How Rights Become Privileges: MO Amendment 2

The 2012 Missouri primary had several important lessons to impart. The first, which I may have discussed in previous election years, is that the way to bring the "correct" voters to the polls is to have an apparently innocuous but important candidate or issue and a loud, contentious issue or candidate that only seems to matter to one side. In this primary cycle, there was a preponderance of hotly contested Republican seats, and a very dangerous, never advertised Tea Party constitutional amendment. Republicans came out to vote overwhelmingly, and the Amendment passed resoundingly. The full body of the amendment is at the bottom of this article. Basically on the ballot it read as if it was just reinforcing the first clause of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

  • In reality, it says that people have the right to worship the (singular, Christian) Almighty God (but not all those others) including to pray whenever their conscience dictates (such as during science classes).
  • Public meetings can now be started with exclusionary prayers as long as the officiant is invited by someone.
  • I have not yet figured out how the mandatory publishing of the Bill of Rights in schools will be twisted, but I expect as a precedent to posting the Ten Commandments adjacent (as an alleged inspirational source)
  • Students cannot be punished for refusing to do assignments that might conflict with their faith (evolution, geology, astronomy, etc).
So I expect Missouri to soon be incurring legal fees on the order of replacing several major bridges, or (more likely) in lieu of funding science education for a decade. [More (Including the language of the Amendment)]

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Missouri Supreme Court gives Missouri voters the option to slap a 36% cap on payday loans

On Tuesday of this past week (July 31, 2012), the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that a ballot initiative capping the interest rate of small loans at 36% (including payday loans) will appear on the Missouri general ballot this coming November. This court decision is terrific news for the many poor, working-poor and struggling middle class people who have been victimized by predatory lenders throughout Missouri. I have previously discussed this hotly contested payday loan court case here. The payday loan industry had attacked this ballot initiative on numerous technical grounds, including constitutional issues, but in its July 31, 2012 decision, the Missouri Supreme Court shot down all of the arguments of the industry, holding that the payday initiative will go on the Missouri ballot in November. Here's the entire opinion of the Court. [More . . . ]

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Hiring someone else to serve your jail time

If you get into criminal trouble in China, you might be able to hire someone else to do your prison time. Here's an excerpt from Slate:

The practice of hiring “body doubles” or “stand-ins” is well-documented by official Chinese media. In 2009, a hospital president who caused a deadly traffic accident hired an employee’s father to “confess” and serve as his stand-in. A company chairman is currently charged with allegedly arranging criminal substitutes for the executives of two other companies. In another case, after hitting and killing a motorcyclist, a man driving without a license hired a substitute for roughly $8,000. The owner of a demolition company that illegally demolished a home earlier this year hired a destitute man, who made his living scavenging in the rubble of razed homes, and promised him $31 for each day the “body double” spent in jail. In China, the practice is so common that there is even a term for it: ding zui. Ding means “substitute,” and zui means “crime”; in other words, “substitute criminal.”

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The real problem with Guantanamo

Glenn Greenwald spells out the real problem with Guantanamo:

What made Guantanamo controversial was not its physical location: that it was located in the Caribbean Sea rather than on American soil (that’s especially true since the Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that U.S. courts have jurisdiction over the camp). What made Guantanamo such a travesty — and what still makes it such — is that it is a system of indefinite detention whereby human beings are put in cages for years and years without ever being charged with a crime. President Obama’s so-called “plan to close Guantanamo” — even if it had been approved in full by Congress — did not seek to end that core injustice. It sought to do the opposite: Obama’s plan would have continued the system of indefinite detention, but simply re-located it from Guantanamo Bay onto American soil. Long before, and fully independent of, anything Congress did, President Obama made clear that he was going to preserve the indefinite detention system at Guantanamo even once he closed the camp.

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