Author: Raymond

 
From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

Lawyers from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) have filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving Montana’s low political campaign contribution limits. The public interest law group is asking the court to take up the case following a decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision to uphold Montana’s strict campaign finance laws.

The low contribution limits raise free speech concerns, according to WILL President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has the perfect opportunity to clarify the standard to which state government can set limits on how much ‘speech’ someone can give,” Esenberg said. “The low contribution limits in Montana seem particularly problematic. The Court needs to clarify this area of the law and doing so will both safeguard the electoral system and people’s First Amendment rights.”

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From Tommy Christopher:

Trump really thinks it’s the Justice Department’s job to help Republicans win the midterms.

Trump touched off a firestorm Monday when he suggested the Justice Department shouldn’t be prosecuting corrupt Republicans right before the midterm elections.

“Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department,” Trump wrote. “Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff[.]”

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

The Electoral College is part of the checks and balances designed to prevent concentrations of government power. For example, the United States Constitution supersedes the state constitutions, allowing the federal government to act as a check on states’ power. Likewise, since the elected legislatures of the states has the responsibility of choosing the electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” the states can act as a check on federal power.

Also, the Electoral College acts as somewhat of a power balance between large and small states.

Likewise, the electoral college acts as a check on populism, which can be quite tyrannical. Instead of one huge national majority acting as a single overbearing power, candidates must win enough smaller majorities in individual states, each of whom may have differing interests, to accumulate the necessary electoral vote majority. The point is to check populist power as a means of limiting concentrations of government power;

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From John Scalzi:

Steve Bannon and the New Yorker — Well, this was predictable enough, to anyone who wasn’t David Remnick: The New Yorker announced that Bannon would be the headliner of its upcoming “festival,” in conversation with Remnick, who is the magazine’s editor-in-chief. That didn’t sit particularly well with much of the New Yorker’s staff, or, more importantly in this case, many other participants of the festival, who all started dropping out rather than share the program with Bannon. Between those drop outs, staff disapproval and a wholly predictable backlash on Twitter, Remnick bowed to the inevitable and dropped Bannon from the program with a somewhat defensive statement. Bannon, of course, was gleeful about this, calling Remnick “gutless,” which is what Remnick deserves for inviting that fascist piece of shit to his festival of ideas in the first place.

As a former journalist, I can understand Remnick’s thinking on this one: He’d been angling to interview Bannon for a while, and the idea of getting that festering lump of white “supremacy” on a public stage where he couldn’t equivocate or finesse his way out of his shitty racist ideas seemed like a good one. The problem was that Remnick was thinking with his journalist brain and not his event coordinator brain. The event coordinator brain should have realized that inviting Bannon to a New Yorker-branded “festival of ideas,” complete with travel expenses and honorarium, was in effect paying Bannon to take on the New Yorker imprimatur for his ideas. It’s not reportage; it’s the New Yorker saying “these ideas are important enough that we paid to get them on our stage.” And note well that Bannon was meant to be the headliner.

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From Earth-Bound Misfit:

So McCain broke under torture. Everybody does. Unless you, personally, have experienced being tortured by North Vietnamese sadists, you have no right to judge McCain.

Therefore, if you’re one of the legions of right-wing trolls who have called McCain “Songbird”, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Corruption is nothing new in the Republican Party. They have long tied themselves to the rich in this country, and willingly traded their votes for campaign donations, sweetheart deals, and illegal payoffs.

They make promises to ordinary Americans at election time, but after the election they break those promises and go back to policies that favor the rich to the detriment of everyone else. They invented the Washington swamp, and love to wallow in it.

But since Trump moved into the White House, the GOP corruption has grown by leaps and bounds.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

Many are already accustomed to leaving the task of cleaning and drying the dirty dishes to a dishwasher – what if it were possible to do something similar with an infant in need of a diaper* change? A newly issued US patent granted to inventor Iman Farahbakhsh, of Quchan, Iran, explains the concept…

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

My grandparents lived in Riverside, in what is now part of Nunes’ district, would never call themselves farmers, they were ranchers. Their ranch produced oranges. Maybe it is an Old California thing and no longer is true? Anyway, it grates on my 5th-generation Californian nerves to see Nunes’ occupation listed as Representative/Farmer in the central valley.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

With August ending, it’s worth remembering that we are not, as we once would have expected, a year away from the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa. Nor are we looking back three years to the 2015 Ames Straw Poll. That’s because Republicans foolishly ended that event in 2015. And that might just be why Donald Trump won the nomination in 2016.

The straw poll was, to be sure, a ridiculous event. Candidates basically paid for votes. As many over the years noted, the straw poll didn’t do a very good job of predicting either the winner of the Iowa caucuses or the eventual nominee — as the final caucus winner, Michelle Bachmann in 2013, could tell us.

So why did it matter — or at least perhaps matter — that there was no straw poll in 2015?

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From nojo at Stinque:

We were right about the idea: Self-government doesn’t run by itself. The veneer of democracy is not the substance. We laugh at despots claiming 98 percent of an election, because we know the whole thing’s a sham, rotten to the core. We applaud the sight of voters — elsewhere — exercising their franchise, holding up their purple fingers, claiming their stake in the future of their nation.

We want to believe that’s how it works. We really want to believe that’s how it works here.

David Frum — yes, we know, but these are the times we live in — tweeted a photo this week, one of his lines tagged on a board. It’s a good line, a very good line, something close to what we’ve been saying a lot lately:

“If conservatives realize they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism, they will abandon democracy.”

And here we are.

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