And you notice that the GOP has basically stopped trying to attack her. They have their own problems now, and frankly they don't have the energy or luxury to spend that energy on Sotomayor with the Obamacare train coming at them full speed.Basically before it ever started, the fight over the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor is done. She is going to be confirmed by a relatively wide margin and without a substantial, mainstream assault on her credentials or suitability for the bench.
To be clear at the outset, this is a descriptive point, not a normative one. I'm explaining the political reality, not how the process should go forward. I actually think that nominees should be subject to a substantial, sustained inquiry into their judicial philosophy and intellect.
But that isn't the world in which we live, or in which this particular nomination will proceed. The phase of defining a nominee in the public's eye now lasts around forty-eight hours. In that time Harriet Miers was pretty much done - finished. By this point, there has been a huge amount of press coverage and opponents have had the opportunity to make their case. It's a shockingly short period (unfortunately so), but it reflects (a) the ready availability of research materials, and (b) the rapid turn-over of news cycles.
For a nominee like Sonia Sotomayor, that is the life-or-death period. Once the public is comfortable with her suitability, then the irreducible political reality is that there is no serious prospect of vigorously challenging the nation's first Latina Supreme Court nominee when the President's party has an overwhelming numerical advantage in the Senate.
The collapse of serious opposition also becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Potential donors to conservative advocacy groups - perceiving neither a grave threat to their core values nor a real prospect of wounding an opposing President by defeating the nomination - will minimize their financial support, particularly in this economy.
Without a public drumbeat of concern - and with the press's attention inevitably shifting away - the opposition outside the circle of committed advocates is almost certain to run out of gas by the weekend, a full five or six weeks before the hearings begin. There could be a burst of revitalizing energy with the disclosure of some ethical transgression, but zero reason to believe that will actually happen.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Over Before It Began
Obama Loses The Gitmo-mentum
It's hysterical. Congress actually rightfully stands up to Obama on permanent detention, but they run like a scared labradoodle when it comes to the unfathomable dark superpowers they believe these detainees possess, like the ability to effortlessly escape from Supermax prisons and menace the local Super Wal-Mart and the power to teleport hordes of armed jihadis into Florence, Colorado for a surprise attack. Also, like COBRA, they have crates of blue laser rifles and a weather domination machine they they can use to create a blizzard in Washington D.C. or something. No, really. We can't let these guys in! YOU MUST BE SCARED OF THEM!The Obama administration has all but abandoned plans to allow Guantanamo Bay detainees who have been cleared for release to live in the United States, administration officials said yesterday, a decision that reflects bipartisan congressional opposition to admitting such prisoners but complicates efforts to persuade European allies to accept them.
Four Uighur detainees, Chinese Muslims who were incarcerated at the U.S. military prison in Cuba for more than seven years, arrived early yesterday in Bermuda, where they will become foreign guest workers. An administration official said the United States is engaged in negotiations with other countries, including Palau, an island nation in the western Pacific, to find places for the remaining 13 Uighurs held at Guantanamo.
The Uighurs, who were ordered released by a federal judge last year, never counted America as an enemy, according to the men's lawyers and human rights groups, giving the administration grounds to argue that they should live in the United States. Picked up in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2002, the Uighurs were later cleared of the "enemy combatant" label but remained in minimum-security confinement at Guantanamo.
Attempting to settle non-Uighur detainees in the United States would generate even greater congressional opposition, and the administration has decided not to pursue it broadly, an administration official said yesterday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. But he said there may yet be "a few" candidates for settlement in the United States among the dozens of Guantanamo detainees who have been cleared for release.
Congressional Democrats yesterday reached agreement on a war-funding bill that would allow detainees to be sent to the United States for trial. The draft bill included no provision for prolonged detention without trial, a step that President Obama has said will be necessary to incarcerate detainees who are too dangerous to release but who cannot be prosecuted.
It's not that Obama lacks a plan to resettle and detain the actually dangerous ones. That's what Supermax facilities are FOR. It's that Congress is playing the fear card on themselves.
Brinksmanship Down
U.S. intelligence officials have warned President Obama and other senior American officials that North Korea intends to respond to the looming passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution this week -- condemning the communist country for its recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests -- with another nuclear test, FOX News has learned.We'll see where this goes. At some point Obama will have to deal with North Korea on a serious one-on-one basis. The good news is even China is willing to listen to the consept of increased sanctions on Pyongyang at this point, as they are just as worried about Kim Jong-Il as the rest of the world. Russia too sees North Korea as a serious threat to their western borders.What's more, Pyongyang's next nuclear detonation is but one of four planned actions the Central Intelligence Agency has learned, through sources inside North Korea, that the regime of Kim Jong-Il intends to take -- but not announce -- once the Security Council resolution is officially passed, likely on Friday.
