Hatemasters
 

I wouldn't call it the band of the decade but they were one of the few shining lights in a very, very dark period.

Another vote for Alito
 

I rather liked this endorsement of Alito by his undergraduate thesis advisor, which I read today in the WaPo:

"I confess surprise that a man so dreadfully intellectually and morally challenged as George W. Bush would want a person as intellectually gifted, independent, and morally principled as Sam Alito on the bench."

-- Professor Emeritus Walter Murphy

:D

S_A_M

Another vote for Alito
 

The PoPD. Sad, but to be expected from an ivy tower academic, those who can't do, teach.

Doesn't look like a vote to overturn Roe......
 

On abortion, a nuanced stand

In 3 of 4 cases, Supreme Court nominee Alito voted on the side of abortion rights.

By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – If there was any doubt about where US Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito stands on abortion, his 90-year-old mother quickly and decisively put that question to rest.
"Of course he's against abortion," Rose Alito told the Associated Press in a telephone interview from her Hamilton, N.J., home.

Her candid statement may go down in history as the most blunt and honest admission of a Supreme Court nominee's view on the hot-button issue.

But the true test of appeals court judges isn't which personal views they hold, but to what extent those personal views may influence how they rule in a particular case.

On this issue, legal analysts disagree in their assessments of Judge Alito. Some say he is a conservative ideologue. Others say he is a smart, careful jurist who leaves personal views behind when he dons his black robes.

The best evidence of his work as a judge are his published opinions. They contain a few surprises and some ammunition - for both the left and the right.

For example, of the four abortion cases in which he participated as an appeals court judge, he voted on the pro-choice side in all but one. A 1995 Alito vote striking down a Pennsylvania abortion restriction in particular is raising eyebrows among some legal scholars.

"That [1995 case] strongly seems to indicate that Alito is not a policy-driven true-believer who's used every possible opportunity to advance one side's preferred outcome, but instead a judge who has indeed come down on both sides, in different cases," says David Garrow, a constitutional historian and expert in reproductive rights cases at the high court.

Senate investigators, legal scholars, and special interest group lawyers are poring over Judge Alito's opinions written during 15-years of work on the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals. They are looking for clues of what kind of justice Alito might become if confirmed to a life-tenure post on the nation's highest court.

How he may rule in abortion cases is particularly relevant to the inquiry since President Bush has named him to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a key swing voter and defender of abortion rights.

If Alito holds a different view on that issue, his vote could shift the balance of power on the court. His four abortion cases include:

• A 1991 challenge to a Pennsylvania law requiring married women to notify their husbands before seeking an abortion. The court struck down the restriction. Alito dissented.

• A 1995 challenge to a Pennsylvania law that required women seeking to use Medicaid funds to abort a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest to report the incident to law enforcement officials and identify the offender. Alito provided the decisive vote striking down the abortion restriction.

• A 1997 challenge to a New Jersey law that prevents parents from suing for damages on behalf of the wrongful death of a fetus. Alito ruled that the Constitution does not afford protection to the unborn.

• A 2000 challenge to New Jersey's ban on so-called partial-birth abortions. Alito struck down the law based on a recent Supreme Court decision.

Analysts are divided over the meaning of Alito's votes and his various writings while on the bench.

"I don't think these cases tell us anything about whether he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade or not," says James Bopp, general counsel for National Right to Life. "Nor do they tell us whether he supports pro-life as a value."


But Mr. Bopp says examining Alito's approach to deciding cases can reveal what kind of justice he might become. "In these cases he didn't go beyond the issues that needed to be resolved," he says. "He wasn't trying to create law. He was just carefully following the existing law."

Bopp says Alito's style of judging is likely to carry over to his work on the high court. "He's not a rookie. He's been doing this for 15 years," he says. "That usually doesn't change. He will do the same thing as a justice."

The Alito case receiving the most attention is his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In his 15-page dissent, Alito said that while the provision might impose some limitation on a woman's ability to obtain an abortion it was not so severe as to rise to the level of an "undue burden."

The judge based that conclusion on his study of Justice O'Connor's writings on the issue.

Alito's dissent says that the potential implications on women in abusive relationships were "a matter of grave concern" to him.

But he added that it was for state lawmakers, not judges, to decide the wisdom of such measures. "Whether the legislature's approach represents sound public policy is not a question for us to decide," he wrote. "Our task here is simply to decide whether [the abortion law] meets constitutional standards."

The US Supreme Court took up the case the following year and used the case to broaden the "undue burden" standard, in a way that rejected Alito's analysis.

