The Courthouse News Service reported Monday that Chevron Corp. asked a federal judge Friday to order the release of outtakes from Joseph Berlinger’s 2009 documentary, “CRUDE” (trailer below). Today, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan granted the San Ramon, Calif.-based oil giant’s request, leaving one question unanswered: Will the footage exonerate the company and bring an end to its maddening 17-year-old court battle in the South American country?

In the conclusion of a 31-page decision issued in the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York, Judge Kaplan wrote:

The Court expresses no view as to whether the concerns of either side are supported by proof of improper political influence, corruption, or other misconduct affecting the Ecuadorian As Justice Brandeis once wrote, however, “sunshine is said to the best of disinfectants.” Review of Berlinger’s outtakes will contribute to the goal of seeing not only that justice is done, but that it appears to be done.

Three portions of the documentary* highlighted by Chevron in their request to the judge involve Steven Donziger, the New York-based attorney leading the lawsuit against Chevron, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa and Dr. Carlos Beristain, a one-time expert witness in the case:

A. Plaintiffs’ Counsel Meets with Expert Witness — Crude contains footage of a number of meetings that took place in the Dureno community of the indigenous Cofan people. A version of Crude “streamed” over Netflix depicts one such meeting, at which Dr. Beristain, an expert who contributed to Cabrera’s neutral damages assessment, is shown working directly with both the Cofan people and plaintiffs’ counsel. Berlinger, however, altered the scene at the direction of plaintiffs’ counsel to conceal all images of Dr. Beristain before Crude was released on DVD. The interaction between plaintiffs’ counsel and Dr. Beristain therefore does not appear in the final version of Crude sold on DVD in the United States.

B. Plaintiff’s Counsel Interferes with Judicial Inspection — In another scene of Crude, Donziger, one of plaintiffs’ lead counsel, persuades an Ecuadorian judge, apparently in the presence of Chevron’s lawyers and news media, to block the judicial inspection of a laboratory allegedly being used by the Lago Agrio plaintiffs to test for environmental contamination. Donziger describes his use of “pressure tactics” to influence the judge and concedes that “[t]his is something you would never do in the United States, but Ecuador, you know, this is how the game is played, it’s dirty.”

C. Plaintiffs’ Representatives Meet with the Ecuadorian Government — In another scene, a representative of the plaintiffs informs Donziger that he had left the office of President Correa “after coordinating everything.” Donziger declares, “Congratulations. We’ve achieved something very important in this case . . . . Now we are friends with the President.” The film then offers a glimpse of a meeting between President Correa and plaintiffs’ counsel that takes place on a helicopter. Later on, President Correa embraces Donziger and says, “Wonderful, keep it up!” Donziger explains also that President Correa had called for criminal prosecutions to proceed against those who engineered the Settlement and Final Release. “Correa just said that anyone in the Ecuador government who approved the so-called remediation is now going to be subject to litigation in Ecuador. Those guys are shittin’ in their pants right now.”

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Earlier this week it was reported that the Obama White House removed confessed terrorist Faisal Shahzad from the Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list sometime after Barack Obama came into office.

Terrorist Faisal Shahzad had substantial connections to the Taliban, reached out to the Taliban, was influenced by Yemeni terror leader Anwar al Awlaki, made at least a dozen return trips to Pakistan since arriving in the United States in 1999, and he bought a one way ticket with cash to Pakistan.

Now we find out that he was “blogging” and asking for jihad as far back as 2006 but that the Obama Administration took him off the terror watch list anyway.

Terror expert Walid Phares weighed in on the confessed Times Square bomber today in an interview on FOX News:

To be clear, Shahzad was actually commenting on terrorist websites and not actually blogging.

Earlier this week it was discovered that Shahzad was posting on terror websites since 2006.

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Here are some very depressing stories showing that bloated welfare states funnel money to some rather disreputable characters – even when governments uncharacteristically try to do the right thing.

The Daily Mail reports that a European Court has ruled that the U.K. no longer can impose restrictions on welfare payments to women married to suspected terrorists:

A European court has instructed Britain to drop restrictions which limit social security benefits paid to the wives of terror suspects. Ministers imposed tight rules on payouts to stop the money falling into the hands of alleged Al Qaeda fanatics. Under the restrictions, cash payments were strictly limited and families had to show receipts to justify every penny of spending. But yesterday the European Court of Justice said there was no danger of the handouts being used to fund terror and branded the measures unlawful.

