1. Walgreen's drug store chain is considering merging with a European drug store chain and moving it's headquarters to Switzerland in order to lower its corporate taxes -- despite the fact that almost 25% of its revenue comes directly from our government for Medicare and Medicaid patients. SCOTUS says corporations are persons and have religious beliefs. If Walgreen's is a person, then it must be a sociopath without a sense of moral responsibility.
2. Rick Perry on FoxNews floated the conspiracy theory that the Obama administration is behind the surge of immigrants coming across our southern border. He doesn't offer any reason that Obama would want this but vaguely suggests "ulterior motives." Careful, guv'ner. This might be another "Oops" moment.
3. Speaking of Texas, that's the place where a gun license qualifies as a voter ID but a college student ID does not. Hmmm. No mystery there.
4. The latest form of protest from anti-environmentalists is called "rolling coal." It involves spending up to thousands of dollars to alter their truck engines and exhausts systems to produce heavy, black, soot-filled exhaust as a form of political protest. One trucker said "It's my way of giving them the finger." There's a Facebook picture of a truck backed up to a Prius, enveloping it with its cloud of black exhaust; another with a sign on the back that says: "Prius repellent."
Here's the link with pictures: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/06/rolling-coal-photos-video_n_5561477.html
Just another week in the Land of the Free.
Ralph
Monday, July 7, 2014
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Should Ruth Bader Ginsburg resign so Obama can appoint her successor ?
With the end of a Supreme Court term, when resignations are usually announced, attention has focused on Ruth Bader Ginsburg's age (81). No one has suggested that she's not still up to the job. In fact, the dissent she just wrote for the Hobby Lobby case would suggest that she is at the height of her powers and her influence.
It's really a political question, and it usually starts with citing statistics that Republican justices are so much better than Democratic justices at timing their leaving the court when a more like-minded president would be making the replacement nomination. Consider that Thurgood Marshall, the giant of liberalism, was replaced by the uber conservative Clarence Thomas; the moderate Sandra Day O'Connor by the very conservative Samuel Alito.
.
Obama still has 2 and 1/2 years, and he will most like be followed by Hillary Clinton for 4 to 8 years. That should make it fairly safe for RBG to wait a few more years. But the stakes are so high, we can't afford to lose one liberal vote.
Others have argued that Ginsburg is so effective and has such a history of shaping the court's views of women's issues, that it's unlikely that Obama or Clinton could get anyone nearly as liberal confirmed, especially if the Republican's take control of the senate in 2014. So she should stay.
Here's my dream scenario -- well, if I'm going to indulge in a dream scenario, I would resurrect Barbara Jordan from the dead and have Obama nominate her. But my more realistic dream scenario is this:
Ginsburg stays on the court. Hillary Clinton wins in 2016, and the Democrats still control the senate. Then Hillary nominates Barack Obama to replace Ginsburg when she steps down in 2017. Think about it. When he taught at the University of Chicago Law School, his specialty was constutional law. So he would combine a constitutional scholar, liberal views, plus the experience of having been president and had to deal with the consequences of SCOTUS decisions.
OK: So here's my real dreamy team: Let Ginsburg go ahead and resign. By a miracle Barbara Jordan comes back to life and Obama puts her on the court. Then Hillary wins in 2016 and puts Obama on the court to replace Clarence Thomas, who has just been impeached for repeated and obvious conflict of interests and refusing to recuse himself from those cases.
And that's only two wishes. Don't I get three? My #3 is a doozie: Antonin Scalia continues his slide into dementia and goes out as a paranoid, blithering idiot. His family intervenes and gets him to resign, and Hillary has a wide open field of smart women to choose from.
Ralph
It's really a political question, and it usually starts with citing statistics that Republican justices are so much better than Democratic justices at timing their leaving the court when a more like-minded president would be making the replacement nomination. Consider that Thurgood Marshall, the giant of liberalism, was replaced by the uber conservative Clarence Thomas; the moderate Sandra Day O'Connor by the very conservative Samuel Alito.
.
Obama still has 2 and 1/2 years, and he will most like be followed by Hillary Clinton for 4 to 8 years. That should make it fairly safe for RBG to wait a few more years. But the stakes are so high, we can't afford to lose one liberal vote.
Others have argued that Ginsburg is so effective and has such a history of shaping the court's views of women's issues, that it's unlikely that Obama or Clinton could get anyone nearly as liberal confirmed, especially if the Republican's take control of the senate in 2014. So she should stay.
