The dog’s troubles stem from a biting incident last year when an animal control officer responded to a complaint about Major and another dog at the home of Bluefield resident Estella Robinson, according to the court’s opinion. A municipal judge directed that the city kill the dog, citing a city ordinance that authorizes the destruction of dogs deemed “vicious, dangerous or in the habit of biting or attacking persons.”Bozo... Lassie... Either a court has jurisdiction or it doesn't. Everyone knows some dogs, like some people, are heartless bastards, but if the state wants to deprive the worst of us of life or liberty, it has got to follow the right procedures.
Ms. Robinson, who last year pleaded guilty to having a dangerous animal, claimed that the municipal court’s death sentence clashed with a state dog regulation that says only circuit and magistrate courts may decide the fate of an allegedly dangerous canine. The state’s highest court agreed with her.
“A municipality seeking an order to kill a vicious or dangerous dog must do so in circuit or magistrate court,” wrote Justice Menis E. Kethum in the opinion....
Justice Loughry said he loves animals — recalling his “fond memories of [his] childhood companion and faithful dog, ‘Bozo,’ — but said he’s not blinded to “the sad reality” that some dogs are dangerous and vicious.
While the majority acknowledges the statutory authority of municipalities to enact ordinances, it cavalierly disallows the enforcement of such ordinances in municipal courts simply because a statute allows for counties to seek the destruction of vicious dogs in either magistrate or circuit court... [W]ill the majority’s ruling be relied upon in the future to strip municipal courts of their power to enforce other ordinances, such as those involving assault and battery and hate crimes, merely because there are statutes that also authorize the prosecution of such matters in either magistrate or circuit court?The West Virginia legislature could easily fix this problem and make the municipal court's power explicit, but now they'll have to do it while the dog lovers are staring right at them. Loughry attempts to rebalance the empathy:
Will the confusion created by the majority effectively sanction future and potentially fatal attacks by vicious dogs upon unsuspecting children as they walk to school within a city’s limits? Will an elderly couple be mauled by a vicious dog in their front yard as they rake leaves?And I see 2 follow-on points after #2, supra:
The president angered voters with new Environmental Protection Agency policies, which some see as a “war on coal” and have stalled mining permits for the state’s coal mining industry...
Race likely plays some role here. In the 2008 primary, 2 in 10 white West Virginia voters said race was an important factor in their votes, second only to Mississippi. Those voters went for Clinton 8 in 10 times....
Potentially more interesting are the results from North Carolina, where 20 percent of Democratic primary voters chose “no preference” over the president.
"I'm not concerned about one tiny blip of a state filled with uneducated poor people."And a special thanks to my son Christopher Althouse Cohen, who kept up the pro-Hillary side of the conversation, including this:
And I'm not concerned about one crime-ridden blip of an inner city filled with uneducated poor black people.
How does that sentiment sound to you? Sounds like the insipid blurt of a racist asshole? Well it's no different than the sentiments you and the Obamatrons seem to endorse.
Well guess what? The majority of America isn't concerned about one large blip of any city filled with over-educated rich people.
No doubt you are one of the important educated rich people who you seem to think should control the lives of the rubes in flyover land. Well you've got a surprise coming to you, O superior being. It's people like you, and your superior messiah, that have been and will be the eternal losers in the United States. It's the people you mock and disdain as hillbillies and racists that die for your sorry, lazy, worthless little white ass.
Believe me, when Obama is defeated, either before or after the Democratic convention, your premature schadenfreude will seem even more pathetic than it already does.
You're going to lose. And that's a good thing.
Go Hillary!
Let me just sum it all up by saying that, come Election Day in November, I will be watching CNN-HD, popping some popcorn, and laughing as McCain obliterates Obama faster than Hillary could respond to a nuclear attack against Israel.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won a lopsided victory on Tuesday over Senator Barack Obama in the West Virginia primary, where racial considerations emerged as an unusually salient factor. Mrs. Clinton drew strong support from white, working-class voters, who have spurned Mr. Obama in recent contests.White. White. White. Race. Race. Race. Oh, you Democrats. You've really made a nice place for yourselves.
The number of white Democratic voters who said race had influenced their choices on Tuesday was among the highest recorded in voter surveys in the nomination fight. Two in 10 white West Virginia voters said race was an important factor in their votes. More than 8 in 10 who said it factored in their votes backed Mrs. Clinton, according to exit polls.Ugh. Is the NYT painting it this way, or does HC's big victory deserve this downgrade?
CHARLES GIBSON: Is there any discussion of what kind of an exit strategy there would be?I hate the idea of Hillary as VP.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: There are various exit strategies right now. Number one would be, go out on a win. So, stay in until West Virginia, where Sen. Clinton is likely the winner, and Kentucky on May 20, and after that, bow out. Two, negotiate for the imposition of Michigan and Florida, to get those delegations seated, declare victory on that, and get out. But the big one, Charlie and this is what some people close to the Clintons are talking about: Is there a way to negotiate a settlement with Barack Obama to have Sen. Clinton on the ticket?
