Al Franken Demolishes GOPs Anti-Thurgood Marshall Campaign

From Crooks and Liars:

As Blue Texan at FDL noted, Al Franken laid waste to the GOP's anti-Thurgood Marshall Campaign and as they called it, their minority outreach program. Franken gives his "good friend" Lindsey Graham and the Republicans a little history lesson on what an "activist judge" is and why Justice Thurgood Marshall wasn't one of them.

Franken: You said there are three things that judges hold to when they’re not activists. You said that they respect precedent. They make narrow decisions and they defer to the political branches, in other words the legislature. And there are a lot of recent cases that we’ve been talking about that instinctively strike me and a lot of other people as falling outside of these three guidelines. And I think that in these cases the Supreme Court was legislating from the bench, which is being activist.

Franken goes on to discuss why the decisions in Circuit City v. Adams, Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Rent-a-Center v. Jackson, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS Inc., the Supreme Court would have fit into Kagan’s guidelines of what would define an “activist court” and noted that Republicans all “seem to like” those decisions. He went on to explain why there is no way that Brown v. Board of Education should not be lumped in with those other cases and how it was “an exemplar of overturning a precedent that needed to be overturned.”

Franken: There are certain situations where the Supreme Court really should subject the law to a heightened scrutiny and this is what I think Justice Marshall was talking about when he said that the court should show “special solicitude for the despised and disadvantaged, the people who went unprotected by every other organ of government and who had no other champion.”

Now in the opening statements you were criticized for admiring Justice Marshall for believing this, but I actually think that this belief, Justice Marshall’s belief is just good, Constitutional law.

Are you familiar with Carolene Products… Carolene Products case of 1938?

Kagan: Yes sir.

Franken: Are you familiar with Footnote Four of that decision?

Kagan: Yes sir.

Franken: And you’re familiar with that because the footnote’s really important, isn’t it? It’s often taught in Constitutional law classes, whether they be in the first year or the second year or the third year, right?

Kagan: It is.

Franken: Can you tell me what that footnote says and why it’s important?

Kagan: Senator it seems as though you have it in front of you and you’re going to do a better job of it than I am at this moment.

Franken: You’re a mind reader. Footnote Four basically says that when courts interpret the Constitution and try to figure out whether a law complies with the Constitution, courts should give special scrutiny to laws that violate a specific part of the Constitution, that restrict the political process and that affect “religious, national, racial and discrete and insular minorities” who have a really hard time getting help through the normal political process.

Now to me discrete and insular minorities sounds a lot like the despised and disadvantaged that go unprotected and have no other champion. Is it safe to say that Justice Marshall’s belief is consistent with Carolene Products?

Kagan: Well there’s no doubt Sen. Franken that racial classifications are subject to very high scrutiny under the Equal Protection clause and have been so for a long time and the Equal Protection clause exists to ensure against discrimination on disfavored basis very much including in the archetypal example is race and that it is not only appropriate but obligatory on the courts to enforce that prohibition on discrimination on the basis of race.

Franken: So Justice Marshall’s belief that was criticized in the opening statements is really very consistent with established Constitutional law, isn’t it?

Kagan: Well Sen. Franken, I will say that when I wrote those words I was not speaking of Footnote Four in Carolene Products. I was speaking instead of what I’ve talked about several times at this hearing which is Justice Marshall’s deep belief in insuring a level playing field for all Americans and insuring that each and every American regardless of wealth or power or privilege, that each and every American gets fairly heard before the court and when I wrote that tribute to Justice Marshall and wrote those words that was very much what I had in mind.

Franken: So I’d like to leave you with this thought, okay. Justice Thurgood Marshall was one of the greatest lawyers, jurists in American history. This is a man who won Brown v. Board of Education, who helped end segregation in our nations’ schools and opened the doors to black Americans. This is a man who proved that separate but equal was inherently unequal.

Not only that but he served with distinction as Solicitor General, as a judge on the Second Circuit and as the first African American Supreme Court Justice. This is a giant of the American legal system. And I think what I really want to say is that Justice Marshall wasn’t some activist radical. Rather his views were very much in the mainstream and in line with Constitutional jurisprudence since 1938, since Carolene and before that. And I just think that we need to be aware of that and germane about it.

Kagan: Sen. Franken I’ll just say what I said on many occasions in the past which is that Justice Marshall is a hero of American law and a hero of mine.

Franken: And of mine. Thank you.

Al proves once again why any Republicans that dismiss him as just being a comedian, do so at their peril.

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Rachel Maddow: Boehner fails politics 101

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Keith Olbermann - Countdown: Oil spread leaves horror in its wake

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The following from Crooks and Liars:

Keith Olbermann talked to John Wathen from The Waterkeeper Alliance who has been photographing the disastrous environmental impact of the oil spill in the Gulf. His blog is at http://bpoilslick.blogspot.com/. I've been watching some of the video from his site for a while now and was glad to see Keith finally give their work some attention.

