Just a blog from a gay man. My View. I hope you will enjoy
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Gay & Lesbian Cruising Weekend Mississippi
Monday, May 19, 2008
Wendy Wright President of Concerned Women is a Bigot
Speaking of woman haters Toby Keith
TRACE ADKINS A BIGOT & A WOMAN HATER
Sunday, May 18, 2008
AN OPEN LETTER TO ELLEN DEGENERES
LEGAL GAY MARRIAGE IN CALIFORNIA DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH
I am happy that the California State Supreme Court has made it legal to let gay citizens get married I have my doubts about that the law will last. In one shape or another this issue will end up in the United States Supreme Court. The latest Court Appointees by President Bush will overturn the law. The Republican Right Wing has hijacked our courts. This started with Reagan in the 1980's and that Man hated gay people.
The Republican party caters to the the stupid Christians of this country. Christians are ruining this country. I hope one day. President Reagan & President Bush has made being a liberal a bad word. Its about time the liberal made CHRISTIAN a bad name.
GAY BOOK REVIEW LANCE BASS OUT OF SYNC
Friday, May 16, 2008
Ellen Degeneres is getting married
Monday, May 12, 2008
WAVELAND & BAY ST LOUIS MS GAY CRUISING
ALEC BALDWIN HE HAS A TEMPER BUT WHO DOESN'T
Now Alec you have a temper like all of us. You owe the public nothing. No explanations is needed. Just remember to kinder when leaving a phone message.
Gay Men Kissing For Geroge W Bush
A REAL HERO IS GONE Irena Sendler
Sendler, among the first to be honored by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism, died at a Warsaw hospital, daughter Janina Zgrzembska told The Associated Press.
President Lech Kaczynski expressed "great regret" over Sendler's death, calling her "extremely brave" and "an exceptional person." In recent years, Kaczynski had spearheaded a campaign to put Sendler's name forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city's welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw's Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.
Seeking to save the ghetto's children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto — and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.
Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.
Records show that Sendler's team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.
"Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory," Sendler said in 2007 in a letter to the Polish Senate after lawmakers honored her efforts in 2007.
In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families — most of whom perished in the Nazis' death camps — Sendler wrote the children's real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.
When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate's yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded
IIt took a true miracle to save a Jewish child," Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by Sendler's team as a baby in 1942, recalled in an AP interview in 2007. "Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come."
The Nazis took her to the notorious Pawiak prison, which few people left alive. Gestapo agents tortured her repeatedly, leaving Sendler with scars on her body — but she refused to betray her team.
"I kept silent. I preferred to die than to reveal our activity," she was quoted as saying in Anna Mieszkowska's biography, "Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler."
Zegota, an underground organization helping Jews, paid a bribe to German guards to free her from the prison. Under a different name, she continued her work.
After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.
"A great person has died — a person with a great heart, with great organizational talents, a person who always stood on the side of the weak," Warsaw Ghetto survivor Marek Eldeman told TVN24 television.
In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics. Poland's communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983.
Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said Sender's "courageous activities rescuing Jews during the Holocaust serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind."
Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler was largely forgotten in her homeland until recent years. She came to the world's attention in 2000 when a group of schoolgirls from Uniontown, Kan., wrote a short play about her called "Life in a Jar."
It went on to garner international attention, and has been performed more than 200 times in the United States, Canada and Poland.
Sendler, born Irena Krzyzanowska, said she lived according to her physician father's teachings, arguing that "people can be only divided into good or bad; their race, religion, nationality don't matter."
She married Mieczyslaw Sendler but they divorced after the war's end. Sendler then married fellow underground activist Stefan Zgrzembski, and they had two sons and a daughter. One died a few days after birth. The second son, Adam, died of a heart failure in 1999.
Sendler is survived by her daughter and a granddaughterSometimes you can't win, sometimes you won't even come in second! As long as your trying.
