We are doomed.

Seriously - we are fucking doomed. If this is the best America has to offer, we are already in the crapper.

What do YOU pray for?

Not the kind of Christian beliefs I was raised to believe in...

From Daily Kos...

The Family Research Council is a strange, strange place:

    The Family Research Council is giving its members "prayer targets" surrounding the Supreme Court's consideration of DOMA and Prop 8, asking them to pray that Ted Olson and David Boies "present their arguments in an inept, confusing and unconvincing way" and "fail to gain traction in the minds of the Justices," Good As You reports.

This is encouraging - Banks can be sued over 2008 collapse

No real punishment yet, but this opens the door..

From Crooks and Liars

(Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc suffered a defeat on Monday as the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a decision forcing it to defend against claims it misled investors about mortgage securities that lost value during the 2008 financial crisis.

    Without comment, the court refused to consider Goldman's appeal of a September 2012 decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.

    That court's action lets the NECA-IBEW Health & Welfare Fund, which owned some mortgage-backed certificates underwritten by Goldman, sue on behalf of investors in certificates it did not own, but that were backed by mortgages from the same lenders.

    In afternoon trading, Goldman shares were down $2.47, or 1.6 percent, at $152.37 on the New York Stock Exchange.

    Other bank stocks also fell, amid concern about an escalation of the euro zone crisis, with the S&P financial sector index down 0.7 percent.

    Goldman and other banks have faced thousands of lawsuits by investors seeking to recoup losses on mortgage securities.

    The bank has said that letting the 2nd Circuit decision stand could cost Wall Street tens of billions of dollars.

The Supremes

We know the five conservative justices will overrule The Voting Rights Act which was approved by over 90% of Congress - so how do you suppose those five men will justify overturning a law deemed so important by a vast majority of Congress and the American people?

The Supremes

When a government appoints Supreme Court Justices because of their bigoted, religious views, you are going to get court rulings that just don't make sense. Citizens United is just one example, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.

The U.S. becomes more and more corrupt each day.

The results of a government bought and paid for by big business

Common Cause working on our behalf

Advocacy group Common Cause filed a petition with the DOJ yesterday asking it to "investigate potential conflicts by Justices Scalia and Thomas" in hearing campaign finance cases "and move for their disqualification from the landmark Citizens United case." Citing the Justices' invitation to conservative financier Charles Koch's retreat this month, the group alleges "they may be biased" toward Koch who spent millions on 2010 campaigns.

It's all in your point of view.

One used Supreme Court for sale.

From Acerbic Politics

Speaking of Justice Alito's head shake

From an article by Doug Kendall at MSNBC (click on the link to read more)...

But It Is True, Justice Alito

In fact, Obama's carefully-phrased comment to the justices highlights two critical aspects of the majority's decision in Citizens United v. FEC, both of which constitute dangerous and revolutionary shifts in long-settled law:

1. The Court ruled that the First Amendment makes no distinction among speakers -- that the identity of a speaker makes no difference for purposes of government regulation of speech. As Justice Stevens pointed out in his dissenting opinion, this logic leads to some remarkable conclusions: "Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by 'Tokyo Rose' during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders." Stevens also clearly explained that the majority's logic "would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans." This is truly an unprecedented reading of the Bill of the Rights that could have consequences that reach even beyond campaign finance law. By eliminating any distinction among speakers, which, as Obama noted, has been recognized for at least a century, the Court hinted that any regulation that distinguishes between corporations and individuals may be problematic -- raising the question of what other rights currently reserved for citizens the Court might soon extend to corporations. As Stevens noted in his dissent, under the majority's logic, "it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech."

