Obama names supreme judge

So, just to recap the argument here.

Columbia has standards for graduating cum laude. Those standards are 2 part. Obama could have a 4.o GPA at Columbia with only 62 credits and thus not have been eligible for honors. He also could have had a 3.0 and 75 credits and not have been eligible. Without no evidence, it is impossible to pick one over the other as to why he didn't graduate with honors.

Harvard Law has standards applicants must meet to be accepted.
Obama was accepted to Harvard Law.
Since we have no evidence of Obama's GPA and LSAT it would not be logical to assume he didn't meet the standards. We don't know. Because Harvard has standards, the most likely event without evidence would be that Obama DID meet the standards.

Someone however has stated without facts or support that Obama didn't meet the standards. Without support that statement is not "fact" as was claimed. It is nothing more than speculation.

Goodbye genoves.. See you when you come back under another name.

This article raises some very interesting questions. I have not seen these charges rebutted anywhere.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why Obama is mum about Harvard

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: September 11, 2008
1:00 am Eastern

© 2009

On the surface, at least, Barack Obama's single most impressive accomplishment has been his 1990 election to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review.

This position also provided Obama his only real executive experience as he supervised the law review's staff of 80 editors.

One has to wonder, then, why neither he nor wife Michelle emphasized this singular honor during the up-by-the-bootstraps biographical sections of their respective speeches in Denver.

In fact, neither of them so much as mentioned Obama's time at Harvard, this despite his vulnerability on the executive experience charge.

Their silence likely derives from one verifiable fact: Obama's record at Harvard was no more authentic than John Kerry's record in Vietnam.

Kerry was justifiably swift-boated because he fraudulently positioned himself as a war hero. Obama seems to have learned from Kerry.

In the age of the Internet, the less said about a dubious credential the better, and Obama's law presidency credential is dubious on any number of levels.

(Column continues below)




For starters, Obama did not do nearly well enough at his previous stop, Columbia University, to justify admission to Harvard Law.

According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated in 1983 with a major in political science but without honors.

In the age of affirmative action and grade inflation, a minority in a relatively easy major like political science had to under-perform dramatically to avoid minimal honors. Obama apparently did just that.

The specifics we may never know. As the New York Times concedes, Obama "declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."

Would that Bristol Palin could get off so easily!

There are any number of possible reasons for Obama's reticence about Columbia: his grades, the courses he took, his writing samples and, of course, his associations.

At that time, for instance, both Bill Ayers and Obama fell within the orbit of left-wing Columbia superstar Edward Said. Just recently out of hiding, Ayers was attending the Bank Street College of Education, which adjoins the Columbia campus.

Five years after leaving Columbia, Obama decided on law school. His lack of resources did not deter him from thinking big. Nor did his B-minus effort at his Hawaii prep school or his equally indifferent grades at Columbia.

As Obama relates in "Dreams From My Father," he limited his choices to only three law schools " "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." (It must be nice to be Obama.) He does not mention his connections.

Harvard Law School is notoriously difficult to get into. Annually, some 7,000 applications apply for some 500 seats. Applicant LSAT scores generally chart in the 98 to 99 percentile range, and GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95.

If Obama's LSAT scores merited admission, we would know about them. We don't. The Obama camp guards those scores, like his SAT scores, more tightly that Iran does its nuclear secrets.

We know enough about Obama's Columbia grades to know how far they fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard.

As far back as 1988, however, Obama had serious pull. He would need it. As previously reported, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama's behalf.

An orthodox Muslim, al-Mansour has not met the crackpot anti-Semitic theory he could not embrace. As for bin Talal, in October 2001, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent his $10 million relief check back un-cashed after the Saudi billionaire blamed 9/11 on America.

For an insight into the Khalid al-Mansour connection, see see this video.

These are not connections that Obama would like to see broadcast, which further explains his shyness about the Harvard experience.

There is more. Obama did not make the Harvard Law Review (HLR) the old-fashioned way, the way HLR's first black editor, Charles Houston, did 70 years prior.

To Obama's good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which editors were elected based on grades " the president being the student with the highest academic rank " with one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition.

This competition, the New York Times reported in 1990, was "meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review."

It did just that. At the end of his first year, Obama was named, along with 40 or so of his classmates, an editor of the HLR.

Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited, unsigned note.

In this note for the third volume of the 1990 HLR, he argued against any limits on abortion, citing the government's interest in "preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair."

Obama's timing, however, was better than his writing. In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency of the HLR, the Harvard Law School found itself embroiled in an explosive racial brouhaha.

Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that the Harvard Law School appoint a black woman to the law faculty.

This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.

Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first African-American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues.

"Obama cast himself as an eager listener," the New York Times reported, "sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once."

In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all-day affair, Obama's fellow editors elected him president from among 19 candidates. As it happened, Obama prevailed only after the HLR's small conservative faction threw him its support.

Curiously, once elected, Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."

One more thing: The 1990 Times article about Obama's election notes that the president of the HLR usually goes on to serve as a clerk for a Supreme Court justice.

Not the Mansourian Candidate. Here, oddly, his ambition deserted him. He told the Times that he planned "to spend two or three years in private law practice and then return to Chicago to re-enter community work, either in politics or in local organizing."

In this unlikely surrender to Chicago politics, the realist sees insecurity at best and, at worst, the quid for al-Mansour's quo.

Here is another in the same vein:

That post says it all..


Nothing following your statement


That is what you have presented, nothing.


You made a claim without evidence to support it. I provided evidence to refute your claim and pointed out you have no evidence to support it. Rather than bringing evidence you bring nothing. You wanted to debate genoves. Yet, when it comes time, you can't seem to present even the simplest of supported arguments.

The Republican hypocrisy surrounding the confirmation of Sotomayor is stunning.


Supreme Hypocrisy

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) announced this week that Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings will begin on July 13, timing that closely mirrors Chief Justice John Roberts' Senate confirmation schedule. Therefore, Sotomayor's hearings will start 48 days after her nomination was announced; Roberts received a hearing after 51 days. The Chief Justice was confirmed 72 days after his nomination, even though senators were distracted from reviewing his record when Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. The 72nd day after Sotomayor’s nomination will be Aug. 6, the day before Congress' summer recess is supposed to begin. Yet despite Leahy's attempt to achieve parity between President Obama's and President Bush's nominees, Senate conservatives immediately complained that Sotomayor is receiving preferential treatment.

OBSTRUCTIONIST TACTICS: Initially, conservative complaints that Sotomayor cannot be confirmed in a timely manner were heavy on overblown rhetoric and light on substance. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) claimed that obstructing Sotomayor is necessary to prevent a "situation like they did with Guantanamo." A GOP press release suggested that senators should review each of Sotomayor's 3,000 decisions at the pace of six decisions per day -- a rate that would not allow Sotomayor's hearings to begin until 2011. Of course, during Justice Alito's confirmation, Judiciary Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said that "we don't need to read everything." By mid-week, conservatives were claiming that Sotomayor herself is at fault for creating the need for a delay because she was not forthcoming in her disclosures to the Senate. In a letter that closely resembles a press release by the right-wing Judicial Confirmation Network, all of the Senate Judiciary Committee's seven Republicans claimed that Sotomayor hid key documents from the Senate and made conflicting statements that must be resolved before they could consider her nomination. The letter's claims, however, dwell upon trivial distinctions, apply newly invented rules to Sotomayor, or otherwise demand that she complete irrelevant or even impossible tasks before her nomination may be considered. At one point, for example, the letter asks Sotomayor to "clarify" why she has at times referred to herself as a former "vice president" of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund, and at other times referred to herself as the former "First Vice President" of the same organization. At another point, the letter criticizes Sotomayor for failing to turn over copies of the law review articles she edited as a law student, even though neither of Bush's nominees were required to disclose the very same information. Three paragraphs of the letter are devoted to demands that Sotomayor uncover decades-old files from her career as a litigator, even though many of these files may no longer exist. Moreover, the senators' new demands come despite the fact that Sotomayor already provided a stunningly detailed record of her career to the Senate. Her 173-page questionnaire and 130 page appendix far exceed the level of disclosure that was required from either of Bush's nominees. Roberts's questionnaire was 83 pages long; Alito's a mere 64.

