Oddly, the name Koch appears 10 times in this Washington Post article. It appears that some lawprof brains are aboil with worries about the nefarious Koch brothers. Kochophobia rages on, and these furious minds seem to imagine themselves overcoming the evil that is Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — as if their "ethics" plan — assuming it could be put in place — couldn't possibly backfire and oust their favorite liberal/swing justice.
The professors said in their letter to the committees that their goal is not to second-guess the activities of any individual judge but to create "mandatory and enforceable rules to protect the integrity of the Supreme Court." An influential British judge declared in the 17th century that "no man may be a judge in his own case," the letter said, but "inexplicably we still allow Supreme Court justices to be the sole judge of themselves on recusal issues."
And what man will be the judge of whether these law professors are truthfully reporting their motives?
Under the ethics code that the lawyers consider their model, approved and regularly updated by the nation's chief appellate judges under the chairmanship of the chief justice, lesser judges are prohibited from accepting travel reimbursements from outside groups if they "give the appearance of influencing the judge" or "otherwise give the appearance of impropriety."
Nan Aron, director of the liberal group Alliance for Justice, said that if these rules were extended to the Supreme Court, none of the justices could attend "overtly political meetings or events" like those sponsored by the Kochs.
And who will be the judge of which meetings and events are overtly political? If they're sponsored by the Kochs, they're political. So far, we know that. Thanks a lot. I love the irony. It's obvious that this proposal is overtly political!
At present, said Ellen Yaroshefsky, director of the Jacob Burns Ethics Center at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, "we have standard-less standards" at the court that she struggles to explain to students.
She said it would be straightforward for the court to appoint an independent body of retired justices or other experts to adjudicate recusal and ethics controversies.
Oh, wonderful! An independent body of retired justices or other experts. Yes, wouldn't it be great to have an independent body of retired justices or other experts decide which Supreme Court Justices got to participate in particular cases?
So... retired Justices Souter, Stevens, and O'Connor might step up to decide who to disqualify in — let's say — the case about the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Maybe you think that skews a tad liberal, a tad too anti-Scalia-and-Thomas. Well, first, that's not a bug, it's a feature. And, second, whoever is setting up the "independent body" could always balance it with those "other experts." You know where to get them, don't you? Elite law schools! Begin with the names of those 100 professors who signed that letter to Congress.
It's all so delightfully inbred — isn't it? — in the feverish fantasy life of the Scalia- and Thomas-haters of legal academia.
On August 19th, Justice Kennedy gave an address that included an interesting passing remark about the role of blogs. Justice Kennedy was talking about how law review case comments generally come out too late to be of use to the Court (especially in the context of deciding whether to grant certiorari in a case). As a result, when Justice Kennedy asks his clerks to look to see what the law reviews have said about a particular case, there isn’t any commentary yet. Justice Kennedy adds: “I’ve found, what my clerks do now, when they have interesting cases — They read blogs.”
This means that the lawprofs who keep up high-profile blogs have disproportionate influence. You have traditional lawprofs laboring over law review articles, but these articles come out too late to discuss a case that's pending in the Supreme Court. One answer — I'm not the first to say this* — is that law review articles should properly be about something other than the latest pending or just-decided cases, something more timeless and profound. But I think that most law professors would like to be involved in the legal developments of the day. It must be irritating to see that the lawprof bloggers have a special line to the Court.
This may stir up an old question that I know nags at some law professors: Will I be required to blog? Very soon after I started blogging, I heard the question is it acceptable for lawprofs to blog? and then, right after that, the question will I be required to blog? jumped up. In the minds of some non-blogging lawprofs, it preceded the question is it good for lawprofs to blog? — which seemed like a more appropriate question to me. But I can see why someone with a legal mind would ask will I be required to blog? before is it good for lawprofs to blog? It's the same reason lawyers think what do I want the answer to be? before they try to figure out what the answer is.
Anyway, Justice Kennedy's remark shows why it's good for lawprofs to blog, but it would be ridiculous to require lawprofs to blog. Wouldn't it? Or is it ridiculous to require lawprofs to write law review articles?
_________
*And I'm writing this too quickly to figure out who else has said this.
