“Appointees come one at a time, and to provide “non-partisan balance” as you suggest would mean keeping score, vis-a-vis ideology and temperament.” extract from reply

You are correct in your rebuttal. My concern with Ms. Kagan is the fact she’s never held a judgeship and has basically been operating in academia most of her life excluding her current appointment to that of Solicitor General.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has a track record of analyzing past opinions/briefs from sitting judges and they do try to parse every aspect of their persona to see if they will get a candidate that possibly will skew the court towards either a conservative or liberal agenda over a many year period. We surely don’t want judges sitting on the court that wish to make law from the bench as they do now instead of interpreting it, but seemingly it is so. Conservative Christians et al. with various agendas who are concerned about the slippery slope of same sex marriage, abortion issues, gays in the military etc. are surely keen on who gets the appointment. If the committee screws up there’s a good chance a number of them won’t be coming back when the new Congress is called to session 2011 and they know so too.

So your concerns are spot-on because in fact that’s what happens concerning these committee screenings for a prospective candidate.
I’m so disappointed with the corporate friendly ideologues we now have on the court, I’d rather have a supercomputer with neural net input analyzing motions and ruling on the outcome rather than these blustering, pompous men and women. I feel we’d get much better decisions than the arcane rulings that continue to spill forth from the high court.

Note: ‘Message in a bottle’ … I have no idea when this will post. Currently I cannot access the site without Doug assisting my posts. Akismet the WordPress SPAM filter has blocked me from CHB, Doug has sent a request to release me to the tank, but it can take up to eight days?! When I Google Carl Nemo, I’m now even getting a dropdown prompt…”is Carl Nemo a threat to society”. Huh?

Today I’m working on a ‘black helicopter” friendly landing site next to my home to facilitate an efficient roundup on their behalf… / : |

Carl Nemo **==

While I agree with the general tenor of your post, I take issue with your statement that “the Senate Judiciary Committee et al. providing input into this decision [should, must, etc] realize that the most important criteria for the high court is achieving non-partisan, non-prejudicial balance concerning appointees.” I disagree.

Appointees come one at a time, and to provide “non-partisan balance” as you suggest would mean keeping score, vis-a-vis ideology and temperament. I can’t think of a worse proposition to guide our judicial appointments. I hope what you really meant was that each proposed appointee had to be judged on his/her analytical and judgmental merit, whether it would be applied with Solomonic style and substance, leaving personal partisanship and prejudices aside.

Rare qualities for sure, but certainly obtainable for 9 individuals in a country of over 300M people. But then again, ho hum, we are talking about what the Senate can accomplish to assure such wisdom in the court room.

Do NOT read this post. Do NOT read any post by me.

That should make your life a whole lot easier.

Thank you for not reading this post.

“Your post sounds suspiciously like the ditto-head s— that flows from the nether orifice of Rush Limbaugh and others of his ilk.” …extract from post with re: to DDearborn “personally”

Yo G-Lawer,

This is a prime example of what’s not right about your thought processes and core persona. Your basic post content is fine, but you invariably must attack the other poster. What if DDearborn were simply mistaken and also to accuse him of being in the ranks of the “ditto-head sh–” simply as a function of his/her opinion is over the top…?! You simply can’t post without attacking the messengers, the people on this site, the media or whomever in a low life, classless fashion. Truly you are a tragic soul.

There’s thousands of other sites on the web that will welcome you with open arms that’s loaded with pseudo-intellectual, rude trolls as yourself.

As I’ve said before you are like a rock in our collective “site shoe”… / : |

Carl Nemo **==

You are wrong. Plain flat wrong.

“Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago who was dean when Kagan was hired there, wrote in a May 10 article:

“In her formative years as a scholar, Kagan wrote a series of illuminating articles about freedom of speech. They were illuminating not only because they shed interesting light on the First Amendment, but also because they reveal a lot about Kagan. In an area rife with ideology, her articles addressed complex and weighty legal questions without even a hint of predisposition.

” In one early essay, she addressed the provocative issue of hate speech. After examining the question in a rigorous, lawyerlike manner, she came out in full support of a highly controversial 5-4 decision authored by none other than conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, which held that the government cannot constitutionally ban hate speech. Kagan reached this result even though it was clearly contrary to the liberal orthodoxy at the time.”

I could not find anything about Kagan’s views on citizenship. The Supreme Court and the Congress have been impressively clear that a citizen must act to strip himself of citizenship, and I believe you are lying when you say that she thinks the President should have the power to strip citizenship.

Your post sounds suspiciously like the ditto-head s— that flows from the nether orifice of Rush Limbaugh and others of his ilk. Before spouting stuff like this you owe it to yourself as well as to the listener to do just a little bit of research to establish the veracity of your statements. In this case it is more than obvious that you did not.

Although it’s trendy to peg homosexuality as being normal for some folks it is an aberration. The majority of folks on planet earth have a bias for being attracted to the opposite sex; i.e., bonding, marrying, having children and raising families. It’s the law of yin and yang; ie, the law of opposites attracting each other and out of that comes synthesis; ie., hopefully productive children, families along with healthy, wholesome societies with a future.

Homosexuality on the other hand is monochromatic and static with no possibility for the aforementioned except through contrivance; ie, adoptions, in vitro fertilizations along wth synthetic family situations including “kinky” short term liasons between simply ‘lovers’. Although the partners can and do love each other it is not the way of the Tao. It’s unnatural and anathema to creation itself, therefore doomed or biased towards failure and dissolution along with societies that support such a paradigm.

I don’t want homosexuals of either sex singled out and persecuted, but to me they are an aberration relative to the maintenance of a sound, fruitful society. They are the minority and it must remain that way if we are to survive as a nation which at this point seems unlikely due to our abandonment of that which is logical and necessary for such.

Carl Nemo **==

What will be a disgrace is if she interprets any law outside the bounds of constitutional authority.