I am having a real problem with the 'debate' of recent days in which the opponents of affordable health care have focused on the part of the plan that requires health insurers to provide free access to family planning, i.e. birth control. The religionists are claiming that such a mandate is unconstitutional because it deprives them of their freedom of religion. To me that means that their religion mandates that they prevent women from controlling their bodies, that they prevent married heterosexual couples from planning their own families. I have read the Gospels pretty carefully and I cannot find in any them statements 'by' Jesus or any of the now long dead people who wrote them that this is somehow the doctrine of the religion they claim was handed them by Jesus and that by having this requirement in the AHC Act that you are being denied free exercise of your religion. What I fear in this 'debate' is that the result will be a deprivation of liberty for all. This is not free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment. This is the stuff of your basic garden variety theocracy. I am sorry if you are offended by my opposition to such nonsense but please don't try to impose your theocratic views on the rest of the society. I want no part of you or your moral precepts. I will find my own way in this world.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HPyl2tOaKxM

For those of you who love Celtic music this video is priceless. Watch it! What the feck

Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-forced-sterilization-20120126,0,2398463.story

This article in the Los Angeles Times attracted by attention. In March of 1968 Elaine Riddick was a 14 year old dirt poor pregnant black teenager. According to this article the state of North Carolina determined that Ms. Riddick who had been impregnated as the result of a rape was determined by an administrative agency of the state to be 'feeble-minded' and therefore an undesirable person and the state's “Eugenics Board” determined that to 'protect' her and to 'protect society' that she should be sterilized so that she could no longer bear children. North Carolina at least had the 'decency' to await the birth of the child that she was carrying. According to the article her child, a son, was born on March 5, 1968. Several days later after obtaining the consent of her illiterate grandmother evidenced by an X on a consent form a physician severed her fallopian tubes and cauterized them and rendered her sterile. According to this article the state estimates that some 7500 people were forcibly sterilized. North Carolina now proposes to pay Ms. Riddick the paltry sum of $50000 dollars to compensate her for this terrible wrong and deprivation of a fundamental right. Ms. Riddick is understandably very angry about this. She has vowed not to accept such an insulting payment for the state's incredibly terrible violation of her fundamental rights that has so tragically affected her life. Apparently some 32 states engaged in such terrible conduct. It caused me to wonder if California was among those 32 states. I did a little research and found that California had its own forced sterilization program from 1909 through 1964.

On March 11, 2003 Governor Gray Davis issued an apology for this evil done to its 'undesirable' citizens. You can read Governor Davis' apology here. The press release announcing this apology recites that California began these forced sterilizations in 1909 under a law enacted by the California Legislature and that California forcibly sterilized “approximately” 19,000 'undesirable' Californians. California's eugenics program had the support of prestigious universities such as Stanford. It was supported by such notable entities as The Carnegie Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. This was reported in a November 5, 2003 article entitled “Eugenics and the Nazis-the California Connection” written by Edwin Black and published in the San Francisco Chronicle. You can read that article here. Histories of this evil practice point out that the targets of the eugenics programs were racial and religious minorities and persons who were regarded as inferior such as people with seizure disorders and homosexual people and some people convicted of criminal offenses that were considered particularly heinous.

It is simply amazing to me that we fought a war to eradicate the threat of Nazism that wreaked havoc on an entire continent and who were experimenting with eugenics to create a pure Aryan race of people. The Nazis used eugenics under Josef Mengele. The Nazis used genocide and eugenics to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other 'undesirables'. The US and its wartime allies decried Nazi eugenics and genocide. Yet we continued the practice of eugenic sterilization well into the seventh decade of the twentieth century without a second thought. Thirty-two states had eugenics laws. Indiana was the first to enact one and California the second state in 1909. This is as serious a violation of fundamental human rights, the right to bear children, as anyone can imagine.

