Kinsley on good form:
"If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than…a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” What does that tell you?," – Tom Tancredo, digging deeper.
On Sotomayor and the Republicans:
Wikipedia bans all self-serving editors from Scientology IP addresses.
It's quite something, full of candor and some truly fascinating details about the past with the Israeli paper, Yediot Achronth. It also has some great bons mots like the following:
“Bibi can’t behave with Washington like the boy who killed his parents and then asked for mercy because he was an orphan."
“The Israelis are the ones who taught us that there are no sacred dates. Israel’s governments broke every possible deadline in their talks with the Arab world. The question is not the target date, it is whether there is progress in the negotiations. To a certain degree, the Israeli policy is sabotaging the campaign against Iran."
"How exactly can the Palestinians destroy you? The real existential danger is that you will not succeed in parting from them."
This kind of frankness is rare in Washington, where the discourse is constrained by the fact that anyone saying similar things here will be accused of anti-Semitism or self-hating Jewishness if they do. But Indyk's passion for Israel is not in question; the same could be said for many of us eager to see Israel's future secured. There's also a riveting account of what really happened at the end of the Clinton administration:
YA: You describe in your book what happened in 2000, we said, how Ehud Barak and Shlomo Ben-Ami placed generous proposals on the table that Arafat rejected one after another. Could this have been managed differently?
Indyk: “Yes, it could have been done differently. The joint strategy, ours and yours, was Syria first. At the Shepherdstown conference of January 2000, when we missed the chance to reach an agreement with the Syrians, Arafat experienced a turnabout. Until then, he was afraid of being left behind. After the failure with the Syrians, Barak and Clinton—as President Bush rightfully said—courted Arafat desperately. Had there been an agreement with Syria, the equation would have been different.
I write in the book that for seven years, Hafez Assad was interested in the process, not the outcome, but before his death he underwent a change: he wanted to reach a deal. The fact is that over the years, he refused to send a senior figure to direct negotiations with Israel. Prior to his death, he sent his foreign minister Farouk Ashara to the talks.
When Ashara came to Washington to negotiate with Barak, we dealt with the question why he did not shake his hand and why he condemned Israel in his speech, and ignored the most important thing he said: it is a dispute over borders, not an existential conflict. The Syrians were prepared for a series of compromises. People who read my book say that Barak did not have the courage to complete an agreement with the Syrians. Barak is a courageous man, there is no argument about that. The problem was the timing. The moment to finalize an agreement with Assad was between December 1999 and February 2000. Had Barak risen to the occasion at the right moment, it would have changed everything.”
The Pentagon denies the story. Scott Horton says it's true (read his whole post):
The Daily Beast has confirmed that the photographs of abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison which President Obama, in a reversal, decided not to release, depict sexually explicit acts, including a uniformed soldier receiving oral sex from a female prisoner, a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation, forced exhibition and penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms.
These descriptions come on the heals of a British report yesterday about the photographs that contained some of these revelations—and whose credibility was questioned by the Pentagon.
The Daily Beast has obtained specific corroboration of the British account, which appeared in the London Daily Telegraph, from several reliable sources, including a highly credible senior military officer with first-hand knowledge who provided even more detail about the graphic photographs that have been withheld from the public by the Obama administration.
… you know the GOP is in trouble. Here's Charles; here's Cornyn. Charles prefers a principled discussion of identity politics and the law, without calling anyone a racist. Amen. But the Ricci case strikes me as over-reach. All Sotomayor did was adhere to the established precedents. It wasn't up to her to wage a judicial campaign against affirmative action. The system was clear, and as Wiki points out,
On appeal, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (Sotomayor, Pooler and Sack, JJ.) affirmed the district court's ruling in a summary order, without opinion, in February 2008. However, after a suggestion that the court hear the case en banc, the panel withdrew its summary order and in June 2008 issued instead a unanimous per curiam opinion. The panel's June 2008 per curiam opinion characterized the trial court's decision as "thorough, thoughtful and well-reasoned" while also lamenting that there were "no good alternatives" in the case. The panel expressed sympathy to the plaintiffs' situation, particularly Ricci's, but ultimately concluded that the Civil Service Board was acting to "fulfill its obligations under Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act]". The trial court's opinion was adopted in its entirety by the panel.
As Hilzoy noted, this was an example of judicial modesty, no?
And in this case, she even expressed "empathy" for the white male victim. As for the "wise Latina" speech, you have to look at the entire context, which is far more nuanced than the familar pull-quote. The nuance doesn't get her off the hook, though. The speech is imbued with the kind of boomer pomo smugness that reminds me why I'm not on the left. But that's a great chance, as Charles notes, not to throw around the "racist" or "dumb" or "nasty" canards, but to use the Sotomayor hearings to debate the role of identity and experience in making judicial decisions – issues that came up with the life-story of Clarence Thomas (without which his judicial philosophy makes only partal sense) and the ethnic background of Nino Scalia.
Using the hearings as an opportunity to sing the virtues of trying to overcome one's personal biases in interpreting the law would be a blessing. A mature GOP would leap at the chance.
"I [speak now] as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which recently completed an 18-month investigation into the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, and produced a 200-page bipartisan report, which gives the lie to Mr. Cheney's claims. I do so because if the abusive interrogation techniques that he champions, the face of which were the pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib, if they are once more seen as representative of America, our security will be severely set back," – Carl Levin, laying waste to Cheney's claim that Abu Ghraib was "a few sadistic prison guards."
My own post on the core contradiction of Cheney's speech – and its rank denial of reality – can be read here.
Crete, Illinois, 5.50 am
It's sometimes a helpful tool, especially for diplomats. Stephen Walt tries it with Iran:
This was the point of my post on the Amalek meme.
The Dish 