Friday, November 01, 2013
Weekly reminder
As of October 29, at least 9,977 people had been killed by gunfire in the US since Newtown, at least 89 of them in Massachusetts.
132.5 - More on NSA spying
More on NSA spying
Recently, syndicated columnist Richard Cohen, who has an undeserved reputation as a liberal, declared that he had changed his mind about Edward Snowden. Initially, he recalled, he called Snowden “ridiculously cinematic” and “narcissistic” and certainly no whistleblower. Actually, he also said Snowden would be remembered as a "cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood" and called journalist Glenn Greenwald "vainglorious" but we'll, let that pass because last week, Cohen said "time has proved my judgments were just plain wrong." Which is not at all surprising for Richard Cohen, but still the admission is welcome.
One of things that changed his mind is that, while he still maintains that much of what Snowden revealed had already been leaked, still, quoting him, "my mouth is agape at the sheer size of these data-gathering programs."
Even those of us who say that no, this was not, as the smug pundits would have it, old news to be ignored can agree with the jaw-dropping part. And the gaping just increases by the day.
For one example, we've heard about the spooks tracking information about the phone calls made by millions of Americans. We've heard about them tracking internet usage and emails. Now it turns out they are also harvesting hundreds of millions of e-mail address books along with “buddy lists” from instant messaging services around the world.
According to documents among those released by Snowden, on a single day last year, a day described in the documents as typical, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected nearly 690,000 e-mail address books, a rate of over 250 million per year, plus a half-million more buddy lists on that same day.
That is, rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is just swallowing up a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Such address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information while inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometime contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.
This would all be blatantly and transparently illegal if it were done domestically, but because these contact lists are gathered through secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or other services that control Internet traffic, it's all supposed to be just swell.
Except, of course, for the fact that data does not know borders and many large tech companies maintain data centers in various places around the world - so that, for example, an email from one US-based gmail account to another US based-gmail account could easily be routed through a server outside the US - and, one NSA offical said, when information passes through “the overseas collection apparatus, the assumption is you’re not a US person.”
Which means that although the collection takes place overseas, two senior US intelligence officials acknowledged to the Washington Post that it sweeps in the contacts of millions, perhaps tens of millions, of Americans.
It also came out recently that the NSA has engaged in massive spying on the phone systems of European nations.
A couple of weeks ago, the French newspaper Le Monde reported that last December, in that one month, the NSA recorded over 70 million phone calls in France.
And according to an account in the Spanish daily El Mundo on October 28, the NSA recently tracked over 60 million calls in Spain, again in the space of a single month.
The NSA targeted the personal cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, uncovered when the German paper Der Spiegel showed her NSA documents with her cellphone number written on them. Confronted about this, White House officials insisted that the US "is not monitoring and will not monitor" Merkel's calls but carefully dodged saying they hadn't done so in the past.
Thomas Oppermann, who heads a German parliamentary committee that oversees the country's intelligence service, says his panel was "deceived" by the US about its intelligence activities in Germany.
And it wasn't just Merkel. Der Spiegel had previously uncovered NSA activity against the offices and communications of senior officials of the European Union.
And it wasn't just Europe: Der Spiegel also reported that the NSA has been systematically eavesdropping on the Mexican government for years, including hacking into the public email account of then-president Felipe Calderón, an email domain also used by cabinet members and which contained, the NSA documents proudly declare, "diplomatic, economic and leadership communications."
The NSA also monitored current Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and others around him even when he was a candidate for president in the summer of 2012.
This came out not long after it was revealed that the US had been spying on Dilma Rousseff, the president of Brazil, along with her key advisors as the NSA told itself there were "high-value targets" among her inner circle.
In fact, the NSA monitored the telephone conversations of at least 35 world leaders after obtaining their numbers from an official in another department of the federal government.
However, there was one world leader who didn't seem upset by all the spying: British Prime Minister and all-around freedom-of-the-press-hating David Cameron, who has repeatedly attacked the revelations, most recently by claiming that critics of the massive spying programs have a "la-di-da, airy-fairy" view of the world, and now is threatening to "act" against newspapers - specifically, the Guardian - if they don't "demonstrate some social responsibility." That is, if they don't just shut up.
It could be that part of the reason for his attitude is that unlike the case of Angela Merkel, in fact unique among leaders, the White House says not only that it doesn't and won't spy on Cameron, but also that it never has.
To top this off with one of those "laugh so you don't cry" moments, a source described as "a senior administration official" told the AP on Monday that the White House is considering no longer spying on the heads of state of US allies but they haven't made up their mind yet.
The thing of it is, all this massive intrusion on the privacy of, all this spying on, literally scores if not hundreds of people around the world is not only morally and politically offensive and profoundly anti-democratic, it becomes self-defeating. The director of the NSA, Starship Captain Keith Alexander, has defended a policy of what he called "collect it all" by saying that you can't find a needle in a haystack if you don't have the haystack.
(He actually said “You need a haystack to find a needle,” which sounds like a koan, but I'm pretty sure we got his meaning right.)
The problem is, though, the NSA's approach is less like trying to find a needle in a haystack than it is trying to find a needle while throwing huge handfuls of hay over it. In fact, the NSA is collecting so much information that it has occasionally threatened to outstrip even its own massive storage capacity, so much so that at times the agency has had to issue “emergency detasking” orders - that is, to tell its own programs busily sucking up data to "Stop. Just ... stop."
Oh, and one of the things causing the NSA to choke on its own data? Spam. Kinda nice in an odd way to know they're getting screwed up by the same thing the rest of us are.
But one clear result of this glut, this plethora, of data is that these programs are just not nearly as good, not nearly as efficient, as they're made out to be.
The NSA and its defenders, echoed by the media, like to make grandiose claims the programs are key to, vital to, absolutely indispensible in, stopping terrorists. Back on June 18, the House Intelligence Committee held a hearing about NSA disclosures, during which Starship Captain Alexander claimed that on more than 50 occasions since 9/11 these programs have protected the US and our allies from terrorist threats across the globe, including more than 10 targeting the US.
But early in October, Alexander admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that such claims are essentially vapor. Sen. Pat Leahy charged that the claim of thwarted attacks was "plainly wrong. ... These weren't all plots, and they weren't all thwarted." In response, Alexander conceded that the examples were "not all plots" and, significantly, also admitted there were only "one or possibly two" cases of terrorist activity that would not have been prevented "but for" the massive spying. Which easily leaves us to wonder if even that figure is exaggerated.
Our privacy is being stripped, our rights undermined, power is being concentrated in fewer hands, official secrecy is expanding dramatically - and no one, when they are actually pressed, can give us a single damn good reason why.
So it's nice to know that there is some pushback on this. First, internationally, Germany, France, Spain, the European Union, Brazil, and to a lesser extent Mexico are all royally ticked off. Domestically, there are some legislative attempts being made to at least begin - empahsize begin - to address some - emphasize some - of the worst aspects of this.
On that, remember that in terms of domestic spying, there are two primary issues. One is Section 215 of the so-called PATRIOT Act, the one call the TRAITOR Act. This is the section used to justify the massive phone spying. The other is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which is what's used to justify the massive internet spying. There are some bills looking to go after Section 215, for example, by requiring that any warrant issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court must contain "specific and articulable facts" that the information is relevant to an investigation and the that the order "pertains to" an individual.
The are proposals to require the White House to release its legal justification for the spying. This to me is one of the most astonishing aspects of the whole business: The Bush gang and now the Obama gang claim they have the legal authority to do all the spying they are doing based on their own legal interpretation of the laws. Here's the kicker: That interpretation is secret and the White House has refused to release it. They say "we have to power to do this, the law says so." The public goes "uh, wait a minute, how do you get that from this," and they say "we won't tell you." Or, as Ring Lardner wrote in one of his stories, "'Shut up,' he explained."
There are also bills to change the FISA Court itself by requiring release of its findings and the manner of choosing its members. As of now, those members are chosen in secret by the Chief Justice - which right now means John "The Smirk" Roberts. There are a couple of proposals to make the process public and to spread around the authority.
Unfortunately, there is no bill in Congress with prospects of moving forward that tackles Section 702 of FISA, the section used for PRISM and other internet spying.
Some of the names attached to various of these bills are, in the Senate, Pat Leahy, Al Franken, Mark Udall, Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley, Mike Lee, and Richard Blumenthal, and in the House, John Conyers, Justin Amash, Adam Schiff, Todd Rokita, Rick Larsen, Steve Cohen, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Jim Sensenbrenner, and Zoe Lofgren. You might make note both of those names - and of those names you don't hear in that list and maybe ask them why they aren't on it.
Potentially more important in the grander scheme of things is that there is also pushback in the streets. Last Saturday, October 26, thousands of people marched in Washington, DC under the banner of the Stop Watching Us coalition while "satellite" actions occurred in places like Austin, Chicago, and eight sites in Germany.
Billed by organizers as "the largest rally yet to protest mass surveillance", the march and rally was sponsored by an unusually broad coalition, everything from the ACLU, the Green Party, Color of Change, and Daily Kos to the Libertarian Party, FreedomWorks and Young Americans for Liberty. Left and right agree on little, but we can agree on privacy.
The rally included presenting to Congress a letter demanding an end to blanket data collection, a letter that now has over 585,000 names attached.
The best couple of sentence summation came in a statement from Edward Snowden, which was read to the crowd.
Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-edward-snowden-is-no-traitor/2013/10/21/f9d2ae5a-3a74-11e3-a94f-b58017bfee6c_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-nsa-is-doing-what-google-does/2013/06/10/fe969612-d1f7-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-collects-millions-of-e-mail-address-books-globally/2013/10/14/8e58b5be-34f9-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/10/france-summons-us-ambassador-over-spying-2013102183224174263.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/28/stop_watching_us_as_diplomatic_fallout
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/nsa-spying-allegations-germany_n_4154334.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/24/nsa-guardian-35-world-leaders_n_4159208.html?utm_hp_ref=uk
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/nsa-surveillance-world-leaders-calls
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-hacked-email-account-of-mexican-president-a-928817.html
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/21/206038/more-anger-from-mexico-over-us.html#emlnl=World_Newsletter
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/david-cameron-guardian-act_n_4170600.html?ref=topbar
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/25/david-cameron-angela-merkel_n_4162948.html?ref=topbar
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/28/usa-spying-cameron-idUSL5N0II2WQ20131028
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10401111/US-denies-spying-on-David-Cameron.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/nsa-spying-allies_n_4172164.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/10/1288-more-on-nsa-spying.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/crux-nsa-collect-it-all
http://warincontext.org/2013/07/21/how-big-is-the-nsas-haystack/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan
http://fair.org/home/see-spying-works/
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/10/04/when-can-you-trust-the-nsas-claims-about-the-nsa/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/effs-cheat-sheet
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/26/nsa-stop-watching-us_n_4166640.html
https://rally.stopwatching.us/
https://rally.stopwatching.us/viewing-parties/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/26/nsa-rally-stop-watching-washington-snowden
https://optin.stopwatching.us/
http://rt.com/usa/stop-watching-us-rally-791/
Recently, syndicated columnist Richard Cohen, who has an undeserved reputation as a liberal, declared that he had changed his mind about Edward Snowden. Initially, he recalled, he called Snowden “ridiculously cinematic” and “narcissistic” and certainly no whistleblower. Actually, he also said Snowden would be remembered as a "cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood" and called journalist Glenn Greenwald "vainglorious" but we'll, let that pass because last week, Cohen said "time has proved my judgments were just plain wrong." Which is not at all surprising for Richard Cohen, but still the admission is welcome.One of things that changed his mind is that, while he still maintains that much of what Snowden revealed had already been leaked, still, quoting him, "my mouth is agape at the sheer size of these data-gathering programs."
Even those of us who say that no, this was not, as the smug pundits would have it, old news to be ignored can agree with the jaw-dropping part. And the gaping just increases by the day.
For one example, we've heard about the spooks tracking information about the phone calls made by millions of Americans. We've heard about them tracking internet usage and emails. Now it turns out they are also harvesting hundreds of millions of e-mail address books along with “buddy lists” from instant messaging services around the world.According to documents among those released by Snowden, on a single day last year, a day described in the documents as typical, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected nearly 690,000 e-mail address books, a rate of over 250 million per year, plus a half-million more buddy lists on that same day.
That is, rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is just swallowing up a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Such address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information while inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometime contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.
This would all be blatantly and transparently illegal if it were done domestically, but because these contact lists are gathered through secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or other services that control Internet traffic, it's all supposed to be just swell.
Except, of course, for the fact that data does not know borders and many large tech companies maintain data centers in various places around the world - so that, for example, an email from one US-based gmail account to another US based-gmail account could easily be routed through a server outside the US - and, one NSA offical said, when information passes through “the overseas collection apparatus, the assumption is you’re not a US person.”
Which means that although the collection takes place overseas, two senior US intelligence officials acknowledged to the Washington Post that it sweeps in the contacts of millions, perhaps tens of millions, of Americans.It also came out recently that the NSA has engaged in massive spying on the phone systems of European nations.
A couple of weeks ago, the French newspaper Le Monde reported that last December, in that one month, the NSA recorded over 70 million phone calls in France.
And according to an account in the Spanish daily El Mundo on October 28, the NSA recently tracked over 60 million calls in Spain, again in the space of a single month.
