But how can they tell the computers are down?

#NorthKorea seeing loss of #Internet access, researcher says. Hermit kingdom officials must reboot both #computers. http://a.msn.com/01/en-us/BBh737M

On the stain of torture

We Americans like to think of ourselves as better than others. More open. More welcoming. More moral.
The torture report released this month by the Senate Intelligence Committee raises serious moral issues, of course, but a new poll that found that 51 percent of Americans surveyed said the harsh CIA practices were “acceptable under the circumstances” is just as troubling.
A few thoughts: http://www.recordnet.com/article/20141220/OPINION/141229986/101035/A_OPINION

#JohnMcCain #Chaney #terrorism

On Bill Cosby and the court of public opinion

http://www.recordnet.com/article/20141206/OPINION/141209706/0/SEARCH

News content isn't free

Consumers resist paying for anything they can get for free. Who can blame them? But one thing they must be convinced to pay for is news. That's because it can't be produced for free. Consumers may not like the news they read, see and hear, but there must be a system in place to provide them with timely, accurate and unbiased information.
http://www.recordnet.com/article/20141123/NEWS/141129835/0/SEARCH

When a grandkid is coming

When that first #grandchild is about to arrive it makes you add up the costs and benefits of raising kids. On balance, it's all worth it. http://www.recordnet.com/article/20141108/NEWS/141109584/101128/A_OPINION

Ebola: fear and loathing

When it comes to #Ebola the thing we should really fear is fear ... oh, and #politicians. http://shar.es/100H6z  via @sharethis

Justices sent clear signal on same-sex marriage

http://www.recordnet.com/article/20141011/OPINION/141019937/101035/A_OPINION

The economic development incentive game

Stockton, Calif., alleged to be in the running for the multi-billion dollar Tesla battery plant, lost out when the Fremont, Calif.-based electric-car maker picked Nevada for its new plant. Of course, the Silver State handed over the keys to the state treasury as an incentive. In doing that, Nevada officials did what elected officials across the nation do all the time in the name of economic development. The question is should they.
I wrote about this topic in a Sunday column for The Record. It can be found at: http://www.recordnet.com/article/20140913/OPINION/140919847/101128/A_OPINION

This should shock no one

A few thoughts about Stockton I wrote for Sunday's Recordhttp://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140803/A_OPINION0604/408030315/0/SEARCH:

But what if they'd been Muslims?

A little Sunday morning snipping about the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling. http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140706/A_OPINION0604/407060311/-1/A_OPINION

If only Gov. Perry had self-control he thinks gays lack

Texas Gov. Rick Perry had another "oops" moment last week when he compared being gay to being an alcoholic. It's all a matter of self-control, he said. Oh, and he said it in front of a San Francisco audience during a business recruiting trip.
Yeah, Gov, and blue eyes are a matter of self-control too.

 Gov. Rick Perry at the Iowa State Fair

But Perry is not one to miss a chance to double down on stupid remarks. Or perhaps just throw some red meat toward the Texas Republican Party that recently adopted a platform recognizing "reparative therapy" for gays. By the way, that "therapy" has been discouraged by the American Medical Association and outright banned by California and New Jersey (If Texas Republicans think "reparative therapy" can turn gays into straights, it follows that they must believe that the therapy can be crafted so that straights go gay. Somebody should ask).
Monday, Perry was on CNBC's "Squawk Box" where he was dismissive about the ire generated by his remarks before the Commonwealth Club of California.
"I understand," he said. "People have different opinions about that."
To Perry, being gay is a "lifestyle" -- perhaps, like being left-handed? -- that he said he does not "condone" nor "condemn."
And he insisted the issue of gay marriage is a states' rights issue (feel free to conjure your own code language here).
"Texas has made the decision on that already by a vote of over 75 percent," Perry said. "They said that marriage is between one man and one woman. And I respect that. And I respect whatever they want to do in California and New York."
Sure you do, governor. Intolerance and inequality are OK in Perry's world as long as supported by a majority vote.

Student loans get no credit from GOP

Senate Republicans this week blocked a measure that would have let students refinance their debt just like homeowners and businesses do every day.
The GOP leadership, in the person of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, complained that Sen. Elizabeth Warren's legislation did nothing to address student debt and in fact was nothing but an election-year ploy to make a campaign issue.
Of course, the Republicans didn't offer any legislative alternatives to address the crushing $1.2 trillion student loan debt that economists, real estate agents and bankers fear is hampering economic growth. The average student borrower now carries $25,000 in debt, a figure that increased 70 percent between 2004 and 2012.
Recent graduates struggling to pay their college loans likely aren't out buying cars or houses.


Sen. Elizabeth Warren               

Warren's bill would have let people with federal and private loans issued before 2010 refinance at 3.85 percent. That's the rate Congress set for federal student loans a year ago.
The proposal actually won a majority of Senate votes, 56. And three Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted with Democrats. But under the Senate's arcane rules, a majority isn't a majority. Warren needed 60 votes to advance the legislation.
Republicans simply weren't going to back a bill that called for a new tax on millionaires to offset the cost of lowering interest rates on students. Fine. Warren said she's willing to find other ways to pay for it. But from across the aisle her offer was met with silence.
Student debt is among the few things that can't be dismissed by bankruptcy, the theory being a lender can't repossess an education. That's fine too.
What's not fine is subsidizing businesses with tax dollars or loaning money to banks at virtually zero or allowing companies to avoid U.S. taxes by off-shoring their operations solely for the dodge. And it's not fine to do that while refusing to make low-cost loans available to the next generation of doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, academics and, ironically, business leaders.

Flood of children is another signal reform is needed

A humanitarian crisis is playing out along this nation's southern border. As many as 90,000 children are expected to cross into the United States this year, according to The Associated Press, most of them without their parents or other adults. For the most part, they are refugees from the horrors of their Central American homelands, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. These are countries plagued by poverty, drug and gang violence.
News reports about these children have again raised the issue of America's immigration policy. But no matter how desperate their plight, these youngsters have become the most recent pawn in the debate over one of our most politically divisive issues.
Look no further than Tuesday's defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, ousted in the Virginia Republican primary by a tea party candidate who's never held elective office. Cantor's demise demonstrates how toxic immigration can be to a politician. Never mind that the nation's growing Hispanic population makes dealing with this issue politically inevitable.
Xenophobia, often fed by thinly-veiled racism, has a storied history in this nation. Virtually every immigrant group has faced it to some degree. We pride ourselves on being a nation of immigrants, a refuge for the tempest tossed, but when it comes down to it many Americans would be just as happy if the doors were slammed shut on newcomers and even happier if many the newly-arrived simply left.
Politicians long ago learned to cater to Americans' darker side and exploit our fears. They've long been helped by a cooperative media. But little in our national history -- not even when William Randolph Hearst controlled 25 percent of the nation's newspaper circulation -- compares to the torrent of fear-mongering flowing from FOX News. There is nothing fair or balanced or, often, even factual about the rabid-baiting analysis offered by Rupert Murdock's network commentators. That's what was so startling (and welcome) about what FOX's Brit Hume said Monday concerning those thousands of children now trapped in an immigration purgatory.

