SCOTUS... "If Only..."

I first wrote a blog post about this gentleman back in 2008 - part of that post is included in one from 2012, re-aired below.

It's a pipe dream, of course - but what a superb addition to the SCOTUS line-up this man would be, to fill the now vacant seat of Antonin Scalia dec'd. According to Wikipedia Mr Fitzgerald is now in private practice, in Chicago.

By the way, regarding the late Justice Scalia, there's a good read by a favourite writer of mine, David Michael Green, at The Smirking Chimp: The Loser's Way, (or, What Do You Do When your Politics Suck ?)


Re-airing my 2012 post:

One public figure in the United States I can admire without reservation (and there are precious few) is US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. He has been in the news once more this week, this time announcing his decision to step down from his post in Northern District of Illinois after a stint of 11 years. From the end of June he intends to take the summer off before considering other job possibilities.
(Photo: Getty Images)

His 24-year, often high profile, career has included prosecuting terrorists, mob members, corrupt governors and a presidential aide - we can only guess at what job offers might be forthcoming. Possibilities mentioned here and there on the net would be to replace the current FBI director whose term will end in September 2013, or U.S. attorney general under a new administration.

Mr.Fitzgerald has never made his own political leanings known. He prosecuted Republican Governor George Ryan and Governor Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, with equal zeal.

On Thursday, speaking to reporters he said, "For the office, it's important that there be change. I thought this was the right time." Asked about future plans, "I don't know, and that's sincere," he told reporters. "Public service is in my blood."
(Photograph: Chicago Sun Times)

Fitzgerald's parents came from Ireland's County Clare, they met in the United States, raised their son in Flatbush and guided him to a scholarship at a Jesuit high school. He worked as a school janitor in Brooklyn to make money for college and spent summers opening doors at an upscale co-op building on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. His father worked at a building on East 75th. Fitzgerald says he remembers where he came from and pinches himself when he realizes where he is. "The values we grew up with were straight-ahead. We didn't grow up in a household where people were anything but direct," Fitzgerald says.

I've posted before about Patrick Fitzgerald -this comes from a 2008 post....

A writer called Fitzgerald an "Untouchable", in the mould of Eliot Ness ."The Prosecutor Never Rests", an article by Peter Slevin from 2005 gives a flavour of Patrick Fitzgerald's personality.

"His thoroughness, his relentlessness, his work ethic are legendary," says terrorism expert Daniel Benjamin, a former member of the National Security Council.

Seeing Fitzgerald in action, says Los Angeles lawyer Anthony Bouza, a college classmate, is "like watching a sophisticated machine." Colleagues speak in head-shaking tones of Fitzgerald's skills in taking a case to trial. A Phi Beta Kappa math and economics student at Amherst before earning a Harvard law degree in 1985, he has a gift for solving puzzles and simplifying complexity for a jury."

"The staff of the 9/11 commission called him one of the world's best terrorism prosecutors. He convicted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and all four defendants in the embassy bombings, which had left 224 people dead. He extracted a guilty plea from Mafia capo John Gambino and became an authority on bin Laden, whom he indicted in 1998 for a global terrorist conspiracy that included the African bombings"

"People who know Fitzgerald describe him as anything but a stuffed shirt. During a key moment in one New York trial, he slipped a note to his co-counsel, who interrupted questioning to read it to himself. It said, "Is there beer in the fridge?""

"He's no slouch at stagecraft, either. At the trial of a Mafia hit man, the defense argued that a ski mask -- part of what Fitzgerald called a "hit kit" that included surgical gloves, a gun and hollow-point bullets -- was really just a hat. (The defense also said the surgical gloves were for putting ointment on the defendant's ailing dog.) During closing arguments, Fitzgerald startled the jury by rolling up one leg on his lawyerly dark suit. "These are just shorts, ladies and gentlemen," he said, according to one account. "These are just shorts."

Chart above is set for 12 noon as no time of birth is known.

