Category Archives: Rule of Law

What does ‘frivolous lawsuit’ mean to you?

Today at the Columbia Rotary Club, our speaker was Darrell Scott, lobbyist for the S.C. Chamber of Commerce.

He talked about what he does for the Chamber over at the State House, and told some sea stories about his experiences (some people say “war stories;” I’m from a Navy family). The least convincing part of his presentation? A couple of times in explaining a close vote, he referred to the experience giving him “gray hairs.” Sorry, kid — I don’t see ’em.

Two things interested me in particular. One was the report card on the 2012 legislative session, which included grades for all of the lawmakers. You can see the full report here. I’ve reproduced the scorecard on the senators above. It’s interesting to see who stands well with the Chamber, and who does not. Some observations on that chart:

  • You see the expected split, with most Democrats scoring low and most Republicans doing better.
  • But Democrat Nikki Setlzer, who represents a big chunk of that most Republican of counties, Lexington, scored a perfect 100.
  • John Courson, recently named the Chamber’s 2012 “Public Servant of the Year,” fell a bit short of that, at 94. The disagreement was over the “Business freedom to Choose act (h.4721),” which the Chamber described as “legislation to prohibit local governments from enacting flow control ordinances on solid waste disposal.”
  • Vincent Sheheen, whom the Chamber endorsed for governor two years ago, only scored a 69 — fairly typical of Democrats.
  • That was still better than Tom Davis, who lately has been styling himself the Ron Paul of the state Senate. He got a 68. This reminds us of something — the Chamber is about as enamored of Tea Party Republicans as it is of Democrats, if not less so.

The other highlight of the meeting, I thought, was the exchange that came when attorney Reece Williams got up to ask young Mr. Scott a question. After explaining that he was a veteran of more than 200 jury trials, he asked the speaker how he would define that bete noir of the Chamber, a “frivolous lawsuit.” I enjoyed the way he asked the question — aside from the fact that he presented it in a civil, gentlemanly, even courtly manner (Reece is as nice a lawyer as you’d ever want to meet), as he spoke, he turned way and that to address the “jury” of fellow Rotarians, thereby gently suggesting that he was challenging each of us with the question as well.

The speaker answered him, but his answer wasn’t as memorable to me as what Realtor Jimmy Derrick got up to say in response. After explaining he and Reece are old friends, Jimmy said that he reckoned he had been sued about 200 times himself, and he pretty much considered those actions to be frivolous.

Afterward, I asked Reece what he thought of the answers he’d gotten. He said they pretty much confirmed what he’d thought before: “A ‘frivolous lawsuit’ is one that’s brought against me…”

SC judicial selection remains far from what it should be

“We ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

That quote, which Martin Luther King attributed to a preacher who had been a slave, came to mind in perusing this report at The Nerve.

Basically, it tells you what we told you in the “Power Failure” series more than 20 years ago, and many times since in The State: That while our method of choosing judges in South Carolina isn’t the worst system in the country (the worst would be direct popular election, which is employed in far too many jurisdictions), it’s far from what it should be.

Back when we first wrote about it the SC bench was one of the best examples of the gross imbalance of power in SC, which we (after V.O. Key and others) called “The Legislative State.” Judges were chosen completely by and at the discretion of the Legislature, and whether you made it to the bench depended on how many friends you had among lawmakers.

Today, lawmakers still retain complete control over the selection of the judiciary, and it is to my knowledge accurate to characterize the system as The Nerve does:

Once a judicial candidate has been approved by the 10-member, legislatively dominated Commission, he or she goes on to a joint session of House and Senate for a majority vote. The vote, however, isn’t simply for or against the one candidate; it’s for one candidate over against others. That’s because the Judicial Merit Selection Commission is required to nominate up to three qualified candidates for each position (assuming there are three qualified applicants). If they want the job, therefore, judicial nominees must curry favor with legislators – “curry favor” meaning schmooze, glad hand – in order to secure the requisite number of votes. Lawmakers, for their part, have in the past been quite open about the fact that they’ve got to “get to know” candidates before they’ll support their candidacies.

What this means, in effect, is that by the time a judicial nominee becomes a judge in South Carolina, he or she is personally and professionally beholden to state lawmakers in unhealthy ways. Can judicial independence really exist in such a system? The fact that the question can be seriously asked is a problem.

All true, near as I can tell — not having been personally present for a judicial election in awhile.

I’ll say one thing in the current system’s defense, though — it does produce better results than it did when we first started writing about it. That’s because, with Glenn McConnell’s leadership, that Judicial Merit Selection Commission was formed, and has done a pretty fair job since then of making sure those candidates that lawmakers are allowed to vote for do have real-world qualifications. So now, you still might have to be the most popular candidate among lawmakers, but you have to be the most popular among a small group of qualified candidates.

