In April he attended an annual meeting of the poobahs at the National Academy of Sciences, one of the world’s premiere science organizations and the backbone and guts of the science movement that drove American prosperity and security in the 20th century. Historians will want to note especially the history President Obama recounted in the first few minutes of the speech.
Can we use video for DBQs in AP courses yet? Here’s one to use.
I can’t bite my tongue and let idiots rage on unfairly and inaccurately about important matters.
Earlier I noted the difficulties with reality at Texas Darlin’. The warden of the blog dropped by and suggested I should join the discussion there if I had something to say. It always ends badly. Someone there says something plug ugly stupid, and I note the facts. My posts get edited, or censored.
Some post linked there, and I looked. I couldn’t resist. The owner and commenters are flailing around like a bass in the boat, trying to make a case that Sonia Sotomayor shouldn’t be a justice of the Supreme Court. They have convinced themselves that she’s a racist, she’s sexist, she got where she is solely because of affirmative action and the Great Cabal that Runs the World. And they are stuffing tinfoil in their ears now — it makes their hats leak, but it keeps them from hearing anything that might upset them.
I expect they’ll remove my posts soon. If you care, I’ve made some defense of Sonia Sotomayor, and I copied the posts below the fold. Texas Darlin’ inmates correspondents repeat every canard about Sotomayor you can imagine. And some you can’t imagine.
Texas Darlin’ is neither.
I am persuaded to do a series of posts on the nomination of Sotomayor. In the interim, here’s my attempt to square things at Texas Darlin’, below the fold.
As a judge, Sotomayor has ruled in 100 cases that involve questions of racial discrimination of one sort or another. Tom Goldstein, Supreme Court advocate and founder of the leading Supreme Court blog, has read all of those decisions. He says that Sotomayor does not seem to put her thumb on the scale and has in fact, most of the time, ruled against those charging discrimination.
In only 1 of out 8 cases, he says, has she favored in some sense claims of discrimination.
“The fact that she so rarely upholds discrimination claims I think answers the idea that she is always angling for minorities,” he says.
And if the New Haven case is a harbinger in one direction, there are other cases that point the other way too. Sotomayor, for example, dissented when her colleagues allowed the New York City Police Department to fire one of its officers for sending hate mail on his own time. While the hate mail was patently offensive, hateful and insulting, Sotomayor wrote, it did not interfere with the operations of the police department, and, she observed, under our Constitution, even a white bigot has the right to speak his mind.
In another case involving a black couple bumped from an American Airlines international flight, Sotomayor said their race discrimination claim was clearly trumped by an international treaty governing airline rules. It matters not, she said, that her ruling might mean airlines could discriminate on a wholesale basis and that there would be no legal recourse. The treaty’s language is clear and it is not for the courts to make policy, she said, adding that if policy is to be changed, Congress or federal agencies must do it.
White bigots ought to study more and flap less.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Judge Sotomayor would bring more federal judicial experience to the bench than any Supreme Court justice in 100 years. Over her three-decade career, she has served in a wide variety of legal roles, including as a prosecutor, litigator, and judge.
Judge Sotomayor is a trailblazer. She was the first Latina to serve on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and was the youngest member of the court when appointed to the District Court for the Southern District of New York. If confirmed, she will be the first Hispanic to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
While on the bench, Judge Sotomayor has consistently protected the rights of working Americans, ruling in favor of health benefits and fair wages for workers in several cases.
Judge Sotomayor has shown strong support for First Amendment rights, including in cases of religious expression and the rights to assembly and free speech.
Judge Sotomayor has a strong record on civil rights cases, ruling for plaintiffs who had been discriminated against based on disability, sex and race.
Judge Sotomayor embodies the American dream. Born to Puerto Rican parents, she grew up in a South Bronx housing project and was raised from age nine by a single mother, excelling in school and working her way to graduate summa cum laude from Princeton University and to become an editor of the Law Journal at Yale Law School.
In 1995, Judge Sotomayor “saved baseball” when she stopped the owners from illegally changing their bargaining agreement with the players, thereby ending the longest professional sports walk-out in history.
