Ronald Goldstock, an adjunct professor at NYU Law teaching Corruption and Corruption Control has been accused of, you guessed it, corruption.
Goldstock is also a member of the Waterfront Commission, which gives him a limited degree of special privileges. For instance, he is allowed to place a police placard in his car and park in otherwise illegal spots when conducting official business for the Commission.
On Tuesday, he left his car for over six hours on Washington Square South, under a No Parking Sign, with the police placard displayed. Upon returning to his car, a reporter asked what police business he was on, and Goldstock answered he had been attending the Vera Institute of Justice luncheon. The time was 5:50pm. Pretty late for a luncheon to end, but coincidentally only minutes after Goldstock's class let out. Oops.
If illegally parking your car doesn't sound like that big of a deal, consider that reserved parking spaces in New York City often cost more than many people's rent. Now try to figure out the value of having thousands of reserved spaces across the city. Also, it's just a dick thing to do.
In response to Obama's plan to not defend further challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, Newt Gingrich said a series of pretty stupid things. Not just normal foaming-at-the-mouth news pundit stupid, but utterly disconnected from reality and reason stupid:
Imagine that Governor Palin had become president. Imagine that she had announced that Roe versus Wade in her view was unconstitutional and therefore the United States government would no longer protect anyone’s right to have an abortion because she personally had decided it should be changed. The news media would have gone crazy. The New York Times would have demanded her impeachment
So, to start off this hypothetical, we have to assume that Obama had lost the presidency, and Palin is president. But...Palin didn't run for president, she was the vice-presidential nominee. I guess we have to assume that McCain also died within his first two years of office, an odd premise given that McCain is still alive and well.
Next, we have the weird scenario where a Supreme Court decision is declared unconstitutional. Not simply that Palin believes it was wrongly decided, but that it actually violates the Constitution. Everyone turn to Article III and try to figure this one out. ...I guess the claim would be there was not an actual case or controversy for the court to hear? Or that it improperly exercised original jurisdiction? Obviously not the case, but that's what it would take for a decision to be unconstitutional.
Finally, the metaphor doesn't even match up. Obama didn't strike down DOMA, he ordered the Justice Department to not defend it. The end result may be that DOMA is overturned by the courts, but that's a process that requires agreement between both the executive and judicial branches, and is not the executive striking down a law unilaterally.
On the other side of the debate we have the American Family Association. Oh, wait. That's actually the same side of the debate, just the sane, level headed side. The AFA's in-house attorney Pat Vaughn said that while the organization believes that marriage is a religious institution and can only exist between one man and one woman, DOMA is likely unconstitutional as a violation of the Full Faith and Credit clause.
Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman has announced that the New York courts will be slashing $100 million from their $2.7 billion budget.
The budget reduction will come from a hard freeze on new hires, reduction in administrative staff and judicial hearing officers, and by providing less support to town and village courts.
It is unclear whether the hard freeze would apply to judicial clerks. Because clerks typically only work for one or two years, without new hires, their ranks could be quickly depleted. Judicial clerks typically earn very little, while playing an important role in the judicial process. While it's nice to see a government body curtailing its spending, we hope the NY courts will recognize the bargain they get from their clerks.
A Pakistani judge has ordered that the trial of a CIA contractor Raymond Davis who shot two dead in Lahore can proceed. The question of Davis's diplomatic immunity is still pending before Pakistan's highest court, but this ruling means the case will proceed at the trial level in the mean time.
The lower court found that Davis produced no credible evidence to support his claim of diplomatic immunity, meaning...Pakistan has the same issues pending in multiple courts during trials.
Remember when Wikileaks revealed that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton had ordered our diplomats to spy on their foreign counterparts, and all the main stream news media was like "Good! We need to know the Russian consul's e-mail password!" ...Yeah, maybe that's going to come back and bite us in the butt. We're pretty sure diplomatic immunity is only extended to de jure diplomats.
