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Category Archives: Lawyer stuff

Equal justice under the law

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

A Republican/conservative activist illegally films an idiot at Acorn giving absurd tax advice. Acorn loses its federal funding, the conservative is hailed on Fox, and no one suggests that the heavy hand of the law should reach down to punish the only real illegality uncovered-the filming. Another conservative illegally tapes a phone conversation among a […]

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Weird Constitutional Theories

Monday, August 31, 2009

Think Progress reports on a Missouri School District that forced its marching band to return T-shirts it ordered. The T-Shirt’s design is depicted below. The reason? Assistant superintendent Brad Pollitt explained that the t-shirts were banned because they were imposing on religious views: Though the shirts don’t violate the school’s dress code, Pollitt noted that […]

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The Church calls on Scalia to redress an injustice

Saturday, August 29, 2009

The Boston Globe reports that the Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocese is trying to keep the public from seeing internal documents bearing on the decisions made by the present Cardinal of New York relating to the assignment and re-assignment of child molesting priests: A Roman Catholic diocese in Connecticut has invoked the First Amendment’s separation of […]

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Afraid of empathy

Monday, July 13, 2009

Charles Grassley, who has somehow been elected a United States Senator,quakes in fear at the prospect of a judge who is able to feel empathy: President Obama said that he would nominate judges based on their ability to “empathize” in general and with certain groups in particular. This “empathy” standard is troubling to me. In […]

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Prop 8 upheld

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The California Supreme Court, as expected, upheld the validity of Proposition 8. A quick reading: before we held that same sex couples were constitutionally entitled to the legal use of the term “marriage” to describe the legal relationship to which they, along with opposite sex couples were entitled to enter. I.e., civil unions with the […]

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Olbermann missed something

Monday, May 18, 2009

I just got through watching Keith Olbermann attacking Michael Steele, who suggested that gay marriage was bad for small business. Olbermann pointed out that gay weddings would pump about $16 billion annually into the economy for photographers, restaurants, etc. You know, the same exorbitant expenses incurred by straight folks. It’s clear Olbermann is not a […]

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Not a favorable comparison

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Steven Benen, at the Washington Monthly, takes exception to the fact that the UK is banning political extremists from entering that country: I can vaguely understand why these measures might be tempting, but it’s developments like these that remind me why U.S. civil liberties are worth appreciating. I agree with his position that these bans […]

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The Republican Philosophy in a Nutshell

Sunday, May 3, 2009

The folks at ThinkProgress have done an admirable job of exposing Karl Rove’s latest bit of hypocrisy here. Seems Karl no longer feels that the President’s choice for the Supreme Court deserves absolute deference. No surprise there, and in any event, exposing Rovian hypocrisy makes shooting fish in a barrel look like rocket science. But […]

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Not much, but the best we can do

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Jay Bybee, who wrote one of the recently released torture memos, is now a federal judge on the Court of Appeals. That’s one step below the Supreme Court, for anyone who’s counting. Lately there has been a lot of calls for his impeachment, something he would richly deserve. Some members of Congress have even oh-so-cautiously […]

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Another step back

Thursday, April 16, 2009

This is quick. After writing the previous post, I learned that Obama has explicitly barred prosecutions of those who did the torturing, officially approving the “just following orders” defense that we (as it turns out) self righteously rejected at Nuremberg. The idea that anyone would have a “good faith” belief in the validity of a […]

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