Judge Sotomayor ruled in favor of the environment in a case of protecting aquatic life in the vicinity of power plants in 2007, a decision that was overturned by the Roberts Supreme Court.
In 1992, Judge Sotomayor was confirmed by the Senate without opposition after being appointed to the bench by George H.W. Bush.
Judge Sotomayor is a widely respected legal figure, having been described as “…an outstanding colleague with a keen legal mind,” “highly qualified for any position in which wisdom, intelligence, collegiality and good character would be assets,” and “a role model of aspiration, discipline, commitment, intellectual prowess and integrity.”
3. Cases: Archie v. Grand Cent. Partnership, 997 F. Supp. 504 (S.D.N.Y. 1998) and Marcella v. Capital Dist. Physicians’ Health Plan, Inc., 293 F.3d 42 (2d Cir. 2002).
4. Cases: Flamer v. White Plains, 841 F. Supp. 1365 (S.D.N.Y. 1993), Ford v. McGinnis, 352 F.3d 382 (2d Cir. 2003), and Campos v. Coughlin, 854 F. Supp. 194 (S.D.N.Y. 1994).
5b. Cases: Bartlett v. N.Y. State Board, 970 F. Supp. 1094 (S.D.N.Y. 1997), Greenbaum v. Svenska Hendelsbanken, 67 F.Supp.2d 228 (S.D.N.Y. 1999), Raniola v. Bratton, 243 F.3d 610 (2d Cir. 2001), and Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education, 195 F.3d 134 (2d Cir. 1999).
10c. Honorary Degree Citation, Pace University School of Law, 2003 Commencement.
Judge Sotomayor is a widely respected legal figure, having been described as “…an outstanding colleague with a keen legal mind,” “highly qualified for any position in which wisdom, intelligence, collegiality and good character would be assets,” and “a role model of aspiration, discipline, commitment, intellectual prowess and integrity.”ere are the sources for the ten statements:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
I can’t believe there are still people out there who argue that President Obama is not eligible to be president, and who still refuse to look at the evidence.
Here’s a measure of how far down in the barrel they have to scrape to keep this issue alive: Check out this blog by a New Mexico paralegal who is a source for World Net Daily. A nation loaded with good Constitutional scholars in law schools, history departments, political science departments and public affairs and management schools, and WND finds an obscure paralegal in New Mexico instead, to get the lowdown on U.S. law on citizenship.
There’s a sucker born every minute, but WND’s philosophy is that anyone can act like a sucker if you work hard enough at it. WND is working very hard.
The complaint details some of the tragedy the blogger’s life has become but, no surprise, offers nothing to suggest that Obama is ineligible, nor that bloggers who claim Obama isn’t eligible for the presidency have any better evidence than the guy arrested for threatening federal agents.
A Springfield blogger is accused of threatening the life, limbs and lower alimentary canal of a Secret Service agent.
James T. Cuneo, 43, was indicted Thursday on charges of making a series of threats against Special AgentRonald Brown in the course of his official duties.
This was strange turnabout for Brown, whose job in the agency’s Presidential Protection Division is mainly to thwart threats against the commander in chief. For the first time in his 15-year career, Brown wrote in federal court papers, someone was repeatedly harassing him.
There’s a difference between a dog on a bone and a psychotic; some of the Obama denialists appear to have blurred the difference. Cuneo’s complaint appears to revolve around the same issue that set off Texas Darlin’ and a fewdozen others. Cuneo escalated the thing; let’s hope no others do the same.
On Oct. 16, Brown and Springfield police detectives dropped in on Cuneo to chat about threats he had allegedly made about Google executives on his Internet blog: walkndude.wordpress.com. (WordPress has taken the site offline for violation of its terms of service.)
“Cuneo was extremely belligerent, refused to answer questions and became increasingly threatening,” Brown wrote in an arrest affidavit. “We left the driveway of Cuneo’s residence without further incident.”
Cuneo then began to phone the Secret Service office in Portland, threatening Brown and others, the government alleges. “Cuneo,” Brown wrote, “seems to think that we are aiding and abetting the ‘illegal U.S. President’ and that he and others need to arrest us for not doing our job.”
