Thursday Open Thread

Filed in National by on May 20, 2010

Welcome to the Thursday edition of your semi-daily open thread. As always, the floor is yours. Spill your digital thoughts below.

Alright, I am talking about Sue Lowden for two days in a row. She’s finally decided on her strategy to deal with her chicken barter remarks. Deny, deny, deny. Watch this video of her being interviewed in a candidate forum:

No I didn’t, yes you did. What is she, 5?

George Rekers, the long-time anti-gay crusader who hired a male prostitute to “carry his luggage” may have put a lot of court cases in jeopardy. Rekers is a professional anti-gay witness:

But legal experts say the scandal may affect more than Dr. Rekers’s reputation. They say it places obligations on those who have relied on Dr. Rekers to inform the court in at least one continuing case to modify or withdraw their arguments.

“Each lawyer must tell the court if he comes to know that one of his witnesses has given ‘false’ testimony,” said Stephen Gillers, an expert in legal ethics at New York University. That could come into play if the expert is discredited, he added.

We already know that Florida AG Bill McCollum hired Rekers to testify in favor of Florida’s gay adoption ban (which was ruled unconstitutional). Rekers has also testified in other cases.

In the November 2008 decision declaring the Florida gay adoption law unconstitutional, Judge Cindy Lederman of Miami-Dade Circuit Court wrote that Dr. Rekers was “motivated by his strong ideological and theological convictions that are not consistent with the science,” and not “credible.” Mr. McCollum, a Republican who is running for governor, has appealed that decision. In papers filed well before the scandal broke, he denounced the court’s “wholesale disregard” of testimony by Dr. Rekers and another expert, calling the decision “arbitrary,” stressing Dr. Rekers’ qualifications and stating that “the trial court entirely discredited him based on his religion.”

To Professor Gillers, Mr. McCollum is now obligated both as a lawyer and as a public official to alert the appellate court. “It is not enough for the attorney general simply to refrain from relying on the testimony in his brief and argument,” he said. “He has an affirmative duty to speak up.”

Rekers did not testify in the California Prop 8 trial but his work was cited by other “expert” witnesses in the trial.

Tags:

About the Author ()

Opinionated chemist, troublemaker, blogger on national and Delaware politics.

Comments (26)

Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed

  1. MJ says:

    Tom Corbett channels Joe McCarthy. I guess it’s OK to try and bully your critics, sort of what Dumbya and Cheney did during their 8-year reign.

  2. donviti says:

    so i’m curious to see what the obama sheep feel over the miranda rights of us citizens being subject to review…but the Arizona law infringes on our basic level of fairness.

    You know, it’s really amazing to me that Obama can get away with this kind of bullshit.

  3. Sarah Palin is an idiot. She thought Arlen Specter was running against Republican Tim Burns in PA-12.

    Hannity went on to talk about “the race that I am most interested in tonight… and that is the Pennsylvania 12 race. And here you have John Murtha’s old seat, he held for all these years – two-to-one Democrat to Republican in the district. It’s literally neck and neck… If Burns pulls this off tonight, what would that say to you?”

    Palin’s answer revealed that she thought Burns was running against Specter: “I think Burns will pull this off tonight. And just like the Rand-slide that we were just talking about, you’re gonna see Burns, having this representation of a smaller, smarter government, getting the economy back on the right track with limited overreach of the governments (sic). That’s what Burns stands for. And, you know, Specter, he was a representative of bigger government, even when he was within the Republican Party. And people are saying, ‘When you consider what it is that he stood for and voted on and represented, enough is enough.’ That’s not what our country needs today. We need someone like Tim Burns in there. And you’re gonna see that via vote today with the electorate.”

  4. cassandra m says:

    Rand Paul goes on Rachel Maddow to pontificate on how the Civil Rights Act should scale back to let business owners discriminate and then the fun begins.

    Jim DeMint can’t quite figure out how to react to that or Paul’s non-endorsement of the ADA and Paul takes a couple of pretty big steps towards true glibertarianhood by smelling the politics and going for overkill on the “retraction”.

    Fun and Games.

  5. Yeah, I’m going to write about Rand Paul when I get a chance. He’s having a spectacular implosion today. An old story is now getting rehashed – Paul’s former spokesman had to resign after it was revealed that on MLK Day the spokesman had posted “Happy N****r Day.”

    I don’t know why people keep saying those Tea Partiers are racist.

  6. pandora says:

    I predict many, many Baby Paul posts. Talk about a gift that keeps on giving.

    You know, I wondered what it would take to make the GOP run for the hills. Ah yes, Libertarianism is all fun and games until someone threatens to take it out of La La Land and put it into practice.

    Pass the popcorn.

  7. anonone says:

    Don’t y’all miss the Delaware Libertarians coming out to sing the praises of repealing civil rights legislation? It is part of the Libertarian platform, after all.

    Where’s Newton and Nixon? Nixon even published a post singing the praises of Rand Paul a while back.

  8. anon says:

    Rand Paul thinks it’s OK for an employer to pay overtime only to white people.

    He is a Kook-itarian.

  9. anonone says:

    Actually, that is pure Libertarian dogma.

  10. Ooh, more on Rand Paul (I should really save these for my post, oh well).

    In a May 30, 2002, letter to the Bowling Green Daily News, Paul’s hometown newspaper, he criticized the paper for endorsing the Fair Housing Act, and explained that “a free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin.” (Hat tip: Page One Kentucky.)

  11. anonone says:

    DV, none of the DL posters will blog about any real substantive criticism of Obomba.

  12. anonone says:

    BTW, his Rand Paul’s dad Ron Paul published some truly vile racist stuff in his newsletter back in the early 90’s. He only renounced it after he began running for President by saying he didn’t write his own newsletter.