Unfortunately, this story is not an isolated incident. Here’s a report from the Express about a Muslim cleric who collected welfare from the Brits while (to put it mildly) being a reprehensible slug: “The twisted cleric provoked outrage by comparing British troops to Nazi stormtroopers and telling parents of dead soldiers that their children had died in vain. …Choudary, a former lawyer…rakes in more than £25,000 a year in welfare handouts.”  And CNN reports that, “Since the mid-90s, London has been a haven for foreign jihadi preachers, organizers, agitators and propagandists, many of them recipients of generous welfare benefits.

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Despite the fact that it is well established that the term ‘Tea-Bagger’ is a sexually offensive slur, officials at Organizing for America, the official Democrat Party group dedicated to organizing the party in ‘10 and ‘12, are using the term “Tea-Bagger’ in their official gatherings.

John Ruberry of Marathon Pundit attended a recent OFA meeting in Evanston, IL and he took copious notes.

As a motivator to the faithful, Gorman suggested, “Fear–Imagine America under Sarah Palin.”

Uh, dude. She’s not on the ballot this year. I thought Gilpin was a class act, albeit a misguided one, until, while not mentioning him by name, she called Illinois GOP gubernatorial nominee Bill Brady, “A teabagger, a really bad guy.”

Hmmmm, explicitly using fear and vilification of American citizens to organize the base of your party. Classy.

President “Tea-Bagger” and now the entire Democrat Party OFA leadership owes the patriotic men, women, and children who protest at Tea Parties an apology.

Below are images of elderly and minors who the President of the United States, and the Democrat Party, feel it is appropriate to depict as people who take testicles into their mouths:

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Sixth Circuit Justice Diane Wood, on President Obama’s short list for the Supreme Court, has drawn fire for supporting Justice Blackmun’s assertion in Roe v. Wade that abortion was among “a core set of individual rights exists that neither the states nor the federal government may trample.”

Taken by itself, this statement should be unobjectionable to anyone who believes in such a thing as “rights.” The real problem is that liberal judges have taken it upon themselves to decide which rights are worthy of constitutional protection.

Beginning in the progressive era, the left has articulated a double-standard of rights, one in which “property” rights are separated from and subordinated to “non-property” rights, often referred to as “personal” rights or “human” rights. Part of their argument for this distinction was that the founders themselves, or their nineteenth-century interpreters, made the same distinction, but put economic or property rights above human rights. Theodore Roosevelt, in his progressive phase, claimed that Abraham Lincoln “showed the proper sense of proportion in his relative estimates of capital and labor, of human rights and property rights,” by giving preference to personal rather than property rights.

But this is a fundamental distortion of the founders’ view. They never made any such distinction.

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Mark Steyn joins us late and Peter Robinson leaves early in this guest packed episode. Author Drew Klavan joins us for a fascinating discussion of being a conservative and working Hollywood and pop culture in general. Then John Dennis the Republican trying to unseat Nancy Pelosi, followed by Dr. George Savage who discusses some of the amazing technology advances he is helping to bring to the market. Finally, John Yoo gives us his expert insight into the machinations involved in catching and charging the Time Square bomber. Questions? Comments? Write us at podcast@ricochet.com or come join the discussion on our Facebook page.

President Obama, Senator Reid, and Speaker Pelosi showed their ability to ruthlessly ram through their legislative agenda with a combination of procedural tricks, sleight-of-hand, and painful arm-twisting, all of which could happen again. They also hope to have a Supreme Court which will rubber-stamp their legislative agenda and thus guarantee its long-term survival. If one agrees with Santayana’s “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” then it is instructive to examine the way that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt viciously attacked and tried to control the Supreme Court in order to secure his New Deal agenda.

In 1935 the Court struck down as unconstitutional certain parts of FDR’s New Deal. The essence of the Court’s common-sense reasoning was that Congress, the legislative branch, may not avoid its lawmaking responsibilities and punt them to the President, the executive branch. Moreover, the Court in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935) further irked FDR because the Court held that FDR had to follow the law and could not arbitrarily fire a Federal Trade Commission commissioner, Mr. William Humphrey, a Republican whom FDR believed did not support the New Deal with sufficient enthusiasm.

