The ad produced indignant reaction from the lawyer class. As expected, the outraged Left, supported by the usual media suspects, has led the charge. But there are also notable conservatives who have joined the chorus. There is former solicitor general Theodore Olson, obviously not content with representing groups seeking to persuade unelected judges to decree an end to the universal traditional concept of marriage. Defending defenders of suspected terrorists might allow him, perhaps, to curry further ideological favor with his new Democratic wife. Then there is Dean Ken Starr, whom I know, and whose participation in defending these lawyers is especially unfortunate.

The usual indignant cry is that these lawyers embody the finest American tradition, namely, that even the most unpopular defendant deserves representation. Moreover, the members of the legal elite jumping to the defense of the “Al Qaeda 7″ claim that the Cheney ad represents an attack on their patriotism. I have heard Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Irvine Law School, who himself has defended a Guantanamo detainee, make those very arguments. These lawyers, it is said are only defending a principle, but do not necessarily accept the ideas of the detainees, any more than someone who is defending an accused rapist by that action himself condones rape.

Let me try to some responses to what are, on the whole, straw man claims by the legal profession reflexively circling the wagons. First of all, no one has challenged the right of these attorneys to represent “unpopular defendants.” The challenge is to whether such attorneys, having represented these accused unlawful enemy combatants, are entitled to be selected for government positions without having their previous representation considered for purposes of determining whether they have a conflict of interest or at least whether they are able to work vigorously on behalf of the national interest of the United States.

Second, the positions that they likely hold now are not just those of career prosecutors operating within the bounds of existing law as well as an office ethic that will shape and control some of their personal prejudices and beliefs. Rather, these are political appointees, whose jobs are more likely to be supervisory or otherwise entail more policy-directed discretion.

Third, these lawyers are quite unlike the typical criminal defense lawyer just trying to make a living. In many instances, though not all, they took these cases pro bono publico, out of a personal conviction and ideology. It is possible that their only principle is the high-minded one of giving an unpopular accused some legal representation, as their public posture would have it. But one may be skeptical about assertions that a baser ideology has nothing to do with their choice. These lawyers by and large do not come from professional environments where, if one looked into the deepest recesses of their souls, one would believe that they are the secular saints they profess to be. Much more likely, people opt for something in which they truly believe when selecting cases from the vast array of possible pro bono publico service. Especially if they are going to spend uncompensated time, it is likely to be for a cause and/or a client in which they believe quite passionately. That does not mean that these lawyers necessarily share the jihadists’ goals of killing Americans. But they well may share a general aversion to the U.S., reflected in an ideology that the U.S. is a flawed society in need of reconstruction, a force for evil more than good, whose government is to be distrusted and constrained.

Fourth, their clients are not unrepresented. Usually, they have military counsel assigned to represent them. And, unlike the possible disparity of training or resources between prosecutor and defense attorney that might occur in the ordinary criminal case, in these military cases both the training and the material resources of the two sides are comparable. The eagerness of such civilian counsel to assist the detainees, then, is more likely out of some vague ideological affinity than an urgency to provide legal assistance, as such. 

Fifth, not all the cases are pro bono. There are many private attorneys who are compensated to defend these detainees. Those attorneys very well may be more like ordinary attorneys representing their clients professionally, but not ideologically. But that also puts the lie to the claim that these detainees have no material resources for their defense. The government of Kuwait has spent many millions of dollars on legal help for their nationals detained at Guantanamo. I have read that Eric Holder’s law firm has been a significant beneficiary of such money; the firm’s lawyers (including Holder) have also participated frequently in pro bono representation.

Sixth, the detainees’ attorneys are often drawn from the top legal firms in the country, with legal resources that the military finds difficult to match. Moreover, such detainees often have multiple attorneys, including law professors (such as Dean Chemerinsky) to supplement the ranks of other top-flight attorneys.

