AMERICA'S IMPERIAL COURTS

A list of just some recent and appalling usurpations of power by the courts -- from Qando.

* A Federal Judge in Missouri ordered Kansas City to raise property taxes in order to pay for his court-ordered remedies. Several state courts are now embroiled in similar controversies over court-ordered tax increases.

* By invoking a non-existent "right" to privacy, the courts have increasingly legislated social outcomes from the bench, including finding a right to abortion in the 14th Amendment, and most recently, a right to homosexual marriage in some jurisdictions such as Hawaii and Massachussets.

* Federal Courts have repeatedly struck down voter referenda, such as Prop 209 in California, that ended affirmative action through race-based classifications, or Prop 187, which would have denied taxpayer benefits to illegal immigrants. Federal courts in Washington overturned a state referendum to ban assisted suicide.

* Federal Courts have ruled that states may not compose their state senate of representatives from geographical districts, but must proportionally represent the state's population. Essentially this says that it is unconstitutional for states to fashion their legislatures in the same manner that the Constitution requires the national legislature to be composed.

What lots of people fail to realize is that these judgments have happened only because Congress has let them happen. Congress can legislate to limit the power of the courts in any way it likes. Article III of the constitution says so. Maybe they will start to use that power now that there is all-round control of the U.S. government by the GOP. The courts are certainly doing all they can to push Congress into doing something.

Qando has much more

And the latest rubbish verdict: The Supreme Court "ruled that workers can sue for age discrimination without proving that the discrimination was intentional". So you can now be sued for something you did not know you were doing!

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ELSEWHERE

I was going through my old files looking for something else the other day when I came across an interesting Table in J. Ethnic Studies of 1982 (10:2), pp. 106ff. It uses NORC data to tabulate the ethnic composition of the U.S. population as of 1980. I am not certain what the precise NORC question was but the survey appears to have asked people what their predominant origins were. Germany was cited by 15.6%, England and Wales 11.9%, Ireland 9.5%, Italy 4.7%, Poland 2.8% and Scotland 2.6% -- giving only 24.7% for the entire British Isles. Blacks were 11.5%. So I think it will surprise many to hear that the U.S. population is more German than English. And if we take 80% of the England & Wales figure to get (VERY roughly) WASPs, we find that WASPSs are a minority of only 9.5%. These days of course all the percentages above would have been trimmed back by the Hispanic influx. But the whole set of results does make very stupid the current American code of referring to blacks and Hispanics as "minorities". WASPs are a minority too -- a smaller minority than blacks in fact. Maybe WASPs should demand affirmative action on their behalf! (For those not up with the jargon, WASPs are White Anglo-Saxon Protestants).

Illegal immigration: "We've reached a very strange moment in the immigration debate. On Wednesday, President Bush condemned a group of good American citizens worried about the breaking of U.S. immigration law. He condemned the organizers of Project Minuteman as 'vigilantes' even though they have broken no law and pledge not to do so. An hour or two later, Mr. Bush welcomed to his Texas ranch a man [Mexican President Vincente Fox] who insults the United States for its immigration policy and leads a government that routinely flouts U.S. immigration law. ... Mr. Bush's description of the Minutemen as vigilantes is a misreading of American history. The vigilantes were a lynch mob. The Minutemen are an expanded version of the Neighborhood Watch programs popular in many American cities. It's sad to see an American president roll out a royal welcome to a foreign dignitary so openly contemptuous of U.S. law, while simultaneously condemning Americans who are trying to help duly constituted authorities enforce the law."

If this guy were white he would be in jail, not still in his job "A federal jury in New Orleans yesterday determined that the city's first black district attorney discriminated against dozens of white employees in January 2003 by summarily replacing them with black employees days after he took office. The jury found that Eddie Jordan acted illegally but did not hold him personally responsible. The plaintiffs were awarded almost $1.8 million in back pay and damages. "What I wanted was a win. Money was not the issue," plaintiff Clemens Herbert told reporters. "He was trying to disguise racial discrimination through politics, and the jury saw through it.""

Moderate Muslims cheer bin Laden rebuke: "The condemnation of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda by the Islamic Commission of Spain on the first anniversary of the train bombings in Madrid that took 200 lives is making waves throughout the Muslim world. The Spanish commission's fatwa, or condemnation, follows other signs of the kind of public theological debate rarely seen in the Muslim world, openly challenging the dominance of Saudi Arabia's wealthy Wahhabi fanatics. One Islamic scholar even calls it a sign of 'a counter-jihad.' In a recent interview with the Qatari daily newspaper Al-Raya, for example, Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, the former dean of Shariah and law at the University of Qatar, urged his fellow Muslims to purge their heritage of fanaticism and adopt 'new civilized humane thought.'"

Leftists ignore history -- as usual: "Two years ago this week, the American invasion of Iraq was underway. Why had we gone to war? In the months leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, President Bush repeatedly gave his reasons. Saddam Hussein, he said on Oct. 7, 2002, "has tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States." ... The president had also made the case for taking action before the UN General Assembly on Sept. 12, 2002. "If we meet our responsibilities," he said, "the people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world. ... Isn't it odd that such clear and compelling justifications for the war and where it might lead have been largely forgotten in what passes for debate these days? Instead, the talking point we hear -- over and over -- is that the casus belli for the invasion was simply and exclusively Saddam's possession of stocks of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). That is usually followed by the assertion that since no such caches of WMD have been found, the war was unjustified and, it is customary to add in an outraged tone, based on a bald-faced "lie."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again -- this time in April Fool's mode

My latest post on MARXWORDS shows that Engels thought Aryans were superior.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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