Surfacing again.

It wasn’t just work that kept me at bay. I actually looked back four years and saw that, once the primaries were over, there wasn’t much to talk about.  And there isn’t, really, but there are folks who need to fill talk time 24/7 so we get a lot of idiocy.

Take Hillary Rosen, for example. To say that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life – in the context of Mitt’s missus being his go-to on the day-to-day concerns of American women everywhere – is hardly, um, false, even if inelegantly phrased.

Let’s just say that when your college struggles involve taking a loan from your husband’s father and calling your broker when money gets tight, you’re not quite in sync with the economic pressures millions of American women – and men – face today.  Of course, pointing this out gets you outed for  ”class warfare” or “resenting” Mitt Romney’s success.

For the record, I don’t resent Mitt Romney’s success.  There are some folks who used to work for Dade International (among others) who might, and for good reason. But I don’t.

That said, I think claiming first-hand knowledge of Americans’ economic insecurity when you have Romney’s background is, shall we say, inauthentic.

Also: David Gregory?  The Hillary Rosen dustup is over. Completely.

And Hillary Rosen? Can you go on a cruise for a few weeks? Jeebus.

Next in line for non-story of the last month: the Fox News mole.

Sugar is sweet, cigarettes are bad for you, and Fox News is a propaganda shop. And if your big scoop is a tape of Mitt Romney seeming genuine and human (even if he’s talking about a habit that can only be afforded by the 1%, or maybe 2%) before an interview with Sean Hannity, you’ve got nothing. Move on.

Finally, in the “don’t get pwnd by Barack Obama” category, if you’re on the wrong side of an ad about the killing of Osama bin Laden, take your medicine and move on. Because when you don’t, this happens:

As far as my personal role and what other folks would do, I’d just recommend that everybody look at people’s previous statements in terms of whether they thought it was appropriate to go into Pakistan and take out bin Laden.

I assume that people meant what they said when they said—that’s been at least my practice. I said that I’d go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him, and I did. If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they would do something else, then I’d go ahead and let them explain it.

Explaining it, in Mitt’s case, meaning convincing people that things he said in 2007 and 2008 weren’t things he really meant.  At least it’s only this one time, right?

There’s a West Wing – The U.S. Poet Laureate – where President Bartlett remarks, after an interview but on tape, that perhaps his opponent in the upcoming election is a “22 caliber mind in a 357 Magnum world.” The next four days are all about the Ritchie campaign complaining that Bartlett is calling Ritchie stupid, and by whining about the slight and demanding an apology, they get four days of a news cycle about whether Governor Ritchie of Florida is stupid.

Mitt Romney and the GOP whined about Obama’s bin Laden ad, and so we’ve spent the last few days reminding everyone that the wimpy Democrat got bin Laden when the macho Republican didn’t. And as for politicizing bin Laden? Child please. (See also: Jon Stewart.)

Not the best place to fight.

Plus there’s this, from Josh Marshall:

…as I first argued back in 2004, national political campaigns are only loosely about ‘issues’ as news obsessives construe them. Contemporary American campaigns are much more meta-battles over power, masculinity and dominance, what I once called “bitch-slap politics.” Not pretty perhaps but you’ll never understand campaigns without understanding things through this prism. And that’s very much what’s happening with the Obama campaign’s latest fusillade against Mitt Romney. This isn’t simply – maybe not even mainly — about the actual decision to risk so much to kill bin Laden. It’s a dance to – let’s not run away from what it really is – unman Romney in his contest with the president.

People don’t expect Democrats to make such brash moves on national security politics. It’s been a very long time since a Democratic president has been in a position to do it. Its aforementioned obviousness aside, it’s garnered a collective gasp from the pundit class. It was a smack right across the face of Mitt Romney right as he’s making a reasonably successful reintroduction of himself to the American people.

Marshall says it’s about manhood, but I’d put it differently. It’s about making Romney look weak. And it was slick: Romney couldn’t let the attack pass, and he doesn’t have a good response.

Buckle up – there’s lots more of this to come.

Not dead – just busy.  Meantime, the phenomenal Patty Griffin…

Burning Down the House, from the Stop Making Sense tour.

Read into it what you like.

In today’s episode of “Barack Obama is not like the Republican party,” our protagonist makes a video in support of Planned Parenthood:

Women are not an interest group. They are mothers and daughters and sisters and wives. They are half of this country, and are perfectly capable of making their own choices about their health.

Amen to that.

