Later On

The way Congress continues to support the F-22 is shameful. Their price tags are showing, as it were. The NY Times has an editorial that slams their actions:

An unlikely alliance of senators — led by Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and including Edward Kennedy and John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut — is backing an indefensible defense budget boondoggle: the wasting of $1.75 billion on seven additional F-22 fighter jets that the Pentagon says it neither wants nor needs.

The plane, the most expensive jet fighter ever built, was designed for cold war aerial combat. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has repeatedly argued that the Pentagon needs to phase out such high-cost, outdated programs so it can buy the kinds of weapons that American troops desperately need to complete their mission in Iraq and defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

The F-22 has not been used in either war. Buying more would only make it harder for the Air Force to shift money into aircraft like unmanned intelligence drones and the more adaptable, cheaper-to-fly F-35 fighter, which is set to begin production in 2012.

The F-22’s main contractor, Lockheed Martin, and its multiple subcontracting suppliers, have spread its 25,000 jobs across 44 states. And a majority of the members of the Armed Services Committee proved unable to resist that lure. Senator Chambliss, whose state is home to Lockheed Martin’s primary manufacturing plant for the F-22, sponsored the committee amendment adding the seven planes, which was approved by a 13-to-11 vote. Senator Kerry, who is not on the committee, has since said that he also supports the purchase.

President Obama is right to stand up for the nation’s military priorities and sound fiscal discipline in threatening to veto next year’s military spending bill if the extra F-22s remain. He has the full support of the Armed Services Committee chairman, Carl Levin, and its ranking Republican, John McCain, who plan to offer an amendment to remove the seven F-22s.

Providing for America’s real defense needs is expensive enough without making the military budget double as a make-work jobs program. Capping the F-22 program at 187, as the Pentagon wants, would keep production lines intact for years to come, well beyond the immediate need for stimulus-related job creation.

The full Senate will have a chance to put the nation’s security needs ahead of a bogus job program when the Levin-McCain amendment comes up for a vote in the next few days. If not, Mr. Obama should use his veto pen.

Interesting development, reported in ProPublica by Abraham Lustgarten:

They were tough words for the natural gas industry to hear. In a blunt speech before the Colorado Oil and Gas Association last week, Timothy Wirth, a former Colorado Democratic senator and Under Secretary of State for global affairs in the Clinton administration, warned industry leaders that they need to pay attention to the environmental and climate concerns that are shaping national policy, or risk being left behind.

Wirth took the industry to task for not engaging in the climate legislation being debated in Congress — a bill he said every other energy industry was deeply involved in — and for fighting the changes taking place in energy policy rather than participating and seeking fresh opportunities.

Wirth, who today is president of Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundation, is no enemy of the oil and gas industry. He described clean-burning natural gas as the single most important component of a new energy supply chain that can help cut greenhouse gas emissions, and he said the use of nation’s bountiful natural gas reserves is essential to curbing climate change. But he also said the industry is preoccupied with the wrong priorities and is off message.

"The time has come for the natural gas industry to get organized, take the gloves off, and get thoroughly engaged in helping our country advance rapidly toward a low-carbon economy," Wirth said…

Continue reading.

I just received some spam advertising a Costco gift card—just normal spam. But at the bottom:

17
La donna, poi che fu partito il duca,
rimase in gran travaglio de la mente;
che non sa come a Montalban conduca
l'armatura e il destrier del suo parente;
però che 'l cuor le cuoce e le manuca
l'ingorda voglia e il desiderio ardente
di riveder Ruggier, che, se non prima,
a Vallombrosa ritrovar lo stima.

18
Stando quivi suspesa, per ventura
si vede inanzi giungere un villano,
dal qual fa rassettar quella armatura,
come si puote, e por su Rabicano;
poi di menarsi dietro gli diè cura
i duo cavalli, un carco e l'altro a mano:
ella n'avea duo prima; ch'avea quello
sopra il qual levò l'altro a Pinabello.

