The 81st Texas Legislature convened at noon on Tuesday, January 13, 2009. The session ends on Monday, June 1, 2009. Right out of the box, the House of Representatives was in turmoil over the issue of the House Speakership. The incumbent (and King of the Dumbos — Tom Craddick, R-Midland) was overthrown by a coalition of Dumbos and Donkeys. Craddick was replaced (with substantial Donkey support) — time running out — by a "moderate" Dumbo, Joe Straus, R-San Antonio. Meanwhile, over in the Senate chamber, the Dumbos changed the rules of that body and rammed a Voter ID bill down the throats of the Donkeys. The Dumbo front-man for the Voter ID bill was Senator Dan Patrick, R-Houston — no kin to Dan Patrick, former ESPN talking head and current jock radio talk show host — who rivals former Speaker Craddick for the title of "Dumber Than Dirt." The Voter ID bill made its way out of the Senate and came to the House. In that chamber, the leadership "team" put the Voter ID bill at the bottom of the calendar — when time would be short — in hopes that the Donkeys might be pressured to vote for the remedy for a non-existent problem. No credible evidence of widespread voter fraud exists in Texas. The Dumbos insist that the Voter ID bill will prevent future voter fraud. For the past week, the Donkeys have employed delaying tactics that torpedoed a lot of pending legislation in the hopper while Donkey representatives went to the microphone at the back of the chamber to ask questions (in 10-minute increments) of one another and witless Dumbos. This delaying tactic of asking questions "for clarification" is known as "chubbing." Forget reality TV. Forget carnival geek shows. When the Texas Legislature is in session, it is The Most Bizarre Show On Earth. In today's Austin fishwrap, the editorial cartoon portrays the House of Representatives as they are and the faux-redneck humor columnist opines that voter fraud might give Texas a better quality Legislature. If this is (fair & balanced) Lone Star lunacy, so be it.
[x Austin Fishwrap] The Voter ID Controversy In The Texas House Of Representatives By Ben Sargent
[Ben Sargent drew editorial cartoons regularly for the Austin American-Statesman (1974-2009). Sargent now contributes a cartoon to the Sunday editorial page. His cartoons are also distributed nationally by Universal Press Syndicate. Sargent was born in Amarillo, Texas, into a newspaper family. He learned the printing trade from age twelve and started working for the local daily as a proof runner at fourteen. He attended Amarillo College and received a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1970. Sargent won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1982. He has also received awards from Women in Communications, Inc., Common Cause of Texas, and Cox Newspapers. He is the author of Texas Statehouse Blues (1980) and Big Brother Blues (1984).]
If We Allow Voter Fraud Will We End Up With A Better Legislature? By John Kelso
Friends and neighbors, let me become the first to come out in favor of voter fraud.
Before you start screaming and pulling your hair out, hear me out. If a different set of people voted, maybe we'd get a smarter bunch of people elected to the state Legislature.
Here's the situation. Everything up at the Capitol got all gummed up because of a battle over the voter identification card bill.
The Democrats said that making people show a photo ID at the polls was a ruse to keep poor people and old folks from voting. The Republicans said the countryside is rife with people who aren't registered to vote cheating at the polls. I'll bet the number of people buying beer underage with phony IDs far outnumbers the number of people using phony IDs to vote illegally for, say, Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston. But who's counting?
What I can't understand is why the argument was necessary in the first place. All you'd have to do to fix the problem is put one of those automatic photo booths like you used to see at places like Sam's Club out in front of each polling place, and let people who don't have photo IDs get their pictures made. How hard could that be? This service would come with a laminating machine.
Anyway, the two sides slammed into a wall over this voter ID issue. To keep the ID bill from passing, the Democrats resorted to a tactic called "chubbing," Funny word, chubbing. Kind of brings the obvious to mind.
Or it's a fishing term.
"Yeah, we were chubbing with plastic worms 'bout 10 feet from shore when I landed this particular five-pound hawg."
But at the Legislature, "chubbing" is a term for stalling by asking a lot of stupid questions about bills that don't amount to doodley.
Like "About that no smoking bill, senator? How 'bout some pie?" Anyway, because of this voter ID squabble, much legislative business that should have gotten done didn't. It would be easy — and redundant — to say the problem is that the Legislature is a bunch of nincompoops. On the other hand, whose fault is that? Who elected these Bozos?
That's right — for the most part, you and me, the registered voters who were who we said we were at the polls.
Maybe it's time for a change. If the registered voters are picking losers, could it be time to switch out voters?
