Doctor Jacquelline Perlman has had it. After a 12-year career as an OB-GYN doctor she his quitting her practice. One of the major reasons is the exorbitant costs of malpractice insurance.

“I’ve decided to retire from obstetrics,” said Perlman, 42. “It breaks my heart. Malpractice costs are a big part of it. It’s a very sad story.”

Last spring her insurer dropped her and several of her fellow doctors because of the high risk of covering OB-GYNs. Dr. Perlman’s new insurer was to charge $160,000 a year for coverage and that proved too much for Perlman to take.

Perlman noted that over the last five years, as her insurance costs multiplied, her actual income dropped by 20 percent.

So, another good doctor — one that has never had a malpractice case stick to her — leaves the profession. Now, before some of you out there assume the insurance companies is the villain here, let us pinpoint the real villain: trial lawyers.

It is the nuisance lawsuits, those filed merely to harass doctors in order to get a quick settlement, and lawyers that game the system with nonsense lawsuits as well as clients looking for a lottery-like payout that will make them instant millionaires that cause this problem.

One of the most important aspects of what should be a true reform to our system of medicine would be a policy that would curtail these out-of-control, greedy lawyers. Naturally, tort reform and trial lawyers are coming up as a protected class in Obamacare. And why is that? Because trial lawyers gave Obama a ton of cash for his campaign, that’s why.

This proves that Obamacare is not about “reform,” nor about improving our medical system. It is first and foremost about political payoffs. Obama is shameless in his political payoffs and this one is particularly stark.

In the meantime, as Obamacare takes its baby steps toward final passage, more great docs like Mrs. Perlman will quit the business.

Obama keeps pretending that we will be “allowed” to “keep our doctors if we like them.” But as each day passes we are finding more and more reasons why many of us will lose our favorite doctors whether we like them or not.

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For years, leading plaintiffs’ lawyers have promised a legal assault on industrial America for contributing to global warming.

So far, the trial bar has had limited success. The hurdles to such suits are pretty obvious: How do you apportion fault and link particular plaintiffs’ injuries to the pollution emitted by a particular group of defendants?

Today, though, plaintiffs’ lawyers may be a gloating a bit, after a favorable ruling Friday from the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, which is regarded as one of the more conservative circuit courts in the country.  Here’s a link to the ruling.

The suit was brought by landowners in Mississippi, who claim that oil and coal companies emitted greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming that, in turn, caused a rise in sea levels, adding to Hurricane Katrina’s ferocity. (See photo of Bay St. Louis, Miss., after the storm.)

For a nice overview of the ruling, and its significance in the climate change battle, check out this blog post by J. Russell Jackson, a Skadden Arps partner who specializes in mass tort litigation. The post likens the Katrina plaintiffs’ claims, which set out a chain of causation, to the litigation equivalent of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”

At first blush, this looks like just another meaningless and hysterical law suit, but, think about this for a moment. The plaintiffs are going to have to provide actual, factual, relevant, and meaningful evidence, and actually debate the merits of man made global warming in the public eye. The defense will be able to provide relevant, factual, and meaningful evidence, such as the “no warming in the last 10 years” information, all in the public eye. If the climahysteric plaintiffs lose, this could be a major slap in the face for the AGW movement.

Al Gore has been challenged to debate after debate after debate, yet, refuses to engage in one. The Washington Posts’ Andrew Freeman chickened out on a debate with Climate Depot’s Marc Morano. The US Chamber of Commerce called for a climate trial, and, rather than anyone taking them up on it, they were demonized. Lord Monckton has offered to debate any climate alarmist, and none will take him on. Perhaps this trial will shed some reality on the situation, and finally put to rest the notion of anthropogenic climate change. Until they bring it back up in a few years, of course.

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“I think I’ve got it—the hate in America and where it’s coming from. Rush Limbaugh’s effort—aborted by his fellow investors, it seems—to buy the St. Louis Rams has given me the insight…

So the hate: I think people have a natural instinct to want to declaim, to inveigh, denounce, opine, and show-off to great rhetorical effect. It’s as natural as dreaming of playing major league baseball (it is, speech for speech’s sake, like baseball, a man’s thing). People (men) just want to hear themselves talk….