Here's my dream scenario -- well, if I'm going to indulge in a dream scenario, I would resurrect Barbara Jordan from the dead and have Obama nominate her. But my more realistic dream scenario is this:
Ginsburg stays on the court. Hillary Clinton wins in 2016, and the Democrats still control the senate. Then Hillary nominates Barack Obama to replace Ginsburg when she steps down in 2017. Think about it. When he taught at the University of Chicago Law School, his specialty was constutional law. So he would combine a constitutional scholar, liberal views, plus the experience of having been president and had to deal with the consequences of SCOTUS decisions.
OK: So here's my real dreamy team: Let Ginsburg go ahead and resign. By a miracle Barbara Jordan comes back to life and Obama puts her on the court. Then Hillary wins in 2016 and puts Obama on the court to replace Clarence Thomas, who has just been impeached for repeated and obvious conflict of interests and refusing to recuse himself from those cases.
And that's only two wishes. Don't I get three? My #3 is a doozie: Antonin Scalia continues his slide into dementia and goes out as a paranoid, blithering idiot. His family intervenes and gets him to resign, and Hillary has a wide open field of smart women to choose from.
Ralph
Saturday, July 5, 2014
Some final (I hope) thoughts on Hobby Lobby
For a "narrow" case decision, Hobby Lobby has generated a huge debate, as well as a bitter division among the nine justices themselves. Here are some random thoughts.
1. The majority in this decision about contraceptives used by women are all middle-aged, Roman Catholic males who were appointed by Republican presidents.
2. I wrote yesterday about the hypocrisy in Hobby Lobby's refusing contraceptive coverage on a religious freedom claim, objecting to forms they consider abortion-inducing -- yet they do business with China, a government that forces women to have abortions. Today, I learned that there is an even more cogent hypocrisy: Hobby Lobby itself reportedly has $70 million invested in companies that make birth control and morning after pills.
3. The court majority has further enraged the women justices by a subsequent decision that granted the religion-oriented Wheaton College an exemption from even having to fill out the form that allows insurance companies to provide birth control without the college paying for it. They said even filling out the form made them complicit in the use of contraceptives.
4. This whole argument has become a mess. Altio's majority opinion is full of inconsistencies, non sequeters, and shoddy reasoning. For example: He writes that this religious freedom exemption does not apply to other medical controversies like vaccines; but he offers no reasoning for why this is different and deserves unique treatment. The division in the court itself and in the country is becoming a real problem, and the court's reputation is already suffering. The public's trust in SCOTUS has dropped. But I think that is not so much because of the divisiveness but because it is becoming ever-clearer that this court is always going to tilt toward the interests of business over the citizens and because the inconsistencies that appear obvious to others are based on justices personal prejudices -- but they claim not to let personal feelings be involved. It erodes trust.
5. And where does this "religious freedom" for corporations end anyway? What about all the other religions that might want to opt out of requirements based on religious beliefs: Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses, opposed to blood transfusions? What about Quakers and their pacifist beliefs? Why should they have to pay for war? And what about Muslims wanting to follow Sharia law?
HERE IS A SIMPLE SOLUTION
In fact, Alito even alluded to this simple remedy in his opinion, when he wrote that the best way to resolve this "would be for the government to assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives at issue to any women who are unable to obtain them under their health insurance policies due to their employers' religious objections."
Exactly. This is perhaps the best argument we've had yet that it would be so much simpler, as well as less expensive, to just eliminate employer-provided health insurance and move to a Medicare for All health care plan paid for through taxes. Yes, some might call it socialized medicine. Whatever you call it, Medicare is the most efficiently run, trouble-free, least expensive type of plan we could have. That would eliminate all these corporations' requests for exemptions based on their religious beliefs, and it would eliminate people not wanting to be forced to buy insurance. You just provide it and tax for it. SCOTUS has already said that would be legal.
Just think. All this Sturm und Drang would vanish if we had single payer insurance funded through taxes.
Ralph
1. The majority in this decision about contraceptives used by women are all middle-aged, Roman Catholic males who were appointed by Republican presidents.
2. I wrote yesterday about the hypocrisy in Hobby Lobby's refusing contraceptive coverage on a religious freedom claim, objecting to forms they consider abortion-inducing -- yet they do business with China, a government that forces women to have abortions. Today, I learned that there is an even more cogent hypocrisy: Hobby Lobby itself reportedly has $70 million invested in companies that make birth control and morning after pills.
3. The court majority has further enraged the women justices by a subsequent decision that granted the religion-oriented Wheaton College an exemption from even having to fill out the form that allows insurance companies to provide birth control without the college paying for it. They said even filling out the form made them complicit in the use of contraceptives.
