Completely Unnecessary

I have too much packing to blog - you may have noticed - so I’m reposting Jen Marshall’s tips for all those damn judges on your Chicago/Cook County ballots!

Greetings all my Cook County friends!!!

As you well know, there will be way more than just Presidential nominees on the ballot on Nov 4th.
Here’s what you’ll be voting for:

• Proposal Call for Constitutional Convention: ‘to establish a recall for elected officials.”
• President
• Illinois U.S. Senator
• U.S. Representative
• State Senator
• State Representative
• Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioners (Vote for 3)
• State’s Attorney
• Clerk of the Circuit Court
• Recorder of Deeds
• Board of Review
• Judge of the State Supreme Court, Appellate Court & Circuit Court.

General Ballot Info

http://www.chicagoelections.com/

Judges

[Information's at the] Chicago Bar Association. [fixed!] You’ll find a PDF voter’s guide to the judicial nominees. Read about the evaluation process and judge for yourself whether it is valid or not. The CBA puts in a lot of work to determine who is and is not qualified, and I think its a great service. You can even print up a pocket voter’s guide to take to the polls with you.

There is a bit more info, and a list of further NOs in [this Sun Times article] as well…I tend to agree with the author in that if a reputable association recommends voting against a judge, I’ll do it.

Also check out: www.voteforjudges.org.

Water Reclamation District

[The Sun Times has some recommendations]

Constitutional Convention

I found a great article by Greg Harris on this issue here.

Of all the research I did on this issue, most were heavily leaning towards a yes vote, but Harris does a nice job of simplifying why a NO vote makes more sense. To me, anyway.

All the things that need ‘fixing’, can be done through amendments, not re-writing the damn thing!

Early Voting Sites
http://www.chicagoelections.com/page.php?id=9

Ok, that’s all I have for now. Hopefully this helps someone out there…of course, most of this is fairly opinionated, so you’re free to say ‘piss off’ as well.

Voting is so damn exciting (and if you know me, you know I’m not kidding)!

X,
Jen

X,
Brie

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• Jeremy Karpen for IL 39th District State Representative
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Palin’s widely anticipated stuff up on Supreme Court cases aired tonight.

The governor believes Roe v Wade should be left to the states because she’s ‘a Federalist’, but also believes there’s an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution.

I’ll leave that contradiction aside because I don’t care about Palin’s stance on abortion (and her verbal roulette in that clip probably doesn’t explain it that well anyway).

The anticipation had to do with Couric’s follow up. Palin notably couldn’t think of any other Supreme Court cases with which she disagreed - other than nameless ones that should be left to the states.

But as Jezebel commenter, lacey in ak, points out, at least one decision should have occurred to the governor. Perhaps Palin might have remembered that she filed an amicus brief in Exxon v Baker and then released a statement complaining about the decision.

That last part happened in June.

In other news, in the Senate today the bailout was strangely attached to the Paul Wellstone Mental Health Bill. Ezra Klein explains:

Tax bills have to originate in the House of Representatives. But the current thinking is that the Senate should pass a bailout bill to increase pressure on the House. So they needed to find some piece of legislation that had already passed the House but had not yet passed the Senate.

The 25 Nay votes are a strange mishmash of Senators from both sides of the aisle. It’s probably not often that Russ Feingold finds himself voting with Brownback, Sessions and Inhofe. (Also means that Feingold voted against the Wellstone bill, which must have killed him.) Dole made a bid to hang onto her Senate seat with her ‘no’ vote - who knows if it’ll work.

And, finally, the corruption trial of Senator Ted Sevens (R-AK) continues apace. Today, friend and renovator, Bill Allen, testified that while Stevens asked for an invoice, it was clear that Allen should never bill the senator for work done to ‘the chalet’.

Apparently Allen and Stevens were such close friends that they:

used to go to “boot camp” in the desert Southwest - where they would walk around, eating little and drinking only wine, “trying to get some pounds off.” [ADN via Mudflats]

I have no idea.

(Sounds pretty awesome though…)

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It’s just day one of the corruption trial against Senator Ted ‘NO!’ Stevens (R-AK),* but it’s already showing signs of being my favorite thing to happen this year.

Stevens is charged with seven counts of filing false statements, the majority of which surround nearly $200,000 in renovations to his home that seems to have gone unpaid by the senator.

