4th Amendment?

What 4th Amendment?

The case ultimately reached the Indiana Supreme Court, which ruled last week that current "public policy" is not conducive to resisting entry because civil protections have arisen to mitigate the threats of pre-industrial prison life -- threats like indefinite detention, violence or disease from unclean, overcrowded facilities.

The court reasoned that since those things are no longer of concern (even though they are), Indiana should not permit citizens to resist unlawful police entry, which they saw as having the potential to cause an escalation of violence toward officers.

The decision (PDF).

This reminds me of Arizona's Jan Crow laws - where police are able to stop anyone anytime and demand to see their papers proof of United States citizenship.

So now police in some of the several states have the ability to check someone's identification (and prove some cause later) and to enter someone's home without a warrant (and prove some cause later). Which isn't terribly different from what came before, but now has explicit legal allowance to do so. Why is it so difficult for some individuals to envision the intended and unintended consequences of such allowances?

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Impunity

Justice Clarence Thomas and the Right-Wing of the Supreme Court of the United States of America have recently ruled that a prosecutor can knowingly rob 14 years off your life and nearly get you murdered under state sanction, and they can do it with near absolute impunity from prosecution or punitive damages.

I'll let Jeffrey show you the round-up.

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Insufficient Evidence

What has happened, and what still happens, in regards to our generations' "War on Terror," should be a shame on our national conscience as great as that of the Japanese American Internment. I could relate it to many of the historical injustices the people of this nation, through fear or greed, suspended the rights of fellow Americans for purposes that could only be described as illegitimate or lazy. But the Internment is the one that comes to mind the easiest, because that should have been our lesson on fear-based government overreach.

Maybe it would be easier to draw lines to our history if politicians, pundits and cultural harpies didn't spend so much time trying to rewrite or undermine the events and lessons of the past.

For those of you wondering, this is but one of the reasons I will never fully trust the government. I love my country, I respect my government, and I realize that anyone can make mistakes. But I also know that people who make mistakes don't like to admit it, and any human being can make assumptions. If that human being has some form of authority, he can do significant damage with those assumptions if he is able.

If someone in authority thinks you are a threat, and you have limited resources to defend yourself, they will come for you first. Vigilance is always necessary so that such things like this can be called out when the time comes, cynicism is always necessary to make sure you aren't being fed a bunch of bullshit when those in authority tell you about it.

It is also important from a real security standpoint. Behaving badly will always keep them from effectively focusing resources on the more legitimate threats - they will be too busy with the low hanging fruit.

This is one of the reasons I refuse to respond to the politics of fear.

This is also one of the reasons I find it abhorrent and intellectually sloppy to equate all Muslims or Middle Easterners with terrorism in our political discourse, our campaigns, our media and our culture. That helps cover up those in authority who make mistakes, it helps those mistakes make us less secure, and it only increases the ignorance necessary for our population to forget (and thus repeat) the sad lessons of our own history.

This is also one of the reasons I find it ridiculous that interrogations might involve torture, or that individuals can be held by our government for significant periods of time without formal charges being brought. If someone is a prisoner of war, they are a prisoner of war - obey those rules. If someone is suspected of a crime, bring charges against them in a court of law. It really is that simple.

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Speech Vs. Publicity

George Will follows the right wing of the cliff like a lemming in this howler of an article confusing the definition of free speech, and supporting the Supreme Court-backed march towards the feudalization of the United States.

Yup, I'm talking about campagin financing. While this time, his focus is on the Arizona state method of allowing candidates to voluntarily limit their contribution ceiling and campaign dollars by applying for public campaign funding.

Will uses the rhetorical device of false equivalency: because public funding of a campaign will increase the amount of money to a candidate based on the amount of money private funding candidates spend against them, Will claims that somehow "limits" someone's free speech in some way. Speaking of the 9th Circuit, who upheld Arizona's law, Will says

It upheld this abominable law that is obviously designed to coerce candidates into limiting their political speech by making the exercise of their First Amendment rights trigger government spending on behalf of their opponents.

