Can the Patriot Act make it a crime for an American to advise a group that has been designated a terrorist organization—if that advice pertains only to human rights and ways to seek peace?

It is this question that was heard before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday.

The Americans challenging the restriction are the LA-based Humanitarian Law Project and its president, USC professor, Ralph Fertig, who has advised a Kurdish rebel group in Turkey.

This is from the AP:

The Supreme Court struggled Tuesday to balance the constitutional rights of humanitarian aid groups with the government’s efforts to combat terrorism.

The issue arose in a challenge by aid groups and individuals to parts of a key anti-terror law that bans “material support” to foreign terrorist organizations, even when that support consists of training and advice about entirely peaceful and legal activities.

The aid groups involved had trained a group in Turkey on how to bring human rights complaints to the United Nations and assisted them in peace negotiations, but suspended the activities when the U.S. designated the Turkish outfit a terrorist organization in 1997. They also wanted give similar help to a group in Sri Lanka, but it, too, was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 1997.

Now keep in mind, we are not talking about groups like Al Quaeda that have been designated as our enemies, and thus are subject to a host of restrictions, Patriot Act or no Patriot Act.

The organization in question is a Kurdish rebel group called the PKK.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg does a good job of teasing out more of the issues.

And the LA Times David Savage has this post-hearing update.

A ruling is expected in June—with Kennedy again the swing vote. (Or maybe Roberts will also have a sensible moment. At least it is comforting to think so.)

PS: AND THE TWISTED LOGIC AWARD FOR TUESDAY’S HEARING GOES TO Antonin Scalia for this dandy quote: “It hasn’t criminalized speech. Most of that aid and assistance that is prohibited is not in the form of speech, but it happens to include speech as well.I think that is quite different from a law that is directed explicitly at speech.”

(Um, Antonin. Dude. That’s like saying if you advise the criminal to turn his or herself in, or if you similarly tell the criminal not to shoot the hostage, we can criminalize that speech as aiding and abetting, and such a statute in no way impinges on the First Amendment. That’s—-what’s the phrase I’m looking for?—oh, yeah: totally whacked.)

I’m still doing light posting, but here’s a story from the Miami Herald that merits attention.

It is about a free speech case involving a student who said some angry things on Facebook about her teacher, and was punished by the school principle as a consequence.

Here’s how it opens:

A student who set up a Facebook page to complain about her teacher -- and was later suspended — had every right to do so under the First Amendment, a federal magistrate has ruled.

The ruling not only allows Katherine “Katie” Evans’ suit against the principal to move forward, it could set a precedent in cases involving speech and social networking on the Internet, experts say.

The courts are in the early stages of exploring the limits of free speech within social networking, said Howard Simon, the executive director of the Florida ACLU, which filed the suit on Evans’ behalf.

“It’s one of the main things that we wanted to establish in this case, that the First Amendment has a life in the social networking technology as it applies to the Internet and other forms of communication,” Simon said.

In 2007, Evans, then a senior at Pembroke Pines Charter High School, created a Facebook page where she vented about “the worst teacher I’ve ever met.”

But instead of other students expressing their dislike of the teacher, most defended the teacher and attacked Evans.

A couple days later, Evans took the page down.

But after Principal Peter Bayer found out about it, he bumped Evan from her Advanced Placement classes, putting her in classes with less prestige, and suspended her for three days.

There’s more. So read it here.

And here’s an MSNBC story about other incidents in which student speech is challenged, even outside school.

On Sunday, the LA Times reported that the Menifee Unified School District, a school district located in Riverside County, has pulled a book from all school library shelves because of its racy content. And what lust-drenched book might the Menifee school folks have found morally problematic? Tropic of Cancer?— Henry Miller’s 1934-published novel that, while a bit long-in-the-tooth now, is still a perennial favorite when it comes to outraged shelf-yanking

Nope, the tome in question is the Merriam-Webster’s 10th edition dictionary. Its offense? It includes somewhere in its pages the term “oral sex.”

Evidently one—count ‘em, one—- parent complained so, rather than choosing a thoughtful and measured response to calm the histrionic parent, the local district officials instead swooped in and purged all the district’s schools of the dictionary. (Without consulting the school board, I might add.)

