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Title: Getting Over Scalia
Source:
Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel
URL Source: http://baltimorechronicle.com/2008/042908Betz.shtml
Published: Apr 29, 2008
Author: William Betz
Post Date: 2008-04-30 19:22:44 by aristeides
Keywords: None
Views: 110
Comments: 6
Getting Over Scalia A thug is a thug, regardless of his ethnic identity, whether his thuggery is perpetrated at the point of a gun or the point of a pen. During an interview that aired on "60 Minutes" on April 27, Antonin Scalia demonstrated, in his inability to discuss articulately the decision of the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, just how vacuous and hypocritical the legal reasoning behind that tragic theft of democracy truly was. Shockingly, after suggesting that anyone who has the gall to question the decision should “get over it,” Scalia then pronounced that Bush would have won the election anyway and the result would not have been different had the Supreme Court declined to intervene. The Court, it will be remembered, stopped a vote recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, handing the presidency to George W. Bush. Apparently Scalia is not aware that a consortium of news organizations performed a complete recount of Florida votes and found conclusively that Gore had won Florida. Unfortunately, this inconvenient truth was at least temporarily misplaced —and maybe permanently lost—in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. As seems appropriate for a national candidate who had a popular majority of more than 500,000 votes, Gore won the presidential election in 2000. Had it not been for the tortured logic of the majority of the Supreme Court—consisting of its five “conservative” Republican members who, as the interviewer Leslie Stahl correctly pointed out, rendered a political decision—then the United States would not have suffered eight years of George W. Bush, along with the degradation of the Constitution and the rule of law; an immoral and unjustified war of choice based solely on lies propagated by the bastard Bush administration and our concomitant disgrace in the eyes of the world; the descent of America into rationalizing the need for—and its right to—torture; the transfer by the Bush administration of the national treasury to the private hands of its corporate cohorts; the destruction by intentional neglect of the City of New Orleans and the country’s general infrastructure; the politicization of the CIA, the Justice Department and virtually every other agency of the Federal government; the appointment of incompetent political cronies to important government positions; and the virtual dismantling of the social structure of the nation. As far as Scalia's call for honesty is concerned, the Justice claimed during a "60 Minutes" interview that the Bush v. Gore decision was 7-2, when it was actually 5-4.The damage caused by the Supreme Court as the result of its palace coup is incalculable and in all likelihood irreparable. The legal “reasoning” used by the Court in Bush v. Gore was, to anyone familiar with constitutional law and, indeed, to anyone who understands American democracy, astonishingly dishonest. (As far as Scalia's call during the "60 Minutes" interview for honesty is concerned, the Justice claimed that the decision was 7-2, when it was actually 5-4.) In Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 121 S. Ct. 525, 148 L.Ed.2d 388 (2000), the Supreme Court ordered that a recount of votes directed by the Florida Supreme Court be stopped because of the potential violation of the right of Bush and his supporters to equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. Equal protection jurisprudence had developed over the previous century to guard the rights of persons based on their minority status, the “discrete and insular minorities” famously identified 70 years ago by an earlier Supreme Court. The discrete and insular minorities referred to in the 1938 decision included groups subjected to discrimination on the basis of race, national origin or religion. But who were the vulnerable minorities in Florida? They were Bush himself, Bush voters and Bush supporters and suit-and-tie Republican operatives sent to Florida by the Republican National Committee, people like John (“I’m John Bolton and I’m here to stop the recount”) Bolton, and henchmen dispatched by James Baker, the Texas oil oligarch, Republican uber operative and Bush I former Secretary of State. By assigning to these persons protected minority status, the Supreme Court effectively announced that the rule of law means nothing, not when it stands in the way of a desired political result. The decision represents and will likely always represent the lowest point of American jurisprudence. Leslie Stahl made much of Scalia’s sense of humor and purportedly pleasant personality. The liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined in the humanization of Scalia. Scalia himself discussed his identity as the first Italian American on the Court, noting that traditional negative stereotypes of Italians sometimes included identification with the Mafia. But a thug is a thug, regardless of his ethnic identity, whether his thuggery is perpetrated at the point of a gun or the point of a pen. Surely there were many people who believed Hitler was charming and that Mussolini had a wonderful sense of humor. The crimes of the two, however, remain unforgivable. The crime perpetrated by black-robed thugs in 2000, a crime hidden behind pseudointellectual and dishonest legal reasoning for purely political purposes, a crime so vile that it makes a mockery of democracy, is equally unforgivable. “Get over it,” indeed. William Betz, an attorney, practices in Great Neck, NY. This article was originally published on OpEdNews.com, and is published in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author.
