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US Citizens Are Being Told To Carry Birth Certificates Amid ICE Raids

United States citizens, including Native Americans, are being warned to carry ID with them after reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers questioning and detaining people this week.

One such warning came from the Navajo Nation President, Buu Nygren, in Arizona, following reports that some residents had been approached by officials.

Newsweek reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE for comment via email Friday morning.

Why It Matters

With President Donald Trump's plan to ramp up deportations of illegal immigrants, ICE and DHS will likely come under increased scrutiny in the coming weeks and months as they seek to show force when it comes to immigration enforcement. Any overstepping could result in legal action against the agencies.

Americans largely support his mass deportation plans. A New York Times/Ipsos poll, carried out from January 2 to 10, found 55 percent of voters strongly or somewhat supported such plans. Eighty-eight percent supported "Deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have criminal records." Large majorities of both Democrats and Republicans agreed that the immigration system is broken.

What To Know

Nygren's post on Facebook Wednesday came a day before ICE carried out a raid in Newark, New Jersey, in which a U.S. veteran was reportedly detained by officials, along with some American citizens.

According to the tribal leader in Arizona, there had been "several concerns and unconfirmed reports" that immigration officials had detained Diné people in urban areas.

"My office is looking into this matter and will provide updates as they come," he said in the post. "I am working actively with our state leaders and law enforcement to protect our Diné people."

The leader said citizens should carry their certificate of Indian birth, their state ID or driver's license, or other forms of identification in case officials stopped them. The message reflected advice from the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), with both organizations adding that those detained by ICE had the right to access an attorney and the right to remain silent.

Matthew Fletcher, a professor at the University of Michigan who focuses on federal Indian law, told Newsweek that many tribal citizens in rural areas do not have any form of I.D. proving their citizenship. For those who do, ICE agents are not always familiar with their documents, he said.

Since the election in November, immigration advocacy groups have been trying to prepare communities for potential increases in immigration enforcement, including courses and classes on immigrants' rights. Warnings of racial profiling have also been issued by groups and experts, with concerns those with legal status or citizenship could be accidentally targeted.

The detention of American citizens by immigration enforcement is not new. In 2021, the Government Accountability Office reported that ICE may have deported as many as 70 between 2015 and 2020, while 674 were arrested.

In 2021, civil rights groups in California sued ICE for arresting Brian Bukle, a Black man living in Riverside County, who had been a U.S. citizen for 50 years. The state's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation wrongly reported him for deportation to ICE, who detained him for 36 days before his citizenship was acknowledged. The case led to a $150,000 payout.

The Trump administration has promised to carry out the President's mass deportation plans, already touting hundreds of detentions and some deportation flights in recent days. Numbers given by ICE were similar to those seen in the last few months of the Biden administration, while deportation flights are also a regular occurrence.

What People Are Saying

Fletcher told Newsweek: "Indigenous people in the southwest should absolutely be on their guard. There are many mixed-race brown people there who are Indigenous and tribal citizens. I get the sense that ICE is engaged in a massively overbroad initiative right now on purpose, a shock and awe policy, that will sweep in many American citizens."

NIJC executive director Mary Meg McCarthy said in a statement on Monday: "NIJC and allies across the country will be fighting back. We will continue to work to extend access to legal counsel to as many people as possible, defend rule of law and due process by challenging illegal policies in federal court and defending law that holds the federal government accountable, and never lose sight that our communities are stronger when we welcome immigrants and ensure access to justice for all."

New Jersey Democratic Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, on the raid in Newark, said on X:

"It doesn't matter if you're a citizen who served our country in uniform, you too can be stopped without a warning or a warrant and shaken down for your papers … There is nobody in this country who should be subjected to a warrantless search. No federal agent has the authority to stop and harass any passerby without cause."

What Happens Next

While sanctuary cities and states have continued to promise to support undocumented migrants who have not committed any other crimes, it is expected that ICE will conduct raids in these communities in the coming days and weeks.

The White House will look to put out a strong message that it is delivering on Trump's promises, already having been more vocal on enforcement actions taking place.

Today's Today

"Bloody Sunday"

On March 7, 1965, an estimated 525 to 600 civil rights marchers headed southeast out of Selma on U.S. Highway 80. The march was led by John Lewis of SNCC and the Reverend Hosea Williams of SCLC, followed by Bob Mants of SNCC and Albert Turner of SCLC. The protest went according to plan until the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they encountered a wall of state troopers and county posse waiting for them on the other side.