That’s a big improvement. Of course, it came about because Sen. McConnell wanted to preserve the current system. So he just made the current system better, to blunt legitimate criticism. It’s good that we have better-qualified candidates ascending to the bench. And this system is much better than direct popular election.

But it’s not as good as what we should have. The system most likely to produce a qualified, independent judiciary that stood as a full, coequal branch would be one like the federal system — the executive nominates, and the legislative provides advice and consent. That way, a judge is not the creature of any particular part of the political branches.

As to when we might get something like that, The Nerve is also accurate when it says we shouldn’t hold our breaths waiting for the Legislature to make the change willingly.

CJR on small-town reporter’s clash with SC AG

This is not the kind of thing I normally get into — the disposition of celebrity’s estates — but I thought it interesting that the Columbia Journalism Review had taken an interest in a dispute involving both our attorney general and a semi-retired reporter in Newberry.

Excerpts from the piece:

When the judges responsible for distributing the estate of the late musician James Brown started refusing freedom of information requests from the estate’s former trustees last year, a 60-year-old, semi-retired freelance reporter named Sue Summer wondered why. She started reporting on the squabbles over Brown’s estate for her local paper, theNewberry Observer, when she wasn’t caring for her granddaughter. In the year since her first story ran, Summer believes the attorney general—and therefore the state—has attempted to stop her digging three times, culminating in an extremely broad subpoena issued last month that lists the attorney general as a plaintiff. It requests that she turn over all her on- and off-the-record material pertaining to the case.

This latest subpoena comes after the Facebook page Summer made to document her reporting was taken down after she published a piece in March detailing seven ways Attorney General Alan Wilson allegedly violated the Freedom Of Information Act, she told CJR. (The page has since been reinstated.) In May, Summer received her first subpoena, from the lawyers of a woman called Tommie Rae Hynie, who claims she was married to James Brown at the time of his death. The subpoena specifically demanded all of Summer’s reporting on Hynie’s diary, which is seen as key to the case. The newest subpoena, issued on behalf of Brown’s children, was served on August 22, with a deadline of October 26.

“This is the third attempt to make me go away,” said Summer, who believes the subpoenas are being issued to scare her off the case. “They want me to hush very quickly.”…

When Summer was served with her second subpoena in August, she said that she felt she was missing a part of the story—why would the state make repeated efforts to discourage her from publicizing the case? She took a closer look at the attorney general Alan Wilson’s re-election campaign contributions from July (Wilson took over from McMaster as attorney general last year). Two coincidences caught her eye.

On the day of Summer’s subpoena hearing in May, Wilson—who is responsible for deciding the final distribution of the estate—received election campaign contributions from a law firm who have hired private practice lawyers to secure Tommie Rae Hynie a share. (Wilson did not respond to a request for comment.) Summer also discovered that one of Hynie’s two high-powered attorneys teaches law at the University of South Carolina where McMaster has worked as a fundraiser since finishing his AG term.

“It certainly raises an eyebrow,” Summer said. “As a matter of fact, Wilson was on a bus tour promoting transparency in government on the very day that I was issued a subpoena by his lawyer.”…

It’s an unusual case in a number of ways, not least the fact that private estate disputes are not usually the kind of thing a reporter spends a lot of time digging into. But it looks as though when they do, they might hit some nerves.

Shouldn’t shame and dishonor be enough?

Just got this from Joe Wilson re the bill that outlaws falsely claiming military distinctions:

Wilson stated, “Our brave men and women who have willingly sacrificed their lives to protect and serve our country deserve our upmost respect, honor, and gratitude. The passage of today’s bill further protects the dignity of our Armed Forces. Individuals who dishonestly claim to have dedicated their lives to ensure the American people’s safety for their own personal gain deserve punishment.  Their actions constitute criminal fraud and they should be prosecuted accordingly.  As a proud original cosponsor of this legislation, I urge the Senate to take immediate action and look forward to the President signing this bill into law.”

But I can’t help thinking, why do we need such a law?

For the law to be applied, someone would have to get caught lying about military service, right? So… isn’t the shame and humiliation of having been caught trying to make yourself out to be a hero, and the real-life damage it would do to your reputation, enough?

Seems to me that the court of public opinion is pretty good at heavily punishing offenders on this score.

My Dad, the retired Navy captain, collects ballcaps, and has so many he’s constantly giving them away. A couple he’s given me tout the Navy or the Marine Corps. I like the caps, but don’t wear them because I would be mortified to have someone think I was letting on to be something I am not.

Maybe not everyone sees things that way. But I would think that anyone who valued military service enough to want a connection with it so badly as to lie about it would suffer considerably on being discovered. Don’t you think?

