“We Close at 5″

This has to be one of the most disturbing things I have read in awhile.

Deep Thought

If only Henry Louis Gates had a gun…

Sotomayor

At long last, the hearings are finally upon us.  I have to confess that I’m following them mostly by reading headlines, but the attention-grabbing news from yesterday was Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham’s statement to the would-be Associate Supreme Court Justice, delivered in his typically folksy manner:

“Unless you have a complete meltdown, you are going to be confirmed”

He then proceeded to rip her a new one. The media has largely been going along with this spectacle… treating the hearings with high drama, yet acknowledging in a wink-wink sort of fashion that her nomination is a fait accompli, sort of as if everybody is playing their expected roles — i.e., the Republicans are being unnecessarily antagonistic, confrontational, and offensive in their lines of argument and questioning, but they are just catering to their base and she’s going to be confirmed, so what does it matter?

However, unless I’m missing out on something, I believe that for Sotomayor’s nomination to advance for a full Senate vote, she needs to be approved out of the Judiciary Committee by at least one Republican.  And with a line-up including a former prosecutor who failed to win confirmation to a federal judgeship on account of charges of alleged racism (Ranking Member Jeff Sessions), one far-right crazy guy (Coburn), three reflexive Republicans that are part of the GOP leadership (Senators Kyl and Cornyn), it’s hard to see where that one Republican vote comes from.  We’re left with Senator Grassley, who based on his opening statement is in the same corner as Kyl and Cornyn, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, and Graham. My best guess is that the best chance for a yes-vote comes from Hatch, but none of these Republicans were very gracious towards the nominee yesterday.  What do you all think?

Sensitive

One of my pet peeves about the liberal blogging community, which is no different from the conservative or any other blogging community, is the whole circle-the-wagons, follow-the-herd mentality that often comes into play, the latest example being the outrage (OUTRAGE!) being directed at David Broder for having the temerity to take an unfair swipe and soon-to-be-sworn-in Minnesota Senator Al Franken. 

Now I’m no fan of Broder, and I like Franken, but these are Broder’s offending words in his latest column that has Krugman outraged, which means that other liberal bloggers follow suit shortly thereafter.

[Al] Franken, the loud-mouthed former comedian, will be the 60th member of the Senate Democratic caucus — just enough for them to cut off any filibuster threat if they can muster all their members.

That’s right, Broder has the temerity to suggest that Franken was a former loudmouth comedian, which of course he was.  And he was quite good at it, too.

Palin

Ikes.  I am one to normally shy away from witnessing things that cause discomfit.  For example, couldn’t watch the Palin-Couric interview, the Sanford press conference, etc., but I had to tune into the Palin resignation press conference, and I’m sure I share the sentiment of all when I say my reaction was… “Wow.”

The pundits are predictably finding analytical nuggets from her speech that leave me scratching my head. The weirdest of all is the idea that her critics finally forced her from the stage. Nobody I know, who wasn’t a fan of hers, wanted to “force her from the stage,” indeed, they and I were hoping that she is the candidate.  From Reagan, Gingrich, to Bush 43, she is the natural result of Republicanism’s evolutionary arc over the last 30-something years.

In any case, the whole discussion is moot anyways, since I’m sure that we’ll still have Palin to kick around plenty more in the future.

Happy Independence Day!

“I’m a Runner” - Sarah Palin edition

This time it’s actually an interview from Runner’s World. Andrew Sullivan seems to think there’s a lie somewhere in her account of a fall while running on the McCain ranch. I don’t really see what he thinks the issue is there. I do think it’s interesting to note that she blames the McCain staff for not letting her run enough:

Palin: A great frustration I had during the campaign was when the McCain staff wouldn’t carve out time for me to go for a run. The days never went as well if I couldn’t get out there and sweat.

Q: Did you raise that issue, and put the ultimatum down that you needed to run?

Palin: Absolutely, and they would say, “Yes, in a couple of days we’re going to start carving out that half-hour or hour to run,” and too often it never happened, and that was frustrating.

The infighting continues.

Palin Exposé

This Vanity Fair write-up on the surreal political phenomenon that is Sarah Palin is fascinating.  Gives a bit of insight into many of the enigmatic political events of the past 9 months.  Plus, any chance there was for you to take Obama for granted in the foreseeable future will be eliminated.

Senator Franken?

Could it be? The StarTribune is reporting that Coleman won’t appeal the Minnesota Supreme Court ruling in favor of Franken, which apparently sets the stage, 7 months after the fact…

UPDATE: Coleman concedes… Senator Franken!!

BREAKING!!

Halperin breathlessly reports:

 ”Rush Limbaugh warns of a third Obama term in 2016. ESSENTIAL READING: Find out what the talkmeister said here.”

I know, I know, I have an unhealthy visceral dislike of the man, but in my book that little weenie is the posterboy for everything that is wrong about the media and how it reports on politics.