Let me repeat that. School officials removed the Webster’s dictionary from every library in the district on account of the dictionary’s “sexually graphic” content.

The Press Enterprise has a story which features the district’s explanation for the book banning:

School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the “sexually graphic” entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus…..

“It’s just not age appropriate,” said Cadmus, adding that this is the first time a book has been removed from classrooms throughout the district.

“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” Cadmus said.

Well, as it happens, I have a rather substantial pile of dictionaries in my personal library, so perhaps I can aid Ms. Cadmus in her search. I don’t have the the 10th edition of Merriam-Webster, but I do have two other Webster’s dictionaries among my array of reference books, both of which are approximately the size of bedside tables. Let me just haul ‘em out and take a look.

Okay, neither of my Webster’s volumes contain the term “oral sex.” (Oral herpes, yes, oral sex, no.)

As one might imagine, they do, however, include the term “sex,” (which would logically seem to be the offending part of the term so objectionable to the Menifee parent). And, in a random (but enthusiastic) search of Webster’s 2nd edition (first published in 1955) I found that it also includes words like orgasm, prostitute, orgy, sodomy—and sodomitical, a word I didn’t previously know existed but toward which I developed an instant affection, so much so that I have now vowed to work it into sentences as often as possible, as in, “My dear Ms. Cadmus, perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’m rather concerned that the new Supreme Court decision—you know the one I mean, yes? It’s known as Citizens United— is going to have a distinctly sodomitical affect on the democratic process. What do you think?”

I find that my half-century old Webster’s also has a whole pile of other words and terms of which the vigilant Menifee-ites really should take note, things like chastity belt, condom, gonorrhea, pimp (”a go-between in illicit sexual affairs; especially a prostitute’s agent”) and dildo (”a device of rubber, etc. shaped like an erect penis, and used as a sexual stimulator: also spelled dildoe…”)

Frankly, I’d have found many, many more treasures for Ms. Cadmus and friends (really, try it yourself) but I had to stop because the dog was bugging me to go for a run.

Before I put on my running shoes, however, I did take the time to check to see if the good old 1955 Webster’s had within its august pages the word cunnilingus. Webster’s did.

(n [L., lit., from cunnus, vulva, and lingere, to lick] a sexual activity involving oral contact with the female genitals.)

It also had fellatio (n. [from L. fallatus p.p. of fellar, to suck] a sexual activity involving oral contact with the male genitals)—thus providing proof positive that the dictionary purgers at the Menifee Unified School District define the term “logic-phobic, anti-literate jackasses,”—which I did not find in the 2nd edition of Websters but, if it is not included in the 10th edition, I truly hope Webster’s will consider adding in the 11th edition, with a nice photo of the Menifee folks to illustrate.

Sadly, even if Webster should take my suggestion, those being pictured would never learn of the honor because, as my brief search has just demonstrated, if we follow the Menifee action out to its natural conclusion, we will have no dictionaries of any kind in our school libraries at all.

NOTE: More news in a while.

As most of you know, on Thursday morning the US Supreme Court blasted aside a century old ban on corporate elections spending with its 5/4 decision in the case known as Citizens United.

Here’s how the LA Times explains it:

Until now, corporations and unions have been barred from spending their own treasury funds on broadcast ads or billboards that urge the election or defeat of a federal candidate. This restriction dates back to 1907, when President Theodore Roosevelt called on Congress to forbid corporations, railroads and national banks from using their money in federal election campaigns. After World War II, Congress extended this ban to labor unions.

Now all that has been handily wiped away.

If you want to know a bit more about the broad strokes of the case, listen to NPR’s Nina Totenberg.

Adam Liptak of the New York Times also has a fairly cogent description:

Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The 5-to-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.

The ruling represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision to reshape the way elections were conducted.

Ironically, this comes right at the time when ordinary Americans have been growing increasingly alarmed and enraged by the way that big money interests influence lawmaking, both on Republican and Democratic sides of the aisle. However, after Thursday’s decision, those big money interests will be able to go upstream of the pesky and time consuming lobbying process in order to focus directly on buying electing the lawmakers whom they believe will view their agendas from the most felicitous possible perspective.

