Month: May 2009

President Nelson Makes The Call

by dday

So the President from Nebraska has weighed the options, peeked at his campaign account, and decided with a heavy heart that he just couldn’t let Americans have better health insurance choices:

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said Friday that he will oppose legislation that would give people the option of a public health insurance plan. The move puts him on the opposite side of two-thirds of Americans.

A poll released this week by Consumer Reports National Research Center showed that 66 percent of Americans back the creation of a public health plan that would compete with private plans. Nelson, in comments made to CQ, joins the 16 percent of poll respondents who said they oppose the plan.

Nelson’s problem, he told CQ, is that the public plan would be too attractive and would hurt the private insurance plans. “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the game,” Nelson said. Including a public option in a health plan, he said, was a “deal breaker.”

The problem, as President Nelson explained, is that the public plan might be too good a deal for Americans, leading them to want to purchase it. And that would just be terrible. Terrible for Ben Nelson, anyway, because his contributions would dry up.

The company Nelson finds himself in is laid out clearly: business, the insurance industry, and Republicans. Of course, this isn’t surprising, considering his campaign donation history. Open Secrets says Nelson received $608,709 from the insurance industry in 2007-2008, making the insurance industry his biggest donor group, more than lawyers and even lobbyists.

And so, Nelson has decided to bow to the wishes of his campaign contributors, instead of standing up for what 73% of the American public want: A choice of a public health insurance option.

Actually, I think we do put too much emphasis on the money game as the reason for politician’s every move. Nelson probably just has a personal, cultural, ideological relationship to conservative interests, and simply cannot envision progress of this ilk. Plus, publicly opposing his own party makes him a darling of the DC media circuit and increases his clout. Despite the fact that reconciliation instructions mean that Democrats could opt for passage with only 50 votes, Nelson will get lots of publicity as he, according to the article, tries “to assemble a coalition of like-minded centrists opposed to the creation of a public plan, as a counterweight to Democrats pushing for it.” And the chattering class will praise his bold centrism and ability to say no to his hippie cadres.

He may not be successful – in this case, Democrats on the left really are threatening no deal without a public plan, although what form that plan takes is more the question – but it’ll sure give him that unbeatable stature. That’s what makes a President a President.

.

La Didone

by tristero

And now for something completely different…

I really thought, despite a highly successful run in New York, the Wooster Group’s La Didone would never be seen again. This morning, however, I learned that it will be performed at Redcat, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in Los Angeles from June 11 through the 21st. If you have even the slightest interest in non-narrative/experimental/very cool theater, I strongly suggest you go. I was so amazed I saw it twice and I am by no means enamored of most Wooster Groop productions.

La Didone combines a performance of Cavalli’s 1641 opera about Dido and Aeneas with a re-enactment of Mario Bava’s sci-fi cult film, Planet of the Vampires (which, as Dennis will tell you, surely influenced Ridley Scott’s Alien). Somehow, it works – not as camp, not as some incomprehensible pomo hogwash, but rather as a weird kind of apocalyptic draama in which the experience of falling in love is likened to an infection by an alien life form. It’s heartbreaking and genuinely disturbing.The parallels between the opera and the movie, which seem to have nothing in common, are uncanny.

Also uncanny are the performances, especially mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, who plays both Dido and one of the doomed members of the starship’s crew. The staging is also superb, with appropriately kitschy space suits and Baroque costumes – Neptune’s a hoot, as is Cupid – and a Ben Burtt-level of near-continuous electronic walla. (You do know who Ben Burtt is, right? Shame on you!)

Anyway, if you’re in LA go see it. You’ll either love it or come away convinced that whoever recommended you see La Didone is…not well.