CHARLES GIBSON: And what do they think?
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: It's hard to know. I mean, first of all, would Sen. Obama go for it? Can he get over the bitterness of this campaign? Can he be convinced that it's the strongest ticket? Third, of course, would Sen. Clinton take it? I think if it was offered in the right way, yes.
Does Hillary Clinton really want the vice presidency? It seems to me that the senate offers her a better venue for achieving her ambitions and goals personally, politically and in public policy -- and a future in public life with much greater longevity -- than anything she'll find as Barack Obama's number two....Also, I can't understand this notion that Obama would pay Clinton to get out of the race — that is, that his campaign would pay her debts for her. Clinton spent her own money on her campaign. How is it permissible for Obama to refill Clinton's personal bank account? I don't know the election law here. I am simply asking why this outrageous bribery is even allowed.
Most people who accept the vice presidency do so either because they believe it will line them up to succeed to the presidency or because it brings them to a level of power and honor their careers held little prospect of bringing them otherwise. But neither applies to Hillary Clinton. She's already of the stature and standing to run for president. She's a genuinely historic figure. And she's already been heavily involved in a successful two term administration.
Remember too that the recent trend for greater vice presidential involvement in key administration decision-making has brought with it a flat requirement that vice presidents be strictly loyal and politically subservient to the president. Quite simply, the vice presidency is beneath Hillary's stature....
Helping to retire an opponent's campaign is not unprecedented and can sometimes be justified in the interests of party unity... But using more than $10 million raised in large part by small individual donations to pay back the Clintons who appear to be worth many tens of millions of dollars simply seems wrong....That's for sure.
Frankly, I'm surprised that it's even being suggested. It would be a mistake for the Clintons to ask (and just because people are chattering about it -- don't assume they have or will), a mistake for Obama to offer and one that would risk a severe backlash.
That's not what people gave their money for.
[I]f you look at Obama's vote in Pennsylvania, you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the '70s and '80s, led by college students and minorities. In Pennsylvania, Obama did best in college towns (60 to 40 percent in Penn State's Centre County) and in heavily black areas like Philadelphia.Do you think it's odd that "somewhat conservative" voters are more inclined to vote for Obama than moderates? It doesn't really fit Judis's "Next McGovern" theory.
Its ideology is very liberal. Whereas in the first primaries and caucuses, Obama benefited from being seen as middle-of-the-road or even conservative, he is now receiving his strongest support from voters who see themselves as "very liberal." In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among "very liberal" voters by 55 to 45 percent, but lost "somewhat conservative" voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent. In Wisconsin and Virginia, by contrast, he had done best against Clinton among voters who saw themselves as moderate or somewhat conservative.
The primaries, unfortunately, are not going to get any easier for Obama. While he should win easily in North Carolina, where he benefits from a large African-American vote and support in the state's college communities, he is going to have trouble in Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia, where he will once again be faced by a large white working class vote.... [I]f Obama doesn't find a way now to speak to these voters, he is going to have trouble winning that large swath of states from Pennsylvania through Missouri in which a Democrat must do well to gain the presidency.
[H]uman individuals drive the law, as Mr. Toobin tells it. The story of Jay Sekulow, "a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn" whose "ignorance" was "his best weapon," swells the 12-page chapter on the Supreme Court's religion cases, but there isn't a word about the Rehnquist Court's most important Free Exercise case, Employment Division v. Smith. Smith, written by the conservative Justice Scalia, said religion was not entitled to special exceptions from generally applicable laws. (You can't avoid the Controlled Substances Act, for example, by saying you need to use peyote in a religious rite.)There's something else in the religion chapter that I couldn't fit into the review. When Toobin writes that Jay Sekulow's "ignorance" was "his best weapon," he's portraying the lawyer as someone who bumbled into using the Free Speech Clause to win protection for religious activities. Toobin writes that Sekulow didn't realize that "cases involving religion were always argued under the Free Exercise Clause."
Smith doesn't fit the theory that the conservatives are out to favor religion or the proposition that the religion cases "usually come down simply to ‘What will Sandra do?'" Justice O'Connor opposed the doctrinal shift in Smith, as did the three most liberal justices: William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun. It was a liberal tenet that the Free Exercise Clause relieves religious practitioners from requirements the law imposes on everyone else. To bring up Smith would require Mr. Toobin to acknowledge that conservatives favor equality and liberals want to favor religion and that would mess up the narrative arc of his story.
