In reading this brief note from Ken Silverstein regarding the Freedom Defense Fund, I was reminded of this story from 2004 about the College Republicans bilking little old conservatives out of their savings.
It should surprise nobody that Republican groups are basically run like the crassest sort of televangelist scam.
A new study supports our fears: Supreme Court nominees present themselves one way at confirmation hearings but act differently on the court. That makes it difficult for senators to cast informed votes or for the public to play a meaningful role in the process.
The study — with the unwieldy title “An Empirical Analysis of the Confirmation Hearings of the Justices of the Rehnquist Natural Court” —published in Constitutional Commentary, looked at how nine long-serving justices answered Senate questions, and how they then voted on the court. While it does not say that any nominee was intentionally misleading, it still found a wide gap.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, for example, told the Senate that they had strong respect for Supreme Court precedents. On the court they were the justices most likely to vote to overturn those precedents. Justice David Souter deferred more to precedent than his Senate testimony suggested he would.
And water is wet. Look, anyone who says they didn't know that Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts (in my memory) were lying about their politics and their respect for precedent (when they weren't obfuscating and stalling) is either lying themselves or should have their homes wallpapered in bubblewrap and be ordered into conservatorship for their own protection.
Early in the fall of 2007 Scott Horton initially advocated that Michael Mukasey be confirmed to the post of Attorney General of the Bush Administration, arguing that although Mukasey was of course conservative, he was a thoughtful conservative with a great deal of personal integrity.
Mr. Horton gradually and painfully retreated from both elements of that position, first retracting his advocacy of confirmation for Mukasey, and eventually withdrawing the positive opinion of Mukasey the man.
Now me, I don't travel in rarefied circles where I would get to know a Michael Mukasey, but I could have told Mr. Horton that Mukasey doesn't have any personal integrity, or rather, whatever personal integrity he might have was of lesser importance to Mukasey than his instinct toward authoritarianism and ass-covering for movement conservatism. That was obvious, based on two simple facts: the Bush Administration believed Mukasey to be a suitable candidate for Attorney General, and Mukasey was willing to take the position.
It is theoretically possible that a principled conservative (i.e., not a movement conservative) could have taken a position in the 2000 Bush Administration without understanding the depths of corruption in American conservatism as embodied in the Republican Party leadership. But by 2003, no-one -- and I mean no-one -- of sufficient status to be offered a position in the Bush Administration could have avoided knowing the excremental depth of the cesspool into which they were diving. Anyone willing to take that swim was already corrupt.
Conservative Newt Gingrich, on the sacrifices that we have to make for safety from terrah-ists:
When one asked him how the government could justify stripping rights from Americans in such pieces of legislation as the Patriot Act, Gingrich said that the government has a “right to defend society,” and when under threat, “people will give up all their liberties“:
“If there’s a threat, you have a right to defend society,” Gingrich said. “People will give up all their liberties to avoid that level of threat.“
The Conservative Wall Street Journal, on the sacrifices that we have to make for safety in air travel:
After the Federal Aviation Administration fined Southwest Airlines more than $10 million last month for inspection lapses, Congress rounded up the usual scapegoats for some hearings. FAA officials told the House Transportation Committee that the Southwest situation was "an isolated problem, not a systematic one." But James Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the panel, was unpersuaded.
"It's clear we have a structural problem at the FAA," declared Mr. Oberstar, to nationwide headlines. [...] An industry-wide "audit" commenced, and FAA inspectors set about finding something – anything – awry with an aircraft to show Mr. Oberstar and other Congressional overseers that the agency was up to the job of enforcing federal maintenance requirements to the letter.
[...]Other airlines got the message. American, Delta and United have now grounded thousands of flights for unscheduled maintenance checks that have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the shell-shocked FAA striking a pose for Congress.
[...] Mr. Oberstar and other Democrats in Congress would just as soon do to the Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Product and Safety Commission and other "consumer protection" agencies exactly what they've managed to do to the FAA inside of a month's time. We thought we'd left this hypernanny state mentality in the 1970s, but with this Democratic Congress it is back with a vengeance.
¡Civil Liberties, No! ¡Unregulated Industry, Sí! If you can't whip up an electorally beneficial frenzy of fear and hatred of swarthy furriners over a "threat", it doesn't exist. That goes double if actually dealing with the so-called "threat" to Americans' so-called "safety" might require some kind of regulation -- property wants to be free.
