The numbers are in and the price tag for last year’s Franken-Loserman negative ad barrage that all but made the 2008 Olympics unwatchable was $55 million.
If this Congress doesn’t reform campaign spending we’re going to have to make more adjustments in 2010 because this shit has to stop NOW.
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Obama, in his first public remarks on the controversy…condemned “all this nonsense that is being spewed out” by critics who have accused Sotomayor of being a racist and have likened her to a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
“I’m sure she would have restated it,” Obama said of Sotomayor’s remarks in an interview with NBC News that will air next week. “But if you look in the entire sweep of the essay that she wrote, what’s clear is that she was simply saying that her life experiences will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people are going through
“That will make her a good judge,” he added….
Meanwhile, Republican leaders scrambled Friday to contain some of the more incendiary and racially tinged remarks that have been aimed at her, fearing that continued personal attacks could severely damage the GOP’s appeal to women and Hispanics. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, said he was “uneasy” with some of the remarks and urged Republicans to focus on her legal record.
[WaPost via PiPress]
The nasty comments — even at the Strib — are dying down. Sotomayor’s actually record trumps the talk radio lies. This is a learning opp for the right. For the first time perhaps ever they’ve spouted off without any knowledge of the topic at hand and have been startled to hear their words echo all about but not be picked up by others. Instead of swelling to a crescendo the Wurlitzer let those notes die a plaintive, unharmonized death.
The NYTimes’ Opinionator has the nasty quotes and some of the Republican blowback from — dare I say it? — principled conservatives who’re tired of the out-of-context quotes and talk radio lies. Not to worry, the bedwetters are fighting back, determined to keep the Republican party the most minorityless of minority parties. Still, even Krauthammer says “No magazine gossip from anonymous court clerks” as in fuck Jeffrey Rosen and phony hatchetjobs. Rich Lowry may still be a douche, but it would take a butter knife and cranial surgery to correct that.
A wedge has been driven between talk and party, douches and bags, and that can only be good for all of us. As for the pro forma here, Opinionator cites Yale law prof Stephen L. Carter:
Today, the hearings continue to follow the same model that they did half a century ago, when the Dixiecrats invented them. Senators ask about the nominee’s views on a variety of cases, and the nominee respectfully declines to answer. Then the senators ask about judicial philosophy, and the nominee dances a bit, murmurs a few plain-vanilla reassurances, then clams up. We get no new information.
And, obviously, those old racist Dixiecrats are now RepubLOLcats. The questions are the same but instead of defending racism they now seek to project it onto others.
Same as it ever was. America’s biggest societal problems are rooted in Southern racist culture, a phenomenon almost as nasty as the racist bullshit you can find north of the Mason-Dixon. So why is Cornyn and the upper reaches of the Republican establishment recoiling from the Sotomayor smears? Maybe because they don’t want to read stuff like this from Charles Blow:
First, there’s former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. When the Supreme Court was considering Brown v. Board of Education, Rehnquist was a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson. Rehnquist wrote Jackson a memo in which he defended separate-but-equal policies, saying, “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”
Furthermore, Rehnquist had been a Republican ballot protectionist in Phoenix when he was younger. As the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen correctly noted in 1986: Rehnquist “helped challenge the voting qualifications of Arizona blacks and Hispanics. He was entitled to do so. But even if he did not personally harass potential voters, as witnesses allege, he clearly was a brass-knuckle partisan, someone who would deny the ballot to fellow citizens for trivial political reasons — and who made his selection on the basis of race or ethnicity.”
Then there’s John Roberts, who replaced Rehnquist as the chief justice in 2005. That year, Newsday reported that Roberts had made racist and sexist jokes in memos that he wrote while working in the Reagan White House. And, The New York Review of Books published a scolding article in 2005 making the case that during the same period that he was making those jokes, Roberts marshaled a crusader’s zeal in his efforts to roll back the civil rights gains of the 1960s and ’70s — everything from voting rights to women’s rights. The article began, “The most intriguing question about John Roberts is what led him as a young person whose success in life was virtually assured by family wealth and academic achievement to enlist in a political campaign designed to deny opportunities for success to those who lack his advantages.”
Gingrich tweeted that “a white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw.” Make up your own minds about where Rehnquist’s and Roberts’s words and actions should fall on the racism spectrum, but both were overwhelmingly confirmed.
Until someone can produce proof of words and actions on the part of Sotomayor that even approach the scale of Rehnquist’s and Roberts’s, all I see is men throwing skeleton bones from class closets.
RepubLOLcats are wise to back off before facts like these are too widely distributed. They want to keep John Roberts where he is, but the more Americans learn about their white bread Chief Justice, the less credible the Republican-clogged SCOTUS becomes.
The Washington Post in any event is never getting their credibility back. The Daily Villager turns Michael Fletcher loose and publishes a Saturday-worthy false equivalency puff piece on the poor but misogynist Clarence Thomas versus the poor but talented Sonia Sotomayor. And yes, Miguel Estrada gets a mention but as usual without context, i.e., the scandalous way the Bushies refused to release any of Estrada’s notoriously partisan internal memos.
Sonia Sotomayor never sexually intimidated her underlings, although she may have verbally castrated some pretty boy lawyers who tried to bullshit their way through a trial in her court. Sonia Sotomayor wasn’t a major buyer of porn videos and by all accounts Sotomayor has a “normal” home life unmarred by allegations of sexual harassment. And, unlike Estrada, Sotomayor isn’t a rabid partisan.
The WaPost, however, forgot that Saturday is Colby King day, and former Post weekend editor in chief shreds the shameful Thomas myth/record.
More in line with their role as the defenders of the Village establishment, the WaPost is also running a phony poll that lets you declare either your objectivity or your slavish devotion to diversity. The only correct answer is “Other” and a nasty note in the comments.
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Bob Herbert on what real hell looks like.
Africans suffer because of our indifference. European colonialists destroyed the Garden of Eden and the resource-hungry First World has never found it convenient to put paradise back together again.
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Overparenting on the down swing? I’m not surprised. Obsessive-compulsive parenting is a byproduct of too much economic comfort. The market and real estate crash reordered priorities and for that children should be grateful.
In my nonparental mind children are to be herded, not raised.
They taste better that way.
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Now they’re saying the black police officer did have his gun out. Both officers were in plain clothes, there is no evidence the black officer tried to shoot the white officer but circumstances and race led to conclusions being instantly drawn.
I really don’t give a shit how good a cop the white dude was, racist assumptions killed Officer Omar J. Edwards. Our police need to be retrained and we need more cops, especially cops of color. Making people who carry guns work long hours makes no sense at all. Let’s treat cops better, and then expect more from them.
Our urban cops are trained by police culture and on-the-job exposure to poverty-based crime to shoot nonwhites. We have to untrain them and get them back to the business of solving crimes. Crimes not being solved? We need more cops, more law enforcement training, and better outreach to our communities. All this white cops shooting nonwhites undermines police authority and that leads to more cops shooting more people.
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The crookedest most racist sheriff in America says a federal probe is just political.
When they indict Sheriff Joe Arpaio I hope they make him stand trial while wearing a pink prisoner’s uniform.
Golden Rule justice is the best justice.
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Phil Spector, 19 years to life.
He deserves to die in prison even though he was only convicted because he was a drug-crazed Hollywood liberal. Most millionaires just pay someone to do their killing for them and it ends there thanks to a justice system that’s singularly incurious about the misdeeds of the rich and powerful.
Oh, and Michael Jackson’s latest come back is under way.
