There’s a new site you’ll want to check out called Blue Jersey, authored by ten Garden Staters, including the illustrious GD Frogsdong. They’re all progressive, they represent a wide range of ages and locations, and they’re New Jersey's one-stop shopping for all political news. So stop by and say hi!
So Harry Reid did indeed suggest Miers, and has promised not to use the cronyism argument against her.
Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) urged President Bush to pick White House counsel Harriet Miers as his nominee to the Supreme Court, RAW STORY can confirm.I have very mixed feelings about this decision. One on hand, I see the wisdom in suggesting someone perceived to be a moderate, especially considering there are wingnuts like Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen waiting in the wings. That Bush is running scared from a filibuster fight, and was forced into choosing someone suggested by the opposition has angered his base, works in our favor. And, much like with Roberts, filibustering a SCOTUS nominee has no real advantage when, in the end, Bush is going to get someone that he wants eventually, anyway. Better to damn his nominee with faint praise and cause him to rile his base instead.
In a conference call held with liberal bloggers last week, Reid declared that he had told Vice President Dick Cheney and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card that Miers was a good choice for the Court.
"I said, 'I think that rather than looking at the people your lawyer’s recommending, pick her," the senator remarked. "The reason I like her is that she’s the first woman to be president of the very, very large Texas bar association, she was a partner in a law firm, she’s actually tried cases, she was a trial lawyer, and she’s had experience here. I could accept that. And if that fits into the cronyism argument, I will include everybody as a crony, but not her, when I make my case."
Six Iraq War veterans have announced Congressional bids—and they’re all running as Democrats. Paul Hackett will also challenge Mike DeWine for his Senate seat in Ohio.
Lawyer Patrick Murphy and five other veterans of the Iraq war are asking questions about President Bush's policies in Iraq as part of their broader Democratic campaigns to win congressional seats in next year's elections.Best of luck, guys.
Given their experience in Iraq, the six Democrats in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia say they are eminently qualified to pose the tough questions. Their reservations mirror public opinion, with an increasing number of Americans expressing concern about the mission and favoring a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops.
The most recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll showed only 37 percent of Americans approve of Bush's handling of Iraq, with 62 percent disapproving.
[…]
Bryan Lentz, 41, an attorney from Swarthmore, Pa., volunteered to go to Iraq at age 39 with a civil affairs unit. The Army reserves major was so disillusioned by the lack of a plan in Iraq that he decided while he was in Iraq to run for Congress.
He is trying to unseat 10-term GOP Rep. Curt Weldon (news, bio, voting record), who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
"I'm not anti-war, I'm anti-failure," Lentz said. "We need to define what victory is and we need to set a plan to get there. You cannot stay the course if you do not set a course."
Olivia just showed up on the front porch, looking all raggedy and pissed off. She gave me this really irritated look, like, "Where the hell have you been?" and sauntered back in, where she and Matilda proceeded to hiss at each other with big tails.
A separate grand jury has indicted DeLay on a new charge of money laundering.
Both indictments accuse DeLay and two political associates of conspiring to get around a state ban on corporate campaign contributions by funneling the money through a political action committee to the Republican National Committee in Washington.D’oh! The Hammer’s gonna meet the gavel. (Hat tip to Ol’ Cranky.)
DeLay's earlier indictment charged that conspirators carried out a fund-raising scheme by having the DeLay-founded Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee send corporate money to the Republican National Committee. The RNC then sent back a like amount — $190,000 — to distribute to Texas candidates in 2002, the indictment alleges.
Picking up on the various discussions going on about the Democrats, third parties, and progressive movements, Mannion has written a piece called Fugue for the Disenchanted, in which he explains why he won’t abandon the Democrats, and asks:
Who will you vote for? For governor? For Congress? For mayor? For dog catcher?My short answer is the best candidate. I'm not a Democrat, though I've always voted that way (and undoubtedly will again). However, I've got no party affiliation, because I always intend to vote for/support the best candidate for the job, and once—just once—I did support a Republican nomination. You may have heard of him; his name is Patrick Fitzgerald, and he's currently investigating the Plame leak in Washington, although he's the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, where I used to live. I agree with Mannion’s categorization of the Democrats as the better party, the party that has been repeatedly vindicated on principle, and yet…I’m not a Democrat. There are things about which I care very much that the Democrats don’t address satisfactorily, or don’t address at all. Which leads me to my longer answer, and it starts this way: voting isn’t everything.
Americans have a habit of talking about politics as something apart from the normal doings of their lives. Kind of strange of us, considering that the normal doings of our lives are only possible because of politics. Turning on the tap to get a drink of water is a political act if only because the water flows and is relatively clean because of decisions made by politicians who owe their jobs to political decisions made by us.Absolutely right. They owe their jobs to our political decisions, not just our votes. Sometimes political decisions are completely independent of Who We Will Vote For, and we’d probably end up with better politicians if we made our decisions that way more often.