The NSA targeted the personal cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, uncovered when the German paper Der Spiegel showed her NSA documents with her cellphone number written on them. Confronted about this, White House officials insisted that the US "is not monitoring and will not monitor" Merkel's calls but carefully dodged saying they hadn't done so in the past.
Thomas Oppermann, who heads a German parliamentary committee that oversees the country's intelligence service, says his panel was "deceived" by the US about its intelligence activities in Germany.
And it wasn't just Merkel. Der Spiegel had previously uncovered NSA activity against the offices and communications of senior officials of the European Union.
And it wasn't just Europe: Der Spiegel also reported that the NSA has been systematically eavesdropping on the Mexican government for years, including hacking into the public email account of then-president Felipe Calderón, an email domain also used by cabinet members and which contained, the NSA documents proudly declare, "diplomatic, economic and leadership communications."The NSA also monitored current Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and others around him even when he was a candidate for president in the summer of 2012.
This came out not long after it was revealed that the US had been spying on Dilma Rousseff, the president of Brazil, along with her key advisors as the NSA told itself there were "high-value targets" among her inner circle.
In fact, the NSA monitored the telephone conversations of at least 35 world leaders after obtaining their numbers from an official in another department of the federal government.
However, there was one world leader who didn't seem upset by all the spying: British Prime Minister and all-around freedom-of-the-press-hating David Cameron, who has repeatedly attacked the revelations, most recently by claiming that critics of the massive spying programs have a "la-di-da, airy-fairy" view of the world, and now is threatening to "act" against newspapers - specifically, the Guardian - if they don't "demonstrate some social responsibility." That is, if they don't just shut up.
It could be that part of the reason for his attitude is that unlike the case of Angela Merkel, in fact unique among leaders, the White House says not only that it doesn't and won't spy on Cameron, but also that it never has.
To top this off with one of those "laugh so you don't cry" moments, a source described as "a senior administration official" told the AP on Monday that the White House is considering no longer spying on the heads of state of US allies but they haven't made up their mind yet.
The thing of it is, all this massive intrusion on the privacy of, all this spying on, literally scores if not hundreds of people around the world is not only morally and politically offensive and profoundly anti-democratic, it becomes self-defeating. The director of the NSA, Starship Captain Keith Alexander, has defended a policy of what he called "collect it all" by saying that you can't find a needle in a haystack if you don't have the haystack.
(He actually said “You need a haystack to find a needle,” which sounds like a koan, but I'm pretty sure we got his meaning right.)
The problem is, though, the NSA's approach is less like trying to find a needle in a haystack than it is trying to find a needle while throwing huge handfuls of hay over it. In fact, the NSA is collecting so much information that it has occasionally threatened to outstrip even its own massive storage capacity, so much so that at times the agency has had to issue “emergency detasking” orders - that is, to tell its own programs busily sucking up data to "Stop. Just ... stop."Oh, and one of the things causing the NSA to choke on its own data? Spam. Kinda nice in an odd way to know they're getting screwed up by the same thing the rest of us are.
But one clear result of this glut, this plethora, of data is that these programs are just not nearly as good, not nearly as efficient, as they're made out to be.
The NSA and its defenders, echoed by the media, like to make grandiose claims the programs are key to, vital to, absolutely indispensible in, stopping terrorists. Back on June 18, the House Intelligence Committee held a hearing about NSA disclosures, during which Starship Captain Alexander claimed that on more than 50 occasions since 9/11 these programs have protected the US and our allies from terrorist threats across the globe, including more than 10 targeting the US.
But early in October, Alexander admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that such claims are essentially vapor. Sen. Pat Leahy charged that the claim of thwarted attacks was "plainly wrong. ... These weren't all plots, and they weren't all thwarted." In response, Alexander conceded that the examples were "not all plots" and, significantly, also admitted there were only "one or possibly two" cases of terrorist activity that would not have been prevented "but for" the massive spying. Which easily leaves us to wonder if even that figure is exaggerated.
Our privacy is being stripped, our rights undermined, power is being concentrated in fewer hands, official secrecy is expanding dramatically - and no one, when they are actually pressed, can give us a single damn good reason why.
So it's nice to know that there is some pushback on this. First, internationally, Germany, France, Spain, the European Union, Brazil, and to a lesser extent Mexico are all royally ticked off. Domestically, there are some legislative attempts being made to at least begin - empahsize begin - to address some - emphasize some - of the worst aspects of this.
On that, remember that in terms of domestic spying, there are two primary issues. One is Section 215 of the so-called PATRIOT Act, the one call the TRAITOR Act. This is the section used to justify the massive phone spying. The other is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which is what's used to justify the massive internet spying. There are some bills looking to go after Section 215, for example, by requiring that any warrant issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court must contain "specific and articulable facts" that the information is relevant to an investigation and the that the order "pertains to" an individual.
The are proposals to require the White House to release its legal justification for the spying. This to me is one of the most astonishing aspects of the whole business: The Bush gang and now the Obama gang claim they have the legal authority to do all the spying they are doing based on their own legal interpretation of the laws. Here's the kicker: That interpretation is secret and the White House has refused to release it. They say "we have to power to do this, the law says so." The public goes "uh, wait a minute, how do you get that from this," and they say "we won't tell you." Or, as Ring Lardner wrote in one of his stories, "'Shut up,' he explained."There are also bills to change the FISA Court itself by requiring release of its findings and the manner of choosing its members. As of now, those members are chosen in secret by the Chief Justice - which right now means John "The Smirk" Roberts. There are a couple of proposals to make the process public and to spread around the authority.
Unfortunately, there is no bill in Congress with prospects of moving forward that tackles Section 702 of FISA, the section used for PRISM and other internet spying.
Some of the names attached to various of these bills are, in the Senate, Pat Leahy, Al Franken, Mark Udall, Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley, Mike Lee, and Richard Blumenthal, and in the House, John Conyers, Justin Amash, Adam Schiff, Todd Rokita, Rick Larsen, Steve Cohen, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Jim Sensenbrenner, and Zoe Lofgren. You might make note both of those names - and of those names you don't hear in that list and maybe ask them why they aren't on it.
Potentially more important in the grander scheme of things is that there is also pushback in the streets. Last Saturday, October 26, thousands of people marched in Washington, DC under the banner of the Stop Watching Us coalition while "satellite" actions occurred in places like Austin, Chicago, and eight sites in Germany. Billed by organizers as "the largest rally yet to protest mass surveillance", the march and rally was sponsored by an unusually broad coalition, everything from the ACLU, the Green Party, Color of Change, and Daily Kos to the Libertarian Party, FreedomWorks and Young Americans for Liberty. Left and right agree on little, but we can agree on privacy.
The rally included presenting to Congress a letter demanding an end to blanket data collection, a letter that now has over 585,000 names attached.
The best couple of sentence summation came in a statement from Edward Snowden, which was read to the crowd.
Today, no telephone in America makes a call without leaving a record with the NSA. Today, no Internet transaction enters or leaves America without passing through the NSA’s hands. Our representatives in Congress tell us this is not surveillance. They’re wrong.Amen to that. And if you are not deeply offended and profoundly outraged and even frightened by all this, you really need to ask yourself what's wrong with you.
Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-edward-snowden-is-no-traitor/2013/10/21/f9d2ae5a-3a74-11e3-a94f-b58017bfee6c_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-nsa-is-doing-what-google-does/2013/06/10/fe969612-d1f7-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-collects-millions-of-e-mail-address-books-globally/2013/10/14/8e58b5be-34f9-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/10/france-summons-us-ambassador-over-spying-2013102183224174263.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/28/stop_watching_us_as_diplomatic_fallout
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/nsa-spying-allegations-germany_n_4154334.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/24/nsa-guardian-35-world-leaders_n_4159208.html?utm_hp_ref=uk
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/nsa-surveillance-world-leaders-calls
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-hacked-email-account-of-mexican-president-a-928817.html
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/21/206038/more-anger-from-mexico-over-us.html#emlnl=World_Newsletter
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/david-cameron-guardian-act_n_4170600.html?ref=topbar
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/25/david-cameron-angela-merkel_n_4162948.html?ref=topbar
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/28/usa-spying-cameron-idUSL5N0II2WQ20131028
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10401111/US-denies-spying-on-David-Cameron.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/nsa-spying-allies_n_4172164.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/10/1288-more-on-nsa-spying.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/crux-nsa-collect-it-all
http://warincontext.org/2013/07/21/how-big-is-the-nsas-haystack/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan
http://fair.org/home/see-spying-works/
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/10/04/when-can-you-trust-the-nsas-claims-about-the-nsa/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/effs-cheat-sheet
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/26/nsa-stop-watching-us_n_4166640.html
https://rally.stopwatching.us/
https://rally.stopwatching.us/viewing-parties/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/26/nsa-rally-stop-watching-washington-snowden
https://optin.stopwatching.us/
http://rt.com/usa/stop-watching-us-rally-791/
132.4 - Outrage of the Week: Shopping while black
Outrage of the Week: Shopping while black
Now for our other regular feature, the Outrage of the Week.
Last week came news that Trayon Christian, a 19-year-old engineering student from Queens, is suing Barneys, an upscale men's clothing store in Manhattan. But that's not the Outrage of the Week. The reason for the suit is.
Christian had a work-study gig at the New York City College of Technology last spring. Once that was over and his paycheck was deposited, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. Christian, whose Facebook page shows him to be a fashion-loving teen, wanted a $350 Ferragamo belt of the sort worn by a favorite rapper, Juelz Santana.
He'd been to Barneys before but had never bought anything. Still, it meant he knew the store had the belt and right where it was. He got it, went to the counter, produced his debit are and ID, and the belt was his.
Maybe. He only got a block from the store when he was stopped by two NYPD plainclothes cops saying they'd gotten a call from someone at Barneys. Christian showed them his student ID and his drivers license. The cops told him his debit card was a fake.
They were asking him "How could you afford a belt like this? Where did you get this money from?"
Did I mention Trayon Christian is black?
He was handcuffed and arrested. He says he was held for two hours before he was released. Interestingly, the only part of his account the cops dispute is that they say he was held for less than an hour, as if that was the significant point. Which means the fact that he was handcuffed and busted because someone at Barneys and New York City cops couldn't believe that a young African-American man could have come by the money for an expensive belt legally doesn't seem to be in dispute. And that sort of blatant racism is nothing short of an outrage.
As a footnote, Christian brought the belt back to Barneys and got his money back, saying "I’m not shopping there again. It’s cruel. It’s racist.”
And so, as someone at DailyKos noted, as a result of its own prejudice, Barneys has lost a customer who is going to be an engineer probably pulling down 90 big ones in a few years. Which is, I suppose, a sort of poetic justice.
Sources:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/barneys-accused-stealing-black-teen-article-1.1493101
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/23/1250074/-Shopping-While-Black-Arrested-For-Buying-a-Belt
Now for our other regular feature, the Outrage of the Week.Last week came news that Trayon Christian, a 19-year-old engineering student from Queens, is suing Barneys, an upscale men's clothing store in Manhattan. But that's not the Outrage of the Week. The reason for the suit is.
Christian had a work-study gig at the New York City College of Technology last spring. Once that was over and his paycheck was deposited, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. Christian, whose Facebook page shows him to be a fashion-loving teen, wanted a $350 Ferragamo belt of the sort worn by a favorite rapper, Juelz Santana.
He'd been to Barneys before but had never bought anything. Still, it meant he knew the store had the belt and right where it was. He got it, went to the counter, produced his debit are and ID, and the belt was his.
Maybe. He only got a block from the store when he was stopped by two NYPD plainclothes cops saying they'd gotten a call from someone at Barneys. Christian showed them his student ID and his drivers license. The cops told him his debit card was a fake.
They were asking him "How could you afford a belt like this? Where did you get this money from?"
Did I mention Trayon Christian is black?He was handcuffed and arrested. He says he was held for two hours before he was released. Interestingly, the only part of his account the cops dispute is that they say he was held for less than an hour, as if that was the significant point. Which means the fact that he was handcuffed and busted because someone at Barneys and New York City cops couldn't believe that a young African-American man could have come by the money for an expensive belt legally doesn't seem to be in dispute. And that sort of blatant racism is nothing short of an outrage.
As a footnote, Christian brought the belt back to Barneys and got his money back, saying "I’m not shopping there again. It’s cruel. It’s racist.”
And so, as someone at DailyKos noted, as a result of its own prejudice, Barneys has lost a customer who is going to be an engineer probably pulling down 90 big ones in a few years. Which is, I suppose, a sort of poetic justice.
Sources:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/barneys-accused-stealing-black-teen-article-1.1493101
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/23/1250074/-Shopping-While-Black-Arrested-For-Buying-a-Belt
132.3 - Update 2: McDonald's McFails again
Update 2: McDonald's McFails again
Okay, out third updates starts with the fact that two weeks ago I gave a Hero Award to Nancy Salgado, a McDonald's cashier who makes $8.25 an hour after ten years with the company, who confronted the president of McDonald's USA over the poverty-level wages employees get.
Subsequently, she called the company's "McResource Line," which is supposed to help McDonald's workers with issues like child and health care. First she was told she didn't even qualify for the help because the McDonald's she works at is a franchise, not one owned directly by the corporation.
But the person on the phone went on to make helpful suggestions. Like get Food Stamps. Get Medicaid. Apply to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
In fairness to her, the woman on the phone was trying to be helpful within the constraints under which she worked, but the point is that McDonald's "help" for employees getting poverty-level wages is to tell them to have the federal government - that is, taxpayers - pick up the bill.
