Today the five justices of SCOTGO — Supreme Court of the Galatian Overlords — made it a lot easier for the Right to take down public employee unions.

On First Amendment Thursday, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court delivered an unsubtle warning to public employee unions: You are living on borrowed time.

In Knox v. Service Employees International Union, the five—Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito—reached out to decide a question that was not argued or briefed; their opinion all but begs right-wing advocacy groups and public employers to use its emerging First-Amendment jurisprudence to take down public-employee unions and in essence find a Southern-style “right to work” law in the Constitution.

The article linked explains the decision better than I can. Two justices, Sotomayor and Ginsburg, concurred in the result but objected that the written decision addressed “unnecessarily significant constitutional issues well outside the scope of the questions presented and briefing,” Sotomayor wrote. Breyer and Kagan dissented.

Next week: The Obamacare decision.

More.

Rachel compares the Fast and Furious flap to an experience of being on a long bus ride and realizing the person sitting nearby and having a loud phone conversation is talking into a wad of aluminum foil shaped like a cell phone.

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Priceless: Her encounter with people protesting Eric Holder because he is “anti-gun” but who could not name a single anti-gun thing he has ever done.

Here, Bob Herbert says that to immerse oneself in this issue is like being on acid.

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By all accounts the sting operation was a mess, both badly planned and badly executed. This was the ATF’s baby, and it’s not clear to me if Holder was even aware of it before the Right started kicking up a fuss. Holder pulled the plug on the operation last year and ordered his inspector general to conduct an internal investigation, which of course doesn’t satisfy the Right, because they assume Holder is guilty of something more than not keeping the ATF on a tighter leash. The head of the ATF, Kenneth Melson, resigned last year, probably not voluntarily.

Holder has turned over something like 7,000 documents to Congress, but says the rest of the subpoenaed documents contain information that would compromise ongoing criminal investigations if revealed. Naturally, in the fevered imagination of righties, those documents contain information of a vast conspiracy to gut the Second Amendment.

The Right wants to be allowed to go on a no-holds-barred fishing expedition in the ATF and Justice Department, and if in doing so they set criminal investigations back several years, or get more agents or civilians killed, I doubt they care.

See also Five Things To Know About The Republican Witchhunt Against Attorney General Holder

I’ve been aware that the righties have been going on and on about something called Fast and Furious for months now, but every time I checked it out it didn’t add up to much. “Fast and Furious” was part of a sting operation conducted by the ATF between 2006 and 2011 to trace gun trafficking across the Mexican border by the drug cartels. It has led to some arrests, but on the whole has been a flop. One border patrol agent was killed in a botched operation.

If you aren’t seeing an Obama Administration scandal here, you must not be a rightie. Fast and Furious combines two rightie obsessions, guns and the Mexican border. Oh, and the Obama Administration, never mind that the program began during the Bush Administration. Righties are certain that the Obama Administration planted guns in Mexico as part of a scheme to undermine the Second Amendment. Recently House Oversight Committee member Rep. John Mica (R-FL) said,

“People forget how all of this started. This administration is a gun-control administration. They tried to put the violence in Mexico on the blame of the United States. So they concocted this scheme and actually sending our federal agents, sending guns down there, and trying to cook some little deal to say that we have got to get more guns under control,” Mica said, a theory that is supported by absolutely zero evidence. “That’s how this all started.”

According to everything I can find, “all of this started” in 2006, three years before the Obama Administration took office. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped the wingnuts from working themselves into a frenzy over Fast and Furious. House Republicans, Darrell Issa in particular, have striven mightily to jack Fast and Furious up into Obama’s Watergate.

To make a long story short, the House Oversight Committee chaired by Issa, has worked up a nice constitutional crisis by holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt because he didn’t give them evidence confirming what they wanted to believe. This is basically all about destroying the Obama Administration by any means necessary. The President’s evoking executive privilege may be less about a cover up than about rope-a-dope. Josh Marshall:

Here’s my question: Does the Obama White House really care? I’ve seen very little evidence that Eric Holder doesn’t enjoy the total confidence of the President. And a contempt vote only has the power of whatever moral opprobrium it carries. In practice, it means little to nothing. Presidents in a general election context often welcome confrontations with the base of the opposition party in Congress. I wonder if the White House (and also the campaign) actually welcomes this or at least is happy to see the House take its best shot.

Stay tuned.

The best thing on the web today, IMO, is Gary Wills’s “The Curse of Poliical Purity.” Reading it, I wanted to print it out and shove it in the faces of every “Obama is worse than Bush” progressive on the planet. A taste –

To vote for a Republican means, now, to vote for a plutocracy that depends for its support on anti-government forces like the tea party, Southern racists, religious fanatics, and war investors in the military-industrial complex. It does no good to say that “Romney is a good man, not a racist.” That may be true, but he needs a racist South as part of his essential support. And the price they will demand of him comes down to things like Supreme Court appointments. (The Republicans have been more realistic than the Democrats in seeing that presidential elections are really for control of the courts.)

