| The wingnut "scandal" of the day: "Evidence appears to be mounting that the Obama administration has systematically targeted for closing Chrysler dealers who contributed to Repubicans. What started earlier this week as mainly a rumbling on the Right side of the blogosphere has gathered some steam today with revelations that among the dealers being shut down are a GOP congressman and closing of competitors to a dealership chain partly owned by former Clinton White House chief of staff Mack McLarty."
Reality: "There is just one problem with this theory. Nobody has bothered to look up data for the control group: the list of dealerships which aren't being closed. It turns out that all car dealers are, in fact, overwhelmingly more likely to donate to Republicans than to Democrats -- not just those who are having their doors closed."
Hilarious.
Also, guess who said this about Obama's SCOTUS nominee, Sonia Sotomayor: "President Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor shows that empathy has won out over excellence in the White House." In the same breath, the author singles out Clarence Thomas as a pioneer in constitutional law. That's right, the same justice Dahlia Lithwick described as spending "...every morning of oral argument...in perfect, motionless repose."
Drum roll, please...John Yoo! The man who (poorly) scripted legal opinions, not based on the law, but to support predetermined (and illegal) political decisions! Whee!
Also the meme that Sotomayor is an "activist" judge rings hollow, especially when considering conservative SCOTUS darling, Anton Scalia, a former Nixon political operative who cloaks himself under the mantle of "orginalism," yet consistently backs Republican party policies that, say, deny the right of habeas corpus to anyone the president designates. Better yet (from a comic viewpoint) was his claim that torture isn't a "punishment," and, therefore, can't be considered "cruel" and "unusual" from a constitutional perspective.
And, of course, Scalia was at the heart of our generation's most "activist" SCOTUS decision -- Bush v Gore, which handed the presidency to Bush in 2000. Arguing that the 2000 Florida vote counting violated the constitution's Equal Protection clause, the court's majority "remedied" Florida's voters' rights by forbidding the state courts to define a uniform system for counting votes, and set an arbitrary deadline for counting votes that froze the vote-counting at a time when Bush Jr held a lead, prompting Alan Dershowitz to call it the "single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history." Indeed, the decision was so embarrassing to the majority that they begged in the written opinion that courts should never use Bush v Gore as basis for any future court cases...
Whee. |