OLBERMANN: Some of the most devastating pictures yet of the extent of the damage being caused by this oil disaster is coming from an Alabama conservationist named John Wathen, who has been flying over the spill whenever he can to document independently exactly what is taking place. Footage shot last week posted on YouTube, this gentleman revealed that the devastation is worse than BP has been telling us and it possible that it is more extensive than many of us had feared.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN WATHEN, ALABAMA CONSERVATIONIST: The further we got in the Gulf and the more consistent it came, at 17 miles out, it was obvious that the entire Gulf was covered at this point.

At 23 miles out, we encountered the heaviest sheen yet. The water was a deep purple, maroon, blue. It looked almost like a rainbow. The scope of this is beyond belief. It will take years at this rate to gather up even a portion of the oil that‘s on the surface today.

Some of it looks more like bruised internal organs of the human body than the surface of the ocean. And yet that‘s what it is.

The first time I came out, I saw a fire, there was only one. Today, when we got here, there were four. Within a couple of passes, there were seven.

From the size of these fires, it seems as though we‘re not only trying to kill everything in the Gulf of Mexico but everything that flies over it as well. This toxic environment can‘t be good for the birds that fly over the Gulf. And certainly nothing can live in these rainbows of death that cover the entire horizon.

As we look closer, we saw this pod of dolphins, obviously struggling just to breathe.

SUBTITLE: Thirty-six dolphins try to escape the BP slick. Eighteen dolphins in this pod.

WATHEN: Then we found this guy, a sperm whale swimming in the oil had just breached along his back where you see red patches of crude as if he had been basted for broiling.

Then there was this pod of dolphins found later, some already dead, some in the death throes. It seemed to be they were raising their heads and looking at the fires wondering, why is my world burning down around me? Why would humans do this to me?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OLBERMANN: Joining us now from Tuscaloosa, the man behind the remarkable video, John Wathen, conservationist with the Water Keeper Alliance. Thanks for your time tonight, sir.

WATHEN: Thank you. I appreciate being here.

OLBERMANN: As I implied there, that‘s not even your most recent footage. Do the new images show any sign of improvement out there?

WATHEN: Not at all. If anything, things are getting worse.

When we first went out, there were bright red colors. There were vivid colors in the oil and there was some separation between the bands. The second time, it looked more like deep bruising on the skin. This time, when we went out there, it was—it was much wider. It was much widespread from a mile and a half off the shore to Gulf Shores, Alabama, all the way out to the rig some 90 miles away. We didn‘t fly over clean water one time.

OLBERMANN: The—obviously—

WATHEN: It is getting worse.

OLBERMANN: The thing that is resonating with people that have seen your video online, in particular, have been the dolphins. How many would you say you spotted and how many of them were already dead by the time you saw them?

WATHEN: Well, we couldn‘t get an accurate count on how many were actually dead. We had three people in the plane trying to count.

And we figure we saw over 100 dolphin that‘s were in distress. Some were obviously dead. They were belly up in the water. And there were several more that were in, you know, obvious distress. It looked to me as if they were in their death throes.

OLBERMANN: The burning of the oil, the use of the dispersants that obviously created the separations that you described, and now, just the sort of coating of the surface, wall to wall oil, is this an instance where the attempt of the cure, what BP is supposedly doing to clean up what it has spilled into the Gulf, that the cure is as bad if not worse than the original disease itself?

WATHEN: In my opinion, absolutely. This dispersant, we‘re putting so much of this stuff in at the source. What they‘re basically doing is just hiding it from sight. We‘re not seeing it on the surface anymore. So, it must not be as bad.

But it‘s robbing the water column of the oxygen. And we‘re seeing these huge plumes of oil underwater. And what you‘re seeing in Florida today, in my opinion, is where these plumes are coming from the Continental Shelf and boiling out into that shallow water.

I flew the Florida coast right after this video. And I had people actually in water that had oil in it. And you could see the sheen for miles and miles and miles out on the horizon. So, they can‘t see from the beach what I can see from the airplane. This thing is huge.

OLBERMANN: What happens when that hurricane blows that into more sensitive—as if the rest of the ecology wasn‘t sensitive enough—but into things like the marshlands, what happens to the marshlands? Do you have any guess?

WATHEN: Well, from what I heard from most of the locals down there and the people that really know the marshes and bayous, this is the worst possible scenario, is a weak storm like this because all it‘s doing is raising the tide and pushing the oil into the marshes without enough force to really break it up. We‘re pushing bulk into the marshes, With the dispersant that‘s involved here, the oil, a lot of it is under the water and the booms had no effect with or without the waves. The oil was coming under the boom.

