A south-central Pennsylvania GOP mayoral candidate was arrested this week and arraigned on two felonies and two misdemeanors in connection with an alleged relationship with a pre-teen from the conservative candidate’s church group.

The cops alleged that Gregory J. Nies of Lititz, PA., inappropriately touched, hugged and kissed the girl, being raised by grandparents locally, when she stayed over at his family’s home between June 2002 and October 2004.

Nies, 56, the cops alleged, on some eight occasions would paw the girl in the basement of his home, where he lives with his wife and children, informing her, “this is what dads do.”

[Intelligencer Journal] Sex Case Ensnares Lititz Man

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JNOV made another video:

Me like.

How could anything possibly go wrong?

Pundit Tucker Carlson publicly announced Tuesday that a right-leaning news site resembling the Huffington Post he’s been planning will go live within weeks.

Carlson will launch TheDailyCaller.com, which he said would focus on reporting on the Obama administration and “adding facts to the conversation.”

“We are a general-interest newspaper-format style site,” Carlson told conservative bloggers at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday. “There just aren’t enough people covering this administration and telling the people what’s going on.”

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Wow:

Former U.S. solicitor general Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, who argued opposite each other in Bush v. Gore, are now teaming up to “represent two same-sex couples filing suit after being denied marriage licenses because of Proposition 8. Their suit, to be filed in U.S. District Court in California, calls for an injunction against the proposition, allowing immediate reinstatement of marriage rights for same-sex couples.” The American Foundation for Equal Rights, which is leading the case, notes that it is the first time that Olson and Boies have “served alongside each other as co-counsel.” “For a long time I’ve personally felt that we are doing a grave injustice for people throughout this country by denying equality to gay and lesbian individuals,” Olson told The Advocate in an interview. A copy of the 10-page complaint is here.

And I was sure Ted Olson was a complete douchebag.  I’ve learned something new.

Ted Olson to Team Up With Bush v. Gore Foe to Challenge Prop. 8 in Federal Court [Think Progress]

AFER Press Conference (video)

Update: Courtesy of SanFranLefty, here’s the motion for preliminary injunction (pdf).

[via]

On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy bought a first-class ticket for Covington on the East Louisiana Railway, and found himself a seat. That night, he found himself in jail.

Plessy, seven-eighths Caucasian by the standards of the day, had boarded a Whites-only coach. The keen-eyed conductor, empowered by an 1890 state law, asked Plessy to move to a Colored coach on the same train. When Plessy refused, the New Orleans police were called in to haul him away.

Violating the law carried a $25 fine or twenty days in jail.

The case we know as Plessy v. Ferguson reached the Supreme Court in 1896. Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing for the 7-1 majority, argued that the still-fresh 13th and 14th Amendments — one abolishing slavery, the other guaranteeing all citizens “the equal protection of the laws” — had no bearing on the matter at hand:

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Jeffrey Rosen:

Of course, Judge Sotomayor should be confirmed to the Supreme Court. She obviously wasn’t my first choice, for reasons I reported three weeks ago, having mostly to do with concerns about her temperament reported to me by former clerks and New York prosecutors. But I hope and assume the White House wrestled seriously with those questions of temperament and weighed them against Sotomayor’s other obvious strengths.

The Sotomayor Nomination [TNR]

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