Barack Obama's Case Comment on Abortion for the Harvard Law Review:
Politico.com has the scoop. According to the article, the citation for the case comment is 103 Harv. L. Rev. 823.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Obama's Case Note:
- Barack Obama's Case Comment on Abortion for the Harvard Law Review:
The case involved negligence of commission - driving in an unsafe manner, while everything Obama wrote about dealt with negligence of ommission - failing to take action.
I think there is a bigger distinction between negligently driving a car and failing to take "proper" prenatal care of a child than Obama was willing to admit.
Like these statements by Bill Dyer:
And these:
And this statement by David M. Nieporent (along with many similar statements he made):
James Lindgren, to his credit, was more circumspect, although also wrong:
But most amusing of all is this statement:
Who said that? The exact same people who just wrote a piece called this:
I learned a lot about Politico when I recently heard Hannity strongly recommend them.
A bunch of people have jumped into this thread to give you a prompt and vivid answer: because no matter what he wrote, no matter how "straightforward" or innocuous or mainstream, his enemies would try to find a way to create a distracting discussion about how allegedly there's something wrong with it. Just like they tried to do with his birth certificate.
You show me something genius that GWB has published or said and we'll call it even?
In all seriousness though, i'm no legal expert but its a review that he wrote as a 2L and politico quoted two people (Cass Sunstein as a supporter granted a one of them) who say its pretty much in the bounds of what a 2L at Harvard Law would write.
What passes for entertainment for me is seeing how long before someone points out Bush in response to criticism of Obama.
As for Mr. Obama's note, it is what it is. I wouldn't want my law school writings to define me 20+ years from now. Then again, my paper "How the ACLU and other liberal interest groups are destroying restorative justice programs" would go over well with most of the country, as opposed to most of the blogosphere and the law school crowd, who would hate it. (So much for that Supreme Court nomination I was counting on).
(I got an A on the paper, by the way, from a far-left professor).
It's a good concise summary of the case and the surrounding law... neither controversial nor particularly interesting.
"Obama's lost law review article about fetal rights" is a bit like Al Capone's vault (or the UHF bit about Al Capone's glove box)
other hand
so what?
I was a POW, although I prefer not to talk about it much. By the way, did I mention that I was a POW?
I agree (and readily admit that it goes both ways; if we found John McCain's long lost op-ed for the Navy Times arguing that the uniforms are too starchy, people would pick at that too). But it would seem that he would have wanted to get it out early so that it wasn't a distraction on some inopportune day, e.g., today.
Thin gruel, thin resume.
His advocates say his successful campaign for the nomination confirms his managerial ability. But that success could easily be the fruit of David Axelrod's efforts. As far as we know BHO simply followed the script others wrote for him and read the teleprompter with a pleasing smile. You could say that's all Ronald Reagan ever did. But Reagan was the governor of the nation's biggest state for 8 years. Thus far no one had provided a reason I should vote for this man other than he's not John McCain.
Nick
Yes. That is the correct answer. Everything else Obama brings is a bonus.
Can a fetus with a heartbeat, but without a cerebrum or cerebellum really live? That's who's being protected by the Born Alive protection act.
I don't need BHO to vote against McCain, I can go for a third-party candidate.
Unfortunately for you, Obama didn't make such fine distinctions. In his discussions on this bill, the only thing that mattered was that the baby was intended to be aborted. So it didn't matter for him if the cerebrum or cerebellum existed or was damaged or whatever. All that mattered was that there was an intent for an abortion. If the baby was born perfectly healthy, his bill would not protect the infant if they threw it into the garbage while it flailed its limbs.
Perhaps you should expect a little more honesty from your presidential candidates and their campaigns.
Which brings the total page length to about . . .six.
One house, one wife, no planes crashed, has actually worked for a living at jobs he got on his own, no volcanic temper or behavioral problems. No wonder the conservatives don't like him.
