Yes, as it happens, this is serious.

In case you hadn’t heard, two rich people got married in England today. If you’ve had any awareness of the celebrity news, as carried by every goddamn publication in the world, you already know this, even if you don’t know why you should give a rat’s ass about it.

I find it particularly mystifying that anyone in the United States, or any other civilized country, would care, and I’m not just grousing about it.

You see, a couple of hundred years ago some brave Americans stood up to an English king (well, he was German, really, like the current occupants, but he was the king of England) and announced what was at the time a radical proposition:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .

They view things differently over in England. They believe that a king or queen is entitled to rule by an accident of birth. Or, to be more specific, the English dogma is that the incumbent inbred king or queen, whoever he or she might be, is given authority by god to rule over the country.

When people, whether they be the yammering twits on the Today Show (Motto: “Just pretend you’re watching the news”) or the throngs of people lining the streets of England, celebrate or give any credence to the monarchy, they are saying that the Declaration of Independence is wrong. We’re not all created equal, some lucky few families are inherently superior to everybody else in the world. They deserve everything they have because they, well, just because.

So if you see me scowl or grimace at every mention of one more undistinguished rich guy marrying one more conventionally attractive woman, or when you express similar feelings of disgust, that’s standing up for American principles.

If the English are stupid enough to buy into their royalist ideology I can’t stand in their way, but the world will be better off when nobody claims or recognizes any title of royalty.

UPDATE: Blue Mass Group is also covering this.

A reasonable approach to an increasingly difficult matter, or a midnight power grab by a cabal of political Judases, turning on their erstwhile constituents (see “Corporate Lawyer Chides Union Reps for Language” by esteemed BMGer sabutai)

 I would say the answer is obvious.

Is anyone following this?

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

I don't have many ties to Massachusetts, but WTF is a majority Democratic legislature doing to screw union workers out of their collective bargaining rights?

If you've ever had teenagers you know that it can be challenging to make sure they maintain their abstinence pledge. After all, look at Bristol Palin.

Now, a group of pro-abstinence mothers (how did they get to be mothers? I have no idea) have come up with a new line of sexy underwear to promote chastity in their little girls. Because, after all, what's a better time for your nubile young daughter to start an abstinence conversation then when she and her boyfriend are down to their underwear?
We created a line of underwear to use as conversation starters to help reinforce family morals as they relate to relationships and dating.

So if you have decided that the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue has gotten too sexy for you, WWYMD might be just the thing for you.

Andy Bromage over at Seven Days has a great article this week on corruption in Vermont's crime lab involving fraud in DataMaster testing procedures.

The gist of the article is that the lab technician in charge of doing tests on the state's fleet of DataMasters, the device used to test breath samples for alcohol content, engaged in a variety of stratagems to make sure that the machines would appear to be operating correctly to measure the blood alcohol content even if they weren't.

Two leading criminal defense attorneys, David Sleigh and Frank Twarog, are now using these improprieties to attack the validity of lab results used in DUI cases in Vermont.

If you're a regular viewer of any of the myriad of Law and Order shows on TV you know about the Brady rule. Based on the Supreme Court decision of Brady v. Maryland, it requires prosecutors to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense. Among other things, evidence that evidence being presented against the defendant may not be credible is specifically covered by case law applying the Supreme Court’s Brady decision.

This body of law was addressed by the Supreme Court just last week, when they allowed a conspiracy by New Orleans prosecutors to conceal evidence to go unpunished.

There is a revealing quotation from Washington County State's Attorney Tom Kelly at the end of the article:

“If we were convinced that we had invalid evidence, we wouldn’t use it,” the prosecutor says. “I have not encountered any problems with the machines, but again, it will be up to the courts to decide whether the challenges have any merit.”

The problem is that the prosecutor isn’t the one who gets to decide. Even an honest prosecutor could review some particular piece of evidence, conclude that it wouldn’t affect the strength of the State’s case, and decide not to turn over the evidence. After all, the guy’s guilty!

They wouldn’t be prosecuting him if he weren’t, right?

It sure makes you wonder how many convictions were based on fraudulent DataMaster evidence, doesn’t it?

Who doesn't like the idea of having their taxes cut, right? After all, taxes are money out of your pocket, and nobody feels that they have enough money, so if they can hold onto some of it they'll be happy.

That's been the Republican mantra for decades, ever since Reagan was president, or even earlier (remember Jarvis-Gann in California, the proposition that has decimated California's educational and other public institutions?).

This idea continues to form the latest Republican tax proposal, and I think it really deserves a close look.

You see, the Republicans, and their head budget guy, Paul Ryan, have proposed a new tax plan, and their plan does, as promised, cut taxes. A lot. $182,900,000,000.00. In case you're not used to reading numbers like this, it's $182.9 billion.

There's only one problem here. With all that money in tax cuts, who's not getting a tax cut?