19
Di Vallombrosa pensò far la strada,
che trovar quivi il suo Ruggier ha speme;
ma qual più breve o qual miglior vi vada,
poco discerne, e d'ire errando teme.
Il villan non avea de la contrada
pratica molta; ed erreranno insieme.
Pur andare a ventura ella si messe,
dove pensò che 'l loco esser dovesse.

20
Di qua di là si volse, né persona
incontrò mai da domandar la via.
Si trovò uscir del bosco in su la nona ..

Obviously, Italian poetry. But what? and why?

Received last night from Marijuana Policy Project:

Tonight, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that, once enacted, will remove a decade-old provision that has prevented Washington, D.C., from implementing the medical marijuana law passed by 69% of voters in 1998.

Known as the Barr amendment, the provision has forbidden the city from implementing a voter-approved ballot initiative that protected medical marijuana patients from arrest and jail.

Repealing this democracy-unfriendly amendment has been a primary focus of MPP’s federal lobbying efforts for many years. In 2007, we even hired former Congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga.) — the original author of the amendment — to lobby to overturn it.

Tonight’s vote represents a victory not just for medical marijuana patients, but for all Americans, who have the right to determine their own policies without federal meddling. Ten years ago, D.C. residents overwhelmingly made the sensible, compassionate decision to pass a medical marijuana law, and now, finally, suffering Washingtonians will be allowed to focus on treating their pain without fearing arrest.

I want to thank MPP’s 27,000 dues-paying members, whose support helped to make this win possible. If you’d like to see more of these kinds of successes, I hope you’ll donate to MPP’s federal lobbying efforts. We’re turning supporters’ donations into results, and we can’t do it without you.

Sharona Coutts writes at ProPublica:

Goldman Sachs has proved once again that it knows how to make money. Wednesday’s announcement of a record quarterly profit of $3.44 billion [1] ($) has spurred debate [2] over how the bank did it.

In addition to making money via its own trades, Goldman profits by advising clients about deals. Some of that advice has proved quite savvy.

As we reported last year [3], one of Goldman’s money-making strategies was to encourage some clients to bet on declines of the creditworthiness of a range of states — including California, New Jersey, New York and Florida. Goldman advised hedge funds to take the bets by buying credit default swaps, the insurance-like financial instruments that have been blamed for contributing to the financial meltdown last fall [4].

The strategy angered California Treasurer Bill Lockyer [3] because his state was paying Goldman millions to help market the same bonds that Goldman was advising other clients to bet against.

This week’s announcement of huge profits — and the likelihood of near-record bonuses [5] — at Goldman led us to wonder how much investors could have earned by following Goldman’s controversial advice.

Basically, if you had bought swaps against $10 million in California bonds in July 2008, it would have cost just under $80,000. Today, you could theoretically sell those swaps for $350,000 — making a 338 percent profit.

Read the rest of this entry »

TOBS Lavender is a very nice soap and witih the Kent BK4 I got a very fine lather. The red-tipped Super Speed with a UK Wilkinson Sword blade delivered a smooth, efficient shave, which I finished with GFT Spanish Leather aftershave, a favorite. Excellent shave!

Other boar brushes are on their way to me. That experiment shall continue.

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

The Justice Department informed a federal district court Wednesday that it was no longer seeking to rely on coerced and tortured evidence in the habeas corpus case of Mohammed Jawad, who was arrested as a child in Afghanistan, interrogated under torture, and then locked up at Guantanamo Bay for the last six and a half years.

As I explained when I wrote about this in late June, the government had been relying on confessions that even a Bush military commission judge had ruled were elicited by torture and unreliable.  The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Jawad, filed a motion to suppress the evidence. On Wednesday, the day the government was due to file its opposition to the motion, the Justice Department instead filed papers saying that it would not oppose suppressing the evidence.

