I'm sure every single person opposed to the Patriot Act because they didn't like the idea of someone violating privacy by monitoring international communications between terrorists is now opposed to the idea that election losers should be able to get and use the private communications of a citizen group that pushed a ballot measure that passed.

...Even though that ballot measure was the California Marriage Amendments and the election losers are marriage neutering advocates.

This matter was in a federal appeals court today.

Read what I have to say about the issue and the coverage by LATimes.com at The Opine Editorials.

Surely, if we don't have access to all communications made by and between public-servant lawmakers working with compulsory tax money - and we don't, despite sunshine and open-government laws - then there isn't a right to have access to the internal communications of a citizen-led ballot campaign funded with private, donated money.

It may not be the end of the case, but a judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Miley Cyrus for posing in a picture with other teens, apparently making fun of people of Asian ancestry (mostly). It seems the plaintiffs thought people have a right not to be offended. I wonder where they got that notion?

I'm not going to defend the actions of the people in the photo from criticism. Actually, I criticize their actions. Making fun of entire groups of people for aspects of their appearance that they were born with is stupid and can be downright cruel.  Plus, I happen to think "Asian" eyes are beautiful. But this is a freedom of speech issue. Check out the blog entry and the comments that follow.

U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt ordered compensation for a same-sex couple to correct what the court considered an injustice. One of the two men works for the federal government; he and his partner got a neutered marriage license during California's five month window before the California Marriage Amendment was adopted. Benefits were not extended by the employer (the federal government) to the partner. They sued. I discuss this and the LATimes.com blog entry reporting it - over at The Opine Editorials.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker refused Wednesday to dismiss a desperate, grasping-at-straws legal challenge to the California Marriage Amendment, which means a trial is still planned. My analysis is over at The Opine Editorials.

In a desperate attempt to find some way of removing a Constitutional, duly-adopted state constitutional amendment, a federal judge wants to determine the motivations of the backers of the ballot proposition that put that amendment in place. So, the judge has asked for their internal communications.

This is an example of what I mean by the term "homofascism".

My analysis is over at The Opine Editorials.

Carlos R. Moreno was the only member of the California Supreme Court to vote to overturn the duly adopted California Marriage Amendment. He was rumored to be under consideration for SCOTUS before a "wise Latina" got the spot. Maura Dolan of the Los Angeles Times has a profile piece on him, and I take a look at it over at The Opine Editorials.

I'm generally in favor of that.  I'm also in favor of people keeping private consensual behavior... private.  I don't need to see it on parade.

J. Kelly Strader, a professor of law at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, has a commentary in today's Los Angeles Times discussing the impact – or the alleged lack thereof – of the Lawrence vs. Texas decision on laws and court rulings about sexual behavior. The piece starts out mentioning the effort to repeal the California Marriage Amendment, then quickly moves on to Lawrence, maintaining that that there is a "constant threat to our privacy rights."

My analysis is over at The Opine Editorials.


(Blogging note: I will likely not be blogging again for the rest of the day, or at least not until very late in the day.)

Another convicted murder on California's death row has died of natural causes, a peaceful death he denied to 74-year-old Lois Roy Fried of Tulare County.  He's the "70th condemned prisoner to succumb to old age, suicide or murder compared with 13 executed by the state since capital punishment resumed in 1978" reports Carol J. Williams of the Los Angeles Times.

I am deliberately removing his name and the name of another murderer.

The newspaper, apparently unwilling to blame him for the murder which he was convicted of committing, wrote he "was convicted and sentenced to death a year after the May 25, 1982, murder of 74-year-old Lois Roy Fried of Tulare County."  Yeah, I’m sure that was mere coincidence.  They couldn't bring them to say "a year after he murdered..."

Executions have been on hold in California since early 2006, when death row inmate [a convicted murderer] successfully challenged lethal-injection procedures as cruel and unusual punishment. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose ruled the three-drug sequence unconstitutional after hearing expert testimony that some of those put to death in the state hadn't been fully anesthetized before the final-- and intensely painful -- dose of potassium chloride that induces cardiac arrest.

How about we do what the people who wrote the Constitution did with their murderers?  I can respect people who object to capital punishment on religious grounds.  But those who object on Constitutional grounds are demonstrably wrong.

But further legal challenges have been threatened and pressure is mounting on state officials to take the cost-cutting step of commuting death sentences to life without the possibility of parole, a change estimated to save $1 billion over five years.

There are 680 inmates on death row, where the condemned now spend an average of 25 years while exhausting state and federal appeals.

That's where the cost comes in.  Some of these bleeding hearts have deliberately made the process expensive so that they can cite the expense as a reason not to have it.

