Richard Bennett

Scalito!

The dude is a federalist: In the early 1990s, Alito was the lone dissenter in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a case in which the 3rd Circuit struck down a Pennsylvania law that included a provision requiring women seeking abortions to notify their spouses. …and only 55 years old. The hysterical reaction is going to be … Continue reading “Scalito!”

The dude is a federalist:

In the early 1990s, Alito was the lone dissenter in
Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a case in which the 3rd Circuit struck down a Pennsylvania law that included a provision requiring women seeking abortions to notify their spouses.

…and only 55 years old.

The hysterical reaction is going to be fun to watch. One case they don’t want you see is this one:

A majority opinion in Fatin v. INS, 12 F.3d 1233 (3d Cir. 1993), holding that an Iranian woman seeking asylum could establish that she had a well founded fear of persecution in Iran if she could show that compliance with that country’s “gender specific laws and repressive social norms,” such as the requirement that women wear a veil in public, would be deeply abhorrent to her. Judge Alito also held that she could establish eligibility for asylum by showing that she would be persecuted because of gender, belief in feminism, or membership in a feminist group.

Oops. HT Jeff Goldstein.

Appellate law blogger Howard Bashman knows Alito and likes him:

A first for the Third: Not only is Circuit Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. President Bush’s third nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, but Judge Alito is also the first judge serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ever to have been nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Philadelphia-based Third Circuit is, of course, the federal appellate court before which I practice most frequently, and I know Judge Alito well. At some point over the days to come, I will explain why I enthusiastically support this nomination. For now, my wife (who thinks Judge Alito is a great person, too) and I just want to take a moment to wish Judge Alito well in the days ahead, for he is a truly kind, intelligent, and compassionate person who undoubtedly will serve the Nation with great distinction on the Supreme Court just as he has served to this point with great distinction as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge.

So that’s another “yes” vote from the blogosphere. HT Baseball Crank.

In addition to being vaguely racist, the Scalito label isn’t especially accurate:

The conservative bent of judge Sam Alito, who President Bush nominated this morning to the U.S. Supreme Court, has prompted facile comparisons to Justice Antonin Scalia, arguably the most stridently conservative member of the court. But clerks and associates say the comparison, often made with the derisive nickname of “Scalito,” does a disservice to the man. “I think he really looks at the facts of the case; he’d be very realistic,” says former clerk Katherine K. Huang. “He doesn’t have his head in the clouds. He’s not going to be carried away by some legal doctrine or some arcane grammatical rule.” Huang is refering to a little-known Social Security case in 2002 which may be instructive when it comes to comparing Alito to Scalia.

In that case, Alito argued passionately with other members of the 3rd Circuit Appeals Court that a disabled woman, Pauline Thomas, should be granted benefits because she had been laid off from her job as an elevator operator and could not find a new job since the position of “elevator operator” had virtually disappeared from the economy. A lower court had ruled that a narrow and technical reading of the Social Security statute did not entitle Thomas to benefits. Alito called this result “absurd” and overrode the objections of several of his colleagues and convinced the full 3rd Circuit to overturn the lower court decision.

Alito’s passion didn’t move the Supreme Court, however, which overturned his decision in 2003. In a pointed rejection of Alito’s opinion—accusing him of “disregarding” basic grammatical rules for interpreting the law—the Supreme Court fell back on the narrow and technical reading and denied Thomas her Social Security benefits. The author of this stinging rebuke to Alito? Justice Antonin Scalia.

From your well-know righty rag, Time.

Cost of Fitzgerald investigation

One of the crazy factoids that’s buzzing around the left side of the blogosphere says that Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Joe Wilson matter only cost $723,000. It’s been on Daily Kos and 30 other blogs, and widely used by Air Hysteria’s hosts. It’s based on a sloppy reading of a story in the Washington Post: … Continue reading “Cost of Fitzgerald investigation”

In its first 15 months, the investigation cost $723,000, according to the Government Accountability Office.