  13. You are already misrepresenting him Cass, which is what I expect. Don’t have a story make it up. He said the issue was settled. He did not say the law should be scaled back. The statement had to do with whether the focus should have been on repealing Jim Crow laws as opposed to also enforcing rules on private businesses. The real issue is simple should the federal government have the power to regulate purely intrastate businesses. On that he said he would prefer another approach. That is neither extreme or racist.

    It is a legitimate point of debate though one that really doesn’t matter because he wouldn’t support reopening the civil rights law and neither does anyone else. The John Birch Society considers it a settled issue.

  14. anonone says:

    Here is Rand Paul misrepresenting himself:

    “a free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin.”

    Rand Paul

  15. cassandra_m says:

    He said the issue was settled. He did not say the law should be scaled back.

    You have already been told that you –specifically — are in no position to be here making any accusations of misrepresenting anybody. Until you join the reality-based community, your assessments of who is misrepresenting anyone here mean absolutely nothing.

    But if you had actually looked at the interview that he gave to Maddow BEFORE he had to walk all of that back with nods to “settled law”, you would have known that.

  16. P.Schwartz says:

    Dem governor cracks down on illegal children (Richardson)
    American Thinker ^ | May 20, 2010 | Russ Vaughn

    As everyone knows the only people in America who are so heartless as to report illegal immigrants to the immigration cops are evil conservative Republicans like those profiling fascists in Arizona, right?

    Right?

    Well not so fast there, Bubba.

    Left wing wunderkind, Bill Richardson, Democrat and waiting-for-indictment corruptocrat, lame-duck governor of New Mexico, has ordered the state department of children’s and family services to begin reporting illegal immigrant children to ICS.

    Oh the horror of it all! Reported by the NY Times, right? Well, no. Reported by the Washington Post and the LA Times, right? Well, er, ah, no. But the Associated press picked it up and broadcast it to the world, right? Uh, well, no. Sissy Chrissie Matthews is feeling a vibration all the way up to his prostate gland, right? Well, not so’s you’d notice, but then with that guy…

    Don’t bother Googling for it because it’s not there, but it was at the top of the front page of the Albuquerque Journal yesterday (subscription only – free story here courtesy of the Las Cruces Sun-News). Does this thundering national media silence tell you anything about who controls the flow of information in this world?

    That’s right folks, it’s going unreported because the edict came from one of the lapdog media’s favorite also-rans, Big Bill Richardson, failed governor, failed commerce secretary and failed human being. Had a Republican governor done this there would be howling calls for boycotting New Mexico, which, when you think about it being next door to Arizona, would give outraged liberals an easy two-fer.

    We all know there’s no hypocrisy in liberalism, right?

  17. P.Schwartz says:

    CNN Interview

    May 19, 2010
    WOFF BLITZER: So if people want to come from Guatemala or Honduras or El Salvador or Nicaragua, they want to just come into Mexico, they can just walk in?

    CALDERON: No. They need to fulfill a form. They need to establish their right name. We analyze if they have not a criminal precedent. And they coming into Mexico. Actually…

    BLITZER: Do Mexican police go around asking for papers of people they suspect are illegal immigrants?

    CALDERON: Of course. Of course, in the border, we are asking the people, who are you?

    And if they explain…

    BLITZER: At the border, I understand, when they come in.

    CALDERON: Yes.

    BLITZER: But once they’re in…

    CALDERON: But not — but not in — if — once they are inside the — inside the country, what the Mexican police do is, of course, enforce the law. But by any means, immigration is a crime anymore in Mexico.

    BLITZER: Immigration is not a crime, you’re saying?

    CALDERON: It’s not a crime.

    BLITZER: So in other words, if somebody sneaks in from Nicaragua or some other country in Central America, through the southern border of Mexico, they wind up in Mexico, they can go get a job…

    CALDERON: No, no.

    BLITZER: They can work.

    CALDERON: If — if somebody do that without permission, we send back — we send back them.

    BLITZER: You find them and you send them back?

    CALDERON: Yes.

  18. More Obama assassination fantasies.

    The Secret Service is investigating a bar in West Allis, Wisconsin after a bartender burned President Obama in effigy in front of a cheering crowd. A video obtained by local NBC affiliate TMJ4 shows a bartender at the Yester Years Pub and Grill burning a small figurine of Obama “with what looks like duct tape” wrapped around its neck. The crowd can be heard laughing and shouting in the background. Watch TMJ4’s report:

  19. MJ says:

    David just wants a seat in the back of the bus. And he really doesn’t want to eat at the same lunch counter as everyone else. Delusional David is trying to be Dover’s version of Ward Connerly.

  20. anonone says:

    Burning in effigy is political speech, not a threat.

  21. jason330 says:

    Fortunately rhe Secret Service doesn’t think so.

  22. anonone says:

    Then I am sure that you must have applauded when the SS herded Bush protestors into “free speech zones” because all of Amerika is no longer a free speech zone.

    I hope your enjoying the Obomba police state.

  23. anon says:

    Korn kickoff for auditor on Saturday.

  24. jason330 says:

    Carper stabs Banking Sugar Daddies in Back – Votes for tepid Senate Reform Bill

    Speaking of Carper – Where are the Delaware Teabaggers when you need them. Carper’s amendment was a naked federal power grab, restricting state attorneys general from going after credit card usury.

    http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/banking-financial-institutions/97729-white-house-fights-back-against-dem-amendment-to-wall-st-bill

  25. P.Schwartz says:

    silly anonone, it’s only political speach (and patriotic at that) when you are burning Uncle Sam, Bush/hitler or Chainy.

    Burning the US or Isreali flag is cool, but anything else it teabagger violence.