Marriage neutering advocates are not all marching in lockstep when it comes to timing out their tactics, which is causing concerns among the fascists.  The Los Angeles Times had an article noting this, as an update regarding the court challenge to the duly adopted California Marriage Amendment.  My analysis is over at The Opine Editorials.


(Thanks to that homocentric website that sounds like a brand of cotton swab for continuing to link to posts like this.)

A drugged-up maniac used his daughter as a human shield in a shootout with SWAT officers.  Both ended up dead.  The mother of the toddler sued over the police actions.  The L.A. County Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu threw out the lawsuit against the City of L.A. before a jury could get it - before closing arguments in the case were presented.  Victoria Kim has the Los Angeles Times article.

Attorneys for Lorena Lopez, mother of 19-month-old Suzie Pena, argued in the trial that officers should have retreated and negotiated further with Raul Pena, who was delirious on alcohol, cocaine and methamphetamine and holding his daughter hostage in the office of his car dealership on July 10, 2005.

Police shouldn't even have guns, tasers, or clubs.  They should all have flowers and pot and acoustic guitars and tambourines, so they can sing hippie songs and bring peace and calm that way?

The city contended in trial that officers attempted the rescue in the best tactical way possible, and that the baby's father was the only one to blame for her death because he chose to repeatedly hold her as a shield during the hours-long standoff.

And who thought this would be a good guy to make babies with?  Oh, that's right.  Lorena Lopez.

City Atty. Carmen Trutanich, who was being interviewed by The Times when a deputy city attorney came into his office to announce the news, jumped from his chair with a cheer and high-fived the lawyer, saying millions of city dollars had been in jeopardy.

Unfortunately, this moment was photographed and published online, and he's drawing lots of criticism for celebrating when there is a dead toddler.  The reality though, is that the toddler has been dead for years.  He's celebrating a favorable court decision.

"This is a case where nobody wins except the citizens, because no one should have been sued in this case," said Trutanich, who spent four hours vetting the evidence with the city's legal team before it went to trial.

It's an important victory for Trutanich, who is a newly installed City Attorney.

Lopez, who worked cleaning houses to provide for her four children, said Pena appeared calm and normal, even though they had had a fight the night before and she had filed a police report. Within a few hours, he emerged from his used-car dealership holding Suzie in one arm and firing at officers with the other.

Father of the year?

Police surrounded the block as Pena threatened to kill everybody, referring to himself as Tony Montana from the movie "Scarface."

Police officers successfully rescued Lopez's older daughter Ilsy, who was trapped in the dealership in the midst of gunfire.

You know, that's the first I’ve heard about that.  Kudos to those officers.

But when they entered the building mistakenly believing Pena had been shot down, a barrage of gunfire was exchanged and Suzie was killed by a gunshot between her eyes from a high-velocity rifle.

Sad.  Very, very sad.  It’s a shame that cops are put into such a horrible position, where any mistake can mean death and loss of career, and even doing things right means psychological scars and extreme scrutiny.

I can't imagine losing a toddler like that.  It must be unbearable.  But it isn't the fault of the officers, and the taxpayers should not have to pay.

I told you Obama's election would not reduce this nonsense.  A recent Los Angeles Times editorial insists that we will need racist policies that treat people differently solely based on their skin color.

To some Americans, it means that today, 145 years after the abolition of slavery, we can finally check race relations off the list and move our focus to the other pressing problems that face the country. Others say that's ridiculous and that, Obama or no Obama, the work of creating a truly egalitarian, nondiscriminatory society remains far from finished.

A lack of racism does not necessarily mean there will be equal outcomes.  Discrimination of some sort is necessary in every aspect of life, though I do agree it is stupid and counterproductive to discriminate against people as employees or consumers or citizens based on circumstances of their birth that have no relation to how well they fulfill their role.  Or rather, I agree with the editorial board that it is stupid and counterproductive when it comes to doing that against traditional minority groups, but where I split from the board is that it is also stupid and counterproductive to discriminate against white people.

Oh, and it is clear in reading this editorial that the board must think that the systems discussed do not discriminate against Asian Americans such as those of Chinese or Japanese ancestry.  Yeah, whitey hates the brown and black man, but not the yellow man.

Or is it that white racism isn't really a widespread, pervasive problem anymore – except when it comes from pandering Leftist who seem to think that some people just can't get along in life without assistance from them?

As many conservatives see it, we're living in a chastened, post-racial America in which discrimination has been largely dismantled, Jim Crow is dead and gaps are being narrowed.

Actually, Larry Elder points out that there is plenty of racism - by some African Americans.

More specifically, we should do away with morally troublesome policies such as affirmative action, minority set-asides and "pre-clearance" that aid minority groups at the expense of the majority, and revert, instead, to the sounder principle of colorblind justice for all.

Of course.