I wonder how Witless Romney and Maine Gov. Pepé Le Pew with their 47% feel about that.
Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/10/1306-hero-award-nancy-salgado.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/mcdonalds-food-stamps_n_4151647.html?ir=Business
Okay, out third updates starts with the fact that two weeks ago I gave a Hero Award to Nancy Salgado, a McDonald's cashier who makes $8.25 an hour after ten years with the company, who confronted the president of McDonald's USA over the poverty-level wages employees get.Subsequently, she called the company's "McResource Line," which is supposed to help McDonald's workers with issues like child and health care. First she was told she didn't even qualify for the help because the McDonald's she works at is a franchise, not one owned directly by the corporation.
But the person on the phone went on to make helpful suggestions. Like get Food Stamps. Get Medicaid. Apply to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.In fairness to her, the woman on the phone was trying to be helpful within the constraints under which she worked, but the point is that McDonald's "help" for employees getting poverty-level wages is to tell them to have the federal government - that is, taxpayers - pick up the bill.
I wonder how Witless Romney and Maine Gov. Pepé Le Pew with their 47% feel about that.
Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/10/1306-hero-award-nancy-salgado.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/mcdonalds-food-stamps_n_4151647.html?ir=Business
132.2 - Update 1: Same-sex marriage
Update 1: Same-sex marriage
Three brief updates, two from last week and one from the week before.
First, in talking about how same-sex marriage rights have come to New Jersey, I mentioned the midnight weddings in Asbury Park performed by a retired priest.
The update is that the evening of that same day, that retired priest, Tom Pivinski, married Malcolm Navias, his partner of over 20 years. It was an interfaith service at their home and afterwards, they noted that the rings they have worn for 20 years can now legally be called wedding rings.
The second update is that I mentioned or at least intended to mention, that 8 counties in New Mexico allow same-sex marriages. This unusual situation can arise because the state constitution refers to marriage as a union of two people, neither expressly allowing for or denying same-sex marriage rights.
Well, after those counties began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the state Supreme Court agreed to make a decision to settle the matter for the whole state. The court heard oral arguments on October 23.
What's astonishing here is how feeble the arguments against it have become. Jim Campbell, counsel for 12 GOPpers who sued to stop same-sex marriage, actually argued that the purpose of the marriage statutes was to encourage procreation.
Now, beyond the fact that at a time when population growth and resource depletion are genuine environmental concerns and so encouraging procreation would seem to be not the best idea, by Campbell's argument, not only same-sex couples but those beyond child-bearing years could not marry. Those who are infertile could not marry. Anyone who has had a vasectomy or a tubal ligation could not marry. Birth control should be illegal.
But it gets dumber. Campbell also argued that allowing same sex-couples to marry would "discourage" heterosexual couples from marrying and procreating. And he can say that because as everyone knows, the marriage rate among heterosexuals has just plummeted in states with same-sex marriage! Why, some of those states don't even do opposite-sex marriages any more!
I really wish that when he said that someone in the court had just said to Campbell "Discourage? Um, how?"
Justice Charles Daniels didn't do that, but he did note that marriage entails "many other benefits," most of which have "nothing to do with whether we have children." He mentioned tax benefits, inheritance and property rights.
A decision is expected by year's end. So it's possible - I emphasize possible - that soon New Mexico could make it fifteen states with marriage equality.
Speaking of which, I have to make a small correction. Last week I said that 14 state plus DC allow for same-sex marriage and six more recognize some form of domestic partnership or civil union, together covering 43% of the population of the US. I also said that 10 years ago that percentage would have been zero.
While that would be true for states with full marriage equality, it overstates the case when you include domestic partnerships and civil unions: New York City allowed domestic partnerships in 1998; California did so in 1999 and DC in 2002; Vermont had civil unions starting in 2000. So 10 years ago, the percentage was not zero. But just over 15 years ago, it was.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/tom-pivinski-gay-interfaith-marriage_n_4149508.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/new-mexico-same-sex-marriage_n_4152503.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_union
Three brief updates, two from last week and one from the week before.First, in talking about how same-sex marriage rights have come to New Jersey, I mentioned the midnight weddings in Asbury Park performed by a retired priest.
The update is that the evening of that same day, that retired priest, Tom Pivinski, married Malcolm Navias, his partner of over 20 years. It was an interfaith service at their home and afterwards, they noted that the rings they have worn for 20 years can now legally be called wedding rings.
The second update is that I mentioned or at least intended to mention, that 8 counties in New Mexico allow same-sex marriages. This unusual situation can arise because the state constitution refers to marriage as a union of two people, neither expressly allowing for or denying same-sex marriage rights.
Well, after those counties began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the state Supreme Court agreed to make a decision to settle the matter for the whole state. The court heard oral arguments on October 23.
What's astonishing here is how feeble the arguments against it have become. Jim Campbell, counsel for 12 GOPpers who sued to stop same-sex marriage, actually argued that the purpose of the marriage statutes was to encourage procreation.
Now, beyond the fact that at a time when population growth and resource depletion are genuine environmental concerns and so encouraging procreation would seem to be not the best idea, by Campbell's argument, not only same-sex couples but those beyond child-bearing years could not marry. Those who are infertile could not marry. Anyone who has had a vasectomy or a tubal ligation could not marry. Birth control should be illegal.
But it gets dumber. Campbell also argued that allowing same sex-couples to marry would "discourage" heterosexual couples from marrying and procreating. And he can say that because as everyone knows, the marriage rate among heterosexuals has just plummeted in states with same-sex marriage! Why, some of those states don't even do opposite-sex marriages any more!I really wish that when he said that someone in the court had just said to Campbell "Discourage? Um, how?"
Justice Charles Daniels didn't do that, but he did note that marriage entails "many other benefits," most of which have "nothing to do with whether we have children." He mentioned tax benefits, inheritance and property rights.
A decision is expected by year's end. So it's possible - I emphasize possible - that soon New Mexico could make it fifteen states with marriage equality.
Speaking of which, I have to make a small correction. Last week I said that 14 state plus DC allow for same-sex marriage and six more recognize some form of domestic partnership or civil union, together covering 43% of the population of the US. I also said that 10 years ago that percentage would have been zero.
While that would be true for states with full marriage equality, it overstates the case when you include domestic partnerships and civil unions: New York City allowed domestic partnerships in 1998; California did so in 1999 and DC in 2002; Vermont had civil unions starting in 2000. So 10 years ago, the percentage was not zero. But just over 15 years ago, it was.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/tom-pivinski-gay-interfaith-marriage_n_4149508.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/new-mexico-same-sex-marriage_n_4152503.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_union
Thursday, October 31, 2013
132.1 - Clown Award: Maine Gov. Paul LePage
Clown Award: Maine Gov. Paul LePage
We will start this week with one of our regular weekly features, the Clown Award, given for acts of meritorious stupidity.
This week, the winner of the big red nose is Maine Gov. Paul LePage. A week or so back he was speaking to a group of right-wing women. According to a secret recording of his remarks, he told them that, quoting him,
Never mind that. So 47 percent aren't working? How many of those are students? How many are non-working spouses? How many are retired? How many are unemployed?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Department of Labor has something called the Labor Force Participation rate. It's the percentage of working-age people who are either employed or searching for work. In August, Maine's Labor Force Participation rate was 65.3 percent - which was above the national average of 63.2 percent. Considering that Maine's population is also older than the country as a whole, they actually sound like a pretty hard-working group of folks.
By the way, according to calculations of the far right-wing Heritage Foundation, of those working-age people who are not in the labor force, once you take away the people not working because they are taking care of family members, are ill, disabled, or retired, or are students, those left over for the category of "other" reasons for not working amount to just 1.1% of the total labor force.
But getting back to our clown, Gov. Pepé Le Pew was not done denouncing the residents of his own state: "One in three are collecting welfare," he claimed. "Highest in the country."
Uh.., no. As of this past March, fewer than 16,000 families in Maine were receiving TANF benefits, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Maine has something over 550,000 households, which means less than 3% of households were receiving such benefits. Even if Le Pew wants to claim he only meant a third of the 47%, that still makes it just 6% of households. Not exactly one-third.
When the recording came out, the wingnuts acted as wingnuts always do. Susan Dench, founder and president of the appallingly-misnamed Informed Women's Network, the group to which LePage was speaking, called the secretly-done recording "pathetic" and those who captured it "hapless little girls." Rule #2 of my popular list of right-wing tactics is "Attack, attack, attack."
For his part, when asked to confirm or deny that it was in fact the governor on the recording, his office replied with a statement saying Le Pew believes everyone can contribute to society and that "liberal activists" are determined to "increase the welfare rolls" while not answering the actual question. Which is a repeat of Rule #2 plus Rule #6, which is "Never answer a question."
Here's one question that doesn't need an answer: If Paul LePage a clown?
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/22/paul-lepage-47-percent_n_4143728.html
http://thetippingpoint.bangordailynews.com/2013/10/22/state-politics/gov-lepage-lets-slip-what-he-really-thinks-about-maine-people/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/01/rules-all-of-them-so-far.html
We will start this week with one of our regular weekly features, the Clown Award, given for acts of meritorious stupidity.This week, the winner of the big red nose is Maine Gov. Paul LePage. A week or so back he was speaking to a group of right-wing women. According to a secret recording of his remarks, he told them that, quoting him,
About 47 percent of able-bodied people in the state of Maine don’t work. About 47 percent. It’s really bad.First of all, just what is it with right-wing bozos and the figure of "47 percent?" What's the deal there? Is it some secret handshake? Or just used as a figure high enough to be shocking to their audience with a number unusual enough - "47" - to sound authoritative?
Never mind that. So 47 percent aren't working? How many of those are students? How many are non-working spouses? How many are retired? How many are unemployed?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Department of Labor has something called the Labor Force Participation rate. It's the percentage of working-age people who are either employed or searching for work. In August, Maine's Labor Force Participation rate was 65.3 percent - which was above the national average of 63.2 percent. Considering that Maine's population is also older than the country as a whole, they actually sound like a pretty hard-working group of folks.
By the way, according to calculations of the far right-wing Heritage Foundation, of those working-age people who are not in the labor force, once you take away the people not working because they are taking care of family members, are ill, disabled, or retired, or are students, those left over for the category of "other" reasons for not working amount to just 1.1% of the total labor force.
But getting back to our clown, Gov. Pepé Le Pew was not done denouncing the residents of his own state: "One in three are collecting welfare," he claimed. "Highest in the country."
Uh.., no. As of this past March, fewer than 16,000 families in Maine were receiving TANF benefits, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Maine has something over 550,000 households, which means less than 3% of households were receiving such benefits. Even if Le Pew wants to claim he only meant a third of the 47%, that still makes it just 6% of households. Not exactly one-third.
When the recording came out, the wingnuts acted as wingnuts always do. Susan Dench, founder and president of the appallingly-misnamed Informed Women's Network, the group to which LePage was speaking, called the secretly-done recording "pathetic" and those who captured it "hapless little girls." Rule #2 of my popular list of right-wing tactics is "Attack, attack, attack."
For his part, when asked to confirm or deny that it was in fact the governor on the recording, his office replied with a statement saying Le Pew believes everyone can contribute to society and that "liberal activists" are determined to "increase the welfare rolls" while not answering the actual question. Which is a repeat of Rule #2 plus Rule #6, which is "Never answer a question."
Here's one question that doesn't need an answer: If Paul LePage a clown?
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/22/paul-lepage-47-percent_n_4143728.html
http://thetippingpoint.bangordailynews.com/2013/10/22/state-politics/gov-lepage-lets-slip-what-he-really-thinks-about-maine-people/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/01/rules-all-of-them-so-far.html
Left Side of the Aisle #132
Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of November 1-7, 2013
This week:
Clown Award: Maine Gov. Paul LePage
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/22/paul-lepage-47-percent_n_4143728.html
http://thetippingpoint.bangordailynews.com/2013/10/22/state-politics/gov-lepage-lets-slip-what-he-really-thinks-about-maine-people/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/01/rules-all-of-them-so-far.html
Update 1: Same-sex marriage
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/tom-pivinski-gay-interfaith-marriage_n_4149508.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/new-mexico-same-sex-marriage_n_4152503.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_union
Update 2: McDonald's McFails again
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/10/1306-hero-award-nancy-salgado.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/mcdonalds-food-stamps_n_4151647.html?ir=Business
Outrage of the Week: Shopping while black
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/barneys-accused-stealing-black-teen-article-1.1493101
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/23/1250074/-Shopping-While-Black-Arrested-For-Buying-a-Belt
More on NSA spying
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-edward-snowden-is-no-traitor/2013/10/21/f9d2ae5a-3a74-11e3-a94f-b58017bfee6c_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-nsa-is-doing-what-google-does/2013/06/10/fe969612-d1f7-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-collects-millions-of-e-mail-address-books-globally/2013/10/14/8e58b5be-34f9-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/10/france-summons-us-ambassador-over-spying-2013102183224174263.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/28/stop_watching_us_as_diplomatic_fallout
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/nsa-spying-allegations-germany_n_4154334.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/24/nsa-guardian-35-world-leaders_n_4159208.html?utm_hp_ref=uk
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/nsa-surveillance-world-leaders-calls
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-hacked-email-account-of-mexican-president-a-928817.html
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/21/206038/more-anger-from-mexico-over-us.html#emlnl=World_Newsletter
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/david-cameron-guardian-act_n_4170600.html?ref=topbar
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/25/david-cameron-angela-merkel_n_4162948.html?ref=topbar
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/28/usa-spying-cameron-idUSL5N0II2WQ20131028
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10401111/US-denies-spying-on-David-Cameron.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/nsa-spying-allies_n_4172164.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/10/1288-more-on-nsa-spying.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/crux-nsa-collect-it-all
http://warincontext.org/2013/07/21/how-big-is-the-nsas-haystack/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan
http://fair.org/home/see-spying-works/
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/10/04/when-can-you-trust-the-nsas-claims-about-the-nsa/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/effs-cheat-sheet
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/26/nsa-stop-watching-us_n_4166640.html
https://rally.stopwatching.us/
https://rally.stopwatching.us/viewing-parties/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/26/nsa-rally-stop-watching-washington-snowden
https://optin.stopwatching.us/
http://rt.com/usa/stop-watching-us-rally-791/
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Weekly reminder
As of October 22, at least 9,722 people had been killed by gunfire in the US since Newtown, at least 89 of them in Massachusetts.
