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Michael Medved smacks down birfers

Redtail said:
:jaw-dropp NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! I'm up for a job at North Eastern State...:covereyes
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Hah! If you get a job at the Broken Arrow branch, not only will you live about three miles away from me, you'll also have to drive past a homemade John Birch Society billboard every day.
 
the only mention i've heard of this in person was my dad. he said he had heard that he may have been born in Kenya, and i just pointed out the facts and he agreed with me. this was in December.
 
MattusMaximus said:
Really? Please, do share.
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Jumping in, here...

In Georgia, so far we've had a lawsuit over the matter -- dismissed, thank Chaos -- and a US Army Major from Georgia is refusing deployment to Afghanistan on the grounds that the Commander in Chief is not a citizen.

Several folks at my place of work are into this. Many of them believe Obama to be a secret Muslim planted in the White House in order to destroy America from within. Others believe he may be the Antichrist.

I'm telling you, unless you live in this kind of environment, you just can't imagine.
 
Brainster said:
Remember Chief Justice John Roberts? A total of 22 Democrats voted against him. Remember Associate Justice Samuel Alito? A total of 40 Democrats voted against him.
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Yup. It was stupid then, it's stupid now.
 
Alt+F4 said:
My gosh, Orly can't even explain her own argument but she did take time to call her critics "brown shirts".
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Orly Taitz was on the Cobert Report the other night and he poked fun at her for comparing the Obama administration to the Nazis. She also compared Obama to Stalin.
 
Piggy said:
Several folks at my place of work are into this. Many of them believe Obama to be a secret Muslim planted in the White House in order to destroy America from within. Others believe he may be the Antichrist.

I'm telling you, unless you live in this kind of environment, you just can't imagine.
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At my workplace (I work for the media) it's not quite that bad, since almost everyone here is fairly centrist.

Oklahoma is a bit of an anomaly in that they fairly consistently put Democrats in the State Senate and local governmental positions, but our national representatives and electoral college votes go red every single time with a few exceptions.

Before I mentioned a John Birch Society sign. It's been sort of a fixture around here for a long time. I don't know anything about the guy that has it in his front yard. Anyway he used to live next to a busy intersection (about ten years ago) where a lot of people saw it, but it was little more than a curiosity. It said in large letters "GET US OUT OF THE UNITED NATIONS." I had to see that thing every time I went to my fiancee's house. It didn't bother me that much. Free speech, put whatever the hell you want in your yard. The thing is, even though the guy's moved to a lower traffic area, the JB's have gotten web-savvy since then and now their web URL is right under the sign nowadays.

There's been about three or four additional home-brewed signs popping up in high-traffic areas here and there with the same message. By all accounts it appears that the John Brown Society is picking up members in Oklahoma.

In all honesty, they could be culling together the remnants of the old Tom Metzger W.A.R. organization which used to have a fairly significant presence here. Or it could be otherwise normal folks who've been laid off, are angry as hell and need someone to blame.

The birther and more fringe stuff isn't getting a lot of play on the TV news channels, but on the AM radio call-in show's it's going BALLISTIC.

I am seriously considering changing my voter registration. The GOP isn't the party of Reagan anymore no matter how much they invoke his name. Since "Bull Moose" isn't an option anymore, I've discovered to my absolute amazement that I'm more of a "blue-dog" Democrat.
 
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Pssst...hey. You guys wanna see pictures of these signs? I could probably go on a photo safari.
 
Piggy said:
Yup. It [lockstep partisan voting for supreme court nominations] was stupid then, it's stupid now.
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I'm not so sure. The Supreme court today has become a kind of legislative branch and as such doesn't it make sense to only vote for people who are ideologically aligned with your side? Far and away the most important issue is what the justice's ideological leanings are. After that legal skills are a nice to have attribute but probably all likely candidates are pretty well schooled in the law anyway. What separates them is their ideology.

