Well, I have to admit. That is not who I thought would retire.
SCOTUS
by John Cole| 12 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
by John Cole| 12 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
Well, I have to admit. That is not who I thought would retire.
by John Cole| 18 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
Property Rights case turned away:
The U.S. Supreme Court turned away a challenge by hotel owners Monday to San Francisco’s conversion ordinance, which requires owners of long-term residential hotels to pay a city fee before switching their property to short-term tourist use.
In a unanimous ruling, the justices said the owners of the San Remo Hotel in North Beach had no right to go to federal court with their claim that the ordinance was an unconstitutional confiscation of private property, because they had already lost the same argument in the state Supreme Court.
“State courts are fully competent to adjudicate constitutional challenges to local land-use decisions,” said Justice John Paul Stevens. He said neither federal law nor constitutional guarantees of property rights entitled the owners to “a second bite at the apple in their forum of choice.”
The backstory:
Tom Field, who along with his brother filed the suit in 1993, said the ruling was disappointing.
“Is our economic system based on capitalism and private property rights, or are we going to be increasingly told by government how to run our businesses and our lives?” he asked.
The Fields bought the three-story hotel in 1971 and spent $500,000 restoring it. After they applied to convert their remaining residential rooms to tourist use in 1990, the city charged them a $567,000 fee, which they paid in 1996 while continuing to litigate.
Their original suit in Superior Court claimed that the fee was invalid because the city had wrongly classified the hotel as residential, when it had actually been mainly a tourist hotel for many years. But by the time the case reached the state Supreme Court in 2002, after stops in both state and federal courts, the Fields were making a full-scale attack on the ordinance, claiming it failed to promote any legitimate city interest and amounted to confiscation of their property without compensation.
The state’s high court upheld the ordinance in a 4-3 decision, saying the fees were reasonably related to the loss of low-cost housing and prompting Justice Janice Rogers Brown to declare in dissent that private property was “entirely extinct in San Francisco.”
Discuss.
More here (.pdf).
by John Cole| 30 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
Justice was slow, but caught up with him in the end:
Edgar Ray Killen, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, was found guilty today of felony manslaughter in the killings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi four decades ago. The verdict, delivered on the 41st anniversary of the deaths, was less severe than the murder conviction that the state prosecutors had sought.
The jury, which began deliberating Monday afternoon, reported just before breaking for the night that they were spilt 6 to 6 on the case against Mr. Killen, an ailing, 80-year-old sawmill operator who was charged with masterminding the 1964 slayings. The jurors resumed their deliberations this morning, after spending the night sequestered at a hotel on the order of the judge, Marcus D. Gordon of State Circuit Court in Neshoba County.
Mr. Killen, the first to face state murder charges in the case, could be sentenced to up to 20 years on each of the three counts. He did not testify at his short trial, which began last Wednesday, and he was breathing with the aid of an oxygen tube, looking straight ahead, as he listened to the reading of the verdict and the confirmatory poll of the jurors by the judge.
Mr. Killen was immediately taken into custody.
Good.
This post is in: Domestic Politics
Happy Fathers Day, everyone.
Project Nothing has his own tribute up.
by John Cole| 13 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
And now for some real Nazi’s (Bug Me Not password):
Hate groups, particularly Nazi-oriented skinheads, are mushrooming across New Jersey at the same time that anti-Semitic incidents in the state have shot to an all-time high.
Law enforcement officials and organizations that monitor such groups say New Jersey’s increase is extraordinary.
Active hate groups in New Jersey totaled 31 last year, up from five in 1999, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks such groups around the nation.
“They’re popping up all over,” said Brian Christensen, an investigator with New Jersey’s Office of Bias Crime and Community Relations.
Experts say that the increase in the number of groups does not necessarily mean more people are getting involved or that some larger war of the races has gained momentum. They also point out that the overwhelming majority of bias crimes are not committed by those in hate groups.
Just so people remember what real Nazis and neo-Nazis are all about.
by John Cole| 10 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
An enormous 11 page piece in the NY Times on Gay Marriage titled “What’s Their Real Problem With Gay Marriage? (It’s the Gay Part),” which is, on balance, a pretty fair piece on the issue of gay marriage and the political forces aligned to stop it. While the article (at least to me), seemed to be pretty balanced, some passages are bound to create and uproar among some. These include:
But for the anti-gay-marriage activists, homosexuality is something to be fought, not tolerated or respected. I found no one among the people on the ground who are leading the anti-gay-marriage cause who said in essence: ”I have nothing against homosexuality. I just don’t believe gays should be allowed to marry.” Rather, their passion comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: it seeks to spread itself.
That passage will cause problems for the obvious reasons. Same with this:
Of course, this view of homosexuality — seeing it as a disorder to be cured — is not new. It was cutting-edge thinking circa 1905. While most of society — including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Education Association, the World Health Organization and many other such groups — eventually came around to the idea that homosexuality is normal, some segments refused to go along. And what was once a fairly fringe portion of the population has swelled in recent years, as has its influence.
And then there is this:
Several anti-gay-marriage activists drew my attention to a study showing that since gay civil unions became legal in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, the rate of out-of-wedlock births in those countries has increased. When I made the observation that, of all things to lay at the feet of homosexuals, the birth rate was surely not one of them, Laura Clark had an answer: ”When marriage can mean anything, it means nothing. Why bother to get married at all?” And indeed, she is accurately reflecting the analysis of Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution whose articles on the topic in The Weekly Standard make the rounds of the activists. Kurtz links rising rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth to the legalization of gay unions. He follows a British demographer in studying cohabitation rates in three groups of European countries: the Nordics, those roughly in the geographic middle and the southern tier.
Read the whole thing.
by John Cole| 3 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
Here is something you don’t see every day- an ode (well, not really an ode) to WalMart.
Because curiosity got the better of me while I was writing this and because google rules, here is an actual Ode to Walmart:
Ode to Wal Mart
isles and isles
of bargins piled
high–
as eye can
see
triumphant consumers
generals and colonels
march down battlements
armies
clutch toy cars
plastic princess barrettes
ride to battle in plastic baby seats
babies learn to seek
cheapest deals
before they can talk
It goes on. The internets is great.