Big Fish

Gotta remember that sometimes the big fish gets away just because it's a big fish.

Kathleen Kane (D-Pennsylvania AG) was boated nicely and will prob'ly spend some quality time in prison - pending appeal, of course.  Cuz even when it works well enough to convict somebody in a fairly lofty position, our "justice" system works a little differently for people who're rich and/or powerful (see Big Fish above).

From Philly.com:

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane was convicted Monday of perjury, obstruction, and other crimes, after squandering her once-bright political future on an illegal vendetta against an enemy.

What bugs me the most is that this is another great example of a political system that seems to run (at least in part) according to some kinda High-School-Fuck-Around set of rules.

Too Many Dots

Just thinking a little semi-randomly.

There's an empty seat at SCOTUS, and many empty seats thru the Federal Judiciary, and practically no discernible intent coming from Mitch McConnell to get any of that filled any time soon.

Also, after shitloads of Anti-Abortion laws coming out of the states, plus the Anti-Voting stuff, now we have this growing tide of Anti-Equal Rights legislation.

Recently, a very nice lady told me her thinking is that the GOP / "Conservatives" have been pushing all this malarkey knowing it serves a function beyond the usual thing of whipping the wingnut voters into a rich creamy lather.  She says they know most of the shit they're putting into the law is ridiculous, and it'll be struck down, but that the little extras that go along with these new statutes stand a good chance to stick. 

So first - yes it's true - one of the best things for a man is the company of a smart woman.

Second, I need to look a little closer at what else is included with the bullshit in Georgia and North Carolina and may be coming up in Michigan.  

Circling this back to SCOTUS and empty seats on Federal Benches, it's an interesting little game.  Because a whole strategy has to emerge now for moving the challenges to existing law thru the courts.  With a real probability of a prolonged 4-4 split at SCOTUS, each of the circuit appeals courts becomes a de facto mini-SCOTUS.  And won't that be fun?

And now, kinda skipping to the chase, I've recently been thinking some of these newer developments are starting to make sense if I factor them into a wider strategy that looks a whole lot like a continuing assault on the Redress Clause of the 1st Amendment.

For quite a while, Conservatives and Neo-Libs have been pushing for things like Tort Reform and Mandatory Sentencing, and Forced Arbitration (instead of law suits) on everything from Cable Subscriptions to Employment-At-Will Agreements, and a variety of other things I'm sure I'm totally unaware of.

An awful lot of power is being brought to bear to make it harder for "Regular Joes" to seek relief thru the courts because LLC's (eg) are finding it easier to off-load or duck entirely their responsibilities under the law. 

I have to consider it a pretty bad sign when so many people in positions of power and privilege seem to view our Justice System as something that's old and clunky and just too inconvenient; or they see the probability of having some judgement going against them as just another business expense.

And then add in a coupla hundred million people who can't or won't - or anyway don't - pay much attention to the whole thing because they're increasingly too busy keeping their last nostril above the water line, and holy fuck, Batman, how do I not think we're crazy stoopid close to Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

I really don't like myself when I get all alarmist like this, but honest, kids - this shit ain't good.

Somebody talk me down here.

Today's Bernie

Bernie really gets it sometimes.  We've allowed ourselves to be suckered into thinking that a kind of selective (if not arbitrary) authoritarian crap is what our Justice System is supposed to be about.

Be honest, @BernieSanders hated the Crime Bill. Spoke against it passionately & repeatedly.

Watch this.

POWERFULhttps://t.co/69F4R7IQkI

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) February 27, 2016

And BTW - it's a pretty simple parlay to connect the fucked-up-edness of our legal system with the total FUBAR of the Corporate Prisons Industry.

Stay in line or they'll fuck you up - just because they can.

Zimmerman III

...or IV, or whatever we're up to now.  It's hard to keep track.  I guess I'm wondering when they'll finally get tired of fucking around with this guy and just Cop-Murder him, and I'm not advocating for the cops to punch this asshole's ticket BTW, but isn't that kinda what we do now?  We have a Criminal Justice System that doesn't work for shit, and an awful lot of our cops have come out of a military where the basic policy is Kill Your Way To A Peaceful Resolution - what're we waiting for?