I just spent an hour wandering through Gov. Romney's 2010 1040 and its attachments. I am impressed by a couple of things. First Mitt doesn't have a job and the tax return with attachments is 203 pages in length. Mitt gave his church a total of 2.9 million dollars between cash and  non-cash transfers as I read the returns.  That's not quite a tithe but it's close.  Second Mitt isn't quite the job creator he bills himself to be. He took a deduction for twenty thousand dollars and some change for houselhold employees. That's one maybe two low paying jobs he and his wife created.   I also noticed that much of his income came from foreign investments in Europe and other places like the Cayman Islands. He is also earning income from several trusts.  No detail on these foreign investments  or the trusts is given other than the amount he and his Missus received from those investments and trusts.  Without that detail there is no way for the public to know what it is that Mitt actually does for a living other than making speeches and clipping coupons. His and his wife's health insurance premiums were only at about a total of  fourteen thousand dollars in that year. That certainly was far less than what my last year of medical insurance cost  before I became eligible for medicare.

Your father George  released twelve years of tax returns when he ran for President in 1968.  You have whined and complained about releasing one year. Sorry but I can't feel your pain.

Sorry Mitt but your fiances are so foreign to mine that I just can't conceive of you being one of us.  You stated publicly that you didn't earn much from speaking fees. I certainly think that $375K for talking about anything does not qualify as 'not a lot.'  And you are going to do what for the American People and the vanishing middle class?

My l reaction was "ho hum."  I was seriously underwhelmed by it. His delivery was off, he sounded bored  and the speech itself, well it sounded like it had been purchased three hours earlier at SpeechesRUs.com  I had hoped for much better. He didn't sound like Give 'Em Hell Harry Truman at all. I was disappointed. He certainly did not address my issue-- the convince me why I should vote for you issue. He sounded like he had just been worn down by the Obstructionist Caucus in the Congress.  The most exciting part of the event was the welcome accorded to Gabby Giffords. More later perhaps.

The Supreme Court in a unanimous decision may have marked the beginning of backtracking on the Court's relatively recent jurisprudence related to Fourth Amendment search & seizure rights in criminal prosecutions. The case is US vs Jones and is cited as 565 US ___ (2012). You can read it here. It also may foreshadow an ideological realignment on the court. There are three opinions filed in Jones. There is a majority opinion authored by Antonin Scalia and joined in by the Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Kennedy and somewhat surprisingly Justice Sotomayor. Sotomayor filed a concurring opinion in which she reminded its readers and perhaps the other justices that the rationale Justice Scalia set out was the narrowest possible ground on which to rule. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the third opinion in which he takes on the analysis by the majority.

Before I discuss those opinions at any length it is helpful to examine the facts.

Antoine Jones was the owner of a nightclub in the District of Columbia and law enforcement developed evidence that Jones was involved in the trafficking of controlled substances. The Drug Warriors went to the district court in DC and based upon evidence they already developed obtained a search warrant allowing them to attach a GPS device to the undercarriage of a vehicle registered to Jones' wife but driven by him exclusively. The magistrate when s/he issued the search warrant ordered that the prayed for device be attached to the underside of the vehicle within ten days of issuance and that it be done in the District of Columbia. Law enforcement acting like a combination of both Keystone Kops and a blundering constable did not honor the terms of the warrant and instead they installed it on the vehicle not in the District but rather in Maryland and not within the ten days prescribed but on the eleventh day. It is interesting to note that this case would not have seen the light of day in the Supreme Court had the law enforcement officers hewn to the requirements imposed by the issuing magistrate. They then monitored each movement of this vehicle for a period of twenty-eight days. Wherever the vehicle and its driver went so went the Constable at least digitally. The Government obtained data that showed them quite clearly where Jones (and his wife's car) were at all times and showed each and every stop made by anyone driving the Jeep. Some two thousand pages of data were captured by this device and sent off to the Government. This information was then used in conjunction with other web based assets to dig up great amounts of information about Jones and/or his wife.

Jones was eventually convicted of various drug offenses related to cocaine and he was sentenced to life in federal prison. He appealed and the Circuit Court overturned his conviction and the Government filed a petition for certiorari. This morning SCOTUS filed its opinion and affirmed the decision of the Circuit Court.

This decision is of interest to me because it is about something new and different how the Constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures play out in the modern electronic and digital age and because we see in this opinion by Scalia and the concurring opinion of Justice Alito that we are about to return to a time when search and seizure depended on concepts of property law.