County sheriff Jim Clark had issued an order for all white men in Dallas County over the age of twenty-one to report to the courthouse that morning to be deputized. Commanding officer John Cloud told the demonstrators to disband at once and go home. Rev. Hosea Williams tried to speak to the officer, but Cloud curtly informed him there was nothing to discuss. Seconds later, the troopers began shoving the demonstrators, knocking many to the ground and beating them with nightsticks. Another detachment of troopers fired tear gas, and mounted troopers charged the crowd on horseback.

Televised images of the brutal attack presented Americans and international audiences with horrifying images of marchers left bloodied and severely injured, and roused support for the Selma Voting Rights Campaign. Amelia Boynton, who had helped organize the march as well as marching in it, was beaten unconscious. A photograph of her lying on the road of the Edmund Pettus Bridge appeared on the front page of newspapers and news magazines around the world. Another marcher, Lynda Blackmon Lowery, age 14, was brutally beaten by a police officer during the march, and needed seven stitches for a cut above her right eye and 28 stitches on the back of her head. John Lewis suffered a skull fracture and bore scars on his head from the incident for the rest of his life. In all, 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 treated for lesser injuries; the day soon became known as "Bloody Sunday" within the black community.

It Gets Worse

Dear Gov. Henry McMaster @henrymcmaster

Please take all of this, strap it to a cinder block, and shove the whole thing up your ass.

Your pal,

Mike 

PS)

WaPo: (pay wall)

South Carolina bill outlaws websites that tell how to get an abortion

More states could follow, setting up a battle over the future of online speech across the country.

Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the right to abortion in June, South Carolina state senators introduced legislation that would make it illegal to “aid, abet or conspire with someone” to obtain an abortion.

The bill aims to block more than abortion: Provisions would outlaw providing information over the internet or phone about how to obtain an abortion. It would also make it illegal to host a website or “[provide] an internet service” with information that is “reasonably likely to be used for an abortion” and directed at pregnant people in the state.

Legal scholars say the proposal is likely a harbinger of other state measures, which may restrict communication and speech as they seek to curtail abortion. The June proposal, S. 1373, is modeled off a blueprint created by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), an antiabortion group, and designed to be replicated by lawmakers across the country.

Seeking an abortion? Here’s how to avoid leaving a digital trail.

As the fall of Roe v. Wade triggers a flood of new legislation, an adjacent battleground is emerging over the future of internet freedoms and privacy in states across the country — one, experts say, that could have a chilling impact on First Amendment-protected speech.

“These are not going to be one-offs,” said Michele Goodwin, the director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy at the University of California at Irvine Law School. “These are going to be laws that spread like wildfire through states that have shown hostility to abortion.”

Goodwin called the South Carolina bill “unconstitutional.” But she warned it’s unclear how courts might respond after “turning a blind eye” to antiabortion laws even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe.

Many conservative states’ legislative sessions ended before the Supreme Court’s decision, and won’t resume until next year, making South Carolina’s bill an anomaly. But some tech lobbyists say the industry needs to be proactive and prepared to fight bills with communications restrictions that may have complicated ramifications for companies.

“If tech sits out this debate, services are going to be held liable for providing basic reproductive health care for women,” said Adam Kovacevich, the founder and CEO of Chamber of Progress, which receives funding from companies including Google and Facebook.

Abortion is illegal for millions. Will Big Tech help prosecute it?

Tech companies could soon be navigating a disparate patchwork of state laws, caught in the middle of a political tug of war between red states and blue states. Democrats are already considering new data privacy proposals to protect reproductive health data and other digital trails that could be used to prosecute people seeking abortion. Meanwhile, Republican states could attempt to preserve and collect that same data, which has been used as key evidence in cases against pregnant women.

Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, said the First Amendment and Section 230, a bill that shields internet providers and tech companies from liability for the posts, photos and videos people share on their sites, provide a strong defense in many instances for websites and providers facing lawsuits over hosting information about abortion access.

Texts, web searches about abortion have been used to prosecute women

But individuals could face liability for aiding and abetting people in accessing a criminalized procedure if they send messages about how to obtain an abortion or otherwise break the law.

