Free Republic

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 Court Dismisses Kerchner Complaint/Petition for Lack of Standing. The Decision Will Be Appealed. The Hon. Jerome B. Simandle of the Federal District Court in the District of New Jersey at 10:39 a.m., on October 21, 2009, filed his long-awaited opinion dismissing the Kerchner et al. v. Obama et al. complaint/petition. We allege that Obama has not conclusively proven that he was born in Hawaii. We also allege that even if he was so born, he is not an Article II “natural born Citizen” because his father was a British subject/citizen when Obama was born and Obama...

He's just getting started. And if this fellow is any indication of the kind of judges we can expect to populate our federal courts, I guarantee you we will spend the next decade or more scratching our heads at the idiotic leftist decisions that will become commonplace on the federal bench. From an editorial in the Washington Times: On Oct. 1, the president nominated Louis Butler, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, to the U.S. District Court of his state's Western District. While Mr. Butler's resume is in order, his appreciation of a judge's proper role seems lacking. Mr. Butler...

In the DeLano case, 06-4780-bk, Judge Sotomayor, presiding, and her colleagues on a panel of the Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit (CA2), issued a summary order to protect, not the rule of law, but rather their appointee to a bankruptcy judgeship, Bankruptcy Judge John C. Ninfo, II, WBNY. Her conduct in that case and the order are so contemptuous of the most important Constitutional guarantee that a judge, let alone a justice of the Supreme Court, must safeguard, namely, due process of law, that Judge Sotomayor withheld the order from the Committee in her three principal and supplementary responses to...

In Tennessee, a judge is legally required to be “patient, dignified and courteous” with people in court. He is also required, not unreasonably, “to respect and comply with the law”. But not all judges do. The Supreme Court of Tennessee recently disciplined Judge Durwood Moore for unlawful judicial conduct. Presiding in court one day, the judge happened to glance at Benjamin Marchant, a friend of someone who had court business. Marchant was not a witness, just a spectator. Yet after observing him, the judge ordered court officers to seize the man, get a urine sample from him and have it...

...Obama chose the most far left judicial activist available as his Supreme Court nominee—but the Obama press will make certain that this is NOT about Sotomayor’s far left judicial activism. No, according to the leftist press, Republicans will make race an issue in Sotomayor confirmation! Hatch, Cornyn and Graham are already gun shy on the matter…

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, said Thursday he does not plan to vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, becoming the first Republican to explicitly state his opposition to President Obama's pick for the high court. "With all due respect to the nominee and nothing personal, I do not plan to vote for her," Roberts told talk radio host Christ Stigall on Kansas station KCMO. Roberts also noted he was one of the 28 Senate Republicans in 1998 who voted against confirming Sotomayor to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Sotomayor was ultimately confirmed to that court...

After Gov. Sarah Palin's selection of a new justice for the Alaska Supreme Court last month proved controversial, the governor agreed to a live interview about the process of picking judges. We sent the governor a few general questions in advance. Then she decided to answer in writing. Here's what she wrote:

It's not typical that Texomans would welcome a former pro football player who wasn't a Dallas Cowboy or Houston Oiler. However, they did Wednesday night as part of MSU's Artist Lecture Series. While Hall of Famer Viking Alan Page earned accolades on the football field, it's his work off the football field that he was here to discuss. Jason Calder reports. He was a defensive tackle for the Minnesota Vikings, number 88, part of the Purple People Eaters. Alan Page said, "Football players are really known as dumb jocks and defensive linemen have all been hit in the head at...

Washington, DC -- President Barack Obama has nominated his first pro-abortion judicial candidate as he named David Hamilton as his first Appeals Court nominee. Hamilton is a former Clinton nominee whom Obama has appointed to serve on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Hamilton was initially appointed by President Clinton to a district judgeship in Indiana in 1994 even though the ABA gave him a “not qualified” rating. In that position, Hamilton issued a series of rulings over seven years that prevented Indiana from implementing its informed consent law that would give women information about abortion's risks and alternatives.

Gov. Palin is totally pro-life. Always has been. Always will be. She believes in a culture of life from cradle to grave. Her choice for Supreme Court judge was made in accordance with Alaska law. She chose the person most qualified from the names sent to her. The Governor's choice has a record of fairness. That is important as the courts sort out some very thorny issues. Governor Palin's choices were either a liberal or an independent. She went with the independent. And as the following article reflects - this selection process is flawed. ........................ Process of selecting Alaska's judges...

... In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers. "I've never encountered, and I don't think that we will in our lifetimes, a case where literally thousands of kids' lives were just tossed aside in order for a couple of judges to make some money," said Marsha Levick, an attorney with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, which is representing hundreds of youths sentenced in Wilkes-Barre. Prosecutors say Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and...

I am no jurist and, I’ll admit, I may be reading too much into Judge Scoles’ specific ruling. However, gentle reader, the language used by the honorable judge has certainly raised my eyebrows. Does His Honor really mean to imply that, as a Jew, Mr. Rubashkin is a bigger flight risk than if he were not a Jew?!?!? I wonder if this very Honorable judge would have thought, for example, of making a ruling denying bail to some Imam whose pronouncements were too incendiary for inciting to shed infidels’ blood? Don’t you think that CAIR, ISNA, ICNA and others would...

What would happen if on the 5th of Nov it was obvious that McCain had won the election by a fairly wide margin and Obama refused to concede? I am not sure but I am very afraid that in the current racial and political climate things could get out of hand very quickly and, potentially, very explosively.

"At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has...

The California Supreme Court, in a 4-3 majority, attempted a new form of alchemy today. They tried to change homosexual partnerships into something they simply are not capable of being, marriage. They did so through a raw exercise of renegade judicial authority which clearly rejected the expressed will of the people of California. They did so without even making any pretense of relying on past precedent. They simply declared, in the words of the majority, that protecting marriage as a lifelong relationship of love between a man and a woman which forms the foundation of the first society of the...

Glass shattered in a driveway in a quiet Albuquerque subdivision a few nights after Christmas. Minutes later, at the end of a chaotic quarter-mile trek over fences, through vacant lots and across a six-lane highway, police sirens began to wail. One man lay dead against a chain-link fence, dirt on his teeth and a bullet hole in his heart. The other stood in his stocking feet in the middle of the street with his revolver tucked into the waistband of his jeans. "Why did he do it, sir?" he asked the officer who took his gun and put him in...

A river is a beautiful thing. However, a river outside its banks is called a flood and turns from being a beautiful amenity to being a destructive force. This role change describes what may be happening to our judicial branch of government. There are many very fine judges, but all too often we hear about bad decisions in which the judge applied his personal philosophy to arrive at a decision far beyond simply interpreting the law. We are seeing a nationwide trend of judges starting to tax and spend without legislative authority. It is bad enough to see a poor...

Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity. The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of 10 cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1,000 attempts. The study raises the possibility in the future of the technology...

Governors Highway Safety Program Attempts to Bias NC Judges Against Motorcyclists Raleigh, NC December 23, 2008 Editorial opinion of a Concerned Citizen Documented proof has been published by the NC Governors Highway Safety Program, that the NC GHSP is using taxpayer funded lobbying to influence North Carolina judges in advance of "technical changes" to the General Statute 20-140.4 which contains the NC helmet law statute, effective date of January 1, 2008. In an article published in the Fall 2007 issue of Centerline, which is published by the Governors Highway Safety Program, NC Department of Transportation, is the following quote: "GHSP...