DonViejo
DonViejo's JournalGay Marriage Cases Flooding Appeals Courts Throughout Nation
Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS
By AMANDA LEE MYERS Published AUGUST 5, 2014, 2:41 PM EDT
CINCINNATI (AP) — Federal appeals courts covering nearly half the United States will soon hear arguments on whether gay and lesbian couples have a right to marry, part of a slew of cases putting pressure on the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a final verdict.
If the appeals courts continue the unbroken eight-month streak of rulings in favor of gay marriage, that could make it easier for the nation's highest court to come down on the side of supporters.
If even one ruling goes against them in the four courts taking up the issue in the coming weeks, it would create a divide that the Supreme Court also could find difficult to resist settling.
"We're going to be racking up more courts of appeals decisions, and every one we get puts more pressure on the Supreme Court to weigh in," said Douglas NeJaime, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine. "It's very likely the Supreme Court ultimately settles this question. Given how quickly things have moved, it's hard for the court to avoid this in the short term."
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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/gay-marriage-cases-flooding-courts
Poll: Public divided over Israel's actions
Source: The Hill
The public remains divided over whether Israel’s actions toward Hamas have been justified, though more are critical of Hamas’s actions, according to a Gallup survey released Tuesday.
Forty-two percent of people in the United States said Israel’s actions are justified, while 38 percent said they are unjustified. Twenty-one percent said they have no opinion.
Only 14 percent said Palestinians’ actions against Israel are justified; 66 percent said they are unjustified.
Public opinion of Israel’s actions has changed little over the last 10 days since Gallup conducted its last poll on the issue. Slightly more people, however, now say Hamas’s actions are justified.
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Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/international/214308-public-remains-divided-over-israels-actions-poll-says
Federal contractors vow to fight Obama executive order
By Benjamin Goad - 08/03/14 02:27 PM EDT
Business interests are vowing to fight President Obama’s executive order imposing new restrictions on companies who want to do business with the federal government.
Obama announced the action this week, ordering up new regulations that would require firms seeking federal contracts to disclose labor law violations and create new compliance advisers at agencies to oversee decisions about which firms get the work.
But contractors, already facing executive orders requiring them to pay a higher minimum wage and subjecting them to additional anti-discrimination rules, say the president went too far.
“We are concerned these sweeping changes threaten the due process rights of federal contractors and conflict with existing federal procurement and labor law,” said Geoff Burr, vice president of government for Associated Builders and Contractors. “ABC and the federal contracting community across all industries are prepared to fight this order in the courts and in Congress.”
Read more: http://thehill.com/regulation/administration/214124-contractors-vow-to-fight-obama-order#ixzz39XetlgUc
NBA's San Antonio Spurs Hire Female Assistant Coach
Source: TPM
By TOM KLUDT Published AUGUST 5, 2014, 1:23 PM EDT
The San Antonio Spurs announced Tuesday that Becky Hammon will join the team's coaching staff. Hammon, an all-time WNBA great who has played the last eight seasons for the San Antonio Stars, said she will retire as a player at the end of the current season.
She will join the Spurs sideline for team's title defense in the 2014-2015 season, making her the second female assistant coach in NBA history. According to ESPN.com, Lisa Boyer was the first female assistant when she served on the Cleveland Cavaliers coaching staff during the 2001-2002 season.
Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said he was impressed with Hammon when she spent time with the team last season.
“I very much look forward to the addition of Becky Hammon to our staff,” Popovich said. “Having observed her working with our team this past season, I’m confident her basketball IQ, work ethic and interpersonal skills will be a great benefit to the Spurs.”
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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/becky-hammon-first-nba-assistant-coach-san-antonio-spurs
Former GOP Lawmaker Suggests Third Party Led By Sarah Palin
By CAITLIN MACNEAL Published AUGUST 5, 2014, 12:28 PM EDT
Steve Baldwin, a conservative activist and former California State assemblyman, on Tuesday penned a detailed proposal for a third, ultra-conservative party.