Remember, too, that this figure is a minimum: It includes only gun deaths reported in the media. Many such deaths are not reported; suicides rarely are. Include those, and based on estimated by the Centers for Disease Control there have been over 28,000 deaths by gun in the US is 2013.
Remember, too, that this figure is a minimum: It includes only gun deaths reported in the media. Many such deaths are not reported; suicides rarely are. Include those, and based on estimated by the Centers for Disease Control there have been over 28,000 deaths by gun in the US is 2013.
131.6 - Outrage of the Week: Voter suppression in VA and TX
Outrage of the Week: Voter suppression in VA and TX
It's not new, it's not just happening now, it's not even something I haven't mentioned before. In fact, I talked some about it just last week. It's on-going, so much so that it could be a topic every week. It's voter suppression - and it is again the Outrage of the Week.
Voter suppression doesn't seem to register much in Massachusetts, it just doesn't seem to have the same traction here as in some other places: For one example, either last year or the year before there was a move for a signature campaign for a ballot question to require voters to produce photo ID at the polling place in order to vote. The fact that I'm not sure what year it was is evidence of how badly the effort fizzled.
In fact, the state legislature recently advanced a state constitutional amendment to facilitate early voting and more widespread use of absentee voting here, concepts the those who want to suppress the vote oppose.
But you need to realize this and make no mistake about it: There is a nationwide, conscious, coordinated campaign by the right wing to restrict voting rights in America, to make it harder and harder for people to vote, particularly to make it harder for students, minorities, the poor, and the elderly - the first three of which groups lean left in their politics and the latter of which is the main support for two programs the reactionaries would love to bring down because they stand as symbols of progressive changes over the past 75 years: Social Security and Medicare. The main method has been to demand more and more specific means of identification in order to register and then to vote, means of identification that those four groups are less likely to possess.
But that's not the only way, which brings us to two events of the past week.
First comes news from Virginia that a federal district judge has refused to stop the state from purging up to 57,000 names from the voter registration rolls. This purge is being done through a system used by a number of states called Crosscheck. The purpose is to weed out those who are registered in more than one place, something the most usually happens when a voter moves from one voting precinct to another and the first precinct never removes their name so even though they never vote in the first place again they are still listed as a registered voter there. It's real purpose, that is, is to remove deadwood from the rolls.
However, this purge is occurring just weeks before state-level elections in Virginia, including for governor, and local election officials complained that they were not given sufficient time to research the names and find out if they really should be removed. As a result, some officials dropped people from the rolls without even checking.
Those who wanted to check were under the gun: Loudoun County Registrar Judy Brown said she wanted to delay the purge because there wasn't enough time before the election to research the names. But her local election board ordered her to proceed. She had a week - and she's already heard from people who have actually been voting there for the last couple of years, meaning they should not have been on the purge list.
One registrar, Lawrence Haake of Chesterfield County, flatly refused to purge any voters after he conducted a preliminary review that found nearly 10 percent of the names given to him by the state for potential purging were, in fact, eligible voters.
The state Democratic Party sued to stop the purge and have the 38,000 names already removed reinstated, but despite the experiences of Brown and Haake and the rest of the evidence presented in the case, including county officials reporting error rates of 11% to 13% in the lists of voters to be purged provided by the state, District Court Judge Claude Hilton did his best Sgt. Schultz impression and denied the motion, claiming the evidence did not convince him that anyone had been disenfranchised.
Which when you think about it is a pretty creepy position since it means that you can't act to prevent your right to vote from being taken away, you can only try to get it back after the fact.
A particularly interesting aspect to all this is that the legal advisor for the Virginia Board of Elections is Attorney General Ken "Vaginal Ultrasound" Cuccinelli - who also happens to be the Republican candidate for Governor. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
As an aside, the good news here is that in polls, Cuccinelli has been consistently clearly behind Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe. Not that I have any hots for McAuliffe, but he's not Cuccinelli.
Okay, moving from the right wing to the wacko wing, we move to Texas, which has a new voter ID law going into effect November 5. And credit where it's due, you have admit they've come up with something creative. They've already done their best to hinder the ability of blacks, Latinos, college students, and the poor to vote; now they've come up with a way to do the same to women.
The new law says that as of November 5, Texans must not only show a photo ID to vote, it must be a photo ID with their up-to-date legal name. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 34% of voting age women do not have ready access to a photo document that will satisfy Texas's requirements, largely because young women have not updated their documents with their married names.
And for such women who lack ID, getting one is becoming more difficult: A birth certificate is not enough, because that's not your current legal name. They will have to show legal proof of a name change and they have to be the original documents. The inevitable result is that a number of women in Texas who as of today are legal voters in another week or so suddenly won't be. Like I said, give the devil his due for creativity.
But what puts the exclamation point to all of this is the utterly amazing, even stunning admission from Judge Richard Posner about the case Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.
What was Crawford v. Marion County Election Board? It was the case arising from a challenge to a voter photo ID in Indiana, the case that lead to the Supreme Court upholding a ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals that the law did not disenfranchise or unduly burden voters.
Who is Richard Posner? He was the circuit court judge who wrote that court's opinion, the one the Supreme Court upheld.
And what was his admission? They got it wrong. And he said it in so many words. Asked in an interview “Do you think that the court got this one [that is, Crawford v. Marion County] wrong,” he answered “Yes. Absolutely."
So the person who wrote the opinion that lead to the Supreme Court decision that has formed the basis for every legal defense of increasingly harsh voter ID regiments - many of which quote the case inaccurately - the person who wrote the opinion that initiated the entire superstructure of legal gobbledygook, double-talk, and baloney in service to the denial of the right to vote, that person is now shuffling his intellectual feet and going "golly gee whillikers."
Of course, though, it wasn't his fault. Of course not.
“I think we did not have enough information,” he said. “If the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.”
Yeah, well, he should have paid more attention to the information he got: The Brennan Center, which does a lot of work on voting rights, filed an amicus brief describing how the Indiana law at issue could disenfranchise a significant number of voters. But even if he was aware of it, I'm not sure he would have cared, as he was rather dismissive of those concerns, saying in his opinion that the "benefits of voting to the individual voter are elusive."
That, I said at the time, means that as far as Posner is concerned, as an individual your very right to vote is an "elusive benefit" of little value - so it's not that important if it's lost.
Which, I have to say in fairness, actually makes his change of heart - he noted in that interview that photo ID laws are "now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention” - all the more remarkable. It changes nothing about the case or the law or or the Supreme Court's decision or any of the other voter suppression laws, but maybe, just maybe, it can help to begin to turn the tide back to voting as a right to be exercised, not an obstacle course to be negotiated only by the chosen few.
Sources:
http://www.lowellsun.com/breakingnews/ci_24273825/lawmakers-start-push-early-voting
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/federal-judge-rejects-democratic-challenge-to-virginia-voter-roll-purge/2013/10/18/26235068-3809-11e3-8a0e-4e2cf80831fc_story.html?hpid=z2
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/10/17/virginia-election-officials-purging-almost-40000-voters/
http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/state-regional/va-removes-k-from-voter-rolls-over-democrats-objections/article_2d111de4-49de-523b-bd9c-5d93b7c0a00e.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/all-opinions-are-local/wp/2013/10/22/the-polling-gets-worse-for-cuccinelli/
http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/texas-republicans-find-a-way-to-disenfranchise-women-voters/news/2013/10/17/77023#.UmF3Bmoo6Ul
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/17/2789931/threat-women-texas/
http://www.brennancenter.org/
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/14/voter_id_judges_shocking_admission_we_got_it_wrong/
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176641/judge-who-framed-voter-id-laws-constitutional-says-he-got-it-wrong#
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2008/01/footnote-to-both-of-preceding-yeah-what.html
It's not new, it's not just happening now, it's not even something I haven't mentioned before. In fact, I talked some about it just last week. It's on-going, so much so that it could be a topic every week. It's voter suppression - and it is again the Outrage of the Week.Voter suppression doesn't seem to register much in Massachusetts, it just doesn't seem to have the same traction here as in some other places: For one example, either last year or the year before there was a move for a signature campaign for a ballot question to require voters to produce photo ID at the polling place in order to vote. The fact that I'm not sure what year it was is evidence of how badly the effort fizzled.
In fact, the state legislature recently advanced a state constitutional amendment to facilitate early voting and more widespread use of absentee voting here, concepts the those who want to suppress the vote oppose.
But you need to realize this and make no mistake about it: There is a nationwide, conscious, coordinated campaign by the right wing to restrict voting rights in America, to make it harder and harder for people to vote, particularly to make it harder for students, minorities, the poor, and the elderly - the first three of which groups lean left in their politics and the latter of which is the main support for two programs the reactionaries would love to bring down because they stand as symbols of progressive changes over the past 75 years: Social Security and Medicare. The main method has been to demand more and more specific means of identification in order to register and then to vote, means of identification that those four groups are less likely to possess.But that's not the only way, which brings us to two events of the past week.
First comes news from Virginia that a federal district judge has refused to stop the state from purging up to 57,000 names from the voter registration rolls. This purge is being done through a system used by a number of states called Crosscheck. The purpose is to weed out those who are registered in more than one place, something the most usually happens when a voter moves from one voting precinct to another and the first precinct never removes their name so even though they never vote in the first place again they are still listed as a registered voter there. It's real purpose, that is, is to remove deadwood from the rolls.
However, this purge is occurring just weeks before state-level elections in Virginia, including for governor, and local election officials complained that they were not given sufficient time to research the names and find out if they really should be removed. As a result, some officials dropped people from the rolls without even checking.
Those who wanted to check were under the gun: Loudoun County Registrar Judy Brown said she wanted to delay the purge because there wasn't enough time before the election to research the names. But her local election board ordered her to proceed. She had a week - and she's already heard from people who have actually been voting there for the last couple of years, meaning they should not have been on the purge list.
One registrar, Lawrence Haake of Chesterfield County, flatly refused to purge any voters after he conducted a preliminary review that found nearly 10 percent of the names given to him by the state for potential purging were, in fact, eligible voters.
The state Democratic Party sued to stop the purge and have the 38,000 names already removed reinstated, but despite the experiences of Brown and Haake and the rest of the evidence presented in the case, including county officials reporting error rates of 11% to 13% in the lists of voters to be purged provided by the state, District Court Judge Claude Hilton did his best Sgt. Schultz impression and denied the motion, claiming the evidence did not convince him that anyone had been disenfranchised.
Which when you think about it is a pretty creepy position since it means that you can't act to prevent your right to vote from being taken away, you can only try to get it back after the fact.
A particularly interesting aspect to all this is that the legal advisor for the Virginia Board of Elections is Attorney General Ken "Vaginal Ultrasound" Cuccinelli - who also happens to be the Republican candidate for Governor. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
As an aside, the good news here is that in polls, Cuccinelli has been consistently clearly behind Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe. Not that I have any hots for McAuliffe, but he's not Cuccinelli.
Okay, moving from the right wing to the wacko wing, we move to Texas, which has a new voter ID law going into effect November 5. And credit where it's due, you have admit they've come up with something creative. They've already done their best to hinder the ability of blacks, Latinos, college students, and the poor to vote; now they've come up with a way to do the same to women.The new law says that as of November 5, Texans must not only show a photo ID to vote, it must be a photo ID with their up-to-date legal name. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 34% of voting age women do not have ready access to a photo document that will satisfy Texas's requirements, largely because young women have not updated their documents with their married names.
And for such women who lack ID, getting one is becoming more difficult: A birth certificate is not enough, because that's not your current legal name. They will have to show legal proof of a name change and they have to be the original documents. The inevitable result is that a number of women in Texas who as of today are legal voters in another week or so suddenly won't be. Like I said, give the devil his due for creativity.
But what puts the exclamation point to all of this is the utterly amazing, even stunning admission from Judge Richard Posner about the case Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.
What was Crawford v. Marion County Election Board? It was the case arising from a challenge to a voter photo ID in Indiana, the case that lead to the Supreme Court upholding a ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals that the law did not disenfranchise or unduly burden voters.
Who is Richard Posner? He was the circuit court judge who wrote that court's opinion, the one the Supreme Court upheld.
And what was his admission? They got it wrong. And he said it in so many words. Asked in an interview “Do you think that the court got this one [that is, Crawford v. Marion County] wrong,” he answered “Yes. Absolutely."
