I tweeted my 20 year old non-political niece a happy 4th of July wish

here were her responses

"Happy 4th of July but this year I'm not feeling very patriotic"

"America sucks right now"

246 years ago our founding fathers threw off the oppression of being ruled by unelected leaders

now the GOP has returned us to the terrible state our FFs worked so hard to free us from.

Republicans are making inflation worse with their political ads

As the U.S. approaches midterm elections, the influx of political advertisements highlighting rising inflation under the Biden Administration is likely to stoke even more inflation and lead to further monetary policy tightening, a Goldman Sachs note published Thursday said.

Beyond further increases in food and gas prices, “another key upside risk is the coming barrage of political advertisements highlighting high inflation ahead of the midterm elections in the next few months,” Goldman Sachs wrote.

Inflation expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies. When concerns over inflation rise, workers are often motivated to ask for higher wages to offset the rising price of fuel and food. This, in turn, results in companies raising prices for their goods to offset higher labor costs, spiraling inflation further upwards—something referred to in macroeconomics as a wage-price spiral.

The perfect troll of the anti-American right

Republicans on Supreme Court want Americans arrested for practicing their 1st amendment rights

WASHINGTON — Gail Curley, the Supreme Court’s marshal, has written to the governors of Maryland and Virginia and local officials in suburban Washington, D.C., asking them to enforce state and county laws that prohibit picketing at private homes.

In the letter to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, she said laws in his state prohibits assembling “with another in a manner that disrupts a person’s right to tranquility in the person’s home,” and provides a penalty of up to 90 days in jail.

When the demonstrations began, after the draft Supreme Court abortion opinion was leaked in May, Hogan said he was “deeply concerned” that hundreds of people were picketing outside the homes of some justices who live in his state.

“Since then, protest activity at justices’ homes, as well as threatening activity, has only increased,” Curley said in the letter, with large groups using bullhorns and banging drums. “This is exactly the kind of conduct that Maryland and Montgomery County laws prohibit.”

Liz Cheney: 'Republicans cannot be both loyal to Donald Trump and loyal to the Constitution'

Rep. Liz Cheney, speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Wednesday, said it’s time for Republicans to make a choice: Donald Trump or the Constitution.

The vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee leaned into her message just a day after White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s stunning testimony unveiled new details about the highest echelons of the White House in the final days and hours before the violent Capitol attack.

In taking the stage at the Reagan Library in California, Cheney didn’t shy away from her newfound role as the face of the anti-Trump GOP and a relic of the Republican Party before the dominance of Trump, who she said is “attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic.” The Wyoming Republican, who has yet to rule out a run for president in 2024, spoke in a manner that paves the path for a presidential run.


She ran through the Jan. 6 committee’s damning weeks of testimony that has illustrated Trump’s multi-pronged attempt to hold on to power and his bubbling rage. Cheney mentioned Trump’s summoning of rioters to Washington, D.C., and Hutchinson’s claim that Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Trump felt that “Mike deserves it” as rioters called for the death of then-Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6. Cheney took aim at Republicans and elected officials who have “made themselves willing hostages to this dangerous and irrational man.”

“It’s undeniable. It’s also painful for Republicans to accept. And I think we all have to recognize and understand what it means to say those words, and what it means that those things happened,” Cheney said to the crowd at a site long associated with traditional Republican values as reflected in Reagan’s presidency.

The Supreme Court Has Destroyed Its Legitimacy and There Is No Reason to Respect It

When an unelected conservative majority simply imposes the right’s policy preferences by fiat, there is little reason for the rest of us to respect the Court’s authority.

Nathan J. Robinson

here has always been a certain amount of artifice in what Supreme Court justices do. Whether they are conservatives or liberals, they pretend that their personal moral and political values are irrelevant to their votes, and that they are just Following The Law. They delude themselves into thinking they are mere “umpires” who might have differing legal theories but are certainly not partisan. They try to get the public to accept this myth, because if we did think of the justices as mere “robed legislators,” there would be little reason to treat their decisions with deference and respect. It is necessary for the court’s legitimacy that the public not see its rulings as the mere imposition of certain partisan policy preferences by an unelected council who are only in their positions for arbitrary reasons (e.g., because of the timing of another justice’s death).

The desire to preserve the myth of a legitimate court was one reason Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire. She felt it “belittles and diminishes the court to have retirements so obviously timed for political reasons.” It also explains why some liberal legal professionals praised the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Their politics and personal beliefs were seen as irrelevant. Instead, their qualifications and intelligence were what mattered. Yale Law School’s Akhil Amar predicted that Kavanaugh “will be a pro-intellectual and anti-polarizing force on the Court.” The Washington Post ran a law professor’s op-ed called “I’ve known Amy Coney Barrett for 15 years. Liberals have nothing to fear.” The author argued that as a justice, “Barrett would not draw on any extralegal source of authority—be it religious, moral or political.”

These predictions were obviously lies or unbelievably naive delusions. As I documented at great length at the time, both Kavanaugh and Barrett both had long track records of making conservative decisions that obviously incorporated their value judgments. The justices themselves, during their confirmations, pretended they weren’t going to be partisan (Kavanaugh was said to have called Roe v. Wade “settled law” in an August 2018 conversation with Sen. Susan Collins; yet the New York Times, reporting on his confirmation hearings a month later, mentioned documents revealing that Kavanaugh had, in the past, questioned whether Roe was indeed “settled law.” In any case, he clearly didn’t actually think the “important precedent” was worth upholding—although that somewhat paled next to the many other egregious instances of outright perjury in his testimony defending himself against allegations of past sexual assault). The pretense of neutrality was obviously untrue. Donald Trump had publicly promised that the justices he appointed would overturn Roe. It’s reasonable to doubt that any statement uttered by Donald Trump could ever be accurate, but this was one pledge he followed through on. Lindsey Graham, in his recent debate with Bernie Sanders (in which Sanders cleaned Graham’s clock), boasted openly about having a “conservative” Supreme Court. So much for objective “umpires” merely applying the law.

When SCOTUS isn't robbing rights, they are killing Americans with crime

A new study finds concealed-carry laws lead to a boost in gun crime by between 29% and 32%, mostly by triggering a surge in gun theft.

The study comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that struck down New York’s attempt to limit the ability to carry a gun outside their homes. That ruling was seen as particularly significant as other states have sought to restrict concealed-carry permits.

The study, authored by John Donohue, Samuel Cai and Matthew Bondy of Standard Law School, and Philip Cook of Duke University, looked at data from 47 cities between 1979 and 2019. In particular, the study, circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research, uses differential timing in the adoption of right-to-carry to look at the effects on crime, using FBI and Justice Department data.

The most significant impact is that right to carry laws elevate gun theft by roughly 35% — “introducing tens of thousands of guns into the hands of criminals or illegal gun markets each year.” The study notes that other countries, such as Israel, impose jail sentences for negligent gun practices such as leaving firearms in unlocked cars precisely because of the ill effects of stolen guns.

Having guns increases the probability of success to robbery by criminals, but only 40% of robberies are committed with one, suggesting that firearms are scarce, and their availability important. Violent crime, robbery and aggravated assault rise by between 11% and 15%, with the firearm component rising by roughly twice that level, the study says.

Our rights were stolen by Republican judges appointed by Republican Presidents who lost the popular

and assisted by a Senator that has never got even 1.5 million votes.

Republicans don't care that their views and beliefs are very unpopular and not the will of the American people. All they care about is turning the USA into a brutal right-wing dictatorship

Truer words have never been spoken