Eideard

Yup. The Supreme Court says corporations are just people. Their money doesn’t count anymore than money from you or me.

Let me get my Wellies on before this crap gets any deeper.

She is 16, the daughter of a firefighter and a nurse, a self-proclaimed nerd who loves Harry Potter and Facebook. But Jessica Ahlquist is also an outspoken atheist who has incensed this heavily Roman Catholic city with a successful lawsuit to get a prayer removed from the wall of her high school auditorium, where it has hung for 49 years.

A federal judge ruled this month that the prayer’s presence at Cranston High School West was unconstitutional, concluding that it violated the principle of government neutrality in religion. In the weeks since, residents have crowded school board meetings to demand an appeal, Jessica has received online threats and the police have escorted her at school, and Cranston, a dense city of 80,000 just south of Providence, has throbbed with raw emotion.

State Representative Peter G. Palumbo, a Democrat from Cranston, called Jessica “an evil little thing” on a popular talk radio show. Three separate florists refused to deliver her roses sent from a national atheist group. The group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, has filed a complaint with the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights.

“I was amazed,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the foundation, which is based in Wisconsin and has given Jessica $13,000 from support and scholarship funds. “We haven’t seen a case like this in a long time, with this level of revilement and ostracism and stigmatizing.”

The prayer, eight feet tall, is papered onto the wall in the Cranston West auditorium, near the stage. It has hung there since 1963, when a seventh grader wrote it as a sort of moral guide and that year’s graduating class presented it as a gift. It was a year after a landmark Supreme Court ruling barring organized prayer in public schools.

Which illustrates how backwards, for how long, the city of Cranston has persisted in denial.

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Now there’s a way to protest those intrusive TSA X-ray body scanners without saying a word. Underclothes printed with the 4th Amendment in Metallic Ink. Let them know they’re spying at the privates of a private citizen. The 4th Amendment to the US Constitution is readable on TSA body scanners.

From the designers:

“4th Amendment Wear made a statement without having to say a word. It’s what we considered ‘technological Judo’ – it used the very act of invading someone’s privacy to communicate a message that questioned how far Americans were willing sacrifice that sense of privacy. It didn’t outright condemn the search – it just raised questions. It gave the wearer a sense of individual liberty to be able to express their concerns, while not causing a disturbance.”

Yes, this truly appeals to my sense of humor – and provokes limitless ideas of variations on the theme. Some of which aren’t even obscene.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed most of the constitutional claims raised by a Charlottesville man who was arrested after stripping down to his running shorts during an airport checkpoint protest…

False imprisonment and malicious prosecution claims against three Richmond International Airport police officers were not included in the motions for dismissal.

Aaron Tobey, 21, was detained at an airport security checkpoint on Dec. 30 after partially disrobing to display part of the text of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment handwritten on his chest. Tobey says he was protesting security measures, including enhanced pat-downs and the use of whole-body imaging scanners that he believes violate the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

…Judge Henry E. Hudson also rejected the equal protection and search-and-seizure claims against the TSA screening officers who summoned police, but said it was premature to dismiss the free-speech claim…

“The question, then, is whether the TSOs in fact radioed for assistance because of the message Plaintiff sought to convey, as opposed to Plaintiff’s admittedly bizarre behavior or because of some other reasonable restriction on First Amendment activity in the security screening area,” Hudson wrote.

The president of The Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville-based civil liberties group that filed the lawsuit on Tobey’s behalf, said the answer to that question is clear.

“Aaron Tobey was arrested for exercising his right to free speech, which is clearly protected under the First Amendment,” John W. Whitehead said after Hudson issued his ruling.

Tobey, a University of Cincinnati student at the time of the arrest, staged the protest as he prepared to board a flight to Wisconsin to attend his grandfather’s funeral. Disorderly conduct charges were later dropped by the Henrico County prosecutor.

You can’t always fight City Hall. I recommend against trying it alone. But, I applaud those who use their Constitutional rights to free speech to do so. The TSA – like most Homeland Insecurity mutants – stinks on ice for limiting our freedom to travel while achieving next to nothing at providing safety and security for air travelers.

Mayor Nash

Be careful before starting a Boy Scout troop in Gould, Ark. Or a Harry Potter fan club. Or a baseball team. The City Council adopted an ordinance last week making it illegal to form any kind of group without its permission.

