In Case You Had Forgotten, Bill Moyers And Two Legal Scholars Explain How Citizens United Allows Corp's To Buy Elections

The video below appears originally as the first video on this page. Please watch Bill Moyers interviewing Monica Youn, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham School of Law, on the direct and indirect consequences of Citizens United:

If we want to preserve any semblance of democracy in America, we must find a way to rid ourselves of that execrable Supreme Court ruling. Otherwise the Golden Rule applies ("those who have the gold make the rules"), and we the people (except for the very wealthy) will have no participatory role in our government, and our flag may as well look like this:

I understand Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has a good campaign underway to rid us of Citizens United; perhaps you can join his effort. If that doesn't suit you, please find something, or prepare to lose your democracy.

'Corporate Religion': It's Bad For Business, And Of Course For Civil Liberties

Emily Martin and Jennifer Pizer at TPM engage in some serious reflection on what it would mean if corporations were allowed to defy laws based on their purported "corporate freedom of religion": it's not a pretty picture. Consider, they say, what would happen if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, allowing them effectively to overrule the ACA requirement that employer-provided insurance plans must offer women access to contraception at zero co‑pay:

...

The proponents of the Arizona bill explained in interviews that they introduced it so that businesses could refuse to provide service to gay or lesbian customers. But the bill itself never mentioned sexual orientation; the primary thing it did was change Arizona’s existing religious exemptions law to vest corporations, partnerships, and other for-profit businesses with religious rights. In doing so, however, the bill would have given these for-profit businesses a license to ignore many state and local laws if the businesses claim the laws burden the business’s religious beliefs, unless applying the law in question to the business in that particular circumstance is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling state interest.

...

In other words, if Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood win with this argument, the Supreme Court will have reinterpreted longstanding federal law to adopt at the national level a key goal of Arizona’s bill, empowering corporations across the country to discriminate against their customers and employees in many contexts based on the corporation’s ostensible religion, whether or not that discrimination would otherwise be illegal. As a result, if the Supreme Court decides an arts and crafts chain is capable of religious beliefs and thus can have a religious right to deny its employees insurance coverage for birth control, then airlines might be able to assert a religious right to pay men more than women, bakeries could assert a religious right to deny employees insurance coverage for vaccinations, hotels might be able to assert a religious right to refuse rooms to customers based on race, and restaurants could assert a religious right to refuse to serve gay couples. 

Given the national furor when the Arizona legislature passed such a proposal, it would be troubling indeed if following Governor Brewer’s veto, the Supreme Court rejected decades of settled federal law to provide a corporate right to discriminate in the name of religion. Arizona’s governor did the right thing by recognizing that SB 1062 represented a radical and divisive approach that was wrong for the state, as did legislatures in Mississippi and Kansas when they set aside similar bills. The Supreme Court should not reshape federal law to craft a similarly radical and divisive rule for the nation.

(Note: the bill referred to is a recent Arizona bill to vest corporations with religious freedom; it was vetoed by Governor Brewer.)

At least two other states have abandoned their attempts to pass such a law, in part because, civil liberties aside, it would be really bad for business. And indeed it already has been bad for Hobby Lobby's business: Stella's multimedia artworks (like the one that recently won a place in a juried exhibit, one called "Freedom of Speech" which overlooks our workspace right now) require a variety of craft materials, and she has stated that she will no longer trade with Hobby Lobby until they relinquish their claim to a corporate "freedom of religion" and its application in dodging duly passed laws. One customer gone... how many more will depart in the face of such a draconian change in the meaning of personal freedoms?

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AFTERTHOUGHT: some may ask whether I am accusing the CEOs of these corporations of operating in bad faith... claiming corporate freedom of religion as an excuse to discriminate against customers and/or employees in matters that have little if anything to do with religion. Yes, I am... and yes, they are. And if the Supreme Court lets them get away with it, so is the Supreme Court.

US National Archives Blocks Search For Gov't Docs Containing 'WikiLeaks'

FDL's Kevin Gosztola:

Searches for “WikiLeaks” in the public search engine for the US National Archives have been blocked, according to a posting at Cryptome.org. Any search containing the word “WikiLeaks (like “Congress” and “WikiLeaks”) turns up an error message.

