Gotta give credit where credit is due, Senator Feinstein
S.3525 Target Practice and Marksmanship Training Support Act
I am writing as your constituent in the 51st Congressional district of California. I am writing as your constituent in the 51st Congressional district of California. I oppose S.3525 - Target Practice and Marksmanship Training Support Act, and am tracking it using OpenCongress.org, the free public resource website for government transparency and accountability.
The summary of the bill states that it “Amends the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 to direct the Secretary of the Interior to issue a permit for the importation of any polar bear part (other than an internal organ) from a polar bear taken in a sport hunt in Canada to any person who meets specified requirements.” As I recall ,we have done little to curb climate change - one of the most glaring examples of that is the reduction of the Artic Ice Sheet which is the polar bear’s habitat. This animal is endangered. I object to encouraging hunting of this majestic animal where it is not acting out one’s cultural heritage.
The Senate Votes on Keystone XL Soon. Call your Senator:
The Senate will soon be voting on an Amendment that would railroad construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
This pipeline would transport the world’s dirtiest oil across critical drinking water and accelerate climate change by helping develop the Alberta tar sands, which NASA’s top climate scientist James Hansen says would mean ‘essentially game over’ for the climate.
Your calls help stiffen the spines of waffling Senators and encourage them to reject the pipeline. Can you give your Senators a call right now?
Note for Californians:
I received an e-mail from Sen. Barbara Boxer stating her opposition to this project. If you must choose only one Senator to contact, pick Dianne Feinstein.
24 Hour Challenge: Stopping the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline: www.StopTar.org
The environmental movement is joining in an all out, 24 hour push to keep Congress from approving the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. From noon eastern on Monday to noon on Tuesday, we are aiming for 500,000 messages to show the clear public support for President Obama’s decision to deny the permit for this dirty energy project.
The reason for this urgency is that we think there will be an attempt to put a provision to approve Keystone XL in the Senate transportation bill. And this can happen at any moment. So we are showing that there is widespread public support for the President’s rejection of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The American public does not want to see Congress approving a dirty energy project.
I protested NDAA alone today
I asked on Twitter and Facebook, but no one wanted to walk in to the field offices of our U.S. Senators downtown with me. The only hassle to meet would have been parking because the field offices are across the street from each other.
It seems that U.S. Senators have a concern about crazy, violent people dropping in on them. Both offices have intercom systems with cameras on the the frames of their front doors. After one is let in, one enters the reception where a woman greets you through a glass partition, a bit like when one goes to a theater box office…not very welcoming for a constituent, but who walks in to a federal officers unannounced as I did full of happiness and light? I didn’t, but I wasn’t violent and I was restrained…go figure. No, I was not invited past the next door to speak to someone without a piece of glass between us.
In both cases, my pitch was mostly like this:
- I’m here to talk to you about the Senator’s vote on NDAA
- Sections 1021 and 1022 violate my civil rights; they violate:
- My 4th Amendment rights
- The standard for Habeas Corpus
- It violates standards set by The U.S. Constitution and the Magna Carta
- I’ve been told that one should be polite discussing issues with congressional aides, but there is no polite way to truly describe how obscene I find the way the senator voted.
In both offices, I was told that Senator Feinstein has proposed legislation to clean this mess up. Considering the source, it’s a flip of the coin that it will really make a difference - I said as much to the woman who I spoke with in Sen. Feinstein’s office. I can’t say that I expected much from my protest of one at the offices, but I followed through and did what I said I would do. It’s that last point that motivated me to follow through.
This is the first known use of the U.S. military to intervene in a labor dispute on the side of management in 40 years — not since the Great 1970 Postal Strike when President Nixon called out the Army and National Guard in an (unsuccessful) attempt to break the strike, according to the resolution.
The use of the Armed Forces against labor unions is something you expect to see in a police state.
See no Posse Comitatus, do nothing, right, Senator?
“My country tis of thee….sweet land of <redacted>”
“This week, the United States Senate passed S. 1867 also known as the National Defense Authorization Act including sections 1031 and 1032 which authorize the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens without trial or charge.”
Thanks, Carl Levin
I warned my senators about this, neither of them heeded my call.
These are what fascists look like.
No, there is absolutely no fucking conflict of interest or influence in this at all. None.
Clement’s law firm, Bancroft PLLC, was one of almost two dozen firms that helped sponsor the annual dinner of the Federalist Society, a longstanding group dedicated to advocating conservative legal principles. Another firm that sponsored the dinner, Jones Day, represents one of the trade associations that challenged the law, the National Federation of Independent Business.
Another sponsor was pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc, which has an enormous financial stake in the outcome of the litigation. The dinner was held at a Washington hotel hours after the court’s conference over the case. In attendance was, among others, Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican and an avowed opponent of the healthcare law.
The featured guests at the dinner? Scalia and Thomas.
Where is my senator while this misconduct infects the Supreme Court?
Cruel but Not Unusual: Clarence Thomas writes one of the meanest Supreme Court decisions ever
The damage this SC has been inflicting will be felt for decades to come. Our Civil Rights are being eroded people—wake up!
“In 1985, John Thompson was convicted of murder in Louisiana. Having already been convicted in a separate armed robbery case, he opted not to testify on his own behalf in his murder trial. He was sentenced to death and spent 18 years in prison—14 of them isolated on death row—and watched as seven executions were planned for him. Several weeks before an execution scheduled for May 1999, Thompson’s private investigators learned that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence that would have cleared him at his robbery trial. This evidence included the fact that the main informant against him had received a reward from the victim’s family, that the eyewitness identification done at the time described someone who looked nothing like him, and that a blood sample taken from the crime scene did not match Thompson’s blood type.
In 1963, in Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must turn over to the defense any evidence that would tend to prove a defendant’s innocence. Failure to do so is a violation of the defendant’s constitutional rights. Yet the four prosecutors in Thompson’s case managed to keep secret the fact that they had hidden exculpatory evidence for 20 years. Were it not for Thompson’s investigators, he would have been executed for a murder he did not commit.
Both of Thompson’s convictions were overturned. When he was retried on the murder charges, a jury acquitted him after 35 minutes. He sued the former Louisiana district attorney for Orleans Parish, Harry Connick Sr. (yes, his dad) for failing to train his prosecutors about their legal obligation to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense. A jury awarded Thompson $14 million for this civil rights violation, one for every year he spent wrongfully incarcerated. The district court judge added another $1 million in attorneys’ fees. A panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict. An equally divided 5th Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed again.
But this week, writing on behalf of the five conservatives on the Supreme Court and in his first majority opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas tossed out the verdict, finding that the district attorney can’t be responsible for the single act of a lone prosecutor. The Thomas opinion is an extraordinary piece of workmanship, matched only by Justice Antonin Scalia’s concurring opinion, in which he takes a few extra whacks at Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent. (Ginsburg was so bothered by the majority decision that she read her dissent from the bench for the first time this term.) Both Thomas and Scalia have produced what can only be described as a master class in human apathy. Their disregard for the facts of Thompson’s thrashed life and near-death emerges as a moral flat line. Scalia opens his concurrence with a swipe at Ginsburg’s “lengthy excavation of the trial record” and states that “the question presented for our review is whether a municipality is liable for a single Brady violation by one of its prosecutors.” But only by willfully ignoring that entire trial record can he and Thomas reduce the entire constitutional question to a single misdeed by a single bad actor…” [READ MORE]
Senator Dianne Feinstein, why do you allow Thomas to continue to practice judicial misconduct?
