harikari.com

The Washington Post reports:

The firm, whose clients include labor unions and environmentalists, is seeking to enter the Republican primary for the 8th District seat held by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D).

The firm “wanted to run as a Republican because we feel the Republican Party is more receptive to our basic message that corporations are people, too,” Klein [the campaign manager] said, adding that his client has no particular beef with Van Hollen.

Van Hollen welcomes the competition. “The majority on the Court has made a mockery of our campaign finance laws, and Murray Hill is just mocking the mockers,” said Doug Thornell, a senior adviser to Van Hollen.

…

Murray Hill does face a couple of tiny problems in its effort to get elected to Congress.

For starters, candidates must officially register to vote as a Republican to run in a Republican primary in Maryland.  Late this week, the Montgomery County Board of Elections wrote to Murray Hill, informing the firm that its voter registration application had been rejected.

It seems the corporation does not meet the “minimum requirements” for voter registration, which include being a U.S. citizen and at least 18, according to Kevin Karpinski, a lawyer for the county elections board.

Just another case of The Man sticking it to Corporate America.

The odds are against Murray Hill, Inc.getting on the ballot, but I love the ad and I do think that somehow, someway, in the not-too-distant future, a corporation will find a way through the legal obstacles of registering a corporation to run for public office.  When that hapens, I can only hope it’s a corporation with the same goal in mind – to push the Supreme Court ruling to its limits, and get them to redraw the lines in a sensible way.  I’d start with the premise that corporations are not persons and should not have any rights to political speech.  In fact, they should not even be able to pay their damn lobbyists.  If we got them completely out of the picture, maybe we could get back to a country of people run by people for the people.

Oh, and yes… you can buy a campaign t-shirt.  I think I’ll order mine now.

A couple of weeks after the far-right activist Supreme Court falsely ruled 5-4 that corporations have many of the same rights as living breathing citizens of this country, I finally found an article by Thom Hartmann that I remembered reading over seven years ago.  I found the article via an article on the Project Censored website. 

It was back in 1886 that a Supreme Court decision (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company) ostensibly led to corporate personhood and free speech rights, thereby guaranteeing protections under the 1st and 14th amendments.  However, according to Thom Hartmann, the relatively mundane court case never actually granted these personhood rights to corporations. (cut to Hartmann article)

[Excerpt from a letter penned by Abraham Lincoln] “As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.  I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.”

Lincoln’s suspicions were prescient.  In the 1886 Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state tax assessor, not the county assessor, had the right to determine the taxable value of fenceposts along the railroad’s right-of-way.

However, in writing up the case’s headnote – a commentary that has no precedential status – the Court’s reporter, a former railroad president named J.C. Bancroft Davis, opened the headnote with the sentence: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Oddly, the court had ruled no such thing.  As a handwritten note from Chief Justice Waite to reporter Davis that now is held in the National Archives said:  ”we avoided meeting the Constitutional question in the decision.”  And nowhere in the decision itself does the Court say corporations are persons.

Nonetheless, corporate attorneys picked up the language of Davis’s headnote and began to quote it like a mantra.  Soon the Supreme Court itself, in a stunning display of either laziness (not reading the actual case) or deception (rewriting the Constitution without issuing an opinion or having open debate on the issue), was quoting Davis’s headnote in subsequent cases.  While Davis’s Santa Clara headnote didn’t have the force of law, once the Court quoted it as the basis for later decisions its new doctrine of corporate personhood became the law.

… and from a few paragraphs earlier in the Hartmann article:

Corporations are non-living, non-breathing, legal fictions. They feel no pain. They don’t need clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe, or healthy food to consume. They can live forever. They can’t be put in prison. They can change their identity or appearance in a day, change their citizenship in an hour, rip off parts of themselves and create entirely new entities. Some have compared corporations with robots, in that they are human creations that can outlive individual humans, performing their assigned tasks forever.

Isaac Asimov, when considering a world where robots had become as functional, intelligent, and more powerful than their human creators, posited three fundamental laws that would determine the behavior of such potentially dangerous human-made creations. His Three Laws of Robotics stipulated that non-living human creations must obey humans yet never behave in a way that would harm humans.

