Montana Ruling Trips Up Main Stream Media

If a court makes a ruling in the backwoods and no one willing to talk, is it still a ruling?


Main stream media (MSM) refuses to report on Montana's home run hit in the ninth ending with two outs and runners in scoring position. If you belong to the 99%, I take great pleasure in revealing the game ball we call Democracy that went bounding over the park fence.

The Montana Supreme Court upheld a ban on direct corporate spending in political campaigns, rejecting Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission ruling on Friday December 30, the last working day of 2011.

In the case of Montana, or more accurately its voters, "clearly had a compelling interest to enact the challenged statute in 1912,” wrote Chief Justice Mike McGrath for the Court’s the majority opinion. At that time the State of Montana and its government were operating under a mere shell of legal authority, and the real social and political power was wielded by powerful corporate managers to further their own business interests.

The Montana court agreed that past political corruption gives Montana a compelling interest in regulating corporate spending. They also pointed out that corporations can form voluntary political action committees - subject to disclosure requirements - as a way to remain politically active.

To reverse the Montana Supreme Court, however, the justices would have to extract themselves from a quandary of their own making, noted professor Rick Hasen of the University of California-Irvine Law School on his popular Election Law Blog. "If the Court were being honest in Citizens United," Hasen wrote, "it would have said something like: We don't care whether or not independent spending can or cannot corrupt; the First Amendment trumps this risk of corruption."

But by "dress[ing] up its value judgment ... as a factual statement," continued Hasen, the U.S. Supreme Court must now explain why the Montana Supreme Court was not correct to consider the factual record when it came to justifying corporate spending limits in campaign finance laws.

How the Citizens United majority will affect Montana's factual record remains hypothetical.

Yet, as with the Nationl Defense Authorization Act, the news falls on deaf ears, if you to listen to network television in America. All news channels talking heads primarily focused discussion on Iowa Caucus news, prefering to dance on lethal topics like abortion and dead issues as a Newt Gingrich presidential bid. Incredibly, what was left from discussion was the indefinate detention of citizens without trial or - as in this case - an unprecedented lower court ruling thrown like a log onto a fire at the beginning of election week.

As of Tuesday, January 3rd 2012, hits for 'Montana Supreme Court' in the last 7 days of news revealed only one reputable publication, The Raw Story, having bothered to cover the ruling. Other hits turned up bloggers on alter.net and a handful of assorted links. Virtually all hits carried an identical lead in, sadly indicating the same story was copied over with very little re-write.

This writer had discovered the Montana ruling through Digg.com, a user-generated news website which permits anyone to submit any story or url, regardless of who the content belongs to. In this case, the submitter was FreakoutNation, who prompted 397 diggers to dig the story into the websites Top 10 News Story listings - inappropriately titled "The Bitch Slap Heard Around The World" - not to be confused as indecent or offensive. The action of the Montana court is quite back-handed by jurisdictional standards, and serves a volley to the partisan Supreme Court of the United States.

What was inappropriate was that the slap was hardly heard from around the world. In fact, the main stream media Has been mute, mostly because every lawyer in the country has a differing opinion on where the case will next turn.

As the G.O.P. caucuses blow millions of dollars in negative character assassination campaigns while poisoning the minds of voters both local and nationwide, we are reminded once again of our brothers and sisters who have lost their homes, who are jobless, who have families to support. They are not in their current position because they are lazy or or unintelligent - they simply did not get the same equal opportunities the rest of us did. These people, whole families, whether couch-surfing or huddled en-mass in the bitter cold, are not going to benefit from the millions of dollars that are bursting from the coffers each candidate. Iowa has a homeless shelter, a 99% movement and has groups of people who are not corporations and who are neither heard from nor represented in the Republican caucuses. The sight off the poor are not reflective of the image the Republican caucuses wish to show America on prime time television. After all, this show belongs to the Job-Killing Republican party, and as with the Rose Bowl Octopus on the January 1st, the huddled masses will go unseen here in Iowa tonight.

