Quote of the Week...from Groucho Marx

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well, I have others.        ---Groucho Marx

Back when Citizen's United was being decided by the conservative wing of the United States Supreme Court more than a decade ago, justices bandied about concepts like "corporations are people" and "spending money is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment".  Yet it seems that whenever conservative politicians...who almost unanimously claim themselves to be highly principled advocates for freedom of businesses to make their own decisions without government interference...including what to do with their own money and how to conduct their affairs...it all goes out the window whenever convenient.  So Major League Baseball decides to move its All-Star Game from Atlanta after Georgia's new voting law was passed, and Senator Ted Cruz urges Congress to pass punitive legislation against them!  So cruise lines operating out of Florida have reasonably decided that crew and passengers need to provide a record of their COVID vaccination...our state's conservative governor has decided to interfere, decreeing that they are banned from doing that!  But Ron DeSantis' "principled when it suits him" mentality goes further: earlier he signed a law making participants in public protest demonstrations and marches potentially liable for the actions of others in those events, a direct violation of the First Amendment if I ever saw one.  And what about all these election laws passed by different "red" state legislatures and governors that give those partisan bodies the right to arbitrarily nullify any election they have a problem with (in other words, when Democrats win) while claiming the laws are necessary in principle to restore public confidence in elections?  Oh yeah, I'm "confident" that if a Republican wins an election in one of those states by 10 votes there's no problem but if a Democrat prevails by 10,000 somebody will dig up a bogus fraud charge, leading eventually to a partisan vote to overturn the results and install the losing Republican candidate...you just know this going to happen.  And what about all this bemoaning of "cancel culture" and criticism of Facebook and Twitter by Republican congressmen when these private companies fact-check their users' posts and remove the more habitual abusers, while overwhelmingly ostracizing one of their own...Liz Cheney...for simply telling the truth about the 2020 election and Trump's culpability in the Capitol riot on January 6th? I think this pronouncing and then shameless shirking of principle isn't just confined to politics, though: it is a sad trait of our universal human nature.  And only a master of cynical comedy like Groucho Marx could have put it so succinctly, as he did in the above quote...