Octopus Overlords

cheeba wrote:What it does is allows people to do what they want with their money (kinda). Many argue that Obama won the last election because of the latino vote. It wasn't the overabundance of money coming from latino voters, it was the relatively poor minority getting out and voting. Their voices weren't drowned out.

And no republican wants the voices of the poor drowned out. This isn't superheroes vs. villains.

Robert Shrum, senior adviser on many Democratic campaigns wrote:In politics there is certainly no linear relationship between amount of money and degree of success.

El Guapo wrote:So it seems like wealthy donors now can give a trivial amount to lots of candidates rather than a trivial amount to a few. Doesn't seem like a huge deal in and of itself, except as a prelude to striking down the individual limit in the next decision.

Overall, while I generally favor campaign finance restrictions, there's a pretty straightforward and logical constitutional case against them - by financing political speech you are creating / allowing speech that would not otherwise occur. Therefore restricting political contributions is restricting speech in a meaningful sense.

cheeba wrote:What it does is allows people to do what they want with their money (kinda). Many argue that Obama won the last election because of the latino vote. It wasn't the overabundance of money coming from latino voters, it was the relatively poor minority getting out and voting. Their voices weren't drowned out.

And no republican wants the voices of the poor drowned out. This isn't superheroes vs. villains.

cheeba wrote:Read this.

Robert Shrum, senior adviser on many Democratic campaigns wrote:In politics there is certainly no linear relationship between amount of money and degree of success.

cheeba wrote:Read this.

Robert Shrum, senior adviser on many Democratic campaigns wrote:In politics there is certainly no linear relationship between amount of money and degree of success.

RunningMn9 wrote:I'm not as concerned about the amount of money spent directly leading to winning elections.

I'm more concerned with the amount of money involved directly controlling who is effectively able to run in elections. I'm more concerned with the amount of money involved directly leading to politicians that are owned by their donors.

I have a problem with a Democracy built on the concept that the amount of free speech I am entitled to is dependent on the number of dollars in my bank account that I'm willing to use to buy favors from politicians or political parties.

Alefroth wrote:I'm curious to see how this one goes. You're basically renting a antenna at the end of a very long cable.

Aereo

RunningMn9 wrote:Clearly what is missing in our national politics is more money.

Isgrimnur wrote:-1 gold. Remember the double Irish?

Alefroth wrote:I'm curious to see how this one goes. You're basically renting a antenna at the end of a very long cable.

Aereo

There are far more important principles at play here, most importantly, whether a commercial service can enable you to access your own content over the Internet, regardless of where you are. I.e., the cloud.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld Michigan’s ban on the use of racial preferences in university admissions, a decision that might encourage other states to adopt similar prohibitions.

By a vote of 6 to 2, the court concluded that it was not up to judges to overturn the decision by Michigan voters to disallow consideration of race when deciding who gets into the state’s universities. California, Florida and the state of Washington have similar prohibitions.

“This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the court’s controlling opinion.

“There is no authority in the Constitution of the United States or in this court’s precedents for the judiciary to set aside Michigan laws that commit this policy determination to the voters.”
...
At issue at the Supreme Court was language that says state colleges and universities “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

Today the U.S. Supreme Court decided Navarette v. California, a case concerning when the police have the authority to stop a vehicle due to a reasonable suspicion that the driver may be intoxicated. Justice Thomas wrote for the majority, concluding that under the totality of the circumstances presented in this case, which included a 911 call from another driver who claimed to have been run off the road, it was reasonable to stop Prado Naverette’s truck. After stopping the vehicle, the officers smelled marijuana, looked in the truck’s bed, and discovered 30 pounds of marijuana.

One of the things that is interesting about the Court’s decision in Naverette is the line-up. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion was joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Kennedy, Alito, and Breyer. Justice Scalia dissented, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan. According to Justice Scalia, an anonymous 911 call reporting one incident of erratic driving is not sufficiently reliable to provide for reasonable suspicion that a driver is impaired and is thus insufficient to justify a traffic stop.

Isgrimnur wrote:Michigan anti-affirmative action law stands:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld Michigan’s ban on the use of racial preferences in university admissions, a decision that might encourage other states to adopt similar prohibitions.

By a vote of 6 to 2, the court concluded that it was not up to judges to overturn the decision by Michigan voters to disallow consideration of race when deciding who gets into the state’s universities. California, Florida and the state of Washington have similar prohibitions.

“This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the court’s controlling opinion.

“There is no authority in the Constitution of the United States or in this court’s precedents for the judiciary to set aside Michigan laws that commit this policy determination to the voters.”
...
At issue at the Supreme Court was language that says state colleges and universities “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

I suppose that, as long as the policies in place do not show a de facto discrimination, then they can use whatever criteria they choose. However, they're going to be under a lot of scrutiny to make sure they're not violating rights, and I imagine the state university system will get the crap sued out of them if they get it wrong.

Isgrimnur wrote:Navarette v. California decided:

Today the U.S. Supreme Court decided Navarette v. California, a case concerning when the police have the authority to stop a vehicle due to a reasonable suspicion that the driver may be intoxicated. Justice Thomas wrote for the majority, concluding that under the totality of the circumstances presented in this case, which included a 911 call from another driver who claimed to have been run off the road, it was reasonable to stop Prado Naverette’s truck. After stopping the vehicle, the officers smelled marijuana, looked in the truck’s bed, and discovered 30 pounds of marijuana.

