Attack Journalism

Al Reuteera publishes the following "facts" about Priscilla Owen, whom the Senate finally voted on and confirmed to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals (link via Powerline):

Owen, 50, recently received the worst rating on the Texas Supreme Court in an annual judicial evaluation poll by Houston lawyers. With 350 votes cast, 39.5 percent said she was outstanding, 15.2 percent rated her acceptable and 45.3 percent said she was "poor." None of the court's eight other judges had as many "poor" votes and only one had fewer "outstanding" votes.

Looks bad, but I'm sort of interested in knowing who exactly conducted this poll. And aren't there more than 350 lawyers in Houston? It's also curious that Al Reuteera doesn't mention the fact that Justice Owen received the highest possible rating from the American Bar Association (hardly a bastion of conservatism).

Owen is a member of the Federalist Society, an increasingly powerful legal society that describes itself as "a group of conservatives and libertarians" who believe "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be."

Gee, I'd hate to see what Al Reuteera would say if Justice Owen was as member of Opus Dei.

Owen graduated in 1977 from the law school at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, as the top student in her class. She worked as a corporate lawyer with expertise in oil and gas at a large Houston law firm before being elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1994 in a campaign aided by current White House adviser Karl Rove. She was re-elected in 2000 with 84 percent of the vote.

In other words, Owen is just another pawn in Karl Rove's master plan to rule the world, and the 84% who voted for Owen are all brainless robots.

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has endorsed Owen's nomination but they clashed on a number of cases when they were on the Texas Supreme Court, most famously in an abortion rights case in 2000. Owen was a dissenter on the court's vote upholding a teenage girl's right to abortion without notifying her parents. In his opinion, Gonzales wrote that dissenting justices advocated a position directly contradicting state law and that adopting their view "would be an unconscionable act of judicial activism."

Read this, then try to tell me that most "journalists" in the MSM aren't a bunch of lazy hacks who don't bother to investigate any claim that coincides with their leftist agenda.

Owen is a divorcee who lives in Austin, Texas, where she teaches Sunday school and tends the altar at St. Barnabas the Encourager Evangelical Covenant Church, which split from the Episcopal Church last June because of disagreements with national church leaders who ordained a gay bishop and allowed dioceses to consider blessing same-sex unions.

In other words, Owen is a hypocritical fundamentalist Christian who needs to be feared.

Note to Al Reuteera: Let us know when you stop confusing so-called facts about a person with whom you disagree with uninformed partisan commentary.