Thursday, July 2, 2009

GOP senator: Sotomayor group's 'extreme positions'

By Julie Hirschfeld Davis


A top Republican senator says a Puerto Rican legal advocacy group advised by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor took extreme positions on capital punishment, abortion and racial quotas.


Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions says it's absurd for the White House to argue that documents detailing the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund's activities while Sotomayor sat on its board are not relevant to her nomination.


He's the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee evaluating the federal appeals court judge.


The White House says the panel already has all relevant information on Sotomayor.


Sessions says more PRLDEF documents could shed light on Sotomayor's approach, including her views on racial preferences in employment.


THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.


WASHINGTON (AP) _ The White House hit back Thursday at a key Republican senator who has accused Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's allies of withholding documents from her past.


White House Counsel Greg Craig told Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, that board meeting minutes and other papers detailing the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund's activities while Sotomayor was an outside adviser aren't relevant to her nomination. Republicans have raised concerns about the judge's involvement in the group, arguing it has taken extreme positions.


Sotomayor early last month gave the panel documents she contributed to or helped write as a board member, but Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Judiciary chairman, joined Sessions recently in asking for more information about the group's activities and policy positions while she was involved.


The organization, now know as Latino Justice PRLDEF, began sending some of that material to the committee Wednesday, but Sessions' office said Sotomayor's backers were delaying the release of the information to prevent a thorough investigation.


Cesar Perales, PRLDEF's president and general counsel, told the AP earlier this week that he planned to send the documents on a rolling basis, and all of them would arrive on Capitol Hill by the end of the week. Hearings on Sotomayor's nomination are scheduled to begin July 13.


In a letter to Sessions, Craig said the Judiciary panel already has all pertinent documents on Sotomayor. He said the judge never served on PRLDEF's staff or supervised its employees, and noted that Republicans have in years past refused to release similar documents on their own Supreme Court nominees

So Much for Wise Latinas

Ann Coulter :: Townhall.com Columnist
by Ann Coulter




With the Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano this week, we can now report that Sonia Sotomayor is even crazier than Ruth Bader Ginsburg.


To recap the famous Ricci case, in 2003, the city of New Haven threw out the results of a firefighters' test -- which had been expressly designed to be race-neutral -- because only whites and Hispanics scored high enough to receive immediate promotions, whereas blacks who took the test did well enough only to be eligible for promotions down the line.



Inasmuch as the high-scoring white and Hispanic firemen were denied promotions solely because of their race, they sued the city for race discrimination.


Obama's Justice-designate Sotomayor threw out their lawsuit in a sneaky, unsigned opinion -- the judicial equivalent of "talk to the hand." She upheld the city's race discrimination against white and Hispanic firemen on the grounds that the test had a "disparate impact" on blacks, meaning that it failed to promote some magical percentage of blacks.


This strict quota regime was dressed up by the city -- and by Sotomayor's opinion -- as a reasonable reaction to the threat of lawsuits by blacks who were not promoted.


That's a complicated way of saying: Racial quotas are peachy.


According to Sotomayor, any test that gets the numbers wrong -- whatever "wrong" means in any given context of professions, populations, applicants, workers, etc. -- is grounds for a lawsuit, which in turn, is grounds for an employer to engage in race discrimination against disfavored racial groups, such as white men.


Consequently, the only legal avenue available to employers under Sotomayor's ruling is always to impose strict racial quotas in making hiring and promotion decisions.


Say, if the threat of a lawsuit permits the government to ignore the Constitution, can pro-lifers get New Haven to shut down all abortion clinics by threatening to sue them? There's no question but that abortion clinics have a "disparate impact" on black babies.


This week, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 for the white and Hispanic firefighters, overturning Sotomayor's endorsement of racial quotas.


But all nine justices rejected Sotomayor's holding that different test results alone give the government a green light to engage in race discrimination. Even Justice Ginsburg's opinion for the dissent clearly stated that "an employer could not cast aside a selection method based on a statistical disparity alone."


