Category: Politics As Usual

Imagine that

~ susie

When you buy a judge, he stays bought!

A study released on Tuesday by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy identified a “statistically significant” relationship between ballooning campaign contributions by business interest to state supreme court candidates and pro-business decisions by those courts.

Researchers studied more than 2,345 business-related state high court opinions between 2010 and 2012 and campaign contributions during that same time to sitting state high court judges. As the percentage of contributions from business groups went up, the probability of a pro-business vote by judges — defined as any decision that made a business better off — went up as well.

The study’s author was Joanna Shepherd, a professor at Emory University School of Law. During a teleconference, she said the findings demonstrated that state court elections were becoming increasingly politicized and expensive. She pointed to surveys showing concern within the judiciary and among the general public about the influence of outside dollars on the courts.

“The more campaign contributions from business interests the justices receive, the more likely they are to vote for business litigants when they appear before them in court,” she concluded in her report.

Your voice of centrist reason

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson really puts professional twerp David Brooks in his place:

David Brooks, in a column on what he takes to be the inner life of Edward Snowden, the N.S.A. leaker, has a long list of those he believes Snowden has betrayed. Among them are “his employers,” Booz Allen and the C.I.A., who “took a high-school dropout and offered him positions with lavish salaries. He is violating the honor codes of all those who enabled him to rise.” He also “betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed.”

This is an odd perspective. The founders created the Constitution in part so that a solitary voice could be heard, whatever strictures of power surround him. More than that, they would not want a twenty-nine-year-old to feel so overcome with gratitude for his social betters—so humbled that they had noticed him—that he would be silent. The “honor code” that Brooks claims was violated is perhaps nothing more than condescension mitigated by social obligation. People with graduate degrees thought that giving someone not in their circle a chance was proof of their decency; by getting his hands dirty, Snowden not only broke whatever non-disclosure agreements he was asked to sign but intruded on their sense of their own goodness. By David Brooks’s logic, the next time they put aside the résumé of someone who attended a community college, it’s really Edward Snowden’s fault.

And she ends:

The press is not among the elements of civil society that Brooks lists; and yet it is the one to which Snowden turned. He did not drop his documents from a helicopter, and neither did the reporters, who are often there when what Brooks might regard as less crass safeguards fail. Whistle-blowing and investigative reporting can be loud, and grating, and necessary.

Reading Brooks’s laments about Snowden and “the fraying of the social fabric,” I found myself thinking about Norman Rockwell, if not in the same way Brooks might. (In 2008, after what he saw as a rhetorical triumph by Sarah Palin, Brooks wrote, “Somewhere in heaven Norman Rockwell is smiling.”) The image that came to mind was one of the panels from Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” series: the one on freedom of speech, in which a man stands up at what looks like a town meeting. He might be about twenty-nine. He is wearing a work jacket, so maybe he’s a high-school drop-out. There are better dressed people in the hall. And they are listening to him.

Continue reading “Your voice of centrist reason” →

Tell Me What Is Being Done In My Name…

~ Boohunney

Charles Pierce:

OK, let us persist in the notion that I am an American citizen. Let us persist in the notion that I am the citizen of a self-governing political commonwealth. Let us persist in the notion that I have a say — and important and equal say — in the operation of my government here and out in the world. Let us persist in the notion that, in America, the people rule. If we persist in these notions — and, if we don’t, what’s the fking point, really? — then there is only one question that I humbly ask of my government this week.

Please, if it’s not too damn much trouble, can you tell me what’s being done in my name?

Moral Mondays

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

The things going on in North Carolina are just awful, but the citizens aren’t taking it lying down:

Moral Monday organizers say they’re expecting more than 1,000 people at this evening’s protest at the state legislative building, marking what could be the largest protest yet.

In the run-up to the weekly Moral Monday demonstration, schoolchildren will wheel red wagons filled with 100 pounds of petitions to Gov. Pat McCrory’s office this afternoon. The petitions, which represent 16,000 signatures, call on McCrory to keep the cap on class sizes and oppose private school vouchers.

Former congressman and state Superintendent Bob Etheridge is expected to be among those joining the schoolchildren in the petitions delivery. The plan is for the petitions to be delivered at 4:15 p.m., followed by a protest on Halifax Mall at 5 p.m.

[…] After last week’s demonstration, McCrory called for an end to the Moral Monday protests, calling them “unlawful.” At his party’s NC GOP convention in Charlotte Saturday, McCrory said he was not intimidated by the protests.

“They should not be blocking the business of North Carolina,” McCrory said Tuesday. “They are allowed to protest, but sometimes I think we congratulate people for blocking things and being unlawful.”

Quote of the day

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Peter Scheer of Truthdig:

As a senator, Barack Obama was vehemently opposed to the abuses of power by the Bush administration. He rejected the “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand.” If President Obama changed his mind about that, it seems to me there was a perfectly appropriate time to say so, and that would have been, at the latest, before the 2012 election.

Some Georgia Tea-pubs embracing solar power

~ Boohunney ~ 2 Comments

An Atlanta Tea Party group is beginning to question the reluctance of Georgia Power to expand its solar capabilities.

Renewable energy advocates and leaders of the Atlanta Tea Party are taking on utility giant Southern Co., and its subsidiary Georgia Power, over resisting the call to expand its development of solar energy.

As Debbie Dooley, co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party explained in an interview with Climate Progress, the group’s interest in the debate is quite simple: ‘The free market has been one of the founding principles of the Tea Party since it began and a monopoly is not a free market.’

Electric consumers in Georgia are supplied by monopolies given in designated areas of the state by the Public Service Commission.

Currently, Georgia Power is under no PSC mandate to incorporate solar power. Too many clouds, Tom Fanning, CEO of Southern Co., the parent of Georgia Power, recently said. ‘It’s time is not here, but we’re looking at it.’ ….

‘We have to diversify our energy portfolio. We can no longer be dependent, and have all our eggs in one basket,’ said Debbie Dooley, state coordinator of Atlanta Tea Party Patriots.

It seems to go against conventional wisdom that Tea-pubs would support solar after the outcry of the Solyndra affair. Well, for one thing, Solyndra technologies depended on solar cells manufactured from copper. At the time of its failure, the copper market was sky high making the copper panels unaffordable. (Can you say “free market.) But, with silicon technologies becoming more efficient, the cost of silicon based panels have dropped 75% in the past 10 years.

Dooley is also planning to push legislation to break up current monopolies.

‘She plans to continue her efforts by pushing for upcoming legislation that would allow private companies to set up solar farms and feed their energy into Georgia Power’s grid, continuing to put pressure on Georgia Power for cost overruns at its Vogtle nuclear power plant, and possibly even challenging the law that grants monopoly rights to utilities.’

It’s kind of one of those “hell has just frozen over” things, I guess. I would love to see more solar so Georgia can reduce its dependence on the many coal firing plants around the state. If the Tea-pubs want to support solar power on a “free market” basis, well, I’ll be happy we got to the same place on two different roads.