Last Call at the Vapor Room. As the sun was going down over Twin Peaks in San Francisco on the last day of July, two staffers took down the Vapor Room sign.
Handpainted and hung on a wrought iron bracket, the sign had not seemed out of place on a Haight Street Victorian built of redwood in a time when carpenters could express their artistry. Inside, people commiserated and said their goodbyes. The United States government had threatened to seize the building if the landlord didn’t evict the club. And the Vapor Room was a club —a Cannabis club on the original Dennis Peron model, where people could hang out and socialize. Truck owner wants DEA to pay up after botched sting. The phone rang before sunrise.
It woke Craig Patty, owner of a tiny North Texas trucking company, to vexing news about Truck 793 - a big red semi supposedly getting repairs in Houston. "Your driver was shot in your truck," said the caller, a business colleague. "Your truck was loaded with marijuana. He was shot eight times while sitting in the cab. Do you know anything about your driver hauling marijuana? " "What did you say? " Scalia: 'Handheld Rocket Launchers' could be Constitutional. Scalia Suggests Women Have No Right to Contraception. Justice Scalia: Money Is Speech. While conservatives are furious about John Roberts’ health care decision, liberals are silent about the defections from the Supreme Court’s liberal justices.
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John Roberts is hardly the hero and judicial statesman people make him out to be. Supreme Court Won’t Take A Second Look At Janet Jackson’s Breast. Scalia, The Supreme Court’s Resident Clown, Rages Against Obama In His Dissent Of AZ Immigration Decision. Civility and deference are encouraged, if not demanded, of licensed, practicing attorneys to sitting judges and justices of all courts both federal and state.
I shall assume that since I have no matters before the United States Supreme Court, I, like Scalia, am entitled to exercise my free speech rights under the United States Constitution. I submit what some might consider obvious: Antonin Scalia is a buffoon…a clown…the Court jester. He has played this role for most of his 25 years on the bench (having been appointed by President Reagan) and is portrayed as such by many who have had the unpleasant experience of being a target of his ire during oral arguments or a recipient of his nasty grams sent through interoffice mail (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor reported her dismay at receiving these notes from Scalia as set forth in book, The Nine.) So what makes today or this dissent different from the voluminous collection of dissents and concurring opinions previously set forth by Scalia?
Scalia’s scary thinking. If the Supreme Court overturns part or all of the Affordable Care Act in the coming week, it’s likely to do so by a 5-4 vote, in which case most of the attention will focus on Anthony Kennedy, the Court’s so-called swing justice.
But the harshest spotlight should shine on Antonin Scalia, who, as a practical matter, must be part of any vote to strike down the law. (Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan and Sotomayor are certain to vote to uphold the ACA.) The argument against the ACA is that it supposedly exceeds Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. The problem for Scalia is that in 2005 he voted to uphold a far more expansive federal law – one that criminalized the cultivation of medical marijuana for purely personal use in a state where doing so was legal. In that case, Scalia wrote that, “where Congress has authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.” I’ve been reading Scalia’s work for 25 years. North Carolina tries to outlaw sea-level rise. North Carolina is no stranger to the “if you dislike it then you should have made a law against it” model of legislation, but this is extreme: The state General Assembly’s Replacement House Bill 819 would rule that scientists are not allowed to accurately predict sea-level rise.
By all legal calculations, the sea level will now rise eight inches by the end of the century. Sure, so far models have predicted an increase of more than three feet, but if they keep that shit up, they’re going to JAIL. OK, there’s not really a prison sentence attached to this proposed rule, but that doesn’t stop it from being crazeballs. See, actual sea-level rise is nonlinear, because there’s feedback — the warmer it gets, the more the water volume expands, and the more stuff melts, and the more it expands, etc.
That’s how most scientific models arrive at their predictions, because that is how physics works. Posthumously-Conceived Children Get No Benefits. Too Big to Jail. Brandon Garrett has pulled together a database of all the deferred and non prosecution agreements and plea agreements since 2001.
And he’s sliced and diced them. And now he’s writing a book for Harvard University Press about what he’s finding. The working title? Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Take On Corporations. Garrett is a Professor at the University of Virginia Law School. Garrett wonders, for example, why the Justice Department secures guilty pleas for environmental crimes while getting primarily deferred and non prosecution agreements in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) cases. “There is nothing inherent in environmental crimes that requires guilty pleas and FCPA that requires deferred prosecution agreements, right?” Stand Your Ground? Only If You're White and Male. More federal judge abdication. Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution: Harvard law professor Einer Elhauge shows how the Founding Fathers supported mandates.