Seventh, if ideology is not a consideration in the decisions by law professors and white-shoe law firm pro bono attorneys, why does one not hear about those folks representing, say, Blackwater contractors accused of crimes? Or former or current members of the U.S. military who are prosecuted for allegedly engaging in crimes during battle or in atrocities against civilians? Or White supremacists? Or anti-abortion protesters? Why is there, for example, an ideological predictability to Dean Chemerinsky’s other representations, say, of Representative John Conyers, a Michigan left-wing Congressman or of former Bush critic and exposed truth-manipulator Joe Wilson and his wife? The notion that he believes in the “correctness” of those causes but just not of the cause of the Guantanamo detainees becomes ever less credible.

Eighth, returning to the issue of government lawyers, especially those who are political appointees, what would have been the reaction had the Bush administration appointed to the upper echelons of the Civil Rights Division attorneys who had been deeply involved in the defense of KKK members accused of violent crimes against Americans? Or had put drug cartel lawyers in charge of drug policy? It is without a doubt that the reaction from the legal grandees and the academic Left would have been quite different than a mass chorus of “Unpopular defendants deserve representation and representing them should not be considered in their fitness for public policy positions.”

Ninth, why has the same Left, from the Obama administration to the legal academy to all those various interest groups and other members of the legal nomenklatura, been so intent on finding ever more creative ways to a) criminally prosecute, b) disbar, or c) otherwise professionally humiliate and ostracize John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and others who, in the aftermath of 9/11, provided legal advice within an area of ill-developed law and facing what were believed to be inevitable national security threats? Lame arguments that this or that conclusion those attorneys reached was not sufficiently nuanced are make-weight. The idea that the Left was concerned that George W. Bush receive excellent balanced (rather than programmatic, Left-endorsed) legal advice is just ludicrous.

I have no problem with representation for unpopular clients. But I am not persuaded by the Left’s professions of idealism to some supervening principle of fairness and of an uncharacteristic lack of ideological celibacy. Nor do I believe that such representation ought to be ignored when someone is seeking appointment to a political public office that requires the lawyer to put together policy that might demand decisions entirely at odds with what was, for many of them, a long-term personal commitment.

Ann Coulter has an acerbic take on the weak-kneed conservative lawyers and on the hypocrisy of the legal culture regarding defending “unpopular clients” (which don’t include pro-life causes and certainly not the killers of abortion doctors). The conservative lawyers’ scolding of Liz Cheney includes an appeal to John Adams’s defense of British soldiers accused of murder in the “Boston Massacre.” Coulter responds: “Yes, but even John Adams didn’t take a job with the government for another 19 years after defending the British guards — who, in 1770, were ‘the police.’ He also didn’t take a position with the U.S. government that involved processing British murder suspects.”

In a very pointed piece, Andrew McCarthy demonstrates the importance of the “Al Qaeda 7″ because in counter-terrorism “personnel is policy.” “It is perfectly obvious that many progressive lawyers are drawn to the jihadist cause because of common views about the need to condemn American policies and radically alter the United States. That doesn’t make any lawyer unfit to serve. It does, however, show us the fault line in the defining debate of our lifetime, the debate about what type of society we shall have. And that political context makes everyone’s record fair game. If lawyers choose to volunteer their services to the enemy in wartime, they are on the wrong side of that fault line, and no one should feel reluctant to say so.” Exactly.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal exposes the hypocrisy of The New York Times on the duty of lawyers.

Well, there is the problem of the public employees unions, with their expenditures of taxpayer-supplied funds for their political gain. Of the top five political spenders, who spent more than a billion dollars over the last decade on influencing politicians, two are the teacher’s union and the public employees’ union:

“Fifteen special interest groups including casino operators, drug firms and unions for teachers and public employees spent more than $1 billion during the last decade trying to influence California public officials and voters, the state’s watchdog agency reported today….Five special interests were responsible for more than half of the billion dollars spent since 2000, including:

–The California Teachers Assoc., which spent $211.8 million.
–The California State Council of Service Employees, $107.4 million.
–The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, $104.9 million.
-The Morongo Band of Mission Indians, which operates a casino under a state-approved compact, $83.6 million.
–The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, which also operates a casino, $69.2 million.”

