One of Ms. Miers's most significant cases, according to lawyers who have worked with her, was the Microsoft case, Microsoft v. Manning. The company appealed the decision of a federal trial court to certify a class of purchasers, who argued that Microsoft's MS-DOS 6.0 software was defective, said Jerry Clements, a partner at Locke Liddell & Sapp who worked on the case with Ms. Miers. The appeals court upheld the class certification, but the trial judge reversed her own decision, Ms. Clements said.
"That was the beginning of a series of cases in Texas that really started shifting the state into a position of not being so much of a plaintiff's haven for class actions," Ms. Clements said.
The above is the only moment of truth in Jonathan D. Glater's nonsense in this morning's New York Times. It's called "As a Private Lawyer, Miers Left Little for the Public Record" but think of it as the Times coded confession that they won't do anything to upset the nomination.
Not just because a woman is quoted gushing that "in my heart of hearts" she just knows Harrie
would make a great Supreme Court Justice, even if she can't get a hold of her throbbing heart long enough to verbalize why that is.
But because Glater, and thank you P.J. (community member who works for the Washington Post) for calling this morning, is sending out code. Goldstein & Howe is impressed with Harrie of Celibacy in the City. See, the argument goes, constitutional questions really don't come before the Court that often. The argument, true or not at present, is based upon a model. The model's based upon the present make upon the previous make up of the Court (prior to Roberts). The model's nonsense to anyone who knows anything about the Court. You will have two new members (Roberts and, at some point, someone else). How many Justices does it take to grant cert? (Article's silent on that.)
Here's another question: Who are Goldstein & Howe?
. . . data collected by Goldstein & Howe, a Washington law firm specializing in Supreme Court litigation.
Oh, is that who they are? They're that. They're also a husband and wife team.
But they're also a bit more. Their clients are corporate America. So that should be noted in the article. But even more importantly is one of the corporations they've represented in their brief career.
That would be the New York Times. A little thing called disclosure should have been included in this nonsense. It's not just Nike or PG&E, they find time to help out the Times. Why isn't that in the article?
Now maybe Glater needed a quote and didn't know a thing about Tom Goldstein? Maybe, for instance, he called NPR's Nina Totenberg and she said, "John-John, call Tommy! He's a gas and a giggle! He calls me 'Totes'!" (Which, for the record, he does. Apparently "Tote bag" was already taken. Is NPR in the midst of another fundraiser?)
But someone should have noticed that the relatively new Goldstein & Howe was being plugged and that no disclosure was made of the Times' own relationship with G&H. This isn't Goldstein's problem, this is the Times. (P.J. said Goldstein would probably agree that a disclosure needed to be made in the article.)
The article rushes to assure Harrie's just a kind, sweet soul, a Norman Bates type, apparently, who wouldn't hurt a fly. How is Harrie prone to rule on matters involving corporate America?
That's the article the Times still won't write. They'll hem and haw so that four years from now they can produce a list of reporters and articles that mentioned something for a paragraph or two and claim that they were "clear" on where Harrie stood. But they aren't being clear.
Let's go to real news.
Jim notes Robert Parry's "Making Sense of the Miers Nomination" (Consortium News):
By picking his personal lawyer Harriet Miers to fill a key swing seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, George W. Bush angered his right-wing supporters, who wanted someone with clearer conservative credentials, and opened himself to new charges of cronyism -- a double whammy of bad PR. So why did he do it?
The most common theory is that Bush was looking for a stealth candidate who wouldn’t provoke strong Democratic opposition but would get solid Republican backing -- after some wink-wink assurances that she would vote the right way on abortion and other core conservative issues.
That indeed may be the answer. Bush may have just miscalculated how disappointed his conservative base would be and how offended other Americans would be at his straight-faced assertion that his White House counsel was "the best person I could find."
But there is another theory that would fit the facts. It may be that Bush is less concerned about constitutional issues than he is about criminal and political disputes that might reach the court if the troubles surging around his administration get worse.
What if, for instance, a senior Bush aide is facing prosecution in connection with an untested law prohibiting unmasking covert CIA officers? It might be handy for Bush to have a trusted friend on the court of last resort to rule on some technical legal questions that could torpedo the whole case.
Or what if it turns out that Bush himself participated in the criminal act? Wouldn't it be advantageous if the lawyer who helped him out of previous legal scrapes was sitting among the judges who would make a ruling on this one? (And there really is no reason to think that a Bush appointee would step aside because of some fretting over conflicts of interest.)
The Nixon Tale
Bush also might be concerned about the court ordering him to hand over a document or reveal some sensitive secret that could be politically embarrassing. Who better to see the issue through Bush's eyes than someone who has worked by his side for the past decade?
Republicans haven't forgotten that when Richard Nixon was trying to keep his White House tape recordings out of the hands of Watergate prosecutors in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him unanimously. Conservative justices joined with liberals in declaring that no man is above the law.
After Nixon surrendered his tapes, which revealed him plotting the Watergate cover-up, his presidency was finished.
Brenda e-mails to note Lawrence O'Donnell's "Plamegate: The Next Step" (The Huffington Post):
If Karl Rove's lawyer, Bob Luskin, is still as easy to read as he has been since I broke the story that his client was Matt Cooper's source, then we now know that Rove has received a target letter from Patrick Fitzgerald. How do we know it? Luskin refuses to deny it.
Fitzgerald does not have to send Rove or anyone else a target letter before indicting him. The only reason to send target letters now is that Fitzgerald believes one or more of his targets will flip and become a prosecution witness at the pre-indictment stage. A veteran prosecutor told me, "If Fitzgerald is sending target letters at the end of his investigation, those are just invitations to come in and work out a deal."
The Third Estate Sunday Review is up. Thank the UK Computer Gurus who worked on fixing the problem.
Marcus, my reply to your question had followed. But it's very lengthy and I'm copying and pasting it to use it for an entry tonight. It's a good question but it's better for an evening post. Also, I couldn't touch on the points necessary, in full, this morning. It will be answered tonight but if you read this and think, "If C.I. was going to answer my question, this would be the perfect time," you're right it would be. It will be answered but later tonight.
Rod doesn't know what the topics for Democracy Now! are this morning but, as Marcia says, it's "always worth watching." (And again, the communities' sympathies are with Amy Goodman and her family on their recent loss.)
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