A FAMILIAR DANCE: The right's disingenuous claim that Sotomayor's nomination must be obstructed are far from novel. Indeed, Sotomayor is only the most recent of Obama's well-qualified nominees to receive the same shoddy treatment. Consider Dawn Johnsen, an Indiana law professor who has been nominated to head the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and who may be the single most qualified attorney in the world to lead that office. A former acting head of the OLC during the Clinton Administration, Johnsen was among the most outspoken opponents of Bush's pro-torture policies. Nevertheless, Senate conservatives have successfully prevented her nomination from receiving a floor vote, often citing her pro-choice views for justification even though OLC's role has little or nothing to do with abortion. Obama nominee Harold Koh, former dean of the Yale Law School and a leading scholar of international law, has received similar treatment since he was nominated to be the State Department's chief legal adviser. Although an op-ed in the New York Post claimed that Koh wants to apply fundamentalist Islamic law in U.S. courts and anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly called him "too dangerous for America," Koh has received ringing endorsements from mainstream progressives and conservatives alike, including Yale Law School's conservative Federalist Society. Nevertheless, Koh's nomination has yet to receive a vote. Perhaps the most bizarre example of conservative obstructionism, however, is the Senate's failure to confirm Judge David Hamilton, President Obama's nominee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. A distinguished federal trial judge who has been endorsed by conservatives ranging from Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) to the president of the Indiana chapter of the Federalist Society, Hamilton's nomination is nevertheless endangered by a possible filibuster. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) announced that he would filibuster Hamilton because Hamilton allegedly banned Christian prayers in the Indiana state legislature, but endorsed allowing legislative sessions to be opened with an Islamic blessing. In reality, Hamilton issued two opinions, one applying a Supreme Court decision that bans officially-sanctioned prayers which prefer one religious sect over another, the other holding that permissible non-sectarian prayers may be offered in a foreign language such as Arabic.

THE RIGHT'S DOUBLE STANDARD: Not so long ago, Inhofe sang a very different tune. In 2003, when Bush was still president, Inhofe proclaimed that filibustering a nominee is not only "wrong" but even "contrary to our oath to support and defend the Constitution." McConnell claimed -- falsely -- that judicial filibusters were "unprecedented," a claim echoed by Sessions. Indeed, Senate Republicans were so convinced that Bush's nominees were above scrutiny, they even invented something called the "Ginsburg Rule," which provides that Bush's judges could ignore any question they didn't want to answer during their confirmation hearing. Moreover, conservatives' strident claims were matched by strong-arm tactics such as the "nuclear option," a maneuver that would have eliminated judicial filibusters altogether. Democrats relented, even allowing a judge who believes that basic labor protections such as the minimum wage, maximum hour, and child labor laws are unconstitutional to be confirmed to the nation's second-highest court. Now that they are in the minority, conservatives suddenly think that their own rules shouldn't apply. The only remaining question is whether the majority will allow a dwindling group of right-wing senators to impose such a double standard.

--americanprogressaction.org.

Which automatically makes it the most intelligent thing it has ever said.

And still no rebuttal from you Possum?

You have earned that moniker Possum by your inability to do what you claimed you wanted to do. You wanted to debate. Rather than present anything. You seem to have run away and posted 30 cut and pastes on another thread.

Did you miss this, Mr. Parados? I would like to see your rebuttal of these points.


-1 Reply report Fri 12 Jun, 2009 10:08 am This article raises some very interesting questions. I have not seen these charges rebutted anywhere.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why Obama is mum about Harvard

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: September 11, 2008
1:00 am Eastern

© 2009

On the surface, at least, Barack Obama's single most impressive accomplishment has been his 1990 election to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review.

This position also provided Obama his only real executive experience as he supervised the law review's staff of 80 editors.

One has to wonder, then, why neither he nor wife Michelle emphasized this singular honor during the up-by-the-bootstraps biographical sections of their respective speeches in Denver.

In fact, neither of them so much as mentioned Obama's time at Harvard, this despite his vulnerability on the executive experience charge.

Their silence likely derives from one verifiable fact: Obama's record at Harvard was no more authentic than John Kerry's record in Vietnam.

Kerry was justifiably swift-boated because he fraudulently positioned himself as a war hero. Obama seems to have learned from Kerry.

In the age of the Internet, the less said about a dubious credential the better, and Obama's law presidency credential is dubious on any number of levels.

(Column continues below)




For starters, Obama did not do nearly well enough at his previous stop, Columbia University, to justify admission to Harvard Law.

According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated in 1983 with a major in political science but without honors.

In the age of affirmative action and grade inflation, a minority in a relatively easy major like political science had to under-perform dramatically to avoid minimal honors. Obama apparently did just that.

The specifics we may never know. As the New York Times concedes, Obama "declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."

Would that Bristol Palin could get off so easily!

There are any number of possible reasons for Obama's reticence about Columbia: his grades, the courses he took, his writing samples and, of course, his associations.

At that time, for instance, both Bill Ayers and Obama fell within the orbit of left-wing Columbia superstar Edward Said. Just recently out of hiding, Ayers was attending the Bank Street College of Education, which adjoins the Columbia campus.

