I’m of two minds about President Obama’s shout out for Senate rules reform in his State of the Union speech. I’m glad he brought attention to the need for reform, but mostly I’m very disappointed he proposed to eliminate the filibuster only for appointments and not everything else.

Democratic House lawmakers in Indiana walked out again to protest a right-to-work bill, after there were signs of a deal on a vote this week. Republicans in the House approved $1,000-a-day fines for the lawmakers. Understand that in Indiana, legislators only make about $23,000 a year.

The President is making a distinction between nominees who the various agencies can do without for a spell and nominees whose seating is crucial to the functioning of the agency.

The key is the PATRIOT Act’s extension of “material support for terrorism” to include associational and speech crimes, even where the defendants had no intention of supporting violence. In Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder (2010), the Supreme Court denied a First Amendment defense to the terror prosecution of a charity whose offence entailed funding workshops encouraging non-violence in Turkey (in the same Term that the Supreme Court held that corporations do enjoy a First Amendment right to buy elections).

In a stinging report, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released their findings of a two-year investigation into Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, showing that he unfairly targeted Latinos and discriminated against them at the expense of other crimes in his jurisdiction, including sexual assault crimes.

This nifty holiday card is being circulated by activist Saint Teresa Stone–yes, that’s her real, birth certificated, government name–one of the bright lights in the Los Angeles underground of punk rock, politics and vintage pleasures, concurrent and oft co-mingled streams that erupt from the same deep underground wellspring of desire, passion and joy. And what [...]

I am not the government. I am not the state. I am not capitalism.

I am the 99%.

Mayor Bloomberg has declared that a tent is not Constitutionally protected, which rules out tents as free speech zones. Last night, police threatened to take down the medical tent at OWS, but the Occupiers, joined by Jesse Jackson, apparently talked them out it.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told a crowd in Northbrook that he would like to see the Senate rules changed so that if a minority wanted to filibuster to prevent a vote on the bill, they would need to actually continuously talk on the Senate floor. Why not just majority rules?

I have become the exemplar of Obama Derangement Syndrome with a Friday post about the White House starting a mini-war in Africa. It was front-paged on Saturday and caused a bit of debate. So let me make some additional remarks.