But it’s not true.

GAO does report on some of the expenditures of Special Counsels, but their reports don’t come out for a year after the expenditures are made. Every six months, they issue a report on the expenditures that were made in a six month period ending six months before the report, so we don’t have figures for the past year.

The reports that we do have are pretty sketchy, as they don’t include all the personnel costs associated with government employees, like Fitzgerald himself, for example.

Fitzgerald started in Dec. 03, and the report for the period ending Mar 04 shows personnel costs of only $13,330. That’s one cheap lawyer.

In the next six months, ending Sept 2004, Fitzgerald got his operation ramped-up and charged $584,899, again exclusive of certain personnel costs for government employees.

In the next half-year, Fitzgerald charged $112,550 plus an additional $35,195 for Justice Department lawyers and an unspecified amount for FBI investigators:

Also, certain costs were incurred by detailees from the Federal Bureau of Investigation involved in the investigation but the associated costs were not readily identifiable. Such costs of detailees are not reflected in the statement of expenditures

So that’s already $759,236 not counting FBI agents and anything that happened since March of this year. Certainly, the costs are in the millions already, but we won’t know the basics for a year, and even though we won’t know the whole story. One thing is clear, however: the costs of this investigation are already a lot more than the figure used by the Kossacks.

And yes, this type of investigation is cheaper than Ken Starr’s, but no more substantial.

My sentiments exactly

Politechnical nails it: Not Scooter Libby! I’m crying now. When I voted for Bush, Libby’s presence in the administration was key to my vote. I had been 99% for John Kerry until I learned that Libby would be staying over in a second Bush administration. Well, that’s enough for me. Heh heh heh.

Politechnical nails it:

Not Scooter Libby! I’m crying now. When I voted for Bush, Libby’s presence in the administration was key to my vote. I had been 99% for John Kerry until I learned that Libby would be staying over in a second Bush administration. Well, that’s enough for me.

Heh heh heh.

Now the fun starts

Whoopee! Moveon.org, the organization that was started to protect Bill Clinton from the consequences of lying to a Grand Jury, is on the warpath to promote the idea that lying to a Grand Jury really is a big deal after all. So what’s going to be more fun, liberals changing their tune about lying, or … Continue reading “Now the fun starts”

So what’s going to be more fun, liberals changing their tune about lying, or conservatives changing theirs? We’ll see.

Clinton, Stewart, and now Libby

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spends two years investigating press leaks and comes away with nothing more than a face-saving indictment on a charge slightly more serious than jaywalking. There was no charge for any crime directly related to the disclosure of any secret identity or any misuse of classified information. The official in question, Scooter … Continue reading “Clinton, Stewart, and now Libby”

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spends two years investigating press leaks and comes away with nothing more than a face-saving indictment on a charge slightly more serious than jaywalking.

There was no charge for any crime directly related to the disclosure of any secret identity or any misuse of classified information. The official in question, Scooter Libby, has resigned and presumably a trial will follow on his alleged Clintonian Grand Jury behavior.

This is much less than the self-identified informed sources lead us to believe was coming, so the credibility of such people as Arianna Huffington, Larry O’Donnell, Markos Zuniga, and Josh Marshall is nullified.

Fitzgerald says his investigation was “more serious than baseball” but fails to prove it. He’s from Chicago, and we know what that means. The Fifth Amendment takes a beating, as it did in the case of Clinton’s lies to the Grand Jury and Martha Stewart’s lies to the FBI. Why even ask questions that require the subject of the investigation to incriminate himself?

Even the mainstream media is not impressed by this outcome:

The charges in the Friday indictment are similar to the ones used in Martha Stewart’s criminal case. She was convicted last year for obstructing justice and lying about why she sold ImClone Systems stock, just before a negative government decision on an ImClone drug. She served a five-month prison term followed by home confinement.

This is no Watergate, it’s one guy acting on his own, essentially a case of “nothing to see here, move along.”

