Paul Craig Roberts: "Gullible Americans." sm

• US, UK at odds over timing of arrests - Liberal
  • Why am I not surprised? - nm - Starcat
    • This is not a surprise either: Chertoff says US needs more authority. sm - LVMT
      • Paul Craig Roberts: "Gullible Americans." sm - LVMT
        • As King George himself said, "See in my line of work - sm - Starcat
          • Some of the Brits see through it...sm - LVMT
            • Confiscating vacuum cleaners? LOL - sm - Starcat
              • British Government Says Mothers With Babies New Terror Threat sm - LVMT
                • What's more crazy than that? - Liberal
                  • More from the British media on the terror alerts...sm - LVMT

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http://www.vdare.com/roberts/090111_shame.htm

on Glenn Beck a couple of days ago, use the links below to see part of the video or read the transcript.  It concerned a tax revolt and whether or not anyone would be willing to stop paying taxes and go to jail.   Besides being a very funny man, Nelson was inspiring when he said he never voted to be part owner of GM or for any of the other nonsense going on today.  He does not want to stick his children, grandchildren and the great grandchild on the way with the tab for all of this irresponsible spending. 

video:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/29/video-craig-t-nelson-s-gl_n_209024.html

transcript:  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,522939,00.html

...whose appeal was denied just today.

Sen. Craig loses appeal in airport sex sting case

By STEVE KARNOWSKI – 37 minutes ago

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Idaho Sen. Larry Craig has lost his latest attempt to withdraw his guilty plea in a Minneapolis airport men's room sex sting.

A three-judge panel of the Minnesota Court of Appeals on Tuesday rejected the Republican's bid to toss out his disorderly conduct conviction.

Craig was arrested in June 2007 in a Minneapolis airport bathroom stall by an undercover officer who said the senator solicited sex.

He pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor and paid a fine, but changed his mind after word of his arrest became public. Craig insisted he was innocent, but the case effectively ended his political career.

Craig's attorney argued before the appeals court this September that there was insufficient evidence for any judge to find him guilty. Prosecutors said his guilty plea should stand.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iM7VsmCI91xXDASkhgtGf3_zk__gD94V9JQ00

my initial uninformed "gut" reaction was that he was a "good guy."  In fact, I had to check my pulse to make sure I still had one because I found myself approving of something Bush did.

The fact that he would take on this kind of case pro bono just confirms that my "gut" reaction was right (hopefully).

Sometimes karma has a way of kicking someone right smack in the butt when they come from a place of hatred, inequality and superiority.  I truly hope this is the case here and that Bush, even if inadvertently, happened to finally make a good decision.

I believe his role was a bit larger than you suggested.  "Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. provided significant help to gay activists in a 1996 landmark Supreme Court case protecting gays from discrimination based upon their sexual orientation, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

At the time, Roberts was a lawyer specializing in appellate work for Hogan & Hartson, a large D.C.-based law firm. Walter A. Smith, Jr., then head of the pro bono department of the firm, told the paper that Roberts didn't hesitate. "He said, 'Let's do it.' And it's illustrative of his open-mindedness, his fair-mindedness. He did a brilliant job."

At any rate, he's been portrayed him as a fair-minded, tolerant, fair person, and I'm glad President Bush nominated him because I believe we need a person like that in the Supreme Court.  I also hope if the president has another appointment to make that he chooses Alberto Gonzalez, who I also think has those qualities.

Have you even bothered to take the time to notice that EVERY SINGLE POST ON THIS BOARD about Judge Roberts is a POSITIVE POST???

What planet are you from, anyway?  Is your life so pathetic that the only pleasure you get is from stalking people on this board in the bizarre way you do and constantly put them down personally?  Dang.  You need a Happy Meal, dude. 

Secondly, to my democratic friends, have any of you watched the John Roberts' confirmation hearings?  I have been watching for two days now..In fact, right now they are in recess, so I thought..let me check out the MTStars political board..MSN news video site on the computer has live hearings and they are fascinating..I have to tell you, so far I kind of like Judge Roberts..My only hesitation is Bush recommended him..

       www.sfgate.com        Return to regular view

(08-05) 19:27 PDT DENVER (AP) --

A decade ago, John Roberts played a valuable role helping attorneys overturn a Colorado referendum that would have allowed discrimination against gays — free assistance the Supreme Court nominee didn't mention in a questionnaire he filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The revelation didn't appear to dent his popularity among conservative groups nor quell some of the opposition of liberal groups fearful he could help overturn landmark decisions such as Roe v. Wade, which guarantees a right to an abortion.

