US Politics Thread |OT| THE DARKEST TIMELINE

[Mandark]

https://twitter.com/ishapiro/status/532990258913501184

[Great Rumbler]

@NationalMemo 4m4 minutes ago

BREAKING: Obamacare subsidies survive by a Supreme Court ruling of 6-3.

WALRUS LIVES ANOTHER DAY

I TOLD YOU GUYS

[Phoenix Dark]

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/was-supreme-court-justice-john-roberts-blackmailed/

[Mandark]

Supreme Court also upholds the Fair Housing Act* and in his dissent, Clarence Thomas points out that racial imbalances aren't always bad for minorities, cause 70% of NBA players are black.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

*I haven't actually read up on the case, so this cold be simplifying it to the point of distortion.

[close]

[Yeti]

Add Chris Christie to the 2016 clown car

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/25/chris-christie-president_n_7663610.html

[Great Rumbler]

YES MORE PLEASE NOM NOM NOM 

[Steve Contra]

Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal in the same week

[Mandark]

Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal in the same week

Remember how these guys were rising stars about five years ago?  Some Kwame Brown, Freddy Adu level busts right there.

[Joe Molotov]

Apparently they could have ruled in a way which left the subsidies up to executive branch rule-making, but didn't.  Which means a Republican president won't be able to yank the subsidies away (and current GOP candidates won't have to promise to do that) without getting a bill through Congress.

President Huckabee can just ignore Supreme Court rulings, tho.

[Phoenix Dark]

SC will release more decisions on Friday btw. We might get the gay marriage megaton to rule all megatons.

The salt in Scalia's Obergefell's dissent is going to be epic. Throw a couple breadsticks in and you'll have Olive Garden alfredo

[Brehvolution]

Double down on being wrong, brehs.

I know it makes you look bad when the narrative you pitch is so awfully wrong. The smart thing would be to hop on the next flavor of outrage for the day and be wrong about that.

[Great Rumbler]

Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal in the same week

Remember how these guys were rising stars about five years ago?  Some Kwame Brown, Freddy Adu level busts right there.

The conservative political machine regularly snatches up young, fresh-faced Republicans and pumps them full of the same old talking points that everybody else gets. Then, they all get into a big argument over who memorized their lines the best.

[Mandark]

Schadenfreude aside, really glad that the case went as it did.  Unlike NFIB v. Sebelius, which was aimed at the mandate, this was aimed at a part of the law designed to directly to help poorer people afford health care.  That's really shitty.

It's remarkable how much opposition the ACA has gotten after it passed.  States opting out of the exchanges (and after the Sebelius ruling, out of the Medicare expansion), constant symbolic bills to repeal the law, numerous court challenges including two that got to the SCOTUS.  I can't think of anything similar in my lifetime.

[Joe Molotov]

Nonschadenfreude aside...

http://wonkette.com/589443/lets-get-drunk-on-republican-obamacare-tears-together

[Great Rumbler]

It's remarkable how much opposition the ACA has gotten after it passed.  States opting out of the exchanges (and after the Sebelius ruling, out of the Medicare expansion), constant symbolic bills to repeal the law, numerous court challenges including two that got to the SCOTUS.  I can't think of anything similar in my lifetime.

And unlike civil rights legislation in the 60's, some of the biggest beneficiaries of the ACA are conservatives and Republican states.

[Steve Contra]

"Millenias of judicial restraint"

*references an 800 year old document*

[Kara]

It's remarkable how much opposition the ACA has gotten after it passed.  States opting out of the exchanges (and after the Sebelius ruling, out of the Medicare expansion), constant symbolic bills to repeal the law, numerous court challenges including two that got to the SCOTUS.  I can't think of anything similar in my lifetime.

I'm old enough to remember the end of legal spousal rape, that's the closest thing I can think of and tbh I don't want to research that for fear of projectile vomiting.

[Phoenix Dark]

"Millenias of judicial restraint"

*references an 800 year old document*

It could still be canonically 4000 years old.

