Month: April 2004

The biggest screw-up in family law in a generation was corrected by the California Supreme Court yesterday, in the Marriage of LaMusga case. The court ruled that a long-distance moveaway by a custodial parent may not be in the child’s best interests, depending on all the circumstances. Now this doesn’t sound like much (it’s pretty much common sense, isn’t it?), but it has tremendous importance in light the standard that it replaces, the Burgess rule that the custodial parent has a presumptive right to move and that’s all there is to it. The feminist groups are screaming like pigs over it; mom’s attorney said “This is the worst day for children in the history of California;” notorious lobbyist and law professor Carol Bruch said “this is a tragic day for children, a tragic day for the rule of law and a tragic day for scholarship.”

Burgess was a dishonest opinion, denying the fact that a long-distance move is a “significant change of circumstance” in most cases, which it had to do in order to expand the moveway right practically to infinity (once made, custody orders remain in force until a “change of circumstance” takes place warranting a re-examination; Burgess took that possibility off the table.)

The author of Burgess was the now-deceased but then doddering old fool Stanley Mosk, who was replaced by the author of this opinion, Justice Carlos Moreno, the Gray Davis appointment. As checkered as Gray’s legacy is to California, he obviously did well in appointing Moreno, but then again, he had good help.

See Rough&Tumble for news accounts:

Child Custody Rights Refined — A divorced parent’s freedom to move away is limited. The state Supreme Court says a child’s welfare is paramount in disputes. Maura Dolan in the Los Angeles Times Bob Egelko in the San Francisco Chronicle Claire Cooper in the Sacramento Bee Michelle Quinn in the San Jose Mercury AP’s David Kravets in the Oakland Tribune — 4/30/04

and see the court’s opinion for all the details, including the saucy dissent by Justice Kennard, the drunk driver.

From The Australian:

Documents found in Iraq’s old ministry of oil reveal that hundreds of prominent individuals received vouchers to buy Iraqi oil at cut-rate prices and sell it on the open market — at tremendous, often seven-figure, profits.

Those named include not just Sevan but a vast array of Russian politicians, close friends of French President Jacques Chirac (including France’s former minister of the interior), British Labour MP George Galloway, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and, closer to home, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri.

In short, it’s a who’s who list of high-profile anti-war and anti-sanctions voices, all revealed to be shills for Saddam.

All we are saying is Give Peace a Chance (to line my pockets!)

A reader emailed this to me:

API Report

The Associated Press reports that New York junior Senator Hillary Clinton narrowly escaped injury in the aircraft that she was piloting when she was forced to make an emergency landing in Southern Texas because of bad weather.

National Transportation Safety Board officials have issued a preliminary determination that pilot error contributed to the accident, and that the senator was flying in IFR conditions while only having obtained a VFR, single engine land rating. The absence of a post-crash fire was likely due to insufficient fuel on board. No one on the ground was injured.

Pictures taken at the scene show the extent of damage to Senator Clinton’s aircraft. (click for photo).

I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief now.

The evil California Prison Guards’ union has invented a new form of comment spamming. See the comment by Jeff DiCello of Santa Rosa, CA on Patio Pundit: Jill responds and Mossback’s Progress: Everybody’s an expert and Preston Line Staff’s voice.

I say we give him the chair.

The original is here, and DiCello apparently stole it.

George Monbiot has written a delightfully hysterical account of the religious right’s influence on American foreign policy, standard issue for the muesli-eating snobs who go to Guardian breakfasts to bask in their supremacy to cowboy America, but I much prefer Mark Steyn’s account of the influence of bonker-mindedeness on the Left:

In 1968, in his best-selling book The Population Bomb, scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

In 1972, in their influential landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and gas by 1993.

In 1977, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States (incredible as it may seem), confidently predicted that “we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

Now, in 2002, with enough oil for a century and a half, the planet awash in cut-price minerals, and less global famine, starvation and malnutrition than ever before, the end of the world has had to be rescheduled.

Happy Earth Day, everyone.