Liberals are feverish about the idea that corporations might be able to spend to money on advertisements during political campaigns. They might unduly influence the political process, it is said. Looks like the government workers’ unions and the California Indian tribes are doing the job corporations can only hope to do.

On a related matter, though these are federal, not state, numbers, the federal stimulus funds primarily helped teachers, by far. Assuming, that is, that the stimulus really helped save those jobs. More likely, government budgets are set a year in advance, so that teachers and other government workers were protected from significant job losses by budget decisions made before the brunt of the recession was felt. Judging by the political outcry, this year might be quite a different matter. Via Instapundit.

Meanwhile, the dysfunctional California state government, led by the Governator, makes the situation worse with a regulatory powergrab through its “climate change law” that will increase joblessness and cause more businesses to flee the state.

To be able to make statements like this with such aplomb, he must be either a great politician or a schizophrenic. Perhaps both.

Sean Penn wants reporters jailed and critics of his own politico-social efforts to die screaming of rectal cancer. Let’s see, what would be an appropriate response to Spiccoli? Oh, yes: I want Celebutards shot.

Speaking of dumbing down, the Red Chinese government will require new training in “Marxist journalism” for the press: “Under communist theories of journalism, media should support the leadership rather than operate as a watchdog.” Once again, the U.S. is well ahead of the Chinese, at least when the Democrats are in power. American journalists, especially those who graduate from journalism schools, are expert practitioners of communist news theory. It’s called the New York Times, the L.A. Times, NPR, PBS, CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, etc.

Via Instapundit: “It is much more dangerous to publish a cartoon of Mohammed than to slice apart a Christian with a machete.”

Received your census form yet? The government has put me on notice that I shall be receiving mine shortly. Constant Conservative  has some thoughts about the distorted process the census has become. Rather than insuring proper representation and taxation through the then-expected use of “direct” taxes (such as poll taxes, in the traditional understanding of that term), the census is now the vehicle for allocation of massive amount of federal funds.

Are there plans to reduce or eliminate the mortgage interest deduction? That’d do a number on the real estate market.

Other contributors join the debate. John O’Sullivan is wracked by unease about hiding behind visions of American exceptionalism to brush off concerns about the debilitating effects of big government. O’Sullivan worries that appeals to American exceptionalism lead to a false sense of invincibility and an isolationism premised on a cultural “Fortress America” that is particularly attractive to conservatives. But “It can’t happen here,” is disproved by history. O’Sullivan gently chides Lowry and Ponnoru for omitting the danger from such complacency:

“But one aspect of it, though mentioned, is somewhat underplayed by Lowry and Ponnuru, maybe because it is an aspect of Anglospheric rather than narrowly American exceptionalism. The political and economic orthodoxy of the Anglosphere — sound finance, property rights, the rule of law, free trade and free capital movement — has been the dominant global orthodoxy for more than two hundred years. Twenty years ago this orthodoxy looked likely to be dominant for another two centuries. But it is now seriously challenged by a very different tradition associated with Colbertian France and Wilhelmine Germany: state direction, economic and trade regulation, capital controls, protectionism, industrial cartels, etc. These ideas are highly appealing, for rather obvious reasons, both to undemocratic governments and to international organizations. And their threat to the freedoms of the Anglo-American tradition will not stop at the water’s edge when national sovereignty is also under attack.”

The danger comes from Obamism. The tea party movement is a healthy reaction of the body politic against this statist virus, but it remains to be seen whether or not it is enough to inoculate the more passive elements of American society against the draw of the plantation mentality of elitist American leftism that promises to take care of the slaves as long as they, in turn, work for the master and don’t get uppity. Obamism, after all, is simply the latest ideological manifestation of Progressivism, whose theorists were also honorees in the pantheons of socialism and fascism, as Jonah Goldberg has so convincingly demonstrated in Liberal Fascism. Progressivism, socialism, and fascism transcend national boundaries, and, like other malevolent and harmful agents, they do not stop at this nation’s shores, as Obamism has made abundantly clear.

