Monday, June 10, 2013

Private Parts

The ever-insightful digby leads us to an article by Daniel J. Solove in the Chronicle of Higher Education from 2011 wherein the discussion about privacy and why it matters is discussed. In short, it calls into question the trope that we hear whenever something like news of the N.S.A. looking into the data of every phone call ever made hits the headlines: “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

To describe the problems created by the collection and use of personal data, many commentators use a metaphor based on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell depicted a harrowing totalitarian society ruled by a government called Big Brother that watches its citizens obsessively and demands strict discipline. The Orwell metaphor, which focuses on the harms of surveillance (such as inhibition and social control), might be apt to describe government monitoring of citizens. But much of the data gathered in computer databases, such as one’s race, birth date, gender, address, or marital status, isn’t particularly sensitive. Many people don’t care about concealing the hotels they stay at, the cars they own, or the kind of beverages they drink. Frequently, though not always, people wouldn’t be inhibited or embarrassed if others knew this information.

Another metaphor better captures the problems: Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Kafka’s novel centers around a man who is arrested but not informed why. He desperately tries to find out what triggered his arrest and what’s in store for him. He finds out that a mysterious court system has a dossier on him and is investigating him, but he’s unable to learn much more. The Trial depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used.

The problems portrayed by the Kafkaesque metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition. Instead they are problems of information processing—the storage, use, or analysis of data—rather than of information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.

The question is not whether or not I or anyone else has something or nothing to hide. We all do, whether it’s our credit card statement or our web-browser history, and no matter what it is, the idea behind a country founded on a Bill of Rights that includes the statement “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated” should be taken as least as seriously as the one about the well-regulated militia.

Simply put, the only person who can decide for me what’s private and what’s not is me. I can go on Facebook and tell the world — or at least those who know me — what I had for dinner last night, what movie I saw last week, and so forth. I can even tell you if I’m in a relationship or not or where I work and who I work with. Those are my choices, though, and I made them freely. But the idea of things that I choose to keep private being subject to scrutiny by other people and without my knowledge or consent is offensive not because they might find some deep dark secret but because I’m the one who is supposed to be the one who decides that, not someone else.

I may indeed have nothing to hide. But that’s for me to decide.

Friday, June 7, 2013

The Power To Be Heard

Via digby, Bobby Kennedy speaks on June 6, 1966 about freedom of speech and freedom from interference.

Hand-in-hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard — to share in the decisions of government which shape men’s lives. Everything that makes men’s lives worthwhile — family, work, education, a place to rear one’s children and a place to rest one’s head — all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people. Therefore, the essential humanity of man can be protected and preserved only where the government must answer — not just to the wealthy; not just to those of a particular religion, not just to those of a particular race; but to all of the people.

And even government by the consent of the governed, as in our own Constitution, must be limited in its power to act against its people: so that there may be no interference with the right to worship, but also no interference with the security of the home; no arbitrary imposition of pains or penalties on an ordinary citizen by officials high or low; no restriction on the freedom of men to seek education or to seek work or opportunity of any kind, so that each man may become all that he is capable of becoming.

Hit Parade

The Guardian says the N.S.A. went for more than just phone records.

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

As I noted on Twitter last night, I look on the bright side: now I know my readership is actually higher than StatCounter says it is.

I understand that a lot of people are upset by this news. I refuse to be one of them. It’s not that it doesn’t concern me that there is an agency out there that is gathering information and that there is every possibility that they’re doing it at this very moment. But anyone who thinks that it hasn’t been going on for a very long time in a very systematic method and that it doesn’t matter whether there’s a Republican or a Democrat in the White House needs to take a cold shower of reality.

It’s not that the folks in the tin-foil hats are right and the secret government agents are out there to spy on each one of us individually and that they’re up to no good. Anyone who’s ever worked in any sort of bureaucracy, be it a government entity or your local Wal-Mart, knows that they gather information. That’s life. It’s a part of the bargain we make in living in what we hope is a free society that is also protecting us from those who want to harm us.

So unless you plan to live completely off the grid and don’t plan on buying anything, making a phone call, or Googling yourself, then you can expect this kind of news. As a lot of the people who knew about it said, it’s old news: a lot of other people know what you’re doing with your car, your computer, your TV, and your grocery list. But not your guns.

Short Takes

The N.S.A. went after more than just Verizon.

Israel keeps a wary eye on Syria’s border fighting.