One of the things that is interesting about the Court’s decision in Naverette is the line-up. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion was joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Kennedy, Alito, and Breyer. Justice Scalia dissented, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan. According to Justice Scalia, an anonymous 911 call reporting one incident of erratic driving is not sufficiently reliable to provide for reasonable suspicion that a driver is impaired and is thus insufficient to justify a traffic stop.

The issue at hand is the power and reliability of anonymous tips. Here the California Highway Patrol received an anonymous tip through a 911 dispatcher that a silver Ford 150 pickup on a particular highway had run the tipster off the road. The CHP saw a truck matching the description on the highway and stopped it on suspicion of drunk driving — but did not first observe the truck doing anything illegal or reckless. In fact, the cops followed the truck for five miles without observing any traffic violations. The cops approached the truck and (allegedly) smelled marijuana, which led to a search and the discovery of a substantial amount of marijuana in the truck bed.

Isgrimnur wrote:The summary at Popehat is pretty good:

The issue at hand is the power and reliability of anonymous tips. Here the California Highway Patrol received an anonymous tip through a 911 dispatcher that a silver Ford 150 pickup on a particular highway had run the tipster off the road. The CHP saw a truck matching the description on the highway and stopped it on suspicion of drunk driving — but did not first observe the truck doing anything illegal or reckless. In fact, the cops followed the truck for five miles without observing any traffic violations. The cops approached the truck and (allegedly) smelled marijuana, which led to a search and the discovery of a substantial amount of marijuana in the truck bed.

Scraper wrote:

Isgrimnur wrote:The summary at Popehat is pretty good:

The issue at hand is the power and reliability of anonymous tips. Here the California Highway Patrol received an anonymous tip through a 911 dispatcher that a silver Ford 150 pickup on a particular highway had run the tipster off the road. The CHP saw a truck matching the description on the highway and stopped it on suspicion of drunk driving — but did not first observe the truck doing anything illegal or reckless. In fact, the cops followed the truck for five miles without observing any traffic violations. The cops approached the truck and (allegedly) smelled marijuana, which led to a search and the discovery of a substantial amount of marijuana in the truck bed.

You can always count on Thomas to be on the side that says "F YOU" to the American people.

Isgrimnur wrote:Maybe...

The ruling in the case of Paroline v. United States, settling a dispute among lower courts on a mandatory law of restitution to victims of child pornography, refused to establish a specific formula for allocating the financial blame, telling federal trial judges to “do their best,” with a few suggestions for starting points. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion.


The decision clearly will spare a Tyler, Texas, man, Doyle Randall Paroline, from paying all of the nearly $3.4 million that lawyers for a young woman identified only as “Amy” had demanded from him. Paroline had two images of her being photographed as her uncle sexually abused her when she was eight years old. Now a young woman, she had testified that “My life and my feelings are worse now because the crime has never really stopped and will never really stop.”

The Court ruled that a federal district court judge must calculate how much to assess against Paroline personally. There is no doubt, Justice Kennedy wrote, that Paroline “was part of the overall phenomenon” of distributing and keeping images of the abuse of Amy. He should have to pay his share and, Kennedy said, it must be enough to send the message that his part in the crime was not victimless.

Lawyers for “Amy” had insisted that Paroline, like everyone who has her images and looks at them, contributes to her continuing injury, so each of them should be required to pay the full amount for her losses, in whatever multiples of individuals are found and prosecuted for having the pictures.
...
Only one Justice — Sonia Sotomayor — agreed with the demand for full restitution, but Sotomayor did so in dissent. Three other Justices, also in dissent, said that calculating each possessor’s share of the overall harm to “Amy” would necessarily be “arbitrary,” so there should be no restitution to her because Congress had “provided no mechanism” for calculating shares of the cause of her injury.
...
The majority expressed confidence that district court judges could devise ways to make a calculation of comparative harm, aided by the government (which would have the burden of proof on the amount of the victim’s loss). But, in order to aid the judges in this task, Justice Kennedy laid out some general principles.

First, there must be a conviction, which would establish that the individual in question possessed images of the victim.
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Next, the judge can take into account a variety of factors on “relative cause” for each individual convicted
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Kennedy cautioned that “these factors need not be converted into a rigid formula, especially if doing so would result in trivial restitution orders. They should serve as rough guideposts for determining an amount that fits the offense.”

In warning against going too far to hold each individual who possesses child pornography financially liable, the majority opinion said there was a risk that this could violate the Constitution’s ban on “excessive” forms of punishment, because restitution is a form of punishment carried out by a government process.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to overturn the death sentence of a man who confessed to kidnapping, raping and killing a 16-year-old girl in Kentucky.

The justices ruled 6-3 that Robert Keith Woodall was not entitled to a new sentencing hearing despite his claim that jurors received faulty instructions.

Woodall argued that the trial judge should have told the jury not to draw any negative conclusions about his refusal to take the stand at his 1998 capital sentencing hearing.

Justice Antonin Scalia said the trial judge was under no obligation to instruct the jury about drawing adverse conclusions. Scalia acknowledged that prior Supreme Court precedents have required such instructions during the guilt phase of a criminal trial and in some cases during sentencing. But he said those decisions did not "clearly establish" a broad rule for all sentencing hearings.
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Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan joined Scalia's opinion reversing the appeals court.
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Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, said the "normal rule is that Fifth Amendment protections apply during trial and sentencing." Breyer said the high court's precedent was clear in requiring the no-adverse-inference instruction during a sentencing hearing.

Rip wrote:This has me wondering. Historically if a person were arrested while carrying their laptop, would they be able to search it without a warrant? To me a smartphone of today is a laptop of yesterday, or a locked briefcase of the day before.