Just what Americans want to hear in the midst of a financial crisis and record unemployment! It involves a five-year plan to construct courthouses in various parts of the country. The Federal Judiciary and the General Services Administration (GSA) are in charge of the multibillion-dollar project, which has been slowed down by “fiscal challenges,” according to a federal audit released this week. That’s putting it mildly.

For example the Federal Judiciary told Congress that 12 courthouse projects would cost around $1 billion when in fact it will take a whopping $3.2 billion to finish the job. This means that the project masters likely planned to squeeze the extra $2.2 billion out of Congress mid construction, when lawmakers had little choice but to allocate the funds for completion. The audit, conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), flat out says that the document the judiciary uses to request money for courthouse construction projects “lacks transparency and key information” about their “cost.”

There is an official process that must be followed when the judiciary requests taxpayer dollars for these kinds of projects, which are known as capital planning. The goal, as it should be government-wide, is accountability and justification of proposed projects. In this case, 10 of the 12 courthouse projects would not even qualify for new construction under the court system’s own planning standards.

Evidently, that’s why the big brass at the judiciary concealed information from Congress and the American people. “The five-year plan submitted for approval of several billion dollars worth of projects — a one-page list of projects with limited and incomplete information — does not support the judiciary’s request for courthouse construction projects,” the GAO writes in its report.

This is not the first time that the Federal Judiciary gets blasted for its egregious spending sprees. Just last month the GAO issued a scathing report saying that the judiciary exceeded its congressionally authorized allotment for new courthouse space by 3.56 million square feet. This cost American taxpayers $835 million, according to the GAO, and an additional $51 million a year to rent, operate and maintain the facilities.

The problem had actually been identified years earlier in a separate federal audit, but the judiciary went full-throttle with the wasteful projects. In fact, in 2010 the GAO determined that 27 of 33 courthouses completed since 2000 exceeded their congressionally authorized size by a total of 1.7 million square feet. Instead of cutting back, the problem only got worse.

This week’s GAO report blasts the judiciary, albeit in a very diplomatic way, for lying to Congress to keep its monstrous courthouse construction project going. “As a result, there is a risk that congressional funding decisions could be made without complete and accurate information,” the report says.

Previously, the candidate, a renowned leftist attorney who advocates for the rights of terrorists, has been blocked by Senate Republicans, but Obama refuses to give up. For the firth time, Caitlin J. Halligan’s nomination is up for Senate approval to fill a vacancy on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Halligan is currently general counsel for the Manhattan District Aattorney’s office in New York.

It’s hardly the first time Obama appoints an outspoken liberal activist to a lifelong judicial post. Two of the more memorable ones sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. The first, Sonia Sotomayor, has radical ties to the leftwing Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and has expressly rejected the notion that courts should be impartial. Before becoming a Supreme Court justice Sotomayor expressed support for the use of international law in deciding questions arising under the U.S. Constitution and she supported a radical, judicial activist agenda that includes opposition to any restrictions on abortion rights and Second Amendment rights.

Obama’s second Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan, is also a known liberal activist who had never been a judge when she got nominated to the High Court and had very little legal experience. When Kagan served as dean of Harvard Law School she accepted $20 million from members of the Saudi Royal Family to establish a Center for Islamic Studies and Sharia Law, the authoritarian doctrine that inspires Islamists and their jihadism.

Halligan, a former New York state solicitor general, is of the same mold and has quite a record as a legal activist, which is why her nomination has been rejected four times. Never the less, the commander-in-chief wants her on the crucial D.C. Circuit Court that plays a major role in interpreting federal statutes and regulations. The court also hears a lot of cases involving terrorists and Halligan has expressed that the president doesn’t have the legal authority to detain enemy combatants associated with al-Qaeda.

A nonprofit that investigates judicial candidates has published an in-depth research paper on Halligan outlining her positions on gun rights, terrorist war crimes, marriage, judicial pay and the U.S. Constitution. One U.S. Senator, who blocked her nomination in 2011, explains that on a host of issues, Halligan consistently came down on the side of the far left. “She consistently advocated an activist and extreme approach to the law,” said Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley.