4. This whole argument has become a mess. Altio's majority opinion is full of inconsistencies, non sequeters, and shoddy reasoning. For example: He writes that this religious freedom exemption does not apply to other medical controversies like vaccines; but he offers no reasoning for why this is different and deserves unique treatment. The division in the court itself and in the country is becoming a real problem, and the court's reputation is already suffering. The public's trust in SCOTUS has dropped. But I think that is not so much because of the divisiveness but because it is becoming ever-clearer that this court is always going to tilt toward the interests of business over the citizens and because the inconsistencies that appear obvious to others are based on justices personal prejudices -- but they claim not to let personal feelings be involved. It erodes trust.
5. And where does this "religious freedom" for corporations end anyway? What about all the other religions that might want to opt out of requirements based on religious beliefs: Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses, opposed to blood transfusions? What about Quakers and their pacifist beliefs? Why should they have to pay for war? And what about Muslims wanting to follow Sharia law?
HERE IS A SIMPLE SOLUTION
In fact, Alito even alluded to this simple remedy in his opinion, when he wrote that the best way to resolve this "would be for the government to assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives at issue to any women who are unable to obtain them under their health insurance policies due to their employers' religious objections."
Exactly. This is perhaps the best argument we've had yet that it would be so much simpler, as well as less expensive, to just eliminate employer-provided health insurance and move to a Medicare for All health care plan paid for through taxes. Yes, some might call it socialized medicine. Whatever you call it, Medicare is the most efficiently run, trouble-free, least expensive type of plan we could have. That would eliminate all these corporations' requests for exemptions based on their religious beliefs, and it would eliminate people not wanting to be forced to buy insurance. You just provide it and tax for it. SCOTUS has already said that would be legal.
Just think. All this Sturm und Drang would vanish if we had single payer insurance funded through taxes.
Ralph
Friday, July 4, 2014
A July 4th reminder
Amid the celebrations of the Declaration of Independence that the original 13 colonies made to throw off the increasingly oppressive yoke of the English rule, remember that we are caught up in a very divisive conflict among our own people now about immigration reform.
We have angry mobs screaming "Get Out . . . Go Home" at frightened women and children in California -- one of our later states that was mostly owned by Spanish speaking people who were there before we arrived.
There are no "Native Americans" except those we belatedly choose to call native Americans; and look how we treated them. Took the land that they inhabited, cheated them, pushed them out, confined them to reservations under terrible conditions.
So when did it become "our" land and our right to exclude others who want to come here? I agree there are practical problems. We can't just open the borders and take in everyone, because we have a collective society with agree-upon rights we give to each other. It is a participatory democracy.
But could we, at least for today, put aside the hate and the fear of the outsiders? Remember the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty from a grateful France . . . "Give me you tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free."
Let's at least have a little humility and less entitlement and arrogance. And let's put aside petty political squabbles and agree on some sensible reforms to our immigration system.
This is a nation founded on and by immigrants. Except for the Native Americans, we all descend from immigrants -- and even their ancestors came here from somewhere, even if it was 10,000 years ago.
Of course, many of the "keep out" shouters refuse to believe scientific evidence that the earth existed ten thousand years ago, but that's another problem for another day.
Ralph
We have angry mobs screaming "Get Out . . . Go Home" at frightened women and children in California -- one of our later states that was mostly owned by Spanish speaking people who were there before we arrived.
There are no "Native Americans" except those we belatedly choose to call native Americans; and look how we treated them. Took the land that they inhabited, cheated them, pushed them out, confined them to reservations under terrible conditions.
So when did it become "our" land and our right to exclude others who want to come here? I agree there are practical problems. We can't just open the borders and take in everyone, because we have a collective society with agree-upon rights we give to each other. It is a participatory democracy.
But could we, at least for today, put aside the hate and the fear of the outsiders? Remember the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty from a grateful France . . . "Give me you tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free."
Let's at least have a little humility and less entitlement and arrogance. And let's put aside petty political squabbles and agree on some sensible reforms to our immigration system.
This is a nation founded on and by immigrants. Except for the Native Americans, we all descend from immigrants -- and even their ancestors came here from somewhere, even if it was 10,000 years ago.
Of course, many of the "keep out" shouters refuse to believe scientific evidence that the earth existed ten thousand years ago, but that's another problem for another day.
Ralph
SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision . . . maybe not so bad ?
As I said I would in yesterday's posting about the Hobby Lobby decision, today I am trying to condense and explain a quite different point of view that comes from an interview on WABE (Atlanta's NPR radio station) with Mark Goldfeder, who is a Senior Lecturer at Emory University School of Law
and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at
Emory University.
