and minorities.
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Speaking at the Planned Parenthood conference in DC this afternoon,
Barack Obama leveled harsh words at conservative Supreme Court justices, and he offered his own intention to appoint justices with "empathy." Obama hinted that the court's recent decision in Gonzales v. Carhart -- which upheld a ban on partial-birth abortion -- was part of "a concerted effort to steadily roll back" access to abortions. And he ridiculed Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote that case's majority opinion. "Justice Kennedy knows many things," he declared, "but my understanding is that he does not know how to be a doctor."
Obama also won a laugh at the expense of Chief Justice John Roberts, saying that judgments of Roberts' character during his confirmation hearings were largely superficial. "He loves his wife. He's good to his dog," he joked, adding that judicial philosophy should be weighted more seriously than such evaluations.
"We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/07/17/274143.aspx--------------------------
Obama opposes Southwick judicial nomination.WASHINGTON--The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday votes on a very controversial judicial nominee, Leslie Southwick, a former Mississippi state court appeals judge. According to the Alliance for Justice, Southwick is " hostile to worker, consumer and civil rights.''
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/06/obama_to_oppose_southwick_nomi.htmlObama is not scary, just disappointing. Regarding a matter more serious than vegetables -- a judicial confirmation -- he looks like just another liberal on a leash.
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Obama, touching all the Democratic nominating electorate's erogenous zones, concocts a tortured statistic about Southwick's "disappointing record on cases involving consumers, employees, racial minorities, women and gays and lesbians.
After reviewing his 7,000 opinions, Judge Southwick could not find one case in which he sided with a civil rights plaintiff in a non-unanimous verdict." Surely the pertinent question is whether Southwick sided with the law. To some of Southwick's opponents, his merits are irrelevant. They simply say that it is unacceptable that only one of the 17 seats on the 5th Circuit is filled with an African American, although 37 percent of Mississippians are black. This "diversity" argument suggests that courts should be considered representative institutions, like legislatures, and that the theory of categorical representation is valid: People of a particular race, ethnicity or gender can only be understood and properly represented by people of the same category.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20070813/ai_n19476124-----------------------
WASHINGTON -- Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama of Illinois met Friday with the head of the U.S. Marshals Service to voice frustration over what they call a lack of progress in establishing new safety measures to protect federal judges.
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The Illinois senators expressed their concerns Friday to John Clark, the acting director of the U.S. Marshals Service. Clark, who recently had a meeting in Chicago with Lefkow and more than 20 other judges about security issues, vowed to resolve the matter.
Obama said he and Durbin told Clark to give them "an immediate written update" for how and when the security systems would be installed.
Don Hines, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, said officials would meet with the security company next week. "We expect the installations to begin in the near future," he said.
http://obama.senate.gov/news/051217-senators_press/
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