Category: Old Dish

Scotusblog lays out the battleground Alito decisions:

in 1991, supporting abortion restrictions, in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision that later went to the Supreme Court and led to the partial reaffirmation of Roe v. Wade; in 1997, in Bray v. Marriott Hotels, seeming to endorse a limited view of minorities’ job rights; in 1991, in Nathanson v. Medical College, appearing to embrace tougher standard for asserting disability rights; in 2000, in Chittister v. Department of Community and Economic Development, finding that Congress had gone too far in passing the Family and Medical Leave Act; in 2004, in Doe v. Groody, embracing broader police search power, including strip searches; and in 2004, Dia v. Ashcroft and Ki Se Lee v. Ashcroft, taking a hard line against immigrants’ rights.

Doesn’t exactly sound like a libertarian, does he? Meanwhile, the current SCOTUS ignores Hamdan. Another little death for liberty in America.

Mediacrity is having a field day.

Not quite as politically skewed as the faculties they run:

College presidents are about twice as likely to be registered Democrats as they are to be registered Republicans or independents, and twice as many of them voted last year for John F. Kerry as for George W. Bush for president, according to The Chronicle’s survey of presidents of four-year institutions. Of the survey’s respondents, 41 percent said they were registered Democrats, 22 percent said they were independent, and 19 percent said they were Republican.

Larry Summers isn’t the only one slightly to the right of his professors.

We now have the U.S. military’s own data. I don’t think we’ll ever reach consensus on the actual numbers, but every measure agrees on the trend. What is beyond dispute is that the insurgency is now stronger today than it has ever been – if measured by its ability to launch attacks and kill civilians and Iraqi security forces. Money quote:

Iraqi civilians and security forces were killed and wounded by insurgents at a rate of about 26 a day early in 2004, and at a rate of about 40 a day later that year. The rate increased in 2005 to about 51 a day, and by the end of August had jumped to about 63 a day.

It’s easy to dismiss these numbers from a distance, or to say they are a function of the insurgents’ failure to kill U.S. troops. You could even argue that this kind of widespread slaughter will help undermine the insurgency – as it murders more and more Muslims, and reveals the nihilism of the enemy. You could argue that the critical indicator is whether the political process is continuing and if the infrastructure can be better protected and rebuilt. At least, those are the more plausible arguments I’m hearing these days, as evidence of progress in Iraq. They’re not insane arguments. But imagine if the United States endured such a terrorist casualty rate. If you callibrate for population, imagine an America where 700 civilians or cops are murdered each day by insurgents able to operate at will. One 9/11 a week. And each week, the number grows. How likely is it that a successful transition to constitutional government can be maintained in such a climate?

“At the end of the day, Scooter Libby’s the one who’s under indictment for telling lies, not Joe Wilson. But it would be a whole lot easier to focus on Libby if Wilson would just shut up and go away. Alas, that’s not going to happen. He clearly loves the attention too much. Wilson’s op-ed was entitled, ‘Our 27 months of hell.’ A better title might have been, ‘How to turn your 15 minutes into 27 months.'” – Jason Zengerle, on TNR’s blog, The Plank.

The Bowen report on the state of Iraq reconstruction is now out, and it’s pretty devastating. You can download it here. There was “no comprehensive policy or regulatory guidelines” for staffing the interim occupation, and systematic planning was “insufficient in both scope and implementation.” Dan Drezner has the goods. To take on what we took on and to have done so little planning is to me an unforgivable lapse. Like Dan and George Packer, I’m angrier than even the anti-war types about this, because I wanted the war to succeed and trusted people I now realize I was a fool to trust. My feelings are not far from the lines of this emailer’s:

