Roberts Memo--"Troubling" re: RACE....New York Times 9/4

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/politics/politicsspecial1/04roberts.html?pagewanted=print

September 4, 2005
Old Memo From Roberts the Young Lawyer Shows a Caustic Side
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 - When he was a young lawyer in the Justice Department in 1982, John G. Roberts Jr. wrote a memorandum that contained an unusually caustic assessment of a prominent black lobbying group called TransAfrica, according to documents released Saturday.

The documents written by Mr. Roberts, who now serves on a federal appeals court and has been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bush, were released by the National Archives and Records Administration.

The memorandum was written in response to a letter to the Justice Department in which TransAfrica's president at the time, Randall Robinson, said he would be providing a free subscription of the organization's policy journal.

TransAfrica was set up to lobby the government on behalf of American blacks on issues relating to Africa and the Caribbean. It had organized a series of successful demonstrations outside the South African Embassy before that country abandoned apartheid.

Mr. Roberts's superior, Kenneth W. Starr, asked him in a memorandum to draft a thank-you note to TransAfrica. Instead, Mr. Roberts wrote on Feb. 16, 1982, that no thank-you note should be sent. "Sometimes silence is golden," he wrote. "TransAfrica is the American lobby group supporting various Marxist takeover attempts in Africa, particularly Namibia."

At the time, the Reagan administration had adopted a policy of what it called "constructive engagement" with the white regime in South Africa, which also ruled Namibia, then known as South-West Africa.

Sylvia Hill, a professor at the University of the District of Columbia and the vice chairwoman of TransAfrica Forum, the current incarnation of the organization, said the remarks were troubling. "One has to be concerned that he essentially used the argument that our support for struggling people in countries who had oppressive legal and racist regimes meant support for Marxism, Communism or the Soviet Union," she said in an interview.

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The way to defeat the Roberts nomination is to play the race card.

With racial issues on everyone's mind now after Katrina, Judge Roberts is going to have a very hard time explaining his views given the current mood of the country.

In a weird, macabre way, things have suddenly changed as far as Bushie's political capital goes. The emperor has no clothes, and Katrina certainly showed that to the world.

Now Bush faces the challenge of getting two Supreme Court picks confirmed more or less simultaneously. That changes the math as far as Roberts goes, because it becomes all too obvious that Bush can't get a free pass on "just this one judge". Two rightwing picks at one time is a whole lot to ask, especially from an increasingly unpopular president whose lack of judgement has just been on display for all the world to see. Plus, the MSM is on his case big time and isn't likely to let go now that Bush has essentially threatened the safety of their comrades who reported from New Orleans.

And one more thing...OK, two more things...we have the grand jury wrapping things up and we have the Abu Ghraib pictures which may very well come out during the hearings.

for rich South Africans. Those people didn't only not get to vote - they were the only country in the world who were not actually part of a country. If the USA & Nato or the UN were not going in to give those people "countryness" ... marxists always showed up in the vacuum.

Roberts is a Dork!

Have to be to not fight apartide.

No more dogma.

We give them Roberts they give us Clinton

will pay attention to the racism in these memos. Several others have come to light about Roberts and his disdain for any civil rights protection.