He said the establishment GOP just isn't cutting it.
"We don’t want the GOP to pursue a 'socialism-lite' agenda. We want them to go on the warpath and do whatever it takes to stop the destruction of our constitutional Republic," Baldwin wrote in Barbwire, a conservative Christian site run by Liberty Counsel Action's VP Matt Barber. "It has become increasingly clear that the GOP leadership will do everything in its power to prevent the party from being influenced in any way by the Tea Party. I have given up on the GOP and am simply not sure it can ever be reformed."
He said that the new Third Party "will do to the GOP what the GOP did to the Whig Party 150 years ago: it will replace the GOP as the main party contesting the Democrat Party."
more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/third-party-proposal-sarah-palin
Exclusive: ‘Pro-Troop’ Charity Pays Off Tea Party Cronies Instead
Source: The Daily Beast
Move America Forward has collected millions to send care packages to U.S. troops. But its assets have been used to benefit conservative political consulting firms close to its Tea Party founder.
By Kim Barker, ProPublica
In February 2013, Move America Forward announced an ambitious fundraising goal. The charity, launched in part by one of the most prominent figures in the Tea Party movement, had adopted the 800 Marines in a battalion fighting in Afghanistan and wanted to send them all care packages.
“For some troops, these care packages are the only mail they will receive all year,” the group said in one email solicitation.
The charity later described the fundraising drive as a rousing success: In less than five weeks, all 800 Marines in a 1st Marine Division battalion nicknamed Geronimo were sent care packages and notes in Afghanistan, it claimed.
But that couldn’t have been true. The Marines of Geronimo weren’t even in Afghanistan during Move America Forward’s fund drive. Instead, they were deployed more than 3,000 miles away, in Okinawa, Japan.
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Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/05/exclusive-pro-troop-charity-pays-off-tea-party-cronies-instead.html
Rick Perry’s deadly “charm”: May have executed innocent man … but dopey press loves his new glasses!
The evidence keeps building that Texas covered up its execution of an innocent man. Oh well! Isn't he dreamy?JIM NEWELL
Rick Perry is just so … adorable. And hardworking. And charming!
Did you know this? It’s the gist of a big long profile of “The New Rick Perry” in National Journal, the latest in a series of Rick Perry Is Adorable pieces to have emerged as the longtime Texas governor mulls another presidential run. The last one didn’t get very far, mostly because Perry hadn’t prepared and was all drugged up following back surgery and also isn’t a very bright guy. But the New Rick Perry is ready for the next sucker, according to this puff piece published in National Journal, which opens with a 10-million-word explanation for why Rick Perry now wears eyeglasses, and then offers credulous passage after passage. “The new Perry isn’t just working harder than his 2012 incarnation. He’s also seeking to occupy a different political space,” the author, Michelle Cottle, writes. “Last time, Perry ran as a conservative firebrand. This time, with Cruz and others sucking up all the oxygen on the right, he is trying out a new message. Forget the wild-eyed cowboy squawking about how Texas might be forced to secede from the union. Today’s Perry is pitching himself as a thoughtful, seasoned elder statesman.” Sure he is.
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He is, in sum, a dreamboat: “Looking especially presidential — gray suit, burnt-orange tie, and, at 64, still the best head of hair in politics — he bounced from topic to topic, but kept returning to a couple of overarching themes.”
Around the same time that National Journal was publishing this press release from Rick Perry’s political team, the Washington Post was publishing a piece of journalism regarding a case with which Perry is well familiar: the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted of burning his house down and murdering his three young daughters trapped inside, and ultimately put to death in 2004.
more
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/05/rick_perrys_deadly_charm_may_have_executed_innocent_man_but_dopey_press_loves_his_new_glasses/
Ayan Hirsi Ali: Bibi Netanyahu deserves Nobel Peace Prize for Gaza campaign
The public intellectual and controversial atheist thinks the man waging war on Gaza is a paragon of peaceELIAS ISQUITH
During an interview published on Friday by Israel HaYom, the Sheldon Adelson-backed Israeli daily, public intellectual and author Ayan Hirsi Ali claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for waging ongoing military campaign by the IDF against Hamas militants in Gaza.