Kudos on sticking to the logical and, as it turns out, factually correct argument. Honestly, I assumed, like many others did, that if Obama had published something it would have been ferreted out sooner. But you consistently and properly pointed out the overreach of those who turned an absence of evidence into not merely evidence of absence, but into proof of absence. I'm disappointed and surprised that nobody who argued that so categorically has shown the character yet to admit you were right.
getting back to Obama, is there anything about this note to suggest the great brilliancr attributed to him?
How brilliant do you want him to be? I'd say that "probably smarter in academic terms than any president of the last 40 years (with the possible exception of Clinton, who did well at Yale, but not as well as Obama did at Harvard)" is smart enough. Are you aiming higher, like maybe somebody who knows how many houses he owns?
Nobody "overreached." Obama's campaign misrepresented the facts. That's not the same thing.
There's no evidence that BHO is in any way brilliant. If he had a record of accomplishments then his academic record would be irrelevant. But we have nothing. No one has yet given me any reason to vote for him, or just what qualifies him to be president.
It should be noted that the possibility of collusion is as strong in regular parent-child cases as it is in fetal cases. Plus defendant gets to coach the plaintiff's chief witness over dinner.
I will admit that I have not done a second of research on this issue. However, I follow politics closely, and yet I do not recall such a "flat denial." In light of the previous factual inaccuracies regarding this issue, I hope you will provide a non-partisan citation to support your claim.
It suggests to me that he's not brilliant enough for any top research university to offer him a tenured position (at least for academic reasons) without further writing on his part.
... which, assuming it's true, would say what about his intelligence relative to the only other guy who may be elected POTUS?
It means that Bob Barr isn't completely out of the running.
That's a fair point. On the other hand, I think the news impact is going to be minimal.
I think he decided to take sort of a middle-ground approach to this. He was prepared to readily acknowledge it, if asked about it specifically. And that's what happened. But he would otherwise generally avoid talking about it.
I also think that as a matter of etiquette, it's somewhat poor form to brag about an unsigned note. Or do anything that might be construed as bragging about it. I have asked for, and have yet to see, another example of someone claiming authorship (e.g., in the form of a public statement, or on a resume) of an unsigned HLR student note.
Imagine if months ago he had issued a statement saying something like "hey everyone, I wrote this unsigned note." Undoubtedly, some people would have reacted by claiming that he was trying to take credit for something he didn't do. He would have been challenged to show proof he wrote it. And then that proof would have been challenged, just like his birth certificate was challenged. It would be in his interest to try to avoid a scenario like that.
The quotation is this:
As Politico said, the statement was narrow but accurate. Obama's unsigned note wasn't published while he was "president of the Law Review" (it was published earlier). And "articles" are something different from unsigned notes.
You weren't present when the statement was made, and you don't have a transcript of the interview, and you don't know what the question was that was being answered. It's not LaBolt's fault that Ressner decided to write something ("one thing Obama did not do while with the review was publish any of his own work") that was false, and was not an accurate paraphrase of what LaBolt actually said.
Please note that Ressner could very easily have provided the exact LaBolt quote in his first article. He didn't. Why not? Instead he gave us an erroneous paraphrase. This tends to create the impression that he's sloppy, and/or he had an agenda. Either way, I'm inclined to take what he says with a big grain of salt.
The "nice try" is all yours. You've failed to explain how the LaBolt quote is incongruent with anything I've said.
Another "nice try." Too bad Obama's campaign never issued "a flat denial that he published anything." I already cited what LaBolt actually said, and it's far from "a flat denial that he published anything." And it's a quote that was not published until today. So you are indeed making things up, just like the folks I cited earlier. If you know about some other "flat denial," then show us where it's hidden.
Gosh, that's funny. I assume you're supporting the candidate who's been called a liar by a bunch of Republicans.
Gosh, you sure sound a lot like nieporent. It is very typical of his style to make claims like that without offering a shred of proof. You should indicate exactly what statement by "Obama's campaign misrepresented the facts."
If you get excited by counting pages, then you need to include the pages in Obama's books. Unlike McCain, Obama wrote his books by himself. And unlike McCain, Obama got rich the old-fashioned way: he created something a lot of people decided to buy. As compared with leaving his kids and disfigured wife behind to run off with a beer heiress barely half his age.
ejo! What a surprise to bump into you here. Last I noticed, you were on another thread claiming (implicitly) that the State Dept was promoting Russian propaganda (details here). I thought you were about to explain how Putin convinced Rice to do that, but then you abruptly disappeared. I can't imagine why.