So the person who wrote the opinion that lead to the Supreme Court decision that has formed the basis for every legal defense of increasingly harsh voter ID regiments - many of which quote the case inaccurately - the person who wrote the opinion that initiated the entire superstructure of legal gobbledygook, double-talk, and baloney in service to the denial of the right to vote, that person is now shuffling his intellectual feet and going "golly gee whillikers."
Of course, though, it wasn't his fault. Of course not.
“I think we did not have enough information,” he said. “If the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.”
Yeah, well, he should have paid more attention to the information he got: The Brennan Center, which does a lot of work on voting rights, filed an amicus brief describing how the Indiana law at issue could disenfranchise a significant number of voters. But even if he was aware of it, I'm not sure he would have cared, as he was rather dismissive of those concerns, saying in his opinion that the "benefits of voting to the individual voter are elusive."
That, I said at the time, means that as far as Posner is concerned, as an individual your very right to vote is an "elusive benefit" of little value - so it's not that important if it's lost.
Which, I have to say in fairness, actually makes his change of heart - he noted in that interview that photo ID laws are "now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention” - all the more remarkable. It changes nothing about the case or the law or or the Supreme Court's decision or any of the other voter suppression laws, but maybe, just maybe, it can help to begin to turn the tide back to voting as a right to be exercised, not an obstacle course to be negotiated only by the chosen few.
Sources:
http://www.lowellsun.com/breakingnews/ci_24273825/lawmakers-start-push-early-voting
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/federal-judge-rejects-democratic-challenge-to-virginia-voter-roll-purge/2013/10/18/26235068-3809-11e3-8a0e-4e2cf80831fc_story.html?hpid=z2
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/10/17/virginia-election-officials-purging-almost-40000-voters/
http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/state-regional/va-removes-k-from-voter-rolls-over-democrats-objections/article_2d111de4-49de-523b-bd9c-5d93b7c0a00e.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/all-opinions-are-local/wp/2013/10/22/the-polling-gets-worse-for-cuccinelli/
http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/texas-republicans-find-a-way-to-disenfranchise-women-voters/news/2013/10/17/77023#.UmF3Bmoo6Ul
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/17/2789931/threat-women-texas/
http://www.brennancenter.org/
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/14/voter_id_judges_shocking_admission_we_got_it_wrong/
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176641/judge-who-framed-voter-id-laws-constitutional-says-he-got-it-wrong#
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2008/01/footnote-to-both-of-preceding-yeah-what.html
131.5 - Hero Award: Malala Yousafzai
Hero Award: Malala Yousafzai
And this week, guess what, we have another Hero Award, given as occasion arises to someone who on some matter big or small just does the right thing.
This is actually the fourth straight week with a Hero Award. The universe must be having a good month.
In this case, the who is someone I'm sure you know about, but you may not have heard about the why.
The who is Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani girl who a year ago was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman because of her advocacy for education for girls.
That's the who, and that itself would clearly be enough. But this is the why: She recently visited the United States, a visit widely covered by major media, during which she met with President Obama on October 11.
In a statement released after the meeting, Malala said she was honored to meet with Obama, but that she told him she's worried about the effect of US drone strikes in her country.
Interestingly and revealingly, the White House statement on the encounter didn't find room to mention that part of the discussion.
For the most part, the mass media, which was so interested in her visit, also avoided that part of the news. But as the media watchdog group FAIR points out, that's not unusual: This past April, a Yemeni writer and activist named Farea al-Muslimi testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the effect of drone strikes on his country: "What the violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strike accomplished in an instant. There is much anger against America." FAIR found that with the notable exceptions of the New York Times and the Washington Post, the mass media largely ignored the hearing.
But getting back to the case here: For speaking truth to power, particularly power that doesn't want to hear it, Malala Yousafzai is a hero.
Footnote: A group called Roots Action is trying to initiate a movement for an international agreement to ban weaponized drones. A petition to that end has now gathered around 100,000 signatures. A small start, but such movements always start small. You can find a link to the petition below.
Sources:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/exclusive-malala-yousafzai-continues-fight-education-year/story?id=20547267
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/11/205176/obama-and-first-lady-meet-with.html
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/10/15/drones-the-media-and-malalas-message/
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/04/24/drone-strike-testimony-not-news/
Roots Action petition:
http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6180
And this week, guess what, we have another Hero Award, given as occasion arises to someone who on some matter big or small just does the right thing.This is actually the fourth straight week with a Hero Award. The universe must be having a good month.
In this case, the who is someone I'm sure you know about, but you may not have heard about the why.
The who is Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani girl who a year ago was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman because of her advocacy for education for girls.
That's the who, and that itself would clearly be enough. But this is the why: She recently visited the United States, a visit widely covered by major media, during which she met with President Obama on October 11.
In a statement released after the meeting, Malala said she was honored to meet with Obama, but that she told him she's worried about the effect of US drone strikes in her country.
I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees. I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education, it will make a big impact.
Interestingly and revealingly, the White House statement on the encounter didn't find room to mention that part of the discussion.For the most part, the mass media, which was so interested in her visit, also avoided that part of the news. But as the media watchdog group FAIR points out, that's not unusual: This past April, a Yemeni writer and activist named Farea al-Muslimi testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the effect of drone strikes on his country: "What the violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strike accomplished in an instant. There is much anger against America." FAIR found that with the notable exceptions of the New York Times and the Washington Post, the mass media largely ignored the hearing.
But getting back to the case here: For speaking truth to power, particularly power that doesn't want to hear it, Malala Yousafzai is a hero.
Footnote: A group called Roots Action is trying to initiate a movement for an international agreement to ban weaponized drones. A petition to that end has now gathered around 100,000 signatures. A small start, but such movements always start small. You can find a link to the petition below.
Sources:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/exclusive-malala-yousafzai-continues-fight-education-year/story?id=20547267
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/11/205176/obama-and-first-lady-meet-with.html
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/10/15/drones-the-media-and-malalas-message/
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/04/24/drone-strike-testimony-not-news/
Roots Action petition:
http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6180
131.4 - Clown Award: Sen. James Inhofe
Clown Award: Sen. James Inhofe
Now for the Clown Award, given as always for meritorious stupidity.
The big red nose this week goes to Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who said on October 20 that he "probably wouldn't be here" if he had been insured under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
During a colonoscopy earlier this month, in which doctors were unable to remove a stick, it was discovered that Inhofe had multiple blocked arteries and required immediate heart surgery. He received an emergency quadruple bypass earlier this month.
In a radio interview, Inhofe said he could be treated right away because of his health care plan, but that under the Affordable Care Act, quoting, "with my age, that would have been about a six-month wait" because he did not actually have a heart attack.
Now you probably know without my telling you that this is insane: The idea that the Affordable Care Act would bar anyone above a certain age - Inhofe is 68 - from getting needed emergency surgery is so ridiculous that simply stating it is sufficient refutation.
But I can tell you where it comes from: The ACA includes provisions about setting up advisory panels to make recommendations about "best practices" based on clinical research and actual clinical experience, which is hardly a new, a radical, or even an unusual idea. But in the minds of paranoid reactionary nitwits like Inhofe, that turns into the federal government dictating what medical procedures and treatments your doctor can prescribe for you and when they can and can't prescribe them.
In the same interview, Inhofe went on to claim that Obama is trying to "impose" socialized medicine on America, "the single pay, and we know that's what he's trying to do." Your lips to God's ear, bro'.
By the way, Inhofe, who voted against aid for victims of superstorm Sandy but wanted relief for victims of tornadoes in Oklahoma because that was, to use his words, "totally different," is also the Senate's leading nanny-nanny naysayer on global warming, claiming it's "outrageous" to suggest human activities can affect the climate because "God's still up there." His middle name - really - is "Mountain." Which is appropriate as he clearly has rocks in his head.
James Inhofe: complete, thoroughgoing clown.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/jim-inhofe-obamacare_n_4137864.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_practice
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/21/inhofe-oklahoma-tornado-aid_n_3312972.html
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/james-inhofe-says-bible-refutes-climate-change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Inhofe
Now for the Clown Award, given as always for meritorious stupidity.The big red nose this week goes to Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who said on October 20 that he "probably wouldn't be here" if he had been insured under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
During a colonoscopy earlier this month, in which doctors were unable to remove a stick, it was discovered that Inhofe had multiple blocked arteries and required immediate heart surgery. He received an emergency quadruple bypass earlier this month.
In a radio interview, Inhofe said he could be treated right away because of his health care plan, but that under the Affordable Care Act, quoting, "with my age, that would have been about a six-month wait" because he did not actually have a heart attack.
Now you probably know without my telling you that this is insane: The idea that the Affordable Care Act would bar anyone above a certain age - Inhofe is 68 - from getting needed emergency surgery is so ridiculous that simply stating it is sufficient refutation.
But I can tell you where it comes from: The ACA includes provisions about setting up advisory panels to make recommendations about "best practices" based on clinical research and actual clinical experience, which is hardly a new, a radical, or even an unusual idea. But in the minds of paranoid reactionary nitwits like Inhofe, that turns into the federal government dictating what medical procedures and treatments your doctor can prescribe for you and when they can and can't prescribe them.In the same interview, Inhofe went on to claim that Obama is trying to "impose" socialized medicine on America, "the single pay, and we know that's what he's trying to do." Your lips to God's ear, bro'.
By the way, Inhofe, who voted against aid for victims of superstorm Sandy but wanted relief for victims of tornadoes in Oklahoma because that was, to use his words, "totally different," is also the Senate's leading nanny-nanny naysayer on global warming, claiming it's "outrageous" to suggest human activities can affect the climate because "God's still up there." His middle name - really - is "Mountain." Which is appropriate as he clearly has rocks in his head.
James Inhofe: complete, thoroughgoing clown.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/jim-inhofe-obamacare_n_4137864.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_practice
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/21/inhofe-oklahoma-tornado-aid_n_3312972.html
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/james-inhofe-says-bible-refutes-climate-change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Inhofe
131.3 - Good News #3: Ex-Kansas AttGen Phill Kline's law license suspended
Good News #3: Ex-Kansas AttGen Phill Kline's law license suspended
Finally, one bit of good news on a different topic, a bit of news that may not have much impact on the world at large but just does my heart good.
Former Kansas state Attorney General Phill Kline first appeared on my radar in February 2005 when I wrote about his demand that abortion clinics in the state turn over the complete and unedited medical records of nearly 90 women and girls, claiming he needed the material for some bogus fishing expedition about "underage sex" and "illegal" abortions. Kline, who I dubbed Attorney General Slime, was also the man responsible for the prosecutorial persecution of Dr. George Tiller, the abortion provider who was later murdered by a fanatic wacked out over Slime's failure to get Tiller thrown in prison.
Well, last week, the Kansas Supreme Court suspended Kline's law license for misconduct in office. The court unanimously found that Kline’s “overzealous advocacy” and “improper motives” in his prosecution of abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood and George Tiller, led to “significant and numerous” violations of professional conduct.
The 154-page report cited “clear and convincing evidence” that Kline violated 11 separate rules governing the professional conduct of attorneys during his tenure as Johnson County district attorney and later Attorney General and that he "repeatedly" violated rules prohibiting "engaging in false or dishonest conduct.”
The state’s disciplinary administrator for attorneys had wanted Kline to be disbarred, but the court wasn't willing to go that far, limiting the ruling to indefinite suspension.
In a bit of unintentional humor, Kline's attorney, one Thomas Condit, said the court’s action was based on a “cherry picking” of oral and written comments over a period of many years.
Um, yeah - so the evidence was of an on-going pattern of misconduct over a number of years, not a single incident. Thanks for the confirmation.
Phill Slime is now an assistant professor of law at Liberty University in Virginia - yeah, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, ranked on Forbes' magazine list of US colleges and universities as #636 out of 650. So I don't think he'll be needing his law license and he's unlikely to run for office again: Even the GOPpers in Kansas got tired of him.
Even so, like I said, this does my heart good.
Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2005/02/when-i-look-over-my-shoulder.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/18/former_kansas_attorney_general_debarred_over_targeting_of_abortion_providers/
http://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/18/4560734/kline-indefinitely-suspended-from.html
http://www.forbes.com/colleges/liberty-university/
Finally, one bit of good news on a different topic, a bit of news that may not have much impact on the world at large but just does my heart good.Former Kansas state Attorney General Phill Kline first appeared on my radar in February 2005 when I wrote about his demand that abortion clinics in the state turn over the complete and unedited medical records of nearly 90 women and girls, claiming he needed the material for some bogus fishing expedition about "underage sex" and "illegal" abortions. Kline, who I dubbed Attorney General Slime, was also the man responsible for the prosecutorial persecution of Dr. George Tiller, the abortion provider who was later murdered by a fanatic wacked out over Slime's failure to get Tiller thrown in prison.
Well, last week, the Kansas Supreme Court suspended Kline's law license for misconduct in office. The court unanimously found that Kline’s “overzealous advocacy” and “improper motives” in his prosecution of abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood and George Tiller, led to “significant and numerous” violations of professional conduct.
The 154-page report cited “clear and convincing evidence” that Kline violated 11 separate rules governing the professional conduct of attorneys during his tenure as Johnson County district attorney and later Attorney General and that he "repeatedly" violated rules prohibiting "engaging in false or dishonest conduct.”