An attorney who worked with Roberts cautioned against making guesses about his personal views based on his involvement in the Colorado case, which gay rights advocates consider one of their most important legal victories.

"It may be that John and others didn't see this case as a gay-rights case," said Walter Smith, who was in charge of pro bono work at Roberts' former Washington law firm, Hogan & Hartson.

Smith said Roberts may instead have viewed the case as a broader question of whether the constitutional guarantee of equal protection prohibited singling out a particular group of people that wouldn't be protected by an anti-discrimination law.

"I don't think this gives you any clear answers, but I think it's a factor people can and should look at to figure out what this guy is made of and what kind of Supreme Court justice he would make," Smith said.

On Friday, Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans released two memos by Roberts when he was as an assistant counsel in the Reagan White House. In one, Roberts argued that President Reagan should not interfere in a Kentucky case involving the display of tributes to God in schools.

In the other, Roberts writes that Reagan shouldn't grant presidential pardons to bombers of abortion clinics. "The president unequivocally condemns such acts of violence," he wrote in a draft reply to a lawmaker seeking Reagan's position. "No matter how lofty or sincerely held the goal, those who resort to violence to achieve it are criminals."

Meanwhile, the Justice Department denied a request by Judiciary Committee Democrats for Roberts' writings on 16 cases he handled when he was principal deputy solicitor general during President George H.W. Bush's administration. The department also declined to provide the materials, other than those already publicly available, to The Associated Press and other organizations that sought them under the Freedom of Information Act.

"We cannot provide to the committee documents disclosing the confidential legal advice and internal deliberations of the attorneys advising the solicitor general," assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella wrote Friday to the eight committee Democrats.

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the panel's senior Democrat, said Roberts made decisions whether to pursue legal appeals in more than 700 cases. "The decision to keep these documents under cover is disappointing," Leahy said.

The gay rights case involved Amendment 2, a constitutional amendment approved by Colorado voters in 1992 that would have barred laws, ordinances or regulations protecting gays from discrimination by landlords, employers or public agencies such as school districts.

Gay rights groups sued, and the measure was declared unconstitutional in a 6-3 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996.

Roberts' role in the case, disclosed this week by the Los Angeles Times, included helping develop a strategy and firing tough questions during a mock court session at Jean Dubofsky, a former Colorado Supreme Court justice who argued the case on behalf of the gay rights plaintiffs.

Dubofsky, who did not return calls Friday, said Roberts helped develop the strategy that the law violated the equal protection clause in the Constitution — and prepared her for tough questions from conservative members of the court. She recalled how Justice Antonin Scalia asked for specific legal citations.

"I had it right there at my fingertips," she told the Times. "Roberts was just terrifically helpful in meeting with me and spending some time on the issue. He seemed to be very fair-minded and very astute."

Dubofsky had never argued before the Supreme Court. Smith said she called his firm and asked specifically for help from Roberts, who argued 39 cases before the court before he was confirmed as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., in 2003.

Smith said any lawyer at Hogan & Hartson would have had the right to decline to work on any case for moral, religious or other reasons.

"If John had felt that way about this case, given that he is a brilliant lawyer, he would have just said, `This isn't my cup of tea' and I would have said, `Fine, we'll look for something else that would suit you,'" Smith said.

The Lambda Legal Defense Fund, which helped move the case through the state and federal courts, said Roberts' involvement raised more questions about him than it answered because of his "much more extensive advocacy of positions that we oppose," executive director Kevin Cathcart said.

"This is one more piece that will be added to the puzzle in the vetting of John Roberts' nomination," Cathcart said.

The Rev. Lou Sheldon, founder of the Traditional Values Coalition, said his support for Roberts' nomination has not diminished. "He wasn't the lead lawyer. They only asked him to play a part where he would be Scalia in a mock trial," Sheldon said.