Maybe the senate should just eliminate all the hearings, and all the hypocritical questioning and just put the nomination up for a straightforward vote. Senators would just vote based on their own partisan interests. I suspect this is what happens now, but under the current system the US must endure several weeks of ridiculous hypocritical partisan posturing, just straightforward lying and absurd non-answers by the candidate before the he is accepted or rejected.
 
Piggy said:
Beg pardon?[apparently expressing disagreement with davefoc's comment that the Supreme Court has become a kind of legislature]
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If the Supreme Court made decisions just based on the content of the constitution, existing law and precedent it would be reasonable to see the Supreme Court's function as primarily judicial. In fact, the constitution and the law are full of ambiguities that open the door for decisions where the constitution and law are just interpreted to mean whatever the justices thinks it should mean. In most cases, I think that is what happens. And as such I suggest that the justices are serving more as a legislature where their personal views of what the law should be are more important than whatever the written meaning of the law is.

If the Supreme Court just deferred to the legislature where the ambiguity of the constitution and other laws precluded an objective decision I would agree that the Supreme Court was primarily fulfilling only a judicial function. Of course the Supreme Court doesn't do that. Instead it claims objective meaning in the relevant law where it doesn't exist to support what they wanted the law to be.

Maybe they should stop televising it [Supreme Court candidate hearings].
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I don't think that would change the underlying fact, given the function of the Supreme Court as it exists today, that a Supreme Court nomination is almost a completely partisan event. The hearings might be the most dishonest and hypocritical public action that the Senate engages in but they still might serve some purpose in that they might serve to filter out unethical or dishonest justices.
 
davefoc said:
If the Supreme Court made decisions just based on the content of the constitution, existing law and precedent it would be reasonable to see the Supreme Court's function as primarily judicial. In fact, the constitution and the law are full of ambiguities that open the door for decisions where the constitution and law are just interpreted to mean whatever the justices thinks it should mean. In most cases, I think that is what happens. And as such I suggest that the justices are serving more as a legislature where their personal views of what the law should be are more important than whatever the written meaning of the law is.

If the Supreme Court just deferred to the legislature where the ambiguity of the constitution and other laws precluded an objective decision I would agree that the Supreme Court was primarily fulfilling only a judicial function. Of course the Supreme Court doesn't do that. Instead it claims objective meaning in the relevant law where it doesn't exist to support what they wanted the law to be.
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I disagree. The process of judicial review has been well established for generations, and is necessary for our system to work properly. Deferring to the legislature would short-circuit that process. It's a bad idea.

And I don't think that justices' political ideologies are what distinguish them primarily. It's more their judicial philosophies. That said, of course, they're human, so all sorts of factors come into play.

And I don't see that there's a real problem with justices' "personal views of what the law should be [being] more important than whatever the written meaning of the law is". That's become a political bogeyman under the misnomer of "activist judges" -- ignoring the law is simply an outright failure to do the job, which has nothing to do with the philosophies of judicial restraint v. activism -- who are "legislating from the bench", but I don't see any evidence that there's any real problem in this country with that, although occasionally you get some truly bizarre rulings, but these are usually corrected on appeal.

As to the SoSo hearings, we were treated to a strange spectacle of many Republicans falsely accusing SoSo of being an "activist judge" (she's squarely in the judicial restraint camp) while simultaneously raking her over the coals for not serving up rulings that they would like to see based on their ideology rather than the law and precedent as written.

And the news media all too often conspire in this by consistently mis-reporting on SCOTUS and federal appeals cases. It's rare that I see a news story which reports on the legal issue that is actually before the court. Rather, they go for the "story" by elaborating a narrative of personal conflict among the parties couched in the language of current hot-button social issues, even though the narrow legal issue to be decided doesn't really have anything to do with that.
 
Hello Piggy,
At least some of what you said might have been based on a misunderstanding of what I intended.