Brit Hume

Hume: "The immigrant children illegally crossing American borders by the thousands have triggered a logistical, humanitarian and law enforcement crisis to which current US immigration policy has no satisfactory answer. It may be tempting to call for their deportation but that ignores an important consideration: what the minor children most of them unaccompanied by adults had to go through just to get here. Nearly all are from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, three countries plagued by extraordinary levels of drug and gang violence. Honduras now has the highest per capita murder rate in the world.
"These kids are not so much immigrants as refugees who somehow had to make it here by crossing the treacherous terrain of Mexico, a harrowing journey of a thousand miles or more. If this country had an immigration policy that gave priority to those who had shown the personal wherewithal to succeed and contribute in this country we would find a way to keep these hearty and obviously capable kids. Remember how well the Vietnamese boat people have done in America, their mettle having been severely tested by their arduous journey here after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
"We should try to keep these immigrant children here not because it’s compassionate, though it is, but because it’s the smart and self-interested thing to do."
Bret Bair: "We hear Brit these towns and cities along the border, Arizona, talking about it, how they’re overwhelmed by this stuff."
Hume: "They are and that’s a very serious problem that must be dealt with on an emergency basis. But I have seen some of these kids. A youth home where I serve on the board here in Virginia has taken in dozens of them. They are remarkable kids from what I have seen of them. They are well behaved. When meals are served some of them weep at the fact that they’re eating better than their families can back home. They wait til all are served before they’ll eat. They turn up at prayer services. This is an extraordinary breed of young children. They potentially could make an enormous contribution to this country if we can find a way to house them and care for them and let them stay."
Americans can differ on immigration policy. You can quibble about Hume's analysis. But you can't argue with the fact that a healthy immigration debate is needed. America needs to find a practical, workable solution. Demonizing people who are different or hold different views advances nothing. Hume himself became a target by offering a more measured, humane view of some tempest tossed children.
Unfortunately, Cantor's defeat Tuesday likely signals to those leaning toward common-sense immigration reform that there is nothing to be gained by pushing the issue. And, sadly, it gave those opposed to any type of reform an even greater license to cater to our fears.

Love first, then patience, planning

Raising a disabled child can be so tough that financial challenges that are part of the deal are often ignored. They must not be.
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140608/A_OPINION0604/406080303/0/SEARCH …

State of Jefferson, state of frustration

Many residents of Del Norte and Tehama counties are upset, as in, "We're being ignored."
Nobody cares, they say, what they think or what they need, especially all the nobodies in Sacramento. Next week they will go to the polls and express their anger on an advisory measure that asks each county's board of supervisors to join a wider effort to form the nation's 51st state.


Signs such as this dot the extreme north state.

Elected officials in Glenn, Modoc, Siskiyou and Yuba counties already have voted to join the movement. Butte County supervisors will vote June 10. Boards in several other north state counties are awaiting the results of the Del Norte and Tehama votes before deciding what to do.
Backers want to form the state of Jefferson. In fact, in Siskiyou County, voters on Tuesday will decide whether they want to rename their county the Republic of Jefferson.
What's going on?
Consider just one fact: Del Norte and Tehama counties have a combined population of just 91,000 residents. In California, there are 62 cities with populations of more than 100,000 people. Not one of those cities is north of Sacramento (OK, Roseville, population 105,940, is slightly northeast of the capital city, but don't try that argument out in, say, Red Bluff or Yreka).
In what the north-staters longingly consider the good old days, each county used to have a state senator. That all ended in the mid-1960s with the Supreme Court's one-man-one-vote decision that apportioned the state's upper chamber by population rather than by geography.
Eleven north state counties now share one state senator. The greater Los Angeles area has 20 and the San Francisco Bay Area has 10.
In terms of getting their voices heard by elected officials, the plight of north state residents might be compared to that of, oh, most Americans. Increasingly, only the rich, urban and powerful get their voices heard in Washington. A good number of north state residents are poor, rural and, certainly in their view, powerless. Oh, and north state residents are overwhelmingly white so some might draw other conclusions about what's going on.
Rules are made and laws passed without any consideration for how they will affect them, Jefferson state backers say. The north state has much of California's forest and farm land, its minerals and its water, but north state residents have little say over those assets (by that logic, perhaps the state should be split at San Joaquin County's southern border and then Gov. Jerry Brown can try to find another freshwater estuary to tunnel under). It's an argument hard to dispute.
On the other hand, it also is hard to dispute the logic of the one-man-one-vote court ruling. If you were a resident of Los Angeles in 1960, population 6 million, having one state senator seemed unfair given that Tehama County, population 25,000, also had one state senator. Back then, a Los Angeles resident could reasonably argue a resident of Red Bluff had a louder voice in Sacramento.
The argument can be made that all states have two U.S. senators so why not one state senator for each county? But that's based on the premise that the relationship between the counties and the state is the same as between the state and the nation. It is not, and that reality makes it highly unlikely the one-man-one-vote ruling will be reversed.
So, what to do?
North state counties say the only solution is succession from California. Forgetting for the moment the highly complex financial and logistical problems of slicing off the north, there are the political realities.
Under the U.S. Constitution, separation requires a vote of the state Legislature -- where north-staters say they don't have a voice -- and the U.S. Congress, where increasingly Americans don't have a voice unless they also happen to be American billionaires.
The reality is this Jefferson state movement is going nowhere. Some of the arguments backers make are reasonable and their frustrations legitimate, but reason and legitimacy have little to do with political reality. Short of armed rebellion -- and those haven't worked out too well in the past -- statehood is a pipe dream.

Our season of disinvitation

The former president of Princeton University, William Bowen, did a little name calling Sunday.
Students who campaigned against the guy who was supposed to deliver the commencement address at Haveford College were "immature: and "arrogant."
That probably wasn't exactly the uplifting, now-go-out-there-and-get-yours speech students were expecting.


Robert Birgeneau

Condoleezze Rice

More than 40 students and three professors at the college outside Philadelphia had protested a commencement speech invitation to Robert Birgeneau, former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. The protestors objected to Birgeneau's 2011 handling of an incident in which police used force at a Cal student protest. Haveford protestors wanted him to apologize, support payments for victims, and write Haveford students a letter explaining what he'd learned from the incident.
Oh, and they wanted him to buy them ice cream too. OK, that part's not true, but just barely false.
"I am disappointed that those who wanted to criticize Birgeneau's handling of events at Berkeley chose to send him such an intemperate list of 'demands,'" Bowen said Sunday. "In my view, they should have encouraged him to come and engage in a genuine discussion, not to come, tail between his legs, to respond to an indictment that a self-chosen jury had reached without hearing counter-arguments."


