Supreme Court strikes blow against spreading menace of democracy

The scourge of freedom is on the run!

Reuters: The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday expanded how much political donors can give candidates and parties in federal elections by striking down a key pillar of campaign finance law.

On a 5-4 vote, the court struck down the overall limits on how much individuals can give to candidates, parties and political action committees in total during the federal two-year election cycle.

Seriously, I don’t understand what the plebians are complaining about. After all, they have as much right to buy a politician as a Wall Street billionaire.

Blatant and shameless oligarchy, here we come…

[photo via Wikipedia Commons]

SCOTUS turns away Oklahoma ultrasound law

Los Angeles Times: For the second time in two weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court has let stand a ruling that strikes down a major abortion regulation from Oklahoma.

The justices on Tuesday turned down the state’s attempt to reinstate a law that would have required pregnant women to undergo an ultrasound test and hear about the size and possible heartbeat of the fetus.

Last year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down the state’s ultrasound law on the grounds it put an undue burden on a woman’s right to abortion.

This is what always gets me; the extremely weak and stupid rationale for these sorts of laws. “State Atty. Gen. Scott Pruitt appealed and argued the law was needed to ensure women were ‘fully informed’ before they opted for abortion,” according to the report.

Just once I’d like to see one of these clowns asked point blank what they think it is that most women don’t understand about pregnancy. What Pruitt’s argument — and that of every “informed consent” spin doctor out there — boils down to is an argument that women are too stupid to know what they’re doing, so they need a helpful Republican male politician to draw them a damned picture with a sonogram.

It’s not just an unnecessary burden, it’s an insulting one, as well.

Jim Crow Stew

Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News.

Supreme Court slaps back insane corporate overreach

Washington Post: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that human genes cannot be patented, a decision that could shape the future of medical and genetic research and have profound effects on pharmaceuticals and agriculture.

The ruling was a split decision for Myriad Genetics Inc., which holds patents on genes that have been linked to breast and ovarian cancer.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, said that merely isolating those specific genes — called BRCA1 and BRCA2 — was not worthy of a patent.

“Myriad found the location of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, but that discovery, by itself, does not render the BRCA genes … patent eligible,” Thomas wrote.

On the other hand, Thomas wrote, Myriad’s creation of a synthetic form of DNA — called cDNA — based on its discovery does deserve patent protection.

That you can just go out and find something that already exists and patent it is crazy. How about I take out a patent on iron ore — and then whenever someone makes so much as a tiny steel cotter pin, I get a little something?

But the claim was actually worse than that and would’ve given the company a practical monopoly on work involving these genes, slowing medical research tremendously.

“Today, the court struck down a major barrier to patient care and medical innovation,” said the ACLU, which represented the challenegers to Myriad’s claims . “Because of this ruling, patients will have greater access to genetic testing, and scientists can engage in research on these genes without fear of being sued.”

[image via Caroline Davis2010]

Alito’s naked judicial activism

Steve Benen:

I’m still working my way through the transcript (pdf) of today’s Supreme Court oral argument on California’s Prop 8, but there’s one quote that already seems to be generating quite a bit of attention. It comes by way of Justice Samuel Alito:

“Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years. Same-sex marriage is very new. I think it was first adopted in The Netherlands in 2000. So there isn’t a lot of data about its effect. And it may turn out to be a — a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing, as the supporters of Proposition 8 apparently believe.

“But you want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution, which is newer than cell phones or the Internet? I mean we — we are not — we do not have the ability to see the future. On a question like that, of such fundamental importance, why should it not be left for the people, either acting through initiatives and referendums or through their elected public officials?”

Alito’s argument seems to be one focused on the calendar. Perhaps, the theory goes, millions of Americans can be denied equal rights for an indefinite period of time, and jurists can revisit the issue in the future. At that point, they can revisit whether or not allowing two consenting adults to get married is “a good thing.”

Remember the fine print in the Declaration of Independence? We have an inalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, just so long as the specific type of happiness is older than mobile telephones.

There’s a term for handing down a decision that’s based on personal beliefs, rather than the Constitution and law: “judicial activism.” Seems to me there was a time when conservatives thought that was a bad thing. It’s not their job to decide whether or not a law or a finding is a good idea, only whether it’s just.

We didn’t hire Samuel Alito to be a speculative anthropologist, we hired him to be a Supreme Court Justice. No one’s asking him to predict the future, because that’s not in the job description.

