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The Pen: The Supreme Court 5, Baking Fresh Fact Pretzels Every Day

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G_j Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-11-10 11:08 AM
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The Pen: The Supreme Court 5, Baking Fresh Fact Pretzels Every Day
This is the fourth in our series of critical analyses of the many
twisted aspects of the decision by five judicial radicals on the
Supreme Court to throw our democracy over the side of the ship of
corporate state.

But first a quick shout out to all you of you who are YouTube
videographers, otherwise please jump down a couple paragraphs.

We're having a contest to see to see who can submit the most creative
YouTube video on the theme of "I'M THE PEOPLE", because apparently
five members of the Supreme Court can't tell the difference between
natural citizens and disembodied, fictitious business entities.

"I'M THE PEOPLE" Video Rules & Submission Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/the_people.php

The top 10 winners will each get their choice of one of our
progressive advocacy gifts, PLUS the grand prize winner by your votes
will get a Dennis Kucinich pocket constitution, personally
autographed by our hero Dennis Kucinich himself!! Make a video, even
if it's just you speaking to the camera, and get your videos in so we
can get the voting function going. Additional prizes for videos with
the most YouTube views on their own!

And now we continue our examination of the factual funny business
that now purports to pass as a Supreme Court decision, again with
specific citations to pages of the opinion itself.

We have already discussed how Kennedy, writing for the slim rogue
majority, made his OWN finding of fact, in the absence of any actual
trial record finding in this case or any other, that PACs were
inherently too burdensome to even require corporations to try to obey
those rules. But there is little factual commentary in his opinion
that is not at least as specious.

Still on this same point of the regulations on PACs, he tries to find
support by arguing, "This might explain why fewer than 2,000 of the
millions of corporations in this country have PACs." (opinion p. 22)

Oh, really? That "MIGHT" be the reason? Well, we can think of lots of
OTHER explanations that "might" be true. Lots of corporations "might"
be too busy running their own businesses to be working also to
pervert the results of our elections. Or maybe they "might" find that
it is easier to bribe members of Congress directly on specific issues
through lobbyists than fool with PACs.

But because Kennedy's own pet premise "might" be a reason, that for
him becomes the only possible unilateral conclusion, to try to
justify upending 100 years of recognition by both the Court and
Congress that corporate influence on elections must be regulated.
This is nothing short of a fraud on critical thinking.

As further justification for playing wrecking ball with all
precedent, Kennedy all by his lonesome found as a matter of fact that
the makers of the Hillary Hit Piece Video were greatly prejudiced in
having to wait two years to prevail on their claim (opinion p. 17).
Which claim? The one they ABANDONED (opinion p. 12) because not even
they believed the Supreme Court would tear up the law in such a
radical way? Why, my, my, if only they had suspected, they would have
broken the law even more up front.

Again and again Kennedy smears and deliberately confuses the
difference between real citizens and faceless, fictitious business
entities, using expressions like "accountable to the people" and "the
right of citizens" and "voters must be free" and "associations of
citizens" (opinion pp. 23, 25, 33). His appalling and original (with
him) finding of fact that corporations are in essence nothing more
than an 800 pound gorilla version of the voice of the people is
transparently ridiculous on its face.

Indeed, even with regards to corporations the majority pretends that
all this must be done to protect mom and pop, one man shop operations
(opinion pp. 38-39). How further unleashing the largest behemoths in
any way levels the playing field for the little guy (as opposed to
tilting it even more) is a mystery intentionally left unsolved by
Kennedy. In fact, by this opinion all that an obscenely rich
individual would have to do to evade all other election financing
laws would be to individually incorporate (itself an abuse of the
intent of chartering of corporations, if the truth be known), a judge
created loophole as big as the state of Delaware by its own terms.

But perhaps the most blatant flight in the face of reality in the
opinion is his finding of fact that the First Amendment does not
distinguish treatment for "media corporations". (opinion p. 36) If
Anthony M. Kennedy had ever actually read the First Amendment one
time it could not have escaped even his horse blindered attention
that freedom "of the PRESS" is addressed as an entirely SEPARATE,
distinct and additional issue from "freedom of speech" (for the
people). The very statute he presumes to overturn and trash, which
did make such a distinction, he slams as being an "admission" of its
"invalidity" for carving such an exception.

And having arrived at the false fact, again entirely his own
invention from the bench, that there is no way to distinguish a true
news organization from any old unrelated business monolith, Kennedy
all but accuses anyone relying on the First Amendment of being
AGAINST free speech for even making a distinction for the "press".
(opinion p. 37) Another fact pretzel courtesy of baker Kennedy, hot
and fresh from the oven!

It should be noted that this kind of loopy factual thinking is
endemic among the Supreme Court 5. Read, if you can stomach its
snarkiness, this from Scalia's concurring opinion (p. 2), sniping at
the historical review in the dissent of Justice Stevens:

"Despite the corporation-hating quotations the dissent has dredged
up, it is far from clear that by the end of the 18th century
corporations were despised. If so, how came there to be so many of
them."

What's Scalia's logical fact determination process, that despised
business entities would altruistically limit their procreation (like
real natural persons of course), in the absence of any actual
constraining regulation, by virtue of KNOWING they were despised? If
these five were not in the aggressive process of drastically
dismantling our democracy such reasoning would be laughable. Maybe we
need birth control for bad corporations, seeing as how they're
persons too and all.

But here we are out of time already again. So please stay tuned for
the next installment in this series when we will start to tackle
Kennedy's gross misreading of all manner of case precedents, to
conclusively demonstrate they stand for no such thing as he asserts.

And remember, if you haven't gotten your request in yet, you can get
a "Corporations Are NOT The People" bumper sticker or an "Impeach The
Supreme Court 5" bumper sticker by just going to the page link below
and we will send you one for no charge, not even shipping.

Supreme Court Protest Bumper Stickers:
http://www.peaceteam.net/bumper_stickers.php

We'll have the second printing sometime next week and we are shipping
as fast as we can, so get your requests in if you want one or both.

And be sure to submit both action pages on these issues. First we
MUST have a Constitutional Amendment to repair the grave damage done
by this radical ruling.

Corporations Are NOT The People Action Page:
http://www.millionfaxmarch.com

But even beyond that, The Supreme Court 5, Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia,
Alito and Thomas must be impeached and removed from the bench, before
they demolish with any more of our jurisprudence.

Impeach The Supreme Court 5 Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1030.php

The links just above are the regular action links for those NOT on
Facebook. The Facebook versions of these same action pages are

Corporations Are NOT The People:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1029

Impeach The Supreme Court 5:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1030

And this is the Twitter reply for the Corporations Are NOT The People
action

@cxs #p1029

And this is the Twitter reply for the Impeach The Supreme Court 5
action

@cxs #p1030

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.millionfaxmarch.com/in.htm
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Richard Steele Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-11-10 11:11 AM
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G_j Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-11-10 01:14 PM
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