Fact-esque

Post-Partisanship Blues Part #619: Clues to Obama Admin's Continued Cluelessness

There continuie to be disturbing signs that on a lot of different levels President Obama and his people just don't get what they're dealing with. Despite the refusal of the GOP to negotiate over the stimulus bill, their incessant attacks on him personally, and their lock-step voting anti-everthing he does, the NYT reports today that he's considering appointing a "moderate" conservative to the federal bench because said conservative is acceptable to the GOP. (via Norwegianity)

A senior administration official said Judge Hamilton would have the support of both Mr. Bayh, a Democrat, and the state’s other senator, Richard G. Lugar, a Republican. He will be nominated for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, based in Chicago.

That's bad enough if understandable. Lugar might conceivably be a wedge into Republican flanks, what with his history of yo-yo transformations from hypocrite to sanity to fringe whacko and back again, and be worth cultivating on that score. But that's not why they said they did it.

The administration official said part of the reason for making the Hamilton nomination the administration’s first public entry into the often contentious field of judicial selection was to serve “as a kind of signal” about the kind of nominees Mr. Obama will select. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the nomination had not been officially made.

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The administration official said the White House was hoping to reduce the partisan contentiousness of judicial confirmation battles of recent years.

“We would like to put the history of the confirmation wars behind us,” the official said.

This is either the most striking example of naivete from this Admin yet or a frightening symbol of just how determinedly blind these guys are.

SCOTUS Prepares Establishment Clause for Populist Rejection

When I'm wrong, I admit it.

When I wrote about the Pleasant Grove v Summun case last week, I was incensed as well as flabbergasted that the vote was unanimous and that not a single Justice seemed to question the deeper issues.

I was wrong.

Frederick Clarkson at Talk to Action went more deeply into it than I had time to do and discovered that indeed one Justice had expressed misgivings.

Justice David Souter was the only one to worry about the religious establishment implications of Pleasant Grove City: "But the government could well argue, as a development of government speech doctrine, that when it expresses its own views, it is free of the Establishment Clause's stricture against discriminating among religious sects or groups. Under this view of the relationship between the two doctrines, it would be easy for a government to favor some private religious speakers over others by its choice of monuments to accept."

No shit, Sherlock.

SCOTUS Backs Worker But Why Did It Have To?

In yet another surprisingly sane decision in favor of workers, the Supreme Court reversed the finding of the Sixth District Appeals Court that removed retaliation protection from a worker who co-operated with an official internal investigation.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled yesterday that a federal anti-discrimination law protects employees from retaliation when they cooperate with internal investigations of harassment.

The court sided with Vicky S. Crawford, who said she was fired from her longtime job in charge of payroll for the Nashville school system after she answered questions in an ongoing investigation into what the court termed the "louche goings-on" involving a supervisor.

Crawford said the boss, Metro School District employee relations director Gene Hughes, had put his crotch against her office window and once pulled her head toward his groin.

The school district's investigation did not recommend disciplinary actions against Hughes, but Crawford and two others who testified against him were later fired over unrelated matters.

Doesn't make much sense, does it? No action taken against the harrasser but witnesses who aided the investigation were fired and the 6th District saw no problem with that? David Souter found himself lecturing the 6th District as if he was explaining to aborigines that 2+2 doesn't, never has and never will = 5.

WaPo Notices Biased Judges 5 Yrs After Everyone Else; Obama's Opportunity

For years a major charge against Bush has been his packing of the Federal courts with conservative GOP flunkies and ideological robots. Liberal blogs were covering this long before newspapers thought there was anything the least bit hinky about Bush's picks despite their records of racism, political hackery, and statements by nearly all of them that the Constitution was, you know, just a piece of paper. An odd stance for a Federal judicial nominee whose job it will be to interpret that "piece of paper" you might think, but few newspaper editors thought that issue was worth covering. During Bush's whole first term, about the only good thing the Dems did was keep Bush from packing the benches with the worst of his neocon hacks, a valiant and fairly successful effort that was all but ignored by the nation's media.

Well, now that it's way too late to matter the Washington Post has finally looked around and noticed that, gee, there are a lot of Bush appointees on our Federal courts who ignore the law and replace it with Republican dogma just to embarrass Democrats. Jeffrey Smith writes that GOP judges seem to go out of their way to reverse  decisions made by Democratic judges on appellate courts.