The independents, too ignorant or inexperienced to recognize these basic facts, are the people most susceptible to lying flattery. They are called the good folk too inner-directed to follow a party line or run with the herd. They are like the idealistic imperialists “with clean hands” in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American—they should wear leper bells to warn people of their vicinity.

The etherialists who are too good to stoop toward the “lesser evil” of politics—as if there were ever anything better than the lesser evil there—naively assume that if they just bring down the current system, or one part of it that has disappointed them, they can build a new and better thing of beauty out of the ruins. Of course they never get the tabula rasa on which to draw their ideal schemes. What they normally do is damage the party closest to their professed ideals. Third parties are run by people who make the best the enemy of their own good and bring down that good.

My only quibble with Wills’s piece is that he is harder on “independents” than on the fair-weather progressives who want to defeat President Obama because he isn’t progressive enough. The former may be foolish, but the latter are way too effective useful idiots for the Koch Brothers. And let me emphasize the word “idiots.”

The other piece I want to point to this morning is “New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims” by Jordan Michael Smith. In brief, some newly declassified documents underscore the fact that the Bush Administration was given all kinds of warnings of a terrorist attack on the U.S., and the Bushies pooh-poohed them. Before 9/11 they discontinued Clinton Administration policies that at least took al Qaeda seriously and cut back on the Clinton Administration’s drone surveillance program that was watching bin Laden. And after 9/11 they blamed Clinton and persuaded much of America that only they were qualified to keep America safe from terrorism.

I doubt little of this will make national news headlines, which is a shame. Because Mitt Romney is hiring old Bush II Administration clowns as foreign policy advisers, and it’s important for Americans to fully understand how incompetent the Bushies really were.

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Lily was feeling well enough last night to eat a little and drink some water, and this morning she wanted to be petted. So she’s not quite done yet. I am giving her some kind of messy barium compound to coat her stomach, plus prednisone and antacid, to keep her more comfortable.

I’m not yet out of the hole for Lily’s vet bills, so I’m keeping the beg-a-thon going a bit longer.

A big thank you to everyone who has contributed so far; it’s already been a huge help.

Lily hasn’t been euthanized yet. She appeared to be a bit perkier this morning, so the Vet suggested I take her home and try to give her a few more good days. I brought her home about an hour ago. So far she seems uncomfortable and unhappy, but we’ll see.

I remember Miss Lucy continued to show some interest in life and wanted to be petted and cuddled up till a few hours before she died. But then, she didn’t have surgery to recover from. I put Lily on a big, soft pillow, and now she appears to be nodding off to sleep.

The Vet bill for her diagnosis and care is pretty steep, and donations received will be gratefully appreciated.

A big thank you to everyone who has contributed so far.

Yesterday some jailhouse audiotapes of conversations between George Zimmerman and his wife were released. I haven’t listened to them, but there’s a description in the Orlando Sentinel.

The recordings show that from his jail cell, Zimmerman gave his wife step-by-step instructions on how to change a password and clear security questions so she could move money, gave her orders to withdraw specific amounts and directed her to pay the bills.

Prosecutors allege the couple was moving money out of an Internet PayPal account that was awash with donations for Zimmerman, who’s charged with second-degree murder in one of the most racially-charged criminal cases in the country. He shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old, in Sanford Feb. 26.

The couple spoke in code, according to prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda. In the calls Zimmerman makes repeated reference to “Peter Pan,” an apparent reference to PayPal.

Joe Coscarelli provides a bit of transcript in New York magazine.

SHELLIE: After this, we go over, you’re gonna be able to just, have a great life.
ZIMMERMAN: We will.
SHELLIE: Yeah, we will. You’re
ZIMMERMAN: I’m (inaudible) excited.
SHELLIE: Yeah, you should be. You should be excited.

In other words, these two seem to think they had just hit the mother lode. And you’ll love this bit:

They also discussed Zimmerman getting out on bail, and how to keep him from the press. The Sentinel reports that his choice of words was not ideal:

… “Well, I have my hoodie,” he says, a possible joke, referring to the hooded sweatshirt Trayvon Martin wore the night Zimmerman shot him in Sanford, Feb. 26.

Classy.

Zimmerman’s lawyer Mark O’Mara has filed a motion asking the Court to reconsider an order to release all of the audiotapes. He says the Zimmermans were not talking about the money on those tapes, so the public doesn’t need to hear them. Still …

The really remarkable thing about the audiotape release is that they’ve made very little splash in the blogosphere. Even righties who have blogged exhaustively about every news story about what Zimmerman’s second cousin’s garage mechanic said about the shooting are oddly subdued about the newly released recordings. Poster boy remorse?

