We can either have a situation where we have a small number of people with a huge amount of wealth or we can have a democracy. But we can’t have both.
— Bill Gates, Sr.

This week brought another round of pro-corporate rulings from Bush’s Supreme Court. There’s no longer any question that John Roberts will push the Court hard to the right. The only question is how much damage to the nation these men will do before a new President can bring some balance back to America’s judiciary.

The most egregious rulings — which began during the Rehnquist court — are those that undercut Congress’s feeble attempts toward campaign finance reform. True, the McCain-Feingold bill has problems. But the Court has decreed that it will never be improved and there’s no point in proposing options because the crux of the matter — rich people buying legislators with campaign contributions — has been ruled off limits as “free speech.”

Huge irony here, with major dollops of chutzpah.

Wealthy elites can use their money to buy politicians and influence policy and the practice is protected as a fundamental American right to political speech. The rest of us have the same rights, of course, but our soapbox orations, letters to the editor, emails to our Representatives, and blog postings never count as much as the hefty campaign contributions and million dollar TV ads of the rich.

When the rich “speak,” the politicians listen. When the rest of us “speak,” we’re thanked for our opinions and quickly forgotten.

I call this the most egregious of rulings because as long as we give the rich more power than the People, we do not have a functioning democracy. And without a functioning democracy, none of this will ever change.

First priority: Supreme Court justices who can tell the difference between a sincerely-expressed opinion and a bag of money. Until then, “free speech” in America is a farce. All speech costs, and the speech that moves America’s leaders is very expensive.

The ever-professorial Juan Cole almost loses it after Bush’s latest foray into decider-speak:

In Israel, terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it’s not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that’s a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq.

Cole doesn’t mince words in showing his exasperation with Bush, and gives the kind of cogent analysis that, apparently, has not occurred at the White House for 6+ years:

These words may be the stupidest ones ever uttered by a US president. Given their likely impact on the US war effort in the Middle East, they are downright criminal.

The US political elite just doesn’t get it. Israel is not popular in the Middle East, and it isn’t because Middle Easterners are bigots. It is because Israel is coded as the last European colonial presence in the region, an heir to French Algeria, British Egypt, and Dutch Indonesia– and because the Israelis pugnaciously continue to try to colonize neighboring bits of territory. (This enmity is not inevitable or eternal; in 2002 the Arab League offered full recognition of Israel in return for its going back to 1967 borders, but the Israeli government turned down the offer.) But for the purposes of this analysis it does not really matter why Israel is unpopular. Let us just stipulate that it is. Why would you associate American Iraq with such an unpopular project, if you were trying to do public diplomacy in the region?

Really, the only reasonable explanation for Bush’s words is that he is a serious Christian-Rapture-Nut who thinks causing an all-out conflagration in the Middle East is doing God’s work. Because conflagration is what we’re going to get:

Even if it were true that an Israel-Palestine sort of denouement were in Bush’s mind for Iraq, was it wise for him to make it public?

That sort of scenario is precisely the propaganda message broadcast by the Jihadi websites in Iraq and the Arab world! They say that the US military occupation of Iraq, in alliance with Shiites, has turned the Sunni Arabs into Palestinians! Bush could not have handed the guerrillas a better rhetorical gift. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that DVD’s of Bush’s comments will be spread around as a recruiting tool for jihadis, and that US troops will certainly be killed as a result of this speech. You could say that the US military presence is already pretty unpopular in the Sunni Arab areas. But what of the progress in al-Anbar Province? Will Bush’s speech help or hurt Sunni Arabs who want to ally with the US against the foreign Salafi Jihadis? Hurt, obviously.

“We have overestimated what the military can achieve, we have set goals that are unrealistic, and we have inadequately factored in the broader regional consequences of our actions.” — Sen. Richard Lugar

A highly-respected, Republican hawk has stated the obvious about Mr Bush’s idiot war, yet when interviewed by Jim Lehrer, Luger could only advocate more of the same. Luger  knows that America’s addiction to Middle Eastern oil means that, not only will we not be leaving Iraq any time soon, we will likely have to increase our military presence in the region. But Luger is also a politician with one eye ever trained on the next election, so he parades a bit of “political courage” and criticizes the now totally unpopular Bush.

And nothing changes.

There is no solution to what Juan Cole  has called “Iraq’s everyday apocalypse,” because it’s really not about Saddam, or WMD, or Al Qaeda, or Sunnis vs Shiites.

The world is running out of oil. Iraq has some of the last great reserves. When Americans allowed a pair of money-grabbing oilmen to take over the country, Iraq was already doomed.

And no matter how awful gets, we’re not leaving till all of our oil has been extracted from their soil.

As the Congress makes a lot of noise but no sense on the immigration issue, the New York Times documents “the boom in immigration detention — the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration“:

Sandra M. Kenley, a legal permanent resident who had high blood pressure and a bleeding uterus, died in a rural Virginia jail after not receiving her medication. Returning home from a trip to Barbados she was locked up because of two old misdemeanor drug convictions. Abdoulai Sall, an auto mechanic, had no criminal record, but was still seized during an immigration interview. He had a severe kidney ailment and he, too, complained about not getting his medicine. He got sicker and died in another Virginia jail last December.

