The Hollywood Liberal

Odds tilt toward GOP Senate
Republicans are in the strongest position since losing the Senate eight years ago.

Kerry Turns Up Pressure on Russia Over Ukraine, Warning of New Sanctions
Secretary of State John Kerry said Russia needed to take steps in the coming “hours” to pressure separatists in eastern Ukraine to give up the fight.

In the Shadows of Shrines, Shiite Forces Are Preparing to Fight ISIS
Security officials in Iraq’s Shiite holy twin cities, Karbala and Najaf, scoff at the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, saying their defense forces are ready to meet the threat.

News: Slain Libyan Rights Activist Documented Her Last Hours Online
One of Libya’s most prominent civil rights activists, Salwa Bugaighis, was assassinated in her home in Benghazi on Wednesday, shortly after she posted an image of militiamen outside her home on Facebook.

What Today’s Supreme Court Ruling Means For Other Laws That Protect Clinic Patients

This ruling is about as narrow as one could reasonably expect from the current U.S. Supreme Court.

The post What Today’s Supreme Court Ruling Means For Other Laws That Protect Clinic Patients appeared first on ThinkProgress.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Bill Sikes

The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated buffer zones around Massachusetts abortion clinics Thursday morning, in a ruling that held a Massachusetts law that effectively barred anti-choice activists from protesting less than 35 feet from a clinic was unconstitutional. The ruling was a blow for the reproductive rights community, but its outcome wasn’t a surprise to many.

The Massachusetts law was among the nation’s broadest in barring most individuals from standing less than 35 feet from an abortion clinic. As the court recognizes in McCullen v. Coakley, this law was instituted to protect the public health and safety of both patients and employees at the clinics, particularly from stalking and harassment that has turned violent in many instances. In Massachusetts, this violence included clinic shootings less than 20 years ago that killed 2 employees and wounded 5 others. Harassment and stalking around clinics can also dissuade many individuals from visiting clinics altogether.

But narrower laws in Colorado and a number of cities and localities could survive the majority’s relatively narrow ruling, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts. While the four justices who wrote separate concurring opinions would take a hatchet to all restrictions surrounding abortion clinics, the five who signed onto the majority opinion applied a scalpel that may not necessarily affect many of the other existing laws.

“This really was very narrowly crafted to Massachusetts,” said National Abortion Federation President Vicki Saporta.

The court rejected the assertion of the four concurring justices. While these justices would have struck down Massachusetts’ law as inherently disfavoring anti-abortion speech, the five-justice majority held instead that the law could not punish such a broad swath of conduct.

“The buffer zones burden substantially more speech than necessary to achieve the Commonwealth’s asserted inter­ests,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote for the majority, calling Massachusetts’ law “exceptional” among all 50 states (while also incorrectly suggesting that Massachusetts is the only state with a fixed buffer zone). To elaborate on this point, it cites several other laws that it presumably would uphold, seemingly because they punish particular types of conduct rather than barring everybody within a certain distance. Punishing “harassment,” for example, would be permissible. It cites as an example a New York City law that creates a protected zone of 15 feet, but specifically prohibits “follow[ing] and harass[ing]” another person within that protected distance. If it wanted to protect against physical violence, the court suggests it could pass a law similar to the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994 (FACE Act), which punishes ‘physical obstruction,” “injury,” and “intimidation.”

By the Guttmacher Institute’s count, there are at least 12 other cities whose buffer zone laws may be challenged in light of today’s ruling. But many other laws, including Colorado’s “bubble zone” law that prohibits individuals from getting within a certain distance of an abortion patient, are more specific about the types of conduct they prohibit, and thus might very well survive the Supreme Court’s new test.

Chicago’s “bubble zone” law, for example, bars individuals from getting closer than 8 feet to someone entering an abortion clinic with the intent of handing them a leaflet or speaking to them without their consent. It is unclear whether the court would deem this close enough to “harassment” or another harm the state is authorized to prevent. And it is unclear whether another similar law with a different sized buffer zone would survive scrutiny. But the Court is clear that it favors more specificity in these laws.

The Massachusetts law arose from a failed attempt at protecting abortion clinic patients and staff. In fact, Massachusetts used to have a narrower law that was deemed wholly ineffective. That law prohibited individuals from getting closer than six feet to a person entering an abortion clinic to counsel or persuade that person without their consent. But even police officials testified that this moving buffer zone, often known as a “floating” or “bubble” zone was nearly impossible to enforce, and that onerous crowds were collecting around the edges of the prohibited zone.

To better protect the safety of those inside the clinic, Massachusetts passed the 35-foot buffer zone. This new law prohibits anyone from entering that zone, with the exception of passersby, patients, employees, and law enforcement personnel. And advocates say it’s the only thing that’s worked. To address similar problems of chaos, violence, and harassment in its state, New Hampshire just last month passed a buffer zone law that establishes a smaller zone — 25 feet — but with very similar language.

While McCullen will prevent Massachusetts and other states from using what they have determined is the most effective means to protect people entering these clinics, one thing that is clear from the rhetoric of the four concurring justices is that this ruling is about as narrow as one could reasonably expect from the current U.S. Supreme Court. In one of the concurring opinions, Justice Antonin Scalia lamented that even today’s ruling invalidating Massachusetts’ law on narrow grounds “carries forward this Court’s practice of giving abortion-rights advocates a pass when it comes to suppressing the free-speech rights of their opponents.”

The post What Today’s Supreme Court Ruling Means For Other Laws That Protect Clinic Patients appeared first on ThinkProgress.

My Final Post: So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You
From: Greg Mitchell

Will the Tea Party Actually Ditch the GOP?
From: The Christie Watch
Let’s hope so.

