Best thing on the web today: Dark Ages Redux: American politics and the end of the Enlightenment by John Atcheson

Why Vincent Chin Matters 30 years ago, Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Chicago for being Asian. His killers got off with probation and a $3000 fine.

What happens when more people get health insurance. See more comments by Paul Waldmen and Dan Taylor.

—————-

We finally have a diagnosis from Lily’s biopsy, which is feline lymphosarcoma. Its a very nasty disease, although the Vet said very often it responds well to chemotherapy. I’m supposed to take her back in a week to see if she’s a good candidate for that, but of course that’s going to run up a bigger bill.

With all the medicines I’m giving her now she is actually perking up and eating a little. She’s also climbing on my lap to be petted. She’s not her old self, but she’s improved considerably from Tuesday, when I thought the only option was euthanasia. She may have some life in her yet.

So, I’m still taking donations, although what I’ve received so far has been enormously generous and a huge help.

I don’t know what her chances for any meaningful recovery, but at least there’s a little hope.

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.

The Scramble — Click for Larger Image

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.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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.

—–

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.

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.