An appeals court today found the NSA phone surveillance program unconstitutional. Reactions across the political spectrum:

From liberals: Good. We’ve been against this ever since the Bushies started it.

From libertarians/Breitbrats: Good. We are winning against the evil Obama/liberal surveillance state.

From Republican hawks: Oh noes! Al Qaeda ISIS will kill us in our beds!

Usual bullshit, in other words.

FYI From Thursday evening until Sunday we’re going to be in lockdown meditate-till-you-drop mode here at the Zen Center, so I’m supposed to stay off the Internet and meditate and think not-thinking like a good zennie. I’ll pop in to clear the message queue when I can, but don’t blab.

Via Balloon Juice, lights are going out for Chris Christie.

But amid the bustle, there was an absorption of a new reality for the governor and those closest to him: that his bid for the White House seems increasingly far-fetched. A political team long characterized by its self-assuredness now sounds strikingly subdued, sobered and, realistic about his odds.

In two dozen interviews over the past 24 hours, many of the most trusted allies and advisers to Mr. Christie acknowledged that winning the Republican nomination required a domino-like series of stumbles from his rivals and an unlikely breakthrough for him. …

… Instead of crowing about fund-raising records (as Jeb Bush is) or traveling the country as an announced candidate (as Senator Marco Rubio is), Mr. Christie’s team is in a sense starting over now, hoping that the developments in the legal case represent a new chance at a campaign unburdened by the threat of direct legal action against the governor.

On Friday allies and aides of Christie were indicted in Bridgegate, but not Christie himself. I haven’t seen anyone say that “direct legal action against the governor” is out of the question in the future, however.

 Elsewhere: Best thing I’ve read today — Police Violence Is Putting the Lie to Tea Party Conservatism

I’ll get a chance to write more later, but in the meantime, see Timothy Egan on the California drought.

I’m too tired to write anything now, except to note that as “conservatives” have been worked into a frenzy by nonsensical rumors that the federal government is planning a military takeover of Texas, they are also outraged that six Baltimore cops have been charged with homicide in the death of Freddie Gray.

So, the U.S. Army is a pack of jack-booted thugs who will steal your liberty, except when deployed to a Muslim country, but the Baltimore police are off limits no matter what they do. Let’s not try to be consistent or anything.

Regarding the violence in Baltimore, I defer to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Now, tonight, I turn on the news and I see politicians calling for young people in Baltimore to remain peaceful and “nonviolent.” These well-intended pleas strike me as the right answer to the wrong question. To understand the question, it’s worth remembering what, specifically, happened to Freddie Gray. An officer made eye contact with Gray. Gray, for unknown reasons, ran. The officer and his colleagues then detained Gray. They found him in possession of a switchblade. They arrested him while he yelled in pain. And then, within an hour, his spine was mostly severed. A week later, he was dead. What specifically was the crime here? What particular threat did Freddie Gray pose? Why is mere eye contact and then running worthy of detention at the hands of the state? Why is Freddie Gray dead?

The people now calling for nonviolence are not prepared to answer these questions. Many of them are charged with enforcing the very policies that led to Gray’s death, and yet they can offer no rational justification for Gray’s death and so they appeal for calm. But there was no official appeal for calm when Gray was being arrested. There was no appeal for calm when Jerriel Lyles was assaulted. (“The blow was so heavy. My eyes swelled up. Blood was dripping down my nose and out my eye.”) There was no claim for nonviolence on behalf of Venus Green. (“Bitch, you ain’t no better than any of the other old black bitches I have locked up.”) There was no plea for peace on behalf of Starr Brown. (“They slammed me down on my face,” Brown added, her voice cracking. “The skin was gone on my face.”)

