(no subject)
Gay activists switch focus to Legislature
By TOM PRECIOUS- News Albany Bureau
ALBANY - Gay rights activists say they will now switch from a legal strategy to a grass-roots political movement to convince the State Legislature to broaden marriage laws after the state's highest court ruled Thursday to keep intact New York's ban on same-sex marriages.
But many lawmakers say there is little impetus for them to get involved in the debate that several said is a closed issue now that the Court of Appeals rejected lawsuits brought by 44 same-sex couples seeking the right to get married.
Read the rest here. And check out the banner ad to the right. Nope, no bias here.
Do I have to say once again there is no right to marry? Just why in the hell are homosexuals so determined to turn marriage into a right in the first place? Whatever the reason, it cannot be good. The homosexual agenda never has been. For anyone.
Justices gave us great gift for 4th
7/4/2006
By TRUDY RUBIN
On Independence Day, I can't think of any better gift to the nation than the Supreme Court ruling last week that checked President Bush's expanding claims of executive power.
July Fourth should remind us how blessed we are to live under rule of law. Most Americans take that blessing for granted and fail to understand how rare is the legacy bequeathed by the Founding Fathers. A 5-3 majority on the court gave us a wake-up call.
The case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, was technically about whether Osama bin Laden's former chauffeur, a Yemeni named Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who is imprisoned at Guantanamo, could be tried by military commission - a system established by Bush. The court ruled that such commissions were not authorized by federal law and violated our signature on the Geneva Conventions.
The decision also dismissed the president's claims that his powers as commander in chief must not be questioned in wartime.
Since 9/11, the administration has been trying to expand executive power and to avoid consultation with Congress on issues related to terrorism. Bush ignored Congress when he established military commissions to try Gitmo detainees. He ignored existing security law, which Congress would have revised, when he set up a massive program of telephone and e-mail surveillance. He has issued about 750 "signing statements" asserting the right to ignore or reinterpret laws that Congress has passed and he has signed.
"There is a strain of legal reasoning in this administration that believes in a time of war the other two branches have a diminished role or no role," Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., told the Washington Post.
The crucial message the Supreme Court conveyed to the White House is this: As you battle terrorism, don't undermine the very democratic institutions you seek to defend. To which I'd add: Don't undermine the very democratic system you are promoting abroad.
This thought has been much on my mind since returning from a trip to Iran and Iraq. The White House is vociferously promoting "rule of law" in the Middle East, where religious law often trumps constitutions, and written laws function (or not) at the whim of authoritarian rulers.
In Iran, a supreme cleric has authority that supersedes that of the elected government. In Iraq, the legacy of a brutal dictator makes it painfully hard to establish a workable judicial system, and laws have little meaning for ordinary citizens because they are rarely enforced.
Arabs don't enjoy separation of powers - our system of checks and balances that keeps (or should keep) an executive from getting out of hand. Parliaments and courts exert minimal leverage against authoritarian rulers. The media are mostly state-controlled, and independent journalists risk prison or worse.
The Hamdan decision is a reminder of the importance of checks and balances. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, in a concurring opinion: "Concentration of power in the Executive Branch puts personal liberty in peril of arbitrary action by officials, an incursion the Constitution's three-part system is designed to avoid."
The long-running struggle against Islamist extremists, however daunting, cannot justify the degrading of our system. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor put it brilliantly in a June 2004 case rejecting the president's claim of authority to hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely as an enemy combatant without a hearing. She wrote: "We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president.
"It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad."
The Supreme Court gave us a July Fourth gift by reminding us of those principles. Let the fireworks begin.
Yeah. A gift. If you want to call undermining the war effort a gift. And only anti-American assholes like this buttfaced clown would do that.
Can you just imagine having people like those on SCOTUS and journalists like Rubin and the traitors at the New York Times during WWII? We would have lost that war if we did. No question.
By TOM PRECIOUS- News Albany Bureau
ALBANY - Gay rights activists say they will now switch from a legal strategy to a grass-roots political movement to convince the State Legislature to broaden marriage laws after the state's highest court ruled Thursday to keep intact New York's ban on same-sex marriages.
But many lawmakers say there is little impetus for them to get involved in the debate that several said is a closed issue now that the Court of Appeals rejected lawsuits brought by 44 same-sex couples seeking the right to get married.
Read the rest here. And check out the banner ad to the right. Nope, no bias here.
Do I have to say once again there is no right to marry? Just why in the hell are homosexuals so determined to turn marriage into a right in the first place? Whatever the reason, it cannot be good. The homosexual agenda never has been. For anyone.
Justices gave us great gift for 4th
7/4/2006
By TRUDY RUBIN
On Independence Day, I can't think of any better gift to the nation than the Supreme Court ruling last week that checked President Bush's expanding claims of executive power.
July Fourth should remind us how blessed we are to live under rule of law. Most Americans take that blessing for granted and fail to understand how rare is the legacy bequeathed by the Founding Fathers. A 5-3 majority on the court gave us a wake-up call.
The case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, was technically about whether Osama bin Laden's former chauffeur, a Yemeni named Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who is imprisoned at Guantanamo, could be tried by military commission - a system established by Bush. The court ruled that such commissions were not authorized by federal law and violated our signature on the Geneva Conventions.
The decision also dismissed the president's claims that his powers as commander in chief must not be questioned in wartime.
Since 9/11, the administration has been trying to expand executive power and to avoid consultation with Congress on issues related to terrorism. Bush ignored Congress when he established military commissions to try Gitmo detainees. He ignored existing security law, which Congress would have revised, when he set up a massive program of telephone and e-mail surveillance. He has issued about 750 "signing statements" asserting the right to ignore or reinterpret laws that Congress has passed and he has signed.
"There is a strain of legal reasoning in this administration that believes in a time of war the other two branches have a diminished role or no role," Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., told the Washington Post.
The crucial message the Supreme Court conveyed to the White House is this: As you battle terrorism, don't undermine the very democratic institutions you seek to defend. To which I'd add: Don't undermine the very democratic system you are promoting abroad.
This thought has been much on my mind since returning from a trip to Iran and Iraq. The White House is vociferously promoting "rule of law" in the Middle East, where religious law often trumps constitutions, and written laws function (or not) at the whim of authoritarian rulers.
In Iran, a supreme cleric has authority that supersedes that of the elected government. In Iraq, the legacy of a brutal dictator makes it painfully hard to establish a workable judicial system, and laws have little meaning for ordinary citizens because they are rarely enforced.
Arabs don't enjoy separation of powers - our system of checks and balances that keeps (or should keep) an executive from getting out of hand. Parliaments and courts exert minimal leverage against authoritarian rulers. The media are mostly state-controlled, and independent journalists risk prison or worse.
The Hamdan decision is a reminder of the importance of checks and balances. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, in a concurring opinion: "Concentration of power in the Executive Branch puts personal liberty in peril of arbitrary action by officials, an incursion the Constitution's three-part system is designed to avoid."
The long-running struggle against Islamist extremists, however daunting, cannot justify the degrading of our system. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor put it brilliantly in a June 2004 case rejecting the president's claim of authority to hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely as an enemy combatant without a hearing. She wrote: "We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president.
"It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad."
The Supreme Court gave us a July Fourth gift by reminding us of those principles. Let the fireworks begin.
Yeah. A gift. If you want to call undermining the war effort a gift. And only anti-American assholes like this buttfaced clown would do that.
Can you just imagine having people like those on SCOTUS and journalists like Rubin and the traitors at the New York Times during WWII? We would have lost that war if we did. No question.