TBT: The Brutal Truth

Samuel Alito was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice on Tuesday, surviving one of the narrowest Senate confirmation votes in a century to become the second conservative put on the court by President Bush.

Alito took the constitutional and judicial oaths from Chief Justice John Roberts, Bush's first Supreme Court appointee, in a private ceremony at the court, a spokeswoman said.

Bush appointed Roberts and Alito after promising to select justices in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the court's two most conservative members. The choice of Alito sparked concern among Democrats and some liberal groups that his former stands against abortion and on other hot-button social issues would push the court to the right.

After weeks of debate, the Senate confirmed Alito, 55, a federal appeals judge since 1990, on a largely party-line vote of 58-42, making him the 110th member of the nation's highest court.

Hey, I have a question. Why, when people say 'I swear,' are they often admonished with 'don't swear'? Or when asked to swear, some people won't? Is this a religious thing, like you're only supposed to swear about things pertaining to Jesus? When I was little I thought it was because 'swear' also means bad words, and bad words are bad. Like that girl on my soccer team who would scold me for saying 'Oh my God,' and even 'oh my gosh,' because it starts with the same letter. I had to carpool with that bitch. Either way, please, riddle me that.

"The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections," said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who advised Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. "The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left."

WTF does that mean? So the only thing we represent to this nitwit is a couple of cans of Red Bull and a shit load of ATM machines.

In his 2000 campaign, George Bush promised to bring “dignity” to the White House… but we’ve since found that he brought Jack Abramoff instead.

Understand this, congressional Democrats, and understand it well: you are not dealing merely with a body of political opponents in the GOP. You are dealing with a group of people that want you exterminated politically. The days of walking the halls of the Rayburn Building, sharing a bourbon with a colleague from the other side of the aisle, and hammering out a compromise are as dead as Julius Caesar. Collegiality is out. Mutual respect is out. They want you gone for good. Erased. Destroyed.

And you have been far too polite about this. The writing has been on the wall for a while now. Back in 1995, Republican Senator Phil Gramm said, "We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs." That was eleven years ago. If you listen close, you can hear the beasts baying in the distance, waiting to slip the leash.

Dogs of war and men of hate
With no cause, we don't discriminate
Discovery is to be disowned
Our currency is flesh and bone
Hell opened up and put on sale
Gather 'round and haggle
For hard cash, we will lie and deceive
Even our masters don't know the webs we weave

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world

Invisible transfers, long distance calls,
Hollow laughter in marble halls
Steps have been taken, a silent uproar
Has unleashed the dogs of war
You can't stop what has begun
Signed, sealed, they deliver oblivion
We all have a dark side, to say the least
And dealing in death is the nature of the beast

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world

The dogs of war don't negotiate
The dogs of war won't capitulate,
They will take and you will give,
And you must die so that they may live
You can knock at any door,
But wherever you go, you know they've been there before
Well winners can lose and things can get strained
But whatever you change, you know the dogs remain.

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told Republican Party activists on Friday night that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito was the "worst nightmare of liberal Democrats."

On the same day that Osama Bin Laden's chilling warnings make it Red Alert clear that Bush's obsession with Iraq has not made us safer here at home -- and, indeed, has caused us to take our eye off the real enemy -- the Dems decide that the charge against Bush shouldn't be led by someone who can forcefully articulate why the GOP is not the party that can best keep us safe, but by someone whose only claim to fame is that he carried a red state.

Talk about clueless.

I know I've said this before and before, but the Democrats will never become the majority party until they can prove to the American people that they have a better plan for keeping us safe. And that means having someone like Jack Murtha give the State of the Union response -- someone with the authority to make the point that, on every level, Iraq is the wrong priority. And that the hundreds of billions already spent on Iraq (and the countless billions to come) would be better spent shoring up our ports, roadways, railways, securing our nuclear installations and chemical plants, and properly supporting our first responders.

I've always been somewhat reluctant to come down hard on homosexuals (in social situations with other church-goers or with my Republican friends at political events). I'm just not the type to judge others out of spite. I've never really known anyone close to me that's gay, although I've met a few people here and there at my work that later I was told were.