I.R.S. official apologizes for lavish conferences.

Student loan plans go down to defeat in the Senate.

Gov. Christie names N.J. attorney general as interim senator.

R.I.P. Esther Williams, 91, star of MGM water musical spectaculars.

Tropical Update: TS Andrea soaked Florida. Meanwhile, another disturbance takes shape.

The Tigers beat the Rays

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Missing The Point

Via TPM:

A public discussion held on the Muslim faith and the First Amendment in Manchester, Tennessee turned to chaos on Tuesday after several hundred people in attendance jeered and heckled a U.S. attorney and an FBI official who spoke about constitutional protections for various forms of speech.

[...]

One protester in attendance disagreed with the two federal officials.

“I feel like (these) men are attempting to intimidate people with the freedom of speech and that bothers me,” he said, according to the Tennesean.

Heavy sigh.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

The Big Database

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 (but not the usual suspects) that police can take DNA samples from detainees even if they haven’t been convicted of a crime.

A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that police may take DNA samples when booking those arrested for serious crimes, narrowly upholding a Maryland law and opening the door to more widespread collection of DNA by law enforcement.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that government has a legitimate interest in collecting DNA from arrestees, just as it takes photographs and collects fingerprints. Rejecting the view that the practice constitutes an unlawful search, the majority said it was justified to establish the identity of the person in custody.

[...]

As with other recent court decisions involving the Fourth Amendment’s “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” the justices split in an unusual fashion.

The dissenters were three of the court’s liberals plus conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who amplified his displeasure by reading a summary of his dissent from the bench.

“The court has cast aside a bedrock rule of our Fourth Amendment law: that the government may not search its citizens for evidence of crime unless there is a reasonable cause to believe that such evidence will be found,” Scalia said from the bench.

In his dissent, Scalia wrote that the majority’s attempts to justify the use of DNA as an identification tool “taxes the credulity of the credulous.” He added, “Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

Scalia was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The argument that DNA collecting is no different than fingerprints falls apart when you realize that DNA is not just proof of identity; it tells you everything about someone, even down to their propensity for disease or genetics. It skates way over the line beyond just identity, and that’s going too far. Scott Lemieux at LGM takes it from there.

If this decision stands, we might as well just collect DNA samples from everyone at birth and be done with the pretense that we’re applying the Fourth Amendment to DNA collection. The originalist language is useful, though, because it highlights what a particular embarrassment it was for Thomas to have joined Kennedy’s opinion without comment. I’d love to hear the “originalist” justification for the proposition that you can conduct a search of one’s body without suspicion (let alone warrant) or exigent circumstances as long as the information collected is really useful.

The second — and also ironic — point is that if the conservatives are okay with this, then why not all sorts of databases, like, oh, say, guns? CLW noted, “[t]here are already huge national databases of cars (CARFAX), of credit info (Experion, Equifax, and TransUnion), of international travelers (passports), of dogs and cats. But, because of Da Second Amendment, we can’t have a huge federal database of guns. Got it.”

Friday, May 31, 2013

Civil Discourse

Third time’s the charm, right?

A third letter similar to the ricin-laced letters that were sent to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his pro-gun control outfit Mayors Against Illegal Guns was also addressed to President Barack Obama, NBC4 New York reported Thursday.

The report cited “law enforcement sources,” who said the letter to Obama did not reach the White House and is currently being tested for ricin. It arrived Thursday at an off-site facility, according to NBC4.

The content of the letter mirrored the message in the Bloomberg letters, which warned “what’s in this letter is nothing compared to what I’ve got planned for you.”

When they track this person down, the perp will undoubtedly claim their right to free speech and the 2nd Amendment, etc. and how Obama is intimidating everyone.

PS: Not that the two stories are connected, but I can’t thinking that if we didn’t have so many people fetishizing about their guns, we wouldn’t have a string of stories like this.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Some Rights, Some Wrongs

Charlie Pierce has a nice piece on Sen. Rand Paul and RNC Chair Reince Priebus, the Martin and Lewis of Wingnuttia, paying a call on the GOP in the Granite State. Hey, it’s already 2013; time’s a-wasting for the primary.

Among the gems that they tossed out was this little diatribe from Mr. Priebus on the state of the Constitution at the hands of Barack Obama:

“A president that touts ego, power, and a hatred for dissent above everything else, that’s Barack Obama, that’s the leader of this country. I don’t think this administration realizes that the First Amendment wasn’t a suggestion. The Bill of Rights is not a wish list, it’s a set of non-negotiable limits on the federal government.”

