California Democrat John Burton is a jerk, but sometimes he hurls his curmudgeonly vitriol with panache:
In our Saturday post about the California Democratic Party’s ad attacking Meg Whitman but masquerading as an “issues ad,” we described the abrupt ending to our conversation with CDP Chairman John Burton. Through his spokesman, Burton on Monday complained that he had been misquoted. Burton says he didn’t say “Fuck you.” His actual words were, “Go fuck yourself.” Calbuzz regrets the error.
The writer at the CBS site “The Coop” seems to think this is a brilliant insight:
Let’s focus on the most explosive and, I think, the most ludicrous: Her supposed “connection” to Goldman Sachs. Greenwald links to Digby, who links to USA Today -gotta love those links – which notes that Kagan received $10,000 in 2008 for serving as a member of the Research Advisory Council of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute. Well, as the noted constitutional scholar and former New Jersey Nets forward Derrick Coleman was wont to exclaim on occasion, whoop-de-damn-do. Fact is that the “Digby” post offers nothing in the way of evidence that points to a nefarious connection. Read a little further, though, and you’ll find the author’s real point: “I think Supreme Court confirmation battles are ideologically instructive for the nation and are one of the few times when it’s possible for people to speak at length about their philosophical worldview. Liberals have to stop running from this. Allowing the other side to define us is killing us.” There you have it. This is really about politics and dissatisfaction with the Obama administration. Some on the lib-left would like the White House to tack far harder in their direction and they are not pleased at his political instinct to move toward the middle. That’s an argument they can have, though now it looks as if Kagan will get caught in the cross-fire.
Uhm, yes. That was exactly my point. And the problem is?
Indeed, in a subsequent post, I made the point about the Goldman Sachs connection so damned political it hurts:
[I]t really irks the hell out of me that if we are going to have a big confirmation battle (which goes without saying) the administration is going put themselves in a position in which they have to defend Kagan’s Goldman Sachs ties while Jeff Sessions prances around like the second coming of William Jennings Bryan. Unless they think it’s a terrific idea to convince the American people once and for all that the Republican Party is the people’s only defense against Big Government and Wall Street, I can’t think of a more counterproductive political fight.
Obviously, I don’t know if the GOP will find it in themselves to bash their good friends at Goldman but I do think it’s stupid to hand them weapons to make points like this, however. If we’re going to have a fight, then I’d prefer that it be a real ideological battle rather than allow the Republicans to be wolves in populist clothing.
Supreme Court battles are inherently political and the Republicans, at least, make no bones about using them to advance their agenda. This should not be news to very important journalists unless they’ve been watching this nominating kabuki dance with the credulity of 12 year olds. My gripe is that Democrats are really bad dancers. In fact, they refuse to dance at all.
This morning a group of Latino organizations, civil liberties advocates, and bloggers sent a letter to Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig asking him to relocate the All-Star game from Arizona out of respect for its Latino players. Blue America was proud to sign on to that letter and was so inspired by the effort that we created the One America campaign to back Congressman Raul Grijalva in his lone crusade among Arizona’s elected reps to boycott Arizona until they reverse this unamerican profiling law.
Leadership is nothing new for Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a booming voice on behalf of working families on every issue that comes before Congress. He helped lead the fight against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, helped lead the fight against Wall Street predators and helped lead the fight for equitable health care.
He was also the first member of Congress– and, significantly, the only member from Arizona– to stand up and take a principled and passionate stand against SB 1070, the foundations of an apartheid police state. He first called on Arizona’s governor to veto the patently unconstitutional anti-immigrant bill. After she enthusiastically embraced it, he sent a letter to President Obama urging him to exercise his “authority to limit [federal] cooperation with Arizona officials in their enforcement of SB 1070.” Finally on April 29, he released the following statement:
“The governor and legislature are blind to what this bill will really do to citizens, law enforcement and the state economy. Tourists will not come to a state with discriminatory policies on the books. Businesses will not move here. Hispanic workers and taxpayers will leave. If state lawmakers don’t realize or don’t care how detrimental this will be, we need to make them understand somehow. We are calling on organizations not to schedule conventions or conferences in the state until it reverses this decision. This is a specifically targeted call for action, not a blanket rejection of the state economy. Conventions are a large source of visitors and revenue, and targeting them is the most effective way to make this point before it’s too late. Just as professional athletes refused to recognize Arizona until it recognized Martin Luther King Jr., we are calling on businesses and organizations not to bring their conventions to Arizona until it recognizes civil rights and the meaning of due process. We don’t want to sustain this effort any longer than necessary. It’s about sending a message.”