Regarding the email of the day disputing your reasons to be skeptical about conspiracies to get us into war: maybe, but not the point. I remember my ambivalence back in March, 2003. I was mistrustful of the motivations of the Bush people for going to war, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Saddam Hussein was bad enough to be deposed whatever the reason used to justify the excursion. So, here I am, a more-or-less Democrat, willing to concede that these people I don’t really trust are taking us into a war that ought to be fought. Concede, concede, concede.
BUT, they blew their chance. They have no idea what they are doing. My worst fears about their core values (which evidently have nothing to do with making our nation safe and strong, and everything to do with Rovian marketing strategies) were realized. These tough-talking hawks ignored good advice, behaved like the worst tin-pot tyrants out of bad fiction, and have ruined our standing in the world for a generation. Whether we got into the war for the wrong reasons or for overly-hyped reasons seems irrelevant now. Our military, diplomatic, and political incompetence is the issue. Apparently we were too stupid to cut our losses when we had the chance last November, so now our chickens have come home to roost. I hope Republicans take a long hard look at their party in 2008. They had the chance to put McCain in office in 2000, and they picked Bush. Shame on them, and shame on us.

I wouldn’t be quite so harsh. Being responsible for this country’s security after 9/11 was enough to make anyone overly-cautious and perhaps too terrified of inaction. People can be forgiven good faith misjudgments. What they cannot be forgiven for is recklessness. If we don’t have solid evidence for that in the pre-invasion stage, then we sure do for the post-invasion mess. That debate is now over. And the reconstruction is still in limbo.

There will be plenty of time to examine Judge Alito’s judicial philosophy, qualifications, temperament, paper trail, etc. He looks like a qualified candidate to me at first blush, and readers will know that my basic instinct on judicial nominees is to give the president, of whatever party, considerable lee-way in their selections. A filibuster, right now, looks way-too-extreme to me. But – even though I guess I may get my fair share of blogads in the process – the prospect of another polarizing culture war battle does not exactly encourage, does it? The glee with which the partisan right and left will now posture, the money that will be spent, the energies that will be expended – it’s not a very edifying spectacle for the Supreme Court. I know it’s just where we are, but could we have a little less Beltway glee about it? Conservatives who live for ideological battle, whose main disappointment with Roberts was that he didn’t set the stage for a big ol’ left-right fight, are not conservative in any meaningful sense. They’re ideologues and fanatics. Same goes, of course, for the reflexive hostility on the left. Oh well. Here we go. From NRO, we have the following judicial assessment:

An Alito battle and confirmation should help Rick Santorum’s reelection campaign.

Yeah, that’s a reason to pick him, isn’t it?

Every now and again, it’s worth looking closely at a mind that has lost its mind in the services of blind partisanship. Here follows a paragraph from Hugh Hewitt’s NYT op-ed last week, which, for some reason, I didn’t read, but which a reader just brought to my attention:

The right’s embrace in the Miers nomination of tactics previously exclusive to the left – exaggeration, invective, anonymous sources, an unbroken stream of new charges, television advertisements paid for by secret sources – will make it immeasurably harder to denounce and deflect such assaults when the Democrats make them the next time around.

Hewitt is saying – in a national publication, presumably pre-meditated – that no one on the right ever used exaggeration in its cause, or invective, or anonymous sources, or television advertisments paid by secret sources, until the Miers debacle. This is his empirical claim. He is empirically nuts.

“I recommend that Cheney do a press conference and answer every question. Since that’s never going to happen, there is room for George Bush to say, ‘We never should have identified Valerie Plame on my watch, and I take responsibility.'” – Lanny Davis, NYT today. Amen. Pipe dream, however.

This is hilarious.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Bush’s White House is a conundrum, a bastion of telegenic idealism and deep cynicism. The President has proposed vast, transformational policies – the remaking of the Middle East, of Social Security, of the federal bureaucracy. But he has done so in a haphazard way, with little attention to detail or consequences. There are grand pronouncements and, yes, crusades, punctuated with marching words like evil and moral and freedom. Beneath, though, is the cynical assumption that the public doesn’t care about the details-that results don’t matter, corners can be cut and special favors bestowed.” – Joe Klein, insightfully pinpointing the contradiction at the heart of this presidency. Nowhere was this contradiction more brutally exposed than during the Iraq war.