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Earlier today, we posted a link to an article which mentioned that Kuwait Islamic Bank had entered into a joint venture with Colorado-based real estate company UDR: We were curious as to what, if any, restrictions were to be imposed on the real estate properties in which Kuwait Islamic Bank invested here in the United States, so we made an inquiry via UDR’s “contact us” form on the company’s web site. The company was quick to reply as, within minutes, we received a phone call from Dave Messenger, CFO of UDR. I asked Mr. Messenger two questions: 1. What, if...

Two-thirds of Americans would like to see health care costs cut in ways different than President Barack Obama and Congress are considering in their health insurance reform plans. The majority of respondents believe national tort reform laws to reduce the number of frivolous lawsuits against doctors and hospitals will be the most effective way to lower health care costs, according to a national survey by message research firm M4 Strategies.

Early in my career as a lawyer, I did a lot of work for insurance companies. I once had a case that provoked considerable laughter: a man was building an addition to his motel. He talked with his insurance agent about builders risk insurance, which would cover the structure while it was under construction, but decided not to buy it. One night, the structure caught fire and burned to the ground. The next morning at eight o'clock, the man was at his insurance agent's office, saying that he wanted to buy that builders risk coverage after all.

A principal and an athletic director in Florida could be charged with crimes and spend six months in jail after they prayed before a meal at a school event, the Washington Times reported.

When a New York City police officer caught a .32 caliber slug in his ribs last week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg was quick to question how the career criminal and convicted felon was able to obtain the gun. I'm afraid that the question is going to lead to attempts at broader restrictions on more items in New York and elsewhere because it's possible that the gun involved in the shooting might not be a firearm. That might not make much sense, but firearms laws generally don't. Depending on when the gun was made and/or whether the cartridges is considered "obsolete," a...

Poll is on right hand side as you scroll down Do you agree with the law that requires doctors to notify parents that their teen daughter is getting an abortion? Yes 81.6% No 18.4% Total votes: 206

Federal law now criminalizes activities that the average person would never dream would land him in prison. ---------------------------cut--------------------------- Every year, thousands of upstanding, responsible Americans run afoul of some incomprehensible federal law or regulation and end up serving time in federal prison. What is especially disturbing is that it could happen to anyone at all -- and it has. We should applaud Reps. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), then, for holding a bipartisan hearing today to examine how federal law can make a criminal out of anyone, for even the most mundane conduct. --------------------------------------cut------------------ This is an inevitable...

Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, the No. 3 official in the Obama Justice Department, was consulted and ultimately approved a decision in May to reverse course and drop a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party of intimidating voters in Philadelphia during November's election, according to interviews.

Page 231 contains the requirements for "Race and color." "Births in the United States in 1961 are classified for vital statistics into white, Negro, American Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Aleut, Eskimo, Hawaiian and Part-Hawaiian (combined), and "other nonwhite." Do you see a classification for "African?" I certainly don't. Now, let's look at the document that Obama has provided for certifying his eligibility for the Office of the President of the United States and that is displayed on Annenberg FatCheck.org. FATHER'S RACE is "African" -- an incorrect entry for that data field. Just a typo? I don't think so. The Obot who...

Rep. John Conyers can't see why lawmakers should read the laws they make. What's the point? They wouldn't understand 'em anyway: “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” said Conyers. “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” As Betsy Newmark comments: At least some representative's aides somewhere have read some part of the bill so that should be enough, right? Who says that when you're rejiggering over one-sixth of the US...

*[EXCERPTED]* "...The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act allows the FDA to...control an industry ... Opponents from...N. Carolina argued that the FDA had proved through a series of food safety failures that it was not up to the job of regulation..."

President Obama’s diatribe against the Cambridge cops about the arrest of his “friend”, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates contains perhaps more than the so-called Mainstream Media is reporting. In fact, Barack Obama had his own ongoing ‘problem’ with the Cambridge police while he attended Harvard Law School. As first reported in March 2007 by the Somerville Times, Harvard law student Barack Obama accumulated 17 unpaid parking tickets between 1989-1991 - and never paid the fines ad associated penalties totaling $375 until a few weeks before announcing his presidential campaign. In other words, as a practicing lawyer in Chicago, he allowed...