For the NRLC, which wrote the model legislation, limiting communication is a key part of the strategy to aggressively enforce laws restricting abortion. “The whole criminal enterprise needs to be dealt with to effectively prevent criminal activity,” Jim Bopp, the group’s general counsel, wrote in a July 4 memo, comparing the group’s efforts to fighting organized crime.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Bopp said that the group has refined its blueprint for states since the South Carolina bill was introduced last month. The restrictions on websites and internet hosts in the July model bill language would only apply when the information is likely to be used “for an unlawful abortion in this state,” he said, not abortions generally, as the South Carolina bill says.

The group “tried to be very careful in vetting this so it doesn’t impinge on First Amendment rights,” he added. He said the provision was intended to limit the trafficking of abortion-inducing drugs, which throughout the interview he compared to the trafficking of fentanyl.

Abortion is now banned in these states. See where laws have changed.

Yet there’s broad uncertainty about how courts would interpret such bills, which might lead to companies and websites taking down information about abortions for fear of lawsuits.

“The legal ambiguity works in favor of regulators,” Goldman said. “They can suppress a lot of constitutionally protected speech just because of fear of liability.”

Democrats are expected to respond to the conservative states’ with their own regulatory efforts, largely focused on protecting sensitive data. California State Assembly member Mia Bonta introduced legislation earlier this year that would protect people from law enforcement requests from other states to turn over information that would identify people seeking an abortion.

A staffer in Bonta’s office said she introduced the legislation amid concerns that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe. Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California approached her with the concept of the legislation. The bill will have a hearing in August, and Bonta’s staff is working on amendments to strengthen the legislation in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

“Just because the Supreme Court has decided to strip us of the fundamental right to choose what [to do] with our bodies, doesn’t mean California will stand back and allow others to use our systems to obtain information to hurt people who are exercising a fundamental right here in California,” Bonta said.

Period apps gather intimate data. A new bill aims to curb mass collection.

Democrats in Congress have also introduced the “My Body, My Data Act,” which would create new privacy protections for reproductive health data. The bill has little chance of becoming law in a narrowly divided Congress, but Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), the legislation’s architect, previously told The Post that she wants states to replicate the bill.

Privacy and tech advocacy groups are trying to gear up for the post-Dobbs battles. The Center for Democracy and Technology on Tuesday announced a new task force focused on protecting reproductive health information, which convened academics, civil rights groups and privacy organizations.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group, expressed support for the California privacy bill and is reviewing the South Carolina legislation. Hayley Tsukayama, a senior legislative activist at EFF and a former Post reporter, said the South Carolina bill has “serious problems.”

She’s anticipating that tech companies and their trade associations will be ramping up their lobbying efforts at the state level, especially early next year, when many states resume their legislative calendars.

“For tech companies and for folks interested in digital rights, it’s going to be a wild ride in the next few years,” she said.

Voices Of The Enslaved

Ted Koppel from the late 1990s

The takeaway: Governments don't grant people their rights. Rights are not given - they're inherent. We have those rights no matter what.

Petty ambitious people will always be selfishly motivated to use government power to gain advantage for themselves by denying others their rights, so government has to be constructed and maintained in ways that countervail that selfish impulse - so that government isn't allowed to deny us those rights.

FIGHTING FOR EVERYBODY'S RIGHTS

IS EVERYBODY'S FIGHT

Here Comes Trouble

There's a kind of really stoopid shit that swirls around Qult45 - and swirls around all of us because of Qult45.

And like the Salem Witch Trials, it ends when somebody finally says "enough" and sues the fuck outa the fuckups.

Deadline Hollywood:

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs aired a segment on Friday that amounted to a fact-checking refutation of claims that he and guests have made about an election tech company Smartmatic and its role in the 2020 presidential election, after the company threatened legal action.

Other similar segments will be shown on Justice with Judge Jeanine on Saturday and Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, a Fox News spokesperson said. Lisa Boothe will host Judge Jeanine, as Jeanine Pirro is off for the holidays

Earlier this week, Smartmatic announced that it had threatened legal action against Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network “for publishing false and defamatory statements,” after talking heads on the outlets have pushed claims of election fraud, including unfounded conspiracy theories of rigged voting machine companies.

Smartmatic sent legal demand letters to the networks, arguing that “these organizations could have easily discovered the falsity of the statements and implications made about Smartmatic by investigating their statements before publishing them to millions of viewers and readers.” The company said that its role in the 2020 election was limited to working on Los Angeles County’s publicly owned voting system, even though anchors and guests have advanced claims that it had a much greater role.

On Friday, Dobbs opened a segment by saying that there were “lots of opinions about the integrity of the elections, the irregularities of mail-in voting, of election voting machines and software.” He then went to Eddie Perez, global director of technology development and open standard for the Open Source Election Technology Institute.