Please pay no attention to the fact that he sponsored more than 800 bills as a state senator (link, link, link). Facts published by the State Dept don't interfere with your fantasies, so these facts shouldn't do that either.
Yes, it must just be a case of "the vapors" that caused a Republican senator to say this:
And it was a case of "the vapors" that caused a major Arizona paper to say this:
I'm not the least bit surprised. On the contrary.
As lm already pointed out, prominent moonbat James Lindgren disagrees with you on this point. But you're obviously smarter and more objective than Lindgren, so you should tell us what you know that he doesn't.
Don't hold your breath.
It's nice that you're admitting you were wrong, but you seem to be conveniently forgetting the various different ways you exaggerated various items of alleged evidence (what lm correctly called your "overreach"). You didn't just treat the "news article" as a form of absolute proof that was unwarranted. You also made statements like this:
And this:
Those claims of yours are quite separate from the Politico article. You noticed that Obama declined to take credit for this unsigned note on his faculty web page, and you treated this as a form of absolute proof that the note simply did not exist. Because "nobody omits published works from their resume." Nobody. Except when they do, for all sorts of fairly unsurprising reasons. And you didn't mind making a flat, emphatic claim about what "Obama himself said," allegedly, as if the absence of something on his web page, which could occur for all sorts of reasons, was the perfect equivalent of a direct, personal, explicit statement spoken by "Obama himself," saying "he didn't publish a note, article, or anything else." Trouble is, it's not.
In other words, you definitely didn't treat Obama's "omitting it from his c.v." as merely "absence of evidence," as you are now trying to claim. You treated it as "proof of absence."
There you go again, exaggerating the facts. It's not fair to claim that "Obama hid it," any more than any author of an unsigned note has "hid it." The fact that the note is unsigned means that the author is agreeing to not take credit for it (initially, at the very least). Although I've asked the question several times, I've yet to see a single example (other than this one) of any person later taking credit for an unsigned HLR student note. I think there is arguably an etiquette problem in doing so. When such an author agrees to not take credit, it's not fair to claim they "hid it."
If someone had asked Obama if he had written this note, and he said 'no, I didn't,' then it would be fair to claim "Obama hid it." But that's not what happened.
Those are both possibilities. Here's another possibility: Politico had an agenda. This interpretation is supported by the fact that in the first article, they clearly could have given us the actual quote from LaBolt (that they eventually published in the more recent article), but chose not too. Instead they gave us an erroneous paraphrase that said something that LaBolt didn't say. It's hard to understand why they made this choice, unless they had motivations similar to yours.
The upshot of all this is that claims made by Politico should be taken with a grain of salt (and I'm still skeptical that Politico has given us a clear and complete picture of what LaBolt actually said in the original interview). Likewise for claims made by you.
So what's the evidence?
Let's not rehash the argument about BHO's class standing at HLS as we have beaten that one to death. I'm talking about his lack of brilliant accomplishments since graduating. Has he written any outstanding law journal articles? No-- he hasn't written any articles at all. Was his performance on his New York job after graduating from Columbia in any way brilliant? No- the people who worked with him were not particularly impressed. Was his performance as a state legislator in any way brilliant? Not that I can tell. Just where is this guy brilliant? It seems to me that his advocates have the burden of proof as to his brilliance, not me.
The statement that Lindgren made, and the discussion he presented around that statement, can be found via lm's post here. But I have a feeling you probably already knew that.
If you have questions about Lindgren's statement, it might be wise for you to address those questions directly to him. Aside from the fact that the statement is his, he might have a more favorable view of your sincerity than I do. For example, he might be blissfully unaware of your routine practice of ducking fair questions (example, example, example).