Asked whom she admired, Ali — who once called Islam a “nihilistic cult of death” — included Netanyahu on a list featuring her husband, Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, as well as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Princeton professor Bernard Lewis. Ali said she admired Netanyahu “because he is under so much pressure, from so many sources, and yet he does what is best for the people of Israel, he does his duty.”
“I really think he should get the Nobel Peace Prize,” Ali added. “In a fair world he would get it.”
Ali isn’t the only prominent supporter of Israel’s war to make the provocative Nobel Peace Prize claim. Recently, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, said the nation’s army, the Israeli Defense Forces, similarly deserved global acclaim for the “unimaginable restraint” with which its waged its attacks on Hamas.
more
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/04/ayan_hirsi_ali_bibi_netanyahu_deserves_nobel_peace_prize_for_gaza_campaign/
Prosecutor under fire in contested Texas execution
Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DALLAS (AP) — The prosecutor in the case of a Texas man executed for the fire deaths of his three daughters faces new scrutiny from a New York-based nonprofit group accusing him of misconduct.
The Innocence Project announced Monday that it’s filed a state bar grievance against John H. Jackson, a former judge who prosecuted Cameron Todd Willingham.
Willingham was executed in 2004 for killing his three daughters in a house fire in Corsicana. But fire science experts have long said the original investigators were wrong in calling that fire arson. And a jailhouse informant who provided key testimony against Willingham tried to recant years before the execution.
The Innocence Project says Jackson and a local wealthy rancher tried to keep the informant from changing his story publicly. Jackson has denied wrongdoing.
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Read more: http://www.salon.com/2014/08/04/prosecutor_under_fire_in_contested_texas_execution/
Informant Lied in Death Penalty Case
A blockbuster report Monday from The Washington Post reveals prosecutors got a jailhouse informant to lie about a capital murder case in exchange for a lighter sentence. In 1992, Cameron Todd Willingham of Texas was convicted of killing his three daughters by lighting their house on fire. Key to the prosecution’s case was testimony from Johnny E. Webb, who testified in court that Willingham told him how he started the fires. In 2004, Willingham was executed despite serious doubts about forensic evidence. Now, Webb says his testimony was coerced by prosecutor John H. Jackson, who arranged for Webb’s sentence to be lightened and to secure funds for him from a wealthy rancher. If this behavior had been exposed before Willingham’s execution, he may have been entitled to a new trial. The Innocence Project, a New York-based advocacy group, called for an investigation into Jackson’s conduct, charging he “violated core principles of the legal profession, and did so with terrible consequences ... the execution of an innocent man.”
Read it at The Washington Post
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2014/08/04/innocent-man-may-have-been-executed.html#sthash.flr0MiJO.dpuf
Colorado: Bar discriminated against man in drag
Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DENVER (AP) — Colorado regulators say a Denver gay bar discriminated against a man when a bouncer denied him entry last year because he was dressed in drag.
The civil rights division of the state’s Department of Regulatory Agencies has ordered the Denver Wrangler to resolve the dispute with Vito Marzano, a gay man who was wearing a dress and wig when he went to the bar Aug. 31, 2013.
The order obtained Monday says the bouncer turned Marzano away because his appearance didn’t match the one on his driver’s license. But regulators determined that the bar wrongly favors those with a masculine appearance because its dress code bars high heels, wigs and perfume.
A bar employee who answered the phone wouldn’t comment. Marzano says the order will help protect others from discrimination.
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Read more: http://www.salon.com/2014/08/04/colorado_bar_discriminated_against_man_in_drag/
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Name: DonGender: Male
Hometown: Massachusetts
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Member since: Sat Sep 1, 2012, 03:28 PM
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