"... so that a conversation between them consists of each person trying to say what the other person would have said had it been their turn to speak. And that isn’t a real conversation at all."
A British professor, quoted by an American lawprof (Einer Elhauge) in an article (published last October) called "Is 1L one hell? Survival tips from a law professor." There are 10 survival tips, and the Britprof's quote is from #9: "Don't be boring." That's a good tip for everyone, but as applied to first year law students:
Don’t be afraid to disagree or be provocative, or even to try on positions you aren’t quite sure about. And don’t close your minds to those who disagree with you. You may find that they are more convincing than you thought, or that discussion with them deepens your understanding of just why they are so wrong.
Students (and others) are afraid to say something wrong or — horrors! — frowned upon by their peers 'n' profs. We need the fear of being boring as a counterweight. Oh, I'm kidding. You don't need to be afraid of being boring. You just need to succumb to seductive and intense pleasures of not being boring.
***
Professor Elhauge's #1 tip is something I've been saying to students for a quarter century:
1. Realize the Difference Between Being Confused and Understanding the Confusion
Often students have the following the experience. They read the materials and thought the law seemed pretty clear. Then they went to class. And now the issues seem confusing. So they wrongly conclude that class is actually lessening their understanding. What this reaction misses is that often the correct understanding is that the laws and issues are unclear. There is conflict about what the doctrine means, when it applies, when it trumps other doctrines, and what justifies it, and the same set of issues can be framed in multiple ways. Realizing this doesn’t mean you are confused; it means you understand the confusion.
It's a gift to delight in understanding that comes in the form of confusion. Most lawprofs have this gift, I think. Which makes it all the more annoying for the law students who resist the realization that their confusion is in fact an understanding of confusion. See? It's annoying. We're annoying, we lawprofs.
Yes, of course. It was built into Obama's style of communication that it would become incoherent when it moved from campaign oratory — which he seemed so good at — to the real work of governing — which requires you to make specific decisions about the details. At a high plane of principle and abstraction, there is a beautiful harmony. For example, most Americans believe in freedom of religion and reject discriminating against a particular religion. That's not what the dispute over the mosque near Ground Zero is about. Yet Obama thought he could participate in the dispute by doing nothing more than celebrating those principles.
What happened was, most people thought he was taking a position on the wisdom of building the mosque. That is, they didn't see that he was remaining aloof on the high plane of abstraction, beckoning them to join him up there and bask once again in the beautiful harmony that radiated from his glorious presidential campaign. But they'd moved on to trying to solve particular problems, and — like a law student handing in a D exam — Obama hadn't done the hard work of applying the doctrine to the fact pattern.
Obama's response, when he saw that people had misunderstood what he'd said, was to chide them for misreading. He didn't take advantage of the opportunity to do a rewrite and apply the uncontroversial principles to the controversial real-world problem. He stood firm on his lofty pillar of abstraction.
"The danger here is an incoherent presidency," said David Morey, vice chairman of the Core Strategy Group, who provided communications advice to Obama's 2008 campaign. "Simpler is better, and rising above these issues and leading by controlling the dialogue is what the presidency is all about. So I think that's the job they have to do more effectively as they have in the past [in the campaign]."
No! Simpler is only better if people accept the invitation to ascend to that high plane of abstraction where no particular decisions are made. Even if they do, it's only a temporary harmony, because when a particular decision needs to be made, disagreement will reemerge. That's what Morey is perceiving as "incoherence." To say, Obama should use abstraction to achieve coherence is to say Obama should hide our disagreements by avoiding the hard work of governing.
"There is no question they are having messaging problems at the White House," Morey said. "They've lost control of the dialogue, and they've gotten pulled down by the extremes on the left and right. They've just not had a coherent set of themes."
But Obama should descend on his own from that level of abstraction — that "coherent set of themes." If he doesn't do it himself, he will be "pulled down" by whoever fills the gap and takes specific positions about the details he likes to rise above.
"Communicating as a law professor does not work as president. It's not worked," [Morey] said. "You're drawing fine distinctions and speaking in long enough paragraphs that they can be misconstrued and taken out of context and frankly, handed to your opposition to exploit. And that's clearly what's going on here [with the Islamic center/mosque comments]."