Corruption, you say? Not according to Stevens:

In his opening statement, Mr. Stevens’s lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, offered an elaborate counternarrative. It was a “devious” Mr. Allen who did lots of extra work on the house and misled the Stevenses into believing they had paid for all the work. Mr. Allen is expected to be the principal prosecution witness.

Mr. Sullivan also suggested he would argue that Mr. Stevens’s wife may be responsible for any confusion about the renovation bills.
…
“Catherine ran the financial part of the renovation,” he said. “Ted devoted all of his time and energy to what he had always done” serving in the Senate.

I hate it when people come to my house, jack it up and put another floor underneath it! But it’s when they outfit the whole thing, put on a garage and decks, and then ‘deviously’ never bill bill me for any of it when I really get mad!

That is just un-American, sir! Do you agree with that kind of activity, Senator?

Stevens Says No!

[That was a lot of work for a rather lackluster result. Le sigh.]

The trial wraps up just before the election, at which point Stevens will get jail time or his widely-anticipated whupping at the hands of Democratic challenger, Mark Begich.

Bonus points for throwing your wife under the bus, Ted.

* - I could have gone Ted ‘Series of Tubes’ Stevens, but that meme is kind of overdone these days.

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Senators Feingold and Dodd have delayed the Senate vote on the bill that would grant immunity to the telecom companies for their role in the warrantless wiretapping.

In December, Obama:

unequivocally oppose[d] giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies and has cosponsored Senator Dodd’s efforts to remove that provision from the FISA bill. Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect.

The situation today is somewhat different, Obama saying:

“Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president, I will carefully monitor the program,” Obama said in a statement hours after the House approved the legislation 293-129.

Glenn Greenwald and Keith Olbermann are screaming at each other across the interwebs, the latter seeming to suggest that a President Obama would be able to take advantage of the poorly written bill to get the telecoms.

That’s not a good enough answer. Aside from the fact that Obama hasn’t stated this ’secret plan’ as his reason for supporting the bill, Greenwald’s argument that no political leader should be given that much blind faith is compelling. Blind faith is what the Right gave Bush for - well - about seven years.

Granted, I’m no legal scholar, but from everything I’ve read, it’s a bad bill that erodes Fourth Amendment protections. Secret Plan or no, it’s time to restrict the power of the executive. I like Obama a lot, but I still want him to have far less power than Bush has claimed.

Obama’s promise to make sure that he doesn’t abuse his power is not a reason to vote for a bad bill. Bush promised to ‘carefully monitor’ all sorts of things and has paved our lovely little road to hell.

Which brings me to my point. I’m in the position of not only being an Obama presidential supporter, but also an Obama senatorial constituent- as are a goodly number of those to read this blog (thanks Google Analytics).

Senator Obama can be contacted here. Tell him to stick to his (December) guns on the FISA bill and not to get involved in political expediency. Make sure to check the box asking for a reply.

You can also call the Chicago office on (312) 886-3506 or the DC Office on (202) 224-2854.

Two weeks ago, Obama demonstrated that Democrats can and should push back on issues of national security. We don’t need to run to the center on this one either.

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I know I’m behind the times; on the upside, I know far more about Australian irrigation, catchment levels and the Murray-Darling scheme than I’d ever hoped to learn.

Anyway, onto Justice Kennedy, who reasserted himself as my favorite Supreme Court justice after a lengthly period on my shit list. Writing the Opinion (.pdf) in Boumediene v. Bush (the case that gave Gitmo detainees their rights back) he said:

Although the United States has maintained complete and uninterrupted control of Guantanamo for over 100 years, the Government’s view is that the Constitution has no effect there, at least as to noncitizens, because the United States disclaimed formal sovereignty in its 1903 lease with Cuba. The Nation’s basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say “what the law is.”

I feel that ‘Snap!’ doesn’t properly represent the the six years of illegality under which these detainees have been held.

Kennedy first won his way into my heart via his Opinion in 1993’s Church of the Lukumi Babalu-Aye v. City of Hialeah:

Our review confirms that the laws in question were enacted by officials who did not understand, failed to perceive, or chose to ignore the fact that their official actions violated the Nation’s essential commitment to religious freedom… No one suggests, and on this record it cannot be maintained, that city officials had in mind [as the target of their ordinances] a religion other than Santería.

I might not always agree with him, but the man does not mince words, which I respect more than most things. The Hialeah ruling is like series of uppercuts to the judge below him - awesome.