This didn’t stop Obama from resubmitting her nomination again in January. The Senate Judiciary Committee subsequently cleared the nomination and is expected to vote on it this month, possibly in the coming weeks. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media loves Halligan and the editorial pages of her hometown newspaper, the New York Times, claims she’s “an  excellent choice” and “there is no good reason to vote against her.”

It’s one of those only in California stories, but it’s going through the federal court system so it deserves attention. Two incarcerated women who practice Wicca, a goddess-worshiping form of witchcraft, sued the state for refusing to hire a Wiccan chaplain. In their complaint the women claim that Wicca has more adherents in their northern California state prison than two of the five religions—including Islam and Judaism—that have state-paid chaplains.

Wiccan inmates have access to a volunteer chaplain, the prisoners claim, but the volunteer is only available every two or three months and the jailed Wiccans need frequent contact with ordained clergy. That’s because clergy is essential to perform “initiations, blessings and ceremonies” in a faith that relies on “an oral tradition of songs and stories.”

A federal court in Fresno dismissed the inmates’ lawsuit in 2011 after finding no violations in their rights. However, this week the notoriously liberal Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals brought it back to life by overturning the decision. The San Francisco-based appellate court ordered the original judge to reconsider the case and determine whether state prisons unconstitutionally prefer majority religions over Wicca and other minority faiths.

If the jailed convicts’ allegations are true, the appellate court wrote in its decision, “the prison administration failed to employ any neutral criteria in evaluating whether a growing membership in minority religions warranted a reallocation of resources used in accommodating inmates’ religious exercise needs.” While the state isn’t required to “provide inmates with the chaplain of their choice,” it must use neutral standards when deciding how to spend money on prisoners’ religious needs, the ruling says.

For many years California prisons have hired chaplains for Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims to conduct religious services for inmates. In the mid 1980s American Indian prisoners sued the state because it didn’t provide spiritual advisers so those are available as well. The group that represents California’s 30,000-plus correctional officers posts this on its website: “California taxpayers, who already pay for prison chaplains covering Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant and Native American religions, might have to add witches to the employee list.”

The case comes out of Virginia where the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit decided that denying a transgender bank robber’s sex-reassignment surgery violates the constitution’s Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. A federal judge in Roanoke denied the argument finding that hormone therapy and psychological counseling provided by the prison are sufficient accommodations for a transgender prisoner. Officials also allow the convict to dress and live as a woman.

But the felon (Michael Stokes), who is serving a 73-year sentence, appealed with the help of leftist civil rights groups. In the appeal Stokes asserts that the accommodations made by the prison did not ease his “extreme distress,” which includes several self-castration attempts. Denying the surgery unconstitutionally ignores his serious medical needs, the bank robber claims in his complaint.

The appellate court agreed, writing in its decision that Virginia prisons can’t justify providing partial treatment for other medical needs, so why this one?  “By analogy, imagine that prison officials prescribe a painkiller to an inmate who has suffered a serious injury from a fall, but that the inmate’s symptoms, despite the medication, persist to the point that he now, by all objective measure, requires evaluation for surgery,” the opinion says.  “Would prison officials then be free to deny him consideration for surgery, immunized from constitutional suit by the fact they were giving him a painkiller?”

In recent years courts throughout the nation have ruled in favor of transgender inmates who have sued to get hormone treatments, laser hair removal and makeup while serving their sentence. As a result states annually spend thousands of taxpayer dollars to provide these convicts, who claim to be diagnosed with “gender identity disorder,” with the benefits.

For instance, Massachusetts pays for the hormone shots of at least four inmates diagnosed with gender identity disorder. Colorado pays for the female hormone treatment of a convicted child molester who is suing the state to provide him with a gender specialist in hopes that the specialist determines he needs the costly sex-change operation.   