National Archives/Getty Images The five conservative justices on the Supreme Court—Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Roberts and Kennedy—cloak themselves in the myth that they are somehow channeling the wisdom and understanding of the Founding Fathers, the original intent that guided the drafting of the Constitution.
I believe the premise of their argument is itself suspect: It is not clear to me how much weight should be given to non-textually based intent that is practically impossible to discern more than 200 years later. Court: Employers Don't Have To Enforce Lunch Break. According to a new report by the CDC, more than 80 percent of teenagers don’t receive formal sex education by the time they have ...
Archie Comics publisher Jon Goldwater has announced that in the final two issues of Life With Archie, to be released in July, titular character Archie ... The people of St. Andrews, Scotland raised $8,000 to build a bronze statue of a 14-year-old stray cat named McHamish, who has recently gained ... The Return of Judge Roy Moore. It’s hard to keep Alabama out of the news.
Two of its recent newsworthy events deserve attention. The first is its attempt to improve on the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, a 76-page statutory creation as remarkable for its length as for its content that was designed to rid the state of illegal immigrants. As drafted, the Act prohibits anyone from giving an illegal immigrant a ride to church (or any other place for that matter). In addition, illegal aliens may “not be permitted to enroll in or attend any public postsecondary education institution.”
Profiling the Supremes. As a lawyer and teacher of psychology, I have more than a passing interest in the intersection of behavior and the law. Three days of Supreme Court hearings on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were an intellectual feast for me. Backup Health Care Plan Involves Nation Sharing One Big Jar Of Ointment. WASHINGTON—In the event the Supreme Court strikes down the president's health care law, the Obama administration has prepared a contingency plan under which all 313 million Americans would share a single large jar of ointment, sources confirmed Tuesday. "We are committed to protecting the health of the American people, and while it's not a perfect solution, allowing citizens to scoop up fistfuls of ointment from a giant communal jar would at least guarantee a certain minimal level of care," said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, stating that the 96,000-pound container of topical rub would be located in the middle of the country and that, in some cases, citizens might have to travel 1,300 miles to have access to the salve.
"I will say there is only a limited amount of ointment, and those citizens who are gravely ill and lack medical insurance will get first dibs at the soothing unguent. " US Police Can Copy Your iPhone’s Contents In Under Two Minutes. It has emerged that Michigan State Police have been using a high-tech mobile forensics device that can extract information from over 3,000 models of mobile phone, potentially grabbing all media content from your iPhone in under two minutes. The CelleBrite UFED is a handheld device that Michigan officers have been using since August 2008 to copy information from mobile phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The device can circumvent password restrictions and extract existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags.
In short, it can copy everything on your smartphone in a matter of minutes. If the Supreme Court Goes Rogue. Republicans Threaten Judges, Accuse Obama of Judicial Intimidation. Florida Police Warn Public Against Taking Law Into Own Hands Unless It’s That Law Specifically Designed For You To Do That. Justices run amok: Fixing the Supreme Court. U.S. Supreme Court Legalizes Strip Search For Any Offense. Hayes: Now We Know Where Supreme Court Justices Get Their News. Scalia Unable To Name All 9 Supreme Court Justices.
WASHINGTON—Associate Justice Antonin Scalia struggled to recall the names of all nine active Supreme Court justices while playing a trivia game Thursday, sources confirmed. A brutal day for healthcare. Wednesday’s Supreme Court arguments on the Affordable Care Act involved complex technical issues of “severability” and “conditional federal spending,” so let’s get right to the core issue. The judges are being asked to take away health insurance from millions of people. And judging from what they said, they just might do it. Supreme Court's Medicaid Decision Could Reach Far Beyond Health Care : Shots - Health Blog. Justices Split in Questions on Insurance Mandate. Audio and Analysis: The Supreme Court’s Health Care Arguments - Interactive Feature.
In Supreme Court Health Care Case, Training for a Legal Marathon. Last week, there were so many of the mock arguments that lawyers call moot courts that they threatened to exhaust something that had never been thought in short supply: Washington lawyers willing to pretend to be Supreme Court justices. The Supreme Court is more concerned with the politics of the health care debate than the law.