Green Bay Packers, still undefeated.

That's Aaron Rodgers, just now, doing his "Justice Prosser" imitation.

"If you're guilty of a crime, you get more support from the state when you're released than if you're innocent."

"They have no authority over people whose conviction is overturned... There is nothing crafted to deal with this kind of situation."

Says Keith Findley, commenting on the case of a man who was freed 2 years ago (with help from the Wisconsin Innocence Project, which Findley direct), and who is now back in jail.

Justice Stevens writes of his "extreme distaste for debates about campaign financing."

That's from his new book "Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir," and it refers to his experience immediately upon his ascent to the Supreme Court in 1976, when the Justices were deciding Buckley v. Valeo. He goes on:

That distaste never abated, and I have felt ever since that the Court would be best served by inserting itself into campaign finance debates with less frequency. 

The Court would be best served, eh? The questions have to do with what the Constitution says about  freedom of speech, so one must wonder why he'd think in terms of what serves the Court best as opposed to what the Constitution means or at least what serves the people best.

That view may have had an impact on the unusually long dissent that I wrote during my last term on the Court against the Court’s overreaching in the Citizens United case...

In addition to my overriding hostile reaction to the subjects discussed in Buckley, I also recall puzzlement about why the Court failed to endorse the position expressed by Justice White in his dissent. He effectively explained why the distinction between limitations on contributions (which the Court upheld) and the limitations on expenditures (which the Court invalidated) did not make much sense, and why the Court should have respected the congressional judgment that effective campaigns could be conducted within the limits established by the statute. Time has vindicated his prediction that without “limits on total expenditures, campaign costs will inevitably and endlessly escalate.” He thought it quite proper for Congress to limit the amount of money that a candidate or his family could spend on a campaign in order “to discourage any notion that the outcome of elections is primarily a function of money.”

That is, he favors limiting speech so that people don't get the wrong idea (the wrong idea being that money affects elections). Under the system we have, as the majority of the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution, candidates can spend all the money they want trying to get elected and people are free to get the "notion" that money affects the outcome of elections.

Justice Stevens continues:

The majority’s response to Justice White relied on the rhetorical flourish that “the concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.” The assumption underlying that colorful argument...

Colorful?

... is that limitations on the quantity of speech in public debates are just as obnoxious as limitations on the content of what a speaker has to say. 

That is to say, it's not really so bad for the government to tell a candidate: We think you've said enough.

But there is nothing even arguably unfair about evenhanded rules that limit the amount of speech that can be voiced in certain times or places or by certain means, such as sound trucks. If we view an election as a species of debate between two adversaries, equalizing the amount of time (or money) that each can spend in an attempt to persuade the decision-makers is fully consistent with the First Amendment. Otherwise, appellate court rules limiting the time that the adversaries spend in oral arguments would be invalid because they limit the speech of one adversary in order to enhance the relative voice of his or her opponent.

He's equating the formal conditions within the confines of the appellate courtroom to the speech that takes place in the entirety of all of the forums in which a candidate might speak: all of the city squares and auditoriums, all of the TV and radio channels, all of the print media, and the entirety of the internet!

There's very little mention of Citizens United in Stevens's book, perhaps because the opinion wasn't written by the Chief Justice, and the subject of the book is Chief Justices. But he does mention it, musing that, based on Roberts opinion in Snyder v. Phelps, "perhaps I should give him a passing grade in First Amendment law."

But for reasons that it took me ninety pages to explain in my dissent in the Citizens United campaign finance case, his decision to join the majority in that case prevents me from doing so.

That's it. He doesn't even attempt to explain Citizens United to the general reader, who's expected to accept that the Court got it wrong but it would take 90 pages to explain why. Citizens United — which we covered in my conlaw class yesterday — is indeed damned pesky to absorb, and there's something disturbing about a case that purports to tell us something fundamental about political speech in our democracy, but that cannot be talked about in straightforward terms. If he's so right and the other side is so wrong, he should be able to say why in a clear, readable few pages. Instead, what we get is either way overcomplicated, so you'll have to go read 90 pages, or it's insultingly oversimplified: John Roberts flunks!

