SWINE FLU IDENTIFIED IN KNOXVILLE.
UPDATE: Why close schools? A very useful analysis, and consistent with what I know about the subject. (Via Aetiology.) And here are some thoughts of mine on neglecting public health. Plus, some related thoughts of mine here. And why you shouldn’t trust case counts.
PEREZ HILTON, COPYRIGHT THUG. Given his history, that’s amusingly hypocritical. Though “copyright coward” is a better term, since he’s using a bogus copyright claim to avoid taking responsibility. “It is clear that Hilton is embarrassed by what he said, and he is using a transparently frivolous copyright claim to try to squelch free speech about his ridiculous statements. I’m not standing for it. If Hilton sends me a DMCA takedown notice, I’m going to fight it — and I may sue him. I have never seen a clearer example of fair use in my life.”
NYT Re-Writes Obama’s ‘Legal Career’
May 3rd, 2009From his lickspittle hagiographers at the New York Times:
As a Professor, Obama Held Pragmatic Views on Court
By JODI KANTOR
May 3, 2009
Many American presidents have been lawyers, but almost none have come to office with Barack Obama’s knowledge of the Supreme Court. Before he was 30, he was editing articles by eminent legal scholars on the court’s decisions. Later, as a law professor, he led students through landmark cases from Plessy v. Ferguson to Bush v. Gore. (He sometimes shared his own copies, marked with emphatic underlines and notes in bold, all-caps script.)
Now Mr. Obama is preparing to select his first Supreme Court nominee to replace retiring Justice David H. Souter. In interviews, former colleagues and students say they have a fairly strong sense of the kind of justice he will favor: not a larger-than-life liberal to counter the conservative pyrotechnics of Justice Antonin Scalia, but a careful pragmatist with a limited view of the role of courts…
Former students and colleagues describe Mr. Obama as a minimalist (skeptical of court-led efforts at social change) and a structuralist (interested in how the law metes out power in society). And more than anything else, he is a pragmatist who urged those around him to be more keenly attuned to the real-life impact of decisions. This may be his distinguishing quality as a legal thinker: an unwillingness to deal in abstraction, a constant desire to know how court decisions affect people’s lives…
Though Mr. Obama rarely spoke of his own views, students say they sensed his disdain for formalism, the idea — often espoused by Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas, but sometimes by liberals as well — that law can be decided independent of the political and social context in which it is applied. To make his point, Mr. Obama, then a state senator, took students with him to Springfield, Ill., the capital, to watch hearings and see him hash out legislation.
And he asked constant questions about consequences of laws: What would happen if a mother’s welfare grant did not increase with the birth of additional children? As a state legislator, how much could he be influenced by a donor’s contribution?
Former students say that Mr. Obama does not particularly prize consistency or broad principle. Adam Bonin arrived in Mr. Obama’s class with the firm belief that drawing districts to ensure minority representation should be illegal. “It struck me as wrong that the legislature should pick and choose what interests should be represented in the legislature,” Mr. Bonin said.
“What I took from the class and the reading materials was the reality that unless these voices are physically present in a legislature, they won’t be heard,” he said. “As long as everyone is grabbing for power, members of racial minority groups ought to do the same.” …
“I would imagine that if Barack had a free hand to appoint judges without having to worry about confirmations, about politics, that his idea of a great justice would be someone like a Thurgood Marshall,” said Geoffrey Stone, a former dean of the University of Chicago law school.
Mr. Obama often expressed concern that “democracy could be dangerous,” Mr. Stone said, that the majority can be “unempathetic — that’s a word that Barack has used — about the concerns of outsiders and minorities.” ..
In class, Mr. Obama liked to tell students that the Supreme Court was not as far off as it seemed, that it was a dynamic institution that they should not be afraid to challenge and change…
What a piece of disinformation, even by the standards of the New York Times.
Before he was 30, he was editing articles by eminent legal scholars on the court’s decisions.
Whereas once upon a time the presidency of the Harvard Law Review was handed out based upon merit, Mr. Obama was only given the position because he is black. There is no evidence of him having edited any articles that anyone can find.
Moreover, during his tenure at the Harvard Review Mr. Obama only wrote one unsigned article, a vague six page ‘summary’ on abortion, which he has never acknowledged as his own.
An article that oh so empathically suggested that the government may have more important concerns than “ensuring that any particular fetus is born.”
(And even as a part-time visiting professor, Mr. Obama never authored a single piece of legal scholarship.)