The response has been a barrage of death threats from neo-Nazi groups, both to the Congressman and to his staff.
Please help us get Raúl’s back by donating one dollar– for ONE AMERICA– to his re-election campaign at One America. (If you want to donate $1,001, that’s fine too.)
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that members of the Supreme Court must be lawyers. But a long line of activist presidents – both Democrats and Republicans – have altered the original intent of the Framers so that a degree from an Eastern elitist law school is now almost a constitutional necessity. If Elena Kagan (Harvard Law ’86) is confirmed for the Court, all nine justices would have received their legal training at Harvard or Yale.
This is one of those moments when you sense that American democracy is more of a rigged game than they taught you back in high school civics classes. Few object to a meritocracy in which people, regardless of family backgrounds, are judged by what they have accomplished in life. But should that binding decision have been made by the admissions committees at two law schools when the applicants were still in their early 20s? Imagine a guidance counselor shouting, “Future Supreme Court justices over here. Everyone else, best of luck with your legal careers – if you don’t aim too high.”
Once the criterion was Harvard, Yale or bust, it was almost inevitable that Elena Kagan, the former dean of guess-what-law-school, would have been tapped for the Supreme Court. This is not an exaggeration. Let’s do the math together.
Kagan is clearly qualified for the job. Nonetheless it’s amusing to see wingnuts and Villagers carrying on about Kagan being unqualified, since the qualifications she’s gathered are the very ones that have have been so clearly demanded for the job.
The question of diversity is always an interesting one. Back in the beginning of the Republic it was all about region, then came religion, then race, ethnicity and gender. And it was common to choose people outside the legal profession until recently. “Diversity” has shifting definition that changes with the nation, which is kind of ironic considering all the legal sturm and drang about whether or not the constitution is a living document: it’s quite clear that the Court itself is a (slowly) evolving institution.
I’m guessing this will be the last Ivy league choice for a while.
I realize that facts are irrelevant to this faith based argument but this should give at least a moments pause to even the heartiest tea partier:
Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman’s presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found.
Some conservative political movements such as the “Tea Party” have criticized federal spending as being out of control. While spending is up, taxes have fallen to exceptionally low levels.
Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.
“The idea that taxes are high right now is pretty much nuts,” says Michael Ettlinger, head of economic policy at the liberal Center for American Progress. The real problem is spending,counters Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, which organizes Tea Party groups. “The money we borrow is going to be paid back through taxation in the future,” he says.
Individual tax rates vary widely based on how much a taxpayer earns, where the person lives and other factors. On average, though, the tax rate paid by all Americans — rich and poor, combined — has fallen 26% since the recession began in 2007.
You would think this news would come as a big relief to the tea partiers who seem to think they are enduring the suffering of Jesus under the tax burden. But it won’t. The anti-tax sentiment among middle and working class people actually means “stop giving my money to people I don’t like” (and among the Peterson level deficit fetishists, it’s “taxes are for the little people.”) Neither of those sentiments are actually related to the deficit, but the deficit is a lovely excuse for such selfishness.
The deficit scolds and the anti-tax zealots who wring their hands over their grandchildren’s debt are all unwilling to pitch in for that debt and help pay it down today. Apparently, the only acceptable way to help their grandkids is to make their kids suffer in their old age. They call this family values.
Another routine day on the mean streets of America:
I used to worry that the many police officers who were called up for Iraq and Afghanistan would bring their warlike attitudes back to the streets of the US. Lately I’ve been thinking I may have had it backwards and the police are taking their bad habits overseas.
