Legal Left/Trial Lawyers

The scandal related to the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to drop voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party is expanding, according to a Washington Times editorial.

The Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee today on a vote of 13 to 6.

Sotomayor is a truly awful selection, as I wrote previously at the American Spectator. The recent confirmation hearings in which she openly and shamelessly misrepresented her past statements only provided more proof that she isn’t fit for the high court — and possibly for any court.

Frank Rich is surely the most dishonest writer and the biggest bigot working at the New York Times today.

In his latest column this haughty bloviator who must every passing day mourn his decreasing relevance to modern political discourse as his newspaper fades away into insignificance tries to turn the tables by accusing Republican senators who grilled Judge Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation proceeding of being the real racists.

He writes

Yet the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent. [...]

Much of the audience was surely driven away by the sheer boredom of watching white guys incessantly parse the nominee’s “wise Latina” remark. This badgering was their last-ditch effort to prove that Gingrich was right when he called Sotomayor a racist at the start of the nomination process. She confronted that overheated controversy directly. “I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment,” Sotomayor testified.

And of course on this point the hopelessly incompetent Sotomayor lied through her teeth. She made the comment repeatedly before and only backed away from it during her confirmation hearings. But her perfunctory explanation was more than enough to absolve her in Rich’s eyes.

Rich continues

It’s the American way that we judge people as individuals, not as groups. And by that standard we can say unequivocally that this particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better conclusion than the individual white males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past.

Rich is correct in saying that “It’s the American way that we judge people as individuals, not as groups.” This is probably why Rich avoids discussing Sotomayor’s vile ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano, which centered around a case in which New Haven, Connecticut discriminated against a group of firefighters precisely because they belonged to the wrong race.

One of the plaintiffs discriminated against, firefighter Ben Vargas, who like Sotomayor claims Latino heritage, testified at the hearings. Vargas said

I am Hispanic and proud of the heritage and background that Judge Sotomayor and I share. And I congratulate Judge Sotomayor on her nomination.

But the focus should not have been on me being Hispanic. The focus should have been on what I did to our new promotion to captain and how my own government and some courts responded to that. In short, they didn’t care. I think it important for you to know what I did, that I played by the rules and then endured a long process of asking the courts to enforce those rules. [...]

I was shocked when I was not rewarded for this hard work and sacrifice, but I actually was penalized for it. I became not Ben Vargas, the fire lieutenant who proved themselves qualified to be captain, but a racist statistic. I had to make decisions whether to join those who wanted promotions to be based on race and ethnicity or join those who would insist on being judged solely on their qualifications and the content of their character. [...]

So Rich ignored the fact that the hearings weren’t only about aggrieved white men. At least one Latino man was victimized by Sotomayor but Rich couldn’t care less because he considers it his mission to defend Sotomayor at all costs. 

Imagine the cognitive dissonance that must cloud Rich’s troubled mind: A member of the “Latino” victim class gets thrown under the bus by Rich in his zeal to protect “a wise Latina.”

And only a truly ambitious liar like Rich can attempt to portray a hearing at which the nominee’s blatant, in-your-face racism was challenged (for the most part feebly) by members of the opposition party as an event that showcased the opposition party’s racism.

In the same column he insults black Americans and Republicans by describing Michael Steele as “the G.O.P.’s token black.”

Rich is the same fellow who tried to incite hatred against conservatives in a recent column on the DHS report on “rightwing extremism.”

You may also recall that it was the pathologically obsessive Rich who in 2004 couldn’t help attacking President Reagan while he lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda. “Although mourners paying their respects to Reagan were often touted as representative of the entire nation, you could nod off counting the white visitors before a black person appeared.” Rich argued that the massive outpouring of grief regarding Reagan was phony and that media coverage of the death strongly resembled the saturation coverage of O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

The fact that the Old Gray Lady keeps Rich on staff is just more proof that the newspaper left the news business long ago.

“She’s making Harriet Miers look good.”

-Ann Coulter talking about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a few minutes ago on the “Glenn Beck Program”

Embezzler Bernard Madoff, who swindled clients out of at least $50 billion, was sentenced to 150 years imprisonment today.

Very few media reports have focused on the damage that Madoff did to left-leaning foundations and political causes.

I wrote about this topic in the American Spectator in January.

The record-breaking fraud has forced the closing of the JEHT and Picower foundations, longtime supporters of leftist groups.