He thereupon ripped Eric Holder for wanting to read Miranda rights to the Christmas Day bomber and to Osama bin Laden (?).

I wasn’t there when the guys in Philadelphia came up with the first ten amendments to the Constitution, and I don’t know off-hand if there was a debate among them as to which amendments should go where, as if being the first made it more important than the others that came after. It looks to me as if they did them in an order that set out some very basic principles of law and limitations, and then went along and included others as they came along without ranking them, and none of them take precedence over the other.

That means that you can’t pick and choose which right to enforce while undermining another just because you don’t like the outcome.

And it also means you can’t pull off bullshit like this:

Christmas may be seven months away, but Texas is ready for it.

State lawmakers there waged their own battle against the so-called War on Christmas on Friday, passing legislation, House Bill 308, that allows public school teachers to say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Hanukkah” and display Christmas trees, nativity scenes or menorahs. Winter displays must represent more than one religion or include secular symbols.

But while the legislation specifies that schools may not constitutionally favor one religion over another, the bill is named for only one religion — Christmas.

The bill passed and Gov. Rick Perry plans to sign it. Of course he does. The Baby Jesus trumps the First Amendment every time. And when the law is struck down by the courts for being the breathtakingly blatant violation of the Constitution that it is, the Religious Reich will nail itself to the Cross of Martyrdom and Victimhood as the sacrifice of the suppressed majority and proclaim that Christians will be forced to hide their faith from the world. If only.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Just Another Lone Wolf

Good thing they caught him.

Federal officials believe a localized “terror attack” was thwarted when an FBI raid on a Minnesota man’s mobile home turned up Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs and several firearms.

Buford Rogers, 24, was apprehended Friday after the raid of his Montevideo, Minn., home.

“The FBI believes that a terror attack was disrupted by law enforcement personnel and that the lives of several local residents were potentially saved,” the Minneapolis FBI office said in a statement released Monday.

Authorities say the thwarted attack was a low-level case of domestic terrorism. The investigation remains ongoing, according to the FBI statement.

Buford is linked to an unidentified militia group, officials said.

Was he read his Miranda rights? Where is Lindsey Graham demanding that the Obama administration certify him as an “enemy combatant”? How come he’s being treated as a common criminal?

Because his name is Buford, not Dzhokar.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Terrorist Watch List

John Yoo is one of those people who will go down in history as one of those benignly evil people who don’t actually do terrible things like commit torture or genocide themselves but enable those who do and defend them.

“Apparently the FBI interrogated the younger Tsarnaev for 16 hours,” wrote torture memo author John Yoo at National Review. “And then, for reasons that are still unknown, the government read him his rights.”

Yoo has never met a right he didn’t want to ball up like a piece of paper and toss into a trash can in the name of national security. But despite being an attorney and professor at the prestigious University of California Berkeley School of Law, Yoo is either misleading his readers about why Tsarnaev was read his rights or unaware of a basic legal rule.

The judge appeared at the hospital because the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure state that suspects have to be brought before “a magistrate judge, or before a state or local judicial officer” and it must be done “without unnecessary delay.” The Supreme Court has held that, absent exigent circumstances or the suspect waiving the right to go before a judge—as wannabe Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad reportedly did—a suspect has to appear before a judge within 48 hours of being apprehended. This is usually referred to in legal shorthand as “presentment,” as in, “presentment before a judge.”

He is also one of those people who tell us that our rights and the Constitution don’t really matter if you’re dead, and that the Founding Fathers certainly didn’t intend to protect the rights of people who were indoctrinated by foreigners to blow us up. And he does it all without getting that faraway stare in his eyes or wearing a hat with teabags dangling from it.

He’s the one who should be on the terrorist watch list.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

He Has The Right To Remain Silent

Via TPM:

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings acknowledged to the FBI his role in the attacks but did so before he was advised of his constitutional right to keep quiet and seek a lawyer, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Once Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was read his rights on Monday, he immediately stopped talking, according to four officials of both political parties who were briefed on the interrogation but insisted on anonymity because the briefing was private.

After roughly 16 hours of questioning, investigators were surprised when a magistrate judge and a representative from the U.S. Attorney’s office entered the hospital room and read Tsarnaev his rights, the four officials and one law enforcement official said. Investigators had planned to keep questioning him.

