Scoop: Review: "Proving Election Fraud" - Richard Charnin

Scoop: Review: "Proving Election Fraud" - Richard Charnin

Stock deals are rigged for insiders. Big money runs Congress. And we've gone to war based on a series of calculated lies.

Are you willing to accept the fact that our elections are subject to the same type of corruption?

If you are, then Proving Election Fraud by Richard Charnin pulls back the curtain and exposes the pattern of election fraud over the past four decades. It's not a mystery when your look at the numbers and check them against multiple public sources. The information is all there - if the experts care to look.

Charnin is the widely known internet poster using the name TruthIsAll. He was the first to discover the glaring discrepancies in the 2004 election results shortly after the polls closed. His internet posts on the mathematical impossibility of a Bush victory were critical in fueling the doubts about that election and those that followed.

His many posts are the basis for a consistent narrative and argument using a clearly outlined and heavily quantified analysis. The result is a wealth of information about how elections really work and a methodology (the True Vote Model) that allows the interested reader to check the official results of any national or state election.

Charnin's straightforward style fits his subject matter. For example, early on he makes a powerful point, one of many that appear throughout the book:

"Simple mathematics proves that the 1968, 1988, 2004 and 2008 elections were fraudulent. The returning voter mix required for the Final Exit Poll to match the recorded vote was not just implausible -- it was impossible. In each election, more voters from the prior election returned to vote than were alive. The fact that they were returning Nixon, Bush 1 and Bush 2 voters cannot just be a coincidence. The statistical anomaly has no rational explanation other than election fraud." (p.52)

When the official victory margin includes dead voters and excludes uncounted votes, it's more than reasonable to assume election fraud.

How does Charnin know this? He took the time to correlate pre-election polls, historical (Census) votes cast and recorded, voter mortality, returning voter turnout and national exit poll vote shares. Using this basic information, he calculates the True Vote for each presidential election since 1968. And he debunks the arguments designed to convince us that Bush actually won while the exit polls "behaved badly," including "reluctant Bush responder," "swing/red shift," and "false recall."

Uncounted and Phantom Votes

Uncounted and "phantom" voters are the basis for much of the analysis found in the book. Votes remain uncounted because they're "spoiled" or of a separate class, provisional and absentee votes. Returning "phantom" voters were necessary in order to force the Final National Exit Poll to match the recorded vote in the four elections referenced.

Nixon won by half a million recorded votes, but six million went uncounted. George H.W. Bush won by seven million and more than ten million were uncounted. Gore won by a half million with five million uncounted. And Kerry lost by three million with four million uncounted. Uncounted votes are typically from minority districts where the vote is consistently 70-90% for the Democratic candidate. Is that a coincidence?

Had the phantom voters not materialized and had all the votes been counted, history would have changed. In addition, the Clinton and Obama margins would have been significantly higher than recorded, perhaps forcing the hoped for change. More important, the will of the people would have been accurately measured in what we were led to believe was a fair election process. ...

The Rise of the Corporate Court: How the Supreme Court is Putting Business First | People For the American Way

The Rise of the Corporate Court: How the Supreme Court is Putting Business First | People For the American Way

People For the American Way Foundation today released "The Rise of the Corporate Court: How the Supreme Court is Putting Business First." The report exposes the undue deference the Supreme Court has paid to corporations at the expense of the legal rights of individuals.

More and more, the Supreme Court has become a political ally of big business," said Michael B. Keegan, President of People For the American Way Foundation. "Constitutional principles and laws enacted by Congress that protect ordinary Americans are being torn asunder. Under our laws and our Constitution everyone, including big business, should be held accountable for their actions. This Court seems all too willing to let the privileged and the powerful prevail over the rights of individual Americans."