[h/t Maddowblog]

Cartoon by Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

I am coming out of my blinding rage at the conservative wing of the Supreme Court (slogan: “we are the precedent we seek”) in the wake of this weeks arguments on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and have stepped away from the ledge.  I think, as many people are saying, it’s pick ‘em as to whether ACA survives intact, with a non-zero chance that the whole bill gets tossed out.

First, the disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.  So take everything below with a grain of salt. Or two. However:

I guess I am stunned that there is significant – much less any – danger that a this bill could get thrown out based essentially on semantics.  Because there is no doubt that Congress is constitutionally empowered to impose a tax, and there is likewise no question as to its ability to create a special break from that tax for people or institutions which act in a certain specified way. (Just ask the oil companies!)

Had the authors of PPACA set up an “uninsured patient tax”, with anyone who buys qualifying insurance exempted from said tax, the lawsuit against PPACA would be dead in its tracks.  Now, there might be states rights claims against the Medicaid expansion, and I suppose one could argue that the state exchanges infringe on states rights, as well. But those seem like huge leaps.

Instead, the law was structured with a mandate, enforced by a penalty.

It is important to note that, substantively, there is no difference between this and what I described above.  Individuals making identical decisions about whether to buy insurance would face the same financial incentives and burdens either way.

But because the law, semantically, features a requirement as opposed to an incentive, it gave the right side of the bench a hook.

Smarter people than me have expelled ay more words than I will on this subject.  And there’s been a lot of tea-leaf reading going on, based on what Justice Kennedy said toward the end of day two of oral arguments. Where it sits now is that there are four solid votes to uphold – Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor – and three to overturn – Alito, Scalia, and Thomas. Roberts is likely tilting to overturn, but if Kennedy votes to uphold, he might bring Roberts along for the ride.

And so it comes down to Anthony Kennedy.  Perhaps he will feel some small pull of humility, and not demolish Obama-Romneycare in one fell swoop. This is, however, the man who in one breath noted that while there was no data measuring it, he was on safe ground in saying that some women later come to regret their choice to abort a child, so humility may not be a governing principle at play.

It’s depressing enough that Scalia – whose brilliant is so dazzling we mortals can’t begin to comprehend it – was spouting GOP talking points during oral arguments.  And that one of the justices sitting on the case is married to a woman whose work involved overturning PPACA. (See also the brilliant Pierce on the burden of being Nino.)

But what’s truly disheartening is the sense that, if it were President Romney, and he had put the Massachusetts model to work nationally, we probably a) wouldn’t have so many – if any – states attorneys-general lined up to fight it and b) there’s very little doubt that the court would uphold it. This is, after all, the health reform plan essentially created by the Heritage Foundation, for crying out loud.  They applauded Romney’s efforts in Massachusetts, praising individual elements, like the mandate and exchanges, that they later opposed when they were being proposed by a Democrat and passed by a Democratically controlled congress.

The mistake many “experts” made before this case was heard was in thinking that the right flank of this court is encumbered by any respect for judicial restraint. They proved in in Bush v. Gore, and, shockingly, in Citizens United, actually expanding the case before them.

A lot of people got down on Solicitor General Donald Verrilli for fumbling his oral arguments this week. But I’m with John Cole on this one: if the Supremes want to overturn health care reform, they’d do it even if the ghost of John Marshall came back to defend it.

There aren’t a lot of ways that I long for the simple, purer times of the 50′s, or the turbulent 60′s. But there is this: I miss the Warren Court. I miss the days when the willingness of the Court to protect individuals from overreaches of government power was what passed for “judicial activism”, not finding ways to protect poor corporations from the burdensome hand of the federal government or those pesky individuals who stand up for their rights under laws Congress has passed.

Beyond that, and only somewhat related, I consider it a continuing outrage that Clarence Thomas sullies the seat that was once occupied by Thurgood Marshall, and think that may be George H.W. Bush’s worst Presidential legacy.

Robert Farley at LGM pointed out this gem, from the Washington Post (which, as an aside, is the financial albatross around the very profitable neck of the somewhat sketchy Kaplan educational empire), positing that the problem with higher education is that those darned professors aren’t doing enough teachin’.

Farley eviscerates David Levy’s argument swiftly, so not much for me to add on that point, except to say that when a sentence like this appears in print, it should be a clue that the author is just making shit up:

An executive who works a 40-hour week for 50 weeks puts in a minimum of 2,000 hours yearly. But faculty members teaching 12 to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks spend only 360 to 450 hours per year in the classroom. Even in the unlikely event that they devote an equal amount of time to grading and class preparation, their workload is still only 36 to 45 percent of that of non-academic professionals. Yet they receive the same compensation.

