May 2009 archive

I figured I’d look to the bloggers in the diversosphere I admire most when it came to the Sonia Sotomayor nomination, so I checked out the blogs of the editors of the recently received NAM Journalism award for journalism in ethnic media, Sanctuary.

Sure enough, Manny, from Latino Politico and Nezua from The Unapologetic Mexican had something to say.

From Manny:

I could go into how excited I am to see a Latina be considered for the SCOTUS, the first in this country’s history and only the third woman (because I am beaming), but the buzz-kill has been rather abrupt from the seeing this accomplished and competent judge attacked for those very things that I consider a source of pride.

It should be a source of pride to everyone.

Conservatives like to talk about bootstraps and how important it is to refrain from whining about ones situation. Well…Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t be a finer example of putting the nose to the grindstone despite all the societial odds stacked against you and making it.

But as we’ll see in the coming days, she is an “intellectual lightweight” despite having a long and stellar career on the bench. She will be attacked as a person of color who has the audacity to uphold affirmative action laws not because they’re the law, but because she’s looking out for her people. The media’s whiteness will show in all its unholy glory.

An example of this mindset can be found during today’s broadcast on NPR’s Morning Edition. Ed Whalen, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wasted no time on getting that talking point out into the mix right at the onset. There will be no holds barred with this nomination process.

The conservative movement’s success at derailing Sotomayor’s placement on the Supreme Court is hinged on causing white backlash against her identity and making her out to be a token latina/affirmative action candidate instead of the qualified, capable judge that she has proven to be over the years.

As a blunt blogger friend of mine likes to say, “Bet on it.”

So you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  If you don’t succeed, you haven’t pulled yourself up by your bootstraps.  If you succeed, you will never be good enough.  Meh.

     Fact: Of the 3 people who the Bush/Cheney Regime admits to waterboarding, American citizen Jose Padilla, who is accused of planning to obtain and detonate a dirty nuclear bomb in the USA has been imprisoned on American soil since May 8, 2002. They even put him on trial here. His case was heard by the Supreme Court, the highest court in the empire.

    The strange thing is, the WMD that Padilla was accused of seeking was never found, have yet to surface and can not be proven through evidence.

    That whole evidence thing isn’t such a big deal though since we have denied American citizen Jose Padilla his Constitutional rights to a trial by jury.

    Oh. About Jose Padilla. Did I mention he is almost certainly insane by now? 7 years of solitary confinement, torture and long periods of induced sensory deprivation will do that to a person over time, give or take a few years.

Yippee, I’m getting ready to hit the road again…Is Willie Nelson popular in Europe, do you know his song, On The Road Again.  It always goes through my head since my Dad always sings it when we’re heading out.  I think I left some pictures of him and his motorcycle “Ol Blue” in an earlier essay, but its a catchy tune and its been going through my head with increasing frequency.

It appears we had a f..king religious nut as President who lied to obtain support for the invasion of Iraq in order to bring the end times closer. Cheney and Rumsfeld manupulated the “boy king” by playing to his religious delusions.

Former President George Bush explained to then-President of France Jacques Chirac that that the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Mid-East and must be defeated.  It apears that Bush told Chirac that invasion of Iraq was willed by God in order to usher in the “end times.”

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins“.

Counterpunch: Bush’s Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to “Erase” Mid-East Enemies “Before a New Age Begins”

More, after the fold.  

Election reform is one of the most important issues facing our country and our world right now, even if it doesn’t get the coverage of torture or abortion.  The way that we run our elections and initiative processes determines who makes policy, the type of policy made, and the tone of our political discourse.  If we ignore it or take advantage of the electoral system, we our doing ourselves and our republic a disservice.

This week:  The results to last week’s poll, a lawsuit to ban electronic voting, “The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny,” online voting in Honolulu, the Progressive Party makes progress, photo ID laws, Sotomayor’s election law history, the disappearance of secretaries of state, and more.

But first, I want to say something about Prop 8 and the recent court ruling.  It is outrageous that gay people in California now do not have equal rights, but the court ruling was more on how the initiative process works, and how Prop 8 fits into the state constitution than it was about gay rights.  There has been a lot of oversimplification of the issues of the court ruling and the initiative process, so I’d like to dispel some of that (as much as an amateur election reform activist can…).  Please follow me below the fold.

Crossposted at Dailykos.com, Opednews.com, and Congressmatters.com

(reprinted from a comment in Buhdy’s essay.)

After reading today’s Prop 8 opinion, the court’s ruling is not nearly as bad as some have made it sound.

   Instead, the measure carves out a narrow and limited exception to these state constitutional rights, reserving the official designation of the term “marriage” for the union of opposite-sex couples as a matter of state constitutional law, but leaving undisturbed all of the other extremely significant substantive aspects of a same-sex couple’s state constitutional right to establish an officially recognized and protected family relationship and the guarantee of equal protection of the laws.



   By clarifying this essential point, we by no means diminish or minimize the significance that the official designation of “marriage” holds for both the proponents and opponents of Proposition 8; indeed, the importance of the marriage designation was a vital factor in the majority opinion’s ultimate holding in the Marriage Cases, supra, 43 Cal.4th 757, 845-846, 855. Nonetheless, it is crucial that we accurately identify the actual effect of Proposition 8 on same-sex couples’ state constitutional rights, as those rights existed prior to adoption of the proposition, in order to be able to assess properly the constitutional challenges to the proposition advanced in the present proceeding. We emphasize only that among the various constitutional protections recognized in the Marriage Cases as available to same-sex couples, it is only the designation of marriage – albeit significant – that has been removed by this initiative measure.

Basically, the court is saying that same sex couples can have all of the same rights and privileges afforded to straight couples; they just can’t call it ‘marriage’.  Not the ideal outcome obviously, but in terms of legal protections for same sex couples, the court’s ruling neuters the potential effect of Prop. 8 to mere semantics.

1. The Washington Post reports a Showdown looms on use of ‘state secrets’. Despite promises by President Obama to limit the use of “state secrets”, the Department of Justice is being criticized by “a federal judge in California overseeing a case that has delved deeper than any other into one of the government’s most highly classified data-gathering programs.”

   The Obama administration has invoked the state-secrets privilege in resisting a lawsuit filed by an Oregon charity whose attorneys may have been subjected to warrantless wiretapping. Late Friday, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker issued a terse order that raised the prospect of “sanctions” for government lawyers who have not responded to his order for a plan for how the case should proceed. The sanctions may include awarding monetary damages to the charity, the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation…

   The Haramain case is one of the national security battles left over from George W. Bush’s presidency. Civil liberties groups and left-leaning members of Congress have used the matter to argue that Obama’s approach as president conflicts with his campaign promises of transparency.

Four at Four continues with an update from Pakistan, bombing deaths in Afghanistan, and a surge in Social Security claims.

Welcome to the 11th in the Dog’s letter writing campaign for torture accountability. This the basic premise of this campaign is the Dog writes a letter which the user can then use as a jumping off point for their own letter or cut and paste to send under their own name. In previous weeks we have written to the President, AG Holder, the Supreme Court Justices, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid.