BROWARD BLOG'S SOLUTION & THE PASSING OF WILLIAM F BUCKLEY

Our Brother Bloggers North of The Border have proposed a solution to the pending court funding-JA furlough crisis: have the robed readers donate a small portion of their salary (like 5%) back to the State to be used to fund salaries for judicial assistants.

From the Broward Blog:

JAABLOG challenges all members of the Florida Judiciary to donate 5% of their pre-tax earnings to their local court administration budgets.In Broward alone, with 89 County and Circuit judges earning $137,000 and $145,000, respectively, the extra revenue would total a whopping $627,450. Across Florida, with 990 judges (including higher court judges who earn more), the savings would total over $7,000,000.The average Judicial Assistant (JA) earns roughly $35,000 a year, or $2,917 a month. Many other individuals paid out of the court administration budget earn much less. Broward and other jurisdictions are currently contemplating furloughs for these unsung heroes of up to 22 days, or more than one month of work. Many of them are single parents, and live paycheck to paycheck. In Broward alone, the savings of $627,450 would eliminate the need to furlough a single JA, with plenty of money left over to help other deserving civil servants.

Quicker than a robed reader running to the restroom when the check arrives, a whopping ZERO, ZILCH, NADA, NONE, ....no Judges have responded to the Broward Blog's challenge. What we like best is that they are continuing their challenge every day with a running total of how many days the challenge has been running, and how many judges have stepped up to the plate.

We love those guys in Broward. All they have done so far is bring down the chief judge, publish a running series of pictures of empty courtrooms in the afternoon, highlight a creepy court officer who was hitting on female defendants, and basically give a voice to all those that have been previously stepped on, mistreated, or otherwise just given "The Broward Treatment" by one of those black robed wearing tyrants that have been entrusted to dispense justice North Of the Border.

We note with sadness the passing of William F. Buckley at age 82 today.

The NY Times Obit is HERE

In the opening paragraph the Times wrote:
William F. Buckley, who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.

The Times further wrote that
"In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan joked that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a plain brown wrapper and still anxiously awaited his biweekly edition — “without the wrapper.”
“You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said."


Rumpole notes: Mr. Buckley gave an intellectual voice to conservatism, when all that otherwise existed were some right wing nuts in the John Birch society. The conservatism Buckley wrote about challenged the assumptions that altruistic statism was the backbone of an enlightened society. The Times Obit had this piece from a George Will article:

The liberal advance had begun with the New Deal, and so accelerated in the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale as a traitorous den of atheistic collectivism immediately after his graduation (with honors) from the university.
“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in the National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”

We have previously written that John McCain may be the last sane man in the Republican party. That is because McCain represents the last gasp of power from intellectual conservatives who understand that the issue is not Jesus and Republicans (ala Huckabee), but the issue is altruistic collectivist ethics versus the freedom of the individual and capitalism. When the Republican Party is finally and completely taken over by religious statists, there will no longer be voices advancing the intellectual conservatism that Buckley started, and Regan brought down the Soviet Union with.

See You In Court, where no Judge we know of has accepted the Broward challenge. Although we do admit we have received copies of emails we have not been allowed to publish in which several Dade Criminal Court Judges have propsoed solutions to the problem, including one proposal that the entire court system- Judges, clerks, JAs, everyone, take a one day furlough, with the belief being that the pain of the furlough would be equally shared by everyone.