Bill Maher 4/13/2006 - Bush appoints lawyers from Pat Robertson's Law School

For political appointees there is absolutely nothing wrong with screening potential appointees for their political slant.

For civil service employees if it isn’t against the Civil Service laws or regulations I would be surprised. Of course the administration could get away with it because any investigation and prosecution is in the hands of the Department of Justice.

The Civil Service rules are written to prohibit exclusion based on any non-pertinent, discriminatory test. Given sufficient numbers of applicants with sufficiently high grades or test scores, Civil Service does not, as far as I know, insist that some arbitrary percent of the top candidates be selected based solely on scores. Thus, the recruiters do not “discriminate against” the non-theocratic graduates of Harvard, they simply “select for” the like minded graduates of Regents or wherever.

(It is very similar to age discrimination in hiring: no one “excludes” the 57 year old applicant, they simply look at a pool of three people over 50, five people from 40 - 50, and a dozen people under 30 and consistently “choose” the 28-year-old. No law gets violated and the geezers remain out of work.)

All they would have had to do would be to assemble a faculty of lawyers, preferably experienced law-school professors, who share Robertson’s right-wing evangelical Protestant worldview, or are at least willing to bite their lips on any disagreement for the sake of a good job. Do you really think that would be difficult?

There’s more to being accredited as a law school, isn’t it? I’m asking because I seriously don’t know. The accreditation process for vet and med school is fairly rigorous and includes a review of the curriculum, examinations, clinical facilities, etc. There are a lot of standards beyond just having faculty with the right credentials. I would expect something comparable for law schools.

Well, I’ve never taught at a law school or worked in administration, but as I understand it, everything you’re talking about is fairly standardized. All law schools teach the same basic core curriculum by roughly the same methods. Clinical facilities would not be required for accreditation and, in any case, it’s not that difficult or expensive to set up a law clinic. Thing is, with a law school, as compared to a medical school, there’s not a lot of material investment to be made. You don’t need laboratory equipment or cadavers or operating theaters or boxes of skeletons or any of that – only the minds of the faculty, the minds of the students, and a whole lot of books for which the students are expected to pay, plus classrooms.

On that note, I recall a joke I read a few years back in a magazine, I think it was U.S. News and World Report, in a special edition ranking grad schools. A university president, after a lifetime skimming off the pension funds, dies and wakes up in Hell. The Devil says, “Well! You did such a good job on Earth, I’m going to put you in charge of the University of Hell!” He gives him the tour – there’s a huge campus with rolling green lawns, a fat endowment, and a tenured faculty of Nobel Prize laureates. Finally the president asks, “I don’t understand. How can this be Hell?” The Devil replies, "Oh, I forgot to tell you . . . heh-heh-heh . . . YOU HAVE THREE MEDICAL SCHOOLS!"

I was a Republican since I started voting until last year, when I couldn’t stand it any more. There is a difference between a particular member of the party who is a failure, and the attempt to enforce ideological purity in the party. There was no such attempt at the time of Carter, and there was no such attempt even at the time of Nixon.

You can laugh all you want about Democrats never getting it together, but this diversity makes for a stronger party in the long run. Ditto for Republicans 30 years ago.

It’s really the same mindset as Iraq. You invade based on assumptions that turn out to be wrong, and since you don’t accept the possibility that you can be wrong there is no Plan B. You take over the government, assuming that conservative principles will lead to a paradise on earth, and when you crash and burn there is little to fall back on. That explains the weakness of the Republican slate today.

So, he finally go the school accredited. Right? They been trying for years. But hey, in Tennessee you can become a lawyer by attending the YMCA’s night school. Really!

The highway in front of Pat’s place (business) is maintained by a gay association just so they can have the sigh posted there, a sign they’ve replaced many times.

In that case, you should educate yourself:

ABA Standards of Approval for Law Schools (an index page, with links to sections of the standards)

[story on Regent Law School accreditation, evidently nearly a reprint of a press release from Regent University

[url=“http://www.evergreenpolitics.com/ep/2007/04/monica_goodling.html”]Interesting comments from Washington State](ABA GRANTS ACCREDITATION TO REGENT LAW SCHOOL"}Norfolk Virginian-Pilot[/url)

It gets much, much worse.

Of course it does. The way it’s going, I don’t know if there’s anything that would surprise me any more.

Jesus Christ undergoing meiosis, people!!

Wolf meister brings forward Bill Maher’s esposé of efforts to infiltrate the DOJ with graduates of a fourth-rate law school founded by a televangelist whom I’ve given evidence has theocratic plans, with that information supported by a wide assortment of data from across the Internet – and the thread dies a slow death, while everybody psychoanalyzes Cho and the covert homophilia of the movie 300.

There was a sarcastic remark that this Administration was safe unless one of its leaders was caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. And, thanks to that clown from Florida, we may as well scratch the “live boy” clause too.

What does it take to outrage you, any fucking way?

Oh, I’m outraged, all right. But this Admin engenders outrage fatigue. These unconscionable hiring decisions are a pecadillo compared to trying to draft the DOJ into the Republican Party’s service for purposes of swinging close elections. And that pales beside the Iraq War, the USA PATRIOT ACT, and a slew of other crimes and failures.