Sorry, that's not true. No one is limiting what a privately funded candidate or polictical group can say, or how they can say it or how much money they can raise to say it (all different things, in descending order of civil-liberty-related importance). All this law does is allow for a publicly funded candidate to respond without going bankrupt; and I do not believe they recieve dollar-for-dollar matching funds, or funds in triplicate, as Will attempts to suggest. But they do get to tell the voters that they aren't raising money from interest groups, and are instead accepting limits on their own funding.

It isn't their fault that American voters tend to distrust those candidates who spend all their time hobnobbing with the richest and most well-connected contributors and then writing legislation or contracts that benefit those contributors. (Why would people equate smoke with fire, anyway?)

The other thing this law does is make campaigning accessible to more individuals, not just rich or well connected individuals, by removing the artificial but real limits on free political speech built into a system where running for office costs as much as it does. Those real limitations are, noticably, ignored by Will in this article.

Finally, no one's free political speech is limited by any campaign finance law, despite how many well-financed right-wing pundits continue to say it is. Limiting money to a candidate does not silence speech - they still have the right to say whatever they like, with only the other candidates, the media and the education of the voters to determine if what they say is true. All that campaign-finance rules affect is how the candidate publicizes their free speech.

There's a big difference between the two.

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The O'Connor Hit

The other day on Facebook, I got called out for linking too often to sites like Slate to explain my political opinions on a topic. When I write, I try to link to the analysis, and not drive the pageviews to the websites I find absurd. But doing so somehow allows my "conservative" family and friends to dismiss as hyperbolic fantasy when I quote things right-wingers actually say and write or when I explain how certain statements and positions support a larger, already existing narrative.

So, when I came across this Slate article exploring how the noise machine is going after retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, I knew I'd have to provide the links and give it to y'all in their own words. Because, hell, I could barely believe it. All these links, and a lot of this material, originate from the Slate piece.

Apparently, you just can't advocate for alzheimers research and reform of the judicial selection process these days without a nefarious liberal agenda. Since real conservatives can't possibly hold positions different from those of the right-wing punditocracy, Carrie Severino of the National Review is ready for O'Connor to sit down, shut up, and stop playing the patsy for meddlesome "liberal" groups:

Retired justice Sandra Day O’Connor is now done remaking federal law from the Supreme Court, which frees her up to dabble in state court issues. She has particularly devoted herself to a crusade against judicial elections, and was in Iowa this week as part of a panel rallying support for Iowa’s judicial selection system and the three justices whose retention elections are making headlines.

Ed Whelan of the same fine publication just raises questions regarding the legality, ethics and conflict-of-interests involving O'Connor doing part time work as a federal appeals judge while getting involved in judicial selection reform.

Just questions, you know. These questions don't cause other opinion makers to cite raised questions as fact and issue sweeping indictments like:

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has violated the Code of Conduct for United States judges.

Meanwhile, the video splicers and setup artists over at Andrew Breitbart's Big Government website hired some guy named John Bambeneck to write this howler of a column about O'Connor's desire to kneecap the freedom of Americans to govern themselves:

Part of the controversy is interesting since federal judges are required to refrain from political activity (for good reason) and appearing in a robocall clearly is political activity. There was, of course, the stunt of scheduling a modest number of robocalls at 1am to ensure massive media coverage of the proposition that might otherwise go unnoticed. It’s clever, really. Generate a moderate amount of controversy to bring attention to your candidate or cause, it’s been done before.

The interesting part of that story isn’t that she was doing robocalls (though that is a problem). The interesting part is what this proposition would entail. So-called “merit selection” of judges is simply a euphamistic way of saying “we’re going to take away the right to vote for judges from the citizens and give it to politicians and special interests.”

Sandra Day O'Connor: subverting traditional American government so that liberal interest groups and illegal immigrants can keep hard-working Americans from electing judges. Why does Sandra Day O'Connor hate America?

(As an aside, you know what state has elected judges? Louisiana.)

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