FBI’s grab of Trump’s legal files sends a dangerous message

By Stuart J. Moskovitz, Esq.

Stuart J Moskovitz

Even if you don’t like Trump….

I’ve posted this in Monmouth County News because similar actions have happened not just in Washington, but right out of Red Bank and concerns everyone in this County who believes that a free society should remain so.

We are a divided country. We are a polarized country. That polarization is posing one of the most serious internal dangers to our nation and our notions of democracy.

Like every other attorney, I have told my clients that whatever they tell me is absolutely privileged under the doctrine of attorney-client privilege. That doctrine exists in every state. It exists in the federal system. It is close to sacrosanct. There are extremely few exceptions and they require overcoming the highest burdens imaginable to breach. Read the rest of this entry »

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Boobie Trap: Will The Go Topless Movement Take Off?

Thursday is the 50th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington and his landmark “I have a dream” speech.  Yesterday, thousands of people descended to Washington to commemorate the historic event and celebrate the progress we have made toward racial equality.

Tomorrow is the 42nd annual Women’s Equality Day, a designation created by a Joint Resolution of Congress in 1971 at the behest of Congresswoman Bella Abzug of New York to commemorate the ratification of the 19th amendment which gave women the right to vote.  The 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920.

GoTopless.org seeks to make a woman’s right to go topless part of the American Dream.  Since 2007, when their spiritual leader Rael founded the organization, GoTopless has held an International GoTopless Day on the Sunday closest to August 26.  That’s today this year. GoTopless is holding rallies in 51 cities around the world. In many of those cities, and in most states in the United States, going topless is already legal, according to the organization’s own map.

Today in New York City, where the right to go topless was degreed by a Court decision in 1996 and reaffirmed in 2007 when Phoenix Feeley won a $29,000 Judgment against the City for her wrongful 2005 arrest for going topless, Go Topless advocates are marching from Bryant Park to Times Square and back.  Street vendors should stock up on sunscreen and hydrocortisone.

Here in New Jersey, Feeley’s recent efforts fell, umm, flat.  She got herself arrested for going topless, twice in the same day, in Spring Lake in 2008, fought her conviction of violating Spring Lake’s anti-nudity ordinance up to the NJ Supreme Court and lost.  Rather than pay her $816 fine, Feeley went to Monmouth County Jail and staged a hunger strike.  A GoTopless organized protest drew two fully clothed women. Feeley was released early and healthy.

At the March on Washington celebration yesterday, women kept their tops on.

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GoTopless President Schools Pallone On Women’s Rights

Nadine Gary, President, GoTopless.org

August 12, 2013

Dear Honorable Congressman Pallone,

My name is Nadine Gary, and I’m writing to you on behalf of GoTopless (www.gotopless.org), a U.S. women’s group devoted to obtaining our constitutional right to go topless in public wherever men have that right.

During Asbury Park’s Night Out last week, you were asked by reporter Art Gallagher about GoTopless activist Phoenix Feeley, who is currently into Day 8 of the hunger strike she has begun as an inmate at the Monmouth County Jail. This brave woman has not only gone to jail, serving a 16 day sentence but stopped eating to protest discriminatory topless laws in New Jersey.

Ms. Feeley went through the N.J. court system to fight for her constitutional rights and she is now appealing her case to the U.S. Supreme Court. We hope it will rule on this important gender equality issue that until now has been neglected at the federal level.

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Two Women Show Up At GoTopless Protest

Two women, one from Mercer County and one from Ocean County, showed up at the Monmouth County Correctional Institution this morning to protest hunger striking Phoenix Feeley’s incarceration and anti-toplessness laws.   They kept their tops on.

Sue Vliet, of Toms River, identified herself as an admin of One Million Vaginas, a feminist organization dedicated to empowering women to take their vagina’s back from invasive conservative politicians, was one of the two protestors.  Her sign said, “STOP THE DOUBLE STANDARD. FREE OUR BREASTS.” Vliet said she was protesting the “double standard and draconian laws” that allow men that to bare their chests in public, but not women.

Judith Sherwood of Mercer County read a letter from GoTopless.org in support of Feeley. You can hear that letter by viewing the video below.

Sherwood said she wasn’t raising money to pay Feeley’s $816 fine, which would end the incarceration, as a matter of principle.  Sherwood and Vliet both said they were not protesting topless and risking arrest themselves, because their protest was not about going topless.

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Go Topless Activists Say They Will Picket Monmouth County Jail This Morning

Somehow this event didn’t make it to Greg’s List.

GoTopless.org, the group that says laws that prohibit women from exposing their chests are discriminatory violations of the 14th Amendment, announced that they will be protesting Phoenix Feeley’s incarceration for going topless in Spring Lake in 2008 by picketing in front of the Monmouth County Correctional Institution this morning from 9am till noon.

GoTopless is making Feeley out to be a modern day Susan B. Anthony.  Nadine Gary, a spokeswoman for the organization, said in statement on their website, “Suffragette activists, like Phoenix Feeley and other topless activists today, willingly went to jail for claiming their rights.”

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The United States Constitution Was Ratified 225 Years Ago Today

In honor of the occasion, MMM recommends that every Tea Party member and ‘Certified Constitutionalist’ familiarize themselves with the necessary and proper clause.

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Supremely Political: Did Roberts Pen BOTH Opinions?

 By Matt Roooney, cross posted from SaveJersey

The ObamaCare backstory gets worse all the time, Save Jerseyans.