WikiLeaks reacted on Twitter, “The US National Archives has literally turned into Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.” In another more vivid message, “The US state is literally eating its own brain by censoring its own collective memories about WikiLeaks.” And, in another message, “The US National Archives censoring searches for its records containing the word ‘WikiLeaks’ is absolutely absurd.”

It is unknown when the Archives began blocking searches, but the United States government did adopt a generally accepted and understood policy of censorship back in December 2010 when the US State Embassy cables were being released.

The Library of Congress (LOC) blocked access to WikiLeaks on its computer system, including computers used by patrons in reading rooms. ...

...

Whether or not you like WikiLeaks, and whether or not (as has never been established) they are leaking classified information, this behavior by the Archives has only one legitimate name: censorship. It is one thing to prevent the release of secrets. It is another altogether to prevent public discussion of agency activity. Not only stories from WikiLeaks are blocked: stories ABOUT WikiLeaks are blocked.

Read the rest. Your free-speech rights may come to depend on the result of this battle. And don't think either presidential candidate is better on this issue.

Police Brutalize, Arrest TransCanada Pipeline Protesters

Pipe this crud across US+Texas...
What could possibly go wrong?

Kevin Gosztola at Firedoglake's The Dissenter and Current TV 's Films for Action (essentially crossposts) has details about Texas police (what level? not mentioned) using handcuffed stress positions while pepper spraying and tasering demonstrators who obstructed the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline being constructed by TransCanada, all while TransCanada officials stood by and made no attempt to halt the brutalization.

Here's a bit of background on tar sands by Edward Burtynsky at TreeHugger (love the site name!) for those unfamiliar (note: "oil sands" is just a sanitized name for "tar sands"):

• Oil sands mining is licensed to use twice the amount of fresh water that the entire city of Calgary uses in a year.
• At least 90% of the fresh water used in the oil sands ends up in ends up in tailing ponds so toxic that propane cannons are used to keep ducks from landing.
• Processing the oil sands uses enough natural gas in a day to heat 3 million homes.
• The toxic tailing ponds are considered one of the largest human-made structures in the world.
• The ponds span 50 square kilometers and can be seen from space.
• Producing a barrel of oil from the oil sands produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than a barrel of conventional oil.

In other words, tar sands are an idea whose time is long past. Poisoning water much needed for other purposes to produce a fossil fuel whose burning pollutes our air might have been acceptable in the 19^th century, before far cleaner energy sources were available. It is not acceptable today.

As for suppressing protesters' peaceful demonstrations by brutalizing them... shades of the late 1960s and early 1970s! Does nothing ever change for the better?

Apparent Undercover Charlotte Cops Threaten, Search FDL, TruthOut Journalists

It is with genuine sadness that I report this. FDL reporter Kevin Gosztola and TruthOut's Steve Horn, both credentialed journalists at the Convention, were photographing "four burly middle-aged white males" in the street during a protest march. The four males, dressed as protesters but later identifying themselves as cops, were themselves photographing undocumented immigrants in the march. The undocumenteds were urging President Obama to make good on his 2008 campaign promise to facilitate some sort of solution to the ongoing problem faced by farmworkers without papers, other than the brutal approach in effect now for many decades, which is getting worse in border states. The cops threatened the journalists, one saying he would punch Gosztola in the teeth, another dragging Horn away from his story to a street corner. Gosztola deleted all his photos rather than turn them over to a cop.

Oh, hell. Just go read it. I'm weary and tired of this shit. It is an old, old story with echoes of Chicago 1968, and it is no more acceptable at a Democratic convention than a Republican one. As Jane Hamsher said,

“There’s nothing illegal about photographing people on the street” says Jane Hamsher, publisher of Firedoglake. “There was absolutely no provocation that could have possibly justified the thuggery and bullying by law enforcement agents of journalists who were legitimately covering a public event. It was an outrageous abridgement not only of freedom of the press, but of individual civil liberties.”

But that is where we are in 2012. Civil liberties, especially for journalists and news photographers, are infringed daily, and cops take sides in matters that are not rightfully theirs to resolve, absent violence. Things are different now, but not in a good way. Freedom of the press is in grave danger in America today.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) Tells Us: 'You'd Better Watch Your Language!'

