Conservative Blogger
Saturday, May 7, 2016
Alabama chief justice faces removal over fight to block gay marriage
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| Bailey Comment: The majority of people in America are not queer. |
The Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission on Friday filed ethics charged against Moore, saying that the state chief justice abused the power of his office and displayed disrespect for the judiciary.
The charges largely stem from a Jan. 6 administrative order Moore sent to probate judges telling them an Alabama order and law banning same-sex marriages remained in effect. His order came six months after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges effectively legalized gay marriage.
"By issuing his unilateral order of January 6, 2016, Chief Justice Moore flagrantly disregarded a fundamental constitutional right guaranteed in all states as declared by the United States Court in Obergefell," the Judicial Inquiry Commission wrote in the charges.
The chief justice's order to probate judges came even though a federal judge had enjoined probate judges from enforcing Alabama's same-sex marriage ban, the commission wrote.
The Court of the Judiciary will decide whether Moore is guilty of violating judicial ethics. If found guilty, he could face removal from office.
"The JIC has chosen to listen to people like Ambrosia Starling, a professed transvestite, and other gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals, as well as organizations which support their agenda. We intend to fight this agenda vigorously and expect to prevail," Moore said.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civils rights legal advocacy group, filed the complaint against Moore that led to Friday's charges.
"Moore has disgraced his office for far too long," SPLC President Richard Cohen said. "He's such a religious zealot, such an egomaniac that he thinks he doesn't have to follow federal court rulings he disagrees with. For the good of the state, he should be kicked out of office."
Moore previously served as Alabama's chief justice. The Court of Judiciary removed him from office after 2003 after he refused to comply with a federal court order to remove a boulder-sized Ten Commandments monument that he installed in the rotunda of the state judicial building.
Moore was re-elected in 2012.The fiery Republican chief justice has been an outspoken critic of same-sex marriage both on and off the bench. During a 2012 campaign stop he said gay marriage would be the "ultimate destruction of our country because it destroys the very foundation upon which this nation is based." He sent a Jan. 27, 2015, letter to Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley asking him to stand up to "judicial tyranny" after a federal judge ruled Alabama's same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional.
The chief justice held a press conference last week in Montgomery with attorney Mat Staver, who represented Kentucky clerk Kim Davis after she refused to issue marriage licenses. Moore and Staver criticized the Southern Poverty Law Center complaint as politically motivated.
Moore said he did not tell probate judges to defy a court order but was telling them that the Alabama Supreme Court order to refuse same-sex marriages had not been lifted.
"There is nothing in writing that you will find that I told anybody to disobey a federal court order. That's not what I said," Moore said last week. Asked if judges should be issuing licenses to gay couples, Moore said it remained for "probate judge to decide."
Despite Moore's January order, most Alabama counties are issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. However, a few Alabama counties have shut down marriage license operations and are not issuing them to anyone, in order to avoid giving licenses to gay couples.
Labour's Sadiq Khan elected 1st Muslim London mayor
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| Unbelievable stupid people in this world, voting this guy in? |
Election officials say Khan defeated Conservative rival Zac Goldsmith by more than 300,000 votes, after first- and second-preference votes were allocated.
The result came early Saturday, more than 24 hours after polls closed.
Khan was elected to replace Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson after a campaign marked by U.S.-style negative campaigning.
Goldsmith, a wealthy environmentalist, called Khan divisive and accused him of sharing platforms with Islamic extremists.
Khan, who calls himself "the British Muslim who will take the fight to the extremists," accused Goldsmith of trying to scare and divide voters in a proudly multicultural city of 8.6 million people — more than 1 million of them Muslim.
Gutfeld: Trump is a sports car, the rest are school buses
What follows are the variables that led to Donald Trump’s improbable but nearly unstoppable rise to becoming the presumptive Republican nominee. I realized, as I analyzed these variables, how much they had in common with artificial intelligence, technological explosions, and Moore's Law.
He took the world by surprise.
The surest way to reach frontrunner status is if no one else sees you coming, or takes you seriously, when you happen to show up happy and ready to go.