A question for the legal experts among us: is it true that a disorderly conduct charge cannot be made in the suspect's home? Or is it just dependent on the behavior involved? Also, does anyone know if any official documents have been released regarding the dropped charges against Gates? I know they were dropped due to political pressure, but am curious if they give any other official justification. TIA!

A Dubai resident, Dimple Carvalho (36), has moved the Bombay high Court after finding her name in a dowry harassment case lodged by a south Mumbai resident. Kavita Shah (44) has claimed that Dimple had an "illicit'' relationship with her husband Paresh Shah. Dimple has denied the allegation or that she had any role to play in the alleged incidents of harassment. A division bench of Justice Bilal Nazki and Justice A R Joshi on Wednesday reserved its judgment in the case. The court will also decide on another application filed by Paresh's parents-Lal Shah and Dhanvanti Shah -who have...

Just this week it appears that California's legislature finally compromised on a budget that would fix the shortfall in the short term. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and California legislative leaders Monday said they reached a compromise to close the state's $26 billion budget shortfall. Under the plan, state lawmakers would cut $15 billion in spending. The rest of the gap would be filled by taking funds from local governments and through one-time fixes and accounting maneuvers. The deal must still be approved by rank-and-file legislators, who are expected to vote on it Thursday. "We have accomplished a lot in this budget,"...

During Judge Sotomayor’s public Senate confirmation, she was asked if she would use foreign laws to interpret American laws. The question, asked by Senator Coburn, arose from Judge Sotomayor having repeated stated in the past that she approved of the use of foreign laws to interpret the American constitution, particularly the fifth, eighth, and fourteenth amendments. Judge Sotomayor’s answer to Senator Coburn was “I will not use foreign law to interpret the Constitution or American statutes. I will use American law, constitutional law to interpret those laws except in the situations where American law directs the court.” Unfortunately, no one...

On a sweltering Friday summer evening, and just two minutes prior to going on stage before approximately 1,500 Seventh-day Adventist Christians at the Gladstone, Oregon Campmeeting, the Honorable Representative Dave Hunt (D), Speaker of the House of Representatives for the Oregon Legislature, informed the president and staff of the Northwest Religious Liberty Association that Governor Ted Kulongoski had quietly signed Senate Bill 786, the Oregon Workplace Religious Freedom Act, the day before, on Thursday, July 16, 2009.This was like music to our ears, as naysayers who did not fully understand the nature of the bill had been publicly urging the...

What is not in dispute is that the ACLU is litigious. They will threaten to sue at the drop of a crucifix or the threat to utter a prayer at a public function. So where is the ACLU when it comes to some questionable – some would say illegal – acts of the Obama administration? Which is a greater threat of American civil liberties: a cross on a hill or a government official ordering the chairman and board of directors of a private company to resign? What is the bigger threat to civil liberty: valedictorian of Foothill High, Brittany McComb,...

So says Time Magazine writer Jeffrey Rosen. The idea that the Supreme Court can make policy shouldn't be controversial after its decisions in two of the most contentious cases of the term that ended last month, one involving voting rights and the other affirmative action. In the voting-rights case, Chief Justice John Roberts produced the most impressive example of judicial statesmanship of his tenure by persuading all but one of his fellow Justices to converge around a result that never occurred to Congress when it passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. A prudent demonstration of judicial policymaking, the decision...