I'm thinking we might be better off if we went around town with a van, rounded up a bunch of folks hanging out at bars and bus stops who aren't registered for anything except maybe a free ham at the grocery store, and let them do the voting for us. We might get better results. Ω
[Downeaster (Maine-native) John Kelso has worked for the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman as a humor columnist since 1977. Before coming to Austin, Kelso worked at several newspapers: The Manchester (NH) Union-Leader; The Boonville (MO) Daily News; The Palm Beach (FL) Post, and the Racine (WI.) Journal Times. Kelso has been a general assignment reporter, a copy editor, a sports editor, and an outdoor writer. As a pretend-redneck, Kelso is all gimme cap and no double-wide. His redneck-shtik appears thrice weekly: Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays in the Austin Fishwrap.]
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The poor Dumbos are frothing at the mouth over Judge Sonia's temerity in speaking about the judgment of white men. Everyone knows that white men are all-knowing and without flaw, especially if they are Dumbos. The silence of the True Republican Women in this free-for-all is telling. Perhaps even True Republican Women have their doubts about white male Dumbo brain-power. She won't say it aloud, but Judge Sonia ought to say, "Besar mi culo" to any white Dumbo senator who suggests that she is a racist or incompetent or worse. In Texas, "Besar mi culo," translates as KMA — Kiss My Assets. If this is (fair & balanced) obscenity, so be it.
[x Robert Jensen's Homepage] White Privilege Shapes The U.S. By Robert Jensen
I am sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support.
The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that in the United States being white has advantages. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege.
So, if we live in a world of white privilege—unearned white privilege—how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I ask.
He paused for a moment and said, "That really doesn't matter."
That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: the privilege to acknowledge you have unearned privilege but ignore what it means.
That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race and racism with students. It drove home to me the importance of confronting the dirty secret that we white people carry around with us everyday: In a world of white privilege, some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk openly and honestly about white supremacy and white privilege.
White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of one's identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has affected me.
I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn't live near a reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the state's only numerically significant non-white population, American Indians.
I have struggled to resist that racist training and the ongoing racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I "fix" myself, one thing never changes--I walk through the world with white privilege.
What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me for those things look like me—they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves, and in a racist world that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I'm white.
My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are mediocre, though I don't know very many. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of that time the university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as an insult to anyone, but is a simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.
Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a bitterly racist society and that the racism has real effects on real people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I know, because I am one of them.
I am not a genius—as I like to say, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching full-time for six years, and I've published a reasonable amount of scholarship. Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one churns out to get tenure, and some of it, I would argue, actually is worth reading. I work hard, and I like to think that I'm a fairly decent teacher. Every once in awhile, I leave my office at the end of the day feeling like I really accomplished something. When I cash my paycheck, I don't feel guilty.
But, all that said, I know I did not get where I am by merit alone. I benefited from, among other things, white privilege. That doesn't mean that I don't deserve my job, or that if I weren't white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white. I grew up in fertile farm country taken by force from non-white indigenous people. I was educated in a well-funded, virtually all-white public school system in which I learned that white people like me made this country great. There I also was taught a variety of skills, including how to take standardized tests written by and for white people.
All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a teaching position at the predominantly white University of Texas, which had a white president, in a college headed by a white dean and in a department with a white chairman that at the time had one non-white tenured professor.
There certainly is individual variation in experience. Some white people have had it easier than me, probably because they came from wealthy families that gave them even more privilege. Some white people have had it tougher than me because they came from poorer families. White women face discrimination I will never know. But, in the end, white people all have drawn on white privilege somewhere in their lives.
Like anyone, I have overcome certain hardships in my life. I have worked hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay there. But to feel good about myself and my work, I do not have to believe that "merit," as defined by white people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from white privilege, which continues to protect me every day of my life from certain hardships.
At one time in my life, I would not have been able to say that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was due solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the heroic American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the culture's mythology that I couldn't see the fear that was binding me to those myths. Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I didn't really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn't heroic or rugged, that I wasn't special.
I let go of some of that fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn't special, but that I was still me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know that the rules under which I work in are stacked in my benefit. I believe that until we let go of the fiction that people have complete control over their fate--that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose--then we will live with that fear. Yes, we should all dream big and pursue our dreams and not let anyone or anything stop us. But we all are the product both of what we will ourselves to be and what the society in which we live lets us be.
White privilege is not something I get to decide whether or not I want to keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this society.
