F the FCC

Finally:

A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down a government policy that can lead to broadcasters being fined for allowing even a single curse word on live television, saying it is unconstitutionally vague and threatens speech "at the heart of the First Amendment."

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan threw out the 2004 Federal Communications Commission policy, which said that profanity referring to sex or excrement is always indecent.

"By prohibiting all `patently offensive' references to sex, sexual organs and excretion without giving adequate guidance as to what `patently offensive' means, the FCC effectively chills speech, because broadcasters have no way of knowing what the FCC will find offensive," the court wrote.

Exactly. A priori censorship based on very subjective guidelines based on the antiquated notion of pre-cable three-network broadcast television with outrageous fines when a network broadcasting live may not have the ability to know what performers will say, unevenly enforced.

That said, it'd be nice if performers like Bono could control their language when on a national stage. That's just manners. Better for society to enforce through common propriety than ex post facto punishment.

It's called personal responsibility -- not nanny state-ism.

To quote our conservative friends.

The Ugliness

The teabaggers held a rally in DC on Saturday. Organized in large part by former House Republican Leader Dick Armey's Freedomworks, it was attended at a 5-7% level of what the organizers promised, claimed and even lied about, misquoting ABC News. What it did bring was the ugly lynch mob side of America, or so the imagery brought by the protesters would suggest.

This "classic" image they created and seemed to fetishize symbolizes the morbid contempt in which they hold those who oppose them, as well as the confusion of their message:



The sign is evil enough, printed and distributed, but the staged photo (see lynch link above) is confusing in that it can be read as a defication on their very own message, i.e. a negation, yet is clearly meant to equate Obama with feces, i.e. shitting on Obama.

Seriously, I don't recall any similar image from the anti-Bush/Cheney demonstrations this decade. But then again, they weren't African Americans, and as Maureen Dowd points out in her Sunday column, guys like Rep. Joe "You Lie" Wilson are implicitly reacting to that:

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.

And, back to the dissonance of the protest message, it is at once a confusion of political labelling, Obama is a Communist yet a Hitler (who, to inform the educationally-challenged teabaggers, imprisoned and killed Communist). At the heart of this enraged minority is what one TPM reader who went there calls out:

There were small groups huddled around the Glen Beck inspired flags and the usual disaffected white males wandering in groups with the American flag desecrated by being incorporated into clothing. Having been to the exact same location for the Obama Inauguration and other large political events, this was small fry in comparison. However, it was an angry group with a real sense of absolute entitlement. Something not focused on by many. This sense of entitlement that they deserve to be the dominant deciders and that it's being taken away.

As I've written before, I see this as trying to delegitimize a President elected with a larger electoral and popular margin than in two decades, I believe with the ultimate goal of inciting or legitimizing violence against him. My instincts say that if the President is harmed these forces will make sure it comes from a black man to help legitimize the act -- in front of our local Whole Foods today there was the same white youth manning the LaRouche "Obama as Hitler" table but this time with a young African American fellow traveler.

If you have any doubt that these protesters are on the psycho side of American history:



God bless freedom of speech in our United States of America.

Hate Kings

Here's Paul Krugman calling out the discourse for what it is:

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.

His examples feature devil Glenn Beck, who lied his ass off for hate violence again today, per Crooks and Liars:

Glenn Beck and his fellow wingnuts -- the ones who have been whipping up hysteria among their right-wing populist followers since Obama's election and before -- essentially announced they have no intention of reflecting on their roles in today's horrifying shooting at the Holocaust Museum in D.C.

They did this by doing what they always do whenever these situations arise: First call it all an "isolated incident" committed by a "lone nutcase" who just happens to be acting out beliefs emanating from their own quadrant. Then, when that fails, blame it on the Left.

Beck offered the following rationale on his Fox News show tonight:

Beck: What they're missing is: The pot in America is boiling. And this is just yet another warning to all Americans of things to come.

And this devil, also not intended to reflect:

Not to be outdone, Rush Limbaugh too declared Von Brunn "has more in common with the marchers and protesters we see at left-wing rallies," according to video just aired on MSNBC.