Five years after leaving Columbia, Obama decided on law school. His lack of resources did not deter him from thinking big. Nor did his B-minus effort at his Hawaii prep school or his equally indifferent grades at Columbia.

As Obama relates in "Dreams From My Father," he limited his choices to only three law schools " "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." (It must be nice to be Obama.) He does not mention his connections.

Harvard Law School is notoriously difficult to get into. Annually, some 7,000 applications apply for some 500 seats. Applicant LSAT scores generally chart in the 98 to 99 percentile range, and GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95.

If Obama's LSAT scores merited admission, we would know about them. We don't. The Obama camp guards those scores, like his SAT scores, more tightly that Iran does its nuclear secrets.

We know enough about Obama's Columbia grades to know how far they fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard.

As far back as 1988, however, Obama had serious pull. He would need it. As previously reported, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama's behalf.

An orthodox Muslim, al-Mansour has not met the crackpot anti-Semitic theory he could not embrace. As for bin Talal, in October 2001, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent his $10 million relief check back un-cashed after the Saudi billionaire blamed 9/11 on America.

For an insight into the Khalid al-Mansour connection, see see this video.

These are not connections that Obama would like to see broadcast, which further explains his shyness about the Harvard experience.

There is more. Obama did not make the Harvard Law Review (HLR) the old-fashioned way, the way HLR's first black editor, Charles Houston, did 70 years prior.

To Obama's good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which editors were elected based on grades " the president being the student with the highest academic rank " with one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition.

This competition, the New York Times reported in 1990, was "meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review."

It did just that. At the end of his first year, Obama was named, along with 40 or so of his classmates, an editor of the HLR.

Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited, unsigned note.

In this note for the third volume of the 1990 HLR, he argued against any limits on abortion, citing the government's interest in "preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair."

Obama's timing, however, was better than his writing. In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency of the HLR, the Harvard Law School found itself embroiled in an explosive racial brouhaha.

Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that the Harvard Law School appoint a black woman to the law faculty.

This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.

Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first African-American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues.

"Obama cast himself as an eager listener," the New York Times reported, "sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once."

In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all-day affair, Obama's fellow editors elected him president from among 19 candidates. As it happened, Obama prevailed only after the HLR's small conservative faction threw him its support.

Curiously, once elected, Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."

One more thing: The 1990 Times article about Obama's election notes that the president of the HLR usually goes on to serve as a clerk for a Supreme Court justice.

Not the Mansourian Candidate. Here, oddly, his ambition deserted him. He told the Times that he planned "to spend two or three years in private law practice and then return to Chicago to re-enter community work, either in politics or in local organizing."

In this unlikely surrender to Chicago politics, the realist sees insecurity at best and, at worst, the quid for al-Mansour's quo.

Joe the Jag wrote----Re: parados (Post 3675154


parados wrote:

That post says it all..

Quote:
Here is another in the same vein:
Nothing following your statement
Which automatically makes it the most intelligent thing it has ever said.

***************************************************************
Hey Joe the Jag! I pissed on your shoes repeatedly on another thread showing that you know nothing about law, but since you are a pansy, you don't have the guts to try to show you are correct.

Like most cowards, you think that ignoring it when I piss on your shoes, will be a good tactic...But you do not realize that there are some on these threads who will view you as a gutless coward. I will continue to search out the countless errors you have made.

PS. Just a friendly tip. Don't pick up any of those cigars that Stroger's lackeys throw away at 26th and California. I know you are hard up but try to avoid smoking. It is not good for you.

Joe the Jag wrote:

Empirical evidence cannot show that Hume was right. That was Hume's point.

Joe the Jag is, as usual, full of ****. Note:

1. Introduction

1.1 Philosopher David Hume developed an ingenious and historically important argument regarding cause-and-effect. In his book, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding [1], Hume showed that our belief in the existence of cause-and-effect is a direct result of observation, experience and inference. Our belief rests on empirical evidence; yet this belief can never be substantiated by a formal proof. We may be able to discern and express natural laws, but we cannot be sure they will be valid in the future (for example). Since we will never be able to deduce the existence of cause-and-effect (i.e. that the laws of nature are causal), Hume argued that we must assume its existence as a postulate of any scientific theory.

***************************************************************

Joe the Jag obviously does not know what a FORMAL PROOF IS!

Joe the Jag wrote:

I fail to see the connection. The people who are writing the history textbooks aren't the same ones who are peddling lies about Iraq. Why would the one be influenced by the other?