The Citizen’s United decision is being presented as a free speech issue. Yet, it was not really speech that was being protected on Thursday. It was the ability to use unlimited corporate money to slam or promote a candidate. Had it been so inclined, the court could have narrowcast its ruling to address the principle that was the supposed center of this case, which was the right to show, shortly before an election, an attack dog documentary on Hilary Clinton.

But the five Supremes who voted to give Citizens United its victory, went much further than a decision that would have merely viewed the documentary as protected. Instead the court gave its blessing to the corporate right to spend an unrestrained amount of cash in promoting and buying time for said documentary— or election ads or whatever form of electioneering a corporation thinks will most benefit its candidate of choice. Cynically, the court shrouded all this suddenly unfettered corporate elections spending under the cloak of the First Amendment.

In his written dissent, an impassioned Justice Stevens, vehemently objected to the Constitutional slight of hand that would magically transform a Lehman Brothers or a Pfizer into a…well….person. Here’s how Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick puts it in her article on the ruling,The Pinocchio Project: Watching as the Supreme Court turns a corporation into a real live boy:

Stevens hammers, more than once this morning from the bench on the principle that corporations “are not human beings” and “corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.” He insists that “they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”

But you can plainly see the weariness in Stevens eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the “voices of the real people” who will be drowned out. Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is “to confuse metaphor with reality.” Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.

The rest of us, I am sad to say, should feel very, very worried.

In the aftermath of the 2006 cyber-bullying case that led to 13-year-old Megan Meier’s suicide, there has been a predictable effort to clamp down on any actions by students that seem even vaguely similar to the fatal case. There is also a movement to perhaps criminalize such actions.

Now, however, free speech advocates are pushing back.

LA Times writer Victoria Kim writes a very informative and thoughtful article on the topic that begins with a story about Beverly Hills girl who was the victim of mean girl video in which a bunch of fellow students said creepy things about her on camera and posted it on YouTube. School officials reacted by suspending the student who did the YouTube posting. Her parents took the case to court and, last month, an LA Federal judge sided with the mean girl.

To allow the school to cast this wide a net and suspend a student simply because another student takes offense to their speech, without any evidence that such speech caused a substantial disruption of the school’s activities, runs afoul” of the law, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson wrote in a 60-page opinion.

“The court cannot uphold school discipline of student speech simply because young persons are unpredictable or immature, or because, in general, teenagers are emotionally fragile and may often fight over hurtful comments,” he wrote.

School administrators will be appealing.

Although the female grizzly mother in me wants all the video-posting little wretches suspended with extreme prejudice, my wiser self agrees entirely with Judge Wilson.

Read the rest of the story. It takes a multi-sided look at a complex question with far-reaching implications.

NOTE: I admit, I took the night off last night because it was my birthday, and I was celebrating with friends and family. (My son and his girlfriend cooked for all concerned. How cool is that?) I am running off shortly, but I have a pile up of good stories, so stay tuned.

NOTE 2: Speaking of parents and worry, over the weekend, there was an alcohol-related death of a South Pasadena teenager that was reportedly related to a high school party. According to the back stories I have heard, the tragedy appears to have some similarities to the Orinda case.

The PEN USA Annual Literary Awards Dinner was Wednesday night.

If one is a writer (or an editor or a writers’ agent) it is fun to hang out for a night with a ballroom full of other writerly types, most of whom look distinctly startled to find themselves dressed up and away from their computers.

Among the dressed up and startled were:

Sandra Tsing Loh, who looked fetching in skinny black pants and pigtailed hair…. LA Times Op Ed editress Sue Horton who went for black button-up elegance, novelist/memoirist Aimee Liu, who had on a cunning little beaded number, and journalist Sara Catania who wore a very cool girly, frilly, sheerish thingy.

(The men looked swell too but, with a few exceptions, their accessories were less notable.)

Of course, the point of the evening was to give an array of literary awards (and to raise money for PEN’s excellent programs, like PEN in the Classroom, and others).