Oh, where to start.  ”In the unlikely event” that teachers spend time preparing and grading equal to classroom time? Has Levy ever taught a class in his life?  Also, university faculty do more than teach; they are expected to do research as well, and it is that research that a) burnishes the reputation of the institution which employs them, which is why those institutions are more than casually interested in someone’s research when they grant him or her tenure, and b) in many cases brings money into Universities to support their growing administrative costs (as Farley also points out, a far bigger factor in college costs than faculty salaries).

Sister Susan is a tenured professor in the UC system, and between her teaching load, academic committees, system-wide committees, search committees, and department administration, and, you know, research, she works 50+ hours a week – and that’s probably understating it.  Granted, that leaves her far too much time to think liberal thoughts and steal the faith from the unsuspecting devout who enter her realm, but it’s a long way from twiddling her thumbs while she day-trades on university computers.

And one other thing: if you’re going to write an essay about education, sentences like this can’t be a part of it:

Change in employment terms and conditions is never easy, but further avoiding this issue can only continue an out-of-scale escalation in the cost of higher education, with the demand, ad infinitum, for increased public funds to support it.

Perhaps Mr. Levy’s professors should have spent a little more time giving feedback on his composition skills?

Mrs. Robinson with a a little attitude, because it popped up on my iPod earlier today.

Happy weekend.

So, this happened two years ago.

I remember that day, and the relief that washed over me that this battle was over. (Let’s leave the SCOTUS aside, for the moment.)

But the moment that was transcendent, for me, is still the speech Obama gave to the House Democratic caucus on Saturday, March 20, 2010.

The speech – the last eight minutes or so are below – is, as Michael Scherer predicted, political rhetoric for the history books. And it was, for those sneering wingers, given without a prepared text or teleprompter.

On Monday, it was still ringing in my ears:

Two days later, I am still gobsmacked by Obama’s Saturday speech to the House Democratic caucus.

30 minutes, a few notes, no teleprompter, and rhetoric that, in places, seemed like Sam Seaborn had crafted it for days.

Every once in a while, every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made in all those town meetings and all those constituency breakfasts and all that traveling through the district, all those people who you looked in the eye and you said, you know what, you’re right, the system is not working for you and I’m going to make it a little bit better.

And this is one of those moments.

And so it was. People will be talking about that speech decades from now, even though it’s not clear if Obama flipped anybody, or kept a single wavering yes vote in place.

But by laying out an eloquent vision of service, Obama took what had been a political exercise and transformed it into an affirmation of character.

I still get chills.

I don’t know what the Supreme Court will do, or, God help us, what happens under President Romney (let’s make sure that doesn’t happen, huh?), but considering the hurdles we had to overcome to get healthcare acknowledged as a basic right, what happened two years ago today really was a big fucking deal.

No time for a long post, but a few tidbits:

• From MSNBC: “A suspect wanted in connection with the killing three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school wounded three police officers in a shootout at a house in Toulouse, France, on Wednesday.”
• I am not a political operative, but maybe, if you’re a candidate whose ideology is already perceived as, say, flexible, then your spokesman shouldn’t compare your positions to things that are created on an etch-a-sketch. And God bless Charlie Pierce, who finds the appropriate Star Trek clip for the occasion.
• It always seemed like a lie, and the evidence is now overwhelming: William Rehnquist (and not Justice Jackson) thought the Supreme Court should uphold Plessy vs. Ferguson. (More on this from Scott Lemieux at LGM here.) By my count, that’s two modern GOP SCOTUS nominees who have demonstrably lied under oath, number two being, of course, Clarence Thomas.
• Speaking of the Supreme Court, it (meaning the you-know-who five) continues to struggle with following the clear intent of laws passed by Congress.
• It looks like George Zimmerman may have, er, misrepresented the facts of his encounter with Trayvon Martin. Being caught on the 911 tape muttering “f*%king coons” under his breath probably won’t help, either.
• In the annals of idiotic nontroversies, this may be the most idiotic, and we can thank Newt Gingrich, bastion of racial sensitivity, for that.
• Now that GOP legislatures and governors have decided to go all-in (as it were) on controlling women’s uteri, some women are getting payback. Also: The Snatchel Project, which provides patterns for women to “Knit or crochet a vagina or uterus” to send to GOP representatives. “If they have their own, they can leave ours alone!”
• Finally, an palate cleanser: A deaf community college student greets President Obama at a ropeline, and signs “I am proud of you,” and the President, not missing a beat, signs back “thank you.”

Happy St. Patty’s Day! All you 15 year olds, trust me – go easy on the green beer.

Actually, that goes for everyone.