Some brilliant wag at CBS affiliate 19ActionNews in Cleveland, OH, has not let the “no camera” rule during the federal racketeering trial of Cuyahoga County commissioner Jimmy Dimora go the usual route of water-color sketches and dry recitation:

BTW, it took going to an Arizona news source to Name That Party

With cameras barred from a high-profile corruption trial, a television station has puppets acting out the sometimes-steamy testimony about hookers, gambling and sexually transmitted diseases. In one scene, a furry hand stuffs cash down the shirt of a puppet prostitute.

“I’m horrified,” a laughing anchorwoman said after a segment shown this week on WOIO, a CBS affiliate in Cleveland, where the trial of longtime Democratic power broker Jimmy Dimora is the talk of the town.

h/t Walter Olson

Religious institutions to be forced to violate their conscience.

The Obama administration announced Friday that it would give Catholic hospitals and other religious institutions an extra year to comply with a new requirement that most health plans provide contraceptive benefits at no cost to their members.

The administration, however, held fast to the mandate that most health plans eventually offer free (sic) contraception. That infuriated Roman Catholic bishops and some other religious leaders who had vigorously opposed the rule as a violation of their religious liberty. They wanted a broad swath of religious organizations exempted from the rule.

Important election-year constituents — women’s advocates and liberal groups — were delighted by the administration’s hold-the-line decision. They had been worried the White House might exempt large numbers of religiously affiliated employers, such as Catholic hospitals and universities.

Places of worship, including churches and synagogues, already were exempt.

By refusing to broaden the exemption, “in effect the president is saying that we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” complained Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Sister Jane Marie Klein, chairwoman of the board of Franciscan Alliance Inc., a system of 13 Catholic hospitals, said, “This is nothing less than a direct attack on religion and 1st Amendment rights.”

Hi, all. Just a quick note to let you know that I’ll be taking off early in the AM to head to Loveland for the youth Regional wrestling tournament, where my son will be competing for a chance to advance to the State tournament. I’m proud that Satch made it this far in only his second year of wrestling — and while I don’t think he’s quite experienced enough to advance to the States, I do see quite a bit of potential in him, and I believe that potential will translate into a big season next year (I was able to teach him a near leg turk / stepover turk turn to pin tonight, a series he picked up very quickly; the problem is, he has to break an opponent down well enough to set it up, unless he catches it off a re-shot, and so far he’s shown an inability to use his weight to hold kids down consistently in anything other than a half nelson).

At any rate, that’s where I’ll be for the majority of the day tomorrow, so if no one else posts, please feel free to use this post as a SC primary open thread.

Also, do remember that tomorrow is BJTex’s memorial service. I sent flowers from the pw family, but I’m sure the family would appreciate any words you all might have to offer.

Be well, and we’ll talk again soon. OUTLAW WARRIORS!

****
update: Satch placed 7th (he would have finished fifth had he not lost a tooth during a match, which proved something of a distraction to him after he’d built up a good lead), but still, he bought himself another advancement — this time to the League Championship tournament.

EXT DAYTIME, COMEDY CENTRAL / DNC HEADQUARTERS

DNC MEDIA CHIEF: We have 4,332 magic underwear jokes for Romney, if it’s Newt we’re going to re-animate Chris Farley, Tina Fey’s contractually obligated to have her cock put back on to play Ron Paul if he wins, and if it’s Santorum….

COMEDY CENTRAL EXECUTIVE: Yes?

DNC MEDIA CHIEF: We’re putting new censors in at the FCC; YOU won’t have a problem ridiculing the Santorum problem.

COMEDY CENTRAL EXECUTIVE: Carry on

AtheistsForSantorum

Because the shirts are hyper-masculine while, as everyone knows, all kids love sparkly stuff

It’s a boy! And he’s five. Beck Laxton, 46, and partner Kieran Cooper, 44, have spent half the decade concealing the gender of their son, Sasha.

“I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping,” Laxton said in an interview with the Cambridge News. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” [...]

For years, Becks has been referring to her child, the youngest of three, as “the infant” on her personal blog. But guarding the public from her son’s gender was only part of her quest to let her kid just be a kid.

