Actually, it means any judge who overturns a longstanding legal principle based on their own personal opinions...
aka "legislating from the bench" -- something they're not supposed to do (but
do anyway)
It's a more subtle level of homophobia, I guess.
People have had centuries upon centuries to build their hatred and prejudices into more streamlined, less obnoxious, less obvious mechanisms. It's kind of like how minorities are treated at country clubs ....
And there's another term that grates on my nerves... 'activist
judges'. That expression has come to mean (to me) 'any judge whose
judgement I disagree with). It's a vacuous expression anymore.
(If you watched the entire interview I posted of Ted Olson, he says the same exact thing -- and he's a conservative.)
Aug 19 2010 1:04pm from IGnatius T Foobar @uncnsrd
aka "legislating from the bench" -- something they're not supposed to
do (but do anyway)
Which, of course, you wouldn't be saying if you understood that we live in a common law society, not a civil law society. :p
But I've been through this with Ragnar before ....
N*S: They go through the motions of litigating anyway... The whole thing
is absurd.
I can assure you, the Founding Fathers never intended for the judicial branch to legislate in any way.
Besides, decisions get overturned by the Supreme Court too......
Also, the people are allowed to make laws as well (see 10th Amendment), yet, are overturned by the courts as well....
I can assure you, the Founding Fathers never intended for the judicial branch to legislate in any way.
Besides, decisions get overturned by the Supreme Court too......
Also, the people are allowed to make laws as well (see 10th Amendment), yet, are overturned by the courts as well....
While America debates whether a “bridge-building” Imam Rauf
should erect his $100-million, 13-story outreach “Islamic
complex” (is the name “Cordoba House” now officially to be
dropped? And if so, could Mr. Rauf or the media explain why?) next to
Ground Zero, Islam seems to be at war with most of the rest of the
world, or perhaps vice versa.
Not So Nice Elsewhere
Time magazine has a rare essay on the brutal Russian response to
Islamic-driven terror. Apparently, 3,000 “suspects” have
disappeared since 2000. Tens of thousands of others were killed in the
Chechnyan wars. There are only three mosques allowed in Moscow. In
short, Putin is leading a right-wing, nationalist effort in what might
be charitably called a genocidal war against Islam — brought on
either by Chechnyan-inspired terrorism, Russian social injustice, or
both, or neither. We don’t care much;
I suppose our elites would say
they expect as much over there.
Authorities in Hamburg closed down a mosque used by the 9/11 killers;
there was good reason to do that. But it is the sort of preemptive
action that had the U.S. done it, we would have earned another cowboy
America story in the perpetually resentful Der Spiegel.
In France, the burqa is now banned. Imagine doing that in the U.S. Well,
don’t. Europeans are so liberal that they do not even need habeas
corpus or a Bill of Rights to protect them from tea party types. Heck,
they don’t even have tea party types.
And then we come to the Chinese, who are systematically crushing the
Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang province. Well, wait, we never quite come to
the Chinese. They have so much of the world’s money, and are so
well-known for tolerating no criticism, that our brave cadre of
crusading journalists self-polices itself
and sort of keeps quiet (I
don’t think New York Times columnists will be writing much about
another green revolution or entrepreneurial zone in Tibet or Xinjiang).
So Why the Double Standard?
Readers, you all know why none of these stories make much international
news in comparison to our ongoing psychodrama of a self-described Sufi
healer trying to gain stature, publicity, Middle Eastern money, and
Western guilt by building near Ground Zero. Let us review the reasons
once more.
Self-loathing
1) It starts at home. The so-called cultural elite —
professors, those in the arts, the foundations, the establishment media,
the Kerry-Edwards-Gore-Kennedy type, multimillionaire liberal politicos,
the inherited Big Money, the doyens of the race industry — are now
disconnected from material reality. Most have not a clue how hard it is
to pump oil out of the ground, grow food, or
build a bridge; all such
largess is taken as givens, and produced by a money-grubbing distant
“they” who like this sort of icky, retrograde work. (Had a young
Barack Obama put away the Panama hat and the federal money for a summer,
he could have apprenticed on an oil rig or picked peaches and learned
something.)