The other three actions include the reprocessing of all of the North's spent plutonium fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium; a major escalation in the North's uranium-enrichment program; and the launching of another Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile from the Yunsong military complex on the west coast of North Korea. The North last launched a Taepodong-2 on April 5; it conducted its second nuclear test in the last three years on Memorial Day.
The intelligence community only learned of North Korea's plans this week, prompting CIA to alert senior officials. Asked who would be briefed on this kind of data, a source told FOX News: "The top people: POTUS, DNI." "POTUS" is acronym for the president of the United States; "DNI" refers to the director of the Office of National Intelligence.
All this temper tantrum action may actually galvanize the world to do something.
StupidiNews!
- Digital TV is here as analog TV broadcasts all came to an end nationwide last night.
- The House will take up Rep. Ron Paul's bill designed to audit the Federal Reserve.
- The Senate has approved regulation of tobacco by the FDA, Obama is expected to sign the bill into law.
- BlackRock is set to buy Barclay's mutual fund division to become the largest money manager in the world.
- "Net Neutrality" is back in the news as a cable industry group wants Disney to stop charging ISPs to carry ESPN360.com.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Left Or Right?
The argument is "Well, he's not a right winger because he hated FOX News and the Weekly Standard, so that really makes him a radical Leftist" or it's "You can't call him a right-winger because he hated pretty much everybody."
Needless to say, Jon Chait kills this stupidity rather neatly.
So yes, he was a nutjob right-winger...and so far to the right he thought FOX and the Weekly Standard were just too soft on Obama, the Jews, the blacks, and everyone else he hates.First, the "conventional political classification" is a rubric that accounts for extremists on the far right or left who abhor Democrats or Republicans. Ralph Nader has a lot of bad things to say about the Democratic Party, but that doesn't make him hard to classify on the left-right spectrum.
Second, a certain strand of conservative thought is comfortable with most of the tenets of Republican doctrine with the exception of free trade and, especially, Jews, Israel, and neoconservative influence. Pat Buchanan is the emblem of this brand of conservatism. Buchanan is generally a Republican partisan except for Jewish/Israeli/Middle Eastern issues where he takes strong exception. Von Brunn is pretty clearly a violent and more extreme adherent of Buchanan's basic worldview. That he would detest a neoconservative institution like the Standard isn't "complicating" or surprising at all.
Third, it's somewhat apparent from Von Brunn's writing that he did identify with the Republican Party on some basic partisan questions. He cheered conservatives for getting Dan Rather fired, believed Sarah Palin was unfairly hounded by the media, and so on. Indeed, if there's anything surprising and disturbing about Von Brunn's beliefs, it's that he identifies more closely with the Republican Party than I would have thought a radical white supremacist would. This may be a sign that the GOP has become more appealing to radical right-wingers than it once was, but it could also be an anomaly.
Comparing this guy to Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas or Keith Olbermann just because they dislike FOX News and criticize them openly is ridiculous. But hey, whatever helps these guys sleep at night.
Neocons: Still At It
Because after all, with our economy in the shitter and us neck deep into two wars already, what we really need more than anything else is a third Middle Eastern country to be at war with.
And yet, this guy was America's U.N. Ambassador under Bush.
Amazing.
The Point Is Still The Plan
In the wake of the second act of domestic terrorism in two weeks, the questions about whether or not the constant spew of lies and haterade from the right wing media is a public menace are increasing. (This will immediately be treated by right wingers as a call for government censorship, even though it is not, but obviously, they have trouble telling the difference between being criticized and being forced at gunpoint, which is relevant to this discussion.) I would also point to the right wing blogs penchant for getting people fired for irritating them as an example of how the attitudes they’re inculcating, especially now that the Republicans are out of power, encourage violence. While wingnuts will squeal like babies about censorship for merely being criticized, they actually are always on the lookout to silence political opponents by force. Murder is illegal, but depriving people of their livelihood or privacy is an effective way to send the signal that they will not tolerate criticism or opposition and will silence you by force, if necessary.Or in other words, The Plan.Thus the outing of Publius by Ed Whelan is another example. Whelen didn’t just out him, but linked to his contact page at his place of employment, and certainly to any of us who’ve seen this song and dance before, there’s no doubt that Whelan was hoping to inspire his readers to realize---as lone wolves, of course, who he certainly didn’t encourage---that they could start irritating Publius’s boss, with the hope that he’d project that irritation onto Publius and separate him from his employment. Again, I doubt that’ll happen, but it’s certainly the hope.
If there’s any doubt that the right is inculcating a tribal identity politics coupled with a strong self-assurance that they have every right to use force to silence opposition, consider this: Operation Rescue is trying to buy Dr. Tiller’s clinic. I hope this announcement causes the authorities to take the possibility of conspiracy seriously, because while Operation Rescue claims that they had nothing to do with the assassination, what they’re doing is making Dr. Tiller’s clinic a trophy, which shows that a) they totally see this as warfare and b) despite their cowardly denials of responsibility, they’re basically claiming responsibility.
