Previous Politech message: http://www.politechbot.com/2005/09/20/judge-john-roberts/ -------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: [Politech] Judge John Roberts' views on electronic privacy: should we be worried? Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 00:56:43 -0400 From: <tomlipscomb@private> To: 'Declan McCullagh' <declan@private> Declan: " What..? Me worry?" Total nonsense! EPIC has done fine work... but on this they are simply absurd. This is tribal Tutsi vs Hutu... it has nothing to do with any kind of juridicial reality. It is pure and simple blackmail subtext and like the irascible sweet-talked kid in the highchair in the Carl Rose NYer cartoon facing an anxious Mommy and her offered spoon... "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it!" The usual teeny weeny tiny minority party line groups are showing up with the usual suspects muttering their eternal "doubts" about what THEY have decided is in the best interest of the vast majority. Well I have "doubts" TOO about Roberts.. And that is exactly what I want to have with any decent candidate for SCOTUS-- just like the able Ruth Bader Ginsburg. EPIC should join the "Psychic Friends Network" and continue vacuous speculations about their "beliefs" about what Roberts may or may not "believe," or get REAL. A Congress so irresponsible as to rush to sign the ghastly Patriot Act without even bothering to read it... is hardly an ideal place to criticize a judge that is at least appears to be doing his best to have an open mind in spite of catechism drafts offered for his signature by Senator Chuck Schumer and Ann Coulter. I'd frankly expect Roberts to do far better for us on privacy than the miserable "Patriot" Act. And in the end... EPIC may well celebrate his contribution and the right feel abused. Of course he IS Christian... and ( gasp, horrors! ) Catholic, and is that so hard for the less than 1% and diminishing percentage of liberal Jews in the American population that is so "deeply concerned" about ANY GOP Christian nominee... to allow the majority of Americans? How much of a percentage of the "restricted" Bar Association senior positions for "gentiles" at the law is small enough for the barely 1% of the US population so disproportionately in power not to be "concerned...?" And then let's go on to the dying MSM positions or intellectually stagnant academia for that matter. Take a quick look at the most unbalanced, financially perilous, and counterproductive "affirmative action program" in America. You are seeing it in action here as the NY Times/Boston Globe, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago and other papers fire hundreds of valuable staff rather than face facts. And more importantly, we are in danger of seeing one of the most essential foundations of popular democracy being suffocated in the hands of a kieretsu monopoly, unwilling to respect their responsibility to their shareholders or their markets rather than the shibboleths of their intransigent top-down elitism. Unrepresentative WASP-ridden media were dying in the 1890s before in desperation they included the fresh blood of emerging immigrant talent. And a resulting burst of "yellow journalism" was the best thing that ever happened to the press for the next century. So check the carefully ignored demographics of the fields of the law and journalism, so universally detested today by every opinion poll of the American people. If the American Bar, much less Bill Keller at the NY Times, wants to "preserve our readers' trust," how hard is it? How about stopping holding tedious, incomprehensible conferences about minute issues of minority representation more suitable to medieval scholastics and starting to worry about why the majority of markets are finding them increasingly irrelevant? Doesn't this all look all too familiar? Do we have to go through all this again, just because elites can't learn from history? Does it really matter who the elites are? And isn't that REALLY the tribal subtext of all this? And isn't all unbelievably stupid, sad, and anti-democratic? Thomas H. Lipscomb _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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