Yo Mayor, City Councils, Police Chiefs And Street Cops...

Monday Cartoon Fun: We Haven't Read It, Actually Edition

Chris Wallace Gets Schooled By Ted Olson

Ted Olson explains to Fox News dork why Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

Sunday Cartoon Fun: 14th Amendment Edition

Prop 8 Is Unconstitutional: Updated

by Adam Bink

I just finished reading the meat of the decision. Chief Judge Vaughn Walker has ruled Prop 8 is unconstitutional on both Equal Protection and Due Process grounds. Huge win. The decision is likely to be appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Developing…

CONCLUSION
Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis,the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

REMEDIES
Plaintiffs have demonstrated by overwhelming evidence that Proposition 8 violates their due process and equal protection rights and that they will continue to suffer these constitutional violations until state officials cease enforcement of Proposition 8. California is able to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, as it has already issued 18,000 marriage licenses to same-sex couples and has not suffered any demonstrated harm as a result, see FF 64-66; moreover, California officials have chosen not to defend Proposition 8 in these proceedings.

Because Proposition 8 is unconstitutional under both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, the court orders entry of judgment permanently enjoining its enforcement; prohibiting the official defendants from applying or enforcing Proposition 8 and directing the official defendants that all persons under their control or supervision shall not apply or enforce Proposition 8. The clerk is DIRECTED to enter judgment without bond in favor of plaintiffs and plaintiff-intervenors and against defendants anddefendant-intervenors pursuant to FRCP 58.

IT IS SO ORDERED.

Link to full PDF of decision

Praying Before Legislating: America's Oxymorons

Texas State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar opens debate on new social studies standards with a politically divisive prayer on May 21, 2010.

I always get uneasy when I see prayer in a government office. America's Constitution makes the separation explicit. Why the fuck are government employees praying to Jesus in a government building as they begin government business? A new Facebook group may be in order: Stop Praying At Government Meetings. Someone go start it.

I Am Officially Disappointed

Chris Hedges writes:

Nader Was Right: Liberals Are Going Nowhere With Obama

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

You should read the rest.

Posse Comitatus: Repealed (apparently)

This is a bit scary because we are nearing the conditions necessary:

Report argues for domestic police role for military

by Jay McDonough

The Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878, just after the end of the Reconstruction following the Civil War, and prohibited the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement purposes except in very rare cases. Per Wikipedia, the Act was a political concession to Southern states, withdrawing the Union military forces that policed ex-Confederate states during the Reconstruction.

A couple months ago, the Department of Defense announced it was assigning a full-time Army unit to be on call to facilitate military cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security in the event of another terrorist attack.

A report in the Army Times last month first brought the domestic deployment to light. The Army's 3rd Infantry Division 1st Brigade Combat Team became the first unit assigned permanently to Northern Command.

According to the Army Times report, the Team would be on-call to respond in the event of a natural disaster or terror attack anywhere in the country, or they could be used to "help with civil unrest and crowd control." (Link)

This clearly raises issues with respect to the Posse Comitatus Act, but even more troubling are recent reports a U.S. Army War College professor has written a report asserting military intervention would be required in a number of domestic scenarios.

The author warns potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, "unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters." The situation could deteriorate to the point where military intervention was required, he argues.

The author of the report notes the proposals are his alone and don't represent U.S. policy, but it's also certain the report has been read throughout the Defense Department. But economic collapse? Loss of functioning political order? Purposeful domestic resistance? That's one terrifying slippery slope. And not in keeping with American values.

2nd Amendment Blues

Yesterday, an idiot father and and even more brain-dead “instructor” allowed an eight-year-old boy to fire a fully automatic Uzi submachine gun at an event billed as, “all legal and and fun! — No permits or licenses required!!!” Naturally, the gun kicked up, as it is designed to do, flipping toward the child who managed to shoot himself in the head with it. Since kids’ heads aren’t all that heavily armored, we now have a little boy who will never see his ninth birthday.

So, little Christopher Bizilj is dead, dead, dead. His father, Dr. Charles Bizilj, director of emergency medicine (if you can believe it) at a hospital in Stafford Springs, Connecticut, got to watch his son bleed out from a head wound on the floor. And the people who put this little event together have to look at themselves in their mirrors and ask themselves the simple question, “What the FUCK made me think it was a good idea to put a submachine gun in a child’s hands?”

As a parent and teacher, this horrifies me.
h/t Newshoggers

The Separation Of Church & State: Um, WTF?!

This is not good. It's the kind of thing that really pisses me off. Oy vey!

Pulpit politics

By Libby

If there's a heaven and the Founding Fathers are looking down at us from it, they must be wondering why the hell they saved us from England in the first place. They did this in 04 as well, but of course no one was prosecuted except for some 'liberal' church in California, so they're at it again.