Oscar wants to be free to use naughty words and otherwise break out of the professorial mode. But my experience is that even though students know who I am and can and do read this blog, they seem to accept this as a separate mode of mine and don't use it as a basis for talking to me in a newly confidential way. In the law school, the student-professor relationship is very well established. It really doesn't break down, even when students read your personal journal.Or so I like to think! Maybe not. I'm sure some of my commenters -- writing under a pseudonym, of course -- will tell me that students do not keep this separate. How many of my pseudonymous commenters are, in fact, my students? Yesterday, I had a problem with a commenter who came here to speak insultingly to me -- "You look ugly, stop embarrassing us already!" -- and then asserted that he was a student at my law school. That crossed a line:
A law student might find it interesting to participate here and get outside of the conventional environment. But as soon as you identify yourself as a law student, that can't happen. And I'm not willing to assume my lawprof mentor style with someone who wants the freedom to talk to me in a way that he could not do if he were identified. I'm not going to have a conversation like that. If you want to talk to me as a law student or alumnus, do that, and act like one. But don't come here and insult me and leave me feeling like I have to respond in a tolerant, supportive way.Remember the old problem of authors adopting a pseudonym so they could lard their book's Amazon page with fulsome praise? And, of course, there's the journalist or blogger who adopts a pseudonym to participate in his comments section as if he were a fan of himself.
Ms. Albert, 41, was found by the jury in Federal District Court to have strayed beyond the normal limits of pseudonymous invention, in part by signing a movie contract using her nom de plume...Hmmm... the whole trial worked as a publicity stunt. It subtly transformed Albert into a sympathetic victim.
Long before this somewhat narrow legal matter reached the courts, the broader story of JT LeRoy, with its agitprop allure and celebrity aroma, played out on the larger and much more garish canvas of the press. After “Sarah” thrust the writer into stardom in 2000, JT LeRoy became the damaged darling of the art house set, a street waif and supposed son of a truck stop prostitute who, usually by way of telephone or e-mail (he was “famously reclusive”), befriended the likes of Courtney Love and Winona Ryder — at least until his startling existence as a fiction was revealed.
All the while, of course, it was Ms. Albert, a mother and otherwise obscure novelist from Brooklyn Heights, who was spinning gritty fantasies of drug addiction and Appalachian misery for the rich and famous names at the other end of the keyboard or the line. She gave interviews in a twangy accent to Terry Gross on NPR and sometimes paid her former boyfriend’s half-sister to appear in disguise as JT LeRoy in the rarefied air of literary readings or the international film festival at Cannes.
It was deceptions like these that Antidote’s lawyers said constituted her fraud. Yet even though the company’s lawyers assailed her in court as a trickster and wily master of self-promotion, they — and their client, Mr. Levy-Hinte — admitted a grudging admiration for her writing talents, and for her performance.
They also evinced a quiet sympathy for Ms. Albert, for it was soon apparent that the eight-day trial would include testimony about her rather gruesome history — a litany of adolescent trauma that included sexual abuse, institutionalization and 13 years of telephone therapy in which she spoke to her psychiatrist in the adopted persona of a teenage boy. That boy, whom she took to calling Jeremy or Jeremiah, was a sort of early incarnation of the full-blown alter ego that would eventually evolve into JT LeRoy.
Among the various battles waged at the trial — art versus commerce, truth versus fiction, reality versus the imagination — it was perhaps the battle over JT LeRoy’s purpose in the world that was most in dispute. Before his identity (or, rather, nonidentity) was revealed last year in a series of newspaper articles, the production team at Antidote considered him that rare commodity in today’s biography-obsessed entertainment world: a gifted writer with a titillating past that only enhanced the value of the work. After the revelation, the company took the position that Ms. Albert had used the JT LeRoy “brand” — the same that had attracted them — as a celebrity magnet to draw attention to her books.So she has to pay back the option money, but the trial works to nullify the problem of the fake identity and to allow Albert to step into the spotlight as a writer who can openly take credit for her book. Presumably, it's a good book. Now, by the ordeal of trial, she has become a saleable character. She can now seek absolution in the Church of Oprah. Tell us all about how you needed JT LeRoy as respirator.
Ms. Albert herself, in testimony from the stand, suggested that JT LeRoy was far more than a pseudonym in the classic Mark Twain-Samuel Clemens mold. She offered the idea that JT LeRoy was a sort of “respirator” for her inner life: an imaginary, though necessary, survival apparatus that permitted her to breathe.
Every now and then, one would hear people talk in mysterious tones about log cabins or geodesic domes on virgin land in Vermont or Montana, and the growing of organic vegetables. John Denver's song ''Country Roads'' made West Virginia a favored destination. Then there would be a brisk exit from the blighted city, with a car towing an assortment of furniture, tools, pets and sometimes children. The pull of nature and authenticity, so imbricated in the original material of the American Dream, had overcome the easy temptations of materialism....Far more young people of the era entertained romantic thoughts about doing this back-to-nature thing than actually did it, of course. It was always completely easy to predict how unpleasant the reality of such a life would turn out to be. Nevertheless, it was a putdown of the time to call someone a "phony hippie." You felt you really should drop out and live on a commune. How absurd it seems now to have felt guilty about such a failing!
There was always a slight embarrassment to be experienced when these would-be Amish came sidling back to town, to resume work in brokerages and banks and universities. To this day, that especially vile reminder of the epoch -- the graying and greasy ponytail trailing off the balding pate -- is their living memorial.
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