Friday, June 26, 2015

Scariest anti-smoking commercials

Social revolution boxes in Repubicans


Jonathan Chait puts the decision in context:

The Supreme Court’s decision affirming marriage equality hastens what was already a fait accompli — public opinion has embraced the equal right to marriage at such a rapid clip that it was bound to spread to the deepest red precincts of America within a generation or two. The decision is also the latest signpost of an important structural change that will define the current era in American life. The United States is undergoing a period of social transformation as profound and rapid as any it has seen since the 1960s. The revolution — it may not be too strong a term — has been driven by elected officials and judges, and from the broader culture, the three strands all reinforcing one another...

Jeffrey Toobin deconstructs the dishonest right-wing attempt to destroy Obamacare:

...In dissent, Scalia cranked up his increasingly tired act as the Court’s sound-bite generator. According to Scalia, the Court engaged in “interpretive jiggery-pokery,” spouted “pure applesauce,” and should prompt Obamacare to be renamed “SCOTUScare.” The problem with Scalia’s dissent is the problem with the lawsuit as a whole. It’s a transparent attempt to undermine the law by whatever means happen to be available rather than by any consistent jurisprudential principle. Back in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, judicial conservatives believed in restraint—in deference to the elected branches of government. That led them to oppose such decisions as Roe v. Wade, which overturned state laws banning abortion, and to support broad exercises of executive power. The King case shows that some conservatives have abandoned their old idea of deference to the executive branch and are simply filing lawsuits against the laws they don’t like—and coming up with whatever reasons they can to support them...

Hard to see what the Republican long-term strategy is. They've systematically alienated many in the emerging voting majority: gays, Hispanics, labor, blacks, women. The clown-car gaggle of Repug candidates for president have to pander to their party's right-wing base in the primaries for even a chance at getting the nomination, which will doom that candidate in the general election in 2016. Next year we could see a historic Democratic Party landslide like LBJ's in 1964.

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