I don't know about "patently," but it is racist. I considered saying "insidiously racist," but, on reflection, I'll say it's somewhere on the insidiously-to-patently continuum.
Did we ever discuss any other Supreme Court nominee's LSAT score?
Here's the Carlson quote: "So is Ketanji Brown Jackson — a name that even Joe Biden has trouble pronouncing — one of the top legal minds in the entire country? We certainly hope so … so it might be time for Joe Biden to let us know what Ketanji Brown Jackson's LSAT score was."
It's very easy to say "Brown" and "Jackson," so he's just calling attention to Ketanji. What her parents named her has nothing to do with the nominee's qualifications, so why bring this up in the middle of demanding evidence of her basic intelligence? You don't have to be a genius to see that's racial.
As for "top legal minds"? Since when are Supreme Court nominees chosen from "the top legal minds"? I've never noticed that, and I've been watching the American legal scene for 40 years. In any case, law isn't like math. There's no objective test for law aptitude, and there are plenty of American law school graduates with LSAT scores in the 99th percentile who've never displayed a glint of brilliance.
But what if we could find the 9 biggest brains in the law field and make a Supreme Court out of them? We might discover they make terrible Justices. And, by the way, I believe that the 9 biggest brains — whoever you are out there, Big Brains! — would refuse to take the job. Too boring. Too restricted. No freedom to rove all over the intellectual landscape.
Let's stop pretending we love the work of the very smartest people. Not in law we don't. We actually prefer something more ordinary. We want focus on texts, adherence to precedent, grounding in practical reality. It's dumb to be an intelligence snob here, and Tucker's posturing is particularly dumb. Virulently dumb.
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247 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 247 of 247Greg, I suppose a government school in Indonesia has some connection to the Islamic religion, like a government school in England has some connection to the Church of England. We're lucky with our First Amendment. But Obama did not attend a religious Islamic school, which he could have. Like he attended St Francis for most of his time in Indonesia. I don't know much about Islam, but I don't believe there is any equivalent to infant baptism or newborn religious circumcision. In any event he wasn't born in Indonesia. His mother was not a Catholic, but a non-practicing Protestant. His Javan stepdad was not particularly religious. Atheism? What is that? asks third and fourth grade Readering.
I recommend David Garrow's door stop of a pre-presidential biography for details on Obama growing up, and his education through law school. Garrow believes Obama was not forthcoming on his college record because of a course that sounded Marxist and which he did not want Republicans making hay over. Read Garrow. An actual leftist, so not a political fan of the merely liberal #44.
Contrast to Trump. Penn and Fordham received letters threatening litigation if anything should come out regarding his college record. No doubt since he did not just stay mum on the subject, but repeatedly bragged that he was #1. The only number for #45.
gadfly, “No conservative Republican has ever thought twice, let alone criticize, the name "’Condoleezza.’"
What could you be trying to say by calling out a creatively named black lady on the “other side?” Is it pseudo clever snark posing as irony? Or do you simply admire how open minded Republicans are?
People of African descent from other countries tend to be much more competitive, in terms of admissions qualifications." And they aren't stupid: they try to differentiate themselves from "descendant of enslaved people" run-of-the-mill African-Americans.
I interviewed a Nigerian immigrant who has two engineering degrees and was joining the Army Reserve. I asked him if he was an Ibo and he said yes and was pleased I asked.
Of my black medical students that I taught over 15 years, about half or almost half were foreign born.
Maybe this is evidence that the African slaves were losers in tribal wars.
When it comes to Tucker, he purposely mispronounced "Ketanji" to mock her foreign sounding name, just as he did with Kamala.
I have read, maybe here, that he had trouble pronouncing Ketanji and was mocking himself. Second, there was a big leftist flap right after she was chosen about Kamala's name pronunciation.
@dpd wrote, "As I understand it, judges for higher courts are normally chosen from lower ones."-- That is often, but by no means always, the case. There have always been nominations to the court of appeals of lawyers serving in government service (as prosecutors or high officials in the DOJ) or of law professors or even of lawyers in private practice. The judge who was in the opinion of many lawyers the very best appeals court judge of the 20th century, Judge Henry Friendly of the Second Circuit, was a partner in a Wall Street law firm before his appointment to the bench. (FWIW, I believe that Friendly's grade point average at HLS has never been exceeded by anyone.) For the Supreme Court, it's not even necessary for a justice to be a lawyer let alone a sitting judge, although in practice I believe all of them have had legal training or legal experience. Prior to about 30-40 years ago, it was common to have politicians (Warren, the Governor of California), bureaucrats (Douglas, the Chairman of the SEC), and lawyers (Powell, a practicing lawyer and the head of the ABA) appointed as justices. It's only in very recent times that we've moved towards a system of only nominating mostly sitting judges. (Kagan is the only recent exception to this.) What's driving this is the well-founded belief of both parties that a sitting judge's record is the most reliable way to predict what he or she will do as a justice, not any kind of desire to get the "best" judges.
