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Michael Kinsley wonders why The New York Times thinks journalists should get more First Amendment rights than other citizens.
Snip:
The Times believes that its First Amendment right to speak includes a right (for journalists only) not to speak when subpoenaed in a criminal investigation. Meanwhile, it cannot see how a right to speak includes the right to spend money on speech.
Hmmm… Liberals catching on to the faulty logic of campaign-finance reform.
I love it.
McCain ignores his own law. Again.
This is Google Video. Google Video is awesome.
Here’re videos of squirrels.
Here’s a segment Fox News did off of one of my campaign-finance stories.
What a disgusting column…
Since Condoleezza Rice’s family struggled to give her a better life, she can never be authentically black? I suspect she could be authentically black if she were a Democrat. Odd, that.
Well, I’d written this Miers post-mortem for Tech Central Station two weeks ago — minus some minor adjustments — but my editor thought it was too optimistic about the chances for her withdrawal.
So, ahem, now that I’ve been proven right…
The Harriet Miers nomination is dead. Long live the Harriet Miers nomination.
The political fallout from the Miers withdrawal will likely be minor. The Democrats will get a day of Snoopy-dancing, and conservatives will get a day of tearful embraces — brothers and sisters laying down their arms. But the long-term impact on the judicial selection process is (at the risk of being optimistic) likely to be positive.
If nothing else, Miers has proved that the vaunted “stealth nominee” tactic is a game of Russian roulette — not just for the Constitution and the American people years down the line, but for the president pulling the trigger in the here and now.
Sure, with the perfect, straight-A, spotless-attendance, gold-starred, shiny-haired, white-teethed, adorable-childrened, Reagan-White-House-tenured Judge John Roberts, you can get away with it. Conservatives have already forgotten how perplexed and disappointed they were by Bush’s first Supreme Court pick. The sheer glint in his eye and unflappable competence calmed them like a cool, September breeze.
But there just aren’t that many John Robertses in the world, with impeccable resumes and non-existent paper trails, both at the same time. Jokes about cloning John Roberts were made when he was confirmed. Now, conservatives are thinking of lifting Bush’s federal-embryonic-stem-cell-research-funding ban — if it might help the process along.
Withdrawal: It’s a good thing.
As Miers withdraws, another fight for the heart and soul of conservatism proceeds apace in the House and Senate over whether the GOP can rein in big government.
No one should get their hopes up, but they should get to know Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, who has been leading the fight for small government in the House. I sat down with him last Thursday to discuss the current battle and the fight going forward, and here’s my Post column on that lunch.
In short, he doesn’t see any reason the GOP should (or would) keep winning if it keeps moving in its current direction.
Well, we should all say a big thanks to George Will.
UPDATE: In other news…
Oct 27, 2005 — By Deborah Zabarenko
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hugh Hewitt, the conservative talk show host who has made defending an indefensible Supreme Court nominee his life’s mission over the last month, plans to tie himself to the White House fence to protest the Harriet Miers withdrawal.
“I’m going to go to Washington, D.C. and I’m going to give a speech at the White House, and after I do, I’m going to tie myself to the fence and refuse to leave until they agree to resubmit the nomination,” Hewitt said on his radio show this morning as news of the withdrawal sent shockwaves across America.
“And I’ll probably get arrested, and when I get out, I’ll go back and do the same thing,” he said.
Godspeed, Hugh.
My latest column from Tech Central Station, looking at some more parallels between 1994 and 2006.
Excerpt:
Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.) doth protest too much. In a memo sent out to Republican congressmen earlier this month, Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, tried to quell fears that the 2006 midterm elections will turn into a bloodbath for the GOP.
The president’s approval ratings may be at an all time low, and Congress’ might be the worst since right before the Gingrich Revolution, but Reynolds’ message was simple: “The Democrats say we should be worried. But I am NOT.” The capital letters are in the original.
The parallels between 1994 and 2006 keep piling up. Republican denials that there could even possibly be a problem might just be the next piece of the puzzle.
