Here’s the Tennessee Court of the Judiciary’s public censure in the case (paragraph breaks added):

PUBLIC CENSURE
May 1, 2009

The Honorable Durwood G. Moore
Dickson County General Sessions Judge
Post Office Box 217
Charlotte, Tennessee 37036

In re: Complaint of Benjamin J. Marchant vs. Judge Durwood G. Moore

Dear Judge Moore:

This shall serve as a public censure pursuant to your agreement with the Investigative Panel of this Court. This censure relates to your conduct as General Sessions Court Judge on January 2, 2009.

On this date at approximately 1:30 p.m. Mr. Marchant was a spectator in your courtroom. He had come to observe the court proceedings as he had a friend who had court business and he was there to provide that individual a ride at the conclusion of your court proceedings. While he sat in your court you observed him and ordered your bailiff or police officers in the courtroom to take Mr. Marchant into custody and to administer a drug test on his person. Mr. Marchant was neither a litigant, a defendant or a person who had business before the Court and was a citizen observer. Mr. Marchant at your direction was seized by police officials and required to provide a urine sample which was drug tested. When the drug test was revealed to be negative Mr. Marchant was released.

The ordering of the seizure of Mr. Marchant and this testing were illegal and neither statutory nor constitutional basis existed for your conduct.

The question of what it means to be a parent has never been simple. But three recent cases highlight just how complicated things can get-and how inconsistent the courts have been in weighing genetic parenthood against the deals struck by would-be parents (gay and straight) with their partners.

Because children with autism spectrum disorders tend to process sound and language a fraction of a second slower than children without the disorders, researchers have discovered that measuring magnetic signals that mark this kind of delayed response has the potential to become a standardized tool for diagnosing autism.

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Fifty-four percent (54%) of Democratic voters believe Democrats in Congress have done a good job representing their party’s values over the past several years.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 36% of Democrats believe their representatives in Congress have lost touch with the party’s voters from throughout the nation.

By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

Goldman Sachs has a new enemy-as if it needed another one.

Hank Greenberg, as we sit in his Park Avenue office, is telling me how to do my job, saying reporters need to get to the bottom of the events that preceded and followed the government bailout of AIG, the insurance company he built into a global giant.

There are serious suggestions that Geithner may have urged AIG officials to hide controversial and perhaps illegitimate payments that were made using taxpayer dollars. As Congressman Darrell Issa, R-California, says “Inadvertent reporting errors are one thing. Directing a bailed-out company to withhold crucial information from a government agency in order to keep the American public in the dark is another.”

After the arrival of a disappointing December jobs report, my thought on putting America back to work is simple: de-stimulate.

That’s right. Get rid of the Obama stimulus monster, including the government takeover of health care, cap-and-trade and all this nonsensical talk of creating green jobs. Get rid of the increase in marginal personal tax rates and capital-gains tax rates. Get rid of the payroll tax hike from the health care talks. Get rid of the spending that is a counterweight to growth. Get rid of it, every part of it. It’s creating so much uncertainty that even profitable businesses are afraid to hire new workers and expand.

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President Obama’s announcement earlier today of an additional $2.3 billion in federal tax credits for creating approximately 17,000 subsidized temporary jobs in the green energy industry is drawing a less than enthusiastic response from Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research:

“Show me one other industry that requests and receives a nearly 30 percent taxpayer subsidy. That’s what the wind and solar industries require – at a minimum – to exist. All the president did today is throw more money at an unproven technology that is not economically viable in the marketplace. Unfortunately, the only winners in this latest taxpayer giveaway will be Wall Street money managers and corporate interests in the wind and solar industry.

Obama’s promise has run up against reality in several different ways. The revelation that former detainees now based in Yemen were involved in planning the Christmas attack in Detroit prompted the administration to announce a halt to repatriation of Yemenis. (In fairness, we hasten to note that the ex-detainees who rejoined the fight were released while George W. Bush was president.) It turns out there really are terrorists at Guantanamo–who knew?

Well, Democrats in Congress knew (though who knew they knew?). Isikoff reports that the administration cannot legally carry out its plan to move detainees to Illinois’s Thomson Correctional Center:

The administration is already blocked from moving any Guantánamo detainees to the U.S. for purposes other than putting them on trial. That’s the result of a rider to a congressional appropriations bill that passed overwhelmingly last spring and which expires Sept. 30.
In order to move the Yemenis and other Gitmo detainees to Thomson, the administration needs to persuade the Congress to lift the rider–in an election year, no less–a much more difficult task when the proposal is to move more than 100 detainees to the U.S. rather than 20 or 30.

