Women have died as their husbands used that word. Women have been tortured and raped while that word was uttered to rationalize the behavior.

Please. Think about your use of that word.

I didn’t characterize him as a boy constitutional genius at all. I said he has the tools in his head to become a con law scholar if he wants to. Some lawyers have them, and others have as much chance to do so after graduation from law school as my new puppy does.

He has also tried to play down his academic credentials just as the bitch Clinton did although she was much more disingenuous and just plain phony about doing so.

I know what a con law scholar is, and most of the ones I know who are stick with it for years as a living whether academic or practicing lawyers. The population who definitely are not con law scholars, as Judge Posner makes clear explicitly in his new book, are appellate judges and district court judges.

Obama has never claimed to be a con law scholar. I haven’t claimed that for him. I said that he has the means to become one if that’s what he chose to do just as you have in spades.

And you can tear into me all you like. You get a very thick skin doing what I do for years. Go for it.

But read what I said again–you mischaracterized and conflated it. And it’s not repetitive.

I didn’t characterize him as a boy constitutional genius at all. I said he has the tools in his head to become a con law scholar if he wants to. Some lawyers have them, and others have as much chance to do so after graduation from law school as my new puppy does.

He has also tried to play down his academic credentials just as the bitch Clinton did although she was much more disingenuous and just plain phony about doing so.

I know what a con law scholar is, and most of the ones I know who are stick with it for years as a living whether academic or practicing lawyers. The population who definitely are not con law scholars, as Judge Posner makes clear explicitly in his new book, are appellate judges and district court judges.

Obama has never claimed to be a con law scholar. I haven’t claimed that for him. I said that he has the means to become one if that’s what he chose to do just as you have in spades.

And you can tear into me all you like. You get a very thick skin doing what I do for years. Go for it.

But read what I said again–you mischaracterized and conflated it. And it’s not repetitive.

Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Apart:

The Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one can quite point to it.

Mr. Obama had other business on his mind, embarking on five political races during his 12 years at the school. Teaching gave him satisfaction, along with a perch and a paycheck, but he was impatient with academic debates over “whether to drop a footnote or not drop a footnote,” said Abner J. Mikva, a mentor whose own career has spanned Congress, the federal bench and the same law school.

Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

The Republicans who are prominent who have Harvard Law backgrounds are lying to you every day and two of them are are Ken Mehlman and current Senior White House Counselor and Major Strattegist who in effect replaced Andy Card along with Josh Bolten Ed Gillespie. Much of what people who comment here hate, and Marcy and Bmaz and others expose can be laid at the feet of those two individuals along with Addington and their collective staffs.

Obama attended a small unknown college and was picked in a special project from little known Occidental College in LA to go to Columbia University where he excelled. He did not go straight to law school. He went back to South Chicago, lived humbly, and worked his ass off in the streets and actually did help a large number of disenfranchised people on the South Side of Chicago.

While at Columbia Obama majored in poly sci and minored in international relations. He worked in NYC for 4 years after graduating college, then moved to the South Side of Chicago. After 7 years of working after college, he applied to and got into Harvard Law School. There aren’t many kids with his upbringing in the freshman class at Harvard Law ever. Many of them fit the mode where daddy is ensconsed in a 6-7 figure job in a major player law firm.

From Wiki:

Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago’s far South Side.[10][12] During his three years as the DCP’s director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants’ rights organization in Altgeld Gardens. Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute. In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time to Europe for three weeks then Kenya for five weeks where he met many of his Kenyan relatives for the first time.

He never ever represented slum lords–he was on the other end of the stick. I say this because one “LHP” a blogger here and on FDL and a lawyer who has never practiced in an environment in the streets, although she thinks if she went to Harlem that qualifies, and did not drop out of her academic game planafter college before going to Yale Law school to work in the streets of NYC or anywhere else has falsely accused Obama on a FDL blog that gained her some web noteriety as representing slum lords, and as “just another Chicago Pol.”