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#1. To: aristeides (#0)
Certainly it would be a lot easier to get over if all these criminals were dragged off by mobs and hung upside down in washington square at high noon on July 4.
It's a dirty job but somebody better do it.
I'm pretty certain that O'Connor, Breyer and Ginsburg were/are CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) or Trilats...off the top of my head. Not sure about the others fwiw. [EDIT: I was not aware that George Soros was a CFR member !! That explains many things...both wings of the CFR Party are well represented in this treasonous organization. Here is another source that includes O'Connor (now retired): Why is Soros allowed to donote "tens of thousands" of dollars to individual candidates?
And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness. - T. S. Eliot
http://www.slate.com/id/2058638 Nobody knows anything, the Chicago Tribune gamely concedes. By Jack Shafer The economics of newspapering dictate that any expensive investigative project must lead to a firm conclusion. So the media consortium (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Tribune Co. newspapers, the St. Petersburg Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Palm Beach Post, and CNN) that recounted the Florida presidential recount couldn't very well undersell the statistical findings of the $900,000, nine-month study. It had to inflate them. And inflate them all the newspapers did, at least in their Page One headlines and ledes yesterday, assertively giving the election to George W. Bush under the most restrictive recount standards but to Al Gore under the less rigorous ones. All, that is, except for the Tribune Co., whose flagship newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, undersold the whole project with its wishy-washy headline, "Still Too Close To Call," and wishy-washier still subhead, "Conclusion Not Clear Even If Recount Allowed." Regrettably, the Tribune was unable to maintain the courage of its headline's convictions and proceeded to game out the various recount outcomes, as did the other newspapers, alternately crowning Bush and Gore president. But underlying the Tribune's coverage was its belief that it is probably "impossible to design a study that would determine who should have won the Florida balloting. That is particularly true given the degree to which the Florida election was tainted: Thousands of felons voted, people not registered were allowed to vote, others voted twice and even the dead voted in small numbers. Other voters were erroneously turned away from the polls." But even if you assume that all ballots cast were legal and nobody was unjustly turned away from the polls and that the 6 million plus Florida ballots that weren't contested were cast accurately, the Florida winner is still unknowable. This wisdom comes from Kirk Wolter of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, the point person in assembling the data for the project, who is quoted by the Tribune and the AP (and also, only deeper, in stories by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times). The consortium diligently collected 175,010 overvotes and undervotes, but it concedes that it can't be sure if it collected every overvote and undervote. If the margin of victory is just a couple of hundred votes, as it was in nearly all the media recounts, the contest as "too close to call," Wolter says, because the variability of the vote counts—the possible error— would be larger than the margin of victory. "One could never know from this study alone who won the election," he told the Tribune and other publications. That's a fairly devastating critique, but to find it, readers had to be investigative reporters themselves or subscribers to the Chicago Tribune. I don't think Slate is a Bush supporter by any stretch.
