Good Call

Eric Weiss writes At U.S. Urging, Court Throws Lamberth Off Indian Case on A13. U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth had been the judge in a long, involved case concerning oil and gas royalties pitting Native Americans against the Interior Department. He's been removed for writing passages like this:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cited Lamberth's own words to illustrate why he should be removed from the case, Cobell v. Kempthorne , including a July 2005 opinion in which he called the Interior Department "a dinosaur -- the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind."

Wow.

I have no opinion about the case or the Interior Department. But. Wow.

UPDATE: A commenter at the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog says All Federal Judges go insane eventually. I don't know about that. I do know the AP photographer whose photo accompanies the Post's story did his best to make Lamberth look insane.