The result is that millions of elites have the capital, the leisure, and
the inclination to think utopia is within their grasp; that the
blueprint of the Upper East Side, Palo Alto, Cambridge, Malibu, or
Carmel can be extended throughout the world — if only there were
just enough far-sighted caring people like themselves with clean
fingernails, an exalted sense of self, and children at Amherst or Brown.
So they hold the U.S. up to a standard that indicts us as bad since we
cannot possibly be perfect. And like medieval churchmen who crossed
themselves on the way
to sodomy, lucre, and graft, so too toss-off lines
damning a Bush or Cheney or Halliburton are the new sorts of ritual
entre necessary to join a faculty or work at a foundation or get hired
at a newsroom.
Of course, most Americans do not follow these views as they appear in
the New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald
Tribune, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, or PBS. But the world, I think,
does. So it takes its harsh-view talking points about the U.S. from our
own harshest critics. (My favorite example was Dr. Zawahiri, an
apparently avid Noam Chomsky aficionado, who railed at the U.S. for not
signing Kyoto and not passing campaign finance reform — all hot
topics of concern apparently in the debating caves of Waziristan.)
Note that the elite, secretly at least, understand that no one should
take them all that seriously. A Guantanamo was a Stalag under
Bush but
now a mere complex dilemma, and not to be shut down under Obama (e.g.,
one of those released terrorists might show up in Brentwood).
Affirmative action means taking a law school spot from some hard-working
white clueless guy from Idaho State or a nerdy straight-A Asian kid in
San Mateo, not from a well-connected elite who has the contacts, family
lineage, or money to side-step state-sanctioned discrimination. (Has
anyone heard a wealthy liberal demand an end to legacy or other such
special admittances based on criteria other than merit? Or for that
matter, complain that tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation or
that part-time lecturers are treated less well than Wal-Mart greeters?)
Hating charter schools and teacher merit pay does not mean sending
Johnny to the D.C. schools during a government sabbatical in the Obama
administration.
For evidence of why we
should not take this bunch as too principled,
wait until the Obama tax hikes hit the lower tier of the cultural elite.
(Not all are in the Kerry class — and even Kerry, remember, felt,
for all his tax talk, that he could not quite resist skipping out on a
$500,000 tax bite on his yacht.)
Soon we shall read sophisticated and contorted reasoning how and why a
Manhattan or Chevy Chase $500,000 a year income is not that much when
one has to buy a brownstone, or send Buffy to Sidwell Friends (cf. the
Michelle “raise the bar” trope of 2008). Remember, there will be
no IRS law that says those who voted for Obama do not get hit with 40%
on their upper bracket income, or can opt out on the health care
surcharge, or can get out of California’s or New York’s 10%
state tax (will there be an article soon suggesting those who live in
such caring, high-tax blue states already do
enough for world justice so
as to be exempt from the new federal tax hikes?), or can receive
exemption from the cap on income exposed to FICA taxes being lifted
(that will be the largest tax hike in U.S. history)? Is it really fair
that a caring and committed progressive in high-tax San Francisco or
Manhattan has to pay at the same federal rates as a Neanderthal
reactionary in selfish, low-tax Boise or Carson City?
We Hate What We Want
2) We are held to such Orwellian standards also because of a
foreign elite that loves to be educated here. Now this is weird, so bear
with me. I have had, here and abroad, a zillion conversations with
America-hating elite Greeks, Mexicans, Arabs, Iranians, and Koreans.
Without pause or worry of sounding insane they (1) tell me how bad my
country is and (2) how they went to Stanford or Yale, and not Texas Tech
or UC Riverside.
I have been lectured
to by European elites how horrific the U.S. is for
(1) its global crimes and (2) making it harder than ever to enter and
stay. I cannot count the number of Mexican nationals residing here who
(1) praise Mexico and (2) damn the U.S. for even considering sending
their less fortunate compadres back to a much praised Mexico.
