SO, EXACTLY WHAT PART OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT DID JUDGE HILLERI MERRITT NOT UNDERSTAND?

Friday’s LA Times editorial explains it all:

A unanimous panel of California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal has at last cleaned up a shameful legal mess, ordering L.A. County Superior Court Judge Hilleri G. Merritt to end her prior restraint on the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier this month, after first granting The Times the right to photograph a criminal defendant appearing in her courtroom, Merritt changed her mind and ordered the paper not to publish the lawfully taken picture. The Times, showing more respect for the law than Merritt did, obeyed her order while it appealed, first to her to reconsider and later, when she refused, to the higher court. On Thursday, that court inevitably concluded, as it was required to, that she had violated the 1st Amendment.

Writing for himself and two colleagues, Judge Sanjay T. Kumar produced a stark reminder of just how far Merritt had strayed from well-established law in waging her campaign against open courts and a free press. Riffling through citations, the court noted that “an order enjoining publication of a photograph of a suspect in a pending court proceeding is classic prior restraint of speech.” Publishing “lawfully obtained, truthful information about a matter of public significance cannot be restrained unless it is necessary to protect a state interest of the highest order.” And the “barriers to prior restraint remain high and the presumption against its use continues intact.” Not once, as Kumar made clear, has any appellate court concluded that those barriers could be overcome in a case such as this…

Read the rest.

And here’s the news story by Andrew Blankstein on the same topic.

And here is a previous LAT editorial on the matter.

AND here’s what Wired Magazine had to say earlier this month.

By the way, it is not entirely comforting that a criminal court judge hearing high profile cases has such a high-handed and faulty an understanding of the legal principal prohibiting prior restraint.

FYI: The photo above is from an LAPD handout of murder defendant Alberd Tersargyan—whose in-court photo—taken originally with the permission of the judge—was the one in question.

LA Times reporters, David Sarno and Jessica Guynn, have a very good piece on REACT, the task force that searched the home Gizmodo’s Jason Chen, the blogger who temporarily had possession the lost iPhone prototype.

(The Gizmodo/iPhone prototype story somehow still hasn’t gotten less interesting, even with its alarming implications.)

The LAT reporting begins like this:

When a top-secret prototype of Apple Inc.’s new iPhone went missing recently, the computer giant summoned Silicon Valley’s version of the cavalry — an elite squad whose main mission is investigating crimes against high-tech companies.

Little-known outside the tech world, the unit is suddenly in the spotlight for its April 23 raid on the Bay Area home of Jason Chen, the 29-year-old technology blogger who had gained possession of the missing phone.

The unit swept in after Chen posted a photo and details of the new iPhone on the Gizmodo.com website. But the raid itself has become secondary to a larger debate burning up Silicon Valley and the blogosphere: What is this high-tech police force, and who controls it?

“It’s the iPolice,” said Steve Meister, a former Los Angeles County deputy district attorney. “This whole thing appears, rightly or wrongly, to be law enforcement doing the bidding of a private company.”

The task force, called REACT (for Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team), is a kind of SWAT team, chartered in 1997 to focus on “large-scale crimes that victimize the high technology industry in the Bay Area.”

There’s LOTS more, so read the rest here.

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.

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 »

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……”

The AP reports that King County, Washington has agreed to pay conservative blogger Stefan Sharkansky $225,000 to settle a public-records lawsuit he brought over the county’s delay in releasing documents about the 2004 governor’s election.

Good for Stefan Sharkansky. King County officials complained that they didn’t have the time to comply in timely fashion—which since, the election appears to have hinged on someone getting to the bottom of voter anomalies—is hardly an acceptable excuse.

Here are some of the details:

Sharkansky filed his request in December 2004, seeking a list of everyone who voted in the county in the election that year, but the county didn’t satisfy the request until more than two years later.

He said the documents that were ultimately provided revealed that elections officials in King County counted hundreds of ineligible ballots — including double votes and votes from unregistered or improperly registered voters. That could have changed the outcome of the razor-thin race between Democrat Chris Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi, he said. Gregoire won by 133 votes following two recounts and a trial in Chelan County Superior Court.

The documents were not produced during the trial, and therefore “the trial never explained this mystery of why there were more votes than voters,” Sharkansky said April 24.

Sharkansky is a controversial and occasionally polarizing figure in the Seattle area. That is of no consequence here. He battled ferociously for reporter’s rights and for the public interest with this lawsuit.

And he won.

Read the rest here.

CALIFORNIA DMV SUSPENDING LICENSES FOR USE OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA?

Well, maybe.

The LA Times Maura Dolan has an intriguing story about a lawsuit recently filed against the California Department of Motor Vehicles by Americans for Safe Access.

The suit contends that the DMV has a pattern of investigating and suspending the driver’s licenses of people who use pot on the recommendation of their doctors.

“It happens a disturbing amount,” said Joseph D. Elford, chief counsel for Americans for Safe Access, which promotes legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes and research.

Maybe it’s nothing, or maybe it’s a pattern. I hope the DMV isn’t that stupid.

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SHIELDING JOURNALISTS

Also in the LA Times Monday, on the editorial page, some strongly worded encouragement for President Obama to keep his campaign promise by supporting a federal shield law for journalists.

Here’s how it opens.

During his campaign for president, Barack Obama expressed support for a federal “shield law” to protect journalists’ confidential sources. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia offer such protection.

With the reintroduction in the House of the Free Flow of Information Act, Obama has the opportunity to fulfill his commitment.

The Times, however, advises that we might need to be a teensy bit worried about Eric Holder in this matter.

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HOW BAD IS IT IN THE WORLD OF JOURNALISM?

Next Thursday night, Feb. 26, the LA Press Club is hosting a panel called: What to Do After You Leave Your Job in Journalism.

I’m not kidding.

It’s at 7 p.m. and open to the public. (LA Press Club members get in free.)

It’ll be held at the Steve Allen Theater at the LA Press Club; 4773 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, 90027.

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NATIONALIZE ‘EM OR LOSE ‘EM? (BANKS, THAT IS.)

Prescient economist, Nouriel Roubini, has a co-written column in the Washington Post that calls for the nationalizing America’s banks.

Here’s what he said:

The U.S. banking system is close to being insolvent, and unless we want to become like Japan in the 1990s — or the United States in the 1930s — the only way to save it is to nationalize it.

As free-market economists teaching at a business school in the heart of the world’s financial capital, we feel downright blasphemous proposing an all-out government takeover of the banking system. But the U.S. financial system has reached such a dangerous tipping point that little choice remains. And while Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s recent plan to save it has many of the right elements, it’s basically too late.

According to The Swamp, a number of conservatives are buying into the idea.

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HUFF POST TAKES ON MORTGAGES

The Huffington Post’s Off the Bus Section is calling for citizen journalists to report on the ongoing mortgage crisis from all corners of the nation. Good idea.

Assuredly, there is a lot of room to cover this story better. As to whether the Huffington Post is in a position to provide something new on the subject, remains to be seen.

They sent this note out to possible contributors:

HuffPost wants to tell the story better, by digging deeper in more places than any other news organization. To do it right, we need you.

Cool. We await the outcome.