And the people who do it well, the only people who do it with any formality and structure, are conservatives. The art of this—the formal discipline of rhetoric taught in classrooms for generations—has fallen out of fashion in our era. Except, that is, on right-wing radio and on Fox News. It is the mesmerizing thing about all of these conservatives, not just the bile, but the cadence.. conservatives practice old-fashioned big-breath talking, long oom pa pa flights of castigation and censure and reproach and excoriation and threat and blame and denunciation in which meaning takes a back seat to verbal skill and style….

Losing out on the pure joy of owning an NFL team—as close as you get to being a true potentate in America—Rush may be facing a level of personal disappointment that few of us can truly appreciate, but he’s not weeping. Instead he’s blissfully self-dramatizing, channeling his pain into a great rhythmic flow which blocks out the sound of anybody else.

This, I think, is the root of hate speech: The conservatives talkers have shown many fragile people how to use rhetorical effect—repetitions, rising and falling pitch, tempo, structured breathing, metonymy, synecdoche, and a variety of tried-and-true tropes (“our country over 200 years old now”), combined with passionate enmity —to achieve a little place in the sun….

Source

The writer above is Michael Wolff, a journalist. He is a former columnist for New York magazine and currently is the media columnist for Vanity Fair magazine as well as a television commentator on CNBC. As such he appears pretty eloquent. I guess that makes him a practitioner of hate speech too. He clearly hates Rush. From his argument above, it would seem that his hatred of Rush has quite deranged him. I wonder has he realized that his criticism of Rush would apply equally well to Obama!

The source of some of the the libels against Rush has now been tentatively identified. It is a super-”correct” NYC law firm — Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP — with far-Left connections and which has been a big donor to Obama. It has a specialty in sports-related matters. Lying is apparently part of that specialty. Being truthful is not part of “correctness”, it would seem. Let’s hope Rush takes them on in the courts.

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, DISSECTING LEFTISM, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . List of backup or “mirror” sites here or here — for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is “down” or failing to update. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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President Obama has gone out of his way to “diversify” the federal bench with his spate of nominations of various minorities chief of which was his successful seating of the “wise Latina,’ Sonia Sotomayor, on the Supreme Court. Obama’s nominees* for 10 district court openings include four African-Americans, three Asian-Americans, one Latino and four women. One of those nominees, San Francisco U.S. Magistrate Judge Edward Chen, received a favorable vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington today.

So what sort of judge is Edward Chen? Well, for one, the left-wing American Bar Association rated Chen a “well qualified” nominee and many of his associates at the ACLU speak highly of him. As an ACLU lawyer, Chen was known for opposing English-only policies and for pushing discriminatory affirmative action ideals. He even came to the aid of gang members in one case. Chen was quite the ACLU activist between 1979 and 2001.

His ACLU history would suffice to make many wary of him, of course. But for a segment of America, working for the ACLU is not a disqualifier. So in order to judge Edward Chen one must look at his past. Discovering what Judge Chen thinks of the country upon which he apparently assumes to sit in judgment is a telling exercise. Sadly, it seems he has quite a low opinion of the nation that he will be serving.

One hint at Judge Chen’s feelings about our nation can be seen from his appearance at the 2005 graduation ceremony at the Hastings Public Interest Law Foundation. There, Chen wondered aloud if American patriotism was justified. Chen told the crowd of his, “feelings of ambivalence and cynicism when confronted with appeals to patriotism — sometimes I cannot help but feel that there are too much [sic] injustice and too many inequalities that prevent far too many Americans from enjoying the beauty extolled in that anthem.” Apparently, Chen feels that America is too racist to justify anyone feeling patriotism for her.

In fact, racism seems to be one of Chen’s major concerns and he sees it everywhere. Immediately after the attacks on 9, 11, 2001 Chen’s first thoughts were about racism but not that of the Arabs that sent over three thousand Americans to their deaths. No, as soon as Chen learned of the attacks of 9/11 Chen’s first worry was that white Americans were going to use their racism to justify racist attacks on Muslims and anyone else that got in their way.