The state’s disciplinary administrator for attorneys had wanted Kline to be disbarred, but the court wasn't willing to go that far, limiting the ruling to indefinite suspension.
In a bit of unintentional humor, Kline's attorney, one Thomas Condit, said the court’s action was based on a “cherry picking” of oral and written comments over a period of many years.
Um, yeah - so the evidence was of an on-going pattern of misconduct over a number of years, not a single incident. Thanks for the confirmation.
Phill Slime is now an assistant professor of law at Liberty University in Virginia - yeah, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, ranked on Forbes' magazine list of US colleges and universities as #636 out of 650. So I don't think he'll be needing his law license and he's unlikely to run for office again: Even the GOPpers in Kansas got tired of him.
Even so, like I said, this does my heart good.
Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2005/02/when-i-look-over-my-shoulder.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/18/former_kansas_attorney_general_debarred_over_targeting_of_abortion_providers/
http://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/18/4560734/kline-indefinitely-suspended-from.html
http://www.forbes.com/colleges/liberty-university/
131.2 - Good News #2: Same-sex marriage comes to New Jersey
Good News #2: Same-sex marriage comes to New Jersey
But on the other side of the country, half-steps were not on the agenda. The right of same-sex marriage has come to the great state of New Jersey.
Three weeks ago, I told you that on September 27, Mercer County Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson had ruled that same-sex couples could marry in the Garden State starting October 21.
New Jersey had allowed for civil unions, but that status still denied such couples access to a large number of federal benefits available to married couples. With the demise of the sections of the Defense of Marriage Act that denied federal benefits to same-sex couples legally married in their home states, a clear difference in treatment between civil unions and marriage emerged, one Jacobson said violates the equal protection guarantees of the state constitution. Significantly, she refused to stay the effect of her order pending a possible appeal.
So New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie asked the state Supreme Court to issue a stay.
On Friday, October 18, the state Supreme Court rejected that request in a unanimous 7-0 decision. Although it was only ruling on a stay, not on the underlying case, its response pretty much settled the issue.
Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, writing for the court, said "same-sex couples who cannot marry are not treated equally under the law today" as the court rejected Christie's legal arguments and emphasized he was unlikely to win if he continued to appeal Jacobson's ruling.
That, in the words of Colin Reed, speaking on behalf of Christie, "left no ambiguity about the unanimous court's view on the ultimate decision in this matter." So, at 12:01 AM on October 21, same-sex couples began marrying across New Jersey, including ones such as the nine weddings in Newark officiated by Mayor and Senator-elect Cory Booker and the three performed by a former priest in Asbury Park.
And, just hours later, the Christie administration announced it was dropping its appeal of Judge Jacobson's ruling. And that's it: The ruling stands and a10-year-long legal battle is over.
Christie, who had previously vetoed a bill to provide for same-sex marriage in the state, said in a statement that he strongly disagrees with the court substituting "its judgment for the constitutional process of the elected branches or a vote of the people" but he will follow the law.
What people like him never seem to get through their heads is that constitutional rights are not a matter of political popularity. That's why they're called "rights" rather than mere privileges.
I've addressed this in a little more detail than I normal would because New Jersey is my home state. In some ways, it still feels like home; I heard somewhere the saying "home is where your memories lie" and by that standard, yeah, New Jersey is still home. Anyway, I'm glad to see my home state moving in the right direction.
Marriage equality is still a long slog: Some 35 states have some sort of constitutional or legal restrictions on it. But 14 states and the District of Columbia now have same-sex marriage and, as is often forgotten, six more have some form of civil unions or domestic partnerships - altogether accounting for 43% of the population of the US. Less than 10 years ago, that percentage approached zero. (New York City allowed domestic partnerships in 1998; California did so in 1999 and DC in 2002; Vermont had civil unions starting in 2000. All now have full marriage equality.)
Footnote: On the same day that New Jersey began allowing same-sex couples to marry, four same-sex couples in Tennessee filed a federal lawsuit seeking to force the state to recognize their legal marriages.
These couples had been married in New York or California but upon moving to Tennessee discovered that as far as the state was concerned, their marriages had just vanished because Tennessee will not recognize them. So they are suing, claiming discrimination based on sexual orientation, violation of due process and the right to travel without having one's rights taken away, and denial of equal protection under the law. Will it get anywhere? Who knows? But again, just 10 years ago the answer likely would have been clear.
Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/10/1282-good-news-2-same-sex-marriage.html
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/10/christie_withdraws_appeal_of_gay_marriage_ruling.html#incart_m-rpt-1
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/21/gay-couples-wed-as-nj-recognizes-nuptials/3141655/
http://videos.nj.com/star-ledger/2013/10/mayor_cory_booker_officiates_f.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/21/retired_catholic_priest_officiates_midnight_vows_for_gay_couples_in_new_jersey/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/christie-gay-marriage-appeal_n_4135867.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_union
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/21/gay-marriage-tennessee-lawsuit/3145541/
But on the other side of the country, half-steps were not on the agenda. The right of same-sex marriage has come to the great state of New Jersey.Three weeks ago, I told you that on September 27, Mercer County Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson had ruled that same-sex couples could marry in the Garden State starting October 21.
New Jersey had allowed for civil unions, but that status still denied such couples access to a large number of federal benefits available to married couples. With the demise of the sections of the Defense of Marriage Act that denied federal benefits to same-sex couples legally married in their home states, a clear difference in treatment between civil unions and marriage emerged, one Jacobson said violates the equal protection guarantees of the state constitution. Significantly, she refused to stay the effect of her order pending a possible appeal.
So New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie asked the state Supreme Court to issue a stay.
On Friday, October 18, the state Supreme Court rejected that request in a unanimous 7-0 decision. Although it was only ruling on a stay, not on the underlying case, its response pretty much settled the issue.
Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, writing for the court, said "same-sex couples who cannot marry are not treated equally under the law today" as the court rejected Christie's legal arguments and emphasized he was unlikely to win if he continued to appeal Jacobson's ruling.
That, in the words of Colin Reed, speaking on behalf of Christie, "left no ambiguity about the unanimous court's view on the ultimate decision in this matter." So, at 12:01 AM on October 21, same-sex couples began marrying across New Jersey, including ones such as the nine weddings in Newark officiated by Mayor and Senator-elect Cory Booker and the three performed by a former priest in Asbury Park.
And, just hours later, the Christie administration announced it was dropping its appeal of Judge Jacobson's ruling. And that's it: The ruling stands and a10-year-long legal battle is over.Christie, who had previously vetoed a bill to provide for same-sex marriage in the state, said in a statement that he strongly disagrees with the court substituting "its judgment for the constitutional process of the elected branches or a vote of the people" but he will follow the law.
What people like him never seem to get through their heads is that constitutional rights are not a matter of political popularity. That's why they're called "rights" rather than mere privileges.
I've addressed this in a little more detail than I normal would because New Jersey is my home state. In some ways, it still feels like home; I heard somewhere the saying "home is where your memories lie" and by that standard, yeah, New Jersey is still home. Anyway, I'm glad to see my home state moving in the right direction.
Marriage equality is still a long slog: Some 35 states have some sort of constitutional or legal restrictions on it. But 14 states and the District of Columbia now have same-sex marriage and, as is often forgotten, six more have some form of civil unions or domestic partnerships - altogether accounting for 43% of the population of the US. Less than 10 years ago, that percentage approached zero. (New York City allowed domestic partnerships in 1998; California did so in 1999 and DC in 2002; Vermont had civil unions starting in 2000. All now have full marriage equality.)
Footnote: On the same day that New Jersey began allowing same-sex couples to marry, four same-sex couples in Tennessee filed a federal lawsuit seeking to force the state to recognize their legal marriages.
These couples had been married in New York or California but upon moving to Tennessee discovered that as far as the state was concerned, their marriages had just vanished because Tennessee will not recognize them. So they are suing, claiming discrimination based on sexual orientation, violation of due process and the right to travel without having one's rights taken away, and denial of equal protection under the law. Will it get anywhere? Who knows? But again, just 10 years ago the answer likely would have been clear.
Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/10/1282-good-news-2-same-sex-marriage.html
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/10/christie_withdraws_appeal_of_gay_marriage_ruling.html#incart_m-rpt-1
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/21/gay-couples-wed-as-nj-recognizes-nuptials/3141655/
http://videos.nj.com/star-ledger/2013/10/mayor_cory_booker_officiates_f.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/21/retired_catholic_priest_officiates_midnight_vows_for_gay_couples_in_new_jersey/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/christie-gay-marriage-appeal_n_4135867.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_union
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/21/gay-marriage-tennessee-lawsuit/3145541/
131.1 - Good News #1: Marriage justice advances in Oregon
Good News #1: Marriage justice advances in Oregon
Gabriel Heatter strikes again. Ah, there's good news tonight.
First, some news on the area where most of the good news comes these days - I suppose in some sense, too much because it means there's not a lot of good news on other fronts - but still, good news on this front: same-sex marriage.
First is the fact that there is movement on this in Oregon. For one thing, according to polls, opinion on the matter has improved enough that a group called Oregon United For Marriage is collecting signatures for a November 2014 ballot question intending to overturn the state's 2004 ban on same-sex marriage.
More immediately, in mid-October a lawsuit was filed in federal court, calling the ban unconstitutional. Both methods have worked in neighboring states: a referendum brought same-sex marriage to Washington while court action did so in California.
What's really notable, however, is that just two days after that suit was filed, Oregon’s chief operating officer Michael Jordan, acting on a decision from the Oregon Department of Justice, issued a memo stating that all state agencies are required to recognize the unions of same-sex couples who wed outside the state.
That is, same-sex couples still can't get married in Oregon, but if they get married somewhere else, the state will recognize those marriages as valid. It's what one commenter called "an interesting half-step toward marriage equality."
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Heatter
http://www.katu.com/news/local/Lawsuit-filed-to-overturn-Oregons-same-sex-marriage-ban-227955171.html
http://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-30815-permalink.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/17/oregon_will_now_recognize_the_marriages_of_gay_couples_who_wed_in_other_states/
Gabriel Heatter strikes again. Ah, there's good news tonight.First, some news on the area where most of the good news comes these days - I suppose in some sense, too much because it means there's not a lot of good news on other fronts - but still, good news on this front: same-sex marriage.
First is the fact that there is movement on this in Oregon. For one thing, according to polls, opinion on the matter has improved enough that a group called Oregon United For Marriage is collecting signatures for a November 2014 ballot question intending to overturn the state's 2004 ban on same-sex marriage.
More immediately, in mid-October a lawsuit was filed in federal court, calling the ban unconstitutional. Both methods have worked in neighboring states: a referendum brought same-sex marriage to Washington while court action did so in California.What's really notable, however, is that just two days after that suit was filed, Oregon’s chief operating officer Michael Jordan, acting on a decision from the Oregon Department of Justice, issued a memo stating that all state agencies are required to recognize the unions of same-sex couples who wed outside the state.
That is, same-sex couples still can't get married in Oregon, but if they get married somewhere else, the state will recognize those marriages as valid. It's what one commenter called "an interesting half-step toward marriage equality."
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Heatter
http://www.katu.com/news/local/Lawsuit-filed-to-overturn-Oregons-same-sex-marriage-ban-227955171.html
http://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-30815-permalink.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/17/oregon_will_now_recognize_the_marriages_of_gay_couples_who_wed_in_other_states/
Left Side of the Aisle #131
Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of October 24-30, 2013
This week:
Good News #1: Marriage justice advances in Oregon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Heatter
http://www.katu.com/news/local/Lawsuit-filed-to-overturn-Oregons-same-sex-marriage-ban-227955171.html
http://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-30815-permalink.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/17/oregon_will_now_recognize_the_marriages_of_gay_couples_who_wed_in_other_states/
Good News #2: Same-sex marriage comes to New Jersey
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/10/1282-good-news-2-same-sex-marriage.html
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/10/christie_withdraws_appeal_of_gay_marriage_ruling.html#incart_m-rpt-1
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/21/gay-couples-wed-as-nj-recognizes-nuptials/3141655/
http://videos.nj.com/star-ledger/2013/10/mayor_cory_booker_officiates_f.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/21/retired_catholic_priest_officiates_midnight_vows_for_gay_couples_in_new_jersey/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/christie-gay-marriage-appeal_n_4135867.html
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/21/gay-marriage-tennessee-lawsuit/3145541/
Good News #3: Ex-Kansas AttGen Phill Kline's law license suspended
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2005/02/when-i-look-over-my-shoulder.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/18/former_kansas_attorney_general_debarred_over_targeting_of_abortion_providers/
http://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/18/4560734/kline-indefinitely-suspended-from.html
http://www.forbes.com/colleges/liberty-university/
Clown Award: Sen. James Inhofe
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/jim-inhofe-obamacare_n_4137864.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/21/inhofe-oklahoma-tornado-aid_n_3312972.html
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/james-inhofe-says-bible-refutes-climate-change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Inhofe
Hero Award: Malala Yousafzai
http://abcnews.go.com/International/exclusive-malala-yousafzai-continues-fight-education-year/story?id=20547267
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/11/205176/obama-and-first-lady-meet-with.html
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/10/15/drones-the-media-and-malalas-message/
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/04/24/drone-strike-testimony-not-news/
Outrage of the Week: Voter suppression in VA and TX
http://www.lowellsun.com/breakingnews/ci_24273825/lawmakers-start-push-early-voting
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/federal-judge-rejects-democratic-challenge-to-virginia-voter-roll-purge/2013/10/18/26235068-3809-11e3-8a0e-4e2cf80831fc_story.html?hpid=z2
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/10/17/virginia-election-officials-purging-almost-40000-voters/
http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/state-regional/va-removes-k-from-voter-rolls-over-democrats-objections/article_2d111de4-49de-523b-bd9c-5d93b7c0a00e.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/all-opinions-are-local/wp/2013/10/22/the-polling-gets-worse-for-cuccinelli/
http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/texas-republicans-find-a-way-to-disenfranchise-women-voters/news/2013/10/17/77023#.UmF3Bmoo6Ul
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/17/2789931/threat-women-texas/
http://www.brennancenter.org/
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/14/voter_id_judges_shocking_admission_we_got_it_wrong/
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176641/judge-who-framed-voter-id-laws-constitutional-says-he-got-it-wrong#
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2008/01/footnote-to-both-of-preceding-yeah-what.html
Roots Action petition:
http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6180
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Weekly reminder
As of October 15, at least 9,388 people had been killed by gunfire in the US since Newtown, at least 89 of them in Massachusetts.