You.

That's right, you and everyone else who makes less than $127,769 a year. In fact, the bottom 90% of all taxpayers would receive a tax increase.

Not to worry, though, because we are getting a big tax cut in the aggregate. Does it really matter if 100% of those tax cuts are distributed to the highest 10% of all earners?

The Republicans are betting that it won't matter one bit, because they'll still pitch the debate as one where they are proposing a tax cut and Democrats are proposing a tax increase.

I would think, though, that there should be a huge difference between the Republicans' usual tactic, which is to package a pittance in tax cuts to the middle class with gigantic tax cuts to the wealthy and this new plan, which is to actually raise taxes on the middle class to fund big tax cuts on the rich.

This is really Robin Hood in reverse. This should be a winning argument for us, but it has to be made, and made loud and clear, every single day.

There were those who argued that there was no difference between the two major presidential candidates in 2000, and many of them will continue to argue, after the disappointments of the Obama administration, that there is no meaningful difference between the Obama who runs for reelection in 2012 and whatever troglodyte the Republican Party selects as its candidate.

One of the popular memes these last few years is that elections have consequences, and in a presidential election, one of those consequences is that the president gets to nominate justices to the Supreme Court.

The guy selected in 2000 got to appoint John Roberts, the current Chief Justice, and Samuel Alito, one of Roberts’ accomplices. The guy elected in 2008 got to appoint Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Obama’s two appointees and Bush’s two appointees were on opposite sides of a case this week in which the Bush majority decided that a man who was convicted, sentenced to death, and served fourteen years on death row because of a fraudulent conspiracy to conceal exculpatory evidence carried out by prosecutor Harry Connick, Sr., and attorneys working under him, was not entitled to compensation.

Do you think things might have come out a little differently in this case if Bush hadn’t been in the White House to appoint Alito and Roberts?

I sure do.

Thanks, Ralph.

There are certain institutions in the American press that can always be counted on, and the Wall Street Journal is one of them. Here’s the latest example of their overheated rhetoric.

What’s the action the workers are requesting?

A sign that says the business supports workers’ rights.

And those steel pipes?

Yup, count on the Wall Street Journal.

Newt Gingrich (pbuh) explains the likely outcome of an atheist takeover of the United States:

“I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

No understanding of what it once meant to be an American? Is that as bad as no understanding of what it means to be an atheist or a Muslim?

(I had to get this post up before April Fool's Day!)

Cross posted from Rational Resistance. http://rationalresistance.blog…

We actually think it’s pretty important in the United States. We may have discovered the idea at Runnymede, when the barons stood up to the king and made him acknowledge that the law was more than whatever the king felt like.

Only they haven’t learned that lesson in Wisconsin yet.

You know what they’ve done so far: they screwed around with the rules to pass Scott Walker’s union-busting legislation, then they decided that if you were a Democrat your vote wouldn’t count.

The violations of law were so clear that the opponents of the law went to court and got an injunction prohibiting publication of the law, an essential prerequisite to implementation under Wisconsin law.

So what did the Republicans do? They went ahead and published the law anyway.

If I had been the judge, I’d be some pissed by this time, and apparently the judge who issued the order is. She really did say “Maybe you fuckers didn’t understand what I was saying.”

Well, pretty close anyway:

“Further implementation of the act is enjoined,” said Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi.

“Apparently that language was either misunderstood or ignored, but what I said was the further implementation of Act 10 was enjoined. That is what I now want to make crystal clear,” she said.

And:

“Now that I’ve made my earlier order as clear as it possibly can be, I must state that those who act in open and willful defiance of the court order place not only themselves at peril of sanctions, they also jeopardize the financial and the governmental stability of the state of Wisconsin,” Sumi said.

We’ll see what the next round brings, but I, for one, am looking forward to seeing Scott Walker frog-marched out of the state house to start serving his term for contempt of court.

Cross posted from Rational Resistance.  

Here's a new guy (Republican candidate for President), pizza magnate Herman Cain.  

Like most Republicans, his reading of the Constitution is a little, well, idiosyncratic.  

  KEYES: You came under a bit of controversy this week for some of the comments made about Muslims in general. Would you be comfortable appointing a Muslim, either in your cabinet or as a federal judge?    

CAIN: No, I would not. And here’s why. There is this creeping attempt, there is this attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government. This is what happened in Europe. And little by little, to try and be politically correct, they made this little change, they made this little change. And now they’ve got a social problem that they don’t know what to do with hardly.

 

Oops. I guess I spoke too soon when I talked about his reading of the Constitution, because that's obviously something he's never done. If he had, he might have noticed the Religious Test Clause.  

 

Yes, sir, even though he wants the opportunity to take the oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, apparently that doesn't apply to the parts he doesn't like.  Follow the link and watch the video soon, because we have a hunch he may not be in the race too long.