Some of the cases highlighted in the report include:

• Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (2007), in which the Court protected corporations from lawsuits brought by victims of sex discrimination
• AT&T v. Hulteen (2009), which allowed corporations to discriminate against women who took maternity leave in calculating pensions
• Gross v. FBL Financial Services (2009), which made it easier for corporations to defend against age-discrimination suits
• Hoffman Plastic Compounds v. NLRB (2002), which helped corporations knowingly take advantage of undocumented workers
• Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker (2008), which arbitrarily reduced penalties to be paid by Exxon after it allowed a known alcoholic to captain the Exxon Valdez through the dangerous Prince William Sound, resulting in a catastrophic, 53-million-gallon oil spill
• Entergy Corp. v. Riverkeeper, Inc. (2009), which allowed corporate polluters to use cut-rate methods of minimizing toxic output
• Coeur Alaska, Inc. v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (2009), which allowed corporations to pour mining waste called "slurry discharge" directly into lakes despite EPA rules forbidding it
• Philip Morris USA v. Williams (2007), which limited the penalties paid by tobacco companies for causing millions of cancer deaths even when juries decided otherwise
• Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which gave corporations the ability to pour billions of dollars into elections for local, state, and federal office

"The right-wing voting bloc on the Supreme Court brought a pro-corporate political ideology to the bench," said Keegan. "Now they're acting on it. It's only natural for corporations to win some of the cases they bring to the Court. But the pattern of pro-corporate decisions made by this Court is unmistakable. The right-wing Justices on the Court have been forcing a pro-corporate ideology into the law. Americans who care about our Constitution and our democracy should be deeply disturbed by this trend."

You can read the report here.

Bush Insider Reveals Guantanamo Deception: Hundreds of Innocents Jailed | CommonDreams.org

Bush Insider Reveals Guantanamo Deception: Hundreds of Innocents Jailed | CommonDreams.org

by Bill Quigley

Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided shocking new testimony from inside the Bush Administration that hundreds of the men jailed at Guantanamo were innocent, the top people in the Bush Administration knew full well they were innocent, and that information was kept from the public.

Wilkerson said President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld “indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons” and many in the administration knew it. The wrongfully held prisoners were not released because of political maneuverings aimed in part to cover up the mistakes of the administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who served in the U.S. Army for over thirty years, signed a sworn declaration for an Oregon federal court case stating that he found out in August 2002 that the US knew that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were not enemy combatants. Wilkerson also discussed this in a revealing and critical article on Guantanamo for the Washington Note.

How did Colonel Wilkerson first learn about the innocents in Guantanamo? In August 2002, Wilkerson, who had been working closely with Colin Powell for years, was appointed Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State. In that position, Wilkerson started attending daily classified briefings involving 50 or more senior State Department officials where Guantanamo was often discussed.

It soon became clear to him and other State Department personnel “that many of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all.”

How was it possible that hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners were innocent? Wilkerson said it all started at the beginning, mostly because U.S. forces did not capture most of the people who were sent to Guantanamo. The people who ended up in Guantanamo, said Wilkerson, were mostly turned over to the US by Afghan warlords and others who received bounties of up to $5000 per head for each person they turned in. The majority of the 742 detainees “had never seen a U.S. soldier in the process of their initial detention.”

Military officers told Wilkerson that “many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives.” The U.S. knew “that the likelihood was high that some of the Guantanamo detainees had been turned in to U.S. forces in order to settle local scores, for tribal reasons, or just as a method of making money.”

As a consequence, said Wilkerson “there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place.” ...

Washington's Blog

Washington's Blog

TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010

Krugman: Break Up the Giant Banks to Stop Their Domination of the Political Process

While Paul Krugman seemed to go against the rising tide of experts calling for the giant banks to be broken up, he clarified his position last week:

My view is that I’d love to see those financial giants broken up, if only for political reasons: it’s bad to have banks so big they can often write laws.

Bingo!

The giant banks have enough money to - literally - purchase Congress.

As Dean Baker wrote on April 7th:

In the United States it will always be easy for regulators to look the other way, even when the ultimate consequences prove to be disastrous. By contrast, cracking down on politically connected banks is difficult for regulators. The banks' executives will call their friends in the administration and Congress to complain about the crazy regulator who is trying to keep them from running their business.

And, you can be sure that the banks will have a story. They pay smart people lots of money to develop those stories. The banks' mouthpieces will make a conscientious regulator look like a crazed vigilante who just doesn't understand modern finance. Just ask Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission who was stopped in her effort to regulate credit default swaps back in 1998.

And as Miles Mogulescu writes:

[Simon] Johnson has the long-term politics right--unless we break up the 6-8 largest banks which dominate the financial system, we will both be strengthening a self-perpetuating oligarchy which dominates the political system to protect its own wealth and power to the detriment of the national interest and democratic governance, and which uses it's government guaranteed "too big to fail status" to take excessive risk which will lead to the next bubble, the next meltdown, and the next Hobson's choice by an even more debt-ridden government between bailing them out again with trillions in taxpayer dollars or allowing them to fail and sinking the economy into depression.