For a couple of years Wisconsin was the only state with a law prohibiting the Department of Corrections from using tax dollars for transgender inmates’ hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery. The measure was legally challenged and overturned by a federal court in 2010, however. The Clinton-appointed judge who heard the case ruled that denying convicted male felons hormones that help them look like women violates both the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments.

The case involves a New York City law that says only residents and their guests are allowed to be in or on the grounds of crime-infested public housing complexes. Trespassers can be arrested or detained by police and the measure has led to a reduction in crime, according to authorities.

But New York City Housing Authority tenants have complained that they or their guests have been illegally stopped, searched and arrested. Eighteen residents and visitors filed a lawsuit against the city two years ago seeking reforms and cash. Half settled for an undisclosed amount and the remaining nine have continued with their lawsuit. The city has fought to get it thrown out and the case sits before federal Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan.

This week Judge Scheindlin ruled in favor of the tenants, allowing the lawsuit against the city to go forward. Supporting her stance in the 84-page decision, the judge refers to a well-known black rapper (Jay-Z; real name Shawn Corey Carter) who grew up in New York public housing and, evidently, went on to record a song about his arrest for drug possession.

“In one of his most popular songs, the rapper Jay-Z – who grew up in NYCHA’s Marcy Houses in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn – showcased his knowledge of these Fourth Amendment rights,” Judge Scheindlin writes in a footnote of her order. The outrageous reference was discovered by an online publication dedicated to covering legal matters.

The song (“99 Problems”) the judge refers to is attached in a law-school paper that claims it’s the perfect tool to teach the Fourth Amendment. In it Jay-Z admits, in gangsta lingo, that he was transporting drugs in his car when he saw cops in his rearview mirror. The lyrics include strong profanity that can’t be published here. The law-school paper cited in Judge Scheindlin’s ruling refers to it as “Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps.”

In 2002 Judge Scheindlin made headlines for ordering the release of a Jordanian national, Osama Awadallah, charged with lying to a grand jury about his close ties with two of the 9/11 terrorists. The FBI had evidence that Awadallah had met with at least one of the hijackers dozens of times, but Judge Scheindlin dismissed the charges, ruling that his arrest was unlawful and that the government exceeded its authority by detaining him as a material witness in the terrorism investigation.

That’s in addition to a previous damages award of $128 million for the black and Latino candidates who couldn’t pass a mandatory test to join the New York City Fire Department. Last year the same federal judge, Nicholas Garaufis, asserted the city’s fire department was “a stubborn bastion of white male privilege,” kept intact by six mayors, particularly Michael Bloomberg who ironically is a liberal Democrat.

In a ruling published by a law journal this week, Judge Garaufis says any black or Latino who was not hired or whose hiring was delayed because of the tests can seek compensation. He also orders that at least two out of five entry-level firefighters hired by the city must be black and one out of every five be Hispanic. This is expected to cost taxpayers a chunk of change because hundreds of minority applicants qualify for the reparation.   

In fact, the ruling includes a chart with a breakdown of the black and Hispanic claimants who would have been hired (or hired earlier) in the “absence of discrimination.” The information is broken down to reflect two separate exams and the corresponding compensation amount. The court estimates that blacks missed out on more than $80 million and Hispanics around $46 million.  

The Obama Administration is committed to eliminating the workplace tests all together, asserting that they discriminate against minorities. The Department of Justice (DOJ) calls it “disparate impact,” the racial discrimination created by written exams, which is especially rampant in the nation’s police and fire departments, according to Thomas Perez, the Assistant Attorney General appointed by the president to head the DOJ’s bloated civil rights division.

The theory is that the tests disproportionately screen out people of a particular race, even though they “present the appearance of objective, merit-based selection.” Not only is this discriminatory, according to Perez, employers sell themselves short when they exclude potential workers in this manner. As an example the former Maryland Labor Secretary, who has long fought for the rights of illegal immigrants, said that members of a baseball team should not be chosen by testing their knowledge of baseball history and statistics.