Only ten days after 9/11 occurred, Chen remarked that he imagined that America would revert to the “irresistible forces of racism, nativism and scapegoating” of the past and begin systematic oppression of American Muslims. Later he likened America’s post 9/11 military and security policies to the climate that led up to Japanese internment during WWII. In fact, he seemed to imagine that “a thousand Americans” were being swept up and held in secret prisons right after 9/11.

In a speech given at the Operation Protect and Defend dinner on May 4, 2006, Judge Chen referred to “secret surveillance of Americans without a judicial warrant, secret no fly lists, [and] secret detention of nearly a thousand American residents held without charges.” Naturally, he offered no proof of this wholesale but secret detention of Americans.

Chen also saw racism in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as well. Chen charged that the reason that New Orleans had so much trouble after the storms passed was because the inhabitants of the Crescent City were black. “Institutionalized racism” caused the federal government’s supposedly slow response to the crisis there, Chen said. At the Diversity Celebration of the California State Bar Convention in 2005, Chen asked the audience, “Would the response have been different had the majority of victims been white and middle class rather than poor and black? Would the response have been quicker had it been Kennebunkport instead of New Orleans?”

Racism again came to vex Chen’s overactive imagination in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings perpetrated by an Asian man. Chen’s fevered imagination dreamed up images of Asian men being discriminated against all across the country because of the actions of one mentally unstable nut. In comments before the Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education Conference, Chen worried that Asians would be the “subject of a racial backlash, victimized” by hate crime.

It is apparent that Edward Chen does not find much to celebrate about the United States. The whole country is so filled with “injustice” and “inequalities” that only a crusading judge can right the wrongs.

Now, what of his judicial standards? What sort of philosophy does Chen employ on the bench? Is it a strict standard of reading at law, or is he one of those sorts of judicial activists that uses the law to spread his own particular philosophy of social justice? Sadly, it appears to be the later. At least one can be excused to think this from a 2003 article Chen wrote entitled “The Judiciary, Diversity, and Justice For All” published in the California Law Review.

“…diversity enhances the quality of decision-making. . . . judges have to make determinations that draw not so much upon legal acumen, but on an understanding of people and of human experiences. Such experiences inform assumptions that affect legal decisions. At trial and in evidentiary hearings, judges have to assess the credibility of witnesses. A witness’ testimony may seem more credible if it is consistent with the judge’s knowledge or experience, and, conversely, less credible if it remains outside the judge’s experience. . . . Simply put, a judge’s life experiences affect the willingness to credit testimony or understand the human impact of legal rules upon which the judge must decide. These determinations require a judge to draw upon something that is not found in the case reports that line the walls of our chambers. Rather judges draw upon the breadth and depth of their own life experience, upon the knowledge and understanding of people, and of human nature. And inevitably, one’s ethnic and racial background contributes to those life experiences.”

Of course, this attitude seems to register well with Obama’s views of “judicial empathy.” In this view the law is heavily influenced by the judge’s “feelings” and those feelings are at least as important as the written law. This also matches well with Sotomayor’s ideas that her status as a Latina made her more qualified than an old white man to be a judge. For Obama’s judges, experiences and feelings trump the Constitution and the law and these experiences and feelings should be used as a basis to adjudicate the cases that come before them.

In Chen’s case we can see that the main influence on his judicial philosophy is an inordinate fear of racism. He sees it under his bed, in his closet, in the faces of everyone he meets. With this penchant in mind, can Chen honestly, dispassionately, and seriously serve effectively as a federal judge? One cannot help but wonder if his preoccupation with envisioning racism in every situation makes Judge Chen ill-suited for the federal bench where a dispassionate mien is required. It is easy to see that his constant resorting to charges of racism will likely color every decision he delivers.

Judge Chen will bring “diversity” to the bench as President Obama wants certainly. But will he also bring divisiveness and a desire to get even with all the racism he sees where ever he looks? His record hints that he just might.