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

Pretending it's the End of an Era

Lee Judge, Kansas City Star.

Antonin Crow

Daryl Cagle, Cagle Cartoons.

Quoth Jim Crow

Kate Palmer, AAEC.

Civil rights, shmivil rights...

Jim Morin, Miami Herald.

Antonin Scalia has a dream

Scalia: Voting Rights Act Is ‘Perpetuation Of Racial Entitlement’.

SCOTUS refuses to dismantle what little remains of US campaign finance laws

Associated Press:

The Supreme Court won’t hear an appeal of a decision upholding a century-old ban on corporate campaign contributions in federal elections.

The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from William P. Danielczyk Jr. and Eugene R. Biagi, who wanted the courts to say the ban violates corporations’ free-speech rights.

A federal judge agreed with them, but the 4th U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., overturned that decision. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision struck down a prohibition against corporate spending on campaign activities by independent groups but left untouched the ban on direct contributions to candidates.

The judge said independent expenditures and direct contributions were both political speech, but the appeals court said they must be regulated differently.

The justices will not review that decision.

Thank goodness for small miracles. This decision won’t make things any better, because it leaves the law as it is. But it keeps things from getting any worse — and yes, this case proves that worse is still possible.

Cornyn Thinks Individual Donors are the Problem

I'm going to make the completely unfounded assumption that Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) would rather be called an idiot than a liar. After all, an idiot can't help saying something that's obviously not true, because he's too dumb to know the difference. On the other hand, a liar is someone who says something that's obviously not true, because he thinks you're too dumb to know the difference. One is immoral and unethical, the other is simply a tragedy of birth. So let's cut Cornyn a little slack and assume he's just an idiot.

Raw Story:

Sen. John Cornyn wants everyone to calm down about a Supreme Court decision that would allow corporations to pour an unlimited amount of cash into campaign advertisements. Cornyn believes the effect of the decision has been "overstated."

"I think [the impact has] been overstated," Cornyn (R-TX) told Fox News' Chris Wallace.

Apparently Cornyn thinks that contributions to campaigns by individual donors is more of a threat than unchecked money from large corporations. "Frankly, there has been an explosion of money into federal races for public office since, well, in the last ten years since campaign finance reform. It hasn't done anything to stop the flow of money in," he said.

Yes, the amount of money it takes to run for office is a problem, but it's not the problem that campaign finance reform was designed to address. The problem is that special interests were already able to exercise undue influence over candidates, in the form of huge contributions. It's basically legalized bribery and the Supreme Court has went and made it worse. That's the problem John. The idea was correct a corrupt system, not an expensive one. But we understand that you don't get that, because we've already gone ahead and assumed you're an idiot and these concepts are completely beyond your limited mental faculties.

Did I mention that John Cornyn's the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, that it's his job to raise sacks and sacks of money for Republican candidates, and that the Supreme Court just made his job one helluva lot easier?

I probably should've. I think I'm going to change my opinion on the "liar vs. idiot" question now...

A Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Decision

The Supreme Court, along its typical sane-to-wingnut vote count, voted 5-4 to strike down limits on corporate and union campaign contributions. As a result, conservatives get to shut the fuck up about "judicial activism" now. This overturns laws going back over a century.

For their part, the White House wasn't happy.

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington--while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That's why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.

Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership is doing just that. The ruling wasn't a surprise and they should've had a bill loaded and ready to fire, but these are Democrats, so getting caught with their pants around their ankles shouldn't come as much of a shock.

How bad is this decision? Pretty damned bad. At issue was a "documentary" that was actually a long political ad against then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Talk Radio News Service:

Justice Stevens wrote a lengthy dissent, harshly attacking the bases of the Court’s opinion. He pointed out that the law was not an outright ban, as Citizens United could have used PAC funding, aired the ad earlier, or refused contributions from for-profit corporations. He also noted that the Supreme Court has previously upheld speech restrictions on other groups based on their identities, such as students, prisoners, and members of the armed forces. The majority’s logic, Stevens wrote, “would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.”

Justice Stevens also criticized the majority for producing a broader decision than was necessary. Citizens United had only asked for a special waiver for its documentary, but the majority chose to take the opportunity to strike down the entire law.

Hope you enjoyed citizen democracy. Unless this gets dealt with, individuals just got bought out of the system. 234 years was a pretty good run, though.

