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Slashback: Justice, Settlement, Cosmos
"It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration ..." zarathud writes "Logan Darrow Clements has begun the application process to build a hotel on land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter. This could be allowed under Eminent Domain after the controversial 5-4 Kelo vs. New London ruling which Souter voted for. Justice Souter's home currently occupies the land. The planned hotel, to be called 'The Lost Liberty Hotel,' will include a public exhibit on the loss of American Freedom. 'This is not a prank,' said Clements, 'The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development.'"
Call everyone Sir, just to be safe. Yesterday we posted an item about the first self-proclaimed Jedi in Parliament; here are two updates to the already-updated story. Americans (like me!) may still be baffled by the complications of the honorifics involved.
Stefan Magdalinski writes "If you want to link to the actual speech, then can I suggest you use our volunteer-run, open source, reimplementation of parliament's awful website?"
And reader Russell Dewhurst writes "All MPs (Members of Parliament) are called the Hon. Member for X... If the MP for Copeland were a Privy Councillor he would be the _Rt_ Hon (Right Honourable) Member for Copeland. So the original article was correct, and the correction was wrong, I'm afraid!"Thanks to everyone who's weighed in on this.
MozNews interviews Daniel Glazman, NVu Lead Dev bluephone writes "Now that NVu 1.0 has been officially released, we at MozillaNews asked Daniel Glazman to take some time to give us another interview to book-end our first interview with him, early in NVu's development. He was gracious as always, and fast! Read the interview for unavoidable laws, plans for the future of NVu and Daniel, and even news about his company's upcoming release."
Tom Clancy, eat my shorts. hydraa16 writes "The Cosmos 1 Solar Sail failed to reach orbit. This video shows its loading in a Russian Delta III Submarine, and its launch in the cold Barents Sea!"
If you accidentally blew up your DeskStar, the Empire will repay you. hardreset writes "Remember the day when the IBM 75GXP was the hot new drive? Then ... do you remember the day(s) it bit the dust? If you still have the serial number(s), you may be eligible for a $100/drive settlement from IBM. The settlement page is over here, claim form is here, and the Inquirer article is here. For those of you wearing tinfoil hats, you don't have to send in your drive. For those of you who work for IBM or live overseas, don't bother. If you're hoarding these drives, it might be a good payday!"
You'd have to pay me a lot to listen to the results. Kethinov writes "Because Trent Reznor's release of The Hand That Feeds was a spectacular success, he's decided to release more free musical source material for remixing and listening delight. The new release is another track off his new album With Teeth entitled Only. Interestingly, now he's offering multiple formats for the material instead of just Apple's Garageband format. So now non Apple users too can join the fun."
Its great to see Nvu (the Mozilla XHTML/HTML editor project) coming of age. A free XHTML able WYSIWYG editor is a tool many starting out building webpages could find useful, and begin to bring standards compliant design & creation in from the ground up, not just for professionals and those who choose to learn how to hand code clean and compliant code. I can only see this as a good step forward for compliant markup.
Business Voyeur
Hell yeah, build a hotel on his land, this is america and those in power should be held to at least the same level as those they enforce the law upon!
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
The supreme court does not interpret law. The supreme court interprets the consitution and determines if a law is valid within the bounds set in the consitution. In this case, there has been a decent case made that the law in new london (which is in ct, not nj, by the way) impedes on a citizen's freedom from unlawful seizure (they've done nothing wrong but are having their house taken, unless you consider not making enough money to kick you into the next tax bracket 'wrong').
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Many people do not realize that supream court justices can be impeached.
Section. 2.
Section. 3
Section. 1.
Amendment V
Since clearly those 5 justices cannot read, congress has a duty to remove them from their office. I know many of you don't like the idea of Bush choosing 5 justices (perhaps more, there are rumors of retirement), but that is better than letting these 5 sit on then court. Write your congressmen and make it so.
Actually they don't need to be removed from office, just a reminder that the constitution governs this land may be enough.
The justices in the Dred Scott case were just interpreting the law too. It doesn't mean they made the right decision
Yeah, but normally when a Supreme Court decision is overturned one of 2 things has happened
1. A new constitutional change has been made
2. The original decision was one that a single case (or at best, multiple cases decided by a single incarnation of the Court) decided, and the Court decides that the decision was incorrect.
