Yearly Archives: 2006

alito’s First Action

This entry was posted in Law on by

I’ll admit to raising an eyebrow a bit when I saw this:

Alito, handling his first case, sided with inmate Michael Taylor, who had won a stay from an appeals court earlier in the evening. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas supported lifting the stay, but Alito joined the remaining five members in turning down Missouri’s last-minute request to allow a midnight execution.

Granted that one vote does not a career or trend make but if you listened closely to a lot of the folks who opposed alito you’d almost think he was carrying a scythe himself.
I’ll be interested to read the reaction at Talkleft which had quite a few posts reporting on alito and the death penalty.
There’s more at Scotusblog.

Via Gary Farber.

Taxing the Constitution

This entry was posted in Constitution on by

I wonder just why these folks think this will pass constitutional muster(reg):

The governor’s tax-reform commission is considering a new state business tax of around 1 percent on the gross income or gross receipts of all corporations and partnerships on their business in Texas, the panel’s chairman said Tuesday.

Pretty standard looking at first glance, but check out this next bit:

“If you’re out of state and you sell products in Texas but you manufacture those products in California, you’re going to pay higher taxes than if you had built a plant in Texas and hired people in Texas,” he said. “If all your buildings and employees are sitting up in Chicago, you’re going to pay more.”

As noted in Granholm v Held:

(a) This Court has long held that, in all but the narrowest circumstances, state laws violate the Commerce Clause if they mandate “differential treatment of in-state and out-of-state economic interests that benefits the former and burdens the latter.” Oregon Waste Systems, Inc. v. Department of Environmental Quality of Ore., 511 U.S. 93, 99.

If this goes through as is it looks like it will make a few lawyers happy with their future work.

bush on Science

This entry was posted in Biology Health Care Science on by

Yea, I know that bush can’t make an intelligent statement on science but there are a lot of folks who probably nodded their heads knowingly when he spoke about bannng human cloning and more during last nights stump speach. For all of those and any of the rest of you who haven’t found your way via /. PZ has a bit of science education:

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.
George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.
He’s trusting that everyone will think he is banning monstrous crimes against nature, but what he’s really doing is targeting the weak and the ill, blocking useful avenues of research that are specifically designed to help us understand human afflictions. His message isn’t “We aren’t going to let the mad scientists make monsters!”, it’s “We aren’t going to let the doctors help those ‘retards.'”
Once again, the ignorance and the bigotry of the religious right wins out over reason and humanitarianism. I think I know who the real pig-men are.

Read it all!