Indeed, the dissenters argued that the case should be returned to the lower courts to look for some hidden racial bias in the test. For Sotomayor, the results alone proved racial bias.


The one advantage Sotomayor's talk-to-the-hand opinion has over Justice Ginsburg's prolix dissent is that brevity prevented Sotomayor from having to explain why quotas aren't quotas.


That was left to Ginsburg.


Liberals desperately want race quotas -- as long as quotas never come to their offices.

The latest on eBay's Obama 'Kenyan birth certificate'


WND Exclusive

BORN IN THE USA?



Now it's an autographed photograph for sale

By Bob Unruh
© 2009 WorldNetDaily


The eBay auction seller who has tried multiple times to sell an allegedly genuine copy of Barack Obama's "Kenyan birth certificate" now is offering for sale a photograph of individuals who reportedly contributed to the strategy through which the still-unproven document was obtained.


And the seller, identified as "colmado_naranja," who claims to have obtained the document while traveling Africa, suggested more information will be revealed on a planned YouTube video.


"My user name is InspectorSmith. I've had the account for some time. I have never uploaded anything. ... So this will be the first time that I've ever uploaded anything. So you'll get your document yet, up close and personal," the seller wrote on the latest eBay posting.


The seller explained previously that Kenyans had boasted Barack Obama II was born in the Coast Provincial Hospital in Mombasa at 7:24 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1961, which correlates to speculation that has existed over the president's birthplace since prior to his election.






The seller made four attempts to auction the "evidence," which would presumably render Obama ineligible to serve as president for violating the "natural born citizen" clause. The eBay website has a policy forbidding the sale of certain government

documents, which presumably led to the auction page being removed.



Screenshot of the seller's fifth attempt, with bids approaching $1,000,000, shortly before it was remove


In the fifth attempt at auctioning "the truth about Obama," the seller didn't mention the birth certificate, offering instead a "dissertation" on Obama's birthplace, and the auction page still disappeared.


Ultimately, eBay sent e-mails to members who had exchanged information with the seller, warning them the contact from the seller may be an attempt at fraud.


Now the seller has posted an offer of an autographed photograph of a couple of the people who purportedly helped obtain the document. There were several dozen bids, bringing the price to $365 today.


"I want to make clear that this whole endeavor to obtain information on O's birth was a three man job (more accurately 2 men and 1 lady). Andylenny. Smith. Dawnella Wilson. Smith and Andylenny are (due) the credit for actually getting their hands on the proof. Dawnella Wilson is due credit for financing the whole undertaking. The photo in this listing is up for auction. On the left is Smith and on the right is Andylenny. This photo will be signed by Smith, as Smith. This will be the only autographed photo put up for auction. One auction, one winning bidder, one photo. No more," the seller wrote.




The latest auction is active as of this afternoon on eBay.


The seller offered thanks to the eBay community, those who wrote in about the issue, attorneys and paralegals who made contacts and "all military personnel that have written to me with their support, opinions and offers as hired guns."


"There won't be anymore eBay auctions for documents, stories or dissertations," the seller wrote.


"After the YouTube video I will be heading over to WorldNetDaily to talk with Joseph Farah. I will disclose everything to them," the seller continued. Contact between the seller and WND has so far been limited to an exchange of e-mails.


And no such YouTube video could be found today.


The seller also addressed doubts held by Jerome Corsi, a senior WND staff writer who traveled to Kenya and Hawaii to investigate Obama's birth circumstances.


"I have great respect for you. You're not just a talker but, a doer as well. While many have talked of O's birth, you actually went abroad to get something tangible. Congrats. However, just because you couldn't pull it off doesn't mean that I wasn't able to."

The 'Absentee' Senator

Franken wins by changing the rules.


The Minnesota Supreme Court yesterday declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of last year's disputed Senate race, and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman's gracious concession at least spares the state any further legal combat. The unfortunate lesson is that you don't need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact.


Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat's strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.


But the team's real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman's lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.


What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel's findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn't demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn't lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.


This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire's team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn't been counted, setting off a hunt for "new" Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she'd discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.


Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don't end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.