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May 21st, 2013
thesmithian

‘Too bad that Republicans don’t sing the praises of the First Amendment when the White House is held by the G.O.P. In fact, they do the exact opposite…’

…In fact, they did the exact opposite when the Republican administration does the exact same thing that is now at the center of the Obama scandal involving the Associated Press—that is, seizing phone records of reporters. (Please note: The issue here isn’t whether they are right or wrong. What I’m talking about is the utter hypocrisy of the G.O.P. on this matter.) Let’s take the most important disclosure of a classified program that occurred in my lifetime: the 2005 article in The New York Times that revealed the existence of the program to allow the government to wiretap Americans and others in the United States without a warrant if it was part of a national-security investigation. Somehow, I don’t remember Republicans banging the First Amendment drum when that story came out— instead, they were calling for reporters to be charged with treason, which could have led to them being executed.

bold, ours. more, here.

May 18th, 2013
thesmithian

‘…contrary to the myths that have been built around it, or the use that later politicians want to make of it, Watergate wasn’t about the mistakes of a bureaucracy, it wasn’t a cops and robbers story, or about courageous journalism…’

It was about a pattern of acts by a president that threatened the constitution, the law, and the Bill of Rights. Nothing happening now comes close to that.

more.

May 18th, 2013
thesmithian

The Roberts court has aggressively recalibrated the nation’s laws in the areas of race, guns and political speech—three of the four cases that form the core of…Coyle’s “The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution.”

more.

May 15th, 2013
thesmithian

…[some] may not remember what made Iran-Contra such an extraordinary scandal. The Reagan administration “raised money privately” by selling weapons to a sworn enemy of the United States. Why? Because it wanted to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. And when I say “illegal war,” I mean that quite literally—Congress told the Reagan administration, in no uncertain terms, that Reagan could not send money to the Contras. Period. The Reagan administration, unrestrained by laws and the Constitution, did so anyway, and much of the president’s national security team ended up under indictment.

more.

…[some] may not remember what made Iran-Contra such an extraordinary scandal. The Reagan administration “raised money privately” by selling weapons to a sworn enemy of the United States. Why? Because it wanted to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. And when I say “illegal war,” I mean that quite literally—Congress told the Reagan administration, in no uncertain terms, that Reagan could not send money to the Contras. Period. The Reagan administration, unrestrained by laws and the Constitution, did so anyway, and much of the president’s national security team ended up under indictment.

more.

May 6th, 2013
thesmithian

‘For law enforcement to equate increased religiosity or radicalism with violence isn’t only a bad investigative strategy and arguably unconstitutional…’

…it fundamentally damages the character of society. “To be a radical means to reject the status quo, which in some cases propels society forward…Equating radicalism with terrorism can produce a dampening effect on free expression—either by government or by self-censorship.”

more.

April 29th, 2013
thesmithian
There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting words” those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.

Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942

The fighting words doctrine has been tested numerous times over the last 70 years, losing power with each new decision.

April 3rd, 2013
thesmithian

…there are hundreds of clips, which together have garnered millions of views, of Americans of all ethnicities refusing to comply with inland immigration checks. These checks are conducted by border patrol agents, but it turns out plenty of people think the suspicionless stops are in violation of their constitutional rights.

awesome.

April 3rd, 2013
thesmithian

‘Republican North Carolina state legislators have proposed allowing an official state religion…’

…in a measure that would declare the state exempt from the Constitution and court rulings. The bill, filed…by two GOP lawmakers…and backed by nine other Republicans, says…courts cannot block a state “from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.” The legislation was filed in response to a lawsuit to stop county commissioners in Rowan County from opening meetings with a Christian prayer…

more.

March 19th, 2013
thesmithian

Police have made about 5 million stops of New Yorkers in the past decade, mostly black and Hispanic men. The trial, set to begin Monday, will include testimony from a dozen people who say they were targeted because of their race and from police whistleblowers who say they were forced into making slipshod stops by bosses…“When we say stop, question and frisk, we’re not talking about a brief inconvenience on the way to work or school,” said Darius Charney of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the lead attorney on the case. “We’re talking about a frightening, humiliating experience that has happened to many folks.”

more on the federal civil rights trial, here.

+++++

art: from this project.

March 1st, 2013
thesmithian
When you have in 2012…states making changes to their laws that you can look on their face and see that these changes will make it harder for minorities to have their votes affect the results that they intend, you say that we don’t need [the Voting Rights Act] anymore? Is this some kind of entitlement? Well, the Constitution of the U.S. is an entitlement for everybody.
Congressman James Clyburn (D), South Carolina
February 25th, 2013
thesmithian
This administration has the tools to reach people on their own. They don’t need us as much… [the administration] is undercutting the First Amendment which guarantees a free press through many voices. If they put out their own material…It’s state-run media

CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante

interesting. also to take into consideration is POTUS on local news, magazine and site cover stories, reddit, google hangout, more cover stories, another recent cover story, plus this cover story, this televised forum, this interview w/CNN White House Correspondent … there’s also this question, and this study. and also this, posted earlier. also there is a thing called “investigative reporting.”

February 21st, 2013
thesmithian

By engaging the right on the meaning of the Constitution, Obama has broken new ground. For progressives, he has sketched a fresh template for countering their adversaries’ long-unanswered constitutional narrative.

more.

February 15th, 2013
thesmithian

‘The Republican Party is a presidential election away from extinction…’

If it can’t win the 2016 contest…the party will die. It will die not for reasons of “branding” or marketing or electoral cosmetics but because the party is at odds with the inevitable American trajectory in the direction of liberty, and with its own nature; paradoxically the party of Abraham Lincoln, which once saved the Union and which gives such passionate lip service to constitutionality, has come to embody the values of the Confederacy in its hostility to constitutional federalism and the civil bonds that the founding document codifies. The Republican Party will vanish not because of what its says but because of what it believes, not because of how it presents itself but because of who it is when it thinks no one is looking.

more.

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@danamo

culture is politics. politics is culture.
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