Nightline On Industrial Farming

by tristero

I’m working my way through all the links in farmgirl’s terrific post on “Swine Flu, NAFTA and U.S. farm subsidies.” But I wanted to share with you a link she provided to a pretty good Nightline report on industrial pig farming including footage shot in La Gloria, Mexico, where, apparently, the earliest cases of the swine flu outbreak were reported and which lies some 12 miles away from a hug industrial hog farm owned by a Smithfield subsidiary. For those, like Digby, who were horrified by an earlier post of mine that quoted descriptions of the disgusting conditions on these farms, don’t worry. The Nightline report shows nothing that will sicken you. Unless, that is, you realize that that beauty shot of a pond is not a pond of water.

Several commenters have objected to my refusal to accede to the wishes of corporate pork production and euphemize swine flu by calling it something else. Their argument is that calling swine flu “swine flu” harms small, independent pork producers. Farm Girl, who has studied food issues closely and certainly cares deeply about small, independent farming, agrees with me:

…Mexico’s swine flu (and keep calling it that, no matter what the National Pork Producers say…)

In responding to the objections, I also posted several links to scientists’ discussion of swine flu that make the point that the term is accurate (go here, here, and here, for example. ) In comments to my previous post, Glen Tomkins writes:

Long-established practice in the field is to characterize strains of Influenza A first and foremost by which species it attacks. Thus we have avian (or bird) flu, swine flu, horse flu, dog flu and human flu.

There are other ways to characterize a given strain, such as by which type of the two antigenic glycoproteins it displays, and by this scheme, this swine flu is H1N1, and the avian flu of recent concern is H5N1.

But characterization by the animal of origin is the more basic and informative classification, and the HxNx name should be used as the primary name only if we’re talking about a strain of human flu. The animal vs human flu distinction is the most basic and informative because strains of flu adapted to animals other than humans tend to behave very differently in humans than strains adapted to us. The animal strains tend to cause more severe illness and death, because of some combination of our not being well-adapted to them, and their being not well-adapted to us. A microbe that uses us as its meal plan does not want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs,and tends to do so only insofar as it hasn’t “learned” any better by long practice at adapting to us. But these animal strains also tend to not spread as readily among humans, presumably because that trick, much like not killing us, also requires adaptation to our peculiarities.

So it’s “swine flu”, not because we have it in for the porciculturists among us, or even because “swine flu” is a sexier phrase for CNN to use than “H1N1 flu”, but because that’s the way the nomenclature works, and works most effectively to convey important differences in expected disease behavior that calling it “H1N1” would fail to convey.

Exactly.

It strikes me as exceedingly weird to insist that we describe the agent of a potential pandemic with a pretentious, and less accurate, euphemism. To do so at the insistence of powerful corporations because it might hurt their profits is simply outrageous. Again, regarding the argument that no, it’s not the big guys who will be hurt, but rather the small pig farmer -well, the real danger to small pig farming is not an ignorant and transient association – eating pork products, even disgusting industrially “raised” pork products can’t give you swine flu, obviously – but rather the predatory, illegal, immoral, unhealthy, and downright repulsive practices of Smithfield and their ilk, who have consolidated production and ruthlessly driven many small producers out of business.

On a personal note, several commenters said my previous post sounded like a rightwing blogger. Since I started blogging, I’ve been called, usually in a tone of severe accusation, a communist, zionist, anti-semite, faggot, hetero, atheist, christian apologist, asswipe, moonbat, ignorant, know-it-all, elitist, low-life, and many, many more things. I can only respond:

Just don’t care call me an upstart! No man or woman lives who can call a tristero an upstart!

“The big shock came when I got fired”

by digby

Mind boggling:

It was “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day” at the Franklin Correctional Institution, and Sgt. Walter Schmidt wanted to give the kids an idea of what their parents do.

So he took out a handheld stun device and zapped them with 50,000 volts of electricity.

The children, whose ages are not available, reportedly yelped in pain, fell to the ground and grabbed red burn marks on their arms. One was taken to a nearby hospital.

DOC spokeswoman Jo Ellyn Rackleff said in an e-mail, “We believe that a number of children may have received a shock.”

Schmidt, the arsenal sergeant at the Panhandle prison, said he asked parents for permission to shock the kids.

“When they said ‘sure,’ I went ahead and did it,” he said by phone Friday.

