random things (as opposed to the usual format)

Ed Ryan opens his campaign headquarters, and promptly vows not to return. Really, read the blurb in today's paper. He'll be out in the field. It makes sense campaign wise for him to stick to the field, but I'm not sure about announcing it. I would post the contact info for the new HQ but I can't find the info for other HQs and I want to play fair. It's in the article anyway, look in the paper or search syracuse.com.

The big politics article today is about judges being appointed "acting" judges of a higher level, usually with a bump in pay. As someone who works in the court system, let me ride both sides of this issue. First off, 2 of the big examples cited are Judge Merrill in drug court and Judge Rossi in Integrated Domestic Violence court. Let me say that these two positions need to stay. Without being an acting count court judge, Judge Merrill could not run drug court, and we need a drug court. Some would argue that treatment is letting defendants off the hook, but these people have not been before Judge Merrill. Trust me, if someone screws up drug court, they're paying for it. As for IDV, domestic violence often involves custody desputes and divorces, felonies, misdeanors, and violations (harassment is a violation). Giving a family court judge like Rossi extra authority so he can handle the whole case allows him to be familiar with all the issues. Similarly, Aloi gets his acting position so he can handle anything from Rossi that has to go to trial, since Rossi doesn't handle trials.

That being said, the "acting" judge system does give power to people who weren't elected by the people to have that power, the power instead being handed out by Administrative Judge Tormey. For family court judge Walsh Hood to have no family court cases and instead handle matrimonial issues seems to be giving her a higher post than she was elected to.

Finally, some words on Syracuse.com's forums. Posting there has taught me several things: 1)Lawrence Moten had better stats then I remembered at SU 2)There seems to be a lot of discussion about running Tina Bennett for DA 3) People do not read posts completely before they respond to them (here I'm thinking conservatives responding to my posts, maybe we need a special reading class for them). Despite that, I'll continue to post because my new counter tells me the majority of my tiny number of hits come from there.

Oh and I got added to the blogroll (that sounds like a terrible type of bread) at the Brennan Center! They waited a while to make sure I'd keep posting. So some people are reading.