Year: 2015

Certain to explode some right wing heads. In the Welcoming Ceremony at the White House, Pope Francis introduced himself as "the son of an immigrant family," and noting that America "was largely built by such families." But he focused more on climate issues:

Mr. President, I find it encouraging that you are proposing an initiative for reducing air pollution. Accepting the urgency, it seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation. When it comes to the care of our “common home”, we are living at a critical moment of history. We still have time to make the changes needed to bring about “a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change” (Laudato Si’, 13). Such change demands on our part a serious and responsible recognition not only of the kind of world we may be leaving to our children, but also to the millions of people living under a system which has overlooked them. Our common home has been part of this group of the excluded which cries out to heaven and which today powerfully strikes our homes, our cities and our societies. To use a telling phrase of the Reverend Martin Luther King, we can say that we have defaulted on a promissory note and now is the time to honor it.

Oh Dear.  I just used four exclamation points and "F%$cking" in a headline... What on earth is going on? It is a legally speaking, a settled question.  Our constitution forbids…

Ed Kilgore thinks this will be a very perilous week for Republicans.

There’s really only one way to say it: the week of September 21, 2015 could be unpleasant for a Republican Party struggling to find its way in the runup to a big, high-stakes election. […] Over the weekend Trump batted away criticism over his silence in the face of a supporter who loudly insisted in the candidate’s presence that the president is a Muslim born outside the United States (an assertion an alarming percentage of Republicans believe against all evidence). Trump says it’s not his job to defend the hated Obama. Carson is in the spotlight for insisting against the rather explicit language of the U.S. Constitution that there should in fact be a “religious test” for the presidency, barring Muslims. Meanwhile, Fiorina is being besieged by the facts she ignored in her debate presentation—especially with respect to the Planned Parenthood videos she discussed to the delight of Christian Right voters—and by the long-overdue MSM scrutiny of her arguably catastrophic record as CEO of HP, her primary credential for high office (see Jeffrey Sonnenberg’s refutation of her debate remarks about him and her HP tenure). But even as the three zero-experience front-runners lose friends and alienate people, it’s not like the rest of the field is moving on up. One early favorite, Scott Walker, is by all accounts in desperate condition, and having decided to drop everything else to go try to shore up his horrendous standing in Iowa, made a poor impression on his first post-CNN-debate public appearance there. Off the campaign trail, congressional Republicans are snarled in separate yet equally dangerous internal disputes over the extent to which they will court a government shutdown to express unhappiness with the Iran Nuclear Deal—which they strangely consider a big political winner for themselves—and to cut off federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Budget wizard Stan Collender has now raised his estimate of the odds of a government shutdown to 75%. It’s a particularly bad sign that Republicans are already resorting to the tired and notably ineffective tactic ofarguing that it’s Obama who would be shutting down the government by rejecting GOP demands. If that’s not enough for you, keep in mind the Pope is coming to town this week, and whatever comfort conservatives take from his inevitable condemnation of legalized abortion, he is certain to bring a message on climate change and corporate greed that will make conservative Catholics go a little crazy.

Three things: 1) This guy really is an evil piece of shit. 2) Prop Joe and Pandora will get no more points from this loser. 3) Who will inherit his 10 supporters? Via the NYT:

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has concluded he no longer has a path to the Republican presidential nomination and plans to drop out of the 2016 campaign, according to three Republicans familiar with his decision, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Mr. Walker called a news conference in Madison at 6 p.m. Eastern time.

Read this. It is a part of Donald Trump's only written down policy position (other than a PDF version of his immigration rant).

NATIONAL RIGHT TO CARRY. The right of self-defense doesn’t stop at the end of your driveway. That’s why I have a concealed carry permit and why tens of millions of Americans do too. That permit should be valid in all 50 states. A driver’s license works in every state, so it’s common sense that a concealed carry permit should work in every state. If we can do that for driving – which is a privilege, not a right – then surely we can do that for concealed carry, which is a right, not a privilege.

In addition to doing away with the concept of "state's rights" where guns are concerned, the position paper titled, "Protecting Our Second Amendment Rights Will Make America Great Again," calls for an end to gun and magazine bans and an end to the ban on carrying guns on military bases and recruiting centers. Yes. Craziness to you and me, but gun nuts vote in the Republican primaries.

The Complexities of Color Coalition, the NAACP-DE, the Delaware Repeal Project, and the Unitarian Universalists of Southern Delaware are announcing the first in a series of four town hall meetings to address the racial inequities in Delaware’s criminal justice system. It will take place on September 24th at 7:00PM in Lewes (details below). The message to the political establishment will be clear - it’s time for change in Delaware - the black community is finished with business as usual and determined that its agenda will finally be addressed.

David Atkins on why the press gets Donald Trump and the GOP base wrong. It is willful, not ignorance.

As long as Trump leads, it's impossible to maintain the fiction of equally extreme "both sides do it" partisanship. As long as Trump rules (and, to a lesser extent, that Bernie Sanders continues to rise on the left) It's also increasingly difficult to pretend that "moderates" in either party are actually the center of public opinion, rather than caterers to a unique brand of corporate-friendly upper-class comfort that labels itself as moderate without holding any legitimate claim to the title. Acknowledging those realities would force the press to start reporting the fundamentals of American politics as they stand today: First, that the Republican base wants a rebel leader to take their country back from the inconvenience of being nice to women, gays and minorities; Second, that the wealthy Republican establishment and its center-right Third Way Democratic counterparts don't actually have a legitimate base of voters, but rather illegitimate institutional capture of government via legalized bribery; and Third, that the rest of the country wants liberal public policies that would resemble a Scandinavian government, but most of them are so turned off by the futility of the American political process that not enough of them turn out to vote to make a real difference outside of the bluest states. Those would be very uncomfortable admissions for the establishment press, so they settle instead for hoping that Donald Trump will go away and lose support organically so things can return to "normal." That's not going to happen.