We are in the middle of an undeclared CIVIL WAR

Email Stephen L. Goldstein: trendsman@aol.com

Follow him on Twitter: @drslgoldstein

 from The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, August 19, 2012        

            We are in the middle of an undeclared civil war. And no matter who wins in November, it appears that hate speech, fueled by unlimited Super PAC and billionaire dollars, is never gonna stop, and the divisions that it stokes in the country will grow wider and more toxic than ever—to what end I’m afraid to imagine.

            Sadly, we live in a post-Pandora’s box world, in which bad is the new good, vile is the norm, and there’s little or no hope things will change for the better. It’s gotten so bad, that some career-level haters are “eating their own.” Recently, leaving Sean Hannity speechless on his own show, a totally unglued Ann Coulter demanded Romney (never her favorite candidate) fire his spokesperson Andrea Saul (“the moron,” her word) for praising his Massachusetts healthcare plan in an attempt to deflect a negative, pro-Obama ad, thereby exposing Mitt’s Achilles heel. (Where would we be without Greek mythology?)

            So, imagine the verbal volcanos—and who knows what else?—that will likely erupt after one of the following possible outcomes of the election:

            First: Obama wins and Democrats achieve significant majorities in both houses of Congress. The entire FOX (it isn’t)News organization undergoes emergency psychiatric therapy. Republicans demand the resignation or impeachment of Eric Holder for overturning voter suppression laws that should have been able to prevent Armageddon (their word). In an attempt to overturn the election, birthers Donald Trump and Orly Taitz file lawsuits alleging Obama isn’t a U.S. citizen. Trump “goes native,” undercover in Kenya in search of documents and testimony proving Obama was born there. In states where the GOP remains in control of government, elected officials will redouble efforts to pass legislation to thwart federal law and initiatives. There’s talk of secession, especially in Texas and South Carolina. So what’s new? No matter: Obama and Democrats seize the day and pass the most progressive legislation in recent memory before the mid-term elections, stoking the fires of discontent.

            Second: Obama wins, Democrats lose the House and maintain a majority in the Senate, but it isn’t filibuster-proof. With possible Supreme Court nominations at stake, Harry Reid uses the “nuclear option,” lowering the number of votes needed to invoke cloture. Republicans go wild, scream “Dictatorship!” “Unconstitutional!” The GOP-dominated House votes to impeach the president, but is thwarted in the Senate. Gridlock and the war of words are worse than ever. Routinely, en masse, Republicans walk out of the Senate chamber and vilify Democrats on the steps of the Capitol.

            Third: Romney wins, Democrats have a majority in the Senate and the House. Washington grinds to a halt. Democrats vow to make Romney a “one-term president,” and Republicans cry foul. MSNBC has a field day replaying quotes of Mitch McConnell vowing to make Obama a “one-term president.” Right-wing commentators go ballistic and insist that “elections have consequences” and Romney should be able to implement the programs and policies he promised “the people.” MSNBC runs endless interviews of Republicans’ blocking Obama’s initiatives during his first term.

            Fourth: Romney wins, Democrats have a majority in the Senate but Republicans maintain their lead in the House. Democrats block Romney’s Supreme Court and federal judicial nominations. Tea party/GOP efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade, undo Obama progressive social legislation, and enact an ultra-conservative social agenda lead to mass demonstrations by affected groups.

            No matter which scenario occurs—and there may be others—expect no relief from the political equivalent of a barroom brawl for the next four years. I just don’t see the mechanism or mindset for accomplishing anything that even approaches minimal civility, truthfulness, or well-intentioned consensus-building. It’s as though the only payoff comes from stirring the pot. Our leaders have absolved themselves of responsibility for solving the nation’s problems through the normal give-and-take of politics. In fact, the more extreme and unyielding their positions, the more millions pour in to their campaign coffers. The public seems evermore eager to watch a fight.

            So, our airwaves and public discourse will remain poisoned. Some family members will stop talking to each other. People will stop doing business with people of whom they are politically wary—or at least will proceed, agreeing to disagree and avoid open and honest discussion. Minds don’t change.