Then there's this response from the devil apologist for last week's terrorist -- blame Obama for the right-wing killers:

This afternoon, anti-abortion activist and former Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry went ahead with his second press conference in as many weeks at the National Press Club, the first of which was held in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas. As promised, there were hot wings and Guinness. But there was also an ominous warning that the Obama administration may be making more violent attacks "inevitable."

Joining the discourse more prominently than usual, this self-described right-wing extremist devil is on the record:

Former Drudge alter ego Andrew Breitbart thinks James von Brunn was a "multiculturalist just like the black studies and the lesbian studies majors on college campuses." How do we know? He left us an enraged voicemail! Go ahead, listen. Breitbart is angry that anyone would call a neo-Nazi a "right-wing extremist."

"It's such a fucking slander on people like me. This guy's political philosophy is more akin to the drivel that you hear on a college campuses that delineates us by group and not by individuality.... It's deeply offensive that you would use this for political gain."

Nothing like a proud, card-carrying right-wing extremist -- especially if your card comes from Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell:



The same "Liberty" University that has a problem with non-Republican free speech.

Funny how that works.

Say hello to out-in-the-open, over-the-airwaves, American homegrown fascism. If you disagree, it's on you to speak up.

Before it metastasizes.

Liberty as Irony

I guess there's only one political party that's at liberty to meet in campus facilities at Liberty "University":

Liberty University, the university founded by the late Christian evangelist Rev. Jerry Falwell, has revoked its recognition of the campus Democratic Party club, saying “we are unable to lend support to a club whose parent organization stands against the moral principles held by” the university, The News & Advance, of Lynchburg, Va., reports.

“It kind of happened out of nowhere,” said Brian Diaz, president of the student Democratic Party organization that the school had formally recognized in October.

Diaz, the paper reports, said he got the news May 15 in an e-mail from Mark Hine, vice president of student affairs.

According to the e-mail, the club must stop using the university’s name, holding meetings on campus, or advertising events, the newspaper reports.

Hine said late Thursday that the university could not sanction an official club that supported Democratic candidates, the newspaper reports, but stresses that "we are in no way attempting to stifle free speech.”

I find this particularly humorous considering all the conservative griping about liberal favoritism in academic settings across America. How many so-called liberal-biased universities have banned their conservative counterparts from university facilities?

Per Amy Sullivan, religious and liberal are growing closer every day now, which is perhaps why the Liberty administration feels threatened?

Last spring I met a young woman from Liberty who made her mother drive her to Charlottesville to hear me speak because she had read an op-ed I wrote about being an evangelical and a liberal. She was an Obama supporter and a Democrat, but until she read that piece, she had worried that there was something wrong with her faith, that she wasn't a good Christian.

It's harder to feel that way when there's a critical mass of other people just like you. So even if the College Democrats have been shut down, the idea that theologically conservative Christians must be Republicans has already been challenged. Diaz says that when the College Democrats set up a table at a recruiting fair last fall, "people were a little confrontational, asking us how we could call ourselves Christians and be Democrats." But when they did the same thing this past semester, the response was different. "Now it's more like, 'That's interesting--let me talk to you and hear why you're a Democrat.'" That new openness to political diversity will be harder to shut down.

You know, free speech.

A.k.a. "liberty."

Shoe 'nuff

I think Juan Cole has the most telling comparison:

If you search shoes and Iraq, here is how google shows two BBC stories on December 14, five years apart (they came up together like this at the top of my search):

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Iraqis celebrate Saddam capture
Dec 14, 2003 ... women ululated and crowds beat pictures of Saddam with shoes. ... where the Saddam statue was toppled at the end of the war, ...
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3317637.stm - 46k

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Shoes thrown at Bush on Iraq trip
Dec 14, 2008 ... President Bush's farewell visit to Iraq is marred by an incident in which two shoes are thrown at him during a news conference.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7782422.stm - 8 hours ago

Yep, El Presidente Bush dodged a shoe aimed at his head by an Iraqi journalist, with the hurling of shoes considered the utmost expression of contempt in that country:



I guess free speech has finally come to Iraq -- the very reason we took down Saddam.

