Dan T:

I will say first and foremost that I am a Republican. I want no question as to that, as I am sure you already know.

But your apparent immediate labeling of Judicial Watch is a little unfair. I would admit that they are probably more conservative leaning, but no more than Greenpeace is a liberal-bent organization.

Quite frankly I don't believe that there truly exists a "non-partisan" watchdog group.

mark
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Kilgore is a noun, not a verb..

Hey Mark,

If you mean that you've looked over the Judicial Watch website and still feel they are non-partisan, then I obviously was mistaken in thinking that any intelligent conservative on this board would conclude otherwise, as you're definitely one of the folks on this board I had in mind.

I agree that it's rare for any group that concerns itself with government to be completely non-partisan, but I wrongly supposed that no one would have a standard for partisanship so rigorous as to exclude a docket that's 90+% against a single party.

Greenpeace is an environmental activist group--not a government-oversight group-- and, so far as I know, doesn't claim to be non-partisan.

I don't think there's any real harm in a governmental-oversight group being partisan, so long as they don't misrepresent themselves. As I said earlier, I'm pretty much inclined in favor of any oversight group: they do the work of angels. In Chicago, we have one or two groups that keep an eye on the courts and that enjoy a reputation for fairness. They are often consulted before judicial-retention elections, for example. There are also "good government" groups in a lot of places that have similar reputations for fairness.

I used to think it was pretty easy for folks to agree on what is fair and what isn't. I still think that, on an abstract level, folks can pretty much agree on standards of fairness. They just seem to disagree on how to apply them to particular situations, I guess!