This is the significant part, for me:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is “correct” or “wise,” any more than a forest fire can be “correct” or “wise.” Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

If history is our guide, no good will come from the violence in Baltimore. The people who will suffer most are those in the burned-out neighborhoods who lack the resources to move out.  I disagree with this guy, who argues that the violence is a legitimate political strategy. I don’t see strategy; I just see reaction. It’s understandable reaction, but as Coates says, “wisdom isn’t the point tonight.” Violence may be wrong, but maybe non-violence is wrong, too, in a different way. It’s hard to know.

Nonviolence as a tactic works when it creates sympathy for your side, and when people see you being nonviolent in the face of unreasonable oppression and violence. It works when state troopers attack peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, for example. But when the violence to citizens mostly happens out of sight, nonviolence by itself may be less effective.

Michael Fletcher writes,

Baltimore is not Ferguson and its primary problems are not racial. The mayor, city council president, police chief, top prosecutor, and many other city leaders are black, as is half of Baltimore’s 3,000-person police force. The city has many prominent black churches and a line of black civic leadership extending back to Frederick Douglass.

Yet, the gaping disparities separating the haves and the have nots in Baltimore are as large as they are anywhere. And, as the boys on the street will tell you, black cops can be hell on them, too.

If this is so, where is the remedy? I honestly don’t know.

Via Hullabaloo, this was said by the COO of the Orioles:

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

Something to think about.

What doesn’t have to be thought about is Rand Paul. There was plenty of tone-deaf cluelessness this week, but he may take the prize.

I hope you won’t mind a little horse race commentary. According to a poll taken April 19-21 by Fox News, here are the current rankings of the Republican wannabees among likely Republican primary voters. The number represents the percentage of responders who said they supported the candidate.

Marco Rubio 13
Scott Walker 12
Rand Paul 10
Jeb Bush 9
Mike Huckabee 9
Ted Cruz 8
Ben Carson 6
Chris Christie 6
Donald Trump 5
John Kasich 2
Rick Perry 2
Bobby Jindal 1
Lindsey Graham 1
George Pataki 1
Rick Santorum 1
Carly Fiorina 1
Other (vol.) 1
None of the above (vol.) 3
Unsure 9

Just looking at the first ten, of this crew the ones who have picked up support from a month ago are Rubio, Paul, Christie, Trump and Kasich. Walker, Bush, Huckabee, Cruz and Carson have dropped.

Jamelle Bouie writes at Slate that Jeb is breaking fundraising records. He’s telling people that his super PAC, Right to Rise, has raised more money in its first 100 days than “any other Republican operation in modern history.” Yet this is not discouraging other potential candidates from running.

There are more candidates now then there were when Jeb announced his “shock and awe” fundraising offensive at the beginning of the year, which is to say that Bush has neither shocked nor awed his competition. Despite his fame and name recognition, he’s not a titan like his brother or a leviathan like the present-day Hillary Clinton, or even a minor member of the political pantheon like Clinton in 2007; instead, he’s one hopeful among many. And while he has loads of cash, his chances aren’t appreciably better than his competitors’. Indeed, they’re probably worse: If Jeb stands out from the pack, it’s because he’s a Bush. And the Bush name is unpopular. Dismally, terribly unpopular.

A few days ago Scott Walker appeared to be the GOP’s fair-haired boy, but inexplicably (to me, anyway) now the buzz is about Rubio.  The theory is that Rubio is the guy who could attract the Latino vote without alienating the teabaggers. Just two years ago Rubio’s political ambitions were supposed to be over, because he promoted and then backtracked on immigration reform and gulped water during the response to the 2013 SOTU. Now that seems forgotten.

We’ll see. I suspect we’ll be playing rotating front runner for awhile.

For all his thrashing around to get attention, Booby Jindal clearly is not going anywhere. And Rick Santorum clearly has missed his moment, if he ever had a moment.

This is brilliant. Luther the anger translator (Keegan Michael-Key) appeared with President Obama at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner last night.

Bobby Jindal’s op ed in today’s New York Times is worth a careful read, if only to appreciate how truly demented it is.