I was not attempting to say that judicial activism was bad, just that judicial activism is the current standard for the supreme court. Frankly, I am not knowledgeable enough to argue my point in detail.

I am only somewhat familiar with a few decisions in detail. In addition I have some knowledge of quite a few other decisions and the fact that the court is divided on many of them.

I would argue that the fact that the court is often divided and often along predictable ideological lines suggests that the basis for the decisions is not based on objective interpretations of law.

Nothing suggests this more strongly to me than the recent court decision about medical marijuana. It seemed very clear to me that the justices didn't want to allow states to set medical marijuana policies and they went searching for anything in law or the constitution that would back their views on this. They found it in the interstate commerce clause, but if the logic they applied here was applied generally, the states might as well fold up shop. There are no limits on federal power. And there are no limits on how the constitution can be interpreted to support any decision.
 
Mark Reardon, a rather conservative talk-show host here in St. Louis, has been lamenting / ridiculing 'birthers' for a while now, and today he did a segment on how silly the notion is, and how it hurts Republicans and conservatives in general, because of this incident:

http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/po...lunt-on-birthers-barack-obama-born-in-us-but/

Hopefully he'll have audio up tomorrow that I can link. It was a really funny segment for a show that's usually about politics.
 
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davefoc said:
Hello Piggy,
At least some of what you said might have been based on a misunderstanding of what I intended.

I was not attempting to say that judicial activism was bad, just that judicial activism is the current standard for the supreme court. Frankly, I am not knowledgeable enough to argue my point in detail.

I am only somewhat familiar with a few decisions in detail. In addition I have some knowledge of quite a few other decisions and the fact that the court is divided on many of them.

I would argue that the fact that the court is often divided and often along predictable ideological lines suggests that the basis for the decisions is not based on objective interpretations of law.

Nothing suggests this more strongly to me than the recent court decision about medical marijuana. It seemed very clear to me that the justices didn't want to allow states to set medical marijuana policies and they went searching for anything in law or the constitution that would back their views on this. They found it in the interstate commerce clause, but if the logic they applied here was applied generally, the states might as well fold up shop. There are no limits on federal power. And there are no limits on how the constitution can be interpreted to support any decision.
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SCOTUS is necessarily more activist, as it should be.

Thumbnail version, judicial restraint is the more narrow approach examining the previous decision -- asking whether the lower court committed a blatant error and tending to side with the lower court in the absense of a clear mistake in application or procedure (which was how SoSo's court approached the firefighter case, for instance) -- whereas judicial activism takes a broader view by considering the entire context and attempting to balance the full sets of rights of all parties involved.

The popular term "activist judge", on the other hand, refers to judges merely ignoring the law.

I'll take a look at the marijuana case, hopefully this weekend. I haven't read that one. Sounds interesting.

Maybe this tangent needs to be split?
 
Couple more data points here.

Huffington Post Blogger says the only thing weirder than the Obama Birthers are the Anti-Birthers.

The only thing weirder than the Birthers are the anti-Birthers, who blame the Birthers for being conspiracy theorists yet actively feed the conspiracy by refusing to call for President Obama to release his birth certificate.
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Andrew Sullivan, who pushed the Trig Truther story last year signs up as one of those who wants to see the birth certificate:

So many readers are furious that I have dared to ask the president to show the original copy of his birth certificate. The reason for demanding it is the same reason for demanding basic medical records proving Sarah Palin is the biological mother of Trig.

Because it would make it go away and it's easily done.
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New Kos poll shows that 28% of Republicans (and 4% of Democrats) think Obama was born outside the US.

The poll also shows a significant geographic difference; Southerners (23%) were far more likely to say Obama was born outside the US than those from the Northeast (4%), the Midwest (6%) or the West (7%).

Of course, Democrats had their own problem with conspiracy theorists back in 2007, so it's not as if the Birther "problem" is an insurmountable obstacle to winning back the White House.
 
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