June 2011 archive

Herr Doktor Professor–

Republicans are deeply, deeply concerned about the budget deficit; they believe that our nation’s future is at stake.

But they’re willing to sacrifice that future, not to mention risk the good faith and credit of the federal government, rather than accept so much as a single penny of tax increases as part of a deal.

…

(T)he GOP never cared about the deficit – not a bit. It has always been nothing but a club with which to beat down opposition to an ideological goal, namely the dissolution of the welfare state. They’re not interested, at all, in a genuine deficit-reduction deal if it does not serve that goal.

And everyone who has preached bipartisanship, who has called for a meeting of minds on the subject, is either a fraud or a chump.

The New York State Senate has passed the Marriage Equality bill with a comfortable 36 33 votes in favor and only 26 29 nays. The bill includes protections for religious organizations to be exempt from performing ceremonies, if they choose. There is no residency requirement in NY for a marriage license. Well done, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Gay Marriage Bill Passes In New York: Senate Passes Bill Allowing Same Sex Marriage

Gay couples and proponents of gay rights have a reason to celebrate tonight, as the New York State Senate has passed a bill that allows same sex marriage.

New York will be the sixth, and largest, state in the union to adopt gay marriage. The bill will take effect 30 days after governor Andrew Cuomo signs it into law.

The decision, which passed 33-29, was the culmination of weeks of contentious debate and negotiations between Governor Cuomo and the GOP-controlled Senate. After the bill passed in the Assembly, it was unclear if the bill had secured enough votes to pass in the Senate. When a few notable undecideds joined the cause –including Republican Roy McDonald who famously defended his decision, saying “fuck it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing” — the scale in favor of gay marriage seemed to tip.

Correction: The final vote for passage was 33 to 29. The amendment for the exemption for religious organizations was 36 to 26. h/t to Bruce McF for catching that.

Hello, all!  This installment was inspired by Kossack dsteffen who correctly identified a rather obtuse reference to the abovenamed comedy troupe in the comments at the big orange Wednesday past on My Little Town.  I gave him two honorable mentions in the comments there, but perhaps this more than honorable one will get him some notice.

The Firesign Theatre was, and continues to be still, a very bizarre and very funny comedy troupe.  This is going to be an extremely difficult piece, because most of their work was on vinyl, and around 45 minutes long.  In addition, everything sort of interlocked, so what is hilarious in context is likely to fall flat without the previous half hour or so of it.

I shall attempt to extract the ones that can sort of stand alone, and for the ones that do not shall attempt to include what might seem to be rather long pieces that do not make sense until the end.  Hey, that is what we do here sometimes.

If you do not get Current TV you can watch Keith here:

Due to playing in the mud (don’t ask, trust me it’s messy), the Evening Edition will brought to you by c’est moi.

Lawmakers harden positions on taxes, spending

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republicans and Democrats dug in their heels on Friday as President Barack Obama prepared to wade into a divisive debate over taxes and spending aimed at heading off a default on the government’s debt.

The White House said Obama will meet separately with Senate Democratic and Republican leaders on Monday in an effort to resurrect negotiations that collapsed when Republicans walked out on Thursday over Democrats’ demands for tax hikes.

Banks move closer to deal on Greek bailout

ATHENS/FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Banks and policymakers moved closer to a deal on Friday to help Athens secure funds ahead of a parliamentary vote on austerity next week that Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou must win to avert default.

Despite a refusal by the conservative opposition to back the plan agreed with international lenders and signs of revolt in his own socialist party, Papandreou said he was confident the deeply unpopular package of spending cuts, tax hikes and privatizations would pass.

Yes, the New York State legislature passed a really important bill yesterday fixing a long neglected problem of importance for the all New Yorkers. No, it was not the Marriage Equality Bill that would allow same sex marriage in New York. It was naming Sweet Corn as the official state vegetable. Just what we need in NY, more starch in our diets. Meanwhile, we are still waiting for equality for our GLBT brothers and sisters.

Up Dated: We’re getting there. I’ll keep you posted.

NY pols begin to clear way for gay marriage vote

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

New York Times Editorial: Their Temper Tantrum

Congressional Republicans, who played a major role in piling up the government’s unsustainable debt in the first place, have thrown a tantrum and walked out of the debt limit talks. This bit of grandstanding has brought the nation closer to the financial crisis that Republicans have been threatening for weeks. But, at least now, their real goals are in sharp focus.