Sasha dresses in clothes he likes — be it a hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother. The big no-no’s are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts. In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha’s dressed in a shiny pink girl’s swimsuit. “Children like sparkly things,” says Beck.

Ahhhh, kids as sociological experiments. How special.

…because you might just get it.

Krauthammer:

Create an entirely new narrative. Push an entirely new issue. Change the subject from your record and your ideology, from massive debt and overreaching government, to fairness and inequality. Make the election a referendum on which party really cares about you, which party will stand up to the greedy rich who have pillaged the 99 percent and robbed the middle class of hope.

This charge, too, is straightforward: The Republicans serve as the protectors and enablers of the plutocrats, the exploiters who have profited while America suffers. They put party over nation, fat-cat donors over people, political power over everything.

It’s all rather uncomplicated, capturing nicely the Manichaean core of the Occupy movement — blame the rich, then soak them. But the real beauty of this strategy is its adaptability. While its first target was the do-nothing protect-the-rich Congress, it is perfectly tailored to fit the liabilities of Republican front-runner Mitt Romney — plutocrat, capitalist, 1 percenter.

Obama rolled out this class-war counter-narrative in his December 6 “Teddy Roosevelt” speech and hasn’t governed a day since. Every action, every proposal, every “we can’t wait” circumvention of the Constitution — such as recess appointments when the Senate is not in recess — is designed to fit this re-election narrative.

If we accept JG’s formulation that a single, unified ruling class has us all in an endless cycle of flatly dishonest political blaming and scapegoating rooted in “social equality” and Welfare State leveling, (overlaying a grand, ongoing corporatization and an entire reimagining of American moral principle that enables all of this, I’d add) then we’d better get used to being fed this constant diet of rhetorical gruel, heavy on the social values cum personal liabilities that make and break candidates by a predictable, nearly rote formula.

This is how it is done.  This is the battleground — not the polls, and not even the road to them, but the media’s What Really Matters game show of principles, replacement progressive principles so vividly etched into the national consciousness by now as to be tantamount to a growing central religion of State.  Newt’s wife — look!  Santorum’s family; Mitt’s money!  Look!

Because we’re not electing a patron of original principle nearly as much as we’ve being led to believe a certain central ethic about just how much of a glorious services provider our captors have assembled around us, all the while stealing us blind, lining through our constitutional rights, and lying about it all.

Of course, we can’t be expected to think a layer deeper — nor do we — when it’s so offensive to the narrative’s crafters and their many stooges.  To point back to what the nation was founded on and what’s essential to its survival, that is.

It wouldn’t be nice to talk about real even while being led off in chains.

– though doing so reveals just how much our Constitution has already been degraded and deconstructed. Still, hurray for small victories, right? “Supreme Court delivers a knockout punch to the White House”:

Wednesday the United States Supreme Court delivered a knockout blow to the White House in the cause of religious liberty.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a unanimous court swatted away the government’s claim that the Lutheran Church did not have the right to fire a “minister of religion” who, after six years of Lutheran religious training had been commissioned as a minister, upon election by her congregation.

The fired minister — who also taught secular subjects — claimed discrimination in employment. The Obama administration, always looking for opportunities to undermine the bedrock of First Amendment religious liberty, eagerly agreed.

There was just one big problem standing in the way of the government’s plan: the U.S. Constitution. For a long time American courts have recognized the existence of a “ministerial exemption” which keeps government’s hands off the employment relationship between a religious institution and its ministers or clergy.

Here, in this case, the Department of Justice had the nerve to not only challenge the exemption’s application but also its very existence.

But, Chief Justice Roberts pushed back hard, telling the government essentially to butt out:

“Requiring a church to accept or retain an unwanted minister, or punishing a church for failing to do so, intrudes upon more than a mere employment decision. Such action interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs. By imposing an unwanted minister, the state infringes the free exercise clause, which protects a religious group’s right to shape its own faith and mission through its appointments. According the state the power to determine which individuals will minister to the faithful also violates the establishment clause, which prohibits government involvement in such ecclesiastical decisions.”