Focus on the Family Action, the political arm of the Colorado Springs-based conservative Christian ministry Focus on the Family, said Roberts' involvement was "certainly not welcome news to those of us who advocate for traditional values," but did not prompt new concerns about his nomination, which the group supports.

"That's what lawyers do — represent their firm's clients, whether they agree with what those clients stand for or not," the group said in a statement.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/08/05/national/w135401D98.DTL

Roberts resisted women’s rights

1982-86 memos detail court nominee’s skepticism

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By Amy Goldstein, R. Jeffrey Smith and Jo Becker

Updated: 11:48 p.m. ET Aug. 18, 2005

Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. consistently opposed legal and legislative attempts to strengthen women's rights during his years as a legal adviser in the Reagan White House, disparaging what he called "the purported gender gap" and, at one point, questioning "whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good."

In internal memos, Roberts urged President Reagan to refrain from embracing any form of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment pending in Congress; he concluded that some state initiatives to curb workplace discrimination against women relied on legal tools that were "highly objectionable"; and he said that a controversial legal theory then in vogue -- of directing employers to pay women equally to men for jobs of "comparable worth" -- was "staggeringly pernicious" and "anti-capitalist."

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Roberts's thoughts on what he called "perceived problems" of gender bias are contained in a vast batch of documents, released yesterday, that provide the clearest, most detailed mosaic so far of his political views on dozens of social and legal issues. Senators have said they plan to mine his past views on such topics, which could come before the high court, when his confirmation hearings begin the day after Labor Day.

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Covering a period from 1982 to 1986 -- during his tenure as associate counsel to President Reagan -- the memos, letters and other writings show that Roberts endorsed a speech attacking "four decades of misguided" Supreme Court decisions on the role of religion in public life, urged the president to hold off saying AIDS could not be transmitted through casual contact until more research was done, and argued that promotions and firings in the workplace should be based entirely on merit, not affirmative action programs.

In October 1983, Roberts said that he favored creation of a national identity card to prove American citizenship, even though the White House counsel's office was officially opposed to the idea. He wrote that such measures were needed in response to the "real threat to our social fabric posed by uncontrolled immigration."

He also, the documents illustrate, played a bit role in the Reagan administration's efforts in Nicaragua to funnel assistance to CIA-supported "contras" who were trying overthrow the Marxist Sandinista government.

In one instance, Roberts had a direct disagreement with the senator who now wields great influence over his confirmation prospects, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). In a 1983 memo, Roberts was dismissive of a "white paper" on violent crime that had been drafted by one of Specter's aides. Noting that the paper proposed new expenditures of $8 billion to $10 billion a year, Roberts wrote: "The proposals are the epitome of the 'throw the money at the problem' approach repeatedly rejected by Administration spokesmen."

President Bush nominated Roberts, now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, four weeks ago.

Yesterday's deluge of more than 38,000 pages of documents has particular political significance -- because of their content and their timing. The papers, held in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, are likely to be the last major set of written material from Roberts's past to become public before his confirmation hearings.

Extensive insight
Senate Democrats have been pressing the Bush administration to release Roberts's files from the highest-ranking position he has held in the executive branch, as the Justice Department's deputy solicitor general from 1989 to 1993 under President George H.W. Bush. But administration officials have asserted that those records should remain private on the grounds of attorney-client privilege.

Previously released documents, from slightly earlier in the Reagan era, when Roberts was a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith, have established that the young attorney was immersed in civil rights issues of the time, including school desegregation, voting rights and bias in hiring and housing. The new batch provides the most extensive insight into Roberts's views of efforts to expand opportunity for women in the workplace and higher education.

Fool me once, shame on you....etc.

I feel better knowing Congress is smart enough to not believe BU_ _ SH _ _ twice from this farce of a president.

Roberts: Iraq Will Affect Future War Votes
Experience With Faulty Data Has Made Senators More Wary, Panel Chairman Says

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 14, 2005; A04

The Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said yesterday that one lesson of the faulty prewar intelligence on Iraq is that senators would take a hard look at intelligence before voting to go to war.

I think a lot of us would really stop and think a moment before we would ever vote for war or to go and take military action, Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) said on Fox News Sunday.

We don't accept this intelligence at face value anymore, he added. We get into preemptive oversight and do digging in regards to our hard targets.

