[Ed Note: The author appeared with me last night, as I guest hosted the Mike Malloy Show. We discussed the following article, as well as his other recent piece examining the dangerous scam of U.S. corporate welfare as military "foreign aid" in Egypt. You can now listen to that interview here. - BF]

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

As Vermont becomes the first state to consider a Constitutional amendment that would put an end to "corporate personhood", it is perhaps worthwhile to examine the historical context in which the concept arose and the forceful challenges to its validity that have been mustered by a minority of Supreme Court Justices.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor created a stir when, during oral arguments in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, she not only questioned the validity of the corporate challenge to limits on campaign spending but questioned a legal doctrine which dates back to an 1886 decision, Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. She observed that it was the courts who "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," and that "an argument" could be made "that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

Sotomayor, whose position was not included in Justice John Paul Steven's dissenting opinion in Citizens United --- a dissent she signed onto --- is by no means the first Supreme Court Justice to question the legitimacy of a long-standing doctrine of U.S. corporate law which has served to undermine the very fabric of individual liberty and democratic accountability, permitting wealth, power and control over mass communications to be concentrated in the hands of the privileged few.

Earlier dissents from Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas not only challenged the legitimacy of extending to corporations Constitutional rights intended to protect the living, breathing human beings who make up our nation's citizenry but exposed the hypocrisy of the activist, Federalist Society Justices, who claim to be "strict constructionists," but who are, in fact, as we've reported previously, part of a corporate-funded, counterrevolution in law...

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[Now UPDATED with audio archives from tonight's show below!]

I'll be guest hosting the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show every night this week, through Friday, week as the Malloys enjoy a Progressive Cruise on the Caribbean. (Yes, I'm jealous.)

We'll be BradCasting LIVE tonight, and all week, 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the globe from the studios of L.A.'s KTLK am1150. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE and lively chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG during the show, so please come on by and say hey while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

Tonight:

• WILL BUNCH, Senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, author of Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy on the weekend's hagiography over Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday. And on his latest book, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama.
• VINCE WARREN, Executive Director of Center for Constitutional Rights on Bush "cutting and running" from torture charges and Glenn Beck's dangerous attack on a 78-year old professor.
• PLUS: Loads of important news of the day and whatever else comes up along the way, including your calls at 877-520-1150 and tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates acros the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: We were able to reach MARCY WINOGRAD at the last minute to discuss the late breaking news that Rep. Jane Harman is leaving Congress. The archives are below, where you can hear whether she plans to run in the upcoming special election, along with everything else from tonight's show. (Chat room archives are also below!) Enjoy! See ya tomorrow night!...

Whichever side these guys are on, I'm on their side...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives from tonight's show.]

The Malloys are heading out for a week of Progressive Cruising next week (no, that's not some sort of sexual metaphor, it's an actual cruise in the Caribbean with a bunch of progressives, including a bunch of our pals!), so we'll be sitting in for the next week as guest host for the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show beginning tonight!

As usual, we'll be BradCasting LIVE 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the globe from the studios of L.A.'s KTLK am1150. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE and lively chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG during the show, so please come on by and say hey while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

Tonight:

• EGYPT Latest news from the continuing uprising, and a look at recent U.S. history of cooperating with and supporting the country's decades-old torture regime --- with STEPHEN ZUNES, University of San Franciso professor of Middle Eastern Studies and author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.
• ERIC BOEHLERT, Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, on why Fox "News" is virtually unable to cover the goings-on in Egypt, and much more related!
• SKIPPY THE BUSH KANGAROO Yup. You heard me right. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo on this year's "Blog Amnesty Day"
• PLUS: The disgusting Rush Limbaugh and whatever else comes up along the way, including your calls at 877-520-1150 and tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates acros the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Great show tonight (at least in my opinion). Audio archives are now posted below, along with the archives of tonight's chat room! Happy listening and tune in all next week too!...

Rush Limbaugh is a disgusting human being. But you probably knew that. If you didn't, audio from his show today --- which is broadcast over our public airwaves to some 15 million Americans a day, and even over U.S. Armed Forces Radio --- makes it as clear as ever.

First, as highlighted by Media Matters, Limbaugh made light of foreign journalists, including two reporters from the New York Times, being rounded-up in Cairo today because being detained while covering a story of huge import to this nation and the world, by a regime that has spent decades torturing such people is, of course, hilarious...

Next, later on in the very the same show, after he's learned that two Fox "News" reporters had been beaten and hospitalized following detention in Egypt, suddenly Rush gives a damn, and says he was just "kidding before about The New York Times"...

Moral depravity. As appalling as it gets.

For the record, as White House correspondent Paul Brandus tweeted last night as the round-up was beginning, "79 journalists were killed around the world last year - just for trying to tell a story."

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 849 journalists have been killed since 1992. Isn't that hysterical, Rush?

UPDATE 2/4/11: ABC News has compiled a rather lengthy list of the journalists rounded-up in Egypt this week and what happened to each. Rachel Maddow explains why she believes it is being done.

UPDATE 2/5/11: Thanks to UK's Guardian for citing our coverage in their own coverage of Egypt yesterday, helping the world to understand that Limbaugh does not represent the true values of this nation.

