Sonia Sotomayor, evil commie activist judge, wants to take away your guns because she hates Jesus, America, and the flag. Or, at least, that’s what Republicans say
based on a single decision Sotomayor joined:
This year, Sotomayor was part of a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York that held the 2nd Amendment did not apply to the states. At a news conference Wednesday, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and other senators said they were concerned about the decision and pledged to grill Sotomayor about it at her confirmation hearings, which begin July 13.
The panel’s reasoning, Sessions said, “would eviscerate the 2nd Amendment in many parts of the country.”
Republicans shouldn’t press this one too far, though, unless guns are important enough for them to admit they’re hypocrites when it comes to judicial philosophy. After all, Sotomayor was ruling in exactly the way conservatives typically advocate:
Democrats and gun control groups argue, however, that Sotomayor and the other members of the panel were following a restrained approach to the case by declining to rule on an issue the Supreme Court has yet to take up.
How restrained? This restrained:
in an opinion a few weeks ago, in a Chicago gun-control case, a panel of conservative appellate judges said Judge Sotomayor and her colleagues on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had gotten it right.
I’m sure Sessions and Co. would say it was different. The conservative justices were protecting freedom. Sotomayor and her judicial-activist buddies were running an end-run around the constitution to further their goal of destroying real Americans.
Remember
this?
[Democrats] will use the budget reconciliation process, which would eliminate the Republicans’ ability to filibuster, to pass health care legislation. However, they will hold off on reconciliation until October 15. That gives them nearly six months to put together a bill that can garner Republican support. Ultimately, Democrats are sending a clear signal that if Republicans won’t participate in crafting a bill they can support, the Democrats will pass health reform on their own.
A couple of months ago, the Democrats were ready to push health care reform through the system without Republican support if necessary. Now, the discussion has focused almost entirely on how the Dems will water down the health care bill to gain Republican support. I hope the Democrats will realize that there must be a limit on the concessions made to Republicans.
I’m glad the Democrats want to build consensus on health care reform. But there need to be limits. The Republicans’ ideas should be heard, but the Democrats need to set certain minimum expectations for health reform. If Republicans aren’t willing to accept a plan with a robust public option, then their votes simply aren’t worth it. Sen. Charles Grassley yesterday said that any sort of public option would be a dealbreaker for Republicans. If that’s true, we have nothing to talk about. They can wait until October and deal with a bill that takes none of their ideas into consideration.
A little shameless promotion is good for you, trust me. This weekend is the 37th annual
Twin Cities Pride Celebration, and, as always, it’s going to be great. (This year also marks the 40th anniversary of
Stonewall.) We have the third largest Pride celebration in the country, after New York and San Francisco. There will be concerts, food, enumerable booths, fireworks, free stuff, and of course a huge parade on Sunday. Hope to see you there!
Here’s a weird thing for a potential Senate candidate to say:
They’ve asked me to run for the Senate as a Republican. I don’t know if I’m going to do that. [Philadelphia Business Today, via Political Wire]
That was Rep. Mike Castle, R-DE (for now). He’s been considering a run for Joe Biden’s Senate seat. Is he considering whether we wants to run at all, or is he trying to decide whether to run as a Republican or Democrat?
In the House, according to data from the Washington Post, Castle has the 27th-lowest percentage of voting with his own party. He voted with the Republicans 86.9 percent of the time, which seems pretty high, but keep in mind that the vast majority of Representatives voted with their own party over 90 percent of the time.
I don’t know if I’d particularly welcome the switch. Delaware did send Joe Biden to the Senate, so I’m sure we could get a more progressive Senator than Castle. Still, it’s always enjoyable to watch the massive exodus from the GOP.
Michael Steele, chair of the GOP and supreme moron,
has the solution to our health care problems:
So if it’s a cost problem, it’s easy: Get the people in a room who have the most and the most direct impact on cost, and do the deal. Do the deal. It’s not that complicated. If it’s an access question, people don’t have access to health care, then figure out who they are, and give them access! Hello?! Am I missing something here?
Ladies and gentlemen, the modern Republican party. Just do the deal! It’s so easy! Just shut up and give everyone access to health care — stop making such a big production about it!
The next problem Steele and the Republicans will solve is the economy. Just give people jobs and make the stock market go up! It’s so easy!