Really? You should show us your proof. Obama had two jobs in NYC post-Columbia, before moving to Chicago. NYT interviewed both of his supervisors. Neither of them is quoted saying anything negative about him:
So please tell us precisely who was "not particularly impressed [with] his performance on his New York job after graduating from Columbia." Dan Armstrong, a colleague, is quoted claiming that Obama didn't describe the work environment accurately (and if you're terribly fascinated by this I can show you some evidence that Armstrong himself has not described the situation accurately). But Armstrong does not criticize Obama's "performance."
NPR found another colleague who said this:
Anyway, speaking of "not particularly impressed," let us know if have any concerns about what McCain's biographer wrote, regarding McCain's one and only executive job that he ever had, which lasted 13 months:
From "John McCain, An American Odyssey," p. 123. The author is a Naval Academy graduate, Marine, and Vietnam vet. For some strange reason, McCain doesn't even mention that job in his official campaign bio, even though it's the only executive position he ever held. Speaking of thin resumes. McCain has also not signed SF-180, which means that the details of what he did on that job remain a secret.
When are you going to tell us about McCain's "brilliant accomplishments?" We all know his middle name is 'POW,' but I don't think that belongs on a list of "brilliant accomplishments." After all, "it doesn't take a lot of talent to intercept a surface-to-air missile with your own airplane." And the person who said that is someone in a position to know.
Then again, maybe you mean the 'brilliant accomplishment' of leaving his kids and disfigured wife to run off with a beer heiress barely half his age, who gave him the money and connections he needed to launch his political career (video). Kerry was repeatedly called a "gigolo" because his wife is rich, even though he divorced his first wife before he ever met Heinz, and even though he had already been a senator for 10 years before he married Heinz. In other words, he didn't use Heinz to launch his political career, the way McCain used Cindy. If Kerry is a gigolo, what does that make McCain?
Some lovely details of the story are not reported very often. Like the fact that he has admitted lying to Cindy about his age, when he met her. Or the fact that he lied in his book, claiming that his affair with Cindy didn't start until he and Carol were separated; legal documents show that McCain dated Cindy for nine months while still living with Carol. Or the fact that he obtained a marriage license for Cindy while still married to Carol.
Are there some other "brilliant accomplishments" I left out? Maybe the fact that McCain has been called a "liar" by a bunch of people in the GOP? Or maybe McCain's very close personal relationship with convicted felon Charles Keating (video)? What did I forget?
But this "agreement" is a figment of your imagination.
As for seeing an example, if you spent a little less time calling people liars and a lot less time linking to posts where you called people liars, and a little more time googling, it would have taken you about 90 seconds to come up with this. And another two minutes for this. Or this, where she not only lists her student note, but puts it under the "articles" section of her c.v., failing to make the distinction you thought was so important.
If you have questions about Lindgren's statement, it might be wise for you to address those questions directly to him.
As I said we have throughly hashed out his class standing before.
Obama had two jobs in NYC post-Columbia, before moving to Chicago. NYT interviewed both of his supervisors. Neither of them is quoted saying anything negative about him.
So what? The absence of anything negative is no evidence of brilliance.
When are you going to tell us about McCain's "brilliant accomplishments?"
Probably never because I don't think he has any. But how does McCain's lack of brilliance prove anything about BHO? You keep dancing around the question. Show me where BHO has done anything that qualifies him as brilliant. You know you can't because he hasn't really done anything significant. If he's some kind of a hot shot then show me where he has shot hot.
I spent more than 90 seconds looking for an example like that, and found none. So I'm actually very interested in the clever google search that allowed you to find that particular resume in "about 90 seconds." Hopefully you'll tell us what it is, because it sounds like you know some google tricks I'd love to learn.
Anyway, what you've proven is that there are three people in the world, all law professors, and with very long, detailed, academically-oriented resumes (19 pages, in aggregate), who each decided to take credit for an HLR student note. Thanks, that's helpful. It would be even more helpful to know how these three resumes allow us to draw conclusions about HLS grads who have other kinds of careers, in fields that don't emphasize publishing, like politics, business or law practice. Likewise, it would be helpful to know how these three resumes justify the sweeping assertion you made:
Also, since it was so easy for you to find these examples, it's a little hard to understand why you kept them under wraps for so long. I raised this question weeks ago (8/1, 8/11 and 8/12), and you essentially ignored the question. Then again, I realize you were very busy doing other things. Like writing lots of posts falsely claiming that it was a known fact that Obama never published anything in HLR.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but this thread is about an actual person who wrote an actual student note and actually omitted it from his resume (or at least from his faculty web page, which I guess is something like a resume).