Here's the 90-page dissenting opinion, in case you're up for reading it. As we say on the limitless internet: Read the whole thing. I'll bet very few people have read the whole thing. Justice Stevens delves into the history of Americans' attitudes about corporations. (In Citizens United, the majority emphasized free speech, not the source of the speech, while the dissenters made a distinction between individuals and corporations and would have accepted limits on speech when it comes from corporations.) Stevens wrote about the fear of corporations in early American history. He quotes Lawrence Friedman's "A History of American Law": “The word ‘soulless’ constantly recurs in debates over corporations… . Corporations, it was feared, could concentrate the worst urges of whole groups of men”). Later in his opinion, Stevens augments that anxiety about corporations with his own words: "corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires."

Here's the whole "soulless" paragraph from Professor Friedman's book:

The word “soulless” constantly recurs in debates over corporations. Everyone knew that corporations were really run by human beings. Yet, the word was not completely inappropriate. Corporations did not die, and there was no real limit to their size, or their greed. Corporations might aggregate the worst urges of whole groups of men. No considerations of family, friendship, or morality, would temper their powers. People hated and distrusted corporations, the way some people came to fear the soulless computer—machines that can join together the wit, skill, power, and malevolence of infinite numbers of minds.

Thank God my computer is soulless! I'm using it to write this post, and I wouldn't like it to insert any morality, beliefs, feelings, thoughts, and desires, between me and you, as I invite you to aggregate your possibly evil urges here in the comments. With the power of the soulless computer we can join together the wit, skill, power, and malevolence of infinite numbers of minds.

How scary is that?

The pepper-spray cop's "dissonantly casual body language in the context of violence brings to mind the photos from Abu Ghraib..."

"... Lynndie England smiling and giving the camera a thumbs-up in front of tortured prisoners. And, in a fit of macabre recursion, some of the casually pepper-spraying cop meme images reference those very photos from Abu Ghraib. Lynndie and [John] Pike, two 'bad apples' taking the fall for systemic problems with the institutions each represent."

Says Xeni Jardin in a Guardian piece that I found after I noticed (on my own) the similarity between the Pike and England iconic photographs. Jardin was thinking of the thumb's-up photo. I was thinking of the man-on-a-leash photo, which seems more apt because of the impassive expression, though, I must say, looking at England's face now, after seeing the pepper-spray cop, I'm seeing some human expression, a mournful look. Expression is relative. If we get used to completely dead faces, the subtlest tinge of humanity will pop.

(And here's the special Thanksgiving iteration of the pepper-spray meme.)

"The question is not whether but how will the student section at Camp Randall Stadium humiliate their Penn State foes?"

"I'm guessing they make a show of wearing shower caps and bath towels. Just a guess. I know that's gross and insensitive but so are those college kids, as were we at that age."

"Three American college students arrested Monday on suspicion of throwing Molotov cocktails..."

"...  during a protest in Cairo against Egypt's ruling military council were released Thursday..."

In other Molotov cocktail news: "Molotov madman who said on YouTube he would bomb Macy's is out of jail and back at Zuccotti Park."

Obama's religion-free Thanksgiving address.

"As Americans, each of us has our own list of things and people to be thankful for. But there are some blessings we all share....

But no matter how tough things are right now, we still give thanks for that most American of blessings, the chance to determine our own destiny. The problems we face didn’t develop overnight, and we won’t solve them overnight. But we will solve them. All it takes is for each of us to do our part. 

And God's help? I'm noticing the lack of religion in the address. The closest he gets is the use of the word "blessings."

With all the partisanship and gridlock here in Washington, it’s easy to wonder if such unity is really possible. But think about what’s happening at this very moment: Americans from all walks of life are coming together as one people, grateful for the blessings of family, community, and country.

If we keep that spirit alive, if we support each other, and look out for each other, and remember that we’re all in this together, then I know that we too will overcome the challenges of our time.

Again, an absence of God. We'll solve our problems by coming together as a community, not with the help of God, though you are free to conceptualize this coming together in religious terms. I'm not criticizing, just taking note.

Here's what Thomas Jefferson said about Thanksgiving:

I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises... Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government.... But it is only proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe a day of fasting and prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to the United States an authority over religious exercises, which the Constitution has directly precluded them from... civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.