When Interns* Write Op-eds

You get crap (yes, even by typical National Review standards) written by folks like Eli Lehrer offering up gem after gem in a piece entitled “Why the Madoff Sentence is Too Long.” Starting off with the premise that “Bernard Madoff is an evil con man,” Lehrer naturally postulates:

• He harmed people through the bloodless act of stealing their money.
• So long as he doesn’t start an investment firm — something that’s not going to happen — he’s no threat to society.
• His life expectancy is 13 years and the rigors of prison life — particularly for a man used to living at the height of luxury — hardly seem likely to extend that. [The rules are presumably different for men and women not used to living at the height of luxury…]
• He had strong ties to his community, a previously clean criminal record, and an apparently strong family life.

Ergo… “something close to 12-year sentence his defense attorney recommended is pretty reasonable.” Thankfully, the judge deciding the matter disagreed and gave him 150 years.  Madoff is still likely to spend his remaining years in something closer to a minimum security facility, whereas I think he should spend some time with the rest of the law-breaking riff-raff. That white, er, i mean white-collar criminals get such disparate treatment compared to petty drug thieves and burglars sounds to me quite discriminatory, but something tells me that John Roberts would disagree with me.

*or interns masquerading as Senior Fellows at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Ok, ok, I’ll write a post about Michael Jackson

When I was a kid, like everyone else, I was a fan. Not a huge fan, but enough of a fan that I ought to apologize to my mom for insisting that we listen to “Thriller” so many times while driving in our car that any normal adult would have gone mad. My friend Bill somehow got a tape of the video and we loaded it into his parents’ huge, clunky VCR and played it over and over again.

At some point the weirdness took over and I wasn’t able to hear “Thriller” or “Beat It” or “The Girl is Mine” without being soured by the bizarre details of this guy’s life. By singing along to “Billie Jean” was I tacitly approving of a man who had sleepovers with young boys and dangled toddlers off balconies? It’s been years since I could really enjoy the music. Maybe this is why you don’t hear much Michael Jackson on the typical 1980s nostalgia radio stations.

Anyway, since Thursday, the joy is back. I’ve watched a few of the old videos on YouTube, and it’s fun to experience them for themselves again. It’s the way people must feel when an Alzheimer’s sufferer dies and relatives can finally revert to the memories of that person as she was in her prime. And by thinking of Jackson in that way again, I feel a little closer to my childhood than I did a week ago.

The Real Surprise at the Court today

The Court’s most unexpected move was to order the September reargument of the Citizens United v. FEC case. The justices invite lawyers to address the issue of whether the Court ought to overrule its very recent ruling (McConnell v. FEC) that upheld the “electioneering communication” provisions of the McCain-Feingold act, as well as a 1990 ruling pertaining to corporate independent expenditures.

The “electioneering communication” issue is a very important free speech matter, and it looks like the Court (in contrast to its recent Voting Rights Act decision) may be preparing to address it directly. The case at hand has to do with the airing of an anti-Hillary Clinton movie in the time around an election. McCain-Feingold says electoral ads are banned around election time unless they’re funded by the proper sources (that is, money raised via regulated and reported procedures and channels).

The cop-out way to decide this case might be to define “Hillary the Movie” out of the regulated category: It’s not an ad, it’s a “documentary”, so it doesn’t fall under the McCain-Feingold rules. (This is a stretch, but it was also a stretch to avoid the constitutional issue in the VRA case.)  But at least some of the justices must want to consider the uncomfortable move of overruling a very recent (2003) precedent, or they wouldn’t have ordered the reargument.

Shocker

“Court rules for white firefighters over promotions.” Of course it did, and by the predictable 5-4 margin. And nothing will change when Sotomayor takes over for Souter in the fall, although we can expect to hear much about this case between now and then.

Clown

Meet the Press’s David Gregory, interviewing White House advisor David Axelrod — Mark Sanford, “coordinated” press conference question on Iran, Michael Jackson… simply unwatchable.

UPDATE: Also unwatchable, Mitt Romney, being interviewed by Gregory, hitting all his talking points.

Farrah Fawcett, 1947-2009

Farrah Fawcett has died. If you are of a certain age, as I am, you’ll always remember this poster, which is one for the ages.  RIP.

“I’m a Runner” — Mark Sanford Edition

The whole situation is pretty sad. But leave it to Politico to relay speculation that his reclusive lone-wolf ways are related to his being a “long distance marathon runner.” Just like ROD BLAGOJEVICH!

Hmm.

BREAKING: Reaction to Obama’s Iran Comments

Scoop-meister Mark Halperin — informing us as always on the critical angles of the most important issues of the day — reports to us, apparently from turning on the tube this morning, that former Massachussetts governor and failed unsuccessful presidential primary candidate Mitt Romney approves of Obama’s most recent response on Iran.

The brave people of Iran, and indeed the world, can breathe a little easier now.

New Nixon tapes released!

