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In the last 24 hours at dailytimesuck.com . . .
weren't H&R Block and Allstate spin-offs from Sears?rnRemember when sears didn't suck? So if California's Supreme Court is now going to weigh in on this topic, why was there a referendum? If I lived there, I would ask for my tax dollars back. By the way, this is purely a question of governmental process and has very little to do with the subject being debated. nnI'm going to assume that the CA Supreme Court finds in favor of the three plaintiffs, so why didn't the case just go them in the first place? Can any referendum be overturned? What if a referendum had 95% approval, could the courts overturn that? What is the process to appeal the CA Supreme Court, is the only out an escalation to the US Supreme Court? One of the funnier facebook group names I've seen recently is "You don't want gay marriage? Then don't have one and shut the fuck up." I'm going to start a new group called "One million strong for man cocks in man asses."nnWhat, too much? Okay, I'm not going to start that group. Facebook groups are fucking barnacles. Except that Helicopters one! My understanding on the legal deal is that challengers to prop8 will need to appeal to the US Supreme Court and hope that the Court rules that it violates the 14th amendment's equal protection clause. Oh, and hope that the Court decides to see the case. What I assume will happen is that someone who is gay who is married (in CA) will die and there will be a struggle over their estate between their gay husband/wife and their other next of kin and that will be the case that eventually ends up deciding it as I figure the US Supreme Court will dodge anything less. Hmm, that's interesting. I didn't realize the potential implications for existing marriages; I had assumed the only current plaintiffs would be people who weren't married yet. I'd have to think existing marriages would be allowed to remain, as most laws historically have allowed for grandfathered exceptions, but in reality I have no idea. Most of what I will talk about here is about the gays who aren't married yet but want to be as miserable as the rest of us.rnrnAndy, your main question - about why this didn't go to the courts in the first place - goes to the legal premise of "standing". The Court can't simply rule on an issue. Someone has to bring suit. And for one to be able to file suit, they must have standing, meaning that they personally were civilly wronged. Prior to this ban, gay marriages could happen in CA. Although I'm sure I've heard stories of some local jurisdictions not allowing them, the fact there already are alot of gay marriages in that state means that people were able to do this somewhere. And since marriage is a state-recognized thing and not local jurisdiction only, gays could travel to another jurisdiction within CA and get married if unable to do so in their own area. Although an inconvenience for them, they were not having their rights infringed. (Although I don't know really...there could have been and probably were lawsuits about this.) Now that there is a state-wide ban, gays who want to get married in CA can definitely say "you are now infringing upon my rights." So, bada bing, bada boom, lawsuit finds itself in the CA Supreme Court, and they will rule on whether or not this ban violates the CA state constitution. (By the way, this concept is the same reason that any potential overturning of Roe v Wade is about so much more than just who is appointed to the Supreme Court.)rnrnThis could get interesting. I wonder if the result will spurn Sexuality Riots, ala the Rodney King trial. I can hear the newscast now: "Thousands of gays slapped the shit out of straight store owners this afternoon, breaking glass store fronts and running off with as much loafer lightener as they could get their hands on."rnrnIn response to the other questions...In theory, any referendum/vote/law/etc would not be overturned by a court per se, but could be found to be unconstitutional by a court if a person feels strongly enough that their rights have been infringed upon, and they have the means, time, patience, etc to bring civil suit. The percentage with which the law had been approved is irrelevant. Once it gets to the court, it's no longer a popularity contest, it's a matter of right/wrong/legal/illegal in the eyes of those judges. (And hopefully the appointment/approval process for those judges has provided the requisite checks and balances to ensure that you've been provided fair and just individuals qualified to decide just that.) This is why I feel the friend-of-the-court (Amicus Curae) briefs are a joke. It ain't a fucking popularity contest, assholes. It's out of your hands. If any judge actually made a decision that was influenced by these jokers instead of on what they are (supposed to be) qualified to make themselves, it would literally be a travesty of justice.rnrnIn theory, any court decision can be appealed. I think there are a few echelons between state supreme courts and the federal one, like a District and/or Appellant Court. The Appellant Court, however, doesn't actually review the decision, but rather only whether or not all relevant laws were enforced correctly during the trial. I can see the loser of this decision appealing though, and it could find its way to the US Supreme Court. Plus what Carl said, who types faster and more concisely than I. So we could have avoided this whole she-bang if there was a process for judicial review of all topics brought to referendum? My wife and I discussed it this morning and we basically came up with that. A referendum was passed which likely was illegal to the CA constitution, and the courts will find