All the PEN awards are listed here. But memorable among them were:

Steve Lopez, who won the creative nonfiction award for his terrific book The Soloist, about his (still ongoing and daily) relationship with homeless, mentally ill and gifted violinist, Nathaniel Ayers.

The always amazing Elmore Leonard, who won the Life Achievement award, and dispensed a few nuggets of writing advice when he accepted the prize, including his now classic: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

(Note to my writing students: A good idea to at least consider.)

Also memorable, was the choice of Linda Ollson, of Texas Monthly, who won the night’s award for Literary Journalism for her story Before and After, about the affects of an immigration raid at the Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. in Mount Pleasant, Texas. The story is good for many reasons, among them the fact that it doesn’t grind political axes, but merely shows—through a very human lens—the giant pile of complexities and contradictions that plague America’s immigration policy.

This is about as political as Ollson gets:

…It seems disingenuous to single out individual employees or supervisors, since these sorts of dealings are the product of a de facto bargain struck years ago: Poor people from other countries will make our food under harsh conditions, enabling us to eat cheaply and conveniently. Few people want to spend much time contemplating this, so we tend to construe the fact that chicken is inexpensive as if it were a property of the meat itself, like calorie content, rather than the result of a particular economic arrangement situated in a legal and ethical gray area.

You have to register (for free) to read the whole of Ollson’s piece, but here is how the story opens:

There was a man—call him Max, the name he went by at work, or Pancho, as he was known to his family and friends, or Francisco Garcia-Rodriguez, the name recorded on his birth certificate, or Sealed Defendant 3, the title under which he would eventually be indicted by a grand jury in Texarkana. He was 37 years old and lived in the East Texas town of Mount Pleasant. A father of five, he worked in the mornings and brought his kids to the park in the afternoons. He rooted for the Pumas, a Mexico City soccer team, and took an interest in politics and current events; he was a longtime Reader’s Digest subscriber and had recently plowed through the Spanish translation of Bill Clinton’s autobiography. His job was to load boxes of frozen chicken parts onto trailers at a chicken-processing plant owned by Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation, a place locals would often just call Pilgrim’s. He’d worked there for nearly twenty years.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Los Angeles Daily Journal-–the publication that lawyers and judges read—has an interesting article about attorney Peter Eliasberg and the unlikely case about a cross on an out of the way piece of public land, that will heard before the Supreme Court in October. (Chapeau tip to the always excellent How Appealing)

Here is the opening:

When Los Angeles-based American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Peter J. Eliasberg first heard about a controversial cross erected on federal land, it didn’t seem like a case that would end up at the U.S. Supreme Court.

They never do.

But 10 years later, Eliasberg is frantically preparing for his first argument before the high court in an Establishment Clause case that is one of the highlights of the term that begins Oct. 5.

[SNIP]

The case that will bring him to the Supreme Court on Oct. 7 grew out of a long-running religious dispute over a cross in the Mojave Desert that was erected to commemorate war veterans but has instead sparked years of debate about the proper roles of church and state.

At issue is whether the 9th Circuit was correct to bar the federal government from transferring to the Veterans of Foreign Wars a parcel of land in the Mojave National Preserve on which the cross sits in exchange for another parcel of equal value.

Further details of the case-–Salazar v. Buono—may be found here.

This case has roughly a zillion implications, so will be worth watching.

WILL THE SENATE FINALLY PASS A FEDERAL SHIELD LAW?

This week the Senate Judiciary committee will turn its focus on the long-debated but never passed shield law for journalists. It will be the first bill taken up and marked up by the committee, which is significant, reported the Washington Times, as it generally suggests the committee is favoring the bill.

Writing for the Washington Post, Walter Pincus has the most complete run down on the issue —including all the lobbying that has been going on for the bill, which Barack Obama vocally supported during his campaign.

And if the bill does get out of committee, where will bloggers fall in this whole shield deal?

Drawing by Patrick Finney

In Sunday’s LA Times, pediatric doc Alex Blum writes about the case that still haunts him, and what it suggests for the debate over health care reform.

Here’s how it opens:

Along with every other pediatrician I know, I have seen far too often the unconscionable consequences of children not having healthcare coverage. One case still haunts me.

