Bookworm Room

Sadie sent me a great trio of stories today, and I want to pass them on to you:
The UN wants to make sure that the Western nation’s efforts to protect themselves against cross-dressing jihadists (you know, those guys who don burqas to hide bombs) don’t offend transgendered individuals (who may or may not be hiding [...]

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Whether you are for or against gay marriage, Robert George issues a sound warning about the dangers that flow from letting the Supreme Court get its hands on the issue:
It would be disastrous for the justices to do so [rule against California's Prop. 8 and, by extension, make gay marriage the law of the land]. [...]

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I keep seeing headlines all over the place to the effect that Republican Senators will be afraid to vote against the first proposed Hispanic justice.  This may certainly be true for Senators, who are a weaselly, unprincipled bunch, I suspect, though, that for many voters Obama himself is causing the bloom to depart the identity [...]

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Okay, I admit it.  I’m easy.  Call me “winsome” and write a thoughtful, well-informed, interesting article about the continuing resonance abortion has on the political process — even if it did not serve as the centerpiece of this last political campaign — and of course I’m going to link to the article.  In this case, [...]

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I’m sorry blogging has been so light today, but it’s been a go-go-go kind of day that’s left little time for anything but, well, going.  I did have a thought today, which I’ll share with you.
Most lawyers I know have little that’s complimentary to say about the average trial court judge, a feeling that often [...]

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A few months ago, the California Supreme Court overruled the will of the California voters and announced that gay marriage was a fundamental right.  The voters responded by changing the California Constitution to state that, in California, marriage is between one man and one woman.  As you know, if it were up to me, I’d [...]

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Just in time for July 4th, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Second Amendment says what it means and means what it says.
I personally am not now, nor have I ever been, a gun owner.  I keep meaning to go the local firing range and take lessons (operating on the principle that, since I’m surprisingly [...]

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The alternative title for this post would have been:  You’re in prison, not a hotel.  From Best of the Web Today:

He Wouldn’t Hurt a Fly
Henry Boateng is an inmate in a Massachusetts State prison. He went to court arguing that his rights were being violated. Yesterday, a federal judge agreed:
Boateng, who has changed his name [...]

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I’ve been finding very disturbing the intense hostility that conservatives direct against John McCain. So much so that I wrote a very long rant on the subject, which American Thinker was kind enough to publish and which I reprint below:
Perhaps because I’m a neocon, and not a dyed-in-the-wool, native-born conservative, I look at John [...]

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Marriage is not, and never has been, a personal right.  In Western society, it operates at two levels.  First, it functions at a religious level.  This is a deeply personal level, because in every religion, marriage is, or is equivalent to, a sacrament.  In America, you have the Constitutional right to be married in the [...]

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Dennis Prager has a good column discussing what will be, in his view, the ramifications of the California Supreme Court decision creating a new right out of thin air.  One of the points he makes is that, in the future, to avoid charges of discrimination, homosexual relationships will have to be promoted equally with [...]

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Cliff Thier talks about the far-reaching implications of the Court’s (and the government’s) “fundamental rights” language.
The WSJ’s editors take on the election ramifications of the decision — a bit of unexpected, and undeserved, good luck for Republicans in a terribly managed campaign season.
As was to be expected, National Review quickly put together a whole catalog [...]

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Edward Whelan, after pointing out that a President Obama would have the potential to appoint up to six new Supreme Court justices, looks at Obama’s rhetoric about the Constitution and the law, and uses that information to explain clearly what type of justices Obama would appoint:
[I]n setting forth the sort of judges he would appoint, [...]

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The Ninth Circuit, which is the laughing stock of the federal judiciary because it is overruled so often, did something bizarre yesterday: it issued a Constitutionally correct decision. Not only that, the decision meant that a citizens’ group will be able to engage in free speech that is contrary to the type of [...]

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History has its tipping points. I wonder if Britain or, rather, the ordinary British, have met another tipping point. A while ago, I blogged about the fact that, as Melanie Phillips points out in Londonistan, the rule of judges has gone insanely against ordinary Brits, with judges relying on the British Human [...]

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I believe I mentioned already that one of Melanie Phillips’ big points in Londonistan is what happens when judges become highly activist, get invested in some EU/UNabstract notion of “human rights,” and steadily erode away the rights of their own citizens in the inanely confident belief that the only humans with rights are those who [...]

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I canceled my American Bar Association long before I realized I was a conservative. It had gone so overboard in wacko policies that I simply couldn’t stomach sending it my money. This year, the organization gave Justice Kennedy its highest award, presumably so that he could give a speech — this is a [...]

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I’m on another vacation, sitting in a cyber cafe, working at a small computer with a microscopic keyboard, so it must be random thoughts day. Thank goodness DQ is doing the heavy lifting.
The first thing that caught my interest is what Mitt said at the debate, which I really liked:
But it was Romney forced [...]

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In my post about the field of front-running Republican candidates, I got a comment from someone who said that s/he could not possibly vote for Giuliani, because Giuliani is personally pro-choice. Further, the comment writer said (or implied) that this would hold true even if it boiled down to a race between Giuliani and a [...]

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The New York Times has come up with an editorial that contains a perfect bootstrapping argument, one that works off the premise it is supposed to prove.  It's an almost impressive piece of dishonest rhetoric, whether or not one agrees with the sentiment expressed. 
The context for this amazing piece of rhetorical sleight-of-hand is the Times' [...]

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Those who have read my blog for its fairly limited lifespan know that I'm not overly impressed with judges.  I find most of them so concerned with their own personal sense of what's "fair" (and in the area in which I live, fair usually means anti-business) that they have no time for actually considering the [...]

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[This is one of my recent posts that was pretty much unavailable due to Blogger troubles, so I'm republishing it, slightly edited, here.]
Apparently Justice Ginsburg, while in South Africa, was heaping disrespect on the American Constitution. (What is it lately with American public figures going abroad to denigrate America? Think Al Gore here.) Anyway, as [...]

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