Bush picks aide for Supreme Court

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MrsSpringsteen said:
I just didn't want you to be mad at me Irvine :wink:

I think I will be Harriet Miers Jr.. w/ out the heavy eyeliner, oh and the WH job too :D
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oh, i always understand what you mean. i can't imagine getting mad at you.

(unless you pick a bad movie when we go out on our date)
 
Irvine511 said:

oh, i always understand what you mean. i can't imagine getting mad at you.

(unless you pick a bad movie when we go out on our date)
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:love: you are such a doll, I hope you don't mind dating an older woman :wink:

maybe I'll e-mail you if that's OK
 
Some background on Harriet:wink:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10524.htm

Miers Led Law Firm Repeatedly Forced to Pay Damages For Defrauding Investors

By David Sirota

10/04/05 "Huffington Post" -- -- In case anyone thought Harriet Miers wasn't a corporate-shill-in-White-House-clothing, take a gander at how Miers did her best Ken Lay impression while heading a major Texas corporate law firm. That's right, according to the 5/1/00 newsletter Class Action Reporter, Miers headed Locke, Liddell & Sapp at the time the firm was forced to pay $22 million to settle a suit asserting that "it aided a client in defrauding investors."

The details of the case are both nauseating and highly troubling, considering President Bush is considering putting Miers at the top of America's legal system. Under Miers' leadership, the firm represented

the head of a "foreign currency trading company [that] was allegedly a Ponzi scheme." The law-firm admitted that it "knew in March 1998 that $ 8 million in [the company's] losses hadn't been reported to investors" but didn't tell regulators.

This wasn't an isolated incident, either. The Austin American-Statesman reported in 2001 that Miers' lawfirm was forced to pay another $8 million for a similar scheme to defraud investors. The suit, which dealt with actions the firm took under Miers in the late 1990s, was again quite troubling. As the 9/20/00 Texas Lawyer reported, Miers' firm helped a now-convicted con man "defraud investors and allowed the firm's [bank] account to be used as a 'conduit.'" The suit said "money from investors that went into the firm's trust account was deposited into [the con man's] bank accounts and was used to pay for his 'expensive toys.'"
If you think Miers wasn't involved in any of this -- think again. Miers wasn't just any old lawyer at the firm. She was the Managing Partner -- the big cheese. True, she could claim she had no idea this was going on. But that would be as laughable/pathetic/transparent as the Enron executives who made the same ones after they ripped off investors.

I wrote earlier today that Democrats must focus on the fact that Miers' defining career experience up until her nomination was being a Bush crony. These new details about her career only enhance that case, in that it shows she is just like the other corrupt corporate cronies like Enron's Ken ("Kenny Boy") Lay that Bush has surrounded himself with over the years. There is no room on the Supreme Court for people like Miers who are clearly entirely compromised by partisan/corporate loyalties -- loyalties that might make her an attractive candidate to the a corrupt elitists who run today's Republican Party, but a danger to the interests of ordinary Americans.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10525.htm

The Miers scandalist past goes deeper than her ties to corporate crooks in Texas. According to Newsweek, she’s also played a role in maintaining Bush’s National Guard credibility. As Michael Isikoff wrote in July of 2000:

“The Bushies' concern began while he was running for a second term as governor. A hard-nosed Dallas lawyer named Harriet Miers was retained to investigate the issue; state records show Miers was paid $19,000 by the Bush gubernatorial campaign. She and other aides quickly identified a problem--rumors that Bush had help from his father in getting into the National Guard back in 1968. Ben Barnes, a prominent Texas Democrat and a former speaker of the House in the state legislature, told friends he used his influence to get George W a guard slot after receiving a request from Houston oilman Sid Adger. Barnes said Adger told him he was calling on behalf of the elder George Bush, then a Texas congressman. Both Bushes deny seeking any help from Barnes or Adger, who has since passed away. Concerned that Barnes might go public with his allegations, the Bush campaign sent Don Evans, a friend of W's, to hear Barnes's story. Barnes acknowledged that he hadn't actually spoken directly to Bush Sr. and had no documents to back up his story. As the Bush campaign saw it, that [sic] let both Bushes off the hook. And the National Guard question seemed under control.”