that, thus overturning the simple majority. So why were they allowed to vote on the subject in the first place? rnrnOH, and did Prop 8 change the state constitution or is it merely a state law? In 1994 an undisclosed brother, tripped and fell into the charcoal pit and received severe burns. He later checked himself out of the hospital. I believe BAC was .28 or something else crazy. He was not about to let the loss of most of the dermal layers on his hand stop him from celebrating the first win in 4 years!!! Le Gen Dary!!!!! I know the '94 story (didn't he yell "go pika buggy" in the ambulance?). Jeff, is this what you meant, or did something else happen in '97? This would be the first I've heard of it, but then again, I can't really be counted on to remember Saturday of that Carnival: I was out from Champagne until about 4 am, when Martin came running back from Theta Xi, having punched several of them as well as giving Kirk Schirra a black eye (two weeks before his wedding, at which Martin would be speaking), and rang the buzzer three times. Besides myself, I think only Decker - a pledge at the time - plus alum Jimmy Hsu, and maybe Ren and Morry were there. i can remember a lot of things being said that carnival. ah, to be sober exec. Last I knew I was an INTJ as well. nI'd be interested to know if they include/exclude blockquotes. And obviously they don't process the pictures for meaning. Seems like it would work well on a personal blog like the pee-drinker's but not so well here at the club house. the internets say I'm INTP so I guess the ESF comes from jt. he's a pretty princess. To add insult to the injury that will occur tonight, there's this little nugget: nn"Massillon High School is ahead of us," Bengals owner Mike Brown, the oldest son of Paul Brown, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer when asked about the indoor facility. "We don't have one." sad story. nice of the mother to wait until someone got killed to speak up. has anyone taken a look at "the last 24 hours" comments. That's stuff has gone straight-up emo. Like staring into a black abyss of the soul or something. What I'm trying to say, is it's black text on a black background. Yeah, I noticed that on the story archive. You have to highlight the text to read it. Dammit, you know you're getting old when you're mixing up the dates. It was 94. And the "go pika buggy" and hamburger incident were two separate things. Heck of a carnival, '94 was...I had to go on stage and accept the trophy because Head FOAD wasn't up to walking, much less public speaking...not that I was in much better shape... I, uh, don't, uh, know what you're talking about.nI was cleaning some stuff up and went one step too far. Should be good now. Lemme know if there are other problems. Sears wish book was pretty awesome when I was a kid. The thing weighed like ten pounds. For awhile there, I thought the webmaster had been replaced by the Crypt Keeper.rn on google chrome, you have to click the comments link three times to get them to load. i'm not sure i'd worry too much about coding for google chrome though. brian, you got any usage statistics for google chrome vs. the other browsers? it's sad, but to me that would be something really cool and something i don't even know about. nnalso, decker, please use a more recent picture of al davis, like this one:nn I'm on the fence still. I like that when you open a new tab it displays your most visited sites, i like the "incognito" mode for reasons that bean would understand, and the intelligent address bar seems a little better than firefox. nnon the other hand, i hate hate hate not having a "home page" that i can get to from the toolbar. kinda goes against the way i operate a browser. and it still seems a little buggy for me. form resubmission is weird, placement of favorites is non-standard. it doesn't seem to let you use the middle wheel button on a mouse to do that smooth scrolling thing. Prop 8 is an amendment to the state constitution since apparently in CA you can amend the state constitution with a simple majority democratic process (which I find somewhat mind-boggling, honestly). So if it survives review (ie, if the writers dotted their i's and crossed their t's) it, well, amends the CA state constitution and the CA Supreme Court will be basically powerless. An interesting thing to note is that in CA the voters can choose to replace/not renew CA Supreme Court justices so there is more politics involved in the court's decisions than at the federal level.nnSo what will happen is unless the CA Supreme Court can find a way to toss the amendment someone will have to challenge the CA constitution (basically) in federal court as you can't have a state constitution that takes away rights granted in the US constitution. Then the US Supreme Court will have to accept the case and rule one way or the other, most likely based on argument that the CA constitution violates the 14th amendment to the US constitution: nn"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."nnIt is also possible that the CA Supreme Court will do an end run around the issue by ruling some weird thing like 'all marriages granted up until this point are considered Civil Unions' and making Civil Unions de facto marriages, which would be interesting. Oh yeah. I remember the form resubmission thing. Usually, if I want to stay on the same page but not resubmit, I just click the URL and hit enter. But Chrome still tried to resubmit the form when I did that.rnI liked that when you clicked a link, it would open the tab close to your current tab instead of the end of the line.
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weren't H&R Block and Allstate spin-offs from Sears?rnRemember when sears didn't suck?