Judiciary

The Monday morning shows on CBS, ABC, and NBC all worked to portray President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan as a moderate and open-minded legal scholar, downplaying her liberal views. All three network programs also minimized her controversial decision to ban military recruiters on campus while Dean of Harvard Law School.On CBS's Early Show, legal correspondent Jan Crawford touted…

"Supreme Court extends gun rights" a headline on the Web site for the Chicago Tribune erroneously claims today.The link on the page brought readers to a story entitled "Supreme Court extends gun rights in Chicago case." Here's the opening paragraph:WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court reversed a ruling upholding Chicago's ban today and extended the reach of the 2nd Amendment as a nationwide…

When President Bush nominated John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court in 2005, the media did not hesitate to describe both men as "very conservative," but when President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan this year many in the press couldn't seem to identify any liberal ideology. The Media Research Center has produced a video compilation of examples to further…

Lord have mercy, even when it hits him in the face, the Associated Press's Mark Sherman won't concede the obvious: "Cast doubt"? Is that what court rulings do now? A USA Today item has it right:

Did you know that President Obama has nominated for a federal judgeship someone who believes a serial killer and rapist's "sexual sadism" should be a cause to give him a less serious punishment? Probably not, since the media have given it almost no coverage.Robert Chatigny, nominated for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, believes that sexual sadism should be what's known as a "mitigating…

Via the Associated Press (link may be dynamic and subject to change):  A federal judge in New Orleans has blocked a six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling projects that was imposed in response to the massive Gulf oil spill. The White House says President Barack Obama's administration will appeal. Several companies that ferry people and supplies and provide other services to offshore…

How committed is the Washington Post to its crusade to see Congress abridge free speech under the guise of "campaign finance reform"? So much that it's willing to be a political bedfellow with the National Rifle Association, a group it detests for its persistent advocacy of Americans' Second Amendment liberties.In a June 17 editorial, the Post voiced its support behind a bill that Democrats and…

The “deeply polarized confirmation process in the Senate” has “undercut Obama's effort to significantly infuse the federal courts with more women and minorities,” USA Today's Joan Biskupic fretted in a Wednesday front page article in which she refused to identify Obama's nominees as liberals as she attached the positive “diversity” patina to Obama's agenda without any regard for the irony such “…

Borrowing a line from one of her Harvard colleagues, the Washington Post entitled its June 10 front-page profile of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, "Her work is her life is her work."*But the 60-paragraph story by staff writers Ann Gerhart and Philip Rucker shed barely any light on the judicial philosophy that Kagan's life work demonstrates. Instead, Gerhart and Rucker presented a gauzy…

In his June 9 "case study" feature for Time.com, Adam Cohen, formerly of the New York Times editorial board and Time magazine, tackled the question "Are Liberal Judges Really 'Judicial Activists'?" Cohen's short answer: yes, but so are conservative judges, and it's the conservatives on the Supreme Court that have been on an activist kick lately. To bolster his argument, Cohen complained that…

The Associated Press's Mark Sherman didn't try very hard to mask his true feelings on a couple of matters on which Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was working on during the late 1990s. The dictionary from which Sherman is working must have interesting definitions of "unsentimental" and "compassionate." See for yourself in the first four paragraphs of the AP writer's report on what is…

Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos on Thursday touted Supreme Court collegiality from Justice Antonin Scalia as a real victory in the battle over Elena Kagan's nomination. Stephanopoulos enthused, "Justice Scalia, who is likely to be a conservative adversary if Kagan gets confirmed, pointed out that everybody on the bench now is a judge." (Kagan is likely to be a conservative adversary…

Another day, another liberal meme.Yesterday I tackled how Newsweek's Howard Fineman was attacking Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul for picking a fight that the liberal media, in fact, was whipping up.Today, it's Fineman colleague Ben Adler and his insistence that conservatives are fixated on smearing both Elena Kagan and softball players everywhere as gay.Adler made his argument in…