Welcome to your Thursday open thread. It’s the first official day of autumn as well, so Happy Equinox! Will Christine O’Donnell celebrate by doing a ceremony while sky clad? Inquiring minds want to know.
Today is also the day where some of the provisions of the health care law kick in. The provisions like the end of recission, allowing young adults to stay on their parents health care plan and no more pre-existing condition restrictions for children. Nevada’s crazy Senate candidate Sharron Angle hates the new health care law. She also thinks autism is a joke, apparently.
In a video of Angle at a 2009 tea party rally released by the party’s tracker, Angle appears to mock a recently passed Nevada mandate for insurance carriers to cover treatment for autism.
“Take off the mandates for coverage in the state of Nevada and all over the United States,” she shouts. “But here you know what I’m talking about. You’re paying for things you don’t even need.
“They just passed the latest one, is everything that they want to throw at us now is covered under ‘autism’,” she said, using exaggerated air quotes to deliver the word ‘autism.’
Harry Reid has a lot going against him in this election. Nevada’s unemployment is the worst in the country. Sharron Angle is a terrible candidate who has made a lot of gaffes but she was still running neck-and-neck with Reid. I think this video will change things. This is the kind of thing that will offend a lot of people on a personal level.
Antonin Scalia doesn’t think the Constitution forbids discrimination against women.
Leave it to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to argue that the Constitution does not, in fact, bar sex discrimination.
Even though the court has said for decades that the equal-protection clause protects women (and, for that matter, men) from sex discrimination, the outspoken, controversial Scalia claimed late last week that women’s equality is entirely up to the political branches. “If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex,” he told an audience at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, “you have legislatures.”
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Indeed, Justice Scalia likes to present his views as highly principled – he’s not against equal rights for women or anyone else; he’s just giving the Constitution the strict interpretation it must be given. He focuses on the fact that the 14th Amendment was drafted after the Civil War to help lift up freed slaves to equality. “Nobody thought it was directed against sex discrimination,” he told his audience. (See “The State of the American Woman.”)
I wonder if Scalia holds seances to determine what the writers of the Constitution meant. It sounds like a scary place – the Constitution as written says slavery is o.k.