It is unclear whether any of this will matter in court since the FBI says Tsarnaev confessed to a witness and U.S. officials said Wednesday that physical evidence, including a 9 mm handgun and pieces of a remote-control device commonly used in toys, was recovered from the scene.

But the debate over whether suspected terrorists should be read their Miranda rights has become a major sticking point in the debate over how best to fight terrorism. Many Republicans, in particular, believe Miranda warnings are designed to build court cases, and only hinder intelligence gathering.

Conservatives often bemoan how hard it is to convict criminals and how terrible it is that some people get released or acquitted because of a “technicality” such as a conviction being overturned because it was based on illegally seized evidence. They complain that the deck is stacked against law-abiding citizens and the bad guys are all using the system to their advantage.

Yeah, it’s terrible, isn’t it? Sure, it would be a lot easier, a lot more efficient, and save everyone a lot of time and money if we could just grab the bad guys and throw them in jail without having to go to the trouble to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they’re guilty. C’mon, we know they did it; why go through all this hugga-mugga just to live up to some Fourth or Fifth Amendment when we know we’ve got’em dead to rights? (It’s ironic that some people are absolutists about certain amendments, such as the Second, but when it comes to others like the Fourth, Fifth, or Fourteenth; enh, not so much.)

But that’s how it’s supposed to be. The Constitution and the justice system are designed to make it hard to convict someone of a crime. This inconvenient and cumbersome system is what separates us from the worst instincts of human nature; to mistrust the motives of everyone else and presume the worst about others. The most noble and uplifting thing about our Constitution and our justice system is that it actually codifies the belief in the better nature of humanity: that we are good and law-abiding people and that criminal behavior and ill will is not our true nature. No government or set of laws ever did that before, and its what makes us the comparatively free and aspirational society that we are.

Yes, there are bad people among us, and yes, we may find inconvenient and annoying to put up with someone else’s emphatic exercise of their rights, but if you consider the alternative, it’s worth it.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Lindsey Graham Hates America

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) doesn’t think that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev deserves the protection of the Bill of Rights that are afforded to all criminal suspects; he wants him to be held as an “enemy combatant” and treated as such.

For all the horrific crimes that Mr. Tsarnaev is accused of, he is still an American citizen, he committed his crimes in America, and as far as anyone can tell so far, he and his brother acted of their own free will and were not in the service of another country. In those respects he is no different than Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, or Eric Rudolph, who bombed the Atlanta Olympics. The legal system dealt with them just fine and without invoking the holy mantra of 9/11 and the fetid PATRIOT Act.

Mr. Graham is a lawyer and also served in the JAG Corps, so he should know the law. But he’s also a craven sycophant to the right-wing cowards who think that anyone with a name that sets off Spell Check should be denied their basic civil rights because… just because. That makes him just as much of an anti-American terrorist as the Taliban.

PS: Scott Lemieux at LGM explains why Tsarnaev should be Mirandized.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Truly Despicable

If you are looking for a prime example of fetid racism masquerading as legal opinion emanating from the highest court in the land, I present Antonin Scalia and his views on the Voting Rights Act.

Justice Antonin Scalia this week escalated his criticism of the Voting Rights Act ahead of a Supreme Court decision expected within the next two months — raising the likelihood that he and perhaps a majority of justices will overturn the landmark law.

Speaking on Monday night at the University of California’s Washington Center, in D.C, Scalia described a centerpiece of the 1965 law as an “embedded” form of “racial preferment,” in remarks captured by the Wall Street Journal. He reportedly warned that the law would be reauthorized into perpetuity unless the courts invalidate it.

The Supreme Court is poised to rule on the constitutionality of the Voting Right Act’s Section 5, which requires state and local governments with a history of racial discrimination to receive federal pre-approval before changing their voting laws. Civil rights advocates warn that portion of the law is key to protecting minorities from discrimination.

During oral arguments in the case, Shelby County v. Holder, in late February, Scalia said that portion of the law — and its repeated renewal by Congress — reflects a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” The other conservatives justices were also deeply skeptical that Section 5 of the law remains valid given the changing times.

On Monday, Scalia also characterized the law as unfair because federal law doesn’t make similar efforts to protect whites from racial discrimination, according to the Journal.

The “emergency response” to the situation he’s referring to — the systemic denial of equal rights to citizens — had been embedded, so to speak, in the laws and traditions of this nation since its founding. And given the recent attempts by Republicans in the several states, including Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and of course the remnants of the Confederacy, the emergency still exists.

