03.18.07

Following the Law

Posted in General at 10:23 pm by Clay

Continuing my love for contradicitions, I present for you bits from two articles: One an opinion article in the February 24th, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal by Maureen Martin, an attorney who is senior fellow for legal affairs at the Heartland Institute, and the other from the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal on March 6th. I’ll present them in a back-and-forth format.

For the past few years, some judges in Wisconsin have been rewriting state law from the bench. Now it’s possible that they soon may go even further by rewriting the Wisconsin constitution.

Ziegler said she uses a “gut check” to decide if she has a conflict of interest.

There is a disconnect between traditional democratic principles and the notion that citizens need not uphold provisions of state and federal constitutions with which they disagree.

Supreme Court rules state that judges have a conflict of interest in cases in which they or a spouse are a party to the case or “an officer, director or trustee of a party” — in this case, [West Bend Savings Bank, where her husband is on the board of directors(or, as found out later, the cases with companies in which she owns more than $50,000 in stock.)]. A judge must act on the conflict “as soon as the judge knows of the conflict,” said James Alexander, executive director of the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, which enforced the Supreme Court rules governing judges’ conduct.

Once a conflict is discovered, judges have two choices: withdraw or offer the parties the oportunity to waive the recusal, Alexander said.

Now, I’m not about to say that, for sure, Linda Clifford is better for Wisconsin than Annette Ziegler, just because we’ve found out that, as a judge, Ziegler has previously not bothered following the rules. What I will say is that this election is about one thing: Do you prefer to have conservative justices make stuff up from the bench(vote for Ziegler!), or do you prefer to have liberal justices make stuff up from the bench(vote for Clifford!)? Pretending that the liberals somehow have a lock on ignoring the law(constitutional or otherwise) is ridiculous.

Kidneys: Just Take Them Nicely

Posted in General at 9:47 pm by Clay

I love letters to the editor. Why? Because they often make no sense and are seemingly written by crazy people. While I intend to have a questionable logic series at some point, the topic for this post is kidneys.

Or, rather, how to increase the amount we have, without doing ethically distasteful things. A seemingly non-crazy Harold G. from Chicago had a letter published in the Thursday, March 15th, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal that stated:

Today, it is a felony for a kidney donor to receive any form of compensation. It is assumed that compensated donors would be poor and forced, in desperation, to sell a body part to someone rich enough to pay for an organ. That would be terrible and should be unacceptable to everyone.

He then immediately says:

However, millions of individuals are perfectly capable of making a rational, well-reasoned decision to have a safe laparoscopic procedure that usually requires a 24-to-48-hour hospital stay in return for financial assistance that could make a real difference in that individual’s life

So, in other words, it’s just fine to have someone poor give their kidney to someone rich for money. We just have to make sure that everyone views it as the wonderful thing that it is; poor people get richer, rich people avoid dying.

The thing is, the letter writer is for living kidney donations in order to save more lives. The problem is that, if you have a financial incentive, occasionally people are going to do it for the money.