2nd GOP member supports violence against judges...Edit...make that a *3rd*!

[imported_tss4]

Originally posted by: BaliBabyDoc
Cornyn is a tool. The fact that such a tool can rise to Chief Justice in TX . . . well . . . draw your own conclusion.

Yes, the title of this thread is not accurate. But Cornyn's ramblings vary from merely poor logic (linking recent PARTICULAR violence to displeasure with GENERAL judicial decisions) to clear malfeasance (mispresenting the opinions of Constitutional scholars). Both are driven by his politics.

All the more reason to note the irony, it is the unaccountable, arrogant, AND ignorant Congress that needs to be reigned in.

Why beat up on conjur? While the title is Ripesque . . . the topic is certainly worthy of discussion. Per norm, the peanut gallery prefers to quibble with the ancillary instead of address the real issues.

Are we nit picking or are we debating the Topic as printed at the top of this thread? If you want to debate the stupidity of republican's screaming over activist judges then start a topic on it, but don't call it "2nd GOP member supports violence against judges" unless you plan on discussing his supposed support of violence against judges. And Rips threads are a waste of forum space, so why would you defend anyone acting like rip?

 

[imported_tss4]

Originally posted by: miketheidiot

Originally posted by: tss4
You're out of your mind, conjur. I still have yet to see a single reference to something Cornyn said that advocated violence against the judges. He has yet never said that its a good way to effect change on the bench. He said frustration with the bench may be a cause of violence against the bench. You yourself have said that frustration with US policies is a cause of terrorist action. Does that mean you condone terrorism? I doubt it. You need to take step back and reflect on how both liberals and conservatives are telling you you're grasping at straws here.

he did however excuse it, which is almost as bad.

Well, that's a charge that's reasonable.

 

[Starbuck1975]

I meant the Congress. They're attacking their own judges for not doing the Lord's will, apparently.

Which is political suicide...at least historically speaking, attempts by the legislature or executive branch to restrict or otherwise control the judiciary have not gone unnoticed by the electorate.

 

[cquark]

Originally posted by: Genx87

Originally posted by: conjur
I see Cornyn's comments as a veiled threat. More subtle than DeLay's but there nonetheless. Maybe not necessarily threatening violence but threatening their tenure and a warning that violence could come from others.

Really reading into something.

Nice judiciary you have there. It would be a pity if anything happened to it.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
I agree that saying he condone's violence against judges is a stretch.

I agree that, as a public official, with media access, he should have prefaced his analysis with a strong condemnation, rather than what appeared to be a weak afterthought.

If you bear in mind that violence and threats of violence against judges for what are assumed to be political decisions, with few exceptions, seem to be coming from what we call the "radical right", a prudent person would take care not to offer anything that could be construed (or misconstrued) as supporting them. Ideally, our politicians should be smart enough to see this and act accordingly. The examples from the Shiavo case should be fresh in their minds.

I don't see this as support for violence, but a political move to further the Republican agenda against "activist judges".

The problem is that you have no before and after quote. There simply is not enough there to condemn the guy.

I'm not Cornyn's biggest fan, but I just don't see where - even if there is an offense - that he should resign immediately :roll: That is just partisan, hyperbolic crap.

 

[BaliBabyDoc]

Originally posted by: tss4

Originally posted by: BaliBabyDoc
Cornyn is a tool. The fact that such a tool can rise to Chief Justice in TX . . . well . . . draw your own conclusion.

Yes, the title of this thread is not accurate. But Cornyn's ramblings vary from merely poor logic (linking recent PARTICULAR violence to displeasure with GENERAL judicial decisions) to clear malfeasance (mispresenting the opinions of Constitutional scholars). Both are driven by his politics.

All the more reason to note the irony, it is the unaccountable, arrogant, AND ignorant Congress that needs to be reigned in.

Why beat up on conjur? While the title is Ripesque . . . the topic is certainly worthy of discussion. Per norm, the peanut gallery prefers to quibble with the ancillary instead of address the real issues.