Setting the stage for a collision of religion and politics, Christian ministers from 22 states will use their pulpits Sunday to deliver political sermons or endorse candidates — defying a federal ban on campaigning by nonprofit groups.

The ministers' advocacy could violate the Internal Revenue Service's rules against political speech with the purpose of triggering IRS investigations. That would allow their patron, the conservative legal group Alliance Defense Fund, to challenge the IRS' rules, a risky strategy that one defense fund attorney acknowledges could cost the churches their tax-exempt status.

Congress made it illegal in 1954 for tax-exempt groups to support or oppose political candidates publicly.

"I'm going to talk about the un-biblical stands that Barack Obama takes. Nobody who follows the Bible can vote for him," said the Rev. Wiley Drake of First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, Calif.

Needless to say, by the time the legal challenges wend their way through the system, the election will be long over. The only justice we might ever see is if these churches finally lose their tax-empt status so they can never subvert the separation of church and state again.

"We Must Guard Against the Acquisition of Unwarranted Influence...

...whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

That first part of Ike's farewell we have not remembered. Unwarranted Influence. Understatement of the year century! Read this.

Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I'll piss on 'em

Eighteen months of detention. This video of the daughter of the incarcerated is important to watch. This young woman, well, I hope she gets to stay in America!


from MJ

So Long, Suppression

Another remnant of the Fourth Amendment is on its way out...

So, the NYTimes yesterday not only predicted but pretty much called for an end to the exclusionary rule, which generally prohibits the government from using at trial evidence that the police obtained by violating the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights. The article says that the United States is the only country that "routinely and automatically" suppresses unconstitutionally obtained evidence and claims that police misconduct may be better punished by, say, "internal discipline and civil suits."

Yeah, I have some problems with this.

Let's talk about the alleged "routine and automatic" suppression of evidence. I practice before a relatively liberal court. I've worked on maybe 50 or 60 motions to suppress evidence in my nearly 12 years of practice. I can count on one hand the ones that resulted in ANY evidence being suppressed and on three fingers the ones that resulted in the prosecution being dismissed. (In one of those cases, the defendant was then given a seven-year sentence in a parole-revocation hearing, at which the exclusionary rule does not apply.) Now maybe I'm a bad lawyer, but I don't know anyone who wins these things routinely and automatically. Cops lie, and judges believe them and will look for absolutely any excuse--and the decade-long erosion of Fourth Amendment rights provides many--to not suppress evidence.

Let's talk about the other proposed remedies for police misconduct. Internal discipline? What a joke. Getting the bad guys by any means is cause for police celebration, not punishment. And the Supreme Court justices who are gunning to get rid of the exclusionary rule and suggest civil suits as an alternative remedy seem to have forgotten that 14 years ago the Court decided that you can't sue the police for an illegal search unless you first can prove that you are innocent of committing the crime for which you were prosecuted based on illegally obtained evidence. In other words, if the police bust down your door in the middle of the night and tear apart your house--in clear, blatant and intentional violation of the Fourth Amendment--and eventually find drugs, you can't sue them for the unconstitutional search unless you first can prove that you're innocent of any drug charge. Good luck with that.

One final point about comparing the criminal justice system in the US with the system in other countries. The article begins with the story of a case from Canada: Guy is stopped, illegally, with 77 pounds of cocaine in the truck, and the Canadian courts declined to suppress the evidence. The guy gets five years in prison. In the U.S., someone caught with that much cocaine, with no prior criminal record, would be looking at 12 1/2 to 15 1/2 years in prison under the federal sentencing guidelines. Kind of a big difference in penalty there. You can't just look at one piece of the system in isolation.

I Had An Original Thought...

About merit pay for teachers: If we give money to a teacher because his students did better on the test one year, do we take the money away when the students don't do better?

And if, per chance, student scores in that teacher's class were to vary from year to year, forget financially, what are we to make of that conundrum pedagogically, statistically, educationally, socio-economically, policyily, personally, professionally, confusingly?

What Do The Courts Want With Me?

I've been getting visited by the Courts. Should I worry?

Definition Of Asshole (Updated)

There's a guy--reporter?--who wrote a piece in Newsweek. Over at Sadly, No! they, um, rip the asshole a brand new asshole! Begin the ripping:

So I tried to escape the toxic levels of wingnuttery this evening by flipping through my roommate’s copy of Newsweek. Amazingly, I flipped to page 36 and found this:

The Truth About Torture

To get a full accounting of how U.S. interrogation methods were used, the president should give those accused of ‘war crimes’ a pass.

By Stuart Taylor Jr. | NEWSWEEK

Dark deeds have been conducted in the name of the United States government in recent years: the gruesome, late-night circus at Abu Ghraib, the beating to death of captives in Afghanistan, and the officially sanctioned waterboarding and brutalization of high-value Qaeda prisoners. Now demands are growing for senior administration officials to be held accountable and punished. Congressional liberals, human-rights groups and other activists are urging a criminal investigation into high-level “war crimes,” including the Bush administration’s approval of interrogation methods considered by many to be torture.