The two Republicans in the talks, Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and Senator Jon Kyl, the minority whip, had no intention of actually negotiating. Negotiations require listening to those on the other side and giving them something they want in exchange for some of your goals.

There are those of us who knew all along that they weren’t negotiating in good faith. Now get Obama to realize that fact.

Robert Sheer: Bill Clinton’s Legacy of Denial

Does Bill Clinton still not grasp that the current economic crisis is in large measure his legacy? Obviously that’s the case, or he wouldn’t have had the temerity to write a 14-point memo for Newsweek on how to fix the economy that never once refers to the home mortgage collapse and other manifestations of Wall Street greed that he enabled as president.

Endorsing the Republican agenda of financial industry deregulation, reversing New Deal safeguards, President Clinton pursued policies that in the long run created more damage to the American economy than any other president since Herbert Hoover, whose tenure is linked to the Great Depression. Now, in his Newsweek piece, Clinton has the effrontery to once again revive his 1992 campaign mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid,” as the article’s title without any sense of irony, let alone accountability. But that has always been the man’s special gift-to rise above, and indeed benefit from, the messes he created.

Ed Schultz rails against the latest attack on the middles class, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s bill ending collective bargaining on health care for state employees and reducing their benefits.

This is an outrageous attack on state employees and unions that will hurt them for years. The bill will increase the costs of contributions to pension funds and limit access to health care at the same time it could increase subscriber costs by several hundred percent.  It removes the right to choose where they go for treatment unless they purchase an even more expensive plan. Most public employees have no collective bargaining rights except for health care, this bill ends that right.

It also freezes retirees cost of living adjustments (COLA) for the next 30 years. These raises have fluctuated and for the last two years have been 0%. Without some raises the elderly in New Jersey may well find themselves impoverished.

While the bill was opposed by many Democrats, it was the Democratic leadership, including Senate President Stephen Sweeney, Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver and Assemblyman Lou Greenwald, who sold out betrayed the fundamental Democratic values. Any Democrat that voted for this horrendous bill should be primaried by a real Democrat.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

Click on images to enlarge.

June 24 is the 175th day of the year (176th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 190 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment.

Roth v. United States, along with its companion case, Alberts v. California, was a landmark case before the United States Supreme Court which redefined the Constitutional test for determining what constitutes obscene material unprotected by the First Amendment.

Prior history

Under the common law rule that prevailed before Roth, articulated most famously in the 1868 English case Hicklin v. Regina, any material that tended to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences” was deemed “obscene” and could be banned on that basis. Thus, works by Balzac, Flaubert, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence were banned based on isolated passages and the effect they might have on children.

Samuel Roth, who ran a literary business in New York City, was convicted under a federal statute criminalizing the sending of “obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy” materials through the mail for advertising and selling a publication called American Aphrodite (“A Quarterly for the Fancy-Free”) containing literary erotica and nude photography. David Alberts, who ran a mail-order business from Los Angeles, was convicted under a California statute for publishing pictures of “nude and scantily-clad women.” The Court granted a writ of certiorari and affirmed both convictions.

The case

Roth came down as a 6-3 decision, with the opinion of the Court authored by William J. Brennan, Jr.. The Court repudiated the Hicklin test and defined obscenity more strictly, as material whose “dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest” to the “average person, applying contemporary community standards.” Only material meeting this test could be banned as “obscene.” However, Brennan reaffirmed that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment and thus upheld the convictions of Roth and Alberts for publishing and sending obscene material over the mail.

Congress could ban material, “utterly without redeeming social importance,” or in other words, “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest.”

With the Court unable to agree as to what constituted obscenity, the Justices were put in the position of having to personally review almost every obscenity prosecution in the United States, with the Justices gathering for weekly screenings of “obscene” motion pictures (Black and Douglas pointedly refused to participate, believing all the material protected). Meanwhile, pornography and sexually oriented publications proliferated as a result of the Warren Court’s holdings, the “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s flowered, and pressure increasingly came to the Court to allow leeway for state and local governments to crack down on obscenity. During his ill-fated bid to become Chief Justice, Justice Abe Fortas was attacked vigorously in Congress by conservatives such as Strom Thurmond for siding with the Warren Court majority in liberalizing protection for pornography. In his 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon campaigned against the Warren Court, pledging to appoint “strict constructionists” to the Supreme Court.