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Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"The problems the protesters are trying to address are extremely deep-seated…Egypt and other countries of the region have just been through a neoliberal period which have led to…high concentrations of extreme wealth and privilege, tremendous impoverishment and dismay for most of the population." Noam Chomsky, 2/2/11

As more than a million protesters are said to have "flooded into central Cairo" this week, demanding an end to Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian rule, William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, explained a little understood fact about the "tens of billions of dollars" in US military aid used to prop up the authoritarian Mubarak regime.

It is money that Egypt never received, as he explained during an appearance on Democracy Now (see video at end of article):

Hartung, however, has merely focused upon the military component of a much broader scam --- foreign aid --- which John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and in The Secret History of the American Empire exposes to be corporate welfare designed to enhance the power and control of a corrupt and brutal corporate Empire that benefits only a select few local authoritarian elites and the billionaires at the pinnacle of U.S.-based, giant multinational corporations. All at the expense of the great mass of humanity and a sustainable planet...

Via AP...

No time, at the moment, to even begin responding to, or digging into, this one. But seems like we should put it on your radar. So for now, there it is. Please have at it.

For the record, the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been re-authorized by Congress four times since it was originally created and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The VRA's most recent re-authorization, for another 25 years, was signed by George W. Bush in 2006 after it was passed by the Republican-led U.S. House 390 to 33, and by the U.S. Senate in a unanimous 98 to 0 vote.

[Hat-tip @PourMeCoffee via Twitter.]

[Hat-tip @KBZeese on Twitter.]

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Polar bear swims 9 days searching for ice; US farmers get approval to plant GMO alfalfa; Chamber calls Obama's clean energy plans "ridiculously premature"; WV among worst for mercury pollution in US; Pipeline company denies responsbility for MI oil spill; Interior Dept.'s new "Scientific Integrity Officer"; Senators vow to strip Obama climate power; San Bruno pipeline explosion called "tip of the iceberg"; Controversial nuclear reactor design moves forward in U.S.; EPA moves to curb pesticide testing on human subjects ... PLUS: The ethical dilemma at the heart of climate economics ....

The words "EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW" are famously chiseled above the main portico of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington D.C. But is one of the Justices seated in that building, with a lifetime appointment, now receiving special treatment under the law instead?

Evidence is mounting that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas violated federal law by failing to report his wife's annual salary of more than $120,000 per year from conservative political organizations by checking "NONE" on the box for "Non-Investment Income" for his wife Virginia on judicial Financial Disclosure Reports for the last 20 years.

According to the "self-initiated amendment" letters [PDF] signed by Thomas as dated Friday, January 21, 2011, and stamped as "RECEIVED" by the Judicial Conference of the U.S. Committee on Financial Disclosure on a Saturday, January 22, 2011, the Justice failed to reveal such sources of spousal income even on his original nomination disclosure forms during his contentious 1991 confirmation hearings.

One of the amendments hastily filed last week by Thomas states that he "inadvertently omitted" spousal income from as far back as 1989 "due to a misunderstanding of filing instructions." Though it has also been reported that he did report other spousal income on some disclosure reports up until 1996.

Virginia Thomas' income from The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, totaling $686,589 from 2003 to 2007 according to Common Cause, was omitted from the forms entirely, as was her Heritage Foundation employment from 1998 to 2003 and other sources of "non-investment income" from as early as 1989.

When reached by phone for comment on Friday, two different officials at the Judicial Conference were particularly hostile in response to questions from The BRAD BLOG in regard to what appeared to be special treatment afforded the Supreme Court Justice, allowing him to deliver the amendment letters for twenty years of inaccurate financial disclosure forms on a Saturday when the federal government office is not usually open to the public. The swift processing of Thomas' documents, carried out as the news of his false filings was about to break in the media, allowed subsequent news reports to downplay the issue as having already been handled, old news.

Moreover, Thomas' 'inadvertent omissions' appear to be in violation of U.S. federal law, in contradiction to suggestions from the Los Angeles Times' original reporting on this matter last weekend. That report, breaking the story publicly, quoted a judicial ethics expert from Northwestern University School of Law as asserting that Thomas' failure to report his wife's income was "not a crime of any sort."

It would appear that the law professor was wrong.

Closer examination of the original disclosure forms that Thomas filed and signed year after year, quite directly suggests crimes were committed, though none of the mainstream corporate media reports on this issue, to our knowledge, have bothered to focus on that point. According to the statute clearly printed on the disclosure reports filed by Thomas, just below his signature on each, the Supreme Court Justice could be held accountable for his omissions by penalties under the U.S. Code including as much as a $50,000 fine and up to one year imprisonment, or both, for each violation of the federal law. Even stricter penalties are also a possibility --- at least if one believes that even U.S. Supreme Court Justices are subject to the Rule of Law...

Via TPM who asks, "What 'Shellacking'?"...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"The Egyptians have risen up. They’re not going home until their demands are realized….until justice and democracy is restored," says the highly respected Dr. Mohamed ElBaradai, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over Al Jazeera English. "The state of Egypt is in a state of collapse."

ElBaradai, who returned to the country earlier this week, "called upon the Egyptian army to take the side of the people," and called upon Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to immediately step down.

What is unfolding on the streets of Egypt may well be confirmation of one of the core observations presented by Howard Zinn, who died one year ago this week...

Once again, Big Government Republicans are trying to put federal bureaucrats between you and your doctor, while at the same time making the world safer for rapists by redefining the meaning of "rape" entirely. Via Nick Baumann at Mother Jones...

Let freedom ring!