Don't Miss This

Watch this slideshow from Obama's last 2008 campaign rally in Virginia.   The photos were taken by Nida Vidutis, who deserves some kind of award, and posted on Flickr.  Warning: you're gonna cry :)  (via April Winchell and Ezra)

Undecided

Brad Friedman says that Prop Hate is too close to call.   Brad is also offering to help Al Franken out with the coming recount, willing to forget that Al Franken didn't want to pay attention to election integrity issues when he had a show on Air America.   The good news: results of the race will mostly be able to be recounted by hand because of the use of paper ballots.   That could not happen in Pennsylvania.

Marry Who You Want, Babe

Today is "Write to Marry Day", viz:

Bloggers around the country will participate in "Write to Marry Day" on October 29, 2008, posting on their blogs in support of marriage equality for same-sex couples and against California's Proposition 8. Prop 8 is a measure on California's November ballot that would take away the right of same-sex couples to marry.

***

"Prop 8 is an unfair and unnecessary measure that would eliminate equal protections for same-sex couples and write discrimination into the California state Constitution," adds co-organizer Dana Rudolph, founder of LGBT-parenting blog Mombian. "As marriage equality spreads throughout the country, people in all states have a vested interest in making sure this hard-won right is protected."

Basically what happened is the usual right-wing folderol. The California Constitution was finally interpreted correctly by the State Supreme Court and gay marriage became legal. It's pretty much the same thing that happened in Massachusetts last year and the response was equally typical: the Religious Right - Jimmy Dobson, the Devil's Friend, and his bag of nuts in Focus on the Family are right in the middle of it no doubt - got a proposition on the California ballot demanding that the California Constitution and the rights of a group of people they don't care for be violated in order to make the country safe for bigots and haters.

Let just get this straight (no pun intended) once and for all: gay marriage does not and cannot and will not endanger hetero marriage in any way shape or form. The whole argument against it is bogus from beginning to end.

Brother, Can You Spare a Detonator?

An article in The Root (via Avedon) seems to satirize the question I have been trying to deal with for a week (and having all sorts of Typepad-related problems, along with others) but then winds up taking it seriously, which I think it should.

"Would black people riot if Sen. Barack Obama didn't win the election?" That was the question a white man in Memphis recently asked a racial reconciliation group with which I am involved.

After five years of being a columnist for the daily paper in Memphis, I wasn't surprised by the absurdity of his query. Many whites still labor under the illusion that black folk act en masse and that if you ask the right one, you can get the official position of some 40 million people. If a few of us get angry, that logic allows, it must surely result in a riot.

Riot because we didn't get our way? Please. Black people have more than their share of experience with disappointment and dashed dreams. (See: King, Martin Luther; Evers, Medgar; Chaney, James.) Matter of fact, I'd go so far as to say we're experts in making the best out of a losing hand.

The reply to the curious white gentleman: "No! There is no reason to believe black people will riot if Obama does not win."

Actually, there are. Two of them.

"We Are the Organization that Challenges the Administration 365 Days a Year, to be Fair and Just"

Bush Keeps Gitmo Open...Because It Might Embarrass Him to Close It

I kid you not.

A story by Steven Lee Myers in today's NYT signals a turnaround (we hope) in the NYT's 8-year "Cheerleaders for Bush" Phase because he doesn't even begin to pull punches, spin the truth so it sounds better for Bush, or ignore the implications. The fire is in the very first graf.

Despite his stated desire to close the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.

Is that a departure from the usual semi-quasi-propaganda the NYT has been dishing out under Nagourney and the like, or what? Myers avoids actually calling Bush a liar by simply connecting the dots made by facts (something the blogs have had to do since the day the would-be Emperor was selected because the press was too afraid to): he said he was going to close Gitmo and then didn't. What is that if it wasn't a lie? Confirmation: he didn't even bother to look at the plans the Pentagon drew up for the demobbing.

This is the sort of stuff that, until recently, you had to go to the foreign press to get. All of a sudden the NYT, which granted was never the war and Bush booster the WaPo has been, allowed somebody to lay out the facts without manipulating them or whitewashing Bush and His Gas House White House Gang. I was beginning to think I wouldn't live to see one of our last remaining major papers turn back to genuine journalism. It was a very pleasant surprise to be wrong - assuming, of course, that this isn't a one-off that slipped by the publisher's blue pencil.

I'd like to see a lot more 'cause it gets better.