Roberts article

• Really..John Roberts? - gt
  • Roberts article - gt
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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.

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

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. 

This whole Rove thing is not about outing anyone, it is about the uranium and Wilson finding no evidence that Saddam was trying to buy it.  Great article.  Link is below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/opinion/17rich.html?incamp=article_popular

    Thursday 18 August 2005

    Cindy Sheehan is still waiting for Bush to answer her question: What noble cause did my son die for? Her protest started as a small gathering 13 days ago. It has mushroomed into a demonstration of hundreds in Crawford and tens of thousands more at 1,627 solidarity vigils throughout the country.

    Why didn't Bush simply invite Cindy in for tea when she arrived in Crawford? In a brief, personal meeting with Cindy, Bush could have defused a situation that has become a profound embarrassment for him, and could derail his political agenda.

    Bush didn't talk with Cindy because he can't answer her question. There is no answer to Cindy's question. There is no noble cause that Cindy's son died fighting for. And Bush knows it.

    The goals of this war are not hard to find. They were laid out in Paul Wolfowitz's draft Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance in 1992, and again in the neoconservative manifesto - The Project for a New American Century's Rebuilding America's Defenses - in September 2000.

    Long before 9/11, the neocons proclaimed that the United States should exercise its role as the world's only superpower by ensuring access to the massive Middle East petroleum reserves. To accomplish this goal, the US would need to invade Iraq and establish permanent military bases there.

    If Bush were to give an honest answer to Cindy Sheehan's question, it would be that her son died to help his country spread US hegemony throughout the Middle East.

    But that answer, while true, does not sound very noble. It would not satisfy Cindy Sheehan, nor would it satisfy the vast majority of the American people. So, for the past several years, Bush and his minions have concocted an ever-changing story line.

    First, it was weapons-of-mass-destruction and the mushroom cloud. In spite of the weapons inspectors' admonitions that Iraq had no such weapons, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and Bolton lied about chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Bush even included the smoking gun claim in his state of the union address: that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from Niger. It was a lie, because people like Ambassador Joe Wilson, who traveled to Niger to investigate the allegation, had reported back to Cheney that it never happened.

    The Security Council didn't think Iraq was a threat to international peace and security. In spite of Bush's badgering and threats, the Council held firm and refused to sanction a war on Iraq. The UN weapons inspectors asked for more time to conduct their inspections. But Bush was impatient.

    He thumbed his nose at the United Nations and invaded anyway. After the "coalition forces" took over Iraq, they combed the country for the prohibited weapons. But they were nowhere to be found.

    Faced with the need to explain to the American people why our sons and daughters were dying in Iraq, Bush changed the subject to saving the Iraqis from Saddam's torture chambers.

    Then the grotesque photographs emerged from Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad. They contained images of US military personnel torturing Iraqis. Bush stopped talking about Saddam's torture.

    Most recently, Bush's excuse has been "bringing democracy to the Iraqi people." On June 28, 2004, he ceremoniously hailed the "transfer of sovereignty" back to the Iraqi people. (See Giving Iraqis What is Rightly Theirs). Yet 138,000 US troops remained in Iraq to protect US "interests."

    And Iraq's economy is still controlled by laws put in place before the "transfer of sovereignty." The US maintains a stranglehold on foreign access to Iraqi oil, private ownership of Iraq's resources, and control over the reconstruction of this decimated country.

    For months, Bush hyped the August 15, 2005 deadline for Iraqis to agree on a new constitution. But as the deadline came and went, the contradictions between the Shias, Sunnis and Kurds over federalism came into sharp focus. The Bush administration admitted that "we will have some form of Islamic republic," according to Sunday's Washington Post.

    So much for Bush's promise of a democratic Iraq.

    The constitutional negotiations are far removed from the lives of most Iraqis. When journalist Robert Fisk asked an Iraqi friend about the constitution, he replied, "Sure, it's important. But my family lives in fear of kidnapping, I'm too afraid to tell my father I work for journalists, and we only have one hour in six of electricity and we can't even keep our food from going bad in the fridge. Federalism? You can't eat federalism and you can't use it to fuel your car and it doesn't make my fridge work."

    Fisk reports that 1,100 civilian bodies were brought into the Baghdad morgue in July. The medical journal The Lancet concluded in October 2004 that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the first 18 months after Bush invaded Iraq.

    Unfortunately, the picture in Iraq is not a pretty one.

    Bush knows that if he talked to Cindy Sheehan, she would demand that he withdraw from Iraq now.

    But Bush has no intention of ever pulling out of Iraq. The US is building the largest CIA station in the world in Baghdad. And Halliburton is busily constructing 14 permanent US military bases in Iraq.

    George Bush knows that he cannot answer Cindy Sheehan's question. There is no noble cause for his war on Iraq.

By John Yewell/City Editor

With Cindy Sheehan gone home to take care of her stroke-stricken mom, President Bush can enjoy the last week of his Texas vacation free of the distraction of her encampment outside his ranch. But a grieving liberal mom whose son died in Iraq demanding an audience may not be Bush’s biggest problem.

His biggest problem may be my mom.

