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).
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Newtie must think that Michael Steele is his ticket back into power. Otherwise, this makes no sense:
Several members of the Republican National Committee are miffed at Newt Gingrich for claiming that they’re a small bunch of egomaniacs who need to be coddled by the party chairman.
“Newt needs to take a breath,” New Jersey committeeman David Norcross told CNN.
Gingrich made the assertion on C-SPAN Thursday when asked about a new resolution put forth by some veteran members — including Norcross and RNC Treasurer Randy Pullen of Arizona — that would limit chairman Michael Steele’s ability to control how the committee spends its money.
That resolution has sparked a fresh round of infighting between Steele loyalists on the committee and entrenched members who backed other candidates for the chairmanship and remain skeptical of his leadership.
Defending Steele’s tumultuous start, Gingrich said the chairman might be under fire from some in the committee because he “probably has not yet learned the art of massaging the egos of RNC members.”
“They all think they’re precious, and they all think they should be taken care of, and they all think the job of the chairman, first of all, is to make the RNC members happy,” Gingrich said of the committee’s 168 members.
Project much?
The funniest thing is the reaction:
Tennessee GOP chairwoman Robin Smith objected to that suggestion, saying that “RNC members, on the whole, are committed individuals who sincerely work for the best of our party.”
“Forming circular firing squads only gives aid to the Democrats who are doing quite nicely in undercutting the public trust in our government,” Smith said.
Ada Fisher, committeewoman from North Carolina, said RNC members are not “as ego driven as some professional politicians and pundits would like to believe.”
“Most of us are not receiving large sums from being on television, serving as commentators, giving speeches or writing books, nor do we devote our waking hours to playing politics,” Fisher said in a thinly veiled jab at Gingrich.
Another committee member called the former Speaker’s remarks a “gross generalization.”
I love it: “on the whole” they are committed to the party and it’s a “gross generalization” to say they are all egomaniacs.
Meanwhile the Gingrich/Steele team is spitting mad:
North Carolina Republican party chair Linda Daves, who backed South Carolina GOP chairman Katon Dawson during the race for the RNC chairmanship, knocked the members who are now pushing the resolution to regulate Steele’s financial powers.
“I think some of the members should spend more time trying to build the party on the state level and spend less time trying to micromanage the RNC and trying to tear down Michael Steele,” Daves said…
It’s hard to believe that the gasbags tried to convince us for years that these were the grownups, isn’t it?
When an authoritarian structure breaks down it isn’t pretty. The participants are underdeveloped personalities who lose it when the daddy figures aren’t around. And they are losing it.
That’s right, people. It’s not just Obama refusing to call SWINE Flu by its real name – namely, SWINE Flu – but on The Takeaway this morning I actually heard the airheads transition from saying SWINE Flu to calling it the H18237FN10DSND027E – HIke! virus or something. And they even admitted they were doing that because the oh-so-tenderized sensibilities of the men who control the meat industry believe that calling SWINE Flu “SWINE Flu” is bad for business.
Fuck ’em. It’s SWINE Flu, you assholes. And the more you object, the more opportunity there will be to post links that expose the industrial meat business for what it is.* Let’s get started.
If you haven’t read it yet, and I apologize for repeating this link but it really is that good, go now and read Boss Hog. You will never eat Smithfield products again:
A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield’s efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That’s a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.
Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.
From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. [Emphasis added.] Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds — oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.
The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans [Emphasis added], including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.
Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons — cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.
Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as “overapplication.” This can turn hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.
Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.
The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig shit.*
One of the largest pork companies on the East Coast was fined $12.6 million – the largest water pollution fine ever- for dumping hog waste into a Chesapeake Bay tributary.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca B. Smith ruled Aug. 8 that Smithfield Foods Inc. was liable for nearly 7,000 violations of the Clean Water Act since 1991. She said she wanted at least a portion of the fine to be used for Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts. The ruling resulted from an EPA lawsuit that accused Smithfield of polluting the Pagan River and destroying documents to cover it up.
And here, my friend Maria Hinojosa (our children go to the same school) of NOW goes inside a Smithfield pig processing plant in North Carolina to examine efforts to establish a union at the plant. She reports, among other things, that the stench was so awful that a member of her production crew nearly vomited. And try to put yourself in the place of those workers, spending north of 6 hours a day in that nauseating environment, slicing fat off a never-ending supply of dead pig carcasses – extremely dangerous work.
“Transmission of influenza viruses from birds to mammals has probably occurred for centuries,” said Dr. Robert Webster of the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, speaking at the Second International Symposium on Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses. “However, increased opportunities for transmission, larger chicken and pig populations, and overall growth of human populations are associated with a higher risk of interspecies reassortment. This situation is a possible start for a new pandemic.”
While the timing of the next influenza pandemic cannot be predicted, experts agree it is inevitable. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) projects that the next pandemic could kill between 89,000 to 207,000 people, and result in 314,000 to 734,000 hospitalizations. Infectious disease specialists say health authorities are not prepared.*
Finally, here’s a a pollution locator to help you locate factory farms in your community. Frankly, I’d think just a quick sniff of the air would be enough, but this could be helpful, I suppose…
That’s enough for now. Every time I hear SWINE Flu described by euphemism, I’ll post more and more descriptions, videos and photos of the industrial meat industry. I’d like to encourage other bloggers to do the same.