Christine Lagarde

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Birgeneau is among a group of speakers who've been disinvited this year by colleges nationwide following student protests. Among them, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who canceled her speech at Rutgers University, International Monetary Fund Director Christine Lagarde at Smith College, and Muslim women's advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis University. Even first lady Michelle Obama stayed away from a high school graduation in Topeka, Kansas, although her offense apparently wasn't her politics so much as fear her appearance would draw so many spectators there wouldn't be seats for parents.
You don't have to agree with what happened at Cal to understand that Birgeneau is an outspoken advocate for undocumented aliens. You don't have to agree with Rice and the Iraqi War to appreciate her extraordinary mind and how she rose from a childhood in the segregated South to occupy one of the most prestigious positions in the nation. You don't have to agree with IMF policies to understand that Lagarde is one of the most powerful women in the world. And you don't have to agree with her views on Islam to appreciate Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born author and one-time member of the Dutch Parliament, to recognize her work on women's rights.
What is interesting about all these people is they are interesting. Interesting people are often controversial people. And controversial people are the people who make us think, who challenge our biases and force us be more tolerant.
Armed with their newly-minted college degrees, it doesn't seem too much to ask that college students endure a few minutes of talk from someone with different views. If they didn't learn even that much patience and tolerance after four years of college, perhaps their degree doesn't indicate as much learning on their part as the students like to believe. 

VA resignation comes just before retirement

A senior deputy at the Veterans Administration will leave the agency, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki announced Friday.
The announcement came one day after both men underwent a congressional grilling about severe mismanagement in the VA health system including appointment waits, treatment delays and the falsification of records.

Robert Petzel, M.D.

The Associated Press, quoting an unnamed source, said Shinseki asked for the resignation of Robert Petzel, the undersecretary for health.
There's only one small problem: Petzel announced in September he was retiring and earlier this month his replacement was named.
In other words, this is just more dodge-and-evade behavior from an agency charged with caring for the men and women who put on the uniform for this nation.
“I am committed to strengthening veterans’ trust and confidence in their VA healthcare system,” Shinseki said in announcing Petzel's departure (or more correctly, announcing again Petzel's departure).
If this looks like damage control, it is. How the resignation of someone who was retiring anyway suggests a much-needed bureaucratic culture shift is anyone's guess.
For his part, Shinseki, a retired general, continues to urge patience and the arrival of what he promises will be an independent review of VA practices. That report is supposed to arrive in three weeks.
The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that federal prosecutors have joined the agency's investigation to determine whether criminal behavior is involved. And the White House sent Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors to intervene at the beleaguered agency.
Ordinarily those moves could be considered a hopeful sign, but the same promises of change accompanied 2007 reports by the Washington Post about horrific conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, arguably the crown jewel of the VA health care system.
Point in fact, little changed leading to the latest revelations about VA facilities nationwide "cooking the books" to make it appear officials were doing their jobs.
Patience? How many more reports? How many more committees? How many more promises?

VA deserves at least as much concern as a tank

Last year the Pentagon was in a pitched battle with Congress over the Army's hulking Abrams tank, only this time it wasn't the military brass assaulting Capitol Hill to beg for more money and warning of threats to the nation if it wasn't forthcoming.
Nope, it was a bipartisan Congress pushing to spend an extra $436 million on a weapon the experts explicitly say is not needed. In fact, the military planned no more Abrams purchases until at least 2016. The Pentagon has all the 70-ton monsters it needs, especially since the Abrams was designed specifically to thwart an attack in Europe by the then Soviet Union. The chance of that is considerably less it was 20 or 30 years ago.
Why, then, did 173 members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, want the government to buy more tanks? Because it protects jobs and businesses in congressional districts where the tank's many suppliers are located, never mind that 2,000 of the tanks are currently mothballed in the desert north of Reno.


M1A1 Abrams tank is a heavy weight in Congress

Congress's insistence on spending money on what's not needed seems in marked contrast to the miserly way it is willing to spend money on those broken and injured Americans we send off to war.That sad irony was underscored again this week when Veterans Affairs head Eric Shinseki was hauled before Congress to answer allegations the VA has been delaying treatment and falsifying patient scheduling reports at facilities across the nation.
Problems at the VA are not new, of course. In 2007, The Washington Post published a disturbing series of articles about problems at what's arguably the VA's premier facility, Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Walter Reed, where generals go for treatment, became shorthand for scandal. In the wake of the stories, some commanders were dismissed and the VA announced a review of all its medical facilities as then-VA Secretary Jim Nicholson put it, "to make sure veterans are receiving access to the best possible care and environment."
How's that worked out? You don't have to read Shinski's testimony before Congress on Thursday to find out. Just drive to the area around San Joaquin General Hospital in French Camp, CA. You'll see an empty field where the VA says it will build a 150,000 square foot multi-specialty outpatient clinic and a 150,000 square foot community living center.
But, the VA has been making that promise for years and years and years. Each year, the construction start date changes. Last month a VA official told a Stockton town hall meeting held by two congressmen that approval is two to five years away.
"Funding, funding, funding," grumbled Richard Campos, 62, a veteran of the Vietnam and Iraqi wars. "Why was it not an issue when we funded this war (in Iraq and Afghanistan)? We are spending trillions of dollars on these wars. Why is it a problem now to serve these veterans?"
Why indeed?
Why is it so much easier for this nation to spend money on weapons and wars than on fulfilling the promises made to the men and women fighting those wars?
How can health care not be the nation's highest priority for the men and women who are sometimes shattered by their military service?
The concern members of Congress expressed as they grilled Shinseki would seem more impressive if it was backed up by action -- and that means money -- and had it not come just one year after some of those same members pushed so hard to buy an expensive weapon even the Pentagon didn't want.