Brown says Cuneo phoned him in January and, with a colorful series of expletives, threatened him with physical harm, including execution by hanging, electric chair or firing squad. Those threats — and Cuneo’s history of violence — concerned federal officials, according to Brown’s affidavit.
Time to get back to real issues. 2010 is around the corner, 2012 is not much farther.
And, by the way, a federal judge in the District of Columbia issued an order dismissing one of the many nuisance suits filed by the denialists (styled Hollister v. Soetoro) , stating clearly that the suits are nuisances and asking for a showing of why sanctions under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure should not be applied. In short, the judge has ruled that the case against Obama’s eligibility is so rank and utterly without substance that any lawyer of average intelligence and sound mind should know better than to trouble a court with it. I think this is from the court’s order:
Because it appears that the complaint in this case may have been presented for an improper purpose such as to harass; and that the interpleader claims and other legal contentions of the plaintiff are not warranted by existing law or by non-frivolous arguments for extending, modifying or reversing existing law or for establishing new law, the accompanying order of dismissal requires Mr. Hemenway [the attorney of record] to show cause why he has not violated Rules 11 (b) (1) and 11 (b) (2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and why he should not be required to pay reasonable attorneys fees and other expenses to counsel for the defendants.
Crazier fringes of the anti-Obama guild claim that a letter from Obama’s attorneys asking that the suit be dropped is “threatening.” It’s not threatening to tell the schoolyard bully to straighten up. How much ozone have these people depleted?
Update: Yes to Democracy also carries news on the March 24 action by Judge Robertson. When do the denialists finally wake up, smell the coffee, smell the stale beer cans, pinch themselves, take a shower and get on with life? So, to sum up: A judge in Washington, D.C., has dismissed the suit and called the bluff of the plaintiffs and stealth plaintiffs; Huffington Post revealed the financial stake of WorldNet Daily in continuing to finance the suits, and in pushing the suits improperly; and a federal prosecutor won an indictment of a blogger who started rumbling about taking violent action in favor of the Birthers, and who failed to heed warnings to tone down his vitriol. Have the birthers figured it out yet?
First e-mail of the day, from an early-riser friend:
A short while ago I caught a replay, on C-SPAN, of President Obama’s speech in Hradcany Square in Prague. I tuned in so as to catch almost all of it — practically all I missed were the introductory remarks. And they were cheering, I tell you. Can you say, “Ich bin ein Berliner” ??
This guy isn’t fooling around. He’s no Bush. He’s a “people’s President.” He’s charismatic. He’s exactly who we need and when we need him.
Elena Kagan took the oath of office to be the nation’s top lawyer, the Solicitor General, last Friday. The Associated Press is running a story (here from the Sacramento Bee) on whether this is a tryout for the Supreme Court itself, “Obama could make top high court lawyer a justice.” (Isn’t that a tortured headline?)
Three justices may want to retire soon: Justice John Paul Stevens is 88 years old. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 76, and back on the court in record time after surgery for pancreatic cancer. Justice David Souter is third oldest, at 69.
So, this AP story could be a good article for use in government classes. Consider these questions:
Is Solicitor General a stepping stone to the Supreme Court’s bench?
What is the role of the Solicitor General?
How important is Supreme Court experience, or experience in other courtrooms, to success in arguing before the Supreme Court?
What are some of the top cases before the Supreme Court this term, and what are the potential and likely results of these appeals?
What is the role of the U.S. Senate in selection of federal judges, and especially in the selection of Supreme Court justices?
Kagan clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall. What do law clerks do for justices? What does her clerking suggest for Kagan’s advocacy of Voting Rights Act issues, since she worked with Justice Thurgood Marshall?
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It sounds like a number Fred Waring’s Glenn Miller’s band could shout out at the end of instrumental verses. It’s the street address of the White House, not so secretly, and to most fans or other followers of politics, it carries great symbolism.
So a professor at the University of Akron thought it would be a good name for a blog. It is. The blog is a very good compilation of sources and intriguing commentary.
This item caught my eye yesterday — the least tawdry dealing with this issue I’ve seen in a long time, though some of the portraits pointed to are more impressionistic than history. The listing alone reveals a lot. It’s incomplete, of course. This is the one post probably not suitable for 8th grade U.S. history; it’s already come up in my government classes this year.
