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Sixth Circuit Gives The Thumbs Up To Federal Judge Who Belongs To Whites-Only Country Club

Oh gee clubs like this exist... Shocker!

The Code of Conduct for United States Judges unambiguously states that “[a] judge should not hold membership in any organization that practices invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin.” Nevertheless, a sharply divided Judicial Council of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 10-8 to permit a federal bankruptcy judge to remain a member of a country club that has no women or African Americans as full-fledged members:

The Judicial Council, made up of circuit and district judges in the four-state 6th District, voted 10-8 last month to dismiss the complaint. The memorandum written by Chief Judge Alice Batchelder spends little time discussing the merits of the contention that the Belle Meade County Club discriminates, instead focusing on Paine’s unsuccessful campaign to diversify the club.

“The record clearly supports (the) finding that the judge complained of engaged in long and sincere efforts to integrate the club in question. In the majority’s view, those efforts preclude a finding that he has engaged in misconduct,” she wrote.

An opinion by Circuit Judge Eric Clay, one of four separate written dissents, calls the club’s discrimination blatant, the court’s investigation amateurish and the majority’s interpretation of the code strained. Cole pointed to a section of the conduct code that calls for a judge to resign from a club if it fails to end its discriminatory practices within two years.

Setting aside the obvious blight on the judiciary’s reputation for fairness caused by a judge’s membership in a segregated club, there is no way to square the majority’s decision with the plain language of the law. The Code of Conduct’s official commentary provides that a judge must resign “in all events within two years of the judge’s first learning of” a club’s discriminatory practices, but the bankruptcy judge in this case remained a member through fifteen years of unsuccessful efforts to diversify the club.

Moreover, Chief Judge Batchelder is hardly suited to issue pronouncements on judicial ethics in light of her own questionable relationship with her ethical obligations as a judge. Batchelder serves on the board of a notorious oil-industry funded “junkets for judges” organization that provides expense-paid trips to western resorts where the judges are instructed on how to decide cases by industry representatives, and she has repeatedly refused to resign from this board despite an opinion from the federal judiciary’s ethics committee saying that federal judges have an ethical duty not to serve on it.

Batchelder also refused to recuse from a case where the Ohio Republican Party sought to prevent as many as 200,000 registered voters from having their votes counted, even though her husband — the current GOP Speaker of the Ohio House — had an obvious interest in the case as a GOP candidate for reelection.Oh gee clubs like this exist... Shocker! The Code of Conduct for United States... more

OrchidBlack
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Citizens Group Files Petition To Recall Power-Hungry Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) has been raising the ire of Michiganders across his state recently as he has rammed through his radical agenda. This agenda first consisted of advocating for and passing giant corporate tax cuts, continued with stripping many of the state’s public workers of collective bargaining rights with a Wisconsin-style law, then included proposing taxing seniors’ retirement income, and topped off with a possibly unconstitutional power grab that essentially gives him unlimited power to restructure city contracts.

This power grab — which essentially amounts to a form of financial martial law — has begun to manifest itself as Snyder has deployed “emergency financial managers” to cities across the state to unilaterally restructure those city’s financial agreements with their workforce. In Detroit, Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb announced that every single teacher in the city would be laid off, with few signs of how many will be re-hired once school starts in the fall. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow covered this unprecedented power grab on her show last night. Watch it: http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/20/rick-snyder-recall/

Now, one group of Michigan citizens that is standing up to Snyder and his radical remaking of his state is filing a petition to recall the governor. The group, called Michigan Citizens United, says the group is opposed to the new financial manager law and opposes Snyder’s tax cuts for businesses and tax increases on working people:

A group called Michigan Citizens United filed a petition seeking the recall of Gov. Rick Snyder with the Washtenaw County clerk’s office this morning. [...]

[Michigan Citizens United spokesman] Kramer said the group opposes the emergency manager law, among other policies of the governor. “We don’t like the tax decrease on corporations or the tax increase on Michigan families,” he said.

A Facebook page set up around the recall effort this week has already garnered 12,000 “Likes.” The group has set up a countdown clock to July 1 — the date that Snyder can legally face a recall election — on a website called FireRickSnyder.org.Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) has been raising the ire of Michiganders across his... more

V1ct0rCR0cc0
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10 months ago
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10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About Ronald Reagan

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sffsmessiah
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Bertrand Russell - Why I Am Not A Christian

A speech given by Bertrand Russell, March 6, 1927, National Secular Society, South... more

worrg
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1 year ago
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Think Progress » GRAPHIC: How The Chamber Gets Its Foreign Money

Faiz Shakir, a reporter at ThinkProgress.org has uncovered money donated to the... more

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1 year ago
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State GOP staffer sends racist image of Obama

Over the weekend, a GOP official in South Carolina posted a comment to Facebook... more

Jonathonish
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2 years ago
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Bill O'Reilly loses UPS over left-wing stalk-gate

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Diplomats Barred From Obama’s Berlin Speech, But Not McCain’s In Ottawa

The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Embassy in Berlin “instructed Foreign Service personnel stationed there not to attend Sen. Barack Obama’s [D-IL] public rally” in Tiergarten Park because the event is “‘partisan political activity‘ prohibited under its regulations for those serving overseas.”