It gets better, if not dirtier. At roughly the same time Miers was helping Bush dodge National Guard questions; Bush had named her chair of the Texas Lottery Commission, which had been scandal-plagued for years. The chief issue before Miers and the commission was whether to retain lottery operator Gtech, which had been implicated in a huge Texas bribery scandal.

According to the Philadelphia Daily News, Gtech's main lobbyist in Texas in the mid-1990s was none other than Benjamin Barnes, who just happened to have the low-down on how Bush got into the National Guard to avoid going over to Vietnam.

Gtech fired Barnes, in 1997. A short time after Barnes was fired, Gtech had its lottery contract renewed even though two companies had bid-lower than Gtech had.

Former Texas lottery director Lawrence Littwin filed suit, as he thought the whole charade smelled of scandal. Littwin's lawyers suggested in court filings that Gtech was allowed to keep the lottery contract, which Littwin wanted to open up to competitive bidding, in return for Benjamin Barnes's silence about Bush's entry into the National Guard.

Barnes and his lawyers denounced Littwin’s theory as "favor-repaid" theory in court pleadings as "preposterous ... fantastic [and] fanciful." According to the Philadelphia Daily News, Littwin was “fired after ordering a review of the campaign finance reports of various Texas politicians for any links to Gtech or other lottery contractors. But Littwin wasn't hired, or fired, until months after Barnes had severed his relationship with Gtech.”

Littwin later settled with Gtech for a hefty $300,000.

And here we have Republicans more upset about Bush’s Supreme Court choice than Democrats. Well, they have a reason to be skeptical, if not upset. As William Kristol recently noted that Bush’s pick “will unavoidably be judged as reflecting a combination of cronyism and capitulation on the part of the president."

For once the old windbag may be right.
 
Founding Fathers oppose Miers nomination

As any quick look at Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers' record shows, the distinguishing feature of her career has been her blind loyalty to President Bush. Few have argued that her selection is anything more than a reward for her loyalty - it certainly isn't because of her highly controversial legal career helping defraud investors. And we need look no further than America's founding fathers to see just how antithetical they viewed such a nomination.

Just look at the Federalist Papers, #76, in which Alexander Hamilton discusses why the founding fathers gave the U.S. Senate the power to confirm - or reject - the President's Supreme Court nominees:

"To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment..."

The passage gets even more specific about political cronies like Miers:

"[The President] would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure."

Let me translate: the framers thought that the mere existence of the U.S. Senate's advise and consent powers should deter a President from nominating someone like Miers in the first place. Of course, the incredibly arrogant Bush administration has shown us that's not the case and that their desire to put their cronies in high places is their foremost priority. Even so, the message is still clear: the framers wanted the U.S. Senate to reject nominees like Miers, just like it rejected Democratic nominees like Abe Fortas on the same grounds of cronyism. They wanted, in short, a truly independent judiciary - not one that serves at the pleasure and loyalty of any one President or political party.
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I was watching some of this on CSpan last night, I thought this was interesting. I had no idea Cheney would go on shows like Rush Limbaugh :eyebrow:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051005-4.html

Q Scott, on Monday, a number of administration voices -- Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, Ken Mehlman -- reached out to conservative interest groups to express an argument, the White House argument for Harriet Miers' nomination. And they said that she has a conservative judicial philosophy. Specifically, Vice President Cheney went on the conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh's program, calling in from Camp Lejeune, and said, "Rush, you will be very happy with her." Specifically, what did he mean by that? And was there any conversation in the course of those talks about her views on abortion rights, privacy rights, school prayer, or any other issues --

MR. McCLELLAN: You can see the transcript; we made it available to you, or you can see the full transcript of the remarks.

Q I've seen the transcript, but what about these other conversations?

MR. McCLELLAN: What he's referring to is that she is someone who has a conservative judicial philosophy. She's someone who believes in interpreting our Constitution -- strictly interpreting our Constitution and our laws. That's what he talked about in that interview.

