Legal: The Not-So-Wise Latina Lets Loose

Affirmative Action, Law, Race, Racism, The Courts

What happens when the highest court in the land admits to the bench an individual who emotes rather than reasons, and is without the intellectual wherewithal to tell reason from emotion? You get the not-so-wise Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who delivered an unhinged disquisition in favor of institutionalizing affirmative action forever-after.

On Monday, reports John Fund, “the Supreme Court voted six to two to uphold the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), which was passed with support from 58 percent of that state’s voters in 2006. It simply enshrines in Michigan’s constitution that the state should not engage in race discrimination.” (Read “BUSH’S AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AMBUSH” as a refresher.)

But from where Sotomayor is perched, as a confessed recipient of affirmative action (“Sonia SotoSetAsides once admitted that her test scores ‘were not comparable to her colleagues at Princeton and Yale’”), the choice should not be up to Michigan voters.

At 58 pages, her dissent was longer than the opinions of all the other justices combined — and she took the relatively unusual step of reading it passionately from the bench.
“The stark reality is that race still matters,” Sotomayor said. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.” She went on to chastise the majority’s opinion: “My colleagues misunderstand the nature of the injustice worked by” the Michigan amendment.

At least that excuse for a Chief Justice, John Roberts (the man whose clever casuistry gave us Obamacare’s individual mandate), offered a firm rejoinder to this surly woman:

Roberts directly confronted Sotomayor in his own concurring opinion: “It is not ‘out of touch with reality’ to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect . . . that the preferences do more harm than good. To disagree with the dissent’s views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to ‘wish away, rather than confront’ racial inequality. People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.”

More about the career of SotoSetAsides.

State Theft Of Private Property Sets Legal Precedent For More Of The Same

America, Law, Private Property, South-Africa, Taxation, The State

With its monopoly over both law enforcement and “justice,” the state has seen to it that systematic theft serves as legal precedent.

“Long before Cliven Bundy faced down federal agents,” reports Fox News (who else?), “in his dispute with the Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights, fellow Nevada rancher Raymond Yowell, an 84-year-old former Shoshone chief, watched as the BLM seized his herd.”

Adding to that, since 2008 they’ve taken his money as well — in the form of a piece of his Social Security checks.

Yowell’s 132 head of cattle had grazed for decades on the South Fork Western Shoshone Indian Reservation in northeastern Nevada until 2002, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — the same agency at odds with Bundy — seized them. The federal agency sold the cattle at auction and used the proceeds to pay off the portion of back grazing fees it claimed Yowell owed. Once the cattle was sold, the agency sent Yowell a bill for the outstanding balance, some $180,000. They’ve been garnishing his monthly Social Security checks since 2008 to satisfy the debt Yowell says he does not owe.

Tommy Henderson is another victim of state plunder of private property:

The Bureau of Land Management [BLM] took 140 acres of his property and didn’t pay him one cent.
Now, they want to use his case as precedent to seize land along a 116-mile stretch of the river …

In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” the issue of land grabs by the ANC, in South Africa, was addressed extensively, down to the heart-breaking mutilation of livestock by state-supported squatters, in the effort to hasten the ethnic cleansing of the Afrikaner farmer. The parallels to what is underway in the USA are greater than even I had foreseen.

Drone On The Attack

Foreign Policy, Justice, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

GOP TV (Fox News) correctly frames delays and exemptions in the implementation of Zero Care as a pre-election ploy. However, the drone-in-chief’s deadly show of force in Yemen, at a crucial time during an election cycle: now that’s all above board. Standard operating procedure. No hidden agenda there.

Obama’s illegal and naturally illicit drone attacks on Yemen are craven and far from ‘successful.’ Fox News cops to at least six civilians killed in the course of taking out “nine suspected Al Qaeda militants.” That’s an almost 50 percent failure rate, if you take on faith the tack offered by those operating outside the law (natural and other). Yes, you’d have to believe the Obama administration that individuals who’ve not been afforded due process of law are guilty. And you’d have to have faith in the same goons that the other casualties are necessary “collateral damage.”

I don’t. Nor should you.

Antiwar.com offers what is likely a more accurate account:

A barrage of US drone strikes across Yemen’s south and east has entered its third day today, and shows no signs of slowing down, as the latest US attacks targeted the Shabwa Province.
With so many of the attacks occurring against remote villages in the hills of Yemen’s rural interior, the death toll is difficult to ascertain, but at least 68 are believed to be dead over the past three days.
Yemeni officials say the strikes are targeting “top leader” of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and that they have high hopes they may kill one such leader, but they can’t confirm anything of the sort so far.
Indeed, while all of the official statements from Yemen have termed the slain “militants” or at the very least “suspects,” not a single person has been identified at all so far officially, and many civilians were confirmed among the slain on Saturday.

To listen to other US mainstream media, it’s hard to ascertain who exactly is responsible for raining drones down on the southern and eastern parts of Yemen. The passive voice is deployed to conceal culpability.

“A ‘massive and unprecedented’ assault against al Qaeda fighters in Yemen appears to be targeting high-level operatives of the terrorist network,” writes CNN. In reading the article @ CNN.com it’s near impossible to determine for sure whodunit.

Origination-Clause Argument Against Zero-Care

Constitution, Healthcare, Law

If—or rather when—a new constitutional challenge to Obamacare fails, this won’t be because Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services lacks merit, but because we are governed by a tripartite tyranny of colluding quislings and their armies of extra-constitutional commissions and agencies, in whose legislation The People have no say.

Indeed, on May 8, 2014, an interesting and rather original oral argument is scheduled to be heard by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in the case launched against United States Department of Health & Human Services. The Plaintiff is the Pacific Legal Foundation. Here is a Summary of the PLF’s case:

Pacific Legal Foundation has launched a new constitutional cause of action against the federal Affordable Care Act. The ACA imposes a charge on Americans who fail to buy health insurance — a charge that the U.S. Supreme Court recently characterized as a federal tax. PLF’s amended complaint alleges that this purported tax is illegal because it was introduced in the Senate rather than the House, as required by the Constitution’s Origination Clause for new revenue-raising bills (Article I, Section 7).

The Origination Clause argument is part of an amended complaint filed in PLF’s existing lawsuit against the ACA, Sissel v. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, pending before Judge Beryl A. Howell, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

PLF’s Sissel lawsuit was on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court considered the challenge to the ACA from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and 26 states, in NFIB v. Sebelius. As initially filed, PLF’s Sissel lawsuit targeted the ACA’s individual mandate to buy health insurance as a violation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8).

MORE.