Later, as a law professor, he led students through landmark cases from Plessy v. Ferguson to Bush v. Gore.
Lest we forget, Mr. Obama taught race and gender grievance law at the University Of Chicago.
His examinations (see the related articles linked below), which we were the first anywhere to post, show his ‘pragmatic views’ quite clearly.
Adam Bonin arrived in Mr. Obama’s class with the firm belief that drawing districts to ensure minority representation should be illegal. “It struck me as wrong that the legislature should pick and choose what interests should be represented in the legislature,” Mr. Bonin said.
“What I took from the class and the reading materials was the reality that unless these voices are physically present in a legislature, they won’t be heard,” he said. “As long as everyone is grabbing for power, members of racial minority groups ought to do the same.”
Yes, Mr. Bonin got ‘educated’ by Mr. Obama.
And we are supposed to be reassured by this example of Mr. Obama’s contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law.
[H]is idea of a great justice would be someone like a Thurgood Marshall…
Say no more.
Meanwhile, here are some excerpts from an article we previously posted from the same Jodi Kantor of the New York Times:
Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart
By JODI KANTOR
July 30, 2008
CHICAGO — The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship…
Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality — whether Americans will elect a black president — he led students through African-Americans’ long fight for equal status…
The Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one can quite point to it…
At the school, Mr. Obama taught three courses, ascending to senior lecturer, a title otherwise carried only by a few federal judges. His most traditional course was in the due process and equal protection areas of constitutional law. His voting rights class traced the evolution of election law, from the disenfranchisement of blacks to contemporary debates over districting and campaign finance. Mr. Obama was so interested in the subject that he helped Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University, develop a leading casebook in the field.
His most original course, a historical and political seminar as much as a legal one, was on racism and law. Mr. Obama improvised his own textbook, including classic cases like Brown v. Board of Education, and essays by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, as well as conservative thinkers like Robert H. Bork.
Mr. Obama was especially eager for his charges to understand the horrors of the past, students say. He assigned a 1919 catalog of lynching victims, including some who were first raped or stripped of their ears and fingers, others who were pregnant or lynched with their children, and some whose charred bodies were sold off, bone fragment by bone fragment, to gawkers…
In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice…
Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling…
“On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection,” Mr. Obama said…
Mr. Obama’s courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change: the Reconstruction-era amendments that were rendered meaningless by a century of resistance, the way the triumph of Brown gave way to fights over busing, the voting rights laws that crowded blacks into as few districts as possible. He was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results…
In his voting rights course, Mr. Obama taught Lani Guinier’s proposals for structuring elections differently to increase minority representation. Opponents attacked those suggestions when Ms. Guinier was nominated as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993, costing her the post…
Nor could his views be gleaned from scholarship; Mr. Obama has never published any. He was too busy…
Mr. Obama was ‘pragmatic’ all right.
Pragmatic about inculcating race and gender grievances into a new generation of lawyers.
Pragmatic about using the courts for ‘social justice,’ and ‘principles’ be damned.
Speaker Pelosi Blocks Investigations of Corrupt Democrats
This should be headlines in every major newspaper.
But, it isn't. No wonder they're going under.
Speaker Pelosi is actively working to block federal investigations of corrupt democrats.
The Washington Times reported:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is working to buffer lawmakers from federal investigators. This is a bad idea. Special legal protections for politicians encourage unethical conduct.Glenn Reynolds adds:
Irvin B. Nathan, general counsel of the House of Representatives, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday about establishing a protocol on how to handle "hopefully rare searches and electronic surveillance involving members of Congress." Mr. Nathan previously failed to negotiate such an agreement with the George W. Bush administration when Republicans controlled the House. His return to this effort isn't surprising given the number of congressional Democrats facing accusations of ethical misconduct.
Democrats facing scrutiny include the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, for his close ties to the defense lobby firm PMA Group, which is under federal investigation; House Ways and Means Chairman Charles B. Rangel of New York about a number of tax issues; Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. of Illinois over his reported effort to persuade ousted Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich to appoint him to fill President Obama's former Senate seat; and Rep. Jane Harman of California, who reportedly was taped in 2005 by the National Security Agency purportedly agreeing to help seek leniency for two accused Israeli spies in exchange for help in lobbying her appointment to chair the House Intelligence Committee.