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I am still soliciting donations for Lily’s vet bill. I’m so sad she can’t be saved, but I think I would have been a lot sadder if I hadn’t tried because the bill would put me in a hole. But what’s done is done. Please help if you can.

All donations of any amount are deeply appreciated.

The vets found cancer in Lily’s stomach, so I will probably have her euthanized tomorrow. She’ll never be able to eat again, they tell me, so there isn’t much point bringing her home.

I will still be stuck with a terrifying Vet bill, so I hope some of you will still pitch in and donate a few dollars. If everyone who drops by here on a typical day gave even $1, it would be a huge help. As I wrote in the last post, I hope this will be the last time I have to rattle the tin cup.

Thanks sincerely for all help.

I haven’t written about Lily before now, but she moved into my apartment a few weeks after the late Miss Lucy died and took over Lucy’s job of household management. Lily is a black and white shorthair, now about seven years old, who is the most people-friendly cat I have ever met. She marches right up to complete strangers and wants to kiss them (or at least smell their faces). Very often when I’m writing she is curled up next to me, purring.

Last week she stopped eating. Saturday a vet looked at her and suspected gastritis. But yesterday she developed black diarrhea, indicating internal bleeding. X-rays and an ultrasound didn’t show a cause, so this afternoon she’s getting exploratory surgery.

Needless to say, this has blown the budget right out of the water.

My other bit of news is that awhile back I decided to give up trying to hang on to my apartment and sell it. I have quite a lot of equity in the place, even in these trying times, so once it’s sold I’ll have some cushion money for veterinary and automotive disasters and perhaps can stop begging for more money every few months whenever my cat gets sick or my car breaks down. I have an agent, and it’s supposed to go on the market officially this week. If anyone is looking for a reasonably priced two-bedroom co-op in southern Westchester County, New York, let me know, and I’ll pass you along to the agent.

So this might be my last fundraiser for a good long while, or even forever. But I’m guessing I’m looking at about $3,000 in vet bills on top of the $900 or so I already shelled out to save Lily. Which is $3,000 I do not have right now. I’m reconciled to giving up my apartment, but I would be very lonely without Lily.

I don’t have any good photos of Lily, but here is a video taken of her by a previous temporary owner:

And here’s the PayPal button. I’m still looking for some other way to pay online, but if you really can’t deal with PayPal, let me know.

All help, however modest, is deeply appreciated.

It’s been a discouraging couple of weeks for the Obama campaign. Now that the Right has more or less reconciled itself to having Mittens for a candidate, and is more or less solidified behind him, Romney has gotten far kinder coverage in the news than he had before. I’m expecting the media narrative of the 2012 campaign to shape up as well-meaning softie Obama versus tough centrist businessman Romney.

Except Romney is a sock, and Obama can be tough when he needs to be.

And here’s a surprise — in Nate Silver’s forecast model, Obama’s chances of winning the general election went up slightly last week, and Romney’s went down. My sense of things is that Romney had a better week in media than Obama did, so that’s not what I would have expected.

My suspicions are that the more the American people see of Romney, the less they will like him. His own worst enemy may prove to be himself. However, “the narrative” can go a long way toward putting lipstick on the pig, as they say.

The President’s new policy on immigration drew a typical Romney response.

For hours, Romney tried to ignore the news. Finally, after a rally here with a ragtime band playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in a town-square gazebo, Romney made a statement that struck a radically different tone from the hard-line approach he took on illegal immigration during the Republican primaries.

“I believe the status of young people who come here through no fault of their own is an important matter to be considered and should be solved on a long-term basis so they know what their future would be in this country,” he told reporters outside of his campaign bus.

“I think the action that the president took today makes it more difficult to reach that long-term solution, because an executive order is of course just a short-term matter. It could be reversed by subsequent presidents. I’d like to see legislation that deals with this issue.”

But he made no commitment to supporting any particular option.

The less-crazy elements of the GOP understand that they can’t keep pissing off Latinos and expect to win elections. But to endorse the policy would stir up the wrath of the rabidly xenophobic base. So Romney had to find a way to say the policy is fine but the President was still wrong to implement it. One wonders how many hours it took the Romney team to craft the message the candidate finally delivered.

And, of course, the biggest reason the President went ahead with the policy change is that there was no hope there would be “legislation that deals with this issue” in the foreseeable future.

Today Romney is accusing Obama of playing politics to get the Latino vote, but he refuses to say that he would repeal the executive order if elected.

A big chunk of the electorate won’t focus much on the elections until the conventions. My prediction is that as people get a closer look at Romney, the more uncomfortable they will be with him. The only question is whether the Right’s propaganda machine can make up for their candidates’ obvious shortcomings.

Update: See also Romney: Being Vague About My Plans Helps Me Get Elected and Romney Dodges Immigration Questions.