What a complete jerk Joe the Jag is. He does not know who is writing the history books. I don't think he ever read one.

Joe the Jag does not know that according to Diane Ravitch, an expert in American Education, the left wing morons are indeed writing History books used by our children in school and most of them are filled with exaggerations and lies.

"American Odyssey" quotes a "Columnist" who said of President Eisenhower in 1959. "The public loves Ike. The less he does the more they love him"
Why not name the columnist so that readers can gauge the credibility of the Source?

Joe the Jag knows nothing about History books, the people that write them and the many errors which are in the books.

Joe is truly a Jag.

I didn't miss it. It doesn't raise any interesting points. It only repeats the speculation that has already been pointed out is speculation.


As has already been pointed out with a link to Columbia, that means NOTHING. Obama could have just as easily not earned enough credits while getting a 5.0.

Yes. we won't know them but YOU said it was "FACT". You aren't very good at this are you Possum?


No evidence is presented to support this.

That seems rather presumptuous, don't you think? We can assume something because we don't know? That is the same pure nonsense I pointed out earlier.

There is nothing in that piece that needs to be rebutted Possum. It is speculative fiction. Anyone with at least half a brain would recognize that there are no facts there.


Repeating the same fictions that were already rebutted doesn't make a strong case in a debate Possum. It only shows you don't know the first thing about debate.

This is a statement that makes me wonder if you understand anything about politics Possum.

Let's look at 2 scenarios...

1. Obama scored in the upper 80% on the LSAT. He would be attacked for how he got into Harvard.
2. Obama got a perfect or near perfect score on the LSAT. - What do you think would have happened politically if that was revealed Possum? I suggest that you and other RW fools would be attacking him because he is an "intellectual."

So, politically, Obama has no reason to release his LSAT since no matter where he scored the opposition would try to use it to attack him.

On the other hand, not releasing the scores gives Obama the upper hand. He can let people like you speculate and claim you know in spite of no evidence. That makes you look like the fool claiming something is "fact" when you have no evidence to support it. Now, imagine that Obama lets you guys go on for 4 years hawking this stupid speculation then in 2012, he does release his scores and he got a perfect or near perfect score. It gives him a distinct political advantage because it undermines 4 years of your statements and makes you look even stupider.

Now.. let's look at the facts we do know.

1. Obama didn't graduate with honors from Columbia
2. Obama took the LSAT.
3. Obama was accepted to Harvard
4. Obama graduated in the top 20% of his class at Harvard.
5. The minimum score on the LSAT for being accepted to Harvard is about 170 out of 180.
6. Getting a 170 on the LSAT puts one in the top 5% of those taking the LSAT.

Let's look at what you are arguing.
1. You are saying Obama does poorly in classes.
2. You are saying Obama did poorly on the LSAT


Yet, when it came to Harvard, Obama did so well in his classes that he did better than 80% of the top 5% of those taking the LSAT. Let's assume for a moment that the LSAT is indicative of where one will graduate. What this means is that when Obama graduated he was roughly in the top 1%, of those that took the LSAT. The top 1% of those taking the LSAT would probably be in the 176-180 range.

If we accept your scenario Possum, it would mean that Obama somehow managed to overcome being a poor student and low LSAT scores to graduate higher than 99% of those that took the LSAT. That would make Obama super human when it comes to what he did at Harvard. I don't buy it. I think it would be far more likely that Obama scored in the top 1% on the LSAT similar to where he graduated.

The moral of the story is..
People don't change their spots even if they do change their screen names.

Your argument is baseless Possum and completely unsupported. The far more likely scenario is that Obama qualified for Harvard in the usual way.

We know Clarence Thomas got into Harvard because of affirmative action. That means Clarence Thomas probably wasn't in the top 1% of those that took the LSAT. Let's assume he managed to make the top 10%. What that would mean is that Thomas probably would have graduated near the bottom of his class. We do know that Thomas didn't graduate with Latin Honors.

You argued that Sotomayor, Obama and Thomas all got into Harvard simply because of affirmative action. Sotomayor and Obama both graduated with Latin Honors putting them in the top 20% of their classes. This would be an argument FOR affirmative action Possum since it shows that 2 out of 3 minorities do very well when given a hand up. I suggest it is more likely that Obama and Sotomayor got into Harvard on the basis of their LSAT and grades. Don't you think you want to argue that too?

Mr. Parados: You have skipped over most of the evidence in the article below:

Did you miss this, Mr. Parados? I would like to see your rebuttal of these points.


