Bump and Update: The pillorage continues.

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Ohio Supreme Court Justice Alice Robie Resnick got a D.U.I. last week. She refused to take a breath or blood test so she lost her license for a year. The cop used a portable breath teast on her which is not admissible in Ohio courts and it came out at .216, a number she immediately said had to be wrong.

Her conversation with the cop was recorded as standard procedure. What is not standard procedure is that the newspaper has released three videos of her interacting with police to the public on its website. Can she get a fair trial after this?

Her state-owned jeep was impounded and returned to the Court. She said she will make arrangements for someone to drive her to court in Columbus (from Toledo where she lives) at her expense.

There's an interesting op-ed in today's L.A. Times by Joan A. Lukey, former president of the Boston Bar Assn., positing that Bush's best bet to get a conservative, moral values driven nominee on the Supreme Court is by nominating Anthony Kennedy as Chief Justice to replace Rehnquist. In a nutsell, here is her reasoning.

The Republicans, however, do not have the 60 votes necessary to defeat a filibuster. He therefore needs a plan to circumvent the talkathon strategy. Most likely, this will take the form of giving with one hand while taking away with the other by putting forth two candidates at once.

By nominating a conservative but relatively centrist chief (i.e., a conservative who occasionally shifts toward the center, including on social issues), Bush will earn kudos, and political capital, for his restraint. With that additional capital, he can invest in his "values" agenda by filling the associate-justice vacancy with a staunch social conservative, a move that has a much more profound, and longer-lasting, effect on the ideological balance of the court.

Robert Chambers, who served 15 years in prison for manslaughter in what was known as "the preppy murder case," has rejected an offer to plead guilty and serve four months for possession of two straws and an empty tinfoil that had traces of drug residue on them. The maximum he could receive if he went to trial and lost is one year.

Cops stopped him in Harlem last year and ticketed him for driving with a suspended license. The straws and tinfoil turned up in a search of the back seat of his car.

Were they even his? Does anyone else go to jail in New York for drug residue? He and his lawyer are not talking.

Here is a bulletin from NarcoNews about Washington's claims that "narco-traffickers in Mexico are kidnapping and murdering U.S. citizens in Mexico and that law enforcers along the border are being targeted by the “cartels.”"

If you get caught running a red light or speeding in Phoenix, you can expect the cop to pull out an inkless fingerprinting pad along with his ticket book. Is this the shape of things to come?

The cops say it's voluntary, but how many motorists believe that? As the local ACLU spokesperson says,

"`The standard is not whether we have anything to hide... ``It's 'Does the government have a right to invade our privacy?'''

[link via CrimProf Blog and Grits for Breakfast.]

The Frieder Brothers of Cincinnati, long deceased, are receiving some well-deserved recognition for their heroism and good deeds in rescuing more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazis by bringing them to the Phillipines, which welcomed them and provided safe haven and employment.

The brothers from Cincinnati had taken turns going to Manila for two-year periods during the 1920s and '30s to run the Helena Cigar Factory, started by their father in 1918. While they were there, they established a Jewish Refugee Committee and worked with highly placed friends - U.S. High Commissioner of the Philippines Paul V. McNutt and Manuel L. Quezon, the first Philippine president - to help the mostly German and Austrian refugees get passports and visas, then find employment and homes in Manila.

by TChris

During February, PBS will air Slavery and the Making of America, a four-part series "documenting the history of American slavery from its beginnings in the British colonies to its end in the Southern states and the years of post-Civil War Reconstruction."

As one reviewer notes, it's worth reflecting on the disgrace of our past to better comprehend the present.

To have a real understanding of America -- its history and its values, its economic growth and social order -- it's important to know more about slavery in America and its development and dimensions. In the words of James Oliver Horton, a professor at George Washington University, "Slavery was no side show in American history -- it was the main event."

by TChris

Voting irregularities in the United States during the last two presidential elections produced angry commentary but little action. Not so in Iraq, where disenfranchised voters took to the streets.

Hundreds of Iraqis shouted slogans and waved Iraqi flags Sunday outside Baghdad's heavily guarded Green Zone to protest alleged irregularities they say prevented tens of thousands of people in Mosul from voting in last weekend's landmark elections. ... Electoral commission officials in Baghdad have acknowledged that many polling sites never opened Jan. 30 or opened late because of what they said were security concerns.

by TChris

Some members of Congress evidently believe the First Amendment doesn't apply to law schools. Representatives recently voted (by 327 to 84) to support a resolution encouraging the executive branch to challenge a Third Circuit decision that upheld the right of law schools to ban military recruiters from their campuses without losing federal funding. The military needs more lawyers, but some law schools prefer not to be associated with the military's discriminatory policies.

The 2-to-1 [court] decision relied in large part on a ruling in 2000 by the Supreme Court to allow the Boy Scouts to exclude gay scoutmasters. Just as the Scouts have a First Amendment right to bar gays, the appeals court said, law schools may prohibit groups that they consider discriminatory.

Representative Tammy Baldwin explains why the resolution (like the law withholding federal funds from campuses that "obstruct" military recruiting) is short-sighted.

"We should be looking at ways to strengthen our military and expand our resources," Ms. Baldwin said. "When will we have the debate about the harm caused by excluding many qualified, skilled Americans from serving in our military simply because they are gay or lesbian?"

Sharia law may be coming to Iraq. This certainly isn't what the Bush Administration had in mind for the new Iraqi government. But Bush-backed candidate Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is behind in the vote tally to the United Iraqi Alliance.

It was the country's most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who initially demanded speedy elections, knowing that a popular vote would bring to power a legitimate government run by the majority Shiites. When the Bush administration objected, the ayatollah forced the White House to back down by calling protesters into the streets of Iraq.

Update: (by TL)Buried in the latest Post article is this piece of information:

The judge awarded only $1 for damages, even though he could have given the plaintiff lost wages and the cost of new motion- sensor lights for her porch and more. She had itemized about $3,000 in all.

We're talking about Durango, Colorado. This is a town so sparsely populated that it doesn't even have taxis waiting at the airport to drive arriving passengers into town. What would motion-sensor lights attract besides wild animals? Did she want a scare every night? Lost wages? This is beginning to sound more and more like a scam.

Sabrina Harman is one of the remaining Abu Ghraib guards facing criminal charges over the abuse. The court has dropped the most severe charge against her, that of watching indecent acts. Her remaining charges involve:

She is accused of conspiring with other guards to abuse a group of detainees in early November 2003. Specific incidents of alleged abuse by Harman include writing "rapeist" on the leg of one detainee and forcing another to stand on a box with wires in his hands and telling him he would be electrocuted if he fell off.

She is also accused of taking photographs of a group of naked detainees who had been ordered to masturbate.

Who could forget this picture?