Reynolds makes a couple of solid points as to why Republicans don’t have to break out their emergency pants just yet. The Republican congressional committee has three times as much cash on hand as the Democratic congressional committee; and, as the memo boasts, “redistricting has reduced the overall number of truly competitive congressional races.”
But he also hauls out a chunk of argument that looks increasingly stale and irrelevant: the idea that though voters are exceedingly upset with Congress as a whole they’re still eager to send their own congressmen back to Washington, D.C. Reynolds cites a Pew poll from September showing that 57 percent of Americans would like to see their Congressman returned to office, versus 25 percent who would not.
But if Reynolds or his staff had done any digging into the poll numbers from 1994, he probably wouldn’t have cited the Pew poll — at least not if he wanted to disprove the 1994/2006 connection.
Read on … if you dare …
(Toward the end, I compare Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to lactose-intolerant kittens. It makes sense in context. Well, maybe even out of context it makes sense. Depending on your general disposition toward kittens.)
Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, takes on the rumors of a 2006 GOP Congressional wipeout in this (PDF) Landscape Memo, sent out to members of the Republican conference. People may be pissed at Congress, he acknowledges, but Republicans should be safe because of redistricting and because the Democrats are incompetent.
Now, I’ve never disputed that the Democrats aren’t offering a palatable alternative. But when your enemies’ incompetence is the only thing saving you… you’re working on borrowed time.
I’m also not entirely convinced by this point, though it is an interesting bit of history to keep in mind this year. I quote (the PDF seems to be done as an image, not text — so %$#$^$#^%#$^#$^#@$!$@! annoying — so here’s an image of the relevant passage):
Now, it is worth remembering the 1998 midterm elections — and even, to some extent the 2000 presidential election — to remind Republicans just how ineffective the hammering of Clinton’s sex life was as a political tactic.
But 1998 is the year the GOP ran against Clinton’s sex life. When they ran against him on substantive, size of government issues — as in, say, 1994 — they met with resounding success.
Similarly, the lesson Democrats should take might look something like this: If you try to win Congress based on words like “Halliburton” and “Valerie Plame,” you’ll lose, lose badly and deserve to lose badly; if you find your voice on substantive issues, perhaps even morphing into the party of fiscal discipline (Bush has left that space wide open), you have a shot.
Congressional elections are won on local issues … except for the cycles when they’re not.
Meet Lamb and Lynx, two white-supremacist 13-year-olds who sing.
The Olsen Twins were just softening us up, apparently, for the eventual White Power Revolution.
Good names, though. Good names.
(To the one on the left, though: I wonder what it’s like to be the slightly off-looking white-supremacist twin. Bummer.)
On Monday, I’ll be one of two speakers at a little dinner put on by my Post colleague, Robert George. I’ll be arguing in the negative on the question of whether mandatory spending limits on campaigns would be permissible or desirable.
This issue is, of course, before the Supreme Court this term, as it takes up whether Vermont’s campaign-finance system, which includes mandatory spending limits, is permissible under the Constitution.
At the heart of the matter, as with all campaign-finance arguments, is the question of whether money is speech. That question was addressed eloquently and forcefully by Justice Scalia in his dissent from McConnell v. FEC, and so the text of that dissent is reproduced after the jump.
For background on how the modern campaign-finance-reform lobby (and, yes, it’s a lobby, not a movement) came to exert so much influence, and how it passed McCain-Feingold back in 2002, see my piece here.
Here, free-speech champion and anti-reform legend Brad Smith lays out some of the faulty assumptions behind campaign-finance reform and the perverse consequences that follow from “reform.” (One of those consequences is millionaire and billionaire candidates like Michael Bloomberg in New York City, whose success has led reformers in Gotham to start looking at limits on expenditures.)
There’s a ton more to be found on blogs like Skeptic’s Eye, written by Allison Hayward, who worked under Brad Smith at the FEC.
