May 2009 Archives

The zit known as California is coming to head.

The state could save billions, and raise billions more, if it ended its participation in the war on drugs. That wouldn’t solve all the state’s problems, but it’d be a good start.

If you have to use a firearm in self-defense, quit shooting when the danger is over. We shoot to stop an attack; we don’t shoot to punish.

Head fake or delirium?

… some abortion rights advocates are quietly expressing unease that Judge Sotomayor may not be a reliable vote to uphold Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 abortion rights decision.

If Sotomayor isn’t a reliable vote to uphold Roe, then Obama is as incompetent as his press secretary says he is:

…in his briefing to reporters on Tuesday, the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, was asked whether Mr. Obama had asked Judge Sotomayor about abortion or privacy rights. Mr. Gibbs replied that Mr. Obama “did not ask that specifically.”

So what did he ask non-specifically?

I wonder. Obama can’t just click his heels and make it go away. Repeal would require an act of Congress.

You do know we’re not going back to the status quo ante, right?

Fresh meat:

Some on the right outlined new strategies adapted to the nominee and the moment. Several said they planned to focus on same-sex marriage. “Gay marriage will be bigger than abortion,” said Curt Levey, executive director of the conservative legal group Committee for Justice. “People know that abortion is in some sense a stale issue that has been fought over many times, but gay marriage is very much up for grabs.”

Barring a surprise, this is spot on:

Sotomayor is going to be confirmed. There is little doubt about it. So, going into weeks or months of paroxysms and hysterics about alleged “judicial activism” is just going to make the [GOP] look bitter, mean, tone deaf, and out of touch.

Wiser than white men: Judge Sonia Sotomayor

We don’t have the votes to stop her, or a reason to stop her. True, she doesn’t share our judicial philosophy, but she doesn’t have to. Elections have consequences, and this is one of them.

During the Bush years, we insisted that the Senate give each of the president’s judicial appointments an “up-or-down” vote. How do we go back on that now?

Besides, her appointment won’t change the balance of power on the court, and her personality might rub Tony the wrong way. Use her confirmation hearings as a “teaching moment,” ask tough but fair questions, and then let her slide.

Ralph Peters says we should quit taking prisoners.

Well of course people get to vote on your rights. Where do you think your rights come from?

Or, to put it another way, how do you know when something is a right? Because you say so?

“The California Supreme Court today upheld Proposition 8’s ban on same-sex marriage but also ruled that gay couples who wed before the election will continue to be married under state law.” (LA Times)

The court’s opinion, in pdf, is here.

Tom Goldstein, a Supreme Court litigator, assures us that Sotomayor’s “opinions are thorough, well-reasoned, and clearly written.”

A Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee should ask what, if anything, Judge Sotomayor finds objectionable about this statement:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion as a judge than a black male who hasn’t lived that life.

No, you’re not “really tough to pigeonhole” if you’re “a solid vote for the Supreme Court’s liberal wing.”

True, Neo is still jive talking (even the Left thinks so.) But in deed, he’s vindicating Dubya:

The genius of democracy is that the rotation of power forces the opposition to come to its senses when it takes over. When the new guys, brought to power by popular will, then adopt the policies of the old guys, a national consensus is forged and a new legitimacy established.

That’s happening before our eyes.

House Democrats have blocked an investigation into Nancy Pelosi’s claim that the CIA lied to her about waterboarding. Why, I wonder …

Former Army sergeant Brian Hughes calls for an end to “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Most of what he says isn’t new, but this nugget, if accurate, is surprising:

The truth is that public opinion has moved dramatically on this issue. Public support for repeal consistently polls above 75% — well above Mr. Obama’s approval ratings. The fact that support is above 90% for men and women aged 18-29 should put to rest any worries that repeal could interfere with recruitment.

Even when interpreted in the “modern context,” the Constitution doesn’t have an answer for every question:

White House adviser David Axelrod said the U.S. Constitution, like any document of its vintage, must be subject to interpretation in a modern context.

“Fidelity to the Constitution is paramount, but as with any document that was written no matter how brilliantly centuries ago, it couldn’t possibly have anticipated all the questions that would be asked in the 21st century,” Mr. Axelrod said.

Our Constitution was ratified in 1787; of course it didn’t anticipate all the questions we’d ask in the 21st Century. But it didn’t have to. If you have a question the Constitution doesn’t answer, it tells you where to get the answer.

Nail, meet head: “They clearly want more in services than they’re willing to pay for in taxes.”

• The Obama Administration will not ask the Supreme Court to review a decision that undercuts the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law. Instead, the administration will defend the law when the case goes to trial.

• Democrats in Congress have decided to deny Obama the $80 million he asked for to close the military prison at Guantanamo.

• The GOP is now only slightly less popular than urinary catheters.

BONUS ITEM:

[Obama’s] changes to Bush practices thus far — cutting back on secret detentions, probable new restrictions on interrogation, and relatively small procedural changes to military commissions — will leave some suspected terrorists in a better place than they would have been under the Bush regime (although Obama’s increase in targeted killings will likely result in more deaths and injuries, without due process, to terror suspects and innocent civilians). [Emphasis added. — Ed.]

Obama’s disastrous economic policies are likely to cause a worldwide depression and force the government to default on its debt. But in other ways, he’s not a bad president:

The Obama administration is expanding a program initiated by President George W. Bush aimed at checking the immigration status of virtually every person booked into local jails. In four years, the measure could result in a tenfold increase in illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and identified for deportation, current and former U.S. officials said.