Only a bad law professor operates that way. A good law professor speaks as clearly as possible and draws attention to anything the courts have glossed over or left ambiguous. We lawprofs try to extract the doctrinal rules and point up any place where courts have left the rule mushy. Then we apply those rules to particular factual settings. We hypothesize the most difficult applications of law to fact and help the students work through these hard problems. Obama's lolling at high levels of abstract principle and avoiding the specifics of applying principle to real problems is not the way of the law professor.
Strong begins by stirring up outrage over Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, writing that if she saw Rush Limbaugh having a heart attack, she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out.” I get it. Liberals hate Limbaugh. And, in casual company, people who aren't too prissy and think they are funny don't mind saying they'd like it if people they hate would drop dead. This has nothing to do with Fox, of course.
Next, Strong has some discussion of whether the town hall meetings in the summer of 2009 reminded people of the early stages of the Nazis rise to power. The material here is, to me, pretty tame. It's actually a pretty cliché question to raise, and Strong presents us with no overt attempts to coordinate news stories about the meetings to push this Nazi comparison. It's standard and not shocking to muse over whether things seem fascist. (Ask Jonah Goldberg.)
Finally, we get to material about Fox News.
The very existence of Fox News, meanwhile, sends Journolisters into paroxysms of rage.
Okay, you're writing about overreaction, and you use the phrase "paroxysms of rage"?
When Howell Raines charged that the network had a conservative bias, the members of Journolist discussed whether the federal government should shut the channel down.
I want to see is the actual proposal to shut down Fox News.
“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.
Libel law allows individuals to sue over damage to their reputation. Private lawsuits. That would not be the government taking action against the network, and it's certainly not a proposal to shut down Fox News.
“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”
What's the big deal there? Scherer isn't proposing that the government shut down Fox News. He's criticizing Fox News as not following good principles of journalism. It's not even a complaint about the conservative slant.
Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”
Is there a quote we are not getting? The material in quotes is not a proposal to "yank Fox of the air." It's a question — a question I read as critical of government action against Fox. Clicking some links, I finally figure out the quoted question is from Scherer, not Zasloff.
But Zasloff stuck to his position.
What position?!
“I think that they are doing that anyway; they leak to whom they want to for political purposes,” he wrote. “If this means that some White House reporters don’t get a press pass for the press secretary’s daily briefing and that this means that they actually have to, you know, do some reporting and analysis instead of repeating press releases, then I’ll take that risk.”
So that's the worst of it? Zasloff thinks the government could or should limit access. That's not shutting down Fox!
Scherer seemed alarmed. “So we would have press briefings in which only media organizations that are deemed by the briefer to be acceptable are invited to attend?”
Zasloff got pushed back.
John Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic, came down on Zasloff’s side, the side of censorship.
Censorship? What censorship?
“Pre-Fox,” he wrote, “I’d say Scherer’s questions made sense as a question of principle. Now it is only tactical.”
"Scherer's questions"? What questions? I see one question from Scherer in the article. I'm interested in this contrast between principle and tactics, but I can't understand what it refers to!
The Daily Caller needs to do a whole lot better with its own journalism if it wants to hit the big time criticizing journalists. This is weak!
***
I go back to the text of the article, and I see that it's been rewritten, without a notation that editing has taken place. The Scherer-Zasloff part that puzzled me so much now reads:
Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “I hate to open this can of worms,” he wrote, “but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?”
And so a debate ensued. Time’s Scherer, who had seemed to express support for increased regulation of Fox, suddenly appeared to have qualms: “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”
Zasloff asked a question. He's a law professor. Yes, it's inflammatory, but so what? He's getting a discussion going, and nobody goes for it. Broadcast licenses do require stations to serve the public interest, so there is a real topic to be discussed, and Zasloff isn't some weird crazy to ask. It's within the realm of law. What's notable is that the Journolist members don't support that kind of action against Fox.
***
My conclusion remains: The Daily Caller's article is weak. And I'm inclined to think the material in the Journolist archive is pretty mild stuff.
I saw the NYT article yesterday and decided it wasn't worth blogging, but I'm blogging it now because it's getting blogged and only to say that I consider this news a huge bore in light of the fact that law students' grades are always adjusted on a curve.
