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First of all, my apologies for the delay in posts of late. Now, Sonya Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings were completed more than a week ago, but between caring for family members and working a full-time job, it took a while to make it through the week’s proceedings. I didn’t need to slog through much before Sessions went off the rails. The Virgin Mary is a little dirtier than a lot of people think. Okay, a lot dirtier. Something tells me that if all of the Bible had been revealed through bird poop, there would still be people out there who would completely buy into it. Lest I leave it out, here’s another [...] Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy In Rick Shenkman’s new book, Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter, he calls our attention to this myth of The People that McConnell invoked in Meet the Press this past weekend. David Gregory alluded to some statistics about how the United States ranks among industrialized nations in terms of health care. Those statistics paint a very different picture than what McConnell claims. McConnell’s retort? “Well, that’s one expert. If you ask the American people…” Continue reading…  Glenn Beck has never actually read Thomas Paine. And he's all broken up about that. Glenn Beck has never read Thomas Paine. Not in any real way. Yes, he seems to have read Common Sense, Paine’s propaganda piece designed to convince the colonies that independence was the only real option. Yes, Paine describes government as “but a necessary evil,” even under the best circumstances, but he goes on to point out that in order to overcome our vices, we “find it necessary to surrender up a part of [our] property to furnish means for the protection of the rest.” Paine saw the government as the lesser of two evils. The greater is anarchy. Beck’s lack of familiarity with Paine is glaringly clear at the conclusion of his portion of the book. (The last third being dedicated to the full text of Paine’s original Common Sense.) At the conclusion, Beck outlines his ‘9.12 Project,’ an effort to encourage people to rediscover the abject fear and panic we felt in the days following 9/11. Actually, Beck describes the ‘Project’ as an effort to get us to remember the feelings of community and oneness we shared then… and in so doing dismiss community in favor of an every-man-for-himself mentality. He is apparently unaware of irony. Continue reading… I’ve spent the last few days (when I wasn’t shopping for a new car and working full time) trying to assemble a scathingly funny send-up of Senator Jefferson Sessions’ performance in Sonya Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings (crack cocaine anyone?). But it was not to be. It was a) too easy and b) beside the point. Sessions may be self-spoofing and just sitting there begging to be skewered, but there is a deep and disturbingly resilient problem in evidence here: fear; a pervasive fear of the power of the judiciary, embodied by the Supreme Court. In attempting to deal with their psychological issues, the GOP has wrapped this abject terror in a little tin phrase of a package: ‘activist judges’. <<CUE OMINOUS ORGAN MUSIC>>This is the definition I’ve put together for the term:
Of the three branches of government, the judiciary is where reason has the most power and freedom. The president, the Congress, they can be lobbied, cajoled, bullied. The Supreme Court cannot. Sure, the occasional ruling (Dred Scott and Bush v. Gore, for instance) seems to defy logic, but such cases are few and far between. Cases before the court are argued, researched, debated between the judges and the most convincing argument wins. Continue reading… |
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