Not that I am anything but happy and relieved at this decision, but I think the Conservative Catholic majority on the bench probably arrived at the same decision as the Liberal minority for a reason that isn’t exactly founded in law.

Catholics and ex-Catholics feel free to tell me where I’m wrong, but I imagine these conservatives would be inclined to view DNA as something like the handwriting of God. This belief might form an aversion that would guide their legal response without ever becoming explicit in an opinion. Allowing mortals to lay claim to the text of human life as their corporate property is bound to rub them the wrong way. Just as every sperm and egg is sacred, the DNA in each cell is the magic mojo by which the code of life becomes flesh. “In the beginning was the Logos…
“ All the mysticism of the Word made Flesh is in play here for the right set of believers.

Note that Scalia joined with liberals recently in rejecting the taking of DNA samples from any/all detained persons as “intrusive” in a way that fingerprinting is not. What way is it more intrusive? Well your DNA is a copy of you – it contains or represents a copy of you in potentia. Your mugshot, your fingerprint is not you nor is it in any way con/trans/hypo/hyper/substantial with you. Those are just marks made indirectly by your body. DNA isn’t an identifying mark left by your body, like a fingerprint. It is your body, part of it. And in the right circumstances theoretically could even be taken from you and used (gasp) to create another living being. Or the information gleaned from it could be used to make a prediction about you and enable some private or public entity to discriminate against you. The second possibility will set off alarms for liberals. The first sets off alarms for a conservative Catholic, possibly in addition to the potential for discriminatory uses. The retention and possible replication of your genetic info clouds your uniqueness in the history of Creation.

MA under Romneycare has the most expensive health care of any locale in the United States, which means that it is the most expensive in the world. We Americans were Number 1 worldwide in high costs, and under Obamacare we are absolutely guaranteed to stay that way. Romneycare lifted the insured rate* in MA to 95%, which Switzerland (which runs at about 60% of the US per capita cost and is the second most expensive country for health care on the planet after the US) had already achieved before instituting its 1994 individual mandate to purchase insurance.

* Remembering as always that being insured is not the same thing as being able to access or to afford medical treatment, and in this country is not and never will be proof against bankruptcy.

You said it, so I don’t have to. Could they fail? I suppose – anything is possible. But their track record says they will not.

There’s really no rational explanation for the continued support by organized labor of the Democrats, besides corruption of union leadership. Essentially they belong to the same bought off class of technocrat administrators as elected officials. Both represent their ordinary hard working constituents – in theory. In practice, both exist to sell their constituents out to the ownership class, and to make themselves rich in the process. How long can such a threadbare travesty like this continue? I would have thought it would have burned to the ground ages ago – but on it goes.

I guess it can’t be said too often nowadays: “Americans had better watch what they say and watch what they do.” Out of an abundance of caution, the Constitution has been placed in Supermax detention for ‘safekeeping’.

Ask not what your country knows about you, ask what you really know about your country.

Imagine for a second that this Harvard historian had said the same thing about a black economist…y’know how they just don’t care about the future and all that, and so that largely determines their ideas about economics blah blah blah…

Oh yeah, he’d be history all right. And if the word got out that he’d said that, in ANY setting, he’d clear out his Harvard office before even being told to.

I don’t want to pick fights with anyone who self-applies the term “liberal” over its proper definition, but it seems to me that the situation has degenerated to the point that all you have to do to call yourself liberal is pronounce yourself cool on gay rights, pat yourself on the back for electing a black President and support a woman’s right to choose something. You can support a foreign policy that rewards and encourages the assassination of union leaders in Central America, support never ending and numerous wars with Muslim peoples because Israel is our friend and the only democracy over there, in tandem with an escalating war on Constitutionally protected liberties at home, while also supporting an international regime of “free trade” and open borders to cheap labor which destroys the middle class aspirations of workers in America, and still call yourself a capital L liberal, and nobody thinks it strange.