For Rep. King's Edification

Yes, it's another English-only bill, introduced by another ignorant Republican congressional nut-job.  As told to us by Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel to the ACLU, H.R. 997, the “English Language Unity Act of 2011,” does at least four things:

• It makes English the official language of the United States. ...
• It requires all "official functions" of the U.S. government to be performed in English. This means, among many other things, tax documents, voter guides and probably signage in federal buildings. ...
• It imposes a "uniform language testing standard" for naturalization. That is, it imposes a heightened language test for citizenship beyond what immigrants have been taking for generations. Anybody seeking U.S. citizenship would now have to "understand generally the English language text of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the laws of the United States made in pursuance of the Constitution." ... [Jeebus! is there anyone alive who can claim to do that? - SB]
• Finally, ... it appears to bar members of Congress or any other officer or agent of the federal government from "officially" conversing in any language other than English (but said member or officer may converse "unofficially" in another language).

Please read the full version of Rottman's worthy sarcastic rendering, followed by his concise history of court rulings on language restrictions in American history (the short version: the gummint can't do it).

This bill is clearly unconstitutional under the First Amendment, as I don't have to tell you if you're reading this site. Rep. King should be censured for even introducing it; hell, he should be tarred, feathered, dipped in boiling oil and ridden out of town on a rail. Instead, House Judiciary Committee ranking minority member John Conyers (D-MI) approached the legislation with the (ahem) seriousness it deserves: he delivered his response in Spanish, a premeditated act which would have been illegal under the terms of the bill. Bravo, Rep. Conyers! (If this bill passed, could I legally say "bravo" in an official context?)

AFTERTHOUGHT: a bit of exploration reveals that Rep. King introduces this piece of dog-shit in every session of Congress... and still he gets re-elected. His constituents' ignorance is understandable (if regrettable) in these days of paranoia; King's own ignorance, on the other hand, is abominable and inexcusable.

Internet Defense League Launches Tomorrow

Do you give a damn whether private corporations with unfriendly agendas prevail upon their lackeys in Congress to give them effective control over the Internet? Do you care whether SOPA/PIPA and its descendants impose ridiculously stringent restrictions on your web sites' content? You do, and you do? Great! Sign up to be part of the Internet Defense League. Before you sign up, take a look at their list of early institutional members; I think you'll feel you're in good company.

Here's a selection: Mozilla, WordPress, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), FightForTheFuture, reddit, CHEEZburger (!), Open Technology Institute, ... just go look for yourself, so I won't have to type dozens of links. And yes, your doggerelist is a member; I signed up many weeks ago.

Oh, and for members (free to sign up... donations accepted, of course), there are all kinds of cool logos for your site, including the cat face in the sidebar here.

DISCLOSE Act Fails

From SFGate, a hostile editorial (op-ed? not clear):

D.C. Democrats are pushing the Disclose Act again. Disclose stands for Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections. The ACLU and National Right to Life Committee oppose this bill because they fear it would chill free speech. As far as the anti-abortion group is concerned, Disclose stands for "Deterring Independent Speech about Congress except by Labor Organizations and Selected Elites."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., frames this year's bill, which failed to win a floor vote in the Senate on Monday, as a reform made necessary by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision to allow independent expenditure campaigns to spend unlimited money from corporations, plutocrats and unions.

...

For once, I find myself opposed to the ACLU position. If spending truly were speech, chilling campaign contributions by identifying contributors might have a chilling effect on free speech. But the Roberts Court notwithstanding, spending is not speech: inequalities in campaign spending are surely the most corrosive influence on actual free speech by natural humans (not corporate entities, and not PACs or SuperPACs) of any in the long history of campaign abuses. Historically, the party that spends the most money on advertising (usually negative advertising, but put that aside for now) is the party that wins a given office, and historically and at present, that party is almost certainly the GOP. What could be more inimical to free speech regarding a partisan contest than effectively unlimited "speech" (i.e., spending) by Republicans and severely limited "speech" (i.e., spending) by Democrats? They should have renamed the Citizens United decision the "GOP Victory Assurance" decision. However imperfect the DISCLOSE Act may be, the notion that we can merely do nothing about this inequity and yet continue to call ourselves a representative democracy is ludicrous.