But as far as he is concerned, it’s the white men in this country who are in danger of losing their place at the top of the heap.

Monday, April 15, 2013

Hunger Striker Speaks Out

This editorial in the New York Times by a prisoner at Gitmo is going to get a lot of pixels.

One man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

The prisoner, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, dictated his story over an “unclassified” phone line through a translator.

I am certain the orcosphere will attack the Times for giving the man the opportunity to speak; how dare they let a dangerous terrorist mock the First Amendment? Except if the man’s story is to be believed, he was in the wrong place in the wrong time and no one has been able to prove he’s guilty of anything more than that. But, hey, it’s not like we lock up innocent people, right?

All Gitmo has done is give our enemies something to point at and call us hypocrites for demanding that other countries live up to our standards of justice when we don’t do it in Cuba. (Funny how we always seem to have these double standards when it comes to anything to do with Cuba; i.e. the worthless and counterproductive embargo that was meant to put an end to a dictatorship when we have robust trade and friendly relations with equally repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia and China.)

President Obama was right to try to close Gitmo as his first executive order more than five years ago. The fact that Congress won’t allow it is testimony to the cowardice of the big bad butch Republicans who are afraid that a 135-pound laborer from Yemen will take over the Supermax prison in Colorado and turn it into a terrorist cell.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Bedside Story

In this day and age, this is just sad.

A gay man was arrested at a hospital in Missouri this week when he refused to leave the bedside of his partner, and now a restraining order is preventing him from any type of visitation.

Roger Gorley told WDAF that even though he has power of attorney to handle his partner’s affairs, a family member asked him to leave when he visited Research Medical Center in Kansas City on Tuesday.

Gorley said he refused to leave his partner Allen’s bedside, and that’s when security put him in handcuffs and escorted him from the building.

“I was not recognized as being the husband, I wasn’t recognized as being the partner,” Gorley explained.

He said the nurse refused to confirm that the couple shared power of attorney and made medical decision for each other.

“She didn’t even bother to look it up, to check in to it,” the Lee’s Summit resident recalled.

It’s also a violation of the law. In 2010, President Obama signed an order that required any facility that receives Medicare or Medicaid funding to allow visitation rights to same-sex partners of patients. In this case it sounds like the hospital got caught in the middle of a family feud.

There is a happy ending: according to JMG, Mr. Gorley has been allowed to return to the hospital to visit his husband.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Holding Freedom Hostage

Paul Krugman writes that the Republicans have dusted off an old argument from years ago to block the agenda of President Obama and the Democrats. Instead of arguing the merits of, say, expanding Medicaid to people who need it, they now say that giving people a guarantee that they will have health insurance is an assault on freedom.

Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a stirring speech Reagan gave in 1961, in which he warned of a grim future unless patriots took a stand. (Liz Cheney used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article just a few days ago.) “If you and I don’t do this,” Reagan declared, “then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” What you might not guess from the lofty language is that “this” — the heroic act Reagan was calling on his listeners to perform — was a concerted effort to block the enactment of Medicare.

These days, conservatives make very similar arguments against Obamacare. For example, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has called it the “greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime.” And this kind of rhetoric matters, because when it comes to the main obstacle now remaining to more or less universal health coverage — the reluctance of Republican governors to allow the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of reform — it’s pretty much all the right has.

They trot out this pony for lots of other things, too. Universal background checks and liability insurance for gun owners shreds the Second Amendment. Giving free or reduced lunches to impoverished children takes away the parents’ rights to feed their children the way they see fit. Banning interracial marriage is an assault on the rights of states to protect their own traditions, and of course the one we’ve been hearing a lot of recently, permitting marriage equality is a blatant attempt to muzzle the freedom of the “religious” to bully and harass the LGBT community.

David Brooks’ column last week where he said that granting gays more freedom actually meant less was a caricature of the argument, and this is how we know that they’re getting down to the fumes. When they have to tell you that more is actually less and up is actually down; that more choice for more people is tyranny and that finding a way to stop a madman from sweeping a kindergarten with 154 bullets in less than five minutes is the last step before Stalinism, it makes you wonder at what point will it dawn on them how utterly contemptuous of freedom they really are.

Friday, April 5, 2013

North Carolina Goes South

North Carolina won’t have a state religion after all. Well, at least not this year. Yet.

North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis’ office said Thursday that a resolution asserting North Carolina has the power to set an official state religion is dead, and won’t go any further.

