Monday, November 1, 2010

Prosecutorial Payback, Shrouded in Secrets

Halloween is over, but this is scary:

After a failed effort to stop a woman from talking about a case, an activist was served with a 'sprawling' federal subpoena.

"It had almost 100 subparts and sought documents, e-mails, phone records, checks, bank records, credit card receipts, photographs, videos and 'Facebook communications (including messages and wall posts)' concerning contacts with dozens of people, including doctors and lawyers, along with information about a billboard supporting the [a doctor and his wife being prosecuted] and a documentary film called, perhaps presciently, 'The Chilling Effect.'"

When the woman refused to comply with the court’s order, a federal judge imposed fines of $200 each a day."

Read The New York Times, A First Amendment Case, Shrouded in Secrets.

Government secrecy is antithetical to democracy. See OpenTheGovernment.org.

The 'Tea Party' Revolt

UPDATE: Read Politico, Next for GOP leaders: Stopping Palin.

"The ordinary Americans in the Tea Party movement lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican power." Read The New York Times, The Grand Old Plot Against the Tea Party, which predicts that "their numbers will surely grow once the Republican establishment’s panacea of tax cuts proves as ineffectual at creating jobs, saving homes and cutting deficits as the half-measures of the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress. The tempest, however, will not be contained within the tiny Tea Party but will instead overrun the Republican Party itself, where Palin, with Murdoch and Beck at her back, waits in the wings to “take back America” not just from Obama but from the G.O.P. country club elites now mocking her."

Economics 101 -- Why Hoover Was Wrong and the Republi-CONs will Lose the Next Election

"More and more voters are convinced that what we need is not spending but more punishment. The irony is that they will end up punishing themselves." Read The New York Times, Mugged by the Moralizers.

Time to call the Republi-con bluff!

How Pumpkin Pies Are Made

Just in time for the holidays:



I think I'll have apple pie!