Appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, Federal Judge John McCarthy Roll was shot and killed today when an assailant opened fire in a Safeway parking lot in Ariz., where Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. was meeting with constituents.
Just two years ago, he was targeted with death threats -- and given a security detail -- after ruling that a group of illegal immigrants could go forward with a multi-million dollar civil rights lawsuit against a state rancher....
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.Peaceably to assemble.
And judging from the comments to this post, people are already trying to score political points. Well, they kind of telegraphed this strategy, didn’t they? Remember Bloomberg making a fool of himself by blaming the Times Square bombing on the Tea Party? How about waiting until we actually know something, this time? That’s likely to be soon enough.Yes. Please.
The Hmong are a tribe in the fog-shrouded mountains separating Laos from southern China, and they were natural allies for the C.I.A. because of their enmity toward Laotian lowlanders to the south, who dominated the Communist leadership.
General Vang Pao quickly organized 7,000 guerrillas, then steadily increased the force to 39,000, leading them in many successful battles, often against daunting odds. William Colby, C.I.A. director in the mid-1970s, called him “the biggest hero of the Vietnam War.”
Lionel Rosenblatt, president emeritus of Refugees International, in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2008, put it more bluntly, saying General Vang Pao’s Hmong were put “into this meat grinder, mostly to save U.S. soldiers from fighting and dying there.”
Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water? Well, do you know what it is?... Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?... Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridated water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream?... You know when fluoridation first began?... Nineteen hundred and forty six. Nineteen fortysix, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your postwar commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice.
No, this is nothing like ebonics. It's the opposite of ebonics, if anything. Cornel West may be black, but his speech is not at all ebonics. It's pretentious straining at erudition, which is why it's so damned funny when he screws up.
I would not put up a post making fun of someone who lapses into an ebonics-type usage. I don't see the value in mocking that. I do see big value in puncturing a puffed-up academic — even though political correctness nags at me to refrain from making fun of the way a black person speaks.
I do have some sympathy for West here, though, because I think PC folk have failed — over a long period of time — to give him the feedback that would have kept him from developing this absurdly inflated style of speech, with its danger of missteps like this, and the self-serious demeanor that makes his mistakes especially funny.
The couple, who have three sons and still grieve for a daughter they lost soon after birth, are going to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to win the right to select sex by IVF treatment....
The man said: "After what we have been through we are due for a bit of luck. We want to be given the opportunity to have a girl."
The woman, who is consumed by grief over the daughter who died soon after birth, admits she has become obsessed with having a daughter and it has become vital to her psychological health.
Victoria's Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act 2008 bans sex selection unless it is necessary to avoid the risk of transmission of a genetic abnormality or genetic disease to a child.How would you analyze this question? Abortion is legal there, and the woman has already used abortion as a method of sex selection. The case is about who may have access to advanced treatments.
It was them criticizing me as a person, and that was something that frankly pissed me off. I’ve heard worse in bathrooms about me.... If I had the chance to sit down with them over a poutine, I think we'd all be, like, lovely people together.
"But pressure is the last thing that would make me want to 'join' a community... The massive backlash against me in the gay media and community only made me dig my 'closeted' heels in further."So, what do we learn from this? Possible lessons:
I now pass this gavel, which is larger than most gavels here but the gavel of choice of Mr. Speaker Boehner…Now, my ears have been tuned by decades of immersion in feminism and Freudianism, and I say that's an intentional reference to the phallus and the will toward domination it symbolizes. Nancy Pelosi intended to provoke disrespectful titters, I think — with deniability, of course.
President Barack Obama isn't giving up in his attempt to hand a federal judgeship to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler.Attempt to hand — that's a weird way to put it. The President has the appointment power. There's no way to get federal judges other than by having the President "attempt to hand" out the positions.
For the third time, Obama has sent Butler's name to the U.S. Senate as his nominee to become a federal judge for Wisconsin's Western District, based in Madison, the White House announced Wednesday....And here's the Wall Street Journal on the confirmation issue:
Also renominated Wednesday was Victoria Nourse, a UW law professor the president has tapped for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. Nourse would replace Judge Terence Evans, who has moved to senior status.
Expect little change in the partisan grudge match over court picks, which Chief Justice John Roberts decried as a "recurring problem" in his year-end report Friday. Democrats will continue to control the Senate, which confirms federal judges. In the last Congress, however, judicial nominations were low on Democrats' priority list, disappointing liberal activists who felt the ex-law professor in the White House and his filibuster-resistant Senate majority squandered an opportunity to reshape the federal judiciary.
