Sarah Espinosa, 22, of Albany, New York allegedly combined three activities that made for a uniquely bad combination: drinking, driving, . . . and snake theft. Espinosa culminated this poor judgment by succeeding in crashing into a firehouse after the snake reportedly wrapped itself around her neck in Long Island.
One of the touchstones for GOP members has been the pledge to “pay as you go” — covering any increases in spending with corresponding cuts in spending or new revenue. The campaign season appears to have taken its toll on that pledge with tax cuts that can add nearly $1 trillion to the federal debt.
As someone who writes on military history, I could not resist a story this week out of California. Democratic Rep. Julia Brownley has a novel campaign challenge on her hands this week after it was discovered that her mass political mailer showed a picture of female sailor in what was supposed to be a U.S. military uniform — showing Browley’s support from veterans and current military personnel. Unfortunately, the woman was actually wearing not only a fake military uniform but one displaying German Luftwaffe insignia. Of course, at least Brownley can use the connection to the Bundeswehr to call out the Katastropheneinsatz to handle disaster control relief.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is again making news in public comments made about the Court and its cases. In two different public events, Ginsburg suggested that the Supreme Court majority has a bias due to the gender of the majority of the Court and engaged people in the political debate over whether she should retire and who should replace her. Putting aside the merits of these debates, I remain deeply disturbed by the active public speaking tours of justices who appear to relish the attention and feed public controversies, including many with political aspects.
Continue reading “Ginsburg: Male Justices Do Not Understand Issues Affecting Women In Hobby Lobby”
We previously discussed how the CIA used a doctor in an international vaccination program to help locate Osama Bin Laden. The use of such a cover violated international agreement and led to other doctors being attacked or barred from areas as suspected CIA operatives. Under huge international pressure, the Obama Administration finally agreed not to use such programs as covers for the CIA this year. However, a new story alleges that the CIA used young, undertrained Latin Americans for spying in Cuba while working as part of a program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in dealing with HIV prevention and other subjects.
New details are emerging on the botched execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood in Arizona that we discussed earlier. If you recall the horrific scene, Wood took roughly two hours to die. Now it appears that the dosage for the new drugs were way off — requiring the prison to increase the dosage to 25 times what was thought to be necessary.
I am not a golfer and it is one of the sports that I least enjoy watching. However, it does occasionally supply an interesting legal controversy. Pro golfer Dustin Johnson this week is taking a leave of absence from the PGA tour (the Washington Post is calling it a suspension). The reason is intriguing. He failed three drug tests and allegedly has been sleeping with the wives of other players. The drug tests however were reportedly for marijuana and cocaine. Since those are not performance enhancing drugs, I do not understand why the PGA even tests for them or why Johnson being a cad is an issue for the PGA.
As of close of business on July 31, 2014, our debt has risen to $17,618,599,653,160.19. That crippling level of debt is itself astonishing but what is equally astonishing is that $7 trillion of that debt has been added in just the five and a half years of the Obama Administration. That $7 trillion is more than the debt accumulated from George Washington through Bill Clinton combined.
This month, Washington seems caught in some strange time loop. The President allegedly fighting off an attempt to remove him while Members of Congress are denouncing his “Imperial Presidency” and contempt for constitutional law. It must be enough to give Bob Woodword and Carl Bernstein vertigo.