Median San Joaquin Co. home prices above $250K

Median single-family home prices in San Joaquin County climbed above a quarter million dollars in April.
Figures out from the California Association of Realtors put the median price at $251,000, up more than 28 percent from a year earlier.
Home sales jumped nearly 19 percent in April compared to a month earlier, but were off nearly 21 percent compared to April 2013.
CAR also reported that there is roughly a three month supply of homes available for sale -- six to seven months is considered normal -- and the homes that are on the market are staying there a bit longer. In April, the average time on the market was just under 24 days compared to just over 20 days a year earlier. Statewide, homes remain on the market an average of about 34 days.
Part of that longer sales time can be attributed to lower affordability and relatively higher interest rates during the first quarter of 2014.
This week CAR reported that statewide affordability declined sharply in the first quarter compared to the first quarter of 2013.
Home buyers, CAR said, needed a minimum annual income of $86,419 to purchase of a $416,720 statewide median-priced, existing single-family home in the first quarter of 2014.  The monthly payment, including taxes and insurance on a 30-year fixed-rate loan, would be $2,160, assuming a 20 percent down payment and an effective composite interest rate of 4.46 percent.  The effective composite interest rate in fourth-quarter 2013 was 4.43 percent and 3.56 percent in the first quarter of 2013.
Affordability -- the percentage of all households that can afford to buy a median-priced single-family home -- is considered the most fundamental measure of housing well-being for home buyers. Affordability has dropped 23 percent since its peak in the first quarter of 2012.
In the first quarter of 2013, 44 percent of the state's households could afford the median-priced home. That dropped to 33 percent in first quarter of 2014.
As of Wednesday, CAR was only reporting affordability rates for 22 of the state's 58 counties (data for San Joaquin County has not been released). However, in Sacramento County about 50 percent of the county's households could afford a median-price home costing about $264,000, CAR said.

Fighting irreversible error

From arrest to "the moment of death," how this nation executes the death penalty should be overhauled, concludes the bipartisan Constitution Project, a Washington-based legal research group made up of capital punishment supporters and opponents.
Release of the group's two-year, 217-page study comes just one week after Oklahoma killed a murderer in such a barbaric fashion as to offend the sensibilities of all but the most strident capital punishment advocates. Inmate Clayton Lockett writhed and gasped for 43 minutes before he died not from the drugs the state was administrating, but from what officials said was a heart attack.
That should not have happened; that should never happen again.
The Constitution Project makes 39 recommendations to overhaul capital punishment, including abolishing the use of the lethal drug cocktail used by Oklahoma and many of the other 31 death penalty states. Instead, a single drug protocol -- a large dose of a barbiturate -- should be used, panelists concluded. Texas, with the nation's most active death chamber, uses the single-drug protocol.
The panel's recommendations, however, call for changes beginning long before the condemned enters the death chamber. They range from how suspects are interrogated to how they are defended, and from how evidence is handled to what evidence can be considered on appeal (the complete report is available at http://www.constitutionproject.org/).
"Without substantial revisions — not only to lethal injection, but across the board — the administration of capital punishment in America is unjust, disproportionate and very likely unconstitutional," said committee member Mark Earley, who was a Republican attorney general of Virginia when the state carried out 36 executions.
 If we're going to insist on this sentence, then as Americans we are required to carry it out in adherence with the constitutional prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment." That's true even for those among us who believe a murderer does not deserve a swift and painless death.
We also are required to make sure that every person condemned be judged guilty beyond any reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. A recent study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that at least 4 percent of death row inmates are likely to have been wrongfully convicted.
Recently there has been much hand-wringing in some political circles about alleged voter fraud, the demonstrated occurrence of which is considerably lower that even 1 percent. Forgetting the thinly veiled political reasons for this voter fraud fear-mongering, shouldn't we be more concerned about the possible miscarriage of justice that occurs when an innocent man or woman is executed?  That is a mistake which cannot be reversed.

One nation, pretty much under one God, justices say

The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that explicitly Christian prayers opening meetings of government bodies do not violate the concept of the separation of church and state begs the question: had the case before the court been brought to defend an explicitly Muslim prayer, would the ruling have been the same?
The answer goes to the heart of diversity and our willingness to accept and tolerate our differences, be they gender, age, racial, ethnic, sexual orientation or religious.
Monday the high court ruled 5-4, voting along the court's usual liberal-conservative lines, that a town in upstate New York did not violate the Constitution by starting its meetings with a prayer offered by a "chaplain of the month." As it turns out, that chaplain was almost always Christian; although town officials say they have invited other faiths to participate.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy

The prayers, said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy writing for the majority, were merely ceremonial. Such ceremonies have a tradition dating to the first meeting of Congress, he noted. In fact, the court ruled in 1983 that the Nebraska Legislature could open its sessions with an invocation from a paid Presbyterian minister because such ceremonies were "deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country."
Kennedy echoed that reasoning.
"Ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond that authority of government to alter or define," Kennedy wrote.
By this rationale, such prayers are but a tip of the hat, as it were, to a creator, rather like the Pledge of Allegiance is a tip of the hat to the Founders. To be honest, we often mindlessly do both as a rote exercise because tradition demands it.
Justice Elena Kagan begged to differ in her dissent. The practices of Greece, N.Y. could not be reconciled "with the First Amendment's promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government."
All five votes on the majority side came from Catholic justices: Kennedy, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Three of the four dissenters are Jewish: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. The fourth justice, Sonia Sotomayor, was raised as a Catholic, but she is said to be not a regular church goer.
Disputes over the propriety of ceremonial prayers have been fought many times, including recent disagreements at several agencies in San Joaquin County. In many cases they have been settled by rotating those offering the prayer among the faiths, requiring that prayers not be specific to a given religion, or both.
By this new ruling, such rules have been tossed. In fact, Kennedy made clear the courts cannot be asked to be the nation's prayer police.
“To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian,” he wrote, “would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact.”
Greece, N.Y. had been sued by a two citizens, a Jew and an atheist, on First Amendment grounds. They were offended because, in Kennedy's words, the prayers "made them feel excluded and disrespected."
Kennedy's answer: tough.
"Adults often encounter speech they find disagreeable," he wrote.
True, but rarely are does government essentially require its citizens to put up with disagreeable speech as the price for participating in that government. Which brings us back to the threshold question posed earlier: would the ruling have been the same had the question been about a Muslim prayer opening a government meeting?
The answer is clear, especially if the court's defense centered on tradition and the myth that this nation's earliest settlers came here seeking anything but freedom for their own Protestant religion (only one Catholic signed the Declaration of Independence, the Maryland planter Charles Carroll).

Death in Oklahoma: a sloppy, sordid affair

The shamefully sloppy execution this week of convicted killer Clayton D. Lockett should give pause to even the most ardent supporters of capital punishment.
The Oklahoma convict was left to gasp and moan under the effects of the drugs the Sooner State used. Eventually Lockett died of what officials said was a massive heart attack.
Ziva Branstetter, an editor at The Tulsa World, was a witness. She wrote that Lockett had begun rolling his head from side to side. “He again mumbles something we can’t understand, except for the word ‘man,' ” she wrote. “He lifts his head and shoulders off the gurney several times, as if he’s trying to sit up. He appears to be in pain.”
The whole messy business took 43 minutes.


The pillow is a nice touch, don't you think?