Also, no one should neglect Bob Bauer’s Web site. Bauer’s a liberal/progressive who’s realized, well ahead of his fellow travelers, that campaign-finance regulation is a dead end.
OK, I already don’t understand the entire concept of pets. If it were up to me, I’d ban all animals from living amongst us — save, say, seeing-eye dogs (at least until seeing-eye-robot dogs are ready to take over).
But why — why in God’s name — would you make it easier for the disease-carrying fur balls to waltz all over your furniture?
The Gallup poll mentioned in my column this morning is already behind their G-ddamned subscription wall. And most news stories today are focusing on the president’s bargain-basement numbers.
But briefly:
Congressional Job Approval
Oct. 13-16, 2005
Approve: 29
Disapprove: 64
Sept. 12-15, 2005
Approve: 35
Disapprove: 59
So, there’s been a serious jump in the disapproval.
Now, onto the polling that was, in many ways, much more interesting. That data comes courtesy of Democracy Corps, a little group founded by James Carville, Stanley Greenberg and Robert Shrum. As I mention in my column, these folks seem to be thinking somewhat seriously about what a Democratic Contract With America would look like.
In their October 2005 Strategy Memo (download the PDF here), they have some data that should be of extreme interest to Republicans. Frank Luntz pointed me to this report, characterizing the numbers as shocking.
For instance, the report finds that:
* Twice as many voters are open to switching to the Democrats as are open to switching to the Republicans.
* An attack based on the idea that the Republicans have brought with them a two-fold increase in the number of corporate lobbyists, able to win tax breaks for oil companies and higher drug prices for pharmaceutical companies, tests through the roof — raising serious doubts about the Republican Party with 71 percent of voters.
* In a congressional contest where the current incumbent is named and faces a generic challenger from the opposition party, Democrats hold a 6-point advantage, 48 to 42 percent. (This is very important because, as I mentioned in my column, generic discontent with Congress is one thing; the willingness to throw your own guy out in favor of the opposing party is quite another.)
Anyway, in short, I’d advise Republicans to read this latest Democracy Corps memo (the Contract stuff starts on page 9) — and perhaps keep checking back there as the 2006 campaign gets under way.
The Republicans may deserve to lose at this point, but they don’t have to keep screwing up. Salvation lies in restoring some measure of fiscal responsibility.
“They need to demonstrate accountability,” Luntz told me. “They need to show they can hold Washington accountable for spending.”
The moderates, the Perot voters: They care about this stuff, even if the Republican establishment wants to pretend they don’t.
Here’s my most recent for The Post. The polls are starting to look like 1994 in reverse, and no less a stalwart than Frank Luntz, architect of the Contract With America (a very different architect than Karl Rove), thinks the GOP is headed for a big kerfuffle.
An excerpt:
October 19, 2005 — ECHOES of 1994 are getting louder. Except that back then hungry Republicans gobsmacked complacent Democrats by taking over Congress with the help of the Contract With America — and this time it’s the Republicans with their fingers in their ears.
The latest wake-up call comes by way of a Gallup poll released yesterday: Public disapproval of Congress is at an astonishing 64 percent. That’s four points higher than in 1994, when the electorate was disgusted by the ruling Democrats after years of scandals and corruption — and ticked off at an increasingly unpopular president and wasteful spending.
So far, most Republican officeholders and party bigwigs are still pretending it’s all just one big bizarre coincidence.
Not Frank Luntz. The pollster, a chief architect of the Contract With America, thinks the threat is clear as a bell. “You have the economic anxiety that existed in 1994,” he told me yesterday, plus the hostility toward elected officials, anger toward Washington and desire for change — all four of the ingredients needed to create a “wave that throws out incumbents.”
As Brendan Miniter notes in this column, the spending hawks in the Republican Study Committee may be receiving the royal treatment these days, but even if we implement most of their proposals, we’re still totally and utterly screwed.
The idea of trimming the fat off government is all well and good. But it’s just kittens and fur. You can shave a cat — in most jurisdictions — but it’s not going to weigh all that much less afterwards.
