Politics: Antonin Scalia Supreme Court Analysis

When it comes to all of the posts that I want to do, a theme about them stood out to be. I should do an analysis on the justices of the Supreme Court. And I should start with Antonin Scalia, the person whose death made me care about the Supreme Court. I don’t know who all I’ll do in the future, but I will do the living, retired justices at some point in addition to those who were on the court and even will be on the court from 2016 onward. Know that I might not do any of these of a former justice who is still alive.

I don’t know how polarizing a figure Antonin was while he on the court and before it. I know that the Republican’ts were not wanting him to leave the court so much that they would keep his seat vacant a record amount of time before replacing it with someone else. It was a terrible thing to do, but it sadly didn’t break any laws.

What are some of the things that he might have done wrong? Well, he didn’t want minorities to have special protection. I guess he just thought it would cause general inequality to happen. It might be like how some people are against Black Lives Matter who aren’t racist, but just seem to think that it is bringing too much focus to one detail over another. I’m sure that most civil right advocates don’t want blacks to have more power than whites, just equal power.

One of the important feelings that he had was about executive privilege. To me, it is a way of saying that the president should have more important powers than other people in some cases. Antonin was in favor of this. I don’t know if I like that idea if only because of who is president at the moment. But I guess that I can see the value of it at times.

An important thing that he did before he became a part of the Supreme Court was that he did a successful case before the Supreme Court. I don’t fully understand this case as it doesn’t have a page on Wikipedia. The case is Alfred Dunhill of London, Inc. v. Republic of Cuba.

He was against abortion and that is something that I will always agree with. Abortion is wrong. Now there are some mishandling of the issue and contradictions in the beliefs of it. I should do a whole long post about abortion. Still, I would never vote solely based on that issue.

Something characteristic of him was that he was generally scathing with his opinions. He was kind of mean in some ways with what he wrote regarding opinions on various cases. There are some notable cases where he was the only one to dissent.

There are other problems with him. He has admitted to getting most of his news from talk radio. That’s not actually a news source. You shouldn’t get your news from late night talk shows either. But he might have just not liked this perceived liberal basis in the news to the point where like many people today, he avoided the news he didn’t like. He only read conservative leaning news sources, which is a problem like reading only liberal sources would be.

I am somewhat glad that he is no longer on the court, but I wish that the vacancy could have been handled better. If only the Republican’ts hadn’t procrastinated like they always do, the court would still have a moderate on it once Anthony Kennedy leaves. He sided with the side of conservatives so much that they couldn’t handle a loss like his. He was polarizing indeed and it doesn’t look like his negative influence is going away any time soon.

Politics: Following the Illinois Governor Race 2018 Round Two

I don’t know what all can and might still change regarding the race for governor of Illinois. One of the people running originally ran as a Republican then switched to independent then switched to the Constitutional party before just metaphorically throwing up his hands in the air, dropping out of the race altogether. I might explain more of the third party options as I go along in this post, but I will explain why it would be illogical to vote for any of them. Still, I might as well go into more of this race now that the primary has past and the challengers are set.

Some background into this election is needed. You see, ever since Jim Edgar left office, Illinois has had bad governors of varying degrees. The primary didn’t offer a lot of good alternatives. I was going to vote for someone before learning about too many things they did that I didn’t like. Meanwhile, it seemed like Bruce Rauner, the incumbent governor, had no chance of losing the primary to his Republican challenger. I should have voted for her, but I didn’t. If she had won the primary, then I’d be voting for her in the general election. The Democratic side of the primary ended up with J B Pritzker as the winning simply, to me, because people knew who he was and not who the other people were.

You might think that the vote should be easy. In theory, it would be. But it isn’t. While Bruce has proven to be a terrible governor thus far by refusing to work with the opposing party and other faults I’ll get to later, J B is far from perfect.

One of the ads that show up from time to time has him talking to Rod Blagojevich, the worst Democrat alive and USA’s worst governor of all time. A link between them would be a very bad thing. Only the ads aren’t clear about what might have happened in these conversations. It seems to be one of the typical Republican’t ways of arguing with a person where they want you to know and be outraged by something while failing to tell you what that thing is even though they have the information about it.

If there was any wrong doing by J B, it is hard to tell so in the ads. There’s also a major concern about how this wiretapped conversation came into the hands of Bruce. It doesn’t seem like he should have this information, yet he does. The fact that he won’t reveal where it came from is as red a flag as the possible link to Rod that J B might have.

Still, one can’t get over the fact that Bruce is a failure. There are even ads about this. Bruce refuses to work with Illinois speaker of the house, Mike Madigan. Illinois 101 says that you have to work with him whether you like him or not. (You probably won’t like him.) Bruce thinks that he has stood up to Mike, but I don’t see it that way. If it happened the way Bruce thought it would, then various work like a budget would have happened. Instead, things aren’t getting done. Now Mike is still a huge problem. But Bruce is worse. And if you’ve seen Everybody Loves Raymond, you would know that as terrible as a person that Marie Barrone is, it is insane to go against her. Mike is like Marie Barrone. But Bruce doesn’t know how to get with the program.

I have to talk about the third party candidates in the race just to paint a clearer picture of how screwed this state is regardless of who gets elected. Kash Jackson is the libertarian candidate who seems to have had too many issues with his wife and not paying her child support. While him being the poorer candidate means that he can’t buy his way into office like we’ve seen in this state in 2006 and 2014, it also means that he has little chance of winning office. Besides, there is not enough known about him that makes voting for him worthwhile.

Bruce has pissed off his conservative base. That is a huge mistake that Mark Kirk made and is one of the reasons that he is no longer a US senator. That is why Sam McCann has broken ranks with the Republican party and formed the Conservative party. But he has his own set of failures with misusing money. We don’t want someone like Eric Greitens in Illinois. There should not be people with dark money or potentially misusing money.

When I researched the third party candidates, I noticed that there were at least two who were in the independent party. I guess that anyone can be in that party and they shouldn’t have to limit their number of nominees unless required to do so by law. The point is, there are other people in the race that aren’t worth keeping track of.

You’d think that J B would be a sure bet since Bruce sucks so much. Only J B suffers from some of the same problems that Bruce either does or has. J B has no experience in politics, much like Bruce four years ago. J B wants to legalize marijuana, which is a terrible idea. It seems like J B could just buy the election without any real goodness to his name. So what would the vote come down to?

The third party option is highly illogical if you are wanting one candidate to lose over the other. If I don’t want Bruce to win, then it only makes sense for me to vote for J B. I may not like either of the two candidates, but it would be moronic to vote third party while hoping one of the major party candidates loses as a result. Still, regardless of who wins, I might have to start counting down the days until the 2022 midterms on facebook. I will do that for sure if Bruce wins.

Well, there’s nothing else to state here except my endorsement of the race. If you live in Illinois, then I would recommend voting for J B Pritzker on November 6^th, 2018. He is far from perfect or even being that good a candidate. But if you agree that Bruce Rauner is bad, has lost touch with his conservative party, or is overall a terrible incumbent, then there is no logic choice than to vote against him by voting for J B.