            Of course, we have always been a divided and contentious nation. The Civil War was brutal. But it had a beginning, middle, and end. Now, we are embroiled in a battle that seems endless—and unendable. In mythology, after all the bad stuff left Pandora’s Box, only hope remained inside. If only we could access it#

Romney can't make lemonade out of Ryan lemon

from The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, August 17, 2012

email Stephen L. Goldstein: trendsman@aol.com

follow him on Twitter: @drslgoldstein

            Poor Mitt Romney: He can't make lemonade out of his Paul Ryan lemon. I’m thrilled that he chose extremist Ryan as his VP.

            I’ve had Paul Ryan on my mind for ages. My recently released novel, “Atlas Drugged: Ayn Rand Be Damned!,” is a dystopia that paints a picture of free markets gone wild and the United States turned into the Corporate States of America by mean-spirited “captains of industry” who put profit over people. While I was writing it, I thought of people like Ryan, who idolize Rand and accept her preposterous (and poorly written) fiction as gospel truth. He used to give out copies of “Atlas Shrugged” as Christmas presents and try to make his Congressional interns read it. Never in my wildest dreams did I think Romney would feel so desperate, that he would choose as his running mate so toxic a partner.

            Ryan is the consummate example of an adolescent whiz kid who was drugged on Ayn Rand’s Kool-Aid but never weaned from it, fancies himself John Galt—and grew up to be a second-tier technocrat on the taxpayer payroll, who is now raised to national prominence by a third-rate candidate for the presidency. There’s abundant evidence to poke holes in his delusional and frightening dystopia for the nation. “The Ryan Plan” (aka the GOP federal budget) is a roadmap for disaster, a war on the poor and the middle class. The Koch brothers couldn’t have written it better—probably tweaked the draft. The case against Ryan is laid out by ThinkProgress (thinkprogress.org). Here are highlights from it:

            1. Ryan wants to raise taxes on the middle class, cut them for millionaires.

            2. He would extend the Bush tax cuts, but not President Obama’s for those with the lowest incomes.

            3. Ryan would virtually eliminate programs that benefit the lower- and middle-classes.

            4. He would end Medicare and replace it with a voucher system, raise eligibility to 67, cost enrollees more than $5,900 annually by 2050.

            5. Ryan thinks Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” and wants to privatize it at the mercy of stocks and bonds, which he apparently believes are always safe bets.

            6. The Economic Policy Institute estimates Ryan’s budget would result in 4.1 million lost jobs in two years.

            7. He wants to eliminate Pell Grants for more than 1 million students.

            8. Ryan supports $40 billion in subsidies for big oil.

            9. He co-sponsored a “personhood” amendment, which would outlaw abortion, some forms of contraception and in vitro fertilization.

            I can’t wait for Ryan to debate Joe Biden, point by point on these and other equally sinister positions. He has all the suppleness of a bowling pin. Crafty Biden will deliver strike after strike against him, score a perfect 300.

            No one in his right mind would want to live in the America of Paul Ryan, except Mitt Romney. Many of Ryan’s supporters deny biological, survival-of-the-fittest Darwinism, but embrace dog-eat-dog social Darwinism, where unbridled greed is the greatest virtue and morality is determined by a dollar sign. But sadly, Romney isn’t trying to appeal to all Americans. Ryan, Mitt hopes, will make his candidacy acceptable to the tea party. He may fool them, but most Americans know “the fruit” of both those lemons “is impossible to eat.”

            "Atlas Drugged: Ayn Rand Be Damned!" is available in bookstores nationwide, through www.barnesandnoble.com, www.amazon.com, and other online booksellers. Order it NOW from Amazon (paperback or Kindle): http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Drugged-Ayn-Rand-Damned/dp/1555717098/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344306781&sr=8-1&keywords=atlas+drugged+ayn+rand+be+damned

                  

Supreme Court has made US into country of LIARS!

email Stephen L. Goldstein: trendsman@aol.com
Follow on Twitter: @drslgoldstein

            When The History of The Rise and Fall of The American Republic is written, its author will no doubt present, as an overarching thesis, that we “did it” to ourselves—sadly fulfilling former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s prediction during the Cold War that we would be “destroyed from within.” And he will surely point to 2010 and 2012 as decisive years in the collapse and brand the United States Supreme Court as a major agent of our self-destruction.