Citing well-known legal precedent dating as far back as Reconstruction, the court made it clear that it is not up to the government to contradict a faith’s determination as to who should — and should not — be performing religious functions.

The Supreme Court clearly announced Wednesday that the First Amendment itself gives special recognition to the rights of religious organizations and rejected the government’s view that the Religion Clauses of the Constitution don’t apply to religious organizations’ freedom to select their own ministers, priests, rabbis and imams.

The Court also took aim at Plaintiff’s Cheryl Perich’s claims for back pay finding that such relief would operate as an unconstitutional penalty against a religious institution for terminating an unwanted minister and exercising its constitutional right to make decisions about internal church governance.

Horrific ruling. I mean, if the Court is going to uphold powers outside of the government, how is the government ever going to impose a radical egalitarian agenda on the entirety of the population, one in which it alone gets to decide every civic and social outcome — and for which it will become the de facto “benevolent” policing authority in our fundamentally transformed Utopian police state?

That is, why does the Court hate equality?

My guess is racism. But there’s probably some patriarchal impulse doing some work here, as well. Either way.

(thanks to JHo)

Wow. Talk about ingratitude! The same activist media who has buried his past relationships, refuses to find his transcripts, covers for his numerous and frequent mistakes and misstatements, and has been a cheerleading propaganda arm for the entirety of his radical redistributionist, authoritarian agenda — this is who Obama is going to blame for being seen as aloof?

Shit, man. May as well have the Secret Service round up Pinch and Stephanopoulis and Gregory and Friedman, et al., stuff them into rubber gimp suits and ball gag them, then display them in little cages on the White House lawn.

And here I was thinking the conventional view of this haughty poser as being distant and disconnected from the electorate was built on the 90 rounds of golf and all the fancy vacations and the public shows of tone deafness, even as the America he’s bent on fundamentally transforming is, on the bitterclinger level, suffering from the pains of economic contraction and administrative molestation.

Silly me.

The waffling on whether or not Romney was going to release his income taxes combined with a sort of embarrassed blushing that he pays about 15% plays directly into the faux-outrage of Alinsky-trained Obamabots. Romney needed the pugnaciousness to loudly declare not only his success as a capitalist but that he, even at 15% on investment earnings is still paying more than 99% of taxpayers.

Mitt Romney’s disclosure this week that his effective federal tax rate is “probably closer to the 15% rate than anything” has created the predictable political uproar. The White House and its media allies figure they’ve now got their stereotype of the Monopoly man, albeit without his cane and top hat, who they can crush in their planned class-warfare campaign.

We’re not sure if facts will matter in this cacophony, but someone should at least try to introduce a little reality into the debate, especially since Mr. Romney seems so unprepared to make the case.

Start with the fact that, like Warren Buffett, Mr. Romney said he makes most of his money from investments, not wages or salary. Thus his income is really taxed twice: once at the corporate tax rate of 35%, then again at a 15% tax rate when it is passed through to him as dividends or via capital gains from the sale of stock.

All income from businesses is eventually passed through to the owners, so to ignore business taxes creates a statistical illusion that makes it appear that the rich pay less than they really do. By this logic, if the corporate tax rate were raised to, say, 60% from today’s 35% and the dividend and capital gains tax were cut to zero, it would appear that business owners were getting away with paying no federal tax at all. [...]

The nearby table from the CBO report shows that in 2007 the average income tax rate paid by the 1% was 18.8%, compared to 4.2% for Americans in a broadly defined middle class from the 21st to 80th income percentiles. The poorest 20% on average paid a net negative income-tax rate of 5.6% because of the checks they receive for tax credits that are “refundable.” These are essentially transfer payments redistributing income from the rich and middle class to the poor. [...]

The main point is that the average effective tax rate on the richest 1% is already twice as high as that of the middle class. No matter how many times Mr. Buffett asserts it, secretaries and plumbers do not on average pay a higher tax rate or less in taxes than do CEOs. Here is what the CBO concludes: “Taken as a whole, the federal tax system is progressive.” [...]