Frankly, I don't think I will live to see that day; I am realistic about the scope of the task. However, I continue to have hope, to believe in the creative power of human beings to engage the world honestly and act morally. A first step for white people, I think, is to not be afraid to admit that we have benefited from white privilege. It doesn't mean we are frauds who have no claim to our success. It means we face a choice about what we do with our success. Ω
[Robert Jensen is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin. Jensen holds a B.S. from Moorhead State University (MN), an M.A. from The American University (DC), and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Jensen's books include Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (2004), The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (2005), and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (2007).]
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The Blowhard (Charles Blow) is exquisite in today's NY Fishwrap Op-Ed page. One Sonia Sotomayor is worth 10,000 Dumbos like Rehnquist, Roberts, The Newtrino, The BFI, Tancredible, and Token Steele. When The Blowhard called this Confederacy of Dunces, "Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb" he was correct all four times. If this is a (fair & balanced) four-fold repeated incantation of stupidity, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
Rogues, Robes And Racists
By Charles M. Blow
Someone pinch me. I must be dreaming. Some of the same Republicans who have wielded the hot blade of racial divisiveness for years, are now calling Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, a racist. Oh, the hypocrisy!
The same Newt Gingrich who once said that bilingual education was like teaching “the language of living in a ghetto” tweeted that Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist.” The same Rush Limbaugh who once told a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back” called Sotomayor a “reverse racist.” The same Tom Tancredo, a former congressman, who once called Miami, which has a mostly Hispanic population, “a third world country” said that Sotomayor “appears to be a racist.”
This is rich.
Even Michael Steele, the bungling chairman of The Willie Horton Party knows that the Republicans have no standing on this issue. In an interview published in GQ magazine in March, he was asked: “Why do you think so few nonwhite Americans support the Republican Party right now?” His response: “Cause we have offered them nothing! And the impression we’ve created is that we don’t give a damn about them or we just outright don’t like them.” Ding, ding, ding, ding.
Ironically, one of the candidates who was defeated by Steele for the chairmanship sent out Christmas CDs that included a song entitled “Barack the Magic Negro.” Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.
Politically, this “racist” strategy could prove disastrous. Hispanics are the largest and the fastest-growing minority group in the country. And, in recent years, they have increasingly been the victims of racial discrimination. It will be hard to paint the victims, as personified by Sotomayor, as the offenders.
A report entitled “Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South” that was released last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center found “systemic discrimination against Latinos” that constituted “a civil rights crisis.”
The report noted: “And as a result of relentless vilification in the media, Latinos are targeted for harassment by racist extremist groups, some of which are directly descended from the old guardians of white supremacy. ”
This finding is borne out by the F.B.I.’s hate crimes data, which show that the number of anti-Hispanic hate crimes have increased by half since 2003, while all other hate crimes have increased by 6 percent.
Politics aside, what exactly did Sotomayor say that got everyone in a huff? In a 2001 speech she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” She acknowledged a racial bias. That doesn’t make her a racist.
Why? Because racism exists along a spectrum. On one end is the mere existence of racial bias. Harvard’s Project Implicit, an online laboratory, has demonstrated that most of us have this bias, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum are the conscious expressions of that bias in the form of prejudices. On the other end, at the extreme, are deliberate acts of racial discrimination based on those prejudices. That’s where the racists dwell. Think of it this way: You know that you could cheat on your taxes; acknowledging that you are tempted to do so reveals a frailty, but only the act of cheating is a crime.
I have yet to read or hear of Sotomayor’s acts of racial discrimination. (She is nearly 55 years old. Surely if she is a racist, and a judge to boot, there has to be some proof of it in her actions, no?)
Now let’s look at a couple of the men who have ascended to the bench.
First, there’s former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. When the Supreme Court was considering Brown v. Board of Education, Rehnquist was a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson. Rehnquist wrote Jackson a memo in which he defended separate-but-equal policies, saying, “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”
Furthermore, Rehnquist had been a Republican ballot protectionist in Phoenix when he was younger. As the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen correctly noted in 1986: Rehnquist “helped challenge the voting qualifications of Arizona blacks and Hispanics. He was entitled to do so. But even if he did not personally harass potential voters, as witnesses allege, he clearly was a brass-knuckle partisan, someone who would deny the ballot to fellow citizens for trivial political reasons — and who made his selection on the basis of race or ethnicity.”
