District Judge Matthew Dowd gives probation to another sex criminal - and ends up disgraced yet again. A report from combined Kansas Liberty dispatches.

DA agreed to 'stand silent' while Dowd passed sentence

As part of a May plea agreement with a 75-year-old man accused of having sex with a 6-year-old and a 7-year-old, Shawnee County District Attorney Robert Hecht agreed that the state would “stand silent at sentencing” - even though the judge who was assigned the case is notorious for handing out light sentences for sex crimes involving children.

The sentencing took place on Friday, when Shawnee County District Court Judge Matthew Dowd sentenced Harold Spencer to probation for crimes that could have drawn two life sentences.

It was the latest in a series of decisions in which Dowd, a Democrat, has departed from sentencing guidelines to give child rapists milder sentences. It also may be Dowd's last such decision, since it launched a series of events that culminated with the judge announcing he would no longer take part in trials in which sex crimes against children were alleged. [ Read more...]

An echo of the Dowd judicial scandal? Supporters say a successful effort would 'put judges on alert that they're accountable.'

Citizen group seeks to unseat Douglas County judge Paula Martin

A group of Lawrence residents will renew their effort to unseat Douglas County District Court Judge Paula Martin who sentenced two men accused of raping a 13-year-old girl to 60 days of jail time and probation.

A member of the group said he hoped, if the effort is successful, to put other judges on notice that they are ultimately accountable to the people.

“Maybe if we had been able to take Judge Martin out in 2004, this Judge Dowd in Topeka wouldn’t have been so lax in his sentences of sex criminals,” said Kevin Groenhagen, in reference to Shawnee County District Court Judge Matthew Dowd who was the subject of public protests this week after sentencing a 75-year-old man who had sex with two children under the age of 8 to probation. [ Read more...]

UPDATE: Wichita grand jury gives up, blames Kansas Supreme Court for 'interpreting' laws in a way that makes enforcement impossible

Late-term abortionist dodges another legal bullet

Dr. George Tiller, operator of a clinic in Wichita that performs late-term abortions, dodged another legal bullet Thursday when a grand jury in Wichita investigating his practice disbanded without returning indictments.

In a statement released following its adjournment, the grand jury said that although it appeared Tiller’s Wichita clinic performed “questionable” late-term abortions, interpretations of Kansas’ laws on abortion have created so much confusion that the grand jury not only found it impossible to issue indictments, they weren't clear on who had created the interpretations.

“As the current law is written and interpreted by the Kansas Supreme Court, late-term abortions will continue for many circumstances that would seem, as a matter of common interpretation, not to meet the definition of ‘substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,'” the grand jury said in its statement.

By Rebecca F. Sisk for KansasLiberty.com

Complications with the new drug Gardasil, which protects against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV), the primary cause of cervical cancer in women, are alarming several organizations nationwide, including some in the state of Kansas.

Gardasil was first licensed by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2006. The demand for the vaccination spread quickly throughout the United States. The drug has been approved for girls as young as nine, and some state and local governments are pushing for the vaccination to be made mandatory for girls entering sixth grade.

However, Judicial Watch, a Washington DC-based watchdog organization, reported last week that based on documents from the FDA, Gardasil has been implicated in at least 10 deaths since just September. [ Read more...]

Burton Folsom, a historian of modern American history at Hillsdale College in Michigan, wrote a very useful little book which should be assigned reading in a wide variety of history courses at both the high school and college level.

Entitled The Myth of the Robber Barons, Folsom eviscerates the idea that capitalists exploited the people during the industrial revolution.

Such a view developed as a result of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a time when businessmen were not held in high esteem, and as a direct result of Matthew Josephson’s 1934 book The Robber Barons which first applied the old medieval term to individuals like John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould and Andrew Carnegie. [ Read more...]

State-owned and operated casinos are constitutional and permissible in Kansas. The extremely activist and left-wing Kansas Supreme Court unanimously ruled June 27 that state-owned and operated casinos were legal in Kansas. For many statehouse observers this was not a surprise.

The Kansas Supreme Court is dominated by liberal Democrats with three of its seven members having been appointed by Governor Sebelius. That is how the constitution gets re-written without the voters deciding.

There has never been a statewide vote by Kansans authorizing a change in the Kansas Constitution to authorize state-owned casinos. In fact, there has never been any vote on casinos. The Kansas Constitution has a provision against gambling that goes back to territorial days. [ Read more...]

The obvious, 'analyzed.' The Associated Press has done some deep analyzing and discovered that there's a probable relationship between Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Kansas' abortion-backers. Shocking. There's also this:

"The case against Tiller was started by former Attorney General Paul Morrison, an abortion rights supporter. Many Democrats believed Sebelius was instrumental in getting Morrison to switch parties to run in 2006, when he ousted Phill Kline, an anti-abortion Republican."

Poor Kline. No credit, no way. The case against Tiller was started by Kline, of course. Morrison tried to walk away from prosecuting one of the state's most powerful political donors when he replaced Kline but ended up having to file minor charges against Mr. Abortion anyway. 

Hedging bets? For a governor who's betting Kansans will gamble away enough money to pay the state's bills, Sebelius isn't going out on a limb when it comes to Obama's prospects in Kansas in '08.

According to Real Clear Politics, when asked if her presence on an Obama ticket would mean she could deliver the state, she told a DNC press conference, "You know, twice in our history have Kansans voted for a Democrat for President, the last time was 1964. So I'm not betting on it."

But at the Salina Journal's blog, it's a different story: "Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius recently told reporters in Denver that Illinois Sen. Barack Obama could win Kansas in November's presidential election."

Java joes. Lindsborger (is that a word?) Wes Fisk and the boys in his "cyber coffee group" posted a birthday card to the 536th most unpopular man in Washington, DC - George W. Bush, whose birthday was yesterday - on his Think About It blog. Bush's unpopularity comes after the 435 members of the US House of Representatives and the 100 members of the US Senate. And we're not even counting the thousands of well-respected journalists in the DC press corps. In fact, Bush may be the most popular man in Washington, come to think about it.