In the segment, an unidentified off-camera voice asks Perez, “Have you seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to flip votes anywhere in the U.S. in this election?”

Perez responded, “I have not seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to delete, change, alter anything related to vote tabulation.” He also said that he was not aware of them having any other direct customers with election officials beyond Los Angeles this cycle. He also said that Smartmatic and another company that has been targeted by President Donald Trump, Dominion Voting Systems, are “two completely separate companies.”

- the piece goes on, but you get the picture.

Here's the segment DumFux news aired rebutting their own assertions:

And then - CNN:

President Donald Trump convened a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Friday, including lawyer Sidney Powell and her client, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, two people familiar with the matter said, describing a session that began as an impromptu gathering but devolved and eventually broke out into screaming matches at certain points as some of Trump's aides pushed back on Powell and Flynn's more outrageous suggestions about overturning the election.

Flynn had suggested earlier this week that Trump could invoke martial law as part of his efforts to overturn the election that he lost to President-elect Joe Biden -- an idea that arose again during the meeting in the Oval Office, one of the people said. It wasn't clear whether Trump endorsed the idea, but others in the room forcefully pushed back and shot it down.
The meeting was first reported by the New York Times.

White House aides who participated in the meeting, including White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and counsel Pat Cipollone, also pushed back intensely on the suggestion of naming Powell as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud allegations Trump's own administration has dismissed (or, as seems more feasible, hiring her in the administration for some kind of investigatory role). Powell has focused her conspiracies on voting machines and has floated the notion of having a special counsel inspect the machines for flaws.

- snip -

Shortly after that meeting, Trump's campaign staff received a memo from the campaign legal team on Saturday instructing them to preserve all documents related to Dominion Voting Systems and Powell in anticipation of potential litigation by the company against the pro-Trump attorney.

The memo, viewed by CNN, references a letter Dominion sent to Powell this week demanding she publicly retract her accusations and instructs campaign staff not to alter, destroy or discard records that could be relevant.

A serious internal divide has formed within Trump's campaign following the election with tensions at their highest between the campaign's general counsel, Matt Morgan, who sent the memo Saturday, and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Though the campaign once distanced itself from Powell, Trump has been urging other people to fight like she has, according to multiple people familiar with his remarks. He has asked for more people making her arguments, which are often baseless and filled with conspiracy theories, on television.

So hey there, USAmerica Inc - maybe you shouldn't be trying so hard to strip away the 1st amendment right that guarantees us all access to the courts - the right to petition the government for redress.

And maybe the general citizenry should be paying a bit more attention as the Corporation-Owned Coin-Operated Politicians continue to blame us as they try fuck us out of that right.

Divide And Conquer

Turns out the Mark Zuckerberg character in the movie Social Media wasn't the plucky entrepreneurial good guy supernerd after all.

I think maybe the writers and producers had that suspicion all along.

WaPo, Yaël Eisenstat:

I joined Facebook in June 2018 as “head of Global Elections Integrity Ops” in the company’s business integrity organization, focused specifically on political advertising. I had spent much of my career working to strengthen and defend democracy — including freedom of speech — as an intelligence officer, diplomat and White House adviser. Now I had the opportunity to help correct the course of a company that I viewed as playing a major role in one of the biggest threats to our democracy.

In the year leading up to our 2016 election, I began to see the polarization and breakdown of civil discourse, exacerbated by social media, as our biggest national security threat; I had written about that before Facebook called. I didn’t think I was going to change the company by myself. But I wanted to help Facebook think through the role it plays in politics, in the United States and around the world, and the best way to ensure that it is not harming democracy.

A year and a half later, as the company continues to struggle with how to handle political content and as another presidential election approaches, it’s clear that tinkering around the margins of advertising policies won’t fix the most serious issues. The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers aim at us, showing each of us a different version of the truth and manipulating us with hyper-customized ads — ads that as of this fall can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they’re run by a political campaign. As long as Facebook prioritizes profit over healthy discourse, it can’t avoid damaging democracy.

I'm good with the argument that we don't want a private sector entity deciding questions of free speech - that's not really what we're talking about - but I get the argument.

Coupla things:

• It's everybody's job - everybody's right, and everybody's obligation - to hold as many people as possible to account for telling the truth.
• There's a near-absolute expectation that advertisers don't get to put out false or misleading claims about their own products, or the products of their competitors.

