Alito to Obama: "You Lie!"

Well, close enough.


UPDATE
More, including video.

This constitutional power play and effort at intimidation by Obama (with the full Court present at the SOTU speech) has to be about the most graceless and classless thing the man has done since taking office (although his mocking of the notion that morality might place some limits on scientific research during his speech announcing that he would fund ESCR ranks right up there).

The man has no class and absolutely no moral compass beyond his own wants and preferences. The rightness or wrongness of a thing is wholly dependant upon whether Obama wants it or not. This demogogic and patently false attack on the Court with the members of the Court front and center during the speech was nothing short of a disgusting display of arrogance and raw hubris.


UPDATE #2 (28 January)
Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barnett writes:

In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds Congressmen? To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment? What can this possibly accomplish besides alienating Justice Kennedy who wrote the opinion being attacked. Contrary to what we heard during the last administration, the Court may certainly be the object of presidential criticism without posing any threat to its independence. But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order. A new tone indeed.

Comerica Bank: Doing It's Part to Kill Small-Town America

Shame on them:

Comerica Bank called $11 million loan, demanding liquidation
Thursday July 24 2008, 1:38 pm

The acting CEO for Norwalk Furniture said Comerica Bank, which holds $11 million in loans for the company, has refused to even talk to several investors interested in buying out the loans and taking over the company.

***
Aversa said he finds it suspicious that Comerica would call in a loan in Ohio in which the company had paid back $2 million within the past 60 days shortly after the bank closed their Ohio offices.

“I don’t think its an accident that Comerica closed their Cleveland offices (recently), they stopped making loans in Ohio and then they show up on our doorstep and say liquidate,” Aversa said. “They know they’re never going to do any banking here. If this was in Detroit, it would not be this way.

“What’s happening here is a crazy, panicked world. The dynamics are almost like a depression,” he said. “If this company was located in Detroit or Texas, would they be treating us like this?”

[More]


Comerica Caravan
Friday July 25 2008, 1:40 pm

In just 16 hours, Norwalk Furniture employees gathered about 50 employees and headed up in a caravan to Comerica headquarters in Detroit with one message "Norwalk Furniture Calling, Answer Your Phone."

After Dominic Aversa, acting CEO in the company's reorganization, released details about Comerica's refusal to consider buyout offers and the bank's insistance on liquidation, employees finally saw a way they could join in the battle.

"I don't think they have any idea what they've done," said Kim Gross, an employee who helped organize the caravan. "We're going to show Comerica what we do for a living."

Company officials gave the employees several pieces of furniture made in Norwalk to take along to set on the sidewalk in front of the bank.

"Hopefully we can get Comerica to answer their phone," Gross said. Aversa said Thursday that bank officials wouldn't even respond to phone calls from the company or several groups of investors interested in buying out the loan and putting workers back in the factory.

The bank called company officials late last Friday afternoon insisting on full repayment of the company's $11 million loan and line-of-credit or immediate liquidation. The bank insisted the company shut down immediately, leaving about $1 million worth of unfinished orders sitting on the factory floor and finished items waiting undelivered in trucks.

***
After they rally in front of Comerica's headquarters, the Norwalk employees will head to Comerica Park, the home of the Detroit Tigers, for tonight's game against the Chicago White Sox at 7.

Gross said they will hold up their signs and talk to anyone who will listen about Comerica's treatment of businesses and employees in Ohio.

***
"Comerica paid $66 million for naming rights to Comerica Park," she said. "I guess that's their vision of community support, a little different from ours."

***
Gross also pointed out that Norwalk Furniture was the first account Comerica ever got in Ohio.

[More]

Comerica chairman, Henry F. Potter, was unavailable for comment. But a spokesman said that Mr. Potter would be willing to take on many of the Norwalk Furniture employees thrown out of work as tentants in his rental properties in "Potter's Field". The spokesman also noted that Mr. Potter was looking forward to the renaming of Norwalk as "Pottersville".

McDonald's Says Traditional Christian View of Marriage "Motivated by Hate" ...

... emanating from the chief bigot in Rome. (I made that part up, but it follows naturally from the argument.)

Regular Guy Paul has the details.