If Republican Scott Brown wins Teddy Kennedy’s former Senate seat in this month’s special election, Democrats are ready and willing to do everything they can to delay his swearing-in, reports the Boston Herald:

[If] Brown wins, the entire national health-care reform debate may hinge on when he takes over as senator. Brown has vowed to be the crucial 41st vote in the Senate that would block the bill.

The U.S. Senate ultimately will schedule the swearing-in of Kirk’s successor, but not until the state certifies the election.

Friday, a spokesman for Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, who is overseeing the election but did not respond to a call seeking comment, said certification of the Jan. 19 election by the Governor’s Council would take a while.

“Because it’s a federal election,” spokesman Brian McNiff said. “We’d have to wait 10 days for absentee and military ballots to come in.”

By Tom McMahon.

WASHINGTON - The Club for Growth PAC today announced it will oppose U.S. Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) in his 2010 bid for the Republican nomination for a fourth term in the United States Senate.

“Bob Bennett is out of touch with the times and with his state, and Utah Republicans have better choices for their candidate in November,” said Club President Chris Chocola.

“Our extensive research suggests Utah Republicans already understand this, as they have begun rallying around several viable and superior candidates,” Chocola said. “The Club for Growth PAC is committed to seeing one of them defeat Bennett either at the nominating convention in May or in a primary election in June.”

“Bennett’s record, whether on spending, earmarks, or his disastrous plan for a federal health care takeover, is part of the problem in Washington,” Chocola said. “Utah deserves a pro-growth, free-market reformer in the Senate who will instead become a part of the solution. The Club for Growth PAC will today begin working to help Utah Republicans elect one.”

Among Bennett’s recent Senate lowlights:

· He voted for TARP, the $750 billion Wall Street bailout;
· He voted to save the disgraceful “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark;
· He refused to block funding for any further bailouts of auto manufacturers;
· He voted against redirecting wasteful Defense earmarks toward improved health care for disabled veterans;
· Voted against a resolution stating the Senate had a “moral obligation” to cut spending;
· After voting against President Obama’s 2010 budget, Bennett voted for most of the bloated spending bills comprising it;
· Bennett’s health care proposal would impose an unconstitutional individual mandate, increase federal taxes and spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, and force Americans to pay their insurance premiums through the IRS.

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PAID FOR BY CLUB FOR GROWTH PAC AND NOT AUTHORIZED BY ANY CANDIDATE OR CANDIDATE’S COMMITTEE. 202-955-5500.

Kansas Progress editorial: For months, nobody told us about this conflict of interest, but everybody needed to know

Fox News calls MIT economist Jonathan Gruber “one of the leading academic defenders of health care reform.”  Of course, “health care reform” means whatever President Obama and liberal Democrats decide to call “reform.”

Yesterday, Friday, January 8, at 5:23 p.m., The Boston Globe reported that President Obama’s administration has paid about $400,000 to Gruber.  This is an influential ObamaCare supporter.  It appears that while Gruber did not try very hard to disclose the payments, Gruber may have replied honestly when asked.  From The Globe:

Gruber is being paid to analyze the costs and effects of various health reform proposals.

For example, he wrote an Op-Ed piece last month in the Washinton Post on a proposed tax on high-cost health insurance plans and was quoted in an online Atlantic Monthly article in November, and in neither case was his tie to the administration disclosed. Gruber, however,did disclose his paid work for the administration in a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In a phone interview with the Globe today, Gruber said that he never attempted to hide his government contracts and in fact disclosed them whenever he was asked by reporters. But he said he could only recall three or four instances in the past year when reporters even asked him whether he was under contract with the Obama administration. (more…)

From the Tiahrt for Senate campaign:

Tiahrt Calls for Resignation of Secretary Napolitano

WICHITA-U.S. Congressman Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) today issued the following statement following the administration’s initial report of the Christmas day bombing attempt. Tiahrt is asking his colleagues to join him in calling for the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

“The Obama administration’s homeland security system failed miserably,” said Tiahrt. “Were it not for an act of God, hundreds of lives would have been lost and our nation paralyzed. The time has come for Secretary Napolitano to immediately resign her position at the Department of Homeland Security. (more…)