***

TBTF is antithetical to democracy. Because of their TBTF competitive economic advantage, the largest banks have become even larger since the beginning of the Great Recession in fall 2008 and the 6 largest banks now control assets totaling over 60% of the country's Gross Domestic Product. With this outsized control of the economy comes outsized control of the government. A bank with assets exceeding 2 trillion dollars can spend whatever it takes to influence elections and convince Congress to pass legislation that favors its interests rather than those of the vast majority of middle class voters, especially after the Supreme Court's pernicious decision in the Citizens United case allowing unlimited election contributions by corporations. "Oligarchy" is a term Americans used to apply to countries like Russia and smaller third world countries, not to ourselves. But with TBTF, as Johnson and Kwak explain,

"The Wall Street banks are the new American oligarchy-- a group that gains political power because of its economic power, and then uses that political power for its own benefit. Runaway profits and bonuses in the financial sector were transmuted into political power through campaign contributions and the attraction of the revolving door. But those profits and bonuses also bolstered the credibility and influence of Wall Street; in an era of free market capitalism triumphant, an industry that was making so much money had to be good, and people who were making so much money had to know what they were talking about. Money and ideology were mutually reinforcing. ...

Supreme imbalance: Court leans heavily on Harvard and Yale | McClatchy

Supreme imbalance: Court leans heavily on Harvard and Yale | McClatchy

WASHINGTON — There are about 1.2 million lawyers in the U.S. They learned their craft at 200 American Bar Association-approved law schools, of which the top 20 or so are the most competitive, all with top-notch professors and students.

When Justice John Paul Stevens retires this summer, however, the eight remaining members of the Supreme Court — the top arbiter of U.S. law and a check and balance on the White House and Congress — will be comprised entirely of legal minds trained at two law schools, Harvard and Yale.

(Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg earned her law degree from Columbia, another Ivy League school — but only because she left Harvard Law after two years to follow her husband to New York for her final year of study.)

This Harvard-Yale predominance at the pinnacle of justice gives President Barack Obama yet another wrinkle to consider when seeking the best replacement for liberal anchor Stevens, in addition to experience, intellect, age, record, confirmability, gender, race, religion and geographic diversity.

Obama is a Harvard Law graduate, but he also promised to change how Washington works and to bring a greater diversity of Americans into the power structure.

Stevens attended Northwestern, in Chicago, now ranked 11th by U.S. News & World Report. The other seven justices, despite their diverse personal backgrounds, all earned their law degrees from Yale, now ranked No. 1, or from Harvard, No. 2.

...

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/15/92276/supreme-imbalance-court-leans.html#ixzz0lGyGWBcz

Declining Home Values, the Massachusetts Vote and the “Gathering Storm” | FDL Action

Declining Home Values, the Massachusetts Vote and the “Gathering Storm” | FDL Action

By: Jane Hamsher Wednesday April 14, 2010 9:12 am

Thomas Ferguson is a professor of politics and economics at University of Massachusetts at Boston. The author of the “Investment Theory of Party Competition,” he believes that business elites, not voters, are the dominant force in political systems. Together with Joi Chen, he has released an analysis of the Brown/Coakley election, and concludes that the Brown vote correlates strongly with the decline in housing values (PDF):

Our findings about the fall in housing prices point to something much deeper – something that more jobs by themselves are unlikely to fix, though they might dampen it. Our statistical tests indicate that declines in housing values operated independently to depress the Democratic vote share.

We think it is unlikely that the housing variable is merely a proxy for some other unmeasured factor, such as income. Instead, we suspect that our result drives to the heart of the “Tea Party” phenomenon. Put simply, our data are consistent with the notion that a good part of the swing toward Scott Brown came from voters who were not only frightened by high unemployment – their own, or their neighbors’ – but who also suffered large losses in wealth from the collapse of the housing bubble. For most Americans, their greatest economic asset is their house. We thus suspect that the housing collapse is also likely associated with major declines, or potential declines, in retirement incomes. Particularly for older voters, this has to be very alarming.

They conclude that this discontent among older voters has largely taken a right-wing frame because of the impoverished nature of the economic conversation in the media:

At a time when real disposable per capita income minus government transfer payments (or “take home pay minus government assistance”) has sunk to its lowest levels since the giant recession of the early 1970s, most major television and radio networks continue to trumpet both efficient markets and the imagined evils of Keynesian, countercyclical programs. With only modest exceptions, so does the money-driven world of think tanks, the rest of the press, and the government itself.