Then there’s John Roberts, who replaced Rehnquist as the chief justice in 2005. That year, Newsday reported that Roberts had made racist and sexist jokes in memos that he wrote while working in the Reagan White House. And, The New York Review of Books published a scolding article in 2005 making the case that during the same period that he was making those jokes, Roberts marshaled a crusader’s zeal in his efforts to roll back the civil rights gains of the 1960s and ’70s — everything from voting rights to women’s rights. The article began, “The most intriguing question about John Roberts is what led him as a young person whose success in life was virtually assured by family wealth and academic achievement to enlist in a political campaign designed to deny opportunities for success to those who lack his advantages.”
Gingrich tweeted that “a white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw.” Make up your own minds about where Rehnquist’s and Roberts’s words and actions should fall on the racism spectrum, but both were overwhelmingly confirmed.
Until someone can produce proof of words and actions on the part of Sotomayor that even approach the scale of Rehnquist’s and Roberts’s, all I see is men throwing skeleton bones from class closets. Ω
[Charles M. Blow is The New York Times's visual Op-Ed columnist. His column appears every other Saturday. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper's graphics director, a position he held for nine years. In that role, he led The Times to a best of show award from the Society of News Design for the Times's information graphics coverage of 9/11, the first time the award had been given for graphics coverage. He also led the paper to its first two best in show awards from the Malofiej International Infographics Summit for work that included coverage of the Iraq war. Charles Blow went on to become the paper's Design Director for News before leaving in 2006 to become the Art Director of National Geographic Magazine. Before coming to The Times, Mr. Blow had been a graphic artist at The Detroit News. Blow graduated magna cum laude from Grambling State University in Louisiana, where he received a B.A. in mass communication.]
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The Dumbos are in full-throated howling-mode and they and their hypocrisy are disgusting. This blogger hopes that Judge Sonia (Not Maria as Dumbass Dumbo Mike Huckabee called her!) Sotomayor reads her first opinion from the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court in Spanish! Let the Dumbos froth at the mouth. And, if Judge Sotomayor is aggessive and unpleasant, let her vent her disdain for the 3 Stooges on the Court: Scalia, Alito, and Thomas. She can add a postscript for the CJOTUS. May Justice Sotomayor forever refer to her Dumbo colleagues as pendejos.
[x YouTube/Barsopen1970 Channel] "Maria" (1999) By Blondie (Deborah Harry Solo)
If this is (fair & balanced) admiration of Judge Sonia (Not Maria) Sotomayor's excellence, so be it.
[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — BracketedNumbers — Directory] [1] Mad Dog (Mike Madden) On White Privilege & Outrage [2] Joltin' Joe (Conason) On Real (& Imagined) Affirmative Action
[x Salon] [1]—Back To Directory The White Man Is Being Oppressed! By Mike Madden
Imagine a world where the nation's first black president has nominated a long-serving, highly educated judge to become the nation's first Latino Supreme Court justice, and only its third female justice. The president is popular with voters in and out of his political party; the opposition party is struggling to come back from two straight losing elections by showing it's got a vision for the future, as well as hoping not to fall completely out of favor with Latinos, the country's largest — and fastest-growing — minority group.
You might not think, in that world, that early opposition to the court nominee would involve accusing her of being racist and sexist, and steadily questioning her intelligence in a way that implies she's an affirmative action pick. That might seem, in fact, like a fairly self-destructive strategy, one that even the opposition party's most hardcore base would want to avoid. But welcome to 2009.
"White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw," wrote Newt Gingrich — whom conservatives routinely fall over themselves to praise as a driving force of ideas for the Republican Party, and who is also, at least for now, making noises about running for president in 2012 — on Tuesday on his Twitter feed. The ex-House speaker managed to make the sentiment sound even more Neolithic by compressing it to fit Twitter's 140-character limit. "Latina woman racist should also withdraw." He seemed to be grunting, not tweeting. (Gingrich was then forced to fend off questions about whether he had posted that item while touring Auschwitz &3151; which he denies, and which you couldn't make up.)
The GOP establishment has mostly been trying to stay away from a fight many Republicans realize they can't win; with 17 years as a federal judge and a biography that Horatio Alger might have thought too trite to use in his rags-to-riches novels, Sonia Sotomayor is virtually a lock to be confirmed. Though Pat Roberts of Kansas has said he'll vote against her, GOP senators are not rushing to the ramparts. But the base wants a battle, and some conservatives seem unable to resist using Sotomayor's nomination to bring up the resentment-based, racial backlash politics that the country mostly avoided during last year's historic election. The Sotomayor nomination has, at last, unleashed the pent-up id of a faithful, and fearful, GOP demographic — the aging white male. Focusing on a New Haven, Conn., affirmative action case Sotomayor helped decide, a few lines from a 2001 lecture and a New Republic article questioning her intelligence that even the author is trying to back away from, the wingnut and pundit case against Sotomayor isn't particularly subtle. Or smart. But it does seem to involve more than a little of what Freud called "projection."
