Our President, Consitutional Scholar

Article II, Section 3

"He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient."

First, it's not only allowed that the president would give his views on the 3rd branch's ruling, it is a constitutional requirement, if he feels it needs consideration by Congress...

-Excellent letter to Glenn Greenwald, response to his excellent entry today.


















More context here.

In Other, Happier Posts

Grum is awesome. That is all



(via Too Many Sebastians)

With This One.....

I don't want to get philosophical. I don't want to try and wade through finer points of the law.

It's simple: Abortion is legal, and shooting doctors point-blank in church is first degree murder.

Any other judicial consideration of that crime is enabling the murder of conscious, feeling human beings, who, along with their loved ones, are capable of suffering.

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These conservatives are lawless.

*Fnarp*

(via IamFakeBlood)

Blech-quiem.

From reader reactions at The Dish:

I was looking at the tally a few minutes ago, and it looks like Brown won by 100,000 votes. 100,000 people get to derail the possibility of health insurance for 40 million? In a state where they have already passed this same reform? How does that make any sense at all? The states represented by Democrats in the Senate have populations that vastly outnumber those represented by Republicans. They need to represent us.

Health-care reform is a bastardized gift to private insurers. I dunno, maybe this is for the best, somehow.

If they're gonna call y'all a bunch of pinko socialists and (GASP) liberals, might as well push for single payer and a repeal of DADT. Just sayin', cowards.

Addendum:

All that said, and as horrible as the Democrats have been all year, the most amazing -- and depressing -- aspect of all of this is how Americans have so quickly forgotten how thoroughly the Republicans, during their eight-year reign, destroyed the country. Whatever the source of our national woes are, re-empowering that faction cannot possibly be the answer to anything.

Subhuman Garbage

You may have heard that Rush Limbaugh said some stupid, hateful shit about Haiti and how Obama blah blah blah. I never, ever listen to Limbaugh, so I, like most of you, I assume, only ever hear about the worst of the worse things that come out of his mouth. His most recent comments take the cake.

Many people on the left, like Olbermann, have said their piece (I have yet to hear anybody whatsoever on the right condemn Limbaugh).

None comes close in their rejoinders to Roger Ebert. It occurs to me, the two have at least one thing in common. They both have wide audiences. Limbaugh has millions of listeners a day, and Ebert has perhaps that many readers and fans. The differences start after that. One encourages, inspires, and nurtures a journey towards clearer, more mature discernment of nearly all things. The other takes direct advantage of the base ignorance of his following. One can be enjoyed by the illiterate. The other, well:

To: Rush Limbaugh
From: Roger Ebert

You should be horse-whipped for the insult you have paid to the highest office of our nation.

Having followed President Obama's suggestion and donated money to the Red Cross for relief in Haiti, I was offended to hear you suggest the President might be a thief capable of stealing money intended for the earthquake victims.

Here is a transcript from your program on Thursday:

Justin of Raleigh, North Carolina: "Why does Obama say if you want to donate some money, you could go to whitehouse.gov to direct you how to do so? If I wanted to donate to the Red Cross, why do I have to go to the White House page to donate?"

Limbaugh: "Exactly. Would you trust the money's gonna go to Haiti?"

Justin: "No."

Rush: "But would you trust that your name's gonna end up on a mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes?"

Justin: "Absolutely!"

Limbaugh: "Absolutely!"


That's what was said.

Unlike you and Justin of Raleigh, I went to Obama's web site, and discovered the link there leads directly to the Red Cross. I can think of a reason why anyone might want to go via the White House. That way they can be absolutely sure they're clicking on the Red Cross and not a fake site set up to exploit the tragedy.

But let me be sure I have this right. You and Justin agree that Obama might steal money intended for the Red Cross to help the wretched of Haiti.

This conversation came 48 hours after many of us had seen pitiful sights from Port au Prince. Tens of thousands are believed still alive beneath the rubble. You twisted their suffering into an opportunity to demean the character of the President of the United States.

This cannot have been an accident. A day earlier, a sound bite from your show went viral, in which you said Obama would exploit the situation to please his "black followers -- both the light-skinned and the dark-skinned ones."

Sen. Harry Reid made his careless comment thoughtlessly. Yours must have came after some thought. A one-liner in code to please your listeners who enjoy hearing African-Americans discussed in racist language. Yes, racist -- as anyone living in this country must realize.

You have a sizable listening audience. You apparently know how to please them. Anybody given a $400 million contract must know what he is doing.

That's what offends me. You know exactly what you're doing.

Just The Facts, Ma'am.