Jindal apparently has decided to position himself as the Christian Right candidate for President, and he’s not above selling out the state of Louisiana to do so. Along with the usual doublespeak that uses “sincerely held religious belief” to mean “ignorant bigotry,” Jindal is actually threatening the business community with dire consequences if they don’t stop “bullying” people with “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

I liked this part:

A pluralistic and diverse society like ours can exist only if we all tolerate people who disagree with us.

Kinda takes your breath away, huh? Jindal continues,

That’s why religious freedom laws matter — and why it is critical for conservatives and business leaders to unite in this debate.

If we, as conservatives, are to succeed in advancing the cause of freedom and free enterprise, the business community must stand shoulder to shoulder with those fighting for religious liberty. The left-wing ideologues who oppose religious freedom are the same ones who seek to tax and regulate businesses out of existence. The same people who think that profit making is vulgar believe that religiosity is folly. The fight against this misguided, government-dictating ideology is one fight, not two. Conservative leaders cannot sit idly by and allow large corporations to rip our coalition in half.

Since I became governor in 2008, Louisiana has become one of the best places to do business in America. I made it a priority to cut taxes, reform our ethics laws, invigorate our schools with bold merit-based changes and parental choice, and completely revamp work-force training to better suit businesses.

Our reforms worked because they were driven by our belief in freedom. We know that a nation in which individuals, and companies, are protected from the onerous impulses of government is one that will thrive and grow.

“From January 2011 through January 2015, Louisiana under Jindal ranked 32nd in job creation with 5.4 percent growth over four years.  … This compares with a national average of 8.21 percent.” [source]

That’s the intellectual underpinning of America, and in Louisiana we defend it relentlessly.

Intellectual underpinning?

Liberals have decided that if they can’t win at the ballot box, they will win in the boardroom. It’s a deliberate strategy. And it’s time for corporate America to make a decision.

Those who believe in freedom must stick together: If it’s not freedom for all, it’s not freedom at all. This strategy requires populist social conservatives to ally with the business community on economic matters and corporate titans to side with social conservatives on cultural matters. This is the grand bargain that makes freedom’s defense possible.

Because, you know, those civil liberties-loving liberals just hate liberty, or something. But let’s go back to an earlier part of the op ed, in which Jindal says,

Some corporations have already contacted me and asked me to oppose this law. I am certain that other companies, under pressure from radical liberals, will do the same. They are free to voice their opinions, but they will not deter me.

I’d like to know what sort of leverage “radical liberals” have on corporate America that we could pressure business to do anything business doesn’t want to do? The fact is, business doesn’t give a hoo-haw what “radical liberals” think. Business is just looking out for business. And Jindal is threatening business if it doesn’t stop acting in support of its own interests and does what Governor Jindal says. Because freedom.

 Ed Kilgore writes,

So Jindal’s willing to sacrifice some convention business—kinda important to New Orleans, a gay-friendly, tourism-dependent city Bobby’s willing to completely betray—and maybe the kind of corporate “investment” decisions Republican governors normally think of as the sum total of “economic development” on the altar of his commitment to those who would carve out a separate little paradise for themselves where laws contradicting “biblical principles” as understood by cultural conservatives need not be acknowledged. But he’s implicitly going beyond that selfish cost-benefit calculation and threatening job-creators that they’re going to lose the support of The Faithful for their own interests if they consort with secular-socialists on the Christian Right’s agenda.

As in other states with hard-Right governors, Jindal’s tax cutting has put Louisiana in a revenue bind. LSU is drafting an “academic bankruptcy” plan as a result of budget cuts; this news story says “the viability of the entire institution is threatened. … Louisiana’s higher education community is facing an 82 percent funding cut if no extra state money is found.”

