(Pic of the girl wounded from the Highland Park shooting came from here.)
Mehdi Hasan speaks with Igor Volsky and Adam Serwer about the latest gun carnage from Highland Park, Illinois and the liability of our renegade SCOTUS, with a good segment here from Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (and 7 are now dead, by the way...refreshing candor from Philly Mayor Jim Kenney, and no, I don’t blame him for it...one of the reasons why I like to include segments with Hasan is that, in addition to his insight and thorough reporting, the people he interviews are folks I consider to be pretty solid subject matter experts like Volsky and Serwer)...
...and I give Ana Kasparian so much credit for getting through the next segment, showing the humanity that all of us should feel in response to the story of the 2-year-old boy who lost both of his parents in the Highland Park shooting.
And by the way, there are a lot of times when I’ll say “Oh, don’t be so hard on the Democrats” when it comes to a particular issue where they’re ostensibly trying to do the right thing while the “party of R” is acting batshit insane as usual, but I’m not going to do that here. I don’t think one word of what Ana says here needs a caveat or qualifying language of any kind whatsoever.
And on top of that, I (like maybe you also – I don’t know of course) am seeing more language on social media to the effect of, “If you blame Biden and the Dems for anything and you claim to be a Democratic organizer or worker on a campaign but you’re not organizing more Dems to come out to the polls, then you must be a lousy organizer.” Yes indeed, what would the Democratic Party be without a circular firing squad?
Is there more I can do? Yes, and I’ll endeavor to do that. Is there more all of us can do? I’m sure the answer to that question is also yes. But a thoroughly deflating response from the individual who is pretty much the head of the Democratic Party needs to be called out (and this doesn't help either).
President Biden needs to familiarize himself with the Judiciary Act of 2021 (here), which calls for the Supreme Court to be expanded to 13 justices (the Bloomberg Law article actually calls for 15, which would be one justice for each U.S. appeals court – the number 9 for the SCOTUS justices represented the number of circuit courts at our nation’s founding – more here). So basically, Biden should be saying, “Look, we have a renegade Supreme Court that doesn’t care about precedent or settled law, with a majority of 6 conservative justices who, in addition to disregarding the separation of church and state recognized in our Constitution, lied during their confirmation hearings about respecting Roe (yeah, I know we’re talking about meely-mouthed legalese to try and prevent a repeat of what happened with Robert Bork, but “Strip Search Sammy” Alito sure as hell didn’t say Roe was “egregiously wrong” during his confirmation). For that reason, in addition to holding our majority in the U.S. House, I need at least 2 more Democratic U.S. Senators to get rid of the stinking filibuster and codify Roe into law, in addition to taking another shot at Build Back Better, to say nothing of reinstituting the assault weapons ban and passing actual common sense gun reforms on top of the Murphy/Cornyn bill.” (The Repugs keep coming back to their awful ideas when they don’t pass the first time – why can’t we come back to our ideas that are actually good?). And basically, we have the 1/6 Committee quite rightly carrying out oversight of our lunatic former executive...that's how the "checks and balances" are supposed to work between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our federal government!
If Biden doesn’t come up with some kind of a comprehensive strategy in response to this SCOTUS full of Philistines and our almost nonstop gun slaughter in this country, then he’s guilty of nothing less than dereliction of duty!
Anyway, here is Ana’s clip...
Update 1 7/8/22: And when it comes to our utterly awful SCOTUS, we should be completely embarrassed by this, which is totally deserved.
Update 2 7/8/22: OK, to be fair, this is progress, however incremental it is.
Update 3 7/8/22: Ugh!...
Update 4 7/8/22: Another step in the right direction (here)...
Update 5 7/8/22: I thought this was a pretty smart take.
...and in case we were wondering what The Roger Ailes BS Factory had to say about all of this..well, it looks like Trae Crowder is all over it (NSFW/H)...
...and speaking of corrupt Repug BS, here is more from RoJo, including taking a private jet to his Florida mansion on the taxpayer dime (at least he doesn’t have to worry about being the very worst of the rotten Repug U.S. Senators, as long as Tuberville, Cruz, Hawley, Lee, and Big Hair Blackburn continue to take up space in “the world’s greatest deliberative body”...to do something about RoJo, click here)...
....and David Doel tells us about big media scrubbing the image of dirty energy companies (I have to admit that I didn’t know the history of the “adver-torial,” but I probably should have. And I’m sure Amy Westervelt is a good reporter, but she’s a TERRIBLE announcer! Despite that, I’m going to get the OptOut app because it’s definitely important...by the way, Bellotti was a SCOTUS decision that allowed corporations to contribute to ballot initiatives – that was a crack in the metaphorical door when it comes to corporations donating to political campaigns, but of course Citizens United kicked that door wide open)...
...and turning to world news a bit, it looks like Boris Johnson is stepping down as British PM (and yes, there are some parallels here between Johnson and Mango Mussolini, but the leader of Cult 45 would NEVER have been able to withstand rough-and-tumble UK politics...not saying Johnson was exactly a towering intellect either, but despite it all, he has better political instincts than Former President Fergus Laing – David Pakman tells us more...and no, I don’t think much in the UK will substantively change either)...
...and I know we think some people in movies and entertainment are immortal somehow (such as Bowie and Mary Tyler Moore...at least I do at times) and it’s a shock to learn when they aren’t, and I think you can say that also about James Caan who recently passed...great in so many films, one of which was Thief with Willie Nelson, Robert Prosky and Tuesday Weld...saw a film Caan appeared in long ago called The Rain People with Duvall also and Shirley Knight, directed by Francis Ford Coppola – neat to see everybody starting out and learning the ropes, you might say...I know Al Pacino as Michael Corleone is the main focus of this clip from The Godfather of course, as it should be, but Caan is memorable also (and don’t get me started on Brian’s Song)...
...and as long as I’m “setting the wayback,” let’s take a trip a few years further still – this tune was Number 1 on the pop charts this week 55 years ago.
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