*The 10 nominees mentioned above are as follows:

Two African-American circuit nominees, highly regarded sitting district judges Andre Davis and Joseph Greenaway, earned well-qualified American Bar Association ratings, the organization’s highest ranking. The third, well-respected Rhode Island Superior Court Associate Justice O. Rogeriee Thompson, was nominated last week and has yet to receive an ABA ranking. The four Asian-American nominees would increase by 36% the number of Asian-American judges. They include Southern District of New York Judge Denny Chin, who would be the first Asian-American judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit; California Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Nguyen, who would be the first Vietnamese-American district judge; and Magistrate Judge Edward Chen, who would be the first Asian-American member of the Northern District of California. Both Nguyen and Chen earned well-qualified ABA ratings, while the ABA has not yet ranked Chin.

(Cross posted at RedCounty.com.)

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If you would like a great example of how the Old Media takes a story that has no legitimacy at all and uses it as the basis for a smear job, the Associated Press offered a wonderful sampling of the tactic for you on June 8. From a headline that makes the issue seem more weighty than it is, to the lack of competent reporting from both sides of the matter, AP employed this favorite Old Media tactic by taking another swipe at Governor Sarah Palin with little by way of substantive evidence. It’s another “seriousness of the charge” story despite the complete lack of evidence as well as a lack of any gravitas on the part of the original source of the charge.

At issue is the false charge leveled by a Huffington Post blogger that Governor Palin “plagiarized” a section of her speech as she introduced talk show host Michael Reagan in Anchorage, Alaska on Wednesday, June 3. The HuffPo blogger charged that Palin lifted several sections of Newt Gingrinch’s work without attribution, and AP gleefully repeats the blogger’s claims despite that the truth turns out to be a far different case.

The headline is particularly interesting in that it seems to imply something far more formal than a mere HuffPost blogger’s blather. The AP headline screams, “Palin Slapped With Plagiarism Charge.” After reading such a headline the “slapped with plagiarism charge” almost seems to say that some legal body had “charged” the Governor with some violation of the law. But the truth is the “charge” is more like a claim and the claim is not backed up even by the person that was supposed to have been plagiarized — not that AP reports that, of course. Let’s not let facts get in the way.

AP lays out the charge in its first few paragraphs.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been accused of paraphrasing at length from an article co-written by Newt Gingrich when she gave a speech, but her lawyer says proper credit was given to the former House speaker.

…Dunn compared Palin’s speech introducing conservative talk show host Michael Reagan, son of former President Ronald Reagan, to an Anchorage audience Wednesday to the article urging Republicans to study Reagan, written by Gingrich and Craig Shirley in 2005.

Despite this blogger’s claims, Palin did mention Gingrich as the source of the words at the outset of the speech. In fact, Palin mentioned Newt twice during her remarks the first time saying, “Recently, Newt Gingrich had written a good article about Reagan,” and the second time she said, “what Newt had written in this article…” What more do you want in a spoken address to indicate a source?

On top of the false charge, AP notes that the blogger is writing a book on Palin and from his work on her thus far, no doubt it will not be a flattering look at her career. So a blogger accuses Palin of stealing from Newt Gingrich and AP reports this story despite the fact that this blogger has no legitimacy on the matter and is writing an adversarial book on her that he is hawking.

Also, notice how AP gives us the “but her lawyer says” line? Well, it turns out that through spokesman Rick Tyler, Newt Gingrich says the same thing as Palin’s lawyer. Newt’s own people say that no plagiarism occurred. Unfortunately, readers of the AP account were not informed of this fact.

The upshot of this whole deal is that AP used a flimsy charge made by a biased blogger and reported it as a serious matter and then didn’t fully report that even the person that was supposed to have been plagiarized said there wasn’t any plagiarism.

Now, don’t get me wrong, here. I am not charging that a blogger is an insubstantial source merely on the face of it. I am saying this blogger lacks any serious gravitas. I am also saying that the charge itself is silly, flimsy, and foolishly made solely to get the blogger attention as opposed to revealing any deep, dark Palin misdeeds.

