During last March’s primary to select candidates for Alabama’s next chief justice, both major parties embarrassed themselves. Disgraced former Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was removed from office for defying a court order to remove an unconstitutional Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building in 2003, defeated incumbent Chief Justice Chuck Malone to receive the Republican Party’s nomination. Meanwhile, Alabama Democrats nominated Harry Lyon, a perennial candidate who called for “public execution” of undocumented immigrants, and who was once shot in the neck after a neighbor caught Lyons pouring chocolate syrup on the neighbor’s car.

In the wake of several hateful anti-gay statements Lyons wrote on his Facebook page, the state’s Democrats are now trying to disqualify him as their candidate:

The Alabama Democratic Party plans a hearing in Birmingham on Friday to discuss the possible disqualification of Harry Lyon, currently the party’s candidate for Chief Justice, and Lyon said he believes the party will drop him from the ballot.

The body of evidence submitted in the show-cause letter includes inflammatory comments made about gays on his Facebook page, but Bradley Davidson, executive director of the Alabama Democratic Party, said Monday evening that the move was chiefly because of incidents that indicate “a lack of self-control and bizarre behavior.” . . .

In comments made on Facebook, Lyon called homosexuals and those who support same-sex marriage “an abomination of God.”

In another statement, Lyon said that “only sick and perverted persons believe in homosexuality or lesbianism, though there are a lot of them.” In another instance, Lyon, using a derogatory term for gays, asked those who believe in homosexuality to “delist” him.

Republican candidate Roy Moore has made similarly bigoted comments. In one 2002 opinion, then Chief Justice Moore even suggested that gay people should be executed. According to Moore, “[t]o disfavor practicing homosexuals in custody matters is not invidious discrimination, nor is it legislating personal morality. . . . The State carries the power of the sword, that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle.”

Danny Tarkanian is the Republican nominee in a newly created congressional district in Nevada. He also seems to think his opponent has a very good makeup artist. During a speech to a GOP club earlier this week, Tarkanian went into a lengthy rant about how “all these black Democrats” have accused him of making a racist comment. He then levied an unusual allegation against state Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, his Democratic opponent, claiming that “[w]e could be like Steven Horsford who’s not doing anything with [the African-American] community and, you know, pretend we’re black and maybe try to get some votes if that’s where it is.”

This is the man Tarkanian accused of pretending to be black:

The Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office is threatening local medical marijuana dispensaries with steep fines and potential jail time unless they close their doors by September 6. City officials recently sent a letter to over 1,000 locations where they believe medical marijuana shops are operating, as well as over 700 landlords who own the properties, to inform them they will incur a $2,500 fine for each day they remain open past the September deadline.

Although California passed a ballot initiative in 1996 allowing physicians to recommend and patients to possess marijuana, the L.A. City Council voted to ban medical marijuana dispensaries last month. This letter is an early step in the city’s attempt to enforce the ban and close down nearly 800 dispensaries that are currently operating in Los Angeles.

Kris Hermes, a spokesman for the advocacy group Americans for Safe Access, noted that since there are already several measures in the works to overturn the city ban on medical marijuana facilities — collecting enough signatures would force a referendum, and the state Supreme Court may take up the issue — it is hard to know how to respond to the city’s harsh crackdown:

But the city’s effort places the dispensary operators in an uncomfortable position, Hermes said.

“We don’t have a clear-cut response for them on what’s going on,” Hermes said. “It would be imprudent to tell them to stay open. But at the same time, there is all this other activity going on that could change the situation in a matter of weeks.”

Medical marijuana shops are struggling to remain open in other California cities as well. The world’s largest medical marijuana dispensary, Harborside Health Center, is facing pressure from the Justice Department to close its Oakland and San Jose facilities amid a federal crackdown against state-based marijuana shops.

Although marijuana is prohibited under federal law, 17 states and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis for medical purposes, and nine additional states are considering legalizing it by the end of this year. An unprecedented majority of Americans now support marijuana legalization, and a bipartisan bill was recently introduced in the House to protect medical marijuana operations that are abiding by state law from federal interference.

In one of the most shocking incidents of animal abuse in recent memory, a man tied three dogs to a train track in Ohio and documented the event with pictures or video. While one of the dogs managed to escape and is resting in a Cleveland shelter, the other two were mauled by an oncoming train. The dogs’ ordeal was discovered only by chance, as they were taken to a remote location with no nearby housing, suggesting the killer was sensitive to the risk of discovery.