            In 2010, in Citizens United, a majority of the Court ruled that, under the protective halo of the First Amendment, the government could not limit the amount of money corporations and unions spend on “electioneering contributions.” In federal races, they still may not contribute directly to candidates’ campaigns and parties, but that hardly matters. As a result of the decision, a new mantra has entered popular speech—“Corporations are people”—and “a terrible [reality] is born”: our democratic republic has been turned into a plaything for plutocrats and a cash cow for political candidates. There can no longer be any pretense that our government is not for sale—regularly bought and sold.

            In 2012, in a lesser known, but no less seminal a “free speech” ruling, the Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2006, which made it a federal crime for anyone to claim having received any U.S. military decoration or medal. Of course, that didn’t stop Californian Xavier Alvarez, a former member of the Three Valleys Municipal Water District governing board in eastern Los Angles County, from claiming he was a retired Marine with 25 years of service and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. As unthinkable as it may sound, the Supreme Court actually overturned Alvarez’s lower-court conviction, affirmed his right to lie about his military service, and denied the government the power to stop him—or anyone else from lying.

            Either ruling by itself is bad. But taken together, these two Supreme Court decisions, reached, of all things, on the basis of our most cherished Constitutional Amendment, create a moral climate that will bring us to the lowest point in our history, perhaps to our demise—if we aren’t there already. Today, we are treading water in a sea of filthy lucre, lies, and filthy lucre funding lies. It won’t be long before we drown.

            Now, let me make one thing perfectly clear: Of course, I’m for free speech! I’m a columnist. I couldn’t possibly be against it. I accept the fact that from the earliest years of our republic, politics has always been a nasty business. I’d like to, but know I can’t, wash Illinois Cong. Joe Walsh’s mouth out with soap for saying that his opponent, double-amputee Tammy Duckworth is not a “true” military hero, California Cong. David Dreier for saying that insurance companies should be allowed to discriminate against people with brain tumors, Florida Cong. Allen West for calling Social Security disability “a form of modern 21^st-century slavery,” and Maine Gov. Paul LePage for calling the U.S. Internal Revenue Service “the Gestapo.” Instead, I defend their right to say such atrocious things, confident in the wisdom of “give ’em enough rope and they’ll hang themselves,” that their words will come back to haunt them.

            But what I’m completely against—and what I think everyone should want outlawed—is the license the Supreme Court has given to use unlimited money to finance unlimited, calculated, systematic lying to turn the government of the United States over to a small group of the richest of rich individuals and corporations at the expense of average Americans. Behind closed doors, Karl Rove, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and others have to be laughing at the stupidity of the American public—and the complicity of the Court.

            In addition, I don’t know how we can continue to protect lies, just because they happened to be used in political campaigns. Surely, if we don’t have the right to yell “Fire” in a crowded theatre, we shouldn’t be able to speak when our pants are “on fire.” Today, words travel at lightening speed. There is almost no time to correct errors and misinformation, let alone to counter intentional falsehoods. Someone needs to knock some sense into the Supremes.

            Perhaps, it isn’t too late for our collective American spirit to prove Khrushchev wrong and save ourselves from within. If not, he’ll be dancing on our grave from Communist heaven, and we will have helped write the closing chapter of The Decline and Fall of the American Republic.#

OUTED: Jeb Bush!

email Stephen L. Goldstein: trendsman@aol.com

Follow on Twitter: @drslgoldstein

            This column answers three questions: Will wonders never cease? Does hypocrisy know no limits? Can you fool all of the people all of the time?

            Extremist Jeb Bush is now parading as the self-proclaimed voice of moderation—and the press is letting him get away with it. During his recent appearance before a Congressional committee, the same man who as Florida governor swore he would never raise taxes had the chutzpah to say that, had he been president, he would have accepted the hypothetical deal that every ITAL tea party/GOP presidential candidate rejected when it was proposed to them during one of their debates: $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases.

