A Party Admission?

Uh oh. The primary voters in South Carolina are not going to like this one bit. John McCain announces that he will not support the nuclear option and, apparently after drinking some truth serum, comes clean about the Republican's unclean hands from the '90s:

On Thursday, one wavering Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, told a
television interviewer, Chris Matthews, that he would vote against the change.

"By the way, when Bill Clinton was president, we, effectively, in the
Judiciary Committee blocked a number of his nominees," Mr. McCain said.

Yep. Sure did. And Bill Frist is going to a forum run by Rev. Dobson (yeah, the one who was talking about Spongebob being gay) to announce that the Democrats are "against people of faith" for blocking 10 (ten) TEN Bush nominees. First, the diagnosis by videotape by the Cat-Killing Doctor, now this. Josh Marshall says it best on Frist:

How much do we have to endure so that this guy can run for president?

I recall Paul Tsongas pulled out a stuffed panda he dubbed "Pander Bear" on the campaign trail in 1992. Someone needs to order Frist one...
- posted by Joshua @ 1:21 PM (0) comments

 
Some People Say...

One of the most devious efforts by this White House has been the attempt to eliminate "facts" from the discourse. Indeed, as Frank Luntz recently advised Republicans, "It is tempting to counter-attack using facts and figures. Resist the temptation."

Instead, the right is trying to suggest, like it has with the mainstream media, that there are "red facts" and "blue facts." In essence, it is trying to get people to believe that there are no agreed-upon-facts. I'm amazed by how many conservatives I read who claim that the reality is much different than the so-called "Main Stream Media" is portraying it, even blaming Bush's poor poll ratings on the way news is reported. Essentially, a "who ya gonna believe -- me or your lying eyes?" argument. Eric Boehlert at Salon.com (subscribers only, unfortunately) has written an excellent piece about this effort. Boehlert notes:

The most egregious example of this almost metaphysical chutzpah appears in an
October 2004 article for the New York Times Magazine, in which Suskind
quotes a senior Bush advisor who dismissed reporters for living in the "the
reality-based community." The advisor said, "That's not the way the world
really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our
own reality."

The movie, Out Foxed, does an very good job of discussing how Fox News has become skilled at trying to create doubts about undeniable facts by attempting to make viewers believe there are two sides of every fact, using the phrase "some people say." For example: "Some people have noted how Richard Clarke says that Condeleeza Rice was not attentive enough to the Al Qaeda concerns he brought to her attention, while some people say that Richard Clarke is a disgruntled wacko who can't be trusted. Will we ever know the truth?"

Boehlert has an excellent example of this effort:

One small example, the type that occurs almost hourly on Fox, came during
the recent controversy over comments by CNN's news president Eason Jordan about U.S. troops targeting journalists in Iraq. (The comments eventually led to his
resignation.) On Feb. 14, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade interviewed Reese
Schonfeld, one of CNN's founders, who years ago left the company.

Schonfeld: "But remember that a U.S. tank [in April 2003] rolled up in
front of the Hotel Palestine, which is where all the journalists were, turned
the turret around, pointed its gun, and fired up at the building."

Kilmeade: "That's what CNN reported."

Schonfeld: "No, that's what is reported. The guy from Reuters was killed,
and a Spanish journalist was killed. Nobody knows why. The U.S. Army has never
completed its investigation into that incident."

Schonfeld was correct on the facts regarding the Hotel Palestine incident,
which are not in dispute. But the Fox host wanted to suggest the facts were in
dispute, or subject to CNN's bias, therefore making them easier to set aside.
"They have an ability to confuse an issue and neutralize the facts that aren't
in their favor," says Brock. "When a reader looks at a story and does not know
what to make of it, then Fox has done its job."

The consequences are enormous, says Auletta. "In a democracy, you need a
common set of facts." Suskind notes, "If you believe there is no inherent
value to public dialogue based on fact, then that frees you up to try all sorts
of things other people in power wouldn't have ever thought of. And we're seeing
the evidence of that now."