We are thus driven to conclude that the sometimes wild assertions and arguments advanced by Tea Partiers largely reflect the poverty of economic and political analysis in the establishment media. Indeed, the U.S. case bears an unsettling similarity to the situation in many parts of the parts of the Middle East. Political establishments and governments refuse to countenance critical discussion of social and economic problems. They marginalize alternative views, while beating the drums unceasingly for orthodoxy. When a crisis hits, however, no one believes them. So disaffected citizens set to work with the only tools they have – bits and snatches of traditional economic and political thinking – to analyze their predicament on their own. It should not be surprising that such efforts often end up being hard to tell apart from Alice in Wonderland or even Goya’s Black Paintings.

I’ve put the blame on the “veal pen” in the past, who largely abandoned their Wall Street critiques when the bankers told Obama they didn’t want their bonuses criticized any more. Without the normal liberal validators driving the economic argument from the left, the media is left with little to cover and the danger has always been that all of that discontent would accrue to the right — which is exactly what happened. But credit where credit is due, Fox’s constant “Obama is a socialist” drumbeat has played a huge part in the ridiculously inadequate economic conversation that has driven pissed off old people with declining mortgage values to the right. ...

Senator Feingold Suggests Impeachment of Corrupt Supreme Court Justices - Democratic Underground

Senator Feingold Suggests Impeachment of Corrupt Supreme Court Justices - Democratic Underground

...

There is only one other possible way that we could “get new justices”, as Feingold suggested: Impeachment. Before discussing the pros and cons of a Constitutional amendment vs. impeachment for dealing with the corrupt Citizens United decision, let’s consider why this USSC decision should rightly be considered, as Feingold said, “one of the most lawless in the history of the Supreme Court”.

One of the most lawless decisions in the history of the Supreme Court

Matthews summarized the crux of the Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission in his article:

To read the 5-4 majority decision in Citizens United is to look at a fun-house mirror…. The McCain-Feingold law prohibited corporate-funded independent ads during such a timeframe, and Citizens United challenged the constitutionality of the law as it applied to this particular instance….

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, threw out decades of Supreme Court precedents. Writing in the most sweeping way, he declared that “political speech of corporations or other associations” cannot “be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not ‘natural persons.’ ”

The logic of the Court’s argument would throw out all restrictions on corporate expenditures. “Political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it, whether by design or inadvertence,” it said. This seems to justify unlimited direct gifts to candidates, though the majority didn’t quite go there. But it went everywhere else.

Former U.S. Senator from Wisconsin and Progressive Party candidate for President Bob La Follette, warned of the threat of unlimited corporate power during his 1924 run for the Presidency:

Democracy cannot live side by side with the control of government by private monopoly. We must choose, on the one hand, between representative government, with its guarantee of peace, liberty, and economic freedom and prosperity for all the people, and on the other, war, tyranny, and the impoverishment of the many for the enrichment of the favored few.

Implications for our democracy – Justice John Paul Stevens in dissent

86 years later, Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissent to the majority decision in Citizens United, explained what the majority decision means to the future of our democracy:

Justice John Paul Stevens… warned: “Starting today, corporations with large war chests to deploy on electioneering may find democratically elected bodies becoming much more attuned to their interests.” The Court’s decision, he added, undermines the integrity of our democratic institutions and “will undoubtedly cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress, and the states to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process.”

Stevens cut to the heart of the matter and laid out why corporations should not be treated as persons. “In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant,” he argued. “Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it…. Their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. . .

Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.” …

Stevens also invoked our Founders. “Unlike our colleagues, they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind,” he wrote. “Thomas Jefferson famously fretted that corporations would subvert the Republic,” Stevens observed, and in a footnote, he provided thequotation from Jefferson from 1816: “I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations.”

On the corrupt nature of the decision

Of course, impeachment of our public officials must not be taken lightly. Decisions to impeach should not be taken on the basis of mere differences of opinion or differences of ideology. But to understand the corrupt and lawless nature of the decision one need only look at the justifications put forth by Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority. Matthews summarized this in his article:

The decision asserted, astonishingly and without evidence, that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” It added: “The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.”