Last weekend, I was in Dallas and - to make a long story short - I ended up "having" to see this film. It definitely was NOT my choice to do so, but to avoid a confrontation, I relented. Everybody makes this sort of compromise sooner or later, right? If the film we wanted to see hadn't been sold out, I don't think I'd ever have seen "Brokeback Mountain."

It's been four days since I saw the film, and progressively, day after day, I have been forced to admit that I am ashamed of the way I felt about homosexuals. I literally had no concept of what life is truly like for these individuals, and must continue to be. In my heart I know that good, wholesome, long-standing friends of mine - true-believing Christians - have made life horrible for these people when they go out of their way to bad mouth them behind their backs (no one I know I think would get in someone's face), tell their children homosexuals are going to Hell, etc etc.

I can't explain what I'm feeling, but I haven't had this kind of doubt (about the church I go to) since I made the decision a long, long time ago to leave the family business against my father's wishes. I also didn't go into the same branch of the armed forces that he went into. Which is another story. In a way, I guess, my own personal history and my relationship with a disapproving (and uneducated) father somehow made me "get" what Heath Ledger's character goes through. Let me just say that a lot of heartache was involved. The God I believe in, that I teach my kids to trust, would never wish the kind of pain that I went through on anyone, which really I now know for real, is the same kind of pain homosexuals must go through just to live what for them is an honest life, and the choice they must make. I'd never had my eyes opened to this before, not ONE IOTA.

Tonight, winding down, I said a little prayer. It was more or less the same thing that's been going round and round inside my head since I saw this movie... who am I to judge? I honestly was trembling at one point during the credits before we got up to leave, and I had to struggle to re-gain my composure. Now that I am remembering that, it reminds me of the way I trembled when I first asked God to forgive me of my sins and accept me as I am.

"Brokeback Mountain" humbled me.

... many establishment journalists have raging contempt for the blogosphere. It is a contempt grounded in the fallacy of credentialism and a pseudo-elitist belief that only the approved and admitted members of their little elite journalist club can be trusted to enlighten the masses. Many of them see blogs as a distasteful and anarchic sewer, where uncredentialed and irresponsible people who are totally unqualified to articulate opinions are running around spewing all sorts of uninformed trash. And these journalistic gate-keepers become especially angry when blogospheric criticism is directed towards other establishment journalists, who previously were immune from any real public accountability.

Glenn Greenwald, whose stuff is often excellent, has unleashed a breathtakingly misguided attack at The New Republic today. As one would expect, it's getting many a link, and those who long ago decided The New Republic a festering tumor attached to our body politic are excitedly congratulating Glenn for his bit of amateur surgery. But while the operation is technically impressive (no one disputes Greenwald's ability to turn a phrase), we're dealing with some serious malpractice here ...

Here's a media critic's first lesson: "many" is a warning flag, a dodge, the most obvious and troubling sign of a trend piece. Many is not a percentage and it's not a list of names, it's an assumption masked as a measurement. And the next step for "many" is to become one: a singular (or single digit) example touted as an oft-replicated template.

Perhaps my favorite part of this utterly inane attack is the commenter who opines, "Schmidt's getting paid like Armstrong Williams got paid." How does somone (sic) so stupid manage to operate a computer?

"Tim Robbins, who thinks he can say any thing at any time . . . I have a question: How is it that Tim Robbins is still walking free? How in the world is this guy still able to go to the National Press Club and say whatever he wants to say?

I've been a newspaper journalist for 22 years, Ezra, and I'm with Glenn: Our industry has worried far too much about credentials and not enough about the goods.

Now, worrying about credentials in other fields is certainly appropriate; indeed, the administration's outright hostility toward those with credentials is a big part of why we're in the mess we're in. But journalism isn't public health or intelligence analysis or (need it even be said?) rocket science. Anyone who's reasonably logical and analytical, and a good writer, can function reasonably well as a journalist.

"This is aimed at international communications involving someone who is associated with al Qaeda. This is about connecting the dots and preventing attacks from happening," McClellan said. "It is a vital tool in our efforts to preventing further attacks inside the United States."

