Friday, July 01, 2005

The O'Connor Seat   I was wrong in thinking that Sandra Day O'Connor would not resign.  However, there was a factor in her thinking that, despite fairly thorough reading on my part in the last couple weeks, I was not aware of.  Her husband has Alzheimer's.  I didn't find that referred to anywhere until after the resignation was announced.  Had I known that, I certainly would have made room for the possibility that she'd retire to spend more time with him. The sort of adulatory coverage O'Connor has recieved is the sort which is usually broken out right along with the formaldehyde.  Since Justice O'Connor is not dead, I have no desire to write her obituary.  What concerns us today is her replacement.  The conventional wisdom is there will be a terrific battle over whoever the President nominates.  This is untrue.  If the President nominates the sort of extremist judicial activists he has tended to favor in Appeals Court nominations, there will be a battle royale, and the work of the Senate, for all intents and purposes, will come to a screeching halt for the rest of this year, and possibly beyond.  On the other hand, if he nominates a more moderate candidate, like Alberto Gonzales, he can probably get 80 votes.  The activist groups will still scream, but the Senate will confirm him handily.  To give an idea just how far out of the mainstream most of the candidates the President is reportedly considering are, Alberto Gonzales has published memos stating his legal opinion that torture is perfectly acceptable government behavior, and the Senate considers him a moderate, next to the legal thinking of the rest.  This guy could have comfortably served as the lawyer for Torquemada, or the Borgias, or Doctor Doom, and he's a moderate.  If Attorney General Gonzales is nominated, expect conservatives to start screaming, because he's not conservative enough for them. I'm just saying. 11:22:37 PM    comment []

42% of Americans Support the President's Impeachment   Yes, you read that right; in a new Zogby poll, 42% of Americans want the President to be impeached and to face trial for the high crime of going to war for recreational reasons.  Oh, it may be that some few of them want him impeached for other reasons (like turning the greatest budget surpluses in history into the biggest deficits), but that's got to be the big one:  that he phonied up the evidence so we’d go to war with a country that presented no threat to America, while at the same time North Korea edges nearer to auctioning nuclear weapons off on the open market, and Iran gets ever-closer to building its own nuclear weapons.  The number would doubtless be even higher if Americans thought it might actually happen. And it's funny, but the highest number I ever saw for public support of Clinton being impeached was 43.6%, and that was also in a Zogby poll (lest anyone claim the poll is biased).  The other major polling organizations never saw the number climb out of the thirties.  That is despite the fact that Washington wanted him gone.  The reporters, the lobbyists, the politicians, the socialites, they wanted Clinton removed not for having an affair, but for having an inappropriate one.  Monica Lewinsky was too young, too crass, too much...not one of them.  That's right, much of the Washington criticism of President Clinton's affair always seemed spurred by, well, jealousy.  But despite a year-long drumbeat for Clinton's removal, the numbers were barely higher than they are now, calling for President Bush to be impeached, which none of the mainstream media is talking about. If we still had great numbers as far as balancing the budget, and if we weren't fighting a war in Iraq that looks increasingly likely to cause us to lose the war on terrorism, well, I'd forgive the President if he had sex outside his marriage live on national television.  Since instead of sleeping with a broad, the President has chosen to ruin our position abroad, and blown hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars irresponsibly, I think it's time, and past time, the House at least start to hold hearings on the President’s impeachment. Give the people what they want. 5:32:27 PM    comment []

The Resignation You've All Been Waiting For   The first woman on the Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, has announced she's retiring.  (I never should have been so confident about her anyway; it's not like I even understood her judicial philosophy...it seemed to me her stances on the issues might as well be random.)   One of the consequences of her retirement is certain:  I said if she retired before the beginning of the next term, I'd get a hat and eat it, so now I have to do that.  The second consequence is only slightly less certain:  Washington is going to become a very, very ugly place until a replacement is confirmed.  A Rehnquist retirement would have meant less strife; one conservative being replaced by another is something most Senators were at peace with.  But O'Connor is the swing vote; replacing her with a conservative judicial activist could lead to a radical change in the interpretation of the Constitution.  And meanwhile, we can probably pretty much forget about the Senate passing any controversial legislation that requires bipartisanship. Given just about every bill the Congress passes leads to deeper deficits, that's probably just as well. 11:18:05 AM    comment []

Token Candidates   Republicans are expected to run black Republicans for governor or Senator in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Maryland.  In three of those four elections, these candidates will probably be nothing more than extremely well-financed sacrificial lambs.  They are likely to lose their present jobs in seeking their new one; few other Republican office holders in those states were ever interested in trading their current job for a humiliating defeat, so they found some black guys to do it.  The only really remarkable choice is the Ohio example; that state has been trending Republican in recent years, and Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell is neither charismatic nor a skillful campaigner.  He is quite likely the worst candidate the Republicans could choose to make a run for a top office. The Republican thinking is that by putting up some token black candidates, even to face almost certain defeat, will help the Republicans with black voters.  It's difficult to see why they'd think that; look at the utter lack of inroads the Republicans have made into the black vote since Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court; look how disastrously the Republicans did with Alan Keyes on the Senate ballot in Illinois.  It is not unlikely they will lose more Republicans who won't want to vote for a black man than the number of black votes, if any, they'll pick up by running these candidates. As long as Republicans only work at the appearance game, and not in confronting real issues, like poverty, access to higher education, and racial bias in policing and criminal sentencing, they're not going to gain much ground among black Americans.  Frankly, that's the way it should be. 9:55:37 AM    comment []

Quote for the Day, 7/1/2005   "Outwardly you may be on friendly terms with the people next door, but, if the truth were known, you do not think much of them.  Their ways may be well enough, but they are not your ways.  It is not hatred, far less envy; neither is it contempt exactly.  Only you do not understand why they live as they do...Rude noises come from that house next door that you would not expect from people in their station.  There is nothing that so reveals the breeding of the inmates as the noises that come from a house.  Laughter late at night, when you want to sleep--how coarse it sounds!"   -Frank More Colby, "The People Next Door" 7:50:49 AM    comment []

Will Iran Have a Terrorist President?   Five of the hostages taken during the hostage crisis in Iran, when terrorists seized our embassy in Tehran, believe the President-elect of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was among their captors.  Others among the former hostages are unsure.  And several of the hostage-takers in Iran, including at least one who is now a reformer opposing the new administration, deny he was one of their number.  Here's the thing, though:  there's just no way the CIA didn't get photographs and complete biographies of all the terrorists involved.  Now that this question has become public, they should settle it.  If he was one of the terrorists, that revelation could badly undercut his credibility in dealing with the West.  If he wasn't, for the sake of their mental health, the former hostages who believe one of their captors is now a world leader have the right to know. By the way, the official line from Ahmadinejad's press spokesman is that he was not one of the hostage-takers, and that he opposed the seizure of the embassy before he supported it.  I swear to God. 3:11:35 AM    comment []