Are we nit picking or are we debating the Topic as printed at the top of this thread? If you want to debate the stupidity of republican's screaming over activist judges then start a topic on it, but don't call it "2nd GOP member supports violence against judges" unless you plan on discussing his supposed support of violence against judges. And Rips threads are a waste of forum space, so why would you defend anyone acting like rip?

Debating the "title" of a thread is retarded when there's a substative discussion to be had about tool pols. I didn't start the thread so it's not my responsibility to fix the title. Unlike most of Rips' threads . . . there's actually a worthy topic of discussion underlying conjur's post. Further, you cannot have a debate when EVERYONE says the title is wrong. No one worth your time is arguing that Cornyn actually advocated FOR violence against judges.

I did not "defend" conjur. I clearly stated the title sux (eg Ripesque) but the topic was worthy (IMO).

 

[imported_tss4]

Originally posted by: BaliBabyDoc

Originally posted by: tss4

Originally posted by: BaliBabyDoc
Cornyn is a tool. The fact that such a tool can rise to Chief Justice in TX . . . well . . . draw your own conclusion.

Yes, the title of this thread is not accurate. But Cornyn's ramblings vary from merely poor logic (linking recent PARTICULAR violence to displeasure with GENERAL judicial decisions) to clear malfeasance (mispresenting the opinions of Constitutional scholars). Both are driven by his politics.

All the more reason to note the irony, it is the unaccountable, arrogant, AND ignorant Congress that needs to be reigned in.

Why beat up on conjur? While the title is Ripesque . . . the topic is certainly worthy of discussion. Per norm, the peanut gallery prefers to quibble with the ancillary instead of address the real issues.

Are we nit picking or are we debating the Topic as printed at the top of this thread? If you want to debate the stupidity of republican's screaming over activist judges then start a topic on it, but don't call it "2nd GOP member supports violence against judges" unless you plan on discussing his supposed support of violence against judges. And Rips threads are a waste of forum space, so why would you defend anyone acting like rip?

Debating the "title" of a thread is retarded when there's a substative discussion to be had about tool pols. I didn't start the thread so it's not my responsibility to fix the title. Unlike most of Rips' threads . . . there's actually a worthy topic of discussion underlying conjur's post. Further, you cannot have a debate when EVERYONE says the title is wrong. No one worth your time is arguing that Cornyn actually advocated FOR violence against judges.

I did not "defend" conjur. I clearly stated the title sux (eg Ripesque) but the topic was worthy (IMO).

Then start a thread debating the worthy topic. This thread WAS started to argue that Cornyn actually advocated FOR violence against judges (read the original post and subsequent defenses by conjur). You and I both agree that's stupid. Problem, is stupid thread topics like this make us liberals look like partisan hacks here and rob us of our credibility when we discuss something worthwhile. Conservatives are about as likely to have an honest debate in a thread titled like this one, than I am to debate them in a thread titled "democratic senator wants our troops dead"

 

[aidanjm]

Originally posted by: Kibbo
Hi is criticizing the judiciary, and suggesting that the cause of the violence towards the judiciary is their lack of accountability (which is rather stupid), but he nowhere justifies the actions of those who commit the violence.

I draw a parallel with this argument:

Those who perpetrated the atrocity of 9/11 did so because of a rising frustration regarding the real and percieved effects of American economic and military impirialism.

It is somewhat blaming the victim, and yet it does not excuse the perpetrators from culpability. It tries to explain their actions without excusing them.

Is it not reasonable, tho, to want a politician or public figure to make an explicit, unambiguous condemnation of the violence (when talking on this subject)? It seems like this guy didn't do that, which might leave people wondering where he stands..

 

[Bumrush99]

I'm shocked.

Al Queda has already won the war on terror. They wanted a scared public and a strong US government that would limit the one thing we cherish most- Freedom.

We are slowly heading towards a theocracy with big brother watching our every move when a United States Senator has the audicity to make such comments. It's time to take this country back at all costs, we are headed down a slippery slope that can only get worse.

 

[arsbanned]

See Germany 1933. It's easier to just go along.
I suspect that some actually approve of the idea of harming judges that do not support their own narrow ideas. Nobody will have the cojones to say it directly, but they are thinking it.