When the use of force to silence your critics is mainstreamed in your movement, and the cowardly move of picking on vulnerable individuals is lauded because hurting someone, anyone just feels so right---well, it isn’t shocking that some people take the “let’s hurt someone” and “let’s shut them up with force” attitudes to the level of actual violence.
Part of The Plan (Destroy. Obama.) involves the lengths people will go in order to execute the plan. The truly dangerous end of this spectrum, the Von Brunns and the Scott Roeders, these are the people who have decided that Obama represents an existential threat to their way of life. They have decided that there is no action too radical in order to defend it, up to and including murder.
Is this an indictment of the conservative movement or all Republicans? No, not any more than Rev. Jeremiah Wright represents all African-Americans or Bill Ayers represents all liberals. I happen to think true conservatism has many valid points, especially from an economic standpoint.
But there's only so much shit you can shovel before you get covered in it yourself. When all you do is throw it, enable the throwing of it, then brutally attack anyone who dares to call you on it, you have a problem. When you singularly blame everyone BUT yourself for the problems you percieve having, when entire groups of people are nothing more than scapegoats and "the enemy" and at the top of this pyramid of deranged hatred is the President, you have serious problems.
I have said time and time again when people on a daily basis use their media channels to ask "Who will rid me of this troublesome liberal" and you blame these people to the point of openly calling them enemies of America and enemies of humanity, then you no longer can claim surprise and outrage when somebody like Scott Roeder or James Von Brunn decides to act on these impulses with deadly physical violence.
If you juggle lit blowtorches in a fireworks factory, disaster will eventually happen.
[UPDATE] Sara Robinson documents the atrocities since Obama's inauguration.
Dear America:
--Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal
There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Through February, nationwide enrollment in free school lunch programs was up 6.3% over the same time last year, to 16.5 million students, based on data from the U.S. Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), which subsidizes the programs. Participation in reduced-price lunch programs rose to 3.2 million students, the data show.You figure that's what, one out of four, one out of five kids in America at this point on these programs. More will be on them soon. School districts are having to slash programs just as these programs are needed the most.Demand in some states has climbed at an even greater rate: Enrollment in free lunch programs jumped almost 17% in California, and several states — Arizona, New Jersey, Utah and Vermont — also saw more than 10% growth.
Many new enrollees are believed to be first-timers from families hit by the recession, says FNS Administrator Julie Paradis. "These programs are intended to expand when the need is greater ... and we're pleased that they're working," she adds. "But certainly there are additional costs, and that is a concern at a time of scarce resources. Our state and local partners are stretched."
In Jackson, Miss., where 86% of all students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, "some of our students show up for breakfast and haven't had anything to eat since lunch the day before," says Mary Hill, executive director of food services.
And it's summer now, these kids are out of school. They're not getting that daily meal these days. Next fall, who knows if there will be money for the lunches at all?
Spending has consequences. But cutting spending has consequences too.
If It's Thursday...
Employers are running out of jobs to cut at this stage. The easy job eliminations have been made. Those employees left are having to pick up the workload for in many cases less pay and with fewer benefits.
What we're seeing now are the difficult job cuts as employers have to decide how close to the bone they can cut things without losing entire departments, divisions, and yes, companies. Something will have to give soon.
The happy-face media is calling this signs of recovery. I call it the capitulation before the dam breaks.
Gone Round The Bend
Much is being made by Muslims and their many defenders on the left--and the ignoramus "conservatives" at Hot Air (who lecture us that hate has no ideological bounds, which I already learned not from those clueless ones, but from Sarah Palin e-mails wishing me cancer)--that the shooter of several people (one now dead) at the U.S. Holocaust Museum is not a Muslim but a White guy, James W. Von Brunn, who is a neo-Nazi.Now keep in mind Debbie Schlussel has her own nationally syndicated radio show and newspaper column. She's using this to basically say that yesterday's shooting was caused by tolerance of Islam. If you honestly believe that, there's nothing I can do for you.
But that is a distinction without a difference. In fact, it is because of Muslims--who are the biggest contributor to the worldwide rise in anti-Semitism to Holocaust-eve levels--that neo-Nazis feel comfortable--far more comfortable!--manifesting their views about Jews. Until 9/11 and our resulting new tolerance for Islam, the neo-Nazi types were marginalized and howling at the wind. We know who has been targeting Jewish museums and centers affiliated with Jews in recent years. And it hasn't been, in general, 89-year-old White guys.Mr. Von Brunn has been on this planet for 89 years, and he didn't feel comfortable shooting up a Holocaust museum until now--this new era of "tolerance," in which we must tolerate the most extremist Muslim behaviors and sentiments. It's, in general, not 89-year-old White guys telling people at churches worldwide and in religious schools that the Jews are the devil incarnate, a filthy tribe, the sons of pigs and monkeys, subhuman, etc.
