There ought to be a law...

Missouri voters, stop signing petitions.

There are too many outside interests that think they have a right to influence our state government, and that pisses me off most righteously.

What the hell business does Ward Connerly have interfering in our state government? He lives and pays his taxes in California, but he has a bit in his teeth and wants to outlaw Affirmative Action in Missouri. This pompous jerk thinks he has the right to tell us we should amend our constitution! And I gotta repeat - he is not a Missouri taxpayer, so where the hell does he get off?

With the May 4 deadline for signature collection looming, Connerly is downright desperate to collect enough signatures to get his wet-dream on our ballot in November. So desperate, in fact, that he is recruiting "members and friends" of the Minuteman xenophobes to come to Missouri and collect signatures.

The trip is being pitched as a “1-2 week paid ‘vacation.’” Travel and meals would be paid for. And like professional circulators, Minutemen would receive a small fee for each signature they collect.

Of course, organizers know it’s not money that drives Minutemen. The activist group, comprised of private citizens, has been monitoring the U.S.-Mexico border for illegal immigrants since 2005.

“The tie-in with immigration issues is very strong,” Minutemen organizer Stuart Hurlbert e-mailed his fellow members last week.

“About 3/4 of all immigrants and probably more like 90% percent of illegal immigrants, are immediately eligible the minute they cross the border or get off the plane, on the basis of their ‘race,’ for preferential treatment by all sorts of federally mandated programs.”

Connerly is also pushing a similar agenda in Arizona, but he isn't recruiting hate-mongers to gather signatures there.
"Why not?" you may ask.

Because, dear reader, Arizona has a common-sense law on the books that prohibits petitioners who are not registered voters in the state from circulating and collecting signatures.

Missouri needs a law like this. Fortunately, the people in my part of the state had the good sense to send Jolie Justus to the state senate, and she is on the case, working to get similar legislation passed right here in Missouri.

If you are a Missouri reader, please contact your state representative and state senator and encourage them to support legislation that would close our referendum process to outside interests pushing personal agendas.

UPDATE -- 10:15 p.m.

Via FiredUp! Missouri, we learn that one of Ward Connerly's minions, a fellow named John Wynne, was interviewed by police in Wentzville on Sunday when he ducked monitors who intend to assure that signature gatherers are honestly representing the petitions they are collecting signatures for.

In the course of conducting their interview and investigation, the Wentzville police learned that Mr. Wynne is wanted in three states on misdemeanor voter fraud warrants. He has quite a history of misrepresenting the position of petitions he gathers signatures for.

Because the charges are not extraditable, he was not arrested and so far as anyone knows, he is continuing to duck the monitors and collect signatures while misrepresenting the petition he wants Missourians to sign.

Have you called your state congresscritters yet to put a stop to petition gatherers like this creep?

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Stare decisis crisis

Liars: During their Senate hearings, John Roberts and Samuel Alito portrayed themselves as committed to the principle of stare decisis. Now we know for certain, they were as dishonest as the all-time presidential prevaricator who nominated them.

Disturbingly, John Roberts's and Samuel Alito's actions on the Court now speak much louder than their words to Congress. During the past year, Roberts and Alito have repeatedly abandoned the principle of stare decisis, and they have done so in a particularly insidious manner. In a series of very important decisions, they have cynically pretended to honor precedent while actually jettisoning those precedents one after another.

In the latest ruling from the Supremes, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, Chief Justice Roberts:

...held that the consideration of race by school districts in assigning students to public schools in order to promote racial diversity violates the Equal Protection Clause, even though the Court had unanimously declared more than thirty-five years ago that such a policy "is within the broad discretionary authority of school authorities."

As Justice Breyer rightly asked in dissent, "What has happened to stare decisis?" Breyer correctly observed that Roberts had distorted the Court's precedents, "written out of the law" a host of Supreme Court decisions, and disingenuously reversed the course of constitutional law. Whereas Brown v. Board of Education had held that government could not constitutionally assign black and white students to different schools in order to segregate them, Roberts had the audacity to cite Brown for the extraordinary proposition that government cannot constitutionally assign black and white students to the same school in order to integrate them.

John Roberts and Samuel Alito billed themselves as legal craftsmen who would be guided not by rank ideology, but by a respect for the rule of law. They have now proved otherwise.

CNN senior legal correspondent Jeffery Toobin reported:

Stephen Breyer, you know, who is kind of the Mr. Congeniality of the Court, was so angry, his voice was practically breaking as he read his dissenting opinion. And this isn't really just about whether school boards can consider race. This is about whether affirmative action can exist at all, whether the use of race is permissible.

It was just 2003 when Justice O'Connor wrote her famous opinion in the University of Michigan case saying, yes, race can be considered.... But today's decision may be the beginning of the end of that.

Toobin went on to say that Breyer is "suggesting that it's because of Roberts and Alito. When Stephen Breyer said that -- which is an unusually personal attack -- you could see the chief's justice's jaw muscles starting to vibrate a little. Justice Alito, who's a very kind of low key presence on the Court, sort of turned across the bench and looked at Breyer as he said that."

That's something justices don't say about each other very often. But this is the end of a term where the conservative majority reversed or cut back on a lot of precedents that the court thought were fairly stable. And Breyer was pissed.

And rightly so. As Breyer said: "Rarely in the history of the law have so few undone so much so quickly."

In a separate report, Toobin observed:

Chief Justice John Roberts saying that the students who didn't get -- the white students who didn't get the school of their choice in Louisville and Seattle were equivalent to the black students in Brown v. Board of Education who were denied access to integrated schools in Topeka, Kansas. [Justice] Stephen Breyer responding, "You have got to be kidding me, that the efforts in good faith of these schools in Louisville and Seattle to integrate their schools, to make sure that there's diversity, how dare you compare that to the discrimination of Jim Crow?"

What was all that Repub talk about impeaching activist judges? Perhaps Dems should revisit that idea. Bonus points if the prospect causes Mrs. Alito to pucker and cry indubitably on cue for the camera.

I agree with Corpus Juris' earlier remarks:

We have endured five really, really bad Supreme Court decisions, with the worst coming today. All of them pissing on precedent. So much for stare decisis. Decisions so bad that you are left wanting to ring the necks of Democratic Senators for not filibustering Alito's candidacy...

Yes, indeed.

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