To be sure, there are those who believe those facing the death penalty deserve something less than a quick, painless death. They should, some believe, suffer at least as much as their victims. And Lockett's victim must have suffered. He was found guilty of shooting a woman and burying her alive.
However, such Old Testament eye-for-an-eye thinking at best violates the constitutional ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" and at worst countenances barbarism. There is a reason we no longer draw and quarter convicted killers, no matter how heinous their crimes. Even the Nazis convicted at Nuremberg after World War II, guilty as they were of crimes horrific beyond comprehension, were dispatched quickly by a hangman.
Not Lockett. Oklahoma officials blame the botched execution on one of Lockett's veins collapsing. That hindered the flow of the deadly cocktail being pumped into his body, they said.
Others are less sure that was the cause, especially since the state was using the sedative midazolam for the first time. Then another unnamed agent was then supposed to stop his heart. There also have been problems in states that execute by lethal injection with the placement of intravenous catheters and making sure they were working. Those placing the IV lines, and they are presumed to be prison officials although their identity is always kept secret, are not doctors or nurses.
Oklahoma has exercised considerable secrecy about the doses it used and even the where the state got the chemical. This has been the pattern in many states, including California, that still have the death penalty. Growing public apprehensions about capital punishment has led some companies to stop producing the chemicals and others to stop selling them to the states.
And Oklahoma is not alone in having problems with lethal injections. In January, an Ohio convict gasped for more than 10 minutes while dying.
 “The move to lethal injection in 1977 was an effort to combat all the ills associated with other methods," Fordham University law professor Deborah W. Denno said. Nevertheless, we’ve seen botch after botch.”
Added Ohio State University sentencing law expert Douglas A. Berman, "There's a reasonable modern consensus that death alone should be our maximum punishment, not a torturous death."
Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma has ordered an independent review of the state's death penalty procedures. That's the least the state should do.

The minimum wage? It's all just politics

Anybody that believes President Obama was as upset as he pretended when he chided Republicans for blocking an increase in the federal minimum wage isn't paying attention.
GOP senators did exactly what the president knew they would do. It was all political theater giving Republicans a chance to play to their core constituents, especially small business owners, and Democrats a chance to play to their core supporters, including young people and low-wage earners.
Proposed was a plan to boost the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10. Republicans argue such a boost would cost 1 million jobs. Democrats argue the increase would lift millions out of poverty.
Increasing the minimum wage has widespread public support, although it is less popular among Republican voters than Democrats and independents. It is so popular, in fact, that more than a dozen states -- including California -- have raised their rates above the federal minimum or started legislative debates to do so.
Adjusted for inflation, for example, today's $7.25 federal minimum wage is 33 percent lower than it was at its height in 1968.
The recovery from the Great Recession has created millions of jobs, but a new report from the National Employment Law Project, finds that the poor economy has replaced good jobs with bad ones, certainly low-paying ones. The president loves to talk about all the jobs that have been created on his watch, but he rarely mentions the kinds of jobs.
Unemployment has fallen to 6.3 percent, but that means 10.5 million Americans are still looking for work, giving employers little incentive to raise the wages of those who are working. Result: the average household's take-home pay has declined through the recession and recovery from $55,627 in 2007 to $51,017 in 2012. Republicans don't talk about this much.
At the same time, the average CEO of big companies is paid an average 300 times the pay of the typical American worker, a pay disparity that on its face puts the lie to the idea that people are paid what they're worth. Were the heads of all those too-big-to-fail banks American taxpayers had to bail out worth the millions lavished on them by their employers? Something else Republicans don't talk about.
Last year, Wall Street bonuses jumped 15 percent to an average of $164,000, and that's beyond salaries. The bonuses handed out totaled $26.7 billion, according to New York's state comptroller. That amount, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, would be enough to more than double the pay of all 1,085,000 full-time Americans who are now paid the federal minimum wage.
Not that Wall Streeters are going to share the goodies with those who serve them lunch in the corporate dining room. Neither is Washington, despite the political antics that surround the debate on the minimum wage issue.
Big companies provide big money to politics. With recent Supreme Court rulings making corporations "people" for the purposes of political free speech, the fix is in. And despite crocodile tears shed by Democrats about the horrors of the Citizens United and McCutcheon rulings, that party is just as guilt as the Republican Party of playing the money game. The only voices heard in Washington are those who belong to those toting money.
So why the Kabuki theater of minimum wage? The cynic might suggest it is the Democrats' way of diverting attention during the coming election season from Obamacare, the health reform act that Americans hate (except for all the beneficial parts they love). This may be poor calculus on the Democrats' part since a recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 52 percent of registered voters said they were willing to vote for someone who disagreed with them on raising the minimum wage, and only 30 percent said they would vote for someone who differed with them on Obamacare.
Democrats will pound Republicans about minimum wages; Republicans will pound Democrats about Obamacare. Americans are left with low wages and a health care system in serious need of actual reform. In other words, continued dysfunctional politics in America.

You wanna see my smartphone, get a warrant

If police want to poke around the bowels of your home computer, they can't just knock on your door and tell you to give it up. The 4th Amendment requires they petition a court for a search warrant. It may be inconvenient, irritating even, but it's the law and it has served the nation well since the Bill of Rights was adopted.
Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court will consider if there is any difference between the computer inside your home and the one you carry around in your pocket that also functions as a telephone.
"The justices," as the New York Times said Sunday, "will have to decide how to apply an 18th-century phrase — the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” — to devices that can contain 100 times more information than is in the Library of Congress’s 72,000-page collection of James Madison’s papers."


Virtual home or criminal tool?

The 90 percent of Americans who now carry around smartphones carry their lives in their pockets. With these devices people can access their financial, medical and travel records, email, photographs, calendars, records of purchases and Internet browsing and telephone records. If you want to paint a picture of a person, all you have to do is access his or her smart phone. They also can be critical tools for criminals.
When police arrest someone, understandably, they want as much information about the person as possible. And quickly.
That was the case in 2009 when David L. Riley was pulled over in San Diego for having an expired license. Police found loaded guns in his car and when they inspected his cell phone, they found entries linking him to a street gang. Eventually they found information connecting him to a shooting. He ended up with an attempted murder conviction and a 15 years to life prison sentence.
A California appeals court said no search warrant was required, likening the smartphone to a person's wallet or personal papers they might be carrying.
Comparing a smartphone to a wallet is silly on its face, which essentially is what appeals court judges said in the second case.
Brima Wurie was arrested in Boston in 2007 when a search of his flip phone revealed a call log linking him to gun and drug crimes. But in that case, a federal appeals court threw out the evidence found on his phone, citing the 4th Amendment prohibition against "unreasonable searches and seizures."
“Today, many Americans store their most personal ‘papers’ and ‘effects’ in electronic format on a cellphone, carried on the person,” Judge Norman H. Stahl wrote for a divided three-judge panel of the court, quoting the words of the Fourth Amendment.
There are legitimate police concerns that a criminal carrying a smartphone or the person's associates could set up the device to automatically delete information under certain circumstances. Civil libertarians, however, note that for under $100 cell phones can be placed in a Faraday bag, which blocks remote signals and safeguards data they contain. Bagging and preserving potential evidence would allow a magistrate time to consider if "probable cause" exists to issue a search warrant.
It's a fool's bet to try to guess how the high court will rule, but the 2012 unanimous ruling barring police from attaching a GPS tracking device to a car absent a search warrant might offer at least some small window into the justices' thinking. In addition, last week Justice Antonin Scalia, arguable the court's most conservative member and its biggest 4th Amendment champion, decried as a "freedom-destroying cocktail" a majority court ruling giving police a free hand to stop cars based solely on an anonymous tip.
A significant difference between stopping a car being operated by a possibly inebriated driver and temporarily bagging an arrestee's smartphone is that the smartphone is not going to drive off. That difference should be enough to bring reluctant justices around to Scalia's position of protecting Americans from "unreasonable searches and seizures."