The first sentence noted above essentially asserts that the unlimited use of corporate wealth to influence our elections does “not give rise to corruption…”. Doesn’t give rise to corruption? Perhaps not. It IS corruption.

Maryland State Senator and law professor Jamie Raskin explained the consequences of removing all limitations on the use of corporate wealth to influence our elections:

In 2008, the Fortune 100 corporations had $600 billion in profits… Now imagine that those top 100 companies decided to spend a modest 1 percent of their profits to intervene in our politics and to get their way. That would mean $6 billion, or double what the Obama campaign spent, the McCain campaign spent, and every candidate for House and Senate.

And as for the idea that “the appearance of influence or access… will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy”, my God, how could any reasonably intelligent person say such a thing? ...

...

Bugliosi summed up the significance to our country of Bush v. Gore:

That an election for an American President can be stolen by the highest court in the land under the deliberate pretext of an inapplicable constitutional provision has got to be one of the most frightening and dangerous events ever to have occurred in this country. Until this act – which is treasonous, though again not technically, in its sweeping implications – is somehow rectified (and I do not know how this can be done), can we be serene about continuing to place the adjective "great" before the name of this country?

That assessment is right on target. And it applies as well to any corrupt and lawless decision by the highest court in our land.

Do we need to pass a constitutional amendment to deal with every blatantly corrupt, lawless and absurd decision of our Supreme Court? Or would it be a better idea to serve notice that such abominations will not be tolerated? Should our Supreme Court justices be made to understand that there is some limit to the absurdity and corruptness of their decisions that will be tolerated? Should we send a message that they will be held accountable for adhering to the rule of law? Should we take seriously their oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States? Or do we have to pass a Constitutional amendment every time they blatantly violate their oath and stray beyond the bounds of decency and faithfulness to the rule of law?

OpEdNews - Article: Does the Supreme Court Represent the Citizens of America?

OpEdNews - Article: Does the Supreme Court Represent the Citizens of America?

Every fall in the United States thousands of first year law students, start law school. Most have a dream of some day sitting on the Supreme Court bench. However, very few if any of those students will ever sit in the United States Capital on the Supreme Court. There are one hundred and ninety nine accredited law schools, according to the ABA and over a hundred unaccredited law schools in the United States. There are over one million one hundred forty three thousand three hundred fifty eight lawyers today in the United States, according to the ABA. There are only nine seats on the Supreme Court at any one time. The likelihood of winning the lottery is probably more likely for a lawyer than acquiring one of those seats on the Supreme Court.

...

Currently sitting on the Supreme Court is John Roberts; he is Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.He was born in Buffalo New York. His family moved to northern Indiana when his father retired as the CEO of Bethlehem Steel. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. While at Harvard Law School, he was managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. He taught at Georgetown University for several years as well during his career as a lawyer. Justice Roberts is one of six Catholics on the Supreme Court.

Another lawyer on the Supreme Court bench is Stephen G. Breyer. He grew up in San Francisco California where his father was a lawyer. He received a B.A. in philosophy at Stanford University.He then attended Magadalen College in Oxford and received a bachelor of law degree. Upon returning to the United States, he received an LLB at Harvard University. He practiced law a few years and taught at Harvard University from 1967 until 1994. Justice Breyer is one of the two Jews on the Supreme Court.

The third lawyer to attend Harvard Law School currently sitting on the bench is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was born in Brooklyn New York and received her B.A. at Cornell University at Ithaca New York. She attended Harvard Law School and had already been put on the Harvard Law Review when her husband graduated and got a job in New York. She then transferred to the University of Columbia Law School and was placed on law review. Ms. Ginsberg during her career taught at Rutgers Law and Columbia University. Also during the summers, she taught at Tulane University. Justice Ginsberg is one of the two Jews currently serving on the Supreme Court.

The fourth Harvard trained lawyer on the United States Supreme Court currently is Anthony M. Kennedy. He was born and raised in Sacramento California. He received his B.A. from Stanford University in California. He attended his senior year of under graduate school at the London School of Economics. He received his law degree from Harvard University Law School. Mr. Kennedy has been teaching for years at the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific. He teaches each summer, as he sits on the bench, at Salzberg Austria. Justice Kennedy is one of the six Catholics serving on the Supreme Court. ...