Now, let me point out for you, too, that the Vice President went on those programs right after the President announced his selection of Judge Roberts to fill the vacancy that existed on the Supreme Court. This is a very similar strategy that we had in place for the first vacancy. And we are reaching out to everyone when it comes to moving forward on her confirmation process. She is someone who has, the President said yesterday, not sought out the spotlight. She has quietly accomplished a great deal in her lifetime. She has a career of distinguished service, and a long record of accomplishment.

And it's important for the American people to come to know that record of accomplishment and see the type of person that Harriet Miers is. The President knows that she is someone who, 20 years from now, will be the same person that she is today -- someone who is committed to looking at the law and applying the law, and someone who is committed to fairness. I think you can see from those who know her well that they will talk about how she is someone who believes in fairness and believes --

Q But, Scott, isn't that kind of a --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- believes in the law and our Constitution.

Q Isn't there a little bit of code being used by the administration, when the Vice President goes on Rush Limbaugh's talk show, and says, "Rush, you're going to be happy with her conservative philosophy"? What does he mean by that?

MR. McCLELLAN: What I just said -- maybe you didn't hear me -- but that she is someone who has a philosophy that is based on strictly interpreting our Constitution and our laws. That's what the American people want in a Supreme Court justice.
 
I tried to find the Cheney transcript on rushlimbaugh.com (ew I think I need another shower :wink:) you have to join his lil club there and pay 49.95 :eek: to get it

No wonder Daryn Kagan has so much jewelry..
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/05/AR2005100502200_pf.html

The conservative uprising against President Bush escalated yesterday as Republican activists angry over his nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court confronted the president's envoys during a pair of tense closed-door meetings.

A day after Bush publicly beseeched skeptical supporters to trust his judgment on Miers, a succession of prominent conservative leaders told his representatives that they did not. Over the course of several hours of sometimes testy exchanges, the dissenters complained that Miers was an unknown quantity with a thin résumé and that her selection -- Bush called her "the best person I could find" -- was a betrayal of years of struggle to move the court to the right.

At one point in the first of the two off-the-record sessions, according to several people in the room, White House adviser Ed Gillespie suggested that some of the unease about Miers "has a whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism." Irate participants erupted and demanded that he take it back. Gillespie later said he did not mean to accuse anyone in the room but "was talking more broadly" about criticism of Miers.

The tenor of the two meetings suggested that Bush has yet to rally his own party behind Miers and underscores that he risks the biggest rupture with the Republican base of his presidency. While conservatives at times have assailed some Bush policy decisions, rarely have they been so openly distrustful of the president himself.
 
this pick is all about the continued consolidation of executive power.

you can't (really) purchase a judiciary the way you can the executive branch, and to a lesser extent, the legislature.

so, doesn't it make sense for a party that plans on being in power for the next generation or so to infiltrate the judiciary in order to make laws that will 1) please the base, votes are cheaper when purchased in bulk and 2) loosen restrictions on precisely the corporate doners that give money to potential executives (and the legislature) so that they might make more money, and then give an ever expanding portion of that ever expanding profit margin (thanks to changed laws) to the same party that gave them the judges that loosened the laws.

and the circle goes round and round and round ...
 
:ohmy:

i almost enjoy ann coulter when she decides to pick on the right people for once:

THIS IS WHAT 'ADVICE AND CONSENT' MEANS
October 5, 2005


I eagerly await the announcement of President Bush's real nominee to the Supreme Court. If the president meant Harriet Miers seriously, I have to assume Bush wants to go back to Crawford and let Dick Cheney run the country.

Unfortunately for Bush, he could nominate his Scottish terrier Barney, and some conservatives would rush to defend him, claiming to be in possession of secret information convincing them that the pooch is a true conservative and listing Barney's many virtues — loyalty, courage, never jumps on the furniture ...

Harriet Miers went to Southern Methodist University Law School, which is not ranked at all by the serious law school reports and ranked No. 52 by US News and World Report. Her greatest legal accomplishment is being the first woman commissioner of the Texas Lottery.

I know conservatives have been trained to hate people who went to elite universities, and generally that's a good rule of thumb. But not when it comes to the Supreme Court.