As those who read this blog know, for some time I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the psychology that leads so many people on the right to be so thoughtless about the future of the planet. The other day Amanda Marcotte offered up another intriguing insight:
It was hard for me to wrap my head around the arrogance and short-sightedness that led to this disaster, until last night, in the course of my bedtime reading, I was reminded of the Taliban destroying the Buddhas of Bamyan. The two incidents don’t necessarily seem to have much in common; the Taliban deliberately set out to wipe out these priceless artifacts because they offended their joy-killing, art-hating sensibilities. The oil spill, of course, is an accident. But I’d argue that there’s a common thread between the incidents that led up to both these acts of unfathomable destruction. Whatever the ostensible excuse the Taliban had for destroying the Buddhas, outsiders can clearly see that they’re motivated mainly be a petulant unwillingness to engage or regard anything that makes them feel smaller or less important. Pleasure and beauty offend fundamentalists, because these things are out of their control and present a threat to their death grip on power. Art reminds people that there’s something more than the tightly controlled, colorless existence offered by fundamentalism, and so the fundamentalists are wary of it… “Drill, baby, drill!” was a slogan that revealed that, for conservatives, the potential for environmental destruction is a reward unto itself. It excites. It makes you feel big and important, that mere nature will bend to your will. Only softies care about things like preserving the past or securing the future. Past and future are concepts that offend the narcissism of right wingers, since both concepts remind you that there’s more to this world than you and what you want. Preserving the environment for its own sake seems pointless, since that just means that it’ll survive you, which reminds you that you’re mortal and will one day be forgotten. And so just as the Taliban blew up those Buddhas that stood as stark reminders that there’s more to this universe than their petty little egos, so American conservatives yelled, “Drill, baby, drill!”
That egotism is part of a certain strain of fundamentalism to be sure.
Plus they just enjoy ruining things for other people. And animals:
I’ll never forget sitting in a crowd of wingnuts at a family gathering watching some footage of the Exxon Valdez spill and watching them all laugh uproariously at dying, oil covered birds flopping around on the beach.
So Andrew Sullivan is on one of his quirky crusades against Elena Kagan, to force her to answer questions about her sex life so that people will know how that affects her judgment on gay rights issues. And yet, except for a lot of Harvard whispering, there’s no evidence that Kagan is gay. As Richard Kim says:
I don’t know if Elena Kagan sleeps with women or men. I don’t know if she sleeps with anyone at all. I don’t care. What I do know is that she has never claimed to be a lesbian, that she’s never spoken out in the first-person as an advocate of gay rights and that she has never publicly discussed a romantic relationship with a woman. Gay isn’t some genetic or soulful essence; it’s a name you call yourself–and Kagan has not done that. So in my book, case closed. Elena Kagan is not gay. Is she straight? I don’t know, and again, I don’t care. Why does she have to have a sexuality at all?
Kim asks whether or not we should have asked John Roberts about how his heterosexual life experiences affect his decisions making and I do recall lots of talk at the time about about Roberts’ “late marriage” and odd views toward women. (This picture raised eyebrows for the same reason Kagan’s hairdo raises them today.) But aside from a lot of snickering, I don’t recall anyone suggesting seriously that it should be brought up in the hearings.
This is not a door anyone should want to open. If we are going to ask presidential nominees how they will apply their sex lives to cases, it’s not going to be pretty. In fact, it’s downright alarming.
I wrote about this topic a couple of weeks ago and don’t really have anything of substance to add. The woman has a right to be a single, middle aged career woman without being forced to answer questions she doesn’t want to answer about her intimate life. If she’s not out there crusading against gay rights, there absolutely no reason to assume anything or even bring it up.
Ezra Klein interviews Simon Lazarus, “public policy counsel to the National Senior Citizens Law Center and a frequent commentator on the Supreme Court and the intersection of the law and economic and labor issues” who makes an extremely important observation:
EK: This is one of those things that’s coming up in a lot of my interviews. Everyone agrees she’s brilliant and hardworking, but they really emphasize her tactical intelligence, her ability to negotiate out to the position she wants. I guess more people have seen it because she worked on the Hill and in the executive branch. But I don’t know how to weight it. How important are these skills?
SL: I think it’s an important skill, but it’s a different skill. Being a judge is a cerebral enterprise. It’s not like political negotiation where you’re trading this piece of the decision for that piece of the decision. It’s more being able to understand other people’s intellectual frameworks and figuring out ways to work within those frameworks and nudge them in the direction of results you favor. Stevens was just extraordinarily good at this, and I think Breyer is good at it too. But on this court, which is so dominated by intellectual legal superstars, you have to be able to play at that level in order to get in the game in the first place. For instance, I don’t think Earl Warren would be enormously effective in moderating Roberts’s or Kennedy’s views because they wouldn’t take him seriously. That doesn’t mean Warren wasn’t a great justice. But it’s a different court today.