[Human Snorenado]

The tears of the losers has been the best possible birthday present

[HyperZoneWasAwesome]

Bobby Jindal is so white he mispronounces his own name.

#BobbyJindalIsSoWhite he thinks Naan is what you call your grandmother

#BobbyJindalIsSoWhite that he has to be washed separately in warm water.

#BobbyJindalIsSoWhite he's never been randomly selected at the airport

#bobbyjindalissowhite He calls it Chai Tea.

[Kara]

#bobbyjindalissowhite He calls it Chai Tea.

[benjipwns]

It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner. See National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U. S. ___, ___ (2012) (SCALIA, KENNEDY, THOMAS, and ALITO, JJ., dissenting) (slip op., at 60) (“Without the federal subsidies … the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all.”).

[benjipwns]

Bobby Jindal is so white he mispronounces his own name.

#BobbyJindalIsSoWhite he thinks Naan is what you call your grandmother

#BobbyJindalIsSoWhite that he has to be washed separately in warm water.

#BobbyJindalIsSoWhite he's never been randomly selected at the airport

#bobbyjindalissowhite He calls it Chai Tea.

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2015/06/25/jep-and-jessica-robertson-bobby-jindal-is-our-pick-for-president/

Jep and Jessica Robertson told FOX411 the Louisiana governor, who announced his run Wednesday, is their pick for president.

"I definitely would vote for him he's a very, very good man," Jep Robertson told FOX411. "We've gotten to chat with him several times, kind of just talking, he's a great dude....he's very transparent, has a great family, so yeah I'd definitely give him my vote."

Robertson's older brother Willie has also been vocal about who he wants in office.

“I’ve been talking a lot with Bobby Jindal, who is our governor. Bobby is a good friend of ours. He and his wife are good friends of Korie and [mine]. He has been on our television show. Anybody that comes down and has been on an episode of ‘Duck Dynasty,’ obviously is the frontrunner in my book,” Willie Robertson told FOX411 in May.

[Phoenix Dark]

It's definitely been interesting watching Our Man In Paris and Meta go to battle on GAF, alongside Brian Beutler and other liberal bloggers doing the same against Cannon. My nervousness about the situation was the fact that such a ridiculous case even made it to court. I figured of course we know at least three of the judges who agreed to take the case, but my fear was that Kennedy was the fourth. A 5-4 decision was my fear - in fact, even if the govt had won 5-4 I would have been pretty bummed.

Seems like Black Mamba was right all along.

[Phoenix Dark]

Indeed.

[Kara]

You mean watch Meta and others battle on GAF while I seethed with rage and wished cancer on him from the sidelines?

Yeah but then some lickspittle snitched to meta and you had that proxy war where he got sanctimonious while shilling for stripping people of their health insurance.

[Phoenix Dark]

All this while attaining two master's degrees. Cheebs would be proud.

[benjipwns]

It's definitely been interesting watching Our Man In Paris and Meta go to battle on GAF, alongside Brian Beutler and other liberal bloggers doing the same against Cannon. My nervousness about the situation was the fact that such a ridiculous case even made it to court. I figured of course we know at least three of the judges who agreed to take the case, but my fear was that Kennedy was the fourth. A 5-4 decision was my fear - in fact, even if the govt had won 5-4 I would have been pretty bummed.

Seems like Black Mamba was right all along.

pish tosh: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=154550194&postcount=1023

[Brehvolution]

What about cancer in the digital realm?

[Phoenix Dark]

I battled with Meta on GAF. Dude is a prick. Not sure he deserves cancer though.

Now that the subsidies are saved, go ahead and give him cancer

spoiler (click to show/hide)

nm he'd still be fucked. so many scust worthy plans

[close]

[Mandark]

GAF talk outside the quarantine zone

[benjipwns]

I think it broke through the sticky barriers while you were gone because of Walrus' obsession and my ban.

[benjipwns]

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/246204-gop-bill-would-force-supreme-court-to-enroll-in-obamacare

A House Republican on Thursday proposed forcing the Supreme Court justices and their staff to enroll in ObamaCare.

Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) said that his SCOTUScare Act would make all nine justices and their employees join the national healthcare law’s exchanges.

“As the Supreme Court continues to ignore the letter of the law, it’s important that these six individuals understand the full impact of their decisions on the American people,” he said.

“That’s why I introduced the SCOTUScare Act to require the Supreme Court and all of its employees to sign up for ObamaCare,” Babin said.

Babin’s potential legislation would only let the federal government provide healthcare to the Supreme Court and its staff via ObamaCare exchanges.

“By eliminating their exemption from ObamaCare, they will see firsthand what the American people are forced to live with,” he added.

[benjipwns]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/06/why-isnt-anyone-outraged-by-ann-coulter-anymore.html

 

[Great Rumbler]

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/246204-gop-bill-would-force-supreme-court-to-enroll-in-obamacare

A House Republican on Thursday proposed forcing the Supreme Court justices and their staff to enroll in ObamaCare.

Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) said that his SCOTUScare Act would make all nine justices and their employees join the national healthcare law’s exchanges.

“As the Supreme Court continues to ignore the letter of the law, it’s important that these six individuals understand the full impact of their decisions on the American people,” he said.

“That’s why I introduced the SCOTUScare Act to require the Supreme Court and all of its employees to sign up for ObamaCare,” Babin said.

Babin’s potential legislation would only let the federal government provide healthcare to the Supreme Court and its staff via ObamaCare exchanges.

“By eliminating their exemption from ObamaCare, they will see firsthand what the American people are forced to live with,” he added.

Why, it's almost like certain people don't understand, or willfully ignore, what Obamacare actually is!

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/06/why-isnt-anyone-outraged-by-ann-coulter-anymore.html

 

Because her shtick is obvious and well past its expiration date.

[AdmiralViscen]

annihilated

[Brehvolution]

The gay agenda prevails! 

[Phoenix Dark]

Time to watch the schadenfreude

[ZephyrFate]

What a time to be alive!!! Mandatory gay marriages for everyone!!! Gonna be in SF for gay pride in 4 hours!!! Gonna gay out so fucking hard!!!

[Kara]

I almost don't mind be American this week.

[Phoenix Dark]

Obama's eulogy at the SC



the bitter tears that will come of this

[Phoenix Dark]

https://twitter.com/SteveDeaceShow/status/614527302626471936

#TheShift

[Great Rumbler]

Well, you see, the Supreme Court destroyed years of established jurisprudence and defied the will of the people without regard.

But enough about Bush v Gore.

[Mupepe]

Hahahaha I still believe he is acting. He's so over the top and his personal history makes him super suspect.

[benjipwns]

Constitutional Remedies to a Lawless Supreme Court

This week, we have twice seen Supreme Court justices violating their judicial oaths. Yesterday, the justices rewrote Obamacare, yet again, in order to force this failed law on the American people. Today, the Court doubled down with a 5–4 opinion that undermines not just the definition of marriage, but the very foundations of our representative form of government.

Both decisions were judicial activism, plain and simple. Both were lawless.

As Justice Scalia put it regarding Obamacare, “Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.’ . . . We should start calling this law SCOTUSCare.” And as he observed regarding marriage, “Today’s decree says that . . . the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.”

Sadly, the political reaction from the leaders of my party is all too predictable. They will pretend to be incensed, and then plan to do absolutely nothing.

That is unacceptable. On the substantive front, I have already introduced a constitutional amendment to preserve the authority of elected state legislatures to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and also legislation stripping the federal courts of jurisdiction over legal assaults on marriage. And the 2016 election has now been transformed into a referendum on Obamacare; in 2017, I believe, a Republican president will sign legislation finally repealing that disastrous law.

But there is a broader problem: The Court’s brazen action undermines its very legitimacy.

This must stop. Liberty is in the balance.

Not only are the Court’s opinions untethered to reason and logic, they are also alien to our constitutional system of limited and divided government. By redefining the meaning of common words, and redesigning the most basic human institutions, this Court has crossed from the realm of activism into the arena of oligarchy.

