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                               BILL MOYERS

Roberts's hard-edged performance at oral argument offers more than just a rhetorical contrast to the rendering of himself that he presented at his confirmation hearing. "Judges are like umpires," Roberts said at the time. "Umpires don't make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire." His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by "modesty and humility." After four years on the Court, however, Roberts's record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire  CONSERVATIVE.

A guy by the name of Jeffrey Toobin was on Bill Moyers show this week end. I never really liked this 'pundit'. He seems to appear on MSNBC all the time. And I always thought him wishy-washy. I thought him a weakling attempting to tease, please and appease.

Not only did he write this article in the New Yorker on our Chief Justice; but he turned it into a book deal and now he shows up with the best newsman on television today: Bill Moyers.

The man I thought the weasel, ends up having some fire in his stomach besides his pants.

Toobin has been following Roberts since he was first confirmed and spoke the lies about umpires and such.  I knew, of course, when the fascist was nominated which way he would vote on every single issue that would ever reach the Supreme Court. So did every progressive who did not have his head up his arse. I mean where or where came the little Roberts boy in the first place?

Roberts's career as a lawyer marked him in other ways as well. In private practice and in the first Bush Administration, a substantial portion of his work consisted of representing the interests of corporate defendants who were sued by individuals. For example, shortly before Roberts became a judge, he successfully argued in the Supreme Court that a woman who suffered from carpal-tunnel syndrome could not win a recovery from her employer, Toyota, under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Likewise, Roberts won a Supreme Court ruling that the family of a woman who died in a fire could not use the federal wrongful-death statute to sue the city of Tarrant, Alabama. In a rare loss in his thirty-nine arguments before the Court, Roberts failed to persuade the Justices to uphold a sixty-four-million-dollar fine against the United Mine Workers, which was imposed by a Virginia court after a strike.

One case that Roberts argued during his tenure in the Solicitor General's office in George H. W. Bush's Administration, Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation, seems to have had special resonance for him. The issue involved the legal doctrine known as "standing"--one of many subjects before the Supreme Court that appear to be just procedural in nature but are in fact freighted with political significance. "One of the distinctive things about American courts is that we have all these gatekeeper provisions that keep courts from getting involved in every single dispute," Samuel Issacharoff, a professor at New York University School of Law, says. "The doctrine of standing says that you only want lawsuits to proceed if the plaintiffs are arguing about a real injury done to them, not simply that they want to be heard on a public-policy question." Liberals and conservatives have been fighting over standing for decades. "Standing is a technical legal doctrine, but it is shorthand for whether courts have a role in policing the conduct of government," Issacharoff says. "Typically, the public-interest advocates, usually on the liberal side of the spectrum, favor very loose standing doctrines, and people who want to protect....

Oh, what a surprise. Who'dathunk? Roberts is a corporate fascist lackey who would do ANYTHING to protect the corporate oligarchy and stamp upon the rights of the individual American. Absolutely ANYTHING. The man has no shame.

Toobin wraps it up in the New Yorker, in his book and on Moyers this way:

In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary  Republican Party.

 Moyers wrote a piece in Huffington today, kind of wrapping up his findings on his PBS show. The primary discussion between Toobin and Moyers dealt with Kennedy's Opinion in the so-called CU decision calling corps persons and trashing the McCain-Feingold campaign financing laws.  Toobin underlined the fact that Roberts is the one who set this entire decision up. That is, the case could have been decided narrowly since the only issue was whether the law applied to cable movies you had to pay for. (The movie at issue trashed Hilary and was bought and paid for by repub corporate fascists). Roberts set up a reargument of the case after the parties had stipulated that they did not wish to litigate the Constitutionality of the McCain Feingold legislation. And it was Roberts who ordered that the issues would not be so confined and that the constitutionality of the legislation was entirely at issue:

Last month, the Supreme Court carried cynicism to new heights with its decision in the Citizens United case. Spun from a legal dispute over the airing on a pay-per-view channel of a right-wing documentary attacking Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential primaries, the decision could have been made very narrowly. Instead, the conservative majority of five judges issued a sweeping opinion that greatly expands corporate power over our politics.

Never mind that in at least two separate polls an overwhelming majority of Americans from both political parties say they want no part of the Court's decision; they want even more limits on the power of money in elections. But candidates and their campaign consultants are gearing up to exploit the court's gift in the fall elections.