David Sirota, that feisty little progressive we love so dearly, hits the nail on the head in his analysis of how the Dems need to address Bush’s nomination of Miers:
The Bush White House, not one to overlook their opponents' weakness, are now capitalizing on Democrats missteps on the Roberts' nomination. … The White House's thinking is pretty simple: Democrats have now publicly said that a nominee with a largely unknown record is acceptable, and Miers has that. Should be smooth sailing, right? Wouldn't Democrats look hypocritical to oppose Miers on the basis of her lack of real Supreme Court-qualifying experience or adequate legal credentials, in light of Democrats recent willingness to confirm a nominee with similar drawbacks?That last assertion alone is reason to question this nomination. If she can say that Bush is the most brilliant man she’s ever met with a straight face, that’s definitive evidence she’s been cloistered inside his bubble of loyal cronies for far, far too long.
Yes, except for one big chink in her armor - and I stress BIG chink, especially in light of the President's weakened position and swirling controversies over the deleterious effects of cronyism. … Miers has one defining characteristic that is different from Roberts, very troubling, and very politically potent: her major defining career trait is her position as a Bush crony/ultra-loyalist. Though Roberts certainly earned some stripes as a Bush crony in the Florida 2000 fiasco, his ties to the Bushies are small compared to Miers, who seems to be a de facto member of Bush's immediate family.
As Bush's former speechwriter David Frum has written, Miers "rose to her present position by her absolute devotion to George Bush." She was, among other things, his personal lawyer, a political appointee of his in Texas (where she got into a lot of trouble), a hatchet person in Bush's efforts to hide his National Guard record, and an all around Bush bootlicker (Frum said Miers said "the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met").
Apologies for light posting today. One of our cats pushed out a screen last night and has gone missing; we left the deck door open last night in case she came back, but instead we got a poor little freaked out bird, who I spent nearly an hour trying to gently remove without giving it a heart attack. The bird is now free again, but no sign of Olivia. Keep your fingers crossed for the little devil.
Oddjob points us to profiles of Miers here and here.
For some thoughtful rightwing reaction (and a good round-up of what other conservatives are thinking), see here. (They don’t seem too happy, and I don’t blame them. Differences aside, there is generally respect for the SCOTUS across the political spectrum, and no one wants to see it sullied with the appointment of a hack.)
Max has more here, including Harry Reid’s statement on Miers’ nomination, my reaction to which was displeasure, to be honest, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’m unhappy with something Reid has said, and sometimes it turns out he’s got something up his sleeve. Let’s hope this is one of those times.
Harriet Miers. Here’s what I’ve found out so far:
1. She’s never been a judge.
2. She’s represented Bush as his attorney and has had a long and loyal relationship with him.
3. She pulled a Cheney and was put in charge of a search process and ended up choosing herself.
Bush has absolutely no respect for the Supreme Court. Even the rightwingers are calling her a Bush crony. Atrios quotes John Podhoretz with a real that-about-sums-it-up comment:
This is the Supreme Court we're talking about! It's not a job for a political functionary!Disgusting.
Following on the heels of the various discussions that have been going on around here over the past couple of weeks regarding how the progressive net roots can best assert itself within the current political climate (third party? reform the Democratic Party? progressive coalition?), Peter Daou has written a great follow-up to his recent essay, The Triangle: Limits of Blog Power that applies the construct he laid out therein in a new piece, The Triangle: Obama’s Diary & Netroots Disenchantment, written as a response to a dKos diary by Senator Barack Obama, Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party.
I strongly recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
First, the root deficiency of Democrats with respect to message is not that Democrats don’t match Republicans blow for blow (as Obama puts it, “energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion.”) It’s that they fail to project core convictions. What passes for Democratic conviction today is a mutated form of “press release speak,” the political version of an evolutionary dead-end, a soulless evocation of ideals and principles devoid of the visceral connection with a human heart that gives it meaning.This is exactly what I’ve been shouting about since I started this blog. On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King told the country that he had a dream. It’s time for the American Left to announce that it has a vision—a vision of an America in which every American can realize his or her dream, whether that dream is to find a job, free oneself of the chains of poverty, get married, go to college, or take advantage of any of the other opportunities that ought to be available to every citizen of this nation. Not everyone announces his or her dream in such stirring style as did the Reverend King, but everyone does have a dream, and our passionate, authentic vision must be that every person has the same chance to make it reality.
Press release speak is endemic in the Democratic leadership, but it is absent in the blog world, which explains the appeal of blogs to rank and filers. That’s not to say that Democrats don’t give the occasional stirring speech, but the Democratic establishment sorely lacks a modern-day Martin Luther King, someone who speaks words so unfeigned, so blunt, so true that by sheer force of will their words move public opinion and rouse people to action.