The diplomats’ union objected to the ruling, calling it an “unnecessarily narrow interpretation” of the Foreign Affairs Manual. “The fact that you are working for the U.S. government overseas should not preclude political activity that you could engage in in the United States,” one retired senior Foreign Service officer said. But a State official explained the ruling:

But “we always maintain that no U.S. government Foreign Service person overseas should be seen to be advocating one side or the other,” State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy said, adding that “it has nothing to do with who” the candidate is.

“When a German sees you there, they’re not going to think, ‘Oh, he or she is on their off time.’ It’s ‘Oh, they are a Democrat, a Republican, an independent,’ God knows what,” Kennedy said in an interview.

But the ruling — which Kennedy admitted is unprecedented — appears to indicate a double standard from the State Department. Last June, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) delivered a speech to the Economic Club of Canada in Ottawa. The event was reportedly organized in part by U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins, whom President Bush appointed in 2005. But more than that, the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa confirmed to ThinkProgress that Wilkins also attended the event.

Not only did McCain make clear references to and critiques of Obama’s policy positions in the speech, but he also referred to his own presidential campaign six times.

Although both the McCain and Obama campaigns denied their respective speeches in Ottawa and Berlin were political, the State Department only prohibited diplomats from attending Obama’s event. The fact that Wilkins attended McCain’s speech without worries that he would “be seen to be advocating one side or the other,” undermines Kennedy’s justification for barring Foreign Service personnel from attending Obama’s speech.The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Embassy in Berlin “instructed Foreign... more

RyanBWylie
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3 years ago
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Al Quaeda may watch C-SPAN

Maybe I should start watching it

dhighsmith
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3 years ago
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The blogger's new mantra: I am a blogger, hear me roar!

The battle between the mainstream media and the blogs isn’t starting. It’s already over. The blogs won.

"The mainstream media has finally acknowledged what has been obvious for quite some time; that the internet web logs, or “blogs”, are here to stay. Far from being a passing fad, blogs like the present one existed before the word “blog” was coined to describe them. After nearly 14 years, and a readership that exceeds that of most city newspapers, the suggestion that blogs like this one are a passing fancy is at best wishful thinking.

The mainstream media has long attempted to dismiss blogs as somehow “unprofessional”, usually because blogs are not vast centers of commerce. Occasionally there will be a gratuitous hit piece, attempting to portray the internet as a haven for child molesters second only to the clergy. Always there is the implication that blogs should not be taken seriously because the bloggers don’t play the game by the same rules as the mainstream media.

With regard to that last one, it is true that the blogs don’t play by the same rules as the mainstream media. We have neither governments, owners, nor advertisers imposing rules on us. Media entities with huge overheads can be bought. Reporters will trade their souls for a ride on Air Force One. Private Blogs (as opposed to blogs set up by public relations firms pretending to be private blogs) running on spare change are immune to that sort of thing.

The mainstream media’s attitude is perhaps best typified by the story of Fox News and the Monsanto Growth Hormone. A team of reporters, Steve Wilson & Jane Akre, researched the effects of synthetic bovine growth hormone on cattle and discovered that a great deal of evidence exists that people who consume the meat or dairy products from treated cattle can suffer adverse health effects. Monsanto got wind of the story and together with dairy associations pressured Fox News to shut the story down. Fox News ordered the reporters to change the story, the reporters refused and Fox fired them. The reporters sued and LOST on appeal when the court ruled that since there is no law requiring the media to tell the truth about anything, the mainstream media is within their legal rights to fire reporters who refuse to lie! As a side note, that legal precedent is troubling when one realizes that our national elections are counted by a privately owned company, owned jointly by the TV networks (who are not bound by law to tell the truth) and not subject to either citizen or governmental oversight.

So, when it comes to regaining their credibility, the mainstream media has a huge mountain to climb. It should come as no surprise that the mainstream media, rather than start telling the truth, has decided that it is easier to try to discredit the bloggers. And so we get phony blogs operated by public relations firms and various intelligence agencies that put out total nonsense, such as pods on the 9-11 planes, so that the mainstream media can point to it on cue and say “See, we told you they were loons”, as Popular Mechanics did in their March 2005 issue.

But in the end, such dirty tricks only work if the public doesn’t know the tricks are there, and because of the blogs, the tired old cold-war-relic propaganda tricks are now widely known and easily spotted by the public at large. The numbers make it clear. Total viewership of the network news is in decline, while readership of the blogs is exploding. The public has become skeptical and now trusts only themselves to sort out what is true and what is false. That is a very healthy thing."

By Michael RiveroThe battle between the mainstream media and the blogs isn’t starting. It’s... more

Conniepae
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3 years ago
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Fitzgerald indicates he may be ready to testify on Rove’s efforts to push him out

Testimony we can trust! In the past, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has... more

Conniepae
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3 years ago
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Cheney to Run for President???

He isn't derious is he? I mean... is he??? From the article: "The... more

Justin_Gunn
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4 years ago
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Sixth Circuit Gives The Thumbs Up To Federal Judge Who Belongs To Whites-Only Country Club

Citizens Group Files Petition To Recall Power-Hungry Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder

10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About Ronald Reagan

Bertrand Russell - Why I Am Not A Christian

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The Left's Top 25 Journalists

State GOP staffer sends racist image of Obama

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Diplomats Barred From Obama’s Berlin Speech, But Not McCain’s In Ottawa

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Fitzgerald indicates he may be ready to testify on Rove’s efforts to push him out

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