Sadly, AP uses this bad source anyway and presents it as if it had veracity. And thus we have another smear job on Governor Palin based on unsubstantiated claims from a biased source presented to us as if it were news.

And the hits just keep comin,’ folks.

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Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, wrote the dissent on a decision rendered by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Hayden v. Pataki. New York state inmates filed a lawsuit “claiming that because blacks and Latinos make up a disproportionate share of the prison population, the state’s refusal to allow them ballot access amounts to an unlawful, race-based denial of their right to vote.

Sonia Sotomayor

Judge Jose Cabranes wrote the majority decision in favor of the state of New York and against the “criminal felons.” Eight members of the Second Circuit voted against Hayden in the case. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rendered the same decision in a similar case. Sotomayor wrote the dissent. According to a Washington Times editorial:

In a remarkably dismissive, four-paragraph opinion, she alleged that the “plain terms” of the Voting Rights Act would allow such race-based claims to go forward.

Judge Cabranes‘ decision in favor of the state was backed up with this:

Particularly compelling is the fact that the Voting Rights Act was passed to help further the aims of the Constitution’s 14th and 15th Amendments. The 14th Amendment specifically allows states to deny the vote to those convicted of crimes.

So, essentially, Sotomayor’s dissent said that Congress could:

…prohibit New York from doing something the Constitution itself specifically endorses.

Incredible! More from the editorial:

It’s as if she thinks black and Hispanic felons are convicted in order to deny them the vote, rather than that they are denied the vote as a result of being duly convicted. Her position ignores the fact that it is the convicts’ own actions, their crimes – not any state-based racial discrimination – that make those felons ineligible to vote.

Remember this supposedly single quote from Sonia Sotomayor?

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.

The White House says if Sotomayor had the opportunity, she would have used other words. Nope, apparently not. She has repeated the same or given a version of the same over and over. As Hot Air says:

Evidently, the idea that her biology makes her a superior judge has been with her for decades.

The woman believes the death penalty is “racist” and “against humanist thinking,” and she believes felons should have the right to vote. We should begin hearing some strong objections to her nomination coming out of Congress this week. Right?

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If you’ve spent any time at all on Internet message boards or in college debate class you’ll have seen the rafters vibrate with righteous condemnation against the “slippery slope argument.” It is claimed that a worst case, ultimate extrapolation of a thing is a bad argument because it isn’t necessarily a truism. Supporters of the Second Amendment, for instance, are scolded by liberals when the supporter says that any new gun law is “one more step to banning guns.” The gun restricter says that the gun supporter is employing a “slippery slope” argument and that it is idiotic to claim that one new law must mean that a gun ban is the ultimate outcome. One doesn’t necessarily follow the other.

It is a logical conclusion, of course, that one step won’t necessarily lead to a series of other steps. But, humanity isn’t ruled by logic and those small steps that ultimately lead down the road to ruin are far more common than not. Here is another example of how one step led to another to bad effect and, as is far too often the case, the situation at hand was made in the arena of the law. And recently that slope descended even further down that road to hell.

In a recent Washington Post article, Curtis A. Bradley and Jack L. Goldsmith detailed a slippery slope situation that took 200 years to slide down when activists realized that they could warp the meaning of a law written in 1789 to fit their political goals in 1980. Naturally, those political goals were a leftist’s dream come true.

In 1789, the Alien Tort Statute became American federal law. This law was originally meant to give a more stable venue for cases brought against foreign litigants bringing consistency in U.S. law to such cases . It was also meant to help foreign governments avoid the confusion that would have resulted in having to take into consideration the practices of all our different states, giving them just one forum instead of 13 (now 50) to contend with. This helped ease any diplomatic tensions that might have occurred with foreign nations being forced to deal with so many different courts in the U.S. Seems like a logical law, right?

200 years later enter the radical left.

The statute hid in obscurity for almost 200 years before a federal appellate court in New York invoked it in 1980 to allow victims of human rights abuses committed abroad to sue foreign officials in U.S. courts. This holding turned the statute on its head by creating, rather than reducing, friction with other countries. It also spawned a cottage industry of human rights litigation.