The resolution, filed by two Republicans from Rowan County, declared “each state is sovereign and may independently determine how the state may make laws respecting an establishment of religion” – thereby claiming the federal government and courts have no authority to decide what is constitutional.

The bill’s primary sponsors were Reps. Harry Warren and Carl Ford, a tea party member. Eleven other legislators signed the resolution. Legislators introduce hundreds or even thousands of resolutions every year, honoring constituents or declaring their stances on issues, but they carry little legal weight.

Warren said in a statement that the bill was only intended to allow Rowan County officials to open their meetings with prayer, not to establish a state religion.

Instead, they’ve turned their attention to another GOP obsession (no, not gay sex): voter suppression.

A bill filed in the state Senate Tuesday would carry a tax penalty for parents whose children register to vote at their college address.

Senate Bill 667, known as “Equalize Voter Rights,” would remove the tax exemption for dependents who register to vote at any address other than their parents’ home.

“If the voter is a dependent of the voter’s parent or legal guardian, is 18 years of age or older and the voter has registered at an address other than that of the parent or legal guardian, the parent or legal guardian will not be allowed to claim the voter as a dependent for state income tax purposes,” the bill says.

The measure would affect only state income tax, so it wouldn’t have much effect on out-of-state students. But it could effectively cut student voting in counties like Watauga and Orange, where college voters have been a key part of the Democratic Party’s dominance.

The bill would also require voters to have their vehicles registered at the same address as their voter registration. That also could cut down on college student registration, since many students maintain their vehicle registration in their home counties.

Between state-mandated Christianity and tax hikes to punish college-age voters and their families, the Republicans in North Carolina sure have a strange view of smaller government and freedom. Apparently it only applies to white straight Christian men.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Sadly Ironic

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) gets death threats over proposing that gun owners carry liability insurance.

“Yesterday, several death threats were phoned into my New York office in response to news reports about a bill I authored requiring gun owners to have insurance,” the congresswoman said in a statement Wednesday morning. “The calls were fielded by young interns, who were understandably shaken by this experience.”

Maloney told the New York Daily News that the threats came in three menacing phone calls, which left her so disturbed she ended up missing a planned awards dinner Tuesday night.

“They said they were going to kill me,” she told the paper.

She said law enforcement is investigating the matter and so she won’t comment further.

America, heck yeah.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Sunday Reading

Old Warriors — Jill Filipovic at The Nation explores the myth that Roe v. Wade started the culture war and that marriage equality will further it.

Numerous commentators, most notably at The New York Times, have expressed concern that a broad ruling on marriage equality could turn into the next Roe v. Wade, igniting decades-long culture wars and damaging public perception of the Supreme Court. Better to rule narrowly, they say, and let the states follow the emerging trajectory towards marriage equality.

That argument, though, is not only totally ahistorical, but dangerous for both civil rights and the Court’s credibility.

Contrary to the current mythology, Roe didn’t incite the culture wars, and before the case was decided in 1973, the right to abortion across the fifty states was far from a foregone conclusion. As Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel detail in their book Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling, an organized, primarily Catholic Church–backed anti-abortion movement existed in force before Roe. Although abortion rights were initially championed by Republicans and favored by a majority of Americans, social conservatives saw an opening to exploit for political gain. According to Greenhouse, before the Court decided Roe, conservative architects of the “New Right” had already decided to use opposition to abortion as part of a strategy for party realignment that would come to fruition with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. “New Right” leaders sought to bring Catholics and into the party and politicize Evangelicals to form a coalition of traditionalists based on hostility to progress and change.

Abortion was hardly their only issue. The new conservative coalition opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, claiming that gender equality would destroy the family and send our daughters to war. They stoked white voters’ fears of full racial integration with racist tropes about black criminals and welfare queens. Those narratives and appeals to tradition continue today, with social conservatives hoping for a return to a gauzy vision of Good Old Days America before the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s—and before women, people of color, religious minorities and other marginalized groups were able to secure a full range of rights.

A different ruling in Roe—or none at all—wouldn’t have prevented a Republican Party realignment that was already underway. It wouldn’t have prevented abortion, and the rights of women and other traditionally disempowered groups, from becoming controversial political issues. But a Roe-free United States would almost certainly mean a United States wherein abortion laws were wildly varied, with women in many parts of the country having no legal right to abortion at all. Similarly, even though Brown v. Board of Education inspired an immediate backlash from Southern racists, it’s tough to argue that without court intervention, racial integration of public schools and other facilities would be better without Brown than the (admittedly lacking) state of racial equality today.