In contrast, Republicans long have made molding the courts a top objective. As they did in the last Congress, Republicans likely will make up in energy what they lack in numbers, using parliamentary privileges to slow or block Obama nominees.
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) tweeted from the House floor that a "birther" had interrupted the Constitution reading that's been taking place.Yes, it happened...
An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible.What psychological suffering this man caused in so many vulnerable parents of little children! For a scientist to subvert science — why don't we have a much more intense feeling of horror about that? How dare those trained in science to misuse it and undermine the enterprise of science? Our shared interest in science is so strong – our need to rely on experts so great — that we should severely punish those who betray it. But we can't, really, can we? If we tried, we might only exacerbate the pressures on scientists to toe the line and give us the answers we want, lest we target them for destruction.
"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."
What's internet brand equity? It's a measure of who's talking about you online, based on Internet data, social media, blogs and the top 75,000 print and electronic media outlets. The resulting tool, the group claims, gauges the relative value of the various institutions and how they change over time.
The Global Language Monitor created their ranking system in order to eliminate what they described as inherent bias in the other published ranking systems. Rather than emphasizing the opinions of college deans, high school guidance counselors and the ratio of the endowment to the number of students, GLM believes their method reflects the opinion of the world at large.
"I can only imagine [the trauma felt by] someone who had lived at a level of near adoration by those around him, and seen the grandeur with which his father was treated,” said Ms. Afkhami, who now also lives in exile in the US.
“And then to suddenly, really quite suddenly, be dislocated, separated from his parents and also when he was with them to witness his father, whom all heads of state almost universally had courted and admired and flattered, was suddenly a pariah, there was no place for him."
And, after all that, you're surprised how I talk about marriage?Strangely, the news that Russ Feingold will teach a course at Marquette Law School got me looking back at a post I wrote in 2005 about a lecture he gave at Wisconsin Law School, and I see that the lecture focused on the congressional oath and I brought up the issue of the marital oath:
I would never have said this out loud, but I couldn't help thinking how interesting it was that Feingold shaped his whole lecture around the sanctity of the oath, when just a few days ago he announced that he was getting a divorce, his second. Was I the only one who thought how strange it was to hear a man piously invoke a passionate fidelity to an oath when he had -- so conspicuously -- gone back on the marriage oath twice?\
But I like Senator Feingold. I do think he's a good man. I don't presume to know what happens to people in their marriages, and I am divorced myself. Nevertheless, he could have discussed his devotion to the Constitution from some perspective other than the fact that he'd sworn an oath. Taking an oath to the Constitution, after all, is not the strongest reason to support it.
Cleveland: “Yeah, uh, what happened? I mean my daughter and my niece witnessed what was going on. Was anything done about the situation? Do you need their names or information or anything from them?”
Officer: “No, not at all.”
Cleveland: “You don’t?”
Officer: “Nope. It was an intoxicated boyfriend of another boyfriend.”
Cleveland: “Well, how old was this child?”
Officer: “It wasn’t a child. It was an adult.”
Cleveland: “Are you sure?”
Officer: “Yup.”
Cleveland: “Are you positive? Because this child doesn’t even speak English. My daughter had, you know, dealt with him before, seeing him on the street. You know, catching earthworms.”
But this hypocrisy is just truly too much. Enuf already--the more someone complains about the homos the more we should look under their bed
"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist — I really believe he is Antichrist — I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you- sit down and tell me all the news.""Here's "A Tale of Two Cities":
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.Pretty much the same thing, no? Close enough for RNC work.
You more or less grew up in New York. Being a child of Sicilian immigrants, how do you think New York City pizza rates?He's applying his legalistic language fussiness to food, but then what's with "infinitely"? What happened to verbal precision all of a sudden? He's gushing like... a girl.
I think it is infinitely better than Washington pizza, and infinitely better than Chicago pizza. You know these deep-dish pizzas—it's not pizza. It's very good, but ... call it tomato pie or something. ... I'm a traditionalist, what can I tell you?
[Wisconsin's new Governor has called a] special legislative session and told lawmakers he wanted them to approve a string of bills by the end of February....I'm sorry I didn't walk down the street to witness the inaugural ceremony, which included "a choral rendition of 'Aquarius' and 'Let the Sunshine In' from the musical 'Hair.'" Caught in the same 1960's time warp: "Outside, dozens of protesters walked around the Capitol waving placards and shouting, 'Hey, hey, ho, ho, Scott Walker has got to go.'" Damn. I missed some photo ops!