Sixty-two immigrants have died since 2004 while being held in a secretive detention system, a patchwork of federal centers, private prisons and local jails. Advocacy groups and lawyers say that the system not only denies detainees the most basic rights but also lacks the oversight and regulations that apply to federal prisons. Instead of fixing this broken system, the Senate bill that is lumbering toward final passage — after surviving a crucial procedural vote yesterday — is overloaded with provisions that will make it even harsher and more unfair.

One of the worst amendments comes from Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. It would impose mandatory detention of all people who overstay their visas. It’s a huge overreach that threatens to swamp the detention system, filling already-strapped prisons at great expense and inevitably leading to more abuses and deaths. And because it takes away the power of officials to decide who poses a genuine threat and who doesn’t, it would undermine efforts to catch and deport the truly dangerous.

So, as with the incarceration of pot smokers, we are converting hundreds of thousands of otherwise decent people into criminals, at an annual cost of billions. But hey, the prison business is booming.

Before our idiot invasion of Iraq, there was Afghanistan, the “good invasion.” Since the Taliban were harboring Bin Laden and other planners of the 9/11 attacks, invading Afghanistan made sense to most folks (not me). Unfortunately, the Bushies undertook the project with their trademark incompetence, and six years later Bin Laden remains at large, the Taliban are on the rebound, and our continuing presence in the country is just bad news:

U.S.-led coalition and NATO forces fighting insurgents in Afghanistan have killed at least 236 civilians so far this year — surpassing the 178 civilians killed in militant attacks, according to an Associated Press tally.

Insurgency attacks and military operations have surged in recent weeks, and in the past 10 days, more than 90 civilians have been killed by airstrikes and artillery fire targeting Taliban insurgents, said President Hamid Karzai.

Separate death toll figures from the U.N. and an umbrella organization of Afghan and international aid groups show that the numbers of civilians killed by international forces is approximately equal to those killed by insurgents.

“Burning the village to save it” worked so well in Viet Nam it is now America’s prime export to the Middle East. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and soon, we fear, Iran, we blunder on, killing way more good guys than bad.

On Saturday, [President Hamid] Karzai accused NATO and U.S.-led troops of carelessly killing scores of Afghan civilians and warned that the fight against resurgent Taliban militants could fail unless foreign forces show more restraint.

“Afghan life is not cheap and it should not be treated as such,” Karzai said angrily.

Mr. Karzai meet Mr Bush, for whom ALL non-fetal life is cheap.

Seems the only good news any more is that each new day means one less day of Bush and his crew:

Yesterday, George W. and Laura Bush hosted Ruffins and his band, the Barbeque Swingers, at the annual Congressional Picnic. Bush’s remark to Ruffins is the ultimate symbol of his disdainful attitude towards the culture of New Orleans that he allowed to drown under the floodwaters of the Mississippi:

MR. RUFFINS: Well, thanks for having us.

THE PRESIDENT: Kermit Ruffins and the Barbeque Swingers, right out of New Orleans, Louisiana. (Applause.)

MR. RUFFINS: Thank you. Thanks for having us. We’re glad to be here.

THE PRESIDENT: Proud you’re here. Thanks for coming. You all enjoy yourself. Make sure you pick up all the trash after it’s over. (Laughter.)

Coming from the man who totally trashed America and its reputation………….

The sharp knives are out for Michael Moore once again and, as with his past films, some of the sharpest are in the hands of democrats. This time the friendly fire is coming mostly from presidential contenders, who all want to sound like they’re serious about achieving universal coverage, but are floating plans that avoid the real issues.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of South Carolina all have staked out positions sharply at odds with Moore’s approach. But none of them is eager to have that fact dragged into the spotlight.

If Moore’s fire-breathing proposal catches on among party activists, who tend to be suspicious of the private sector and supportive of direct government action, the candidates’ pragmatic, consensus-seeking ideas could look like weak-kneed temporizing — much the way their rejection of an immediate pullout from Iraq has drawn heated criticism from antiwar activists.

In “Sicko,” the filmmaker calls for abolishing the insurance industry, putting a tight regulatory collar on pharmaceutical companies and embracing a Canadian-style government-run system.

Rather than welcome Moore’s contribution to the conversation, his detractors are accusing him of advocating “socialized medicine” and hoping that such time-tested commie-baiting is enough to make him go away. The irony is that socialized medicine is just what we need — not “socialized” as in the way the Soviet Union used to do things, but “socialized” as in medicine practiced with a social conscience.

Our current system is the very opposite: mal-socialized medicine. It breaks American society into 250 million private actors all competing for a piece of a woefully limited healthcare pie. It is bound to create winners and losers, to stratify American culture, and to exacerbate the already difficult conditions of the poor and middle class.

Moore is simply asking that we consider bringing moral and humane concern for one’s neighbors into the practice of medicine:

The problem is that the U.S. corporate health insurance system, the corporate-dominated economy more generally, and the ideology that undergirds both, seeks to defeat the essential insurance function of sharing risk — of everyone helping to take care of everyone else.

Moore offers this challenge, or plea: “If there is a better way to treat the sick simply by being good to each other why can’t we do that?”

People in the other countries visited in the film “live in a world of we, not me,” says Moore.

To varying degrees, they have created solidarity societies, and they are happier, and healthier, for it.

Fracking commies………