The Post article says that the initial cases brought forth using this new interpretation of the 1789 law were “largely symbolic” and altered nothing imposing no real penalties. But soon radical leftists warped the law even more. New cases began to prove much farther reaching as U.S. corporations began to be targeted as “aiding and abetting” those charged with the so-called civil rights abuses occurring in other countries.

These cases are not merely symbolic — the U.S. corporations have deep pockets and U.S. bank accounts — and present enormous opportunities for judicial meddling in foreign relations.

A case brought against South Africa by class-action attorneys many years after apartheid ended is a “dramatic example,” say Bradley and Goldsmith. It was brought to a New York court in hopes of penalizing American corporations for having had dealings with South Africa during the years of apartheid.

The Bush administration opposed the litigation claiming that it would seriously impact the executive branch’s ability at diplomatic relations with the current South African government and would have “adverse consequences” on economic relations. Even the post-apartheid South African government opposed the litigation because they felt it interfered with its own policies “embodied by its Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Even the Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch had privilege in dealing with South Africa.

But the arrogant New York court didn’t care.

This should have been enough for dismissal. Five years ago, the Supreme Court said in reference to the South Africa litigation that “there is a strong argument that the federal courts should give serious weight to the Executive Branch’s view of the case’s impact on foreign policy.” Yet the New York court, unpersuaded, concluded that allowing the lawsuit to proceed “would not contradict American foreign policy in a manner that would ’seriously interfere with important governmental interests.’ ” Thus it supplanted its foreign policy views for those of the federal government and refused to respect South Africa’s efforts to move its society forward.

Unfortunately, the activists in the New York court refused to dismiss the case despite so many voices opposed to it.

What is the result? This case can now go forward to interfere with the right of South Africa to reconcile with its own past in its own ways and could have major economic impact on our own economy by ruling that American firms are now liable for what some other country did with its people.

More significant, the court ruled that firms were liable for a foreign government’s human rights violations, even if they did not engage in the abuses or intend to facilitate them, as long as companies were aware that their business activities would substantially assist the government’s illegal practices. This put GM and Ford on the hook for supplying trucks that the South African government used to attack anti-apartheid activists, and IBM for providing computers and software that the government used to register and segregate individuals.

And thus the slippery slope is well traveled. From a law meant to help other nations to deal with our nation to one now warped to be used to interfere with other nations dealing with their own people, we see this law misused by radical leftist activists as well as activist judges looking to find what they want in law instead of reading it as is.

So, next time someone says that a slippery slope argument is not valid, tell them of this South Africa case. Then remind them of Shakespeare’s derisive comment that first we must “kill all the lawyers.”

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A few of our newly minted spokesmen for all those seemingly ubiquitous new Republican moderates out there are starting to say that if we oppose Sotomayor, we do so at our own risk. By this they mean that if we are seen to oppose a strong Hispanic woman we will be hurting our chances further with Hispanic voters. To this one can only say poppycock. Sotomayor should be opposed and vigorously but not because of anything other than her rather un-judicial judicial philosophy.

No one, not one conservative commentator or politician, cares a whit that Sotomayor is Hispanic. There simply is no expectation of opposing her because she is of Latino heritage. And so, because of this, there should be no reason whatever to shy from criticizing her qualifications and philosophy. Further, to allow moderates on our side or anyone on the left to equate our opposition to a racial objection is illegitimate and should be vociferously denied.

Ms. Sotomayor does not believe in the rule of law, she does not believe in precedent — except for creating new ones based on her political/racial as opposed to judicial ideals — and she has no interest in judicial restraint. She is not a jurist but an activist for the most liberal of causes. She will make for an unreasonable Supreme Court Justice and will surely churn out one illogical, constitutionally unsupportable decision after another. She should be opposed on these principles.

But the crux of the pro-Sotomayor argument is two fold. One part holds that if we oppose this Latino woman we will be made out as haters of Hispanics and will lose Hispanic voters and the second is that opposition of Obama’s pick will be no different than our constant complaints of Democrat opposition to Reagan’s, George H.W. and W. Bush’s picks. Both are specious arguments.

