catocom
Well-Known Member
Thx that's a load off my mind.
I'll be able to sleep soundly at night.
pats .45
sleep tight
Thx that's a load off my mind.
I'll be able to sleep soundly at night.
When did this happen? Suddenly over the last couple of months? Or did this happen last year?
If you are talking about the abuse of Eminent Domain... I am there with you, sir! Taking citizens' property and redistributing it to your business buddies is NOT what Eminent Domain was meant for.
A 5/4 ruling about 5? years ago before Bush's appointees. It was a case from Conneticut where the local politicians confiscated all the property from a poor section of town and turned it over to a developer so he could build a mall. The liberal activists (Souter being one of them) said that the property was taken for the public "good" and that was close enough to public "use". As soon as Obama replaces a conservative judge, these rulings will be common place and voting will be superfulous since they can overrule the legislature and the executive to promote the "progressive" agenda.
Student Writings From 1970s Show Sotomayor Assailing Princeton for Discrimination
The Daily Princetonian has posted a series of Sonia Sotomayor-related letters and articles from the 1970s that show her interest early on in the issues of discrimination and minority representation.
FOXNews.com
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor once accused Princeton University of attempting to "relegate" the Puerto Rican and Chicano population to "oblivion," according to a decades-old letter to the editor released by the university's newspaper.
The Daily Princetonian has posted a series of Sotomayor-related letters and articles from the 1970s that show her early interest in the issues of discrimination and minority representation as a student at the Ivy League school.
In one May 10, 1974, letter to the editor, Sotomayor -- whose parents are from Puerto Rico -- described and defended a student complaint against the university charging it with an "institutional pattern of discrimination."
Puerto Rican and Chicano students objected that Princeton had no administrators or faculty members of either background, she wrote. They objected that there were very few Puerto Rican or Chicano students on campus and that the university did not offer courses dealing with their cultures.
"What is terrifying to us are the implications," Sotomayor wrote. "The facts imply and reflect the total absence of regard, concern and respect for an entire people and their culture. In effect, they reflect an attempt -- a successful attempt so far -- to relegate an important cultural sector of the population to oblivion."
She continued: "It has been said that the universities of America are the vanguard of societal ideas and changes. Princeton University claims to foster the intellectual diversity, spirit, and thoughts that are necessary components in order to achieve this ideal. Yet words are transitory; it is the practice of the ideas you espouse that affect society and are permanent. Thus it is only when Princeton fulfills the goal of being a truly representative community that it can attempt to instill in society a respect for all people -- regardless of race, color, sex or national origin."
The Sotomayor letters and articles from her college days, though decades old, could help provide personal context for Sotomayor's subsequent decisions on such issues on district and appeals courts.
One case from last year when she was on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has drawn much attention. In the case, the appellate panel ruled against a group of white firefighters who sued the city of New Haven, Conn., for throwing out the results of a promotion test because not enough minority firefighters scored high.
During her college years, Sotomayor was also co-chairwoman of a campus group called Accion Puertorriquena.
it was great dude!!!! the whores over there are so desperate that you can really get 'em cheep!
May 26, 2009
Flashback: Limbaugh foresaw Sotomayor pick in '97
@ 5:44 pm by Walter Alarkon
Rush Limbaugh all but predicted 12 years ago that Sonia Sotomayor was headed to the Supreme Court.
In 1997, when President Bill Clinton nominated Sotomayor to become a U.S. Circuit Court judge, Limbaugh urged Senate Republicans to block her confirmation.
The conservative radio host said, on the day of Sotomayor's confirmation hearing, Sept. 30, 1997, that she was extremely liberal and was on a "rocket ship" to the high court, according to a 1998 New York Times story on GOP efforts to stop her confirmation.
The Times suggested that Limbaugh's Supreme Court warning was a key reason why GOP senators delayed a floor vote on her nomination for months even after several Republicans on the Judiciary Committee supported her.
Sotomayor was confirmed later in 1998. She received backing from 25 Senate Republicans, including seven who are still serving.
The New Republic
The Case Against Sotomayor
by Jeffrey Rosen
Indictments of Obama's front-runner to replace Souter.
Post Date Monday, May 04, 2009
This is the first in a series of reports by TNR legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen about the strengths and weaknesses of the leading candidates on Barack Obama's Supreme Court shortlist.
A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Sonia Sotomayor's biography is so compelling that many view her as the presumptive front-runner for Obama's first Supreme Court appointment. She grew up in the South Bronx, the daughter of Puerto Rican parents. Her father, a manual laborer who never attended high school, died a year after she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of eight. She was raised by her mother, a nurse, and went to Princeton and then Yale Law School. She worked as a New York assistant district attorney and commercial litigator before Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended her as a district court nominee to the first President Bush. She would be the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, if you don't count Benjamin Cardozo. (She went to Catholic schools and would also be the sixth Catholic justice on the current Supreme Court if she is, in fact, Catholic, which isn't clear from her official biography.) And she has powerful supporters: Last month, the two senators from New York wrote to President Obama in a burst of demographic enthusiasm, urging him to appoint Sotomayor or Ken Salazar.