The demise of Roth

In Miller v. California (1973), a five-person majority agreed for the first time since Roth as to a test for determining constitutionally unprotected obscenity, superseding the Roth test. By the time Miller was considered in 1973, Brennan had abandoned the Roth test and argued that all obscenity was constitutionally protected, unless distributed to minors or unwilling third-parties.

Is canceled.  Cancelado.  And why, you wonder is it canceled rather than merely delayed?  The dog ate the homework? A good question.  Your Bloguero regrets to inform that as he types these lines, he sits in the gritty city of his birth, Newark, New Jersey (Note: your Bloguero apologizes to the reader for this apparent redundancy).  He is sitting at gate C-71 at the Airport.  And it was evening and it was morning, and it is the beginning of the second day of travel from Eastern New York to urgently, passionately desired Mexico.  Total elapsed mileage so far: less than 150.  Total elapsed time: 1 day and counting.

Yesterday, your Bloguero’s friends at United Airlines had a small mechanical problem, and at about 8 am your Bloguero, who was then through security and waiting to get on a plane that was strangely and conspicuously absent, was informed in sum and substance that he could not go.  Tomorrow, yes.  What is now Yesterday, and was today at that time, we’re sorry, today, no.  No?  No.  Sir, I can put you on a flight at 6:55 am tomorrow with four stops all over this vast and wonderful country with its amber waves of grain and purple mountains. You will reach your deeply longed for destination at about 4 pm CT.  Your Bloguero stares in full disbelief.  He computes: 10 hours to arrive?  3 changes?  Overnight waiting? Your Bloguero decides to throw his fabled penury to the jackals and to get to get a ticket direct from Newark.  He rents a car. He drives.  He marvels at the complexities of the Information Society.   (Note to United: Your email that this flight was canceled reached your Bloguero about 4 hours after the cancellation.  So much for digital competence.)

In the middle of his unexpected, sudden highway excursion, as if there weren’t enough difficulties in the world already, your Bloguero has an extremely unpleasant encounter with his friends at Hertz.  I recount this in its glory for your edification.  Your Bloguero, who had gotten a good rate on a rented car back in May, informs H that, alas, he will not pick up the vegetable until noon, less than 24 hours late, but late nonetheless, the next day at noon.  This, your Bloguero assumes is a courtesy that responsible people should provide, rather than just showing up the next day with an explanation and demanding the car.  How very, very wrong.  The result of this courtesy?  Hertz is ever so very slightly sorry to inform your Bloguero that he will have to pay almost 3 times as much for the rental as was his original deal.  What?  For a day less?  How can that be?  And why, pray tell?  The “explanation” is priceless.  Sir, it is because when you modify your reservation it’s as if you canceled the old one and made a new one at today’s prevailing rate, according to H’s computer system, so you get the exorbitant rate we have today, not the rate you contracted for back in May.  H does not say, “Sir, we are mercilessly gouging you because we are a mighty global corporation, and your lizard overlord, and you, a mere mortal, exist to be taken advantage of.”  Five phone calls later, telephones, computers, prompts, eventually people, assistant managers, managers, promised but unmade calls back, and your Bloguero, who is then feeling the jackbooted foot of H on his throat and his shoulders entering his ears because of his undissipated annoyance, cancels the reservation.  He makes another one, almost as cheap with National.  Net increase of cost? $30.  Your Bloguero spends most of the money H tried to extract from him taking his children out to dinner on his way to Newark and a motel via Manhattan.  Your Bloguero resolves to tell the world of H’s treachery, and never, ever to use their company again.  (Note to H, whose full name will never again be typed in this blog: you owe me $30.  Pay up.)

Your Bloguero sits in the airport in overcast Newark.  He wonders: is there a single reported case in which a stranger has ever offered to a passenger a package or luggage to carry onto a flight?

This Week In The Dream Antilles is a weekly digest.  Sometimes it is actually a digest of essays posted in the past week.  Sometimes, like now, it isn’t.  Hasta Pronto!