The Binary Circumstance

The Supreme Court has made it more difficult for a government whistleblower to sue if they are demoted or retaliated against when exposing government misconduct.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Tuesday made it harder for government employees to file lawsuits claiming they were retaliated against for going public with allegations of official misconduct.

By a 5-4 vote, justices said the nation’s 20 million public employees do not have carte blanche free speech rights to disclose government’s inner-workings. New Justice Samuel Alito cast the tie-breaking vote.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the court’s majority, said the First Amendment does not protect “every statement a public employee makes in the course of doing his or her job.”

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The ruling sided with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, which appealed an appellate court ruling which held that prosecutor Richard Ceballos was constitutionally protected when he wrote a memo questioning whether a county sheriff’s deputy had lied in a search warrant affidavit.

Ceballos had filed a lawsuit claiming he was demoted and denied a promotion for trying to expose the lie.

Dissenting justices said Tuesday that the ruling could silence would-be whistleblowers who have information about governmental misconduct.

“Public employees are still citizens while they are in the office,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens. “The notion that there is a categorical difference between speaking as a citizen and speaking in the course of one’s employment is quite wrong.”

The ruling is significant because an estimated 100 whistleblower retaliation lawsuits are filed each year.

The Bush administration had urged the high court to place limits on when government whistleblowers can sue, arguing that those workers have other options, including the filing of civil service complaints.

Kennedy noted in his ruling that there are whistleblower protection laws. The ruling, which had the votes of the court’s conservatives including new Chief Justice John Roberts, showed great deference to the government.

A new report from the United Nations says the world is losing the HIV/AIDS battle.

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The world continues to lose an ugly battle to HIV/AIDS that shows no sign of letting up after 25 million people have died a quarter-century into the epidemic, the head of the U.N.’s HIV/AIDS joint program said.

“I think we will see a further globalization of the epidemic spreading to every single corner of the planet,” UNAIDS head Peter Piot told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Geneva.

UNAIDS on Tuesday was scheduled to launch a 630-page report that takes stock of where the world currently stands with nearly 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS. It documents countries’ progress and failures, and projects what must happen to keep some regions from experiencing disaster. The report was set to be released a day ahead of a High Level Meeting on AIDS in New York, a week prior to the 25th anniversary of the first documented AIDS cases on June 5, 1981.

“It won’t go away one fine day, and then we wake up and say, ‘Oh, AIDS is gone,’” Piot said. “I think we have to start thinking about looking at the next generations. There’s an increasing diversity in how the epidemic looks.”

I thought the United Nations supported diversity.

Piot said that there is still time to stop it from worsening, but action is needed now on a number of fronts.

“Ultimately, it depends on how the leadership reacts, how the international community will continue to respond and how ready communities are to face the problem,” Piot said. “Intervention is very low … for many critical populations in many countries. We need to really intensify the response to AIDS.”

Piot said the picture is not hopeless, with examples of progress in nearly every part of the world. He said Thailand and Uganda were two of the only previous examples where exploding epidemics were curbed, but a handful of other countries, including Kenya and Zimbabwe, are also starting to show promise.

It seems that homosexual storks are quite capable of being good parents.

In the latest example of homosexual activity among animals in captivity, same-sex stork couples at a zoo in Overloon, Holland, have delighted zoo workers by adopting and raising a number of chicks.

A pair of lesbian storks were given two eggs to sit on, while a gay male couple was given one egg to nurture.

Staff were unsure if the gay storks would have a natural urge to raise offspring, but were surprised to find the birds embraced parenthood.

Wild animals usually express homosexual behavior in mating rituals, but the storks in Overloon are tenderly caring for and feeding their adopted chicks.

Parc Overloon spokeswoman Esther Jansen said all three chicks had hatched successfully: “The gay storks look after the eggs and the chicks just as well as our heterosexual birds.”

Sorry I haven’t been blogging much the past few days.

I’ve been trying to pull together a home theater system and the whole process has been making me kind of crazy. Between researching and evaluating receivers, speakers, HDTV tuners, screens, HDMI, DVI, component, RCA connections as well as antennas, I feel like I’ve been living in a kind of techno-hell.

On the one hand, I’m amazed at the technology and what you are able to have in your own home at a relatively modest cost but on the other, it’s often difficult to sort out the sales hype from the reality of what will give me the kind of high-performance, low-maintenance, competitively-priced system that I want.

I’ve been reading a lot on the Internet related to building home theater systems and I could have been blogging a lot of it but that would be just another “job” that I don’t really have the time or energy for right now.

I quickly learned that an inexpensive “theater in a box” could greatly improve the picture and sound on my 10-year-old CRT TV, so much so that I wondered if I really wanted or needed to go any further.

On projects like this, however, I’ve learned that once the fever takes hold of me, it’s got to run its course.