This week’s opinions are but the latest in a long line of judicial assaults on our Constitution and the common-sense values that have made America great. During the past 50 years, the Court has condemned millions of innocent unborn children to death, banished God from our schools and public squares, extended constitutional protections to prisoners of war on foreign soil, authorized the confiscation of property from one private owner to transfer it to another, and has now required all Americans to purchase a specific product, and to accept the redefinition of an institution ordained by God and long predating the formation of the Court.

Enough is enough.

Over the last several decades, many attempts have been made to compel the Court to abide by the Constitution. But, as Justice Alito put it, “Today’s decision shows that decades of attempts to restrain this Court’s abuse of its authority have failed.”

...

If the Court is unwilling to abide by the specific language of our laws as written, and if it is unhindered by the clear intent of the people’s elected representatives, our constitutional options for reasserting our authority over our government are limited.

The Framers of our Constitution, despite their foresight and wisdom, did not anticipate judicial tyranny on this scale. The Constitution explicitly provides that justices “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” and this is a standard they are not remotely meeting. The Framers thought Congress’s “power of instituting impeachments,” as Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers, would be an “important constitutional check” on the judicial branch and would provide “a complete security” against the justices’ “deliberate usurpations of the authority of the legislature.”

But the Framers underestimated the justices’ craving for legislative power, and they overestimated the Congress’s backbone to curb it. It was clear even before the end of the founding era that the threat of impeachment was, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “not even a scarecrow” to the justices. Today, the remedy of impeachment — the only one provided under our Constitution to cure judicial tyranny — is still no remedy at all. A Senate that cannot muster 51 votes to block an attorney-general nominee openly committed to continue an unprecedented course of executive-branch lawlessness can hardly be expected to muster the 67 votes needed to impeach an Anthony Kennedy.

The time has come, therefore, to recognize that the problem lies not with the lawless rulings of individual lawless justices, but with the lawlessness of the Court itself. The decisions that have deformed our constitutional order and have debased our culture are but symptoms of the disease of liberal judicial activism that has infected our judiciary. A remedy is needed that will restore health to the sick man in our constitutional system.

Rendering the justices directly accountable to the people would provide such a remedy. Twenty states have now adopted some form of judicial retention elections, and the experience of these states demonstrates that giving the people the regular, periodic power to pass judgment on the judgments of their judges strikes a proper balance between judicial independence and judicial accountability. It also restores respect for the rule of law to courts that have systematically imposed their personal moral values in the guise of constitutional rulings. The courts in these states have not been politicized by this check on their power, nor have judges been removed indiscriminately or wholesale. Americans are a patient, forgiving people. We do not pass judgment rashly.

Yet we are a people who believe, in the words of our Declaration of Independence that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations . . . evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.” In California, the people said enough is enough in 1986, and removed from office three activist justices who had repeatedly contorted the state constitution to effectively outlaw capital punishment, no matter how savage the crime. The people of Nebraska likewise removed a justice who had twice disfigured that state’s constitution to overturn the people’s decision to subject state legislators to term limits. And in 2010, the voters of Iowa removed three justices who had, like the Supreme Court in Obergefell, invented a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

Judicial retention elections have worked in states across America; they will work for America. In order to provide the people themselves with a constitutional remedy to the problem of judicial activism and the means for throwing off judicial tyrants, I am proposing an amendment to the United States Constitution that would subject the justices of the Supreme Court to periodic judicial-retention elections. Every justice, beginning with the second national election after his or her appointment, will answer to the American people and the states in a retention election every eight years. Those justices deemed unfit for retention by both a majority of the American people as a whole and by majorities of the electorates in at least half of the 50 states will be removed from office and disqualified from future service on the Court.

As a constitutional conservative, I do not make this proposal lightly. I began my career as a law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist — one of our nation’s greatest chief justices — and I have spent over a decade litigating before the Supreme Court. I revere that institution, and have no doubt that Rehnquist would be heartbroken at what has befallen our highest court.

But, sadly, the Court’s hubris and thirst for power have reached unprecedented levels. And that calls for meaningful action, lest Congress be guilty of acquiescing to this assault on the rule of law.