I'll revisit this topic, but right now I have other responsibilities.

Greenwald On 'Tea Party "Treason"'

Glenn Greenwald at Salon asks the highly controversial question, "What powers should the president have against those who [verbally] advocate open, violent revolt against the U.S. government?" The answer seems to depend

• first of all, on whether you are a Muslim (even if you are a US citizen... cases in point, Anwar Al-Awlaki, citizen and Muslim, as vs. Mississippi Tea Party Chair Roy Nicholson, citizen and non-Muslim, who has similarly made some radically anti-government statements),
  
  
• second, whether there is any sustainable analogy between presidential extrajudicial assassination orders against American citizens far from any battlefield and Lincoln's orders to kill rebels in the Confederate army (who, though arguably American citizens, were nonetheless soldiers in uniform engaging in battles of a systematic insurrection against the USA), as frequently asserted by neocons,
  
  
• and finally, whether individuals who are not charged with any crime against the United States but who associate with and possibly assist the likes of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, may be, systematically, secretly and without a warrant, surveilled by the FBI (case in point, Jacob Appelbaum, an activist whose internet provider has been harassed with no fewer than 23 "national security letters" of which that ISP was not permitted to inform Appelbaum, thus arguably a failure "to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation" [a Sixth Amendment right]).

Be sure to watch the video in which Appelbaum, through incisive questions, pins a DoJ/FBI representative to a very uncomfortable assertion of support in the law for essentially secret and warrantless demands for documents from Appelbaum's ISP. It is chilling to hear these things said out loud by such a spokesperson, who apparently believes the statute (I presume some part of the PATRIOT Act) prevails over the Fourth Amendment.

Supreme Court Unanimously TossesBroadcast Cursing Sanctions

... to which I can only say, "Fuckin' A!"

The cases at issue were brought by a radical right-wing Bush administration FCC, who wanted almost to criminalize even incidental, fleeting curses or transient glimpses of nudity.

The history of FCC policing of broadcast profanity and nudity arguably got its serious start in 1978 when Pacifica Radio aired George Carlin's famous monologue "(bleep) (bleep) (bleep) (bleep) (bleep) (bleep) (bleep)" where each (bleep) was a different obscenity or profanity. In today's ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed a wish that the Pacifica ruling be overturned as having been wrongly decided, but that didn't happen, fuckin' goddammit.

AFTERTHOUGHT: and I was so looking forward to FCC sanctions on commercials by candidate Joe the Plumber for rear-view shots of the plumber at work...

Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!

No apologies... I just had to do it. A narrow-minded Republican made me.

Most of the public response to the brutal silencing of two Michigan state legislators, Reps. Lisa Brown, D-West Bloomfield, and Barb Byrum, D-Onondaga, women who committed the unpardonable sin [/snark] of mentioning their vaginas in floor speeches during a heated debate of an unconscionable anti-abortion bill, has displayed better grace and good humor than I would have managed under similar circumstances. E.g., Naomi McAuliffe of the Guardian:

Apparently, when discussing a medical procedure, it's not really appropriate to use medical words. Well not about lady bits anyway. It makes me wonder what euphemisms would be acceptable. "Will the representative get his hand out of the otter's pocket?" "Can the honourable gentleman refrain from trespassing in the lady cave?

Meanwhile, the formidable Eve Ensler joined Reps. Brown and Bynum and a crowd of about 2500 in a performance of Ensler's The Vagina Monologues on the steps of the Michigan capital. The entire event serves to point up the Michigan state House debate of perhaps the most draconian anti-abortion bill anywhere in the nation, proposed by the Republican men of the House, who seemed determined not even to let women representatives speak in their own behalf.

I could go on and on about the utter folly of Republicans' determination to go forward with such blatantly unconstitutional bills in an election year, perhaps appeasing their base of maybe 30 or 40 percent of the male population, while alienating the entire veritable army of women, probably slightly over 50 percent. But I won't do that. Instead, I'll just quote the title of a book by Michigan Rep. Maxine Berman, D-West Bloomfield...

“The Only Boobs in the House are Men”.