FDR did not like that, because his New Deal depended on creating a massive federal regulatory bureaucracy within his executive branch control. So, on February 5, 1937, FDR announced his infamous “Court-Packing Plan,” directly attacked the Supreme Court, and planned to stuff the Court with his loyalist lackeys. FDR followed up with a March 9, 1937 Fireside Chat where he said that America needed his Court-Packing Plan and “must take action to save the Constitution from the Court, and the Court from itself.”

On March 29, 1937, the Supreme Court bowed to FDR’s unprecedented political attacks and decided three cases in favor of the New Deal. By 1941 the Supreme Court’s “Four Horsemen,” Justices Butler, McReynolds, Sutherland and Van Devanter, were gone, leaving no one who dared speak truth to power: that Congress cannot shirk its constitutional responsibilities and that the president must follow the law. Thus, the New Deal Juggernaut rolled full-steam ahead with no one left to protect the American people from the huge federal regulatory bureaucracy that still pervades every aspect of American life and even spawned a new area of law, Administrative Law.

Today there are and will be many legal challenges to the Obama-Pelosi agenda, including health-care, financial regulation, cap-and-trade, immigration, and whatever else lurks in their legislative pipeline.

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Today, in 1945, combat in Europe ended. World War II was almost over.

I don’t care if he sleeps with SEIU and AFGE, mad props to my favorite cartoon character….  Baby Huey.

Audit The Fed.

Earlier this week, on May 3rd, we witnessed liberty in action:  a Clinton-appointed federal judge took the government to task over its continued holding of the Hutaree “Christian militia” members in Michigan.

They can try to spin it any way they want, but the government lost this one, big-time.  There are two fundamental rights implicated in the judge’s ruling — free speech, and the right to a reasonable bail.  Both of these fundamental, constitutionally protected rights are absolutely vital to our system of ordered liberty, and to the very existence of our republican form of government.  Judge Roberts’ ruling thus deserves much wider discussion than the old media has given it; it should be printed out and taught to every high-school kid in the US.  It shows how our republic — and our criminal justice system — are meant to work.

Is this a politically motivated prosecution?

It is no secret that even before President Obama was elected, the left began focusing once again on what they call “right wing militia” groups.  To hear them talk, every single militia member is a budding young Timothy McVeigh.  Thus, there was some alarm but not a great deal of surprise when nine members of the “Christian militia” group called the Hutaree were arrested in Michigan.  Now, thanks to an extensive order written by the federal judge in charge of the case, we now know that the case against the Hutaree is thin, and based almost entirely on the theory that they exceeded the allowable bounds of free speech.  One could very well argue that by definition this is a politically motivated prosecution, since it focuses on what the government is terming “hate speech.”

I’ve included a copy of the Court’s ruling with this post — please take the time to read it.  You will know a great deal more about the evidence against these men.  You may be fairly shocked at at paucity of evidence against them.  You may even wonder how easy it might be to start with “fringe” groups like the Hutaree, and then draw an ever tighter stranglehold around the free speech rights of other “radical right wing groups,” like your local TEA Party members.  Remember, these men never committed any act of violence against any person — they are being prosecuted for their political speech alone.

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It’s time for your weekly dose of Coffee and Markets, featuring The New Ledger’s Francis Cianfrocca, a podcast brought to you by the fine folks at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and LibertyPundits.com, your home for conservative podcasts. In this week’s edition, we discuss the crazy fallout from a glitch on the stock market Thursday, the latest unemployment numbers, and what’s happening with the crisis in Greece.

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Related Links:

Video: Cramer Spots Fat Fingers in Real Time
TNL: Some Contrary Indicators in Markets
Big Picture: Bonds Are For Losers Revisited
Kudlow: The Contagion Panic is a Bloody Mess
Business Insider: Here’s a List of Stocks in Which NASDAQ is Cancelling Trades
TNL: What Republicans Should Have Done About Financial Regulation

See part one here.

