Category: Politics

This morning, I came across this petition asking demanding that the White House release key documents on Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. I signed the petition (in part because it’s a kind of neat interface with the map and all) and I agree that the White House ought to be more forthcoming with information on Roberts. To give this guy a fair hearing, we need to find out who he is.

But c’mon, people. Roberts is about as good as we’re going to do.

I don’t think there’s any question that Roberts is indeed a conservative. But as far as he’s been portrayed so far in the media, he does not seem to be an ideologue in the stripe of someone like Thomas or Scalia. And with W. et al, it could have been a lot worse. A LOT. I saw an article in the paper the weekend before Roberts nominated about a movement to convince Bush to nominate Roy Moore, who was the Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice who was impeached/fired because of this whole Ten Commandments deal.

Okay, maybe nominating a nutjob like this guy was never going to happen. But still, considering the possibilities of who Bush could have named, I think liberal-types got off relatively easy. I don’t know if Bush actually “won” the election (Harper’s this month has an interesting article that still raises questions about 2004 and Ohio), but I do know that Kerry didn’t and I also know the dems lost seats in the Senate. The only thing the left can do about the Supreme Court (and everything else, for that matter) is to fight harder and try to turn the tide.

As I typed that, I am listening to an NPR “Morning Edition” story about how Army recruiting is way down. It’s stories like this (and Bush’s approval rating and Rove’s criminal activities and a whole bunch of other things) that give me hope for 06.

I stumbled across this weird letter sent out from the College Republican Headquarters before the 2004 nomination to W., apparently to fellow “loyal” and “prayerful” party members. The site where I originally found this describes the letter as “hypnotic;” to me, it seems more like a really strange chain letter.

Check out the Cost of War web site, which includes a rolling counter for the cost of the war in Iraq and points of comparison. As an example: according to the web site, for the amount of money we have spent so far in Iraq, the U.S. could have hired an additional 3,217,823 teachers.

It’s part of the National Priorities Project. And you’ll note the handy counter I’ve added to my sidebar, too.

There have been numerous NUMEROUS reports about Karl Rove’s lying and leaking ways on the web– Wonkette, Daily KOS, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, you name it. I’m not going to bother to link to these things because if you throw a brick at the blogosphere, you’ll hit a Rove critique. Or, if you are in a right wing mood, apologies.
But last night’s The Daily Show talk about all this was the best I’ve seen so far (be warned– this is a big QuickTime file). What I like most about this piece is that Stewart et al reminds us that this whole deal with Rove ratting out the CIA agent (and lying about it) really dates back to the beginning of the Iraq war when Bush claimed in his State of the Union address that we needed to take action because Iraq was trying to get the raw materials for making nuclear weapons (BTW, that turned out to be a lie, too).

Anyway, check it out, or watch the repeat of The Daily Show when you get a chance.

This is a sort of “two-fer” deal in terms of posts:

• The House of Representatives voted for an amendment to ban flag burning. Two thoughts:

• Isn’t it interesting, during a news cycle where we are learning that Bush’s war in Iraq is going quite badly and where poll numbers indicate that most Americans now thing this is a bad idea, that the Republicans try a diversion like the whole flag burning thing?
• My favorite commentary on flag burning came years and years ago from Miss Manners. This had to be at least 15 years ago when I was living in Richmond and regularly reading The Washington Post. Miss Manners pointed out that the issue with burning the flag has nothing to do with it being legal or not. It’s just rude, and, as Miss Manners pointed out, sometimes people do all sorts of things that are rude just to make a point.

Here’s an interesting list: “The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” put out by the obviously conservative group called “Human Events.” Pretty funny list. The “usual suspects” are there– The Communist Manifesto is number one, The Kinsey Report is number four, and The Feminine Mystique is number seven. The commies, sex, and them “damn feminists,” that seems consistent with the right.

But then there are some surprises. There’s Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which I suppose they put on there because Hitler is everyone’s number one “bad guy” of the twentieth century. But considering the fact that Pat Buchanan recently said that the U.S. and Great Britain should have been with Germany during World War II to fight the commies, I’m sure there are a few conservatives saying “hey, hey, wait a minute: lay off the Nazi.”

And then, oddly at number five, there’s John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, which I suppose is on the list because of the word “Democracy” is too close to “Democrat.” And then there’s a bunch of philosophers on the list that are pretty much “common reading” in graduate programs in this country: Nietzsche, Foucault, Adorno, Gramsci, etc.

Update:
Via Maud Newton’s blog, I came across this article, “Better read than dead,” which was published in the Toronto newspaper, Eye Weekly. Here’s my favorite paragraph:

Likewise, the harmful nature of many books on Human Events’ shit list — selected by a “panel of 15 conservative scholars” — can’t really be quantified in the loss of human life or destruction of property; rather, the selected books have been deemed most harmful because they dared to question the individual’s God-given right to accumulate maximum wealth despite the social consequences and to go home and be cared for by a dutifully subservient wife. (However, none of the books is so harmful as to escape the grasp of capitalism; the list comes complete with purchase links to Amazon.com.)