Friday Open Thread

Filed in National by on March 4, 2011

Welcome to your Friday open thread. Hooray for Friday (yes I can no longer hide my love affair with Fridays). Share your thoughts below in our open thread.

I don’t think this got much attention yesterday, but the judge that “struck down” health care reform on dubious grounds has declined to issue a stay on implication of the law.

Though Vinson could have issued an injunction stopping implementation of the health reform law, he didn’t. On the other hand, plenty of conservatives interpreted his decision as offering the “functional equivalent” of an injunction, meaning that the 26 states that are parties to the case could simply consider the current law null and void in their states.

In something of a gamble, the Obama administration asked Vinson to clarify matters. Today, he did.

A federal judge who struck down the entire healthcare reform law issued a stay of his ruling in order to give the Obama administration seven days to file an appeal.

The administration asked U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson for a clarification of his Jan. 31 ruling after some states said they would stop efforts to implement the law in light of his decision.

The administration is expected to file an appeal with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

This is, in other words, a procedural win for the administration and the ACA. Vinson added, however, that the Justice Department must seek an expedited appellate review of his ruling within the next seven days.

So, bottom line: the Affordable Care Act is still on the books, and whether some far-right state officials like it or not, it must still be enforced.

This will wind it’s way through the courts but this is important because it will be a lot harder to get rid of the law as it gets implemented. Can you imagine the outcry if a judge took away your health care subsidy?

Mike Huckabee has really stuck his foot in his mouth lately. He tried to humor the birthers by pushing “intellectual” birtherism (sometimes referred to as post-birtherism), the idea that Obama was infected by Kenyan anti-colonialism. Then he tried to walk it back while still claiming Obama is some kind of anti- American weirdo. His test of Americanism is “Little League and Boy Scouts.”

Last night on Fox News, Mike Huckabee continued his attacks on President Obama’s American-ness, saying “This is not a kid who grew up, you know, going to Boy Scout meetings and playing Little League baseball in a small town.”

Dan Amira: “If the absence of Little League or Scout meetings is really so disconcerting to Huckabee, we wonder what he would say about Ronald Reagan, who also never participated in either of those things… In fact, out of all our presidents, only George W. Bush is a former Little Leaguer, and only John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, and Bush were in the Boy Scouts. All of our other presidents, we guess, had an exotic, un-American upbringing, and a skewed worldview.”

Oh my. Huckabee has sinned against St. Reagan.

Tags:

About the Author ()

Opinionated chemist, troublemaker, blogger on national and Delaware politics.

Comments (12)

Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed

  1. jason330 says:

    In fact, out of all our presidents, only George W. Bush is a former Little Leaguer, “

    Does anyone need any further proof that little league is evil?

  2. Von Cracker says:

    Ha! I start coaching LL tomorrow morning. If I discover a little GWB, I’ll bring it up during the Marxist-New Caliphate meeting we have scheduled for next week. ๐Ÿ˜‰

  3. Dana says:

    Just a point of information: about every fourth or fifth time I access DL using Mozilla Firefox, the site causes an error which shuts down Firefox. This happens on two separate computers, one at home and one at work, the one at home using Vista and the one at work using Windows XP.

  4. jason330 says:

    Try viewing it with a Mosaic browser running on a Commodore 64. That should fix you up.

  5. Dana says:

    I have an old Commodore 128, but it’ll switch to C-64 mode. My normal computer is a TRS-80.

  6. cassandra m says:

    I’m probably the last person to know about this, but Keith Olbermann is blogging.

    FOK News Channel indeed.

  7. donviti says:

    I don’t see a post on the Obama Administration torturing their own citizens (Bradley Manning).

    You could of course have one cued, but in the meantime I posted it on my site in case you all don’t get around to discussing how Obama is pretty much the same as bush when it comes to his treatment of prisoners.

  8. Geezer says:

    Hey, cโ€™mon! Itโ€™s only ONE U.S. citizen. Singular, not plural! You liberals always have to exaggerate!

  9. donviti says:

    Well, listening to NPR recently it seems we got a shit ton of Muslims holed up in a more super than supermax prison somewhere in the US and the place is so strict that they can’t even pray together for fear they may “radicalize”. You know, when they prey together they are really just plotting to kill people.

    It’s in the Quran. I read it.

    Besides, this is just one example I have. For now that is, just for now.

  10. Newshound says:

    George W. Bush and Cal Ripkin Jr hosted the MOT Little-League ‘Challenger’ team (special needs kids) on tha lawn of the White House back in 2004 or 2005.

    It was a great event! Thousands of LL’s around the country were on the ‘list’ to go, but because of Delaware’s great group of volunteers, only one team was chosen, which was the team from Middletown-Odessa-Townsend.

  11. Dana says:

    Mr Viti’s interesting typo:

    You know, when they prey together they are really just plotting to kill people.

    ๐Ÿ™‚

  12. jason330 says:

    President Obama hates Democrats. Day by day, it is increasingly difficult to deny that inconvenient truth.