OpEdNews - Article: Part 8 of Supreme Court Analysis: First Amendment Absolutism, But Only For Corporations

OpEdNews - Article: Part 8 of Supreme Court Analysis: First Amendment Absolutism, But Only For Corporations

This is the eighth of our much anticipated installments tearing up into little itsy bitsy pieces the rogue Supreme Court ruling to declare our country the kingdom of the corporations. We're not proud, we're not tired. But there are still yet more fundamental and unforgivable errors in this opinion we have not yet addressed.

Here we confront the shameless hypocrisy of creating a super protected status for the "speech" (amounting to nothing more than the power to spend vast sums of money) of corporations, by the same Supreme Court line up that has demonstrated ZERO tolerance for the "free" speech of just about anybody else.

In his opinion, Kennedy, writing for The Supreme Court 5 (including Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito), can find no other reading of the First Amendment except that the "speech" of corporations "beyond all doubt" cannot be constrained in any way (opinion p. 19). Even requiring them to maintain a PAC as a vehicle for their political speech is too onerous of a paperwork burden he says (opinion pp. 20-21). And though previous courts and Congress have long recognized a compelling governmental interest making sure ordinary citizens were not drowned by a flood of corporate money, for Kennedy this was somehow a new invention of the Austin case that he then arrogates to overrule (opinion p. 31), specifically a governmental interest in preventing "... the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public's support for the corporation's political ideas."
...
So what, you might now be asking yourselves, WOULD be a compelling governmental interest in limiting free speech? The opinion cites a handful of some 20-30 plus year old cases, examples of people in the military, people in prison, etc. (opinion pp. 24-25) But of course we don't have to look that far to find evidence of Kennedy's hypocrisy. This same line up of judges has spoken very recently on the free speech rights of ACTUAL people, and let's just see what they said.


In Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410 (2006), Kennedy wrote the opinion that a whistle blower, who was a deputy district attorney, could be retaliated against for speaking out against wrongdoing by the police. Somehow defending the free speech of someone charged with protecting the integrity of our law enforcement agencies was not a compelling government interest. But making sure multi-national corporations are not even slightly inconvenienced in buying our elections? That is, according to this same judge.


In Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393 (2007), Roberts wrote the opinion that unfurling a nonsensical joke banner ("Bong Hits For Jesus") off of school property was such a threat to the foundations of our society that it must be stamped out with the biggest possible boot, a dire governmental emergency. But having our policy debate leading up to an election totally dominated by corporate special interests? For Roberts, not so much.


Yes, when it comes to actual people or real compelling interests (like stopping police wrongdoing) the First Amendment is not for us. Because we now have a majority on our Supreme Court for which only the rights of corporations are supreme, inviolable, and sacrosanct. But for more evidence of just how dreadfully bad this decision is, you will have to wait until the ninth bone chilling installment of the Night of the Living Dead Dissents. ...

George W. Bush 'knew Guant�namo prisoners were innocent' - Times Online

George W. Bush 'knew Guant�namo prisoners were innocent' - Times Online

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration. ...

Anger over health-care reform spurs rise in threats against Congress members

Anger over health-care reform spurs rise in threats against Congress members

By Sari Horwitz and Ben Pershing | Friday, April 9, 2010 | Washington Post Staff Writers

Anger over the health-care overhaul has led to a nearly threefold increase in recent months in the number of serious threats against members of Congress, federal law enforcement officials said.

The lawmakers reported 42 threats in the first three months of this year, compared with 15 in last three months of 2009, said Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance W. Gainer, who had information about threats involving both chambers.

"The incidents ranged from very vulgar to serious threats, including death threats," Gainer said. "The ability to carry them out is another question and part of an investigation to determine what, if any, appropriate steps to take."

Nearly all of the recent threats appear to come from opponents of the health-care overhaul, said Gainer, who also served four years as chief of the U.S. Capitol Police. And, he said, there have been "significantly more" threats against House members than against senators.

The threats, which have led to at least three arrests, have not abated since President Obama signed the measure into law March 23. The Capitol Police have contacted the FBI about such threats even more often since the law was signed, said Lindsay Godwin, an FBI spokeswoman. ...

Exclusive: FEC commissioner helped RNC conceal role in 2004 vote suppression | Raw Story

Exclusive: FEC commissioner helped RNC conceal role in 2004 vote suppression | Raw Story
Judge found sworn testimony 'belied' the facts

Caroline Hunter, a Bush-appointed Federal Election Commissioner who remains in office, provided misleading statements under oath in an effort to conceal Republican National Committee involvement in vote suppression activities during the 2004 presidential election, a Raw Story investigation has found.

