Democracy for America has a petition for you to sign Tell President Obama: Prosecute Wall Street Criminals.

Here is a key part of the explanation that you will see at the above link:

Wall Street banks have gotten away with way too much already. As long as they know that breaking the law will never result in anything more than a slap on the wrist, they’ll keep taking the kinds of risks that led to the last economic collapse — and would almost certainly create another crisis for working families in the future.

Who would have thought that we would have to explain this to President Obama? Next time, we need to elect someone who understands this and promises to prosecute white collar crime as vigorously as other kinds of crime. White collar crimes like the ones that some the Wall Street executives perpetrate cause more physical harm to more people than an armed robber causes when he or she displays a gun, but does not use it.

Making a promise of vigorous prosecution of white collar crime be a litmus test for the next President, is not too much to ask. It shouldn’t even be a promise that we should have to ask a Presidential candidate to make. The extremely bad precedent that Obama has set, is what makes it necessary to ask for this promise from now on.

Talking Points Memo has the article Jon Stewart Ridicules ‘Dallas Dipsh*ts’ Fearing ‘Texas Takeover’ (VIDEO)

“The United States government already controls Texas, since like the 1840s, and then left and then came back — just borrow a textbook from a neighboring state, it’s all in there,” he added.

Here is the video.

A certain person sitting next to me while watching this video said, “You know, I have to stop telling people I come from Texas.”

Salon magazine has the article Bernie Sanders wants to lead “a political revolution” to make America more Scandinavian.

The article has a video of Sanders being interviewed bu George Stephanopolous. Salon chose to quote these words from Bernie Sanders in part of the interview.

“In countries like Denmark, Norway, Sweden — very democratic countries — voter turnout is a lot higher than it is in the United States,” he said.

“In those countries, health care is the right of all people,” Sanders added. “College education and graduate school is free. Retirement benefits [and] child care are stronger than the United States of America. In those countries, by and large, government works for ordinary people and the middle class, rather than, as is the case right now in our country, for the billionaire class.”

ABC News also has an article, Sen. Bernie Sanders Says America Needs ‘Political Revolution’ in 2016, about this interview. There is something about what the ABC News article decided to talk about that strikes me as a little less substantive and a bit more about political soap opera. And that gives you a hint as to why George Stephanopolous needed to be tamed.

Sturbridge for Bernie Sanders also mentioned this article.

The article contains a video interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC television. You could label this interview as Bernie Sanders stands up to George Stephanopolous and wins. He was very civil and emphasized the positive reasons for wanting to run. By trying to stay positive, he diverted leading questions that were meant to elicit negative comments about his political rivals.

If nothing else, we finally have a candidate that resists being dragged into the mud by the media pundits, and he does it in a very civil way.

MoveOn.org has posted How to Take Back Our Economy and Democracy From the 1% on their Facebook page.

It sounds like a good list of bullet items. There is one of them that I must comment on.

I suppose it might be too complex in the poster to explain why you don’t need to raise taxes on the rich to “pay for better schools and rebuild the nation’s infrastructure”. After all the FED arm of the government creates money from computer key strokes. You don’t need taxes to get the money for the government to pay for something. You need to tax the rich to prevent them from using their huge stashes of cash to compete for resources with the government that is using its money to “pay for better schools and rebuild the nation’s infrastructure”.

It may sound like a distinction without a difference to quibble about the reason for an agreed upon tax increase. However, people do derive other policy plans from what they think taxes are for. Seeming to promote the false belief of the purpose of taxes here might encourage other people to extrapolate that false belief to programs that do not make sense.

io9 has the article New Test Suggests NASA’s “Impossible” EM Drive Will Work In Space.

The EM drive is controversial in that it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum; the engine, invented by British scientist Roger Sawyer, converts electric power to thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves within a closed container. So, with no expulsion of propellant, there’s nothing to balance the change in the spacecraft’s momentum during acceleration. Hence the skepticism.

I have just realized the value of dark energy and dark matter in physics. The answer to every seemingly impossible invention that seems to defy the laws of physics is “but what about dark energy and dark matter?” Since all we know about dark energy and dark matter are their effects on the expansion of the universe, we might as well attribute all unexplained behavior to them. Well, I don’t really mean attribute it to these factors. The issue is that you can’t say anything is impossible when you know you have something that affects physical objects, but you don’t know what that something is. As our <sarcasm>beloved</sarcasm> former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, would say this is something we know we don’t know. As he would go on to say, what about all the things we don’t know we don’t know?

The New York Times has an opinion piece Bernie Sanders Yells His Mind written by Gail Collins.

Our topic today is: Bernie Sanders for president?