130.11 - Outrage of the Week: Kansas moving toward two-tier voting rights
Outrage of the Week: Kansas moving toward two-tier voting rights
So having just looked at the financial side of the right wing's plan to turn the word "democracy" into a vapid slogan to be paraded out on special occasions to provide an opiate for the masses, let's check out some recent news on the voting side, on the efforts to make it ever harder for people to vote. This is the Outrage of the Week
The state of Kansas is planning on instituting a two-tier voter system, restricting what races you are allowed to vote in based on what kind of voter registration form you use.
The move is the brainchild of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who wants to force people to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. This, just to be clear, is to register; it's entirely separate from the demand to show photo ID at the polling place when you actually go to, as is increasingly true, try to vote.
The thing is, if you register to vote with a federal form rather than a state form, there is no requirement to prove citizenship. Instead, the person registering signs a statement swearing under penalty of perjury that they are a citizen.
That, of course, is not good enough for Kobach - who, by the way, was also a driving force behind Arizona's infamous SB 1070, the "your papers, please" ethnic-profiling law and ran for his present office on a pledge to stamp out “voter fraud” in Kansas before winning and then not being able to find any. In the present case, Kobach has sued the federal government to force it to include with the federal form the state's requirement to provide proof of citizenship in order to register.
Meanwhile, Kobach has sent a memo to all the state’s county election officials instructing them to keep track of which voters register with the federal form and which use the state form so that the former group can be limited to voting in federal-level elections and barred from voting in state or local races.
What's more, anyone who submits the state form without the demanded proof of citizenship will be barred from voting in any election until they do. As a result of this law, which went into effect on January 1, about 17,500 previously-registered voters are "in suspense" - that is, have had their voting rights suspended.
Kobach calls that memo a contingency plan in case he loses in court. I call it a cynical, disgusting scheme because he knows he's going to lose, considering his "prove you're a citizen" law is under challenge and the Supreme Court has already struck down a similar law in Arizona. Kobach’s legal analysis of that decision is that it only applies to federal elections. Quoting him: “The federal government doesn’t have the authority to tell Kansas what to do in Kansas elections.”
Actually, unfortunately for him and happily for the right to vote, it does. The 14th and 15th Amendments provide more than enough legal backing to undo the legal sleight of hand Kobach is trying to pull off. So in the moderately long run, this particular scheme may well fail, although it's difficult to know how many people will have their right to vote stripped away or limited in the meantime.
But Kobach and the others of his ilk don't care about that. They shoot for the win, but for the moment at least they are happy even if all they succeed in doing is creating FUD - fear, uncertainty, and doubt - about their ability to cast a ballot in the minds of the people, the poor, the young, students, minorities, the people they want to keep from voting.
The battle for the right to vote goes on.
Oh, and as a footnote to this: State Rep. Jim Ward, who opposes the "prove it" law, says he once asked Kobach how voter registration workers should collect the documentation now needed to register under the new law. Kobach's answer: “Carry a copy machine with you.”
Which attitude pretty much tells you all you need to know about Kris Kobach's commitment to the right to vote.
Sources:
http://www.kansas.com/2013/10/04/3038825_kobach-laying-groundwork-for-two.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/09/the_rights_despicable_new_voter_suppression_scheme_two_classes_of_voters/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
So having just looked at the financial side of the right wing's plan to turn the word "democracy" into a vapid slogan to be paraded out on special occasions to provide an opiate for the masses, let's check out some recent news on the voting side, on the efforts to make it ever harder for people to vote. This is the Outrage of the WeekThe state of Kansas is planning on instituting a two-tier voter system, restricting what races you are allowed to vote in based on what kind of voter registration form you use.
The move is the brainchild of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who wants to force people to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. This, just to be clear, is to register; it's entirely separate from the demand to show photo ID at the polling place when you actually go to, as is increasingly true, try to vote.
The thing is, if you register to vote with a federal form rather than a state form, there is no requirement to prove citizenship. Instead, the person registering signs a statement swearing under penalty of perjury that they are a citizen.
That, of course, is not good enough for Kobach - who, by the way, was also a driving force behind Arizona's infamous SB 1070, the "your papers, please" ethnic-profiling law and ran for his present office on a pledge to stamp out “voter fraud” in Kansas before winning and then not being able to find any. In the present case, Kobach has sued the federal government to force it to include with the federal form the state's requirement to provide proof of citizenship in order to register.Meanwhile, Kobach has sent a memo to all the state’s county election officials instructing them to keep track of which voters register with the federal form and which use the state form so that the former group can be limited to voting in federal-level elections and barred from voting in state or local races.
What's more, anyone who submits the state form without the demanded proof of citizenship will be barred from voting in any election until they do. As a result of this law, which went into effect on January 1, about 17,500 previously-registered voters are "in suspense" - that is, have had their voting rights suspended.
Kobach calls that memo a contingency plan in case he loses in court. I call it a cynical, disgusting scheme because he knows he's going to lose, considering his "prove you're a citizen" law is under challenge and the Supreme Court has already struck down a similar law in Arizona. Kobach’s legal analysis of that decision is that it only applies to federal elections. Quoting him: “The federal government doesn’t have the authority to tell Kansas what to do in Kansas elections.”
Actually, unfortunately for him and happily for the right to vote, it does. The 14th and 15th Amendments provide more than enough legal backing to undo the legal sleight of hand Kobach is trying to pull off. So in the moderately long run, this particular scheme may well fail, although it's difficult to know how many people will have their right to vote stripped away or limited in the meantime.But Kobach and the others of his ilk don't care about that. They shoot for the win, but for the moment at least they are happy even if all they succeed in doing is creating FUD - fear, uncertainty, and doubt - about their ability to cast a ballot in the minds of the people, the poor, the young, students, minorities, the people they want to keep from voting.
The battle for the right to vote goes on.
Oh, and as a footnote to this: State Rep. Jim Ward, who opposes the "prove it" law, says he once asked Kobach how voter registration workers should collect the documentation now needed to register under the new law. Kobach's answer: “Carry a copy machine with you.”
Which attitude pretty much tells you all you need to know about Kris Kobach's commitment to the right to vote.
Sources:
http://www.kansas.com/2013/10/04/3038825_kobach-laying-groundwork-for-two.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/09/the_rights_despicable_new_voter_suppression_scheme_two_classes_of_voters/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
130.10 - Worse than Citizens United?
Worse than Citizens United?
This is something you absolutely need to know about.
Last Tuesday, October 8, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a case that could do more to undermine any hope of putting limits on the influence of money in political campaigns than even the infamous Citizens United case did.
Wrapped in the flag and parading as a blow for free speech, the Citizens United decision in 2010 gave corporations and the rich an opening to pour vast and often anonymous amounts of cash into political campaigns. That, combined with the rise of super PACs, has already flooded the election system with huge amounts of money. But so far we’ve managed to keep a little distance, a little daylight - or at least the appearance of a little distance - between the money and the candidates themselves. McCutcheon would eliminate even that porous barrier to buying members of Congress.
Here's the deal: Under current law, there are limits on the total amount of money an individual can donate to state and national party committees as well individual candidates per federal election cycle, that is, two years. Put simply, during a single election cycle an individual can donate no more than $48,600 to all federal candidates for office and no more than $74,600 to party committees that make contributions to candidates, for a total of $123,200 every two years. You can spread out that money any way you want, but you can't exceed those limits. McCutcheon v. Federal Elections Commission could eliminate those limits, allowing our millionaires and billionaires even more control over political campaigns - and candidates - than they have now.
The "McCutcheon" of the case is Shaun McCutcheon of Alabama, the chair of the Conservative Action Fund, who says it's a horrendous violation of his free speech rights that he and his fat cat cronies can't dump as much money as they please directly into the coffers of their preferred puppets. (Parenthetically, he's also a climate change denier, but that's not surprising with these people.)
At oral arguments, observers said it appeared that a slim majority of the Court was receptive to McCutcheon's free speech claims although I frankly wonder if that's out of some deep philosophic commitment to the First Amendment - a commitment that's rather spotty in some other areas, such as speech rights of students - or rather a deep philosophic commitment to the power of money.
Now, to be more specific and entirely as fair as possible, Shaun McCutcheon is looking to get rid of the aggregate limits on donations. He's not seeking to have the individual limits overturned - that is, the limits on how much you can give to one committee or one candidate - but only the overall ceiling. Put simply, he says he's okay with, for example, "you can only give X dollars to a candidate." He just wants to be able to max out those donations to as many candidates as he wants without a limit on the total he donates. That would be bad, but it could be worse.
Because the real hand grenade in this, the real danger, the thing that threatens to blow up limits entirely, is that Senate Minority Leader Fishface McConnell is trying to use the case as a vehicle to get the Supreme Court to dismantle contribution limits altogether - and, perhaps indicating the Court's leanings, his lawyer was permitted to intervene in the case and given an opportunity to make that argument during oral arguments.
In 1976, in the case Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court ruled that campaign contribution limits are constitutional on the grounds that such limits were only a “marginal” restriction on speech, one which was justified by the government’s interest in preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption. Unfortunately, in an often-overlooked part of its Citizens United decision, the Court narrowed its definition of “corruption” to exclude buying access to politicians or ingratiating oneself with them, characterizing corruption as something closer to outright bribery. Justice Kennedy wrote for the court majority that "[i]ngratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption.” That is, during an election campaign, go to a politician and say "I'll raise this much money for your campaign if you'll vote this way on bill such-and-such," that's corruption. After an election, go to a politician who knows damn well how much money you raised for their campaign which is why they're so happy to make time for you and say "I think you should vote this way on bill such-and-such," that's not corruption.
I like to call such things a distinction without a difference.
But it's that hair-splitting that Fishface is using to justify a call for turning our elections into a true financial free-for-all. According to the Sunlight Foundation, most of the funding for congressional and presidential campaigns already comes from the top one percent of the one percent of the rich, who they call "the elite class that serves as gatekeepers of public office in the United States."
If the Court embraces Fishface's arguments, it not only would make political campaigns even more the playground of the rich than they already are, not only would make access to elected officials even more the prerogative of the powerful than it already is, it would also leave alternatives to our already-squashed political debates even more in the wilderness as third parties become even more disadvantaged than they already are. It could make participation in electoral politics almost pointless.
The justices will issue their opinion in McCutcheon before the end of next June. Hang on, this could be bad or it could be really bad.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/08/mccutcheon-v-fec_n_4059180.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/watch-citizens-united--th_b_4085573.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/09/campaign_finance_at_the_supreme_court_is_mccutcheon_v_fec_the_next_citizens.html
http://ivn.us/2013/02/21/mccutcheon-v-fec-the-next-citizens-united/
This is something you absolutely need to know about.
Last Tuesday, October 8, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a case that could do more to undermine any hope of putting limits on the influence of money in political campaigns than even the infamous Citizens United case did.
Wrapped in the flag and parading as a blow for free speech, the Citizens United decision in 2010 gave corporations and the rich an opening to pour vast and often anonymous amounts of cash into political campaigns. That, combined with the rise of super PACs, has already flooded the election system with huge amounts of money. But so far we’ve managed to keep a little distance, a little daylight - or at least the appearance of a little distance - between the money and the candidates themselves. McCutcheon would eliminate even that porous barrier to buying members of Congress.
Here's the deal: Under current law, there are limits on the total amount of money an individual can donate to state and national party committees as well individual candidates per federal election cycle, that is, two years. Put simply, during a single election cycle an individual can donate no more than $48,600 to all federal candidates for office and no more than $74,600 to party committees that make contributions to candidates, for a total of $123,200 every two years. You can spread out that money any way you want, but you can't exceed those limits. McCutcheon v. Federal Elections Commission could eliminate those limits, allowing our millionaires and billionaires even more control over political campaigns - and candidates - than they have now.The "McCutcheon" of the case is Shaun McCutcheon of Alabama, the chair of the Conservative Action Fund, who says it's a horrendous violation of his free speech rights that he and his fat cat cronies can't dump as much money as they please directly into the coffers of their preferred puppets. (Parenthetically, he's also a climate change denier, but that's not surprising with these people.)
At oral arguments, observers said it appeared that a slim majority of the Court was receptive to McCutcheon's free speech claims although I frankly wonder if that's out of some deep philosophic commitment to the First Amendment - a commitment that's rather spotty in some other areas, such as speech rights of students - or rather a deep philosophic commitment to the power of money.