I was confident I'd find Saturn and/or Capricorn very prominent in Fitzgerald's natal chart, and I wasn't wrong.

Sun, Jupiter and Saturn itself are all in Capricorn. Saturn is ruler of Capricorn, both are connected to law, as is Jupiter. Saturn and Capricorn represent the discipline, rules, and structures of law. Jupiter and its sign of rulership, Sagittarius represent the judgement and philosophical aspect of law and justice.
Very apt - and evidence of astrology in action - again!

Mercury at 22 Sagittarius harmoniously trines (120*) Uranus at 25 Leo - Intuitive mind with independence of thought - somewhat ahead of his own time.

Mars at 11 Cancer exactly opposes Jupiter at 11 Capricorn - indication that he seeks out challenges, has to temper a tendency to go over the top at times, but because Saturn is positioned close to Jupiter, such tendencies are held in check, and emanate in Fitzgerald's case mainly as the excess zeal for which he is famous and occasionally criticised.

The Moon's position can't be pinpointed without time of birth, but it would lie somewhere between 22 Aquarius and 6 Pisces. If born before noon (my bet) it was in Aquarius, along with his natal Venus. Analysis is key to his work, and that's a strongly Aquarian trait.

This is the kind of guy we need as president, but as long as he returns to some public office, it'll feel reassuring that good things and good people do happen here.... sometimes.

Through clearing fog....President Obama

Did any astrologer "see" the real Barack Obama in the run up to the 2008 election, or during the weeks immediately following? I was beginning to doubt it when I stumbled across this, fairly brief, Obama astro-profile written in 2008 by astrologer Hunter Reynolds: Barack Obama’s astrology chart: “Grace in a Cracked Vessel”
Snips:

When I stare at the symbolic map of his psyche and consider his unique blessings and blind spots, I am sobered. He — like all of us — is a cracked vessel........

To the extent that he uses his charisma for self-aggrandizement instead of advocating for those whose suffering he feels as his own, his ambition becomes his undoing.

Minus the cathartic, body-reclaiming routines of basketball and regular workouts, his articulate activism could easily slip into provocative impatience; his altruistic passion could degenerate into dominating others "for their own good."

This much is certain: Barak is a born representative. He is both qualified and cursed to serve as a the face of our collective ego, for on the breath of his luminous presence is a trace of nicotine—a whiff of our own secret shame.

Hunter Reynolds' website is Astrodharma, by the way.

Did anybody else see the real Obama? From what they're saying now, a few amateur political commentators who have been marinated in US politics for most of their adult lives did. Apparently they tried vainly to pass on the knowledge to the rest of us, who were too busy Yes We Can-ing to listen.

I wasn't that busy chanting, to be honest. Having achieved US citizenship in 2008, just in time to register for voting, I registered Independent, and started by supporting the single candidate saying the things I wanted to hear: Dennis Kucinich. He was pretty much ignored or worse, ridiculed. He withdrew. I wondered about John Edwards, then Hillary, but eventually just went with the crowd and Obama. I really thought him too inexperienced to be taking on such a huge job, made even more huge by Prez G.W. Bush's 8-year stint. I had no inkling things were going to turn out this bad, though. None. I have always felt that there's a aura of mystery around Obama. In astro-terms he's very Neptuney, and has turned out to be a shape-shifter extraordinaire.

The real Obama hove into view some months ago, for those of us who are straining to peer through the slowly clearing Neptune fog.

One of my favourite political commentators, Prof. David Michael Green, associate professor of Political Science at Hofstra University, located in Hempstead, New York, wrote a brilliant essay at the weekend: "Stupid Democrats, Stupid Republicans", it outlines the present situation wonderfully well. The full, long essay can be read at Prof. Green's website The Regressive Antidote.