And why is it that sometimes it’s the limited-government types who are most eager to say, “There oughta be a law…”?

Terrorism? Hate crime? It was worse. It was “multiple counts of first-degree murder”

This morning on the radio, I heard the question raised as to whether the killings at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin should be considered an act of “domestic terrorism.”

Sure, I said to myself. And that would have been that, except that I then proceeded to think about it, and changed my mind.

“Terrorism” has to have a political aim — a goal to be achieved by sowing terror within a population. (Such as, for instance, trying to cow Americans to the point that we withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia, which was Osama bin Laden’s motive.) Without that, it’s something else.

The Oklahoma City bombing pretty much (although not perfectly) fits the definition because the conspirators — and the existence of multiple conspirators lends credence to the political aspect — were trying to send a message in response to Waco and Ruby Ridge. I’m not entirely clear what policy goal they hoped to achieve, but the use of mass murder to send a political message seems pretty clear.

We’ve heard about how the Sikh temple killer was a white supremacist, which nudges us toward politics, but that only suggests that if he was going to kill somebody, it seems likely he’d strike at nonwhites. Which he did. But that still suggests irrational personal animus more than saying he had some policy goal in mind.

There are those who would call it a “hate crime.” Well, they can do so without me. I could see it as a crime motivated by hate (one supposes some strong emotion was involved, although perhaps not), but I don’t hold with having a special category of crime based in the attitudes of the perpetrator, beyond such basics as whether the crime was intentional. We punish actions in this country, not opinions.

Attorney General Eric Holder seems to have wanted to cover all bases today, calling it “an act of terrorism, an act of hatred, a hate crime.”

Of course, his goal is to offer succor to mourners on behalf of the community, which means saying anything and everything that might express the country’s horror. If he were acting as a prosecutor in the case, we would have every right to demand that he be more precise.

And that’s the thing here that makes the search for motives, for terminology that will place a name upon these horrific crimes and thereby place them in a box of understanding — there will be no trial, no public proces of discernment and administration of justice. The killer robbed the mourners of that by killing himself.

On “Tell Me More” this afternoon as I was coming back from lunch, I heard a discussion that contained some foolishness (something to the effect that if it had been a dark-skinned man shooting up a bunch of white people, that would be terrorism), but also some wisdom — the point was made that people reach for an explanation like “terrorism” (or, I would add, “hate crime”) rather than random act of evil because that suggests there’s something we can do about it going forward. A political movement with a violent agenda is something you can take action against, and prevent further such acts. But an individual act of madness, or personal evil — how do you ward that off?

What we know is that there were six acts of senseless, premeditated murder. Which is more, far more, than bad enough. And in terms of how empowered we feel to deal with it, more horrible than anything else.

Never forget the lesson of video poker

Cindi’s column today (“The danger of video gambling isn’t the gambling“) about the problem with video gambling in SC today contained a paragraph that she would keep on a SAVE/GET key* if she still had one:

Video gambling was born of corruption. A powerful state senator, who would escape federal extortion charges only by dying before the indictments could be issued, slipped what he called a “technical” change into state law that legalized one of the most addictive forms of gambling on earth. Over the next decade, the rogue industry grew into one of the most potent political forces in our state by ignoring what meager laws we had and pumping hundreds of millions of dollars of its ill-gotten gains into political campaigns. At its heyday, it was admitting to revenue equal to half the state budget. It managed to take out a governor and nearly take over the Legislature.

The “powerful state senator,” of course, was Jack Lindsay, of Bennettsville, my hometown. And the way he got the “technical” change into law was via a proviso. Provisos are of course a terrible way to make state law, precisely because they’re a great way to sneak something past one’s colleagues.

What a lot of my readers — such as Bud — fail to understand about video poker is that the problem wasn’t the gambling, per se. Although it was indeed a particularly insidious and addictive form of gambling. The reason The State‘s editorial board turned against it was the way we saw it undermine and corrupt the legislative process. Toward the end, it was rare for lawmakers ever to dare try to effectively regulate or tax it, because they knew they’d face well-financed primary opposition if they did. (Which is why in recent years you’d sometimes see references to “school choice” as a latter-day video poker.)

They looked upon the fate of David Beasley and trembled. And despite what our governor thinks, a trembling Legislature is not actually a “beautiful thing.”

1st Amendment meant to protect POLITICAL speech

Some of my friends here on the blog occasionally ask whether I ever change my mind about anything. They mistake the certainty, and consistency, with which I express myself for rigidity. There are a number of reasons for this. One is a certain… forcefulness… that creeps into my writing when I’m not trying to hold it back. Another is that, if I express it here, it’s usually an idea that I’ve tested many times over the course of decades. And I’m not likely to shift suddenly on a matter such as that.

