to being head guy on the Harvard Law Review.

Do you have any evidence that he coasted? That his grades and honors were due to affirmative action?

No, you don’t.

So where does that come from? From a conclusion you draw based solely on his skin color. There’s a word for that.

We, as a party, don’t need to go where you are going.

I don’t consider myself a moderate or middle of the roader. I am, and have been, a think for myself conservative.

The blowhards in this thread don’t much like me either.

When I grew up, the Republican was the party of fiscal responsibility, public and private. The government was supposed to watch spending and balance its budget; individuals were supposed to save their money, send their kids to college so they would have a future, and generally try to build themselves and their communities up.

In terms of foreign policy, we wanted a strong country, but one that used its strength conservatively. We knew that no country is strong enough to right every wrong or fight every fight.

That’s not today’s Republican party. Today it is a party all about abortion, guns and wars. According to our vice president, deficits don’t matter. The private virtues also don’t matter.

Is it anti-intellectual, anti-education? You betcha. Sarah Palin is the face of this new Republican party. It’s a feature, not a defect, to be unable to get through a good school with good grades.

The new Republican party is not, in my opinion, a viable long term political organization. You can’t turn accomplishment and education into negatives, and that’s what the blowhards are doing, and not have it come back and bite you. You need intelligent, thoughtful, educated people to build a movement, and you don’t get them by insulting them.

I’m still fighting for what I believe are true conservative principles. When this election is over, and the move begins to coronate Sarah Palin as the leader elect, I will be in the front rows of those saying she is exactly what we do not need.

I may lose. I may be unpopular. But, to tell you the truth, if I cared about being with a near term winner and spouting the received wisdom, I never would have become a conservative in the first place.

For example, I think the family is important and that marriage is important. I believe that people should wait until they are in a committed marriage before having kids. I believe parents should spend time with their kids, know what’s going on in their lives, and see that they keep their grades up and their noses clean. And, while I am capable of having compassion for people who don’t quite manage that, I’m against making them into some kind of social hero a la Jamie Lynn Spears. It’s called the culture war, and I remember quite well which side of it I’m on; I don’t abandon my side or my principles because of perceived short term political advantage.

1) Social conservatism is more than being pro-life. Palin seems to be of the opinion that so long as you are pro-life your social conservatism is not to be questioned. I do not agree. It’s how you live.

2) We don’t have Obama’s transcript, but we do know he was Magna Cum Laude at Harvard. Since Harvard graduates people Summa Cum Laude once in a blue moon (Has there even been one since Peter Huber?), that’s the highest honor they give most years, assuming you don’t count President of the Law Review. Even though Harvard has an almost uniformly liberal faculty (and the one known Republican, Charles Fried, resigned from the McCain campaign today, citing Sarah Palin as the reason), it takes a lot more than being liberal and having a good narrative to make Magna. Exams are graded anonymously, same as at all major law schools, and you have to deliver the goods to get the grades. Here’s the point: Obama is smart. He’s wrong, as smart people often are, on a host of issues, and we may pay for his being wrong, but wrong and stupid are two entirely different things.

3) As of today, no pipeline has been built or is scheduled to be built on account of anything Palin did. What she accomplished was forcing through a $500 million payment to a Canadian oil company to study the feasibility of pipeline. They are under no obligation to build it. The oil companies are under no obligation to put gas into it if it is built. The pipeline owner is under no obligation to deliver that gas to the US instead of to, say, Alberta, Canada, if it is built and the gas is put into it. It may end up being a huge coup and a visionary accomplishment, but right now it’s just a risky gamble of a half billion dollars of tax payer money.

of taxpayer money and got no commitment in return. That’s an accomplishment. Fiscally conservative – maybe not. It’s easy to spend hundreds of millions without showing a definite result. It may still work out, but if a private company CEO spent money that way they might not even get their golden parachute.

As for what Magna shows – it isn’t about Sarah Palin; it’s about your repeated assertion that we know nothing about how Obama did at Harvard. We know, in fact, that he did very, very well in a system where exams are graded anonymously. He is still wrong in his basic approach toward government, but it’s not because he’s stupid.

Here’s the bottom line: John McCain and Sarah Palin are leading the Republican party headlong to a disastrous defeat of historic proportions. First step in coming back is acknowledging that Palin and all she represents is a huge part of the problem. Had McCain picked anyone else, we would have at three or four more Senators and a dozen more Congressmen next spring. McCain may be “amused” but he contributed mightily to this disaster. There is no reason for the rest of us to pretend not to see what we see; we need to start figuring out how to rebuild what was a great party before Bush-McCain very near destroyed it.

Agreed with an Illinois Supreme Court decision that fetuses cannot sue their mothers.

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprofblog/files/obamacase_comment.pdf

It wasn’t signed, in accord with the standard Harvard practice, but it has been confirmed to be Obama’s work.

Not everyone who could get a Supreme Court clerkship tries to get one.

One of my co-clerks almost certainly could have had one, but decided not to apply for personal reasons. Another friend chose to do a White House fellowship, but odds are high that if he preferred he could have clerked for the court.

It is a matter of public record that Obama was offered a DC Circuit clerkship by Abner Mikva, who at the time was a feeder judge to the Court (one of the clerks at the Court my year as a clerk was, indeed, a Mikva clerk). He turned it down. As a general rule, if the President of the Harvard Law Review wants to clerk on the Court, they get a clerkship. That would have been doubly true for the first black President, I suspect; I can’t imagine that one or another of the liberal justices would not have snapped him up. It’s interesting and a bit intriguing that he skipped adding that standard little resume builder, but it’s pretty certainly not because he would have been turned down.

Write ons to law review are not necessarily less smart or intellectual than those who grade on (I graded on to my school’s law review, so I’m not being defensive here). Being able to write on also requires intelligence. Again, though, we know that Obama’s classwork was good, because he graduated Magna Cum Laude. At Harvard, exams are graded blind, and while there is affirmative action for admissions there’s no affirmative action curve in grading.

Obama is wrong on a lot of important issues, but it’s not because he’s dumb. To repeatedly assert that he’s substandard intellectually with nothing to present as proof other than his race takes you to places where you don’t want to be.