Caveat Emptor applies, but only to a certain extent. So if (eg) your dealership has a car for sale that you advertise as a peach, when it's a lemon - you can expect a visit from the fraud unit.

You can be fined.

You can go to jail.

You can be barred from that industry.

Thing 3: No rights are absolute or unlimited. Speech is not just an expression of ideas - it's also an action. If your actions present a clear and present danger to others - as individuals or as a community - you can be (and should be) smacked down.

We've got to have a taste of a Teddy Roosevelt-style Trust Buster in the White House. Some of these companies have grown too big and too powerful.

It's not like we've never been here before

Today's Corporate Overreach

Albert Breer, Sports Illustrated:

ATLANTA — On Tuesday, NFL owners put three hours aside for a privileged session to speak—amongst themselves and family members—about the most sensitive of topics.

One was how the league will handle players kneeling during the national anthem going forward. An idea being floated in the room goes like this: It would be up to the home team on whether both teams come out of the locker room for the anthem, and, should teams come out, 15-yard penalties could be assessed for kneeling.

The league is currently being sued by Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid, with the two unsigned free agents alleging that NFL teams colluded to keep them unemployed. Kaepernick was the first NFL player to kneel during the national anthem, to protest police brutality, starting a trend that swept across the league in 2016 and '17.

The NFL addressed the anthem issue at its meetings in October and March, with plans to further discuss it at this meeting. The league also met with the Players Coalition in October, and agreed to a seven-year, $89 million social-justice partnership.

According to sources, the owners also discussed how to move forward its partnership with the players and finalized the terms of the deal.

My dearest NFL,

Fuck you.

Even if you decide not to go thru with it, you're seriously considering it. Add this to all your other attempts to manipulate and control players to the point where most of them lose everything no matter what they're willing to sacrifice in order to play a game that makes a very few people obscenely wealthy, and I can only conclude one thing - fuck you.

Your pal,

Mike

The Prophet Zappa

From Joe's Garage, Acts I, II & III (1979):

Eventually it was discovered
That God
Did not want us to be
All the same
This was
BAD NEWS
For the Governments of The World
As it seemed contrary
To the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings
Mankind must be made more uniformly
If THE FUTURE
Was going to work
Various ways were sought
To bind us all together
But, alas SAMENESS was unenforceable
It was about this time
That someone
Came up with the idea of TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Based on the principle that
If we were ALL crooks
We could at last be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of THE LAW
Shrewdly our legislators calculated
That most people were
Too lazy to perform a
REAL CRIME
So new laws were manufactured
Making it possible for anyone
To violate them any time of the day or night,
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President,
The most exalted industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions
TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Was the greatest idea of its time
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,
So, of course, they had to be TRICKED INTO IT...
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal

Garrett Epps, The Atlantic:

If a citizen speaks at a public meeting and says something a politician doesn’t like, can she be arrested, cuffed, and carted off to the hoosegow?

Suppose that, during this fraught encounter, the citizen violates some law—even by accident, even one no one has ever heard of, even one dug up after the fact—does that make her arrest constitutional?

-and-

He was charged with “disorderly conduct” and “resisting arrest without violence,” but the local prosecutor dropped the charges, saying in essence that no reasonable person would believe them. Lozman then brought a federal lawsuit against the city for “First Amendment retaliation.” A federal judge agreed that Lozman had “compelling” evidence that he’d been arrested as punishment for his protected speech. But the judge then threw out the case, reasoning that he actually could have been charged with the obscure state offense of “willfully interrupt[ing] or disturb[ing] any school or any assembly of people met for the worship of God or for any lawful purpose.”

What this meant, the court decided, was that the officer who arrested Lozman would have had “probable cause” (a reasonable basis to believe a crime had been committed) to arrest him if he had known about “assembly of people” statute and wanted to enforce it. The fact that the officer didn’t know about it was irrelevant—and so was the city’s unconstitutional motive. As long as an officer could have arrested Lozman for something, in other words, the retaliatory motive didn’t matter. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed: the existence of probable cause for any offense is an “absolute bar” to a suit for retaliatory arrest, it said.

"You're making trouble, so we'll have you arrested, and we'll charge you with some weird shit later because everybody's guilty of something - all we have to do is smash-fit some bullshit ordnance around what you did".

Call It Progress - I Guess(?)

Miami Herald

The good news is: the kid wasn't shot.

