Brilliant Politics

As Charles Blow points out in the New York Times, Chief Justice John Roberts made racist and sexist jokes in memos while working for Ronald Reagan.

The former Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, had worked as a young man to make it more difficult for blacks and Hispanics to vote in Arizona.

Furthermore, Rehnquist had been a Republican ballot protectionist in Phoenix when he was younger. As the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen correctly noted in 1986: Rehnquist “helped challenge the voting qualifications of Arizona blacks and Hispanics. He was entitled to do so. But even if he did not personally harass potential voters, as witnesses allege, he clearly was a brass-knuckle partisan, someone who would deny the ballot to fellow citizens for trivial political reasons — and who made his selection on the basis of race or ethnicity.”

But white guys on the Supreme Court don’t have any biases or prejudices, right? They are objective, right?

-CDP

After just 6 seconds of mild waterboarding, conservative Chicago radio jock, Mancow Muller, changes his mind and declares that waterboarding is torture. Now if only Sean Hannity had the cojones to accept Keith Olbermann’s offer:  $1000 for each second that Hannity can tolerate waterboarding will go to a charity of Hannity’s choosing. That would be entertainment!

Photovoltaic Tree in Styria, Austria

The clean energy future that is emerging will include many types of “distributed generation,” or small and local sources of alternative energy.

The photo is courtesy of Anna Regelsberger on Wikipedia Commons.

-CDP

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele wants you to be very, very afraid. He told an NRA gathering yesterday that Democrats want to take your guns away and move terrorists into your neighborhoods.

Andrew Sullivan is essential reading on the devolution of the Republican Party and how the systematic use of torture and illegal surveilliance has degraded American democracy. I quote him at length below because this passage is a concise summing up of what has happened to the Republican party:

Bill Kristol provides a curtain-raiser for a Cheney speech next week that promises to entrench the notion that the Republican party is the Torture Party.

As always, Kristol’s sole principle seems to be the wielding of power. He, like Cheney, is beginning to understand that history is beginning to gel around the assumption that the Bush-Cheney administration presided over the worst attack on US soil in history and failed to capture or bring to justice any of its perpetrators, put the next generation into unparalleled and unsustainable debt, did nothing to combat climate change, viciously opposed the civil rights movement of its time, shrunk the GOP to one in five voters, precipitated the worst recession since the 1930s, took the US into two grueling, unwinnable wars, humiliated the US at the UN with fatally flawed intelligence for war in Iraq, and destroyed the credibility and endurance of the Geneva Conventions, thus ensuring that future captured Americans will be tortured with no recourse….

If Kristol and Cheney believe that conservatism should become the political philosophy that gives the executive branch absolute power to tap any phone without a warrant, seize anyone in the US or world, deny them any due process and torture them for “intelligence”, then they are welcome to do so. But at some point, surely, decent conservatives who believe that the West’s defense does not need a police state and a torture regime will fight back. At some point, surely, some conservatives will advocate a sane intelligence-gathering policy and an adult understanding that total security is impossible in a free and interconnected world – and that only unscrupulous, cynics pretend otherwise for the goal of manipulating public fears for political advantage.

Or are they all still as bullied by Rove and Cheney and Kristol as they were for the eight years these goons ran their party and their country into the ground?

Paul Bockwoldt talks about joining his gay brother’s rugby team (the team is mostly gay) as a way to get closer to his brother.

Daniel Beaty, a classmate of my stepson’s at Yale in the late 90′s, gives a riveting performance on Def Poetry Jam:

Editor’s Note: This commentary of mine was broadcast on public radio, WBFO, in Buffalo, New York on May 12, 2009. You can listen to the audio here, on the WBFO website.

I was driving home one day in May 2007 when my cell phone rang. It was the Communications Director of the Iowa Democratic Party returning my call about the upcoming Democratic political dinner in Cedar Rapids. She said that my blog, Brilliant Politics, had not been published long enough to qualify for press credentials, but . that I sounded like a nice guy, so she would grant credentials for me and my photographer, Martin Saunders.

When we arrived at the hotel in Cedar Rapids, the lobby was buzzing with journalists, film crews, and political bigwigs. We stepped onto an elevator with Senator Tom Harkin. I said to him that we were from Brilliant Politics and he replied, “Brilliant Politics …that’s an oxymoron. I’ve never seen that animal.” The hallways were jammed with hordes of volunteers chanting slogans that echoed off walls plastered from floor to ceiling with campaign posters. Press scrums mobbed Bill Richardson, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton. I asked Edwards a question about global warming and captured his answer on my new digital voice recorder. Later we chatted amiably with our fellow reporters at the press table. We were now members of the press because…well…we had asked to be. (more…)