It’s a bad idea. In fact, President George W. Bush ought to pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution for interrogation methods approved by administration lawyers.

Go read the rest. There are torture pictures. It is a righteous, foul-mouthed repudiation of Stuart Taylor Jr., aka: Fucking Dick!

UPDATE: A truth commission is starting to sound like the only thing we have a chance of getting. Why, MSM, are you such wimps?

Is It Safe Redux

Over at The Dish Andrew has more on the hypocracy of the Hippocratic oath takers.

Psychologist Marty Seligman has objected to the notion that he "assisted" the torture program of the president in Gitmo and throughout the war on terror. Jane Mayer never actually used that word, others have in describing Mayer's book. No facts in Mayer's book have been disputed by Seligman. Here's Jane's response to his protestation of total innocence of what he became involved with, wittingly or unwittingly:

Professor Seligman’s disavowal actually adds a rather interesting new fact to the story of how the psychology profession played a role in the CIA’s “special” interrogation program. In “The Dark Side,” I established by interviewing him, that he had personally spoken for three hours at the Navy’s SERE School in San Diego, in April of 2002, at a somewhat mysterious confab organized in part by the head of Behavioral Science at the CIA.

This was a pretty crucial moment in the development of America’s secret interrogation and detention program. Abu Zubayda had been captured just weeks before, and the CIA was trying to come up with ways to make him talk. They had no patience for the slow, rapport-building methods used by the FBI, whose role in the case they had just superceded. But what to do? At this very moment, Professor Seligman, it seems, agreed to participate in what he says was an unexplained private high-level CIA meeting, held on the campus of the part of the Navy that runs a secret program emulating torture – the SERE School in San Diego.

Professor Seligman says he has no idea why he was called in from his academic position in Pennsylvania, to suddenly appear at this CIA event. He just showed up and talked for three hours about how dogs, when exposed to horrible treatment, give up all hope, and become compliant. Why the CIA wanted to know about this at this point, he says he never asked. But somehow- and this is what is news as far as I know – Professor Seligman does know that in his audience were the two psychologists who soon after became the key advisers to the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. So, Professor Seligman, must have had some contact with them, since he knew they were in his audience. Did he speak with them? What did they talk about?

According to sources close to the FBI, around the same time, one of those psychologists, James Mitchell, showed up where Abu Zubayda was being held, and started talking about Dr. Seligman’s theories of “Learned Helplessness” as shedding useful light on how to coerce Zubayda into talking. Specifically, he spoke of Seligman’s dog experiments, in which random electric shocks broke the dogs’ will to resist. An FBI agent was appalled – pointing out they were dealing with humans, not dogs. But Mitchell said it was “good science” for both.

(Mitchell declined to elaborate on the treatment of Abu Zubayda, when I interviewed him, but admitted he admired Seligman’s work on Learned Helplessness. A lawyer for Mitchell later claimed that he had not tried to apply the theory to detainees. But a colleague, Col. Steve Kleinman, who worked in the SERE program, said Mitchell talked all the time about how Learned Helplessness provided the blueprint for interrogating detainees).

So- did Seligman assist the U.S. Torture program? I am careful not to say so in “The Dark Side,”- I just recount the facts of his odd visit to the SERE school. So- he is not denying anything in my book.

But now that he brings all of this up again, it would be nice if he’d answer a few more questions. What exactly did he think he was doing that day in April of 2002 with the CIA? How did he know who Mitchell and Jessen were, and, what role did he think they were playing at that time? Maybe he was as clueless as he says he was. But, why doesn’t he then tell us know what he thinks of his theories being used in this way? Does he renounce Mitchell and Jessen? Does he think they used psychology immorally? He was the head of the APA- has he ever spoken out about this? Has he ever complained to the CIA about what they did with his science? Time for some more information here...instead of non-denial denials...

Is It Safe?

We have been appalled by images of doctors using their skills to torture, as in The Marathon Man. Well, it is pretty clear that America has done the same thing. Apparently we have doctors helping interrogators torture inmates. Now, the question is, do the licensing agencies who certify these MD's revoke the liscense? Of course they should! But, they won't. They probably won't even know who the doctors are.

We know all this, and we know about the torture that abso-fucking-lutely happened, even if Wolf will only say it is alleged (this is a problem the MSM needs to fix. The ought to TELL THE TRUTH, not allude to it!). We now have a well documented book to help us grok the horror.

America, America, what the fuck are we doing? Jane Mayer talks about her book and tells us:

WTF??!!

I am amazed that The New Yorker would publish such a crass, tasteless potentially controversial picture!

A Good Cartoon

Mike Luckovich makes funny cartoons!