Let it be said that when given a chance to complete the liberation of black Americans, on June 23, 2003 five justices consigned them to another generation — or, perhaps, a term of indefinite duration — of virtual enslavement to the past.

Adding insult to our national injury is the fact that the head of the death squad was a woman appointed by a president who believed in the principles of personal freedom, merit, and equal treatment as much as, if not more than, any other president in our nation's history. What a shame!

"This is a major wake-up call. This is a 9/11, [a] major wake-up call that the enemy is at our doorsteps."

The Constitution divides the appointment power between the President and the Senate and expects Senators to advise the President, not just rubber-stamp his choices.

The Senate’s role in the process is not secondary and is not confined simply to a vote. The Constitution expressly speaks of the Senate’s authority to “advise” as well as the power to “consent,” which includes the power to withhold such consent.

So history shows that the Senate’s advice traditionally has been given before a nomination was made, not after. Consultation in advance of a Supreme Court nomination makes good governing sense, it makes good constitutional sense, and it makes good political sense. When there is bipartisan consultation in advance of a Supreme Court nomination, a Supreme Court battle can be avoided and a highly regarded, consensus nominee can usually be agreed upon. On the other hand, a phone call informing senators of a nomination just before Fox News breaks the story is not real consultation.

[edit]

In its report on the Supreme Court Appointment Process the Congressional Research Service has said it plainly, quote: "It is common practice for Presidents, as a matter of courtesy, to consult with Senate party leaders as well as with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee before choosing a nominee."

[edit]

All of this is why preserving and strengthening respect for the courts is especially important right now. This is not the time, and a vacancy on this Supreme Court is not the setting, in which to deepen the Nation’s political and ideological divisions.

QUESTION: And on the Texas sodomy case, does the president believe that gay men have the legal right to have sexual relations in the privacy of their own home?

FLEISCHER: I think, on this decision, the administration did not file a brief in this case, unlike in the Michigan case, and this is now a state matter. QUESTION: So the administration has no position on this?

FLEISCHER: It's just as I indicated. The administration did not file a brief on this, as I think you know.

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowersvalidation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today's decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.

What an astounding week!

As you noted earlier, today's holdings, plus Monday's, represent a shockingly progressive set of decisions from a supposedly conservative court...

Then we have Wiggins v. Smith, where, by a 7-2 vote, the same court that would ordinarily uphold any death penalty conviction—even if defense counsel had been hopped up on crack and dressed up as Cookie Monster—actually accepts an ineffective assistance of counsel claim. This court, which has blindly sided with the prosecution in the last few ineffective assistance of counsel cases, seems to have figured out (finally!) how shockingly bad/young/inexperienced/overburdened some court-appointed defense counsel can really be.

Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today. It ought not to remain binding precedent. Bowers v. Hardwick should be and now is overruled.

The present case does not involve minors. It does not involve persons who might be injured or coerced or who are situated in relationships where consent might not easily be refused. It does not involve public conduct or prostitution. It does not involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter. The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government. "It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter." Casey, supra, at 847. The Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual.

Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Texas Fourteenth District is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

The first recorded execution for sodomy in the New World happened in Virginia in 1624. Richard Cornish, a ship's captain, was hanged for demanding sex from his indentured servant, William Cowse.

Software filters are flawed and often reflect the tastes and morals of the people who create them. They are faulty, and they can be abused. The filters will prevent the dissemination of some forms of legal, constitutionally protected information to adults. Government lawyers did not dispute the fallibility of software filters, but argued that the blocking of the occasional legitimate Web site - for sake of argument, let's say the one for Planned Parenthood - was a small price to pay for keeping kids from using library computers to search for porn. The Supreme Court agreed. The Bush administration was pleased.

The best system for preventing kids from using the Internet to gain access to objectionable material is for parents to spend time talking with their children. Any kid old enough to Google the net for "pink nipples" is old enough to have a talk with his parents about values.

Another issue: Whose filter will the libraries use? The software has to be compiled by someone whose value judgments are trustworthy.

Say, here's an interesting idea: How about filters endorsed by Roman Catholic priests? Or, maybe librarians in Kansas will choose filters created by the same school advisory board that required science teachers to give as much class time to Christian creationism as to Darwinism. How about a filter created by the government itself, which cuts off funding to agencies that seek to disseminate information about birth control, and spends $8,000 to drape the naked right boob of the statue Spirit of Justice in the Justice Department?

Prowling the skies over Afghanistan in the months before President Bush took office, unmanned and unarmed Predator drones proved to be one of America's major successes in its frustrating hunt for Osama bin Laden.

But the promising aircraft remained grounded under the new administration until after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, say current and former U.S. officials who describe a paralyzing internal debate over finances, arming the drones with deadly missiles and concern over who would take the blame if something went wrong.

As late as a week before the suicide attacks against New York and Washington, senior administration officials meeting at the White House had not yet resolved questions about plans to equip each Predator with as many as two Hellfire missiles to kill bin Laden, these officials told The Associated Press....

[T]he Predators remained grounded until Sept. 11. Officials at the White House meeting the week earlier put off recommending flying armed Predators to hunt bin Laden. Instead, they finalized a series of other measures to rout al-Qaida from its base in Afghanistan, including rearming the rebel Northern Alliance.

Those recommendations were being forwarded from Rice to Bush when the Sept. 11 hijackers struck, officials said.

Abbas said that at Aqaba, Bush promised to speak with Sharon about the siege on Arafat. He said nobody can speak to or pressure Sharon except the Americans.