Legal experts say Hunter's submission of such statements under oath is a serious ethical and professional breach which could warrant a bar review and potential disbarment. At the time, Hunter was serving as deputy counsel to the Republican National Committee.

How a young Republican lawyer became a central witness

...

On Oct. 20, 2004 in Columbus, Ohio, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett decry rampant voter fraud in the state.

"The reports of voter fraud in Ohio are some of the most alarming in the nation," Gillespie asserts.

Two days later, the Ohio Republican Party challenges 35,000 voters, most of whom live in urban, Democratic-leaning areas.

On Nov. 1, the showdown over the injunction plays out in Newark Federal District Court.

"Is the RNC discussing the political aspects of wide-scale voter fraud? Absolutely, your Honor," argues RNC counsel Bobby Burchfield. "They're talking about it every day, because it's a pervasive problem." ...

OpEdNews - Article: Senate Has Become Graveyard of Congress

OpEdNews - Article: Senate Has Become Graveyard of Congress

The U.S. Senate has become the graveyard of Congress! Dozens of bills passed by the House of Representatives--to improve the health, safety and economic well-being of Americans--are locked up in the Senate month after month.

This was not always the case. In the sixties and seventies, legislation affecting consumers, workers and the environment often started in the Senate and was sent to the House in the hope that that body would not weaken or defeat these bills.

Committee chairs like Senators Warren Magnuson, Gaylord Nelson, and Walter Mondale would move legislation after great public hearings open to the citizenry. Auto safety, product safety, meat and poultry inspection, gas pipeline safety in the late sixties, followed by the sweeping air and water pollution control bills in the early seventies, were examples of Senatorial initiatives.

Today, the Senate lies paralyzed even as it is controlled by 59 Democrats--usually enough for comfortable passage of legislation sought by a majority party that also controls the presidency ....

Supreme Court May Lack Protestants, After Stevens Leaves : NPR

Supreme Court May Lack Protestants, After Stevens Leaves : NPR

With U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens talking openly about retirement, attention has focused on the "who" — as in who is on President Obama's short list of potential nominees. But almost nobody has noticed that when Justice Stevens retires, it is entirely possible that there will be no Protestant justices on the court for the first time ever.

Topic With A Hint Of Taboo

Let's face it: This is a radioactive subject. As Jeff Shesol, author of the critically acclaimed new book Supreme Power, puts it, "religion is the third rail of Supreme Court politics. It's not something that's talked about in polite company." And although Shesol notes that privately a lot of people remark about the surprising fact that there are so many Catholics on the Supreme Court, this is not a subject that people openly discuss.

In fact, six of the nine justices on the current court are Roman Catholic. That's half of the 12 Catholics who have ever served on the court. Only seven Jews have ever served, and two of them are there now. Depending on the Stevens replacement, there may be no Protestants left on the court at all in a majority Protestant nation where, for decades and generations, all of the justices were Protestant. ...

Exclusive: FEC inaction on enforcing election laws rises more than 600 percent | Raw Story

Exclusive: FEC inaction on enforcing election laws rises more than 600 percent | Raw Story

Little-noticed Republican appointee has encouraged deadlock

After GOP lawyer Caroline Hunter helped lead the national Election Assistance Commission, a propitious series of events allowed her swift confirmation to the Federal Election Commission.

The result, along with FEC appointments of her two Republican colleagues, has been a staggering decrease in the commission's ability to enforce campaign finance law.

A new statistical analysis shows that the number of FEC enforcement decisions that ended up in deadlocked votes -- three-three ties on the six-member bipartisan commission -- soared more than 600 percent in 2009.

...

The new statistical analysis performed by Holman for Public Citizen, which he released exclusively to Raw Story, shows that from 2003 to 2008 the number of FEC enforcement decisions that ended up in deadlocked votes averaged less than 2 percent and in three of those six years averaged less than 1 percent. (Holman said those low percentages have been consistent since the creation of the FEC in 1975.) Yet, in 2009, Holman found that deadlocks on enforcement cases jumped to 12.6 percent -- an increase of more than 600 percent.

(The full Public Citizen analysis, showing that there has not been a comparable leap in other types of votes, can be found here.)...