Left-wing groups funded by those charities include ACORN, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Alliance for Justice.

Judicial Watch has released a report on LatinoJustice PRLDEF (formerly the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund or PRLDEF), the racist left-wing group that at one time had Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor on its board.

The Judicial Watch report, available here, notes that the group has long been been involved in the racial grievance industry and took many controversial positions while Sotomayor was deeply involved with it. (The report quotes my research at page 1.)

Excerpts: 

In 1980, when then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch criticized a Supreme Court decision that upheld racial quotas, the PRLDEF signed a statement characterizing the comments as “”ill-informed, rhetorically excessive and unnecessarily divisive.” [...]

In 1981, the PRLDEF applauded a decision by a federal judge that forced teachers at an Ann Arbor Michigan elementary school to undergo “consciousness raising” about a dialect spoken by young black children called “Black English.” The training program cost taxpayers $44,000. The civil rights attorney who handled the case, Gabe Kaimowitz, worked for the PRLDEF. He said his intent was to make the lawsuit the “basis of suits against schools in Chicago and New York, and to extend the suit to embrace not only poor blacks but poor Puerto Rican students,” who supposedly spoke a dialect known as “Spanglish.” [...]

In 1988, the PRLDEF engaged in a battle with the New York City Police Department over its “racist” promotion exam, ultimately presiding over a radical redesign to allow more minorities to achieve a passing grade. According to The New York Times: “The new test, a four-part exam prepared with the help of an expert designated by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund…involved changes in format, including the addition of open-book questions and a video portion.”

In 1990, the PRLDEF attacked then-New York Mayor David Dinkins after the mayor labeled three Puerto Rican “nationalists” who shot five members of Congress in 1954 “assassins.” The radicals were members of a violent Puerto Rican terrorist group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN). The PRLDEF said the mayor’s comments “lacked sensitivity.” Reuben Franco, President of the PRLDEF said: “[Mayor Dinkins] doesn’t recognize that to many people in Puerto Rico, these are fighters for freedom and justice, for liberation, just as is Nelson Mandela, who himself advocated bearing arms.” [...]

Of course, ACORN has already endorsed Sotomayor’s nomination for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.

Was this photo taken at Shining Path headquarters? (just kidding) Disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke (left) and ACORN enabler Drummond Pike (right) in an undated photo taken in Peru. On the wall is a large poster of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. (photo: Pike’s blog)

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John Podesta’s left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund has invited many liberal and radical groups to a meeting Thursday morning to discuss how to use rhetorical misdirection to take the focus off ACORN’s increasingly well publicized corruption. One of the groups, Alliance for Justice, is advertising the crisis management meeting called “Reframing the Attack on Voter Registration” on its website.

The intrepid investigative journalist Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner reports

Nearly a dozen left-wing advocacy groups are meeting Thursday at the Center for American Progress (CAP)  to discuss how to respond to a growing barrage of damaging news reports and editorial criticism of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform (NOW). [sic]

The strategy meeting at the liberal think tank is being described as a “briefing and discussion” on how to respond to the negative coverage. ACORN is currently under investigation for voter registration fraud and related allegations in at least 14 states.

Among the organizations expected to attend the strategy session are: Advancement Project, Alliance for Justice, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Community Change, Common Cause, Fair Elections Legal Network, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and People for the American Way.

Bertha Lewis, billed as “ACORN’s new chief organizer and CEO,” is a featured speaker. [...]

Lewis is the ACORN executive who lied to Lou Dobbs on CNN last month. Lewis can’t stand controversial Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and she said he claimed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. As Newsmax reported:

What Arpaio actually said was that whenever he tried to enforce U.S. immigration laws, activists on the left accused him of being a racist, like a member of the Klu Klux Klan. He then went on to say he didn’t let the insults bother him.

Lewis refused to back down from her malicious lie, which is not surprising because when confronted, ACORN officials routinely lie, lie, and lie some more.

I suspect that ACORN and its allies will play the race card. Useful idiot Adam Serwer of the American Prospect summed up last fall what they’re likely to say in coming days:

The allegations against ACORN are part of a tangle of misinformation and insinuation that is being played out across the media, and within the Justice Department. ACORN, because of its advocacy on behalf of low-income and minority families, and its efforts to register voters in poor and minority districts, has become a focus for the right’s racial anxieties.