Three days after the April 24 incident, Warden Duffie Harrison wrote Schmidt that his “retention would be detrimental to the best interests of the state” because he had “engaged in inappropriate conduct while demonstrating weapons … to several kids during a special event at the institution.”

“You tased at least two kids to demonstrate the EID, which is in direct violation of procedure and placed the department at risk of litigation,” Harrison wrote.

Schmidt was terminated after 14 years with the Department of Corrections.

“It wasn’t intended to be malicious, but educational,” Schmidt said. “The big shock came when I got fired.”

DOC Secretary Walt McNeil expressed concern for the children, whose names were not released, and ordered a full investigation into the matter.

Schmidt said he could not give more details about what happened because of the investigation.

Electronic Immobilization Devices such as the one Schmidt demonstrated are typically used to subdue unruly or uncooperative inmates.

Unlike the Taser, which is fired at a distance and delivers its shock via dart-tipped wires, the EID Schmidt used must be in direct contact with the person to shock them. The 50,000 volts emitted by the device are 450 times as strong as the current in a household electrical outlet.

Somehow or another these correctional opfficers seem to have gotten the idea that making human beings feel horrifying, pain that totally disrupts the neural and muscular system is so harmless you can even use it on little children. Where ever would he get that idea?

And by the way, any parent who gives someone permission to use that thing on their children should have their kids removed from the home. They are far too dangerous to have kids anywhere near them.

h/t to NO

Engineers Of The Train Wreck

by digby

Blogometer picked up this interesting tidbit from Red State that perfectly illustrates the right’s problem:

Meanwhile, RedState’s hogan wants Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to replace ex-Republican Arlen Specter (D-PA) as the Ranking Member on the Judiciary Cmte: “Jeff Sessions should be Republican Ranking Member on the Judiciary Committee. Not [UT Sen.] Orrin Hatch. Not [IA Sen.] Chuck Grassley. […] To have Orrin Hatch or Chuck Grassley at the helm would be an unmitigated disaster. Each are cut from the same cloth — that of the old guard Republicans in the Senate who have given us the train wreck that the Party has become. They would hire terrible staffers who would neither be the smartest lawyers nor actually conservative — and, potentially, maintain a significant number of Specter’s former staff. Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, would field a talented team who could educate America on just who America is getting in the next Supreme Court justice.”

Sessions is an ignorant ideologue who was denied a federal judgeship when it turned out he was a raging bigot:

Sessions entered national politics in the mid-’80s not as a politician but as a judicial nominee. Recommended by a fellow Republican from Alabama, then-Senator Jeremiah Denton, Sessions was Ronald Reagan’s choice for the U.S. District Court in Alabama in the early spring of 1986. Reagan had gotten cocky by then, as more than 200 of his uberconservative judicial appointees had been rolled out across the country without serious opposition (this was pre-Robert Bork). That is, until the 39-year-old Sessions came up for review.

Sessions was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. The year before his nomination to federal court, he had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers–including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.–on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the “Black Belt” counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions’s focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. The activists, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted in four hours and became a cause célèbre. Civil rights groups charged that Sessions had been looking for voter fraud in the black community and overlooking the same violations among whites, at least partly to help reelect his friend Senator Denton.

On its own, the case might not have been enough to stain Sessions with the taint of racism, but there was more. Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU ) “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as “un-American” when “they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions” in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to “pop off” on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race” for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes “loose with [his] tongue.” He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a “piece of intrusive legislation,” a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings

All of that’s a GOP qualification for elected office in Alabama, so being rejected on that basis naturally vaulted him into the Senate. Making him the ranking member today means the Republicans will put their ugliest face forward during judicial confirmation hearings. But hey, it’s their long, ongoing funeral.

The assertion that he’s the guy with the smart staffers may very well be true. I don’t know. But the idea that it’s Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley who are to blame for the Party’s fortunes, while confederate radicals like Sessions are the great hope for the future makes me laugh. And it’s a perfect illustration of the GOP’s problem. Hatch and Grassley are to the right of the vast majority of Americans at the moment but have longstanding mainstream conservo-cred. Sessions, on the other hand, is the very picture of the harsh, hard-right movement conservatism that the country has rejected. Bring him on.