And from there I offer you two frames from today’s edition of This Modern World:

Click on the frames or here to read the whole comic.  Go on now…

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.

What does that mean?  Is that “blow” like in “You know how to whistle don’t you”  Just put your lips together and blow?” Or is that “blow” as in “cocaine,” or is it blow like “fellate?”  Take your pick.

Nonsense?  Yes…  but not if you are a high school student.  Those words may be interpreted by an authority figure as loaded words that advocate something prohibited in a school policy.

Kind of like “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”  Does that phrase promote marijuana use?  Promote Christianity?  Nonsense?  definitely…  Is it likely to promote some kind of harm or disturbance that the government wishes to avoid?  Not likely.  Was it disruptive?  Not until the principle demanded that the students take it down.

But that didn’t stop the Supreme Court from ruling 5-4 against Joseph Frederick, the one student holding the banner that refused the principal’s order. Principal Morse wanted it down because she interpreted it to promote drug use, and she believed that schools should be able to enforce their zero-tolerance drug policies.  Okay, I’ll give them that authority on school grounds and at school functions.  But holding up an obliquely worded message designed to attract television cameras at an Olympic Torch Relay event on non-school property?  You’ve got to be kidding me.  5-4?  That’s a 9-0 vote in favor of a citizen’s right to free speech in any modern democracy.

Was it more offensive because it said “4 Jesus?”  Depends on what you believe.  Roberts did not mention it in his majority opinion.  But I have to think that if Hendrickson’s banner read “Bong Hits 4 Buddha” it would not have received much attention and a legal case, if any, would not have progressed to the Supreme Court.

If you are interested, you can read the whole Supreme Court opinion here.  I did, and I found that Justice Stevens’ dissenting opinion (starting at page 45) made far more sense than Roberts’s majority opinion.

So drugs are bad, especially when mixed with Christianity.  What about sex?  Last I heard, the schools weren’t enforcing a zero-tolerance-for-sex rule and they weren’t testing kids to make sure they were virgins.  So could a principal prohibit students from hoisting a nonsensical banner mixing sexual innuendo during a similar event?

Someday we may find out.

So, what I suggest is that we further test the boundaries of student speech.  If you know any high school students, feel free to encourage them to see how far they can go with any of the following ambiguous messages:

Shoot Up 4 Shiva

Pipe Licks 4 Mary

Light up 4 Allah

Huff 4 Hosanahs

Eat Tabs 4 Yahweh

Mainline 4 Mwari

Cracking 4 Christ

Jello Shots 4 Jehovah

Sloppy Seconds 4 Agnostics

Adrenachrome 4 Atheists

Why is the ongoing discussion and political fight over the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors so important?

Former Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson explained it quite well in a speech he made on April 1, 1940 to the United States Attorneys who were serving in each Federal Judicial District across the country.

The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. … While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.

…

The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and as impossible to define as those which mark a gentleman.  And those who need to be told would not understand it anyway.  A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.

Sure… the federal prosecutors serve “at the leisure of the president,” but it does matter why the Bush Administration dismissed eight prosecutors.  We need to know if Gonzales, under Bush’s orders, dismissed eight good prosecutors so that he could replace them with prosecutors that Jackson describes as the worst – one’s that act “from other base motives.” 

More about this after I’ve had time to read the transcript of Alberto Gonzales’s remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee today.

NYT story here.

The Supreme Court ruled this week that the EPA could not sidestep its authority to regulate CO2 emissions unless it could prove there is no scientific basis to do so. 

Scientists around the world overwhelmingly agree that man’s burning of fossil fuels has greatly contributed to the level of CO2 in our atmosphere, and that the added levels of this heat trapping gas is a major cause of global warming.

Remember way back when Bush wasn’t the president?  Back in September 2000 he was just running for president and, during his campaign, he pledged to “establish mandatory reduction targets for emissions of four main pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and carbon dioxide.”

Well he flip-flopped on that promise just a few months into his first term when decided against ratifying the Kyoto Protocol agreement.  The nations that were on board were none to happy with Bush’s change of policy, especially after Christine Todd Whitman had just met with many European leaders and assured them that the Bush Administration was serious about limiting the emissions of greenhouse gasses.

169 countries went ahead and ratified the treaty in spite of Bush’s refusal to sign on the nation that emits the largest quantity of greenhouse gases.