Griper Blade: I, Robocaller

Robocalls. If you're a voter in one of the "battleground states," you're familiar with them. Right when you're in the middle of doing something liberal -- say, destroying the family by making cakes for same sex weddings -- the phone rings and a voice tells you "the truth" about Barack Obama.

Who makes robocalls? That should be obvious from the name -- robots. Clearly, they see the McCain-Palin ticket as being stronger for their radical robot agenda. The metal men, with their fierce laser beam eyes and computer brains, want nothing more than to see McCain elected.

Why?

I looked up the Three Laws of Robotics and discovered a chilling fact. See for yourself:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

My discovery? That there's nothing barring a robot from lying. You could argue that losing an election would constitute "harm" for Barack Obama, but robots -- with their merciless calculations -- could see McCain losing as an equal harm. The second law could be overriding the first, since offense and defense are merely different positions in the same game. Team McCain orders the robots to make the calls, so the robots do it. The harm caused to Obama by doing it is rendered neutral by the harm caused to McCain by not doing it.

And doing it they are. Oh, yes indeed. Doing it they most certainly are...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: The Jewel of Liberty

Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings -- give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else!... Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.
-Patrick Henry

I went Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon to get the skinny on yesterday's Supreme Court decision ruling that prisoners at Guantanamo have habeas corpus rights. That quote comes from his post. It pretty much says it all. If we give up everything this nation stands for in order to protect it, what are we protecting? Once again, the idea that we're "fighting for freedom" is shown to be a bunch of crap. We're fighting for authoritarianism, which has much more in common with modern day China than those original thirteen colonies.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that you don't get to lock people up forever without having to prove you've got a damned good reason to do it. That's it. They didn't set anyone free, they didn't keep anyone from being arrested, they didn't order Gitmo burned to the ground. All they did was require that the military and the administration give some good reason for keeping people in a dungeon.

The reaction on the right has been predictable. The BS flies fast and furious. The one response that really got to me while I was looking for reactions was Sen. Lindsey Graham's. "I am deeply disappointed in what I think is a tremendously dangerous and irresponsible ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court," Graham said. "The court has conferred upon civilian judges the right to make military decisions. These judges have virtually no training in military matters yet civilian judges, in some of the most liberal district courts in the country, will have an opportunity to determine who is a threat to the United States."

It's that "in some of the most liberal district courts in the country" that gets me. For the record, Lindsey Graham's a freakin' prick. What he's saying is that liberal judges aren't real judges and paints them as terrorist sympathizers. There aren't many people in government that I actually hate -- Lindsey Graham just made that short list with this divisive and stupid statement...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Want to Know What Kind of Judges McCain Would Nominate? Meet Robert Bork

Yesterday, I wrote, "Any Democratic voter who believes McCain would be better than Obama is a brand-new kind of stupid." Today, I'm going to show why that is. People who've bought into Hillary Clinton's argument that experience is everything might conclude that McCain has the experience market cornered. If, as Hillary tells us, the most experienced is the most qualified, then Baghdad Johnny wins hands down.

Of course, experience isn't really a huge advantage in a president. Nixon was very experienced, Lincoln was not. Given a choice between the two, I'd take the newbie without giving it a second thought. As choices go, this isn't really much of a stumper.

The problem with these Democratic voters who are a brand-new kind of stupid is that they aren't listening to what McCain is saying. Or, at least, they're ignoring what he's saying. Because what he's saying is that he's George W. Bush...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Good News & Bad News About Bald Eagles

The good news, being played up by almost every damned news source I've checked today:

National Geographic:

The bald eagle has rebounded from the brink of extinction, U.S. officials say, and in an announcement this morning the government removed it from the list of federally protected species.

[...]

Michael Daulton, director of conservation policy for the National Audubon Society in Washington, D.C., called the eagle's recovery "one of the greatest achievements for conservation in American history."

Now the bad news, reported by almost none of the news sources I've checked to day:

The celebratory mood, however, is dampened in some quarters by a Supreme Court decision Monday that conservationists fear will curtail the reach of the Endangered Species Act.

Traditionally federal agencies must consider how projects such as dam building, forest logging, and subdivision construction will affect endangered species before issuing permits.

But in its recent 5-4 ruling, the court decided the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can transfer permitting authority to state agencies without first considering the welfare of endangered species. The ruling specifically affects permits issued under the Clean Water Act.

"The full effect of this decision remains to be seen, but we are very concerned," said Irvin of Defenders of Wildlife, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case.

[...]

Irvin is concerned the Bush Administration will try to use the ruling to argue that other federal laws also trump the Endangered Species Act.

