Free Republic

The Bush Administration has discovered what liberals have known all along: the Constitution is a mighty comprehensive document, giving the federal government powers over the minutest aspects of our lives. Case in point: apparently Bush & Co. have discovered that there is a right to miniature golf defined in the U.S. Constitution. That’s the upshot of a new set of rules updating the Americans with Disabilities Act being released for public comment this Tuesday. Other new rights include easier access to light switches in hotel rooms by moving them 6 inches lower, wheelchair lifts in courtrooms to provide easier access...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: For More Information, Contact: June 13, 2008 Jennifer Harris, Communications Officer, PIO#234-07/jlh 703.838.5078 or jennifer.harris@alexandriava.gov Alexandria Student Recognized for Support of Human Rights The Alexandria Human Rights Commission is pleased to announce that Debra Luecretia Mason, president of T.C. Williams High School Gay Straight Alliance (GSA), is the winner of the Commission’s seventh annual 2008 Student Human Rights Awards for her leadership role and promotion of equality for all regardless of sexuality. The Commission established the Human Rights Awards seven years ago to recognize students who have contributed significantly toward improving basic human rights and fairness for...

A tray of asymmetrical chocolate lumps balances on the counter behind the espresso machine, where owner Jean-Marc Gorce is slinging a cappuccino. Scotch-taped to the walls, clippings about the mom-and-pop truffle shop display accolades from Gourmet, the New York Times and 7 x 7. At the window, a few stools share a high counter; outside, two tables perch on the sidewalk. Cluttered but quaint, off-kilter but authentic, XOX Truffles is just the sort of place that one might associate with North Beach's motley character. Yet one of its design anomalies - a step from the curb into the shop -...

Group wants Wi-Fi banned from public buildings A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they're allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings. Arthur Firstenberg says he is highly sensitive to certain types of electric fields, including wireless Internet and cell phones. "I get chest pain and it doesn't go away right away," he said. Firstenberg and dozens of other electro-sensitive people in Santa Fe claim that putting up Wi-Fi in public places is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The city...

As much as you've heard about the fuss over building a wheelchair ramp to the president's podium in the Board of Supervisors' chamber, there's one point that hasn't been made. This isn't about the project's $1 million cost, nor the construction, nor the principle of the matter.This is another case of those bickering supes. Because if the six supervisors who voted against building the wheelchair ramp wanted to stop it, they had ample time months ago. And they didn't say peep."I went around to each of the supervisors' offices and asked 'Do you want to weigh in on this?' "...

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — A public high school has turned away a deaf student's service dog despite a state ruling saying the animal should be allowed. W. Tresper Clarke High School's principal intercepted 15-year-old John Cave outside the Westbury school's entrance Tuesday, a day after the state Human Rights Division told the school to let in the dog. Commissioner Kumiki Gibson wrote that state law "prohibits educational institutions from denying access to their facilities to people with disabilities." Cave left and did not go to classes Tuesday. East Meadow School District Superintendent Leon Campo said Tuesday the school would admit...

San Francisco should not have to spend $1 million on a wheelchair ramp in the Board of Supervisors chambers to assure equal access for people with disabilities. There must be less expensive options than the 10-foot ramp that has been through 18 designs and consumed more than $200,000 in planning. One alternative would be to do what the board has done for the past three years - seat its president near floor level, instead of the ornate, elevated podium that would require a significant retrofit of the historic room. Board President Aaron Peskin said he would like to find a...

Where else but San Francisco City Hall could a 10-foot-long wheelchair ramp wind up costing $1 million? Thanks to a maze of bureaucratic indecision and historic restrictions, taxpayers may shell out $100,000 per foot to...

Where else but San Francisco City Hall could a 10-foot-long wheelchair ramp wind up costing $1 million? Thanks to a maze of bureaucratic indecision and historic restrictions, taxpayers may shell out $100,000 per foot to make the Board of Supervisors president's perch in the historic chambers accessible to the disabled. What's more, the little remodel job that planners first thought would take three months has stretched into more than four years - and will probably mean the supervisors will have to move out of their hallowed hall for five months while the work is done. "It's crazy," admits Susan Mizer,...

TAMPA - An arrest warrant has been issued for Charlette Marshall-Jones, the detention deputy who dumped a quadriplegic man from his wheelchair, Sheriff David Gee said late Friday. "Miss Marshall-Jones has been made aware of the charges against her, but as of this moment has not turned herself in and we do not know her whereabouts," Gee said.

