Calling a lower court's decision flawed, The FCC has asked the Supreme Court to overturn the Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime show decision.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals in July threw out the FCC's $550,000 fine against CBS stations for the broadcast as arbitrary and capricious.

Apparently buoyed by the oral arguments in the Fox profanity appeal in the High Court earlier this month, the FCC, backed by the Department of Justice, filed a petition for a write of certiorari Wednesday, according to Andrew Schwartzman, president of Media Access Project, who received a copy of the petition.

In the United States at the present day, the reverence which the Greeks gave to the oracles and the Middle Ages to the Pope is given to the Supreme Court.

-- Bertrand Russell

posted by Scats : 11/21/2008 05:46:00 PM

... multiple and sustained efforts by Friends of Brad Will in New York to convince Senator Clinton to use her international bully-pulpit to help bring justice and closure to the [Brad Will] case have gone unanswered.

A month ago, on October 22, some of them sat in front of Senator Clinton's New York office, at 780 Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan, and fasted to appeal for her assistance to her late constituent, his family and friends.

According to one report, Senator Clinton was physically present in the office on at least one of those days, but avoided responding to or speaking with those fasting out in front, much less writing the letters and making the public statements to bring justice to the case that any authentic advocate of human rights would do, especially if it involved a constituent.

...

And you might say that, "the next Secretary of State will have to follow the policies of the next president." In an ideal world, that would be true. But so much happens, day in, day out, in so many lands... so many daily attacks on dissidents, community organizers, and others who dare speak and act to improve their lives... that no US president could possibly micro-manage the situation and take preemptive action on each pending atrocity from the Oval Office. That's what a State Department is for: to handle the constant communications that are necessary with other governments.

And if - as the mass media seems to agree right now - US President-elect Barack Obama is about to install someone as the next Secretary of State who has shown zero understanding of, much less passion and action for, human rights in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere (except in isolated cases where the same mass media has turned a particular case into an international cause celébre), we're going to see more of the same terrible story happen over and over again.

If you can't get somebody to act to defend human rights when she's your own local elected representative, do you really believe that such a person would begin to do so if she suddenly represented the entire country before the world?

posted by Scats : 11/21/2008 03:33:00 PM

As you know, Mormons have a practice of converting dead people from other religions into Mormons through a practice known as posthumous baptism. Ordinarily, this might just seem a silly act of disrespect towards the individual's personal beliefs and convictions.

However, the Mormons have made an overt effort to posthumously baptize Jewish Holocaust victims. That is not merely silly and disrespectful, that is superfluously offensive. An agreement between Jews and Mormons limited the practice thirteen years ago. But the Mormons returned to the practice recently.

Well, then of course, many of us rightly took offense for the heavy Mormon influence during the Prop 8 vote in California. Well, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I am converting dead Mormons into homosexuals.

My first Conversion is Joseph Smith.

...

Dear God of the Homos,

With your great and everlasting love that blessed the covenants of Achilles and Petroclus, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and of Jonathon and David, bless then the soul of Joseph Smith of Sharon, Vermont with your divine penis. Let it pierce the anus of his soul, and let you be forever joined to him, since on this oppressive earth, he was denied the pleasure of the male sex.

Forever and ever, our brother Joseph Smith has now joined our family (We Sing the Hymn to Praise God of the Homos!).

Blessed be God of the Homos,

Amen

posted by Scats : 11/21/2008 12:34:00 PM

I've been in contact with an attendee at tonight's Federalist Society meeting where Attorney General Mukasey spoke for roughly twenty minutes before collapsing. According to this trusted eyewitness, events transpired roughly as follows. Attorney General Mukasey was roughly twenty minutes into a speech defending the administration's torture policies and particularly arguing against prosecutions of people who made decisions in the aftermath of 9/11 (essentially arguing against what he believed amounted to the criminalization of policy differences).

Some seven or eight minutes prior to the incident a heckler start shouting, calling Mukasey a "tyrant." But the AG seemed unfazed by this; and members of the audience shouted the heckler down.

The eyewitness tells me that Mukasey seemed particularly in earnest about the argument he was making. And when he first began to falter it appeared he was merely choking up. Soon, what at first appeared to be choking up blended into slurred words. Twenty to thirty seconds later he collapsed, his fall broken by a nearby FBI agent.

The room fell silent. After a moment there were shouts from the table where Mukasey's wife was sitting, calling to turn down the stage lights. A woman in an evening gown, presumably a doctor, ran up to the stage and the FBI agents hovering over Mukasey allowed her to attend to him. The eyewitness told me that Mukasey collapsed at approximinately 10:06 and was taken off on a stretcher at approximately 10:33.

The one additional detail is that this eyewitness says that the medical personnel attending to Mukasey were talking to him for at least part of that period, at one point asking him "can you wiggle your toes." In other words, it appears that Mukasey did regain consciousness to at least some degree before being taken to the hospital....After Mukasey was taken away the audience was led in a prayer for Mukasey by former Congressman David McIntosh (R-IN).

posted by speakingcorpse : 11/21/2008 04:33:00 AM

More dovish experts are also excited about the prospect of Secretary Clinton, albeit for slightly different reasons.

“Her top, top, top advisers told me, ‘Steve, she will animate things in the Middle East—she will deliver a Palestinian state. Gold-plated,’” said Steven Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington. Mr. Clemons also noted the irony that Mrs. Clinton potentially would be tasked with preparing the road for the direct negotiations with antagonistic foreign leaders that she excoriated Mr. Obama over during the primary. “She criticized him so much for going to meet foreign leaders without preconditions; now she is the one who is going to have to go and get all the preconditions sorted out.”

posted by speakingcorpse : 11/19/2008 02:31:00 PM