Ashamed Of My Name

With the possible highly probable exception of the Bread-Mold-As-Brain-Tissue Wing of The Party That Dares Not Speak Its Name, Chief Justice John G Roberts - NO FUCKING RELATION TO YOURS TRULY, BTW - will not be remembered fondly.

Does the name Roger B Taney ring any bells?  How 'bout Melville Fuller?

I'm trying to stay with my doctrine of Judge Slowly here, but the SCOTUS ruling on Section IV of the VRA yesterday looks like another Monument to Stoopid.

Here's the metaphor: Very few people are robbing banks any more, so we can safely get rid of the law that makes Bank Robbery a crime.

We go now to Charlie Pierce for some brain bleach:

Today Among People Who Wear Robes

A Little More On The Voting Rights Atrocity

Even More About Today's Voting Rights Atrocity

We are so fucked.

DumFux News

I'm sure they'll say it was just a joke; a little self-deprecating silliness - cuz hey, that's what all the Libruls are saying about us anyway.

But the one thing you have to know by now is that you can't bring the funny if you don't bring the truth.

USA - USA - USA

We're number...18?  Aah fuck.

Per Global Wealth DataBook (Credit Suisse):

What happens when a country's middle class takes a hit?  Look around.

Hey, Hey Paula

I truly don't give a good goddamn about Paula Deen or the little dramas that play themselves out behind the scenes of daytime cable TV.  If this was just another dustup over royalties or whose ego got bruised in a contract fight or whatever, then none of it matters at all, and I'd leave it alone.  But it isn't, and it does, so I can't.

I'll leave it at this, from Dan Bernstein at CBSChicago.com:

Until yesterday, she had the system wired to play up all the folksy charm of her heritage while smoothing away any rough edges of its horrific historical dark side. She even accomplished one of the most shockingly brazen endorsement deals in the history of modern media – finally getting around to admitting her own diabetes, only to begin shilling for a drug purported to fight the disease. She was stuffing her drooling viewers’ bodies full of excess glucose, only to grab at their money once they talked to their alarmed doctors.

A charade that never really should have been allowed to happen in the first place is finally over. An uneducated, unattractive woman who can’t cook somehow stumbled up to a prime position in American media by pandering successfully to similarly stupid, unhealthy people, aided by TV executives happy to keep cashing their checks.

hat tip = Blue Gal

Today's Scary Numbers

From the documentary I posted earlier today:

In the US, with Congress consistently getting approval ratings down around 10-15%, something like 96% of all Reps and Senators are re-elected and returned to Washington.

In the Soviet Union, when their "polling" was all about how everybody dearly loved all those wacky guys-n-gals in Moscow, the re-election rate was somewhere around 92%.

Call me crazy, but y'know - just sayin' - maybe we're doin' it wrong(?)

A Fragile Democracy

A media system wants ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity.

Your homework for this week:

Smart People

...talking about shit that matters.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Tim Wise

On the creation of "Whiteness":



I think I put this up at least once before - it bears repeating.

Mr Delbert McClinton

Rumored (not-completely-falsely) to have been the guy who taught John Lennon to play harmonica, Delbert's just one of those guys who gets around so much and plays so much that you could believe he invented Blue-Eyed Soul (which ain't all that far from a natural fact neither).

Practically a throw-away:

It's Tough Out There For A T-Rex