From the Washington Post:
Obama pushing to diversify federal judiciary amid GOP delays
By Philip Rucker, Updated: Sunday, March 3, 3:00 PM
In Florida, President Obama has nominated the first openly gay black man to sit on a federal district court. In New York, he has nominated the first Asian American lesbian. And his pick for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit? The first South Asian.
Reelected with strong support from women, ethnic minorities and gays, Obama is moving quickly to change the face of the federal judiciary by the end of his second term, setting the stage for another series of drawn-out confrontations with Republicans in Congress.
The president has named three dozen judicial candidates since January and is expected to nominate scores more over the next few months, aides said. The push marks a significant departure from the sluggish pace of appointments throughout much of his first term, when both Republicans and some Democrats complained that Obama had not tried hard enough to fill vacancies on federal courts.
The new wave of nominations is part of an effort by Obama to cement a legacy that long outlives his presidency and makes the court system more closely resemble the changing society it governs, administration officials said.
“Diversity in and of itself is a thing that is strengthening the judicial system,” White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler said. “It enhances the bench and the performance of the bench and the quality of the discussion . . .
In my reader's guide to understanding Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, I predicted that Obama's first term would be fairly low key as this cautious man tried to win re-election by not scaring the white majority, but much would be different in the second term once he's safely home.
Of course, Obama isn't a big believer in diversity for his own staff -- where he wants the right man for the job -- just for the rest of us for the next several decades:
Of course, Obama isn't a big believer in diversity for his own staff -- where he wants the right man for the job -- just for the rest of us for the next several decades:
The diversity of Obama’s judicial nominees stands in contrast to staff selections at the start of his second term that have been dominated by white men, including White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
By contrast, 17 of the 35 pending judicial nominees are women, 15 are ethnic minorities and five are openly gay, according to White House statistics. Six are straight white men.
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28 comments:
Dispossed Majority and Camp of The Saints were written more than 40 years ago...
LoL "Jack" Lew, wasn't Jacob until some weeks ago?
Obama's half-brother.
Gay is only 3 percent of the population not hearing about hispanics though.
Flaunting Reggie Love's presence for the Tiger Woods weekend was pretty damned flagrant.
If the way he behaved the first term was trying to be low-key to not arouse the white majority, then we're in for some interesting times in the coming few years....
Right off the back, it sounds like he's behaving illegally- 6 straight white men only, has to fail whatever disparate impact laws that exist. And certainly the representation of gays and lesbians is much higher.
When Obama wanted the premier accomplishment of his first term, he turned to the whitest part of the U.S. Armed Forces, the Navy Seals.
"Of course, Obama isn't a big believer in diversity for his own staff"
False. Obama's administration is the most diverse yet and the White House employs about an equal number of men and women.
"contrast to staff selections at the start of his second term that have been dominated by white men"
Forgetting that most of those staff appointees were minority woman the last time around.
The Democrats reward the people who vote for them. The Republicans punish the people who vote for them.
By contrast, 17 of the 35 pending judicial nominees are women, 15 are ethnic minorities and five are openly gay, according to White House statistics. Six are straight white men.
Women judges SUCK. There's one bankruptcy judge in Dallas who's excellent, but all the others I've dealt with are incompetent. This will be a disaster.
6 straight white men only, has to fail whatever disparate impact laws that exist
Wrong - the current "disparate impact" interpretation of Title VII only applies to protected classes.
Heterosexual White Males are not a protected class. They are the only group that is never protected - except perhaps when AA is so overreaching that White males can prove disparate treatment, which is incredibly difficult. That is what the plaintiffs in the Ricci case were trying to sue for.
Under the law, White men are 2nd class citizens, and Obama is just trying to fulfill the promise of the law. He, too, has a dream, and will have a lasting legacy.
Six are straight white men
That's 6 out of 35 - a clear evidence of discrimination: Based on demographics of general population, twice more is expected (12). Given demographic of J.D. holders, the number should have been 14-15.
@Anonymous (3/3/13, 5:36 PM):
"Flaunting Reggie Love's presence for the Tiger Woods weekend was pretty damned flagrant."
Why are so many people who comment on right leaning websites and blogs convinced that Barack Obama is gay, and that Reggie Love is his "boy toy?"
