I Promised You More

You mean my mortgage deduction isn't guaranteed in the constitution?

Post-Racial America (You Bet)

Thanks to a Brazilian friend for introducing me to the work of Barry Deutsch.  You can expect more.

It is all the more pertinent after reading Linda Greenhouse´s essay in today's NY Times.

Race is the project of the Roberts court – more than enhancing corporate welfare, more than lowering the barrier between church and state, more than redefining the boundary between state and federal authority.

The Shrub´s Official Portrait

I can see Dick Cheney´s hand.

Can't Help It, I Love This Picture

Trump has enough self-respect for the two of them.

Our Imbecile Constitution?

There's an interesting opinion piece in the NY Times today, called Our Imbecile Constitution.
Lest the title seem unnecessarily offensive, it is taken from the Federalist Papers, in which the authors referred to the Articles of Confederation as imbecilic.

Nowadays we have to speak of the constitution reverentially.  Mitt Romney and the Mormon church go so far as to think it was either written by Gawd (and, I don't know, maybe found under a rock in a forest in upstate New York?) or at least divinely inspired.

According to the author of this current piece, it hasn't always been so in our history:

In the election of 1912, two presidents — past and future — seriously questioned the adequacy of the Constitution. Theodore Roosevelt would have allowed Congress to override Supreme Court decisions invalidating federal laws, while Woodrow Wilson basically supported a parliamentary system...

Apropos of Wilson's ideas, I remember reading in the midst of the months-long "Watergate nightmare," how the situation was being prolonged because of our particular constitutional system.  In a parliamentary system, Nixon would have received a no-confidence vote and been gone in a relative heartbeat.

But if one must choose the worst single part of the Constitution, it is surely Article V, which has made our Constitution among the most difficult to amend of any in the world. The last truly significant constitutional change was the 22nd Amendment, added in 1951, to limit presidents to two terms. The near impossibility of amending the national Constitution not only prevents needed reforms; it also makes discussion seem futile and generates a complacent denial that there is anything to be concerned about.

By contrast, according to the author, there have been "more than 230" state constitutional conventions (how many more? one wonders). He claims that each state has had an average of almost three constitutions.


The electoral system is a good example of a discussion that seems futile.  Everybody agrees it makes no sense and needs to end, but nothing happens, or is likely going to happen.  In the meanwhile, the 2012 presidential election is going to be decided in 11 or so key battleground states.  We have the real possibility of once again electing a president who loses the popular vote...a sentence which ignores the dysfunctional nature of what our constitution allowed to happen in 2000, and presumes we actually did elect Bush over Gore.


Romney, in defending his courtship of Donald Trump's money and support was quoted today as saying:

“You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me, and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in....but I need to get 50.1 percent or more, and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”

My first thought is to wonder what planet he's been living on.  He should know that he doesn't need to get 50.1 percent of the vote.

Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Liar

Fred, thanks for sharing this.

I was listening to a Bill Maher podcast today at the gym.   He commented on the assertion some people make that gay marriage diminishes traditional marriage.

This assertion is made by people who are apparently untroubled by the fact that Romney delivered the commencement address recently at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University....a diploma from which diminishes my diploma from a real university.

It is funny to hear Romney defend "tradtional" marriage between one man and one woman.  I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard recently that this will be the first election in US history where both candidates' grandfathers were polygamists.  I don't know anything about Obama's grandfather.

The Innocent Man

If there is anyone who still thinks the death penalty is a good idea (and apparently a majority of my fellow citizens do), they should be forced to read The Innocent Man, by John Grisham.  It's a non-fiction account of, despite the title, five innocent men in Oklahoma.  Two of them were on death row, one of whom came within 5 days of being executed.  Two of the five are still in prison, serving life term, with no chance of a DNA test proving them innocent because they were convicted without a body being found or a crime scene to investigate.

Grisham says, about the process of writing this book:

The journey also exposed me to the world of wrongful convictions, something that I, even as a former lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about.  This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it.  Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same--bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors.

See also the website of The Innocence Project. They have helped exonerate close to 300 people, some on death row and others not, since they began their work in the late '80s.