In a press statement, the National Association of Home Builders, a trade organization that represents developers, applauded the Supreme Court decision as maintaining balance when considering environmental regulations.

"We can't say that the Endangered Species Act is an 'uber-statute' that should slow down regulatory decisions," the builders association president Brian Catalde said.

So here's a future headline regarding the bald eagle being taken off the endangered list -- "It Was Good While It Lasted."

Griper Blade: Score One for the Theocrats

It's the Bush packed Supreme Court in action. The latest in a series of short-sighted, simpleminded, politically motivated SCOTUS decisions says that if the government uses your money to violate the Constitution, you get to shut the hell up about it.

Bloomberg News:

The U.S. Supreme Court limited the power of taxpayers to challenge government actions as unconstitutionally promoting religion, throwing out a suit aimed at President George W. Bush's faith-based initiatives office.

The justices, voting 5-4, said a group of taxpayers lacked the legal right to sue over White House-sponsored conferences designed to help groups compete for social-service funding. The suit contended the sessions promoted religious organizations over secular ones.

"The decision insulates the federal government's executive branch from lawsuits centering on the U.S. constitutional ban on establishment of religion," the report reads. "The ruling also may shield states, although a number of them have laws that give their taxpayers broad rights to sue over public spending."

The whole thing hinges on the issue of 'standing' -- i.e., who has the right to sue. This Supreme Court has a history of ruling on the issue of standing when they can't find any other reasoning to get the result they've wanted. This way, they don't have to actually make a decision on the case. The Supremes had previously ruled that an atheist father, Michael Newdow, had no standing to challenge a California law requiring schools begin the day with the Pledge of Allegiance (complete with the affirmation, "Under God").

So who has the right to sue in these cases? That's a damned good question...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Republicans Don't Stand For Things, They Stand Against Things

It may be the most insulting decision of our time. Speaking for the majority of the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote of the abortion procedure intact dilation and extraction, "It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns ... what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child." [full decision here (PDF)]

In other words, women can't possibly understand what a doctor tells them. Somehow, right wing conservative magic will set in later on down the road, giving women a brief flash of the superior understanding usually reserved to Republican men, and they'll be overcome with grief to learn that they had an abortion.

It's the sort of ruling that reeks of being written in his head long before he heard the case. It's not an opinion about abortion or law, it's Kennedy's opinion that women are children and incapable of informed decisions. The line of reasoning comes not from the last century, but from the century before it.

Meanwhile, Kennedy's -- and the majority of the court's -- pre-suffrage mindset creates real world problems with real world consequences. Ironically, Kennedy may come regret what he's done -- but I doubt it. That would require wisdom...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Since When Does Bush Get to Talk About the 'Sanctity of Life?'

Is there anyone on Earth who wants George W. Bush to make their medical decisions for them? I hope not. The president has a long history of making exactly the wrong decisions. From Iraq to Katrina to deciding Harriet Miers was a shoe-in for the Supreme Court, Bush has proved the lousiness of his decision making skills over and over.

So it was without great joy that american women received the news that Bush and the Supreme Court had made a medical decision for them. The Supreme Court's decision that a ban on intact dilation and extraction -- misnamed by opponents and a compliant media 'partial birth abortion' -- is constitutional means that, male or female, you no longer have the right to be healthy. It's not protected by the Constitution.

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America:

"The Court has disregarded the medical opinion of leading doctors who oppose the ban. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists -- which represents 90 percent of the OB GYNs in this country -- says the ban is harmful to women's health and interferes with medical decision making.

"This case is about more than abortion. This decision means the Court is willing to partner with the Bush administration and uphold laws that interfere with personal decisions that should be left up to a woman and her family.

"Indeed, this is a setback for all Americans who believe politicians should not make private, personal medical decisions for the rest of us. Many pro-choice lawmakers, including presidential candidates, opposed the Bush Federal Abortion Ban. These leaders are right to remind the public that President Bush's appointees to the Court are taking women's reproductive rights in a dangerous direction."

The law bans the procedure, even in the event that pregnancy would affect the woman's health. Bush, Congress, and the Supreme Court have determined that the procedure is never medically necessary, despite the fact that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say that it is. Nothing, not even the freakin' facts, will stand in the way of the anti-choice ideology. The people who think that evolution is a bunch of crap and God made you out of dust get to make medical decisions for you from now on. Bring on the witch doctors and faith healers...

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