The bad news is: that's what passes for good news now - that some asshole white cop didn't murder some knucklehead brown kid.

It's unbelievable, but that qualifies as a positive outcome.

Mr Trudeau

Here's a picture of PM Justin Trudeau at a Pride Day event, wearing rainbow socks and a pink shirt, high-fiving a young girl dressed as a Wonder Woman ballerina.

Anyone else starting to get the feeling Canada's just kinda fuckin' with us now?

Everybody's Doin' It

...so why should I be any different?  

This pic is "important", partly because certain Photo Editors have told us it's important, but I think there may be quite a bit more to it than that.

28-year-old Ieshia Evans, Baton Rouge, July 2016

First, if you show up dressed like you're looking for trouble, I have to think maybe you're looking for trouble.

Along those lines, the feeling of invulnerability the cops have to get from wearing their Play Date Suits* can cause them to be a lot less likely to avoid trouble - and actually, most people become far more likely to start trouble because of that feeling of invulnerability.

(*available at fine Cop Shop outlets everywhere for as little as $400 each - up to $1000 depending on options. And be sure to identify yourself as Military or Police or Security, because they don't sell this shit to just anybody, y'know)

So, do we need to look any further than what seems obvious here?  Do we really have to ask why people get fucked up and fucked over by a police force comprised of officers equipped for urban warfare and trained to deal with American citizens as if they're the enemy?

The shitty little irony is that those cops are convinced they're protecting Ms Evans - nobody seems able to clearly identify exactly what they're protecting her from (which means there's a high probability they're just rationalizing their behavior), but if she's not ridiculously careful, they're gonna protect her to death.  In the end, who protects any of us from our protectors?

And ain't that all kinds of pretty fucked up right there?

Today's Facebook Silly

(And a quick reminder that, for way too many of us, we're making our political decisions from deep inside an alarming deficit of knowledge about fairly simple concepts we were supposed to have learned in 9th-grade Civics.)

I see a lot of otherwise smart friends putting up some really dumb posts. I include myself in the first group of course, but there's no way I could ever break into that second group (of course again) because - you know - I'm just that awesome.

Main complaint du jour: Drug Testing people for Welfare-type Bennies.  This one pops up in various iterations; this time appearing on the wall of a high school buddy's sister:

She was a cop (I think).  She studied Law and Enforcement (says that in her bio). Did she just miss the sessions on Probable Cause and The Bill of Rights?  Or is it a little too much to expect law enforcement officers to know something about that silly old document they all swore to uphold?

Congressional Research Service:

Federal or state laws that condition the initial or ongoing receipt of governmental benefits on passing drug tests without regard to individualized suspicion of illicit drug use may be subject to constitutional challenge. To date, two state laws requiring suspicionless drug tests as a condition to receiving governmental benefits have sparked litigation. The U.S. Supreme Court has not rendered an opinion on such a law; however, the Court has issued decisions on drug testing programs in other contexts that have guided the few lower court opinions on the subject.

Constitutional challenges to suspicionless governmental drug testing most often focus on issues of personal privacy and Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable searches.” For searches to be reasonable, they generally must be based on individualized suspicion unless the government can show a “special need” warranting a deviation from the norm. However, governmental benefit programs like TANF, SNAP, unemployment compensation, and housing assistance do not naturally evoke special needs grounded in public safety or the care of minors in the public school setting that the Supreme Court has recognized in the past. Thus, if lawmakers wish to pursue the objective of reducing the likelihood of taxpayer funds going to individuals who abuse drugs through drug testing, legislation that only requires individuals to submit to a drug test based on an individualized suspicion of drug use is less likely to run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. Additionally, governmental drug testing procedures that restrict the sharing of test results and limit the negative consequences of failed tests to the assistance program in question would be on firmer constitutional ground.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

If you suspect me of doing something illegal, then you gather your evidence, you attach my name (and yours) to it, you present it to the nice judge, and then the judge decides what happens next - not you; not by a show of hands from your little mob of drinking buddies; not some Coin-Operated Politician who needs you to concentrate on some shiny object so you won't notice he and his Sugar Daddies Uber-Patriot Donor Base have their hands in your pants.

It's called Due Process, and it's part of that whole American Exceptionalism thing.

Seriously, kids - we gotta brighten up a little.

A Bridge Not Far Enough

First - "conservatives" have been trying hard to pretend GW Bush never even existed.  Wonder what they're gonna say about this:

The rhetorical gymnastics I think we can anticipate coming from Jeb's Bunch oughta be a pretty thing to watch too.

