Prairie Weather

The froth of the maddened steed, the cries of dismay from the heroine, her white bosom heaving, as they near the cliff's edge...

Andrew Ferguson reads Newt Gingrich's top 21 books and suggests, maybe inadvertently, that our Newt is a romance novelist at heart.  Or wait, maybe he's one of those self-improvement authors. 

The choice between these two roads diverging in a yellow-bellied wood is always stark: a question of “whether the United States as we know it will cease to exist.” If nothing else, the Lesser Gingrich shows the author’s ingenuity in adapting his theme. “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less,” for instance, is aimed at the pure activist. It includes a chart to calculate how much the liberals are making you spend on gas, along with checklists, printed petitions, a membership card, a bumper sticker — everything but a decoder ring. In “The Art of Transformation,” he manages to one-up the usual business-book jargon by compiling an impenetrable lexicon of his own. He shows us an OODA loop, for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, and connects “Islands of Excellence With Invisible Bridges” while “mind mapping” for project planning.

Politically, Gingrich tears up the Quaint Document and lobbies for the adoption of gingrichism.  Gingrich, as Ferguson notes, uses the royal "we," not the democratic "we" of the bargaining and compromise demanded by our forefathers.

Like most Utopians, Gingrich sees the world in binary terms. Only his alternative future can prevent the cataclysm that has been about to happen for so many years. Muddling through — which is the default option of our constitutional system and the one that most Americans, latently conservative as they are, seem to prefer — never surfaces in the swirling mists of his crystal ball. For all the reciprocated disdain he claims to feel for the establishment in Washington, where he has lived for more than 30 years, he is still its unwitting champion; for without the crises that Gingrich chronically imagines, the establishment would no longer be necessary.

The point is, the cliff is always there, the heroine's bosom always heaving, and only Gingrich can remedy the situation. 

The guts of Obama's news conference

On meeting the debt-limit deadline: 

Mr. Obama repeatedly mocked tax breaks that he said were for “millionaires and billionaires, oil companies and corporate jet owners,”... ...but he did not explicitly say that he would reject a deal that did not eliminate such breaks... NYT

The only difference between Obama and Republicans I can discern is that Obama knows how to play peek-a-boo behind a triple negative.

Will Palin jump in?

... Earlier in the day, Palin's daughter had let slip in a television interview that her mother had made up her mind about a presidential run--but didn't say which way she was going to go. Before the heading into the theater, Palin spoke to reporters, but she didn't let on much either: "I told Bristol, too, what is talked about on the fishing boat stays on the fishing boat." 

That comes from  The Atlantic where Joshua Green describes the huge reception Palin got yesterday in Iowa during the premiere of the film about her.

Today's poll shows GOP in trouble

And with all those lovely candidates!  Just when they thought it was safe to climb in their buses!

Republican voters are not satisfied with the candidates running for the Republican nomination and wish they had more choices, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. None of the candidates currently hoping to challenge President Obama in 2012 has earned enthusiastic support from more than 7 percent of Republican voters.

That 7 percent applies to both Romney and Bachmann, so you can imagine where the rest are.  So much for the catapulting of Michele Bachmann.

Obama's numbers aren't good, but he's still holding on.  It's interesting that Americans (not just Democrats) still blame Bush for the economy, along with Wall Street. 

Americans are closely divided over Mr. Obama’s handling of his job as president: 47 percent approve and 44 percent disapprove. With the exception of a short-lived jump in approval ratings after the death of Osama bin Laden, the public’s evaluation of Mr. Obama’s stewardship has remained steady — ranging from 44 percent to 49 percent over the past year.

Americans are especially critical of the way Mr. Obama has handled the economy, though they are more likely to blame the Bush administration and Wall Street for its dismal state than Mr. Obama. ...NYT

The general lack of enthusiasm is not unusual this early in the contest, according to the Times.

The poll numbers will be available later this afternoon.

Remember, it's not just that Bush did it, it's that he really did it and they know it!   A constant reminder would be a good idea.  Out here in a territory where those "Miss Me Yet?" bumper stickers are common, I think we need a MoveOn contest for a bumper sticker with those words and a really good graphic.