The analysis of Justice Scalia was that the installation of the GPS device was trespassory and the Government had to commit a trespass to the vehicle belonging to Jones and/or his wife in order install the device that would advise the Government of each and place Jones went for the entire twenty-eight days it was on the vehicle sending data back to the Government. As soon as he determined there was a trespass Scalia found a search and from that a constitutional violation. The precise holding of the Court was “We hold that the Government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a “search.” Scalia continued and wrote that the Government had occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information. Scalia a champion of 'originalism' which is the belief that the Constitution's meaning today is the same as it was when the relevant portion was adopted. He says that there can be no doubt that ' such a physical intrusion would have been considered a search by the men who adopted the Constitution. He also is of the belief that there is no constitutional right to privacy. This ruling is reminiscent of the SCOTUS' 1928 ruling in Olmstead vs United States, 277 US 438 which held that listening devices attached to telephone wires on a public street didn't arise to the dignity of a 'search' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment because there was no physical entry into the house or office of the defendant. This case was overruled by Katz vs United States, 389 US 347 less than forty years later when the court so famously noted that the Fourth Amendment protects people and not simply places. Katz disapproved of Olmstead and held that attaching an eavesdropping device to a pubic telephone booth was a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment even though it was not accompanied by a trespass. Obviously had Katz been decided by the current Court it may have been decided differently and Olmstead would still be good law because there could be no trespass to a public telephone booth and therefore it was not within the listing of protected areas contained in the Fourth Amendment. Scalia concludes in his analysis in Jones that the court's ruling based upon the logic of Olmstead and the meaning of constitutional proscriptions is not a return to that law but rather a separate analytical pathway in addition to Katz and its famous rule that the Fourth Amendment governs and mandates relief when there is a violation of a person's subjective but objectively “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Justice Sotomayor opined in her concurrence that this analysis by Justice Scalia “supplies a narrower basis for decision” and because there is a search when the Government gets its evidence from an intrusion “into a constitutionally protected area.” At this point it is interesting that had Sotomayor not written her concurrence and instead had joined in the Alito opinion we would have had the same result but a completely different rationale. It would have been a rationale based upon privacy rather that archaic property law.

The third opinion, also entitled a concurrence is supported by the Court's usual 'liberal wing' composed of Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan written by a most unlikely writer, Justice Samuel Alito. Justice Alito generally votes with the four justice-caucus generally referred to as the conservatives. Alito promptly went on the attack. Alito concurred in the judgment but really wanted a more extensive ruling than the 'majority' justices wanted. Justice Alito started off with obvious problem with constitutional jurisprudence when right up front in his opinion he said unabashedly that the case before them required them to apply the 18^th century amendment “to a 21^st century surveillance technique” a GPS device and he wrote “[i]ronically the Court has chosen to decide this case based on 18^th century tort law.” Also rather ironically Justice Scalia in a show of irritation commented negatively on this phrase by Alito-- it was not quite a bitch slap but it was amusing. Alito and his three co-signers, Breyer, Kagan and Ginzburg, clearly wanted to go further in this case than Scalia did. He states right up front that neither he nor the 'majority' found that there was a seizure of the vehicle because case law holds that a seizure occurs when there is a meaningful interference with the possessory rights to vehicle. Alito takes great pains to point out the fact that no matter what the majority wrote it is a return to trespass as a sine qua non for a search. Early in his opinion Justice Alito says he would “analyze the question presented in this case by asking whether [Jones'] expectations of privacy were violated by the long-term monitoring of the movements of the vehicle he drove.” Implicit in that sentence is Alito's suspicion that there is indeed a right to privacy under the Constitution. What I find fascinating in Alito's opinion is that he takes seriously the Ninth Amendment which proclaims that the enumeration of certain rights “shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Phillip Parker, 14, of Tennessee was found dead over the weekend apparently by his own hand. Parker was another gay teen (or someone believed to be gay) who just couldn't deal anymore with the bullying of his peers and decided that it was just too painful to go on.  This is another example of the 'hate gays at any cost' mentality of the christianist politicians including the likes pf Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney who in their wild quest for the hightest office in the land have embarked on a kill the gays kind of retail politics and self-proclaimed 'righteous' people who seem to thrive on hate and some of whom without any thought for the consequences of their actions and their preaching  who support themselves and their families by raising money to campaign against equality under the law.  Gay and lesbian people are the last discrete group of people it is okay to hate.  Phillip is another young man terminated before he grew up to be whatever it is he wanted to be. Now he is no more and the haters will continue to deny any responsibility for his needless death and the needless deaths of every young person who has died at the hands of their insane theologies and culture wars. There is no room in this society for people even 14 year olds who harrass and intimidate their peers to the point that those children kill themselves after having lost all hope.  I do not think that it any sort of coincidence that so many of these suicides occurr in what we call the Bible Belt of this country   Sadly it will not get better for this young man or his family.  Rest in Peace, Phillip.