Of all the budget cuts suggested by the pork-busters in the House, the elimination of the presidential public financing system ought to be among the least controversial. It’s a waste of money, it’s welfare for politicians and it has not moved America one inch, vote or dollar closer to the “clean” elections campaign-finance lobbyists claim they want.
The usual crew has sent the usual outraged letter to Congress. The always delightful Allison Hayward (formerly of the FEC, currently of somewhere hopefully far less dreadful) has some fun picking it apart here.
“Today, Hillary, I need to know if I can count on you to stand by my side in my campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
– Hillary Clinton Senate challenger Jeanine Pirro, in an ill-fated fundraising letter sent to… Hillary Clinton
More: “You and I both know the U.S. Senate isn’t Hillary’s real goal.”
That they do.
I must say I enjoy Roberto Benigni:
ROME, Italy (Reuters) — Oscar winner Roberto Benigni treated Italians watching Saturday’s prime time news show to an impromptu strip tease to mark the release of his new film “The Tiger and the Snow” about the war in Iraq.
Benigni, whose poignant Holocaust film “Life is Beautiful” won the 1998 Oscar for best foreign film, left the newscaster on Italy’s most watched evening news program open-mouthed when he began unbuttoning his shirt during an interview.
…
Prior to removing his shirt, Benigni had already hijacked the opening credits of the 8 p.m. (1800 GMT) news, jumping behind the newscaster and announcing: “Berlusconi has resigned.”
The closest thing we have in America, I suppose, is Robin Williams. But he’s just an unfunny ass.
So, it seems Slate (formerly owned by Microsoft) has it in for the new iPod.
Gawker, however, puts the whole thing in … um … perspective.
Now, OK, Apple is pretty good at hype. And Jack Shafer has a (limited) point regarding press buy-in to Apple hype. But that fact that some of its products aren’t big hits — including some versions of the iPod — really says very little. You can ankle-bite and ankle-bite and ankle-bite, but they still gave the world the freakin’ iPod.
Sure, the iPod Shuffle seems kinda dumb (the lack of display renders it utterly useless in my mind, even though it seems a nice size to use while, say, running). The iPod Photo was a flop. And the iPod Nano, despite the current hype (and it’s being really, really hot), seems pretty pointless to me as well.
But the iPod video idea is a big one. And, as I said a few posts down, the real breakthrough here has little-to-nothing to do with the device itself. I suspect the first ones will have some serious battery-life issues and maybe other problems. The breakthrough is selling music videos and popular TV shows and movies for a few bucks a pop.
The key to the copyright-protection arms race, it seems obvious, is simply keeping the prices low enough so that the average consumer won’t seek out pirated content. This is a great step in the right direction, in that regard. New content is now available for download, and it’s priced to sell. I’m not going to screw around with Lime Wire to get a new episode of Lost (even if someone puts it up there, which, theoretically, they could already do anyway by capturing it off TV) if it’s at the iTunes store for $2.
So, yeah, some products will flop, and some of those flops will be heralded in the press as breakthroughs. The iPod video, however, probably doesn’t fit that bill.
Whereas the well-government and regulating of Printers and Printing Presses is matter of Publique care and of great concernment especially considering that by the general licentiousnes of the late times many evil disposed persons have been encouraged to print and sell heretical schismatical blasphemous seditious and treasonable Bookes Pamphlets and Papers and still doe continue such theire unlawfull and exorbitant practice to the high dishonour of Almighty God the endangering the peace of these Kingdomes and raising a disaffection to His most Excellent Majesty and His Government For prevention whereof no surer meanes can be advised then by reducing and limiting the number of Printing Presses.
Here’s my most recent Post column, in which a longtime supporter of campaign-finance reform argues that the FEC should keep its hands off the Web:
The campaign-finance-reform lobby is launching a new attack on one of our most basic rights.
For more than 200 years, Americans have had the right to operate printing presses without having to get a license from the government. The First Amendment was written to protect against just such depredations of freedom of speech, hallmarks of monarchical tyranny.