We can never really know what happened in chambers. That said, emerging anonymous accounts seem to comport with what we can plainly observe about this repugnant capitulation to unconstitutional, unrestrained big government by Chief Justice John Roberts.

It was supremely political.

Be assured, I’m not leveling this charge simply because I don’t like the decision! The Chief Justice simply didn’t do a very good job of masking his purely tactical motivations.

If you read the conservative Kennedy-Alito-Thomas-Scalia dissent (click here – pdf), one of the first things you’ll notice is how the dissent frequently refers to the majority opinion as the “dissent.” Is the current batch of High Court clerks just sloppy? Or is something else going on here?

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America’s Sacred Scriptures

By John D’Amico

The American people are “demanding that we realign our country’s compass with its founding principles” in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution! So says the Republican Party’s “Pledge toAmerica,” which champions smaller, more accountable government, economic freedom, lower taxes, and fiscal responsibility. The Tea Party’s “Contract fromAmerica” calls for fiscal responsibility and limited government “consistent with the U.S. Constitution’s meaning,” asserting that “our moral, political, and economic liberties are inherent, not granted by our government.”

Republicans and Tea Partiers want the smallest possible federal government that taxes the least and interferes in daily life the least. Toward that end, they want to slash government spending, privatize and curtail Social Security and Medicare, defund and repeal the Affordable Care Act (deridingly referred to as “Obamacare”), eliminate Environmental Protection Agency regulations, and cut programs that mainly serve low-income Americans.

Are these policies and programs consistent with the core values and ideals underlying the Declaration and the Constitution? Only a probing analysis of the meaning and intent of our founding documents can help us answer this question. In We Hold These Truths (Macmillan 1987), the renowned 20th Century philosopher and educator Mortimer J. Adler called the Declaration of Independence, “the architectural blueprint” of theUnited States, from which “we can derive the fundamental principles of republican or constitutional government.” He wrote that from the Preamble of the Constitution, the articles that follow it, and their subsequent amendments, “we can come to understand the elaboration of those articles of political faith in terms of governmental aims, governmental structures, and governmental policies.”

The Declaration of Independence proclaims that:

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Chief Justice Roberts’ Foley

A National Review Online Editorial

In today’s deeply disappointing decision on Obamacare, a majority of the Supreme Court actually got the Constitution mostly right. The Commerce Clause — the part of the Constitution that grants Congress the authority to regulate commerce among the states — does not authorize the federal government to force Americans to buy health insurance. The Court, in a 5–4 decision, refused to join all the august legal experts who insisted that of course it granted that authorization, that only yahoos and Republican partisans could possibly doubt it. It then pretended that this requirement is constitutional anyway, because it is merely an application of the taxing authority. Rarely has the maxim that the power to tax is the power to destroy been so apt, a portion of liberty being the direct object in this case.

What the Court has done is not so much to declare the mandate constitutional as to declare that it is not a mandate at all, any more than the mortgage-interest deduction in the tax code is a mandate to buy a house. Congress would almost surely have been within its constitutional powers to tax the uninsured more than the insured. Very few people doubt that it could, for example, create a tax credit for the purchase of insurance, which would have precisely that effect. But Obamacare, as written, does more than that. The law repeatedly speaks in terms of a “requirement” to buy insurance, it says that individuals “shall” buy it, and it levies a “penalty” on those who refuse. As the conservative dissent points out, these are the hallmarks of a “regulatory penalty, not a tax.”

The law as written also cuts off all federal Medicaid funds for states that decline to expand the program in the ways the lawmakers sought. A majority of the Court, including two of the liberals, found this cut-off unconstitutionally coercive on the states. The Court’s solution was not to invalidate the law or the Medicaid expansion, but to rule that only the extra federal funds devoted to the expansion could be cut off. As the dissenters rightly point out, this solution rewrites the law — and arbitrarily, since Congress could have avoided the constitutional problem in many other ways.

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The Land of the free and the home of the brave

The United States government is now requiring people who wish to travel via airplane to submit to radioactive photography that exposes their nude body, or alternatively submit to a full body pat down.

The constitutional experts at the Asbury Park Press think that’s a good idea.

Here for their first reading, I offer the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution to the editorial board of the Neptune Nudniks:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

What is the probable cause that justifies every airline traveler to be compelled to submit to these searches?

The Council for American-Islamic Relations issued this travel advisory for airline passengers.  For women wearing hijab they advise the following:

• If you are selected for secondary screening after you go through the metal detector and it does not go off, and “sss” is not written on your boarding pass, ask the TSA officer if the reason you are being selected is because of your head scarf.
• In this situation, you may be asked to submit to a pat-down or to go through a full body scanner. If you are selected for the scanner, you may ask to go through a pat-down instead.
• Before you are patted down, you should remind the TSA officer that they are only supposed to pat down the area in question, in this scenario, your head and neck. They SHOULD NOT subject you to a full-body or partial-body pat-down.
• You may ask to be taken to a private room for the pat-down procedure.
• Instead of the pat-down, you can always request to pat down your own scarf, including head and neck area, and have the officers perform a chemical swipe of your hands.
• If you encounter any issues, ask to speak to a supervisor immediately. They are there to assist you.

I don’t have a daughter, but I will be adding hijab to my Christmas shopping list for my wife, mother, sister and nieces.  You can buy them online here.

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