DS: The ACLU seems to be targeted for misinformation by the theocratic element of the GOP: Do you as an Independent sense an organized effort to undermine and/or eliminate the ACLU, and if so, who, what, where, and why?

EB: Oh, absolutely there is. The ACLU is a convenient boogeyman for a wide range of groups and it is very useful as a fundraising tool. Bear in mind what I said before about politics being now largely an exercise in marketing. One of the principal tools of marketing is fear. People are afraid and insecure in all sorts of situations and marketers exploit that to sell products. Afraid of bad breath that might make you lose that date with the girl you like? Don't worry, just buy our product and your breath will be minty fresh. And we'll sell you zit cream and teeth whitening toothpaste and weight loss products and even new cars using essentially the same techniques. And the same thing is true in political marketing. There's that great line in the movie The American President where one politician says of his opponent, "Whatever your problems are, I promise you that Bob Rumson isn't the least bit interested in solving them. Bob Rumson is interested in two things - making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections." And that is indeed how elections are won these days.

For a wide range of religious right leaders - Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and many others - the ACLU has become, quite literally, their meal ticket. By blaming the ACLU for the moral rot in America, they scare simple-minded folks who long for a mythical past when everything was so much better and induce them to send in money to protect them from this boogeyman. And it wouldn't bother me nearly so much if the marketing campaign was not so deceitful.

DS: What's an example of distorting or lying about the ACLU that we hear too often from the right?

EB: Oh boy, I can think of lots of them. I'll give you a general example ... In the early 90s there was a Supreme Court case called Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches. It involved a church in New York that wanted to rent a public school auditorium to show a series of films. The school district had a policy that community groups could rent their facilities after school hours, but not churches or religious groups. The church filed suit and they were represented by the American Center for Law and Justice, Pat Robertson's legal group headed by Jay Sekulow. They won the case, as well they should have. But when the case was over and they had won, Jay Sekulow went on the 700 Club and talked to Pat Robertson and they proclaimed that this case was a "great victory against the ACLU." There was only one problem with that - the ACLU was on their side in the case. The ACLU had submitted an amicus brief on behalf of the plaintiffs arguing that the school district's policy was an unconstitutional restriction on free speech and should be voided.

Another example, and more recent, involves Jerry Falwell. In a nationally syndicated column last year, Falwell discussed a case in Massachusetts where a group of students were suspended from school for handing out candy canes with religious messages attached to them on a little card at Christmas time. In that column, Falwell said that students have the right to pass out religious literature "no matter what the ACLU says." But here again, this was highly dishonest. Not only was the ACLU on the same side in the case, it was the ACLU who wrote a letter to the principal on behalf of these very same students telling him that the suspension was unconstitutional, that the students had every right to distribute the candy canes and that if the decision was not reversed they would be filing a suit. The school reversed its position as a result of that letter, lifted the suspension and apologized to the students.

One could easily go on all day with similar examples. The fact is that the ACLU has consistently defended the rights of Christians to exercise their religion freely. They have defended the rights of street preachers to preach on public sidewalks and public property all over the nation, from Indiana to Washington to Las Vegas to New Mexico. They have defended the right of churches to perform baptisms in public parks. They have defended churches against zoning restrictions that are an undue burden on them, including defending Jerry Falwell himself against the city of Lynchburg in a case against a city zoning regulation that forbid his church from owning more than a certain amount of property.

... LIVING IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!!!

The IRS has frozen refunds for hundreds of thousands of low-income taxpayers without telling them they're being investigated for tax fraud or giving them a chance to defend themselves, the IRS taxpayer advocate said Tuesday.

In a blistering report to Congress, Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson said complaints about unpaid tax refunds have soared more than 400% since 2002. Sixty-six percent of those who complained were entitled to a full refund, an investigation by her office found. An additional 14% were determined to be eligible for a partial refund, Olson says.

So, John I guess I've figured you out. I wonder if the rest of your poster's really know who you are, what your about and who you really work for. They will know very soon whom you work for John. You work for the Government. You allow all these anti-war, anti-Bush posts at C L for the sole purpose for these posters to rounded up later and arrested. That free publicity about C L was just to get more people at your site. We are to Mr. Amato, if that is your real name, and very soon you will be exposed for the fraud that you are.