            In addition, uncompromising Jeb now has the gall to posture himself as the leading GOP spokesperson for bipartisanship—and against take-it-or-leave-it, my-way-or-the-highway ideological rigidity. Meeting with reporters and editors recently in New York, he has been quoted, in garbled sentence structure, lamenting the loss of an alleged GOP spirit of “working across the aisle”: “Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, similar to my dad, they would have had a hard time if you define the Republican Party—and I don’t—as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement.” He also said: “Back to my dad’s time or Ronald Reagan’s time, they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support that right now would be difficult to imagine happening.”

            Don’t ever be taken in by Jeb’s political equivalent of “Kumbaya.” The heir apparent to the tattered Bush Dynasty speaks with a forked tongue. As Florida governor, he was partisan, divisive, and autocratic. He set out to recreate the Sunshine State in his image—and let no one stand in his way. He relentlessly attacked government as the cause of our problems, was the sworn enemy of unions and public education. When he told Marco Rubio to jump, the former Florida House Speaker asked, “How high?” In 2010, he got tea-party favorite Rubio elected to the U.S. Senate, helping to radicalize it. Even now, behind-the-scenes, Jeb pushes an activist, fiercely ideological agenda in Florida: Constitutional Amendment 8, which would destroy our historic separation of church and state and allow unlimited tax dollars to flow to religious organizations—for any purpose. In other words, Jeb is still an example of the rabid partisanship he claims to be against.

            The obvious question is: Why is Jeb speaking out now? Why has he not been the voice of compromise and moderation during most of the Obama years—and especially after Sen. Mitch McConnell said his chief goal was to make Obama a one-term president? Obviously, because the strategy has boomeranged! Being anti-everything-Obama has made the tea party/GOP anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-a-lot-of-good things. Jeb now realizes he and his party opened a Pandora’s box of political mischief, created and indulged the tea-party Frankenstein that has taken over and is destroying them—and he’s lost any chance of becoming president.

            “All the world’s a stage”—and Jeb and the members of the tea party/GOP don’t know it, but they are acting out a Greek tragedy. Their rigid ideology, which they have all clung to as their strength, is now the source of their own undoing. They are losing long-time, moderate party members to extremists. It’s the fulfillment of 30 years of misplaced thinking: The Ronald Reagan whom Jeb called “moderate,” set in motion the radicalism that has destroyed the GOP. According to Grover Norquist, the Gipper asked him to start Americans for Tax Reform, as the head of which he bullied Republicans into signing the extremist no-tax pledge, which Jeb now derides.

            As in any Greek tragedy, the tea party/GOP is deaf to choruses that have tried, and continue to try, to save them from their clueless course of self-destruction. Of their own doing, they are twisting in the wind. Greek tragedies are not about “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” just the opposite: the Law of Karma, “what goes around comes around.” In Greek tragedy, characters are responsible for their own downfall, caught in a vice of their own making, unable to free themselves from themselves. They don’t slip on banana peels and crack their skulls. Fatal “character” flaws do them in.

            So, the answer to my initial three questions should be obvious: Wonders will never cease. Hypocrisy knows no limits. And you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, though people like Jeb Bush will never stop trying. They just can’t help themselves.#

Where there's a Bush, there's a debacle: DyNasty has ruined America

email Stephen L Goldstein: trendsman@aol.com
Follow on Twitter: @drslgoldstein

            Where there’s a Bush, there’s a debacle—too often, with Florida at the center of it and the rest of the nation wondering what’s wrong with the Sunshine State. I wish the nightmares could be wiped away with the shake of an Etch A Sketch. But unfortunately life doesn’t follow art. Instead, the dynasty continues relentlessly to pursue its agenda of imposing its self-righteous will on the rest of a nation—and what’s wrong with “us” is that too many of us are slow to connect the dots.

            Past Bush Debacle One: In 2000, the eyes of the world were on Florida during the torturous recount of presidential votes. That bruising fiasco featured George W. Bush in the foreground and Jeb Bush in the background, pulling the strings of then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Who can forget her Sunday-evening rush to take center stage to “certify” the results of the Florida vote—or the consequences of that suspect election? The lack of integrity of the voting process in this country was exposed, to our collective shock. Even the most cynical among us never imagined the degree to which ballots were routinely tossed or otherwsie compromised. In its politically tainted decisions in Bush v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court lost all credibility, from which it has never recovered. And the course of history was changed. George W. entangled us in a war in Iraq and put Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Court, setting in motion some of the worst decisions it has ever made. Al Gore wouldn’t have done any of that.