And if Congress will not act, passing the constitutional amendments needed to correct this lawlessness, then the movement from the people for an Article V Convention of the States — to propose the amendments directly — will grow stronger and stronger.

As we prepare to celebrate next week the 239th anniversary of the birth of our country, our Constitution finds itself under sustained attack from an arrogant judicial elite. Yet the words of Daniel Webster ring as true today as they did over 150 years ago: “Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.” We must hold fast to the miracle that is our Constitution and our republic; we must not submit our constitutional freedoms, and the promise of our nation, to judicial tyranny.

As I said posting this on GAF, that I'll admit, I once thought five years ago that Ted Cruz might not be too bad for a GOPer from Texas ala Mike Lee or Rand Paul.

[Great Rumbler]

Imagine if Cruz actually started pushing for a Constitutional amendment to get rid of Obamacare.

[Kara]

"We do not pass judgment rashly."

Many thousands of dead Afghani and Iraqi civilians would disagree.

[Great Rumbler]

Trump's feud with the head of Univision is pretty amazing:

Reality TV star and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s feud with the Spanish language television network Univision isn’t just about crowning Miss USA – now there are golf games and matters of foreign policy at stake.

Days after the network said it would sever ties with the 2016 dark horse after he characterized Mexican immigrants as drug smugglers and rapists in his lengthy presidential announcement, the Donald posted an image to Instagram on Friday of a letter to Univision CEO Randy Falco banning “any officer or representative of Univision” from using Trump National Doral Miami’s golf courses or facilities. He also demanded the company halt construction on a gate connecting “our respective properties.”

“Please congratulate your Mexican Government officials for having made such outstanding trade deals with the United States. However, inform them that should I become President, those days are over. We are bringing jobs back to the U.S. Also, a meaningful border will be immediately created, not the laughingstock that currently exists,” Trump wrote in a postscript.

[Human Snorenado]

VERY CLASSY, VERY PRESIDENTIAL

[Joe Molotov]

As you can see, he's a uniter not a divider, unlike our Race-Baiter-in-Chief.

[ToxicAdam]

This story irks me.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150626/us-burning-man-requests-6a7736905f.html

[Great Rumbler]

I never really knew what a total garbage heap Woodrow Wilson was:

As we witness this unexpected and I think historic sea change at least in the symbolism of neo-Confederate nostalgia, it is worth remembering that the fight for equality and civil rights for African-Americans and against white supremacy in its various forms has never been a march in a single direction. If the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, it's very much been a zigzag arc.

Even after the federal government withdrew its final support from Reconstructed, biracial governments in the South in 1876, those governments and movements didn't collapse overnight. Biracial politics and political movements continued on in diminished but persistent forms well until the 1890s before being finally snuffed out in a wave of Supreme Court decisions, mass disenfranchisement and violence. As Gregory Downs noted in his article on the origins of Juneteenth, in the 1890s there were some 100,000 African-American voters in Texas. By 1906 that number had fallen to fewer than 5,000. The blanket of Jim Crow absolutism that had come to rest over the South by the first years of the 20th century may have looked like some time immemorial reality. But it was actually a very new creation, finally secured only in the 1890s through an interlocking chain of Supreme Court decisions, extra-judicial violence, new legislation and the collapse of interracial political coalitions.

One of the legacies of the Civil War was a near unbroken Republican dominance of the presidency for a half century after the end of the Civil War - with the anomalous exceptions of two non-consecutive terms of Northerner Grover Cleveland, elected in 1884 and 1892. That dominance came to an end in 1912 when a division between establishment (Taft) and reform (Roosevelt) Republicans allowed the election of Woodrow Wilson, the governor of New Jersey who was nevertheless very much a Southerner, born and raised in Virginia.

Even after the North and the national Republican party withdrew military support for black political rights in the South it still remained supportive of black civil rights in a more limited but still significant way. Because of that, black voting support for the GOP then was as strong as it is for the Democratic party today, where black voting was still permitted. One of the key places that support evidenced itself was in federal hiring.