So now, there is nothing blocking it. All of that oil is going to be in our marshes. It‘s going to be in our estuaries. And there is nothing we can do about it.

OLBERMANN: How much do you think the fires, the burning off spread this into the environment in other ways? Do you have any way of measuring that?

WATHEN: I don‘t have any way of measuring it, Keith. But it‘s phenomenal when you get out there and you realize that these huge towering columns of smoke are coming from incredibly small fires on the horizon. When you look at the amount of oil that‘s out there, each one of those columns of smoke is nothing more than a tea cup in comparison. It will take thousands of these fires to burn all the oil on the Gulf of Mexico. This is—this is ludicrous.

We‘re toxifiying the atmosphere. We‘re killing everything in the Gulf of Mexico around this thing. It seems like we‘re trying to kill everything in the air, too. It‘s insane out there.

OLBERMANN: Indeed, it is. John Wathen, chronicler of that, resident of Alabama, member of the Water Keeper Alliance, his Website on the disaster is BPoilslick.blogspot.com. Mr. Wathen, great thanks for your time and we‘ll talk to you again when the next video gets out of there.

WATHEN: Thank you. It‘s an honor. I hope to have the next video out by the next week that will cover the Florida coastline. And then again, we want to go up right after this storm. I want to try to get down there and get as much of it as I can.

OLBERMANN: We‘ll talk you to then. Thank you, sir.

Hundreds sickened by oily beaches

Oil Rain In Louisiana?

Leeches

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Here comes da judge (with energy-stained hands)

Way down in Louisiana, a federal judge, Martin L. C. Feldman "issued a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of a May 28 order halting all floating offshore drilling project in more than 500 feet of water and preventing the government from issuing new permits for such projects."

Hmmm. It would seem reasonable to me that the government should shut things down until we figure out exactly what happened and why and what needs to be done to prevent it from happening again.

It would seem especially important to know those things when there are 4,000 plus drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, which is now becoming a slimy, gooey, oil slick due to the stupidity and perhaps criminal culpability of BP and Halliburton and other nogoodnik companies that put profits before anything else.

The government plans to appeal the judge's ruling. That also makes a lot of sense.


But, the question arises: Why would a judge do such a thing? Especially now that Lousianians have been praying diligently for some god or other to stop the leak?

Well it turns out that da judge has "massive holdings in energy companies." Think Progress put together a list:

"Like many judges presiding in the Gulf region, Feldman owns lots of energy stocks, including Transocean, Halliburton, and two of BP's largest U.S. private shareholders -- BlackRock (7.2%) and JP Morgan Chase (28.3%)."

It's all spelled out in detail here.

Texas GOP - Evil incorporated

Just when I think things can't get any worse in Texas, things get worse in Texas!

Don't get me wrong: I like Texas. I lived in Texas for 14 years! But I am ashamed of Texas. I am ashamed that the people of Texas have elected such a stupid governor and so many stupid legislators. I'm ashamed of the Texas State Board of Education. I am particular ashamed that so many Texans affiliate with what is arguably one of the most reprehensible and ignorant political parties in our national history - the Republican Party of Texas.

Think Progress has the story.

"Just months after the Republican Attorney General challenged a same-sex couple's request to divorce, the state GOP is pushing even further in their new 2010 platform. Taking a page from the heinous Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill, the GOP both wants to criminalize marrying a same-sex couple and reinstate a sodomy ban."


The entire article is here. Read it and weep for Texas.

Let's pray, Louisiana!

Did you know that yesterday, Sunday, was designated a day of prayer by Louisiana legislators?

The problem, it seems, is that science and technology haven't been quick enough to stop the multitudinous gallons of crude befouling what was once the pristine Gulf of Mexico, so these Louisiana dingbats decided that as a last resort they should resort to the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent deity to whom they all bow their collective knees.

You know, maybe god, being god, can help. Maybe.

So thus it was that Loonysiana state Senator Robert Adley read a statement which saith: "Thus far efforts made by mortals to try to solve the crisis have been to no avail. It is clearly time for a miracle for us."

I am not making this up!

Welcome to the 16th century. Don't these dingbats have any brains whatsoever? The evidence is all around them, smothering their coastlines in black/brown slimy goo: the deity doesn't give a damn!

And don't you think it might occur to doofuses like Adley that if the deity did give a damn he/she would have stopped this disaster before it started - being omnipotent and omniscient and all?

Furthermore, the resolution by the Loonysianian lawmakers didn't designate a deity which is a fatal mistake! It "called" on people of all religions to pray.

To who? Whom? Yahweh? Allah? Buddha? Krishna? Zeus? Osiris? Talk about causing confusion in the heavenly realms!


All of this would be funny if it weren't so sad!

Father's Day

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God is gonna get you - via the Christian Reconstructionists via Sharron Angle

Political hackery walking hand-in-hand with stupidity and weirdness seems to be the norm among the so-called "conservatives" and Tea Party tinkerers.