It is the consensus of the media paying attention to the South Carolina GOP primary election held today  that Newt Gingrich has won that primary by some fifteen percentage points over Romney. South Carolina awards delegates at the GOP national convention by congressional districts and  on the basis of this it seems like Uncle Newtie will collect 21 of the 25 delegates to which South Carolina is entitled at the convention.. The next primary is in Florida at the end of the month. This is going to be a contest between the former speaker and the former governor. If Romney gets swept under the furniture by Gingrich again, I suspect that it is all over for the Massachussets governor. At this point I should remind you that I predicted that Gingrich would end up being the nominee of the GOP. I predicted that here and here. I would suspect that the White House and the DNC are salivating over the probability that our crazed uncle will Obama's opponent in November.

Now even before the funeral has even been had for SOPA and PIPA the Congress of the US is about strike another ineffective blow in the war against pedophilic conduct and child pornography. It is more overreaching on the part of National Security State. This time the Congress is aiming it's big stick at you.

Representative Lamar Smith of Texas' 21^st congressional district has introduced “for himself and” Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida's 20^th congressional district HR 1981 which amends 18 USC 2703 in some major respects.

Lamar Smith is one of the stereotypical Texas lunatics. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz also serves as the chair of the Democratic National Committee. This piece of legislation is short-titled the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (PCIPA). You can read the current version of this Bill here.

This bill does a couple of very interesting things. First of all it creates a new crime punishable by twenty years in federal prison. The title of this section of the Bill calls this crime “Financial Facilitation of Access to Child Pornography.” The actual elements of this new crime are that (1) someone “knowingly” conducts, attempts or conspires to conduct a financial transaction (2) in interstate or foreign commerce (3) with “knowledge”that such transaction will facilitate access to or possession of child pornography. The Bill expressly exempts law enforcement or anyone acting with the consent of law enforcement from prosecution for this new crime.

Section 4 of the Bill then amends the current section 2703 of Title 11 of the US Code by adding new paragraph (h) to the statute that requires all ISPs (yes yours and mine) to retain for at least one year a log of temporarily assigned network addresses assigned to its customers “that enables the identification of the corresponding customer or subscriber information under subsection (c)(2) of this section. Now section 2703(c)(2) is where the real damage is done. It requires your ISP to record you name, your address, any local and long distance telephone records or records of session times and durations. It must record your length of service including starting date and types of service utilized and the means and source of payment for such service including bank account and credit card numbers. The statute requires that the ISP release all this information whenever the government presents the ISP with an “administrative subpoena” seeking the information.

An administrative subpoena is a piece of paper. It is signed by a law enforcement official such as an FBI agent that commands the person served to provide certain documents or other things more or less described in the document to the law enforcement agent and/or to show up for questioning by law enforcement. It has the force of law and it is an end run around the Warrant Clause of the Fourth Amendment and requires no finding or determination of probable cause.

Essentially if the law enforcement agency is interested in it you have to provide it to them or talk to them about it or both produce and talk or suffer civil and criminal penalties for a failure to do so.