As ACLU lawyer Jonathan Hafetz put it to me in an e-mail last night: “This is huge and shows the importance of habeas and court review.”

The Air Force really seems to have outlived its usefulness and ought to be folded back into the Army so that they can get good direction on winning battles and fighting small wars. In any event, the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps have their own planes and do a lot of their own flying. And perhaps even the Air Force is starting to recognize this. Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent:

Building on yesterday’s announcement that Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) didn’t have the votes to strip funding for the Air Force’s F-22 fighter jet from the defense authorization bill, here’s an Air Force captain providing some really useful context — namely, the Air Force’s problems with adjusting to a threat environment where manned air combat isn’t a realistic scenario. Writing at Small Wars Journal, Capt. Daniel Magruder, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, notes that the rise of irregular warfare — in which relatively low-tech insurgents don’t contest the United States in the air — is partially a response to the Air Force’s overwhelming success at establishing the United States as the world’s dominant air power. He finds the Air Force’s culture of individualism and tech-worship largely incapable of adjusting to the less comfortable implications of dominance, like how the service’s relevance to low-intensity conflict like the counterinsurgencies being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq will be measured by how it contributes to what, at the end of the day, is a fight led by ground forces:

The Army views airpower as another avenue to pursue fires and collection of data on the enemy in support of ground combat forces—largely at the tactical and operational levels of war.  On the contrary, Air Force airpower enthusiasts see a more strategic use.  Throughout the development of airpower theory, doctrine, and its application, the promise was made possible by faith in airpower’s ability.  Since World War I, air forces have chafed at the thought their planes be used to support ground and seas forces. …

The Air Force is beholden to the missions it supports.  Currently, the most pressing national security dilemmas are long-term counter-insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The Air Force must realize that [irregular warfare] will continue to be a strategic imperative and ignoring the fact can place the institution in peril.

Magruder’s substantive recommendations are expressed gingerly, as you might expect from someone in the Air Force who’s questioning the relevance of his service’s most cherished principles and whose bosses are largely fighter pilots. He thinks it’s a good idea to ask how the Air Force can expand the air capacity of allied nations, and notes how the rest of the services are champing at the bit for the Air Force to invest in more unmanned aerial vehicles that have direct applications to the wars the United States is presently fighting. When it comes to the F-22 itself, Magruder notes that the amount the Senate put back into the defense authorization to fund the F-22, against Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ wishes, is equivalent to the next fiscal year’s military aid to Pakistan. “[I]t is obvious the money is strategically better spent combating terrorists, insurgents, lawlessness and pursuing our interests in that country (cross-roads radical Islam and nuclear weapons),” he writes.

Colin Clark at DOD Buzz hears that the debate on the F-22 funding will resume by Tuesday. Maybe Levin will email Magruder’s piece around.

From an article by Faiz Shakir in ThinkProgress:

“Many Americans are under the delusion that we have ‘the best health care system in the world,’” the New York Times editorial page wrote in 2007, but “the disturbing truth is that this country lags well behind other advanced nations in delivering timely and effective care.”

Compared with Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States that ranks last in all dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The United States currently ranks 50th out of 224 nations in life expectancy, with an average life span of 78.1 years, according to 2009 estimates from the CIA World Factbook.

Canada, Great Britain, and many of the other countries that the right-wing enjoys beating up on actually like their health systems and wouldn’t want to trade places with an American. Moreover, Americans don’t get a good bang for our buck. A Business Roundtable study found that compared to France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, U.S. workers and employers receive 23 percent less value from our health care system than the citizens of these other nations.