Patriotic American John McCain objects to providing military personnel with educational incentives to become ex-military:
McCain is worried that the benefits would be so juicy people would leave the military to get their education. "I want to make sure that we have incentives for people to remain in the military as well as for people to join the military," he said.
I eagerly await McCain's sponsorship of a bill preventing mercenary companies working for the US Government from paying more than the US military. Wouldn't want to create an incentive for military personnel to take their training and leave the military.
Of course, by McCain's own admission, he doesn't know much about economics. No shit, Sherlock. But that's OK -- ignorance of economics hasn't slowed down the freewheeling stupid embodied in the Bush administration. Why should it hurt McCain's candidacy?
It turns out that the trope about the lefty blogosphere being a meritocracy is pretty much self-serving bullshit. It's all about who you know.
And, no, this isn't about me personally. I had my shot during the 2004 election and chose not to pursue bloggy fame. But the people who pretend that the power distribution curve only applies to Republican economic policies really need to STFU.
From Think Progress:
The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Political Insider reports:
In 1998, 27 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of Democrats tuned in regularly to Atlanta-based CNN. Eight years later, the number of Democrats had risen to 29 percent.
But the number of Republicans who tuned in to CNN had shrunk to 19 percent. Gosh, where do you think they went?
Over the same period, Fox News’ share of Republican viewers jumped from 14 to 36 percent.
Hollander also notes that conservatives “dramatically dropped news sources that they perceive as being biased against their position.” Evidently, this included C-SPAN, which also saw a dramatic drop in conservative viewers.
...
But too much Fox News may be bad news for conservatives. An April 2007 Pew Research Study survey found that viewers of the conservative Fox News channel had the lowest knowledge of national and international affairs.
The religious allegations have already run the gamut, and I'm also envisioning what the message will look like if Obama's the nominee. Now that William Kristol and Joe Lieberman are jumping on the Marxist meme, that will surely be the next go-around of allegations. Unfortunately for the right, "Obama is a radical Muslim angry black Christian atheist" just isn't that marketable.
It's yet another Mencken Moment (there have been so many over the last years), but once again, let us remember: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
Digby notes that some Randroid-or-other bribed Atlas Shrugged onto the reading lists of some colleges in the South. She also notes that:
...the Ayn Rand Institute provides nearly half a million free copies to American high schools to indoctrinate teen-agers into romantic selfishness (thus validating their natural adolescent tendencies as being acceptable adult behavior.)
It's not just that the Ayn Rand Institute provides free copies of Rand's horrible books, but it also sets up a prize-money contest for essays written on the books to create an incentive for high school students to slog through hundreds and hundreds of pages of Rand's turgid, florid, fetid prose. Again, where is the prize money for the anarchist essays? Objectivism is about liberty? That's a line pulled straight out of Rush Limbaugh's carbuncled ass.
(As a side note, has anyone else wondered why the fundies aren't up in arms about the Randroids peddling a book with a rape scene to the impressionable underage minds that the fundies are so concerned about protecting? I guess as long as its a conservative man raping a woman, that's just jim-dandy.)
By way of Discourse.net, we read of this unfortunate gentleman, an American citizen detained by ICE, who refused to believe that he was a citizen:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he's never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack's claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona.
On Thursday, Warziniack finally became a free man. Immigration officials released him after his family, who learned about his predicament from McClatchy, produced a birth certificate and after a U.S. senator demanded his release.
"The immigration agents told me they never make mistakes," Warziniack said in an earlier phone interview from jail. "All I know is that somebody dropped the ball."
Oh, sure, that shit sounds all funny like "Born in East L.A." but it's the inevitable result of a two-tiered system, where one tier of the system basically doesn't allow for much in the way of rights for the individual.
A worse problem is that under the Military Commissions Act of 2006 we now have another, even more pernicious two-tier system. If you're accused of "materially supporting" "hostilities" against the US or someone on the US's side and believed not to be a citizen, you have no right to challenge your indefinite detention (including on the grounds that you're actually a citizen), and you'll wind up in a kangaroo court like those down in Gitmo, which will have the power to do a hell of a lot more than deport you.
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