What a waste of the taxpayers’ money.

UPDATE: It’s also worth noting, of course, that Scooter is innocent until proven guilty. What we actually have in the indictment is Scooter’s claim that he learned about Plame from a reporter, and Fitzgerald’s claim that he learned about it from Cheney. What if both are true? I would assume in that case that Scooter walks, and it’s not an unlikely scenario.

UPDATE 2: See the indictment here. It’s pretty thin. See Jeff Goldstein for a great link round-up.

Savoring victory

The coolest thing about the defeat of the Miers nomination is seeing neo-blogger Hugh Hewitt get all self-righteous in his whining about how close it brings us to the collapse of civilization as we know it. And it’s right for Hewitt to complain, because the Miers defeat (or victory, if you oppose incompetence on the … Continue reading “Savoring victory”

For once in his presidency, Bush has refused to “stay the course” when doing so would have meant certain disaster, so one of the biggest cudgels used against Bush by his enemies has been reduced to a wet noodle. We aren’t staying the course in Iraq because that’s the only way Bush nows to act, it’s because it’s the right thing to do. So Bush wins by losing.

Hewitt loses by displaying the kind of blind partisanship that we’ve come to expect of left-wing bloggers, and that crowd loses on the same count as well.

And second to the fun of seeing Hewitt squirm is the fun of seeing Kos and his Chief Lieutenant Armando go at each other tooth and claw.

So it’s a good day all around.

Web 2.0: old Kool-Aid in new bottles

How silly is the thinking behind the Web 2.0 movement? Try We Are the Web by Wellbert Kevin Kelly: There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one … Continue reading “Web 2.0: old Kool-Aid in new bottles”

How silly is the thinking behind the Web 2.0 movement? Try We Are the Web by Wellbert Kevin Kelly:

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don’t. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

In retrospect, the Netscape IPO was a puny rocket to herald such a moment. The product and the company quickly withered into irrelevance, and the excessive exuberance of its IPO was downright tame compared with the dotcoms that followed. First moments are often like that. After the hysteria has died down, after the millions of dollars have been gained and lost, after the strands of mind, once achingly isolated, have started to come together – the only thing we can say is: Our Machine is born. It’s on.

Presumably, he speaks from experience about the wiring of all those other planets, having visited them while toking hash.

Nicholas Carr didn’t drink the Kool-Aid (or smoke the hash). See The Amorality of Web 2.0:

The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call “the mainstream media.” Here’s O’Reilly: “While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls ‘we, the media,’ a world in which ‘the former audience,’ not a few people in a back room, decides what’s important.”

I’m all for blogs and blogging. (I’m writing this, ain’t I?) But I’m not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere – its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation. Now, all the same criticisms can (and should) be hurled at segments of the mainstream media. And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from – and, yes, more important than – what bloggers can do. Those despised “people in a back room” can fund in-depth reporting and research. They can underwrite projects that can take months or years to reach fruition – or that may fail altogether. They can hire and pay talented people who would not be able to survive as sole proprietors on the Internet. They can employ editors and proofreaders and other unsung protectors of quality work. They can place, with equal weight, opposing ideologies on the same page. Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs.

But I don’t want to be forced to make that choice.

Carr has already got the 2-fers hoppin’ mad, of course.

h/t Jeff Jarvis, who’s very upset with Mr. Carr:

So Carr is really saying two things: He is saying that the professionals are better than the amateurs because they are paid. I don’t buy that. And he distrusts the amateurs, which is saying that he distrusts the public those professionals supposedly serve. Which is to say that he distrusts us. Well, distrust begets distrust. So the feeling is mutual.

It’s quite simple, really: It’s all about supply and demand. When distribution was scare and made content scarce, it promoted the creation of a professional media class. Now that neither is scarce, the economics are changed. The market is free. Lots of content is free. There is more content. I believe that there is thus more good content. So media must rethink their business models, their value, their relationships to the marketplace. And I believe that is good. Carr believes disruption is amoral. I believe stagnation is unnatural.