But, y'know - maybe we could stop fuckin' with each other just long enough to remember some of the really good things that happen once in a while, even if they have to grow out of something really shitty.

Tell ya what tho', love him or hate him or somewhere in between, that Obama guy knows how to make a fuckin' speech.

For we were born of change. We broke the old aristocracies, declaring ourselves entitled not by bloodline, but endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. We secure our rights and responsibilities through a system of self-government, of and by and for the people. That’s why we argue and fight with so much passion and conviction — because we know our efforts matter. We know America is what we make of it.

Look at our history. We are Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, pioneers who braved the unfamiliar, followed by a stampede of farmers and miners, and entrepreneurs and hucksters. That’s our spirit. That’s who we are.

We are Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer, women who could do as much as any man and then some. And we’re Susan B. Anthony, who shook the system until the law reflected that truth. That is our character.

We’re the immigrants who stowed away on ships to reach these shores, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free –- Holocaust survivors, Soviet defectors, the Lost Boys of Sudan. We’re the hopeful strivers who cross the Rio Grande because we want our kids to know a better life. That’s how we came to be. (Applause.)

We’re the slaves who built the White House and the economy of the South. (Applause.) We’re the ranch hands and cowboys who opened up the West, and countless laborers who laid rail, and raised skyscrapers, and organized for workers’ rights.

We’re the fresh-faced GIs who fought to liberate a continent. And we’re the Tuskeegee Airmen, and the Navajo code-talkers, and the Japanese Americans who fought for this country even as their own liberty had been denied.

We’re the firefighters who rushed into those buildings on 9/11, the volunteers who signed up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’re the gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge. (Applause.)

We are storytellers, writers, poets, artists who abhor unfairness, and despise hypocrisy, and give voice to the voiceless, and tell truths that need to be told.
We’re the inventors of gospel and jazz and blues, bluegrass and country, and hip-hop and rock and roll, and our very own sound with all the sweet sorrow and reckless joy of freedom.

We are Jackie Robinson, enduring scorn and spiked cleats and pitches coming straight to his head, and stealing home in the World Series anyway. (Applause.)

We are the people Langston Hughes wrote of who “build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how.” We are the people Emerson wrote of, “who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long;” who are “never tired, so long as we can see far enough.”

That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others. We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. America is not some fragile thing. We are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes. We are boisterous and diverse and full of energy, perpetually young in spirit. That’s why someone like John Lewis at the ripe old age of 25 could lead a mighty march.

And that’s what the young people here today and listening all across the country must take away from this day. You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, because you’re ready to seize what ought to be.

For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there’s new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. And it is you, the young and fearless at heart, the most diverse and educated generation in our history, who the nation is waiting to follow.

Today's Dots

Here's another guy with a dash cam and a fair understanding of his rights under the US Constitution:



The problem here tho' is that the driver didn't demand Probable Cause.  No matter what the cop says about roadblocks, the dragnet is extralegal.  The cops have no authority to presume everybody's guilty (IMHO just so they can sift thru the population looking to collect a few bucks in fines because their budget's pretty tight again this year)  None zero zip zilch nada.

The 2nd trooper yells about how driving's a privilege not a right, and that you're required to have your license and proof of insurance etc.  But that's a dodge on his part.  His in-your-face tactics are meant to intimidate in order to coerce your "voluntary" cooperation and deflect from the fact that his actions are outside the fucking lines.  Anyway, the cops couldn't demonstrate why they suspected that particular driver of violating the law.  Detention by law enforcement without probable cause is illegal.


OK, so how 'bout this one:



Somebody sees this guy walking down the street with his gun, and the cop shows up to "check him out".  The rationale is that the cop just needs to make sure the gun's not stolen, but again, there's no reasonable expectation on the part of anybody that any laws have been broken.  If Citizen Hung-Like-A-Hamster wants to press the issue, then he has no obligation to provide any information to the officer.  He could've refused to allow the cop to record the serial number of his weapon, and he didn't have to give his name.

Connecting the dots - suddenly, we have the hippie-dippy ACLU groupies making common cause with the Ammosexuals and the Peter Pan Libertarians.  Strange bedfellows indeed.

Ashamed Of My Name

With the possible highly probable exception of the Bread-Mold-As-Brain-Tissue Wing of The Party That Dares Not Speak Its Name, Chief Justice John G Roberts - NO FUCKING RELATION TO YOURS TRULY, BTW - will not be remembered fondly.