Defiant cattleman not so sure about freedom for all

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children; they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
These are the words of Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher whose defiance of the Bureau of Land Management has made him the darling of FOX News and assorted government haters.

Bundy: cattleman and social critic

The cowboys and cowgirls who have joined him, replete with rifles, handguns and
vows to defend their version of freedom, so far have forced the BLM to back away. The agency had planned to round up Bundy's cattle. Bundy has been grazing his herd on federal land, ignoring grazing fees other ranchers pay, since 1993. Other administrative and judicial remedies will be considered, according to BLM officials.
He made the comments about government subsidy when at one of the news conferences he calls daily, only one reporter and one photographer sauntered up. That didn't stop this Marlboro man from holding forth on the villainous BLM and all manner of social ills troubling him. That's when he decided to tell the world African Americans would be better off picking cotton as slaves.
That there is room to question the propriety of the federal government controlling vast stretches of the Western United States seems legitimate (85 percent of the land in Nevada is owned by the federal government). There might be legitimate beefs about fees the government charges cattlemen, although it would be just as reasonable to complain about how little the government charges companies that extract the nation's mineral and energy wealth from public lands.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to honor a federal court that has no jurisdiction or authority or arresting power over we the people,” he said. He also likes to ride around on a horse waving an American flag.
Bundy owes the government -- the taxpayers -- more than $1 million in grazing fees. His family has grazed cattle in Nevada since they homesteaded in the 1870s, but he stopped paying his fees after the BLM ordered him to restrict the periods when his herd roamed the 600,000 Gold Butte area as part of an effort to protect the endangered desert tortoise.
But for now, the rules are the rules. And Bundy is obliged to follow them or suffer the consequences ... in this case the loss of his private property -- his cattle -- in exchange for his years-long use of public property.
And certainly Bundy's racist comments should give pause to his followers, the talking heads at FOX News and various politicians who've decided to circle up near the chuck wagon with this guy.

Shields up for automaker

General Motors says it takes responsibility for a faulty ignition switch problem linked to at least 13 deaths, but was in court this week asking a judge to protect the automaker from other responsibilities.
GM attorneys asked a federal bankruptcy judge to dismiss dozens of lawsuits over the defective switch in millions of its cars, and to bar similar cases in the future.
Specifically, the court is being asked to reaffirm the company's 2009 restructuring agreement that shielded the "new" company from liability for incidents that took place before July 10, 2009, the day the agreement went into effect.
As luck would have it for GM, most of the cars in the recall were made before 2009.
According to its court filing, GM faces 54 lawsuits filed since last February, all but two of them seeking class-action status. They all claim economic damages for such things as a lower car value or missing work while the ignition was repaired.
Certainly it would not be unreasonable to question the validity of the shield GM claims it has under the bankruptcy agreement especially given the fact that the automaker knew about the faulty ignition switches years before being forced to recall millions of vehicles. It would not be unreasonable to argue that GM should have made the potential liabilities known to the bankruptcy judge. Failing to do so was either an astounding oversight or fraud. Whatever the case, why should GM be able to claim protection?
Obviously, GM doesn't want to pay for those claims or even face the expense of dealing with them. The company has said both publicly and in its latest court filing that it is not asking for a dismissal of personal injury lawsuits.
“General Motors has taken responsibility for its actions and will keep doing so,” GM said in a statement released after filing court papers seeking to escape some of its responsibility. “G.M. has also acknowledged that it has civic and legal obligations relating to injuries that may relate to recalled vehicles, and it has retained Kenneth Feinberg to advise the company what options may be available to deal with those obligations.”
All of this stems from GM's initial determination that it was cheaper to deal with the potential lawsuits than recall the vehicles and replace a 57-cent spring. One would have thought with $49.5 billion in taxpayer bailout money, the company could have come up with a solution that was less deadly than the one it chose. It didn't and now shouldn't be allowed to escape the consequences.

Anonymous tip is grounds for a traffic stop

California motorists are familiar with highway signs urging them to call 911 to report suspected drunken drivers. It can all be anonymous. It seems a reasonable thing to do.
The U.S. Supreme Court agrees. In a 5-4 ruling, the court said Tuesday that making the call that lets police stop such vehicles passes constitutional muster. Such stops do not amount to an unreasonable search or seizure. That's true even if the arresting officer does not see the vehicle speeding or swaying while driving down the highway, the court said.
The ruling affirms a similar ruling from the California courts.

The deadly potential if police don't act.

Six years ago Mendocino County dispatchers received a 911 call reporting that a pickup truck had run another vehicle off the road. The caller remained anonymous but offered a detailed description of the truck, including its license plate number.
Officers spotted the vehicle and stopped it. They didn't see the driver speeding or swerving but when they pulled truck over, officers did see 30 pounds of marijuana in the truck bed. Two men were arrested and convicted of marijuana trafficking. They appealed under the 4th Amendment prohibition against "unreasonable" searches and seizures.
The high court turned them away, stepping back from an earlier ruling that police cannot rely solely on an anonymous tip to stop and search a pedestrian. Justices in that case worried that callers could unfairly target people for searches.
Certainly an argument can be made that a similar potential exists with motorists. An incident of road rage could become such a case if an upset driver drops a dime on another motorist.
However, there are two big differences. One, driving is a privilege not a right, unlike what most of us presume we have when simply strolling down a street. Two, the potential for harm to others is much greater with motor vehicles. Bumping into a person in the mall is different than bumping into a person with a car in the mall parking lot.
Yes, some minor inconvenience accompanies being stopped by police who've received a tip about a potential reckless or intoxicated driver. But caution suggests the need for police action. If the tip turns out to be false, so be it and the motorist can be sent along. If true, a driver with the potential to kill can be taken off the road.
“We have firmly rejected the argument that reasonable cause for an investigative stop can only be based on the officer’s personal observation, rather than on information supplied by another person,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/04/22/6343576/supreme-court-upholds-search-of.html#storylink=cpy