It's not as if the students previously got the grades they deserved and now the grades are phony. When lawprofs grade law school exams, we may start with raw scores that represent what we really think of them, but the final grades are determined by the school's predetermined goals for averages and percentages at the various grade levels. If the school thinks those averages and percentages are set in the wrong place and it can reset them.
It never had to do with the actual performance of the students. It was always about where the school, as a matter of policy, decided the grades ought to be. It was always about communicating with law firms and other employers in the hope of advantaging our graduates in comparison to other law schools' graduates. We're all lawyers here. This is all advocacy. Are you actually surprised?
Art is important, but it's not more important the real hour-to-hour life of the people who must live with big and intrusive works of public art. Consider:
The concept, devised by British artist Luke Jerram, has put more than 130 pianos in parks, squares and bus stations since 2008 in cities including London, Sydney and Sao Paulo. And now it's New York City's turn to play, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Thursday.
"There's going to be a huge amount of talent here," Jerram said in an interview. "The piano's actually a blank canvas for everyone's creativity, really, so I just hope that the city enjoys it."
So I just hope.... I just hope, if your apartment or office is within earshot of one of those pianos that you like "Chopsticks," "Für Elise," Billy Joel songs, and the way it sounds when someone drags their fingers the full length of the keyboard. Why do Jerram and Bloomberg think that saccharine everyman "creativity" will blossom? Hey, New Yorkers, have you seen this extremely popular YouTube tutorial — "How to play EXTREMELY annoying songs on piano"?
Oh, why am I so cynical?
Jerram got the idea at his local coin-operated laundry, according to a website about the project. He saw the same people there every weekend, but none of them talked to each other. He thought a piano might help bring people together in places like that.
You know, years ago, when we remodeled the law school building here at the University of Wisconsin, some lawprofs — I won't say who — thought it would be a wonderful idea to put a piano in the atrium — a big open space where the students hang out to talk or rest or study. These professors enthused about the existence of perhaps one student who was an accomplished classical pianist. They imagined bringing people together through the music that would be unleashed from the hulking object. I was horrified. It was one of the few times over the years — and I've been here for a quarter century — when I spoke out and told people — in person — that their well-intended project was unlikely to produce the human happiness they envisioned. (I hope a metaphor alert is unnecessary, but... liberal policies....)
The results in other cities have been surprising and life-changing, [the artist] said in an interview. A woman in Sao Paulo heard her daughter play for the first time on one of Jerram's pianos in a train station. The mother had worked to pay for lessons for four years, but the family had no piano at home.
In Sydney, a couple met at a piano and are now married, Jerram said.
So 4 individuals had a warm experience that they could have had in some other way. But then it wouldn't have pumped up the egos of the artist and the mayor.
"It seems like a good idea that brings a sense of fun and playfulness to the city," said David Rosenfeld, who was riding his bike in the area.
A man on a mechanical device that will scoot him right out of there if somebody's granddad decides to play "Woolly Bully" or "96 Tears."
Most pianos will be open for song until 10 p.m.
Oh, fine then. 10. After your nerves have been jangled for — what? — 14 hours, you can try to settle down to get enough sleep before it all starts again.
"She was drawn to the Catholics among them, who corrected her misimpression that the existence of sin 'means you are bad.' It means 'precisely the opposite,' they taught her. 'It means you have a chance to come back and repent and be saved,' she says."
The NYT has an article about Eve Tushnet, the daughter of lefty lawprof Mark Tushnet. As a Yale student, she first attended a meeting of the conservative group "specifically to laugh at them, to see the zoo animals." Now, she advises individuals with a homosexual orientation to abstain from sex.
As the hundred or so daily readers of eve-tushnet.blogspot.com, and a larger audience for her magazine writing, know by now, Ms. Tushnet can seem a paradox: fervently Catholic, proudly gay, happily celibate. She does not see herself as disordered; she does not struggle to be straight, but she insists that her religion forbids her a sex life.
That blog has been on my blogroll for a long time. Her father, now a Harvard lawprof, is one of the many former Wisconsin lawprofs who are out there at other law schools carrying on what people here like to think of as the Wisconsin tradition.