First, Bush has no right to say "Trust me." He was elected to represent the American people, not to be dictator for eight years. Among the coalitions that elected Bush are people who have been laboring in the trenches for a quarter-century to change the legal order in America. While Bush was still boozing it up in the early '80s, Ed Meese, Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork and all the founders of the Federalist Society began creating a farm team of massive legal talent on the right.

To casually spurn the people who have been taking slings and arrows all these years and instead reward the former commissioner of the Texas Lottery with a Supreme Court appointment is like pinning a medal of honor on some flunky paper-pusher with a desk job at the Pentagon — or on John Kerry — while ignoring your infantrymen doing the fighting and dying.

Second, even if you take seriously William F. Buckley's line about preferring to be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston telephone book than by the Harvard faculty, the Supreme Court is not supposed to govern us. Being a Supreme Court justice ought to be a mind-numbingly tedious job suitable only for super-nerds trained in legal reasoning like John Roberts. Being on the Supreme Court isn't like winning a "Best Employee of the Month" award. It's a real job.

One Web site defending Bush's choice of a graduate from an undistinguished law school complains that Miers' critics "are playing the Democrats' game," claiming that the "GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness." (In the sort of error that results from trying to sound "Ivy League" rather than being clear, that sentence uses the grammatically incorrect "which" instead of "that." Web sites defending the academically mediocre would be a lot more convincing without all the grammatical errors.)
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:love: :love: :love:

damn, baby, her grammatical bitch-slapping has me all hot i could just ... :combust:

anyhoo, read the rest: http://www.anncoulter.org/cgi-local/welcome.cgi
 
nbcrusader said:
I bet you haven't read this many conservative pundits in a long time.... :wink:
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i read conservative pundits all the time.

just so i can see how WRONG they are.

except for the few times they agree with me.

;)
 
Isn't funny how Ann is now saying the very same things the left has been saying for the last two terms. It's almost as if we stepped in bizzaro world.
 
There is something here from Ann Coulter ? abort, avert eyes..:no:

She probably just thinks he should have nominated her

I read this today

Harriet Miers confronted the trick question head-on last year. Just how did the president play horseshoes with his dog?


''The president throws the horseshoes to Barney, and Barney runs after them," she said matter-of-factly. ''The metal horseshoes are too heavy for Barney to lift, so he doesn't carry them around.

''Instead he moves them around with his nose. He has pretty quickly learned how to get under the horseshoe enough to flip it over. As you know, the president loves horsing around with Barney."
 
If it weren't so sad I would find it amusing that a lot of right-wingers are ripping her to pieces because they are scared to death she won't be willing to turn the United States into a theocracy.

I my more paranoid moments I wonder if Bush is actually being totally brilliant here and has nominated a crony who will do exactly what he wants but doesn't have an inconvenient paper trail for Democrats to attack her with. Of course it seems that lack of a paper trail is making some people in his own party nervous, so maybe it wasn't so brilliant after all.
 
37933.jpg




Focus on the Family man is ready to give non-family Harriet his firm support.:shrug:
 
Did she really say that? I guess she hasn't met that many men :D

Btw Irvine, I heard on Howard Stern that Harriet has a man friend that she's had a "semi romantic" relationship w/ for thirty years or something like that..

miers_bush_brilliant.jpg
 
MrsSpringsteen said:
Btw Irvine, I heard on Howard Stern that Harriet has a man friend that she's had a "semi romantic" relationship w/ for thirty years or something like that..
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well, Katie Holmes is pregnant, with, apparently, Tom's child, so i suppose anything is possible ...

;)

though i think it's all part of the script. she's not really pregnant, but will have something of a miscarraige, it will drive them apart, and they'll separate but still love one another even though they can't be together and she'll get out of the contract she signed to be his "girlfriend" earlier this year.
 
lol, oh well..I only have "semi romantic" relationships w/ men too, so maybe Harriet and I should run away together a la Thelma and Louise and look for our own personal Brad Pitts

I think Katie is really pregnant, I like to believe in fake romance ;)
 
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