I am always amused by the Indian, Pakistani, Arab, or South American
journalist, who comes to the U.S. to be educated, stays, marries an
American, begins writing in places like Time, Newsweek, the New York
Times, or the Washington Post, starts lecturing red state/middle America
about its blinkered prejudices, praises in the abstract his godforsaken
and long since abandoned homeland — and since arrival has mastered
the proper phraseology and referents to please an entrenched elite left
who hired and alone reads him. America is always to be judged in the
abstract,
never in the sense of “compared to what?”
Envy?
3) Then there is the oldest and strongest of emotions, envy —
what the Greeks (Hesiod in particular) called the instinctual, the
really bad type, phthonos (anguish induced by the good fortune of
others). We talk of American decline, yet our military remains more
powerful than the next ten combined. We talk of American recession and
an emerging China, yet 1 billion Chinese in booming times account for an
annual gross product of under $5 trillion, while 300 million Americans
in a deep recession created nearly $15 trillion last year. In other
words, a third as many people produce three times as many goods and
services. In terms of culture — sports, entertainment, the arts, the
media, etc. — there is almost no rational explanation why five
percent of the world’s population dominates global attention. Or as
another Greek
intellectual once told me, “I am so sick of America
— American money, American sports, American movies, America this,
American that. I have America on the brain and it’s driving me
crazy!”
We simply do not understand our gargantuan footprint, being mostly
inward looking and not too worried whether a guy in Peru or a professor
in Belgrade likes us or not. (Most out here in Selma would shrug and say
something like, “OK, the guy in Peru and Belgrade hate us, so what
the f—?”)
Unlike the professor or correspondent who makes his money by often going
abroad and so wants to be liked by the envious (that makes cappuccino
time far easier), the farmer, welder, and clerk don’t much care, at
least in comparison to financing the boat, getting a rug, or ensuring
that at least one kid somehow makes it through college. Do you wish to
get a Frenchman, Greek, Mexican or Iranian
angry? (I know, I’ve done
it.) Then simply in the midst of his normal dressing down of America,
meekly reply, “Well, er, I don’t think Americans much like your
country either.” Anguish, shock, real hurt all follow — as in
“How could you be so cruel to say that?”
In other words, imagine a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house-type neighborhood in a
so-so location. Suddenly this new mega-salesman moves in (1776-2010 is
new). He tears down about four tract houses, and plops down in their
place a faux-Florentine palazzo McMansion, as crass as it is
comfortable. It towers over the rest and is full of glitzy appliances,
with a five-care garage and pool, fake columns and domes — the whole
bit. Then the proud new owner walks nightly down the neighborhood
sidewalk with his white tennis shoes and a baseball cap, and smiling
with his hand out-stretched, blaring out now and then to strangers
—
in sincere and heartfelt fashion as the nice guy he is — “How
are you fellows doing? Real nice to meet you. Call me if I can help at
all.”
I doubt the impressed neighborhood crowd would say, “Thanks so much.
Please show me how you made such money to buy such an impressive
house.” More likely at night, local youths would throw trash on the
lawn, and spray graffiti on his stone wall — while during the day
their parents would finagle how to marry at least one of them off to the
rich salesman’s pom-pom daughters.
That’s sort of America — and the world. End of story.
should erect his $100-million, 13-story outreach “Islamic
complex” (is the name “Cordoba House” now officially to be
dropped? And if so, could Mr. Rauf or the media explain why?) next to
Ground Zero, Islam seems to be at war with most of the rest of the
world, or perhaps vice versa.
Not So Nice Elsewhere
Time magazine has a rare essay on the brutal Russian response to
Islamic-driven terror. Apparently, 3,000 “suspects” have
disappeared since 2000. Tens of thousands of others were killed in the
Chechnyan wars. There are only three mosques allowed in Moscow. In
short, Putin is leading a right-wing, nationalist effort in what might
be charitably called a genocidal war against Islam — brought on
either by Chechnyan-inspired terrorism, Russian social injustice, or
both, or neither. We don’t care much;
I suppose our elites would say
they expect as much over there.