And, as the chart below shows, the U.S. spends the most per person on health care, but actually has worse life expectancies than many countries which spend less:

The Right has recently held that FDR’s actions prolonged the Great Depression—but they attack the government spending (stimulus) as the cause, whereas a couple of economists claim that yes, he did prolong the depression, but the problem was not taking sufficiently aggressive anti-trust action and allowing wages to rise too high, neither of which is a problem today. Thanks to a commenter for bringing the study to my attention. The report begins:

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,” said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. “So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”

Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt’s policies not gone into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt’s policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity. [This I don't quite understand: if productivity increases, then a company needs fewer workers. Increasing productivity would thus seem to me to exacerbate rather than alleviate unemployment. – LG]

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.

“High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns,” Ohanian said. “As we’ve seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market’s self-correcting forces.”

The policies were contained in the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which exempted industries from antitrust prosecution if they agreed to enter into collective bargaining agreements that significantly raised wages. Because protection from antitrust prosecution all but ensured higher prices for goods and services, a wide range of industries took the bait, Cole and Ohanian found. By 1934 more than 500 industries, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of private, non-agricultural employment, had entered into the collective bargaining agreements called for under NIRA…

Continue reading. Again, note that stimulus (government) spending helps, rather than hurts, the progress out of a recession by replacing consumer demand with the government spending (on infrastructure, education, and other goods and services).

Very interesting post via a post at ShaveMyFace.com.

Excellent instructional video by SMFZach:

Above you see my new boar brush, an Omega I ordered from BullGoose Shaving Supplies. (The Speick shave stick—very nice—is from the same place: stretching my postage dollar.) Boar bristles, I’ve learned, absorb water, unlike badger bristles, but they are also coarser, so the lather-holding ability tends to be less. Still, they have strong aficionados. Zach wrote an excellent comprehensive guide to boar brushes and Tim has some good comments on using a boar brush with shaving cream.

Boar brushes break in with use—I asked on ShaveMyFace.com about the break-in period, and Murray responded:

As a boar brush breaks in, the bristle-tips split.

Vulfix boar brushes require almost no breaking in. These brushes kind of blur the line between boar and badger. They are very soft on the face and they have good backbone. Typical of boar, they don’t hold as much water and lather as badger, but they are impressive brushes in their own right. The 2199, 2233, and 374 have the same brushhead in different handles. I like the larger handle on the 2199. I prefer these three to the 18, which has a less dense knot.

Omega brushes seem to benefit from at least a couple of weeks, and they keep getting better from there.

The Semogue 2000 barber brush, may require close to a month, but those who have it seem to think it is worth it. The Semogue 1305 is probably closer to the Omegas in its break-in characteristics.

So this first shave is just the start of the learning curve, but I already don’t much like this handle shape. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I ran short of lather on the third pass, and so finished with an oil pass. And, after the first pass, I changed the aged Polsilver blade for a new Astra Superior, and I did get an excellent shave. The Alt Innsbruck was so nice yesterday, I used it again today.

More as I learn.

Nate Carlile at ThinkProgress:

On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos this past Sunday, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) argued that the $787 billion stimulus package “hasn’t helped yet. … What I proposed is, after you complete the contracts that are already committed, the things that are in the pipeline, stop it.” Watch it:

The next day Arizona Republican Gov. Jan Brewer received letters from four Obama administration officials — Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar — pointing out the billions headed for Arizonans. LaHood wrote:

The stimulus has been very effective in creating job opportunities throughout the country. However, if you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) quickly fired back on Tuesday, saying that he “strongly support the comments of Senator Kyl and call[s] on the administration to retract its threat against the citizens of Arizona.” But Brewer, who faces a massive budget deficit, a combative GOP-controlled state legislature and the prospect of arguing in favor of raising the state sales tax, has already tapped into billions of dollars made available by the stimulus package — and rejected efforts by the Arizona GOP to slash funding for education and health care. In March, Brewer announced she would accept the stimulus money, citing among many financially strapped programs the need to fund public education:

“To forgo these funds at this time would be a disservice to Arizona taxpayers who have remitted their federal taxes in good faith and have seen many of those hard-earned dollars expended for the benefit of residents of other states,” the governor wrote. “Our citizens need their fair share of those funds returned home to provide for their families during these hours of our greatest need.“

On July 8, Brewer signed legislation that secured more than $1 billion in federal education funding for Arizona. Only a few weeks earlier, Brewer announced Arizona was among the first to receive federal energy funding, which Brewer said in a press release is expected to create 1,500 jobs — and she noted more money was on the way: “After demonstrating successful implementation of its plan, the state will receive an additional $27 million, for a total of $55.4 million.”

Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress reports a disgusting development—continuing the tradition of the GOP as the Party of No:

Following a Senate hearing yesterday, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar explained to reporters that his department “can’t go about doing our job” because Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is preventing the confirmation of his top land staff:

We don’t have the capacity at this point in time, frankly, to provide those answers, because I don’t have the leadership yet. So yes, it will be a detriment at this point in time. We frankly can’t go about doing our job if we don’t have our people in place.

Senate rules allow a single Senator to anonymously block the confirmation of Presidential appointments, for any reason. McCain is blocking Bob Abbey, the nominee to be the Bureau of Land Management administrator, and Wilma Lewis, the nominee for Interior’s assistant secretary for land and minerals, “until the Obama administration takes a position on his legislation to clear a path for a copper mine in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest.”

McCain is not the only senator to abuse his privilege by holding nominees in order to extract concessions from the Obama administration:

– Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) has placed a hold on Robert Perciasepe, nominated to be the Environmental Protection Agency’s second in command, because “he is dissatisfied” with the EPA finding that clean energy legislation would only cost American households a postage stamp a day.

– Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-SC) has placed a hold on Cass Sunstein, nominated to be the director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, on concerns from the agriculture industry about his opinions on animal welfare.

While conservatives block key appointees, they’re also railing against the Obama administration for trying to staff up with appointees that don’t require Senate confirmation. The right-wing has referred to these appointees as “czars” that are part of a “socialist plot” and a “giant expansion of presidential power.”

In fairness, he may not be a racist—it’s hard to know a person’s soul—but he does love to make racist remarks. Faiz Shakir at ThinkProgress:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who has been searching for excuses to vote against Judge Sonia Sotomayor, said on CNN today that Sotomayor’s testimony was “muddled” and lacked clarity. “I do think Roberts and Alito are far superior in terms of answering questions crisply and with clarity and having very little inconsistencies in what they said,” Sessions claimed. The Senate Democratic Leadership office quickly assembled a video reminding Sessions of how “crisply” Roberts and Alito dodged questions that they didn’t want to answer:

Ian Millhiser writes that Sessions clearly “doesn’t remember the Roberts and Alito hearings very well.”

What a delightful thing:

Way back when, I mentioned there was a surprise coming S&P’s way. Since it is now out there officially, I can discuss it publicly.

After the brouhaha with McGraw Hill began, I was contacted by numerous people — mostly readers emailing words of support. But a few West Coast lawyer types seemed to be asking lots of questions, and revealing little.

I poked around with some law firms in California, and started to pick up the rumor that California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CALPERS) was going to drop the bomb on S&P, Moody’s and Fitch. No one would say anything on the record, but it was clear that litigation was being considered as an option against the Ratings Agencies.

Here is the money quote:

The AAA ratings given by the agencies “proved to be wildly inaccurate and unreasonably high,” according to the suit, which also said that the methods used by the rating agencies to assess these packages of securities “were seriously flawed in conception and incompetently applied…”

“The ratings agencies no longer played a passive role but would help the arrangers structure their deals so that they could rate them as highly as possible,” according to the Calpers suit.

Now, here comes the fun part: Calpers doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the money. Sure, the financial instruments at hand (Cheyne Finance, Stanfield Victoria Funding and Sigma Finance) have  defaulted on their payment obligations. The losses to Calpers are ~!$1 billion.

But that’s not what’s going on here: These Left Coasters want their pound of flesh. They don’t care for the Ratings Agency folks, and consider them a blight on the investment landscape.