Maybe, Tucker is mocking Biden?
I think (in a roundabout way) he was saying that if her LSATs were awful, then she was admitted to her fancy Ivy League school as a quota admission...
Thanks for the hanging curve balls right down the middle:
'Her name is "foreign" sounding and "hard" (sic) to pronounce.'
Only Joe can't pronounce her name.
'Look at all the dead-stupid creeps who were convinced (and may still believe) Barack Obama was a Muslim.'
If you ask any authority on Islam, they will tell you that Obama is still a Muslim and will always be a Muslim.
It is the faith into which he was born and educated. He attended and studied in a madrassa in Indonesia. I think that certainly qualifies him as being (for at least a time) a Muslim.
When he denounces that faith he will then become an apostate, and many large and influential branches of the religion believe that such an action merits the death penalty...
"Mike said Obama attended 'Muslim services.' The site does not disprove that"
Michael K. was making the claim that Obama was (or had been) a Muslim. What I linked to refuted his claim.
"Gee. I thought he went to Muslim services and a Muslim school in Indonesia. I guess that doesn't qualify anymore. Maybe you mean he was an apostate."
He's being sarcastic by saying, flippantly "I guess that doesn't qualify anymore (to prove Obama was a Muslim)." He suggests maybe I am saying Obama was an "apostate"...(from Islam).
It's really very plain, so I can only assume you're making an conscious and fruitless effort to deny Michael K. made a claim that is contradicted by the information at the FactCheck.org link.
Considering that her nomination is explicitly racist and sexist I am not sure what you were expecting.
I am of two minds on this. Personally, I think that LSAT scores, SAT scores, GPAs, etc. are irrelevant once you have left school for the real world. If you can do the job I don't care if you graduated high school or not, and if you can't do the job I don't care if you have a PhD from Harvard. However, if her LSAT scores were below the standards of the schools she attended and that was because she was given a pass due to racial and gender preferences, that brings into question her ability to be unbiased in those sort of cases. That does matter. Of course, I am of the belief that Supreme Court justices should be unbiased and make decisions based solely on the Constitution and law, which has become more and more evident to be a fiction.
I do wonder if Tucker was inspired by Obama hiding his college transcripts.
how would BIGDEMTECH construct an algorithm for Biden to build a slate of choices for his decision?
would / could such "algo" be racist?
gadfly said...
No conservative Republican has ever thought twice, let alone criticize, the name "Condoleezza."
you mean, like writing "There's no skeez a, like Condoleezza"?
Or wait, that wasn't a conservative, or a Republican
Amexpat said...
I have problems with the way affirmative action is done in the US - I think it should be community based rather than race based. But, it's of no significance how someone got into law school.
Really? it's of no important to you whether or not a person's credentials came because of nepotism, payoffs, or racism?
Rather than having been earned?
Well, it's important to a lot of the rest of us.
What's important is what they have done in their legal career.
So, what has KBJ done in her legal career?
What has she accomplished used on her own capabilities?
Tel us about her brilliant decisions. About the tangled legal knots she untangled.
Oh, she doesn't have any?
Hmm.
readering said...
Contrast to Trump. Penn and Fordham received letters threatening litigation if anything should come out regarding his college record.
Whereas with Obama they schools he attended are all run by leftists, so there was no need for threatening letters.
But the fact that they didn't release anything tells us he sucked as a student, and everything he got, he got because he was a black male and a smooth talker, not because he actually accomplished anything.
Which is to say, he is, always has been, and always will be an empty suit
Douglas, in some respects the qualifications to be a trial jusge are higher than to be an appellate judge. The ABA sometimes finds the same person to be unqualified as a trial judge but highly qualified as an appellate judge. It wants to see trial lawyers presiding over pretrial proceedings, trials and other evidentiary hearings, whereas a stellar academic record matched with a successful legal/political career of some sort qualifies one to sit on a three-judge appellate panel and issue rulings drafted by clerks and shared with fellow panelists.
readering said...