James Bennett adds thoughts about the lost personal liberties as other citizens of the Anglosphere allowed themselves to be trapped in the tentacles of Leviathan. Britons now living in a condition where they are frightened to defend themselves from personal attack or to speak up against violent and separatist subgroups within their society lest they be subjected to the full force of ever-more intrusive and oppressive laws, not long ago carried handguns at least as casually as Americans do now.

If this sounds rather Steynian, it is. Like John O’Sullivan, Steyn cautions that the bravado of some conservatives that big government-induced decline cannot happen in the United States is meritless when one examines comparative political systems in the Anglosphere that, after all, shares historical roots with the U.S. Steyn mentions Canada and Scotland, two once-self-reliant cultures brought down by the nanny state. Adding his trademark humor, Steyn avers that the history of Canada post-World War II is neatly portrayed in Monty Python’s “Lumberjack Song.”

The court decided that the Pledge is not a religious exercise but an expression of patriotism that pays respect to our form of government. Judge Reinhardt in dissent spent over 130 pages reprising his decision in the earlier case brought by Newdow that was eventually thrown out by the Supreme Court in 2004. Based on selected statements by members of Congress and by President Eisenhower, he saw the addition of “under God” by Congress in 1954 as an attempt to introduce religion into the Pledge.

The court also rejected, 3-0, Newdow’s suit that claimed the motto “In God We Trust” violated the Establishment Clause. The theory there was that the motto is merely ceremonial, without any religious message. Reinhardt concurred only in the result.

I agree with the court’s decision. I never saw the phrase as a religious sentiment, but as a reflection of the message of the Declaration of Independence that individual rights come from God and of the country’s sense of its exceptionalism. There is, as well, the American heritage of being descended from religious dissenters who sought to establish a new Jerusalem in the New World.

But I see other problems, not with “under God,” but with the Pledge as a whole. The Pledge currently is “voluntary” for school children. So were school prayers and Bible readings that the Supreme Court struck down over the years as Establishment Clause violations. The Court rejected the “voluntariness” of those professions, claiming that school children would be loath to decline to join in reciting the prayer or Bible reading for fear of ostracism by their peers. That same argument can be made about the Pledge, with or without “under God.” The Supreme Court has often said that government cannot coerce political orthodoxy in violation of the free speech clause any more than it can coerce religious orthodoxy in violation of the free exercise and establishment clause cases. The Court has already declared a mandatory Pledge to be unconstitutional. If a “voluntary” prayer is not truly voluntary for school children, a “voluntary” Pledge is not, either. That would appear to be the true weakness of the Pledge’s constitutionality.

The problem? The dumbing down of higher education. The solution, according to this article? “Ill-prepared and unmotivated as many applicants are, colleges are eager to have them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to stay afloat financially. Admitting throngs of weak students, however, leads to an array of problems for non-selective schools….Instead of just trying to maximize “access” to college, we ought to limit government loans to those who seem to have the ability to benefit from higher education.”

On a not entirely unrelated topic to the above: The inflation in the number of law professors over the last decade. Up by 40%, far more than the number of students. Number of classes taught per professor has dropped to allow more research into, mainly, esoterica that feeds the perception of quality necessary to raise scores in the U.S. News rankings that law students crave and which they obviously are willing to pay higher tuition for. At least for now. No specific figures on the increase in the number of school bureaucrats, though it is agreed that the number has risen. Quite a bit, from my observations.

The struggle for basic civil rights continues. Civil rights and equal opportunity for all. There must be no bars to happiness, and people must be able to find happiness in bars.