But here’s an example of something I’ve changed my mind on…

Back when I was a special-assignments writer at The Jackson Sun in Tennessee — we’re talking late 70s, early 1980 perhaps — I would occasionally fill in when one of the editorial writers was on vacation. On one occasion, I wrote an editorial headlined something like “Yes, even Hustler.”

It had something to do with one of Larry Flynt’s legal battles. Basically, I was asserting that however disgusting his exercise of it may be, the free-press right guaranteed under the First Amendment applied to his publication as well.

Potter Stewart, who knew it when he saw it.

I would not write that today. My respect for the intent of the Framers has grown over the years, and I am far more reluctant to cheapen the Bill of Rights by inferring that they meant to assert a right to publish pornography. No, I’m not inclined to launch a crusade to ban such publications, either (which are almost quaint in view of what is freely available on the Web). I just wouldn’t take up my cudgel in Flynt’s defense today, because to do so would require dragging Madison, Hamilton and Jay into the gutter with him.

And I believe that would be wrong. The intent to protect citizens in expressing political ideas that may offend the government just seemed too clear to me. And no, I don’t accept the convenient canard that obscenity is in itself an inherently political statement.

The courts may not entirely agree with me all the time on this, but in general they have not granted commercial speech, or obscenity, the same protections as political speech.

What brought this to mind was something that Logan Smith — who is roughly the age I was when I wrote that defense of Flynt — posted yesterday on his blog, Palmetto Public Record:

It’s been less than a week since thousands of angry conservatives swarmed Chick-fil-A restaurants in South Carolina and across the country to support the fast food chain’s stance on same-sex marriage. Many expressed outrage that city officials in Boston and Chicago wanted to ban the restaurant, claiming that doing so would somehow violate Chick-fil-A’s “freedom of speech.”

This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of free speech and censorship, of course, but that’s beside the point. At least people are getting politically active — even if their form of activism is buying fried chicken.

However, we do agree that government officials who use regulations to target specific businesses are abusing their power. That’s why we’re waiting for those Chick-fil-A fans to launch a similar flash mob of support for another business being banned by city government for moral reasons — the Taboo Adult Superstore in Columbia.

When he called attention to his post on Twitter this morning, asking, “Why no defense of Columbia sex shop from Chick-fil-A supporters?” I replied, “Perhaps they believe (as do I) that “free speech” refers to POLITICAL speech. The Framers didn’t have sex shops in mind.”

You may argue that what Mr. Cathy engaged in was the exercise of religion, rather than politics, but hey — same amendment. More to the point, he was expressing himself on something that has undeniably become a political issue. And local government types in some jurisdictions were proposing to use governmental power to penalize him for it. (At this point, we could get really strict constructionist and say that this is not the same as Congress passing a law to abridge this right, and that would be an interesting conversation — but irrelevant to the case at hand. We’re not arguing the merits of a lawsuit here, but whether all those people who flocked to Chick-fil-A last week are consistent in their political ideas by not similarly defending a sex shop.)

Now, all of this said, I give Mr. Smith credit for not merely presenting the sort of empty, kneejerk, moral-equivalence argument that I fear I did all those years ago (the editorial is buried in a box somewhere in my garage, and fortunately not readily at hand). He gets into “adverse secondary effects,” which is more sophisticated than what I recall saying.

But I still say that the analogy is a false one. One would in no way be inconsistent to stand up for free speech rights in one case, and not the other. If I had been moved to participate in that Chick-fil-A demonstration, which I was not (aside from being, you know, allergic to chicken), I certainly would have felt no obligation to have defended the latter.

The Blackminton Scandal of 2012

Not that I care about this, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do a play on the “Black Sox Scandal.”

Beyond that, I really am sort of indignant at the creepiness of people who would deliberately lose in order to eventually win by getting to play weaker opponents. It’s just despicable on a number of levels:

Associated Press9:07 a.m. CDT, August 1, 2012

photo by Arne Nordmann

LONDON — Eight female badminton doubles players were disqualified Wednesday from the London Olympics after trying to lose matches to receive a more favorable place in the tournament.

The Badminton World Federation announced its ruling after investigating two teams from South Korea and one each from China and Indonesia. It punished them for “not using one’s best efforts to win a match” and “conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport” in matches Tuesday night….

IOC Vice President Craig Reedie, the former head of the international badminton federation, welcomed the decision.

“Sport is competitive,” Reedie told the AP. “If you lose the competitive element, then the whole thing becomes a nonsense.

“You cannot allow a player to abuse the tournament like that, and not take firm action. So good on them.”

Good on them, indeed.

