The Catch Up Thread For 1/21/10: I Will Ask The SCOTUS If This Blog Is A Person?

Lots of things to get into today. Good, bad, great, and ugly:

Today was a great day to be a powerful corporation, as we all know the news by now about how conservatives are the real "judicial activists" on the Supreme Court:

In a ruling that has major implications for how elections are funded, the Supreme Court has struck down a key campaign-finance restriction that bars corporations and unions from pouring money into political ads.

The long-awaited 5-4 ruling, in the Citizens United v. FEC case, presents advocates of regulation with a major challenge in limiting the flow of corporate money into campaigns, and potentially opens the door for unrestricted amounts of corporate money to flow into American politics.

In the case at issue, Citizens United (CU), a conservative advocacy group, was challenging a ruling by the FEC that barred it from airing a negative movie about Hillary Clinton. CU received corporate donations and the movie advocated the defeat of a political candidate within 60 days of an election. CU argued that the FEC ruling violated its freedom of speech, and that the relevant provision of McCain-Feingold was unconstitutional.

The outage at the conservative cartel of Alito, Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas has been obviously felt throughout

Tom Goldestein from the intrepid and industrious America Blog

Much will depend on the wording, but today's decision is a small revolution in campaign finance law.

The remarkable Dahila Lithwick

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.

And it even caused President Obama to voice in total disapproval over the outrageous decision

"With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics," said President Obama in a statement. "It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans... That's why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision."

It was a forceful type day from the President, as earlier, he went full hard on the banks by going on the advice of Paul Volker instead of Larry Summers or Tim Geithner.....finally:


The looks on both Volker's (first) and Summers'(second)faces say it all:

Lovely.

The news that Air America has folded has rippled across the air waves.

And we are truly living in the age where 41 is greater than 59.





If CNN would stop doing politics, it would be a great news network.