Supreme Court

Book says Souter mulled resignation after Bush v. Gore.

In “The Nine,” which goes on sale Sept. 18, Toobin writes that while the other justices tried to put the case behind them, vid Souter alone was shattered,” at times weeping when he thought of the case. “For many months, it was not at all clear whether he would remain as a justice,” Toobin continues. “That the Court met in a city he loathed made the decision even harder. At the urging of a handful of close friends, he decided to stay on, but his attitude toward the Court was never the same.”

What happened in those deliberations?

...it's time to push back the regressive forces in Congress. Support the Freedom of Choice Act.

Step 1:
Join NARAL Pro-Choice America in our National Call-In Day to Support the Freedom of Choice Act
- Wednesday, April 25
- Call 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to both of your senators and your representative
- Use the following script:
“Please cosponsor the Freedom of Choice Act (H.R.1964/S.1173) to codify Roe v. Wade and guarantee the right to choose for future generations of women.”
- Click on the link [on the page linked above] to find out what other organizations are participating.

Step 2:
Fill out the form [on the page linked above] to urge your members of Congress to sign on as cosponsors, and then forward this action to your friends.

Who's involved?

NARAL Pro-Choice America is co-sponsoring the national call-in day with the following coalition partners:
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
Advocates for Youth
Alliance for Justice
American Association of University Women
American Civil Liberties Union
Catholics for a Free Choice
Center for American Progress Action Fund
Choice USA
Feminist Majority Foundation
Law Students for Choice
Medical Students for Choice
National Abortion Federation
National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum
National Council of Jewish Women
National Council of Women’s Organizations
National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association
National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health
National Organization for Women
National Women’s Law Center
People for the American Way
Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
Reproductive Health Technologies Project
Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States
Sistersong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective

The pro-choice community is working to guarantee the right to choose through the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). 

• FOCA will restore the reproductive rights recognized under the vision expressed in 1973 in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, before anti-choice legislators and courts chipped away at these rights. 
• FOCA will secure the right to choose by establishing a federal law that will guarantee reproductive freedom for future generations of American women.  This guarantee will protect women’s rights even if President Bush and his allies are successful in reversing Roe v. Wade or imposing even more restrictions on our right to choose.

Click here to learn more about President Bush's Federal Abortion Ban and the Supreme Court's recent decision.

This is going to be a long battle in the war to establish and defend women's rights. I'm under no illusion that the current Congress, what with forced-pregnancy advocates sitting on both sides of the aisle, will pass this legislation, but showing support is a first step towards getting our elected officials to realize that the vast majority of Americans don't want the government controlling family planning.

Russell Shaw calls for progressives to unite around whatever Democratic Party nominee for president:

I look at this past week's 5-4 Supreme Court vote against "partial birth abortion." Then I hold up the ages of liberal Justices John Paul Stevens (87), and an increasingly feeble Ruth Bader Ginsburg (74) against the actuarial tables.

I just pray these two are able to serve on the Court until that hopefully blessed morning of January 20, 2009.

At Noon on that day, a Democrat will- from my mouse to the Goddess' ears- take the Oath.

I'd love for the oath-taker to be Al Gore, or John Edwards, or Bill Richardson. But if it comes down to saving Roe, I'd settle for Hillary. With more campaign funds than her Democratic opponents, her nomination is likely. I can see where Obama will fade, Edwards may need to drop out, and Gore will stay out.

At this point in time, though, I can see a scenario that causes ideological purists on our side of the fence to do something stupid that will cause Hillary to fall short, and thus, pave the path for another anti-choice, Justice-appointng [sic] Republican to get into the White House.

Despite the fact that Russell Shaw is echoing radical right-wing (as well as Markos Moulitsas) talking points about "ideological purity" -- a Rovian expression if I ever heard one -- I can see his point. Just this morning, I was thinking about how any of the top four -- Obama, Edwards, Richardson or even Clinton -- would get my vote. And while I know not nearly enough to choose any one above the others, at this point, my sense is that one of them would suffice for me come November next year.