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First of all - yay! CA’s Supreme Court upheld the right of same-sex couples to marry. Awesome news, especially in light of previous setbacks in the courts for gay-rights advocates.

Surprising no one, anti-gay activists are upset and moving to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November. (For his part, Governor Schwarzenegger said he would not support an amendment to overturn the court’s ruling.)

The court cited an 1948 ruling overturning a ban on interracial marriage, noting that all citzens must be treated as equal under California law. This doesn’t sit well with anti-gay activist and lawyer, Robert Tyler:

“Where is the court going to rationally limit marriage if its not a union between a male and female?” said Mr. Tyler. “There is no evidence to establish that a homosexual lifestyle is an immutable characteristic such as race.”

Um… that’s interesting. So race is genetic and homosexuality a lifestyle/construct. I was under the impression that current thinking was just about completely the opposite. I mean, I know homosexuality is always going to be a ‘lifestyle’ for these guys, but I’m sure even Mr Tyler has bi/tri/etc.-racial friends.

So good luck to Mr Tyler, but even better luck to the thousands of happy couples who will be able to marry just 30 short days from now.

Gay Couples Rejoice at Ruling [NYT]

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Exhibit A: SCOTUS’ recent 6-3 vote upholding Indiana’s voter ID law. The law requires residents to produce a state or federal ID to vote. (Free IDs are provided by the state, but require an original birth certificate or passport.)

Exhibit B: Bill progressing through Missouri that would require proof of citizenship from voters. Residents would be required to produce an original birth certificate, naturalization papers or a passport. (Missouri is also recently advanced a bill similar to the one upheld by the Supreme Court.

Exhibit C: Justice John Paul Stevens (88), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (75), Justice Antonin Scalia (72), Justice Anthony Kennedy (71), Justice Stephen Breyer (69), Justice David Souter (68).

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Eight Werribee teenagers pleaded guilty today to sex crimes involving a 17-year-old girl. For their plea, the will variously receive ‘rehabilitation’, supervision, and probation. They’re not going to get any jail time because boys will be boys, right?

I mean, all they did was: set her hair on fire three times, urinate on her, throw her clothes into the river, poke her with a stick, drop a lighted cigarette down her pants, and force her to perform oral sex as she pleaded with them. Oh, and also videotape it all and burn it onto DVDs that they then sold for $5 at local schools.

Why should these upstanding young men receive jail time?

Boys point to the girl, calling her “the victim” before laughing mockingly. One boy walks to the lens and declares: “What the f—, she’s the ugliest thing I have ever seen.”

Did I mention she has mild developmental disabilities?

The boys also filmed themselves dropping flares on a homeless man amongst other typical teen behaviors like making chlorine bombs.

Don’t worry, some of their parents knew, and clips were available on YouTube for at least some time.

Sentences get a bit tougher if you’re an adult. A man who kidnapped and raped a woman got a whole eight years for the act, despite his contention that a bite from a funnel-web spider’s what made him do it.

Unfortunately, there are no funnel-webs in Victoria, so the boys couldn’t use that as an excuse.

Good thing they didn’t need one.

Links:
DVD Teens Escape Jail Term [The Age]
Outcry Over Teenage Girl’s Assult Recorded on DVD [The Age]
Spider Bite No Excuse for Rape, Court Says [Yahoo News]

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I generally prefer keeping bigots like Fred Phelps’ Westboro baptist church* off the radar. Any media presence, be it praise, derision, or just insanity, fuels the fire of these kinds of people.

It’s like the KKK - I respect their right to exist, but I’m down with their marginalization. Or like dog training; they’re not totally rational, so the best way to stop their bad behavior is through calm ignoring.

So view this post instead as a shout out to the American justice system, which today ordered Westboro to pay $11 million to the father of a dead soldier. Those familiar with the church will no doubt guess why - they protested the kid’s funeral because we’re all going to hell and Iraq is about gays. Or something.

Anyway, according to the judge, the award “far exceeds the net worth of the defendants,” which sounds like good news to me. Even posterboard and tempra paint can be pricey when you’ve got $11 mil to pay back.

* - I’m not using proper nouns for those two words because I think the church perverts the teachings of Baptists beyond recognition as part of the faith. That’s my own personal opinion, though - others would probably disagree.

Church ordered to pay $10.9 million for funeral protest [CNN]

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