for a change and fix some problems.

I am not completely naive. I realize that many potential 2008 or 2010 Democratic voters will drift back into the Republican Party eventually. But centrists who are really Democrats that create three way races will be the quickest way to return Republicans to power and deepen the current mess.

And so I have this to say to Mike Bloomberg and the Unity 08 crowd: The problem is not partisanship, the problem is the Republican Party.  Once you admit this to yourselves, we will actually win and get government to work for the people again.

There is all kinds of stuff regarding Vice President Cheney floating around the intertubes today. The Washington Post story on Cheney’s crucial role in reversing 230 years of Constitutional government and pushing for unfettered Presidential power in time of war is a must read.

I also read the transcript of today’s press conference with White House spokes toady Dana Perino, and she spent the entire time dancing around the Vice President’s recent argument that his office was not a part of the executive branch.

The WAPO story and today’s presser may only seem to be connected due to the focus of each being Cheney. But a closer look at the stories serves to show a striking similarity as you read along. In both cases the Vice President stakes out positions which those who must argue for him find very difficult if not impossible to intelligently sustain.

Here are some examples from the WAPO story: (more…)

June is shaping-up to be one of the highest casualty months since the Iraq War began some four years ago.  But even with all of the casualties on the ground, the chickenhawks are fully aware that the United States has had air superiority over Iraq since the opening days of the war, and one can assume, would have air superiority in any conflict.  Apparently, Cheney (the real “war czar”) has decided to apply that lesson learned to the inevitable attack on Iran.  From Anti-war.com…

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing – that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack – but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

The Government is using creative accounting practices to hide multi trillions of dollars in debt according to Dennis Cauchon with USA Today. The entire liability for each U.S. household on the accumulated debt is $516,348. 

The debt accumulated in fiscal year 2006 was over $1.2 trillion in reality, but was reported after creative accounting to be only $248 billion.  That represents an accumulated debt owed on the federal budget for each household of $11,434 for 2006 alone.  (more…)

The pundits at The Hill indicate that a new and far more serious scandal (I call it war crimes and treason, myself) regarding the Bush Administration and Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon’s handling of the Iraq prison, Abu Ghraib, has its fuse lit and is about to explode.

And yes, this is in ADDITION to the followup story Seymour Hersh brought us in The New Yorker earlier this week about Major General Taguba, charged with investigating the torture and prisoner deaths at the prison we operated, who said (to summarize):

• Bush and Rumsfeld lied through their teeth when they claimed not to know about the abuse and deaths (and again, many of the prisoners were never charged with any crime but were held indefinitely, with some never leaving… at least, not leaving alive
• Bush and Rumsfeld demanded that only lesser ranking people (read: mostly grunt GIs like the strange Lindy England and the whistle blower known as Brigadier General - now demoted - Janis Karpinski) be charged; also that Bush and Rumsfeld ordered Taguba NOT to investigate their OWN culpability through orders to produce “information” regardless of the cost in minds and lives
• That when Taguba tried to do his job properly, he was forced to retire

And yet we expect everyone else in the world to recognize that American soldiers and civilians taken hostage should be treated fairly and humanely according to those “quaint” Geneva Conventions.

Let me add something to my previous post about Bush and Gitmo:

It’s critical that we understand and acknowledge that, in the nearly six years and thousands of detainees sent to Gitmo since we turned it into the kind of lawless horror Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden WISHED they had perpetrated, a precious few - perhaps less than a dozen - detainees held there have ever been charged with any crime except the unspoken one: being Muslim and living in their own countries (usually ones where they have oil or oil-related resources we want to plunder) when the Bushies decided to invade.

If there’s a War on Terror (rather than a war of abusive ERROR on our part), I suspect we may be the biggest perpetrators of terror. God help me; I never expected to have to say that about my own country. To do so makes me ill - quite literally.

Thursday night, around dinner time, word was seeping out that a big meeting had been called for today to seriously consider the shutdown of the so-called “enemy combatant” prison at the naval base the U.S. keeps at Guantanamo Bay (aka Gitmo), Cuba. Then, just as suddenly as that story broke, the Bush Administration in its never-ending pursuit of petulant, destructive, and treasonous incompetence seemed to pivot and decide: “Hey, if you’re gonna tell us we HAVE to close Gitmo, we’ll show you by keeping it open after all.” [sigh]

As Constitutional law scholar the excellent Jonathan Turley who is a professor at George Washington University noted last night in an interview with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, Gitmo has indeed become symbolic of the Bush Administration’s “war against the rule of law.” [In Bush's America, this is just one of his many wars against science, reason, the U.S. Constitution, the working class, public education, human rights... I could continue to list them all day and still not come close to assembling a comprehensive list; these Bushies have been very busy destroying all we hold dear.]

Gitmo should and ultimately MUST be closed. Of that there is no doubt. But if the Bushies ever do shut it down on their treasonous watch, there is also absolutely no doubt that the closure itself will be nothing but symbolic. They would just move elsewhere (we’ve created secret torture prisons throughout the world) the 375 or so detainees currently housed in our Cuban hellhole. (more…)

bhfrik brought us the quite unbelievable - that is, unbelievable if you haven’t been paying attention to how egregious and thoroughly unjust life in Bush’s United States has become - story of how the wife of one of the American GIs (Alex Jimenez) missing in action for weeks in Iraq was about to be deported by the same American government that lied the soldier into the Iraq war. I really wish I could tell you the outrage of the country has completely KO’ed this insanity, but this IS still Bush’s America and neither justice nor sanity ever prevails.

There is some positive news, but more of a “stay of execution” than any just resolution. What passes for the immigration authority these days now says it will not, for the time being, deport Mrs. Jimenez (how kind of them, eh?). However, they were very clear that they will NOT grant her the green card her husband applied for back in 2004. Without a visa, without a green card, and now quite possibly forever without her husband, this soldier’s wife probably stands an all-too-great risk of being deported at a later date, say about the time this story dies down in the press.

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

Knowing that a diverse gathering of lefties wander by ATD’s welcoming intertubage, let me start with the following.   WARNING:  Anti Ralph Nader Rant Ahead.  Click the ‘more’ button only if you want a healthy dose of Nader Hater medicine.

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While pro-harsh punishment folks just love those “three strikes and you’re out” laws that can send someone convicted of a third crime into prison for the rest of his or her life, I wonder why so very little gets said in the “Mainstream Media” (MSM) about how President George W. Bush not only insists he is free to break the very laws he signs (through “Bush Gets Out Of Jail Free!” singing statement exclusions), he is also this nation’s biggest criminal lawbreaker.

The great folks at TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime talk about Bush and the “Karl Rove-Ken Mehlman-Official White House Email Funneled Through GOP Servers Then Purged to Hide From Citizens” debacle.

OR, as the Bushies like to say, “WHAT U.S. Constitution? WHAT Presidential Records Act?“