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan, July 15, 2009 – The Army’s top judge gathered with other U.S. and Afghan leaders in Bagram district July 11 to celebrate the groundbreaking of the first in a series of new courthouses slated to further the rule of law within Afghanistan’s provinces. Lt. Gen. Scott C. Black, judge advocate general of the U.S. Army, greets, Abdul Basheer Yaqobi, chief prosecutor of Parwan province, at the Bagram district center prior to a groundbreaking for a new courthouse in Afghanistan’s Parwan province, July 11, 2009. U.S. Army photo by 1st Lt. Lory Stevens  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image...

only watched bits and pieces and so I'll just speak to the most interesting thing I noticed. Senator Tom Coburn questioned Judge Sotomayor repeatedly about the second amendment and Judge Sotomayor was very technical about exactly how far the right extended. Suffice to say, Judge Sotomayor doesn't see the 2nd amendment as an absolute right that no government can take away. Senator Coburn later asked Judge Sotomayor if there is a Constitutional right to defend one's self. Judge Sotomayor thought about this question and she answered that the particular question had never come before the court. In other words, one...

Other than declaring war, neither house of Congress has a more solemn responsibility than the Senate's role in confirming justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. As the Senate considers the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Americans are watching to see if this nominee would lend her support to those who've declared war on the rights of America's 80 million gun owners. After the first day of confirmation hearings, gun owners have good reason to worry. Those of us who respect the Second Amendment are concerned about the case of Maloney v. Cuomo, which reviewed whether this freedom applies to all...

There was plenty of fireworks in the second day however, for the most part, the back and forth between Senators and Judge Sotomayor could only be interesting to serious political junkies and constitutional scholars. The most important part, in my opinion, came in a back and forth between John Kyl and the Judge. Senator Kyl quoted President Obama's standard for choosing a Supreme Court justice.

I'm surprised and disturbed by how many times today Sonia Sotomayor has backed off of or provided less-than-convincing explanations for some of her more controversial speeches about the role of gender and ethnicity in judicial decision-making.

BOSTON (AP) — Massachusetts lawmakers are weighing a bill that would end discrimination based on transgender status. The bill would add "gender identity and expression" to the state's discrimination and hate crime laws. Supporters say the goal is to give transgender people legal protections at work, in public accommodations and in housing. Opponents said the bill would lead to a breakdown in privacy in rest rooms, locker rooms and other single-gender facilities and would open women's bathrooms to sexual predators.

The highly charged “Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009” (S. 909) would make it a federal crime to violently attack anyone you hate. Unless, of course, the anyone you hate happens to be a white heterosexual. That’s right, S. 909 -- aka, the “hate crimes bill” -- being pushed through by the Obama Administration as one of its highest legislative priorities would make it a federal crime to commit a violent act against anyone based on race or gender orientation – unless the race was Caucasian and the orientation was towards the opposite sex. Lest anyone have any...

PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) - Byrd and Melanie Billings had a growing brood of adopted children with autism, Down syndrome and other disabilities, and took care to make their nine-bedroom house a safe place for them, wiring it with surveillance cameras in every room. It was those cameras that captured images of the masked men who shot the wealthy couple to death in a break-in executed with chilling precision.

On the eve of Judge Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, I continue to think that non-liberal Senators should vote against confirming her under the standard established by Democrats during the confirmation of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. That standard holds that consistent disagreement with the outcome of a judge's decisions in important cases is sufficient grounds for voting against that judge's elevation to the Supreme Court.

It’s opening day of the Senate SCOTUS hearings on the Sonia Sotomayor nomination. We’ll get gavel-to-gavel coverage this morning on all major networks and CSPAN starting at 10am Eastern. The good news: At least we’ll be spared Joe Biden’s bloviations.

Politico has an excellent preview of this week's hearings. After week's of Michael Jackson, health care, and cap and trade, the Supreme Court takes center stage. The polling on Judge Sotomayor is underwhelming. The latest CBS poll has her favorability at eight points over unfavorability (23-15) but most are still undecided. That's way down from the last time CBS polled in which her favorability outweighed her unfavorability 33-9. The latest Rasmussen poll has her unfavorability as two percent higher than her favorability.

This one's going to blow baby boomers' minds. It concerns a little-known law dating to Elizabethan England suddenly being enforced with gusto in Pennsylvania. The law can force adult children to pay their parents' health-care costs. If Mom and Pop can't pay, you pay. If they have the money but refuse to pay, you pay. If you don't, watch your credit rating sink under the weight of a legal judgment that will haunt you for life. It happened to Don Grant. It can happen to you. The Havertown man is nearly 50 and struggling to pay his mortgage and $100,000...