Mission Accomplished!

Signs

I'm a big fan of Laura Ries' The Origin of Brands Blog. I don't know how she is as a consultant on a product that hasn't come out yet, but she does sharp, succinct, insightful analysis, particularly amusing with regard to politics this year:

One look at the signs at a campaign rally says it all. Who will win. Who will lose.

When building a brand, words matter. And the words that matter most for a politician are the words on campaign posters and website home pages.

The candidate who has the best and most consistent words will build the strongest brand and most likely will win the election.

On Hillary:

Where did Clinton go wrong? It all comes down to the signs. She never had consistent sign language. I have never seen so many different and ever changing campaign slogans in my life. I complain about Coca-Cola changing taglines every year, but Clinton seemed to change her signs every day. Except for keeping the printing industry happy, her signs did little to build her brand.

In fact, her constantly changing message reminded people of one of the Clinton brand’s greatest weaknesses. A common criticism of the Clinton presidency was its constant change of strategy with every shift of the wind based on poll tracking data.

On McCain:

So far, John McCain has survived without a message, but going into the general election he won’t go far without one. If he wants to avoid being labeled as “Bush Third Term,” he’s got to start printing some good signs right away. Not an easy task, but without the right sign language, he is doomed.

On Obama:

The Obama campaign demonstrates the value of having the right sign language. Barack Obama faced an uphill battle in establishing his brand. First of all, his first and last name are strange. And even worse, Obama rhymes with Osama the country’s number 1 enemy. Add to that he is black, young and new to the national stage. The wacky Reverend Wright hasn’t help him either...

(On Obama vs. Clinton)...All that said, the race has been a tight one. But one I believe was definitively ended on Tuesday night. Not because of the primary results which gave one win to Obama and one to Clinton. But because of the images of each candidate’s “victory” speech. The sign language spoke loud and clear that Obama will win the nomination and Clinton will lose it...

...In North Carolina, Obama was brilliant. He stood tall in front of a sea of supporters all holding the same sign, with the same message, in the same colors. “CHANGE we can believe in.” Powerful stuff. Of course, his speech was incredible, but what clinched it was the sign.

Rather interesting considering this affront to civil liberties today when a 61-year old librarian was denied her right to peaceful free speech today:



In comparison to what the above signifies about the Republican candidate, how about what this says about the Dems'?

4th and Four

Four months from today the big decision gets made. Today the well-mannered, anti-Progressive ex-Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) has passed away. I won't pretend to mourn him politically, nor do I enjoy the white-washing (sic) the MSM is bent on doing, but do offer bloggy condolences to his family.

With four months to go we've got an outgoing President being openly heckled at a moderate-sized Independence Day event. We've got oil prices above where our nation's arch enemy, Osama Bin Laden, has wanted them since before the start of El Presidente's disastrous Presidency, Cheney/Bush essentially using their eight years of rule to give Osama the win. We've got a Republican candidate running who, in this time of economic peril and energy crunch, owns eight-count'em-eight homes.

On the other side, we've got a challenger to all of the above GOP cognitive dissonance whom they are flailing around to negatively brand, and whom is considering hosting the largest acceptance speech audience in American political history -- at Denver's Mile High Stadium.

So after reading attacks on Obama from the left, some of them even justified, most of them revealing partisan ignorance of the candidate who's being nominated, it is particularly enjoyable to read Andy Borowitz's latest juicy column full of satire, "Liberal Bloggers Accuse Obama of Trying to Win Election":

Suspicions about Sen. Obama's true motives have been building over the past few weeks, but not until today have the bloggers called him out for betraying the Democratic Party's losing tradition.

"Barack Obama seems to be making a very calculated attempt to win over 270 electoral votes," wrote liberal blogger Carol Foyler at LibDemWatch.com, a blog read by a half-dozen other liberal bloggers. "He must be stopped."

But those comments were not nearly as strident as those of Tracy Klugian, whose blog LoseOn.org has backed unsuccessful Democratic candidates since 2000.

"Increasingly, Barack Obama's message is becoming more accessible, appealing, and yes, potentially successful," he wrote. "Any Democrat who voted for Dukakis, Mondale or Kerry should regard this as a betrayal."