            Past Bush Debacle Two: From 2003 to 2005, the brothers Bush muscled the power of the state into a devastating family matter. The heart-wrenching case of the brain-dead Terri Schiavo kept alive on a feeding tube was turned into political theatre—and posturing. An aide’s legal memo written to then-Florida Republican Senator Mel Martinez even crassly suggested that the case would resonate with the GOP’s political base. Who can forget the legal appeals and stays, press conferences and pronouncements, an extraordinary weekend session of Congress, George W.’s interrupting his vacation to return to Washington to sign a misguided bill at 1 a.m. transferring jurisdiction of the Schiavo case to federal courts? Jeb Bush orchestrated the torturous affair. Ultimately, it rightly backfired on him, but it divided the country and destroyed a family in the process.

            Current Bush Debacle: And now, there’s the murder of Trayvon Martin, another tragic tale on the public scene in which Jeb’s political judgment is transparent, but his moral judgment was clouded. During a 2005 photo-op, with a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association by his side, the-then governor signed (what is commonly referred to as) “The Stand Your Ground Law.” It gives Floridians who feel threatened the right to shoot to kill anyone anywhere—and ask questions later.

            Critics predicted that it would lead to disastrous consequences. Former Miami Police Chief John Timoney has been quoted saying, “Whether it’s trick-or-treaters or kids playing in the yard of someone who doesn’t want them there or some drunk guy stumbling into the wrong house[,] you’re encouraging people to possibly use deadly physical force where it shouldn’t be used.” Since the law was passed, through June 2010, “justifiable” homicides in Florida have tripled. If only Jeb had listened to the warnings and had stood up to the NRA, Trayvon Martin might be alive. At the time of this writing, he’s found words to endorse Mitt Romney and recommend Marco Rubio for vice president; but none for Trayvon Martin.

            Future Bush Debacles: What disasters could loom from the policies of The House of Bush? Lives destroyed because of ill-advised Medicaid reforms? A building collapsed because a charter school conglomerate built a facility on the cheap? Floridians devastated by a hurricane because budget cuts have dismantled emergency services? I don’t have a crystal ball to predict—or an Etch A Sketch to make it go away: Just hope against hope that it never happens, but gnawing fear that it might.#

U.S. ain't "exceptional": It's hypocritical!

email Stephen L. Goldstein: trendsman@aol.com

           The phrase “American exceptionalism” has given rise to another one of those specious litmus tests that right-wingers have concocted to (dis)qualify candidates and officeholders. Next to Grover Norquist’s anti-tax, no-tax pledge, it’s conservatives’ sine qua non of loyalty tests—though the founding fathers knew nothing of it, would never have presumed to invoke it or have approved of it. In fact, two foreigners (Alexis de Tocqueville and Joseph Stalin) coined it, but for dramatically different reasons. (Of course, President Obama’s enemies have declared him an apostate to “American exceptionalism” and, therefore, unfit to be president. But that’s another matter for another time.)

            Briefly put, the chorus of yea-sayers alleges that the United States is “exceptional” because our country is superior to every other one, bar none. From an unimpeachable moral high-ground, they claim a unique role in the world. In the words of historian Gordon Wood summarizing the syndrome, “Our beliefs in liberty, equality, constitutionalism, and the well-being of ordinary people come out of the Revolutionary era. So too did our idea that we Americans are a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty and democracy.” Neoconservatives enhance the notion of “exceptionalism,” claiming the nation rises to the level of the biblical “shining city on a hill,” which sanctifies our doing just about anything with impunity—at home and abroad—simply because we are who we are.

            Well, I beg to differ. I’m not buying any of that high-flying, self-righteous folderol—at least not in these perilous, hypocritical days in America, Augean Stables with no Hercules coming ’round the bend. These days, we are more reprehensible than exceptional—for touting our ideals while trampling them. Exceptionalism is as exceptional does. Everywhere, our collective actions undermine the foundations of our much-ballyhooed republic “of the people, by the people, and for the people”! We have stooped so low to conquer, there’s no chance we can straighten up anytime soon. We don’t follow our own “rules of the democratic road.”