There is at least one good thing about Web 2.0: it’s taking part of Jeff’s mind off Howard Stern, at least for a while.

I have a somewhat cynical view of all this: the people I see beating the drum for Web 2.0 are exploiting it economically; Tim O’Reilly chiefly. This guy always manages to turn a handsome profit bashing capitalism, and more power to him for that:

More immediately, Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it’s not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web. Web 1.0 was the era when people could think that Netscape (a software company) was the contender for the computer industry crown; Web 2.0 is the era when people are recognizing that leadership in the computer industry has passed from traditional software companies to a new kind of internet service company. The net has replaced the PC as the platform that matters, just as the PC replaced the mainframe and minicomputer.

But that doesn’t mean we have to buy the largely fanciful vision he uses to con his customers out of their lunch money.

More to come after we’ve read O’Reilly’s essay on his current meme, What is Web 2.0?

Another Terrorist Supporter at the Guardian

Regular readers will recall our link to the gory tale of the killing of a Chinese democracy activist reported in the Guardian which turned out to be hysterical (the guy was beaten but not killed.) The Daily Ablution has more on the reporter, who fits a profile of sorts: Today’s Private Eye, making explicit comparisons … Continue reading “Another Terrorist Supporter at the Guardian”

Today’s Private Eye, making explicit comparisons with the Dilpazier Aslam affair – to which the Eye has gleefully alluded at least three times – raises some interesting points concerning Mr. Joffe-Walt’s background.

Of course, it comes as no surprise to learn that the Guardian foreign correspondent, who has 18 months of experience as a professional journalist, was moved to act as a “human shield” in Iraq (he found the experience “very stressful”). Like Mr. Joffe-Walt’s dissociation from the real world, such sentiments are to be expected in the Guardian newsroom.

What’s of more concern is the reporter’s avowed support for a terrorist organisation (does this sound familiar?). In an interview with Newsweek magazine, he reveals that:

“I support the Earth Liberation Front. I think what they do is morally defendable as long as they don’t kill people. That’s the principle of direct action.”

The ELF, a group of serial arsonists, caused over $43m worth of damage in 600 attacks between 1996 and 2002 (PDF), when FBI named them the largest and most active terrorist group in the US. They remain active.

I wish we could say we were surprised by this, but after the Dilpazier Aslam affair we put nothing past the Grauniad.

Miers doomed

The White House’s Harriet Miers support group is sad and depressed: “The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end….Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over … Continue reading “Miers doomed”

The White House’s Harriet Miers support group is sad and depressed:

“The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end….Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over as soon as possible. But the White House is so irrational that who knows? As of this morning, there is a sort of pig-headed resolve to press forward, cancel the meetings with senators if necessary, and bone up for the hearings.”

Excellent.

Kaus on the Judybats

Mickey Kaus is kind enough to answer the question we posed yesterday on the press obsession with Judy Miller. with six reasons. First on the list echoes what we said yesterday: a) Treason: Miller wasn’t just perceived as in cahoots with neocons in foisting the war off onto the public. She was doing it from … Continue reading “Kaus on the Judybats”

Mickey Kaus is kind enough to answer the question we posed yesterday on the press obsession with Judy Miller. with six reasons. First on the list echoes what we said yesterday:

a) Treason: Miller wasn’t just perceived as in cahoots with neocons in foisting the war off onto the public. She was doing it from within the New York Times, which the Left correctly perceives as one of “its” institutions. As a traitor within the liberal camp, she has to be expelled and punished, in a way she wouldn’t be punished if she’d been an equally mistaken and influential reporter for National Review. The host body rejects her.

And most intriguing is the femme fatale angle, which certainly explains Arianna’s personal obsession. While Arianna’s looking hotter with her recent facelift, botox job, and blonde hairdo, the former wife of a gay man isn’t really in the running for the race Miller’s been winning for twenty years. Andrew Sullivan disagrees, however.