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Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a way bigger deal than the outcome of the Massachusetts election. 

Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

…

Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, an author of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, called the ruling “a terrible mistake.”

“Ignoring important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent, the Court has given corporate money a breathtaking new role in federal campaigns,” said Mr. Feingold, a Democrat.

Giving corporations the right to fund election campaigns is an absurdity.  This kind of ruling is what I feared most following Bush’s Supreme Court appointments. 
 
Corporations have been around far longer than our country, and our founding fathers were very wary of extending privileges to economic entities.  They were way more concerned with living, breathing human beings.  The Bill of Rights was written for the benefit of people, not companies – and there lies the ultimate irony of this ruling. 
 
The driving force behind getting this case to the Supreme Court came from The Right, and they are the faction that, when it comes to appointing Supreme Court Justices, scream for “strict constructionists.”  Nowhere in the Constitution are there any rights granted to corporations.  Why?  Because corporations can amass huge quantities of money and they can live forever.  Our founders did not approve of giving such entities a voice in electing representatives of the people, because they knew that corporate contributors would fund campaigns of candidates that, once elected, would satisfy the wants and needs of business, not people.
 
Goldman Sachs is huge and they reported $13.4 billion in profits today.  They should not be allowed to fund the campaigns of congressmen because their interests and the interests of your average American are vastly different.  As a result of today’s ruling, one huge corporation like Goldman Sachs will be able to blast the grassroots campaigns of reform candidates clean out of the water. 
 
The Plutocracy just got way bigger today.  Say goodbye to the Republic, because it’s a thing of the past.  It’s a sad day in the history of our country.  A travesty.

One might think that a Christian church would be a relatively safe place to visit – that it wouldn’t be full of people carrying guns.  That’s probably true for most churches, but not this one.  The New York Times reports:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Ken Pagano, the pastor of the New Bethel Church here, is passionate about gun rights. He shoots regularly at the local firing range, and his sermon two weeks ago was on “God, Guns, Gospel and Geometry.”  And on Saturday night, he is inviting his congregation of 150 and others to wear or carry their firearms into the sanctuary to “celebrate our rights as Americans!” as a promotional flier for the “open carry celebration” puts it.

“God and guns were part of the foundation of this country,” Mr. Pagano, 49, said Wednesday in the small brick Assembly of God church, where a large wooden cross hung over the altar and two American flags jutted from side walls. “I don’t see any contradiction in this. Not every Christian denomination is pacifist.”

The bring-your-gun-to-church day, which will include a $1 raffle of a handgun, firearms safety lessons and a picnic, is another sign that the gun culture in the United States is thriving despite, or perhaps because of, President Obama’s election in November.

…

Mr. Pagano said the church’s insurance company, which he would not identify, had canceled the church’s policy for the day on Saturday and told him that it would cancel the policy for good at the end of the year. If he cannot find insurance for Saturday, people will not be allowed in openly carrying their guns.

…

…John Phillips, pastor of the Central Church of Christ in Little Rock.  In 1986, Mr. Phillips was preaching in a different church there when a gunman shot him and a parishioner. Both survived, but Mr. Phillips, 51, still has a bullet lodged in his spine.

In a telephone interview, he said he found the idea of “packing in the pew” abhorrent.

“There is a movement afoot across the nation, with the gun lobby pushing the envelope, trying to allow concealed weapons to be carried in places where they used to be prohibited — churches, schools, bars,” Mr. Phillips said.

“I don’t understand how any minister who is familiar with the teachings of the Bible can do this,” he added. “Jesus didn’t say, ‘Go ahead, make my day.’”

Well that’s his opinion, but the congregation of the New Bethel Church knows:

Seriously though, this story reads like an open invitation to a gun nut with a death wish.  I hope it doesn’t turn out that way but, if it does, no amount of insurance will be enough to cover the damage.

Duh…

The A.P. Reports:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a school’s strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal.

In an 8-1 ruling, the justices said school officials violated the law with their search of Savana Redding in the rural eastern Arizona town of Safford.

Redding, who now attends college, was 13 when officials at Safford Middle School ordered her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear because they were looking for pills – the equivalent of two Advils. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the school was acting on a tip from another student.

“What was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear,” Justice David Souter wrote in the majority opinion. “We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.”

And you may ask yourself:  Why wasn’t this a 9-0 ruling?  Who was the lone dissenter?

If you guessed Justice pubic-hair-on-a-Coke-can Thomas, you were right!

In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas found the search legal and said the court previously had given school officials “considerable leeway” under the Fourth Amendment in school settings.

…

Thomas warned that the majority’s decision could backfire. “Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments,” he said. “Nor will she be the last after today’s decision, which announces the safest place to secrete contraband in school.”

So will Safford Middle School or Vice Principal Kerry Wilson be held liable for conducting the illegal search? 