As far as I can tell, the Obama=gay narrative, as well as all the rumors about Obama's supposed affair with Reggie Love and his supposed escapades at a bathhouse called Man's Country, originated back during the 2008 Democratic primary on a gossipy, drama-loving Hillary Clinton fan site called Hillbuzz.
Hillbuzz is run by a gay political junky from Chicago who worked for Hillary's campaign, hates Obama and his supporters (for good reason, actually) and claims to have inside knowledge that Obama and Rahm Emanuel are really closeted gays. But if you read the site more than once or twice, you'll begin to notice a pattern -- he claims to have inside knowledge that just about every man in the public eye is really closeted and gay (including NFL stars, NBA stars, etc.).
And he hates Axelrod and the Obama organization because he got threatened, denounced as racist in the local media, beaten up and blacklisted in Chicago for supporting Hillary over the hometown messiah.
The blog got really popular for a while, largely because Andrew Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh started reading it and promoting it. And to be fair, it published a lot of quality blog posts that were filled with kernels of information on the inner workings of Chicago politics.
On a side note, it would have been nice if influential conservatives and Republican political operatives would have tried harder (or at all) to learn about how Chicago politics works, since, you know, Barack Obama and his inner circle came out of the Chicago political swamp (this blog's posts on Chicago politics are a good resource). But save for Stanley Kurtz, none of the big-brained conservatives in Manhattan or the Beltway seemed the least bit interested in scouting their opponents from Chi-town, or in learning they were likely to play the game.
So they're just starting to figure it now, after most the damage has been done. But neither here nor there now.
Back to Hillbuzz, Obama, Man's Country and Reggie Love: since I spent some time on the periphery of Chicago and Illinois politics, I'd occasionally read Hillbuzz because of its good inside Chicago political stuff. But ultimately, Hillbuzz was too flighty, gossipy and drama-filled to take seriously for very long.
Its proprietor is a gossipy, drama-loving gay guy (sorry for the stereotype, but it's true in this case) who has a penchant for declaring damn near every prominent man to be gay and who has an axe to grind because he was legitimately wronged by the Obama people in Chicago.
Since the Obama gay rumors originated on Hillbuzz and haven't been entertained on more reputalbe websites (except in the comments sections), they can't be taken seriously.
Back when I lived in Chicago, practically every celebrity in town, except maybe Coach Ditka, was rumored to be gay.
Obama was quite radical in his first term; the issue was and is that the MSM was all-in for Obama, mainly because he is a radical black leftist, and therefore that selfsame media culture was more concerned about Kim Kardashian's latest Showmance than Obama circumventing Republican governance through executive fiat. The beginning is the end is the beginning. In all the recursive reflections, the only question is whether Obama ever sees some white staring back at him.
If Obama's radicalism is keyed through racial-resentment-as-governmental-sine-qua-non, as you suggest, then what he's doing with the judiciary is only just another step. Things like Hate Crimes Legislation (always note what Google won't prompt, it often will tell you the future; right now they're censoring any prompts for 'pedophile'), enacted pretty early in his administration, was easily as radical as his current appointments to the bench; and if you can't see that the two are interlinking pieces, then you truly are quite myopic.
Truthfully, I think you remain more concerned with convincing people of your ability to deconstruct Obama from your book on his autobiographical forgery. Thus you see what you want to see and push a continuing narrative that matches up to your profile and predictions on Obama in place of really connecting the pieces present.
It remains, I'm sure, quite humiliating to know that your only published book is a deconstruction of a composite character named 'Barack Obama', written by a white leftist radical by the name of William Ayers. Most ironic is that it just makes you another level of propagandist for Obama's persona, and to an extent worldview; so your hubris in writing 'Half-Blood Prince' now means that you you're complicit in the forgery.
For anyone who has read Ayers' other work it's quite easily discernible that "Obama's" history is largely Ayers', both so far as writing style and biographical details.
This either means that 1) you willfully omitted such details on Ayers or 2) did not understand at all the parallels between 'Dreams' and Ayers' work. The latter is almost certainly true, which also means that, sorry, you really don't understand the details of radical leftism. No idea about it, thus, as an ethos.