It’s not that I care about whether something is detrimental to the “sport” of badminton, which seems perfectly adapted to the way most of us experience it — as a backyard mockery of sport for klutzes staggering about with racket in one hand and a beer in the other. How is this an Olympic sport to begin with? (And don’t even get me started on how I feel about having the Horse Guards Parade become a venue of beach volleyball, of all bogus sports. I imagine former members of the Horse Guards are harrumphing up and down the length of Britain. I certainly would be, were I they. What have they done with the horses while this nonsense is going on? That’s what I want to know…)

But it is indeed a violation of what sport is about.

It reminds me of my longtime nemesis in slow-pitch softball, the opposing player who deliberately tries to draw a walk. I played a lot of slow-pitch softball in my younger days, and I was usually the pitcher, because I was the only one willing to stand there lazily tossing the ball from a mound much closer to the plate than in baseball, at bruisers who were doing their best to send it back rocketing at my head.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been a slow-pitch softball pitcher, but it is next to impossible to keep throwing strikes — much, much harder than if you get to throw straight at the plate. You have to loft it up into the air just so, at a prescribed height well above the batter’s head, and then have the momentum fall away from it at precisely the right point and the right speed so that it drops toward the ground exactly through the strike zone.

The point of slow-pitch softball — as I always wanted to scream at the cretins who stood there with their bats on their shoulders, waiting for the walk — is to allow everyone to hit the ball, and get it into play. It’s not a duel between pitcher and batter. It’s a small step away from putting the ball on a tee. It’s to make the game fun, not to avoid hitting for strategic reasons. And of course, after the first guy stood there and took a walk, I got so angry that I couldn’t throw strikes for anything, and soon I was walking in runs, and had to be relieved. Which is way more humiliating than being taken out in the Major Leagues.

OK, so it’s not exactly the same thing. But it ticks me off the same way…

Could (should) Big Brother have stopped Holmes?

Fascinating piece in the WSJ today, posing the following question:

Would Total Information Awareness have stopped James Eagan Holmes?

You perhaps remember the fuss. That program by the Defense Department was curtailed when the Senate voted to revoke funding amid a privacy furor in 2003. The project had been aimed partly at automatically collecting vast amounts of data and looking for patterns detectable only by computers.

It was originated by Adm. John Poindexter—yes, the same one prosecuted in the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal—who said the key to stopping terrorism was “transaction” data. For terrorists to carry out attacks, he explained in a 2002 speech, “their people must engage in transactions and they will leave signatures in this information space.”

The Colorado shooter Mr. Holmes dropped out of school via email. He tried to join a shooting range with phone calls and emails going back and forth. He bought weapons and bomb-making equipment. He placed orders at various websites for a large quantity of ammunition. Aside from privacy considerations, is there anything in principle to stop government computers, assuming they have access to the data, from algorithmically detecting the patterns of a mass shooting in the planning stages?…

This not only evokes 1984, but the department of “pre-crime” envisioned in “Minority Report.” Which should send all sorts of shivers down the sensitive spines of libertarians.

But a legitimate question is being posed here. Since such data is being mined, should not someone be on the lookout for transactional patterns such as those Holmes engaged in? Guy suddenly isolates himself from society (a step leading to what I call the Raskolnikov syndrome), buys several rapid-fire weapons and lots and lots of ammunition? If it’s possible for such patterns to raise red flags, then shouldn’t it, if it can prevent the deaths of innocents?

In passing on this question, I’m not thinking in terms of having the cops bust down doors and file charges against people for having raised red flags. But I do think it might be worthwhile to have a chat with someone displaying such signs, to ascertain what is going on — or perhaps making the people in that person’s life aware of what’s happening, to empower them to intervene if they see fit. That could go a long way toward snapping some potential killers out of their trip down the rabbit hole.

As the columnist asks of the NSA: “Did it, or could it have, picked up on Mr. Holmes’s activities?” And if not, why not? And if it did, what should it have done?

Romney: No, wait — TODAY it’s a tax…

photo by Adam Glanzman, Flickr

Wait a minute… I see he said this yesterday, which means, I suppose, we might hear something else today. But in the meantime, here’s what he said yesterday:

UPDATE: And now we’ve come full circle in all the “penalty” vs “tax” talk. Mitt Romney has spoken and clearly affirmed that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is a tax, directly contradicting his senior adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, who had said earlier this week that it was a penalty. Romney tried to explain the contradiction by noting in an interview with CBS News that it was all about the Supreme Court’s majority opinion. “While I agreed with the dissent, that’s taken over by the fact that the majority of the court said it’s a tax, and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There’s no way around that,” Romney said.

When Romney was asked whether the fact that he was unequivocally calling the mandate a tax meant he had changed positions on the issue, the Republican focused on President Obama, saying he “has broken the pledge he made” because “it’s now clear that his mandate, as described by the Supreme Court, is a tax.”

