You know, the alleged usual. Here’s the alleged latest, via WisPolitics:
According to a new court filing, a forensic investigation of computers GOP lawmakers, their aides and their lawyers used in the redistricting process found some files were deleted just after a federal court ordered three witnesses to turn over documents to the plaintiffs. Other files were deleted one week before the lawmakers’ firm, Michael Best & Friedrich, turned over its redistricting files to Dems after they took control of the state Senate following a recall election. [...]
Yesterday’s filing updated the court on a forensic examination of the computers and noted the cost of the review had now reached $100,000. The plaintiffs asked the court to require the Legislature, its employees and/or its attorneys to cover the costs of the forensics.
The subpoenas are being used to force GOP officials to reveal where the mystery computers, external hard drives, discs and documents are located, and the groups who are making these demands want the answers under oath.
It’s been months and months, but the state of Wisconsin never told the plaintiffs, who want to search said computers, where the computers were, and made every effort to block them from finding out, so now the Dems are playing hardball. They want those documents, and they want them now.
Republicans who control the Wisconsin legislature. Wisconsin’s governor is the one and only GOP “rising star” Scott Walker. Of course, Walker, along with the legislature, approved redistricting maps that benefited their party
It isn’t clear who deleted these documents, but– call me crazy– I’m guessing it wasn’t a Democrat.
Madison - Documents were deleted from state redistricting computers last year even after a lawyer for the Legislature told lawmakers’ aides to preserve all records on the computers, according to documents filed Wednesday in federal court.
Nine hard drives were recently given to groups suing the state because of questions about whether legislators and their attorneys had turned over all the documents they had been ordered to provide. One of the nine hard drives was unreadable and the outside of it was dented and scratched, which suggested its metal housing had been removed, according to affidavits in the case.
In addition, some of the hard drives had a program installed on them that could remove electronic data and hide the fact that files had been deleted, according to the filing. So far, however, a computer expert has not been able to determine if the program was actually used.
JSOnline goes on to say that a “panel of federal judges ruled last year that two Assembly maps on Milwaukee’s south side violated the voting rights of Latinos. The court put in place new maps for those districts but not others, meaning the Republican-friendly maps were largely preserved.”
And the fun never ends under Scott Walker’s watch. Stay tuned.
I’m not a subscriber, so the only info I can provide you on the New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Toobin is what I can access and what Taegan has posted.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turns eighty this month, and she can project the daunting stillness of a seated monarch.
Per Taegan, Justice Ginsburg tells she intends to stay on the court “as long as I can do the job full steam.”
Said Ginsburg: “There will come a point when I — It’s not this year. You can never tell when you’re my age. But, as long as I think I have the candlepower, I will do it. And I figure next year for certain. After that, who knows?”
If only Justices Scalia, Alito, and/or Thomas would throw in the towel. Hey, a girl can dream, right?
By the way, irony is not dead. Scalia said the following during the oral arguments on the Voting Rights Act:
NBC: Vice President Joe Biden speaks in Alabama at the annual commemoration of the Selma to Montgomery bridge march of 1965.
“We saw in stark relief the rank hatred, discrimination, violence that still existed in large swaths of the nation.”
“What all of you did that day, and the next, and the next, and the next, allowed America to… begin to see the potential that actually existed maybe, maybe for the first time.”
“What happened at the bridge generated a lesson that was absolutely clear… it was palpable… There’s courage to stand up to moral imperatives of the day… saying the right thing… But there’s a different kind of courage standing and looking at somebody who has a club in his hand, and you KNOW… The courage to look evil in the eye.“
“… Believing that although the cost had been high, victory was inevitable.”
“We owe Jesse Jackson… We owe John Lewis, and so many more. We owe all of you a debt that we can never be fully repaid.”
“I wonder how many people remember what the fight was about… But today you say… it was about the right to vote, nothing else. Just the right to vote. It wasn’t about the right to go to ‘somebody’s school’… Most everybody already thought by ’65 [the right to vote] was pretty settled.”