Last year Perez guaranteed that the DOJ will continue to “combat such discrimination so that our nation can fulfill its greatest promise of equal opportunity and equal justice for all.” Previous to that he sued anArizona public college system for discrimination because it requires job applicants to furnish proof of residency before getting hired.

It marks the first time in U.S. history that a federal court considers whether the 13^th Amendment, which prohibits slavery between humans, applies to animals. In this case the plaintiffs are five orcas (Tilikum, Katina, Kasatka, Ulises and Corky) living in tanks at Sea World in San Diego California and Orlando Florida. They perform in daily shows at the parks on opposite coasts of the country.

But the whales’ attorneys from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) claim they are “incarcerated” and treated like slaves because they’re forced to live in tanks and perform in shows. This amounts to slavery, according to the orcas’ PETA lawyer, Jeff Kerr. “It’s a new frontier in civil rights,” Kerr said. “Slavery does not depend on the species of the slave any more than it depends on race, gender, or ethnicity. Coercion, degradation, and subjugation characterize slavery, and these orcas have endured all three.”

That’s a whale of a statement! Sea World’s attorney said PETA is wasting the court’s time since the case defies common sense and goes against 125 years of case law applied to the Constitution’s 13^th Amendment, which prohibits slavery only between humans. “Neither orcas nor any other animal were included in the ‘We the people’ … when the Constitution was adopted,” he told the judge.

Arguments went on for an hour and the judge didn’t indicate when he would rule, only that it would be at a later date. The whales’ attorney maintained a steady level of passion, calling it a historic day. “ For the first time in our nation’s history, a federal court heard arguments as to whether living, breathing, feeling beings have rights and can be enslaved simply because they happen to not have been born human. By any definition these orcas have been enslaved here.”

The case comes from San Luis, a Mexican border town in southwestern Arizona with about 25,000 mostly Hispanic residents. U.S.-born Alejandrina Cabrera, who graduated from a public high school in Arizona, is running for a spot on the town’s council yet she barely speaks English. Her attorneys claim that forcing her off the ballot over the language barrier is a violation of her civil rights.

But since 1910, Arizona law has required “that ability to read, write, speak, and understand the English language sufficiently well to conduct the duties of the office without the aid of an interpreter shall be a necessary qualification for all state officers. . . .” Additionally, a measure making English the official state language was approved by an overwhelming 74% of Arizona voters in 2007.

This week Yuma County Superior Court Judge John Nelson ordered Alejandrina’s name stricken from the March ballot after a lengthy hearing that started in the morning and continued into the night, according to a local newspaper report. The judge heard testimony from a sociolinguistics expert who said Cabrera failed to demonstrate English proficiency and Cabrera was not able to respond to questions posed to her in English in court proceedings.

Judge Nelson ruled Cabrera wasn’t qualified to run for office because her English language skills were “only a minimal survival range.” The case reached court after the San Luis City Council approved a motion earlier this month asking for verification that Cabrera meets the state requirement that any person holding public office must speak, write and read English.

In the days leading up to the court hearing, Cabrera was quoted in a mainstream newspaper story admitting that she speaks “little English” and, though she graduated from an Arizona high school, she spent much of her childhood in Mexico.  She said in San Luis, few speak English; “You go to a market, it’s Spanish,” Cabrera said. “You go to a doctor, it’s Spanish. When you pay the bills for the lights or water, it’s Spanish.”

As if to justify this, the same article points out that more than 90% of the population in San Luis is Mexican-American and that “Latino civil rights leader” Cesar Chavez died there. Typical of mainstream media coverage of these sorts of matters, the story seems to omit a very important fact; San Luis is in the United States of America.

The bizarre case comes from Massachusetts where a male inmate, who identities as female, is serving a sentence at a correctional institution in Norfolk. The criminal, Christine Alexander, was diagnosed with “gender identity disorder” in 2003 and receives hormone replacement therapy and psychological counseling as he progresses “towards feminization.”  

As if this weren’t outrageous enough, Alexander also wants taxpayers to finance the cosmetic beauty treatment of laser hair removal because in his case it’s medically necessary, according to his attorneys. That’s because the inmate has a rare medical condition, according to court documents cited in a legal report this week; he “suffers from facial and body hair, and male pattern baldness.”