Just this week, that indispensable journalistic website Talking Points Memo reported that K&L Gates, an influential Washington lobbying firm, is alerting corporate clients on how to use trade associations like the Chamber of Commerce as pass-throughs to dump unlimited amounts of cash directly into elections. They can advocate or oppose a candidate right up to Election Day, while keeping a low profile to prevent "public scrutiny" and bad press coverage. And media outlets already are licking their chops at the prospect of all that extra money to be spent buying airtime -- as much as an additional $300 million dollars. That's not even counting production and post-production costs of campaign ads, which are considerable. A bad situation just got worse.

If you want to know just how much worse, look to the decision's potential impact on our court system, where integrity, independence and fair play count the most when it comes to preserving faith in our system. It's as susceptible to the lure of corporate wealth as the executive and legislative branches are.

Ninety-eight percent of all the lawsuits in this country take place in the state courts. In 39 states, judges have to run for election -- that's more than 80 percent of the state judges in America.

Bill Moyers made this wonderful metaphor last night, the type of metaphor that has made him famous:

Like the Titanic, we will go down, but with even fewer life boats.

Believe it or not, this entire discussion fits into the Ethos of the American Fascist.  Here is something from Greenwald, discussing Yoo and Bybee and Gonzo and the pricks who helped form American Foreign Policy by sucking Cheney's dick and providing a legal basis for torture and other mayhem abroad:

As for the extent to which the U.S. is comparable to Venezuela, let's look to the Bush State Department's 2008 Human Rights report, which calls that country a "constitutional democracy" and then notes:

Although the constitution states that no person shall be subjected to cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment, there were credible reports that security forces continued to torture and abuse detainees. . . .PROVEA reported that in the 12 months prior to September, it received 17 complaints of torture (an increase from 11 the previous year), and 573 complaints regarding cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, a decrease from the 692 cases reported in 2007. PROVEA defines "torture" as methods used by state security forces to extract information from victims and "cruel and inhuman treatment" as methods used by members of state security forces in order to punish or intimidate victims. . . .

The government did not authorize independent investigation of torture complaints. Human rights groups continued to question the attorney general and the human rights ombudsman's commitment to oversee neutral investigations. There was no data available on convictions in cases of alleged torture. . . .

A warrant is required for an arrest or detention. . . . . A person accused of a crime may not be detained for longer than the possible minimum sentence for that crime nor for longer than two years, except in certain circumstances, such as when the defendant is responsible for the delay in the proceedings. Detainees were promptly informed of the charges against them. . . . Detainees were provided access to counsel and family members.

So, other than the fact that (a) the number of torture complaints in Venezuela is miniscule when compared to what the U.S. did (there were at least 100 deaths of detainees in U.S. custody alone); (b) all detainees in Venezuela were criminally charged and provided access to counsel and family, and (c) nobody has accused Venezuela of invading and bombing other countries and abducting people off the street and shipping them around the world to be tortured, what is happening in Venezuela actually sounds quite similar to what Burck, Perino and their friends did and continue to advocate and  justify.

Precious, is it not? Maybe a large segment of Americans are stupid enough to miss the hypocrisy of the bush administration trashing Hugo Chavez while its own policy concerning the rights of prisoners makes Chavez look like a card carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Here we are killing people right and left--just the ones recorded of course--and Hugo is the commie tyrant. And the legal minds who enabled cheney and his fascist regime to carry on its program of mayhem?

Yoo is a respected Professor, Bybee is a Federal Appellate Judge and Gonzo was Attorney General of the United States. 

It is not the law that counts in this country, folks. It is the interpretation of that law that counts. So much for the bullshit that says we are the country of laws, not men.

THE LAW IS WHAT THE POWERFUL SAY IT IS.

Every night, on my knees I pray,

Dear Lord, hear my plea...

Don't ever let Justice take the power away from me

Or let individuals thrive

Ooh, her breasts are heavenly

Her arms reach out for thee

She could make thee free

But we shant have her in my country

Just my interpretation--that's the law--

Controlling this country

Tell you it was must my interpretation

Controlling all you see

I never met her, but I shall forget her

Justice in my interpretation

Oooh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Keep away from this country

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNn361umypM