But his work was not totally cast aside. Then Chief Justice William Rehnquist embraced and quoted the Alito dissent in his own dissent, which was joined by three other members of the court.

Critics say Alito's dissent suggests he is not sensitive enough to the concerns of women. They see it as an example of his personal views on abortion influencing his approach to the law.

Supporters say he made an honest effort to identify and apply O'Connor's "undue burden" standard as it existed at the time.

In the 1995 Medicaid case, Alito cast the deciding vote striking down a Pennsylvania abortion restriction. Analysts say it was a close legal question and Alito could have decided the case either way.

"If he has antiabortion philosophical leanings he did not let that warp his judgment in the case," says Seth Kreimer, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and co-counsel on the winning side in the 1995 case. "But there are a lot more degrees of freedom at the Supreme Court level than at the court of appeals."

Doesn't look like a vote to overturn Roe......
 

WaPo disagrees.

Doesn't look like a vote to overturn Roe......
 

I believe George Carlin has some new shows coming up. I suggest holding off reaching a decision until he weights in.

A little perspective about the deaths in Iraq.....
 

I notice this today when reading the newspaper:

Red-light running has long vexed traffic officials. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, more than 900 people were killed and 176,000 injured in the United States because of red-light runners in 2003.

I also noticed that 16,000 people were murdered last year. The lowest amount since 1965.

Yet the entire country is focused on the deaths in Iraq. Considering we live in a country of almost thirty million people, the amount of deaths in Iraq are really minimal.

Of course every death is a tragedy, but political policy has to deal with numbers.

The fact that we conqured Iraq and have occupied it for so long with an insurgency, two thousand deaths is so low it is almost a miracle.

Hatemasters
 

Say if we went out to dinner, would you pretend they give you too much food, and let me have 1/3 of your entree? Say if I couldn't pick between 2 entrees, would you suddenly decide that you wanted 1, then let me have 1/3?

That's what feeds my ego and makes me like and value a woman.

Hatemasters
 

On the first question, if we go to, say, Cheesecake Factory, I will let you have 1/3 of my food unless I have not eaten in like 36 hours or something. On the second one, if we both wanted the same thing, I would let you have part of mine when I ordered it and you got something else. However the menu is sooooo extensive there that it seems unlikely. But if you find some other restaurant that has similarly large portions (perhaps a measure is, chicken dishes include more than one double chicken breast), but has a more limited menu, we could maybe work something out.

A little perspective about the deaths in Iraq.....
 

2.

Extrapolating some of that data, in the same time period as the war in Iraq, there has probably been as many red-light deaths in America as there have been battlefield deaths in Iraq, but the difference is the larger potential benefits of the red-light running deaths is nil, while the deaths in Iraq are contributing to a burgeoning democracy in the ME, the first of its kind in an Arab ME country.

The problem is the red-light running deaths are probably largely the underrepresented in America. The people the dims do not care to make an issue. Perhaps poor and minority. While these deaths might logically reduce the voter base on teh dimwit plantation, death is not a bar to voting D (see Cook County, IL for example). Thus there is no cheap partisan political hay to make over these deaths, while the deaths in the ME can be falsely spun in an attempt to treasonously degrade the CinC's leadership of our nations's successsful War on Terror. See below:


http://www.goodolddogs3.com/sheehan-sweetie.jpg

Hatemasters
 

Would you and Hank have the noirish sex as a prelude to the dinner or as a post-meal celebration?

fwiw, his wife is not so interested in the food.

A little perspective about the deaths in Iraq.....
 

How many have died in Islamic riots in France-istan in that time period? where have more vehicles blown up?

Hello Justice Alito, Good bye Roe!
 

First DeWine, now Graham.....

The defection of even two members of the group, which decided earlier in the year to support filibusters only in "extraordinary circumstances," would virtually ensure that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., would win a filibuster showdown.

55 "Republican" Senators MINUS 7 RiNOs PLUS 2 of those RiNOs who put down the kool-aide that the dimwits slipped them=50 Real Republicans.

50 PLUS VP Cheney as the tie-breaker=NO FILLIBUSTER UNLESS THE DEMOs WANT THE NUCULAR OPTION BROUGHT DOWN ON THEIR SORRY SOCIALIST ARSES!!!

Woo Hoo!!!! America Wins!

More predictions
 

2

More predictions
 

Right. Have you read the dissent in Doe v. Groody?

The reasoning there is just a wee bit tortured.

Not to mention the fact that it completely ignores specifically enumerated rights in the Constitution. Originalist indeed. I'm sure the Framers would have been just fine with the strip search of a ten year old. Except that is exactly the kind of overreaching and intimidation by authorities they feared when they wrote the bill of rights.