This is why Republicans can’t be trusted on policy. They have absolutely no clue how these things work. There are lots of complicated, moving parts in our health care system — you don’t just sit a few people down in a room and “do the deal.” And remember, it’s not just Steele who thinks this way. Just last week, the entire House Republican caucus presented a four-page health care plan.
This is also why the Republicans are out of power right now. When times are good, their facility with political attacks does them well. When times are tough, though, the American people want a party in power that actually knows what it’s doing.
Does the word “apocalypse” sound a bit over the top to you? Well, just think about the drama and hand-wringing of this past legislative session. Now imagine what it will be like when the deficit is
4 times as large as this biennium’s.
Politics in Minnesota’s Steve Perry runs down what the numbers will look like without this year’s one-time stimulus money and education shift. After one-time money and accounting shifts this year, we only (only!) had to come up with $2.1 billion in this biennium. In 2012, we presumably will not have help from the Federal government. Plus, we will need to pay back the education shift that we so wisely used in this biennium. The result:
- In sheer inflation-adjusted dollars, the $7.3 billion ‘12-‘13 deficit is equal to 3.5 times the net $2.1 billion hole that the Legislature and the governor had to make up this year for ‘10-‘11.
- As a share of the prior biennium’s collections and expenditures, the projected 24 percent ‘12-‘13 shortfall is equal to 4 times the net 6 percent ‘10-‘11 deficit.
Once again, this is why we shouldn’t rely on one-time money or accounting shifts to “balance” the budget. Because it’s not balancing the budget, it’s just kicking the can down the road. Our policymakers — including, but not limited to, Governor Pawlenty — should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen.
At least,
that’s how much they’re spending on Norm Coleman’s losing battle:
The fundraising committee for Senate Republicans has invested heavily in Norm Coleman’s ongoing battle in Minnesota, including about $938,000 last month alone.
Considering that Senate Republicans have another rough election year ahead of them, you’d think they would recognize the writing on the wall and start saving that money for Senate candidates in 2010. It’s absolutely sick to me that they’re willing to throw away $1 million per month just to keep Franken out of the Senate for another month or two.
As I predicted yesterday, State Representative Kurt Zellers
has been elected the next Leader of the House Republican Caucus. Zellers was probably the best choice for the House Republican Caucus, especially considering his opponent was failed CD1 candidate Randy Demmer (who I mistakenly called Paul yesterday, an error all the more inexcusable given the number of posts I wrote about Demmer during his incompetent congressional campaign).
Back in March, I asked
When will Obama own the Bush economy? The answer is: Not yet, but it’s getting closer and closer, according to a new
Rasmussen poll:
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 39% of voters now say the country’s economic problems are caused more by the policies Obama has put in place. That’s a 12-point jump from a month ago.
Fifty-four percent (54%) still say the country’s economic woes are due to the recession Obama inherited from President Bush. That figure is down eight points from 62% from early June.
So, by July or August it will be the Obama economy. That seems reasonable enough. After about six months, Obama should certainly share responsibility for the economic situation. Nevertheless, I hope Americans realize how much worse things could have been, and that it can take a long time to turn around a recession of this magnitude.
Of course, what’s more important, at least politically speaking, is the state of the economy in November 2010. It will be the Obama economy starting in a month or two — but that could either be a good thing or a bad thing for Democrats, depending on the trajectory of the Obama economy over the next year.
Liberals and conservatives talk past each other on taxes all the time, for one simple reason: We have a fundamental disconnect about who the rich and the poor are. Liberals are more likely to see a person’s wealth or poverty as something s/he was born into, while conservatives are more likely to assume that person is responsible for his or her success or failure.
Both are true, but not all the time. There are plenty of rich people who are self-made, but there are also plenty of trust-fund babies. There are many poor people who have made bad choices, and there are many poor people who are victims of their circumstances. It’s never as simple as black and white, left and right.