As Professor Goldfeder explains, all the talk about Hobby Lobby (abbreviated hereafter as HL) being a "closely held" corporation really is not the significant thing, because 90% of U. S. companies are considered closely held. They are, almost by definition, smaller companies -- many of them primarily a family business -- as opposed to a large, publicly traded corporation.
However, according to a New York University report, 52% of all private employees work for such "closely held" companies. It's not an insignificant number of people. So in what sense was it a narrow decision that will not have much effect beyond this case?
The reason we don't need to worry about a slippery slope, according to Goldfeder, is that, in addition to being closely held, the corporation has to meet the further criteria of "strict scrutiny jurisprudence." These safeguards have been there for at least 21 years, since the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).
Goldfeder explains that, unlike what most people assume, this was not primarily a constitutional case testing the freedom of religion right. It was a case brought under the RFRA, which requires that to be granted an exception three criteria must be met. And this HL case is the first one in those 21 years that has met those criteria.
The corporation must first convince the court that its religious objection is a sincerely and deeply held one and that the requirement would be a substantial burden on their belief system. HL did this.
If that criterion is met, then the government can deny the exemption only if it shows: (1) that it has a compelling interest in the requirement (to provide birth control) and (2) that there is no other way to satisfy that requirement. If the government can convince the court on these two counts, the company loses the case, and no exemption is granted. In other words, the law does not allow for religion to trump unless all three of these criteria are met.
The court was not convinced that the only way to provide contraceptive care for HL's employees was to require the company to violate its religious beliefs. After all, the government has already established a way of doing that for catholic churches and hospitals. Therefore, quite properly according to this reasoning, the court upheld the exemption for HL.
Goldfeder says that almost no corporations can meet that standard of strict scrutiny. He says, further, that this way of deciding about an exemption has been available, at least since the RFRA became law in 1993. What this case did was simply affirm that this provision in RFTA is in fact a good test, that the Court knows how to balance interests properly, and that occasionally, once every 50 years or so, a deserving group will get an exemption."
That is Professor Goldfeder's argument. It makes the court decision seem both less outrageous and less ominous. Whether he is correct remains to be seen.
Now I feel compelled, however, to question the court's finding that Hobby Lobby has a sincerely held religious objection in view of the fact that HL freely engages in trade in China, a country where government (until recently) compelled women to have abortions if they already had a child and got pregnant. That makes an IUD and the birth control pill seem like pretty small potatoes. Yet HL, it seems, is willing to put aside their religious objection to abortion in order to profit from its business in China.
However, what I don't know is whether Hobby Lobby only sells to China or whether they actually operate in that country, have employees there, etc. That would make a lot of difference. This argument will undoubtedly go on for some time.
Ralph
As Professor Goldfeder explains, all the talk about Hobby Lobby (abbreviated hereafter as HL) being a "closely held" corporation really is not the significant thing, because 90% of U. S. companies are considered closely held. They are, almost by definition, smaller companies -- many of them primarily a family business -- as opposed to a large, publicly traded corporation.
However, according to a New York University report, 52% of all private employees work for such "closely held" companies. It's not an insignificant number of people. So in what sense was it a narrow decision that will not have much effect beyond this case?
The reason we don't need to worry about a slippery slope, according to Goldfeder, is that, in addition to being closely held, the corporation has to meet the further criteria of "strict scrutiny jurisprudence." These safeguards have been there for at least 21 years, since the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).
Goldfeder explains that, unlike what most people assume, this was not primarily a constitutional case testing the freedom of religion right. It was a case brought under the RFRA, which requires that to be granted an exception three criteria must be met. And this HL case is the first one in those 21 years that has met those criteria.
The corporation must first convince the court that its religious objection is a sincerely and deeply held one and that the requirement would be a substantial burden on their belief system. HL did this.
If that criterion is met, then the government can deny the exemption only if it shows: (1) that it has a compelling interest in the requirement (to provide birth control) and (2) that there is no other way to satisfy that requirement. If the government can convince the court on these two counts, the company loses the case, and no exemption is granted. In other words, the law does not allow for religion to trump unless all three of these criteria are met.
The court was not convinced that the only way to provide contraceptive care for HL's employees was to require the company to violate its religious beliefs. After all, the government has already established a way of doing that for catholic churches and hospitals. Therefore, quite properly according to this reasoning, the court upheld the exemption for HL.
Goldfeder says that almost no corporations can meet that standard of strict scrutiny. He says, further, that this way of deciding about an exemption has been available, at least since the RFRA became law in 1993. What this case did was simply affirm that this provision in RFTA is in fact a good test, that the Court knows how to balance interests properly, and that occasionally, once every 50 years or so, a deserving group will get an exemption."
