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After nearly two decades on the United States Supreme Court, Associate Justice David Souter is announcing that he will be retiring from the bench. He is expected to serve until his replacement is nominated by Pres. Barack Obama and conformed by the Senate.
Justice Souter was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1990 by Pres. George H.W. Bush. Souter was initially cast as a conservative on the Court, but has moved toward the liberal side, voting most often with the liberal side of the present Court. Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer are generally thought of as the Court’s liberal wing.
The retirement of Justice Souter presents the Obama White House with its first big test of establishing the Obama agenda for the longterm. It is thought that this Presidency will have the opportunity to make two, if not three, appointments, given Justice Stevens age (88), and Justice Ginsberg’s health. Given that all three of these Justices make up the present liberal wing, an appointment of a Justice with similar ideology may well have little affect on the Robert’s Court. Additionally, given the fact that Souter was initially appointed for his conservatism, it is not out of the realm of possibility that at least one Obama appointee may disappoint his leftist base.
And it is that “base” that will now be Obama’s test. His first federal judge appointee is an avid ACORN fundraiser and supporter. His challenge for his appointee for Souter’s seat will be to satisfy his base while at the same time not appearing to be leaning too far off the centrist view. An initial list of possible appointees has probably already been prepared, particularly in light of Justice Ginsberg’s cancer surgery. But she has made it clear that she has no intentions of stepping down in the near future.
Whoever the appointee is, they will be in for a volatile confirmation process, so let’s hope the vetting is far better than it has been for the Cabinet positions.
Update: As of 1:45pm EST, there had been no official announcement from the Court, and Pres. Obama deferred any questions about Souter’s retirement. It had been noted in recent weeks that Souter was the only Justice who had not yet hired law clerks for the next session.
UPDATE: Pres. Obama interrupted his Press Secretary, ROBERT GLIBB, to announce that he had spoken with Justice Souter, and had accepted his resignation. Let the Judicial Games begin!
Olbermann’s Plastic Ivy
Fortunately, we have Keith Olbermann to point out that Rush Limbaugh did not accurately quote the preamble to the Constitution in his CPAC speech last weekend. I’m not sure what scam Olbermann imagined Rush was trying to put over on the American people by saying conservatives believed in the “preamble to the Constitution” and then quoting words from the Declaration of Independence — but Olbermann put an end to that cruel deception!
These small-time opportunities to show off by correcting someone else’s teeny-tiny mistakes are the lifeblood of Olbermann’s MSNBC show, “Countdown.” Olbermann is no more capable of not correcting Rep. Charlie Rangel when he said “inferred,” but meant “implied,” than an obsessive compulsive could pass a sink without washing his hands.
There is utterly no purpose to these lame “gotchas,” except that Olbermann is so desperately insecure that he is willing to waste valuable airtime in order to convince other status-conscious idiots that he is, like, scary-smart.
Olbermann relentlessly attacked low-level Bush administration employee Monica Goodling for not going to a name-dropping college, saying — approximately 1 million times — that she got her law degree “by sending 100 box tops to Religious Lunatic University.”
I would venture to say that the students at Goodling’s law school at Regent University are far more impressive than those at the Cornell agriculture school — the land-grant, non-Ivy League school Keith attended.
I wouldn’t mention it, except that Olbermann savages anyone who didn’t go to an impressive college. As it happens, he didn’t go to an impressive college, either.
If you’ve ever watched any three nights of his show, you know that Olbermann went to Cornell. But he always forgets to mention that he went to the school that offers classes in milking and bovine management.
Indeed, Keith is constantly lying about his nonexistent “Ivy League” education, boasting to Playboy magazine, for example: “My Ivy League education taught me how to cut corners, skim books and take an idea and write 15 pages on it, and also how to work all day at the Cornell radio station and never actually go to class.”
Except Keith didn’t go to the Ivy League Cornell; he went to the Old MacDonald Cornell.
The real Cornell, the School of Arts and Sciences (average SAT: 1,325; acceptance rate: 1 in 6 applicants), is the only Ivy League school at Cornell and the only one that grants a Bachelor of Arts degree.
Keith went to an affiliated state college at Cornell, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (average SAT: about that of pulling guards at the University of South Carolina; acceptance rate: 1 of every 1.01 applicants).
Olbermann’s incessant lying about having an “Ivy League education” when he went to the non-Ivy League ag school at Cornell would be like a graduate of the Yale locksmithing school boasting about being a “Yale man.”
Among the graduates of the Ivy League Cornell are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Thomas Pynchon, Paul Wolfowitz, E.B. White, Sanford I. Weill, Floyd Abrams, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Ginsburg, Janet Reno, Henry Heimlich and Harold Bloom.
Graduates of the ag school include David LeNeveu of the Anaheim Ducks, Mitch Carefoot of the Phoenix RoadRunners, Darren Eliot, former professional hockey player, and Joe Nieuwendyk, multiple Stanley Cup winner.
One begins to understand why Harvard students threw a chicken on the ice during Cornell’s famous rout of Harvard at a 1973 hockey game.
If you actually want to pursue a career related to agriculture, there is no better school than the Cornell ag school. I have nothing but admiration for the farmers and aspiring veterinarians at the ag school. They didn’t go there just to have “Cornell” on their resumes.
In addition to the farmers, there are some smart kids who go to the ag school — as there are at all state universities. But most people who majored in “communications” at an ag school don’t act like Marshall Scholars or go around mocking graduates of Regent University Law School.
The sort of insecurity that would force you to always say “trebled” instead of “tripled” could only come from a communications major with massive status anxiety, like Keith. Without even looking it up, I am confident that Harvard, Yale and Princeton do not offer degrees in “communications.” I know there is no “communications” major at the Ivy League Cornell.
“Communications” is a major, along with “recreation science,” most commonly associated with linemen at USC. But at least the linemen can throw a football, which Keith cannot because his mother decided he was not physically robust enough to play outdoors as a child.
It may seem cruel to reveal the true college of someone who already wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worried that he’s a fraud. But I believe that by pointing out that Olbermann actually is a fraud, I am liberating him.
You may not realize it now, Keith, but you will look back on this day and say, “That was the best thing that ever happened to me!”
Finally, you can stop pretending that you went to the hard-to-get-into Cornell.
Now you won’t have to quickly change the subject whenever people idly remark that they didn’t know it was possible to major in “communications” at an Ivy League school.
No longer will you have to aggressively bring up Cornell when it has nothing to do with the conversation.
Relax, Keith. Now you can let people like you for you.
http://townhall.com/columnists/AnnCoulter/2009/03/04/olbermanns_plastic_ivy?page=2