Her father, a nonobservant Jew, and her mother, a Unitarian, both belonged to progressive traditions, tolerant of her sexuality.
Eve became a Catholic in her sophomore year at Yale.
[S]ince 2002 she has made a meager living through writing, computer programming and freelance research. She lives in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of downtown Washington and volunteers two hours a week at a Christian pregnancy-counseling center.
Tushnet's website receives "hundreds" of visits per day — hardly enough to call her an influential blogger. But that reach comes through her scribblings for magazines like the National Review, titles that are apt to give space to people "on the inside" of gays advocating against them. Her writings are interesting, we'll give her that; ex-gays! sublimation vs. repression! And so is her story.... But she is a person with a platform who is out harming human beings with her instruction, and that's simply unacceptable.
Here's the article, in which — among other things — Craver quotes my blog post from last January, where I talked about why I didn't want to do the interview. I don't know if he realizes it or not, but Craver's article is better because he needed to do what I told him to do and he did it: read the blog and try to get it instead of asking me to explain myself.
I'm not saying he got everything. He most assuredly didn't. For example, after (correctly) noting my peeve about men in shorts, he tells the story of Meade asking me out like this:
In fact, Meade's first date proposal came after Althouse posted a response to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, from which she drew this piece of advice for men: "A young man should perceive when a girl likes him and he needs to ask her out to dinner and a movie before somebody else does."
Meade saw his opportunity and seized it. "OK. Want to have dinner with me and see it again? I'll wear my pants [a reference to Althouse's distaste for shorts]," wrote the loyal commenter, eyes averted.
That wasn't about shorts at all. It was a reference to my delight — "LOL! The green pants..." — when Meade changed his comments avatar to a close-up of a male model in green trousers immediately after — I can't find exactly where — I'd professed love for said model.
Mistakes aside, picking around through my various posts, looking for clues and quotes, resulted in a better material than Craver is likely to have produced if I'd talked to him for an hour. But he does make me look a little pissy in the email I sent him declining the interview:
Basically, the answers to all these questions are already on the blog. If that sounds enigmatic, I mean to be enigmatic. I'm bored by whether something is right wing or not and how can anyone be right wing and so forth. The point of the blog is not to be bored.
He doesn't include the questions he's proposed. In trying to decide if I wanted to overcome my instinctive disinclination to do an interview with a UW student writing for the Isthmus, I asked, "Could you give me an idea of what kinds of things you are looking at and how much of the blog you have read?" He offered these questions:
Why is your blog so successful?...
What is the goal behind your blog?...
What is the blog's politics?...
How have your experiences shaped the world view/political view expressed on the blog?
I didn't think I'd be very interesting blabbing in person about such things, and I didn't want to see what quotes would be cherry-picked out of my babblings for the readers of the local "alternative" paper. Isthmus, as you'd expect in Madison, has a lefty slant, and I had every reason to expect a hit piece. (Including past experience.) And since the writer was a UW student, if I'd spoken with him, I would have treated him in that friendly, accommodating, supportive way that suits my professorial role. Consequently, I would have found it hard to protect myself from a hit piece and to respond to it after the fact. I'm not going to get into any kind of a public fight with a UW student.
I wasn't going to read the article because I didn't want to get annoyed, but then reader Larry K emailed me the link to it and — even though he alerted me that it was "scurrilous" — I couldn't resist. Then I was surprised that it wasn't as bad as Larry K seemed to think:
[Criticize Democratic politicians and policies long enough] and you'll get a scrawny University student trawling through your personal life and making repeated references to your UW salary (which is healthy, but a fraction of what I'm sure she could earn in private practice)....
If this dude thinks her blog is right-wing, he ought to move out of the basement - and work on his critical thinking skills. The apparently big insight of this article - "People who call Ann Althouse a right-wing political blogger miss the point. She's a right-wing pop-culture blogger" - is simply asserted, and then goes nowhere. Having "attitude" is right-wing? Did this guy miss the 20th century?
Ah, but wait! Maybe having attitude is right wing! In the Isthmus article, Craver wonders about my (oft-derided) line "to be a great artist is inherently right wing." I stand by that, for the reasons I gave at the time. Now, I realize I could expand that into: Having attitude is right wing. That might ring true, and, in any case, it will rile the lefties, which is how I have my fun a motivating force behind my blogging, which you know I consider to be art work (and therefore... right wing!).