PROOF THAT RONALD REAGAN WAS BAD FOR AMERICA
Named to an influential set of 13 regional courts, they were, as a group, young, brainy and bold. They became the legal vanguard of the Reagan agenda to lessen federal control — and protections — in American life.
Now, nearly 20 years after Reagan left office, many of them are at the height of their power. Their opinions routinely draw national attention. Eight are the chief judges of their circuit courts and in key positions on the U.S. judiciary's policy making committee. Many are superstars of the conservative movement, appearing as speakers at meetings of the arch-conservative Federalist Society and, in past years, landing on GOP presidents' short lists for Supreme Court appointments.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Indiana Supreme Court Idaho Hillary Rodham Clinton Commission President Reagan District of Columbia Circuit Civil Rights Act Second Amendment Federalist Society Cracker Barrel J. Harvie Wilkinson Laurence Silberman Charles Cooper Richard Posner Frank Easterbrook
Their influence is a testament to Reagan's promise to set a new course for the nation's law — a promise reverberating in the presidential race today. His lawyers sought nominees who would not try to solve society's problems and who would reverse the trend of judicial involvement in school integration, prison problems and the environment.
Reagan's enduring legacy shows the power a president has in shaping the law — not just at the Supreme Court, which gets so much attention, but also in the mid level appeals courts. Republican John McCain has pledged to appoint judges on the right, as Reagan did. Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton would try to reverse Reagan's legacy.
Washington lawyer Charles Cooper, who helped in judicial selections during Reagan's two terms, says the Reagan judges' "influence now is born of 20 years … of intellectual, analytical work" and adds: "I can't imagine that there is a historic parallel for an effort like this playing out as well."
Many Reagan nominees were law professors, such as Frank Easterbrook, Richard Posner and J. Harvie Wilkinson,or GOP insiders, including Edith Jones, Alex Kozinski and Laurence Silberman. The impact of their appointments is evident throughout the law and on the high court's docket:
•A case before the Supreme Court that will determine the Second Amendment's scope arose after Silberman, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, wrote that it gives individuals the right to bear arms. Silberman's opinion bucked a series of lower-court rulings that said the Second Amendment applied only to a collective right of state militias.
•A dispute involving a black employee who sued the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain for discrimination was taken up by the high court after an attention-getting dissent in the case by Easterbrook, chief judge of the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.
Lower courts had broadly interpreted a section of the 1866 Civil Rights Act to cover individuals who faced retaliation after claiming discrimination. Easterbrook disagreed and said the 7th Circuit majority, which followed that pattern, was ignoring a "sea change" in the high court's interpretation of the law. Oral arguments in the case suggested the justices may endorse parts of his dissent.
•When the justices recently upheld an Indiana voter-identification law requiring people to show a government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot, they affirmed a 7th Circuit opinion by Posner. The Indiana law "will deter some people from voting," Posner wrote. But he said that does not override Indiana's legitimate concern about potential in-person voter fraud.
High-profile Supreme Court cases such as these generate headlines, yet appeals courts judges have the last word in the vast majority of disputes in federal courts. The justices hear fewer than 1% of appeals, and have taken even fewer in recent years: about 75 per annual term, down from about 150 during the mid-1980s.
Although bound by high-court precedent, appeals judges have latitude in their interpretations. The decline in cases has bolstered the impact of appeals court judges — including the Reagan class.
Remaking the appeals courts
Reagan's influence on the appeals courts surpasses his successors in terms of sheer numbers.
From 1981-89, he appointed 83 appeals court judges — 66 of whom still hear cases today. The first President Bush appointed 42 during his single term. During two terms, President Clinton appointed 66, and President George W. Bush has appointed 58.
Within Reagan's group of appointees, there also are more judges with prominent profiles. Among them is Antonin Scalia, an fiery conservative whom Reagan put on the appeals court in Washington, D.C., in 1982 and elevated to the high court in 1986.