 

[conjur]

Hmmmm.....


CIA Textbook on Psychological Operations In Guerrilla Warfare
http://www.tscm.com/CIA_PsyOps_Handbook.html

5. Selective Use of Violence for Propagandistic Effects

It is possible to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets, such as
court judges, mesta judges, police and State Security officials, CDS chiefs,
etc. For psychological purposes it is necessary to gather together the
population affected, so that they will be present, take part in the act, and
formulate accusations against the oppressor.

The target or person should be chosen on the basis of:

* The spontaneous hostility that the majority of the population feels toward
the target.

* Use rejection or potential hatred by the majority of the population
affected toward the target, stirring up the population and making them see all
the negative and hostile actions of the individual against the people.

* If the majority of the people give their support or backing to the target
or subject, do not try to change these sentiments through provocation.

* Relative difficulty of controlling the person who will replace the target.

The person who will replace the target should be chosen carefully, based on:

* Degree of violence necessary to carry out the change.

* Degree of violence acceptable to the population affected.

* Degree of predictable reprisal by the enemy on the population affected or
other individuals in the area of the target.

The mission to replace the individual should be followed by:

* Extensive explanation within the population affected of the reason why it was
necessary for the good of the people.

 

[BBond]

This BS has to stop. Just read this garbage! These people have the nerve to refer to themselves as moral? Schafly and the rest of these goons as well as DeLay and his friends from the putrid state of Texas should all be locked up.

Wake up people. Look at what your support is enabling.

These people are fascist scum.

And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty

By Dana Milbank
Saturday, April 9, 2005; Page A03

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is a fairly accomplished jurist, but he might want to get himself a good lawyer -- and perhaps a few more bodyguards.

Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" decided that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.

Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy's opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles "is a good ground of impeachment." To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the "good behavior" requirement for office and that "Congress ought to talk about impeachment."

Next, Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said Kennedy "should be the poster boy for impeachment" for citing international norms in his opinions. "If our congressmen and senators do not have the courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, they ought to be impeached as well."

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush's judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.

A judge in Atlanta and the husband and mother of a judge in Chicago were murdered in recent weeks. After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to "engage in violence."

"The people who have been speaking out on this, like Tom DeLay and Senator Cornyn, need to be backed up," Schlafly said to applause yesterday. One worker at the event wore a sticker declaring "Hooray for DeLay."

The conference was organized during the height of the Schiavo controversy by a new group, the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. This was no collection of fringe characters. The two-day program listed two House members; aides to two senators; representatives from the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; conservative activists Alan Keyes and Morton C. Blackwell; the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's parents; Alabama's "Ten Commandments" judge, Roy Moore; and DeLay, who canceled to attend the pope's funeral.

The Schlafly session's moderator, Richard Lessner of the American Conservative Union, opened the discussion by decrying a "radical secularist relativist judiciary." It turned more harsh from there.

Schlafly called for passage of a quartet of bills in Congress that would remove courts' power to review religious displays, the Pledge of Allegiance, same-sex marriage and the Boy Scouts. Her speech brought a subtle change in the argument against the courts from emphasizing "activist" judges -- it was, after all, inaction by federal judges that doomed Schiavo -- to "supremacist" judges. "The Constitution is not what the Supreme Court says it is," Schlafly asserted.

Former representative William Dannemeyer (R-Calif.) followed Schlafly, saying the country's "principal problem" is not Iraq or the federal budget but whether "we as a people acknowledge that God exists."

Farris then told the crowd he is "sick and tired of having to lobby people I helped get elected." A better-educated citizenry, he said, would know that "Medicare is a bad idea" and that "Social Security is a horrible idea when run by the government." Farris said he would block judicial power by abolishing the concept of binding judicial precedents, by allowing Congress to vacate court decisions, and by impeaching judges such as Kennedy, who seems to have replaced Justice David H. Souter as the target of conservative ire. "If about 40 of them get impeached, suddenly a lot of these guys would be retiring," he said.