Evidently prison officials drew the line and refused the laser hair removal, so Alexander sued in federal court, claiming that corrections department officials are violating his Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment and Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection. Alexander asserts in his complaint that the failure to provide him with laser hair removal (referred to as “medical treatment”) will lead to serious bodily harm, untreated mental illness and continued depression.

A federal judge in Massachusetts agreed, ruling that Alexander’s allegations are sufficient to establish that he has a serious medical need (presumably for laser hair removal) which has not been adequately treated under the Eighth Amendment standard. Appointed by Richard Nixon in 1972, the judge (Joseph Tauro) found that prison officials knew of Alexander’s need for “medical care” yet failed to provide it.

Many states across the county spend thousands of taxpayer dollars annually to provide transgender inmates—diagnosed with gender identity disorder—with hormone treatments, hair removal, makeup and women’s underwear. A few years ago a separate Massachusetts inmate, convicted of murdering his wife, sued the Department of Corrections to pay for an expensive sex-change surgery, claiming that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body.  

For a couple of years Wisconsin was the only state with a law prohibiting the Department of Corrections from using tax dollars for transgender inmates’ hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery. The measure was legally challenged and overturned by a federal court in 2010, however. The Clinton-appointed judge who heard the case ruled that denying convicted male felons hormones that help them look like women violates both the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments. Only in America!  

This is hardly earth-shattering news considering Obama’s judicial appointments so far. However, the ABA rebuff sheds light into the magnitude of the president’s crusade to stockpile the federal court system, where judges get lifetime appointments, with like-minded activists. In fact, Obama has made it an official policy to “diversify” the federal bench when it comes to gender, race and even life experiences.

But the White House has agreed not to nominate any candidates deemed unqualified by the ABA, the 400,000-member trade association that provides law school accreditation. Though it claims to be an impartial group of lawyers, the ABA usually takes liberal positions on divisive issues and Democratic/liberal nominees are more likely to receive the group’s highest rating of “well qualified” compared to their Republican/conservative counterparts. This has been documented in various studies, including a recent one conducted by political science departments at three Georgia universities.

With this in mind, one can only imagine how deficient Obama’s rejected candidates really are. Their identities and negative ABA ratings have not been made public, but inside sources tell the paper that broke the story this week that nearly all of the prospects were women or members of a minority group. Nine are reportedly women—five white, two black and two Hispanic—and of the five men one his white, two are black and two are Hispanic.

The number of Obama hopefuls stamped “not qualified” already exceeds the total opposed by the ABA during the eight-year administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the story points out. That means Obama’s rejection rate is more than triple what it was under either of those previous administrations.

While alarming, this is not surprising. After all, Obama has tried appointing a number of leftist ideologues with no legal experience such as Goodwin Liu, the California law school professor who suspiciously concealed more than 100 of his most controversial speeches, publications and other background materials from the U.S. Senate committee that screens judicial candidates. After failing to earn Senate confirmation for a federal appeals court seat, Liu landed a spot on California’s Supreme Court which only requires state approval.

Obama’s two Supreme Court appointments (Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) also have documented histories of bias and favoring liberal causes or favored groups. Sotomayor was a top policy maker at the leftist Puerto Rico Legal Defense and Education Fund and a member of the open-borders National Council of La Raza. Her race-conscious and activist judicial philosophy was in full force during her Supreme Court debut when she introduced a pair of new terms aimed at describing illegal immigrants in a more friendly and politically correct way.

Kagan is a liberal activist and political operative with no experience as a judge. This month Judicial Watch obtained internal documents that indicate Kagan was involved in crafting Obamacare during her time as solicitor general. This is important because Kagan will likely participate in the Supreme Court’s upcoming deliberations to review the constitutionality of the controversial healthcare law. As the president’s top advocate Kagan was responsible for drafting the measure’s defense in the event of a legal challenge.