Greg, I suppose a government school in Indonesia has some connection to the Islamic religion
Hmm, you think that in a 90% Muslim country, a religion that has NO "separation between Church and State", no commandment to "render unto Caesar that which is Ceasar's, render unto God that which is God's", schools paid for by the Muslim government might be "Muslim schools"?
Yeah, I think so, too.
I don't know much about Islam, but I don't believe there is any equivalent to infant baptism or newborn religious circumcision.
https://seekersguidance.org/answers/general-counsel/is-there-baptism-in-islam/
There is no baptism in Islam in the sense that it exists in the Christian tradition.
There are, however, practices that welcome the baby into the community of believers, including the calling of the adhan (call to prayer) and iqama (reminder to stand up to pray) in the ear of the newborn and the aqiqa celebration in which the community gathers to celebrate the birth of the infant and pray for him or her.
Atheism? What is that? asks third and fourth grade Readering.
Catholics have First Communion as early as age 7, well before the 3rd grade
The question is not "was 3rd grade Obama a practicing atheist?" The question is "did 3rd and 4th grade non-Christian Obama, living in 90% Islamic Indonesia, live as a Muslim boy of hhis age in that country would live?"
And the answer is almost assuredly "yes".
Politicians don't release their grades, not should they. There is no advantage for them to do so. If you know a politician's grades it is either because they were illegally leaked (Bush) or because they were part of other records that were already accessible to the public (Kerry, McCain). So for the love of God, stop asking for this information and acting like you are entitled to it and thinking it's suspicious that politicians don't release it.
At the same time though, judicial confirmations are no holds barred proceedings. Carlson's demand was silly, but after the Kavanaugh hearings, there's nothing he has to apologize for.
Remember when Michael Bechloss was on Imus and said that Obama probably had the highest IQ of any president. And Imus asked" "What is it?"
The question never got answered. Nor will Carlson's. But the point is made.
"As for 'top legal minds'? Since when are Supreme Court nominees chosen from 'the top legal minds'? I've never noticed that, and I've been watching the American legal scene for 40 years."
Defending President Nixon's nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the United States Supreme Court against accusations that he was "mediocre," Senator Roman Hruska was widely mocked for observing that there were a lot of mediocre judges and lawyers, and that they too were entitled to representation on the United States Supreme Court. But now it is posited that they are all largely legal mediocrities. Maybe we need some affirmative action here: someone should be nominated to provide a little representation for the excellent.
"I don't know about "patently," but it is racist."
Why, because it assumes that an affirmative action hire is an affirmative action hire? The fact is, the most qualified applicant for any position outside of sports is almost never black. Everyone knows that, but saying it is "racist". On the other hand, I don't recall you pointing out that it was not only racist, but also illegal for the government to stipulate that the next supreme court opening would be filled by a black woman.
"Personally, I support affirmative action, but I support it because people benefit from it and I want them to."
Do you want your doctor to benefit from affirmative action?
"It's really very plain, so I can only assume you're making an conscious and fruitless effort to deny Michael K. made a claim that is contradicted by the information at the FactCheck.org link."
Cookie, don't you realize that the term "fact check" is now generally assumed to be synonymous with "lie"?
Garrow believes Obama was not forthcoming on his college record because of a course that sounded Marxist and which he did not want Republicans making hay over.
It's most likely because he applied to college as Barry Sotero from Indonesia.
"I’d wager that a majority of folks who haven’t attended college understand that nominees for SCOTUS should have a record of high achievement in college, law school and substantial experience participating in the U.S. justice system, guitarjoe."
My point is that those things should carry more weight than a test score prior to those events. A careful reading of what I said would have told you that.
But I'll wager that the things you listed mean less to Fox viewers than any decisions a judge might have made that have an impact on various culture war issues.
Somebody up above was wondering about President Obama's grades in law school. Well, he was elected President of the Harvard Law Review by the outgoing editors, so they thought he was pretty smart, and he graduated magna cum laude. I can't find what the cutoff was for magna cum laude at HLS in 1991, when Obama graduated, but in 2018 it was limited to the students with GPAs in the top 10% of the class. I don't suppose the cutoff was less difficult in 1991. So we know that Obama's grades were in the top 10% of HLS. That makes him pretty smart, smarter than most of the people posting here in all probability.
