Tag: law

Happy Friday and welcome to the 14th in the Dog’s First Amendment Friday series. This series is following the syllabus for the class called The First Amendment and taught at Yale Law School by Professor Jack M. Balkin. As with the Friday Constitutional series this is a layman’s look at the Law, specifically the Supreme Court opinions which have shaped the boundaries of our 1st Amendment Protections. If you are interested in the previous installments you can find them at the links below:

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net“

Happy Friday and welcome to the 9th in the Dog’s First Amendment Friday series. This series is following the syllabus for the class called The First Amendment and taught at Yale Law School by Professor Jack M. Balkin. As with the Friday Constitutional series this is a layman’s look at the Law, specifically the Supreme Court opinions which have shaped the boundaries of our 1st Amendment Protections. If you are interested in the previous installments you can find them at the links below:

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net“

The Dog writes about law a lot, mostly because it fascinates him, the way it evolves and changes based on new information or new ways of viewing our basic Constitutional rights. One of the areas of particular concern is, of course, the torture of prisoners and the holding of them without charge or trial, whether they are designated as “enemy combatants” or not. On May 21st the President gave a policy address about the closing of Guantanamo Bay prison camp. In this speech he mentioned there were likely to be prisoners who, in his words could not be released but also could not be tried.

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net“

From the AP, we learn about two men who were arrested in a drug sting in New York City.  The problem?  The two men arrested committed no crime and the officers who falsified the report and prompted the arrest were, themselves, arrested.

A case of a few bad apples?  Not anymore…

State Secrets.  Vital to the National Security of America.  No, this isn’t about torture, but, about a trade agreement.

The Office of U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), part of President Barack Obama’s office, has denied a company’s request for information about a secretive anticounterfeiting trade agreement being negotiated, citing national security concerns.

The USTR this week denied a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Knowledge Ecology International, an intellectual-property research and advocacy group, even though Obama, in one of his first presidential memos, directed that agencies be more forthcoming with information requested by the public.

The USTR under Obama seems to be taking the same position about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) as it did under former President George Bush, that the treaty documents are not open to the public. One of Obama’s campaign promises was to make government more open and responsive to the public.

The USTR, in a letter to Knowledge Ecology International’s director James Love, said information in ACTA, an anticounterfeiting and antipiracy pact being negotiated among the U.S. and several other nations, is “properly classified in the interest of national security.”

I highlighted the “and antipiracy” for a reason…

Let me explain the title of this essay.  My wife blogs, though not politically, and under a pseudonym.  At one time, she did a Sunday Morning Musing’s post where, over her cup of coffee, she would give her thoughts.

Well, I’m a nightowl.  I don’t drink coffee at night, I drink whiskey.  I rarely “muse”, in fact, I rant quite a bit.  When the news becomes an never ceasing onslaught, I grumble in disgust.  I’ll probably make this a continuous series.

So, what’s got me grumbling tonight?

I must start this essay with a flashback to another another essay of mine, “Our Government is No Longer Viable“:

So, yes, if you are like me, then you see that our government is no longer viable.  That our Two-Party system has now utterly failed.  Our founding fathers feared this day and warned us of it — the day when two or more of the branches of government band together against the third.  To be fair, that day arrived long ago, but, our government still seemed to function somehow.  Today, it isn’t even functioning.

So, what happens when even the Judicial Branch of our government is totally co-opted against the citizen?  We got a hint of it from the Supreme Court:

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Supreme Court ruled Monday that elected judges must step aside from cases when large campaign contributions from interested parties create the appearance of bias.

By a 5-4 vote in a case from West Virginia, the court said that a judge who remained involved in a lawsuit filed against the company of the most generous supporter of his election deprived the other side of the constitutional right to a fair trial.

It is in times like this that we must see the end-game that is being played out before our very eyes…

This just posted by the New York Times:

Obama Weighs Plan Allowing 9/11 Suspects to Plead Guilty

The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.

There is more to this…

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) once again showed America, and his home state of South Carolina, the face of a corrupt politician.

GRAHAM: The reason I don’t want to go back any more than we have already done is because I know what happened. Out of fear, we overreacted. … They took a view of the law that I think was aggressive, and I would not have approached it that way. Right after 9/11, we all thought we were going to be hit again. So as we go back and try to hold people criminally liable. I think we’re doing a lot of damage to the country, because their mistakes were not criminal mistakes. They were mistakes made out of fear.

The rest, as they say, is history…