My mother is a lifelong Republican. She got it from her father, a yellow-dog Republican if ever there was one. As unofficial GOP godfather of Fillmore, Calif., he collected absentee ballots every election for his large family and marked them himself. No sense in taking chances that someone might vote for a Democrat.

So when my mother called me the other day and told me she was considering registering as a Democrat, I was, well, stunned. Somewhere in a cemetery plot near Fillmore a body is spinning.

For the last year or more my mother has been gradually expressing ever greater exasperation with President Bush, the war, and the religious right. “Have you heard about this James Dobson guy?” she asked me on the phone, referring to the head of Focus on the Family. “If they overturn Roe vs. Wade, that’ll be it for me,” she said.

Then she mentioned Cindy Sheehan.

For all the efforts to discredit Ms. Sheehan, what she accomplished in drawing attention to the human cost of the war, if my mother’s opinion is any indication, crossed party lines. There’s a Mom Faction in American politics, and while it isn’t a monolithic Third Rail, it’s at least and second-and-a-half rail. When their children are dying on a battlefield of choice, you touch it at your peril.

My mother has her fingers on the pulse, and scalps, of many such women. She’s a hairdresser with a clientele that has been coming to her regularly for decades. Now grandmothers, these women were moms during Vietnam, in which over 50,000 American sons and daughters died. They worried then about their kids’ safety, now they’re worried about grandkids - theirs or someone else’s. Most are pretty mainstream, most Republican, and most, my mother tells me, pretty much fed up with George Bush.

There is other evidence of trouble on the Republican horizon. According to the latest compilation of state polls produced 10 days ago by surveyusa.com, of the 31 states Bush won in 2004, he now enjoys plurality job approval in only 10. This includes a 60 to 37 percent disapproval rate in the key state of Ohio, and a 53 to 44 disapproval rate in Florida.

A recent assessment from the influential and scrupulously nonpartisan Cook Political Report reads: “Opposition to and skepticism about the war in Iraq has reached its highest level, boosted by increased American casualties, a lack of political progress inside the country and growing signs of an imminent civil war. Given the centrality of the Iraq War to the Bush presidency and re-election, a cave-in of support for the president on the war would be devastating to his second-term credibility and influence.”

If Republicans are wondering where Cook is finding this “cave-in of support,” they could start looking in worse places than my mother’s one-chair salon, where Cindy Sheehan found sympathetic ears.

According to various reports, Bush and his team concluded that granting Sheehan an audience would only have encouraged other malcontents to demand similar attention from the president. Whatever the rationale, the decision alienated the clientele of Natalie’s Beauty Shoppe.

In the end my mother decided against changing her registration. Any criticism she might have of Bush, she decided, would be more credible if she stayed in the party, a sophisticated conclusion I admire and applaud.

Although Democrats can’t count on being the automatic beneficiaries of such dissatisfaction, Bush’s refusal to acknowledge fault, his “because I’m the Daddy and I say so” attitude, doesn’t work for a lot of women anymore. Women resent being patronized, and that’s how many view the president’s treatment of Cindy Sheehan.

The next election may be 14 months away, but when my mom and a lot of others like her walk into their voting booths, they may well be reflecting on their children and their choices, and which party is less likely to put either in harm’s way.

John Yewell is the city editor of the Hollister Free Lance. He can be reached at jyewell@freelancenews.com.

In a little-remembered debate from 1994, the Clinton administration argued that the president has inherent authority to order physical searches — including break-ins at the homes of U.S. citizens — for foreign intelligence purposes without any warrant or permission from any outside body. Even after the administration ultimately agreed with Congress's decision to place the authority to pre-approve such searches in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, President Clinton still maintained that he had sufficient authority to order such searches on his own.

It is important to understand, Gorelick continued, that the rules and methodology for criminal searches are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities.

Executive Order 12333, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, provides for such warrantless searches directed against a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.

Reporting the day after Gorelick's testimony, the Washington Post's headline — on page A-19 — read, Administration Backing No-Warrant Spy Searches. The story began, The Clinton administration, in a little-noticed facet of the debate on intelligence reforms, is seeking congressional authorization for U.S. spies to continue conducting clandestine searches at foreign embassies in Washington and other cities without a federal court order. The administration's quiet lobbying effort is aimed at modifying draft legislation that would require U.S. counterintelligence officials to get a court order before secretly snooping inside the homes or workplaces of suspected foreign agents or foreign powers.

In her testimony, Gorelick made clear that the president believed he had the power to order warrantless searches for the purpose of gathering intelligence, even if there was no reason to believe that the search might uncover evidence of a crime. Intelligence is often long range, its exact targets are more difficult to identify, and its focus is less precise, Gorelick said. Information gathering for policy making and prevention, rather than prosecution, are its primary focus.

The debate over warrantless searches came up after the case of CIA spy Aldrich Ames. Authorities had searched Ames's house without a warrant, and the Justice Department feared that Ames's lawyers would challenge the search in court. Meanwhile, Congress began discussing a measure under which the authorization for break-ins would be handled like the authorization for wiretaps, that is, by the FISA court. In her testimony, Gorelick signaled that the administration would go along a congressional decision to place such searches under the court — if, as she testified, it does not restrict the president's ability to collect foreign intelligence necessary for the national security. In the end, Congress placed the searches under the FISA court, but the Clinton administration did not back down from its contention that the president had the authority to act when necessary.