Aside from that, presumably you're logical enough to realize that your request is fundamentally silly, since unsigned student notes are, well, unsigned. So to prove that a given person omitted it from his resume would first require me to know that he wrote the note, which is hard to do because the authors of the notes are generally unknown to the public.
Exactly, which means we already know that you're inclined to dismiss facts you don't like. So it's hard to understand why you're demanding to hear those facts over again.
He had two supervisors. They both said favorable things about him. This is not just "the absence of anything negative." It's the presence of something positive. One of his supervisors said he was a "star." So we're still waiting for you to prove your claim that "the people who worked with him were not particularly impressed." It's possible you have some proof. On the other hand, it's possible that you are roughly as credible as nieporent.
The two questions are related because there are (realistically) just two people running for president.
Getting rich by creating something lots of people want to buy is exactly the sort of thing I thought Republicans considered "significant." Nevertheless, it's something most GOP leaders (like Bush and McCain, for example) haven't done. One exception I can think of is the governator.
Fair enough.
Zarkov,
I'm not sure why I take the bait on your straw men. Who's making this claim about Obama's brilliance that you keep flailing at? That a candidate is even arguably smarter than any President in the last 40 years is good enough for me, as it should be for anyone. Besides, I hesitate to call any politician "brilliant" contemporaneously. I think that sort of judgment is better made retrospectively.
But since you insist, I do think Obama has shown signs of brilliance, especially in his speech on race relations. And I have a lot of company in that opinion. But since you'll probably disagree and dismiss my opinion as biased, the question is, who would Zarkov consider an objective, qualified judge of brilliance? Hmmm, let me think... Charles Murray?
Some people don't believe in that kind of hesitation:
Read the comments by some of his former co-workers at the Business International. He made mixed impressions, and no one described as "brilliant." Some of the comments are negative, and others are mildly positive. They are mainly correcting his exaggerations in his resume about BI.
For example, Bill Millar saysJeanne says:From Barack Obama Embellishes His Resume. From these comments, it's clear BHO did engage in some resume inflation. Perhaps not lying but coming close.
"But since you insist, I do think Obama has shown signs of brilliance, especially in his speech on race relations."
See you have to really strain to come up with a substantial accomplishment. Even if we assume the speech is "brilliant," (it's not) one speech does not demonstrate brilliance especially since it was most likely written for him.
"... the question is, who would Zarkov consider an objective, qualified judge of brilliance?"
We don't need a judge, we need facts. Then we can all be the judge. No matter how you try to spin it, or dance around the question, BHO has done very little that is especially noteworthy from the time he graduated law school until he announced his candidacy. Does he have a very high level of native intelligence? He might, again the evidence is scarce and weak, and his refusal to make his records public (as Biden did) doesn't help.
What would impress me? Significant accomplishment in his chosen field: law. He has none. Extraordinary performance on at least some of his jobs. I don't see any. Outstanding leadership in business, government or the military. Again nothing. As far as I can see, we just have another Chicago pol, who can give good speeches under controlled conditions.
I guess you've forgotten your original statement. It was this:
(Emphasis added.) The coworkers who chimed in on that blog were not commenting on his job performance. They were talking about two other things: whether or not they liked him, and whether or not he described the workplace accurately. They were not in a position to evaluate his job performance. His supervisor was in a position to do that, and offered a favorable evaluation that I cited here. Dan, Bill and Jeanne are three co-workers who offered opinions on Obama's personality. Dan said this:
Bill said this:
Jeanne said this:
By the way, Jeanne pointed out that Dan was incorrect to state that Obama "had neither reason nor opportunity to interview" anyone.