The bills would: give tax breaks to business owners and income tax credits for contributions to health savings accounts; reduce business regulations; provide protections from lawsuits; give the governor more say in state rule making; turn the state Department of Commerce into a partly private entity to focus on job creation; and require a two-thirds majority vote in both houses of the Legislature to approve any increases to the state sales, income and franchise taxes....
"My top three priorities are simple: jobs, jobs and more jobs," Walker said.
He also promised to improve education, protect natural resources, honor the role of family and "right-size state government by ensuring government is providing only the essential services our citizens need and our taxpayers can afford."
The show had started promisingly. Taking the stage in a red sequined shirt, black slacks and a white sailor hat, Berry began with "Roll Over Beethoven"...He tried to resume playing, but paramedics arrived, and he was taken off for examination. The fans waited, and he came back again, thanked the people and left — "using a bit of his signature 'duck walk.'"
Although Berry played this and following songs - "Sweet Little Sixteen" and "School Days" -- at slower tempos than the original recordings, he filled them with his classic guitar riffs and sang them with weathered authority....
Things then quickly began going off the rails. Berry played snippets of blues songs and an unsteady version of " Memphis Tennessee," before taking an extended pause to try to retune his guitar, complaining that it was out of key with the piano. He made several unsuccessful attempts at "Let It Rock," in part seated at the piano, and performed disjointed bits of "Carol" and "Johnny B. Goode."
Berry revived to lead the crowd in a sing-along of "My Ding-a-Ling" and acknowledged things weren't going well, telling the crowd he'd try to do better at entertaining them. It was not to be. After a version of "Reelin' and Rockin'" they found the band gamely following his inconsistent tempo, Berry made his way to the piano, where the show came to an end completely at odds with the joy in his music.
During countless classroom discussions, boys have told me that from a very young age, they have been taught that for a "real" man, sex is about the aggressive conquest of female bodies and scoring with as many of them as you can. While these ideas have long been around, they are more socially sanctioned now than ever before.
So what happens when individual risk factors become societal norms? And when pornography, because of its ubiquity and availability, effectively becomes sex ed?...
[Girls are] feeling depressed and worthless as they realize that real-life translations of porn don't make them feel sexy or powerful at all, since the sexual personas they're trying to emulate have been created by - and for - men.
The school, to be called the Madison Preparatory Academy, would have longer school days, offer a college preparatory curriculum — and require students to wear uniforms.Why does the State Journal use the term "single-gender" instead of "single-sex" in this context? Anyway, I think the problem is making a special school for males and not having an equivalent one for females. But this isn't a case of training males for elite achievement (as it was in the Supreme Court case dealing with the Virginia Military Institute). Caire seems to be saying that males have a special problem that needs remediation. Actually, he seems to be saying black males have a special problem needing remediation:
As the proposal heads for preliminary approval from the School Board early this year and possible final approval in the fall, it already faces opposition from the teachers union, which opposes non-unionized charter schools, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, which opposes single-gender schools.
Caire views the school as a key step toward building a stronger black middle class in Madison....But it's not racial discrimination that's being proposed. It's sex discrimination. In equal protection law, race discrimination must be justified — at least theoretically — meeting a higher standard than sex discrimination. But if the government interest to be served by sex discrimination is characterized as racial, does that make the argument for sex discrimination weaker or stronger?
An underdeveloped black middle class in Madison means fewer positive role models for youth, Caire said, which partly explains why the city has disproportionately lower graduation rates and higher incarceration rates among minorities.
We inspect our exit point — a manhole in the middle of the road. Will Hunt, a bespectacled 26-year-old who is writing a book about the underground (“The last frontier,” he says, “in an over-mapped, Google-Earthed world.”) will serve as our spotter. Will’s job is to watch for traffic: ascending from the hole, we do not wish to be hit by a car. We are to communicate by walkie-talkie. Will ties a long pink ribbon to the inside of the manhole cover. Dangling downward, this will be our signal we have reached the end....Time to hop on the subway again?
Filthy, backpacked, smelling of the sewer, we board a rush-hour subway....
The sewer under Greene Street was only four feet high (Erling is 6 foot 3.) It got smaller and smaller, until they were forced on hands and knees, then eventually on their bellies. Crawling through raw sewage. The ceiling was higher on Canal Street, they report, but the floor was caked with so much feces they sank in it like quicksand. They were turned back by an impassable mountain of waste....
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