The idea of the modern left is to work through the system while subverting, largely traceable to luminaries out of institutions like the Frankfurt School in the West. For all their radical ideas, the point remains that they are strategically brilliant in their cautious circumspection; first always comes moral equivocation, then after enough victories in the specific sector comes moral outrage and clarity, and therein the heterodoxy works so well that it comes closer and closer to either parity with orthodoxy or, as an unworkable followup, as the replacement to orthodoxy. Like a post-script from after the apocalypse, pretending that dystopia is actually utopia.
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This either means that 1) you willfully omitted such details on Ayers or 2) did not understand at all the parallels between 'Dreams' and Ayers' work. The latter is almost certainly true, which also means that, sorry, you really don't understand the details of radical leftism. No idea about it, thus, as an ethos.
The idea of the modern left is to work through the system while subverting, largely traceable to luminaries out of institutions like the Frankfurt School in the West. For all their radical ideas, the point remains that they are strategically brilliant in their cautious circumspection; first always comes moral equivocation, then after enough victories in the specific sector comes moral outrage and clarity, and therein the heterodoxy works so well that it comes closer and closer to either parity with orthodoxy or, as an unworkable followup, as the replacement to orthodoxy. Like a post-script from after the apocalypse, pretending that dystopia is actually utopia.
In specific terms that relate to Obama? It's rather easily traceable to see the radical policies at work, whether it's creating a security-state intermixed with racial demagoguery (thus, Thought Crimes that would shock Philip K. Dick and Orwell), allowing Black Panthers to chase Whites away from polling stations (thus a perfect inversion of the Jim Crow South) or turning NASA into a grounded - yet head-in-the-clouds-liberal-fever-dream - arm of diversity and racial spoils rather than following the ideal of scientific discovery.
Further, this is simply how Obama gets away with it. A closed media that works for or with him, depending, moreso than they have any sitting President. To the extent that Obama being caught with someone like Derrick Bell is a "so what?" moment. It's all "so what?", no matter how many times Obama violates the constitution and any notion of Equal Rights. Radicalism has been normalized.
And your articles are doing little to nothing to connect these pieces. The way you've followed and interpreted the Obama narrative, is akin to being shocked by the Great Depression while ignoring the founding of Federal Reserve in 1913. Somewhere between pernicious and embarrassing.
As for the Obama + Reggie Love = gay rumors, it seems more likely that Reggie Love represents the cool black jocks that Obama probably always wished he'd been cool/athletic enough/able to hang out with when he was in high school and college.
Obama went to a high school where he was basically the only black guy. While he was, in fact, on the Punahou basketball team, he was a scrubby bench warmer who hung out with white stoners. And as he tells us in Dreams From My Father he hung out with radical feminists, punk rockers and poets when he got to Occidental college.
With regard to his social circle at Columbia ... well, nobody seems to know much about his Columbia years -- though he tells us in Dreams that he fasted (from sunup to sundown?) and lived like a monk.
So he doesn't seem to have been in with the jocks -- or with what passes for jocks at Columbia -- there either.
As for Reggie Love, he was a football star at Duke -- yes, reports to the contrary notwithstanding, Duke has a football program -- who also doubled as a marginal "walk on" for Duke's fabled basketball team. Coach Mike Krzyzewski kicked the not-yet-21 year old Love off the basketball team for underage drinking after embarrassing photos of him in an inebriated, passed-out state made their way to the internet (Love had the misfortune of passing out at a University of North Carolina fraternity party -- UNC is Duke's arch-rival -- where his unconscious body was drawn on with markers, urinated on and "tea bagged" on camera by UNC students).
After graduation, Reggie Love tried out for the NFL's Green Bay Packers, but was released during the team's training camp. With one year of NCAA eligibility remaining in basketball (but with his football eligibility used up) Love returned to Duke the following season to pursue a graduate degree. Coach Krzyzewski allowed him to return to the Duke basketball program, and although he didn't get to play much, his was a redemptive, "feel good" story garnered him a lot "love" from ESPN and the sports media.
Like plenty of other middle class blacks with elite educational backgrounds and lots of connections, Reggie Love made his way to the Obama campaign. He became candidate Barack Obama's assistant, or "body man."
It's not difficult to understand why the athletic, basketball-loving ex-jock from the black upper crust would become a favorite of the basketball-loving wannabe jock from the black upper crust who he worked for.
There's no reason, however, to believe that the Obama + Reggie Love gay rumors were ever anything more than internet B.S. from a blogger who was mistreated by Barack Obama's sleazy Chicago organization, and who wanted to get even.