This week's ruling came with the usual conservative-liberal spit with two exceptions. Justice Stephen Breyer, often voting with the court's liberal wing, joined the conservative wing. Justice Antonin Scalia, often seen as the leader of the court's conservative wing, sided with the dissenters.
“Drunken driving is a serious matter, but so is the loss of our freedom to come and go as we please without police interference,” Scalia wrote. “To prevent and detect murder we do not allow searches without probable cause or targeted ... stops without reasonable suspicion. We should not do so for drunken driving either.”
Scalia's is an interesting argument, coming as it does from a man who in the past has had few qualms about government interference in many areas of citizens' private lives.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/04/22/6343576/supreme-court-upholds-search-of.html#storylink=cpy

County home prices up, but not sales

Home prices in San Joaquin County continue to climb with median prices pushing toward a quarter of a million dollars last month.
The California Association of Realtors said last week that the median priced single-family home sold for $245,900 in March, up 28.6 percent in the last 12 months and up nearly 5 percent from February's median price.
However, year-over home sales dropped 24 percent, echoing slipping sales across the state.
“While the demand for housing was up from February, the market is taking a hit from lower housing affordability compared to a year ago, which led to a decline in home sales from last year,” said Kevin Brown, the association's president.
“Moreover, concerns over tighter lending standards and increased borrowing costs are also contributing factors to the sluggish market as they both negatively impact the bottom line of home buyers who obtain financing through mortgages.”
Earlier this month, Realty-Trac Inc. reported that San Joaquin County had a 40 percent drop in new foreclosure filings in March compared to a year earlier. The decline continues the county's retreat from its one-time status as the nation's No. 1 foreclosure market. San Joaquin County last month ranked 35th. The No. 1 label now belongs to Port Lucie, Fla., where one of every 99 housing units received a foreclosure notice last month. In San Joaquin County one of every 258 housing units received a notice in March.
Sales figures released by CAR closely match data released by Irvine-based DataQuick that said the median priced home in the county sold for $225,750, a price about 30.1 percent higher than in March 2010.
According to DataQuick, home sales in March were the lowest for a March since 2008, when 24,565 homes sold statewide – a record low for the month. California’s high for March sales was 68,848 in 2005. That would have been just before the real estate crash. Last month's sales were 23.9 percent below the average of 43,251 sales for all months of March since 1988, when DataQuick's statistics begin. California sales haven’t been above average for any particular month in more than eight years.
The supply of homes for sale is slowing increasing in San Joaquin County, which also parallels what's happening statewide. CAR said there was a 3.4 months supply available for sale last month. That's up from the 2.2 months supply in March 2013. A normal supply is in the six month range.
CAR's complete report on March sales is available at www.car.org/newsstand/newsreleases/2014releases/march2014sales
DataQuick home sales figures can be found at www.dqnews.com/Charts/Monthly-Charts/CA-City-Charts/ZIPCAR.aspx

Trouble getting through to the cable guy? Just wait

Here's a question to ask yourself, especially about the time your cable bill arrives: What do 86 of the 107 in-house Comcast lobbyists have in common?
Answer: they all came out of government. They include a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission and several former chiefs of staff to Senate and House Democrats and Republicans.
In 2013, Comcast spent $18.1 million on its lobbying efforts, seventh highest of any corporation or organization, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
So the next question is: why is this important?
The answer: because those men and women are working hard and lavishing millions on Washington decision-makers to make sure that Comcast's $45 billion purchase of Time-Warner, the nation's second biggest cable and high-speed Internet provider, becomes reality. Oh, and the No. 1 cable and Internet provider? Comcast.
In an information/technology age it is disturbing that we are considering concentrating in one giant company this much of such a vital industry. The phrase "too big to fail" leaps to mind. If this acquisition goes through two other phrases are likely to enter the lexicon: "too big to regulate" and "too powerful to punish."
Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, argues bigger will be better. The company will have more money to do more things and make more investments in innovations. That will force rivals to do the same. All this will be oh so good for consumers, company officials and their shills claim.
But how does that square with the reality that most of the content produced by rivals like Netflix and Amazon will flow through Comcast's cable pipelines? How good, really, will that be for the rivals?

And consumers? When was the last time an unregulated monopoly helped consumers?
Ask grain growers in the 1880s Midwest how having service from one railroad helped them.
Make no mistake, it's no accident that more than 80 percent of Comcast's lobbyists come from government. A company hires such people -- at huge salaries -- precisely because they've been insiders. They know which people to buttonhole and where the bodies are buried.
Good for consumers? Good for rivals? Hardly. This deal, like so many mega-company formations in recent years, is good for those making the deal and those allowing the deal to go through -- the politicians and bureaucrats sent to Washington on the shaky vow to look out for Americans and America.
The acquisition will go through because, government officials will eventually declare, there was no legal reason in this rigged game for it to be denied, notwithstanding arguments about safeguarding our democracy and at least the façade of one-man, one-vote.
If as a Comcast or Time-Warner customer you think your incomprehensible bill is too high now, just wait. If you think you have trouble getting a real company person on the phone to answer a question or complaint, just wait. The phone-tree from hell is about to arrive. And those are only the visible parts of what has the real potential for nefarious behavior when the companies are joined.

What was Scalia really suggesting?

“It was wrong,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said “I think the Framers would have been appalled. … It was revising the Constitution.”
Scalia, like many preachers who claim to fathom the mind of God, likes to claim unique insight into the collective thinking of the Framers.
In this case, his complaint is about the unanimous court decision in New York Times vs. Sullivan, 50 years old this year and still the high court's most important press freedom pronouncement.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

