President Obama’s quest to transform federal courts by appointing unqualified leftist ideologues is worse than previously imagined, according to a mainstream newspaper that reports the notoriously liberal American Bar Association (ABA) has rejected a “significant number” of potential judicial nominees, most of them minorities and women.
This is hardly earth-shattering news considering Obama’s judicial appointments so far. However, the ABA rebuff sheds light into the magnitude of the president’s crusade to stockpile the federal court system, where judges get lifetime appointments, with like-minded activists. In fact, Obama has made it an official policy to “diversify” the federal bench when it comes to gender, race and even life experiences.
But the White House has agreed not to nominate any candidates deemed unqualified by the ABA, the 400,000-member trade association that provides law school accreditation. Though it claims to be an impartial group of lawyers, the ABA usually takes liberal positions on divisive issues and Democratic/liberal nominees are more likely to receive the group’s highest rating of “well qualified” compared to their Republican/conservative counterparts. This has been documented in various studies, including a recent one conducted by political science departments at three Georgia universities.
With this in mind, one can only imagine how deficient Obama’s rejected candidates really are. Their identities and negative ABA ratings have not been made public, but inside sources tell the paper that broke the story this week that nearly all of the prospects were women or members of a minority group. Nine are reportedly women—five white, two black and two Hispanic—and of the five men one his white, two are black and two are Hispanic.
The number of Obama hopefuls stamped “not qualified” already exceeds the total opposed by the ABA during the eight-year administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the story points out. That means Obama’s rejection rate is more than triple what it was under either of those previous administrations.
I don’t know for sure, but I expect that the nominees would be people like Obama’s friends: the racist Jeremiah Wright, domestic terrorist Bernadine Dohrn and Marxist Bertha Lewis.
I posted this to highlight another way that electing an unqualified leftist harms the country. It’s no wonder that companies are shipping jobs overseas – what company would want to run afoul of a judge whose only judicial qualification is being a member of politicized left-wing hate groups?
In a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republicans questioned Attorney General Eric Holder about the smuggling of weapons to Mexican gun cartels through Operation Fast and Furious, when he knew about its existence and what he did about it when he learned of it.
Republicans pushed Holder on why it took him nine months to respond to memos sent to the Department of Justice.
“I am eager to hear whether the Attorney General thinks that is acceptable and what he intends to do about it,” said Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa).
While the Fast and Furious gun smuggling scandal was at the top of everyone’s mind, and what conservatives specifically wanted to hear about, only a few Republican senators grilled him on it. Democrats on the committee tried to talk about nearly everything else, including treatment of Muslims by the Department of Justice, bath salt regulations, and anti-bullying measures.
The Republicans that did come out swinging on Fast and Furious got Holder to give stammering and often inconsistent testimony.
[…]Cornyn also had the most intense exchanges with Holder during the entire hearing, asking about the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and whether or not Holder would like to apologize to the family.
“It pains me whenever there is the death of a law enforcement official, especially under the circumstances. It is not fair, however, to assume that the mistakes that happened in Fast and Furious directly led to the death of Agent Terry,” Holder said.
Cornyn also asked whether or not anyone in the Department of Justice has been made accountable for the errors that have been made.
“Can you name me one person who’s been held accountable for this Fast and Furious Operation? Just one in the Department of Justice?” Cornyn said.
Holder responded: “Well we have made a number of changes with regard to personnel both in the Phoenix U.S. Attorney’s Office, also at the ATF Headquarters here. I will certainly await the report that comes out of the Inspector General. And I will assure you and the American people that people will be held accountable for any mistakes that were made in connection with Fast and Furious.”
Wow… I think the Republicans might be a bit angry about how that Border Patrol agent got murdered because of this gun-smuggling operation, which was administered by the Department of Justice. I think Eric Holder knows more than he is admitting to, based on his evasive, politicized answers.
His column on National Review is the second most popular at the time I write this (Wednesday night).
Excerpt:
And as regards same-sex marriage, why is the normative Christian and Jewish belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman anti-science and anti-intellectual? What we have here is the usual left-wing tactic of smearing opponents. If you disagree with race-based affirmative action, you are a racist; disagree with the ever-expanding welfare state, you lack compassion; disagree with redefining marriage in the most radical way ever attempted in history, and you are a hater. No wonder the Left developed the foolish and destructive self-esteem movement — no one has anywhere near the self-esteem leftists have. They are certain that they are better human beings in every way than those who have the temerity to oppose them.
This Jew will take the evangelicals’ values and the evangelicals’ America over those of left-wing intellectuals any day of the year. If evangelicals come with some views I find irrational it is a tiny price to pay compared to the price humanity has paid for the Left’s consistently broken moral compass — about America; about Communism and Islamism; about the superiority of peace studies over waging war against evil; about America’s role in the world; about Israel; about the welfare state; about Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and all the other left-wing dictators the Left has celebrated; about the belief that men and women are basically the same; about the greater worth of any animal than of the unborn human; and about nearly every other major moral issue.
If these professors typify the views of Eastern Nazarene College, which is officially listed as a Christian university, it is reason for despair. Once left-wing values enter the evangelical bloodstream, there is almost no hope for America.
I’ve been noticing that a lot of the New Atheists who complain the loudest about the violent wars in the Old Testament are the same ones who line up to defend abortion – a practice that has killed over 50 million unborn children since 1973, in America alone. Not all atheists are pro-abortion, but I think they are more likely to be pro-abortion than evangelicals and conservative Jews.
The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.
“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.
The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.
Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener,” skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.
Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn’t. Two years ago two professors published another study in Skeptical Inquirer showing that, while less than one-quarter of college freshmen surveyed expressed a general belief in such superstitions as ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance and witches, the figure jumped to 31% of college seniors and 34% of graduate students.
And naturally, studies show that religious people are both more generous and more likely to stay married than their secular counterparts. It’s not a cause and effect relationship, but the probabilities are suggestive. More probable than not, as Dr. Craig says.
WINTERY KNIGHT 