Fox News and their progeny aren't just an effort to badly skew news to the right through an obvious right-wing bias; it's a concerted effort to make Americans question every negative thing they hear about the right and this Administration. Don't let them get away with it.

- posted by Joshua @ 8:33 PM (0) comments

 
Was It a "Moral Choice" During the Age of Segregation?

With all the outrageous talk by the Christian right about impeaching Justice Kennedy for his Lawrence v. Kansas opinion finally overruling the barbaric Bowers v. Hardwick decision, and the rumors that Justice Scalia is in line to become Chief Justice, it's worth refreshing our recollections on Scalia's simply outrageous statements in his Lawrence dissent, as Scalia believes that anti-homosexual legislation is an exercise in morality, not discrimination:

Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. I noted in an earlier opinion the fact that the American Association of Law Schools (to which any reputable law school must seek to belong) excludes from membership any school that refuses to ban from its job-interview facilities a law firm (no matter how small) that does not wish to hire as a prospective partner a person who openly engages in homosexual conduct. See Romer, supra, at 653.

One of the most revealing statements in today's opinion is the Court's grim warning that the criminalization of homosexual conduct is "an invitation to subject homosexual persons to discrimination both in the public and in the private spheres." Ante, at 14. It is clear from this that the Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed. Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive. The Court views it as "discrimination" which it is the function of our judgments to deter. So imbued is the Court with the law profession's anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously "mainstream"; that in most States what the Court calls "discrimination" against those who engage in homosexual acts is perfectly legal; that proposals to ban such "discrimination" under Title VII have repeatedly been rejected by Congress, see Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 1994, S. 2238, 103d Cong., 2d Sess. (1994); Civil Rights Amendments, H. R. 5452, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. (1975); that in some cases such "discrimination" is mandated by federal statute, see 10 U. S. C. §654(b)(1) (mandating discharge from the armed forces of any service member who engages in or intends to engage in homosexual acts); and that in some cases such "discrimination" is a constitutional right, see Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U. S. 640 (2000).

Discussing this opinion is particularly timely, given the fact that a gutsy NYU student recently asked Justice Scalia, during a question and answer session that veared into a discussion of Lawrence, a rather personal question:

One gay student asked whether government had any business enacting and enforcing laws against consensual sodomy. Following Scalia's answer, the student asked a follow-up: 'Do you sodomize your wife?' The audience was shocked, especially since Mrs. Scalia [Maureen] was in attendance. The justice replied that the question was unworthy of an answer.

As far as Scalia's concerned, laws that allowed doctors to refuse to treat homosexuals and allowed pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions that they objected to on the basis of a "moral objection" would be perfectly acceptable too. Wow. Is this the 21st Century?
- posted by Joshua @ 8:02 PM (0) comments

 
Apocalypse Now?

I've written frequently, and recently, about the consequences of the incredible power that the Religious Right holds within today's Republican Party. But, even after reading about women who couldn't get their birth control prescriptions filled by moralistic pharmacists or state legislators passing bills to allow doctors to refuse to treat homosexuals, I can't say anything gave me as much pause as reading about the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference that was held in Washington DC, beginning April 7.

Salon.com had an excellent article, and here's some highlights. First, the conference began on the premise that Terri Schiavo had been murdered. And to support that premise, they made up some facts:

According to David Gibbs, the attorney for Terri Schiavo's parents, Terri
sobbed in her mother's arms after the courts condemned her to death. "Terri
Schiavo was as alive as any person sitting here," he said. "Anything you saw on
the videos, multiply times two hundred. I mean completely animated, completely
responsive, desperately trying to talk." Schiavo, said Gibbs, would struggle to
repeat the word "love" after her mother, and managed to get out something like
"loooo."

Gibbs was speaking to a banquet of religious right activists and
conservative operatives last Thursday, the first night of the Confronting the
Judicial War on Faith conference in Washington. The 100 or so people in the
audience had converged on the Washington Marriott from 25 states. Many cried as
they listened.