There's been much written about the broomstick known as Sharron Angle. From every account she is a danger to herself and Nevada and the U.S. of America.

And while what follows is not really a "new" twist, it bears further public airing and debate. If you thought the Nazis in the 30s posed a threat to Germany, you ain't seen nothing yet!

B. E. Wilson, erstwhile reporter on the fantasies of the religious right, has discovered (on Angle's website) an endorsement from the NFRA (National Federation of Republican Assemblies) prez, one Rod Martin. Angle, saith Martin, "will uphold true conservative values for the citizens of Nevada and the nation."

What in the world could that mean? What "conservative values"? Nobody knows for sure but Martin's connection with the Christian Reconstructionist movement provides a few answers - answers sane people ain't gonna like!

Mr. Wilson quotes Frederick Clarkson, doubtless one of the most significant students of Christian Reconstructionism:

It would, notes Clarkson, "replace democracy with a theocratic elite that would govern by imposing their interpretation of 'Biblical Law.' Reconstructionism would eliminate not only democracy but many of its manifestations, such as labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools. Women would be generally relegated to hearth and home. Insufficiently Christian men would be denied citizenship, perhaps executed. So severe is this theocracy that it would extend capital punishment beyond such crimes as kidnapping, rape, and murder, to include, among other things, blasphemy, heresy, adultery, and homosexuality."


Read Wilson's article here and note the links to information tying Angle to the Christian Reconstructionist Movement.


And here's another article noting her penchant for armed insurrection!

The monster god

The problems we face in our world today are monstrous! Which is fitting, if, as it would appear, the God of the three major faiths is, in fact, a monster.

Theodicy, the attempt by humans to explain why god does what he/she does, is whistling in the wind. Those who engage in such attempts to justify the acts of a creator god who they claim to be benevolent, omnipresent and omnipotent, find themselves laughingstocks in the face of reality.

Let's take just one example - the scourge of malaria. If this god created all things, he or she created malaria.

From Time magazine, June 21, 2010, pp. 39ff:

"The history of malaria is a long one. Originating in West Africa, it spread to half of mankind by the mid-19th century and has killed tens of millions more, including eight American Presidents. [Betcha Palin doesn't know that!] Malaria played a role in stopping Alexander the Great in India. It contributed to the fall of Rome, the relocation of the Vatican and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. It still rages in the poverty-stricken world: it killed 863,000 people in 2008--89% of them African, and 88% of those people children under 5--and infected 243 million more, says the World Health Organization (WHO)."

A great effort is currently underway to halt this terrible disease, caused by the bite of "a deadly subspecies of mosquito, Anopheles Funestus, which feeds almost exclusively on humans, with an appetite to shame a vampire."

And if the anti-malarial efforts are successful, it will NOT be because of the intervention of any deity, nor will it be because a deity has "revealed" a good and proper way to fight malaria. It will be because of years of work by dedicated scientists!


Some will remember the old Sunday School ditty, "Jesus Loves The Little Children." Well, Jesus does not love the little children, nor does his Father, Yahweh! Jesus is quoted in the Gospels as saying that God's people are of intrinsic value. Look at the lowly sparrow, saith Jesus. God takes care of the sparrow, so just think how much more he will take care of you.

This, my friends, is obviously a crock! Nobody takes care of the sparrows; they are left to fend for themselves, often against the worst of odds. Jesus creator god does not exist. If he did, he would be a monster!

There is no one "up" there or "out" there looking after anybody. In truth, as Victor J. Stenger has said over and over again, the universe is exactly as we would expect if there were no god!

Which means it is up to us! Maybe if we understood this and shed our religious superstitions, we would realize we're in this mess together: we are all we have and if we want to survive we'd better figure out a way to get along and take care of one another.


Which also means that all those TV preachers and scummy "evangelists" and other religious leaders prancing around in fancy robes reading mumbo jumbo from discredited ancient texts should be shut down or arrested for defrauding the human race!

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Jon Stewart - Judgment Day - The Strife Aquatic

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Porky Pig and the Pledge of Allegiance

What? No god in Porky's Pledge. Omigod! Turn him into bacon!



h/t to the Friendly Atheist.

Todd Bentley and his encounter with a financial angel

We've written much about the fundamentalist, pentecostal, holy-ghost-loving, knock-em-down and heal 'em, divorced, heavy drinker scam artist Todd Bentley previously. Now he claims to have had an encounter with a financial "angel."

Send money.

Jesus Christ! How can some people be so damn dumb as to believe anything this religious freak has to say!

Beware, though: if you are sane you may fall off your chair laughing at this moron!

h/t to Dan Florien at Unreasonable Faith.

A new pope - pomp and ceremony

A little nonsense to brighten your day.

h/t to PZ Myers.