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Comments
I can't get past the headline here.
So today the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. The reasoning of the majority, according to Chief Justice Roberts, was that the "preclearance" map wasn't up to date enough.
(Background info: legislative redistricting -- i.e. the drawing of district borders for Congressional, state house, and state senate seats -- has to be "precleared" by the U.S. Department of Justice, in some places. Specifically, these are defined to be places that have had a history of discrimination against voters who are members of racial minorities.)
This seems to make sense given the age of the law -- it was passed in 1965 -- until you note that the VRA gets periodically reauthorized, most recently in 2006, wherein (from what I've heard from the news) Congress considers the evidence of racial discrimination and then chooses to reauthorize it.
Furthermore, the law contains provisions whereby locales can leave or enter the preclearance authority of the VRA -- called "bail out" and "bail in" provisions. They have both been used before, so the preclearance maps don't stay the same forever.
From the reasoning I heard was in Roberts's written decision, it seems that the philosphical/ideological approach to this is that, for the federal government to do something about a problem like racial discrimination in voting practices, first, the problem has to happen, then second, the problem must be documented, and then third, the problem must be proven, in order for something to be done about it. And this must be done every time the question comes up again.
Dangit, our government is slow and inefficient enough already. We should be optimizing things so that we maximize the use of taxpayer dollars to solve problems, not to determine the status of problems. I know that research and evaluation are necessary, but not in excess.
Oh, I forgot to mention: New laws about voting procedures -- such as voting locations (a.k.a. "polling places"), voter identification requirements, etc. -- also require (or would have required, given the recent SCOTUS decision) preclearance. Hence Texas state officials going "hey, fuck you DOJ, our new voter ID law don't need your stupid preclearance
".
There is still part of the VRA, Section 2 (I think), which says that voting arrangements must be nondiscriminatory. But what the recent decision has effectively done is shift the burden of proof from the states/localities (to show that their practices are not discriminatory, and thus be allowed to stand) to the voters/residents/plaintiffs (to show that the practices in their locality are discriminatory and thus should be struck down).
Which just goes right back to my point about this decision basically resulting in letting a problem happen before fixing it, rather than proactively preventing a problem.
Which annoys me because
like any good engineer knowsthe most efficient way to solve a problem is to prevent it from happening in the first place.In other news, I swear that the Roberts Court is made of trolls.
Granted, they're in the catbird's seat to be able to troll. But they're definitely in the business of pissing off everyone a little bit.
Courtesy of Thorn 14, an internet comment find from some news site:
Happy
2013th237th birthday, USA!(image courtesy of @saigyouji)
And in other political news, here is some commentary on the importance of downballot elections: how a close Attorney General race in California may have affected the Supreme Court decision on Proposition 8.
TL;DR: SCOTUS dismissed the appeal on the basis of lack of standing, but that's because the plaintiff wasn't the state itself; the state AG didn't defend prop 8. Had the state AG chosen to do so, standing would not have been in question. In 2010, current AG Kamala Harris (who chose not to defend Prop 8) defeated opponent Steve Cooley (who said he would defend Prop 8) by 13796 votes in the statewide race for attorney general.
Question. In the hypothetical case Nicolass is as crazy as he looks and acts and grants Snowden political asylum, who/what decides to embargo us and how long does it take? They're skimping on imperialist dollars, so...
Our governments were getting so well:
Rick Perry apparently will not be returning for a fifth term as governor of Texas.
Good fucking riddance. He survived two very lucky re-elections -- once by a highly fractured opposition (hence the nickname "Governor 39%", when he won with just 39% of the vote), once with a massive Tea Party movemnet propelling him to an easy win thanks to his party affiliation.
From a social networking acquaintance: http://www.nydailynews.com/james-gandolfini-tax-disaster-top-estate-lawyer-article-1.1391181
TL;DR: The will of the late Sopranos star James Gandolfini will be subjected to heavy rates of taxation.
Said acquaintance simply prefaced this with "#injustice".