Or maybe he's still alive because he's not anonymous enough to be disposed of discreetly.  Celebrity has its privileges here in USAmerica Inc.

CNN:

George Zimmerman -- the man acquitted by a Florida jury over the death of Trayvon Martin -- was arrested Friday in Florida on suspicion of domestic violence with a weapon, local authorities said.

Zimmerman, 31, was arrested by police in Lake Mary around 10 p.m. and booked into the John E. Polk Correctional Facility, according to that facility's website.

In addition to domestic violence, Zimmerman faces a charge of aggravated assault, reports the Seminole County Sheriff's Office, which operates the Polk Correctional Facility.

And one more little thing - battalions of Daddy State Chicken Chokers spent buttloads of time and energy defending George Zimmerman and slagging Trayvon Martin; when might we expect them to step up and tell us they got that one wrong?

What It's Costing Us

We're allergic to paying for the things that actually make us exceptional - and I'm not talking about the empty rhetorical bullshit being peddled by "conservatives".

Comfort

Charlie Pierce at The Atlantic:

The comfort of the ordinary. The comfort of the mundane. Let's just have a trial. Let's just have an open and honest trial, with all the evidence right there in the open, and not whispered piecemeal and half-baked out of Spookworld to Richard Engel or Barbara Starr. Let's have an open and honest trial with no showboating from an embattled U.S. Attorney, and all the evidence laid out there in good, honest cop-speak -- "The suspect said..." "The suspect did..." (One of the most startling examples of this came during the sanity hearing granted serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee when, reading from his own notes, one of the arresting officers testified, "The suspect stated it takes about an hour to boil a head.") We can do that here. 

Chickens Come Home To Roost

Gee - it's just like 1970 again.  The cops are not your friends...

(hat tip = The Agonist)

From care2 make a difference:

Sometime between the time he was arrested on March 27, 2009 around 2:00 p.m., and March 31 at 1:23 p.m. when he was pronounced dead, Christie had been sprayed with ten blasts of pepper spray, also known as OC (Oleo-resin Capsicum), which is a derivative of cayenne pepper.

  ...and the world is a ghetto.

WTF, Mr Holder?

Hey, rednecks.  You guys are always goin' on about how the death penalty is a good idea, and a useful tool for preventing crime - how 'bout we hang a few of these Bankster pricks and see what kinda hurry their shit gets straight.

60 Minutes via YouTube - part 1   part 2

This Is A Justice System?

Via Crooks and Liars, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:

Apparently in this country you become ineligible to eat if you have a record of criminal drug offenses. States have the option of opting out of that federal ban, but Mississippi is not one of those states. Since McLemore had four drug convictions in her past, she was ineligible to receive food stamps, so she lied about her past in order to feed her two children.

The total "cost" of her fraud was $4,367. She has paid the money back. But paying the money back was not enough for federal Judge Henry Wingate.

To hear some people tell it, you'd think OWS was nothing but spoiled kids gripin' about their allowance.  Taibbi's story serves to point out a few things that really are just flat wrong with the way we've been doing things here in the USA for a good long time.  And it isn't only about "the rich get richer and the poor get children".  There are real problems with the basic structure of our system.  So I don't know what all we need to do to fix it, but maybe we could start by addressing the concept of equal protection under the law.

Police State

Calling all Libertarians and Anti-Gubmint Independents:  This is what's happening in Indiana, after many years of "conservative" erosion of civil rights in the guise of "common sense laws and law enforcement"; and under the watchful eye of a very popular Republican, Governor Mitch Daniels.

This is what's happening because of who you've been allowing to get elected.  Make no mistake here.  Every time you say something like "they're all bad" or "they're all the same" or "why can't the ballot say None Of The Above" or anything else that's just fuckin' stupid, you're taking yourselves and others out of the process, which is exactly what these shit-heels want you to do.

(hat-tip to Little Green Footballs)

INDIANAPOLIS— People have no right to resist if police officers illegally enter their home, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled in a decision that overturns centuries of common law.

The court issued its 3-2 ruling on Thursday, contending that allowing residents to resist officers who enter their homes without any right would increase the risk of violent confrontation. If police enter a home illegally, the courts are the proper place to protest it, Justice Steven David said.

“We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” David said. “We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.”