Mrs. Pelosi, California Democrat, on Thursday invoked the separation of powers as justification for the move. Mrs. Pelosi, who has acknowledged being aware previously of Mrs. Harman's controversial dialogue, claims the stance is a matter of principle. "Whether it's invading an office or wiretapping a conversation, it's important for us to have the separation of powers and the respect for individual liberties, again, while not harboring information that would be useful under the speech [or] debate clause," she said.
And don’t forget Pete Visclosky, Jim Moran, Allen Mollohan, etc. I know, I know — there are so many it’s hard to keep track!So much for draining the Swamp.
Sunday Shocker... Ahmadinejad Calls For the End of Israel
Ahmadinejad is out campaigning for the upcoming regime election. Here is a banner from one of his rallies. (ISNA)
Ahmadinejad called today for the Zionist regime to be uprooted.
Fars News reported:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday called on certain world powers which played a role in the creation of the Zionist regime to dismantle the regime or accept arrangement of a referendum to determine the fate of the occupied Palestine by its own residents.
Addressing a large gathering of people in the city of Karaj in Tehran province, Ahmadinejad referred to Israel's deadline to the Palestinians to leave their houses, and said the regime aims to force the oppressed Palestinian people to leave their houses while the UN Secretary General and those who claim to be advocates of democracy and human rights do not hear the voice of the Palestinians.
"If bullying powers don't desist from (their) crimes, they should know that nations will uproot them," he added.
Addressing the bullying powers, Ahmadinejad said, "You have always defended the Zionist regime and called Palestinians' elected government terrorist for showing resistance and defending their rights, but the era for the bullying of your fake regime has come to its end and you have no choice but to accept the reality."
What George Will missed: The decrepit state of the California GOP
May 4, 2009 02:21 PM by Michelle Malkin62 Comments | 4 Trackbacks
George Will’s column was timely, but also left out another critical point in his analysis regarding California’s economy. How has the “Golden State” gotten into the shape it’s in?
Yes, we have more than our fair share of RINO’s, but that’s not the core of the problem. The core is unfettered illegal immigration, aided in part by our conservative hero, Ronald Reagan’s boondoggle when he signed the Amnesty Bill…that opened the floodgates.
Reagan should have known…trusting liberals is not the most intelligent thing a right-thinking person can do. Our conservative icon gave the liberals the benefit of the doubt, and his trust…and got burned for it.
With the state already heavily Democratic, and inundated with closet socialists, a realist could have predicted what was to come:
New, and expanded social programs were created to take care of all the illegal migrant workers, their family members, and others opened the flooded into California to take advantage of all the freebies.
When you come right down to it, this was and is the greatest cause for the California economic downfall. This immigrant population eventually flooded the public school system. “Free” health care for the same. Then came the necessary “bi-lingual” state publications, so that the I.A.’s could communicate more efficiently to get the state benefits, and so on, and so forth. All while not adding funds to the kitty via income tax. What ever happened to the idea of paying one’s fair share?
How was California ever going to be able to dole out benefits to these people without taking in off-setting capital? The liberal’s did what liberal’s always do…they took the easy way out, and raised taxes on everything. Nothing was off limits.
Fast forward to the present…California STILL has the largest outlay of cash for immigrant benefits in the nation. It has the highest personal income tax, business tax, and property tax rates in the nation. Approximately 30% of it’s prison population consists of illegal alien criminals. It leads the nation in restrictive environmental laws. It also has the largest deficit in the nation. Businesses are leaving the state en mass.
California has rules and regulations that are the most restrictive in the nation, from conservation to gun rights to free speech. This “bleeding heart” mentality has changed this once great state into a failed social experiment. Yet, progressives don’t think they’ve done enough! It will never be enough, as far as they are concerned.
This is the model the liberal progressives are using to re-shape America. It is grandiose, corrupt, based on emotion not science, and is costly.
Unfortunately, California’s gift to the rest of America is incompetent, foolish, power hungry, ignorant elitists, who ARE above the laws they pretend to enforce. Thank you,Barbara Boxer, Jane Harmon, Diane Feinstein, the Sanchez sisters, George Miller, Nostril-damus, Nancy Pelosi, and of course, the Nuevo-Mexicanas racists now in the Obama Administration.
Can you see what’s in store for you, America? It is happening now in Washington, D.C. All Your rights are under assault, and are in jeopardy. One party, one ideology is steering this country towards oblivion. We must unite, and rid ourselves of this “progressive” cancer, before it’s too late.
“Those who forget the lessons of history, are doomed to repeat it.”