In my opinion, it appears that Dan and Bill are dripping with envy because they once had the same job as Obama, and now he's running for president, and they're not. In any case, they were not in a position to evaluate his job performance, and were not claiming to evaluate his job performance, so their statements do not support your original assertion.
Ah, so now we get to the moving goalposts phase.
The only people who routinely publish their c.v.s on the web are academics, so any sample that relies upon web links is going to be skewed to academics. People who have careers in other fields generally don't post their c.v.s, so I have no way of providing URLs for you (*); obviously someone who doesn't list his publications at all isn't going to include his Harvard Law Review note on the non-list of publications. But the whole point was that Obama was an academic at the time, and had a publications page up; the question wasn't why he hadn't spontaneously announced he had published something, but why he would have published something and then omitted it from his list of publications.
(*) Of course, there are plenty of other non-academic examples of lawyers claiming credit for HLR student notes, including from law practice, (which took another few minutes of googling).
Yes, but you asserted that people do -- without knowing that Obama had -- "for all sorts of unsurprising reasons" (which you specified), without having any basis for that claim. Shouldn't you hold yourself to the same standard to which you hold everyone else?
When I do that search I get 11,800 results. The Jones resume is #10 on the list, the Chang resume is #26 on the list, and the Stolzenberg resume is #36 on the list. I guess I wasn't motivated enough to read through several dozen multi-page legal resumes in order to find examples like these. I was also influenced by the fact that you ignored the question even though I asked it several times, weeks ago. I deduced that you would probably have answered the question if such examples were actually easy to find.
It's not a question of "moving goalposts." It's a question of asking for data in an open-minded manner (you might want to look back at my original questions on this subject, weeks ago), and then trying to figure out what the data actually means, when some of it finally shows up.
A resume is not the only place where such evidence might appear. For example, it's possible to imagine a prominent person being profiled in a newspaper or magazine, and mentioning in an interview that they wrote an unsigned note for HLR. Or someone could mention it on a blog or forum. I tried to find such references, and couldn't.
True, that was a question. Trouble is, you pretended that the question only had one possible answer, and you knew what the answer was. So you said this:
What you did went way beyond merely expressing an incorrect opinion. You claimed to know for a fact something you didn't actually know for a fact. And you claimed that Obama made a statement that he didn't actually make. Likewise, you told us you had a "quote" from LaBolt, even though you didn't, and then later you told us that the distinction between a quote and a paraphrase is "pointless." Even though in this instance the paraphrase was erroneous, which became clear when Politico finally revealed the actual quote that they inexplicably failed to include in their original article.
Wrong. I did have basis for the claim: common sense. And I explained my reasoning (and I also referred to other evidence, like Scheiber's report that Obama had indeed published an unsigned note). But that's not the point. The point is that I made it clear that I was expressing opinion and speculation, not fact. I never claimed that I knew for sure that Obama had published something. I simply said it was possible, and that there was insufficient evidence to rule it out. You, on the other hand, repeatedly claimed to know for a fact something you didn't actually know for a fact. This amounts to distorting the evidence, which is something you seem to do habitually.
I do hold myself to the same standard, and it has to do with respecting the difference between an opinion and a fact. A distinction you regularly disregard.
No, I said I think it's a dicey exercise to declare any current politician "brilliant." But if you force me to do so, I'm as comfortable using the term for Obama as for any politician I know.
Where'd you get that idea? He wrote it himself. If you have evidence to the contrary, please produce it or withdraw the allegation.
Yes, but if the judge isn't fair, it doesn't matter how strong the facts. Jim Lindgren is convinced Obama is probably smarter than any President in 40 years, but you're still questioning his intelligence. Jim also mentioned that Obama writes well enough to be a tenured professor at any law school in the country, but you don't believe he wrote his own speech. The author of a book on intelligence you cite repeatedly says Obama's speech was "brilliant," and you're still not impressed. That's is why I said this kind of discussion is pointless. If William Shockley impregnated his own wife with Barack Obama's sperm you'd probably chalk it up to affirmative action.
zarkov:
On a related note: it's interesting to notice that Obama wrote his books by himself, and McCain did not. Obama can also count his houses without relying on his staff.