As red America drinks the Republican kool-aid, it's the bloggoshere wherein lie the true information heroes. Main stream news outlets suck in every dime of campaign money for the fair trade of 'air time', selling empty blocks of silence where spin doctor's practice the fine art of mind manipulation while employing demographic messages which contain false-truths.

In 2008, Barack Obama spent $750 million dollars to become President of the United States. Factoring in all possibilities of where money could possibly go, one can only surmise that nearly every penny of it went to political advertising, minus some cab fare. The 2008 Presidential election did not permit corporate spending because Citizens United vs. FEC of 2008 failed to affect those races.

But 2010 bore a whole new animal, when suddenly corporate spending on political ads no longer required disclosure. Personal campaign funds across the board were emptied for campaign advertising, but what made the year remarkable was the G.O.P.'s unusual comeback in Congress.

Just when dismal polls shadowed forecasts of any Republican seats to be gained, negative ad campaigning combined with a surge in media growth had resulted in heavy losses for the Democrats. Corporate money greatly favored the G.O.P. candidates in 2010 elections, where special interests found the more willing party. Consequently, the Boner-era Republican hard-liners grew from cash to stash for the ultra-conservatives, where all the way up to the end of the 112th Congress they rode their gifted horse into the ground.

Money injected into main stream news media keep the news corporations fat and healthy. Employees of any main stream news organizations receive benefit packages, salaries, paid holidays and 401k plans. These people, while still the 99%, are dis-associated with their brethren because of who they work for. While they may sympathize with the Occupy Wall Street movement, they are politically bound from participating in these movements.

In other words, if you fear for your job and for the income that it provides, because you fear for the loss of your home and food to eat, then you are compromised, my friend. Your fear governs the truth you believe and report.

Bloggers, on the other hand, are driven by a lack of truth. From the Reagan-era 80's to the infancy of computer networks throughout the early 90's, keeping in-the-know was fleeting, like an information dark age. Newspapers biased news that were affecting sensitive cultural issues, whose holdings included multi-national affiliations which swayed editorial boards to the point of inspiring authors to base fiction.

If corporations are people, as the U.S. Supreme court tells us they are, then are corporations not silencing the very people who work for them? Is this not an aspect of discrimination that the Robert's Supreme court has overlooked?

Bloggers are one rung below website news outlets and - because they can type more than 140 characters -one rung higher than tweets. But because bloggers are free of advertising - as such revenue even websites are dependent - they are not bound to influence the end story to please an editor.

In fact, simply because the vacuum of truth compels them, bloggers are charged as curators of modern history, lest main stream media erase truth from record permanently.

Personhood: When Fetus Meets Corporation

I'm going to be a proud Father! I am so bemused with myself, the first order of business is to create a spreadsheet. After all, my child is now a corporation!

That is, in terms of what the Republicans plan to introduce as a constitutional amendment.

One may purchase both prenatal vitamins and family plot - theoretically - and write them both off, enjoying the luxury of the same tax exemptions corporations do.

But you may want to read the fine print:

"The genome of this person is no longer available because the patent associated with this DNA sequence has been terminated due to multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement claims pursuant to the Universal Corporate Tax Code section xii".

When Mississippi voters turned down measure 23 - a right wing anti-abortion campaign to criminalize abortion - a collective breath was given for the freedom of persons who have a womb. It is the woman who is under direct fire, for her right to bear or to not bear child is at stake.

The proposed state constitutional amendment would have defined a person "to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof."

This sounds like a mouthful, but essentially what this means is that under no circumstances are abortions permitted. If you are pregnant, you keep it.

It appears the Job-Killing Republican Party has picked this issue up on the campaign trail, and every candidate has weighed in. And, even though the personhood measure had failed in Mississippi , each of these candidates had declared they would enact a Federal Mandate if elected President of the United States.