Q: When the votes were recounted in Florida, who won the 2000 presidential election? A: Nobody can say for sure who might have won. A full, official recount of all votes statewide could have gone either way, but one was never conducted. According to a massive months-long study commissioned by eight news organizations in 2001, George W. Bush probably still would have won even if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a limited statewide recount to go forward as ordered by Florida's highest court. Bush also probably would have won had the state conducted the limited recount of only four heavily Democratic counties that Al Gore asked for, the study found. On the other hand, the study also found that Gore probably would have won, by a range of 42 to 171 votes out of 6 million cast, had there been a broad recount of all disputed ballots statewide. However, Gore never asked for such a recount. The Florida Supreme Court ordered only a recount of so- called "undervotes," about 62,000 ballots where voting machines didn't detect any vote for a presidential candidate. None of these findings are certain. County officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to the investigators that news organizations hired to conduct the recount. There were also small but measurable differences in the way that the "neutral" investigators counted certain types of ballots, an indication that different counters might have come up with slightly different numbers. So it is possible that either candidate might have emerged the winner of an official recount, and nobody can say with exact certainty what the "true" Florida vote really was. The study cost nearly $1 million and was the most thorough and comprehensive news-media review of the Florida balloting. It was sponsored by the Associated Press, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, St. Petersburg Times, Palm Beach Post, Washington Post and the Tribune Co., which owns papers including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel and Baltimore Sun. The news organizations hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to look at each untallied ballot. Trained investigators examined 175,010 ballots provided by local election officials. The media consortium then analyzed the raw data produced by NORC and drew conclusions. The result, released Nov. 11, 2001, was something of a muddle. The Associated Press reported the findings this way: The Palm Beach Post put it more dramatically: He couldn't have caught George W. Bush even if his two best chances for an official recount had played out. Similar Conclusions, Uncertain Results An earlier study by a different media consortium reached similar conclusions. That study was conducted by a group that included the Miami Herald, USA Today and Knight Ridder newspapers. As USA Today said of the findings on May 11, 2001: The newspaper said that Gore might have won narrowly if lenient standards were used that counted every mark on a ballot. "But," it said, "Gore could not have won without a hand count of overvote ballots, something that he did not request." Although their conclusions were similar, the Miami Herald study and the later and larger study came up with different numbers, evidence of the uncertainties involved. An official recount might well have come up with yet a third set of numbers. The uncertain nature of the later study's findings, which could well apply to both, was aptly and poetically expressed by Palm Beach Post columnist Frank Cerabino: In a statewide election decided by hundreds, maybe only dozens, of votes, the limitations of the voting machinery – compounded with sometimes sloppy custody of the ballots and the slight but measurable biases of allegedly neutral human tabulators – make getting precise vote totals virtually impossible. -Brooks Jackson http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/when_the_votes_were_recounted_in _ florida.html
If you get an answer let me know...
“Get over it,” indeed.
#2. To: angle (#1)
(Edited)
[EDIT UPDATE - Confirmed CFR Members on USSC:
Breyer, Stephen G. - Supreme Court Justice (1994-present)
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader - Supreme Court Justice (1993-present)]
List Of CFR And Trilateral Commission Members Of Last Four Administrations
By Bill Gertz The Washington
Times 10-22-98]
#3. To: FOH, robin, aristeides (#2)
#4. To: aristeides (#0)
Apparently Scalia is not aware that a consortium of news organizations performed a complete recount of Florida votes and found conclusively that Gore had won Florida.
Recounting the Media's Florida Recount
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2001, at 6:37 PM ET
Thought for the day:
Calling an illegal alien an 'undocumented immigrant' is like calling a drug dealer an 'unlicensed pharmacist'
#5. To: aristeides (#0)
(Edited)
Apparently Scalia is not aware that a consortium of news organizations performed a complete recount of Florida votes and found conclusively that Gore had won Florida.
AP: A vote-by-vote review of untallied ballots in the 2000 Florida presidential election indicates George W. Bush would have narrowly prevailed in the partial recounts sought by Al Gore, but Gore might have reversed the outcome – by the barest of margins – had he pursued and gained a complete statewide recount.
Palm Beach Post: Al Gore was doomed.
USA Today: George W. Bush would have won a hand recount of all disputed ballots in Florida's presidential election if the most widely accepted standard for judging votes had been applied.
Cerabino: Like sorting grains of sand on a windy day, getting a definitive recount of Florida's votes in last year's presidential election has turned out to be an exercise in frustration.
Thought for the day:
Calling an illegal alien an 'undocumented immigrant' is like calling a drug dealer an 'unlicensed pharmacist'
#6. To: Dakmar (#3)
Why is Soros allowed to donote "tens of thousands" of dollars to individual candidates?
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