Extracts:

The thing about Obama that neither Democrats nor Republicans understand is that this guy is fundamentally regressive in his politics. That is the essence of his presidency, though – astonishingly – very few people get that. Look at the litany of issues addressed above. If you honestly asked yourself for each of them what, in the abstract, would a progressive president do, and what would a regressive president do, you can immediately decipher the true nature of Barack Obama. A progressive president wouldn’t triple American forces in Afghanistan and launch three new wars abroad, but a regressive president would. A progressive president wouldn’t out-do Dick Cheney in wrecking the Bill of Rights, but a regressive president would. A progressive president wouldn’t follow behind the lead of Republicans on civil rights issues, but a regressive president would.

And that’s just what this regressive president has done, all down the line. Never mind that we’re just getting started here. We could go on and on with this, issue after issue. What do you think a regressive president would do about the planetary nightmare of global warming? Nothing, perhaps? Gee, does that sound familiar? How about giving out unprecedentedly gigantic oil tracts off the Atlantic coast? Or multiple rounds of additional tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy? Hey, where have I heard that before? Even Obama’s signature ‘liberal’ issue, his health care plan, was just dandy from the perspective of the insurance industry, with whom he cut a deal at the very beginning of the legislative process......

Democrats are stupid about this. They still mostly like Obama, to the tune of about 75-80 percent job approval, though they might grumble here and there about this or that perceived failing of the president’s. It is a measure of their abysmally low standards and our pathetic national political discourse that policies like Obama’s can satisfy his base, so much so that he won’t even face a primary challenger from his left........

These attitudes are also a measure of bias as well, or what one might describe as a sort of political tribalism of the uninformed........

Why? I suppose some of it is because he’s black. And some of it is because he’s young and articulate and energetic and photogenic. Mostly, though, I think it’s because he’s a Democrat, and people are so tuned out from public affairs – despite what public affairs policy decisions are doing to their lives right now – that they simply go with that in-group vs. out-group rubric: “Democrat good, Republican bad”. Chances are they got that from their families and communities, along with their religion and nationalism and so on. Of course, to a certain extent, one of the key functions of political parties has always been simply to serve as precisely that sort of short-hand...... But there is a point at which such guiding assistance can cross a line into negligent laziness. More importantly, as in our time, there is a very real danger that today’s Democrat is far from being your father’s Democrat. At which point, using party labels to make otherwise blind decisions about politics becomes not just laziness or negligence, but complicity in a crime. And a crime where you’re one of the victims, no less.........................

In short, Democratic support and defense of Barack Obama is a sad joke. This guy is no liberal. He is, in fact, using liberal votes to join the Gingriches and Cheneys and Palins of this world in the project of destroying liberalism and its great achievement of massively widening the middle class and sharing national prosperity. Hey, not a bad gig, if you don’t mind the whole cynicism part, and the whole spending eternity in Hell thing.

.............It’s not a good sign when so many people – basically all of us – have politics which are so flat-out wrong. And if these feel like the worst of times politically in America, that is not such an exaggerated perception, notwithstanding the country’s more overt crises throughout the past two or three centuries...... There are significant differences now, however......... our body politic is so diminished that it can no longer recognize basic political facts anymore. Nothing is more emblematic of that than the case of Barack Obama. Democrats love him for being a good old liberal Democrat. Republicans hate him for the same reason. Both are so politically dumbed-down that neither can recognize how absurdly wrong they are on such a central question as the politics of the country’s chief executive.

But, of course, the biggest single problem facing the polity is that nobody is talking about the biggest single problem facing the polity. The country has been hijacked by hyper-greedy elites, who have demonstrated that there is absolutely no bottom to what they are willing to do to the rest of us, and to the country, to milk it and bilk it of every last remaining penny of value..........

A Ramsussen poll from March 2011 found that "Most voters think President Obama is more liberal than they are" - which says a lot about the level of critical thinking of a majority of people in the USA! Or, alternatively, about the rot at the heart of this nation, where the majority don't give a damn about what is happening to their fellows. Take your pick - either way it's not pretty!

This morning it seems Keith Olbermann too has seen the light - or the darkness surrounding the president.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/12/keith-olbermann-obama-social-security-medicare_n_895420.html