According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

Explosives landed in a U.S. diplomatic complex in Liberia's besieged capital Wednesday, causing injuries among thousands of people seeking refuge from a civil war engulfing Monrovia, a U.S. official said. There was no immediate report of any injuries to Americans.

Rebels, fighting to install rule in Uganda according to the Biblical 10 commandments, abducted 30 schoolgirls in a raid in the east of the country on Monday night, an army spokesman said on Wednesday.

A Senate committee with all its Democratic members absent voted to limit filibusters of President Bush's judicial nominees Tuesday, a move Republicans hope will usher future federal judges through the Senate faster, even if Democrats want to stop them.

Democrats oppose changing Senate filibuster rules for judicial nominees, but Republicans have a one-vote majority on the Senate Rules Committee and expected to win Tuesday's committee vote in any case. Democrats are expected to fight the measure on the Senate floor.

The Rules Committee officially voted 10-0 for the measure, which would reduce the number of senators needed to force a vote on a judicial nominee with each successive vote until only a 51-member majority is needed.

A Qatar man alleged to have been paving the way for al-Qaida operatives to settle in the United States was designated Monday as an enemy combatant by President Bush and could ultimately face trial by a military tribunal, government officials said.

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, 37, has been in custody since late 2001, first as a material witness and later on criminal charges of lying to the FBI and on a charge of credit card fraud. This new designation puts him under the control of the Defense Department, without most rights afforded defendants in the civilian U.S. criminal justice system.

[edit]

Al-Marri's designation as an enemy combatant came after prosecutors Monday dropped the criminal charges against him. Alice Fisher, deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's criminal division, said the decision was made not because that case was weak but because it was the best way to deter future terrorist attacks.

"We are confident we would have prevailed on the criminal charges," Fisher said. "However, setting the criminal charges aside is in the best interests of our national security."

Bush approved the designation of al-Marri as an enemy combatant Monday morning, she said.

Designation as an enemy combatant means that al-Marri has no right to representation by an attorney - a situation that has drawn court challenges - and that he could be held by the military indefinitely, possibly to face eventual trial by a military tribunal where fewer U.S. criminal justice rules apply.

The administration said national security interests drove the decision to turn over Mr. Marri to military custody. They would not elaborate.

[edit]

Elisa C. Massimino, director of the Washington office of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said the Bush administration had made it difficult for the public to tell why someone like Mr. Marri was declared an enemy combatant while the administration used the criminal system to convict someone like Iyman Faris, a truck driver from Ohio who admitted last week that he was involved in a conspiracy by Al Qaeda to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge.

"It really looks like a situation where they make the rules up as they go along," Ms. Massimino said.

Here's the way the study worked. The researchers took a group of 171 prisoners who entered the InnerChange program, and found then selected the records of a group of other inmates that met the selection criteria but didn't enter. The comparison group was selected to match the program entrants on race, age, offense type, and something called the "salient factor score," (SFS), a standard measure of recidivism risk. Then the post-release criminal behavior of the non-entering comparison group was compared with the graduates of the InnerChange program.

Veeeeeeerrrrrrrrryyyyyyy zzzzzzzientific, nicht war?

But completely bogus. Not only were the entrants to the program a self-selected group, which means that in some important ways (such as a desire to change their lives) they weren't actually matched to the comparison group, but it was only the graduates -- 75 of the 177 entrants -- who showed better behavior than the pseudo-control group. Comparing all of the entrants (including those who dropped out, were kicked out, or got early parole) to all of the comparison group, the difference in recidivism reverses: the InnerChange group was slightly more likely to be rearrested (36.2% versus 35%) and noticeably more likely to actually go back to prison (24.3% versus 20.3%).

In other words, those who succeed, succeed, while those who fail are likely to fail. Whodathunkit?

there's no excuse for cherry-picking by comparing those who make it througha program with a group matched to all of those entering the program. That's just cheating. The only legitimate way to analyze the data is to keep everyone selected for the program in the study, regardless of how long they stay. (This is called "intention-to-treat" analysis, a carry-over from its roots in medical-outcomes research.)

Nor is there any excuse for reporters regurgitating this pap without checking with the people who know better. (Finding someone who hates the program on ideological grounds to describe the findings as "junk science," as the religion News Service did, doesn't count.)

The Ford Model T, the granpappy of the modern Ford, got 25 miles per gallon of gasoline. Today's Fords average 22.6 miles per gallon. The Ford Explorer slugs along on a gallon every 16 miles.

Anyone not think we need better regulations governing gas mileage?

This petition is a vivid reminder that government officials can use the veil of "national security" to shield themselves from criminal prosecution for misconduct, civil legal liability or embarrassing revelations. The only way to minimize those kinds of abuses is to treat legal claims of national security with a healthy dose of skepticism.

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman--Ms. Lewinsky." -- Bill Clinton

"This tax relief is for everyone who pays income taxes." -- George W. Bush

The hunt for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq has been fruitless. The tax cut turns out to give no break whatsoever to millions of low-income taxpayers. In the view of some Democrats, President Bush has been lying about these and other matters, the way Lyndon B. Johnson lied about Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon about Watergate and Bill Clinton about his sex life....

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group, said of Mr. Bush's statement that all income tax payers would benefit from his tax cut, "Such claims are not accurate."

In fact, a review of the president's public statements found little that could lead to a conclusion that the president actually lied on either subject [emphasis Demagogue's].