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Banned
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ace, you've been snookered....taken to the cleaners, but you're better off than a lot of other people....too many of whom are dead, disfigured, or missing a limb because of you're "intellectual alignment" this flawed and incompetent little man, and his hubris and lack of curiosity.
Quote:
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2...6-28702537_ITM
http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Newswe...0037&oliID=229
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl.../ai_kepm319403
The Truth Behind the Pillars: The final act: They cultivate an Olympian air, but the justices are quite human--and can be quite political.(Nation)
Source: Newsweek
Publication Date: 25-DEC-00
The Truth Behind the Pillars: The final act: They cultivate an Olympian air, but the justices are quite human--and can be quite political.(Nation)
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and her husband, John, a Washington lawyer, have long been comfortable on the cocktail and charity-ball circuit. So at an election-night party on Nov. 7, surrounded for the most part by friends and familiar acquaintances, she let her guard drop for a moment when she heard the first critical returns shortly before 8 p.m. Sitting in her hostess's den, staring at a small black-and-white television set, she visibly started when CBS anchor Dan Rather called Florida for Al Gore. "This is terrible," she exclaimed. She explained to another partygoer that Gore's reported victory in Florida meant that the election was "over," since Gore had already carried two other swing states, Michigan and Illinois.
Moments later, with an air of obvious disgust, she rose to get a plate of food, leaving it to her husband to explain her somewhat uncharacteristic outburst. John O'Connor said his wife was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona, and a Gore win meant they'd have to wait another four years. O'Connor, the former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate and a 1981 Ronald Reagan appointee, did not want a Democrat to name her successor. Two witnesses described this extraordinary scene to NEWSWEEK. Responding through a spokesman at the high court, O'Connor had no comment.
O'Connor had no way of knowing, as she watched the early returns, that election night would end in deadlock and confusion--or that five weeks later she would play a direct and decisive role in the election of George W. Bush. O'Connor could not possibly have foreseen that she would be one of two swing votes in the court's 5-4 decision ending the manual recount in Florida and forcing Al Gore to finally concede defeat. But her remarks will fuel criticism that the justices not only "follow the election returns," as the old saying goes, but, in the case of George W. Bush v. Albert Gore, Jr., sought to influence them.....
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Quote:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl.../ai_kepm319403
<b>Conflicts of interest in Bush v. Gore: Did some justices vote illegally?</b>
Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, The, Spring 2003 by Neumann, Richard K Jr
On December 9, 2000, the United States Supreme Court stayed the presidential election litigation in the Florida courts and set oral argument for December 11.1 On the morning of December 12-one day after oral argument and half a day before the Supreme Court announced its decision in Bush v. Gore2-the Wall Street Journal published a front-page story that included the following:
Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 76 years old, and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, 70, both lifelong Republicans, have at times privately talked about retiring and would prefer that a Republican appoint their successors. . . . Justice O'Connor, a cancer survivor, has privately let it be known that, after 20 years on the high court, she wants to retire to her home state of Arizona . . . . At an Election Night party at the Washington, D.C., home of Mary Ann Stoessel, widow of former Ambassador Walter Stoessel, the justice's husband, John O'Connor, mentioned to others her desire to step down, according to three witnesses. But Mr. O'Connor said his wife would be reluctant to retire if a Democrat were in the White House and would choose her replacement. Justice O'Connor declined to comment.3
In a story published the following day, Christopher Hitchens, the United States correspondent for the Evening Standard of London, wrote that "O'Connor . . . has allegedly told her friends and family that she wishes to retire from the Court but won't do so if there is to be a Democratic president to nominate her replacement."4 Helen Thomas, a nationally syndicated columnist, wrote that "[t]he story going around [Washington] is that a very upset Justice Sandra Day O'Connor walked out of a dinner party on election night when she heard the first mistaken broadcast that Vice President A Gore had won. The ailing O'Connor apparently wants to retire, but not while a Democrat is in the White House and could pick her successor."5 Various parts of this story were repeated in a number of publications.6
The following week, Newsweek published a more detailed account:
[A]t an election-night party on Nov. 7, surrounded for the most part by friends and familiar acquaintances, [Justice O'Connor] let her guard drop for a moment when she heard the first critical returns shortly before 8 p.m. Sitting in her hostess's den, staring at a small black-and-white television set, she visibly started when CBS anchor Dan Rather called Florida for Al Gore. "This is terrible," she exclaimed. She explained to another partygoer that Gore's reported victory in Florida meant that the election was "over," since Gore had already carried two other swing states, Michigan and Illinois.