"America needs a healing," Gibbs said, and the crowd murmured its assent.
"We're sitting here desperately as a nation needing to adopt the heart of God …
We're on the eve of a real major decision. Are we going to do it God's way, or
are we going to head down the path of whatever these judges think is best? Terri
was alive. The courts killed her. The courts killed her in a barbaric fashion.
Others are already facing and will face a similar fate if we don't do
something."

Tom DeLay appeared via videotape (he was on his way to Pope's funeral) and made similar comments to his earlier threats on the judges from the Schiavo case. And since the complaint about the judges there was that they weren't activist enough, right-wingers have had to fine tune their complaints against the judiciary. They've moved from screaming about "judicial activism" to "judicial tyranny."

Back when there actually WERE liberals on the Supreme Court, billboards showed up down South that read, "Impeach Earl Warren." Now, just because every decision doesn't go their way, right-wingers have set their sights on not-sufficiently-brainwashed judges like Anthony Kennedy:

On a Friday panel titled "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny," a constitutional
lawyer named Edwin Vieira discussed Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence vs.
Texas, which struck down that state's anti-sodomy law. Vieira accused Kennedy of
relying on "Marxist, Leninist, Satanic principals drawn from foreign law" in his
jurisprudence.

What to do about communist judges in thrall to Beelzebub? Vieira said,
"Here again I draw on the wisdom of Stalin. We're talking about the greatest
political figure of the 20th century … He had a slogan, and it worked very well
for him whenever he ran into difficulty. 'No man, no problem.'"

The audience laughed, and Vieira repeated it. "'No man, no problem.' This
is not a structural problem we have. This is a problem of personnel."

As Dana Milbank pointed out Saturday in the Washington Post, the full Stalin quote is this: "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Milbank suggested that Kennedy would be wise to hire more bodyguards. ...

The affair finished with a rousing speech by recent Republican senatorial
candidate Alan Keyes, who drew enthusiastic applause when he said, "I believe
that in our country today the judiciary is the focus of evil."

Oh. So when right-wingers claim that it is inappropriate for Democrats to oppose judicial nominees based on the fact that they possess an extreme conservative record, just remind them of this conference. Absent the Democrats involvement, we will have a judiciary that is chosen for its adherence to getting the right result (i.e. the result the religious right wants) every time. So much for an independent judiciary.

And, by the way, with all of this talk about judges ignoring the significance of God and moral law when they interpret the Constitution, this fact is worth remembering:

In Gibbs' telling, Circuit Court Judge George Greer cavalierly ignored all
this overwhelming evidence. Such villainy, he said, is the direct result of a
legal system that has tried to cast off God's dominion.

"Our Founding Fathers," he said, "they were going to take the word of
God, and God has given us in the Bible his word, and they said this book will
always be true, and if there is ever a close call in policy, in leadership, in
law, in society, if there's ever a question, we want to look to the source of
absolute truth. That's why the Ten Commandments are so important. They were the original source of American law."

That version of history is taught at Christian schools like Jerry Falwell's
Liberty University, Gibbs' alma mater. It is also a virtual fairy tale. The
Constitution contains not a single mention of God, Christianity or the Bible. As
the historians Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore wrote in their book "The
Godless Constitution," such secularism wasn't lost on an earlier generation of
Christian conservatives, who decried America's founding document as a sin
against God.

They quote the Rev. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, who said in
1812, "The nation has offended Providence. We formed our Constitution without
any acknowledgement of God; without any recognition of His mercies to us, as a
people, of His government or even of His existence. The [Constitutional]
Convention, by which it was formed, never asked even once, His direction, or His
blessings, upon their labours. Thus we commenced our national existence under
the present system, without God."

Someone should tell Antonin Scalia. He missed that part when he was looking for the "original intent" of the Constitution.

Put simply, this is what the fight over the filibuster is all about: An independent judiciary vs. one that is beholden to the narrow views of one incredibly powerful interest group.
- posted by Joshua @ 1:59 PM (0) comments