LHP even tried to smack Obama over his poker games as if they were the stuff of quintissential Boss Tweed graft.

She also misinterpreted Obama’s Present Votes in the Senate which were done expressly at the request of liberal activist entities like Planned Parenthood and NOW.

One Avner Mikvah who was a D.C. Circuit Judge and then went to the White House to serve as President Bill Clinton’s White House Counsel and who is now a full professor at University of Chicago Law School wrote an op ed in NYT explaining Obama’s Yes Votes that LHP critiqued without having any knowledge of what they meant at all. Mikvah served in the Illinois Senate, was an federal appellate judge in arguably the most prestigious although I would hardly say most important circuit (but many would) and is a full time law prof at U Chi. LHP has not yet done those things which might have given her (or a small amount of research) some insight into Obama’s real background far flung from what she portrayed.

When and if LHP can get the Clintons to release
a) Tax returns
b) Foundation Contributors
c) Library Contributors

that will be helpful. And to use LHP’s vernacular, the contributors to the Clinton’s fortune pushing $200 million people are “not particularly law abiding citizens” and muchof the money is dirty and some of the major contributors have now been put in federal prison. Some of them make Tony Rezko look absolutely chiorboyesque.

Incidently, Planned Parenthood is on record with 100% support of Obama’s pro-abortion stance which was mischaracterized in Hugh’s little list on this same blog with different commenters! go figure that one out that exists on FirePuppyLake that I linked here.

I know one who had no federal litigation experience and I have watched her repeatedly at oral argument and I would hope I could deliver a quicky course to a tenth grader and they could ask better questions on the facts and the law of the case. She is poorly prepared most of the time, and I think she frankly lacks a decent 2nd year law student’s grasp of constitutional law, the application of legislative history, (despite Scalia’s objections it’s a major part of the vast percentage of opinions in any Federal Reporter you can throw up in the air and let drop on the floor,k and certainly she cannot find key on point precedents nor can her law clerks seem to.

That’s be one Frank Hull on the Eleventh Circuit CA.

And why we are at it, how about closing down GITMO and terminating the lease, unless we are willing to allow unrestricted travel to Cuba for all Americans (as long as they promise to visit the gulag as part of their visit).

I agree with PP that the knowledge which Obama has of constitutional law and the thought he has had to have about it is light-years beyond McCain’s. Of course this is a very low bar.

I agree with you entirely on FISA. However it’s not fair to Obama to call him vaccuous. He never held himself out to be a con law scholar, but he sure could hold his own against anyone on Feingold’s Constitutional Law subcommittee if he took the time and applied himself.

You know well he hasn’t wanted to appear to be a constitutional law scholar anyway because he is already being beaten up for his education as “too elite.” Why the hell do you think a woman with $200 million from Yale law school kept standing up in the back of pickups and tossing down boiler makers in Pennsylvania and Virginia? You can’t campaign for President by incorporating Scotus Blog’s Academic Roundup in your campaign speeches

If you get on a train Joe Sixpack is probably going to be able to voice an opiinion on the kabuki playing out with Brett Favre and the Pack, but not likely to lightup if you ask his opinion on Glenn Reynolds’ (University of Tennessee College of Law) and Brannon Denning’s (Cumberland School of Law) essay entitled “Heller’s Future in the Lower Courts,” in the Northwestern Law Review
although guns may be near and dear to his heart.

As to your views on FISA, you’ll never have anyone more firmly in your corner who appreciates them than me. I was just as disappointed in Obama there.

However if you compare Obama to almost every Presidential candidate he knows a lot more about con law than they began to.

If and when Obama were to apply himself to a con law issue he would be able to drill it in depth and knows without googling how to get hold of an army of constitutional law scholars, one of which happens to be Cass Sunstein whether he is currently being satanized by the liberal blogosphere or not.

