SCOTUS and POTUS

Probably the California Supreme Court knew what the US Supreme Court was going to rule so they ruled that it was unconstitutional to put legal limits on the amount of medical marijuana you can possess. Take it from there.

Hugo Chavez, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, charged the United States caused the destruction in Haiti by testing a "tectonic weapon" to induce the catastrophic earthquake. He told a Spanish newspaper that the US was playing God by testing devices capable of creating eco-type catastrophes. The earthquake followed a test of "weapon of earthquakes" just offshore from Haiti. Venezuelan versions of Seymour Hersh reported that the earthquake "may be associated with the project called HAARP, a system that can generate violent and unexpected changes in the climate". HAARP is a study in Alaska directed at the occasional reconfiguration of properties of the Earth's ionosphere to improve satellite communications. I find this report very re-assuring that someone on planet earth finds us so menacing.

So today Venezuela, Bolivia and France ("We'll always have Paris.") denounced the United States for occupying Haiti. Even conservative Republicans are criticizing our humanitarian aid work as akin to the invasion of Iraq. And Doug Brooks not to be outdone said that the health care reform debate was akin to the long discussion we had before invading Iraq.

Meanwhile, things are settling in. The Coast Guard has cleared the port in Port-au-Prince. The cranes will get to work tomorrow. Plans are underway to evacuate 400,000 Haitians and resettle them in the country. Through a works for food project, they will all build new homes, which they will own. Some of the air traffic has been cleared but over 110,000 flights are logged waiting OKs from the airport to come. Vandalism has quieted down and shops are re-opened. Farmers are appearing with fruits and vegetables to sell. The inflatable operating tents have been erected. And the Hospital Ship has started treating people who are being medevac'd to the ship. The US is planning on taking some Haitian refugees temporarily to Gitmo. Donations keep pouring in. And it looks like Europe and the United States are getting into a diplomatic flap over the future. So everything is normal or "normalized".

Barack Obama, who has been reported on the ropes, appears to have rebounded with his announcement of the "Volcker Principles" to regulate the banks. Tomorrow Republican Senator Shelby from Alabama will sound forth on what his party's take on this is. Already today the usual swarm of lobbyists for the bankers denounced the measures, saying the costs will have to be handed down to the customers. Gee, what a surprise.

The new senator from Massachusetts has already stepped in it. It appears he endorsed a teabagger for congress in 2010 but then discovered the guy was a birther and withdrew the endorsement, provoking the ire of his teabag supporters. He also said that he was for healthcare for everyone and that his main objection to the Health Care Bill was that his state would have to pick up the medicare costs for other states. He was referring to Ben Nelson's sweetheart deal. What will he leadership say when he gets into town? So is he for a new bill or not?

Well, Barack Obama is on the ropes. In a Fox News poll about his present position, they buried some trial heats for the 2012 presidential elections. They tested Obama against Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich. Although meaningless there are fun. Obama leads Romney by 47-35, Palin by 55-31 and Gingrich by 53-29. Each margin included healthy leads among independent voters whom we told Obama lost in Massachusetts. And he also beats the generic teabagger candidate by 48-23.

The Prop 8 trial continued today with some hot testimony. Yesterday, the Olson and Boies team in discovery unearthed a document from the California leader of the Mormans where he instructed his church to place someone in each district to help organize the Prop 8 effort. The persons were to take strategic advice from the organizers so as " to have the appearance of plausible deniability." What's everyone a spy these days? Today we were treated to Hak-Shing William Tam, who serves as secretary to the American Return to God Prayer Movement. He peddled propaganda during the campaign that gays were 12 times more likely to molest children than gays and that same-sex marriage would lead to the legalization of sex with children. I've visited these arguments in other posts about expert witnesses testifying that all this is rubbish.

But my concern is that after ten days of testimony that the Associated Press chose today to report on testimony that had already been destroyed and they treated it as if this man had a legitimate point of view. Then one of the anti-gay lawyers tried to insert that gays had lost political support for "alleged death threats against backers of California's same-sex marriage ban". This has been a sub-theme for several days, including one of the reasons the lawyers claim witnesses backed out of the trial--which was nonsense because their testimony directly contradicted the anti-gay lawyers position. While Olson and company continued to score within the trial itself, the anti-gays scored today by getting AP to perpetrate the basest lies of their case.

And what about Silent Clarence Thomas' dissent today in the Supreme Court case? While he thinks corporations are the greatest thing since sliced bread, he opposed the majority decision's that they must reveal their financial support in political ads and other campaign materials. He didn't think that was wise. Why not, it seemed the only rational part of today's majority decision? Because Clarence's eyes are on California and Washington where gays want to know the backers against same-sex marriage and other anti-gay laws. He knows Ted Olson is coming and he wants to be on record to protect homophobes.