It's mind-reading to claim Tucker (or his writer) believes no black woman has a high LSAT score. Not really sure what the offense taken is here. One is justified to expect on avg a lower qualification score for an explicitly AA-derived candidate, but one should, as Tucker is clearly doing here, give them a chance to prove they're the exception.
It's not patently diversitist to request certifying licenses, works, references, etc. It is a probable, but naive predictor of performance.
Greg, I was an American Catholic at a private school in Protestant England. My mandatory religious doctrine did not have anything to say about atheism, which was a non-issue for children. (We did learn Greek, Roman, Norse mythology at various times in school.) Quite a few students attended solely for the academic quality although everyone had religious dictrine classes. The government schools were Anglican (Queen head of the church and all that), but that did not make the students all practicing C of E.
Obama was the American son of an American Christian mother in Indonesia, not that she practiced any faith. He did not practice Islam any more than I practiced Anglicanism in England. By the time he was old enough to be cognizant of such things he was off to his grandparents in the US.
Weird fetishes surrounding Obama's background.
Obama applied to colleges around 1980. College admissions officers would have wanted an African-American who had gone to an exclusive prep school, even if his grades weren't the best. Having lived abroad would have been a plus, but at that time there was no reason someone pretending to be an Indonesian would have been considered a greater get, especially if he wasn't eligible for a government grant, which would have gone to a real Indonesian pursuing graduate studies in America.
There's no reason to assume that Obama didn't get satisfactory grades at HLS. He was older and probably more stable and industrious than some other students. HLS students got to pick their own classes and could craft a program that suited their strengths -- and as they say, the hardest thing about Harvard is getting in.
Still, there were real gaps in the man's knowledge and understanding. Specialized knowledge he had, but he wasn't the genius Beschloss made him out to be. It was those gaps in his education, though, that marked him as a real American of his generation and class, rather than a foreigner.
New rules limiting the number of magna cum laude and cum laude graduates to the top 40 percent of the class mean that 36 percent fewer students than last year will receive honors, according to an HLS news release yesterday. Jun 10, 1999
I don't see most people, whether left or right or whether they watch Fox, CNN, or MSNBC caring about a judge's academic history or even his or her achievements as a judge. The most vocal people will want to know if a judge will support Roe v Wade, gay marriage, and the Affordable Care Act or find a way to reverse previous decisions. They may say they want an originalist judge or, at the other end of the spectrum, one who is more activist, but I'll be most people don't actually know what they mean by those terms or follow them to any conclusions as to the results of those positions.
As for standardized academic tests, I don't know anyone except college educated liberals who actually talks about them as a measure of worth--and I'm a college educated lib. Conservatives give weight to them as a predictor of a student's preparedness for college, and they encourage the tests to maintain standards, but I've rarely heard one evoke them as something useful in telling us about career accomplishments. That's why Carlson surprised me by doing it.
@Rollo: Cum laude cast a wide net but magna cum laude HLS meant top ten percent of the class.
It's really very plain, so I can only assume you're making an conscious and fruitless effort to deny Michael K. made a claim that is contradicted by the information at the FactCheck.org link.
Cook depends on "FactCheck.org" to deny something that is pretty obvious. Barry Soetero went to an Islamic school in Indonesia, a 90% Muslim country (especially after they expelled or massacred the Chinese). FactCheck.org just made a hilarious claim of "Mostly False" on Maria Bartiromo's statement that that the US has doubled oil imports from Russia.
You Americans are crazy.
After spending most of his time at a Catholic school the family moved, so Obama attended a state school for part of third grade and fourth grade. A school that had been started as Dutch school for colonists. Weird. No basis for treating the American schoolboy as a Muslim. I didn't change faiths by moving to a foreign country where there was sectarian disapproval of my religion.
Bob Boyd said...
It seems like some supporters of affirmative action want to claim affirmative action is a good thing, but that no one benefits from it, which is absurd
Personally, I support affirmative action, but I support it because people benefit from it and I want them to.
You need to read about "mismatch"
The reality is that everyone loses because of "affirmative action", other than the college administrators / business executives" who get to babble about what good b=people they are because of their racist actions.
Reality: The objective measures of ability to succeed, like LSAT, GRE, SAT, ACT scores, actually do work, regardless of your skin color.
When you admit to a competitive school student who simply aren't prepared for the level of competition they will face, you set them up for failure. Again, skin color doesn't matter here. Stupid legacies at Harvard do just as poorly as stupid "minorities"
If you want people to go to college, get an education, and become functional human beings, then you oppose "affirmative action", because it makes all those things far less likely.