I differ somewhat from your view on the motive behind Republicans’ inability to reach deal with Obama. I don’t believe they are sincere about really shrinking government until it only provides for common defense of national territory and private property or some such 18th century Libertarian caca. Norquist may be sincere but most Republicans aren’t. Far too many of their own pet projects will go wanting, and they would disappoint too many of their campaign donors in and out of their district, if they went that far. (Yes their rhetoric goes that far, but they will not follow up). Republicans can’t agree with Barack Obama, even if he agrees with them, because he’s [i]Barack Hussein Obama.[/i] He’s not just the leader of the Democratic Party, but he embodies what they hate most about it. He’s black for starters, and has a strongly foreign, Muslim sounding name. Rank and file Republican voters hate the Democratic Party largely based on issues of ethnic and religious and even gender identification. They mainly hate the Democrats as a party because they hate the constituencies who loyally vote Democratic: blacks, immigrants -Hispanic and otherwise- gays, Jews, and uppity women. Being who and what he is Barack Obama would be the embodiment of much of what Republicans hate and fear about the Democratic Party even if he had never risen to any position of power. Even if Obama agrees with them, elected Republicans can’t be seen agreeing with him by their base, or they will be Tbagged in the next primary. Whatever Obama would agree to, they cannot agree to since whatever the Arch-Fiend Obama would agree to is, of course, Marxist Socialism in league with the Crypto Caliphate and the World Homosexual Agenda. This is what many Obots say about what is happening, I know. But as worrisome as that fact is, I don’t hold that to be a disproof of the argument. In this case they’re actually on target. The only way Republicans can reach agreement with Obama on the general shape of a budget is if they think their voters think that Republicans have publicly humiliated Obama and made him bow to their white authority. Beyond that, the Republican strategy is to sow as much chaos as they can through obstruction, and then blame Obama for it. After all the dire things they’ve said about the Democrats and Obama over the years, they feel compelled to make the sky fall on America like they said it would if Democrats took the White House.

It is ironic that in Obama the Democrats have elected a True Believer in the Reagan Revolution and Neoliberal doctrine of “fiscal discipline” and austerity, while for Republicans the deficit scaremongering is, as you say, merely a bludgeon to attack the traditional constituencies of the other party. Republicans have zero qualms about running up massive deficits when they are in control of all spending and can direct it for their own pet pork projects, and globalized warfare.

Instead of ACA, they should have called it “TJ”: that’s the only place most people in America will be able to afford to see a doctor – across the border.

Think it’s misunderstood and unpopular now?
Just wait a couple years until they finally do understand it. There’s going to be a whole shitload of very unhappy people in this land.

I’d love to believe that the collapse of support for Obamacare will be met with a universal agreement that “…and now we must finally implement Single Payer since everything else has been tried and has failed”, but I really doubt that will happen. America has this weird way of taking the wrong fork in the road, doubling back to retrace its steps, and then taking the wrong way once again. The replacement for Obamacare, which is a terrible Republican program, will likely be something just as bad or worse that the Republican think tanks even haven’t hatched yet.

I guess it’s understandable really, and maybe even inevitable: there are just more Tuesdays than there are Al Qaeda leaders. Can’t stop Tuesday from rolling around the calendar, can you? So, Tuesday comes around again, and you’re sitting in the Tuesday kill list meeting, and you say “So who do we have today?” And your aides look down and say nothing and the NSC adviser says nothing. So then do you say, “Well OK everybody gets to take a long lunch, nothing to do, meeting adjourned.” No, of course not.

“General Ripper, bring me the phone book…”

Thatcher was the politician who famously said, “There is no such thing as society.”

I can’t imagine how the Pope finds any overlap between Christian values on the one hand, and on the other hand, a vicious attitude toward the poor and a hostility to the fundamental idea of community, national or otherwise, which motivated Margaret Thatcher’s political career. Yes, she was a Cold Warrior against the Soviet Union. But she opposed Communism for exactly the same reasons that she promoted policies that enable millionaire bankers and those born to privilege to steal bread out of the hands of those who’ve actually worked for it. She hardly promoted freedom. Unless by freedom you mean leisure and privilege for a few, and slavery for the many.

I think the answer to all the mysterious uncertainty on this subject of whether and in what specific circumstances your government thinks it can kill you probably lies somewhere in an overlap between the answer Louis Armstrong gave about jazz, (If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know) and the old answer about prices in a shop without price tags (If you have to ask you can’t afford it). If things have gotten to the point where you really feel the need to push the government for an answer, the true answer is likely to be neither something that you can afford, and knowing it will not help you any longer.