That is a clear violation of the Constitution, legal scholars agree. But it is also a sign of just how nasty politics has gotten in Gould, a farming town of 1,100 some 70 miles southeast of Little Rock, where members of the Council have struggled with a local political group that seeks to influence how the town is governed. The mayor, Earnest Nash Jr., also happens to be a member of the political group, the Gould Citizens Advisory Council.

Even by the standards of small-town dramas, Gould’s situation is bleak. The town faces nearly $300,000 in unpaid taxes, and there have been frequent clashes among the mayor, the advisory group and the City Council over how to repay it. Those clashes — and a perception by the City Council that the citizens’ group is seeking too much influence — led to the ban on new organizations…

Last week, the Council overrode the mayor’s veto of two other controversial measures. One required that the citizens advisory council cease to exist. The other made it illegal for the mayor to meet with “any organization in any location” either “inside or outside Gould city limits” without the Council’s permission.

The advisory council, which calls itself a nonpartisan group that educates voters and raises money for public causes, says it will continue its work. But the City Council, in one ordinance, accused the group of “causing confusion and discourse among the citizens” by harshly criticizing local officials at public meetings.

As a result, the City Council said, “No new organizations shall be allowed to exist in the City of Gould without approval from a majority of the City Council…”

In the meantime, Mr. Nash said he would continue to do his job exactly as he always had.

“Technically, what I’m doing I guess is illegal,” he said. “But if I’m going to get arrested for meeting with citizens or letting them form their own groups, that’s a pretty good reason to go to jail.”

No doubt Congress wouldn’t mind passing similar legislation if very many voters decided to go their own way outside the limits of our 2-Party country club commedia della politica.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A number of old-fashioned Republican conservatives decided Friday night they would be contradicting their own beliefs in the American Constitution if they voted to deny fellow citizens the same rights of marriage they enjoy themselves – for any reason. The issue turned on gender identity. The decision was made as it should be – on the virtues and value of our Constitution.

The right-wing Conservative Party of New York State, activists from many religions who felt their beliefs take precedence over civil law, Tea Party activists of one or another stripe all tried to turn those Republicans away from acting in concert with Democrats who supported this bill. They failed.

Progressives, Democrats, LGBT activists and civil libertarians, who have toiled for years to bring this measure to pass in a state that has a long history of democracy and struggles for equal rights – won their case. They have prevailed.

Good for you, New York. And special kudos to those Republicans who turned away from the mean-spirited reactionaries and bigots who have captured so much of that Party throughout the United States. I write often about traditional American conservatives. Their history has affected the ethics of my family – and my extended family – throughout my life. Honesty, rejection of hypocrisy, care for the natural wonders of this planet, a willingness to understand and seek understanding in the joys of education, a fair chance at a good life for all – are what I was raised with.

Many in that extended family have walked away from what the Republican Party has become in these last ten years. I’d be the last to suggest there’s a qualitative change among today’s Republicans – outside of the states that never left those values in the first place.

Good for you, New York.

A debate that has raged within the Presbyterian Church for more than three decades culminated Tuesday with ratification of a measure allowing the ordination of gay and lesbian ministers and lay leaders, while giving regional church bodies the ability to decide for themselves. Leaving the truly bigoted branches to maintain their backwardness.

With the vote of its regional organization in Minnesota, the Presbyterian Church USA became the fourth mainline Protestant church to allow gay ordination, following the Episcopal and Evangelical Lutheran churches and the United Church of Christ. The Minnesota vote was closely followed by one in Los Angeles.

“This is an important moment in the Christian communion,” said Michael Adee, a Presbyterian elder who heads an organization that fought for gay ordination. “I rejoice that Presbyterians are focusing on what matters most: faith and character, not a person’s marital status or sexual orientation…”

Linda Fleming, an elder and deacon at Knox Presbyterian Church in Ladera Heights, which hosted the Pacific Presbytery meeting, said she was among those who had changed her mind on the issue in recent years.

“I finally decided at the age of 63 that it is inevitable,” she said. “I think it’s like letting black people come to white churches, or letting women become ministers. It’s inevitable.”

Interesting to see the easy understanding between this and other issues of civil rights. Anyone think Congress will come to the same level of understanding anytime, soon?

