The courts do not want to be viewed as a panacea of all of society’s ills, a task too large and often inappropriate for them to handle. If an injury is far-reaching, it is likely that a better solution would come from a political forum.

That’s all very nice, and it keeps your Honors’ benches from getting muddied by the concerns of the proles, what with all their societal ills, but with corporations buying legislative bodies Left and Right, who *does* propel the concerns?

The eff bulletin ew references should make judge Walker smile at the passage about exigent post-it notes. What if they fall off the work order? Talk about exigencies. Electronic post-it notes, however, might be subsumed under the Storage rules and regs. Eff is right to appeal this skimpy ruling by a seemingly fatigued jurist; however, it is laced with all the appropriate hints for the anti-standing associate justice of Scotus, Alito. Walker even seems drear when expressing some hope for congress, bouncing as his Order does, among various cites of fisaaa. Jokes aside, I wonder how much of these tedious processes actually exists in software, and how much, in contradistinction, still generates what Alberto complained is veritable stacks of approval forms mountaining *inches* tall in the inbaskets of government administrators and overseers. Diggs-Taylor*s improvised characterizations continue to have a true resonance these five years later. And there remain a few minutiae for Walker*s review in at least one final case of this genre.

If I may go OT for a moment longer, this appears to be a HUGE story:

The chief federal judge handling Guantanamo detainee constitutional challenges is calling on Congress and the Obama Administration to write a new law to determine when the United States can hold terrorism suspects as war captives. In lengthy interviews with Chief Judge Royce Lamberth and two of his colleagues on the United States District Court in Washington, D.C., they told ProPublica:

· “Judges aren’t in the business of making law — we interpret law,”

· “How confident can I be that if I make the wrong choice that he (the detainee) won’t be the one that blows up the Washington Monument or the Capitol?”

· “It’s an honor to have the responsibility of blazing the trail in determining how justice should be administered in these cases….it’s also frustrating when not all the rules are clear and not all the specifics of how a matter should be dealt with are before us.”

· “It should be Congress that decides a policy such as this that has a monumental impact on our society and makes a monumental impression on the world community.”

@#16—DW Bartoo

Poor Lady Justice-not only is she blind,but apparently deaf and dumb,also.

Here’s some additional details from the Times Picayune-the New Orleans newspaper:

Judge Thomas Porteous not trustworthy, task force declares

By Bruce Alpert, Times-Picayune

January 21, 2010

A House task force Thursday recommended that U.S. District Judge Thomas Porteous be impeached because of a “long-standing pattern of corrupt conduct.”The panel unanimously approved four articles of impeachment which will be considered by the House Judiciary Committee in the next week or two.

“Judge Porteous engaged in a pattern of conduct that is incompatible with the trust and confidence placed in him as a federal judge,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Task Force on Judicial Impeachment.The articles accuse Porteous, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, of seeking and taking kickbacks and other gifts, including money, trips and free meals at expensive restaurants from lawyers and a bail bond company with business before him, not disclosing his improper conduct as a state judge to the Senate during his 1994 confirmation proceedings and making false statements in a personal bankruptcy filing.

His conduct, one of the impeachment articles states, was “so utterly lacking in honesty and integrity that he is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and is unfit to hold the office of federal judge and should be removed from office.Schiff said the task force’s investigation included interviews with 65 witnesses, 25 of whom gave testimony under oath.

Perhaps the most serious complaint against Porteous was his refusal to recuse himself from a complicated federal case or disclose that he had been receiving monetary gifts and lunches for years from the Amato & Creely PLC firm hired by the plaintiff. He also shared roughly half the proceeds from the $40,000 worth of court assignments he assigned to the firm — an arrangement the articles call a “kickback” — and continued to accept payments of thousands of dollars in cash from the firm while he was considering a verdict that eventually favored the plaintiff, according to the task force findings.

Porteous is barred from hearing cases through the fall of 2010, or his removal from office, whichever occurs first. But he continues to receive his $174,000 federal salary until he resigns, or the Senate votes to remove him from office.

“Judge Thomas Porteous Not Worthy, Task Force Declares,” Bruce Alpert, Times Picayune(link to follow)

A couple of weeks later,Floyd published an update to the piece upthread:

Update on Our Brave New Slavery: Yes, It Applies to American Citizens, Too

Written by Chris Floyd

Wednesday, 30 December 2009

I wrote a piece here a few days ago on a recent ruling by the Supreme Court, in which the justices agreed with the passionate plea of the Obama Administration to uphold — and establish as legal precedent — some of the most egregious of the Bush Administration’s authoritarian perversions. One of the attorneys involved in the case rightly likened the ruling to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the Court declared that any person of African descent brought to the United States as a slave — or their descendants, even if they had been freed — could never be citizens of the United States and were not protected by the Constitution. They were non-persons under the law; sub-humans.

I noted the grim irony that this principle of non-personhood had now been reintroduced into the law of the land by our first African-American president. (But this is only to be expected, given the law of opposites that so often governs American politics: only a lifelong Red-baiter like Nixon could make an opening to Communist China; only a supposed liberal like Bill Clinton could gut the federal welfare system. And only an African-American president could reintroduce the principle of slavery and get away with it. No doubt it will be a woman president who finally re-imposes a total ban on abortion.)

The many decisions by the Supreme Court and lower courts upholding the federal government’s authoritarian power to strip Terror War captives of inherent and inalienable legal rights are part of a larger framework that applies both in theory and in practice to everyone — American citizens included.

What we are seeing is the construction of a new “social contract,” the open codification of a new relationship between the individual and the state, in which all powers and rights reside solely in the latter, which can bestow them or withhold them at will, arbitrarily, unaccountable. In contrast, it is the individual who must be totally accountable to the state. The state is bound by no law, but the individual is subject to them all — including “secret laws” and decrees and executive orders of which he or she has no knowledge.Empire Burlesque

Update on Our Brave New Slavery: Yes, It Applies to American …Dec 30, 2009 … Update on Our Brave New Slavery: Yes, It Applies to American Citizens, … could reintroduce the principle of slavery and get away with it. …

http://www.chris-floyd.com/…news/1893-update-on-our-brave-new-slavery-yes-it-applies-to-american-citizens-too.html – Cached