…
Take the case of Fired Up. The network of progressive, Democratic-leaning Web sites is petitioning the Federal Election Commission for protection from the nation’s campaign-finance regulations.
The FEC has ruled that big-media companies like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, CBS, etc. enjoy what’s called a “press exemption” from McCain-Feingold — allowing them to support or attack candidates without being prosecuted for making illegal corporate campaign contributions. But it has yet to grant any such protection to blogs and other Web sites not considered part of the traditional media.
The “cleanies” want to make sure they never get it. Thus, the country’s leading campaign-finance-reform groups — Democracy 21, the Campaign Legal Center and the Center for Responsive Politics (all recipients of millions of dollars from left-wing foundations) — are lining up against Fired Up.
“There’s a supreme irony in their viewpoint,” Fired Up founder Roy Temple told me yesterday.
Temple worked alongside Gov. Mel Carnahan in Missouri to pass campaign-finance reform in that state, and he worked with Sen. Jean Carnahan (the governor’s widow) to pass McCain-Feingold. So, he’s no anti-campaign-finance-reform fanatic. But he believes the ‘Net has the power to be more important than any reform.
“Political money is like water, it will find the path of least resistance,” he said. “The more we have a vibrant civic space on the Internet, you will ultimately do more to rebalance the political calculus in this country than any effort to try to control political money.”
Fired Up! America can be found at the link, and that site has links to some state sites.
Certainly, I’m not alone in admiring the iPod video player. My Lord, has there ever been a sexier piece of electronics? I mean, outside of any given mixing board, with all those knobs and buttons and slide-y things…
No music geek can resist a mixing board.
But, back to the iPod video player… This is going to be more revolutionary than even the original iPod. And the significance, it seems to me, has less to do with the machine itself than with the concept of selling individual episodes of popular TV shows, music videos, etc. at a couple bucks a pop. That, more than the ability to watch videos on a tiny, portable, color screen will be the lasting legacy of what Apple has just unleashed.
Already, my badly overworked girlfriend is eager to start downloading episodes of Lost that she’s missed so far this season (how can you live having not seen the “Orientation” episode???). And just to test out the cool new technology, we felt compelled to buy a Kanye West video — you know, the one with that awesome backing vocal track — last night at an extremely bizarre hour. It was really… neat.
Now, I suppose there’s some question how useful the TV downloading function is, given the prevalence of various DVR-type devices and services. But there’s something to be said for catching up on an entire season of Lost on a train or plane ride — whether on your laptop or an iPod. Again, the medium for watching these videos seems a lot less important to me than the ability to buy them item-by-item at a low price.
Also, I’m guessing they can sell a whole lot of music videos, unlocking a huge amount of untapped value. Videos have for years just been expensive ads. Now, you can get people to pay money for the ads themselves. Maybe this can even foster something of a revival in the art of music-video making — an art that’s been in bad shape ever since MTV started its long Grind into oblivion.
And lastly, this could be a real boon to independent filmmakers and artists. I think audio Podcasting was an utterly bullshit phenomenon. I have neither the time nor the inclination to listen to a Podcast, and I don’t know a single human being who feels differently. But Apple’s distribution system could be used to sell any variety of sketch comedy, or parody, or animation, or short film — and I think people might pay for that. Now, some of this type of material is already circulating for free on the Web. But when you’re talking about $1 a download, I don’t think that the price is much of a hurdle.
I’m pretty excited. I don’t really want to buy one of these gizmos, to be honest. I don’t think I’d find it too gratifying to watch a little screen on the subway. I’ll stick with my now-bulky-seeming original iPod for some time yet. Plus, it’s good to let Apple work out the bugs when they release something new.
But this is going to change the media world something fierce. And I can’t wait to see what people do with it.
These days, fellow Post editorialist Robert A. George (not Robert “Princeton” George, who is much better paid) is feeling quite smug about having jumped off the Bush bandwagon in, oh, 2004.