In the middle of one night during my training at a county hospital outside of Los Angeles, a 12-year-old boy arrived at the emergency room. He was having a seizure. From a brain scan, we made the terrible diagnosis: He had suffered a massive stroke. At best, he would be severely disabled for the rest of his life.

SUPREMES SAY CALIFORNIA CANNOT DELAY JUDGE-DEMANDED PRISON POPULATION REDUCTION

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme court said it would not extend California’s Sept. 18 deadline for coming up with a plan that will reduce the state’s inmate population by 40,000 inmates over a period of two years.

The SF Chronicle has the story.

In a brief order Friday, the justices refused to extend a Sept. 18 deadline for telling a special three-judge panel how California will reduce its inmate population by roughly 25 percent over two years.

The order does not represent a decision on the merits of the state’s appeal. Instead, it is a procedural ruling that nonetheless forces the state to comply with the panel’s directive to present a plan for lowering the number of inmates while the appeal goes forward.

It is difficult not to see some irony in the fact that, after weeks and weeks of squabbling and grandstanding, the state legislature couldn’t manage to pass its plan to reduce California’s prison population by 27,000 (through sentencing and parole reform combined with alternative sentencing for certain inmates).

Instead, on Friday, lawmakers passed a wimpy piece of legislation that reduced the lock-up population by only 16,000 inmates.

Yet, now it looks increasingly likely that a panel of federal judges will force a prison population reduction of 49,000—nearly twice the number that was in the bill the legislators wouldn’t pass..

This oughta be interesting to watch.

SCOTUSBLOG has more on the Supremes’ decision.

SCOTUS, THE HILLARY MOVIE AND THE 1ST AMENDMENT

Last Wednesday the Supreme Court heard arguments about what has now become known as the “Hillary, the Movie” case.

According to the experts who are quarreling about the issue, the case could either:

1. Trash the campaign finance laws that, since 1907, have been restricting corporate contributions.

OR

2. Endanger the First Amendment.

The New York Times got a panel of legal scholars and law professors together to give their opinions on the damned-whichever-way-they-rule situation.

Then on Sunday, columnist George Will wrote an opinion column on the dilemma for the WaPo.

Here’s how it starts:

Last March, during the Supreme Court argument concerning the Federal Election Commission’s banning of a political movie, several justices were aghast. Suddenly and belatedly they saw the abyss that could swallow the First Amendment….

Both are worth reading.

I’ll be blogging more later today about local news.

But until then, here are a few snips from Paul Krugman’s column about the screaming protesters who have been showing up at the town hall meetings held across the country to talk about health care. (Like this meeting in Tampa.)

There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.

That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

So this is something new and ugly. What’s behind it?

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, has compared the scenes at health care town halls to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000 — the demonstration that disrupted the vote count in Miami and arguably helped send George W. Bush to the White House. Portrayed at the time as local protesters, many of the rioters were actually G.O.P. staffers flown in from Washington.

But Mr. Gibbs is probably only half right….

You can read the rest here..

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So how about all of you out there? Do you have good health coverage? Is it reasonably priced or too expensive? What does it pay for? Are you confident the insurance will cover you and/or your family in the event of serious illness. What has your experience been? What about your family and friends? And what do you want—or not want—out of the package before Congress?

Me we each renew our commitment to our best aspirations.

“And crown thy good with brotherhood….”

Have a terrific day!

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PS: If you want to have a brief semi-political moment today, read the smart essay written by my friend and Annenberg colleague, Roberto Suro, in the Washington Post, in which he makes a provocative pitch for dumping the Emma Lazarus poem from the Statue of Liberty, the crown of which has finally been reopened today for the first time since September 11.

Whether you agree or disagree (I’m actually pretty attached to the poem, myself), Roberto has an intriguingly thought out rational for tossing those fourteen famous lines, including an historical rundown on how the poem, “The New Colossus,” came to grace the base of our Lady of Liberty in the first place.

All of the above provides a perfect jumping off point for a spirited 4th of July argument….uh…discussion…while you’re waiting for the fireworks.

Then for an alternate point of view of Lazarus’ sonnet, here’s what poet Robert Pinsky had to say about those same familiar lines: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to……”