Tag: law

Paul Krugman outlines a serious warning in his NYT Op-Ed Sunday :

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline – on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost – to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs – will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world – most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting – governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.

It is [the] the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times. And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

So, today we learn that CIA Assistant Director Steve Kappes will be “retiring“.

He got to be involved in torture, rise up in the ranks, oversea botched missions and failed station’s where he put “his people” in place. Mission accomplished. Time to enjoy himself till the next Republican administration!

So, who was Steve Kappes?

I shouldn’t be surprised by this, I really shouldn’t, but, I am.

A new Tea Party group, Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots, has grown quickly since being launched last month by an active duty Marine Corps sergeant. The group, which vows to “stand up on the very soil we defended to preserve common sense conservatism and defend our Constitution that is threatened by a tyrannical government,” currently has over 400 members, who have signed up through its Facebook page, though many are not active duty military. And it has close ties to the broader Tea Party movement.

It is indeed in the military oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies – foreign and domestic. And, I don’t dispute this statement:

Many people in the military “feel like they can’t speak out against Obama or Congress,” said Stein. “The armed forces should have a little bit more say than we think we do,” he said.

Yes, those in the military are allowed to have opinions, even political opinions. But, if that opinion is based on right-wing falsehoods, that opinion can become dangerous to the military as a whole.

Taser Bullets? That is the report.

Called the nanosecond electrical pulse (nsEP) project, the research focuses on using brief electrical pulses to temporarily paralyze an individual by disrupting the nervous system, similar to the way the Taser, another popular nonlethal device, works. But where this project differs from most other stun guns, according to the Pentagon, is that it could theoretically be built as a wireless system, and have a longer lasting effect.

In the next paragraph, it goes on to state how this research may be able to be shrunk into bullet form.

The Pentagon’s Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate, which is sponsoring the work, declined a request for an interview, but answered written questions. “It is hoped the technology can be made small enough to fit in a small, self-contained round,” Dave Law, the chief of the office’s technology division, wrote of the research project. “The round would have a power source and therefore would not need wires.”

I’ll tell you why this is a bad idea.

Justice John Paul Stevens has announced his intentions to retire during the Obama administration. This is not unexpected news, he is 89 years old. There is now discussion and much  speculation about his replacement. The three names most prominently being discussed are:

   The White House has declined to comment on its preparations for selecting a successor, but those close to the process repeatedly have mentioned three names as likely to merit close consideration.

   One is Mr. Obama’s solicitor general, Elena Kagan, a former dean of Harvard Law School who was considered for the nomination that ultimately went to Justice Sonia Sotomayor […]

   Liberals see a surer voice in another finalist for last year’s vacancy, Judge Diane Wood of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. On a court known for its intellectual heft, Judge Wood has proven a serious counterweight to such influential conservative judges as Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, legal observers say […]

   A third oft-mentioned name is Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

   As a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration, Judge Garland oversaw investigations into the Oklahoma City federal building bombing and the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski.

There is some wariness about SG Kagan who has defended executive power

This will not necessarily shift the Roberts Court but it will have a long term impact for the next generation.

h/t to David Dayen @ FDL

The Obama administration disregard for the rule law and human rights continues

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba – Still operating under Bush-era policies that President Barack Obama last year called “a mess,” the Pentagon will resume military commission hearings for accused terrorists Wednesday in a top secret compound originally designed for the trial of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

War court critics denounced the decision to go ahead with hearings this week, saying that without new rules that the Obama administration has yet to complete, the commissions are operating with uncertain procedures.

“It’s really like a lame duck commission,” bristled Mike Berrigan, deputy chief defense counsel.

snip

Among the questions the lack of a new manual of procedures leaves unanswered is whether a defendant could enter a guilty plea in a case where he might face the death penalty. Under military law, such a confession isn’t allowed, a requirement that stymied earlier efforts to try the 9/11 conspirators after they offered to confess to a judge directly without empanelling a jury.

Polluters and other defendants in numerous lawsuits brought by Law School Clinics in behalf of the victims of corporate and state government abuse have discovered their adversaries’ Achilles heals.  Reprising events in the early history of the Legal Services Corporation, the defendants are now actively moving in state legislatures to cut off funding to the law school clinic lawyers who represent their adversaries.  The result, they hope, will be continued immunity from legal inquiry and a continuation of business and pollution as usual.

Many years ago, during The Great Society, the federal government funded the Office of Economic Opportunity, (OEO) which provided many services, including civil legal services to poor people.  These legal services were obviously capable of transforming society in fundamental ways.  Poor people, for so long disenfranchised, found they had access to federal and state courts and free lawyers to pursue fundamental violations of their civil rights.  Instantly, poor people had allies in enforcing their legal rights.  In response, those who favored the status quo immediately sought not to remedy poor people’s complaints, but instead to cut them off from their lawyers, to forbid the lawyers from pursuing these important cases.