Can things get still worse in Washington?
Yes, they can. And they will, if the Supreme Court decides for corporations and against real human beings and their democracy in a case the Court will be hearing today, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
Wake up, people! Wake up! The Sotomayor hearings are done now, and - with apologies to Gerald Ford - our long national naptime is over.
For twenty or thirty years now, this country has maintained two absurd fictions when it comes to American jurisprudence and the process of selecting the members of our national courts. Both of these grand national lies were reaffirmed last week, as if the legal principle of stare decisis - roughly, maintaining the status quo - had now metastasized into a rigid political one as well. What a joke.
If you read the liberal blogosphere, you know about Senator Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions's history of dubious racial statements.
If you're following on most of the mainstream media, you don't. You
might even buy the Alabama Republican's not-so-subtle assertion that
Sotomayor is a "racist" -- discriminating against whites -- while
Sessions is above any considerations of color.
In over three years of researching and reporting about the prisoners
held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, I learned early on to expect, as one of
Guantánamo's first commanders, Maj. Gen.
Once an election is done, it is hard to undo.
That's true in Iran, and it's also true in the United States.
This is why it is important to get the rules by which elections are held right before elections are held.
For this reason, one of the essential components of the Voting Rights
Act -- arguably its most powerful tool for combating discrimination and
disenfranchisement -- has long been a requirement that officials get
approval from the Department of Justice before they change the way in
which elections are conducted.
OK, let’s get this right: Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is making the rounds of the Capitol this week and some jackasses are still saying she has to explain her
Last week's press coverage of Judge
Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court was gruesome in so many ways, as reporters
routinely fell down and failed to reflect even the most basic tenets of
journalism.
The president's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme
Court has come during a most awkward time in the history of U.S.
journalism, which many analysts claim is in serious decline, if not on
life support.
What her nomination clearly shows us is that what this nation needs is
more incisive journalism, not less. Yet, to be sure, the rise of
right-wing media, which include FOX News and virtually all the known
right-wing radio talk show hosts, is the antithesis of journalism.
The Republicans are still frozen in
fight-or-flight at the precipice of race. President Obama's nomination
of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has leading members of the GOP
peering down, looking nervously at each other, deciding whether they
should follow Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, and their
audiences into the abyss, or whether any of them will spread their arms
in a blocking motion to slowly move everyone back to political sanity.
On Friday, court-watchers received some deeply depressing news - 33
pages of unconstitutional hogwash directed at the Supreme Court by
President Obama's Justice Department (PDF),
in which no stone of dubious legality was left unturned in the
administration's desperate and unprincipled attempts to mimic its
predecessors by preventing 17 Uighurs at Gua