Let's set aside for a moment the fact that this is the New York Daily News.
Well, it could be over there, but then an acquaintance of said acquaintance responded thus:
Wait...if "Swindler Big Brother" is supposed to "work for" the money it gets, then what about the heirs? Shouldn't they "work for" said money too?
It's HARD WORK being related to James Gandolfini. Do you have any idea how many other sperm they had to beat to do it?
Perry was notorious enough to be covered by newspapers here, thanks to his presidential ambitions. But you know, I can get the part about divided opposition, but tell me as an outsider, what is exactly the point about his Tea Party support? If folks voted for him, it doesn't feel to me like some stroke of luck. Besides, the argument from luck is kinda lame. Around here, folks of the right-wing opposition once claimed they lost the election because the TV aired a campaign encouraging the young people to vote.
2010 was a "wave year" when a Republicans enjoyed major successes at both federal and state elections, thanks in part to cultivating the "Tea Party" movement. Perry's most recent re-election was in 2010.
The guy thinks of himself as a the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, he discovered in 2012 that his charisma was not up to snuff.
Border patrol union are worried about the possible addition of staff that immigration reform will bring. Their spokesman says it's better to just increase working hours than add a shitton more staff, since hiring so many new guys quickly risks bringing in corrupt recruits or something.
Not really sure what to make of this, since I'm not familiar with what goes on at the USA's borders.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/07/the-american-dream-of-retireme.html
What does the so-called "American Dream" mean today, especially to people looking to retire after a life's worth of good hard work, but also to the broader social context? The PBS News Hour's economics correspondent Paul Solman finds some people's comments on the topic. Including Adam Smith's, in fact.
So the city of Detroit is trying to file for bancrupcy, since our provincial governments have nowhere near the kind of scope or control over their own assets American cities seem to have I'm quite surprised to find out this is a thing that happens.
Apparently, the U.S. government can send guys from "a joint terrorism task force" to somebody's house because of Google searches they did.
Seems the Googling was done at work, and somebody from the workplace reported it, but it still sounds a little extreme. And apparently they send people to do this a hundred times every week.
I suppose they have some legal obligation to assume everything is a worst-case scenario. SWATting is a legitimate prank again.
So anyone know what happened to that guy who got thrown in jail for making a joke about killing people at school?
So, I've heard that US Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has threatened 420 filibusters since becoming minority leader in 2007.
I wonder what he's smoking.
From what little I know about the guy, he actually filibustered himself at one point.
American politics can be uncomfortably hilarious.
I hear legally blind people will be allowed to carry guns in Iowa, and apparently this is already legal in some other states. Anybody have a list of such states?
I also heard that blind people accidentally shooting bystanders isn't really a thing that happens much, and I've been having trouble finding any news of that happening, so I guess that's true.
Keep in mind "legally blind" spans a whole lot of degrees of sight. My mother is legally blind, but can still read with sufficiently good glasses.
Isn't that just, like, -15 diopters of myopia?
Hell if I know the exact numbers.
Despite this being very late, this deserves an answer so there's good news and bad news.
Good news is that he finally got bailed out of jail after an anonymous person donated the 500k required to free him before his trial.
The bad news is this.
Later, it was reported that he was on suicide watch. And who the fuck wouldn't be suicidal under those circumstances?
It doesn't matter if he's found not guilty at trial, and it doesn't matter if he and his family successfully sue and get a huge amount of money. After what he's been through, I don't see how he can have a normal life. Some trauma you just do not ever completely recover from. Fucking scary that this can happen.
And in other U.S. politics news, there is now a federal government shutdown because the Republicans can't keep themselves from fucking with Obamacare while making a budget.
I wonder how many tea-partiers and fashion-libertarians there are out there who think that the government has actually completely shut down. And separately, I also wonder how many of them are cheering for the shutdown due to their hatred of things labeled "government".
Either way, this actually happened.
And that is very impressive in the worst way possible.
@glennmagusharvey:
At least one.(Why do I follow this clown?)