Trump had made overtures about running for president for years, and therefore was relegated to “boy who cried wolf” status.
We in the media mocked him regularly.
Until, of course, the wolf arrived – and announced that he would run.
The latest headlines on the 2016 elections from the biggest name in politics. See Latest Coverage →
He could make jokes befitting of a Comedy Central roast, and get away with it. This was not just a first, it exemplified Andrew Breitbart's central belief that politics is downstream from culture.
But being new to politics meant that Trump left no visible trail.
Sure, he had published books and appeared on morning television. He had ranted congenially on Howard Stern about war, marriage and sex – but there were no concrete issues attached to his views.
As he got older, his businesses likely served as a front for him -- as he prepared for his big foray onto the world political stage.
While America watched “The Apprentice,” Trump was watching America.
Because most presidential runs are preceded by the normal gradient of steady advances (run for a seat in the House, then on to the Senate, maybe become governor, then get sidetracked into a disastrous affair with a nanny), no one took him seriously – and their response to Trump came off as condescending and clumsy.
In fact, it was his surprising entrance that led to his Party’s own misunderstanding of him. The Republicans came off as stiff: how could they not see this coming? The fact is, they could not see it coming because there was no sign to be seen.
It wasn't their fault. If you expected a black swan, then they wouldn't be called black swans.
His rise fed off of existing content.
Trump’s rhetoric, vision, and ideas are rooted in a short-hand version of talk radio and cable television conservatism. It is hard to explode onto the scene, if you have spent decades creating your principled vision (like say, Ronald Reagan or um, Ronald Reagan).
Trump didn’t have to: he just scooped it all out of the white noise generators around him, and shaped it into a digestible, accessible platform of promises. He exploited existing hardware to great effect -- and like no other.
He did his homework, which was the equivalent of "books on tape" as reconfigured by Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Fox News.
A good comparison might be the lone hacker, who succeeds in putting the whole thing into action – after all the work had been done previously by other companies and organizations.
You can’t hack something that isn’t there, after all.
So what did Trump hack? The conservative movement.
He got in, figured it out, and ran with it.
All of those conservatives who had been in that movement for decades expressed understandable frustration. Imagine being in line for a Springsteen concert, and a chap cuts to the front of the line -- then disses you for waiting patiently. That's Trump entering the 2016 race, and relegating all before him, as establishment.
In sum: The traditional ideologies of patriotism, American exceptionalism – along with strong alpha male nationalism, buffet style cable TV content, linked to the alienation of an endless Obama era (eight years of the same, continuous political ideology naturally becomes tiresome – even to the apolitical) – all of this set the table for Trump to flip that final switch. It could just as easily have been Glenn Beck or Oprah Winfrey.
In fact I believe much of the animosity toward Trump from notable names and faces is due to the fact that they feel Trump's dare exposes their cowardice to do the same.
His machine ran itself with no outside help
His steady fast rise inspired greater interest, which then accelerated his steady, fast rise even more. Essentially, his momentum creates more momentum – and the power driving the movement starts to increase on its own – without needing input from the outside (aside from talking heads constantly pointing to the momentum, as its proof of life).
In the frightening world of artificial intelligence, one would call this “recursive self-improvement,” in which the entity’s primary purpose is to become more powerful, so that its rate of improvement keeps doubling.
Trump figured out how to apply Moore’s law to politics. Moore’s law is the theory that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit double every two years (roughly). Trump, by using the media’s vulnerability (they must find content to fill space) to his advantage (let me give you this “winning” story), created his own momentum.
He worked his advantages, quickly calling in favors
Trump obtained the strategic advantage by tapping into the social networks he’d already built among the media – which translated into massive amounts of free time on television – a plus that his 16 competitors did not have.
The social network created personal friendships, which translated to camera-ready spokespersons (old friends who now owe something to this mythic celebrity in their midst) on different shows, crafting the message.
The message was clear: Trump was not part of the establishment; his adversaries are. This provided excellent camouflage for his underlying posture: that of an authoritarian ruler. His many supporters could embrace the autocracy, without admitting to. Instead of saying, “I want an autocrat,” they can say, “He’s an outsider.” That doesn’t seem as bad. And it worked like magic.