Chicago Tribune

And the circular logical is impeccable.  The police break down your door; they take whatever they want; they can stomp you and your family if you "resist" (and of course you will get stomped, because of course the cops will claim you resisted); and if you claim they've made a mistake, you can hire a lawyer (with whatever you can scrape together after  the cops have taken everything) and go to court; but since you had no right to "resist" in the first place - even when it was an UNLAWFUL entry - you have no case.

Let me be clear (if that's at all possible at this point): The scenario above is not meant to illustrate what's bound to happen every time the cops go to somebody's door.  There will be many more legitimate incursions than not.  But that's not the point (that's NEVER the fucking point).  The point is that when you grant the kind of power that this bullshit decision entails, you will get abuse - because you're inviting abuse.  Get it?

Justice Delayed

Monica Marie Goodling, the key figure in the controversy about the political hiring and firing of U.S. Attorneys during the Bush Administration, has received a public reprimand from the Virginia State Bar.

A VSB subcommittee concluded that Goodling, a member of the VSB since 1999, had violated ethics rules by committing “a criminal or deliberately wrongful act” that reflected adversely on her “honesty, trustworthiness or fitness to practice law.”

Read the full decision.

But, hey - she was a douchebag for Jesus, so we're not gonna lift her license; and after all, she didn't really mean to break the law.

At a certain level, the power and the money and the position make it impossible for anybody to be guilty or to be held to account for anything.  The best we can hope for is that "nobility has the good grace to die by its own hand in matters of honor."  This is just all pretty fucked up right here.

God And Country

The 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco says the phrase "under God" in the pledge of allegiance is OK because it's a patriotic thing and not a religious thing.  Fine.  But the ruling itself is a nice bit of hair-splitting - aimed at mollifying both sides rather than trying to get to a point of Settled Law - and so it's mostly bullshit.

I'm conservative, so I think first and foremost, that there's no way I'm going to hold myself liable to taking a Loyalty Oath.

Second, even if I go along with this crap, I much prefer the original.

Third, I have no allegiance for bed sheets or underwear or upholstery, so I intend never to pledge my allegiance to a flag.  The ideal itself is what's important - not the symbol.

Finally, if I ever feel the need, I'll recite my own version:
"I pledge allegiance to The United States of America. One nation; indivisible; with liberty and justice for all."

What He Said

No particular reason for this right now - it's just good to remind ourselves that here in The US, the process is as important as the goal.

A Useful Libertarian

An interview with Radley Balko on law enforcement.
Most prosecutors are well-intentioned, honest public servants. But it's deeply troubling that those who aren't are almost never held accountable, and in fact are often re-elected, appointed as judges, or go on to get elected to political office.

Corporatism

There are a few things for which Capitalism is just not well-suited.  Prisons for example.

Here's a story from The Texas Observer reporting on a riot in Pecos.
"As the crisis negotiators quickly found out, the riot had not been prompted by gang infighting, racial tensions or a spontaneous outburst of violence. The men incarcerated at the Pecos prison are considered “low-security”; most are serving relatively short sentences for immigration violations or drug offenses. All are set to be deported at the end of their sentences.
Leaders of the rebellion were demanding a meeting with the Mexican Consulate, the FBI and the warden to discuss a number of grievances that they said GEO Group, the prison company that manages the 3,700-bed facility, had refused to address.
The evening of the uprising, the inmates sent a delegation of seven men—a Venezuelan, a Cuban, a Nigerian, and four Mexicans—to meet with the authorities.
They explained that the uprising had erupted from widespread dissatisfaction with almost every aspect of the prison: inedible food, a dearth of legal resources, the use of solitary confinement to punish people who complained about their medical treatment, overcrowding and, above all, poor health care.
The delegates pointed to a string of deaths (according to public records, five men died in Reeves between August 2008 and March 2009, including two suicides) they attributed to the prison’s inattention to medical needs."

It's never as simple as it seems, but when you set up a system that provides a profit incentive for a certain outcome, try not to act surprised when that outcome is what you get.  The goals are always lofty-sounding;   "we have to do something (about Illegal Immigration, Illegal Drug Use, etc) to keep Real Americans safe", but the practice is that we're paying companies to put Scary-Looking Dark-Skinned People in jail, so that's what they're doing.