“What is the harm in this?” you ask. Well for openers it applies to every ISP in this country and to every customer of every ISP. This means simply that your ISP must intercept and trap all sorts of personal information about you. Including your purchase of that sexy little pink underwear you bought for your wife, husband, girlfriend or boyfriend. It applies to your Amazon book purchases, classes you may take on line. Your library habits and the books you read or subscribe to on line. They will share all your bank statements that you accessed from your computer in the privacy of your own home. Essentially since most peoples' computers are simply extensions of their minds it allows Big Brother to pick your brain and gather up your own private thoughts and beliefs at any time whenever any law enforcement officer is curious about what you are up to on your computer.

I have no idea how many internet connections there are in this country but it must be at least a hundred million. That simply means that ISPs are storing private and personal information for a hundred million people for at least a year or until Uncle Sam asks for it.

What's the harm you say because you know you aren't a child pornographer. The harm is that it does violence to fundamental constitutional rights and guarantees in the name of possibly capturing a child pornographer (you know don't you that pornographers don't pay to see their own productions) and that it is more likely that Uncle will simply catch some guy downloading pay for view kiddie porn. It is not an efficient use of limited resources and will not make any discernible difference in the government's war against sex. It is however more evidence that the US is not the Land of the Free as we are taught to believe from our first days in school as children.  I was really shocked that a faux progressive like Wasserman-Schultz  would have any connection with such a nonsensical, in effective and anti-liberty legislation. With friends like Debbie Wasserman-Schults who needs enemies?

I have been watching with great interest the on-going battle for the hearts and minds of the GOP faithful currently dominating the news out of South Carolina. South Carolina for those of you who might not remember was the first state to jump ship and secede from the Union in 1861. It is also the home of John C. Calhoun (1782-1850). Calhoun is widely believed to be the Prophet of Nullification and was a champion of the institution of slavery. Calhoun served in both the House of Representatives and the U S Senate and was Andrew Jackson's vice president. South Carolina is also the home of Mark Sanford, Jr. Sanford is the most recent former governor and is noted mainly for his unique ability to hike the Appalachian Trail with his mistress while they both were secluded in a hotel room in Buenos Aires Argentina. Sanford is a conservative christianist champion of family values, traditional marriage and other “traditional values”.

Now today the big news out of South Carolina is the fight for the GOPer nomination between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. Newt of course is also a champion of traditional marriage having been traditionally married three times over the course of about fifty years. His last two wives were his mistresses during his first and second marriages. Now some would call him a serial monogamist but the term serial adulterer seems more appropriate to me since his last two wives were also his mistresses. Sorry Mr. Gingrich that doesn't qualify as monogamy under anyone's definition. His second wife and former first mistress has recently accused him of having come to her and asked her for an “open marriage” which she declined. At the time of this request he had apparently 'been seeing' Calista, his current wife and former second mistress for a number of years. Gingrich calls the accusation by the former Mrs. Gingrich Number Two “trash” which it actually is but Newt's calling it 'trash” is far short of a denial of the truth of the accusation and seems downright silly to me. And in fact it's rather humorous in a sardonic sort of way. Mr. Gingrich doesn't seem to be the faithful type and should he be elected president it will be interesting to watch him straightfacedly take the oath to “faithfully execute the office of president.” Fidelity apparently isn't a big thing with Newt.

Mitt Romney, former champion of medical care for all, is also a supporter of traditional marriage and traditional values and is now opposed to health care for all. Mr. Romney is a member of the Mormon church and claims to be a Christian but the theology of the Mormonism shows that it is not possible for a Mormon to be a Christian. It is not a monotheistic religion. It is a polytheistic religion and it is the fervent hope of every male to be a god governing his own planet. He is more aptly described as a 'christianist.' A christianist is a religionist who does not know the difference between religion and politics and who habitually ignores the bright line between the two. His grandfather was a supporter of if not actually a participant in polygamy. His father, George, who was born in Mexico in the state of Chihuahua after his polygamy-supporting father had fled the US with his polygamist father (Mitt's great grandfather) moved to northern Mexico to practice polygamy. Today they would have said to 'practice their religion', a battle cry we hear almost daily from christianist preachers defending various absurdities such as opposition to marriage equality in the name of their particular mythology and ancient tradition.