First of all, we should stop pretending that being nice to every Hispanic candidate for anything regardless of that candidate’s ideology will “get” us anything. George W. Bush went out of his way to pick Hispanic candidates for all sorts of government positions. He has Hispanic family members and is well known for his soft stance on immigration reform. No Republican can stake a claim to being more Hispanic friendly. What did it get him? Not a single thing. Over his 8 years the Republican Hispanic vote has steadily eroded.

So, any obviation of conservative principle to pander for the Hispanic vote is a fool’s errand. It isn’t worth the erosion of our principles to try and cajole votes from the Hispanic community. This is absolutely not to say that we should abandon any efforts to recruit good Hispanic candidates that exhibit strong conservative principles, far from it. But, as in this case, meekly accepting a candidate like Sotomayor will do no good to help us gain the vaunted Hispanic vote.

Secondly, crying over the spilled milk of the days when a president could expect little opposition to his Supreme Court picks is a waste of time. Since Reagan, the left has seen to it that this long-time practice is dead as the Dodo. Bemoaning the partisan tone of Supreme Court picks truly is futile. Furthermore, since we’ve allowed the SCOTUS to become so overly powerful, it is foolish to want to return to the days of presidential deference for Court picks anyway.

If the goal is to return to an era when SCOTUS picks sail through the Senate without rancorous partisan fights, then we will first have to denude the Supreme Court of the undue power it has accumulated. That would require that Congress retake its role as Constitutional authority. Instead of making law to which it hasn’t thoroughly applied the litmus test of the law of the land and then assuming that the Courts will iron out the constitutionality of same, Congress has to again begin to consider the legal basis of its attempts at legislation.

Until such time as Congress again begins to think in terms of the constitutional legitimacy of its own actions, however, we must all realize that the battle for the rule of law will be in the arena of the Courts. That being true we must fight for judicial restraint and constructionist principles in judicial candidates.

Sotomayor is well known for having said that she sees her job as that of rule maker instead of law reader. She has said that she feels her status as a Latino woman makes her better qualified than a white man to be a judge and she has issued many a ruling based on her theories of social “justice” as opposed to an adjudication on the law as written. This woman is an activist that has never shied from using the bench to advance her political goals nor has she been squeamish about saying so. (For some of the issues against her qualifications, see this piece)

This is why we oppose her and we should not allow her candidacy to quietly glide by unopposed. That Sotomayor is of Hispanic heritage is a meaningless distraction and we must reiterate this fact in every posting about her.

One of the best single paragraph explications in this early debate against Sotomayor was penned NRO’s Rich Lowery:

Sotomayor’s nomination represents an extraordinary personal accomplishment and an important symbolic affirmation for Latinos. Her confirmation, though, would be another step toward eviscerating the constitutional function of the Supreme Court, as empathy trumps impartiality.

Just so, Mr. Lowery, just so. Think of this as a model of how to argue against this horrid SCOTUS nomination.

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Ever since Justice Sandra Day O’Connor began babbling about it several years ago, the talk of Supreme Court Justices of the United States of America using foreign court rulings to base their decisions upon has been a topic of dread for those interested in adhering to the U.S. Constitution.

It should be shocking to see a U.S. Supreme Justice talking about using foreign precedent but it would sadly not surprise anyone that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, former ACLU lawyer, is doing just that. Not only is she bringing up the subject but she professes not to understand why any American would be upset that a SCOTUS Justice might see nothing wrong with using foreign court decisions to decide our own rulings.

Apparently the word “sovereignty,” and the phrase “supreme law of the land” are not as important to her as they are to most Americans as infuriating as that is.

In a recent New York Times piece, Justice Ginsburg is stumped by those against importing foreign ideas into our law. “I frankly don’t understand all the brouhaha lately from Congress and even from some of my colleagues about referring to foreign law,” she said at an appearance at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

Fortunately, The Times quotes Chief Justice Roberts as to why it is a bad idea.