Acceptance — Aaron Hartzler tells how he gets along with his parents who would rather see him dead than gay.

“Honey, we’re praying for you.”

This is how my mother ends every email she sends me. Typed in italics and peppered with smiling emoticons, Mom’s electronic missives are as precious as she is — as earnest as the Empty Tomb Cake she bakes each spring on Good Friday. An edible replica of the cave where Jesus was buried after dying on the cross for our sins, the Empty Tomb Cake is the standard passion week centerpiece in my childhood home. It is frosted in gray, surrounded by a field of green coconut grass, and finished off with a Hostess Ding-Dong as the stone that was rolled away. On Saturday night, after everyone goes to bed, Mom steals into the kitchen under cover of night and rolls the Hostess Ding-Dong away from the door of the Empty Tomb Cake, then retouches the frosting. On Easter morning Jesus has risen — right there in the middle of the kitchen table.

As sweet as Mom’s loving messages and born-again baked goods appear at face value, there’s a silent threat in “we’re praying for you” that sticks in my craw. I came out to my parents the first time at the age of 19 when I was kicked out of the Bible college where my dad taught. Since then, their ongoing prayers for my “deliverance” from “Satan’s lie of homosexuality” have continued unabated in the presence of my four younger siblings and the unsuspecting wait staffs of Olive Garden restaurants nationwide. Indeed, my parents offer a never-ending stream of supplication to a God they’re certain is testing them with a son who has been blinded to the righteous pursuit of a female partner by the penis-shaped temptation of Satan.

“We’re praying for you” isn’t a harmless afterthought. It’s not a pleasant wish for my general well-being, continued physical health or financial security. No, my mother’s “we’re praying for you” is an italicized baseball bat, a silent plea for God to change her oldest son from something abhorrent and abominable back to the fresh-faced young man who dated the captain of the Bible college cheerleading squad, before it was discovered he was also sleeping with the captain of the boy’s soccer team.

Very Natural Gas — A dairy farm in Indiana goes for recycling in a big way.

Here at one of the largest dairy farms in the country, electricity generated using an endless supply of manure runs the equipment to milk around 30,000 cows three times a day.

For years, the farm has used livestock waste to create enough natural gas to power 10 barns, a cheese factory, a cafe, a gift shop and a maze of child-friendly exhibits about the world of dairy, including a 4D movie theater.

All that, and Fair Oaks Farms was still using only about half of the five million pounds of cow manure it vacuumed up from its barn floors on a daily basis. It burned off the excess methane, wasted energy sacrificed to the sky.

But not anymore.

The farm is now turning the extra manure into fuel for its delivery trucks, powering 42 tractor-trailers that make daily runs to raw milk processing plants in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. Officials from the federal Department of Energy called the endeavor a “pacesetter” for the dairy industry, and said it was the largest natural gas fleet using agricultural waste to drive this nation’s roads.

“As long as we keep milking cows, we never run out of gas,” said Gary Corbett, chief executive of Fair Oaks, which held a ribbon-cutting event for the project this month and opened two fueling stations to the public.

“We are one user, and we’re taking two million gallons of diesel off the highway each year,” he said. “That’s a big deal.”

Doonesbury — Live birth.

Friday, March 29, 2013

Well Regulated

Adam Lanza, the man who attacked Sandy Hook Elementary School in December, was well-armed.

Adam Lanza left a home stuffed with weaponry and carried out the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in a 154-bullet barrage that took less than five minutes, investigators said Thursday in the first detailed account of his surroundings and troubled state of mind.

Search warrants from the second-worst school shooting in American history revealed that the home Lanza shared with his mother in Newtown, Conn., was a veritable arsenal: Authorities found at least nine knives, three Samurai swords, two rifles, 1,600 rounds of ammunition and a 7-foot, wood-handled pole with a blade on one side and a spear on the other.

Authorities also recovered a certificate in Lanza’s name from the National Rifle Association, seven of his journals, drawings that he made and books from the house, including books on living with mental illness.

The warrants offered a thorough look at the environment in which Lanza lived before he shot his mother, Nancy, to death and drove to Sandy Hook on the morning of Dec. 14. Twenty first-graders and six teachers and staff were killed before Lanza shot himself to death with the 155th bullet.

And it will be noted that each of these items was purchased legally.