Tag: Constitution

Maj. Gen. Eaton {retired} makes so many points, Points that many of us have been saying, especially those who have served and Swore Oath in entering that service, be it military of government, in such a short discussion that it makes it a Keeper and All So Called Repub Reps. especially, and their Supporters, Should Be Required To Watch Him!! {but they still won’t get it}

They’ve been trying to take down the Constitution and Country since reagan but especially since newt and delay, the bugman having run to do exactly that as to his previous life as a regulated using poisons to kill rodents etc, and increase his corrupt wants as well. But they thought they had it during the past decade and they don’t want to loose what they thought they gained!!

Battered by the media tsunami caused by Arizona’s “show us your papers” law and the resulting lawsuits and threats of boycotts, Arizona’s legislature today sought cover by seeking to moderate provisions of SB 1070.  Are these real changes or are they just cosmetic changes and an effort to save face?  It’s probably some of each.  Put another way, those who oppose the law can know that their outrage is being heard and felt.  But the changes don’t eliminate the problem, they just provide better cover for it.

The Arizona Daily Star reports:

– State lawmakers voted late Thursday to repeal one of the more controversial provisions from the new law aimed at illegal immigration….

HB 2162, approved by the House and Senate, changes the law to specify that when deciding whom to question about immigration status, police may not use race, ethnicity or national origin as a factor.

That is a significant change from SB 1070 as it was approved by lawmakers and signed less than a week ago by Gov. Jan Brewer. That version of the law permits police to consider any of those factors when deciding if there is “reasonable suspicion” someone is not in this country legally, as long as it is not the only reason for investigating further.

There’s more, of course:

As originally approved, SB 1070 requires police to determine the immigration status of those with whom they have “lawful contact” if there is reasonable suspicion the person is not here legally.

That “reasonable suspicion” language remains. But the language about “contact” is replaced with a reference to “stop, detention or arrest.” Paul Senseman, the governor’s spokesman, said the changes effectively reduce checking immigration status to “secondary enforcement.”

“There have to be other steps, such as another law being broken first,” he said, before an officer could, with reasonable suspicion, inquire if a person is a citizen or legal resident.

He compared it to Arizona’s seat-belt laws: Police cannot stop a motorist solely because the person is unbuckled. But officers can issue a ticket for failing to buckle up if the driver is stopped for some other reason.

Join me in Nogales.

“The state  calls its own violence law, & that of the individual, crime.”- Max Stirner

Come senators, congressmen

Please heed the call

Don’t  stand in the doorway

Don’t block up the hall

For he that gets  hurt

Will be he who has stalled

There’s a battle outside

And it  is ragin’

It’ll soon shake your windows

And rattle your walls

For  the times they are a-changin’.

—Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin'”

Clarence Thomas may not have spoken in oral arguments at the Supreme Court in more than four years, but this morning Linda Greenhouse writes in the New York Times about Thomas’s consistent, twice repeated argument that the Eighth Amendment does not proscribe “harsh treatment”, including beatings of prisoners.  You read that correctly.  Prison beatings, according to Justice Thomas, aren’t forbidden by the Eighth Amendment. And presumably, neither are stress positions, sleep deprivation and other forms of torture.  And as if that position were not repulsive enough, Thomas apparently wants it to be adopted by the new majority of the Supreme Court.

Recently we have seen quite a bit of controversy about the filibuster.  Most folks do not even know what that term means, and with good reason.  The rules for it changed, as I recall, in 1975, after damned old Nixon got booted, and, in my opinion, for ill.

However, the politicians, the pundits, and the public do not understand (or, if they do, are misleading folks) about its nature.  The Republicans mostly say that it was the will of the Framers, and that is just not only incorrect, but a lie.  In fairness, the Democrats said the same thing when they were in the minority.  Most of the pundits have it wrong as well.  Please follow and I shall explain what it was, and now is.

While we were all shopping and arguing over whether or not fruitcake is fit for human consumption, Obama decided to go to bat and fight for someone.   Who was he fighting for?   The torturers of the Bush administration, that’s who.   Oh, and anyone else in the United States government who wants to torture and violate the human rights of others.

As Chris Floyd reports, The United States is now legally free to torture whomever it wants, thanks to the Supreme Court of the land, and the political power weilded by Barrack Hussein Obama.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here’s how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.”  They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

And people wonder what this “hatred” is towards Obama.   “I didn’t get my pony?” they ask?   Ha.  They have no idea.   I hate Obama for the same reasons I hate Bush.  Why?  Because Obama IS Bush.   His administration is one and the same as the Bush administration, and I mean that quite literally when it comes to justice, human rights, and the wars.    ALL THE SAME PEOPLE are running the show, and we know that Bush’s Justice Department is a bunch of corrupt, human rights-violating  flunkies recruited from the ranks of the “religious right”.    And they are still in office, fighting for their hatreds

Now Obama is not just passively letting these people continue the Bush/Cheney yearas, he is going out of his way to enable  them.  

He is putting his name to the most egregious violations of human rights in this nation’s history.  

What’s really pathological is that he is shitting on the very system that freed African American people, of which he is a gene-carrying member.  

More from antiwar.com:

US: Guantanamo Prisoners Not ‘Persons’

by William Fisher,

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that “torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use.”

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., had ruled that government officials were immune from suit because at that time it was unclear whether abusing prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal.

Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

Ironically, the first African American president is promoting a policy frighteningly familiar to the Dred Scott decision of yesteryear:

“Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow,” he added.

The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants – whether or not they were slaves – were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

Thanks, Obama.   Next time someone calls you an “Uncle Tom” I simply won’t cringe.  I might even nod.   I might even say “hell yeah.”

Mother Jones {MoJo} Drumbeat brings the link to the site for the book The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law

Read exclusive excerpts from narratives by the attorneys who have represented Guantanamo Detainees, at above link