Making that decision so much easier is the fact that the Republicans have so far offered up boobs, bigots and bobbies. Given the radical and, yes, misogynist and, yes again, racist and, yes, obviously, homophobic values at the core of the right wing, I don't see myself voting for any Republican for president any time soon. Add in their modern penchant for fascistic governmental control over individuals -- making the phrase "the party of Goldwater" an oxymoronic joke -- and I don't see myself voting Republican in my lifetime.

However, Congress is a different matter. Do we continue to vote for pro-forced-pregnancy Democrats? How do we, as progressives, in good conscience cast our lot with men (yes once more, I'm afraid) who consider women's right to privacy to be non-existent, women's medical choices to be controlled by politicians, women's health to be a distraction, women's lives to be important only when not distracting from other interests, and women's bodies to be, ultimately, Property of the U.S. Government?

I wonder how many Democratic and independent voters even realize that their Democratic Senator(s) and/or Representative is an advocate of forced pregnancy.

The question is pertinent right now, pre-primaries, while we look at what kind of future we want to forge in the can't-come-soon-enough post-Bush America. Now is the time to ask the questions. Now is the time to choose. Now is the time to push for the progressives that will defend privacy and equal rights and civil rights and human rights for everyone, not just the ruling men who look upon the rest of us as "peasants."

It's not an easy thing, when the Democratic Party, whose vague favoring of progressive values stands out like a monument to all things noble and just when compared with the venal depravity that describes the power centers of the GOP, has such a slim and weak hold upon Congress.

It's all the more difficult when you consider that men claiming progressive values have historically dismissed our alarms about the Handmaid trends happening in our politics -- our politics. And it sure as heck doesn't help that ignorance and willful ignorance on the part of ostensibly well-intentioned men when it comes to issues women face continue.

The demographics are with us, though. More GOP seats in the Senate are up for election next year. Americans in general are suspicious of an overly invasive Government. And, while meaningful statistics are lacking (at least from what I can tell), based on anecdotal evidence there are quite a number of so-called "pro-life" Americans who oppose abortion until the issue comes home to roost in their own families, in their own lives.

So what's it going to be, boys? When you throw women's lives into the mix, does women's equality count as "important shit"?

Well they did it: The conservative men of the Supreme Court declared that the State has the right to control women's wombs, thus rendering women officially as second-class citizens with fewer rights than men, and even fewer rights than non-persons.

I really don't know what to say, except that if men had to bear the pregnancy burden, there would be no such debate today.

People will look back at this decade as the era when the United States turned to darkness. Iraq, torture, raiding the taxpayer coffers for corporate profit, unprecedented deficits, refusal to acknowledge global warming (let alone do anything about it), and now this.

"Today's decision is alarming," Ginsburg wrote for the minority. "It tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists....And, for the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health."

Bucking Markos' insistence that reproductive rights are not part of the "important shit," McJoan writes on Kos:

This decision throws basic abortion rights into question, which in turn brings the right to choose to the forefront of 2008, when Democrats again are going to have to make supporting the right to choose a litmus test, and where we're going to have to fight hard in the primaries for truly progressive candidates who will make protecting the right to make our own medical decisions paramount.

Enjoy....

The "I'm just a stupid jerk, so get off my case" excuse.

Bush: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”

Video-WMP Video-QT

Hell hath no fury as a wingnut scorned.

When Fox News journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig were being held by Gaza kidnappers, they were used as solemn symbols of our grand struggle against Islamic fascists. But ever since they were released, physically unharmed, they have become, as John Amato documented the other day, the targets of the same sort of hostility and bizarre resentment which was directed at Jill Carroll when she was released. It's almost as though the fact that they weren't killed -- and then refused to read some fictitious propaganda script about their captivity -- instantaneously transformed them from glorious martyrs in the War on Terror to impediments which needed to be neutralized through attacks on their mental health and character.

