In a public appearance in San Francisco on Feb. 1st, retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose departure from the court led to the appointment of new justice Brett Kavanaugh, on Friday warned that the United States is new facing dangers to our democracy. The cause: "We have a social framework of decency that we're very quickly losing."
The 82-year-old retired justice did not cite any public officials or political controversies as evidence of his critique, and instead bemoaned the shortcomings of the “cyber age.”
“I am so concerned with the egocentrism that the cyber age has brought us,” Kennedy said. “Our young people in the cyber age don’t think the past is important. ... If it’s not on your screen, it’s not important.”
Hmm.
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2011—House GOP meltdown over budget cuts:
Basically we're seeing two factions in the GOP these days, the ORCs and the YATs.
The first are the Opportunist Republican Cynics (ORCs), and they are still the dominant faction. They are led by John Boehner, and they are basically the same people who drove America's economy into the ground under George W. Bush. They've regained power thanks to tea partiers, Fox News, and a willingness to parrot the doomsdayer teahadist rhetoric about spending and debt, but they also understand that actually following through on what they promised would be a political disaster of epic proportion. The problem for ORCs is that they don't have anything else to offer because they last time they were allowed to drive policy decisions for the GOP, they ended up thoroughly discrediting the party.
The other faction are the Yelling Angry Teahadists (YATs). They don't control the GOP leadership, but there's enough of them that the GOP needs them to maintain its majority. The YATs believe everything they said during the campaign about how Obama is the second coming of Karl Marx and how spending is destroying America. They really believe the only way to save America is to eliminate the deficit and they believe the deficit can be balanced by immediately cutting spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. And they believe the rest of America agrees with them. YATs are the only Republicans with any real enthusiasm, but that's mostly because their ideas haven't yet been discredited by the test of reality.
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