Check out the stuff in the widgets — the link to the current WhiteHouse.gov feed is a good idea, cool, and by its mere existence, an indicator of the influence of technology on politics.
I’m curious to know how one might use this blog in the classroom. Got ideas?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Maybe most notable is the listing of Obama Action Comics, in the vein of Saturday Night Live’s “Ex-Presidents” superhero series.
Concluding a triplet of Obama-related posts I would like to present Jason’s “Obama Comics”. While playing on the internet one day, Jason found a cache of images of a Japanese Obama action-figure that bore an uncanny resemblance to various Blaxpoitation stars of years gone by. The inevitable comic strip resulted, and you can see this week’s episode, “Vol 1 No 12 – Coming Soon to a Radio Near You“, in which Obama deals with Rush Limbaugh, who I gather is famous in America.
The strip has language that makes it unsuitable for schools, let me warn you. No sound — probably Not Safe For Work if you work in a school, but nothing a high school teacher doesn’t hear daily anyway.
In a move that is likely to panic climate change denialists (and others who claim not to be denialists, but oppose acting because they claim to be “skeptical”), federal agencies working under the new Obama budget might actually do some of the necessary research. Bob Parks told the story in his weekly missive.
3. NASA: THINGS HAVE NOT GONE WELL IN CLIMATE OBSERVATIONS.
First there was the Bush Administration’s shameful cancellation of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) launch in 2000. The only fingerprints on the cancellation belong to Dick Cheney. It would by now have settled the critical issue of the role of solar variation in global warming. Then, on Tuesday, the $278 million Orbital Carbon Observatory, designed to measure greenhouse gas emissions, crashed shortly after launch. The good news is that the Omnibus Appropriations Bill that passed on Wednesday provides $9 million for NASA to refurbish DSCOVR, which has been shut up in a Greenbelt, MD warehouse for 9 years.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Did you listen to the Republican response to President Obama’s speech last night?
Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal delivered the response — and “delivered” is a pretty good description of the style of the thing. My wife and I had sarcastically predicted the Republicans would call for taxcuts as a cure for everything, from broken legs to global warming — and Jindal did just that.
It’s still not Bobby Jindal. Nor was it, nor is it, Sarah Palin. Will Republicans figure that out?
(Yeah, he’s a Rhodes Scholar. He’s also a creationist. Sometime between getting selected for Oxford and running for governor he appears to have volunteered for a lobotomy. We don’t know yet the extent of the impairment to his judgment, but it probably isn’t limited to science, and even if it were, that’s enough to disqualify him.)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Is it time? Is there any chance we could bring the Pueblo home?
Regular readers here probably know of my admiration for the resistance put up against North Korea (NPRK) by the captive crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo during their 11 months’ imprisonment in 1968.
In a recent comment to a post I did back in 2006, a reader named Bob Liskey offered an interesting, and rational way by which NPRK could demonstrate lasting good faith in negotiations with the U.S., especially over the state of their energy generation and nuclear weapons production:
We made every effort to avoid the catastrophe of a second Korean War and the use of nuclear weapons such a war. Much better and saner than a RAMBO approach.
At this point in time, I would like to see the OBAMA administration suggest to NK that if they really want to improve and normalize relations with the USA then they ought to return the USS PUEBLO as a clear intent to improve and normalize relations. I would like to see the USS PUEBLO returned to the USA and docked at SAN DIEGO as a memorial to the crew and DUAYNE HODGES and those who undertake secret and dangerous missions on behalf of the USA.
Mr. Liskey offered several other chunks of history of the incidents in 1968 you may want to read, including just how close we were to the brink of using nuclear weapons to retaliate against NPRK, an issue that is not much discussed elsewhere, I think. Interesting reading.
What’s Bill Richardson doing this week? Since he’s not on track to be Secretary of Commerce, maybe we could borrow him to establish a pillar of world peace in North Korea, instead?
Mr. President? Sec. Clinton? Do you ever drop down into the Bathtub? What about Bob Liskey’s suggestion?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 