"This is a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land," wrote the blogger E Pluribus Unum on Redstate.com, in a post that called Sotomayor "an incompetent student of the Constitution" and "a garden-variety race-hustling bigot." "She's demonstrated no qualifications other than being incompetent, activist, and bigoted." Not to be outdone, Rush Limbaugh hit the same themes. "She doesn't have any intellectual depth," he said on his show Wednesday. "She's an angry woman, she's a bigot. She's a racist. In her own words, she's the antithesis of a judge, she is the antithesis of justice, in her own words." And Pat Buchanan, on MSNBC, called her "an affirmative action pick" and compared her to Harriet Miers, who even Republicans agreed wasn't up to the job when former President George W. Bush tried to name her to the Supreme Court four years ago. On National Review's Web site, Mark Krikorian posted a screed about Sotomayor's insistence that people pronounce her name correctly. "Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits," he wrote. " Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English ... and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to."
The "racist" charges come partly from a lecture Sotomayor gave in 2001, at Berkeley's law school, where she said diversity on the bench was important because judges' life experience informs their decision making. That may not sound so controversial, but conservatives are pulling out one sentence in particular, where Sotomayor said she "would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." In the context of the whole eight-page speech, it doesn't sound as jarring, but that didn't stop Ann Coulter from pouncing on it. Add that to a case Sotomayor helped decide, which the Supreme Court may overturn this summer, while her nomination is pending, and you've got a potent narrative. The federal appeals court Sotomayor sits on ruled against a white fireman in New Haven who sued the city after it threw out the results of a promotion exam because black and Latino firefighters appeared disproportionately likely to fail it.
Senior administration officials say the case just shows Sotomayor following legal precedent, but conservatives seem to think it shows an angry Puerto Rican on the warpath against the white man. "On September 11, America saw firsthand the vital role of America's firefighters in protecting our citizens," Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, said in a statement Tuesday, minutes after word leaked that Sotomayor was President Obama's pick. "They put their lives on the line for her and the other citizens of New York and the nation. But Judge Sotomayor would sacrifice their claims to fair treatment in employment promotions to racial preferences and quotas." RedState's editor, Erick Erickson, felt compelled to stand up for white men on Wednesday. "I dunno, Sotomayor," he wrote on Twitter. "Considering white males engineered Western Civ, you'd think they'd have a handle on things to be able to make decisions."
Not surprisingly, the idea of trying to block a Latina judge from the Supreme Court by stirring up resentment over affirmative action doesn't strike many observers as the best way to appeal to Latino voters. "If Sonia Sotomayor's name were John Smith, she'd be just as qualified, and no one would be charging affirmative action or reverse racism," said Mark McKinnon, a Republican strategist who left John McCain's presidential campaign last year because he didn't want to help it go negative against Obama. "To suggest as much is itself racist. And I think most Americans see right through the smoke screen."
The White House -- which wouldn't comment for this story -- isn't exactly trying to avoid reminding people of Sotomayor's Puerto Rican heritage, preferably with a soft-focus lens that plays up the historic nature of her nomination. If conservatives overreach in opposing her, the administration won't complain. "Latino voters are responding with a tremendous sense of pride and appreciation," said Fernand Amandi, executive vice president of Bendixen & Associates, a Democratic polling firm that surveyed Latino voters for Obama's campaign last year. "The Hispanic community -- especially after the immigration issue -- is very sensitive to dog-whistle attack politics. During the immigration debate, Hispanics were never directly attacked or called out, but the message they received was they were not wanted here." The dog-whistle line may have already been crossed; it's not exactly a hidden message to call someone a race hustler.
Republicans who actually have to win elections don't seem interested in engaging in the backlash politics. "The approach that many of the senators and leadership is taking is, well, you know, let's give her a fair hearing and see what she has to say," said GOP pollster Glen Bolger. "It's really hard to stop this kind of nomination [with only 40 Senate seats], and then there's the political Hispanic angle." A Republican consultant who advises GOP candidates on winning Latino votes, Lionel Sosa, said he expected most senators to ask plenty of questions about Sotomayor, then support her. "For Republicans to mount a filibuster is foolhardy," he said. "If a Republican doesn't care about getting reelected, and a Republican doesn't care about the image of the Republican Party, they may vote against her, but I think in the end, we'll see who the smart ones are and who the not so smart ones are by how they cast their votes."
