Archive for December 12th, 2008


Scumbag Psychics Have Nothing To Worry About

December 12th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

Bad Astronomy links to the story of Lisa Miller, a San Francisco woman sentenced to two months in jail for using a fake psychic routine to scam $108,000 from a victim who came to her for relationship advice. There were a couple of questions that popped up in the post and the comments, and I think they bear more examination.

Does this set some kind of precedent for the truth or falsity of claims of psychic powers? Can we start rounding up other psychics and prosecuting them for fraud? The short answer is “no.” There’s really nothing here that makes it any easier for the government to prosecute psychics. (more…)

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Links For Brains: 12/12/2008

December 12th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy
  • Notorious hate-based sect Westboro Baptist Church looks to put a sign blaming Santa for the bad economy into the mix outside the Washington state capitol building. (Fred Phelps is having those dreams about sweaty Elf sex again. Time to crank out some brimstone.)
  • Amanda Peet and Paul Offit team up to fight fear-mongering anti-vaccination propagandists. (The kids would call it “made of win,” if they hadn’t all died of measles and whooping cough.)
  • President Bush ties Endangered Species act to a tree, cuts out science oversight, leaves it to die. (Threatened species, including snail darter, spotted owl, intelligent Republicans, said to be terrified.)
  • Senate Arms Services Committee report concludes that “[a]buse of detainees in U.S. custody was a direct result of decisions by top administration officials.” (Document is six hundred pages of the word “duh,” with extensive footnotes.)
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Georgia Legislature to Supreme Court: “Suck My Jurisdiction”

December 12th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

The Georgia General Assembly has managed to find a new level of legal crazy in their battle against reproductive rights. HB1, sponsored by Representative Bobby Franklin, denies that the Supreme Court of the United States has any ability to rule on abortion laws, and claims that Roe v. Wade doesn’t apply to any state that wishes hard enough.

The bill is breathtakingly audacious and spectacularly wrongheaded. Plus, it’s got flaws in its reasoning so large that they’re actually pulling ink out of other nearby bills. Keep your eye on the leaping logic, kiddies. It goes as follows.

The bill starts off by saying that the State of Georgia “know[s] that life begins at conception.” Oddly enough, there is no basis presented for this conclusion. Georgians have magically settled all debate on the issue, and they didn’t require anything so pedestrian as evidence. Now, even the tiniest clump of post-conception cells is “a person for all purposes under the laws” of Georgia, so it follows that all abortion is now properly redefined as “prenatal murder,” and it is “abundantly clear that the practice has negatively impacted the people of this state in many ways, including economic, health, physical, psychological, emotional, and medical well-being.”

Then, the bill points out that Constitution give Congress the power to legislate about five specific crimes: counterfeiting, piracy, felonies on the high seas, offenses against the law of nations, and treason. (We’ll connect the dots to the Supreme Court in just a second, I promise.) Since murder isn’t on the list, Congress can’t meddle with it; the Tenth Amendment reserves to the states the exclusive right to define and punish other crimes.

Next, the bill discusses the kinds of cases that the Constitution allows the federal judiciary to rule on, namely cases “arising under this Constitution.” The bill is pretty badly drafted, so it doesn’t say so explicitly, but the assumption here is that, because Congress can’t legislate about murder, a murder prosecution therefore doesn’t arise under the Constitution. The courts lack what’s called “subject matter jurisdiction,” which means that the federal courts totally can’t mess with (in this case) the state’s ability to write and enforce murder laws. Because the federal courts don’t have subject matter jurisdiction over murder cases, the Supreme Court had no authority to rule on Roe v. Wade. 40 years of precedent have just vanished in a puff of logic.

Even if the Court had jurisdiction, the bill asserts, the ruling doesn’t apply to Georgia, since Georgia wasn’t a party to the case in question. Georgia wasn’t involved, so Georgia isn’t affected. Texas is the only state barred from prohibiting abortion, and only because it failed “to properly plead ‘lack of subject matter jurisdiction’.” (Texas just doesn’t understand the Constitution as well as Georgia, obviously.)

Except, Supreme Court rulings aren’t automatically binding on only the parties involved in the case. That’s sort of the whole point of having a Supreme Court in the first place. When the Supreme Court says a state can’t do something – deny black citizens the right to vote, tap your phone without a warrant - it means any and every state, not just one. Brown v. Board of Education (theoretically) desegregated every school system in every state, not just Topeka. (Then again, it’s Georgia government. They may not agree with that one either.)

Also, the bill completely ignores the other bits of the Constitution that do allow the federal courts to rule on state criminal laws and punishments. If Georgia defined “murder” as “the killing of a white person, but only if a black guy did it,” the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment would catch on fire, and the federal courts would have to step in just to keep it from igniting the rest of the National Archives.

I’m exaggerating, but the point is that there are plenty of constitutional ways for the Supreme Court to issue a ruling on a abortion rights case. The Court found that Constitution protects a right of privacy, and that certain too-severe restrictions on abortion restrict that right in a way that is more powerful than any legitimate state interest. While the theory behind the opinion isn’t a monolith of constitutional analysis, no one has (to my knowledge) ever seriously suggested that Roe should be overturned because the Court wasn’t allowed to hear it in the first place. Respectfully, Georgia, the attorneys who tried the case on behalf of the State of Texas would have had to be gigantic malpracticing douchebags to let an argument like lack of jurisdiction slip by. The fact that they didn’t attempt it suggests that it’s obviously retarded.

I’m not done with this awful bill, but I don’t want to overload you with word vomit. On the backswing, we’ll discuss the so-called evidence of how terrible legal abortion has been for Georgia, and some of the really, really scary shit that the bill would  write into the law of the state. In the meantime, citizens of America, of Georgia, and especially the 43rd District, should contact Representative Franklin and ask that he at least understand the Constitution before he tries set it on fire.

at the Capitol:
Suite 402 Coverdell Legislative Office Building
Atlanta, GA 30334
404.656.5087
bobby.franklin@house.ga.gov

in the District:
4552 Cedar Knoll Drive
Marietta, GA 30066

And, because it’s right there on his official Georgia General Assembly web page:
770.928.0896 – Home

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Wordpress Updated

December 12th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

Managed to update the guts of the site without any major hiccups. Not that you noticed, what with your “having better things to do on a Friday night.”

Weekend ho!

EDIT: The new interface is mostly pretty awesome.  I just have one major complaint. Since I am a control freak, I make the other contributors to this blog submit their posts for review before I schedule them to publish. I USED to see the “Pending Review” posts on the main dashboard. Now, I don’t see them there. I have to click in and check. Not cool, Wordpress! Gimme back my front page Pending Review count!

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