Authorities in Hamburg closed down a mosque used by the 9/11 killers;
there was good reason to do that. But it is the sort of preemptive
action that had the U.S. done it, we would have earned another cowboy
America story in the perpetually resentful Der Spiegel.
In France, the burqa is now banned. Imagine doing that in the U.S. Well,
don’t. Europeans are so liberal that they do not even need habeas
corpus or a Bill of Rights to protect them from tea party types. Heck,
they don’t even have tea party types.
And then we come to the Chinese, who are systematically crushing the
Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang province. Well, wait, we never quite come to
the Chinese. They have so much of the world’s money, and are so
well-known for tolerating no criticism, that our brave cadre of
crusading journalists self-polices itself
and sort of keeps quiet (I
don’t think New York Times columnists will be writing much about
another green revolution or entrepreneurial zone in Tibet or Xinjiang).
So Why the Double Standard?
Readers, you all know why none of these stories make much international
news in comparison to our ongoing psychodrama of a self-described Sufi
healer trying to gain stature, publicity, Middle Eastern money, and
Western guilt by building near Ground Zero. Let us review the reasons
once more.
Self-loathing
1) It starts at home. The so-called cultural elite —
professors, those in the arts, the foundations, the establishment media,
the Kerry-Edwards-Gore-Kennedy type, multimillionaire liberal politicos,
the inherited Big Money, the doyens of the race industry — are now
disconnected from material reality. Most have not a clue how hard it is
to pump oil out of the ground, grow food, or
build a bridge; all such
largess is taken as givens, and produced by a money-grubbing distant
“they” who like this sort of icky, retrograde work. (Had a young
Barack Obama put away the Panama hat and the federal money for a summer,
he could have apprenticed on an oil rig or picked peaches and learned
something.)
The result is that millions of elites have the capital, the leisure, and
the inclination to think utopia is within their grasp; that the
blueprint of the Upper East Side, Palo Alto, Cambridge, Malibu, or
Carmel can be extended throughout the world — if only there were
just enough far-sighted caring people like themselves with clean
fingernails, an exalted sense of self, and children at Amherst or Brown.
So they hold the U.S. up to a standard that indicts us as bad since we
cannot possibly be perfect. And like medieval churchmen who crossed
themselves on the way
to sodomy, lucre, and graft, so too toss-off lines
damning a Bush or Cheney or Halliburton are the new sorts of ritual
entre necessary to join a faculty or work at a foundation or get hired
at a newsroom.
Of course, most Americans do not follow these views as they appear in
the New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald
Tribune, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, or PBS. But the world, I think,
does. So it takes its harsh-view talking points about the U.S. from our
own harshest critics. (My favorite example was Dr. Zawahiri, an
apparently avid Noam Chomsky aficionado, who railed at the U.S. for not
signing Kyoto and not passing campaign finance reform — all hot
topics of concern apparently in the debating caves of Waziristan.)
Note that the elite, secretly at least, understand that no one should
take them all that seriously. A Guantanamo was a Stalag under
Bush but
now a mere complex dilemma, and not to be shut down under Obama (e.g.,
one of those released terrorists might show up in Brentwood).
Affirmative action means taking a law school spot from some hard-working
white clueless guy from Idaho State or a nerdy straight-A Asian kid in
San Mateo, not from a well-connected elite who has the contacts, family
lineage, or money to side-step state-sanctioned discrimination. (Has
anyone heard a wealthy liberal demand an end to legacy or other such
special admittances based on criteria other than merit? Or for that
matter, complain that tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation or
that part-time lecturers are treated less well than Wal-Mart greeters?)
Hating charter schools and teacher merit pay does not mean sending
Johnny to the D.C. schools during a government sabbatical in the Obama
administration.