Ireland Sticks a Fork in Plans for EU Power Grab; Tells Elitists in Brussels to Pound Sand [UPDATED]

Erin go bragh!

DUBLIN, Ireland - Ireland's voters have rejected the European Union reform treaty, a blueprint for modernizing the 27-nation bloc that cannot become law without Irish approval, electoral officials said Friday.

In a major blow to the EU, 53.4 percent of Irish voters said no to the treaty. Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen now will join other EU leaders at a summit next week to try to negotiate a new way forward.

Anti-treaty groups from the far left and right mobilized "no" voters by claiming that the treaty would empower EU chiefs in Brussels, Belgium, to force Ireland to change core policies — including its low business tax rates, its military neutrality and its ban on abortion.

***
Rural and working-class areas were almost universally anti-treaty. Better-off parts of Dublin registered stronger support for the EU. In suburban south Dublin, a largely wealthy and highly educated district, the "yes" camp triumphed with 63 percent of the vote. But a neighboring, scruffier district voted 65 percent "no."

***
Anti-treaty pressure groups warned that the EU would use treaty powers to reduce Ireland's ability to control its own tax rates and maintain a ban on abortion...

(emphasis added)

My Comments:
We'll soon be seeing stories about the "ungrateful" Irish who have "taken advantage" of EU economic development projects in order to fuel their "Celtic Tiger" economy, but who have now "betrayed" that investment in their well-being by turning their backs on the rest of Europe.

But it's not like the rest of Europe haven't benefited from Ireland's development into an economic power.


UPDATE (15 June)
What other blogs are saying about the Irish vote:

Prolife Victory in Ireland at The Truth About Margaret Sanger (with lots of links to the responses at several other blogs, which I therefore will not list here)

Did the Irish save civilization again? at From Burke to Kirk and Beyond ...

How The Irish Saved Civilization - AGAIN! at Island Breezes

All Hail the Irish! at What's Wrong with the World

Treaty of Lisbon: "The Irish Save Civilization", Part II? at Against the Grain

The general reaction to the Irish vote seems to be overwhelmingly positive, with many alluding to Thomas Cahill's best-selling book from over a decade ago titled How the Irish Saved Civilization.

But then there's this reaction, which responds to my post (as the blogger in question is wont to do) with labeling and questioning of motives.

Hey, Tony, KISS MY ROYAL IRISH ARSE, YOU FECKIN' FECK!

I'll be sure and call up my cousins in Ennis, Co. Clare (with whom I've had the pleasure of staying on a couple of my visits to Ireland, and with whom I correspond fairly regularly), and chastise them for their "Americanism" in voting down this latest effort at re-colonizing their country and re-imposing foreign rule.

And just to stir the blood a bit, here's my post from last year on the anniversary of the death of Ireland's greatest modern-day hero (and devotee of G.K. Chesterton), Michael Collins. By the way, the blogger above who took issue with this post also took issue with that one, as well.

Seems Tony has a problem whenever the Irish get too "uppity".

Obama's "Opportunity Costs" [UPDATED]

Jim Geraghty writes at National Review Online:

So, unless you’ve paid no attention to the race so far, you’ve probably heard that Barack Obama could have made more money in the past by taking different jobs, but chose other ones.

From his strategist:

"This is a central part of his life and story," said David Axelrod, Obama's chief campaign strategist. "He could have written his ticket at any law firm in the country. . . . He decided instead that he wanted to be a civil rights attorney, and he signed up with a small firm that had a reputation for doing this kind of work."

From his wife:

Michelle Obama: “Barack, yeah, went back to law school. So did I. But he didn’t go into corporate America and make a lot of money. He could have. What did he do? He became a civil rights attorney in a small firm in Chicago, and a Constitutional law scholar. Why? Because to whom much is given, much is expected. And when you’re given the gift of advocacy, you don’t sell it to the highest bidder, according to Barack. So Barack spent years in the shadows when no one was looking, working on issues of justice and fairness, housing discrimination, employment discrimination, voting rights.”

Also: "We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we're asking young people to do," she told a group of women at a day-care center. "Don't go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we're encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond."