[…]
In my previous ‘triangle’ essay, I discussed the political landscape from the perspective of bloggers. Looking at it from the perspective of party officials like Senator Obama, perhaps there’s a different message to be taken from the netroots. Instead of decrying the supposed tendency of the online community to “brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, "true" progressive vision for the country,” they should realize that what netroots activists really want is leaders who will fight like warriors for what’s right and just, leaders who will shed the Beltway-speak and the focus groups and the strategists and advisors and tell Americans why progressive ideals are ethical ideals, American ideals. Stop listening so hard to what people tell you they think and teach them how and what to think. Don’t sit back while the right creates conventional wisdom and then fashion your policies around it, use the netroots and the media to build a triangle that reshapes conventional wisdom.
Thursday, I noted that Blue Meme had started a list on this subject, and this was it just three days ago:
Karl Rove
Bill Frist
Tom DeLay
Scooter Libby
Richard Perle
David Safavian
Jack Abramoff
Well, in addition to the GAO finding the Bush administration guilty of the dissemination of covert propaganda in the Armstrong Williams pay-for-play business (hat tip AMERICAblog), we’ve got a couple of big names to add to that list:
Dick Cheney
and
George Bush.
Near the end of a round table discussion on ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos dropped this bomb:Say hello to your new commander-in-chief—the tyrannosaurus of turpitude, President Denny Hastert!
Definitely a political problem but I wonder, George Will, do you think it’s a manageable one for the White House especially if we don’t know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a report or have indictments but if he is able to show as a source close to this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions.
Hello, Shakers. Well, my cousin’s married, and my ass is sore from about nine zillion hours in the car, but we made it there and back in one piece, much coffee and countless rounds of the Alphabet Game later.
Many, many thanks to Shamanic for keeping things very interesting and lively around here this weekend and also to RJ Eskow for stopping by, too. I am in your debts.
I guess I'd better go find out what’s been going on in the world…
My cousin is getting married this weekend—my little cousin who I remember being born and is now old enough to get married!—so Mr. Shakes and I are off to Cincinnati for the weekend, since my parents were nice enough to pay for our hotel.
The lovely Shamanic from SimianBrain will be keeping you company in my absence, along with the regular crew, so please make her feel welcome; I know you’ll enjoy her sassy simian stylings.
Have a wonderful weekend, everyone, and thank you again for the support these past two days. You’ve all made what could have been, in years from now, a dreadful memory instead a time which I will always think of very fondly indeed. My heart is full.
See you Sunday.
Okay, we haven’t done this in awhile, but it’s always fun when we do, and we all need a little fun tonight, right? I do, anyway. So, here goes (and there’s no theme this time, other than that they’re some of my favorite films—no cheating now!):
1. I don't want this guy taking you to some sketchy quarry in the middle of Newark to find crack whores huffing turpentine or pit bulls raping each other or whatever else is down here!
2. I'm nice, I really am, apart from my terrible taste in pie.
3. How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't know how the can opener works!
4. Laugh it up, fuzzball.
5. I didn't ask for a shrink; that must've been somebody else. Also, that pudding isn't mine. Also, I'm wearing this suit today because I had a very important meeting this morning and I don't have a crying problem.
6. Vice, virtue…it's best not to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality.
7. How could I forget about you? You're the only person I know.
8. I spent like three hours doing the shading on the upper lip—it's probably the best drawing I've ever done.
9. You show me how to control a wild fucking gypsy and I'll show you how to control an unhinged, pig-feeding gangster.
10. We've got chicken tonight. Strangest damn things. They're man made. Little damn things. Smaller than my fist.
First he makes the outrageous claim that he wasn’t given a chance to speak before the grand jury, an assertion so robustly stupid that his own lawyer had to refute it. And now all his bloviating about how this is a partisan attack by Travis County DA Ronnie Earle has prompted the grand jury foreman to consent to an interview with the local news and explain that he doesn’t appreciate being accused of collusion with the DA to unfairly indict DeLay.
Just keep yapping, you egotistical shit. Each word that falls from your lying maw removes another inch of soil from that grave you seem so intent on digging yourself.
Via Political Wire:
Promoting his new book in Michigan, Newt Gingrich (R) "discussed a possible run for president in 2008, saying health care and government modernization are the pillars of his program," the AP reports.Dems, get on healthcare big time. It’s a liberal issue, and to get done right, it has to be.
Said the former Speaker: "If I'm potentially going to run, I have to get my message out, and if it works and five others pick it up, I won't run. If the message doesn't work, I won't run. But if the message works and nobody picks it up, I'll run."
Even a decade ago, the Jesuits I knew were supporting women’s and gay rights in the church.
A top Jesuit official has been contacting leaders of the Roman Catholic Church to protest a soon-to-be-released Vatican document that is expected to reinforce the teaching that gays are not welcome in the priesthood.Good for you, Rev. Chojnacki. Some clergy are discussing a possible strike, too.
The Rev. Gerald Chojnacki, head of the New York Province of the Society of Jesus, said in a letter to his priests that he was asking bishops to tell Vatican officials who are drafting the policy "of the great harm this will cause many good priests and the Catholic faithful."