People should remember that polygamy was practiced historically not just by Mormons but by the Jewish people and pretty much all of the hunter-gatherer primitives as a way of growing their populations as they wandered through the desert in search of a king and a kingdom. Traditional Mormons did the same thing and only abandoned the practice when Utah's admission to the Union was conditioned on the banning of polygamy by the Mormon church. Traditional marriage is pretty well illustrated by the picture that accompanies this post. In reality traditional marriage evolved from the 'cave man' nuptials represented by the picture to a business relationship between a man and a woman and the woman's father. I think one point is clear and that is that traditional marriage is not and was not static it is a dynamic institution one that changes over the course of history.

Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-rick-perry-formally-exits-presidential-race-20120119,0,7617992.story

The Los Angeles Times announced this morning that the hapless Pastor Rick has 'suspended' his presidential campaign. Because of federal election commission rules and practices and the availability of matching federal funds dying and vegetative presidential candidates don't quit the race for the white house they suspend their campaigns. I don't think that anyone except the delusional pastor who earned cheers at the GOPer debates at his expressions of pride that two hundred thirty-some people have died in Texas' death chamber during his terms as governor really expected the American people to send another delusional Texan to live in the White House. Dubya was certainly enough for a long long time. I take this announcement as an indication that my prediction that Newt Gingrich is going to be the eventual nominee of the GOP is correct. It is not my position that the rank and file members of the GOP will demand the nomination of Gingrich. I doubt that there are any rank and file members left since the GOP was taken over by a an unholy alliance of the One Percent who actually run the country and the christianists who manage daily to confuse politics and religion and demand that all things be governed by Holy Writ, their Holy Writ I mean. I suppose that the One Percent would be somewhat okay with Romney as an acceptable nominee despite his past flirtation with liberalism as governor of Massachusetts and the father of “Romneycare” but much prefer Uncle Newtie, crazy as he is for the simple reason that he is a known quantity and will be easier to manipulate while in office and has preumably already been corrupted by his time in high office as Speaker of the House during the Clinton impeachment nonsense. The christianists on the other hand do not believe that Mormons and by extension Mitt Romney are Christians. That is probably the one thing that I am in agree with them on. Mormons are not monotheists and their fondest hope and belief is that the males in the LDS church will find themselves eventually as godlets of their own planet one day, if they are righteous and make enough babies that is. Woman apparently have the same status in the LDS church that women have in the Roman Church. That polytheistic belief is definitely not a part of traditional Christian theology. The christianists in the GOP will not be happy with a Mormon heading the ticket and the party for this campaign and may just sit on their hands come eection day. Perry is a christianist  and his endorsement of Gingrich is designed to derail the current front runner in South Carolina and block his march to the nomination. The  One Percent will go along with that program.

This is going to be fun. I think I will order the large pop corn with extra butter.

Link: http://pollposition.com/2012/01/13/holy-tebow-democrats-republicans-at-oddsIn

I have been wondering recently why it is that I should concern myself with the the 2012 elections. Why should I participate? I have been wondering about this almost constantly for the last several months at least in a semi subliminal manner. I have tried many diversions to protect me from having to think this out. Mostly I have diverted myself from active consideration of this important issue by watching the crazy GOPer candidates for nomination to be the next president. All of those candidates are funded by superpacs operating anonymously by reason of their newly minted First Amendment-based rights to spend as much money as they can find pushing their own economic interests as though they were real people. This delusion is of course thanks to Citizens United vs FEC. I can laugh at the nonsense spouted by the Governor of Texas and wonder if he really believes the nonsense he spouts. I can still divert my attention by considering the craziness of Newt Gingrich as he prats on about the family values preached by the serial adulterer that he is and his really crazier ideas like firing school janitors and replacing them with the children of janitors who are paying off their tuition at the schools they attend. Apparently without regard to the fact that when they get out of school there will be no janitor jobs for them because their kids will have them, assuming of course we still have public schools by then I was diverted by the former senator from Pennsylvania who views himself as the god-chosen alternative to that world renowned dog lover, Willard “Mittens” Romney the creator of Romneycare in Massachusetts and now fervently disavows it so he can criticize what GOPers call Obamacare.

