Category Archives: Resistance

2020 Speculations: Wanted — A Fighting Leader

If my intuition is right — that her fighting voice and image best fits this moment and the angry, fired up base — this could well be her moment.

“We won’t always win when we fight,” she said, “But if we don’t put up a fight, we’ll always lose.”

So far, the Committee newcomers,  Harris, Booker and Klobuchar, are promising, but just not yet in the same class.

So these are my current speculations on the 2020 Democratic horse race. I’ll close with a quote from a Warren floor speech before the vote, about the ultra-secret FBI instant-“investigation”.  She declared flatly that, despite all its shortcomings,

“ . . . the available documents contradict statements Mr. Kavanaugh made under oath. I would like to back up these points with explicit statements from the FBI documents — explicit statements that should be available for the American people to see. But the Republicans have locked the documents behind closed doors.”

If anybody can find a way to pay open those closed doors, it could be her. And if that happens, Brett Kavanaugh may soon have many new reasons to Ralph. And the White House could be faced with a real fighter in 2020.

It would be about time. Overdue, in fact.

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Post-Confirmation: Our World Won’t End Right Now. (But you can see the clouds gathering.)

I don’t mean to diminish for a minute the magnitude of the institutional violence done to women this week, especially survivors of direct assault and abuse. Yet the list of legal catastrophes whose likelihood would climb with Kavanaugh’s ascension had already gotten long, and portends massive negative impact on many other segments of the population.

Further, there was an excellent, but now forgotten overview of this in the opening session of Kavanaugh hearings, presented by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

I don’t know why Whitehouse isn’t  better known.  Maybe it’s Rhode Island’s mini-size (at barely 1200 square miles, it makes Vermont — 8 times as large– look huge; or maybe its due to the state’s mostly Democratic voting record.) Perhaps it’s because he is not running for president.

Whatever; Whitehouse was a prosecutor and state attorney general before he came to Washington. He knows how to make a case succinctly and trenchantly. And he made this detailed pre-rapist case against Kavanaugh in the first round of opening statements on September 4.

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Blue Wave? Red Wave? How about the Carolina Brown Wave (aka Big Poop)??

The hog industry’s PR agencies cultivate a wholesome, (white) family-friendly image. But most of the hogs and the farms are really owned by giant international corporations; and the biggest is Chinese. (That ginormous Smithfield plant? Chinese-owned.)
And Big Poop can also play hardball, in that vast battleground, the front lawn. The Republican NC legislature is comfortably stashed in the pocket of their newest jeans.

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Kavanaugh Wrap-Up: The Wheat from the Chaff

Too many media people around this past week’s supreme Court hearings wasted their energy doing horse race and atmosphere coverage. Political sportscasters, I call them; and pretty bush league at that.

Their frame was: the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh (hereafter “K”) is a done deal, so all that matters is the hullabaloo, that and the shadow horse race rehearsal for the 2020 presidential contest. Which meant excessive attention to whether aspirants Kamala Harris or Cory Booker managed to draw some blood and get a boost from a bombshell revelation.
But the pair didn’t really have any real ordnance, it was reported, and neither came out with a 2020 home run. That’s true enough, and for the media political sportscasters, this was all that mattered. And that’s utterly mistaken.

The New York Times’s Saturday postmortem reflected this outlook:

“Boorish. Rude. Disrespectful. Insulting. Grandstanding. Hyperventilating. Deranged. Ridiculous. Drivel.

Those were among the words angry Senate Republicans used this week to assail the conduct of Democrats at a Supreme Court hearing that was often tense and sometimes toxic. . . .

With little power to stop a nominee they saw as a conservative partisan, a Republican-imposed process they considered grossly unfair and a demanding political base spoiling for a fight, they decided it was time to sow disorder over the court.”
For me such reportage was mainly stale baloney. Its superficiality is a disgrace to their profession. It only reports one superficial level of the debate that went on there.

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Kavanaugh Hearing, Day One: Sheldon Whitehouse Vs. the “Roberts Five”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Tomorrow, we will hear a lot of “confirmation etiquette.” It’s a sham.
Kavanaugh knows the game. In the Bush White House, he coached judicial nominees to just tell Senators that they will adhere to statutory text, that they have no ideological agenda. Fairy tales.
At his hearing, Justice Roberts infamously said he’d just call “balls and strikes,” but the pattern – the 73-case pattern – of the Roberts Five qualifies him to have NASCAR-style corporate badges on his robes.
Alito said in his hearing what a “strong principle” stare decisis was, an important limitation on the Court. Then he told the Federalist Society stare decisis “means to leave things decided when it suits our purposes.”
Gorsuch delivered the key fifth vote in the precedent-busting, but also union-busting, Janus decision. He too had pledged in his hearing to “follow the law of judicial precedent,” assured us he was not a “philosopher king,” and promised to give equal concern to “every person, poor or rich, mighty or meek.”
How did that turn out? Great for the rich and mighty: Gorsuch is the single most corporate-friendly justice on a Court already full of them, ruling for big business interests in over 70 percent of cases, and in every single case where his vote was determinative.
The president early on assured evangelicals his Supreme Court picks would attack Roe v. Wade. Despite “confirmation etiquette” assurances about precedent, [Kavanaugh’s] own words make clear [he doesn’t] really believe Roe v. Wade is settled law.
We have seen this movie before. We know how it ends.

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