A great example comes by way of King Banaian at SCSU Scholars. Banaian takes a look at data from a recent Pew study on generational income mobility and concludes that while many of the children of poor parents have their income improve relative to their parents’, it’s no more than we’d expect from random chance. For the wealthy, however, more of their children see increases in income than we could expect from a purely random result. He writes:
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The Republican gubernatorial field is a major source of amusement for me these days. First you have former State Representative Bill Haas, who represented Champlin for a decade and was the city’s mayor before that. I know Haas’ record pretty well, I worked on the campaign that beat him in 2004. We had a phenomenal candidate in Denise Dittrich, but even so, you have to be a pretty terrible incumbent to run ten points behind George W. Bush in Champlin in 2004. Despite this, Haas thinks he’s a credible candidate for Governor. Perhaps he’ll be running on his experience as a lobbyist for the last five years.
Then there is State Representative Paul Kohls. Now that Mark Olson is out of the legislature, Kohls probably holds the mark for the most time spent speaking on the House Floor. To his admirers (does he really have any), he’s loquacious. To the rest of us, he’s just really obnoxious.
Finally, today comes word that State Representative Tom Emmer, the King of the Crazies, is going to run for Governor. Emmer had been considering a run for House Minority Leader, but I’m told he didn’t have anywhere close to the votes he needed to win. Apparently Emmer decided that it’d be easier to win a statewide election than to pull together 24 supporters in the House Republican Caucus. Good luck to you Tom.
Sadly, there is just too much crazy in this Republican field. There is a real danger that Haas, Kohls, Emmer, et al will divide up the winger vote and allow a more moderate, sane candidate to win.
By the way, the House Republican Caucus will be selecting a new leader tomorrow night. The Strib identifies Paul Demmer and Kurt Zellers as candidates. From what I hear, Zellers is the frontrunner. Zellers will be a formidable leader, certainly a more disciplined messanger than Marty Seifert.
Here’s an
interesting analysis of the Iranian election from two PhD candidates at Columbia University. Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco looked at the numbers and concluded that they looked non-random:
The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average — a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another — are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.
…But that’s not all. Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran’s vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.
Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-adjacent digits. This may not sound so different from 70 percent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 percent.
It turns out that the chance of both of these irregularities happening in a single election is less than one percent.
[via FlowingData]
After giving the GLBT the cold shoulder one too many times,
Obama looks to make amends:
The Obama Justice Department has reached out to major gay rights organizations and scheduled a private meeting for next week with the groups, in an apparent effort to smooth over tensions in the wake of the controversy over the administration’s defense in court of the Defense of Marriage Act.
After five contentious months, I seriously doubt this will be enough to placate GLBT activists. The problem is, it’s getting harder and harder to assume that Obama ultimately means to expand gay rights.
I’m one of the first people to acknowledge that Obama can’t do everything at once. In fact, I’ve said before that GLBT activists may have to accept that they won’t be the first priority on Obama’s list — the economy and health care were always going to be the top priorities. I think GLBT groups understand that, and could accept it — if it appeared that the administration was preparing for an eventual push on gay rights.
So far, though, there’s been very little evidence that gay rights are even on Obama’s radar. The only time the issue comes up is when GLBT groups make headlines for trying to goad the Obama administration into action. That’s not sitting well with Obama’s base, and he should put in some serious work to fix it.
And by “work,” I don’t mean a “private meeting.” I mean serious work preparing to take a stand on GLBT rights. It’s time for the administration to at least lay the groundwork for repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Reasonable gay rights activists will understand if it’s not done immediately — they just want to know that Obama is actually committed to the cause.
House Democrats are moving forward with a (thankfully)
fairly liberal approach to health reform:
House Democrats released the outline of their health care reform bill Friday - a proposal that would create a public insurance option, expand Medicaid and require employers to provide coverage or pay a tax.
There’s been a lot of brouhaha in the media over the public plan, but a NY Times poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly support the plan. In fact, even 50 percent of Republicans support the public plan. It has such overwhelming support that it would be absolutely outrageous for the final version not to include a public plan.
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A dedicated reader sent in this interesting anecdote over the weekend…
I flew back to MN from DC today and, as we’re taxiing into the gate at MSP, there’s an obnoxious younger guy talking loudly on his cell phone.
In the course of his convo, he identifies himself as a former Coleman staffer and mentions that he’s in town for a “pre-concession bbq” that a bunch of former/current staffers are having…
This - along with the news that the last of the Coleman staffers are getting new jobs - is a sign that the end is near.
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