In part two I asked the union workers “Do you think the Government is doing a good job helping you and your family?” They replied, “NO!” Then I promptly asked, “Do you think they should do more?” Immediate response is “Yes.”

I also asked “Do you think standing here with a sign is working?” Reply “Ya, it is working for me. I have been doing this for 5 years.”

I asked them why the flyer they were handing out has a rat in a building. They explained the rat in the building on the flyer represents private contractors taking jobs from union workers, which makes them a rat.

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So about two weeks ago Sen. John Kerry, a lead author of the looming Kerry-Graham-Lieberman global warming/cap-and-trade legislation said about his bill, to disassociate from Earth Day loopiness: This is not an environment bill.

No kidding. No one on the planet claims it would change the climate in any way our most sophisticated instrumentation could discern. It’s about power. Hence the title of books like “Power Grab“.

Today we read in E&E Daily, from another co-sponsor Sen. Lindsey Graham: “It’s not a global warming bill to me. Because global warming as a reason to pass legislation doesn’t exist anymore. ”

Oddly, both remarkable statements have been ignored by the establishment press, slavish as they are to also seeing this agenda through to the end because, as Sen. Tim Wirth said in 1988 and Barack Obama in his 2010 State of the Union address, even if you don’t buy the excuse, their agenda is still “the right thing to do.”

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President Obama made the right decision to appeal the ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb, which held that the statute establishing the National Day of Prayer violates the Establishment Clause and is therefore unconstitutional.

In so doing, the judge substituted her opinion for 135 calls to prayer by presidents of the United States, the actions of virtually every Congress that has been in existence both before and after the Constitution was written, and the actions of all 50 state legislatures. Her decision is a part of the continuing assault on America’s religious heritage. America’s Judeo-Christian principles are so interwoven in a tapestry of freedom and liberty, that to begin to unravel one is to unravel the other.

Our Founding Fathers spoke eloquently not only about their personal belief in God, but also about how our nascent nation was called to a higher purpose by God. Out of respect for that purposeful birth, the first act of the U.S. Congress was to appoint a minister to lead the legislators in prayer. And, in deep and abiding faith, Presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama have called upon God for his protection, mercy, and guidance.

These acts are instructive; they show how deep America’s religious roots run. The Declaration could not have been clearer: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….”

The freedoms and liberties that we enjoy are granted by God. They are not man-made, nor government-granted. Man or State may shackle us, may separate us from our freedom; but ultimately, we will reclaim what is rightfully ours. Government’s purpose is to preserve man’s rights and when government treads on those rights, it breaks a sacred covenant. Then, as the Declaration states, it is the people’s “right, it is their duty” to reclaim what God has given.

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In 1831, a French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville’s recognized how different America’s infant democracy was from other democratic republics. He issued warnings to our young republic, “One also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom”. De Tocqueville continued, “…when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power”.

The agenda driven by President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Reid is aggressively targeted toward our becoming an all powerful central government. Since the 2008 election we have seen unprecedented expansion of government. History has shown us that as government expands individual liberty contracts.

In January of 2010, during the waning days of my primary campaign for Illinois Governor, former Polish President Lech Walesa came to Chicago to endorsed my effort. Known as the great anti-communist, founder of Solidarity, best-friend of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II, Walesa continues to inspire and encourage strong leadership. During the luncheon, Walesa issued an ominous warning for America, “America is sliding toward socialism; America is no longer the shining city on the hill.” In the videotaped interview, Walesa saw a hint of socialism creeping into America’s domestic policies. He spoke of “the issue with the banks” and how “the government wastes all the money … building a bureaucracy — just for itself.”

Walesa said that the strongest candidates are committed to principles. The framers of our Constitution based out government on strong principles, sometimes referred to as the first principles. The “first principles” that will Ensure Liberty and the American Promise for future generations are:

1. Smaller Government,
2. Fiscal Responsibility,
3. Lower Taxes,
4. National Security,
5. Federalism.

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Panic has gripped stock markets worldwide over the Greek debt crisis and the threat of a debt-deflation contagion through banks in Europe (primarily) and the U.S. that own the bonds of Greece, Portugal, Spain, and so forth. If these bond asset prices collapse totally, lending facilities would be badly crimped for both the short and long term. And that, in turn, would damage prospects for economic recovery.

