Those two key ideas were written on protest signs and they were sung and shouted thru the 25 degree air when about 70 people of a variety of ages gathered near the federal courthouse on Marconi Boulevard. Columbus joined communities all over the country to mark the second anniversary of the US Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Three of our city's organizers for Occupy the Courts spoke with the Columbus Free Press recently. Two of them also spoke with WCRS Columbus.

Bob Krasen, Doug Todd, and Michael Greenman work with Move to Amend, Central Ohio. Krasen said the word about today's protest is out to a fairly good number of organizations.

"Nobody really knows how many are going to come, but we’re hoping for a crowd of a couple hundred.”

Krasen said the demonstrations against the Citizens United decision can also be celebrations of activists coming together in common cause to defeat this threat to our democratic republic.

In case you missed it, President Barack Obama has signed a death knell for the Bill of Rights. It's a hell of a way to begin a year many believe will mark the end of the world.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) makes a mockery of our basic civil liberties. It shreds the intent of the Founders to establish a nation where essential rights are protected. It puts us all at risk for arbitrary, indefinite incarceration with no real rights to recourse.

The Act authorizes a $626 billion dollar defense budget (which does not include the CIA, special ops, various black box items, etc). Obama's signing statement says it does address counterterrorism at home and abroad as well as Defense Department modernization, health care costs and more.

There are many schemes now for undoing the doctrines under which corporations claim constitutional rights and bribery is deemed constitutionally protected "speech." Every single one of these schemes depends on a massive movement of public pressure all across the homeland formerly known as the United States of America. With such a movement, few of the schemes can fail. Without it, we're just building castles in the air. Nonetheless, the best scheme can best facilitate the organizing of the movement.

The U.S. Constitution never gave any rights or personhood to corporations or transformed money into speech. It ought not to be necessary to amend a document to, in effect, point out that the sky is blue and up is not down. If the Supreme Court rules that Goldman Sachs can send legislation directly to the White House and cut out the congressional middleman, will we have to amend the Constitution to remove the Goldman Sachs branch of government? Where will this end?

The U.S. Department of State and President Obama, if only temporarily, handed out a big victory for human health and the environment this afternoon by rejecting the proposed permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. In the tense moments leading to the Congressional Christmas recess, Republicans attached a rider to the payroll tax cut extension calling for a sped-up, 60-day review process of the pipeline to leverage President Obama into approving the project. By attaching the pipeline review to a politically charged piece of legislation designed to extend a two-percentage-point payroll tax cut in addition to providing a reduction in Medicare payments to doctors and desperately needed extensions for unemployment benefits, Republicans ostensibly had the perfect mechanism to force a decision on Keystone XL in the favor of Big Oil.

This afternoon, the Department of State recommended to President Obama that he reject the presidential permit based upon insufficient time for a proper review and insufficient evidence that the construction of the pipeline is in the national interest. President Obama agreed.

“But no matter how futile, repulsive or dysfunctional war may be,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her book Blood Rites, “it persists.”
A fascinating story in the New York Times just after Christmas showed this persistence unfolding before our very eyes.
The sale of arms to Iraq (remember Iraq?) — $11 billion worth of almost everything, fighter jets, battle tanks, cannons, armored personnel carriers, armor and helmets, even sport utility vehicles — is going to move forward even though it makes little sense from multiple points of view, including U.S. geopolitical interests. As far as I can tell, the sale is going to go through because “war persists” — or something persists, a force invisible to reporters and beyond the control of diplomats (at least those who speak on the record).

“The Obama administration is moving ahead with the sale . . .” the Times informs us, “despite concerns that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is seeking to consolidate authority, create a one-party Shiite-dominated state and abandon the American-backed power-sharing government.”