That is Professor Goldfeder's argument. It makes the court decision seem both less outrageous and less ominous. Whether he is correct remains to be seen.
Now I feel compelled, however, to question the court's finding that Hobby Lobby has a sincerely held religious objection in view of the fact that HL freely engages in trade in China, a country where government (until recently) compelled women to have abortions if they already had a child and got pregnant. That makes an IUD and the birth control pill seem like pretty small potatoes. Yet HL, it seems, is willing to put aside their religious objection to abortion in order to profit from its business in China.
However, what I don't know is whether Hobby Lobby only sells to China or whether they actually operate in that country, have employees there, etc. That would make a lot of difference. This argument will undoubtedly go on for some time.
Ralph
Thursday, July 3, 2014
SCOTUS' decision and its naive slippery slope
The appalling naivite -- or their crass manipulativeness, take your pick -- of several recent landmark Supreme Court decisions is really troubling. Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion on the Hobby Lobby case, for example, blithely says it is a narrow decision which only applies to the specific case in question. That is, it allowed the exception only in the case of four specific methods of birth control that the plaintiffs claim are actually abortions, but which scientific testimony says are not. It was not a ruling on contraception, in general, or to more general religious objections concerning federal regulations of commerce, like whether a public services company can refuse to serve gays, citing religious objections to their "life style."
However, the day after the Hobby Lobby decision was announced, the court confirmed that the ruling, by not commenting on them, actually left in place lower court rulings that favored businesses that object on religious grounds to all 20 methods of government-approved contraception. Thus the slippery slope of the ruling that was ostensibly about "abortion" (even though they were wrong about the facts) Did Alito and his four concurees not understand -- when he issued his majority opinion -- that it actually was broader and left in place objections, mainly from Roman Catholics, about contraception in general? If they all did understand it, why did they sign off on language that called it a narrow decision applying only to this case?
It seems at least we have a slippery slope in terms of the understanding what the decision actually does. even by the justices who concurred in the majority opinion. Some critics have even called the opinion incoherent and inconsistent. They're all lawyers, and they have smart law clerks. Doesn't anybody really vet these things?
It's certainly not reassuring when what comes from the court is not just a position you strongly disagree with, but seems so poorly thought out and so sloppily written.
Ralph
PS: I had already written this post to put up later when I read a different perspective from a Senior Fellow of the Emory University Center for Study of Law and Religion. I decided to go ahead and post this one above as written -- because it is consistent with the main argument from the left -- and then write another blog about the other point of view for tomorrow.
However, the day after the Hobby Lobby decision was announced, the court confirmed that the ruling, by not commenting on them, actually left in place lower court rulings that favored businesses that object on religious grounds to all 20 methods of government-approved contraception. Thus the slippery slope of the ruling that was ostensibly about "abortion" (even though they were wrong about the facts) Did Alito and his four concurees not understand -- when he issued his majority opinion -- that it actually was broader and left in place objections, mainly from Roman Catholics, about contraception in general? If they all did understand it, why did they sign off on language that called it a narrow decision applying only to this case?
It seems at least we have a slippery slope in terms of the understanding what the decision actually does. even by the justices who concurred in the majority opinion. Some critics have even called the opinion incoherent and inconsistent. They're all lawyers, and they have smart law clerks. Doesn't anybody really vet these things?
It's certainly not reassuring when what comes from the court is not just a position you strongly disagree with, but seems so poorly thought out and so sloppily written.
Ralph
PS: I had already written this post to put up later when I read a different perspective from a Senior Fellow of the Emory University Center for Study of Law and Religion. I decided to go ahead and post this one above as written -- because it is consistent with the main argument from the left -- and then write another blog about the other point of view for tomorrow.
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Target says "No targets in our stores, please"
Target, the nation's third largest retailer, has banned guns from its stores, asking customers even in the states whose laws allow it, not to bring their guns into Target stores.
According to a Target press release, appeals from the group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, influenced Target's decision. More power to the moms.
Ralph
"Bringing firearms to Target creates an environment that is at odds with the family-friendly shopping and work experience we strive to create," the announcement said.Target is by far the largest chain to do this so far. A couple of restaurant chains, Chipotle and Chili's, and Starbucks coffee shops have also requested no guns. Starbucks' CEO released an open letter "respectfully asking our patrons not to bring guns into our inside or outside facilities."
According to a Target press release, appeals from the group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, influenced Target's decision. More power to the moms.
Ralph
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