Yesterday, David Warren, a columnist for Real Clear Politics and The Ottawa Citizen, attacked Centanni and Wiig for being cowards and "men without chests" and said that they illustrate so much of what is wrong with the West and why we are losing to the Islamofascists:...

Who needs an election when you run the House?

San Diego Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann rendered his decision in the election challenge in California’s 50th Congressional District. He dismissed the request for a recount and for discovery of the facts of the Busby-Bilbray election stating specifically that "Once the House asserts exclusive jurisdiction and selects a candidate, the court no longer has jurisdiction" (emphasis added). The judge argued that the June 13 swearing in alone was sufficient to establish Bilbray’s "election." The event had the power to take away any and all citizen rights and immediately rescind authority over their own elections.

Requests for a recount resulting from major problems with the election were deemed insufficient and the rights of voters to due process were cast aside in deference to Speaker Hastert or any future Speaker. The induction of Republican Bilbray was just seven days after the election and a full 17 days before the election was officially certified by the San Diego Registrar.

The American visa card: Don't leave home.

According to the article, the two Americans have already submitted to an FBI interview, but one of them -- the American-born 18-year-old -- "had run afoul of the FBI when he declined to be interviewed again without a lawyer and refused to take a lie-detector test. " For those actions -- i.e., invoking his constitutional rights to counsel and against self-incrimination -- he is being refused entry back into his country. And the Bush administration is now conditioning his re-entry on his relinquishing the most basic constitutional protections guaranteed to him by the Bill of Rights.

Since neither of the two Americans are citizens of any other country, they are in a bizarre legal limbo where the only country they have the right to enter, the U.S., is refusing to allow them to return home.

Bush v. Gore Redux.

1) Bush v. Gore was a 5-4 opinion. (If I could put that in neon, I would.) Full stop. No qualifications. No dissenter joined any aspect of the opinion of the Court. Pace uberhack Stuart Taylor, there is no such thing as a "partial concurrence." You join an opinion, or some aspect of an opinion, or you do not. Souter and Breyer did not join any part of the per curiam, including its equal protection analysis. Anyone claiming that Bush v. Gore is a 7-2 opinion is lying, or lacks an even rudimentary understanding of constitutional law.

And via Bitch Ph.D., Adam Kotsko's deconstruction of wingnutty debate tactics (of which we've seen our share here).

5. Being "willing to be convinced" -- but only if the conservative's opponent can provide a thorough, definitive, and bulletproof argument on the spot. The existence of vast libraries of literature is most often disregarded (the only exception in the history of arguments being baa's decision to read The Second Sex in this thread) -- in any case, it's the duty of the conservative's interlocutor to supply the conservative with the perfect book, totally representative of all work on the topic, reasonably short, not overly academic, hopefully with pictures.... Most people seriously studying a topic read many books and articles, but the conservative reserves the right to make a definitive decision after reading a single book, preferably of fewer than 200 pages.

Don't forget to stand up-wind from the BBQ now.

I'm struck by today's news that President Bush has designated an ecological treasure that's underwater a national monument. You can bet they made sure there was no oil there.

Also oh so ironic: Justice Antonin Scalia's Supreme Court majority opinion today that uses all sorts of ends-justify-means rationalizations to undermine a key provision of the Fourth Amendment. Scalia has just redefined judicial activism. To hell with the law -- and forget all that Founding Fathers crap -- just look at all my good reasons why we should ignore the law -- just look at the police academy!

At least the Republicans in Congress were in their usual self-righteous form today, using cheap rhetoric to try to score political points while doing everything to avoid talking about the disaster in Iraq. A lot of peacock feathers there.

In case you missed it on Wednesday, Zbigniew Brzezinski on the NewsHour [video | mp3]addressed what the Republicans won't:

Well, the president opened his press conference by make a statement, which I suspect most Americans didn't quite fully interpret correctly. This is what he said: "I have just returned from Baghdad. I was inspired to be able to visit the capital of a free and democratic Iraq."

