;-)
Posted on 10/27/2005 12:40:24 AM PDT by Do not dub me shapka broham
Throughout the public evisceration of Harriet Miers, even her critics have tended to concede one of President Bush's main claims: Miers couldn't have been a complete loser to rise to the top of the bar and of her law firm.
Wrong.
Mediocrity—that's a better word for it...
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.msn.com ...
wassssssssssssssuppp
Slate? De overkill kill ya.
Be nice.
:_)
"Mark Obbie was editor and publisher of Texas Lawyer newspaper when Harriet Miers led the State Bar of Texas. Obbie teaches journalism and media law at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and is the former executive editor of The American Lawyer. "
For the people who will attack the author as not knowing what he's talking about.
Well, there is mediocrity, and then there are such things as outstanding mediocrity and mediocre mediocrity, too. Further, we ought to consider that somebody brilliant could indeed jump out of the judicial gown and desolate the whole country - one never knows what to expect of them. Thus a plodding mediocrity is a much safer choice. Besides, the very existence and presence of a mediocrity as a reference point gives a warm and pleasant feeling of superiority to all wannabe geniuses.
:P
-good times, G.J.P. (Jr.)
If Harriet Miers wasn't so selfish, she'd withdraw. She's underqualified beyond belief.
Guess who seeks election to such groups. Not the busiest, in-demand lions of the bar. Instead, it's usually the second stringers, the runners-up in the lawyer game. Real lawyers, for the most part, snicker about "bar weenies"—much as they did about the goofs in high school who ran for class president. Does David Boies spend his $800-an-hour time going to committee meetings and wrangling over the ABA's next convention schedule? Hardly. He might deign to give a speech at a bar gathering if he can fit it into his busy trial schedule. But bar weenies—their slightly kinder name is bar junkies—are the ones holding the Town Car door open for Boies when he arrives at the hotel. And when they're not doing that, they're jabbering endlessly about legal-regulatory policy questions that even most lawyers find stupefying.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2128758/
Less to do with selfish and more to do with pliable. She'll do what W tells her to do.
Well, that's you, and over here on this thread Your Favorite Idiot is about to spin off her stick again. Better come do your spinning one more time before all the plates come crashing down.
Which I predict will happen on Friday, late afternoon.
I'm a member of the California and Texas bars, and I've never wasted my time with bar associations.
Everything this guy says about them is consistent with how I feel about them.
With the exception of that Beldar guy (who runs the Beldar Blog) very few attorneys would try to pass off Miers as being a good pick for this job based on her resume.
And now that Lenard Leo has finally bailed...
:-)
Leo Leonard.
D'oh!
:0)
;-)
Actually, the theme from the movie is "Vote for Pedro"...Napoleon wasn't running for class office. So is the author comparing Harriet to Pedro?
Let's put it this way. I would not go around among straightforward conservatives or conservative religious types promoting it. One has to have a sense of humor and ability to suspend disbelief or grant a large degree of whatever the movie equivalent of poetic license is to appreciate the movie. There were times during viewing it (I waited until I could rent it) that I just sat there waiting while whatever the director was trying to do in the movie sailed right past me... and I suspect, past many others who watched it. I can imagine that many of the people who enjoyed it more were probably a lot younger on the average. Some of it is reminiscent of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" -- more juvenile than funny (for my tastes, anyway). I'd rate it as a bit better than FTaRH, which I found rather flat.
ND does have an edge that it promotes to some degree the positive notion that believing in one's self can and often does lead to success, regardless of what others think.
Personally I thought a more entertaining movie than either ND or FTaRH was "School of Rock" with Jack Black. Apparently he did all his own playing on the '68 Gibson SG. Tasty (and a little more sparing and more deft with the juvenile humor).
