I'm sure this confusion over the role of the judiciary wouldn't have anything to do with Mike Huckabee's presidential aspirations!

In a recent interview with right-wing radio host Steve Deace, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee claimed that lawmakers may flout court decisions they happen to disagree with:

A president has certainly got to respect a ruling of the court, but if the ruling of a court is wrong, and it’s fundamentally wrong, and you have two branches of the government that determine that it’s wrong, then those other two branches supersede the one. . . . The two branches of government, legislative and executive, have every right to make it clear to the Supreme Court that their interpretation is wrong. And whether they do that by constitutional amendment to spell it out to the court, or by passage of further amplification of law, there are many means, I think, at hand to do that.

Huckabee is, of course, wrong about the separation of powers — and embarassingly so. While Congress does have the authority to overrule court decisions that wrongly interpret its own acts, the whole point of having a Constitution is that it draws lines that can’t be crossed by elected officials. What’s the point of announcing that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” if Congress can ignore any court decision preventing it from establishing a religion?

I've mentioned before that I had a miscarriage several years ago. Emotionally, the scars lasted for years and years. My poor sister, pregnant again after two recent miscarriages, is holding her breath, hoping that this pregnancy goes all the way to term. For someone hoping for a child, a miscarriage can be a devastating thing.

And now in Utah, un-fricking-believably, it can now be a criminal thing too.

Utah is not a state known for its legislative sanity. This, after all, is a state that recently made headlines for proposing to honor gun manufacturers on Martin Luther King Day and for considering the elimination of 12th grade to cut back on education spending.

Well, it just got a whole lot worse.

Utah just became the first state in the U.S. to criminalize miscarriage and punish women for having or seeking an illegal abortion. Utah's "Criminal Miscarriage" law:

• expands the definition of illegal abortion to include miscarriages
• removes immunity protections for women who have or seek illegal abortions
• treats women as presumptive criminals and leaves them open to criminal prosecution

But even among states that punish illegal abortions, this "Criminal Miscarriage" law is unique. It not only punishes individuals who perform illegal procedures; it punishes women.

This legislation was prompted by the case of a 7 month pregnant 17 year old girl who paid a man $150 to beat her until it caused a miscarriage, but make no mistake, this is all about making it impossible to have an abortion, and controlling women through their reproductive options. But don't write off that prosecuting women for miscarriages is some fantastical dystopian ravings of an ultra-liberal, think again:

So, after making it near impossible and mostly illegal for undocumented (and even documented) women to buy their own health insurance that covers abortions, after making it impossible to get free or reduced cost health insurance that covers abortions–the state of Utah feels it’s important to then criminalize women who don’t have “legal” abortions.

But…what is a “legal” abortion? Is getting advice on what herbs to take from a midwife “legal?” Is taking various medications that many Latinas can get from Mexico and other Latin American countries “legal?” Is a coat hanger “legal?”

Because there seems to be no definition of what equates “legal” written into this legislation, that means any woman anywhere who for whatever reason miscarries–will be subject to criminal charges. And lest you think that prosecutors have ever shown restraint when it comes to pressing criminal charges against women who are making their own *often times very LEGAL* choices about their bodies, please, surf around the National Advocates for Pregnant Women website for a while. This organization of lawyers that defend pregnant women from criminal prosecution, has worked to defend women who have done such things as being pregnant and addicted to various drugs to refusing c-sections to being “uppity” in the birthing room.

Unbelievable. The legislation is written so loosely that any district attorney could prosecute any woman for "reckless behavior" that results in losing a pregnancy. Drinking too much, maybe. How about not wearing a seatbelt? Or not taking pre-natal vitamins/getting pre-natal care? Where does it end? I gotta ask: when will we ever stop treating everyone else except rich, white men as second class citizens?

Via Talk2Action:

George Bush's nominee for Surgeon General has drawn a lot of heat for among other things, his crack-pot anti-gay views as a leader in the United Methodist affiliate of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. But a new report may finally sink his already controversial nomination in a sea of conflicts of interest that have marked his career.

Dr. James Holsinger has also been a longtime leader of the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church. The Confessing Movement is a rightwing "renewal group" affiliated with the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), whose purpose for a generation has been to divide and disrupt the historic churchs of mainline protestantism in the interests of advancing neoconservatism and the religious right.