John Cole comments,

That would basically be the death of public universities in Louisiana, because no one in their right mind would apply to go and fewer would apply to work there. So in the long run, it may not be just the fact that Louisiana is a haven for bigots driving business out of the state, but the fact that there are no Research 1 institutions working in union with business (see what the morons in the NC legislature are trying to do to university system and the impact it will have on the Research Triangle there), but also because there will be no educated workers in the state to handle the jobs businesses will have. And qualified personnel aren’t going to relocate to some remote bigoted outpost.

So yeah, Jindal. Have at it. Enjoy the complimentary education you’re about to get from the free market, you backwoods hick.

But, y’know, it’ll be worth it to Bobby Jindal as long as Billy Bob Baker can toss customers planning a same-sex wedding out of his bakery. Because nothing says freedom like the privilege to discriminate.

See also Human Rights Campaign Took A Red Pen To Jindal’s Religious Freedom Op-ed.

This headline — Koch brothers will offer audition to Jeb Bush — says a lot about our current state of political affairs. Their lordships seem to think politicians are just hirelings to be auditioned. Maybe they’re right. And, anyway, a multitude of sources say they’re going to support their boy Scott Walker. See David Koch Signals a Favorite: Scott Walker and David Koch: Scott Walker Would Defeat Hillary Clinton ‘by a Major Margin’. I guess all those years of being the Koch’s loyal poodle are paying off for ol’ Scottie.

See also Elias Isquith:

A subsequent report from Politico cast some doubt on whether David Koch’s claim that Walker should be the GOP’s nominee was as ironclad as the Times indicated. But that doesn’t matter, really. What matters is that because Kennedy illogically and unnecessarilyclaimed in the Court’s Citizens United opinion that “independent expenditures … do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,” a cryptic remark from one wingnut billionaire can have major implications for a country of more than 300 million.

Despite how farcical such a state of affairs is already, it’s only going to get worse. One of the crucial assumptions Kennedy used to justify Citizens United, for example, was that a big-spending independent group could be barred from coordinating with a candidate. Kennedy reasoned that if a political nonprofit wants to pay for ads attacking Politician X, there won’t be corruption — or even its appearance — unless the nonprofit worked directly with X’s opponent. If the nonprofit were run by X’s allies, it would make no difference.

Opponents of the ruling thought the hypothetical was patently ridiculous. They figured that any wall built between a candidate and her allies would be highly permeable at best. But another recent development from the GOP primary, this time involving former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, suggests the pretense of non-coordination is falling apart even more rapidly than expected, and that we may be about to witness the birth of a whole new kind of presidential campaign.

Technically, Bush is not yet a candidate for president. But he’s fundraising indefatigablyfor his Right to Rise super PAC, which he can “coordinate” with so long as his campaign remains undeclared. That’ll be money well-saved, too, according to the Associated Press: Bush is planning to be the first serious candidate ever to “outsource” to the super PAC much of the work usually done by the official campaign. Thanks to Justice Kennedy, the super PAC won’t be constrained by fundraising limits.

So there we are.. But there is one faint ray of hope from Montana,  of all places. The Koch worked very hard to get Medicaid expansion blocked (why?) in Montana, but they failed. For all their money, they can be ham-handed oafs in politcs:

For the Medicaid battle the Kochs tried a new strategy, one that never works in the West. They flew in a bunch of high-priced young politicos from Washington to get the job done. These held “town meetings” in rural communities at which they showed up in slim-fit suits and pointy shoes, looking like they were heading to a nightclub, lecturing farmers and ranches on politics and the dangers of “more Obamacare” and publicly threatening moderate Republicans. It didn’t take long for them to get booed off the stage by their own partisans.

See, for example, Koch Brothers Group Shouted Down By Irate Citizens During Montana Town Hall Meeting.