Obama’s campaign, however, quickly seized the opportunity to say that Romney “contradicted his own campaign, and himself,” reports the Washington Post

You ever see such a case of somebody trying to have it every which way?

Roughly, here’s the timeline:

  1. Romney pushes through health care reform as governor, and it includes a mandate that everyone have insurance. He goes around bragging about it for years, as well he might…
  2. But then, President Obama pays him the complement of pushing health care reform that does the very same thing, and suddenly Mitt’s not so proud of what he’d done, because he wants the votes of people who spit on the ground every time Obama’s name gets mentioned. If Obama did it, the thinking goes, it’s evil. So Romney quits bragging.
  3. Then, the court says it’s not a mandate; it’s a tax. And the GOP seizes on that, because if there’s anything nearly as evil as Barack Obama in their book, it’s a tax.
  4. But then Romney’s aide says the court’s wrong, because Romney, having created just such a mandate, ought to know a mandate when he sees one. Which stands to reason.
  5. But then Romney adopts a position of Hey, what do I know? It may look like a mandate to me and this other fella, but the court says it’s a tax, so it’s a tax. And taxes are bad, harrumph, harrumph.

At this point, is there anyone left in the country, of any philosophical bent, who’s enthusiastic about voting for Mitt Romney in the fall? Oh, some are eager to vote against Obama; that hasn’t changed. But are they pumped about voting for Romney? I doubt it…

‘Dewey Defeats Truman,’ 2012 style

Bud brought our attention to this on an earlier comment:

Everyone knows the famous photo of the Chicago Tribune’s front page declaring, in error, “Dewey Defeats Truman” in 1948. (The newspaper fell victim to its early deadlines and made a guess at the presidential election result at press time, damning itself to history.)

CNN’s erroneous report this morning that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down President Obama’s healthcare reform — live on air for 7 minutes, with a lower-third caption — has spawned its own “Dewey Defeats Truman,” courtesy of Gary He, a product director at Insider Images (and Photoshop,of course)…

I thought I’d just make it easier for y’all to see.

So that you might fully savor the visual reference, here’s a link to the original.

Actually, there were a number of originals shot from slightly different angles, and/or split-seconds apart.

Of course, this iconic image has been spoofed before

New GOP meme: attacking Obamacare as a tax

Recovering from the blow to their position on Obamacare, Republicans (except Mitt Romney, whose signature achievement as governor was just vindicated, although you won’t hear him say so in this bizarre political climate) have already shifted tactics.

They are genetically compelled to attack, attack, attack the president. So their new means of doing so is to seize upon the court’s assertion that Obamacare constitutes taxation, and attack it accordingly (all taxes being, according to their ideology, bad). Lindsey Graham, being the smartest Republican in Washington, was among the first to make this shift:

To our Democrat colleagues, stand by your tax increase or stand with us to Repeal and Replace Obamacare.

(Note the way he says “Democrat colleagues.” This is a subtle ruse on his part to hide from his base the fact that he is as smart as he is: Look at me! I don’t know the difference between a noun and an adjective any more than you do! But then, he hurts himself with that same base by calling the enemy “colleagues.”)

Democrats, being partisans, will probably not respond any more intelligently.

But here’s how I wish they would respond: By saying, OK, it’s a tax. So let’s stop fooling around. Let’s replace this with single-payer, which of course we would all support through our taxes.

I’d like to see that, but I’m not holding my breath. I’d done enough of that, waiting on the Supremes to make up their minds.

Fast and Furious and Very Confusing

Some of my readers have evinced an interest in this Fast and Furious thing that is causing such a stir in Washington. Seeking to learn more about it, I started reading the results of a six-month investigation into the case by Fortune magazine. It left me more or less as confused as I was before.

An excerpt:

As political pressure has mounted, ATF and Justice Department officials have reversed themselves. After initially supporting Group VII agents and denying the allegations, they have since agreed that the ATF purposefully chose not to interdict guns it lawfully could have seized. Holder testified in December that “the use of this misguided tactic is inexcusable, and it must never happen again.”

There’s the rub.

Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.

How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It’s a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson’s anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election. (A Justice Department spokesperson denies this and asserts that the department is not drawing conclusions until the inspector general’s report is submitted.)

“Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false,” says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa’s committee.