As a young teenager I watched the Left in this country commit ritual suicide with a combination of infighting and corruption.

Let's not let history repeat itself.

Veterans Day Blues

The worst Veterans Days are always the ones where there's a war going on. And while all wars seem to engender some degree of patriotic censorship, even the ones going well, the chaotic banning of anti-Iraq War vets from V-Day parades is just, well, un-American:

Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out were prevented from joining the annual parade down Atlantic Avenue and restricted to a nearby parking lot, officials said. Organizers said the groups were trying to push a political agenda at an event to honor veterans. Earlier this week, the Veterans Day Parade Committee rejected their applications to participate, according to the Long Beach Press- Telegram. "This is not a political event, this is a time to come and just say thank you to all veterans," said Long Beach City Councilman Val Lerch, who also was on the parade committee.

Here's Val. I'm hoping he means well, but you just don't know these days, with such a dissent-averse rightwing as we have now. The partisans in charge.

Keith Olbermann had on a very compelling Paul Rieckhoff, Executive Director and Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), where they covered the stifling of veteran free speech, the 1 in 4 stats of Iraq & Afghanistan war vets currently homeless, and a recent case story in the L.A. Times by a photographer who got closer than usual to his Marlboro Marine.

Oh, and they cover Bush not pausing in his war council to attend the annual wreath-laying at Arlington National Cemetary.

Meanwhile our very own Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command, says:

None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go.

Getting Iranian behaviour to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.

Getting our government to change its behavior is not even possible until January 20, 2009.

It's enough to drive one to absinthe.

Speech

On the road again, this time in the rather fetching city of Vancouver, where over dinner we discussed the speech at Columbia University by this asshole nutjob of an Iranian President who's name I can't be bothered to type since I'm blogging by Blackberry. The upshot from across the table was (1) he shouldn't have been allowed to speak there in the first place and (2) the university President introducing him seemed wacked to be insulting him in his intro, having invited him in the first place.

My thoughts, in reverse order, are that (2) I'm assuming the Columbia President felt a need to innoculate himself, whatever the resulting media dissonance, and (1) as odious as the Iranian President's speech might be, including his threat to wipe Israel off the map, since he hasn't directly threatened the United States itself, and since many political speakers offend someone or some group as much as he offends Jews in NYC, it is better as usual to let daylight be the best disinfectant.

Just as Hugo Chavez made himself lool like a fool to all but his ardent supporters when he spouted hyperbolic at the U.N. last year, so too did this guy look like a dipshit for dodging direct questions and, best of all, denying that any homosexuality exists in Iran, which drew outright laughter in the room.

Oddly enough, if anything could have made him seem like a moron...that was it.

More fun to come with this U.N. visit, f'sure.

War for Peace

I'm watching these anti-war protesters getting arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights. It strikes me that free speech is the first correction to the Constitution, not Amendment #78 or even low double-digits. No violence, no guns, no dead children due to the protest, and they're being busted in D.C. itself.

Our America. Wild.

The jackboot stuff kicks in around 6:15 when a mounted cop uses the unreasoning fear tactic, using the threat of violence from his horse to do it.

It's like suddenly being at a Karl Rove-staged GOP/Bush rally. As if D.C. is Bush's space, sheriff Cheney, not our town anymore. Not for every American.

So this is what the social contract has come to under imperialistic GOP rule.

I was also struck by the question of whether this protest was part of a larger plan, some sort of coordinated peace movement, but I'll bet the best we can expect is that the viral dissemination of the arrest video makes a couple stars and provides a little fuel.

But I don't think that's the case. I just watched this riveting video one of my heroes, former weapons inspector Scott Ritter. He just wrote a book called Waging Peace because he thinks that for there to be a truly effective peace movement, it has to get hard, get organized, get Sun-Tzu.

Ritter argues that the majority of Americans aren't against the Iraq War, they're just against losing. Ritter comes right out and says we lost.

Was that so difficult?