But the conservative noise machine has a tendency to bleed into the GOP mainstream; Joe the Plumber went from the accidental hero of wingnut blogs to the centerpiece of the McCain campaign in less than a week last year. The confirmation process could wind up taking up most of the summer, and there's plenty of time for Republicans of all sorts to start calling Sotomayor names by the end of it. Which is probably just how the White House wants it. Ω
[Mike Madden is Salon's Washington correspondent. Madden attended University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1998. He is currently working as a Washington Correspondent at Salon Media Group. He has worked with The Arizona Republic as a staffer in its Washington Bureau, as a correspondent for Gannett, and as a suburban staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer.] ________________________________________________________ [2]—Back To Directory Sonia Sotomayor Is Not Clarence Thomas By Joe Conason
For Sonia Sotomayor, nothing could be quite so predictable at this moment as her vicious denigration by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Karl Rove, the denizens of the "Corner" at National Review Online and the myriad squawking noisemakers on Fox News. With instantaneous unanimity, the right-wing verdict against the judge was handed down. She is "dumb," or at least "not that bright," a slur that requires no evidence because she is obviously an "affirmative action" nominee for the high court.
And we all know what that means, don't we? Just ask Clarence Thomas.
The conservative campaign to dismiss Sotomayor's accomplishments and diminish her qualifications follows a pattern that is by now all too familiar. Yet she is measurably smarter than most of her critics — if a summa cum laude degree from Princeton and a spot on the Yale Law Review are worth anything — and overcame disadvantages that suburban sons and daughters of privilege (such as Coulter and Limbaugh) probably cannot imagine.
So why do some of Sotomayor's nastiest adversaries imagine that the public will accept these false characterizations of her intelligence and credentials? Perhaps that instinct follows from the right's own sad experiences with Republican affirmative action — most notably in the matter of Justice Thomas, who embodied all of the problems that conservatives perceived in the pursuit of ethnic diversity. When the wingnuts attack Sotomayor with inaccurate stereotypes, they're projecting onto her the shortcomings of their own beloved Clarence.
Eighteen years ago, the Senate confirmation of Thomas earned historic notoriety for its bizarre descent into conflicting recollections of sexual harassment and pornographic banter. But the lingering question about the man selected to replace the legendary Justice Thurgood Marshall was whether he fulfilled the White House description of him as "the most qualified [candidate] at this time." As Thomas confessed in his memoir a few years ago, "Even I had my doubts about so extravagant a claim."
So extravagant was Bush's assertion as to verge on comical. Far from being the "most qualified," Thomas was a nominee with no experience on the bench beyond the 18 months he had served on the U.S. District Court of Appeals. He had never written a significant legal brief or article. He had achieved no distinction in private practice or law enforcement. He had never even argued a case in federal court, let alone at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Indeed, his entire career had resulted from affirmative action, beginning with his admission to Holy Cross College, continuing with his acceptance by Yale Law School, and including his first job as an assistant attorney general in Missouri. Thomas later insisted that he had been damaged by the stigma of affirmative action, especially when he tried to find a job after graduating from Yale Law. (To the extent that minorities were stigmatized at Yale, of course, much of the blame was owed to right-wing figures such as law professor Ralph K. Winter, the Federalist Society eminence who was quoted back then complaining that none of the minority students at Yale were truly qualified to be there.) Still, when Missouri Attorney General (and later Republican senator) John Danforth came to Yale, his legal alma mater, in search of African-American employees for his office, Thomas stepped right up.
Flash forward now to the discussions within the first Bush administration over how to replace Marshall, the liberal lion whose departure provided conservatives with a chance to spin the direction of the court. Every account of those deliberations indicates that Bush and his aides went through a list of potential African-American nominees to the high court — and rejected politically moderate judges with better qualifications than Thomas, such as Amalya Kearse. They picked him because they had to fill a "black seat" on the court, and because he was prepared to enforce their ideology on the court — a function he has reliably performed in lockstep with Justice Antonin Scalia.
In other words, Thomas was chosen from a Bush [41] White House shortlist that excluded white males — supposedly a profound sin when committed by the Obama White House in selecting Sotomayor.