On Friday July 11th, 2009, Ireland passed the Defamation Bill by one vote. One of the aspects of this bill would make it illegal to criticize religion… any religion under penalty of fines up to 25,000 Euros. That is the equivalent to nearly $35,000.When I first heard this story on the internets, I was certain that it was a false story. I read the story, googled it, checked out legitimate Ireland news sites, and double checked more Ireland news sites. The story checks out. It seems that the Blasphemy Clause of the Defamation Bill was challenged in the legislature...

Remember when Bill Bennett said this. If you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

Honduras, the tiny Central American nation, had a change of leaders on June 28. The country's military arrested President Manuel Zelaya -- in his pajamas, he says -- and put him on a plane bound for Costa Rica. A new president, Roberto Micheletti, was appointed. Led by Cuba and Venezuela (Sudan and North Korea were not immediately available), the international community swiftly condemned this "coup."

OK, my headline is admittedly too simplistic. In fact, the whole medical malpractice milieu is sorely in need of a fix. We have unnecessarily large awards to aggrieved patients, crushing insurance costs to doctors to cover malpractice, a situation where defensive medicine drives up costs, and an entire industry of lawyers whose job it is, apparently, to rape the system and cause it to be burdensome for all of us. On top of that, we have a national party in the Democrats assisting these very destructive lawyers to do just that. This is a part of our medical system that...

EDITORIAL: Sotomayor plays the race cardThe Washington Times, LLC A biased judge should not be promoted to a higher court. Yet the Obama administration has not been able to put to rest fears that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor might let ethnic grievances sway her decisions on the bench. That's exactly what it appears Judge Sotomayor did in the Ricci v. DeStefano case, in which she ruled that white firefighters could be denied promotions they clearly had earned. That's why it is worth revisiting the Supreme Court nominee's infamous "wise Latina" speech. The renewed focus on that speech should center...

Hats off to the New York Times for an inspiring profile of Lt. Ben Vargas, a New Haven firefighter who was one of the plaintiffs--the only Hispanic plaintiff--in the Ricci case. The Hispanic Firefighters' Association sided against him and he was hospitalized after being beaten up in the men's room of a bar in an attack that he believes was orchestrated by pro-race discrimination forces. But the Hispanic firefighters' group eventually came around, and Vargas and his co-plaintiffs were finally vindicated by the Supreme Court.

This week there was a perfect storm of bad news for the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor. First, on Monday, the now infamous Ricci case was decided by the Supreme Court. The Ricci case, again, is the now famous case in which test results for firefighters were thrown out because not enough minorities scored high enough. The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to overturn Sotomayor's ruling. Of course, as Stuart Taylor pointed out, even those that sided with Sotomayor didn't agree with her judicial logic.

There are many reasons to find problems with sharia law. In its full form, it contains numerous provisions that are barbaric and irreconcilable with any advanced society: stoning married adulterers, flogging the unmarried, throwing homosexuals from roofs or steep hills, amputating limbs for theft, and much more. But sharia is much wider than that. It moves seamlessly from the public to the private realm, and it is in the latter that we find demands that a measure of sharia be introduced to this country. Such demands have been made, not just by Muslims, but even by an astonishingly naïve Archbishop...

judges in Ricci adopted something resembling the position she took when the case was before her. It's comforting that liberals now understand that there are worse things than having a divided Supreme Court disagree with your position. During the Bush years, when a divided Supreme Court would strike down this or that Bush anti-terrorism measure, some liberals were quick to declare the president "lawless." They did so despite the fact that there was little precedent on the subject, and such precedent as there was often supported the Bush administration's position. Fortunately, liberal commentators seems to be "growing in office."

President Barack Obama’s claims of broad executive authority to carry out the war on terror are drawing fire from an unexpected source: federal judges nominated by President George W. Bush, who asserted the sweeping powers in the first place.