[Holds up a map of Iraq, with a small dot on it.]

Now, this is what the president actually visited. This is an aerial map of Baghdad and, within it, the viewers can see a small spot. That is the so-called Green Zone, a fortified American fortress housing the American embassy, the American high command, and all the major institutions of the Iraqi, as he said, free and democratic government, in an American fortress....

And then, last but not least is the fact that the so-called Iraqi government, three years after the beginning of the occupation, still sits in an American fortress. It cannot venture outside of it. To call it a government is to misuse the word "government."...

[W]e have to get rid of the mindset, which is really by now totally ahistorical -- we no longer live in the age of colonialism. We no longer have to assume "the white man's burden" in order to civilize others, and I'm using these phrases in quotation marks....

Well, how many thousands of Iraqis will die in the meantime? How many hundreds, how many thousands of Americans will die in the meantime?

How much will our prestige internationally decline? How many billions of dollars will we spend on this?

Good questions. Questions the Republicans don't even want to ask, let alone answer.

But I'm sure the newly non-indicted Karl Rove will come up with some good anger points to turn citizen against citizen. Nothing stirs up the ire of the GOP like American citizens.

They're Chinese. They were arrested by mistake -- even the Bush Administration says so. So why are they languishing in their fifth year at Guantanamo?

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court rejected an appeal Monday from two Chinese Muslims who were mistakenly captured as enemy combatants more than four years ago and are still being held at the U.S. prison in Cuba.
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The men's plight has posed a dilemma for the Bush administration and courts. Previously, a federal judge said the detention of the ethnic Uighurs in Guantanamo Bay is unlawful, but that there was nothing federal courts could do.

Lawyers for the two contend they should be released, something the Bush administration opposes, unless they can go to a country other than the United States.

So they're free to go, only elsewhere. Until then, they're non-persons held in a military prison because they're guilty of having been victims of a "mistake."

The U.S. government has been unable to find a country willing to accept the two men, along with other Uighurs. They cannot be returned to China because they likely will be tortured or killed.

So these Chinese men are in maximum-security lock-down as a form of sanctuary. Pretty big-hearted of W, isn't it?

Bush administration Supreme Court lawyer Paul Clement told justices that there were "substantial ongoing diplomatic efforts to transfer them to an appropriate country."

Clement said that in the meantime, the men have had television, a stereo system, books and recreational opportunities: including soccer, volleyball and ping-pong.

The detainees' lawyers painted a different picture, saying that hunger strikes and suicide attempts at Guantanamo Bay are becoming more common and that the men are isolated.

"Guantanamo is at the precipice," Boston lawyer Sabin Willett wrote in the appeal. "Only prompt intervention by this court to vindicate its own mandate can prevent the rule of law itself from being drowned in this intensifying whirlpool of desperation."

Then again, these guys aren't exactly innocents:

from Talk to Action

We all have heard South Dakota State Senator Bill Napoli's description of a woman who might qualify for an abortion under the rigid strictures of South Dakota's draconian abortion law – an exemption now immortalized as the Sodomized Virgin Exception.

Bob Nelson, a contributor to the Rapid City Journal's Mount Blogmore, considers the plight of those young women less fortunate.

It was an easy rape, she said
(Though not the way she hoped to wed)
The stones were sharp against her head,
(Not her dream of a bridal bed)
And the dress he tore as he thrust her down
was not her idea of a wedding gown.

But really, it was not complex.
Just some simple brutal sex.
And though her young life had other plans
She would bear the child of the gentleman.
And try to love each smile and dimple,
And be thankful that the rape was simple.
And thank the men who made her free.
Simple men like Napoli.

No thanks are necessary, little lady. It was their simple pleasure. As Napoli himself says, "If I, as a legislator, can make life better, really help somebody, that's a wonderful feeling."

Word has come thru of the discovery in Iraq of the body of peace activist Tom Fox.