In his ads:

Obama’s law professor Laurence Tribe: “What was most remarkable about him was that even though he could have written his ticket with any Wall Street law firm and had offers for clerkships on circuit courts with a virtual pathway to a Supreme Court clerkship, he didn’t. He chose instead to go back to the South Side of Chicago and work with the community, registering voters, doing civil rights work. He was really just doing good things with his legal education. It was an inspiration to watch.”

And apparently it's been a longtime theme of Obama's campaigns. In David Mendell's biography of the Illinois senator, Obama: From Promise To Power, he writes: “By most accounts, in the Rush contest [the 2000 Democratic House primary] Obama was too fond of reciting his impressive resume, too often mentioned that he had forsaken a high-priced law firm for public office and too often spoke in the high-minded prose of a constitutional law lecturer, all of which could make him appear condescending to his audience.”

***
Clearly, this is something that Obama and those around him see as one of his key character strengths. He invokes this moral trump card almost as often as John Kerry told us he served in Vietnam.

(If Michelle Obama indeed believes the key criteria for picking the next president is the kinds of "choices he made while no one was looking," fine. I’m leaning towards the candidate who turned down early release from torturous imprisonment because he knew the purpose of his captors’ offer was to break the will of the other prisoners.)

[More]

My Comments:
My response to Obama's much-touted "sacrifice" (apart from noting that it seems a little unseemly to brag about such things - though, admittedly, I've been guilty of it myself)?

Big frickin' deal.

I mean people out in the real world make such sacrifices and entail such opportunity costs all the time. Moms decide to stay home and raise their own kids rather than go out and earn that second family income. Dads forego more lucrative employment so that they can spend more time at home with their families and in their communities. Families sometimes relocate to communities with fewer high-paying job opportunities so that their kids can be brought up in settings that meet their spiritual and educational needs. Civic-minded folks who might otherwise spend free time and disposable income engaging in leisure activities instead volunteer their time, efforts, and money toward building better communities. And anyone who goes into public service is, by definition, foregoing better-paying jobs in the private sector.

In short, Obama's story, while evidence of a commendable desire to serve the public interest, is neither unique nor indicative of his being especially qualified for the office of the President of the United States.

And besides, as Geraghty notes, if this presidential race is going to come down to who has sacrificed the most in service of the public interest, the guy who spent years in the Hanoi Hilton while serving his country in the armed forces - foregoing early release as long as his fellow POWs were still being held - wins that contest in a landslide.

Color me particularly unimpressed by Obama's "sacrifices".


UPDATE (29 May)
More from Jim Manzi at National Review Online in "Obamerica":

I don’t have a visceral reaction to Barack Obama one way or the other, but I sure found his commencement address at Wesleyan to be pretty off-putting. He smugly put himself forward as an exemplar of the well-lived life, and proceeded from this to the more politically significant solipsism of imagining how much better America would be if it were filled with people who were a lot more like Barack Obama...

But during my first two years of college, perhaps because the values my mother had taught me —hard work, honesty, empathy — had resurfaced after a long hibernation. . . .

I wrote letters to every organization in the country I could think of. And one day, a small group of churches on the South Side of Chicago offered me a job to come work as a community organizer in neighborhoods that had been devastated by steel plant closings. My mother and grandparents wanted me to go to law school. My friends were applying to jobs on Wall Street. Meanwhile, this organization offered me $12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car.

And I said yes.

***
I’m pretty far from being a John McCain booster, but does Obama not get that he’s running against a guy who spent the directly analogous years of his life in a fetid jungle prison being hung upside down and beaten with sticks until his bones broke?

And I said yes. Cry me a river, pal.

[More]

"Let's face it, ... Sir Thomas More would have been denied tenure today ..."

Sounds like a fairly accurate assessment by this commenter at Fumare of the continuing mess taking place at Ave Maria School of Law.

Not that tenure at that particular institution means anything, mind you.

Last week, Dale Price described the situation at AMSOL as "an absolute disgrace":

Obviously, I don't have all the details, but from what I know of the persons involved and the dreadful treatment of professors at AMSoL (Charles Rice) who don't get with the Florida program, I'm siding with the professors.

That, and there's nothing remotely Catholic about tearing away the livelihood of a husband and father of seven. Few of the people I have criticized on this blog have done anything remotely as rancid. When a public face of "orthodox" [sic] Catholicism does things like this, no wonder people flinch away from it. And rightfully so.

