You might not have noticed since it was pretty dull and a lot of other things were happening, but the Sitting Decider and some asshole Mormon upstart spent an hour and a half talking about basically nothing last night, the first such exercise in extemporaneous theatre of a scheduled series of three.
As is my wont, I’m going to talk a little about it.
I was surprised at first by the ferocity and duration of the controversy surrounding Missouri Rep. and Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s embarrassingly boneheaded remarks about the female reproductive tract’s alleged powers of discernment. The excoriations you’d expect to hear in response to an aging white male wax scientific about “legitimate rape” have been in ample supply from both parties. Even the insufferable Sean Hannity called his comments “a terrible mistake” on his show Tuesday night, and the next co-president of the United States, Mittens Romney, earlier that day called upon Rep. Akin to leave the race.
But then I got to thinking about why this is such a huge flap. Why should anyone be surprised that a republican has some seriously backward views? Obviously his comment about rape was as stupidly incorrect on the facts as it was ignorantly dismissive of the horrors, but stunning ignorance is a stock-in-trade of the modern republican party. I guess that’s the point really: Akin’s mumbling struck a nerve precisely because he’s again revealed the ugly truth of the far-right pro-lifers which have increasingly become the standard bearers of the republican mainstream. They’re so tragically or willfully misinformed in order to cling to their manifestly bogus stance on reproductive rights that it was inevitable one of them would detonate a land mine on camera sooner or later.
What’s really interesting (read: disgusting) is how transparently political the fallout has been.
It was my pleasure to travel through airport security earlier this week in order that I could board a plane. With an hour to go before it was due to take off, I was slightly apprehensive about the longish line snaking away from the nudie scanners. Luckily it all worked out, but I was quite surprised while I waited to encounter a sign advertising yet another seemingly arbitrary TSA rule:
ABC News reported on Wednesday that America’s rugged, heroic Olympic athletes will be decked out in some classy duds designed by Ralph Lauren this year for the opening ceremonies in London. The BBC offered the next day that “the classic navy blue blazers, white trousers and skirts, and red-accented ties and berets may have a distinctly American look” that will no doubt have every Real American biting their lips to hold back tears of nationalist joy. But there’s a catch: the uniforms, while designed in the United States, were made in China.
Oh boy, cue the outrage!
Nina Totenberg and others reported in NPR’s health blog Sunday that the Supreme Court is very soon to hand down its decision in the controversial case of the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, it appears the decision has been scheduled to be given on Thursday. At issue are four distinct questions. The first was whether the suit, brought by 20 states against the federal government, can even be decided now by the Court since an 1867 law regarding taxes might be prohibitive. It appears to be the case that the justices feel that they can. The second, and most interesting to me and it seems most other people, is whether the so-called “individual mandate” provision to purchase health insurance or be assessed a fine is allowed by Congress’s broad powers to regulate interstate commerce. The third concerns whether a vast expansion of Medicaid mandated by the law is impermissably coercive on the states, who bear the responsibility of that program’s administration. Finally, the fourth is the resulting question of severability: if any part of the law should be found to be unconstitutional, how much of the rest of the law can be permitted to stand?
I wrote much earlier this year, among other things, about how this decision will be both interesting and significant. At first I thought I would wait until the ruling to talk about the case in any detail, but instead I’ll now attempt to predict how the Court will rule on this question and analyze a few other significant rulings handed down this week.
The Influencing Machine is a work of graphic nonfiction, written by Brooke Gladstone of On The Media fame, and illustrated by Josh Neufeld, probably best known for a journalistic serial he drew about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I first heard about it when Gladstone was interviewed on the Colbert Report in support of the book last year. 
The interview was interesting and I’ve enjoyed On The Media, so when I happened to notice it at the Elliot Bay Book Company not long ago I picked up a copy. It was well worth the sticker price.
The goal of the book is to critically examine the nature of the American media, roughly beginning with the rise of print in the colonies. Its thesis is that there is no “Influencing Machine” if that phrase means to imply that the media are some kind of external, possibly sinister force that control or direct outcomes in public life. The media are instead a mirror, Gladstone argues: “We get the media we deserve.”
I just completed my tour of duty as a potential juror at King County Superior Court. My summons arrived by mail at my old place, so I only found out last Friday that I was due downtown at 8 am Monday morning. I arrived ten minutes late, massively hungover from an epic house party I hosted over the weekend, and sat in a dimly lit room with about three hundred people. We watched a cheesy orientation video telling us all about how jury trials are the cornerstone of American constitutional democracy. There were posters on the walls scattered about claiming the same in case we forgot. Then a judge got up and said pretty much the same thing.
Then I waited two hours before being the 24th of the first 50 prospective jurors to be called up to a courtroom. I even raced down the hill on my bike in pretty heavy traffic, still somewhat hazy, to get there on time. Later, a bailiff would quip “We make you wait for hours but if you hold us up ninety seconds there’ll be hell to pay.” Government is nothing if not a paragon of efficiency.
The 11th annual Sasquatch music festival happened Memorial Day weekend at the Gorge Amphitheatre near the hilariously named city of George, Washington. It was four days of sun, dirt, dramatic daily temperature swings, tens of thousands of total strangers variously drunk or high or on vast quantities of controlled substances — or, as is more likely, an increasingly unplanned combination of all three — all sharing portable toilets and farmland for camping. All this was done to bring to pass a music festival at one of the most scenic venues in the world, the likes of which haven’t been seen since last year.
The New York Times dropped a bombshell expose earlier this week when it reported on many details of a ‘Secret Kill List’ that the President heads up. The existence of such a list within the administration isn’t news: the Los Angeles Times reported more than two years ago about a CIA drone hit list when there was talk of putting US citizen Anwar al-Awalki on it. Of course, he was put on that list and was later executed by drone to much fanfare.
What is new information is the personal role that Obama himself takes in deciding who lives and who dies. According to Tuesday’s Times article, “Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.”
The question of whether a pair of homosexual adults ought to be able to enter a federally recognized marriage has been under debate for twenty years or so. Hawaii appears to have forced the issue in the early 90s with the interesting case of Baehr v. Miike. The Hawaii Supreme Court remanded a trial court dismissal of a suit alleging Hawaii’s ban on same-sex marriages was illegal. The Court found in 1993 that, because the ban was discriminatory based on sex, it was subject to “strict scrutiny” and hence the burden of proof that the law was sound rested with the state “by demonstrating that it furthers compelling state interests and is narrowly drawn to avoid unnecessary abridgments of constitutional rights.” This led to a remarkably childish legislative and judicial back-and-forth which culminated in the People of Hawaii enacting, by a vote greater than two thirds, a constitutional ban in 1998.
At around the same time there had also been federal wrangling over the legal status of homosexuals. Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 on ending fifty years of refusing to allow gays in the military, which was derailed in part by then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell, leaving us with the widely reviled Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy. In 1996, Congress enacted the dubious Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which federally codified marriage as being only between a single heterosexual couple on fears that the US would be forced to recognize Hawaiian gay marriages due to the Full Faith and Credit clause in its Constitution. Many states followed suit in the intervening years; at present, 42 states ban gay marriage, 31 of them through Constitutional provision.