            Every 10 years, “the shining city on the hill” sinks deeper and deeper into the ditch. The reapportionment mandated by the Constitution we hold up as a quasi-divinely inspired document and model for other nations has been turned into a sham: the incumbents’ guaranteed re-election scheme. No matter how hard “the people” try to get districts drawn without partisan bias, gerrymandering continues to maintain the status quo, putting the vested interests of political parties over those of “the people.” It’s no wonder so many voters don’t bother to go to the polls: They figure the system is rigged so their votes barely count—or don’t count at all.

            In addition, every election cycle, we belie our “exceptionalism” by redoubling our efforts to deny Americans from exercising their constitutional right to vote. Especially in recent years, more and more of us know first-hand the humiliation African-Americans felt for generations at polling places. We have lost any claim to the moral superiority to ensure elections around the world are fair and democratic, as long as voter suppression (masquerading as efforts to minimize virtually non-existent voter fraud) is rampant here. Campaigns play dirty tricks (jamming phone lines so supporters of candidates can’t reach their offices) and say dirty words (lies and disinformation) in the name of protected, political, free speech. It is exceptionally ugly.

            Furthermore, the “shining” Supreme Court on Capitol Hill has tarnished its image once again, sinking even lower than Bush v. Gore, when it absurdly ruled that corporations were people in Citizens United. The court’s unexceptional, ideologically driven majority could have saved itself from ignominy and the nation from being sold to corporate plutocrats if it had followed the unimpeachable logic of the syllogism: People bleed; corporations don’t bleed; corporations are not people.

            Crony capitalism and unbridled greed, violations of civil rights through state laws and constitutional amendments, constant assaults on the historic separation of church and state, shady legal justifications for domestic surveillance and treatment of alleged terrorists—we are a nation suffering a schizophrenia of our collective soul.

            “Exceptionalism,” no! Hypocrisy sí! Until we put our own house in order, at the very least live up to the sanctimonious words by which we profess to live and govern, we have no right to claim superiority over anyone or anything. We have met the enemy to our lofty ideals, and he is us.

            So, the next time you hear anyone professing to believe in our “exceptionalism” and/or condemning someone else for not doing so, remember how great we can be—but choose not to be.#

           

People WITH Guns Kill: Yesterday, Aurora, Colorado; Today, Wisconsin; Tomorrow ?

email Stephen L. Goldstein: trendsman@aol.com

            Until this afternoon, the memory of the senseless bloodbath in Aurora, Colorado had faded for everyone, except the hapless victims and residents of that otherwise anonymous town. TV crews moved on to their next breaking-news assignments—or waited poised to pounce. Some empathetic, mindful, opportunistic editor may yet send a resourceful reporter to sniff out a residual human-interest story in Aurora—a victim emerging from a coma, the marriage of two people shot, whatever.

            Until the shooting spree in Wisconsin, for all practical purposes, Aurora was old news. Like Columbine and the shooting of Cong. Gabrielle Giffords, it already became a minor footnote in history, if that. The predictable, national soul-searching that erupts after every sweeping disaster is over. Publicly, we soon stop asking “How could it happen?” and “Why did it happen?” and “How can we keep it from happening again?” And because we stop asking, we think it CAN'T happen again. Americans have the historical perspective of fruit flies and the moral conscience of mites: We are willful amnesiacs, especially when it comes to the bad stuff. And nothing is going to stop it, or us, for two reasons.          

            First, the National Rifle Association owns elected officials throughout the country. For decades, it has wielded more power than Grover Norquist and Citizens United combined. In the aftermath of Aurora, once again, at its headquarters, it’s party-time. Literally and figuratively, spirits are running high. Executives and their lobbyists will no doubt have high-fived and popped more than one champagne cork, toasting to their continued success at keeping the U.S. safe even for assault weapons. Especially in an election year, no one running for Congress or president is going to buck them. President Obama felt morally bound to tell his Urban League audience, “I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals; that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities”—but he didn’t pledge to take any action. And typically, Mitt Romney, who once was for gun control, is now against it.