One of the reasons for the administration’s inability to get their health care plan through the House of Representatives is the dislike that many House Democrats have for the entrenched leadership, many of whom come from gerrymandered California districts that produce ultra-liberal representatives far to the left of the swing district Democrats.

From Scrappleface, Obama urges a majority vote. On the Constitution. No more of that pesky supermajority requirement that stands in the way of health care reform. A straight up-or-down vote.

Not wanting to enhance viewer numbers and thereby possibly encourage the Celebutards and anti-American directors in the film industry (which seems to encompass a discouragingly large proportion of them), I do not watch the Academy Awards marathons. To get some overview of the atmosphere at the most recent event, I am relying on Carbolic Smokeball and its Teen Film Critic. [Caution: Content warning.]

Appearing at the University of Alabama on Tuesday, Chief Justice Roberts addressed the incident at the State of the Union speech in a response to a thoughtful question by a law student. “I have no problems with that [criticizing Supreme Court opinions],” he said. “On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances and the decorum. The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court - according the requirements of protocol - has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.” “I’m not sure why we’re there,” he continued.

As expected, as the article shows, the pathetic Pillsbury doughboy of presidential press secretary, the buffoonish Robert Gibbs, has to try to get in the last word.

I  would at this point consider an appearance by the justices at next year’s State of the Union speech extremely unlikely, which will only cause further embarrassment to Obama by detracting from his event. Instead, people will be reminded of his boorishness at this year’s speech.

At the door she met him, excited and flushed,
“I’ve got a surprise,” she whispered, and blushed.
Now inside, his hands clasp hers, full of love,
But as they embrace, he moves down from above.

After venturing to her mountains of bliss,
A stay that is followed by many a kiss,
His hands travel south for more exploration,
A mysterious canyon the next destination.

The terrain in that area once was quite bushy,
But now is smooth as a baby’s tushy.
Or was. Now his hands come upon a protrusion,
Then another, and more, adding to his confusion.

So many bumps he can feel all around,
He has to see what his hands there have found.
On gazing upon her, his eyes are bedazzled,
Like Jennifer Hewitt, she’s got “vajazzled.”

Decorating much of her southern region,
Are crystals galore, their number legion.
At first he is puzzled, he must admit.
Still, their sensuous sparkle is quite a hit.

Though if they go down from her mound of Venus,
That quite could annoy a visiting penis.
“They’re just on the hill,” she explains with a titter,
“The canyon below is pristine, without glitter.”

No longer content with a monologue,
The feminine private part’s now on this blog
And everywhere else, as an object of passion,
With fashion that’s art, and art that’s fashion.

How can one love it? Let me count the ways.
It might be left natural, or trimmed, waxed, or shaved.
But, ladies, if you just don’t want to go plain,
Don’t tattoo or pierce. Vajazzling’s no pain.

“Irreconcilable Differences”: The political minefield of forcing health care changes through the Senate. By the way, those problems are why I think that those who believe that the administration and the Democratic leadership will not use reconciliation are correct. The success or failure of the vote on Obama/Reid/PelosiCare will depend on their ability to bamboozle or frighten enough House Democrats into voting for the monstrosity that the Senate already has passed, with the promise of changes to come through the reconciliation process, a process that, after the House then votes to adopt the current Senate bill, never happens.

Health care, like any good that is at least to some extent “scarce,” if for no reason than that there are constant innovations available to only a few initially, must be rationed. In a private market, the rationing device is price. Under government, rationing occurs through other means (bureaucratic rules and sclerotic administration, nepotism and other corruption, political influence peddling and bribes, and, yes, sub rosa pricing through gifts, favors, and bribes) as well as more traditional price rationing through emerging black markets and other ways to escape more rigid government programs. Eventually, as always, to save government health care, privatization is needed.

From the archives, musings from Stratfor.com about the reasons for the Western European infatuation with Barack Obama that resulted in him being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an infatuation not shared by all Europeans and doomed to disappointment by the intervention of the realities of national interests.