For evidence of why we
should not take this bunch as too principled,
wait until the Obama tax hikes hit the lower tier of the cultural elite.
(Not all are in the Kerry class — and even Kerry, remember, felt,
for all his tax talk, that he could not quite resist skipping out on a
$500,000 tax bite on his yacht.)
Soon we shall read sophisticated and contorted reasoning how and why a
Manhattan or Chevy Chase $500,000 a year income is not that much when
one has to buy a brownstone, or send Buffy to Sidwell Friends (cf. the
Michelle “raise the bar” trope of 2008). Remember, there will be
no IRS law that says those who voted for Obama do not get hit with 40%
on their upper bracket income, or can opt out on the health care
surcharge, or can get out of California’s or New York’s 10%
state tax (will there be an article soon suggesting those who live in
such caring, high-tax blue states already do
enough for world justice so
as to be exempt from the new federal tax hikes?), or can receive
exemption from the cap on income exposed to FICA taxes being lifted
(that will be the largest tax hike in U.S. history)? Is it really fair
that a caring and committed progressive in high-tax San Francisco or
Manhattan has to pay at the same federal rates as a Neanderthal
reactionary in selfish, low-tax Boise or Carson City?
We Hate What We Want
2) We are held to such Orwellian standards also because of a
foreign elite that loves to be educated here. Now this is weird, so bear
with me. I have had, here and abroad, a zillion conversations with
America-hating elite Greeks, Mexicans, Arabs, Iranians, and Koreans.
Without pause or worry of sounding insane they (1) tell me how bad my
country is and (2) how they went to Stanford or Yale, and not Texas Tech
or UC Riverside.
I have been lectured
to by European elites how horrific the U.S. is for
(1) its global crimes and (2) making it harder than ever to enter and
stay. I cannot count the number of Mexican nationals residing here who
(1) praise Mexico and (2) damn the U.S. for even considering sending
their less fortunate compadres back to a much praised Mexico.
I am always amused by the Indian, Pakistani, Arab, or South American
journalist, who comes to the U.S. to be educated, stays, marries an
American, begins writing in places like Time, Newsweek, the New York
Times, or the Washington Post, starts lecturing red state/middle America
about its blinkered prejudices, praises in the abstract his godforsaken
and long since abandoned homeland — and since arrival has mastered
the proper phraseology and referents to please an entrenched elite left
who hired and alone reads him. America is always to be judged in the
abstract,
never in the sense of “compared to what?”
Envy?
3) Then there is the oldest and strongest of emotions, envy —
what the Greeks (Hesiod in particular) called the instinctual, the
really bad type, phthonos (anguish induced by the good fortune of
others). We talk of American decline, yet our military remains more
powerful than the next ten combined. We talk of American recession and
an emerging China, yet 1 billion Chinese in booming times account for an
annual gross product of under $5 trillion, while 300 million Americans
in a deep recession created nearly $15 trillion last year. In other
words, a third as many people produce three times as many goods and
services. In terms of culture — sports, entertainment, the arts, the
media, etc. — there is almost no rational explanation why five
percent of the world’s population dominates global attention. Or as
another Greek
intellectual once told me, “I am so sick of America
— American money, American sports, American movies, America this,
American that. I have America on the brain and it’s driving me
crazy!”
We simply do not understand our gargantuan footprint, being mostly
inward looking and not too worried whether a guy in Peru or a professor
in Belgrade likes us or not. (Most out here in Selma would shrug and say
something like, “OK, the guy in Peru and Belgrade hate us, so what
the f—?”)
Unlike the professor or correspondent who makes his money by often going
abroad and so wants to be liked by the envious (that makes cappuccino
time far easier), the farmer, welder, and clerk don’t much care, at
least in comparison to financing the boat, getting a rug, or ensuring
that at least one kid somehow makes it through college. Do you wish to
get a Frenchman, Greek, Mexican or Iranian
angry? (I know, I’ve done
it.) Then simply in the midst of his normal dressing down of America,
meekly reply, “Well, er, I don’t think Americans much like your
country either.” Anguish, shock, real hurt all follow — as in
“How could you be so cruel to say that?”