(I suspect Obie included the ref. to ND because he's in academia. I suspect after kids, and maybe 20-somethings getting their first whiff of nostalgia for their own "good old days," the academics are the next largest viewers because they need to keep up with what junk movies kids watch, otherwise the kids will figure out ways to poke fun at them in classes as fuddie duddies who don't know what's *really* going on. ;-)
It's insanely funny bad. It's defies description. You really should see it.
I think for me to answer that completely for you would spoil it for you. Suffice to say that if you saw the movie, I think you should read the editorial and would appreciate the editorial references very much. I found the editorial hilarious, but then, I'm fairly irreverent (or irrelevant, or something like that ;-) ;-)
But beyond the humor, I think the author makes some very salient points about the realities of practicing law in Dallas and outsiders perceptions and possibly misperceptions concerning the positions that Miers has held in Dallas. It gives an insiders' unique perspective, and a perspective that I have not seen in any other editorials about Miers (pro or con).
I'll take it under advisement.
:-)
I'm shocked she accepted Bush's offer. Or was it the other way around?
[visualops: did you by any chance flash on the ending as you were reading the editorial? ;-)]
;0)
He's probably my favorite dramatist from the 20th century, and one who was only approached-in my estimation-by Beckett and O'Neill.
You read his plays, scratch your head, and wonder, how in the world could someone ever stage this in real life?
ROFLMAO! You called that!
Thank God for small favors.
:))
I'm not culturally literate but I do recognize Ionesco's name and looked him up on the web. Wow. I'll put the word out among my more culturally literate friends and let them do the hard work to find the local venue for me (I'm so lazy ;-) ;-)
Those pieces of paper mean only you met basis expectations. After that it is buyer beware, what you think you see is not always true.
BASIC ...dumbass (I earned that title from none other than der sink)
BASIC ...dumbass (I earned that title from none other than der sink)
He should know.
;-)
[Kathryn Jean Lopez]
I'm shocked The Drudge Report hasn't highlighted Miers's quoting Barbra Streisand favorably in her '93 speech.
Posted at 01:57 PM
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_23_corner-archive.asp#080792
Yes, that Barbara Streisand.
Sheeeee-it, Dane ain't goin' NOWHERE. That boy's been here since 1998. He'll be back for more even if Miers IS withdrawn. And I think Bush--and those two, particularly MNJohnnie--will eagerly push her even if it comes out she's been selling meth off the South Portico. "See, meth, that's pure capitalism, that's real world experience, right there, that's what we need on the Court!"
Bush needs to get some of his own party loyalty--to all the GOP watercarriers in Congress who will lose their jobs if this woman is appointed and turns out to be as dumb and wishy-washy as she seems to have written and spoken in the past--and withdraw this lousy nominee.
The rats are fleeing the (sinking) ship.
"I'm willing to wager that Leo Leonard's old job at the Fed. Soc. is in a more precarious position than he would like us to believe. The rats are fleeing the (sinking) ship."
Now that is a bet I WON'T take. Leo Leo's reign as king of the FedSoc jungle will soon be lion dead, I have a feline-g.
[Kathryn Jean Lopez]
I'm shocked The Drudge Report hasn't highlighted Miers's quoting Barbra Streisand favorably in her '93 speech.
Posted at 01:57 PM
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_23_corner-archive.asp#080792
Yes, that Barbara Streisand.
A little further down:
JUDICIAL USURPATION AND LEGISLATIVE ABDICATION [Ramesh Ponnuru]
[AS APPLICABLE TO GUN CONTROL, FOR EXAMPLE -- SteveH]
Rich: I think you're giving Miers too much credit here, and the Post too little. There are a lot of ways to connect the themes of judicial usurpation and legislative abdication. You could adopt the argument that legislatures are to blame for not reining in the courts (an argument which I think is generally sound). You could go on to note that legislatures have not sought to reclaim their powers because they are perfectly happy to see the courts get the blame for tough decisions.