Then he says that those of us who want to be fighting for peace have to realize it isn't about converting everybody over to our cause. There are, in fact, pro-war factions that aren't going to change, including those in Congress who are vested in the military-industrial complex, per GOP President Dwight D. Eisenhower himself.

“If you want to be anti-war, that means you have to be in conflict with those who are pro-war.”

D'oh!

Petraeus is now revealed as completely in bed with Bush. He sees himself as a future Presidential candidate or something, defending his counterterrorism reputation. (Wouldn't you?) Leading up to the reuniting in D.C., Bush has been making a total fool of himself (and of course thus us) in Australia, confusing it with Austria (I kid you not), calling the APEC meeting he was at "OPEC" (what would Freud say?) and just like on his last trip to China, going off the stage the wrong way into a dead end (how overdetermined).

As for Bush's supposed nemesis, our nemesis, Osama Bin Asshole, either he or someone dressed like him (it's actually hard to tell) is in a newly released video giving us a recent history lesson (sad for its accuracies), taunting us to leave in another smartly timed release to steel our resolve.

The last thing Osama (or Al Quaeda) wants is for us to leave. Otherwise why would he/they release tapes on the last weekend of the last Presidential election?

Our presence there is his oxygen, and unless there are some serious Democratic led fireworks over the next several weeks, the USA is going to keep providing it to him.

Kosfight

DailyKos must have finally pushed him too far. Bill O'Reilly declared jihad the week before the 2nd annual YearlyKos convention, leading to a distancing from the event by JetBlue. It's been covered extensively elsewhere, especially well in this TPMtv video, but I got an interesting analysis by loyal reader "m":

I hate to say it, but i'm starting to find the whole "Kos / O'Reilly" deathmatch very interesting from an old v. new media standpoint.

You have:

O'Reilly:
- an extremely large old media megaphone (granted, it's cable, but you know what i mean).
- It's Fox, so he can say whatever he wants, including cherry-picking wacko user comments, material out of context, & outright lies, etc.
- He can also have psychos like Malkin & Coulter, as well as a few faux Demos on to reinforce his baloney.
- And he can do it night after night, for however long his show is (and I assume he's also spewing this drivel on his radio show also)
- he's using his reach to try to scare off Kos' advertisers (which, i can only imagine, are piddly in the grand scheme of things)

then, you have Kos:
- largest political community website
- has solidarity with just about every other progressive site (Atrios, etc, etc)
- all of them are banding together to embarass/humiliate O'Reilly any way they can, with complete access to anything that's public record (the lawsuit depositions being the most obvious), and an army of amateur researchers who are only too happy to do so.
- they're using their reach to try to scare off O'R' advertisers (which, i can only imagine, are quite substantial in terms of $$)

Neither side seems to have any reason to stop short of death.

I think it'll be very interesting to see who cries "Uncle", and what the determining factor is. I think it's got to be O'R, since Kos has no one to answer to, but we'll see.

Maybe falafel boy just sees this as a load of inexpensive red-meat programming, and he doesn't care about having the humilatingly hilarious text of his harassment deposition winging endlessly thru cyberspace. But sooner or later, his advertisers might.

Home Depot appears to have pulled out earlier this week.

Presidential candidate Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) evidently stood up to O'Reilly, we may get to see it tomorrow.

For the record, I believe in free speech, even odious speech. I believe that in a democracy, if you find certain speech odious, it's your job to speak up.

It's not surprising that the Republican Party desperately wants to smear DailyKos and try to denigrate its brand value. Hopefully Red Scare it, make you the weirdo for going there to read or express progressive American opinions.

For the record, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga deserves a Congressional medal someday for single-handedly reviving, or inventing, a crucial corner of American democratic speech: the virtual public square.

It'll be interesting to see where the site goes once there's a Democratic President, especially if Congress stays the same. Will there be more Party specific critique and action? Will it still get 500,000 hits a day? Will it get more?

Let's do our best to make it until then.

Meowww

Republican once were though "strong on defense", mostly thanks to two 1950's terms by President (former General and WWII Supreme Commander) Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now, however, they seem to purr, screech and meow.