Progressives played it smart:

They teamed up with hospital executives, doctors and business leaders. These are Republican-leaning types who wanted Medicaid expansion in 2013 but were let down by their own high-priced conservative lobbyists who failed to deliver Republican votes. This time, the progressives took care of business and pressured one in five Republicans to vote for it. Kim Abbott of Montana Human Rights Network, who coordinated the effort, says they banked a record 10,000 calls to legislators. They found citizens with life-ending illnesses who could not afford treatment, who are not eligible for Medicaid nor an ACA-subsidized plan, and paired them with hospital leaders for media appearances and to testify at hearings at the Capitol. The Kochs’ crew, meanwhile, testified at the same hearings that Americans “will no longer have an incentive to work hard” if Medicaid is expanded. …

… At the height of the debate two months ago, former Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a rancher, wrote a letter to his local newspaper pointing out that Koch Industries owns a ranch in Montana that has taken $12 million in public grazing subsidies while spending their fortune to prevent someone who makes $11,000 a year from getting public help for medical care. The Koch team leader reacted by penning an angry opinion piece, attacking Schweitzer but leaving his accusation unanswered, thus spreading the bad news. It was a serious blow.

Maybe if the Kochs weren’t getting all those free goodies from the government they would have to work harder. Maybe they’d have less time to play politics.

The best part was that the Montana Americans for Prosperity chapter released a statement saying  that “the voices of millions of Montanans” didn’t want to expand Medicaid through Obamacare. Millions? The entire population of Montana is 1,023,579, according to the Census Bureau. There’s no such thing as “millions of Montanans.” Someone from Montana would know that, I suspect.

Some guy named Joel Kotkin plumbs new depths of stupid. After acknowleding that California really is suffering an actual drought — although he won’t blame climate change — he writes this —

Like many Californians, [Brown] recoiled against the sometimes haphazard and even ugly form of development that plowed through much of the state. Cutting off water is arguably the most effective way to stop all development, and promote Brown’s stated goal of eliminating suburban “sprawl.” It is typical that his first target for cutbacks this year has been the “lawns” of the middle–class suburbanite, a species for which he has shown little interest or tolerance.

There are a lot of things that could have been done better, but let’s talk about the several years in which Republicans blocked California from doing anything but rot. I liked this part, too:

But it’s not just water that exemplifies the current “era of limits” psychology. Energy development has always been in green crosshairs and their harassment has all but succeeded in helping drive much of the oil and gas industry, including corporate headquarters, out of the state. Not building roads—arguably to be replaced by trains—has not exactly reduced traffic but given California the honor of having eight of the top 20 cities nationally with poor roads; the percentage of Los Angeles-area residents who take transit has, if anything, declined slightly since train-building began. All we are left with are impossible freeways, crumbling streets, and ever more difficulty doing anything that requires traveling.

Developing green technology doesn’t count as “developing,” apparently, and building rail doesn’t count as improving transportation infrastructure. We must not be allowed to diverge from fossil fuels and internal combustion engines. And I’m not sure how you can blame rail development for a decline in transit use if the rails haven’t been developed yet.

See David Atkins at Washington Monthly — Dear Conservative Concern Trolls: California Will Be Just Fine, Thank You. 

Joel Kotkin over the The Daily Beast has a has scribbled out the millionth version of the “California is Dying” article—a genre of conservative wishful thinking that turns out to be hilariously wrong every time it is written. For years the story was that California would become the next Greece: hopelessly in debt, unable to pay its bills, with an exodus of taxpayers. That turned out to be bunk, of course: all the state needed to was a 2/3 Democratic supermajority and a Democratic governor, and the state’s fiscal situation was rectified almost immediately.

The new opportunity to concern-troll California with big business propaganda comes with the drought. The drought has become the platform from which the conservative complaint machine hits all its favorite targets: Silicon Valley and Hollywood elites, environmentalists, immigrants, and public works (especially transportation.) Republicans who wish they could turn California into Texas want the state to divert rail funding into building more freeways, drain the wetlands to support oil fracking and big agriculture, and close down the borders so that racist whites will feel a little less uncomfortable. They also want to build lots and lots of desalination plants, and blame progressive policy for the widening income inequality gap that sets the wealthy coast apart from the poorer interior.

The truth will out.