That’s right. “Consensus building” is completely ineffectual in our current political environment (and the Court is nothing if not political), because we are in an era of ideological polarization. It’s chicken or feathers. If you exalt consensus, all you will get is a consensus for conservatism and a sharp move to the right because they are playing a different game entirely.
For example, here’s a smart observation from one of Ezra’s commenters, which shows that his particular skill is fairly useless on today’s court:
The press, once again intent on creating truth from its own ignorance by process of repetition, keeps emphasizing the importance of Obama appointing a smart consensus builder to replace Stevens. Of course, Breyer, a pragmatist with a sharp legal mind who gets along well with Scalia, already fits this mold.
How’s that working for us?
Ezra continues:
A lot of what you’re saying sounds like a defensive vision for legal liberalism. That’s a change, right? The old version was that conservatives wanted a passive judiciary that wouldn’t try to legislate from the bench while liberals wanted an active judiciary that saw social justice as part of its mandate. But you’re saying that it’s now flipped and conservatives want the active judiciary while liberals want a more passive court that won’t impede legislative progress. Is that right? And if so, is that a sufficient philosophy for liberals? SL: Over the last 20 or 30 years, conservative majorities have done so much damage to very significant New Deal and Great Society and kindred social legislation that undoing that damage would actually be a very affirmative broad goal to set. And the philosophy behind that goal, a philosophy that Justice Stevens held close, is that it’s critical for judges to interpret statutes to promote the basic goals that Congress had in mind when it enacted the statute.
I’m fairly sure that’s where the “strict constructionists” come in and say that what matters is what the Founders had in mind. They were apparently ordained by God. (Actually “strict constructionism” has a real (if idiotic) meaning in legal philosophy, but in practice it’s used by the right to convey the idea that the wrong people are benefiting from rights that were only meant for Real Americans.)
The discussion reminds me of the tale of Huckleberry and The Box Turtle phonying up the congressional record so they could mislead the court into believing that the congress intended the opposite of what it actually intended. It didn’t go over very well. I suspect they have since learned that it’s not necessary since today’s conservative Court majority doesn’t actually care what the congress intended. These days it’s just ignoring the intent of the congress and making it impossible for people to exert their rights in court by using illogical reasoning in its opinions. Where do you find consensus on something like that? Agree to only do it half the time?
It looks like the California GOP thinks as Arizona goes, so goes the nation:
For the last decade, many California Republicans have tiptoed around the issue of illegal immigration and sought to distance themselves from Proposition 187. GOP standard bearers from Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River) to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have sought to downplay the issue and set themselves apart from the views embraced by former Gov. Pete Wilson during his 1994 reelection campaign, which had a central tough-on-immigration message.
But now, apparently, it’s time to party like it’s 1994. Spurred on by Steve Poizner’s consistent campaigning on the issue, with big assists from a distressed economy and the national immigration discussion ignited by a new law in Arizona, Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has decided she can ignore the issue no longer.
Whitman launched a new radio ad focusing on immigration this weekend. And who did the Whitman campaign turn to shore up Whitman’s tough-on-immigration bona fides?
You guessed it — Pete Wilson.
In a new 60-second radio spot, Whitman turns to Wilson, who says: “I know how important it is to stop illegal immigration, and I know Meg Whitman. Meg will be tough as nails on illegal immigration.”
It’s hard to believe that Jerry Brown is going to be governor again, but it looks like that’s what’s going to happen. If it doesn’t win, we will know that the right is definitely on the march. If they can’t even fight them back here, then fasten your seatbelts.
Whitman, by the way, has proven already that money goes through her hands like a sieve — and she’s cratering.
Not long ago Meg Whitman had such a huge lead – 50 points – over Steve Poizner for the GOP nomination for governor, many folks thought the race was over and started sizing up her chances against the Democrats’ Jerry Brown.
When she came in to talk to our Editorial Board last week, Whitman brushed off news that some polls showed Poizner had closed the gap to about 10 points. Still 10 points isn’t anything to scoff at, especially with only a little more than a month before the polls open.
Well, this week ABC’s SurveyUSA poll shows that Poizner is now 2 points behind her – 39 percent to 37 percent.