Thanks to the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress, you’ll soon pick up the tab for people with bad credit:

… Congress is moving to limit the penalties on riskier borrowers, who have become a prime source of billions of dollars in fee revenue for the industry. And to make up for lost income, the card companies are going after those people with sterling credit.

Matt Yglesias thinks conservatives have set themselves up for a fall:

… I argue that even though the right’s effort to change the subject on torture away from “what did the Bush administration do?”, to “what was Nancy Pelosi briefed about?” has been an incredible tactical success, it stands a huge chance of backfiring …

And why is that, Matt?

Obama wanted to avoid a backward-looking focus on torture in part because it distracted from his legislative agenda. But if we’re going to be looking backward anyway, thanks to conservatives’ insistence on complaining about Pelosi, then the move forward strategy lacks a rationale. And far from forcing a standoff in which Pelosi will abandon her support for an investigation, the right has forced her into a corner from which she can’t give in to moderate Democrats’ opposition to such a move without looking like she’s cravenly attempting to save her own skin.

That’s a good argument, except for one flaw: Pelosi is cravenly attempting to save her own skin. Judias Priest, dude, have you watched the woman?

If there’s an investigation, Pelosi goes down. And she ain’t going down, at least not if she can help it. So we conservatives don’t want an investigation, and neither does Pelosi. Since our interests and hers converge, we’ll keep shouting “dog!” and she’ll keep barking. This backfires only if Obama decides that he wants to see Pelosi in the dock. And that, as the president likes to say, would be a “distraction.”

This is a serious matter. So after you get a chuckle from it, you Republicans really should wipe that shitty grin off your faces:

CIA Director Leon Panetta challenged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accusations that the agency lied to her, writing a memo to his agents saying she received nothing but the truth.

Today, Nancy Pelosi made a mistake. She threw down to the CIA.

When you have a closet full of bones, you don’t throw down to the CIA. Because that agency will inventory your mess, and then send the list over to the Washington Post:

Pelosi’s performance in the Capitol was either a calculated escalation of a long-running feud with the Bush administration or a reckless act by a politician whose word had been called into question. Perhaps it was both.

For the first time, Pelosi (D-Calif.) acknowledged that in 2003 she was informed by an aide that the CIA had told others in Congress that officials had used waterboarding during interrogations. But she insisted, contrary to CIA accounts, that she was not told about waterboarding during a September 2002 briefing by agency officials. Asked whether she was accusing the CIA of lying, she replied, “Yes, misleading the Congress of the United States.”

In other words, she has now dared the CIA to prove that she’s lying. Bet on the agency to take the dare.

And they’re not being paranoid, either:

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said he finds it “interesting” that a document detailing congressional briefings was released just as “some of the groups that have been responsible for these interrogation techniques were taking the most criticism.”

Yeah, well, some of us found it “interesting” when the agency released documents at just the right time to inflict maximum damage on the Bush Administration.

Before you talk about prosecuting officials at the Central Intelligence Agency, you need to first make sure that you have no boogers in your own nose. Because even if our spies can’t find Saddam’s WMDs, they can find you, and they’re not going down alone.

Thomas Sowell: “The left has long confused physical parallels with moral parallels. But when a criminal shoots at a policeman and the policeman shoots back, physical equivalence is not moral equivalence. And what American intelligence agents have done to captured terrorists is not even physical equivalence.”

Victor Davis Hanson: “In short, while pundits still believe Cheney is a marginalized figure and an easy target of scorn, in fact, his methodical defense of the past is both logical and principled, and is beginning to illustrate, in quite painful fashion, the utter hypocrisy of the entire Democratic position on enhanced interrogations techniques and Guantánamo Bay. The American people more likely agree with Cheney than not; and even if they did not, they still prefer a candid and honest opponent to a disingenuous and self-serving ally.”

Mary, Mary:

Slowly but surely, Obama is owning the cover-up of his predcessors’ war crimes. But covering up war crimes, refusing to proscute them, promoting those associated with them, and suppressing evidence of them are themselves violations of Geneva and the UN Convention.

Well, if it’s a crime for a lawyer to give legal advice with which a layman disagrees, then I suppose it’s also a crime for a president to appeal a court order …

CNN: “A source close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now confirms that Pelosi was told in February 2003 by her intelligence aide, Michael Sheehy, that waterboarding was actually used on CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah.”

David Frum: “The powers that the Obama administration claimed in order to arrest the financial crisis and mitigate the recession are being used and abused in ways that are underming the legal and financial stability of the United States. Investors: You are warned.”

Confirmation of the obvious.

Andy’s still open to prosecutions, but Andy ain’t running anything.

We’re about ready to wrap this up, yes?

Having uncapped his pen before he engaged his brain, President Obama finds himself not knowing what to with the detainees at Guantanamo. Nobody wants them. (Well, the Chinese want some of them, but not for tender ministrations.)

So here’s my suggestion to the president: Send the Gitmo detainees to Safford, Arizona. When looking for nothing more than Advil, school officials in Safford have been known to strip down 13-year-old girls who have no history of disciplinary problems. Imagine what they’d do to Muslim terrorists who got mouthy!

It’s possible. Two of the presumed front-runners are lesbian.

New York Times: “The nation’s debt clock is ticking faster than ever — and Wall Street is getting worried.”