Supreme Court Strikes Down Law That Keeps Anti-Choice Protesters 35 Feet Away From Abortion Clinics
From: Dani McClain

Massachusetts’s 35-foot buffer between health clinic patients and anti-abortion advocates has been ruled unconstitutional.

Putin’s Ukraine Policy Backfires
From: Bob Dreyfuss

Whatever Russia may have wanted to accomplish in Ukraine since last November, it has accomplished the opposite.

‘A Swat Team Blew a Hole in My 2-Year-Old Son’
Alecia Phonesavanh: After our house burned down in Wisconsin a few months ago, my husband and I packed our four young kids and all our belongings into a gold minivan and drove to my sister-in-lawÂ?s place, just outside of Atlanta. On the back windshield, we pasted six stick figures: a dad, a mom, three young girls, and one baby boy. That minivan was sitting in the front driveway of my sister-in-lawÂ?s place the night a SWAT team broke in, looking for a small amount of drugs they thought my husbandÂ?s nephew had. Some of my kidsÂ? toys were in the front yard, but the officers claimed they had no way of knowing children might be present. Our whole family was sleeping in the same room, one bed for us, one for the girls, and a crib. After the SWAT team broke down the door, they threw a flashbang grenade inside. It landed in my sonÂ?s crib.

NFL Removes Cap on Concussion Damages
The NFL will open its wallet to help retired players suffering from dementia and other concussion-related damages. The league and lawyers for the 4,500 former NFL players who accused the league of covering up the long-term consequences of traumatic brain injuries unveiled a proposed settlement on Wednesday that removes the cap on concussion-related damages. The NFL agreed to pay $765 million in August to settle the concussion lawsuit filed in Philadelphia federal court by retired players in 2013. But U.S. District Court Judge Anita B. Brody, expressing concerns that there would not be enough money to cover every claim, rejected the deal in January.

In Iraq, former militia program eyed for new fight
BAGHDAD (AP) — They were known as the Sahwa, or the Awakening Councils — Sunni militiamen who took extraordinary risks to side with U.S. troops in the fight against al-Qaida during the Iraq War. Once heralded as a pivotal step in the defeat of the bloody insurgency, the Sahwa later were pushed aside by Iraq’s Shiite-led government, starved of political support and money needed to remain a viable security force.

France clinches top spot in Group E; Ecuador out
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — France drew 0-0 with 10-man Ecuador to advance to the second round of the World Cup on Wednesday, while the South Americans will be going home from the tournament.

Buy a vowel? Couple flown to Grenada, not Granada
WASHINGTON (AP) — A District of Columbia couple has sued British Airways, saying the airline ruined their vacation by booking them tickets to the Caribbean island of Grenada instead of Granada, Spain.

Supreme Court limits cell phone searches after arrests
Because cellphones contain so much information, police must get a warrant before looking through them, the court ruled unanimously

Defeated challenger Chris McDaniel still defiant
He lost the Mississippi Republican primary runoff to Sen. Thad Cochran, but tea party favorite Chris McDaniel declared, “I’m still standing.”

The Right-Wing Media Machine Behind Boehner’s Obama Lawsuit

After years of conservative media figures agitating for congressional Republicans to impeach President Obama, today House Speaker John Boehner announced plans to sue the president for not “faithfully executing the laws of this country.”

Discussing the suit — which would be filed on behalf of the House of Representatives — Boehner claimed that it was “not about impeachment.” But in a piece for The New Republic, Brian Beutler argues that conservatives’ push to stir up outrage over Obama has led Republicans to seek a “relief valve for the building pressure to draw up articles of impeachment”:

Having created a clamor within the GOP conference, and the conservative base, over Obama’s use of executive power, Republicans now must satisfy the consequent appetite to do something about it. Suing Obama is meant to do that. The goal is to be head-turning enough to simultaneously address coalition management obligations–calm restive conservatives, keep the base energized–and serve as a relief valve for the building pressure to draw up articles of impeachment.

The risk is that it’ll whet rather than diminish the right’s appetite for impeachment. But Boehner doesn’t have much choice. You can’t gin up this much outrage over Obama’s actions, and then do nothing to stop him, when the Constitution provides you so many tools to do just that.

Much of the building pressure for impeachment has come not only from congressional Republicans, but from conservative media figures, whose calls for impeachment have been a steady drumbeat since Obama took office.

Republicans Won’t Pass Immigration Reform
Debra Saunders, RealClearPolitics
The New York Times reports that House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy is considered “the best hope” to win passage of a comprehensive immigration reform bill in Congress after he becomes majority leader in July. It’s sort of quaint how the Gray Lady wants to believe in miracles. If a comprehensive bill — such as the Senate bill that set a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — had a chance of passing, then it was in 2009 and 2010, when Democrats controlled the White House, Senate and House of Representatives. President Barack Obama had promised a bill in his first year in office. If…

LA Mayor Exemplifies America’s Decline
Dennis Prager, RealClearPolitics
Last week, during the official celebration of the Los Angeles Kings winning the Stanley Cup, the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, told a jammed Staples Center that “there are two long-standing rules for politicians . … They say never, ever be pictured with a drink in your hand and never swear. But this is a big f—–g day,” he said, holding up a bottle of Bud Light. You read that right. In front of 18,000 people at Staples and hundreds of thousands of others watching on television — many of them, of course, children — the mayor of the second-largest city in America held up a beer…

May wants more surveillance powers
Home Secretary Theresa May renews her call for new surveillance powers – dubbed a “snooper’s charter” by critics.

Labour renews push for policy checks
Labour is to challenge Chancellor George Osborne to get the spending commitments of all major political parties costed independently.

VIDEO: Cameron and Miliband clash over Coulson
David Cameron and Ed Miliband clash over Andy Coulson and phone hacking claims in a noisy PMQs session.