Squatch’s Open Thread 03/12/2015

Ah, today that dreaded task . . . laundry!  Yesterday, I came downstairs to a mess made through the night by my 3 furballs.  I wonder what today will be like?  Their shenanigans blocked access to the laundry.  We'll see as soon as I am finished here.

Puzzle — Today’s took me 3:08 (average 5:08). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes

The Nation — In common with the other big rightward swerves by the Roberts Court, the 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller was an aggressive exercise in mendacity. By upending the well-established meaning of the Second Amendment, the Court made the country less safe and less free. It did this under the guise of a neutral and principled “originalism” that looks to the text as it was first understood back in 1791 by the amendment’s drafters and their contemporaries.  …

In the process, the conservative justices engaged in an unsubtle brand of outcome-oriented judicial activism and “living constitutionalism” that they claim to abhor—an irony noted by a host of devoted Supreme Court watchers across the ideological spectrum. Richard Posner, the prominent Reagan-appointed federal appellate judge and prolific commentator on legal and economic issues, derided Scalia’s flawed approach as “faux originalism” and a “snow job.”

A "snow job" is certainly an understatement especially in light of the two mass shootings of 02/12/2015.  So according to SCROTUS, the original intent of the 2nd amendment was to give the individual the "right to bear arms" and has nothing to do with a militia (army).  If that is the case, then what can the US do to curb the rampant gun violence that exists today? As of today, there have been 355 mass shootings, a mass shooting being defined as an incident with four or more deaths or woundings.  That is more than one per day.  A very sad commentary on a nation that is supposed to be enlightened.

Alternet — The richest Americans increasingly are taking over the levers of power and shaping the political debate, despite opposing views held by a majority of Americans, a new and unprecedented academic study of the top 1 percent has confirmed.

The super-rich are more politically active than average Americans, financing and contacting elected officials and knowing many on a first-name basis. Their agenda, which is often cited by public officials across the country, emphasizes private profit-making and is skeptical of almost every public program to address economic inequality, thestudy by Chicago-based university researchers found. The top 1 percent's social agenda, while “more liberal than others on religious and moral issues, including abortion, gay rights, and prayer in school,” is still “much more conservative than the non-affluent on issues of taxes, economic regulation, and social welfare,” the researchers found.

Put another way, today’s top 1 percent generally do not believe the longtime conservative line that a rising economic tide will lift all Americans, but have a darker view in which one’s fate is tied to the survival of the fittest. They consider climate change a non-issue and most would cut federal and state safety nets and anti-poverty programs, shift taxpayer dollars into privatized education and do little to ensure access to higher education.

Click through to see the eight points gleaned from the report "Democracy and The Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans".  I doubt all of this is a surprise.  But doing something about it will take a lot of hard work.  As it is, I think the US is a democracy in name only.  With the wealthy having so much political power, the US is a plutocracy.

Washington Post — The new argument, which Piketty spelled out recently in the French newspaper Le Monde, is this: Inequality is a major driver of Middle Eastern terrorism, including the Islamic State attacks on Paris earlier this month — and Western nations have themselves largely to blame for that inequality.

Piketty writes that the Middle East's political and social system has been made fragile by the high concentration of oil wealth into a few countries with relatively little population. If you look at the region between Egypt and Iran — which includes Syria — you find several oil monarchies controlling between 60 and 70 percent of wealth, while housing just a bit more than 10 percent of the 300 million people living in that area. (Piketty does not specify which countries he's talking about, but judging from a study he co-authored last year on Middle East inequality, it appears he means Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudia Arabia, Bahrain and Oman. By his numbers, they accounted for 16 percent of the region's population in 2012 and almost 60 percent of its gross domestic product.)

Click through for the rest of this interesting article.  Piketty definitely has a point, especially if his figures can be fully substantiated.

My Universe —