—
*Note:It is true that the crowded, filthy, conditions of Smithfield’s industrial hog farms are a perfect breeding ground for disease and viruses, including ones that infect humans. It is also true that Smithfield is an unspeakably prolific polluter. From the Rolling Stone article above:
In 1999, Luter bought a state-owned company called Animex, one of Poland’s biggest hog processors. Then he began doing business through a Polish subsidiary called Prima Farms, acquiring huge moribund Communist-era hog farms and converting them into concentrated feeding operations. Pork prices in Poland were low, so Smithfield’s sweeping expansion didn’t make strict economic sense, except that it had the virtue of pushing small hog farmers toward bankruptcy. By 2003, Animex was operating six subsidiary companies and seven processing plants, selling nine brands of meat and taking in $338 million annually.
The usual violations occurred. Near one of Smithfield’s largest plants, in Byszkowo, an enormous pool of frozen pig shit, pumped into a lagoon in winter, melted and ran into two nearby lakes. The lake water turned brown; residents in local villages got skin rashes and eye infections; the stench made it impossible to eat. A recent report to the Helsinki Commission found that Smithfield’s pollution throughout Poland was damaging the country’s ecosystems. Overapplication was endemic. Farmers without permits were piping liquid pig shit directly into watersheds that fed into the Baltic Sea.
It is also true that a Smithfield subsidiary was about 12 miles from La Gloria, where the first cases of the latest SWINE Flu strain occurred: some 60% of the town was affected. And it is also true that the Smithfield subsidiary in Mexico is also an incredibly disgusting polluter.
However, there is, at present, no hard evidence yet linking Smithfield Foods’ practices to this SWINE Flu virus. This is important to remember: whether or not Smithfield Foods eventually gets implicated in the SWINE Flu outbreak does not change the simple fact that their business practice is unhealthy, unsanitary, unspeakably cruel to both pigs and humans, and extremely dangerous to work in.
Any questions now why Democrats are paying good money to run Specter as a Democrat?
I didn’t think so.
UPDATE: dday notes that because of the rules of the subcommittee, it could be much harder to get a nominee through the Senate.
Special note: Of course, I don’t like Specter. Of course, I’m disgusted that the Democratic party has moved so far to the right that a conservative pinhead like Specter would even consider joining. Of course, I’m appalled at the manipulation and cynicism involved in purchasing Specter’s votes for Obama’s Supreme Court nominations.
But that is exactly what is going down. To ignore it, or to deny it, is not merely silly. It’s naive. Dangerously naive: after all, there is a vicious, malicious, extreme-right Republican party that, given half a chance, will rear its ugly head up again and create even more havoc than they already have.
Now, it’s time to get Franken seated. And fast.
Bye-bye, Mayberry Machiavellis. Welcome to politics, Chicago-style
BTW. my suggestion for whom to replace Souter: David Boies. Seems only fair.
Economist Robert Frank, creative thinker and all around nice guy (and friend of this blog) went into the Lion’s Den today and found that the beast was rabidly foaming at the mouth:
I’ve been writing about this phenomenon for a while now. It’s an outgrowth of puerile Randism. These people really believe they are something very, very special. More absurdly, they really believe they work harder than everyone else. That’s right, a moronic, blow dried FOX TV celebrity who spends more time with a tailor and manicurist in one week than most people spend in a lifetime, considers himself to be wealthy and successful not because he’s a TV performer who got lucky, but because he’s superior to everyone who makes less money than him. Indeed, these overpaid, Galt-worshipping wingnuts actually think they produce something and what they produce is unique and important.
If there is anyone in the world who should be thanking his lucky, lucky stars that Rupert Murdoch created a TV propaganda arm to protect the aristocracy and decided to hire a bunch of vapid spokesmodels to parrot talking points, it’s a FOX News gasbag. John Galt would call such people parasites — and in this case, he wouldn’t be wrong.
Jay Bybee signed off on notorious Bush-era torture memos. And now? He’s serving as a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, thanks to George Bush.
Jay Bybee showed no respect for our laws and isn’t fit to be a federal judge. Can you sign this petition urging Congress to impeach Jay Bybee?
The President put it very plainly last night, perhaps more plainly than he’d admit.
“President Obama said, ‘They used torture, I believe waterboarding is torture,'” Nadler said, speaking of Obama’s comments about his predecessors. “Once you concede that torture was committed, the law requires that there be an investigation, and if warranted, a prosecution.”
Those who would condone war crimes at this point look increasingly foolish. We are a nation of laws, and if you don’t want a law prosecuted, you repeal it, but you cannot ignore it. I would refer these apologists to Sen. Robert Byrd, who knows a thing or two about the Constitution:
The recently leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as well as the four released memorandums from the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), confirm our worst fears. These documents point to brutal, inhumane acts which were repeatedly carried out by U.S. military personnel, and which were authorized and condoned at the highest levels of the Bush Administration. These acts appear to directly violate both the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions. Spain and the United Kingdom have already initiated investigations of Bush Administration officials who approved these acts. The United States needs to investigate as well. To continue to ignore the mounting evidence of clear wrongdoing is a national humiliation […]
The rule of law is not just a lofty concept to which we should aspire only when convenient. It is a fundamental principal upon which our Republic was founded, and it is the foundation of our free society. I understand the desire to look forward and to forge a new path on high ground instead of on the low road of the past eight years. But to use the need to move on as a reason not to investigate basic human rights violations is unacceptable. Excusing individuals at the highest levels of government from adhering to the rule of law, whether in wartime or not, is a dangerous precedent, for it undercuts the principle of accountability which permeates representative democracy.
We can start by ensuring that a violator of international laws and a moral reprobate is removed from the federal bench. Call and email Congress, particularly the members of the House Judiciary Committee, and ask them to open hearings.