Yet Reagan's broader judicial juggernaut was not an unqualified success. In 1987, the Senate rejected one of his most celebrated appeals court appointees: Robert Bork, who joined the D.C. Circuit six years earlier. His nomination fight came to symbolize partisan rancor over judicial appointments.
President George H.W. Bush had two Supreme Court appointments; President George W. Bush also has had two. Each considered several of Reagan's appeals court judges. None was chosen, however — the result of several factors, possibly including the controversial paper trails these men and women had created while on the bench.
The first President Bush interviewed Edith Jones, a 1985 Reagan appointee to the southwestern 5th Circuit, for the seat vacated when liberal Justice William Brennan retired. Jones came under fire from defense lawyers for her blunt criticism of lengthy appeals in death penalty cases. Bush ended up choosing David Souter in 1990, who has disappointed conservatives by usually voting with the high court's more liberal justices.
Reagan broke the prior White House pattern of accepting senators' preferences for appeals court seats and put in place a sophisticated screening of candidates run by Department of Justice and White House lawyers. American University law professor Herman Schwartz, who has written extensively on Reagan's judges, contends that good people were passed over because they were not ideologues.
In the years since Reagan left office, several of his judges have remained on the front lines of the nation's most contentious disputes.
Wilkinson, 63, now on the Mid-Atlantic 4th Circuit, was a member of the selection team in the Reagan Justice Department. "There was a great deal of excitement about it," Wilkinson recalls, and a hope of appointing "those who respected more fully the role of the democratic branches of government and need for judicial restraint."
In 1984, after Wilkinson returned to teaching at the University of Virginia, Reagan nominated him for the appeals court.
On the 4th Circuit, Wilkinson wrote an opinion striking down a Richmond city policy directing 30% of public contracts to minority-run businesses. Two years later, the high court affirmed that decision.
In 2003, Wilkinson wrote a decision in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan fighting with the Taliban. The Bush administration sought to hold Hamdi without charges or a hearing. Wilkinson approved that. The high court reversed his ruling.
On the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, based in Cincinnati, now-Chief Judge Danny Boggs opposed the University of Michigan's affirmative action plan at the law school. In 2002, he wrote, "Its admissions officers have swapped tailor's sheers for a chain saw."
The Bush administration cited Boggs' dissent as it urged the justices to void Michigan practices. The court by a single vote allowed the law school policy; it rejected an undergraduate race-based program that it found too rigid.
Reagan judges, including Easterbrook, also approved bans on the abortion procedure known by its opponents as "partial birth." The high court in 2000 struck down bans in a case from Nebraska. After Sandra Day O'Connor, the key vote on the case, was succeeded by Samuel Alito in 2006, the court changed course. It upheld a U.S. ban similar to the state prohibitions.
And now what?
President Clinton failed to seriously undercut the Reagan conservatism on the bench. He put a priority on diversity and set records for the percentages of appointees who were women and minorities. Of his appeals court appointments, 50.8% were women or minorities, says Sheldon Goldman, a University of Massachusetts Amherst, political science professor.
Clinton did not choose prominent liberal academics to counter the conservative lightning rods on the federal bench. "President Clinton did not wish to expend major political capital with his court appointments," Goldman says.
President Bush has tried to reinforce Reagan's legacy and tapped young conservative thinkers. Goldman says that has turned into "a major success story for Bush."
Yet Bush's appointees may remain for years in the shadow of Reagan's prominent jurists. Some, including Easterbrook and Kozinski, are still in their 50s. Their impact and Reagan's final legacy will be shaped by what happens next.
Says Eleanor Acheson, an assistant attorney general for Clinton who oversaw judicial selection, "The whole name of the game is who will be the next president."
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Friday, May 9, 2008
Marie Osmond is far from a perfect parent so Stay out of Billy Ray & Miley Cyrus Life
AL REYNOLDS & HOWARD BRAGMAN
I wish Star Jones good health & happiness. I wish the Same for Mr Al Reynolds.