The Supreme Court’s ruling this morning on the New Haven firefighters’ lawsuit is a reminder of the vital role a sane majority on the high court plays in protecting the rights of citizens against the dictates of liberal ideology. The 5-4 ruling, which reverses a decision endorsed by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, validated the complaints of a group of firefighters who took and passed a promotion test but wound up being told that the exam was invalid because no minorities had done well enough on it.

The case of the Ricci Vs. DeStefano has become a lightning rod ever since Judge Sonia Sotomayor was chosen to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court. Today, the Supreme Court reversed Sotomayor's decision 5-4. The majority opinion was written by Justice Kennedy and two concurring opinions were written by Justice Scalia and Justice Alito. The dissenting opinion was written by Justice Ginsberg.

Howard Fischer's latest screed against self-defense. I've posted the article in the Star, plus my comment. Senators favor concealed guns on college campuses By Howard Fischer Capitol Media Services Tucson, Arizona | Published: 06.28.2009 PHOENIX — State senators voted Friday to let people with concealed-weapons permits carry guns onto college and university campuses. Supporters said the move would make campuses safer. The 15-6 vote on the provision in HB 2439 came after backers said they believe that having people who are licensed by the state to have weapons should cut down on the number of massacres that occur on campuses....

It's no secret that members of the Saudi royal family have provided extensive financial support to al Qaeda. But now, as Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times reports, thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents provide a detailed look at this disgusting phenomenon.

You've got to wonder what Governor Corzine's political handlers are thinking these days. Amidst an epic financial crisis, they've apparently decided that portraying the Governor as a gun banner is a distraction needed to win re-election. But they haven't done their homework and have picked a discredited issue fabricated by the gun ban lobby that's going to badly misfire and embarrass the Governor, not only for what it focuses on, but also for what it ignores. Since winning the Democratic gubernatorial primary on June 2, the Governor has been publicly pressing to ration the Constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to...

Amison v. State, 5 So.3d 798 (Fla.App. 2 Dist. 2009) a case from Dade City, Appellate case number 2D07-5928 was reversed because they most likely did some things right. [1] The lawyer, a public defender, filed a pre-trial motion to suppress evidence or a request to block evidence of the search. Because the judge denied the motion, [2] Amison plead no contest most likely because of the overwhelming evidence against him, reserving the right to appeal the denial of his motion. What happens when a motion to suppress, or a motion in liminie, is requested after the jury is sworn,...

His name has become a verb, one so crisp and eloquent that it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary: if you've been blocked from appointment to public office, you've been "borked." The term's namesake is Robert Bork, whose path to the Supreme Court was derailed in 1987 by a hostile Senate. As Sonia Sotomayor braces for the same firing line, Bork, 82, sat down with NEWSWEEK for a rare interview. Excerpts: Was it your view that the law on abortion should be left totally to the democratic process? I oppose abortion. But an amazing number of people thought that...

The continuing contemporary interest in Thomas More (1478-1535) is hardly to be accounted for by popular fascination with sixteenth-century English politics or even by admiration for a martyr to a religious cause no longer universally popular. St. Thomas More (1477-1535) More lived, as we live today, in a time of rapid social and cultural unraveling. The meaning of his life, at least for us, is not so much his worldly success and religious piety, extraordinary as both of these were, but rather the courage and consistency with which he opposed the forces of disintegration. The culture war of the early...

It is one of the oddities of the global war on terrorism that while al-Qaeda is almost universally condemned, its Sunni terrorist counterparts in Hamas continue to attract a devoted following. Former president Jimmy Carter annually sings Hamas’s praises, insisting to all who will listen that Western governments must reach out to Gaza’s jihadist rulers. At “peace” demonstrations and on college campuses, banners are waved in honor of the group openly sworn to the destruction of Israel and the extermination of Jews worldwide. All this and more is the subject of Steven Plaut’s devastating new pamphlet, “Hamas: The Terror Elite.”...