As one of the legal experts who testified during the Clinton Impeachment and lead defense counsel in the last judicial impeachment trial in the Senate, I have been struck by the replication of a number of misconceptions surrounding impeachment. That led to Sunday’s column on certain myths regarding impeachment. According to a CNN/ORC poll last week, some 33 percent of Americans think the president should be impeached. Over a majority now disapprove of his conduct in office according to other polls. However, that is not enough for impeachment. As many of you know, I am highly troubled about the actions taken by President Obama in violation of the Separation of Powers. I testified (here and here and here) and wrote a column on President Obama’s increasing circumvention of Congress in negating or suspending U.S. laws. I ran another column recently listing such incidents of executive over-reach. Some like the violations of the power of the purse in the shifting of hundreds of millions of dollars raise extremely serious challenges to our system. However, I do not believe that these violations have yet reached the point of impeachable offenses. Ideally, a federal court will review some of these violations and show that the system can work in the maintenance of the lines of separation though the Administration is clearly going to fight hard to block any review of the merits by any federal court. That is where such matters should, in my view, be heard and resolved. In the meantime, the President’s threat to continue to act unilaterally is playing a dangerous game of chicken in our system and, if he goes too far in an act defying clear congressional or judicial authority, he could cross over from interpretive disagreements into impeachable offenses. Yet, the current array of conflicts have divided lower judges on the merits. Such interpretive disagreements are not the thing that impeachments are made off. Having said that, one should not take the lack of impeachable offenses to take away from what some of us view as very serious violations by this President — a usurpation of authority that all citizens should denounce in the interests of our constitutional system. Continue reading “ON THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF NIXON’S RESIGNATION: 5 MYTHS ABOUT IMPEACHMENT”
We recently discussed the controversy surrounding a confrontation between Thrin Short, 16, and her sister Joan, 21, and Feminist Studies Associate Professor Mireille Miller-Young. Miller-Young was then charged with criminal conduct including Theft of Person; Battery; and Vandalism. While initially pleading not guilty, Miller-Young has now entered a no contest plea to charges to the three misdemeanors. Despite the videotape of the incident and violation of both criminal law and presumably university regulations, Miller-Young remains employed at the university.
There is a disturbing story how this week concerning the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and specifically Commissioner Michael Yaki, a Democratic appointee who was a former senior adviser to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Yaki spoke on sexual harassment law in education, a subject on which I have previously written to express my concerns over the loss of due process rights for accused students. Yaki’s comments however seem to threaten core free speech principles as he laid out his view of the need to curtail harmful speech. Yaki spoke of the need to outlaw unpopular or what he considers degrading speech because college students are too impressionable.
A river to a major city is now so polluted that almost half a million people residents have been told not to drink their tap water. Sounds like China, right? Think Toledo, Ohio. While we have been following the rolling environmental disasters in China, we often forget about our own failure to protect the basic health of our citizens. Toledo is such an example. While newspapers have detailed how algae blooms are releasing toxins, they largely fail to state the likely reason or downplay it: phosphorous and nitrogen from farm fertilizer runoff.
Warning: the image above may get you sued by the New York Port Authority. We have long discussed the insane evolution of trademark and copyright laws. Now, Fishs Eddy, a housewares store in Manhattan, has been hit with a cease-and-desist letter from the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) over dishes that merely show the skyline of the city. The MTA claims that the common silhouette of the city includes some of its “assets” and that the store must destroy all of its products with the images and promise never again to sell images of the skyline. It is reminiscent of the English decision finding that taking photographs of London icons are also violations. Here the authority is claiming ownership to skyline images and 9-11 images even in silhouette.
Submitted by Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
The Russian Parliament passed worrying laws that will certainly have a chilling effect on free speech in Russia. Now these laws are in effect and certainly prove to be useful to the government in stamping out dissent and non-sanctioned information.
BBC news reports bloggers with more than 3,000 daily readers must register with the mass media regulator, Roskomnadzor, and conform to the regulations that govern the country’s larger media outlets.
Internet companies will also be required to allow Russian authorities access to users’ information.
Submitted By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
On August 3, 1914 Europe began the worst human disaster known to that time when the German Empire declared war on France. The subsequent world war would cost the lives of at least fourteen million individuals and shattered the fabric of society that had evolved for centuries. The devastation that was once Germany set in motion a chain of events and underlying conditions that would lead Europe into the Nazi terror of the Second World War.
Today, the presidents of Germany and France presided over a ceremony in the French region of Alsace marking the beginning of the conflict between their nations with an affirmation of their continued solidarity to maintain peace between their nations and of Europe generally.