Andrew Sullivan, also, has joined the Coalition of the Gloating — independent-ish conservatives who figured out a few months before the rest of us that Bush sorta sucks.
But I’d say: Come off it.
We knew Bush sucked, too, but we went ahead and cast our lot with him anyway. Do I regret it? Honestly, no. I’m not joining any Coalition of the Shamefaced. I voted for Bush, and I’m proud of it.
Why?
Well, a few reasons. But, first and foremost, I believed strongly at the time — and still do — that throwing Bush out would send one message, and one message only, to the radical-Islamic world: Please don’t hurt us, Mr. Terrorist!
Is that fair? Is that logical? Is that a good way to pick a president? Well, I can understand your skepticism. But there are times, there are elections, where the show is more important than the substance. Faced with an enemy that gauges us constantly for weakness, looks to see what makes us cringe and what makes us cower, and then takes any sign of weakness as an invitation to strike — yes, I feel I cast the correct vote, given the choice that faced us as a nation in 2004.
Is Bush doing a good job prosecuting the war in Iraq? Obviously, there have been mistakes. But count me firmly out of the camp that bemoans the lack of troops. In modern American warfare, where the primary concern is force protection and the primary political weakness is the American public’s intolerance of any casualties, I simply don’t believe we’d be in better shape with more targets on the ground and more body bags coming home each week. And as for the even more ludicrous argument that the Bush administration erred by dismantling Saddam’s army — please. If there were anything that could make the situation in Iraq worse, it would have to be a Saddam-loyalist, Sunni-dominated army ready and waiting to overthrow the new government the second the U.S. leaves.
On the home front… Well, my various (and miscellaneous) objections to Bush’s performance in that sphere would surprise no one. Medicare prescription drugs, campaign-finance “reform,” No Child Left Behind, farm subsidies, various tariffs, a new war on indecency, etc. etc. etc. I’m no fan. And, theoretically, if Kerry were president and we still had a Republican Congress, divided government would probably be better, as far as spending.
So, if we’d been voting only on domestic issues last time around, I would have voted for Kerry. Would the Supreme Court nominations have been worse? Yes, clearly. Roberts is still a bit of a question mark, but he’s in the ballpark. As for Miers… I’d pretty much flip a coin between Miers and whomever Kerry would have picked.
But we weren’t voting on domestic issues. We were voting on the question of whether we saw terrorism as effectively a law-enforcement issue (the Kerry view — remember that NYT magazine feature?) or an issue of transforming the despotisms in the Middle East.
I don’t think one has to believe Bush has executed the War on Terror flawlessly. I don’t even think one has to agree with the decision to invade Iraq. One just has to agree, at base, that regime change — however affected — should be the goal throughout much of the Middle East. We’re better off without Saddam. We’ll be better off without Assad. And we’d be better off without the mullahs.
The thing is, the War on Terror argument only works once. We showed that, as a nation, we weren’t going to change horses midstream in 2004, that we weren’t going to be cowed by terror. We stood behind Bush.
Now, however, Bush is going to be gone one way or another. Now, we have to start making some serious decisions about the direction of the Republican Party. Now, we have to choose whether Big Government Conservatism is acceptable — the price of being a “governing majority” — or whether it’s deplorable, a betrayal of everything the conservative movement and the Republican Party are supposed to stand for.
A terrorist attack in the next couple years could change the calculus. No doubt about it. But it would also make it more likely that the Democrats would put up someone who can deal seriously with terrorism, like Hillary. It’s unlikely that the Republicans will once again be blessed with a John Kerry.
Though, in modern times, it seems you never lose elections by underestimating the extremism of the Democratic base. So, I could be very, very wrong.
In a way then, I suppose, continued Democratic stupidity could be the conservative movement’s most fearsome enemy in 2008.
Shudder.
Could this be the confirmation killer?
Big government and social conservatism… sounds like Miers symbolizes the Bush administration pretty well.
