Monthly Archives: May 2009
Pro-life nutjobs murder Dr George Tiller
He has fought for a woman’s right to choose for decades. He has been charged in a court of law and beat the politically-motivated case with an acquittal. They have shot him in both arms trying to end his practice of medicine. They have bombed his clinic and picketed his clinic regularly.
They finally silenced Dr. George. They murdered him this morning. On his way to church. From MSNBC:
He was acquitted in March of misdemeanor charges stemming from procedures he performed, but moments after the verdict the state’s medical board announced it was investigating allegations against him that are nearly identical to those the jury had rejected.
Prosecutors had alleged that Tiller had in 2003 gotten second opinions from a doctor who was essentially an employee of his, not independent as state law requires, but a jury took only about an hour to find him not guilty of all 19 counts.
Tiller, who could have faced a year in jail for even one conviction, stared straight ahead as the verdicts were read, with one of his attorneys patting his shoulder after the decision on the final count was declared. His wife, seated across the courtroom, fought back tears and nodded. The couple declined to speak to reporters afterward.
Tiller, 67, has claimed that the prosecution was politically motivated. An attorney general who opposed abortion rights began the investigation into Tiller’s clinic more than four years ago, but both his successor, who filed the criminal charges, and the current attorney general support abortion rights.
Tiller has been a favored target of anti-abortion protesters, and he testified that he and his family have suffered years of harassment and threats. His clinic was the site of the 1991 “Summer of Mercy” protests marked by mass demonstrations and arrests. His clinic was bombed in 1985, and an abortion opponent shot him in both arms in 1993.
They had to kill him to silence him. Sick bastards who say they are pro-life killed Dr. George. May they all rot in hell.
Update from the NYT:
The shooting occurred at around 10 a.m. (Central time) at Reformation Lutheran Church on the city’s East Side, Dr. Tiller’s regular church.
Wichita police said that the shots were fired from a handgun in the church lobby during the morning service. The authorities gave few details, but said they were searching for a powder blue Taurus made in the 1990s that had been seen leaving shortly after the shooting. They said witnesses had described seeing a white man departing.
How can these hypocrites say they are pro-life? How in the hell do they rationalize this sickening bullshit?
Letting the air out of the rights rant on Sotomayor and race.
The Scotusblog lawyers have studied all 97 race-related cases of Judge Sotomayor. Here are the results, sure to piss off the extremists on the right:
Other than Ricci, Judge Sotomayor has decided 96 race-related cases while on the court of appeals.
Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent’s point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case. So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1. (emphasis mine)
Of the roughly 75 panel opinions rejecting claims of discrimination, Judge Sotomayor dissented 2 times. In Neilson v. Colgate-Palmolive Co., 199 F.3d 642 (1999), she dissented from the affirmance of the district court’s order appointing a guardian for the plaintiff, an issue unrelated to race. In Gant v. Wallingford Bd. of Educ., 195 F.3d 134 (1999), she would have allowed a black kindergartner to proceed with the claim that he was discriminated against in a school transfer. A third dissent did not relate to race discrimination: In Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143 (2002), she dissented from the majority’s holding that the NYPD could fire a white employee for distributing racist materials.
So the nutters like Gingrich, Limpballs etc need to shut the fuck up. Of course they won’t stfu, they will just keep on lying their collective asses off so that they can call her a racist. Smear tactics are what they do the best..other than lying.
Contact your congress critters!
From Public Citizen:
The Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (TRADE) Act, sponsored by fair trade champions Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Rep. Mike Michaud (D-Maine), was first introduced last year and eventually gained 80 House and Senate cosponsors. This landmark legislation sets forth in concrete, detailed terms a progressive vision for good trade agreements in the future and criteria to renegotiate existing failed pacts like NAFTA and the WTO.
Watch Global Trade Watch’s Director Lori Wallach discuss our strategy for building a new trade and globalization agenda in 2009.
The form to fill out is located here on their site.
2 top legal minds join the Prop 8 case.
Irony Alert: They faced off against each other in Gore v Bush. Now, they are teaming up to fight the hatred and the Prop 8 freaks. From the MercuryNews:
Two of the nation’s top litigators who opposed each other in the Bush v. Gore election challenge in 2000 have joined forces to seek federal court intervention in California’s gay marriage controversy.
Theodore B. Olson and David Boies have filed a U.S. District Court lawsuit on behalf of two gay men and two gay women, arguing that the California constitutional amendment eliminating the right of gay couples to marry violates the U.S. constitutional guarantee of equal protection and due process.
Olson said today that he hopes the case will wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The lawsuit seeks a preliminary injunction against California’s Proposition 8 until the case is resolved.
It has to go all the way to SCOTUS. The haters and homophobes can’t win this..
Sotomayor’s cases show us she is what?
They show that she swings both ways, as in right and left of the center. Which means no one can really call her a liberal or conservative.
Justice David Souter was supposed to be right of the center, which is why Bush41 nominated him. He was as far from that description as you can get.
Same goes for Sandra Day O’Connor. She was moderate on some issues, left on others. Very seldom was she right of center.
The NY Law Journal and Law.com have articles up about her cases. Her one case that bothers me is her siding with Bush43 on the gag order regarding groups that support abortion and receive federal funding. Marc Ambinder from The Atlantic has this:
David Brody of Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) News breaks down Sonia Sotomayor’s most notable abortion-related decision, in which she ruled in favor of the “Mexico City Policy,” finding that the U.S. government is free to ban aid to foreign groups that support or perform abortions. (As The Hill notes, this decision won her praise from at least one Republican.) Brody’s prediction: that since Sotomayor has never ruled directly on the legality of abortion, she will be pressed even harder on the issue during her confirmation process.
Of course, that doesn’t really tell us much about her opinion regarding the legality of Roe v Wade.
I like Dahlia Lithwick’s article on Sotomayor and the logic she presents on why the Rethugs haven’t got a leg to stand on with regard to tarring and feathering her as a friggin liberal, activist, racist Judge:
Instead of wading into a bruising identity politics war they cannot possibly win, conservatives—even the angriest conservatives—should wade into Sotomayor’s vast legal writings. There are hundreds of cases for them to read and parse and quote out of context. Let’s have this confirmation battle on the merits, rather than in the sinkhole of unfounded character attacks. The real problem for Sotomayor’s opponents is that anyone who has closely read her opinions won’t find much to build a case on. As the indefatigable team at SCOTUSblog has chronicled here and here, on the appeals court, Judge Sotomayor has taken a fairly moderate, text-based approach to the cases before her, placing her much closer to retiring Justice David Souter than to the late Justice William Brennan on the judicial activism spectrum.
She has been overturned three times at the Supreme Court, and may well be again soon. But she was also a state* prosecutor, a corporate lawyer, and a Bush I appointee to the federal bench. As the White House points out in its talking points today, “In cases where Sotomayor and at least one judge appointed by a Republican president were on the three-judge panel, Sotomayor and the Republican appointee(s) agreed on the outcome 95% of the time.”
Lithwick tackles all the bs the Rethugs will throw at her. It’s a good read and I highly recommend it.
So, the bottom line for me, is this: She really isn’t known to be left or right of the center all the time. My hope is that she turns out like David Souter and surprises the shit out of everyone, including Obama. Below is Jonathan Turley this evening on Countdown, discussing Judge Sotomayor’s cases and rulings. Plus how does she feel about equal rights for the LGBT community?
Its my Right to be Left of the Center 