Does the name Roger B Taney ring any bells?  How 'bout Melville Fuller?

I'm trying to stay with my doctrine of Judge Slowly here, but the SCOTUS ruling on Section IV of the VRA yesterday looks like another Monument to Stoopid.

Here's the metaphor: Very few people are robbing banks any more, so we can safely get rid of the law that makes Bank Robbery a crime.

We go now to Charlie Pierce for some brain bleach:

Today Among People Who Wear Robes

A Little More On The Voting Rights Atrocity

Even More About Today's Voting Rights Atrocity

We are so fucked.

Dot, Meet Dot

Not to get too magical-mystical here, but when we're talking about the FISA Court and USA PATRIOT Act and the shenanigans at NSA and the FBI, etc - I think I have to go along with Mark Udall; mostly anyway - and Obama too btw.  There has to be a balance, which (imo) we've let get away from us in a pretty big way.

Balance is kinda the key to the whole self-governance thingie.  We have to continue to develop better ways to catch the bad guys after the fact - and better yet, prevent the bad guys from doin' the dirt in the first place - without making it more probable that some tin-plated martinet will abuse the power, and turn it to his own ends.  (Thank you, Capt Obvious)

Here's 5 minutes of Udall on NPR, talking about what he and Ron Wyden are proposing:



Almost at the very end, Udall makes a point that kinda blew up in my brain.  He said (paraphrasing), "...privacy is the ultimate form of freedom".

If I make a not-entirely-silly leap, I can say Privacy = Anonymity; and in a still not-so-silly way, Anonymity = Invisibility; and Invisibility is very much the be-all and end-all of the super powers.

On the one hand, if nobody can see you, then nobody can fuck with you.  This is mostly a very good thing for individuals.

But on the other hand, if you can't be seen, then you can't be held to account for anything you do.  This is always a very bad thing for societies.

So, balance.  Aye, there's the rub.

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Fight The Power

I think this is what revolution should look like.

A Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area won a trial Friday in his lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.

A Small Win

...or maybe that should be the word 'win' spelled with the lower case 'w'(?)

From Addicting Info:

The full body scanner technology, which produces a semi-nude image of a persons body, has been controversial since they were first introduced. While the advocates for it called the scanners safe, that the images were not clear enough to be considered intrusive, privacy advocates have taken, at times, odd measures to protect the scanners.

What has been neglected in much of the media attention, however, is the safety of these scanners. The radiation used by the models of machines built by OSI Systems has been called into question, with serious concerns about the levels of dosage used. Late last year, OSI failed to meet critical safety requirements, and on Friday, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) announced their termination of the OSI contract. While OSI is not the sole supplier, its systems were under the most scrutiny due to the clarity and detail they provided.

So first, chalk one up for even a slight delay in stomping all over people's rights - of course, with one contractor out, it only makes things better for somebody else's brother-in-law to become very wealthy at taxpayer expense while doing practically nothing effective about the problems of terrorism.

Second, it's kinda nice to know that an opportunistic slug like Mike Chertoff is being left on a dry sidewalk under a scorching summer sun.

Today's Quote

LBJ On Voting Rights:

"It's outrageous that all people do not have the dignity to which they are entitled.  But we can't legislate human dignity -- we can legislate to give a man a vote and a voice in his own government. Then with his vote and his voice he is equipped with a very potent weapon to guarantee his own dignity."

--Lyndon Johnson, 1960; speaking about 1957 Civil Rights Legislation

Urinalysis

This one makes the rounds every so often.

I was thinking that if one of you "conservative" geniuses ever once tho't of challenging the Pee Test in the courts on 4th and 5th Amendment grounds (eg), maybe you'd feel a bit less inclined to shit on poor people all the fuckin' time.  Cuz that's really it, right?  You need to be absolutely sure that you never have to admit that the guys you're always voting for are bending you over the table and fucking you with your pants on; you can't stand thinking that everything they've told you over the last 30 years is total bunk; and how they're using you to do their dirty work on everybody else.

So it just can't be that you're allowing yourselves to get fucked over.  It's really all about how you need that shit to roll on down the hill, so you can feel a little better about the whole filthy mess - that you helped create - that you help perpetuate every time you buy into this cynical manipulation.

Would this be a bad time to start talking to you about accepting responsibility for your part in turning this country into the giant FUBAR that you're always pissin' and moanin' about?