Vieira, a constitutional lawyer who wrote "How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary," escalated the charges, saying a Politburo of "five people on the Supreme Court" has a "revolutionary agenda" rooted in foreign law and situational ethics. Vieira, his eyeglasses strapped to his head with black elastic, decried the "primordial illogic" of the courts.

Invoking Stalin, Vieira delivered the "no man, no problem" line twice for emphasis. "This is not a structural problem we have; this is a problem of personnel," he said. "We are in this mess because we have the wrong people as judges."

A court spokeswoman declined to comment.

 

[conjur]

That culture of life sure is picky about who gets life and who gets death.

 

[mhillary]

Thats just shocking.

 

[conjur]

In Contempt of Courts
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050425&s=blumenthal

Michael Schwartz must have thought I was just another attendee of the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference. I approached the chief of staff of Oklahoma's GOP Senator Tom Coburn outside the conference in downtown Washington last Thursday afternoon after he spoke there. Before I could introduce myself, he turned to me and another observer with a crooked smile and exclaimed, "I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!"

For two days, on April 7 and 8, conservative activists and top GOP staffers summoned the raw rage of the Christian right following the Terri Schiavo affair, and likened judges to communists, terrorists and murderers. The remedies they suggested for what they termed "judicial tyranny" ranged from the mass impeachment of judges to their physical elimination.

The speakers included embattled House majority leader Tom DeLay, conservative matriarch Phyllis Schlafly and failed Republican senatorial candidate Alan Keyes. Like a perform­ance artist, Keyes riled the crowd up, mixing animadversions on constitutional law with sudden, stentorian salvos against judges. "Ronald Reagan said the Soviet Union was the focus of evil during the cold war. I believe that the judiciary is the focus of evil in our society today," Keyes declared, slapping the lectern for emphasis.

[...]

The threatening tenor of the conference speakers was a calculated tactic. As Gary Cass, the director of Rev. D. James Kennedy's lobbying front, the Center for Reclaiming America, explained, they are arousing the anger of their base in order to harness it politically. The rising tide of threats against judges "is understandable," Cass told me, "but we have to take the opportunity to channel that into a constitutional solution."

Judges are part of the Axis of Evil now?

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: conjur

For two days, on April 7 and 8, conservative activists and top GOP staffers summoned the raw rage of the Christian right following the Terri Schiavo affair, and likened judges to communists, terrorists and murderers.

"but we have to take the opportunity to channel that into a constitutional solution."

Judges are part of the Axis of Evil now?
[/quote]

I'm afraid what that "constitutional solution" will be.

It will actually mean the disolution of it.

 

[BaliBabyDoc]

This episode is beautiful. The more they rant and drool . . . the more of America realizes they really don't want to be associated with these people.

The simple fact is the overwelming majority of Americans respect the judiciary . . . both locally and nationally. We may not agree with every decision but it's probably the sole branch of government that anyone would describe as fair, honest, and "working" for the people.

 

[conjur]

Originally posted by: dmcowen674

Originally posted by: conjur

For two days, on April 7 and 8, conservative activists and top GOP staffers summoned the raw rage of the Christian right following the Terri Schiavo affair, and likened judges to communists, terrorists and murderers.

"but we have to take the opportunity to channel that into a constitutional solution."

Judges are part of the Axis of Evil now?

I'm afraid what that "constitutional solution" will be.

It will actually mean the disolution of it.

I think it will involve a bit of:

"PRAY-EEZE JAY-SUS"

 

[1EZduzit]

Originally posted by: Bumrush99
I'm shocked.

Al Queda has already won the war on terror. They wanted a scared public and a strong US government that would limit the one thing we cherish most- Freedom.

We are slowly heading towards a theocracy with big brother watching our every move when a United States Senator has the audicity to make such comments. It's time to take this country back at all costs, we are headed down a slippery slope that can only get worse.

Well put. I don't know what Al Queda thought was going to happen, but it has sure given our leadership an opening to curb our rights as much as they can get away. I've always said that the difference between the Repugs and Dems is that the Repugs can fix this countries problems, they just need to take away some of your rights and the Dems can fix the problems they just need more money. I'd rather give up my money then my rights any day. It seems to be a "your money or your life" type scenario to me.