“You walked out of the doors of the… church… that’s why, in spite of the certain knowledge that you’d get beaten, you stepped your foot on that bridge and defied and ultimately defeated those voices of prejudice. That’s why you did it. Because you know and every American knows… that without the right to vote, there’s no right guaranteed, and you can’t count on anyone else voting your interests. YOU gotta vote your interests.“
“You broke the back of the forces of evil. …. That march didn’t end in Montgomery. You know it continues today.“
“Never did I think 40 years earlier that I’d be standing on that platform [with Pres. Obama]. Things have changed, they’ve gotten better, but folks, there’s still a lot more.”
“In 2011-12, we were preparing to run for re-election. 40-41 states passed 180 laws to restrict the right to vote. 180 laws. Some more pernicious than others. We saw it with state legislators working to end same day registration, cutting back early voting, requiring voter ID where no fraud was ever shown, restricting voters registration drives… Here we are, 48 years after all you did, and we’re still fighting? In 2011, ’12, and ’13? We were able to beat back most of those attempts, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.”
“Strom Thurmond voted for re-authorization, and yet it’s being challenged in the Supreme Court of the U.S. as we stand here today. Legislators in a number of states are looking for new ways to restrict and make more difficult for African Americans and other minorities to vote.“
“Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act… We can’t let our guard down.”
“Here’s what John said [at the National Democratic Convention]… He said, “They’re changing the rules. They’re cutting polling hours and imposing requirements intended to suppress the vote. Too many people struggled,” he went on to say, “And die to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote. We have come too far together to turn back.”
In a little noted speech reported in the conservative Washington Examiner, the leading Supreme Court judge who regularly legislates from the bench, Antonin Scalia, signaled that he is ready to further rule in favor of more guns in more hands, with even fewer restrictions than now.
[...]
USA Today reported that Scalia teased Totenberg before an audience at the Smithsonian Associates:
Asked if the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is as unequivocal as the First Amendment’s right to free speech, Scalia said, “We’re going to find out, aren’t we?” — an indication he expects the court to hear a gun rights case in the near future.
“There are doubtless limits (on gun rights), but what they are, we will see,” Scalia said.
But as with his remarks this week contemptuously dismissing Congress’s repeated renewal of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) – and his claim that the VRA is nothing more than “racial entitlement” – Scalia is once again signaling his role as the radical right wing SCOTUS enforcer. Scalia is a cross-breed between the Federalist Society and the Tea Party – sort of a brown shirt with a Harvard legal degree — in this case on assault weapons and big guns, Scalia apparently regards anything that can shoot a bullet as Constitutional, only drawing the line at rocket launchers that can bring down aircraft. How extreme is that? It makes the NRA look like moderates.
Because it was during an appeal to the Supreme Court in 2009 on behalf of Davis that Scalia – and BuzzFlash is not making this up – actually wrote a dissenting opinion that there was nothing in the Constitution that prevented a state from executing an innocent man (or woman). [...]
If the Constitution doesn’t protect us from being executed even if we are innocent, then, Houston, we have a fundamental problem of human rights in America.
[...]
Scalia is a dangerous man. He should be in a loony bin for self-styled intellectuals who scorn all brains but their own (“I think, therefore it is the law” is his motto), where he would not be such an ongoing threat to the nation.
If you base your arguments on misconstrued data, then your argument is faulty at best and without merit at worst.
If your final judgment of a case is based on your own worthless arguments, then you are erroneously and egregiously changing and affecting lives and law, not to mention disenfranchising voters and altering election outcomes.
At the voting rights argument in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts tore into Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, grilling him on his knowledge of voting statistics.
The point the chief justice was trying to make was that Massachusetts, which is not covered by the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act, has a far worse record in black voter registration and turnout than Mississippi, which is covered by Section 5 of the act.
But a close look at census statistics indicates the chief justice was wrong, or at least that he did not look at the totality of the numbers.
Lt. Col Barry Wingard is the lawyer for Gitmo detainee Fayiz Al-Kandari. For their ongoing story + related topics, please click on the link below: Kuwaiti Citizen Detained at Guantanamo since 2002
You can read the complete story here or on Wikipedia.
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