I always thought Andrew Sullivan's passionate love affair with Barack Obama meant he knew something we did'nt.
"Back when I lived in Chicago, practically every celebrity in town, except maybe Coach Ditka, was rumored to be gay."
Yeah, that sounds just about right.
Never heard any Ditka gay rumors either (lol), and can't imagine any -- especially not with how hard Ditka works the 20something girls in the Rush St. bars (or at least used to about 5-10 years ago when I'd occasionally end up in Rush/Division establishments).
Never heard any Michael Jordan gay rumors either (and yeah, ditto for the working the girls in the bars there too) . . . but have heard them about Scottie Pippen, and Bill Wennington.
Ridiculous.
Kind of have to wonder if there's anything to Norm Nixon's rumors about Magic contracting HIV at Eddie Murphy's coke-fueled 1980s parties in the Hollywood Hills though.
Why are so many people who comment on right leaning websites and blogs convinced that Barack Obama is gay, and that Reggie Love is his "boy toy?"
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I think birtherism and all this silly conspiracy stuff about Obama is caused by repressed racial anxiety on the part of white conservatives. Since it's not respectable to oppose Obama for being anti-white and a threat to white interests, conservative whites are desperate for things to attack him with. Ironically, much of this stuff is transparently racial anyway, no matter how hard conservatives deny that race has anything to do with anything.
"Drunk Idiot said...
Why are so many people who comment on right leaning websites and blogs convinced that Barack Obama is gay.."
A lot of the tabloids run articles to that effect. And the overtly sleazy yellow press (as distinguished from the covertly sleazy yellow press like the NYT, Newsweek, etc.) often tends to be right when it comes to scandal.
Aren´t Paleos doing the right thing by exposing Obama´s alleged homosexuality? I mean stepping out of the closet was the progressive thing to do the last time I read the memo. Anyway, my gaydar goes off with Obama and I´m seldom wrong.Same with Rahm.
"Back when I lived in Chicago, practically every celebrity in town, except maybe Coach Ditka, was rumored to be gay."
I've heard that about Mayor Washington (probably true) and Governor Thompson of Illinois (which I doubt). Mayor Koch was recently "outed" in NY Magazine post his death by a young gay friend, I saw.
And to enforce their decisions, Obama is buying the Department of Homeland Security 2,717 light armored vehicles called MRAPs:
"Obama DHS Purchases 2,700 Light-Armored Tanks to Go With Their 1.6 Billion Bullet Stockpile"
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/03/obama-dhs-purchases-2700-light-armored-tanks-to-go-with-their-1-6-billion-bullet-stockpile/
Jesus H Christ, Axelrod unleashed the trolls on this thread.
Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro Dunham Marshall Davis Whatever-The-Fuck-His-Real-Name-Really-Is was born on August 4, 1961.
Reggie Love was born on April 29, 1981.
For you humanities-major-idiots who keep polluting iSteve with your presence, that's a difference of TWO DECADES!!!
Steve, I'm telling you, man, those of us who actually give a damn about this country - we try and try and try to get stuff past Komment Kontrol and get nothing but failure for our efforts - while you let Axelrod's people waltz in here and shit on every possible discussion we can even imagine having?
I'm telling you, dude, it's demoralizing.
It's very, very demoralizing.
Every time the 9th circuit is overturned, an angel gets its wings.
Seems like we're going nationwide with the 9th circuit's mentality, so it's looking up for the angels, anyway.
OTOH, everything being written to excuse Obama and Love, actually comes off like a description of homosexuality.
In the context of the other things known about Obama (bath houses, the gay dudes in his church, the limo story), it all fits together very nicely.
ATBOTL said...
I think birtherism and all this silly conspiracy stuff about Obama is caused by repressed racial anxiety on the part of white conservatives.
Birtherism was a function of both the circumstantial evidence, and Obama's not releasing a birth certificate. No idea what other conspiracies you are imagining; just a red herring wrt to the Love thing
Since it's not respectable to oppose Obama for being anti-white and a threat to white interests, conservative whites are desperate for things to attack him with.
Right, it's soooooo hard to find legitimate things to attack.
Ironically, much of this stuff is transparently racial anyway, no matter how hard conservatives deny that race has anything to do with anything.
Being against Obamacare is raciss!
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