Mandate Upheld

The news just came out that the Supreme Court has upheld the health insurance mandate, but they called it a tax. The Right will surely be outraged and say that they are being taxed to support the welfare state. Expect more money to flow to the Republicans. Yet it seems that Romney has already maxed out on 'Crazy'. His is already getting more money than he can use.

Update: 7/2/12
I found this article, about how Chief Justice Roberts  came to his decision. It appears that he originally sided with the conservatives but changed his mind because he was concern about the long term credibility of the Supreme Court. What was interesting was that Justice Kennedy tried very persistently to make Roberts come back to the conservative position. Since Kennedy was supposedly the swing vote, it showed that the Affordable Care Act never had a chance if that was true. Until now, Justice Kennedy might have been concerned to be to most powerful man in America. With Roberts changing his vote, is Roberts now the new top dog?

A challenge to the super women myth

Sally wanted to share this cover story from the Atlantic Monthly. Space is available on this blog for anybody who wants to share an article with the rest of the group.

Why Women Still Can’t Have It All

It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.

Here is a link to the article and a video interview by the author.

Supreme Court Decision

At today's meeting there was much interest in the anticipated Supreme Court decision. Several member were on their iPads and iPhones checking for the latest news. It was almost a race to see who would break the story first. When I got home I found out that Wikipedia had already reported the Arizona immigration decision.

The big decision on healthcare will have to wait until Thursday. There is already a wikipedia page setup for the case, which I am sure will be updated as soon as the decision is announced. Isn't it great to read about breaking news in an Encyclopedia.

Correction:
With apologies to Norm, the correct answered to his question of how many Justices were nominated by a Democrat President is four, not two as I said. I did not count the two nominated by Clinton, Breyer and Ginsburg. Oddly, the two nominated by Obama, Sotomayor and Kagan, replace Justices appointed by Republicans. So there used to be only two Justices nominated by Democrats.

Obama Supports the Dreamers

We had far too much news to cover. The Obama Dream Act announcement was not brought out until the last 15 minutes of our meeting, and much of our discussion was about the heckler. For those that missed the announcement here is a link to Obama's annoucement.

There was much more to this story. Ron only had a brief time to mention the political implications. Let me use this blog to bring out some points that I wish we had time to cover.

1. Did Obama trap Romney, who has yet to issue an opinion on the Dream Act?

2. Will this encourage Hispanic voter turn-out in keys states like Florida?

3. Is it more likely that Marco Rubio will be picked as Romney's running mate?

4. Was the timing of the announcement to coincide with the Supreme Court ruling on the Arizona immigration laws?

5. Is Arizona now in play?

6. Does this announcement justify Obama's crackdown at the border?

7. Can we now expect Obama to come out in favor of other immigration reform?

Arab Legacy

We had an interesting discussion of the conflict in Syria and other Arab countries. In our frustration we may have blamed the problems on Arabian culture, going back a thousands of years. We forget that a thousand years ago, the Arabs were civilized and the Europeans were the barbarians.

Here is a short TED talk about how the letter 'x' came to represent the unknown. It reminds us that much of our mathematics come from the Arabians and credits it to the logic of the Arabic language.

Cyber Warfare

The virus attack on the Iranian nuclear program was in the news recently, but this is old news. Here is a TED talk about the Stuxnet virus from a year ago. The news may be old but it is still facinating.