That brings us back to President Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States.

The 1912 presidential election featured not only a historic fissure in the Republican party, it also features two candidates associated with the Progressive Movement, Wilson and renegade Republican and former President Theodore Roosevelt running on the Progressive Party ticket. Wilson is known and still honored as a Progressive reformer on the domestic front and his foreign policy is still referenced as the embodiment of idealistic foreign policy engagement, putting democracy rather than realpolitik at the center of policy formulation. Yet to say that Wilson was a disappointment on civil rights is a colossal understatement.

It's not hard to find anecdotes about Wilson's celebration of the racist tour de force Birth of a Nation, the country's first cinematic blockbuster. But Wilson's racism went far, far deeper. We rightly judge people at least in part in the context of their times, not ours. But even judged against the standards of his own day, Wilson was a racist and a throwback, committed to turning back the limited gains African-Americans had held onto after Reconstruction. As an historian and political scientist, Wilson played a part in the historiographical reimagining of the Reconstruction years as a period when half savage blacks ruled over white Southerners in connivance with corrupt Northern extremists before being overthrown by white southern "redeemers" in the last two decades of the 19th century. Nor did Wilson leave his racism in the realm of ideas.

When Wilson came to Washington he quickly instituted a purge of African-American federal workers in Washington and around the country. Where purges weren't possible, federal workplaces were re-segregated, often with surreal and hideous results. Even more than Wilson, Wilson's wife Ellen, a Georgia native, was a visceral racist who was shocked to see the limited level of integration then in place in the nation's capital. She was reportedly especially disgusted to see black men and white women working in the same workplaces and took a personal role in pushing forward resegregation in Washington, DC.

Numerous African-American federal workers were fired, in many cases by white Southern Democratic appointees. The Post Master General and the Treasury Secretary both re-segregated their departments and gave supervisors free rein to fire African American employees at will. In Atlanta, 35 African-American postal workers were summarily fired. Similarly stories took place throughout the country. Wilson's Collector of Internal Revenue in Georgia said in 1913, "There are no Government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negroes place is in the cornfield."

Significantly, not only did Wilson's Southern backers see his election as an opportunity to remove the little remaining federal intrusions on the race relations in the South. They also saw it as an opportunity to expand them into the North, where many believed, with some reason, they would find a welcome reception among Northern whites. Federal workplaces introduced separate bathroom and eating facilities for African-American employees. But in many cases, it was simply not possible to create the physical infrastructure of segregation quickly enough or at all, a fact which lead to bizarre workarounds. According to W.E.B. Du Bois, in workplaces where black employees could not be separated from white employees because of the nature of the work, special cages were built for black employees within white workplaces. Really.

The effective segregation of the federal government continued in place for two decades before the tied began to shift in the 1930s under President Franklin Roosevelt.

[Kara]

Purge people for the color of their skin and not their deviation from the Party line brehs.

[HyperZoneWasAwesome]

that can't be real?

a person could, and realistically should figure that Donald Trump has the biggest ego of any of the candidates, I really do think Jindal has the market cornered on that. If not ego, then at least 'delusional belief in self', or whatever that psychological disorder is called.

[Kara]

SpaceX's resupply launch to the International Space Station crashed and burned yesterday. (It was unmaned if you were wondering why you hadn't heard about it.)

I sure am glad that the taxpayers are footing the bill for Elon "I make Steve Jobs look like Richard Stallman" Musk's model rocket club. Sergei Korolev faffed about with one of those too and look how he turned out.

[Kara]

god i wish there were fellow defense contractor brats on this board, so much hot fire in that post

[Great Rumbler]

[brob]

that little graphic of the Obamacare being electroshocked back to life reminds me of the cutesy animated videos that would play on the score screen at my local bowling alley when you hit something worthwhile. 

[Phoenix Dark]

I don't think Jindal is delusional per se. He's not really running for president: he's running for a Fox analyst job, speaking tour booking, book tour, etc. Money.

[ToxicAdam]

That John Huntsman brand of Republicanism doesn't sell many books or speaking engagements, does it? (sadly)