Of course, he wasn’t deterred by the risk of being caught entirely, and for good reason: Ohio has some of the weakest animal cruelty laws in the country. An investigation by Cleveland’s Channel 5 found that, while the vast majority of states make abuse a felony, it’s only a “slap on the wrist” in Ohio on the first offense:

The Humane Society of the United States releases a yearly “Humane State Ranking” report assessing states’ animal protection laws. Ohio ranked 45 in 2010. The ranking was changed to 36 in 2011, after Ohio’s Livestock Care Standards Board adopted new rules to protect farm animals. …

Another animal rights group, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, ranks Ohio 31st. The state’s lack of felony legislation for animal cruelty cases is a “substantial flaw” in the law, according to Scott Heiser, the senior attorney and criminal justice program director for the ALDF. Heiser said animal cruelty laws are a large part of the reason Ohio is ranked 31.

Heiser said Idaho, North Dakota and South Dakota have no animal cruelty statutes. In Iowa, Mississippi and Ohio, a second offense for animal cruelty is a felony. A first offense is a misdemeanor, no matter the severity of the allegations of cruelty.

In Ohio, the first offense of animal cruelty is a second degree misdemeanor, meaning that it carries a maximum jail sentence of 90 days. The same offense is a felony in 44 other states.

A recent case of dog torture in Pennsylvania highlighted similar problems in the law there. Ohio, however, might be planning to do something about it — new legislation, referred to as “Nitro’s Law,” would strengthen animal cruelty laws against dog kennel owners. The legislation is currently stalled in the Ohio Senate, despite the fact that many people who commit murder and assault had previously abused animals.

Republican Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy spoke at the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference on Monday, where he expressed concerns similar to those expressed by Chief Justice John Roberts last year about the growing vacancy crisis on the federal bench:

The Senate is a political entity and will act in a political way and that’s quite proper. When you’re appointed to a lifetime position, it’s proper for the political branch of the government to have considerable authority over that decision. On the other hand, there is a difference in a political function and a partisan function, and the current climate is one in which highly qualified eminent practitioners of the law simply do not want to subject themselves to this process. And I think its incumbent upon members of this conference, particularly the members of the bar to face the fact that they have the responsibility to ensure that this appointment, selection, and confirmation progress is done without the partisan intensity that now accompanies it. This is bad for the legal system. It makes the judiciary look politicized when it is not, and it has to stop.

Kennedy is right about the confirmation process. And while the judge wars certainly did not start when President Obama moved into the White House, they’ve escalated substantially under Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Under McConnell’s leadership, Senate Republicans routinely filibustered Obama’s trial court nominations, the first time such relatively low-ranking judges have ever been the subject of this kind of obstructionism. And McConnell completely misrepresented Senate precedents in order to justify shutting down every single one of Obama’s court of appeals nominees starting last June.

Justice Kennedy would be a much more credible messenger against infecting the judiciary with partisanship, however, if he hadn’t recently joined a legally indefensible dissent in the most politically charged case in decades — voting to wipe out the entirety of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in the midst of a presidential election. And he would have even more credibility if he hadn’t been the driving force behind the Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United.

Almost 100 people protested against Mitt Romney’s extreme immigration policies outside of a campaign fundraiser the GOP presidential candidate attended at The Club, a private dining club in Birmingham, Alabama. The exclusive, 60-year-old restaurant requires a membership, and applicants must be sponsored by a current member and provide a picture with their application. Attendees at the Romney fundraiser paid as much as $25,000 to share dinner with Romney.

Before the event’s attendees reached the fundraiser, they passed the mostly Hispanic crowd chanting outside of the exclusive restaurant’s gates:

When Romney drove by at 4:45 p.m. only a handful of protestors had gathered and the candidate did not stop, but by 5:15 local protestors and a charter bus load from Decatur had arrived. They called out “No Papers, No Fear” and “Education not Deportation.”

The protest rally preceding Romney’s event was organized by the Immigrant Youth Leadership Initiative of Alabama and was held because Wednesday was the first day that undocumented immigrant youth brought to this country by their parents could apply for Deferred Action from deportation, an Obama administration policy that will allow such youth to obtain permits and work legally in the the U.S.

Romney still has refused to say if he would undo President Obama’s immigration directive protecting DREAM Act-eligible young adults from deportation, although a co-chair of his campaign said Romney would “rescind” the policy. During the GOP primary, Romney often staked out the most extreme immigration positions of any one of the GOP candidates, and his immigration advisers include the anti-immigrant official who wrote Alabama and Arizona’s immigration laws.