That dream within a dream.
(Source: youtube.com)
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Robert Reich, as usual, sounds reasonable to me. I’ll pay a payroll tax for universal health care because it would control costs, which, along with coverage, are the crisis in health care.
Two appellate judges in Atlanta — one appointed by President Bill Clinton and one by George H.W. Bush – have just decided the Constitution doesn’t allow the federal government to require individuals to buy health insurance.
The decision is a major defeat for the White House. The so-called…
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The court has told employers that they can rest easy, knowing that the bigger and more powerful they are, the less likely their employees will be able to join together to secure their rights
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| — | Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center “High court bars mass sex bias case vs. Wal-Mart” - Yahoo! News 6/2011 |
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A third federal judge upheld President Obama’s health-care overhaul on Tuesday, tossing out a challenge of the law’s mandate that all Americans hold insurance. The judge, on the D.C. circuit, becomes the third Democrat-appointed jurist to uphold the controversial law; two Republican-appointed…
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…That fraction of one percent of Americans who now earn as much as the bottom 120 million Americans includes the top executives of giant corporations and those Wall Street hedge funds and private equity managers who constitute Citigroup’s “plutonomy” are buying our democracy and they’re doing it in secret.
That’s because early this year the five reactionary members of the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “persons” with the right to speak during elections by funding ads like those now flooding the airwaves. It was the work of legal fabulists. Corporations are not people; they are legal fictions, creatures of the state, born not of the womb, not of flesh and blood. They’re not permitted to vote. They don’t bear arms (except for the nuclear bombs they can now drop on a congressional race without anyone knowing where it came from.) Yet thanks to five activist conservative judges they have the privilege of “personhood” to “speak” – and not in their own voice, mind you, but as ventriloquists, through hired puppets.
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t r u t h o u t | Bill Moyers: “Welcome to the Plutocracy!” You know, I wondered why Moyers’s show on the Petroleum Broadcasting Service was cancelled. |
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The GOP rode a wave…
…of corporate money, not voter anger, into this victory, outspending Democrats by seven times. Just as in Bush v. Gore in 2000, a 5-4 SCOTUS decision (and judicial activism), in this case Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, is the wind that fills their tattered sails. It’s all the more impetus to Move to Amend.
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One longs for the days of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. This is not your father’s GOP. Gone are the steel-spectacled fiscally conservative Eisenhower Republicans. It’s all cash on the barrelhead in a smokey backroom now.
Why you should never vote for another Republican as long as you live.
Follow the money, if you can
The Republicans are filibustering a bill that would require political ads to disclose who funded them. Democrats need only a single vote to break the filibuster, but not a single Republican will support the bill. This bill is a small thing that would reverse some of the Supreme Court decision (“Citizen’s United“) that opened up the floodgates for corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on political ads, with no accountability.
I don’t think there could be a clearer signal of who owns the Republican Party, and whose interests they represent.
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Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the Government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fever and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the founders hoped and trusted they would do.
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From Justice Hugo L. Black’s concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s historic decision in favor of the New York Times. Just now I pulled down my paperback copy of The Pentagon Papers (1971), (blew off the dust,) and found this quote on the inside front cover. Critics of WikiLeaks should take heed. |
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President Carter went to Lebanon in 2006 to do election monitoring. And while he was there, he met with representatives of all parties involved in the election, including Hamas [in the Occupied Territories] and Hezbollah, which are on the FTO lists, and told them things like what constitutes a fair election, what the international law standards are, and this kind of thing. Now, under today’s ruling, those things that former President Carter did—all in the interest of promoting nonviolent conflict resolution and involvement in the democratic process by supporters of groups that are on the FTO list—all those things could be serious crimes landing him in prison for fifteen years.
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I think we can expect that the material support statute, which was modified, in part, by the PATRIOT Act, will now cast a very broad chill on not only humanitarian aid efforts in crisis zones, in areas that are afflicted by war, sometimes controlled by rebel groups, but that also will cast a really broad chill on journalists and on other humanitarian groups that, like our plaintiffs, were intending to go and talk to parties that have been sort of put on these blacklists and try to get them to turn away from the behavior that ended up putting them on these blacklists in the first place.
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Shayana Kadidal Democracy Now! | Headlines for June 22, 2010 According to this activist SCOTUS, then, the humanitarian and electoral work of Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center could be criminal. |
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I’m glad this process of countering the Citizens United decision has begun.
By: David Dayen Monday April 26, 2010 8:45 amRep. Alan Grayson says that legislation to deal with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which he believes will pass the House shortly, will include a ban on direct campaign spending by any corporation who has a contract with the federal government.
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