Month: June 2014

Last SCOTUS: Riley v. California.

This one (Riley v. California) from yesterday was about whether or not the cops can just scroll through your cell phone without a warrant.  Spoiler warning: not just ‘no.’ Hell, no.  And it wasn’t even close:

With today’s decision, the Court displayed a unanimity that was somewhat uncharacteristic for such a momentous case on an issue like privacy: only Justice Samuel Alito wrote separately, although he agreed with the result in the case and much of the Court’s reasoning.

Yeah, 9-0 decisions typically happen for a reason. And often that reason is to, ah, clarify things on a particular topic.

Via Instapundit.

SCotUS: Free speech win in McCullen v. Coakley.

The short version: at question in McCullen v. Coakley was whether a Massachusetts law keeping abortion protestors farther away than 35 feet from an abortion center was a violation of those protesters’ free speech, given that said law exempted abortion clinic personnel.  The court agreed, 9-0, that (as SCOTUSblog put it, via Legal Insurrection) “The Court makes clear that states can pass laws that specifically ensure access to clinics. It holds that states cannot more broadly prohibit speech on public streets and sidewalks. ”  As the Boston Globe noted, “The high court’s justices had indicated when they heard the case in January that the state needed to find other ways to address safety concerns and prevent the opponents from impeding access to clinics.” That’s Supreme-Court speak for Fix it or we will; and you will hate how we fix it, because we find that that’s a great way to keep us from getting the dumber cases for review. Continue reading SCotUS: Free speech win in McCullen v. Coakley.

SCotUS: Barack Obama’s recess appointments were invalid.

Shocking and surprising absolutely nobody at all.  Leon Wolf did an excellent job at expressing his scorn for President Barack ‘I’m a Constitutional Scholar!’ Obama’s ridiculous position that the Senate is in recess when the President says that it is; I’ll merely add that the President was one Justice away from having the entire situation blow up for every President from now on, forever.  Because Barack Obama seems determined to be the guy who makes sure that Presidents can’t have nice things, apparently.

Should America be doing more to fake an interest in soccer?

This is not me mocking the game, per se – it’s just that we’re apparently doing fairly well in the World Cup, so far, and eventually we might actually win one. If and when we do, we should give serious consideration to figuring out how to pretend that America actually cares as much about this accomplishment as the rest of the planet apparently does. Because it’s going to severely annoy every other country in the world if we shrug it off; including the countries we actually like. A little judicious hypocrisy wouldn’t hurt, here.

Just a thought.

Moe Lane

PS: At the very least: if we ever do win a World Cup we should probably agree among ourselves to not needle the rest of the planet (like we do, cheerfully) by calling it ‘soccer.’  At least for a few days. A week, at the most.

HAHAHA! (Via @RennaW)

Oh, that’s good.

A massive sinkhole that swallowed eight prized sports cars at the National Corvette Museum has become such a popular attraction that officials want to preserve it — and may even put one or two of the crumpled cars back inside the hole.

Makes perfect sense to me, really.

Via

The EPA… has had some convenient hard drive crashes, too.

Uh-huh.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the IRS share a problem: officials say they cannot provide the emails a congressional committee has requested because an employee’s hard drive crashed.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy confirmed to the House Oversight Committee Wednesday that her staff is unable to provide lawmakers all of the documents they have requested on the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, because of a 2010 computer crash.

The hard drive in question was assigned to Philip North. And this is the part… this is just the part.

Uh- huh.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

‘It’s beginning to look a lot like… 2006.’

OK, so it doesn’t scan.  The quality of my political filking is probably not the Democrats’ worst problem right now, though:

I could spend several hundred words going over that graph of Barack Obama’s poor, and widening, approval rating – but I’d just be coming up with new and different ways to say That approval rating really sucks for the Democrats. Which it does. And that’s going to translate into bad news for a lot of downticket races If you look over at RCP right now they’re forecasting no net change in the gubernatorial tally. Which is relevant because the Democrats have high hopes of gaining Florida, Maine, and Pennsylvania; it’s just that they’re about to lose Arkansas, Hawaii, and Illinois. And, for that matter: the Democrats lost a lot of governorships last time. They probably would have preferred to get the Midwest back, honestly.

Anyway. Nice place to be, four months or so out. Nice place to be.

The surprisingly unsurprising Florida-19 race.

And it truly is at least a little surprising:

Republican Curt Clawson cruised to an easy victory in Florida’s 19th Congressional District on Tuesday in a special election to replace former Rep. Trey Radel, who resigned his seat in January after he was convicted of cocaine possession.

With all precincts reporting, Clawson had earned 67 percent of the vote. Democrat April Freeman had 29.3 percent to finish second, while Libertarian Ray Netherwood finished a distant third with 3.7 percent.

You would expect that an R+11 district would be favored to put a Republican in office, but there’s that entire ‘convicted of cocaine possession’ with regard to the previous officeholder.  I remember that, back in 2006 and 2008, such a revelation would end up being slopped all over not only the disgraced politicians, but all of the politician’s partisan colleagues (and the party as a whole) as well. I guess it really isn’t going to be 2006 or 2008 this election cycle, after all.

At least, not for us.

2016 GOP convention down to Cleveland and Dallas.

Personally, I expect it to be Cleveland.

Ohio will just be too important in 2016. As usual, sure, but in 2016 there’s going to be a GOP governor (unless John Kasich implodes, which so far he’s shown precisely zero signs of doing). Besides, Cleveland is pretty danged… undramatic. If you assume that the GOP is going to run a Return to Normalcy campaign (safe assumption), a lack of drama would be ideal.

Also: dear God but Texas gets hot in the summer.