These wingnuts truly seem to believe that the reason people voted for a left leaning Democratic government across the board was because they actually wanted a far right government. If that makes sense to you, then you must be a conservative too.

¡PRESENTE!

by digby

Blogger and regular reader Nezua alerted me to this new organization that sounds very interesting. He writes:

OVER AND OVER we hear about The Hispanic Vote™ and The Latino/a Vote® and it is a real thing we are talking about in all of this. Our people—nuestra gente—have long been a force in this land, be it under the golden sun harvesting the corn that has for thousands of years fed our antepasados (ancestors) or away from the sun and working hard in US places of business or doing so much to build strong familias together, as las mujeres—the women—among us are known for historically. We are a beautiful and long enduring people, and responsible for so much creation here that sustains us today: Art, Literature, Food, Clothing, Song.

And yet, our voices have yet to be utilized and enjoined in a way that can efficiently organize around the issues that affect our communities. Don’t mistake what I say: the Latina/o (or “Hispanic”) community is famous for its ability to organize on the local level, and we are proud of this. And that is why it is time to continue to tie this ability and history together and bring it to an even higher level.

It’s true that while so much joins us, we do come from many different backgrounds and hold varying views on the issues that affect us. We will not always agree, nor should we. What we can agree on, though, is that we should have a way to centralize and engage the politics that affect us on so many levels.

I am involved in launching a site, Presente.Org, that is determined to achieve this very goal. Please stop over and check it out. If what I have written above interests you, please sign up.

Hasta luego!

After listening to the fatuous gasbags opine all day about how women and Hispanics have illegitimate claims to be on the high court and represent some odd, fringe groups who can’t possibly be “the best one for the job,” I can’t help but get a little strident on this. It’s pretty clear that we have quite a way to go before our society has truly repudiated white, male privilege.

Many people marched for social justice today, by the way, not that the mainstream media noticed. You can read about it here. Sample tweet:

Hoy fui ha marchar porque quiero seguir estudiando y trabajando y que mi familia pueda trabajar tanbien. (Today I marched because I want to continue to study and work and I want my family to be able to work too).

How dare they want the American dream?

Swine PU

by digby

After reading tristero’s (literally sickening) post this morning about factory farming and toxic gasses, I struggled to recall where I had recently heard about studies being conducted into swine odor and manure. I hadn’t had my coffee yet and couldn’t quite put it together. And then suddenly, I remembered:

JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: The House of Representatives passed a $410 billion spending bill. It is loaded with pork, courtesy of both parties.

“The New York Times” reports one watchdog group says the bill includes $8 billion for more than 8,500 pet projects. Among them are these: $1.7 million for a honey bee laboratory in Texas; $1.5 million for work on grapes and grape products, including wine — this is my favorite — $1.8 million to research swine odor and manure management in Iowa. They could do the same research in Washington, D.C…

One of his emailers wrote this:

Ed in Iowa writes: “Here in Iowa, we’re sure in need of some swine odor and manure management. And I can tell you that for darn sure, since I live downwind to several hog farms. What you don’t understand when you make fun of this is that it’s a huge problem. Pigs are big business here. Their manure could be used for fertilizer and biofuels, instead of just polluting the air and the water. It is a smart investment that will pay off in clean air, clean water, cheap food, and jobs.”

The right went nuts on the this funding for swine studies:

Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) is back at it, taking swipes at federally funded animal research projects. First he took on the grizzlies—lambasting studies to gauge whether the mighty creatures were in danger of becoming extinct— and now he’s peeved about pigs—or pig odor, to be precise. The former presidential candidate last week mocked a federal set-aside for pig odor research, listing it on his Twitter feed as one of the “Top 10 Porkiest Projects” allocated funding in the latest federal spending bill being debated in Congress. Sen. Tom Coburn (R–Okla.) chimed in on his own Web site that “This earmark is $1.7 million to take the stink out of manure,” and pretty soon the blogosphere was snorting about liberal (and pig) waste.