Ha ha. I enjoyed Sarah Palin's contempt there. (And good for her, saying "lectern," instead of, like most lawprofs I've heard, "podium.") She's not contemptuous of law professors, generally. Just law professors out of place.
And that's kind of the way I feel about Sarah Palin. The question is: What is the right place for her? I think she does really well observing national politics, commenting, critiquing, and campaigning. Campaigning for others, though, I think. In office, maybe she's as out of place as a professor of law posing as Commander in Chief.
ADDED: The discussion of law clerks begins about 39 minutes into this video of Thomas's remarks at the University of Florida Law School. He says he thinks it's important to have diversity, and his idea is to concentrate on his circuit, the 11th Circuit. So he'll look for law students who are near the top of the class in schools in that circuit (which includes Florida).
He's explicitly scornful of the bloggers who refer to the students at the less highly ranked law schools as "TTT" or "third tier trash." It's interesting to me that he's paying attention to the blogs (and, of course, I'm not one of the bloggers who would ever use that term). He also speaks of wanting to visit law schools in his circuit. He has a touching dedication to the southeastern United States.
By the way, this talk at UF consists entirely of responses to student questions, and the questions are excellent. If you go to that 39 minute mark and watch the part about law clerks, keep going. The next question — at about 42:30 — is about natural law.
AND: The material about hanging out with law students is at about 46:30 in the video. He goes on to say "I don't dislike the professors, but I come to law schools to see the students." He doesn't like big events, and he thinks it has something to do with his desire, long ago, to be a priest. He speaks with a real passion for spending time with students.
There's a lot of enthusiasm about Obama's appearance at the GOP retreat — enthusiasm among Obama supporters. I skimmed the transcript late last night without finding something I could say. Obama seemed to be haranguing the Republicans about bipartisanship again, as he did during the State of the Union address, and I didn't see what this added, other than that it was nice/bold of him to show up at their event — give them some face time. But obviously, he's reaching out now because he needs them, as he did not before. Why, then, should I be impressed, and, more importantly, why should the Republicans help him now?
But given the amount of enthusiasm — e.g., Marc Ambinder gushing about "An Amazing Moment" — I decided — now that it's not late at night anymore — to take the time to watch the video and, as I go, blog from the transcript. Since that will take a little time, let me end this post now, so you can get the conversations started. Here's the video of the speech, and here's the Q&A section.
To give you something to chew on, here's Ambinder:
The moment President Obama began his address to Republicans in Baltimore today, I began to receive e-mails from Democrats: Here's an except from one of them: "I don't know whether to laugh or cry that it took a f$$@&$* year for Obama to step into the ring and start throwing some verbal blows... I'm definitely praying at mass on Sunday morning that this Obama doesn't take another 12 month vacation."
Well, that's a funny contrast to Obama's big theme of bipartisanship!
This e-mail comes from a very influential Democrat.
Hmm. Who? Some Catholic. Some Catholic who's praying to God that his guys kick the other guys' asses.
Accepting the invitation to speak at the House GOP retreat may turn out to be the smartest decision the White House has made in months. Debating a law professor is kind of foolish...
Heh heh... bring it on, baby!
... the Republican House Caucus has managed to turn Obama's weakness -- his penchant for nuance -- into a strength. Plenty of Republicans asked good and probing questions, but Mike Pence, among others, found their arguments simply demolished by the president. (By the way: can we stop with the Obama needs a teleprompter jokes?)
Okay, I will be looking for the strengthful nuance that knocks down all arguments.
More than the State of the Union -- or on top of the State of the Union -- this may be a pivotal moment for the future of the presidential agenda on Capitol Hill. (Democrats are loving this. Chris Hayes, The Nation's Washington bureau chief, tweeted that he hadn't liked Obama more since the inauguration.)
Got it. The Prez's people loved it. Maybe this wasn't really about inspiring bipartisanship but firing up the base. That's fine. If he does anything well, he deserves credit for the thing he does well. Let's just be clear about what the thing is.