This page agrees that race-conscious policies such as affirmative action should be temporary -- existing only until they are no longer necessary because society's inequities have been addressed.

Outcomes will never, ever be equal.  Never.  Never.  Never.  Even in Soviet-style forced-equality, there were the connected few who had advantages over the masses.  So when is enough enough?  Notice that the race-obsessed Left, which looks at everyone as part of  balkanized groups, can never give a time frame or some hard goal that can be verified.  It is always going to be "needed" because the Left likes to have that control.

But it is naive to think we have arrived at that moment.

Oh, of course it is naïve.  Yes, only the wise editorial board and other Leftists can see what is really going on in society.

Although more blacks go to college today, and although they have more opportunity to compete for middle-class jobs, the black poverty rate in 2007 was still triple that of whites, and the black male unemployment rate today is still almost double the white male rate.

And what can government do about that?  We’ve had government program upon government program for scores of years already.  More government involvement actually seems to make it worse, or stifle true progress.

Blatant, de jure racism has given way to a murkier variant. For instance, although the intentional segregation of public schools was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, UCLA's Civil Rights Project reports that blacks and Latinos attend schools today that are more segregated than they've been in 40 years.

That’s because school attendance is almost mandated according to where people live.  What should we do?  Force people to relocate so that they will be living next to someone of a different skin color?

The disproportionate number of young black men in prison -- one in nine African American men between the ages of 20 and 34 is incarcerated -- has devastated black communities.

And there are far more men in prison than women.  So where is your editorial about that?

They are afraid  that the SCOTUS will strike down racist programs:

But it's not clear how long this conservative court will hold off. In the Austin case, the court noted ominously that "we are now a very different Nation" and hinted that a new look at the constitutional issues surrounding race might be coming.

Give me a break - ominously?  The best way to end racism is to... not be racist!

U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker, a George H.W. Bush appointment, weighed in with some stuff yesterday.  The CMA remains in effect for now.  My analysis over at The Opine Editorials.

The California Marriage Amendment is likely to stay in effect while a federal court considers whether or not it violates the federal Constitution.  Of course it doesn't, but you can read my analysis of the story over at The Opine Editorials, where there are also other lively discussions of interest.  If you don't have that site bookmarked, you really should.

As you've probably heard by now, lawyers Theodore Olson (known as a conservative) and David Boies are challenging the California Marriage Amendment in federal court. I'd be interested in hearing if he has any new argument for neutering marriage.  So far, I'm not hearing one, and the "old" arguments aren't persuading me - or most of America.  My analysis of the Los Angeles Times story on Olson & Boies' move is at The Opine Editorials, where you can find a lot of new material.

I have repeatedly seen the charge that folks like me consider any court ruling that goes against what we like to be judicial activism.

What do we mean by judicial activism?

Judicial activism the opposite of judicial restraint.

Our Constitution limits government.  Our federal government is only supposed to do what it is instructed to do in the Constitution.  If we find that the federal government needs new powers, we should grant them by Amendment.  In other words, the government is restrained.  This includes federal courts.  This can also be applied to most, if not all, states and their constitutions, and thus state courts.

When a case or dispute is presented to a court, the first question that should be asked by the court is, "Does this fall under this court’s jurisdiction?"

For example, let's say a minor teenager living with his biological parents thinks his allowance is not high enough.  If he tries to take his parents to court for more allowance, the court should say, "This is not our jurisdiction.  Your parents have the authority to set your allowance."  Maybe a judge thinks the parents are being stingy.  Maybe she thinks the parents are being too generous.  It doesn’t matter.  It is not the court's jurisdiction.

It is not the role of the courts to fix every unfair or wrong thing in society.  It is not the role of the courts to make every decision, even in government.  Some things fall under the jurisdiction of the legislature, some under the executive (President, Governor, Mayor, etc.), some under the electorate, and some to individuals and their voluntary associations.  Some things should remain at the local level, some things at the state level, and other things at the federal level.

Now, the judicial activist either doesn't consider the question, "Does this fall under this court’s jurisdiction?", or the activist too often answers "Yes, it does."  The judicial activist strikes down laws not because they really violate the constitution, but because a judge or group of judges doesn't like the law (and someone asked them to strike it down).  The judicial activist may have good intentions, but intervenes where he or she shouldn't.  While such a person might right a wrong, they are often doing so at the expense of the overall Constitutional balance of power that keeps our government in check.

I'd rather have a Supreme Court of the United States of America stacked with individuals who are personally liberal and rule with judicial restraint, than one stacked with judicial activists who are conservatives.  It takes a special kind of person to have access to power, but refrain from exercising it whenever he or she feels like it.  We need special people on the SCOTUS, just like we need special people in our other roles of power.

Not everything should be decided by SCOTUS.