TAMPA - Sheriff's officials are investigating why a deputy in a jail booking video appears to dump a quadriplegic man out of his wheelchair. Hillsborough sheriff's spokesman J.D. Callaway said the agency is looking into what happened to Brian D. Sterner, 32, during his Jan. 29 booking at the Orient Road Jail, after a television reporter confronted Callaway with the jail's own video. Footage aired on WTSP-Ch. 10 Monday night showed a uniformed officer unseating Sterner from his chair, then searching him as he lay on the floor where he had fallen. "She said, 'Stand up.' I said, 'I can't...

Alice Camarillo, who is legally blind, says she was ridiculed when she asked for help reading the menu at fast-food restaurants like Burger King, McDonald's, Taco Bell and Wendy's. She sued. A federal judge in Albany threw it out, saying the law doesn't require restaurant workers to be polite. Yesterday, a Manhattan federal appeals court overruled the lower court, and Camarillo can sue the restaurants under the Americans with Disabilities Act. "I feel good about it," Camarillo, who lives in upstate Hudson, told the Daily News. "I'm just sorry it took so long. Quite a few things that they did...

It is the convergence of junk science and public policy gone horribly awry. A Washington, D.C., man with coronary disease wants a federal judge to impose a smoking ban in Virginia so he may patronize restaurants there without having to inhale secondhand smoke. He claims his condition limits what the Americans With Disabilities Act defines as "major life activities," so restaurants that let people smoke discriminate against his "disability." Some observations: It is an annual tradition for the Virginia legislature, respectful of individual rights, to reject smoking bans for bars, restaurants and bowling alleys. And until Virginians change their minds,...

Freakonomics One year from today, a new president moves into the White House. This president will be eager to carry out any number of plans — including, surely, plans to help the segments of society that most need help. Extending a helping hand, after all, is one of the great privileges and responsibilities of the presidency. But before charging ahead with such plans, the new president might do well to first ask him- or herself the following question: What do a deaf woman in Los Angeles, a first-century Jewish sandal maker and a red-cockaded woodpecker have in common? A few...

A federal appeals court ordered a San Francisco judge on Friday to reconsider his ruling requiring United Parcel Service to give its deaf employees a chance to compete for jobs as drivers of small delivery trucks. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 13-2 that U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson had used the wrong standard in his 2004 decision that UPS was discriminating against deaf people with safe driving records by refusing to consider them for commercial driving jobs. Henderson allowed the plaintiffs to show that they were qualified for the jobs based on their driving records, and failed...

A judge rules that the retailer needs to stand trial for having a Web site that is insufficiently accessible. When a federal court judge issued rulings Oct. 2 that the $60 billion retailer Target needed to stand trial on charges that its Web site is not sufficiently accessible to visually-impaired shoppers, it sent a strong signal to much of the e-commerce space.

The Americans With Disabilities Act, for which the nation has the first President Bush to thank, has produced many bizarre legal claims. One of the latest comes from perfectly healthy people who say they were denied jobs that would have left them disabled. Victor Breehne got the ball rolling when he applied for a "highly wrist-sensitive job" making power tools at a Black & Decker Corp. plant in Tennessee. He was offered a job contingent upon him passing a medical exam that included a nerve-conduction test to determine whether he was susceptible to carpal-tunnel syndrome. Manufacturers whose employees perform repetitive-motion...

Launched by an Executive Order in April of 2002 under the guise of expanding the scope of 1990's Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has since received the official sanction of the U.S. Congress... This commission is the driving force behind a massive policy shift that will literally turn public schools into mental health screening centers...all parents of public school children are supposed to be receiving written notice of these new federally mandated mental health screening policies. Some will also get permission slips to sign that will allow school counselors or other non-medically-educated bureaucrats...

<p>CAMPBELLSBURG, Ky. — Kentucky State Police say a car belonging to an Ohio woman missing since April has been found along with skeletal remains on a farm in north-central Kentucky.</p> <p>Kentucky Trooper Chip Perry told The Associated Press today that the silver 2000 Chevrolet Impala is registered to 80-year-old Ada Wasson.</p>

October 03, 2007 (Computerworld) A federal court judge has certified a class-action lawsuit against Target Corp. filed by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB). Judge Marilyn Patel, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, certified the case as a class action on behalf of blind Internet users throughout the U.S. under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), according to court documents. The class covered under the ruling includes people who tried without success to access Target.com and, as a result, have been denied access to "the enjoyment of goods and services offered in Target stores,"...