The ATF’s accusers seem untroubled by evidence that the policy they have pilloried didn’t actually exist. “It gets back to something basic for me,” says Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). “Terry was murdered, and guns from this operation were found at his murder site.” A spokesman for Issa denies that politics has played a role in the congressman’s actions and says “multiple individuals across the Justice Department’s component agencies share responsibility for the failure that occurred in Operation Fast and Furious.” Issa’s spokesman asserts that even if ATF agents followed prosecutors’ directives, “the practice is nonetheless gun walking.” Attorneys for Dodson declined to comment on the record…

A bit further down, I find a description of the thing that has confused me the most about this case, and all the GOP indignation over it:

Irony abounds when it comes to the Fast and Furious scandal. But the ultimate irony is this: Republicans who support the National Rifle Association and its attempts to weaken gun laws are lambasting ATF agents for not seizing enough weapons—ones that, in this case, prosecutors deemed to be legal…

Court strikes down parts of Ariz. immigration law

As I run out of here to go to Rotary, I toss this up for discussion:

Court rejects parts of Arizona immigration law

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected much of Arizona’s controversial immigration law, but upheld other provisions, giving a partial victory to the Obama administration.

The court ruled that Arizona cannot make it a misdemeanor for immigrants to fail to carry identification that says whether they are in the United States legally; cannot make it a crime for undocumented immigrants to apply for a job; and cannot arrest someone based solely on the suspicion that the person is in this country illegally.

However, the court let stand the part of the law that requires police to check the immigration status of anyone they detain, if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person is unlawfully in the United States. Even there, though, the justices said the provision could be subject to additional legal challenges. The court said it was “improper” for the federal government to block the provision before state courts have a chance to interpret it and without determining whether it conflicts with federal immigration law in practice….

The court also said the biggie — a ruling on Obamacare — is coming up Thursday…

The four-day runoff campaign in the 7th

Just got around to this news from yesterday:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A Tuesday runoff election has been set to determine the Democratic nominee in South Carolina’s new 7th congressional district after a judge ruled all ballots cast in the race should be counted.

The Election Commission said it will not appeal the ruling and is preparing voting machines for the new race, while the candidate that was originally declared the winner said Friday evening she hasn’t decided whether she will appeal.

The ruling on Friday means an unprecedented four-day campaign for the district, which stretches from Florence to Myrtle Beach, in the northeast part of the state. With all the votes counted in the five-way contest, Gloria Bromell Tinubu, a Coastal Carolina University economics professor, received 49 percent of all the votes cast in the June 12 primary, while Myrtle Beach attorney Preston Brittain received 37 percent.

In his ruling, Judge Larry B. Hyman Jr. said the state Election Commission was wrong when it refused to count votes for state Rep. Ted Vick, D-Chesterfield, who dropped out of the race after a drunken-driving arrest in late May.

I don’t know what to think of it, other than this… I’d like to go through a period of time in which people file for office, and run, and don’t get kicked off the ballot, and either win or lose based on the number of votes on that day, without all of these courtroom dramas changing or putting forth new interpretations on rules, and changing results, to the point that we can’t keep track of who’s running for what when.

That would be nice, just for a change.

‘Waterloo’ DeMint: President Obama deserves ‘slap in the face’

In his never-ending quest to chase civility right out of our politics, Jim ‘Waterloo’ DeMint has now contributed the following:

“If the court throws it out, I think it’s a well-deserved slap in the face to the president and the Congress to make us think that what we’re here for is to honor our oath of office, which is the pledge to defend the Constitution, which limits what we can do,” DeMint said.

I realize that you can’t tell from that what the issue is. You might reasonably infer that Mr. Obama is trying to declare himself king or something, with that hyperbolic nonsense about honoring the oath of office and defending the Constitution. But these people talk like this; it doesn’t have to make sense.

No, the administration’s great sin here, the imagined flouting of the Constitution, is trying to address the inexcusable farce of the way we pay for health care in this country.

You know what? I think I’m going to become a straight-ticket voter. I’m going to vote against anyone who advocates Conan the Barbarian politics. You know what I mean: The sort of politics that holds that the greatest things in life are:

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

A bad idea (electing judges) gets worse in NC

The popular election of judges has always been a terrible idea. But now, thanks to Citizens United, it’s worse:

The North Carolina Judicial Coalition is a new tax-exempt organization, known as a super PAC, supported by wealthy conservative Republicans who are determined to make this year’s race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court ideological and expensive.

This kind of influence in judicial elections is a direct result of the Citizens United decision, which allows corporations and unions to make unlimited so-called independent expenditures in campaigns. In adissent in that case, Justice John Paul Stevens predicted that such spending would overwhelm state court races, which would be especially harmful since judges must not only be independent but be seen to be independent as well. North Carolina is proving him right…

The North Carolina Judicial Coalition was set up to re-elect state Justice Paul Newby, who has opposed adoptions by same-sex couples and disallowed a lawsuit challenging alleged predatory lending. He gives conservatives a 4-to-3 advantage over liberals on the State Supreme Court and is being challenged by the more liberal state appellate judge, Sam Ervin IV, a grandson of the senator and son of a federal appeals judge…

Go read the whole editorial. Yep, it was always a bad idea — nothing like picking justices on the basis of Kulturkampf issues — but now it’s expensive, too.

