MAY 17, 2011
Appeals Court: No Dancing Allowed at Jefferson Memorial

A federal appeals court in Washington today said expressive dancing is prohibited inside the Jefferson Memorial in a decision that upheld the dismissal of a suit alleging government suppression of First Amendment rights.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said expressive dancing “falls into the spectrum” of prohibited activities—including demonstrations, picketing and speechmaking—at the memorial. The rules, the court said, ban conduct that has the “propensity” to draw onlookers. The court’s ruling is here.

The plaintiff, Mary Brooke Oberwetter, who was arrested with other dancers in April 2008, said federal regulations that govern the use of the memorial do not prohibit silent dance. Oberwetter and fellow dancers said they was honoring Jefferson on the eve of his 265th birthday when the authorities interrupted. Police said Oberwetter twice refused to stop dancing.

“Although silent, Oberwetter’s dancing was a conspicuous expressive act with a propensity to draw onlookers,” Judge Thomas Griffith wrote for the appeals court. Judges Judith Rogers and David Tatel joined the opinion.

Read more.

Hat tip: Pink Tank

Justice Antonin Scalia loves to fulminate, the facts be damned. For all his haughty jeering at the logic and/or intelligence of those who disagree with him, his jurisprudence, often, is based not on rational argument or contemplation of the evidence, but shows like “24″ and “Cops.”

MCM

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Michelle Alexander on California’s ‘Cruel and Unusual’ Prisons
The author of The New Jim Crow says that it will take a grassroots movement to tackle our country’s addiction to mass incarceration.
Liliana Segura

On May 23, the US Supreme Court handed down a 5-4
decision ordering California to release tens of
thousands of inmates from its overcrowded prisons on the
grounds that their living conditions-including lethally
inadequate healthcare-were so intolerable as to be
“cruel and unusual punishment.” For years, California
has stored its prisoners like so many cans of soup;
stacked in cells or bunk beds in squalid conditions that
breed violence and disease. A 2008 NPR report on massive
overcrowding at San Quentin State Prison found 360 men
caged in what was once a gymnasium: “Most of these men
spend twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in the
gym,” NPR reported, describing it as “a giant game of
survivor.” The day before the Supreme Court ruling, four
prisoners were seriously injured at San Quentin when a
riot broke out in a dining hall.

Prison numbers have dipped in recent years, but with
nearly 2.4 million Americans behind bars, mass
incarceration remains a national crisis. In California,
home of a notorious “three strikes” law, parole
violations represent more than half of all new prison
admissions, and three of four prisoners are non-white.
It’s an extreme example of what has happened across the
country.

Michelle Alexander, a former ACLU lawyer in the Bay Area
and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness, has pointed out that the rush
to incarcerate has gotten so out of control that “if our
nation were to return to the rates of incarceration we
had in the 1970s, we would have to release four out of
five people behind bars.” Arriving in California for a
series of events just after the decision came down,
Alexander spoke to me over the phone about the ruling
and what it means.

Read more.

The ‘Christian’ Dogma Pushed by Religious Schools That Are Supported by Your Tax Dollars
By Rachel Tabachnick, AlterNet
Posted on May 23, 2011, Printed on May 28, 2011

Are your state’s tax dollars funding the teaching of religious supremacism and bigotry? What about creationism? The answer is undoubtedly yes, if you live in a state with a voucher or corporate tax credit program funding “school choice.”

Religious schools across the nation are receiving public funds through voucher and corporate tax credit programs. Many hundreds, if not thousands, of these schools use Protestant fundamentalist textbooks that teach not only creationism, but also a religious supremacist worldview. They offer a shocking spin on politics, history and human rights.

In 12 states and the District of Columbia, almost 200,000 students attend private schools with at least part of their tuition paid with public funds. The money is taken from public school budgets to fund vouchers or by diverting state tax revenues to tuition grants through corporate tax credit programs. An interconnected group of non-profits and political action committees, led by the wealthy right-wing school privatization advocate Betsy DeVos and heavily funded by a few mega-donors, is working to expand these programs across the nation. The DeVos-led American Federation for Children hosted Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and Michelle Rhee at a national policy summit earlier in May.

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Review of recall petitions going slowly; July 12 election in doubt
Three Democrats’ cases to be put off; board may plead with court for more time
By Don Walker and Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel
May 27, 2011

It opens the possibility the board will have to go to court next week seeking more time to complete its work. And that could mean a delay for any recall elections, which were expected to be held July 12.Madison – In an announcement destined to shake up the drive to recall senators from both parties, the Government Accountability Board said Friday that its members would not be able to consider the recall petitions of three Democrats when they meet on Tuesday.