We will deeply miss him when he goes. Justice Stevens wrote the dissenting brief on Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission with Ginsburg,Breyer and Sotomayor dissenting. I will try to reproduce the salient parts soon but he basically addresses the equation that money equals free speech--which the court ruled today. Stevens long and complex dissent got especially heated when he took on the "originalists". He called the majority "judicial activists" , which is the tag so-called conservative judges put on others. He also was very tough in taking on the majority's assertions about the intent of the Founding Fathers' and pointed out that the majority failed to discuss any of the origins of the First Amendment to make their judgment on the intent of the amendment. He said the majority position was actually diametrically opposed to the Founding Fathers and backed it up with textual references.

What he was politely saying with tough legal arguments was that our fine originalist judges are nothing more then conservative political activists masquerading as judges. He also blasted the perversion of Roberts' civil libertarian statements about the absoluteness of the First Amendment, citing chapter and verse Roberts' own decisions on the Court limiting the free expression of several different classes of people.

My 84-year old father-in-law is a Supreme Court junkie, reading every opinion. For years he has called me, railing about Scalia and Thomas. A former FBI agent and small town lawyer, he voted Republican all his life. But the extreme right-wing bent of the party finally drove him with alot of the family to break and vote for Barack Obama. His vote was almost exclusively a protest against any more right-wing judges on the Supreme Court and his confidence in Barack Obama as a constitutional lawyer. He had the very good sense to know that John McCain not only didn't understand the role of the judiciary but would send worse candidates to the court than George W. Bush.

I thought Sotomayor should have knock out one of the majority with a nunchuk, since she demonstrated her knowledge of them so well in her hearings.

Washington radio commentators said the decision simply meant "more money." There would be more money in this town for political consultants and that television revenue would rise dramatically for the 2010 election. For the rest of us, it could forestall any real reforms in our system and block any initiatives the Administration has of fixing the imbalances in our economic system. One conservative said ,"Why are you upset? All they did was decide that corporations have rights just as you do.' Well, you see there is a slight imbalance here. My limited contributions to political causes will always be dwarfed by a corporation. Also, as Judge Stevens said, I could never get into the position of essentially blackmailing a candidate by threatening to run ads against him. I don't have the financial capability of getting into a situation of a quid pro quo relationship with a politician.

And there is another issue here. It's being reported that the ruling allows corporations and unions to give unlimited amounts of contributions. There is a perceived equivalence here between groups of American workers, who only represent 6% of our workforce and have limited union funds, and American corporations, who often have foreign shareholders, who have unlimited funds. It is a grotesque imbalance of power.

In a previous post, I raised the prospect of our society becoming so atomized that we could not agree any longer on the common good or the public good. This was in reference to whole generations of children being homeschooled in Christian fundamentalist schools. We have created a fairly sophisticated apartheid system with the dispersion of the population in age-determined communities, religious-based communities and still existing race-based communities. There is no common civic ethos. Our school systems are being torn apart by political fights over evolution, exclusions in history books and silly battles over sex education.

Now the situation is quite dire when we have private armies carrying out our foreign policy but there is no acountability, private and foreign corporations buying state highways and private companies assuming prison management. The public budgets are in effect subsidizing private corporations without either fiscal accounting or the responsibility assigned "real" public officials.

The issue of torture, for instance, which I find to be profound and troubling really was one of money.

Washington state-based psychologists told the Government they could re-engineer the SERE program and they received an initial grant of $250,000. A high target detainee was found and being successfully interrogated by the FBI, and he was whisked away to be water-boarded under the supervision of these psychologists to see whether their project worked. Since they had to be present, more government grants were given and they studied the results. By the time, the project was officially ended in 2005, even though torture continued until 2007, these guys earned well-over $1 million for a project that lacked all scientific evidence. But our whole image as a country had been seriously harmed.

Blackwater provided the CIA with a capability to assassinate would-be terrorists and to provide security in difficult situations. The company provided their men with the sexual services of underage girls as a morale boost and killed many locals because they weren't restricted by the rules of war. Local reaction is generated against us as a country and not them. By the time the company changes its name, Christian fundamentalist Eric Prince has become a billionaire from government contracts. Now Iraqis, whom we allegedly liberated, are suing Blackwater and the United States.

And the list goes on about the extent of the damage done by privatizing government services. They do give everyone involved "plausible deniability" as the Morman organizer for Prop 8 said. But at some point one has to ask where are we in all this--you and I--American citizens. Thousands of people are becoming millionaires off of us without our ability to have any say in it. We don't know when and where the blowback will come from. We are apt to discover whole new schemes we hadn't known before.

And yet we have reached a point where we don't seem able to make the basic decisions a modern society must make to preserve ourselves and to advance to the future. The majority decision today said that corporations aren't a threat to the government. Not if you allow them to own it. But when was the profit-motive equated with national interest?