Antique Western U.S. Map wallpaper
Remember OLC lawyer John Yoo who claimed that Bush’s presidential powers basically made Congress and the Supreme Court irrelevant, now in the professional spin business, warns the US Against “Results-Oriented” Sotomayor . Hey if I need a half-ass legal excuse to torture, beat, rape and other assorted atrocities Yoo is at the top of my call list, just above George Bush, but until my morals are ripped from my cold dead hands Yoo and his ilk will be ignored. Let’s also remember that Newt Gingrich is an historian,
On Wednesday, Gingrich tweeted: “Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman.’ new racism is no better than old racism.”
Moments later, he followed up with the message: “White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”
Justice Robert Cooper Grier was appointed to the SCOTUS by President James Polk. One can not help but notice from their portraits they are white males. Justice Grier ruled in favor of Dred Scott v. Sandford,
Dred Scott v. Sandford,[1] 60 U.S. (How. 19) 393 (1857), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court that ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants[2]—whether or not they were slaves—were not legal persons and could never be citizens of the United States. It also held that the United States Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories. The Court also ruled that because slaves were not citizens, they could not sue in court. Lastly, the Court ruled that slaves—as chattel or private property—could not be taken away from their owners without due process.
We can’t get in the way back machine and see what the decision would have been had Grier been Black or Latin or a woman, but one its hard to believe a Black justice would have ruled that he could be owned. Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American Supreme Court Justice serving from 1967 to 1991. Would America and so many Americans of any ethnic background have suffered as much racial and gender injustice had the Supreme Court been more diverse between President Polk and 1967. I tend to doubt it. We squandered a hundred years of what could have been a better America because the powers that be thought it best the country be run on a bizarre idea called separate, but equal. If some Newt or Rove wants to write some column defending Dred Scott as a cool calculated piece of legal precision that involved absolutely no sympathies towards predisposed opinions I’d love to read that fairy tale.
Nate Silver takes down a rightie potshot over Sotomayor’s personal financial management, Grandmother of World’s 23rd Best Economist Posthumously Offended by Sonia Sotomayor’s Spending Habits; Will Obama Withdraw Nomination? Its the check their granite counter tops time, once again.
A genuinely interesting post on Sotomayor’s decision on student free speech. Sotomayor’s Student Free Speech Ruling: The Nitty Gritty
The principal learned of Doninger’s blogpost two weeks after it went up, and punished Doninger for posting it by not allowing her to run for Senior Class Secretary. She gave four reasons: Doninger had not followed proper procedures for resolving disagreements with the administration, the post’s language had been “vulgar,” claims in the post had been inaccurate, and the exhortation to other students to “piss her off more” had been inappropriate.
The most troubling part was that Sotomeyer went too far in restricting what a student could say about a school official while not on school grounds or using school facilities. If you’re a teacher, students get to call you names when they get home and log on the net. Students have been bad mouthing teachers since Plato, it comes with the territory. But as that blogger notes the SCOTUS in general has not been exactly pro student free speech regardless of political leanings. Deeply unfortunate, but not a deal breaker for Sotomayer. It will probably even score her some points with moderate conservatives.
ACORN – faster then a speeding bullet, able to sabotage any US election in a single bound ( where were they in 2000 or 2004), OF USEFUL IDIOTS, AND USELESS ONES.
Matthew Vadum of the American Spectator calls me a “useful idiot” for not believing that ACORN caused the mortgage crisis, radicalized the president of the United States, and conspired to steal the election from John McCain and Sarah Palin. These were the “allegations” I was referring to when I wrote this piece last fall, in which I had the gall to speak to both the people filing charges against ACORN and the folks who work inside the organization. As I noted quite clearly at the time, “ACORN is in many ways a troubled organization,” going on to list their various problems–but conservative bloggers like Vadum aren’t content to confine their criticisms to ACORN’s actual issues with taxes, embezzlement, and voter registration fraud. These problems aren’t as sexy or sensational as a secret plot to subvert American democracy. So folks like Vadum simply make things up in order to prove ACORN is part of some vast conspiracy to do evil–Vadum himself previously mused on one occasion whether ACORN should be labeled a “terrorist” organization.
The Long Goodbye 