“If we’re relying on a decision from a German judge about what our Constitution means, no president accountable to the people appointed that judge and no Senate accountable to the people confirmed that judge,” Chief Justice Roberts said at his confirmation hearing. “And yet he’s playing a role in shaping the law that binds the people in this country.”

Just so, Chief Justice, just so.

One might think that Justice Ginsburg has some well thought out legal reasons why she thinks it not so bad to import foreign law into our own. One would be wrong. In fact, her reasoning is downright childish.

The Canadian Supreme Court, she said, is “probably cited more widely abroad than the U.S. Supreme Court.” There is one reason for that, she said: “You will not be listened to if you don’t listen to others.”

Justice Ginsburg gives the impression that she wants to emulate the unhinged, obsequiousness evinced by Sally Field when she took the Oscar in 1985 as she bellowed, “You like me, right now, you like me!”

Justice Ginsburg is obviously more interested in being liked by foreigners than in properly adjudicating American law within the American tradition, more interested in injecting foreign ideas than in paying proper fealty to the Constitution.

This woman cannot retire fast enough to suit a patriotic American.

But as they say on TV… But wait, there’s more.

She had a secondary reason that is even worse than her first one.

“What happened in Europe was the Holocaust,” she said, “and people came to see that popularly elected representatives could not always be trusted to preserve the system’s most basic values.”

That’s right, America. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg doesn’t see any difference at all between the United States of America and Nazi Germany!

Yes, her retirement will be a blessing to this country and the world.

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A judge has dismissed a deportation case against one of 130 suspected illegal immigrants arrested in a factory raid in Van Nuys, saying federal agents had no right to detain him. Immigration Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor ruled last week that federal agents illegally detained Gregorio Perez in last year’s raid on Micro Solutions Enterprises because they did not have a warrant for his arrest or “reasonable suspicion” he was in the country illegally.

Tabaddor said Immigration and Customs Enforcement only learned Perez’s background when more than 100 armed agents entered the printer cartridge manufacturing plant, blocked the exits and ordered workers to line up based on their immigration status. Perez “was subjected to an intimidating and coercive environment in which a reasonable person would feel more compelled to provide answers or information that one might not otherwise provide under different circumstances,” Tabaddor wrote.

Ahilan Arulanantham, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who represents Perez, said about 40 to 50 immigrants arrested in the raid have made similar arguments. Immigration experts say illegal immigrants arrested in raids elsewhere in the country have brought similar challenges, but these are rare – in part because many do not have attorneys to represent them in court. “I am not aware of massive challenges to deportation based on unlawful detention,” said David Leopold, a vice president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement will appeal the judge’s decision, Virginia Kice, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. Kice said that the agency complied with the terms of a federal search warrant during the operation last February.

According to a copy of the judge’s ruling, ICE said Perez admitted he was from Mexico and brought illegally into the country when he was about 9 years old. On Friday, Perez would not say where he was from. During the Feb. 7, 2008 raid, agents executed the search warrant on Micro Solutions Enterprises and arrested eight workers and charged them with providing fraudulent information to get their jobs. Agents arrested another 130 workers on suspicion of being in the country illegally. Since then, more than 100 workers who are U.S. citizens and legal residents have filed claims for damages with the federal government alleging they were illegally detained in the raid. Civil rights lawyers have also sued the government, alleging officials have refused to release information about the operation.

Perez said he was arrested at the plant and detained in downtown Los Angeles with other workers. He said he slept the night on the cell’s concrete floor, wasn’t fed for more than 18 hours, and was called out in the middle of the night for an interview. The 23-year old said agents never advised him of his right to seek a lawyer. That was another reason Tabaddor threw out the deportation case, noting that the federal government gleaned Perez’s birthplace and immigration status under these conditions. “It’s good to know my rights,” Perez said on Friday. “Now, I won’t let myself be intimidated.”

Leopold said immigration attorneys held a seminar last year to discuss challenging the legality of such arrests and hopes immigrants will raise similar cases elsewhere in the country. “ICE has to operate under the same rules as everybody else. Just because they’re dealing with immigrants doesn’t mean they can leave the Constitution at the door of the workplace,” Leopold said.

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