During the presidential campaign, it was John McCain who proposed a form of the British Prime Ministers' questions for the president. It was derided as a gimmick. This is no gimmick. I have not seen a better and perhaps more productive political discussion in this country in...a long time. 90 minutes worth!
Maybe since Al Gore debated Ross Perot on NAFTA. Republicans may have wished they had spoken to John McCain about what happened to him in the presidential debates before they decided to broadcast this session.
No, it's the Democrats who shut down the cameras when they think things won't look pretty.
The president looked genuinely engaged, willing to discuss things. Democrats believe that he tossed away the GOP talking points and lack of real plans into a bludgeon against them.
How do you toss away the lack of something into a bludgeon? To be fair, it was the "lack of real plans." There could have been some fake plans that, when tossed away... but even if the packet of fake plans hit somebody, it wouldn't feel like a bludgeon. Maybe paper cuts.
"The whole question was structured by a talking point," he told Jeb Hensarling....
"He"? Who's "he"? Obama? That Catholic guy? (And sorry about that last link. I thought it was "Hensnarling.") And what "whole question"? Is that a way to refer to all the questions?And is Ambinder's whole blog post copied (sloppily) from a Democratic talking point?
I put that quote in the banner (for now) because I really, really believe in the sentiment, but the "she" referred to is not me. It's Tavi Gevinson — the "tiny 13-year-old dork that sits inside all day wearing awkward jackets and pretty hats" who is a big star in the fashion world. I'm a little suspicious of the quote, because I think someone who says that about a blogger may really be thinking: I hope she stays in her place and doesn't imagine she can enter the truly important world that is my domain. But for a blogger saying it about herself — I think it's exactly the best way to feel.
I'll leave it to you to extrapolate what that means in the lawprof blogger area of endeavor.
So, the Supreme Court came out with a big free-speech decision yesterday, and President Obama's response was that he needs "to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less."...
The President was a law professor — technically, a "senior lecturer" at the University of Chicago Law School — for 12 years. Why would a law professor oppose a Supreme Court decision on a matter of constitutional law and not respect the authority of the Court and honor our system of separation of powers?
Now, the Supreme Court came out with this big free speech decision yesterday. It's sweeping. It is huge. Did you hear Obama's response? Obama said that he needs to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing else, a forceful response. Now, I want to point out that Obama was a law professor, or technically a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago law school for 12 years. Now, why would a law professor oppose a Supreme Court decision on a matter of constitutional law and not respect the authority of the court and honor our system of separation of powers? Why? Of course it's easy. Because he doesn't like the Constitution. And this we know. He thinks the Constitution restrains him and restricts him for doing things to people. The Constitution spells out what the government may not do, and that's what he doesn't like.
IN THE COMMENTS: El Pollo Real wrote:
So, are you peeved that he didn't mention you, curious about why he didn't, or flattered even though he didn't?
I said:
The similarity of the language — especially "on a matter of constitutional law and not respect the authority of the court and honor our system of separation of powers" — makes it unquestionably mine. He did this once before that I noticed, but I declined to post about it.
I'm happy that he or somebody who prepares material for him reads my blog, but certainly if you're going to quote me like that, you ought to say my name.
If you go to the link, you'll see that the very next paragraph begins: "Thomas Lifson writing about this in the AmericanThinker.com." Why didn't I get that? Lifson even got his URL said aloud.
He has used things from my blog a couple times and named me. That needs to be the standard form, certainly when a quote is used. I think there are other occasions when a topic is inspired by a blog post, and I think in at least some of those cases, the blogger whose idea is used ought to be credited by name.
It's quite possible that my material arrived chez Rush in email form without attribution, but all they'd have to do is put a distinctive phrase in Google and they would see if it's a quote so they could give credit.
I think perhaps Rush has text in front of him that he is intending to paraphrase -- as he started to do with my post -- and then for one reason or another he lapses into outright quoting. Maybe he's in a hurry or he can't, in real time, quite understand the text so he can't paraphrase it.
I don't think it's outrageous and deliberate presentation of my work as his. I just think I should get named.
Another thought is that maybe they're trying to protect me from the wrath of Madison, Wisconsin and law professors everywhere. They should email me if they have questions in that vein. In case you are wondering, Rush and his people have never corresponded with me about anything.