Tom Fox, the Virginia peace activist ... has been found dead, a State Department spokesman said last night. The FBI verified that a body found in Baghdad on Thursday morning was that of Fox, according to the State Department. It was not immediately clear last night when he had been killed or how. Nothing was said immediately about the circumstances leading to the discovery of the body. [...]

Fox disappeared Nov. 26 in Baghdad, along with Norman Kember, 74, of Britain, and James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, both of Canada. The four worked with Christian Peacemaker Teams, a Toronto- and Chicago-based group that opposes the Iraq war and has criticized treatment of detainees in U.S. and Iraqi jails.

UPDATE: 6:19 PM, PT: AP report with additional detail on the death of Tom Fox. His body indicated, from the wounds, that he was tortured before he was shot in the head and chest. His hands were bound.

Last year, within days of the abduction of the 4, Media Matters documented Rush Limbaugh's ditto head take on christians abducted in-country, while there opposing the war, working as peace activists within Iraq.

Yeah, all right. Now, let's take this at face value just for a moment.

This could all be BS. I mean, we've never heard of the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. This could all be a stunt, but let's take it -- well, let's take it both ways.

We'll take it face value at first, then we'll look at it as a stunt second. I said at the conclusion of previous hours

-- part of me that likes this. And some of you might say, "Rush, that's horrible. Peace activists taken hostage." Well, here's why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality.

So here we have these peace activists over there. I don't care if they're Christian or not. They're over there, and as peace activists, they've got one purpose. They're over there trying to stop the violence. Now, if this German group fits the mold, they are probably blaming the United States and coalition forces for all of this.

Authorities tell ABC News they are investigating Limbaugh for money laundering violations, involving "30 to 40" just-under-$10,000 withdrawals from US Trust bank, structured to avoid Federal currency reporting requirements.
[18 November 2003]

But more importantly, they believe that if they just go there, like these idiotic human shields before the war, if they just go there -- "Mr. Limbaugh, it's real simple, something you wouldn't understand because you've never been to conflict resolution. But it's real simple. If we go there, and we show them that we are people of peace, and that we want to stop the violence, and that we don't hold them responsible, they will see and understand that this is the way to bring peace."

Imagine, for a moment, had they been there church planting or attached to Franklin Graham's West Wing sponsored Samaritan's Purse (reported as inside Iraq first!). Oh, I do believe the entire Right Wing Wurlitzer, in all its bellows and buffoons, would assemble... a new casus belli would be called forth. Or their bodies discovered, mysteriously, in Iran.

Instead:

LIMBAUGH: They wouldn't have been kidnapped because they wouldn't have been there in the first place if Bush hadn't gone and caused the war and created all these terrorists.

I mean, these people are liberals, they're warped. Well, I mean, that's why there's -- I'm telling you, folks, there's a part of me that likes this.

Probably, even with this, though, you know, they're not going to see the light of day. They're not going to -- I know, let them take me out of context. I don't care anymore.

I hope no one thinks I thought Saturday morning, in liberal leftischer blogoland, needed yet another story about Pill Boy.

No, this got written up, at the instance of yet another wholly tragic martyr, to contemplate the Bush Family Greed (themselves fixers and enablers for generations) which has met the Great American Emptiness - and to deliver this tidbit from Rush's personal timeline:

Marries third wife Marta Fitzgerald [27 May, 1994] a 35-year-old aerobics instructor he met on Compuserve.

The two are married in Justice Clarence Thomas' house, with the ceremony officiated by Thomas himself. Also in attendence were William Bennett, James Carville and Mary Matalin.

- only consider this line up of eminent personages if you are not eating. It's an appetite killer. And remark on the vast moral emptiness of our so called governing class. They are all, with heartbreakingly few exceptions, pundits, lobbyists, TV/radio personalities, war mongers, campaign managers, consultants, titans of various cash industries, fixers and enablers and too many of these same people revolve in and out of academia (Ken Starr, Condi Rice, Larry Summers) and / or the military.

And in some cases are on the SC. For life.

Have a pill. Or two or three... Hell, it might even help.