Rosa Parks would be pleased

I was stunned to read that the Empire State of the South was imposing a de facto poll tax. Glad to see some judges remember the civil rights struggle well enough not to want to go back to those days.

Las Vegas SUN: Court Blocks Ga. Photo ID Requirement:

ATLANTA (AP) –
A federal appeals court Thursday refused to let the state enforce a new law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls.

Earlier this month, a federal judge barred the state from using the law during local elections next month, saying it amounted to an unconstitutional poll tax that could prevent poor people, blacks and the elderly from the voting. The state asked the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to lift the stay, but the court declined.

Under the law, voters could show a driver’s license, or else obtain a state-issued photo ID at a cost of up to $35.

depends on how you define activism

According to the NYTimes OpEd page, it seems the judges most likely to pronounce an act of Congress to be unconstitutional are those generally defined as Conservative. From the birth of the nation until 1858 — 67 years — the Court struck down congressional legislation twice. The next 133 years saw occurrences about every 2 years. Since 1991, with the “Reagan Court” the justices have made 64 such decisions.

So what is judicial activism, anyway? My favorite definition of morality is the fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time: this sounds like more of the same.

So Who Are the Activists? – New York Times:

How often has each justice voted to strike down a law passed by Congress?

Declaring an act of Congress unconstitutional is the boldest thing a judge can do. That’s because Congress, as an elected legislative body representing the entire nation, makes decisions that can be presumed to possess a high degree of democratic legitimacy. In an 1867 decision, the Supreme Court itself described striking down Congressional legislation as an act ‘of great delicacy, and only to be performed where the repugnancy is clear.’ Until 1991, the court struck down an average of about one Congressional statute every two years. Between 1791 and 1858, only two such invalidations occurred.

Of course, calling Congressional legislation into question is not necessarily a bad thing. If a law is unconstitutional, the court has a responsibility to strike it down. But a marked pattern of invalidating Congressional laws certainly seems like one reasonable definition of judicial activism.

Since the Supreme Court assumed its current composition in 1994, by our count it has upheld or struck down 64 Congressional provisions. That legislation has concerned Social Security, church and state, and campaign finance, among many other issues. We examined the court’s decisions in these cases and looked at how each justice voted, regardless of whether he or she concurred with the majority or dissented.

We found that justices vary widely in their inclination to strike down Congressional laws. Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was the most inclined, voting to invalidate 65.63 percent of those laws; Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, was the least, voting to invalidate 28.13 percent. The tally for all the justices appears below.

Thomas 65.63 %
Kennedy 64.06 %
Scalia 56.25 %
Rehnquist 46.88 %
O’Connor 46.77 %
Souter 42.19 %
Stevens 39.34 %
Ginsburg 39.06 %
Breyer 28.13 %

One conclusion our data suggests is that those justices often considered more ‘liberal’ – Justices Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens – vote least frequently to overturn Congressional statutes, while those often labeled ‘conservative’ vote more frequently to do so. At least by this measure (others are possible, of course), the latter group is the most activist.

Lying is not a technicality

From a letter to the editor I sent last week: they replied with a
query for contact info which usually means they are going to run
it.

The lies didn’t start with I. Lewis Scooter Libby
and his false testimony and it’s plain they won’t end there.

But regardless of your political affiliations or your feelings about
the administration’s conduct, lying under oath is not acceptable.
We expect no less from school children, after all.

Instead of focusing on whether or not perjured testimony was justified
— I can think of no case where it would be — we should ask why
Libby lied? Who or what was he protecting? That is what Patrick
Fitzgerald will discover, no matter how much sand is kicked in his
face, as he so aptly put it.

There must be a reason why someone would dishonor their oath of
office and the oath to tell the truth to the federal grand jury:
who are they serving, if not their country?

Apple sells a million video downloads in 20 days

Apple sells a million video downloads in 20 days:

Apple just sent out a press release announcing that they’ve sold more than one million video downloads through the iTunes Music Store (they know as well as we do that sooner or later they’re going to have to change that name).

iTunes Media Store, anyone?

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one a day

Flickr: JPG Magazine: 1 a day, no borders, originals only:

About JPG Magazine

JPG Magazine is a quarterly printed magazine of brave new photgraphy. It’s for people who love imagemaking without attitude – the kind of photography you get when you love the moment more than the camera. It’s for photographers who have found themselves online, sharing their work, and would like to see that work in print. More info about JPG.

We here at JPG love Flickr, so we started this group to discuss the magazine, the themes, your submissions, and anything else we can think of. But please note, posting an image here is not a submission. To submit your work to JPG, please see the submission info at jpgmag.com.

Could be an excuse to carry the camera around more.

it’s that time of year

National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo:
2005 Participant

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing.

entropy

More entropy at work.

My DSL line is being flaky: actually my landline phone service is at fault. I ended up moving the DSL modem/interface into another room and pulling cable back to the Airport. Of course, I have an Airport that dates back to the 20th Century with just one Ethernet jack, so I had to leave the wired network offline and just support wireless connections. This of course meant that this website was offline, and anything hanging off the wired side of things — like my iTunes music collection or printing — was also unavailable.

Things seems normal now, so all is back as it should be.

I am looking into getting a newer Airport Extreme (with two Ethernet jacks and possibly an Extreme card: I have one in the iBook but have never knowingly used it in an 802.11g network). Power-over-Ethernet sounds like a good idea; I guess I had forgotten they offered that. Though the used/eBay market may not yield one that snazzy.

For reasons unknown, Google AdSense cashed me out today, paying me the $60 I earned. That will help.