Let’s look at the federal appellate bench. I can go circuit by circuit with you and trial court by trial court. I know some of these people and they are far from constitutional law scholars, and I think I read more constitutional law than a number of appellate judges I know or know about do, and more law reviews and hell that’s not my main occupation. I can show you cases of first impression on the planet in the Eleventh Circuit where one of the better judges Stan Birch (whose conservative leanings I often don’t agree with and his law clerks particularly in criminal opinions) who hires some of the better law clerks at that Circuit who has missed key precedents including precedents that he himself wrote.
And just because I didn’t take care of or talk about a pheochromocytoma yesterday or in a long while, doesn’t mean that I can’t or that I can’t marshall enormous resources to do so in a state of the art way if I have to.
If Obama were occupied day to day in drilling con law as many law professors or the appellate attorneys who are immersed in it who run SCOTUS Blog, he could hold his own.

On the other hand, Clarence Thomas wasn’t denied a job in Atlanta out of law school because he was black. He was denied a job because he couldn’t have begun to cut it at the law firms where he applied period.

And when I see lists like Hugh’s (for some goofyreason separate comments to this same blog were put up on FDL by separate commenters–you go figure that one because I simply can’t) when someone like Hugh writes that Obama didn’t offer universal health care and Hillary did that’s simply naive to the max.

If you want to get an idea and this goes for Hugh as to what health care isn’t, try delivering it for years. I’ve paid close attention to health issues and studied them and the promises by candidates who began making them before I was born. There are always promises rolled out particularly in the last few campaigns and not one of them sees the light of day.

Right now we have a tremendously systemic problem that in many large states ambulances have a ridiculous ETA to a hospital in major trauma cases and this kills. We have a huge problem that middle income Americans are vastly underinsured with huge deductables and have a helluva time getting to see the right physician. 1/5 Americans claims to have this problem. Of those reporting access to physician problems last year, 43.5 million had insurance, compared with 25.9 million in 2003. Many of the underinsured earn 200% of the federal poverty level. The poverty level is $17,600 for a family of three and that number of 200% included 11.4 million in 2007 up by 7.2 million since 2003.

17.5% of the uninsured said they had a major unmet medical need for health care in 2007. 28.6% of people said they could not physically get to a doctor’s office when it was open.

All of this means for example that someone who has AODM Type “II” may not get care early on when it can be tightly controlled with two rather inexpensive default drugs out of the hundred or so we have at our fingertips like Glucophage and Glipizide BID and when they are seen they may have significant retinal lesions, renal problems and skin problems that can lead to amputation. And the care for many of the inner city hospitals affiliated with tertiary centers that end up caring for them is exponentially higher when that happens. I don’t see a lot of “solutions” for that in either of the Democratic Senators’ plans, and I don’t need to tell you that while McCain wants to pour billions down the tube in Iraq so that we can get oil deals for Big Oil, his health care plan is “let ‘em eat fucking cake.”

It has now become a struggle for most physicians who are not part of a very large corporation or Kaiser type clinic one day at a time with insurance companies and their red tape and bureaucracy.

Hillary’s plan and Obama’s plan as I’ve said before left much that they couldn’t acount for or deal with, and that’s before Congress would metabolize them thoroughly with legislation written by the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies.

For the most part, access to health care is being completely controlled by insurace companies who additionally are paving the way for identity theft by mailing out 250,000 Social Security numbers to the wrong addresses like Blue Cross did the other day.

Constitutional law scholarship isn’t going to be paraded in any presidential campaign. However you’re correct that Obama could have shown the background he has by doing the correct thing and exhibited leadership in FISA and I subscribe to all your statements there and I’m deeply disappointed with what he did.

Unfortunately, we don’t know much really about how a candidate will perform until he spends time in the Oval. Look at Bush. What experience did he have in Austin? Not much and it damn well shows now.

The Supreme Court appointed him in the first election and it is not likely we’ll know what happened in Ohio in thesecond one for Bush.