Tag Archives: law

“Nuisance” Laws

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The Supreme Court will hear this fall a case that will determine whether States can sue fossil fuel companies for damages related to global climate change.

The state and local government officials argued that fossil fuel companies are liable under nuisance laws.

As Just the News put it, though,

Typically, state nuisance laws are used in disputes with neighbors where an individual may be conducting activities that lower the value of another individual’s property. Legal experts said state nuisance laws are inappropriate to address damages from climate change.

Michael Williams, West Virginia’s Solicitor General, had this, also:

Questions that touch on global energy markets and interstate commerce and foreign policy, those are decisions that really belong in the hands of Congress or at the very least at the federal level[.]

Phil Goldberg, Manufacturers’ Accountability Project Special Counsel, on the broad variety of separate lawsuits currently in the lower courts:

This is throwing a bunch of legal spaghetti up on the wall and seeing what sticks. All these different kinds of the combinations and permutations undermine the idea that there is any kind of legal theory or finding behind these allegations that they may have.

Indeed. The climate funding industry supporters don’t have any serious case in progress or in the offing.

That brings me to related questions: what about all the plaintiffs and law firms behind these “climate” suits? Shouldn’t they be sued under those same nuisance laws for being themselves nuisances with these foolish lawsuits?

Aren’t they also vulnerable under a variety of SLAPP—Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—lawsuits? After all, plaintiffs don’t actually expect to win these cases; they’re just suing to intimidate their targets with high and growing costs of defending themselves or to wear them down and force the defendants to change or outright abandon their positions. Plaintiffs here, with the complicity of lawyers, simply repeatedly sue and sue and sue until their goals are achieved.

A Pseudo-Seminarian Candidate for Texas Senator

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That would be the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Texas Senatorial candidate James Talarico. (That he was a shoo-in for the Party’s nomination is only because his opponent in Party’s primary election was the Extremist and part-time racist Jasmine Crockett.)

Here’s an example of Talarico’s own Leftist extremism:

God is nonbinary[.]

On which he expanded:

“Most Texans understand that God is beyond gender. The Apostle Paul says as much in his letter to the Galatians,” Talarico said. If Republicans have an issue with that, he added, “they should take it up with the Apostle Paul.”

This Texan non-seminarian went to the tape, or rather to the King James Version of Paul’s letter as recounted in Galatians, to see what the Apostle actually wrote. Paul opened his letter with this:

Paul, an apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead;)
And all the brethren which are with me, unto the churches of Galatia:
Grace be to you and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ,

God the Father—not once, but twice in those three paragraphs. Not God the Binary—or Nonbinary—or God the Transgender, or God the Gender Fluid, or…. God the Father, which is the male sex and one of the two human genders and sexes.

Paul had several additional references to God in his Letter, and every time he referenced God with a qualifier, it was universally God the Father.

It’s a mystery to me whence Talarico got his “nonbinary” characteristic. Except from the swamp of his mind.

This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?

Transgenders are Better than other Americans?

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Kansas passed a law with effect last Thursday that requires driver licenses to reflect the biological gender of the license holder and not the holder’s currently self-claimed gender. The law invalidates, with immediate force, existing driver licenses that reflect a gender different from the holder’s birth gender. That lack of notice strikes me as unfair, but that’s a separate issue. The law also

invalidates birth certificates of residents [sic] who changed their gender and says citizens can sue transgender Kansans who use public bathrooms that don’t correspond with their assigned birth sex.

The plaintiffs in this lawsuit claim that

the law violate[s] transgender Kansans rights to privacy, equality, and free expression guaranteed by the state constitution.

Leave aside the plain fact that the plaintiffs’ suit utterly denies biological fact. What’s interesting here is the self-important arrogance of the plaintiffs, along with the cynically offered irrelevance of one of their beefs.

Last thing first: the law does not deny the plaintiffs’ their right to free expression. No one is telling them they cannot self-claim a different gender than that of their biology. No one is telling them they cannot live their lives as though they were that…alternate…gender, with the few exceptions that all citizens have when exercise of their rights interferes with the ability of their fellow citizens to exercise their own rights.

Which brings me to the first things. Plaintiffs, with their suit, insist that others’ rights to privacy and equality must take a back seat to plaintiffs’. To hell with women’s rights to their own privacy, the equality of their own rights. They must accept that their rights are less important than, are inferior to, the claimed rights of men who claim to be women.

This is a suit that should be tossed on its face, with prejudice, and in short order.

In Which the Judge is Wrong on Principle

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Even if he might be correct in a strictly legal sense (which does constrain him via his oath of office). Magistrate Judge William Porter has ruled that DoJ may not search the electronic devices seized from Washington Post news writer Hannah Natanson. Porter claimed, as paraphrased by Just the News

seizing Natanson’s devices the department took her work product, documentary material, and access to the confidential sources—”all the tools she needs as a working journalist.”

The underlying case centers on Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, an IT employee of a government contractor, supposedly removing classified information and passing that information to Natanson.

This is Porter claiming that received stolen property is legitimately a news writer’s “work product.”

For anyone outside the journalism guild, receiving stolen property is a serious felony. It’s long past time to end this criminal carveout for news writers and the news outlets that employ them. Stolen property is precisely that, not more and not less, no matter who gets it.

Of Course He Is

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Because he must. SecDef Pete Hegseth is appealing a district court’s ruling blocking him from proceeding with investigation of, and potential retirement-related sanctioning, Arizona Progressive-Democrat Senator Mark Kelly over Kelly’s participation in a video encouraging disorder in the military ranks by emphasizing what every service member already knows—they have an obligation to disobey illegal orders—and by which emphasis he encouraged especially the lower and bottom ranks to question every order they’re given.

It may be that Hegseth is wrong with his move vis-à-vis Kelly, but the magistrate’s ruling is, it seems to me, badly premature. The Federal courts should not be interfering with what is at bottom a strictly military matter. Furthermore, until a final ruling regarding Kelly’s retirement status and retired rank is issued, no material harm has come to Kelly. That makes the magistrate’s ruling rationale speculative at best.

What should happen is for the civilian courts to let DoD’s investigation take its course and any potential sanction be realized. Only then would a civilian Federal court have any jurisdiction over the matter.