For more on the destruction (at the hands of Tom Monaghan and his sycophantic minions) of what made AMSOL attractive to begin with, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.


UPDATE (9 August)
It just gets worse.


Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
Ave Maria Law Faculty Speak Out - Substantial Majority of Faculty Have No Plans to Participate in Relocation

Professor Rice Responds

What If You Started a Law School Dedicated to the Study of Law in the Catholic Legal Tradition ...

Giant Homer Simpson Angers English Pagans

Crass commercialism in the English countryside is upsetting to more than just pagans:

The publicity team behind "The Simpsons" movie, which premieres in the United Kingdom next week, has taken its marketing campaign to a whole new level — one that has enraged members of the British public.

A 180-foot-tall drawing of Homer Simpson has appeared on a hill in the English countryside, right next to the famed Cerne Abbas Giant, a well-known British landmark.

The Cerne Abbas Giant, a chalk outline of an aroused, club-wielding man dating to at least the 17th century, is a revered symbol of fertility among pagans. It is Britain's largest chalk drawing, carved into the natural chalk rock beneath the turf.

Its new neighbor is Homer Simpson, proudly wielding a doughnut and clad more modestly in an enormous pair of Y-front briefs in the adjacent lush, green field.

The artist of the Homer Simpson giant is Peter Stuart, who was commissioned to create it using biodegradable paint, which will eventually wash away.

Ann Bryn-Evans, joint Wessex district manager for the Pagan Federation, told ABC News that Cerne Abbas "is a place people have a lot of affection for. Young girls used to pray at the feet of the figure so they wouldn't become old maids." Now, she said, "they've carved this darn great eyesore."

Today, the site is protected by the National Trust. Because of the site's historical significance, visitors must observe Cerne Abbas from the bottom of the hill.

[More]

My Comments:
On the other hand, that one pagan dude in the photo looks pretty happy to see Homer.

Country Club Republicans Now Backing Hilliary

Be sure to check out Regular Guy Paul's analysis of what is driving an apparent swing of formerly-Republican campaign cash to the presidential campaign of Hilliary! Clinton:

Bruce Bartlett, a prominent member of the inky punditocracy, is arguing that no Republican can win the next election, and also that conservatives should therefore support the most conservative Democrat candidate, and argues further that that candidate is New York Senator Hillary Clinton...

***

... It is too easy to write off such people as opportunists who just want to be on the winning side. There is a deep undercurrent of hostility to the Republican Party among many who formerly supported its candidates. They are simply disgusted with the incompetence with which the Iraq war has been waged, the total disappearance of fiscal discipline, and what they view as the party’s incessant pandering to ignorant and intolerant yahoos on issues such as immigration, gays, global warming, abortion, and stem cell research, among others. [Emphasis added.]

So let me get this straight. They think that with a Democrat president, they'll get more "fiscal discipline"? Not likely. That the Iraq War will be more effectively conducted? Highly doubtful.

Or is it perhaps their real reason that they want to get away from those "ignorant and intolerant yahoos", the social conservatives? If that's the goal, moving to the Democrat side of the aisle makes sense. No such people over there to trouble you.

If one is tired of "religious zealots, gun nuts, anti-tax extremists and pro-life absolutists", then throwing money at Senator Clinton makes sense.

These are the "country-club" Republicans, and they like their illegal immigrant nannies and gardeners, and when the pool boy knocks up their daughters, or their mistresses are late, they want to be sure that the abortion clinic is clean and well-stocked. They're rich enough to pay the taxes that hold the middle class down, and keep the small businesses small, and they don't need expanded gun rights because the police routinely patrol their neighborhoods, and the country club stores their skeet rifles. Church belongs on Sunday mornings when they aren't out on the links or the boat, thank you. (Think Harrison Ford in Sabrina and Regarding Henry, or Ben Affleck in Changing Lanes.)

[More]

My Comments:
Good riddance to elitist RINO rubbish.

Two More Reasons to Despise Disney, Inc.

Darby and Buster.

Assuming they weren't already (given what Disney has previously done to the Pooh franchise), A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard must be spinning in their graves.

(Of course, it doesn't help that Sarah and I continue to buy Disney movies for the kids.)