The board said in a statement that petition challenges in the districts of Sens. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), Jim Holperin (D-Conover), Robert Wirch (D-Pleasant Prairie) and Dave Hansen (D-Green Bay) had raised “numerous factual and legal issues” that warrant further investigation.

“Because of the strong likelihood that any finding of sufficiency or insufficiency by the board will be appealed to a circuit court, it is imperative that the issues raised by these challenges are fully examined, and that a complete record is created for a court to consider,” the accountability board said in its statement.

Read more.

A Monopoly Reborn

Remember back in 1984 when AT&T’s 70-year-old ‘Ma Bell’ telephone monopoly was broken up by court order?
In his historic ruling Judge Harold H. Greene wrote, “It is antithetical to our political and economic system for this key industry to be within the control of one company.” Ma Bell was broken into the ‘Baby Bells,’ all in the name of competition and customer choice.

That was then.

Read more.

Elections supervisors in key counties refuse to implement new law
By Marc Caputo, Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau

TALLAHASSEE — The elections supervisor in Rick Scott’s home county refuses to recognize a new law the governor signed out of concerns that the U.S. Department of Justice hasn’t decided whether it violates a law protecting minority voters.

In a letter to the state’s elections division, Collier County Elections Supervisor Jennifer Edwards pointed out that her county is one of five in Florida that needs Justice Department pre-approval “or preclearance” under the 1965 Voting Rights Act before it makes any voting changes.

“Since assuming office in 2000, it has been my practice to meticulously comply with the requirements,” she wrote May 21. “The purpose of this letter is to inform you that due to our ‘covered’ status, I will not implement any changes resulting from the Governor’s signing of CS/CS/HB 1355 until we receive notification that the bill has been precleared by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

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Federal Judge Denies ‘First Amendment’ Defense by O’Keefe, Giles in ACORN Worker Law Suit
By Brad Friedman on 5/27/2011 4:13pm

Rightwing activists and propagandists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, employees of con-artist and propagandist Andrew Breitbart, may not use the First Amendment as an excuse for breaking the law in California, according to a federal judge’s ruling this week.

Judge M. James Lorenz rejected the defendants’ argument and motion for summary judgment in federal court, as part of the civil lawsuit filed against them by former San Diego ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera.

Giles had previously thrown O’Keefe under a bus by arguing that she should not be held accountable at all for violating California’s Invasion of Privacy Act [CA Penal Code § 632], since he, not she, was actually wearing the hidden video camera used to secretly tape their conversations with Vera, even after they had asked if their meeting would be kept confidential.

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How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory
The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America’s Unfair and Imbalanced Network
by Tim Dickinson

At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as “the Chairman” – Roger Ailes.

“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”

This article appears in the June 9, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue will be available on newsstands and in the online archive May 27.

The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”

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Insider: “The Christian Right is Aiming to Destroy All Things Public”
By Frank Schaeffer, De Capo Press
Posted on May 13, 2011, Printed on May 19, 2011

The following is an excerpt from Frank Schaeffer’s new book, Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics — and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway (Da Capo Press, 2011). Raised in Switzerland in l’Abri, a utopian community and spiritual school his evangelical parents founded, Schaeffer was restless and aware even at a young age that “my life was being defined by my parent’s choices.” Still, he took to “the family business” well, following his dad as he became one of the “best-known evangelical leaders in the U.S.” on whirlwind speaking tours. While rubbing shoulders with Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, Schaeffer witnessed the birth of the Christian anti-abortion movement, and became an evangelical writer, speaker and star in his own right.

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Ironically, at the very same time as Evangelicals like Dad and I were thrusting ourselves into bare-knuckle politics in the 1970s and 80s, we were also retreating to what amounted to virtual walled compounds. In other words we lashed out at “godless America” and demanded political change—say, the reintroduction of prayer into public schools—and yet also urged our followers to pull their own children out of the public schools and homeschool them. The rejection of public schools by Evangelical Protestants was a harbinger of virtual civil war carried on by other means. Protestants had once been the public schools’ most ardent defenders.

For instance, in the 1840s when Roman Catholics asked for tax relief for their private schools, Protestants said no and stood against anything they thought might undermine the public schools that they believed were the backbone of moral virtue, community spirit, and egalitarian good citizenship.

The Evangelical’s abandonment of the country they called home (while simultaneously demanding change in that society) went far beyond alternative schools or homeschooling. In the 1970s and 1980s thousands of Christian bookstores opened, countless new Evangelical radio programs flourished, and new TV stations went on the air. Even a “Christian Yellow Pages” (a guide to Evangelical tradesmen) was published advertising “Christcentered plumbers,” accountants, and the like who “honor Jesus.”

Read more.