Sotomayor's former clerks sing her praises as a demanding but thoughtful boss whose personal experiences have given her a commitment to legal fairness. "She is a rule-bound pragmatist--very geared toward determining what the right answer is and what the law dictates, but her general approach is, unsurprisingly, influenced by her unique background," says one former clerk. "She grew up in a situation of disadvantage, and was able, by virtue of the system operating in such a fair way, to accomplish what she did. I think she sees the law as an instrument that can accomplish the same thing for other people, a system that, if administered fairly, can give everyone the fair break they deserve, regardless of who they are."
Her former clerks report that because Sotomayor is divorced and has no children, her clerks become like her extended family--working late with her, visiting her apartment once a month for card games (where she remembers their favorite drinks), and taking a field trip together to the premier of a Harry Potter movie.
Sponsored By:
But despite the praise from some of her former clerks, and warm words from some of her Second Circuit colleagues, there are also many reservations about Sotomayor. Over the past few weeks, I've been talking to a range of people who have worked with her, nearly all of them former law clerks for other judges on the Second Circuit or former federal prosecutors in New York. Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court. Nearly all of them acknowledged that Sotomayor is a presumptive front-runner, but nearly none of them raved about her. They expressed questions about her temperament, her judicial craftsmanship, and most of all, her ability to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices, as well as a clear liberal alternative.
The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench," as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. "She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren't penetrating and don't get to the heart of the issue." (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, "Will you please stop talking and let them talk?") Second Circuit judge Jose Cabranes, who would later become her colleague, put this point more charitably in a 1995 interview with The New York Times: "She is not intimidated or overwhelmed by the eminence or power or prestige of any party, or indeed of the media."
Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It's customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn't distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions--fixing typos and the like--rather than focusing on the core analytical issues.
Some former clerks and prosecutors expressed concerns about her command of technical legal details: In 2001, for example, a conservative colleague, Ralph Winter, included an unusual footnote in a case suggesting that an earlier opinion by Sotomayor might have inadvertently misstated the law in a way that misled litigants. The most controversial case in which Sotomayor participated is Ricci v. DeStefano, the explosive case involving affirmative action in the New Haven fire department, which is now being reviewed by the Supreme Court. A panel including Sotomayor ruled against the firefighters in a perfunctory unpublished opinion. This provoked Judge Cabranes, a fellow Clinton appointee, to object to the panel's opinion that contained "no reference whatsoever to the constitutional issues at the core of this case." (The extent of Sotomayor's involvement in the opinion itself is not publicly known.)
Not all the former clerks for other judges I talked to were skeptical about Sotomayor. "I know the word on the street is that she's not the brainiest of people, but I didn't have that experience," said one former clerk for another judge. "She's an incredibly impressive person, she's not shy or apologetic about who she is, and that's great." This supporter praised Sotomayor for not being a wilting violet. "She commands attention, she's clearly in charge, she speaks her mind, she's funny, she's voluble, and she has ownership over the role in a very positive way," she said. "She's a fine Second Circuit judge--maybe not the smartest ever, but how often are Supreme Court nominees the smartest ever?"
I haven't read enough of Sotomayor's opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor's detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths. It's possible that the former clerks and former prosecutors I talked to have an incomplete picture of her abilities. But they're not motivated by sour grapes or by ideological disagreement--they'd like the most intellectually powerful and politically effective liberal justice possible. And they think that Sotomayor, although personally and professionally impressive, may not meet that demanding standard. Given the stakes, the president should obviously satisfy himself that he has a complete picture before taking a gamble.
Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor at The New Republic.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Figures. Sotomayor Made Same Racist Statement in 1994, Too
Greg Sargent reported:
A copy of the 1994 speech was included with the questionnaire she submitted for the 1998 confirmation. A Sotomayor supporter sent both to me.
Here’s what she said in the 1994 speech:
Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that “a wise old man and a wise old woman reach the same conclusion in dueling cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes the line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, if Prof. Martha Minnow is correct, there can never be a universal definition of ‘wise.’ Second, I would hope that a wise woman with the richness of her experience would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.”
That’s virtually identical to the comments from 2001 that have generated days and days of controversy.
Great pick, Barack.
More... Sotomayor repeatedly referenced "wise woman" in her speeches.
Posted by Gateway Pundit at 6/03/2009 12:32:00 PM