Moments later, with an air of obvious disgust, she rose to get a plate of food, leaving it to her husband to explain her somewhat uncharacteristic outburst. John O'Connor said his wife was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona, and a Gore win meant they'd have to wait another four years. O'Connor, the former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate and a 1981 Ronald Reagan appointee, did not want a Democrat to name her successor. Two witnesses described this extraordinary scene to Newsweek. Responding through a spokesman at the high court, O'Connor had no comment.7
This, too, was repeated in a large number of publications, both in the United States8 and abroad.9
According to an article in USA Today five weeks after the Court decided Bush v. Gore, "[p]eople close to the justices confirmed much of the story, which was first reported in the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek magazine."10 At that point, a defense tentatively circulated and then disappeared. USA Today added that "some people suggest that O'Connor was actually upset that the election was being called for Gore while the West Coast polls were still open."11 This theory was not again reported in the mainstream media, perhaps because it cannot be reconciled with the comments attributed to Justice O'Connor in the Newsweek article or to the comments attributed in many of the articles to John O'Connor, presumably the person most qualified to attest to Justice O'Connor's intentions.
Later, in his book on the court battles that lead to Bush v. Gore, Jeffrey Toobin repeated the election night story and included a direct quote from John O'Connor:
Justice O'Connor said "This is terrible," and she hastened away from the television . . . . Her husband, John, explained her reaction to the partygoers, saying, "She's very disappointed because she was hoping to retire"-that is, with a Republican president to appoint her successor.12
Toobin also described another incident, which occurred while the Supreme Court was adjudicating Bush v. Gore:
On . . . the day of the Supreme Court's first opinion on the election, O'Connor and her husband had attended a party for about thirty people at the home of a wealthy couple named Lee and Julie Folger. When the subject of the election controversy came up, Justice O'Connor was livid. "You just don't know what those Gore people have been doing," she said. "They went into a nursing home and registered people that they shouldn't have. It was outrageous." It was unclear where the justice had picked up this unproved accusation, which had circulated only in the more eccentric right-wing outlets, but O'Connor recounted the story with fervor.13
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You can't fall back on the excuse that he was elected twice....he received a million less votes than the man he ran against in 2000, and he was fortunate enough to be the son of a man who had himself stacked the SCOTUS with sympathetic partisans, and was VPOTUS under a man who did likewise......resulting in five "justices" willing to discard all legal precedent and their own oaths of office to rule him the "winner" of a questionable and bitterly contested election, in the state where his brother got to pick the election oversight offiicials.....
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/ma...e162076ei=5090
Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush
By RON SUSKIND
Published: October 17, 2004
.....In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. <b>''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.</b> And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. <b>We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''</b>
Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''
The 9/11 commission did not directly address the question of whether Bush exerted influence over the intelligence community about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. That question will be investigated after the election, but if no tangible evidence of undue pressure is found, few officials or alumni of the administration whom I spoke to are likely to be surprised. ''If you operate in a certain way -- by saying this is how I want to justify what I've already decided to do, and I don't care how you pull it off -- you guarantee that you'll get faulty, one-sided information,'' Paul O'Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. ''You don't have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt.''
In a way, the president got what he wanted: a National Intelligence Estimate on W.M.D. that creatively marshaled a few thin facts, and then Colin Powell putting his credibility on the line at the United Nations in a show of faith. That was enough for George W. Bush to press forward and invade Iraq. As he told his quasi-memoirist, Bob Woodward, in ''Plan of Attack'': ''Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. . . . I'm surely not going to justify the war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray to be as good a messenger of his will as possible.''
Machiavelli's oft-cited line about the adequacy of the perception of power prompts a question. Is the appearance of confidence as important as its possession? Can confidence -- true confidence -- be willed? Or must it be earned?
George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history's great confidence men. That is not meant in the huckster's sense, though many critics claim that on the war in Iraq, the economy and a few other matters he has engaged in some manner of bait-and-switch. No, I mean it in the sense that he's a believer in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality.
Whether you can run the world on faith, it's clear you can run one hell of a campaign on it...
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