RTFA for lots of details and history. The mother church, the Free Church of Scotland, must be croaking over this.

Arizona – the Mississippi of the West

One of the most radical offshoots of modern conservatism in the United States is called “tentherism,” which invokes the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment to claim that a whole host of federal government powers are illegitimate, from the operations of the Social Security program to the national highway system, and that states are supreme.

During a speech at the Oceanside Tea Party rally in recent months, Arizona State Senate President Russell Pearce (R) took this philosophy to a new extreme. In the speech, where he denounced the federal government’s efforts to stop the implementation of the state’s radical anti-immigrant law, Pearce claimed that Americans aren’t even citizens of the United States, that they are rather citizens of “sovereign states,” meaning that we should be loyal to the laws of individual states rather than the federal government…

It’s ironic that Pearce says that it’s “time somebody gets its right” with respect to the Constitution — because he doesn’t. While it may not need to be said that Americans are, of course, citizens of the United States, if the Arizona state senator is confused about this issue he could always reference the very document he cites. The 14th Amendment of the constitution lays out very plainly that all people born in the United States are citizens of the United States…

And if Pearce actually read the Constitution, he would also see that it clearly trumps state law and “shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby.”

Like most of the dimwits prancing around under secessionist flags and gun-powered foolishness, these gutless wonders dedicate every chance they get to bad-mouthing democracy and the rule of law – until they need a helping hand. Then the handout becomes their bible until the next election cycle, of course.

Waiting for the Market to open this morning I came across Margaret Carlson’s excellent analysis.

“It isn’t fair!” is a cry we try in kindergarten and never give up. To tamp down this thirst for instant justice, the nuns at my school invoked the sweet hereafter, where all wrongs would be righted, as a reason for us to suck it up at recess.

As an adult, and a lucky one, the last thing I want now is fairness. I could be waiting on tables instead of being served at them, delivering the papers instead of writing for them.

In that, I’m like Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker. He didn’t want fairness to kick in after he assumed power in January and used the rubric of “budget repair” to bully the folks who clean his office and guard his prisoners.

The sweet hereafter made an early appearance in Wisconsin on Tuesday. A Democrat, Chris Abele, cruised to victory in the race to fill Walker’s former post, Milwaukee County executive. And state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, part of a 4-3 conservative majority seen as likely to support Walker’s assault on unions, ended up in a too-close-to-call election that may result in a recount. Just six weeks ago, Prosser was expected to coast to victory over JoAnne Kloppenburg, an assistant attorney general. Only five incumbent Supreme Court judges have been defeated since 1852.

Ordinarily it takes four years to right an electoral wrong. Not this time. Liberal and conservative groups descended on Wisconsin to turn what would normally be a ho-hum election into a referendum on Walker…

Regardless of the eventual outcome, Kloppenburg’s out-of- nowhere showing is a cautionary tale for those governors following in Walker’s path by curtailing workers’ bargaining rights, and for the Tea Party, which you’d think would be fighting for the little guy, not the big bully…

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Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
Judge Mahmoud Attiya

Egyptian voters overwhelmingly approved proposed constitutional amendments that pave the way for parliamentary elections in June, according to the head of the judicial committee overseeing the referendum.

“We are proud of the Egyptian people for deciding their own destiny,” Judge Mahmoud Attiya said Sunday. “We assure the world that the March 19 referendum was fair and transparent at all stages.”

Of the 18,366,764 ballots cast Saturday, there were 14,192,577 “yes” votes and 4,174,187 “no” votes, Atiya said…

The proposed amendments included limiting the president to two four-year terms, capping emergency laws to six months unless they are extended by public referendum, and placing elections under judicial oversight…

Presidential candidate and head of the Arab League Amre Moussa, who urged a “no” vote, lauded the referendum as “the first official step towards the democracy called for in the January 25 movements.”

“‘Yes’ or ‘no’ is not the issue — that Egyptians are participating and voting today is what’s important,” he said Saturday.

Attiya told CNN that the next step in the transition to a civilian government is for the military to move forward with parliamentary elections in June.

Hey – it’s a start.

One of the joys of a constitutional democracy is that there can be – hopefully, will be – opportunities for further discussion and referendums if needed. The essential point is that the Egyptian people have had a first chance at an election that wasn’t rigged by a despot.