Tea Party

by Jeremy Leaming

Despite upholding the Affordable Care Act, corporate America continues its winning ways before the nation’s highest court.

Specifically, the Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s biggest lobbyist for business interests has “prevailed in 68 percent of its cases before the Roberts Court,” writes Neil Weare for the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC). He adds that the Chamber’s “success has grown significantly since the stable Rehnquist Court, when it was just 56” percent.

In close cases, Weare says “Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito have become the Chamber’s strongest champions.” Roberts has sided with the Chamber 84 percent of the time; Alito has sided with it 92 percent of the time.

“In sum,” Weare concludes, “the October 2011 Term yet again demonstrates the roaring success of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has had before conservative Justices on the Roberts Court.”

The trend also shows liberals are making little headway in reversing the decades-long movement to destroy the nation’s social safety. While poverty continues to grow, and a small group of outlandishly wealthy people continues to consolidate its power, all three branches of the federal government, not to mention a slew of Republican-controlled statehouses, seem forever beholden to the wealthy few.

The Affordable Care Act, which the high court narrowly upheld, and did so by placing limits on Congress’s spending power, is also under attack by right-wing politicos who are bent on hampering even moderate efforts to create a decent social safety net in a wealthy country.

As noted here, Republican governors are loudly proclaiming they’ll work to undermine the Affordable Care Act, especially its provision calling for an expansion of Medicaid. TPM’s Brian Beutler reports that Louisiana’s right-wing governor, Bobby Jindal, says “we’re going to do everything we can” to trash the Obama administration’s health care law.

by John Schachter

Jonah Goldberg’s online tongue-in-cheek, ironic, satirical humor column on The Washington Post website this past weekend suffers from one major flaw: it’s apparently not intended to be tongue-in-cheek, ironic, satirical or humorous. Oh, well.

Goldberg tackles, as he puts it, the “top five clichés that liberals use to avoid real arguments.” We’ll get to that part of the column in a moment.

But first Goldberg opens by criticizing “mainstream liberals from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama -- and the intellectuals and journalists who love them” for claiming to be “dispassionate slaves to the facts; they are realists, pragmatists, empiricists.” Liberals, he claims, insist that “if only their Republican opponents weren’t so blinded by ideology and stupidity, then they could work with them.”

Let’s take a look at the facts. (Yes, we know Goldberg and his ilk don’t like when – cliché alert! – facts get in the way of a good argument. Wasn’t it Sen. Jon Kyl’s (R-Ariz.) spokesman who, when challenged on a ridiculously inaccurate statement Kyl used in a floor speech, insisted that Kyl’s comments and statistics were “not intended to be a factual statement”? Should we at least give him credit for at least admitting this distaste for facts?)

Despite ALL the evidence to the contrary, many Republicans continue to believe that President Obama was not born in the United States.Polling in March 2012 – nearly a year after the White House released the president’s long-form birth certificate, which should have ended, once and for all, the ridiculous “debate” – found that large percentages of Republicans in three key primary states still doubted the facts.