In NY, Speech Is Free, But You Pay For Anonymity

H/T Bryan for pointing us to this post by Matt Peckham in Time's Techland blog:

Watching faceless online passerby troll bloggers or mock fellow scribblers can be a drag, but what if legislators’ answer to online ne’er-do-wells was to ban anonymous comments from websites entirely? That’s what the state of New York is planning to do in identical bills — S.6779 and A.8688 – proposed by the New York State Assembly that would “amend the civil rights law” in order to “[protect] a person’s right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting.”

The bill would require a web administrator to “upon request remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate.” By “web site,” the bill means just what it seems to: Any New York-based website, including “social networks, blogs forums, message boards or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.”

...

That sound was, of course, the noise of a few of our nation's founders turning in their graves. For example, the various pseudonymous authors of the Federalist Papers are surely rotating rapidly.

I have published under my real name (well, OK, my real nickname) for decades. But faced with such a law I would make up a pseudonym just to defy it. Anonymous or pseudonymous speech emphatically does have a place in the discourse of a free society. And it is protected under the First Amendment, as our nation's founders understood without having to have it explained to them in words of one syllable.

Based on the proposed law, I have to assume that New York wants its residents to abandon altogether the web hosting business. That suits me, or as Texans say, it's no skin off my back. When I had self-hosted business and personal sites (as opposed to Blogger-hosted or WordPress-hosted), my host was about 30 miles north of me, and they placed as few restrictions as possible on what I posted. That's how it's supposed to be in America.

Obama Determined To Make It Difficult For His Base To Vote For Him

I don't understand why he is doing things like this (from Greenwald , quoting Washington Post):

President Obama plans to issue an executive order Wednesday giving the Treasury Department authority to freeze the U.S.-based assets of anyone who “obstructs” implementation of the administration-backed political transition in Yemen.

The unusual order, which administration officials said also targets U.S. citizens who engage in activity deemed to threaten Yemen’s security or political stability, is the first issued for Yemen that does not directly relate to counterterrorism.

Unlike similar measures authorizing terrorist designations and sanctions, the new order does not include a list of names or organizations already determined to be in violation. Instead, one official said, it is designed as a “deterrent” to “make clear to those who are even thinking of spoiling the transition” to think again. ...

...

It is quite beyond me why Obama's apparent need to fix an election in Yemen should become a free-speech issue for any American citizen. But Obama seems determined. I'd like to see how they spin this one.

UPDATE: be sure to follow Greenwald's links to Jeremy Scahill (regrettably in multiple tweets) and Marcy Wheeler.


AFTERTHOUGHT: the above post is probably inadequate to make clear the danger to Americans' free speech rights. So here's Greenwald regarding possible Yemeni or American speech on the one-candidate "election":

In other words, the U.S. Government will now punish anyone who is determined — in the sole discretion of the U.S. Government — even to “indirectly” obstruct the full transition of power to President Hadi. But what if someone — a Yemeni or an American — opposes Hadi’s rule and wants to agitate for a real election in which more than one candidate runs? Is that pure political advocacy, as it appears, now prohibited by the U.S. Government, punishable by serious sanctions, on the ground that it “obstructs” the transition of power to Hadi? Can journalists who report on corruption or violence by the Hadi regime and who write Op-Eds demanding a new election be accused, as it seems, of “threatening Yemen’s political stability”?

(OT, if I ever meet the guy who implemented copy-pastes in the Blogger editor, I shall murder him/her with a blunt instrument... Oh, OK, I suppose I should explain that, too. Suppose your blog body has a yellow background... hey, it could happen. Now suppose you want to copy-paste a paragraph from a quoted web site into your blog. What should the default background be? Why, of course, says Blogger, it should be the background of the original, which nine times out of ten is white! But not just a solid white background for the graf you copy-pasted. Oh, noooo, nothing so sensible. Blogger imposes a line spacing on quoted text, so that the copy-pasted area on my blog consists of black print on a white background for each line... with yellow visible between lines. This is madness. Any damned fool can see that the proper background color for a copy-paste is "transparent" or "inherit"; there is no excuse for introducing another color. The fact that there's no excuse doesn't stop Blogger...)