So what did Bush have to say today?

“Whatever we do,” he said, “must be in concert with what happens internationally.” He added, “Unless there is an accord with China, China will produce greenhouse gases that will offset anything we do in a brief period of time.”

So since China might not do anything, then we’ll do nothing?  Gee… that’s a great strategy.  If the other biggest polluter in the world won’t be good, then we won’ either.  If every nation followed our petulant president’s lead, nobody would do anything, and we’d all live happily ever after on the shores of Kansas.

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.

Back in July of 2005, Elizabeth Holtzman wrote a lengthy article for The Nation in which she made the case for how Bush and his top advisors could be prosecuted under the War Crimes Act. She ended the article with this:

Still, calls for the Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate possible criminal liability under the war crimes and anti-torture laws can be issued, and members of Congress and the Senate can press for it.

In the final analysis, there is no sure way to compel the government to investigate itself or to hold high-level government officials accountable under applicable criminal statutes. But if the public does not seek to have it happen, it will not happen. Those in the public who care deeply about the rule of law and government accountability must keep this issue alive. Failure to investigate wrongdoing in high places and tolerating misconduct or criminality can have only the most corroding impact on our democracy and the rule of law that sustains us.

About a year later, The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in the Hamdan Case that the Bush Administration had broken rules outline in the Geneva Conventions and that they had broken other international treaties governing the treatment of detainees.

In August 2006, a Federal Judge ruled that Bush had broken wiretapping laws.

If Congress were to call for a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration, they could be made to stand trial for breaking the laws, and the penalties for breaking the laws are substantial. Thom Hartmann wrote much more about this here and here.

So what did Congress do? Last week it passed the Military Commissions Act that gave Bush the power to detain and torture anyone he wants to. But that’s not all, the bill also includes this:

The legislation would narrow the range of offenses prohibited under the War Crimes Act. This would protect civilians (such as CIA interrogators and White House officials) from being prosecuted for committing acts that would have been considered war crimes under the old definition. The change is retroactive to 1997, which means any crimes committed since 1997 would be prosecuted under the new standard, not the old one.

That’s’ Bush’s first “Get out of Jail Free” card.

Look for the next one when Congress reconvenes after the mid-term elections to address the wiretapping problem. This could happen even if the Democrats manage to gain control of one of the houses of Congress. Remember, eleven Democrats voted for the torture bill. If they thought that was okay, they’ll probably think it’s okay to hand out another pass on the wiretapping violations.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says, in Italian, “F@%k you!”

Boston Herald story here.

Despite Scalia’s insistence that the Sicilian gesture was not offensive and had been incorrectly characterized by the Herald as obscene, the photographer said the newspaper “got the story right.”

Smith said the jurist “immediately knew he’d made a mistake, and said, ‘You’re not going to print that, are you?’ ”

…

Smith was working as a freelance photographer for the Boston archdiocese’s weekly newspaper at a special Mass for lawyers Sunday when a Herald reporter asked the justice how he responds to critics who might question his impartiality as a judge given his public worship.

“The judge paused for a second, then looked directly into my lens and said, ‘To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’ ” punctuating the comment by flicking his right hand out from under his chin, Smith said.

The Italian phrase means “(expletive) you.”

Well no wonder Scalia and Cheney get along so well. They both have a fondness for dropping f-bombs on anyone who questions their impeccable character.

This story about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s agreement with the White House that allows President Bush to continue his domestic spying program “with oversight” instead of demanding that he comply with existing law only proves that we no longer live in a democracy. “We the people” have been hosed.

And just how craven are the Republicans in the House?

The House Intelligence Committee said last week that it would seek limited briefings for some panel members so that they could weigh changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but the Republican leaders of the House committee stopped far short of proposing the kind of continuing oversight and rules changes that the Senate committee has settled on. A spokeswoman for the White House, Dana Perino, called the Republican senators’ proposal “a generally sound approach.”

“We’re eager to work with Congress on legislation that would further codify the president’s authority,” Ms. Perino said. “We remain committed to our principle, that we will not do anything that undermines the program’s capabilities or the president’s authority.”

We are doomed.

Time to post that 1941 quote from Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis: “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.”