The Christian wing of the christianists held a big pow wow in Texas over the the weekend to choose the anti-Mittens candidate and they seem, with god's help after much prayer a la Tim Tebow to have chosen Frothy Mix Santorum to save them from the cult Mormonism represented by the Mittens and his Magic Underwear. The list of crazies just goes on like the river Styx carrying all sorts of detritus out of mind and out of mind's eye.

The damn Democrats (DEMs) aren't any better. They rattle swords and then cave. The DEMs' leader is no better he wavers on vetoing something he says he doesn't like and then caves and signs it anyway making a tough-sounding squeal indicating a measured dislike and signs an extra-constitutional signing statement to prove he's really on the right sign of any particular issue. I really see no choice. GOPers are corrupt. DEMs are corrupt. The man of hope we thought we elected president almost four years ago is corrupt. He is bearing the full weight of the institutional corruption that is the US Government. I have nowhere to go. I am feeling as powerless to affect any kind of change whatsoever. My lesser self wants to throw bombs if for no other reason than someone might notice that something is seriously wrong here. My better self restrains me and says.....it is possible to save ourselves. I just don't know what I am going to do about this battle going on.

This morning reading on my favorite blogs I read that forty-three percent of Americans believe that Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos' current season success is due to 'divine intervention.' What?! Yes 43%! You can read the poll here, Now I will admit that this poll was taken before last night's Tebow/Broncos shellacking administered by New the England Patriots. I wonder if anyone told god that New England is where the march to marriage equality was born and nurtured. One would think if “god hates fags” as much as good christianists like our friends at the Westboro Baptist Church says s/he/it does god wouldn't have let Tim Tebow go down to defeat last night at the hands of those nasty Yankees I suppose it is within the realm of possibilityhowever  that god was really pissed off at Tim yesterday. What could Tim have possibly done to make the godhead angry enough to allow New England to shellack the backsides of Tebow and his fellow broncos that way they did? What could it be that caused god to forget about New England's connection with marriage equality?

I don't know how anybody else feels about this but damn it, this poll is just another reason to sit out 2012 election cycle. If almost a majority of my fellow citizens believe that silliness, it is time to give the continent back to our native peoples, turn out the lights and head back to wherever we came from.

Francis Cardinal George is the Archbishop of Chicago soon to retire as he turns 75 in the new year. He is a very public man in the twilight of his position as archbishop. Recently in a local television interview during a time of negotiating the route of Chicago's annual Gay Pride event Prince Francis loudly rang the bell of hatred and discrimination and compared the organizers and by extension the larger gay community to the KKK. This was said because the coming Gay Pride Parade in the Windy City was scheduled to pass by one of the parishes of the Chicago Archdiocese during a time in the late morning when Sunday masses were being held in the parish church. The pastor of the church was irate and in the midst of a hissy fit threatened to cancel some or all of the Sunday masses on the appointed day. That was the Cardinal's cue to add his voice to the hateful noise over the plans for the parade. Needless to say Cardinal George's comments caused consternation, hurt, pain and harm to many people and were widely played up in both the local and national press. George's comments likening gay people to the KKK were seized upon by the blogosphere as well and everyone was off to the races. The proverbial bell was rung and everyone was unhappy and everyone let everyone else know that they were unhappy. War raged and people hated people. Petitions calling for him to resign were circulated on the internet. I signed one. A perfect storm of protest was brewing. Cardinal George who admits he has gay people in his biological family was more than a little surprised and stunned at the hornets buzzing around his head and aiming to do damage to him in the final year before his mandatory retirement as archbishop.