“My fifteen minutes of fame,” the Vermont senator said gruffly over the phone. Gruff is pretty much his normal way of speaking, but Sanders was actually in a good mood at this point in the conversation. Later, the volume would escalate.
.
.
.
Question: Sanders self-identifies as a “democratic socialist.” Aren’t people going to think that’s a little extreme?

Answer: This week, the governor of Texas announced he was putting a special watch on U.S. military exercises this summer, due to public speculation that the soldiers might take over the state and confiscate everyone’s guns. Also, the Idaho Legislature recently killed a bill that would have provided federal aid in tracking down deadbeat dads, due to concern that it might involve the use of Shariah law. I do not want to hear you calling Bernie Sanders an extremist.

My apologies to my Texas friends for exposing the kind of place they have chosen to live. Some of them deserve it, while others actually try to fight it.

Should I even mention the Talking Points Memo article Shooting Reported At Anti-Islam Group’s Cartoon Contest In Texas? <sarcasm>Where were the Texans’ guns if they thought this event was such a good idea? What’s the right to bear arms for if it isn’t to protect yourself when you have an event that is meant to poke potentially angry people in the eye?</sarcasm> I hope my friends in Garland weren’t too close to the scene.

Thanks to Michael Horan for posting The New York Times item on Facebook.

There is a new Facebook page Sturbridge For Bernie Sanders.

If you want to encourage people of Sturbridge and the surrounding towns to learn about Bernie Sanders, then go to the above link and “Like” the page. Tell others who might become interested in Bernie Sanders to at least take a look at the page.

Elizabeth Warren has a Facebook post about The Washington Post article Battle rages over key Obama trade policy.

A group of legal experts question a key facet of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

It just amazes me how in the face of contrary opinion from so many respected experts, that Obama can still think he is right, they are wrong, and they just don’t understand. I wonder if he has been hypnotized.

One excerpt from the article really makes me wonder what on earth the President has been smoking.

The Obama administration would argue that ISDS does not function as a shadow mechanism outside American courts; it provides a fair, stable mechanism for resolving disputes between American companies and other countries’ governments.

“Part of our goal here is to make sure that there is a neutral process that is legally recognized, so that if an arbitrary burden or tax or tariff is imposed on a U.S. company in these countries, that they have recourse to a fair, impartial venue to resolve it,” Obama said recently. “Foreign countries already have that here in the U.S.”

If his goal is to provide a fair and stable mechanism, then why would he upend centuries of work on establishing just such a fair and stable mechanism. Surely as a lawyer and as a scholar of the U.S. Constitution, he must understand all the effort and experimentation that has gone into making our system as fair and stable a mechanism as we have been able to figure out how to do so far. That’s not to say that we can’t come up with additional ways to make it more fair and more stable. However, President Obama seems to be quite willing to undo all the effort that has been made so far.

Remember the last President who thought that we needed to undo 50 years of precedent on how to regulate banks. The exact disaster that those precedents had prevented from recurring for 50 years were the result of getting rid of those regulations. I am talking Bill Clinton here. Why is President Obama so stubbornly anxious to create a disaster larger than the one Clinton created? Is this some kind of contest?

Politicus USA has the article Chief Justice Roberts Admits Conservatives Believe Politicians Should Serve The Rich.

Although it appeared that all of the Court’s conservatives believe campaign finance laws and regulations have outlived their relevance in American politics, Roberts agreed with liberals that “States may regulate judicial elections differently than they regulate political elections, because the role of judges differs from the role of politicians. Politicians are expected to be responsive to the preferences of their supporters. Indeed, such responsiveness is key to the very concept of self-governance through elected officials. The same is not true of judges. In deciding cases, a judge is not to provide any special consideration to his campaign donors. Our precedents applying the First Amendment to political elections have little bearing on the issues here.”

No, I am afraid that Roberts does not understand the role of politicians and what we expect of them. He also misunderstands the “very concept of self-governance through elected officials.” The article does not specify exactly what Roberts fails to understand. So let me explain exactly what is wrong with what Roberts says. Politicians are expected to be responsive to the voters. That is why the election officials are supposed to count ballots, not campaign contributions to decide who wins an election.

Supporters and donors are important because they help you get votes, but it is the votes and voters who cast them that are supposed to have the final say. If you get the votes, but consistently fail to look out for the interests of the people who voted to make you win the election, then this is a failure of self-governance. This type of politician is not giving proper consideration to the selves that are supposed to be governing through the representation of the people that they elect.

With all the supposed advice and consent of the Senate, how do we select Supreme Court Justices that have so little understanding of what our Constitution says?