That's not the argument Miers makes. The argument she makes is that the courts can't be blamed when they are forced to step in to resolve problems that elected officials have failed to resolve (e.g., the problems of school funding and low-income housing siting). That is a very standard argument, usually associated with liberals. Eliot Spitzer, for example, often argues that it is necessary to pursue anti-gun policies through the courts because legislatures have failed to act. But it's hard to see how the courts are to distinguish between a) a legislative "failure to act," b) a legislative decision that there is no problem demanding solution, or c) a legislative decision that solving any problem would create new and greater problems. Any act of judicial usurpation can be described as a reluctant response to the legislature's failure to enact what the judges wanted them to enact.
Miers may have modified or reversed her views since then, but the speech strikes me as an example of the kind of mindset that one does not want in a Supreme Court justice.
"This is consistent with what I was going to do," he said. I have to return to the Federalist Society to take care of business there."
LMAO.
Mr. Leo has come under intense criticism from conservative jurists -- particularly among members of the Federalist Society -- for promoting Miss Miers, whom they say lacks the clear conservative judicial philosophy that Mr. Bush promised in his bench nominees. Several members of the Federalist Society who know Mr. Leo have said that they think he is only backing Miss Miers out of loyalty to the Bush administration rather than support on the merits.
Gee, ya think?
http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2005/10/27&ID=Ar00106
Yes, that Justice Ginsburg, and Attorney General Reno.
Says it all.
Something tells me that she and Bob Schieffer are the only two human beings on this planet whose favorite president is Gerald Ford.
He'll think twice before he lynx himself to a stealth candidate.
... WHILE BABS DISSES MIERS
http://www.barbrastreisand.com/statements.html#ifnotnowwhen
Does This Smell Familiar?
...Barbra Streisand
Posted on October 6, 2005
Cronyism, corruption, incompetence, high crimes and misdemeanors with the Bush Administration, the list goes on and on. I can't help but feel like I am back in 1972, when Richard Nixon was embroiled in a complex web of political scandals. And most recently, President Bush nominated Harriet Meirs, White House lawyer and longtime friend to the Supreme Court. Meirs' has no judicial experience and more importantly no track record from which to be evaluated. Again, the list goes on and on' ...
:_)
In one of the speeches, delivered to a women’s group in Dallas, Ms. Miers wrote that court cases involving law and religion typically grow out of an insistence on the part of individuals for more self-determination and that “the more I think about these issues, the more self-determination makes the most sense. Legislating religion or morality we gave up on a long time ago.” It was this passage that prompted the greatest concern among conservatives, who argue that court cases permitting universal access to abortion and gay marriage have been decided on the same principle.
In another speech,also from 1993,Ms. Miers said that women had just celebrated the naming of Janet Reno as the first woman to hold the post of U.S. attorney general. She cited Barbara Streisand and Justice Ginsburg approvingly in the same speech and said that the reason men dominate the U.S. Congress is “the control of financial resources.”
The Judiciary Committee said the answers to the questionnaire were expected late in the evening and would not be made publicly available until today.
Several traditional supporters of the president’s judicial nominees have been quiet in the past two weeks. The Committee for Justice, formed to promote the president’s nominees, sent out email alerts more than once a day before and during the confirmation hearing of John Roberts. The group’s messages have lately been reduced to a trickle.
An executive vice president at the Federalist Society who has been acting as a liason between the White House and conservatives, Leonard Leo, has also been largely absent from the debate in the past two weeks. Mr. Leo reportedly cancelled a speech he was to give this weekend at an annual meeting of the Catholic Leadership Conference in Arizona.
Political observers said the White House would only be likely to consider a withdrawal if it became clear that some Republicans would vote against Ms. Miers. Senator Vitter, a Republican of Louisiana, sent a letter to the White House yesterday requesting more information about Ms. Miers, a move that many interpreted as a sign of his opposition. Speculation grew yesterday that Senator Brownback, a Republican of Kansas, would send a similar letter today.
http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2005/10/27&ID=Ar00106
The guns have fallen silent.
When is the White House going to raise the white flag?
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