Posts Tagged ‘reality’

Well at the Volokh Conspiracy (via Glenn) we discover what law professor Louis Michael Seidman of Georgetown thinks of the hearings so far. He doesn’t like what he heard yesterday:

Speaking only for myself (I guess that’s obvious), I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate—that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments. To claim otherwise—to claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results—is to claim that whenever Justices disagree among themselves, someone is either a fool or acting in bad faith.

Not what you’d call a ringing enforcement is it.

I’m not a law professor, or a lawyer, I’ve only argued one civil case before a judge and jury personally against an experienced lawyer (I won.) so I can’t claim anywhere near the experience of law or how it works that the many lawyers who blog can, but I can say this…

…I’ve read Glenn Reynolds for a lot of years and I don’t recall too many assessments this blunt about an individual’s professional competence that wasn’t cloaked in comedy:

If her politics were different, this would be clear evidence that she is unfit.

Professor Reynolds is one of the most honest men in blogs and has been for a decade. The law is his profession, he teaches the law. If after this statement anyone is going to convince me that Judge Sotomayor deserves this position they have quite a hill to climb. Her professional experience on her resume may meet the minimums necessary for the position she is up for, but that’s all.

You know way back in February although I disagreed with most of the plans of the Obama administration I pointed out that they had only been in power for a few weeks and we really can’t judge where it is going.

Well we’ve now had six months (and boy it seems a WHOLE lot longer) and there is only one conclusion that can be made:

These guy are a bunch of cheap Chicago hoods and thugs who have been given access to the biggest score in their lives and are going to make the most of it.

There are honest liberals who see what they are and are refusing to co-operate.

There are honest liberals who are with him when he goes in their direction but loudly call him when he is wrong.

There are those who are so either so enraptured with the concept of this administration or so afraid of being called racist they will excuse almost anything.

And then there are the pols and business who see what is going on and are going to grab what they can and settle old scores.

This is where we are and we can’t do a thing about it till late next year other than make sure they know we will remember when 2010 comes.

Oh and you might notice that I put this under the tag “just deserts” that’s because we as a nation let this happen.

Update: fixed title

You know sometimes you have to let people actually figure it how much worse it could be for them to figure it out.

Voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on eight out of 10 key electoral issues, including, for the second straight month, the top issue of the economy. They’ve also narrowed the gap on the remaining two issues, the traditionally Democratic strong suits of health care and education.

The Captain then comments on the most telling

The political class question is most revealing. Those who consider themselves apart from the political class trust Republicans more on the economy by a wide margin (58%-28%), while those inside the political class support Democrats … 99%-1%. No, that is not a typo. It’s a demonstration of the slavish devotion to Democrats within the political class, and the breakout indicates that the Democrats have more trouble than even this poll shows on voter trust.

You know I don’t even think it’s the corruption itself. Americans are big boys and know the ways of the world, I think its the fact that it’s so damn blatant.

We always get the government we deserve, always!

US News finds it difficult

Posted: July 9, 2009 by datechguy in catholic, opinion/news
Tags: , ,

Via Hotair we see US news figures that it’s time that family values just go away:

So it’s time for a bipartisan cease-fire. Bipartisan because readers will write in with their list of cheating Democrats—but it’s the GOP that, as a party, has styled itself as pious defender of marriage. Take the marriage front out of the culture war. Spare us any more awkward scenes of a pol, aggrieved spouse standing stone-faced next to him, pronouncing himself a sinner and then refusing to answer more questions (or, Sanford-style, giving a solo performance with more mawkish details than we really want or need).

And that cease-fire ought to extend to the latest incarnation of “family values,” the crusade to “protect” traditional marriage from gays who want to marry each other. The Republicans’ peccadillo problem undermines their (sometimes contrived) moralism on the issue. They should spend more time protecting marriages from internal problems than trying to gin up voter angst over bogus external threats.

So apparently because some people can’t keep their vows we need to change the definition of marriage, what nonsense. Hey lets follow this to it’s natural end. Let’s not pass judgment at all.

If a person doesn’t want to hire a woman because she is a woman we should let it go.

If a person doesn’t want to rent to blacks or hispanics or asians we should let it go, after all haven’t we all guilty of racial sensitivity?

Hey and that whole civil war thing too, who were we to pass any sort of judgment on another culture, if you don’t like slavery don’t own a slave.

And furthermore we object to places like Saudi Arabia that don’t allow the vote to woman, after all we have people who abuse women here.

And that whole honor killing thing, hey we can’t make a cultural judgment when ours is so imperfect.

And those people who object to kids using drugs, hey some of them might have used pot when they were young so we certainly have no business judging them, in fact we should do the whole Sharon Stone and put not only the condoms but the coke and pot on the table in bowls, after all we know they are going to do it anyway.

Why even have marriage vows, we know men can’t keep them, in fact why have any laws restricting sex at all, it’s just not in the nature of men and we all know that in the 60’s we celebrate the Woodstock generation and free love who are we to say.

And hey sometimes we have a friend in a police force fix a parking ticket so we certainly can’t object to lobbyists trying to get a good deal for their clients.

This is the end result of this kind of nonsense. And nonsense it is. The idea that when you can’t always live up to your values you drop the values is the path of the coward and the fool. As the saying goes:

“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.”

I’m sure the author would like to leave it untried. A lot easier to do what you want when there are no rules, isn’t it? Talk about someone who needs to read the Pope: Caritas in veritate.