Yeah, kind of in a bad mood today

Because this.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Supreme Court struck down aggregate limits on campaign donations, offers a novel twist in the conservative contemplation of what Nazis have to do with the way the rich are viewed in America. In January, Tom Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, worried about a progressive Kristallnacht; Kenneth Langone, the founder of Home Depot, said, of economic populism, “If you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” Roberts, to his credit, avoided claiming the mantle of Hitler’s victims for wealthy campaign donors. He suggests, though, that the rich are, likewise, outcasts: “Money in politics may at times seem repugnant to some, but so too does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects,” he writes:

If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades—despite the profound offense such spectacles cause—it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.

So pick your analogy: when thinking about people who want to donate large sums of money to candidates, should we compare their position to that of the despised and defeated, like the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, in the nineteen-seventies, or of scorned dissidents, like flag-burners, trying to get their voice heard with their lonely donations? 

And this.

The opinion was classic Roberts: professing to make a minor adjustment to the status quo, but carrying the seeds of potential destruction for core legal principles settled for decades. To some, it evoked his decision last year overturning the core of the Voting Rights Act — a ruling that also claimed to toss back to Congress an issue lawmakers have little desire to revisit.

Critics saw the chief justice’s arguments about the leaky nature of current campaign finance rules as cynical and disingenuous, effectively punching yet another gaping hole in the law by citing loopholes his court helped to create or enlarge.

“It’s like the definition of chutzpah: the guy who kills his parents and asks for mercy from the court because he’s an orphan,” said Larry Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice, which favors tighter campaign finance regulation. “Look at what the court has done since 2007 after Roberts came on board, one case after another gradually striking down the laws that are in place and then claiming that, therefore, more has to be done. It’s nonsensical.”

And this.

All of which means, in effect, that the more money flowing through the system the better. Those who, from lack of money, are muted or excluded from the process are simply losers in a fair democratic system.

And also this.

ExxonMobil has 25.2 billion barrels worth of oil and gas in its current reserves, it's going to extract and sell all of it, and isn't expecting any meddling climate regulations to get in the way.

That's the main takeaway of a report the company released this week to its investors, examining the risk that greenhouse gas emissions rules in the US and worldwide might pose to its fossil fuel assets. Exxon made headlines a couple weeks back when it promised to issue the report after facing pressure from shareholders led by Arjuna Capital, a sustainable wealth management firm.

[...]

Exxon's report suggests that its planners don't believe serious carbon limits will be on the books anytime soon, leaving the company free to burn through its reserves of oil and gas. That's a disconcerting vision to come just on the heels of Sunday's new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which predicted a nightmarish future if greenhouse gas emissions aren't slowed soon.

"The reserves are going to be able to turn into money, because they're assuming there isn't going to be a policy change," said Natural Resources Defense Council Director of Climate Programs David Hawkins. "They're definitely saying that no matter how bad it gets, the world's addiction to fossil fuels will be so overwhelming that the governments of the world will just suck it up and let people suffer."

And last, this.

It's hard out there for the 1 percent.

Okay, that's not true at all. But they think it is. If you talk to people on Wall Street, most of them—even, in my experience, the ones shopping for Lamborghinis—will tell you that they're "middle class." Their lament, the lament of the HENRY (short for "high-earner, not rich yet"), goes something like this. You try living on $350,000 a year when you have to pay taxes, the mortgage on the house in a tony zip code, the nanny who knows how to cook ethnic cuisine, the private school tuition from pre-K on, the appropriately exclusive vacation, and max out your retirement and college savings accounts. There just isn't that much cash left over each month once you've spent it all!

Abbott bases education policy on theories of white nationalist

You could not write a better script for the epic disaster that is Greg Abbott's gubernatorial campaign if your name was Wendy Davis.

In his pre-Kindergarten education plan released this week, Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott cites the work of a man who believes that women and minorities are intellectually inferior to white men.

Abbott's plan explains how he'd reform pre-K through third grade in the state. Instead of expanding access to state-funded programs, as his Democratic opponent Wendy Davis has proposed, the attorney general proposes offering additional funds to only those programs that meet a certain standard of achievement.

In the second paragraph of his introduction, Abbott cites Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

"Family background has the most decisive effect on student achievement, contributing to a large performance gap between children from economically disadvantaged families and those from middle class homes," Abbott writes, citing Murray's book Real Education in the footnote. (Abbott's plan misspells the book's title as "Read Education.")

I thought it was bad enough when Abbott said that spending money on pre-K was a waste.  This is quite obviously a much more serious problem.

In 2005, when economist and then-Harvard President Larry Summers said that women are underrepresented in science programs at elite universities because of their "innate" intellectual differences from men, Murray expanded on Summers' point.

"No woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophical traditions," he wrote. "Women have produced a smaller number of important visual artists, and none that is clearly in the first rank. No female composer is even close to the first rank. Social restrictions undoubtedly damped down women’s contributions in all of the arts, but the pattern of accomplishment that did break through is strikingly consistent with what we know about the respective strengths of male and female cognitive repertoires."

What GOP war on women?  LMAO.  Can you believe Abbott is going to be in San Antonio today promoting Murray's bigoted drivel?

Murray is a very problematic source of inspiration for an education plan. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes him as "one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor."

"In Murray’s world, wealth and social power naturally accrue towards a 'cognitive elite' made up of high-IQ individuals (who are overwhelmingly white, male, and from well-to-do families), while those on the lower end of the eponymous bell curve form an 'underclass' whose misfortunes stem from their low intelligence," the Southern Poverty Law Center, which describes Murray as a "white nationalist," writes.

I didn't think anything could top palling around with Ted Nugent, child predator, for bad decisions.  This is is still in second place but it's closing fast.

None of this is really breaking news, though.  As mentioned previously, Republicans just aren't trying to conceal their racism, misogyny, and hatred of the disadvantaged any longer.

Murray's 2008 book that Abbott cites, Real Education, argues that students with lower IQ's are not as educable as smarter children and should be siphoned off to vocational programs instead of sent to college. He estimates that only 10 to 20 percent of young adults are capable of doing college-level work.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) recently cited Murray in his controversial and racially-charged assertion that poverty is caused by lazy, "inner city" men. 

I don't have any better idea than anybody else about what might motivate the prototypical Democratic voter to drag themselves to the polls this November, but if they are paying attention and manage to do so, this race -- and others down the ballot -- would simply be no contest (and not the kind of sweep the GOP usually enjoys in off-presidential cycles, either).  When I said that Greg Abbott needed to make a few mistakes in order for Davis to win... well, he's certainly holding up his end of the bargain. 

Christy Hoppe at Trailblazers has more on this week's unfolding nightmare for Abbott.