If you're a racist pig who just wants to ahve "tokens" around so you can feel better about yourself, then you support "affirmative action".
No, there's no "in between" here
Douglas B. Levene said...
Somebody up above was wondering about President Obama's grades in law school. Well, he was elected President of the Harvard Law Review by the outgoing editors
Are you a liar, or an ignoramus?
Obama was elected President of the Harvard Law Review because he was the 3rd most popular candidate, but the 2nd choice for most of the people who favored the 1st two.
It had NOTHING to do with his academic abilities. Even Obama admitted that
So why are you lying about it?
So @Greg's point is that Obama was the third smartest kid on the Harvard Law Review his year? Well, OK, then.
In any event, I'm not sure Greg heard the whole story. In 1990 (the year of Obama's election as president of the Law Review), the Law Review, and indeed all of Harvard, was bitterly divided between leftist radicals and conservatives. Obama was elected because the outgoing editors thought he had the brains and personality to work with both sides and to get them to work together. The men I know who voted to make him president of the Law Review think in hindsight that was a wise choice. Of course, this doesn't mean that he was a successful or good president of the United States, just that he was apparently a pretty good editor of the HLR, and smarter than most of the folks posting here.
Readering
Let's be clear here:
1: Is Barry "Barack" Obama an actual Muslim? Or christian?
No, he isn't. He's a Barryist, a narcissistic pice of shit who doesn't beige there could ever be anything more important than himself
2: Is that what was being argued about?
No, it isn't. The claim was that he was technically a Muslim while he was in Indonesia. which is to say, he went to Islamic services and otherwise lived as an islamic male of his age would ahve done, while he was there.
3: You tell a lovely story about being an American Catholic attending a private school in Protestant England. But
A: Was your mother a non-believing, non-practicing Catholic?
B: Was your father a believing and practicing member of the CoE?
No?
Then congratulations, your story has no relevance to the Barry experience. Thank you for playing
If you'd like to provide documented proof that Barry never attended Islamic services with his Muslim (step-)father, feel free.
Lacking that, you've got shit.
[Reads latest from Greg; shrugs; turns other cheek]
”If you'd like to provide documented proof that Barry never attended Islamic services with his Muslim (step-)father, feel free.”
You’re arguing about surface behavior as if it shows the truth of a person’s inner self. Obama’s having attended services with his father doesn’t make him a Muslim. I attended church with my family when I was growing up, but I was never a Christian, if by that we mean having any noticeably religious feelings or commitment to the precepts being preached. I mostly day-dreamed through the abstract (to me) and boring services. I was takento church but I was never of the church, (and I am not today).
Also unaddressed is that the dopes I referred to who believe(d) Obama was a Muslim believed he was a Muslim while he was the President. Your whole futile argument is really just a means of side-stepping this.
Lots of African American kids in my city go to Catholic school. They're Baptist, Pentecostal, AME, and other denominations. They go to religion class at school, maybe to mass, although they don't go to confession or take communion. They don't believe in transubstantiation, although by the end of their senior year they probably know what it is.
Honestly, how did we get from the LSAT to this? Some people just can't let things go.
Robert Cook said...
You’re arguing about surface behavior as if it shows the truth of a person’s inner self.
The truth about Obama is that he's a narcissistic piece of shit
But the outside reality is what voters have to go on, and what the world has to go on.
And the odds are extreme high that teh "outer reality" of Barry Obama in Indonesia was that he was a Muslim.
The "inner reality" is the province of God, if there is one
Obama’s having attended services with his father doesn’t make him a Muslim
It does to the Muslims
Cookie,
Ford was credible?
Yes, comrade, and so were Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin...
Owen,
Surely quite a few blacks from the Caribbean are descended from slaves, too?
Can't decide whether Greg hates Obama more than Islam or the other way around. But a hater he is for sure. On pretty much every topic on which I notice his comments. Even when I agree with him, like with Putin, I recoil from the way he expresses himself.
It is racist, but that is because it is a comment on Pres. Biden explicitly picking someone because of race. Does Tucker Carlson care about the particular bleeding heart liberal Democrat appointee? Or is he attacking the way she was chosen?
This doesn't show that Tucker Carlson is a racist. It shows that if someone is picked because of race, he is going to attack it on those grounds.
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