Not quite a public bookmark, but a public love note to my wife. Someday if we acquire the wherewithal, we’ll create Becky’s Bookmobile and submit it for the Unusual Libraries list.
Today’s reason: disenfranchising speech.
Master of the indirect smear campaign, Karl Rove, is at his finest lately giving us a new phrase, activist judges, and painting whole swaths of upstanding citizens who fit the term trial lawyers in a negative light. We’ve disgust the defamtory nature of the GOP’s ‘trial lawyer’ label (which goes hand-in-hand with their derision of the L word) ad nauseum, but I want to reinforce my belief that any subsection of the population can be marginalized by this type libel and it is unfair to the trial lawyers who chose that career out of a sense of duty to the citizenry. The idea that “activist judges” are far spread and are doing anything outside the boundaries of their power needs some focus, too. Check out Lambda Legal’s article on the judges Bush is labeling — or in many cases, mislabeling.
Judge David O. Carter … In 2000, Carter issued an injunction requiring public school officials to allow a Gay-Straight Alliance student club to meet on campus because it allowed other non-curriculum-related groups to meet. Right-wing groups protested outside the school regularly and spoke out against the ruling, even though Carter was following clear law on equal access for groups in schools.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy … In 2003, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down state laws making it a crime for gay people to have sex. Four of the six justices who voted to strike down the law were appointed by Republican presidents. Right-wing groups protested the decision and regularly invoke it as an example of “activist courts” simply because the ruling put basic fairness ahead of an antigay political agenda.
Politics aside, you have to feel good when a fellow human being gets some good news. So congratulations, George W. Bush. This week we learned that:
The CIA is responsible for us getting into the war in Iraq
The Pentagon accidentally destroyed certain National Guard payroll records for the first quarter of 1969 and the third quarter of 1972, including those that would solve the missing months of GWB’s service. Oops!