It's not really about whether this challenge falls to popular vote (it won't), nor whether the opinion of either of the candidates matter (it won't either). If it's anything like the National Defense Authorization Act, there is not much to talk about because the decision would already be made; there will not be much of a voice from the people. The votes will be cast and it will become law.

Republicans Kill Jobs - Again

An obscure reference to a Kansas City Star article in 2009 reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had decided to purchase condoms from foreign companies in a move that cost around 300 American jobs. The agency had considered those jobs that were slated to be lost, but foreign condoms costs 2 cents, where American ones cost about 5 cents.

Under new proposed rules, even retailers would not bother stocking contraceptives of any kind, including banning "birth control measures which interfere with a fertilized egg attaching itself to the uterine wall, including fertility treatments...".

Federal law to ban the use of prophylactics draw a line in the sand of decency and common sense. There are no alternatives. Sponge? No way. Diaphragm accessories? Illegal. Chasity belts? Leave it to the courts to decide.

By repealing the Affordable Heathcare Act, how exactly do Romney, Bachmann and Gingrich plan to shield taxpayers from the burden of costly garbage dumpster baby investigations?

Somebody from that GOP podium should tell our fertile and very sexually active America that they have to take a cold shower, and while your at it, be sure to vote Republican.

Lest we forget their importance, words can kill people if used incorrectly, quotes Judy Brown in her revised version of the Federal Personhood Amendment pdf. She goes on to contrast cases where court rulings conflict with scientific proof.

Each GOP candidate was asked what they would do if the Supreme Court struck down a personhood law. Santorum said he would fight the court over the issue.

“With the partial birth abortion statute, when the court struck it down we wrote another bill and told them they were wrong. We eventually got the court to reverse itself,” he says.

Newt Gingrich said he would "completely defund Planned Parenthood and use the savings to fund adoption services". He also said it would be "possible to write the bill so it would not be appealable".

Is Gingrich applying for the position of God? Who on earth is entitled to draft and pass controversial legislation that is written in stone and cannot be repealed? It's as if Gingrich plans to descend the capital steps with etched tablets dictating abortion law. If neither Bush nor Obama forged those powers in the Office of Legal Counsel, Gingrich would be sure to expand them himself.

Bachmann said the life issue was a foundational issue for all of her other actions. “This is not a checked box for me, this is my core conviction that I would die for.”

Luckily, Michele Bachmann will likely never die for her own core convictions - but that does not mean many women will not die because carrying a baby to full-term is no longer an option - it would mean poverty and hunger. It would mean going without. Many thousands of women with stories to tell of how they became pregnant will come forward. These women all eat for two.

The problem with the right wing is they think they can chisel away at logic when courts rule against their absurdity until they gain a foothold by a favorable ruling. This is the same kind of thinking process that the Perry campaign utilized to try to sue their way into the Virginia primary. This tact is slightly reminiscent of the legal birth of corporate 'personhood' from this passage -

"One of the most severe blows to citizen authority arose out of the 1886 Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Though the court did not make a ruling on the question of "corporate personhood," thanks to misleading notes of a clerk, the decision subsequently was used as precedent to hold that a corporation was a "natural person."

Even the Supreme Court had split on the 2004 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commision, when dissenting Justice Stevens wrote a scorching opinion of the Roberts high court: " ...the majority gave themselves an opportunity to change the law"..

The Republican Party in it's entirety are so right field the only thing that seperates them from fascism is a chain-link fence. The entire line up is so right-wing extreme, to even play ball every GOP candidate is required to toe the line of boundaries just to receive a cheer. The abortion issue is literally killing nomination hopefuls left and right, where even Mitt Romney -who some label as a Blue Dog Republican - took to the field with the rest of his comrades in declaring his support for personhood.

It's harrowing that from this field of candidates we must choose a verifiable opponent worthy to put a fight against a virtually assured victory for President Obama - even if they all seem fascist in the end.