They’ll say conservatives and Republicans are sinister, racist scum who don’t want minorities to vote, and all the negative publicity is the result of a vast conspiracy that originated among scab health care workers on the planet Klendathu who all belong to country clubs that frown on same-sex marriage unless it’s solemnized by a non-union pastor who dines on endangered species and who enjoys maximizing his carbon footprint, yada yada yada, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

We’ve heard this fanciful narrative before but the difference is now a surprisingly large segment of the population is paying attention to ACORN’s illicit activities.

Surprise, surprise. The radical left-wing activist group ACORN lauds President Obama’s selection of Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court.

ACORN released this statement from its vice president, Maria Polanco:

ACORN members across the country are inspired by President Obama’s historic nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the pending vacancy on the United States Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor brings a wealth of not only judicial experience, but experience in the real world as well. As a longtime practitioner of the law as private litigator, public prosecutor, and judge, Sonia Sotomayor has a profound understanding of how the law affects real families in real situations.

Judge Sotomayor’s incredible history of rising to the top of the legal profession from humble roots resonates deeply with ACORN members who work every day to open up opportunities for those in challenging circumstances. Coming from an immigrant family living in a public housing project in the Bronx, she called herself “an ordinary woman who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences” She may be an ordinary woman in some ways, but she is an extraordinary choice to serve as the next Supreme Court Justice.

As a Latina woman from the Bronx myself, I know today’s historic nomination will provide inspiration to millions of young girls and boys across the country, and provide renewed faith in a justice system that has often failed the poor and powerless. ACORN looks forward to a fair and even-handed confirmation process, and to welcoming Judge Sotomayor’s brilliant mind and critical perspective to the Supreme Court by its fall session.

We profiled ACORN in the November editions of Foundation Watch and Labor Watch.

For what it’s worth, President Obama’s radical new nominee to replace Associate Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, used to serve on the board of LatinoJustice PRLDEF. (White House backgrounder)

Along with groups such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), LatinoJustice fought a war of attrition against President George W. Bush’s 2001 nomination of conservative Miguel Estrada, a Honduran-born immigrant, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Democrats in the Senate filibustered the nomination and Estrada withdrew from consideration in 2003.

A tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit, LatinoJustice PRLDEF hailed the nomination of Sotomayor on the basis of her ethno-cultural heritage. “As the second largest and fastest growing population in America, with a large pool of qualified individuals to choose from, it was wholly appropriate for the president to nominate a Hispanic,” the group said in a written statement. (PDF)

According to the group’s website, it gets some of its funding from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

A search of philanthropy databases reveals other significant donors to LatinoJustice to be Carnegie Corporation of New York ($1,025,000 since 2000), Ford Foundation ($2,280,000 since 2001), Rockefeller Foundation ($1,275,000 since 2000), and JPMorganChase Foundation ($70,000 since 2001).

Among radical left-wing groups, it has a fairly garden-variety agenda. A captive of identity politics, it pushes for multiculturalism, diversity, bilingual public education, race-based gerrymandering of electoral districts, race-based employment quotas, tenants’ rights, and illegal immigrants’ rights.

LatinoJustice PRLDEF was known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund until last year when it filed Articles of Amendment with New York State to change its name. (See pages 35 to 41 of its IRS Form 990 for the group for Tax Year 2007.)

(Note: This blog post was updated several times on the day it was posted.)

Brace yourself for an onslaught of vile propaganda from the “living Constitution” crowd after President Obama today nominated the manifestly unqualified, politically correct, leftist judge Sonia Sotomayor to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sotomayor’s main qualifications are that she is a woman and that she is a Latina (of Puerto Rican ancestry).

Sotomayor also has ties to the race-obsessed left-wing grievance group/shakedown operation known as the National Council of La Raza, which Kevin Mooney profiled in the December 2007 Foundation Watch.

Ed Whelan writes at National Review Online that Sotomayor gave a speech that became a law review article in which she expressed her “hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” when each is acting as a judge “in deciding cases.”

There is not much room for misinterpretation here. This is a racist statement. Sotomayor is arguing that her race gives her unique insights and makes her a better judge.

Don’t expect to hear a peep about this from the mainstream media though.

But just imagine if the president had selected a white man who wrote that it was his “hope that a wise man of Anglo-Saxon descent with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Puerto Rican female who hasn’t lived that life” when each is acting as a judge “in deciding cases.”

Imagine how the liberals and the race grievance industry would howl.

On TV liberal pundits such as CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin are already tripping over each other to praise the Sotomayor pick. It’s only going to get worse.