The court also ruled the officials cannot be held liable in a lawsuit for the search. Different judges around the nation have come to different conclusions about immunity for school officials in strip searches, which leads the Supreme Court to “counsel doubt that we were sufficiently clear in the prior statement of law,” Souter said.

“We think these differences of opinion from our own are substantial enough to require immunity for the school officials in this case,” Souter said.

The justices also said the lower courts would have to determine whether the Safford United School District No. 1 could be held liable.

There seems to be a whole lot of immunity being granted these days.  Everyone seems to be following the examples set by the lawless members of the Bush Administration who, except for Scooter Libby, have not been held accountable for anything.

More about the SCOTUS decision here.

The Atlantic Monthly article on European and American shifts in secularism/religion is a good history and a good analysis.  In the long haul I think that scepticism will probably carry the day but a lot of new “crusades” will be undertaken – but the banners will be only symbolic because they serve a political and economic purpose to rally the troops and raise the funds for maintaining/replacing political structures.

Speaking of stupid political structures…

The stupidity and arrogance of Homeland Security, particularly as it plays out in airport security is beyond belief.  On 60 Minutes this past Sunday the TSA said that the most dangerous players are not on the list because they don’t want to tip people off that they know who they are but, if your name is Robert Johnson, just accept the inconvenience of being searched every time you try to board–they had a room full of Robert Johnsons who related their experiences. 

That reminded me of the time I was challenged trying to take too much booze into California and, in the interrogation room, I asked to see their written guidelines.  When they asked why, I–big mistake–pulled out my ACLU card and said, “Because they tell me that I have some rights.”  He said that, when I was at the border, I had no rights and that they could even search my body cavities to which I replied, “Oooh, will you?” with a smile.  My wife cringed.  The upshot was that they let me leave with my booze but I couldn’t bring it into California.  It was a case of the border police enforcing a California law, not a federal law which would have allowed the gallon of rum that I was carrying.  From then on, I just hid it in a bag of charcoal in my car figuring that at least they would get dirty retrieving it.

Former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey submitted his written responses to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee today.  Here’s what he had to say about events leading up to the Alberto Gonzales’s late-night visit to Ashcroft’s hospital bed in an effort to get him to renew the warrantless NSA wiretap program:

Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.

The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital…

Comey said that Cheney’s office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance.

The disclosures also provide further details about the role played by then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales. He visited Ashcroft in his hospital room and wrote an internal memorandum on the surveillance program shortly afterward…

It is unclear who directed the two Bush aides to make the visit.

Democrats said yesterday that the new details from Comey raise further questions about the role of Cheney and other White House officials in the episode.

“Mr. Comey has confirmed what we suspected for a while — that White House hands guided Justice Department business,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). “The vice president’s fingerprints are all over the effort to strong-arm Justice on the NSA program, and the obvious next question is: Exactly what role did the president play?”

A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Comey also named eight Justice Department officials who were prepared to quit if the White House had not backed down, including FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, current U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg of Alexandria and Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel and led an internal legal review of the surveillance program.

The only thing that is “unclear” here is whether or not Cheney was acting on Bush’s orders or if he was pushing his own agenda.  Cheney was definitely involved in the decision to renew the illegal spying program even after many members of the Justice Department raised questions about its constitutioinality and recommended that it be discontinued.
 
But that didn’t stop Cheney from attempting to undermine the Justice Department by trying to get an ailing, drugged John Ashcroft to sign off on its renewal. 
 
Congress should subpoena Cheney immediately and require him to tell them about the NSA program and why he thought it necessary to ignore the advice he was getting from lawyers in the Justice Department and push through what he was being told was an illegal program.
 
I’ve always said that THIS is the issue that will unravel the Bush Administration, because they were clearly in violation of existing laws and the U.S. Constitution, and they’ve even admitted to it.
 
If there is an investigation and for some crazy reason the TRUTH is revealed, Bush and Cheney will be impeached for their total disregard of laws they swore on The Bible to uphold when they took office.

Back in January when Bush was feeling all bipartisan and conciliatory because he’d just got thumped in the mid-term elections, he thought he’d try and make nice with the new Democratic majority by ceasing his illegal NSA wiretap program and start obeying the surveillance laws outlined in FISA.

King George has changed his mind:

Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.

Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants.

As a result of the January agreement, the administration said that the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program has been brought under the legal structure laid out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for the wiretapping of American citizens and others inside the United States.

But on Tuesday, the senior officials, including Michael McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said they believed that the president still had the authority under Article II of the Constitution to once again order the N.S.A. to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants.

During a hearing Tuesday of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. McConnell was asked by Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, whether he could promise that the administration would no longer sidestep the court when seeking warrants.