Amid threats to strip the $410-billion bill of its earmarks, Democratic Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin took the floor to passionately defend his state’s swine scientists. “People constantly complain, with good reason, about big farms, factory farms and their environmental impacts,” he said, “so it makes good sense to fund research that addresses how people can live in our small towns and communities, and livestock producers can do the same, and coexist.”

The problem with federal earmarks for scientific research is that they can be doled out based on political connections and lobbying rather than on a grant review by a panel of scientific peers. In this case, the Swine Odor and Manure Management Research Unit at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Ames, Iowa, had been stripped of funding last year by the Bush administration, and this was designed as a way to reboot the program. As Harkin put it, “This item is only included as an earmark now because the last Bush budget proposed to terminate a number of agricultural research projects in order to come in at a lower budget number, knowing full well that this needed research was likely to be restored by Congress.”

Everyone had a good old laugh about the pork for the pork in the stimulus bill, just like they laughed at volcano monitoring and pandemic funding, all things that had been sorely neglected during the Republicans’ rule and all of which have been shown in just a couple of months to be vitally necessary public expenditures. (It may be that the pig odor spending wouldn’t directly address the swine flu issues, but I think we can all agree after what we’ve seen of this flu epidemic that neglecting to monitor the effects of factory pig farming is probably not a good idea.)

The Republicans didn’t only argue that these things shouldn’t be in the stimulus package, although they did make that argument. (And made fools of themselves for doing it since all government spending in a recession is stimulative.) The main thrust of their argument was that this kind of spending was wasteful — ridiculous, useless profligacy that big spending liberals use to buy votes. They got big laughs on the late night shows and all the gasbags amused themselves to no end making fund of these funny sounding programs that no common sense American could possible believe was a worthwhile use of taxpayer dollars. And they have been proven asses.

Not that it will stop them, or the press, from doing it again. It’s the easiest story in the world and lots of fun. But the GOPs simple-mindedness and the media’s professional laziness could actually kill us one day.

Like The Corners Of My Mind

by digby

Just in case everyone gets a little too cocky about the great Democratic Era Of Dominance, I would just remind everyone that this was where we were only six years ago today:

Women were swooning, manly GOP men were commenting enviously on his package. And then there was this:

MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo op in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just–I can’t think of any, any stunt by the White House–and I’ll call it a stunt–that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It’s not a stunt if it works and it’s real. And I felt the faces of those guys–I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of–the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he–you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That’s what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you’re watching that from–say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We’re coming.’ Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not–we’ve allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it’s time to tell them, you know what, `You’re going to be help accountable for this.’

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

Never forget who these people really are.

Happy Codpiece Day everyone.

Update: Greg Mitchell gives the full rundown on the press malfeasance of that day.

Not So Fast My Friends

by dday

I hate to quibble with Tristero, but there will be a major obstacle to getting a nominee through Congress. Despite the potential for 60 votes, despite the party switch of Arlen Specter – in fact, BECAUSE of the switch of Arlen Specter – getting nominees out of the Senate Judiciary Committee under current rules will be a practical impossibility, it appears.

Check out the Senate Judiciary Committee Rules:

IV. BRINGING A MATTER TO A VOTE

The Chairman shall entertain a non-debatable motion to bring a matter before the Committee to a vote. If there is objection to bring the matter to a vote without further debate, a roll call vote of the Committee shall be taken, and debate shall be terminated if the motion to bring the matter to a vote without further debate passes with ten votes in the affirmative, one of which must be cast by the minority.

Your current lineup of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Arlen Specter
Orrin Hatch
Chuck Grassley
Jon Kyl
Jeff Sessions
Lindsey Graham
John Cornyn
Tom Coburn

Which of these fellas do you think will be ready to provide the necessary one vote from the minority to bring things to a vote in the committee on tough questions now?