From the LA Times:

Nixon’s voice in the tapes is often a mumble with an occasional burst of profanity breaking through.

Context on Sanford

Governing magazine had a good article last year on the South Carolina governorship, which is perhaps the weakest in the country. It’s weak because the 1895 constitution was largely written by segregationist “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman:

The primary goal of that constitution was to guarantee that nobody but a white man would ever be elected governor. But the authors, in the throes of racial paranoia, went further. They divided executive power in a whole series of complex ways just to make sure that, if there ever was a black governor, he couldn’t do anything. That’s why South Carolina has nine separately elected constitutional officers, and why boards and commissions, not the governor, cast the decisive votes when it comes to running the executive agencies.

So maybe Sanford’s absence didn’t have much impact on the state’s operations after all.

More Sanford

Re: the curious tale of Mark Sanford, like Dillon, I suspect that we haven’t quite scratched the surface of what the South Carolina governor has actually been doing these last few days, and by that, I mean he was doing something a little more embarrassing than hiking in his birthday suit. Somebody perceptive out there, I can’t remember where, wrote that there is something just a little bit off about a Republican, family-values loving politician skipping out on his kids without telling them where he is going… over FATHER’S DAY, of all days. Oh, the humanity — the guy was AWOL on Father’s Day!

UPDATE: From a TPM reader, maybe Sanford deserves some credit…

I’ve been thinking about it, and I believe Sanford may be the first politician to use the “I’m leaving to spend some time AWAY FROM my family” excuse. Most of them go with the far less credible with-the-family thing. So give the man his due, please, for he is a pioneer.

Blood on Their Hand$?

One of the more disheartening stories I’ve read in awhile was an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “Iran’s Web Spying Aided by Western Technology,” which documents how a joint venture of mega-corporations Siemens and Nokia has helped the Ahmadinejad-Khamanei regime control, monitor, and censor electronic-based communications (i.e., internet, text-messaging, etc), all in search of the all-mighty dollar euro.

Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections. Instead, in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.

I’m not a fan of Congress’s tendencies (especially among our friends on the other side of the aisle) towards impulsive and jingoistic nationalism when it comes to issues of national security and foreign policy (e.g., “Freedom Fries“), but I hope in this case that Republicans and Democrats can come together on an appropriate punitive response — hearings and investigations of these allegations and, depending on their findings, an appropriate sanction such as the barring of any federal contracts with Siemens or Nokia, or perhaps something even more grave.  Grave, that is, in a financial sense, since these are the only terms that these firms seem to understand.

We see something analagous going on in Beijing, which recently mandated that any PCs sold in China be equipped by internet monitoring devices.  And no doubt, many western firms, including US firms, have played a crucial role in helping the Beijing government construct perhaps the most elaborate and effective communications monitoring capability outside of Fort Meade. If and when there is unrest in China, you can be sure these capabilities will be deployed to their maximum effect. And these companies must be sent a message that if and when that happens, they will pay a price, both to their bottom line and to their reputation. Companies like to talk a lot about corporate social responsibility these day, mostly about their impact on the environment, but I would like to see this seedier side of business conduct added to the CSR equation.

UPDATE: For the record, Nokia Siemens is saying that it provided “lawful intercept capability” to the Iranian government, raising the question of lawful according to…. Iranian law? They are actually clarifying that they did not provide the highly-intrusive deep packet inspection capability.  Whatever the case, all the more reason for a “deep packet inspection”-quality investigation of Nokia Siemens’ activities in Iran, the extent to which it aided and abetted the authorities, as well as the larger conversation of the ethics of setting up sophisticated IT networks for authoritarian regimes.  And for the record, I don’t presume to know the answer to this last question.

There’s no politics like state politics

The New York Times has a pretty decent roundup of state budget crisis news, as most states careen towards the July 1 start of the next fiscal year. Meanwhile, in light of the California mess, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has evidently done the wise thing and declined to run for governor. The State Senate in New York appears no closer to resolving a power struggle, even as Governor Patterson calls them into special session. And in a bizarre move, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who was recently thwarted in a bid to reject federal stimulus funds, disappeared for four days. It’s unclear who, if anyone, was running the state while Sanford was missing.

It’s to be expected that in a situation of great fiscal stress, problems and tensions that are glossed over in the fat years would break out into the open. On the other hand, perhaps it’s time for a systematic and non-partisan nationwide evaluation of state government performance, along the lines of the study of state legislatures undertaken by the Citizens Conference on State Legislatures in the early 1970s.

Iran (cont.)

More analysis by Chatham House showing significant anomalies in Iranian election results.

I think that the evidence is pretty clear, even though no academic or government official seems willing to say definitively that the election was rigged.

At this point it all seems to be moot.  (more…)

Latest from Mebane on the Iran election

Expert vote fraud analyst Walter Mebane of the University of Michigan now has data that “give moderately strong support for a diagnosis that the 2009 election was affected by significant fraud.” (PDF, see p. 9.)