“Sir, the president’s authority under Article II is in the Constitution,” Mr. McConnell said. “So if the president chose to exercise Article II authority, that would be the president’s call.”

…

The administration’s proposal would also provide legal immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the National Security Agency’s surveillance program without warrants before it was brought under the surveillance act in January. It would also provide legal protections for government workers who took part in the N.S.A. program.

I went back and read Article II, and I didn’t see what Michael McConnell claims to see.  I read it twice and I couldn’t find where the president was exempt from laws protecting our civil liberties.  I read the Fourth Amendment too, and that made it pretty clear to me that the Bush was clearly violating our Constitution.

And notice in that last paragraph where the Administration wants to grant retroactive immunity to corporate telecommunications companies?  And, just as was done in the Military Commissions Act, they want to retroactively grant immunity to all government officials who may have broken laws while carrying out their orders for the past six years.

There is a name for the merger of corporate and state interests that consolidates power in the hands of the few.  It’s called fascism. 

What this story tells me is that some people are finally recognizing the Bush Administration as a fascist regime, and some members in Congress are trying to hold them accountable for their blatant violations of law.  So now the Administration is trying to cover its ass by pushing through laws that grant immunity for everything they and their wealthy corporate coconspirators have done.

High crimes and misdemeanors?  Yes, I think so. 

Start the revolution.

FBI Director Robert Mueller testified before the Senate today about his agency’s abuse of provisions of The Patriot Act.  “Abuse” meaning of course that federal laws were broken.

…Mueller testified at the panel’s second hearing into a Justice Department inspector general’s report this month that revealed abuses in the FBI’s use of documents called national security letters to gather data.

Reviewing headquarters files and four of 56 FBI field offices, Inspector General Glenn Fine found 48 violations of law or presidential directives during 2003-2005. He estimates there may be up to 3,000 unidentified or unreported violations throughout the FBI.

Mueller said he had instituted procedures for issuing these letters. “What I did not do and should have done is put in a compliance program to be sure those procedures were followed,” he added.

…

Mueller said he had reduced such inaccuracies since learning of the problem in 2005 but noted that warrant applications are long and contain thousands of facts.

“I’m not impressed with your assertion that there are thousands of facts,” Specter said. “That’s your job. You asked for these powers; we gave you them. If these applications are wrong, you’re subjecting people to an invasion of privacy that ought not to be issued.”

Specter, a Republican, was correct in his assertion that Mueller’s FBI had violated the rights of the American people. 

But what did other Republicans have to say?

Republican Sens. Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Orrin Hatch of Utah opposed altering the law to curb FBI authority. “You’ve acknowledged the problems and pledged to fix them,” Hatch said. “That’s what Congress and the American people need.”

“Pledged to fix them?”  Didn’t Mueller “pledge” to follow the laws when he took over the FBI? 

You’ve just got to laugh out loud when you read this stuff.  These are the same Republicans that were in power when Clinton was president and they wouldn’t give him a break on anything.  They were out to get him from day one and were ready and willing to impeach him on any charge they could find.  They had to settle for a blow job. 

They would have loved to have one of Clinton’s appointees testify before them and admit to how his department broke the laws.  They would certainly not accept any “pledge” to “fix” the problem.

I say pin this on Mueller and Bush and impeach the whole lof of them.  They don’t have any respect for laws–and they admit it!  They are all a bunch of criminals.

Come on Democrats!  Stop being so craven.  Do what you swore to do when you took office–defend the Constitution and the rule of law.  The survival of our Constitution depends on it.  Impeach the entire Executive Branch.

Need a list of impeachable offenses besides the illegal intrusions into privacy that Mueller admitted to?  Stephen Colbert listed all the offenses last week on his show and dared the Democrats to “buckle on your balls like men and impeach the president.”  Watch it.

Here’s what was argued before the Supreme Court today:

What does it mean?  Does it promote drugs?  Does it promote Christianity?  Both?  Neither?  Is it purely nonsense?  Would David Byrne approve of the message?  Do you care?

I wrote more details about the case back in December when it was taken up by the Supreme Court. 

Most people seem to agree (last I checked it was 74% to 26% at this MSNBC poll) that it was wrong for the school principal to make Joseph Frederick take down his sign that he was holding up across the street from his school during an Olympic Torch Relay passing through Juneau that day and then expel him from school.  Most people agree that his nonsensical banner fell under the category of “free speech.”

Kenneth Starr argued for the opposing point of view:

“Illegal drugs and the glorification of the drug culture are profoundly serious problems for our nation,” Mr. Starr, a former solicitor general, told the justices in the opening moments of his argument on Monday.

In other words, his approach was to present the free-speech case as a drug case and argue that whatever rights students may have under the First Amendment to express themselves, speaking in oblique or even in arguably humorous dissent from a school’s official antidrug message is not one of them. 

