Has Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Cindy S. Lederman been getting too much sun or is she seeing the light?

Judge Lederman ruled on a case challenging a Florida law that bans lesbians and gays from adopting, ruling the statute unconstitutional.

The case raises the big question Republicans are pondering as they decide which way forward for their battered Party: Embracing ignorance and authoritarianism or some manner of qualified libertarianism.

[Pictured above is Martin Gill with the two brothers he hopes to adopt in Florida.] From the ACLU:

WTF is going on?

WASHINGTON – The extraordinary powers of customs and border agents to invade the privacy of individuals at the U.S. border are spreading inland and creating what amounts to a “Constitution-free Zone” that covers fully two-thirds of the American population, the American Civil Liberties Union said today in a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

197.4 million people live within 100 miles of the U.S. borders, and the government has just assumed extraordinary powers to search U.S. citizens within these zones.

This is not tinfoil hat stuff. Look at the map (scroll down a little). Do you know what this means?

“In the United States, citizens are not supposed to need an internal passport,” said Steinhardt. “This is our country and we are free to go where we please, without being stopped and interrogated by the authorities, as long as we are not behaving illegally or in a way that is clearly suspicious.”

It has brought to our attention that "(s)enior Justice Department officials told civil-rights organizations they plan to deploy hundreds of poll monitors in November to prevent voting-rights violations and deter fraud (Perez, Wall Street Journal, September 9. 2008).

In light of the Wisconsin DOJ/GOP's efforts at voter suppression (that now looks to fail) and the McCain Campaign project sending misleading absentee ballots to voters, the presence of U.S. DOJ officials at polling places has civil rights groups nervous, though it's not confirmed that the DOJ officials will be in Wisconsin at this point.

As Evan Perez writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Update: FBI Response to The Progressive Article Alleging the FBI Authorizes InfraGard Members to “Shoot to Kill” [- this is what is called a long non-denial denial -]

Lee Rayburn, one of the most engaging radio hosts in America - The Mic, 92.1 FM (Madison, Wisconsin) - talked to an acquaintance some months back who told him that a U.S. government agency was involved in deputizing businesses' principals in a secret program to be activated in the event of a national emergency.

Rayburn has an ear for a good story; and the source seemed credible, so he mentioned the bare facts on his morning radio show broadcast out of Madison.

Rayburn said he wondered about the facts and treated the matter with due skepticism; but he was disturbed by one aspect: The alleged civilian shoot-to-kill with immunity element of the program. Smells like ... fascism.

by Michael Leon

Madison, Wisconsin— Recalling his successful arguing of the landmark Fourth Amendment case in 1972 against the Nixon administration as Nixon literally sought the legal destruction of American Constitutional government through the Supreme Court’s imprimatur, the great civil rights attorney, Arthur Kinoy (1920-2003), writes:

The government’s team had arrived. I immediately looked for their most prominent member, the one wearing the traditional long morning coat that government lawyers invariably wear when arguing before the High Court. … I expected to see Erwin Griswold, the Solicitor General and a former dean of Harvard Law School (pictured above-right). … Instead, I saw an unfamiliar man, tall, dark, and scowling, wearing the morning coat. I turned to (William) Gossett and whispered, ‘It’s not Griswold!’ ‘No,’ answered Gossett, ‘it’s Mardian (Robert Mardian, a Nixon hatchet man at the DoJ Internal Security Division, dedicated to the destruction of anti-war and civil rights citizen groups.) … ‘All (Mardian) needs is the jackboots,’ someone later remarked to Kinoy. … Then something even stranger happened. Griswold walked into the courtroom and sat down in the seat reserved for the Solicitor General, as though to make it clear to the Court that he had not withdrawn because of illness or scheduling conflicts, but for some other reason. He sat there quietly throughout the argument, as if he were constantly saying to the Court through his physical presence, ‘I am not arguing this case. Just remember that.’