Rain Down From Above

by Bunk X ( 17 Comments › )
Filed under Art, Entertainment, Humor, OOT, Open thread, Politics, Russia, Satire, Socialism at July 8th, 2012 - 11:00 pm

Ivan Leonidovich Maximov‘s “Rain Down From Above.” Read into it what you like, it has a happy ending, and because we all like happy endings, it’s presented here on The Overnight Open Thread.

Tags: animation, Ivan Maximov, Overnight Open Thread, Political Commentary

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2012 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Art, Entertainment, Humor, OOT, Open thread, Politics, Russia, Satire, Socialism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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17 Responses to “Rain Down From Above”
( jump to bottom )

AZfederalist

1 | July 9, 2012 12:01 am

Hey Bunk, good to see you back posting OOT’s again. Now, where is everybody?
doriangrey

2 | July 9, 2012 12:22 am

My head hurts… That is almost all… See ya’ll, well whenever…
doriangrey

3 | July 9, 2012 12:23 am

Oh… and it’s all Bunks fault… (he’s an iceholes)…
Bunk X

4 | July 9, 2012 12:39 am

@ AZfederalist:
Temporary — I’ll toss something in when I can. I’m an iceholes.
Guggi

5 | July 9, 2012 2:44 am

Obama invites Egypt’s Islamist leader to US

President Barack Obama has invited Egypt’s newly elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, to visit the United States in September, an Egyptian official said on Sunday, reflecting the new ties Washington is cultivating with the region’s Islamists.

“President Obama extended an invitation to President Morsi to visit the United States when he attends the UN General Assembly in September,” Egyptian aide, Yasser Ali, said after Morsi met US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns.
Mike C.

6 | July 9, 2012 3:54 am

(Checks watch again…) 5 comments? did almost everybody have that worm/trojan on their computer and lose the internet?
Guggi

7 | July 9, 2012 3:58 am

Groundhog Day

Report: Netanyahu ready to free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Abbas meeting

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed willingness to release Palestinian prisoners to pave the way for a meeting with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, according to two Israeli sources and two Western diplomats cited in Haaretz.
Macker

8 | July 9, 2012 7:12 am

@ Guggi:

أوباما, being who he is, will invite the Mohammedans to the White House before anyone else, with the possible exception of his Chicago buddies. Did they include a hole in the ground to accommodate them too?
Iron Fist

9 | July 9, 2012 7:58 am

@ Macker:
You can rest assured that Morsi won’t be left waiting while Obama eats dinner or be shuffled out the back door past the garbage cans the way Netyanyahu was treated. Obama values his Muslim Brotherhood allies.
Macker

10 | July 9, 2012 8:06 am

@ Iron Fist:

Yes, Morsi will Lead أوباما from Behind!
MacDuff

11 | July 9, 2012 8:10 am

Guggi wrote:

Groundhog Day

Report: Netanyahu ready to free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Abbas meeting

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed willingness to release Palestinian prisoners to pave the way for a meeting with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, according to two Israeli sources and two Western diplomats cited in Haaretz.

If there were thousands of the smoking cascaras of Palestinian fighters lying about, perhaps Abbas wouldn’t have to be lured to a peace deal.
Guggi

12 | July 9, 2012 8:18 am

MacDuff wrote:

If there were thousands of the smoking cascaras of Palestinian fighters lying about, perhaps Abbas wouldn’t have to be lured to a peace deal.

But the whole world would scream: genocide !!!!
Iron Fist

13 | July 9, 2012 8:27 am

@ Guggi:
Let them scream. It isn’t like they will actually do anything. Europe is powerless without the United States, and politically it is impossible that we would act against Israel no matter how much Obama would love to.
Guggi

14 | July 9, 2012 8:40 am

Iron Fist wrote:

Europe is powerless without the United States

You don’t even know in which mess the Euro-zone and especially Germany is and this is only part of the ugly story.
Macker

15 | July 9, 2012 8:43 am

@ Guggi:

Lovely.

/
Guggi

16 | July 9, 2012 8:46 am

Macker wrote:

@ Guggi:
Lovely.
/

And with every treaty they sign it becomes worse.
Guggi

17 | July 9, 2012 8:55 am

Did Scalia Scare Off Roberts?

(…)

The following is speculation, but plausible, and would be an interesting parallel to the conservative legislative strategy. Any objective legal observer would tell you (and I’m trying to be one here) that the dissent’s treatment of the severability issue is detached from 200 years of constitutional law. It’s unsupported legally and it’s a mess logically. It also includes a citation to a quote that Harry Reid gave to the New York Times in Janauary 2010 concerning the bill — this from at least two justices (Scalia and Thomas) who routinely say that any use of legislative history is a sham because it’s necessarily incomplete. One wonders what a quote not uttered on the floor of Congress but to a journalist would constitute in that case? In any event, rather than holding the mandate costitutional and those portions of the bill inextricably linked with it (guaranteed issue/community rating), four members of the Court were primed to throw the whole bill out. That level of judicial activism, in a context like this one, would be nearly unprecedented.

I imagine the dissenters either had Roberts’s vote or that Roberts left the post argument conference without commiting to a side and saying something to the effect of “let me see how it writes.” He certainly didn’t trust the dissenters, as he clearly instructed his law clerks to begin working on an alternative majority opinion (the final product was too polished and too long to have been written at the last minute). And he waited to see what was written.

What was written was not measured judicial analysis, but rather an opinion that started with a goal — throw the bill out — and then figured out how to get there, blowing by any precedent in its path. The challengers were right in one respect, in that the mandate was a unique use of federal power that had not been considered by the Supreme Court. But severability had been considered by the Court literally dozens of times, and the four dissenters charged right by what those decisions had said.

So Roberts was left with a choice: engage in the severability analysis himself (a messy task indeed) or find some other way to uphold the bill. He chose the latter, and the result is what we have today.

That dissent intended to get his vote. It might have had it only struck a portion of the law. But Roberts correctly realized that he couldn’t jump off that cliff without precedent or logic supporting him. Kennedy, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas went all in. And they lost their bet. Just like the conservatives in Congress.