2. To make matters worse, the Court dramatically redefined the meaning and standard of "corruption," ruling that only the strictest and most direct forms of corruption -- e.g. bribery -- are prohibited, and not, as was previously the standard, any "appearance of undue influence." This critical component of last week's decision redefined the boundaries of what constitutes corruption and made influence by special interests significantly more difficult to prove. More important, the ruling, as Obama precisely indicated and as Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) fervently reiterated this morning on the Senate floor, appears to sweep away vital barriers that were keeping foreign special interests, such as Toyota, from manipulating American elections. If all speakers are treated equally under the First Amendment, and the only corruption Congress can prohibit is direct vote-trading for money, then there is no reason why foreign companies with a U.S.-presence couldn't spend endless amounts of money to influence U.S. elections. Under the logic of the Supreme Court's decision, just as Exxon can now spend millions to oppose a candidate who, for example, supports the climate bill, so, too, could Toyota or other foreign companies.

If Justice Alito wanted to disclaim any of this, or if he thought that the majority's opinion was not as far-reaching as Justice Stevens' powerful dissenting opinion demonstrated, he should have written a concurring opinion. He should have explained how the logic of the Court's opinion doesn't change course on over a century of campaign finance law that seeks to limit corporate influence in elections and showed us that the Court's formalistic approach to the First Amendment and corporations won't lead to foreign corporate spending in U.S. elections. But muttering at the State of the Union clarifies nothing.

Important Words

Let's hope Barack Obama paid attention...

"In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, [John] Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff, " writes The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin. "Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

From The Progress Report, 5/18/2009

Supreme Court Overturns Bush v. Gore

The Onion reports on one of most monumental rulings by the nation's highest court in the entire history of mankind. The first paragraph...

WASHINGTON—In an unexpected judicial turnaround, the Supreme Court this week reversed its 2000 ruling in the landmark case of Bush v. Gore, stripping George W. Bush of his earlier political victory, and declaring Albert Arnold Gore the 43rd president of the United States of America.

Read more by clicking here.

Antonin Scalia: A Fun Guy (News) (Commentary)

Antonin Scalia is a real conservative now sering on the U.S. Supreme Court. If he wasn't in such a position of extreme power, he'd be funny.

From the AP via Yahoo...

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia rejected the notion that US courts have any control over the actions of American troops at Guantanamo Bay, argued that torture of terror detainees is not banned under the US Constitution and insisted that the high court has no obligation to act as a moral beacon for other nations.

"We don't pretend to be some Western Mullahs who decide what is right and wrong for the whole world," Scalia told a BBC interviewer Tuesday, defending narrow interpretation of the reach the US Constitution gives the nine justices on the country's high court.

Changing Times

Supreme Court

Did You Know - Freedom of Speech

Hmmm....

The following clip from a fairly conservatice rag intrigues me - and leaves me confused on where our new Supereme Court will take us. Following the "Bong Hits for Jesus" decision, it just isn't clear what types of free speech are free. I'll bet, however, that before long a lot of other freedoms of speech will be gone. It's just a matter of time before we become GWB's religious nation.

Putting its recent ruling on student speech into practice, the Supreme Court on Friday rejected a school district's appeal of a ruling that it violated a student's rights by censoring his anti-Bush T-shirt.

A seventh-grader from Vermont was suspended for wearing a shirt that bore images of cocaine and a martini glass _ but also had messages calling President Bush a lying drunk driver who abused cocaine and marijuana, and the "chicken-hawk-in-chief" who was engaged in a "world domination tour."

From Newsday.com.

Did You Know - Government Supports Religion

It's a new nation out there, folks...

Bush just loves that Supreme Court: Court Bars Suits Against Faith-Based Initiatives.

The Supreme Court today handed President Bush's faith-based initiatives program a victory, ruling that federal taxpayers cannot challenge the constitutionality of the White House's efforts to help religious groups obtain government funding for their social programs.
In a 5-4 decision, the court blocked a lawsuit by a Wisconsin-based group of atheists and agnostics against officials of the Bush administration, including the head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

The court ruled that the suit, by the Freedom from Religion Foundation and three of its taxpaying members, could not go forward because ordinary taxpayers do not have standing to challenge the expenditures at issue. The ruling reversed a 2-1 decision in favor of the foundation by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in January 2006. The case is Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation.

From the J-Walk Blog...

Assorted Political Fun

(click on any image for a larger view)