Welcome to Buster's Blog

Irregular commentary on whatever's on my mind -- politics, sports, current events, and life in general. After twenty years of writing business and community newsletters, fifteen years of fantasy baseball newsletters, and two years of email "columns", this is, I suppose, the inevitable result: the awful conceit that someone might actually care to read what I have to say. Posts may be added often, rarely, or never again. As always, my mood and motivation are unpredictable.

Buster Gammons















Monday, June 30, 2014

Time-Travelling SCOTUS Rolls Back The Clock 100 Years Or So


It's discouraging and disgusting.  In two of the most regressive opinions in decades, the Supreme Court of the United States rendered two highly divisive 5-4 decisions which undermine labor rights and access to contraception.  Welcome to 1895!

According to the Court's Conservative Cabal, unionized home health care agencies which are funded entirely by Medicare are just "semi-public", and any non-union employees who wish to freeload can no longer be required to pay fair-share union dues, even though they must by law receive all union-negotiated pay raises, protections and benefits.  It's a narrow version of right-to-work B.S.

And to go along with the atrocious Citizens United v. FEC decision, the Roberts Court has birthed its evil twin, the Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius ruling.  Now, corporations are not only people, they are religions as well.  The Green family owns Hobby Lobby.  The Greens are evangelical Christian fanatics who claim personal religious objections to contraception.  Yet the Greens want the tax benefits of providing health insurance to their employees while simultaneously preventing their female employees from getting insurance-covered birth-control services, as mandated by Obamacare.  They want it both ways, and the SCOTUS conservatives have given it to them.  It's a complete crock of shit.  Business owners may now cite their own personal "religious" objections to all sorts of laws, rules and regulations.

This damn Court doesn't offer even the pretense of objectivity.  The battle lines are drawn and every decision is pure ideology. 

In both of these retrograde decisions, the five Justices in the slim majority are conservative Republicans, appointed by Republican presidents.  All five are men.  Draw your own conclusions, but I'd say Reagan and the Bushies got what they paid for.

The Supreme Court is not infallible.  It is capable of awful mistakes.  Dred Scott.  Plessy v. Ferguson.  Eventually, the mistakes are corrected and society is allowed to move forward.  Such will be the case with these two most recent, and most unjust, decisions.


"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." -- Martin Luther King Jr.








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