Mario Piperni dot Com

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Nice to see scum like this getting what they deserve.

Hal Turner, an online radio “shock jock” and blogger, was convicted on Friday of threatening to kill three federal judges in Chicago, Illinois, in retaliation for a ruling they made that upheld handgun bans, government officials said.

Turner was arrested and charged in June 2009 for posting incendiary comments that said the judges involved in the case deserved to be killed. The three judges he threatened, who had upheld a ban on handguns in Chicago and the Oak Park suburb, testified at the trial.

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The post included photographs of the judges, their phone numbers, addresses and a map of the building where they work.

Turner has been known to post the names and home addresses of judges he believes are on the wrong side of conservative issues, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups.

Get a load of his defense.

Turner had sought to portray himself as a “shock jock” and fierce gun control opponent whose tirades were protected by the constitutional right to free speech.

“He thought it was political trash talk,” defense attorney Peter Kirchheimer said in opening statements. “It was the same thing he’d done many times before, only this time he was arrested.”

Testifying in his own defense, Turner said he was a paid FBI informant who was trying to “flush out” dangerous neo-Nazi and white supremacist members of his audience on behalf of the government.

I’m just waiting for some wingnut to cry out that the judge should have recused himself from the case.  They’ll claim his judgment was compromised in presiding over a case involving other judges.

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From Glenn Church over at Foolocracy comes this bit of nuttiness.

This November, Oklahoma voter will have a chance to decide on one of the pressing matters of the time – should Oklahoma ban sharia law?

Of all places in the United States, Oklahoma is one of the last that someone would expect sharia law. That is why the sponsor of the bill, Rex Duncan said, “I would describe this as a pre-emptive strike. We don’t want to let it get a toe-hold.”

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…people like Duncan are playing to the lowest fears of people who think that radical Muslims and international socialists are going to take over the American judicial system.

Race-baiting, fear-mongering Republicans are getting more insane and desperate by the day.  These people have really lost it.

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Finally.

The Justice Department filed suit Tuesday against Arizona, charging that the state’s new immigration law is unconstitutional and requesting a preliminary injunction to stop the legislation from taking effect.

The lawsuit says the law illegally intrudes on federal prerogatives, invoking as its main argument the legal doctrine of “preemption,” which is based on the Constitution’s supremacy clause and says that federal law trumps state statutes. The Justice Department argues that enforcing immigration laws is a federal responsibility.

But the filing also asserts that the Arizona law would harm people’s civil rights, leading to police harassment of U.S. citizens and foreigners.

Although it was no secret that the Justice Department would take action, the right is going to go nuts over this.  Let the games begin.

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The Gulf disaster just keeps on getting uglier.

A New Orleans federal judge lifted the six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling imposed by President Barack Obama following the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Drilling services shares jumped on the news.

Obama temporarily halted all drilling in waters deeper than 500 feet on May 27 to give a presidential commission time to study improvements in the safety of offshore operations. More than a dozen Louisiana offshore service and supply companies sued U.S. regulators to lift the ban. The U.S. said it will appeal the decision.

U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman today granted a preliminary injunction, halting the moratorium. He also “immediately prohibited” the U.S. from enforcing the ban. Government lawyers told Feldman that ban was based on findings in a U.S. report following the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig off the Louisiana coast in April.

“The court is unable to divine or fathom a relationship between the findings and the immense scope of the moratorium,” Feldman said in his 22-page decision. “The blanket moratorium, with no parameters, seems to assume that because one rig failed and although no one yet fully knows why, all companies and rigs drilling new wells over 500 feet also universally present an imminent danger.”

Aside from the fact that preliminary inquiries show that safety measures were ignored by BP and others, it is precisely because “no one fully knows why” that the moratorium was invoked.  To follow the judge’s logic, no planes should have been grounded on 9/11 because to do so meant that a few hijacked airplanes assumed “imminent danger” for all other planes flying that day.

This makes no sense except to note…

That judge, it turns out, has in recent years had interests in Transocean—the world’s largest offshore drilling company and the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig—as well as other energy companies engaged in offshore oil extraction.

According to the most recently available financial disclosure form for District Court Judge Martin Feldman, he had holdings of up to $15,000 in Transocean in 2008. He has also recently owned stock in offshore drilling or oilfield service providers Halliburton, Prospect Energy, Hercules Offshore, Parker Drilling Co., and ATP Oil & Gas. Feldman was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983.

Stinking politics, self-interest or madness before common sense…take your pick.

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