Isn't it about time for a headline reading...

... Bachmann vaults to first place?

No, she's still only in second place, but the race is heating up.  Or something like that.  "Catapulting" should do the trick.

Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-Minn.) newfound political momentum isn't limited to Iowa, a new poll showed late Tuesday night.

Bachmann, the newly-minted presidential candidate, gained ground since a May Suffolk University poll, catapulting into the (distantly) second place position among Republicans of New Hampshire, according to a new edition of the poll.
 
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) leads Republican presidential contenders among the Granite State's likely GOP voters, drawing the support of 36 percent of them.

Bachmann is the only candidate other than Romney in double digits; 11 percent of New Hampshire Republicans said they support the three-term congresswoman as the nominee, up from 3 percent in early May. ...The Hill

Conservative justices are behaving like deliquent children of the rich

In an op-ed piece in today's Times, Jeff Shesol points out that there's nothing very new about criticisms of Clarence Thomas and other conservative justices who have -- at present and in the past -- played politics.

Surely there is nothing new or unnatural about justices holding political views and seeking the company of others who share them. It is to be expected that when one believes that right-thinking Americans are locked in an existential struggle with home-grown “Bolsheviki,” as Chief Justice William Howard Taft did in the 1920s, one would invite the patriots, not the Reds, to Sunday brunch. It is hardly scandalous that justices are more likely to speak to friendly audiences than hostile ones. The court’s history, moreover, is filled with political machinations, like Justice William O. Douglas’s attempts to lead or at least join the Democratic presidential ticket; justices’ back-channel consultations with presidents, from F.D.R. to L.B.J.; and speechmaking about subjects far and (sometimes too) wide.

Yet there are few, if any, precedents for the involvement of Justices Thomas and Scalia with the fund-raising efforts of the Koch brothers. ...

Yup.  Those two have gone out of their way to draw shame to a Court which was already severely damaged, most notably by taking an important case away from the Florida Supreme Court and insisting on making a federal ruling from "on high."  It brought the Court down and there's been no visible recovery or even the faintest apology as the Court has moved on through a decade as though it believes it's still an unsullied institution.  Indeed it apparently believes it's answerable to no one.

Two of the justices who contributed to the 2000 debacle have been engaged in serial attacks on the Court's reputation.  Maybe its reputation has had dips in the past, but Scalia and Thomas are unrepentant and, as Shesol says, seem to have "doubled down."

During this past term, editorial boards, law professors and others have come forward with proposals to curb the court in various ways — changing the guidelines for recusal, for example, or holding justices accountable to the code of conduct. Whatever their virtues, none of these ideas are likely to take root. For more than a century, every meaningful attempt at Supreme Court reform has collapsed, and not for lack of ingenuity. The founders gave us a court that makes its own rules. As Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote in the 1930s, sternly rebuking some of his brethren, “the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of self-restraint.”

In the face of criticism, the court’s conservatives may be doubling down. Justice Thomas, in particular, has lashed back, refusing to disclose activities and relationships that have been called into question. Stone’s admonition, clearly, is as relevant as ever. Over its history, the Supreme Court has faced periodic threats to its legitimacy and has survived with its powers intact, thanks in large part to its public esteem. At some point, another challenge will come. And the court, next time, may find fewer Americans on its side if its members allow themselves to be perceived, in Justice Breyer’s words, as “junior-varsity politicians” who possess, but do not merit, the last word.

___

We are temporarily liberated from the supremacy of a corrupt court even as July 4th comes up this weekend to remind us that the original intention of our forefathers was to establish freedom.  The Supreme Court has wrapped up this term and is going home having "favored big business over the interests of consumers and employees and continued to lean toward an expansive view of the First Amendment" according to a summary of the cases in the Washington Post. 

George Will, writing in the Post today, is gleeful that the First Amendment continues to protect money over both freedom and individual rights.  The guy's getting old.  Maybe next Monday a festive hot dog will lodge in his throat and take him to some real justice in the sky.  Will calls the Court's term "a victory for the First Amendment." 

The First Amendment is about free speech, children.  What we're getting instead is freedom for