Bookworm Room

Back in the 40s or 50s, Esquire Magazine, when it was still a magazine for gentleman, published some quite funny, if very risque cartoons.*  One of them showed a gorgeous, voluptuous, obviously purely decorative woman talking on the phone in her apartment.  Behind her is a kitchen piled to the ceiling with dirty dishes.  It [...]

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I read E.J. Dionne’s fatuous defense of Kagan in The New Republic, and started formulating a response to his superficial argument comparing Kagan to Roberts.  (It was so superficial it almost, but not quite, devolved into “and they’re both homo sapiens.”)  Fortunately, I was spared that effort when I read both Paul Mirengoff’s and Ed [...]

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J.C. Arenas on the laundry list of qualifications for Obama’s Supreme Court picks: Obama’s first Supreme Court appointment was Sonia Sotomayor, the Bronx-bred daughter of Puerto Rican parents, who supposedly was a valedictorian student with a deficiency in English and become an Ivy-League educated jurist credited with saving Major League Baseball. Now we have Elena [...]

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I know that much is being said amongst both Progressives and Conservatives about Kagan’s possible lesbianism.  Progressives are mad at her for being in the closet; Conservatives are worried about her orientation affecting her rulings as a Supreme Court judge.  Both are completely wrong. Regarding the Progressive’s disdain for Kagan’s decision to keep her private [...]

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I’d like to analyze a Harvard’s law prof’s defense of a Harvard law dean.  The Prof (and ex-dean himself) is Robert Clark, who wrote an op-ed in the WSJ defending Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s approach to the military during her tenure as dean of Harvard Law.  He spells out the facts, which I’ll accept [...]

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To no one’s surprise, Obama nominated Elena Kagan to fill the opening on the Supreme Court.  Many have pointed to the fact that she’s never served as a judge before as one of the main reasons Obama did so — she has no paper trail.  Since I have a generally low estimation of judges at [...]

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If you are a young lawyer, struggling to learn what a non-responsive answer really looks like, you can’t do better than this question-and-answer session between Jake Tapper and Presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs.  If Gibbs were any slicker, he’d just ooze right out of the room: TAPPER:  Robert, in terms of what Geithner and Summers [...]

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Whether you are for or against gay marriage, Robert George issues a sound warning about the dangers that flow from letting the Supreme Court get its hands on the issue: It would be disastrous for the justices to do so [rule against California's Prop. 8 and, by extension, make gay marriage the law of the [...]

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It was a foregone conclusion, but it’s still irksome that the RINOs piled on for Sotomayor.  It’s not just that she’s a judicial activist who dislikes self-defense, lies about her record, and shilled for a radical Puerto Rican group.  It’s that the hearings showed something very, very specific about her:  she’s a complete mediocrity.  The [...]

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This clip of today’s Sotomayor hearings may just have hit upon the most important constitutional question that faces us all as we confront our devolution into the Obamatopian State. In this segment, Senator Tom Coburn (R., OK) asks Judge Sotomayor whether she agrees that Americans have a basic right to self defense. The ensuing silence [...]

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You know that I don’t like judges.  I’ve certainly made no secret of that fact, and it’s no doubt a by-product of practicing law in a region crawling with activist judges.  Listening to Sotomayor struggle to articulate things — and to avoid her own footprint — in response to Sen. Lindsay Graham’s questioning is painful.  [...]

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The Washington Post is warning Republican senators not to be mean to poor Judge Sotomayor.  It’s a funny (inadvertently funny) article, because the Post editors acknowledge that Obama was anything but gracious when he was a Senator; then they explain why, even though he wasn’t gracious, he was right; and then they urge Republicans to [...]

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Something very weird is going on when a woman has worked 25 plus years as a lawyer (in both the private and public sector), but has only about $1,000 in savings, and less than $1,000,000 in equity. Financial records may show that (a) she gave everything to charity; (b) she gave everything to poor relatives; [...]

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Reviewing the facts and law is so passe.   The New Editor explains how it will be done in the Sotomayor era.

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Phyllis Chesler wrote a nice column today reminding conservatives (a) not to Bork Sotomayor (because two wrongs definitely don’t make a right); and (b) to make sure to develop Sotomayor’s understanding of the Constitution and her role as a judge — because, after all, that is what this whole job interview is about. Because of [...]

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Sotomayor’s statements about judges (better if they’re female and minority) and their role (to make policy) have been disturbing.  It’s worth nothing though that, as James Taranto points out that, on at least one occasion Sotomayor came out strongly in favor of free speech, even though it was very ugly speech: Sotomayor Plays Against Type [...]

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The applause from Sotomayor on the Left is, you’ll pardon me for saying, canned.  They know Sotomayor is not a solid judicial candidate, so they’re focusing on the usual race and sex packaging.  The excitement isn’t there.  This is rote identity politics.  A good example is Ruth Marcus’s column applauding Obama’s choice, which I reproduce, [...]

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I keep seeing headlines all over the place to the effect that Republican Senators will be afraid to vote against the first proposed Hispanic justice.  This may certainly be true for Senators, who are a weaselly, unprincipled bunch, I suspect, though, that for many voters Obama himself is causing the bloom to depart the identity [...]

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Don Quixote and I had a very interesting conversation yesterday about the libertarian way to change societal evils. I don’t recall how the conversation wandered over to that topic, but it seems to me it started with a chance reference to a very well known incident in California in the late 1970s. Back then, a [...]

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This just in, over BNO news: BULLETIN — U.S. SUPREME COURT: SENIOR OFFICIALS CANNOT BE SUED FOR ALLEGED POST 9/11 ABUSE. This is good news, because current administration figures should not be suing past administration figures for the latter’s conduct in a crisis.  I mean, can you imagine if Eisenhower’s administration had gone gunning for [...]

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Okay, I admit it.  I’m easy.  Call me “winsome” and write a thoughtful, well-informed, interesting article about the continuing resonance abortion has on the political process — even if it did not serve as the centerpiece of this last political campaign — and of course I’m going to link to the article.  In this case, [...]

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The Supreme Court has acted and held that Ohio’s mad Democratic Secretary of State can continue to allow every two bit Mickey Mouse and corpse to show up on election day, at multiple polling places, to ensure an Obama victory in that state.

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Just in time for July 4th, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Second Amendment says what it means and means what it says. I personally am not now, nor have I ever been, a gun owner.  I keep meaning to go the local firing range and take lessons (operating on the principle that, since I’m [...]

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I’ve been finding very disturbing the intense hostility that conservatives direct against John McCain. So much so that I wrote a very long rant on the subject, which American Thinker was kind enough to publish and which I reprint below: Perhaps because I’m a neocon, and not a dyed-in-the-wool, native-born conservative, I look at John [...]

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Marriage is not, and never has been, a personal right.  In Western society, it operates at two levels.  First, it functions at a religious level.  This is a deeply personal level, because in every religion, marriage is, or is equivalent to, a sacrament.  In America, you have the Constitutional right to be married in the [...]

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