Holsinger was elected to the highest court in the Methodist Church a time when the IRD-affiliated church "renewal" groups had launched efforts to use church judicial systems to enforce their notions of orthodoxy, particularly on matters related to homosexuality.

Now, an investigation Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D. and Lawrence H. McGaughey, Esq., and published at Media Transparency, shows that Holsinger used the sale of a United Methodist Church-owned hospital in Kentucky, as a cash cow for his personal ambitions. It took years of litigation by the church to find out what had happened to its money, only to learn that Holsinger had diverted millions to endow professorships at the Chandler Medical Center at the University of Kentucky where he served as Chancellor and fundraiser-in-chief. Read more...

Int'l. Herald Tribune :

Observing President George W. Bush in action lately, we have to wonder if he actually watched the election returns in November, or if he was just rerunning the 2002 vote on his TiVo.
[..]In 2006, the voters sent Bush a powerful message that it was time to rein in his imperial ambitions. But we have yet to see any sign that Bush understands that. Indeed, he seems to have interpreted his party's drubbing as a mandate to keep pursuing his fantasy of victory in Iraq and to press ahead undaunted with his assault on civil liberties and the judicial system. Read full article here

Roger Ailes: " It's all the feminists fault"
Schlafly: "A man's life has been sacrificed, and three children have been denied their father by malicious feminists who have lobbied for laws that punish spousal rape just like stranger rape and deny a man the right to cross-examine his accuser. They have created a judicial system where the woman must always be believed even though she has no evidence, one in which the man is always guilty...read on"

Following up on Josh Marshall's post on Luskin and gold, I've found that Luskin also switched sides in the middle of a case he was representing. In 94-95' Luskin was working for the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) against a RICO case. Then he suddenly ( 2.1 ) In February 1995, Luskin switched sides. Luskin went from LIUNA and Arthur A. Coia’s advocate to their prosecutor under “internal reform effort.” It was as if Johnny Cochrane was allowed to take over Marsha Clark’s job and prosecute O.J. Simpson in a quasi-judicial system funded and controlled by O.J. Simpson.

Will he do the same thing to Mr. Rove?

We've got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon international law, not the Constitution of the United States? That's just outrageous," DeLay told Fox News Radio. "And not only that, but he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous."

This man is seriously disturbed. Keep opening your mouth Tom, you are becoming more and more an embarrassment each day you speak. If anything ,Justice Kennedy shows just how hard he is working to do his job. As far as I know, every college student, professor, Corporate CEO, lobbyist, and most of the Senate uses the internets.
AmericaBlog has some of the fallout over the attacks on our judicial system: Man arrested in NYC for threatening to kill judge, bomb courthouse.

Talk Left: Words of advice for DeLay: Zip it. You've become a caricature and a laughing stock. You are making a mockery both of the office you hold and your party. You're on your last leg. Is it too much to ask that you go out with a little dignity?

Scum

Madison man allegedly used Bible to justify rape

This perverted barbarian started molesting a girl when she was 11, telling her that the Bible said it was okay.
I checked, by the way. The Biblical punishment for this is actually that he has to marry her. (Assuming that she wasn't engaged to be married; raping an engaged virgin is punishable by death.) Yeah, that'll show him. Good thing that our judicial system isn't based on the Mosaic law code, despite what some people say.

JUMPIN JACK FLASH     MaxSpeak, You Listen!

I'm at Jack's place. The Social Security Trustees' report was supposed to be up at 11:30 a.m., and so far it's 20 minutes late.

Now it's up, here, and Snow's press release is here.

Some minor cookery in view: they bumped the two key years back one each, so they can say, look, things are gittin worse. The Trust Fund cash deficit is presumed to begin in 2017 instead of 2018, and the Fund's assets exhausted in 2041 instead of 2042. The actuarial imbalances get marginally larger, as predicted here this morning. The only question is how they jigger the assumptions, which evidently they do, albeit to minor effect.
I checked, by the way. The Biblical punishment for this is actually that he has to marry her. (Assuming that she wasn't engaged to be married; raping an engaged virgin is punishable by death.) Yeah, that'll show him. Good thing that our judicial system isn't based on the Mosaic law code, despite what some people say.