George, to his credit, has finally issued an apology for comparing gay people to the group that historically hated people of color and who were responsible for hundreds of lynchings and other deeds of violence to people of color in the United States during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. I doubt that he understood that what he was doing in his television interview was tying gay people to one of the two most horrific issues of our national past, slavery. He did not realize that he was demonizing a group of people who gave no cause for this unchristian demonization. The bell was loudly rung but the apology came much more quietly on a Friday afternoon much like the news dumps that the White House sends out just before a weekend in the hope that it won't be seen by many. I fear it did little to assuage the hurt and the pain suffered by the people victimized by his most unchristian fit of temper. You can read his apology here. I would bet dollars to donuts that his apology will not garner nearly the attention that his ill-tempered tirade did. Cardinal George should insist on giving as much publicity to his change of heart and his apology as he did to the original rant. To his credit the apology was not conditional and he didn't apologize 'if anyone was offended' as so many other public figures have done in similar circumstances. He should make a public admission of sin and should sit on the front steps of Holy Name Cathedral in sack cloth and ashes on a coming Sunday and pray for the forgiveness of those he has harmed. The bell he rang can not be un-rung but his apology should at least be as loud as his tirade.

One of the blogs I follow is that of Professor Jonathan Turley who writes a very cogent blog on legal issues usually with a progressive view of things legal.  Turey is Shapiro Professor of Law at George Washington University. He wrote an article on his blog "Res Ipsa Loquitur" criticizing the use of the power of the president to fill up vacancies when the Senate is not in session. You can read Professor Turley's comments here. I wrote a somewhat shorter version of this post in response to the professor's article. I want to elaborate a little bit more on my blog rather than on the professor's blog. It is, after all his blog and I don't want to monopolize it

As I said in that response I am having a hard time with this issue. I doubt that the appointment of Richard  Cordray via Article II Section 2 of the Constitution to be Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will have a lasting effect on anything since his appointment will expire at the end of the 112^th and any rules he makes as director can be overturned by the next director assuming one is nominated and confirmed by this president or any successor. It is interesting because unlike other 'independent agencies' such as the Securities Exchange Commission and the Federal Communication Commission there is no governing board of the CFPB.  The Director makes the rules and enforces them without having to get the consent of a majority of a governing board. The appointment of someone to an office with a fixed term of five years such as any director of the CFPB by recess appointment which expires at the end of the Congress  is quite different than a recess appointment of a judge or justice which while only lasting until the end of a current Congress allows the appointee to exercise the judicial power of the United States during that ‘interregnum’. The problem with judicial recess appointments of an appellate judge who does not have tenure on ‘good behavior’ is that s/he can bind future courts (as opposed to a trial judge) under the principes of stare decisis. While the appointment of  Chief Justice Rutledge via recess appointment by President Washington in 1795 may have been a lousy appointment had he gone through the confirmation process as it existed in 1795 and been issued a commission after confirmation it would not have rendered him sane or non-suicidal or any more qualified to be a justice than he was when Washiington signed his commisson. Judicial appointments via Article II, Section 2 have been common in our history. One that does strike me as a good appointment was that of Chief Justice Earl Warren who was named chief in September of 1953 while Congress was in recess. He was nominated later and confirmed by the Senate in March of 1954. It was Warren after all who engineered a unanimous court in Brown vs Board of Education which ended racial segregation in public schools.
Congress when it created the CFPB exempted it from control of both the executive and legislative branches and gave it an interesting financial base: the Federal Reserve system which has to fund it from its own earnings as a bank. Congress also amended into the act an interesting poison pill, forbidding the new agency to exercise its new rule making powers and oversight powers until a director was seated. There is some logic to this since the Director of the CFPB exercises the new powers given to the agency without having to get the approval of a governing board. This itself is an indication that the Congress (or at least some of its Beholden Members) wants the agency to be a eunuch: no director no power. This collision between the branches is most assuredly a political question and in theory at least should be worked out by the Congress and the President and, dare I add, ultimately by the People of the US in their power to retire congress critters in November. I believe the statute was designed to fail and is an example of what happens when the legislative branch is beholden to the ‘people’ ( as defined by Citizens United) who paid to send them to DC to do their bidding rather than being beholden to an electorate composed of real flesh and blood people. At any rate I seriously doubt that the courts will upend this appointment because it is clearly a dispute between co-equal branches of government and one which courts have been loathe to venture into in the past. At any rate I have no doubt that congressional shenanigans will continue. I for one will sit back and watch. Things would be so much easier if I were running the show or even if we had an electoral system that was actually responsive to the needs of the People. Therein lies the problem