The Supremes' brave new world

In an editorial called "Three bad rulings", the NYT sums up how the Supreme Court yesterday managed:

to reopen the political system to a new flood of special-interest money, to weaken protection of student expression and to make it harder for citizens to challenge government violations of the separation of church and state.

God. The criminalization of student speech has already been rolled and smoked on linguistics blogs, by Dennis Baron on Web of Language here and by David Beaver on Language Log here, for example. It's just insane, and damaging to the foundation of the country, as is the dismantling of the separation of church and state.

But it's the corporatist, almost corporate fascist, slant of lots of current news that might hurt us most. Most information we see is already in the control of a few hands, and now Big Money will be back to buying elections. This just had to come at the same time as we find out that our highest 'elected', 'executive branch' officials see themselves as utterly free from any oversight whatsoever.

A mundane but annoying example is the assault on internet radio that's underway (see here). If you want to listen to music not in your personal library that's more interesting than the psuedo-country and bleached out hits of yesterday, you're SOL, by and large, even in a town the size of Madison. We do have the wonderful WORT, but they're covering everything not on 'mainstream' radio.

It's a pretty depressing moment: Even people who voted for Bush have to a remarkable extent realized what a creep they helped foist on us, and it's pretty clear that these guys are simply and literally criminals. But Bush is still in office and we're feeling the bootheel of a judiciary that's going to kick us hard for years to come.