Now, to be more specific and entirely as fair as possible, Shaun McCutcheon is looking to get rid of the aggregate limits on donations. He's not seeking to have the individual limits overturned - that is, the limits on how much you can give to one committee or one candidate - but only the overall ceiling. Put simply, he says he's okay with, for example, "you can only give X dollars to a candidate." He just wants to be able to max out those donations to as many candidates as he wants without a limit on the total he donates. That would be bad, but it could be worse.
Because the real hand grenade in this, the real danger, the thing that threatens to blow up limits entirely, is that Senate Minority Leader Fishface McConnell is trying to use the case as a vehicle to get the Supreme Court to dismantle contribution limits altogether - and, perhaps indicating the Court's leanings, his lawyer was permitted to intervene in the case and given an opportunity to make that argument during oral arguments.
In 1976, in the case Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court ruled that campaign contribution limits are constitutional on the grounds that such limits were only a “marginal” restriction on speech, one which was justified by the government’s interest in preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption. Unfortunately, in an often-overlooked part of its Citizens United decision, the Court narrowed its definition of “corruption” to exclude buying access to politicians or ingratiating oneself with them, characterizing corruption as something closer to outright bribery. Justice Kennedy wrote for the court majority that "[i]ngratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption.” That is, during an election campaign, go to a politician and say "I'll raise this much money for your campaign if you'll vote this way on bill such-and-such," that's corruption. After an election, go to a politician who knows damn well how much money you raised for their campaign which is why they're so happy to make time for you and say "I think you should vote this way on bill such-and-such," that's not corruption.
I like to call such things a distinction without a difference.
But it's that hair-splitting that Fishface is using to justify a call for turning our elections into a true financial free-for-all. According to the Sunlight Foundation, most of the funding for congressional and presidential campaigns already comes from the top one percent of the one percent of the rich, who they call "the elite class that serves as gatekeepers of public office in the United States."
If the Court embraces Fishface's arguments, it not only would make political campaigns even more the playground of the rich than they already are, not only would make access to elected officials even more the prerogative of the powerful than it already is, it would also leave alternatives to our already-squashed political debates even more in the wilderness as third parties become even more disadvantaged than they already are. It could make participation in electoral politics almost pointless.
The justices will issue their opinion in McCutcheon before the end of next June. Hang on, this could be bad or it could be really bad.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/08/mccutcheon-v-fec_n_4059180.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/watch-citizens-united--th_b_4085573.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/09/campaign_finance_at_the_supreme_court_is_mccutcheon_v_fec_the_next_citizens.html
http://ivn.us/2013/02/21/mccutcheon-v-fec-the-next-citizens-united/
130.9 - RIP: Joe Bell
RIP: Joe Bell
I'm going to spend a little more time on the other RIP because it's for someone I expect you did not hear about. His name was Joe Bell.
Joe Bell's 15-year-old son Jadin killed himself in February after being bullied by classmates over his homosexuality. In response, Bell vowed to walk across the whole county, speaking and raising awareness about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth along the way.
He set out from his home state of Oregon in late April, planning to walk 15 to 25 miles a day and speak on behalf of the group Faces For Change, an anti-bullying foundation established in his son's memory.
On October 9, he was struck and killed by a semi-truck while walking through Colorado.
The driver, who may have fallen asleep, was charged with reckless driving.
Ogden OUTreach of Utah held a memorial service in his memory. I would say that the best way to memorialize Joe Bell would be to make future such pilgrimages unnecessary.
RIP, Joe Bell.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/10/joe-bell-dead_n_4079989.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/03/joe-bell-cross-country-walk-_n_3209300.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/22/joe-bell-gay-teen-cross-country-walk-_n_3132550.html
https://www.facebook.com/events/223161237843860/?context=create
I'm going to spend a little more time on the other RIP because it's for someone I expect you did not hear about. His name was Joe Bell.Joe Bell's 15-year-old son Jadin killed himself in February after being bullied by classmates over his homosexuality. In response, Bell vowed to walk across the whole county, speaking and raising awareness about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth along the way.
He set out from his home state of Oregon in late April, planning to walk 15 to 25 miles a day and speak on behalf of the group Faces For Change, an anti-bullying foundation established in his son's memory.
On October 9, he was struck and killed by a semi-truck while walking through Colorado.
The driver, who may have fallen asleep, was charged with reckless driving.
Ogden OUTreach of Utah held a memorial service in his memory. I would say that the best way to memorialize Joe Bell would be to make future such pilgrimages unnecessary.
RIP, Joe Bell.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/10/joe-bell-dead_n_4079989.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/03/joe-bell-cross-country-walk-_n_3209300.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/22/joe-bell-gay-teen-cross-country-walk-_n_3132550.html
https://www.facebook.com/events/223161237843860/?context=create
130.8 - RIP: Scott Carpenter
RIP: Scott Carpenter
Two brief RIPs this week.
On the first I'll be especially brief because I'm sure you know about it already: Former astronaut, aquanaut, and techno-thriller author Scott Carpenter died on October 10 at the age of 88 after suffering a recent stroke.
Carpenter was the fourth American to fly in space and the second to orbit the Earth, taking off on May 24, 1962.
He swung both ways, if you will: Besides flying in space, an experience he described as "transcending" and one he wished everyone could have, he also spent a record 30 days on the ocean floor aboard the Navy's SEALAB II, an experimental habitat located off the coast of California.
RIP, Scott Carpenter.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/10/scott-carpenter-dead-age-88_n_4080474.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEALAB_%28United_States_Navy%29
Two brief RIPs this week.
On the first I'll be especially brief because I'm sure you know about it already: Former astronaut, aquanaut, and techno-thriller author Scott Carpenter died on October 10 at the age of 88 after suffering a recent stroke.Carpenter was the fourth American to fly in space and the second to orbit the Earth, taking off on May 24, 1962.
He swung both ways, if you will: Besides flying in space, an experience he described as "transcending" and one he wished everyone could have, he also spent a record 30 days on the ocean floor aboard the Navy's SEALAB II, an experimental habitat located off the coast of California.
RIP, Scott Carpenter.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/10/scott-carpenter-dead-age-88_n_4080474.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEALAB_%28United_States_Navy%29
130.7 - Clown Award: Rep. Steve Pearce
Clown Award: Rep. Steve Pearce
And one more thing before the break, the Clown Award, given for meritorious stupidity. Feel free to laugh.
This week the big red nose goes to Rep. Steve Pearce, a GOPper from New Mexico, who posted this bit of sage wisdom on his personal Facebook page:
Of course! Why didn't we all think of that? Of course borrowing money on no income, going even further into personal debt, is a great idea! And of course banks will be happy to lend you money just on your signature without knowing when you will be able to start paying it back. Of course!
What a clown.
And doubling his clownishness, the post was taken down and his office lamely if predictably blamed the "badly worded post" on an unnamed "staffer." Exactly why unnamed staffers are able to put up uncleared posts on Pearce's personal Facebook page was unexplained. Predictably.
Pearce says he is working without pay during the shutdown, but considering that he's worth about $8 million, I doubt that he's really feeling a financial pinch. Or needs to take out a loan.
ProgressNow New Mexico, noting that Pearce's constituents are among the poorest in the country, suggest they should call him to ask him for a loan. After all, the group says, if he's so sure that private loans are the answer, he should be the first to offer them.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/11/steve-pearce-furloughed-workers_n_4086260.html?1381527062
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-diB65scQU
http://pearce.house.gov/
And one more thing before the break, the Clown Award, given for meritorious stupidity. Feel free to laugh.This week the big red nose goes to Rep. Steve Pearce, a GOPper from New Mexico, who posted this bit of sage wisdom on his personal Facebook page:
"If you are a furloughed government employee, we encourage you to reach out to your financial institution as soon as you worry you may miss a paycheck. Financial institutions often offer short-term loans and other resources. Don't wait until you are behind on a bill; call now and explore your options."That's right, if you've been laid off because of the stupidity and venality of right-wing bozos like Steve Pearce and are worried about paying your bills, don't worry, be happy: just take out a loan!
Of course! Why didn't we all think of that? Of course borrowing money on no income, going even further into personal debt, is a great idea! And of course banks will be happy to lend you money just on your signature without knowing when you will be able to start paying it back. Of course!
What a clown.
And doubling his clownishness, the post was taken down and his office lamely if predictably blamed the "badly worded post" on an unnamed "staffer." Exactly why unnamed staffers are able to put up uncleared posts on Pearce's personal Facebook page was unexplained. Predictably.
Pearce says he is working without pay during the shutdown, but considering that he's worth about $8 million, I doubt that he's really feeling a financial pinch. Or needs to take out a loan.
ProgressNow New Mexico, noting that Pearce's constituents are among the poorest in the country, suggest they should call him to ask him for a loan. After all, the group says, if he's so sure that private loans are the answer, he should be the first to offer them.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/11/steve-pearce-furloughed-workers_n_4086260.html?1381527062
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-diB65scQU
http://pearce.house.gov/
130.6 - Hero Award: Nancy Salgado
Hero Award: Nancy Salgado
Finally, a slam-dunk Hero Award.
Nancy Salgado is a 26-year-old single mother with two children. She is also a cashier at a McDonald's in Chicago. She makes $8.25 an hour. She has been working at McDonald's since she was 16 and has never gotten a raise.
Last week she interrupted a speech by Jeff Stratton, President of McDonald's USA, at some fancy-schmancy dinner or another, telling him she's worked for McDonald's for 10 years and can't even afford to buy shoes for her two children.She was promptly arrested, but not before leaving Stratton tongue-tied and flustered, his only comeback being "I've been there 40 years" as if that was relevant.
No one asked him how many raises he'd gotten in that time or how his kids were fixed for shoes.
By the way, there are moves in Massachusetts to raise the minimum wage and to require employers to provide earned sick time. One group is now working to get initiatives on the November 2014 ballot should legislative efforts fail.
But getting back to Nancy Salgado: Nancy, you are not only a hero - you positively rock.
Sources:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/09/1245625/-McDonald-s-employee-arrested-for-interrupting-speech-by-McDonald-s-USA-President
http://raiseupma.org/
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10846
Finally, a slam-dunk Hero Award.Nancy Salgado is a 26-year-old single mother with two children. She is also a cashier at a McDonald's in Chicago. She makes $8.25 an hour. She has been working at McDonald's since she was 16 and has never gotten a raise.
Last week she interrupted a speech by Jeff Stratton, President of McDonald's USA, at some fancy-schmancy dinner or another, telling him she's worked for McDonald's for 10 years and can't even afford to buy shoes for her two children.She was promptly arrested, but not before leaving Stratton tongue-tied and flustered, his only comeback being "I've been there 40 years" as if that was relevant.
No one asked him how many raises he'd gotten in that time or how his kids were fixed for shoes.By the way, there are moves in Massachusetts to raise the minimum wage and to require employers to provide earned sick time. One group is now working to get initiatives on the November 2014 ballot should legislative efforts fail.
But getting back to Nancy Salgado: Nancy, you are not only a hero - you positively rock.
Sources:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/09/1245625/-McDonald-s-employee-arrested-for-interrupting-speech-by-McDonald-s-USA-President
http://raiseupma.org/
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10846
130.5 - Hero Award: Drew Reisinger
Hero Award: Drew Reisinger
Okay, our third Hero Award is smaller by comparison, but still worthy.
Drew Reisinger is the Register of Deeds for Buncombe County, North Carolina. He is creating a challenge to a 2012 amendment to the state constitution which bans same-sex marriages. He says he will accept marriage license applications from same-sex couples - and then hold the licenses and ask North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper for legal advice.
Reisinger said he had been forced to deny same-sex marriage licenses to "upstanding citizens," and he felt like that was not fair.
Reisinger's announcement came just hours after Attorney General Cooper revealed that he supports same-sex marriage. But Cooper also said his personal views won't prevent him from defending the ban in court.
Which may well be true and it's possible, even very probable, that Reisinger's actions will go nowhere, at least in the short term. But it does put the question to Cooper and by extension others: Will you actually defend in court a provision you believe is wrong - or would you, could you, might you, as Eric Holder did in the case of the Defense of Marriage Act, just decide to not mount a defense?
For using his official position to raise that question, Drew Reisinger is a hero.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/14/north-carolina-gay-marriage-ban_n_4099068.html
Okay, our third Hero Award is smaller by comparison, but still worthy.Drew Reisinger is the Register of Deeds for Buncombe County, North Carolina. He is creating a challenge to a 2012 amendment to the state constitution which bans same-sex marriages. He says he will accept marriage license applications from same-sex couples - and then hold the licenses and ask North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper for legal advice.
Reisinger said he had been forced to deny same-sex marriage licenses to "upstanding citizens," and he felt like that was not fair.Reisinger's announcement came just hours after Attorney General Cooper revealed that he supports same-sex marriage. But Cooper also said his personal views won't prevent him from defending the ban in court.
Which may well be true and it's possible, even very probable, that Reisinger's actions will go nowhere, at least in the short term. But it does put the question to Cooper and by extension others: Will you actually defend in court a provision you believe is wrong - or would you, could you, might you, as Eric Holder did in the case of the Defense of Marriage Act, just decide to not mount a defense?
For using his official position to raise that question, Drew Reisinger is a hero.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/14/north-carolina-gay-marriage-ban_n_4099068.html
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