In a nutshell, the Sullivan ruling makes it much harder for public officials to win libel cases than it is for private citizens.
Scalia's troubling pronouncement, certainly not his first and doubtless not his last, came Thursday at the National Press Club in Washington, where he made a joint appearance with his personal friend but often adversary on the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
If the Sullivan rule were reversed, it would help shield public officials from criticism. Point in fact, over the decades the court has never seriously reconsidered Sullivan despite Scalia's repeated grumblings. He considers libel a state matter.
With Sullivan, it became a federal matter.
L.B. Sullivan was police commissioner of Montgomery, Ala. who claimed he had been defamed in a paid advertisement in the New York Times. That ad, signed by a number of prominent Americans including former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, sought donations for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights struggle in the South.
Alabama courts ruled that statements in the ad that African American students were being met with "violent intimidation" could reflect on Sullivan, although he was not named in the advertisement. The state courts awarded him the $500,000 he sought.
In unanimously reversing the decision, the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time ruled that the First Amendment's free press protections put limits on libel suits against the media by public officials. It's not impossible for public officials to bring and win such suits, but after the Sullivan ruling it got a lot harder. Under Sullivan, an official must show not only that a factual statement is false but also that it was published with "actual malice" or "reckless disregard" for the truth.
The Sullivan rule opened the door for the media to cover this nation's civil rights struggle and a brand of reporting that torments public officials to this day. But beyond allowing reporters freedom to dig deeper into the doings of public officials, the ruling really expanded the right of all Americans -- not just the press -- to freely and openly comment on the performance of public officials, from the local dog catcher to the president of the United States.
That's not such a bad thing, Americans of all political stripes would likely agree.
However, Scalia may be right that the Founders would find Sullivan unsettling given the highly partisan press of their day. The courts of that period were often used by politicians to throttle opposing views expressed by both individuals and in publications. But just because those particular public officials -- who carry the God-like title of Framers -- might find Sullivan disturbing is no more reason to reverse it than Scalia's carefully parsed argument based on a much more disquieting state's rights logic.
When the state's right argument is tendered, the public's antenna should go up, especially when coming from someone channeling the Framers.

Money buys influence, but is anyone surprised?

A new poll shows a growing number of California voters favor tinkering with Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax limitation measure long considered the third rail of politics.
No more.
About half of voters surveyed by the Field Poll support changing some parts of the law and 69 percent support indirectly increasing taxes on businesses to make it harder for commercial properties to avoid reassessments.
In fact, the poll found that 71 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans favor changes to the law to prevent businesses from structuring property transactions to avoid triggering reassessments under Proposition 13.
A bill that sought to address that issue stalled in stalled in a legislative committee last year where it was opposed by the California Chamber of Commerce, which labeled it a “job killer.”
Interestingly, the Field Poll results come as Princeton and Northwestern universities released a report, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens."
The report concludes that the U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the nation's citizens but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful (www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf).
It would not be a stretch to suggest the findings of researchers Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern fit the California experience.
Said the researchers: "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."
The influence of these powerful elites suggests, in the case of California, despite bipartisan voter support for changing Proposition 13, chances are slim.
And getting slimmer, thanks in no small part to the conservative bloc of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Two infamous decisions by the high court -- the 2010 Citizens United decision bestowing First Amendment "personhood" on corporations and unions, and this month's McCutcheon ruling abolishing campaign-contribution limits -- make it even easier for the powerful elites to drown out the voice of the average citizen.
You don't support the state's high speed rail project or Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to bore twin tunnels under the Sacrament-San Joaquin River Delta? Sing out. Just don't be surprised when your concerns are muffled by the chorus of south state and south Valley water interests, unions representing workers that will build them, and companies that stand to profit handsomely from the multi-billion dollar projects.
In Sacramento, just as is the case in Washington, those who have the money can make sure they are heard. It's not that they overtly buy votes, although surely that has happened. Rather it's access to those officials who vote and the ability to constantly remind them that election campaigns cost money -- money the rich and powerful can make available or withhold.

It's a falsehood that we can outlaw political lies

Do Americans have a constitutional right to lie?
That question likely is not the one that the U.S. Supreme Court will decide when it takes on an Ohio case that comes before it next week. That case involves an ousted member of Congress who complained to the Ohio Elections Commission about an anti-abortion group's attacks. His gripe: the group's claim he "voted for taxpayer-funded abortion" when he voted for Obama's healthcare law. Ohio has a law on the books that makes lying about a political opponent illegal. In this case, Democrat Steve Driehaus even threatened to sue a billboard company, which considered, but did not run the ad.
Driehaus said statements against him by the group Susan B. Anthony List were false because federal funds cannot be spent to pay for abortions (that prohibition began in 1976 with the Hyde Amendment).
The Elections Commission found "probable cause" that the statement was false. That set the stage for a full commission hearing. Before it was held, Driehaus lost his reelection bid and withdrew his complaint.
The antiabortion group, however, wants the case to go forward. Next week the Supreme Court will consider the matter, seen as clearing the way for an attack on the constitutionality of the Ohio law and similar measures in 15 other states.
The free speech issue is not likely to be considered, but rather the narrower question of whether these laws can be challenged as unconstitutional even if no one is successfully prosecuted. What's being suggested is a preemptive strike against the laws, which would be sort of like attacking a capital punishment law with no convicted killers sitting on death row.
Of course the real issue is the latitude for snipping we allow in the political arena. The bar already is pretty low. Politicians, their supporters and opponents often take shameful liberties with the truth. To cite but one example is the ongoing and bogus claim, say, by a sitting president that when unemployment drops, it's because of his programs. When joblessness increases, invariably the claim by his opponents is that the higher rate is the fault of the president's policies.
Is there a politician around these days -- local, state or federal -- who doesn't claim an elixir for creating jobs? That claim may not exactly be a criminal lie, but it doesn't exactly nestle next to honesty either.
And it's not like the current crop of politicians invented the technique of reality invention. Political falsehoods have a long and storied tradition in American politics. Lyndon Johnson ran as the peace candidate in 1964 against Barry Goldwater, who LBJ painted as a war-monger. Johnson, of course, was secretly moving the nation toward war in Vietnam. That constitutes a pretty big lie.
Does anybody actually believe waterboarding isn't torture? The George W. Bush administration era politicians continue to foist that fantasy on Americans.
Point in fact, Americans have to put up with a lot of falsehoods and the high court has shown a decided reluctance to stop them. Two years ago the justices in a 6-3 ruling threw out the conviction of a man who falsely claimed he was a Medal of Honor winner. After Navy SEAL Team 6 took down Osama bin Laden a shocking number of men claimed they'd been SEALs. If the court had ruled against the phony Medal of Honor claimee, wouldn't we be obliged to ferret out and prosecute the phony SEALs?
"I hope the Supreme Court will not say that free speech protects your right to lie," Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University told the Los Angeles Times. "At some point, you should not able to consciously lie about your opponent."
In a perfect world, he's right. And political lies can be pretty conspicuous to anyone really paying attention. But politics doesn't always reflect attributes we might associate with a perfect world. And trying to fashion a law -- or in this case laws in 16 states -- that makes lying in politics punishable carries its own perils.
Obviously, there are worrisome risks with letting blatant lies go unchallenged in the public arena. Lies repeated often enough too often become truth to some. One of the most troubling aspects of court rulings such as the high court's 2010 Citizens United case was that it opened the political money spigot to corporations and unions. That means they can drown out other voices. If they're lying -- and they will -- the truth might never be heard.