Byron York--NRO

Book Says Bush Aides Dismissed Christian Allies

allay any of my doubts about SP.  If she were an 18-year-od college student, this would be a flattering piece.  As a VP candidate, shallow, uninformed, asking polite questions, flashing some gam.  No thanks. If you think she is qualified -- let the press ask her some questions!!!  If not, put her in a wet T shirt poster and be done with it.

okay, in going to the site you posted, and going to the subheading of what you'll pay in taxes, with Obama, I will pay $1118 less and with McCain only $325 less -

Now for me, that is a no brainer!  Of course if I am worried about the economy in general, and my household in particular, I would have to choose Obama!

In your other post above, you wrote: This country has laws to protect people from being murdered, from having their lives taken from them by another person.

Those "people" are called "citizens" under the Constitution, and the "phrase" you refer to that defines citizens is found under article XIV reads as follows:

Amendment 14 - Citizenship Rights Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

As you can see, the words fetus, embryo, or twinkle in my daddy's eye are NOT included in the definition.  One must be born first in order to be a citizen and receive protective services.

IMHO, when life begins is mostly a matter of philosophical and/or religious belief and not something to be legislated.

What does this say for our future?  If what this writer is saying is true (or evenly remotely a little bit true) looks like a lot of hard times ahead.  What I found of particular interest is the paragraph that talks about unemployment (the last 3 lines are in all caps).  What would happen to this country if unemployment reaches 30-40 percent?  Would we be able to survive?  Are there any plans in the future that Obama had promised during his campaign that will turn things around.  He had a lot of plans/ideas during his campaign, but now all I hear him keep saying is "it's going to get worse" or "it's really bad", but not hearing of any of those plans.

Also, I didn't realize that there were so many people receiving welfare and food handouts in this country (11 million?).  There shouldn't be any reason for this.  Not well Wall Street execs, politicians, etc. are still flying on luxury private planes and certain politicians are staying in $9 million dollar ocean front homes.

I'm just wondering if people who read this are following along and believe a lot in this article may come true or could happen what are you doing to prepare? 

Anyway...just an interesting article.

http://caps.fool.com/blogs/viewpost.aspx?bpid=122176&t=01000619699519786208

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2008/10/08/will-msm-report-obama-membership-socialist-new-party

http://stoosviews.blogivists.com/2008/10/30/obamaniacs-and-the-cult-of-obama-they-are-coming-for-your-kool-aid/

Here's what really stands out in this article - "Obama, on the other hand, is seeking to duplicate the failures of the president he is replacing, only on a far greater scale."

http://www.wmicentral.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=2264&dept_id=581907&newsid=20224719&PAG=461&rfi=9

Okay, I'm outta here for the night.  Here's another read.

http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/11/13/the-terrible-danger-of-a-personality-cult/

just wanted to break the string.

Posted below is an article.  Please read.  No it is not gossip or made up, it is real and it is disgusting.  Obama has done nothing about this and will not.

Racism of the Congressional Black Caucus
President's spokesman cites 'membership policies' as explanation

"To your knowledge has the president ever disagreed with the expressed hope that children 'could live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character' as made by Dr. King," Kinsolving asked.

As WND reported, U.S. Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., was refused permission to join the organization because of his race.

Kinsolving recently documented in his WND column how Anh ("Joseph") Cao, the Vietnamese-American Republican from Louisiana who defeated the re-election bid of New Orleans Democrat William Jefferson, expressed an interest in joining because the district he represents is predominantly black.

Charges of racism arose after posting of a video showing top Obama economic adviser Robert Reich saying he wanted to make sure economic stimulus money didn't go to just "white male construction workers."

Also as WND reported, Democratic Party strategist Donna Brazile admitted she swiped Obama's complimentary blanket from his inauguration ceremony and then joked it was not a criminal offense because, "We have a black president ... this was free."

Also, outrage erupted over the inauguration benediction by Rev. Joseph Lowery, the 87-year-old civil rights pioneer, for asking God to help mankind work for a day when "white would embrace what is right."

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/republican-senator-seeks-to-outlaw-tobacco-2009-06-05.html

If they are worried about teenagers smoking, then make it illegal just like booze. I know they have the soft law now, but it really doesn't work too well (just like the booze but at least it may help). Then when they turn 21, it would be their decision, not the government.

My only vice is smoking and a drink once in a while. Both these items are getting too expensive but I've been smoking over 40 years and trying to quit 6 times in the past has never worked for me and I'm tired of trying. LET ME ALONE!!!!

Great article in opinion section of LA Times (you can get it online).  Dated 06/24/2005, "Hustling on K Street" by Jonathan Chait, concerning Bush paying back the lobbyists and big business.

Reps. John Conyers and Maxine Waters are trying to get a meeting going in Congress tomorrow with Republicans joining in this time to debate and discuss the Downing Street Memos.  Dont know if it will be covered on C-Span, sure hope so.