The Dow closed yesterday off nearly 350 points. Earlier in the day the Dow was down 850 points, though there is talk of computer glitches and technical problems that may have temporarily undermined trading. Either way, the market is getting creamed as a result of the Greek story.

The real winner? Gold. It’s up about $25, to $1,200. People want real money. They do not trust the debt-laden currencies of Europe and the United States. Or for that matter Japan. Gold is fast becoming, once again, a reserve currency of choice.

Meanwhile, the EU/IMF bailout package for Greece, which does include draconian budget cuts, contains a 2 percentage point increase in the VAT tax that is anti-growth. Steve Forbes correctly said Wednesday on CNBC that the Greeks should be slashing spending and should move to a flat tax, just like the countries in Eastern Europe. I gave him a Nobel Prize for that.

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A powerful irony of unintended consequences of Arizona’s new immigration law is emerging, which is that the law will only harm innocent Arizonans. Perception can be more powerful than reality, and even if the millions of Americans who oppose the new law are wrong, they can bring harm as a result of a law intended to help Arizona.

On May 6, La Raza, the country’s largest civil rights group and 19 other labor and civil rights groups, including the Major League Baseball Players Association, announced a nationwide boycott of all economic activities related to Arizona. The state’s hotel and lodging association, for example, reports that 19 meetings have been cancelled, at an economic loss of $6 million. This is only the beginning. Protesters of the law may or may not be right, but the intensity of their anger will bring punitive action to the state.

We are learning after the fact the deleterious effects of S. B. 1070, reminding us a little of the health care law that Congress recently passed with few knowing what was in the bill or what it would do.

In attempting to clear up the matter of whether this new law violates the constitutional rights of the 4th and 14th Amendments, Kris Kobach, a law professor who helped draft the law, reports that police officers cannot willy nilly simply demand identification without probable cause from someone who “looks Hispanic.” He argues that there must be “lawful contact” and that “the most likely context where this law would come into play is a traffic stop.”

Now look at what Koback just confessed–”a traffic stop.” How many of Arizona’s 500,000 illegal immigrants are going to be caught primarily at traffic stops? A relatively minuscule number. Besides, Arizona doesn’t even need a new law for this because traffic violators must produce a driver’s license that proves legal residency.

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Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Tea Party movement is “struggling to overcome accusations of racism,” some of which has been perpetuated in its editorial pages. Yesterday’s New York Times, home to the most obsessively anti-Tea Party editorial page in America, was stunned to discover that “at least 32 African-Americans are running for Congress this year as Republicans, the biggest surge since Reconstruction, according to party officials.”

Previously, The Times reported that Tea Partiers are, on average, people with a high levels of education and higher than average incomes. So it would seem that they aren’t, as some editorialists and pundits contend, simply a gang of subliterate militia men or, as actress Janeane Garofalo recently told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, a subsection of the white power movement.

Wandering the recent Tax Day tea party in Washington DC with Reason.tv’s Meredith Bragg, we saw some stupid signs–though none that could be considered offensive or racist. We talked to some people that claimed President Obama was both a Czarist and Bolshevik. We spoke to a former star of Saturday Night Live who has previously claimed that president might, in fact, be the anti-Christ. Or a communist. Or both. There were those who fretted that the United States were morphing into a Stalinist state. And there were countless protesters concerned that the Obama administration was spending recklessly, interested in auditing the Federal Reserve, and seething about the General Motors bailout.

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News reports last week suggested that 130 companies that cater to main street concerns — like Harley Davidson — had hired lobbyists because of the impact the financial reform legislation will have on their business. The regulatory boondoggle will affect almost every entity that caters to middle class America — from car dealers to dentists. That’s right dentists.

News from Washington is that the group representing America’s dentists are now in freakout mode over the bill. Most dentists offer payment plans. If Johnny need braces, dentists offer payment plans that help the middle class afford them. If the financial reform bill is enacted into law, the federal government would regulate the plans.

This is a prime example of how the legislation — while proporting to regulate Wall Street will actually regulate Main Street.

Yet Citi and Goldman Sachs are supporting the legislation supposedly aimed at them. If Wall Street wants this bill and Main Street is harmed by the bill, how exactly is this Wall Street reform?

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