The goal of the litigation (as I see it) isn’t to make the rating agencies pay a financial penalty; rather, it is to publicly try them just as the regulatory rules are being rewritten. I also predict that CALPERS is going to attempt to not just win, but humiliate these agencies, call them out in the most embarrassing way possible, trash the senior executives, and make things very uncomfortable in general for these firms.

They don’t want them to merely suffer — they want to destroy their unique position as an Oligopoly, to remove them from having a special status under the SEC rules.

In these sorts of litigations, plaintiff can be very often bought off cheaply. In this case, that won’t happen. An offer a few million dollars — or a few 100 million — won’t tempt them into taking the money and going away. They have as much money as they need to finance this litigation to the long, drawn out, bitter end.

If I was a Rating Agency lawyer, I would be very, very nervous . . .

Some of the additional details: …

Continue reading.

Take a look. There are quite a few experiments in the menu at the right, and it opens with an ice bomb (completely fill a cast-iron container with water, tightly screw in the top, then drop it into a mix of acetone and dry ice and stand back).

Spencer Ackerman:

More from the White House’s letter objecting to certain provisions in the fiscal 2010 defense authorization. I thought this deserved to be quoted in full:

Interrogation Duties:  The Administration objects to section 823 in its current form, which would prohibit contractor personnel from interrogating persons detained during or in the aftermath of hostilities under any circumstances.  In some limited cases, a contract interrogator may possess the best combination of skills to obtain critical intelligence and this provision, therefore, could prevent U.S. Forces from conducting lawful interrogations in the most effective manner.  The Administration fully supports the application of ordinary Defense Department rules and regulations to contractors engaged in interrogations (as contemplated in subsection (a)(2) of the current section 823), and could support a revised version of the section that would apply such provisions to contractors who participate in interrogations.  The Administration also would object to any amendment requiring video recording of all intelligence interrogations. Although the Administration is open to studying a possible video recording requirement, implementing a mandatory requirement at this time would be imprudent, unduly burdensome, and could risk significant unintended consequences in current and future military operations.

Emphasis added. CIA Director Leon Panetta banned contractor involvement in CIA interrogations. Why should contractors be acceptable in military interrogators? After all, the military has a more robust interrogation capability than CIA does. And this video provision is also noteworthy. As a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama was instrumental in requiring police interrogations to be videotaped, which was both a civil liberties and a quality-control measure.

From the Center for American Progress:

Judge Sonia Sotomayor is well-qualified to serve as a Supreme Court Justice, with more federal judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in 100 years. Her loyalty to settled law is, in the words of the Congressional Research Service, "the most consistent characteristic of Sotomayor’s approach as an appellate judge." And she is tremendously popular; Americans overwhelmingly support her confirmation to the nation’s highest court. Even Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), in a surprising moment of candor, told Sotomayor that she would be confirmed "unless you have a complete meltdown." Yet, as Sotomayor’s elevation to the Court grows increasingly inevitable, conservatives are the ones melting down. They are using Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings to hurl more and more desperate attacks.

A TAINTED LEADER: In what may be the biggest strategic blunder since Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) chose Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election, Republicans selected Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) as their point person on the Sotomayor hearing. Sessions, whose own nomination to the federal bench was rejected by the Senate in 1986, has a long history of controversial statements about race. He once quipped that he "used to think [the KKK] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers." He routinely referred to an African-American attorney who worked for him as "boy," and he once warned that attorney to "be careful what you say to white folks" after Sessions overheard him chastising a white secretary. Yesterday, at Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing, Sessions wondered aloud how Sotomayor could have voted differently than another judge of "Puerto Rican ancestry." So, it’s odd that conservatives would pick this man as their leading voice against the first Latina nominated to the Supreme Court. The selection suggests that Senate conservatives wholeheartedly embrace Sessions’ views on race.

Read the rest of this entry »