No, it's guys with names like Mohammed and Ahmed on our own American streets who make Mr. Von Brunn far more at ease in 2009 than he was even in 1999 to attack places associated with the Jews. They created the comfort zone for James W. Brunn to engage in today's shooting.
The rash of anti-Semitic attacks in America, with a frequency unheard of in previous contemporary U.S. history--on synagogues all over the country, a Jewish community center in Seattle, and now this Holocaust museum--have all happened since 9/11 and our new tolerance for Islam and all of its intolerant extremism. This is no coincidence. It is a correlation.
It simply hasn't occured to Debbie here that preaching knee-jerk reactionary blind hatred of a group of people for being different puts her squarely in the same box as Von Brunn.
Not only that, but blaming "excessive tolerance" for the events of the last few months is insane, considering there's a much obvious agent of cause here: the reactionary knee-jerk hatred preached by Schlussel and taken to heart by Von Brunn has come bubbling to the surface thanks to the election of one Barack Obama. It's the irrational hatred of the President that is much more likely to be causing nutjobs like Von Brunn to take physical action.
But that would be an admission of culpability for people like Deb. As Jeffrey Goldberg puts it:
White Christians have done an excellent job being anti-Semitic for several hundred years -- almost a couple of thousand, actually -- without any help whatsoever from Muslims.The hate goes way back, folks. When somebody tries to say "Hey, let's not hate each other so much" it's like pouring water on a grease fire.
We continue to reap the whirlwind, America. It's going to be a long four years.
Pyrrhic Victory Part 3
A Nebraska doctor said Wednesday that he will perform third-term abortions in Kansas after the slaying of abortion provider George Tiller, but would not say whether he will open a new facility or offer the procedure at an existing practice.If Dr. Carhart steps up, then he'll certainly be another target. Will he be protected? Will he be attacked? He believes he is providing a vital service. Others will certainly believe he is a killer.Dr. LeRoy Carhart declined to discuss his plans in detail during a telephone interview with The Associated Press, but insisted "there will be a place in Kansas for the later second- and the medically indicated third-trimester patients very soon."
"I just think that until everything is in place, it's something that doesn't need to be talked about" in detail, Carhart said a day after Tiller's family announced his Wichita clinic was permanently shutting its doors.
Tiller's clinic was one of the only facilities in the country that performed third-trimester abortions. Carhart has run his own clinic in Bellevue, Neb., since 1985, but had performed late-term abortions at Tiller's clinic because of Nebraska's more restrictive abortion laws.
What lessons will America draw from the Tiller murder and apply to Carhart's clinical services?
StupidiNews!
- With 27,700 cases in 74 countries, the World Health Organization is considering declaring a H1N1 flu epidemic.
- Congress may be looking into Dick Cheney's role in "harsh interrogation techniques".
- Internal e-mails showed that the Bush administration leaned heavily on Bank of America to buy Merrill Lynch.
- Oil has hit $72 a barrel and rising on increased demand forecasts.
- Astrophysicists are modeling the far future of the Solar System, including scenarios where Mars is flung into deep space.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Credit Where Credit Is Due
Honestly? It took you how many years to see this, Shep?
Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion
This afternoon, a gunman apparently shot at least one person at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. MSNBC is reporting that the suspected shooter, who also sustained gunshot wounds, is James Von Brunn, a white supremacist born in 1920. Brunn has been approvingly cited on Stormfront, a national white supremacist website. He is apparently the author of a tract called, “Kill the Best Gentiles,” which his website describes as “a new, hard-hitting exposé of the JEW CONSPIRACY to destroy the White gene-pool.” Brunn, a WWII veteran, also wrote a screed on President Obama’s citizenship that was re-posted to popular right-wing blog Free Republic:This guy is a piece of work, an 88-year old WW II vet who happens to be a hardcore Right-wing racist anti-Semitic asshole. Here's hoping both the injured guards and Von Brunn recover fully...there's some justice to be meted out.
(P.S....he's not a Muslim, wingers. He's one of yours...one of those guys who hates everyone not a white Christian male, and who doesn't believe Obama is a real US citizen. Oh, and he's a Freeper, too.)
How many of these attacks have to happen before we start admitting we have a right-wing domestic terrorism problem in this country? Just two months ago, the DHS released a report saying right-wing domestic terrorism is on the rise. The Wingers said it was unfair, unfair, UNFAIR to say that!
And since then, we've had several incidents of domestic terrorism here. It's been two months since that report came out. Just two months.
It will only get worse from here. I guarantee it.
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