-1 Reply report Fri 12 Jun, 2009 10:08 am This article raises some very interesting questions. I have not seen these charges rebutted anywhere.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why Obama is mum about Harvard

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: September 11, 2008
1:00 am Eastern

© 2009

On the surface, at least, Barack Obama's single most impressive accomplishment has been his 1990 election to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review.

This position also provided Obama his only real executive experience as he supervised the law review's staff of 80 editors.

One has to wonder, then, why neither he nor wife Michelle emphasized this singular honor during the up-by-the-bootstraps biographical sections of their respective speeches in Denver.

In fact, neither of them so much as mentioned Obama's time at Harvard, this despite his vulnerability on the executive experience charge.

Their silence likely derives from one verifiable fact: Obama's record at Harvard was no more authentic than John Kerry's record in Vietnam.

Kerry was justifiably swift-boated because he fraudulently positioned himself as a war hero. Obama seems to have learned from Kerry.

In the age of the Internet, the less said about a dubious credential the better, and Obama's law presidency credential is dubious on any number of levels.

(Column continues below)




For starters, Obama did not do nearly well enough at his previous stop, Columbia University, to justify admission to Harvard Law.

According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated in 1983 with a major in political science but without honors.

In the age of affirmative action and grade inflation, a minority in a relatively easy major like political science had to under-perform dramatically to avoid minimal honors. Obama apparently did just that.

The specifics we may never know. As the New York Times concedes, Obama "declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."

Would that Bristol Palin could get off so easily!

There are any number of possible reasons for Obama's reticence about Columbia: his grades, the courses he took, his writing samples and, of course, his associations.

At that time, for instance, both Bill Ayers and Obama fell within the orbit of left-wing Columbia superstar Edward Said. Just recently out of hiding, Ayers was attending the Bank Street College of Education, which adjoins the Columbia campus.

Five years after leaving Columbia, Obama decided on law school. His lack of resources did not deter him from thinking big. Nor did his B-minus effort at his Hawaii prep school or his equally indifferent grades at Columbia.

As Obama relates in "Dreams From My Father," he limited his choices to only three law schools " "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." (It must be nice to be Obama.) He does not mention his connections.

Harvard Law School is notoriously difficult to get into. Annually, some 7,000 applications apply for some 500 seats. Applicant LSAT scores generally chart in the 98 to 99 percentile range, and GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95.

If Obama's LSAT scores merited admission, we would know about them. We don't. The Obama camp guards those scores, like his SAT scores, more tightly that Iran does its nuclear secrets.

We know enough about Obama's Columbia grades to know how far they fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard.

As far back as 1988, however, Obama had serious pull. He would need it. As previously reported, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama's behalf.

An orthodox Muslim, al-Mansour has not met the crackpot anti-Semitic theory he could not embrace. As for bin Talal, in October 2001, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent his $10 million relief check back un-cashed after the Saudi billionaire blamed 9/11 on America.

For an insight into the Khalid al-Mansour connection, see see this video.

These are not connections that Obama would like to see broadcast, which further explains his shyness about the Harvard experience.

There is more. Obama did not make the Harvard Law Review (HLR) the old-fashioned way, the way HLR's first black editor, Charles Houston, did 70 years prior.

To Obama's good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which editors were elected based on grades " the president being the student with the highest academic rank " with one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition.

This competition, the New York Times reported in 1990, was "meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review."

It did just that. At the end of his first year, Obama was named, along with 40 or so of his classmates, an editor of the HLR.

Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited, unsigned note.

In this note for the third volume of the 1990 HLR, he argued against any limits on abortion, citing the government's interest in "preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair."

Obama's timing, however, was better than his writing. In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency of the HLR, the Harvard Law School found itself embroiled in an explosive racial brouhaha.

Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that the Harvard Law School appoint a black woman to the law faculty.

This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.

Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first African-American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues.

"Obama cast himself as an eager listener," the New York Times reported, "sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once."

In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all-day affair, Obama's fellow editors elected him president from among 19 candidates. As it happened, Obama prevailed only after the HLR's small conservative faction threw him its support.

Curiously, once elected, Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."

One more thing: The 1990 Times article about Obama's election notes that the president of the HLR usually goes on to serve as a clerk for a Supreme Court justice.

Not the Mansourian Candidate. Here, oddly, his ambition deserted him. He told the Times that he planned "to spend two or three years in private law practice and then return to Chicago to re-enter community work, either in politics or in local organizing."