IMO it’s long past time to impeach. But I realize that’s a minority view even on this board, and even among the Bush-bashers on this board. Everyone realizes the difficulty of getting the Senate to convict by two-thirds when its partisan makeup is almost an even split. Also there’s the problem of succession, and there’s absolutely no precedent for a POTUS-VP simulpeachment. It would be viewed as a coup d’etat to put Pelosi in the WH – and it would be, except for being entirely constitutional.

So what can we do? What’s the point of outrage? Let’s just hope the House continues to hold the Admin’s feet to the fire on the Justice Department scandal, and establishes hard proof of election-rigging perpetrated or planned. That would be impeachable, even the Pubs would have to admit. Likewise if they really tried to circumvent the Presidential Records Act by using outside servers for their e-mails.

Remember: Nixon got away with a whole lot of criminal acts, such as the secret bombing of Cambodia. But when he cheated at the game of electoral politics, and got caught at it, he had to go. That was one line he could not cross without consequences.

Write your Congresscritter. What else is there to be done?

What Brainglutton said, Poly.

Also, folks in my area don’t care. In fact, they see it as a good thing. The local ministers support this sort of thing from their pulpits every Sunday. It’s very conservative Christian around here, and the locals (my kinfolk) don’t see a thing wrong with it.

Of course, as I’ve mentioned in past threads, Christian Reconstructionism has a foothold (or more) here.

And for us non-christians in my area, debating this issue among ourselves is just “preaching to the choir”. Good for stoking our outrage over the administration, but that fire has been burning plenty hot for quite some time now in us.

I care. I care a lot. I’m just completely impotent.

There are straight lines that I will not touch. I think I should be credited for that. This one, for instance. Nosiree, Bob! Not going anywhere near it!

Polycarp
Thanks for reviving the thread.
Well I’m certainly ouraged :mad: heck I started the thread.

What really sticks in my craw is I’m NO fan of Dubya Bush and I’m NO fan of religion either.
So, it seems for this administration, the only criterion for employment is going to a “God” University?

I wonder what would have happened if the team assembled for the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Moon Landing consisted entirely of graduates of Messiah College or Bob Jones University.

I’m not a fan of Bush, Pat Robertson, or religion as a whole really, but what the president has done is neither the worst thing he’s done in office nor is it at all surprising that his administration would consider religion to be a deciding factor for employment. I’m not saying that it’s right, but I find it to be far from outrage worthy. More in the neighborhood of disappointing.

Repent! For the time of the Prophet is at hand! :smack:

Something would have exploded, but probably the wrong one. I have this really great image in my head of anvils dropping all over Hiroshima with confused looks all over the face of the Japanese.

Actually, this pretty much describes my point of view.

See, I’m a Bush hater who, up until a week ago, wasn’t willing to go entirely along with the impeachment crowd. I was sympathetic, certainly, and would have welcomed the removal of this gang of crooks from power, even though I was somewhat leery of what seemed to me to be self-justifying efforts that were infected with the remembered sting of Clinton-era persecution. The Iraq debacle, horrifying as it’s been, didn’t push me over; gross incompetence is not a high crime. Ditto the shockingly inept handling of Katrina. The warrantless wiretaps were a clear violation of FISA, but couched in a totally conventional grab for expanded Presidential power, which every Oval Office occupant has pursued. I was tempted to tip by the Valerie Plame affair, but events and evidence were so muddied that it was impossible to tell what had really happened. And so on. Without question, the worst, and most harmful, Presidential administration of my lifetime, and probably the last hundred years… but still not worthy of being impeached.

But politicizing law enforcement? Turning federal prosecutors into an arm of the campaign machine? That, to me, is an utterly inexcusable abuse of power. In my mind, and according to my view of the American political system, you can be as much of an asshole as you want to be… but you have to give the people a fair shot at tossing you out if they disapprove. The moment you try to subvert the electoral system, it is incumbent upon us, for sake of the national honor, to strip you of your power and ban you from office. There is no worse offense than that.

And I would argue that even deceiving the nation into an unjust, immoral war isn’t as bad. Why? Given that enough of us were happy to swallow the obvious bullshit that was being used to sell the war and go along with it, in my mind, that means that on some level it was a reflection of the national will to go kick some brown-skinned ass, regardless of how little sense it made. That mess cannot be laid solely at the feet of Bush & Co.; it’s the fault, and the failing, of all of us, collectively. We must all, as a nation, be judged for it.

But undermining the mechanism by which we sift through our candidates and designate our choice of leadership: that stain is entirely on the hands of Bush and his minions. That is a blade directly to the heart of the American character, and it cannot, and must not, be forgiven.

As of about a week ago, when it became clear what was really going on, I finally reached my personal tipping point. It may seem strange, given everything else the nation has endured while the current bunch of liars and fools have been holding the reins, that such a comparatively minor issue should be judged so significant, but from my perspective, the kind of transgression, and the intent behind it, makes all the difference.

A month ago, I wouldn’t have said this, but I now believe that this administration must be removed from power, as soon as is feasible.