That seems like quite a stretch…

How did the judges react?

Chief Justice Roberts took issue with a suggestion by the student’s lawyer, Douglas K. Mertz, that schools that seek to inculcate an antidrug message must permit students, outside the formal classroom setting, to offer competing views. “Content neutrality is critical here,” Mr. Mertz said.

“Where does that notion that our schools have to be content neutral” come from, the chief justice wanted to know. He added, “I thought we wanted our schools to teach something, including something besides just basic elements, including character formation and not to use drugs.”

…

Mr. Mertz clarified his point. “There is no requirement of equal time or that it be neutral,” he said. The school should be able to express a viewpoint, he continued, but “in the lunchroom, outside in recess, across the street, that is a quintessentially open forum where it would not be proper, I think, to tell students you may not mention this subject, you may not take this position.”

During the argument, Justice Alito interrupted Mr. Kneedler as the deputy solicitor general was asserting that a school “does not have to tolerate a message that is inconsistent” with is basic educational mission.

“I find that a very, very disturbing argument,” Justice Alito said, “because schools have defined their educational mission so broadly that they can suppress all sorts of political speech and speech expressing fundamental values of the students under the banner of getting rid of speech that’s inconsistent with educational missions.” 

We’ll have to wait until later this year to hear the outcome of this case, but I’ll bet it won’t be a 9-0 ruling in Frederick’s favor.

Is anyone surprised by today’s headlines about the FBI’s illegal use of the Patriot Act?

The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, underreporting for three years how often it forced businesses to turn over customer data, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday.

FBI agents sometimes demanded the data without proper authorization, according to a 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. At other times, the audit found, the FBI improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances.

The audit blames agent error and shoddy record-keeping for the bulk of the problems and did not find any indication of criminal misconduct.

Still, “we believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities,” the audit concludes.

First Fine says the “errors” were simply the result of “shoddy” work, and then he says they were “illegal” and “serious.” 

Oh, and by the way, the White House objected to the requirement for the Inspector General to conduct annual audits.  How are they supposed to operate in secrecy if they have to keep telling the people how they’ve ignored the law?

No worry.  That’s in the past.  I’m sure they’ll just fix the problems.

Here’s what the Washington Post story reports:

Alan Raul, vice chairman of the White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and a former Reagan White House lawyer , said in an interview that the Bush administration has asked the board to review and recommend changes in the FBI’s use of national security letters.

“The processes seem to be seriously in need of tune-up,” Raul said. “We hope to play a role in helping the FBI get to where it knows it needs to be.”

You gotta love that, a “tune up.”  The Justice Department wouldn’t dare hold any FBI agents accountable to the law would they?  I mean why bother prosecuting agents for acting illegally when you can just tune them up and get them back to work?

Tell that to the next guy the FBI busts for some stupid non-violent drug law.  “Dude, we’re not going to arrest you for possessing mushrooms, we’re just going to give you a tune up and then you can go on about your business.”

And if you get a chance, listen to “I Spy for the FBI” by John Hiatt today.

Some people think that if you are a high school student, you are a second-class citizen not afforded the inalienable right of free speech granted to you by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Today’s papers report that Joseph Frederick, a senior at Juneau Douglas High School in 2002, was suspended from school for ten days because he held a banner across the street from the school during a 2002 Olympic torch relay that read “BONG HITS FOR JESUS.”  He was actually suspended five days for the banner incident and another five days for “invoking free speech rights and quoting Thomas Jefferson to school officials about the suspension.” (link)

Principal Deborah Morse claims she was exercising her duty to enforce rules of conduct when she confiscated the nonsensical banner from Frederick and suspended him from school.  Frederick filed suit challenging the suspension.  He lost in Federal Court, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor.

That didn’t stop Morse from taking her case to the Supreme Court for a ruling on how far the school can go to enforce its drug-message policy.

Do you want to know who filed on behalf of the Juneau school district?  Of course you do.  It’s none other than the monomaniacal Kenneth Starr.  He took the case pro bono.  He should lose this case, but who knows what else he’ll uncover about Frederick during his “investigation.”  He’s probably subpoenaed all of Frederick’s freinds, teachers, employers, ex-girlfriends, etc. in an effort to come up with something personal about him so he can write another book that ends up having nothing to do with the case.

Eric Hagen, one of the attorney’s in Starr’s office said, “It makes it a little harder when teachers and principals in their daily duties might be subject to a damages lawsuit and be held personally liable.”

Since when is it an educator’s daily duty to restrict a student’s right to free speech off of school grounds?  I’d say never. 

Note to Deborah Morse:  If you want to avoid getting sued for violating rights granted to every American in the First Amendment, don’t violate their rights.

The Supreme Court is expected to hear this case in late February.