In this unlikely surrender to Chicago politics, the realist sees insecurity at best and, at worst, the quid for al-Mansour's quo.
******************************************************************
\
I have read many autobiographies. Some people skip over embarrassing incidents in their lives. BUT NO ONE WHO GOES TO HARVARD LAW SCHOOL NEGLECTS TO TELL HIS AUDIENCE ABOUT HIS OR HER ENTRY TO THAT SCHOOL; HOW THEY WERE HAPPY WHEN THEY RECEIVED THEIR ADMISSION TO THE SCHOOL; HOW THEY MADE UP THEIR APPLICATION TO THE SCHOOL' HOW THEY WERE ELECTED?? TO THE COVETED PRESIDENT SPOT IN THE HARVARD LAW REVIEW.

It is because of this, and other circumstantial evidence that I am quite certain that Obama is an Affirmative Action baby. You don't know very much about Harvard Law School, do you?

I read the "Audacity of Hope" several times. You ought to try it. Writing it the way he did is like a baseball player winning the world series with a home run and not even mentioning the game.

Sorry, it is prima facie evidence that he is an Affirmative Action entrant!

Are you doubting Mr, Brian Connoly, parados?

He, an official from Columbia said that Obama graduated from Columbia BUT WITHOUT HONORS.

Because you are ignorant about Harvard Law School and the grades needed for ANYONE to enter ( unless they are AA's) you don't have a clue.

AGAIN, I defy you to find any evidence anywhere which says that someone--anyone--except an Affirmative Action Free Rider can get into Harvard Law School in 1983 having graduated WITHOUT HONORS.

Go ahead, find evidence to that effect and I will concede your point.

Really? And which autobiographies have you read that didn't skip over their application to law school and the Harvard law review? Can you list them? I am curious.


I am curious Possum. Can you provide ONE autobiography of someone that went to Harvard Law that actually lists there GPA and LSAT scores? I look forward to something to debate with you instead of your made up crap.

LOL.. so because you make **** up it is evidence? There is no "circumstantial evidence." There is ONLY speculation on your part. Since when did "circumstantial evidence" suddenly become "fact"? As to your claim about autobiographies skipping over the embarrassing stuff, that is plain hogwash. The best autobiographies do no such thing. In fact, they talk about the embarrassing things while barely touching on the well known exploits.

I said no such thing.

I pointed out that graduating with Honors requires 64 credits. Are you doubting the Columbia requirements for Honors put out by the University?

ROFLMAO.. Really? I have to prove something because you can't provide any evidence of your statement?

1. Please provide evidence that Harvard requires HONORS for acceptance.
You can't because Harvard has no such requirement. It only lists grade point.
2. Please provide evidence of Obama's grade point average
3. Please provide evidence of Obama's LSAT.

Until you provide some support for 1, 2 and 3 listed above, you have ZERO argument.

Mr. Parados: You have skipped over most of the evidence in the article below:

Did you miss this, Mr. Parados? I would like to see your rebuttal of these points.


-1 Reply report Fri 12 Jun, 2009 10:08 am This article raises some very interesting questions. I have not seen these charges rebutted anywhere.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why Obama is mum about Harvard

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: September 11, 2008
1:00 am Eastern

© 2009

On the surface, at least, Barack Obama's single most impressive accomplishment has been his 1990 election to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review.

This position also provided Obama his only real executive experience as he supervised the law review's staff of 80 editors.

One has to wonder, then, why neither he nor wife Michelle emphasized this singular honor during the up-by-the-bootstraps biographical sections of their respective speeches in Denver.

In fact, neither of them so much as mentioned Obama's time at Harvard, this despite his vulnerability on the executive experience charge.

Their silence likely derives from one verifiable fact: Obama's record at Harvard was no more authentic than John Kerry's record in Vietnam.

Kerry was justifiably swift-boated because he fraudulently positioned himself as a war hero. Obama seems to have learned from Kerry.

In the age of the Internet, the less said about a dubious credential the better, and Obama's law presidency credential is dubious on any number of levels.

(Column continues below)




For starters, Obama did not do nearly well enough at his previous stop, Columbia University, to justify admission to Harvard Law.

According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated in 1983 with a major in political science but without honors.

In the age of affirmative action and grade inflation, a minority in a relatively easy major like political science had to under-perform dramatically to avoid minimal honors. Obama apparently did just that.

The specifics we may never know. As the New York Times concedes, Obama "declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."

Would that Bristol Palin could get off so easily!

There are any number of possible reasons for Obama's reticence about Columbia: his grades, the courses he took, his writing samples and, of course, his associations.