In other words, imagine a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house-type neighborhood in a
so-so location. Suddenly this new mega-salesman moves in (1776-2010 is
new). He tears down about four tract houses, and plops down in their
place a faux-Florentine palazzo McMansion, as crass as it is
comfortable. It towers over the rest and is full of glitzy appliances,
with a five-care garage and pool, fake columns and domes — the whole
bit. Then the proud new owner walks nightly down the neighborhood
sidewalk with his white tennis shoes and a baseball cap, and smiling
with his hand out-stretched, blaring out now and then to strangers
—
in sincere and heartfelt fashion as the nice guy he is — “How
are you fellows doing? Real nice to meet you. Call me if I can help at
all.”
I doubt the impressed neighborhood crowd would say, “Thanks so much.
Please show me how you made such money to buy such an impressive
house.” More likely at night, local youths would throw trash on the
lawn, and spray graffiti on his stone wall — while during the day
their parents would finagle how to marry at least one of them off to the
rich salesman’s pom-pom daughters.
That’s sort of America — and the world. End of story.
The prior messages was an article by Victor Davis Hanson.
the double-standard is about 10x worse for Israel.
Know how often people talk about the "massacre" in Jenin where 70+ people, mostly terrorists, were killed by Israelis?
How often do you hear about Black September?
Wiki says:
Arafat later claimed that the Jordanian army killed between 10,000 and 25,000 Palestinians, although more conservative estimates put the number between 1000 and 2000.
(Jordan says 3,400, which is probably a reasonable estimate)
The mainstream media now reports that it was Bush's fault.
Well, here we go, folks.
http://www.atr.org/days-thebr-largest-tax-hikes-history-a5370
120 days to go until the largest tax hikes in history.
So much for Imam Obama's promise (made on 2008sep12) that "no family making less than $250k/yr will see any form of tax increase."
Was anyone really naive enough to believe that a statist like Obama *wouldn't* go tax-and-spend crazy?
http://www.atr.org/days-thebr-largest-tax-hikes-history-a5370
120 days to go until the largest tax hikes in history.
So much for Imam Obama's promise (made on 2008sep12) that "no family making less than $250k/yr will see any form of tax increase."
Was anyone really naive enough to believe that a statist like Obama *wouldn't* go tax-and-spend crazy?
this is a pretty interesting piece of research.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/09/what_kind_of_academic_signs_th.html
short version: a researcher took a petition signed by a bunch of academics condemning Israel for "Human Rights Violations" and tracked down most of those who had signed it.
They then sent those people a petition condemning honor killings, wife beatings, and female circumcision in the Moslem world, asking for their signatures. Almost none agreed to sign.
I actually found the results somewhat surprising - that they won't even pay lip service to the things they claim to value.
Well ... I for one object to the phrase "female circumcision" because it isn't
circumcision, it's more like castration. And a lot of people deliberately
confuse the two because they want to associate that particular atrocity with
actual circumcision as practiced in the civilized world.
According to the Governor of Arizona, headless bodies have been found in the Arizona desert, either burnt or buried or just lying out there, by our own law enforcement agencies. This was a specific statement made by the Governor to the media on multiple occasions. As it happens, the assertion is completely without factual basis, some would say "made up." And now she says she just "misspoke."
Umm, she lied to the people of Arizona. This wasn't a "mistake" by somebody who didn't have her facts straight, it was an outright fabrication!
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2010/09/04/2010-09-04_jan_brewer_gop_governor_of_arizona_and_sb1070_supporter_i_was_wrong_on_headless_.html
She's loony. Basically, she lost her train of thought for 10 seconds during the debate... gives me the impression of somebody who's trying to keep her lies straight.
... and so, yeah, space aliens... space aliens with... with great taste in clothing... are abducting our Mexican neighbors and beheading them in the desert. Oh, and the drug lords.
La Chupacabra! On the loose in Arizona!