Alito is now at the end of the tunnel

By Jason Satek - Columnist

     With the smoke clearing from the latest Supreme Court nomination, a successful elevation of Samuel Alito, the legal world may calm for a period. The 58 to 42 vote seemed to fall within party lines, with a few exceptions: Democrat Senators Byrd (W.V.), Conrad (N.D.), Nelson (Neb.) and Johnson (S.D.) are all up for re-election in the next two years from states that Bush/Cheney carried in 2004. The only Republican defection, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, may be the most affected; an associate termed this vote “Lose-Lose” as Chafee faces a primary fight from the right and the prospect of a tough general tussle in an increasingly Democrat-trending state.
   The 42 votes against would have been enough to rebuff cloture if they had remained a solid voting bloc, but the attempt went down 75 to 25 on the day before, ending any hopes for filibuster. John Kerry’s attempt to be the cavalry, riding to the rescue of the hardcore opponents of Alito and consequently bolster his chance to be a repeat nominee for president in 2008, bucking a trend of one-and-done since Adlai Stevenson in 1956, fell flat. Whether the cause was fear of the “nuclear option,” inability to get “the goods” on Alito during the process, or some other reason, the filibuster gambit came so late in the game that it seemed destined for kabuki drama or moral victory status.
    Sour-grapes comments by Senator Kennedy, “There is no consensus that he will allow the court to perform its vital role in continuing the march of progress toward justice and equal opportunity,” always make me wonder how any partisan can interact on the cocktail party circuit:
   Senator- Well, hello Justice X. Sorry about those comments about you being a raving bigot and making your children cry. Just shoring up my political base, don’t you know. What are you doing? Put down that punchbowl! No! Stop! Aieeeeeeeeeeeeee!
   Well, not like that to be certain, but we are unlikely to ever see an electoral activism reaction like that of Charles Evans Hughes. A former Cornell law professor and governor of New York, Hughes was nominated for the Supreme Court in 1910 by William Howard Taft. After serving six years as an Associate Justice, Hughes resigned the position to become the compromise Republican presidential candidate to challenge incumbent Woodrow Wilson. “The Bearded Iceberg,” as Theodore Roosevelt referred to him, allegedly went to bed thinking he was victorious only to find in the morning that California, and by it the election, had gone against him. After a stint as Secretary of State among other positions, Hughes was appointed to replace his old boss Taft as Chief Justice in 1930 by Herbert Hoover, concluding perhaps the best illustrative argument against the “non-political” nature of our highest court.
   Arguments for court balance are traceable to a minority party. Was balance the subject when Franklin Roosevelt picked nine justices over an 11-year period and tried to increase the number of total justices to defuse opposition? Not likely.
   Court appointments could and probably should become a bigger election plank, as litigation seems to challenge legislation as the tool of choice for change. President Bush may not be done, and this is in no part a reference to Ann Coulter’s crack about Justice Stevens and poisoned crème brulée.
   Stevens turns 86 this April; Oliver Wendell Holmes was the oldest active justice, retiring at 90. Records are meant to be broken, and I’m certain I could find more than a few individuals fervently hoping to attend that birthday party.

What don't we know about Bush's wiretap program

By Ron Felten - Columnist

Before I get too deep into this, I’d like to remind everyone that President Bush took our country to war in Iraq based on principles embodied in what has come to be referred to as a group of “16 words” in his 2003 State of the Union address.
“The British government,” Bush said, “has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Since then, former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer has said that “the information on yellow cake [a slightly processed form of uranium]” was “incorrect” and, further, former CIA Director George Tenet has said that these “16 words should never have been included in the text” of Bush’s speech and that the British intelligence reports the president was citing were “inconclusive.”
Despite UN weapons inspectors not being able to find a trace of WMDs in their many searches of Iraq, the president pressed on with his plan to invade the country in March of 2003 and proceeded to overthrow Hussein, the man who, Bush says, “tried to kill my dad.” This illegal war of aggression, as the leaked Downing Street Memo of 2002 illustrates, was Dubya’s plan all along.
This memo (originally published by the UK’s Sunday Times), which is a transcription of meeting minutes from a session between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his administration’s higher-ups, reveals that as early as mid-2002 “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
The U.S., the document continues to note, “had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”
It was only after the “Coalition of the Willing” invaded Iraq and, as administration critics (and those with a little common sense) had predicted, found no trace of these weapons that Bush earnestly began his campaign of revisionist history.
In his State of the Union address last week, Bush continued his rhetorical whitewashing. He talked a little about Iraq (though he never referred to Hussein by name) and, interestingly, twice mentioned the still at-large Osama bin Laden.
“Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder,” Bush said, “and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously.” I’m sure all of us – Democrats, Republicans, Independents, etc. – will agree with that. But I have a consequent question: Why are we not dedicating more resources to our efforts to capture bin Laden? Why has he been allowed to go on terrorizing the rest of the world – the deadly Al-Qaeda attacks in Madrid and the UK come to mind – while we spend absurd amounts of money (not to mention the cost in human lives) doing whatever it is we’re doing in Iraq? (Even Bush has denied a connection between Iraq and the September 11 terrorist attacks.)
Again, Bush has muddied the waters, so to speak, around the truth of our involvement in Iraq. First it was the weapons of mass destruction. Then, after the American people collectively called him on that lie, Bush decided we were there to “raise up a new democracy.” Now, of course, we’re there also to fight a “terrorist insurgency,” which happily rode into the country on our military’s coattails.
Bush is big on these buzzwords (e.g. “terrorism,” “mass murder,” etc.). And none is seemingly more effective than his favorite: “freedom.” How interesting, then, that while we are supposedly helping to build a free and democratic Iraq (while also protecting it from evil-doers and searching for WMDs), we are systematically losing our liberties here at home.
I wrote last week about the current wiretapping scandal so, today, I’d like to share a little bit of information with you regarding another one of our rights that seems to be quickly disappearing. Like our unprotected and consequently non-existent privacy, our Constitutional right to free speech is also being challenged by Bush and his administration.
Kevin Zeese, a registered Green Party member and also a card-carrying Libertarian who is running for a Maryland U.S. Senate seat this year, wrote in an open letter to Senator Paul Sarbanes in December that the latest version of the Patriot Act, which is pending renewal as of this writing, aims to further silence dissent here in the US.
“Section 602 of the Conference Committee's version of [the] Patriot Act,” Zeese writes, “makes holding an un-authorized sign at a Democratic or Republican National Convention, a Presidential or Vice Presidential appearance, and any other event designated by the Secret Service as a ‘national special security event’ a felony punishable by a year imprisonment.” Some “free” society we have here, huh?
As Zeese goes on to ask, “What does holding a sign have to do with national security?” If Bush is as concerned about bin Laden and terrorism as he claims, why is our right to express a dissenting opinion (or a supporting one, for that matter) being stripped away? What’s the connection? And, further, in light of these efforts by our government, how can the U.S. claim to have some kind of moral authority to impose “democracy” on the rest of the world?
But is the corporate American media holding Bush accountable for any of this? For the illegal eavesdropping or silencing of free speech? Of course not. They refuse to cover even some of the most incriminating information, such as the report by conservative blogger (and award-winning journalist) Doug Thompson, who is a freelance writer and photographer for Reuters and the Associated Press, that in a December meeting with his advisors, Bush said, “Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It’s just a [expletive] piece of paper!”
Smoke screens and secret plans, by design, can only remain as such for so long. Eventually, the true agenda comes forth and we, as a citizenry, must decide what course of action is best for us. Next week’s topic: impeachment.

Phoning it in

So Ron it's Right