Yet the right can never bring its corrosive racial skepticism to bear on Thomas, a man who had proven his willingness to parrot reactionary bromides. He is the single most prominent beneficiary of the quest for diversity in American history, but he is their diversity candidate — and thus deserved elevation, if not as a distinguished jurist, then because he had suffered discrimination as a conservative.
It is a curious worldview that would validate Thomas and denigrate Sotomayor, when the contrast in their records reflects so well on her and so poorly on him. It is strange, too, that the same conservatives who found the saga of Clarence Thomas and his rise from obscurity so inspiring seem to find no such inspiration in the very similar story of Sonia Sotomayor.
In his memoir, Thomas recalls the innocent delight of old friends and family, who "saw my nomination as an affirmation of the American dream: a poor black child from the segregated South had grown up to become a Supreme Court justice. Who could be against that?" The same question can be turned around now — with considerably greater justification. Ω
[Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. Conason received a B.A. in History from Brandeis University in 1975. He then worked at two Boston-based newspapers, East Boston Community News and The Real Paper. From 1978 to 1990, he worked as a columnist and staff writer at The Village Voice. From 1990 to 1992, Conason was "editor-at-large" for Details magazine. In 1992, he became a columnist for the New York Observer, a position he still holds. Conason has written a number of books, including Big Lies (2003), which addresses what he says are myths spread about liberals by conservatives. His new book is It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush.]
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The Nickster provides an A-Ha moment with today's Op-Ed in the NY Fishwrap. The Nickster asks (rhetorically) if you would slap your father; this blogger would rather slap a Dumbo (after waterboarding the sucker). In this blogger's dim past, he overheard a True Republican Woman relating what her professor-hubby told her about meeting some undergraduates who were protesting something or other in 1970: "Al (her hubby) said that you could smell them as they came down the hall." The description of the olfactory experience was accompanied by a facial characterization of disgust. Bingo! Dumbos have a low-disgust threshold. If this is (fair & balanced) physiologic response analysis, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap] Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re A Liberal By Nicholas D. Kristof
If you want to tell whether someone is conservative or liberal, what are a couple of completely nonpolitical questions that will give a good clue?
How’s this: Would you be willing to slap your father in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit?
And, second: Does it disgust you to touch the faucet in a public restroom?
Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.
Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.
The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.
This came up after I wrote a column earlier this year called “The Daily Me.” I argued that most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices. To overcome that tendency, I argued, we should set aside time for a daily mental workout with an ideological sparring partner. Afterward, I heard from Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. “You got the problem right, but the prescription wrong,” he said.
Simply exposing people to counterarguments may not accomplish much, he said, and may inflame antagonisms.
A study by Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania found that when people saw tight television shots of blowhards with whom they disagreed, they felt that the other side was even less legitimate than before.
The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process. The crucial part of the brain for these judgments is the medial prefrontal cortex, which has more to do with moralizing than with rationality. If you damage your prefrontal cortex, your I.Q. may be unaffected, but you’ll have trouble harrumphing.
One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.
Some evolutionary psychologists believe that disgust emerged as a protective mechanism against health risks, like feces, spoiled food or corpses. Later, many societies came to apply the same emotion to social “threats.” Humans appear to be the only species that registers disgust, which is why a dog will wag its tail in puzzlement when its horrified owner yanks it back from eating excrement.
[UVA] Psychologists have developed a “disgust scale” based on how queasy people would be in 27 situations, such as stepping barefoot on an earthworm or smelling urine in a tunnel. Conservatives systematically register more disgust than liberals. (To see how you weigh factors in moral decisions, take the tests at www.YourMorals.org.)
It appears that we start with moral intuitions that our brains then find evidence to support. For example, one experiment involved hypnotizing subjects to expect a flash of disgust at the word “take.” They were then told about Dan, a student council president who “tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students.”
The research subjects felt disgust but couldn’t find any good reason for it. So, in some cases, they concocted their own reasons, such as: “Dan is a popularity-seeking snob.”
So how do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empirical? A start is to reach out to moderates on the other side — ideally eating meals with them, for that breaks down “us vs. them” battle lines that seem embedded in us. (In ancient times we divided into tribes; today, into political parties.) The Web site www.civilpolitics.org is an attempt to build this intuitive appreciation for the other side’s morality, even if it’s not our morality.
“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”
Thus persuasion may be most effective when built on human interactions. Gay rights were probably advanced largely by the public’s growing awareness of friends and family members who were gay.