It's very unusual for the Court to overturn over a century of legal precedent in which multiple Courts have ruled the same way, unless there has been a legal or constitutional change.
And in this case, we have decisions reaching back over a century authorizing the use of eminent domain power to sieze land for transfer to another private party. (e.g. Berman v. Parker, 1954; Luxon v. North River Bridge, 1894; Wayne County v. Hathcock, 1981). Overturning that would have been a much bigger deal than this decision, which simply affirmed the status quo.
If you're interested in becoming a property owner, many states (e.g. Michigan) have their own laws in place to prevent such seizures, and have had those for decades--indeed, such state protections served the land owner in Wayne County v. Hathcock well, after it had been held that there was no US Constitutional protection.
In short, I think such seizure suck. But there really isn't anything in the constitution preventing them, they were almost certainly anticipated by the Founding Fathers, they've been legitimate for years, and I don't understand why people are surprised by this ruling (which merely upholds the status quo) or particularly angry at this Court and not earlier ones that decided the same way.
And the fastest place to fight this is probably in the state legislatures, though obviously a Constitutional amendment is always a possibility.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
It's not moronic. It's within the law of the land as interpreted by the very justice being targetted. You can't proclaim this unjust because, after all, it's what has been determined as legal if it goes successfully forward.
The justices interpret the law as you say. And you know what? They are also subject to those laws. So if an effort succeeds, it would be deemed as such within the limits of the law. It would be legal, just as it was (determined to be) legal for the state to take those people's homes.
It's funny you find this outrageous, because it is EXACTLY what the justices allowed themselves. Targetting them is not only legal, but also in all senses of the word, just. You disagree? Well, that is how those people felt when their land was taken for private use by the state.
"Do you shoot the Generals for fighting a war?"
Uhh...yeah. You're the idiot if you think otherwise. A general is the leader of the soldiers and is a high value asset in a war effort. What freakin world do you live in that you don't go after the generals if you can?
Unless you mean it's a war I oppose to but living in the country that was on the offensive, but I doubt that's what you really meant since I wouldn't be shooting the pro-war politicians either, just voting him out of office or otherwise suitably removing him from power. That may require a bullet, but many times other means work well.
btw, I'd like to hear how your argument backing this decision melds with the 4th and 5th amendment. 4th amendment protects home and property against seizure, seizure usually meaning without due process and/or without compensation (expropriation to some).
The 5th amendment further reiterates this, stating property cannot be removed except by due process. A municipal board or similar is not due process regarding private property for private use. A jury is.
Further, you seem confused about eminant domain. Eminant domain is taking of private land for public use. This was understood back then, and why only public use was mentioned (the reason being to put the additional condition that just compensation for such takings was insured). Taking private land for private use is NOT eminant domain.
The Framers or 1st Congress didn't just up and forget to handle private property for private use; not only was it not eminant domain, private property otherwise was protected by 2 amendments. By your argument, the lack of addressment of private property in the constitution also means the government could take it without compensation whatsoever, since it would not fall under for public use. Careful what you back.
It was 2 "Dems." 3 of 7 appointed by Republicans voted to take your rights away, too. Make sure you get your facts straight before you go lecturing on the facts. Anyway, you completely missed his point.
No, that's not it. The Supreme Court does *interpret* the law. The reason that they have this power to declare laws "unconstitutional" is that they seized this power a number of years ago. There was a legal dispute and they declared some obscure law unconstitutional to set a precedent. They tried to give everyone involved what they wanted so no one would challenge their decision. The result is that the Supreme Court has this broad-ranging power that we see it exercise today.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Q. What if I no longer have a receipt or any other supporting documentation?
A. You must produce a receipt or other supporting documentation evidencing the purchase of an eligible 75GXP hard disk drive, or you will not receive any Settlement Benefits.
Well let's see. I bought my deskstar in 2000, let me grab my file for that year... Ah yes, it's here under D, next to the receipt for that donut I bought.
Seriously I will be impressed if anyone can provide the required "supporting documentation." How lame is it to win a lawsuit that will apply to almost nobody?
Crappy thing is, I seriously have a stack of these deskstars sitting here. My last one went bad not even two weeks ago.
or else!