Don’t think they wouldn’t relish bottling up an Obama nominee in committee, and using all the lies sure to be served up by the Mighty Wurlitzer and the conservative noise machine to justify it. Surely the 50 conservative organizations already planning on conference calls will push for that decision to be made. This rule can change if there’s a new organizing resolution, but in order to make that bullet-proof, all 60 Democrats would need to be seated, and willing to vote in favor. Giving even more reason for the minority to block Al Franken. Giving Specter even more power should he decide to wank and vote against a new resolution.

In the Senate, there’s ALWAYS a way to obstruct.

…Oh, almost forgot, I agree with Mark Halerpin, how dare there be so few white men on that list of possible SCOTUS nominees. The MAN’s been keeping us Caucasian males down for too long. A world with a 7-2 male/female split on the Supreme Court ain’t a world I want to live in.

Update: by digby — Joe Klein says Obama needs to suck up to Huckleberry, hard.

.

Moderates And The Middle

by digby

Notice how Rick Sanchez of CNN frames the discussion about the Supreme Court pick:

For the sake of actual argument, the Republicans are really going to be on the sidelines on this one, unless things change. So you’re gonna have people in the Democratic Party who are gonna be saying, no you’ve gotta have a hispanic, ya gotta have a woman, ya gotta have someone who either agrees with their view of abortion or gay rights or whatever it is and you’re gonna have the other moderates in the Democratic Party who are gonna want to take the president back to the middle.

Evidently, “moderate Democrats” who want to take the president “back to the middle” believe that the next Supreme Court Justice should be an anti-choice, white male. Why they think that I do not know.

Now that the Republicans are out of it, the gasbags have to cast the so-called moderate Democrats in their role as social conservatives who are opposed to “quotas” and “special interests,” like hispanics and women. (The fact that women make up half the population and there’s only one on the court — and that hispanics are the largest single ethnic minority in the country is what makes them so “special” I guess.) Luckily, those moderates are going to drag the president away from the crazed left wing DFHs back to the happy middle where Real Americans are.

Earlier, I heard Chip Reid say to Robert Gibbs that President Obama’s remarks saying that the “quality of empathy of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes,” was the very “definition of judicial activism.”

These establishment journalists are stuck in the conservative mindset. (And, again, nobody has done a very good job of instructing them as to why this is wrong even though, in the case of judicial activism, you have to be a moron to see it quite this way.) They literally can’t conceive of another way to think about this than the usual Democratic/Republican paradigm, even when it’s no longer operative. Because of that they can’t let go of the poorly reasoned propaganda and village conventional wisdom they’ve heard throughout their careers.

Update: I should have known. It’s actually much more explicit even than that. The Hill reports this:

A group of more than 50 conservative groups held a conference call early Friday to begin plotting strategy, sources on the call said.

“You’re already having chatter between conservatives on who is going to be the nominee, what type of nominee is going to be put forward by President Obama,” said Brian Darling, the Heritage Foundation’s Senate director and a former top Judiciary Committee staffer.

Groups like the American Center for Law & Justice, the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary and the Committee for Justice will all prepare background research on potential nominees, setting up the eventual, inevitable attacks on the nominee as a left-wing extremist.

[…]

“It seems like out of the gate [Obama] didn’t seem terribly nervous about going pretty hard left,” Daly said.

“This is a battle that is very important to the president. It’s very important that the president nominates somebody who doesn’t embarrass him,” Darling said.

No wonder the gasbags are so well prepped.

Update: Goddamit this makes me mad. Pat Buchanan said that Obama should look for a John Roberts, “someone with real stature that impresses people, could even get Republican votes. I think he will go for a minority, a woman and or a hispanic …” He then went on to admit that women and Hispanics did “represent a broad swathe of the Republic” which was very nice of him. Especially seeing as women actually represent a majority of the public. But he then reiterated that it would be a mistake. We need someone we can respect.

Matthews more or less agreed, wondering if Obama can “fight” the push to name a woman or a Hispanic. Clearly, he needs to.