Supreme Court strikes down overall limit on campaign contributions to candidates over a two-year period, though it leaves in place (for now!) limits on individual contributions to candidates. The Court's casual equation of money and speech is beyond annoying -- I'm so old-fashioned I believe speech is speech and money is property -- but this ruling ought to be easy for Democrats to run on: all they need do is cast their opponent as the lapdog of millionaires and corporations -- you wouldn't even have to avoid seeking out campaign donations from those same millionaires and corporations yourself if you hit first and hard. Then again, when do Democrats ever hit first and hard, or find the easy stuff easy?
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) offers his own plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something vibrant and new. Nah, just kidding: he'd repeal it and replace it with tort "reform" which saves money for rich HMO-owners and no one else, with spending caps for Medicaid and Medicare which cut benefits, with the "restoration" of Medicare "cuts" which were actually cuts in Medicare subsidization of private health insurers, and a Rube Goldbergian "high-risk pool" scheme which wouldn't cover very many folks with pre-existing conditions and would cost a lot more money than he says it would. The worst part? Mr. Jindal wants credit for not just saying "no" to everything like a diaper-loaded brat! You can't just have ideas, sir -- you have to have ideas that aren't utter-crap-with-crap-sauce.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says Republicans need to get "beyond deportation" and "make clear it is open to a more welcoming approach to immigration." The same Rand Paul who co-sponsored the "Anchor Babies" bill in the Senate in early 2011? The bill that would have amended our Constitution so that folks born in America to undocumented immigrants on American soil could be stripped of their right to American citizenship? Always watch what they do, not what they say -- especially Rand Paul, who's so far made a career out of selling out to his corporate paymasters and mouthing off about matters like drones and free speech and defense spending without doing thing one about them.
Sen. McConnell (E-KY) calls the Affordable Care Act a "catastrophe." It's one thing to mouth right-wing pablum, I suppose, but is he really ignorant of the fact that his home state of Kentucky is one of the few places where the ACA did really well from the beginning -- thanks largely to a state-run exchange that rolled out much better than the national exchange did? Such apparent ignorance must count for something in his upcoming re-election race -- if Ms. Grimes can take advantage of it, of course, since Democrats seem to have a lot of trouble catching what's thrown in their lap.
Finally, a South Carolina girl wants to make the Columbian mammoth the "state fossil," but some knuckledraggers in the State legislature have a tantrum about it, demanding an amendment declaring that the mammoth was created "on the sixth day." I do not know what penalty they've proposed for declaring that our scientific understanding of fossilization proves the beauty of God's creative process. Seriously, we need to understand that legislatives who need amendments like these are very likely deeply insecure about their faith -- no one who really believes the Bible tells them all they need know about the world would worry quite so much about whether the law marches in jackboot lockstep with it.
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