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There are things worth griping about with this presidency. But lately, all I've been hearing is Republican talk, everywhere, and it attempts to obscure the facts.

What Decade Is It?

Ali Love - Love Harder



This should be on the radio, on the teevee, everywhere.

Damn sexy.

(hopefully out before Valentine's Day Versus set)

Wider Margine of Defeat

You probably don't even have to watch this. There's almost nothing new here. There's virtually nothing surprising in it, at all. We came perilously close, there. She could still, quite possibly, win the nomination. Don't doubt it. She's as proudly ignorant as her followers, if not more so. It sells.


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We've All Seen Avatar

But we haven't all seen Avatar yet:

By giving us an alien species of natives who don’t fit into that conventional narrative, Mr. Cameron takes that out, forcing us to grapple with how we’d react if our society found itself lusting after the land or resources of a people even we believe to be more advanced than us in some ways — people whose communion with nature does enable them to survive better than we can in their environment rather than the opposite. This is a feat that can only be accomplished in a story about aliens, insofar as it is human nature for the victors in our armed conflicts to presume that their very civilization is objectively superior. Apparently it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable.

From Conor Friedersdorf's review and explicit defense.

Go see it again, then. Help it rightly beat Transformers.

(we are not shocked here at the Tympani Room to hear that David Denby, walking idiot, has completely missed the point)

9/11™ Happened

While you were mayor.

WHILE BUSH WAS PRESIDENT



I will repeat, even if I am the only one reading this, ad infinitum, every time I hear this shit:

GEORGE W. BUSH, (R) TEXAS, WAS PRESIDENT WHEN WE WERE HIT.

Christ.

I'm not interested, really, in assessing total blame. I also don't believe Bush/Cheney orchestrated it to take advantage of the opportunity for war. I'm not a conspiracy nut. They were just incompetent. They were warned. They, and the system failed us. Under a REPUBLICAN REGIME.

GET SERIOUS, PEOPLE. GODDAMN.

And we were lucky this time, but unless Barack Obama personally received a warning entitled "Abdulmutallab determined to attack within the U.S.", as Bush did re: Bin Laden, y'all got no high ground on which to stand.

It's a moot point really. Can we all calm down a little? You can't be 100% safe, nor should you be. We can do better than this, but come on. Your chances of dying in a car-crash are still much higher. Get on with your lives.

Lullaby for Gaia

In other words, there is no spiritualism to the Na'vi. Their beliefs would be fantastical on Earth, but on Pandora every single one of their convictions are borne out by physical facts. Even the Earthlings and their Earth tools are able to prove the scientific validity of Na'vi claims.

- Letter To Ebert

Avatar crossed the 1 Billion Dollar mark at the beginning of 2010.

More than half of those earnings come from overseas, and, ticket-inflation notwithstanding, I didn't expect this to be as big a hit as it is.

But it's passing a test in my head that few movies pass. I'm still thinking about it. For all the negative reaction to its seven-layers deep coat of MESSAGE, its easy comparison to Dances with Wolves and cheap new-agerism, I think any of us who felt that way might've been thinking too fast.

I'm not willing to act above this flick. It had me. Whatever choices Cameron and Co. made, it had me. Obviously it didn't play, nor was it developed, like any other movie.

I'm beginning to think it may have been one of the most positive films I've seen in quite some time. My urge is to see it again, to take in its peerless visuals more fully, and to approach it less full from what I usually expect my masterpieces to sound like. The script may or may not be great, but what were we wanting that script to do?

I need to see it again, like I said, to find out. My feeling here is that the visual accomplishment, impressive to be sure, is not the real key, in a world full of filmgoers who've seen everything, to its success.

Could it be we're entering an age of consciousness that demands social and ecological justice? Do we yearn to find some resolution to our murderous, destructive past through an embrace of one of the aspects of technology that can be good, to see other people's experiences as if they're our own?

Wish I Didn't Have to Politicize....

...but, so far, the deadliest attack to take place on American soil occurred under a President who ran on a platform of strong national security and strong national defense, and was warned about it repeatedly, and was reading a story-book to children the moment we were hit.

Zero people die in a failed terrorist attack, and Obama's weak, can't keep us safe? You, all of you, need serious, serious propaganda cessation treatment. Stat.

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Watching the fake ad they made here makes me wonder, considering the above, if maybe Democrats could be forgiven a little, facts checked or not, for not wanting to seem like Republicans in sheeps' clothing. But the facts need to be stressed a little more than they are, one way or another.

Because, again, I ask the question, why are you all so silent on your own party's complete and abject failure to keep us safe in the first place? Would you all have been so forgiving and supportive to Al Gore? Don't make me laugh.