At that time, for instance, both Bill Ayers and Obama fell within the orbit of left-wing Columbia superstar Edward Said. Just recently out of hiding, Ayers was attending the Bank Street College of Education, which adjoins the Columbia campus.

Five years after leaving Columbia, Obama decided on law school. His lack of resources did not deter him from thinking big. Nor did his B-minus effort at his Hawaii prep school or his equally indifferent grades at Columbia.

As Obama relates in "Dreams From My Father," he limited his choices to only three law schools " "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." (It must be nice to be Obama.) He does not mention his connections.

Harvard Law School is notoriously difficult to get into. Annually, some 7,000 applications apply for some 500 seats. Applicant LSAT scores generally chart in the 98 to 99 percentile range, and GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95.

If Obama's LSAT scores merited admission, we would know about them. We don't. The Obama camp guards those scores, like his SAT scores, more tightly that Iran does its nuclear secrets.

We know enough about Obama's Columbia grades to know how far they fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard.

As far back as 1988, however, Obama had serious pull. He would need it. As previously reported, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama's behalf.

An orthodox Muslim, al-Mansour has not met the crackpot anti-Semitic theory he could not embrace. As for bin Talal, in October 2001, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent his $10 million relief check back un-cashed after the Saudi billionaire blamed 9/11 on America.

For an insight into the Khalid al-Mansour connection, see see this video.

These are not connections that Obama would like to see broadcast, which further explains his shyness about the Harvard experience.

There is more. Obama did not make the Harvard Law Review (HLR) the old-fashioned way, the way HLR's first black editor, Charles Houston, did 70 years prior.

To Obama's good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which editors were elected based on grades " the president being the student with the highest academic rank " with one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition.

This competition, the New York Times reported in 1990, was "meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review."

It did just that. At the end of his first year, Obama was named, along with 40 or so of his classmates, an editor of the HLR.

Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited, unsigned note.

In this note for the third volume of the 1990 HLR, he argued against any limits on abortion, citing the government's interest in "preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair."

Obama's timing, however, was better than his writing. In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency of the HLR, the Harvard Law School found itself embroiled in an explosive racial brouhaha.

Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that the Harvard Law School appoint a black woman to the law faculty.

This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.

Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first African-American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues.

"Obama cast himself as an eager listener," the New York Times reported, "sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once."

In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all-day affair, Obama's fellow editors elected him president from among 19 candidates. As it happened, Obama prevailed only after the HLR's small conservative faction threw him its support.

Curiously, once elected, Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."

One more thing: The 1990 Times article about Obama's election notes that the president of the HLR usually goes on to serve as a clerk for a Supreme Court justice.

Not the Mansourian Candidate. Here, oddly, his ambition deserted him. He told the Times that he planned "to spend two or three years in private law practice and then return to Chicago to re-enter community work, either in politics or in local organizing."

In this unlikely surrender to Chicago politics, the realist sees insecurity at best and, at worst, the quid for al-Mansour's quo.
******************************************************************
\
I have read many autobiographies. Some people skip over embarrassing incidents in their lives. BUT NO ONE WHO GOES TO HARVARD LAW SCHOOL NEGLECTS TO TELL HIS AUDIENCE ABOUT HIS OR HER ENTRY TO THAT SCHOOL; HOW THEY WERE HAPPY WHEN THEY RECEIVED THEIR ADMISSION TO THE SCHOOL; HOW THEY MADE UP THEIR APPLICATION TO THE SCHOOL' HOW THEY WERE ELECTED?? TO THE COVETED PRESIDENT SPOT IN THE HARVARD LAW REVIEW.

It is because of this, and other circumstantial evidence that I am quite certain that Obama is an Affirmative Action baby. You don't know very much about Harvard Law School, do you?

I read the "Audacity of Hope" several times. You ought to try it. Writing it the way he did is like a baseball player winning the world series with a home run and not even mentioning the game.

Sorry, it is prima facie evidence that he is an Affirmative Action entrant

Are you doubting Mr, Brian Connoly, parados?

He, an official from Columbia said that Obama graduated from Columbia BUT WITHOUT HONORS.

Because you are ignorant about Harvard Law School and the grades needed for ANYONE to enter ( unless they are AA's) you don't have a clue.

AGAIN, I defy you to find any evidence anywhere which says that someone--anyone--except an Affirmative Action Free Rider can get into Harvard Law School in 1983 having graduated WITHOUT HONORS.

Go ahead, find evidence to that effect and I will concede your point.