My latest Tech Central Station column, on the Miers nomination and conservative dissension:
While the White House and its minions (aided by liberal pundits) try to spin the conservative debate over Miers as one between snobs and slobs — elitist conservative intellectuals versus the base — a much more important fissure is showing: that between the GOP’s pragmatists and its idealists.
No one serious (and perhaps no one at all) is making the case that Miers is “qualified,” in any conventional sense of the word, to serve on the Supreme Court. Instead, some are making the case that Miers is Bush’s pick and that should be good enough for conservatives; or, at least, that trying to derail her will only hurt the president and the party.
While pragmatism is essential to any political movement that hopes to implement some of its ideas in the real world rather than rant about all of them in conferences and on blogs, with Miers these pragmatists may have taken the concept too far.
In the current conservative crisis, there are going to be a lot of pragmatists running around yelling that everything is fine - in large part because that’s what’s easy and expedient. But it seems unlikely that they will be able to stifle debate. Conservatives were hungry for power in 2000, after eight years of Clinton, and ready to unite behind anyone who looked like a winner. Debates about the meaning of conservatism could wait until another day. Not so this time around.
Many conservatives will enter 2008 with a profound sense of ambivalence. After eight years of Bush, they will be asking, “Is this all there is?” Unless the conservative movement can rediscover a purpose other than perpetuating its and the Republican Party’s power, the answer will not weather the storm.
Should be a fun few years.
Devastating anti-Miers column from John Fund today. He was supportive early on (or at least thought a fight would be counterproductive) but has now changed his mind.
Basically, it seems, the more he heard from Miers’ supporters, the more worried he got. The highlight, far and away:
It was Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who went so far as to paint Ms. Miers as virtually a tool of the man who has been her client for the past decade. “In Texas, we have two important values, courage and loyalty,” he told a conference call of conservative leaders last Thursday. “If Harriet Miers didn’t rule the way George W. Bush thought she would, he would see that as an act of betrayal and so would she.” That is an argument in her favor. It sounds more like a blood oath than a dignified nomination process aimed at finding the most qualified individual possible.
Everything about this nomination gets more disturbing every day.
Fire Miers.
Yesterday.
According to the Washington Post, Roy Rogers is looking to make a comeback — at least in the D.C.-area market.
While I’ve always enjoyed Roy Rogers as a quick bite on my way up and down the New Jersey Turnpike, and even in Penn Station’s decadent food court, I’m not sure what they offer as a freestanding chain anymore. Their best items, the roast beef sandwiches, have kind of been taken over by Arby’s.
Perhaps they should lay low for a while, and then when the states’ attorneys general reach a Master Fast Food Settlement Agreement with McDonald’s and Burger King and Wendy’s they can become the American Spirit of the burger game.
Or maybe I’m thinking too far ahead.
In this AP story, Scalia disavows ever having had designs on the office of chief justice. It may sound disingenuous — and I believe his feelings on the matter are understandably mixed — but I’ve long believed it’s a position that would ill-suit him.
I think he knows that, too, and relishes the role he plays in its stead.
In the 2003 American Spectator article after the jump, I recount a statement Scalia made a couple years ago on this subject. And I ask the question: Isn’t it already the Scalia Court anyway?
“As the Republican Party did 40 years ago, today is another time for choosing whether we are committed to the ideals of limited government, fiscal discipline and traditional moral values or whether we will continue to sacrifice those principles on the altar of preserving our governing majority.”
– Mike Pence
Young America’s Foundation
September 26, 2005
Washington, D.C.
“Another Time for Choosing”
“Ms. Miers may not be every conservative activist’s dream candidate, but there is every reason to believe that she will add to the conservative leanings of the Court, and that if the Democrats had power the alternatives would be far worse. Politics is not a one-time cause or battle. It is the long term cobbling of a strong coalition, that to be lasting must eschew extremism and embrace sane choices that, although not perfect, are better than the realistic alternatives or nothing.”
– Bruce Kessler
Democracy Project
October 7, 2005
“Get over it, Republicans”
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