Daily Topics - Wednesday April 4th, 2012
By shawnt56
Catch The Thom Hartmann Program LIVE at our new time, 3-6pm Eastern!
Hour One: OWS vs. The Tea Party
Hour Two: Drug test America's biggest welfare queens...banksters & oil barons - Jamie Weinstein, The Daily Caller
Hour Three: Did the Klan kill Martin Luther King, Jr.? Stuart Wexler, The Awful Grace of God
Comments
#2
The reason the power to decide Constitutionality is given to unelected people is to avoid the Socrates thing, sentencing someone to death one day and erecting statues to them the next.
The UK's supreme court can't strike down laws because there's no higher law on which to base such a decision. The English Constitution is just laws that are considered important--meme-like, you might say. But that country does have judicial review on a lower level.
I agree that some restrictions should be put on that power here, though. E.g., the court should not be able to strike down laws of a type, only the specific laws that are brought before them. Stare decisis might take care of the others of that type later, but only when brought before the court, so that different circumstances can be taken into account.
#3
I agree that a Supreme Court justice should be removed from office for lying in the confirmation hearing. (Of course, the Senate should just go back to debating among themselves an dlooking at real evidnce, rather than doing a job interview, but that's another matter). In my hypothetical constitution, I have included fraudulent attainment of office in the list of reasons to impeach a member of the government.
In Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington, the court only said that strip searches were allowable, it didn't say they were mandatory. So there is the possibility of legislation forbidding it.
#4
HR347... the anti-occupy law. Was listening to Best of the Left yesterday, anyone else hear about this law that was nearly unanimously voted for by both parties? If not research it, be aware of what its doing to the right to assemble peacefully.
N
#5
Its economical to test all unemployed people to knock a possible 2% off the unemployment rolls... until you factor in the cost of paying for the drug tests!
N
#6
As for protesting signs (and their limitations), I've been wondering why people don't just go buy some blank T-Shirts, iron transfer material that can be printed on by a typical PC connected printer and create T-Shirts with whatever they want on it. It would be interesting to see how they could demand that people don't wear shirts, or try to claim them as dangerous.
N
#7
Speaking of white racist organizations, a caller to Randi Rhodes mentioned one called The Order of the Camellia.
#8
Pusillanimously ugly. I didn't even have to look that one up. "Pusillanimous" means "cowardly" or "timid".
#9
This long-term vs. short-term argument about judicial review seems odd coming from Thom. One of the reasons argued for government regulation is that you can't wait for lawsuits to make companies clean up their act, because in the meantime people will die. And yet on the subject of judicial review, he wants people to have to wait while their basic rights are violated by the government itself.
No one relaxes thinking that the Supreme Court will protect their rights, because we all know that a case has to be brought to the court. The ACLU's existence is proof.
I think Thom's in motivated-cognition territory on this topic.
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
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From The Thom Hartmann Reader:
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From Unequal Protection, 2nd Edition:
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I have to thank either Thom or Sue for inclusion in the newsletter of a link to the Discover Magazine blog The Crux. I had no idea it was covering linguistics, which is a subject I obviously love.
On that subject, Santorum's anti-TelePrompTer rule keeps getting him in trouble not just because his lack of a prepared speech allows him to make the mistakes, but also because he can't release a written speech to the press to prove what he meant to say.