Sigh

Saturday morning, it's still cool (but not for long, summer's here in central NC), the mower awaits, then the weed eater. They already ran the truck race at Dover. After that we watched Chris Hayes on Hastert, then Rachel Maddow on Hastert. What a jerk. I kept wondering why he didn't just hire a lawyer to be his bag man. Was the alleged crime of his pre-Congress days so heinous that he couldn't get a lawyer--in Chicago?--to help him at least walk the line of the banking laws. This is so stupid. Best question I read so far: so how did Hastert amass such a fortune being a cloth-coat Republican that he could give away $3.5 mil? Maybe that'll come out. There's also this: yet again we have a sex scandal to divert the public from whatever more important and substantive issues are going down, such as this nasty trade bill, and the renewal of the Patriot Act.

This morning I ran into this, a further aspect of the Hastert story, and how it dovetails with the criminal incompetence of the mainstream press:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/30/1388977/-Did-You-Know-Dennis-Hastert-Was-a-Democrat#

WHAT????

Here's a good take on the Hastert story from Rude Pundit.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2015/05/not-so-wild-conjecture-about-what.html

I liked the possible scenarios Mr. Pundit conjectures. It should be noted that they are not contradictory. That is, one could check "all the above" and be consistent.

Over at Crooked Timber, Corey Robin takes note of some real stuff behind the chaff:

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/05/25/fight-racism-confirm-clarence-thomas/

Turns out that the people who worked for a number of years to get Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court were also founders of Citizens United. Twenty years later their work paid off. Amazing. And at the moment Mr. Thomas may well be understood as the deciding vote on Burwell, the spurious "Moops Invade Spain" suit now before the Court which aims to destroy the Affordable Care Act by turning essentially a typo into the "true meaning and intent" of the whole law.

4. Citizens United was formed by Floyd Brown in 1988 in the wake of the failed effort to get Robert Bork onto the Supreme Court. Brown helped make the Willie Horton ad. Getting Clarence Thomas confirmed by the Senate was one of the organization’s first missions. In 2010, Thomas was part of the slim majority that ruled in favor of Citizens United in Citizens United v. FEC. Though several arguments for his recusal in the case were brought up at the time, no one mentioned Citizens United’s contributions to his confirmation. (from the Corey Robin article above)