He neutralized the enemies
Trump gained this advantage so quickly that he was able to use it not only to build his base, but to suppress his competition: elbowing them out of coverage. He created a monopoly among the candidates – one they could not imitate. In the realm of entertaining the masses with blunt rhetoric, Trump was Coke, and everyone else was Royal Crown. Ultimately he was able to turn the election season into a single obedient agency shaped around him. Everyone else was outside, looking in. Beware if you cross the machine. Like Coke, he only linked himself with “winning,” not with losing.
It would be hard to maintain a big lead like his, if his adversaries could mimic his style, or steal his ideas, effectively. But they were too slow, fearful and unfamiliar with these tactics.
The gap between Trump and the others only increased, as strong candidates like Jeb Bush and Rick Perry found it too difficult to assimilate. A dog can’t beat a cat, at being a cat. Or possibly, a pig.
He kept it lean, and mean
Trump’s tight organization made him a nimbler, fast moving warrior. In most organizations, bureaucracy slows you down – humans have different preferences and their squabbling and pernicious gossip adds a drag to your revving engine.
As Trump campaigners have noted: there is only one boss, and one voice – and they do as he says.
The allegiance is infectious, turning his supporters into dedicated, aggressive sports fans for Team Trump. Ultimately, this finite system of working parts allows the team to move faster than everyone else.
Trump is a sports car; the rest are school buses.
Elizabeth Warren going on Trump attack for Dems
The night of Donald Trump’s big Indiana Republican primary win, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., was ready. She tore loose with a series of late-night anti-Trump tweets in which she accused him of racism, sexism, xenophobia, narcissism and a host of other faults.
Two weeks earlier, after being asked about another Warren tweet storm in which she accused him of being "a loser," Trump fired a warning shot across Warren's bow. "Who's that, the Indian? You mean the Indian," he responded, referring to a well-known political controversy over Warren claiming Indian heritage.
The exchanges signal the start of what could be a nasty surrogate side-battle as the general election campaign begins to take shape. Warren is poised to be an aggressive Trump critic, for the Democrats and Hillary Clinton, should she lock up the nomination. And for Trump, who thrives off detecting weakness and pouncing, Warren is a target-rich environment.
From 1986 to 1995, she listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools directory. Harvard Law School cited her alleged Indian heritage in dealing with criticism that it lacked a diverse faculty. Her recipe in the "Pow Wow Chow" cookbook became the subject of derision, after charges it was plagiarized from a New York Times cookbook.
"I think she's a fraud," said longtime nemesis and Boston conservative talk radio host, Howie Carr. "I think her entire success in academia and in politics is based on a lie that she's a Native American. She refuses to take a DNA test. She doesn't even call herself Native American, anymore," he said.
Asked what the purpose of that alleged fraud would have been, Carr said, "She was basically going nowhere in her academic career. She was an instructor at the University of Texas Law School in Austin. Suddenly she began checking the box and she was a tenured professor first at the University of Pennsylvania, and then she got a job at Harvard University law school. "
The latest headlines on the 2016 elections from the biggest name in politics. See Latest Coverage →
"The more Donald Trump takes the bait and attacks Elizabeth Warren and thrusts Elizabeth Warren into a national dialogue, the better for Hillary Clinton because the issues Hillary Clinton is fighting for are overwhelmingly popular with Democratic voters," he said.
Her critics, among them former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, whom she beat in the 2012 Senate race, suggest Warren's Twitter tear is not accidental. "She's been getting on Twitter more and more and criticizing Trump like she is the pit bull for the Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee, and, I would suspect, Hillary Clinton," he said.
Carr added, "I think Hillary Clinton is giving her instructions. She's going to put on her war bonnet and go out and attack Donald Trump."
One of the ironies of this fight is that the two are vying, at least in part, for the same voters – blue-collar workers and swing-state independents who may well decide the election.
Trump is trying to pull them right with promises of more coal and less regulation, while Warren, with her strong progressive bona fides, is pulling left with a call for more government safety nets and regulation.
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