Mr. Romney said at Monday’s Republican presidential debate that he would like to see a top income-tax rate of about 25%. Mr. Obama is seeking a rate closer to 42%, for starters. Mr. Romney’s challenge is to persuade Americans that lower rates will mean more jobs and growth, and more revenues for the government. One certainty is that if he stays on his current path of playing defense, Mr. Romney won’t deserve to be the GOP nominee because he’s likely to lose the fall election.

First, this: “House, Senate Postpone Piracy Bills Under Pressure”:

Capping a dramatic week of protests and legislative maneuvering, leaders in the Senate and the House announced on Friday that they are backing off efforts to pass a pair of controversial bills to crack down on foreign websites that use pirated content.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced that he will postpone a cloture vote on the Senate’s Protect IP Act, originally scheduled for Tuesday. And in the House, Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said he will postpone consideration of the House version until more agreement can be found.

Congress backed off the legislation after an unprecedented online protest on Wednesday by an estimated 115,000 websites and 13 million Internet users that catapulted the debate onto the national stage. At least eight former cosponsors of the Protect IP Act have defected, and support is waning for the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, which aims to give U.S. officials more tools for combating international piracy and copyright infringement.

[...]

Wikipedia, Craigslist, and other high-profile websites went so far as to black out their entire sites in protest against the legislation. Critics say the measures would limit free speech and harm the open nature of the Internet.

Now that dramatic show of force by Internet companies large and small seems to have paid off.

SOPA has yet to clear the House Judiciary Committee, despite ardent work by Smith. And the Senate bill, which had been on a relatively fast track after the Judiciary Committee unanimously approved it in May, looks equally doomed.

Just as the Web protests were roundly dismissed and disparaged by the bills’ supporters, Reid’s decision to back off sparked sharp reaction from Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who sponsored the Protect IP Act.

“I understand and respect Majority Leader Reid’s decision to seek consent to vitiate cloture on the motion to proceed to the Protect IP Act,” Leahy said in a statement. “But the day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem.”

Smith, meanwhile, said that it is “clear that we need to revisit the approach” on combating piracy.

The decision marks a failure for many in the traditionally strong entertainment lobby, which had pushed hard for the legislation.

Takeaway: a strong showing by a pissed-off, motivated electorate can still, in some instances, beat back the bought legislation drafted on behalf of monied special interest groups.

If the protest gets enough media attention — meaning, if the protests are bi-partisan, and the push from the left is so significant in scope that the activist media rethinks its knee-jerk support of increased federal power.

Then there’s this: “Supreme Court Ruling Favors Texas in Redistricting”:

The Supreme Court today threw out interim redistricting maps drawn by a federal court in Texas saying the court had not paid enough deference to maps drawn by the Republican dominated state legislature.

The unsigned unanimous decision will clarify a controversy in the state that has already lead to a delay in the Texas primary.

At issue are two sets of maps for the state’s congressional districts, which had to be redrawn after Texas gained four new seats in the 2010 census reapportionment. One map, drawn by the GOP-controlled legislature, favors Republicans lawmakers and is is currently being challenged by Latino groups. Another congressional map was drawn by a federal court in Texas and meant to be used on an interim basis for the next election. The court drawn map had favored Democrats.

The state of Texas had challenged the court drawn interim maps arguing that the court should have deferred at least in part to the maps drawn by the legislature.

But Latino groups and Democrats had argued that the legislature drawn maps did not reflect the Latino population growth in Texas since the 2010 census.

While it does not compel the use of the maps drawn by the legislature, the Supreme Court decision said the federal court has to go back to the drawing board.

Evidently, some rank attempts to destroy the separation of powers are so blatantly political that not even the liberal SCOTUS justices could find a way to justify the judicial overstep at the federal court level. Too, the anti-American idea that districts need to be drawn so as to ensure a particular ethnic group is empowered (a move that redounds to the identity politics players on the left and in the Democrat party, a move that is merely a disguised form of quota representation) will not be given the cover of a court-sanctioned camouflage. That is, the Latino groups challenging the legislature will have to do so using the identity politics argument, the jurisdictional argument of the federal courts having been (temporarily, at least) rebuked.

So maybe all is not yet lost: we live to fight another day.