He said that agreement has been reached on the Phase 2 review that the intelligence panel is doing to look into whether the Bush administration exaggerated or misused prewar intelligence. The review may not be finished this year, he said.

The intelligence panel vice chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), also appearing on Fox, called the review absolutely useful because if it is the fact that they [the Bush administration] created intelligence or shaped intelligence in order to bring American opinion along to support them in going to war, that's a really bad thing -- it should not ever be repeated.

Appearing on CNN's Late Edition, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said the White House is supporting the study, adding: I think that what you're going to find is that the statements by the administration had backing at the time from accepted intelligence sources.

He said that when administration statements turned out to be wrong, that was because the underlying intelligence was not true, but that's not the same as manipulating intelligence, and that is not misleading the American people.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), appearing with Roberts on Late Edition, said that Iraq became the center of terrorism after the March 2003 invasion.

I'm afraid we're going to see Iraq is not only the center of the war on terror, which it was not before we attacked Iraq, but now it is going to, I'm afraid, export it.

He added that Iraq has become the heartland of terrorism. It was not before we attacked.

Levin, a member of both the Senate intelligence committee and Armed Services Committee, has been a leading critic of the Bush administration's handling of the war.

Levin also said that the United States must get allies, as many as we can, including in the Muslim world because this is a form of fanatic Islam which has to be defeated by the moderate Islamic people.

In a column in yesterday's Washington Post, former senator John Edwards (N.C.), the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2004, said the failures of the Bush administration turned Iraq into a far greater threat than it ever was. It is now a haven for terrorists [and] has made fighting the global war on terrorist organizations more difficult rather than less.

The president and his senior aides have said since before the invasion that Washington went to war primarily because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to the United States and its neighbors because of his connection to terrorists. Once fighting began, they argued that Iraq was the central front in the battle against terrorism.

In his Veterans Day speech on Friday, the president turned his original argument around, saying, The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity, and therefore, We must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war against the terrorists.

I think its the one glimmer of hope the fact that he at least had the decency to stand up for gays rights to lease an apartment and other civil liberties. 

What I continue to find ironic is how the conservatives could see this as a possible negative "ideology" for their party. 

I plan to vote for Barack Obama (bash him if you want - I cannot be swayed!), but I checked out Ron Paul's website awhile back, and it seems like he has a pretty great record.  I wouldn't mind if he got elected.  I think both Obama and Paul seem to have one great quality in common - integrity!!  People can call me foolish if they want, but I go with my gut feeling a lot through life (serving me well so far), and I have a good feeling about both of these men.  They seem like decent, honest men - well, honest for politicians at least. :)

I like Obama because he talks about the things that mean the most to my family, and I really think he has what it takes to bring our divided nation back together somewhat, but if a Republican makes it to office, I hope it's Paul.

candidate or just a wasted vote?  I'm not liking neither Obama nor McCain at this point, and I've been researching Ron Paul a little bit.  I don't know that I'm leaning towards him, just curious if he has a viable chance in this election. 

It seems worthless to vote for someone you know won't get enough of the votes to actually win the thing.  Any thoughts?  Does Ron Paul have enough supporters to get voted in?

Go Ron Paul!

Would love to see a true statesman like Ron Paul be President of our country.

Great article in the Rocky Mountain News. 

This is why the powers that be behind the scenes made sure Ron Paul didn't get proper media coverage and couldn't get his message out there........too many agendas in governments around the world.  We do need to keep our butts out of this......no matter what happens, the middle east will always and has always been fighting.  Surely the U.S. doesn't think WE will be able to suddenly stop all that.  All we are doing is making matters worse by taking sides at this point.  If Israel feels the need to counter attack or invade the gaza strip, regardless, we need to stay out of it.  Let them do what they need to do and we need to stay out. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gTWqWrI4M

Ron Paul has been so right all along.  We just keep throwing more and more money, printing more money, just wasted, all of it!   Government is not supposed to be in the business of economic planning for this country....that's not a free society!   Government has NEVER done ANYTHING worthwhile with our money other than blow it............they have no business in the private sector. 

All the CEOs they sit up there and grill....what have they found out?  Nothing....and they never will.  Government can't get anything right.