A corollary is that the most potent way to win over opponents is to accept that they have legitimate concerns, for that triggers an instinct to reciprocate. As it happens, we have a brilliant exemplar of this style of rhetoric in politics right now — Barack Obama. Ω
[Nicholas D. Kristof writes op-ed columns that appear twice each week in The New York Times. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he previously was associate managing editor of The Times, responsible for the Sunday Times. Kristof graduated from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. In 1990 Mr. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement. They were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for commentary for what the judges called "his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world."]
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Every neighborhood needs some dude on speed (washed down with Red Bull) who does an early-morning "controlled burn" of dry twigs in the woods behind his house. If this is (fair & balanced) LOL gonzo lunacy, so be it.
Q. What are some things you do to manage your time effectively? A. I get up at 4:30 every morning. I like the quiet time. It’s a time I can recharge my batteries a bit. I exercise and I clear my head and I catch up on the world. I read papers. I look at e-mail. I surf the Web. I watch a little TV, all at the same time. I call it my quiet time but I’m already multitasking. I love listening to music, so I’ll do that in the morning, too, when I’m exercising and watching the news. —An interview with Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney, in the Times.
Whoever said that the early bird gets the worm could have been talking about me, only I’m a person, not a bird, and I’m not interested in getting worms, more like getting things done. But I do get up early. In fact, the secret to my success could be boiled down to three little words: my quiet time. It begins at 1 A.M., when I get out of bed, check my e-mail, brush my teeth, scan some documents, and floss. Then I’ll surf the Web, maybe order a sectional couch or trade zloty futures. Last week, I bought a Swiss chalet and sold it at a twenty-per-cent profit while I was still in my pajamas. I wanted to high-five someone, but no one else was awake. Sometimes I can’t remember if I’ve flossed already, so I’ll do it again, just to be sure, while checking my e-mail and maybe sending a fax. Did I mention that the early bird gets the worm? That in many ways applies to me.
By 1:03, I’ve had two cups of coffee, I’m down in my basement on the elliptical, and my heart is pounding like a cheetah’s. I know that cheetahs have a fast heart rate because I often watch Animal Planet while I’m on the elliptical, although sometimes I’ll do the picture-in-picture thing so I can watch CNBC Asia while I’m watching the thing about the cheetahs. It isn’t always about cheetahs; it’s about other animals, too, like meerkats. I just said cheetahs as a for instance. I do the elliptical naked. One time when I was on the elliptical, I patched myself into a conference call in Jakarta and accidentally hit the camera thing on my phone, so everyone wound up seeing me in the buff, all flopping around and everything. Another time when I was on the elliptical, I saw an amazing documentary about cheetahs.
While I’m on the elliptical and maybe ordering a hovercraft online, I’ll drain a six-pack of Red Bull. Red Bull Red Bull Red Bullybullybull. Then I’ll call London. I don’t have any business in London, but I have a London phone directory and I like to call people at random. It helps me clear my head. You’d be surprised, though, how some people in London will get totally honked off if you call them out of the blue just to say “What’s up?” It’s not an anti-American thing; sometimes I’ll call them with a fake British accent and say “Tallyho!” and they’ll still get pissed. They’ll act like it’s the middle of the night, even though with the time change and everything it’s already 6 A.M. But even if they tell me to go fuck myself it recharges my batteries.
There’s no end to the things I can accomplish during my quiet time. I have a fairly nimble contralto voice, and after I pop an amphetamine or two I’ll work my way through the Metropolitan Opera repertoire, taking breaks to revise my will or maybe buy a fishing lodge. One thing I like to do is a controlled burn of dry twigs in the woods behind my house. I’ll do the elliptical for twenty minutes, set fire to the woods, sing an aria from “The Magic Flute,” then jump back on the elliptical. Now, here’s something that honks me off: neighbors who call the fire department when you’re in the middle of a controlled burn. Those sirens start wailing and, before you know it, there goes my quiet time. I guess the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who understand quiet time and those who don’t. By the way, you know who really makes the most of their quiet time? Cheetahs. I saw a documentary on them one time and they are awesome. ☐
[Andy Borowitz is the creator the Borowitz Report, a Web site that is a lot funnier than the stuff posted by Matt Drudge and his ilk. Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker. He is the first winner of the National Press Club's humor award and has won seven Dot-Comedy Awards for his web site. He is the author of five humor books, including The Borowitz Report: The Big Book of Shockers, a 2005 finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. His most recent book is The Republican Playbook. Borowitz is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, Class of 1980.]
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