Report: Myers says JAKE left the Scotch in his car

Image from videotape, at WISTV.com.

At least, that was his first story, according to this report from WIS. Then, he blamed it on “that lady”:

LEXINGTON COUNTY, SC (WIS) – Eleventh Circuit Solicitor Donnie Myers finds himself facing new alcohol charges after a South Carolina Highway Patrolman stopped the elected official last month on suspicions of driving under the influence…

“When you pulled out in front of me over here on before we got to Old Cherokee, you were swerve — you were driving down the middle of the road,” Alveshire told Myers.

“You know why?” Myers asks the trooper, “Because I was listening to the Carolina game and it’s good stuff,” Myers said.

“You had anything to drink?” the trooper asks. “Yeah, I had a few,” Myers responds.

The trooper tells Myers to walk to the back of his car when he spots a cup inside the car. Alveshire asks the solicitor what’s in the cup, and Myers responds that it’s some scotch that state Sen. Jake Knotts left in the car.

“Hang on a second,” the trooper tells Myers as he pulls out his radio and calls for backup. “Can I get one of y’all down here to Old Cherokee and Old Chapin?”…

Myers spends several minutes leaning on the back of his car as the trooper sits inside his vehicle working on the case. Myers changes his story as to whom the open container of alcohol belongs to. “That was her drink,” Myers yells to the trooper, referring to a woman who pulls up behind the trooper out of view of the camera…

Sounds a bit like that old Maxwell Smart routine: “No? Well, would you believe…?”

I assume there will be “film at 11.” Or videotape, anyway.

I was not aware that she had a CHOICE in this

I’ve been sort of puzzling over this press release since it came in yesterday:

Carol Tempel to Withdraw from House District 115 Race After Supreme Court Ruling
“It’s the right thing to do”

Carol Temple

Charleston, SC – Democrat Carol Tempel announced Wednesday that she will withdraw from seeking the Democratic nomination for House District 115 (James Island, Folly Beach, Kiawah) after Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling that very clearly stated that candidates must turn in their Statements of Economic Interests and Statements of Intention of Candidacy at the same time. Tempel acknowledged she had inadvertently filed electronically but did not submit a paper copy of her Statement of Economic Interest and thus will be forgoing a run for the nomination. Tempel released the following statement on Wednesday:

“The Supreme Court could not have been more clear in their ruling yesterday. If candidates did not file properly, they should not be on the ballot. I accept full responsibility and thus will forgo seeking the Democratic nomination for House District 115. While the opportunity of serving the people of Charleston County is still on the table, I had to respect yesterday’s ruling and uphold the rule of law. I call on other candidates in Charleston County to follow my lead and do the right thing. If you did not file properly, do not risk being held in contempt of court by stubbornly trying to remain on the ballot. I look forward to fellow James Island resident Paul Thurmond and all other candidates in Charleston County who did not file properly to respect the law and immediately withdraw from the race. “
Tempel is currently weighing the option of running as a petition candidate for House District 115.
#####

OK… but as far as I know, she had no choice in this. I mean, she was legally off the ballot. So I’m confused by the “It’s a far, far better thing I do” tone of this announcement, as though she were making some sacrifice, of her own volition, for the principle of the Rule of Law.

Or maybe I’m just misreading it…

A conservative celebrates “growing government” — in the judicial branch

Our regular contributor Bryan Caskey celebrates the Senate’s passage of legislation expanding the state judiciary:

Six More Family Court Judges On the Way

Normally, I view additional government spending with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, even as someone who extols the virtues of fiscal restraint, I can absolutely say that we need more judges here in South Carolina.

Finally, the State Legislature has realized that South Carolina needs more judges to help manage the rising caseload here in the Palmetto State. Today, the SC Senate passed a bill approving the creation of six new family court judges and three new circuit court judges; nine in total.

This has been long overdue. South Carolina has the fewest number of judges per population and more than twice the national average of case filings per judge. Each year, Justice Toal tells the legislature these facts in her State of the Judiciary Report.
As a practicing lawyer here in South Carolina, I can tell you that wait times for hearings are longer than they need to be. I do a fair amount of family court work, and I do it throughout the state. Some counties run a tight ship, and others are an absolute nightmare.
In a certain county, in family court, just to get a hearing scheduled, not heard, can take up to six months. That’s insane. I know the wheels of justice are slow, but six months to get a hearing scheduled means the wheels of justice have fallen off. If you want to get the dockets moving, you have to have more people available to get the cases disposed of. Alternative dispute resolution (mediation) has taken some pressure off the court, but you cannot force people to agree. Sometimes, especially in family court, you have to have an adjudication…

I give him joy of those new judges. They were needed. It’s good to see at least one of the neglected areas of state governmental responsibility get at least some of the resources it needs.