            Second, the NRA owns the U.S. Supreme Court. In tortuous stretches of language and logic, in its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, a majority of the justices twisted the restrictive language of the Second Amendment (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”) into an individual’s right to possess a firearm. For that decision, the Court deserves an A+ for NRA advocacy, an F for reading comprehension, and a second F for moral leadership. In Heller, the Court affirms the constitutionality of certain prohibitions and restrictions on firearms-possession, but that is not enough to redeem the immorality of its overall decision. Like too many others, the Supremes drank the Kool-Aid that “guns don’t kill; people do”—ignoring the overarching truth that “people with guns kill.”

            So, nothing will happen to bring sanity to gun laws and ownership in America until “people pressure” gives our elected leaders the cover they need to stand up to the NRA. Predictably, there has now been a next Aurora, Columbine, and Giffords tragedy--this time in Wisconsin and a Sikh house of worship. So, 24/7 TV coverage, hand-wringing and soul-searching continues again—and predictably forgetting will soon set in. The framers of the Constitution wrote the Second Amendment to protect us from government tyranny. But they should have included one to protect us from ourselves.

Semi-profile in Courage: Chief Justice John Roberts

by Stephen Goldstein, email: trendsman@aol.com

            When the unthinkable happened, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts defected from his soul mates in the right-wing Supreme Court cabal and voted with his liberal colleagues to declare “Obamacares” constitutional, all hell broke loose. “Holy Oxycontin!” Rush Limbaugh allegedly screamed in private. George W. Bush almost rolled over in his golf cart. And John Boehner jumped out of his tanning bed half-baked. Justice Scalia may already be in therapy.

            In Florida, ground zero for opposition to health system reform, the news went down even harder. Former state Attorney General Bill McCollum, who initiated the lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court decision, looked like a teenager who hadn’t told his parents he dented the family car when I saw him interviewed by Greta van Susteren. Rick Scott, who funded a PAC to fight what became the Affordable Care Act and ran for governor so he could stop health system reform, is lucky he’s bald, or he would have torn out his hair. Word has it that the Roberts family has been permanently scratched from the Koch Brothers’ Christmas card list. 

            In disbelief, everywhere in Rightwingdom, the shocked were asking, “How dare Roberts break ranks? Where did he come off having an independent thought? Didn’t someone make him swear an oath always to do what Scalia says?” In the hollowest of hollow gestures, Speaker John Boehner announced that the U.S. House of Representatives would vote to overturn the Affordable Care Act. And in the spirit of bad losership, the tea party/GOP’s putative leader Mitt Romney announced, with bravado bordering on the absurd, that he would “repeal and replace” “Obamacares” within a nanosecond of his taking the oath of office.

            Predictably, the enraged Right everywhere—How dare Roberts do this to us?—is following Romney’s lead: promising without being able to deliver. They’ve got nothing to replace “Obamacares” with, except the current, unworkable status quo in healthcare delivery, sufficiently tweaked to ensure private interests can make bigger billions at the public expense without accountability, limitation, or conscience. “Romneyscares,” Mitt’s as-yet unexplained but certain to be horrific alternative to the now reaffirmed law of the land, depends on an alleged infallibility of “the market” to make healthcare “all better”—like it’s ever done so. It’s Rick Scott’s preferred solution on steroids.  

            Meanwhile in Florida, thrown for a loop by the supreme decision and violating his oath of office, Gov. Scott still won’t act like a grown-up, face reality, and follow the law of the land. He’s refusing even to implement a health insurance exchange, which allows individuals to compare plans and prices—a market-based feature of “Obamacares” which benefits consumers. He’s also committed to not expanding Medicaid. Expect the tea party/GOP Legislature to continue to try to wiggle out of “Obamacares,” even though doing so hurts millions of Floridians.

            Chief Justice Roberts is the master of doing the unthinkable—and redeeming himself. He flubbed administering the oath of office to President Obama at the Capitol and had to do it a second time in the Oval Office. With his vote upholding “Obamacares,” he’s set the stage for a second decision on health system reform. If Obama wins a second term with large enough majorities in both houses of Congress, Democrats should pass “Medicare for All.” And Roberts with equal judiciousness should uphold its constitutionality.#