Before we get too excited about SCOTUS striking down most of Arizona’s crazy-pants immigration bill and holding that we shouldn’t have a blanket rule of consigning children to life in prison without parole…the court overturned a century’s old Montana law prohibiting corporations from buying and selling politicians.

[LAT: Supreme Court Ends Montana Ban on Corporate Political Spending]

Fallows thinks we’re fucked:

• First, a presidential election is decided by five people, who don’t even try to explain their choice in normal legal terms.
• Then the beneficiary of that decision appoints the next two members of the court, who present themselves for consideration as restrained, humble figures who care only about law rather than ideology.
• Once on the bench, for life, those two actively second-guess and re-do existing law, to advance the interests of the party that appointed them.
• Meanwhile their party’s representatives in the Senate abuse procedural rules to an extent never previously seen to block legislation — and appointments, especially to the courts.
• And, when a major piece of legislation gets through, the party’s majority on the Supreme Court prepares to negate it — even though the details of the plan were originally Republican proposals and even though the party’s presidential nominee endorsed these concepts only a few years ago.

Until people who vote can be made to understand that the GOP is their enemy, not their friend, we will not have nice things.

5 Signs of a Radical Change in U.S. Politics [The Atlantic]

NRO is a site littered with some of the worst writers in the conservative movement. Jonah Goldberg is the spawn of a genuinely horrible GOP activist. New addition and racist in residence David Yerushalmi is controversial even among the other bigots that make up the wingnut-o-sphere. But Kathryn Jean Lopez, K-Lo to those who keep up with this sort of thing, is just plain dumb. Pareene:

It is quite hard to take her seriously enough to actually criticize her as a thinker or writer or editor, which makes it all the weirder that anyone named her editor of anything. She doesn’t inspire the hatred someone like Maggie Gallagher inspires, because with Maggie Gallagher you at least feel like you’re dealing with an adult capable of rational thought. Lopez just seems damaged, and dumb.

Read more »

The jury in the Jerry Sandusky case has told the judge that they have reached a verdict on the 48 charges against Sandusky that he raped and molested 10 different young boys over a 15 year period.

Stay tuned…MSNBC says it may take a while to hear the verdict because the judge won’t let anyone leave or have outside communications until all 48 charges and their verdicts are read.

Updated to include the perp walk out of the courthouse to the waiting police car:

[ CNN Flash video not available. ]

Another end-timer:

[Ronald]Weinland’s defense attorneys told jurors during the eight-day trial that their client deposited church money in Swiss bank accounts because he believed society was in its “final days,” and that before Jesus Christ returns, the U.S. financial system would collapse. Weinland’s website claims the beginning of the end of earth as the human race knows it started on May 27 – just eight days before the start of the trial.

Prosecutors argued the teachings of Weinland’s ministry were no excuse for not reporting the foreign accounts to tax collectors. Prosecutors also alleged Weinland illegally wrote off personal expenses as church expenses to evade $357,065 in taxes from 2005 through 2010.

Read more »

So in 740 years they can make that shitty first Star Trek movie with the bald Indian chick:

Can’t stop watching this … mesmerizing. I don’t have the room (or the money) for one, but … wow. Love the Danes.