While the Democratic Party just had a highly successful YouTube format debate with rather braver-than-journalist user-gen questions, it seems the Republicans are just too scared to face regular American voters. Per Andrew Sullivan:

Rudy won't bite, apparently. Romney's decidedly cool to the idea. The others are getting iffy. Hewitt declares YouTube and CNN biased. Heh. For my part, the current old white men running for the GOP already seem from some other planet. Ducking YouTube after the Dems did so well will look like a party uncomfortable with the culture and uncomfortable with democracy. But then, we kind of knew that already, I guess, didn't we?

Ho ho, we did!

But a reader of Talking Points Memo thinks that maybe the problem isn't American voters, maybe the GOP is terrified to reveal exactly who are the core Republican voters:

As far as issues like illegal immigration and "coercive interrogation techniques" go, how does one ask questions like this in a Youtube format in an amusing way? The differences between the GOP base and the political mainstream can seem less extreme when asked by someone like Wolf Blitzer, but if presented from the standard GOP rank-and-file member of the base, it seemed like a great way to show how unhinged the GOP has become on some of these issues. Personally, I'm surprised the GOP ever got close to agreeing to this format, and once the Democratic debate happened and showed the format in action, I didn't see how it could have been pulled off by the GOP.

Mark my words: if they do hold the debate, filter will be on Rovian. You know, like 11.

Who else is making like a kittykat in the crazy camp? Why, none other than Bill O'Reilly, who has been trying his damnedest to demonize DailyKos, a place where people can go and express their opinions for all to read. You know, Participatory Democracy. O'Reilly has made such a massive misfire (he'll fail at anything here but playing to his base -- this is just strengthening Kos) that Stephen Colbert is getting into the act. By condemning...uh...promoting the site himself.

Unlike with his target, to post on O'Reilly's site you have to pay $5/month. That's $60 per year for "free" speech. And he sure can't take the heat when he's called on the hate speech posted to his site -- he's so feline he has to turn off Jane Hall's microphone and smear her, shouting, as a liar. (You can help fight back here.)

I guess when they're not chicken or chickenhawk, they're abusing their seats of power by breaking the law. In this New York Times article, they name 14 Federal lawmakers from sea-to-shining-sea who are current subjects of criminal investigations.

Yes, two of them are Democrats, well deserving of inclusion. That leaves 86% as Republicans.

They also commit perjury.

They've got that cat scratch fever.

Judicial Activism

Well, you can't say that Mister Bush has been completely ineffective as acting President. He's put arch-conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court. If the Democrats ever needed another campaign issue to insure their majority rule for the next 25 years, the newly reactionary U.S. Supreme Court majority just handed it to them with a series of end-of-term rulings that give the phrase "judicial activism" a new home -- the Federalist Society, a.k.a. the Washingtonian Republican rightwing.

How much must former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor rue her vote installing Mister Bush in office over 2000 popular vote winner and probable Florida recount winner Al Gore? All her good work come undone, she chose to serve on the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Commission only to have that effort tossed back in her face like mud. And now the man that replaced her has joined the four other rightwing reactionaries to give us resegregation, corporate smear ads, limits to student free speech outside school grounds, license for developers to ignore the Endangered Species Act, and protection for Bush/Cheney-style faith-based graft using our tax dollars.

Justice Stephen Breyer made his point aloud, in this case after a reported shouting match with Chief Justice Roberts over the affirmative action case and what it means to be an American, to the Court in session (via Jeffrey Toobin at CNN):

Justice Breyer used a phrase, "Never in the history of the court have so few done so much so quickly." And he was talking about Chief Justice Roberts and Justice [Samuel] Alito making this court a far more conservative institution in just one year. And at that phrase, "And never have so few done so much so quickly," both Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts looked over at Breyer and went, whoa, that's pretty personal by the standards of the Supreme Court.

You think I'm reaching with a quarter century realignment for the Dems? It happened the last time Republicans drove America into the ground. Hell, even Fox has Bush polling at record lows. Even better, they have Dems polling ahead of Republicans on facing off against a jingoistic threat!

I look forward this Supreme Court's first opportunity to rule on a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body when she finds herself pregnant.

Make it 50.